Future Winds (22 page)

***

White lights strobed a glimmering shine throughout New Horizon. Aisha lifted her head off the table she sat at and shook herself into full consciousness. She was unsure how long she had been staring blankly down at the decapitated body of Natalia Fox. The lights above pulsed brighter and faster to alert everyone aboard the ship of a higher sense of urgency and danger.

Aisha reached for Natalia’s glass tablet to investigate the cause for alarm. Alerts, streaming codes, and warnings flashed across the screen, and Aisha swiped her fingers across one of the incoming messages. The display switched over to a live camera feed that overlook the city in creation, Liberty. Below the skyline, there appeared to be conflict. With her attention grasped via the video before her, she leaned forward and zoomed in on the footage. Her eyes bulged as she witnessed the insects that had attacked days prior running through the city, slaughtering civilians and military members alike. Behind their wake, was a trail of dead bodies by the hundreds of thousands.

Aisha felt sick in realizing every single human being on the surface of Flare faced immediate extinction. Jumping to her feet, she took off out of the room and made way to the ground floor of New Horizon to exit, fight, and defend anyone still alive out there against the onslaught.

Making it to the ground floor, she approached one of the exits, guarded by an artificial intelligence soldier wearing all grey. “Step aside,” she commanded of the human-like robot.

“New Horizon is in a state of lockdown. No one enters and no one leaves,” he said in a threatening tone.

The sound of bangs and scrapes echoed in from the large metal door the drone stood before. The walls were too thick to listen and determine the cause of the pinging with certainty, but Aisha assumed it could only be the sound of people trying to gain access, to find shelter, and safety, only to be denied, and cut apart as they pounded against the locked door.

“People are dying out there,” she screeched.

“New Horizon currently harbors twenty-six members of Citizens United. The safety of these individuals are of the highest priority.”

“The lives of twenty-six government officials are worth more than the millions being slaughtered out there?” flared the girl whose eyes now began to burn in anger.

“Miss Sayegh, please step aside or I will be forced to place you under arrest for obstruction and endangering the welfare of unarmed peaceful government personal. Those charges would equate to a five-year prison sentence, minimum.

I thought robots were supposed to be intelligent,
Aisha thought.
This is insane.

Backing away, Aisha engaged her stealth cloak. She had heard enough from this puppet and intended to decommission the robot so that she might freely exit the ship.

“My vision exceeds the standard spectrum of light human beings are restricted in seeing. I have the ability to see in thermal heat signatures, Miss Sayegh. This is your final warning,” he advised as two more AI guards stepped into view in his defense.

Disengaging her cloak, Aisha huffed off to the elevator shaft that would return her to the bridge where she could think of another way to get help out to the people enduring a full scale holocaust.

Entering the server room, a dozen or more military members plugged away at their computers trying to regain control of the situation outside from the safety of their seats.

“Alpha niner fiver squad, meet up with the counterinsurgency forming four degrees east of your location,” a man yelled into a microphone before moving onto screaming various obscenities and slamming his headset against the wall.

The squad he was trying to get repositioned was butchered while he spoke to them. Aisha could hear the screams of the men and women through his headphones as they fell to the floor beside her.

“They have breached one of the carriers!” a woman screamed.

“Which one?” a random voice questioned in panic.

“Heart and Soul, the carrier furthest in the back.”

“They flanked us? Smart bunch of roaches,” said a man, commander of the units at work in the room.

Scanning the room, Aisha found Linus standing off in a corner with his arms behind his back, awaiting a command. “Linus!” She called, “Come with me.”

The two entered the bridge of the ship, and paying no mind to Fox’s body still lying decapitated on the ground, Aisha picked up the deceased commander's tablet and handed it to the AI drone.

“Get a message out for me to Jason, the hellcat pilot that left this morning.”

***

Tyler reached the source of the screams to find a young girl. She was one of the pale humanoid aliens native to Flare’s underworld. Naked, kicking, and screaming, she was struggling to fight off a man who was on top of her. He was overpowering her with ease. After slamming her face into the ground, he drove his long, sharp fingernails into her eyes. Her body began twitching while blood dripped out of her face.

“Vaktin-Nolous,” the man uttered with a deep cynical chuckle.

Withdrawing his nails from her face, he sat upright and gathered himself. Slightly winded from fighting her, he ran his fingers down her chest and towards her pregnant looking belly. He rolled his thumbs on her abdomen as if gently massaging it but then abruptly plunged his fingers deep into her stomach as violently as he had done her face. Struggling to retrieve his hands back out this time, he was holding something. It was a child, alive and flailing about in his blood soaked hands.

His black eyes lit up with a sort of joy as his pale ugly face filled with a grin from ear to ear. The umbilical cord connecting the squirming child to the dead lifeless mother on the ground just a few feet away was as shocking as ever a sight to see. Before Tyler could fully process what it was he was witnessing, the man squished the child's skull in like an empty bottle, and ripped away its head like a piece of unwanted bread. He asserted his lips around the dead child's neck and began sucking the fluid out.

The room lit up with gunfire. Tyler had seen enough.
Fuck this planet, fuck these people, no... fuck these demons!
The lasers from his rifle ate right through the demon-like man. His soft skin burned away as he dropped the carcass of his last supper and began laughing while falling to his knees. He was not afraid of death. It was just another pleasurable experience for him in his long list of sickening self-indulgences.

As if receiving the massage of a lifetime, the creature closed his eyes and let out a moan of gratification. Tyler wanted the act of killing him to be satisfying, but this pale monster had robbed him of that satisfaction. Now on the ground, he coiled around, disguising his pain for bliss. He rolled over and looked into Tyler's eyes with a smile, his final act, before embracing death.

Tyler looked to the child, or what was left of it. Having been sucked of its insides through its neck, it looked like a dried out peach, withered of all life. Painfully, Tyler shifted his eyes over to look at the mother. Her mouth was wide open and her face was covered with the blood from her empty, open eye sockets. The display on the ground before him was the most befouled thing he had ever experienced in his entire life. Never in a million years could he have imagined such an atrocity and yet, here he was standing above this scene of senseless carnage.

“Let us continue.” Aries suggested.

“Yea,” he agreed, locked into a blank stare with the empty eye sockets of the pasty-skinned, dead women on the ground. “Let’s.”

***

Jason sat beside his hellcat atop the peak of the highest mountain in a range of hundreds. He had landed to watch the sunrise and stayed to sulk the day away. He was arguing with himself in an attempt to justify the loss of his fellow pilot, Lanfen and the ground squad in the armadillo that accompanied him in the takedown of the four legged stone giant in the early morning.

Deep down, he knew he was to blame for their deaths. He was in charge of the assault and had done a poor job in balancing their safety with the success of the mission. He had tipped the scales into his favor to defeat the goliath beast while placing the lives of his comrades directly into the face of danger. Eliminating the giant was a success, but the victory was paid at the price of death. Their lives were not his to offer in payment and yet, he had done so anyway.

An alarm began sounding in the cockpit of his aircraft, signaling an incoming transmission. Jason climbed up off the rocky soil beneath his feet and clambered his way into the ship to listen to the message.

Punching a button before him, a video feed played a message sent from the girl with the metallic arm.

“Terminator girl?” Jason questioned in making out the familiar face.

“Jason,” she yelped as the video statically cracked in and out of clarity. “You and your copilot need to get back here asap. Your aunt is dead and the locusts are attacking the city. They are slaughtering everyone.”

He wasted no time in slapping the lock to his cockpit shut and firing up the hellcat’s engines.

***

Tyler and Aries continued deeper underground. They crossed over a rickety wooden bridge that stretch overtop a stagnant river of red. Now on the other side, their only path forward was a thin piece of land that stretched around a large lake of crimson.

The sound of high pitched laughter echoed from the other side of the blood lagoon and Tyler took cover behind a large cluster of rocks. He peeked out from behind the safety of the stone to see what it was that passed by. A group of tiny creatures hopped around the pool dancing and singing. They were small no doubt, if standing beside Tyler they would only reach his hips at full posture. They had large mouths that were jam packed full of teeth, strange horizontally oval shaped heads with a huge set of ears similar to that of a bats, and straggly arms that hung down to their feet like an ape. The tips of their fingers were blade like and their heads had a set of thick horns that stuck out like a ram, though each of the creature’s horns varied in its particular twisting shape.

“Imps?” Tyler muttered under his breath, disturbed to find such a creature existed.

They laughed and played, but their means of play, Tyler quickly noticed, was actually a means of murder. They were stabbing one of their own. The runt of the litter squealed in pain while the rest chased him down. Catching it, they stabbed it with their sharp claws repeatedly, and then set it loose only to chase after it again. Singing, laughing, and stabbing in full repetition.

Tyler came forth when the imps were out of sight and continued off into the next room where Aries believed Scorpio resided. Once inside, the room proved to be the largest yet, a vast underground canyon with enormous trees and cacti that grew from a rocky ravine below.

One of the largest of trees was thick with many branches that stretched from the ground and twisted at least fifty feet up into the rock ceiling above. Hanging from its limbs were the bodies of a couple dozen of the pale skinned, human-like beings. Naked and bound by the hands, some were still alive, though barely. Their eyes drooped in sadness and their bodies were skinny down to the bone with rib cages that looked as though they were about to poke through the frail skin at any given moment.

One of the imps below walked over to a woman hanging up in the tree. It stabbed at her foot with one of its needle like claws and held a chalice of bone up to catch the stream of blood that followed. When his cup was full, he picked up a smoldering rock from a pile of embers and fire. The sound of the stone sizzling in his hand suggest the notion to be painful, but he did not seem to mind. He sealed off the girl’s wound as if turning off the spigot to running water then left to drink in his spoils.

The girl simply stared off into nothingness throughout the ordeal. Pain and sorrow was all she knew now and, while the event made Tyler cringe, it was obvious that she was used to this torture. She had lost all hope and was dead inside. Her body now was nothing more than an empty, soulless vessel.

“I think we took a wrong turn,” Aries informed.

“Yea, cool,” Tyler said in relief while gazing down into the valley where hundreds of small holes lit with fire homed clusters of the imps within the valley. The sound of them laughing echoed through the canyon, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Getting out of this gully was as satisfying a suggestion as any.

Turning around, the two backtracked to the room with the pools of blood and entered through a cavity with skulls draped across the border.
Not the kind of room you want to enter
, Tyler thought as he wearily walked inside the dimly lit area. Through the shadows he spotted the glimmer of Scorpio’s metal chastise. “He is here!” Tyler announced, running over to the disabled bot.

“Let me take a look,” Aries said, floating over.

Tyler stepped aside and allowed her the chance to attend to her fallen friend. He was scraped up pretty good, but fully intact from the looks of it.

“Cover your eyes, Tyler,” Aries warned before emitting an enormous spark. A pulse so bright that, even with his eyes clenched shut, Tyler felt as though he had been temporarily blinded.