The Fate of Nations Book II The Harvest (3 page)

Why couldn't they get past that wall? Was this some new form of life? Had the humans evolved ? Did they now possess a defense against them?

It was of no real importance to the Grays, there were many ways to disable a human. These beasts were easy to overpower. It was, however, a curiosity to them.

They looked and probed and peered in at Sarah with their remorseless, relentless black eyes. They did not sense Mikel’s presence in there. He remained silent.

He was adept at blocking them out.

They peered in at her. She could feel them staring at her, hating her. She stayed still and kept her eyes closed, the way Mikel had instructed her to do.

When they left, she ate pieces of the spongy material on the wall where it wouldn’t be noticed. It tasted like raw mushrooms and Mikel had assured her that it was organic and safe for her to eat. She caught the dripping moisture in her hand and drank it to keep her throat moist.

She had been in there for about a week although, it seemed like much longer. Time stretched and bent and stood still in that cocoon.

She slept. She lay awake looking at the strange orb that hung just inches from her face. She talked to Mikel in her mind and she sang silent songs. She moved only when she had to, pulling the spongy substance from the wall in places that she thought the Grays wouldn't see. She bent her knees and flexed the muscles in her legs and in her arms to keep from getting so stiff and sore, but she always did this while she was laying flat on her back in case the Grays appeared.

The Grays checked on her frequently now, to see if she was dead. If they had been aware that the neuro toxin they had injected into her neck to paralyze her had long since worn off, they would not have risked letting her live to escape the confines of the death cocoon.

Mikel explained it to her while she lay there listening to him talk about a far away planet called Zeteron where the moon shone a turquoise blue in the daylight hours and blazed orange light at night.

She had interrupted his tale by asking him why she had to lay still when the Grays came to check up on her. “You are supposed to be paralyzed Sarah,” he stated matter of factly. “You aren't supposed to be able to move.” Hr rephrased his statement when she asked him what “paralyzed” meant.

“They weren't sure of how much neuro toxin to inject you with because you are so small, so the dose they gave you wasn't enough to permanently paralyze you like it did the others that are here. The neuro toxin wore off,” he added, “and it's lucky for you, Sarah, that they don't know that much about children, or you would certainly never walk again, and would probably be dead already.”

If nothing else that had happened up until that point had convinced Sarah that she was in mortal danger, that did. It hit home with a sharp, dagger-like precision. Sarah's blood turned icy cold and she shuddered despite the warmth of the enclosure.

The Grays were accustomed to catching adults.

Men or woman who were outside, alone, and

vulnerable. They normally picked them off one at a time, but they often found couples out together in remote areas.

Humans were relatively easy to subdue, to

overpower and to capture. “Yes”, Mikel asserted, “adults are their regular fare. You were just a lucky find for them,” and then he added, a little hesitantly, as if the very words repulsed him, “The young are usually reserved for the Elect among their race.”

On their visits now, the Grays jabbed her arm with an instrument that resembled a crude fork. The first time the older Gray poked her with it, she almost yelled out in hurt surprise. “It’s never going to be done!”, the younger Gray screeched pathetically. As it screeched, Mikel interpreted the screeching language into her mind. “It isn’t even dead yet!” It sounded pitiful.

“It will take weeks for it to finish,” the younger one moaned, “let’s kill it now.” “No!” the old one screamed. “You know if we kill it now it will spoil the meat! It won't be any good to eat!” They withdrew from the opening and left Sarah alone once more.

Sarah lay there, her mind in a torturous fight for sanity. The hours dragged by with no clear sense of passing. The days felt like weeks, time was so distorted, so nonexistent in that humid death cocoon.

She laid there in the humid chamber, alone and afraid. She was growing more and more afraid that Mikel would just forget about her. Sometimes days passed by with no word from him.
Was she really going
to die this way?

Mikel watched the Grays closely and followed them with his mind. He saw everything they did. He knew every thought they had.

Mikel finally entered her mind once again and told Sarah what they were planning. Sarah listened carefully as he gave her new instructions. They weren’t going to wait any longer. The two Grays had agreed that she might not ever die in there. They would have to kill her.

Sarah waited in the deafening quiet of the cocoon, her face a mask of horror and fear, her muscles taut and straining to leap from the enclosure. Her survival instincts were kicking in and attempting to take control of her conscious mind. They fought desperately against her will to lay still, to stay calm, like Mikel told her.

Mikel's voice, in her mind, calmed her frayed nerves, and reassured her that he would get her out of there. “Just lie still Sarah, be patient, be calm. I will not let you die in there.”

Sarah lay there for a few hours, that stretched into days, before she heard the sucking sound again. The old Gray jabbed her with its' instrument but she didn’t cry out. She bit the inside of her cheek to ward off the pain.

She hadn't screamed, not even after the first time they had jabbed her arm, even though the scorching pain nauseated her.

“Clench your teeth,” Mikel instructed her. “You cannot let them see that you feel the sting of the probe.

They will realize that the neuro toxin has worn off.

Don't let them see you flinch, do not cry out. Stay absolutely still. I can help you to appear unconscious to them, Sarah, but you have to lie still and keep your eyes closed.”

Sarah had a high tolerance for pain. She had always had scrapes and cuts and bruises from playing outside or rough housing with her brother, but this pain was a lot harder to ignore. This pain shot straight into the muscle of her arm, making it contract and expand in exquisite agony.

Her vision behind her closed lids blared in bright white pain, fading to a dull red as the pain subsided.

The right side of her face was turned away from the Grays as they peered in at her and stuck her arm with the probe, and the most effective way she had found so far to disengage from the pain was to bite the inside of her cheek as hard as she could. For some reason that even Mikel couldn't explain, it caused the pain to dull enough so that she could bear it. She had tried clenching her teeth the way Mikel instructed, but it did nothing to ease the pain, and she vomited.

The Grays watched her coldly as she lay there with vomit pooled in her mouth, waiting for her to swallow, waiting for any reaction that was a voluntary reaction. How she kept from strangling on that vomit, Sarah could never really figure out herself, but she didn't. She lay there with it in her mouth until the Grays left a long while afterward. Once they had been gone for a reasonable time (by Mikel's reckoning), she swallowed the foul mess in her mouth, nearly choking on it as it slid back down her throat.

The Gray always stabbed her hard enough to draw blood, and when the old Gray saw that that fresh blood was still oozing out of the wound it had inflicted it got very angry.

It screeched loudly and began speaking to her in its' strange guttural speech. Sarah heard, the now familiar, sound of buzzing in her mind.

When the Grays were angry, a metallic, insectile buzz emanated from their minds that she picked up on instantly. Although she couldn't read their thoughts unless they directed them into her mind or if Mikel translated them into her mind for her, she could hear this noise their minds made.

It sounded like bees, hundreds of metallic bees buzzing, and there was no escape from that sound.

Sarah heard it until they calmed down again. They made that noise without being aware of it. It was just a side lobe of their agitated thoughts.

The old Gray one started stabbing her arm again and again, screeching and speaking its' weird unintelligible language. Sarah was close to screaming in pain and she knew this time the Gray horror would kill her. Suddenly the other Gray stuck its' head through the covering and shrieked loudly.

The two of them disappeared back through the panel and moments, maybe hours, later Mikel whispered in her mind.
“Now!”
, he whispered. She moved as fast as she could. Her limbs were stiff from laying in there so long. She leapt clumsily to the panel that covered her coffin and thrust her hand against it. It didn’t open. It only stretched and sprang back.

“Pull it apart!”
Mikel shouted in her mind. Sarah grabbed it with both hands and pulled as hard as she could. A ragged hole large enough for her to get through appeared ,and she scrambled out...into nothing.

Sarah didn’t fall, although the chamber that she had been in was near the top of a tall column of chambers that stretched out below her for about twenty stories. The towering rows of chambers were tightly packed together about the width of a football field across.

Sarah was buoyant, but slowly, very slowly, she drifted down. She thought the direction was down. It was impossible for her to determine up from down in that place.
“Move faster!”
Mikel shouted.
“They are
coming back for you!”
Sarah moved her arms and legs and propelled herself to the opposite wall.

There were holes of different sizes embedded in the surface of the opposing wall. She reached one of these holes and climbed in. It was very large and she could stand up in it. It was dark in there and as she turned around towards the entrance, where a faint grayish light came in, she could see the row of columns where she had been imprisoned. The Grays were back!

They hovered outside of a container near the top of the column where the thick filmy panel bore the ragged hole of her escape. Sarah heard them scream in rage. The buzzing noises their minds made became deafening. She watched as they started looking for her.

They zipped through the space between the

columns and the wall with amazing speeds. Back and forth, they flew and were quickly working their way down to where she was hiding.

Instinctively, she backed up as far into the hole as she could. She kept backing up until she realized that the hole she had climbed into was actually a tunnel.

Sarah didn’t waste any time when Mikel told her to run! The Grays had smelled her out. She was blind in there and as she ran, she stumbled and fell. Her arms pistioned out in front of her and she felt the coarse grainy surface of the tunnel’s walls. There was scrabble under her feet and she reached down to pick some of the stones up.
“I can throw a rock at them,”
she thought to herself, not realizing at the time what a ridiculous and futile idea that was. No sooner had she picked the stones up, Mikel shouted “drop those right now Sarah!

Keep running!”

Sarah didn’t understand why he sounded so angry but she listened to him and kept running blindly through the tunnel. Mikel skillfully guided her through the tunnel and she now ran effortlessly by listening to his directions.
“Stop”,
Mikel said
“turn here.”
Sarah turned to her right but found nothing there except the rough granite feel of the tunnel’s surface.

“Turn the other
way”
Mikel said quickly. She turned to her left and discovered another, smaller, tunnel leading off from the one she was in.

Sarah felt safer in this smaller tunnel as she crawled through it. Sharp outcrops of the rugged tunnel surface tore at her knees and hands but she only registered it in the back of her mind. It would only be later that she noticed that her knees were bloody and her hands had cuts and gashes all over them. Her adrenalin blocked the pain and heightened her other senses as she fled, in sheer terror, from the Grays.

The smaller tunnel offered no more resistance against the pursuing Grays than the larger tunnel had.

They seemed to have no trouble at all moving through it even though they were three times Sarah's size.

She could hear them faintly behind her at first, moving along the tunnel's surface but the sounds were getting louder and she knew they weren't very far behind. Mikel directed her into another branching tunnel. There was a vast maze of tunnels in there.

Mikel could block out her thoughts from the Grays but it was her scent that they followed and by then she reeked. She left an easy trail for them to follow and Mikel frantically thought of a way to disguise it.

Mikel led her through the tunnel and out to a smooth surfaced, oval shaped room where small metallic mesh suits hung in a row on the curved wall.

Helmets, that had the appearance of heads, hung above the garments.

He told her to put one of the bio suits on, but first, to go into one of the other tunnels that led from the room a few steps, and then come back out again.

Sarah did what Mikel said to do. She ran into one of the tunnels a few feet and then back out again. She hurriedly put on one of the metallic mesh bio suits.

The suit was larger than it looked and hung over her hands and feet but it instantly shrank down in size to fit her. It wasn’t heavy although it looked it and the helmet closed snugly around her neck.

Mikel had her quickly pull a few more of the garments and helmets down so that it looked like a pile of them on the floor and then told her to crawl under them and stay very still.

Sarah could see out of the dull chrome colored helmet and through the blackened eye holes that were shaped like huge, slanted, almonds. She watched the hole that she had crawled out of to enter this room and it wasn’t long before she saw one, then both, Grays emerging from the tunnel.

They were taller,
like pulled taffy,
she thought, stretched tall and thin. They had stretched themselves to wriggle through the tunnel and as she watched in horror, their bodies began to shrink back to their usual size.