Charged - Book One Read online

  The water flowed like the main hull of a sub had been breached. It was completely full in eighteen seconds. They had lost their camouflage and their movements started to slow.

  The four at the main door had started fighting each other and two others had already stopped moving completely and were floating in the center of the room. They must have been the injured ones. After just a few minutes, the four creatures at the door stopped moving and their wings quivered as they starting sinking. The two injured creatures started seeping black ooze. Three escaped, seven drowned and one was sliced in half.

  “Yes!” Aaron said with excitement. I thought there was some relief all together in the room, but when we lost the cameras in the garden rooms, it seemed to diminish significantly.

  Danel didn’t share our excitement. It wasn’t over until Station Ten arrived.

  “The three that fled back to the elevator shaft will find a new place to dig,” Danel said, killing Aaron’s excitement.

  Only a few minutes had passed and we needed a few more before Station Ten arrived.

  “Are you sure those doors have an airtight seal?” Aaron said.

  “Positive. Why?”

  Aaron only looked down toward the door and all of our eyes followed. There was water coming through the bottom and a lot of it. Danel motioned for everyone to be quiet.

  “It didn’t hold them,” Danel whispered.

  “It may have taken most of them down,” I whispered back.

  CHAPTER 36

  OF ALL THE THINGS that could’ve appeared in my head, I was thinking of Hell. There were no childhood images. There were no thoughts of girlfriends, family or good liquor… just Hell. Not because I believed I was going there, but because I’d never believed. It was something that even in my nine-year-old Catholic childhood, I’d never accepted, never absorbed. Hell was not a fiery pit that swallowed evil. It was not Dante’s Inferno. It was not bad karma. It was not Satan or God’s wrath. It was this. What you could see. What you could feel. It was these things coming to physically tear us in half. All of this sent another nauseating feeling through my body.

  We could hear the inhuman screeching in the halls growing louder as they closed in on us. And just when I thought they had reached the outside of the helm door, it grew quiet. I was praying they hadn’t changed direction to the main hall.

  The first impact against the helm door was so intense we all jumped up out of our seats. They were right behind it. They hadn’t left. The walls and floor of the control room trembled at the sheer force, but the door held. The screeching wailed in the halls. I could hear more than one, more than three screeching at the same time. My entire body trembled.

  There was another loud crash against the doors. It was louder and had more force than the last one, like there were two ramming it at the same time. The floor shook and the table and chairs slid an inch or two out of place. Kye let out a slight gasp and she quietly moved two steps to get behind the table farther away from the door with the device in her hand. We needed the door to hold, but we all knew it wasn’t going to.

  Suddenly, the screeching stopped. For just a moment, I thought maybe, just maybe, Station Ten was here. The silence lingered behind the door, but there was no gunfire, just silence. I closed my eyes for second, hoping they were not strategizing a new plan. Then, there was a different sound: the unbearable scraping of metal claws against the helm door. The creatures weren’t interested in bashing through anymore. They were going to just tear it into pieces. The sound of their claws cutting through the metal left a high-pitched unbearable ringing in my ears.

  It was only seconds before the eight-inch-thick door started to buckle in the center and metal started to separate as several six-inch hooks started to peel it back. We watched in complete terror and even Danel trembled. After a few more minutes, two had slashed a hole large enough to get their arms through. They started cutting the air in the room with their razor-hooked hands.

  “Get back!” I yelled.

  I ducked, quickly grabbing Kye’s hand and ran for the back of the room. The entire floor was now covered in the orange fluid from the gardens and I almost slipped twice. Aaron and Danel rushed to follow me.

  We all watched as the creatures’ arms reached into the room. Their arms were larger and longer than my legs. It was like huge black cables were swinging around, alive with electricity. Then the arms pulled back out and several hooked claws grabbed the bottom of the hole and started to peel the metal door down.

  I decided I wouldn’t wait to see if they had any organs. I lunged three feet towards the door for close range and shot one in the neck and one in the chest. I wanted a clear shot at one of their heads, but only their arms and chests were pushing through the opening. I leaped back to the other side of the room. When I turned back around to see the damage I’d done, I saw holes the size of my fist where I fired, but they didn’t stop. They continued to move at the same speed, completely unaffected. I just wasted two bullets.

  When half of their bodies were through the doors, I shot one in the head. I took off half its skull and it still kept coming. The gun was slipping in my sweaty hands when I squeezed off another shot, demolishing the other half of its skull and it fell limp halfway through the door. The dead creature was then pulled from the opening and another started coming through. Danel leapt to the screen on the table to surge the doors, but just before he could, the power went out. All was black except for Danel’s and Kye’s glowing bodies as we listened to the metal doors being pulled apart.

  The darkness was agonizing and the doors were not electrified. I wanted a fighting chance and I wasn’t going to get one. My eyes were not focusing. I looked all around for Aaron and found Danel’s eyes, which were glowing orange. I went toward the soft glow, shuffling quickly around the opposite side of the oval table, praying I wouldn’t trip over a chair.

  “One minute for auxiliary,” he whispered.

  I reloaded the gun with the hollow points in less than a second in the blackness, like I’d done a thousand times before and handed it to him. He took the gun with his oversized hand and hesitated. He hesitated long enough for me to wonder if he would shoot me first. As if things couldn’t get any worse. But he turned around and pushed me farther back in the room. I found Aaron and Kye at the end of the table as my eyes finally focused.

  “They’re coming in!” Danel shouted, his voice shaking with fear.

  Six more shots went off and he turned back, swinging his extra-long arm and putting the gun in my face.

  “Reload it!”

  I grabbed the gun, reloaded and heard Aaron empty an entire clip into the blackness. I returned the .357 back to Danel. I wasn’t sure if he would hesitate again. I brought the box back, so this was entirely my fault. And I had no choice other than to give the alien who hated me, a gun loaded with hollow points. Just as Danel turned around, the auxiliary power came on. There were two inside the room and two more coming through the door.

  “Surge the doors!” Aaron yelled.

  Kye was back at the computer in lightning speed and started tapping on the computer screen embedded in the oval table. Daniel handed me the gun. And I blew the head off of one of the creatures in the room.

  “Shit!” Aaron yelled. His gun had jammed.

  One of the creatures was on top of him in less than a half a second and just as Aaron got the chamber emptied, the creature rammed its razor hooked hand through his shoulder and lifted him off the ground. I put three bullets in the creature’s head and Aaron and the creature fell to the floor. There were more climbing through the opening when Kye opened the circuit to surge the doors. Their screeches filled the room. It felt like my eardrums had burst. I covered my ears, dropping to the ground overwhelmed with pain just when the auxiliary power cut out.

  I forced myself to stand back up and one was hanging from the ceiling face-to-face with me. I could hear nothing; my ears made a strange muffled ringing sound as I stared directly into its eyeless face. And my hand was empty, so
mehow I dropped my gun. I could see its black silhouette outlined by Danel’s glowing eyes. Danel was close. I could see him scrambling on the floor looking for Aaron’s gun. Kye was right behind me, crouched down looking for mine. The creature dropped to the ground in front of me, looking down at me and swung its’ hooked enormous arms back to slice me in half. But it didn’t; it paused. I watched as its midsection split open and an enormous tongue-like flap with the consistency of black tar darted out of its body. The black tongue wrapped itself around my waist at a speed that was so quick I thought I was dreaming, but I felt it. I felt it crushing me and pulling me towards it like it was going to eat me.

  I was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear anything but muffled sounds out of my own mouth. Frantically, I tried to pull the black tongue off of me as it started crushing me. It started pulling me closer and I knew I would be snapped in half before it pulled me all the way in. Its mid-sectioned mouth wasn’t big enough to swallow me whole. It was unaffected as I punched over and over at the tongue and I heard something snap inside my body. From my left side shot an excruciating pain. A rib had snapped. I saw something move from the right side and two shots went off. The creature fell to the floor and the black tongue loosened slightly.

  “I gotcha, buddy,” Aaron gasped, dropping the gun and passing out.

  Kye pulled the tongue from around my waist and put one more bullet in the creature’s head as I slumped to one side in pain, gasping for air. After a few moments, I tried to stand up, stumbling once and grabbed the table edge to steady myself. My hearing cleared a little and Danel was standing in front of me. He tapped a few squares on the oval table and auxiliary came back on.

  The floor was covered with dead creatures. The air reeked of the burnt remains hanging in the door. I could taste the smell in my mouth. It was toxic, like boiling ammonia. The room was silent and motionless. I kept looking up, expecting another one to fall from the ceiling, but this didn’t happen. Surging the doors had worked. I started to count them on the floor to see how many were left. There were five on the floor, but there was no way of telling how many had survived the garden domes. At the moment, there were no more standing outside of the door.

  I found the revolver on the floor next to Aaron, reloaded the empty chambers, but didn’t give it back to Danel. I crouched down next to Aaron, where he lay with the dead creature’s claw still in his shoulder. His pupils were dilated and he was motionless. He was in shock.

  “Aaron, can you hear me?”

  “Six left, at most,” he whispered back at me. I sat there looking at him. Somehow, I knew Danel hesitated. Somehow my gut said that Aaron noticed something was off with him. He stared at Danel and then his eyes closed, but he was still breathing. His shoulder looked dislocated and he had lost a lot of blood. I needed to find Jessica to heal him. Kye reached over and her hands glowed orange around his head and Aaron closed his eyes. I didn’t know what she was doing or how she was doing it, but there was no time to ask.

  “I’ve stopped the pain and I’ll try and stop the bleeding,” she said, taking off her shirt and tying it tightly around his shoulder. I stood up, grabbing the gun that Aaron had and put in a new clip. Then I heard screaming. Not screeching; not an animal.

  Danel had turned on the audio to the main hall. It was obvious that if they couldn’t get in, the creatures were going to draw us out. Danel ran for the opening in the doors, but he was too big to get through the gaping hole. It was long but too thin for his thick chest to squeeze through. Then he tried to open the doors with his bare hands, but it didn’t work. He ran over to the oval table and tapped a number of buttons, but nothing worked and the screaming continued. They were being slaughtered. His people were unarmed and being sliced into pieces. I looked at the screen for a moment; they were rushing at them, picking off the larger males first. And Danel turned to me. Nothing could be real anymore. But as much as I didn’t want this to be reality, all of this was happening and I would die knowing it.

  “Please help them! Station Ten will be right behind you!” He pleaded with me. But I didn’t stop to listen. I handed him the pistol and I squeezed through the gash in the door cutting my leg in the calf. I tried to shake it off, but I felt blood running down into my shoe and my broken rib was sending pain down my entire left side.

  CHAPTER 37

  I RAN WITH A FORCE that I didn’t know I had inside of me. All I could see was Boyd and Ben and Jessica in my head. The main hall was at the other end of the station and it seemed to take forever to get there. The screams got louder and as I got closer my heart sank with their cries.

  I was in a horrible position. I couldn’t even see the creatures. My panting now echoed in the hall and the pain in my side was throwing my balance off. I just kept running toward the main hall until I came to the large green doors with two large gashes in it. It was horrific. Ten inches of a metal-like material that was stronger than any on Earth had been pulled back like a tin can.

  Quickly, I checked to make sure I had extra hollow points in my pocket. I should have done this before I left the control room. I peered through the gashes in the door. I saw no movement and no creatures inside. I crawled through the gash successfully, not cutting myself again and my eyes were immediately drawn to a glowing pink lab coat on the floor a few feet in front me. I glanced all around the large room. The tables were overturned and the oversized chairs thrown all over. There were smears of glowing fluids on the walls, floors and tables everywhere. A few steps closer to the glowing lab coat and I realized that it was Ben.

  Oh God, not Ben.

  He didn’t move. I wanted to check for a pulse, but then I realized that I wouldn’t know where to check. He was almost torn in half through the abdomen and his lab coat was saturated in pink and purple glowing fluids. The large cut in his neck and his lifeless eyes led me to believe that he was certainly dead. I knelt, grabbing his hand and thought of Kye. This was horrible. My hope sank as I stared at my dead friend.

  Then something grabbed me. I turned my head to look, but I couldn’t move. It felt like something grabbed my head and neck but it wasn’t a hand. It wasn’t a claw. It wasn’t one of those monsters’ tongues. My shoulders grew intolerably tense. I wasn’t being moved or thrown by anything; I was just frozen. Frozen and vulnerable to anything that was still in the room. My hand was still clasped to Ben’s hand on the floor beside me. Panicked, I struggled with all my strength to move again, but it was useless. I took in my surroundings and tried to concentrate. I could still feel my body, feel my rapid breathing. I just couldn’t control it. I could hear my heart beating faster and feel the stiffness in my neck and shoulders.

  Then I noticed that the pink and purple fluids on Ben’s body were moving, changing. They were slowly transforming into a vapor-like substance as they crawled closer towards my hand that was still touching his. A million fears and assumptions ran through my mind. I tried to yank my hand out of his hand, but nothing was effective. I was trapped, immobile. I stared at the glowing vapors as they slid over my hand and started to sink into my skin.

  I could feel a cooling sensation sliding up my arm as my heart pounded faster and faster. I didn’t really know anything about this species.

  Then Ben blinked and in a barely audible voice said, “I’m sorry,” as he released his last breath.

  Somehow I knew he was the reason I was frozen. I could feel the vapors, or whatever they were, in my veins pulsing with the quick rhythm of my own heart. The gasses reached farther up into my shoulder and neck making me feel cold from the inside out. Suddenly, I could feel how old Ben was and he was a lot older than five thousand years; maybe seven, maybe ten. All I knew was that he was older than Danel, but I didn’t know how I knew this.

  I needed to remain calm. I didn’t know if it was just passing through me or going to just take my body over. A part of me didn’t want to know. I wasn’t even sure if the other black creatures were all dead. I knew it had only been a few moments, but the immobility made it seem so much
longer. I tried to think of Kye and Aaron and how they might need me right now. I tried to move again, but I was paralyzed. Then, everything changed.

  CHAPTER 38

  IT WAS LIKE I WASN’T IN MY BODY ANYMORE. I could no longer feel my body. I could no longer feel my heart pounding or feel myself breathing. My head was swimming with vague sounds and numerous voices. My mind surged with images and fragments of images at such a speed it was like traveling through time. I saw a multitude of alien faces: men, woman, Lyra, Collin, Danel, Alma, Boyd and so many more. I couldn’t keep them straight. The images were intertwined together, meshed together, overlapping one another. I saw a whole planet of aliens. Millions, all distressed, all terrified of something. And every one of them called me Ben. But that was his name. I didn’t want Ben to die, but he was dying and these seemed to be his memories. Thousands of years of memories flashed before my eyes. This was more than any human could absorb.

  I knew this alien beside me. And now, I knew Danel had lied. He had lied about everything. In the conference room, he said they were two similar planets with similar species. This was a lie. I watched the black creatures attack and conquer Tanjenna. Two completely separate worlds with two different alien races. I saw wars, explosions and destruction well beyond anything that had ever happened on Earth. Two completely different creatures forced to live only a few hundred miles from each other. It was only a matter of time before they came and destroyed Ben’s world.

  I saw battle after battle, only to watch Danel’s race dwindle and eventually surrender. The Tanjennians were enslaved. They were slaves to the very things that I’d led to the station. I saw them secretly building the ships underground, one by one, over many years. I saw a large group of aliens on their combined ships make a pledge to never speak of it again. It was the past and didn’t need to be remembered. It was over and gone. Aeyan, Collin, Jessica and so many others were born here on Earth. They didn’t know. The black-winged creatures didn’t want the ship. They wanted revenge for the detonation of the sun that had destroyed both planets. I tried to scan the images to see if Danel’s people were responsible for the wars, for the destruction of their sun, but I found nothing.