Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

“It worked!” Carbine exclaimed.

“Yes. I am so tired, though,” Maya said quietly.

Ratt, having returned to the company of walking, talking people, explained his dream-vision to them while he constructed a working light out of the salvage they had consolidated near their shelter. He couldn’t answer or speculate further as to the origins of the prophetic dream, just that it had happened.

“I was in the presence of something. I’m not sure what. It was intelligent, of that much I’m sure. I may be wrong. But I believe it was the Drop. Or something behind it.”

“Something behind it?” Jon asked, puzzled.

“Yeah. Like there is an intelligence of some kind behind the Drops. Their function. Somehow. He spoke of our adversary. Upon awakening, I knew immediately what he was talking about.”

“Vampires?” Carbine asked, unfamiliar with the word.

Maya nodded. “I’m familiar with the term, from crypto-mythology from pre-Storm Earth.”

“Except it’s not just mythology,” Ratt said, raising one outstretched index finger to the sky. “Only thing I don’t get. The voice, the presence. It was a voice, but I still can’t shake the feeling that—”

“Ratt, we get it,” Jon interrupted. “The point?”

“Right.” Ratt dipped his head and shrugged his shoulders. “He said he—not him, but the adversary—he said he, no, it—”

“Ratt!” the whole party shouted.

“Okay! He said that it was old and had been on Earth before. Something about Enki not being the only prisoner in Hell.”

At Ratt’s words, Jon spied Maya visibly stiffen. She appeared to be trembling, but the morning sun had already begun its preheat setting of the dry land.

“What is it?” Jon asked her.

“I don’t know… but I wonder. Things I heard. Stories. A long, long time ago.” This time, she shuddered so that no one could miss it, and wrapped her arms around herself.

Jon turned to Maya, hoping she could shed some light of a different kind on the mystery, but her face remained expressionless, although she looked to be deep in thought.

“What’s with your eyes?” Carbine asked the other question on everyone’s lips.

“My eyes?” Ratt asked, looking up, frowning. His eyes, now quite alien in their appearance, were magnified as usual through the thick lenses of his goggles. “What’s wrong with my eyes?”

“They, uh…” Carbine started. “There are two of them.”

Ratt looked as if he might say something smart-ass to Carbine, his mouth pulled to one side wryly.

“What he means,” Jon interrupted, “is that each of your eyes contains two irises and two pupils. They are overlapped a bit on top of each other. It’s uh… a little weird, kiddo.”

“Unsettling!” Ratt exclaimed and brought his hands up to his goggles as if they were somehow mirrors that he could use to examine himself.

“I’ve seen that before, one other time,” Maya spoke up, her voice soft and laced with something Jon couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“Huh?” They all turned to her.

“Where?” Jon and Ratt asked.

“A long time ago. Someone that I… someone that used to be a friend,” Maya said, lowering her gaze to the desert floor.

Jon squinted one eye and thought to press her, but decided against it.

“It’s from the Drop. It has to be. From his contact with whatever he met. The other person who, uh, who had eyes like that also came into contact with this place,” Maya continued.

“This place?” Carbine asked.

“This place. Hell. The pocket dimension. One of my crew, someone… close to Enki, he uh, he helped us free Enki from this place, just before the Storm. Afterward, his eyes… they… they looked like that.”

“I see,” Ratt muttered, straightening his goggles and seeming satisfied with the explanation without further detail. “As long as they still work, which they do, I am quite content.”

For himself, Jon wasn’t so sure, but decided that further information could wait for another time. Maya had said she was tired. It had been a long night for all of them and they had much ground to put between themselves and this place before nightfall. He had no doubt the pack of savages would try their hand a second time. Without any further questions into the matter, they all chalked it up to a mystery and focused on things they could influence, like what to do next. Lucy’s temporary absence was never brought up.

They organized into two teams—Lucy and Carbine went out in search of Ratt’s hoverboard and the ruined ATVs, one of which Jon and Maya could assist Ratt in repairing and then fabricate a makeshift sled with which they could drag as many supplies and tools as they could fit on it. The decision to leave camp was unanimous. Their destination: the gold pillar of light beyond the hills, calling to them with its destiny song like a candle in a darkened window.

8

“Well? Is it safe?” Carbine asked as he belly-crawled up to his friend.

“I can’t tell yet,” Jon replied, without taking his eyes from the binoculars.

“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the farmhouse, and what can happen if we rush in. There is no hurry. Let’s just watch and learn.”

In the valley below, several klicks from where Jon and the others hid among the rocks and patches of paddle cactus, lay a city.

Surrounding the clearly occupied city was a wall, its footprint somewhat circular in shape.

Along the top of the wall’s perimeter, pacing back and forth, walked several dozen armed men and women. From what Jon could see, their weapons were somewhat substandard compared to the plasma launchers and Lawnmowers of Home. They also lacked any uniformity. Like the clothes these sentries wore, it would seem that they used anything at hand. The overall feeling that Jon got was more akin to the East Side Lords of Underground than the armies of the Human Republic.

The wall itself was every bit as ragtag as the people who defended it. Constructed from what Ratt called “urbanite,” it was built from the crushed, fragmented, and broken remains of a previous, pre-Storm city’s structures. These chunks of a dead city lay stacked into a rough wall, the gaps