The Eden Project: Humanity's Last Chance (21 page)

The confidence of the tall beast withered as he stumbled away from the flurry of death let loose in the middle of his cannibal army. The beast reached into his pocket and pulled out a handheld device.

Before the cannibal King could communicate on his device, the ground began to tremble as the ships clanged and shifted. They began to turn up towards the heavens. The floor gave way and the ships slowly positioned themselves for launch.

The beast screamed through his rotting teeth, “I want those ships. I need that blood.” He clicked the call button on his device. “Two missiles at the island. Now!”

The beast put the device back into his pocket. He walked over and picked up the doctor’s gun. He messed with the controls and smiled when it made a humming sound as it turned on. He easily snatched Ada away from the doctor and put the gun to her head.

The ships lifted up to the top of the dome and broke through the thick glass as they continued to position themselves for takeoff.

The boy tired, but never gave way to the horde. The last few infected were killed with beleaguered swipes of Trumpet’s blade.

Trumpet stared coldly into the eyes of the tall beast who pressed the gun to the little girl’s head.

“Maybe it’s your blood I want,” the beast said studying Trumpet.

The hissing howl turned everyone’s head except the tall beast who had expected it. The missile blasted through the western dome and just missed ES2. The missile did little obvious damage to the ships but its blast wave sprayed thousands of shards of glass and titanium flooring into the launch apparatus.

The ships continued to rise as the buried rockets beneath them began to emerge from the ground. Loud, grinding sounds accompanied the now flawed positioning of ES2. It did not lift to the same height or angle as the other ships. The blast had taken its toll after all.

When the beast noticed Doctor Quarna’s concern for the second ship, he laughed deeply from a belly full of human blood and tissue.

Doctor Quarna noticed Trumpet twitch. Curiously, the boy no longer held both knives. The second knife was now lodged just above Ada’s helmet deep into the mouth and throat of the gagging beast.

When Ada fell to the ground with the giant, Trumpet was already there to help her to her feet. The boy was drenched with infected blood so Doctor Quarna motioned him to stay back from the girl.

Trumpet nodded and quickly buried his second knife into the skull of the cannibal King.

Doctor Becker ran out to help them as the next missile sailed just between ES2 and ES3, over their heads and struck the middle wall blowing a hole open to the doctor’s side of the dome.

The pressure from the blast knocked all of them back off their feet and onto Trumpet’s pile of infected corpses. The ground began to tremble as the three launch rockets ignited. Doctor Quarna struggled to his feet in a daze. His hearing was lost. He was covered with infected blood and when he found Doctor Becker she was covered in it too.

It was over now. The project was over and they would soon be over. He went to her and pulled her into his arms. They kissed each other madly with infected blood on them everywhere. They did not care. The ships were up through the glass and the kids had a chance now. The species had a chance now.

Ada crawled over to Trumpet who lay unconscious with a metal shard dug into his small chest. She pet his hair back sweetly as she sat next to him up on the bodies of the dead.

* * *

ADAM SAT ON THE FLIGHT DECK in his commander’s seat still wearing his flight suit. His crew was not complete. Any that were not with him were either dead or on another ship.

He was stripped of everything, but he still was the best pilot left on earth and he would fly his ship. He waited for the call. The sensuous female computer voice started the countdown. T-minus-ten-nine-eight and how quickly the seconds in that world had run out.

He could feel the rocket power trembling as the ship lifted up through the top of the dome. He knew ES2 and ES1 would be moving up and out at the very same moment. He closed his eyes and dreamed that somehwere on another ship Gen could feel the rumbling of the rockets, but then he remembered.

She was on her knees on the floor of the dome with Tuna and Cassie. The heat of his rockets might be ending her life now. He hoped down in the deepest depth of his soul that some miracle had occurred and the two people he loved most could have found a way to survive or at least live beyond the moment of the launch. He did not want his first flight to be the means to their end.

He turned on the exterior cameras to see the dome for the last time. The other kids in the flight crew watched on their overhead screens. They were mortified by what they saw. ES1 had made it and they had made it, but ES2 was falling down back onto itself. The floor of the dome was filling up with fire and rocket fuel until the entire dome exploded with the imploding rockets of first ES2 and then ES4.

Air sucked hard into his lungs and his heart stopped. The whole of the island seemed to explode as flames billowed up in an inferno toward them enveloping the ship’s camera in smoke.

They worried the explosion would reach up and throw them back down to the earth to die with the rest of the species, but it never did.

The ES3 lifted high into the sky and approached the heavens. Every cell in Adam’s body ached from irrecoverable loss, yet even as sorrow tightened his chest he knew that none of it mattered anymore.

These few survivors of the planet earth must leave all that death behind and together build a brand new past.

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