Future Winds (24 page)

“We are going through with proposition zero,” Miles announced, not caring of the words spoken by the president. “The skills and abilities that the workforce will gain should offset for the lack in numbers in the general populous. When we are ready to bring new citizens into our planet, you will not stop us simply because you do not wish to come. You know damned well that when we fire up the warp gate, and lock it on to your ship, there is little you can do to stop the draw through time and space towards us.”

President Walker clenched his jaw, seething in anger. It was clear that between the two men, this was a game of chess, and Miles had just declared check.

Aisha could see all of the members seated around the room wearing the watches that Natalia had told her about before. They wirelessly connected to one another, and gave them the ability to access an immense amount of data right at their fingertips. The technology also gifted them with maintaining their freedom of thought from any form of higher authority. If proposition zero went through, all of life would be injected with the serum that granted Citizens United total control. The will of humanity could be bent and shaped to execute the desires of a hundred elitists.

“You are using the invasion as a means to ram this bill through,” he flared. “I will not allow it!”

“With all due respect, Mr. President, you are light years away, and I do believe that this new society will collectively agree you are no longer fit to be the man for the job,” Miles chuckled. “I would like to think a fitting leader for the future of humanity to be one of charisma and intelligence. Possibly a blonde with blue eyes and good thick, broad shoulders,” he added, referring to himself.

“Miles! You know what will happen if you do that,” the president hollered, his upper lip twitching.

“Say, Walker. Is that William Lawson’s you have there? A damn fine scotch. Always was your favorite, wasn’t it?”

The president’s lips began to tremble violently as his face went stiff and his veins began to raise out of his skin. He dropped his glass and the shattering sound it made in hitting the floor was quickly followed by snorting. Walker's throat was closing up on him. His attempt to gasp for air resulted in him obtaining none and it looked as though all of the muscles, joints, and limbs in his body were undergoing some paralysis-like spell.

“I heard that you had barrels of the stuff brought aboard your carrier before leaving earth,” Miles taunted. “Say, you don’t look so good, Walker. Are you alright?” he added, raising his eyebrows and putting a finger to his lip. “What is it, boy? Did little Timmy fall down the well? Did someone taint your drink, Walker? Oh jeez, I would call for help but you are just so dog gone far away, ya know?” He smiled as he watched the president grip his chest in pain, unable to breathe. “Oh the irony in being poisoned by an already poisonous beverage.”

The president's face began to drip sweat as it turned beet red in color. Wheezing for air, he mouthed a phrase Aisha could not quite make out before he fell to the floor.

Turning to face the members around the table, Miles left Walker up on the display to die in front of them all.

“Looks like the president just signed off on proposition zero. On top of that he appointed me the new commander and chief. What a guy, huh?” He laughed. “Axstrasa, get the fleet on the line. Let them know proposition zero is passed and to begin injecting the populace on their end.

Lewis, I want you to collect all the survivors on Flare into the carrier directly behind New Horizon. I believe it is called Rising Sun? Anyway the carrier has an assembly auditorium that should be large enough for everyone.

We will begin injections immediately folks. After which we will get straight to work in building a
proper
defense around our new city so that we may warp in more carriers. The darkest of days are behinds us, my friends. The winds of our future have shifted in our favor, and tomorrow holds hope and prosperity that the citizens of man will truly unite once and for all.”

***

Peering up over the rock that shielded him and his two drones from the blast of the grenades, Tyler glimpsed down to the mess of ravaged bodies from the strange ritual he had interrupted. If these demons could resurrect one another as Scorpio had suggested, they would have a tough time picking up and sorting out the fragmented pieces of their friends. That was if Scorpio’s assumption was even correct or if their souls had anywhere to return to given the destruction of their bodies.

“What happens now?” Tyler asked the two bots with his eyes fixated on the mesh of limbs and insides stretched below.

“It will take me a minute to ping and map out an exit for us,” Scorpio said.

“No, not with us.” Tyler paused to look over to the bot, “With them,” he corrected.

“I do not know, Tyler. What I know of these beings, I gained in analyzing their dialects and learning their vocabulary. I would not suggest staying down here to wait and find out though. These individuals are very violent in nature with one another. Judging by the way they dissected that young man they had captured, I can only imagine what they will do to you for having disrupted their sacramental ceremony.”

Nodding his head, Tyler turned back to look at the scene of gore, “Yea, ok. Let’s get out of here.”

***

Ness poked his head out from under the steel beam he had been hiding under for the better part of the afternoon. The one sided massacre had come to an end and the storm of lightning and fire was passing through to the west. Being up by the warp gate, Ness had a clear view of the slaughter down in the city. It was like nothing he had ever seen or anything he could have ever imagined. To witness countless lives lost to a slaughter, then any survivors be eaten by fire from above, was the stuff of nightmares.

Climbing to his feet, he scanned the horizon for any movement, but there was only black smoke from fires still burning and stagnant death embodying the sea of mass genocide.

Bodies piled high against New Horizon began to shift and fall. Someone had opened the doors from within and was pushing the piles of corpses out of the way so that they might reach the outside.

There are survivors
, he thought with a slight glimpse of hope as he began making way towards the carrier.

Ness froze when he noticed the man who had abducted his brother was also on the city's outskirts, but three, to four hundred feet away. The man was accompanied by two awkwardly pale men who wore only thin shreds of a linen-like cloth. Most of their bodies were naked and exposed to the hot, late afternoon sun.

Being on the edge of the city himself, and knowing the men must have approached from the east, Ness was unsure as to where exactly they had come from.

Crouching low, he observed as the two men that accompanied the larger soldier scavenged dead soldiers of their weapons and armor. When fully armed, and fit from head to toe, they set off towards New Horizon: whose doorways were almost fully clear of corpses and debris.

Cautiously, Ness followed the three through the ruins of the city towards the entrance of the carrier, where a couple thousand survivors were
exiting
the ship that had served as a safe haven amidst the chaos outside.

Trying not to step on any of the millions of bodies that littered the ground, Ness tip toed on ahead. Hearing a crunch below his feet he stopped to see that he had stepped on the lower half of a detached jaw, its teeth scattered about, littering the ground. Wanting to vomit in disgust, he continued forward until approaching a point where a decision had to be made.

His only path ahead was up over a long stretch of dismantled corpses. He could go around the mess, but that would cost him twenty-five, thirty minutes minimal. He would risk losing sight of the three men.

Feeling a sense of urgency to catch up to the man who had abducted his brother, he closed his eyes and crawled overtop the dead. He begged and pleaded with himself to try and ignore the sounds of squishing and popping beneath his hands and feet as he crawled. Each step forward, his fingers seemed to sink further into the mush of the fallen, and he did not get far before fully caking his uniform in the blood of the bodies below.

Coming down off the freeway of corpses, Ness slipped on a pile of insides and fell forward yelping. Some of the entrails belonging to the unidentifiable individual had gotten into his mouth. Quickly he began to cry and struggle to regain his footing as he vomited onto the corpse he had fallen into.

Looking ahead, the men hadn’t noticed his cry, and he was close behind them so with tears in his eyes he made haste forward.

“Where are you going?” grunted the brutish man to the crowd of nomads who were leaving New Horizon.

“All survivors are to head over to the convention hall within Rising Sun,” said a soldier to the brute, “that means you three as well.”

“Na, not us,” the large man said pointing to his wristwatch. The other two paler men also wore the data watches that signified they were members of the rich elitist group that was above all law.

But they are soldiers,
Ness thought,
soldiers don’t sit in that position of power.

The three armed men entered the carrier past the crowd leaving the ship and Ness quickly followed behind.

“Hey! Kid!” Yelled a voice from behind that stopped Ness dead in his track. “The hell you doing?”

Turning to face the guard, he felt his face turn red, as he couldn’t think of a viable excuse for needing to enter the ship and follow the three men.

“Yea...I just need to get to my block to retrieve my unconscious father. He has been in a coma for several days. If I don’t retrieve him, he will not make it there,” Ness lied.

The soldier looked him up and down.

He will never buy that! Where did I even come up with that? My unconscious father?

Ness’s uniform was covered in blood from the bodies he had scaled to get here. This forced the soldier to lower his eyes in sympathy, then he gave the boy a nod of approval.

“Hurry up, kid. This is a mandatory meeting for all.”

With his heart racing, Ness dashed through the doors of New Horizon and made way down the main hallway of the ground floor until reaching his block. He ran over to his bunk and climbed to the top where he had stashed the rifle from the day prior. Stuffed behind a heap of clothes, he retrieved the weapon from his cubby and began to inspect it.

Fairly standard stuff,
he thought as he looked it over.

Even though he had never pulled the trigger of a firearm before, this one seemed pretty straight forward. It was a cartridge less firearm, so that meant no bullets needed to be loaded. It fired energy drawn forth from its power core.

Just disengage the safety and pull the trigger.

Ness climbed down from his bunk and scurried for the door. He poked his head out of the room but the man that had abducted his brother was gone and out of eyesight.

Trying to get his eyes fixated once more on the brute, Ness began a light jog down the dimly lit corridor.

The echoes of conversation approached from behind and Ness clumsily took cover behind a cluster of crates, knocking a handful of them over as he waited to see who it was that approached.

“Pick up the pace, ladies.” a voice echoed from down the hallway.

It was a unit of men and women. They were strolling towards him with weapons.

Realizing they would see him, he tried to cram himself further into the pyramid of crates. This dislodged one stacked above and sent it tumbling down to the ground, cracking on impact, right in front of the path of the crew that approached.

They stopped to investigate and Ness tightly squeezed his eyes shut.

You are so stupid,
he thought.
They probably would have just kept walking had you not panicked, you fool. Does keeping your eyes shut help any? No you ass… it does not.

Ness slowly opened his eyes to see the barrel of a rifle was pointed directly atop of his forehead. The wielder of the weapon was the man with the sacred, bearded face, and an eye patch that Ness had seen the night before. He was accompanied by a squad of civilians, half of which were also armed.

After a moment of looking Ness over with his one good eye, the man seemed to have realized where he recognized the young boy from. The rifle he was holding was the one he had given to him after strangling and breaking the neck of his guard friend. Lowering his weapon and scrunching his lips, he turned to his companions.

“Come on. Let's go,” he said softly.

The group continued ahead. They turned a corner and were quickly out of sight. Ness took a deep breath and slumped down to sulk in his cowardice for a moment before getting back up, tripping over more of the crates in the process. He picked up his rifle and walked down the hall, again searching for the large man that had taken Lucas away. Only now, Ness was not so confident in his ability to confront the man when he found him, but he knew he must.

Passing a collection of empty blocks and rooms, Ness was quickly losing hope that he would find them in the massive carrier. The stillness about the ship, with all the populous evacuated to the convention, made for an eerie sight. It made the sound of gunfire all the more identifiable, and while his heart skipped a beat in hearing it, he promptly sought out the source of the sound. This led him just outside of a set of glass doors that led to a medical bay.