Apex 3: Shaylo Attacks (5 page)

Heart to Heart

Watson was sitting in the chair beside his bed when he awoke, staring at his hands like he might find the meaning
of life nestled somewhere between his fingers.

He looked up and said, “Oh, hey pal. Glad to see you awake.”

Jack coughed and sat up straighter, wondering why the heck Watson was there.

Watson
cut right to the chase. “I noticed Ms. Hopkins has taken a shine to you.”

Jack
felt immediately uncomfortable. “I suppose she has.”

Watson nodded and cleared his throat. “You should know that she’s been through a lot. She lost everyone during the first invasion. She’s a lost soul and she’s vulnerable to influence.”

Jack’s brow furrowed. “I didn’t know that. It explains why she’s so upset sometimes.”

“Just be good to her, okay? I don’t want to see her go through any more turmoil.”

Jack considered Watson’s concern, and realized he was right to be worried. He said, “I’m hardly consistent these days. I’m all over the damn place. Maybe I should take a step back if you’re worried…”

Watson cut him off. “She doesn’t need stability. She needs strength. I’m not here to tell you to back off. I’m here to tell you that you’re the perfect person for her. She needs someone powerful to look up to and you’re the most powerful man on the planet. But I want you to treat your role in her life with the respect it deserves.”

Watson was acting like Sally was his own daughter. Then again, most of the troops in his charge were young and most of them had lost someone so it was no wonder he’d stepped in as a sort of surrogate parental figure.

Jack
still wasn’t convinced he could be trusted with someone’s feelings that were so vulnerable.

He said, “I don’t know, sir.
If she needs someone to emulate, I’m not the guy for her. I killed aliens as they tried to escape. I’ve committed several murders in the past month. I know I’m a good person, but sometimes that doesn’t matter. I do terrible things anyway. I’d hate for anyone to think I was worth looking up to.”

“I disagree. You’ve done what was necessary. That makes you strong. And you’re not a bad person either. You don’t have to be perfect all the time to be a good guy. Let me tell you a story
. I think it’s an ancient Native American tale or something. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.

“It goes like this: There are two wolves within all of us who fight each other for dominance over our lives. One of them is full of hatred and greed and lacks remorse. The other
wolf is gentle, peaceful and kind. Do you know which one will win the fight?”

Jack
shook his head, enthralled by Watson’s newfound demeanor but also by the story.

Watson said, “The one that wins is the one you feed.”

Jack smiled. He usually hated crap like that, but this time it was clever and appropriate to the situation.

“I promise to
feed the good wolf from now on,” he said with a halfhearted smile.

“Good boy. Now get the hell up. You’ve been lounging around for two days and there’s shit to do.”

Jack chuckled and shuffled towards the edge of the bed as Watson got to his feet and left him to dress.

Abandoned and Alone

The female Grey captain tried to hail
Shaylo’s ship one last time. She wasn’t surprised when he continued to ignore her. He hadn’t even tried to respond to any of the prior hails.

She’d lost everything. She was the one to order her people to surrender during the assault that had failed so miserably and now her men were all dead because of her ill-advised orders. Her one last shot at redemption was to liberate her brethren and
now that wasn’t even an option now that the humans had ordered their deaths.

She took some solace in
the fact that even though the super humans had beaten her and the entire first invasion, there was no way they’d survive an attack from General Shaylo. It was theoretically impossible to beat such staggering odds, even for the enhanced humans.

She dropped from the sky and took a seat on a boulder, far from watchful human eyes.

She would be executed when Shaylo got a hold of her, and she deserved her fate, but that didn’t mean she was looking forward to it. She decided right then that she’d take the coward’s way out. Even execution showed some measure of pride. Her decision was akin to admitting she’d given up. She would kill herself.

She took off her mechanized armor and allowed the Earth breeze to wash over her. The earth was one of the more hospitable planets for her kind and she’d taken a perverse liking to it.

She flexed her fingers and then concentrated on making her internal organs fail, one at a time. When her vision spun before her, she knew she was closing in on death.

Her last thought before embracing the void was this: I wish I could’ve killed more humans.

Tour of the Universe

Jack met his mom, Sally, Hank, and Watson in the base cafeteria. He grabbed a coffee and a bagel before sitting down to join them.

His mom patted his leg and Sally smiled across the table at him wryly.

Hank busied himself eating bacon and eggs like no one in the room even existed. But for all Jack knew, that was how he always acted.

Watson informed
Jack that the second wave hadn’t shown itself yet.

Jack
said, “That’s good. I don’t know if I’m ready for another fight just yet.”

Hank
’s head shot up and he said through a mouthful of bacon, “You were great back there in Nevada. I had no idea you could do stuff like that.”

Jack
smiled, afraid to acknowledge the reference because he didn’t want his mom to know what he’d done. Hank stared at him a beat too long and then got back to his meal.

The exchange was uncomfortable.

Jack focused on his empathic ability. He wanted to know what was going through Hank’s head. If he was jealous, did that mean he was a threat? He had too much to worry about without having to second guess Hank’s motives. He could know where the guy stood and then deal with it.

He felt the ability rise, and emotions swirled through him, but each one was hard to extrapolate from the whole. He felt sadness, ambivalence, joy, unease, relief, and regret, all at the same time, and he couldn’t tell which emotion belonged to which person at the table.

It was then that the ability took over with a surge that nearly made Jack scream out of fright. It swelled and grew, completely out of his control. He didn’t feel each of the emotions any more strongly; he just felt more of them. It was like he was casting his net farther and wider. He was picking emotions up from other troops stationed around the base. And then he felt every person from Cheyenne. The net cast wider, bringing him even more emotions. Soon there were too many to individually feel. They all swirled together into a huge ball of indiscernible feeling.

He stood up and stumbled backwards, gasping for breath. An arm went around his waist to steady him
and hold him up.

His empathic net grew exponentially. He felt like he could tap into the human collective consciousness. But that’s when things went haywire. His ability exploded, unbound by distance or the laws of physics. He felt it wash over the entire universe, bringing back feelings he barely understood.

His body started to shake as his friends sat him back down. He could hardly focus on any one of them.

And then, just as he grew accustomed to the feelings washing over him, he felt his body start to phase.

He yelled, “Oh, shit!” because whatever was about to happen was going to be bad, he just knew it.

His vision flickered as physical objects appeared and vanished rapidly
. His skin tingled and his mind reeled.

And then he vanished.

He didn’t expect to arrive in a desert this time. He expected far worse, and he wasn’t disappointed. He saw the black of space all around him, dotted with pinpoints of starlight. He phased away, and saw a planet, up close, like he was seeing it from an orbiting space station. It was red and purple and the night side was speckled with unnatural light; there was a civilization down there.

He tried to breathe, but he couldn’t and wasn’t even sure he had to.

Then, without warning, he appeared above a different planet, this one smaller and darker. Soon, he was watching as planet after planet flickered before his eyes in quick succession. Some were bigger than others. Each was a different swirl of colors. One planet would disappear, only to be replaced by another. He knew that the planets weren’t appearing before him, he was appearing before them. Each time he saw a planet, he felt the emotions of its inhabitants. He was being given a personal tour of the universe by his own out of control abilities.

Then things got more personal. He started to see alien landscapes, all different, as he appeared on the surfaces of planets. Some of them felt familiar
, in ways he could almost understand, while others were so alien he could barely wrap his head around what he was seeing. Before he had a chance to become familiar with any one, a new one would appear before him.

Just then, he started to see creatures. He saw a yellowish creature first. It was as tall as he was but it had no facial features he could make out and it balanced on a dozen spider-like legs except that the legs looked like they were woven of thick strands of black hair or some other type of fibrous
horn-like material.

That creature barely even noticed him when it was replaced by another, this one small and white, like a fish but with a single, lidless eyeball that was held above its head by a thin filament. It walked on two long legs with
fat suckers at the base of each that acted as its feet. It only looked like a white fish because it breathed through gill-like apparatus on either side of its head. It was making guttural noises with its mouth as it operated some type of alien technology that made no sense to Jack.

The fish was replaced by a black tentacled creature with a huge boxy head and way too many tentacles it used to support its weight. It had thick, muscular arms that jutted from its trunk in all the wrong places. There was no pattern to their distribution around its body. Each moved fluidly, like they either had no bones in them or else they had a hundred elbows. Its box shaped head spun all the way around, its sunken, jet black eyes, swiveled this way and that as it took in a panoramic view of its world.

Then Jack found himself inside a metallic structure, staring at a pink, gelatinous blob that was working some advanced alien controls. He was aboard an alien spacecraft. The blob squelched and farted as it moved around the small space, flipping switches and pressing buttons frantically. Its body looked like it could just melt away into a puddle of sludge. He was glad he phased away before he had to see its face.

He saw so many creatures, in such quick succession that he could barely contain all of the information. Sometimes he’d see one for a few minutes, and sometimes for just a second. He’d see terrestrial creatures, and then aquatic, and then airborne ones. Often he’d appear in places so dark he didn’t even see the creature he was sure was right in front of him, but he could feel it.

He had no clue how he was able to survive in their alien atmospheres or when this would all end. He was traveling the universe. This could take awhile.

Safe and Sound

Sally’s face hovered before him. He couldn’t feel her with his empathic ability and for that he was grateful.

He had reappeared back in the cafeteria, in the exact same spot he’d vanished from. He wondered how long he’d been gone. Was it years, or decades?

His mind was spinning out of control. “How long was I gone?”

His mom’s face came into view. “You didn’t go anywhere, son.”

That wasn’t
right. “I went everywhere. I was a part of everything.”

Watson said, “Get him back
to bed. He’s delirious.”

He felt his weight
being lifted by many arms. He tried to move his legs but they were dangling in the air like a marionette’s.

He was placed in
a bed. Faces hovered and shadows fell over him for awhile and then, after some time, he was left alone. 

His brain felt bruised
and raw with all of the new information flashing through it. He tried to focus on any one single thing, but he couldn’t manage it. There was just too much. He must’ve seen millions of different types of alien creatures. He felt like he’d spent a very long time touring the cosmos, and yet he had never left the mountain bunker.

Then he had an epiphany. He might have phased in and out so rapidly all across the universe that it just appeared to the others that he’d never left their sight. He wasn’t even sure if he could do that, but it felt like the truth.

His brain crashed like it had been attacked by a computer virus and he fell asleep instantly.

Deployment

The First Mate reported that none of the armored suits showed any bio-readouts any longer. That meant that the owners were all dead, including the Captain. There were now no survivors from the initial invasion as far as she could tell.

For his part,
Shaylo didn’t seem to care either way. He’d been ignoring her reports on them ever since she’d started to give them.

He
sat at his command console and watched as his warriors departed in ship after ship. The ships were well armored and armed with enough firepower to take out the rest of mankind but he knew better than to ask his men to sit behind the controls and let the ships do all of the fighting for them. Part of being an effective General was oftentimes letting the men have their fun. The troops wanted to get dirty. They had a bloodlust that had to be sated or it would drive them crazy. He couldn’t have that on his ship so he would let them disembark and get to know the enemy intimately as they slaughtered them.

The first order of business was to kill off the advanced humans. He had a visual on them already so if his men failed, he’d at least know how they’d failed and be able to adjust for a follow-up attack. He doubte
d if the additional scrutiny was necessary but he was thorough when it came to his job. No stone would be left unturned. And no human would escape death today.

He rarely got excited about a conquest, but these creatures had proven to be far more formidable than he’d expected when he first accepted the mission from High Command. They might even put up a struggle. It would be futile, but it would make things more interesting.

He said to the First Mate. “Tell Command that we’ve begun the invasion. Get coordinates for the next planet we’re supposed to clear while you’re at it.”

She was surprised by his reversal. He had insisted that he always focused on the task at hand before moving to the next one so his order seemed hypocritical. Maybe he’d decided the Earth didn’t deserve his whole concentration any longer now that he had a plan in place. She didn’t question him though; she just obeyed his orders.