Chapter 8

The suns had reached their zenith and the day's heat kept building, oppressing the jungle under a thick, sticky blanket of humidity.

Sweating profusely, John focused all his energy on putting one foot in front of the other. Two hours had passed since Paradox's violent rescue and it was hard to shake it off. When he did, his mind rewound everything he'd seen during the weird connection between him and the robot. Both experiences left him with one dreadful certitude: the rules of the game had changed. In a blink of an eye, the battlefield was there. But the enemy had yet to be seen and being exposed freaked him out.

His foot tripped on a root. John jerked his arm toward a trunk to keep his balance. His knees buckled and he slipped to the ground, suddenly lacking the strength in his limbs to stay on his feet.

Sitting on his heels, John wiped his face with his sweat drenched shirt and glanced up at the slope.

A few yards in front of him, Paradox, who was still carrying a drowsy Harris over his massive shoulder, halted and swivelled his head toward him.

"I'm good," John grunted as he tried to breathe. Today was not the day to feel under the weather. A voice deep inside told him that it was worse that than. He'd lost twenty pounds in the last month and was but a shadow of his former self. There was no ignoring it anymore. It's never your muscles that keeps you up; it's your mind. This was Hell Week all over again and he'd be damned if he quit now.

John pushed on his hands and stood up.

The sky rumbled. The robot lifted his long globular face toward the canopy. They couldn't see much through the dense foliage but the luminosity seemed to have dropped quite suddenly.

"Danger, John Robinson. Move faster."

"Yeah, I was afraid you were gonna say that."

Being tossed around on Paradox''s shoulder stirred Harris awake. First started the moaning. Then came the cursing, the struggling, and finally, the jungle resonated with her pleas to be put down. John found himself tempted to oblige and shut down her reptilian brain once and for all.

Instead, he let Paradox gain some terrain on him.

The robot became a black blur twenty feet in front of him. Then, all he could see were the trees and branches swaying behind the machine. Finally, he was alone. This wasn't a problem because Paradox's footprints were easy to follow. What bothered him instead was his temperature display on his wrist-computer, 101.8 degrees, his heart rate, stuck at one eighty two beats per minute, plus the queasy feeling settling in his stomach. He was edging on a heat stroke.

John came to a halt next to a six-foot wide boulder, skirted around to find its shady side, then flopped down on his backpack and stretched his legs to loosen his joints. A shudder ran all over his arms and spine. He needed water and didn't miss the irony of being thirsty while half the forest was flooding.

While he cooled down, he scanned the trees in front of him and realized that the humming had steadily increased and unlike what he had first thought, it wasn't in his head. It was everywhere.

John pressed a hand on the ground and cursed. It was shaking. Scared that it could be a sign of another landslide, he glanced up at the jungle above him when an ominous shadow darkened the sky.

His body tensing like a spring, John lurched to his feet, slung his bag and rifle over his shoulder, and rushed up the slope toward the crest, expecting to feel the ground sliding underneath his feet at each step. It didn't. As he reached the crest, the sky turned dark and the humming became a loud oppressive electromagnetic wave that pounded deep into John's chest. The air itself began to vibrate and tingle, as if he were in the middle of the most powerful electrical substation.

Every fiber of his body urged him to turn around at once to avoid being fried.

But he couldn't.

As the atmospheric pressure suddenly grew stronger, a fierce wind lifted a whirlwind of dirt, leaves, and twigs into the air and the trees around him bent like bamboo.

Flogged by the flying debris, John felt his ribcage being compressed and his whole body pushed into the ground. Feeling like he was sucking in air thick with dirt and pollen through a straw, he collapsed to his knees, coughing and pressing his hands over his aching ears when Paradox appeared through the underbrush twenty feet down to his left, leaped up the slope toward him, and deployed his four arms to protect him, not a second too soon. A tree snapped and suddenly, a blanket of leaves, branches, and small trunks hit them. John curled under Paradox's body as ground and sky shook violently around them.

There was a terrible metallic screech. All the hair on John's neck bristled in response. A part of his mind warned him that something had been crushed, but he couldn't think beyond that. His pulse pounded too fast in his temples. In the pocket of air under the robot, his upper lip began to twitch. Then a tremor started in his left hand and spread up his arm all the way up to his shoulder. A spasm seized his left leg. His vision contracted.

In the darkness, the noise was deafening. Then the noise and the darkness were no more.

John opened his eyes to feel himself being pulled through a bed of thorns. He gasped in pain as Paradox hauled him out of a well made of collapsed vegetation and dragged him up on a large, flat boulder partially covered with leaves and a few branches. Panting, John rolled on his stomach and pushed himself on his knees.

The chaos had stopped and the air had regained its normal density, but the scene in front of his eyes confused him utterly.

A huge black ship had landed, flattening everything within half a mile radius all around it, clearing the view of the trench and of the plain that lay beyond.

Absently rubbing the numbness in his left arm, he stared at the dozens of alien ships lowering in the dark pink sky while above the wreckage zone, an electrical storm produced a web of pink and purple lightning. Was any of this real or was he somehow trapped in another vivid hallucination? Or maybe it was another disconcerting vision triggered by his connection to the robot?

Real or not, John felt fear grasp him deep in his guts.

Wedged between the artificial channel and three alien ships, two Jupiters stood next to each other. One looked like it had gone through a war, the other looked like the one he'd left two days ago.

"More coming, John Robinson," the robot said before taking off at full speed, looking like a spider crawling down the maze of broken trees.

Maybe if he lay down for a while, caught up with some sleep, maybe all this would vanish when he next opened his eyes. He would wake up on the Jupiter's roof, undoubtedly sunburned, unless Maureen had spread sunscreen on his face.

Thinking about his wife, John looked at his wrist-computer and opened a comlink.

"Maureen, do you copy?"

"John! Where are you?" Her strained voice burst out of his computer.

Alarmed, John pulled his binoculars from his bag. "Er… about two hundred meters west of the-"

"We're under attack!" His wife screamed through the static. "They're all coming at us-"

"Take off! Don't stay there!" he shouted as he focused on the two Jupiters.

Bright red rays streaked from the forest line and hit both Jupiters while a barrage of fire hit them from behind.

This was real! Tightening his grip on his rifle, John sprang down the boulder and lurched into the devastated jungle.