DR2 - The Cross of Changes by Nick Midian, Book III, part 4 of 10
Written by Nick Midian
Content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Duncan
English grammar, spelling, slang, Highlander continuity and general
corrections by Theo
French slang, content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Mash
French slang by Alan
EMAIL: jcaballero@euskalnet.net
SPOILERS: For Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 3rd season, BUT no Xander/Willow
kissing and no Lover's Walk (welcome to the wonderful State of Denial,
Land of 'Shippiness). Hmmm, I've messed with the third season's timeline
to accommodate it to my necessities. Let's just say that 'Band Candy'
happened a lot later than it did, around the first days of February, OK?
For Highlander: None really, the characters of the TV series and films are
only tangentially mentioned. You just need to know the basics of
Highlander-style immortality, BUT I've always thought that whole
'Immortals have no parents and are found in a little basket' is a... um,
the Spanish word for it is 'chorrada', so let's just ignore it, OK?
KEYWORDS: Romance, Angst, Action-adventure, Violence, Alternate Universe,
Crossover.
RATING: PG-13 with some mild R parts for violence and sexual innuendo.
DISCLAIMER: This story has been written with no intention of profit,
merely for the pleasure of writing and sharing it.
The concept and characters of BTVS (Buffy, Angel, Cordelia, Xander,
Willow, Oz, Giles, Joyce, Spike, Drusilla, Snyder, Faith, Harmony, Lyle
Gorch, Quentin Travers and the rest) are intellectual and legal property
of Joss Whedon, Warner Brothers, Mutant Enemy, etc. Also, the concept of
Highlander and the characters mentioned here (Duncan MacLeod, Amanda
Darieux, Richie Ryan, Joe Dawson and the Society of Watchers) are the
property of Panzer-Davis and Rysher Entertainment.
Michael Deveraux, Rachel Curran, Crystal Parker, Kyle White Owl, Robert
Coltrane, Elvis the Dog, Broderick Egoyan, Damon Frost, Mr. Smith, the
World Committee for Civil Defense and the rest are my own creation.
All the songs and lyrics here are used without permission, they are
copyright of their respective rights owners.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Please, understand that English is not my native language,
so any grammatical or spelling errors are my fault, not of any one of my
wonderful beta-readers. If you're thinking of sending any flames, please
be kind with me. I'm a grown man, but I still can cry like a child,
believe me.
SUMMARY: Broderick Egoyan has carefully chosen the right moment to strike,
when friends are against friends and all trust seems about to vanish
between Slayerettes and Archangels. It's right when you think things
couldn't get worse that they get worse.
And now, on with the show. Fasten your seat belts ladies and gentlemen,
because it's going to be a long, hard and jumpy ride...
~~~~~~
The cast for Book III
Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris
Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia Chase
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers
David Boreanaz as Angel
Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg
Seth Green as Daniel 'Oz' Osborne
Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles
Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers
Matthew Perry as Michael Deveraux
Paula Trickey as Rachel Curran
James Marsters as Spike
Nikki Cox as Crystal Parker
David James Elliott as Kyle White Owl
Elvis the Dog as Himself
Eliza Dushku as Faith Adams
Donald Sutherland as The Old Chess Player, Broderick Egoyan
Sebastian Spence as Damon Frost
Avery Brooks as Mr. Smith
Amy Chance as Aphrodesia
Persia White as Aura
Alan Rickman as Conrad Swann
Wesley Snipes as Talon Pantera
Dennis Rodman as Rush Pantera
Tom Berenger as Colonel Cabbot Ashe
Michael Ironside as The Sergeant
Benjamin Bratt as Santero
Trevor Goddar as Backlash
Dolph Lundgren as Havoc
Rob Rowland as Chopper
Jake Busey as Sniper
Shaquille O'Neal as Beast
Matthew Ferguson as Chip
Bill Paxton as Major Stephen Marsden, USAF
Tom Sizemore as Master Sergeant Ricky Perkins, USAF
John Leguizamo as Airman First Class Charlie Martinelli, USAF
Mario Lopez as Airman First Class Alonso 'Bear' Vasquez, USAF
Patrick Labyorteaux as Sergeant Edwin Walters, USAF
Richard Dean Anderson as Col. Jack O'Neill, USAF
Michael Shanks as Dr. Daniel Jackson
Amanda Tapping as Maj. Samantha Carter, USAF
Christopher Judge as Teal'c
Don S. Davis as Gen. George Hammond, USAF
Teryl Rothery as Dr. Janet Fraiser
Tom McBeath as Col. Harry Mayborne, USAF
Peter Deluise as Airman Shepard, USAF
with
Kevin Spacey as Robert Coltrane
Nicholas Lea as Jonah Whalls
and
Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Lady in Red
~~~~~~
Incise: P3X254, 1308 hours Zulu
"Then I suppose now is the time for me to say something profound...
nothing comes to mind. Let's do it."
Col. Jonathan 'Jack' O'Neill
The landscape was so arid - that the mere vision of the wide, endless
desert plains, was enough to make any normal man think twice about the
wisdom of venturing into them.
The light of the twin red suns in the sky above was surprisingly weak, as
the two stars were further from the surface of the planet than what they
should be, to give that empty rock even a minimal chance to house any sign
of life.
But, still, the crimson shine was enough to bathe the sandy and scarred
planet into an eternal twilight, that was at the same time beautiful and
suffocating.
No matter where he looked, even with the aid of his powerful hi-tech
binoculars, all that Major Stephen Marsden was able to see was an endless
ocean of red sand dunes surrounding them to the very limits of the
horizon.
And, not for the first time since that mission had started, the tall
military man wondered who'd had the bright idea of sending him and the
rest of his team to a place so barren, that not even the most basic
bacteria would stand a chance of survival.
Sighing inside the protection offered by his space suit, Major Marsden
passed a thick-gloved hand over the reflecting surface of his facial
plate, cleaning it of the red dust that had slowly covered it.
Momentarily hindering his vision he turned around, looking for the rest of
his team, waiting from him at the end of the dune's slope. And from his
point of view, the four members of his team camped around the two off-road
vehicles, didn't look amused at all.
Far from that, he knew that they were tired, grumpy and fed up with a
mission no one of them had wanted to execute. But he also knew they were
professionals and that they would carry their orders to their very ends,
no matter what.
Even when the atmosphere of the planet was toxic for any form of life
based on carbon, the advanced filters and converters with which their
suits were equipped allowed them to act without the limits of a lack of
breathable air, and the trouble that would arise carrying oxygen tanks
with them.
Food and water were a completely different matter. Even when all the
members of the SG-4 team were experts in survival, it was impossible to
find anything edible or any trace of usable water in the middle of that
red nothingness.
So, they were limited to the food concentrates and the energizing liquid
they could carry inside their suits - and even that stuff they were only
able to consume with the aid of a set of plastic straws, as the idea of
taking off their helmets was totally out of the question.
In case of emergency, the suits also had recycling units for their own
bodily fluids; but that was a measure that none of the five men of the
team liked to even contemplate.
So in the end, considering the hostile temperature, the heat and the
effort that was required to move in an atmosphere that had half the
gravity of Earth, all that they had was 24 hours to complete their
assigned mission. One day, and nothing more.
Major Marsden looked down at the console installed on the lower part of
his helmet, an advanced HUD like the ones installed on the modern fighter
planes. It offered him information about the state of his
Kevlar-reinforced suit, the ambient conditions and practically everything
that would be useful in a situation such as theirs.
What interested the American military officer at that very moment, was the
time. 1310 Zulu hours. Ten hours of elapsed mission time. Fourteen hours
were remaining to finish the mission, with or without success.
Carefully pushing the rubber keys of the console installed on his left
forearm, Marsden changed the communications system so he only would be
heard by his second in command, and not by the rest of the team.
"Sergeant Perkins!" he called. "Mission status report."
From the lower part of the dune on which top he was settled, one of the
four men of the team separated away from the rest and started to climb the
sand mound with long, gravity-less jumps until he reached the commanding
officer's spot.
His movements were clumsy, hindered not only by the unearthly temperature
but also by his bulky space suit, the equipment and the armament he
carried on his person.
"Sir?" Senior Master Sergeant Ricky Perkins asked, as he awkwardly tried
to cope with his ordinance M4 carbine, hanging it from the specially
designed attachments on his suit.
When he spoke, his voice came crackling and echoed by the effect of the
radio transmission, but fluid and clear enough to be understood. "We're
having some problems with the electronic equipment, all this damn dust
slips through every juncture and crack in the casings. We may even have
some troubles with the suit filters, later on."
Frowning, the major directed a hard stare to his subordinate although he
knew that the reflecting surface of their facial plates, designed to
protect him from the harmful solar radiation, wouldn't allow the sergeant
to notice it. "I would like to hear some good news for a change, Sergeant
Perkins."
His bulky suit annulled the younger man's shrug, but Marsden knew he was
smiling beneath the helmet and that his clear blue eyes were sparkling
with humor. "Do you want me to make something up, sir?"
Much to his own amusement, Major Marsden also smiled. "No, Ricky, but
thanks anyway for the offer. Any sign on the monitors?"
The younger, shorter man took a piece of hardware from his utility belt
and opened its lid, showing that it was a miniature but obviously advanced
laptop, covered in a transparent plastic case to protect it. "This place
is as dead as my great-grandfather, sir. Radiation levels... stable on
red. Air and gases... on red. Nothing on the spectrometer, the motion
detectors, the seismograph... oh, whatthehellwasthat!?!"
"What?" his commanding officer asked, leaning down to look at the green
liquid glass screen as he keyed on his console, opening the communications
channel to the rest of the team.
"A pulse," Sergeant Perkins informed him, "seismographic activity in
quadrant... beta-nine!"
"Vasquez!" the commanding officer roared, as the three men at the lower
part of the sand dune quickly stood to attention, checking the different
equipment they had installed on the two military 4WD buggies.
Sliding down the slope of the dune, taking care of not ripping their suits
on any sharp rock, the two military men quickly neared their subordinates.
"I want bodies on all the approaches ASAP! Martinelli, Walters! The
vehicles have to be operative now!"
As two of the soldiers jumped behind the steering wheels of the desert
buggies, weighted down to operate in the lower gravity of the planet, and
started their engines, the last remaining member of the team climbed up
the tower-like structure built in the rear of one of the buggies.
On a standard vehicle of that kind, that structure would house a rotating
observation post equipped either with anti-tank rockets, or a heavy
.50-caliber Browning machine-gun. But, in these modified units, the
armament had been substituted by advanced electronic equipment for
analysis and surveillance.
Airman First Class Alonso 'Bear' Vasquez secured his M249LSW on its props
on the vehicle and quickly activated all the electronic systems, checking
them with fast and trained eyes.
"Sir! We have a signal on quadrant beta-nine, loud and clear! Parameters
are... oh, Santa María Madre de Dios, we have blips and blinks on all the
consoles, seismic, radio, infra-red..."
"It has to be some kind of electromagnetic disturbance affecting the
system," Airman First Class Charlie Martinelli said, with his unmistakable
accent from Brooklyn. The major sat at his side and he started to lead the
convoy off, rounding the sand dune and being followed at a prudent
distance by Perkins' and Walters' buggy. "This place is a fuckin' desert."
"Is that possible, sergeant?" Major Marsden asked with a frown, as he
indicated to the driver to start directing their group to the source of
the signal.
"Martinelli should keep his spaghetti mouth shut, sir," Perkins answered.
"The systems are OK, we've double-checked all of them and there's no
doubt."
"An earthquake, then?" Martinelli insisted stubbornly.
The Master Sergeant shook his head absent-mindedly, not realizing that no
one would notice his expression. "Nah, the pulse is too regular and
stable. The source has to be artificial."
Martinelli released a somewhat tired sigh. "I was afraid you'd say
something like that, Sarge. Is it too late to turn around and go back
home?"
"Gentlemen," Major Marsden said, ignoring the Italian-American's
commentary, "we are professionals, we have a mission and we're going to
accomplish it with complete success. If any of you thinks otherwise, this
is the moment to say so. I have no problems in leaving you here and
allowing you to return home... on foot."
An unmistakable sigh was heard again through the radio channel, followed
by Airman First Class Martinelli's voice, full of resignation. "Well, I
guess this is what they pay us for, after all."
"And we can't let SG-1 have all the fun, can we?" Walters added with a
snort of laughter.
Major Marsden said nothing but, under his reflecting facial plate, he
smiled.
~~~~~~
They traveled for two long hours, following the beeping signal on their
monitors as they crossed the endless desert plains.
Although the chatter was lively at first, fueled by the excitement of the
moment, it soon faded away under the heat and their tiredness. And the
realization that, wherever they were going to and whatever they would find
there, it was almost certain that it would present some kind of danger to
them.
"There's something worrying you, Ricky?" Major Marsden asked his second in
command, limiting once again the conversation to the two of them. "What's
on your mind?"
The USAF Master Sergeant was reluctant to speak at first, but soon he
released a tired sigh and nodded inside the protection of his pressurized
helmet. "I was thinking that pulse signal is too intense. We should have
detected it before."
"And?"
"Well, it's like a beacon signal, something to alert somebody of
something's location. And I think that if we didn't detect it before, that
was because it wasn't activated."
Marsden didn't like what his subordinate was implying, not at all. "All
the reports say that this planet is uninhabited, sergeant. No sign or
trace of life."
"And that beacon? How was it activated?" Perkins sighed again and made a
strange noise with his tongue, rolling it. "It had to detect us."
The major shrugged awkwardly, denying importance to the matter. "Probably
it's some kind of automatic autonomous system. I don't think there's
anything to worry about."
"Yeah, well sir, if you don't mind I'd prefer to keep a bullet in the
chamber for the rest of the mission, so to speak."
Marsden knew that the sergeant was speaking both figuratively and
literally at the same time. "I didn't say we wouldn't take the correct
precautions, sergeant. But I'm sure everything will be OK."
When it came through his helmet's speakers, Perkins' voice carried a
distinctive snort of sarcastic laughter. "From your mouth to God's ears,
sir."
Ten minutes later, the outcroppings were visible for the first time,
rising up from the sandy red surface like mythological giants. To the very
limits of the darkened sky and, although the radar of the vehicles had
detected the rocky formation minutes ago, none of the men of the military
unit were ready for their real immensity.
"We should have detected them before too," Perkins informed his superior.
"They're too big for the instruments to ignore them."
The mass of tableland extended from one side of the horizon to the other,
their limits disappearing from sight in the distance. And its height was
so immense that soon, as the two buggies got closer to it, the soldiers
traveling on them lost the sight of its upper edge, lost between the
clouds and the dim darkness of the planet's eternal twilight.
But the most amazing thing, was that the tableau rose abruptly from the
desert - as if somebody, a nameless ancient god, had ripped it from its
natural bed and, making it cross the whole world, let it fall in the
middle of that arid desert.
Around it, there was no other sign of rocky formations; no mountains,
hills, nothing but endless sand dunes and then the ragged red cliffs,
reaching to the sky.
"Maybe they were hidden by a sandstorm," Vasquez postulated. "Or maybe
there's something in the mineral composition of the formation affecting
the instruments."
"Whatever it was, there's nothing we can do about it," Major Marsden told
them, as he checked the hour on his suit's HUD. They barely had time to
find whatever it was, and return to the Stargate. "The radar shows that
our objective is in the middle of that formation, any suggestions about
how we can get to it on time?"
"I guess climbing that motherfucker of a mountain is out of the question,"
Martinelli said.
"We'd need a week for that alone, spaghetti," Vasquez told him with a
snort, "and it's a tableau, not a mountain."
"Whatever," the New Yorker said with a shrug.
"Sir, the radar shows that there's a canyon leading directly to the source
of the beacon signal. It's too narrow to use the ARV's," Vasquez informed
the major, meaning the All-Road Vehicles, "but even on foot I think we'll
only need an hour to reach it."
"Too in the nick of time, Bear," Perkins commented. "We'll have to enlarge
the mission time one hour."
"Then we'll tighten out belts, sergeant, and we'll do the trip back home
without pit stops. Walters, Martinelli, drive us to the entrance of the
canyon. We'll leave the vehicles there and continue the mission," Marsden
ordered, being immediately obeyed by his men.
After reaching the entrance of the canyon and parking the vehicles by
them, they covered the buggies with twin rubber blankets to protect their
instruments and mechanisms as much as possible from the hostile
temperature. Then the five soldiers ventured into the narrow crack,
advancing in single-file with Martinelli leading the group and Vasquez
bring up the rear.
"I don't understand how it is that I'm always the first one," the
Italian-American protested, as usual. "I mean, can't Bear take point? He
would cover us better with all that fat! Or why not Walters? Why does it
have to be me?"
"You go first because if we find some hostile activity, you're so ugly
that you'll frighten them, OK?" Perkins told him harshly. "And now keep
your mouth shut, Martinelli, I won't repeat it. And try not to make any
noise of brisk movement - if we provoke a cave-in, I have no idea of how
we'll manage to get out of here."
"You're too grumpy today, Sarge," Martinelli insisted, his voice full of
merriment. "You should try to have a better state of mind, be a little
more optimistic! I mean, what's not to like with the beautiful,
breathtaking scenery?"
Around them, the canyon was oppressively narrow - the knife-edge walls of
rough red rock barely leaving them space to move with their bulky
pressurized suits and equipment. The cliffs soared over their heads so
near one to the other and so tall that, if they looked up, the two of them
seemed to become only one, closing, suffocating them.
"Martinelli?" Major Marsden called the attention of the younger man.
"Yeah, sir?"
"Do as you're ordered and keep your mouth shut."
Sighing with resignation and boredom, Martinelli nodded inside his helmet.
"Affirmative, sir."
Even when Vasquez had estimated they would only need one hour to reach the
beacon signal's point, in the end they actually needed twice that time to
cross the whole length of the canyon, so narrow and intricate it was.
Finally, when they were so tired and sweaty inside their protective suits
that Marsden was beginning to question the wisdom of his own orders, the
narrow passage opened without warning. And the five men of SG-4 came into
a large clear opening, in the middle of the gigantic formation.
"Oh, Santa Maria Madre de Dios," Vasquez whispered reverently as they
entered into the clearway.
"I hear you, brother," Walters agreed as he slowly took a complete turn
around and looked up at the scenery. "I'll be damned..."
Like a pit, the opening had an approximate length of three football
stadiums. The walls, as straight and rough as the rest, rose up to the
very top of the tableau, describing a soft curve near the upper edge that
formed a sort of natural dome. Something with an opening in the center,
that they estimated would be as wide as tennis-court.
Filtering through that circle, the weak reddish light of the twin suns
bathed everything inside the clear region. And, as they moved heavily in
the low-gravity ambience, the five men felt that they were swimming in
blood.
Bringing his advanced binoculars to the front of his facial plate, Walters
observed the opening. "It's perfectly rounded," he said, adjusting the
controls of the device to increase the zoom. "I'd say it's almost a
perfect circumference. Amazing..."
"And who cares about that?" Martinelli grunted with a snort. "Look at that
shit!"
Walters followed the direction of his partner's finger, and understood why
the rest of the team was quiet and looking at the same point with what was
a reverent, scared silence.
In the exact center of the open space, a building that surprisingly
resembled an ancient European cathedral stood up like a displaced, lost
voyager of space and time - its gothic towers and pinnacles rising up
sharp and proud, the edges of the roof full with twisted and snarling
gargoyles.
"What the hell is this!?!" Martinelli exclaimed, as he made the sign of
the cross over his chest. "A fucking joke?"
"I doubt it, Martinelli," Major Marsden whispered, as he started to walk
towards the building. "It's our mission, so let's get going."
"It doesn't have any windows," Walters observed needlessly, as he took a
compact digital video camera and started recording. "Amazingly, the
architecture style looks Gothic European... Germanic, I'd say. But those
gargoyles... I've never seen anything that detailed, it's incredible. What
a discovery!"
"Your take, Sergeant?" the major asked his second in command, as they got
closer to the building, standing beside one of its walls.
Perkins knelt down, and passed a gloved hand over the rough surface of the
rock. "If I didn't know it's impossible, I'd say they sculpted the whole
building from the rock instead of constructing it. I don't know, sir, this
is a little outside my area of knowledge."
Leaning his hands on his waist, Marsden looked up to the upper part of the
cathedral and a stone gargoyle returned his look, with its hard and blind
eyes.
=Nothing more than statues,= the military man told himself. But, still, he
couldn't help a chill that ran down his spine, feeling himself being
watched. "Do you think it can be...?"
"Goa'uld?" Perkins shook his head in denial before remembering that his
superior couldn't see his gesture. "No, sir, those snakes are more
interested in destroying things than in building them. This is different."
"Walters!" the Major called the cultural and scientific expert of the team
who promptly trotted to his side, all the time recording with his camera.
"Any idea of how old this thing might be?"
The younger man remained for a few moments in silence, before answering.
"No, sir. This planet hasn't had conditions adequate for the existence of
life in at least a billion years, and that's if it ever had them. And I
don't think this construction is so old, it's too well conserved. It was
probably built by a visiting culture, although I have no idea of how they
managed to do it, sir."
"Thanks, sergeant," Marsden said, calling him by his military rank
although the two of them knew it was purely honorific. "Anything to add?"
"Sir, whatever we're looking for, it's inside this building. And although
it gives me the creeps, we should get into it as soon as possible." He
couldn't help a nervous giggle, that sounded ridiculously girly. "Well,
I'm anxious to see what it is."
"Uh, guys?" Martinelli's voice came then through their speakers. "You
should take a look at this."
The foursome quickly rounded the building until they found their partner
waiting for them, and the short Italian-American man indicated to the
building doubtfully. "What's that?"
"I think it's a door, lasagna-brain," Vasquez told him, with a snort of
laughter. "Haven't you ever seen one before?"
"It's a shame that with these gloves you can't see which finger I'm
showing you, Bear," Martinelli growled at his partner. "I mean, what is
that?"
On both sides of the large door, tall and wide enough to belong to a
medieval castle, similar statues of dogs sculpted in the same red rock
guarded the entrance.
They were the size of a Percheron horse, and each one of them possessed
three heads with their snouts opened in twisted snarls, showing their
intimidating canines and bifurcated, reptile-like tongues.
Instead of tails, the men noticed as they rounded the statues while
examining them, the hellhounds had similar, and horrible, snakes. The
craftsmanship had been so elaborate and careful, that they had chills only
looking at them.
"Cerberus, the mythological dog that guards the gates of Hell," Walters
said, as he knelt down beside the statue on the right and brushed the
thick dust away from the stand where it was settled. "There's an
inscription here... wow..."
"What, Walters?" Marsden asked the man, starting to get impatient. Time
was running low, and he was beginning to share his sergeant's impressions.
The sooner they got out of there, the better for all of them.
No matter what, he couldn't break free from the sensation of being
watched.
"Well, ah, the inscription, sir," Walters said doubtfully. "It's... it's
in Latin, sir."
"Latin?" Marsden frowned, and knelt down beside his subordinate. "Can you
read it?"
Walters gulped soundly and licked his suddenly-dry lips, wishing he could
lift up the facial plate of his helmet and wipe off all the sweat that was
drenching his face and the back of his neck.
"Yes, sir. It's very archaic, but I think... uh... 'here is the First One,
the one that was, the one that will be, guarded by time and space. May his
memory fade away, may this door never be opened again...' There's
something else written below, but I can't...no, wait, here it is. 'Not
with fire, not with steel, only with the same... 'sanguis'?"
"Blood," Martinelli whispered, remembering his lessons from his Catholic
school and making the sign of the cross again. "I'm not liking this, sir.
I'm not liking this at all."
"Already wanting to go home to your mom?" Vasquez asked him. This time,
and much to his surprise, he didn't get any retort from the
Italian-American Airman.
Marsden licked his lips, and considered his options. "Let's go inside."
"Sir?" Martinelli asked with trembling voice. "Is it necessary? I mean,
not that I'm scared, but..."
"Do I have to remind you that we're on a mission, Martinelli?" Perkins
asked him, as he got closer to the large double door and tested its
surface. "Metal, I'm not sure which kind."
"It looks very heavy and solid," Vasquez said, walking beside him. "Do we
use the C-4?"
"We could do that," the sergeant said, leaning against the door, "or we
could just push it."
Grinning, Vasquez imitated him, adding his strength to the one of the man.
"I hadn't though about that."
The large gate remained immobile at first but then, as Walters and Marsden
and finally, although very reluctantly, Martinelli added their help, it
slowly opened with a creaking sound as its metallic edges scratched the
stone surface of the interior floor.
"It seems that it hadn't been opened for awhile," Walters observed, seeing
the white mark that the door had left on the floor.
Following the rest of his teammates, Martinelli shook his head. "We should
have left it that way."
Before anyone of them could answer him, a sharp noise like the one caused
by a fork screeching the surface of a dish was heard and the five men were
suddenly pushed to the floor by a mighty force that choked the air of
their lungs.
"What was that?" Perkins asked, rolling onto his back and feeling suddenly
that he weighed a ton. "What is this?"
"The gravity... it's suddenly increased. Vasquez!" the major ordered, as
he tried to stand up to his feet. "Do a complete run-down of the ambient
parameters."
"Yes, sir," the airman said, keying in the console on his forearm. "Well,
this is...sir, all parameters are on green levels."
"Green?" Marsden asked. "That's impossible."
"No, sir. All parameters; pressure is one atmosphere, temperature is 25
degrees Celsius, humidity is 25 percent..." Vasquez brought his gloved
hands to the juncture of his helmet with the rest of the suit. And, before
any of his partners could do anything to prevent it, he opened the locks
and fastenings, taking off the helmet with a hissing sound of
depressurized air.
As the rest of the SG-4 team looked at him with open mouths, Vasquez took
a long and greedy breath and the sound produced by his lungs filled the
still, dry air of the building.
"The air is definitely breathable, sir," he said with a large smile. "A
little dry, but breathable." He pointed with his head to the open door and
smiled. "Something inside this building must be generating a force field,
keeping the poisonous gases outside."
After a short moment of doubt, the rest of the team followed his example
and one by one they retired their helmets, breathing freely for the first
time in hours and, after removing their gloves too, wiping their faces and
necks with expression of deep relief.
"Keep the helmets and the gloves close," Marsden advised them, "in case
the conditions change again."
Receiving a series of 'yessir's' as response and as the group got
accustomed again to the Earthly gravity, Major Marsden looked around. And,
fastening his helmet and gloves to his utility belt, started to take
charge of the situation.
"Sergeant, Vasquez, I want a control point established here ASAP. Walters,
you and me will reconnoiter this place. Martinelli, you come with us."
The military team promptly followed their commandant's orders and, as
Perkins and Vasquez deployed the equipment they had carried from the
vehicles, Marsden, Walters and Martinelli started the exploration of the
interior of the building, their weapons out and ready.
"This place is large," Martinelli whispered, keeping his voice low without
thinking about it. "At least more than my flat. I wonder what kind of rent
you gotta pay for this place."
"Martinelli..." the Major said, his tone showing clearly how low his
patience was running. "Any idea, Walters?"
As he examined the tall ceilings and rough wall with the powerful light of
the halogen flashlight attached to the barrel of his M4 carbine, Walters
bit his own lip pensively and shook his head.
"I don't know what to say, sir," he sincerely said, "all this has me
deeply confused. The building seems European in its exterior style, but
there is a surprising lack of decoration in the interior. And, frankly,
any suggestion I could make would be just a feeble hypothesis. The truth
is that I have no idea about who could have built this, when, why or how."
"Nice to know that you have everything under control, fella," Martinelli
whispered as they moved from a place to other, walking backwards behind
them and covering their backs with his automatic USAS-12 shotgun. The
building was divided in smaller squared rooms, about ten feet large each
one, with doors on each wall. "This is like a fuckin' maze. What do we do,
sir?"
"Keep exploring it," Marsden said as he took a small plastic flask from
the interior of one of his pockets. The Major unscrewed its cork and let a
few drops of a green luminescent thick liquid fall in the center of the
room. "This will serve to mark our trail. Come on, let's go."
For half an hour, the trio explored the maze of rooms and doors until,
when they were about to lose their patience, they arrived at a distinctive
room in which they calculated would be the center of the building.
That room, about three times larger than the previous ones they had
visited, had an opening in the ceiling. And, when they looked up they
noticed that it was right beneath the larger opening in the dome-like
exterior. The red glow of the twin suns entered through it and, once
again, Marsden had the sensation of being bathed by an ocean of blood.
"Too gloomy for me," Martinelli muttered between clenched teeth, as the
moved to the center of the room.
In the middle of the room there was a statue, about ten feet tall,
representing a winged angel with large extended feather wings and sculpted
in the purest, whitest marble they had seen.
The angel, wearing long vaporous robes, had his arms extended in front of
him, the hands together right at the men's eye-level with the palms up as
if he was asking or begging for something. His face, serene and calm, was
so beautiful that it was almost painful to look straight at him.
=Unnaturally beautiful,= Marsden thought, captivated by his chiseled,
asexual features.
In his hands, or floating about two inches above them to be exact, there
was a perfect sphere the size of a cue ball. Something made of glass and
shining with an inner golden glow that managed to make the red dusk of the
suns vanish, casting light and shadows on the angel's face, giving them
life.
"Amazing," Walters said, as Marsden and himself walked close to the angel
and the object his hands were holding. Raising his electronic devices, the
scientific member of the team did a fast check in of the ambient
parameters.
"Simply amazing. This... ball, is apparently the source of the beacon
signal. Somehow it's projecting light, but not heat or any other kind of
radiation perceivable by our instruments. It's... well, amazing."
Out of the corner of his eyes, practically on the very limits of his
vision, Martinelli would have sworn he had seen something moving. Not a
body, not a figure but more like the whisper of a shadow.
Nevertheless, he turned around raising his weapon and his dark eyes
scanned nervously the red semidarkness on the room. His sensation of
suffocation and of being watched increased to the point of being
intolerable and he felt a cold, chilling sweat drenching his body under
his heavy suit.
Gulping down, nervously, he licked his lips and tasted the salty flavor of
his sweat accumulated on his lower lip. 'The taste of fear', as they had
called it on the academy.
The Italian-American airman took off the safety of his weapon, and loaded
a round into the chamber.
Marsden sighed deeply and put on his gloves, before reaching for the
shining glass ball. "Are you sure that's safe?" Walters asked him.
He nodded softly, although he wasn't really sure. "Intelligence said that
there was the possibility that there would be a great source of power
here, guarded in the middle of this nothingness. It has to be this."
Walters nodded doubtfully, wondering how would Intelligence have
discovered such information and he allowed the officer in command to
proceed without saying anything else. Truth to be told, he was too
intrigued not to fall to the temptation of taking that ball home and
ripping all its secrets from its shining interior.
From his point of view as he looked up, Major Marsden found himself lost
in the void gaze of the marble angel, trapped into his rounded blind eyes
as his gloved hand, seemingly by its own volition, closed around the glass
sphere.
=It's warm,= he thought, taking the artifact from the angel's hands, his
eyes never leaving the statue's ones.
And then, he suddenly stopped breathing.
The angel's features melted the moment that the ball abandoned his hands,
changing, rearranging. His beautiful appearance vanished into a demonic
face, ridges, planes and edges appearing on the polished surface, turning
it into a twisted grimace full of rage and hate.
His thin lips opened, allowing the military man to see a set of pointed
fangs, long and sharp as razor blades.
"Oh, God!" he heard Walters whispering, allowing him to know that he
wasn't dreaming it. "What the hell is this?"
He couldn't answer him, his whole attention was trapped by the hate in
those white marble eyes first. And then by that blinding light coming from
the glass interior, as the shining of the ball in his hands grew
exponentially and the warm sensation he had felt became a burning pain
even through his thick gloves.
Marsden felt pain as he had never felt it before but he didn't scream, he
didn't even release the slightest sigh. He kept on looking at that light
until its bright intensity blinded him for real, and its heat burnt the
skin of his hands, making it bubble up and separating his flesh from his
bones.
Not even when the fabric of his gloves was set into flames, not even when
his eyeballs started to boil, not even when his inner organs liquefied and
he tasted his blood inside his mouth, not even then did he release the
slightest sound.
He couldn't. He was already dead and all that remained of Major Stephen
Marsden, USAF, was an empty, bleeding casket.
=Dead,= the idea passed through his mind in an exhalation. =Dead, but not
finished.= He still had something to do before that, he had a mission to
accomplish.
Reaching out with his hand, as the flesh started to get rotten on his
bones, he grabbed Walters by the chest of his suit and brought the younger
man closer to him, effortlessly lifting him from the floor.
The scientific soldier couldn't react, overwhelmed by the panic. And when
his superior officer looked at him with empty eye-sockets that oozed the
white fluid that had been once his eyes, Edwin Walters was only able to
scream at the top of his lungs.
And, when the undead corpse that had once been Stephen Marsden bit him on
the neck, ripping a large chunk of the flesh of his throat, he couldn't
even do that anymore.
A fountain of blood spurted out from the horrible wound as his muscles and
tendons were ripped from his neck, exposing his trachea. The warm red
liquid fell on the animated corpse's corrupted face and he shook his head
like a shark, completely ripping the chunk of flesh from Walter's throat,
hungrily munching it.
=Delicious,= the thing that had been Stephen Marsden thought, swallowing
it into his decaying body. =The most delicious thing in the universe.=
~~~~~~
The shadows were taking form around him. In front of his eyes, the dark
shadows detached from the obscure nooks and corners, filtering between the
junctures of the walls; standing up, thickening and taking human form.
Martinelli closed his eyes for a brief moment and shook his head, thinking
that it had to be some kind of hallucination, something provoked by his
deep state of fear or by something else he couldn't think of.
But they were still there, when he opened his eyes again. Darker than the
darkness itself, humanoid beings made of retails of night. Red eyes
looking at him from faces that could only be described as nightmarish and
open mouths full of pointed, twisted fangs.
Lips that moved, whispering, murmuring an intelligible string of words
that, at the Italian-American airman's ears, was terrifying and
captivating at the same time.
"Santa Madonna," Martinelli whispered, making the sign of the cross again.
"Major! Sir! We have to get outta here!"
As the shadows started to move, circling Martinelli, the soldier gulped
and, with his weapon trembling in his shaking hands, turned around just in
time to see how a rotting body wearing his commanding officer's clothes
grabbed one of his fellow soldiers.
And, as the man screamed and weakly struggled in his grasp, tore a large
part of his throat with his teeth, provoking an explosion of blood that
drenched his putrid face.
"Oh, my God," Martinelli panted as the creature released Walter's lifeless
body, letting it fall into a shapeless pile of flesh at his feet, and then
turned around to look at him with empty, bleeding eye-sockets.
A pair of glowing red dots arose inside those empty cavities, pinning
Martinelli's figure as the corpse's mouth enlarged into an impossible wide
smile that showed twin rows of shark-like fangs that oozed blood and
saliva.
The creature started to move, walking towards the soldier and Martinelli
finally came out of his trance, shouldering his USAS-12 and aiming at him.
"Don't move, mutherfuckah!" he shouted at the creature as he noisily took
off the safety.
However, the monster kept walking toward him as the shadow demons started
to move around them, walking on foggy feet faster and faster until they
became a blur of movement, a tornado of darkness surrounding them.
The creature's smile grew if such a thing was possible, until the corners
of his mouth were touching his ears and his jaws emerged from his
over-stretched lips like the ones of a shark.
"Chaaaarlie..." Marsden's voice came out with a haunting singsong tone,
even when his lips didn't move an inch. "Cooome with meee..."
Centering the sights on his head, Martinelli clenched his teeth together.
"Fuck you, sir."
Martinelli pulled the trigger and, as the thunder of the gunshot silenced
the maddening murmurs of the shadows, reverberating on the red stone
walls, the upper right part of Marsden's head exploded into a thick mist
of blood, brain tissue and bone fragments, exposing the interior of his
skull.
It made him backpedal a couple of steps as the liquid remains of his brain
oozed out of the tremendous wound, sliding down the side of his rotten
face.
His smile, in spite of this, never faltered.
Breathless, with his dark eyes wide open in shock and panic, Martinelli
emitted a low meaningless gurgle, knowing that he was about to piss in his
pants. "No," he whispered, lowering his shotgun. "No! No!! Noooo!!!"
Losing control as fast as he was losing his grasp on sanity, the
Italian-American airman pulled the trigger of his weapon again and again,
hitting his commanding officer in his shoulder, his chest, his abdomen...
Every time that the .12-gauge slugs hit against Marsden's corrupted body,
a thin mist of blood and something that was indefinable sprayed out of the
newly-opened wound. And the zombie backpedaled a couple of steps with the
force of the impact, until he reached the twister formed by the moving,
whispering shadows.
But he didn't fall down, he didn't die.
In the end, when his USAS-12 clicked finally empty, the only thing that
Martinelli was able to do was let his gun fall to the stone floor. And,
panting heavily and feeling his throat because of the effort of screaming,
look helpless as the corpse started to walk again towards him, his fanged
smile wider than ever and the glass ball in his hand shining like a
nuclear explosion.
His eyes were trapped by that bright intensity, and Martinelli didn't know
anymore if to laugh or to cry as Marsden's corpse started to call him
again, singing out his name.
~~~~~~
While the were deploying the surveillance and data analysis systems,
Master Sergeant Perkins couldn't shrug off the impression that someone, or
something, was right behind him, looking over his shoulder. And, some
minutes later, this feeling was replaced by an intense sensation of being
watched.
And then, when he was about to call himself crazy, he started hearing the
voices.
Incoherent, intelligible, whispering right in his ears.
Leaving what he was doing, Perkins stood up and turned around, sure that
he had seen something moving out of the corner of his eye. "What was
that?"
"What?" Vasquez asked, raising his eyes from the screen of the monitor he
was checking. "Sarge?"
Lifting his M4 carbine, Perkins took a slow turn around, aiming at the
shadows, partially vanished thanks to the halogen lamps they had placed
and the flashlights of their weapons. "Something is moving there," he
whispered in a low voice.
Vasquez arched his brow. "Sarge, this place is dead. Nothing's lived here
for the last one thousand..."
The beam of Perkins' flashlight reached one of the farthest corners and
something, for the lack of a better word, moved inside the circle of
light. Something bulky but twisted, like a disfigured man enveloped in
thick, black robes. But it wasn't a man.
His head moved and, for the shortest of seconds, they saw a pale face,
white as paper, plus a set of inhuman features with glowing red eyes and
pointed teeth that would be more fitting for a carnivorous beast.
Then, the thing covered his face with his long, twisted arms and moved out
of the circle of light, vanishing into the darkness. Perkins tried to find
it again with the beam of his flashlight, but it was impossible; the thing
had simply disappeared.
After letting out a short, perplexed, moan, Vasquez scrambled for his LSW
in such a hurry that he stumbled upon practically all of the hardware they
had deployed, throwing some valuable pieces to the floor.
Neither he nor his sergeant worried the slightest for it, they just raised
their weapons and stood back to back, turning around as they tried to
dissipated the darkness with their flashlights.
"I got him!" Vasquez shouted, when his beam of light captured the creature
again for a brief moment before he, she of it quickly moved back to the
darkness, effectively vanishing into it.
The echo of his voice hadn't still faded when Perkins flashlight captured
the creature's figure again, right on the opposite part of the large room
where Vasquez had seen it before. A heartbeat, and the dark creature ran
away.
"Shit," he growled, "either that thing is very fast, or there's more than
one of them."
"Probably the second," Vasquez whispered with a nod of agreement. Licking
his dry lips nervously, he eyed the semi-opened door leading outside. "I'm
not liking this at all, Sarge. We should put our suits on and get away
from here, before it's too late."
Shaking his head in denial, Perkins kept waving his rifle, the butt firmly
anchored against his shoulder. "Negative, airman. We won't go without our
partners. Furthermore," he added as the volume of the unnerving murmurs
grew up, becoming deafening, "I think it's already too late."
As if it had been waiting for the most dramatic moment possible, an
invisible force pushed the door, closing it with a rumble that shook the
entire building. Perkins stifled a curse, as a little voice inside him
told him that was the sound of their fate being sealed.
The darkness turned complete black, as they lost the soft reddish glow of
the exterior light. And the two military men found themselves trapped in
the middle of an island of yellow light offered by the halogen lamps they
had installed, two shipwrecked persons lost in a vast ocean of night.
With sharks swimming in it, waiting for them.
"What are those things?" Vasquez asked, before taking a small medal with a
tiny cross and the effigy of the Holy Virgin Maria from the interior of
his suit. He kissed it, and started to pray softly under his breath.
"Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores..."
Shaking his head, Perkins wished he had the faith to find comfort in a
prayer.
Anyway, before he could answer the younger man, a scream cut off the
incoherent, endless string of the murmurs. And, as both Vasquez and
Perkins turned to aim their weapons to the source of the unearthly yell, a
disheveled and wide-eyed Martinelli came running into the room by the door
he and his group had crossed barely a quarter of hour before.
=Or maybe it's a ghost looking like Charlie Martinelli,= Perkins thought,
looking at him and seeing the paleness of his complexion and the pure,
sincere fear shining in his eyes.
In a corner of his mind, he realized that the phantasmagoric voices had
gone silent and that the only movement he could see now was at the very
limits of his range of vision, as if those things could only live in the
periphery of his consciousness.
For a second, Perkins thought that Martinelli was going to outrun them, as
he was running as fast as if he had the Devil himself on his tail, and he
reached out with his arm to grab him by the chest of his suit, stopping
him.
Not recognizing the Master Sergeant at first, Martinelli yelped and
struggled in his grasp, trying to break free as he shouted incoherently.
"No, no, let me go, Madonna, Santa Madonna, no, please, no..."
"Martinelli!!" the sergeant shouted, shaking him and trying to take him
out of his panicked state. "Snap out of it!!"
Now that he was able to look at him closer, Perkins noticed the deep
wounds on his face and neck, and the way in which his whole suit was had
been ripped. If he hadn't known better, he would have said claws had
caused it. Anyway, what he realized was that the only reason Martinelli
was alive was thanks to the protective plates of Kevlar of that same suit.
"Sarge!!" the Italian-American exclaimed, as the light of recognition
finally shone in his eyes. "Those things... Walters... the major..."
"What?" Perkins asked. "What happened to them?"
"Walters is dead!!" he yelled, tears of hysteria coming to his eyes. "The
major killed him!"
"What?!?" Vasquez asked in shock. "The major? Are you crazy?"
Biting his lower lip until a drop of blood ran down his chin, Martinelli
shook his head nervously. "Those things...Marsden took the ball, and
became one of them..." By now he was practically sobbing, silent tears
rolling down his cheeks. "He bit Walters... he ripped his fuckin' throat
out!!"
"Things?" Vasquez felt his mouth dry and wiped his lips with the back of
his hand, as he looked nervously over his shoulder. "What kind of things?"
Perkins released Martinelli's chest and moved away from him, raising his
carbine. "Those things."
The murmurs had come back and, with them, the shadows - moving around them
outside the circle of light provided by SG-4's lamps. Their dark forms
moved swiftly, swimming into the obscurity, their voices getting louder
and louder in a maddening song.
"We gotta get outta here!" Martinelli screamed, trying to run away. "Those
things will kill us!"
Perkins grabbed him by the shoulder before he could go, and kept him back.
"No! The door is closed, and your suit is in pieces! You won't survive
outside!"
"We won't survive inside here, either!! We have to get out of here!"
"Too late for that," Vasquez told them, seeing how the shadows were
getting closer and closer, not intimidated anymore by their artificial
lights. "They're coming, guys!"
"Martinelli," Perkins told the younger man in a hurried tone, "you can go
or stay here with us and fight, I won't try to stop you. But if you go,
you will die."
Looking at him with dark sad eyes, Martinelli shook his head. Then,
drawing out his M9 pistol, he turned around and leaned his back against
his partners. "We're all going to die anyway."
"Alright, guys!" Perkins exclaimed, facing the shadows and raising his
carbine. "Back to back, firing sectors of 120 degrees! And don't waste the
ammo, we'll need it."
At that very moment, the shadows attacked.
The dry air filled with the pungent sting of the burnt cordite, the
flashes of the firing weapons and the deafening thunder of the gunshots.
The three remaining members of the SG-4 tried to keep the shadows back
with all they had, tracing arcs of fire with their weapons, knocking down
the ghostly creatures as they advanced over them en mass.
Still, even over the firestorm of the shots, the murmurs were everything
that could be heard.
"Come here!! Do you want this, eh? Do you want this?" Martinelli yelled at
the top of his lungs, feeling a mix of fear and rage filling his body.
Swinging his pistol from one side to the other, the young man fired it
against the shadows again and again. "Eat this! Eat this, stronzos di
merda!! Vafanculo tutti!"
They could see the impacts each time their weapons hit the shadows, the
shadowy creatures shook and backpedaled under the rain of lead, large
chunks of their bodies flying in the air.
Looking over the sights of his Colt M4 as he fired it in short automatic
bursts, Perkins would have sworn that those chunks vanished into rivulets
of darkness as they got separated from their bodies, turning into nothing.
And they weren't even keeping them at bay.
"Come on! Come on!" he exclaimed, without stopping his fire. "Don't let
them come any closer!"
"Aaaahhh!" Vasquez yelled as he emptied his light machine-gun, shredding
them with automatic fire. A shadowy creature took center place in his
firing sector, and he ripped him apart with a wave of hot lead. The figure
shook under the impacts, the shadowy body dancing under the bullets like a
puppet in the middle of a hurricane. "Die, motherfucker, die!!"
The M249LSW clicked empty and, as the frustrated airman shook it with
rage, he took a new look at the creature in front of him and cursed under
his breath. After the more than twenty bullets that he had put into it,
the creature was still standing on its feet, soft rivulets of smoke coming
out of the bullet holes on his black-robed body.
"Shit," he growled, releasing the light machine-gun and reaching for his
pistol. Before he could draw it out, the shadows moved over him like
hungry wolves, tens of hands grasping his suit and grabbing him away. "No,
noo!!"
Powerful hands grabbing him, long fingers digging into his clothes,
tearing them apart and digging into his flesh as he felt a burning pain as
he had never felt it before.
As his voice raised up into a crescendo of agony, Perkins and Martinelli
turned instinctively to look at him and what they saw was enough to freeze
the blood inside their veins.
Vasquez, lifted from the floor by an uncountable groups of arms made of
darkness that surrounded his large body, a fanged mouth attached to his
neck, making his blood flow out in a red river as the airman shook
spasmodically.
A ripping sound and suddenly his arms were separated from his torso,
splintered fragments of bone appearing from the bleeding trunk. Vasquez
screamed in agony, and a blanket of shadows covered his body. One that
dragged him away, making him vanish.
"Oh, God, no," Martinelli was able to whisper, before a clawed hand
grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him away from Perkins.
The Master Sergeant turned around, firing his weapon - but, by the time he
could look, his companion was completely out of sight.
Cursing their luck, Perkins held his carbine in one hand and drew his
pistol with the other. Turning around like a twister, the sergeant fired
his guns again and again, managing to keep the shadows away for a few more
moments.
But then his weapons got empty and he knew it was the end of it all. He
continued moving for a few moments, pulling the triggers, his ears full
with the clicking sound of the hammers falling on the void of the chambers
and the murmurs of the shadows changed their tone, becoming louder, more
hostile.
As he finally lowered them, defeated, the shadows continued moving around
him, their chanting murmurs driving him crazy. He caught glimpses of their
white face in the almost absolute darkness, saw their eyes, their smiles,
felt their hate.
It was the end. Perkins took a long breath and released his guns, which
clattered against the stone floor. Closing his eyes tiredly, he let his
head fall back and released a long, exhausted breath.
"Come on," he whispered as he raised his foot, "let's finish this."
Stomping down, he crushed the flashlight of his carbine with his foot,
making darkness reign completely.
The murmurs grew, accompanied by the movement of the creatures' robes
brushing the floor as they moved over him.
Perkins screamed, but just for a brief moment. After a few seconds, his
voice died into a wet gurgle and then, not even that was heard.
~~~~~~
Martinelli was sitting down in a corner, crouched and trembling like a
trapped mouse. The only thing that wasn't shaking in his whole figure was
his pistol, and that was only because he had its muzzle tightly pressed
against his own throat, right between his Adam's apple and his chin.
He was crying, sobbing as he pulled the trigger again and again and the
firing pin hit the empty chamber. "No, please, please, please..."
Around him, cornering him, the shadows kept moving in soft whispers of
darkness, and the only thing he could outline from their ghastly figures
were their glowing red eyes, boring into him, feeding from his sanity.
Martinelli wanted to die, wanted to end with everything for real, that
madness, that nightmare.
"Do you want to die, Charlie?" the voice came from the other side of the
room. "Do you really want to die?"
Looking through the tears blurring his eyes, the young airman nodded
slowly. "Please, yes, please..." he begged with desperation. "I just want
this to end."
A laugh was heard, barely more than an amused, maniacal giggle and a
shining resplendence appeared in the middle of the room, banishing the
shadows. The light was coming from a glass ball, a perfect sphere of pure
light floating two inched over the open hand of the decayed corpse that
had once been Major Marsden.
As the decomposing zombie began to move toward him, flowing between the
whispering shadows as if they weren't there, Martinelli was captivated by
the resplendent glow of the orb and his dark eyes were lost into its
depths.
There was something in there, something moving, shape-shifting, something
that was surprisingly dark and solid, like a stain of petroleum floating
in a golden ocean.
He could even feel it. It was pure evil.
"You should think twice about that, Charlie," the zombie said, getting
closer to him. "A new age is coming, a new reality for all of us. Don't
you want to stay and witness its glory?"
Raising the sphere, the zombie smiled wider and the intensity of the light
grew until it became blinding - Martinelli had to look away, covering his
eyes with his hand as his whole world was engulfed into a burning
heatwave.
It was as if he was standing next to the sun and the young airman opened
his mouth wide, releasing a pained exhalation as his tongue swelled up,
hindering his breathing.
As he went completely blind, his vision changed and he had glimpses of a
different world, allowing him to see a future he didn't want to live.
Rivers of blood running through demolished cities. Nightmarish beings
moving between burning buildings, as the whole surface of Earth was
ravaged by the armies of darkness. No place for goodness anymore, no space
for the human beings.
And a thing, a creature that was only hate and poison reigning on a throne
of darkness under an eternally burning sky.
Hell on Earth.
"Isn't it beautiful?" Marsden asked him, his undead grin reaching his
earlobes as he kneeled down beside the young airman, looking at him with
those unnatural red glows shining in his empty eye-sockets. "Isn't it
wonderful, Charlie? Just imagine the possibilities..."
At that very moment something started to ache inside Martinelli, a burning
fury so intense that threatened to set his whole being on fire. A hate as
he had never felt before. As his face twisted in a grimace of hate, the
young airman spat a pink mix of saliva and blood into the corrupted face
of the zombie.
"Fuck you!" he roared. "Fuck you all, asshole!! Do you know what you can
do with your new world? You can take it and shove it up your ass, jerk!!"
Reaching out to his utility belt, Martinelli unsheathed his survival knife
and with a soft and fast movement stabbed the undead being, sinking the
blade in the middle of his chest to the very hilt.
Backpedaling and standing up, Marsden looked down at the handle of the
knife protruding out of his chest and then rose his glowing embers to the
man still on his knees. The expression on his rotten face seemed
disappointed, but Martinelli couldn't have sworn to it.
"Did you say you wanted to die, Charlie?" the zombie asked, raising once
more the shining sphere. The shining light increased its intensity once
more, twisting inside its crystal confines as if it wanted to escape from
them.
Marsden smiled and his lips stretched out, showing his shark-like teeth.
"Wish... granted."
~~~~~~
Outside the ancient red building, the calmness was reigning as it had done
for entire millennia, and the only movement was the one produced by the
soft solar winds, brushing the arid surface of the planet, making the red
sand form tiny twisters before falling back to the surface.
Coming out from the interior of the cathedral, a sharp agonizing scream
sliced through the silence, shattering into a thousand pieces of fear and
pain.
However, it only lasted for a few seconds. And after that, the silence and
the calm returned once more.
And, as it had been for a whole age, an age that was ending, nothing that
was alive remained on that barren orb floating in the middle of the dark,
cold space 150 million light years away from Earth.
~~~~~~
To be continued...
Written by Nick Midian
Content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Duncan
English grammar, spelling, slang, Highlander continuity and general
corrections by Theo
French slang, content beta-reading and storyline suggestions by Mash
French slang by Alan
EMAIL: jcaballero@euskalnet.net
SPOILERS: For Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 3rd season, BUT no Xander/Willow
kissing and no Lover's Walk (welcome to the wonderful State of Denial,
Land of 'Shippiness). Hmmm, I've messed with the third season's timeline
to accommodate it to my necessities. Let's just say that 'Band Candy'
happened a lot later than it did, around the first days of February, OK?
For Highlander: None really, the characters of the TV series and films are
only tangentially mentioned. You just need to know the basics of
Highlander-style immortality, BUT I've always thought that whole
'Immortals have no parents and are found in a little basket' is a... um,
the Spanish word for it is 'chorrada', so let's just ignore it, OK?
KEYWORDS: Romance, Angst, Action-adventure, Violence, Alternate Universe,
Crossover.
RATING: PG-13 with some mild R parts for violence and sexual innuendo.
DISCLAIMER: This story has been written with no intention of profit,
merely for the pleasure of writing and sharing it.
The concept and characters of BTVS (Buffy, Angel, Cordelia, Xander,
Willow, Oz, Giles, Joyce, Spike, Drusilla, Snyder, Faith, Harmony, Lyle
Gorch, Quentin Travers and the rest) are intellectual and legal property
of Joss Whedon, Warner Brothers, Mutant Enemy, etc. Also, the concept of
Highlander and the characters mentioned here (Duncan MacLeod, Amanda
Darieux, Richie Ryan, Joe Dawson and the Society of Watchers) are the
property of Panzer-Davis and Rysher Entertainment.
Michael Deveraux, Rachel Curran, Crystal Parker, Kyle White Owl, Robert
Coltrane, Elvis the Dog, Broderick Egoyan, Damon Frost, Mr. Smith, the
World Committee for Civil Defense and the rest are my own creation.
All the songs and lyrics here are used without permission, they are
copyright of their respective rights owners.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Please, understand that English is not my native language,
so any grammatical or spelling errors are my fault, not of any one of my
wonderful beta-readers. If you're thinking of sending any flames, please
be kind with me. I'm a grown man, but I still can cry like a child,
believe me.
SUMMARY: Broderick Egoyan has carefully chosen the right moment to strike,
when friends are against friends and all trust seems about to vanish
between Slayerettes and Archangels. It's right when you think things
couldn't get worse that they get worse.
And now, on with the show. Fasten your seat belts ladies and gentlemen,
because it's going to be a long, hard and jumpy ride...
~~~~~~
The cast for Book III
Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris
Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia Chase
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy Summers
David Boreanaz as Angel
Alyson Hannigan as Willow Rosenberg
Seth Green as Daniel 'Oz' Osborne
Anthony Stewart Head as Rupert Giles
Kristine Sutherland as Joyce Summers
Matthew Perry as Michael Deveraux
Paula Trickey as Rachel Curran
James Marsters as Spike
Nikki Cox as Crystal Parker
David James Elliott as Kyle White Owl
Elvis the Dog as Himself
Eliza Dushku as Faith Adams
Donald Sutherland as The Old Chess Player, Broderick Egoyan
Sebastian Spence as Damon Frost
Avery Brooks as Mr. Smith
Amy Chance as Aphrodesia
Persia White as Aura
Alan Rickman as Conrad Swann
Wesley Snipes as Talon Pantera
Dennis Rodman as Rush Pantera
Tom Berenger as Colonel Cabbot Ashe
Michael Ironside as The Sergeant
Benjamin Bratt as Santero
Trevor Goddar as Backlash
Dolph Lundgren as Havoc
Rob Rowland as Chopper
Jake Busey as Sniper
Shaquille O'Neal as Beast
Matthew Ferguson as Chip
Bill Paxton as Major Stephen Marsden, USAF
Tom Sizemore as Master Sergeant Ricky Perkins, USAF
John Leguizamo as Airman First Class Charlie Martinelli, USAF
Mario Lopez as Airman First Class Alonso 'Bear' Vasquez, USAF
Patrick Labyorteaux as Sergeant Edwin Walters, USAF
Richard Dean Anderson as Col. Jack O'Neill, USAF
Michael Shanks as Dr. Daniel Jackson
Amanda Tapping as Maj. Samantha Carter, USAF
Christopher Judge as Teal'c
Don S. Davis as Gen. George Hammond, USAF
Teryl Rothery as Dr. Janet Fraiser
Tom McBeath as Col. Harry Mayborne, USAF
Peter Deluise as Airman Shepard, USAF
with
Kevin Spacey as Robert Coltrane
Nicholas Lea as Jonah Whalls
and
Catherine Zeta-Jones as the Lady in Red
~~~~~~
Incise: P3X254, 1308 hours Zulu
"Then I suppose now is the time for me to say something profound...
nothing comes to mind. Let's do it."
Col. Jonathan 'Jack' O'Neill
The landscape was so arid - that the mere vision of the wide, endless
desert plains, was enough to make any normal man think twice about the
wisdom of venturing into them.
The light of the twin red suns in the sky above was surprisingly weak, as
the two stars were further from the surface of the planet than what they
should be, to give that empty rock even a minimal chance to house any sign
of life.
But, still, the crimson shine was enough to bathe the sandy and scarred
planet into an eternal twilight, that was at the same time beautiful and
suffocating.
No matter where he looked, even with the aid of his powerful hi-tech
binoculars, all that Major Stephen Marsden was able to see was an endless
ocean of red sand dunes surrounding them to the very limits of the
horizon.
And, not for the first time since that mission had started, the tall
military man wondered who'd had the bright idea of sending him and the
rest of his team to a place so barren, that not even the most basic
bacteria would stand a chance of survival.
Sighing inside the protection offered by his space suit, Major Marsden
passed a thick-gloved hand over the reflecting surface of his facial
plate, cleaning it of the red dust that had slowly covered it.
Momentarily hindering his vision he turned around, looking for the rest of
his team, waiting from him at the end of the dune's slope. And from his
point of view, the four members of his team camped around the two off-road
vehicles, didn't look amused at all.
Far from that, he knew that they were tired, grumpy and fed up with a
mission no one of them had wanted to execute. But he also knew they were
professionals and that they would carry their orders to their very ends,
no matter what.
Even when the atmosphere of the planet was toxic for any form of life
based on carbon, the advanced filters and converters with which their
suits were equipped allowed them to act without the limits of a lack of
breathable air, and the trouble that would arise carrying oxygen tanks
with them.
Food and water were a completely different matter. Even when all the
members of the SG-4 team were experts in survival, it was impossible to
find anything edible or any trace of usable water in the middle of that
red nothingness.
So, they were limited to the food concentrates and the energizing liquid
they could carry inside their suits - and even that stuff they were only
able to consume with the aid of a set of plastic straws, as the idea of
taking off their helmets was totally out of the question.
In case of emergency, the suits also had recycling units for their own
bodily fluids; but that was a measure that none of the five men of the
team liked to even contemplate.
So in the end, considering the hostile temperature, the heat and the
effort that was required to move in an atmosphere that had half the
gravity of Earth, all that they had was 24 hours to complete their
assigned mission. One day, and nothing more.
Major Marsden looked down at the console installed on the lower part of
his helmet, an advanced HUD like the ones installed on the modern fighter
planes. It offered him information about the state of his
Kevlar-reinforced suit, the ambient conditions and practically everything
that would be useful in a situation such as theirs.
What interested the American military officer at that very moment, was the
time. 1310 Zulu hours. Ten hours of elapsed mission time. Fourteen hours
were remaining to finish the mission, with or without success.
Carefully pushing the rubber keys of the console installed on his left
forearm, Marsden changed the communications system so he only would be
heard by his second in command, and not by the rest of the team.
"Sergeant Perkins!" he called. "Mission status report."
From the lower part of the dune on which top he was settled, one of the
four men of the team separated away from the rest and started to climb the
sand mound with long, gravity-less jumps until he reached the commanding
officer's spot.
His movements were clumsy, hindered not only by the unearthly temperature
but also by his bulky space suit, the equipment and the armament he
carried on his person.
"Sir?" Senior Master Sergeant Ricky Perkins asked, as he awkwardly tried
to cope with his ordinance M4 carbine, hanging it from the specially
designed attachments on his suit.
When he spoke, his voice came crackling and echoed by the effect of the
radio transmission, but fluid and clear enough to be understood. "We're
having some problems with the electronic equipment, all this damn dust
slips through every juncture and crack in the casings. We may even have
some troubles with the suit filters, later on."
Frowning, the major directed a hard stare to his subordinate although he
knew that the reflecting surface of their facial plates, designed to
protect him from the harmful solar radiation, wouldn't allow the sergeant
to notice it. "I would like to hear some good news for a change, Sergeant
Perkins."
His bulky suit annulled the younger man's shrug, but Marsden knew he was
smiling beneath the helmet and that his clear blue eyes were sparkling
with humor. "Do you want me to make something up, sir?"
Much to his own amusement, Major Marsden also smiled. "No, Ricky, but
thanks anyway for the offer. Any sign on the monitors?"
The younger, shorter man took a piece of hardware from his utility belt
and opened its lid, showing that it was a miniature but obviously advanced
laptop, covered in a transparent plastic case to protect it. "This place
is as dead as my great-grandfather, sir. Radiation levels... stable on
red. Air and gases... on red. Nothing on the spectrometer, the motion
detectors, the seismograph... oh, whatthehellwasthat!?!"
"What?" his commanding officer asked, leaning down to look at the green
liquid glass screen as he keyed on his console, opening the communications
channel to the rest of the team.
"A pulse," Sergeant Perkins informed him, "seismographic activity in
quadrant... beta-nine!"
"Vasquez!" the commanding officer roared, as the three men at the lower
part of the sand dune quickly stood to attention, checking the different
equipment they had installed on the two military 4WD buggies.
Sliding down the slope of the dune, taking care of not ripping their suits
on any sharp rock, the two military men quickly neared their subordinates.
"I want bodies on all the approaches ASAP! Martinelli, Walters! The
vehicles have to be operative now!"
As two of the soldiers jumped behind the steering wheels of the desert
buggies, weighted down to operate in the lower gravity of the planet, and
started their engines, the last remaining member of the team climbed up
the tower-like structure built in the rear of one of the buggies.
On a standard vehicle of that kind, that structure would house a rotating
observation post equipped either with anti-tank rockets, or a heavy
.50-caliber Browning machine-gun. But, in these modified units, the
armament had been substituted by advanced electronic equipment for
analysis and surveillance.
Airman First Class Alonso 'Bear' Vasquez secured his M249LSW on its props
on the vehicle and quickly activated all the electronic systems, checking
them with fast and trained eyes.
"Sir! We have a signal on quadrant beta-nine, loud and clear! Parameters
are... oh, Santa María Madre de Dios, we have blips and blinks on all the
consoles, seismic, radio, infra-red..."
"It has to be some kind of electromagnetic disturbance affecting the
system," Airman First Class Charlie Martinelli said, with his unmistakable
accent from Brooklyn. The major sat at his side and he started to lead the
convoy off, rounding the sand dune and being followed at a prudent
distance by Perkins' and Walters' buggy. "This place is a fuckin' desert."
"Is that possible, sergeant?" Major Marsden asked with a frown, as he
indicated to the driver to start directing their group to the source of
the signal.
"Martinelli should keep his spaghetti mouth shut, sir," Perkins answered.
"The systems are OK, we've double-checked all of them and there's no
doubt."
"An earthquake, then?" Martinelli insisted stubbornly.
The Master Sergeant shook his head absent-mindedly, not realizing that no
one would notice his expression. "Nah, the pulse is too regular and
stable. The source has to be artificial."
Martinelli released a somewhat tired sigh. "I was afraid you'd say
something like that, Sarge. Is it too late to turn around and go back
home?"
"Gentlemen," Major Marsden said, ignoring the Italian-American's
commentary, "we are professionals, we have a mission and we're going to
accomplish it with complete success. If any of you thinks otherwise, this
is the moment to say so. I have no problems in leaving you here and
allowing you to return home... on foot."
An unmistakable sigh was heard again through the radio channel, followed
by Airman First Class Martinelli's voice, full of resignation. "Well, I
guess this is what they pay us for, after all."
"And we can't let SG-1 have all the fun, can we?" Walters added with a
snort of laughter.
Major Marsden said nothing but, under his reflecting facial plate, he
smiled.
~~~~~~
They traveled for two long hours, following the beeping signal on their
monitors as they crossed the endless desert plains.
Although the chatter was lively at first, fueled by the excitement of the
moment, it soon faded away under the heat and their tiredness. And the
realization that, wherever they were going to and whatever they would find
there, it was almost certain that it would present some kind of danger to
them.
"There's something worrying you, Ricky?" Major Marsden asked his second in
command, limiting once again the conversation to the two of them. "What's
on your mind?"
The USAF Master Sergeant was reluctant to speak at first, but soon he
released a tired sigh and nodded inside the protection of his pressurized
helmet. "I was thinking that pulse signal is too intense. We should have
detected it before."
"And?"
"Well, it's like a beacon signal, something to alert somebody of
something's location. And I think that if we didn't detect it before, that
was because it wasn't activated."
Marsden didn't like what his subordinate was implying, not at all. "All
the reports say that this planet is uninhabited, sergeant. No sign or
trace of life."
"And that beacon? How was it activated?" Perkins sighed again and made a
strange noise with his tongue, rolling it. "It had to detect us."
The major shrugged awkwardly, denying importance to the matter. "Probably
it's some kind of automatic autonomous system. I don't think there's
anything to worry about."
"Yeah, well sir, if you don't mind I'd prefer to keep a bullet in the
chamber for the rest of the mission, so to speak."
Marsden knew that the sergeant was speaking both figuratively and
literally at the same time. "I didn't say we wouldn't take the correct
precautions, sergeant. But I'm sure everything will be OK."
When it came through his helmet's speakers, Perkins' voice carried a
distinctive snort of sarcastic laughter. "From your mouth to God's ears,
sir."
Ten minutes later, the outcroppings were visible for the first time,
rising up from the sandy red surface like mythological giants. To the very
limits of the darkened sky and, although the radar of the vehicles had
detected the rocky formation minutes ago, none of the men of the military
unit were ready for their real immensity.
"We should have detected them before too," Perkins informed his superior.
"They're too big for the instruments to ignore them."
The mass of tableland extended from one side of the horizon to the other,
their limits disappearing from sight in the distance. And its height was
so immense that soon, as the two buggies got closer to it, the soldiers
traveling on them lost the sight of its upper edge, lost between the
clouds and the dim darkness of the planet's eternal twilight.
But the most amazing thing, was that the tableau rose abruptly from the
desert - as if somebody, a nameless ancient god, had ripped it from its
natural bed and, making it cross the whole world, let it fall in the
middle of that arid desert.
Around it, there was no other sign of rocky formations; no mountains,
hills, nothing but endless sand dunes and then the ragged red cliffs,
reaching to the sky.
"Maybe they were hidden by a sandstorm," Vasquez postulated. "Or maybe
there's something in the mineral composition of the formation affecting
the instruments."
"Whatever it was, there's nothing we can do about it," Major Marsden told
them, as he checked the hour on his suit's HUD. They barely had time to
find whatever it was, and return to the Stargate. "The radar shows that
our objective is in the middle of that formation, any suggestions about
how we can get to it on time?"
"I guess climbing that motherfucker of a mountain is out of the question,"
Martinelli said.
"We'd need a week for that alone, spaghetti," Vasquez told him with a
snort, "and it's a tableau, not a mountain."
"Whatever," the New Yorker said with a shrug.
"Sir, the radar shows that there's a canyon leading directly to the source
of the beacon signal. It's too narrow to use the ARV's," Vasquez informed
the major, meaning the All-Road Vehicles, "but even on foot I think we'll
only need an hour to reach it."
"Too in the nick of time, Bear," Perkins commented. "We'll have to enlarge
the mission time one hour."
"Then we'll tighten out belts, sergeant, and we'll do the trip back home
without pit stops. Walters, Martinelli, drive us to the entrance of the
canyon. We'll leave the vehicles there and continue the mission," Marsden
ordered, being immediately obeyed by his men.
After reaching the entrance of the canyon and parking the vehicles by
them, they covered the buggies with twin rubber blankets to protect their
instruments and mechanisms as much as possible from the hostile
temperature. Then the five soldiers ventured into the narrow crack,
advancing in single-file with Martinelli leading the group and Vasquez
bring up the rear.
"I don't understand how it is that I'm always the first one," the
Italian-American protested, as usual. "I mean, can't Bear take point? He
would cover us better with all that fat! Or why not Walters? Why does it
have to be me?"
"You go first because if we find some hostile activity, you're so ugly
that you'll frighten them, OK?" Perkins told him harshly. "And now keep
your mouth shut, Martinelli, I won't repeat it. And try not to make any
noise of brisk movement - if we provoke a cave-in, I have no idea of how
we'll manage to get out of here."
"You're too grumpy today, Sarge," Martinelli insisted, his voice full of
merriment. "You should try to have a better state of mind, be a little
more optimistic! I mean, what's not to like with the beautiful,
breathtaking scenery?"
Around them, the canyon was oppressively narrow - the knife-edge walls of
rough red rock barely leaving them space to move with their bulky
pressurized suits and equipment. The cliffs soared over their heads so
near one to the other and so tall that, if they looked up, the two of them
seemed to become only one, closing, suffocating them.
"Martinelli?" Major Marsden called the attention of the younger man.
"Yeah, sir?"
"Do as you're ordered and keep your mouth shut."
Sighing with resignation and boredom, Martinelli nodded inside his helmet.
"Affirmative, sir."
Even when Vasquez had estimated they would only need one hour to reach the
beacon signal's point, in the end they actually needed twice that time to
cross the whole length of the canyon, so narrow and intricate it was.
Finally, when they were so tired and sweaty inside their protective suits
that Marsden was beginning to question the wisdom of his own orders, the
narrow passage opened without warning. And the five men of SG-4 came into
a large clear opening, in the middle of the gigantic formation.
"Oh, Santa Maria Madre de Dios," Vasquez whispered reverently as they
entered into the clearway.
"I hear you, brother," Walters agreed as he slowly took a complete turn
around and looked up at the scenery. "I'll be damned..."
Like a pit, the opening had an approximate length of three football
stadiums. The walls, as straight and rough as the rest, rose up to the
very top of the tableau, describing a soft curve near the upper edge that
formed a sort of natural dome. Something with an opening in the center,
that they estimated would be as wide as tennis-court.
Filtering through that circle, the weak reddish light of the twin suns
bathed everything inside the clear region. And, as they moved heavily in
the low-gravity ambience, the five men felt that they were swimming in
blood.
Bringing his advanced binoculars to the front of his facial plate, Walters
observed the opening. "It's perfectly rounded," he said, adjusting the
controls of the device to increase the zoom. "I'd say it's almost a
perfect circumference. Amazing..."
"And who cares about that?" Martinelli grunted with a snort. "Look at that
shit!"
Walters followed the direction of his partner's finger, and understood why
the rest of the team was quiet and looking at the same point with what was
a reverent, scared silence.
In the exact center of the open space, a building that surprisingly
resembled an ancient European cathedral stood up like a displaced, lost
voyager of space and time - its gothic towers and pinnacles rising up
sharp and proud, the edges of the roof full with twisted and snarling
gargoyles.
"What the hell is this!?!" Martinelli exclaimed, as he made the sign of
the cross over his chest. "A fucking joke?"
"I doubt it, Martinelli," Major Marsden whispered, as he started to walk
towards the building. "It's our mission, so let's get going."
"It doesn't have any windows," Walters observed needlessly, as he took a
compact digital video camera and started recording. "Amazingly, the
architecture style looks Gothic European... Germanic, I'd say. But those
gargoyles... I've never seen anything that detailed, it's incredible. What
a discovery!"
"Your take, Sergeant?" the major asked his second in command, as they got
closer to the building, standing beside one of its walls.
Perkins knelt down, and passed a gloved hand over the rough surface of the
rock. "If I didn't know it's impossible, I'd say they sculpted the whole
building from the rock instead of constructing it. I don't know, sir, this
is a little outside my area of knowledge."
Leaning his hands on his waist, Marsden looked up to the upper part of the
cathedral and a stone gargoyle returned his look, with its hard and blind
eyes.
=Nothing more than statues,= the military man told himself. But, still, he
couldn't help a chill that ran down his spine, feeling himself being
watched. "Do you think it can be...?"
"Goa'uld?" Perkins shook his head in denial before remembering that his
superior couldn't see his gesture. "No, sir, those snakes are more
interested in destroying things than in building them. This is different."
"Walters!" the Major called the cultural and scientific expert of the team
who promptly trotted to his side, all the time recording with his camera.
"Any idea of how old this thing might be?"
The younger man remained for a few moments in silence, before answering.
"No, sir. This planet hasn't had conditions adequate for the existence of
life in at least a billion years, and that's if it ever had them. And I
don't think this construction is so old, it's too well conserved. It was
probably built by a visiting culture, although I have no idea of how they
managed to do it, sir."
"Thanks, sergeant," Marsden said, calling him by his military rank
although the two of them knew it was purely honorific. "Anything to add?"
"Sir, whatever we're looking for, it's inside this building. And although
it gives me the creeps, we should get into it as soon as possible." He
couldn't help a nervous giggle, that sounded ridiculously girly. "Well,
I'm anxious to see what it is."
"Uh, guys?" Martinelli's voice came then through their speakers. "You
should take a look at this."
The foursome quickly rounded the building until they found their partner
waiting for them, and the short Italian-American man indicated to the
building doubtfully. "What's that?"
"I think it's a door, lasagna-brain," Vasquez told him, with a snort of
laughter. "Haven't you ever seen one before?"
"It's a shame that with these gloves you can't see which finger I'm
showing you, Bear," Martinelli growled at his partner. "I mean, what is
that?"
On both sides of the large door, tall and wide enough to belong to a
medieval castle, similar statues of dogs sculpted in the same red rock
guarded the entrance.
They were the size of a Percheron horse, and each one of them possessed
three heads with their snouts opened in twisted snarls, showing their
intimidating canines and bifurcated, reptile-like tongues.
Instead of tails, the men noticed as they rounded the statues while
examining them, the hellhounds had similar, and horrible, snakes. The
craftsmanship had been so elaborate and careful, that they had chills only
looking at them.
"Cerberus, the mythological dog that guards the gates of Hell," Walters
said, as he knelt down beside the statue on the right and brushed the
thick dust away from the stand where it was settled. "There's an
inscription here... wow..."
"What, Walters?" Marsden asked the man, starting to get impatient. Time
was running low, and he was beginning to share his sergeant's impressions.
The sooner they got out of there, the better for all of them.
No matter what, he couldn't break free from the sensation of being
watched.
"Well, ah, the inscription, sir," Walters said doubtfully. "It's... it's
in Latin, sir."
"Latin?" Marsden frowned, and knelt down beside his subordinate. "Can you
read it?"
Walters gulped soundly and licked his suddenly-dry lips, wishing he could
lift up the facial plate of his helmet and wipe off all the sweat that was
drenching his face and the back of his neck.
"Yes, sir. It's very archaic, but I think... uh... 'here is the First One,
the one that was, the one that will be, guarded by time and space. May his
memory fade away, may this door never be opened again...' There's
something else written below, but I can't...no, wait, here it is. 'Not
with fire, not with steel, only with the same... 'sanguis'?"
"Blood," Martinelli whispered, remembering his lessons from his Catholic
school and making the sign of the cross again. "I'm not liking this, sir.
I'm not liking this at all."
"Already wanting to go home to your mom?" Vasquez asked him. This time,
and much to his surprise, he didn't get any retort from the
Italian-American Airman.
Marsden licked his lips, and considered his options. "Let's go inside."
"Sir?" Martinelli asked with trembling voice. "Is it necessary? I mean,
not that I'm scared, but..."
"Do I have to remind you that we're on a mission, Martinelli?" Perkins
asked him, as he got closer to the large double door and tested its
surface. "Metal, I'm not sure which kind."
"It looks very heavy and solid," Vasquez said, walking beside him. "Do we
use the C-4?"
"We could do that," the sergeant said, leaning against the door, "or we
could just push it."
Grinning, Vasquez imitated him, adding his strength to the one of the man.
"I hadn't though about that."
The large gate remained immobile at first but then, as Walters and Marsden
and finally, although very reluctantly, Martinelli added their help, it
slowly opened with a creaking sound as its metallic edges scratched the
stone surface of the interior floor.
"It seems that it hadn't been opened for awhile," Walters observed, seeing
the white mark that the door had left on the floor.
Following the rest of his teammates, Martinelli shook his head. "We should
have left it that way."
Before anyone of them could answer him, a sharp noise like the one caused
by a fork screeching the surface of a dish was heard and the five men were
suddenly pushed to the floor by a mighty force that choked the air of
their lungs.
"What was that?" Perkins asked, rolling onto his back and feeling suddenly
that he weighed a ton. "What is this?"
"The gravity... it's suddenly increased. Vasquez!" the major ordered, as
he tried to stand up to his feet. "Do a complete run-down of the ambient
parameters."
"Yes, sir," the airman said, keying in the console on his forearm. "Well,
this is...sir, all parameters are on green levels."
"Green?" Marsden asked. "That's impossible."
"No, sir. All parameters; pressure is one atmosphere, temperature is 25
degrees Celsius, humidity is 25 percent..." Vasquez brought his gloved
hands to the juncture of his helmet with the rest of the suit. And, before
any of his partners could do anything to prevent it, he opened the locks
and fastenings, taking off the helmet with a hissing sound of
depressurized air.
As the rest of the SG-4 team looked at him with open mouths, Vasquez took
a long and greedy breath and the sound produced by his lungs filled the
still, dry air of the building.
"The air is definitely breathable, sir," he said with a large smile. "A
little dry, but breathable." He pointed with his head to the open door and
smiled. "Something inside this building must be generating a force field,
keeping the poisonous gases outside."
After a short moment of doubt, the rest of the team followed his example
and one by one they retired their helmets, breathing freely for the first
time in hours and, after removing their gloves too, wiping their faces and
necks with expression of deep relief.
"Keep the helmets and the gloves close," Marsden advised them, "in case
the conditions change again."
Receiving a series of 'yessir's' as response and as the group got
accustomed again to the Earthly gravity, Major Marsden looked around. And,
fastening his helmet and gloves to his utility belt, started to take
charge of the situation.
"Sergeant, Vasquez, I want a control point established here ASAP. Walters,
you and me will reconnoiter this place. Martinelli, you come with us."
The military team promptly followed their commandant's orders and, as
Perkins and Vasquez deployed the equipment they had carried from the
vehicles, Marsden, Walters and Martinelli started the exploration of the
interior of the building, their weapons out and ready.
"This place is large," Martinelli whispered, keeping his voice low without
thinking about it. "At least more than my flat. I wonder what kind of rent
you gotta pay for this place."
"Martinelli..." the Major said, his tone showing clearly how low his
patience was running. "Any idea, Walters?"
As he examined the tall ceilings and rough wall with the powerful light of
the halogen flashlight attached to the barrel of his M4 carbine, Walters
bit his own lip pensively and shook his head.
"I don't know what to say, sir," he sincerely said, "all this has me
deeply confused. The building seems European in its exterior style, but
there is a surprising lack of decoration in the interior. And, frankly,
any suggestion I could make would be just a feeble hypothesis. The truth
is that I have no idea about who could have built this, when, why or how."
"Nice to know that you have everything under control, fella," Martinelli
whispered as they moved from a place to other, walking backwards behind
them and covering their backs with his automatic USAS-12 shotgun. The
building was divided in smaller squared rooms, about ten feet large each
one, with doors on each wall. "This is like a fuckin' maze. What do we do,
sir?"
"Keep exploring it," Marsden said as he took a small plastic flask from
the interior of one of his pockets. The Major unscrewed its cork and let a
few drops of a green luminescent thick liquid fall in the center of the
room. "This will serve to mark our trail. Come on, let's go."
For half an hour, the trio explored the maze of rooms and doors until,
when they were about to lose their patience, they arrived at a distinctive
room in which they calculated would be the center of the building.
That room, about three times larger than the previous ones they had
visited, had an opening in the ceiling. And, when they looked up they
noticed that it was right beneath the larger opening in the dome-like
exterior. The red glow of the twin suns entered through it and, once
again, Marsden had the sensation of being bathed by an ocean of blood.
"Too gloomy for me," Martinelli muttered between clenched teeth, as the
moved to the center of the room.
In the middle of the room there was a statue, about ten feet tall,
representing a winged angel with large extended feather wings and sculpted
in the purest, whitest marble they had seen.
The angel, wearing long vaporous robes, had his arms extended in front of
him, the hands together right at the men's eye-level with the palms up as
if he was asking or begging for something. His face, serene and calm, was
so beautiful that it was almost painful to look straight at him.
=Unnaturally beautiful,= Marsden thought, captivated by his chiseled,
asexual features.
In his hands, or floating about two inches above them to be exact, there
was a perfect sphere the size of a cue ball. Something made of glass and
shining with an inner golden glow that managed to make the red dusk of the
suns vanish, casting light and shadows on the angel's face, giving them
life.
"Amazing," Walters said, as Marsden and himself walked close to the angel
and the object his hands were holding. Raising his electronic devices, the
scientific member of the team did a fast check in of the ambient
parameters.
"Simply amazing. This... ball, is apparently the source of the beacon
signal. Somehow it's projecting light, but not heat or any other kind of
radiation perceivable by our instruments. It's... well, amazing."
Out of the corner of his eyes, practically on the very limits of his
vision, Martinelli would have sworn he had seen something moving. Not a
body, not a figure but more like the whisper of a shadow.
Nevertheless, he turned around raising his weapon and his dark eyes
scanned nervously the red semidarkness on the room. His sensation of
suffocation and of being watched increased to the point of being
intolerable and he felt a cold, chilling sweat drenching his body under
his heavy suit.
Gulping down, nervously, he licked his lips and tasted the salty flavor of
his sweat accumulated on his lower lip. 'The taste of fear', as they had
called it on the academy.
The Italian-American airman took off the safety of his weapon, and loaded
a round into the chamber.
Marsden sighed deeply and put on his gloves, before reaching for the
shining glass ball. "Are you sure that's safe?" Walters asked him.
He nodded softly, although he wasn't really sure. "Intelligence said that
there was the possibility that there would be a great source of power
here, guarded in the middle of this nothingness. It has to be this."
Walters nodded doubtfully, wondering how would Intelligence have
discovered such information and he allowed the officer in command to
proceed without saying anything else. Truth to be told, he was too
intrigued not to fall to the temptation of taking that ball home and
ripping all its secrets from its shining interior.
From his point of view as he looked up, Major Marsden found himself lost
in the void gaze of the marble angel, trapped into his rounded blind eyes
as his gloved hand, seemingly by its own volition, closed around the glass
sphere.
=It's warm,= he thought, taking the artifact from the angel's hands, his
eyes never leaving the statue's ones.
And then, he suddenly stopped breathing.
The angel's features melted the moment that the ball abandoned his hands,
changing, rearranging. His beautiful appearance vanished into a demonic
face, ridges, planes and edges appearing on the polished surface, turning
it into a twisted grimace full of rage and hate.
His thin lips opened, allowing the military man to see a set of pointed
fangs, long and sharp as razor blades.
"Oh, God!" he heard Walters whispering, allowing him to know that he
wasn't dreaming it. "What the hell is this?"
He couldn't answer him, his whole attention was trapped by the hate in
those white marble eyes first. And then by that blinding light coming from
the glass interior, as the shining of the ball in his hands grew
exponentially and the warm sensation he had felt became a burning pain
even through his thick gloves.
Marsden felt pain as he had never felt it before but he didn't scream, he
didn't even release the slightest sigh. He kept on looking at that light
until its bright intensity blinded him for real, and its heat burnt the
skin of his hands, making it bubble up and separating his flesh from his
bones.
Not even when the fabric of his gloves was set into flames, not even when
his eyeballs started to boil, not even when his inner organs liquefied and
he tasted his blood inside his mouth, not even then did he release the
slightest sound.
He couldn't. He was already dead and all that remained of Major Stephen
Marsden, USAF, was an empty, bleeding casket.
=Dead,= the idea passed through his mind in an exhalation. =Dead, but not
finished.= He still had something to do before that, he had a mission to
accomplish.
Reaching out with his hand, as the flesh started to get rotten on his
bones, he grabbed Walters by the chest of his suit and brought the younger
man closer to him, effortlessly lifting him from the floor.
The scientific soldier couldn't react, overwhelmed by the panic. And when
his superior officer looked at him with empty eye-sockets that oozed the
white fluid that had been once his eyes, Edwin Walters was only able to
scream at the top of his lungs.
And, when the undead corpse that had once been Stephen Marsden bit him on
the neck, ripping a large chunk of the flesh of his throat, he couldn't
even do that anymore.
A fountain of blood spurted out from the horrible wound as his muscles and
tendons were ripped from his neck, exposing his trachea. The warm red
liquid fell on the animated corpse's corrupted face and he shook his head
like a shark, completely ripping the chunk of flesh from Walter's throat,
hungrily munching it.
=Delicious,= the thing that had been Stephen Marsden thought, swallowing
it into his decaying body. =The most delicious thing in the universe.=
~~~~~~
The shadows were taking form around him. In front of his eyes, the dark
shadows detached from the obscure nooks and corners, filtering between the
junctures of the walls; standing up, thickening and taking human form.
Martinelli closed his eyes for a brief moment and shook his head, thinking
that it had to be some kind of hallucination, something provoked by his
deep state of fear or by something else he couldn't think of.
But they were still there, when he opened his eyes again. Darker than the
darkness itself, humanoid beings made of retails of night. Red eyes
looking at him from faces that could only be described as nightmarish and
open mouths full of pointed, twisted fangs.
Lips that moved, whispering, murmuring an intelligible string of words
that, at the Italian-American airman's ears, was terrifying and
captivating at the same time.
"Santa Madonna," Martinelli whispered, making the sign of the cross again.
"Major! Sir! We have to get outta here!"
As the shadows started to move, circling Martinelli, the soldier gulped
and, with his weapon trembling in his shaking hands, turned around just in
time to see how a rotting body wearing his commanding officer's clothes
grabbed one of his fellow soldiers.
And, as the man screamed and weakly struggled in his grasp, tore a large
part of his throat with his teeth, provoking an explosion of blood that
drenched his putrid face.
"Oh, my God," Martinelli panted as the creature released Walter's lifeless
body, letting it fall into a shapeless pile of flesh at his feet, and then
turned around to look at him with empty, bleeding eye-sockets.
A pair of glowing red dots arose inside those empty cavities, pinning
Martinelli's figure as the corpse's mouth enlarged into an impossible wide
smile that showed twin rows of shark-like fangs that oozed blood and
saliva.
The creature started to move, walking towards the soldier and Martinelli
finally came out of his trance, shouldering his USAS-12 and aiming at him.
"Don't move, mutherfuckah!" he shouted at the creature as he noisily took
off the safety.
However, the monster kept walking toward him as the shadow demons started
to move around them, walking on foggy feet faster and faster until they
became a blur of movement, a tornado of darkness surrounding them.
The creature's smile grew if such a thing was possible, until the corners
of his mouth were touching his ears and his jaws emerged from his
over-stretched lips like the ones of a shark.
"Chaaaarlie..." Marsden's voice came out with a haunting singsong tone,
even when his lips didn't move an inch. "Cooome with meee..."
Centering the sights on his head, Martinelli clenched his teeth together.
"Fuck you, sir."
Martinelli pulled the trigger and, as the thunder of the gunshot silenced
the maddening murmurs of the shadows, reverberating on the red stone
walls, the upper right part of Marsden's head exploded into a thick mist
of blood, brain tissue and bone fragments, exposing the interior of his
skull.
It made him backpedal a couple of steps as the liquid remains of his brain
oozed out of the tremendous wound, sliding down the side of his rotten
face.
His smile, in spite of this, never faltered.
Breathless, with his dark eyes wide open in shock and panic, Martinelli
emitted a low meaningless gurgle, knowing that he was about to piss in his
pants. "No," he whispered, lowering his shotgun. "No! No!! Noooo!!!"
Losing control as fast as he was losing his grasp on sanity, the
Italian-American airman pulled the trigger of his weapon again and again,
hitting his commanding officer in his shoulder, his chest, his abdomen...
Every time that the .12-gauge slugs hit against Marsden's corrupted body,
a thin mist of blood and something that was indefinable sprayed out of the
newly-opened wound. And the zombie backpedaled a couple of steps with the
force of the impact, until he reached the twister formed by the moving,
whispering shadows.
But he didn't fall down, he didn't die.
In the end, when his USAS-12 clicked finally empty, the only thing that
Martinelli was able to do was let his gun fall to the stone floor. And,
panting heavily and feeling his throat because of the effort of screaming,
look helpless as the corpse started to walk again towards him, his fanged
smile wider than ever and the glass ball in his hand shining like a
nuclear explosion.
His eyes were trapped by that bright intensity, and Martinelli didn't know
anymore if to laugh or to cry as Marsden's corpse started to call him
again, singing out his name.
~~~~~~
While the were deploying the surveillance and data analysis systems,
Master Sergeant Perkins couldn't shrug off the impression that someone, or
something, was right behind him, looking over his shoulder. And, some
minutes later, this feeling was replaced by an intense sensation of being
watched.
And then, when he was about to call himself crazy, he started hearing the
voices.
Incoherent, intelligible, whispering right in his ears.
Leaving what he was doing, Perkins stood up and turned around, sure that
he had seen something moving out of the corner of his eye. "What was
that?"
"What?" Vasquez asked, raising his eyes from the screen of the monitor he
was checking. "Sarge?"
Lifting his M4 carbine, Perkins took a slow turn around, aiming at the
shadows, partially vanished thanks to the halogen lamps they had placed
and the flashlights of their weapons. "Something is moving there," he
whispered in a low voice.
Vasquez arched his brow. "Sarge, this place is dead. Nothing's lived here
for the last one thousand..."
The beam of Perkins' flashlight reached one of the farthest corners and
something, for the lack of a better word, moved inside the circle of
light. Something bulky but twisted, like a disfigured man enveloped in
thick, black robes. But it wasn't a man.
His head moved and, for the shortest of seconds, they saw a pale face,
white as paper, plus a set of inhuman features with glowing red eyes and
pointed teeth that would be more fitting for a carnivorous beast.
Then, the thing covered his face with his long, twisted arms and moved out
of the circle of light, vanishing into the darkness. Perkins tried to find
it again with the beam of his flashlight, but it was impossible; the thing
had simply disappeared.
After letting out a short, perplexed, moan, Vasquez scrambled for his LSW
in such a hurry that he stumbled upon practically all of the hardware they
had deployed, throwing some valuable pieces to the floor.
Neither he nor his sergeant worried the slightest for it, they just raised
their weapons and stood back to back, turning around as they tried to
dissipated the darkness with their flashlights.
"I got him!" Vasquez shouted, when his beam of light captured the creature
again for a brief moment before he, she of it quickly moved back to the
darkness, effectively vanishing into it.
The echo of his voice hadn't still faded when Perkins flashlight captured
the creature's figure again, right on the opposite part of the large room
where Vasquez had seen it before. A heartbeat, and the dark creature ran
away.
"Shit," he growled, "either that thing is very fast, or there's more than
one of them."
"Probably the second," Vasquez whispered with a nod of agreement. Licking
his dry lips nervously, he eyed the semi-opened door leading outside. "I'm
not liking this at all, Sarge. We should put our suits on and get away
from here, before it's too late."
Shaking his head in denial, Perkins kept waving his rifle, the butt firmly
anchored against his shoulder. "Negative, airman. We won't go without our
partners. Furthermore," he added as the volume of the unnerving murmurs
grew up, becoming deafening, "I think it's already too late."
As if it had been waiting for the most dramatic moment possible, an
invisible force pushed the door, closing it with a rumble that shook the
entire building. Perkins stifled a curse, as a little voice inside him
told him that was the sound of their fate being sealed.
The darkness turned complete black, as they lost the soft reddish glow of
the exterior light. And the two military men found themselves trapped in
the middle of an island of yellow light offered by the halogen lamps they
had installed, two shipwrecked persons lost in a vast ocean of night.
With sharks swimming in it, waiting for them.
"What are those things?" Vasquez asked, before taking a small medal with a
tiny cross and the effigy of the Holy Virgin Maria from the interior of
his suit. He kissed it, and started to pray softly under his breath.
"Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores..."
Shaking his head, Perkins wished he had the faith to find comfort in a
prayer.
Anyway, before he could answer the younger man, a scream cut off the
incoherent, endless string of the murmurs. And, as both Vasquez and
Perkins turned to aim their weapons to the source of the unearthly yell, a
disheveled and wide-eyed Martinelli came running into the room by the door
he and his group had crossed barely a quarter of hour before.
=Or maybe it's a ghost looking like Charlie Martinelli,= Perkins thought,
looking at him and seeing the paleness of his complexion and the pure,
sincere fear shining in his eyes.
In a corner of his mind, he realized that the phantasmagoric voices had
gone silent and that the only movement he could see now was at the very
limits of his range of vision, as if those things could only live in the
periphery of his consciousness.
For a second, Perkins thought that Martinelli was going to outrun them, as
he was running as fast as if he had the Devil himself on his tail, and he
reached out with his arm to grab him by the chest of his suit, stopping
him.
Not recognizing the Master Sergeant at first, Martinelli yelped and
struggled in his grasp, trying to break free as he shouted incoherently.
"No, no, let me go, Madonna, Santa Madonna, no, please, no..."
"Martinelli!!" the sergeant shouted, shaking him and trying to take him
out of his panicked state. "Snap out of it!!"
Now that he was able to look at him closer, Perkins noticed the deep
wounds on his face and neck, and the way in which his whole suit was had
been ripped. If he hadn't known better, he would have said claws had
caused it. Anyway, what he realized was that the only reason Martinelli
was alive was thanks to the protective plates of Kevlar of that same suit.
"Sarge!!" the Italian-American exclaimed, as the light of recognition
finally shone in his eyes. "Those things... Walters... the major..."
"What?" Perkins asked. "What happened to them?"
"Walters is dead!!" he yelled, tears of hysteria coming to his eyes. "The
major killed him!"
"What?!?" Vasquez asked in shock. "The major? Are you crazy?"
Biting his lower lip until a drop of blood ran down his chin, Martinelli
shook his head nervously. "Those things...Marsden took the ball, and
became one of them..." By now he was practically sobbing, silent tears
rolling down his cheeks. "He bit Walters... he ripped his fuckin' throat
out!!"
"Things?" Vasquez felt his mouth dry and wiped his lips with the back of
his hand, as he looked nervously over his shoulder. "What kind of things?"
Perkins released Martinelli's chest and moved away from him, raising his
carbine. "Those things."
The murmurs had come back and, with them, the shadows - moving around them
outside the circle of light provided by SG-4's lamps. Their dark forms
moved swiftly, swimming into the obscurity, their voices getting louder
and louder in a maddening song.
"We gotta get outta here!" Martinelli screamed, trying to run away. "Those
things will kill us!"
Perkins grabbed him by the shoulder before he could go, and kept him back.
"No! The door is closed, and your suit is in pieces! You won't survive
outside!"
"We won't survive inside here, either!! We have to get out of here!"
"Too late for that," Vasquez told them, seeing how the shadows were
getting closer and closer, not intimidated anymore by their artificial
lights. "They're coming, guys!"
"Martinelli," Perkins told the younger man in a hurried tone, "you can go
or stay here with us and fight, I won't try to stop you. But if you go,
you will die."
Looking at him with dark sad eyes, Martinelli shook his head. Then,
drawing out his M9 pistol, he turned around and leaned his back against
his partners. "We're all going to die anyway."
"Alright, guys!" Perkins exclaimed, facing the shadows and raising his
carbine. "Back to back, firing sectors of 120 degrees! And don't waste the
ammo, we'll need it."
At that very moment, the shadows attacked.
The dry air filled with the pungent sting of the burnt cordite, the
flashes of the firing weapons and the deafening thunder of the gunshots.
The three remaining members of the SG-4 tried to keep the shadows back
with all they had, tracing arcs of fire with their weapons, knocking down
the ghostly creatures as they advanced over them en mass.
Still, even over the firestorm of the shots, the murmurs were everything
that could be heard.
"Come here!! Do you want this, eh? Do you want this?" Martinelli yelled at
the top of his lungs, feeling a mix of fear and rage filling his body.
Swinging his pistol from one side to the other, the young man fired it
against the shadows again and again. "Eat this! Eat this, stronzos di
merda!! Vafanculo tutti!"
They could see the impacts each time their weapons hit the shadows, the
shadowy creatures shook and backpedaled under the rain of lead, large
chunks of their bodies flying in the air.
Looking over the sights of his Colt M4 as he fired it in short automatic
bursts, Perkins would have sworn that those chunks vanished into rivulets
of darkness as they got separated from their bodies, turning into nothing.
And they weren't even keeping them at bay.
"Come on! Come on!" he exclaimed, without stopping his fire. "Don't let
them come any closer!"
"Aaaahhh!" Vasquez yelled as he emptied his light machine-gun, shredding
them with automatic fire. A shadowy creature took center place in his
firing sector, and he ripped him apart with a wave of hot lead. The figure
shook under the impacts, the shadowy body dancing under the bullets like a
puppet in the middle of a hurricane. "Die, motherfucker, die!!"
The M249LSW clicked empty and, as the frustrated airman shook it with
rage, he took a new look at the creature in front of him and cursed under
his breath. After the more than twenty bullets that he had put into it,
the creature was still standing on its feet, soft rivulets of smoke coming
out of the bullet holes on his black-robed body.
"Shit," he growled, releasing the light machine-gun and reaching for his
pistol. Before he could draw it out, the shadows moved over him like
hungry wolves, tens of hands grasping his suit and grabbing him away. "No,
noo!!"
Powerful hands grabbing him, long fingers digging into his clothes,
tearing them apart and digging into his flesh as he felt a burning pain as
he had never felt it before.
As his voice raised up into a crescendo of agony, Perkins and Martinelli
turned instinctively to look at him and what they saw was enough to freeze
the blood inside their veins.
Vasquez, lifted from the floor by an uncountable groups of arms made of
darkness that surrounded his large body, a fanged mouth attached to his
neck, making his blood flow out in a red river as the airman shook
spasmodically.
A ripping sound and suddenly his arms were separated from his torso,
splintered fragments of bone appearing from the bleeding trunk. Vasquez
screamed in agony, and a blanket of shadows covered his body. One that
dragged him away, making him vanish.
"Oh, God, no," Martinelli was able to whisper, before a clawed hand
grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him away from Perkins.
The Master Sergeant turned around, firing his weapon - but, by the time he
could look, his companion was completely out of sight.
Cursing their luck, Perkins held his carbine in one hand and drew his
pistol with the other. Turning around like a twister, the sergeant fired
his guns again and again, managing to keep the shadows away for a few more
moments.
But then his weapons got empty and he knew it was the end of it all. He
continued moving for a few moments, pulling the triggers, his ears full
with the clicking sound of the hammers falling on the void of the chambers
and the murmurs of the shadows changed their tone, becoming louder, more
hostile.
As he finally lowered them, defeated, the shadows continued moving around
him, their chanting murmurs driving him crazy. He caught glimpses of their
white face in the almost absolute darkness, saw their eyes, their smiles,
felt their hate.
It was the end. Perkins took a long breath and released his guns, which
clattered against the stone floor. Closing his eyes tiredly, he let his
head fall back and released a long, exhausted breath.
"Come on," he whispered as he raised his foot, "let's finish this."
Stomping down, he crushed the flashlight of his carbine with his foot,
making darkness reign completely.
The murmurs grew, accompanied by the movement of the creatures' robes
brushing the floor as they moved over him.
Perkins screamed, but just for a brief moment. After a few seconds, his
voice died into a wet gurgle and then, not even that was heard.
~~~~~~
Martinelli was sitting down in a corner, crouched and trembling like a
trapped mouse. The only thing that wasn't shaking in his whole figure was
his pistol, and that was only because he had its muzzle tightly pressed
against his own throat, right between his Adam's apple and his chin.
He was crying, sobbing as he pulled the trigger again and again and the
firing pin hit the empty chamber. "No, please, please, please..."
Around him, cornering him, the shadows kept moving in soft whispers of
darkness, and the only thing he could outline from their ghastly figures
were their glowing red eyes, boring into him, feeding from his sanity.
Martinelli wanted to die, wanted to end with everything for real, that
madness, that nightmare.
"Do you want to die, Charlie?" the voice came from the other side of the
room. "Do you really want to die?"
Looking through the tears blurring his eyes, the young airman nodded
slowly. "Please, yes, please..." he begged with desperation. "I just want
this to end."
A laugh was heard, barely more than an amused, maniacal giggle and a
shining resplendence appeared in the middle of the room, banishing the
shadows. The light was coming from a glass ball, a perfect sphere of pure
light floating two inched over the open hand of the decayed corpse that
had once been Major Marsden.
As the decomposing zombie began to move toward him, flowing between the
whispering shadows as if they weren't there, Martinelli was captivated by
the resplendent glow of the orb and his dark eyes were lost into its
depths.
There was something in there, something moving, shape-shifting, something
that was surprisingly dark and solid, like a stain of petroleum floating
in a golden ocean.
He could even feel it. It was pure evil.
"You should think twice about that, Charlie," the zombie said, getting
closer to him. "A new age is coming, a new reality for all of us. Don't
you want to stay and witness its glory?"
Raising the sphere, the zombie smiled wider and the intensity of the light
grew until it became blinding - Martinelli had to look away, covering his
eyes with his hand as his whole world was engulfed into a burning
heatwave.
It was as if he was standing next to the sun and the young airman opened
his mouth wide, releasing a pained exhalation as his tongue swelled up,
hindering his breathing.
As he went completely blind, his vision changed and he had glimpses of a
different world, allowing him to see a future he didn't want to live.
Rivers of blood running through demolished cities. Nightmarish beings
moving between burning buildings, as the whole surface of Earth was
ravaged by the armies of darkness. No place for goodness anymore, no space
for the human beings.
And a thing, a creature that was only hate and poison reigning on a throne
of darkness under an eternally burning sky.
Hell on Earth.
"Isn't it beautiful?" Marsden asked him, his undead grin reaching his
earlobes as he kneeled down beside the young airman, looking at him with
those unnatural red glows shining in his empty eye-sockets. "Isn't it
wonderful, Charlie? Just imagine the possibilities..."
At that very moment something started to ache inside Martinelli, a burning
fury so intense that threatened to set his whole being on fire. A hate as
he had never felt before. As his face twisted in a grimace of hate, the
young airman spat a pink mix of saliva and blood into the corrupted face
of the zombie.
"Fuck you!" he roared. "Fuck you all, asshole!! Do you know what you can
do with your new world? You can take it and shove it up your ass, jerk!!"
Reaching out to his utility belt, Martinelli unsheathed his survival knife
and with a soft and fast movement stabbed the undead being, sinking the
blade in the middle of his chest to the very hilt.
Backpedaling and standing up, Marsden looked down at the handle of the
knife protruding out of his chest and then rose his glowing embers to the
man still on his knees. The expression on his rotten face seemed
disappointed, but Martinelli couldn't have sworn to it.
"Did you say you wanted to die, Charlie?" the zombie asked, raising once
more the shining sphere. The shining light increased its intensity once
more, twisting inside its crystal confines as if it wanted to escape from
them.
Marsden smiled and his lips stretched out, showing his shark-like teeth.
"Wish... granted."
~~~~~~
Outside the ancient red building, the calmness was reigning as it had done
for entire millennia, and the only movement was the one produced by the
soft solar winds, brushing the arid surface of the planet, making the red
sand form tiny twisters before falling back to the surface.
Coming out from the interior of the cathedral, a sharp agonizing scream
sliced through the silence, shattering into a thousand pieces of fear and
pain.
However, it only lasted for a few seconds. And after that, the silence and
the calm returned once more.
And, as it had been for a whole age, an age that was ending, nothing that
was alive remained on that barren orb floating in the middle of the dark,
cold space 150 million light years away from Earth.
~~~~~~
To be continued...