Page 6 of Taken (After the End #6)

Chapter Five

Rhen

With my green bean seeds in my back pocket, my nametag Velcroed to my breast and Pam successfully uploaded into my ugly gray watch, I feel ready and armed for a wonderful adventure as I climb the ladder up towards the surface.

Pam told me that there’s protocol for what should happen if I’m able to grow something successfully in the soil up above that could mean I’m allowed to wake the Captain and select crew members early.

But she insists it’s a long shot and not to get my hopes up, and that she’s only allowed to provide me with that protocol if I succeed by her measures.

“Whatever, Pam. Way to be a tease.”

“I assure you…Rhen…that I am not a sexual…”

“I know, I know, I know. I’m just joking.”

“Ha. Ha ha ha. Haha. You are funny…Rhen.”

“Thanks, Pam.” Her fake laughter is horrifying, but I’ve gotten used to it.

The old girl’s putting on a good show, and it’s appreciated.

The world is mine, all mine to play in. I turn the metal crank above my head and say, “You know, weirdly, I think I’ve gotten used to the idea that you and I could still be besties in thirty years. You know, you’re growing on me.”

“That is great to hear…Rhen. My AI programming makes me capable of better understanding your way of communication the more time we spend together. That is why…we have gotten so close.”

I smirk. “You’re cute.”

“While I have no physical form, I understand this to be an expression, one of camaraderie, from you…Rhen. I thank you for it. You are my…friend, too.”

“What do you think the odds are of our green beans actually growing?” I grin and pop the portal door open. Light rains down and I squint against the familiar blaze.

“I think you are optimistic, and a sense of optimism is always…”

I take a step, to climb the rest of the way up the tunnel, but before I can move a muscle or hear the end of Pam’s platitudes, something huge grabs me by the top of the head and yanks me the rest of the way out like one of those giant grabber arms in an arcade.

I’m thrown onto my back on the sand amid a gale of grunts and ticks.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit. It’s the animal!

It must have found me! I scream bloody murder, kick and thrash, but when I open my eyes, prepared to defend myself from the glass-sheet-monster or maybe the giant insect, I’m shocked beyond all measure.

Because the eyes staring down at me are distinctly human.

Ish.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I shout, throwing my hands out in front of me. The male’s eyes widen and then narrow. He shouts over his shoulder in a language that I definitely don’t recognize, and I speak Portuguese and English—French and Spanish, too if I’m being generous.

I can’t decide if he’s shouting at me or about me, but I can see that there are more males like him in my peripheral vision. I don’t focus on them, but shout at the threat that seems most immediate, “Hey, dude, friend, brother—I can call you that, right? I’m Black, you’re Black. Maybe. Sort of…”

He isn’t listening to a word I’m saying. He grabs me by the hair, searing pain shooting through my scalp, and lifts me onto my feet. He stands, dragging me with him, and I understand as he starts walking why I only found him humanish.

The male may have two arms, two legs, a torso and a head, but he’s also twice the size of the largest man I saw in the tanks downstairs, and he moves like an animal, a predator.

He yanks me up against his chest, throwing the heavy band of his arm around my waist so hard it feels like I could throw up.

He turns too quickly for me to be able to see what’s happening, but I hear it.

The swipe of some kind of a blade through the air.

It sounds like it does in the movies, exactly. How incredible is that?

He’s speaking in low, gruff tones and, when he’s finished, there is no reply from the one, two…

three males standing up against him, holding short blades in their hands that look just like the one he’s got in his fist. All jagged and spiky on one side, smooth and slightly curved at the tip on the other.

An in-built grip bifurcates the blade, and on the other side of the grip is another, shorter version of the same dagger.

These males all look prepared to fight to the death.

Meanwhile, more humanish beings stand off in the distance—there must be a dozen of them or more, mostly male, and not one who looks prepared to stop whatever is about to go down.

A tense moment of silence passes, and then the guy behind me tries to bite me. “Dude!” What the fuck? Oh hell no.

I buck my whole body violently, moving like a mad woman. I never learned how to fight, even though both my parents thought I should. After they died, I had tio Jo?o teach me a couple tricks.

I surprise the male behind me just as his teeth graze the side of my throat, and he loosens his hold just enough for me to be able to slip through it, push him off me, and hit the sandy ground. I sprint for the portal opening.

“Pam! Help!” I shout uselessly at my imaginary friend, because she doesn’t have a body, as she’s told me repeatedly.

I slam into the metal portal opening at the same time that a body slams into my back, knocking all the wind out of me and making me gag and gasp for breath.

Trapped between a rock and a hard place, agony tears through my middle and I start to see spots, which explains why I don’t quite understand the picture so violently splattered across the canvas of the world before me.

Off in the distance, those glinting flashes become suddenly clear.

Against the murky horizon sits a huge encampment.

I couldn’t see it from the portal window because of the angle, but it’s there.

Hundreds of tents scattered all over the earth made out of this incredible, shimmery material.

They look like they should be transparent, all those sheets, but I can’t see through them.

They’re bright when the light refracts off of them.

Almost blinding, colored like mother of pearl.

I’d like to paint them, all grouped together like that. But no, I don’t think I’ll get that chance. Because halfway between the encampment and the Sucere Chamber entrance, three creatures that can only be described as beasts are charging straight towards me.

I’ve never seen anything like them. As they draw closer, I see that they have dark green scales that glint with lighter greens and yellows when the sun hits them.

Short horns curling upward like a demon’s sprout from the places you’d find their widow’s peaks and white hair cascades long and straight around their knobby spines.

With enormous, thick thighs that branch into legs reminding me of a raptor’s, they have three massive toes on each foot tipped in forty-centimeter-long talons and three massive fingers tipped in claws that are as curved and sharp as the knives the humanish men around me are holding.

These creatures are things of nightmares. No, these are things of nightmares only a demented artist might have dreamed.

As the things arrive five feet in front of me, I let out a blood-curdling shriek, which is quickly silenced when the male with his arm around me claps his hand over my mouth.

The nightmare monsters aren’t looking at me, anyway.

Not even my screams can distract them. In fact, as soon as they take their next steps, they each launch up into the air, soaring at a distance that no ordinary human could achieve.

I watch them blot out the sun above me in awe, arcing down a dozen feet away on my other side.

The moment they land, the arm around my waist lifts me up. The humanish male whirls me around and takes a few loping steps, and I let out another blood-curdling screech as I take in the sight marring the desert’s bleak horizon.

The scaled demons with the wide faces and the shimmery blue-green skin and the dreadful talons and the crazy spikes shooting out of their backs and horns shooting out of their heads are, in fact, not the scariest things out here.

Oh no. There’s another monster here ten times the largest demon’s size. Because why the fuck not?

“Pam, what the fuckity fuck!”

But Pam doesn’t answer, or if she does, I don’t hear her. Not when the largest demon releases a horrific screech as he pulls in front of the pack of three demons and meets the twenty-foot-tall angry jellybean monster first.

He draws weapons—short daggers—out of some sort of pocket near his ribs, which is odd since he isn’t wearing a shirt, and slashes at the thing, causing it to open its horrible mouth and let out a horrible roar.

I feel like I should write a children’s book. Yes. That’s what I’ll do as soon as I wake up from this terrible dream to find that I’m back home, in my bed in the refugee bunker city formerly known as Lisbon, listening to bombs and rage turn the world to something uninhabitable.

The jellybean opened up its terrible mouth

And let out a terrible roar.

The demon men cut at its jelly face

And cut and cut some more.

I think I’m onto something.

I tumble over the sand when the male tosses me aside.

He sprints off to join the demons, along with the other three humanish males who had, only moments before, been squared off, prepared to fight him.

They all charge the jelly monster with their daggers outstretched, but the thing is formidable in the worst way imaginable.

Every time it screeches, you feel it in your bones.

My vision blurs, my pulse accelerates, I sweat in a gush, and my teeth chatter like I’ve been left out in the cold.