Forts: Endings and Beginnings Read online

  The creature’s eyes locked on Owen. The rider tilted his head to the side ever so slightly and whispered with the subtlest hint of wonder: “It is an honor to stand in your presence, young one. An absolute honor.”

  Immediately Owen moved behind Fellow. He didn’t like these things. They were weird. He could clearly see their brains pulsating beneath their skin. They were freaking him out.

  “My name is Asop.” The alien added, moving its attention to Fellow. “You are the one designated Undergotten, are you not?”

  Fellow felt Owen’s hand grasp tightly onto the leg of his pants from behind.

  “Yeah, that’s me. I mean, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever heard it put that way, but you’ve got the right guy, I guess.”

  “You and the child are to ride with me,” Asop added in a very matter-of-fact tone as the ivory colored claws of his jumpy dragon dug impatiently into the dirt.

  Peeking from behind Fellow, Owen watched as the gargantuan wings of the beast flailed for a moment, and the talons on its feet kicked up lumps of dirt and leaves as it roared once more.

  After wiping a bit of Sea Dragon spittle from the lenses of his glasses, Owen stated with a deadly serious hush, “There’s no way I’m getting on that thing.”

  Less than five minutes later he was airborne.

  At that exact moment, a little further ahead, Chris Jarvis found himself bouncing on the back of the blue-skinned fish-monster as it barreled through the forest. Despite its size, the huffing four-legged fish trotted with admirable deftness. Directly beneath him, Chris could feel the protruding ridges of the creature’s spine digging into his rear. Near his dangling feet on either side, gills expanded in time with every breath of the muscled beast. To his left, something sort of resembling a whale was dragging itself across the forest floor with a pair of stubby legs protruding from a space just below its ungodly long and entirely toothless mouth. Its body was so large that the monster seemed to be smashing through the trees rather than moving around them, and leaving a path of splintered wood in its wake. On the oversized creature’s back stood fifteen or so of the small-faced transparent aliens. Each of them was decorated in jagged, multicolored armor constructed of stone rather than steel; oddly natural, as if it had been discovered and utilized rather than shaped to meet their needs. Seated directly in front of Chris and sandwiched between him and Nestor’s stony shell was his youngest son, Nicky. He could hear the fear in his son’s every breath. He could feel it in the boy’s bones as he shivered against his chest. Placing one hand on Nicky’s shoulder, Chris squeezed gently. The gargantuan whale thing to his right growled so loudly it shook the ground and the surrounding trees, and caused Chris’s heart to jump inside his chest. Utilizing an eye the size of a compact car, the great beast glanced in his direction. Chris quickly realized, however, that it was looking at his son rather than him. In fact, every member of this strange new army seemed obsessed with his son. For Chris Jarvis, this realization proved more than a little unsettling. He’d already seen firsthand what Owen was capable of doing in this world. Could Nicky do the same? Could he do more?

  Who exactly was saving whom?

  Just twenty minutes later Christopher Jarvis noticed the forest beginning to open up. Five minutes after that, the trees disappeared entirely. Leaning to the side, he peered around Nestor’s rocky shell and spotted a super-sized hole carved into the ground off in the distance. It almost looked like a cliff. It was beyond massive and seemed to extend onward for miles in every direction. At its center was nothing but blackness, the sort of blackness so black that it almost didn’t feel real. To Chris’s surprise, none of the aliens, or their wacky fish creatures, or the huge turtle man leading the scaly thing he was bouncing on, seemed to care that they were moving full speed in its direction.

  “What’s that?” Chris yelled over the thumping sounds of stomping feet and wailing monsters.

  “That is the doorway to Ocha, my good man!” Nestor bellowed back before pulling on the leather reins of the creature and kicking his heels into its side. Gritting his teeth and pulling his muscles tight, he added with a growling mumble: “The entrance to hell.”

  Their hearts racing, both Nicky and his father leaned to opposite sides while struggling to maintain their balance and watched as a trio of Sea Dragons soared down from the clouds and plummeted into the darkness of the pit at nearly ninety-degree angles. As they descended, the monsters opened their mouths, bared their dangerously sharp teeth, and screamed into the void below. As if they had dropped into a vat of liquid night, their huge bodies were swallowed by the nothingness and disappeared without a trace.

  Adding to the unease of Chris Jarvis, they did not return.

  Leaning back, Chris wrapped his arms around his youngest son and held his breath. Ahead of him more Sea Dragons plummeted into the darkness. The first line of creatures traversing the forest floor approached the blackness and leapt in without hesitation. Nicky’s breathing turned ragged and uneven. Reaching around his son, Chris placed his hand against the boy’s chest and pressed firmly against the ribs behind which his worried heart lay. For an instant he questioned what exactly he was doing and why he was doing it. It was all so stupid, so indescribably bizarre, and so unbelievably dangerous. None of it made any sense. None of it even came close to making any sense. The fingers of his youngest son wrapped around his and squeezed tight. The boy’s heart thumped against his palm like a drum beating out of tune and threatening to split its bindings. For an instant Chris considered wrapping both arms around Nicky, dropping back from the charging monster they were seated on, and hoping for the best. For an instant, running away made sense. Before he had the time to consider this course of action fully, he felt the impossibly thick muscles of the monster beneath him coil like a spring and leap into the air. In front of him, Nestor yelled something he couldn’t quite make out over the noise of the charging army. The turtle man sounded angry though: angry and focused, and ready to fight. Momentarily airborne, the stomachs of both father and son dropped into their legs and rolled further still into their toes. A second later the darkness of the pit enveloped them entirely. For Chris Jarvis, the initial sensation proved unlike anything he’d ever experienced, far different from what he felt when he lowered himself into the stream leading into the forest of Fillagrou. This was colder, much colder. Thick like mayonnaise and prickly like a stiff winter’s breeze, the blackness swallowed him whole. The thumping of Nicky’s heart disappeared, and an instant later his son was gone entirely. Nestor, the creature underneath him, the ones to his left and right and the wild sound of the attacking army evaporated and was carried away by an angry, distrustful gust of nonexistent wind. Shivering in the nothingness, Chris found himself alone. He was shivering, and he couldn’t stop shivering. As the darkness began to snake its way into the pores of his skin and pull him apart from the inside out, he realized just how big a mistake he’d made. Wherever he was going—wherever it was this blackness was carrying him— he wasn’t welcome.

  Wherever he was going felt uncomfortably familiar.

  *

  *

  CHAPTER 32

  POWER STRUGGLE

  *

  From her position just inside the doorway of the rickety slave hut, Staci watched as the ever-expanding mob of Ochan soldiers charged in the direction of tiny little Roustaf, Tahnja, and the weary-determined slaves standing alongside them. From somewhere behind her a pair of long, bony fingers wrapped themselves around her arms and pulled her toward the hole Donald had been lowered into a moment prior. Spun against her will in the direction of the hatch, Staci suddenly found herself face-to-face with the gaunt and worn visage of a malnourished Fillagrou slave leading her through the creaky hut.

  “Please, child. You must hurry,” the Fillagrou female whispered breathily.

  To Staci’s surprise, the poor creature looked far thinner than any other Fillagrou she’d come into contact with, which seemed almost impossible. Her skin was so tightly drawn against the
bones and muscles underneath that there barely seemed to be skin at all. What little lips she had were cracked and looked like they’d been that way for years, decades maybe. Her skin was a disgusting mismatch of strangely colored welts and jagged scars accumulated during years of continuous torture. Sunken deep, her eyes seemed more gray then red, blurry and peppered with bulging, purplish spider web veins.

  “Please child! You must hide!” the ghostly female repeated sternly, tugging Staci’s arm with noticeably more force as she headed toward the open hatch near the rear of the tiny shed.

  From somewhere behind her, Staci heard a scream. She quickly turned in its direction. The space just outside the hut had very quickly transformed into anarchy. Among the wildly flailing bodies and weapons and splattering blood, she could see no sign of Roustaf or Tahnja. She wondered if they were even still alive, and doubted that they could be. Again the Fillagrou female stiffly jerked her backward. A three-foot tall purplish creature with roll after roll of flabby skin that made him look like a walking mound of tires wedged his forearms into Staci’s stomach and began pulling her from the front. From outside the hut came another scream, and then another, and another after that in close succession. Something slammed into the wall to the right, snapping one of the weathered boards keeping the hut upright and sending splinters of wood in Staci’s general direction. Suddenly struggling to breathe, Staci felt herself sliding backward across the filth-covered floor. Though there was nowhere to go, she wanted to leave. Despite his rather diminutive height, the little purple man proved to be surprisingly strong. For every step she took backward, he pulled her three in the opposite direction. With the Ochan guards getting ever closer to the entrance to the hut, the remaining slaves inside began pouring toward the entranceway to join the fight.

  Wedging himself into her gut, the little purple man in front of Staci lifted her onto his shoulder with a pained grunt and angrily screamed. “No time for this, child! You have to hide!”

  Less than a second later he was moving as fast as his stubby legs were capable, carrying the terrified girl toward the still open hatch as her feet dangled midair. When he was just a few feet away from his destination, the entire hut began to shake. The wall to the left collapsed inward, slamming into both Staci and the flabby-skinned man and tossing the pair of them toward the wall on the opposite side. Though their combined weight was barely two hundred pounds, the aged and mostly useless lumber easily gave way. They tumbled to the frozen soil in a cloud of debris and dirt. Once outside, what remained of the structure imploded violently, collapsing onto those still inside and engulfing the surrounding area in pillowing dust and splinters.

  Coughing violently as her lungs filled with the harsh Ochan soil, Staci lifted a loose board off her chest and tossed it aside. Rolling to her stomach, she began to crawl blindly. Her chest was on fire, her heart pumping crossly against the interior of her ribs. Her head was pounding and she could feel a trickle of blood seep down the side of her face into the crook of her neck. Somewhere under her hair, she was cut. She wasn’t sure just how bad, but she was cut. The cloud of dust was amazingly thick. Seeping in through her nose, it began to pool about halfway down her throat. It’s here that it twisted, solidified, and transformed itself into a golf ball sized lump that made both breathing and swallowing impossible. From somewhere just outside the cloud of debris Staci heard a scream that caused the hairs on the back of her neck to stand at attention. It was the sound of someone dying. It was a sound she once imagined she’d never have to hear outside of a movie theater or in a television show. It was sound that had become all too familiar. Something slick and moist sailed in from outside the haze and splattered across her face. Staci reached up with one hand she wiped it away. Though the color was all wrong—more of a yellowish green than red—it was obviously blood. It was still warm.

  Almost immediately Staci hopped to her feet and began to run. Her knees were scrapped and bleeding, and she could feel her own blood running down the side of her leg and into her shoes. The blood leaking down from the top of her head slid into the collar of her shirt and had begun to pool in her armpit. There was no time to stop, though. There was no time to worry about how badly she was scraped or just how much blood she was losing. Every instinct was telling her to run, and that’s exactly what she did. It was all happening so fast. There was no time to think, or formulate a plan, or even consider where she was headed. She had to move and keep moving. Running made sense.

  She didn’t want to stop running.

  After bursting through the cloud of gray colored dust, the world around hurdled rapidly back into focus. Before she could get her bearings, something slammed into Staci’s side, knocked her to the ground and smacked her face once more against the frozen soil. She bit down hard on her tongue. Now it was bleeding too. It was at this point the tears began to flow. Staci simply couldn’t hold them back any longer, and honestly had no interest in trying. From somewhere behind her came the clanking of more swords, even more screams. These sounds were followed immediately by the familiar collapse of another slave hut. Lifting her head from the dirt, she told herself to ignore the pain in her mouth and the pounding in her head. She had to. She needed to pull herself together. She wasn’t bleeding because she couldn’t bleed, and she wasn’t crying because she couldn’t afford to cry. Bleeding and crying would get her nowhere, would accomplish nothing. Bleeding and crying were childish things. There was too much to deal with and too much to focus on. Something had to be ignored, whether she wanted to or not.

  Staci’s face was covered in so much soot and grime that her tears had begun to wash it clean. To her immediate left, a skinny creature with rough patches of curly brown hair and a snout similar to a pig lay sprawled in the dirt with his hands pressed against his stomach. A thin, watery-blue liquid was seeping through the cracks in his boney fingers, moving across his torso and pooling in the sand below. His breaths were coming in rapid-fire succession. Wincing with tears in his eyes, the furry creature noticed the shivering girl staring at him and feigned a smile. It was an odd expression, very false feeling, almost as if he were doing it just for her. His face was a roadmap of deeply set wrinkles with grayish particles of sand wedged between. A thin stream of the blue liquid began to trickle from between his jittery lips.

  “Run,” The dying thing managed to squeak in between its labored breaths. “Run, child. Do–do not stop. Just–just run.”

  Staring into his deep-set eyes with their cloudy brown pupils, Staci found herself unable to move. Her muscles were frozen solid, her joints locked like concrete. She wanted to move, and she knew she needed to move, but her body simply refused. The pool of blue liquid beneath the brown-furred thing had doubled in size, spread across the dirt, and was now seeping into the fibers of her clothes.

  “Go now! Go, please!” The injured creature gurgled urgently before settling into a wild hacking fit.

  Reaching forward with a jittery hand, the dying mound of bloody fur shoved her backward with his remaining strength. He was pleading for her to get to her feet and run. He desperately needed her to get away.

  Wiping the tears from her eyes, Staci looked past the puddle of murky-blue blood and the shaky, stuttering lump of curly-haired flesh. In the distance, the battle between the slaves and the Ochan soldiers continued to rage. The Ochans seemed to be winning, and winning handedly. The corpses of the dead and dying were scattered everywhere, many of their limp bodies partially submerged in their own distinctly colored insides. Again the creature nearby urged her to run, again he pleaded urgently with what little he had left in his reserves. His voice was fading, his eyes beginning to roll back in his head. The once forceful nudges on her shoulder were becoming gentler.

  It was at this moment that Staci made a decision. It was at this exact moment that she moved past simply understanding she had to do something to realizing that she needed to do something. Everything was dying around her. Her tears and her bleeding were pointless remnants, old toys that had outlived the
ir usefulness. The time had come to put them away.

  The next time the creature reached forward to brush her aside, Staci snatched hold of his arm and wrapped her fingers around the stiff and frozen hair of his wrist.

  She needed to stop crying.

  With her free hand, she wiped the tears from her eyes before sliding her body across the dirt and closer to her furry neighbor. A long, pale-pink tongue slipped from his mouth and dangled limply across his cheek. Inhaling deep, Staci steadied her shaking limbs as best she could. Though her knees were on fire, she propped herself up on them and slid herself closer still.