Chapter Nine
Three days had passed before the shipping container compound was fully assembled. One day passed before Aidyn and I grew fed up with out accommodations. It was bad enough the first night when it was just us. There wouldn’t have been a problem if some privacy had been made around the toilet if no other part of the washroom. Despite the lack of certain creature comforts, we accepted the situation, until that was, the arrival of the others. When they came, since Aidyn and I were staying in the only bathroom, we had to get up and leave every time one of seven people had to bathe, use the toilet, or prepare for bed. The worst part wasn’t the redundancy of our need to leave, or even the lack of any real door between our room and theirs, but the smell; Aidyn and I were forced out of our comfort to return to a room smelling like the public restroom it was. The water treatment technologies behind the wall worked perfectly, but they could do nothing to stop the nauseating fumes of field ration flatulence.
We also weren’t happy with the distribution of the beds. It wasn’t that we had issues with each other but we found the bed placement unfair. All in all, there were six containers. In the first one to be delivered, Aidyn’s and mine, there was the water facility. The second container, belonging to the boys, was placed side-by-side to the first; the door was in the side of both boxes near the front. The metal of the doors was folded around the edge of each container to create an airtight seal. Box number three was reserved for Nellya Alone and like its neighbors, had a door in the same place; I could see from the foot of my bed all the way to Nellya’s far wall. The fourth container was placed end-to-end with Nellya’s. I wasn’t quite sure why, but it only had half the available space open, like in the first container. Container number five was next to the fourth and butted up to the second; it had the only exit to the outside. The last container was for Mr. Dabahov to sleep in.
Aidyn and I were perturbed by the layout because Nellya and Mr. Dabahov each had their own container while the fourth and fifth containers were uninhabited. Granted, those two also didn’t have beds in them, but our feminine instincts ignored that fact.
The fourth day after assembling the shelter was when Mr. Dabahov scheduled our first expedition into the desert wasteland. For no reason other than we were teenagers, Aidyn and I wanted to sleep in that day. Naturally, Mr. Dabahov saw to it personally that we got up. At 4:30 am, he marched through the compound in his pink floral boxers to do business in a nonprofit way.
“Good morning ladies, no, you don’t need to get up, I’m just going to vee.” His tone sounded more awake than it should’ve been so early in the morning.
On the top bunk, I sat straight up, failing to catch the tan sheet as it rolled off my chest; beneath me, Aidyn’s stirring rocked the bed. “Wait a second and give us a chance to leave!” She growled, angry to be forced out of bed so early. “We really don’t want to see that.”
A pained look of guilt splashed across Mr. Dabahov's face, but as soon as it appeared it was gone. “Fine, hurry out of here so I can go.”
Aidyn and I weren’t thrilled to leave our beds, and I particularly dreaded having to wait in the next room, where Victor slept. It was humiliating to stand in one’s pajamas in front of the opposite gender.
“You,” Mr. Dabahov grabbed my left arm as I passed him. “Why are you vearing a bikini?”
“Excuse me?” I asked, aware of Aidyn stopping in the doorway to listen in.
“You know, a two-piece bazing zuit vorn by girls in ze summertime before ze Catrion War.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I admitted.
“It looks like you are veering a bikini. You’re clothes are so colorful and your bra ties like a bikini top.” I looked down at my outfit; I had on short teal shorts and a fun purple top from the scavenging expedition.
“I’ve had the shorts for a long time—they were a Christmas present—and my bra came from a recent scavenging expedition.” I explained, still confused by Mr. Dabahov.
“So it is a bikini top. I’ve never seen you vear it and it vas strange to me zat you vould sleep in a bazing zuit.” He let go of my arm. “Before ze war, young vomen vore zem as shirts in ze summertime and rarely did zey sleep in zem.”
“Oh,” I muttered wondering why I needed to know such information. “Thank you for telling me.” I left the room and leaned against the wall next to Aidyn.
Three hours later, Aidyn and I were getting ready for the trek into the desert. Aidyn had khakis, a grey tee-shirt with a zip-up matching sweatshirt, sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat. On her cloth belt was a borrowed scimitar from Mr. Dabahov and in her hands was the broomstick-turned-bowstaff.
I had stark white pants with my father’s sword attached to the back belt loop like I’d seen him do. My upper half was covered by the straps of my bags, bow, and arrow pouch, and the purple bikini top I’d slept in.
We joined the others in the fifth container. Victor stared interestedly at me before looking away embarrassed. To my disgust, Alaric did the same.
“Vhat are you doing in that? You’ll burn up! Go put more clothing on!” Mr. Dabahov commanded me. Disgruntled, I pulled a zip-up sweatshirt on and returned to the exit.
With my swift return to the exit foyer, Mr. Dabahov reached for the door, but it was my turn to ask him a question. “Sir, what’s he doing?” I pointed at Leroy.
“Vhat?”
“Can’t he stay here? He doesn’t have to come.” I pleaded. “I’ll stay with him so he’s not alone.”
Mr. Dabahov looked from the kid to the tail and shook his head. “No, ve all must go.”
“What?! Why?!” I was infuriated the moment Leroy’s sentence was passed; an appeal had to be made.
“Don’t question my authority.” He reprimanded. “You vill both come vhether you like it or not.”
Even with his tone leaving no room for argument, I was determined to counter him, yet Mr. Dabahov wouldn’t hear it. He marched outside, earning baffled stares from his entourage. Having no other option, all of us, including Leroy and I, followed a fair distance back from Mr. Dabahov’s stern silence.
Just outside was one of the dune buggies equipped with two titanic water containers, each holding as much as a tall fat person’s custom-fitted bathtub. On top of the new tanks were four jury-rigged seat belts. I started to climb on top of the dune buggy, since I was the one most able to get up there after Leroy, but Mr. Dabahov shooed me off.
“No, you and ze little one are riding in ze back.” He pointed inside the dune buggy in a twirling fashion. “Victor, Alaric, and zat ozer girl vill take ze roof.”
“My name’s Aidyn. Learn it.” Aidyn muttered under her breath.
Mr. Dabahov sat down in the driver’s seat, Nellya took the front passenger seat, and I took the backseat. Leroy sat down on my lap to conserve space. We derived some amusement from the remaining three getting on the roof. Victor held his hands together, fingers intertwined, for Aidyn to climb up to her seat. Then he leaned onto the roof, heaved, and rolled upwards. Not nearly as tall as Victor, Alaric longed for some help. None came; he struggled and scurried until he got halfway, but by then, Mr. Dabahov had floored it. Unfortunately Alaric stayed with the vehicle, and somehow got on top.
The desert heat was unbearable. I felt like the very moisture of my sweat was being evaporated before I could derive any cooling from it. My mouth was drier than my mother’s attempt at cornbread. If we didn’t have many gallons of water, survival for five minutes would’ve been impossible. If it was this suffocating for me, I couldn’t fathom what Victor, Aidyn, and Alaric were going through on the roof without any protection from the punishing sun.
For two hours, Mr. Dabahov drove but for two hours, nothing was spotted except for barren yellow dunes. It was on the way back excitement fell in our direction, or rather, we fell into it.
The metal structure we called home had come into sight, probably because we drove onto a hill, when the bottom fell out. The sand beneath the spiked rubber tires melted under the weight of the vehicle. Bringing the four-wheeled craft to a jarring halt, the shifting sands caused the dune buggy to plummet fifteen feet down into a newly-formed pit.
The stiff shocks cushioned the impact, but didn’t stop our wonder. The dune buggy appeared to be stuck in an intersection of several subterranean tunnels. Going off in all directions, the tunnels were about eighteen inches in diameter. Apparent after the fall was the reason we’d fallen: the intersection of the tunnels weakened the sand above it.
“Hey, are you guys okay?” Aidyn asked from somewhere above us. I poked my head out of the roll cage and saw she and Victor standing at the top of the hole looking down. After a quick examination of the others, I nodded.
The consensus was that the four of us at the bottom of the pit should get out. It was a genius plan created by Captain Obvious. Logistically speaking though, it wasn’t easy. Of the four of us, Leroy got out the easiest, thanks to his wings. Stuck on our legs, Mr. Dabahov, Nellya, and I had to wade out.
At the top, keeping a safe distance away from the unsteady sand at the edge of the pit, I had a better perspective of what had happened but I had little time to break down what had happened to Alaric’s innocent question and Mr. Dabahov’s not-so-innocent response.
“Does anyone else hear that buzzing sound?”
Mr. Dabahov’s reply started with a synonym for a dung beetle’s choice diet. “It’s ze Catrions! Ve’re being ambushed!”
Panic and fear slammed all of us except Mr. Dabahov and Leroy; Leroy was too young to understand and for Mr. Dabahov, it was a less-than-pleasant reunion.
Before I even got my scimitar all the way out of its scabbard, hundreds of Catrions were flying around us. Hot adrenaline replaced the blood circulating through my veins.
The Catrions, in their natural form, couldn’t fly. Truthfully, they could barely walk. Catrions were shaped like snowmen with thin irregularly placed twiggy arms and legs. These three short legs were enough to keep them erect but movement was restrained to a clumsy shuffle. That was why they flew. To fly, they had invented wire-framed orthopters dubbed Dragonflies by the humans. Their flying contraptions were called Dragonflies due to their remarkable resemblance to the mystical mosquito munchers when a Catrion sat in one.
The first three spheres, also the largest, conformed to the shape of the Catrion. The next sphere had a glass orb in it filled with a sloshing yellow liquid in it. Typically there were two to three more smaller wire balls on the end that held vibrant glass orbs of dazzling color. I knew from reading the history book (which I seldom did) that those colorful spheres were far more sinister than they looked. Called Biospheres during the war, these glass balls contained an organic gas which did any number of things to the human body. Back at the front of the Dragonfly, two pairs of translucent wings flapped rhythmically up and down. The Dragonflies let the Catrions get around infinitely more efficiently.
Many Catrions landed and many more stayed airborne. Following Mr. Dabahov’s lead, I began hacking at the Catrions. Whereas Mr. Dabahov’s motives were a combination of vengeance and blood lust, I imagined my purpose was to protect Leroy.
I found the orange exoskeleton of the Catrions made precise cuts futile except when amputating their frail limbs. The scimitars could wedge deep into the Catrion being struck but were often too difficult to free. The style of combat most effective against the Earth-born aliens was savage, brutal, and stress-relieving; Victor’s hammer or Aidyn’s twirling staff were the best weapons available.
In our party, only Mr. Dabahov proved to be a Catrion killer; he had multiple piles of bodies forming around him. That wasn’t to say he was the only one racking up kills—my tail’s killing abilities were impressive.
Leroy was in the center of a rough circle formed by everyone else; we all had our backs to him and fought defensively. Somehow, it hadn’t seemed possible at the time with Oken shoulder-to-shoulder with me, but a Catrion waddled between us towards Leroy. Backhanding the Catrion seemed like it would’ve worked, but doing so would have left my left side exposed. As the Catrion approached Leroy, he began crying and saying he was sorry for being bad. When the Catrion’s three-fingered hand reached for my nephew, I did all that made sense.
I reacted.
Snatching my father’s katana from its sheath, I swung hard with my tail. The killing blow was so fierce, the top three inches of the blade entered one side of the Catrion’s head, and exited out the other. Viscous pink blood splattered the back of Oken’s dirty blonde hair.
Quite unexpectedly, the images of a younger version of my father sprinting across red sand, standing naked with Drib in a dark weightless room, and then wearing his black military uniform in a carpeted office appeared in my head. Next came a moving picture of a teenage girl, clad only in her skin, with an ankle-length tail swaying gently; she was standing there crying.
Swooping in after the images, came organized structures of language.
“What’s that?!”
“It has a class five spinal appendage!”
“Is it the Animal?”
All the Catrions around me stepped back.
“No, it can’t be! It’s the wrong subspecies!”
“Is it the Smith Child?!”
“It might be but the Smith Child isn’t known for violence!”
“Kill it!”
“No!”
“It’ll sooner kill you!”
“All the more reason to kill it!”
“No! Keep it alive! The Animal had perfect DNA!”
“But it’s not the Animal!”
“But we don’t have its DNA!”
“Subdue them all! We could use the others!”
“But it has a class five spinal appendage!”
“Alive!”
The manic hysteria quieted down.
“Did anyone else hear that?” I asked absentmindedly while bashing a nearby Catrion.
“Hear vhat?”
“No,”
“Shut up already.”
“I did.”
“Huh?”
“I’m sorry, I was too busy trying not to die to notice any sounds. What was it? Church bells?” That last one was Victor.
The confusion ceased when something more tragically disturbing took its place. Mr. Dabahov had been dancing a death dance with almost a dozen Catrions. He was skilled, there wasn’t any doubt on that, but skill was just good luck haunting one body too long. The phantom stalking Mr. Dabahov was about to change.
One of the Catrions in front of Mr. Dabahov had a toilet-shaped weapon, like many of the Catrions. If it were a toilet, the rectangular part that would have been the tank was held underneath two of the fragile arms of the Catrion while the bowl conformed to the midsection of the Catrion. On what would’ve been the base of the toilet was a six-inch circular opening with three hinged flaps covering it. These flaps, like the lips of a hungry chimpanzee about to snack on a twig of fresh termites, opened. The Catrion holding the queer weapon jiggled backwards, a pop not quite as loud as the rupture of a corn kernel in a movie theater’s concession stand sounded, and a ball of acid roughly the same size as the flapped opening it came out of flew through the air.
The ball of acid hit Mr. Dabahov in his chest. Dropping his wide assortment of weapons, Mr. Dabahov collapsed to his knees. In an attempt to rid himself of the horrible pain, he threw his hands onto his chest, into the acid that was eating away his flesh. Screaming in agony, he shouted his last words to the clear sky.
“My love, ve die ze same!”
Those who survived Mr. Dabahov watched in horror as the acid ate away his tissue. First the acid ate the cartilage holding his ribs to his breast bone; the skin, muscle, and other fibrous tissues in his hands melted away. The bones in three of his fingers fell to the African sand he kneeled on. His pain must have been excruciating, but thankfully, it was short-lived. The acid touched a lung, causing it to deflate with a slow hiss. By the time the acid reached his heart, it was barely the diameter of a golf ball. As his heart beat for the last time, the shrinking ball of acid burned a trench into the lifeless muscle; the blood coming in from the heart’s last pump drowned out what was left of the acid.
We were all traumatized, Nellya more than the rest of us combined. Witnessing someone die, let alone fie painfully due to violence, shocked us so much we could barely fight anymore. None of us dared to believe what had just happened; I was too stunned to let another mysterious voice distract me.
An instant replay of Mr. Dabahov’s death played back in my head. “I said alive!”
The image of a person kneeling in a dark room, with his hands clapped together, pleading for mercy appeared in my mind; I could neither see the man’s face, nor was I even sure he was human. “Forgive me my lord, I don’t know what came over me.”
“Very well,” The first voice said; I saw a sea-green glass orb hover in my head. “Inoculate the rest of them.”
A Dragonfly zoomed overhead, dropping the same green sphere I’d visualized seconds earlier. The glass ball landed in the center of our party just next to Leroy, shattered, and enveloped us in a fog the color the orb had been. Coughing and spluttering became a common song we sang as a chorus. My eyes burned as one-by-one the others succumbed to the fumes.
First Victor fell, then Leroy laid on the ground. Alaric buckled at the knees and Nellya tried to hold on to her consciousness but failed. Aidyn pulled her shirt up over her mouth and nose, determined to continue twirling her stick; her makeshift mask didn’t work for long. Seeing my friends fall angered me so much I vowed to kill every Catrion within my reach; I didn’t feel any debilitating effects from the gas.
I didn’t understand why they all dropped yet I seemed fine, except for choking a lot. In a fit of rage, I slashed down at the nearest Catrion while hacking upwards with my tail. A Catrion lost two of its three oddly positioned arms with the downswing of my arm and the upswing of my tail brought my father’s katana up the thorax of another. That Catrion slammed into another one, and pink Catrion blood oozed from each of the three Catrions.
A red stop sign appeared in my head. “Stop it!”
A Dragonfly flew inches from my head, dropping another glass sphere, this one blue. Again the colored smoke had no effect on me.
Enfuriated further, I snapped my scimitar to the side, away from my body, cutting the legs out from under three Catrions. My tail flicked the other direction, whacking a Catrion with the flat side of the katana; I felt the Catrion’s orange exoskeleton crack beneath the blow. In an aggressive change of direction, I brought the katana into the crevice between the top and middle sections of the Catrion next to the one that got slapped; it’s head rolled. Hoping for my scimitar to flow in its movement, I curved it up, intending to come down again and decapitate another Catrion.
My plan was foiled.
At the top of the arc, two Dragonflies with a cable between them swooped from the sky and caught my wrist in the cable, yanking it backwards. My feet lifted a few inches off the ground as I was carried backwards; the pain created by dangling from my wrist was indescribable. My ride was cur short when my heel met Victor’s rib cage and I tied my feet to his shoulder. The Catrions didn’t crash as I had hoped, but the additional weight kept them from going anywhere. Still though, they strained to keep the cable’s tension up.
Thinking I could cut the cable with my tail, I attacked it. The result was a sharp shooting pain down my arm, into my shoulder, and down my spine. Also, swinging at the restraint left me unprotected from the grounded Catrions.
I started killing all the Catrions my tail could reach. That gave me a chance to take my scimitar in my left hand and have that much more security.
On my first outward swing with the scimitar, two daredevil Dragonflies dove at me from behind; one went below my arm and the other above. Only when their cable cut a red gash in my arm did I realize that they’d caught me again.
Ignoring the tears streaming down my face as the Dragonflies attached to both my arms pulled in opposite directions, I fought merely to stay alive. The Dragonflies lifted me a foot off the ground; I felt like my arms were going to rip off.
A cable snapped around my tail, but this one didn’t have the same success. Without my commanding it to, my tail tossed the katana up, wormed out of the snare, caught the falling sword, and on the way down, drove it through the top of a Catrion.
The Dragonflies tilted me backwards so using my tail became increasingly difficult. Their strategy didn’t stop me from struggling on; my tail began striking low and to the side. Even when a third cable wrapped around my chest, constricting the blood flow to my already flaming arms, I fought ferociously. After a long battle, the Catrions managed to subdue me.
When that moment finally came, I was frustrated, crying, and still kicking. In front of me, two Dragonflies flew low, their wingtips almost touching the ground. Like many of their brethren, these Catrions carried a cable between them. There was no way for me to stop them, though I thought the katana made contact with one of them after they passed. Their cable hadn’t been aimed at my tail but it did eventually halt my tail’s movement because it coiled around my neck.
As light faded to dark, I wondered what my stupidity had gotten my friends and I into…
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