At the End - a post-apocalyptic novel (The Road to Extinction, Book 1) (16 page)

“Could you hear me?”

“No.”

“Then probably not. But they’re catlike, so
who knows what they can hear.” I stepped into the hall and turned
right.

“Wait!”

I stopped.

“Can we pick up stuff? We should test out
what exactly we can do while invisible.”

I whirled around on a heel. “All right,
that’s probably a better idea than wandering around the ship
without a clue as to what we can do.” After some tests, we learned
that if we picked up objects with the cloak on, the object didn’t
cloak, unless we decloaked then recloaked. We had to cloak with
anything we wanted to hide, which was a nice heads-up.

We crept down a few halls before our first
assessment of the cloaks before the eyes of our enemies. An alion
stood at a console, tapping the screen in a hurry. We stood
motionless to the side of it, weapons up and primed to kill. At
least we hoped. If it proved to have a safety, then our guts would
probably be thrown all over the place, blood dripping through the
grating. The image flashed in my mind: it was horrible. I wanted to
puke. The fear of being heard kept the roiling of my stomach at
bay.

The alion finished its work, turned to us,
and walked past as we parted for the beast. It didn’t notice we
stood within an arm’s reach.

I sighed. I cleared my throat a dozen times
after the alion vanished out of sight.

“That went well,” Penelope said. She saw my
sick face. “It could have gone a lot worse.”

I nodded at her. “I know. It’s just . . . it
walked right past us, you know?”

“Oh, I know. Come on, it’s probably not a
good idea to dawdle.” She opened the next door with the access
disk. An alion stared right through us, scanning from side to side,
skeptical of its senses, as if expecting to see another alion on
the other side of the shifting door. It crouched down, its head
level with my crotch. Circumspect, it slinked by us. We jogged to
the next hall, shaking.

“Every time I see one, I feel like I’m about
to die,” I told Penelope.

The disk in her hands was moving so fast I
thought she was about to fling it right at me. “Well don’t piss
your pants yet, wait till we’re out of here.” She steadied her
nerves.

She had a weird sense of humor, one that was
growing on me.

In the few hours that we wandered around the
ship, we passed numerous alions, some were dressed in light body
armor of some kind. The black material had a nice sheen that caught
the eye.

We finally stumbled into a storehouse with
water supplies. I saw no food, but the water was inviting enough.
Three alions typed at touch screens.

“How are we going to steal the water without
them noticing?” I asked.

A stack of silver bottles lay next to the
closest alion to us. Penelope eyed them with desire. “We’ll just
have to kill them all.”

“Are you melted? What if they have sensors
on the ship that can pick us up, we don’t want to give them any
more reasons to search for us; if we’re lucky, it could be a while
before they find out we killed any of them, let’s just try to keep
it that way.”

She shrugged. “We need this water . . .
what’s your plan?”

“I’ll create a diversion so that you can
steal a bottle and run away. Once you’re out of sight, cloak again
with the bottle so that we can fill it without them noticing.”

“That’s actually a pretty good plan.”

“Thanks. Sometimes I get them, sometimes I
don’t. I’ll decloak outside the room and knock on the door.”

“It will have to be a bigger diversion than
that to get all three out,” she said. “There’s a terminal out
there, smash it to the ground, you don’t even have to decloak to do
it.”

“All right, I’ll give it a try. Be ready.” I
jogged off around the corner. The giant display was much cooler
than any of our displays, paper-thin with brilliant colors, and it
looked like it could project holographic images. The screen was
connected to the wall by a few thick silver poles, linked together
by pivoting ball sockets, rotating in all directions. I grabbed the
display with both hands and yanked. My back popped between my
shoulder blades. I stumbled backwards. It didn’t seem to have moved
at all when I peered up at it. But Penelope was counting on me.

I pulled on the arm that attached at the
back of the display and examined how it was secured. It was fused
together as one piece. “Damn,” I whispered. If I had the bag with
all the saws in it . . .

I scrutinized the screen again. I lowered
it, and on stable feet, I twirled, building momentum as I kicked
it. A loud, sharp noise echoed in the hall, worse than glass
shattering. I tottered to the grating. My ankle felt as if it were
broken in ten places. I scooted out of the way, back against the
empty wall across from the screen. The three alions rushed out to
investigate the scene. Eyes scrunched, confusion shown plainly on
their cat faces. One disappeared back into the other room. The
other two trotted off in an unexplored direction.

Penelope emerged from the water room. She
found me on the floor. “Nice work, dude. You okay?”

“I may have busted my ankle.”

“Really?” She knelt down and handed me the
container of water. “Can you move it?”

I attempted to rotate it. It popped in a
blaze of pain. I cried out. “Oh man . . .” I breathed through the
throbbing. Unexpectedly, I heard hard steps coming our way. “You
know what, I can hop, it’s all right.” She helped me stand on one
leg. Slowly lowering my foot to the ground, I put pressure on the
ankle. It wasn’t as bad as I had thought. “I think it was mostly
shock.”

She eyed me, worried. “If you say so. Come
on.” We hurried off in the opposite direction that the two alions
had gone. Limping, the pace was slower than before.

More and more alions started to fill the
halls, as if we were traveling to the heart of the operation. On
the verge of hysteria, I swallowed my fears, clearing my throat
every other second. Eventually we came to a pentagonal room
bustling with alions. Consoles encircled a pit in the center of the
room, where a low table stood, brimming with electronics. Bright,
colorful buttons and switches and displays were everywhere in the
room. The wall opposite from where we entered looked as if it were
just one giant screen.

Dodging the massive alions, we crept across
the room. The wall display was mostly black, with hundreds of tiny
blue dots and tiny green dots near bigger multicolored dots. Almost
all of the dots were on the right side of the wall. Foreign symbols
marked the screen by the bigger dots.

Penelope’s mouth dropped. “It’s outer
space,” she observed. “The multicolored dots must be planets.”

A cluster of blue and green dots surrounded
a planet. An alion stepped forward and touched the planet. The
screen changed, focusing on the cluster. Suddenly, feed from
another ship appeared, as it was fired upon by other foreign ships.
A face of an alion replaced the stream. A harsh growl came from the
alion on the display. “Rark kak . . .” The screen cut out, then
reappeared. “Roc . . .” The screen cut out and in several times, as
the alion on the other side communicated with the alions on our
ship.

From the pit below, a supremely large alion,
with stripped fur patches displaying scarred battle wounds, pressed
a button with a humanlike finger and replied to the figure on
screen. The growl within its voice hurt my ears. The screen flashed
black, then returned to the map of space. The blue dots retreated
away from the planet where the two colors grouped.

“What do you think that was about?” Penelope
whispered.

“I think they are at war, and those dots are
ships. War maps usually have two colors for factions, at least in
video games, you know, for the two opposing sides. There are so
many dots though . . . so many ships . . .”

Puzzled, she watched the retreating blue
dots. “If they’re at war, why are they here?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I appraised the
alion down in the pit again. “That must be the admiral of the
ship.”

Penelope nodded. “Wouldn’t surprise me, the
ugly beast is huge.”

I maneuvered out of the way of an alion in
front of the wall screen, as it scurried over to a console. I
assessed the map again, eyeing the upper left corner. A planet
there rotated with two blue dots around it, one of which flashed
continually. Several smaller, light-blue dots crossed over onto the
planet itself, as if they were supposed to be on the planet.
Penelope walked over.

I pointed up at the planet I was
scrutinizing. “I think that planet up there is Earth, with the two
blue dots and the mass of little dots. I think the big blue dots
are the ships in space and the little ones are the ones under the
atmosphere.”

“What makes you think it is Earth?” she
asked, squinting at the planet.

“That blue dot is the only one flashing, so
I assume that’s the ship were on.” I reached up to tap it, but it
was too high. “If we could touch it, I bet it would enlarge.”

“Now who’s the one with a melted brain?” She
folded her arms across her chest. “You want to bring up Earth on
the jumbotron right in front of them on their own bridge? That’s
completely stupid!”

“I just wanted to know,” I responded. “I
just wanted to know . . .” She was right, it was stupid, but my
brain was addled by my haywire nerves.

Across the room, an alion bellowed. The
Admiral in the pit whipped its head towards the subordinate and
roared a command. The wall map changed to a camera in the hall
where we had escaped from our pods. Two alion bodies lay motionless
on the ground. Another command was shouted from the pit, and the
screen changed to show a picture of an alion’s face, along with
several lines of their untranslatable symbols and an orange bar. It
reminded me of my driver’s license. The image disappeared, replaced
with a second face and a red bar.

I saw the furious displeasure of the Admiral
down in the pit. The beast growled deep in its throat, then snapped
an order. All the alions moved twice as fast as they had been
going, their humanlike fingers touching displays like a computer
hacker in a movie attempting to break into the U.S. Defense System
in under a minute.

The silver disk hung from Penelope’s
invisibility belt. The glowing red orb flickered a few times, but
then went out, as if it shut off. “The disk.” I nodded at it.

Penelope detached it from her belt. “They
must have disabled it. The alion with the red bar must have been
the disk’s owner.”

“They’re smart. Uhrm, too smart . . .” I
dodged another alion as it ran by. “We need to find another one of
those.”

We scanned the room: all of the disks hung
around the alion’s necks. It would be impossible to steal them
without notice. An alion trotted up to the map and pressed both
humanlike hands to the screen. It shifted the top left corner down
to its height, tapped the planet I thought was Earth, and
immediately the image expanded. A big globe appeared with
continents that matched Earth’s. The alion hit all of the ships in
the vicinity.

The screen suddenly split into fifty or more
cat faces. At the center, a large section showed an alion that
resembled the Admiral. The two chief figures discussed something,
then all the rest of the alions in attendance roared, as if to
answer commands given to them.

The map came back, and the alion returned to
the console it had been working at.

The table before the Admiral unexpectedly
came alive, shaping into a holographic image of a recognizable
city. “That’s Vancouver,” I gasped. “They’re even in Canada.”

Above the city, a ship equal to the one
above Seattle hovered in the cloud-laden sky. From it, dozens of
fighters flew in formation, until they met resistance in the air.
Canadian fighter jets blasted shots at the alion vessels. The
aerial skirmish lasted under a minute. The Canadian jets were all
blown to smithereens.

The holograph ceased, and the Admiral left
his post, vanishing down a hall. “We should follow him,” Penelope
suggested.

“Uhrm. What?”

She tugged on my shirt. “Come on.”

I stood my ground, but she was already gone,
around the corner and into the same hall as the Admiral. I didn’t
have a choice but to follow. The alion sauntered along on the
grating, as if it thought its body untouchable, invulnerable. We
tailed a mere meter behind it, weapons raised. We could have killed
it if we wanted, and from the look of anguish on Penelope’s face, I
knew she was on the edge of pulling the triggers. She resisted.

Across the ship we went, to the Admiral’s
quarters. The giant door closed behind us. The cat had a pillowy
bed, shaped twice its size; it looked warm and inviting even to my
eyes. The beast poured a glass of a clear amber liquid. It strolled
over to a bench that sat between a desk and the bed. Using one
humanlike hand to write on a screen, it fiddled with the disk
around its neck with the other. The orb at the disk’s center glowed
yellow.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“We need that disk,” she replied.

“Why that one?”

“Why not that one?” she snapped. I didn’t
have a good reason not to take it, except that the massive alion
scared me senseless. “It will open all the doors, it will have the
highest access. Who knows what we can do with it, maybe we’ll need
it to access the hangar bay.”

“How are we going to get it from the
alion?”

Penelope unzipped her jacket, unsheathing
the knife. She crept towards it, blade ready for a piercing
blow.

“No,” I said.

She ignored me. At the alion’s side, the
Admiral shifted its head towards her, aware. It swiped the air as
she jumped back a step. The long, deadly claws struck nothing but
empty space. The alion growled, then returned its attention back to
the screen.