Revelation (17 page)

Something Samuel said, seemingly an eternity ago, came to me:

Foolish thing – to run into a xenofungal field without the proper breathing equipment. If I hadn’t come along, you would have been dead. Or worse.

We
did
have the proper breathing equipment, but the spores must have gotten in some other way, through my skin. Through the fog of dreams I remembered the glowing dust settling on my hands. But this thought slipped from my mind as sand slips through a crack. It just didn’t seem important, now. Not anymore. I saw the effects of the xenovirus, infecting a thousand worlds across our galaxy. Why was it doing this? Why was it expanding? Why did it want to destroy everything?

Or did it want to save it?

I didn’t know where this thought came from. All the same, it felt...right. But it
couldn’t
be right. It was killing us, all life. It turned humans into ravaging monsters. It was twisting animals into warped versions of themselves. And some creatures, like the xenodragons and crawlers, did not seem to be of Earthly origin at all. How could it be saving us if it was killing us?

It was a wonder that I could comprehend anything when my head felt so addled. In my dreams I found a conscious lucidity that was hard to explain. I felt I suddenly knew everything there was to know, and that this knowledge would disappear as soon as I awoke. It was hard to tell if this was a feeling, or if it was the truth. It felt like the truth. These swirling dreams were my new reality, and that waking itself was but a distant dream. I found myself not caring, either way. Strange as it might sound, this question wasn’t important at the moment. What was important was discovery, of finding answers to all the questions that had been haunting me ever since the xenovirus killed everyone I held dear.

I walked forward, finding myself on Earth again. I was in the Great Blight, walking toward a line of hills under a boiling, crimson sky. At the top of one of the hills, a lone figure stood, brown cloak and hood swirling in the wind. I walked toward him, unnaturally fast, my gait seeming to take me a mile with each step. The man turned, and walked away – to the north.

I followed, and was soon running. I wanted to scream at him to wait, but no words came. Instead, I ran, fueled by a panic I didn’t understand. If I lost him, I felt
all
was lost. Somehow, I knew catching up with the man would help me discover all the answers to the questions that had been maddening me for so long. I sprinted, finally making headway. The miles melted behind as I charged north, across flat plains spread evenly with xenofungus, past copses of deadened trees cocooned in pink growth and dripping slime. I passed lakes and rivers of pink fluid that cut their paths through the fungus, some of the liquid funneling into tiny crevices within the surface, dripping down, who knew how far. I ran and ran through thick, pink trees growing claustrophobically close. Then, as I burst from the trees, there was the man, standing at the top of a ridge.

I climbed the ridge, and walked up to stand beside him. Something told me not to look at him. Not yet. Instead, I stared straight ahead. I saw that I wasn’t on top of a ridge. The ridge made a wide circle, round and round, like a rim, until it was lost to my sight. A bowl spread out before me, so wide that all of its edges were lost to sight.

Ragnarok Crater.

Within that crater I saw nothing but an empty field of pink, countless rocks and boulders, covered with the xenofungus. No,
not
rocks and boulders. They were the fragments of Ragnarok. An entire, fiery mountain had crashed down from Heaven, had rent itself into Earth, had created Hell. Sometimes, I wondered if it really had fallen down, the Rock – if the world
really
had ended like this, or if it was only one massive lie, designed to keep all of us Bunker dwellers underground. From what I saw before me, it was all too real. Though I knew this was a dream, in my lucidity, I knew that this existed. This was real.

Swarms of flyers spiraled out from hidden holes in the ground, from between the cracks of crumbled, jagged mountains. Moving out of their holes, at lightning speed, were crawlers – thousands of them. With high and painful shrieks, they charged toward where the man and I now stood.

The man half-turned to me. “This is the fate of the world should you fail, Alex.”

That voice. I could not place it, though it sounded so familiar – both in its tone and seriousness. At first, I thought it was my father. I don’t know where this thought came from. Then, with realization, I remembered where I had heard it.

It all hinges on you, Alex. You have wondered, more than once, what your place is here. I am telling you now. Without you, this mission will fail. Without you, the world will fall and everyone will die.

I could finally find my words and speak.

“You are the Wanderer.”

I turned to look at him, but the Wanderer’s face was masked in shadow. The terrain had somehow become dimmer, the clouds thicker, and the darkness deeper. The Wanderer gave a slight smile, nodding in wordless reply. From my position, only his right eye was visible. It was completely white.

I stepped away. He was one of
them
.

But something kept me from running, even as the swarm of flyers and monsters rolled toward us in a Blighted tide, white eyes glowing. Though his eyes were white, he wasn’t on
their
side. Though infected with the xenovirus, he was not a Howler. He had not fallen under the xenovirus’s spell. He was something else. And I wanted to find out exactly what that was.

“The time is coming soon,” the Wanderer said. “Everything is changing. And you will be the one to stop it.”

“Stop what?”

He gestured outward, and with a sweep of the hand, including everything now attacking us. “This. This invasion from another world. Though a thousand worlds shall fall, one will remain. It is a prophecy as deep as energy. This cannot be altered. It was written from the beginning, in the fabric of everything.”

I understood little of what his cryptic words actually meant, this blending of prophecy and science. I was beginning to think that they were one and the same – that the deeper we came to the infinitesimally small, the closer we came to the truth of reality. Was that truth God? Prophecy? Fate? I couldn’t have said.

The crawlers and flyers were dangerously close, now. Still, we remained standing, to be consumed in pointless sacrifice.

“I want to do whatever I can to stop them,” I said. “We all do.”

He smiled. “You will get your chance, Alex. You must merely be patient. You must merely be open to the possibilities – to what the lords of fate place before you.”

I had no idea what that meant, and didn’t have time to think about it. A crawler, twisted and with three white eyes glowing, sailed through the air ahead of the swarm, on course to crash into me. I could only watch in horror as that twisted face gnawed at empty air, as its long claws curled in the expectation of entering my flesh. The end of my life was near, but still, I stood calm, defiant.

In a roar and beating of wings, a completely white dragon swooped right in front of me, striking at the crawler with extended claws. The crawler gave a wretched scream when another dragon, this one colored red, appeared on our left, giving a bone-shaking roar that stopped the frontrunners in their tracks. Both dragons swirled toward the ground, landing between us and the oncoming horde.

“We must go,” the Wanderer said.

The dragons lowered their wings. The Wanderer ran forward, climbing onto the back of the white dragon. He meant to fly on it. Once mounted, the Wanderer looked at me with white eyes, expecting me to do the same.

Unthinking, I ran to the red dragon, scrambling up its leg and onto its back. I settled between two ridges there, and found myself surprisingly secure. I held onto the ridge in front of me. The hard, scaly skin was warm to the touch. No sooner was I settled than both dragons took flight, beating their wings and lifting off from the ground, where the crawlers writhed in a teeming mass in the spot we had vacated. The fungus and Crater fell away. We angled south as the sun victoriously burst through the clouds.

I smiled, wondering if any of this was real. I knew it was a dream, but it felt more real than reality.

We sped on, going even faster, the air sharp and revitalizing. Soon, the spire appeared in the distance – no longer sinister, but welcome – like returning home. I didn’t understand this sentiment, because I had never had a home in my life. Even Bunker 108 had felt unreal – humans weren’t meant to dwell underground, surrounded by gears and machines and bolts.

I suddenly had an outward vision of myself, riding on the dragon. It was such a strange sensation that it knocked the wind out of me. I saw myself, eyes staring ahead intensely toward the spire to the south.

And my eyes were completely white.

Chapter 15

I shot up in bed in a dark room, fear and panic clutching my heart. Cold sweat ran down my bare chest.

“Alex!”

It was Anna. I felt her hand on mine before I even had a chance to realize where I was and what was happening. A moment of chaos passed, where I didn’t know or understand anything. There was a deep pulse, a thrumming, surrounding everything. It was a moment before I realized that this sound and vibration was
Odin,
flying through the air.

“What happened?” I asked, my voice parched.

Anna reached for a nearby canteen in the darkness, and held it to my lips. I felt the cool water enter my mouth. I drank a good long while.

Anna didn’t answer me for a moment. “I’ll get the light. I’ll tell you everything.”

“No. Don’t. Keep it off, unless you want to split my head open.”

My mind was still spinning. The images I’d seen were a maelstrom, overwhelming me, keeping me pinned. I had no idea where to start – whether I should try to connect to that reality, or this one.

Anna sat down next to me, the cushion of her stool swishing. She held my hand again.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” she said. “You were out for the longest time.”

“How long?” I asked. “Spores, right?”

I could see Anna’s head nod in affirmation in the darkness. “They got in through our skin. Maybe through the mask, too. But yeah. We were all out for a long while, but all came to with the morning. You, though...you stayed unconscious. We moved you onto the ship. We didn’t lose anyone, but we also weren’t attacked. Makara gave the order to blast that damn thing to pieces.”

At first, I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then I realized that she was referring to the spire.

“No,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

I didn’t know why I felt so strongly about that. I was remembering my dream. The spire was the last vision I’d had, apart from the fact that my eyes were –

I closed my eyes.

“Alex?”

No. It was just a dream. It wasn’t real. Still, I kept my eyes closed.

“So, it’s really gone?” I asked. “The spire?”

“Yeah. It is.”

Anna wasn’t telling me something, and it was driving me crazy.

“You never told me how long I was out.”

She hesitated. “Two days, Alex.”

I sat up straighter in bed, opening my eyes. “Two days? We should have left that thing alone. It wasn’t what we thought, at all. Is Vegas still there?”

Anna didn’t answer me, and her lack of an answer was answer enough.

“I didn’t want to shock you,” she said. “Not at first. You’ve been through a lot.”

I felt coldness crawl over me. Another city, gone. The second largest one in the Wasteland. Thousands of people dead, in a couple of days. And I had been asleep during all of it.

“That’s why we’re in the air, then,” I said. “That’s why we’re not helping.”

“Makara and the gang lords gathered who they could,” Anna said. “A couple thousand, maybe. Thousands more died. The farms were the hardest hit.”

The farms. Michael’s wife and kid would have been there.

“Michael’s wife is fine,” Anna said. “So is his kid. They’re both on the ship, safe.” She sighed. “Much more so than everyone else. They’re all heading west.
Gilgamesh
and
Odin
are hovering above them, to keep the air clear of any dragons, if they come.”

“Have there been any?”

Anna shook her head. “No. Not now, at least. They attacked the city, and there was nothing we could do. When we shot that spire thing down, it made them all go haywire. The only thing we could do was try to evacuate everyone. Luckily, Rey and some of the other lords had already prepared a lot of supplies and trucks. The water trucks are filled, and will help water the people and fuel the vehicles...at least for a little while. They won’t last forever, though.”

“How long?”

Anna paused. “A week, maybe. Even with the amount we have, we’re going to have to find another water source, soon.”

I said nothing, and could only be shocked by how much things had changed. I realized then why that spire had been empty of Blighters. It wasn’t because it was trying to trick us. It was trying to protect us. In the dream, something strange had happened. The Wanderer, with his white eyes, had been infected with the xenovirus. But he was not dangerous. At least, I didn’t think he was. And the feeling I got, when we had ridden the dragons back to the spire...

My head swam. We rode
dragons
. It was just a dream, but it had felt so real. It was messing with my mind, now, so much so that I knew, without a doubt, that destroying that spire was a mistake. It had unleashed the swarm.

“It’s really gone, then?”

Anna nodded. “We’re probably ten miles west of Vegas now. Everyone’s been kept going by force. I don’t know how much time we have until the swarm starts to follow...”

I shuddered. Everything had changed so quickly. I felt
I
had changed, though I hadn’t been awake to witness any of the attack’s horror. I had been here, sleeping, while everyone had been down there, dying.

“I guess everyone in our group is alright?”