The World Forgot (4 page)

“Are you kidding me with this crap?” I say to no one in particular. “Why is this a thing? Tell me, why do the Almiri have a ski lift with no safety net just dangling over the edge of Splatter Mountain? Were they kamikaze snowboarding in their spare time?”

“That's, uh, a really big drop,” Ducky says as he looks out over the ledge to the slope below.

Marnie looks too, then glances behind us. I have a feeling she's thinking the same thing I am: Are we safer attempting to cross a two-hundred-meter drop when there's a band of angry aliens behind us with ray guns, or might we be wiser to, you know,
not
do that?

“We could try to slide down the slope,” Marnie interjects.

Dad's still fiddling with the lift's operating panel. “That's about as straight a drop down as you could ask for,” he says.

“Why would you ever ask for that?” I mutter. The drop reminds me of the Death Torpedo waterslide on the boardwalk down the shore. Except instead of merely chafing your thighs and shooting you into a pool with a nose full of water, this one would knock you across an assortment of jagged rocks and leave you a giant jelly smear at the foot of the mountain.

“All set!” Dad cries, slapping a triumphant hand on the control panel.

“So,” I say, glancing down the side of the mountain once more, then back to where the Jin'Kai—and our certain doom—quickly approaches. I grab tight hold of the nearest chairlift. “Me first, then?”

I slide into the chair, and Ducky sits down beside me. At first I'm surprised he's chosen to plummet to his death next to me and not his girlfriend. But then, of course, I notice that Duck's skin is ashen gray, and despite the cold, he's sweating bullets. He probably could've sat down next to Dr. Marsden and not have noticed. I try to get ahold of myself, in order to help Ducky get ahold of
him
self.

“Ducky,” I say in as soothing a tone as I can muster, while Cole helps my father settle in next to Marnie in the chair behind us. “You can do this, Duck. It's just a chair. You sit in chairs all the time. All you have to do is sit and not look down.” Ducky nods vacantly and pulls down the front safety rod (like a single strip of metal half a meter from our stomachs is
really
going to save us in the event of an emergency) and grabs hold of the bar beside him like it's a limited-edition Jetman figurine. “There you go,” I say. “You can do it.”

Ducky lets out a whimper.

“Ye'll be fine, love!” Marnie shouts from behind us. “Be a brave lad, yeah?”

And is it just me, or does Ducky sit up just the tiniest bit straighter after that?

As soon as Dad and Marnie are safely tucked into their seat, Cole dashes to the control panel and smacks the go button. The lift comes to life and starts us with a jolt across the gap. I turn around just in time to see Cole ripping the control panel away from the console and punching it through with his fist, sending sparks flying and assuring that the Jin'Kai can't simply hit reverse on us. A moment of real commando can-do from Cole.

“Nice thinking, Cole!” I shout at him.

“Feel bad for dumping me yet?” he shouts back.

“Let's discuss it at a different time, shall we?”

Ducky moans.

My feet dangle beneath me as the lift moves rapidly forward, swaying slightly back and forth. Our destination is obscured, and the cable disappears ahead of us into the dark. Ducky's breathing is raspy, and when I turn to him, I see that he has not followed my instructions at all and is in fact staring directly down at the gaping maw of death.

“Elvie, I'm not gonna make it,” he says, voice trembling.

“You'll be fine, Duck,” I tell him. “Just look ahead.”

“No.” Ducky shakes his head weakly. “No, I think . . . yeah, I think I'll pass out now.”

And before I know it, Ducky has begun
sliding out of his seat
. His butt's almost off the bench before I manage to clutch at his jacket.

“Ducky!” I scream. One hand still tight on his jacket, I release my grip on the bar beside me and slap Ducky's face with everything I've got, to try to rouse him. But his eyes just roll around blankly.

“I'll be fine, Elvie,” he mumbles. At this point I'm not even entirely sure he's conscious. “Just let me pass out for a little whi . . .” His voice trails off and he slides even farther. I grab him with both hands—one wrapped awkwardly around his back and the other clutching the material under his armpit—but he's far too heavy for me, and apparently he has far too great a death wish. His butt slips right off the seat, and his weight jolts my arms at the sockets and yanks us both full-force into the safety rod.

Which turns out to be a good thing, since the laser blast fired from behind us zips by directly where my head used to be, and singes the hood of my jacket. Several more shots zip by, all off target, which makes me think we must be far enough into the misty darkness that the baddies can't see us clearly. But the shots aren't far enough away to make me
not
want to totally crap my pants.

“Help!” I scream as Ducky's dead weight slips in my weakening grasp. His chin is on the safety rod at the moment, and I
might
be worried that the thing were cutting into his jugular, if it weren't currently the only thing holding him up. As for me, my gut's smashed so hard into the bar that I am
this close
to puking, but I'm keeping it together because Ducky has saved my ass more times than I can count. I'm a little peeved that this is the moment he decided to let me return the favor, but I suppose we can discuss that later.

At least the Jin'Kai seem to have ceased firing. Who cares why.

Suddenly I hear a clanging, and the chair begins to sway as the cable jostles violently. It takes me a long second to ­realize that the movement is
not
due to Ducky plummeting to his death below me but rather something moving on the cable above. With my grip still as tight as I can get around my bestie, I crane my neck as far as I am able, and to my surprise I see a figure
climbing toward me on the cable
.

“Ducky!” I scream. “Ducky,
wake up
! They're coming! They're—”

I look up again. It is not a Jin'Kai making his way hand over hand across the length of moving cable.

It's Marnie.

Holy shit, that girl's a badass.

“Make room!” she orders one second before swooping down to land beside me, where Ducky was once sitting. Thankfully, I managed to dart my head to the side just a few centimeters, avoiding a boot to the nose. As she squats in the moving chair, Marnie reaches down and manages to find a better purchase on Ducky's jacket. Together we haul him up, both of us grunting in equal parts exertion and frustration. Ducky is mumbling incoherently, making every attempt to slide out of our grips to his death, but after some tricky maneuvering and arm repositioning, Marnie raises the safety rod and we pull him safely back into the seat. I've got him by the feet, his upper body stretched across Marnie's lap. He looks for all the world like a napping baby.

“Remind me to murder him later,” I tell Marnie.

“Not if I get 'im first,” she replies.

I don't know if the cable has been jostling this whole time and in my concern for Ducky I simply didn't notice, but suddenly I am once again aware of lots of tugging and bouncing.

“Is that the Jin'Kai?” I holler at Marnie over the wind. If
she
can climb across on that cable, Lord knows those hunks of alien evil can do it too. I wrap my free arm tightly around the bar beside me and do my best to see what's causing the movement, but the fog here is thick.

“Probably Cole with yer da',” Marnie tells me. Sure enough, as soon as she says it, I can make out Cole, moving hand over hand across the cable just like Marnie did. Except that Cole's got my father hanging around his neck like a kid who's way too old for a piggyback ride. Dad—to put it mildly—looks freaked. I let out a breath of relief. “The Jin'Kai are comin' up behind them,” Marnie goes on. “They'll be on us in minutes.”

Looks like I sighed a little too soon.

“What do we—” I start. But Marnie's too quick for me.

“I've got a plan,” she says, then without any warning pushes Ducky's full weight into my lap and stands up once more in the chair. We rock and clang and sway, and if Ducky were awake, I'm positive he would full-on motion-sickness-barf right in my face.

I cling to him more tightly.

“What are you doing?” I shout up at Marnie.

But she's got no time for me. She's gazing back at Cole and Dad. “Archer!” she shouts. “Gan, catch the chib!” And she pulls a slender knife out from the small of her back. How she kept it hidden from the Almiri this whole time is a mystery for another time—like, say, a time when she's totally not thinking of doing what I'm pretty sure she's thinking of doing.

She tosses the knife to Cole, who—despite the fact that he is
clinging from a moving cable with a full-grown man on his back
—catches it one-handed.

“Cut the line!” Marnie shouts at him.

“Are you crazy?” I scream, eyes bulging.

She glances down at me. “Ye oughtta lower that safety bar,” she says. Then she glances back at Cole again, apparently with just enough time to save us all from his deathly stupidity. “
Behind
ye, ye daft bampot!” she screeches. “Cut the line
behind
ye!”

Even from here I can hear Cole's sotto voce “D'oh!”

I slap down the safety bar and hold on for dear life.

Whatever type of blade Marnie's been packing must be the Ginsu's burlier cousin, because within seconds I hear the thick metal cord above us
twang
. I feel just the slightest of jerks—the cable beginning to snap.

As quick as lightning, Marnie squeezes herself back into her seat.

A second
twang
! And we jerk again.

“Donald, love,” Marnie says to the boy in the fetal position between us. Ducky's eyes flutter open and roll lazily in her direction. “Remember that story ye were gabbing on about in such detail a ways back, to pass the time?” She reaches over to pet his head gently. “The one with the archeologist, carried a whip?”

He's waking up. “Um, yeah?” You can practically see him trying to make his way through the brain fog with a lantern.

Twang!

“Ye recall that bit in the middle?” Marnie goes on. “With the bridge and the mingin crocodiles?”

Ducky's eyes grow slowly but steadily larger, to the point where I think they might expand and take over his entire face. He rouses enough to reach back and grab hold of the arm of the lift chair, easing my burden considerably.

“Oh, sweet Mama Jama,” Ducky exhales.

“That's it, dove,” Marnie coos, leaning back in her seat to watch Cole slicing. She turns back to us. “Hold on ti—”

That's when the last cord breaks away, and the cable swings down, and we are immediately flung forward. Behind us I can hear the screams of the Jin'Kai as their end of the cable swings back toward the lodge. It's a very short-lived relief, since, you know, we're hurtling toward the side of a mountain at an increasingly alarming speed. I slide in my seat, but the inertia of our swing plus Ducky's mass keeps us both from falling out.

I'm going to have to apologize to that safety rod for mocking it earlier.

As we swing lower and lower, the snowy slope ahead of us comes into focus.

“Wait fer it!” Marnie calls over the whipping wind. How she can even manage to form words in this chaos is beyond me. “Hold . . .” We're a few dozen meters from the slope when she releases my buddy the safety rod and kicks off the back of the chair.

“Now!”
she screams.

I drop below the chair and feel the seat whip over my head.

For a second it feels like I'm flying, but really what I'm doing is falling sideways, Ducky still clutched to my chest. The snow comes up at us, and I hit it with a
whompf!
losing hold of Ducky in the process. I hear the impact of the others in the snow as well, but I can't see them, because I'm busy rolling backward down the slope, head over heels, without any way to get my bearings. I roll around and around and around, until the large tall dark object I'm fast approaching reveals itself to be a giant tree, and I twist to crash back-first into it, which sends another shower of snow down on top of me.

As I start to lose consciousness, I wonder why I can't ever find myself running for my life somewhere like the Bahamas.

Chapter Four

In Which Hope, Having Been Dashed, Makes a Surprising Reappearance

When I come to—seconds later? minutes? I find myself still beneath the tree, looking up at the lightly falling snow. I decide that I must not have been out too long. Otherwise someone would have found me.

Assuming that they aren't all jelly stains on the mountainside.

“Dad? Ducky? Cole?” I call out weakly. “Marnie?” I get no response. I manage to sit up, my arms aching from the strain. I can feel what I imagine are some world-class bruises forming already. I look around in the dark, but all I see are the shadows of more trees. I rise slowly, unsure of what's making me so wobbly: my legs or my head. I wonder if I'm concussed. If that's the worst that comes out of falling off a kilometer-high ski lift and crashing into a mountain, then I suppose I'll count myself lucky.

There's a
shushing
sound out in the dark, coming toward me. The dancing shadows are too much for my wonked-out vision to process, and I can't see who, or what, is moving in. As the
shushing
grows closer, I am able to determine that the rapid, synchronized footsteps are coming from farther down the slope. And they most definitely don't belong to my hobbled father or my extremely uncoordinated best friend.

I make a beeline away from the sound in a straight line, neither up nor down the hill. As soon as I start running, I hear the shushers change course in their pursuit. The snow isn't terribly deep, but the slope is steep enough that I am continuously losing my footing as I go. Ahead of me is a thick bramble of trees, and I move toward it, hoping to find cover among the pines.

“There she is!” one of them calls from behind me. In my panic my foot slips out from under me and I tumble, sliding on my ass through the dense tree coverage. I twist and turn in a series of comical contortions to avoid the trunks as best I can, and honestly I think I'm doing a pretty spectacular job of not smashing to death against an evergreen. I would probably give myself an A+ in Not Smashing, and that's not even grading on the curve. But I guess I've been too concerned about the trees and not enough about
huge honking boulders
, because suddenly one of those appears in front of me as though out of nowhere, and it's absolutely too late to move out of its way.

Well, we had a pretty good run there, Life.

I brace myself for the inevitable broken bones, praying I will somehow make it through the wreckage. . . .

And collide with the boulder with a dull
thud
.

A dull thud?

Sure enough, this particular boulder ends up being
soft
.

And warm.

And . . . furry?

“All right, human scum,” says one of the three Jin'Kai I now find looming over me, ray guns pointed at my noggin. “Stand up, girl. Hands where we can see them.”

The boulder behind me rumbles, and I smile at the suddenly confused looks on my attackers' faces. “Okay,” I say. I rise from the ground, hands up over my head, and step to the side. “But before we go any further . . .” I nod toward the rumbling lump behind me. “Have you met my friend Drusilla?”

With that, the “boulder” rears up on its hind legs, revealing itself to be none other than Lord Byron's ursine companion, roughly 150 kilograms of bear-hurt. Drusilla is on top of the first Jin'Kai before he knows what's mauling him—pinning him to the ground and swiping at him with her massive paws.

The other two Jin'Kai open fire on the bear, and the smell of burned flesh and fur immediately fills my nostrils. I whip my head around to discover several large wounds they've opened in Drusilla's side. “No!” I cry out, throwing myself at one of the bastards. He merely tosses me aside, turning his gun on me.

But before he can fire, a flash of fur knocks his arm to the side, sending the shot astray. It takes me a second to realize that
this
lifesaver isn't Dru—she's still busy crushing her original prey, seemingly oblivious to the scorched wounds on her side. No, instead there are two dogs attached to my former assailant, and even in the commotion I recognize them as Thunder and Boatswain, Byron's pet pooches. They've got their jaws locked on the guy's forearm and crotch, respectively.

And the third Jin'Kai? Well, he has maybe a nanosecond to process the
When Animals Attack!
special unfolding in front of him before something smashes him in the back of the head and he drops to the ground, out cold.

Now, I spent a lot of boring days in Mrs. Kwan's English Lit class, daydreaming up elaborate scenarios in which Charles Dickens ran a cat orphanage, and D. H. Lawrence teamed up with Samuel Pepys in a traveling aerial burlesque act. (I was not, for the record, Mrs. Kwan's favorite student.) But I never, not even in my wildest imagination, pictured the poet Lord Byron and his menagerie of furry critters
performing kung fu in the snow
.

Where is my phone when I need to vidcap something?

Byron leaps into the air and sails over my head in what looks like a flying double roundhouse kick from Jetman, then punts the dog-entangled baddie square in the chest, sending the dude flying backward into the snow. The dogs fall back, perfectly content to let their master do the heavy lifting. They bark vociferously as Byron engages the Jin'Kai in mano a mano combat. It's a ballet of fists and knees and headbutts, complete with Byron's cocky carefree quips as they tussle.

“Have at thee, Mankin! Ha-ha-ha!” Byron spits.

Whatever it is Byron is talking about is totally lost on me—although I suspect it might make Mrs. Kwan chuckle.

The Jin'Kai retreats a step and reaches behind his back. But as he brings the weapon to bear (har, har), Drusilla's massive jaws clamp down on his arm, causing him to shriek. So the Jin'Kai might be superhuman alien killing machines, but it's nice to know that a good bear-chomping will still give them pause. The dude flops around like a rag doll as Drusilla whips him back and forth over her head, then finally flings him several meters through the air into a tree. When he lands, Byron is on him with several well-placed socks to the jaw.

“The great object of life,” Byron tells the dude as he Hulk-smashes him, “is sensation.”
Smash, smash, punchity-­punchity, smash.
“To feel that we exist, even though in pain.” He finishes off the dazed Jin'Kai with a spinning kick that forces the dude's head quite literally into the tree trunk, so that his suddenly limp body dangles from his anchored noggin.

“Feel that?” Byron asks.

There is no reply. All three Jin'Kai are out of commission, one with some pretty permanent reminders to never wrestle a bear.

“Hello, young Elvie!” Byron exclaims. “You look well.”

“Uh, hey, Gramps,” I reply. “By the by . . . what the hell is going on?”

Instead of answering me, Byron gives me a surprise shove down into the snow, which I appreciate in retrospect as a ray gun blast sizzles into the tree in front of me. I flip over onto my back to look down the hill, where I spy what appears to an entire platoon of Jin'Kai running straight for us, firing at will. Byron draws two firearms of his own from behind his back.

“This, sweet child? Why, this is the counteroffensive! Death and glory!”

As his dual-wielded blasters put an exclamation point on his battle cry, from over my head I hear several large electrical claps in response. At first when I look up, I'm not quite sure what it is I'm looking at. It just looks like moonlit sky, but somehow more . . . shimmery. I can make out the sparks from heavy weapon fire appearing from out of nowhere, raining down laser-y death on the Jin'Kai, who dive for whatever cover they can find. The shimmering effect above suddenly becomes more agitated, and the sky disappears and it's not the moon above me but a hovering ship.

A ship with a stealth cloak.

“Elvie!” Ducky cries from overhead. “I'm in a spaceship!”

“I can see that, Duck!” I scream back, super-relieved that he's still alive.

A cable lowers, dangling from a round porthole in the underbelly of the ship about half a meter in circumference.

“Elvie!” Byron shouts. “Connect me!”

Frantically I snatch the cable and search Byron for some kind of latch. I find it on his back, lock the catch into place, and then tug on the cable for good measure.

“Now grab hold, darling girl!”

I do as I'm told, wrapping myself around Byron in a big hug, with my arms placed securely under his so as not to obstruct the ass-whoopery he's still doling out. All at once the cable jolts, and we're flying up toward the porthole, which is sliding closed even as we hurtle its way. The Jin'Kai scatter in the face of suddenly uneven odds.

“Remember the Poconos!” Byron shouts as we pass into the ship. The porthole seals under our feet, and we land on the metallic surface with a
thunk
. Byron punches an intercom on the wall. “We're aboard. Now gather the animals and make haste!”

“We've got them, sir!” comes the response. I can feel the ship shift course.

“Well, aren't you a sight for sore eyes?” Byron says, looking down at me.

Slowly I release my death grip on Byron's chest. Looking around, I spy Ducky, Marnie, Dad, and Cole, each one with a bigger grin on their face than the last. “So I take it you're the cavalry?” I ask after finally taking a breath.

“This quaint little carriage?” Byron replies, unlatching himself from the cable. “No, dear.” He accesses a vidscreen next to the intercom and brings up an image that I assume is a replica of the ship's main view screen. We are speeding away from the ground, already nearly a kilometer above the surface. The view is wavering with the now familiar shimmer of the Almiri stealth. Out of thin air an entire squadron of spaceships appears, a large command ship at the center of the formation.

“
There
is your cavalry.”

•    •    •

“You've been building a fleet?” I ask, incredulous.

“‘Fleet' implies a scale we have not attained,” Byron says as he leads us through the hallways of the command ship toward the bridge. “We began construction a few years ago after the realization that the Jin'Kai might pose a serious threat. Our efforts had to be carried out in secret, of course. Mankind might have become a wee bit paranoid if advanced starcraft had suddenly appeared in the skies above them.”

“You mean like in the way they did just now?” Ducky points out.

“Well, the situation has changed, hasn't it?” Byron explains. “The Jin'Kai have escalated things to another level altogether. They didn't just hit us, Elvie. Hundreds of humans, maybe more, died down there in the Poconos when they struck.”

“It was Marsden,” I say as we pass through a second hallway.

“We cannae ken such a thing fer sure, Elvie,” Marnie chimes in.

“I
do
ken,” I tell her. “Er, know. I know it. The computers at HQ were wiped. Not just destroyed. Wiped. And Marsden left one terminal operational for me to find. He's trying to tell me that I won't be able to find them.”

“Yer sounding a wee paranoid, Elvie,” Marnie says.

We come to a sealed door, and Byron flashes a card across the wall sensor.

“Access granted, Commander Byron.” The door slides open onto a large command bridge. The room is a hive of activity, with Almiri officers buzzing about intently at work stations and running around to who-knows-where.

But the only person I see is Captain Oates.

“You didn't think a little gunfire could stop me now, did you?” he says as he absorbs the full brunt of my face-first bear hug.

“Of course not,” I say, trying to suck the tears back into my eyes before anyone else sees them. “What about the others?”

“Clark is fine. A few others you probably don't know. We lost eight in all. Including Rupert.”

Byron takes his place in the command chair at the center of the bridge and taps aimlessly at his arm console. “I'm sorry for your loss, old friend,” he tells Oates earnestly. “I wish we had arrived sooner.”

“That you arrived at all is the only reason any of us still draw breath, Commander,” Oates says. He says it without a hint of malice—just a simple statement of truth.

“Elvie,” Byron says to me. “You said Marsden was trying to send you a message? You personally? Why would he do that?”

“They have Olivia. My daughter. Your great-granddaughter. Marsden took her, with my mom.”

“Your mother?” Byron says. He stops tapping and gapes at me. “Zee? She's alive?”

“Oh, right, yeah.” I give Gramps the quickest version of “Previously: On Elvie's Shit Life” I can muster. “My mom faked her death after she gave birth to me and is actually one hundred percent alive. Hurray.”

A glimmer of something flashes across Byron's face. Something like sadness? Regret, maybe? It's hard to tell with him, seeing as he's so melodramatic all the time regardless.

“This Marsden took her and your daughter?”

I almost don't have the heart to tell him.

“No,” I say. “Zee's . . . with him. She sold out the Almiri at Cape Crozier, stole Olivia from me, and took off with Marsden to wherever it is evil douche bags go after daring aerial escapes.”

Byron takes a moment to let the news of his estranged daughter's betrayal sink in. His eyes close and he tilts his head back, letting out a long sigh.

“Anyway,” I say. I can feel a poem coming on, and I'd like to nip that in the bud if at all possible. I don't have time for self-pity from a guy who loves to hear himself talk. Not right at the moment, at any rate. “We came back to the ski lodge hoping you could help us track them down. Which is when we found the whole town barbecued.”

“I warned them,” Byron says, his head hanging. “But they weren't inclined to listen to me at that point.”