Revelation, page 12
part #3 of Relic Wars Series
He tied his own up alongside it. The horse was a lean black Friesian with a familiar look.
“Sable?” Eric asked, reaching over to touch it. The mare was one of his family's horses, maybe the quickest in their stable. The horse seemed perfectly calm.
Samuel had gone riding, Eric remembered. Now he'd parked his horse out behind the Andersons' barn.
Eric dismounted; the grass was mowed low here. His boots landed in the soft black dirt, hitting it louder than he would have liked under the weight of his leg braces.
He crept around to the barn's small side door instead of the large main door facing the house. The board that usually held it shut had been swung aside, and the door was slightly ajar. He could see nothing but darkness inside the barn.
Turning his head, he could hear voices somewhere in the darkness above. The hayloft. A female voice cried out and gasped, then moaned in pleasure.
Eric relaxed. It wasn't Suzette's voice, he was fairly certain. She'd never made sounds like that. If it wasn't Suzette, though, who was it?
Suzette's older sister, Karina, was close to Samuel's age. They'd been in school together and dated for a little while. She was married now and lived a hundred kilometers away, but she might have been home for a holiday visit. Maybe she and Samuel were rekindling the old flame. Maybe he was hearing adultery.
Suzette had a younger sister, too, who was only about sixteen, if that. If Samuel was up there with her, that would be...inappropriate and disturbing.
Or, for that matter, Suzette's mother was still gorgeous like her daughters. Maybe she and Samuel—
Eric shook away the thought...but he had to admit that none of the options were really acceptable. Samuel was either hooking up with an underage girl or a married woman. Or else—
Suddenly flush with anger, Eric pulled the side door open farther and stepped inside, staying as quiet as he could manage. The people upstairs sounded too busy with themselves to notice. He could hear Samuel panting up there. Gross.
“Yeah, yeah,” a female voice panted. “Like that, like that...keep doing that...”
Eric started up the steep, narrow steps at the back of the barn. They creaked as he climbed them. With each step, he felt his anger rising. Samuel's behavior was far out of bounds, regardless of which Anderson woman he was copulating with up there. Or which girl.
He reached the top of the stairs. There was hardly anything to see; moonlight trickled in through cracks and knotholes, and his eyes slowly adjusted.
He could hear them, and he could smell their sweat, but they were still shadowy bodies, writhing on the floor only a couple of meters away.
Finally, Eric raised his pocket screen and turned it to illuminate mode, so it cast a bright beam of light into the hayloft.
“Hey!” Samuel turned to glare at him. Samuel's back was bare, his pants lowered, and a woman was under him, her leg curled around him. “Get out of here!”
“Who are you with?” Eric asked.
Samuel squinted, shading his eyes against the bright beam. “Eric? That you? When did you get home?”
“Who are you with, Samuel?”
Samuel let out a sigh, then pushed himself off and rolled away to one side, grabbing his pants.
Suzette lay on a blanket on the floor, completely naked, as Eric had never seen her. She sat up, squinting in his light beam, and drew the blanket around her.
“What...?” Eric began. He had no idea what kind of question he was trying to form; the answer seemed pretty obvious, but there was some kind of barrier in his brain, holding back the clear truth from penetrating all the way inside. “What are you...?”
“Sorry, kid,” Samuel said, zipping up.
“Suzette?” Eric said, feeling stupid. Somewhere beyond that brain barrier lay pain, he knew, but for now he was insulated by shock.
“We didn't plan this, Eric,” she said, sitting up and drawing the blanket around her. “It just kind of happened.”
“You planned enough to bring a blanket, though,” Eric said, still feeling completely detached from the situation.
“Yeah, well...I mean we planned this, tonight, but we didn't plan...all this.” She looked away.
“All this?” Eric blinked, feeling stupid. “So, this isn't the first time?”
“Look, things happen,” Samuel said.
“Eric, I've learned some things about myself while you've been away,” Suzette said, quietly. “Like, I have needs. Really, really strong needs. And I have to take care of them.”
“You need to have sex with my brother?” Eric asked. “What about marriage? You said you were waiting for marriage.”
“Sure, when I was a kid,” Suzette said. “But then...at university...well...”
Eric blinked as her words sunk in. Slowly. “My brother isn't your first, either.”
“Eric, things change—”
“Obviously.” Eric looked between them—Samuel pulling his boots on now, Suzette just sitting there in the hay, a blanket draped over her shoulders, her clothes still heaped in the corner like she expected to sit there a while longer. Or maybe resume things once Eric left.
Then, finally, the brain-pain barrier snapped, and he felt everything at once. Anger, pain, jealousy. Hate. And fear, like the whole world was cracking open all around him.
“What is wrong with you?” Eric looked between them, not even sure who he was addressing. “Both of you? Samuel, you know what the church teaches about this. About premarital...this.”
“What the church teaches?” Samuel lit a cigarette, momentarily casting his face in a fiery red glow. He'd grown a mustache since Eric had last seen him; it made him look more like their father. He was shorter than Abel, thicker, his bare torso shaggy as a bear's. “You know, that's to keep kids from getting pregnant. Once you're an adult...well, you'll learn.”
“Don't give me that,” Eric snapped. “You don't know what I've been doing this last year.”
“Not learning your way around women, that's for sure,” Samuel said with a snort. “But, hey, listen—”
Whatever he was going to say, Eric didn't let him finish. He jumped at Samuel in a blind rage, punching him in the jaw. The burning cigarette was knocked loose and hit Samuel's hairy shoulder, where it ignited the hairs like a patch of dry tinder.
Samuel shouted in pain and surprise, while at the same time countering Eric's attack with a fist to the solar plexus. Eric crumpled, the air knocked out of him, and would have fallen to the ground if not for his leg braces holding him up.
“You son of a bitch,” Eric whispered to Samuel, with all the oxygen he had.
“You shouldn't talk about Mom like that,” Samuel said.
“I hate you.” Eric managed to straighten up. His hands were balled into fists, and as soon as he had air enough—
Samuel struck him again, across the face. And again, bloodying Eric's nose.
“Stop it, you idiots! You're setting the barn on fire!” Suzette pounded her blanket at burning hay where Samuel's cigarette had rolled off. The stuff must have been pretty dry, because the flames were spreading fast. Suzette tried to smother them with her blanket, looking like a tall, blond, naked firefighter with amazing curves.
Samuel cursed and grabbed his blue Colonial infantry jacket to help her.
Eric watched them both struggling to put out the quick-spreading flames, and felt no particular urge to do his part. Let it burn. Let everything burn.
“I hate you both,” Eric said. “I never want to see either of you again. Do you hear me? You're both a couple of sleazy, backstabbing, lying, sinning, betraying—”
His voice grew louder with each word, and the entire barn seemed to shake with his anger.
No—the barn was really shaking. Hard, like an earthquake was hitting them, but Eric didn't think there were any fault lines in the area.
Dust spilled from the rafters just above them. Hay bales toppled, the floor shook, and everyone but Eric was thrown to the floor. Samuel grunted, and Suzette cried out in pain.
The fire spread across the hay like a liquid, as fast as spilled milk across the floor.
The rattling intensified, and pieces of wood broke and tumbled from the ceiling and the walls. Sinkholes appeared in the hay as some of the loft's old floorboards broke loose and fell to the ground below.
It sounded like a hurricane was lashing the barn outside.
Suzette crossed to the big loft doors, from which hay would be pitched on more normal days than this, and unlatched them.
“Don't!” Samuel shouted, but she ignored him.
She shoved open the loft doors to see what was happening outside. One blew wide open and slammed against the outside of the barn.
Eric clunked his way over to look out beside her.
A ship streaked low over the farm. Eric momentarily thought of their father admonishing Abel for “buzzing” the town.
This was no Colonial ship, nor even an Allied ship, or a plane coming in for an incredibly bad landing at a spot with no runway.
It was like a long, narrow, black triangle, resembling a giant obsidian arrowhead.
Eric felt everything inside him turn to ice.
It was a worm craft. Not a wormfighter, not a destroyer, and although it was fairly small and sleek, he found it almost more threatening than any of the worms' fighters or warships.
He'd seen ships like this only once before—on Madbox Colony, when Eric and his friends' destruction of Gregorski's laboratories had apparently triggered an attack from a small annelid battle group that had been hidden somewhere inside that star system, monitoring Gregorski's research. Gregorski had been finding ways to make the worms stronger and more capable, like recoding the DNA of the crude photosensors in their flesh to give them fully developed eyes all over their bodies.
Three of these sharp, narrow black ships had come into the colony during the worm attack, protected on all sides by wormfighters. They'd landed outside Gregorski's lab.
That was all Eric knew about them, but it chilled him. These might be some kind of research ships, with the worms' equivalent of scientists and engineers onboard. He'd assumed they were there to salvage what they could of Gregorski's research before the lab burned down, and before the worms themselves destroyed the colony. Apparently Gregorski's research, guided by his worm-infested brain, had been the only thing stopping the worms from destroying the colony in the first place.
But what were they doing here, at Suzette's home?
The craft turned above the Anderson house, blasting away shingles and shattering windows. One dormer collapsed from the ripples of force the thin craft radiated beneath it.
“What the hell is that?” Samuel said, watching the craft rotate a hundred and eighty degrees, dealing a lot of damage to the two-story house beneath it.
“It's an alien ship,” Eric said. “A research ship, I think. Where's your family, Suzette?”
She was gaping at the craft, her long blond hair blowing back from her face. “My...? Oh. They're all at Karina's tonight.”
“You told me they were home,” Samuel said.
“That was in case I changed my mind,” Suzette said. “Or wanted to get rid of you. You know, after.”
“After?” Eric looked at her. “How many times have you two—”
“Are they coming to kill us?” Suzette asked.
“Fair question,” Eric said. “Do you have any weapons out here? I've got my laser rifle.”
“I've got Dad's lion pistol.” Samuel turned away from the hovering craft and picked up a long-barreled handgun with a laser sight on the top. It fired .50 caliber explosive uranium rounds and was a common sidearm among those who worked the prairie and had to watch for outsized predators.
“We'll have to get in kissing distance before that helps,” Eric said.
“Next time I get a weekend off, I'll be sure to bring a goddamn plasma-spitter with me,” Samuel said. “I didn't come here planning to fight aliens.”
“Nope,” Eric said, glancing at Suzette, who didn't take her eyes off the ship.
“Why is it just hovering there?” she asked. “Why doesn't it do something?”
“If all it does is hover there, count yourself lucky,” Eric said.
“My daddy's got some guns, but they're down in the basement,” Suzette said. She continued stomping the flames with her feet, then grabbed her jeans and shirt off the floor. “But nothing...military. Which is what I'm guessing we need here. We've got a couple hundred gallons of gas in the storage tank, for the tractor. That's all I can think of.”
“Over there?” Eric nodded at the steel cylinder of the five-hundred gallon tank; it looked a bit like a giant steel can turned on its side.
“Yeah, I think it's about half-full,” Suzette said.
Eric was trying to puzzle out what they could with that when the research craft charged forward toward the barn.
Two worms dove out on either side, dressed in armor. Long blades extended around their heads, meeting at sharp points in front of their mouths to form pyramid-like cages. These began to spin at high speed, forming drill heads.
The worms burrowed into Suzette's yard; their ten-meter-long bodies followed after them so smoothly that it was like watching champion high-divers penetrate the water, barely making a splash on their way down.
The spike-armored tips of their tails vanished underground.
At the same time, the ship roared over the barn, ripping off a large chunk of the roof as it went. Eric, Suzette, and Samuel were left exposed to the night sky above.
The blanket was ripped off the smoldering hay, and the blast of air acted like a bellows, feeding the heat back into a roaring fire. Brightly burning hay scattered across the floor and floated up in a fiery drift.
“Come on!” Suzette shouted, already running toward the stairs, still barefoot, while fire raced around the hayloft.
Samuel followed, and Eric clunked his way down the narrow steps after them.
Downstairs, Suzette grabbed a pitchfork from the wall. She looked up at the flames curling around the boards of the loft above, flickering bright red where floorboards had already fallen through.
She spun on Samuel, jabbing the pitchfork at his face. He dodged back, holding up his hands.
“Watch it!” he said.
“You idiot!” she snapped. “You set my barn on fire!”
“I didn't rip the roof off!”
“You may as well have! Was this your first time in a hayloft or what?”
“No,” Samuel said. “I did it with Jenny Osbourne in her hayloft in high school. And one time in Korey Perzwalski's loft. Not with Korey, obviously. I think that was with...who was that with? Cameron Wu? Ursula Metcalf? Crap.” Samuel scratched his ear and looked deep in thought.
“You're so sleazy,” Suzette snarled.
“I could have told you that,” Eric said. “Let's get moving. These things come up from underground—”
As though it had heard him, a worm erupted through the floor, sending broken boards and nails spinning out all around it. It wasn't the largest annelid he'd seen, but it was pretty sizable, big enough to bite a goat or sheep in half. Its skin had a mottled gray and white look rather than an earthy, pebbly mud color.
The pyramid drill structure around its head opened into four long metal triangles, like sharp flower petals opening in the night. Inside, a ring of teeth surrounded the entrance to a blood-red maw.
Suzette screamed; she'd never seen the annelids before. She raised her pitchfork, ready to defend herself. Eric hoped she didn't try to charge the thing.
Samuel opened fire, hitting the beast with bullets meant to mow down the giant predators of Gideon. One chipped a tooth and punched the inside of the monster's throat; another ricocheted off its four-spiked collar.
Eric hit it with a laser blast that looked like it might have penetrated armor, burning a coin-sized hole into it, but he definitely didn't drop the worm.
Odd weapons rolled up along the worm's back. These weren't the artillery-sized pieces that some of the worms carried; they looked like oversized objects from some mad scientist's torture dungeon. It had a meter-long syringe needle attached to a clear pack loaded with gallons of some foul-looking brown fluid. Another pack, tied to it with a rough material like cheap burlap, leaked a smoking green liquid.
The worm raised a wide, shallow rotating cannon weapon that reminded Eric of a kind of witch's cauldron from a movie. A large one, that you'd have to stir with a broomstick.
“Watch out!” he shouted, and the worm fired.
In all his fights with the worms, he hadn't seen a weapon exactly like this one. It rattled as it spun unevenly, looking like it would fly off the metal arm to which it was affixed.
A volley of little objects burst out from the rattling cannon, spreading out from each other at high speed. Eric and the others barely had time to duck as the hard little objects pummeled the wall behind them. A couple of them hit Eric—one in the leg, jarring his brace, and one in the shoulder, which hurt like hell. It was like the baseball launching machine at the fun park in Lightpoint.
The projectile cracked on impact. It looked like some kind of hard clay ball rolled in sticky filth. Eric howled in pain; it felt like the damned thing had broken his shoulder. He heard similar cries from Suzette and Samuel as the projectiles hit them.
He supposed he should have been grateful that the worm hadn't launched plasma, or even sharp and rusty high-speed scrap, but he wasn't in the mood to send up prayers of thanksgiving at the moment.
Eric and Samuel returned fire, hitting the worm a few times, but still not stopping it.
A spill of burning hay tumbled through the gap of a missing floorboard. Eric looked up; the fire was raging up there in the loft. The only reason they hadn't fled the barn was the alien menace outside. But now that was inside with them, too.
“Run for the side door!” Eric said. He aimed his laser rifle at one fire-weakened support column and swept it around the far side of the barn. The worm ducked low, avoiding the beam, but the worm wasn't his target. Not directly, anyway.
