He pulled his finger from the glass. At that moment the ball careened toward the house and smacked into the side of the mansion below the window, drawing both sets of playing eyes to the man watching them. JB waved enthusiastically. Ashley flashed an unsure smile. Gordon walked away. — Trevor Stone sat at the head of a long table in the mansion's basement. A collection of televisions, audio equipment, and computers surrounded the room in cabinets and on counters.
Two doors led away as did a set of stairs. One of those doors opened to the armory. The second to a small utility room.
Unbeknownst to the council members gathered at the table, that second door led to more than a hot water heater. Trevor’s portal to the strange device that provided him with access to mankind’s genetic memories lay hidden in there while the key that unlocked that door-a key visible only to his eyes-hung on his neck.
Trevor glanced around the table at the assembling military council. They had met on numerous occasions in the three years since Trevor returned from his cross-dimensional excursion yet he still missed Reverend Johnny’s booming voice.
However, Jon Brewer attracted Trevor's full attention as he began the meeting with a disturbing report.
'We found the same thing in Seattle that we found in Grand Forks, Oklahoma City, Dallas, and Cincinnati,' Jon licked his lips and fidgeted in his seat. 'We found nothing.'
'Nothing?' Dante Jones, Director of Internal Security, repeated with a question mark.
Brett Stanton scratched one of the scars on his thin, pot-marked face and asked, 'There were supposed to be bad things there. Now wait, this wasn’t a reconnaissance goof, was it?'
Gordon Knox answered definitively, 'I had people in there a month before the troops. Seattle was crawling with Deadheads, Mutants, and we even had reports of Wraiths.' Brewer responded, 'Well they were gone when we got there. Not a trace. Well, I mean, lots of bodies of people.' 'Wait a second,' Dante asked. 'You found bodies? Human bodies?' When Jon nodded Dante concluded, 'So they were there not long before you guys marched in. They just vanished.'
Trevor noticed Anita Nehru sitting at the far end of the table with her head cradled in one hand while vacantly swirling a twizzle stick in a cup of coffee with the other. Her husband, Omar, sat across the table trying to get her attention but failing.
'Trevor?'
'Huh?
Gordon repeated what Trevor missed, 'I said, the way the hostiles are disappearing reminds me of how people were disappearing before all this.'
Dante agreed, 'Yeah, this looks kind of familiar.'
'Alllrriiigghtty then, does that mean they're all going to come back, too?' Lori Brewer’s flippant remark raised a scary question.
Brett Stanton leaned forward and scratched his noggin as he laid it out, 'Okay, now, well, if we were to go thinking back to all that, when was the last time we know for sure a bunch of people went missing?'
Trevor closed his eyes and revisited those chaotic days some ten years prior. The first signs of impeding Armageddon came in the form of mass disappearances. Those disappearances included Ashley.
Her group had been the first recovered, but not the last. For more than four years the expanding armies of the human Empire happened upon caches of ‘ark riders’, pulling them from gooey green sarcophagi with no recollection of their ordeal. However, no such riders had been found in the three years since ten thousand baseball fans showed up at Wrigley field. That group had disappeared the day before the invasion began in earnest; an invasion triggered by the conception of Trevor's son.
Unfortunately, the baseball fans at Wrigley field completed their journey through time before Trevor’s armies marched into Chicago. Instead of finding people waiting to be liberated from green globs, they found torn and shattered corpses. The ark riders, in that case, had completed their time travel too soon, arriving in the midst of a hostile city where they ended up a food source for a variety of nasty predators.
Trevor spoke, 'I think Ashley was the last to disappear and the Wrigley field mess was the last to reappear.'
Knox postulated, 'So something stole away people, maybe to try and save them, at the start of all this. Now, here we are and something is stealing away monsters…to save them?'
'Not just any monsters,' Trevor said.
Brewer agreed, 'You’re right. It’s stuff from Voggoth’s place.'
Trevor looked to the far end of the table again. Anita remained silent with one hand stroking her long dark hair and her eyes focused on that cup of coffee. Omar, frustrated at her trance-like demeanor, sat in his chair puffing on a cigarette. 'Anita.' She did not respond. Trevor repeated, 'Anita?' 'Huh? What? Oh, sorry.' Trevor took a good look at her face.
Anita and Omar had immigrated from India to the United States long before the end-of-the-world. He spoke in a purposely bad accent and often times appeared more than eager to embrace the stereotype, if it served to his advantage.
Trevor considered Anita to be an amazing woman. The more he learned of her the more intelligent he knew her to be. That’s why he had named her Chief Analyst Hostile Information and Tracking, placing her in charge of the Red Rock research facility. After Reverend Johnny’s death, Anita also took the role of Chief Analyst of Hostile Biotechnology.
While she lacked a hard science background, she could translate scientific data into understandable information. Anita served as the perfect translator between the council and the scientists doing the hands-on research at Red Rock.
Trevor said, 'We were discussing the fact that the hostiles disappearing in the major cities all seem to be from Voggoth’s realm. Is that the case?'
She ran a hand through her hair, sighed, and changed her posture from slouching to stiff. Still, the bags under her eyes suggested a severe lack of sleep.
'As far as we can tell, yes. Um, well, as I’ve detailed before, our analysis of the genetic structure of the various hostiles collected over the years has shown, that, um…oh yes, has shown that this invasion has come from…come from…come from eight different points of origin. We have…we have come to this conclusion by finding…I mean…tracking I guess or measuring the amount of cell damage done by radiation that we think the organisms were subjected to during their travel here.'
She glanced nervously around the table, perked again, and spoke in a stronger voice, 'Basically, we found that there’s eight different places these things are coming from. Maybe there’s more, we don’t know, but so far we found eight.'
Trevor led, 'And seven of them…'
'And seven of the different types of creatures, I guess, coming here share a DNA structure almost identical to our own. You could say we share the basic building blocks of life and are, um complex organisms.'
Dante said, 'Hey, like that goes for both the organized armies and the animals, right?'
'Yes,' Gordon Knox answered while Anita nibbled on a finger nail. 'We know that the Chaktaw and the Jaw- Wolves and Rat-Things all come from the same place. We know the Plats and Bloodhorns come from another. It’s like if we were to launch an invasion of another planet and take lions, tigers and sheep along with us for the ride.'
Trevor’s heart skipped a beat as Gordon's words hit home. On that parallel Earth mankind played invader to a world belonging to the Chaktaw. Not only had human armies come through, but also pigeons and wolves and Grizzly Bears.
One man’s animal is another man’s monster.
Stanton, Jon Brewer, and Dante started a round of cross talk but Anita’s suddenly firm and loud voice silenced the room.
'Listen! I said there were eight different points of origin but only seven are like us. The others…the eighth… their cells aren’t like ours or the Hivvans’ or the Duass’. They aren’t complex organisms, and they don’t even seem to be alive! That’s Voggoth. Wraiths and Mutants come from Voggoth's place! Goat-Walkers and Deadheads. Totally…' her voice trailed. '…totally… different…'
Dante said, 'Well wait a sec'. We always called The Orders stuff bio-mechanical. Johnny said the stuff was grown, as if they were one part machine and part organic. How does something grow that isn't alive?'
