contribution to the small band of survivors had been to create sketches of hostiles from fragmented information.
She had demonstrated patience and commitment and resilience. Now those traits conspired to trap her in Red Rock. Her patience kept her searching for answers when others would give up. Her commitment would not allow her to run from this chamber of horrors as long as her dungeons might reveal something that could change the war; her resilience kept her brave in the face of the horrors in that place.
Anita forced herself along the enclosed catwalk until she reached the exit door. A swipe of her keycard opened the heavy portal and she moved into a sterile hallway. When the door slid shut behind she leaned against it and inhaled a deep breath.
She regained her composure as best as could be expected from a person who had not slept in two days. Off she staggered, avoiding the elevators and choosing one of the many stairwells as if extra exercise might return a bounce to her step.
It did not. By the time she reached Sub-Level 2 her legs felt ready to collapse. That resilient part of her psyche that kept her going finally admitted that a nap-even if only an hour-was required…
Anita fell asleep slumped against a hard desktop. A solitary lamp cast a fuzzy white light over papers, books, photographs, and piles of notes.
The dream came again. In it she drifted through a charred battlefield. Dead human soldiers lay strewn across a blackened Earth. Trees stripped bare stood on the horizon like zombie claws reaching from the grave. Tiny fires flickered giving the landscape a Hellish glow.
One of the bodies belonged to her son. His empty eyes stared at nothing; his jaw lay wide open suggesting he died screaming.
As bad as the sight of seeing her child dead, the true terror of the dream came from Anita feeling a sense of responsibility. A sense of failure for not finding the answers.
She knew the questions well enough. She knew that the invaders had come from eight different points of origin. She knew that organized armies of various technological abilities as well as aliens ranging from prey animals to predators had also come to her Earth, where initially they had wreaked havoc upon the population but now lived-the animals at least-as part of Earth’s ecosystem.
She also knew that seven of those invaders shared a basic DNA structure with humanity. They were, she rationalized, built with the same building blocks even if their outward appearance varied greatly.
One race, however, stood apart from the rest. They did not share the same building blocks as the other creatures. Voggoth’s warriors-the ‘grown’ entities that served as his war machines-exhibit the traits of simple, archaea organisms, not unlike bacteria. Furthermore, the minions of his race-the ones many had come to think of as the ‘soulless ones’ — had no DNA. No biology at all. They existed as things, different from rocks, concrete, and iron only in their behavior.
Those war machines of simple design and those soulless creatures that appeared to live but, in reality, did not all came from the same point of origin. From wherever it was this Voggoth lived.
And now those creatures marched across her country in a seemingly unstoppable tide. As she walked through her dream she saw the results of that march; results that had played out across California, the Pacific Northwest, the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, and now the Great Plains. For the moment, the dead body of her son existed only as a phantom harbinger of what might be. If only she could unlock the answers.
In her dream, Anita began to cry. She held her faced in her hands. In the past, this is where she would wake up, the burden of responsibility too great to allow sleep. On this occasion, the dream played differently.
When she removed her hands from atop crying eyes, she saw the bodies of the dead soldiers again. This time, however, they were not human despite still wearing the body armor and battle dress uniforms of The Empire’s fighters. This time she saw the oval heads and oversized maws of Mutants lying on the battlefield in human garb, including her son.
She gasped but before shock could chase her from the nightmare, Anita saw something more. She saw another of the Mutant creatures, this one not dead but standing among the cadavers with its bulky arms raised toward the sky as if praising whatever devil he considered a God.
It finished giving praise and found her eyes.
And spoke.
“The Universe is empty.”
Anita Nehru woke; her arms flailed across the desk in impulsive defensive strikes knocking over a stack of books and sending an empty coffee mug rolling across the floor. Her breath changed from a quick cry to deep and heavy gasps. After a moment she rubbed her baggy eyes with the palms of her hands.
In and out her breath calmed with each cycle, but a constant shaking remained, along with one very strong impulse.
Anita opened the lower desk drawer. Inside she found a jumbled pile of note books, some plain old tablets, others made with fancy bindings or leather covers. The presentation did not matter, only that each of the notebooks offered sheet after sheet of paper begging to be filled with her thoughts.
All but one of the notebooks was full from start to finish in handwriting, some in cursive, some in print; some neat and proper but the majority jagged and rough; yet all from her hand.
Anita wrote a description of her dream. A description that was repeated dozens of times throughout the notebooks. And as she wrote about the new twist to this dream, an idea formed.
She wrote faster. Her pen ran dry of ink. She threw it across the room and yanked another from the top drawer, mixing red ink now with blue. Faster and faster she wrote. Her tired eyes grew wide with crazed fascination.
I will only be sure after I look into their eyes. The answer is there.
The Mutant stood in a room about half the size of a racquetball court but with a lower ceiling. Anita Nehru sat face-to-face with the thing, separated by six inches of safety glass leaning forward with her arms fidgeting. Her tired eyes alternated between fast blinks and bouts of wide-open stare.
A technician flanked her; a short fellow with chubby cheeks and wire-rimmed spectacles wearing a white lab coat. After nearly an hour of sitting next to her doing nothing, the technician inhaled deliberately and summoned the courage to ask, “Um, Mrs., Nehru, what is it you wanted to see the specimen for?”
She spoke, but instead of responding to his question she asked herself, “Why are these things from Region 8 so different? These Mutants, the Wraiths, even those Roachbot-things. How could the Stick-Ogre change from purely organic into some kind of mix? It’s not possible. When I look at these things under a microscope-their dead molecules look familiar-a shadow of something else. I should know-I should see it…”
“W-what’s that, Mrs. Nehru?”
“Most of the species are similar to us. DNA. Carbon-based life. But not Voggoth. And not these things that come from his world. Or does he even have a world? I look at this thing and I see something-an answer is here. It knows the answer.”
Anita’s fists clenched and unclenched. Her face grew red. She stood and paced in front of the glass, watched by the creature’s tiny eyes situated on its nearly egg-shaped skull.
“What happened to the Feranites? What happened to the animals from their world?”
Images from her dreams of dead soldiers and charred battlefields played in her mind.
The Universe is empty.
“What are you? Damn it! What are you?”
A child of Voggoth.
At that moment Anita saw the eyes of a human being on the face of the Mutant. She saw an abomination.
Her left hand slammed down on an oversized yellow button.
“Mrs. Nehru!”
A dozen nozzles situated throughout the holding cell sprayed a fine vapor into the chamber. A light panel above the observation wall flashed WARNING: CHAMBER STERILIZATION SEQUENCE ACTIVATED and a sharp klaxon burst to life.
Her hand slammed down again, this time on a red button. The vapor ignited in a contained fireball of orange and yellow that engulfed the creature, charring the body first black and then to ashes.
