C.M. Simpson's Blog

Wednesday's Verse - When Our Children... Tuesday's Short - Jalaya

Carlie's Chapter 3 - Dear Tiger: Don't Look Back

LAST WEEK, Simone was worrying about where Tiger was. This week, Tiger tells her what happened to his parents and the colony on Deskeden.Chapter 3 – Unexpected Incursion

Hey, Simone.
Quick note. I’m fine.
Um, why did I stay?
Because mum and dad got into the ruins, and they found these strange slime moulds, and I remember what you said about the stuff in the jars. I tried to stop them from going back in, but they refused to listen, so I had to wait.
And while I waited I did another condensed course—this one on slime moulds. Thing was, I couldn’t find anything on the ones you talked about, or the ones we’d found in the ruins, so I had to do a base work-up. Mum and dad were thrilled! They thought it was wonderful that there was finally something we could work on as a family.
They weren’t so impressed when I told them why I was doing it. And they really didn’t like what I had to say about what happened to you.
What can I say, Sim? I was missing you, and I lost my temper. The thought they could be so naïve about what might happen, and then the way they just brushed all my fears away like I was some stupid, small child… Well. Let’s just say I let them have it with both barrels.
And I’m not proud of that. Really, I’m not.
Not just because they were shocked that it happened, but more because they were shocked by the way I got my information. It was like they didn’t want to believe the way the company had behaved. We had the biggest argument that night, let me tell you—and the next day, they disappeared.
Just… vanished.
Screaming at me to run, because I’d gone after them, because their equipment had started playing up.
One minute they were moving through what looked like a large, underground amphitheatre, and the next their broadcast started to fizz and crackle, and I lost the picture. I was supposed to stay on the monitors, but I couldn’t. I mean, I’d already lost you; I didn’t want to lose them as well, and I couldn’t just sit and wait for someone else to go check it out—especially not when I was the one who actually knew what was growing on those stone benches, and what to do if someone got infected by it.
I scrambled the emergency crew, and got Kiara to take my place, and then I went down to find out what had happened to them.
I didn’t want to think the worst. I really didn’t. I wanted to believe the emergency team leader when she said it was probably just a glitch in the gear. I really, really did.
We went into the ruins quickly, but carefully. They deployed a forward team to scan ahead of the medics and the guys carrying the rescue equipment, just in case there’d been a cave in, or there was the sudden arrival of some unknown predator—and goodness knows I’d been studying a lot of those in the last few weeks. Those slime moulds are very aggressive.
I was wondering which one had gotten out of containment, when we reached the edge of the amphitheatre, and I could see that it wasn’t what we thought.
For one thing, my parents were fine, kind of. They were standing exactly where they’d been standing when the equipment cut out, and they were busy recording what was happening on the amphitheatre stage.
Why they were doing that, I don’t know. Maybe they had already worked out they weren’t going to survive, and were doing their best to document it, so the rest of us would know what happened. Anyway, I moved forward for a closer look, and the rest of the team moved forward with me.
“Do you think they’ll listen to you if you tell them to leave?” the team leader asked, and I shook my head.
She gave a sigh, and then stepped past me, signalling to four of her team as she did so.
‘You’d better wait here,’ she said, and they all trotted forward.
I wanted to go with them, but I was terrified.
It was like we were standing on the edge of a tropical storm, and the amphitheatre looked all shivery. The air in front of me was warmer than the air around me, but it felt hot and dry, rather than hot and wet, and I knew that couldn’t be. We were coming into the cooler season, so I couldn’t figure out where all the heat was coming from—and then there was the light.
I don’t know what was on that stage, but I didn’t know of anything that could throw a light like that, all orangey red, with a touch of yellow fizzing around the centre. I didn’t like the look of it. As the team leader advanced, I followed.
For the life of me I couldn’t work out why my parents hadn’t moved.
It was hard to keep an eye on them, and an eye on the light on stage, but I tried. I think that’s what saved me, too. The team reached my parents, and the team leader reached out and laid her hand on my mum’s shoulder. Her off-sider did the same for my dad, and I looked up.
The light had become hurtingly bright, and it made my eyes sting, but it was what it was doing that almost made me forget my parents. You see, Sim, the light was growing. It had started out as a glow surrounding the thing on the dais, but when I looked this time, it had stretched up to form a sort of pointed arch.
The arch grew wider, enough to be a doorway, and then this… creature stepped through. It was an alien, Sim, bipedal, and wearing some sort of power armour. I watched it step out of the light, saw it pause to scan the auditorium, and realised why my parents hadn’t moved.
That thing stooped down and lifted two cables from the stage floor. When it pulled on them, my parents cried out, and stumbled towards it. I started to run after them, even as the rescue team leaned across them and took hold of the cables, some pulling against the alien, and some trying to cut the lines.
The alien pulled again, and everyone shouted. I was shouting, too, and my parents heard, and they looked back. And that’s when they told me to run, and to not look back.
I wasn’t going to, Sim, but then that archway flared bright orange and six more of those monsters came through. They were armoured, and they carried harpoons. I hadn’t understood what had happened to my parents, until they fired.
Each harpoon took out one of the rescue team, and then my dad reached over and grabbed hold of the team leader’s las-pistol. He pulled it out and fired, and the bolt hit the thing that held their ropes. It gave this angry roar, and pointed at them… and that’s when my parents disappeared.
They went up in a flare of light, and everyone holding their ropes fell.
And I ran, Sim. I ran as fast out of those tunnels as I could.
I hit the surface, and I ran for the comms hut. I was going to call for help, but it was too late.
I hadn’t even made it half way, before the air around me started to get real hot, just like it had in the amphitheatre—and then a sliver of light appeared, right in the middle of camp.
That’s where we had our comms centre. In the middle of camp.
There was no way known I was going near that light.
I turned and ran for shuttle field. They were still unloading, but they stopped when I showed them the… portal?
There’s a protocol about things like that.
Unexplained phenomena.
They pulled everyone nearest them back into the shuttle, and they lifted. They might have waited longer, except by then they could see the aliens coming through. There were flashes of light and people fell, and the shuttle crew didn’t wait any longer than that.
We left so many behind.
And I didn’t even try to get them to wait.
I’m sorry, Sim.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The complete series is available as short, individual ebooks, and will become available as an omnibus, later this year. In the meantime, you can find them on this blog, until one week after the last chapter in the last book of the series has been posted, at which point this series will be taken down, and a new series serialised on site.