Omar Nehru stood at his bedroom window holding a simmering cigarette and watching the first rays of dawn glitter off Harveys Lake. A pair of tree swallows darted out from shore, zigzagged over the lazy water, and returned inland toward the forested slopes surrounding the basin. Omar admired their blue-black coat and wondered what spring game they played.
He watched the day begin from the A-frame home situated a few yards north of the main estate, the place where a small band of survivors had weathered the early storm of the invasion some eleven years before.
Even after the arrival of Stonewall’s brigades and Tom Prescott’s band of roving soldiers the lake kept that isolated feel. Now-so many changes and so many years later-the center of The Empire bustled with activity.
Although Trevor remained far away at the front lines, the estate had regained its mantle as the heart of humanity’s fight for survival. Many of the functions the ill-fated President Evan Godfrey had transferred to Washington DC during his temporary reign returned to the estate. As a result, trucks and cars and helicopters constantly buzzed the area. The two lane perimeter road often grew congested with traffic.
He found it hard to believe so much time had passed; that the fledgling band of survivors had grown into a nation.
From survivors to conquerors. From an extended family to an Empire. Over the course of those years the changes felt gradual, to the point he hardly noticed.
Through it all he maintained a sort of detachment, even when traveling to Atlanta to bring the captured Hivvan matter-makers on line; even when investigating the strange structure in the Ohio countryside that had facilitated Trevor’s disappearance four years ago.
Omar relied on fronts to maintain that detachment, including a finely honed sense of sarcasm and a forced accent to comply with the stereotype of his Indian heritage. Yet those fronts could not help him now. As he watched the birds play and the sun flicker, Omar felt a sense of doom falling like a shroud over everything. It pierced his well-cultivated detachment and brought an ache to his heart.
Omar raised the cigarette to his lips and inhaled a deep drag.
More than a decade ago he came to Trevor’s estate with a six-year-old son, an eleven-year-old daughter, and Anita, his wife.
His boy now worked with a logistics and transportation company supporting garrison units along the northern border. According to last week’s letter, he operated from the ghost city of Toronto. Omar found small comfort in his son serving away from the front lines, but also knew that eventually everyone would face Voggoth’s onslaught.
His daughter worked as a pharmacist/nurse at a hospital outside of Virginia Beach. Last time they had spoken on the phone, his daughter told him that she saw surprisingly few wounded come through her ward. Omar did not tell her that the reason so few wounded reached the rear area was because the troops retreated too fast to save them.
Omar tasted another puff of tobacco to sooth his nerves. Post-Armageddon cigarettes were far cruder than the old world’s, but also more direct in delivering their effects.
My family. What has happened to us?
Of course he had always known that his children would leave home someday. The pain of watching them make off for a new life without you is a hardship for which every parent prepares but it still comes as a bitter pill. But that pain was meant to be shared with the one woman he had ever loved, his beautiful wife, Anita.
He turned his eyes to the King sized bed. The sheets on one-half of that bed were asunder from a night of tossing and turning. On the other side the sheets remained neatly tucked, having been unused for the third night in five.
It seemed to Omar he no longer shared his home with his wife. She had found a new home. Or an obsession. An obsession that threatened to devour not only her time and attention, but her sanity.
For a long time now Anita Nehru no longer lived at the A-frame house along the coast of Harveys Lake. For a long time now Anita Nehru lived in Hell.
Anita Nehru walked in sluggish strides along a catwalk enclosed in heavy glass. A line of containment pens the size of small gymnasiums stretched below, all with transparent ceilings.
One pen held a large predator known as a Shellsquid. A study of the radiation damage done to the creature’s stem cells suggested it came from the same world as the Duass. At the moment the creature rested silently in one corner with its tentacles withdrawn inside what resembled a conical shell.
Anita paused and stared at the predator with a blank gaze. Bags carried under her eyes. The white lab coat she wore smelled from two days’ worth of sweat and wear. Her once-striking long black hair hung in tangled strands.
She moved on-zombie-like-to the next pen. This one presented the biggest puzzle in all of the Red Rock Research Facility. The creature in Large Specimen Containment Area Number Three had been in custody for several years.
Not so long ago, this fifteen-foot tall Stick Ogre resembled a horrific combination of a walking-stick insect and a bald humanoid. Stick Ogres fed primarily on various tree leaves and fruit and their excrement proved not only highly pungent, but highly fertile.
While quite capable of defending their nesting areas-even using small trees as clubs-Stick Ogres usually remained quiet and reclusive.
That had changed in the blink of an eye last year.
The creature in Large Specimen Containment Area Number Three roared and slammed its large body into the walls of its cell, almost continuously. Even the thick safety glass and soundproofing could not muffle its raucous hollers.
It no longer resembled that combination of insect and humanoid. The once slender but tall animal had become wide and lined with blood-red muscles, as if it were a body that had shred its skin. The face had morphed into a devil’s skull complete with a trio of bony horns and eyes seemingly changed from organic to mechanical. Deadly talons sprouted like daggers from paws at the end of its arms and legs. Sharp metal spines — metal! — protruded along its back.
It had not been fed in a long time; the last keeper who tried lost an arm, tranquilizers had no effect, and security refused to enter the cage with anything less than lethal intentions.
As far as she could tell, this metamorphosis occurred instantaneously early last July to all Stick Ogres. In fact, her research teams tracked instant transformations in nearly three dozen different types of invading entities. Some of those had been docile prior, a few predators. All had changed into deadly beasts with a rabid disposition.
Both type A and type B Giant Sloths had morphed into iron-plated beasties capable of spitting fire with a kind of flame thrower protruding from their mouths. Two of those were in containment up on Sub-Level 6.
Reports suggested that a similar fate had befallen all of the alien invaders known as “The Tribe of the Red Hand,” or Feranites, resulting in a new race of robotic soldiers joining Voggoth’s legions.
As in the case of the Stick Ogre, security cameras captured the instant evolution of the Sloths on tape. The original animals had grown completely still, then vibrated, and then their new selves grew out of their flesh as if each living cell changed, one by one, into the new entity.
This was no natural evolution like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly, but some kind of biological alchemy. Eyes replaced by artificial lenses, blood, bones, and hair into grease, metal, and wires.
The creature below stopped its rage for a moment; something it rarely did.
Anita leaned against the glass. The surface felt cool. Her sleep-deprived mind worked the pieces of the equation over and over.
According to radiation levels found inside the stem cells of the Stick Ogres and the Sloths, those creatures came to Earth from the same point of origin as the Feranites. But not anymore. They no longer had stem cells. They no longer had any living matter within their frames. Like statues or rock formations, the creatures were made of molecules but not of living tissue. They could be destroyed, but not killed; not exactly.
So how can they thrash about? How can they roar? Why can they walk and attack?
Her thoughts fell away as she realized that the demonic thing in the cell below stared up at her, as if studying her.
She backed away from the glass and stumbled. Her arms and hands fidgeted-as they almost always did anymore-in a sign of nerves.
The creature roared and ran headlong into a wall. She felt the impact as a distant tremor.
Anita closed her eyes tight and let the blackness provide some measure of peace. But it was an illusion. Peace would not come to Anita Nehru; not as long as these mysteries gripped her in obsession. Not as long as she felt an answer lay within her grasp if only she pressed a little harder.
Trevor had assigned her to Red Rock despite her lack of formal scientific training. Her gift did not come from hard core research, but from an ability to take raw data and turn it into usable information. Indeed, her initial 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.
Bits of burning flesh lay on the floor of the smoke-filled room. The glass grew very hot causing an aroma similar to singed wiring to drift through the observation area.
“I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!” she shouted at the pile of remains.
“Mrs. Nehru! Anita! What are you doing?”
She held ultimate authority over Red Rock, but her behavior now moved beyond the eccentric and into unreasonable.
Yet the force of his protest fell apart when she grabbed his collar and screamed into his red face, “Don’t you see? It’s all a deception! We never had a chance! All of our guns and tanks would never be enough!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The universe!” She shouted. “The universe is empty! And I know why!”
Omar followed Lori Brewer around what had once been a garage housing Ferraris but now served as his personal laboratory. Since the earliest days of the post-Armageddon struggle, Omar worked in this shop to understand the technologies brought to Earth by the invaders.
Over the years he had grown accustomed to interruptions. Sometimes General Jon Brewer, occasionally Gordon Knox, and often-times Trevor Stone. On this day Lori Brewer-the Imperial Administrator-visited his habitat. As usual during these interruptions, the accent in Omar’s voice grew more pronounced the longer she lingered.
“I do not know what it is you are wanting me to be saying.”
The short-haired brunette stopped at a glass case displaying a de-constructed Chaktaw rail gun. A half dozen assistants in various combinations of lab coats, overalls, and casual dress tinkered with items at work benches and tables around the garage.
She explained to him again, “My job is allocating resources. And then people make things from those resources. And then I have to make sure that those ‘things’ get put on trains or in trucks and make their way to where they are needed. So here’s the point, Omar. You get a lot of resources. You get technical people. You get lab equipment. I spend a lot of Continental dollars on your storage depots, on your personnel, on the recovery teams, even on the power you use. The question is, what am I getting for it?”
She gave him an opening and Omar replied from what he perceived as a position of strength: “What do you get from my humble efforts? Let us see here-hmmm-have you noticed those really big fancy ships with aircraft upon them? What do we call them…”
Lori tapped her foot and rolled her eyes but allowed Omar to vent.
“Oh, yes, the Dreadnoughts. And then there are the active camouflage suits if I am recalling correctly, and the Eagle transports that have been known to pitch into the effort.”
“Omar,” her patience ran out. It usually did. “What have you done for me lately? Our resources are running out. The matter-makers down in Atlanta are running full-bore for bullets and fuel. In a few weeks those facilities may be in The Order’s bombing range. Meanwhile, I’ve got the Excalibur over in Pittsburgh that isn’t back in the game yet because we don’t have the people or the parts to finish its repairs. I’ve got to start making some decisions on what gives us the most hope of staying alive. I hate to say this but-“
One of Omar’s assistants cut dared cut in to the conversation, “Dr. Nehru?”
Both Omar and Lori shouted with dueling aggravation, “What?”
The man held a phone. “Phone call. It’s Red Rock. They say it’s an emergency.”
Omar’s cigarette dangled from his half-open mouth. As he reached for the phone his expression turned into one of dread, like a soldier’s parent receiving a phone call from the army in the middle of the night.
“Yes, this is Dr. Nehru. This is about my wife, isn’t it?” as Lori listened to his side of the conversation she found it amazing how clear and plain his English became. “When did this happen? Is she okay? Of course I will be there as quickly as possible.”
He hung up.
“Omar, what is it?”
“It’s Anita. They say she has gone mad.”
The white and black Internal Security helicopter circled the Red Rock facility on its way to the landing pad. Through the windows Omar spied the 1960s-era remains of the topside Air Force base including an old tower complete with a radar dome. The main building-constructed of sturdy but nearly featureless concrete-served as the tip of a structural iceberg.
The chopper landed with a soft thud. The rear passenger door opened a split second after the skids hit the ground. Omar hurried out with his lab coat billowing in the rotor-wind. Lori Brewer struggled to keep pace.
The Colonel who ran security at the Red Rock facility met Omar on the tree-lined path leading away from the landing pad.
“Dr. Nehru?”
As he answered, “Yes, of course,” Lori realized that no trace of Omar’s Indian accent remained. “What has happened to my wife?”
The group walked through a side door into a small lobby. Groups of workers and soldiers stood around with their eyes fixed on Omar as if he held a solution to a problem.
“We’re not sure, exactly, sir,” the Colonel said. “She began acting erratically, first when she disposed of a specimen for no apparent reason. According to the technician who was with her, she appeared to calm down after that and said something about going to her office. An hour later we received a security alert from the primary containment cell block.”
The Colonel guided them along a corridor. Lori noticed the security cameras and warning signs that suggested they had moved to a more sensitive area of the facility.
She asked, “The containment blocks?”
“Yes Ma’am. We’ve got about three dozen specimens contained on the lower levels for biological study and weapons testing.”
“Yes, yes, but what about Anita? What has happened?”
They stopped at a freight elevator flanked by a pair of well-armed guards.
The Colonel said, “She started moving through the cell blocks down there and euthanizing the specimens.”
“She just started killing off the things?” Lori asked. “For no reason?”
“Not that we can tell, ma’am.”
“So what is the problem? She decided to destroy the specimens. Is this such a big deal? Is she not in charge here?” Omar may have lost his ethnic accent but he found another accent, one of defensiveness.
The doors to the elevator opened. The Colonel motioned them inside and pushed a button for Sub-Level 6.
He said, “You have to understand, doctor, your wife oversaw most of these things. She knew how hard it was to get them. They were a gold mine of information to her.”
Lori broke in, “Did anyone try and talk to her?”
“That’s the problem, ma’am.” The elevator hummed and descended into the bowels of the facility. “Security and some of the techs tried to intercede. She grabbed a pistol from a weapons locker and forced every one out.”
“No, no, there is a mistake,” Omar said. “Anita is a peaceful woman!”
The doors to the elevator slid open to a large, white, round room filled with monitors and sealed doors. A group of security guards, workers, and researchers stood in the area like a bunch of high school kids forced outside by a fire alarm.
The Colonel said, “As far as we can tell she’s exterminated every specimen in one whole cell block. We shut the bulkheads down so she can’t get out. With that gun-well, I didn’t want her to hurt anyone or for us to have to hurt her. Then she asked for you, Dr. Nehru.”
“For me?”
“Actually she asked for The Emperor first. We told her he was far away at the front. Then she insisted to see you.”
They stopped near one of the closed doors. It resembled a submarine bulkhead except larger and painted white.
“You’re not going in there alone,” Lori jumped.
“Yes I am.”
The glow of spinning red warning lights bounced across the walls in a slow parade of flashes. Big glass panels-like giant aquariums-lined one wall of the long, wide hall. The other side of that hall contained lockers and monitoring devices and scientific equipment.
Omar walked through the patches of light and dark created by the lack of main power in that section. The hair on the back of his neck stood straight. To calm his nerves he fumbled for a cigarette which he hurried to light.
He had toured Red Rock with his wife once before. In his nightmares he often saw an ‘incident’ inside the high-tech dungeon. He thought of Skip Beetles and Crawling Tube worms slipping free of their bonds and running roughshod through the underground levels. In all those nightmares, however, he never imagined his wife to be the monster running loose.
He passed the first of the containment cells. Beyond the glass doors he saw a burned pile of ashes. The smell of charred flesh-of some kind or another-lingered.
“Anita?” He realized his call sounded more a whisper. “Anita? It’s me, Omar.”
He spied a shadow move behind an overturned table. He could not tell-not at first-if that shadow belonged to his wife or one of the horrors inhabiting that vile place.
“Omar-Omar?” Her voice suggested she did not trust her ears.
He jogged to her. Anita Nehru lay with her knees pulled to her chin and propped against a side wall below a fire extinguisher. She had positioned herself just inside a rim of darkness as if hiding from all she had done.
“I’m here, Anita.”
He snuffed his cigarette on the floor and knelt. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw deep bags under her eyes and her hair bundled in tangled mess. She lazily held a pistol in one hand. In the other she clasped a bundle of notes and papers.
“It’s you. You came.”
“Of course.”
She smiled briefly then her eyes stared beyond him at some sight visible only to her eyes. He easily removed the pistol from hand and slid it out of reach.
“I want to go home, Omar. I want to leave this place.”
“Yes, of course. This we shall do. Come along, right now.”
She appeared ready to move but stopped as she remembered something. Her eyes glanced around at the now-dead containment cells. Then she became conscious of the notes in her grasp.
“Wait, Omar, listen to me. I did all this-I did it all for a reason.”
“I am sure. But let’s talk of this when we get home.”
She grabbed his arm and said, “Listen, Omar, I understand now. Do you hear me? Trevor has to know. He has to know that we never had a chance. All of the guns and the armies won’t be enough, Omar. We never had a chance!”
“Anita, come home with me.”
“All these years down here-these things have gotten inside my head. I’ve studied them under a microscope, in the lab-most of them are just animals like what we have here on Earth-just a little different in how they look. That’s not important. But the others-I have watched them one little piece at a time. It’s been like a puzzle-coming together. No-more like coming into focus. I can’t explain it, but I know now. I know why the others are so different.”
“I’m sure they are,” he reached under her shoulder as if to lift her to her feet.
She burst with a shout that caused him to lose his balance and fall backward onto the floor.
“GODDAMN IT you have to hear me, Omar! You MUST listen to me. Trevor MUST listen. You have to tell him. I can’t go-not like this-but you have to. You must tell him!”
“Calm down. We will send a message to him.”
“NO!” Then calmer, “No. You will go to the front and tell him yourself, Omar. You will tell him what I have learned.”
She stared at him with hard eyes for a long moment, and then collapsed into sobs as the weight of her work, of her life in the dungeon, of the truth she had learned, came falling hard on her shoulders.
He whispered in her ear, “What has this place done to you?”
“I know, Omar,” she answered by telling him exactly what the horrors at Red Rock had finally taught her. “I know why the universe is empty.”