Ashlyn Chronicles 1: 2287 A.D. (34 page)

***

“Ash, what’s wrong? Ash?”

She seemed lost to the terror, to the pain. Her breath was sparse and labored, she shook uncontrollably, her back arched again, racked by pain.

“Dad, help me!” she screamed out between clenched teeth. Her skin was white. Her eyes dripped tears.

Steven slapped her face. “Wake up, Ash, wake up!” His slap seemed to rouse her slightly, almost bringing her back. Slapping her twice as he screamed her name, her distant eyes finally focused on Steven’s face. In her deep, frozen eyes Steven saw that something was horribly wrong!

“It’s Phillip, Steven! Enlil has him. They’re torturing him.”

A cold chill raced through Steven. His jaw clenched, and he rose to his feet. “How, Ash? How do you know?”

“I’m not sure! I can hear his screams. He’s calling out to you. He’s in horrible pain, Steven. Horrible!”

“Ash, is there some way you can let me see what you see? I’ve got to see him. I’ve got to.”

“It’s bad, Steven! Very bad!”

“Can you?”

Sitting cross-legged upon the sand, their minds melded. He waited, watching the scene unfold as Ashlyn’s consciousness reached out, searching through a dark void for Phillip’s mind. From some faraway place, as if Phillip were calling to him from across a vast chasm, Steven heard Phillip’s screams. His plaintive, anguished cry tormented Steven’s soul. Steven’s heart was near to bursting.

“Ash, I need to see him!”

Her concentration deepened and focused on a distant, tiny spot of light that stood like the candle of a lighthouse in the surrounding darkness. In a single heartbeat, they raced toward it, entering Phillip’s mind. Steven could now see, hear, and feel everything.

The pain froze him.

“No! Please, don’t cut—it hurts—it hurts. Dad, help me. You can’t be dead, you can’t be! You’ve got to help me, Dad! I’ll kill you all! I swear, I’ll kill you! No more cutting, please, no more! Kill me. Just kill me. Kill me.”

“Ash, there’s got to be something we can do!” With Steven’s words, the meld disintegrated and they returned to their own surroundings.

“Ash! There must be something we can do! There has to be!”

“Perhaps—but you can’t go with me. I can’t support both of us from this distance.” A nod from Steven and she straightened her posture, refocusing. In typical Zen fashion, Ashlyn closed her eyes. Her breathing grew deep and her brow furrowed. Within seconds, she was again lost into her netherworld of darkness.

***

“My dad will kill you all!”

More pain. More
whirring
.

“No, don’t…”

“Phillip, it’s me Ashlyn. I’m here with you. I’m going to help you. I want you to follow my voice. Your father is waiting to see you, just follow my voice.”

“Dad’s alive?”

“Yes, he’s alive. He’s here with me. He wants to hold you. Come on, Phillip, follow my voice.”

“I knew he was alive, I knew it! But, Ashlyn, how come I can’t see you?” Again the pain. “My dad’s going to kill you!”

“Phillip, we need to leave this place. Keep walking towards my voice. That’s it, come on. You’re almost there.”

“I think I can see you, Ashlyn. But, where are we?”

“Come toward my voice. Come into the garden that your dad and I found. It’s called Eden. There is food and water here, and even a warm river if you want to go for a swim. Come on, follow my voice into the center of the garden. Your dad is waiting to see you!”

Ashlyn led his mind into a place where they couldn’t hurt him anymore—a place where he could be free. “That’s right, your dad and I are waiting for you. Come on, Phillip. It’s this way.”

He followed her into the picture her mind had placed in his subconscious. He followed her into the garden. Its stream begged to be jumped into. Its trees asked to be climbed. Most importantly, his father stood waiting, a smile on his face, his arms wide, waiting for a hug. He ran to his father with more joy than he’d ever felt before.

“Stay here, Phillip. Stay with your father until I return. Don’t leave the garden. It is painful outside. You will be safe here. Do you see the large wall? It will protect you. The pain can’t come here. Only your father and I can be here with you. No one else but us, all right?”

“I won’t leave. Dad and I are going to go fishing, aren’t we Dad?”

“That’s right, son, we’ll catch a big one.”

“That’s good, Phillip. You stay here with your father. I’ll be back soon, very soon—and Phillip?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you!”

“I love you too, Ash.”

They waved goodbye as their minds separated.

Ash awoke gasping for air, her muscles convulsing from the pain she had felt in the meld.

Holding Ashlyn tight, her trembling hands and damp cold skin told Steven how intense it had been. “Ash? Are you okay? What happened?”

“I led his mind into a place of hiding. They won’t be able to hurt him anymore. He’s your son, all right. He has a strong will—very strong. He was resisting, telling them that you were going to kill them all. He has incredible strength of mind.”

“But what were they doing to him? Did you see?”

Her long pause made Steven swallow. “Yeah—I saw.”

“And?” Steven waited. He saw that the words were stuck in her throat.

“They were cutting into his reproductive organs. They were taking genetic samples.

There is also something burrowing into him, they inserted it through his nose. If I had to guess, I think it’s going to extract a bit of his DNA from the glands in his brain. I don’t think it will damage him. Enlil still wants him—alive.”

“Why?”

“So…”

He saw her hesitancy. “Why, Ash?”

“So that he can eat him.”

Steven’s limbs went weak and tears filled his eyes. He swore that Enlil’s death would be a painful one.

“I’ve got to get to him, Ash. I’ve got to.”

“We’ve got to.” They were her last words before fainting.

The strain of Ashlyn’s meld had exhausted her. The pain she had endured weakened her mind. The ordeal had been nearly as hard on her as it was on Phillip. She would need time to heal.

Steven had a thousand unanswered questions that he wanted to ask her, but he was ever so grateful for what she had done. She had saved Phillip from endless, unbearable pain.

Late that night, when Ash awoke, Steven gave her the last of the meat in their packs, including his portion. Ashlyn needed it more than he did.

Knowing how critical time was, they quickly resumed their journey. Ash tried to answer Steven’s questions as best she could. But in reality, she didn’t know much more than Steven about how or why she had been able to do what she did.

In the end, they chalked it up to the fact that Phillip had inherited enough of Steven’s genes to make the link possible.

Phillip’s demise gave them an urgency that reflected in their pace. For the next six days, they pushed hard, traveling fast, stopping for only three hours during the hottest part of the day.

Though severely deprived of food, they remained vibrant and energetic, thanks to the Gifts.

In the early evening on the twelfth night since their escape, they came to a stop atop a small dune. Before them, across a sea of dunes, sat the Great Pyramid, which dwarfed the one on Earth.

The pyramid rose from the ground like a leviathan. Large as it was, it wasn’t until the middle of the second night when they reached the wall surrounding it that they truly appreciated its magnificence.

As they crept along the base of the thirty-meter-high wall looking for an entrance, they were surprised to see no sign of guards or security.

It was nearly two hours later, after having walked two kilometers along the second side, when they finally found an entrance.

However, as they came to within meters of the massive gate, its large doors swung open. A group of eight humans exited in two single file lines, carrying two stretchers.

I think they are carrying dead people,
said Steven.

He couldn’t help but wonder if one of them was Phillip.

The group was dressed in small pieces of leather skins with strapped sandals on their feet. Crouching against the wall in shadowed darkness, they watched the small band head out into the desert.

Just as they were entertaining the idea that they could perhaps sneak inside through the open gate, the gate’s doors swung closed.

Umm—do you want to follow them?
Ashlyn mentally whispered.

Yeah, and why are you whispering in the meld?

Whispering is sexy—so romantic, like spies discussing a secret mission
. She scurried ahead into the shadows.

Steven took off after her, admiring her verve and bravado, and to put it simply, her let’s-get-it-done attitude. He had to admit that hearing her whisper in the meld carried the same effect on him as feeling her warm breath on his neck. It was erotically sexy.

Trailing the procession, hanging off to the right side, they used the rises and dips in the terrain to close their distance.

Ashlyn noticed it first—she saw that the sky was getting brighter and that it glowed faintly orange. There was also a scent of smoke and decayed meat.
Do you think that smell is from…
asked Ashlyn.

It is,
affirmed Steven.
It’s the same smell I remember a few days after the attack, when we went in search of survivors. The material lining of our armor reeked of it.

The air grew thicker and more nauseating with each step—the sky growing ever brighter. Two kilometers further, the procession stopped at the edge of a ridge. With a coordinated heave, the group unceremoniously threw each of the encased bodies over the edge before simply turning around and heading back.

What now?
asked Ashlyn.

Follow me.
Running the last fifty meters to the edge, they looked down upon the graveyard of corpses. The orange-red glow that lit the night sky was caused by volcanic lava; the ground was pitted, cracked, and broken. Dozens of huffing and puffing fires spurted, bubbling noisily, slow-cooking the corpses that lay strewn on top of the soil nearby. It was as unsettling a sight as the odor was suffocating.

“Gehenna,”
said Steven. “The lake of fire and sulfur, where they are tormented day and night forever.”

There was no need for Steven to say more—and Ash had no words to describe the horror of what was before her. It truly was Hell.

“If we’re going to enter the city, we’ll need more clothes. Especially you, you’ll stand out like a rabbit thrown into a den of wolves,” said Steven. Not waiting for a reply, he unslung his pack.

Steven knew that compared to the shriveled humans they’d seen thus far, her beauty and vitality were going to be a dead giveaway as to her recent arrival on this world. Although, to be fair, his own chiseled body was going to stand out almost as prominently.

His eyes teared from the wafting, acrid smoke. “Wait here!” Steven hopped down, making the jump to the bottom, where the most recent bodies had been thrown. What he landed on crunched and softened under foot. It was gushy and his imagination nearly made him retch.

The two they had just heaved over had landed near the top of the pile. Steven picked them out easily, for they were the only ones that were not covered in something akin to a wingless fly. It was the first insect life Steven had seen on Hades. Under the bright light of the three moons, the flies appeared almost as a single mass, fluidly moving around and over the tops of one another.

Steven quickly unrolled the nearest casing. The body went tumbling down to the bottom of the pile as it spilled out of the wrapping. He did the same with the second. As unsettling as it was, he took relief in the fact that neither of them was Phillip—which had been much of his motivation to see who was inside.

Clambering down the pile, each step brought a flood of nauseating sensations. The sounds of crunching bones, squirting fluids, and the squishing, oozing sound of pure mush all worked together to send intensely powerful images.

Unfortunately, they were both males, one of which was far too thin to make his loin covering usable, but he assumed it might work for Ash. The other man was a bit more squat, rotund, and his would do nicely.

Still in need of a bosom wrap for Ashlyn, Steven hurriedly opened two more swathed corpses before he found a female. Even then, he hesitated as he contemplated removing it. It sickened him to have to touch her badly bloated, gooey, decomposing body. The noxious fumes were a story unto themselves as the odor threatened to render him unconscious. Then came the knockout punch. Under the wrapping, a churning nest of white maggots squirmed in the cavities of what had once been the woman’s breasts.

Shaking the wrapping out, hundreds of clinging maggots were sent flying into the air. The little fly creatures went wild as they jumped to feed upon the freshly exposed food of their own younger brethren. It was a gagging glimpse of a strange eco-system.