Children of the After: The Complete Series: A Young Adult Postapocalyptic Action and Adventure series (22 page)

Jack began to move again, his own eyes darting from cage to cage, and Tammy followed him and his siblings between the rows of metallic prisons. They passed a third row of big hulking creatures that resembled gorillas, and then another row with very human like aliens. These she had seen before as well. Apart from their bulbous eyes and long three fingered hands, they shared many similar features to man, but even though all three of her companions gasped and stared at each new row, they continued on among the cages.

Two more rows of vaguely humanoid creatures passed, and Tammy fought not to look down to the floor in shame. It was obvious that these were not creatures. They were people. Maybe not from here, not from earth, but people nonetheless. And they were caged like animals. Passing the latest collection of prisoners, Tammy noted that the next row of cages held a recently familiar sight. Here, the insect creatures from last night buzzed about in their cages, crashing into the bars, and bouncing off the ceilings in a chaotic mess. She had never seen them in daytime before, and with the lighting in the room they looked completely different from what she had imagined she had seen in the darkness.

Although they stood upright, their legs stuck out of what would be their hip joints at a more horizontal angle than humans. Shaped like a human’s, their legs had a thigh and a knee, followed by another segment of leg that did resemble those of men, but instead of an ankle and foot, they had another knee-like joint and section of leg that ended at a blunted point.

Their torso looked like a human’s, except that under their two primary arms were smaller appendages in a row on each side, like the legs of centipedes only longer. Their arms were shaped like a person’s, except that their hands only consisted of two hooked fingers. Though they didn’t have any antennae, their head really did resemble that of an ant, with short mandibles and multi-faceted eyes. Even more odd, their entire body was covered in a hard, shell-like skin, but was also covered by very thin, almost ghostly hair over much of their bodies minus their faces. Tammy shivered, remembering their encounter with one of the creatures the night before.

Shaking off the memory, she noted as her companions’ heads all turned slightly. Looking in the same direction as they, she watched as a man approached with Cole in tow from between the rows of cages ahead. He was tall and thin with a sparse beard and dirty hair that clung to his scalp in loose curls. Like the doctor he wore a lab coat, though his was stained with filth, nearly in entirety.  Beneath his lab coat were black slacks and a pair of what looked to be loafers that might have once been tan or light brown. Now they were too stained to be certain.

Nearing, the man smiled, but so dark were the rings around his eyes, and so slumped were his shoulders that the look showed no real joy. His eyes darted this way and that, almost nervously, but Tammy could see uncommon intelligence there. She wondered what he knew that others didn’t. Though his methods were barbaric, what could he have gleaned over the previous months? What truths had he unlocked?

A moment of awkward silence passed as his beady, sunken eyes fell upon each of them one at a time, but eventually the man called Darvski split his natural frown with a monotonous voice that hinted at exhaustion.

“I know what you are thinking,” Darvski admitted. “But please, do not judge my actions out of context.  Every life here has either been captured while attacking our community, or trying to infiltrate it. Before the war I did my research much differently than now, and I do not like it any more than your faces show that you do.”

Jack heard the pain in the man’s words and knew them to be true. He too knew that this was inhumane. Whether the creatures were mindless killers, or thinking feeling species of man like people didn’t matter. This was evil. Immoral.

There were so many questions in his head fighting for dominance that the scientist before him must have read the confusion on his face for exactly what it was.

“Cole has told me about finding you four on the road. You are lucky to have crossed paths. I understand you must have a lot of questions, but I must ask you to contain yourselves. I will tell you all I can about the invasion and my theories, and I will tell you what I have discovered since then. If you have more questions when we are finished, and I have time, I will answer what I can. Will that suffice?”

“Yes, thank you,” Jack answered for all of them.

“Good. Then I will begin with the invasion. We first realized that the ships were here when planes began exploding in midair. Their technology is far superior to our own. Our radar could not locate them. Their ships were all but invisible. Even thermal scans would show nothing out of the ordinary. For weeks we knew they were out there, but we couldn’t accurately track them. Our best clue was mass bird deaths. Birds kept flying into their ships and breaking their necks. It wasn’t until some Canadian crop dusters went up with tanks full of paint and began spraying that we finally got a look at one of their ships. They were huge. Bigger than our cities, and they just floated there, like they had been there forever. People panicked. What else could they do? Every military around the world began attacking the ships, but to no avail. We spent every technology we had. Even nuclear. Nothing happened to them, but we still had no idea why they had come or what they wanted. Then they retaliated. As far as we can guess, every one of their ships all around the globe attacked at precisely the same moment. It was instantaneous. With a single pulse of energy they destroyed everything. We don’t know exactly what it was, but think of it like a radio broadcast signal. They broadcast a signal so strong, that it generated extremely high electrical currents into every metal structure in the world. The wiring of our houses superheated, catching everything on fire. Vehicles caught fire or exploded. Our warships were destroyed. Aircraft plummeted out of the sky. Gone. Our missile silos exploded, military drones rained down around the world. Everything was gone in an instant.”

Jack tried to picture the things the man was saying. The world as he had known it, a living and thriving world filled with billions of humans would have stopped in an instant, nearly completely destroyed. All of the technology they had developed and relied on for day to day life was gone. No wonder there were so few people. How many had gone up in the flames of their homes or cars? His head spun, but still he tried to listen.

“By gone, we thought killed, but we looked. Everywhere we went was destruction. Sure, metal buildings like this, with little to burn still stood. Concrete or brick buildings still stood, but everything else was a ruin. But we didn’t find the dead. At least not near so many as we should have. It is as if they were spirited away in the initial attack. But it didn’t make sense. Why take our people and destroy all that we have worked for? One or the other, sure, but why both? Then the first wave came. They were brutal creatures, filled with rage, and hunger. They are there,” he said, pointing back the way Jack and his companions had come to the first row of cages. “There were so many, and they destroyed everything. We fought for weeks, expending our ammunition as numbers on both sides dwindled. We thought we had them. We were winning. And then, finally, we thought we had won. They stopped coming. Then came the next wave. They were bigger, meaner, faster, and stronger than the previous. More deadly. And they weren’t alone. They came with cage row three,” he pointed again. “But we were lucky. They fought each other just as much as they fought us. All of our numbers fell again. Scientifically, I knew that if something didn’t change we would pass the tipping point where humans would no longer be able to recover even if we did survive.”

Jack watched Dr. Darvski pause as if to reflect on what he was saying. He shook his head, his shoulders sagging even more if possible, but then he continued again.

“The next wave didn’t last more than a few days. They couldn’t survive the atmosphere, or radiation levels, or something about our planet. They grew ill within hours and were dead in a day or two. Then came the ones you saw last night. Three different species of them. One after the other. They are hard to fight, especially now that we don’t have ammo. We are forced to fight hand to hand and to be honest they are superior in a fight like this. They don’t have the analytical mind like we have, but they have a hive mentality. They communicate with each other instantaneously, and can better coordinate their attacks and movements. Fortunately they don’t attack to destroy us, only for food. They dwindle our numbers from time to time until they move on, but we have learned to deal with them. The next several waves were what really caught us off guard.”

Jack tried to process all of the information as fast as Darvski was giving it, but his head was swimming. The people were gone, and many had died, but more were just missing? How was that possible? Had the aliens taken them? If so, then what for? Why did the invasion come in several different waves of different species? What could possibly be worse than giant insects carrying off your friends for food? The questions just kept piling up, and there was nothing for him to do but keep listening.

* * * * *

Sam fought to keep her mind clear. Though she wanted nothing more than to interrupt again and again, she defied the urge when it arose. A lot had already been said. The invasion had happened. People had been taken and the world as they knew it had been destroyed. She was learning what had happened, and if she could keep her own mouth shut she just might get all the answers to her questions. All she had to do was be quiet. She could do this.

“After the dust settled with the insect humanoids, we thought it was over again. Things seemed safe. Weeks passed without a single attack or incident. We began venturing out more and more, and reports came in that gatherings of people were being found all over the place. Chicago. Detroit. Memphis. You name it. Our scouts reported finding people here and there and some began joining with our own group here, only they weren’t really people. Some
people
that were spotted had strange hands and eyes, though from a distance no one could tell, and again the fighting began. These things were trying to take over the few remaining places we still had left standing. They wanted our shelters, and again we had to fight to hold on to what was ours. Thankfully these fights didn’t last too long. Both sides just stopped fighting and secluded themselves from one another. We haven’t seen any of those in a while,” the scientist said pointing back to the human-like things in the cages.

“They weren’t it, though. It still wasn’t over. Next they sent a wave of their best infiltrators yet. Just like humans. I mean just like us. The next wave looked, walked, moved, and thought like us. We could barely tell them apart. Their eyes’ color was a little off, more metallic, and their big toe was jointed different. Like a thumb. Aside from that their only obstacle to crossing behind our lines was communication. Even though they couldn’t talk like us, some of them managed to get into human camps.  Before you knew it, the word got out and Grant ordered everyone in the resistance to line up. We all had to take our shoes off. Even me.”

Sam watched Darvski pause, as his eyes crossed over each of them to the cages beyond. Looking over his shoulder he turned back to Cole, who still stood silently behind him.

“Cole, why don’t you run along and bring me that big brute of a boy… What’s his name?”

“Tom?” Cole questioned.

“Yeah, that’s him. Thank you.”

Off Cole went without a word, and Sam watched him vanish between the cages before turning back to Dr. Darvski.

“Let me tell you. You have to understand,” the good scientist began again. “We were all afraid. Terrified. And there we were, all lined up, out there, right here in front of the hangers. Grant lined us all up and ordered we take off our shoes, so we did. Most of us anyhow. Those who didn’t got put down right there where they stood. We caught two of them that day. Two of the pretenders right here in our own camp, pretending to be human. Grant had them put down too, which looking back is a shame, cause I have never gotten to study one. Not yet at least. But you see? Even through those tough times, I knew there was work that had to be done so I started running tests on the creatures. Grant had them captured for me, so that I could learn their weaknesses, and I did, but I learned so much more. I know you have probably heard that I am off my rocker. That I have a few screws loose. Ya know, crazy. But I assure you that my tests are not wrong. I have run DNA scans on every specimen in this room and hundreds more, and the results are confounding. I’ll try and explain it as best I can. You are all familiar with chimpanzees, right?”

“Yes,” Sam said, as she watched Jack and Will both nod.

“Good, then it might interest you to know that chimps and humans have virtually the same DNA. Mathematically they are about one percent different. One percent. We both come from a common ancestor, and though our DNA is very similar,
we
are vastly different. Do you understand what I am saying?” Darvski asked again, waiting for their nods.

“Some of the invading aliens I have tested have DNA that is less than a third of a single percent different than ours, meaning that they are more closely related to us than chimps. So if our evolution deviated from that of chimps some five million years ago, then our evolution from what is in these cages branched off much later than that. We are related to these beings, and closely so. I know, you must be thinking, but how is this possible? It sounds too crazy to be true, but hear me out.

For our DNA to be so similar, we
have
to have a common ancestor. That fact alone leaves us with only two possibilities. One, either we originated somewhere other than earth and were brought here millions of years ago, or two, that these creatures were taken from here millions of years ago and have now been returned. Which brings me to my theories,” Darvski said with a smile, as he waved down the aisle to Cole and Tom who had both returned.

“I believe that a long time ago, these creatures already existed on this planet and were taken away from our planet by whoever flies those ships up there,” he said, looking up as if into the sky. “Then, for whatever reason, they brought them back. This would explain all the strange artwork left by ancient people. Many strange images of man-like creatures exist all over the world left by ancient cultures, and until now no real reason ever existed for those images.

Another explanation is that these people are in fact humans that the aliens took up into their ships, and altered their DNA before returning them to us, one wave after another. Perhaps they are performing experiments of their own. The equipment I have is not sophisticated enough to give me evidence if this was the case. Nor am I certain I would be able to detect it under ideal circumstances.

Finally, the last theory I have is that at one point in our evolution a number of our people were abducted and allowed to evolve separately from us, and now they are being returned. Keep in mind, children, that these are only theories. And now, you may ask your questions.”

Sam stood awestruck for several seconds. Crazy? Yes. But plausible too, given no evidence to the contrary. Could they actually be related to all the things in the cages around them? If what he said about chimps and humans was accurate, which she had to assume it was, it seemed totally possible. If chimps were so vastly different from humans yet they had nearly identical DNA, who’s to say that these new creatures couldn’t be much the same? She certainly wasn’t in a position to argue the matter.

Still, she was still trying to process the information when Jack started to talk.

* * * * *

Will stood with his mouth open listening to all that Dr. Darvski said. To him it sounded an awful lot like
Planet of the Apes
. Kind of. All this talk about evolution and aliens and stuff made his head hurt, and for the first time, he realized that his head had been hurting for days, asthma attack or not. Regardless of the pain in his head, however, he had just one question and he intended to ask it, but Jack managed to open his mouth first.

“If they are, or were an ancestor or relative of ours, then where did they go and where did they come from?” Jack asked.

“That’s a good question, my boy, but I am afraid I don’t have an answer. Like I said, we couldn’t even detect their ships so we don’t even know what direction they approached earth from. But some scientists have speculated that mathematically speaking, there have to be thousands, maybe even as high as millions of planets with intelligent life out there in the universe. Though we consider ourselves intelligent, there might be races who evolved billions of years before ours and have become so advanced that to them we look like wild animals or even insects. I would assume that one of those races is responsible for those ships up there in the sky.”