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Authors: Kenneth Toles Jr.

Keepers: Blood of The Fallen (10 page)

BOOK: Keepers: Blood of The Fallen
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He had a couple streams of tears escape his eyes and roll down his cheeks. He didn’t look upset, but he was. I wiped the tears from his cheeks. “It’s ok. You got past it.”

He laughed, “It’s more like I got
through
it! I survived it. I guess that’s the best word to describe it…I
survived
it,” he said smiling and nodding. “I’ve never talked about it before. It’s really something that I pushed out of my memory. I tried to forgive and forget, you know? I guess I never really got to forgive. That’s why my relationship with them was always so weird. We had love, but getting past that part of our past was a pain in the ass.” He was still trying to laugh it off.

I just nestled up closer to him and fell asleep in his arms. We slept for fourteen hours and woke up at 4pm the next day, according to the ticking wall clock. I felt rejuvenated and prepared to make life-altering decisions. Mo seemed different, somehow, but in a good way. He seemed happier. I figured it was because he finally talked about his parents. I had no plans to bring it up again. We decided to go to the community center, where everyone ate their meals during the day. We woke up just in time for lunch, which was at four thirty.

Inside the big banquet hall was one really long rectangular shaped table. Everyone sat at the tables with their plates. There were no children, but there were people that were in their late teens, eighteen and nineteen. We walked over and took two seats at the very end of the table, about five seats away from the nearest person. All eyes were on us, but no one stopped eating. They all ate as if they’d been starving. There were no overweight people there either, at least not by regular people standards. They were all dressed in clothes that were torn and dirty, but the people themselves didn’t appear to be dirty. We did our best not to look at them too much, but they were basically staring at us. I opened up a silver dish that was in front of us at the table and grabbed the ladle. It was soup, but there was no meat or vegetables in it. It was just broth.

“Don’t ask, that’s all there is,” an old man said to us, with a smile on his face. His face was wrinkly and his red-gray beard was long and uneven. He was bald down the middle of his head, and had long hair on the sides and the back. His clothes were ragged like everyone else’s.

“Ok, thank you, this is fine,” I said back to him. I didn’t want to offend anyone, and he
was
smiling at us when he spoke to us, so I couldn’t be rude. I filled up two bowls with the broth and passed one to Mo, who had the I-feel-awkward look on his face. “Just eat,” I said, chuckling quietly. We didn’t have spoons so we had to drink from the bowls. It actually didn’t taste too bad. It had a flavor that said chicken, pork, beef, and turkey, but for some reason, I didn’t think it was either of those. I didn’t even want to know what it was, especially not after we had two more bowls of it.

“The way you two eat, it doesn’t seem like you plan to stay another day. That stuff is good at first, but after a couple days, it gets old,” the old man said, laughing.

Remarkably, the broth hit the spot just right. I didn’t leave hungry at all. After the meal, everyone left to go back to their homes. It was almost sad to watch them go home, without speaking to one another. They didn’t say goodbye to the people that were sitting right next to them. It was weird, but I knew my assumptions were correct. Something wasn’t right about Asia An. I honestly didn’t even believe that the place was called Asia, or at the very least, it wasn’t named after Asia. We left the building and started walking towards the town hall, where Leader apparently lived. We both knew what we had to do. We couldn’t fight for a cause we knew nothing about, we only wanted to solve Earth’s problem. We would have to ask for the full story.

When we got to the building, we walked inside and noticed that the secretary wasn’t there. I assumed she was on a break. Good. We walked into Leader’s office, and he wasn’t there either. When we went down to the basement, we noticed that all of the weapons were gone, and there was no sign of anyone there. We went back out into the street and decided it would be best to ask one of the civilians. We knocked on the first house we came to. A guy, no older than twenty came to the door and invited us inside.

“I couldn’t help but notice your eyes keep glancing at the window,” I said.

“She does that,” Mo said, laughing. “She’s very observant.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I’m not used to having company. We’re…never mind,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I can’t say. I’m probably in enough trouble already.”

“Then, tell me. We won’t let anything happen to you. I’m a Keeper, and my boyfriend Mo is the last Kavar. If no one else can help, we can.” I tried to sound convincing.

“If I tell you, you have to swear to keep it to just yourselves.”

“We swear.”

“He hasn’t said anything. I won’t say unless he swears as well.”

“Me?” Mo asked. “I thought you were kidding. Yeah, whatever, I swear too.”

“Ok…Well, about 9 years ago, there was a really bright light. You may have heard of it; it happened in Israel. A lot of people thought it was the second coming of Jesus.”

“I heard about that!” Mo said, excitedly. “Well…” he said looking around down at the floor, “I did…wasn’t it supposedly the second coming of Jesus or something?”

“It wasn’t the second coming of Jesus, that’s for sure. The older people here were calling it the rapture. They didn’t want to believe that we were just being abducted by aliens. These guys just appeared at our doors and brought us here. They never said a word to us during the abduction. Then, when they finished plucking us from Earth, he told us-”

“Leader?” Mo asked.

“Yeah. He told us that we were chosen for a great purpose. He said something about needing source power or something.”

“Source energy,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s it. What does that even mean?”

“They want to kill all of you, so they can create new people.” Mo said, as he stood up and walked to the window. “They’re going to kill everybody here unless we do something about it.”

“Leader has a huge military. And most of the people here are scared of him. He’s not going to be a push over. But…we all know he left for Alburia this morning. He’s been there all day.”

“Then we have time.”

“Time for what?” I asked.

“We can get everyone back together in the lunch place and rally the troops. Better yet, we can go to the city hall and get the weapons!” Mo seemed overly excited about the weapons.

“One problem. The oldest people here don’t think Leader’s a bad guy.”

“Fine. We do it with the young people that believe he’s a jerk. Can you contact them?”

“Yeah, we have a way.”

“Good. Get them all to the city or town or village hall place or whatever you call it, and get the weapons. We’ll all meet back in the food place.”

“It’s called the city hall and the mess hall. Simple really.”

“Whatever,” Mo said, shrugging.

We ran out of the house and back to the food place, as Mo had taken to calling it. We didn’t know how we were going to fight an actual military, but we couldn’t leave those innocent people to die. To think that they were actually from Earth…that was a huge sigh of relief. It was also a difference maker, because we knew that we could talk to all of them with no translators. We could speak every language on Earth. That was one skill that Kneulton’s machine couldn’t take away.

We found ourselves in front of a crowd of people again. It wasn’t a very big crowd, but it would have to do. Without Santana, we needed a voice, but neither one of us could do it alone. We weren’t the speakers that she was. She had a voice that made things resonate. She could get people to listen with very little effort. We needed her to stand with us. We needed to get her out and back on her feet. For that meeting, though, we had to be good enough.

It wasn’t much of a speech, but it seemed to get the twenty-four people pumped up. We even managed to get one fifty-seven-year-old man to show up and listen to us; he was the only man over thirty that believed Leader was a bad guy. We told everyone that we were all at war, starting at that moment. We were all in the beginning of something that only had one outcome: Death. Our hearts were what would determine if we were the ones dying or living, in the end. We told them about Santana, and we worked up a plan to get her out of the temple. Luckily, there was one woman that escaped the temple. No one ever noticed that she left, because they took so many children that day. She knew a way in and out that would bypass all of the doors, but we needed to pick a team to execute it. It was a team of four small women. The size was very important, because the grates that we would have to crawl through were too small for someone of Mo’s size to fit in.

VI

I had literally done nothing without Mo, since everything got crazy again. Taking on a rescue mission with a pack of strangers certainly was a heck of a way to try something new. I took three girls with me: Sasha, Berni, and Lizzy. In order for us to make it work, we had to follow specific instructions that Berni had drawn up with Mo. She was the one who was able to escape before, but she did it as a child; she needed Mo’s help coming up with a plan for the guards, should we have to take one down. We only accounted for one guard, because the path we were taking through the ventilation system was discreetly located.

To begin, we had to stop the wind turbines outside. It was the only way to get into the vent without being chopped into pieces by the fan blades. The electricity running into the temple was all being directed into the source chamber, and with a turbine like the one we shut down, the chamber was being supplied with an enormous amount of power. We all crawled into the vent, and Sasha replaced the cover and stayed put. She was our watch at the entrance, because it was our only exit.

I pushed forward with the other two girls, until we came to our next stop. It was a vent that ended at a hallway and continued on the other side of the same hallway. We heard footsteps, but after we waited for several minutes for someone to pass and nothing happening, we decided to just make a run for it. Berni and I said our goodbyes and goodlucks to Lizzy, she was our middle of the path watch. I also made sure to tell her to just run if she absolutely knew we had been discovered. Berni had to reassure the crying Lizzy that we would not be caught. Berni went first through the vent, across the hall, and into the other vent. She barely escaped a big guard, who turned the corner just as the vent cover was let back down. The hinges on the vent covers were very squeaky and rusty, so we were lucky to go unheard, let alone unseen.

Once the guard passed, I took a deep breath and rushed to the other side of the hallway. Lizzy let the vent cover down before I could even get to the other one, and when I did get inside, I turned to look at her; her eyes were shooting daggers at us. She turned and disappeared into the darkness in a hurry. Then I heard a grunt from outside of the vent. I knew I’d been seen. Berni and I made a mad dash through the vent, still taking her path. We could hear the vent cover rip off of the wall and a hand smacking the metal inside of the vent, causing an echo. It had to be a knight, because it sounded like a metal glove clawing around inside of the vent. There were no words being said, just a lot of grunting and clanging.

“I don’t think he really knows. We should slow down and be quiet again,” I said to Berni, who was dripping with sweat. She was terrified, and she had every right to be. I got her to slow down, and we quietly made our way through the vent. The rest of the way was a matter of making the correct turns, because there were no more hallways to cross. The next time we would open the vent would be when we were ready to jump out, to the right—Bernie repeated that quite a bit—and grab the door knob. When we finally arrived at our destination, we had to sit for several minutes, before a conversation between Kneulton and another big guard was completed. They kept saying, “when he comes back.” That was the only part we could hear, because we were too busy controlling our breathing; I could only hear my own thoughts.

When they finally walked away, I pushed the bottom of the grate to lift it. It, like the others, squeaked loudly. I had to go slower than the rest of the times, probably just out of extreme fear, but the sound that the vent made was far too loud to move quickly; not to mention, the sound made me cringe. Once I got the vent open far enough, I poked my head out, to look both directions, before crawling out. I didn’t see anyone, so I left Berni to hold the vent up, while I quickly crawled out,
to the right
, to grab the doorknob. I twisted it, and to no surprise, it wasn’t locked.

When I made it inside of the room, Santana was lying in the floor where we last saw her. She was still asleep. I rushed over to her and shook her to wake her up. She woke up, but she was still out of it. I helped her to her feet, and we walked to the door. I poked my head out once more, and then I made her take a knee. We went out and to the left, where Berni was still holding the vent up, waiting for us. She took Santana by the arms and dragged her inside of the vent. When Santana was inside, I got inside.

We couldn’t get Santana to stop trying to talk the entire way back to the vent: the one that was ripped off the wall. She just kept mumbling about Mo and something bad. I could tell her throat was extremely dry, and I urged her to stop talking. Berni had tears falling from her face, because she knew that Santana had been through more than most humans could bear. Berni was a very sensitive girl.  When we got to the ripped off vent, I remembered what I told Lizzy: to run if we were seen. She darted long before we made it back, or even left, and she was probably already telling Mo that we were caught.

I really hoped that she hadn’t went back to Asia An. Berni went up to the vent opening and stuck half of her face out of the vent. She looked both ways, while I tried to listen for any sounds. We didn’t see nor hear anything. She crawled out of the vent and went to the other side. While she held the vent door up, I pulled Santana out by her arms, and we crawled into the vent. It was at that moment that we knew we were going to make it out. We started crawling at an average pace, instead of a slow and steady one. It was a little more noise than we should have been making, but we were getting excited.

The noise we were making must have made things complicated for Sasha. By the time we turned the corner, we heard the vent door slam and footsteps running away. It was a pretty funny moment, during a scary time. We kept going anyway. When we crawled out of the vent, Berni stretched her back, and then we put Santana’s arms around our shoulders and started jogging. Another point of having four women was to be able to be more efficient in moving Santana had she been out of it, like she was. Being left with only two of us, Santana’s state definitely complicated things. It wasn’t a far walk—for some reason the temple was closer to the eastern border than it should’ve been—but it seemed to take forever.

When we got back to the border, Leader and his men still weren’t back yet. We walked in and saw Mo and a small group of people waiting for us. He ran up and took Santana from us. “You ladies are awesome!” He said excitedly. “Where’s Sasha and Lizzy?” He asked, as he turned around to thank them.

“They’re not here?” I asked.

“No. They came back with you didn’t they?”

“No. They left before we did.”

“Wait. What do you mean they left before you did? They didn’t help get Tana out? They left you there? With them?!”

“I told them to leave if we got caught. We were almost caught, so Lizzy took off. Sasha heard us coming, and I think she got scared and took off.”

“I’m here! I’m here!” Sasha said, as she ran up to us from the guard station.

“Good. Where’s Lizzy?” I asked.

“I haven’t seen Lizzy. She never came back my way.”

“It was the only way, Sasha!” Berni shouted.

“Well she didn’t come back, Berni. I don’t know what happened, but I haven’t seen her.”

Berni started crying again. We all thought the same thing. We were all thinking that she had been caught and probably killed. I had to go back. I wasn’t going to sneak back in though. I was going to kick the front door down. “Mo, I don’t need you to try-”

“No, Asia. No. I can’t let you go in there again. You may not be able to use the same route again.”

“I’m going in through the front door. Lizzy was the youngest one of us. She was only 18. She was still a kid, Mo. I can’t sit here, knowing that I left her in there. She was my responsibility.”

“I’m going with you then. There’s no way you’re going alone. But we have to be honest here. Nine times out of ten, she’s already in some deep trouble. We need a plan. We can’t just go in there thinking we can handle them. Our powers are gone. Tomorrow, we go. We do what we have to do.”

“I don’t want to wait.”

“If we wait…if you let us wait… If they’ve killed her, we’ll get revenge. I have some unfinished business with Kneulton anyway. Do you trust me?”

“Of course I trust you.”

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Then, wait. We’ll go tomorrow, and I promise we’ll win this war. There’s no more denying it. This
is
war. Look at Tana. Look at what they did to everybody on Earth. Hopefully they haven’t done anything to Lizzy, but chances are, they’re doing what they did to Tana, to her. They’re out for blood. So now, we’re out for blood. And I love you too.”

BOOK: Keepers: Blood of The Fallen
2.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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