Apocalypto, Quinten Pheonix [best electronic book reader .txt] 📗

Apocalypto

The full moon lit the desert sand as Clint staggered from the hotel to the cave entrance. A growth from his third eye had formed into a bulb, and it was pushing its way through his forehead, causing it to throb. Hundreds of distinct character's voices had awoken in his mind, and they chattered excitedly.  

Barely aware of his surroundings, clutching at his nauseous stomach and sweating profusely, he leaned against the underground tunnel's walls until he came to an opening underground.

He grabbed and pulled and twisted the bulb in his forehead and finally wrenched it from his head, revealing a chunk of crystal made from the elements in his body. He fell unconscious to the ground...

 

 

*

Brian was digging in a crater for shrapnel. Penny’s shout started him: “Raiders!” A cluster of them approached from the horizon on sand-scooters.

“Scat!” said Brian.

Penny's feathers camouflaged with the desert sand and she skitted back to the hotel while Brian went back to digging.

The raiders arrived.

“Brian,” said Nathan. “We’ve got a bone to pick with you.” They semi-circled him, pulling out semi-automatics and pointing them at him, “Put it down.”

He dropped his shotgun in the sand.

Nathan approached him nonchalantly, then went to punch him with a surprise jab from the side, but Brian blocked it with his left and connected with a body blow, keeling Nathan over. They accosted him and tazered him to the gound.

They held him up. "Did any fleeing co-op find their way into the hotel?" asked Nathan.

"What's it to you?" asked Bruce.

Nathan hit him with an uppercut to the face, splitting his eyebrow. He put his hand on Brian’s shoulder: “Why do you do this to yourself, Brian?”

Bloodied sweat dripped from Brian's eyebrow. "What are you, a shrink?"

Nathan nodded at one of his men who went into the hotel. 

"So it's like this, now, is it?" asked Brian. 

An officer came out with a box of tequila over her shoulder. "No co-op," she said.

As they mounted their scooters, Nathan noticed an object in the sand. He knelt and picked up a strange feather. Its color changed from red to blue as he held it against the sky, spinning it back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. 

 

The sun was just dipping below the horizon, and the howls of the freaks started coming through the hotel windows.

Clint was hidden in the attic with two of the guests. A commercial played from a portable television. "The NWO," came the voice from the commercial, "It's us who saved the world from the villainous World Government. It's us who released carbon into the air to remove the nuclear smog. It's us who’s making the medicine that can be used by all to prevent getting infected by the scratch or bite of a freak. With Overlord Grey at the helm, you can rest assured the world's in the best possible hands it can be. The NWO: it's us!"

The trapdoor swung open revealing Debbie in the honeymoon suite below. "They're gone.” She camouflaged into the color of the carpet.

The three of them descended from the attic into the honeymoon suite. 

"Damned traitors," said the wiley woman, Irene. "If it wasn't for the raiders, we'd have hacked into Intel by now."

"We've got to rendezvous with the rest of the survivors,” said Brendan, softly and with intensity. “Find another way to establish a connection to Intel." 

Brian came in, bruised and battered. "Could you take care of their dinner?" he asked Clint.

Clint went to fetch dinner.

"I just took a beating for your asses," he said.

"Let your boy, Clint, join the co-op," said Brendan, "And it'll be worth it."

"Why would you want Clint to join the co-op?" asked Brian, but they didn't answer. 

Clint came back with their dinners.

After they ate, Debbie spent some time looking yearningly out the windows across the desert. "Do you think Mum turned into a freak?" she asked.

Brian went to Debbie and comforted her. "The one thing I know about Jenny," he said, "Is that she's a survivor. I'm sure she's out there, somewhere, with her soul intact."

Irenes utility belt bleeped, and she took out a small communication device. "We're back," she said. Brendan pumped his fist and became active. "Hotspot up and running south-east of here, in an underground cavern beneath the desert."

Brian turned to Clint. "Do you want to go with them?"

Clint stood. "I do."

Brian gave him a fatherly look of judgement. "Wait another day," he said to Irene and Brendan. "I'll stock you up." 

Brendan nodded. "Good decision," he said.

The howls of the freaks wailed hauntingly through the windows.

 

Brian and Clint were in the canyon at midday with Walter, stocking up on water, which Walter pumped from a well in the side of the nearby mountain.

Brian tipped a barrel of scrapmetals over Walter's table in his makeshift tarp as Clint loaded up the quad with the water. "See you soon," said Brian. 

"Don't sweat it," said Walter. He looked at Clint meaningfully. (...Good luck, Clint...)

Clint looked at Walter incredulously. (...Can you hear me?...)

"You go on ahead on the quad with the water," said Brian to Clint "I'll walk."

Walter looked at Clint intently, but didn't respond.

"Well, come on, Clint," said Brian. What are you waiting for?"

"I'll come on by the hotel tonight," said Walter. "Help you send off your boy."

Clint rode off, and Brian began the walk around the mountain and over the dune back to the hotel.

When he came over the sand dune that revealed the hotel in the near-distance, Brian saw a group of a dozen or so of the new guard outside the hotel. His five guests stood flustered outside. Brendan and Irene were in handcuffs being pushed into the van. 

He heard Debbie screaming. She was trying to escape the clutches of a group of officers who'd trapped her around the storehouses at the back of the hotel. There were a group of them working together to try and snare her. An officer pounced and put a bag over her head. "Debbie!" he yelled, and ran to the storehouses. He was clotheslined by an officer as he pulled up.

"How long have you been harbouring co-op, Brian?" asked Gren, the officer who'd clotheslined him.

"Help!" yelled Debbie from within the bag as the officer put her into the back of another jeep and removed the bag.

"Leave my kids out of this!" yelled Brian

"You're safe, now," said the officer.

Another officer emerged from the hotel. Gren called to him: "Get him?"

The officer stopped in his tracks, then began walking again, shaking his head.

"Well, did you get him or not?" asked Gren.

"He wasn't in there."

"He has to be."

"He wasn't in there, all right? I searched all around the place. There must have been some kind of a hidden escape or something. You want to wait all night, I can search the place and find it."

Gren gave her the evil eye. "You better watch it, Lucy, or it'll be your ass." He turned and gave Brian a corrupt look. "Torch the place," he said.

"But-" said one of the guests.

"Suitable accomodation will be provided for you in the capital at Lord Grey's expense."

"The capital?"

Gren nodded. "For your own protection. We need to start getting everyone behind those walls where it's safe."

They got flamethrowers from their jeeps and set the hotel ablaze as Brian fought furiously. "Clint! Clint!" The hotel burned halfway to the ground.

Gren gave the orders for the cavalry to depart. The guests were put in the jeeps and roared away. Lucy held handcuffed Brian down and Gren produced a gem-studded vial. "What's that?" asked Brian.

"Your ass," said Gren, and he stabbed the vial into Brian's back. It filled up with rainbow vapour. 

Brian writhed and twisted and turned as his body crumpled like a box of fruit juice. His body finally contracted and went limp. Gren handed the vial to Lucy. "Take this. I'll be right with you."

Lucy took the vial and rode away while Gren went through Brian's pockets. As he looked at the face of a broken pocket-watch, his head exploded in a fiery puff as Clint whacked him over the head with a flaming panel of wood he'd gotten from one of the storehouses, knocking him out and burning one side of his head.  

Clint dropped the flaming plank of wood and went to Brian to look at his face. The pupils of his eyes had entirely disappeared, leaving only the retina. 

He gave him mouth-to-mouth, trying to breathe the air back into his shrunken body.

"Clint!" It was Walter. He'd pulled up on a scooter. "Come with me!"

"We've got to fix him!" said Clint, beating Brian on the chest. 

"You can't," said Walter, who grabbed him and tried to wrestle him away. 

But Clint was too slippery.

The central pillar of the hotel cracked and the second floor came thundering down; the walls fell open, and the heat breathed out into the air above triumphantly.

"It's his soul, you hear?" yelled Walter above the inferno. "If you want to help your old man, you've got to find the co-op." He managed to get Clint in an arm lock and pry him away. 

Clint let go and jumped on the quad. "Where are we going?"

"Underground. There's a network of canals the co-op use to stay off Lucian's radar."

 

*

Lexus Lyon sat in the palace throneroom to meet the incoming officers and inspect the mutants they'd brought with them. His sister, Jenny, sat on a chair fanning herself. A troupe barged in with a swag of captured mutants. Debbie was among them. "Here you are, my lord," said Lucy. 

The captives were put in a line. Lexus got up and strode before them as he spoke. "You're all heroes. Victims of the mistakes of previous generations. But don't worry: Lexus Lyon's not going to abandon you. We're setting up a city of dreams for you to all live in freedom." He went amongst them one-by-one and shook their hands and asked a few questions.

"To the city of dreams with them," he waved once he'd made it to the end of the line.

Jenny was looking hard at Debbie. "Oh, but she's adorable," she said. "Let me keep her."

"Very well," said Lexus dismissively. "Make sure she's safe, first."  

Jenny took Debbie to her quarters.

Lucy produced a vial filled with rainbow vape. 

"Good," said Lexus. He took the vial. 

Lucy saluted and departed, and Lucian went to his lair. On the desk was a dark-crystal ball on an inverse pentagram, filled with rainbow vape.

He clicked the vial into a fitting in the crystal ball and a cylinder open, releasing the vape, filling Lucian with all that extra feeling...

At that moment, Brian's body uncrumpled, and the crystal ball became as a third eye behind his other two through which Lucian could see...

Lucian exhaled with satisfaction at the expansion of his minion, and his pleasure flooded throughout his entire network of drones. 

He picked up the dark-crystal ball from the desk and took it to a scale in another part of the room. A screen slid open on the wall, displaying a graph that read:

 

Soul-o-Meter

Unsafe-38% 

Safe-62%.

 

The 38% clicked over to 37% and the 62% clicked over to 63%.

"I am sixty-three percent god," he said proudly.

 

*

Clint and Walter were scurrying around the mountain to the waterhole. "The time has come," said Walter, "To tell you about your mother."

Clint had felt it coming. "What do you know about her?"

"Your mother is Jenny Grey, Lucian Grey's sister."

"So Lucian Grey is my uncle?" asked Clint with dawning realisation.

"Yes," said Walter.

"How do you know this?"

"I helped your mother and Brian escape from the palace many years ago, before Aaron Grey went crazy. At least, they say he did, but we know better. That's how the co-op formed." 

Clint started to see how what had happened was all part of a great pattern containing forces which had played themselves out many times before. "Where will they take Debbie?"

"They're calling it the 'city of dreams.' Once they go, they never come back. Your only chance is to find her in the capital before she's proclaimed a heroine and disappears."

"What about