Yeah, after a month-long hiatus for health reasons, I'm posting again!
Since it has been awhile, I'm going to put up some Thomas Mann videos as well as the first chapter (still in progress, I should add) from my latest project, Escape From Planet Earth!
First, Thomas Mann - and after the cut, Escape, Chapter 1!
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Escape From Planet Earth
Chapter 1
The night was dark, the moon was such a sliver that any who saw it would think it looked fake, like a bad painting.Few could see the moon, though, or any of the night sky. The stars were hidden, vast black patches of the sky cities that floated high above the earth's surface. They had been there so long that the ones the ground, the wretched morlocks of the earth, never even thought about how odd it looked. It was normal.
Daniel did notice it, as he looked up from the open side of the dropship. He had grown up in the sky state. He had never once set foot on the soft yielding surface of the earth. He had only ever stepped on ground that was metal or carpet and was perfectly level.
Looking down at the surface below him, broken and destroyed and mind-bogglingly uneven, he swallowed nervously.
“We're not going to be walking down there, are we?” he asked the cold and grizzled leader of heroes. Daniel had only been told to call the man Lieutenant 491, and 491 loathed him for his softness.
“Yep. Watch where you step. There's a lot of unexploded ordinance down there, boy. Step wrong and ...” His hands moved open and apart to mime an explosion.
“That's bad?” Daniel asked.
The hero looked away disgustedly. “Just stay close and shut up and find what we're after.”
“Yes, sir.”
Spotlights from the dropship swept the open field they were aiming to land in. Open was a misnomer, however, as Daniel saw all sorts of rubble and what he thought might have been a skeleton. Several things looked up at the bright lights and scampered off, screeching or hissing in anger.
“What were those?”
“Dead, if they come back,” Lieutenant 491 grunted.
The legs of the ship touched the ground and the ship shifted as it adjusted to the terrain. Daniel grabbed onto a handle with a white-knuckled grip. “Is that a normal noise?!” he asked, hearing a hissing noise from the landing struts.
Ignoring him, the lieutenant ordered his men off the ship. They took up defensive positions, covering every possible angle with automatic weapons.
“No sign of uglies, sir!” one hero yelled.
“C'mon,” the lieutenant said, grabbing Daniel and dragging him off the ship. He stumbled after the man, marveling how strange it was to walk on ground so uneven.
“Is the ground all like this?” he asked.
The lieutenant was ignoring him again. “Get your scanner out, and find the goods,” he told Daniel. “Do it fast because we came in with lights, and that always attracts trouble.”
Daniel trembled. “What kind of trouble?”
“Just find the goddamn signal!”
With a shove, Daniel was sent tumbling to the ground. Picking himself up quickly, he activated his scanners and tried to make his panicked mind make some sense of what he saw.
I know this, he thought, looking at the screen. But none of it made sense to him now. It didn't help that he kept moving his feet, trying to find a patch of dirt that was bare of concrete pieces and flotsam.
“Where is it?!” the Lieutenant snapped.
“Be quiet, and let me think!” Daniel snapped back, surprising himself. The Lieutenant seemed surprised at the spine in his words, as well.
“Listen, you blue-blooded son-of-a-bitch, I don't care if you're a God in the State, down here you're just a squishy liability-”
“Sir! We're picking up Uglies!”
The lieutenant dropped his line of thought. “How big?” he demanded, walking away.
Daniel looked back to his screen. He had a reading! Ah, yes, how had he forgotten what that meant? He turned and followed the signal.
It seemed to be leading him into a building. Getting in there and out of sight would be a bad idea, wouldn't it? Turning to look at Lieutenant 491, he saw the man was deep in conversation with the sensor operator.
“Sir?” he called. There was no response. “Sir!”
491 might have looked his direction, it was hard to tell. “I'm going in this building, sir, the signal ...” He trailed off. Had there been a nod? He hoped so, because it seemed the officer was not going to actually look at him.
He continued to follow the signal into the building, which seemed to have once been a store for refueling vehicles. Empty racks and shelves looked skeletal in the dim light, which made his already intense fear grow. fumbling for a flashlight, he clicked it on and sighed as the bright light pierced the gloom.
Just as quickly he clicked it off. The light was bright - too bright. Far from make it safer, he realized it would only make him an easier to see target.
My god, he thought. You're starting to think like an Ugly, and you've only been here two minutes.
His scanner beeped. It had a good lock on the target. Whatever it was - he had not actually been told what it was they were seeking, except that it contained a homing chip.
Everything had homing chips, pretty much. Nearly piece of equipment more advanced than a toaster, labourers, military men. Bureaucrats, like himself, were some of the few who didn't - who needed to find a bureaucrat? They were just there. A thousand others stood ready to replace him, if need be, as Lieutenant 491 had told him before they had left the safety of the sky State.
The signal was coming from one of the smaller back rooms of the building. Moving slowly towards he, he realized the floor inside was much smoother and more level, and he felt glad for it.
He reached for the door, expecting it to open, but it stayed quite shut. He waved at it repeatedly, first one, then both arms, before realizing it was manually operated.
“I've heard of doors like this,” he muttered, barely-audibly. He was too nervous to speak much louder than that.
A thought struck him - what could be down here that would have a tracker in it? Things didn't just fall down here. If it had been left by a previous squad, it wouldn't be worth sending a new squad to come fetch it.
It had to be something valuable. Or very dangerous.
His hand paused. He had a job to do, though, and if Lieutenant 491 told his superiors he had failed to perform his duty, he'd probably be shipped to a Polar Station. Or worse, demoted.
Bracing himself, and trying to avoid thinking of what horrors might lurk behind the door, he grabbed the knob and opened it.
It was a primitive latrine, he realized first. And there was nothing in it. No beings at least. It was very dark, but he could see that clearly.
He stepped inside, his footsteps sounding terrifyingly loud in the small room.
“There's nothing at all in here,” he said out loud, looking around.
He glanced in the sink and wished he hadn't. It was splashed full of what looked like not-entirely dry blood. Blood that clearly splashed up onto the wall. His eyes followed it up.
What he had taken to be a pattern on the tiled wall wasn't. He realized the dark lines were in fact dried blood. And the blood splatters continued over to the porcelain bowl nearby.
He glanced inside, and immediately wished he hadn't.
“Bllaaaaaargh!” he said out loud, feeling his stomach lurch.
“You goddamn maggot-ridden fucking golden maggot! What are you doing!?” Lieutenant 491 was suddenly there, shaking him. “We have to get the fuck out of here!” His eyes were crazed, and he looked terrified. It bothered Daniel far more than if he had simply been angry.
But somehow it made him feel more in control of himself. “I found the tracker!” he said, pointing towards the toilet. “There's a hand in that toilet, I think it has a tracker in it!”
“You idiot! It doesn't matter, we have Uglies crawling all over us!”
Daniel's mouth fell open. “Oh god. We're fucked.”
A long burst of gunfire sounded, at least five solid seconds, and 491 was off like a flash, running for the door. After a moment, Daniel tore off after him.
“Aaaaghhh!” 491 was screaming like a child as he went out the door, but stopped. Something twice as tall as a man was before him, and before he could do more than scream it had picked him up and screamed back, slamming his body into the concrete repeatedly.
Daniel tried to stop, but the smooth floor was slick and he fell onto his back. His head hit the hard floor and he saw flash and stars from the blow.
There was a hole in the roof, he realized, and he could see the moon through it. Then the moon was hidden as something looked in through the hole at him. He could see nothing of it but its silhouette, but it seemed big and hairy. It seemed to be watching him and he stared back, too afraid to move, but unable to make out any details.
It disappeared just as quickly as it had appeared.
He could hear sounds from outside. The dropship's engines were growing in sound, and the gunfire continued, interspersed with the soldiers yelling and the groans and excited shouts of the Uglies as they moved in for the kill.
“Holy shiiiiitt!”
“Where's the Lieutenant?”
“My gun's jammed!”
“On the left, on the left!”
“Back to the ship!”
“Where's the goddamn Lieutenant?!”
Their cries, professionalism drilled into them mixed with pure terror, bled together and over each other into a cacophany that we slowly turning into simply screams of terror.
Explosions drowned it all out for a moment, and he heard the dropship's engines cough as it was clearly damaged. The sound was loud, drowning out the screams, until it began to fade as the ship took off. But the screams didn't fade.
“Don't leave us behind!”
“They left us!!” someone screamed in a panic. “They fucking left u-” His words stopped abruptly, but the gunfire and screams continued for several more minutes.
The guns fell silent, but the Uglies didn't. They continued to shout in distorted voices in anger or happiness or whatever strange emotions they felt. Daniel didn't know what they thought and didn't want to.
They must not have known he was in here, or they would have gotten him already. Except that one who had looked in the hole in the ceiling. He would have to move before it remembered to come for him.
Slowly he sat up and clutched his aching skull. “Ohhh ...” a soft moan escaped his lips before he clamped a hand over them. He couldn't make a sound.
Half crawling, half dragging himself, he went back towards the bathroom, and closed the door. Laying on the floor, he saw the vermin crawling across the floor, but ignored them. His head hurt, and the sounds of the mutants, now muted by the walls, were still disturbing on a deep level.
Holding up a hand, he saw it shake uncontrollably. He felt drained in a way he never had before. All he wanted was to lay here and die.
He gratefully shut his eyes, hoping that he would never wake up.
*
The transport craft rocked as the engine hummed to life. It's nose titled upwards towards home and the ship shuddered as it lurched forward. The men inside the belly of the metal creature grabbed whatever they could to hold on- an unnecessary reflex. As soon as a ship's hovering mechanisms initiated, an automatic and quite reliable containment-field protected the heroes from falling out of the vehicle, or even being thrown around violently.
A man inside the ship was screaming and crying. He begged for anything and everything as the blood poured from his massive gaping wounds in his midsection.
“Hold him still, just hold him!” ordered the medical officer. Though the man had lost a catastrophic amount of blood, suffered extreme trauma and would soon die if neglected, all on board knew he would be fine. All the doc had to do was slap on a Life-Pad to cool his body off. Once the cells were cooled and calmed, the patient would be preserved.
“Nnngh, gaah,” the wounded Hero cried.
“I know, I know, but it'll all be fine. When next you wake up, you'll be as good as new, private,” said the medic as the Life-Pad was applied. Within a few tense moments, the man's face slackened, and his limbs gave up thrashing. “You're not feeling pain, now, son.” It never ceased to amaze him how fast the cell-cooling nanotechnology took effect.
“How long can someone stay on ice like that, doc?” the gunnery sergeant asked.
“Oh, depends on the age of the subject. Easily thirty-years if necessary. Often fifty.”
The NCOs of the platoon turned away as soon as their task with the critically wounded man was done. “We lost our CO, and we left behind some heavy weapons and men,” said one squad leader.
A corporal leaned back and put his hands behind his head in a gesture of total confidence. “Here it is: the Lieutenant died what he was, a Hero. When he seen we left behind those CDIW's and personnel, he went back to retrieve them. He couldn't make it back, so he initiated their self-destruct sequence. That took him out.”
They all knew it wasn't true, of course, but they had to have an explanation. They couldn't return to base after leaving behind the brutal and unstoppable Cell-Destroying Infantry Weapons. To leave any advanced technology on the surface was a crime, but to leave such an advanced weapon was a Class A Offense, which would almost certainly result in demotion- that is, a swift relocation to the surface of the earth.
“What if they find out we're lying?” asked a sergeant from the decimated squad. Right now all he could feel was grateful that it had not been him. The guilt would come later.
“They won't- they won't want to, anyway. But if they did, we get the same punishment we'd be given for losing the weapons,” the corporal replied.
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