Chapter 28 Children of the Moon

Chapter28

Children of the Moon

 Try as she might Kia could not get Captain Marks to come with them. It was not only that her touch was more intimate than he could bear, but his fear of what lay beyond Older’s Bed anchored him to the island as much as any chain and stake could.

  “Marks, please,” Kia pleaded, trying yet again to pull him away from the tree, “we can’t leave you here.”

 Marks shrank away from her hands, “Keep those things away from me. They are knives they cut to my soul. You’re not the Kia I knew. I don’t trust you. Maybe you’re one of them.”

  The Captain’s words hit her like an iron bar. She stood up and back away as quickly as could, careful of the snake- like tree roots tangled beneath her feet.

  “Very well, you have not accepted what has happened to you or us,” she said turning toward Alex, “Obviously my touch dredges all that up. We will leave and give you time, maybe when we return you’ll be ready to come with us back to Wayferra.”

  The Captain’s expression softened, his eyes became glassy, “You don’t know?”

   Kia grasped Alex. She saw more pain in the Captain’s human face. “What of Wayferra?” She demanded.

  “When they brought me back they shut me up in a room, a room of glass. I saw them descend upon that fair place. Spears of sunlight streaked down, fire and iron burning and crushing everything in its path. They tried to run. They tried to fight. Some flew, some burrowed, many died. They took the rest. The Merfolk swam to deepest depths, dark and drear. But none escaped. They did not release me until I saw it all! Wayferra is no more. Chimera is no more. And where were you?”

  Kia’s body shuddered with grief. She collapsed in Alexander’s arms. They held each other weeping and clinging to one another…

  Kian’s good dream had suddenly turned nightmarish. He bolted upright in his bed. He could still feel Kia’s body trembling against his chest. His face wet with tears. It seemed no amount of morning light could dry them away.

‘Chimera gone…the captain a human…Kia…Alexander…the chamber…the change…was it all just a dream…could the Karkins be real…’

 Shaken and disoriented Kian rubbed his face, looked around half expecting to see trees and underbrush and Kia, no just four walls, sunshine streaming from the large window over his bed. He stood up hoping to leave the dream behind.

 ‘a dream…it was just a dream…please let it be a dream…’  He thought as he dressed, making a conscious effort to push it all away. Such horror could not be true, could it? All the while knowing it certainly could.

 They were still reading his thoughts, a fact Kian could not afford to forget. He carried that awful truth around with like a rotten aching tooth he could not pull. He would have to be careful, busy his self with work and the girls...  

  Days later while Kian was helping repair a sun filter at the base of the dome, he watched a two-man work crew enter an air lock. A harvester had broken down just twenty feet from the large utility airlock a quarter mile from his work site.  They were just finishing up, all that remained was replacing a motor cover and he and Simon Walls, a twenty five year old electrician would be through for the day. They were tightening the last screw when they saw a pressure suited repairperson running toward them.  

  Her name was Tammy Gray Walls; she was twenty-three years old, a mother of a two-year-old boy and Simon Walls’ wife. Her suit was leaking, a common occurrence, much too common.

 She had not told her husband that she had volunteered for surface work. They needed the extra time credits and she knew he’d never agree. So when he looked up and saw her sun shielded face pressed against the dome, he was shocked, but not as much he was about to be. She slapped her gloved right hand against the dome. It rang like a bell. He ran to her slammed his body against hers just before she exploded against the glass. He stumbled back, passed out and two days later killed his little boy with nail gun and then turned it on himself.

  The Technocrats, also known as the Company and lately operating under the playful dress up guise they called the Karkins, Ancient Aliens from deep space come down to wreak havoc on poor Chimera, cheered as they watched Tammy Walls’ body explode against the dome and run down its’ slick cold surface like a bloody cream pie.    

  But their delight was not over, as two days later her husband overwhelmed with pain and guilt put on an even better show for them.

   Kian knew he had to do something. He did not know that Karkins were really just another brutal incarnation of the company, but he figured as much. So when a Company suit showed up at his door with a summons to appear before the Crater Commander he was ready to go.

  This time he arrived there alone. No one had to show him how to get there. Unlike the rest of Camelot’s residents his all access chip really was all access, unless blocked by the Commander his self, he could go anywhere he wanted. Of course there were places on Luna Kian did not know about and you can’t go where you don’t know.