Sam Sawyer Chapter Nineteen

Sam Sawyer Chapter Nineteen

Having cleaned up the kitchen, made all the beds and finished a half dozen other little chores that could have easily been put off, they all followed Kit outside.  Silence followed them like a long black cloak.

Unlike Kathy, Kit knew what was about to happen. They, especially Sam, was happy to give her all the time she needed before he took her to a place from which he was not sure even he could return. He was not even sure how exactly he was going to do it.

Kathy’s skull fracture had been massive, devastating. He knew that the moment his fingers pressed her shattered skull into the soft spongy thing that was her brain. There was no hope. No time. Nothing else to do, except the impossible. And if he failed, well she was dead or good as dead. Nothing to lose.

He watched Kit walk down the loose gravel path, not wondering where she was going but dreading the moment she arrived. She was a beautiful young slip of a girl, not unlike Hilly. Her black leather outfit nothing more than an I don’t care façade carefully pieced together to hide a frightened child, who if anything, cared too much. Her eyes, deep dark wells brimmed with a passionate empathy, no amount of eye rolls and angry squinting could hide. Was he about to snuff that out? Yes, yes, he was. But that wasn’t the question stabbing at his heart. Could he bring her back, or make her a home there, here, in the dark? Could any of them truly make a home, in the dark?

Well, the darkness had already fallen. They, the ones outside, still managing to walk around with their eyes clamped shut just didn’t know it yet. Well they would soon enough.

Oloran was already seated and settled, a fog rolling in, pervasive, silent. His army already walked the Earth, the sleepers, the lying walkers, the patient stalkers. Most were like Hilly, late comers. But the rest, a handful of scouts, his shadow people, his skin walking shape shifters were already here, had been on Earth for centuries, sampling and whetting his appetite for more.

Oloran’s psychic tendrils had stretched across the galaxy long ago, discovered Earth, tasted her salty sweetness, found it pulsing with life, emotion, fear and rage, love and something more.

Earth’s banquet beckoned, demanded. He, it, they, yearned and stretched its’ consciousness, it’s will across the great void. Oloran’s black under current skirted time and space becoming snake like sewage vapors of insatiable lust just strong enough to pry open Earth’s psychic door.

His mind ‘fingers’ reaching, breaching, grasping, took the weak willed first, those that were, for whatever reason, born just a bit darker than their terrain brethren, or maybe just too open, too innocent and naïve, easy prey. No matter the reason, they became his flesh- gloves, his mask, his knife and fork, his teeth and belly. They were the forerunners, the werewolves, vampires, skin walkers etc. Weak human beings tempted beyond their ability to resist, ‘gifted’ by Oloran to live as walking death forever.

Olorans darkness melding with theirs turned them inside out, transforming them into monsters, addicts to blood and terror. Humankinds’ worst nightmares came true centuries ago, paving the way for the day terror machines, the ‘greys’, shipped in by spheres and saucers, the U. F. O.s Oloran’s needful hardware. His physical presence on Earth being the last thing he needed to make Earth his own and rid it of the Nordics Earth’s patient, dispassionate wardens...

Kit pressed both hands against the sphere’s curved invisible wall. A handsome young soldier was standing mere inches from her face. From where Sam and Kathy were standing, it looked like she was holding his face in her hands. The ‘blind’ soldier stepped forward, sliding further down the muddy shoreline seeming to disappear right into Kit but merely vanishing from their other worldly point of view.

Her face glistened with tears when she turned toward them. “I’m ready.” She stated with forced flatness.

“Wish I was.” Sam said as she walked into his open arms and pressed her head against his rock- hard stomach. She was so short, childlike; an egg gently caressed between the jaws a steel vice.

Kathy caressed Sam from behind, but only for a moment. She eased away from him when he started to glow. This was he and Kit’s time, their moment of oneness, a moment that would tolerate no intrusion.  She could only hope it was not her last time. She was happy to do what ever it took to keep her safe even if it meant nothing at all.

It was as if the sun was rising from his shoulders. Kathy shielded her eyes rushing toward the trees instinctively seeking cover.

Try as she might, he could not see Kit behind Sam’s glowing football player physique. His golden light brightened whitened blinded her finally forcing her to turn and duck behind a massive pine tree. It was happening…

Sam could not see Kathy crouching behind the massive tree, no more than he could see Kit. She was too close, too small, shrinking into him becoming lost inside him.  

Darkness slid like soothing bath water over skin, unseen. He closed his arms to comfort Kit. She was not there. “Kit?” Her name left him. He could feel it go but could not hear it. Assuming his eyes were open he tried to find her in the dark. Nothing, then his eyelids cracked open as if they were out of sync with his mind.

Swirling black fog engulfed him. The light, he had to summon the light, force it from his core. She was there, in that light. She had to be, there was nowhere else, was there?

Turning his attention inward, rejecting the silky black comfort. He closed his eyes, at least that’s what it felt like, and thought of her.

“Kit.” He launched her name, his love, his will; willing it to become something she could sense approaching, a direction, a lifeline, a path back to him and herself; back to the world.

Sprawled on a barren plateau, beneath a clear blue sunless sky her body lay face up. Her eyes were open but white, a dull bleached bone white. Several layers of sheer loose gauze flapped and fluttered over her deathly still form as a dry cold wind whipped over it.

Her hair, knotted and fly away dry, flapped across her slack features brittle as sun backed plastic.

High above a sliver of silver slowly penetrated the blue, literally slicing open the sky as if were made of paper. For the Nordics it was. For them, all realities were potentially manageable, traversable.

Deep in the darkness a familiar speck of light blinked open. Sam saw it, felt Kit inside it. Now he not only had a direction but an impetus. He threw himself at it. Taking flight, he bulleted toward it. Suddenly it blossomed before him, a tunnel opening, another world revealed, sucking him into it. He happily let it take him.

Cold wind stung his cheeks. Pain a sensation he had almost forgotten, yanked him into a world he had never been. This place was not a mental construct, no fantasy, or dream. It was another planet.

“Ugh! What is that?” He asked aloud, as he suddenly found himself standing on a dull yellow desert. Something off to his right was decomposing polluting the icy breeze with its noxious stench.

Without thinking he pulled his long brown canvas slicker around his body. He was dressed, warmly dressed, head to toe! But how, by whom. Nordics. That fact, their presence popped into his mind; a quickie download from them to bring him up to speed.

This was their doing. He was on their world now, at their mercy just as much as Kit. He held his right hand up to his nose, trying to block her stench. Suddenly he knew where to find her. He knew which way to walk. “Just follow your nose.” He muttered ruefully.

A blurry bit of motion in the far- left corner of his field of vision turned his head. He tried to fly toward it and fell flat on his face slamming his face against the rocky ground. “Ugh!” he pushed himself up, tasting blood in his mouth as his bloody palms stung and burned.

“He felt the cold and yet you thought you were still more than human. Not here Earthman.” The harsh male voice thundered from above.

Pushing his body to his feet, he slung his head around toward the voice, and saw a Nordic ship jutting out of the sky like a the cutting edge of massive scimitar blotting out a huge section of sky.  

Feeling naked he rose from the ground knowing they would not respect any show of fear or weakness. “Where is she?” He demanded, his chest swelling with cold Nordic air, as he spoke.

“There behind you, lying dead on the ground.” The voice fell silent as Sam turned back toward the little flapping object so far away. He ran toward it, ignoring, dismissing the Nordic’s show of strength.

His lungs were burning by the time he stumbled up to her shriveled husk and dropped to his knees beside. “You killed her?” he yelled at the sky; his back turned to the massive Nordic ship.

“No,” Another voice gently whispered just behind him.

He jerked around and saw a beautiful slender Nordic woman crouched beside him. Her loose white hooded robe billowed about her like a tent, revealing her face and nothing more.

“This is what you did.” She rose to her feet letting her robe slide away as she stood and stared  down at Kit’s pitiful corpse. “This is what we did.” She said as Sam turned to her, stunned by what he saw.

Her arms were cradling a tiny baby, suckling it beneath a sheer light blue tunic barely concealing her flawless regal form.