Son of Tesla

SON OF TESLA: Chapter 33

The place was horrifying, a land of death and pain. Brodham's mind recoiled, but he was locked in the visions. Just as the Blue – the Koschei – was roaming inside his own memories, Brodham was being given a tour of the Koschei's dark past. He saw the world through the merciless eyes of a killer. His vision was tainted red.

Change of location. Some kind of loading yard. Massive metal machines huddled along the edge of the field, dark and lifeless. Rain fell from the sky, only it wasn't water. It was bright red, drops that splattered like blood on every surface. Ranks of Koscheis marched past, churning the wet ground into colored mud. Hundreds. Thousands. All illuminated in the lifeless orange glow that never dimmed. There was no night here, no day. Just the eternal twilight haze.

Brodham had seen a scene similar to this, on Earth, right after September 11, 2001. This was an army preparing for war. The tension, the anticipation, the urgency he saw before him – it hung in the air like the crackle of electricity. But this was so much bigger. Even if this was the whole of Tesla's force, it would likely be able to decimate several cities before anyone could come close to stopping it. But the Koschei knew, and so Brodham knew: This loading bay held a fraction of Tesla's terrible army. There were hundreds like it, all massive, all filled to the brim with war machines built with technology that was a century ahead of anything on Earth. Despair. That's what Brodham felt. Utter helplessness. Humans were ants, and Tesla was building a giant magnifying glass. A buzz in the sky caught his attention. He looked up.

Over his head, two dozen oval-shaped ships flew past, and suddenly Brodham was seeing the landscape from their viewpoint. They flew in a direct line over a wide swathe of brown and green peppered with black and dark gray, everything alive with the scurry of machines and Koschei. Then the ships climbed, higher, until the curve of the planet became visible.

For all its death and misery, it was awe-inspiring. The brown-green strip ran in a ceaselessly straight line until it dipped beneath the curve of the horizon both before him and behind. On the left of the strip, the ground was scorched and black, then red-hot as it moved toward the pole closest to the sun. Lifeless rock shone, polished by the relentless heat.

To the right, the planet descended into an arctic wasteland. Here the sun cast no light, no heat. The twilight darkened into night a few miles past the center strip, but in that space Brodham saw glistening ice formations that were as ancient as time itself. And beyond that, pure midnight black.

The planet didn't spin, Brodham suddenly realized. It simply orbited its star without changing its relative position. One side was always bathed in fire, the other a constant frozen tundra, shielded from the star's heat by the planet itself. And in the middle, a thin strip barely a hundred miles wide that circled the planet like a belt. The temperate zone, the buffer between fire and ice. It was only here that life survived, confined to life on a ribbon and trapped in a prison that would never stop existing.

Another shift, this time more abrupt because, with the change of scenery, the entire mood of the world was altered. Brodham felt a piercing fear moving through him. He was afraid. No, that wasn't right. The Koschei was afraid. And that was almost more frightening than anything else. Brodham had become a part of the Koschei's mind: This was a creature without fear. And yet it was afraid. Of what, Brodham couldn't tell.

He was standing in a darkened corridor. The walls gleamed like dull steel, but with a bluish shimmer that seemed to come from under their surface. In fact, the floor was doing the same. The whole hallway pulsed with the eerie blue fluorescence.

Footsteps echoed toward him. The fear quickened. Brodham tried to turn, tried to run, but of course he had no control; he was inside a living recording. Whatever he experienced in this hallway had already happened.

The heavy thud of the footsteps echoed louder. At the end of the hall, a shadow slid across the floor, and Brodham realized the corridor opened into another hallway on the right. Wrapped in the dark blue glow, corners faded away and distinct shapes melted into each other. It had an underwater quality, soft, amalgamated.

The shadow coalesced into a massive, dark figure rounding the corner into the corridor in front of him. Backlighting turned the shape into a grotesque silhouette. It had the form of a man, moved like a man, but bigger, thinner. A tall, distended bogeyman. The pulsating glow made it difficult to gauge height – made it difficult to gauge anything – but the silhouette appeared to be over seven feet tall. Eight feet, maybe.

It came like a glacier. Slow, unhurried. Inexorable. A dark lapel gleamed into view from the shadows, followed by a turned-down collar. Black slacks. Black gloves. Black coat. The man wasn't in the shadows – the man was the shadows.

Although the figure was shaped like a man, its head was morphed into a monstrosity. Much too big for the body, and topped with a tangle of charcoal-gray cables that coiled around its head from its forehead.

And in the blackness, two red points gleamed like the dying embers of a forest fire.

"Get the boy."

Brodham barely understood the words at first. They rolled into him, crunched, slid, bit. Their power was living. Sinuous. Words that could stab and maim and kill. The Koschei shuddered under their weight.

Massssterrr...

The Koschei's reply was nonverbal. It made no real sound, but it filled Brodham's head all the same.

The red pinpoints flared.

"Bring him back alive or I'll tear your body into pieces and feed you to the vucari."

Images of pain and torture flashed through Brodham's mind, a psychic barrage from the furnace of evil standing before him. He wanted to scream. Tried to scream. His cries went soundless and unheard. He felt the pain of the man's thoughts as if they were knives pressed to his flesh.

And suddenly the scene was receding. The tunnel stretched to infinity in front of him. With a jerk, Brodham flew back from the Koschei's mind and found himself on the grassy shoulder of the road in northern New York again. A cool breeze wafted gently over his face. For a moment, the change disoriented him. The shift from the hellish planet to the quiet, upstate roadside was like being wrenched into a different body. And in a way, Brodham knew, that was exactly what had happened.

But the frying pan is only hot until you land in the fire.

Still crouched over him, the Koschei lifted its head away from Brodham's face. It had got what it wanted.

Now it would kill him.

Thanks for reading my story! Please VOTE and let me know what you think of it so far, then check out Chapter 34!