Steem Survivors - Fictional Series - Episode #3

Episode 1 - Episode 2

Footsteps, falling. The beat of them pounding the packed dirt, echoing into the night. Time, that dark lady ever retreating, seemed to stretch on forever. First for what had felt like hours, and then days. Timsaid had managed to keep the survivors running in the same general direction by hissing when he thought he heard footfalls falling astray. With only the light of the stars and moon above to provide them light, and that now partly obscured by clouds, there was no telling if they were running away from the men with the guns, or towards them. The survivors couldn't tell how far, or long, they'd gone.

Out of the darkness, a hand clamped onto @timsaid's forearm, bringing him to a quiet but sudden halt. @mistowed taps a digital pad and a green light shines, granting clear sight to Timsaid for the first time since they'd fled @yogi.artist's campfire with @prufarchy. Wait, where was Prufarchy? "She got hit back there, Timsaid," Mistowed whispered, his trembling voice belying the steadiness of his blood covered hand. "@aden!" Timsaid hissed, and bolted past Mistowed to kneel by the green-tinged, prone from of Aden.

The color of her normally chestnut hair had taken on a sickly green glow, and her hand was pressed to her side, where a darker green was slowly spreading wider across her shirt. She seemed to be barely clinging to consciousness, and the fingertip grip was slipping. The green light held by Mistowed started to bounce and then receded. In the dark again, as Timsaid kept his hand on Aden, Mistowed was gone, and had Prufarchy even followed? He'd have to go after Mistowed, but he felt sorry for anyone that came across his path when he was like this.

Prufarchy crouched low behind a large rock. He could feel the stimulants from the skin pack coursing through his veins, but he could also feel something deeper. Something on a molecular level, something they had done to him. The memories were fuzzy now, but the effects were undeniable. He was faster, stronger, more aware, hell he was awake where most others moved as though sleepwalking. Yogi.artist had tried to help him escape, he vaguely recalled. Or had he? He couldn't recall, but that hadn't stopped him from taking one of the skin packs from Yogi.said's body so he could come back and try to save him. He just hoped it hadn't been too long, and that he hadn't run too far when he had run off with the survivors. hold on, Yogi.artist, he thought to himself as he slipped around a rock and back into the night. When he heard a noise ahead, and saw Timsaid shadowing Mistowed, his eyes narrowed and his palms started to sweat.

Timsaid was only a handful of yards away but he could see the green glow of Mistowed's datapad illuminating the spot he used for cover. Beyond Mistowed, several soldiers stood around, on break from the hunt and confident in their numbers as security. First mistake. Mistowed shut down the data pad, layering himself into the darkness that rushed in, and moved forward. Behind him, Timsaid kept pace, his hands feeling around his torso to check for equipment, weapons, or anything that might help in the coming fight. Finding nothing, he scooped up a rock as he shadowed his friend.

The soldiers weren't paying particular attention to their own security, confident that their's was a righteous service that sheltered under divinity. Their attention was set upon finding these survivors who had somehow surfaced and not been collected immediately. When one soldier had heard a sound echo from his left, beyond a tree, he signaled to his companions and three Taze Rifles swung towards the spot. The soldier set furthest back, out of view of his companions, never felt Mistowed's hands grip the sides of his helmet, and knew only darkness in the moment that followed.

As the soldiers body slid down to the ground, one of his companions turned to issue an order, and immediately understood what was happening. "I got one here, send..." his shout was cut off by the sickening crunch of a rock displacing many of his facial features. Timsaid stepped up besides Mistowed and gripped his shoulder briefly, before rounding off to face the third soldier, who rushed in with Rifle pointed straight at the duo. His first shot went wide, but the soldier suddenly came to a complete halt, dropped to one knee, and again took aim. The knife that quivered in his eye socket had seemed to have sprouted from his head out of nowhere, and the soldier tipped over unceremoniously, into the brush and out of sight. Prufarchy appeared from between two trees 10 meters away, a throwing knife dancing casually across his knuckles.

"I'm going back for the other skin patch, the one Yogi.artist took from us," Mistowed stared hard into Prufarchy's eyes. "Aden can still make it, I just need to get a skin patch set before it's been too long," he sniffed while he talked, averting his eyes away. Prufarchy's eyes narrowed.

"I have the skin patch, I took it from Yogi.artist's body before we ran off. I was heading back to try and save him, he saved my life," said Prufarchy, and the space between the two men grew deathly quiet. Prufarchy danced his throwing knife across his knuckles almost reflexively, and waited for Mistowed to make a move, he didn't look like he was going to give up the patch, no way.

Mistowed's eyes widened as over Prufarchy's shoulder a piece of shadow had detached from the night and resolved into the shape of a soldier, who was bringing the butt of his Taze Rifle down on Prufarchy's neck. As Prufarchy crumbled into a heap on the ground, the hiss of electrified particles sent the scent of ozone turning in the air, and Mistowed and Timsaid, tumbling to the ground.

The cold, dark cell that Timsaid found himself in was lined by bars, through which he could see Prufarchy and Mistowed, similarly bound to chairs and illuminated by a single construction lamp overhead. The slow swinging lamp drew a pool of shadows on the floor, a pool so dark it seemed the worst fears of the survivors could climb out of it at any moment. What the light did not hide had the look of a factory or jail within a facility. It wasn't clear, but it was clear that they were prisoners now.

The heavy slide of a bolt on the far side of the room reverberated off the walls, and skulls, of the survivors. The grating metal on metal finally relented, and the dense metallic door swung inward. Sharp ticks on the floor marked the footsteps of the person who entered, and the swinging lamp had only made clear the lower part of their body. A red light flared briefly, housed in a long pipe that the figure drew deeply on, then tapped out onto the floor, the embers dying before ever reaching the ground. Reloading his pipe, the figure stepped forward and grinned at the survivors.

"Seems like you're my guests for the time being, why don't we get to know each other a little better," he approached the bars, noticing the silence from the survivors, the quiet that had been the response to his entreaty.

"Oh, come on now, there's no need to be shy. Heck, I'll go first," he drawled as he leaned in close to the bars. A strange pendant dangled off of his neck, a circle of metal with three wavy lines crossing it from top to bottom. He held the circle briefly between his thumb and forefinger, and then slipped it back into his shirt, patting the spot twice.

"I'm @berniesanders."

The quiet that greeted his introduceyourself was broken only by a snort from Mistowed, who rolled his eyes back to a point on the far wall.

Berniesanders unlocked Timsaid's cell, walked around behind his chair and started to work the restraints that kept his wrists bound.

"I think you're going to want to talk to me," he said as the hard plastic cuffs popped off Timsaid's wrists, freeing him.

Prufarchy's raised eyebrow conveyed everything he was feeling, and Mistowed snorted again.

An open ocean, endless and glittering, surrounded the survivors and Berniesanders. The platform they were on was pure metal, smooth with no visible seams or welding, and the local wildlife that spun in schools overhead provided a sonic backdrop that reminded Prufarchy of a video he had seen once, down deep in the Sanctum. In that video, the surface world was a cacophony of life, splashing drama across an otherwise neutral seeming scene. Standing here, on this pure metal that reflected each purple of the bruised sky, the survivors shifted uneasily, some pacing while others just shifted their weight from foot to foot.

“What’s this about, @bernisanders?” Timsaid asked, his gaze steadily moving between each survivor as though they might disappear if he didn’t pay attention.

“You’ve probably figured it out by now, but your Sanctum is not the only Sanctum. There are thousands..” Berniesanders waved his arm over the right side of the platform, where land was visible. In the distance, rocky land stretched on endlessly, a parchment novel with no discernible end.

“The Sanctum’s from which you all have come are the most successful, genetically. In your vaults, somewhere in your populations, there exists what we need. The solution, the key,” he pulled on the pendant around his neck, “is here if we know how to see it, to touch it.”

The survivors looked on nervously as Berniesanders took on an almost reverent tone, a zealot monk believing in apocalypses. He looked straight up in the sky. “The Swan will not fly from the east, but will rise in the west,” his eyes bulged and his breathing sped up, “The blood. The blood of the Swan will unlock the Steemship.” Berniesanders began to cough, his body shaking in wracks, his shoulders bouncing at impossible angles.

He looked up at the survivors, “Sorry, that’s been happening a lot lately, I don’t know what it is. But it’s getting stronger,” he smooth his jacket and turned back towards the survivors, the uncertain terror of the moment clear on his face. “I need your help,” he said, “all of you. The time is coming and there is much more happening that what you’ve known about, down in your Sanctums. We need to look up,” Berniesanders suddenly grabbed Prufarchy’s wrist. He had moved so fast, it had become unclear if time had stopped, if we were hallucinating, or if Berniesanders was indeed slicing a clean line down Prufarchy’s palm, holding the pendant that had swung around his neck under the flow.

The three wavy lines surrounded by a circle pulsed, then shone brilliantly, blinding Berniesanders and everyone else. The fire that shot heavenward was at once translucent and a pale yellow, and the smell of cinnamon hung faintly in the air. It seemed that the universe swelled inside of that beam, drawing the breath, vision, and life upward, as a signal into the sky.

After a moment, the pulsing circle died, and the pendant was once more just a pendant. Berniesanders absentmindedly strung the thong around his neck, and slipped the pendant under his shirt, patting it twice. A heavy whirling sound thrummed in the sky above, like a trumpet heralding the sundering of a seal. Berniesanders, smiling triumphantly, looked from the sky to the survivors, a maniacal smile playing across his middle aged features. “This is your chance. All of you are needed, we made you to run the ships. We would never leave you behind, we need you to serve us. We have been looking for a long time, Steemians. Looking, searching, raiding sanctum after sanctum in the hopes of finding the right blood, the precise mixture that would activate the ancient signal and give back to us that which is rightly ours, the stars!”

As if on cue, the sky behind Berniesanders seemed to slide apart from itself, and in the intervening space a rounded, monstrous structure slowly took residence in the sky. As the machine that was too big to measure swallowed the sky, the survivors found themselves slowly huddled, having unconsciously moved together for comfort.

Berniesanders found the situation so funny, his continued laughs served as some cruel soundtrack to the large ship’s descent. The survivors had barely understood the sky, and now they marveled as they tried to understand what was that monster in the sky?

to be continued...