By Scot Noel

He awoke in the desert, buried in sand and glass and unaware of his name. The earth pressed upon him with unbearable weight and with each heartbeat, a bright, internal light pulsed behind his eyes. Like all pain, it drew him to action.

It was the work of moments to swim free of the hold the sand had on him. Breaking out, he screamed and kicked and drew in great lungfuls of air. A few leg strokes more and he was standing tall.

“What the hell!” he said, not making of it a question, but an oath. He could see that his arms were burning, hands glowing like embers of burning wood.  His gear hung in tatters, cape all but gone, boots fused against his legs. He commanded fingers, which hardly seemed his own anymore, to tap their way along his fiery ribs until they came to rest in the center of his chest.  Where once a bright emblem had been -his moniker and shield- now three claw marks tore through the remnants of once indestructible fiber.

“Think,” he commanded himself, holding his head between both hands and pressing hard.  “Think!”

But there was no answer, no sudden revelation, only the whisper of passing wings and a shadow that flitted along the sands beneath his downcast eyes. He didn’t bother looking up.

It was a crater in which he found himself and reflexively he began to climb. The walls shifted beneath him and progress toward the rim was slow.  By the time he reached the top, the shadow and the sound of wings had grown closer and more frequent.

“Stay where you are!  Come no closer!”

Like the cry of a hawk, the voice fell upon him from on high.  He looked up, daring the desert brilliance to catch a glimpse of the thing in the sky. When it soared away from the burning solar disk, he made it out.  A drone with a magnificent wingspan circled above.

The domed city

By Victor Habbick

“No closer to what?” he asked his knees weak.  He staggered at the rim like a drunken man near the edge of a cliff.  Finally, off to the right he saw it, the glittering jewel of a domed city.  Caught in crystal reflection by the noonday sun, it dwarfed the dunes and jagged hills beyond.  As he contemplated the sight, his thoughts muffled beneath a pounding heart, a familiar name sprang up from the well of pain in which he found himself.  This was Krustallos, the city of glass.  Sanctuary for the innocent.

What was it doing in the middle of a desert?  Never mind that, Lisa Lenhart would be there.  She must.

He turned and began to walk toward the glittering oasis. Hot as they must be, the desert winds brushed against him like ice and his flesh cooled quickly as he covered the distance. The glow of his limbs subsided, leaving behind dark and shriveled flesh. Skeletal fingers touched the hollow of his cheeks.  What had happened to him, he wondered?

“You are violating the quarantine zone,” came the voice from above. “Move away from the city or we will open fire!”

The shadow moved closer. It dipped and danced across the dunes, repeating its message until the drone above, or its controllers, could no longer tolerate his continued footfalls in their direction. The desert erupted into spouts of weapons fire. The bursts sprayed sand into his eyes, eyes which seemed unwilling to blink against the onslaught. He wiped the back of his hands against them, clearing them enough to see.

He kept walking.

The next burst of fire tore across his chest, but made no more impression than the sand they had kicked up a moment before.

“Lisa,” he said and kept walking. His mind was clearing and he could picture her now, the close-cropped, raven black hair, eyes wide and long lashes, the slightly crooked smile.

Suddenly the desert lifted from beneath his feet, the air erupting into a maelstrom, the fiery, fierce brilliance of which he recognized. A missile strike from the drone. A mushroom column of gray, superheated effluence rose around and above him.

Losing patience, he jumped into the rising vapors, seeing through them as easily as he could peer through clouds and beyond walls.

A turn this way, then that, and he found his attacker flying just beyond the fireball it had loosed upon him. Rolling to his back, he led the flight path of the drone and, with long-practiced ease, caught up to it a second later. A punch silenced the engine and its wings snapped like kindling in his hands.  The nose pitched down and he let it fall to the desert.  An oversized dart.

Fluttering behind him like a kite, the tattered remnants of his cape announced that he was still high above the desert floor.  He was flying, holding himself at a dizzying height with ease.  It felt good, better even than pulling himself out of the furnace of the sands.  He turned toward Krustallos and tried to understand.

He had built this city, one gift in a long career of saving and advancing the humans he loved. Designed to protect them, it should have held against all siege and terrorist infiltration. Who could have taken it over; what villain held hostage the jewel of the desert?

He couldn’t remember.

For long moments he drifted closer, not quite determined what to do. Lisa was there, the last he knew; she had been making a new home for them in the tallest of the crystal spires, and that meant he had to do something.

“Stay where you are, Heros!  You are under quarantine.”

They had called him by name. Who had called him by name?  Projected from the city, the voice filled the desert sky with its booming authority. He tried to match it.

“You know me!” he shouted toward the domes.  “Name if you can the last thousand who stood against me, or the thousand before them?  Who stands against Heros Meum today?  Come out now.  Leave the city, or there is no basement depth I will not dig to find you, coward!”

There was no reply.

For a moment, waiting in silence, he hovered, scorched boots dangling high above the earth, but when he chose to push forward they pushed back. A battery of lasers opened up, high-strength military pulses hitting him with all the force the drone had thrown his way and more.  Grunting, he waded into the beams. They could not hold him for long, and somewhere over the pop-pop-pop of the laser pulses, a voice was begging now.

“Please, leave us alone! Aren’t there enough dead? Leave us alone!

It was Lisa’s voice. He stopped and the pulses of light stopped. She was begging him, pleading that he come no nearer. He tried to see into the city, but it was too big a space for even his vision to pick out a single woman.

What he could see was that neither the drone strike nor the lasers had done him the slightest harm. Additional harm, that is.  Whoever held the city no longer had the master weapon they had used against him.

“Lisa, don’t worry.  They can’t stop me now!”

“No, you bastard.”  It was still Lisa’s voice, shrill and desperate.  “Stay where you are.”

The words cut across his mind.  He wanted to ask; he wanted to know.  His own thoughts remained muddled, still gray after whatever Brobdingnagian blow had knocked him for a loop.  Who was he up against, and what hold did they have over Lisa?  He couldn’t show his weakness by asking, and he couldn’t dive in while the situation remained unclear.

“Send her out and I’ll spare your life,” he said.  “It’s the best deal I can offer.  Harm her and I’ll personally toss you into the sun!”  A chill accompanied his last words, sending a shiver for which he could not account down his spine.

It didn’t take long for him to have his answer.

A glint of light and a trail of dust brought his attention around to the base of the great domed city.  A transport was moving.  Big wheels bobbed on their independent suspensions as he watched the all terrain bus work its way out from Krustallos.  After coming around one of the biggest dunes, it stopped near a craggy outcrop of stone.  A lone figure stepped down a ramp, a figure in a pressure suit, the helmet glass a mirror of reflective gold.  Once that suit stood on the sand, the ramp quickly retreated; the bus revved up its engines and circled away.

Legs spread and arms folded across his chest, Heros eased down before the figure as gently as if he had been lowered from the sky on a wire. Even before he touched sand, he could hear the crying, and though he could put no reason to her distress, he recognized the voice at once.

“Lisa, you’re all right now,” he said softly.  Though he reached out, she shied away, stepping backward so violently that she went down, catching the worst of it on her butt and outstretched hands.  Even then she wriggled away at his approach and he stopped moving toward her.

“Lisa,” he whispered, trying to focus the sound from his lips so that it would resonate through the helmet of the pressure suit. “I know I look bad, but don’t worry.  It’s still me… I just, I just don’t know what’s going on and you have to help.  Who is doing this?”

The crying stopped.  With some effort, Lisa regained her feet on her own. Now he could see the emotions of fear and grief as they warred across her features behind the helmet’s reflective screen.  She didn’t quite look herself.

“Who did this to me?” he asked.

“What are you doing here?” she queried in return, her tones somehow cutting and purposefully cruel. “Do you want the whole world dead?  Every man, woman, and child?”

“Whoever it is,” he assured her, “I can stop them. I know this looks bad,” he gestured inward with his hands, “but it’s still me.”

“Still you…”  He could see her head drop within the helmet, eyes closing against the unbearable. “Do you think it absolves you if you can’t remember?”

He didn’t know what to say. Looking around, he could see no obvious threat compelling her actions.  Neither lasers nor drones zeroed in.

“Has it stolen your mind too?” she asked, her question broken by sniffles.

The question left him dumbstruck; he didn’t know what to say.

“Is who stealing my mind!?” he demanded, no longer able to proceed in subtle tones. Swiftly and without thinking, he took her by the shoulders, repeating his demand as she struggled in his grasp. Glancing from side to side, she began to scream, eyes following the jerky, terrified movements of her head.  Her wide-eyed focus was on his hands, those blackened claws with which he held her tight.

“No!” she screamed.

He released her and stepped back. “Lisa?”

“You’ve killed me!”

He raised his hands, palms forth, as if in surrender.  “What?  What are you saying?”

“Oh, My God, don’t you remember?  Heros, don’t you remember anything?”

“I remember!” He shouted, but what he remembered was an endless dream of searing pain.  What was the last thing?  The last thought before his nightmare in the fires began?

“You look old,” he said to Lisa.

“It’s been years,” she returned matter-of-factly, her voice turning away from tones of terror and accusation.  “You’ve been gone for years, Heros. The world has turned to sand.”

“Everything…,” He mumbled, pressing his palms to his eyes, as if to soothe the sudden ache of realization.  “It kills everything. I brought it back from the Dead Zone, didn’t I?  The Dead Zone!  How many have I killed?”

“Billions and billions,” Lisa assured him, “and you’re not done yet.”  Her face gone as pale as the gray wisp in her hair, Lisa wilted forward onto her hands and knees.

“But your suit.”

“Might have worked,” Lisa said, “if you hadn’t touched…”

As if trying to absolve himself, Heros kept talking, eyes wide. “I remember now. I took the azure stones and held them close. I thought they would kill me on their own, but they didn’t.  I thought they would weaken me so the plague might have its way, but no!  They sickened me, stole away my strength, but I couldn’t die.

“Still holding the stones, I lifted toward the setting sun. It was a gentle twilight, so filled with water color grace, but that’s not how it looked above the clouds, not beyond the moon. The sun became a furnace the closer I drew to it- a furnace I flew into, sick and dying, praying for death.  Instead…”

By now Lisa had fallen full across the swirling sands.

“Instead, I burned in hell for what I had done,” Heros finished. “Years at the solar core. The plague couldn’t kill me; the stones couldn’t… now the very fire out of which your world was born failed me!  But the pain.  You have no conception.  No conception!  After a time, I went mad, I…”

Quieting, he knelt down and gentled Lisa to her back. She was still breathing, still conscious, but very pale.

“Good thing I built that city,” he said, glancing back toward Krustallos. “It saved them, didn’t it?  When all else failed.”

“A fortress,” said Lisa, smiling. “Yes, my love, but don’t try to help anymore.  You’ve got to leave.”

“Fortress.” Heros nodded, his lips too burnt to smile.  He lifted Lisa with the ease another might use to scoop up a handful of sand.

Whether willing to die all the faster or beyond caring, Lisa didn’t resist.  She neither struggled nor offered a single whisper of protest.

Stepping into the high winds, Heros took her aloft.  He took her higher than ever he had on a romantic flight. The suit Lisa wore protected her from the cold and thinning air.  Only the plague Heros had brought with him out of the Dead Zone could penetrate it.

As he flew, the question occurred to him, what features of the domed city had held the plague at bay?  How had Krustallos survived?

If he could determine that secret, he might yet save mankind.

Soon deep oceans lolled beneath their speeding forms.  Flying on his back, Heros held Lisa close with one arm and pushed the other out before him, his hand clenched in a fist that broke through the thinning but stubborn air like a bullet, leading their supersonic flight.

In no time they were there, the deserts of central Australia spreading out beneath them.  It was a landscape that had long challenged the survival skills of the natives, and Heros didn’t drop far before seeing the great pebble of Uluru dominating the colorful but barren world below. Ayers Rock the Europeans called it, a central part of creation to the Aborigines and for Heros Meum the location of his personal fortress. A place for solitude of which no human knew the address.

Over the years his enemies has already nuked both his Arctic and Antarctic decoys, but Ayers rock with its global reputation and constant stream of tourists had escaped their attention reliably.

A hidden, cosmetically camouflaged hatch in the northern face winked open at Heros’s approach and closed as suddenly behind him.  Lights flared into life all down the length of a descending tunnel.  It was an impressive shaft that fell more than fifteen hundred feet into the core and root of the mountain. There, in a stadium sized expanse of crystalline machines and quartz walkways, a central platform began to glow with awakening power.  Holograms of his father and mother winked up out of nowhere to greet him.  More than conceits to sentiment, the flickering images seemed happy to see him and awaited his command.

“What is it, son?” asked the ageless and un-aging images as one.

“You left us in such a hurry,” added his mother’s simulacrum.

“We’ve been worried,” said the father.  He was a big, strapping figure dressed in white robes.  “You look tired.”

“No time for this,” Heros said, “to the controls! I need the stasis generator, the one Actus Reus built to capture me, remember?”

“Yes,” the insubstantial images said together again.  Though their touch would fail to toggle the slightest switch, their A.I. had been interfaced directly with the fortress’s servo mechanisms. At their urging, platforms creaked and turned, overhead cranes swung, and robotic arms on great extenders maneuvered with swift and dancing moves. Seconds later, the stasis trap was delivered.

“What are you doing?” Lisa asked weakly. Her breath was growing more ragged and her eyes had gone rheumy.

“Saving you, my love,” Heros answered as he tore away her protective suit.  His blackened nails made quick work of the armored gear, ripping it away with the same careless attention a child gives to the wrapping paper of a gift.

In hearing his words about saving and love, Lisa almost laughed.

“Listen to me,” Heros said as he lifted her. Gently carrying Lisa a short distance, he placed the dying woman across a raised table, the surface of which had once served as a surgical platform. His hands moved in a blur as he tied her down.  “This is the most brilliant weapon ever devised. If I hadn’t tricked Actus with my robot twin, he would have used it against me. Stops all motion at the quantum level. That’s what it’s for.  You can’t die if your body stops moving through time, now can you?”

“I can’t live either,” came the sullen reply.  Jaw set, Lisa tried to raise her head, to look Heros in the eye, but the effort failed. She lay back, sickened by the exertion.  Eyes closed, she continued. “Heros, please stop.  I can forgive you for her, for seeing her, but not for the billions who died!  Without you, there wouldn’t be…”

When her voice failed, Heros filled in the gap as he directed the great cone of the stasis projector into place above her.  “Without me, your planet’s poles wouldn’t be radioactive.  Without me– no poisoning of the Red Sea. No need to build Krustallos as a sanctuary against anti-Heros terrorism. No use for my collection of captured villainous gewgaws, this brilliant piece among them. No billions dead. I know…”

“Leave us be,” Lisa whispered with what seemed her penultimate breath, but before her lips could close, before her final sigh might pass into silence, Heros was ready.  The ponderous device above her powered up. At their stations, the holograms of Mother and Father directed energies greater than could have been amassed by the Boulder Dam in a month of Sundays.

A cold blue beam caught Lisa in the chest and stopped her heart. A fraction of a second later, from her graying tresses to her once balletic toes, through flesh and bone and soul, not an electron stirred.

From outside it seemed she had been wrapped in a milky, crystal shield.  Lisa’s body lay cocooned in an adamantine sheath no force could penetrate, for within it the arrow of time had ceased to fly.

“That’s it then,” Heros said. “Mother.  Father.  Prepare another table.  For me.  I’ll be ready shortly.”

With a quick step Heros reached a wide panel of lights, dials, keyboards, and uncounted toggles. He moved quickly, with forethought and determination.

After several minutes his father’s digital simulacrum appeared beside him.

“The generator is recharged,” Father said with an almost Shakespearean flourish. Then, while gazing into the lights dancing beneath Heros’s fingers, he added more softly and in a good imitation of human empathy, “Son, have you thought this through?”

“I know, Dad.  If I let them know where I am, they might bomb us.  Vaporize this whole damn mountain. It’s a risk, but they’re all I have left.”  He glanced back toward Lisa in her cocoon.  “And the only chance she has.”

“You’re sending them everything,” said his mother, her image having appeared on the opposite side.  Her translucent, ghostly hand moved to cover Heros’s own.

He was finished now.

“Mother.  Father.  I’ve given everything. All the stored knowledge of the fortress. Every crystal-trapped memory you sent with me out of our dying universe.  All I know about the stasis field, the Dead Zone, the construction of Krustallos.  Everything.”

“They are not ready!” his parents said in stentorian unison.

“But they will be,” Heros answered.  “That’s the beauty of it.  They have the time.  It’s the one thing I haven’t given them.  Time to be themselves.  There.  Look.  They’re receiving the transmission.

“Now, both of you.  I want you to put me in stasis.  Then go into caretaker mode.  It may be a long time before I see you again.”

“Just as we cannot stop you, neither can we harm you,” said his mother.

“But, mother, you must obey me.”  Cupping his blackened hand near the hologram’s cheek, he looked into eyes reflecting the past of another universe.  The ancient, unaging woman smiled.  “You won’t be harming me, mother.  For me, the time from now to the ending of the stars will pass in an instant.  No long dreams, no separation, no loneliness.  Time will simply stop and one day, hopefully, start again…”

Heros didn’t say another word until the glowing cone of the stasis generator centered into place above him.  The table on which he lay rose to meet it.

“Mother.  Father.  Believe me; I know what will happen.  A thousand, or ten thousand, or a million years from now, those humans will master the black death and they’ll come for us. They won’t forget, and they’ll bring the cure with them.  You’ll have to be watching for them.  Do you promise?”

“As long as there is sun above or heat below, we will watch,” promised his mother.

“Well, they’ll come for Lisa anyway,” Heros said as he watched his father pass a ghostly hand over a bank of relays. The table began a low, bone deep oscillation. “She gave her life to stop me.  They won’t forget her; they’re like that.”

“If they fail to come, we shall wake you,” said Heros’s father.

“No.  No!” Heros insisted, growing more agitated as the tip of the stasis generator began to blaze with light.  “You mustn’t. I carry this thing, this plague!  And they must use all the knowledge I have given them to erase it from me, to restore my full flesh and body. I can’t; I can’t face her again like this.”

“I understand,” said his mother.

“Maybe… Maybe they won’t take the chance with me at first.  They’ll only come for Lisa.  If they do, that’s OK.

My time will come. When I wake, there may only be a ghost of her here to greet me, like the two of you.  Maybe mankind will have left this world by then, been gone for a hundred million years. Maybe.  But still, a recording, a dream of her standing there, waiting for me.  They can do that much, can’t they?”

“We’ll tell them so,” said his father.

“She’ll stand there and I’ll see her again and she’ll say a few words, something simple. ‘You did it, Heros Meum, my hero.  You let us live!’  They can do that much, can’t they?”

Heros had often imagined his love doing the things she would never do, and, once more, he returned to the oldest comforts of imagination.  He held in his minds eye an image of perfect acceptance and adoration. It was his balm and his hope as the stasis beam fell and the tick of the eternal clock ceased… for now.