Dazzle Ships Read online

  Dazzle Ships:

  Eternal Apocalypse, Book 2

  © 2017 E.E. Isherwood. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Dazzle ships:

  Warships painted with geometric lines and alternating colors,

  designed to both attract notice and confuse the

  onlooker as to their true nature.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Author Notes

  About E.E. Isherwood

  Other books by E.E. Isherwood

  Connect with E.E. Isherwood

  Chapter 1

  Watching two fifty-feet-high, ten-feet-thick metal doors sliding closed on their metal guide tracks is an awe-inspiring sight—unless, like me, you are standing directly in their path. Awe doesn't quite describe my feelings. Panic; terror; what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-do: yeah, those are more like it.

  I had about ten seconds to decide whether to step forward and remain in the doomsday bunker where I had spent most of my life or step backward and escape alone into the wasteland of canyons my friend Alex and I had explored over the last two days. Being outside the bunker without Alex's help was probably step one on the path to death. But everyone inside the bunker believed he was a murderer, and they were bent on punishing him for a crime I knew he didn't commit. In there, I'd be his only friend and hope; outside, he'd be mine.

  Forward or back? Forward or back?

  “Elle! Elll-eeee, run!” Alex shouted while being led away by the Grumps—the policemen of the Complex. He wore the strange metal suit we'd discovered on our earlier travels together. It made him stand out, almost glow, among the dingy gray uniforms of the rest of the citizens.

  I swung in front of me the metal staff I'd found in an abandoned bunker during my exploration outside with Alex. Almost without realizing it, the whining of air and regular motion as it spun calmed me and helped me see the path I needed to walk.

  “Run,” he shouted again as a commotion began around him.

  The glow of his suit matched the growing blue light emitted from my staff. When I'd found it in the Outside, it was just a pretty, shiny rod I found useful to smash the dead plague victims haunting the dark spaces of our world. But the more I used it, the more it glowed. The more I moved it, the more it lit up. I spun it as fast as I was able, and it rewarded me with a vibrant color completely at odds with the endless reds of the interior walls and floors of the Complex.

  I lifted it over my head, still not entirely sure what I should do. After a lifetime without privacy, I was tempted to go it alone, but I'd come to realize solitude came with a price.

  I stopped the twirling and held the metal bar over my head with both hands, hoping for a miracle.

  Please be strong, I thought.

  In a few seconds, the two halves of the door smashed into the staff and halted, causing a chirping alarm whistle. The crowd of workers inside the hall fell silent at the new sound. A pleasant voice came from hidden speakers inside the door.

  “Critical obstruction in safety zone. Level 2 override protocols engaged for base security. Thirty seconds until purge.”

  “That doesn't sound good,” I said, feeling tiny and quite vulnerable inside that five-foot gap.

  While I'd been distracted with the door, Alex had done something to free himself from the two Grumps. His suit was radiating blue electricity, and a third Grump made an effort to grab him but bounced off the shining blue metal as soon as he touched it.

  Alex ran my way with the grin of a kid running from a practical joke in progress. The chirping of the alarm was continuous, but the clicking of the Grumps' telescoping security batons was unmistakable. For years inside the Complex, we teens did everything we could to avoid the nasty old bearded men. Usually, they gave warnings by clicking those batons—they weren't much for talking. I'd never witnessed them hitting anyone, though I did see bruises on some of the workers. They liked bragging about such interactions.

  He took an eternity to cross the fifty feet of stone floor. It was still littered with bodies from the recent battle, though that didn't slow him down. He was an adept runner, and I’d seen him dodge obstacles far larger than corpses.

  “Get out,” Alex commanded, sounding anything but the cheerful, if confusing, boy I'd been stuck with lately. He waved me backward, clear in what he wanted. I didn't want to leave my staff hanging there between the two halves, but there was no way to pull it down without letting the doors slam shut while I was inside their glide path.

  The female voice began a countdown.

  “Seventeen seconds until purge. Fifteen. Fourteen ... ”

  Alex was ten feet away when I finally abandoned all thought of rescuing my staff. I'd found it in the garbage, more or less, so I could find another easily enough … I hoped. I backed away from it, then cleared the outer edge of the door so it wouldn't tag me. All I could do was watch.

  He looked down at his wrist where the controls for his suit were located but only for a second. As he approached the remaining gap, he ran, jumped, and raised his arm all at the same time. The arc of his flight put him on a line to hit the staff, which I thought was pretty stupid.

  When the countdown reached five, the metal inner lining of each door had begun to glow with an orange hue. I was slow to notice it while watching Alex but it didn't take long for the orange to consume the doors from top to bottom.

  “Three. Two.”

  Alex's arm slammed into the staff. A wild blue shower of sparks radiated from the impact. I had to avert my eyes in that instant, but I felt Alex squirt out of the gap as heat from the doors followed. I fell back as we collided. My staff clanked on the rocks nearby.

  “Obstruction destroyed,” the even voice of the door reported in a tone very much like haughty satisfaction. “Defense posture red. Door safeties reset. Military mode override. Stay tuned for—”

  The crunch of the door had a finality beyond clipping off the message. I'd fallen on the rock pile beyond the doorway and looked up at where the two gigantic wall sections had come together. A mesh screen lined both doors, and where they met, it erased the hard line of the unnatural object. The overhang above it was more difficult to hide, but a similar mesh hung down. As I watched, a holographic shift took place, so the wall created by the door was broken up by the appearance of rocks. I only knew it was there because I saw it turn on. Unlike the bold images inside the Great Hall, showing a lush green forest that was entirely false, this image reinforced the look of the rocks that were already there.

  Anyone looking for the Complex might stumble upon this wall and deduce its true nature, but most people would see it as another blank rock face in a land filled with them.

  Alex spoke softly, though he was clearly winded from his escape. Unlike me, he was faced down over the pile of rocks. “Thanks for holding the door open for me. That was the dog's bollocks.”

  I couldn't help but laugh as the tension faded away.

  2

  “How did you know my staff would come out?” I assu
med the forces holding it between the two giant doors would make it impossible to budge. I even thought the bar itself would bend and all three of us would get crushed in one bloody pop, a quick end to whatever he and I had stirred up when I found the secret exit to our bunker.

  “Just a hunch,” he replied as he picked himself off the ground. “Based on what we know about the Commander and his people.”

  He thumbed the big door. “They designed everything to be run by a bunch of dummies, no offense to the workers inside. If one of them ended up between these doors, the system would prevent a crushing moment. When you put your staff in there, I hoped it was smart enough to know not to crush it. Same as if a person got stuck. I got lucky.” He brushed his blonde hair from his eyes and dusted himself off. He'd put his pants and black shirt over the metal skin of the suit, but everything was filthy.

  I continued to eye the door. “But the door did shut. It was a protocol or something.”

  “I've never heard any of that jargon before, L. I think this is all something new. A military override sounds like the base is going to war.” He reached down to me, and I let him help me up. I slipped into his arms as if he'd planned it that way.

  He pushed me away like I was contaminated. At the last second, he stopped pushing. “Uh, I'm sorry.”

  “It's all right,” I replied, seriously.

  I stepped over a few rocks, so I stood on the top of the pile of them at the base of the hidden door. Bodies of the dead littered the landscape. The giant land battleship Harvester the Commander used to escape had come through. Two nasty trails of smashed men and women indicated where he'd driven through the crowd. It would have been more distressing if they hadn’t already been dead when they were run over. Had, in fact, been dead for a very long time even if they hadn't realized it and had kept walking around until the Commander flattened them.

  “We should get going,” I added. My intention was to follow the Harvester and wait for the opportunity to stop it.

  Planning wasn't my thing. I saw following as step one. Something would happen in step two. Then we'd be victorious. My whole life had been planned to the minute, so doing something new was not in my vocabulary. Not pursuit and capture of a deadly foe, for sure.

  “Agreed. I'm totally against being blamed for the death of Mr. Bracken.” He'd said it as a joke, but his sarcasm couldn’t be ignored. The Commander exonerated me in the death of my former teacher, but at the last second before leaving the Complex he announced to everyone that Alex was to blame. The real culprit was the Commander himself. He'd pushed me and Mr. B into the room with all of his failed experiments—things that were once human but walked around even after they’d died, just like the creatures the Harvester squashed into the sand. He tried to kill us both. Mr. B had been ripped to shreds because he was weaponless and had been artificially aged so he couldn't even defend himself for more than a swing or two.

  I fought the dead as long as I could and was on the verge of death myself when Alex rescued me. That's a whole other story. The bottom line is the Commander fled in his Harvester while pinning the blame on Alex for a death he himself had caused. The simple people of the Complex knew nothing of nuance and accepted Alex's guilt without question, just as the Commander planned. I was glad to get Alex out of there.

  “I'm sorry for getting you in trouble.” My voice quivered, which wasn't like me. Being responsible for anyone but myself was totally new for me, and I didn't take it lightly. While Alex was the one who followed me against my will, we traded saving each other's lives, both Outside and on the Inside. But if everything got traced back to one person, it would have been me.

  We walked across the flat area beyond the door, and the bodies on the ground thinned out. The broken, sun-baked, and half-naked dead had been walking these hills for decades. I wanted to get across as fast as possible.

  “I'm not sorry. I'm still holding out hope you'll call me your boyfriend.” He tilted to me and gently knocked elbows. Inwardly I groaned, as it was one of his more annoying qualities: a never-ending effort to “woo” me. Because of how our memories had been altered in the experiments of the Complex, he remembered decades of living with me, but I recalled only a year or two of schooling with him. That gave him plenty of time to learn my weaknesses and use them, as he called it, to win my heart. But somehow I'd resisted those charms, and it drove him insane wanting to know why.

  At first, it was super annoying. Then it became kind of cute to watch him fumble so hard. Then he told me I was the only girl he couldn't solve in the whole class—a point of pride for me, and revulsion for him. It left me somewhere in the middle. All I knew for sure was that I preferred him on the Outside with me, rather than no one.

  “I wouldn't hold your breath. I was just getting used to being on my own. And now look—I had to go rescuing you.” I expected him to throw his rescues of my sorry butt back at me, but he surprised me. He started to whistle while we walked next to each other.

  I was dying to know what his reply was going to be, but the farther we got from the bunker door, the less sure I was that he had any intention of whipping out one of his witty responses. We hopped up a steep draw with a series of ledges that almost formed steps. He'd hold my hand to help me up, and I'd guide him to the best places to climb. It was a pleasant hundred yards of physical exertion that dulled the tension of our narrow escape. But by the time we got to the top I almost couldn't take it anymore.

  He started walking over the gentle rise toward the crest of the hillside, and I fell in next to him. Seconds away from demanding some kind of answer, I realized what he'd done. I snuck a look at his face and confirmed he'd been smiling as if enjoying our walk together.

  Dang it.

  We might not be boyfriend and girlfriend, but we’d just acted the parts. I couldn't deny it was the most pleasant part of my day.

  3

  I also realized Alex knew where he was going.

  “Hey, you followed me out. So why do you seem to be leading?” I was friendly and conversational, appropriate for the nice walk under the hot sun, but if I was going to do all that middle stuff I’d mentioned earlier, I needed him to be on the same page as me.

  He stopped as if a machine had been turned off. “Where do you think we’re going?” he asked while turning to face me.

  “To follow the Harvester, of course. Whatever else he’s doing out here, he’s holding elderly people hostage. Our people. And he’s going out looking for others and is going to hold them hostage, too.” I knew the elderly people were special, though Alex had been less than convinced when I told him.

  “So the Harvester went that way,” he pointed to my left. “You already lost it,” he laughed, not unkindly.

  Dang it!

  I let myself be distracted with selfish questions about whether he liked me. Our nice walk took us away from my goal, not toward it. He was right on all kinds of levels.

  “I, well … ” He scratched the back of my neck, hoping to think of something to avoid falling into the hole I’d dug. Sadly, there was no rescue.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got ya covered. I’m going back to the emergency door to get my drone and see if Sybra is still there. I hope she is.”

  “I know the dog—Sybra—found you, but where did the drone come from?” We both began walking again. I was glad to put my fumble behind me. I was impressed he had a plan. It was more than I had.

  “There were two of them floating like pals, but one kind of sputtered and died as soon as they got to me.”

  “And it found you, how, exactly?” He’d given me a story about how the dog showed up and helped him get the suit operating by talking to him—well, sort of. But he’d been vague on details. This was our first opportunity to talk about it since he’d rescued me from the dead bodies in the cemetery chamber.

  He laughed and hooked his arm through mine as we walked across the relatively smooth rock near the top of the hill. He was tentative at first, as if testing my response, but I let him go with a ser
ious nod, sure he was going to tell me something important.

  “I could hear the dog talk to me. In my head. It was a funny voice, kind of mechanical like the woman on the intercom back home.” He then talked with a robotic cadence. “My name is Dog-a-tron 6000. I come from the future to save humanity. But first, my young hero, I have to help you into a robotic suit, teach you how to power it up, and find two airborne friends to guard you. Only then can we rescue the chosen one.”

  I stopped and unhooked our arms.

  “You met someone else out here, didn’t you?” My eyes flinched in the bright sun behind his shoulder. I cupped my hand in front of me, trying to keep it out of my eyes. “Someone helped you and is waiting for you somewhere?” Using my staff, I pointed out over the broken landscape, though not at anything in particular.

  “Yes,” he declared. “Someone did help me. It was the dog.”

  Between the angle of the sun and my own hand, I couldn’t get read his face. I knew he had to be leaving something out, but I didn’t know what. Until I could figure that out, I couldn’t argue.

  “And I’ll prove it to you—” he turned, so his back faced me, “when we find her.”

  He walked the final few paces to the top of the hill, then stopped and put his hands on his hips. The sun caught him just right so the metal armor glared brilliantly with the sunshine.

  “You won’t believe this,” he called back to me. He added, with grim urgency, “Better get up here.”

  My grip on the staff was firm as I raced to the top. I stood next to, and slightly behind him on a large rock. We both shared a panoramic view of a choppy lake with brilliant deep blue water a half-mile below us. The rock around the edges was burnt red and gray, which contrasted sharply at the shoreline. A few small rocky islands were offshore in front of us.

  “I guess we know how something that big can avoid leaving a trail,” Alex pointed to a spot far out on the lake.

  From as far as we were, it looked like a handful of large boats cruising in a straight line as they churned water going away from us.