Page 42 of The Inheritance
I hadn’t seen it before, maybe because I was too focused on countering the poison. The stalkers were damn near indestructible. We’ve been targeting the glands in their neck, but given time, they would regenerate those. You had to deal enough damage to cause actual clinical death, otherwise no matter how badly they were wounded, they would bounce back. Good to know.
I would bounce back as well. And our new regenerative powers seemed to be permanent, which explained why my talent colored this diagnostic slice in white. The regeneration didn’t benefit us. We already had it.
Still, regeneration alone didn’t explain why we survived. That was not the way biology functioned. Consuming mongoose meat didn’t magically mutate your acetylcholine receptors, giving you resistance to snake venom. Eating the stalker hearts should’ve just poisoned us further, but instead both I and Bear healed our wounds and purged the pollen.
On the other hand, regular biology couldn’t account for the emergence of the Talents, compound fractures healing in 7 hours, or a glowing gem passing through solid bone. We were in Arthur C. Clarke territory. Any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, and this was magic.
I sorted through my environment until I found some pollen traces and split that into layers as well. The toxicity was off the charts, although it was barely blue for me now. I tried to look at the two of them together, the heart and the pollen, by imposing one on to the other, but the picture was too complex. After a few seconds, both sets of layers collapsed, and I saw white again. This time I was blind for at least a minute. I had to be careful not to push myself too far.
The best I could figure out was that mixing the pollen and the stalker blood somehow negated their mutual harm while boosting the regenerative properties of stalker heart meat. We could likely stroll through the flowers now, not that I would risk it unless we absolutely had to, and eating the stalker meat should be safe. At least in theory.
The memory of the horrible battery acid taste sliding down my throat made me shudder.
It was a miracle that we survived. A roll of cosmic dice.
I checked my shoulder. The bite had knitted closed. The gashes on my legs from the claws had healed too. I had escaped death. Again. I couldn’t tell if it was the magical gem or my newly acquired regeneration. Possibly both.
Bear licked the hat clean and looked at me.
“More?”
I poured a bit more water out. She lapped it up.
My mouth was dry, too. I tipped the canteen and finished what was left. We would need to find a water source soon. Also, I was hungry. So very hungry. I’d taken my watch off because it broke, so I had no idea how much time had passed. I should’ve checked the bodies for a watch, but I didn’t think of it at the time.
It felt like I hadn’t eaten in days. The stalker heart weighed about two pounds, and I had eaten a whole one just like it and then downed another half. I should’ve been full, but instead I was starving. Water, food, exit. I needed to find all three.
There was something on the opposite wall. Some sort of shapes…
I picked up the hard hat and flicked the light on.
Cave drawings, depicted in rust red and blue. A procession of some kind of beings, resembling raccoons or foxes, maybe? They were leading weird looking donkeys.
Danger.
A vision unfolded in my mind. A caravan of fluffy creatures departing, some being wrapped in rags begging on the street, and a feeling of alarm. Not deadly danger exactly but ruin. Financial ruin.
The vision faded.
Cute fluffy foxes who leave you destitute. “What do you think this is all about, Bear?”
The shepherd wagged her tail.
“Yes, I don’t know either.”
The woman who called me her daughter, the four-armed killers, and now the foxes, all distinct and morphologically different. Three separate species. Representatives of three civilizations? Or was it one complex society?
What the hell was on the other side of the breaches?
Everything the US knew about the other side came primarily from the Houston gate. It was one of the ten original US gates, designated as Prime Four, and for some reason, NASA had been called in to study it.
When the gates burst, the military strike teams had gone inside to close them. In the interviews with survivors, a lot of them reported seeing a second portal. Most of the people didn’t get a good look at it, because as soon as they reached the chamber, they were gripped with an overwhelming urge to attack the anchor. The moment someone destroyed it, the second portal collapsed.
In Prime Four’s case, they had held off on anchor smashing long enough to peer into the second gate. The reports described a world under a green-tinted sky, and a never-ending column of horrific monsters stretching from the portal across a grassy plain. The creatures kept pushing their way through the portal and attacking people in the anchor chamber, and eventually the military team destroyed the anchor to keep from being overrun.
Since then, the US government made three attempts – that I knew of – to allow for a controlled gate burst. They sent in teams to clear the breach and then sat on the anchor until it accumulated enough energy for the gate to rupture and the second portal to form. Then they tried to put a nuke through it.
We didn’t know what happened. In all three cases, the gate collapsed and nobody came out. It didn’t seem to have any effect on the frequency or strength of the gates. In fact, after the third attempt, another gate opened just five miles away and it was a dark orange.
