The Soldiers of Halla Read Online Free PDF Page B

realized…
    We weren’t on Earth anymore.

JOURNAL #37
3
    W e had stepped out of one strange situation, directly into another.
    There were no flumes involved. No journey that I could tell of. I didn’t get the sense that we had traveled any distance at all. Except that one moment we were walking through the windswept ruins of the zoo in Central Park, and a second later we were in an environment I can best describe as being alien. Though I guess “alien” can mean a lot of things. I stood in wonder, looking around at the most barren, forlorn chunk of real estate I had ever seen.
    The air was clear. That’s the best thing I could say about the place. It was night, though there was plenty of light to see by. The sky was full of stars. More than I could imagine. I didn’t recognize a single constellation. The night sky was alive with thin, wispy clouds of all shapes and sizes that moved quickly overhead. At least, I thought they were clouds. They weren’t like any clouds I’d ever seen. Some glowed with color. Reds, greens, oranges, and yellows. Others were dark shadows. None were so thick that they blocked out the stars, yet they definitely had substance. Icould see right through these translucent bodies that shot across the heavens impossibly fast. Many blazed with light, as if they were somehow charged with energy. It was a tightly choreographed fireworks display in the vast night sky.
    On ground level I felt as if I could see for miles, yet there was nothing to see. The landscape was made up of nothing but jagged gray rock. I saw peaks in the distance, chasms beneath them, miles of flat land in between. I thought of the lava field we once visited in Hawaii where the molten lava had spread and hardened, leaving a jagged world of gray. That’s pretty much what this was, multiplied by about a million. There were no buildings. No trees. No sign of civilization. We stood at the bottom of a mountain of rock that jutted up higher than I could see. There seemed to be levels everywhere. Were there caves built into this dark matter? Could people live on this rock?
    Dark matter. That’s what the flumes were supposed to have been made of. The oldest known substance in the universe. The gray rock that made up this strange world looked exactly like the rock from the flumes. Was there a connection?
    As much as this desolate world seemed dead, it wasn’t empty. This is hard to describe, but I’ll try. I sensed life. It’s not like I saw people crawling around on the various levels of rock. I didn’t. But I felt the presence of life. What I saw were shadows and light that moved quickly past on the edge of my vision. When I tried to look at them, they’d be gone. A few times I thought I actually saw the image of a person, but by the time I turned to focus…nothing. These maddening images danced beyond my ability to actually grasp them and understand what they were. Who they were. It seemed as if I were surrounded by ghosts.
    Oddly, I wasn’t scared. Confused maybe, but not scared.
    The only thing normal about this place was my family. Though seeing them standing in that desolate place was about as abnormal as I could imagine. Dad had on his usual dark green khakis and his favorite faded Villanova sweatshirt. Mom wore a jean skirt and a black turtleneck under a white sweater. I already said that Shannon had on jeans and a pink sweater. Marley wore his blue collar that was embroidered with fish shapes. They looked about as normal as I remembered them. They were a typical-looking family from Connecticut…standing together on Mars.
    They let me take in the surroundings without a word. I guess they were waiting for me to get used to the place. Yeah, right. Fat chance that would happen. After seeing all I thought there was to see, which wasn’t much, one question jumped out ahead of all the others.
    â€œSo, uh, this is where I was born? Not exactly