Pahnyakin Rising (2 page)

Dresden, out of the corner of her eye, saw Nick’s creamy fawn drawn-back arm cast the foam ball in her direction.  She whipped her body towards the flying object and caught it effortlessly.  It was as much to her surprise as everyone else’s.  Silence fell over her classmates and Nick growled in shamed defeat.  The girl stood with the ball between her palms for what felt like minutes before she let it drop to the ground with a light thud.  Even if but for a moment, she basked in the awe of her classmates.  Everyone knew Nick Shepherd had never lost a game of dodge ball in his life—at least not until that day. 

Ms. Bell lifted her gold whistle to her cracked lips and blew a deep breath into the tip. 

“Everyone hit the locker rooms.  Six minutes until the bell.”

Dresden turned her head in Bre’ek’s direction.  He remained still, except for the light wiggle of his elongated metal fingers.  The girl had done studying of her own and noticed the Absorbers only stopped moving their fingers if they were transmitting data to other Pahnyakins, something the world had not quite come to fully understand.  It was only known that the members of the species were connected somehow.  Dresden imagined the beings operated like millions of computers connected to the same wireless network.  She wished she knew for sure, but President Cartwright was urged by the Pahnyakins to appear to Congress in hopes of creating a law to protect the mechanical species.  Humans and Pahynakins compromised.  Any human suspected or discovered harming a Pahnyakin would still receive his or her due trial.  If found guilty, the Pahnyakins would take custody of the criminal.  That only occurred a handful of times before everyone in the world knew not to physically disturb the alien species.   

A swarm of students disrupted her glare towards Bre’ek.  Nick, sweat profusely dripping down his oily forehead, approached the girl.  He extended his right arm with his bicep bulging from his cut-off tee shirt and offered Dresden a handshake.

“Good game,” he panted. 

The senior girl, in shock at his sportsmanship, moved to grip his hand.  She looked deeply into his diamond, sea-blue eyes and smiled.

Before their hands could meet, he withdrew his and scoffed with an amazed chuckle.  “I wouldn’t touch a loser like you with a ten-foot pole,” he sneered.  “You only won because you got lucky.  Watch your back during the next game.  I’m gonna throw a ball so hard that you’ll have a black eye for a month.”  His lips curled to a taunting grin.  “Hell, you might not even have to wait until the next class.  Watch your back.”

Dresden spun to her right on the tiptoes of her white sneakers and paid no mind to her classmate’s poor behavior.  She possessed an average level of self esteem.  The round-faced girl knew she was not overly attractive.  The bridge of her nose was bent ever-so-slightly to the left and she could never find a way to make her smile appear any less crooked.  She used an overabundance of charcoal liquid eyeliner on the tops and bottoms of her eyes—so much and so often, in fact, that she carried two tubes in her pocket at every chance she had.  She hated the look of her eyes without the heavy liner; her naked eyes made her look bland and washed out.  Her long hair was a natural jet black and the ends were split, something she was always made painfully aware of as her long bangs fell over her gray eyes.  The girl used the side of her index finger to brush the thick strands of hair to the side of her forehead.  She tirelessly tried every treatment she could think of to change the texture of her locks, but it proved to be pointless.  A girl could only cover her hair with a mayonnaise and egg mixture so many times before she would realize the process was futile. 

All in all, she knew her looks were not to blame for the disrespect she received from her fellow students.  It was her drive to succeed and know it all, to make it to the top at any cost—as long as her efforts would not harm another.  Her classmates groaned when she would ask a question near the end of class and send the teacher into an excited lecture, and that, she thought, was why everyone seemed to hate her.  She found it odd, especially when furthering education was so encouraged within modern society, that she would be teased for always experimenting or keeping her nose stuck in a book, but it bothered her very little.  She already had two Bachelor’s Degrees in Computer Science: one in artificial intelligence and one in computer security and cryptography.  If other kids wanted to spend their time focusing on holographic concerts or wasting away in virtual reality games, that was fine with her.  They could each tease her all they wanted; she knew she’d get the last laugh when she was a CEO in a big city and they were drunkenly reliving tales of a lackluster prom night they thought was fantastic.  But who was she kidding?  She could never find it in her heart to laugh at someone’s misfortune.  It just wasn’t who she was deep down.

The girl walked towards the locker room, slowly falling behind a herd of five other classmates.  She purposely kept enough distance to not be included in the group, but even that was not enough.  Stacy Everton turned her head over her left shoulder and looked Dresden up and down with a grimace before whispering something to a girl with midnight curls.  Stacy’s junior friend looked back and burst into laughter.  With a touch of insecurity, Dresden felt her face turn hot and she thought of rolling the elastic waist of her shorts to show more of her milky legs and not look like so much of a dork.  Maybe that was why the girls were laughing at her, she didn’t know.  She felt awkward around girls her age because she never knew what to do or say to fit in.

The locker room was outdated and cramped and smelled of sweat, perfume, and mildew from the showers that weren’t being used by the female classmates.  Twenty girls bumped elbows and stepped over clothes and shoes scattered on the floor as they each dug through metal lockers painted with peeling blue paint that was probably a good 15 years old.  Dresden’s locker was at the far end of the stuffy room and opened against the brick wall.  For that, she was grateful.  She watched as Nicole Bridge had to wait each day for Melissa Danetti to finish changing clothes to rush getting dressed before the bell.  Dresden felt relieved that she never had to wait on anyone.  She opened her locker and hurriedly tore the white shirt off so she could put on her own ringer-neck tee shirt.  The gray shirt fit loosely on her upper body and made her small breasts seem non-existent under the wrinkled cotton.  Her orange hoodie was form fitting.  It was a gift from her Nonnie and she loved the way the fleece-lined sleeves felt against her bare porcelain arms.  She wriggled into dark denim jeans that fit snug against her flat stomach and bony butt.  It was clear she did not care as much about style as most of the other girls in the room.  Several of them were sliding metal studs back in their eyebrows and nostrils. 

She shoved her P.E. clothes back in her locker and slipped her white sneakers back over her black socks.  From the corner, she watched as three girls crowded in front of a cracked square mirror hanging on the wall.  They held their mouths open as they each used airbrush pens attached to a thin black rectangular box to apply lipstick.  Jewel Pickens guided the tip of the pen over her lips and hot pink replaced brown.  She shook her head in disapproval and wiped the color on a wad of toilet paper in her left hand.  She pressed the second button on the black box and guided the pen over her lips again.  She seemed satisfied with the fire-engine gloss. 

Dresden reached in her locker and grabbed her khaki messenger bag.  She opened the flap on the side of the bag and retrieved a stiff black half circle with a gray cord trailing to a thin black tablet.  She placed the u-shape against the back of her head and rested the metal circles on either side of its opening on her temples.

“Look at her,” she heard Stacy laugh.  “She’s always studying.”

“I know,” Brittany Baxler giggled.  The girl slipped a set of silver bangles around her right wrist.  “She’s such a nerd.  She’s never going to use that stuff.”

Dresden tapped at her tablet’s screen and used the pad of her index finger to swipe through menus until she reached what she was looking for: the third chapter of her newest textbook on databases and programming.  Electromagnetic pulses snapped against her skin and she slammed her locker closed.  She placed the tablet back in her bag and placed the bag’s strap across her chest. 

Maybe her bullies were correct, she thought.  She did have a lot of useless knowledge floating in her brain.  She couldn’t help it; she was fascinated by everything she could learn.  The girl spent the summer previous learning ‘dead’ languages-languages spoken by such few people they were basically pointless unless one was fighting to preserve tradition and culture.  She thought Dumi was the most difficult, but she was also studying advanced calculus at the time, so she rationalized she may have been making it much more difficult than it was.  Maybe she was strange for wanting to know everything there was to learn in the world, but for that she would not be ashamed.  She would wear her curiosity proudly.

Stacy Overton approached Dresden and shoved the teenager in the shoulder with an open palm. 

“Didn’t you hear us talking about you?” she asked the girl.

“Yes,” Dresden replied.  “You can talk all you want, I don’t care.”

Stacy scoffed and looked back to Brittany.  “You hear that?  She says she doesn’t care if we talk about her.”

Dresden attempted to walk away from Stacy, but the senior blocked her path.

“You mean you’re not going to do anything about it?” Brittany asked.  Dresden could tell the girls were itching for a fight.  They needed something to gossip about, but Dresden refused to be the main focus of that gossip.

“I’m not going fight with you,” she stated firmly.  “If you want to talk about me, that’s fine.  But I don’t like fighting and won’t do it.”

She hid that the fact of the matter was she
couldn’t
fight back if the girls made their moves.  Dresden had never so much as slapped anyone with an open hand.  She often watched horror movies and thought of how she would probably be the first victim if the films played out in real life.

Ms. Bell entered the locker room as she did each day.  She stood on her tiptoes and called over to Stacy. 

“Overton, get dressed.  I’m not staying late because it takes you ten years to get ready.”

Stacy rolled her eyes and turned her back to Dresden.  The teenager, unfazed by Stacy’s act of unfounded aggression, returned her thoughts to the discs on her temples.  

Information flowed through her mind.  She found it truly remarkable how the introduction of the Emmiti-Book allowed her to soak up three chapters of information by the time she walked out of the locker room and proceeded home.  Scientists worked closely with Pahnyakin Magisters to release technology the people of Earth could only dream existed.  And every single day, dreams were becoming realities.

-3-

Dodge was tall and heavyset with thick bubbly lips and dark oak-colored hair that was usually cut short and maintained unless he was on the verge of another one of his breakthroughs—and then it was shaggy, but he was still presentable.  He had rosy chipmunk cheeks that swelled like rising biscuits when he flashed his bright white smile.  The five o’clock sun made his hazel eyes look like tangled algae swimming atop the dirty water under the Wotomack Bridge a mile outside of Easton. 

“Why are we wasting our time out here?” asked Dresden’s smooth-faced friend.  “It took forever to get the stuff for this.  If your experiment ruins it, I don’t know when I’ll be able to order more parts.”

The girl pulled her hair into a loose ponytail at the lower back of her head and leaned over to unzip a black duffle bag that rested on the loose white-wooden planks.  It was clear the Wotomack Bridge had long been forgotten by the world.  Its legs dipped into ten-feet of muddy water that smelled like a dirty fish tank.

“Come on,” said the girl.  “We go through this every single time you help me.”

Loose strands of her long bangs fell in front of her eyes and tickled her cheeks as she dug through the small bag.  Irritated, she shoved the strands behind her ears.  They fell to her face again as soon as she moved her head. 

“Why are we even doing this?” asked Dodge.  “I really don’t think it’s going to come back with any kind of data.”

“No,” she argued stiffly.  “I’ve seen them out here at night.  I think they’re…talking, I don’t know.”

Dodge laughed.  “You mean that weird clicking they do?  Come on, this is kind of a waste of time.  Even if they come out here at night, it’s not like they’re doing anything wrong.  I don’t know why you don’t trust them.  Have they ever done anything that we have to worry about?”

The girl lifted her hair and gazed off in the distance. 

She briefly thought to the red silo-shaped energy tower that had been erected on the southern outskirts of town earlier that month.  Nobody had ever seen the interior of a Pahnyakin energy tower or knew much about them, other than the Pahnyakins ran machines so loud that it was impossible to hear within ten feet of the towers.  The alien species lent their technological assistance in exchange for humans building the red metal silos.  Pahnyakins not only guarded the single entrance to the towers placed around the globe, but also guarded a 50-foot perimeter around each energy station. 

“I don’t trust them,” Dresden shrugged, returning her eyes to the duffle bag.  “There’s just something that isn’t right about them, I can feel it in my gut.”

She lifted an eight-pound black and silver square from the bag. 

“That’s only going to tell you how many footsteps are registered,” Dodge observed aloud.

“My box, yes,” Dresden nodded.  “Your box is the one I’m really counting on.”

“Nobody’s ever been able to break their language.  Why are you so set on studying this?”

Dresden looked up to see a bored look upon her best friend’s face. 

“I just have a feeling,” she responded.  “If they were saying the same things to each other that they were saying to us, don’t you think they would try to use the same language—or at least teach us theirs?” 

She grunted as she lifted Dodge’s design from the bag.  His box was similar to the one she had constructed, but his had hers beat by a good five pounds.  Insulated black wires were wrapped around the device.  She was in the process of unwinding them when the wind picked up and blew thick strands of her hair into her piercing glossy gray eyes.

“Okay,” she said with a sigh.  She set the black box on the bridge planks with a near-slam and extended her right palm.  “Give me your knife.”

She looked upward to her friend’s uneasy expression.

“You can’t cut anything on there.  There’s nothing on it that you won’t need to record their noises.”

“I’m not going to cut it.  Come on, let me see your knife.”

Reluctantly, he reached his left hand to his back pocket of his dark jeans and removed a black nylon sheath.  He unsnapped the pouch and slowly pulled a nine-inch black-bladed serrated gut hook knife out for Dresden to see.  Dodge, in a momentary show-off of his weapons skills, tossed the knife into the air.  It spun in a full circle three times before gravity yanked it back to Dodge’s hand.  The knife landed in his dry palm handle-first.  He quickly grabbed the tip of the blade and offered the handle to his friend.

“I’ll never understand how you do that without cutting yourself,” she stated. 

“Practice. Lots of practice.”

Dodge was interesting, to say the least, at least Dresden thought so.  She called him a weapons fanatic, but he continually reminded her that he was no mere
weapons
fanatic, but only interested in bladed objects.  He wouldn’t really know what to do with a gun if he ever had to use one, but he could flip a knife or sword around like no one else.   Dresden thought it was amusing to watch.

“Too bad you’re never going to have to use those skills,” she smiled.

“Hey,” he laughed, “you don’t know that.  What are you doing with it?”

The chilly wind picked up again and Dodge lifted the hood of his white hoodie over his hair and ears.

Dresden yanked the elastic tie from her ponytail and gathered her hair in a tight fist at the left side of her neck.  Just under her chin she began sawing at her hair with Dodge’s knife as he looked on in surprise.

“Holy crap,” he exclaimed.  “I can’t believe you’re cutting your hair with a knife.”

“Well,” she sighed, “I’m sick of it always getting in the way.”

She felt pressure on her scalp as she tightly tugged at her locks.  The last strands of the hair in her hands broke off with a snap.  She looked down at the ten inches of hair in her palm and tossed the lump of blackness to the water below.  Some of the hair became caught in the wind and blew away in the cool air.  She touched the ends of her new bob with her fingertips and could feel how choppy and jagged it now was.

“You can have your knife back,” she said, holding the knife above and in front of her for Dodge to take. 

He took the knife and Dresden stood from the bridge with a compact power drill. 

“Now,” she said, “I need you to hand me this stuff exactly when I tell you to, okay?”

Dodge nodded. 

“I’m going to climb down the notches on that supporting post,” she motioned to the pillar behind Dodge.  “I don’t really know how long I’ll be able to hold myself under the bridge.  I timed myself the other night, but I only lasted about a minute before I had to climb back to the pillar.  So if I tell you I need you to take the box, I need you to take it, or it’s going to end up in the water.”

“Okay.”

The teenager did not doubt his friend’s ability to finish the job, but he did fear that his hard work would be lost to the water.  The idea was stupid.  He was thankful to have the type of friendship that allowed him to say so, but his criticism did not deter Dresden.  The two had been friends since grade school and she was always coming up with wild experiments, but now they were growing older and her experiments called for more expensive materials and a greater length of time spent developing recording devices.  It made no sense to him to waste time attempting to decode Pahnyakin chatter.  The species used mechanical clicks to communicate with one another.  It was common knowledge that even the military could not crack the code, but Dresden was fascinated and determined, which made her unstoppable.  She already thought she was on to something from her experiment around Old Bill’s farm on the opposite outskirts of town.  She recorded Pahnyakin footstep activity months before the species took the farm and communicated with the humans in town that they needed the elderly man’s land to build another energy tower.  Dresden said the visitors were strategically planning a takeover of the medium-size town, but that was one idea Dodge could not support.  It just made no sense that an alien species would travel 11,000 light years to share technology if they were only going to take control of the planet.  Nonetheless, he tagged along and helped his friend as often as he could.  She did the same for him and he appreciated it.

He watched as Dresden carefully dropped over the edge of the bridge and tightly hugged a pillar she could only barely wrap her arms around. 

“Don’t fall,” he cautioned.

“Gee,” she quipped, turning her chin towards the cloudy dark sky, “thanks.  I planned to fall backwards if you didn’t warn me not to.”

“Oh, shut up,” he laughed.  “Are you sure you want to do this?  It’s getting dark out and it’s cold.”

“It shouldn’t take too long,” she replied.  Dresden grunted as she reached her right hand for a hanging metal bar.  She grabbed the cold piece and turned her body towards it. 

Dodge witnessed his friend swinging her left leg towards the bridge and she disappeared underneath the planks below his feet.  He could see part of her right arm through a hole to his left. 

“Okay,” she panted.  “Hurry up and give me the drill and two screws.”

Her friend complied with her request.  She struggled to keep her body wedged between a narrow rectangular box made up of two support beams under the bridge.  She couldn’t look down if she wanted to, but she knew the dark water below her was rippling in the wind. 

Dresden forced the screws side by side into the rickety planks and shouted urgently to Dodge, “Take the drill.  Hurry up, I’m slipping.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” he repeated to her as she returned to the pillar out of breath.

“That was the hardest part,” she responded.  “Now I just have to hook the mounting holes on the boxes to the screws, add two more, and fix the wires.”

Dodge smirked.  “
That
seems like the hardest part.”

Dresden rolled her eyes and climbed back under the bridge.  “Give me your box first.”

The teenager handed the girl the sound-recording device and it fitted over the existing screw with a loud snap. 

“Drill and one screw,” she directed.

He offered her the tools. 

“Ugh,” she moaned over the whir of the drill’s rotations.

“Give me the drill,” Dodge ordered.  “You’re going to fall.”

“No,” she grunted.  “Give me the second box.  Put a screw through the hole at the bottom of it first, though.”

Dodge handed Dresden the second box.  He could see her legs shaking against the support beams and barked down to her.  “Give me the drill and take a break.”

“I’m almost done.”

“You’re about to fall,” he said in a concerned tone.  “I can see you losing grip.”

Dresden forced the drill to the surface of the bridge before scrambling to the pillar.  Her breathing was erratic and her legs felt like jelly.  If she didn’t finish this soon, it would be too dark.  She and Dodge only had about 15 minutes of daylight left and the two did not bring lighting. 

“I don’t think you should go back,” said Dodge.

“Stop,” Dresden snapped.  “I have to do this.  And I don’t need you to try that macho savior crap with me.  I can take care of myself.”

“Fine,” he shrugged.  “If you want to fall and be cold and wet, that’s on you.  But don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

“I’m not going to fall.  I can do this, I know I can.  Besides, I just have to fix the wires and turn on the antennae so they can reach the transmitter. 

Dodge turned his head towards a set of tall weeds 10 feet from the bridge.  He squinted and tried his hardest to see the shoe-box-sized transmitter the two had hidden, but he couldn’t.  He or Dresden would return to the transmitter daily to ensure the devices were recording properly.  The two had attempted to transmit their data over an open radio station, but the local authorities showed up on Dresden’s front porch and ordered her to shut it down.  They said some people heard the recordings—then only a series of stomps and a robotic voice counting back the number of steps recorded every 10 minutes—and became panicked.  Boy, her parents sure were pissed, but they quickly got over it.

“Okay,” he said.  “Just be careful.” 

Dresden returned to the bridge and Dodge fed a bundle of wires through the missing plank.  It was the quickest part of the installation process.  Within a matter of seconds the wires were attached and he heard the activation switches click.  Dresden climbed up the pillar and crumpled dramatically to the bridge’s surface. 

“Oh,” she laughed through gasping for air for her burning lungs, “that was a workout.”

“What about the activation lights?” Dodge asked.  He nodded to the boxes that were only visible to him because he knew where to look.  “Aren’t the Pahnyakins going to be able to see the lights when it’s dark?”

“They’re pointing towards the water and aren’t that bright.  They’d really only have to be focusing below them, but I don’t think they’ll be looking there.”

“And you really think the transmitter is safe over there?  What if the rain really starts coming down?”

“Relax,” she smiled.  “Trust me, it’s all waterproof.  It just can’t be submerged.  Besides, it only has to last a week, and it’s not supposed to rain on any night but tonight.”