Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) by Ben Stevens (historical books to read TXT) 📕

After bouncing his face off the floor, Ratt lay perfectly still. He fought back the urge to cry out or even bring his hands to the bleeding lip his tooth had torn. Like a wild rabbit watching the hunter from under the branches of a tree not five yards away, he was motionless, listening for a reaction to his disastrous attempt at stealth.

With bated breath, he anticipated the raising of the alarm, but it never came. He allowed himself a sigh of relief but remained on high alert. He wiped the blood from his lip. It was swollen, and he could feel the troubled flesh on the inside of his mouth with his tongue. It was bumpy and gross. He slowly stood up and quietly brushed himself off. Although he still couldn’t see squat, his eyes were coming around and adjusting slightly. He could now differentiate darker shapes of black in the ambient darkness of the room, allowing him to navigate between the furniture in the office without any more bumps and crashes.

By the time he had crossed the room and reached the office door, feeling had fully returned to his extremities. Itching had replaced numbness, but Ratt ignored the urge and felt out for the door handle. Ratt felt around clumsily until he found the latch. He slowly turned it and pulled the door open. It let out a long creak, causing Ratt to wish he had yanked instead. Again he froze and waited to hear the “Polo!” to his “Marco!”, but only silence answered back.

On the other side of the door, he was relieved to find a tad bit of ambient light. The mezzanine here was exposed to the outdoors, a small portion of the far corner having fallen away. Ratt could smell the outside air and hear the cooing of doves in the middle distance. He turned toward the nearest wall, opened his fly, and relieved himself. Next, he made his way to the large fake plant in the corner near the open door. Feeling around behind it, he found the backpack he had stashed there earlier.

Satisfied with the convergence of his plan, he smiled giddily and plopped the bottom of the frame on the floor. He untied the bits of stringy leather that laced the pack's main cavity closed and reached his slender arm inside, feeling around for the torch he knew was there. He was frustrated, for it had settled to the bottom and he was having a heck of a time finding it; he should have taken it out before he even got there and stored it someplace more practical, like his hoodie pouch.

“Yes!” The boy’s tiny fingers found the torch and withdrew it from the pack. A flick of his thumb, and the musty theater became semi-illuminated, the torch’s cone of light waving through the air. The multitude of dust motes now visible looked like snowflakes in the torch’s beam, and Ratt felt like a kid on Christmas morning about to open his presents without first waking his parents.

Able to see where he was going now, he easily made his way down the broad, sweeping stairs to the main theater room. He gazed over the long-abandoned chairs that poked their rectangular stubby frames up into the room like tombstones in an indoor graveyard. His imagination was on fire with questions as he took it all in. With the throng of people now absent, he could see the theater for what it was in all its haunted, anachronistic glory.

He floated down the sloping grade of the auditorium floor to the base of the stage at the forefront of the room. Running his free hand along the edge, he followed the curve to the end, where floor met wall, under an old sign that read “EXIT.” A short series of five steps led from the rotten carpet and concrete floor of the auditorium to the warped wooden-slat floor of the stage. Trotting up them with ease, his gaze following the mouldering remains of a thick, heavy black curtain that reached nearly from floor to ceiling, and noticed for the first time the catwalks and the lights.

His gaze lingered on the lights, and he moved the beam of his torch from one to another, pausing for several moments on each one. Every one was a smooth black tube with a square mouth, no, a frame of some kind, fastened to the outside diameter of the tube. This frame, he could see, was designed to hold a sheet of transparent, colored material, for some of them still did. Ratt quickly surmised that the function of these lights, which in many ways resembled large, fixed and mounted versions of the very torch he held, was to shed different shades of colored light down onto the stage. He imagined how much fun it would be to work up in those lofty stations, pointing the focus of the beam here and there—a subtle but important part of the show.

“We all have our part to play in the illusion,” he said to himself, and smiled a musing smile.

As it was in most adventures, he found the real goods behind the curtain. The “Management Only” sign was hanging askew by one rivet, but it still marked the staircase leading down into the basement. Ratt re-shouldered the sagging, heavy pack and made his way downstairs.

He was the proverbial kid in a candy store. The basement storage room was a virtual Library of Alexandria of pre-Storm cinema. And there, on a simple table that to Ratt now looked like an ancient temple’s pedestal holding a priceless relic of the past, was the film projector. He had overheard the grownups speak of the tragedy earlier; of what a shame it was that the projector no longer worked, and how wonderful it would be if it did; what secrets they might have gleaned from the past, etcetera, etcetera.

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