[Galaxy Of Fear] - 12(26)

“I hate loose ends.” Fett pulled a small holdout blaster from his boot, but found it covered with swamp slime.

Fett tossed the blaster aside and aimed his capture cable at the little creature. As he fired, Yoda squawked and threw his arms up in sheer panic. The capture cable accidentally snagged the walking stick, wrapping itself around the cane and jerking it from Yoda’s hands.

Boba Fett stumbled backward as the cable went slack and the stick came flying back into his face. He slipped and vanished.

He had fallen down the hole at the base of the tree. The moment the bounty hunter disappeared, Yoda composed himself with a gentle sigh.

“You were only pretending to be afraid,” Tash said.

“Gave him what he expected to find, I did,” replied Yoda. “Sometimes that is the best way to fool people.”

“That cave,” Zak said. “There’s some sort of wind coming from it. What is that?”

“Strong is that place, with the dark side,” Yoda whispered. “It is not a place for the weak.”

“What’s down there?” Zak asked.

Yoda blinked. “Only what you take with you.”

“We can’t leave him down there, can we?” Zak asked.

The Jedi Master studied Zak thoughtfully. “Find his own way, he must. Unless you wish to go down and find him.”

Zak’s answer was interrupted by bloodcurdling screams. A horde of Children swarmed over tree roots and through puddles, charging toward them out of the misty swamp.

There was no time to react. Zak saw Galt’s face, wide-eyed and screaming, just before the man slammed into him. He was knocked down and stumbled into the entrance to the cave.

Zak fell backward into the dark.





CHAPTER 18


Zak didn’t remember hitting bottom. He barely remembered staggering to his feet. His first real moment of awareness was standing in near darkness and shivering with cold.

Galt was standing next to him. Nearby, several other of the Children who had also fallen into the cave were climbing to their feet.

But the Children seemed to have forgotten Zak. They were staring into the darkness, looking at something that Zak could not see.

And then he could.

Small lights like fireflies swirled in the darkness and mist. Slowly, they grew into images spinning around in the misty cave. Zak rubbed his eyes, wondering if the fall had rattled his brain, but the images remained. It was like looking at holograms, only these visions weren’t coming from any machine.

“That’s us,” Galt whispered, staring at the largest of the images. “That’s me.”

Frightened and amazed, Zak watched as the visions played themselves out like a holovideo.

Zak saw the village, but it was smaller and cruder, as it must have looked when the survivors first started to carve a life out of the swamp. He saw the survivors trying to grow food out of the driest ground they could find, only to have their gardens flooded by the treacherous swamp. He saw the humans hunt swamp creatures, only to be eaten by swamp slugs and dragonsnakes. Defeated, the survivors continued to scavenge food from the wreckage of a ship.

The vision shifted, and Zak sensed that time had passed. The survivors looked thin and worn, but they had built huts. Some of them sat in the village cuddling tiny babies to their bodies to keep them warm. Zak recognized the woman he’d seen in the earlier hologram. Some of the survivors tinkered with a storage machine that preserved the last of their food.

The vision shifted again, and Zak saw the familiar-looking woman pull the last container of food out of the storage unit. The children now outnumbered the parents, and they were all screaming from hunger. In the vision, Zak watched the desperate parents weep as, day by day, their children grew hungry and thin, begging for food. Starving, they ate moss and fungus, but it wasn’t enough.

The last vision was terrible. Zak saw the survivors, starved into madness, turning on a corpse. He and Galt and the other Children could clearly see how horrified the parents were by their own acts. What they had done was a last, desperate attempt to save their children. It was the act of beings so hungry they had lost their minds. As the parents fed their starving children, they cried.

The vision faded.

The crying continued. Galt was sobbing. One of the other Children hugged herself and shuddered.

The Children had relished the thought of eating human flesh because they remembered it from their childhood. But this vision had shown them how desperate their parents had been, and how horrible their final act really was. With a final shudder, Galt and the other Children skulked away into the darkness.

Once again Zak recalled Yoda’s words: They thought we were food. I have taught them otherwise.

The vision in the cave had taught them. Yoda had taught them.