"Recall" - Part Six

 

Part Six

            “We need to get to the reactor,” Quaid said.

            “People are dying!” Melina told him. “We need to get them air!”

            “The reactor makes air,” Cara revealed. “That’s Cohaagen’s secret.”

            As the elevator arrived at their destination – the mine tunnels – the perplexed Melina inquired, “Where does this ‘reactor’ come from?”

            “Martians built it,” Gumball told her.

            “Martians?!” Melina uttered in disbelief. “As in aliens?!”

            “Is it really so hard to believe?” Cara tittered. “I mean, you are standing on their planet after all.”

            “Yeah, but…” Melina struggled to comprehend. “You sure about this?”

            “It’s just up ahead, c’mon,” Quaid led the group, his flashlight shining a path that abruptly came to a dead end. Dumbfounded, he muttered, “What the…?”

            “Aw, man!” Darwin let out a discouraged groan. “Now what?”

            VROOM! Suddenly, they were bathed in the bright light of a mining mole. An amplified voice spoke from inside, telling the group, “Get yer butts out the way!”

            “Benny?!” Na’Riah recognized the voice.

            They did as the cab driver (now mole driver) instructed, allowing the mole to rumble past the intersecting tunnel, its seven-foot-diameter central drill spinning at full speed. It penetrated through the dead-end wall. Afterwards, Benny jumped out of the mole from the cabin at the rear, greeting the people he just helped with open arms.

            “Another unexpected twist!” Al reveled.

            “Why’re you helping us?” Quaid asked Benny.

            “‘Cause you asked me to…or the you who used to be Hauser,” Benny explained. “I was in on his whole plan of stickin’ it to that jerk, Cohaagen. Those are my friends he got down there sufferin’. I am one of them after all.” Benny grabbed his right arm and suddenly twisted it off. Underneath the prosthetic limb was a deformed nub with a few vestigial fingers. He then stretched out his arm and an additional forearm unhinged like a pterodactyl wing, much to the astonishment of Gumball and Darwin.

            “Coooooool!” The Watterson boys exclaimed.

            Benny put on a jagged smile. “Now do what ya’ll gotta do and get to that reactor.”

            “What about you?” Cara asked him.

            “I gotta look after my kids,” Benny said. “They do need feedin’ when this is all over.”

            Benny headed in the opposite direction of the heroes, who went through the open hole in the stone wall. Beyond it, they found the alien reactor, just as it looked in the mind probe with Kuato. They took in the awe-inspiring sight. The columns of the reactor extended seemingly forever into the dark recesses of the hollowed-out mountain. The team stood at the edge of a steep cliff, next to the footings of the flimsy, steel bridge that ran from a cave wall to the reactor core.

            “It’s all one big reactor made out of turbinium,” Cara explained. “Ya see that beneath us? It’s a glacier. The whole core of Mars – this dimension’s Mars – is ice. The reactor melts it, releasing oxygen.”

            “Right,” Quaid agreed with her observation. “And Cohaagen knows all of it.”

            “But the idiot won’t turn it on,” Snake assessed.

            “Of course not,” Anais said. “He can’t control a Mars with an atmosphere.”

            “And this will be enough for everyone to breathe?” Melina asked.

            “Enough for the whole planet,” Cara verified.

            They climbed the bridge’s footings, pulling themselves onto the bridge itself. Wasting no time, they headed for the gargantuan reactor looming ahead of them.

            Of course, walking into the reactor was no simple task.

            Making sure of that, Cohaagen positioned armed soldiers to ambush them.

            But Quaid, Melina, Snake, Al, Na’Riah, and Cara were no easy targets. The skilled marksmanship and combat of the six heroes made short work of the soldiers. That, along with a watch device Gumball and Darwin remembered finding in one of the suitcases, in which the brothers and Anais used holograms to fool the soldiers into shooting their projections, only to shoot at each other.

            Averting the ambush, the team took a freight elevator all the way to the control room of the reactor core where Cara spotted something familiar…

            “My TARDIS!” She called to the tall, rectangular black monolith like an old friend she hadn’t seen in ages.

            “You mean that thing isn’t part of the reactor?” Melina regarded it with amusement.

            “Nope,” Gumball told her. “It’s how we came to your world in the first place.”

            “And it’s how we’re leaving it,” Cara added, “once we’ve activated this…”

            She walked toward the round altar in the center of the room, reaching out for the hand emblem. Suddenly, a light flashed at her, and she stopped her hand. “Don’t touch that!” A voice threatened her. It was Cohaagen, holding a gun aimed right for Cara and her friends. He signaled them away from the altar.

            “What are you afraid of, Cohaagen?” Quaid challenged. “Turn it on!”

            “Impossible,” Cohaagen refused. “Once the reaction starts, it’ll spread to all the turbinium in the planet. Mars will go into global meltdown…that’s why the aliens never turned it on.”

            “You expect us to believe you?” Melina scoffed.

            “Who cares what you believe!” Cohaagen snarled. “In thirty seconds, you all will be dead. Then I’ll blow this place up…and be home in time for cornflakes.” He showed the detonator in his left hand, pointing with the one holding the gun to an explosive charge near the altar.

            “I’d say you won’t get away with this,” Cara said, “but my friend Al over there…” She nodded to Squires. “He doesn’t really like clichés.”

            “Au contraire, ma sœur,” Al spoke in French all of the sudden. “I absolutely adore clichés. Like the one where the stupid corporate baddie wastes time listening to the guy who doesn’t know when to shut up…or the one where he makes the same stupid mistake that he made in Robocop, and he was the one who wouldn’t shut up about wanting a chopper as he holds a gun to the Old Man and…”

            “SHUT UP!” Cohaagen flared with impatience, aiming his gun at Al.

            With him distracted, Na’Riah slashed off the gun hand. Cohaagen howled in agony and fury, his one remaining hand activating the detonator.

            Quickly, Snake ran to the explosive charge, grabbing and tossing it.

            The charge sailed out of the control room and exploded near the surrounding metal wall. The blast created an instant tornado that threatened to suck everyone and everything out of the room. Whereas everyone else managed to hold onto something, Cohaagen and Gumball weren’t so fortunate, both being sucked right out through the hole in the wall.

            They emerged on the side of a mountain, dropping on a sandy slope.

            The breath was sucked from both of their lungs, and they both started to decompress.

            Suffering, Cohaagen’s eyeballs ruptured, and his brain sprouted through his ears.

            Gumball, although able to last much longer than the human Cohaagen, was still agonizing in depressurization when he was hit by a blast of steam and air. The top of the mountain blew from enormous pressure that developed within, erupting like a white volcano. Geysers of steam shot all around Gumball.

            Moments from death, the blue cat-boy was soon able to breathe.

            The sky above him had turned heavenly blue.

            Not before long did he hear the hums and grinds of Cara’s TARDIS, the tall black monolith itself manifested beside him on the slope. “GUMBALL!” Darwin and Anais were the first to emerge from ship, engulfing their brother in a hug. “Are you okay?”

            “Better than okay…I can breathe…on Mars!” Gumball reflected in astonishment.

            “Everyone can now,” said Cara, who disembarked from her TARDIS along with Snake, Al, Norah, Quaid, and Melina.

            “Air on Mars, big domino ships that are bigger on the inside…it’s like a dream,” Melina was overwhelmed. She looked to Quaid, whose expression turned grim and confused on hearing her words. “What’s wrong?”

            “I just had a terrible thought,” Quaid shuddered. “What if this is all a dream?”

            Melina smiled. “Then kiss me quick…before you wake up.” She offered her lips to him. Quaid took her into his arms, and they kissed before a beautiful new sun that shined over Mars.

            Al looked on the romantic scene, which was otherwise the end of the story of Total Recall. The kiss went on for an entire three minutes, much to Squires’ discomposure. “Kinda weird to watch this without the credits rolling.”

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            With the conclusion of their Mars adventure and their memories restored, Cara, Snake, and the Watterson siblings returned to the town of Elmore – in Gumball’s amazing world – with Al and Norah. Al treated them all to dinner at Joyful Burger, supposedly with the currency used in the realm.

            “Where’d ya get the money to pay for all this?” Gumball asked him.

            “Even Omnibucks work in the Infinite DC, kid,” Al winked. He gestured to the cashier, the literal blockheaded Larry Needlemeyer, who was rather overjoyed by the gracious tip that Al gave him.

            “No offense to you kids,” Norah told the Wattersons. “But I’ve been in your world for five minutes, and I feel like I took a massive dose of LSD.”

            “More like acid to me,” Snake hissed, puffing on a cigarette.

            “Sir! For the last time, we do not allow smoking in here!” Larry bellowed from the counter; in spite of his warning, Snake insisted on puffing on his cigarette, causing several paying customers to leave.

            Meanwhile, Cara barely touched her burger and fries; instead, she remained focused on her cybernetic hand.

            Darwin noticed this. “You O.K., Miss Cara?”

            She was hardly aware that Darwin was talking to her until Al nudged at her with his elbow. “I’m alright,” she said. “It’s just…that ‘Ethos’ guy…the ‘Twilight Phantom,’ as he called himself.” Her face was stiffened with a range of uneasy emotions, ranging from concern to terror. “He said that my assimilated hand grew into him…does that make him…my clone?”

            “Nah,” Gumball dismissed. “He looks nothing like you.”

            “But he doesn’t have to,” Cara contested. “If he’s a Time Lord like me, he can look like whoever he wants to. He did say that we’ll see each other with these faces or completely different ones.” Her anxiety only worsened as she then realized, “If he knows about all the worlds within the Infinite DC, like Quaid’s world, then that also makes him dangerous! I need to find him before…”

            She was unexpectedly silenced by a burger that had been shoved into her mouth. She fired an icy glare at the culprit, who was none other than Al. “Sorry,” he shrugged. “I had to get you to calm down before you suffered a Cohaagen-level head explosion.”

            “AL! SERIOUSLY?!” Norah griped with a mouthful of burger. “Read the room!”

            “Sorry,” Al muttered again. “My point is, Cara…don’t worry. Whoever this ‘Twilight Phantom’ is, I’m sure he’ll be a pushover like all the rest of ‘em. Just let him try to go up against the Gladiator of Gallifrey…with the Protectorate on their side.”

            “Yeah,” Gumball stepped in. “And the Gladiator’s friends at their side, too!”

            Reassuring as Al and Gumball’s words were, Cara still couldn’t shake the spine-chilling impression that her first encounter with the Twilight Phantom left.

NEXT TIME...