by Jon McGoran
He nodded, then frowned. “How do you do that?”
I reach under the chest plate and held my breath as I pushed the release button, hoping it would work.
It did, kind of. With a raspy mechanical whir, the chest plate and the shoulder brackets retracted. But the brackets on my lower legs, the ones holding my feet in place, had more trouble. They both made a series of noises—whir, clunk, whir, clunk, whir, clunk—but failed to disengage.
The snow was starting to come down harder, driven sideways by the wind. Squinting up through it at Rex, I said, “It’s jammed. From the impact.”
A section of the hospital collapsed and the ground shook. A murmur rose from the crowd and they backed away as smoke and sparks billowed into the sky. They weren’t staring at us anymore.
Several cars with angry flashing lights were driving toward us over the muddy lawn. I sat up as best I could and put my lips near Rex’s ear. “We’ve got company,” I said.
He looked over at the approaching cars, then turned back to me. “Try it again,” he said.
I reached back under the chest plate and pressed the button. As the leg brackets did their whir, click, whir, click thing, Rex grabbed the brackets on either side of on my left leg and pulled. With a sound of tortured metal they came apart and I pulled my leg out. We did the same thing again, on the other side, and then I was free. Muddy and freezing, but free.
I scrambled to my feet. It was strange to be outside the exosuit. I felt weak and small and vulnerable. My body didn’t seem to be working quite right.
I looked up at Rex. “Where’s Reivik?”
“I had to let her go.”
“You what?”
“I have her driver’s license, her address. She swore she would testify if I let her go. I couldn’t just hold her captive.”
The cars with the flashing lights pulled up right next to us. Rex put his arm around me as we turned to face them.
One of the copters drifted over as well, a big one, hovering directly above us. It didn’t have any flashing lights on it.
All six of the front doors on all three cars opened simultaneously, and six men in uniform got out. They all wore shades, even though it was a dark, gray day. They all had guns drawn, and they all had Wellplants—the new ones. Their cars were facing us, with the headlights on, so I couldn’t see what was printed on the sides.
One of them came forward. “You’re under arrest,” he said.
“What for?” Rex asked.
The guy smiled coldly. He glanced back at the hospital, then down at the broken exosuit on the ground. “I don’t know if I can think of any charges I couldn’t throw at you, but let’s start with stealing and destroying that exosuit, and burning down the hospital.”
He stepped forward, then the others did, too.
“You’re not cops,” I said, and they stopped.
“Excuse me?” said the leader.
I looked around and realized it was just us and them. Everyone else had withdrawn to a safe distance, over by the road. “You’re not police,” I said. “You’re private security. You’re rentacops.”
He smiled again. The same smile. “We are empowered by the state to enforce the law and arrest perpetrators within the OmniCare facility.”
The copter above us was hovering lower, and the rentacop in charge glanced up at it, annoyed, like he had the situation under control and he didn’t need anybody stepping on his toes.
“We’re not in the OmniCare facility,” I said. “In fact, there’s not much OmniCare facility left. And we didn’t burn it down.”
“Well, young lady, you’re going to have to explain that to the judge.”
I could feel Rex tensing beside me, like he was getting ready to fight it out with them. I glanced down at the exosuit. The dart gun was gone, but the shock baton was still clipped on. Next to the gun. I wondered if I could make either of them work with my tiny bare hands.
The rentacop in charge seemed to read my mind. He laughed. “Sweep harp, I would lub to add rejisting arresh to the long lips of cha-chas.”
CHAPTER 59
The other rentacops seemed confused as they looked at the one doing the talking. Their heads tilted forward, staring at him the same way Charlesford had stared at me, as if their Wellplants were studying him.
He glanced back at them, irritated, but confused as well. Then he turned back to Rex and me. “Amb I’d lub to subub, bub…”
“What the hell…,” Rex muttered. But I’d seen this before. I squinted up at the copter hovering over us, then looked back at the rentacops in front of us.
With their shades on I couldn’t tell what was going on with their eyes, but the one in charge swayed and fell sideways. His comrades watched him fall, then they fell, too, one after the other, all in a row.
Rex still looked confused, but I nudged him with my elbow and pointed up at the copter.
“Is that Dara?” he said, squinting at the figure waving out the side door of the copter.
“What about your orders?” I called up to her as she descended.
She shrugged. “I got new orders.”
As Dara touched down, the last section of the OmniCare building still standing let out a loud, grinding noise that sent the firefighters backing away. It toppled over in a column of sparks, settled for a moment, then let out a loud groan, like the last gasp of some horrible dying beast. It folded in on itself as it sank into the earth, then all that was left of it was a glowing red hole and a stream of bright embers, rising into the sky like snowflakes from hell.
We were all quiet for a moment, watching the spectacle in awe. Then I turned to Dara. “Just so we’re clear, we didn’t do that.”
“That’s actually reassuring,” Dara replied. “What about the miners? Did they all get out okay?”
“They got out,” I replied. “But I don’t know if they’re okay.” I turned to Rex. “We need to get to Centre Hollow.”
Rex nodded. “Can you give us a lift?”
A gust of wind twisted the column of smoke and sparks into a corkscrew.
“Sure thing,” Dara said, with a nervous laugh. “But we better hurry up. That storm front from last night is catching up with us. It could be a rough ride.”
Dara wasn’t delighted when I pointed at the filing cabinet embedded in the mud and told her we needed to take it with us. Even with the three of us, the cabinet was hard to lift. It was frustrating, after having carried it by myself with no problem. I got the sense that some in the crowd gathered on the roadside were watching us again, but they were at quite a distance, and none of them seemed interested in coming any closer to see what we were doing.
We finally managed to slide/roll/walk the cabinet onto the copter, but by the time we were in the air, the snow was coming down harder. We had to fly just over the treetops to see where we were going.
From the sky, the fiery pit where the hospital had stood looked like a portal to hell, which in a way it had already been. The last of the school buses and ambulances were gone, all the patients presumably in transit to other hospitals—hopefully ones that didn’t engage in forced medical experiments or slave labor.
I told Dara generally where we were headed, what direction and what landmarks to look for. We flew roughly along Bogen Road, looking for the break in the woods where the old Main Street led down into Centre Hollow.
On our way, I got out of the mud-soaked coveralls, leaving me in the semi-mud-soaked clothes I’d been wearing underneath. There was a blanket in the copter, and Rex wrapped it around me. He wasn’t even wearing a coat, but he didn’t seem cold.
We flew over a couple of places where the ground had collapsed or split open, including one where the angry red glow from the underground fires reflected off the snow, melting it in places. I worried about the fires spreading underground, but with no coal left to burn and no air to support combustion, the only fire was the fire from the chemicals in the processing units. That and the hospital.
But I also worried about
the instability undermining Centre Hollow itself. The branches of the mine under Centre Hollow hadn’t been touched by OmniCare’s operation. They were still sealed off. And the liquefaction that took out the supporting coal columns had happened years ago. But there was no guarantee that the geological instability that took down the hospital wouldn’t spread anyway.
Off to the side, I spotted what looked like a short chimney in the middle of the woods, spouting black smoke. The trees around it were either burned or blackened with soot.
As the wind buffeted the copter and the snow came down harder, I pointed at it and leaned close to Rex. “That’s the vent.”
He looked at me quizzically and I realized he hadn’t been there for any of that. He hadn’t seen the awful fake snow coming out of it, or talked to Devon, or seen what had been going on below it. He moved his face close to mine, brushing my hair away from my eyes as he stared into them. “Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded and wiped my eyes. I’d tell him about that someday, when he told me about whatever horrors he had been enduring these last few days. But not right now.
I leaned toward Dara. “It should be just to the southeast of here. Less than a mile.”
“Good.” She gave me a sober look. “This wind is getting too dangerous to fly so low.”
She adjusted course, and thankfully we didn’t see any other signs of fire or geological instability. A minute later, we spotted Main Street. We flew over the WELCOME TO CENTRE HOLLOW sign and the wrecked VW, then the clearing where Devon and Kiet had reunited. Beyond that, down in the hollow, the faint outlines of the buildings of Centre Hollow came into sight through the snow: the school, the post office, the old stores lining Main Street, and the houses on the street that crossed it. Then I spotted the truck. It appeared suddenly right in front of us; one second there was no sign of it, then there it was, a big, long white box, almost invisible against the snow.
“There’s the truck!” I called out, pointing. “They made it!”
Rex put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, but as I reached up to put my hand over his, I stopped. There was something dark lying in the snow next to the truck. As we got closer, I spotted two more. Three. Six. Twelve. I grabbed Rex’s hand and squeezed it tight. “Oh, no,” I whispered.
They were bodies.
CHAPTER 60
Put me down there,” I told Dara.
“Are you sure?” she asked, concerned. “There’s no place to land. You’d have to go down on a rope. I wouldn’t recommend it in this wind.”
“No,” Rex said. “You can’t go down there. It’s inside Centre Hollow. You can’t breathe down there.”
His words stopped me. He was right. And I didn’t have a breather.
“There’s a clearing, west of here. We just passed it,” I told Dara. “It should be big enough to land, easily.”
Rex shook his head. “Even that’s not safe. Not for long.”
Dara looked back and forth between us, while keeping one eye on the copter’s controls and displays.
“Why isn’t it safe?” she said. “Explain.”
We told her how the clearing was like a no-man’s-land between the area where the miners who had been splintered could safely breathe and the area where the rest of us could safely breathe.
“We can breathe on one side, they can breathe on the other side. It’s not perfect for anybody, but you can breathe in the middle there for at least a few minutes,” I told her. “And if you stay at the western edge, you’ll be fine.”
She gave me a dubious look, then looked at Rex. He shrugged and nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me where.”
The wind grew worse even in the few seconds it took us to find the clearing, and by the time Dara put down, I think she was more worried about the storm than any toxic gases.
“I can’t wait here for you,” she said. “If the wind gets any worse, I won’t be able to take off.”
“I have one more favor to ask,” I said,
She raised an eyebrow, dubious but ready to listen.
I told her about Doc, and about Cornelius, aka Bennett Thompson, and how Doc’s predicament was what sent us out there in the first place. “Doc’s still in jail,” I told her, “and I’m pretty sure there are documents in that filing cabinet that should prove him innocent and get him released, and also reveal what was going on at OmniCare.” I asked her to take it to New Ground Coffee Shop in Philadelphia, that Jerry would know what to do with it. “Plus,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous, “can you ask him to let my mom know I’m okay?”
Dara smiled and said she would, but her smile was cut short as another gust of wind rocked the copter.
We said our thanks and goodbyes, then we opened the side door.
Driving snow whipped into the cabin, stinging our faces and swirling everywhere.
“This is nice,” Rex shouted, holding his arm up to shield his face as we stepped out of the copter.
The snow was only a few inches deep in most places, but drifting so much it was hard to get good footing.
As we approached the middle of the clearing, he said, “The moment you start showing any signs of confusion or whatever, I’m getting you out of there.” He had to raise his voice over the sound of the wind. “Even if I have to carry you kicking and screaming.”
I stopped. “What about you? What if you pass out?” I didn’t have my exosuit anymore. “If you pass out, I won’t be able to carry you out.”
“I’m not that heavy,” he said, laughing. He wasn’t very convincing. “Come on, let’s go.”
“No!” I shouted. “You wait here, where we know it’s safe. I’ll go over to the truck to see what’s going on. If I’m not back in five minutes, you come and get me.”
He looked at me with his clear, somber, deep brown eyes, studying my face while he considered my plan. “Okay,” he said finally. “Three minutes.”
“Four.”
“Okay, four.”
He grabbed me by the elbows and kissed me, filling me with a warmth that I sorely needed.
It took me almost a minute to cross the clearing and make my way through the woods to the truck. The first chimera I came to was half covered with snow and unconscious, but alive. His breathing was fast, shallow, and loud. I shook him, but he didn’t respond. The next one was in the exact same state, and the one after that as well.
A nagging horror grew in the back of my mind, a terrifying suspicion that regardless of our intentions, somehow we had killed them all. I knew we all shared responsibility, the whole group, but I couldn’t help the feeling that if it all went wrong, it would be all my fault.
As I ran from one crumpled figure to the next, my brain seemed to fragment, part of it trying to figure out what could have happened, part trying to figure out what I should do now, part of it focusing more than a little energy on despising myself for my hubris—for thinking I had all the answers, when in reality I couldn’t even figure out what the questions were.
The idea struck me that maybe I could somehow get them all back onto the truck, get them back into that awful mine. Or even back to the hospital, to the underground CCU units, where at least they could breathe.
But those were no longer options. They’d all been destroyed.
There had been plenty of times in my life when I had wished I were different in some way or another, when I embarrassed myself or felt lonely or pathetic. But I had never hated myself before, and at that moment I did, with an intensity that scared me.
I heard a groan near the front of the truck, and I ran over there. One of the chimeras in the snow was moving, just a bit. I brushed the snow off his face and saw that it was Gus, the big guy with the horns we had encountered in the tunnel.
“Gus!” I said. “What happened?”
He looked up at me with half-closed eyes. “Don’t know,” he answered. “We got here okay. The folks here were helping us. Then the storm moved in and they all got sick.”
“Where’s Claudia?
Where’s Devon?”
He shook his head and coughed.
“Hey!” a voice called in the distance. I assumed it was Rex at first, and I turned, ready to argue that it hadn’t been four minutes yet, but it was someone much smaller.
“Help me!” he cried out, breathlessly. “Help!”
“Henry?”
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Thank God! Help us get these poor bastards out of the cold.”
“Us?”
He was a cold, wet, disheveled mess, but he looked healthy, worlds better than the last time I’d seen him, when he couldn’t even get out of bed. “Yeah, there’s a couple others who are doing okay.”
“What happened? And did you get better?”
“I don’t know what happened out here. They came from the mine, in that truck, and they all got sick. Everybody else, too. Everybody but me. I was lying in bed, damn near dead, listening to the wind whistling through the house and wondering if the cold was going to get me before the sickness. Then I just…started feeling better, just like that. I came outside to tell someone, and I saw these folks collapsing onto the ground.”
Something was starting to click into place in my brain, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
“Thank God Claudia showed up a minute later in her big exosuit.”
“She’s here?”
“She’s been helping me get them to shelter, but we could use a hand.” He grabbed my sleeve and gave it a shake. “So, can you help us or what?”
I ignored him for a moment, trying to let my thoughts arrange themselves into something comprehensible.
“I said, can you help?” Henry tugged at my blanket. “They’re going to freeze to death out here.”
“Jimi!” boomed another voice. This time it was Rex for sure, trudging toward me through the snow. I held up a hand, letting him know I heard him, but that I needed a moment to think. “Jimi!” he called again as he got closer. “It’s been five minutes.”
“I know,” I told him, closing my eyes, trying to concentrate, wondering if the toxic gases were making it difficult to think. But they weren’t. I could think just fine.