Evolutionary Rebel

by J. D. Cavan

  “This does not include you, Dr. Myers,” Carlyle asserted.

  Myers was nodding but his head was somewhere else. He had no idea where she was, but he certainly wasn’t going to sit back and let Replica handle this without him.

  “Ben, are you listening?” Silva asked.

  “Yes, I am,” he said.

  “You are to stay out of this Ben,” Silva said.

  Zim shut the communication down and the Order disappeared. Myers walked out of the meeting room and down the hallway. Zim followed behind.

  “What is it, Zim?” Myers snapped, turning around. The general just stood there. “I don’t need a babysitter.” Clearly the Order had wanted Zim to keep an eye on him. “You’re honestly going to leave this up to your Replica to complete this mission?”

  “You think you know best, but you don’t,” Zim said. “Because you’re an Original, because you can take that eye-shield off anytime you want for however long you want.”

  Ben was surprised. Zim had never talked to him like that. He knew it was impossible, but it seemed that Zim was envious of him for his freedoms. No military Replica was permitted to remove their eye-shields for an extended period of time. Ever.

  “I don’t think I’m the best. I just don’t want her to get killed, and the Replica have a reputation of killing Ereb,” Ben stated.

  “There are things you don’t know, things you aren’t going to know.” Zim faced him. Myers glared into his eye-shield wondering what exactly Zim meant by that, what he wasn’t telling him.

  “What are you saying, Zim?” Myers demanded. Zim was frozen in front of him, then he turned and walked away.

  10

  “LOOKS LIKE AN EREB tent city,” James announced.

  They were at a campsite in the Chattahoochee National Forest. James and Luca had gotten rid of the tractor-trailer outside Pittsburgh, and bought a Ford pickup and a Harley for James and Dani with cash they had taken from the hideout. They had to play the part of mindless humans to buy anything. Even cash exchanges eventually activated a Replica response. Aion was monitoring constantly.

  Tents dotted the area and surrounded a large fire pit in the center of the camp. Samantha breathed the clean air into her lungs and warmed herself by the fire.

  “I love this!” Janey said, putting a stick with a marshmallow on the end into the fire. The burnt gooey stuff fell off of it as she put the rest in her mouth. Samantha wondered what kind of life Janey had when it was just with James and Dani. She glanced over at Dani. She was sitting on a stone sharpening her long hunting knife. She seemed to pay little attention to Janey.

  The night went by quickly and it got dark with outlines of all of them sitting next to the fire. James and Dani were sitting, almost on top of each other, on one side of the pit with a bunch of empty beer cans around them, while Luca sat next to Bags on the other side. Samantha sat in between them with Janey on her lap.

  “Tell the story again,” Janey said to Samantha.

  “Not tonight Janey.” She wasn’t into the story of the Ereb origins, even though she knew Janey loved to hear it over and over again.

  “Oh come on Sam, tell us a story,” James said, smirking. Samantha shot him a dirty look.

  “Please!” Janey cried.

  “Okay, okay,” Samantha squeezed Janey’s sides and kissed her on the cheek.

  Luca shook his head. “I’m not in the mood for this.”

  “It’s not about you, Luca,” she replied, continuing to cuddle with Janey. Luca crossed his arms and then got up and walked away from the fire.

  She watched him for a moment and wondered what had gotten into him, but then started the story. “Back when we first became Ereb, way back probably when you were still in diapers…”

  Janey stared giggling. “Diapers” she repeated.

  “Yes, even someone as smart as you wore diapers,” James said. “Go on, Sam.”

  “Many years ago, I Actualized Luca, Dani and Pete, and when we all became Actualized, we realized something.” She let Janey chime in because she could tell she wanted to.

  “That we had differences. That there were different domains, like strength and intelligence and compassion.”

  “Yes, and your brother and I realized that we had certain powers to put things together that no else could. We realized that we could locate other Potential Ereb, and we named that power ‘synchronic sense.’”

  “Yes, yes! And that’s when you knew about me,” Janey said. “I remember when Noah came with Pete and Luca and he wanted to look into my eye and he had the red star like you.” There was sadness in Janey’s voice. She had been close to Noah. James glanced over, his face grim.

  “Noah was the best. He made a lot of Ereb, let me tell you,” James uttered, his words slurring.

  “Once we found out that Ereb high on all four domains could actualize Potentials, and that we could find them when we did synchronic checks—”

  “You Actualized all the Ereb!” Janey interrupted.

  “Many of them, and we could do it freely—”

  “Because there was no Replica yet,” Janey said, her face falling a little. “And then you separated—”

  “Because we had Noah and we could cover more ground. That’s when Luca and Pete went off with Noah to the East Coast and Dani and I stayed out West.”

  “And that’s when you found Lilith at the Ereb camp, right?”

  “We did.” Samantha was getting tried, and she hoped Janey was too. She was getting to the part in the story that she disliked. She had told it so many times that she had dissociated from the feelings, but it was never a pleasant tale for her to tell. It was their very short Ereb history, and Samantha wasn’t so sure if there was going to be a second act.

  “Go on,” Janey said.

  “I Actualized Potentials, and one night during our Festival of the Red Star, guess who shows up?”

  “Lilith!” Janey exclaimed.

  “And in front of hundreds of Ereb, Samantha stood in front of Lilith and lit the sky with two red stars,” Dani chimed in.

  “Lilith believed that the Ereb evolved because we were supposed to help the human race. Humans were in a lot of trouble back then.” Samantha knew it wasn’t the end of the real story, the one that tragically ended months later when General Zim and Replica showed up for the first time. They burned the Ereb camp down, killing Lilith and most of the Ereb. She and a small group of Ereb barely escaped alive. The memory of it still made Samantha sick to her stomach, and now more than ever it seemed to be the beginning of the end of the Ereb story.

  “It’s a happy ending,” James said with sarcasm in his voice. Dani put a finger to his lips to shush him and took swig out of the bourbon bottle they shared.

  “Not really. Lilith dies, I know,” Janey said.

  “Well I don’t want to know,” James muttered in jest, struggling to stand up and then tipping over and falling to the ground. Everyone broke out in laugher. “Very funny.” James pulled himself up after his fall.

  Samantha was laughing, but it was bitter memories.

  “Janey, get into the tent, I’ll be there in a minute,” she told her. Janey got up off her lap and unzipped the tent and got inside.

  Bags climbed into her tent while James yanked Dani up and over toward their tent.

  “Nighty, night,” James mumbled to them.

  “It’s about time you two got a room,” Luca said snidely.

  Samantha glanced over at Luca. He quickly looked away from her, but came over and sat down by the fire anyway.

  “Sorry about before, I just can’t hear that story again.” Luca put a stick in the embers.

  There was something off about him, she could tell. “What’s your problem?”

  “We’re screwed, that’s my problem. And listening to the good old times doesn’t help.” He tossed the stick in the fire.

  “Well it helps Janey,” she said, lowering her voice.

  “Pretending that we aren’t in serious trouble doesn’t help anyon
e,” Luca said.

  She sighed loudly. She felt like she was taking care of him when he was supposed to be there for her. “I don’t know what you want me to do. We’ll get to the Potentials tomorrow—”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” he said.

  She put her face in her hands. “You don’t want me to find Potentials and you don’t want me to surrender to Aion,” she huffed loudly and shook her head. “What do you want from me?”

  He stood up and paced. “At the bank and the hideout, you just don’t get it. I’m trying to protect you, Sam, and—” He stopped himself and turned away from her. It looked like he was wiping tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. She’d never seen him cry before, and it stunned her. Luca was rock solid, but the stress was clearly getting to him.

  “I’m just trying to do what I think is right,” she replied.

  He turned to look at her. His face was red, but there were no tears in his eyes. “I know what you’re trying to do, Sam. I’m not stupid, but you don’t know what I’m trying to do.” He then walked away from her down the dark trail and off into the night.

  Things are getting way too complicated, she thought. They better find the Potentials, and they better find a high-status Ereb. They needed another, now more than ever.

  She got into her tent and Janey was fast asleep. She lay down and felt it immediately. It was the strange sense of time freezing, space and new dimensions opening again. She braced herself, and suddenly the visions returned. She was back in the future.

  11

  ONE OF THEM SLOWLY started moving toward her, his body vibrating and wrenching oddly. He was an older boy, and she froze as he lifted his head. He was not right at all. His eyes were black, with blood inside of them. The boy’s pale face had started rotting away, and holes riddled the tissue of his exposed arms.

  He noticed her, and he opened his mouth, showing sharp teeth and a purplish tongue. It seemed as if the thing was going to try and talk, and she was pretty sure he wasn’t going to belt out a show tune, but she didn’t expect the noise. It hissed loudly, as if her mere presence enraged it. Then the thing woke the others and she squinted in pain. The screeching pierced her eardrums as they all began to howl.

  The things that had barely moved an inch suddenly sprang at her at bizarrely inhuman speed. Samantha whipped her blasters out, aiming first at the boy. Wicked boney claws that used to be hands reached out in front of him.

  She lit him up, blowing holes in his chest, but he kept coming. He was inches from her, so close she could smell his rot, before she put one into his face, blowing half his head off. A heap of flesh that was once a body hit the broken pavement.

  She had a moment to run, but instead held her arms straight out in front of her, taking aim as the rest descended on her. The screaming was so loud that she could barely hear her blasters, but she could see heads coming apart one by one.

  She cut all of them down except one. A wily-looking, demon-possessed woman with bear-sized nails and Medusa’s face dodged her rounds. Only seconds away from reaching her, she put a hot round in her forehead. The racing thing slid on the ground like an airplane making a very bad crash landing before it became motionless. Exorcism complete.

  She stepped over the steaming heap. She could smell the rot of the bodies, the heat from her blaster still cooking them up. She’d never kill a human, but these things weren’t humans anymore. She guessed that whatever sick shit Aion put into the air to try and exterminate humans during Extinction Phase 1 turned some of them into killer-demon-zombie-nightmare-abomination-type things.

  It got dead quiet again as she moved around the bloody smoldering bodies and further down the street until she came to a square. She needed to find her crew. If there were bunch of those messed up things here, there were surely more.

  She sat down for a second on the side of a crumbling stone wall that surrounded a cracked fountain in the middle of square. She realized she was exhausted, days without sleep, food, or water. She wanted to shut her eyes, but she forced them open.

  Night had started to descend and the silence gave way to a horrible crying in the distance. She shot up quickly and was hit with a wave of wailing that almost knocked her off her feet.

  “Oh hell,” she said to herself, pistols primed and ready. All four streets that lead to the square were packed with the demons, screeching and closing in on her.

  Take one street first and try and blast my way through it, run from there, she thought. But she quickly realized it wouldn’t work. She’d only get attacked and torn to pieces from behind; they moved too fast and they were coming from every direction.

  She felt like she had fallen into Hades. The bastards had her surrounded, so she threw her arms out straight at the sides and began to rotate her body. Her slow spinning became a twisting tornado and, just as they got closer, she flicked the switch and opened the heat on her blasters.

  It was peddle to the metal, and she created a force field around her of hell-raining fire, cutting the horde to pieces. She felt her body shaking and rattling, her jaw almost breaking as she clenched it so tightly, rounds booming from her blasters. She squinted as the world outside her filled with blurry images of monstrous faces and bodies ripping apart as she twisted like a wicked explosive device.

  She couldn’t hold this forever, but if she was going to get killed in hell, she was going to give them hell.

  12

  THE NEXT MORNING Samantha was up before everyone. She could still feel the heat from her guns, the dizziness from the spinning and the images of the demon horde fresh in her mind. If this was really her future, which seemed likely, then getting hunted by Zim and the Replica was suddenly starting to feel like a picnic.

  She headed out early on the trail and found an opening that lead to a view of the mountains. They were higher up than she thought—the clouds seemed closer to her and air cleaner. She sat down on huge rock that was more like the edge of a cliff, leaning out over the lookout. It was a perfect place for her to try and clear her head.

  It wasn’t long before she heard someone crunching up the trail. Her body tensed and her mind naturally jumped to whatever horrific thing that had happened to the humans in some bleak unknown future world.

  “Hey,” Dani said, stepping out of the woods. “Am I bothering you?”

  “No, I was just thinking,” she replied.

  “It’s amazing out here. I wish we could live this way, like we used to in desert.” Dani sat down next to her and it was quiet for a moment. “Has it been hard for you?”

  “A little,” Samantha replied, without thinking much about it. Her head was still in the Hades-apocalypse future. She had also been trying to put a bunch of things together at once and wasn’t getting anywhere. Pete’s vague warning, real or imagined; Lilith’s coded statement; and Dr. Myers’s offer for her to surrender to Aion; it all mixed to form nothing coherently helpful.

  “A little? It’s been more than just a little hard for me,” Dani said, sounding hurt and angry.

  Samantha sighed. “It’s not you, Dani. It’s about getting to the Potentials, Actualizing them, and then stopping Aion from creating hell on earth.” There was also something specific and Dani hit on right away.

  “Is it about him, the Original?”

  She sensed her jealousy and it pissed her off. “I’m seeing it, Dani. Dark days ahead, city of rubble and ash. And other things, bad things. Things you can’t even imagine.” She caught Dani’s eyes and tested the water. “I wonder if the Original offers a solution to this nightmare.”

  “He’s from Aion, Sam. So no, I don’t think he offers a solution. What does he even look like, anyway? He’s that hot you can’t stop thinking about him?”

  “Yeah, he is. He’s absolutely beautiful,” Samantha said out of spite. If Dani was going to be petty, so was she.

  “You’re a bitch,” Dani blurted.

  “I thought I could run this crap by you, but I guess not,” Samantha started to stand up
.

  “I guess not.”

  “I’m the one who should be jealous. You and James by the fire, all over each other,” she said, instantly regretting it. This was so not her, quibbling over nothing.

  “It’s interesting that you’re not jealous,” Dani raised her eyebrows. It looked like she had tears forming in her eyes.

  “This is waste of time.” Samantha stared off over the cliff. It was silent.

  “Why did you send me away?” Dani asked.

  She shook her head and furrowed her brow. She couldn’t believe that was bothering Dani. “It was years ago,” she said curtly.

  “We loved each other.”

  “You know why. Noah needed support in the East. We knew that our love for the Ereb cause was more important than what we had with each other,” she told her.

  “Maybe you knew that, but I wouldn’t have fallen for James, and you wouldn’t have fallen for her.”

  “I didn’t have those feelings for Lilith,” Samantha replied. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Then why didn’t you send her? Why me? She was stronger and smarter and she would have helped Noah.”

  “It was better if you went,” Samantha said.

  “Why!?” Dani pushed her.

  “Because I was afraid!” she admitted.

  “Afraid of what? You’re not scared of anything.”

  Samantha pulled her hair back and tied it up. “I was afraid that Lilith wouldn’t make it. I wanted to protect her, but it didn’t matter anyway because I couldn’t even do that.” There was a pause between them. The bitter remorse of losing Lilith entered her—the pain she always kept at bay, away from herself, so as to not cause her to want to burn the world down in a rage.

  “Protect her over me?” Dani’s eyes became tearful, her hurt feelings palpable to Samantha.

  “For the cause, Dani. You’re not listening to me.” It was silent between them for a couple of minutes before Dani spoke up again.

  “You’re right. I can’t give you honest advice about Myers the Original, and that’s on me. I just miss what we had.”