by S. A. Beck
Dr. Yamazaki dared to peek into the front seat. The driver leaned hard against the door, blood pouring from several wounds. The passenger seat was empty. The man who had saved her from the van hadn’t made it into the car.
She scrambled into the front. The Atlantean at the wheel gave her a bleary-eyed look that told her he was struggling to stay conscious.
Movement in the rearview mirror caught her eye. The other sedan was after them and gaining fast. She found their own car slowing down, the Atlantean’s foot sliding off the gas as he slumped in his seat.
The car rocked as the pursuing sedan slammed into their rear fender.
A turn was coming up. Dr. Yamazaki grabbed the wheel and yanked it hard to the right, tires squealing as she managed to make the turn and even out.
The other sedan wasn’t so lucky. Eager to ram them off the road, the agents hadn’t been looking at the path ahead. They smashed right through a fire hydrant, a fence, and straight into the brick wall of a house.
Dr. Yamazaki gripped the steering wheel tightly as the vehicle gradually lost speed. With one hand, she felt for the Atlantean’s pulse and found none. As the car bumped to a stop on the curb, she eased him out of the driver’s seat and took his place.
She soon found she wasn’t coordinated enough yet to drive. She zigzagged for a couple of miles in the back streets of the residential neighborhood, getting honked at several times for cutting people off or running stop signs before she finally gave up. The car was riddled with bullet holes, and someone must have called the police by now. While they wouldn’t shoot her on sight like those agents, they’d take her into custody. Then she would be dead sooner or later.
Before she abandoned the vehicle, she rifled through the Atlantean’s pockets, taking a wallet, a phone, and a small can of pepper spray. Guilt tugged at her for robbing a man who had given his life to save her, but this was survival. He would want her to take anything that might help her elude capture.
Stumbling out of the car, she hobbled away, trying to get her rubbery legs to move her along. She cut through parks and backyards as startled faces stared at her through windows. In the distance she heard the chop chop chop of a police helicopter approaching.
Chapter 17
JUNE 18, 2016, ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
2:07 PM
Orion had proved to be a better candidate than expected. Who would have thought a mild-mannered nobody from civilian life could turn into a super soldier with less than a day’s training?
Yet that’s what had happened.
Orion stood in a special training room, much like the one Marquis D’Arcy had created for Jaxon. A line of weights were stacked on a rack to one side. In a corner hung an especially durable punching bag. Wooden dummies used for kung-fu stood to one side of the room.
Orion was working through those right now. He gave a blindingly fast roundhouse kick to one, sending it spinning on its moveable stand, then he punched the next one low in the stomach. He leapt up and planted two side kicks to the heads of the next dummies, and continued on.
General Meade watched in awe and more than a little fear. Imagine what such a soldier could do in the wrong hands!
Every hit was directly on a pressure point, marked by a network of black dots on the bodies of the dummies, and every hit was incredibly powerful. If the dummies hadn’t been specially designed to take a massive amount of punishment, they would have already shattered into splinters. This guy could hit like a black belt, and as far as General Meade knew, he hadn’t had any military training before today.
General Meade was training Orion himself. He wished he could bring in Marquis, but he was doing more valuable work with Jaxon. A willing servant was far more valuable than this slave. It would be nice if Meade could bring in one of the other martial arts instructors the military could supply, but he knew better than to ask the Pentagon for more funding.
At least not yet. Once they saw how well Orion was doing, they’d cough up the funds quickly enough.
And Orion was amazing. The general had given the Atlantean a basic, first-day course in kung-fu and shown him some videos of some traditional masters from the Shaolin temple, then he’d left Orion to figure out the rest himself. Now he was performing better than Meade ever could, despite his years of martial arts training and practice. Give Orion a few more days, and he’d give Marquis a run for his money.
Dr. Jones stood to one side with a clipboard, making notes. After Orion went through a few more moves with the martial arts dummies, the scientist asked him to lift some weights. Orion went over to the bench press, where Dr. Jones had prepared a bar with three hundred sixty pounds, twice Orion’s body weight.
“Do as many bench presses as you can,” Dr. Jones said.
Orion looked at General Meade, who nodded.
He doesn’t have any will beyond what I say, does he? The general felt a twinge of guilt. I’ve become a slave master.
He thought of his great-great-grandfather, who had been a colonel in the Union army in the Civil War. Old Phineas Meade, a cousin of the more famous General Meade of that time, had been an abolitionist, fighting in the South to free the slaves.
General Meade had always been proud of his Civil War heritage, both the famous general who had won Gettysburg and the lesser-known colonel who had been a minister in civilian life, preaching against the evils of slavery before exchanging his frock for a uniform in order to put those beliefs into practice.
And there he was, one hundred fifty years later, sullying their memory by becoming a slave owner.
It’s necessary, he repeated to himself. It’s necessary.
Orion lay on the padded bench and gripped the bar. He pulled it off its metal hooks and did a smooth, effortless bench press. The sight of this unassuming man bench pressing three hundred sixty pounds brought General Meade out of his thoughts. He’d seen Marines twice Orion’s size incapable of doing that.
Orion pulled the bar to his chest and lifted it again. He did it ten more times before his face turned red, and he slammed the bar back on the hooks.
“He just did a set of twelve bench presses at twice his body weight, and we haven’t even started him on his workout routine!” Dr. Jones exclaimed.
“Make a note of everything,” General Meade ordered. “This will get us more funding, including a trainer for him and an assistant for you.” Or perhaps a replacement for you.
Dr. Jones nodded eagerly and instructed Orion to move to the pull-up bar. Once again Orion looked to the general for confirmation, and once again Meade felt that twinge of guilt.
“Do whatever Dr. Jones asks unless I say otherwise,” General Meade said.
Orion nodded and went over to the bar, where he went through a smooth series of pull-ups in rapid succession.
General Meade’s cell phone rang in his pocket. Grumbling with frustration, he turned away and answered. “What is it?”
“It’s Agent Kelly, sir. There’s a problem.”
“Well, spit it out, agent.”
As Agent Kelly told him about the Atlanteans sneaking into Presbyterian Hospital dressed as doctors, subduing Dr. Yamazaki’s guards, and abducting her, General Meade felt a chill. As the agent went on to describe the fight with the police, the car chase, and Dr. Yamazaki’s escape, that chill turned into something close to terror.
General Meade knew all about fear. There was nothing wrong with a soldier being afraid. Anyone who wasn’t afraid in the middle of a battle was a psycho, and psychos posed as much danger to their own side as the enemy’s. So while he accepted his fear, he never liked it. It meant he wasn’t in control of the situation.
“So wait, you mean to tell me Dr. Yamazaki ran away?”
“Well, drove away, sir. The vehicle was found a couple of miles away, and she wasn’t in it. She appears to have escaped on foot.”
“Yesterday she couldn’t even move her foot,” General Meade said.
There was a long pause.
“I have no explanation, sir.”<
br />
“And the Atlanteans?”
“Four dead, the other two captured.”
“Bring them here,” Meade said.
“The local police are asking a lot of questions about—”
“Bring them here!”
“Yes, sir.”
“And put a news blackout on the whole thing. National security. The cops will toe the line. And think of some cover story.”
Kelly said, “Sir, there was a newspaper reporter in the hospital covering an unrelated story when the shooting broke out. We have him in custody.”
“Call Agent Lewis Frederickson at the local DEA office. He’s one of ours. I’ll send you his number. Ask him to get some crystal meth out of the evidence locker and give it to you. Plant it on this reporter, find it, and threaten him with arrest if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut.”
“Yes, sir.”
General Meade nodded with approval. Agent Kelly wasn’t the quickest or most original thinker on the payroll, but he followed orders without question. “And find Dr. Yamazaki. No, wait. Locate and tail her. It’ll be interesting to see where she goes. Report back to me hourly.”
“Yes, sir.”
The agent hung up. General Meade stared at his phone, wishing he could disbelieve what he had just heard. He turned to Orion. “Come over here.”
The Atlantean hurried over like some eager dog. Dr. Jones followed with a curious expression.
“So tell me, Orion, have you met any others of your kind?” General Meade asked.
Orion stared at him for a moment, looked at Dr. Jones, then slowly surveyed the room. “No.”
“I mean before you came here,” the general asked.
Orion looked confused. “Before?”
Dr. Jones cleared his throat. “Um, sir, you’re forgetting the drug.”
General Meade sighed. How foolish of him. Orion was, at least mentally, in his first days of life. Whatever he had experienced before had been wiped away and would stay that way, at least as long as they kept giving him the memory suppressant.
“Go back to your training, Orion. Jones, stay here for a minute.” Once Orion was out of earshot and working out with some ridiculously heavy weights, General Meade said in a low voice, “I want you to wake up another of the subjects. Pick the oldest.”
“That would be Emma Blankenship. She’s fifty-three,” the scientist replied.
“Good. She’ll have had plenty of time to meet others of her kind. Maybe she’ll have some information she can tell us. Use that truth serum I supplied you with.”
A few hours later, Dr. Jones and General Meade stood on either side of an examination table in the laboratory. On it lay Emma Blankenship. As with Orion, it had taken Dr. Jones some time to bring her out of hibernation and prepare her to wake up. In that time, as per orders, Agent Kelly had called in hourly reports.
Those reports were not encouraging. They hadn’t managed to track down Dr. Yamazaki, and the captive Atlanteans were not talking. That was annoying but not disastrous. With time they’d find the runaway scientist, and Meade could make those genetic freaks spill the beans.
Getting some prisoners was the first real victory they’d had in this war. Not only did he have the aliens to contend with, but now it appeared there really was a group of Atlantean terrorists. The information he could extract would be priceless. That didn’t mean what he and this mediocre scientist were doing now was a waste of time. Gathering as much intelligence as possible always paid off in a war. Different individuals could provide different clues as to what was going on.
“She’s waking up,” Dr. Jones said. “The truth serum should have kicked in by now. You can ask her anything you like.”
Emma Blankenship’s eyes fluttered open. “Whaaaa?”
“Welcome back, Ms. Blankenship. Can you understand me?”
The Atlantean turned her head and looked at Meade through puffy eyes. She looked as if she had just woken up and desperately needed some coffee.
“Ms. Blankenship, have you ever met more of your kind?”
She focused on him. Even though some clarity came to her eyes, she still seemed half asleep, a product of the truth serum. “More people like me? For so long I thought I was alone. I was put up for adoption as an infant and was always different. It was so lonely. It seemed like I could never fit in. My foster parents were kind enough, and I didn’t move around like a lot of kids in the system, but I always felt apart from everyone else, like there was some invisible wall separating me from them.”
General Meade stifled his impatience. His entire project was in danger from all angles, and this woman was telling him her life story. The details might be important though, so he didn’t interrupt.
The Atlantean went on. “Things got stranger when I became a teenager. Maybe puberty set it off—I don’t know. I had always been athletic, but my strength and speed increased to something beyond human. I hid it as much as I could because I was always the odd one out. I didn’t want to be rejected even more.” Tears welled out of her eyes.
She wiped them and continued. “Then something truly remarkable happened. When I was fourteen, I started hearing voices. It was like background chatter, and there was music too. I thought I was going insane until I recognized one of the voices as that of a local DJ. The voices came from all the city radio stations. After a time, I learned how to focus my thoughts to tune into particular frequencies. I also learned to dampen them out so I could get some peace. My range increased, and now my head is a better receiver than the most expensive radio on the market.”
General Meade rubbed his jaw. That was a useful ability. This woman had potential.
“These abilities made me feel even more alone. Eventually I came to terms with it. I never had many friends, never got married, and resigned myself to always being the odd person out. Until a few months ago.”
“What happened?” the general asked.
“I met a guy at a bar. Sometimes I’m so lonely I go pick up men. A bit pathetic, I know, but there are times when you just need to be with someone. This guy was different. He looked a lot like me. Mixed race, or at least that’s what I used to think. We got to talking and moved to a booth near the back for a little more privacy. Once we were out of sight, he took a spoon and bent it with just two fingers. I couldn’t believe it. He was more like me than I had hoped! Then he told me that he was part of a group of similar people. They’d found each other by chance and were searching for more like themselves.”
General Meade bent over her. “Did he say where they were based? How many there are? What’s their group called?”
Emma shook her head. “I don’t know. Just as he was telling me all of this, he got a kind of distant look in his eye, like he was listening to something I couldn’t hear. I suppose I look like that when I’m listening to radio broadcasts in my head. There weren’t any strange radio signals though. I checked. Suddenly he looked nervous and said he had to go. He asked for my address and said he’d be in touch. But he never got back to me. A couple of weeks later, I ended up here.”
The general thought for a moment. “Work with Dr. Jones to make a sketch of this fellow. Provide any details you can remember about him, no matter how unimportant they may seem to you.”
He turned away, his mind racing. That group of Atlanteans had almost taken Ms. Blankenship before they got her. Did they know of the Poseidon Project? And why had that Atlantean suddenly run off?
General Meade’s phone rang again. He walked to the far end of the lab to answer it without being overheard.
“Agent Kelly reporting in, sir.”
“I can see that from my screen, agent. Any news?”
“Yes, sir, actually we have some excellent news…”
Chapter 18
JUNE 18, 2016, MOJAVE DESERT, NEVADA
10:30 PM
Otto could get used to the idea of being a freedom fighter. Of course, he didn’t quite know what he was fighting against, and neither did his comrades-in-arms, but it sure beat c
leaning up other people’s trash by the side of the highway while wearing an orange jumpsuit.
As weird as the other people in the Atlantis Allegiance were, he really liked them. They had a goal, and they banded together like a bizarre little family. Otto had never had goals or a family. He wondered if his parents even cared that he had busted out of jail. Probably not, unless they were using it as ammunition against each other in one of their endless arguments.
Of course he was worried—worried about the government finding him and the rest of the Atlantis Allegiance, worried about Jaxon, worried that the Four Rottweilers of the Apocalypse might tear him apart and have him for dinner when Grunt wasn’t looking—yet he found this new life thrilling.
At the moment, he stood beside Yuhle and Grunt behind the trailers. The shooting range was illuminated by a bright floodlight on top of one of the trailers, and a pair of man-sized targets stood not far off.
“Okay, maggots,” Grunt said in a voice that reminded Otto of every drill instructor in every war movie he had ever seen, “today we’re going to train you in the use of the Taser, the leading electrical weapon in the world. What’s good about Tasers over stun guns is that they don’t just hurt. If you’re fighting someone tough enough, or psycho enough, pain won’t be enough to stop them. It might just piss them off instead. But the Taser packs enough voltage to cause muscle contractions. Whoever you hit will be flopping around on the ground like a fish out of water no matter how tough they are.”
Grunt handed Yuhle and Otto each a large black-and-yellow Taser. They looked like oversized toy pistols with a pair of metal spikes on the end. Nevertheless, Otto held his gingerly, not wanting to zap himself. Yuhle took a stance that he probably thought made him look cool, adjusted his glasses, and aimed at the targets Grunt had set up at a distance.
“Easy there, Tex,” Grunt said.
“I already know how to handle a gun,” Yuhle said with a cocky air.
“Okay then, hombre, give it your best shot,” Grunt said.