The Deep Beneath

by Natalie Wright

  “I wish we were the ones in the Hummer,” Ian said.

  “Why?” asked Tex.

  “’Cause we’d be able to run them off the road instead of them running us off.”

  Erika had been toasty warm nestled next to Jack, but she now shivered as if ice filled her veins. It was as though she’d been squeezed in a vice and her innards would burst from the pressure. An explosion of intensely bright, swirling colors filled Erika’s eyes then burst into brightness like a nuclear explosion in her mind. She was compressed nearly to nothingness, and then, in an instant, she felt as though she was being ripped apart.

  Erika opened her mouth and thought she screamed, but she didn’t hear it. She didn’t hear anything. For a few seconds, the sounds of grinding metal and whining engines were gone. Just when Erika thought she could take no more, her body was slammed with extreme force.

  At first she assumed that the Hummer had finally caused them to roll over and that the pain she had endured was what it felt like to die. But her heart beat wildly in her chest. I’m still alive. She blinked her eyes and looked around. They were in the Hummer.

  Ian was in the driver’s seat as he had been in the Jetta, and Tex sat beside Ian in the front passenger seat. Jack was beside her in the back seat. No sooner had she gotten her bearings, Ian swerved at the last minute and she and Jack were thrown together again.

  “What the heck happened?” Jack asked.

  Erika expected Tex to provide an answer, but he said nothing. Erika moved herself forward in the seat so she could see him. Tex’s head hung down to his chest.

  “Oh no, Tex,” she shouted. Erika ignored his prior requests to not be touched and shook his thin shoulder. “Tex? H.A.L.F. 9? Are you still with us?”

  He lifted his head slightly but gave no verbal response.

  Ian pulled hard to the left, then swung the wheel right and slammed into the Jetta, now being driven by the military man. Erika thought the man looked like one of the soldiers that had surrounded them earlier in the evening, but it was hard to tell in the dark. As she looked into the Jetta, the driver looked at them coming and his face wore a look of sheer terror. Ian rammed the Jetta. Erika was jostled, but the impact was not as great as it had been when they were in Jack’s car.

  “Sorry about your car, Jack,” Ian said. He rammed it again. Erika could hear the Jetta’s tires running over the rumble strips on the side of the road.

  “Tex, did you somehow move us to this car?” asked Erika. It was the logical conclusion to the question of how they had gone from one car to the other, but she still felt silly asking it.

  Tex nodded.

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” said Ian.

  Tex raised his head again. “I did not know that I could do it either, Ian.” His voice was low and slow, and after he spoke, his head bobbed down toward his chest again.

  They were all knocked about as Ian again jammed the Hummer into Jack’s Jetta.

  “What the hell are you doing?” asked Jack.

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to get them off of our tail.”

  “There’s a military guy in that car. If you kill him, we’re all in deep shit,” said Jack.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re already in deep shit.”

  While the guys argued, Erika looked into the Jetta. All she could see of the passenger was a long, thin, pale hand resting on the center console. There were no hands on the steering wheel.

  “She has control of the Jetta,” Erika said.

  “Well, that explains how my Jetta is keeping up with this monster.”

  Ian choked hard on the steering wheel and landed a solid shot across the driver’s side of the Jetta. He kept the Hummer’s side locked against the Jetta. The air was filled with the sound of metal grinding against metal. Sparks flew outside Tex’s window. Ian turned the wheel slightly to the left then hard to the right and hit them again. The Hummer was now in the right lane, and the Jetta bumped along on the rumble strips on the shoulder.

  “Ian, look out!” Erika screamed. Ian’s eyes went back to the road in time to see that he was about to run into a guardrail. He swerved left in time to miss it.

  The Jetta was not so lucky. Erika looked back and watched as Jack’s Jetta hit the barrier and flew into the air. It toppled end over end in midair and came down with a loud crash. The Jetta rolled several times with a sickening sound of metal scraping pavement. Erika was relieved when it finally stopped. But her relief was short lived. The Jetta burst into a ball of flame. “I hate to tell you this, Jack, but your Jetta …”

  Jack looked back. “Dammit.”

  “I am sorry, Jack,” Tex said. His voice was thin and weak.

  “Me too. Me too,” said Jack.

  Erika touched his arm lightly, and he turned to her and forced a weak smile. It may have been an old piece-of-crud car, but Erika knew that Jack was proud of it. He’d bought the car with money he’d worked for and saved. The longer this night goes on, the more I want a redo. They were alive, but it was unlikely the two in the Jetta survived. Erika’s stomach churned at the thought of two more dead bodies. It had been a long time since she had eaten. Her stomach acid threatened to rise up her throat and burn a hole in it.

  “What do we do now?” asked Ian.

  “We keep driving,” said Jack.

  “We’ve basically stolen a car and maybe killed a soldier and –”

  “A piece of government property?” said Tex.

  “That’s not how I was going to put it,” said Ian.

  “I’m thinking we need to put as much road between us and your Commander Sturgis as we can,” said Jack.

  No one argued with him. Ian eased back in his seat and pushed the accelerator down as the black Hummer drove north through the night.

  10

  LITTLE MONSTERS

  Within seconds of finding herself in the small, white car, Alecto knew that she stood no chance of completing her mission to bring 9 home that night.

  Alecto concentrated hard as she attempted to perform the same maneuver that 9 had done. She tried to command the molecules in her body to discorporate and reincorporate in the Hummer. She thought she got close once. Her cells vibrated, which caused a tingling sensation throughout her body. But her molecules did not obey her command. Despite great effort, she could not accomplish the task of switching herself back to the Hummer, let alone take Lopez too.

  Alecto did not understand how 9 could achieve something that she could not. Commander Sturgis said that I am stronger than 9.

  Alecto’s confidence was shaken, but she quickly regained her composure. Lopez had been a quaking sack of water before 9’s trick. He was now completely worthless. He reeked from the smell of body odor, fear and the urine in his pants.

  Concentrating as she was on manipulating the steering and power, she saw the concrete barricade too late. She felt the g-force act on her body as the car hit the barrier and began its ascent into the air.

  The car hit the ground and rolled. Alecto was thrown against the door. Her head banged against the window and her shoulder was hurled into the wall of the door. Pain ripped through her body, but she willed herself to disregard it. She fell to the seat only to find herself tumbled again. She again tried to achieve a temporal translocation as 9 had done, but it failed. With the injuries she had already sustained, there was no time to waste attempting to learn temporal translocation. She would need to escape the car without that skill.

  Alecto focused her mind and observed all that was happening around her. The car was acting as expected given the speed at which it had collided with the concrete barrier. It had rolled twice, but the acceleration was decreasing with each roll. The vehicle was moving toward an upright position. Alecto used her telepathy and blew the door off its hinges and threw herself out of the car before it rolled over again.

  Alecto hit the ground hard. Her head and shoulder were already damaged from banging against the inside of the vehicle, and the impact with the
ground injured her right leg and knocked the wind out of her. She knew she had no time to lay still and catch her breath. She had been trained to ignore pain when in the middle of an assignment. She focused solely on the task of retreating from the crashed car that had come to a stop on its roof a few feet away.

  She tried to stand, but fell back to the ground. Her leg would not bear her weight. She shimmied on her stomach, using her arms and elbows to pull herself forward. She had moved herself about twenty feet away from the crashed car when she heard the spark. Alecto did not look back. She continued to pull herself as quickly as she could, ignoring the scraped skin on her stomach and the bleeding palms of her hands. She felt the heat of the blazing car as she crawled. When she no longer felt the fire, she turned to look. The small white car was engulfed in flames.

  Alecto reached out with her senses, searching for a sign of life in the car. But there was no beating heart. No electrical impulse of a brain. Lopez was gone. Perhaps it is just as well. He seemed to have lost his ability to control his overactive mind. He was of no use to the program anymore.

  Away from the immediate danger of the flaming car, Alecto took stock of her injuries. Her head throbbed with pain, but her skull was not fractured. There would be bruising and swelling unless she healed herself. She decided to leave it for now. She would not expire from a bruise. She turned her attention to her shoulder and judged that it, too, could wait. The worst injury was to her right thigh. The bone was broken. Alecto concentrated on mending the tear in the bone as she placed her hands on the spot. Her ability to see with her whole mind and all of her senses allowed her to communicate with the atoms and molecules in her body. They obeyed her and fused her leg bone back together. She did the same to her hands, healing the cuts and gouges until her hands were once again smooth, the bleeding stopped.

  Alecto pushed herself up and tested her leg. Though the muscle was still a bit sore, the leg easily bore her weight as though it had never been broken. She ran swiftly away from the crashed car and the road and into the desert. Sewell had given Alecto a device that looked like a watch that she had strapped onto her wrist. She pushed the button, activating a signal that let A.H.D.N.A. know that they must retrieve her. In short, it let Commander Sturgis know that she had failed.

  She had no time to concern herself with the fate that awaited her when she returned to A.H.D.N.A. and faced Commander Sturgis. She had to put space between herself and the flaming car. It was only a matter of time before police arrived to investigate. She could not run the risk that they would find her there. Sewell had underscored that point to her. “Let no one see you,” he’d said.

  Within a couple of hundred meters, Alecto found large rocks at the base of a mountain. The rocks were smooth and without much in the way of handholds. Alecto was small and lacked much upper body strength. On her first attempt to scale a boulder she lost hold and fell to the ground. Rather than go at it again immediately, she studied the rock. She attacked it again but this time channeled her strength to her fingers and gripped tightly as she hoisted her legs up behind her. Within a few minutes she was on top of the rock and was able to crouch between it and the next one, shielding herself from view.

  The arid outdoor air was much cooler than she was used to. Alecto zipped her leather jacket, reached in her pocket and pulled out the gloves Sewell had given her to wear. All that Alecto had ever worn had been blue or green cotton pants, rubber-bottomed shoes and nondescript cotton shirts without buttons or zippers. The button and zipper on the long pants that she wore irritated her sensitive skin. The clothes were heavy, especially the coat made of an animal’s skin. It also had an odor that Alecto found displeasing. But she was glad for the extra layers.

  As she waited to be recovered, she could not help her mind from racing with thoughts about 9. How had he bested her when she was created to be stronger than him? Why did he feel the need to run? Alecto trembled though she was now warm. Her breathing was rapid though she was rested. The feeling was much like she had experienced when she had met with Commander Sturgis. I am afraid. She did not understand why her body reacted to her present situation with fear. She was, after all, safe from the crashed car. She was out of sight of any humans who may stop by the flaming car on the highway. What am I afraid of?

  The world of A.H.D.N.A. was the only world she had ever known. She had never considered a need for more. She knew her place. She followed commands. There was order.

  But the outside world was full of unknowns. If she ran away with 9, who would command her? How would she know what to do? What place could she have in a world that would see her as a monster? At least that is what Commander Sturgis had said. “Out there, they will see you as a monster. But to me, you are beautiful.”

  There were no mirrors in Alecto’s quarters or in the rooms in which she obtained her training or submitted to examinations. She had seen her reflection in windows but had paid it little attention. Her appearance was of no consequence to her purpose or duties. But that night, when she got in the car with Lopez, she had seen her reflection in the side mirror and studied it for the first time. And she understood Commander Sturgis’ words. ‘They’ll see you as a monster.’

  Alecto’s head was at least half again as large as any human head she’d ever seen. And there wasn’t a hair on it. She’d never given thought to her lack of hair. She assumed it was a consequence of being part alien. But she’d caught a glimpse of 9, and he had hair. And it looked pale and soft. So unlike her hairless head.

  Her eyes were twice the size of human eyes and so black that they were like a mirror to the world around her. Her nose was a small bump on her face, her ears nearly nonexistent. Her mouth was small, but her lips, especially the bottom one, were full.

  Alecto had stared at her reflection in the small mirror until Lopez urged her into the car. When she got in, she found herself staring at Sergeant Lopez. She could sense the sweat beginning to pour from his underarms.

  “Why are your pores releasing such large amounts of water, Sergeant Lopez?”

  “Huh? You mean sweating? I don’t know … it’s just …” He adjusted his rearview mirror. Twice.

  “Do I make you nervous?”

  Lopez turned the key in the ignition. “Nervous? Me? Nah, what makes you say that?”

  “You keep your eyes averted from mine, you have sweated approximately one-tenth of a liter of liquid since we first met, and you continue to find ways to occupy yourself with tasks that are not required. Are these observations not of one who is nervous?”

  Lopez glanced at her but quickly turned his eyes back to the road. “Well, maybe it would be best if you, I don’t know, maybe stop staring at me quite so much.”

  Alecto did not want to jeopardize the mission by making Lopez so befuddled that he could not do his part. “As you wish.”

  Am I so very different than him? She did not know if Lopez was considered attractive in the human world. But as she looked at him, she concluded that if he was normal looking, then in comparison she was … a monster.

  Alecto had been in the human world for less than two hours, but she would be glad to leave it behind. She felt comfortable in her skin at A.H.D.N.A.

  She knew the helicopter was coming before she could hear it or see it. The molecules around her shifted, causing her skin to prickle. But out here I can feel so much more. Taste and hear and see more. Sense so much more. I am different here. I am becoming …

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a shout. “Get in!”

  She scrambled back down the rocks. Sewell was at the door, his face grim as always. He put out his hand to help her up into the hovering copter. His palm was so sweaty that she nearly lost her grip. Two more non-stealth helicopters arrived at the crash site. Their motors filled the once quiet night with a loud whirr. As they lifted off, men poured out of the other copters.

  A man dressed in black from head to toe argued with the sheriff.

  “He’s military. This is federal jurisdiction.”

  As
they debated jurisdiction, men hurried to put out the flame and take care of their business.

  Soon they were out of range for even Alecto to be able to see or hear what was going on. She continued to stare out the window as she concentrated on picking up information from the commotion going on below. But she felt eyes staring at her.

  She looked across from her, and her eyes met with a pair of dark brown human eyes. The large man sitting across from her had brown skin and large hands that could have made three of Alecto’s. He looked at her so intently, she felt as though he was trying to see through her.

  The man’s eyes were narrowed; the skin on his brow was crinkled. And his lips did not smile. Alecto had seen this look before, especially from her attendants when they were displeased with her for eating too slowly or when she showed signs of illness thus necessitating an extra trip for them to her quarters. The look was anger.

  Alecto stared back at the man.

  “How is it you’re alive and he’s dead?” he asked.

  “I do not understand your question.”

  “How come you ain’t burned to cinders but Lopez is, huh?”

  Sewell shifted uncomfortably in his seat and looked up from his handheld. “Mind your business, Cooper. It’s not up to you to debrief 10. That’s Commander Sturgis’ job. You do not need to answer, 10.”

  Alecto wanted to answer his question. She did not often have the opportunity to engage in conversation. “I want to answer.” Before Sewell could protest, she said, “I was able to escape the vehicle. Lopez was not able.”

  “Convenient.”

  “Convenient?” Though Alecto did not understand the meaning of the word in the context the soldier used it, she was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the man’s questions and unflinching gaze.

  “Yeah. Convenient for you that you just happened to find your way to safety.” He shook his head and his voice got louder. “You’re telling me a puny mutant can get out of a crashed car but a highly trained soldier can’t?”