New Alcatraz (Book 2): Golden Dawn

by Grant Pies

  It had been a week since Higgs came down with whatever he had. And it was one day since he died. His death looked painful, and the inhabitants of their town embellished the details until everyone was in a frenzy over the mystery illness that claimed his life. So far, no one else was sick, but that didn’t really matter. It was a story to tell and repeat. In reality, Higgs moaned and held onto his stomach. He coughed until blood spilled out of his mouth. At the very end, he convulsed violently until he passed out and never woke up. Ransom was among the few people who saw how he really died.

  The rumors, however, painted a much more gruesome picture. People claimed Higgs’ hair fell out, and his fingernails crumbled away. People thought his skin developed boils and rashes that bled, and Higgs’ insides turned to a poisonous, gelatinous substance. People thought a group of settlers should venture out to find the underground dwellings of the distant past. That is how some people felt, but only a few of them dared to say so out loud.

  For each person that wanted to go, there was another that wanted to stop them. For every husband who wanted to find medicine, there was a wife who forbade him to go. For each mother who wanted to leave, there was a child who needed her. For anyone without a direct relative who wanted to leave, the entire village needed their help to farm, hunt, build, or chop wood. If anyone left and didn’t return, it would set their village back years. Especially if those that left were the hunters and builders. Ransom had to be the one to hold the rest of them back from making such a rash decision.

  The sun fell below the horizon, and the sky turned a deep red. This was Ransom’s favorite time of day, a time before the winds picked up and whipped through the village, a time when the snowflakes simply fell. They traveled along their own path, the wind blowing in from the coast hardly influencing them. During this time of day, the noise from the village in the distance died down, and Ransom could hear his feet crunch in the snow underfoot. He sat on a newly chopped trunk and peered to his left and right, into the unknown. He hung his head down and held it in his hands. His long hair was cold and stiff from the snow that landed on him.

  A small, colorful beetle like the one his son had brought him the other day scurried on the forest floor near Ransom’s feet. Its wings fluttered, but it didn’t fly away. It struggled through the thin layer of snow covering the ground. In the distance, near the village, Ransom heard a voice calling out. He looked up and a small figure waved at him and yelled what he thought was his name. He waited until the person said something again and again. He squinted and tilted his head to try and capture more of what was said.

  He stood and waved back at the person, whom he now realized was a woman. One of the villagers he rarely spoke to. He picked up his worn out axe and made his way towards her. There was a note of panic in the woman’s voice. Ransom jogged towards her. He was eager to hear what the woman had to say, but another part of him wanted to go back to the forest, back to the moment before she yelled for him. With each step in the snow, he drew closer to the woman and farther away from his peaceful spot in the forest.

  Even after it was obvious Ransom was headed in the woman’s direction, she still waved her hand at him. Ransom wasn’t tired or out of breath. He stood and held his axe by his side. The woman looked worried. Her eyes were vacant.

  “What?” Ransom demanded from the woman. She hesitated and started to speak several times, but nothing came out. “What is it?” Ransom asked a second time.

  “It’s your son,” she said and stopped and looked away.

  “What! Gray? What happened to him?” Ransom grew panicked and grabbed the woman’s shoulders. He shook her as if that would make her answer come more quickly, but he couldn’t wait for it. He dropped his axe and ran, his feet churning up the snow.

  “He is sick. He has whatever Higgs had,” the woman mumbled, too late.

  Air rushed in and blew the fire around in the fireplace as Ransom burst through the door of his home. The ash from the fire inside and snow from outside twisted together in a tandem spiral. Aurora was leaning over Gray, blotting his forehead with a damp rag. Tears dripped down her cheeks. Merit stood at the foot of the bed. Both Aurora and Merit turned to look at Ransom when he entered. He rushed over to his son. Merit stepped between.

  “You can’t get too close. You might catch whatever it is,” Merit said.

  Ransom flung his brother’s slender arm out of the way, but he didn’t move any closer towards his son. Merit was right. He kneeled next to Aurora. She leaned into him and buried her face in his chest. Ransom hugged his wife and stared at his son. Gray was asleep; he breathed shallow breaths, and his eyes twitched behind his closed eyelids. Tiny beads of liquid dripped down his forehead. Ransom couldn’t tell if it was sweat or water from Aurora’s cloth.

  Aurora leaned more and more into Ransom until they both sat on the floor, and she was sprawled out into his lap. The muffled sounds of her cries echoed into Ransom’s chest. He held Aurora and looked up at his brother.

  “I’m sorry,” Merit said quietly.

  “How did this happen?” Ransom asked through clenched teeth.

  Merit shook his head. “He just passed out in the middle of the village a little bit ago,” he said and motioned towards somewhere outside. “I don’t know anything other than that.”

  Ransom held his wife tighter with each sob that left her mouth. He ran his hands through her hair and rubbed her back. Merit moved away from the bed and headed towards the door, nothing more to offer his brother. They never were particularly close.

  “Wait!” Ransom said. He stood and gently leaned Aurora down on rugs covering the floor where she curled up in a ball. Her face was red, and her eyes were swollen.

  “Higgs died in six days, right?” Ransom asked, and Merit nodded his head. Ransom grabbed a small woven pack from under his bed and stuffed random clothes in it. He wrapped strips of dried meat in a small thin cloth and placed them in his pack. “Then that gives us three days,” Ransom said. He grabbed a knife and a few more items and tossed them in his bag.

  “Three days for what?” Merit asked.

  Ransom filled a hollowed-out gourd with water from a large bowl that sat in the corner of the hut.

  “You get whoever wants to go find these vaults. You tell them to say goodbye to whoever they need to before they leave, and have them meet me out in the forest.” Ransom looked Merit in the eyes. “You tell them I am walking for three days with the forest on my left and the ocean on my right. And if I don’t find anything, I am turning around so I can come home and bury my son.”

  CHAPTER 17

  2075

  GRAY MOUNTAIN, ARIZONA

  A square table sat in the center of a room covered in musty brown carpet. Maybe years ago the carpet was white or at least light tan, but countless people had tracked the desert sand in from the outside and soiled the floor covering. A large map of North America hung on one wall to my left. Circles enclosed various locations, and colored pins stuck out of cities, littering the green landscape. A legend of sorts was written at the bottom corner, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. I felt that I should be curious about the map, but couldn’t bring myself to wonder about one more thing until Whitman explained himself.

  “I hold the judicial system in as high a regard as humans hold us androids,” Whitman said. “So believe me when I say that if I actually had to sleep, I would have slept like a baby the night after my trial.” Whitman motioned for me to sit at the table in the middle of the room. Vesa exited through another door and left Whitman and I alone. “To put it simply, I lied, Powell.” Whitman smiled at the statement. “I lied to you. I lied to the judge. I lied to Prosecutor Klipton. I lied to the jury. It didn’t make a difference in the outcome of the trial. You, of all people, should know that. I was guilty before the trial started. At least in the eyes of the law.”

  “What exactly did you lie about? Did you kill Pierson?”

  “Kill is a relative term. The nature of my experiments with Pierson was generally how
I described them to the jury. I was examining his DNA and compared it to the DNA inside of me. I—we—needed to learn whose DNA was in me. It just wasn’t as personal as I let on. I wasn’t trying to find my human birth parents, or learn about my personality. Yes, that would be welcome information, but it was not my main goal.

  “Pierson wanted to know whose DNA it was as well. The person whose DNA was inside of me was someone who was involved in a much larger experiment. Vesa, by the way”—Whitman motioned in the direction that Vesa exited the room—“Pierson’s daughter.”

  “To answer your question about how I am here, Vesa and her brother, Cooper, intercepted me after my trial. Before I was sent to Wayfield’s vault. They swapped me out for a different android that looked identical to me. I am officially off the books.” Whitman extended his arms out from his sides and spun around.

  “So some other android took your place in their vault?” If not Whitman’s, then whose nanobots did I inject into my body in New Alcatraz five years ago?

  Vesa returned to the room holding two mugs. She set one down in front of me. Inside was black coffee. Steam drifted up, and the aroma filled the musty room. The bag that Vesa had clung to so tightly for a day and a half was now gone.

  I looked at her. “So you helped him escape, huh?”

  “I did,” she said and nodded.

  CHAPTER 18

  2070

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  The entrance to the processing center was on the bottom floor of an underground parking garage filled with Wayfield vehicles and workers who were checking androids in and out. TDA Agents were scattered throughout the garage, but none of them worked there permanently. The processing center acted as a dispatch point for many Wayfield employees and other agents with the Ministry of Science. This was the location where confiscated technology from TDA raids was collected and catalogued. It was the final public checkpoint before Whitman would be taken away and buried several stories underground.

  Vesa watched the Wayfield van park a few spaces away from the main check-in office. She parked nearby in a spot that offered a line of sight to the van carrying Whitman. The man in the passenger seat of the van feverishly texted on his cell phone. The other climbed into the back of the van where they had Whitman.

  “Okay, they’re prepping him for processing. We don’t have much time.”

  Cooper unplugged the thick wire from the back of the Whitman clone and crawled back into the passenger seat. Vesa glanced at the Wayfield van in time to see the driver climb out of the back and walk around to the passenger side. The passenger reluctantly put his phone away and the two of them walked into the small bank of Wayfield offices that were built into the parking garage.

  “Alright, that’s it. We’ve got to go now!” Vesa hopped out of the van. “Let’s go!”

  “You go. I’m not done yet. Bring Whitman here, and I’ll finish. Once I’ve switched the serial numbers in their system, I’ll come and help you move the clone.”

  Vesa clenched her jaw. Her eyes burned through Cooper. This wasn’t how they planned it. Vesa knew moving an android on her own would be difficult. Without even looking at his sister, he knew the expression on her face.

  “Look, that’s the best I can offer. I’m still uploading the new serial numbers. We can drag Whitman into the van, but if they still associate Whitman with his old serial number, then it won’t matter. They’ll know we swapped him out. All of this will be wasted.”

  For the first time since they entered the van, Cooper stopped typing and looked up. “Right now, this is the most important thing. If I don’t assign this android’s serial number to Whitman then not only will we get caught, but everyone back in Gray Mountain will be caught too. I know you want Whitman back here, but if we can’t do this without Wayfield knowing then we aren’t doing it. That is what Dad would have said, and that is what Whitman would have said. And you know it. So go to the van, untie Whitman, bring him here, and then hopefully I will be done and can help you take the other android to their van.” Cooper stopped and let his words sink in before looking back at his tablet and continued typing.

  Vesa sighed and slammed the door shut. Her heart raced. She tried to blend in and look normal, but she felt every eye on her. She scanned the garage, and watched the two employees enter the processing office. On the other end of the parking garage was the entrance to a tunnel that was a direct route to Wayfield’s regional warehouse. That was where Whitman would be temporarily housed until they could transport him to Denver. The entrance of the tunnel was heavily guarded. Once the Wayfield van left the garage and entered that tunnel, Whitman would be out of reach.

  Vesa walked stiffly through the parking garage. Her eyes darting back to the processing office, then over to the tunnel entrance. She stood with her back against the van for only a few seconds. She made sure no one was watching her, then quickly turned around and opened the back door.

  Cooper glanced away from his typing and saw Vesa enter the van and close the doors behind her just as he typed the last line of code needed to switch the serial numbers of the two androids. He set the tablet on the passenger seat as walls of text scrolled down the screen. Cooper crawled out of the back of the white van and stretched his legs. He wheeled the android that looked identical to Whitman out of the back of their van. The powered-down android rattled around in the chair. He stood and waited for Vesa to exit.

  Inside the other van, Vesa frantically untied Whitman. He was still seated in a wheelchair with thick straps across his chest holding him against the wall. Sweat beaded on Vesa’s face and rolled down her neck. Her hands trembled as she tried to unloop the straps. She loosened the strap around Whitman’s chest, flinging it off to the side and moving on to the second strap cinched around Whitman’s waist.

  Outside, Cooper surveyed the garage. Two Technology Development agents in full tactical gear walked by the van.

  The two men slowed their pace, and locked eyes with Cooper. His hands shook. His legs grew weak. He prayed Vesa didn’t choose that moment to exit the Wayfield van. The two agents passed Cooper, and he exhaled a loud breath. But before the two agents were too far away, the other Wayfield employees from the courthouse exited the processing center. At first, they were involved in their own conversation, until one of the men saw Cooper. More importantly, they saw the android that looked just like Whitman.

  “Hey!” one of the men shouted. His voice echoed inside the garage. “What are you doing?”

  The man pointed at Cooper and started to walk quickly towards him. The other Wayfield employee followed. The two TDA agents turned to see what the commotion was. One of the men placed a hand on the black pistol strapped to his thigh. Cooper froze. His eyes focused on the Wayfield van, and he knew Vesa must have heard the yells of the Wayfield employee.

  “What are you doing with our android?” the man yelled. By now, he was only a few steps away from Cooper.

  Cooper gripped the handles of the wheelchair that housed the replacement android. His knuckles turned white. Pivoting on his heels, he leaned forward and took off, pushing the android in the wheelchair in front of him, and raced through the garage. The Wayfield employees followed closely behind, and the two agents followed as well.

  “That’s our android!” one of the Wayfield employees shouted, both at Cooper and at the TDA agents who ran after them.

  From inside the Wayfield van, Vesa saw Cooper round a corner in the parking garage with the replacement android. She saw the four pursuers go after him. And just as the last TDA agent rounded the corner behind everyone else, she saw him draw the pistol from the holster on his thigh.

  Vesa flung the back doors of the Wayfield van open. They clattered against the body of the van. She jumped out and yanked Whitman’s lifeless android body after her, glancing around the parking garage. In the distance, she heard footsteps and muffled shouting bounce off the concrete walls. The air inside the van had been humid, and it clung to her skin. Once outside, the dry air sucked up the moisture and
sweat that beaded around Vesa’s face. She shut the doors to the Wayfield van and wheeled Whitman over to her own.

  Whitman was heavy and Vesa struggled with his body. She grunted with each movement of the wheelchair, and her muscles strained. Vesa climbed backwards into the white van dragging the wheelchair with her. Just as the wheels cleared the threshold, a loud shot rang out in the parking garage. A scream reverberated, followed by two more shots exploding in quick succession. Vesa jumped at the sudden noise, almost slipping on the metal floor of the van. More muffled shouts came from the other side of the garage. She pulled Whitman completely into the van and shut the doors behind the two of them.

  Climbing into the driver’s seat, she peered down the garage where Cooper had fled from the agents and the Wayfield employees. Her insides twisted into knots as the two Wayfield employees rounded the corner and walked toward her. One of the men pushed the Whitman clone in front of him. The two agents were close behind. The one agent that had drawn his gun placed the pistol back into the holster. Even at a distance, Vesa noticed splatters of blood on the man’s face and clothes. She ducked down to avoid being seen.

  “We have a perpetrator down,” the other agent said into a small radio. “White male, mid-twenties, two gunshots to the chest and one to the head.”

  Vesa clamped her hand over her mouth to hold back the loud gasp that rushed out of her body. She crouched onto the floor of the van and briefly contemplated jumping out to go see her brother, but she was paralyzed. Vesa sat on the floor of the van and dared not to remove her hand from her face. She didn’t know what kind of emotion would spill out, and who might hear it. After several labored minutes, she moved to the drivers seat, and gripped the steering wheel until she felt like she could rip it clean off the dashboard.