She stopped talking, and her face screwed up tightly as she gave a small pained groan.
“Helena?” Zeke asked, kneeling in front of her. “Helena, are you okay?”
She groaned and hunched over herself. Her fangs began to protrude from her mouth.
Ezekiel leaned in close and uttered a couple of inaudible words into her ear. A few seconds later and she released her stomach and sat up straight again, blinking away the pain as though it were nothing more than a minor case of indigestion.
Helena forced a smile on her face. “That doesn’t get any easier.”
“What happened?” Kain asked, concern written on his face.
“The Madness,” Ezekiel answered. “Every time we feel as though we’re finally in a place where we understand the patterns, it throws us a curveball.”
Kain grinned. “Baseball analogy? Nice.”
“What’s baseball?” Caitlin asked.
Ezekiel ignored the question and picked up Helena’s pen, adding another note to a list of times in which Helena had begun to turn over the last few weeks.
Caitlin looked pitifully down at the old woman. She looked at a series of bandages wrapped around her ankle, the white of the cotton stained with blood. “How did it happen?”
Helena followed Caitlin’s stare. “An unhappy accident. Curse me for getting caught in a rainstorm and surrounded by hungry Mad. I knew I shouldn’t have risked searching the university, but we need equipment that I just didn’t have.”
“The university?” Kain asked.
“Chicago State,” Ezekiel answered. “A few kilometers west of here in the main city.”
“We’re near Chicago?” Kain said gleefully. “Kitty-Cat! We nearly made it. We’re near the other Weres!”
But Caitlin wasn’t interested in that. She had found who she was looking for, and now she needed answers.
“What were you looking for?” she asked, feeling as though she already knew the answer.
To her surprise, it was neither Zeke nor Helena who answered.
“Nanocytes, of course,” Mary-Anne told them, sheepishly appearing in the door frame.
She looked a mess. Her usually pristine hair was now frayed and tussled into knots with leaves and bracken caught up in it. Her face was decorated in mud, and her skin had changed from its usual dark hue to a violent red in color. Small grazes and burns covered the parts of her exposed skin.
Caitlin’s heart lightened. She had begun to truly feel as though she may have lost Mary-Anne forever. Ma had always been a vampire of her word, which should have meant that she would run clear for the hills rather than risk being around her friends with the Madness working its way inside her.
Helena stood up suddenly. “How in the name of the Queen Bitch and the Dark Messiah did you make it through all that sunlight?”
Mary-Anne was out of breath. She held the door handle for support. “It wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you that much. There’s only so much shade beneath the trees before you’ve got to cross in the open, and no amount of vampire speed can combat the pain you feel when sunlight hits your skin.”
Caitlin couldn’t take her eyes off the blisters. They were already healing, but that didn’t mean they looked any less sore.
Helena offered Mary-Anne a chair, but she refused. “Not for me. Please, don’t let me be a distraction from your conversation. This is real talk about real problems, and I need your help to purge this shit from inside me.”
“The nanocytes?” Caitlin took the cue to continue. “You were looking for nanocytes?”
Helena peeled her eyes away from Mary-Anne and nodded. “Esme Proctor said it best. ‘Nanocytes are the secret to it all.’ Bethany Anne blanketed the Earth with the Kurtherian technology, which used to be exclusive to Weres and vampires. It is the code—the instructions—inside these tiny machines which has become corrupted, and the infected are acting as vectors for the Madness to spread even wider.”
“But how?” Kain asked. “How is that even possible? Humans have nanocytes now, too? How do you know this?”
“Extensive testing,” Helena replied. “You think that my decades of experimentation haven’t yielded me some answers?”
“How did it happen, though?” Caitlin asked. “How did the Madness begin?”
“And how do we end it?” Kain added.
Jaxon yipped.
Ezekiel waved his hands, trying to slow down the building pace of questions. “One thing at a time.” He paused. “The truth is, we don’t know what caused the event. What we do know is that something cataclysmic happened way back when it all began. An event that kicked everything off at once and caused the world to degenerate and devolve.”
Kain’s nose curled. “Like a pulse of energy or something?”
“Yes!” Helena said excitedly. “Exactly like a pulse.” She pushed papers aside and ripped several pinned notes from the wall. She took her pen and began drawing what looked like a satellite in the sky. “As far as I can figure, it had to be something big. Something powerful enough to affect everyone at once and cause the corruption. What is one of the only things in the world which can scramble every machine in the range, but which humans and other sentient beings cannot feel when it happens?”
The room fell into a moment of thoughtful silence.
“An EMP?” Mary-Anne suggested. “An electromagnetic pulse?”
“Bingo!” Helena exclaimed, sending Jaxon into another frenzy of barks.
“Woah, woah, woah.” Caitlin waved her hands in front of her face. “An EMP? Electro mag… What?”
“She’s not from our time,” Mary-Anne excused, sharing a look with Helena.
“Or mine!” Kain added.
Ezekiel grinned but remained silent.
“An electromagnetic pulse,” Helena continued. “See, our ancestors were the gods of technology. We came to a point in time where tiny computers people carried in their pocket had more power in them than the rockets which first sent a man to the moon.”
Caitlin knew Helena was telling the truth, but she didn’t quite believe it. “People went to the moon?”
“Yes,” Helena replied. “So much technology existed that we were able to put computers into space. We call them satellites. These computers gave us images of the Earth, helped the internet bring the world together, and gave us information on storms, weather patterns, and so much more.”
Helena’s face lit with excitement as she spoke. “Great technology which had the power to unite the world and keep signals bouncing invisibly across the globe.”
Caitlin tried to imagine a world united like this. Something so different from the world she grew up in, where the only way to send a message was to talk to your neighbor. It all seemed…impossible.
Ezekiel’s face darkened. “Don’t start praising Sarah,” he muttered. “I won’t hear it.”
“She is the one with the original knowledge,” Helena chided. “Without her, we wouldn’t know anything about the BYPS. The Baba Yaga Protection System, or BYPS, had only one flaw. This technology is connected to someplace on Earth. My life’s work has led me to believe that a pulse was sent to the BYPS from this place, a pulse that somehow corrupted the nanocytes that the Queen intended as the solution to all humanity’s ills.”
She shuffled through the mess of papers as she spoke, showing them the fruits of her research. “However infinitesimal the probability, I can only conclude that we are the victims of Fate’s capricious nature. All it would take is a slight surge in a faulty circuit. A single error in one circuit leading to a cascading failure. The consequent ejection of the failing satellite from the system would be powerful enough to—”
“I’m sorry,” Caitlin interrupted. “A circuit?”
“Think of it as a minuscule highway in which the electricity would run to make the machines operate,” Ezekiel told her.
Caitlin looked at Ezekiel blankly.
“As I was saying,” Helena continued. “A slight surge in a circuit would be powerful enough to destroy it. To fry
it and cause it to malfunction, which would set off the safety measures. Whoever designed the system made sure to build in enough redundancies to ensure the BYPS could run without maintenance for centuries. Magnetic pulses could do unspeakable damage to machinery across a vast range—potentially the world over. Much better to lose one satellite than the whole network.”
“That can’t be right,” Caitlin blurted, scratching her head. “Why would anyone do something like that?”
“Maybe it wasn’t intentional?” Kain suggested, fiddling with a small metal instrument with a hooked end. “Maybe somebody did it by accident. You know, tripped over a wire, or mashed the wrong button, and sent the wrong signal to the satellites?”
“It really doesn’t matter how it happened, and this is all really just my theory.” Helena sighed. “All that matters is that we find a way to fix it. We find the cure and set the world to rights.” She looked from Caitlin to Ezekiel, as if she had suddenly figured out something she’d been trying to fix for ages. “And now, the baton can be passed over to you.”
Caitlin scoffed. “I’m sorry, what is she talking about?”
Ezekiel crossed over to Helena and took her hand in his. “You need to stop talking like this. You can’t give up now. We will help fix you before it’s too late, I promise. She knows the way, I’m telling you. If we just listen to Her and go now, we can make it together. All of us.”
Helena looked deep into Ezekiel’s eyes, a soft smile on her face. She reached out and took his cheek in her palm. “I’m already too far gone, my boy. You’ve seen what happens when I’m left alone. I won’t make it five minutes before I go Mad and turn on you all.”
Ezekiel cast his eyes to the floor, radiating a sadness deep inside.
Helena smiled softly. “Don’t think of it as a sad occasion. Think of it as though we’re turning the chapter on what has come before. I still have some fight in me, so I can help you all prepare, but you know as well as I do that we’ve done as much as we can do here. It’s time to go and find Her and discover what she knows. It’s the only way we’ll make everything right once more.”
Ezekiel reluctantly nodded his understanding, and when he stood, his eyes were watery with tears.
Caitlin wanted to ask a thousand more questions, but she felt that the tone had changed too much to ask them now.
Chapter Seventeen
Potato Creek State Park, Illinois
Caitlin awoke from her sleep as the sun began its descent.
From the second story of the old wooden house, she watched the sun kiss the horizon in the west, exploding into a thousand shades of red, pink, and orange.
Jaxon snoozed at the foot of the bed, his chest rising and falling in a gentle rhythm. He snored softly, a loyal companion tuckered out from an exciting adventure across the skies and back into the forest.
It’s always a circle, isn’t it? No matter how far I go, I always come back to the trees. Caitlin looked across the small clearing around the house and studied the trees, their height, their girth, their colors. They were nothing like the trees she had grown up around in Silver Creek. In the forests of her home, she had been surrounded by evergreens and conifers, pines, firs, and spruces.
But here, far away from her Canadian homeland, the leaves were flat and wide. The colors were shades of fire. Although she didn’t know the names for them, then, she’d later learn she had gazed upon ashes, buckthorns, box elders, and elms.
A foreign land. That’s all she could think, right now. A land far, far from a home she once thought she’d never leave. She looked over the top of the canopy of trees and wondered how far away the ocean might be. A great body of water she had heard of but never seen. How wide was this land which she journeyed now? How much more was there yet to be seen?
And now all this talk of vampires in space. Of satellites orbiting the Earth and strange technology which had sent humans and Unknown alike into the stars. Were there really people out there now, battling Kurtherians and fighting for the galaxy? If that were true, maybe that would explain why none of them had returned home to fix this Madness.
Caitlin reached to her pack on the floor and pulled out the small radio Cammie and Royland had given her. Although it had only been a couple of days, she wanted to hear Dylan’s voice. To talk to him and hear his thoughts on her situation. To know he was okay and feel a part of her home.
Something moved in the clearing below and caught Caitlin’s eye.
Ezekiel crossed the lawn and headed out toward the trees, striding with a focused determination.
Caitlin watched him until he disappeared. She lowered the radio gently to the floor as two thoughts crossed her mind.
First. Where is Ezekiel going by himself?
And secondly. Why would a young man walk into a forest littered with Mad without any form of weapon?
Allowing curiosity to take her, Caitlin tiptoed across the room, being careful not to wake Jaxon. She sneaked across the landing and cupped her hand to hide her laughter at hearing Kain’s voluminous snores. She passed downstairs and exited through the back door, then half-jogged toward the direction she had seen the man go.
He wasn’t difficult to track. Having spent years in the company of Silver Creek’s chief scout—her very own brother—she had picked up a few tricks along the way. The ground was dry and yielded little in the way of footprints, but she could hear his movements in the distance, movements that were echoed by the sudden flight of birds as he made his way to an unknown destination.
After a few minutes, Caitlin heard Ezekiel whistling. She wasn’t familiar with the tune, which bounced across a range of notes and rang around the forest. She ducked behind a tree and watched him from afar, wondering why on Earth he would be trying to draw attention to himself.
Doesn’t he know this place is filled with Mad?
She was certain that he did. Wasn’t it Ezekiel himself who mentioned that the forest had likely been somewhat cleared of the horde by the recent crashing of the dirigible? That the bulk of Mad who had recently strayed into the trees had all been decimated under Caitlin and her crew’s blade?
Ezekiel unknowingly guided Caitlin toward a small clearing in the forest. A boulder the size of a car sat in the center, capturing golden rays of the setting sun.
Caitlin took a position in the forest and hid behind a tree, remaining shaded in the shadows as she watched Ezekiel with interest.
He circled the boulder several times before he placed his hands flat on its surface and began to climb. Several lizards, disturbed by the tiny vibrations, scuttled out of small crevices and ran into the grass. Ezekiel found his place in the center of the stone and sat with his legs crossed.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and fell still.
Caitlin wasn’t sure how long she watched him for. Long enough for the sky to turn dark and the night creatures to come out of their hiding places.
And still, he did not move. Not an inch.
If she hadn’t had known he was there, Caitlin thought she could be forgiven for thinking that the man sitting atop the boulder was just a part of its features.
After another few minutes, Caitlin began to get restless. Her legs ached, and she was sure that soon Mary-Anne and Kain would be awake and wondering where she was. A small black creature flitted near her face and she batted it away, narrowly missing its body by millimeters.
A few seconds later, it swooped around again. She pawed at it and missed it again.
“It’s only a bat,” Ezekiel called from the rock. “A tiny winged creature once thought to be the familiar of vampires the world over.”
Caitlin looked up, surprised to see that Ezekiel was staring at her, his eyes glinting in the starlight.
“You knew I was here?”
“Practically the whole time.” He grinned. “You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
“I guess my strengths lie in my swordsmanship and my good looks.”
“You are good with that sword.”
Caitlin chuckled as Ezekiel invited her to join him. She clambered onto the rock and took a seat beside him. The boulder was uncomfortable. She wondered how he had managed to sit so still on it for so long.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked, once she had finally found the least uncomfortable position she could find.
“Gazing,” Ezekiel answered simply. “Listening.”
“How can you gaze with your eyes closed?”
A smile grew on Ezekiel’s face once more. Caitlin couldn’t help but feel reassured by that smile. “Gazing comes in many forms,” he told her. “In a world in which danger is an imminent threat on both the outside and the inside, it is good to calm the soul and quiet the voices in your head. Only with total clarity can you navigate this world and try to make sense of all that it now holds.”
“You’re talking about meditation?” Caitlin asked.
“In a sense.” Ezekiel nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. It is kind of like meditation. Have you ever tried it?”
“Yeah, like I’ve ever had an hour to sit still and get in touch with my inner Kitty-Cat.”
“I thought you hated that name?”
Caitlin shrugged. “It’s grown on me. Kain and Ma have a way of getting beneath your skin.”
“Yet, you love them, Sir Wolfington and the vampire.”
Caitlin gave Ezekiel a strange look, as though he had just suggested something altogether disgusting. Then, after a moment, she realized that he was right. “I do. They’re my kin. We’ve been through a lot together.”
She played with her fingers and shuffled her position. Already her butt-cheeks were growing cold and numb.
“And Helena?” she asked. “You love her?”
“I suppose it depends what you mean by love,” Ezekiel answered, his face thoughtful. “If you mean that she is someone I care about deeply and would not want to lose, then yes. I suppose I do love her. She was there for me at a time when I had no one. A time when I believed that the world had nothing left to offer but darkness and misery.”
Ezekiel spoke with a calm maturity in his voice. His words reminded Caitlin of her own father, of wisdom acquired over years of existence in the world.
Chasing The Cure: Age Of Madness - A Kurtherian Gambit Series (The Caitlin Chronicles Book 5) Page 13