Shaking her head, Vivian took his hand. "Maybe you do, but there's someone else you need to see there."
"Who?"
"You know, Solly, for a clever man you can be pretty stupid. Family isn't just about blood, as you know well enough. You have to go back because Ross is there. That poor boy has been through enough and will be grieving just as you are. The last thing he needs is for the man he thinks of as his father to up and disappear without even saying goodbye."
Solly nodded. "You're right, of course. We'll set off in the morning. It's time to go home."
Solly spent the afternoon among the rubble of the Buchanan community. In the garden of Beth-Anne Buchanan, he found the little row of graves dug by Scott, Becky Epstein and Vivian. They'd been lined up along the white picket fence and the names had been written above each. Beth-Anne Buchanan, Anna Buchanan, then two more names Solly didn't recognize including one that simply said "Unknown." And there, at the end of the row, "Janice Summers."
He staggered back from the garden and into the ruins of the house. They had put up a fight, that much was obvious from the blood stains he'd seen on the pathway—beside one of which lay a black helmet. So, the Lees had sent in troops as well as one or more Reapers, though there was no sign of any damage to a drone. How could there be? Small arms made barely a dent on them and it was unlikely the Buchanans had any heavy weaponry.
Solly returned to the house he shared with Vivian to find her nudging the contents of a copper frying pan on the glowing red embers of the fire.
"I found some eggs," she said. "I guess they kept chickens and somehow these ones didn't get destroyed in the attack. You okay? Said I'd come with you."
Taking his coat off, Solly slumped on the couch. "I know, but I had to do it on my own. I had to see with my own eyes."
Vivian cursed softly. "I'm not sure these have come out how they’re supposed," she said, getting up and giving the frying pan a final stir. "How hard can scrambled eggs be?"
She showed him the inside of the frying pan which was an unpleasant mix of deep yellows, whites and dark brown. But his stomach rumbled as he looked at it. "It'll be fine," he said. "Thank you."
It was edible, Solly would acknowledge that, but he made a mental note to volunteer to do any further cooking until they got to the farmhouse. As night fell, he went outside with a bucket to draw some water from the stream that ran along the back of the houses here and filled the tank of the toilet—he had a feeling he was going to need it.
It took two days to pick their way across country back to Hagerstown. They avoided the military at Harrisburg by crossing the river south at a place called Highspire, before heading south to York and then east. It was a long and dreary drive and the Humvee didn't give the most comfortable of rides. They were low on fuel by the time they reached the farmhouse as the sun was about to set.
People emerged from the house and barn at the sound of the Humvee's diesel engine, though there was none of the celebration of his last return home. Jaxon was the first to greet him, throwing himself into Solly's arms as the tears flowed again. Solly did the rounds of embraces and, as he hugged Miss Prism, he saw Vivian walking away.
"Viv!" he called. She showed no sign of having heard him, so Solly ran after her and tugged at her arm "Where are you going?"
She shrugged and he could see that her face was also wet. "I go to the Fordham's place, that's where me bed is."
"No," Solly said, surprising himself with the strength of his feeling. "You must stay with us here."
"Why?"
"Because you're family now."
Solly found Ross on his own in the room Janice and Solly had shared. He was sitting in his wheelchair looking out of the window at the darkness beyond with unfocused eyes.
"Son," Solly said, putting his hand on Ross's shoulder.
"Why?" he said, not removing his gaze from the window.
Solly sighed and sat on the end of the bed, trying not to look at Janice's clothes which lay where she'd left them before they'd set off for the raid. "Which 'why' would you like to talk about first?"
"Why did they kill her? She did them no harm. Why not just take her prisoner?"
"I don't know, Ross. They took some prisoners because we couldn't account for more than half the people who'd lived there. I’m afraid they're probably discovering what slavery under the ownership of the Lees actually amounts to."
Ross spun around in his chair. "Why did you leave her there?" he said, his voice pleading.
"I thought she'd be safer there than coming on the raid with us."
"You were wrong."
"I know, Ross, I know."
"Did she ask to stay?"
"No, I didn't offer her the choice."
Ross's anger finally boiled over. "That's your problem, isn't it? Always making decisions for other people. Never thinking they might be the best ones to decide for themselves. Brilliant Solly Masters, the man with all the answers!"
Solly knew that Ross wanted him to bite back, but it would not be good for him to vent uncontrollably only to regret harsh words later. And, in any case, he was right. Though he'd had the best of intentions, the truth was he had been arrogant and, yes, selfish. He'd tried to protect Janice so that he wouldn't have to fear for her safety or cope with the grief of her coming to harm. Good plan.
So Solly sat with head bowed as the last echoes of Ross's accusations died away. He could hear the boy sobbing, but still he didn't look up.
"What are we going to do without her, Solly?" he muttered, a child again.
Solly shrugged. "I'm going to bring them down, Ross. I'm going to bring down the Lee Corporation, or die in the attempt. But first I'm going south to find my children and their mother. I feel as though I've lost everything, and I need to know whether that's true. I need to at least try. I'll give myself a couple of months to find them, and then I'm going to head to DC to join the president so I can do my bit for our country. And to get my revenge."
"And what about me?"
Solly looked at him, saw the fear of further loss. "Your home is here, Ross."
"But you called me son," he said. "Didn't you mean it?"
"Of course I did, but you'll be safer here."
Anger flashed in the boy's eyes. "Can't you just hear yourself? You're doing it again! I don't want to stay here. I want to come with you!"
"But Ross, you can't…" Solly couldn't bring himself to say it, so he just waved at the wheelchair.
"I'm learning! Look."
To his horror, Solly watched Ross fold up the foot rests on his chair and put his feet on the floor. He put his hands on the armrests and, with a heave, pulled himself upright. Solly saw his left leg move forward an inch or two and then Ross's arm began to shake.
Solly launched himself at Ross and was just in time to grab him. They fell to the floor, Solly cushioning the impact. The two of them lay together on the musty carpet as the sound of children playing permeated through the floor and, in the candlelight, they sobbed.
Chapter 2
Despite Solly's yearning to get away from the farmhouse as quickly as possible, it didn't turn out to be that simple. The place he'd called home for the past four months was now haunted by endless reminders of Janice.
He sat through seemingly endless meetings with Jaxon, Arnold and Miss Prism as they talked through the months ahead. He was disappearing just as the planting season was getting underway, just when he was most needed, and the guilt of that abandonment hung over him like a ghoul. They all asked him not to go and told him he was needed here, but he knew that unless he headed south to find his family, he could never settle anywhere.
Jaxon had asked him whether he was taking on this mission because it was hopeless—what were the chances of finding three people who could be anywhere in Texas right now? Didn't he know that it was a war zone down there? Jaxon was a clever young man and Solly was self-aware enough to acknowledge that he probably had a point. But he also knew for certain that he had to try. He would travel
light and move fast, and he'd come back as soon as he'd found them, or had satisfied himself that they were no longer alive. He had an appointment with the Lee Corporation and, as Khan Noonian Singh said, “revenge is a dish best served cold.”
Quite why he was this indispensable linchpin was a mystery to Solly. He had no special expertise or insight and yet every decision was referred to him. When he was gone, someone needed to fill his boots and Jaxon was the only candidate. Scott Lee, while he was the smartest person Solly knew, had no emotional investment in the farmhouse community and all the empathy of a robot. So, Jaxon would take Solly's place with Arnold and Miss Prism to advise him, along with Scott Lee if he hung around.
So, they worked on a planting plan based on a book they'd rescued from the library in Hagerstown. Jaxon's foraging expeditions on the nearby farms had yielded a viable population of hens that was already producing eggs for the community and was being actively encouraged to grow. Miss Prism had developed a fascination with chickens and was now running the unit with surprising enthusiasm.
A small herd of cattle had been assembled from the few survivors of the early days after the Long Night. A single bull had been found, and now enough of the cows were pregnant to ensure a small supply of fresh milk to supplement their dwindling supply of the powdered variety. But the search continued, wider afield, for more stock to make their herd viable.
Joe Kuchinsky had been recovering from his wounds in a bedroom at the Fordhams' place and had taken command both of that community and the detachment of troops from Wright-Patterson. One of their number had been sent to the base to get orders, but Kuchinsky thought it most likely he'd remain with them for the foreseeable future. Solly had advised Jaxon to go to Joe if he needed another opinion on anything. Kuchinsky's presence was one crumb of comfort for Solly as he contemplated leaving the place.
Scott Lee was, it seemed, a man without a mission now. He'd been unable to reactivate Alison since the attack on the Lee Corporation's fabrication plant and believed she was irretrievably lost.
"Here," he said, tossing the cylinder over. He and Solly were sitting in the front room of one of the shacks the Wright-Patterson soldiers had built beside the barn.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Solly asked.
Lee shrugged. "Use it as a doorstop? I don't know. Maybe you can get through to her."
"You think she's still in there?"
"No, I think she was either destroyed by the mind of the drone or trapped. She'd barely survived that encounter with the prototype, and that had only lasted a few seconds. And this time, we couldn't retrieve the body of the Reaper. For all I know, she's still inside it, or maybe even in the hands of Lee Corp engineers right now."
The man's face was drained of all hope, all energy. Solly could hardly imagine this was the same man Paulie had described as having an entire town under his sway through the force of his charisma.
"She was more than just a software project, wasn't she?"
Lee looked up suddenly, as if he were being dragged out of contemplation. "What? Oh. Yes. You're right. She was my secret project. Annabel knew nothing of her."
"Why did you create her?"
Scott Lee drew in a deep breath and rubbed his face as if fighting off exhaustion. "As a counterpoint to the monster I was forced to build. You see, when my darling wife saw the end approaching, she instructed me to create an AI version of her that was indistinguishable from the real thing. Are you familiar with the Turing Test, Solly?"
"Of course I am. I was a software developer for over twenty years."
This brought a little life to Lee's tired face. "Sorry, yes. I forgot. So, it was my task to create an AI that was not only capable of fooling humans into believing they were dealing with a real person, as with the Turing Test, but to go one step further. It wasn't enough for Annabel that the entity could appear to be a human to others. For her, it had to go much deeper than that—it had to be as close to being a living mind as it was possible to be. It would seem, to anyone interacting with it, that her organic consciousness had been transferred along with her memories, prejudices and genius."
"And did you succeed?"
Lee smiled with unmistakable pride. "Yes. Perhaps I succeeded too well. As we discovered in Seattle, the AI version of Annabel is just as clever and manipulative as the original."
"So, how does Alison fit into all this?"
"She was to be the child we never had."
Solly didn't hide his shock. "What?"
"I thought having a child, even a digital one, might soften the Annabel AI. I was hoping to build in some empathy. Since her illness, the real Annabel had precious little of that."
"What went wrong?"
Again, Scott went through his face rubbing routine before settling down and sighing. "I saw what she had become and could not give Alison up. I buried her deep, because I knew Annabel suspected me, and I gave her to Khaled. He hid Alison and escaped from the Lee Building in New York, hoping to find someone who'd take her out of the city. And he found you."
"That was a crazy plan."
"He was a crazy man. He knew more about what Annabel was planning than even I did in those last few weeks. I think it planted the seeds of his insanity."
Solly tried to make himself comfortable on the rickety chair as he composed his thoughts. "I understand why you were so angry that I opened Alison up and she imprinted on me. You are her father as well as her creator."
"I was furious, and it's taken me a long time to get over myself, Solly. For that, I apologize. But the fact is she saw you as her father, and I should have accepted that. No father would have made her take over a Reaper, knowing the pain it would cause."
Solly shook his head. "But you saved our lives."
"At the cost of hers."
They sat in silence, each processing thoughts that ranged from the deep past into an uncertain future.
"It seems we both have a complicated relationship with our children," Scott said, finally. "Do you really think you have any chance of finding yours?" He left the word alive off the end of the sentence, but Solly heard it nonetheless.
"I only know I have to try. I need to take on the Lee Corporation and, to do that, I can't be encumbered by doubt about whether I should have done more to find my family. I've lived with that since the Long Night, but there's always been something else I had to do. But no more. This can't wait any longer."
Scott nodded. "Yes, I think I understand. But, tell me, how do you intend to take on the Lee Corporation?"
"I don't know, to be honest. I was hoping you'd have some ideas on that score."
"I think all we can do is help those who oppose the Lees. The government in DC, Wright-Patterson, good guys like Colonel Moretti in Pennsylvania. We're not going to be of much use, but I kind of think we've done more than most already in taking out the Reaper plant."
"But that will only delay them," Solly said. "It won't stop them building another fabrication facility. We've bought ourselves some time. What are we going to do with it?"
Scott shrugged. "You're going to use it to find your family." He flung up his hands as Solly tensed. "Don't mistake me, I understand why you're doing it, but I suggest you put a strict time limit on it if you want to oppose the Lee Corporation. Oh, if only Alison were still functional."
"Tell me," Solly said, relaxing again. "How were you intending to use her? Once you'd decided you couldn't use her to soften your sociopathic wife's digital version."
"Well, it's like this. Alison is a facsimile of Annabel without her negative traits. Anywhere the Annabel personality could be installed would also take Alison. I had hoped to deploy Alison into Lee Corporation's systems and, through her, control their weapons and systems. She would have to fight her mother, but if she won it would have brought them down, Solly, and we'd have had a chance to avert the second culling."
His face, momentarily so full of animation, slackened again. "But that's not going to happen now."
Solly turned the
cylinder over in his hands. "So, you think there's no chance she's in here?"
"No. I've tried everything I know to reactivate the cylinder, all from within the safety of the safe in the basement, and I get nothing. All essential systems check out, but she’s like a body on life support when the mind has flown."
The last meeting Solly had before he left was the one he'd dreaded the most. His own mood was black enough as he climbed the stairs to Ross's room, but he knew the boy suffered even more, grieving for the loss of his mobility as well as the woman he saw as his mother. Solly could only imagine how powerless Ross must be feeling right now. Relying on others for the most basic necessities, he would have to watch as they toiled in the fields, tending the animals and planting the crops that would keep him alive. Relying on Solly to get the delayed revenge he so craved. And all the time wondering whether, having lost his mother, he would also lose his adoptive father. If Solly found his natural son, what room would there be for Ross?
"Hello, son," Solly said as he opened the door.
Ross was sitting in a small armchair by the window which gave him a wide view of the fields and the lane leading up to the house where the Humvee sat. The boy grunted a greeting.
"You're going tomorrow, then," Ross said.
Solly sat down on the bed. "Yeah, that's the plan."
"And you're going on your own?"
"I am."
"Then why do you need a Humvee?"
"Because I need space to bring Bella and the kids back. Besides, it's the safest transport we've got."
Ross twisted around in his chair. "I have to come, Solly. I have no reason to stay here."
"We've been through this, Ross. You're safer here. And this is where your friends are."
"I don't want to be safe," Ross snapped. "And I need to be with my father, not with my friends."
Solly slumped. Heaven knew he'd welcome the company, and he'd have been happy to have Ross where he could see him. But it was just ridiculous to go out into the fractured world with a paralyzed boy.
Betrayed: Book 5 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival series: (The Long Night - Book 5) Page 2