by A N Sandra
“No one would blame you if you just took a sabbatical,” Sarah told him kindly. “You’ve worked like a champion for years. You’re only thirty-two. No one would blame you for taking time to yourself. St. Agnes appreciates your efforts. Your Ted Talks get an amazing number of views. If you say you’re going to Fiji to play disc golf no one is going to say anything other than have fun.”
“I think the disc golf course in Fiji is clothing optional,” Doctor Justin said unexpectedly. “I can’t go there… everyone with a cell phone will have a record of my—”
“Even better.” Sarah shook her head in disbelief that the contract review she had planned for the afternoon had taken this turn. “Prove you’re a real man.”
“No proof needed.” Doctor Justin smiled a little. The truth was not something he wanted to say out loud. He had no idea how to have fun and he didn’t even want to. He had studied and worked hard as a small child, winning science fairs as a first-grade student. Driven by his mother, he’d spent all his spare time learning. His father, a corporate merger specialist, was a master manipulator and had made sure that his little son Justin did not become a science nerd. Justin was well rounded. He played basketball and baseball, he had friends even though he spent very little time with them, and under his father’s tutelage he learned to read body language and facial expressions. Doctor Justin was a success machine. He didn’t know how to take a break. Every situation that life handed him had been met with success in some form, but he had no idea how to play.
There was one form of stress relief Doctor Justin indulged in, but he couldn’t imagine doing that more than he already did. He had never promised any woman he’d be faithful to them, although there were times he had made public statements during his Ted Talks that implied he had moral standards that he did not. Women wanted to make him happy, and he let them. He didn’t want to take a vacation with a woman; he didn’t want a vacation at all. He wanted a second ivory box to make sure that he made it through the coming holocaust. One had kept him competitive and given him professional success. Two might even help him expose the Hollisters where others had not been able to and prevent the coming trouble.
The coming trouble was impossible to put his head around, even with his constant companion, the ivory box one of his father’s cohorts had left him when he died. Even though he never made a big deal about it, Doctor Justin knew the box was responsible for keeping him calm during tests, thus allowing him to finish college and then medical school early. He had skipped a year of elementary school, done three years of college in one (his father had hired top tutors for that, though), and blown through med school with none of the starts and stops that happened to other people. How could all of his accomplishments amount to nothing?
Restless, Doctor Justin stood up.
“Cancel my appointments,” he told Sarah, who almost fell backward from surprise. “I’m going to go visit Blaine Hollister. See how he’s holding up under the grief of losing his only child.”
“Oh—” Sarah actually gripped the back of a chair to keep herself upright. “Would you like me to call him and let him know you’re coming?”
“I’ll just drop in,” Doctor Justin said. “Take the rest of the day off after you cancel everything. Take tomorrow off too. You’ve been under a lot of stress.”
Sarah hadn’t had a real day off since she’d taken her position with Doctor Justin two years before. He didn’t take days off, and so neither did she. Now she was worried about him in a new way. No one could just drop in on Blaine Hollister. He was a man who had his own class of importance. Even someone with millions and millions of Ted Talk views would have a hard time getting an appointment with Blaine Hollister even months in advance… to decide to simply drop by his office was not going to turn out well. Sarah decided she was really glad he’d given her the day off. Seeing his ego crushed when Blaine Hollister’s admin made him see that he really was not that important would be unbearable.
“Hollister Towers,” Doctor Justin told his driver as he slipped into his waiting car.
A well-kept secret was that in the bowels of Hollister Tower, so far below ground many people would already consider the area to be hell, Blaine Hollister kept a shooting range where he indulged in target practice routinely. Molly had told Doctor Justin about it in an unguarded moment. He even had the elevator code to get to the subterranean floor where the shooting range was. Blaine Hollister went there after lunch every day for an hour. Doctor Justin would meet him there. Why, he wasn’t sure, but in his life experience he had learned to follow inner promptings.
“I’ll call you when I’m ready,” Doctor Justin told his driver.
Walking through the lobby of Hollister Towers, Doctor Justin received sympathetic looks from everyone he was foolish enough to make eye contact with. He made sure to smile gently, careful to project the countenance of a grieving soul mate. Even as he meandered through the lobby toward the elevator, he kept his eye out for women who would be happy to spend the evening in hours of lovemaking to help him move past his grief. Two potential targets were spotted and if both of them were there when he came back from visiting Blaine he’d have to choose. The redhead looked like a discounted version of Sadie… probably not her. The blonde wouldn’t be bad although she was wearing so much makeup she appeared to be glowing. They’d have to go to her place because his cleaning service wouldn’t be able to get her makeup off the sheets and towels.
Doctor Justin bypassed the regular elevators, going to the private elevator the family used. He punched in the code, and once he was on, entered the code to take it to the shooting range six stories below ground. Many people might’ve been claustrophobic at the idea, but Blaine Hollister probably just enjoyed being that much closer to the devil.
Stepping out of the elevator the smell of gunpowder was overwhelming. Just then a round went off at an unexpected decibel level.
“Why didn’t I think of bringing ear protection?” Doctor Justin muttered as he looked around. The elevator had dumped him into a narrow hall. There was only one direction to go and suddenly Doctor Justin was very sorry he had had the idea to come here. He had thought he would surprise Blaine and bond with him in an environment full of testosterone. Getting to know Blaine would help Doctor Justin understand why he was poised to destroy the world.
As he came around the corner Doctor Justin saw several men firing into the shooting range. It looked like Hollister security guards were joining Blaine for target practice. There were no targets, however. At the end of the range was a heap of bodies, and more people were coming in from an unseen staging area on the sides.
Doctor Justin squinted through the haze of gun smoke and shook his head the way a child shakes an Etch A Sketch, sure he wasn’t really seeing these images. Refocusing didn’t change the scene in front of him. Blaine Hollister and several men wearing Hollister Security uniforms were shooting people for target practice or some other reason.
The people entering the end of the shooting range didn’t have facial expressions. Their movements were quite fluid, not purposeful, but not jerky or unnatural. Their faces… years ago Doctor Justin had begun to hear rumors that the Hollister Mental Health Intake Facilities were testing all kinds of drugs on the people admitted there. As an ambitious young man building a career, Doctor Justin hadn’t given any thought to rumors like that. Conspiracy theories were not for people like him. Not until Natalie and Jase had Doctor Justin met anyone who could convince him that the Hollisters were after world dominion. The people in front of him were acting under the influence of a drug Doctor Justin couldn’t imagine existing. They moved more gracefully than television zombies, but they didn’t notice that they were being cut down. They had no fear or awareness of their environment at all.
Time to go. This is not a good place to get caught uninvited.
Doctor Justin backed around the corner, back to the elevator, and got in as if he were in a dream. Without the box in his pocket he would not have been able to make his feet mo
ve. He would have been rooted like a tree for Blaine Hollister to turn around and find. If that had happened, Doctor Justin knew he would have been in the pile of bodies at the end of the shooting range in very short minutes. All his Ted Talk views wouldn’t have saved him. Did Molly know? If she did, she wouldn’t have told him about the range in the first place. Molly wouldn’t care if she had known, though. She was not empathetic.
The elevator door opened on a security guard wearing the same style of clothes as the men below ground shooting people.
“I was just looking for Melissa or Blaine,” Doctor Justin told him hastily, briskly stepping around the mountain of a man before he was asked to explain himself.
As he walked back through the lobby, he called his driver to pick him up without pausing to check for the scrumptious young women he had considered spending the afternoon in bed with. He waited for a moment for his driver by the curb and tried to remember the last time he had been so shaken. Maddy had been quite indignant that he hadn’t been embarrassed when she caught him in her room, and he’d found her attitude amusing. His heart pounded loudly at the idea of being pulled back into Hollister Towers and thrown in front of Blaine’s firing squad.
“Take me home,” Doctor Justin told his driver, sliding into the car. “ASAP.”
As he walked up to his front door, Doctor Justin wondered what it said about him that he was more worried about what the Hollisters were up to because they were taking his future. The one he’d worked for so diligently since being so small. He had been convinced the future was his but events of the last few months, culminating in the scene he had just witnessed, proved he was nothing to them. Molly was attracted to him, but she would be like her father. Capable of possessive feelings about someone she was sexually attracted to, but incapable of real love. If he and Molly didn’t work out, if Natalie hadn’t contacted him, he would be about to die with the general population of the planet before long. Everything he had been working for had been an illusion, and he, who always felt in complete control of himself and therefore in control of those around him, had been fooled into thinking his world was the only world.
His apartment was dark. He had not drawn back the shades before he went to work. Forcefully, Doctor Justin stalked to the windows of his living room and threw the switches that opened the blinds, letting sunlight into his apartment.
“I am not going to go along with them,” he promised himself. After what he had just seen—not just the show of force with the guns, not only the cold-blooded killing of defenseless citizens, but the evidence of medical power no one else could have—Doctor Justin realized that he had not been taking the Hollisters seriously at all. He had been playing at taking action, setting up a small vaccination center, listening to what the news on the Dark Web had to say, trying to see if Maddy or Tilly had a special box, but he had not been preparing himself for the real future. As sure as he had let the light into his apartment, he let understanding flood his consciousness. He would step into the future that was coming on his own terms.
He would go to Maine, seduce Molly Hollister, (it wouldn’t be hard) and find out everything he could about Blaine Hollister’s plans for the new world. As much as he didn’t like the idea, he didn’t see any other way.
Chapter 21
Ancient Times
Six ivory boxes were in the research room where Golda normally kept them locked away from the people who found their presence to be a threat. The rest had been sent with mortal women to keep them calm as the Blood Drinkers descended on Atlantis. Those boxes had probably sunk to the bottom of the sea, although they would be well preserved there. They were sealed to be completely watertight, and the gold crystals inside the boxes were energy sources that would never be depleted, keeping the samples fresh for all time.
“How can I make the best use of them?” Golda asked Barden with Cattu beside her as the battle wound down. The colony was not progressing toward a win. All they were managing to do was slow the inevitable loss.
“Do you know how to destroy them?” Barden asked. “So that the Blood Drinkers can’t use them?”
“It would be murder,” Golda told him. After years of honest debate, she had no patience for deception. Inside the boxes were years of her hard work, the promise of a great contribution to the colony, and life substance. No one had wanted her gift, her great work, and since she knew no one else could see her vision she could look past their ingratitude, but that didn’t mean she was willing to destroy her most satisfying work. Those boxes wouldn’t just be destroyed… the contents would perish if she allowed them to be destroyed. “I don’t think they can be used by the Blood Drinkers anyway.”
“They’ve managed to turn many wonderful things against the Earth,” Barden reminded her just as directly as she had spoken to him. “I have experience with them that you don’t.”
“I can’t destroy them,” Golda insisted. “They are alive—”
“Then we need to hide them,” Barden told her. “Now.”
Golda didn’t want to, but the sounds outside convinced her that if she did not remove them now there would be absolutely no chance later. They would be overrun, even here, even with Cattu and Ursu beside them. By her count there were at least six snakes and their half Eternal allies even though most of their human hoard had not survived the horrible battle.
“Can you swim?” Barden asked Golda.
“Yes…” she said hesitantly. She was afraid of what she was sure he was going to say.
“We can swim for the boats that capsized when Geri tried to leave. With Cattu and Ursu we can right them and go to the mainland.”
That was what she had thought he was going to say. She didn’t have a better idea and before she could change her mind, she nodded agreement and put all the ivory boxes into a cream-colored linen bag. “We won’t be safe on the mainland either, but we can store the boxes there.”
“Should we destroy the equipment in here before we go?” Barden asked. He looked around the lab that had taken Golda forty years to develop. “I wouldn’t want to leave it for them to use.”
“They are destroying everything they touch.” Golda frowned. She found it impossible to imagine that once the snakes had the island colony under their control, they would begin doing research in her tidy lab. “They’ll finish this off when they get here. We need our energy to swim out to the boats and turn them right side up…”
“Let’s go then.”
“We’ll go behind the dormitories, around the back of the refectory, and swim to the boats.” Golda clarified the route because once they began to run, she planned on running with all her concentration.
“I’ll follow you,” Barden said graciously, as if the sounds of chaos and the smell of smoke were not filling the air around them.
Golda reached down, pulled Cattu’s face up a bit and kissed the feline’s nose, in case they were struck down on the way to the capsized boats, or in case they drowned before they could reach the boats, or sank trying to save the boats and turn them over. Then she took a deep breath, nodded at Barden, and began to run for the door. Outside the door she ran with Cattu in lock step almost as if they were one unit, with Barden and Ursu right on their heels. There was no way to see through the smoke how much of the colony was still standing. It was hard to even see the white pebbles that made up the path they followed to the beach.
“Just go,” Barden urged as Golda hesitated at the place where the water rushed onto the sand. She didn’t pause for more than two seconds, though she was leaving not just her home but the community she had helped build to try to serve the world. The sound of something shattering in the distance behind them helped her make up her mind and she slogged into the water, then began to swim.
The boats were even farther from shore than Golda had thought but she was very fit and had the endurance that came with being half Eternal. Cattu was a fantastic swimmer and the two of them kept close. It was easy to be motivated to keep swimming when Golda realized that she had not hear
d any screams from the shore at all. The thought that there was no one left to call out in distress kept her aware that everything depended on reaching the boats.
Trying to turn over a boat far out at sea, already tired from swimming, had seemed risky to Golda when they left the island, but Barden and Ursu flipped over a boat without help. It was not big enough for all four of them, so Ursu and Cattu stayed next to it while Barden and Golda climbed in and rowed it to a second boat, which Barden and Ursu again flipped by themselves. They both got in, and Golda helped Cattu into her boat, which took on a good amount of water from dipping low enough to pull Cattu in.
“I’ve never seen you tired before, Cattu,” Golda said sadly as the big cat collapsed in a soggy heap at her feet. “I’ve seen you sleep, but only to pass the time, not because you were worn out.”
The roar of Cattu’s purr overrode the crash of the waves and sea but Golda knew Cattu was purring from an internal method of coping with pain. To distract herself Golda scooped saltwater out of the small boat with her hands. It took a long time, but before the sun set on their adventure, she had it mostly empty.
“We’re almost at the mainland,” Golda told Cattu. She steered her boat in such a manner that it roughly followed Barden and Ursu in theirs. They were probably anxious to get out of their boat since Ursu was even larger than Cattu and they were wedged into it with part of Ursu’s backside bulging out over the edge.
Nothing about landing on the mainland felt good or right when they finally disembarked at the small dock Barden guided them to. Both Ursu and Cattu were on a heightened danger alert. Sure enough, the group had not gotten far up the narrow road leading away from the dock before a small group of the Blood Drinker’s hoard accosted them.
“Urrrahhh!” Ursu growled as he threw himself on one of them.