A flutter in her core snapped her reverie and her hand flew to her belly. No! How could this happen now, when they needed speed more than ever? For the first time since she’d realized that she was pregnant, she felt a tiny seed of regret. Instant guilt followed the thought and she shook her head. It wasn’t the baby’s fault they were in this mess. It was hers. She’d just go as hard as she could. She was still the Leader after all.
“Guys,” she said. “ I know we have to go fast, so let’s not stop anymore. I can still walk when I can’t run. We don’t need to take long breaks each day. We have to go faster than we are now.” Asher started to protest, but Fi put her hand to his mouth. “I promise, I’ll tell you if I need rest.”
Asher’s lips pressed into a thin line, but she ignored it. He knew her too well. There wasn’t a chance in hell that she would tell them if she were tired. She was going to run until she couldn’t anymore and then she was going to walk until she got to Eden, or dropped, whichever came first. For the first time in a long time, Fi felt her old friend Death tapping on her shoulder. It seemed like He would never stop coming for the ones she loved.
They settled in for a brief rest, trying to suppress their instinct to panic. At Asher’s urging, Fi joined him in their sleeping bag. Though she felt warm and safe in his arms, she couldn’t help her mind from wondering if Kiara was warm and safe. As Asher’s arm grew heavy across her waist, she settled in for a long night of worry. She wished she still had a working strategy like her “Pretty Dresses” of old.
When her little brother Luke had died of brain cancer, she was only six. She learned to distract herself from fear by thinking about pretty dresses. But too much had happened since that time. Now when she lay awake in fear, there was no breaking its grip. The darkness held her down and in the early hours of the morning the “what if’s” whirled into her mind.
What if the Truthers had found Eden? What if Kiara was hurt or killed? What if all of her Family was lost? What if… What if… What if… It was maddening. By morning she was exhausted, but her adrenaline pushed her forward. At first light she jumped up, ready to get going.
They broke camp without eating and pushed forward. There was no discussion about whether to walk or jog. Fi set the pace as best she could. Though her jog was more of a rolling trudge, it was faster than her walk. It was grueling, but she forced the fatigue from her mind. If her knees hurt, or her side ached, or her legs felt oxygen-deprived, she just thought of Kiara and kept going. Only when the entire group insisted that she rest would she acquiesce. Though it was no use, she thought. Each new sunrise without contact with Eden stung like nettles working their way deeper into her flesh. They had to get back.
They’d planned to take a week to get from their camp back to Eden, but their push cut the time in half. Fall was in full explosion, with clear blue skies sailing over oceans of color. The air teemed with the smells of last growth and legions of yammering geese soared overhead, but none of it mattered to Fi. Nothing was beautiful. Nothing was comforting. It was all just a precursor to death.
#############################################
It was mid-afternoon when they reached the hidden entryway to the Eden garage. The door hung wide and the Jeeps were gone, but that wasn’t what stopped them in their tracks. The doorway was covered with hundreds of red handprints with the capital “T” in the center. Truthers.
Fi started to run and then tripped, falling forward onto her knees. Asher and Sean rushed to help her. A scream roared to life in her chest, clawing to get out, and she bit down on her fist. They had to be silent.
Asher drew his sword and took the lead as they entered the colony. They passed through the clean room into impenetrable darkness. They tread carefully, trailing fingers along the moist walls of the tunnels and listening at the intersections for any signs of life. Each time they stopped, Fi begged for a murmur, a cough, anything…but the air was still. Distant dripping broke the silence, a torturous metronome.
Where was everyone? What happened here? The faces of her Family floated through her mind like spirits haunting the place: Sean’s sisters and parents, the Skillmans. They were her and Kiara’s surrogate family now that her parents were gone. And the Coopers: Doc Ron and his wife Aliyah, and their son Aldy. Her eyes filled with tears as they moved toward the residences.
…Her mentor and her father’s old colleague, Louis and his wife, Lizzie. What about them? Oh, God. And the kids…José and Mayra. And Sarge and Lydia and Charlie and Larry and Gary…
She couldn’t stop it. Everyone that she loved was missing, their voices no longer echoing in the halls. When they reached the residential pods, Sean flipped on a flashlight. The first few they passed were empty and Fi’s panic intensified. They can’t all be gone… She raced for the Skillman pod, where Kiara had been staying. As she got within a few feet, her tears spilled over. The door was yanked off its track and the place was ransacked. The mirror above the couch was smashed, and a dripping red scrawl slicked the shatters, “Father’s Will Be Done.”
“Sean.” Fi slumped against the doorjamb on quaking legs. She met her best friend’s eyes and saw her horror reflected. She whirled and stormed away, screaming. “KIARA!”
Sean was right on her heels. “Rachel?” he shouted. “Mom? Dad? Where are you guys?”
“Lily?” Sara was shouting now as well. “Mama?”
“Fi!” Asher rushed after them, reaching for her. “Fi, slow down!”
Fi couldn’t think. She couldn’t stop. “KIARA! Answer me, please!”
She streaked past the labs, the shattered glassware crunching beneath her feet. When she reached the main field pod, she came to a dead stop. The mirror array that brought daylight from the surface filled the enormous cavern with a soft glow, despite the lack of electricity. The fields were destroyed — the crops uprooted and the soil beds ripped apart. And in the middle, the symbol of Eden, the apple tree known as “Eve” lay hewn in two pieces, her remaining fruit still glistening on the branch.
“Oh, God.” Fi sank to the floor. “They’re gone, they’re all gone.” She wrapped her arms around herself as desolation flowed through her like a river. “Kiara’s gone. They took her, they killed her...”
A knifing pain shot through her back and seized her lower body. She cried out and doubled over, buckled by its intensity. It faded for a moment and she breathed hard, her head swimming. Then a second pain hit her with an iron grip that was harder than the first. “Ah, God!”
She panicked as pain overtook her devastation. She felt warmth beneath her. Confused, she looked down and saw a spreading puddle of liquid before she was seized by another fiery blade of pain. Asher, Sean, and Sara stared down at her, aghast.
“Oh my God, Fi,” Sara whispered. “I think your water just broke.”
Trail of Tears
--------------- Darryl --------------
Darryl blinked against the glare and chewed his lip, already cracked and raw with exposure. It’s never going to get any easier, is it? he thought. Two weeks into this goddamned Trail of Tears and every single Dead Zone hit him like a sucker punch. In the nearly five years since the Famine descended, he’d never left the safety of Eden. Though their first day seeing the actual sunrise had made his heart leap, it was only for a millisecond. With the daylight had come his Waterloo.
Not the human devastation: the burning, pillaging, and madness left behind when nine billion humans worked their way down to just millions. They’d been too far out in the woods for that. But that had been small comfort once their forced pilgrimage hit the first Dead Zone…that endless expanse of shattered grey mud.
Though winter is a natural time of slumber, this was more than that. A breeze bereft of birdsong, earth without print or path, where no stubborn tussock defied the drifts. It was death. Annihilation. Nothingness. A cord had formed in his chest, cinching tighter with each breath until his heart finally stopped. Dr. Darryl Heil, scientist, innovator, and Architect of the End of the World was dead.
Now, he was a different man. It was freeing somehow, he thought, to be dead inside. To know that who you once were is as lost as the grasses that should have been thriving in that meadow. The only thing animating his body was his determination to do whatever it took to make things right. He was going to FIX this. The only question was…how?
He eyed the armed thugs surrounding the group and cracking the proverbial whip whenever they moved too slowly. They seemed more like a bunch of criminals to him than religious nuts. Of the forty or so that had stuck with the walkers, rather than racing ahead in the Jeeps with Eden’s captured security team, every one had some sort of battle scar or prison tattoo. Who knew where Lawson had gotten these freaks, he thought, but while there were still close to eighty children with them, they couldn’t do anything crazy.
The first day some folks had started to make a break for it. Where they thought they’d go in the wilderness in winter, Darryl didn’t know, but fear was fear. It could make people take crazy chances. When their captors fired warning shots the message had crystallized. They’d kept their heads down since. Mostly. A few beatings took care of the rest. He shuddered and hoisted the boy, Tobias, higher on his back. He could feel the child growing heavier as he slipped in and out of sleep.
“Darryl?” Aliyah Cooper, Dr. Ronald Cooper’s wife, peered at him with concern. “Are you ok?” Her kind face was drawn, and her usually glowing ebony skin was dry and windburned, with streaks where the knifing wind had ripped tears from her eyes and yanked them behind her like reins.
“I can take Tobias for you, if you need a break.” Doc Ron’s baritone rumbled.
Darryl raised an eyebrow. Doc was already carrying an infant, one of his fellow medical colleagues’ children. “Looks like you got your hands full, Doc.” Darryl couldn’t suppress a sad smile. Fi’s “Family” did that to him. It was why he stuck close. Though only her sister, Kiara, was true family, the ferocity of their connection and loyalty to one another was astounding. All of them were survivors who’d joined together, navigating the starvation and violence of the post-Famine world on their long search for Eden. And because Fi sort of “adopted” Darryl into the group, he’d become one of them. He’d become Family. His throat tightened.
Only someone like Fi could have forgiven him, could’ve understood both his guilt and his innocence. He’d been like the minister in the Scarlet Letter, scurrying into Eden’s corners and hoping no one would notice the red “I” searing its way into his chest. He couldn’t tell them, couldn’t bear that moment when their eyes would go round and they’d stumble backward, desperate to get away from him, from his sin. Like Fi had.
But he’d been wrong. It was remarkable how wrong he’d been. Like him, Fi had struggled to bear the weight of this truth. That his ambition for immortality had led them to this…had cost everything. It was a twisted and brutal irony. In seeking the cure to death he’d accidentally found its siren song.
But she’d freed him when she forgave him, when she understood the difference between intent and outcome, between the man who discovered something and the one who abused it. His hands still shook thinking about it. How could a child piece that apart when his own mind clamped down in naked rejection? Fortunately, Fi was his can opener. Thankfully. Gratefully. And yes, maybe even blessedly. Who knew? Who knew why people ended up where they were and who they were?
If it hadn’t been for Fi, he never would’ve made so many wonderful friends. His mind turned — as it always did now when given its own way — to Georgina Ferrar, head of the Brain, fellow Eden Council Member, and now he realized, complete badass, marching stoically at his side.
When he’d come out of his shell, he’d been surprised to find a kindred spirit in this quiet, brilliant woman. It was odd, the way that one could sit next to a colleague for literally years and not see her. Not see one little thing. Not her deep blue eyes, flecked with green at the edges. Not the wild sweep of her curls when she blew them out of her eyes, crouched excitedly over the holo-tables at the Brain. Not the soft curve of her lovely neck…
It was fortunate for him that she didn’t share his shyness. When he’d been too scared to sit with her at dinner, she’d marched up and dropped into the seat next to him like they’d been eating together their whole lives. Ever since Angie betrayed him by stealing and selling his research, he’d pretty much assumed that he’d never trust a woman again, but Georgina — Georgie, he thought, his chest warming — she was utterly trustworthy.
She’d munched her Einkorn bread and searched his face. Normally he would have flushed or dropped his eyes, but something in the curl of her lips steadied him. She had nodded when she saw him lift his chin. “Good. Glad to see life hasn’t beaten all the stuffing out of you.”
He’d been so shocked that he’d choked on his bite of food and spent the next few minutes with her pounding his back while he wheezed. Very manly. When he’d finally regained his composure, he eyed her, feeling a buzzing in his veins, a boldness. “Yes, well, what do they say? Something about taking a licking and keeping on ticking?”
She’d blushed and he’d joined her as soon as his mind zeroed in on the word “licking.” She’d put her hand to her mouth and swallowed a giggle. A nervous giggle he knew now. At the time he’d thought he had made a fool of himself. Then she said the most drop-dead shockingly awesome thing that a woman had ever said to him. She said, “You’re a lot more fun now that you’re no longer frozen in carbonite.”
He was done. That was it. It was just like in those stupid Hallmark cards designed to make the lonely throw themselves on sharp sticks. You know, the ones with sickening little cupids with arrows? Well, it turned out that all that shlock was dead-on-punch-of-love-in-the-gut-TRUE. He’d never been a mushy type, but then he’d never had a woman treat him like her Han Solo. It was intoxicating.
They’d been together so frequently since then that Fi’s Family had taken to calling her the “wife” to josh him, and his colleagues had actually grumbled that he spent more time at the Brain than in the genetics labs. But despite her brilliance, her humor, and her former love of vintage abaci… (Which, as it turns out, is the plural of abacus. He thanked Lucy Skillman for that one.) …He learned that none of that was the true measure of the woman, of her mettle. Because the day of the attack, she actually became Leia.
She’d made sure that the seed stores were locked down, her salt and pepper curls streaming wild as she’d raced through the tunnels, screaming for the lockdown. There was gunfire and screaming on all sides. He’d raced behind her, calling her name, desperate to keep her from harm, until a child’s scream and a strange bellowing made him whirl. A bull, loosed from the heritage livestock pod, had charged down the tunnel, the walkway bouncing beneath its weight, its eyes rolling and mouth foaming. It was headed right for the toddler in its path, frozen except for her screams.
He’d taken one last look at Georgie streaking away, barking orders, before he’d turned back and raced for the child. The floor had rocked like a sea at storm as the animal thundered toward them. He’d had to pull himself by the railings just to keep his feet. He’d grabbed the child, her pigtails whipping as he whirled off the walkway just as the bull raged over them. He’d scrambled to his feet, still clutching the sobbing girl, when a rapid dat-dat-dat-dat split the air.
He’d clambered back onto the walkway and raced toward the gunfire, his heart beating its own dat-dat-dat. Little Gloria Hilliard, the doctor’s child, had wailed in his arms as he ran, jumping splits in the walkway where other livestock had rumbled through. Then he’d skidded to a stop in the Main Field Cabin, running into a silence so solid it could have skipped a rock. Hundreds of colonists were huddled in the pod, but except for quiet sniffles, no one made a sound.
Darryl’s eyes had fixed on the man standing in the middle of the fields beside the apple tree, “Eve.” It had seemed like a dream, the gigantic ghost of a man, his AK-47 drawn, the barrel pointed straight at a woman with her hands in the air, her grey curls now han
ging down her back in quiet defeat.
He shivered at the memory, and in an instant he was back. Back with the marching feet, the whispered terrors, the silent tears. Even Georgie’s presence at his side was painful. My fault, he thought, all my fault. “You know, Doc,” he said, “Tobias isn’t what’s weighing on me.”
“Darryl, I swear, if you say one more thing about this being your fault, I’m gonna have to smother you in your sleep.” John Skillman forced a smile, adjusting his hold on Kiara Grey, who clung to his back.
“Hear, hear,” Georgie murmured.
“The motion has passed,” Aliyah joked wearily.
John’s wife, Lucy, carried their own small daughter, Zoe, in her arms. “Let’s focus on the positive,” she said, lowering her voice. “They don’t have us all.”
“The Seeders?” Darryl mouthed. She nodded. “But what can they do? There are only four of them.”
“Hey, what’s news?” José joined them, his sister, Mayra close behind. He raised an eyebrow at Sarge, who maneuvered himself and Lydia closer. José’s gaze flew to their captors, but all seemed to be marching with heads down. He kept his voice low. “Are we discussing who I think we’re discussing?”
His eyes burned. José was a trained fighter and Darryl knew that, like him, the boy was itching to do something…to fight back. Still, it just wasn’t possible right now. The word “outgunned” really didn’t begin to describe their predicament. Darryl couldn’t get the image of Georgie with her hands in the air out of his mind. He turned to Sarge, their only military mind. “I know they’re tremendous fighters, but still, there are only four of them. How can they help us?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet against them.” The old man’s eyes grew distant. “You haven’t seen them in action.”
“It should be the easiest tracking job in history,” Mayra said, her head down. “We’re leaving a big enough trail.”
“Unless it snows a lot,” José said grimly, shifting the sling holding the toddler strapped to his back. “But then, given how much most of our gear sucks, we’ll have bigger problems if it snows a lot.”
Emergence (Eden's Root Trilogy Book 3) Page 2