Into the Yellow Zone

by Lynda Engler

  “Yeah, Doc, you keep saying that but I think that’s just a way to get me to do all the heavy work.” Luke’s arm still hurt but he did his best to deal with the pain, aided by a generous supply of Acetaminophen. He was lucky that Dr. Rosario’s lab had been resupplied with essentials, at least until three years ago. Otherwise, there would not be any medicines to combat his ongoing aches.

  Luke wondered if Araddea had been in possession of the eagle’s brain when it had come to his defense, and what had happened to the Wiccan seer when the tiger killed the eagle. Did she feel its pain? Did she feel what it was like to die? What if she had died herself because her psyche was inside the bird at the time of its death?

  Luke had better find Isabella after all he had gone through –and what he had put others through along the way. He did not worry about himself Outside chasing after her, but if his search for her had lead to the death of anyone else, that was something he had a hard time living with.

  He just had to find her. Plain and simple. The pain in his arm and the cuts on his chest were minor inconveniences compared to what Araddea had gone through to help him.

  Dr. Rosario smiled before going into the cabin. Without electronics, they were forced to use a manual pulley system to retract the anchor, like sailors did all throughout history, until the modern electronic age… an age that most of humanity no longer belonged to. As the chains groaned under their own weight and the anchor finally seated itself into its compartment, the scientist returned with breakfast bars. “Meager rations, son, but it’s all we have. No, not you, Pumpkin. You can hunt up your own food.”

  The cat begrudgingly stopped clawing at the old man’s pants leg and returned to his favorite place: Luke’s bunk in the cabin.

  As the old man readied the sails and chewed the stale oatmeal bar, Luke considered the far side of the river. The river’s edge revealed no secrets, just miles of heavily wooded land that ran the length of it. If Isabella had gone over to that side of the river, there was no sign of her. He could not think of any reason his sib would go anywhere uninhabited. Fulfilling her idealistic vision required people. The more the better. He knew she had not planned to cross the river to New York City, though. That would be suicide. No, Dr. Rosario had told the group that they would find other mutants up the Hudson River. He never told them to cross it.

  He was certain Isabella was not on the far side of the wide river. Still, he scanned that side from time to time.

  “I’m sure when we get to West Point, they’ll feed us well.” Dr. Rosario smiled.

  Luke nodded in agreement. They had enough preserved food bars to make the trip. Still, his taste buds craved the spicy flavor of Telemark’s mutton sausage and eggs breakfast, but circumstances forced him to settle for the stale cinnamon flavored oatmeal bar.

  The wind was light and they did not progress far that morning. By mid-day, it died completely. Before they could drop the anchor, the current actually pushed them downstream half a league. They sat in the sun the rest of the day, waiting in vain for the wind to return.

  “I can’t take this anymore!” shouted Luke and went into the cabin to escape the sun. “Move over.” He pushed Pumpkin off the berth and took the orange cat’s place but soon the ball of fur joined him on the bed, adding his body heat to the already sizzling day.

  By the time Luke felt the boat rocking under the keel, the sun had sunk to the horizon. He followed Pumpkin topside where the old scientist had just stowed the anchor. “Whatch’ doin’ Captain? There isn’t enough wind to move anywhere.”

  “There’s some. I just want to get to the other side of the Tappan Zee where it is placid and the river puts less strain on the anchor. We can stay there overnight and hope the wind picks up tomorrow morning.”

  “Whatever you say, Captain. Need a hand?”

  “No, boy. I can handle it. Why don’t you get us some dinner?”

  Luke followed his orders without protest and went below deck to retrieve more stale food bars. As he walked by Pumpkin, he saw the cat with a mouse in its mouth. After fifty years, the Globe had acquired its fair share of resident rodents and Pumpkin was feasting on them now, efficiently exterminating the unwanted tenants. He heard the mice’s movements at night, but so far they had stayed out of sight, at least of the humans on board. Luke thought that if Pumpkin would share, he would be glad to skin and cook the creatures. They would probably taste better than the lousy nutrition bars.

  The sailboat moved slowly but steadily up the river as the light faded from the sky. Luke’s stomach growled louder, the scant dinner only serving to whet his appetite. As they sailed under the center span of the Tappan Zee Bridge, just knowing that their voyage would be over for the day made Luke feel better. Perhaps in the morning they could moor the boat near the shore and find something to hunt. If Pumpkin could find mice and squirrels, they certainly could find something better than oatmeal bars and old MREs.

  “Luke,” said the captain, bringing the boy out of his reverie. “What’s that over there?” He pointed to a dark object near one of the huge bridge supports.

  Luke had not noticed the small object floating in the water because he had been staring up at the massive bridge that spanned the river at its widest spot. He wondered why they had not built it across a narrower section of the water. Maybe the water was shallower here, or calmer here. He was no engineer. He could not even figure out what the object floating in the river was.

  Luke squinted, trying to focus the object better. “I don’t know, maybe a tree trunk. Can we get closer?”

  As the sailboat drew closer to the tall, concrete bridge support, at last Luke saw what the object was: a rowboat. It was wedged against the concrete, and small waves lapped at its edges.

  They pulled alongside the small boat and looked down into it. The rowboat had four rucksacks on board. Pumpkin beat Luke down to examine the contents, though Luke could already smell the fish in one pack from his place on the deck of the Globe. Jumping down into the small craft, Luke opened the bags. Fish, dried meat, nuts, berries, and clothing. The last bag he recognized from his own shelter and inside Luke found three paperback books.

  They were Isabella’s favorite novels.

  * * *

  Isabella

  A cadre of guards escorted them from the cell. The hallway light was blinding after the dark prison. Suppressing her fear, Isabella took the time to notice that the walls were dull metal and the hallway floor was coal black. She could feel a vibration in it, faint at first, but growing as they wound along the interminably long passageway.

  Left, right, then straight as the passage widened into a foyer. Cement stairs with a steel railing along one side led down many flights, more than Isabella could see. Looking down into the bottomless pit gave her vertigo.

  “Go down,” ordered the guard who was behind them.

  Isabella gripped the railing tighter. Her knuckles turned white from her death grip and her breath came ragged with trepidation.

  As they descended, a sonorous hum issued through the wall, growing louder as they went down.

  “What’s that noise?” asked Malcolm, looking down and then back up, but unable to identify the source of the noise.

  The guard ignored his inquiry.

  “What’s that noise?” Isabella repeated her husband’s question.

  The guard remained mute.

  “Answer him!” she shouted, turning to look back at him behind her on the stairs. She was last in line, with Shia and Andra sandwiched between herself and Malcolm, Clay and Kalla up front.

  “Reactor.” The guard prodded her shoulder blade with his rifle. “Keep moving.”

  “As in nuclear?” asked Isabella, her eyes wide in fear. She had not thought that the power plant could still be operational after fifty years.

  “Of course. This is a nuclear power generating facility. What the hell else would it be? Dumb mutant.” The guard mumbled the last comment.

  “I’m not a mutant!” she shouted at the man behind the
weapon still pointed at her back.

  “You’re with them. Same thing,” grumbled the guard, poking her with renewed vigor.

  “They aren’t mutants either! They are just the new kind of people. Still human but they’ve adapted to their environment…” she started to explain but he cut her off.

  “Save it for someone who cares.” His voice grated on her like a dull saw grinding through a tree trunk.

  “That’s the problem. No one does,” she whispered so quietly she was not even sure herself if she had vocalized it or just thought it.

  A moment later, they reached a landing with a steel door and the guard growled, “In there.” Another guard stood at the open door and pointed inside with the narrow tip of his rifle. Kalla and Clay entered together, still holding hands. The little girls walked in, Malcolm keeping a strong hand on each of their shoulders. Isabella entered last and the gruff guard closed the door behind her, both guards remaining outside. At least the door would prevent Sergeant Pokey from stabbing her with his gun again.

  Behind a dingy, gray, metal desk sat an older woman engrossed in a stack of papers, seemingly unaware of the group standing before her. “What are we supposed to do?” Isabella whispered to Malcolm, who now stood protectively before her and the little girls.

  Before he could answer, the woman looked up. “Oh, another group. I’ll be right with you,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  A moment later, she stood and came around the desk and began safety-pinning shiny pieces of paper to each of their shirts. “These will be your identification tags. Don’t take them off,” she advised. She took great care to secure the paper to each of them gently and without accidentally sticking any of them with the pins. She smiled kindly at Shia and Andra as she knelt before them, tags in hand.

  “What is this place and what are these tags for?” asked Isabella, hoping the old woman, who seemed nice enough simply because she did not have a gun, would give them some idea why they were being held prisoner.

  “This is the Indian Point Mutant Processing Center. I am the doctor here and I will give you a brief medical exam and scan your genetic profiles via a blood test. Don’t worry, the blood test won’t hurt.” Again, she smiled as she spoke. Her teeth were crooked and yellow, but her smile was kind.

  “What are you testing us for?” asked Malcolm, clearly confused at the gentle treatment after their imprisonment and his beating.

  “We just want to see what each of your exposure levels are up to. It will help determine your life spans.”

  “So you are helping us?” asked Isabella with a you-don’t-really-expect-me-to-believe-that grin.

  “In a manner, yes,” replied the old woman. Isabella realized this woman was very old – probably older than her grandparents were; maybe even into her 80s. She would remember the world before the Terror Wars. Her voice was high-pitched and somewhat shaky. Not nervous-shaky; old-shaky.

  “I see,” said Isabella, although she did not. “And after the tests you’ll let us go?”

  “That isn’t up to me to decide, but by looking at you, I don’t think they will let any of you go. We only send away the mutants who are over the exposure limits and none of you look old enough, or sick enough, to be in that category. You all look pretty sturdy to me,” she said with another smile, then turned to Andra and Shia. “Especially the little ones.”

  The little girls returned the kindly old woman’s grin.

  “So what will you do with us after you deem us hale and hearty?” asked Malcolm as she finished her ministrations.

  “Oh, well, again that isn’t my area. I’m just the doctor here. You will go with the others to West Point for further processing. Beyond that, it is up to the authorities there to decide your fate.”

  “Our fate?” asked Isabella, raising one eyebrow.

  “Why, yes,” said the old doctor. “Whether you are scheduled for service now or if you will be held in reserve. I imagine only the little girls will be held, as they are too young to serve.”

  “Serve who?” asked Malcolm, but the woman did not answer.

  Instead, she said, “Please follow me,” and led them to a medical lab for their exams and blood work. The doctor turned to Malcolm and examined his forehead. “Oh my, what have you done to yourself, young man?”

  “Ask the soldiers.”

  “Oh dear, they have no right to rough you up. They just don’t understand your worth. Here, let me bandage that for you.” She cleaned Malcolm’s wound, then taped a gauze bandage over the gash. Her hands had brown age spots and wrinkles, but were steady.

  Next, she strapped a rubber-like tie around each of their upper arms and jabbed each with a needle – so much for it not hurting. Andra yelped when it was her turn, but Shia remained steadfastly quiet. The doctor withdrew three vials of blood from each of them, labeled the tubes with the corresponding numbers on their tags, and stood the eighteen vials in a rack. When she was done, she pushed a button on the wall and a speaker immediately sounded.

  Through the static they heard, “Yes?”

  The doctor put her mouth to the speaker. “I have another batch of samples for analysis. Would you please come pick them up?”

  “Right away, ma’am,” the voice responded. Almost immediately, the medical lab door opened and a young man in white coveralls entered, took the rack of vials, and left without a word.

  Isabella held up her wrists to the doctor, showing the red scrape marks from the plastic ties that had bound her in the speedboat. “Ma’am, do you have more bandages, please?”

  “Oh my, you poor girl.” Without another word, she smeared a thin layer of ointment on Isabella wrists and wrapped each in gauze bandage. She examined the wrists on each of the captives, but only Isabella had been injured.

  “Well, that’s done, so let’s get you settled. As long as your blood work doesn’t turn up anything unexpected, you’ll head out to West Point tomorrow.” She escorted them from the lab to another holding cell. Though better lit than the one they had been thrown into the previous night, it was still a cell. Once the metal door closed behind them, they were stuck. The old doctor smiled kindly at them, told them to relax and rest, then turned and left without another word.

  “Rest?” shouted Clay, exasperated finally to the breaking point. “How can I rest not knowing what is to happen to us!”

  The room had eight cots dangling from two walls by heavy chains, one atop the other in bunk-bed fashion. A sink and a door occupied the third wall. Shia immediately opened it to see where it led but only revealed a toilet.

  Kalla threw herself on a lower bunk and grumbled, “At least they don’t expect us to pee in a hole in the floor again.”

  Ignoring her complaint, Clay asked, “I wonder what the old lady meant by service?” His voice was quieter now, but still clearly agitated.

  “I guess we are to become servants,” replied Isabella, but for whom and where remained an open question.

  Malcolm chimed in from the upper-level cot he had climbed on. “They better not even think about taking the girls away from us.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Luke

  Luke secured the rowboat to the side of the Globe and reluctantly bedded down for the night in the cabin of the racing yacht. He wanted to race upstream after Isabella right away.

  “I would advise against traveling in the dark, my boy.” Dr. Rosario enunciated each word entirely too precisely, the kind of voice that usually came just before the old man began a lecture.

  Luke gave him the look, too furious at the doctor’s refusal to even argue with him. He knew he would not win.

  “Luke, I know you are worried, and eager to follow her, but there are many good reasons not to do this right now. The chief one being that even if Isabella was standing on the shore looking for their boat, we would sail right past her and never know it.”

  Luke could not deny that logic, but it did not change the feeling inside his soul had they had to go on, right now to find her. He itch
ed to move. He needed to go – but he knew the doctor was right. It was possible that the little rowboat had just drifted downstream, but Luke could not convince himself of that. There was no way that they would let all their possessions just drift away.

  The adrenaline that had begun coursing through his veins the moment he realized the boat was Isabella’s kept him from sleeping no matter how hard he tried. Between his nerves, the heat, and the humidity, he barely slept. Of course, Murphy’s Law stated that he would fall asleep just before dawn, and he did.

  Murphy was a bastard.

  When the sun streamed into the small porthole and woke him in the morning, he was exhausted, but equally eager to get moving. He had to find his cousin-sister! Isabella could already be dead. She might be injured, held captive as he had been, or attacked by savages. A million things could have happened to her and none of them could be good.

  The wind picked up significantly that morning and Dr. Rosario was able to continue their travels up the Hudson, slowly at first, but eventually gaining more speed as the wind increased. Luke warmed the cooked meat he had found in Isabella’s rowboat in the Globe’s galley and then fried the fish. Luke finally gave in to the incessant mewling from Pumpkin and shared his breakfast, even though he knew the cat had feasted on an ample supply of mice since boarding the vessel.

  Luke kept a watchful eye on both shores for his sister’s group. He hoped that if their boat had drifted away, they would be camped somewhere near the river, out in the open. By mid-morning, they had seen nothing. Luke’s worry over Isabella grew steadily until it escalated into a deep dread and fear for her life.

  To make matters worse, the temperature was heading back up into the unbearable range, but at least the heat of the day was somewhat alleviated by the relative wind on the sailboat. They made good time and by dusk had traveled almost eight miles to a narrow section of the river that had a visible downstream current.

  Unfortunately, the wind had died down to almost nothing again. “I think it’s best to wait until tomorrow and hope the wind is stronger. We’ll never get through that rough water without some strong gusts,” said Dr. Rosario, eyeing the narrow channel.