Colony 41- Volume 2

by S J Taylor

  He watched me for a moment longer and I could feel the moment pressing against me. The stiff, hot breeze played with the tail that he’d tied his dark hair into this morning, but neither of us moved. There was a wall between us, one that I had put there myself, and he kept looking for some way through. I made my barriers as rock solid as the ground we walked on, but still I could see him searching for the words that would make things right between us.

  I’ll never know what he wanted to say. He kept it to himself this time, pressing his lips tighter together as he began adjusting the few weapons and pieces of equipment slung on his back, salvaged from the slaughter of the Freemen camp by the Enforcers.

  He turned away, and I let him.

  The expression on Laria’s pretty face didn’t need any words for me to understand it. The woman was tall and blonde and insufferable. She despised me, and she claimed Jadran for her own. Didn’t matter that he had fallen in love with me first. She wanted him.

  If only she could understand that I wasn’t her enemy in this. I wasn’t ready to fight for Jadran. Not now.

  The open wound across my heart was still too fresh. Saskia had died saving me, when I couldn’t save her.

  So it was just the three of us now. Me, and Jadran, and Laria. All we had was what we carried with us. Three pulse rifles. A couple of stun pistols. A nearly empty pack of food bars and liquid pouches that Laria carried. The other pack was heavier. I carried that one, with the handheld explosive sand the wristcom and yes, my journal.

  Our clothes clung to us with sweat our bodies couldn’t really afford to be losing. Jadran in his shirt that had one sleeve torn away and pants that were stained with something dark. Laria, in that annoyingly cute red top with the gold stitching on the sleeves.

  Then there was me. Rugged brown cotton pants torn by wide gashes that exposed my knees and left thigh. I’d scrounged a new shirt from our scant supplies, but it was a little too tight and it made me self-conscious about what exactly Jadran was looking at when his eyes darted my way. Especially with the way perspiration held it to my skin. At least my steel-toed boots had survived. They weren’t doing my feet any favors, but they were meant for protection, not comfort.

  “How much further?” Laria asked, not for the first time. Or the second time, either.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I figured we’d be in sight of it by now.”

  We weren’t. We were in sight of nothing but a flat, arid landscape that shimmered with reflected heat. Here and there were the crooked skeletons of dead trees, turned to a kind of crystalline stone by forces of nature I was glad to say I didn’t understand. There was no life out here. No animals. No birds. I hadn’t even seen an insect.

  To tell the truth, I was beginning to think my plan had failed before we even began. If we didn’t find this facility soon, it might be time to turn back.

  Before we died out here chasing demons.

  After leaving the broken remains of the city that used to be called Jacksonville, anything resembling society or civilization or life had disappeared. This was what the world had come to, outside of the Reformed Society’s Colonies and the very few human communities who struggled to make their lives outside of the Society’s protection. These were the Outlands, where humans did all sorts of horrible things to survive.

  A sane person would have never come this far out. As for me, I left sanity behind on that Hoverhawk over the Freeman camp, where I had lost my best friend and killed dozens of Enforcers trying to make it right.

  There was still a large battalion of Enforcer troops coming this way. We were maybe a day or so ahead of them, if we were lucky. They didn’t have air support anymore—I’d taken care of that—but they still had ground vehicles and for all I knew they were speeding up behind us right now. We were all headed to the same place, after all.

  Somewhere out here was a facility where the Restored Society had performed genetic experiments, turning humans into mutant monsters in their quest to make a perfect world. Jadran said he knew where it was. At least, the general location. Sort of. I’d figured out what the Enforcers were after out here, but he was the one with the knowledge to get us through this little slice of Hell. I was still trying to figure out what a place like that would look like. Tall chimneys constantly belching smoke, probably. A series of steel and glass structures reaching for the sky.

  The truth was, I didn’t know. The Restored Society had been doing experiments on people for generations now. Turning people into things they were never meant to be. Looking for a way to make their soldiers unstoppable, and the rest of the world docile little puppets from birth. That was their idea of perfection.

  I was one of those experiments. I had been made to be a perfect member of their society. I was bred—or born, I don’t know—to be smarter, faster, stronger, and obedient.

  They goofed on that last one. I turned on my creators. I had declared war on them, back in Jacksonville. They were going to pay for what they did to the world. For what they did to me.

  For what they did to Saskia.

  As for the smarter, faster, stronger part… that’s complicated.

  So those were my reasons for walking out into this forsaken place. Jadran came with me because, well, he loves me. But also, he had his own scores to settle with the Restored Society. Laria was here because of Jadran.

  Because Jadran loves me, and Laria loves Jadran.

  Maybe the world would be simpler if we were all just docile clones doing what our masters told us.

  I said simpler. I didn’t say it would be better.

  When we find the genetics facility, I was going to show the world the truth. The Enforcers were marching to the place where monsters were made so they could destroy it. They wanted to wipe it off the face of the Earth and pretend that part of their history never happened.

  I was going to turn things on their head and make sure every man, woman, and child living in their safe little Colonies saw what they had been doing. I’d broadcast images from that place of horror and show everyone what the Restored Society was really like. No more lies. I wasn’t going to stop until they were torn apart from the inside. Until every scrap of them was gone for good.

  Like I said, that was the plan, but it was going to be very hard to make that happen if we couldn’t find the damned facility in the first place!

  “Maybe we should take a break,” Jadran suggested, his eyes on Laria as he said it. “It is nearly midday, I believe. Time for us to stop, is what it is.”

  “We need to keep going,” I argued. “We’re nowhere near where we want to be. I mean, look out there. Do you see anything out there?”

  He tried for a smile. “The nothingness will still be there when we start walking again.”

  I usually liked listening to the way Jadran talked. The smooth cadence of his strong words usually made me feel safe, somehow. Today it was grating on my nerves. The people from his village had a direct, honest way of speaking. Laria had it, too, although she managed to mix in a lot of sarcasm. They’d both been raised there, in a little place named Refuge.

  Now Refuge was just one more place the Enforcers had wiped off the map. The fact that they were the only two survivors from their village was one of the reasons Laria wanted Jadran for her own so badly. I knew that. In my mind I could even rationalize it and say it made sense.

  In my heart, I wanted to slap her repeatedly across her lovely face.

  She just had that effect on me.

  Hearing Jadran call for a break was all the excuse Laria needed to drop herself to the ground. She landed on her petite little backside with an umph. I couldn’t blame her for that, I suppose. The ground out here was unforgiving. Harder than the concrete of the city. Nothing could get through it, and it wasn’t about to give an inch back to anyone.

  “What do we have left for food?” Jadran asked Laria as he unslung the weapons crossed over his shoulders. He set them down at his feet, within easy reach.

  Because this expanse of the Out
lands might look barren, but the Freemen stories said otherwise. I knew they were just stories. Things like worms the size of people and oceans of glass. Just stories to frighten little children.

  But… better safe than sorry.

  Truth be told I didn’t mind the breather. I was still on the mend from my ordeal at New Merica, where the Enforcers had captured me. I’d been ejected from a crashing Hoverhawk at high velocity and that’s not something you can just walk away from without a few scratches. And some bruises. And a stiff knee. All of that would work itself out, eventually, and for now I was just grateful to be alive. So I dropped myself cross-legged to the unyielding earth as Laria pulled open the supply pack and spread out what we had left for rations.

  “Looks like a food bar each,” Jadran decided, sitting on his ankles between me and Laria. “We’ll have to share a drink pouch.”

  A feast, all things considered. Jadran was being a little too generous in my opinion.

  Laria didn’t see it that way.

  “Why do we have to share?” she whined, counting out the three, four, five remaining liquid pouches. “There’s enough here to—”

  “Because unless you want to die of dehydration,” I said with a sharp snap in my voice, “then we need to conserve what water we have for later.”

  “Like you are somehow an expert on surviving off the land?” she snapped back.

  I stared at her blankly. “Of course I am. That was a big part of our training back in the Colony. Enforcers would have to live in this kind of environment for weeks on end to do their work. I’m trained to live out here.”

  Not that I wanted to rely on anything the Restored Society taught me—Enforcer training especially—but there it was.

  “Oh, of course.” Laria curled one corner of her lips. “Because an Enforcer born and bred, is what you are. Some of us have actually lived out here in the Outlands, Era Rae. Jadran and I were making a life before you came along. We have lived off the land. You were trained to destroy it!”

  Her words found their mark. They hurt. A lot.

  Getting slowly to my feet, I glared down at her, too many words stuck in my throat to say anything. Under the reddish color of too much sun on her cheeks, her face paled. She was waiting for me to strike out at her.

  It would have been so simple. I could break half a dozen of her bones from here without even trying. I knew three ways to kill her where she sat.

  It’s what I was bred to do, after all.

  With an effort of willpower, I pushed back against the rising sensation of calm that always flooded through me when my violent soul was about to come out and play. I might not be like other people, but I was still me. I was Era Rae. There was only one of me in the world, and I’m no monster.

  There was only one of me. I needed to make that count for something.

  “Era Rae,” Jadran cautioned. He didn’t need to. I was fine.

  “You know what?” I finally said, speaking to both of them, breaking the silence. “She can have my share. I’m not hungry, anyway.”

  I stalked away, a good fifty paces and more, and crossed my arms over my belly. I was actually starving, and the little growling sounds coming from my stomach would have betrayed me if I’d stayed there to argue with Laria. Besides, what could I say to her? She’d already made up her mind about me. In her eyes, it was me who killed her village, just by being there. Her family and her friends and everyone she had ever known, dead because of me. Everyone, Except Jadran.

  She was wrong, of course. There was just no way for me to prove it to her.

  Especially when people kept dying all around me.

  Jadran’s hand on my arm was unexpected. If I hadn’t been burying myself in my own self-pity then I might have noticed him before he was on top of me like this, but the ground was so steely hard that it muffled every footstep.

  “Era Rae, listen to me, please.”

  I pulled away from him, yanking my arm back with enough force that he stumbled when his grip broke. What would it take with this man? I was doing everything I could to keep him at a distance and he was still always right there when I needed him.

  Hellfire. How was I going to save him from me when he didn’t want to be saved?

  “Jadran,” I snapped, folding my arms again. “Just go back and make sure the princess doesn’t break a nail or something while she’s living off the land, all right?”

  “Unfair, is what you are being.”

  “Sure.” I rolled my eyes. “Can we just get going again, please? We’ve been at this for two days now, Jadran. You told me you knew where this place was.”

  For a moment he just stood there, and his eyes looked through my defenses and read every one of my secrets. I swear to you, I felt naked in front of him, and I was glad my skin had been chapped by the wind and burnt by the sun because the heat rising in my cheeks was embarrassing. And thrilling.

  Sigh. It was confusing, just like everything else between us.

  “Why are you so far away from me?” he asked suddenly.

  I could have made a joke about how there was only ten paces between us and even that was too close, but I knew what he meant. “Jadran, I just need space, all right? I need you to not be… you. All right?”

  “No,” he told me. “All right is not what it is.”

  “Just leave me alone! Jadran, why can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Because, Era Rae, I—”

  “No. I don’t care. And why, in the name of God, do you keep calling me by my full name? Laria’s got a last name, too, doesn’t she? Why am I the only one you do that with?”

  His smile was warm, and infuriating. “When I found you on our shores,” he explained, “I asked you what sort of trouble had brought you to us. Your answer was your name. You were delirious, but that was your answer. Era Rae. That was the sort of trouble that had found us. So that is how I picture you. Trouble, is what you are. Trouble, is what you carry along in your wake. To me you will never be just Era. You are Era Rae.”

  I wanted to smack him. I wanted to hug him, and never let go. Most of all I wanted to break down and cry on his shoulder and tell him all the reasons why I would never love again.

  And another little part of me wanted to let him love me, no matter the reasons.

  What I did instead was try to push him further away from me.

  “You are such a blistering stupehead! I have never known anyone so dense!”

  I could see Laria out of the corner of my eye, just sitting there, watching us argue. Or, watching me argue, anyway. Jadran remained as calm and still as a mountainside, making me all the more angry. Laria was beaming, watching the whole thing with keen interest.

  “Why are you even here, Jadran?” I demanded. “Huh? Why don’t you just run back to the Freemen? Run back and hide. Why are you even here? Just leave me alone!”

  “This isn’t you.”

  “What? Like Hellfire it’s not. This is me, Jadran. Remember? Trouble in the flesh. Isn’t that what you called me?”

  “Era Rae, I meant—”

  “I don’t have time for this!” I spun on my heel and went to march off before I remembered there was nowhere out here to march off to. Every direction was the same flat, broken ground, waves of heat shimmering up from stones and petrified dirt. No rivers, no sloping hillsides, not even the crumbling remains of a building to be seen…

  No, wait. Was that movement on the horizon? I shielded my eyes with my hands, trying to focus on the hazy image of something impossibly huge squirming along like some kind of insect.

  “What is it?”

  Jadran had snuck up on me again, standing right by my side, making me jump. This time I did smack my fist into his shoulder, and not gently. Hard to say if his arm or my knuckles got the worst of it. The man is built like a mountain.

  “I told you to stay away from me, Jadran.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  His eyes found mine. “Always, Era Rae
.”

  I rubbed my hands over my face and turned away from him again. “Erngh! I can not talk to you. I’m telling you one thing and you’re hearing something completely different!”

  “Maybe I listen to you better than you think.”

  “Stop! Just stop it! All right? I don’t want anything from you, Jadran. Understand? I don’t want anything from you at all.”

  The lie burned my tongue. It cracked his stony façade, too, and knowing that I had finally gotten him to believe me should have made me feel better. Instead a hollow sort of feeling carved itself out in the pit of my stomach.

  The truth was that I did want something from him. Desperately.

  I wanted to be loved.

  How could I ever let that happen again? I couldn’t take that chance. Ever again. Everyone close to me dies.

  I didn’t want Jadran to die.

  He was still standing so close to me. “What if I don’t want to leave you alone, Era Rae? What then?”

  Even now, he wasn’t giving up on me.

  “Just find the facility, Jadran! That’s all I want from you.” Liar, I told myself. “No, I mean it. Find the damned place, find it now, find it—!”

  The ground shifted under my feet. The rumbling, crushing sound of stones grating on each other was deafening as the world was yanked sideways. It was like some giant hand had taken ahold of the Earth and rotated it backward on its axis and all I could do was throw out my hands reflexively to break my fall.

  My wrist bent painfully backward and I ended up slamming into the ground face first anyway.

  Laria screamed.

  I snapped my head up, trying to orient myself, looking for her. Hadn’t she been right over there?

  Jadran found her first. He’d managed to stay on his feet somehow and now he sprinted for Laria, her name on his lips, his face pinched and intense. I knew that look. It was fear. Alarm. Dread. It was etched in the strained muscles of his neck and jaw. I could see it, and hear it in the way he spoke her name.

  When I looked up, I could see why.