Colony 41- Volume 2

by S J Taylor

  Well.

  I was going to dig it up for them.

  “Come on,” I said to Jadran. “Let’s get down there.”

  Book Six - Revelations

  Part I

  Chapter 1 - Mirror, mirror

  Era’s Journal, Entry #3153

  Hellfire.

  When I was at Colony 41, in the Academy, everything made sense. I lived and breathed and trained to become an Enforcer. That was my life.

  Since that time, there hasn’t been a single thing that’s made any kind of sense.

  Not. One. Thing.

  I have fought, and scraped, and clawed my way across a broken landscape to reach a genetic research facility in the middle of nowhere, so I can try to stop the regime that broke the world in the first place. I’ve seen friends and allies, enemies and strangers, killed because of me. Death has followed me everywhere.

  In the process, I discovered I was a killing machine.

  Apparently, it was something I was born to do.

  The Restored Society broke the world. They’ve been trying to remake it in their image ever since. But even before the Event—the nuclear holocaust that burned the ground and poisoned the water and killed whole parts of the Earth—they were already plotting to change people, places and things.

  Especially people.

  Like me.

  I was changed at birth. Before birth? Hellfire, for all I know I was altered before conception. I was made over in their image. Somehow. I’m really bad at explaining it, because I don’t understand it myself. Maybe I never will. I am… something more than human and something less than what I wanted to be.

  There. Does that explain it?

  No. For me either.

  I’ve had to accept myself for who I am. I am a killing machine. I am a living weapon.

  One thing I am not, is a slave.

  The Restored Society does not own me. They don’t control me. I was born to be their possession. They meant for me to be a tool. Something they could take out of a box when they needed me, and then put away again when the problem was solved. As long as I behaved as I was supposed to, I had a place with them.

  That’s who I was supposed to be to the Restored Society. That is not who I was to myself. Because through all the lies, all the mysteries surrounding my birth… up until now, I thought I was unique.

  Turns out I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

  Hellfire.

  Stasis pods.

  We studied these things at the Academy. Just enough to understand the science behind them. After all, we were going to be soldiers, not techies. The pods were designed to keep living organisms in a stasis field or suspended animation, prolonging their lifespan indefinitely. The pods kept out disease, provided nourishment, and cleared out waste materials. They were common in medical facilities and genetic research facilities, like this one.

  There were hundreds of them in this cavernous, two-story space. I counted ten rows of twenty-five pods, all shaped like pyramids without the pointed tops, connected by tubes and wire conduits as thick around as my torso. I stood one-point-seven meters tall, just shy of sixty kilos, and I was dwarfed by these machines. Most of them had blinking red and green lights on their control panels. Those ones were active. Something was in them. Something alive and kept in a permanent state of suspended animation.

  I needed to see what was inside.

  The lights from up above in the research facility chamber, recessed into the high ceiling, blazed like the sun and reflected off the bare metal walls and floor. There were no windows to let in natural light. We were underground here. Buried like a secret the Restored Society didn’t want anyone to know about. Which is exactly why I wanted to dig it up and show the entire world. Whatever was left of the human race was going to get to see the Restored Society for the butchers they were. They weren’t saviors. They weren’t the heroic new government looking to hold the world together.

  They were monsters. Monsters creating monsters.

  That’s what I was sure we were going to find inside those stasis pods. Genetically crafted monsters. The Restored Society hadn’t built this place all the way out here in the Outlands, out past any remnant of civilization, for the view. No. The Society had put their genetics lab out here in an underground facility because they had something to hide.

  Well. Little Era Rae was going to expose their secrets. I was going to find out what they’d been doing out here and broadcast it out over every working vid frequency until everyone could see how evil they are.

  “The rest of the facility is deserted,” Jadran told me.

  He’d glided out of nowhere from one of the multiple hallways that led away from this chamber to others just like it, or to control rooms, to supply depots, and to rooms whose purpose neither of us understood. We hadn’t seen a single soul since coming here just a few hours ago. We’d split up and searched, and still no one. I’d found my way back here quicker than he had.

  “Funny how they just left all this here,” I said to him, pushing short brown strands of my hair out of my eyes. “Don’t you think?”

  “Typical, is what it is,” he growled, shaking his head. “The entire complex is fully automated but they never even considered posting a single guard here, let alone a column of Enforcers. Arrogance runs in their veins. They never thought you would get this far, Era Rae. They thought they were safe.”

  He sat down hard with his back against the wall, holding a hand to his side. Those ribs hadn’t quite healed yet. He hid the bruises underneath that borrowed leather jacket, but I didn’t need to see the physical signs to know he was in pain. There were other hurts on him, too, although none of them compared to the hurt he was carrying inside.

  I wasn’t the only one who had lost friends on this escapade.

  Thankfully, we still had each other.

  I knelt next to him, the rips in the front of my brown cotton pants leaving my knees bare to the cold metal floor. My shirt had rips in the back, too. In fact the only part of my clothing to have survived at all were the heavy boots on my feet. If I made it out of this alive the first thing I was going to do was find a new set of clothes. Or, maybe the first thing I would do was take a bath. I felt like every inch of me was smeared with dirt and dust.

  Jadran looked as bedraggled as I did. Which was to say, he looked amazing under his own layer of dirt. I hated how good he looked when I knew I was a complete wreck. At the same time… I really enjoyed looking at him. His deep brown eyes were narrowed in concentration—and pain—in a face chiseled like stone. His body was toned and muscular in all the right places. The tail he usually kept tied into the back of his long dark hair had come loose and now it hung loosely around his ears, down to his shoulders.

  Reaching out a hand I traced the line of his strong jaw, then brushed a finger across his lips. He kissed it in an absent sort of way. Then his eyelids fluttered, and he looked up at me for real.

  His hand caught the back of my neck and pulled me closer so he could seal his lips to mine, stealing my breath for his own, kissing me in a way that spoke of need and a desire to feel alive. There had been too much death for both of us in the past few days. I understood his feelings, because they were the same as my own.

  Hopefully, what we were doing here in this place would stop the killing. For good.

  We had to hurry, though. There were still Enforcers marching on foot to get here, to destroy the place and any evidence that the Society had done anything wrong. All we had with us to hold off an advancing army was a stun pistol and wishful thinking.

  Somehow I doubt the Enforcers could be stopped with either of those.

  “Come on,” I whispered against his lips. “Let’s do this.”

  It took him a moment before he let go of my shoulder. He did so reluctantly. I could read the disappointment in his face. Again, our thoughts mirrored each other’s, but this just wasn’t the time. “Later,” I promised him.

  If we haven’t been slaughtered by the Enforcers by then, I ad
ded in my own thoughts.

  Right.

  Jadran held out his hand for me to help him up. “You realize,” he said, “that we are going to have to open one of the pods.”

  I’d thought of that. There were no observation windows or viewports on any of the stasis pods. Not that we’d found, anyway. There had been a huge control room just down that hallway over there, with more than a dozen vid screens that were currently blank. Maybe they could be used to monitor the pods without opening them up but I just didn’t have the time to sit and try every single control in order to find out.

  Opening the pods was our quickest way.

  What we hadn’t said, out loud, was that we might not be prepared for what was inside the pod we opened. It could be anything. I remembered the monstrous Children of the Event in the city that had once been called Jacksonville. Warped and twisted bodies that had once been human but sure weren’t human any more. They had killed everything within reach, and it had taken three or four people to bring down just one of the Children. What if we opened a pod and one of those things crawled out?

  It was a chance we would have to take to keep the Restored Society from experimenting on any more humans. Those experiments had created the Children of the Event, and who knew what else. We would open one of the pods and kill what was inside if we had to, but we were going to record whatever we found and broadcast it out. It had to be done. There was just me and Jadran here to do it, and it had to be done.

  That was all there was to it.

  I put a hand on his arm, trying to be comforting. “How long before the Enforcers get here, do you think?”

  He shrugged. Jadran had grown up on a Colony just like I had. We understood the workings of the Society and the Enforcers. We understood each other. “Who can say. They were slowed by your assault on them back at New Merica. Slowed, but not stopped.”

  “Right. So we should get this done.” He just looked up at me, his eyes so dark they were almost black, clouded with unspent emotions. My heart went out to him. “I’m sorry, Jadran, there’s just no—”

  “Time. This is something I know, Era Rae.” His chest heaved with a heavy sigh. “We should begin, then. Back to the control room. We can start the recorders and then come back here.”

  “To open the pods,” I added.

  “One of them, anyway. Yes.”

  He went to walk past me, with his eyes focused somewhere else.

  “Jadran,” I started, grabbing hold of his elbow. “Wait.”

  I was prepared to argue with him, if that’s what he needed. I was prepared to talk about what we were doing from every possible angle like we’d already done a thousand times, if that’s what he needed. I was ready to listen to his innermost demons, if that’s what he needed.

  The one thing I wasn’t prepared for, was what he did.

  Jadran slipped my grip and then took hold of my arms, pinning them to my sides, leaving me helpless as he pulled me close… and sealed his lips over mine again.

  We’d shared intimate moments before. Even on the run from monsters and men alike, we’d found moments to hold each other and kiss each other and sometimes even more. All of that paled in comparison to the heat he managed to put into this one embrace. My knees went weak as he held me, and the world turned on its axis, but time froze around us.

  Blistering Hell, this man is a good kisser.

  Then we were just standing there, breathing and touching, and things started moving in my brain again.

  “What was that for?” I asked, breathless.

  “Because you are the woman you are, Era Rae.”

  For being who I was, is what he meant. I liked the way that Jadran talked. He had a slow and honest way of saying whatever he was thinking, or feeling. Like now. Whatever messed up road I had taken to get to this point in my life, Jadran loved me simply because I was Era Rae.

  This time, though, I could see that his simple words were hiding something more.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him, wishing I could just shut my mouth and let the moment happen. It might be the last time we got to be together like this for a while.

  Only, I couldn’t just let it go. I cared too much about Jadran to let him stay in pain.

  He took a deep breath and then set his jaw. “We don’t have time for this, remember?”

  “Jadran, don’t lock yourself away from me. Come on. You can tell me.”

  “No, Era Rae. I can’t. Not this time.”

  “Jadran!”

  “Era…” Gently, slowly, he pushed me away. “Some things are better left unsaid, even if they are true.”

  I opened my mouth, and then shut it tight again. We did know each other so very well, me and Jadran. What he meant was written clearly in his eyes. He didn’t have to speak it. There was no time to talk. No time to be ourselves.

  Because even after we showed the world what the Society had been doing here in this facility, there was still a very good chance we would end up dead.

  The control room was a mystery to me. Keyboards and dials and switches and more vid screens than I’d ever seen in my whole entire life.

  “You sure this is the place?” I asked Jadran. “There’s not another control center for the stasis pods?”

  “This is the only control room in the entire facility. Watch the screens.”

  His hands were moving swiftly to reset knobs and input commands with different keyboards. I was raised in the Academy, where we were trained to become Enforcers. Jadran’s Colony had focused on raising people for another career entirely. I trusted him to do his part.

  Three of the screens flashed to life on the wall in front of us. There were four rows of them, rising higher and higher, and the three screens Jadran turned on were the ones closest to us. Then another came on, and another.

  Jadran pointed to the two vid screens in the middle. “That’s stasis pod fifty-six. That one is pod eighty-one. Right behind each other, one row apart. If the first one does not have what we need, try the other. I will record the whole thing from here.”

  “And if those two don’t have what we need?”

  He waved a hand across the vid screens. “Then go on to another one, is what we will do. There are plenty to choose from.”

  “Okay. What are the other screens for?”

  “I found vid feeds for the area above ground. It’s all empty desert right now but if the Enforcers approach, I will see them in time to warn you.”

  He was right. On the screens I could see an almost three hundred and sixty degree area above us. Flat, burning sand, rocks, and shimmering heat. There was nothing there. No signs of an advancing army. No signs of life. Me and Jadran had walked for days up there—with Laria, who had sacrificed herself for us in the tunnels below—before we’d found a way into this place…

  The tunnels…

  “Jadran, what if the Enforcers use the tunnels to get here?”

  “They won’t,” he assured me.

  “Why not?”

  “You think the Enforcers are going to walk themselves through a hive of cannibals?”

  I had to admit that was a good point. We’d barely made it out of the tunnels alive. The Enforcers would have to fight their way through every square inch of a maze that was alive with families of flesh-eating cannibals. Might have to burn their way through with flamethrowers, maybe. Not to mention they wouldn’t be able to move very fast. The tunnels weren’t that wide. No. They wouldn’t waste that much time. They would come at us form topside, and no doubt of it.

  I looked from one vid screen to the next. There was nothing coming for us. Yet.

  “I will keep watch,” Jadran assured me again. “There is a speaker system that feeds into the stasis pod chamber. If I see anything, I will warn you.”

  “Warnings are nice, but some way to stop an advancing army would be better.”

  “I agree. I will keep looking through the menu screens to see if this facility ever had any defense mechanisms.”

  “And if those defense mechan
isms can even still be activated?”

  He smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Right.”

  I trailed my hand along his shoulders, feeling the tension in his muscles, wishing I could help him do something to relieve the stress. The best I could do was fix the mess I had put him in. Once this matter with the Reformed Society was done I’d find some way to make it up to him.

  It was hard not to laugh as I made my way back down the hallway. Make it up to him? How could I even begin to do that?

  There was no way. Nothing I could do or say would make it better. I’d come to a point in my life, though, where I knew it wasn’t my fault. The responsibility for what I’d been made to suffer, and for what Jadran had suffered and lost… that lay squarely at the feet of the Restored Society.

  Now it was time to make them pay up.

  Back in the pod chamber I stepped out across the floor, carefully counting the pods until I realized they each had a number painted on their side. All I had to do was follow them to the ones I wanted. Thirties, forties… fifties. Pod fifty-six.

  I stood in front of it, watching the panel lights blip and flash. Up close, the stasis pods had sides made of interlocking metal strips layered horizontally from top to bottom, each maybe twenty centimeters wide, each one overhanging the one below it. Kind of made them look less like unfinished pyramids and more like giant hives for bizarre insects.

  Which led me back to wondering…what was inside? What would we find when we opened this door? Things that were so terrible that the Restored Society had needed them placed all the way out here past the edge of civilization. Or had the facility maybe already been here before the Event took place? After all, the Society had monkeyed with my DNA around the time of my birth, and the Event took place later, when I was six. Plans within plans, these guys. A strategy for every contingency.

  Well. They didn’t have any backup plan for me.

  Jadran’s voice coming through the speakers on the wall jolted me back from thoughts of evil governments run by evil men.