by Jacob Gowans
Sammy gave him a piece of the truth. “My friend and I looking for some people here. Friends.” His words were raspy, his throat swollen, from screaming like a caged monkey when the bars fell.
“Wichita’s been deserted for over a decade.”
“Apparently you live here.”
The man adjusted his gun to remind Sammy it was there. “Who are you looking for?”
“Friends . . .” Sammy’s voice came out as a weak scratch, “. . . who can help me get home.” He watched the man closely to see if he understood his hints.
“Where’s home?”
“I can’t tell—” but Sammy’s voice cut out before he could finish and he just shook his head.
The man lowered the weapon to get a better look at Sammy’s face, then raised it again. As easily as any trained soldier, he flicked off the safety. “Unless you are an exceptional bullet dodger, answer my questions.”
“Can’t—sorry—friend.”
The man fired once, just above Toad’s head. Toad yelped, jumped, then sank lower. His crying changed to sobbing. Sammy swallowed hard but there was no saliva there. His throat was thick and hot. I need a plan! Nothing came. He’d brought himself and Toad to their deaths following a stupid notion that there might still be a resistance in Wichita, in the middle of CAG territory.
I’m a fool. A worthless fool.
The man pointed the gun at Toad, but looked at Sammy. “Tell me who you are or I’ll shoot him.”
“We’re looking for a resistance!” Toad said in a whimper.
Sammy jerked his head toward Toad, but his friend’s face was buried between his arms. “Shut up, Toad!”
“What resistance?” He pointed the gun back at Sammy.
“People—people resisting the government,” Toad answered flatly.
It sounded so lame to hear it out loud.
Toad kept going. “We were taken prisoner in Rio de Janeiro by the . . .” He looked to Sammy for help remembering the names he’d been taught. “The Aegis! And he was held for weeks—me for days. But we escaped and made our way up here.”
Sammy watched the man’s face for any sign of malice or recognition, but he saw none.
“How did you escape and why did you come here?”
This was the question that Sammy could not let Toad answer without revealing everything. If the man was an enemy, they would be tortured for more information. Only this time, they had no chance of ever escaping. No lucky breaks. Sammy was already nearly broken. Toad cried again, looking to Sammy through squinting eyes. Sammy couldn’t speak.
Toad continued to summarize their tale. “We came here because he found a map that said there was a Plainpal in Wichita that was part of the resistance. I didn’t know what it meant, but I came with him anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because—” Toad sniffed several times. “Because we’re part of the resistance, too.”
Sammy’s brow broke out into sweat. Toad had done a marvelous job concealing their anomalies.
“There’s something you’re not telling me. But I think I’m good enough at reading people to know when I’m being lied to.” He lowered his gun and crossed to the building wall nearest the bars. “We’ve been watching you since you came into the outskirts of the city. You make an interesting pair of characters. I wasn’t sure if you were putting on a show. I thought you knew you were being watched.”
He thumbed the safety on the weapon and stowed it into one of the deep pockets in his coat. A little smile appeared on his face. “Take them in.”
The door to the museum opened and before Sammy had time to look around, a cloth sack was thrust over his head and he was dragged inside. Toad shrieked as the same was done to him.
Having no energy to resist, Sammy allowed himself to be carried. Another door opened, and Sammy felt himself set on a soft cushion. Several hands patted him down while someone else ran a scanner over him. He heard two beeps.
“He’s clean,” a voice said.
Then the door closed. Sammy grabbed the cloth and tore it off his face. Toad wasn’t in the room with him.
Sammy panicked. He was alone again. He didn’t want to be alone. His shoulder ached like it had been whacked with a mallet, and his throat still burned. Too tired to do anything else, he stared at the door. It took several seconds for him to notice there was no handle or knob on the inside. He yearned for food, water, and a shower.
The room was small, about the size of a small bedroom. He sat in the only chair, which was comfortable. A light shone above him, but the switch was not in the room. Other than the chair, there were no furnishings.
The door opened, and a familiar-looking man entered, shutting the door behind him. Sammy guessed the man to be in his mid-sixties. His hair was cloud white, his eyes so blue they caught Sammy’s attention. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look angry or intimidating, either. His clothes were simple: a gray and white flannel shirt and jeans. He wore leather boots, not sneakers. Sammy couldn’t remember the last time he saw someone wearing cowboy boots.
“I have a man just outside the room. Don’t get any ideas.”
Sammy didn’t respond. He didn’t have the strength.
“What’s your name, kid?”
The only thing that came out of Sammy’s mouth was a croak. “Do I know you?” he tried to say.
“Do you know me? I don’t think so, because I don’t know you. And I don’t forget faces easily. You gonna tell me your name?”
“Are you resistance?” Sammy asked. He found it easier to whisper as loud as he could than attempting to use his full voice.
The man stared at Sammy gravely, his lips tight and his face lined. Finally, he nodded.
Sammy fell out of his chair onto his knees. He didn’t care how pathetic he looked. Nothing mattered but one thing. “Food.”
The white-haired man knocked on the door. It opened and a head poked in. “Get him some refreshment.”
“Like what?” the guard asked.
“Water. Crackers. Something he can easily eat.”
Less than a minute later, a small plastic plate came back with crackers, cheese, apple slices, and clean, ice cold water.
Sammy reached for it, but the man shook his head. “Your name.”
His eyes were fixed on the plate. His chest heaved and his mouth watered. “Uh—Albert.”
“Your real name, please.”
Sammy stared at the food. “Samuel Berhane.”
Then the plate was in his hands. He touched the food. It was real. He put two whole crackers in his mouth and savored their saltiness. Before swallowing, he put two more crackers in, then two more.
“Slow down. You’re gonna choke.”
Sammy ignored this and ate again. The water helped everything go down easier. It also extinguished some of the fire in his throat. “Thank you,” he remembered to say through a mouthful of cheese.
The older man smiled, then laughed. His laugh was familiar, too. “Not a worry. Do you go by Samuel or Sam or Sammy?”
Sammy nodded at the last.
“Sammy it is. My name is Thomas Byron.”
A nuclear bomb went off in Sammy’s stomach. His eyes got big, his hands went to his midsection, and he hurled everything back up: crackers, water, cheese and apple.
Thomas backed up to the wall, but Sammy wasn’t thinking about the vomit. “Thomas Byron?” he repeated. His voice sounded only slightly better than before. “Thomas Byron?” If he had the energy he would have bounced up and hugged the man. All he could manage was a waning smile. “Walter Byron’s father?”
This time it was the old man’s turn to look shocked. The surprise turned to confusion, then to understanding.
Thomas supported himself on the wall and produced a white handkerchief from his back pocket. “You’re from—?” his hand pointed weakly in a gesture Sammy interpreted as over there. “And you know my son?”
Sammy nodded his head as best he could.
“He’s alive?” Thomas aske
d. “And well?”
“Yes.”
“Oh me, oh life . . .” the old man said as he dabbed his eyes with the handkerchief. Sammy sat in the chair and watched him, wondering if he should say something. Without a word, Thomas stood, knocked on the door, and left the room, still wiping his eyes with his handkerchief.
Sammy decided to try to eat again, only this time to take it slowly. He’d hardly finished two crackers when the door opened. An older woman entered with Thomas, clutching his hand. Tears were in her eyes, too.
“Do you really know my Walter?” she asked.
Sammy nodded, torn between eating the food and talking about Commander Byron. The couple embraced.
“This is my wife, Lara.” Thomas patted her on the back. “We haven’t seen our boy in a very long time.”
It was too much for Sammy to wrap his head around. Byron’s parents? Here? But now that he thought about it, Byron was from Mid-American Territory.
“We have a lot to talk about, am I right?” Lara said. “Thomas, get him out of this room and get him cleaned up—and the other boy, too. We can do better than crackers and cheese!”
Sammy and Toad devoured a kilo of food each while the Byrons watched them with fascination and disgust. As they ate, Sammy noticed his strength returning, though his body needed sleep and time to heal. He also had the difficult task of trying to tell the couple everything he knew about their son while simultaneously putting as much food as he could fit into his mouth. Before all was said and done, they had talked for the better part of two hours.
The longer the discussion went on, the easier it was to see so much of Byron in his parents: their religious foundation, their impeccable manners and kind dispositions. Even Commander Byron’s eyes were similar to Thomas’. He found himself wanting to tell them every last detail he could remember. It gave Sammy the feeling that in some small way he had reunited the family again.
He told them about the Rio mission, how he met Toad, and their journey north, but he said nothing about Stripe or the room with the black door. The Byrons asked many questions about the death of the commander’s wife, but Sammy couldn’t remember if he’d been told how she’d died or not.
“Shall we give them the grand tour, dear?” Thomas asked his wife, throwing his arms back in a great stretch. He was quite robust for a man in his sixties.
“Not right now.” She pointed at Toad, whose face had narrowly missed the plate when he fell asleep. Sammy couldn’t blame him. The only thing keeping him awake was the exhilaration of meeting the Byrons. “They just need a couple of couches to sleep on.”
“Well . . . I guess the tour can wait.”
Lara showed Sammy to a nearby sitting room while Thomas led a stumbling Toad behind them. Sammy remembered nothing after his head hit a pillow.
Eventually Toad’s sniffing woke him up.
“What time is it?” Sammy muttered.
“I think it’s morning . . . I can hear them eating breakfast.”
Sammy’s mind became a little clearer. “Breakfast . . . I want some of that.”
“Do you think we should go in there? I mean, are we guests? We probably smell bad, too.”
“I don’t care. I want food.”
He stood and entered the large dining area, where over two dozen adults sat around a very long wooden table. Toad followed. Lara played the part of hostess and ushered them to their seats. Several people glanced or even stared at them, but Sammy cared too much about his eggs and toast. Not long after his third helping, Thomas jovially entered the room and rested his hands on the boys’ shoulders.
“‘To dwell in presence of immortal youth, immortal age beside immortal youth.’”
Toad looked at Lara with a puzzled expression.
“Tennyson,” was all she said.
“You boys can tell I’m excited to take you around, can’t you?”
“You’re going to show us the palace?” Toad asked since he had missed that part of the conversation. “And let us stay here?”
“Of course we are.” Lara responded from the sink where she and a few of the men were now washing dishes. “Where else would you go? You’re family now.”
Sammy stole a glance at Toad and saw no objection. The notion of family seemed nice, but hopefully this “family” would help him get back home.
Lara excused herself while Thomas showed them where they could shower and change into clean clothing. Then he gave them the grand tour, more of a history lesson, in reality. The building was nearly two hundred years old, originally built as the Wichita City Hall. When the resistance took over the building, it was the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum or “Palace of the Plains.” With all the adjustments the resistance had made over the years to fit the building to their needs, the Palace was much bigger than it looked, which was saying something.
From his time in the bunker in Rio, Sammy had imagined the resistance to be a broken-down, barely-surviving faction of rag-tag fighters. From Thomas’ tour of the Palace, he got the sense that it was much more than that. Besides a well-run organization, they had a network of tunnels running under half of downtown Wichita, and from some of the hints Thomas kept dropping, some highly placed people in government, media, and business.
“At any given time, we’re housing seventy or eighty people in the Palace. Only thirty of us live here permanently. But we could house hundreds if we had to. We’ve tunneled through to a hotel a block away.”
“How do you feed so many people?” Toad asked. “Do you have a secret farm?”
Thomas smiled proudly. “We have enough in storage to feed five hundred people for twenty more years.”
“Twenty years?” Sammy’s face betrayed his shock. Even his addled brain knew what a staggering amount of food that would be. “Where is your storehouse?”
“We keep it in several adjacent buildings around a few city blocks.”
“How . . .?” Sammy started to ask, but still could not fathom so much food.
“Part of it came from cleaning out ghost towns near and far. Pantries, stores—you’d be surprised how much food people left around. Some of it is just good old fashioned know-how. We also get regular shipments of new stock from our members.”
“What else is here?” Toad asked.
“We have an infirmary, and above that, in the towers, we keep our surveillance equipment.”
“Like what?” Sammy asked.
“We got all kinds of toys up there. Land-based transmission interceptors, long-range terrain surveillance, not enough to be terribly effective, but we get snippets of stuff. Right now we think we’re onto something big.”
Sammy’s ears honed in on this. He wondered if it had anything to do with what he knew. “What big thing?”
Thomas looked blankly at him for a moment and then answered, “I’ll tell you later. Let’s look at the basement, and then you boys need to see the infirmary.”
“Okay, why?” Toad asked with a glare.
Thomas smiled at Toad like he was remembering something. “Seeing as how you both have been on the lam for the last few weeks, half-starved, etcetera, etcetera, the doctor thought it would be best.”
“The doctor?”
“Bryce Vogt. You met him earlier.”
“That jerk who shot at me?” Toad asked.
“Cool it, Toad,” Sammy muttered, but Thomas just laughed.
“Boys, let’s go the basement. I think you are going to love it.”
Sammy thought it strange how excited Thomas was to get them into the basement. He understood once they went downstairs. The basement was huge. Massive. So massive, in fact, that Sammy guessed it must extend far beyond the borders of the Palace walls and connect underground to several adjacent blocks to their storehouses and who knew where else. He’d need a map just to get around. One thing was certain, if members of the resistance didn’t want to leave the Palace, they didn’t have to.
“There is one other resistance center,” Thomas said. “Not all the resistance eve
n know where that place is. Wichita is our base of operations.”
The “base of operations” was a giant cavern filled with gadgets, machines, weapons, maps, holo-projectors, blueprints, records, generators, nitro-computers, and many other things Sammy didn’t have a name for.
“It looks a lot cooler than it actually is,” Thomas informed them when he saw the look of wonder on Toad’s face. “We have some extremely talented people working on our side. They helped us get all this stuff. When the resistance first began we were in the technological dark ages, so to speak.”
“How did the resistance begin?” Sammy asked.
Thomas ran his fingers through his hair, rumpling it like a kid would. “Shoot. You really want to hear that whole story?”
“Yeah,” Toad answered for both of them.
Thomas stood for a second, looking around. “Well, let’s sit.”
He led them to a group of desks. After gesturing for them to take their seats, he pulled a mug full of pencils toward him and grabbed one. Leaning back in the chair and twirling the pencil between his fingers, he began.
“Either of you ever hear about the Mexico City bombing? Lark Montgomery?”
“Of course,” Toad said, but Sammy was pretty sure Toad had not.
The history instructions had covered Lark Montgomery in detail. He was a nut job, part of a militant reactionary group resisting the formation of the CAG. Sammy tried to remember the exact date of all those events, but couldn’t.
“The lawyer assigned by the state to defend Lark Montgomery was Crestan DeFry. Does her name ring a bell for either of you?”
Sammy and Toad both signified that it didn’t.
“Figures. Well, one day, mark my words, there’ll be volumes written about her.” To emphasize his next words, Thomas tapped his pencil on the desk. “Brilliant woman.”
The seriousness in Thomas’ face reminded Sammy a lot of Commander Byron.
“Anyway, back to Montgomery—everyone thought he was mad as a hatter. In court and in press conferences, he raged on and on about how he hated the CAG, how the NWG was going to take everything back with force. His trial was famous for his long rants about the CAG being an abomination before God. It scared a lot of people—me included. In those days, terrorist acts were too common. People like him were burning government buildings, sabotaging the air rails. The prosecutors were willing to cut a deal with Montgomery if he’d give information on some of these groups, like where they got their funding from, who was running them, stuff like that.