by Turner, Ivan
“They’ll expect us to try and get out,” Neville shouted at the group, taking charge. “Every exit will be covered and we won’t stand a chance.”
“What do we do, then?” a lady asked back.
And Neville smiled.
He led us without hesitation to the research labs and testing areas. There were no tests being conducted at the moment. Not today. Not on Independence Day.
A clock read 11:04 pm.
Hefting his rifle, he opened fire on the test equipment. He emptied an entire clip into the room, shredding computers and other apparatus. Bits of glass and plastic flew in every direction. Most of the leapers behind us cringed from the noise and flying shrapnel. Neville just laughed as he fired. I just stood and watched. When his rifle was empty, he threw it into the ruined room and pulled the pistol from his waistband. An old man with a smooth featured and elegant face came up and tugged on Neville’s sleeve.
“What are you doing?” asked the man in a richly accented voice.
Neville, standing almost a foot taller, looked down at him. “If they won’t let us go, we’ll tear the bleeding place down around them.” There was so much hate in his voice that I found myself more afraid of him than of them. But I couldn’t imagine what he had been through. He had not replaced his shirt so he stood bare-chested among the debris, looking out at the group as if we were his flock. His mutilated torso was a reminder to all of us of just what went on in those labs. “I’ll tear out every computer and snuff every life if I have to. I won’t go back in a cage!”
So help me, they cheered. They were his flock. And would I have been any different if I had been inside the cage instead of out?
Two doctors came rushing around the corner and into the area. One of the doctors was a pale lady with big bright eyes and the other was a man in his early forties with thin lips and shaking hands.
“Dr. Weaver,” Neville greeted, but I didn’t know which one of them he meant. They both stared at him with the same fear as he gestured to a particularly jagged scar running across his left nipple. “I have you to thank for this.” And then he shot them both dead on the spot.
The room fell into stunned silence.
Then everyone cheered again.
Neville pocketed his pistol again and took a rifle from someone. He announced that there should be no limit to the destruction we should cause.
In the next few minutes, I witnessed horrors that will stay with me for all of my life, which I would have sworn was about to end right then and there. The facility was alerted to our escape. Neville kept us together as a group and moved us from lab to lab. He wasn’t so foolish as to waste more ammunition on machinery which could not shoot back. Instead, he threw things to the floor and stomped on them with his feet. He snapped plastic pieces in half, destroying whatever he could in any way he could conceive.
There were few who stood in our way. Clearly, the people who worked the facility were having difficulty organizing. Or, someone suggested, they may have just been mobilizing by the exits. Neville was clear in his plan for us, though. Obviously, he had given it much thought despite the long odds of this opportunity every coming along. He took great pains to keep them together and rallied. His movements were calculated. He did not seek to engage anyone in combat, but was merciless toward those he did encounter. Neville’s rule was shoot to kill and the others adopted it without a second thought. He was so different from the jovial man I had met on the way out to this installation, so embittered. Whatever he had learned as a soldier himself or as whatever he had been that had resulted in his pilot training, came to the fore with a rushing intensity, sweeping aside all other aspects of his personality.
The soldiers we encountered were hesitant at first. I suppose they had been drilled on the possibility of leaper escapes, but we were clearly valued too highly to be simply shot. They tried to wound as they had done in the first ward, but were ineffective. The leapers were not so kind, aiming for chests and heads. They slaughtered close to ten people in the space of a few minutes, arming themselves off of the dead bodies. Though I marched along with Neville, I could not think of myself as part of the group. I was offered a weapon and refused it. I was caught in the middle. I did not believe the violence was necessary, but I couldn’t see any other way around it. Among all things, I would have assuredly wound up as a prisoner in a plexiglass cage. Was my freedom worth all of these lives?
Once all of the labs were demolished, and I do mean demolished, Neville took us on to the staff quarters. This was a calculated move to damage the morale of those working at the facility, to break down their spirits. Using stolen ID badges, he was able to gain access to most of the rooms. Soldiers’ badges could open any room so our access was virtually unlimited. The thirty nine leapers scattered themselves throughout the staff’s quarters, destroying personal items, rending sheets and mattresses, tearing up books, smashing computers, shredding clothing, hammering holes into the walls. It was an ugly, devastating sight, and I stood by and watched in disgust, knowing that I was the catalyst and knowing still that I could never have left them caged. Even had I known what I was about to witness, I would have made the same decision.
Neville returned to me every few seconds to make sure that I was all right. He took charge of me as a guardian over a child and I was both thankful for it and resentful of it. As I stood alone in the corridor I tried to make some sense of the images. The faces of the people blended into one. I couldn’t tell one person from another and lost all track of time. My mind began to wander, I suppose as a defense mechanism. I thought of Jennie. Was she married? How old was she? I thought of Livvie and of my brothers. I wondered what had become of Igor and GEI after this installation was discovered by the government. I felt small and vulnerable. When I was young and things were bad, I would always tell myself that it would be over soon enough and I would be able to sit and look back on it. I couldn’t tell myself that now. I was in a situation whose ending was not foreseeable. What was worse was that time for me was in such a state of flux that I couldn’t know minute to minute what the state of my life would be. I felt myself begin to come apart.
And then the shooting started in earnest.
It amazes me that science fiction television shows and movies always have futuristic soldiers firing lasers or phasers or some other type of asers. And yet, as I stood in the year 2037, sixty four years after my birth with only thirty four of them lived, what whizzed over my head and around me were bullets. They were metal bullets with hollow points. They bit into walls and the debris that the leapers had made. They cut through human flesh and caused the loss of blood and dignity. I was in the firefight, but I wasn’t part of it. I guess the soldiers realized that their former captives were shooting to kill so why shouldn’t they? To me, the whole thing was a blur. I couldn’t put to writing who died and who was wounded. I couldn’t report the numbers. I don’t even know when I was pulled from the hallway and into a room. I guess it was Neville who saved me, but that point was academic. Before I knew it, he was shouting, calling for a cease fire.
That sounded reasonable.
The gunfire gradually died, but that only made the moaning more audible. I was in a person’s quarters, hiding behind a bed. Neville was there with me and there were a couple of others as well. Out the door we could see the mangled leg of a man and nothing else. Neville shouted out our surrender.
But there was to be no surrender. Even I could see it. The look in the eyes of every man and woman who had spent any time behind plexiglass “bars” was the same. They would not be caged again. Death was not the final option.
Neville stepped into the corridor and stood looking down toward the soldiers, out of sight from my perspective. Whatever his ploy was, I couldn’t figure it out. He had not lost his nerve. I wonder if it was as plain to everyone else as it was to me. He meant to see this through to the end.
There was the soft sound of approaching footsteps. I couldn’t tell how many pairs. Someone was shouting at Neville. Drop y
our weapon. Drop your weapon! Neville stood his ground. Then the shooting began anew. Neville wasn’t the only one firing. His rifle came up after the first shots. He fired his weapon until it was empty. A split second later he was thrown backward and all I saw was a blood spray. One moment he was there and the next moment he wasn’t.
I screamed.
What else could I do? He was the leader of the leapers and he was my one connection to the group. Without him, I was truly on my own. The soldiers moved up to our door but the people with me opened fire and held them off. I huddled behind the bed, wishing still that I could just be somewhere else. I don’t know how long I sat there, the people with me popping up and down, taking shots at the invading soldiers. I think someone went down next to me but I just don’t remember. I did nothing but sit and stare and wait. And, eventually, it all did come to an end.
“Mathew?”
I peeked out from behind the bed and saw Neville standing in the doorway. There was something tied around his left bicep and shoulder. It had been wintergreen in color, but now it was soaked with blood. It looked heavy and brown.
“All right, then?” he asked.
I was.
Everyone else was not. Everyone who had been in the room with me was dead. The seat of my pants was wet with blood. The soles of my shoes were sticky with it. The smell was awful. At least I was coming to my senses.
“Time to go,” Neville said. “There’s not much time.”
I stood and followed him out of the room. The corridor and the surrounding rooms were charnel houses. Bodies were contorted on the floor and up against walls. There wasn’t a living soldier in sight. Of the forty leapers, myself included, only six remained. Neville’s shoulder was badly torn up and I wasn’t sure he would make it too far. Many were dead. Others had leaped through time.
“They’ll have a hell of time putting this mess back together,” Neville said, leading us away from the scene. As we walked, we left a trail of bloody footprints behind us. No one else challenged us as we went. I’m not sure we could have withstood another fight. Those of us who remained were worn and haggard, the adrenaline rush wearing off. There was a woman walking next to me. I glanced at her and she at me. Then she disappeared. I let out a short yelp, but the others pushed me on. It occurs to me now that they probably saw people wink in and out of time often. The empty cells I had seen must have held people at one time or another. I wondered about the others I had been with before my last leap. Rogers Clinton and Awen Mohammed and Samantha Radish. Were there cells for each of them as well?
Neville urged us on, five haggard and distraught people. I thought about the lives that had changed and ended right there. Not just in the last few minutes, but over the course of the years I had missed. The world had always been a cruel place. It treated people with indifference. But it was worse to some than to others. A twist of fate or a wrong turn and you incurred its wrath. Then you could be dead or worse. I regarded Neville. The gleam was fading from his eyes. He moved more slowly than before. He was losing a lot of blood and I guessed he was waging his own battle with death right then and there. He needed medical attention, but I said nothing. There wasn’t a doctor on the premises that would help him.
We ascended a staircase and then another and we were on the roof. The night closed in about us. There were no lights lit on the facility. We had the moon and the stars and the faint glow from the open door. We were alone.
Sitting unused were two helicopters. They looked a bit different from the helicopters I was used to seeing. They were sleeker, for one. It seems that the future always holds a sexier look for our machines. But the general design was the same. I wondered if Neville had planned this from the start. There were only five of us and we fit into one helicopter with no problem. Neville eased himself in with difficulty, wincing as he moved the left side of his body. But he remained silent and began to operate the controls. I kept looking at the door, expecting it to burst open at any minute. Surely they couldn’t have killed everyone. Above our heads, the main rotor began to spin, the tail rotor following suit. Neville cursed slightly about reconfigured controls and one useless arm. I sat next to him, watching his movements.
“Are you watching this, Mathew?” he asked.
I nodded.
“If I pass out, you’ll have to take over.”
“What?” I said. “What?”
“Just push me out the door and slide into the seat. Once we’re in the air, it’s mostly just the stick. Try to land her in an open area and then run like hell.”
I looked back at the three faces behind us. They seemed too tired to care about what he was saying. Having to fly a helicopter would be bad enough. There was no way I would be able to push him out the door. Maybe he saw this because he looked me dead in the eye and a shadow of that old smile returned. “There are no innocents.”
Then we took off into the night air, Neville struggling to control it with one hand, the color draining steadily from his face. Again he began to grumble, this time about the type of fuel the copter used. The ride was much different than the ride that had carried us there so many years before. For one, as adept as Neville was at his craft, he struggled against the wind and had difficulty keeping things steady. He kept the running lights doused so there was nothing but blackness below us. The people in the back remained silent, faceless entities. I never learned their names.
Neville nodded off a couple of times and I had to take the stick from him, reaching over and doing my best to keep the helicopter steady while the others worked to shake him awake. Both times, he came out of it as if out of a dream and smiled knowingly at me. It was both and approving and reproachful smile. I was doing a good job keeping the chopper up. Why wouldn’t I just let him go?
When we cleared the mountain range, the lights of civilization came into view. The change in the view seemed to give Neville a tiny jolt of energy. He sat up a little straighter and took hold of the stick. His eyes were alert, but I didn’t know what he was looking for. He banked low over the ground, skirting over a major city that could have been Denver or Boulder or some city that had been built up within the last fifteen years. He picked up speed and went out over the stretching highways of the Midwest. I stared down at the lights of the traffic as they moved. They winked in and out of sight so quickly that I could hardly follow them. Were cars moving faster or was it just an illusion caused by our own speed? In the darkness, I could barely get a glimpse of the box and egglike forms.
Once we were away from the city, Neville began to lose focus again. He brought us very low and just over a main road, setting the helicopter down in with a jerk. The clock on the dashboard, or whatever you call it in a helicopter, read just before two in the morning.
“Neville, you have to go to a hospital,” I said.
He nodded in agreement, which surprised me. With all that had happened, I was almost ready to believe that he was just going to accept his death. It seemed a hospital would be a risky maneuver for us, but as I thought about it I wasn’t so sure. There had been absolutely no interference since the gun battle. I wondered if the installation itself was still a secret. If it was, then there wouldn’t be any news reports or warnings. Of course, a wound like Neville’s didn’t just happen, but we could worry about explanations after he was treated.
We climbed out of the helicopter and waited for a car to come. Neville was in and out of consciousness, his breathing irregular and his pulse starting to weaken. Almost an hour passed before we saw the first car. It slowed as it approached, seeing the helicopter and not having a way around it. Holding up one of the military badges, one of the men in our small group waved the car down. It was s small car, not too different from the ones I remembered. A man and a woman were inside and they looked fit and healthy. Once they got a look at us, they knew that stopping had been a bad decision. My three conscious companions surrounded the vehicle and threatened them with guns. The man and the woman stepped out of the car and we took it, just like that.
The man with the ID badge drove and a woman sat in the front with him. I helped Neville into the back seat and sat between him and the last of us, another man.
“I’m not going to a hospital,” the driver said. “It’s too dangerous.”
I looked at Neville. “He’ll die.”
Neville made no move. The driver shrugged. The woman in the passenger seat, sensing a confrontation, steeled herself for it. The man on my left just stared out the window.
“If you just pull up near the hospital, I’ll take him inside myself. You don’t have to wait.”
“That sounds fair,” said the woman.
“It’s too dangerous.”
I felt a rage boiling up inside me. It had been there a while, just simmering under the surface, squashed by the fear and the shock. But the helicopter ride and the wait for a car to come by had given me enough time to recover. Was Neville my responsibility? Was he my friend? He was all I had.
“You’ll do it,” I said. “You’ll drop us off at a hospital and then be on your way.”
“No.”
I reached forward, grabbed the back of his hair, and pulled. His head whipped back against the headrest and the car swerved this way and that. He began shouting at me while the woman clawed at my hand. The man on my left just stared out the window. I tightened my grip. Once good jerk and I would pull a tuft out by the roots. With my free hand I reached over and grabbed Neville’s gun. I pointed it at the woman. I can’t say for sure, but I think I might have been able to pull the trigger. I think, at just that moment, I had it in me.
“You’re all wasting your time,” the man on my left finally said over the noise.
We stopped our quarrelling and looked at him. He chose not to return the favor.
“We’ve got one choice and one choice only. We have to ditch this car as soon as we can and try to blend into civilization, whatever civilization may be at this point.” He addressed the driver. “If he wants to go to the hospital, then let him have the car and go.”