by Sandy Nathan
When the blast came, the only thing that saved her was the fact that she was in the doorway.
15
“That was well done, Mel,” a voice Eliana didn’t recognize said. “Find an alien and scare her to death.”
“I’m sorry, Jeremy. I wanted to keep her quiet until we could get her in here and explain.”
“Why didn’t you say, ‘Olga, I’m your teacher, Mr. Adams. We’re trying to save your life.’ That would reassure her, don’t you think?”
“Look, I’m sorry. I’ve had a lot on my mind. I mean, shit...”
“I’ve been having a bad day, too, Mel, trying to save my friends from the nuclear holocaust tomorrow morning. I just found out, too. I thought you could handle a skinny girl.”
The second voice was higher than the first one, which told Eliana that the person was younger. She was in a state where she could hear and think, but not move.
“How long until she comes out of it?”
“Beats me, Mel. I don’t know that much about aliens.”
“But you did predict this behavior.”
“Yeah. That comes from sampling off-world communication. She wasn’t out long with No Mercy. She should come around soon.”
The girl’s eyes popped open.
“Olga, don’t be afraid. It’s Mr. Adams. Remember me from class this morning?”
“Call him Mel, Olga. Don’t stand on preapocalyptic ceremony.”
“Olga, It’s Mel—”
She touched her chest and said, “Eliana.”
“That’s better.”
She sat up. They were in a dimly lit room. Blowing instruments and music stands were everywhere. She knew things like this from her world. It was a music-playing place.
“This is Jeremy.” Mel pointed to a boy with his back to her. He was moving very fast, doing something with the boxes at the end of the room. “He’s getting us out of here.”
Jeremy spoke to Mel, tossing words over his shoulder. He moved tensely and kept his back to them. “We gotta go. They’ll be in the hallway in a minute.”
“I’ll explain as we get out of here, Eliana.” Mel moved to the far wall and pushed something. A doorway opened. They entered another room. Big squares with moving pictures in them filled every wall. They were like the “TV” she had seen at Henry and Lena’s home, but there were many, many more of them.
Some screens showed the sky; others were filled with numbers and lines. Another showed every room in the school, changing from one to another quickly. Rooms in other buildings were shown, buildings she didn’t know. Jeremy slipped through the door and began doing what he had before, moving from one machine to another, doing something behind them. She stared, but her teacher took her shoulders and moved her through the room.
“Eliana, we have to leave right now. Jeremy’s destroying his lab so no one can trace what he’s got. We have to get out...” He steered her to a circular metal thing on the wall, big enough to step through. It had a round wheel in the center.
“Jeremy, unlock it will you?” Mel called over his shoulder. The wheel buzzed and they heard clicking noises. Mel spoke quickly to her while the door unlocked.
“Jeremy’s the Hermitage Academy’s big secret. He’s a computer genius. The techies think he’s a god. He works out of this secret lab, which he and his mom built behind his music studio. Everyone in the school thinks he a weirdo, down here practicing for hours. He’s really saving the planet.
“He’s one of the prime movers in the revolution, and the FBI’s most wanted criminal.” Mel’s voice faltered. “Jeremy got me a new identity. I’d be dead without him.”
“Mel, get out of here. The door’s unlocked.” Jeremy kept moving rapidly from one computer to another.
Mel turned the circle in the door. It unscrewed from the wall.
“Mel, go! Arthur is waiting for us,” Jeremy said, continuing to reverse plugs and switches.
He never turned to look them, but Eliana could see that he was small for his people. He was bigger than her, but smaller than most of the boys in the school. His hair was dark and curled in ringlets. The skin of the back of his neck and hands was dark, but lighter than Henry’s. She couldn’t see his face.
“Get out, Mel!” Jeremy shouted.
Jeremy pulled little square things out of the computers. He shoved them into a carrying bag like the other students had. “Go. I’ll blow the lab when you’re in the tunnel.” He looked around the room and she saw his profile. He had wide lips and smooth skin. “I said, go!”
Mel turned the handle in the middle of the circle a few more times, and then yanked on it. The round door opened out, revealing utter blackness.
“Here,” Mel said, reaching into the darkness behind the door and handing her a helmet. “Put this on. You turn it on like this.” The light on the front of his miner’s helmet lit up. “Let’s go.”
She slipped through the round opening after him.
“Let’s go. Jer will catch up.” She ran down a passageway with her teacher. It was cement; she knew what it was from her time in this world. This world seemed to be made of cement. They hadn’t gotten too far when a light appeared behind them. She heard squealing noises as the door was closed.
“Run, you idiots.” They heard Jeremy running hard behind them.
She was thrown off her feet by the blast. Dust filled the air. She could hear chunks of cement falling behind her.
“You OK, Jer?” Mel said.
After a pause, she heard, “Yeah. I’m OK. Keep going. Get moving.”
They ran. The tunnel emptied into a larger tunnel. Their lights revealed cement vaults, muck and mud. Discolored cement. Filthy water in a shallow trough extended as far as they could see.
“This is how we’ll escape,” Jeremy said.
“Great, Jer,” Mel said. “What about that?” A very heavy metal grate covered the opening between them and where they wanted to go.
Jeremy pulled something from his backpack. He flipped down welder’s goggles on his helmet and lit the end of a metal canister. He worked like he welded every day. He didn’t say anything, quickly removing a section from the grate large enough for them to get through. When they’d entered the older channel, he looked up and down the tunnels.
“These are the sewers of New York,” Jeremy said. “Where the giant mutant alligators live and vampire societies flourish.”
“Do they?” Mel looked apprehensive.
“We better hope not. We’re going that way.” He pointed left. “Go. I’m going to blow the tunnel.” He looked down at the canister he’d used to cut the grating and flipped some switches before tossing it up the tunnel they’d just left.
“Go,” he shouted. “It will blow in thirty seconds!’
Eliana stared at the liquid in the sewer.
“I don’t like it, either, but we have to move!” Jeremy shouted.
“It’s not that,” Mel said. “Maybe water’s poisonous to her or something.”
Jeremy grabbed her feet, Mel her torso. She kept her big coat on, clutching it to her body. It made her an awkward bundle. She wouldn’t take it off.
“If we have to carry her all the way, we won’t make it.”
The second blast threw them from their feet again. They dropped Eliana in the confusion. Her calf was splashed with sewer water and a corner of the coat got wet. She rolled up in a ball clutching her lower leg. They could feel her pain, even though she didn’t make a sound.
“Look at that—water eats right through her skin.”
“Fuck.” Jeremy rummaged in his backpack. “What can fix that?”
“Oy,” she said.
“Oy,” Mel replied. “Like oy vey?”
“Oy. Oy-l.”
Jeremy found a container of machine oil in his backpack. “Is this OK?”
She sniffed it, tasted it, and then poured it over her wound. It began healing instantly. Mel reached over and wrung out the corner of her coat.
“That’s as good as we can do right
now,” he said.
Eliana went up on her pointes, clutching the can of oil. “I go there.” There was the four-inch ledge rimming the sewage channel.
“Let’s do it.” Jeremy swung his backpack up and they charged after her, barely keeping pace. The coat ballooned behind her.
“OK. Stop.” Jeremy came to a halt and pulled a small screen from his bag. He turned it on and held it in front of him. Colors and lines filled it. He pointed at a spot on the screen. “Arthur should be right there with the car. It’s more than ten blocks from the school. That should be outside any perimeter they set up.” A branch of the sewer diverged to the right. They took it for a few hundred yards.
Jeremy looked up through the opening. “This must be it,” he whispered. “The grate’s missing.” He whistled. A similar whistle responded.
“Here. Climb up on my shoulders,” he said to Eliana. She clambered up his back and disappeared into the daylight. She heard them talking from below.
“You next, Mel. Climb up on my shoulders.”
“How are you going to get out? Would you stop being such a martyr?”
“I’m not being a martyr.”
“You are always a martyr.”
Eliana stood on the sidewalk next to a man in a black suit. The argument from below ended when the man dropped something shiny and heavy through the hole. It clanked as he let it down. The man whispered, “Hurry up. We have to get out of here.”
They clambered up the ladder. A long black vehicle waited at the curb.
The stranger pulled the chain ladder out of the hole and handed it to Mel. The stranger then shoved the grate back where it had been and ran around the front of the car, climbing in a door on the other side. “Let’s go.”
Mel opened a door in the back and climbed in. He tossed the ladder on the floor and held his hands out to help Eliana. Jeremy followed. The vehicle pulled into the street, moving slowly.
Jeremy leapt to the front of their compartment and shouted through a small window in the wall between them and the driver.
“Arthur! It’s tomorrow morning!” he cried.
“I know, Jeremy. That’s why I’m here.” A trim hand reached up and waved at Jeremy. Eliana caught a glimpse of the driver’s brown skin and a bit of short black hair.
“It’s over, Arthur! Everything we’ve worked for. There’s not going to be a revolution!”
“I know, Jeremy. The good guys lost.”
“How can that be? We were supposed to have months before the atomics detonated. The scientists were supposed to be on their way to the estate. My mom was coming home... we were going to go into the shelter and make a great new world. I thought...” A wail escaped him. “Arthur!”
“Knock it off, soldier,” Arthur barked. “This is what you trained for. The worst-case scenario. We’ve got to get out of here or we’re going to be dead. Sit back so I can drive.”
Everyone was silent as Arthur maneuvered through the smaller streets. He swerved and backtracked. Between rows of buildings, Eliana could see big riding machines with flashing lights heading for the school behind them. Smaller machines prowled the cross streets. She could see Arthur leaning forward to peer out the front window. The long vehicle tossed them around when he turned and accelerated. He cursed.
“This thing’s like driving a boat. I wish we had cycles—” Arthur slowed as a black-and-white car with flashing lights passed on a side street.
Finally, they got to an area where everything was quiet. Arthur began talking. His voice came from the door near where Eliana sat.
“I’m using the speaker so I can steer this thing. Yes, Jeremy, it’s a shock. It caught us by surprise—and we do have better intelligence than you. We knew the bombs were going to go off. Why else would atomic weapons come up out of bunkers that no one knew were there?
“We thought we had time to take back the country. That was Plan A: stage a revolution and disarm the nukes. We have the scientists to do it.
“If that didn’t work, we had Plan B. You knew that. That’s why we built the shelter on your mom’s estate. We’ve known that all-out war was in the works for years. We thought it was going to be biological or chemical.
“So we made a place for a hundred geniuses and philosophers to hole up until it was safe to come out. We were going to create a race of philosopher-kings—–and make sure the people of the new world didn’t have our faults.”
Eliana could understand much of what Arthur said. English was coming easier to her. She looked at Jeremy and Mel. She could tell by the way they sat that they knew what Arthur was talking about. They were part of it.
“But that’s out,” Arthur went on. “The scientists aren’t coming. Flights around the world are grounded. They shot that missing Russian plane down. No one knows that. The pilot took off without permission and they nailed him. Those pictures of it ‘disappearing’ were from the Russian government, not a weather balloon.
“The only planes flying are heads of state getting home. The major governments know what’s happening, but they’re not telling anyone. They want to get locked into their bunkers before the people figure out that they’ve been left out to die.
“Everything we trained for is out.” Eliana felt Arthur’s bitterness as a taste in her mouth. “None of it will happen.” He laughed, a caustic snort. “That perfect genetic match they found for you in France is in a shelter outside Paris, Jeremy. The two of you won’t be making the smartest babies ever seen.”
“What about my mom? Will the general let her come home?”
“No, Jeremy. She’s too big a trophy. We did find out that your mom and the general are in Russia somewhere, not South America the way they’ve let on. They’re in a bunker, dug in.” A sob escaped Jeremy. “We’ve talked about this, Jer. I know it’s hard, but she can’t get away from the general. And we can’t rescue her.”
Jeremy sat with his fists clenched against his ribs. His lips pulled back from his teeth. Eliana could hear the breath going in and out of him.
“What do we do now, Arthur?” Jeremy gripped the arm of the door. “What’s Plan C?”
“There’s no Plan C and there’s no plan at all if we don’t get to the estate.” Arthur swung around and looked through the hole in the wall for an instant. He had a brown face, but not as dark as Henry’s, and smooth skin. His hair was black and shiny and combed straight back. He had white teeth and dark eyes. She could feel his essence as well as she could his emotions. He was a soldier, a killer. And he was a good person.
“It’s just us,” Jeremy said softly. “We’re the new world.”
“Yeah. But first we have to get to the estate,” Arthur replied. “I’d better drive.” The window between the compartments closed.
Jeremy sat back, silent. He didn’t look at her or Mel. She could feel how upset he was, but he didn’t reach out to anyone.
“We’re it,” he said. “We’re the new world.”
“Don’t forget the people in the village,” Mel reminded him. “There must be a hundred of them.”
“The shelter won’t hold more than a hundred.” Jeremy sat back, shaking his head. “And they’re... villagers. They’re the worst genetic material in the world.”
“I don’t think they’re the worst, Jeremy. Sam of the village isn’t. Or at least he didn’t sound that way from what you’ve said about him.”
“Have you ever seen Sam?”
“You know I can’t leave the city. My papers might not hold up.”
“The last time I saw Sam, he was face down in the mud, passed out.”
“Oh...,” Mel stammered. “But we made him that way, Jeremy. It was his cover so the feds didn’t get him. We came up with that. He wasn’t a drunk before this last year.”
“Yeah. Well, he really likes his cover. Give me a minute, will you? I just need a minute.” Jeremy slumped in silence, face in his hands.
Eliana looked around her, focusing on the vehicle rather than the feelings around her. She’d seen conveyers for peop
le in the streets, but none like this. It was much too big for them; many more people could ride in it easily. It was so long. And beautiful. She stroked the seats, wondering what the material was. She had a disturbing sense that it might have come from an animal. But she had no choice; she had to sit on it. She sat in the middle of the seat in back. Mel sat farthest in. Jeremy had climbed in last and sat on her other side, closest to the door. The wall between the two compartments seemed far away.
Jeremy was silent, but his shoulders shook. Eliana could feel his grief. It was the computers he’d made and the musical instruments. And his mother. She leaned toward him. He held his eyes tightly shut. His hands were clasped in fists. She wanted to comfort him, and thank him for saving her, but he was hurting too much to hear her.
The machines that he destroyed were his. He’d made them and he understood them. They were good machines. He had contacted her world and asked them for help with those machines. That was why she was here. Eliana reached in her pocket stealthily and looked at the piece of paper. It said, “The Golden Boy.” No longer “Find the Golden Boy.”
Jeremy was the Golden Boy. She looked at him with wonder. She had found him. All she had to do was her part. How did she do that?
She peeked at her notebook for instructions. It said: “Be who you are.”
16
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the medic said as he sutured a cut on her cheek.
“Clean up my face so I can get back to work.” Val looked in a mirror. She had some cuts on her face and, most likely, a broken nose. Bruises all over from flying objects. But she was alive. Everyone else in the room had died in the blast. Her partner. Her entire team. The ballet teacher.
Where was the girl? Was she dead? Or had whatever had done that to Richard taken her corpse? Had she killed Richard? Was she an alien?
A hack from headquarters was on the phone. “You should come in for a medical evaluation, Lieutenant. We’ve ordered reinforcements.”
“Like hell I’ll come in. They killed my people. I’m not going to come in until they’re dead.”
“We’re sending a supervisory force, Lieutenant.”