Seeds to the Wind (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 2)

by McCullough Crawford

  After taking only a few steps, a dark mass begins to resolve itself on the floor ahead. As he nears it, Ryan’s shoes, then legs take shape out of mist. When Jon draws level with his friend’s feet, he can make out his entire length and can just make out what must be the rebel leader’s body a little farther down the passage.

  Jon reaches out to grab Ryan’s shoulder and try to shake him awake, knowing he will have no chance of carrying him out if he remains unconscious. His hand brushes something hot and hard. Jerking back, he squints into the haze, and there against the black of Ryan’s jacket is a curving black shard of metal embedded in his shoulder. Reaching out to grab it, Jon can feel the heat radiate off it, so instead of burning his hand again, he slips his jacket off and removes his t-shirt.

  Without the insulating layer of his coat, he can feel the heat continue to rise even higher, but he ignores the scalding steam striking his back as he wraps the shirt around his hand and pulls the piece of shrapnel free, eliciting a moan from Ryan. Part of his mind registers that it must be a part of the steam pipe due to its temperature and size, but most of his attention is focused on the blood that wells up through the hole in his friend’s back.

  Pulling Ryan’s jacket off his shoulder, not noting the absence of Ryan’s pack, Jon sees that most of the wound had been cauterized by the heat of the shrapnel itself, leaving only a slow ooze from the bottom of the gaping hole. Fortunately to Jon’s untrained eye, it looks like nothing vital has been hit, and for the depth of the wound, it seems to have only torn into his friend’s excess of muscle.

  Unwrapping his hand, he tears a piece off of the shirt, stuffing it into the hole and tearing a second strip to tie it in place with. He has to shove Ryan up onto his side to tie the makeshift bandage around the front of his big chest.

  “Ouch, that hurt!” Ryan says with a sharp intake of breath. His eyes flutter open to take in the drenched tunnel and Jon kneeling by his side, slowly turning red like a lobster as it is steamed, with a concerned look on his face.

  “Can you move? I don’t think we’ll make it much longer in this heat,” Jon says as he glances towards the sprawled form of the rebel leader. Sweat seems to bead across his entire chest, rolling and dripping off him like he is in a shower.

  Ryan shifts more of his weight onto the side of his body that did not recently gain a new crater, wincing as he discovers new scrapes and bruises. Managing to get his legs partially underneath him, he pauses to take a deep breath before setting his jaw and forcing himself into a low half crouch. Using his uninjured arm, he cradles the other against his stomach.

  “Let’s go,” he says rather hesitantly, swaying a little bit as the pain and heat wash over him. Ahead of them, the rebel leader is making his own way to his feet.

  “Come on, follow me,” the leader says after quickly assessing the situation as his mind clears from the shock of the blast. “I know a way out of the main tunnel that should get us some fresh air.”

  They head off, each nursing his own injuries but moving as fast as possible while avoiding the increasingly hot air and thick fog that lines the top of the tunnel. Jon uses one hand to help stabilize Ryan when he nearly stumbles into the still-hot steam pipe along the wall. Not sure if he can actually redirect his large friend, he merely hopes that he can help guide him along without getting a burn to add to his other injuries.

  The tunnel splits, and they stumble down the left-hand passage. Its ceiling materializes out of the fog as the tunnel quickly descends. If Ryan hadn’t already been hunched over from the pain each step is causing to radiate throughout his body, the top of the tunnel would have forced him into that position.

  Behind them they hear a muffled explosion followed by a rushing sound. The air temperature suddenly begins to increase as a new wave of steam is forced into this tunnel.

  Pausing momentarily to cough up some of the water collecting in his lungs, Jon stares at his feet with his hands braced on his knees and realizes they are lost in the swirling mist. The cloud swirls densely around him, leaving his legs to fade into the whiteness shortly below his knees. Glancing up, he can’t see Ryan. Even though he could have only managed to shamble a few steps farther down the hall, the fog has swallowed him as thoroughly as a shark swallows a minnow.

  Still struggling to separate the air from the steam, Jon stumbles forward, his arm outstretched but lost in the fog from the elbow on. He only makes it ten steps down the hall before his hand runs into something soft and sticky and a muffled voice curses him.

  “Ow, watch where you’re going,” Ryan says as Jon pulls his hand off the blood-soaked bandage on his back.

  “Follow me through here, we can close the door and keep the steam out.” The voice of the rebel leader comes to Jon’s ears, but he is unable to discern the direction even in the linear confines of the tunnel. He hesitates, his mind working slowly as his body is bombarded by the heat. He tries to reason out the direction he should step, suddenly worried that there might be some unseen pitfall hidden nearby.

  “Come on,” Ryan says, grabbing Jon’s outstretched arm, pulling him towards where he’d thought the wall of the tunnel was located. Riding a wave of fog, Jon stumbles out of the milky half-light of the main tunnel into the gray darkness of a side passage. Ryan’s firm grip leads him through before stopping him several steps inside. Jon’s eyes haven’t even begun to adjust to the darker space, its only light emanating from the opening he just walked through, when with a slow grinding sound the rectangle of light slowly diminishes. The door finally slides shut, isolating them in darkness with a simple click.

  The side passage is noticeably cooler, and the fog that had been stifling in the main tunnel seems to cling to them more like a persistent dampness. Jon’s skin puckers as a light breeze drifts down the hallway from behind him, its light breath feeling like ice after the pressure of the steam. As the breeze caresses his skin, he can feel the humidity slowly dissipate, some of it condensing and forming droplets on his face and bare chest.

  Ryan flicks on a small light; its beam casts a white circle on the floor at his feet. The glare reflected off the gray cement floor illuminates each of their faces in a harsh light. The perspiration and blood loss combine to give Ryan a sickly pallor, his eyes seeming to have sunken farther into his skull. Remembering the reason for his friend’s blood loss, Jon shivers, thinking how easily the supposed authorities would use lethal force on a bunch of unarmed citizens.

  The rebel leader is leaning against the tunnel wall at the edge of the light shining from Ryan’s hand. The lower portion of his face is still covered by a bandanna, but the haunted look in his eyes mirrors Jon’s own feelings.

  “I guess it’s time we take care of some proper introductions,” he says while lowering the cloth from his face, revealing a coating of dark stubble that accentuates the gaunt look to his cheeks. “Until the rally and its, um, aftermath, I was a junior faculty member here at the university. I was in the crowd with several of my graduate students when the riot started.”

  He stares past Jon and Ryan, focusing on a point somewhere beyond the door through which they just came as he continues. His voice is tentative and soft, barely echoing in the hard confines of the tunnel.

  “One of my students, a candidate for a doctorate by the name of Chris Haines, was cut down almost immediately. The bullet or shrapnel or whatever it was came out of nowhere and took half of Chris’s neck with it before it continued off into the crowd. Chris collapsed into my arms as the crowd panicked.” His eyes are still focused beyond the door, but Jon and Ryan can see a glistening at the corners where tears are beginning to form. “I watched as his life rushed out through the gaping hole between his head and shoulders. I watched his bright, curious eyes grow dim and die.”

  The last part comes out as rush, as if some verbal dam broke upstream, and after he is forced to pause for breath. The pause stretches on as Jon and Ryan are too shocked to say anything. The rebel leader continues staring at the wall between them for several long sec
onds before, with a visible effort, dragging his attention back to the present.

  “I’d still be kneeling there now with Chris in my arms if another of my students hadn’t grabbed my arm and pulled me away into the panicked mob. From there, we made it back to my lab, where we were hiding until you two and your friend Sara found us. I guess you could say we became rebels hiding from the patrols of soldiers as they wandered through campus. We slowly accumulated a few others who had taken refuge in the buildings around. We managed to scrounge up some rifles from the armed forces center on campus when we were out looking for food, which is why we greeted you with that display of force in the stairwell. We were just doing what we could to survive knowing we couldn’t let the authorities find us.

  “But that is not what I set out to tell you,” he smiles wryly but without any humor. It is the smile of a man about to be hanged who is told he’ll have to wait because the noose is the wrong size and they need to swap it out. “I guess I managed to prove my identity as a pedantic professor, but still haven’t told you my name. I’m Keith Hallowell, but recently everyone has just started calling me The Professor. Sara, who was a teaching assistant for me last semester, told me who you two are.”

  Jon and Ryan both nod in acknowledgment, both too shocked by The Professor’s tale to do much more. They had seen a portion of the devastation first-hand, but their own recollections are shaky and filled with panic and incongruities caused by their hectic flight from the field. The Professor’s story is clear and vivid, its pain clearly reflected in his haunted eyes.

  “We should get moving,” The Professor says, raising his hand to forestall the questions that Jon and Ryan are about to start spewing. “It’s only a matter of time before they send people down to inspect the damage they’ve caused. There is a cache of gear we stashed in one of the adjoining tunnels up ahead. If we make it there we should be able to hide out for a while before trying to sneak off campus. If any of the others made it, they know what to do.”

  His eyes glisten as he looks back through the brick, earth, and concrete that separate them from the broken tunnel and the others who had been fleeing with them. His squad of “rebels” had been his students and their friends. He’d known them, taught them, and taken responsibility for them. That Chris might have only been the first of them to die in this obscene circumstance is visibly tearing at his heart. The Professor turns, head bent towards the floor, and trudges up the tunnel away from the light. Jon and Ryan follow, knowing no words will help him carry the weight resting on his shoulders.

  Chapter 9

  Western Mountains

  Government Training Facility

  The atmosphere at the training facility for the past few weeks has been hectic to say the least. William and his team have been training and studying the details of their mission without rest from before sunrise to well after the sun sets. If they had had time to pause and really think about where they were and why they were doing what they were doing, they might have started to challenge their guards or at least not given all their effort to the tasks they were assigned. But they are not given the time, and a kind of infectious excitement has settled over the entire facility. William has come to realize that despite being forced into this situation, despite the cruelty and abuse he has witnessed, despite the endless hours of hard work, he is finally doing something that might actually matter. Maybe his name will never be immortalized in stone on the façade of some grand building, but somewhere there will be a list of nameless crew members, each nothing more than an identification number. Then maybe sometime far in the future a database will be declassified then cross referenced with their assigned names, and his real name, William Marin, will be there along with the rest of his team, the rest of his friends.

  The satisfaction that has been welling up inside of him is mixed with a hint of pride. The path he had been on, more by the luck of his birth than any particular desire to be there, would have resulted with him joining a large international company, working in a bland featureless cube, until eventually he would have risen through the layers of management enough to attain one of the coveted offices complete with a door. He’d never exactly thought he had had a choice; good kids go to university, good kids get a respectable job, good kids work hard to get a promotion. He’d spent the years before his arrest doing the minimum that was required to maintain his “good kid” status. As long as he stayed out of trouble, or at least did not get caught, everyone seemed to leave him alone.

  Since his arrest, the primal, dirty fight for survival and the bonds he has developed with the others out of their shared struggles have managed to awaken something within him, something he assumed was only a figment of the storytellers’ imaginations. He actually is excited to do this. He takes pride in his work and is pushing himself to see what he is capable of. A dark part of his mind reminds him that he is probably just playing into his captors’ hands, but he ignores it and dives headlong into the day’s tasks.

  Today their morning activities seemed lighter than usual. On their early morning run before breakfast, their drill instructor had barely pushed them, seeming to be preoccupied with his own thoughts. Once assembled in the dining hall, all the teams were abuzz with rumors. Some reported that they’d seen the rockets being fueled; others that someone had overheard a guard saying he knew the launch date.

  William doesn’t pay that much attention. Every time they are all gathered in the dining hall, there are usually wild rumors running through the crowd. True, today there is an undercurrent of excitement that seems to be mirrored by the guards stationed around the edges of the room, but William’s priority is the heaped plate of food before him.

  Once breakfast is complete, William’s team follows their assigned guard to their duty station. They travel up a narrow corridor, passing underneath a series of lights spaced enough apart that the shadows are so deep in between William almost loses track of his feet. One of his teammates does. William looks back at the sound of cursing and a small scuffle.

  Mike had been following Jackson when he tripped on one of the many cables stretched across the floor. As he stumbled, his momentum caused him to push Jackson in the back with enough force to make him stagger for a step.

  Jackson whirls, grabbing Mike by the collar and dragging him back to his feet so their faces are nearly touching.

  “Watch where you’re going you slimy boot-licker—you won’t get any more commendations if you’re unconscious in the infirmary,” Jackson threatens in a low voice, malice and frustration clear on his face.

  “Get your hands off of me!” Mike squirms ineffectually against the larger man’s iron grip before smirking when he sees that the guard has turned around and is watching. “You don’t want to lose them back in the machine shop, now do you?”

  The rest of the team freezes, knowing all too well the seriousness of Mike’s threat. One step out of line, one angered guard, and they would be back in the machine shops punching and bending arbitrary pieces of metal.

  William pushes past Florence in the narrow hall to get to Mike and Jackson. The guard who is at the head of their column continues to watch, casually taking notes in a small notebook with a stubby pencil.

  “Break it up.” William pushes the two apart, glaring at each in turn. When both look like they are going to protest, he continues taking his role as team leader seriously. “I don’t care what you have going on, knock it off before I have to knock both of you out. Mike, I want you walking up front with me. Jackson, stay back here with Jill. Now can we get a move on?”

  With a parting glare at each other, the young men separate as William herds Mike to the front. William nods at the guard, who has stopped taking notes and is calmly watching the aftermath. Seeing that they are ready to move on, he turns and continues to lead them down the hall. After several paces, the guard reaches to his shoulder, activating his microphone, and begins giving a quiet report of the incident to his superiors. William strains to hear his words, but with the cascading echo of fe
et in the concrete tunnel, he can only make out an indistinguishable murmur.

  Behind them, Jackson stands, fuming at Mike’s barb and the fact that he let it get to him, until Jill comes silently up behind him and grabs his elbow, pulling his ear down so it’s closer to her. She whispers something that the rest can’t hear but that causes him to smile. She smiles as well before giving him a gentle shove ahead of her, and when Florence looks back over her shoulder and winks at Jill, the poor lighting hides the sudden flush on both of their cheeks.

  They follow the tunnel through a series of sharp turns. At each corner there is a large blast door opened against the wall. Each door is set on massive steel hinges, and even though they are flush against the wall, William can tell that they are easily as thick as he is tall as they cross through the threshold that is so thick it takes several strides to clear. After going through three of these portals, they catch up with their guard, who is standing waiting for them at a fourth such door, which is closed. He motions them to stop.

  “Your team has been tasked with the loading of spare parts. The loading zone is currently hectic with the amount of traffic. Once we pass through this door we’ll need to cross several access roads and make our way to warehouse number twenty. Stick together and stay alert. If any of you get hurt before you can put in a good day’s work, Sergeant Richards is going to have my hide. You got it?”

  The entire team nods, prompting their escort to press a recessed switch, which triggers the door’s outward swing. The huge hinges turn smoothly despite the massive weight they support, allowing a shaft of blinding light to sneak through and burn their eyes. The glare reflecting off the dry plain outside slowly grows until all of their eyes are watering and they’re forced to look at the ground. The guard motions them to follow, his breath catching the light as it steams in the cold morning air.