Broken Angel

by Sigmund Brouwer

  She blinked away the pain, concentrating on the beam of light that came from the coal miner’s lamp. She didn’t know how long she could fight the blurring at the edge of her vision. But she couldn’t dive down. She didn’t know the limits of what she could do with her wings, didn’t know if she’d have the strength to pull out of a dive. And the river below was waiting to drag her into a different kind of darkness.

  She circled and circled downward, her light showing the rock face, the fall of water, the rock face.

  Each turn brought more weakness. The black edges continued to press into her vision. Then, dimly, she saw the rope stretched from one side of the chasm to the other, like a strand of web, shadows of the rope thrown onto the slickness of black water below it.

  With a fierceness she didn’t know she had, she willed herself not to fade into oblivion. Her conscious mind screamed to keep at bay the encroaching walls of death, and her subconscious flexed her wings where she needed to hold herself aloft, doing it as naturally as the act of breathing.

  Then the rope bridge was looming in front of her light, suddenly upon her, and she nearly overshot it. In her weakness, and in the newness of flight, she didn’t have the coordination to come down lightly and move her hands and arms separately from her wings to grab at the rope.

  She tumbled into the bridge, entangling herself in the rope, nearly sliding through and off.

  There was a horrible wrenching at her ankle again. This new sensation of pain was her last moment of awareness.

  FIFTY

  Mason could not climb down from his ledge, but he could climb back to the top, where he’d dropped the rope bridge.

  He kept his mind on the physical labor of pulling himself up. His cast rasped against the rope, and he welcomed the sensation as a distraction. He knew if he allowed himself to think of his position—in the dark, hanging on a rope ladder hundreds of feet above the bottom of a chasm—he’d go insane.

  There was no hope downward, unless he jumped too.

  That only left up.

  He was panting when he reached the upper ledge. Slowly, he crawled forward. For a dizzying moment, his hand reached into the void, and his entire body shook with the adrenaline of his fear of heights.

  He shuffled back, away from the drop-off, until his feet hit the rock wall behind him.

  Like an old man, he rose on weak legs. He faced the rock wall and shuffled sideways, toward the waterfall. Maybe there was a way behind it, a place were the limestone had worn away, like behind the waterfall where he first believed he’d captured Caitlyn.

  A few steps later, he slid his foot into air and nearly toppled into the abyss.

  With a sob, he pulled his foot back. Then crumpled to the ground in relief that he hadn’t fallen. A snake wrapped itself around his thigh. He pushed it away but felt nothing in his fingers. He realized it had been a product of his fear, as if his nightmares were coming to life at the realization that he’d die on this ledge. It would be thirst that took him, and the thought of it made him lick his lips.

  The waterfall was so close that mist hit his face. Yet he was unable to reach across the last few feet to that water.

  He crawled back to the rope ladder. He found the two iron hooks, the two loops.

  Then a thought hit him and jolted him with hope.

  He could cut the ladder in half! He’d leave one loop on this hook, and with the matching half coiled around his body, he’d slide to the ledge below. He’d loop the other half at the hook below and slide down again. Then he’d be at the next ladder, and he could climb all the way down.

  It would work!

  He slapped his hip for his knife.

  Gone.

  He felt a snake curl around his belly. He screamed, pulled at it, but found nothing. He bit the inside of his cheek, trying to hold on to his sanity, and whimpered with frustration, remembering what hope had caused him to forget. He’d thrown the knife at Caitlyn.

  All that remained was his backpack, holding the canister he’d intended to use for the harvest of eggs from her body. There was nothing to cut rope.

  After the exertion of climbing the rope ladder, thirst had intensified to torment him. Now there was something else to torture him.

  The offer that echoed in his mind. Life for a life, or death for a death.

  If he hadn’t been so determined to kill her, the knife would be in his hands. He’d be able to escape this horror of slow death, alone in the absolute black of hell.

  Easy death was a mere step or two away, into the void. But he was too much of a coward for that.

  He thought of hanging himself and had a vision of climbing back down the ladder and trying to wrap one of the rope rungs around his neck and letting go. But the fear of heights was too overwhelming.

  If only he had kept his knife.

  Snakes of terror seemed to crawl over his body. He imagined tiny snakes, worming into his ears, pushing at his brain.

  He began whimpering again, almost reduced to catatonic fear.

  The rope, the rope, the rope. If only he could find a way to cut it.

  Crying, he began pulling the rope ladder up until there was enough of it to rest on the ledge beside him.

  Whimpering, he lifted one of the rungs to his mouth.

  He clamped his teeth on the rope. His mouth could barely get around it, and immediately the coarse strands cut through the edges of his lips and the taste of copper streamed onto his tongue.

  Didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. He was an animal. He would gnaw through it. This rung. The next. And dozens and dozens more. Yes. Yes.

  More tendrils of terror and insanity curled through his brain. He fell on his side and curled into a ball, rope in his mouth.

  Chewing. Chewing. Chewing.

  FIFTY-ONE

  There,” Jordan said. The beam of the flashlight showed Caitlyn’s ankle stuck in the webbing of the rope bridge. Her head dangled only inches above the water.

  Billy still cradled Jordan, like a child in his arms. They had thundered through a series of short tunnels to the base of the waterfall, Jordan giving Billy directions at every turn.

  Billy set Jordan on his feet. He didn’t need instructions.

  When Billy stepped onto the rope bridge, it sagged with his weight. He wished he’d left the life jacket on, instead of throwing it off back in the other cavern.

  Jordan kept the flashlight beam on Caitlyn. Her eyes opened.

  “Don’t move,” Jordan urged Caitlyn. “Don’t panic.”

  It was obvious that if she shifted slightly, her weight would pull her loose from the bridge. As it was, she was slipping incrementally.

  Billy tried to tiptoe forward, but the bridge kept swinging. One of the slats that formed the floor of the bridge snapped. His right foot slipped through.

  Think, Billy told himself, think.

  If the slats couldn’t hold his weight, he knew the rope could. That left one option.

  He slowly pulled his foot loose and backed up the half step to the end of the bridge and found solid land.

  “You’ve got to go,” Jordan said. “She can’t hold on much longer.”

  Billy grunted. He moved to the side of the bridge, squatted, and leaned his upper body precariously over the swift-moving water. If he fell in, he’d drown. It was too far to the open cavern on the other side, where Pierce and Theo and Gloria had been sent floating down the river in life jackets.

  But he had no choice.

  With one hand, he grabbed the lower rope of the bridge, where the slats were attached. He allowed himself to fall forward.

  For a moment, the water threatened to suck him loose, an angry monster determined to steal its prey.

  But Billy managed to secure his other hand on the rope. Now he clung with both hands. He scuttled sideways, hand over hand, toward the center of the bridge, his legs and waist in the current, dragging at him with malevolent power.

  He dared a glance over at Caitlyn. She hung upside down, arms at her si
de, making no movement that would pop her loose from the rope webbing that held her by the ankle.

  Hand over hand. Hand over hand.

  As he got closer, she slowly reached for him.

  They were inches away, pinned in the beam of light that Jordan held at the edge of the river, when she fell.

  Billy gave it no thought. He let go with his right hand and clutched for her wrist. His fingers closed over her lower arm. Her body jerked as her feet fell toward the water.

  She gasped and their eyes met.

  Neither said a word. Billy was concentrating too hard on keeping his grip on her arm. And on the rope bridge with his other hand.

  The current pulled too hard, and her arm began to slip through his fingers.

  “No!” Billy roared. He’d never felt anger, not like this. He roared at the river as if it were a living creature. “No!”

  Her wrist slid into his fingers, and he tightened his grip. But that was all he had. Her body was deep into the water. Almost to her neck. He only had one arm to pull her loose. If his grip on the rope bridge broke, both of them would be swept away.

  “No!” he roared again. He fought the river, inch by inch, getting her closer and closer. Finally, her legs pulled loose, and the tremendous strain on his shoulders and arms lessened.

  “Arms around my neck,” he panted. He needed both hands to fight his way back.

  She reached around with one arm, then the other. Billy never knew arms could feel so good.

  He also knew the river wouldn’t win now.

  Hand over hand, he brought them back to safety.

  The chopper was in the air. Brij and the others were all in plastic handcuffs, captured and transported.

  Brij had never seen the valley from this perspective. He also knew it would be his last view of it. He had no doubt that he and the two dozen other Clan members would be sent to the factory. Some might be executed by stoning, but with such a large group, they would be valuable as slaves in the factories.

  Brij wore a wan smile.

  They’d sacrificed themselves to save the rest of the Clan, but it was a sacrifice with even more meaning. The survivors would be sent to the factories, a chance to be among the poor, the desolate, and the hopeless who lived there.

  Caitlyn had helped the Clan more than she could imagine. She’d been a decoy, bringing soldiers to a decoy headquarters. Bar Elohim would believe he’d found a way to destroy the Clan’s ability to remain hidden in the mountain.

  But the others were safe and would continue what the Clan had already been doing for a generation. Eventually rumors would reach Bar Elohim, and in a few years, he might understand that he’d failed yet again.

  In the meantime, it would be that much easier to help Appalachians reach Outside, where they had freedom of choice and belief. With Bar Elohim convinced the underground railroad had been dismantled, it would operate in far greater safety.

  Far more than that, however, was the chance to end the desolation and hopelessness in the factories.

  For years, Brij had been wondering how to smuggle faith inside, but Bar Elohim would be doing it for them, unaware that the choppers were the ultimate Trojan horse.

  “You have wings,” Billy said. He had his life jacket on again. His voice was filled with awe.

  Caitlyn had spread them to let them dry after their time in the river. They were back in the cavern, downstream from where they’d nearly drowned at the rope bridge.

  “I have wings,” Caitlyn said, simply. They covered her arms as if wings and arms were one unit. Nothing seemed strange about it. As if this had been the destiny of her body and she’d finally reached it.

  “Are you going Outside too?” he asked. Jordan sat in the wheelchair again, out of earshot, giving them privacy.

  “Not by river,” she said. “They’ll be watching for me.”

  “Oh.” Billy gave the implication some thought. “But you will be going Outside. Another way.”

  She nodded.

  He was losing his breath again, the way it had happened the first time he saw her. Her face. Her eyes. He wanted to tell her how looking at her made him feel, but he didn’t know if he could put it into words, not even for himself.

  And he was big. Too big. Too slow. Too stupid.

  She was exquisite. Beautiful.

  He was a lumbering creature of the earth. She was of the sky.

  He didn’t deserve to even dream about her, so he said nothing. Only let that feeling of not being able to breathe grow and grow. He hoped he would remember this Outside.

  “Good-bye,” he said. “Theo’s already gone into the river. Mrs. Shelton says she’s going to be with us Outside. Will we see you again?”

  What he didn’t dare ask was something more direct. Will I see you again?

  “William,” she said, “thank you.”

  “William?”

  “Stop calling yourself ‘Billy,’” she said. “People call you that because they want you to stay like a little boy trapped in a man’s body. Outside, they won’t know who you were. Don’t let them believe you are less than you are.”

  Billy nodded. He wanted to remember this too.

  “Good-bye,” she said. “I’ll look for you on the Outside. William.”

  He stepped into the current. Faster than he could have guessed, it took him into the passageway that led to freedom.

  That was the final picture of Appalachia for him.

  Her. In shadows. Wings outstretched. Beautiful.

  * * *

  In the new millennium, when scientists completely understood the human DNA code, advances in medicine became astoundingly rapid. For the wealthy, embryonic screening eliminated every hereditary disease; embryonic stem-cell technology led to an industry of organ cultivation, and the extremely wealthy were able to extend their lives by purchasing new hearts and livers, custom ordered from a laboratory.

  It didn’t stop there.

  Understand that at the one-cell stage, an embryo is much like an egg. The outer cell wall is like the shell. The nucleus at the center is the yolk, containing the DNA that programs the growth of that embryo. Soon, the one cell divides into two, then four, then eight, and continues to divide.

  Different strands of DNA are coded to become active as cells begin to specialize. Scientists learned early to take advantage of this. They first learned to create flies that had up to fourteen pairs of eyes, simply by adding a snippet of DNA into the nucleus at the one-cell stage.

  Because every cell contains the entire DNA code for that organism, any changes inserted into the nucleus at the one-cell stage will be replicated in the nucleus of every new cell created. Once the embryo matures to adulthood and reproduces, it will pass these changes to the next generation of its species through its offspring. Thus biotechnology and the funds and the secret blessing of certain military agencies literally gave scientists the power to begin to reengineer the human species.

  In your innocent childhood, you were unable to comprehend what science had given to you. And stolen from you because of the solitude and loneliness inflicted upon you with a single injection of a DNA strand into the single embryonic cell which became your being…

  * * *

  EPILOGUE

  They’d been waiting for Caitlyn’s shoulder to heal from the knife wound and for a clear, moonless night, with wind coming off the eastern slope of the high ridge that overlooked the perimeter fence of Appalachia.

  Unlike the climb a few weeks earlier near Cumberland Gap, on this night there was no mystery in climbing to the tree-stunted top of this mountain. Caitlyn knew exactly where they were headed and why.

  During the ascent, the silence between Caitlyn and Jordan was as strained as it had been since Billy had pulled her from the river. The wind helped them up the western side of the mountain. It wasn’t until they reached the narrow ridge that its force seemed malevolent, with a strength set on pushing them into the abyss, down into the orange glow of lights that marked the perimeter fence, a long
line snaking around the base of the mountain and disappearing miles away.

  It also seemed as if the wind tugged at Caitlyn’s soul. A wind much colder than this summer air. During all the days since the pursuit had ended in the waterfall cavern, days without the adrenaline of fear to distract her, she’d endured long, long hours with the words of Jordan’s letter to haunt her.

  “We had agreed—the woman I loved and I—that as soon as you were born, we would perform an act of mercy and decency and wrap you in a towel to drown you in a nearby sink of water.”

  He stood silently beside her. She had no doubt what he wanted. Absolution from her. A single word of forgiveness or love.

  They were poised at the moment of separation. On the other side, she might never see him again. She could sense how badly he wanted to speak.

  An abyss stretched in front of them. One also lay between them. The numbness that Caitlyn used so effectively for survival against Mason Lee would not leave.

  “The letter you gave me near Cumberland Gap, it doesn’t tell the whole story, does it?” Caitlyn asked.

  Jordan’s legs were braced against the wind, and he steadied himself.

  When he didn’t answer or even look at her, she continued. “You led Mason away from me and expected to die or to be put in a factory. Even then, you avoided all of the truth in the last words I might get from you.”

  “Yes. There is more.”

  She couldn’t see his face. It was too dark. On a moonlit night, or one with a low cloud bank reflecting the orange lights, the chance that a guard looking upward might see her outlined against the sky was too great. Tonight was perfect for escape.

  “Even now…are you going to keep it from me?”

  “Since the river, each morning I would tell myself that ‘Today is the day I will tell her the rest.’ But I could never find the right moment. Or the courage. We seem like strangers. When you look at me, all I see is a silent accusation. When I tried to talk to you, I mean really talk to you—you’d find an excuse to change the subject.”