“Run, you guys!”
We finally saw Wen. She was exactly where Alex and I had been heading.
We’d made a mistake about the layout. The darkness beyond the first rows of cars wasn’t a gully where we could find cover. It was a continuation of the roadway that crossed the river on the bridge. It appeared darker because of a steep embankment on the left side—which cast all the cars in deep shadow relative to the moon. The organized parking lot linked to the dam was just a small part of the disorderly jam on this side of the river.
The hillside above us reminded me of a colony of ants coming out to defend the colony, like the ones on anthills I'd occasionally found back in the Complex. More green and red lights poked out from all over the place. Almost all the beams were touching the ground on the other side of the river. I began to worry about the recipients.
Young Guard.
A violent mechanical scream boomed overhead. I could as much sense as see where the projectile traveled from the rocky defensive emplacement to somewhere on the other side. Ten more followed. The windows of the abandoned cars shattered—what little was left. The vibrations left me feeling sick, and I stumbled more than ran the last few yards to where Wen frantically waved us to her.
I threw down my shotgun and covered my ears. I had to turn around.
We were behind the first big rocks of the line of small cliffs that formed the edge of the highway, so I couldn’t see the defenses of the dam. I could only see the cars in front of us, the bridge, and the bajillions of vehicles parked on the roadway and airfield on the other side. Many of the wrecks reflected the light of the midnight sun back to us, though a semi-circle of direct brightness bathed those closest to the bridge.
Alex and I may have been wrong about dead men and women walking around on this side of the canyon when we first saw the bridge during our first escape from the Complex. I was certain there were living shapes running back and forth over there.
The sonic assault was but one sliver of the defensive assets of the people in the dam. There had to be a hundred green beams sweeping the far side. They would alternately pulse pure white so bright you couldn’t bare to watch, and a cool green so soft and comforting you couldn’t look away. The beams touched the metal and glowed red hot even after the rays had moved on. I shuddered to think what would have happened had I touched one.
The loudest weapons were more kinetic in nature. Whenever one of them screamed to the other side, a car or two would hop off the ground and land a row or two away.
With the second sun, I saw the survivors run for new cover.
The battle lasted maybe thirty seconds if I counted from the time we began running until we stopped to look back. For another ten seconds, both sides traded fire. Then the far side seemed to give up. The buzzing insects stopped flying to the near side.
One last beast screamed through the air. A sad-looking bus fell on its side where the weapon struck. Somewhere along the way, I’d started crying. I hated that weakness. The tears made it difficult to see if there were any survivors running around. I figured that was for the best. If it was the Young Guard, I hoped they were smart enough to know what they’d invited by getting involved.
We owe them a lot.
I got dragged out of there by my collar. Alex had me. Wen ran by his side, carrying my shotgun.
I think I dropped it.
Yeah, you did.
I did.
I was so confused. Unsure of what came next, I ran with them into the safety of the dead traffic jam, then into the rocky hills. Eventually, they let me fall over and sleep.
I was surprised how comfortable the rocks could be.
5
I woke up in a bed of color. I was under a crisp blue sky of sunrise on the Outside, but I was surrounded by an untold number of colorful plastic bags.
Alex slept next to me. His fingers were tucked into my gauntlet light on my wrist, like he wanted to ensure I didn’t sneak away from him. I heard Wen snoring somewhere in the area beyond him.
Modest cliffs of deep red and dark gray stone surrounded us, save an opening on the far end wide enough for a car to drive through.
I sat up to get a better look, noting Alex’s hand fell right off my flashlight, but he didn’t wake up. His whole plan would have failed, had I wanted to leave him. That warmed my heart as much as the sunshine.
I remembered coming up into the hills beyond the dam last night. Alex led us from one hiding spot to another, looking for a suitable place to catch our breath while drones buzzed in the darkness above us. I was in a daze most of the time, but I did remember coming into this out-of-the-way dead-end nook. We’d slept in a thirty- or forty-foot wide bowl nestled right up against the cool walls. The word that bubbled up from my past was, “quaint.”
A breeze kicked up, and several of plastic bags fluttered up a few feet into the air before quickly settling back to the pile. One landed on Alex’s face, causing me to giggle. He swiped at it, waking himself.
“Hey, sleepy,” I said in a soft sing-song.
“Was I talking in my sleep?” His face was all concern.
I shook my head. “Why?”
He responded with a smile of relief. “I dreamt of cartoons.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
He brushed the bag completely off his chest, then sat up and looked around.
“You did good last night,” I said with all sincerity, finding something to say.
“We all played our parts. You got us into this place.”
I squinted my eyes at him, searching for any hint of sarcasm, but he was clean. I didn’t remember finding anywhere safe, but I had to allow it was possible.
“Yeah,” he continued, “we all got messed up by that gunfight. Whatever those screamers were, they ruined me. I still feel a little sick.”
My stomach agreed. I was hungry, yes, but I refrained from pulling out any of the emergency rations because I’d probably throw them right back up.
“Have you ever run into those? What were they?”
He shook his head. “Whatever’s inside that dam must be worth guarding, though.”
I flashed back to last night, like a replay in my head.
“Thanks again for last night,” I said, trying to erase a small part of my debt to him.
Wen’s head popped up from her spot in the bag bed. “What did you two do?”
Alex and I watched her wake up. Her hair was a total mess and was patted down on her right side, so it was all pointed up. That revealed the beginnings of an ugly scar on her scalp. I’d never noticed it.
“What the hell happened to you? Your head?” Alex pointed to the imperfection on her otherwise immaculate skin, which she apparently knew was the object of his curiosity.
“I don’t remember. It’s always been there. Probably something from—”
She seemed to stare into the distance behind me.
“From my childhood,” she said as if it explained everything.
“After last night, I don’t know what kind of injuries we might have.” Alex looked at me but thumbed toward Wen. “That scar could have come from those pulse lasers.”
“Lasers?” Wen replied while tactfully brushing her hair back into position.
“I don’t know what else they could have been. It reminded me of an Old World movie.” He laughed, then pointed with his fingers and made shooting sounds: “Pew, pew,” he said while pointing one way. Then, “Bewww, Bewww,” as he pointed in another.
“I have no idea what those screaming things were.” He stood up, then helped Wen to her feet. We all appeared equally unsteady on the shifting surface of bags.
I reached down and picked one up, pleased I could read it. The words had faded into oblivion on one side, but the other was still legible. “Armchair General Magazine and Game Emporium. Thousand Oaks, CA.”
I held it out to them. “This says there are a thousand trees, here. In Ka.”
I picked up a red one and read it aloud. “Sam’s Town Ho
tel and Gambling Hall, Las Vegas, N-V.”
After a moment of pondering, I asked, “I wonder if that’s the same as Lost Vagas? And where is en-vee?”
I handed the bag to them, searching for others.
“I think these bags are from far away,” Wen said. She pointed up.
Several bags drifted high above. Much higher than I was looking before.
“They float on the wind from afar, then come here to rest.”
I didn’t know if she was being dramatic, but it struck me as kind of sad. There had to be tens of thousands of bags in the hidden grotto.
Alex started to read bag after bag as he dug them out. The deeper he went, he found the more intact and readable sacks.
“Spanky’s Surf Shop, Malibu, CA. Toonces’ Museum of Cat Lore, Hollywood, CA. Boston Dynamics Gift Shop, San Mateo, CA.” He went on, but I got tired of hearing of the land of Ka.
“What were these used for?” I asked. “They’re all empty. Why would so many of these containers be empty? What did they carry?”
Alex made his “thinking” face. I probably did the same thing. He was trying to summon his memories from eighty years ago. He claimed the memory mist left him unaffected, but I’d begun to suspect it did more damage than he was willing to admit.
“I think they used them to carry dirt from one place to another. It couldn’t be a liquid, as every one of these has holes in the bottoms.” He laughed, poking a wiggly finger through one such opening.
He continued to dig with renewed effort. “Maybe we can find the first bag.”
Wen was unimpressed. She rolled her eyes while talking down to his back. “That would be wonderful.”
“I know, right?” He pulled out handfuls of bags and tossed them well away from his ditch. Each layer was incrementally cleaner, though they also got wet and packed into solid layers as he went down. Those came out practically as bricks. It only took a few minutes, and he had a hole created as deep as his waist.
“A whole world of problems and he wants to play with trash bags.” I smiled at Wen. She smiled back.
“I heard that,” he called over the noise of the crinkling and movement of the plastic.
I shrugged.
We let him go. Wen picked through the bags a bit away from Alex, and I took the opportunity to pull out Mr. B’s Oxy Card—I don’t think I’d ever feel right calling him by his first name—he’d given to me for safekeeping.
I sat down on the bags, content to sit by myself while I sought answers to why he would have given it to me. A few moments later I’d pulled out the little rectangular bundle of colorful sheets. It was page after page of colorful, thin plastic. Lots of pictures had been added to the numerous words found on each page. It spoke of doing assignments and classroom tasks, but I didn’t get much more than that. Whatever a teacher would do, the Oxy Card was designed to help him figure it out if he ever suffered through a low oxygen situation, such as a collapsed room.
The only page of interest was the very last one. It was harder plastic but pure white. It had been glued to the inside of the outer cover.
“Great,” I thought, “twenty pages of gibberish and one so I could add my own notes.”
I slammed the book shut, then gave it a careful appraisal.
“A book?”
Alex mumbled from his job site. I twisted my body so I could see him. He’d almost gotten a hole as deep as his shoulders. “Guys? There’s something down here.”
I jumped up and walked to where he was but wasn’t impressed when I got there. Wen had come back as well, with a similar look on her face.
“Let me guess. More bags?” I put my hand on my hips, continued to smile along with Wen, and assured myself it was another of his pranks.
“I think it’s a tunnel.” There was no humor in his voice.
The path he’d carved out was uneven and looked like it could collapse at any second. But at the bottom, there was a metal something-or-other. It wasn’t bare rock.
He craned his neck to look up at us standing above him. “Help me?”
It had taken half an hour before we had enough of the bags cleared away to see the entirety of the metal gate. That’s what it was.
The gate was inset into the rock face and slanted at an angle. It once had a padlock, but that had rusted away to little more than an ugly decoration. Alex easily swung the gate on rusty hinges.
It was large enough for me to crawl inside.
Why was that your first thought?
After the destruction I’d witnessed last night beneath the perilous open sky, something was comforting about being underground. A small tunnel seemed tame and cozy by comparison.
Alex opened his mouth, but I already knew what he was going to ask.
Chapter 4
“Should we go in?” he asked, as I expected.
“It’s probably a ventilation shaft for the dam,” Wen said in a dour voice. “We’d just get shot.”
That actually sounded pretty reasonable, and I was going to tell her, but Alex spoke first.
“It’ll be fine. We aren’t hurting anything. Just peeking,” he said with a wink at me. Then, to Wen, “Are you coming?”
She glared at him but shook her head. “I risked my life to get out of the Complex. I’m not going back into the ground the first time I find a tunnel. We have no idea what’s down there. It could be the dam, but it could also be part of the Complex, did you consider that?”
“I don’t think it’s the Complex,” he replied while turning to look at the metal bars.
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, I, um. I think the Complex is only on the other side of the river. I don’t think it dips down under the river and comes back up to this side.” His voice trailed off.
I scratched my head, unsure if I wanted to remind him about the pit mine. Mr. B had talked about it many times, that I could remember, and probably lots more times that I couldn’t. He said there were hundreds of miles of burrows branching out from that point. The central shaft was off limits to students, but I’d seen it while exploring our ventilation shafts on the utility level above the Complex.
“I’m sure there are no official passages from there to here,” he said, almost to himself.
He turned back to us with a cocky grin. “Yep. I think we’re tan on the can to go in.”
I bobbed my head in agreement and returned his smile.
“You two can go. I’ll stay here and watch the bags blow in circles. We’ll see which course is safer,” Wen said with rising anger.
“Please, we should all stick together.”
She glared at me. “You’re absolutely right. We should stick together. Out here.”
I felt the heat of her anger just by looking at her. I couldn’t tell if she was mad at me for agreeing with Alex, or at Alex for convincing me. The thought of anyone mad at me made me feel bad.
I smiled weakly, then pulled her away from Alex so we could talk.
“Wen, I want to see what’s down there. We have to know what’s out here, besides the Commander in his Harvest thingy. We need help.”
“And you think you’re going to find help inside a rusty old drainpipe?”
I rolled my eyes sideways, thinking. “I, umm … ”
“You just want to go with him. No matter where he takes you,” she said, so quiet only I could hear.
“Say what?”
“You heard me.”
It took me a long moment to think through what she was suggesting.
“You think I’m … ?” I let it hang there.
“You’re into him. I can tell,” she said without any doubt.
I forced a smile. “Into him” reminded me of “having a thing,” which is what I’d apparently had with Mr. Bracken when he was younger.
I shook my head. “No. It’s not like that. He and I—”
Ugg. How is this so complicated?
“We don’t have anything like that,” I said with a doubt-soaked reply.
“Uh huh.”
/>
“Is that why you came out, Wen? To be with Alex?” I hoped it sounded as stupid as I thought it did. “What about Hui?”
“Hui? What about him?”
Alex said she and Hui always ended up together. But the last memory wipe happened such a short time ago; they’d probably not had time even to talk, much less end up together. I began to see where all this was going.
“Alex said you and Hui were an item, if that’s the correct usage. That you have a thing.”
“He and I came to America as part of a program for gifted—” She abruptly stopped and put her hands to her head, like she was in pain.
“Hùnzhàng! I’m all mixed up.”
I put my hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but she brushed it off.
“I’ll be all right. I remember something that can’t be true. A flash of conversation in a beautiful garden of decorative trees, stone fountains, and endless flowers. It was beautiful.” She looked through me, like she was seeing her memory.
“Alex,” I called. “We may have a problem.”
Wen came across as a tough girl, at least in the relatively short time I’d known her since my last successful memory wipe. But Alex was right: she was with Hui that whole time. I’d assumed it was because they both had the same unusual skin color and their similar eyelids. Like they were meant for each other based on their similarities. A perfect couple.
She fell to her knees. “No. No. It isn’t possible.”
“What’s she doing?” Alex asked as he trotted over.
“No idea. She said she remembered something from her past,” I said with clinical detachment.
“Her past,” he said in a question-like tone. He rubbed his chin.
“What?” I asked.
“I’ve seen this before with other teens. But mostly in the beginning, before the Commander worked out the kinks of the memory hits. I don’t know what it was called, officially, but I always called it Split P because the first girl who got it was named Penelope.”
“What happened to her,” I asked, almost too quiet to be heard.
“Yeah, tell me,” Wen insisted, in a much louder voice.
“Penelope was a lot like you guys. Pretty. Strong. Smart. She—”
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