Ascendancy

by Karri Thompson

  “Basically they’re back doors”—I smiled—“and interestingly enough, I don’t see any obscuras on the outside of them, just inside. In fact, with the exception of the front gate, there are more obscuras just inside Area Four’s perimeter than outside. The majority of this fence is free. And the light posts next to the fence are the only ones fitted with obscuras.”

  “Remember what Chu said: ‘Once you go in, you don’t come out.’ Whoever’s in charge of this place is more concerned about people breaking out than breaking in.”

  “And hopefully that line of thinking will work to our advantage.”

  “It has to, and if it doesn’t, we’ll make it work.”

  I gave Michael another quick hug, and I felt a sudden jolt of empowerment as my heart rate increased.

  My muscles ached, from what I didn’t know for sure, but I speculated the long car ride coupled with my earlier thoughts of defeat made my body tense and sore. But my ankle no longer hurt. Sticky from sweat and humidity, I readjusted my bra, letting in air that was too hot to do much good.

  His laser wound and whip marks were scabs that he said were no longer tender. The bruise on his jaw and cheek had faded slightly, but his knee was sore and red, the heat of the jungle hindering the reduction of swelling.

  “We should try to take a nap. If we bust into that place, we’re going to be up all night,” he suggested.

  In the stuffy mover, we reclined our seats and lay side by side with the windows opened and the roof retracted, a benefit of having a Model Three. Through the canopy above, I watched the sunbeams divide and sparkle across the leaves as the sun made its trek across the sky.

  “Where are the mosquitoes?” I mumbled. “My arms should be covered with bites by now.”

  “What’s a mosquito?” he asked, his words heavy with sleep.

  “Michael, where are you.” My voice cut through the jungle and returned as an echo. “Damn him,” I muttered, lifting away from a seat slick with perspiration to open the mover door. “Michael!”

  A tap, tap came from deep within the trees. Was it a bird, some sort of Australian woodpecker? The tapping increased, then faded. A snap and rustle of leaves came next, loud enough to make me jump and forget about the two inches of mud below my feet when I stood and put on my shirt.

  Giving each foot a shake to release most of the muck, I grabbed an infinity light, flipped it on, and crept toward the sound, avoiding the soft patches of soil and clusters of small plants.

  “Michael?” There he was, one foot up on a small boulder with a tree branch set horizontally across his thigh, his infinity light wedged between a fork of branches like a spotlight. “You shouldn’t have left me like that. I was scared something happened to you. There are crocs, poisonous snakes, and insects, and…what are you doing?”

  “Just in case,” he said and lifted the branch to show me its pointed end. “It’s almost done.” With the small knife we took from Trail’s, Michael, naked from the waist up, continued to hone the branch, his muscles flexing with each move, as he performed something so foreign to his “doctor” hands.

  “In case what?”

  “In case we have to defend ourselves or hurt someone in the process of getting what we want, and getting out of Area Four and the laser pistol aren’t enough.”

  “Do you think you could really hurt somebody with that?”

  “Sure, why not?” He thrust his homemade spear into the ground where it easily penetrated the thick layer of leaf debris and mud.

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Do you still think you could hurt somebody?”

  “Of course,” he said, looking offended. “What do I have to do? Kill someone for you in order to prove it?”

  And he said it with the same piercing eyes that looked at me hours before when he sat on the trunk of the mover. Two hours in an isolation cell was all it had taken. Something savage had worked its way to the surface of his being making me believe that clones were more like their DNA donors than they’d ever want to admit, as capable of hate and war as any pre-plague human whose psyche was pushed to the limit with abuse and neglect. But he it didn’t scare me. I needed him tough.

  “And I made one for you.” Michael tossed me another spear, and I caught it with one hand. Oddly, it felt good to grip something rustic and crude, something primal and on the edge of prehistoric-like and far removed from this century.

  “Not very high-tech.” I laughed. “But it’ll do. Good idea, Jack Merridew.”

  “What?”

  More twenty-first-century humor. “Forget it.”

  “It’s almost time,” he said, his face shadowed by the dimming light as he stretched his shirt back over his head.

  With the muck heavy on our feet, we headed back to the mover, and I caught myself holding my breath at the thought of the vehicle being stuck in the mud and unable to rise into the night sky. But Michael was more confident than me, like he always was.

  “It’s a Model Three,” he said. “It has a lot of power, and my manual operation jitters are gone—at least for now. They have to be. Besides, if something happens to the engine again, I’ll figure out how to fix it.”

  He was right about it having power. The mover ripped from the suck of the mud, rocking free as it rose. He held the steering wheel tightly, unfazed by the sudden, unexpected roar of the mover’s engine as we pulled upward.

  Keeping the mover just above the ocean crests and relying solely on the moonlight, we crossed the channel and dodged right, following the shore.

  “Landing’s not going to be easy. I can barely see.”

  “Me, too. We should find a spot half the distance between the compound and the shore.”

  Michael nodded and increased the mover’s hoverment. The moon’s light barely broke through the tangle of vines and trees, forcing him to switch on the headlights when we thought it was safe.

  “That looks like a good spot,” he said.

  The mover’s beam centered on a small clearing. Eerie birdsong and animal sounds erupted as we landed. A weave of wild grasses topped a thick frosting of mud and tall trees with bushy limbs and vines covered the landscape.

  “We could easily get lost in this. Without a compass…I mean a directional navigator, it’s going to be hard to stay south. We might end up walking in circles.”

  “We can do it,” he said, tossing me my spear from the back seat and grabbing a jug of water.

  “How’s the knee?”

  “It’s tolerating my weight. It’ll be okay.”

  We traipsed though the dank forest, holding our infinity lights low, my body hotter from wearing my tunic again. While keeping the rolled E-Paper secured under my sleeve, I used the sharp end of my spear to scrape notches at waist level along the trees we passed, their soft bark easily cut.

  “What are you doing?” he finally asked.

  “Leaving bread crumbs.”

  “What the—”

  Water splashed against the side of my face and neck, dripping to soak my tank top. Something powerful and half submerged in water violently thrashed; the churning of water, like the crash of waves in a winter storm, rocked the calm, night air.

  Michael’s infinity light flew from his hand as he back stepped, falling against me. His arm slung around my waist to keep me stable, and as his light twisted mid-air, its beam spinning, a pair of orange eyes, low to the ground, flashed and disappeared when the light hit the ground.

  “Keep going. Back, back, back,” I screamed, waving my infinity light behind me. My leg smacked against something hard, something that didn’t give with my weight, and as the rest of my body fell forward with the momentum, I saw what I hit—a large rock, slimy with leaf rot. My spear fell from my hand, landing among a tangle of vines.

  Ignoring the pain in my calf and left wrist, I wrestled myself from the mud and into a sitting position. With my back against the rock, I rotated until I was face up instead of face-down and shot the beam in the direction from which I had come.

  The oran
ge eyes, the aggressive swish of a scaled, knobby tail, the blaze of white, sharp teeth against the beam of light. I knew exactly what it was. Pushing backward was futile. My back cracked against the boulder. Closer and closer it came, its torso swinging side to side, its mouth agape. I dug my hand into my pocket, but my gun wasn’t there.

  “No, No!”

  I saw Michael’s spear before I saw Michael. He gave the beast a whack between the eyes, but the spear’s pointed end did little more than cause the croc to blink. He hooked his arm around my waist and just as the croc’s teeth would have clamped on my ankle, he lifted me from the ground, pulled me up against his side, and carried me to safety.

  He easily outran our foe, and though we were free from its pursuit within minutes, he didn’t stop or let go of me until we were back at the mover, safe and sound under a patch of steamy moonlight.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, catching his breath. “Did it bite you?”

  “No. I’m okay. I think I sprained my wrist when I fell, and I’m going to end up with a pretty big bruise on my shin, but that’s it.”

  “Are you sure it didn’t bite you?”

  “I’m sure. If it had bitten me, I wouldn’t be here. Crocs bite down with an unfathomable amount of pressure. Once they clamp onto their prey, they don’t let go.” He shuddered, and I wrapped my arms around him. “That was the biggest croc I’ve ever seen. It was at least twenty feet long. You saved me. If you hadn’t grabbed me when you did, I’d be dead.”

  “I can’t lose you, Cassie. I told you I’d give my life for you. You know that.” He stroked my hair.

  I’d risk my life for him, too, but I wouldn’t give it—not when I had Victoria to care for.

  “I lost my light,” he said when we ended our embrace.

  “And I lost my spear, and the laser gun,” I moaned. “I still have the E-Paper and L-band inhibitors though.”

  As much as I wanted to go back and retrieve what we’d lost, it was too dangerous. Crocs were territorial, ambush hunters that waited for their prey and then rushed out and attack it.

  “To get to the compound, we’ll have to trek around that patch of marsh land,” I continued. “Right now, that croc’s back in hiding, waiting for its next victim.”

  Michael smiled. “How do you know so much about crocodiles?”

  “Crocodylidae,” I began, playfully showing off my knowledge of scientific names, “have been on this planet for more than 55 million years, making them genetically closer to dinosaurs than they are to any other animal. In fact, some people appropriately refer to them as the ‘living dinosaur.’”

  “Ah, now that makes sense,” he said, drawing me close to his side.

  As we marched, lifting our legs high to compensate for the suck of mud against the soles of our shoes, we barely spoke. When we did, we whispered, speculating about how far we’d gone and if we were keeping south.

  At first, we followed our original path, marked by tree scratches, but when the mud beneath our feet thickened and the sweet, rotten smell of swamp rose into our nostrils, we veered right. While holding my infinity light, I continued to mark the trees with Michael’s spear.

  The mud caked to my jeans didn’t dry and crack away like I hoped. It remained thick and gummy, feeding on the humidity, and just as the earth became semi-hard under our feet, we shifted back to the left, hoping we were heading true south.

  “Hey, do you notice something different about that cluster of trees up ahead?” he asked.

  “No, not really,” I answered.

  But within the next fifty yards, I did see something different. The tree tops glowed a frosty blue in the moonlight—nothing unusual about that—but the cluster he referred to reflected something in addition to the moon’s shine. There was something artificial about them, their branches too symmetrical, their leaves bathed in white instead of blue.

  “You’re right. They’re different. That’s it. The compound.” Thank god, we didn’t get lost, or meet our friend “crocky” another time.

  The compound wasn’t as camouflaged as I suspected. True to the map, its perimeter of artificial trees was separated from the rest of the rain forest by twenty-five yards of bare earth, and the compound itself was built on higher ground.

  “We’re at the north end,” I said, concealing the E-Paper’s glow with my arm as we stood at the edge of the forest. “That means the back door should be just over there”—I pointed—“and there are two obscuras embedded in the artificial trees, which can be avoided pretty easily if we don’t stray from this path.”

  Michael turned off his infinity light. His moonlit face went black as thunder cracked above our heads and returned to a soft blue when the clouds shifted again. “We just lost some of our moonlight. A storm’s brewing.”

  “We should be okay, as long as the compound is semi-lit. And if our inhibitors work, we’re in. We just need to find—”

  “Hey, check that out. A section of trees is parting.”

  “It’s the back door we’re looking for,” I said, trying to contain my excitement.

  The front of a large hovercart emerged first, followed by three men in uniform. As one man guided the cart forward, another man closed the door with his L-Band, and the third man watched and waited.

  Staying at the edge of jungle and relying solely on the light of the moon, we followed the hovercart to the shore, hiding behind a cluster of palms when our shoes hit soft sand. The men unloaded their cargo, dumping long and limp wrapped bundles onto the sand. When the cart was empty, the men took turns, one at each end, lifting the white bags and hurling them into the ocean, on a “one, two, three” toss. Within minutes of the first bundles hitting the water, there was a rustle in the bushes behind us.

  “Watch out!” I whispered and nudged him.

  The tail of a small croc swished against my ankle, but it ignored us. The croc toddled across the sand, joined by more of its kind, and as the men continued to unload their hovercart’s freight into the moonlit sea, a number of crocs emerged at the shoreline, and a frenzy erupted. Unaffected, the men continued their chore as the crocs thrashed and tore, their jaws wide and snapping.

  “Looks like it’s feeding time,” said Michael. “Those are body bags.”

  “They’re dumping dead bodies?” I cringed.

  “Yup.”

  “And this isn’t the first time they’ve done it. Those crocs know this routine.”

  I turned my head away from the chaos of water, dead people, and flailing croc bodies, the sounds of jaws clamping tight above the crash of waves. After the last bag was tossed, Michael gave me a nudge, and we crept back through the inner rim of trees and foliage, keeping up with the hovercart and Area Four employees as they returned to the compound.

  Ten minutes after the back gate closed, the call of rain-forest creatures continued to fill the jungle, and the call for freedom drove me on.

  “Let’s go,” I said, grabbing his hand.

  We dashed across the packed earth, bent at the waist, keeping our bodies low, zigzagging to bypass any obscuras. Our backs grazing the fence of fake trees, we sidestepped along the perimeter.

  “Where’s that door?” he whispered. “I thought it was right here.”

  “I’m not sure,” I answered, but with my next step, the key in my pocket unlocked a three-foot section of tree trucks. As the door sprung open, he caught it, bringing it back until it was slightly ajar.

  My heartbeat echoed in my throat as I peeked through the crack. The men and their hovercart were gone. Dimly lit rows of buildings similar in height but dissimilar in size made up the majority of the compound. Besides tree tops rising before the fence, not a tree, flower, or blade of grass could be seen. The entire compound was set upon concrete.

  A SEC bot rattled by and disappeared around the corner

  We pushed through the door and gently closed it behind us. Bursting across the yard, we stopped when we reached our first “free zone,” a three-foot gap between two buildings.

&
nbsp; “Next stop, the supply room.”

  Thunder clapped and warm drops of rain hit my face as I looked up at the mass of clouds smothering the moon. Another SEC appeared from the end of the building.

  “Damn it,” he said. He held up his spear, and we withdraw back between the two buildings. “It didn’t detect us, or it would have sounded an alarm. We should be invisible to these bots, too, but we can’t take any chances. Let’s go before it makes another loop of the building.”

  Blinking against the rain, we dashed behind the next structure. Sheltered by a small overhang, we waited, taking deep breaths and straining our eyes and ears for any movement and sound. When all was clear, we rushed to the supply room at the end of one of the smaller buildings. The door opened instantly with my key and we snuck inside.

  An obscura-free light post outside shone brightly enough to light up the tiny room. Michael and I stood side-by-side at the window in the ten-by-ten foot room, watching the raindrops ride diagonally with the wind and smack upon the concrete. Small puddles formed, welling in a set of numbers stamped deep into the concrete in rows then overflowing into a drain.

  “I wonder what those numbers are for.”

  It was so obvious to me. “Like P.E.,” I said.

  “What’s P.E.?”

  “Physical education class. After the students changed into shorts and T-shirts, they stood on numbers painted onto the asphalt, so the teacher could take roll. Everyone was assigned a number.”

  I backed up until my shoulders hit the opposite wall, slid downward until I hit the floor, and sat cross legged. When I opened the E-Paper and the map came to life, the lower third of the room shone like it was daylight.

  “Let’s see. There are two more rooms connected to this one,” I said, pointing to a door. “This must be a maintenance building.”

  “And the others?”

  “The other buildings in this compound are not only numbered, they’re named: Ward one through four. Chu-Lung said the twins would most likely be in Ward One. And these buildings,” I continued as I tapped the E-Paper with my finger, “are labeled Labs One through Three. This place sounds like a prison or a hospital.”