Nineveh's Child

by Gerhard Gehrke

  “Your legs,” she said.

  He lifted one. “Touch it, I dare you.”

  She put a hand on his leg. It felt cold underneath the pant fabric. She knocked and her knuckles bounced off metal.

  “What’s left of you?”

  “Aren’t you rather existential this evening?” he asked with a crooked grin.

  “And what about the poison?”

  “You should have hit me in the other arm.”

  She sat down next to him. The warmth of the flame felt good. Her closeness appeared to please him.

  “Tell me how it is that you can find me.”

  He poked his head with an index finger. “Knowledge,” he said. “The device can find the smartest person in the room. You can also reverse polarity and turn it into an idiot detector. But if you activate it inside the redoubt on that setting, it will explode.”

  “Stop it. Just tell me.”

  “I always could get a rise out of you. Okay, I’ll tell. You have inserted inside your brain a device that records everything you do, everything you say, and everything you think. I have one too. Through this miracle of science our overlords have been able to input functionality into us and use us as human computers. Once they get enough of us in working order, we’ll be linked as a giant network with unimaginable calculating ability, all for the betterment of humanity.”

  Dinah shook her head. “What part of that is even true?”

  “Enough of it. So when will you tell your friends that you’re safe so we can end our little camping session and get underway?”

  When she didn’t say anything, he shrugged. “It’s obvious you’re not alone. Did you and Karl reconnect? I’m also certain the Good Samaritan who freed you and let you join her gang of resistance fighters wouldn’t let you come back this far on your own. It pleases me, really. Because this is so obviously a possible trap for you. Either you left them, which means you’re putting all your eggs in one basket in walking in here alone, or you were willing to endanger Karl and friend so you could accomplish your purpose. Bravo. You’re learning.”

  “That’s not true. I didn’t…I wouldn’t.”

  There was motion in the darkness. A small group approached. Karl and Redmon were being marched forward by a pair of the hunters with rifles trained.

  “But you did, little sister. You did.”

  ***

  Dinah was placed into the back of the truck alone. She had begged her brother until she ran out of breath, but her pleas of “don’t hurt them” and “let them go” had fallen on deaf ears. She heard several blows fall and multiple grunts of pain from both Redmon and Karl. Other trucks arrived within minutes. They had been lying in wait the whole time. Their trap had worked perfectly.

  She heard the hunters outside moving about without any excited chatter. There would be no bonfire and no party tonight.

  Her brother didn’t come to see her, and she fought to stay awake and listen for any indication of what was going on. Besides the occasional word spoken, she could hear nothing. No one brought her food or water. Finally the adrenaline in her system went away, leaving her groggy and exhausted. She must have nodded off, as she found herself opening her eyes when the truck suddenly started and they began to move.

  At least staying awake wouldn’t be a problem.

  She was jostled about the cage like a die in a cup, repeatedly hitting her head, elbows, and knees. After just a few minutes, she was sufficiently randomized. Her arms trembled as she tried to brace herself. Finally the truck arrived on somewhat level ground, no doubt the valley floor. Here she experienced periodic bounces but they felt cloud-smooth in comparison.

  The drive went on and on for what felt like hours. When they finally stopped, she had nothing to do but wait. Eventually the back of the truck opened. From the diffuse sunlight, she could tell it was early morning, perhaps dawn, with the sun obscured by fog. A hunter with a puffy, split bottom lip brought her a cup of water and a silver bag full of rehydrated oatmeal. He didn’t make eye contact when he opened the cage door and pushed the bag inside. She didn’t try to slip out.

  What would be the point?

  She saw a trio of other hunters just outside. She guessed she should feel flattered. The guard who had brought her breakfast closed the cage and the rear gate as he left.

  She took the bag and stirred its contents with the small spoon. The familiar straw-colored cereal foodstuff stared back at her. Redoubt Breakfast 101.

  They didn’t go anywhere for the rest of the day, and the truck got unbearably hot. She tried her best to get comfortable on the cage’s floor. She was sweating, and by her best estimate it wasn’t even noon. She knew she was getting loopy when she lost track of time trying to spell “oubliette.” She napped some. Her muscles and neck ached. The bag of oatmeal was eaten, and the water was all gone, yet she returned to both containers and checked them several times in case they had magically refilled themselves.

  It was dark outside when the split-lipped guard again opened the back. He held another bag of reconstituted food and a blanket. After handing over the goods, he refilled her water cup and locked the cage.

  As he stepped down out of the truck, her brother climbed in. He shined a light on Dinah.

  “Rough ride?”

  She didn’t answer. She knew she was a mess. He clicked the light off and crouched down in front of the cage. All she could see now was a blur of blue streaks burned into her retinas.

  “You remember the game we played with the colored dice and the figurines?” he asked. “Of course you do. We don’t forget anything, do we? We made up the rules as we went along. None of the other kids would play because they didn’t understand what we were doing. You always accused me of cheating.”

  Dinah remembered. She must have been three or four. But she kept quiet. She didn’t want him to know how thirsty she was. She tried not to look at the cup of water.

  “We took pieces from all of the other games in the playroom. It meant no one could play them as they were all missing key components. You were happy because we had a fun game to play. But do you know what brought me joy?”

  She shook her head.

  “Knowing that we were in charge. Everyone else had to abide by our rules. If they wanted to join our game, they had to learn how to play. Only a couple of kids ever tried. And if they wanted to play one of the other games, they had to ask us for the missing game pieces.”

  “That one kid tried to fight you,” she said.

  It was hard to see, but he was smiling. “Ah, Douglas. By fight, he was going to talk big and push me a few times. They’re all like that, and it happened with other kids too.”

  “I only remember him.”

  “Yeah, he got off easy. I only had to punch him in the guts a single time to get him to back off. A second one, Douglas’s brother, went down the same way when you weren’t around. But there were two others that tried to ambush me. One in the hallway, one in the gym.”

  “You never told me about them.”

  He shrugged. “I figured you’d notice the bruised knuckles.” He paused to look through the cage as if waiting for her to comment.

  She still didn’t let on that she did indeed remember. She recalled the made-up game and its nonsense rules of treasure hunts, monster battles, and the tables for their dice rolls that they made up without writing anything down. Once she had even tried to explain it to one of her classmates who wanted to try playing when her brother wasn’t around, but after twenty minutes of explanation the classmate had zoned out and given up to go play with dolls. Of course Dinah had noticed her brother’s bruised knuckles, but hadn’t asked.

  “You also remember the staff back then. As mysterious as ever. Any time a kid went missing, they would tell us they had been moved to another facility, as if we had a large network of redoubts with an interchange of personnel and goods. No one bothered, or dared, to ask why no students ever transferred over to us.”

  She drew her knees up to her chest. She was cramped
and sore. “So you got those kids transferred out?”

  “You’re not that stupid.”

  “You hurt them bad enough that they couldn’t ever return to class.”

  “You remember the rules we set if we ever got a third or fourth player. That opened the game up to its full potential. You could attack the other players and take their treasure. In the redoubt, there was a limited amount of resources: limited food, space, time with the teachers, games. That was our treasure.”

  “It was a child’s game.”

  “Well, we never got to try that mode, as no one else could be bothered to understand the rules.”

  One of the hunters came to the back of the truck and stood there as if he had something important to say. Her brother made a sharp clicking sound with his mouth into the com mounted on his neck, and the hunter left.

  “So that was around the same time they took you out of class,” she said.

  “My infractions against my fellow students didn’t go unnoticed. Neither did our game. We were everything they hoped for and so much more.”

  “And you were willing to hurt two other kids because they wanted the dice back for the backgammon set?”

  He shrugged. “That was the cause, but they turned to violence first. It was me who got ambushed twice.”

  “So you’re saying you didn’t notice them trying to come after you? It just happened and you were a victim defending yourself? Where was the genius who doesn’t miss a tell? These were kids. Tripping them in the hallway would have squared things. What did you do to them?”

  He shot an index finger at her. “A trip in the hallway begets a trip back, and soon a punch or a kick, or a cafeteria tray gets dumped over your head. You took the wrong track and let the other kids victimize you.”

  “So, what? I should have beat them senseless every time I got picked on?” She felt angry. She wanted to get up, but inside the cage she couldn’t even stand so she kneeled as best she could and faced him.

  “Dinah, you could have stopped your years of misery from the start.”

  “But you got caught. From that point on they kept you isolated. I only could see you when they let us, even after you started getting sick. And the difference between you and me is that I never wanted to hurt anyone. It was your fault they separated us.”

  He nodded. “The time for games was over.”

  She tried to scrutinize his face for meaning, but all his features were lost in the shadows.

  She fought to calm herself down. When her voice came out even and controlled, she was pleased. “Let me tell you this. You have Karl and Redmon. You have me. You want me alive, and you’re not telling me everything because it’s not in your nature. If anything happens to them, I’m going to do everything in my power to hurt myself.”

  He was silent for a moment. Had she surprised him? He finally said, “So dramatic. But your friends are unharmed.”

  He got up and climbed out of the truck. A hunter closed it up, leaving her in total darkness. She tested the cage door and kicked at the bars in frustration. If this was some game of his, she wasn’t certain who was winning.

  ***

  The high engine whine was now the loudest sound, and it soon grated on Dinah’s ears. From what light she could see through the crack in the door, she guessed it was sometime in the afternoon. The ride felt like it would never end. More than once she thought through the steps that had brought her to this point, and wondered how big of a blunder she had made by surrendering.

  The truck began to climb a moderate grade. They stopped a few times, and she heard voices at each stop, along with another sound: the scraping of metal. Rattling gates were being opened. They had arrived.

  When the truck parked and the back opened, she could see the sun was low but still bright. A new guard stepped in and opened the door to her cage. She crawled out and had a difficult time getting her legs and back to straighten. She held on to the back gate for stability as she stepped down to the ground. The sensation of the ride lingered. The world would be bouncing for a while.

  They had parked in front of a large single-level concrete building. Oak and pine trees grew around the gray structure. Beyond the trees was sky. They were high on a hill or a mountain. When she had been taken from Nineveh as a child, it had been night and she hadn’t seen her surroundings, but the building itself was ugly and massive and familiar in a way she couldn’t specify.

  The split-lip hunter appeared behind her and gestured her forward.

  A rolling metal door was raised via a loud motor, the portal big enough for the truck to be driven inside. Two other identical doors serviced more cargo bays within the structure.

  They walked through the door into a very large space that ran the length of the building. Now she recognized where she was: the greenhouse. The ceiling held an enormous clear skylight. A jumbo jet could pass down through the opening, probably, if her sense of scale on pictures of such aircraft were accurate. Underneath the skylight was a garden stretched out across numerous narrow catwalks. Below would be the ponds of fish. A rush of familiarity surged through her, although the place appeared bigger than before.

  She didn’t see anyone but a handful of the hunters. At least a dozen trucks were parked against one wall, along with stacks of bundled goods. A giant wall partition lay open. This accounted for her misremembering the size of the greenhouse’s interior. As a child she never got to see the trucks or the metal doors to the outside. This was the part of the operations of the redoubt that she had never known about: the accumulation of supplies from the surface.

  She felt stupid. The redoubt was never sustainable, not even close. The hunters and the trucks were the apparatus that allowed them to eat, sleep, and live clean of the dirt and infections of the outer world. Nineveh had survived the fall of the old government by setting up its own utilities and supply chains in the aftermath with whatever villages were around it, assisted by outsiders like Karl. The hunters were the caretakers, their Morlocks who, rather than operate the machines underground, had taken to the surface, leaving the redoubt’s citizens to live down under the earth.

  So who’s the master and who’s the slave?

  They walked toward a set of smaller doors. She knew what lay beyond: a bank of elevators and stairs leading down. Her brother stood there, waiting inside an open elevator.

  “We always took the stairs for the exercise,” she said, feeling foolish after the words came out.

  He didn’t answer, just pushed a button. The door closed, and they went down.

  19. Before: Nineveh

  Kelly and the older kids let Dinah hang out with them whenever they were in the gym. She realized they were all her brother’s age and perhaps had known him, although she never brought it up. They played a lot of cards. When it became apparent that Dinah was becoming a little too good at a game, they picked another. Eventually she would figure out how to win that one too. They kept choosing new games until they settled on ones with no stakes or that required pure luck.

  Of the upper classes of older students, Kelly’s group was two steps above her own class. Occasionally they actually talked about schoolwork. One day Addis showed Dinah her tablet with her latest round of advanced algebra homework.

  “You know this stuff?” Addis asked.

  “We won’t get to radical equations for another year or two,” Dinah said.

  “But you know what a radical equation is.”

  Dinah shrugged. In private sessions, she had breezed through these lessons with Dr. Hel. The problems presented on Addis’s homework screen lined up in Dinah’s mind. The square roots squared. The numbers began to fall together like a cascade of colored sand. Eventually there was one color and one number by each problem. Nothing extraneous, so her answers worked.

  “I’ve heard of them,” Dinah said. “But I don’t really get it.”

  Addis looked disappointed. Kelly and some of the others had been watching, perhaps expecting something. They returned to their respective tablets a
nd tapped away at their private games or schoolwork.

  “So what’s your trick with the cards?” Addis asked. “And don’t tell me that you’re just lucky. There’s no such thing.”

  “I just make a best guess on what cards are coming next. There’s a finite number of them.”

  “You keep track of discards, too.”

  Dinah shrugged.

  “And your guesses are more often correct than wrong.”

  Dinah looked down at the bleacher bench that she was straddling. She searched for a pattern in the fake wood grain and pretended for a moment that she had never done that before. Nine horizontal swooping lines with a quilted grain alignment ran down each bench. All identical. Each bench. In the entire gym.

  She looked up at Addis and nodded. She expected this to be the end. Addis had confirmed what the rest of the kids already suspected. She was a card cheat and would be excommunicated from their bleacher. Her cheeks flushed. She knew she should never have dared to get too close to the older kids. Her track record with her own classmates should have taught her that. This was overreaching, and now would come the Icarus-like fall, followed by laughter and derision.

  But Addis broke into a smile.

  “Are you up for some mischief?”

  ***

  Dinah was the happiest she had been in recent memory as she tromped with the group of older kids down the school hallways. They took a turn toward the teacher and administration offices.

  “They’re all having some meeting,” Addis said. “So we have an hour.”

  Dinah knew this already, as her own class schedule for the afternoon had been slated for “Independent Study.” That would have meant sitting in the library reading or in the gym watching the other kids play, as she had already done her own homework during class.

  Kelly stopped in front of a door at the end of the hallway. “Anthony Breeder,” read the sign on the door. Or Dr. Mephisto, as the kids called him.