Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  While Blake examined the bombs up close and Dana’s attention was on him, Carlos began inching bound hands to his side.

  The left-hand pant pocket was where he kept his cigar-trimming penknife.

  *

  Li had no idea what, but something was off.

  She raised her head from the pillow, listening. Fussing newborns, to the extent noise cancellation failed to negate their babbling. The children on duty, crooning and shushing. Outside the window, the wail of the wind.

  None of that would have awakened her.

  Quickly, quietly, she dressed. She buckled on her holster, tucked the remote detonator in a pocket, and went outside.

  *

  “What is taking so long?” Rikki asked.

  Antonio, his face a featureless, pale oval, might have shrugged. In the unlit garage, it was hard to know. He said, “No news is…no news.”

  True but not helpful, she thought.

  Outside the garage, by the glow of newly risen Euripides, the compound appeared normal. For all she knew, Blake and Dana hadn’t even managed to make the attempt. She could only wait and worry. About them. About two young children left home unsupervised.

  About all the children, most as yet unborn, their futures hanging in the balance tonight.

  *

  Slowly, straining to reach, and entirely by feel, Carlos worked the penknife from his pocket. The way he slumped against a seed bag, his captors couldn’t see. He froze whenever Dana started to turn.

  On the hoist, muttering to himself, Blake must have bypassed the circuits on one bomb. Its counter had gone dark without blowing them all to pieces. Blake had been right, of course. The circuits were as simple as Carlos knew how, as straightforward as he and Marvin together could devise, the better not to blow himself up.

  Tearing one fingernail after another, trying to pry out the blade of the penknife—without crying out, wincing at the pain, or in any way attracting attention—Carlos tried to imagine how the others had gotten their hands on a land mine.

  The blade, finally, had pivoted enough for him to grasp between finger and thumb. Muffled by his body and the seed sacks, he barely heard soft click as the blade snapped into its locked-open position. His captors were across the bunker and otherwise distracted. They couldn’t have heard—but he watched and waited anyway before moving.

  Then, with slow, precise motions, Carlos began sawing at his restraint.

  *

  The digital display on the second bomb went dark, with Blake still alive to notice. None too soon, he thought, his left leg trembling with the strain. He could no longer feel that foot, mashed through his boot by his weight pressing on the chain.

  “Got it,” he announced with relief.

  “Never doubted it,” Dana answered.

  Blake worked the metal hook of a bungee cord beneath the strap fastening one of the inert bombs to its support beam. Wrapping the bungee cord around the bomb, he hooked both ends together. He added two more bungee cords before snipping the strap. Just as carefully, he unstrapped the second bomb.

  Then, one by one, to Carlos’s goggle-eyed stare, Blake tossed the bombs down to Dana.

  *

  Something had awakened Li, but she couldn’t figure it out. She circled the main corridor of the childcare center. Nothing out of place. She circled the building from outside. Still nothing out of the ordinary.

  Until, by moonlight, she encountered one of Carlos’s precious, hand-rolled cigars. All but unsmoked. Lying on the ground. Flattened at one end as though by a broad shoe.

  Li whirled about, searching around her for intruders.

  *

  Long after Eve was finally alone, she stayed in bed. Shivering. Degraded. Ashamed.

  “Serve your elders and serve God,” she had been taught.

  If God was good, why did serving make her feel so…sinful?

  Eve threw off the tangled top sheet. She gargled and brushed and spat, over and over. She showered under scalding hot water, then toweled herself roughly until her skin felt raw.

  Still, she felt dirty.

  She hated herself—again—for not using the knife she had long hidden under the mattress. Once more she thought about turning the blade on herself. But if she succeeded, the ordeal would only shift to Denise, or Leah, or another girl she had helped to raise. Another friend.

  This had to end.

  She dressed, sliding the knife into her waistband, her untucked shirt hiding the haft.

  *

  The disarmed bombs lashed together and sealed inside a black bag, the balloon rig ready to inflate, Blake dared to believe: we’re actually going to pull this off. “Ready when you are,” he said.

  Hobbling up the bunker stairs, he had limped worse than Dana. Neither of them wanted to unlace his boot to see how badly he had injured the foot.

  While Dana shone her flashlight up at him he flicked off the overhead lamps. By the beam of her flashlight he switched on his own, turned its beam as dim as it would go, and hung the flashlight from his belt. He peeled off the tape between the doors.

  “This is it,” he whispered. He turned off his flashlight altogether. Slowly, silently, he opened one of the heavy doors, then stepped outside. He retrieved the balloon rig from where he had set it on the top step, attached the bag with the two disarmed bombs, and took hold of the rig by its hydrogen tank— Failing dismally in his vow not to remember the Hindenburg. To fill even a small balloon with hot air would have taken time they might not have, even if they had been willing to risk the flame giving them away. Helium would have been ideal—if they had had any. What they had was hydrogen, easily split from water.

  Quit stalling.

  By the ambient light of the compound, he opened the gas valve.

  Caught by the wind, the balloon floated off toward the Darwin Sea.

  In the darkness, he soon lost sight of the balloon.

  *

  Handgun at the ready, Li prowled the compound looking for intruders. Since the crushed cigar, she had found nothing. If the ground gave any trace of strangers, she couldn’t tell their footprints apart from hers and Carlos’s. Carlos himself was nowhere to be found.

  A hiss!

  She spun toward the unexpected noise. Almost at once, the noise stopped.

  From behind the childcare center, something large, round, and dark soared into the night sky.

  She began firing.

  *

  Blam! Bla-blam!

  “Something’s gone wrong!” Rikki hissed. “We’ve got to help!”

  She grabbed her knapsack and jumped onto the bulldozer, priming its engine. Antonio hopped up onto the running board behind her seat. To save seconds, they had left the overhead door open. As she turned from the garage onto Main Street, the shooting continued.

  Those weren’t air guns!

  With the bulldozer’s blade hoisted as a shield, Rikki couldn’t see straight ahead. Her gaze sweeping from side to side, she struggled to keep the vehicle on the roadway. Crescent Euripides, just rising, seemed to cast more shadows than light. At no more than a walking pace, afraid she would tip them into the ditch and snap a tread—or a neck—the dozer lumbered toward the fence.

  “Now,” Antonio yelled into her ear, and she shoved the transmission into idle.

  They leapt free just before the bulldozer, coasting forward, rammed the concrete gate. Scrambling to her feet, gritting her teeth, hands pressed to her ears, she dashed from the minefield about to receive the bulldozer’s weight.

  But the blast that flung her to the ground came from overhead.

  44

  The airburst sent Blake tumbling down the bunker stairs and crashing into Dana. Though his ears rang, he sensed a cascade of smaller blasts had followed that huge first one.

  Around the floor of the bunker, status lights shone a healthy green. The explosions had been distant enough. The embryo banks and Marvin’s servers remained okay!

  Helping Dana to her feet, Blake said, “We have to take out Li.”
He couldn’t hear himself speak, but she nodded. Shutting Carlos in the bunker to deal with later, they went looking.

  Just within the fence stood the twisted remains of a bulldozer. In silhouette before the dancing flames, holding a gun, stood a woman.

  *

  Eve clapped her hands to her ears, shrieking in terror. In the childcare center, hundreds of voices joined hers.

  She remembered the loud noise when Ms. Rikki was cast out. Liberation Day, Ms. Li called it. But Eve had not been liberated. Quite the contrary.

  By the flames at the open gate, she saw Li. And near the bunker, their faces in shadow, two people. Two elders. Neither was tall enough to be Mr. Carlos. Then the strangers began slinking toward Ms. Li.

  What horrible thing had the bad people done?

  Creeping closer, Eve found something on the ground outside the bunker. Something that did not belong. It went into her waistband, beneath her shirttails, next to the knife.

  *

  Carlos had all but cut through his restraints when a bone-rattling explosion smashed him into the hard floor. His reflexive spasm snapped the plasticuffs.

  He guessed that Blake and Dana had accidentally triggered the bombs. And that the concussion set off…some of the land mines?…as a rat-a-tat of lesser explosions shook the bunker. He wondered about the dazzling blue flash through the crack between the bunker doors the instant before the huge blast had struck.

  On the slight chance Blake and Dana had survived, Carlos counted to a hundred before creeping from the bunker.

  *

  Roaring flames. Wailing children, in the childcare center and, more and more, spilling out onto the grounds. From speakers across the compound, Marvin’s vain exhortations for calm and quiet. Beyond the fence Antonio and Rikki paced, stymied by the fire that engulfed the twisted remains of a bulldozer.

  Dazed, bloodied, Li stood and gaped.

  “It’s over,” Rikki shouted through the fence.

  In answer, Li shot at her. Chips flew from a concrete fence picket, and Rikki and Antonio dived for the ground.

  Nothing is over till I say it’s over, Li thought. But it might have been. What the hell was that stealthy object she had destroyed? What the hell had the peasants tried? To fight bombs with bombs?

  Fuck ’em. Après moi, le déluge.

  Li took the remote from her pocket. She armed it and the lamp changed from red to green. She flipped up the safety cover, tapped in the security code. The green light started to blink. She pressed the detonator button.

  Nothing.

  Again and again she jabbed the button. Not a damned thing happened. In a rage, she flung the worthless remote to the ground.

  Gun in hand, Li ran deeper into the compound. Someone would pay for this outrage.

  *

  “Damn,” Dana whispered. She had yet to get close enough to risk taking a shot. And between her sprained ankle and Blake’s maimed foot, neither of them could keep up.

  Not that she wanted to shoot the last medical doctor in the world—however bat-shit crazy Li had gone. That wasn’t why Dana hesitated. She saved people, damn it!

  But exiling Li and Carlos to some cave far, far away? Letting them break their own backs for a change to feed themselves? Dealing with them only if and when some dire emergency should require their technical skills? That would be just fine.

  If only she could get close enough to tase the bitch….

  Blake said, “Is this a bad time to mention I seem to have lost my air gun somewhere?”

  Not that he could have hit anything at this range, anyway. “It’s been that kind of day,” Dana told him.

  “So what now?”

  “We hobble after Li,” Dana said.

  *

  A bunker door was open!

  Li tapped on the bunker’s overhead lamps, went down several steps, and looked up into the rafters. No bombs!

  Après moi, le déluge.

  Gun in hand, she considered how best to spend her ammo. Servers and embryo banks alike had been designed with massive redundancy. Even a clip emptied at close range was no guarantee of revenge.

  Maybe there was another way.

  *

  Rikki aimed a fire extinguisher at the bulldozer’s tortured, twisted remains and the flaming puddle of ethanol beneath it. When the foam spray sputtered, she switched to a second extinguisher. Then a third.

  Burning wreckage was strewn across a large area downwind. Antonio ran to douse those fires, lest a shifting wind carry flaming debris into the settlement.

  The last flame around the bulldozer succumbed to the foam. The creaks and pings of cooling metal slowed. The smoke cleared. Antonio had returned.

  “Good enough,” she decided.

  She slipped on insulated gloves. Antonio donned his own pair. One by one, they scrambled up onto the steaming wreckage—

  From which they leapt past the edge of the minefield, to run into the compound.

  To help Blake and Dana.

  *

  Her ankle about to give way, struggling not to pant with exhaustion, not to collapse with exhaustion, not to give them away by crunching on the broken glass strewn everywhere, falling farther and farther behind, Dana limped after their quarry. Li popped into the open bunker (Huh! Hadn’t they left the doors closed?), only to emerge after a few seconds with her face twisted into a feral snarl.

  Leaving Carlos on the floor, bound and gagged? Not plausible. Li would want help. He must have escaped on his own, leaving the door open in his haste to find her.

  The op is falling apart, and so am I.

  Li strode into the structure that housed their backup, ethanol-burning generator. This time she didn’t come right out.

  “Idiot.” Blake swore under his breath. “I missed a scenario.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Power to the embryo freezers. The emergency fuel cells in the bunker will last only for a few hours. If Li manages, even for a day, to cut off power to the bunker…”

  *

  Just for a moment, reflected in a window—one of the few panes she had seen intact—Li had glimpsed two figures, all in black, limping after her. The enemy.

  She dashed into the backup power plant, ran through the building, to come out the backdoor. Behind her pursuers.

  “That’s far enough.” For emphasis, she fired a round into the air. “Turn around.”

  Beneath the face grease, she scarcely recognized Blake and Dana.

  “It’s about time you got here,” Li said as Carlos emerged from the darkness. “Take their guns.”

  Approaching from behind, he gingerly relieved Dana of two kludged-looking weapons and Blake of a third. Two guns went into his pockets and one into his belt.

  “Go. Keep an eye out for the others,” Li ordered. Carlos nodded and faded away.

  “As for the two of you,” Li said, never allowing her aim to waver, “it’s time you learn how badly you blew it tonight.”

  *

  Eve lurked in the shadows.

  Mr. Blake and Ms. Dana were on their knees, hands raised behind their heads, fingers interlaced. Throughout the compound, abandoned, children moaned and whimpered and wailed.

  And Ms. Li…gloated.

  The two forced to kneel before her were irredeemably bad, blasphemers, heretics, fallen from God’s grace. So Eve had been taught. So she felt, so she knew, at a visceral level.

  But she didn’t understand.

  Why did Mr. Blake play with that little girl, Beth, always so patient? Why did he and the girl keep inviting poor, blasphemous, terrified Todd to join their games?

  Why did Mr. Blake not seem bad?

  Unless good could extend beyond the wall, just as evil had reached within….

  While doubts roiled her mind, while Euripides climbed over the fence to spill its wan light down Main Street, the adults prattled on.

  *

  Li’s voice!

  Rikki peeked around a corner to find Dana and Blake at gunpoint. A cluster of chil
dren, wide-eyed, peered back from the shadows. “We’ve got to stop Li,” she whispered to Antonio.

  She took out her air gun. Antonio took out his.

  “On three,” she whispered. “One. Two.”

  The gun rammed into her back preempted “three.”

  “Hands up,” Carlos said.

  He took her weapon. From the corner of an eye she saw him disarm Antonio.

  “I’ve got them,” Carlos called loudly, herding them forward, “and their guns.”

  *

  Adult conversation often bewildered Eve, but this was the worst ever. Not just the words but entire concepts were without meaning to her. Milankovitch cycles? Tsunami? Social justice? Utopia? Extinction? What was phosphorus, and why would they always need more of it? What were the proletariat, totalitarianism, and sociopath loons?

  Still, Eve made sense of snippets. Something about the bunker. Embryos, she knew, was the adult term for all the children waiting to be born. Electricity and power (were they the same thing?) made light and heat and refrigerated food. Mr. Carlos had once told Eve that electricity was a wonderful thing and that, if she would study very hard, someday she could understand it.

  Power, apparently, also kept the embryos cold enough not to spoil.

  Why would Ms. Li threaten to take power from the unborn babies?

  And why was it the four who knelt on the ground, the supposed bad ones, who pleaded for the defenseless?

  Stepping from the shadows, Eve said, “No one will harm the babies. I will not allow it.”

  Ms. Li motioned her over. “Come here, little one.”

  Her skin crawling, Eve repeated, “No one.”

  “I’ll explain later,” Li said, still beckoning. Her gun hand never wavered from those on their knees before her. “Child, know that evil speaks cunningly to confuse you.”

  Am I confused? Eve wondered. Or for the first time, am I seeing and hearing clearly?

  She took from beneath her shirttails the weapon she had found. Finger on its trigger, mimicking how Ms. Li held her gun, Eve swept the barrel back and forth. Tears ran down her cheeks. “No one harms the babies.”

  From Mr. Blake, a sharp intake of breath.

  “This is your brave new world, Li?” Ms. Rikki asked. “Children driven to kill, to save other children?”