The Phoenix Project Series: Books 1-3: The Phoenix Project, The Reformation, and Revelation

by Pritchard, M. R.

  The next night I stare at the genetic data lists, organizing them by the soon-to-be tiny amygdala gene. I label them as SH, for subordinate-humans. It’s a crude label, inhumane even, but it’s a label that’s easy to identify within the data.

  I pair the Residents, all of them. I create an algorithm which pairs the children of the Residents, and their future children. It only takes two generations for the gene to become dominant. In at least five generations people will have to be transferred to other Districts. There is no way around it. The populations are too small, unless other Residents are chosen from the Survivors of the rubble that was once the United States of America. I wonder if Morris and Adam know that there are Districts spread across the country? I’m sure Crane hasn’t even realized that I’ve figured it out, that I figured it out a long time ago.

  --

  The data is complete. I’ve been staring at it each night for weeks, double checking the analysis and the program coding. Trying to decide when I will let them know it is ready.

  I bring Lina to the schoolhouse, intent on returning home to sleep for just a few hours even though my brain is still buzzing with the discovery I made weeks ago. I walk across the hard packed snow, feeling it crunching under my feet. I stop in the courtyard, looking all around me at the ice covered trees and the high piles of snow. I let my eyes focus at a distance again instead of the close computer screens. If I keep staring at the screens for so long I’m going to have to go back to wearing glasses.

  It’s already January and it seems like we’ve received the worst of the snow. We haven’t had a storm in a week. And the high piles of snow have started to compact, shrinking their height. I hear a whistle from behind me and when I turn Elvis is waving for me to come to the barn where he’s standing.

  “What?” I ask when I reach him.

  “You’re going to have a visitor in a few minutes. I’ve been asked to bring you to the gate. You’re going to need these.” He hands me a pair of thick waterproof gloves and an oversized parka. I’m sure they are men’s size and I don’t need to put them on to tell that they will be huge on me.

  “Who’s coming?” I ask.

  No one has been here besides Adam and Morris. I haven’t seen Morris in months. I’ve only talked to him on the phone recently for his every-other-day phone calls. I know he still worries about me. It’s evident in the conversations, and the way I still drift off when something sparks the memory of Crane, Baillie, and that musty basement. I know I won’t be well until I can sleep without reliving those four days and without the fear that Crane could still kill everyone I love.

  “Don’t worry. It’s someone you know,” he tells me.

  We walk to the gate, both of our boots crunch on the hard packed snow. Someone is already waiting when we get there, dressed in a black snowsuit and shiny helmet, standing next to a bright red snowmobile. As we get closer they take the helmet off. I can see it’s Adam wearing quite the hesitant expression on his face.

  This can’t be good.

  He and Elvis greet each other, shaking hands and patting each other on the shoulder. Then Adam turns to me. “I was told that you need to see the fence.” I step back from them. I’m still not ready to leave this place.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “The Funding Entities, they want you to see it. You’ve been making them worry. They think it will help,” Adam tells me.

  “You speak with them?” I ask him.

  “No. Morris delivers their communications-“

  “But you still follow Crane’s orders?” I interrupt him.

  “Let’s just say we humor Crane. We don’t answer to him. Just ask Elvis.”

  I look to Elvis who nods in agreement to Adam’s statement. He picks up a second black helmet and holds it out for me. I step back again. I will not be forced to leave, or coerced…

  “Andie, we are just going to the fence, we will be back in less than an hour,” Adam tells me.

  “You two aren’t giving me a choice, are you?” I ask them both.

  Elvis sets his face in a grim expression. Adam shakes his head a little. “Andie, you haven’t left here in months. Months.”

  I point at both of them with each of my index fingers. “This is bullshit.”

  “Andie,” Adam pleads, “it’s just one hour.”

  I stare at them, thinking. The fence doesn’t seem that bad, as long as we aren’t passing the cement wall and going into town or to Crane’s headquarters on campus. I shudder as I think of the Chemistry building where he kept us for almost a year. Slowly, I reach to take the helmet from Adam.

  “One hour,” I tell him. “And if you don’t bring me back I might take that gun off your hip and shoot you.” Adam looks at me, troubled. I’m sure he never expected for me to threaten him. I don’t care. Even if he was the one who trained me to shoot. I don’t like being forced into this.

  I put on the heavy parka which hangs down to my knees. Adam helps me with the helmet and the gloves, then signals for me to get on the back of the snowmobile. I barely hear the engine start, and when we move I’m not bombarded with the acrid stench of burning oil and gas. This must burn some other fuel that’s odorless and runs the engine almost silent. I wrap my arms around Adam for stability and comfort, and for the first time since we arrived in the Pasture, I leave.

  “See you in one hour,” Elvis tells me as he waves then locks the gate securely behind us.

  As I turn around, watching the entrance to the pasture shrink, my heart beats faster and faster in my chest. Adam drives the snowmobile down the hidden driveway and I don’t turn around until he pulls out onto the road. I’m surprised to find the roads are not cleared, but packed with the same heavy snow as we have in the Pasture. It feels colder out here. The icy air ripping through the gloves and parka chill me to the bone almost instantly. It doesn’t last long before I am flushed with a flash of heat and sweat. I’m sure it’s from my rapidly beating heart, the panic of leaving for the first time. Between the winter air and my sweating episodes, I’m sure this is how a menopausal woman feels at the height of her change. I feel something tapping on my hands. It can only be Adam. I ignore him. Trying to focus on my breathing, trying to slow my heart rate and make the sweating stop. But he keeps tapping on my hands which are locked around the front of him.

  “One hour, one hour, one hour, you can do this,” I whisper to myself. I hear the loud crackle of static in my ear.

  “Andie? You’re squeezing the shit out of me,” I hear Adam’s voice in my helmet. They must be equipped with radios. I hope he didn’t hear me talking to myself. I loosen my grip around him, realizing that my arms and fingers ache from how hard I was squeezing.

  “Sorry,” I tell him.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” It’s all I can say as I try to focus on controlling the panic.

  “We’re almost there. Just a few minutes.”

  I decide to look over Adam’s shoulder, to watch the path ahead of us, and there is a distinct snowmobile trail cut into the snow. They must have been patrolling the fence all winter long. I’m not surprised it was never mentioned in any of the Committee meetings. Of course, it could have been. Lately I’ve just been turning the computer on and leaving the room, not caring about what they discuss. That’s probably why Morris calls me so often. But there has been no word of Survivors finding us. Nothing since Sam showed up right after the bombings. Still, I don’t bother to ask Adam what the tracks are from. I could care less right now. I just want to return to the safety of the Pasture walls.

  I hear a loud humming noise. It’s strange. I can even hear it through the thick helmet. I watch the trail noticing that there is a clearing ahead of us. Bright morning sun is glinting off the snow. Adam slows the snowmobile as he reaches the clearing. He turns to the right, coming to a stop. I stare at the tall chain-link fence topped with tight curls of barbed wire in front of us. It’s at least 500 feet away. It’s at least thirty feet tall. And the strangest thing is: the
re isn’t a speck of snow anywhere near it. Instead, the snow drops off in high banks, straight to the dry dirt ground.

  Adam stands up and removes his helmet. Then he reaches forward unclipping my chin strap and pulling the helmet off my head. “Are you ok?” I didn’t even notice my heartbeats had slowed and the sweating had stopped while I was staring at the fence.

  “Fine,” is all I can say.

  “Impressive isn’t it?” Adam asks. “Just don’t touch it.” He warns.

  I remember what he told me, about the recruit trying to escape during training and burning to a crisp after touching the fence. Back when we had a Runner. Before the bombings ruined anything we could need from outside the gates.

  “Why does it hum like that?” I stand, walking towards the snow bank, stopping just before the snow disappears. There’s a straight drop down to the dirt. I turn my head, my ear towards the fence, letting the loud hum from the pulsing electric current bounce off my ear drum. As I stand there, I notice it’s not only loud, it’s warm. I pull my gloves off and hold my hands out as though I were warming them by a fire. After a few moments I pull them back pressing my fingers to my cheeks, they are warm, much warmer than they were before.

  “It’s powered by the nuclear reactors,” Adam interrupts my observations.

  I know from Ian that the reactors here create enough energy to power most of the state. Now, I’m sure that there is no electricity running outside the fence. The town and farms don’t use much power, and even though this fence must stretch for almost ninety miles encompassing our county, this fence is being powered with far too much electricity. No one in their right mind would go near it. I realize this is why no one found us, or bothered to enter once they did. I look up and down the fence, noticing a few charred objects hanging off it. Something that looks like it could have been a squirrel, trying to leap over the fence in the treetops, but missing and hitting the fence, fried beyond recognition.

  Adam reaches down, picking up a handful of snow, and forming it into a snowball.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him.

  “Just watch.” He reaches back, snowball in hand, and flings it at the fence. But the snowball never makes impact. Instead it melts midair, ice to water to vapor. Complete phase changes in just a few seconds.

  “That’s both incredibly amazing and incredibly wrong at the same time. I don’t even want to ask how you knew that would happen,” I tell him.

  Adam laughs, walking over to me.

  “It gets boring out here.” Crane must have been sending him out specifically to check the fence. Adam picks up my helmet, standing close to me. I’ve forgotten about my panic, but now my heart is racing again, for another reason. “Boring and lonely,” he bends down, kissing me. His lips cooled by the winter air. I’m sweating again. I hate it when he does this to me. The moments of intimacy he sneaks in after I told him what we did was a mistake which can’t happen again. He’s never pressed further, just a few kisses here and there. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them. I just know that what we are doing is wrong. It’s going to get us into trouble. After a few moments he pulls back, smiling. “Time’s up,” he puts the helmet back on my head, tightens the chin strap, pushes the thick gloves on my hands, then gets back on the snowmobile. All without giving me time to recover from his impromptu kiss.

  He returns me to the Pasture, keeping his word of only an hour. Elvis waits for me at the gate, walking me back to the house, as Adam returns to his post at Volker headquarters.

  CHAPTER Nine

  Morris is on the phone. “The doctor will see you,” he tells me.

  “He’s coming here?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Today. He should be there soon.”

  “You could have warned me, Morris. I haven’t even showered.”

  “Get to it then. Adam will be escorting him to you.”

  My heart flutters a little. I try to push that feeling away. I guess I’ll work a little harder at making myself presentable. If Dr. Akiyama sees me looking like a recluse he might actually commit me for being crazy. I hang up the phone and run for the shower. I turn the hot water up as far as I can tolerate, trying to warm my fingers and toes, which are cool and icy from the winter air.

  I dig through my clothes settling on a pair of black leggings, my tall boots, and a heavy brown sweater. I do my best to dry my hair, but it’s too heavy and long from almost two years without a haircut. I should really do something with it. Maybe I’ll ask Blithe for some help. Her hair always seems to be perfectly arranged. I settle for a simple braid. Just as I finish I hear a knock on the door.

  “Where’s the doctor?” I ask Adam as I open the door letting him in with a puff of cold blowing snow.

  “He stopped to see the children and Ms. Black. He’ll be over in a minute.” He stares at me noticing my apprehension. “I wanted to warn you. They want you to leave this place. Go back to the town, the hospital. They need help.”

  “Help with what?”

  “Crane expects the women to start delivering soon.”

  I shake my head in disappointment, at the situation, at myself. “I could never bring a child into this mess,” I tell him. “It isn’t right. What Crane and the Entities have planned, forcing them to have children and re-build the population. No child should ever have to enter into this, how the world is now.”

  “I agree,” is all he says, nodding his head at me, his lips pressed into a thin line. There’s a knock at the door. “That must be the doctor.” Adam opens the door letting Dr. Akiyama in. Adam walks outside leaving us to talk alone.

  “Would you like some tea or coffee?” I motion for him to follow me to the kitchen.

  “Tea would be nice. It’s very cold out.”

  Dr. Akiyama takes off his heavy parka and gloves, hanging them on the back of the kitchen chair. I set a tea kettle on the stove and get two mugs out of the cupboard. I search for the canister of teabags, trying to ignore the awkward silence.

  “How have you been feeling, Andromeda?” Dr. Akiyama asks me. His voice sounds slightly cheerful with a hint of skepticism.

  “Please, call me Andie. I always feel like I’m about to get yelled at when people call me Andromeda.”

  “Ok then, Andie.”

  I sit at the table across from him. He looks older already. Running a hospital seems to do that to a person. No matter how small it may be. When I worked in the city at in the NICU, I remember our latest CEO had grey hair within two years. It went straight to white within the next two years after that.

  “I see you’ve gotten your cast off.” He points at my arm.

  I look down at my arm. The cast has been off for months. I haven’t thought much about it. “Yes,” I tell him. “Colonel Waters cut it off for me a while ago.”

  “Morris is concerned about you.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you going to do about it, about how you’ve been acting?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not going to beat around the bush. I know you’re not stupid. You know what's wrong don't you? Why you feel like you do, why you can’t seem to leave this place, why you can’t sleep, the nightmares?” He’s only the second person to confront me about my sleep.

  Sleep aside, I do know what’s wrong with me. I’ve always known deep down. I was trained to recognize it in nursing school. We were in-serviced for years afterwards since the war on terror had re-started and the veterans started showing up at the hospital to recover. We would see them roaming the halls of the hospital at night. Sometimes they would escort us to get coffee. Happy to protect us as we ventured out into the big city at night. Young attractive men back from war with only one problem: post traumatic stress disorder. They could barely function, they couldn’t sleep, they scared people. Plenty of young nurses got reprimanded for having relationships with them. These young men were barely holding on, the last thing they needed was a romantic relationship.

  Admitting
it to myself, after all this time, I say the words out loud.

  “Yes, I know. It’s post traumatic stress disorder,” I tell Dr. Akiyama.

  But I feel like a fraud. I never went to war. This happened to me at home as I fought to save my daughter, as I lost Ian, as I tried to escape. This is the aftereffect. This is what it did to me, what it made me. After everything Crane and Baillie did, and then the bombings. Watching them, I think, was what did it even though I was so far away. I knew what was happening out there where we used to work and shop and spend weekends, knew that Sam was out there, that Adam was out there, all the unsuspecting people being blown to bits as they ate dinner or drove home from work. Watching the bombings was the worst. Almost worse than fearing I had lost Lina.

  Dr. Akiyama watches me. My face, my expressions, my eyes, as I think about it all and relive it in just a few minutes. A shiver runs up my spine.

  “If this were a few years ago I could prescribe medications to help,” he tells me. “I can’t here. We don’t have them anymore.” I nod my head at him in agreement. “You need to talk to someone about it, about it all.” He pauses, waiting. He must be expecting me to talk to him. But I don’t want to. He may have stitched me up, and mended my broken arm, my broken body. But he’s still one of Crane’s minions. I don’t trust him.

  “What else can I do?” I ask.

  He sighs, realizing his trip may have been in vain. That he may not get me to leave as Crane must want. “You need to face your fears. You have to take what was dealt to you and adapt.” He no longer sounds like a supportive doctor, but a man with a deadline hanging over his head. Crane must be pushing him to get me out of here, to get me working again. Little does he know I’ve already finished my task. “Did you hear me, Andie?” He pulls me out of my thoughts. “You need to face your fears, now.” He crosses his arms.