The Lucid Dreamer (Dystopian Child Prodigy SciFi) (The Unmaker Series Book 1)

by Casey Herzog

  It wasn’t until two hours later that the first signal arrived. Toby MacFarlane’s voice carried over the convoy as he spoke through his walkie-talkie to each other vehicle leader.

  “The place is too full of mutants to fire flares, but the scouts are calling for us to head into the city via the western road. We need to keep ourselves in motion, though. The mutants are in big groups of a couple of dozen each near the outside of the city, according to the scouts. Everyone, Godspeed and keep your eyes on the goal — freeing ourselves from this imposed nomadic life. Weapons up; make sure you fire only at the mutants in there. Take care.”

  The vehicles slipped into the city with caution, but caution was little more than a formality — everyone knew there was nothing left for them now but to fight whatever threw itself at them. Their plan was to get as far as they could until they were forced to continue on foot. That way, they’d have their trucks and cars close in case they needed to retreat.

  Genaro seemed like a ghost town at first, its towers silent and its roads empty. Dante even began to wonder how much of what he had heard was even true, until he saw the first group of the creatures. The sub-humans had indeed made the entrance roads their home, and the group caught sight of a ruined building harboring a large gang of the creatures within its structure. The mutants had some kind of survival instinct still nestled within their brains, because most of them slipped into hiding when the convoy drove past them.

  “I’d rather they had attacked,” the grinning man said, his face now more serious, “I have a feeling we’ll still see that same group later on.”

  Whether he was right or not, time would tell. The first attack did come, however, just a few minutes later.

  “Big group ahead on the road,” Toby whispered into the walkie-talkie link. “Probably not recommended that we engage this far from the center of the city. We need to carve our way in, not smash our way towards our goal. Everyone out of the vehicles, it’s for the best.”

  Dante looked at Margaret and bit his lip. The woman’s eyes were closed as she heard the order she’d been dreading. Marge turned to him and opened her eyes once more, forcing a weak smile.

  “Come on then, we gotta do what we gotta do.”

  The men and women of the convoy flowed out from the vehicles with their weapons ready. The drivers themselves did their best to turn their transports around so they could leave as quickly as they’d arrived before getting off and joining the rest. Toby was signaling a large alley that separated two stout buildings.

  “We go through there. We can attack this group afterwards, or shoot them from the upper floors of one of the taller buildings.”

  The feeling of dread within Dante’s heart began to grow as they commenced their walk towards the area the governor had told them to walk through. Something wasn’t right. He had seen mutants before, and they were not as passive as these were being. Certainly not as passive as to back out of fights and exercise caution.

  A scout stood on a building beside the alley and made all clear signals with his or her lamp, bringing smiles to several of the Convoyan’s faces. The large group poured into the dark alley and began to transverse the space between the buildings. It led out onto a small square that had probably once been used by children for their games.

  Dante watched his people and became nervous. None of them seemed to suspect anything was out of place, and for a moment, Dante thought he was just being paranoid and knew too little of the world to guess what was about to happen—

  “Look out! It’s a trap!” a woman cried from above them, and a roar echoed from the distance. She suddenly screamed; Dante knew the voice belonged to Mia, one of the scouts who had left the building.

  Crack. A body landed among the group, smashing the tiles beneath its weight. There were nervous cries, and Toby approached to illuminate it with his lamp while others lifted their guns to cover the rear. It was Mia. Noises began to echo in the darkness, and Dante knew that this was their own fault.

  “Look,” he told Margaret, and she looked up at the building. The lamp was still being switched on and off, an obvious sign that it had never been Mia who had given the all clear at all.

  “Oh no,” Margaret breathed, and informed several of the others.

  “Calm down, people,” Toby said loudly. “Let’s head back to the vehicles and circle the city before they can—” More screams, closer this time; the sound of running feet approaching at speed. Toby shook his head. “They know where we are, retreat!”

  Dante ran back down the alley as the first of the mutants appeared ahead of them, the city’s sub-human inhabitants clearly throwing caution to the wind. Gunfire broke the silence, and soldiers shouted warnings at each other as mutants began to leap out of windows and burst out of basements. The way back to their transports was suddenly cut off by the appearance of a hundred or so mutants who came in a screaming mass towards them. Toby cursed and ordered the group to stop and fire everything they had at them.

  “Come on!” Margaret cried, pulling Dante away from the group and taking him up a flight of stairs. His club was tight in his hand, but it didn’t feel like enough if a mutant looked his way. A few Convoyans followed, running up into an apartment building that seemed to connect with other structures.

  “Mom, we cannot leave them behind!” Dante cried as he tried to pull himself free. The battle outside was loud and chaotic: the sound of gunfire mixing with the odd explosion and the cacophony of screams and shouts. Somebody pushed past him, and he realized that there were more people fleeing from the carnage towards the surrounding buildings like they were.

  “We can and we will, boy. Now follow me!”

  She dragged him past several doors, her eyes racing between them all. Dante shook his head and pushed her lightly — they had no idea what was waiting for them behind each entrance, and it wasn’t worth finding out.

  MacFarlane’s yells echoed in the night, and both Margaret and Dante heard the man’s familiar rifle gunfire filling the air. He shouted orders, but by the sounds of the screams and the desperate pleas for help and retreat, they had lost, and he clearly didn’t know it yet.

  The healer finally saw a door that led out to the outside of the building and pointed, his foster mother grabbing his hand tighter and running towards it at his side. Footsteps followed them, and Dante was glad they had a chance to make it out accompanied.

  Dante reached the balcony in time to see MacFarlane and his closest soldiers surrounded by an approaching mass of sub-humans of varied mutations, their ragged shapes pushing closer and closer to the governor’s tight circle.

  “Come on, shoot them!” the healer cried, and the adults around him poured their fire down at the square, one of the men even throwing an incendiary grenade into the furious mass of flesh. It detonated, throwing bodies aside and creating enough space for Toby’s group to escape.

  “Follow me!” a man next to Dante shouted, and they continued their escape from the city. The vehicles were just a couple of streets away, visible from their vantage point and still undisturbed by sub-human stragglers.

  “Dante, come on now, don’t get left behind!” Margaret smiled at him as they ran along and Dante felt warmth inside him. He had never appreciated her more than at that moment — the beautiful mother who had been gifted to him after never knowing his own, an angel that had cared for him like nobody else ever had…

  …Unaware that he was about to lose her only a moment later.

  They never saw the structure above them collapse on top of them until it was too late.

  The wooden scaffolding came crashing down violently, its form collapsing under the weight of the mutants who had been standing on it. Dante cried out in fear, his body suddenly bowled over by a heavy human form. The mutant clawed at him, but the healer slammed his club into the creature’s face before another of the group shot the thing in the head.

  “Marge! Marge!” he cried, but then he saw her. She had been crushed beneath the falling structure, half of her bo
dy pinned to the balcony’s surface and her only free arm stretching out to grab Dante.

  “My boy…” Her words were a faint whisper, and there were already mutants climbing over the wreckage to reach her.

  “No…” Dante stopped, the tears running down his face as he saw his mother’s eyes staring at him from a bloody face, her sadness clear as she knew that she didn’t have long left to take care of him.

  “Run,” she said softly before a strong arm wrapped around Dante’s chest.

  “We have to go!” a man cried in his ear, and Dante sobbed as he saw the first mutant bite into his mother’s arm, another reaching for her face and clawing at her skin with pleasure.

  Dante wept as he mouthed a goodbye to her and turned to run away, but the group was still too far from the ground with no stairs visible. There was a long distance between the balcony and the roof of a smaller building below, and he knew that they could very well miss it if they jumped.

  Margaret…

  The man holding him stepped forward and fired as more mutants emerged from the collapsed scaffolding, but there were simply too many. The others began to throw themselves from the balcony, one of them tripping as he jumped and falling to his death.

  “Save yourself!” the fighter beside Dante said, and the boy realized what the man was about to do.

  Dante hopped up onto the balcony edge and turned one last time to look at Margaret.

  What he saw would haunt him forever, forcing him to block out the memory in an attempt to remain sane.

  Margaret was surrounded by them; five mutants who were either clawing or tearing their teeth into her flesh. One of them had severed her hand with a sharp tool and was biting into it, while another was grunting as it rained blows down on her form for whatever sick reason went through its mind.

  It wasn’t the worst part, however.

  It was the fact that despite everything that had been done to her, Margaret was alive.

  And she was staring right at Dante.

  The healer was torn back to reality with a horrible lurch.

  The darkness was gone and he could finally breathe again. As the light of the setting sun caught on his face and the beautiful sky became visible once more, Dante’s mind finally settled and came back to the present.

  And then he screamed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ~The University~

  Callum felt an increased strength in his form and a renewed energy in his limbs that was difficult to explain. The armor had melded with his body via an inner layer that seemed to tap into his muscles and nerves themselves.

  He placed the helmet on his head, and all of his surroundings transformed immediately. It made him feel like he had been looking at the world through a dirty glass until now. His body’s readings — pulse, blood pressure and breathing — as well as environmental conditions appeared in his visual field, added to the highlighted outlines of everyone else in the area who was wearing the helmets and armor. It was a type of augmented reality technology that he had only seen in the hands of veteran officers during the Outsider war.

  And to think that they’ve given me all of this in exchange for nothing, really. Callum thought of the briefing he’d been given just after they’d handed over the equipment, rifle and pistol included; it seemed that Russell, The Whisperer and his men had torn apart an entire squadron sent by Captain Fillmore to investigate the events that had taken place at one of the checkpoints.

  “Does this mean I’m one of yours now?” he asked the captain, as the entire force at the outpost got ready for what was coming and the defenses were set. There were more patrol troops than Callum had imagined, and he soon lost count of the amount of soldiers who came and went. Several other troops looked at him uncomfortably, or even open hostility, as they passed by; they didn’t forget that he had come in as a prisoner after killing one of their companions just a couple of days before.

  “Of course not.” Fillmore knew the man was using a mocking tone, but he didn’t bother to fall for it. “Let’s see how good you are, and how well you perform, and perhaps we can see if you’re worth keeping.” The captain signaled to Callum to follow him, and he set off out of the outpost and towards a bare area behind it with a large satellite dish sitting in the dry soil, the device looking out of place on its own in a place like this one.

  “What are we doing here?” the soldier asked, but Fillmore turned to the base of the satellite and approached it. One of his hands slid up the metal and located a hidden rectangular hatch on its side that he flipped open with the point of his knife. He placed his finger on a button inside and pressed onto it. “Fillmore? What—”

  The ground beneath their feet began to tremble, and Callum hopped aside as a metal door began to rattle and open in the square of dry earth right under him. Soil poured inside the compartment that was becoming visible, but Captain Fillmore didn’t seem to care. His expression was strange, almost triumphant as he looked down into the dark chamber that was revealing itself. At first, Callum thought the mystery room was going to turn out to be a small armory, but the metal gates kept opening until the hole was a dozen meters long and half a dozen wide. A draft came up from it as if there was a tunnel system leading away from the excavation to places unseen.

  Finally, the gates stopped spreading apart, and the two men stood above the dark chamber with expectation rising in both of their minds. Callum narrowed his eyes as he saw the glint of metal inside, but he was unsure. The mystery came to an end when Fillmore pressed a second button on the satellite’s hatch, and orange lamps illuminated its interior.

  Callum’s jaw dropped open.

  “So this is…”

  “Yes, Callum,” Captain Fillmore answered, “This is how we wipe those motherfuckers off the face of the planet.”

  “You alright back there?” the man on the other side of the speaker asked, sounding worried.

  Dante gathered himself and shook the horrible sensation off. His mouth tasted metallic with blood — he must have bit his tongue at some point during the vision.

  The truck felt just like a cold, rumbling vehicle once more, but the healer knew that something big had happened upon entering the tunnel behind them.

  It had been at least fifteen minutes since they had left it behind, but he knew what he had felt. Something had probed his mind and forced a memory to manifest itself in an attempt to learn more about him. It had looked for the most terrible memory of them all; possibly the most pivotal of his life.

  Or not, he thought. Maybe that dark presence wanted to know my origins and was forced to settle with Margaret’s death instead…

  “I’m…fine,” he concluded, a second thought urging him to pretend he was okay if it meant keeping his captors guessing. Captors, he repeated in his head. He hadn’t seen the men up front as that until the vision arrived. Clearly, he was starting to wonder what the University truly meant for him. He dared not mention what had happened at the tunnel or what he had remembered from his past. The driver and other men at the front of the vehicle probably knew what happened to new arrivals when they passed through the darkness and would probably just play along and feign ignorance.

  Everything was a mess, but Dante had a role to play now and play it he would.

  It was only then that he paid attention to the scenery around him and realized that they were already inside the campus’ facilities. The expansive buildings stretched out on the grassy fields, and Dante admired their design. It was clear that not a single of the wonderful structures was similar to the next, and there were even leisure areas like sports fields and stadiums, parks and pools. Those terms were all words that Dante had only heard or read about, so it was a shocking discovery to find that they were something so trivial at the University — there weren’t even any students using them. Very few of the pupils were visible on the outside, but there were certainly a couple of groups of young, uniformed students heading from one of the buildings to another in front of it.

  “Enjoy the view for
now; it may be a few days before you actually get the tour around the place.”

  The truck slowed down for the first time since they’d left the outpost, and Dante watched as they passed under an arch. His heart thundered in his chest as he expected to have another vision, but nothing happened. There were letters inscribed on the front and back of the monument: Universitas Terra, the front name read, with Vita, Scientia, Virtutem written on the back.

  Dante glanced around, trying to catch sight of the technology being used to cleanse the atmosphere, but there was nothing of the sort in sight. This is all strange, he thought. They probably have water, power, food and all sorts of depolluting systems, and I see nothing of the sort. The level of technology needed to clean the sky to this level of quality…Dante couldn’t begin to imagine it.