Earth Thirst

by Mark Teppo

“We should find flashlights,” Mere says, squeezing past me.

  I hesitate, looking back at the stairs that continue going down. The walls of the stairwell aren't the same prefab material of the lab. They're actually stone. We're in the bedrock of the island.

  “This stairwell predates the lab,” I point out. “I know what's down there.”

  The old temple.

  “Silas,” Mere says, “wait a second, will you?” She's found a panel in the wall, a recessed locker of some kind. She rummages through its contents and produces a heavy flashlight. Shining its beam around, she does a quick visual check of the hall and then comes back to me. “Okay,” she says, “let's go.”

  I let her lead and we descend one more floor. She shines the light down the next flight, and the stairs go down a few more metals and then end. A heavy metal grate lies across the floor. She moves the flashlight around too quickly for me to make out any details of what lies beneath the grate. I almost reach out and grab the light from her, but she steps out of reach. Trying to get my attention, she raps the handle against another security door. “One more door,” she says.

  I drag myself away from the grate and pull open the door. The same dull glow of emergency lighting greets us, as well as the distinct odor of blood.

  The short hall beyond the door leads to three rooms: two tiny observation lounges and an operating theater. The last has been recently used—dramatically so—and the last person out hadn't bothered to clean up. There's a dried crust of blood on the tile floor, some of it built up around the drain not far from the metal table. Several trays of used equipment sit nearby, and there are tracks in the blood as if a large cart was parked nearby for a while and then moved once the patient had been… emptied.

  There's power too. Mere spots a workstation nearby with a laptop still attached to the network. She investigates it, and I hear her make a noise somewhere between surprise and alarm. “What is it?” I ask, still looking at the blood stains on the table.

  I used to read the future this way, in the spatter of blood from an animal sacrifice.

  Something's not right. I recognize the scent, though I can't place it. There's panic rising in my chest, a flight response brought on by the scent of the blood. I should know what is causing it. I should—

  “Silas.” Mere gets my attention. A second later, she's got her hand to her mouth and she's backing away from the laptop. As soon as the sound starts, she puts her hands over her ears.

  The video is jerky, shot with a hand-held camera, but I recognize the room. And the chair. And the man in the chair.

  He is being dissected while still alive, and judging by the noise he is making, they aren't using anesthetic.

  I'm dimly aware of Mere running out of the room, but I can't move to stop her.

  I can only watch as Nigel is taken apart.

  Piece by piece.

  * * *

  “They knew we were coming.”

  She's huddled in the stairwell, her back pressed against the stone wall. She doesn't want to look at me, her eyes dart up once—fixating on the oblong shape of the laptop in my right hand—and then return to staring at the floor directly in front of her feet.

  “Yes,” I agree.

  “They burned this place less than a day ago. Maybe even after you sprung me from Eden Park.”

  I agree with that statement too. I put the laptop on the ground and Mere flinches from it.

  “I've removed the video,” I say. “At least, it doesn't auto-run anymore. I'm not sure I've wiped it off the drive.”

  “And you want me to do it?” Mere stares at me.

  “No,” I shake my head, “I want you to see if there's anything else on it.”

  “I'm not touching that thing.”

  I shrug and hold out my hand. “Give me the flashlight.”

  “Why?”

  “I'm going to go look for something.”

  “I'm coming with you.”

  I shake my head. My hand stays outstretched.

  “You're going to leave me here?” Her voice rises in pitch. “With that? With God knows what other sadistic shit is lying around for us to find.”

  “So don't go looking,” I say. “Stay put.” I nudge the laptop with my toe. “Look. Please.”

  “Where are you going?” she asks with a sigh, handing over the flashlight.

  “Down,” I say. “I want to know why there is a grate. Why isn't it a solid floor? What's on the other side?”

  She looks at me again. “You know, don't you?”

  “It's the old temple. The spa, remember?”

  “They blocked it off,” she says. “There's nothing down there anymore.”

  “I want to see it for myself,” I argue.

  “Why?” she asks again.

  “I saw something,” I tell her as truthfully as I can, “back there. Before the video started. I saw a… pattern.”

  “A what?”

  “I'll explain later.” I flap my hand at her. “Flashlight, please. Don't sit in the dark waiting for me to return. Do something to keep busy. Look at this computer. You know more about them than I do. Are you going to let a stupid trick like auto-running a video file keep you from digging for data?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.” She slowly offers me the flashlight. She doesn't move toward the laptop, though. I click on the flashlight and head downstairs. I give her a minute or so before she opens the laptop.

  At the very least, it'll be a source of light.

  As I descend to the grate that lies across the floor at the base of the stairs, I try to remember the temple the way it used to be. Above ground, it had been a simple ring of raised stones—modeled on the old celestial calendars of Central America. In the center, there had been a triangular divot in the ground, a sloped incline that had led down into the first of several natural caves. Sunlight filtered down to the first cave, which was as deep as the native peoples were allowed to go. This was the offering chamber. Below had been a honeycomb of smaller niches, where the steward catalogued and kept the samples: tiny shoots growing in clay urns, long troughs filled with quiescent ferns, and a vast assortment of sealed jars that held seeds and nuts of lost and extinct species. It was a seed bank, and it would be incredibly valuable if it still existed.

  So why had they blocked it off, but not sealed it?

  The grate is securely wedged between the bottom of the stairwell and a lip of stone directly beneath it. There are a few large iron spikes pounded into the wall ensuring that the grate doesn't shift. I kneel on the metal floor and peer through the narrow gaps. The flashlight beam bounces off worn stone steps and vanishes into the darkness below. On the wall, winding down, is a painted line of narrow-petaled flowers and tiny birds. White sea birds and hyacinths.

  I lean my forehead against the cool metal of the grate. The darkness of the stairwell seems more oppressive suddenly, and my palms are slick with sweat. I'm having all the symptoms of claustrophobia, which I know isn't the case. Arcadians don't get claustrophobic. But it's a feeling of being hemmed in, of being constricted and bound.

  I remember white feathers. I remember the rush of wind on my face. The rocky ground rushing past. The spray of water as waves leap up, trying to catch me.

  I hate falling.

  What's down there? What am I afraid of finding?

  Also, lying there, I realize there's something else too. What am I not supposed to remember? If I'm not hiding it from myself, then it was taken from me. Why would Mother do that?

  TWENTY-ONE

  Mere finds me lying on the grate, staring up at the stairs above my head. “There's nothing on the laptop,” she says. “Just an unlocked guest account that was set to load when I brought it out of sleep mode. There's no sign it's ever been on a network or the Internet. The hardware isn't that new, so it looks like it was wiped and reformatted a couple of days ago, the video was loaded—probably from a CD or USB device—and then it was configured to surprise us. That's it.”

  Her w
ords stir something in my head, and I try to grab it, but it remains elusive.

  “What is it?” she asks, sensing my aggravation.

  “I've been down there—” I indicate the open space beneath the grate. “But I can't remember when or why. We forget things after a while. It's too much to hang on to, all that history, and the brain starts to jettison bits and pieces of it after… Anyway, there are some practices we've adopted that ease the discomfort of memory loss, but it doesn't clean up everything. There are little shards that remain, tiny chips of history that lodge themselves in the brain. They're disassociated from the core memory that binds them together, and the brain struggles to keep itself ordered. These little pieces end up in strange spots and, as the brain folds them in, they become disconcerting breaks in your mental history.”

  “That sounds confusing.”

  “You get used to it. After a while.”

  I don't tell her how Mother helps us when we go into her embrace. She won't understand. She hasn't lived as long as I have.

  “Is there any reason to stay here then?” she asks. “Is it going to get better?”

  “No,” I sigh. “Probably not.” I look wistfully at the spikes in the wall once more. Would getting the grate removed help? Would I actually understand what I found down below? Our would it be something that I felt like I should remember, but couldn't?

  Would that be worse?

  “Come on,” she says, offering me her hand. “I want to find the server room. Let's see if it is in that first subbasement. Maybe there's something left there.”

  Using her hand, I pull myself up. She doesn't let go and I end up standing close to her. She leans toward me for a second, squeezing my hand. “I'm sorry,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For what happened to Nigel.”

  Why? is the first word that had popped into my head. He was a bastard. I shudder slightly and, feeling the tremor in my body, she squeezes harder.

  “Thanks,” I say, even though she's misreading my reaction.

  I don't feel any sadness at Nigel's death. I should, but I don't. He wasn't family. Not in the truest sense. Not even in the slightest sense.

  I miss Mere's hand touching mine more than I miss Nigel.

  * * *

  The lab server room is more of a closet, and the narrow space contains two racks of computer gear. It's a bunch of black boxes with a tangled mess of wires coming in and out of everything in an incomprehensible maze, but Mere looks at it like she understands what she's seeing. “Patch panel,” she says to herself as she starts inventorying the boxes, “Router. One—no, two—switches. Four servers, and… shit.”

  “What?”

  “See these lights?” She pops off a plastic panel and shows me a row of red lights next to empty slots. “The drives have all been pulled. Each of these slots should be filled with a hard drive, but they're all empty.” She checks each one of the boxes that she counted as a server, and they're all the same.

  “They really wanted to make sure we couldn't get any data off these. Probably put them all in a bag and tossed it into the ocean. That'd be the quickest way to ruin the data. Damnit. There's nothing here. Nothing at all.” She leans tiredly against the rack. “This was just a waste of time,” she says quietly. “Such a fucking waste of time.”

  “We're still alive,” I say. “We're not in immediate danger. We have freedom to move about. It's—”

  She whirls on me. “‘It's not that bad.' Is that what you're going to say? This entire facility was burned because you took me out of that hospital. They burned Eden Park too! How many have died now? Secutores is covering their tracks, and they don't seem to care about collateral damage along the way. What are we going to do? Where are we going to go? Do you think they'll just let us wander off? We're loose ends. They're going to come after us. Shit, Silas, for all we know they're waiting upstairs for us, laughing at us as we stumble around down here in the dark.” She taps me on the chest, punctuating her remarks. “We don't know why. We don't know what or even where. We don't know anything.”

  I grab her finger. “We're alive,” I repeat. “It's a start.”

  “A start of what?”

  “I don't know. That's why I found you. Intelligence gathering isn't my forte.”

  “Me? That's your whole plan? Find Mere; she'll figure it out. That's it?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Oh, shit. That's not a plan, Silas. That's barely”—she searches for a nice way to say it—“that's like something on a grocery list. Get eggs. Meat. Maybe some cheese.”

  “Short lists work well,” I say.

  “Find Mere. Kill all the bad guys. Like that?”

  “Sure. It's easy to remember.”

  She stares at me. “You're a grunt,” she says. She pulls her finger out of my grip. “That's what you are—what you were. How long have you been following orders, Silas? Jesus Christ. Who put you up to this? Is this your idea? Have you ever thought for yourself?”

  “Yes,” I say. “The night I saved your life, for one.”

  She looks away. “That's not fair,” she says quietly.

  “It's true.”

  “Goddamnit, Silas, I don't need that on me. You saved my life once. You do it again, and this time how many people have died?”

  “You can't connect those events like that. It doesn't work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it's not about you. It's—”

  “What? It's about you?”

  “No,” I say, struggling to grab on to that elusive thought that has been darting out of reach every time I try to reach for it. “Yes,” I change my mind. “It's about us. Arcadians.” And then the thought stops hiding from me.

  “Secutores didn't do this,” I say.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “It was all a trap,” I say. “Right? Everything was set up to capture an Arcadian. Even after the Liberty. Those pop guns couldn't stop me; they were meant to drive me in a specific direction. They wanted me alive.”

  “Secutores?”

  I nod. “Yes. So if that video was made by Secutores, then they have Nigel. They already have an Arcadian. So why burn the lab? Why leave the laptop for us to find? There's no reason to leave that video other than to taunt us. To tell us we're too late. There's nothing we can do for Nigel. He's gone.”

  “Which means this lab belongs to someone else.”

  I nod. “And they didn't want Secutores finding anything useful here. Other than their message: We have him; you don't.”

  “Wait. Were they expecting Secutores to show up?” she asks. “Or us? And if they weren't expecting us, then… oh shit, there was a plane coming in to the airport when we were coming here. Secutores might be coming here right now.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  We see lights among the trees when we leave the burned facility—three pairs of headlights—and we dash for the security of the tree line. The cars stick to the road, and it's easy to stay hidden among the trees as the trio drive up to the facility and fan out into the open ground around the building. As the engine noises stop, we hear voices—men shouting at one another—and a flurry of smaller lights bounce toward the building. They find the open door, and a number of men go inside, while teams of two start to sweep the perimeter.

  I tug Mere away from the tree trunk we're hiding behind. “They'll find the laptop,” I whisper. “We don't need to be here.” Mere had wanted to keep it, but I had argued that it was better for us to be invisible than to hang on to the video file of Nigel's dismemberment. Especially if the video file was meant for Secutores.

  She doesn't want to go, but she lets me pull her away, and we follow the road back to the edge of the crater. Mere is tired and not used to running in the dark, and after a while, I pick her up again and carry her. The access road turns south once it reaches the crater wall, and I follow it even though it is going the wrong way for Hanga Roa. I could climb the crater wall, but doing so with Mere in my arms would be tough.
She's still enough that I suspect she's fallen asleep.

  The road bends back on itself fairly quickly, turning into a series of tight switchbacks that lead up to the rim. It ends in an old dirt road that runs north to south. I turn left, north, and start jogging toward the distant glow of the airport and Hanga Roa.

  * * *

  It's nearly dawn by the time we get back to the hotel. I wake Mere up so that she can climb the stairs under her own power, and she does so listlessly. Once we reach our room, she kicks off her shoes and falls down on the bed, letting her exhaustion pull her back into dreamland.

  The recent exercise and inhaling Mere's scent over the past few hours have made me restless, and if the sun weren't coming up, I would go back out again and prowl around the tiny town of Hanga Roa. But nothing good would come of that. The thirst is there, at the back of my throat. My body is still fighting the toxins. I had been hoping to get some dirt time at the spa, but with that option no longer available, I'm starting to consider Plan B.

  It's not a long-term solution. Blood brings other complications.

  Mere is sprawled on the bed, and I adjust her position slightly so that I can lie down too. I fold my hands across my stomach and stare at the ceiling, trying to ignore the steady beat of her heart. She turns onto her side, a mumbled sigh slipping from her parted lips…

  I close my eyes so that I don't see here anymore, and when I hear her exhale again, it doesn't sound the same. It sounds like wind on water…

  And I'm not lying next to Mere anymore. I'm on the boat again, fleeing the ruin of the fairest city ever built. Fleeing everything I ever knew and loved.

  “We are no longer who we were,” Aeneas says. “We were men who stood our ground, who swore to fight to the last for our king and country. Now, we are nameless scoundrels, running across the dark sea that will surely swallow us before the sun rises again.”

  The men are scattered on the deck—exhausted, wounded, close to death. No one is rowing, and it is up to the captain and me to hold the tiller straight, to keep us on course—the only course available we can take. The wind is behind us, and our sails are full. The timbers of our boat are our most valuable possession. Everything else is broken and worn.