Talker 25 (9780062121929)

by McCune, Joshua

  He gapes at me. In his eyes, I see confusion and what I pray is sympathy.

  “Help,” I mumble.

  He reaches for me, and I strike with a side kick to his stomach. He doubles over; the wrench skitters across the floor. I follow with a knee to the chin that knocks him senseless. On a nearby workbench, adjacent to a soldering iron and some rubbing alcohol, is a box of tie wraps. I use thick black ones to bind his hands and feet.

  There are two gunships in the hangar. The engine’s open on one, a ladder beside it. I spot an array of electronic equipment on the bench against the far wall, including a phone attached to a metal controller of some sort. Terms like X5 DATE/REM and MODE: P1-P6 cluster around numerous dials and pronged interfaces.

  I flip the various controls, but don’t hear anything. I check the adjacent computer, but it’s password protected.

  Tickthumptickthump-tickthumptickthump.

  I sprint back across the hangar, where I retrieve the wrench. Overhead vents blast heat everywhere, but I’m shivering more now than I was outside. I clutch the wrench tighter, consider using it to ring his doorbell, then remember the bottle of alcohol.

  I pour half of it onto his face. He startles awake, curses, blinks back tears.

  I tap his forehead with the wrench. “Tell me how to use the radio.”

  “Huh?” He continues to blink rapidly, his face squeezing up as he tries to look at me. “Who are you?”

  I jam the wrench handle hard into his thigh. He cries out. “Tell me how to use the radio.”

  “Who are you trying to contact?”

  I raise the wrench over his kneecap.

  “Look, girl, you can bludgeon me to death, but without a little information, I can’t help you.”

  “I need to contact somebody in Michigan.”

  “We’ve got a thousand-mile throw on our signal. You aren’t reaching topside. You’d be lucky to reach McMurdo.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A civilian research outpost. Come on, girl, put the wrench down. Let’s figure this out. I can help you.”

  “You have no idea who I am, do you?” I jab the wrench at the gunship. “Can you fly me there?”

  “To McMurdo? What’s going on? Why are you so scared?”

  “You won’t fly me?”

  “I’d need clearance. Without it, they’d shoot us down.”

  Tickthumpthumpthumptickthumpthumpthump.

  I use a pair of sharpened pliers to cut the tie wraps around his feet. “Fine, you’re gonna contact McMurdo for me. Hurry.”

  He squirms to the wall, edges himself up. “What’s going on? Who are you?”

  I wave the wrench toward the radio. “Hurry.”

  “What do you want me to tell them?” he asks as I follow him past the gunships.

  I consider. “Tell them that they’ve imprisoned dozens of boys and girls to help them kill dragons. That they torture us if we don’t help.”

  He grimaces. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  I pull back the jacket to show him the TALKER 25 label on my scrubs. I lower my hood to reveal the CENSIR.

  “What is that thing?”

  “The torture device.” We reach the radio equipment. He extends his bound hands. I want to trust him. Need to. This is already taking too long. I cut him free.

  His gives me a rueful smile before sitting down at the radio. He picks up the phone, plugs in a cable, adjusts a couple of dials. “Come in, Mac Ops, this is Golf Tango One. Urgent. Over.”

  I lean closer to hear. A reply comes in through the receiver seconds later. “Reading your five, Golf Tango. What’s the emergency? Over.”

  “Prisoners treated outside the boundaries of the Geneva Convention. Over.”

  “Say again.”

  I snatch the phone from him. “The military’s enslaved a bunch of kids and is torturing them. Over.”

  “Copy. You are OTG. Not sure how we can help. Over.”

  “Off the grid,” the pilot explains at my questioning look.

  I hand the phone back. “Give them our coordinates.”

  He swallows, looks toward the ceiling, whispers something I can’t hear beneath his breath that sounds like a prayer. Finally he puts the phone to his ear. “Come in, Mac Ops. Relay as you see fit. Coordinates to follow. Wait.”

  He accesses the computer beside the radio, navigates to a map. He types in a command and hundreds of multisized squares appear, most located in the United States. Greens, reds, blues. A handful of black ones are scattered in remote locations across the globe. Georgetown, the largest black and the only installation in Antarctica, sits in the southern middle of the continent.

  He clicks on the Georgetown square. A password entry box appears. BLACK LEVEL. From his pants, he pulls a metal rectangle. A digital bar across the middle displays a super-long array of numbers and letters. A few seconds later, the readout shifts to something new. He hands the rectangle to me. “We have a minute before the passcode updates again.”

  I read aloud. “A—7—5—T—R—H—1—2—K—”

  My CENSIR shocks me.

  “Captain, you’ve been decommissioned.” The words echo through the end of the phone. The voice belongs to Major Alderson.

  The front of the pilot’s head erupts in a spray of blood. The computer screen shatters. I hear the whistle of a bullet an instant later.

  I whirl around. Alderson, a sniper, and some guy with a metal backpack stand near the hangar entrance. Alderson hands the phone to Backpack Guy. The sniper redirects his rifle at me.

  “She’s far too valuable for that,” the major says to the sniper as he strides toward me.

  He lifts the pilot’s head by the scruff and turns him so I can see the carnage. “Well done, Twenty-Five. You have helped us deal with a dangerous security threat.”

  Bile rises in my throat. I swallow it back, breathe through my nose, force a smile. “Glad to be of service.”

  He wraps an arm around my shoulder. “I think you deserve a reward.”

  I expect him to take me to some reconditioning dungeon, but we return to the barracks. He activates overhead lights with his tablet. Several of the girls wake up too quickly to have been asleep. Twenty-One rushes over and grabs my hand. “You’re back. Can we go to the island now?”

  “Not yet,” I whisper.

  “Keep getting those dragons, and you’ll be on that island in no time, child,” Alderson says. “Sorry to disturb you so late, ladies, but I’ve got some good news. Thanks to Twenty-Five’s diligence, we discovered a weak link in our chain. She has earned you a day off from your duties. Good night, ladies. Sleep in.”

  A cheer goes up. He leaves. In the second before the lights go off, I see Evelyn grinning at me.

  I want to cry and roar, but most of all, I want to hit something. Somebody. My CENSIR shocks me. I repress the urge, focus on the mental image of the captain’s head exploding. I wait a few minutes before slinking from my bed. I can’t see anything, but I know this room inside and out. I know where Evelyn sleeps. I tiptoe forward so her guard dogs won’t notice me.

  On a good day, I might give the queen bitch a chance to defend herself.

  I don’t remember the last time I had a good day.

  I’m almost there when my CENSIR shocks me again. But it’s not just me. Other girls are stirring. A beep sounds, the screen turns on. I freeze.

  The video on the screen, shot via drone and labeled 25, is focused on the sidewalk adjacent to Confections of a Chocaholic. I last visited my aunt and uncle in Ann Arbor five years ago, but I remember that candy store vividly. I loved the chocolate-covered raspberries; Sam preferred the double-stuffed turtles.

  Apparently, he still does.

  The drone tracks him from the store to a house a couple blocks away. It zooms in on a window, shows Sam sitting on his bed. He’s waving.

  “He knows it’s watching him?” Lorena says. Her arm’s around my waist. I don’t remember her putting it there.

  I shake my head as I
try to calm my breathing. I force myself to swallow. “Mom used to do that as a joke. ‘Say hi to the camera, everyone!’ He and Mom made a game of it. Punch buggy with drones.”

  The screen switches to different drone footage, dated six months ago, labeled 21. Lots of open farmland. A glowing green dot appears on the horizon. Moving fast toward a dilapidated house. An old man steps onto the porch, a rifle in hand.

  The viewpoint shifts to the dragon.

  The man gets off three useless shots before the Green sets everything aflame, including him.

  “Is that real?” I say. “Did they really do that to her family?”

  It’s not Lorena who answers, but Twenty-One. “Yes, yes, yes. Burn, burn, burn!” She’s clutching the dragon brooch so hard that the tail’s pierced her skin. “Kill the dragons, yes, yes. Kill the dragons, or the dragons kill them.”

  28

  My CENSIR shocks me awake.

  “Wakey, wakey, everyone.”

  Almost a month.

  I’m out of my bed faster than everybody except Evelyn, but I still get a second shock.

  Almost a week of that.

  “Faster, Twenty-Five,” Lester says.

  On my way through the cafeteria serving line, I peek toward the boys’ table. I tell myself I’m looking to see if Nine has recovered yet—he hasn’t—but my gaze lingers on the empty seat next to Eleven.

  “Scoping out your next target!” Four shouts.

  I cast my eyes floorward, see a pair of boots coming my direction. I glance up. The A-B pretends not to notice me. I dodge, but he adjusts, just enough to clip my shoulder. I catch myself from tripping, but my tray tips and breakfast tumbles to the floor.

  “Watch it, talker girl.”

  My CENSIR shocks me.

  “Stop antagonizing the soldiers, Twenty-Five,” Lester says.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”

  But of course it will. Sidelong glares, muttered curses, lewd catcalls, sometimes physical retribution. I ignore it the best I can, and when I can’t, I apologize because I know it rankles them even more. They want me to lash out, to prove that I’m some heartless monster, maybe. I will do everything they ask of me, but I refuse to let them break me.

  The grind of metal biting into scales echoes from the far end of the ER, a dragattoir bigger than the Air and Space Museum I visited on a field trip a lifetime ago. Instead of old planes, space modules, and tour guides, we’ve got torture slabs, computer-controlled “test” apparatus, and Mengeles.

  And chain saws.

  Lots and lots of chain saws.

  The dragon being sliced and diced on the slaughter slab by a half dozen All-Blacks glowed out at the Electrics station five minutes ago.

  On the slab to my left, a car wash of flamethrowers drenches a Red in fire that looks green through the tint of my safety goggles. The filtration mask I wear beneath my jacket hood cannot block the stench of charring flesh.

  To my right, mechanized syringes insert a human-length needle into a Green’s neck. Veins of viridescent light race through its broken body before vanishing at its tail stump. The Green flickers off and on, arrhythmic. I see Fourteen flinch. A soldier laughs, another pantomimes a spasm. The Mengele controlling the syringe system gives a thumbs-up.

  “Clear!” shouts Patch, my Mengele supervisor.

  I turn my attention back to my victim, a Red named Ryla. I clamp the hood of my jacket tight to my ears. Nothing in this place is as loud as Mjöllnir. Well, almost nothing.

  The giant hammer swings down from the wall onto her left shoulder. Bindings rattle, bones shatter. Her eyes burst open.

  Despite my improvised earmuffs, despite her muzzle, I hear her anguished squeal anyway, though it is a whisper compared to the scream that blasts through my head.

  I breathe through my mouth, slow and deep like Lorena told me as I exited the bus this morning. Doesn’t matter. Breakfast rises in my throat. I swallow it back for the third time today.

  Patch shows me an incomprehensible graph on his tablet. Subject 247-R (Ryla): Impact Force. “It’s got brittle bones, this one.” He pulls up another graph. Subject 247-R (Ryla): Telepathic Volume. “It maxed out at one hundred and twenty-two decibels. We’re getting to it.” Using the computer console adjacent to the slab, he repositions the hammer over the Red’s right shoulder. “Ask it again, Twenty-Five.”

  “Ryla, what are the names of your friends?”

  “Kill me.”

  In my head, her voice remains defiant. From the speaker in Patch’s tablet, the words are robotic, monotonous.

  “Tell it this is not a killing blow,” he says. “Tell it if it continues to resist, we will prolong its suffering.”

  I tell her.

  “Kill me.”

  Patch taps his goggles. Lester and Tim, the other A-Bs from our research team, bound onto the slab. From a tool chest, Lester retrieves a device that resembles a trowel. He uses it to peel back the dragon’s eyelid. Tim draws his combat knife. Modern-day executioners. With the filtration masks, tinted goggles, and floor-length jackets—everything black—we look quite the part.

  I shut my eyes.

  My CENSIR shocks me.

  “We talked about this, Twenty-Five,” Patch says.

  “But she can’t even see me.”

  “She can sense it,” he says.

  “Stop being the weak link, Twenty-Five,” Lester snaps.

  I force myself to think of Sam waving at the drone. I will be strong for him. I have to be. I open my eyes.

  One quick thrust. One gigantic scream. I fall to my knees, clutching my head. Breakfast fills my mask. Ryla dims.

  Patch jerks me to my feet, hands me a splatter rag. “Get it together. Ask it again.”

  After cleaning my mask, I repeat the question.

  “Kill me,” she mumbles between soft mewls.

  I think of Sam. “Answer the question.”

  “Please, human.”

  “We’ve almost broken her.” Patch points at her other eye. A vicious thrust later, Ryla’s blind and screaming again. I tremble, but keep my balance. Thankfully my stomach’s empty. Empty enough.

  “What are the names of your friends?”

  “Kill me.”

  “Tell her that if she continues to resist, we will prolong the suffering of every dragon in here.”

  I do.

  Patch gets in my face. “Do it with conviction, Twenty-Five. Don’t be a glowheart.”

  I pretend I’m talking to him, put violence into my words.

  Ryla brightens momentarily; her nostrils flare. “Kill me.”

  We crush her tail, then a wing, cut off two of her feet with a hatchet, pausing after each blow for me to ask my question. Her glow fades, but she’s done screaming. Her responses turn to groans. Two-syllable groans.

  A buzzer goes off. The flamethrower car wash shuts down. That dragon still glows a semihealthy red.

  The overhead loudspeaker activates.

  “Teams, please proceed to your next station. Team One, return to Intake. Team Four, take over at Chemics.”

  My CENSIR warms and tightens. Patch snatches the radio from his belt. “Why are we being swapped?” Something from the other end.

  Patch frowns. “The colonel?” He glances at me. “You’re sure?” Another glance as he shoves the radio back in his belt. “Let’s go.”

  The intake bay opens. A Red is towed in, pulsing brightly, lips drawn back in a snarl as far as the muzzle will allow.

  “A rager,” Patch says. “Your lucky day, Twenty-Five. Even you can’t screw that up.”

  Evelyn saunters from the opposite direction with Team Four. Blood stains her jacket.

  I hug myself against the cold. With the flamethrowers off and Ryla’s warmth dwindling with her glow, the cold draft that blows through the ER has become noticeable.

  “Still don’t have your Antarctic skin, Twenty-Five?” Evelyn says.

  “What’s the scenario?” Team Four’s Mengele asks
Patch.

  “It’s stubborn. Probably in shock. Give it some adrenaline and some hallucinogens.”

  “You think it’s crackable?”

  “In the right hands.” He shakes his head at me. “My talker’s a little too much of a glowheart, though.”

  Four’s Mengele laughs. “Taste of a rager will work that right out of her.”

  “One can hope.”

  Evelyn pulls a half-eaten Baby Ruth from her pocket, unhooks her filtration mask, and takes a bite. She offers the rest to me. “You look hungry, Twenty-Five.”

  My stomach knots up. “I’m fine.”

  She shoves the rest into her mouth. I force myself to watch until she’s finished. She gives this phony embarrassed smile, straps her mask back into place. “Don’t worry, Twenty-Five, I’ll pick up your slack.”

  Our team returns to the beginning of the torture line, where our newest victim awaits, shiny and whole. Patch lowers the cylindrical sheath over the dragon’s body. It hovers there, emitting a low hum for a couple of seconds before rising back to the ceiling.

  His tablet beeps. Two 3-D scans of the dragon appear. Subject 249-R (Name Unknown): Luminal Map/Thermal Map. He beams. “Haven’t seen a Red this bright in a while. Approach, Twenty-Five.”

  As I enter the dragon’s line of sight, its glow dims. I mount the slab and take my mark on the X, a dozen feet from its snout. Though it shouldn’t be able to see me, its green eyes track me the entire way. Its snarl fades. Warm puffs of breath wash over me in gentle waves.

  “Ah,” Patch says. He runs the scan again. He looks from me to the dragon, then back to me. He taps his tablet. My CENSIR loosens slightly. “Initiate communication, Twenty-Five.”

  “What’s the dragon’s name?” I ask him.

  “It’s a battlefield recovery. We don’t know . . .” If he says more, I don’t hear it.

  “Hello, Melissa Callahan.”

  I gasp. I recognize the voice.

  My CENSIR tightens. Patch looks smug. “Tell me its name, Twenty-Five.”

  “Vestia.”

  “One of your friends.”

  Not a question, but I answer anyway. “Yes.”

  “Proceed.” He puts me back in transmit mode.