by Simone Pond
“This was a helluva stunt you pulled. You caused a lot of damage. Wasted a lot of resources.”
“I’m sure my father will pay for it.”
“You took down some of my men,” the officer says, shaking his head.
My knees buckle. I don’t remember running down any people. “Are they dead?” I ask.
“Of course they’re dead.”
The words boomerang around in my brain and I feel sick to my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Men, I’m good here. Get back to base. I’ll handle him.”
The others get in their vehicles and pull away. The officer escorts me to his Jeep. I crouch in the backseat.
“You okay, kid?”
“I didn’t mean to kill anyone.”
“You’ll get used to it.” He leans closer toward me and shoves a huge needle into my thigh.
“What the hellll…” I fight to keep my eyes open, but my head fills with wet cement and I do a face plant on the seat.
Chapter 11
They have me in a small room that looks like a cellar. I don’t know how I got here, or how long I’ve been passed out in this chair, but it feels like a while. The last thing I remember was getting into the Jeep and the officer injecting me. Whatever they drugged me with was potent. My limbs feel like they’ve been pumped full of lead. I have no idea what happened to the others. I’m wondering if this was Zach’s plan: using me as a distraction so they could break free. They could be halfway to Vegas. No, no way, that doesn’t seem right. Dru wouldn’t have let that happen, unless she didn’t know the extent of Zach’s plan. Either way, this sucks.
I wiggle my toes to get some circulation going, and inch-by-inch my cells prickle back to life. It takes a few minutes to drag myself out of the chair. The room is empty except for a monitor on the wall. I’m sure they’re watching me. Whoever “they” are. They must be planning something really fun. Waterboarding? Breaking my fingers with hammers? Might as well get it over with. “When’s the show going to start?” I ask the screen.
Silence.
My reflection in the monitor looks rugged and tough, but I’m freaking out. The quiet is killing me so I drop to the floor and do some pushups to get my blood pumping. My sweat smells metallic from the toxins they shot me up with. During my set of squats, the monitor flashes on.
“Hello, William.”
It’s my father, wearing his customary black-framed glasses and steely glare.
I manage to speak over the boulder lodged in my throat. “Yep.”
“You look well, son,” he says. He doesn’t look angry, rather there’s a slight hint of admiration in his gray eyes.
I stare back at him and remain silent. What am I supposed to say? So, how’s the genocide going? A cold chill moves up my spine, but I force myself to stay calm. I can’t let my emotions take over. “I’ve been working out,” I finally say.
“I can see that.” He removes his glasses and cleans them with a handkerchief.
“So what’s the deal?”
“We’re keeping you in containment for a while.”
“What for?”
“You just broke out of the Subterranea. What did you expect? Special treatment?”
Of course, I expected special treatment—I’m his son. It’s clear the only special treatment I’ll get is living another day. I hold my breath to keep from reacting. I won’t give him the satisfaction. He lifts his eyebrows, accepting my challenge. The silence between us grows. We’re playing a game of chess and if I make one wrong move, I’ll get zapped. I hear Zach’s voice in my head, “Stay calm. If you show any signs of weakness, you give your enemy a window of opportunity. Forget the damn outcome and stay focused. Wait for your window. It’ll come.” I’m not sure I can outsmart my father; he’s been playing this game a lot longer than me. I’m a pawn on his board. Or am I? Screw chess. I’m a boxer and I’ll stare him down before I knock him out. I’ve been training for while and things are different now. I’m not the same boy he shipped off to Denver nine months ago. I hold my shoulders back and glare at him. He holds his composure, but I catch a slight flinch in his eye. This is my window.
“I was coming for you,” I tell him.
He shifts a little, thinking and contemplating my words. “I’m glad to hear it, son,” he says. He’s trying to throw me off my game. I’ve been through this scenario inside the holodome over and over, and every single time I’ve submitted to him I’ve ended up dead. I hold steady.
“How long do I have to stay in this room?” I ask.
“Until we get every single bit of intel out of you.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“We’ll see about that,” he says.
The door slides open and a woman carrying a medical bag enters with a brawny officer. They don’t waste any time getting down to business. He shoves me into the chair and she approaches me with an enormous syringe and a crooked smile.
“I don’t want any trouble,” I tell her.
“Just sit back and relax. The injection will sting for a moment, but you’ll be okay.” She smiles again, showing almost every tooth, like an evil clown. I think of Old Martha. I wish she were here to protect me. I can’t believe I let them capture me. Now I’m stuck in this place unable to do anything to stop my father or the Repatterning. I could try throwing them off by giving them a bunch of misinformation.
“You don’t need to give me any truth serum. I’ll tell you everything,” I say.
“Oh, it’s not truth serum, dear.” She shoves the needle into my index finger and it feels like a bowling ball is trying to squeeze into my skin through a single pore.
“Stop it. Please stop!” I scream.
My spine seizes up and every nerve ending catches on fire. Lighting shoots up my neck and stabs my brain. I’m jerking all over the place. The thug presses me down into the chair. I puke down the front of my shirt.
The woman takes out a cloth and wipes off my face. “There, there, dear,” she says.
“What the hell was that?” I choke.
“A microchip,” she says, with her creepy smile.
“Like a tracking device?”
“Oh, it’s much, much more than that. Why don’t you close your eyes and rest, dear? We have a big day tomorrow.” She removes my soiled shirt and hands me a crisp white t-shirt from her medical bag.
“Big day for what?” I ask, adjusting the shirt.
“Testing the chip. You’re our very first prototype.”
“Prototype?” What the hell are they talking about?
“Yes, dear. We’ll need to sync the chip with your brain activity.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Your father chose you for this. You should be honored.” She nods to the officer and they exit the room.
Honored to be my father’s lab rat? These people are insane. I don’t want to help test out his technology. My finger throbs like it was hit with a sledgehammer. Short and quick electric pulses shoot up my arm. I’m twitching and jerking uncontrollably. This chip is sending messages into my brain and I can’t control it. I want to get it out of my finger before it does too much damage to my brain. I look around the room for something sharp.
“Time to rest, William,” a voice says.
Is that coming from the intercom or my inside my head? I try to sit up, but I can’t lift my body. Are they controlling my movements?
“Screw you!” I yell.
The lights go off and my brain goes dark like a computer powering down.
*
I’m watching myself sleeping in the chair from somewhere above. I’m in two places at once, so this must be a dream. It’d be impossible to see myself asleep from outside of myself. I don’t like this type of dream because I feel misplaced and disconnected. I wait for it to pass along into the next one, but the scene doesn’t change. A young woman appears out of a beam of light and stands next to me—the version of me sleeping in the chair. Her auburn hair wisps around her face
as if a gentle breeze is blowing through the room. Dru, is that you? I say without speaking the words aloud. She stares at me and shakes her head. No, she says, without moving her mouth. I see now it’s not Dru—this apparition is far more beautiful. Her flawless skin radiates like a halo around the moon. An angel. She reaches for my shoulder and looks deep into my eyes. You must remove it, she says. She’s not with me in the room—she’s inside my head. Who are you? I ask, but she flickers and fades away. I close my eyes and try to visualize her, but she slips further away.
The door slides open and light from the hallway fills the room. Sarah is coming toward me. I can’t tell if I’m still dreaming.
“Get up, we don’t have much time. Hurry.” Sarah pulls me out of the chair.
“Why are you here?”
“To get you out of this place.”
“How’d you get into my dream?”
“This isn’t a dream, William. I’m here to get you out of this place. Come on, we have about twenty seconds before the camera goes back up.”
“So this is really happening?”
She drags me down the shadowy hall and jumps into a golf cart parked in an alcove. “Get in. We’re running out of time.”
“Are we playing golf?” I laugh.
“Just get in!” She yanks me into the cart and hands me her digi-pad. The screen streams codes like an emerald waterfall. “I need you to tap that orange link when I tell you to.” We take off down the hallway. “Now!” she yells. I tap the link and she turns left. We cruise down another corridor, speeding as fast as the cart can go. “Now!” she yells again and turns down another hallway. We go on like this for a while. It’s fun, like an amusement park ride. She stops in front of an elevator and jumps out. “Come on, quick.”
“This is the weirdest dream.” I laugh, getting out of the cart and following behind Sarah, who’s running toward an elevator.
“This isn’t a dream!”
“You should know they put something in me. We’re probably being tracked.”
“I’m blocking all frequencies, including whatever they’re using to track you.”
I have no idea how she’s figured out how to pull off such a feat, but I trust she knows what she’s doing with the technology. After all, she claims to be a genius. MIT doesn’t just give out scholarships to anyone. She pushes me into the elevator and we shoot up so fast I have to grab the wall to keep from falling. Sarah keeps tapping the screen on her digi-pad. The door opens. “Thirty seconds,” she yells, dragging me behind her.
We’re in some sort of terminal. “Are we at the airport? Are you taking me back to the Subterranea?”
“Hurry up!” she shouts.
We run through the dark and empty terminal, bypassing the former security check, and make our way to the gates. We pass through the waiting area toward an exit sign, bust through the door and run down a flight of stairs. The cold air blasts into my face, jolting me awake.
“Over here,” Dru’s voice calls out. I knew she wouldn’t leave me behind.
She’s standing in the doorway of a rickety single-engine aircraft that’s rolling forward down the runway. We run after it and Dru reaches down, pulling up Sarah, then the two of them pull me inside and seal the door shut. The plane picks up speed and within seconds we’re in the air. I’m not sure how we’ll make it to Vegas in this air jalopy. Zach in the pilot’s seat, wearing aviator shades even though it’s night. I don’t know whether to hug him or bash in his skull.
“I thought you said you’d come for me,” I yell.
“We did come,” he says.
“Yeah, a little late, don’t you think?”
“I didn’t say when we’d get you, just that we’d get you. I was hoping you could get a look at their headquarters and gather some intel before we got you out.” Zach has a gift for swaying things to suit his agenda.
“They shot some microchip bullshit into my finger that’s messing with my head. And they’re probably tracking us.”
“Good.”
“Good? Are you serious, dude?”
“Now we have some of their technology. They can track us if they want,” he says.
I’m baffled why he’s okay with me having a high-level GPS implanted in my body when we’re trying to escape. “Why would we want that?”
“It’ll be like leading a bear to honey,” he says, smiling.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“We wanna keep our enemies close.”
Makes sense, but I’m not in the mood to go into the details. “Where’d you get this piece of crap?” I ask.
“My connections,” says Zach. “Nothing but first class for you.”
I kick the back of his chair. The plane shakes for a few seconds and levels out.
“Look, I gotta focus here, why don’t you sit down and let Dru explain.”
Dru hands me a bottle of water. “Here, drink this.”
I guzzle it, finishing every last drop. “I don’t get him sometimes.”
“Yeah, sorry about what happened. I didn’t know that part of the plan. Sometimes Zach keeps things to himself. You okay?” Dru sits down and buckles into her chair.
I take the seat next to her, across from Sarah. “I’m fine, but don’t you care that they could be trailing us right now?”
Sarah holds up her digi-pad. “I’ve honed in on the frequencies you’re giving off and I’m trying to replicate them then broadcast them using a GPS torrent app. Send out about a million different pings for them to track. It’s not the best solution, but until I figure out some coding it’ll have to do.”
I look at both of them, wondering how they’re so nonchalant about this chip. “And I’m supposed to be cool with something inside my body that’s spewing off random frequencies and who knows what else.”
“We can use their technology to our advantage,” says Dru.
“I want this damn thing out of me.”
“It could be our saving grace,” says Dru.
“But they could blow us out of the sky right now,” I say.
“Like I said, I’m over-flooding them up with frequencies.” Sara holds up her digi-pad again, annoyed.
“They won’t shoot you down—you’re the professor’s kid,” says Dru.
“You realize we’re talking about my father—the guy in charge of the apocalypse. He doesn’t give a shit about me.”
“They won’t waste the technology,” says Sarah.
As much as I don’t like her line of reasoning, she’s more right than Dru.
Dru takes my hand and examines my finger. Pain claws up my arm and I pull away. “That hurts.”
“I’m sorry.” Her face softens and I want to trust her, but I’m pissed.
“First of all, you guys left me for dead. Second of all, you don’t have a clue how this thing works or what it does,” I say.
“I’m going to study it,” says Sarah.
“Great. So I’m not just my father’s lab rat, but yours too?” I throw my empty plastic bottle at Sarah’s head and it bounces away. She slips on her headphones and tunes out.
“If we pull this off, you’ll be a hero.” Dru wraps her arms around my shoulders and pulls me close against her body. My irritation is replaced with a gentle flow of warmth and relief; I can’t stay mad at her.
“I’m glad you came back for me.” I bury my face into her shoulder, shoving down any tears because heroes don’t cry.
“I’d never leave you behind.”
Chapter 12
Zach lands us right on Las Vegas Blvd. The entire town is powered down and the streets are devoid of the usual swarms of people. For a place known for its flash and glitz, this shadow city is unsettling. We coast along the empty boulevard, passing the behemoth blacked-out hotels like the Excalibur and the MGM. The Bellagio’s once dazzling lake has been drained and all that remains is a dry pit. The electronic billboards that used to sparkle and dance are ink black. The printed ones advertising nonexistent shows have been tagged
with graffiti. A few of them are still displaying ads for the new Los Angeles City Center: “The World’s First Solar City,” “Sustainable Luxury” and “The Finest in Eco-Friendly Living.” In the distance, the horizon glows from the fires burning through the gated communities.
“Where are the stragglers?” I ask.
“It’s still early,” says Dru, glancing at her watch.
“What time do they come out?”
“We need to get off the streets and inside ASAP,” says Zach.
“Where are we going?”
“Circus Circus,” says Dru.
I bust out laughing—Old Martha continues to haunt me.
“What’s so funny?” Sarah glances up from her digi-pad. “Did you drink some more psycho-juice?”
“Circus Circus?” I laugh and laugh until it’s all out. Well, Martha, looks like I finally did run off and join the circus. It feels good to laugh. I savor the moment.
“Why is that funny?” asks Sarah.
“Long story.” I could never explain the irony. “Why so far from the main strip?” I ask.
“Trust me, you don’t wanna stay down here in the thick of it,” says Zach.
“Besides, everything’s already set up at the hotel,” adds Dru. “We’re meeting up with a couple of guys before we head to Bakersfield.”
“Bakersfield?”
“Gathering up our troops before we go to L.A. It’s all part of Zach’s plan.”
I stare at my swollen right hand. “He needs to start sharing some of these details.”
“Zach knows what he’s doing,” says Dru.
“Tell that to my finger.”
We turn left and pull into the parking lot of Circus Circus. When we exit the plane, the first thing I see is a towering clown holding a lollipop. He’s smiling and pointing toward the dilapidated hotel. I don’t trust him.
“Let’s get inside and locked down,” says Zach.
“I’m a little concerned about that clown,” I joke, pulling Zach off to the side. “Also, dude, why are you being covert about the details? You’re keeping me in the dark.”
He opens his arms wide and spins in a slow circle. “We’re all in the dark, buddy.”
“You know what I mean.” I hold up my throbbing right hand.