Surrogacy

by Rob Horner

  This map was different, though the scene changed before I could comprehend the meaning of the difference. There were no pockets of humanity, for one thing, no bulbous collections of green dots to show where my people struggled to survive. There was only red. And yellow. The red dotted the North and South American continents, while the yellow spread out evenly across Europe.

  Then I was in another scene, again witnessing actions not taken by my body, reading words as a frantic arm scribbled them onto the pages of a notebook, thoughts going down on paper from another’s mind, written by a stranger’s hand. The writing was erratic, the thoughts scrambled without cohesion, like the writer was free-thinking his way through scraps of ideas. There were tangential meanderings as one idea sparked an incidental concept, which might flow for two or three sentence fragments before the writer jumped back to his—I didn’t know what to call it—his main idea.

  What could it mean, yellow on one side and red on the other?

  Who is yellow? If the red means the Dra’Gal, what could the yellow mean?

  What happened to the humans we saw on the map yesterday?

  Why did it change?

  Shouldn’t have looked, but I wanted to talk to Fish so I opened the door.

  Fish wasn’t in room, just the map on the screen. Heard another door opening somewhere in Operations, probably Fish’s bowl. Left quick.

  Pretty sure he knows I saw.

  They have cameras everywhere.

  Could he be one of the yellows? Is it the Quins?

  That makes sense, in a way. The Dra’Gal sneak attack the Quins, but they can’t survive on the Quin’s world. Maybe they’ve messed it up so much the Quins don’t want it back. There aren’t that many of either of them left, so Earth might be a good place for both. But Fish says he can’t breathe right in our atmosphere.

  Is he lying?

  What do I do if he is?

  Why would they try to help us, give us powers, if they were working with the Dra’Gal?

  They’ve already got the govt on their side, mostly, except for Teddy K and a few other dummies.

  Maybe Teddy is a Dra’Gal, maybe all of those who worked against Ronaldus Magnus are. It would explain how they always seem to know what to say, how they can all be on the same page even if they’re giving interviews at the same time. Rush says they all get their marching orders from the same place. What if it’s the hive mind?

  Could Rush be a Quin, just setting us up for an eventual takeover?

  Good thing they don’t know everything about me. I’m keeping that last part a secret.

  I can’t see them, but I can do something about them if I need to.

  A knock sounded, and the notebook slammed shut, the eyes I was looking through suddenly flicking to the left, staring at the door.

  “Hello? Bradley? Come on out! We got a new guy coming in. Reports say he can kick Dra’Gal out of their host bodies.

  “All right. I’m coming.”

  The eyes turned back to the page.

  They know. I don’t know how they know, but they know. They’re trying to trick me.

  No one else can do what I can.

  The hands slammed the notebook shut, revealing a yellow-speckled composition book with a black binding.

  And I was back on the couch, sandwiched between the two mentalists.

  “He came to see me, you know,” Mrs. Jean said, “when he first got here and several times after.”

  “He’s a troubled young man,” Dave said. “He hasn’t been diagnosed, not officially, but from the way his thoughts twist and turn, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t have a mental condition like schizophrenia.”

  “His world revolves around how the actions of others will affect him,” Mrs. Jean explained. “That’s the most important thing to understand if you plan to interact with him. It’s not about what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. It’s about how he will perceive your actions as they relate to him.”

  “What did he mean by No one else can do what I can do?” I asked.

  You aren’t the first person who can banish Dra’Gal, Dave’s voice said. He can drive one out, but it kills the host. Still, it’s his secret, so I’m not going to say it aloud.

  “The walls have ears as well as eyes,” Mrs. Jean whispered.

  “What about that map?”

  We’ve wondered the same thing, Dave said. I’ve scoured Iz’s mind—

  And I’ve done my best to read him, Mrs. Jean added.

  --but if there’s anything nefarious going on with the Quins, he doesn’t know about it. Listen, there’s something about the quality of the map in Bradley’s memory that isn’t right. Look at it again.

  The image returned. All the monitors made a part of the whole. Yellow and red sharing the planet.

  After Bradley, I asked Iz if it was possible to put one image on all two hundred screens, Dave said. He said it isn’t how they’re set up. Every camera is linked to a different monitor, and every monitor to a different computer. To make them work together with each one reproducing a part of the whole… It’s the kind of thing that would be nice, but not worth the time to program.

  The elevator doors slid open, disgorging a small horde of people. Tiffany and Ricardo strolled out holding hands. Right behind them came Angelica and the young red-haired guy, now dressed in blacks like the rest of us. He looked a little older with the uniform on, not quite as out of place, but still too young to be here.

  Not like I was one to talk.

  Gina came last, her eyes immediately scanning the group and finding James.

  “The edges,” I said softly.

  What? Dave asked.

  “The edges are fuzzy,” I continued, “like he’s seeing it through something. But the only thing that would cause that would be binoculars, right?”

  I hadn’t thought of that, Mrs. Jean said.

  He wouldn’t need binoculars, though, Dave argued. When you walk in the room, the monitors are right there in front of you.

  I knew there was something wrong with that mental picture. This came from Mrs. Jean. It means he didn’t really see it. He imagined it, or dreamed it, and it became real enough to him for him to think…

  The doors across from the elevator also slid open, revealing the tall, fox-faced guy from last night. Bradley, whom I hadn’t officially met yet. More soldiers came out after him. I’d met Bart the same time as Little Jack, and I remembered Josh from our brief conversation that morning. But three or four others came out as well, hard-eyed guys who I didn’t remember hanging out with the Chosen. Maybe they were a little resentful, like Iz had said, and stayed to themselves.

  Strangely, after seeing into Bradley’s memories, I felt like I knew him better than anyone else. And, because of the ramblings in the notebook, like maybe no one could ever know him well enough.

  Jeff did a quick head count.

  “Here we go,” Dave said, grunting a little as he pushed himself off the couch.

  That makes me feel a whole lot better, Mrs. Jean said. Thanks for sitting with us.

  “Listen up everyone,” Jeff said loudly, making himself heard over the noise of more than a dozen people talking at once. It took a couple of seconds, but everyone quieted down. During that time, Bradley walked around the perimeter of the room and took up a position near the elevators. It was a place from which he could watch everyone and would be warned before anyone could get behind him.

  “Earlier today, we learned that the Quins and soldiers upstairs have been compromised.”

  “What d’ya mean—”

  “Compromised how?”

  “Are they Dra’Gal?”

  “How does he know?” I whispered to myself. It wasn’t soft enough to escape Dave’s attention. Heck, with his power, maybe there was no such thing.

  Jeff only looks like an academic, Dave thought to me. Like many, there is more to him than appearances. He became something of a right-hand man and confidante to Iz soon after getting here, privy to a lot more than most o
f us. Much of that has to do with making sure he can picture a place if we need to get to it.

  That last part made sense at least. He probably spent a lot of time in Operations studying places on video in order to teleport to it.

  “We assume that if one shift has been converted, then all of them have been. Our original plan was to wait until their shift change. That way we could try to purge them all at the same time.”

  “I take it the plan has changed,” James said.

  “Something’s going wrong with the relocation of our guests downstairs, and that’s why our timetable is changing. Fish is going to fill us in on the rest.”

  “Bill was running that ferry!” Raymond said. “Is he okay?”

  “We’ll all find out together,” Jeff answered. “Let’s get to Operations.”

  Rising, I moved off with the crowd, my damp clothes and my intentions to get to the Distilling Room forgotten, caught up in the pre-fight excitement I remembered from Tae Kwon Do tournaments.

  Chapter 15

  The Quins aren’t all right

  The first three van loads of people were taken to three different locations, a precaution Fish thought unnecessary until it was discovered the upstairs staff were compromised. It made me decidedly uncomfortable learning the first drop-off point was Pembroke Mall, even though there was no reason the mall itself should be considered a bad place. Yes, it’s where the carnival was set up when this all started, and it’s where my life went from a little dysfunctional to something that made your typical soap opera drama seem like pie in the sky normalcy. But none of that had happened inside the mall.

  The first trip carried a dozen civilians and went off without a hitch. The twelve people were left with whatever they’d been carrying when they were captured and were given twenty-five dollars, which in 1991 was enough to get a cab ride to any part of Virginia Beach and most of Norfolk. When the van returned, another dozen loaded up and took a shorter trip to the park offices of Mount Trashmore, again without incident.

  I can only surmise that the Dra’Gal-Quins upstairs hadn’t yet caught on to the rotating drop-off points. Or maybe Iz kept that part a secret, not telling anyone but the driver, Billy, to go to different places.

  The third location was Lynnhaven Mall, about fifteen minutes deeper into Virginia Beach than Pembroke. Another dozen civilians left standing outside the mall with the clothes on their backs and enough cash to get them wherever they needed to go. And again, all without incident.

  If the drop-off locations had continued to shift, never repeating, the story would be different. We’d have had some time to rest. I could have gotten down to the Distilling Room before the assault.

  And we wouldn’t have ended up fighting the entire Virginia Beach police force.

  If only.

  Either Billy or Iz decided that three different locations was enough. On the fourth run, the van returned to Pembroke Mall and we lost contact with Billy. Fish couldn’t see the van on any of his cameras. The consensus between Iz and Fish was that even though the Quins upstairs might not know where Billy was going, they certainly knew where he’d been. There’s no other reason for Dra’Gal to be waiting at the mall for another van to arrive.

  We couldn’t be certain this is what happened. Billy could have suffered an electrical malfunction in the vehicle that rendered his radio inoperable. That same something—or something else equally innocuous--might have taken out his Port-Comm. He could have gotten into an accident and be hurt and unable to report in.

  A whole lot of possibilities. But whenever you have nothing but possibilities, you have to start narrowing them down by considering the probabilities. And the probability was that this stank to high heaven. Something had gone wrong. And before we could fix it, we had to neutralize the threat sitting in the offices above us.

  That’s why there were six of us gathered in the secret stairwell at the back of the Staging Area, closer to the top of the three flights than the bottom, and about to breach the door into the kitchens above. The rest were in two vans being driven by Raymond--” Don’t worry, ain’t no Dra’Gal gonna get a hold of us!”—and Bart on their way to a bank parking lot abutting the mall. They’d wait there until Jeff was ready to ferry the rest of us.

  After we finished clearing the upstairs.

  First, indulge me while I do a little nerd-gushing about the Staging Area.

  Its main entry was just outside of the Assembly Room and across the hall from the cafeteria. Swiping the card to the right of the door revealed a wide but shallow room full of bookcases, like a single-aisle library. Certainly nothing to get excited about and unworthy of being called a Staging Area, unless you took it to mean a place where you studied scripts in preparation for a stage performance.

  Then Fish did…something…that involved tilting a book with a green binding forward on the bottom row of the leftmost shelf, pulling a book with a red cover out an inch on the third row of the center set of shelves, and pushing one with a blue binding inward on the first row of the right set of shelves.

  And magic happened.

  For a kid who only two years before saw the comic book world of Bruce Wayne a.k.a. Batman come alive on the big screen, with Michael Keaton in the titular role acting opposite Jack Nicholson as The Joker, this was more amazing than half the science fiction stuff on display in the Operations Room. The center bookshelf slid backward, hidden motors pushing it far enough to clear the shelves on either side. Then it moved to the right, following tracks on floor and ceiling, revealing a much greater depth to the room. It was almost as large as the cafeteria, easily big enough for a half-dozen of those circular tables with chairs all around them.

  There were no chairs in evidence, however. Two rows of lockers lined the right side, each with a name scrawled on a piece of white paper sticking into a metal slot at the top. Little Jack, Raymond, Josh, Bart, and the other soldiers went to their assigned lockers. Each had a small combination lock consisting of five thumbwheels embossed with numbers from 0 to 9. Inside were one of those fancy communication helmets and the odd barrel over barrel rifles I remembered from the carnival.

  The left side of the room held lockers of a different sort. Easily three times as wide as the standard lockers, each of these four featured a door that looked like it could withstand a direct blast from a rocket launcher. After retrieving his rifle and helmet, Little Jack approached the leftmost of the giant units and entered a complicated combination of numbers on a small keypad that looked like a touch-tone telephone number pad. The lock clicked and the door swung open. Inside were small sliding drawers, like a dresser or a fancy standing toolbox, except there were a dozen of them, none more than a couple of inches in height. Jack pulled one out and scanned the contents. Not seeing what he wanted, he pushed it back in and pulled out a second.

  I wasn’t close enough to see into the drawers—though God knows I wanted to—but I saw what he pulled out of the second drawer. It was a hand grenade, complete with pull ring. But it was shaped oddly. Rather than one of the smooth green balls, or the classic pinecone, this was a white cylinder about as big around as a “D” battery and maybe twice as long.

  “Ooh, one of mine,” Danielle said, also watching the broad-shouldered soldier.

  “Yup, a Danielle special,” he affirmed. “Ray? Bart? Catch!”

  Everyone watching winced as he tossed first one, then another, of the “Danielle Specials.”

  “It’s what happens when I use the Distiller,” the stocky brunette said. “It makes grenades that let out something like a recorded version of my “no Manifest” noise. Keeps on making the noise for about fifteen minutes.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t throw these,” Jack said, reaching back into the drawer and producing two more hand-held explosives, though these looked like a classic stick of dynamite. They had the same orange color and the same diameter but were a little shorter. A pull ring sat on one end, like someone had taken the wick and rounded it.

  “My precious babies,”
the younger redheaded guy said. He looked over at me. “I don’t think we got introduced last night. I’m Scott. Scott Russell. I can make balls of light that blow up when I want them to. Those little babies are like concentrated versions though. Each one packs a punch ten times greater than C-4, if you can believe it.”

  “I can,” I said, shaking his hand. For all his apparent youth, he spoke with a firm, confidant voice. “I’m John Wilson, in case you didn’t hear it last night.”

  He waved that away. “It doesn’t matter. Last night or today. All anyone’s been talking about is what you did down in the dungeon last night. That was a hell of a thing to see. Prettier lights than when I blew up my bedroom by accident Monday night.”

  Scott had a rapid-fire way of talking. Not like Jason, who did everything quickly, but more pressured, like a kid who grew up in a house where silence is a virtue, speak when spoken to, that sort of thing. Now that he was in a place where he could talk, he wanted to get everything out before someone told him to be quiet.

  “That’s how I ended up here. My parents thought I was doing drugs and made something explode because my crack pipe or something got too hot. So, I took them outside and made this tiny little ball, about the size of an M-80, and set it under the trash can. Man, that aluminum bucket made a hell of a racket when my bomb shot it up into the air, and almost as much when it came back to earth. That’s when they called the hotline number.”

  “Do they know what we’re doing here?” I asked.

  “Hell no! They think this is some kind of rehab facility. Learn to live with your ability, like Charles Xavier and the X-Men. My dad’s kind of a comic book geek so who knows? Maybe he thinks I’m wearing spandex and running around saving the world. But my mom? No way. She’d stroke if she knew we’re dealing with end of the world stuff.”