Tears stream from the child’s eyes as the dog begins to convulse, its eyes rolling in the back of its head—
A woman with black hair watches from an observation room. Her mouth is moving, but no words come out, silenced by the glass wall that separates them. Men are with her, dressed in green, masked in camouflage.
Mother, the child whimpers.
There is no emotion on her face, nothing at all as the dog seizures, crying in pain beneath its restraints. The child closes his eyes, unable to watch. When he opens them, the dog is dead, its tongue hanging from its mouth like a melted piece of rubber.
The child looks up at Mother: Hands are shaken, words of congratulations are given. The men in green are happy with the results. He can read their smiles as they appraise her. And then he is alone. Mother disappears, leading the men in green out of the room. Silence follows, then darkness as the light is shut off.
He waits, but no one comes for him.
Then suddenly, the dead dog moves; first, its paws twitch, then its head. The child watches in horror as its fur begins to fall off, floating to the ground like leaves from a dead tree, its body turning black. Sweat beads roll down the side of his face, mingling with the tears pouring from his eyes as it begins convulsing. He closes them, squeezing them shut as a venomous howl rips through the silent air—
“MOTHER . . .”
Karma woke up screaming, her heart racing from the dream.
“It’s okay, Karma! You’re safe now,” her mother exclaimed, rushing to her side—The underground laboratory was gone, replaced by a hospital bed, bright lights, and familiar faces. She was back at the med ward.
Her mother grabbed her hand and pressed it to her lips. She looked like she hadn’t slept for days. Ben stood beside her, looking just as concerned. Malik was there, too. Even he looked a little relieved when she opened her eyes.
“What happened?” was the first thing out of her mouth.
It was Malik who answered. “You pulled the number one rookie rule of the year, kiddo. Never take off your drifter suit in the Dead World. You’re lucky you weren’t infected.”
Her mother shot him a look. “It’s not her fault. She should’ve never been there to begin with—”
“Your daughter’s a good woman,” Malik said to her surprise. “She risked her life to save someone else’s. It’s more than what I can say for most people.”
“My daughter isn’t most people,” her mother scolded. She let go of Karma’s hand, long enough so she could stand her full five-foot and four-inch self and face him. “She’s sixteen, too young to go off on a junk run, and you know it.”
“Mom,” Ben said, trying to pull her away—a group of nurses and orderlies gathered by the door, eavesdropping—but her mother ripped her arm out of his grasp.
“It’s alright,” said Malik. “Your mother’s right. She is too young, but we didn’t have a choice. You know the rules; no squad leaves the Nest without a medic. It’s been years, decades since we’ve ventured out there. We had to play it safe—”
“By sending a sixteen-year-old girl?” her mother shrieked incredulously. “There are people twice her age with twice her experience that you could’ve picked!”
Malik’s jaw hardened. “I don’t expect you to understand this, not unless you’ve ever been out on a battlefield, Mrs. Harper, but I’d rather put the lives of my men in the hands of an ambitious sixteen-year-old girl, then a nurse who’s too chicken to step out of her own shoes and into a drifter suit.”
The nurses and orderlies by the door, slinked away, red-faced and embarrassed. They knew exactly what Malik was talking about. They were there when he came to the med ward looking for a medic, and not one of them had stepped forward.
“Don’t give me that garbage,” her mother spat. “She’s lucky she didn’t get killed—"
“Your daughter wasn’t lucky,” Malik said. “I knew she would be safe. If I thought otherwise, I would have never sent her.”
“You shouldn’t have sent her regardless,” her mother groused.
Malik raised an eyebrow. “If you feel that strongly about it, Mrs. Harper, then I suggest next time your daughter doesn’t volunteer.”
Her mother gave her a look. Jax must’ve kept his word and didn’t tell Ben about her volunteering for the junk run, otherwise, her mother would have already known about it. It was too much to take in. Her head was still ringing, clouded with memories, tormented by the dream: The underground lab, the tank, the young man inside of it—and all these two could do was bicker back and forth—
“Stop it,” Karma uttered. “Just stop fighting. Please . . .” She looked down at her arm. Four bruises marked her wrist in the shape of fingers. “The boy,” she said. “We found someone trapped inside a tank . . .”
“I wouldn’t worry about him,” Malik announced with a bitter shake of his head. “He’s not in good condition. He’s been unconscious since they brought him back.”
Karma looked at him. “They brought him here, to the Nest?”
“They had no choice,” Malik said. “Arlington’s orders. But like I said, there’s nothing to worry about. The boy’s a bloody vegetable.”
Karma’s mother went from angry to concerned. “What did Dr Carter say?” She spit out the question before Karma could.
“Funny you should ask,” said Malik. “She’s with the outsider as we speak.”
* * *
“Amazing . . .” A pair of microscopic goggles covered Dr Carter’s eyes, magnifying them twice—thrice the size of normal. “He’s utterly amazing!”
A single surgical lamp filled the dark space, illuminating the outsider stretched out on a metal slab. Though his body was warmer than when he first arrived, a light blue hue to his skin remained.
With her four-fingered hand, Dr Carter lifted one eyelid, then the other, shining a mini flashlight in each one.
“Where did you find him?” she marveled.
Arlington stood beside her, close but far enough to give her space. “I told you,” he said. “My men found him on the junk run. He was unconscious when they found him.”
Dr Carter gave him a look, her caddy expression amplified behind the thick goggles that covered her face. “Why do I sense you’re not telling me everything?”
Arlington grimaced. It wasn’t far from the truth.
She took off her goggles and moved to his heart, listening to his heartbeat with her stethoscope. “First junk run in how many years?” she commented dryly. “And then this? I assume next you’ll tell me it was a coincidence.”
He didn’t answer, didn’t need to. And she knew it.
His next words were cut and dry. “What can you tell me about him?” he said.
She hung the stethoscope around her neck and took a deep breath. “Other than the fact that he’s completely healthy and appears perfectly intact, what can I say? He’s in perfect condition, more than perfect, actually. Based on his graphs, his brain activity is quite extraordinary, especially for someone who’s comatose. There’s no sign of any disease or broken bones or past trauma, either. None that I can tell.”
Again, she asked, “Where did you find him, Arie?”
And again, he didn’t answer.
A letter, he fabricated the answer in his mind. It was the address on the letter that led him to the outsider, but who would believe him? When he got the call from Talon, he hardly believed it himself. The only question that remained is, who was he? And what was his connection to Operation Blackout? It couldn’t be one of Albrecht’s experiments, the children had died in the explosion, the one—according to Benton’s journal—he had caused. Perhaps he was a scientist or from another silo or one of Harper’s—Benton’s, whoever’s—goons, it was hard to say, and until he was awake, they were questions that would have to wait.
“There is one thing, something strange I discovered about our John Doe,” Dr Carter mentioned, peeling off her plastic gloves. She tossed them in the waste hazard bin. “His blood results came back i
nconclusive. Let’s pray he never needs a blood transfusion.”
They stood over the outsider, talking over him as though he were a table.
“What do you mean inconclusive?” said Arlington.
“Typically, there are eight possible blood types,” she explained, counting them off on her fingers. “All ranging from AB positive to zero. Most people are positive, but the outsider isn’t any of them.”
His brows, as heavy as storm clouds, furrowed. “What are you saying, doctor?”
“What I’m saying,” she elaborated, speaking slowly, “is that his blood type is unknown. It’s not in the system. It’s not in any of the medical references, either. Believe me, I checked them all. It’s as though it doesn’t exist.” She peered down at the young man sleeping soundly on the slab. “Whatever’s flowing through this young man’s veins is unidentified.”
Unknown. Doesn’t exist. Unidentified. The words sunk in his brain like cement and stayed there. The young man was special somehow, he could feel it, he just didn’t know how or why. And there was no way he was reporting this to the Supreme Commander of Silo Zero, not until he knew for sure.
“Can you find more about him?” he asked, his eyes searching the young man’s face for any sign of recognition. There was none. It was almost as though the young man had fallen from the sky, a fallen angel from the heavens above. He certainly looked the part. Even an old man such as himself could tell the outsider was a handsome lad.
Dr Carter slipped on her glasses and regarded him. “Exactly, what is it that you want me to find, Arie? What are you looking for?”
Arlington pulled his wary eyes away from the outsider and fixed them on the graphs clipped to the board on the wall: Diagrams, x-rays, blood analysis, medical charts. They were all pinned there and yet none of them had the answers he was looking for.
Who was he?
Could it be a descendant from Benton, he wondered? He thought about the letter, the General’s ominous goodbye, “I always win. See you on the other side . . .” I always win. It was those words that had intrigued him, and those words that planted the seed in his head. The General had something of Benton’s. Something personal. He turned back to the outsider, a flawless mirage from the Dead World, and pondered if this young man was the very thing the General was referring to, but if he was, Arthur was long dead now, and the only one who could answer it was as unresponsive as a dead rat.
He left Dr Carter with one simple order: Keep testing, keep probing, keep doing whatever it was she had to do to find out what secrets the outsider was hiding. In which she responded, “I’m a doctor, Arie, not a magician.”
But if Dr Carter was to unravel the mystery of the outsider by a few measly blood tests and a physical exam, then the patriarch of the Nest didn’t need a doctor or a magician. He needed a miracle. Still, she worked through the night, trying to decipher his genetic code like an old woman trying to piece together a puzzle. Her first reaction to his blood type was that he was infected, but according to their database, his results indicated no abnormalities. There was only one thing she could think of: He was an alien, some species from out of space.
As she switched back and forth between the microscope and x-rays, the outsider slept on the metal slab with nothing more than a white sheet covering half his body. He was truly remarkable, she couldn’t stop thinking every time she laid her eyes on his beautifully sculpted body. Imprisoned in the ice, nameless, parentless, as naked as the day he was brought into the world, whether it was on this planet or another. She couldn’t deny it; she was intrigued.
To keep from falling asleep, she overdosed on mud coffee and set the lights to bright. She doubted the outsider, as dead as a dummy, would mind. Hour by hour, one blood sample after the next, she studied them, counted the cells, separated them into plasma, and made her notes, and came to the same conclusion every time—she needed more samples, more time, more mud coffee.
She reached for her mug and missed her mark, knocking it over and spilling cold mud coffee all over the desk—
“Darn it!” she squealed, rushing to clean it up. By the time she returned with some towels, the coffee had already ruined her work, staining the petri dish that contained the outsider’s blood sample.
“Unbelievable,” she muttered, cursing herself for being such a klutz. She went to the refrigerator to pull the next blood sample and found the shelf empty. Had she already gone through them all? She was tired. Grabbing a fresh needle out of the drawer, she slipped on a fresh pair of plastic gloves and approached the outsider. A machine monitoring his heartbeat chirped beside him like a bird, his eyelids fluttered slightly but remained closed; his lips slightly parted.
He truly was a miracle, she thought. Frozen for how many years? Preserved perfectly as the ice altered his growth, slowing it down like a time capsule. Though Arlington denied knowing anything about him, she knew it was a lie. He knew something, he just wasn’t telling her.
Pushing it from her mind, she found his vein above the crease of his elbow and stuck him with the needle. She had done it a million times before, so many times that it came second nature to her, but this time, his arm jerked and the needle tore from his flesh like a hook being ripped out of a fish’s mouth, spraying blood not only across the floor, but all over her as well, including her face. It flicked across her cheeks and lips like wet paint. She rushed over to the sink and wrenched the nozzle, turning on the water, but it wasn’t good enough. She ditched the sink and jumped into the shower in one of the med ward’s empty rooms, rinsing away the blood.
The water never felt so good. She stood there for several minutes, soaking up the steam, letting the warm water hit her face and smoothed back her hair—something caught in her fingers, entangled around her nails. She pulled her hand back and looked down at a clump of hair.
Her hair.
“What in the world . . .” she murmured beneath her breath.
She ran her hands through her hair again. More clumps fell out. She jumped out of the stall and ran to the mirror, leaving puddles all over the floor. The glass was fogged over, clouded with steam and droplets of mist. She wiped a hand across it and stared at her reflection. She looked no different, maybe a little pale around the eyes, but no different than when she woke up that morning—
Slowly, she leaned in and parted her hair. A bald spot stared back at her, spotted with blood where the roots had been. It wasn’t large, maybe the size of a strawberry, but it was there, and it was black, gleaming at her like an evil eye from the pits of hell.
Her heart raced, thumping like a drum in her chest. She stumbled back and felt something soggy beneath her toes; she almost slipped on it. It was her hair, a huge wad of it curled up like an enormous spider.
The entire floor was covered in them—
No one was awake to hear her scream. The whole Nest was asleep, tucked in their beds, her cries swallowed by the thick, steel walls of the silo. And the one person who was, the only person who was awake at that hour, was much too far away to heed the wails of the tormented doctor.
Back in his quarters, Arlington paced his office, drink after drink, losing his mind, picking up the radio and hanging it up at the last dial. The Supreme Commander of Silo Zero would want to know about this, he knew. She would want to know about the journal, the letter, and the outsider, but what would he say? Why didn’t he report this to her sooner? It would be her first question, her first demand—why wasn’t I informed?
So instead, he curled up in bed, hiding beneath the covers like a child with a flashlight. He had the journal in his lap, flipping through its pages, skimming through the words. The answer was there, it was there, he knew, hidden in the pages of Benton’s journal. The experiment, the twins, had all been destroyed in the lab, and all the scientists who would have been a part of the project would either be old and decrepit or long dead by now . . .
So, who was the boy?
He noticed a few of the pages were missing and wondered if the answer was somewhere lost
on them, wherever they were.
Tell me, Benton. Tell me who he is to you.
The journal was like a dead weight in his lap, reeking of time and grease from a bully’s unwashed hands. His fingers danced over the pages and stopped at the sight of Albrecht’s name. He had become fascinated with the German enthusiast just as Benton had been. Smart and beautiful by the way he described her, and wittingly deadly. Just like his kind of woman, he bantered playfully in his mind, when he was still young enough to love, that is. Or maybe it was the past that captivated him, reading through the torn pages of a lost ledger, written by a hero turned rebel. Either way, he couldn’t put down the book, not since he had stolen it from the gangly paws of Ben Harper. Well, not stolen, more like persuaded.
His eyes felt heavy, but he continued to read anyway. He propped the journal against his pillow and let the words carry him off to another world, another time . . .
Chapter Ten
ONE MONTH BEFORE THE OUTBREAK . . .
“Captain Benton!” Corvine’s voice cut across the gym. Benton was on the treadmill, five miles in, sweat pouring from his chiseled face. He wasn’t like most soldiers who preferred weights over endurance. He learned in the Middle East muscles got you nowhere. It was how long you could stand on your feet that mattered.
Dr Corvine approached in his lab coat and glasses, cradling a clipboard. He wasn’t there to work out, he was there on business.
“Hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said as Benton turned off the treadmill and dried his face off with a towel. He was soaking wet. “But it’s Dr Albrecht. She needs to see you as soon as possible.”
Benton didn’t have time to shower. He quickly got dressed and met Dr Albrecht in her office. Her black hair was neatly trimmed around her face, her skin like porcelain. She wore tan slacks and a white collared shirt beneath her lab coat. His bottom barely touched the seat when she pulled out a stack of letters and plopped them in front of him. They scattered across her desk like a flimsy deck of cards.
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