The Black (The Black Trilogy Book 1)

by J. M. Scarlett

  Karma climbed the metal stairwell deep in thought, wondering the same thing. She had gone through it in her mind a million times. The junk run, Talon and his squad, was it the outsider they were looking for?

  “I doubt it,” she said, though secretly she hoped she was wrong. If the outsider was from another silo, then maybe he’d be able to shed some light on why he was in that tank. She looked down at the bruises on her wrist, peeking out of her sleeve and covered them. She didn’t tell Varra about what happened. She didn’t tell anyone.

  “Who could he be, I wonder?” Varra said, huffing and puffing behind Karma. She was so used to taking the elevators that the stairs stole the breath right out of her. “Where do you think he came from? Where are his parents?”

  Karma said nothing. After they returned from the junk run, Malik was quite clear that she was to tell no one about the details regarding the outsider. A survivor found in the Dead Lands, was all they needed to know. And as much as it killed her to keep the juicy details from her best friend, she had no choice. For one, Varra would never be able to keep it a secret for long, and two, there was no telling how far Malik would go if she spilled the beans. It had been years since anyone had been banished and she wasn’t willing to be the next.

  All she wanted was for things to return to normal, go back to work, forget about the outsider and the tank and the nightmares that came with it. But no matter where she went, she couldn’t seem to escape the drama—

  Upon entering the med ward, they found the entire nursing staff huddled in front of one of the rooms, cursing and shoving and pawing at one another, climbing over each other to get a better look inside.

  “Would you look at this,” said Varra. “What in blue blazes has gotten into them?”

  Karma shook her head. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know but asked anyway.

  "Get in line and wait your turn!" a grumpy nurse spat over her shoulder, followed by a handful of expletives.

  "It's him!” someone else shouted from beneath the flock. “It's the outsider! He’s so cute!"

  “Did you say cute?” Varra prated. “Get out of the way! Let me see—"

  "Alright, alright," came a husky voice bellowing from behind. "That's enough, girls! This isn't a circus, it's a medical center for crying out loud!”

  Nurse Bertha, one of the oldest nurses on staff, barreled her way through. She was an ox of a woman with arms thicker than her legs and the face of a walrus, whiskers and all.

  “Back to work, all of you!” she barked. “Let’s move it. No sulking, either. You too, Wagner. He’s way too young for you anyway—"

  All the women groaned and scurried back to their duties, scattering like rats. Karma tried to steal a glance inside the room, but Nurse Bertha shut the door before she could make out anything other than a hard body beneath a solid white sheet.

  "You'd think they’ve never seen a man before," Nurse Bertha said, shaking her head. "I'll have to post a watchman at the door just to keep the cougars away."

  “I’m surprised he’s here,” said Varra. Her and Karma were the only two that remained. “Shouldn’t he be on level fourteen with the watchmen, under surveillance or something?”

  Nurse Bertha said, “The boy’s a bloody vegetable, Dotson.” She had a habit of calling people by their last names, sounding more like a watchman than a nurse. “What would the watchmen do with him other than use him for target practice?”

  Karma scanned the wing. “Where’s Doc?” she asked.

  “Not feeling good today, I imagine,” Nurse Bertha said. “She didn’t show up this morning and hasn’t been answering any of her calls. Poor thing must be exhausted. Last I heard she was up all night with the outsider.”

  Karma couldn’t remember the last time Dr Carter took a day off. It had to be years. She spent so much time at the med ward that she practically lived there, even when she was ill. But Nurse Bertha had a point. Ever since they returned from the junk run, she hadn’t been around, and word around the campfire was that Arlington had been in and out of the med ward since the outsider’s arrival, demanding all of her time and efforts into figuring out what little information she could discover regarding their precious, rare find.

  “Do me a favor, Harper?” Nurse Bertha whipped out a fistful of pink slips. “I got a bunch of messages for Dr Carter and I need you to run them down to her. Arlington’s been calling for her all morning. I’d do it myself, but I can’t leave the outsider, not with this lot.”

  “I can watch him for you,” Varra offered.

  “And send the lamb into the lion’s den?” Bertha huffed. “I think not, Dotson. I got plenty of work and not enough staff today. You can start off by handing out the trays. They’ve been sitting in that darn food truck for ten minutes now.”

  Now that she mentioned it, Karma noticed the med ward did seem to be a bit chaotic: The waiting room was packed, the patients complaining, the nurses, few and far in between, interested more in the outsider than their job.

  “Personally, I think it’s a waste of time,” the nurse recanted. “Our sleeping beauty may never wake up but try telling Arlington that. Now get off, you two. We got a busy day ahead of us and that’s enough chat for now.”

  During her way down to the residential levels, Karma flipped through the messages. They were all the same: Call me, ASAP . . . Where are you? . . . Any update as of yet? . . . I won’t be ignored. Nurse Bertha wasn’t kidding. Arlington called just about every thirty minutes, looking for her, leaving one nasty message after the other. No wonder Dr Carter was ignoring him.

  She stepped off the elevator and found Dr Carter’s bunker at the end of the hallway of level three. She felt guilty ringing the doorbell but knew if there was anybody Dr Carter would be happy to see, sick or not, it would be her. Besides, she was sure her mentor had tons of questions for her regarding the junk run. Everyone else did.

  She smoothed out the messages, her palms sweaty, and rang the doorbell again. “Doc, it’s me,” she said into the intercom, and waited for a response.

  There was none.

  She pressed the button again. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I have some messages for you.”

  Nothing, still. Maybe Dr Carter was sick. After a moment, she struck the button for the fourth time. “Dr Carter,” she said. “Are you alright? Do you need anything from the ward? Can I get you anything?”

  Silence.

  Either Dr Carter was ignoring her, or she was sleeping. She thought about slipping the messages under the door—almost did—until she noticed there was a crack in it. The door was open. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? There was no sound coming from inside, no light. Carefully, she pushed it open wider.

  “Doc?” she called out, stepping inside a cave of darkness.

  All the bunkers were the same and it wasn’t hard for her to find the light switch on the wall. She flicked it on and gasped. The room was a dump, everything in shambles: Shredded books and broken glass littered the floor. There were gashes in the furniture, stuffing hanging out of their wounds like intestines, and holes in the walls. From the looks of it, there were blood stains, too, all over the place, even on the ceiling.

  “Jesus . . .” she uttered.

  She’d never seen such a mess, not even in her brother’s bedroom, which was always in disarray. Her initial reaction was shock, then it was fear. From room to room she went, calling out for Doc, but she was nowhere to be found.

  Something was wrong. She knew it right away.

  Brrring. Brrring. Karma jumped at the sound. It was coming from the other room. The phone was ringing from the floor, tangled in a mess of clothes. Slowly, she bent down and picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  Arlington’s voice boomed in her ear. “Who is this? Where’s Dr Carter? This is nonsense! I want to speak to her. Do you hear me? Where is she?”

  What a good question, thought Karma.

  Where was Dr Carter?

  Chapter Twelve

  “What
do you mean you can’t find her?” Arlington’s voice blasted through the med ward, ringing off the walls. Bertha stood there, looking ridiculously uncomfortable outside the north wing where a dozen nurses stood. He arrived no more than five minutes after Karma’s return, ranting and raving, demanding to speak to Dr Carter.

  “I told you,” said Nurse Bertha, crossing her thick arms over her chest. “She’s gone.”

  Arlington threw his hands up, causing a scene. “How is that possible? It’s a silo, not a maze! People just don’t . . . disappear!”

  Nurse Bertha pursed her lips, prickling her mustache. “Your guess is better than mine, sir. The last anyone’s seen of her is with the outsider.”

  His eyes narrowed. “The outsider, where is he?”

  “He’s safe,” she said smugly. “I had him moved to the back room, away from the other patients.”

  “I want her found,” Arlington seethed and stepped in closer. “And if you can’t do it, then I’ll find someone who can.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nurse Bertha murmured and watched as he stormed away. Once he was gone, she grumbled to the others. “Party’s over everyone. You heard what the man said, let’s start looking—”

  “Nurse Bertha!” came a shout. “Nurse Bertha come quick!” One of the orderlies came rushing down the hallway, red faced and panting. “I found something. You better come take a look.”

  Not only Nurse Bertha, but just about every nurse in the med ward followed the orderly into an empty patient’s room, a few doors down from Dr Carter’s office. Unlike the doctor’s bunker, the room was intact, nothing appeared to be amiss, other than one—glops of dark brown gunk covered the floor.

  “I heard the shower running,” said the orderly. “I came in to check it out, and this is what I found.”

  Nurse Bertha snagged a pen out of the orderly’s front pocket and used it to pick up the soppy muck. Karma squeezed her way to the front, stealing a peek at the spongy mass hanging from the end of the pen.

  “It looks like a dead rat,” someone said.

  “Or a tarantula,” said another.

  “It’s hair,” Bertha muttered, standing to her feet, her face creased with worry. She turned to the orderly. “You see anyone come in or out of this room?”

  He shook his head. “No ma’am. No one.”

  The wrinkles around her eyes deepened. “I want an entire search of the med ward, every room, every crevice checked. And if you find any more of these,” she raised the glop of hair, “notify me immediately. If Dr Carter’s here, we better find her. Quickly. And no one say a word to Arlington. Not until we know what happened to her.”

  Every nurse, every trainee was called upon, and the rest of the day was spent searching for Dr Carter, but despite their efforts, she was nowhere to be found. Everyone was stumped, especially Karma. This wasn’t like Dr Carter. Not only was it out of her character to disappear without a word, but where could she have gone? She had to be somewhere inside the silo, but where? And why? Why would she be hiding from them? Hopefully, they would find the answers sooner rather than later, but by the next morning, Dr Carter still wasn’t found, and it was more than the med ward that was beginning to worry about her.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Karma’s mother as they sat down for breakfast the following morning. “Where could Dr Carter have gone off to? I hope something terrible didn’t happen to her like your father.”

  Karma couldn’t eat and swirled her spoon in her porridge, creating a whirlpool of oats. “They already checked the stairwell,” she said. It was one of the first places they checked after she didn’t show up anywhere in the ward, assuming she may have jumped, but thankfully, she wasn’t at the bottom of the stairwell, broken in a hundred places.

  “The only other possibility I can think of is someone’s hiding her,” Karma said, stabbing the oats with her spoon.

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” said Ben. He sat there quietly and, just like Karma, hadn’t touched his breakfast. “Maybe there’s a reason she’s hiding.”

  Karma didn’t say it, but that was exactly what she was afraid of. If Dr Carter was hiding, then there had to be a good reason for it. After breakfast, Karma brushed her teeth and readied for work. Just as she was slipping on her shoes, there was a knock on her door.

  For some reason, she wasn’t surprised to see his face.

  “Come to yell at me some more,” she said as Ben stepped inside her bedroom.

  He raised his hands defensively. “I come in peace, just wanna talk.” He flopped on her bed, his skinny bottom bouncing off the mattress like a rubber band. “Look, I’m sorry about the other day. I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. It’s not your fault. I just . . . I don’t know. I took it personal and I shouldn’t have and I’m sorry. I was being a total jerk. Forgive me?”

  Karma finished tying her shoelace and looked at him. “Why did you get so mad that I went on the junk run?”

  He shrugged. “You wouldn’t get it.”

  She was tired of him saying that. “Try me.”

  He propped his feet on the edge of the bed and hugged his knees. “I miss him,” he said, resting his chin on his knees. She didn’t need to ask who. Though it had been years since their father’s death, it still hurt as though it were yesterday.

  “We all do,” she started to say.

  “No,” he retracted. “I mean I really, really miss him. When Dad died, I not only lost my father, I lost my best friend. I don’t have anyone now. Not anymore.”

  It creeped her out how eerily similar he sounded like her grandfather. “That’s not true,” she said. “You’re not alone, Ben. There are people that care about you.”

  He made a face. “Name one.”

  “Me and Mom,” she declared diligently.

  “That’s reassuring,” he mumbled.

  “And Varra,” she quickly added.

  “Varra’s your friend, not mine.”

  Okay, so he had a point, but he was missing hers. Ben wasn’t alone. He was loved, more than he knew, or was willing to admit. But she couldn’t deny the dark cloud lingering over his head these past few years. Ever since their father’s death, he had become withdrawn and closed off, cold at times, even shallow. When they were little kids, he used to tell her everything, but now, he barely opened up. In fact, this was the first time they were talking about what happened to their father.

  “I hate him for what he did,” said Ben. “How could he leave us like this? And for what? For what purpose? So Pops could go crazy? So Mom could cry herself to sleep every night? So I could . . .” he trailed off.

  After a moment, he said, “You want to know why I got so mad about the junk run? Since we were little, you were always the golden child; smart, friendly, everyone loved you. They all knew you would grow up to be something special one day. Then when you got involved with Dr Carter and the med ward, Mom and Dad were so proud of you. I’d never seen them so happy. I mean, look at you! They named you after Grandma for godsakes. But me, who was I named after? You can’t get any more basic than Ben.”

  She stifled a laugh.

  “It’s not funny,” he said.

  “You’re right, it’s not,” she contested. “But it has nothing to do with a name, Ben. Pops, Dad, Mom, me, we all love you. You’re a part of this family. We’re Crazy Old Man Arthur’s grandchildren for crying out loud!”

  They both laughed, giggling like they had when they were children. It felt good. He pulled himself off the bed and said, “Anyway, I just wanted to apologize for the other day. I shouldn’t have come at you like that.”

  Ben lingered by the door like there was something else he wanted to say but couldn’t. She wondered if it had to do with the journal, but truthfully, she no longer cared. As far as she was concerned, the journal was the farthest thing from her mind. Though, there was something she couldn’t quite shake. Ben saw no significance to his name, but she did. Ben. Benton. Could there be another connection, one he couldn’t see? After Ben’s h
eartfelt apology, she finished getting ready and headed up to the med ward. She took the elevator this time, praying that Doc would be waiting in her office, but when she arrived, she was greeted by the same old, solemn faces she had left the day before.

  “Nothing,” Varra advised her, lingering around the front desk. “I’m sure Doc will eventually show up though. She has to.”

  “What about the evacuation chambers?” asked Karma.

  The evacuation chambers were situated on the fifteenth level—along with the Vault, another bomb shelter within the silo itself—and it was the only way out.

  “Not likely,” Varra told her. “My dad says none of the chambers have been accessed since the junk run.”

  Karma took her word for it. If anyone would know it would be Varra’s father, who worked up on level fifteen as an engineer.

  Varra asked her again about the way she found the doctor’s bunker. “Do you think someone could have hurt her?” she asked. “Done something bad to her?”

  Varra wouldn’t be the first to suggest it. Her mother had pondered the same thing. They all had.

  “I don’t know. I hope not,” was the only answer she could muster.

  For the rest of the morning, it was quiet. The entire mood of the med ward had been affected by Dr Carter’s disappearance. Not even Nurse Bertha was her usual grumpy self. On several occasions Karma caught her sobbing quietly behind closed doors. She was just as worried as the rest of them. As for the outsider, he remained tucked away in the back of the ward, no clue to when he would awaken, if he ever did, that is. Arlington stopped by to check up on him every now and then and inquire about the doctor. It was as though she vanished out of thin air. Even the watchmen, who searched every level, couldn’t seem to locate her. But as the silo debated on what could have happened to the good doctor, drawing conclusions like fairy tales, one conspiracy after another, Karma came to one of her own: Only one thing had changed since Dr Carter’s disappearance and that was the outsider’s arrival. The idea had slipped into her semi-consciousness the minute she found Dr Carter’s bunker torn to shreds. She mentioned it to Varra, but the only support she got came in the form of laughter. “How could someone in a coma kidnap someone?” had been her response. Karma had no answer for her. She questioned it herself and the only explanation she could think of was: What if he wasn’t comatose at all? What if he was pretending? Faking?