The Breeders

by Matthew J. Beier

  Dex grappled at his mental strings to understand the scope of it all. If this woman was to be believed, the resistance effort was not only worldwide but also oiled so well that it was thriving right under the New Rainbow Order’s nose.

  “And Diana knew about all this?” he asked.

  “She didn’t know a thing until she got pregnant and we found her. The TruthChips Bozarth planted in his girls after 2359 were equipped with wireless biological activation devices. When a woman became pregnant, the chip would read it in her blood and alert whoever might be watching. You and I were too old to have them, Grace, so nobody could track us down. Thank the stars you were lucky.”

  “You mean they were breaking the Spatial Privacy Act by making chips traceable?” Dex asked. “Do you think the NRO has been doing that too?”

  “I can’t say. I wouldn’t be surprised, but I doubt it’s the case with any of the older chips. You can easily run tests to figure it out either way, but of course they all operate on particular frequencies, and there are a billion different frequencies, so identifying one for any given chip can be difficult. Bozarth passed his custom tracking system down to the right hands, which is why we even have access to it today.”

  “Lovely.”

  “In a matter of speaking,” Sheila said. “In any case, the Opposition is already starting the underground evacuation before the NRO reaches a point of martial law, which is why you both are here. As I said before, we’re scrambling.”

  One final doorway, this one air-locked but equipped with sheets of what Dex could only assume was bullet-proof glass, slid open before them. A heavy breeze of warm air washed over his face.

  “Welcome to the Opposition,” Sheila said.

  Stretching before them was a cave of technology that looked like a cross between a hospital and an office building. Glass cubicles, some empty and some occupied, lined the walls to the right. To the left, Dex saw men and women milling past rooms filled with wall and desk coms, each set to a different channel. In front of some sat people talking digital face to digital face, and on others were what appeared to be the everyday WorldCom newscasts. As Sheila led them along the main corridor, past the cubicles and com rooms, the walls on either side disappeared, only to be replaced by blue-curtained medical stations. Some of the curtains were open, showing off clean hospital tables, equipment sterilizers, ultrascopes, and desk coms. Each partition also held an assortment of physician’s materials: ultra-violet sterilization rods, cotton swabs, speculums, heartbeat monitors, and bottles of disinfectant. Other sections were closed, and Dex could hear voices behind the curtains. They sounded like women asking questions and male doctors responding.

  “You mean overseas?” one of the women said just before a man answered, “Yes, but you’ll be completely safe, I assure you. Now please, if you could sit back on the table for me . . .”

  Dex struggled to hear more, but Sheila grabbed his arm and pulled him forward. She stopped them at the last curtained medical partition on the right. Farther down, the facility stretched into a darker hallway that veered left, into some unknowable quarter. Dex turned to Grace and saw she was already watching him with an exhilarated expression. There was fear in it, of course, but it was clear Grace had bravery on her side. This was her future, and she seemed to have accepted it with open arms.

  She’s the one carrying our child, Dex thought. It’s more real for her. It always was.

  Now, he came face-to-face with his true nature.

  This has gone too far.

  He turned away from Grace, toward the air-sealed door now at the far end of the facility. It was his only way out.

  “Come on, Dex Wheelock,” Sheila said, apparently noticing he had stopped moving. “If you’re coming, you’re coming now. We’ve got to run Grace’s tests.”

  But there it was, crawling up his throat, reaching the back of his lips: weakness. In its tracks was self-loathing. “I . . . I don’t think I want to do this.”

  He was not even facing Grace, but he could feel her shrink behind him. A mother alone, left to fight the evils of the world and, possibly, die while society watched and laughed.

  “Dex?” Grace’s voice. Crushed, but not surprised?

  “I just don’t think I’m ready.”

  “Well, fuck ready,” Sheila said, suddenly irate. “You mean to tell me that you, a graying failsafe of almost forty with no visible meaning in his life, are going to crawl back to that hole of pathetic loneliness and, what, wait for your day to come? Wait for the NRO to just take you while you could be putting up a fight? Are you fucking serious?”

  Tears of shame crept into Dex’s eyes. He turned to Grace. “I honestly don’t think I have what it takes. I’m so sorry.”

  Grace’s expression told him more about himself than he ever wanted to know. She did not need words; her feelings were clear enough. She had hoped to see more strength in him, hoped he would have fought harder for their child.

  Sheila was already talking into her pocket com, summoning someone to escort Dex away. Grace took a step back, toward her new ally.

  “Go,” she told him. “Just go. Be safe, and good luck. I won’t try to contact you.”

  “Grace—”

  But Sheila had been quick. A forceful hand grabbed Dex’s shoulder. He turned to see a massive man staring down at him. Whatever muscle existed underneath his clothes had Dex’s out-massed by threefold. His hips were equipped with not just one but three guns, and the boots on his feet looked steel-toed, the type that could land a deadly kick.

  “Take him, Blitz,” Sheila said. “Keep him in the holding room until I get back and try to talk some sense into him. If I don’t come back, bring him downstairs. He’s a risk.”

  “Wait, what? Downstairs?” Dex asked, but the man pushed him forward, past Sheila and Grace. “Where are you taking me?” Dex demanded. “Grace, wait—wait!”

  “I hope you’ll get another chance,” he heard Sheila say as the monster named Blitz pushed him deeper into the bunker.

  CHAPTER 21 (HER)

  SHE HAD SENSED IT ALL ALONG, that underlying fear in Dex. He was both intelligent and simple, and these were traits that made stepping out of oneself very difficult. Father or not, Dex Wheelock had a life and personal experience to preserve. Grace understood this, but it did not stop anger, disappointment, and embarrassment from burning through her.

  Like a little boy, crawling back to the womb, where he’ll be safe, she thought.

  Only he wouldn’t be. Not in the New Rainbow Order’s world.

  When he disappeared around the corner, Sheila nudged her along, into the medical partition. The only place to sit was the poly-covered examination table, so Grace decided to stand against it.

  “I’ll go find Dr. Trojan,” Sheila said. Before Grace could respond, the scarecrow woman whisked the blue curtain closed. Grace was left with the sterile smell of the medical room and the noises filtering in from the outside: clicks and clanks from the other curtained rooms, WorldCom News, Twin Cities Com News, people laughing in hushed voices, and wheels of a push cart running along the cement floor, toward the darkened hallway Dex had disappeared into.

  Grace scrunched her hands into fists. Serves him right. It’ll be his loss not to see our baby be born.

  But the thought left her feeling stupid and alone.

  The curtain rings scraped open with a quick, jingly rip, and a square-jawed, middle-aged man in an unbuttoned white lab coat stepped in. He was wearing an ultrascope eyepiece and holding the accompanying wireless probe, much like the one her dad had used to test her. “Hi there. Grace Jarvis?” he said without waiting for a response. He adjusted the probe’s pulse controls. “I’m Dr. Trojan, but you can call me Ben. Let’s not pretend we’re not all here for the same reason, shall we?”

  “Are we?” Grace asked. A slight flightiness in Ben’s voice would have suggested the telltale if his Helovan shoes hadn’t already. He was a homosexual.

  “What? Because I’m a queen, you’re thinking I�
��m not on your side? Please, princess, we’re all in this together. I hate the NRO as much as anyone else in here, so let’s get something straight: not all fags are out to eradicate you breeders. In fact, my own father worked for Theodore Bozarth. I assume you know who—”

  “I know who he was, yes. I got that far.”

  “Well, good. Now, let me take a look at you.”

  Dr. Ben (as Grace suddenly felt the desire to call him) instructed her to unbutton her pants, pull them down below her waist, and lift up her shirt. He pulled the ultrascope’s glass viewing screen over his eyes, squeezed out a wide ring of cold jelly onto Grace’s abdomen, then pressed the probe into it and swirled. Grace watched Dr. Ben’s gaze focus on the screen being projected on the glass covering his eyes. He moved the scope around, presumably to view her insides at as many angles as possible.

  “Would you like to see the baby?”

  Grace’s breath almost stopped. It was something her dad had not taken the time to offer for fear of being caught. “Could I?”

  “Of course. Too early to tell at this point if it’s a boy or a girl, but you can definitely see the face and fingers and toes.” He slipped the eyepiece off his head and put it over Grace’s face. And there it was, there he or she was, focused with three-dimensional, lifelike precision on the electronic visor. “There, see the face?” Dr. Ben shifted the probe up and twisted it, and there it was, her child’s face.

  Incredible. A miracle.

  The tiny hands were already forming, held together up near its nose and minuscule eyes. There was a leg, a knee, a shin, a foot, and tiny little nubs for toes. The baby’s head still looked huge compared to the rest of the body, and Grace’s imagination twinkled at the thought of what thoughts that tiny brain might someday produce, if it would ever have the chance. Grace took a moment for herself to hope. This beautiful thing was her responsibility now, her gift to a darkening world. She looked closely at the ultrascope’s screen and saw ears on the baby’s head. Ears! At not even twelve weeks!

  Somehow, the baby’s miniscule hand curved into a fist. Grace gasped.

  Awe. She was in awe.

  “There, see? Is it moving? Looks healthy, from what I can tell without blood tests, even though Sheila said you had bleeding early on, like a lot of Bozarth’s other women,” Dr. Ben said. “You’ll get all the proper tests up at the Cliff House, but suffice it to say I’ll clear you for departure. We’re on a tight timeframe here. Oh, and the baby’s already kicking and swimming like crazy, but you won’t start feeling it for another month or two. It’ll happen when you least expect it.”

  Grace continued staring at her child, who was floating around in peace, oblivious to the dangers already threatening it. Seeing this new life up close, Grace realized how impossible it had been before for her to understand what pregnancy truly was, what it meant: the creation of a soul.

  My oh my, she thought. If only Dex had stuck around to see this. He would have stayed.

  “It’s lucky ultrascopes are so portable now,” Dr. Ben was saying. “This is an old model, obviously, but it used to be that ultrasounds ran off massive machines doctors had to wheel around their examination rooms. It would have been impossible to be incognito with prenatal screenings back then. You’re fortunate everything medical uses ultrascopes now, in a matter of speak—”

  A low rumble sounded from somewhere above them. The ultrascope’s visor, holding the image of Grace’s child, vibrated in front of her eyes.

  Then, from a distance, came the unmistakable wail of sonic guns.

  CHAPTER 22 (HIM)

  YOU PATHETIC FOOL. Look what you’ve become.

  Dex sat in Blitz’s holding room, which was actually nothing more than an office near the end of a long hallway, the dark one he had seen veering left beyond the main chamber as Sheila escorted them in. Judging by its size and the electrical outlet holes still in the brick wall, he guessed the room had once been a crowded studio living space of some sort, when this place had been a terror shelter during the Bio Wars. Just before Blitz shoved him into the room, Dex had noticed the blinking security lights of another airtight door even farther down the hallway. He could only assume it led out another exit. After ten minutes of silence, Dex addressed the immense bouncer.

  “Am I under some sort of Opposition arrest?”

  Blitz was standing with nonchalant posture by the door, chewing on sunflower seeds. “Well, sort of,” he said. “Only until we figure you for a coward and not some sort of mole. Dr. Trojan’ll debrief Ms. Willy on whether the woman you came with is actually pregnant, and then we’ll ask the necessary questions. If she ain’t got a baby in her, it looks like you both might be in some trouble. We don’t like to harm folks, but if someone gets in the way of our operation, there ain’t much we can do. Me? I’m guessing you’re just scared, like I was. I ran, too. My girl, they got her after that. Got the baby, too.”

  “She’s at the Sanctuary?”

  Blitz shrugged. “Don’t know. That would be a blessing. From what I’ve been hearing, though, they’ve been taking women to harvesting camps for the past year or so, where their eggs’ll be taken as needed, once they build the new engineering facilities. I think that’s what they did with my Stacy.”

  “How come they didn’t catch you?”

  “Like I said, I ran,” Blitz replied. “Just like you.”

  “I made the wrong choice.”

  Blitz leaned forward now, his lips stretching into an alarming grin. “But there’s something else to all this, man. I’m low on the totem pole here, so I don’t really know, but it’s got to do with the Sanctuary. The NRO ain’t taking women there no more, which means they sure wouldn’t be taking failsafes either. I’ve heard rumors that the Opposition—”

  Somewhere above them, a thundering boom shook the bunker.

  A detonation.

  The door, Dex thought.

  “What the fuck was that?” Blitz yelled, pulling a gun off his belt. It was the illegal kind with metal bullets, the type that could not distinguish between damage or death. Blitz spun his massive body around and pulled Dex toward his center of gravity. “Did you rat us out? Did you show them where we were?”

  “No!” Dex choked. “I have no idea who else was up there! I came with Fletch Novotny!”

  Suddenly, the shriek of an alarm echoed through the bunker.

  “Fletch Novotny, the little panty waste who fashions himself a terrorist?”

  What? Terrorist?

  “God, everyone he knows is under investigation by the police! He was planning to bomb an engineering facility before Sheila set him straight a few months ago, and his name got out! I thought Ms. Willy fucked him into line, but it looks like she fucked that too!”

  Dex’s mind raced, retraced every step of the day. It could not be a coincidence that the facility was being raided just minutes after he and Grace had arrived.

  Then came his answer: it was the man who had flashed him a glimpse of lustful eye contact in the bathroom hallway, the same one who had been stirring a martini at the Fallopian. He was an undercover fag, and they had led him straight to the Opposition.

  CHAPTER 23 (HER)

  “THAT’S A BREACH,” Dr. Ben said, carefully but swiftly pulling the ultrascope off Grace’s head. “We need to get you downstairs. Those are NRO weapons.” For a moment, Grace only stared at him without an aim in the world. It was her and Dex, it had to be. How else could the police have found the Opposition at the exact same time? But they had been careful going to the bar, purposefully eating dinner in a restaurant that had two exits, and leaving through the back. . . .

  “Ms. Jarvis, come on! We need to get you out!” Dr. Ben yelled. He was already dialing his com. A second later, he was speaking, looking anxiously toward the entrance. “Yes, Mr. Redmond. This is Minneapolis. We’ve had a breach. Eight women were scheduled for tonight with escort Sheila Anne Willy, TruthChip number 743-2934-82. I wanted to confirm, in case they can get out—”

  Sheila was just ru
nning up to Grace’s examination partition as the man drew back the blue curtain. Her words came out between gasps. “Something happened. They must have found Fletch upstairs. I tried to buzz Barry, but his com went straight to voice message!”

  “They might’ve found the rear entrance too,” Dr. Ben told Sheila, holding the com away from his mouth. “Christ, there are seven other women. Can you wait?”

  “Is it smart?”

  Dr. Ben shook his head. “You’re right. Go. I’ll lead them out. You take Ms. Jarvis here. You know how to get to the tunnels.” He glanced past Sheila, at the other women filtering out of their respective partitions. “Look, there’re three more now. I’ll tell them to follow you!” He ran, yelling into his com again, leaving Sheila and Grace amid the clamor of panicking dissenters.

  “Come on,” Sheila said, grabbing Grace’s wrist. The woman pulled her down a hallway she had not noticed when they first entered the medical chamber. It was lit but empty, and closed metal doors sailed past as they ran. Suddenly, footsteps sounded to their right. Grace looked up. It was a stairway, filled with more people moving down from some higher floor—Opposition members who all seemed to be yelling at each other, as if such panic could somehow save them. They continued down the stairway, past Grace’s floor, into darkness.

  “We have to find Dex!” Grace screamed over the clamor. “I can’t leave him!”

  “He left you!” Sheila yelled back. “We have to get out! He should have stayed with you!”

  “But he’s my baby’s father!”