The Breeders

by Matthew J. Beier

  Then, another explosion shook the bunker, this one much closer. Turning around now would be impossible. Grace could barely feel her feet as they carried her with the wave of people, deep into the black.

  CHAPTER 24 (HIM)

  “WE MIGHT BE IN SOME BAD SHIT,” Blitz said before pushing Dex to the back of the room. “Wait here.”

  But Dex followed him into the hallway. They ran down the darkened corridor and toward the light, leaving the empty waiting room behind. In a matter of seconds, they were back in the main chamber with the hospital curtains and cubicles. The room was in chaos. Three women, who looked just as new to the bunker as he was, stood in the middle hallway with pale faces and terrified eyes, yelling names of those who had presumably brought them underground. “Dr. Trojan!” one woman was crying over and over. People in cubicles were either sitting with bouncing fingertips at their desk coms, waiting for data to finish deleting, or ripping out the coms’ cloud chips outright. A group of nearly twenty people swept out from a hallway Dex had not even noticed, one lined with closed doors, and they ran past him, in the direction of the holding cell.

  The other air-locked door, Dex thought. It’s the only way out. He hoped he was wrong.

  Blitz turned around to see Dex standing behind him. “Are you some sort of idiot? Get back to the other door! Follow them out the back!” Blitz disappeared into the fray of scurrying rebels, gun drawn, running straight toward the entrance. He lumbered past the woman screaming for Dr. Trojan, who swung around in tandem with the bouncer as he rushed by, as if he and his weapons might somehow help her. But she froze in her tracks, centering in Dex’s field of vision. Dex ran forward, toward the blue curtained examination rooms, to direct the panicked woman toward the back. If he could help her, perhaps it would undo just an ounce of what he had done to Grace. But through the scattering people, he saw purple-clad figures swarming on the other side of the glass quarantine door. The Bio Police.

  Grace. I have to find Grace.

  He turned to the screaming woman. “Go! Go that way! There’s another door!”

  But just as he said it, a screaming crowd poured back out of the darkened hallway, the same one Dex’s holding room was in. “They’re at the back door too!” a man screamed. “No-go on the back door! Get out through the cave! Down the stairs!” Those who could find a sense of order ran down the hallway with the closed doors. Others milled about like ants caught between stomping feet.

  “If there’s another way out, they’ll know it! Follow them!” Dex yelled at the woman before jumping to the curtain on his left and ripping it open. Inside, another ashen woman, just as confused as the other, was standing erect but motionless with wide eyes. “Go!” Dex said, ushering her out. “The NRO’s here! Go! Follow that crowd!”

  Dex ran from curtain to curtain, ripping them open, horrified to see that the rest of the medical partitions were empty. There was no sign of Grace, and with that emptiness came the crushing truth.

  You left her to die, and now you’ve lost her for good.

  Behind him, the quarantine door exploded, and the sound of police boots and pointed sonic guns filled the room. Dex felt the skin on the side of his face burst as brick shrapnel tore into him, and then came the piercing beat of a gun pulse, hitting him directly on the side of his head. Suddenly, his body seized, and his stomach jumped upward, into his chest. Nausea took Dex, and he fell.

  “PEACE BY PERSUASION HAS A PLEASANT SOUND, BUT I THINK WE SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO WORK IT. WE SHOULD HAVE TO TAME THE HUMAN RACE FIRST, AND HISTORY SEEMS TO SHOW THAT THAT CANNOT BE DONE.”

  —Mark Twain

  CHAPTER 25 (HER)

  THERE WAS A TUNNEL underneath the Sterile Me Susan’s facility, leading through Sheiks Cave and under the Mississippi River. When Grace and Sheila finally emerged into the frigid night, Grace called her dad’s pocket com right away, telling him only the necessary details: something had gone wrong, and she and Sheila needed an inconspicuous way to travel north, to Duluth, preferably without having to scan their TruthChips for any purchases or rentals. No, he could not come with them; no, Dex Wheelock was not coming either. Stuart refrained from prying further and complied within the hour. He booked them a hotel room in a fringe suburb of Minneapolis, bought them two grocery bags of food, and rented a car they could keep for four weeks. He made no mention of how he might get the car back on time, and Grace offered no ideas. She could be anywhere in four weeks. Sheila had made no claim that Frederik Carnevale’s Cliff House would be their last stop.

  “I’ll be in touch when I can,” Grace said, hugging her dad goodbye in the hotel parking lot. I might never be back, she wanted to say but could not. He already knew.

  Stuart hugged the air right out of her. “I love you, Pix. More than you’ll ever know. I hope I was good enough.”

  “You’ve been the best dad in the world.” It was impossible to hold back tears. “And can you tell Linda that I didn’t know it would end this way? I would have said goodbye.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “And even Father. And Abraham and Lars. Tell them, if there’s ever a good time.”

  Stuart held Grace until Sheila tugged on her sleeve and said, “We should get a move on.”

  They parted ways. The two women settled into their hotel room and collapsed into bed within minutes. Sheila slept the night, but Grace’s sleep came in fragments. Every time a police siren passed on the streets below, she awoke, sure they had been found out. But each one continued on its way, fading into the night. It seemed, at least for a time, that they were safe.

  THEY LEFT THE TWIN CITIES at three o’clock the following afternoon, hoping the rental car would keep them inconspicuous on their trip up I-35. As the buildings disappeared behind them, dried-up and harvested cornfields, each dotted in distant spots with year-round greenhouses, flew past them on either side. Patches of yellowed corn stalks left for wildlife to use as winter refuge shone with incongruous warmth against the purple winter sky.

  “I hope we beat the heavy snow,” Sheila said, hunching forward and peeling her eyes at the thickening clouds. In front of them, white flurries were already racing at the car’s windshield, flying into oblivion when they hit. It was just their luck that by nightfall the snow would begin accumulating. “We’ve got another two hours before we get up to the North Shore, but if the snow gets worse, it’s going to be a pain in the ass,” Sheila said. “The Cliff House is . . . well . . . on a cliff. Which means this little car will have to make it up the hill. And they don’t salt that driveway, as a rule, except in emergencies. Better for it to look untouched.”

  That Grace was about to enter the home of one of the New Rainbow Order’s most lauded representatives still seemed both improbable and imbecilic, a trap beyond obvious. But Sheila had insisted when they first climbed into the rental car, “No, no, no. Carnevale inherited this house from his fathers, who were also involved in the Opposition. This goes back to even before the Queen rose to power, hon. Trust me on that.”

  “But how do you know all this?” Grace asked. “What makes you so sure it isn’t all just another way to get rid of people like us?”

  “I’m still breathing. That’s what makes me sure.”

  “It doesn’t mean they’re trustworthy.”

  Sheila sighed. “Do you want to escape or not?”

  “I don’t want my baby to die.”

  “And you want to be part of the Opposition?”

  “I already am.”

  “So, then, trust them. I’ve been a recruiter for Bozarth’s girls for just under two years now, and I’ve visited the Cliff House. Got turned on to it when I was just like you. Totally naïve to everything going on in the shadows, you know? I met a chick in Sandstone Prison. Another of Bozarth’s, just like us. I was clueless about everything when I got pregnant, but this woman was not. Betty Stevens was her name. She told me in jail that she had been on her way to a safe place to have her baby when the Bio Police caught her. Betty didn’t behave very well, and I
got out of jail before she did. But right before I left, she turned me on to a contact she had with some ‘rebel group’ operating out of a mansion north of Duluth.”

  And the rest was history. Sheila explained everything as the sky thickened and the flurries turned into full-on snow. Betty Stevens’s bio crimes had been no more severe than those of Sheila or Grace, but she had an attitude, and her punishment had involved almost constant torture. The Bio Police visited daily to interrogate her about where she had been heading when they caught her. Betty had been careful to erase all incriminating information from her com, but the police still captured a suitcase packed not just with daily essentials but also with obvious keepsakes: holopanels, jewelry, love letters—the mementos of a woman disappearing forever.

  Betty had toyed with the Bio Police, mocking them, claiming the New Rainbow Order’s effort to dominate society would eventually crumble. But she would never tell them how or why, not on her life. Nor would she breathe a word to them about the Cliff House or the informant who had told her about it, because the joke was on them: she would die before revealing secrets of the Opposition.

  On the day before Sheila’s release from Sandstone Prison, Betty had spilled everything to her over lunch, all in whispers, as the prison guards stood at the cafeteria doors, watching them both. Sheila had learned about the Cliff House and the com number to call to meet people who could lead her there. “Use my name when you talk to the man who answers the com,” Betty had instructed Sheila. “Tell him what I told you and that you want in. I know your type, and I know you hate the NRO as much as I do. The Opposition needs people like you.”

  Sheila had sat tight for nearly a year after her release. The police were still monitoring her, not because she was a biological threat but because her anger could inspire rash behavior that might expose the Opposition. They knew Sheila had become chummy with Betty Stevens, and they suspected she had also become privy to the information they so coveted.

  “But finally, one day, I was alone in a bar where I worked, cleaning up for the night. There was a public com there, one anyone could use, where it was easy to call any random address without being traced. So, I called the one Betty made me memorize.”

  It was surprisingly simple after that. The man who answered the com had run a background check on her, seen her crimes against the government, seen their resulting punishments, and inducted her into the Opposition in a matter of days. It was necessary that new recruits with previous criminal records be treated as near-strangers, only to be given assignments with objectives vague enough not to warrant unwanted attention. Her assignment was to monitor a selection of Theodore Bozarth’s secret female weapons.

  “But I fell in love with the man who met with me,” Sheila told Grace. “He took me to the Cliff House. Just for two days, to help with some new intakes. The police had finally started leaving me alone by then, so for all they knew it might have just been a simple holiday on Lake Superior. Nothing their prejudiced little minds couldn’t wrap around.”

  The Cliff House was over four hundred years old, she explained, and it sat just northwest of an equally ancient traffic tunnel on Highway 61. It was elevated, secluded, and the road to it was hidden in the old-fashioned way wealthy people often preferred, so that any approach by snooping strangers would prove difficult, if they were inspired to seek it out at all. Rumor even had it an old Hollywood movie star had once owned the house. The glamour involved in that era of art history had always fascinated Grace, and this would be like touching part of it, like being in one of the old movies herself.

  But she had questions: “Am I going to have my baby at the Cliff House? Does it have . . . medical equipment?” The inquiries came out sounding juvenile.

  “Women are examined and monitored here, that much I know for sure. Again, I’ve been there only once for those two days. I’m on a need-to-know basis, and there are certain things I haven’t needed to know. This will be a first, me being an escort.”

  Sheila had indirectly avoided giving a solid answer, so Grace pressed further, trying a roundabout approach. “Dr. Ben called there during the raid.”

  “Yeah, he would have. And to answer your second question: yes, they have ample medical facilities at the Cliff House. The mansion is a normal mansion, and the Opposition facilities are below, hidden inside the cliff. Tunnels, more or less. Carved out even before the Bio Wars, from what I gathered.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then, another question occurred to Grace. “What happened to the guy you fell in love with? Does he still work up there?”

  “He’s gone.”

  It was a succinct answer. Noticing Sheila’s tightly closed lips, Grace asked no more.

  THEY CONTINUED NORTH. As the interstate’s flatness gave way to the craggy hills surrounding Duluth, Grace watched the day disappear. It still struck her as surreal that she was living the nightmare scenario driven into every heterosterile during childhood. Yet she had survived the night, and here she was, alive. It was already counting for something.

  Duluth was one of the few cities still removed from the spread of civilization between Minneapolis and Chicago, resting along a stretch of hillside on the western tip of Lake Superior. Once a simple, middle-class city contained in its own economic bubble, it had transformed into a hidden refuge during the Bio Wars as disease and fire had disintegrated the larger world. It was a sparsely populated and self-sufficient city with a limitless supply of water, so land values had surged as the terrified wealthy of the Midwest flocked there in droves, bringing the population (then dwindling due to sterilization trends) to a new equilibrium of around fifty thousand. As genetic engineering overtook heterosexual reproduction, Duluth continued to attract entrepreneurs, politicians, artists, and those who could afford an alternative residence during summer months.

  Today, one of those residents was Frederik Carnevale. Or, as Dex had put it, one of the New Rainbow Order’s “premiere-fucking-fags.”

  Now, bright dots of light greeted them as they came over the last hill and wound down the slippery interstate into the city. Most of Duluth’s buildings were old, well over a hundred years, and there were many spanning back further still, to the age before population control and the Bio Wars. The mishmash of structures rushed by in the dark. Newer buildings rose as high as sixty stories, and older ones bowed beneath them, like slaves in deference to the glitters of modernity. The freeway ran through a series of aged tunnels before ending just a few hundred feet from Lake Superior’s shoreline. Tonight, with the snow, there was no moon reflection to spark life into the stretch of black water beyond.

  Thirty minutes later, city lights were scarce. Trees lined Grace and Sheila’s left side; Lake Superior lined their right. The passage of Highway 61 was narrow and crumbled, and north of a small town called Two Harbors, antiquated metal road signs brightened momentarily in the car’s headlights to mark towns that no longer existed. It was as if people in the north, even the nitpicky homosexuals who now populated it, had simply forgotten to update this section of the world. Grace doubted it had changed much since the Bio Wars.

  Suddenly, Sheila slowed the car and turned left.

  Loop Road, Grace read on a faded green street sign.

  After about one and a half miles, they turned right and began ascending a hill that had been obscured in the darkness. Through the trees, however, a single light was visible and growing closer. When Sheila switched the car off, she turned to Grace and grinned. “We’re here.”

  CHAPTER 26 (HIM)

  ANOTHER FIST, ANOTHER SPLATTER of blood on the floor beneath his chair.

  “What else do you know about that facility?”

  Dex’s questioner, Detective Lance Riley, was massive and muscular in his skintight purple uniform. The man was standing over him in an interrogation room at the Bio Police detention center in South Minneapolis, where the walls were white, the LED lights blinding, and the metal table and chair ungodly cold against Dex’s naked body. Two officers were standing
next to the door with their zippers undone, their pants unbuckled, and their bodies ready to punish him if he did not answer the questions. And he did not.

  “Okay, you asked for it,” Detective Riley lisped.

  It was not so bad at first. The two officers only gagged him between words. It was all Dex could do to resist the urge to latch onto their erections with his teeth.

  “I don’t know anything,” he repeated when breathing was possible again. Yes, he could tell them about Fletch Novotny, Sheila Willy, and Frederik Carnevale, then about Grace Jarvis and the baby he had just abandoned. But he had been cowardly enough for one night. These awful homosexuals could use their sex to abuse him all they wanted. He would stand his ground, perhaps even laugh at them. Dex gagged when the guards forced themselves into his mouth once again. He wondered how they punished their own kind. Women? Nude grandmothers sitting on their faces?

  Two minutes passed before the officers pulled out for a second time.

  “At least you guards are attractive, as far as fags go,” Dex choked.

  Detective Riley leaned forward, toward Dex, rubbing his own crotch. “You want to see attractive?” He grabbed a bottle of lube that was sitting at the center of the table.

  Thank heavens Dex’s middle school teacher Mr. Jacobson had given every male in the class a dildo on their first day of seventh grade, because otherwise this sensation would have been completely new. Dex had experimented with the dildo simply because it was considered a social standard, and it actually had been quite pleasant. Today, that experience paid off. It hurt this time, but he was still able to retain his last shred of dignity. He focused, held it close, tried to forget what was happening.

  “Who else is involved in this? Who brought you there tonight?”

  With each question came a harder thrust. They came faster and faster.

  “Were you there with Fletcher Novotny? What were you planning? Who else knows about this? HOW DID YOU FIND OUT? Oh, God—!” Officer Riley collapsed backward, into the chair Dex had been sitting in, suddenly looking bored with his interrogation. He waved a hand at the other officers.