The Breeders

by Matthew J. Beier

  “Pix? Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay, but listen, I need to ask you something. If you’re sleeping in the same room as father, get out of there now so we can talk in private.”

  “He’s at the bathhouse,” Stuart replied. “But honey, wait—”

  “No, I don’t have much time. Now, did Sheila Willy ever meet you in Duluth two days ago for the car exchange?”

  “Car exchange?” he asked, sounding groggy. “You mean the rental? I got a receipt of return sent to my com yesterday. She must have returned it.”

  Damn it.

  “Then something’s wrong, and I don’t know what. Maybe she got cold feet. But listen to me. Something’s about to happen. Attacks. First a small one by the NRO. They’re going to make it look like God’s Army did it.”

  She could hear him rustling in his bed covers, probably sitting up to help focus his concentration. “What do you mean, Pix?”

  “Go somewhere out of the way,” she whispered into the com, wary of any other Cliff House dweller who might frown on her decision to share Opposition intelligence with an outsider. “Go somewhere in the mountains, where they wouldn’t think to attack. And stay there as long as you can. Or . . . go where I’m going.”

  Too much.

  But she couldn’t help herself.

  “Where, honey? Where are you going?”

  “New Zealand.”

  Too much! Someone might be listening!

  “New Zealand? Why in God’s name are you going there?”

  “There’s a place there for me, but I can’t say anything else. Find a way down there. Either now, or go hide somewhere closer for a few weeks, and try to get down there after the NRO declares martial law. I don’t know how easy it’ll be to travel after that, even if you’re a homo—”

  “Wait, what? Martial law?”

  “Tell Father you’re going away. There’s going to be a counterstrike, a big one—”

  Footsteps echoed in the hallway somewhere behind Grace.

  “Dad, someone’s coming. I don’t know if I’ll be able to call you again. I’m going to try to call Linda Glass, but if I don’t, tell her to take Celine and Rita and get out of Minneapolis! Any of the major cities!”

  “Honey, wait—”

  “Daddy, I love you. Father and Abraham and Lars, too.”

  Stuart sniffed back tears on the other end of the call. “I’ll have my com, honey! Wherever I go, I’ll have it!”

  “I love you, Daddy. So much.”

  “I love you, too, Pix. You’re my little girl!”

  Grace pressed the screen to end the call and shuddered. There was a chance she would never hear that voice again. It felt as though the last vestiges of love were falling from her grip forever.

  She turned around slowly, only to jump out of her chair when she noticed a black-clad figure standing in the hallway. It was Albert Redmond. He was watching and waiting with his dark, vigilant eyes. For a moment, they stared at each other through the glass, like animal and prey. Then, he walked down to the doorway and into the room. When he spoke, he remained quiet and collected.

  “You’re crying,” he said.

  She wiped her eyes. “I just made a call.”

  “And how, pray tell?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It sounded as if you were warning somebody to evacuate.”

  Shit.

  Redmond’s gaze wandered down Grace’s body, but not in a lustful way, from what she could tell. In his own peculiar fashion, he was taking her in, considering every inch of her. “You know, Ms. . . .”

  “Jarvis.”

  “. . . Jarvis. This is a scrambled com connection, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally safe. Furthermore, do you realize what a risk it would be to disseminate rumors among the general population? To inspire mass panic and public revolt, which could bring on martial law early and prevent us from moving you to a safe location?”

  Grace’s defense fizzled in her throat. “I . . . I couldn’t go without warning my dad.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  It took every ounce of gumption she had to keep her eyes focused on Redmond. “Only what I’ve heard.”

  “Heard from whom, pray tell?”

  “I don’t remember,” Grace lied. She would not tell him about Marvel having overheard Sheila’s conversation. Grace realized now that while Marvel had been perfectly aware of the situation’s seriousness, they both may have been too naïve to realize that resisting the Opposition might put them in an entirely new sort of danger.

  “It’s not your place to know more than you need to know,” Redmond said. The gentleness in his voice had a razor edge.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Redmond, but it is my place,” Grace replied, shaking with nerves. “I have family and friends who could lose their lives if the Opposition’s counterstrike is going to be drastic. That is my business!”

  Redmond stomped his heavy boot against the cement floor and raised his voice. “And if we took into account every civilian life that isn’t directly working for or supportive of the world’s current political monster, what then, Ms. Jarvis? Let the NRO take you, kill the child inside you, and ship you off to an egg-harvesting camp with all the other females? Because that is what’s coming to you if we don’t act!”

  “It doesn’t excuse killing innocent people,” Grace retorted.

  “None of this is excusable!” Redmond seethed. “None of it. But what I must ask from you, Ms. Jarvis, is a higher level of moral consideration here. You aren’t just saving yourself by saving your baby’s and your lives. You’re saving the very ideal of humanity. What they are doing—” Redmond whipped out his finger and pointed it into oblivion, “—is destroying humanity, bringing us back to day one, and walking backward in social, evolutionary, and ethical progress! If humanity was at its peak before the Bio Wars, it’s now on its way out. You choose, Ms. Jarvis. But just know that you’re too far in now to get out.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning if you try to leave this compound, your life might just accidentally slip out from under you.”

  “Are you threatening to kill me if I opt out, Mr. Redmond?”

  “You’d bring it upon yourself. Goodnight, Ms. Jarvis. Or, what is the name on your new TruthChip? You’d best memorize and start using it. And consider what I’ve said.”

  Before Grace could ask about Sheila Willy, Mr. Redmond marched out of the room and disappeared down the hallway, toward the passageway upstairs. For whatever reason, he was wearing a trench coat, and it sailed behind him as he hurried away. And there Grace was, looking after him, numbed by the fresh reality of her life as a mutineer against the New Rainbow Order. Yes, there was a price to all of this. Fear had opened her arms to the Opposition, but now it threatened to force allegiance upon her in the same fashion as the government. She knew too much to run, and she would end up with blood on her hands if she stayed.

  That night, as the hours ticked away, Grace weighed her options. Finally, as she imagined the sun outside might finally be rising, she erred on the side of motherhood, of fierce protection for the life growing inside her.

  You are the only innocent one in all this, she thought at her child. You and all the other babies the Opposition is trying to protect.

  In the end, that glimmer of innocence sealed Grace’s decision. When she arrived in New Zealand to have her baby, guilt would not consume her. It simply would not.

  CHAPTER 30 (HIM)

  LIGHTS OFF, in the middle of the night.

  Time had adapted Dex, and he was fast asleep when the world went dark through his eyelids. It was the wee hours of morning on January, the twenty-seventh.

  “Up, up, up!”

  An alarm of some sort, low pitched, wailed over and over through the speakers in the jail cell. Above him, Exander’s bunk squeaked, and the man’s single blanket shifted as he sat up. The cell door’s mechanical lock unlatched, and police boots galloped into the cell.

&nbs
p; “Up, up, up!”

  “Huh—?” Exander stammered, making no move at first. Dex remained in his bed as well, out of pure incredulity.

  This is a dream. It’s all a dream.

  Boots, racing toward Dex’s ear. Something jabbing his side, and hard. The butt end of a gun. Another jab, then a squeaking sound and crash as Exander jumped off his bunk.

  “Up, up, up!”

  “Why are the lights off—?” Dex stammered.

  “No questions, just move!” It was one of the younger guards, Officer Maleck, who had taken particular joy in torturing him when Detective Riley had transferred him to the main cell block. He jabbed Dex again. “Get up, Wheelock! NRO orders!”

  Dex pushed his blanket back and heaved his body off the bed. When his bare feet hit the cold floor, his eyes focused. The main lights were off, but there were other lights now, emergency ones glowing a dull red in the corridor outside. And there were echoes of other boots, other screams of “Up, up, up!” and a steady clamor of footsteps.

  “What’s going on?” Dex asked.

  “Get up! No questions!”

  Exander was already on the floor, scurrying toward their shoes in the corner. He threw two of them to Dex before the guard came and beat him over the head with the butt of his sonic rifle. “No time for that, you slimy fuck! Get up!” It was impossible to see the shoes in detail, but both he and Exander managed to slip them on—Dex with two left-fitting shoes, Exander with two right ones—before the guard dragged them out. Dex could only think over and over how smart it was of Exander to go for the shoes, because who knew what was going to happen to them now? They were rushing down the glowing red hallway at gunpoint with all the other detainees, moving toward the far end Dex had seen only once, when being brought to his cell.

  “Down the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs!” one of the guards was screaming, directing the confused men through a door with his rifle.

  Don’t question it, Dex thought. Just go. You brought this upon yourself.

  From somewhere far below, Dex heard what sounded like a light wind blowing through a tunnel. It was a familiar sound, and he raked his mind, knowing he was dancing around the obvious answer. The noise lowered to silence, and Dex suddenly placed it. It’s a maglev train coming into a station, just like all the commuter rails. Only this one . . .

  This one was built underneath the Minneapolis Bio Police Detention Center.

  Murmurs among the men grew louder and louder with each round of the staircase. Finally, after at least ten stories, Dex looked over the railing and saw men flowing off the stairs, onto a floor that was nearly invisible under the dusky crimson lights.

  “There’s a train down here!” a prisoner’s scream echoed up the stairwell. “Where are you taking us?”

  Whispers ascended in a spiral, breathing like a cold whirlwind from person to person. A train? To where? Why would there be a train under the Bio Police detention center?

  “To the dumping pit!” somebody screamed behind Dex. Then there was the sound of a man falling under a blunt impact. One of the guards’ guns or clubs, no doubt. Then came raging screams from a number of inmates, and then bodies, tripping and tumbling downward, into the crowded mess of people. And, finally, high-pitched sonic pulses.

  “Dex, go faster!” Exander yelled. “They’re using their guns!”

  How did the world come to this? Dex wondered, hopping down the stairs, fighting with each step not to tumble onto the men in front of him. They were farm cattle, racing into the butcher’s pen.

  They reached the bottom of the stairway. The air was cold, and Dex clung to his own torso, shivering, as a guard ushered him into a hallway. It was still lit by pulsing red lights, but Dex could see normal LED illumination at the end of it, breaking through the bobbling prisoner heads outlined against it. In this horrible confusion of night, they were all running blindly toward that light, as if there was no other choice. Grab one of the guards’ guns, grab one of the guards’ guns, grab one of the guards’ guns! Dex thought in a repetitive chain, horrified that his footsteps were simply falling in line with all the others, following without any attempt to make sense of the eerie silence braiding between them.

  As they broke out into the light, it became pandemonium. Prisoners were scurrying to nowhere, screaming, “Go back, go back!” but to no avail. There was no exit. They were in an enclosed atrium glowing under standard blue LED bulbs, and there it was, sitting on a pair of gleaming new tracks: a high-speed magnetic levitation train, in the depths of South Minneapolis. It was gray, unmarked, and had only doors for openings, no windows. Only a section of it was visible on the short platform, and it disappeared into a black tunnel on either side. While some of the prisoners were screaming about dumping pits, others were screaming about camps and Mandate 43 and government conspiracies. But there they went, tripping up the steps of the one train car with an open door, because their only other option was to face the Bio Police’s weapons.

  “Exander!” Dex screamed, craning his neck to see the man who had become his friend. But they had lost one another in the madness. Was it possible Exander had stayed back, that he really had been a plant from the Bio Police to garner information from Dex? It didn’t matter now. The flow of panicked prisoners had swept Dex to the side of the train.

  “Get on it! Move!” a guard next to the door screamed, pointing his gun in Dex’s face. Its pulse generator glittered yellow deep inside the barrel. A yellow generator meant death, not stun.

  Goodbye, Grace.

  Dex jumped onto the car, and in a matter of moments, he was rushing through the caged blackness, moving down the length of the train, from one seatless car to another, mostly by the feels and pushes of other prisoners and twice by guards patrolling the small passages where the cars connected. By the time they were beyond the point of no return, lost in the dark, the screams and murmurs had disappeared into hopelessness. Only the dampened sound of caged breathing escorted them now.

  “Exander!” Dex yelled, hoping the quiet might reveal his cellmate’s response, so they could fish each other out of the fray. Men were tromping over Dex’s feet, pushing him to the front of the car. “Exander, are you in here?”

  “Dex!”

  “Exander!”

  “No, Dex! Is that you? Dex Wheelock? It’s Fletch!”

  Fletch.

  “What? Where?”

  “Off to the right, up in the front! In the corner!”

  “I’m coming!”

  The other men piped up now as Dex pushed his way through their sweating, gasping bodies. Finally, he reached what appeared to be the front. A hand closed around his head and felt its way across his short hair, and then its owner grabbed Dex’s hands and brought them into a separate, more tangled mop.

  “Fletch!”

  “Dex! I didn’t know you were in here, man! I thought you might have made it out with Grace!”

  “No,” Dex said, out of breath, suddenly realizing that oxygen might get scarce in here very soon, unless the train’s engineers had been kind enough to provide vents. The thought alone made him almost mad with claustrophobia. “No, I didn’t make it out with Grace. I thought they’d killed you! We all heard explosions from upstairs during the raid.”

  “They stunned me! Doesn’t matter! It all doesn’t matter anymore, Dex. We’re fucked. Totally fucking fucked!”

  “Did you hear about the dumping pit?”

  “That’s where they’re taking us,” Fletch said. “I didn’t want to scare you before, so I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry, man. But I saw pictures, Dex. Pictures. It’s a massive pit in old Tennessee! They’ll stop the train on a really thin bridge that spans the thing and then just unload us! We’ve got to find a way out!”

  Dex’s scattered wits were settling in his mind, and horror coiled in his gut. “Didn’t you see those doors? Totally air sealed. And it’s a maglev train. We’ll be moving fast.”

  Suddenly, their lack of momentum pushed them backward, and an airy burst ru
shed under their feet. The train was moving. Think, Dex told himself. Just think about any and all possibilities. If it was true about the dumping pit, time was flushing away with every second. The train was surely fitted with remote conducting technology, which meant the only humans aboard were those designated for the pit. Their conductor would be a puppeteer in some distant control room, piloting the machine by holocamera. If they somehow managed to escape the air-tight tube, it would still be impossible to stop the train and gain control of it. Without somebody tampering with the train from the outside, they would die. But these trains were still secret. Nobody but the highest government decision makers and the builders would know of them, or at least of their purpose.

  Except there was Fletch’s Opposition. Might they know about the trains and have some sort of plan? Was it even possible? If not, this jungle of packed bodies was about to become the last memory of Dex’s life.

  CHAPTER 31 (HER)

  IT WAS BLACK IN GRACE’S ROOM when she awoke. Another dream about her child, running in a joyful fit. This time, there had been a mountain in front of her, a towering, snow-capped peak, as if straight out of a myth, but it was all in the middle of a sandy desert. Her child, a little girl, was dashing about with pigtails bouncing behind her, through the sand, pointing and laughing at the gleaming, rocky summit.

  New Zealand isn’t a desert, Grace thought, just before looking at the clock.

  5:08 a.m.

  And there was activity outside her room, in the halls. Footsteps, voices. Then a loud knock on her door, and a latch opening.

  “Everybody up, everybody up!” echoed the voice of Albert Redmond. “There’s been an emergency change of plans, everyone, and we need to get you all to New Zealand as soon as possible. Up, up, up!”

  Just as Grace registered this, she felt a tiny flutter in her belly. Movement. A kick? The first!