The Breeders

by Matthew J. Beier

  But there was no time for elation. Redmond repeated his message as he moved from door to door, waking the men and women in residence. Soon, Grace stood in the hallway with a crowd of confused, pajama-clad people. It took a few swallows of her dry mouth to realize she was thirsty, that Sheila was gone, that her only friend in this crowd would be Marvel, the seventeen-year-old. And there she was, fifteen feet away, with those curls bobbing up and down, even after being flattened against a pillow for six hours.

  “Cafeteria, everyone, cafeteria!” It was Redmond’s voice again, reverberating from the next floor down.

  Five minutes later, he was addressing them under the cafeteria’s smooth white lights. On the holopanels this early morning were night views of Lake Superior. A bright moon shimmered on the water.

  “We’ve received intelligence from affiliates in Minneapolis, Des Moines, Green Bay, the Chicago area, and the Kansas City area that the NRO has activated their attack strategy a week early. Our friends monitoring power grids in those cities have reported that the NRO’s new trains began running early this morning. Whether they’re full of people at this point, we have no idea, but sources have confirmed that each train has begun passing through its allotted lineup of Bio Police jails, starting in Minneapolis just an hour ago. We have reports of the Minneapolis train moving south. It has stopped at the first of three detention centers across Iowa, on its way toward more in Kansas City, where it will cut over and cross through Missouri, toward the Unrecoverable Territories. Same thing goes for the Chicago train, which will cut down through Illinois, toward Kentucky. Now, we believe this is the real deal, and they are at the very least removing detained failsafes toward a massive dumping pit on the eastern edge of old Tennessee.”

  Gasps fluttered through the crowd. “Dumping pit?” people whispered to each other in horror. Grace stood stock still, watching Redmond but seeing something far away: Dex, at the Sterile Me Susan’s facility, hating himself as he said goodbye.

  I hope to God you got out, Grace thought at him, wherever he was. An unexpected surge of grief wrenched her chest as she envisioned Dex diving out of a train car to his death. He had been a good man. Better than most others she had known, despite his flaws.

  Redmond was very succinct: They would be leaving for New Zealand within the hour. According to the intelligence, bio-detainee removal was the first step in the New Rainbow Order’s staged terrorist attack. The Opposition expected mass pandemonium once the attack happened, enough for the train operations to go unnoticed. Detainment and removal of all heterosteriles, carriers, and failsafes would follow in a matter of days, once propaganda made it publicly accepted that heterosexuals were behind the attacks.

  “It’s likely the NRO will have infiltrated a true group of God’s Army rebels so that nobody but those doing the infiltrating will realize the entire conflict is staged,” Redmond said. “It will look on all counts like a terrorist effort, but we are expecting something far more drastic than the isolated attacks we’ve seen since the Queen rose to power. This will be a coordinated, worldwide effort, and it will spark a rush of mass heterosexual genocide.”

  “What the hell happened to the Sanctuary? Why aren’t they using it anymore?” asked Ruth, a woman of Middle Eastern descent who had arrived at the Cliff House just four days prior.

  “Suffice it to say that the rumors you may have heard are true,” Redmond said. “The NRO has ceased to operate the Sanctuary in exchange for a more straightforward means of extermination.”

  Ruth shook her head. “And we’re supposed to get to New Zealand before all this happens, without anyone noticing? Are you fucking stupid?”

  Redmond glared at Ruth, then took out his pocket com and used his fingers to pull up information. “At six o’clock this morning, central time—that’s in just under an hour—one of Representative Carnevale’s private chartered jets will leave its hangar at Chicago Midway and fly to Duluth Intercontinental,” he said. “This is nothing unusual, nor is it unusual for Carnevale to book travel for an entourage, even if it is forty-three people. He orders chartered flights for friends at least twice a month, partially so that it won’t be unusual when he helps shuttle Opposition members to New Zealand. None of you are showing too prominently yet, but it’s cold today, so jackets are in order. They’ll help cover you in case anybody is overly perceptive. As it is a chartered NRO flight ordered straight from the top, security will be lax. With your new homosexual names attached to Frederik Carnevale, you are security. And remember, none of you are pregnant, none of you are heterosexuals, and only same-sex people can show each other any type of flirtation or otherwise sexual affection. You already know who your new legal partners are based on your new TruthChips, so you will pair up accordingly as you travel. Put on an act. Females with females, males with males. Failsafes, when you are in public, it will help if you are extremely touchy with each other, and not just the ones you are pretending to be married to. Failure to do this will make your homosexual act extremely unconvincing. You should already have your phony wedding bands to accompany your new identities, save for you three men, who are a single threesome. . . .” Redmond pointed at three failsafes—Steve, Alan, and Jackman, if Grace remembered correctly—and then shrugged. “Questions?”

  Grace raised her hand. “Yes, Mr. Redmond.”

  “Are you getting cold feet, Ms. Jarvis?” he said before she could ask her question.

  “No, sir. I’m only wondering how long of a flight it is to New Zealand.”

  “From here, eight and a half hours.”

  Even for a liquid hydrogen jet, that was fast.

  “Of course, if they aren’t ready to receive us on the New Zealand end, it could complicate things. We’ll know once we’re in the air.”

  “Once we’re in the air?” Grace asked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I have to tell you yet again, Ms. Jarvis, that this situation is bigger than just you,” Redmond sniffed. “Our Mount Tasman facility is extremely secret and extremely particular in the way it can be entered, and too much activity in the area would alert the NRO to our presence there. I can’t foresee a reason you will not be in New Zealand by nightfall, but it’s what happens after you land in Christchurch that we have yet to receive confirmation about.”

  Marvel’s voice rose from the crowd. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  Redmond pursed his lips and kept them tight for a moment, then spoke. “No. You’ll be accompanied by three other Opposition members, plus the hydro plane crew.”

  “Can we trust them?” Alan the failsafe asked.

  “If you can trust me, you can trust them,” was Redmond’s response.

  And there it was, in Grace’s heart: a flutter of doubt.

  CHAPTER 32 (HIM)

  THIS IS WHAT DEX did not know:

  The gray maglev train was racing at 260 miles per hour through the cornfields of Kansas, the culmination of much speculation and even more shoulder shrugs of the region’s farmers. Three years ago, they watched construction of the tracks and saw test trains running late in the night, but since then, the tracks had remained abandoned. Some saw this first gray train pass in those wee hours of the morning, but as it was winter, any farmer doing his work was either inside a solar greenhouse or prepping his morning coffee that would accompany him through the day. Four hundred miles to the southeast, however, in another cornfield on the edge of Missouri, a small group of Opposition affiliates waiting patiently for this day (but surprised anyhow at receiving their call to action) had explosives ready under a section of track five hundred feet long. The explosives had been set for nearly three months, ever since the New Rainbow Order’s plan had become not just apparent but definite. Blowing the tracks early would have brought undue attention to the Opposition and offered the government a chance to rebuild. Instead, striking on the first day of operation would catch them in the act. Stop them in their tracks, so to speak.

  It was not just in Missouri. Each of the seven track lines lead
ing to the Tennessee dumping pit had an unknown explosive hinge point set in the middle of nowhere. Nearby shadow people were watching and waiting with their pocket coms ready, displaying the codes to detonate.

  Abel Johns of Kansas knew how to hack into the wireless controls of the train, and he knew how long it would take to gain access with the hack. He also knew the train cars—surprise surprise—had a fail-safe option in case the trains were held up for any reason. Not only were the cars capable of heat and chemical release that would eventually push the failsafes to jump out the doors into the pit of death, but they were also capable of simple incineration and had little to distinguish themselves from mobile crematories. True, they did not burn instantly with fire, but they could heat and kill within thirty minutes, char in an hour, and completely render men dust in two. Vent releases in the cars’ bases could then dispose of the dust in one fell swoop, powdering the countryside in death. Then why have the dumping pit at all? Abel Johns wondered. Why not just char the men and run the train in circles to release the ashes?

  Perhaps such an easy and prudent mode of extermination would be too boring. Everyone knew homosexuals liked to be extravagant and that they had been planning their takeover of the planet for centuries. Maybe they wanted to savor their victory by watching the heterosexuals jump to their deaths. It would be poetic.

  AS THE TRAIN passed through Kansas, Dex sat in pitch blackness. No windows, no last view of the sun—at least until he was flying downward, into the supposed dumping pit. The men around him were silent, packed together like canned fish. Their groans of desperation had ceased. Oxygen filtered through vents along the top of the car, keeping them alive just enough to dive out when they finally reached the pit.

  “Dex, do you feel that?” It was Fletch Novotny speaking. Dex had managed to crouch with him in the corner of the crowded car. Amazing, the luck of finding his friend. They did not have to die alone, at least. But he wondered about Exander.

  “Feel what?”

  “Holes in the floor. They’re small. Feel it.”

  “I felt them already.”

  “There’s heat coming from them.”

  Dex had noticed this as well. “Maybe they just want to be careful we don’t get cold. It’s January.”

  Neither he nor Fletch laughed.

  But there was time to think now, as the train took them on their way. What had sparked the sudden evacuation of the prisoners? Why so early this morning, of all times? The train had been perfectly situated under the detention center in South Minneapolis, ready to speed toward Tennessee. They had stopped seven more times and heard more shouting and more screams. Dex wondered if his detention center had been only one of many along the track. Was it just men on the trains? Failsafes being removed from society? The detainees had been divided by gender at the detention center, and Dex had not seen or heard any women in the ruckus on the train platform, so he guessed this was the case. Failsafes to the dumping pits, heterosteriles and carriers to the egg harvesting camps. It seemed the rumors about the Antarctic Sanctuary’s original purpose having been abandoned were true.

  All Dex could hear was the steady whooshing sound as the maglev raced with almost-imperceptible speed over the track. At this rate, he would be dead by noon.

  “Dex?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think it’s the attack everyone talked about? That they’re going to round up all the heteros?”

  “Probably,” Dex said, but caring was beyond him now. He had always been a short guy acting tough and rugged to compensate, and now he was just a sardine on the ride of his life, proven a coward and dying one, too.

  AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, in the middle of a dried-up cornfield on the edge of Missouri, the train tracks flew out of their bolts, into the air, carried by a five-hundred-foot-long sheet of fire. It was 8:13 a.m. The faces in charge of setting off the explosives, to remain nameless, were late to implement the operation due to a disconnected fuse that needed repairing at the last minute. They were lucky the steely gray cargo train had not already passed. The prisoners on the train, however, were not so lucky: they were flying at over two hundred miles an hour toward a gap in the track, only ten miles ahead.

  It took the train’s remote conductor, a flighty fag who was sitting in front of a control screen in Chicago, nearly a minute to realize smoke was rising somewhere ahead and nearly another to realize it was smack-dab in the middle of his set course. By that time, it was impossible to stop the train before it hit the obliterated stretch.

  But this frightful trajectory was insignificant compared to the atrocities that had just begun to unravel in eleven of the world’s most influential cities. In Minneapolis, Chicago, Sydney, Wellington, Srinagar, Cape Town, Salzburg, Nice, Stockholm, Chengdu, and Irkutsk, buildings full of innocent, blind-eyed civilians plunged into rubble in a matter of seconds. Where it was daytime, sonic bombs destroyed office buildings and shopping centers. Where night, they destroyed hotels and high-rise apartment complexes. It happened in controlled demolitions “inflicted by an enemy,” or so the New Rainbow Order was going to say—acts of war at a level of destruction unseen for a hundred years.

  From that hour onward, the homosexual regime had its intercontinental martial law and complete control of the world.

  CHAPTER 33 (HER)

  GRACE LOOKED OUT at the atmosphere, which hovered between brilliant blue and the blackness of space beyond. Just as her thoughts were delving into that vastness, into the humorous reality that her personal predicaments were thoroughly confined to the globe beneath her, the hydro plane’s wing flaps moved slightly. The engines’ airy roars lowered with a groan.

  They were slowing down, and much too early.

  The captain and every attendant on the plane, Albert Redmond had assured them, were friends of the Opposition. Yet nothing prepared Grace for what came next over the video intercom: a virile male face turned downward in a grave expression, awash in tears.

  “Passengers, this is your captain speaking,” the man lisped. “I had no idea it would be this big, but the NRO has staged its attack, and the results are . . . horrific. Absolutely horrific. Multiple buildings in eleven different cities around the globe, including Chicago and Minneapolis on our own continent, have collapsed in massive demolitions. The NRO has sent orders to ground air traffic immediately on the closest possible runways. We’ve just reached fifty thousand feet, but we’re still flying over the Unrecoverable Territories. The old state of California, to be exact. We’ve received clearance to land at an NRO base at what used to be Los Angeles International Airport.”

  Grace’s anxiety froze in her chest: Los Angeles. The City of the Dead.

  It was a legendary city, the “City of Angels,” as it had been known before becoming the first major city to be destroyed by obstructer bombs in the final years of the Bio Wars. No civilian nowadays ever dreamed of visiting such ruins. Grace had learned of the government’s base there when the General Assembly disclosed the details of Mandate 43, and the news had come as a shock. The very idea of humanity making a dent in the world’s Unrecoverable Territories had always seemed laughable, an impossible goal. But here Grace was, about to fly into an inhabited military base in Los Angeles. At once terrified for the Cliff House refugees’ prospects and unduly elated that she was unexpectedly going to see this renowned place with her own eyes, Grace watched the captain outline their scheme.

  “From what I understand, there are a number of you on this aircraft who are nearing four months pregnant. Until we get the lay of the land, I’ll ask that you all stay on the plane after landing until you receive further instructions. If anyone does recognize you’re pregnant, we’ll pass you off as active carriers from before Mandate 43 went into effect. It’ll be my call, once I feel out the situation. As always, it won’t be beneficial for us to pretend this is a jet filled with individuals banished to the Antarctic Sanctuary, because it would mean our plane would be flagged for an immediate and particular protocol upon arrival in New Zeal
and, which these days we can assume means you would be taken and dumped somewhere.”

  Grace and Marvel exchanged apprehensive looks. This raised the stakes.

  As they descended over a range of snowcapped mountains, Grace craned her neck to look out the window. The mountains were mostly rocky and desert-like, dotted with green here and there. The snow dusting their higher ridges glowed in the sun, and the sky crowning the mountains was crystal clear. As they flew west, however, the morning became hazy in a way Grace had never seen before.

  From the ocean!

  Goosebumps tingled along her arms.

  And then she saw them: ruins, tall shadows in the haze, looming in the distance. The shapes were familiar; she had seen them outlined in countless motion pictures from the cinematic golden age. Behind them, barely visible through the dazzling brume, was the outline of another long mountain range.

  That’s downtown Los Angeles, Grace thought. Still standing after all these years. Incredible.

  The buildings were still far enough away to appear vague, but she could swear some of them were letting through light, as if their structures had remained intact while entire walls were blown out.

  Three billion people had died of disease during the Bio Wars, and the United Nations had exterminated another two billion on top of them to keep the plagues from spreading. Southern California had been the first major American zone to suffer this fate, followed within three months by the rest of North America’s West Coast. To see it now was an astounding yet sobering experience. Millions died here, Grace thought. Victims of those who were fighting on the same side as I am now.

  Greenery teemed through the rubble of streets and buildings below, and it passed faster and faster as the plane lowered. Suddenly, they were over a concrete runway, and the reverse thrusters pushed Grace forward in her seat.

  Touchdown.