Loop

by Ben Oliver

  I’ve seen this before, on the first day out of the Loop – the soldier who wasn’t carrying a weapon had the same glowing eyes.

  ‘What the fuck?’ I whisper, a sliver of steam rising up from my breath.

  Headlight-eyes turns towards me, his movements stiff. I try to duck out of the way, but those lights fall on me.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he says, his voice horrifyingly serene.

  I stand and move away from Molly, hoping that they somehow won’t notice her.

  ‘Alright, alright,’ I say, holding my hands up above my head. ‘Don’t shoot.’ But I see that headlight-eyes isn’t carrying a gun.

  I back up, trying to keep the rain collector between me and the soldier, trying to keep Molly out of their sight, but there’s nowhere else to go as my foot reaches the edge of the building. I turn and look down into the never-ending fall and a sense of vertigo, of recollection and dislocation hit me all at once. The last time I was here, Tyco’s brother was in this exact same spot.

  The tall soldier turns stiffly to his partner, the glow from his bizarre eyes temporarily sweeping away from me. He gives him a nod.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ the second soldier cries, and I’m almost relieved to hear the panic in his voice – I was becoming unnerved by the calm nature of headlight-eyes.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ I say again.

  ‘Oh no, no, no,’ he says, letting go of the USW so that it hangs by his side, and pulling out a tranquillizer gun, ‘you weren’t put into Battery Project for nothing. We’ll be taking you alive, Inmate 9-70-981.’

  He lifts the tranquillizer gun higher until it’s aiming right at my chest. I close my eyes and wait for the darkness.

  I hear a scream and open my eyes.

  I see the soldier with the tranquiliser grabbing for his throat – blood pouring between his fingers as a Smiler silently lets a chunk of flesh fall to from his mouth.

  The soldier with the glowing eyes watches on, an interested expression on his face. He does not move to help or call for back-up. He simply watches.

  It’s only when the bleeding soldier falls to his knees that I realize the Smiler is my dad.

  I open my mouth to say something, to call out to him, but my words are silenced by the high-pitched wail of a USW gun. The dying soldier had managed to get a hold of his weapon and fire one last round.

  ‘No!’ I scream, as my father lies lifeless on the gravel. The dying soldier looks desperately to his bright-eyed superior, a hand stretching out, begging for help. And then he too falls still.

  Headlight-eyes turns to me and marches robotically forward. He closes the gap between us and the light from his eyes turns orange as he scans me up and down. ‘You are prisoner 9-70-981. Luka Kane, sixteen years old. You are reserved for the Battery Project.’

  I feel dazed, like I’ve been awoken from a deep sleep. ‘What’s the Battery Project?’ I ask, my mind spinning.

  The soldier’s lights turn white again. ‘Hands behind your back, prisoner,’ he states, but before he can engage the magnetic cuffs, my dad has climbed to his feet, half of his face distorted and bulging from the USW round. The sound of his footsteps in the puddles of the rooftop gets the soldier’s attention. He turns and tilts his head, making no attempt to defend himself. My dad tackles the soldier around the waist and they both tumble over the edge of the building. The lights from the soldier’s eyes spin and fade, blinking downwards like a disappearing lighthouse, until they’re gone.

  I stand there in the silence. Unable to comprehend what I’ve just witnessed.

  ‘No,’ I whisper.

  The sound of dozens more soldiers storming up to the roof lets me know that my dad’s death was pointless. Soon these soldiers will find me and take me away to be a part of the Battery Project – whatever the hell that is – and then they’ll kill Molly, and all of this will have been for nothing.

  I walk over to my sister and sit down beside her.

  ‘I tried, Molly. I tried.’

  I can hear them, the soldiers dressed in black, running along the corridor below me, closing in, desperate to get to me, to capture me, to take me away. I try to comprehend what has just happened, try to work out why that soldier had glowing eyes, I try to come to terms with my dad’s death, but I can’t.

  They’re getting closer now. There’s nowhere to hide up here, nowhere to run.

  ‘Luka!’ A voice calls from behind me.

  I know that this is a hallucination, some kind of auditory mirage, because it sounds just like Kina.

  ‘Luka, get in!’

  But God, it sounds so real . . . too real.

  I turn around to see Kina leaning out of a Volta Category 8. Igby is behind the wheel of the flying car, and Malachai, Pander and Blue are in the back.

  ‘What . . . what . . .’

  ‘Today, Luka!’ Malachai calls out.

  I grab Molly and run to the edge of the building. I pass my sister across to Kina just as the soldiers appear behind me.

  ‘Freeze!’ one of them yells.

  I turn and see three soldiers with those bright, blazing eyes.

  I jump. Igby pulls away the minute my feet land in the back of the vehicle. We lurch away so violently that I almost fall straight back out again but Kina grabs my arm and pulls me in. For a second our faces are so close that I can feel her breath on my lips.

  I turn and look back to the Vertical. The three soldiers with the bright eyes stare up at us as we move away. They just watch, still, almost curious. Then five more soldiers join them – these ones have normal Alt eyes, they carry weapons. They aim their rifles at us, but the bright-eyed soldier who stands at the edge of the building holds up a hand, halting their fire. His eyes glow orange, the sound of the vehicle’s engine dies completely, and the lights of the dashboard fade out.

  ‘No! What? No!’ Igby cries, slamming his palm against the dashboard and pressing his thumb against the fingerprint starter over and over again. ‘It’s dead. I don’t know how but they’ve killed the engine.’

  And then the lights come back on, and the electric whir of the engine fires back up. Happy’s voice comes over the speakers. ‘Emergency protocol initiated.’

  ‘Emergency protocol? Fucking emergency protocol?’ Igby shrieks.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Malachai demands.

  ‘They have control, those weirdo, light-eyed fucks have control. They’re going to glide this car right to them!’

  ‘What do we do?’ Kina asks as the car begins to turn slowly back toward the Vertical.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Igby says and climbs under the dashboard, ripping a panel out and tugging out a zip-tied bunch of wires. ‘I’d rather crash-land the goddamned thing than go anywhere near those freaks!’

  One small electric shock later and the car’s engine once again dies.

  ‘Well, that’s that, we’re going put this thing down with no power. We have about three minutes,’ Igby says, and then turns to me, with a big smile on his face. ‘Hi Luka, how the hell are you?’

  I can’t reply. My mind is replaying my dad disappearing over the edge of the Vertical again and again.

  I shake my head, trying to clear it, as the eerie silence of the car fills my senses. I glance at Kina, Pander and Malachai sitting opposite me, my sister draped across their laps. I notice that they too are covering their Panoptic cameras with various hats and strips of material.

  I look out of the window and see the city is filled with soldiers, hundreds of them, moving towards Midway Park in the centre of town.

  I turn back to my friends. ‘How did you know where I was?’ I manage.

  ‘Well, for a while there we thought you’d become one of The Missing, but then Kina remembered you used to live in the Black Road Verts,’ Igby says, his voice strained as he fights to aim the drifting vehicle using only the ailerons to bank it. ‘When we saw the fucking light-show we figured we better get there swift.’

  ‘Honestly. We didn’t think you were still alive,’ Kina says, that on
e-sided smile growing on her face. ‘I’m glad you are.’

  I want to smile back, but those lights, spinning down into the blackness, taking my dad with them, are all that fill my mind. I notice her left hand, the trigger still clasped tightly inside.

  I reach over and take it from her, making sure that my thumb is pressed down on the button. Kina slowly opens and then closes her hand.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, wincing against the pain.

  I nod and turn towards Malachai. ‘Where the hell did you guys go?’ I ask. ‘After the hospital?’

  ‘We lost the Smilers. Hid in a Last Religion Church for most of the night. Then more of those soldiers came, some of them had those torch eyes, we moved to a pub and they came there too. We realized they were tracking us via our Panoptic cameras, so we covered them – I see you had the same idea. We decided to stick together while we looked for our families. When the power came back on Igby left Pod with Akimi and came looking for us in this car. Where’s Tyco?’

  ‘Dead,’ I tell him.

  I notice the faraway look in Pander’s eyes. I look from her to Malachai, who shakes his head, and I know that when she found her sisters they weren’t alive.

  I reach out and put a hand on Blue’s shoulder but he shrugs it off, still angry at me for what happened to Mable.

  ‘Alright,’ Igby calls over the rushing wind, ‘I’ll put us down us at the edge of the Red Zones, so these morons won’t follow. Hang the fuck on!’

  I feel the vehicle dip and speed up as we hurtle towards the ground. My instinct is to look towards Kina. It had been my only wish, back when Tyco was about to kill me, to see her face one more time. At least it came tr—

  ‘Put your seat belt on, moron!’ she yells in my face.

  ‘Right. Yeah,’ I say, shuffling over to Molly and sitting her up before struggling to click her seat belt into place with one hand. I move over to my own seat and pull the strap across my chest. I don’t have time to push it into place. When I look, I see the snowy earth coming up to meet us.

  I’m aware of pain.

  Hot, burning pain in my right shoulder.

  I open my eyes. My face is buried in snow. I’ve been thrown from the car.

  The pain is growing, as though my body is slowly becoming aware that something is horribly wrong.

  I manage to haul myself up to a sitting position, and I look down. A part of the car’s door has sheared off, a twisted shard of ragged metal impaled through my right shoulder and part of my chest. I can feel blood spilling out, warm and fast.

  I let my eyes follow a trickle of blood as it runs into my hand, where the trigger is gripped loosely between a thumb and one finger.

  ‘No,’ I mumble, trying and failing to tighten my grip. Something has been severed in my arm: a tendon or a muscle, and I can barely move my hand. As the blood lubricates the trigger it begins to turn in my weak grip, spinning and sliding away.

  ‘No, no, no,’ I say, as I beg my hand to work.

  The trigger slips further still, revealing the button that will kill me if it comes loose.

  I cry out in effort as I tell my brain to tell my hand to work. Work, you useless piece of shit!

  And then the tube of metal falls to the mud.

  I stop breathing as the red light turns green. I close my eyes and wait for death.

  It doesn’t come.

  I open my eyes. The trigger is still lying there, in the mud and half-melted snow, the light green. And I’m still alive.

  All this time, I think, remembering the hours of clasping that stupid trigger, all this time and I find out it’s a dud just before I die anyway!

  Impulsively, I grab the fragment of metal that is embedded in my shoulder and pull. The pain intensifies, but my instincts tell me to remove it. I scream as it inches out of my body, scraping along bone and pulling at my torn flesh.

  ‘Luka, are you OK?’ Malachai’s groggy voice from somewhere in the distance.

  I pull and pull and pull, and finally, the piece of metal comes free from my shoulder, and I drop it down into the red snow. I turn my head and see a beautiful woman standing three metres away from me.

  ‘Hey, Mr Kane. Over here, Mr Kane,’ the woman calls to me. Tall and blonde, in the smallest bikini I could ever imagine. She’s smiling and winking at me and I’m thinking that she’s going to freeze to death.

  ‘Mr Kane, looking good, but you’d look even better in Dash-Seven; clothing for athletes.’

  And then she blows me a kiss, and disappears. She was a Barker Projection, a holographic advertisement.

  I can hear my friends dragging themselves from the wreckage of the car. I look over, I see Kina and Blue getting to their feet, Pander and Malachai pulling Molly free and Igby dusting shattered glass off himself. They’re OK. I nod and smile to myself. They’re OK. I might not be, but they’re OK.

  In the place of the bikini girl, a man appears.

  ‘Mr Kane,’ the tall, handsome projection says, ‘My name is Galen Rye, I’m the Overseer of Region 86. I don’t want to preach, it’s your life and you can make your own decisions, I just want you to be informed. Within one year of taking Ebb for the first time your life expectancy drops to just four years. Patch up, patch out; Ebb is a road to ruin.’

  Something tries to fall into place in my mind, something important, but I’m reeling from the crash and the pain that is now growing in my shoulder. Shock begins to take control.

  ‘Luka!’ Kina is calling out my name, I hear her footsteps approaching fast and she falls to her knees beside me, the moonlight reflecting in her eyes.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, trying to smile through the pain.

  ‘The trigger!’ she cries, picking it up from the snow and looking at it. ‘Your heart?’

  I shrug. ‘Guess I’m lucky.’

  ‘The sound it made, outside the city, three days ago. It must have been switching itself off.’

  ‘Great,’ I croak, ‘that would be good news if it wasn’t for . . .’ I look down to the hole in my chest.

  ‘Let me look,’ she says, lifting my T-shirt to reveal the wound. ‘Oh no.’

  ‘What is it?’ I ask. ‘How bad?’

  ‘It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . wait, what the hell?’

  ‘Kina, listen, if I’m not going to make it, I want you to know—’

  ‘No, Luka, I think you’re going to be OK.’

  ‘What?’ I look down and see that the damaged fibres deep down in the wound are knitting together.

  ‘What the hell . . .?’ I say, repeating Kina’s sentiment.

  I feel nauseous watching the ripped veins reconnecting, the chipped bone regrowing, and the skin weaving itself together until the wound is nothing but smooth scar tissue.

  ‘Please tell me you all saw that?’ I whisper, looking up to see my friends circled around me.

  ‘Luka . . . are you a freaking superhero?’ Malachai asks, eyes wide.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say.

  ‘Then please explain how you just healed yourself in thirty seconds flat.’

  ‘I . . . I can’t.’

  ‘I think the same thing was happening to Akimi,’ Igby says breathlessly. ‘After you all left, and it was just me, her and Pod, she started to feel better. By the time I left to find you guys she was walking again.’

  ‘The Delay,’ Pander whispers, reaching down and grabbing a piece of shattered glass from the car’s windscreen. She digs the shard of glass into the palm of her hand.

  ‘Pander, don’t do that!’ Kina demands, but she falls silent as Pander holds her palm up to the group. She wipes away the blood to reveal her uninjured hand.

  ‘Why would they do that? Why would they make us heal faster?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Igby replies, looking down at the trigger that still lies in the mud, ‘but I don’t like the fact that the trigger didn’t go off.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I say.

  ‘No, I mean, I’m glad you’re alive, but I think there’s a reason you’re
alive . . . and I don’t think it’s a fucking good reason.’

  I want to ask Igby to expand on his theory, but the Barker Projector fires up once more, and standing in front of us in perfectly rendered virtual reality is Wren.

  ‘What is this?’ Malachai mutters, anger in his voice.

  And then a familiar voice speaks.

  ‘Luka Kane, Malachai Bannister, Woods Rafka, Kilo Blue, Kina Campbell, Pander Banks, Akimi Kaminski, Podair Samson, Igby Koh. This is a list of the living escapees of the Loop. You all have exactly one hour to make your way to Midway Park, or Wren Salter dies.’

  The image of Wren disappears, and all that’s left in her place is the last of the melting snow.

  ‘Why do they want us?’ Blue asks.

  ‘We have to go, right? We can’t let Wren die,’ Malachai insists.

  ‘Who are they? Why do they need us? Can’t they just let us take our chances in the Red Zone or something?’ Pander adds.

  ‘I know who did this,’ I say, still staring at the spot where Wren’s image was.

  ‘What?’ Kina asks. ‘Who was it?’

  I turn back to the group. ‘Igby, can you get this car working again?’

  ‘There are spare parts in the back. If I can get it done at all it’ll take a few hours.’

  ‘Get working on it,’ I tell him, and before I speak again I remember that the Panoptic cameras are still recording sound. I pull my hat down lower, making sure that the camera is covered, and I write in the dirt of the cracked window of the crashed car.

  Take my sister. Find Pod and Akimi. Get to the financial district. There is a group of survivors there in a hidden vault. Find them.

  ‘And what about you?’ Malachai asks, his eyes moving from the writing to mine.

  ‘I’m going to kill Galen Rye.’

  There’s silence among the former Loop inmates.

  ‘Galen Rye?’ Blue says. ‘Galen Rye wouldn’t . . . What are you talking about? He’s our Overseer, this is his Region.’

  ‘When I tried to escape the Facility, the guards were saying As One like soldiers replying to an order. Later, when they caught me, I recognized his voice. He was there during the Delay. Whoever has done this to us has access to the weather, the Barker Projectors, and our Panoptic cameras. I’m telling you . . . Galen Rye is behind all this, maybe the whole World Government.’