WastelandRogue

by Brenda Williamson

  “He took on your father’s work. Or I should say, your father’s and his colleague’s. I wouldn’t wish to discount the genius of Dr. Mariah Sanborn.”

  Both Rye and Shay let out a small gasp.

  “Mariah had a brilliant mind. She and the elder Dr. Renault worked together to develop an agent that would reverse the gene causing sterility. First they had to create a laboratory-controlled bacterium that could act as the carrier. Unfortunately for Mariah and Dr. Sanborn, there was an accident with the bacteria. My fault, really. It seemed the best solution to gain ground on its development. The results were inevitable for a final conclusion. Both doctors and a number of their assistants were infected.”

  “Zandt, did you know about this?” Sevrin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you kept working here?”

  “I though it was an accident, Sevrin, not an intentional act of malice on Dr. Creswell’s part. I’ve worked with the bacteria and it’s what has helped me—” Zandt stopped midsentence.

  “Helped you what?” Sevrin demanded.

  “As you’re probably aware, Renault,” Creswell addressed Sevrin, “lamians with dominant human genes, though rare, are also sterile. What he was working on would make it possible for him and you to have children one day. He has actually succeeded.”

  Sevrin follow Creswell’s gaze from Shay to Rye.

  An infuriated sound seethed from Rye.

  “That’s right, your sister is carrying Dr. Renault’s child.” Creswell sneered.

  Rye lunged at Zandt. “You raped my sister!”

  “No.” Zandt denied this, holding his hands out to stop Rye from attacking him. “I’ve never seen your sister before now.”

  Sevrin grabbed Rye around the waist to stop her.

  “What’s going on, Creswell?” Sevrin asked.

  “Dr. Renault isn’t lying,” Creswell stated. “He had no idea that during his routine physical, one of his inoculations was in fact the bacteria, or that a sample of his sperm was used to artificially inseminate the half-lamian female.”

  “You evil, villainous man,” Rye growled. “We’re going to destroy this place and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”

  “I don’t know about that. Besides, this is one of many facilities under the control of the Wickstrom Group,” Creswell stated.

  “Then we’ll have to go to the source, won’t we?” Zandt challenged.

  “No one really knows where the Wickstrom Group is located.” Creswell grinned.

  “I have a good idea.”

  “No, you just want to believe they are in the easiest place you know the location of. Reality is, they can be found in a multitude of places around the world.”

  “I’ll find them…all of them,” Zandt exclaimed.

  “Do you think it wise to go against us? You are a scientist. A thinker, an observer, a man dedicated to improving the future. The Wickstrom Group is in control of world development. If you don’t work for them, then you’re on the outside looking in. You’ll have no place in our new society.”

  “Zandt doesn’t need you,” Shay declared in a protective tone. “You may have all the equipment and the resources to carry out your plans but as you said, Zandt is the thinker. He’s the man with the intellect and the expertise. It’s you that can’t do without him.”

  Zandt stepped forward. “You want to kill people, Dr. Creswell.”

  “Our aim is on the future, Dr. Renault. We don’t want to start a war, humans against lamians. Our goal is to weaken the lamian breed. Make their females infertile and their males sterile. They’ll die out over time.”

  “Then why use my research to impregnate this half lamian? It can only result in a stronger specimen of both breeds. Doesn’t that go against what you’re trying to do?”

  “Yes. But as scientists, we always need to work to destroy it.”

  Both Rye and her sister hissed a sound of anger.

  Zandt turned to Sevrin. “We’ve got to get going. Time is limited.”

  Sevrin nodded and motioned with his gun for Creswell to move over near the table and the tied up technician.

  “You and Shay go. The two lamians will be strong enough soon and then Creswell and his two technicians can lead us out of here,” Sevrin told his brother.

  “Be careful,” Zandt said, leaving the room with Shay.

  “Do you honestly think I don’t know about the explosives they’ve set?” Creswell said, after Zandt and Shay were gone. “No one pisses in my facility without me knowing, Renault. Your brother and his cohorts have been under surveillance for some time now.”

  Sevrin ran for the doorway to stop his brother from walking into the trap Creswell had obviously hinted at setting. He turned at the doorway and looked back at Rye.

  One of the lamians pushed Rye and said, “Go. We’ve recovered very well, thank you.”

  Rye walked halfway to Sevrin. She looked back at the lamians. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  Both nodded. Sevrin felt her reluctance to leave but he knew she’d come with him. Her sister was in danger again. She’d even leave him to protect Shay.

  “You think by destroying this facility, you can stop the Wickstrom Group? This place is only one of hundreds of outsource subcontractors,” Creswell declared.

  “So where are the high-level overseers of the Wickstrom Group? In hiding?”

  “I don’t know where they are,” Creswell said calmly.

  “But you have a guess, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Creswell. Isn’t that what science is all about? Hypothesizing.”

  “It’s not my business to know that information. However, if I were to guess, they’d be somewhere not easily accessible, not accidentally stumbled upon, impenetrable by whomever they deem their enemies. Lamians will never win this silent war between the species.”

  “Sevrin, we need to get going.” Rye plucked at his sleeve.

  “You’re right. No telling what Zandt and Shay are walking into.” He pulled her out if the room.

  “We don’t know which way they went,” she said in the corridor.

  “If it were me, I’d place the explosives somewhere centrally located where it would do the most damage.” He rushed to the stairwell door where he’d seen a corridor map.

  “I’d think that would be here, in the lowest level.” She tapped the diagram of the floor they were on.

  “No. Zandt said it would take some time to get to.” He studied the layout.

  “But taking out the legs of anyone or anything would cripple a structure,” she argued.

  “Unless it has been reinforced.” He touched the walls. “Have you noticed how everywhere we’ve been, the walls are thick, impenetrable behind their façades?”

  “Then there is no weakness to the building.”

  “Oh, I think there is. They might have strengthened the foundation and reinforced the perimeter but the core of anything is always vulnerable. Everything we’ve seen is a deterrent against entry to the heart of their operations.”

  “Where is that?” Rye moved closer to the map. “We came down here from here.” She pointed.

  “Remember we opened a door and it was a closet?”

  “You think there was a secret door in there?”

  “We searched a whole floor and found nothing but small empty rooms. Even after they took us to that room to wait for Zandt, we passed a similar layout with no indications of labs. There has to be a secret door. The closet would be the least likely area anyone would look for one.”

  “Then let’s go.” Rye went first, running for the staircase.

  The door that they had previously needed a key card to get through was ajar.

  “So far, we’re headed the right way.” He picked up his brother’s lab coat, which was wedging the door open.

  “How did he know we’d follow him?”

  “Maybe he did it for us to get out without needing Creswell.”

  They headed up the sta
ircase and then another and yet another, finding each door propped open. He considered shutting them but unlike Creswell and the other employees, they didn’t have key cards. If he and Rye had to come back this way they’d be stuck. So he left the objects in the doorways.

  “I hope you’re right.” Rye put her fingers in the recessed handle of the door and slid it open.

  “Well?” He moved around her and went inside the small space.

  She searched one side while he searched the shelf unit on the opposite side.

  “I don’t see where any of these shelves slide, swing or move. Every one of them is fastened in place.”

  “Something has to give.” He tugged, yanked and banged on everything. “This is the most logical place for a secret door to be.”

  “We’re wasting time here, Sevrin.”

  He ran his hand along the wall, pushed the panels, hoping one popped open. Nothing happened. “I guess you’re right. We’ll have to look somewhere else.”

  He stepped out of the closet first. Then a whirr of sound spun him back around and he dove into the confined space of the small room as the door slid shut.

  “What did you do?” he asked, holding Rye by the arms while looking around at the vibrating walls and floor.

  “Apparently, that button on that dome thing with the light inside isn’t for turning the light off,” she said, nodding toward the fixture shoulder-high alongside the door.

  “How ingenious, the whole room moves. It’s an archaic elevator.” He kissed her. “And you figured it out.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say I figured it out. Are we really moving?” She looked down. “Have you seen something like this before?”

  “Yes, we are moving and no, I’ve never seen a real elevator. My father knew a lot about history. Zandt and I spent our youth listening to my father’s stories about all sorts of ancient contraptions and unique items. Elevators, airplanes, ice cream and hundreds of other items laced his tales of the olden days.”

  “Ice cream?” Rye stared at him with fascination.

  Someday he hoped to tell her all the stories his father had passed down to them from their ancestors, as well as the stories about the amazing contraptions he had seen firsthand in his travels. “It was an icy-cold treat from hundreds of years ago that you eat.”

  “I don’t eat.”

  “You should try it. You might find you like taste of…you can taste things, can’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, think of eating something for the enjoyment of your senses sometime, instead of a necessity to sustain life. And I don’t mean blood,” he added when she smiled.

  The room stopped. They faced a new corridor, clean and shiny polished metal and glass walls. Lights glowed as bright as sunlight. The heart of the research facility was before them.

  They walked slowly along and looked into the see-through labs.

  “Where do you think we should look first?” Rye jumped at the sound of an alarm.

  “Countdown to sanitation begins now.” the computerized female voice coldly informed them through the intercom.

  “Just start looking. It appears everyone has already left but be careful. I’ve no doubt this place holds many secrets, so we don’t know who might hang back to guard things until the last possible moment.”

  “Ninety-nine,” the female voice announced after a long pause.

  “From what your brother said, I don’t think anyone would risk waiting.”

  “You have to remember, they do this on a regular schedule. They know how to get out and how long it will take them. We can’t linger as long, so we’ll give ourselves until that voice,” he pointed to the intercom, “gets to the count of fifty. If in that time we haven’t found Zandt and Shay, we’ll assume they’ve gotten out and we’ll make our own way out of here.”

  “What about the explosives? How long do you think your brother will wait to set them off?”

  “He thinks we’re in the bottom sub-level and he knows we have to get out, so I’m sure he’ll set the detonator for the longest amount of time possible.”

  “Or not!” Rye yelled over the loud blast echoing down the corridor.

  Sevrin pushed Rye toward a glass door. Inside a lab, he continued prodding her across the room to another door. The floor roiled as though a violent thunderstorm brewed beneath his feet. Equipment on counters danced to the edges and fell. Bottles and boxes dropped from falling shelves. And then he felt himself dropping away with the floor. Rye’s scream surrounded him in the cloudy turmoil of the crumbling ceiling rushing down on them. He tried to reach for her. Touch her one last time. But he felt nothing except the pain of a fall of stone rubble crashing on top of him.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Rye opened her eyes. Lying facedown with the debris from the fallen ceiling on her, she pushed to get up. “‘The longest amount of time’, my ass,” she grumbled.

  The stillness around her suggested she had been unconscious for some time, enough time that every dust particle from the explosion had settled.

  She looked for Sevrin. Where was he? He’d survive if she did.

  He had to.

  “Sevrin,” she called, getting to her feet. “Sevrin, where are you?”

  A strange déjà vu swept through her. They’d been through this before, the allium field. She tried consoling herself.

  He had to have survived.

  “Sevrin?” She staggered along, searching between the mounds of mangled steel and stone.

  Everywhere that she looked, she found more debris, not a trace of Sevrin. Overhead there was a large break in the ceiling. Then she looked at the jagged opening in the floor. Was that where he had been standing? Everything looked so different, as if turned upside down.

  She got on her hands and knees and crawled over broken glass toward the opening. Ignoring the sting from cuts, she leaned over the gaping hole. Below, partly under the wreckage, lay Sevrin.

  “Sevrin, can you hear me?” she asked.

  He didn’t move or say anything. The shortest—the quickest route was through the hole. Common sense told her to find another way down. She was never one to think of her safety first. The worst would be that she broke her leg or got more cuts. All would heal in time.

  Swinging around, she winced at the glass nicking her. She lowered herself through the gap and dropped to the rubble. Unable to get her footing, she fell back and toppled from the mound. Sevrin made a sound, a grunt of pain at the same time. It was her fault for landing on him.

  “Rye?” he mumbled.

  “I’m here.” She started moving chunks of concrete off him.

  “Were you hurt in the fall?” he asked, groaning as she lifted more weight from him.

  “I didn’t fall. I climbed down here.”

  “That didn’t answer my question.” He put his hand over her arm.

  “Some bumps and cuts. In a while, I’ll be as good as new and so will you.”

  “I heal slower, sunshine, remember?”

  His endearment swept though her so fast, tears sprang to her eyes. She leaned down and kissed his forehead. “You will heal and that’s all that matters.” She took a deep breath to hold back the churning emotions threatening to make her cry.

  “Maybe I already have.” He helped push a sheet of steel off that had shielded him from the looser items. “I don’t feel much pain.”

  Rye stared at the heavy metal I-beam lodged in Sevrin’s leg. She wiped the back of her hand over her face.

  “What’s wrong?” Sevrin lifted his head and looked down at what she saw. “That doesn’t look good.”

  He tried to move and immediately expressed with a loud yell the pain he had obviously tried to ignore.

  “It’ll be all right,” she assured him. “After I get the beam off, you’ll heal.”

  She tried pulling, then pushing. Every attempt failed. The steel was heavy and embedded deep. Blood continued to ooze out from where the skin was unable to mend.

  Another violent explos
ion shook the building. More walls came crashing down. Even in his pain, Sevrin thought of her, covering her head with his arms and holding her down on his chest.

  “Apparently, my brother isn’t done blowing this place up.” He tried laughing but it quickly turned into a bout of coughing.

  “I don’t think that was him,” she said, concerned about the experimental chemicals they might have in the facility.

  “Rye, I want you to get out of here.”

  “No.” She kicked at the beam, trying to dislodge it from Sevrin’s leg. He can scream all he wants. She’d not leave him there.

  “Rye, stop.” His grip on her arm dug deep and he pulled her from her task. “We don’t know anything about what they use in that sanitation process. It could kill you.”

  She thought of Shay. They had been apart for so long. Her sister would be devastated to lose her now. She looked around the destroyed room. What hope was there for them to get out alive? With Sevrin trapped and the walls tumbling down, she debated her options.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sevrin forced Rye back. He didn’t want her to die. “You have to leave.”

  When she rose and walked away, he stared in disbelief. Was she really going to leave him? What was he thinking? She had to go. But he couldn’t help voicing an internal plea for help.

  “That’s it, no argument?” he asked. “You’re just going to leave?”

  He watched her continue toward the opening in the wall. A part of him really wanted her to run, find safe ground. Yet the emptiness he’d feel if she left made him yearn to hear her stubborn refusal. He wanted something real to exist between them.

  He pushed up on an arm and another pulsating sharp pain ripped through his leg. The slow healing fought the pressure of the steel beam embedded in the flesh and bone of his thigh.

  He heard the rattle of falling rubble and looked toward the opening Rye had headed for. He didn’t see her. Sadness compounded his raging emotions. Particles of dust from the falling structure burned his eyes. Tears formed and he blinked, using the moisture to wash away the grit.

  If only sadness could be washed away as easily.

  “Give up,” he grumbled and lay back against the rock pile, wishing his thoughts could rule his body’s regenerative powers. A slow death wasn’t a pleasant prospect.