ME2 (S.E.E.D.S. Book 1)

by J Peregrine

  I could hear Dog whining below me, but I kept climbing. My leg muscles struggled and when my panting echoed back at me, I realized I must be close to the top. I looked above me and saw the outline of the door that gave entrance to the hallway. I didn’t have a clue if I could open it from this side, but I had to try.

  I felt the wall around the door searching for a handle, and then as I heard someone walking towards me along the hallway, I froze.

  “What did you find?” I heard them say from beyond the wall in front of me making me hold my breath.

  “Did you find her?” someone shouted.

  I couldn't hear the response.

  “Was it hers?”

  “It had to have been.”

  “He told you the child didn’t live?”

  “Then he lied... I should have expected as much.”

  “Could it have been another child?”

  There was a pause.

  Then crisp footsteps came straight towards me. I shoved my back against the opposite wall for fear they had seen the panel and would rip it open and yank me out of hiding, but the footsteps echoed as they continued past.

  From down the hallway, I could hear what I decided was the man in white, “I wanted to talk to him, are you sure he’s dead?”

  “You said, kill him."

  “I said, stop him! Not kill him! There's a difference. Now we HAVE to find that girl!”

  The heat rose in my body till my skin was burning and covered in sweat. The words 'Andre' had been enough to turn my stomach. Grandfather had told stories of the things Andre had done and been responsible for, including the death of anyone who didn't cooperate with him. According to Grandfather, Andre had been responsible for the death of my mother and the disappearance of my father and would have killed him too if....

  Bile rose in my throat. Once they moved away, I turned from the door, put my back against the wall and slid quietly back down the chute. When I got close to the bottom, I heard Dog move as I slid under him, making him scramble out of my way. Sitting there in the bottom of the chute squished between Dog and the walls I put my head in my hands and silently sobbed, trying to fathom what had just happened.

  We had practiced our escape many times, our path, our rendezvous if separated. We had even practiced what to do if one of us was injured. But we had never practiced this....

  Dog pushed his nose between my arms and gruffed low into my face, so I stopped my sobs and listened. There were sounds above us. It sounded like they were breaking down walls searching for us. I jumped as Dog growled again. They were coming for us even if they didn't know exactly where we were. I suddenly understood they would stop at nothing. So, I turned and hunted for the latch I knew was there. Finding it, I released the clasp and opened the door. Peering out, I listened for a moment. Hearing nothing, I crawled out into the cold dampness that was the shed, then waited as my eyes adjusted to the dark. There was just enough light to see. The chute had dropped us down from the main living area into this secondary cave that we used as extra storage and it had the added benefit of access to the outside. One of the things we stored here was Grandfather’s car and I hoped our escape.

  We tripped through the random items stored there and made our way to the car which was on the far side next to an outer wall. The car was part transportation, part home away from home all in one. Grandfather kept it in good working order, but it was a relic of the past and I was always worried it wouldn’t work. We used it when we wanted to gather seaweed from the coast or fruit from farther away than we wanted to walk in a day. When we got to the car, I laid my hand on the outer panel and held my breath, waiting. Nothing happened. My body panicked. I looked at the panel, my heart racing. My handprint was still there. My hand was covered in sweat. I rubbed my hand on my pants and then again placed it on the panel. It came to life, shimmering in the dark as the door unlocked and slid open. It remembered me.

  I threw in my bag and turned. Dog stood next to me. Part of me expected Grandfather to slide into view, and I so wanted that to happen right now. When we practiced, we had always raced to the chute and then tripped through the mess to be the first one to the car. He let me win every time.

  Dog barked at me, making me jump. I looked down at the hair on his back, it was standing straight up. “They can’t have realized we’re down here,” I said, but Dog nosed the back of my leg towards the car as sounds from above drifted to our ears.

  My stomach clenched as I jumped in followed by Dog. I dropped the bag on the floor and fell into the driver’s seat. Looking at the control panel for a second, then I held my thumb on the starter. We waited an agonizing minute while the screen slowly came to life.

  The lights and the slight buzz let me know the car had started. I flicked on the sensor and waited. I felt like I was in an old movie and we were on a submarine waiting to see what was hunting us. I hoped there was nothing ‘hunting’ us but almost immediately we saw a flash of yellow that warned us something was coming. I swiveled the front of the car around towards the main door. There were two exits, two paths to my father. Hit number one and we would go down the hill and through the trees like I did when we had practiced. I looked out through the windshield. When we had practiced, Grandfather had come with me. My heart pounded and my ears buzzed. We would throw our bags down the chute and slide down after them and then run to the car. As soon as the car lit up, we would throw open the door. He had me sitting with him in the driver's seat as soon as I was big enough to reach the controls and see over the dash from his lap. He would put on mad crashing music and we would put pedal to the metal as we blasted out of the mountain like our tail was on fire and when we got to the trees he would spin the car around and stop. We would laugh and then slowly drive back up the hill again. It was a game. It was fun. We only picked route two once. I didn‘t like the second route, it was... “Damn it!” The sensor now sparked yellow and red from body heat outside the main door. I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. “Damn it!”

  Chapter 4

  My skin prickled. What if I blasted out the door anyway. The car could probably smash through or over anything they might have. I clenched my teeth and quickly strapped the belt to my body. I had to go the other way. I punched in route two and put the car in gear. The car swiveled on its base away from the main exit to face the wall.

  I know how to swim. That wasn‘t the issue. I wasn't afraid of drowning. My pulse accelerated and little beads of sweat sprang from my forehead.

  The issue was that the river was not one of those long, low, lazy rivers that you see in movies or read about in books that let you drift along sleepily like Mark Twain's Mississippi, although if it had been I guess it wouldn‘t be such a good escape route. The issue was that it was the most terrifying thing on earth, and thus not my first choice. I had been down the river only once, and that had been in the daylight. I had vowed never to go down it again.

  As the base of the car clicked into place facing the wall, I clenched the wheel trying to think of any other option. Dog growled, there was a flash of something in the rear-view mirrors. That was it. No options left. So, I hit the button. The doors moved away, and I took a quick breath. All you could see was a shimmering wall as the waterfall that dropped from the top of the mountain came into view and the mist from it rolled into the shed and over the car. The rumble was incredible, all you could hear was the water hitting the river below as it hammered in my eardrums. “All right, hold on,” I shouted. I took a breath and hit the button. The car blasted out of the cave through the waterfall, jamming me against my seat. There was a moment of suspension then I felt all my organs lift and press against my throat as we dropped.

  Hitting the river sent me down and forward into my seat and the control panel. My belt saved me from smashing my head, but it didn't stop me from biting my lip. The impact felt like it should have crushed the car around me, but instead the river swallowed us whole and whipped us into the undercurrent. When it spit us out, we were already going hell bent for leather
through waves that were white with foam. We were ripped through a churning turmoil of water speeding between high banks and giant rocks.

  My heart lodged in my throat and adrenaline pounded through me as I gripped the wheel. I knew it was pointless to try to guide the car, but I was too terrified to let go. It felt like any minute we were going to be bashed against the rocks and break into a thousand pieces. Luckily the car seemed able to defy most of what the river had to offer. I only hoped that the thuds and bumps of us hitting submerged or not so submerged rocks did not damage anything crucial. I really didn’t want to be thrown into the freezing cold water that was roaring past, but it felt like that might happen at any moment.

  We shot up and down through the chaos that made up the rapids as the river rushed down between the canyon walls. The gorge was deep, but I knew there was a section further down where we could land, and I hoped to be able to see it in the dark. Grandfather had landed us there the only time we had been down the river. Unfortunately, that had been in the daylight and at the moment it was dark, and we were moving so fast I didn't know whether I would be able to see it soon enough to guide us there. I knew it was farther down the river, but to be honest I didn't remember how far so the only thing to do was to watch and wait. It was nerve-wracking watching the car just miss the giant boulders as we careened past them hoping we didn’t capsize or worse and knowing I could do nothing to prevent it.

  We finally came to a less terrifying part of the river as it slowed slightly and became more regular in its path. We were still traveling fast but I finally felt like I could ease my death grip on the wheel and breathe, so I turned to look behind us. It was still dark as pitch and all I could see was the vague outline of the mountain against the sky, no following lights.

  I turned back to the river and took a breath and then threw up all over the floor at my feet. What had I done? As I looked into the dark my vision became obscured, and I realized it was the tears flooding my eyes that were making me unable to see. My body shook as I held my head and cried. Grandfather had never like hugs or touching at all for that matter, but I knew he loved me, and I loved him, and now he was gone. Emotions ripped open my heart as in my mind I could still see grandfather’s empty eyes staring back at me. I cried until my head hurt so bad, I had to stop. I choked back tears, caught my breath and wiped my face.

  "What are we going to do?" I shivered as I watched the black water splash up over the car. The name my grandfather had taught me to fear finally had a face. When I was a child the mere mention of his name had been enough to cause a visceral reaction in me, my stomach would sour, and my skin would get all prickly. I had prayed the things grandfather said about Andre were just the crazy ramblings of a paranoid old man locked in his own fearful world. “Andre would eat the heart of his own mother if it would get him what he wanted," he had said. And now this man had murdered my grandfather. I had thought these fears were childish nonsense, fairy tales meant to strike fear into the heart of children. Well they had, and now they were real.

  "This doesn't make sense. There's no reason for him to invade our home, let alone kill grandfather. We can’t possibly have had anything he would want,” I said to Dog, but he was unmoved, he looked stoically out the window and into the dark.

  I hit the wheel and rubbed my face. “Ugh! I don’t get it.” Finally Dog looked at me and blinked. Then it occurred to me. "How did they find us? They had to have been looking for us. Did grandfather make something recently, something new? But how would they have known?" I thought about this for a moment. "That's ridiculous, if I didn’t know about it, then how could anyone else have known about it?" I stared out at the river again.

  I paused, then I looked at my bag. I found the flashlight attached to the underside of the seat where I knew it would be and opened my bag pulling out the notebook. The notebook was bound in leather with leather cords to tie it shut. Its surface was tooled and cool to the touch. I had never been allowed to touch it before, let alone look inside it, but now he had given it to me. "Only to deliver to my father, not to read," I reminded myself. But I had to look, I had to see if there was something there, something important enough to get killed over.

  It turned out that the notebook was full of drawings, notes and equations, page after page of them. It was full of the things he had invented over the years, plus ideas for things that never were. There was almost no white space left. He had created many of these things over the years. Then there were other things, things he found from the past that he would alter or at least try to get working again if not improve.

  Some of the notes seemed to be smaller parts of random formulas and equations for things he didn‘t explain. I thought I might find a machine for time travel or something that would stop people from destroying the world, but there was nothing like that.

  Finally, I couldn’t bear to look any further. “There is nothing in here worth killing for let alone traveling all the way up here for.” I closed the notebook and rubbed my eyes. I was confused and overwhelmed.

  “Maybe Grandfather had something that was hidden in the workshop.” I looked out into the dark trying to think what it could have been. I realized then that it had started to rain and the rain splashing against the river made it seem to spark and flash. As I watched, the rain turned into a full-on downpour with a rumble of thunder and a burst of lightning that lit everything around us followed by a clap of thunder that made me jump.

  I was too nervous to sit still so I rummaged through the car looking for things that might be useful. I found a pocket-knife, some rope and a canteen, all things that might come in handy if I had to leave the car, plus some dried fruit and nuts to augment those in my pack. Then I studied the map, it was topographical, so it showed the river and the ground around it in rough relief. I could see where we were and our destination, south and west. Unfortunately, there was no indication of what was in between here and there or how long it would take to get there. Then I realized that the landing spot, the way out of the river was not marked. I would have to find it on my own, and the rain and lightning seemed to be following us down the river. It was making visibility almost impossible. What if I had missed the landing site already? This thought made my anxiety double again. The only good thing about having anxiety is that it made me forget my misery and kept me awake.

  Why would they have come all the way up the mountain? What had they been looking for? And then in my mind I saw grandfather’s face again and I wanted to cry. So, I forced myself to look for the landing area again when a glint of light caught my eye. Was it the moon or lightning reflecting off a wave? My adrenaline spiked making me want to run and hide or throw-up but instead I leaned toward the glass and saw another flash.

  It might have been lightning reflecting off something caught along the shore. But it wasn't, it was a glint of light off something entering the river and from the landing area. The place I had been hoping to find and searching for suddenly became horribly unwanted. I realized that whoever it was, was moving straight for us at what seemed like an alarming speed “Shit!”

  Chapter 5

  Once the river had slowed, I had been so relieved to be able to breathe it had never occurred to me to go faster on purpose and now that I wanted to go faster, I couldn‘t remember how. Then I remembered. “It’s a wonder we didn’t sink,” I yelled at myself and wondered whether I had ruined anything.

  I hadn’t retracted the tires or even considered whether there was anything I needed to do. Then I gave a brief sigh as I remembered that picking the river as our exit from the shed had automatically switched on the amphibious devices and sealed off the engine, and lucky for me, Grandfather had designed it with automatic flotation. As the propellers engaged, the car moved forward but only marginally faster than the river was already propelling us. Whatever was behind us was much faster and it looked like it would soon be alongside.

  “Damn it!” I paused for a moment and then I made up my mind. “Come on, Dog, time to abandon ship,” I said, as I gr
abbed my pack and looked for the safety bag. It could withstand anything according to Grandpa, rain, fire, dropping from a great height. I didn’t know if it would keep a book from drowning in a river, but it was all I had. So, I wrapped the book in the bag then put that on the top of my pack.

  The dog must have understood my intentions because he was at my side waiting for me to open the door. I looked around one more time. The last thing I wanted to do was lose the car but if I didn’t leave whoever was behind me, whoever had killed grandfather would catch up to us and if it was Andre, I didn’t want to consider the possibilities any farther. Making sure the lights would not come on, I hit the control panel.

  Looking down into the dark water, I realized it was rushing by much faster than it had seemed from inside the car. I stood on the edge for a moment, my heart in my throat and my feeling dizzy with fear. Was this the best idea? I had never imagined life could take such a sudden and desperate turn and wished there was anything else I could do but I couldn’t think of any other options. So, I slid down into the freezing cold water and held the edge as Dog jumped. When I let go of the edge and pushed away from the car, the door shut, and the car drifted away from us down the river. I swam for the side of the gorge hoping I would be able to cling to the side and find my way out.

  I looked back as I swam and watched as the men on the boat caught up to it. Shots were fired, and instinctively I ducked and struggled to move farther away and closer to shore. As more shots rang out, they pinged as they ricocheted off the car. The car was bulletproofed, which would normally be a good thing if you were inside the car. I could hear the ricocheted shots splashing into the water beside us and then I felt a thunk against my pack and another punch my shoulder. “Damn it,” I whispered and gave another huge push with my legs.

  They were trying to get into the car but it only opened if it recognized you and Grandfather had built it like a tank so my guess was that it would be nearly impossible to gain entry without destroying it.