Billy realized he was on his knees.
Theo was trying to hold him upright.
The needle, in Billy’s forearm. He remembered feeling it earlier. But it was difficult to put that thought into words. Whatever the doctor had been ready to inject into Phoenix’s mother was now in Billy.
“Knife out their eyes,” Vore instructed his men. “They’ll still be able to work for us.”
“Won’t matter to me,” Theo said defiantly. He was fighting to keep Billy upright. “I can hardly see anyway.”
“No,” Billy said. The noise came from his mouth like a slow vibration. He felt himself sway.
Vore grinned. To Billy, the movement on Vore’s face seemed to shimmer.
Without warning, an immense panic overwhelmed Billy. So sharp and powerful that he lurched to his feet again despite the drugs washing through his body. Something terrible! Nearby! Monsters! Danger!
He began to flail.
Theo jumped away screaming. Only for a split second. There was a blue arc, striking Theo like a horizontal lightning bolt.
Theo wasn’t the only one who had screamed. The five men surrounding them had first crouched, then bolted with yells of fear. Vore too screamed. He had spun around, lurching away from them, trampling anyone in his way. The crowd had become fluid in mass hysteria, scattering in all directions.
Something horrible was happening. But Billy couldn’t leave Phoenix behind. Or Theo.
Billy fought his panic and the death drugs that had been injected into him. He picked Theo up and held him under an arm. Billy dragged himself back toward the soovie, Theo limp in his grasp.
Billy’s tongue was dead. He tried to call Phoenix’s name but couldn’t make a sound, paralyzed by the overwhelming sense of panic he could not shake.
Billy managed to get his fingers on the door handle. He tore at it, and his hand popped loose. He realized he’d pulled the handle off the door.
Billy tried to pull the door from the frame, but the steel was unyielding. The effort drained him, and he found himself on his knees with the roaring in his ears now so loud he couldn’t hear Phoenix anymore.
Then, as his consciousness darkened, came nothing.
SIX
Two men with long-handled gaffs stood on the bank of a narrow, fast-moving river, about a half mile from the guarded wall at the base of the mountain, well screened by the terrain and trees. A glow of orange was all they could see to indicate the lights and barbed wire and high electric fence that made for a two-hundred-yard cleared zone on the Appalachian side of this wall, a perimeter that flanked the entirety of the small state that had seceded from the rest of America to form a theocracy.
While the river came from the direction of the wall and flowed from the base of the mountain, it did not pass under the wall. It flowed out from a cave just above the two men. An underground river that surfaced here. They’d been alerted that a couple of Appalachians were about to escape, helped by the Clan. The two men had blankets and ample food waiting for the Appalachians.
Johnny Brannon was here in case either of them needed medical help. As a physician’s assistant and a father of two young boys, he had difficulty finding time for much when it came down to it, but he made time for this.
Like Abe Turner, the older man, Brannon lived in Lynchburg. Small towns had all but disappeared after the Wars. Too difficult to protect against roving bands of Illegals. The landscape here in the Carolinas and all along the eastern seaboard was a lot different than it had been a hundred years earlier. After the Wars, the natural evolution of societal living had been a regression to the walled cities of ancient times. Influentials had shifted to city-states, linked by high-speed rail at three hundred miles per hour, where it was possible to protect about thirty thousand in the inner core with twenty-foot-high walls and patrolling soldiers. Generally about a hundred thousand camped outside the walls, the daily migrant workers who were allowed through the guarded checkpoints into the city to supply cheap labor. All open land between the city-states was country without law and structure.
Abe Turner scanned the fast-moving water with his flashlight.
“Matthew 4:18, brother,” Abe said. Abe had escaped Appalachia about a decade earlier but refused to talk about the circumstances.
For the sake of God’s love, Johnny Brannon, the younger man, told himself, find the patience to let the old man ramble.
“Yup, like Jesus said,” Abe continued. “I will make you fishers of men.”
Matthew 4:19. Johnny internalized the correction. No point making Abe feel bad.
Johnny couldn’t spend as much time on the Bible and the history of it as he’d like to but still gave serious effort to learning. His wife was tolerant of his faith but wasn’t a believer.
“Who knew it could be so exciting to be a follower?” Abe asked. “We’ve got gaffs here, not a rod and reel, of course, but we’ll still pull them out, like fishers of men.”
“Didn’t the disciples fish with nets?” Johnny asked. He couldn’t help himself after all. But Abe could be so pompous and condescending. Johnny sometimes thought that was the reason Abe liked being a believer. Everyone had to be nice to him.
“Maybe some used nets,” Abe said, “but when Jesus is in your heart, he speaks right to a person. I’m no net fisherman, so how could Jesus be speaking to me about net fishing? What I hear is the Lord telling me to use the right kind of bait and to reel in all those unbelievers who need him so bad.”
So imposing your modern-day perspective on a manuscript thousands of years old is the best way to understand the Bible? Choose an interpretation that makes you feel good? Johnny was thinking something different. That the fishing Jesus saw involved throwing a net out and dragging it back in, keeping it in constant repair. This took hard work and patience, often with a lack of results. Fishermen of that day had hands scored with scars, sore backs. It wasn’t as exciting as reeling in a hard-fighting bass.
Johnny was determined to be respectful of the older man, however, and didn’t speak those thoughts.
Johnny took his mind off the minor irritation by thinking how brave these Appalachians were, so determined to get away from the religious prison of their country, wondering what it would be like going through a long underground river, not quite knowing what was waiting Outside or even if you’d make it.
This was just the starting point. Johnny and Abe would get the men from the river onto a train, on the northeast route for a couple hours of high-speed to Lynchburg. The underground railroad rotated city-states that accepted refugees on a six-month basis. Johnny and Abe, as volunteers from Lynchburg, had only made four trips in the last four months; one of the reasons volunteers traveled with the refugees was to form an immediate friendship and bond.
From what Johnny knew about Appalachia, the trip would be an incredible culture shock. Behind the electric perimeter fence that surrounded all of the steep and remote valleys of Appalachia were small towns, heavily policed by the religious leader, Bar Elohim, and all travel, except for religious leaders, was done by horse and buggy. In Lynchburg, the refugees would for the first time see how Industrials and Illegals camped in shantytowns and soovie parks outside the walls, just for the chance to migrate into the city in the mornings to work for minimum wage, only to be forced back out again in the evenings. The alternative was to try to live in the lawless open land between city-states, where the survival rate for any but the savage and strong was too low to make the risk worthwhile.
The refugees at least, while never granted voting rights and doomed to remain among the Invisible, could eventually earn the right to get identity chips in their fingers and a form of citizenship as asylum seekers from the oppression of Appalachia. While unable to vote, they would have the right to legal work and to rent apartment units within the protection of the city walls, largely invisible within the system, unlike the Industrials, who had no citizenship and were forced to accept bar-coded facial tattoos if they wanted to enter the city for each day’s emplo
yment. Smaller bar codes could have served as a way for computers to keep track of their movements, but facial tattoos were the most effective way of identifying the Industrials at a glance, and this made protecting the Influentials much easier since Industrials composed the bulk of the population. To minimize the chance of riots, Influentials barred them from gathering in groups and made them leave the walled cities before curfew. The lowest class were the Illegals—those who refused facial tattoos for the sake of freedom and were reduced to hiding in the city sewers or prowling in gangs outside the city walls, among the shanties and soovies, with a curiously structured society of their own.
Thinking about the tremendous adjustment these refugees faced took Johnny back in his memory to the previous time he’d been here along the river. Unfortunately, with Abe.
Six or seven weeks back, they’d waited along the water, expecting only a young woman. Instead, there’d been a National Intelligence man, drugged for short-term memory loss. They’d only been able to figure out his identity from a card in his sodden wallet. Carson Pierce. They’d never heard from him again, of course, nor ever learned what had taken him into Appalachia and then out again like this.
And there’d been an old woman with him—Gloria—and an odd pair of friends. A big, big man, gentle in the face. Billy. With a chatterbox kid who could barely see. Theo. Johnny had gotten the two of them into an apartment in Lynchburg and found them a job, then helped them run away, somewhere into the shanties or soovies.
About a week later, they’d been alerted to come back for the woman. But she hadn’t appeared in the river. Instead, she’d walked up behind them. Completely dry. In a dark cloak that hid most of her body. She too had settled into an apartment, only to disappear a little later.
Lightning flashed from a faraway thunderstorm.
“End times are upon us,” Abe said to Johnny before the rumbles reached them. “Won’t that be great? Just like that lightning. Flash, we’ll be taken away. All the sinners who deserve God’s wrath will get left behind, and we’ll be sitting in heaven, just laughing at all the wrongdoers and the full dose of God’s punishment inflicted on them. Plagues. Wars. You name it.”
Johnny was rescued from one of Abe’s usual end-time rants by the sight of a yellow life jacket in his flashlight beam floating down the current.
“Abe.” Johnny pointed.
The life jacket was empty. Abe snagged it with his gaff and dropped it at his feet.
Johnny scanned the river. Then came the second life jacket. Not empty.
“Hold the light for me!” Abe said. Unnecessarily.
Johnny did as directed.
“Hey!” Abe shouted. “Over here. Ready to help!”
The man kicked in the water toward them. As Abe reached out with his gaff, what Johnny saw in his flashlight beam was a snapshot of a man’s face that would be burned forever in his mind.
The contrast of wet facial hair and emaciated face showed someone who had been in a prison for weeks, barely fed. And the remnants of the right eye, dark and wrinkled, like a puckered prune.
The man’s other eye was milky and, in the brief time that Johnny had the light on it, seemed to wander.
Poor man, Johnny thought. What kind of hell have the religious zealots in Appalachia put him through?
SEVEN
Hey, Skinner, this is unbelievable,’ the first cop said. The fat one. He’d flipped Caitlyn’s cloak over her head and had patted her down. He’d quickly discovered two folded pieces of paper beneath her microfabric and her knife in its sheath.
He’d tossed the folded papers into the front seat of the car, along with the knife.
Now her hands were cuffed behind her back. The cop had bent her over the hood on the driver’s side of the car, pressed her face sideways against the smooth metal. She could hear the ticking of the engine cooling down. And smell the fat cop’s body odor, like soured mustard.
“The knife?” the second cop, Skinner, asked. “Most of them carry something.”
“No.” Fat One was running his hands along Caitlyn’s back. Until this night, no one except her father, and once a doctor when she was a child, had touched the deformity. Now, twice in the space of hours, she’d endured violations that made her shudder with shame and rage.
“She’s wearing some kind of tight bodysuit,” Fat One said to his partner across the hood. “There’s some kind of opening, a vertical slit down the back. And something really weird underneath.”
The cop was going to reach inside. It was over then. Her secret exposed. She should have listened to Jordan, gone immediately to the surgeon he had sent her out of Appalachia to find.
“Leave her alone,” Razor said, handcuffed too and bent across the other side of the hood. “Unless you want a major civil liability.”
Caitlyn was blinded by the cloak over her head but heard a thump on the hood. And a groan from Razor.
“That give you any idea of why you should keep your mouth shut?” Skinner said to Razor.
“Monitor this,” Razor said. “I’m clearly saying that you lifted my head and banged it down. That’s another civil rights violation.”
Another thump. “Illegals don’t have civil rights. Even if they did, my partner has a probable cause to search for weapons. He already found a knife.”
The fat cop’s hands were pulling the microfabric apart where it had been designed to snap open easily.
His hands paused as he reached under the fabric. Then departed. He’d stepped back.
“Hey, Skinner, we need a shotgun on her.” His voice was quieter.
“You can’t just shoot—” Razor’s voice was cut off by a thump, harder than the first two.
“What do you have?” Skinner asked his companion. “I’m busy here. In a civil rights issue.”
Another thump.
“Whatever it is,” Fat One said, “we need it on digital record.”
“So lift the cloak and turn her back to the windshield. Let the monitor get it.”
Caitlyn knew what he meant. A wide-angle monitor mounted on the rearview mirror gave an unbroken surveillance of all squad car activities, including their arrest minutes earlier.
“You’re going to have to come here with a rifle and a flashlight,” Fat One said. “I don’t think the monitor will get enough detail.”
Every pistol and rifle carried by an Enforcer had a small video camera along the bottom of the barrel to record any situation where a weapon was drawn or fired. The surveillance records were used in postmortems, to justify an Enforcer’s actions in court, or analyzed for additional training. But only in situations that involved Influentials.
“Don’t think of moving,” Skinner told Razor. One more thump on the hood. “Understand?”
Scuffling of leather told Caitlyn that the fat cop was moving around the front of the car.
“Get a good shot of her fingers,” Fat One said. “This is some weird crap.”
Then the cop’s hands again, pulling apart the vertical slit of the microfabric. More tugging, oddly gentle, until her deformity was exposed and spread. Flashes of light told her that the cops were scrutinizing what they’d found.
“Insane,” the second cop said. “A set of fake wings. What will the Illegals come up with next?”
“Should we find out how this is attached?” Fat One asked.
“Only if you want hours of paperwork to justify our probable cause for why we undressed her. Let’s take her in and let one of the females find these…things.”
“Good call,” Fat One said, still staring at the wings. “Let this one be someone else’s problem.”
EIGHT
Wearing a gas mask to protect himself from any remaining mist from the fear pheromones, Avery Weldon stepped down from the stealth chopper and waved his crew onto the ground with him. There were six new recruits to the National Intelligence agency. They too wore gas masks and carried stretchers.
Knowing they would follow, Avery didn’t hesitate as he made his way across open
ground to the side of the rusted soovie and the motionless bodies of Billy Jasper and the kid named Theo.
Ten minutes, max, Avery thought, before any of the dispersed crowd returned after the collective panic attack. Plenty of time to load both of the bodies and clear the area.
Avery wasn’t looking for a crowd though. He had an undercover agent inside the soovie park. Avery expected the agent any second.
“We’re in,” Avery said into the microphone inside his gas mask, speaking to the undercover NI man who had called in for a helicopter rescue of Billy and Theo. “Now’s the time to get out if your cover is blown.”
The gas mask was equipped with internal speakers.
“I’m cool,” came the disembodied reply. “Nobody saw me lob the bomb. I ran with the rest of them.”
“What about when you Tasered our targets?”
“Only had to Taser Theo, to keep him from dispersing. Here’s what you should know. The big one didn’t run.”
“But he’s down,” Avery said.
“I didn’t put him down,” the agent said. “He made it to the soovie before falling. The pheromones didn’t scatter him with the rest.”
Avery was impressed. Not many had the mental strength to resist the bombardment of senses inflicted by fear pheromones.
But if the undercover agent hadn’t put him down, what had?
Avery knelt beside the big one. Frowned at the sight of a broken-off needle in Billy’s forearm. The agent who had called them in said it started with a death doctor. Avery made the obvious conclusion. He clicked off his internal microphone to speak to his crew.
“This one goes straight to the paramedic,” Avery barked. That fact that Billy Jasper wasn’t dead yet was another testament to his strength. “Tell medical staff he was probably pumped with chemicals, likely some kind of euthanasia cocktail.”
Four of the men strained to lift Billy and, once they had him on a stretcher, hustled him back to the paramedic on the chopper. The other two loaded Theo.
Flight of Shadows: A Novel Page 4