The Barriers

by Katie French

  “But Riley hasn’t been.” She turns to me. “Riley’s been raised outside. She’s a fighter. You can see from looking at her that she’s equipped to take on this task.”

  Heat begins to rise up my neck. “Now wait a minute.”

  “You have to be kidding me,” Dennis says from across the table.

  Corra shoots him a look. “Dennis, shut up. Riley, just listen. We can find your friends. Besides the Breeders and Nessa Vandewater, we’re the only ones who have satellite capabilities. In seconds, we can tell you where to find your loved ones. How long will it take to drive around and search from town to town, putting your group in the path of road gangs and Breeders’ patrols?” She pauses for effect. “How long before the people you’re looking for end up dead?”

  I cringe at her words as they hit home. I need that satellite. I’d do anything to find Ethan and Clay.

  Licking my lips, I look around the table at the faces staring back at me. They’re all trying to see what Corra sees. Hell, I’m not sure I see what Corra sees. I’m not a survivor. I’m just lucky. Half the time when the shit hit the fan it was Clay who pulled us out. And Clay’s gone.

  “What would I have to do?”

  Corra smiles and begins tapping the tabletop in front of her, directing it to do her bidding. “Subject Eight is a highly classified project stolen from the Breeders’ underground research labs. As you might know, Nessa has been conducting human experiments, subjecting people to horrible treatment with one goal in mind: creating a faster-maturing female. It sounds crazy, but in reality, before the fall of civilization, genetic science had been advancing in that area for years. Scientists created pigs and cows with faster gestation periods with great success. With some research into old archives, Nessa thought we could do the same with humans. And in many ways, it seemed like the answer to our prayers. Just think, mothers who could produce females faster. The population could increase, and humanity could start repairing itself. Many of us worked for years on that very project, creating an embryo that could gestate in only three months and grow to reproductive maturity in as little as three years.”

  “How can that be possible?” I ask.

  Corra leans forward, pursing her lips together. “I don’t want to bore you with all the science so I’ll just say this. Genetic engineering means rearranging our DNA, the building blocks of our body. It was a science long before our time. They did it with plants, and then with animals. By taking the traits from one animal and giving them to another, scientists created new species, made them stronger and more resistant to diseases. But ethically, people weren’t sure about using it on humans.”

  “But when the governments fell, you all decided to do whatever the hell you felt like?” I ask, arching an eyebrow.

  Corra’s smile is cautious. “What choice did we have? We used that science and began testing it on humans.”

  “Plan B,” I mutter.

  “Plan B indeed. But what she didn’t consider—what we didn’t consider—was this: just because a human body can mature that quickly doesn’t mean it should. The brain doesn’t mature at the same pace.”

  The screen in front of me shifts to a video. A hunched form sits in a cell identical to the one I woke up in this morning. Brown matted hair covers her breasts and back, but it’s clear she’s an adult female, completely naked. As we watch, she prowls around the small space like a caged animal. Her gestures and body language suggest chimp or monkey, not human, although she looks completely normal. Then, on the screen, the heavy metal door opens.

  A man wearing military gear like the men around this table enters the cell with a tray of food. The female backs up to the wall, submissively dropping her head but keeping her eyes on the food. Though there’s no sound, it’s seems like he’s speaking to her. She doesn’t appear to answer, just continues to stare at the food, staying at the far end of the cell.

  He’s about to leave when she appears to say something. When he turns, surprise and delight is evident in his expression. He strides toward her, a smile on his face.

  That’s when she strikes.

  Her posture and expression change in an instant. The female pounces on the man, grabbing his shirt and groping for his eyes. As he flails, she makes quick work of his eyeballs, blinding him in seconds. Pushing him off, she bounds out the door as the man falls to the floor, his hands on his bleeding eye sockets.

  “Oh my God,” I say into my hands.

  Dennis snorts. “You think that’s bad?”

  Corra swipes and the video disappears. “It is bad, Dennis. Just because you’ve already seen and dealt with it doesn’t make it any less horrible.” Corra turns to me. “Our friend and colleague, Dr. Handler, is permanently blind. Subject Seven wanted out. When she saw an opportunity, she used what she felt was appropriate force to free herself from captivity. She doesn’t see us as fellow humans. She sees us as threats.”

  “We’re calling it ‘she’ now? What happened to referring to Subject Seven by less endearing pronouns?” Dennis asks.

  Corra sighs, clearly frustrated, and continues. “Subject Seven is smart, but not quite human. Not in her mind. She’s more like an advanced primate species. She’s had no parenting—no collective upbringing to tell her certain actions are wrong or bad. She grew up in a cell with her only parent a twisted one.”

  “Nessa.” She always did want children. If she couldn’t have Clay, she must’ve found a substitute.

  “Nessa Vandewater is no more a mother to Subject Seven than that Nazi Josef Mengele was to the Jews he tortured. But she did create her subjects using her plan-B females. She’s their creator, not their mother.”

  I think of my mother—of the fetus she carried in her belly after being a part of the plan-B experiments. That baby was a parasite, killing my mother from the inside out as it siphoned off her life. If it had lived, would it have been a monster like the one I saw on screen?

  “Where is Subject Seven now?” I ask.

  “She…” Corra pauses, looks at Dennis, and corrects herself. “It escaped after blinding Dr. Handler and killing another man. Before it went, it took something else we need. Something that could change the fate of our world.”

  “What did it take?” I ask.

  “Subject Eight.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Clay

  When we finish our meal and chat, Mike and his entourage escort Cole and me to my shack. Hank sulks at the back of the pack of men. He seems pissed about the fact that Mike’s chosen not to splay our guts on the desert floor. After Mike leans down and whispers in his ear, Hank waves tiredly to the closed front door. “He says to rest. He’ll tell you more this evening when it’s cool.”

  I walk up the steps, thankful for rest. Midafternoon has cooled the temperature to bake instead of broil. It still hotter’n hell’s shithouse, but with the throbbin’ headache I’ve picked up, I could use some R&R.

  But when I open the door, a giant girl throws herself on me.

  “Clay!” she shrieks, plasterin’ my neck with kisses.

  I push her off. “What in the Sam Hill…”

  She stumbles back, her cow eyes blinkin’. “You’ve forgotten again?”

  Cole steps around me and rolls his eyes at her. “No, he remembers you’re not who you told him you are.”

  She plugs her fists to her meaty hips. “What do you know, Ethan? You don’t know what’s goin’ on in his brain!”

  What’s goin’ on in my brain is a throb fit to beat Jesus, but I center on somethin’ she said. “You called him Ethan.”

  “He’s back to thinkin’ I’m Cole again,” the boy explains. He pats my arm kindly. “It’s okay, Clay. I don’t mind.”

  “What?” I say, but I can barely stand. The headache blurs my vision, and the meal creeps up my throat. “I gotta lie down,” I say before crumplin’ to my knees in the doorway. Cole and the girl step back. Crawling through the doorway, I collapse on the floor. I hear them close the door behind me as I try to keep from pukin’.
The pain is a hammer smashing into my cranium.

  “Clay, you all right?” Cole whispers by my ear.

  “Course he’s not all right. You started hollering, and he had to run out and save you. I saw it all from the hole in the boards. It’s your fault he’s like this,” the girl says.

  “It’s not my fault. It’s Miss Nessa’s. And you’re not helping by tellin’ him lies, neither.”

  “They aren’t lies!” she shrieks.

  “Are too!” he retorts.

  “Enough,” I say, grippin’ my head. “I can’t take it.”

  They shut up, thank God. But the silence isn’t comforting, either. I wince and scrunch into a ball. No matter what I do, the pain finds me. Pain, pain, pain. Waves of it. Tsunamis.

  Suddenly, the girl starts humming, her voice smooth and clear. The boy joins her, his voice a light alto. The lullaby’s melody is soothing. I let it carry me away.

  ***

  I wake to the turn of a lock.

  Stiff as hell and achin’, I sit up. It’s dark. The only light comes in from the cracks between the boards, ribbons of moonlight. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I had a hangover. Wish I did. At least I’d have enjoyed the whiskey the night before. I sit up and open my eyes. The boy and girl lie together curled up like a pair of pups. When the door opens, they scatter apart, frowning at each other. Lamplight spills into the room along with its carrier, Hank springin’ in like a leprechaun with his tail on fire.

  “Get up, you pigs,” he whispers. “Get up, you idiot losers. You rotty, pimple-nosed shitheads.”

  I stand slowly, towerin’ a good foot and a half above him. “You’re a master of words, ain’t ya?”

  When he sees I ain’t mad, it makes him even angrier. “You don’t scare me, you giant fat-head. Your brain’s garbage. I heard them talking. You’re re-tarded.” He sings the last word like a taunt.

  I make a fist and stomp toward him. He flinches and skitters back to the door. I laugh. “Not scared?”

  He makes some hand gesture at me that must mean somethin’ awful in his language, but I ignore it. “Where’s Mike?”

  “You’re to meet him now if you can manage with your stupid brain.” He sneers, but he keeps one hand on the doorway as if he might need to bolt.

  And he might ’cause I feel like wringin’ his scrawny neck. “Get out of our way.”

  He sticks his tongue out like a toddler, but then turns, jumps the two steps, and sprawls into the dust, his gas lamp landin’ with a thud and sputterin’ out.

  “Jesus, that kid is a bag of shit,” I say.

  Beside me, Cole watches him sprint through the dust toward the men gathered near the windmill, standin’ in a circle of torchlight. “I wish he’d fall down a gorge.”

  I tousle his hair. “That’d knock some sense into him at least.”

  Cole looks up at me, admiration on his face. “I’d like to knock some into him myself.”

  “Wouldn’t we all?” I sling my arm around his shoulder.

  “What’re we talking about?” The girl appears behind us.

  Cole turns on her. “Stay in the shed. It’s not safe.”

  “If it isn’t safe, you should stay, too. You’re the one who almost died trying to oil a windmill.”

  “Knock off the bickerin’,” I say. “She can come,” I tell Cole. “If they haven’t raped her yet, they ain’t gonna.”

  “Comforting,” she mumbles.

  “You can always stay in the shed,” I say. When I lead Cole down the steps, I hear Betsy behind us.

  The night has cooled and the sky is scattered with a million stars. With a nearly full moon, the scrub and buttes are a muted gray in the distance. A bird caws. The goats, now out of their sun shelters, blink at me with big, round eyes. I guess even goats can learn to be nocturnal in the desert. One bleats as we pass, pokin’ his snout between the wooden fence. Cole runs a finger down its nose, partin’ the coarse fur.

  “Nice.” He lingers, petting the animal. But when I look back over my shoulder, he scampers up to my side again. I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Ugh. Now you smell like that thing,” Betsy whispers.

  Up ahead, the men have gathered around an object illuminated by gas lanterns and torches. When I walk up, I see some kind of schematic drawn on large paper. A few men fiddle with several pieces of pipe taped together, wires coilin’ out of the top like cartoon hair.

  “Is that a bomb?” I ask.

  Everyone turns. Mike looks up at me and then gestures to Hank for him to speak.

  “This is what we wanted you to see. We’ve been working on a way to infiltrate the undergrounders’ bunker for years. We’ve found plans to build a bomb that can take out their main power supply. Without clean air, they’ll be forced up like gophers.” Hank’s smile is mean. “We need to get the bomb inside. That’s where you come in.”

  “Me?” I ask.

  Mike whispers in the kid’s ear, and then Hank speaks. “The ventilation system has a very small entryway. We need someone small.” He points at Cole.

  “Nuh-uh. No way.” I push Cole behind me.

  Mike frowns. Hank knits his dark brows together. “I told you they didn’t want to help us, Mike.”

  My eyes dart between Mike and his men, at the finely sharpened knives tucked in pockets on Mike’s vest. I bet he’s good with those knives, and pretty soon, his men are gonna start callin’ for our heads. I hold my hands out in a calming fashion. “We wanna help—we do. But you know as well as anybody, Mike, I can’t let my brother take all the risk. He’s just a kid.”

  Mike’s face softens as he looks at Cole. He whispers in Hank’s ear again. I can tell whatever it is, it don’t please him.

  “Mike says you could take the boy’s place. You might be able to fit. But if not, the boy goes in.”

  I nod slowly. “Sure. I’ll fit. Let’s see what you got in mind.”

  Mike signals for me to follow him. Beside the table where the men tinker with the bomb, a hand-drawn plan covers the top of a battered card table someone must’ve dragged out of their shack. In the yellow light from the gas lantern, I lean over the drawings, tryin’ not to block the illustrations with my shadow. Below me is a network of sketched rooms with words penciled in the corners. I read “Mess Hall,” “Living Quarters,” and “West End Power Plant.”

  Mike taps the paper with his large, calloused finger.

  Hank leans in and speaks for him. “The bomb has to detonate near the power plant. Someone would have to enter here.” He points to a spot on the map labeled “North Ventilation.”

  “If these undergrounders are smart enough to find a government facility, they’re smart enough to lock their goddamned back door,” I say, stickin’ my thumbs in my belt loops. “They ain’t gonna let me waltz right in.”

  Hank gives me a nasty glare. “Of course it won’t be that easy. But we’ve only seen about a dozen people coming and going from there. They can’t possibly watch everything.”

  I look the map over again. Whoever drew this has sketched narrow tubes runnin’ from the outside ventilation to a main area. Then it angles left over to the power plant. “What’s this?” I point to the big, empty space on the map.

  “We don’t know.” Hank flicks a glance to Mike. He shakes his head as if agreeing.

  “You don’t know? They could have anything in there.” I run a hand through my hair. “You’re sendin’ me into a death trap, and you’re doin’ it all from the safety of your easy chairs.” Heat burns through my chest. “This whole plan stinks. No wonder you want me to do it. There’s no chance you’ll see me again, but you ain’t out nothin’.” My eyes dart around the circle, but no one will look at me. My head’s throbbing. Angry, I reach out and grab Hank by the arm. “If you need someone small, send this bastard. He’s just the weasel you need to slither in somewhere.”

  Hank kicks at my shins, cursin’ and clawin’, but I hold tight. Mike’s eyes blaze as he comes at me, his hand slippin’ to the knives i
n his vest.

  “Let… him… go.” Mike forces each garbled word out as he draws out two eight-inch knives, thin as paper and sharp as death. I wish to God I had a gun.

  I let the kid go. He spills into the dirt, clambers up, and skitters behind Mike, still spittin’ curses at me.

  “I ain’t tryin’ to hurt ’im.” I show my open hands again. “But this plan’s rotten and you know it.”

  Mike tucks both knives back into the neat pockets on his vest. “Show… him… the bomb.”

  I step over to where the men are fiddlin’ with wires attached to a plastic canister filled with amber liquid. Betsy and Cole gather behind me as I look the contraption over. “How will I get this in without blowing my balls to China?” I ask.

  Hank leans over the bomb, an evil smirk formin’ on his face. “It’s got a timer, dumbass,” he says, but he glances up to see if Mike’s around. Lucky for Hank, Mike’s still staring at the map. Hank’s evil smile deepens. “Even a shit-for-brains cow licker like you can drop off a ready-made bomb, right?”

  I keep my face neutral and pretend I haven’t heard him. “If this thing gets bumped, does it go off?” I ask one of the guys threading wires around a set of batteries.

  The man squints into the lantern light behind me. He’s thin with a leathery face and dark nearly black eyes. Patches of raw, sun-damaged skin pock his cheeks and bald head. He stops workin’ on the bomb, stands up, and considers me. “Bomb won’t go off with just a jiggle, but I wouldn’t drop her from any height if I was you.” He pulls a rag from his pocket and rubs his hands with it. “Then again, I ain’t never built no bombs before, so what the hell do I know?”

  I lean back, shocked. “This your first bomb?”

  He sighs. “Turns out I’m one of the only folk ’round here who can read so…” He trails off, nodding at a tattered book. On its pages, I see schematic drawings that look a lot like the bomb before me.

  I clench my jaw, but as I’m heatin’ up, Mike walks over. “Rest… today. Tomorrow… you go. If you… succeed, I’ll… make… you my… speaker.” His meaty hand clamps on my shoulder and his eyes go to Hank, who is shuffling, looking concerned. “Hank… needs a… break.”