Transient - Complete Book One (Episodes 1 - 4) (Transient Serial)

by Kai Holloway

Then she heard a cough.

  Rae froze, listening. The cough had come from somewhere in the room. Looking around, she didn’t see anyone else alive, but the sound of a cough meant there was at least one other person alive in here.

  “Drew?”she whispered. She dared not raise her voice. Anyone could be in the hall outside. A guard or morgue attendant or orderly.

  “Drew if that’s you, make a sound.”

  She listened again, but heard nothing but the shallowness of her own breathing.

  Then she heard a soft tapping sound.

  “I hear you. I’m coming.”

  Rae moved down the long wall, hearing the tapping sound getting louder and louder.

  Where are you, Drew?

  She opened a drawer and unzipped the body bag.

  No.

  Then another.

  No.

  And another.

  This time it was him.

  “Drew….”

  His face was pale and his eyes were closed. Without thinking, Rae bent down and kissed his lips. They were cold and chapped, but he was alive. As her lips pulled away from his, he coughed a little and opened his eyes. At the corners of his mouth, the beginnings of a smile appeared.

  Rae opened the drawer all the way, unzipped the body bag top to bottom, and helped Drew sit up. She rubbed his arms and shoulders, to increase blood flow. He seemed dazed, but was improving with every passing minute.

  “Give me a second,”he protested in a hoarse whisper.“This isn’t easy.”

  “I know,”Rae answered,“but we’d better hurry. I don’t know what time it is, but someone is bound to come by here soon. We have to get out of here, Drew, out of this room, this building, this city—”

  “No.”

  She stared at him.“No?”

  “Not yet. We have a mission to complete, Rae. A job to do. We need to finish what we started.”

  “Yes, but we can do that after we escape.”

  Drew shook his head, speaking slowly.“Once we escape, we’ll never get back in. We’re at the center of the labyrinth now, the belly of the beast. And no one knows we’re here. No one knows we’re alive. We have a chance now to change things, Rae. To change everything.”

  “Maybe but…”

  “It’s not enough to escape,”he persisted.“We have to bring the system crashing down.”

  Before they left the morgue, Drew opened some of the other body bags on the table, and seemed to recognize a few of the faces.“These are all members of the D-Row club,”he said, his voice breaking a little.

  “But why are they here?”

  “Probably for the same reason we are,”he said.“Rounded up, tested, killed.”

  Drew gathered up Rae’s empty body bag from the table, and stuffed it inside his empty bag, so it looked like there was someone inside. He closed the drawer. Then opened another drawer next to it.

  “Help me with this,”he asked.

  Together they carried the other corpse onto the table where Rae had been lying, and closed the drawer it had previously been stored inside.

  “Better,”he said.“Now it doesn’t look like any of the corpses walked out.”

  “Until they do an inventory…”

  A coat rack by the door held three white lab coats. Drew put one on, and handed to the other to Rae. She put hers on, and checked her reflection in the window.

  “Think we’ll pass?”

  “OBK has thousands of employees. No one knows everyone.”

  “What if they recognize my face?”

  “You were. But you’ve been out of the public eye lately. And now you’re out of context. Just look like you belong here.”

  “I certainly don’t feel like I belong here.”

  “Let’s go before someone discovers we’re missing.”

  Drew listened at the door, then opened it slowly. He peeked out, then nodded back to Rae. He stepped into the hall and she followed, and closed the door quietly behind her.

  They reached the stairwell without meeting anyone. This level of the building seemed quiet. Together they took the fire escape stairs down six flights, to the eighteenth floor.

  “Where are we going?”Rae asked.

  Drew opened the fire escape door. “Here.”

  “The test lab,”she said, realising.“What do you hope to find there?”

  He smiled darkly.“Proof.”

  The hallway leading to the lab was monitored by video cameras.

  “Remember,”Drew reminded her,“we belong here.”

  They walked casually down the hall to the entryway of the lab, Rae’s heart hammering in her chest all the way. The door was locked. Beside the handle was a numeric keypad.

  “What now?”she whispered.

  “I got this.”He punched in a code, and opened the door.

  They entered. Inside, the lab was quiet and unmanned.

  “How did you know the code?”

  “I wrote the code,”he said.

  “Years ago. They didn’t change it?”

  He smiled.“They can only change the codes they know about.”

  Drew started up the lab equipment and the terminals. He seemed to know what he was doing.

  “The basics haven’t changed since I worked here. The cryptograph is what it is. Looks like they upgraded the interface, but the backend should be the same. Too expensive to reinvent the wheel. It’s a rickety wheel, but it still works.”

  Rae realized she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in a couple days. She felt dried out, and needed a glass of water. She saw a water cooler in the corner and got them each a cup while Drew did whatever he was doing with the computers.

  Outside in the hall, someone walked by. Whoever it was stopped and looked in through one of the large windows. The blinds were drawn, but it was possible to see in through the slits. Drew and Rae had kept the lab lights off, but the computers were on, and they gave off their own glow.

  Don’t come out, Drew

  But if she warned him, the person in the hallway might here.

  The OBK staff member moved on only seconds before Drew stepped out.

  Rae caught Drew’s eye and put a finger to her lips. He got the idea, and stopped in his tracks. When everything was clear, she waved him over.

  “What now?”she asked.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They stepped back into the hallway and returning to the stairwell, they made their way down eighteen flights.

  “Safer than the elevators,”Drew said.“No one takes the stairs.”

  By the time they reached the first floor, Rae was winded. Her heart was pounding, and she could hear the blood pulsing in her ears. Her legs were sore from neglect. They hadn’t had much exercise during their confinement, and being paralyzed was an ordeal in itself. Pain screamed through her calves and thighs.

  Drew pressed his ear to the door that led to the lobby.

  “Too many people,”he said.

  There was another door marked Emergency exit.

  “How are your legs?”he asked.“Think you can run?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Drew threw open the emergency door.“Well, we’re about to find out.”

  An ear-splitting klaxon sounded the alarm.

  Together he and Rae darted out of the building, and ran as fast as their feet would carry them.

  Chapter 28

  They shed their lab coats and threw them in a nearby dumpster before exiting the compound and running for what seemed like miles until they reached more familiar surrounds.

  Together they jumped the turnstiles at Embarcadero station and hopped on the train to the Daly City Station.

  From Daly Station they headed for Lake Merced Park, leaving behind the busy streets for the hiking trails, where they were less likely to be seen or followed. The walked past the zoo and followed the coastline north to Golden Gate Park.

  Rae felt weak from hunger. She was anxious and tired and had no idea where they were going but at least they w
ere free.

  For now.

  They stopped in a thick wooded area with leaves on the ground and the smell of eucalyptus in the air. They were well back from the road now, where no one could see them.

  “Rest here,”Drew said, and sat down in the leaves with his back to a Monterey pine.

  Rae did likewise. The ground was cold and damp, but she was glad of the break. She caught her breath, then said.“I hope you have a plan.”

  “I have a plan.”

  “We can’t go back home. We can’t go anywhere that people know us or that OBK might find us.”

  “I know a place in San Raphael. We’ll be safe there.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “We have to cross the bridge.”

  “What bridge?”

  “The Golden Gate.”

  Rae could see the wide expanse of bridge from where she sat.“Couldn’t we take a bus?”

  “We stay off the grid. Avoid witnesses. All the buses are monitored with security cameras, and the fares are recorded. Someone on the bus may recognize you, and alert the authorities. They’ll know what stop we got off on. We can’t let them know where we are in the city and we can’t stay in one place. We have to keep moving.”

  “How far is the bridge from here?”she asked.

  “Maybe a mile.”He stood and brushed the leaves from the back of his sweatpants.“Keep your hood up, and hope for fog.”

  Drew ran through the trees, and Rae followed after him.

  They made their way through the Richmond District and the Presidio, then walked over the Golden Gate Bridge, with the water of the bay far below them and the suspension towers rising high above, disappearing in the fog.

  It was cold and windy. The bridge was too long to run the whole way. It seemed like at least a mile and was built on an ascent, rising toward the middle. When they got the centre of the bridge they stopped and looked out.

  Rae was tired from lack of sleep, exhausted from the escape, and weary of the world.“It would be so easy to jump,”she said, looking down into the deep black waters below.“End it all. Just climb over the railing and throw yourself over.”

  “Lots of people do. But you’re not a quitter, Rae.”

  “I know.”

  “You have to keep going,”Drew said.“We both do. For Danielle, and Halldor and Benny. And all those others in the morgue, the ones whose names are lost. They didn’t have to die. But we have to live.”

  She nodded felt cold tears in her eyes, and wiped them away.

  Drew put his arms around her and held her tight as the car traffic roared past and the bridge trembled beneath them.

  “We’ll make this right,”he said.

  And as she rested her head on his shoulder, she felt his strength seep through and Rae’s determination was heightened afresh.

  They would make this right; two transients unwilling to sit around and wait for the sand in the hourglass to run out.

  Rae lifted her chin and kept moving. The cryptograph couldn’t predict that.

  THE END

  We hope you enjoyed this story.

  Rae and Drew’s quest in Volume Two,OUTLIERS begins soon.

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