Mae went next and the lights turned green, which I guess was to be expected. I walked through last, and expected to be yellow, so we could just go drop our bags off and get some food and shut-eye. It had been an extremely long day, and a bite followed by a pillow was just what I needed. The light turned green.
The guards raised their guns at me. “Why are you undocumented? You don’t look like the rest of them.”
Baffled, I shrugged. “Look, I think your machine is broken.” Then it dawned on me, being shot by a hybrid that looked just like Mary’s dead husband on that vessel, then the transfusion from Mae that would help me heal. I had hybrid blood coursing through my body still.
Mae seemed to know this was a possibility but must have forgotten, because I was sure she would have warned me of it.
“You guys know who I am? Dean Parker. The man who was shot trying to stop the entire population from becoming charcoal on the surface of the sun.” I was tired, and wanted to contain my annoyance, but was having a hard time of it. I nodded toward Mae. “She was nice enough to help me out with some super-healing blood, and voila, a year later, I set off your little sensor. Can we just go on through and get some sleep before all hell breaks loose here tomorrow?” I was hoping there would be no breaking loose of hell the next day, but I pushed the theatrics a little far.
They conferred for a moment, but the gun that had been pointing at me a minute ago was down on the guard’s side. That was a good sign.
“Roberts here will lead you to your bunks. No offense was meant, Mr. Parker. We thank you for what you’ve done. All of you.” The fresh-faced guard tried to give us a weak smile, but it came out a pained look.
“Thank you. Have a good night,” Mary said, grabbing her luggage handle.
We made our way through the locker room building and out into the fresh night air once again. It was quiet there, with no sign of anyone other than guards walking in pairs down the dimly lit sidewalks. Large black lantern posts stood every twenty yards or so, casting ominous shadows among the well-manicured lawns and hedges. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as we made our way through the university grounds. We had the hybrids in prison but tried to make sure it looked like they were living in a wonderful place. I could smell flowers as we neared a garden to the side of us and wondered if we had human staff tending to these things or if the hybrids took care of the chores themselves.
Mary must have been feeling something was off too, because as we walked, she put a hand on Mae’s shoulder for a shared moment that neither of them needed to speak for. As we walked by the next lamppost, I saw Mae’s eyes were wet. We were ushered into a beautiful brick building, archways over us as we walked into the large wooden doorway.
“We have you two in these rooms,” the guard said, pointing at two doors in the residence, across the hall from one another.
I almost laughed at them giving us separate rooms, but they wouldn’t know we were together. Neither of us said anything, but Mary did throw me a quick wink.
“Is anyone else on this wing?” I asked.
“Nope. Just you two. Mae, come with us, please.” The guard waved her forward.
“Wait,” Mary said. “Where are you taking her?”
The guard looked impatient, tapping his foot while keeping his face impassive. “She’ll stay with the other hybrids, like she always does when she’s here.”
“No, she can have this room. I want her to stay near us.” Mary stepped closer to Mae.
“Really, it’s okay, Mary.” Mae looked happy to see her friend stand up to the guards, but I wondered if it wouldn’t be better for her to be near her people for information. Seeing the determined look in Mary’s eyes, I didn’t dare suggest this at that moment.
“No, it’s not. You’ve proven yourself to us all. Stay near us. We still have to discuss a plan for tomorrow,” Mary said.
The guard deflated a bit and nodded. “Fine, you stay here tonight. The dean expects to see you for breakfast at eight in the morning. We’ll send someone for you.”
“Can you just tell us where to find him? I’d prefer not to feel like a prisoner here too,” I said. He opened my room door and pointed to a campus map on a small desk near the window.
“Right there,” he said, pointing to a building near the middle of the campus.
“Got it. Thanks, Roberts.” I smiled at him. He quickly turned without looking back, leaving all three of us in the small dorm room.
“That went well, I think,” Mary said, laugh lines crinkling around her eyes. I had the urge to boot Mae out and take Mary into my arms.
“It’s late. How about we sleep, then regroup early in the morning?” This from Mae. Maybe she saw the look in my eyes. “And thanks for treating me like one of you. I’ll never forget it.” The words were touching, but ominous at the same time. I could feel goosebumps rise on my arms, and I wasn’t sure why.
“Goodnight, Mae,” I said, and closed the door behind her. “Good thing the room is all the way across the hall,” I said, smirking at the woman I loved.
She sniffed the air and took her shirt off. “I agree. How about a shower first?”
Looking around, I realized dorm rooms didn’t have their own bathrooms. They had shared toilets and showers on each wing. At least that was how my old school was.
“I know, I saw the sign down the hall.” She opened the door, and I chased after her down the corridor. The hall was dim, and we soon found ourselves interlocked under a weak showerhead. We had plenty of time for saving the world later. That night we took for ourselves.
_____________
There was a tentative knock on the door, followed by a harder one seconds later. I rolled over and checked the time. Seven on the nose.
“I think it’s for you,” Mary said weakly.
“You always say that. Oddly, it never is.” I rolled out of the small twin bed, realizing I was naked.
“Good morning, sleepyheads,” Mae said from the hall.
After sliding into some pants, I opened the door. She held a tray with three coffees in it, each marked with our names. Here we were sleeping, and Mae was thinking of us. She truly was a great friend.
Smiling and saying thank you, I ushered her into the small room. Mary had pulled some clothes from the chair beside the bed, and magically got dressed in moments under the blanket.
“How about we take these to go? I have some news. Take a few to get ready. Leave through the entrance, and head left. About a hundred yards down is a park. I’ll be at a bench.” She looked at me and laughed, then took her coffee and left.
“What’s so funny?” I asked Mary.
She looked down, and I followed her gaze. My pants were on inside out. I burst out laughing, almost spilling my hot coffee.
A few minutes later, after we’d bird-bathed in the bathroom sink, we made our way over to Mae. The morning was beautiful, a single wispy white cloud slowly trailing through the otherwise clear blue sky. It was going to be a hot day.
Mae was sitting on the bench, legs extended and feet crossed. She held her coffee in her hand on her lap, and I was shocked to see how much she looked like Janine right then. That was exactly how she sat when she was in a contemplative mood. My heart suddenly ached, and surprisingly, I didn’t push it away, I embraced it. I felt the love I’d had for Janine fill me. The tender moments, the tough ones, the end of her life, the betrayal I’d felt at learning the truth; they all filled me, and for the first time in years, I felt true. True to myself, and true to Janine.
“Are you okay, Dean?” Mary asked.
“I am,” I answered, and I was. I felt her fingers slide through mine and squeeze my hand slightly.
“What did you find out, Mae?” Mary asked, letting go of my hand and sitting down on the bench beside her friend. We knew Mae would have gotten up early to poke around the other hybrids and hear the latest gossip and news.
“They were a little tight-lipped around me, at least the few I spoke with. Remember, to some of them, I’m the
turncoat. Even to the ones that are happy to be here rather than dead, I still did something I wasn’t supposed to. But a lot of them are happy. It just goes against their indoctrination, which is weakening all the time. I do think there’s a larger group of dissidents than we originally guessed. I don’t have anything to back this up, but the averted eyes and nervous toe-tapping I got this morning told me enough.” Mae took a sip from her coffee and kept staring forward at the dew-covered grass in the park.
“Did you ask about Leslie and Terrance, the two names Clayton the shooter had for us?” I asked.
“I mentioned Leslie in passing to someone I didn’t know well. Asking after her like we were old friends or something. Jarvis paled and told me he hadn’t seen her in some time. That she must be busy with a project for the humans or something. A bunch of BS, if you ask me.”
It didn’t seem like we were going to be able to get far on Mae’s previous relationships. We were going to have to rely on the intel of the guards, and the so-called “dean.” What a presumptuous name to give the head of the camp. It was softer than calling him what he really was: a warden.
“I’m sorry, guys. I wish I could have done more,” Mae said.
“I have an idea.” Mary smiled widely and took a drink of her coffee.
SIX
The dean’s office was my kind of place. Mahogany wood desk, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, not just filled with pretentious unread textbooks and encyclopedias. I saw some King and Child in there too, along with a few of my favorite sci-fi authors. I wouldn’t mind getting locked in there for a few weeks. He even had a connected washroom and a small wet bar, with what appeared to be Scotch in a decanter and one of those fancy digital single-serve coffee makers.
We sat crunched together in front of his large desk, our chairs nowhere near as comfortable and leather-clad as his. When we’d arrived, we were ushered in; I vaguely remembered the guard last night mentioning breakfast with the dean, and my stomach growled at the notion. Maybe he was too busy to eat with the likes of us.
After ten minutes of sitting there, I got up and started flipping through an old Clarke paperback, admiring the classic cover. I’d been lucky enough over the last year to have more free time than I’d had in years, since I hadn’t gone back to working as an accountant. One thing I had missed was reading. Somehow reading about alien civilizations, when I knew it was real, took some of the fun out of it.
The door opened, and a tall man stepped through. I’m not ashamed to say he was very handsome, his light hair neatly combed in a look I didn’t understand how to accomplish. I felt inadequate, with my sink-rinsed hair and wrinkled plaid shirt.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Skip Anderson, otherwise known as the dean.” He spoke with a prim accent. Not one I could place within a region, but more one acquired through an upbringing in private schools and Harvard education.
I was still holding the book, and when I saw his eyes scan to it, I set it down. “You a fan of Clarke?” he asked.
“Sure. Who isn’t? He revolutionized science fiction. But I’m not sure I have a stomach for any of it anymore,” I answered.
“I always liked Asimov better. Robots always interested me as a teenager. Back to business. You really believe this guy from D.C.? There’s no way our hybrids could have contacted him,” Skip said smugly.
Mary rolled her eyes. “I highly doubt that. We learned that there’s an intricate hybrid network of terrorists, recruited even in space. They had a long game, that’s for sure.”
Skip leaned forward, frowning. “That’s impossible,” he said, voice raised. “They have no way to communicate, and no way out. We have things under control here.”
“We were told your surveillance heard some keywords. What can you tell us about that?” I asked, wondering if he would lay his cards out on the table or hold them close to his chest.
“Yes, we have, but those people are under our care now.” Skip spat the word “people,” and Mae tensed as he spoke.
“Which people?” I asked.
“The ones causing the stir at the Oval Office, and evidently around the world. They sent another group of guards when they heard the word Bhlat come through the speakers. As if one of them saying the name of a race will actually make them appear and destroy us.” Skip looked like he was about to stand up, and the handsome man took on a dark, unpleasant face.
“You do remember what happened under a year ago, right? Where were you that day?” Mary asked, probably thinking it would diffuse his undeserved anger.
Skip slid back in his chair; her question seemed to have the desired effect. He looked much younger than his forty-something years as he began to quietly speak. “I hate those bastards.” He looked at Mae for a brief second and averted his eyes back to his desk. “I lived in D.C., well, Arlington. The ships came and I still went to work at the senator’s office. I remember being so mad that no one else showed up. Can you imagine me at work, trying to email files and work on a presentation while we had these gray ships over us, and a bunch of those behemoth vessels looming over the world? What an idiot I was.” He stopped, getting up to cross over to his wet bar. His hand moved to the Scotch, lingering for a few quiet moments before continuing to the single-serve coffee maker. “Coffee, anyone?” he asked, trying to put on an affable voice.
We all shook our heads silently, me wanting him to continue his tale.
“Very well.” He made a cup of coffee, and took it black back to his desk, sitting up a little straighter. “Sorry about that. It’s hard going back to that day, I’m sure for all of us. There I was like a crazy man, working as we were invaded, and my wife was trying to get me to come to her. Well, my ex-wife. She called me first thing and I told her I couldn’t see her. I was still angry with her for leaving me. She’d left a few months earlier, telling me all I cared about was work, and never had time for her.
“She wanted a family. Kids, white picket fence…I thought I did too, when we first met. Only the older I got, the less I wanted that, and the more I wanted a career in politics. We were drifting, but… I didn’t want to admit it.” He was taking us on an extended journey through his time of the Event, but I assumed this path was relevant to the big picture. “She decided to head out of town, I guess. She made a break for it, but no one escaped, as we all know. Well, except you two and your friends.” He said the words with a drip of envy. “I was just leaving the office when the sun had set. I still can’t believe I stayed there all day. No wonder she left me.” He took a drink of his coffee and stared blankly past us toward the door.
“Hey, life is full of growth moments. None of us were or are perfect. It’s what we do with our teachable moments that define us and change us,” Mary said, again impressing me with her ability to spout out positive messages.
He looked at her and smiled lightly. “I’m still trying to be at peace with that idea. I was brought to vessel twelve, along with countless others. I spent the first day just trying to figure out what was going on. There were fights breaking out everywhere, and I witnessed two murders in the first two days alone. I never even tried to stop the young man from killing the other guy. I don’t think anyone was expecting it. He just clocked the older guy and went straight for his throat with his hands. The kid wasn’t big, but he had a sinewy strength to him. Before we knew it, the older man was on the ground, unconscious. The kid took something from his pocket and ran out of the room. Pills.
“The room was full of people, and no one stopped him. We all just stood there with our jaws open, like we didn’t understand what had happened. Finally, a burly man ran after him, but I guess the kid was long gone down the corridors. I decided, then and there, I wasn’t going to be a passive prisoner.
“After exploring the vessel and talking to a lot of people, I knew our prison was huge. Gargantuan, with hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions. We didn’t know the scope, but we were trying to figure it out. So that meant the area they beamed us up from mus
t have been a large one. That meant my wife might have been there with me.” Skip stopped, and I almost said something comforting but decided to hold off. “My ex-wife, I meant. So that was my new goal. Find her among the throngs of matching rooms full of people. Some of the rooms seemed to have expelled a gas into the rooms, because people were down all over the place, seemingly at random.”
We knew now that the Kraski were planning on moving their whole species away from their home, and they were going to put everyone in some sort of stasis using this gas. It basically slowed down the metabolic functions and allowed them to keep humans alive without food and water for prolonged periods of time. Quite a cool concept, if it didn’t mean the death of so many people. It turned out a percentage of people were deathly allergic to the alien toxin, and about five percent of Earth was lost just from that alone, among the already sick who just couldn’t survive, the vessels we’d lost to the sun, and the mass firings the hybrids had rained down on some vessels.
“Quite the needle in a haystack,” I said, getting up to make myself a coffee. I asked if anyone else wanted anything, and after a pause, the dean asked for a splash of Scotch. I wasn’t going to judge the guy for taking a pinch at eight thirty in the morning as he told us a story; I expected it wasn’t going to end well for anyone involved.
He continued as the single-serve machine whirred and poured. I passed him the Scotch, and he swirled the brown liquid on the bottom of his tumbler and watched it as he spoke. “I tried to find the upper corner – the top floor and far left room. It took me hours to get there, and when I did, I searched that first room. People were milling about: some in the halls, some fearful of leaving the room for fear of retribution from an alien host we hadn’t seen yet.
“Some people thought it was a crazy government experiment, and others thought they were just dreaming. I called for Marcie. When I entered a room of the unconscious people, I searched through the piles of them, hoping to see her lovely face. I never did find her. She didn’t make it. They killed her.” His eyes moved once again to Mae’s face, hard lines etched on his forehead. “I found her name on my vessel list after it was over. If only I could have made it to her, I could have protected her.”
The Survivors: Books 1-3 Page 26