But it wasn’t telepathy that warned Michael to stay alert around Ferrance Walker, the snitch Dean Hampton had warned him about. All Michael had to do was glance up now and then to catch Ferrance watching him from one of the assembly stations across the way.
Watching him and smiling.
8
It took Blake a little over a day, working tirelessly with few breaks, to build a functioning computer. He had to scavenge parts from an old one Midas Ford had lying around. When the doctor asked him what he was up to, Blake jokingly told him he was writing a memoir. When Midas asked again, Blake told him to mind his own business.
Midas knew better than to keep pressing. He also knew Blake would tell him eventually, like he always did, once the information became relevant to their cause.
He tried to force down a meal of boiled kale and turnips Arielle had brought him. He had already eaten the bacon, which had been delicious, but now since he was trying to boot up the computer, his greasy fingers kept making a mess of the keyboard. He wiped his hands on a cardboard box, then on his jeans.
The computer loaded, then gave him a series of errors as the old operating system struggled to find an internet connection so it could install about a hundred software updates.
“That’s right,” Blake said, “the phone.”
Weisman had briefly explained how to tether the computer’s wireless network to the phone’s satellite connection. Blake went through half a pack of cigarettes in the time it took him to figure it out. By the time he had established the connection, his lungs were killing him for fresh air. Ignoring the itching sensation growing in his chest, he phoned Weisman.
“Ready,” Blake told his friend. “I think. I hope.”
“He’s ready for you,” Weisman said. “You’ll have to tunnel through using a VPN.”
“What’s that?”
“A virtual private network.” Weisman sighed. “I’ll walk you through it.”
“What would I do without you, Sam?”
“Probably live a quiet, peaceful life on a farm somewhere.”
Blake grinned. “I’d die of boredom.”
The next hour was spent setting up the network and entering a bunch of codes Weisman provided. Breaking into the WDPRA’s secretive internet—and establishing an illegal connection on networks that weren’t supposed to exist—turned out to be surprisingly easy. Blake almost wished he had more computers and satellite phones, along with a few hackers on his crew. There was no telling the kind of damage they could do to Kole’s government using his own internet against him.
Finally, the connection was made. Blake found himself staring at a black square, waiting for a face to appear. His phone beeped twice.
“Battery’s low,” Blake said.
Weisman coughed. “Not…surprised,” he said, hacking phlegm out of his throat. “I’ll sign off, then leave you be. Let me know what you find out—unless it’s bad news. You know I hate bad news.”
“I will.” Blake smiled. “Thank you, Sam.”
“Stay alive, Major.”
With a click, the line went dead. Blake stared at the black box on the monitor in silent anticipation of the face that would appear at any moment. Who could it be? What scientist would risk his life and the lives of his family to establish a connection with rebels hiding out in the Eastlands? It was the sort of crime that could land a person’s entire family in a labor camp for the rest of their lives. Not just parents and siblings. Aunts, uncles, cousins…
When the face popped into existence on Blake’s dusty old monitor, he finally understood.
“Hirscham Kole,” Blake said, staring in utter shock at the eyeless face of Harris Kole’s eldest cousin, those sunken eyelids twisting as the man grinned in response. “I can’t believe I’m speaking with you. I thought you were dead.”
“Everyone thinks so,” Hirscham said. “It’s a nice feeling, like slipping under a warm blanket.”
The man was younger than Blake by around ten years, yet the horrors he’d witnessed, the trauma he’d endured, had aged the man in a way that was pitiful to see. Not to mention his eyes, the lids of which were sealed shut and sunken. Harold Targin Kole had blinded him—his own nephew—after an incident in which Hirscham had supposedly been caught posting on an illegal Christian website using a facility computer. Until then, no one had known about Hirscham’s secret religious proclivities.
“But how—” Blake started to say, then he just sat there in disbelief.
“My mother,” Hirscham said. “God bless her soul. She convinced my father to smuggle me out after my uncle blinded me. She was the one who faked my suicide.”
“I guess the whole video chat was your idea of a joke?”
“Not at all, my dear Louis. I just wanted you to know it was really me and not some imposter.”
“No one could fake your—let’s call it unique—sense of humor,” Blake said.
“Or my ravishing good looks,” Hirscham added. “You’re welcome.”
Blake smiled, filled with warmth and affection for his old friend. “Spite me,” he said, shaking his head. “I heard you burned yourself alive. Covered yourself in gasoline, then struck a match right outside the Capitol building.”
“I’m guessing they found the golden cross around the neck of the body. That’s how they ID’ed me?”
“They did,” Blake said.
Hirscham grinned. “Want to hear something funny?”
“Shoot.”
He leaned forward, his grizzled face filling the screen. “The body wasn’t mine.”
Blake couldn’t help but chuckle. After all that had happened, Hirscham was still Hirscham. The man would tell jokes on his own deathbed.
Hirscham sat back. He reached into his shirt, past the collar, and pulled out a tiny gold cross, which he let hang on a gold chain.
“No need to hide it anymore, Lord knows,” he said. “Not out here.”
“It’s good to see you, old friend,” Blake said. A lump had formed in his throat.
“You as well,” Hirscham said, and his sunken eyelids twitched. “Well, so to speak.”
“So, how’d you do it? The suicide and all that.”
“Finding a body was the easy part, believe it or not. All my mother had to do was buy one on the black market—the corpse of a poor soul who had died of starvation during the famine. They were selling the bodies to cannibals back then, people too desperate to care where their protein came from. Then my father helped her with the gasoline and making sure no one saw them. I guess it helped I come from a family of tough sonsabitches.”
Blake shook his head, amazed and delighted to hear about the man’s successful escape. Even better was the way he had rubbed it in Kole’s face.
“The suicide letter you posted on the Capitol door…” Blake said.
“I wrote that,” Hirscham said, then he began to quote lines from the flyer. “‘Mankind will look back on the Kole family, and the People’s Republic, as one of the greatest and most elaborate scams ever committed against the human spirit and the minds of men…’”
“Beautiful,” Blake said. “Truer words were never spoken.”
The two men shared a laugh.
“I heard Uncle Harold was furious,” Hirscham said. “That made it all worth it.”
Blake allowed a moment to pass before he got to the point. “I need your help, Hirscham,” he said.
“Of course you do. Why else would you agree to pay me such a princely sum?”
Grinning, Hirscham adjusted the collar of a frayed work shirt covered in soil stains. Blake could tell by the redness around his neck and the ruddiness of his cheeks that he was no stranger to the outdoors in this new life, blind or not. He must have been living a quiet life out in the eastern countryside somewhere, as a farmer or rancher. He probably had a wife, maybe even a few kids who helped him out. It was a nice thought.
“It’s about three children from the Noogenesis experiment. Three of the babies who…who survived.”
Hirscham lost the kindly smile. He was now frowning in suspicion, as if Blake were trying to sell him a new pair of eyes.
“I heard one of those babies survived,” Hirscham said in a slightly lowered voice. “My cousin Harris has been trying to track him down. Been hunting him for years.”
Blake almost gave in to a sudden urge—the urge to be completely honest and tell Hirscham Kole about Michael and everything he had been through with the boy. But it was too risky. He trusted Hirscham fully, but they still could not be a hundred percent sure this call wasn’t being monitored. If there was even a one-percent chance someone was listening in…
“This isn’t about that particular baby,” Blake said. “It’s about two others. You won’t know them by name…”
“Of course,” Hirscham said. “What were their codenames? I remember them. All thirty-four of those poor souls, at least the ones who perished when I was still around.”
“They were two girls. T2-27 and T2-34. Charlotte and Arielle.”
Hirscham froze. He sat still as a statue, and just as silent.
“What is it?” Blake asked. “You look like a man who’s about to tell me I’ve found the offspring of Jesus Christ himself.”
Blake gave a good-natured chuckle, then hushed when he saw how serious Hirscham had become.
“I won’t beat around the bush,” Hirscham said. “One of those is my cousin’s baby. Good ol’ Harris had a penchant for fooling around with the concubines. I approached him about it once, but he threatened to slit my throat if I told on him.”
Blake sat back against his chair. The news came as no surprise—after all, what were the chances Charlotte and Harris Kole would share the exact same birthmark located on the same part of their bodies simply by coincidence?
“What about the other one?” Blake said.
“Arielle,” Hirscham said. “She’s the daughter of a concubine named Sara Casmas. Same mother as the one you call Charlotte, only the other half of her DNA was blended. There’s a tiny bit of me and you in her genetic code, as you well know—and about a hundred other men. But I’m sure as shit certain about Charlotte. She’s Harris Kole’s daughter, one hundred percent. He only had two offspring we were able to genetically confirm—and believe me, we tested all against that son-of-a-bitch serial rapist.”
Blake was stunned. “Two offspring… Who was the other one?”
“One of the babies from the Ascendant project. Most of them died, if not all. Not sure what happened to their mother. Claudia was her name.”
Blake’s heart hammered against his ribs.
Holy shit, he thought. Holy spiteful shit.
“Which of the Ascendant babies? Hirscham, which of the seven Type Is was your cousin’s?”
“The seventh one,” he said. “T1-07. Beautiful baby boy. Nine pounds and perfectly healthy. I wasn’t around to see whether he survived or not, but I was there to witness his first couple of years. The boy was a natural Type I according to the scans, and it looked like he was going to make it. He was strong, that one. We had a nickname for him—Lucky Number Seven.” Hirscham sighed. “He was two years old when I had my trouble and my uncle took my eyes. Never got a chance to see if he pulled through or if he perished like the rest of his brothers and sisters.”
Blake could only sit there, perfectly still, his mouth agape.
Michael…Lucky Number Seven…Harris Kole’s son!
“You wouldn’t happen to know,” Hirscham said. “Would you? Did the boy make it?”
Blake covered his mouth. Then he removed his hand, swallowed, and proceeded to tell his old friend a bald-faced lie.
“I left a year after you did, so I can’t be sure. But from what I heard…he didn’t make it.”
“It’s too bad,” Hirscham said. “Seven dead babies. A horrible thing for a mother to endure.”
“Indeed it is,” Blake said. “Indeed it is, old friend.”
9
The attack came at night.
Ferrance must have been waiting for Michael to get comfortable the first week of his imprisonment. Or the man simply liked to take his time, watching his victims and learning their weaknesses before making his move.
Michael turned it over and over in his head afterward, wondering what made men like Ferrance Walker tick. The answer eluded him.
It had been a night like any other. Michael tossed and turned, unable to sleep, until he realized he simply had to urinate. The shack was stuffy and small, and as he scanned the room, he saw the shadowy shapes of men asleep on the floor. Half a dozen of them, with their heads along the walls, feet pointing into the center. Michael had found a place to keep his crude bedding, which was really just two pieces of fabric—one on which to sleep, the other for rolling into a limp pillow—in the corner by the window.
A shaft of moonlight entered through the empty window—glass was forbidden in the camp, as it could be used to craft a weapon—and Michael used it to navigate his way across the room toward the exit. Outside, a refreshing breeze cooled him. He had been sweating since he arrived at Camp Brazen, and his unwashed skin felt like it was covered in a layer of putrid oil that made his pores cry out for fresh air.
The outhouse was a short walk away. Michael could have pissed in the darkness against one of the buildings, but a man in his hut had warned him about that during a whispered session in which a few of them had given Michael advice. Guards patrolled the area at night. If they caught someone urinating outside of an outhouse, the punishment was a week in the hotbox, which was a tiny, one-man shack in the center of camp that was designed to get hotter than hell. Life in a hotbox consisted of one meal a day, three cups of water, and all the time in the world to regret the decision that got you there, according to their description.
Michael was halfway there when a shadow moved against one of the buildings. Instantly, he spun to run back to the shack, to Dean Hampton and the men he knew would protect him. But another man blocked his path. Michael caught a quick glance at his face before a fist connected with his jaw. The man was one of Ferrance Walker’s friends, a red-haired prisoner with a crooked nose that must have been broken in a fight at some point in his life, maybe multiple times. He might have even been a boxer once upon a time. He sure hit like one.
Michael went down, landing on his back. Ferrance’s face appeared above his own, a dark shadow, though not dark enough to hide his grin. Michael’s vision swam as he scrambled to get to his feet. Ferrance was quick and strong. Cupping a hand around Michael’s mouth, the man wrapped his other arm around Michael’s body. Then he and the other prisoner—Michael thought of him as Red because of his hair—combined their strength to half-lift, half-drag Michael toward one of the warehouses.
“Scream at any point,” Ferrance grunted into Michael’s ear, “and I’ll cut your nuts off.”
Something sharp dug into Michael’s side. A shiv.
This was no surprise. Many prisoners had shivs, though Dean Hampton had warned Michael about the consequences of being caught with one. Hotbox on the first offense, execution on the second. Beatings from start to finish. “I ever catch you carrying or stashing a blade, then I’ll be the one to personally beat the tar out of you,” Hampton had told him. “Every man I ever knew in here who owned a shiv eventually had to use it. None lived long enough to regret it.”
The memory of Dean’s voice, along with his stern warnings, comforted Michael as the men forced him into the warehouse. It was a good feeling, a helpful mental state that gave him the confidence to do what he planned next.
Michael closed his eyes. He summoned his telepathic will, immediately sensing the strings in Red and Ferrance’s minds, connecting with them in a way more intimate than the sex act he now understood was about to be attempted.
“Get on your knees,” Ferrance said once they had entered the darkness inside the warehouse. Michael could barely see a thing. But he could feel the point of the shiv now pressed to his throat.
Red kicked the rear of Michael’s left knee. The f
irst attempt failed, probably because Red was having a tough time seeing his target, but the second was successful. Michael fell to his knees, struggling to concentrate. He was shivering—from fear or adrenaline, he couldn’t tell, though it was most likely both—and it was tough to focus his mind, to empty it of the clutter that could, potentially, keep his telepathic ability at bay. He had never been good at using his ability while in the grip of strong emotions—unless he happened to have an episode tonight…
I can’t. It’ll ruin everything. It could kill me.
He gave in to the fear, if only to keep the anger at bay.
“Open your mouth,” Ferrance said. Michael heard a rustling sound as the hand not holding the shiv proceeded to draw down the front of the man’s pants. “Again, you make a single sound, or if I even feel a hint of teeth, then this blade is going straight through your eyeball. You got me?”
Swallowing a cold feeling, Michael muttered, “Yes.” As he stared up at the two men, all he could see were their dark, looming forms, and—faintly, like twists of evaporating smoke—a pair of strings, dancing inside their minds. Michael didn’t need light to see those strings, but he would need concentration to manipulate them.
“Open wide,” Ferrance said, moving toward him.
Then it happened.
A chicken clucked. Two, three, and then more than that. A whole noisy group of excited chickens.
Wings made a fluttering sound. Boots stomped, and men yelled in alarm. One shouted, “They got loose!”
“What in the spiteful wrath?” Red said.
Ferrance drew back. “Son of a bitchin’ bastard.”
Michael’s entire body flooded with a soothing sense of relief. The commotion that had arisen—in which a number of guards madly tried to restrain chickens loosed from their coop—was almost comical in its absurdity.
Bloodcrier: The Complete Two-Book Series Page 45