Jane noticed the great valley of aspen trees they were flying over was surrounded on all sides by ridges, none as steep or tall as the one that led to her plateau, but they were formidable nonetheless. The aspen valley appeared to be several miles long, a couple of miles wide, and given its natural walls, it was almost like a basin, with no easy access in or out. In flying over, Jane almost felt like she was standing in the glinting gilded belly of an enormous Viking ship carved out of solid stone. She doubted that there had ever been even one person in this whole valley, given the difficulty of getting down to the bottom. If anyone ever wanted to hide from the atrocities of this world, Jane thought, this would be a good place to do it.
The shuttle continued to fly low over the dense grove. Then, as if a giant had punched a hole through the golden carpet, the grove opened below, and Jane saw the greens and heathers of wild grasses and the grays of clusters of boulders and rock outcroppings. She also noticed that this area in particular seemed to be covered with sticks and twigs, bleached white by the sun. It was almost as if something had shredded the white trunks of the aspens in the area and scattered them everywhere in an uneven bed of mulch. Even in the low light of the setting sun, the sticks provided a dramatic contrast against the black and gray boulders.
The shuttle was moving too fast for Jane to really see anything clearly, but she stared at the valley floor and at the mass of white sticks. Then, in a blink, she thought she saw something that immediately took her breath away.
“Evelyn, stop the shuttle!”
“Jane, we’re kind of on a schedule here.”
“Stop, Evelyn—stop! Just put the shuttle down by that cluster of rocks ahead.”
The shuttle gently glided over the grass and rocks, and came to rest near a large rock outcropping not far from the edge of the grove of aspens.
Jane stood from her seat and stepped toward the window. From the cockpit, she could see the whole of the grassy valley they had been flying over, and up close what she saw was almost too gruesome to believe. Jane was speechless, unable to find the words to express herself, and then managed to spit out the only word that found its way into her mouth in the moment.
“Bones.”
A minute passed, and as the shuttle’s engines powered down, everything became eerily quiet. Jane could hear herself breathing the shallow, uncomfortable breaths of nervousness.
Jane looked closely at the rock outcropping not ten yards away.
“Everything … is covered in bones,” she said, still finding it difficult to find the words to describe what was grinding through her mind.
From where she stood, around the side of the crop of rocks and littering the top of it, Jane could see dozens of human skulls, mostly cracked or broken in some manner, and the bony remains of at least that many people, dismembered and scattered around. As she glanced along the rocks into the grass, she couldn’t see as well but thought she could still make out traces of white among the long blades of green.
Jane turned from the window and started marching toward the back of the shuttle, feeling a shiver running up her spine.
“Evelyn, lower the ramp.”
Jane watched the ramp ahead of her lower toward the ground. With just a little light left outside, she could see the grove of aspens not far away. Carefully, she stepped out onto the ramp, walking down the side to peer at the grass below. Putting her hands to her mouth, she gasped in disbelief.
There was hardly a place where she could see the earth through the stringy native grass that wasn’t littered with bones. The bones were so densely clustered that as Jane looked away from the shuttle’s ramp, she couldn’t see a path through the valley in any direction that wouldn’t involve tripping over thousands of them. Even from where Evelyn had landed the shuttle, Jane could see dozens of spines, pelvic bones, femurs, rib cages, skulls, and every other bone in the human body imaginable, almost all of which had been picked clean by scavengers.
There was no dry, rotted clothing. There were no personal belongings. There was nothing to identify who these people were, where they had come from, or why they were here. It was just a massive open graveyard full of bones.
“There must be thousands of skeletons out here.”
“Actually, Jane—there are more than two million.”
Jane’s mind and body ground to a halt as she stopped to stare across the valley.
“Two million?”
“More than two million, Jane. I didn’t want to alarm you, given the task ahead of you, so I didn’t say anything. But as we started flying over this valley, the scanners picked up the bones, and given the number of skulls we flew over in getting here, I estimate that the bones of over two million people are here.”
Jane walked to the edge of the ramp but was careful not to step off it, for fear of crunching down on top of someone. In fact, she was becoming remorseful at having the shuttle land in this spot, feeling as if she had just parked on top of someone’s grave.
Directly in front of the edge of the ramp, Jane’s eyes trained on a relatively small skull—probably a woman’s, she thought sadly—that was still attached to most of her torso, one of her arms, and one of the legs of her skeleton. She happened to be resting on her side, but was still facing Jane. Above the right eye, Jane could very clearly see a perfectly round hole—probably from a bullet—and spider-webbing cracks emanating from it. Jane let her hand reach up to touch her own face where she had been bashed by the vagrant and his rock, and couldn’t help but feel she was looking into some horribly twisted and grisly magic mirror.
The terrifying reality of what she was looking at hit her squarely, almost knocking her off her feet. “So it’s true,” Jane began, “people are being executed … If they break the law … if they don’t find their place … they’re killed.”
“Yes, Jane. Sadly, this valley appears to be proof of that.”
Unable to take her eyes off the woman with the bullet hole in her forehead, Jane stared uncomfortably and then finally shook loose from her gaze.
Looking up, again toward the tree line, Jane discovered she was being watched. The wolves had returned, only this time there wasn’t just one or even a dozen. Deep into the woods, Jane could see wolves scattered throughout the trees as far back into the darkening grove as the light would allow her to peer.
Startled, Jane eased her way back up the ramp toward the belly of the shuttle. The wolves seemed unconcerned with her and stared at her, motionless, almost as if they were indifferent as to whether they might make a meal out of her too.
“I think it’s time for us to go,” Jane whispered as much to herself as to Evelyn.
Jane reached the top of the ramp, continuing to stare at the unflinching wolf that had stepped nearest, a couple of paces outside of the wall of aspens. As she did, the ramp lifted, and the wolf—seemingly more curious than hungry—watched and stood his ground.
Jane watched the horrific boneyard, the wolf, his pack, and the once beautiful but now disturbingly haunting grove of aspens all disappear behind the rising metal ramp of the shuttle. As the ramp sealed her off in her own metal box, Jane heard the thunderous rumble of engines overhead.
Quickly glancing through the narrowing crack between the ramp and the hull of the shuttle, off in the distance she saw the silhouette of another shuttle cresting the southern ridge of the basin. A second later, the lights and all but the emergency power in Jane’s shuttle went out.
“Jane, I have detected another shuttle in the area. I turned off the power to help us blend in with the surroundings.”
Jane felt her way in the dark, back to the cockpit, which had only the light filtering in from the cloudless moonlit sky, the sun having ducked below the horizon seconds prior.
“What do you mean, blend in? Are you hoping they’ll mistake us for another cluster of boulders?”
“Well—as a matter of fact—yes.”
Jane stared out of the window. The shuttle overhead was coming from their rear, and with all the instrumentat
ion turned off, it wouldn’t be possible to know if they had been detected until it was too late to do anything.
Having spent the bulk of her life traveling on shuttles, she recognized the roar of its engines. It was a government transport shuttle, not equipped with the same new engines and technology her dad’s shuttles had. It was a relic of decades past, so it rumbled across the sky slowly and laboriously. It continued to get louder with each passing second, and then Jane could see it through the glass of her window, continuing on its course across the valley, a thousand feet overhead.
Seconds later, not a half mile from where they hid, and even against the darkened sky, Jane saw what her mind told her was definitively impossible. The bodies of more people were being tossed from the back of the shuttle. Jane couldn’t tell for sure from where she sat, but she figured that as were the other victims in the valley, these poor souls were also naked. Given their limp forms and the ungainly way they were tumbling toward the ground, she prayed she was correct and that they were already dead. The alternative—that these people would have been alive at the moment they were pushed from the shuttle bay, to suffer the crushing trauma of a fall from a thousand feet—was beyond disturbing.
As the shuttle above continued dumping more bodies into the valley, Jane could see, in the grass below, the dark shapes of hundreds of wolves tearing off after the shuttle and after the bodies, which would become their next meal. It was clear to her now why there were so many wolves on the ridge above, why the sheer size of the pack down here was astonishing, and why they hadn’t attacked her in either place. They were coming to the shuttle, which they knew was the source of their food. They were waiting for another feeding in much the same way the predators at the zoo wait for their keeper to drop the meat into their cage.
The thought of the pack of wolves gorging themselves on those people made Jane nearly vomit, and she could feel her eyes water with tears. How perverted had her country’s leaders become that this was acceptable? How could they justify doing this? Was there so little compassion left in the country that people could literally be thrown away like this? The vulgarity and inhumanity of watching people discarded like they were was shocking and painful for Jane to watch.
Jane couldn’t tell how many people had been tossed from the shuttle. It may have been a hundred, or hundreds, but bodies continued to fall as the shuttle faded from view into the darkness over the valley.
MILITANT
Evelyn maneuvered the shuttle quietly through the mountains as Jane stared absently through the window, still trying to process what she had seen. She felt nauseated and had no way of knowing how many other places the government was using as a dumping ground for anyone unwilling or unable to fit into their master plan. She didn’t want what she had seen to be real, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that her dad was right. He certainly didn’t know about the open graveyard she had just landed in, but he knew the people of this country needed a future away from this insidious regime. Just like her dad, Jane couldn’t just leave Earth and never come back. They had to find another place—another planet—and bring as many people back with them as they could.
“If I have to spend the rest of my life doing it,” Jane offered, still staring out the window, “I am going to save as many people as I can from that fate. I don’t care if I have to travel back to Earth a million times, Evelyn, I have to help these people.”
“I know, Jane. I understand.”
Quietly Jane offered a prayer for the millions of souls departed from the graveyard she was in—and the other graveyards she was sure existed—and for the many millions more who were likely to come to the same horrific end. A moment later, she lifted her head and could see Evelyn was bringing the shuttle in low, setting it down on scrub brush behind a small treeless ridge.
“Alright, Evelyn, let’s talk this through,” Jane said, shaking her head briefly as if it might help her refocus on where she was going as opposed to where she had been.
“DF-23 is about three miles away,” Evelyn began, “over the ridge in front of us and down the slope beyond. There are plenty of rock outcroppings between here and there, but you should try to stay low anyway. I have used the cameras on Vista to map the entire area, and it looks like you might have caught a break, Jane.”
“What? Dad and Tate are lounging out back looking at the stars?” Jane said, trying futilely to lighten her mood.
“Not exactly. Even though DF-23 is sitting on the site of a former prison, it doesn’t appear to be operating as a prison any longer. From the surveillance photos, it also appears that if it ever was heavily guarded around the chain-link fence surrounding the perimeter, it isn’t any longer. Perhaps they don’t feel it’s necessary, or maybe they have grown lazy, but there aren’t any manned guard towers along the perimeter.”
“So all I have to do is hop the fence, walk up, and knock on the back door.”
“Jane, try to get serious here.”
“I am, Evelyn. I’m just nervous—okay?”
Jane stood from her captain’s chair and walked over to her pack, which was still strapped to the wall behind her seat. Pulling it down, she pulled off the holsters. Buckling them around her waist, she tucked a pistol into each hip. Rummaging through her pack, she found an extra clip of ammunition for each and tucked them into the belt as well. Digging deeper into the pack, she pulled out the rigid bulletproof vest inside.
“I sure hope I don’t need this,” Jane said, slipping the vest over her head and fastening it tightly around her waist. It was lighter than she had expected and certainly helped her feel less vulnerable. “Not sure why I would need a bulletproof vest as an explorer, though.”
“Like I said, your dad wanted you to be prepared, and you never know what to expect exploring another planet.”
Jane slipped on the dark canvas jacket, put her cap back on her head, and grabbing the sunglasses and earbud, she headed for the shuttle door, stopping only for a second at the equipment closet to retrieve the bolt cutters.
“So these glasses will help me see in the dark?” Jane asked, placing them on her face as she stepped down the stairs, which had extended to the ground below.
“Yes, they will, and they have a video feed in them, so I will be able to see everything you see.”
Evelyn was right. The glasses illuminated the terrain, almost to the point that it seemed like daylight. Even though it was a moonlit cloudless sky and Jane could see without the glasses fairly well, with the glasses, she could see that there were plenty of sticks, scrub brush, and loose rocks she would have tripped over.
Jane jogged up the side of the ridge, feeling comfortable that she wouldn’t be seen in the dark, especially this far out from the facility. The night air was crisp and felt cool on her skin, though she quickly remembered that it wasn’t as easy to run at altitude, especially with guns and tools and body armor. The only things she could hear were her footsteps crunching on the gravelly earth and the sound of her own rhythmic breathing.
Cresting the top of the ridge, Jane slowed to wind her way through the large rocks and scattered scraggy spruce trees. She gazed down the slope on the other side. Far in the distance, she could see the lights of DF-23, though from where she stood, and even with her illuminating glasses, the building itself looked like a black hole in the middle of the landscape. Using her glasses, she zoomed in on the structure. As far as Jane could tell, the whole side of the building she was viewing had no windows at all. It was solid—probably concrete—from the ground to the roofline fifty feet or so above. The only lights emanating from the structure were those of the exterior safety lights, spaced evenly, high up on the walls. The whole place was completely nondescript and didn’t appear much different than any other warehouse in any district she had ever seen, except that the side of this structure had the number 23 emblazoned in bone-white lettering, spanning the entire height of the wall.
Jane glanced away from the building itself. From the distance, even with her glasses
on, she had a hard time discerning where the fence line was, largely because it wasn’t lit either. She was surprised to finally make out part of the fence, given that she could now see that it wasn’t more than a mile from her current position, and it was easily a mile out from the building.
“You might be right, Evelyn. It doesn’t look much like a prison,” Jane said, starting to walk down the ridge toward the building. “But it looks like they want to keep people at a distance.”
“You can move freely to the fence line at the bottom of the ridge, Jane. I can see you on the satellite images I am receiving, and there aren’t any people between you and it.”
Jane started moving faster down the slope, rocks coming loose under her feet as she stepped, heavy-footed under the added weight of her gear. This side of the slope was more congested with rock outcroppings, spruce, and shrubs. Even with the reassurances from Evelyn that there weren’t any people around her, she still felt better knowing she had more cover as she approached the compound below. Ten minutes later, and after only a couple of mishaps with a cactus and a yucca, Jane edged closer to the fence, just a few yards further from where she stopped.
Jane knelt behind a large sagebrush and peered at the crusty crud-covered fence in front of her. Her heart pounded in her chest, and knots began to form in her stomach.
“Even though the fence isn’t guarded, Jane, we can be sure they have cameras that cover every inch of those grounds. I have to finish my hack of their system to override the images the cameras receive so they don’t detect you coming. Remember, though, that will start the clock. You need to work quickly to cut through the fence and then run as fast as you can to the service entrance around the right side of the building. If you sprint, you can make it in less than six minutes.”
“Not with all this junk I’m carrying, I can’t,” Jane whispered.
Jane and the Exodus (Stargazer Series Book 1) Page 14