Third Wave: Bones of Eden

by Zaide Bishop

  “She was in a nasty fight,” Charlie murmured. “What do you think made her lips like that?”

  “The teachers used to have lips like that. They painted them,” Tango reminded her. Charlie shrugged and put it aside.

  “Down here,” Xícara called. He and Sugar had pried open a set of doors that led down a dark, narrow set of stairs. Carefully, they all made their way into the control room.

  “Servers,” Sugar murmured, touching the seven-foot-high metal boxes laid out in rows. “And the power grid.”

  “Can you fix any of it?” Tango asked.

  “Maybe. I need to find the problem first. Servers aren’t going to help with the lights.”

  He wandered around, opening cupboards to reveal wires and control panels, or plastic binders containing manuals. Tango sat on a computer chair, and Charlie perched cross-legged on a desk while Xícara trailed after Sugar, giving him light to search by.

  There was some banging, a few exclamations and mutters. “I need to find a few things, then I might be able to power it up,” Sugar said finally.

  “What sort of things?” Tango asked.

  “Wires, tools, another power board... It’s hard to remember. All those lessons were so long ago.”

  Tango helped search, and for a few hours they busied themselves finding equipment and helping Sugar take the electronics apart and put them back together. Charlie found a manual that helped considerably, though it was still fiddly, particularly in the poor light. More than once Sugar slipped, slicing the tips of his fingers into bloody ribbons.

  “Flip that switch,” he told Tango finally, and she obliged.

  There was a whirring whine and then with a series of pops, the overhead lights flickered and came on.

  “You did it!” She grinned at Sugar, and he grinned back.

  “Ugh!” Charlie sounded appalled, and when Tango turned, she spotted two skeletons propped up in the corner, previously unseen by the light of the torches.

  “Come on.” Sugar snuffed and carefully packed their torches. “The lights should be working now.”

  “So we need to go to the labs,” Charlie said.

  “Lead on,” Xícara offered, falling in behind her.

  They went back up the stairs into the living quarters, then made their way down the long, empty corridor. It seemed emptier in the flickering white light. Dirtier, more lonely. As they reached the stairs leading up to the viewing platforms into the domes, Sugar suddenly pushed ahead, taking the stairs two at a time and pressing his hands against the Perspex at the top.

  Through the window Tango could see the sunlamp’s glow, burning and bright. Once she had thought that was the brightest and biggest a thing could be, but back then she’d never seen the sun.

  She followed Charlie up after Sugar. Xícara was still staying dutifully at the rear, as if he expected them to be attacked at any time. As they stepped onto the platform, Sugar was wiping his cheeks with the back of his hands, shoulders slumped and hands shaking.

  The dome was dead. Dry dirt and skeletal trees rolled away from them until they became distorted and faint with distance. A gaping dip in the countryside was the ghost of the pond they had fought so hard to get so they would have more water. It looked a fraction of the size Tango remembered. If filled now, it would barely cover her thighs.

  Beyond it were rotting, angular lumps peeling strips of color like a lizard sheds skin. It took her a moment to recognize the misshapen trash as a house. Houses. An entire little village. Her vision blurred, and like Sugar, she had to wipe the tears off her face.

  Xícara put his hand on her shoulder, and she leaned against him, glad he was there to stop the awful feeling that she was simply going to float up into space.

  “It’s... Eden is dead. It’s all gone.” Charlie sounded more awed than distraught.

  “Did you expect the cows and apple trees to come back?” Sugar asked softly. “And just live in the darkness?”

  “No. India wanted me to look for seeds, that’s all. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “I’m not going in there,” Tango said firmly.

  Charlie sighed and stepped away from the Perspex, trotting back down the stairs. After a moment, Tango followed with Xícara still trailing close behind her. Sugar stayed where he was, gazing over their former world, looking almost too defeated to move.

  Tango didn’t want the group to split up, but Charlie wasn’t waiting. And Charlie was priority—or, at least, the package she carried was.

  “Sugar,” she called back softly as he dwindled further and further behind them.

  He glanced up and seemed surprised to realize they had moved on. He trailed after them slowly.

  There was a skeleton in a lab coat blocking the door to the lab. It was still wearing shoes and wrapped tightly in brittle leather skin. Its hair was long and blonde, and Tango realized it must have been one of the teachers from the Varekai side of the dome.

  “They’re small now,” Charlie said.

  “We’ve grown,” Xícara said softly.

  Charlie blinked and studied them. “They can’t be...”

  “What?” Sugar asked, catching up.

  “Kai.”

  “What?” They all looked equally baffled, and Tango’s stomach gave a sickening roll.

  “The teachers, are they Kai too? Were they like us?” Charlie asked.

  “They were nothing like us,” Sugar said with a sharp, adamant chopping of his hand.

  “But this one is the same size as us now. The Varekai grew up to have breasts, the Elikai grew up to be broad and have deep voices. Couldn’t they be—”

  “No,” Sugar snapped, stepping over the body and pushing up the door. He had to fumble with a switch on the wall, but then the lights flickered on, illuminating the first of the laboratory corridors.

  Tango recognized it, and for the first time since they had stepped inside, she felt herself starting to orientate.

  Even now, there were brown streaks and handprints on the walls—crusty brown pools, dry for over a decade, that brought back memories of that hour before the darkness.

  Now he was there, Sugar didn’t seem to know where to go, so Charlie stepped past him, pausing to touch an overturned wheelchair by another door. “This goes into Eden. This is the way Romeo brought me back.”

  “What do you mean?” Xícara asked.

  Charlie continued down the corridor, stepping over armored bodies with face masks, all lying in their own dried blood. “Romeo and Whiskey snuck in here to find Teacher Steve. He overpowered them, and Whiskey got away, but by the time I got here Romeo was unconscious. Teacher Steve was hurting her, so I used the little vials of disease they used to test on us, on him. He died. Then someone shot me with a dart.”

  “Test on us?” Sugar shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Did they used to gas you? While asking you to do tasks? Your nose would bleed sometimes?” Charlie asked. Both Elikai nodded. “That was the test. To see if we could survive outside, I think.”

  She stopped in an open doorway, the floor covered in fragments of broken glass and the heaped, gray bodies of the soldiers. Through a one-sided mirror, they could see another shape in a lab coat draped across a table.

  “This is where it all started,” Charlie explained.

  “You never told me this,” Tango said, looking around in silent horror. She didn’t want to imagine it, but she could see images in her mind. The entire floor was brown here. The ceiling too, painted in sprays and stripes. It scraped and peeled as they walked on it. She could feel it under her toes. How must it have been back then? The gouts of blood, filling the corridor. The confusion, the pain.

  “You started this,” Sugar said. He stepped back from Charlie, lip curled.

  “I killed Steve,�
� she agreed quietly. “But he killed November. Maybe it was all inevitable, like the high tide washing away the flotsam on the beach. I didn’t go looking for him. I didn’t break all the vials that contaminated the dome. It just all came together that way.”

  Xícara put a hand on Sugar’s heaving shoulders. “We can’t argue it wasn’t for the best, brother. I wouldn’t change a thing. I wouldn’t have stayed in here, ignorant, a single day longer.”

  Sugar slapped him away. “And what about all the brothers that died? No one ever died in Eden!”

  Charlie shook her head sadly. “We died all the time. They replaced us. We have to find out how.”

  She continued on down the corridor, and Tango fell in behind her. The two Elikai stayed where they were, talking quietly.

  Tango wondered how painful it had been for Charlie, being there at the start, knowing the why and how of it. Knowing now made Tango ache. She wanted, with a sudden and desperate urgency, to go home to the isles, back to her sisters and her house and their gardens.

  “Down here, I think,” Charlie murmured. “I never went down here.”

  She pushed open a door, and Tango followed her into a long, well-lit laboratory. There were no bodies here. No brown stains on the floor. Computers, with their power turned back on, had blinking buttons, waiting to be brought back to life. Here and there paperwork and books formed small rectangular cities on the bench tops. Petri dishes sat barren and greasy, their pockets of life long since dehydrated and starved. Fridges with glass doors housed endless samples, humming again now as they tried to cool their contents after a decade of dormancy.

  Tango spotted the TV and an entire shelf of DVDs. She padded over, pulling a few down, scanning the titles. They all had the same cover. Geometric shapes, a logo and a title. Here was Natural Horsemanship, then Computer Troubleshooting, Beginner’s Guide to Electronics, Quantum Theory. A lifetime of lessons, waiting to be replayed and committed to memory.

  “Anything about babies?” Charlie appeared at Tango’s shoulder.

  “Not yet. You start at the bottom, and I’ll work from the top.”

  She nodded, sitting cross-legged at Tango’s feet, starting to pull the titles off the shelf. Tango worked her way across the top shelf, putting aside any that looked immediately helpful and putting the rest back.

  “Here.” Charlie held up a case.

  Tango took it, turning it over and reading the title.

  “The Eden Project?”

  “Get the Elikai, will you? I’ll set up the TV.”

  Tango nodded, padding back out into the corridor.

  “Xícara?”

  “Down here,” he called from an open doorway.

  “Charlie’s found a vid about Eden. Bring Sugar.”

  The boys came into the room, Sugar still looking unhappy. Tango didn’t wait for them, rejoining Charlie and dragging over computer chairs for them to sit on. The DVD started to play, and Charlie plopped down beside Tango in a chair. Xícara joined them, but Sugar leaned against the counter instead.

  “Welcome to Eden,” a female voice purred. “In 2312, the Acadia Bacteria was released in Southeast Asia during a military conflict between Korea and China. UN forces quickly rallied to contain the threat, but within two weeks it had mutated, attaching itself to other mammals, then reptiles, and was spread into urban populations by wildlife. People and animals began to develop tumors, but those who survived the first six months had an 80 percent survival rate. In 2325, Peter Jacob-Rachel Virus was released in a terrorist attack in Britain and the US simultaneously. The airborne virus was carried widely by avian life and survived well in a dormant state. Ninety-eight percent of people exposed to the virus died within twenty-four hours, the other 2 percent in the following eight weeks, with only .07 percent recovering from the illness. Of those that survived, 72 percent were found to have a genetic marker that prevented the virus from attacking the host cells.

  “A second genetic marker was discovered in pigs that made them resistant to the Acadia Bacteria, and both of these markers were isolated and patented. Thus the Eden Project was born.”

  Across the screen, images of the devastation were scrolling in a steady horror show of deformities, hospital wards, tumors and computer-animated genetic code.

  “The Eden Project was developed to create a new wave of humanity. Children resistant to both the Acadia Bacteria and all mutant strains of Peter Jacob-Rachel, with 100 percent survival rate, as well as illuminating other known genetic disorders. We hoped to create a perfect race, disease-free and healthy, who could pick up where humanity had left off. The Children of Eden.”

  The picture changed to the laboratory they were in, in a cleaner, busier time. Teachers moved from place to place, busy on computers, peering down microscopes. The image followed a male teacher as he stepped through a door at the far end of the lab into a room of cribs and infants.

  “These children are the future of mankind. Each one genetically unique, without even a distant relation to any of its peers. Each created with flawless genetic code, designed to withstand a world post—Peter Jacob-Rachel, where global infrastructure has crumbled.”

  Tango could taste bile rising in the back of her throat. Her eyes flicked from the screen, where pink and chocolate babies kicked tiny feet and spat bubbles of saliva, to the door at the end of the lab. Neither the Varekai nor the Elikai had ever come in here. They had never thought to look for babies. They had never guessed there could be others still alive back here, unaffected.

  She rose to her feet, deaf to the cheery voice of the TV extolling the virtues of the project. She made her way stiffly toward the door.

  “Where are you going?” Charlie asked.

  Tango pointed, struggling with the words. Her tongue was fat, her throat too tight to squeak out any air. What was on the other side? How many Kai did they let die?

  Xícara got up, hurrying after her and catching her shoulders. Her knees threatened to buckle, but she stumbled forward, hand on the door.

  “Let me.” Charlie put her hand on Tango’s. “I’ll look. Wait here.”

  “Don’t...” Tango murmured, but she wasn’t sure how she intended the sentence to end.

  Charlie pushed open the door, turned on the lights and stepped inside, closing it in her wake. Xícara’s strong arms folded around Tango, and she let him hold her up, gut twisting, wanting Charlie to come back, and not wanting to ever know at the same time. Xícara’s scent enveloped her, and she closed her eyes, letting him be her shield. Letting him block out the truth for a few more precious moments.

  It seemed to take forever for Charlie to return. Sugar had stepped forward, as if to follow, but then Charlie reappeared, closing the door firmly in her wake. She was pale, and she held the doorknob as if she would fight them away if they tried to go inside.

  “There’s nothing,” she said. “The cribs are all empty.”

  “Are you sure?” Sugar asked.

  Charlie closed her eyes, and tears rolled down her cheeks, but she nodded. Tango gave a sigh of relief, choosing to believe her because she wanted it to be true.

  Chapter Eight

  “Are you going to keep hiding forever?”

  Fox looked up to find Whiskey peering into the entrance of his shelter. He tried to be surprised she had found him, but even swollen, fat and awkward, she was still the best tracker in either tribe.

  Still, Fox’s hideaway was well hidden, a several foot-wide channel between rock walls, thirty feet high in some places and twenty feet deep. It opened out onto an eastern-facing beach at an angle and would probably flood out if there was a king tide, but it was extremely well protected from wind and rain. Fox had made a roof with branches and palms wedged between the stone. There was plenty of room for his tools and weapons and to sleep stretched out. A wooden barricade covered the entrance at night. It
wouldn’t stop a hungry python, but it would alert Fox to any dangers trying to force their way in.

  “It’s my choice to make,” he said.

  She crouched down, crawling into the narrow space on her hands and feet. Her belly made her knees stick out, and he winced as she skinned one, muttering angrily to herself. He eased himself a little closer to her, finding a rag to put on her knee and stop the slow ooze of blood.

  She gave him a wry look. “I take it you are not so mad at me now.”

  “I am,” he corrected.

  “I never meant to upset you. I was surprised you were angry. I’m not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to.”

  He rolled his eyes and settled for glaring at the dried palm leaves overhead. “You still don’t get it.”

  “Clearly not. Tell me.”

  “I thought we had something too good to be shared.”

  She looked puzzled. “All good things are better shared.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Not all. India wouldn’t share Tare. Before they were fighting, Charlie and Sugar had no interest in anyone but each other.”

  Whiskey snorted. “Look how well that turned out.”

  “I thought,” he continued with gritted teeth, “we had something like that.”

  “The Varekai and Elikai have always had sex freely. Why suddenly is it something that has to be reserved to show some kind of...dedication?”

  He glanced at her. She was so achingly beautiful. It was hard to believe seeing her awkward and distended could make her more attractive than before, but now she was radiant in a way that made everything else gray and listless.

  “I never liked having sex with my brothers. I was never attracted to them. I didn’t like being touched by them. I thought I liked the Varekai less, but then suddenly there was you, and for the first time in my life I actually wanted to be with someone. I think about you all the time. I think about touching you and the smell of you, there is not a single waking moment when I don’t want to be with you.”

  She was watching him, hand on her belly, with a faintly pained expression. It looked like pity, and he gauged the distance to the entrance, trying to decide if he could force his way past her without hurting her.