Third Wave: Bones of Eden

by Zaide Bishop

  “Subject is deceased in eight minutes, thirty-two seconds. Stand by for decontamination. Cleared for cleaning crew in fifteen minutes.”

  Tango had her hand over her mouth. Xícara was swallowing rapidly, as if he was going to be sick. Sugar looked stunned, but angry too. Breathless.

  “It wasn’t me,” Charlie said quietly, hurt and awed. “It was another one. Another Charlie. They replaced me, like Bravo.”

  “But how many times?” Sugar muttered.

  * * *

  Tango was too sick to keep eating. She contemplated putting it aside, but they couldn’t afford to waste their provisions, so she forced herself to keep shoveling it in.

  “Sit and eat,” Xícara protested, exasperated, when Sugar started to get up again.

  “One more,” he insisted.

  “I don’t think I can stomach another,” Tango murmured.

  “No more tests,” he promised. “This one. Look. Introduction to Reproduction.”

  “I think India and Tare covered that,” Charlie said, rolling her eyes.

  Sugar flicked her an annoyed look before putting the DVD on.

  There was a log and some ethereal music before a woman appeared. Like the women on the magazines, her eyes were lined with dark bruises and her lips were unnaturally glossy. She was wearing a lab coat, like the teachers had, but it was unbuttoned, and underneath she had a shirt the same blue as a sky.

  “Hello, children of Eden. The time has come for you to embrace your true purpose. Today you will be introduced to your other halves, twenty-six companions who have been raised alongside you, but separate. Among them, you will find your soul mate, and together you will begin the process of repopulation.

  You will notice many differences between you. Men have a penis, testicles and facial hair. Women have breasts, a vagina and a womb, which gives them the ability to bear children. In order to have a child, a woman must first make love to a man so that he can deposit his semen inside her.

  “Only then can the egg and semen come together and produce a baby.”

  “India was right. She guessed all this.” Charlie shook her head in quiet amazement.

  Sugar was glaring at the screen in disbelief. “Am I the only one horrified this was how they planned to tell us? ‘Here’s a stranger with a bright blue shirt, now meet these other strangers and make babies’?”

  Tango glanced at him. “Slightly better than letting us wage war for ten years?”

  “Once sperm is deposited in the woman through sexual intercourse, they travel up inside the uterus into the fallopian tube, where they find the ova, also known as the egg. One sperm alone will penetrate the ova. Rarely, a woman may release two eggs at once. If both are fertilized, they will result in fraternal twins. Only one in a hundred births will result in twins.”

  “Wait, is she saying there will only be one baby?” Xícara asked, wide-eyed.

  “Just one? But Whiskey’s huge,” Tango said. “There must be more. Twins, right?”

  Charlie put her hand on her own belly, frowning.

  On the screen, there was an animation of sperm and eggs coming together and dividing as the cells multiplied. The woman in blue continued, explaining how these single cells would become vital organs. She spoke of placentas and umbilical cords, and on the screen the cells slowly grew from a small, deformed tadpole to a monstrous thing with teeth and a black eye set in a bulbous head with withered microscopic limbs.

  It was only in the later stages it started to look anything like the babies they had been handed and told were new siblings.

  “After a little over nine months of growth, the mother goes into labor and the baby is born.”

  “If this is true, then Whiskey is due,” Charlie said, staring at the others with wide eyes. “Overdue, even. We need to get home right away.”

  Tango nodded, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”

  They tied together stacks of books with strips of leather, adding them to their gear and bundling everything up for the trip home. Then, without any further hesitation, they made their way back through the corridors, abandoning the compound and its boundless information resources. On the one hand, Tango was glad to leave, wanting nothing more than to go back to her own people, her sisters, the familiar beaches and well-trodden paths of home. On the other, she was aware how much they were losing just by leaving. They were carrying as many books as they could: about babies, about reproduction and birth, but it wasn’t enough. She was too aware of all the knowledge they could not take with them. Too aware that its absence might cost another life.

  “Stop. What is that?”

  Blinded by the light, Tango had to cup her hand over her eyes to see what Charlie was talking about.

  “What’s what?” Sugar asked. He pressed his hand into Tango’s back, trying to urge her forward, but she held her ground.

  “What did you see, Charlie?”

  “The cars have moved.”

  “Are you sure?” Tango didn’t remember anything in particular about the cars in the street, only that they had been there. As she squinted against the white-hot light, she saw the drag marks on the tarmac and grooves in the miniature dunes of sand that were slowly forming over the roads. Now they angled toward the beach, tilted so they created a narrow funnel.

  “Yes, they weren’t like that before,” Charlie insisted.

  “We should go around,” Xícara said. “To the other side of the dome, come on to the beach further east.”

  Sugar put his hands on his hips. “I thought we were in a hurry? Whiskey? The babies? Or baby. Whatever she’s having. Going all the way around the dome will take five times as long as walking down the street.”

  Charlie shook her head. “Remember the deer?”

  “The deer?” Sugar snorted. “You mean the one that was killed by the pigs? We haven’t seen any sign of the pigs.”

  “That doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” Charlie said. “They could have followed us up the beach.”

  “Why would they do that?” Xícara asked. “They were just pigs, Charlie. We kill pigs all the time.”

  “No.” She frowned. “They were different. They were angry about the piglet.”

  Tango’s skin prickled, remembering the tattoos on the pigs’ sides and the way they had painted one another with blood.

  0011-PGSTX

  Organ donor

  Not for human consumption

  “Yes, but they’ll have forgotten by now,” Sugar said. “That was days ago.”

  Charlie frowned, looking down the street, chewing her lip. “I don’t think they were just pigs in the way we know of them. I think they had human parts in them. ‘Organ Transplant,’ that’s what their tattoos said. I think they were human organs.”

  Xícara turned to her, horrified. “Why would anyone grow human organs in a pig?”

  “To replace the sick ones,” Charlie said. “To replace the ones the disease killed. They grew us so they would have people who couldn’t get sick, but I think they were replacing parts of themselves to stay alive longer.”

  “What does that have to do with us killing the piglet?” Sugar asked.

  “What if having more human parts in them made them smarter? What if being part pig, part human made them think like a person?”

  “That’s disgusting,” Tango said, belly uncomfortably tight.

  “Yes, but...” Charlie murmured. “What would we do if a pig or a crocodile or something stole one of Whiskey’s babies? If it ate it?”

  Tango swallowed, scanning the moved cars and the empty street. Suddenly the sun felt too hot, the air still and stuffy. Xícara slid his hand into hers, and she could feel his breath on the back of her neck.

  Sugar glanced at Charlie’s belly, the swell showing above the bowl of her hips. “Being pregnant is m
aking you paranoid. You haven’t had enough sleep. Pigs don’t set traps. They don’t hunt people, and certainly not in a pack. Let’s go, before something happens back home.”

  He started down the street, moving with stiff determination, not even looking left and right for danger.

  “Sugar!” Charlie hissed. “Don’t be stupid just because you’re annoyed with me. I can’t paddle a canoe. If you get hurt, we’ll be stuck here.”

  He ignored her, and Charlie scrambled after him, hand out, trying to catch him to slow him down. Tango glanced at Xícara, and he flashed her a reassuring smile.

  “Come on. It’s probably nothing. Paranoia, right?”

  “Right,” Tango agreed quietly, but she didn’t like it. Paranoia or not, on the islands, when they were hunting, the Varekai never rushed into any situation they were unsure of. Caution was the best survival tool they had, and marching boldly down the street would have been foolhardy regardless.

  Charlie and Sugar were almost on the other side of the cars when Tango heard the scrape on the tarmac behind her. She turned and saw the hulking pink form of a pig as it trotted into the center of the road, blocking the way back.

  “Charlie!” Tango called out a warning, but she heard Sugar and Charlie’s exclamations of surprise. She didn’t want to take her eyes off the creature before her, its small black eyes boring into hers, but she spared a glance over her shoulder. Two more of the porcine were on the road at the other end of the car funnel, their blue eyes glimmering with hostile intelligence.

  The shuffle of movement beside Tango made her step back, right into Xícara, and he put a hand on her arm to steady her. They had been hiding between the cars. Now they shimmied through the gaps between them, thick hides making a soft scraping sound on the metal as they passed. There were more than they had seen the first day. Close to a dozen of the creatures, all as long as the cars they were sliding between and weighing seven, perhaps eight times as much as a Varekai.

  Under the cars, between the rows, she could see smaller legs. Several litters of piglets at various stages. Easily recognizable by their lack of tattoos.

  “We need to get out of here. We need to run,” Xícara murmured.

  “They have us surrounded. They’ll cut us down before we’ve got two feet,” she said under her breath, wondering, suddenly, if these blasphemies of nature could understand her. If they were self-aware, could they also understand?

  There was a sudden shriek from the other end of the road, but it wasn’t Charlie or Sugar. One of the pigs had lunged, screaming, and Sugar had leaped into its path to defend Charlie. The animal was bigger and stronger, though.

  “Run!” he yelled, but Charlie had already started to sprint, leaping onto the hood of a car and skidding down the back window.

  “Protect Charlie!” Tango demanded, giving Xícara a shove.

  She started to run, and Xícara was a few paces ahead of her, jamming his spear into a pig that lunged for him. The stone head passed through the creature’s cheek on the inside, bursting out under its left ear. It snapped its jaws shut, and the wooden pole shattered, leaving broken fragments, blue twine and stone lodged in the wound.

  Tango dodged around another gaping mouth, but a half-grown piglet slammed into her knee, appearing suddenly between two cars. There was a deep twang of pain, and her leg buckled. She fell hard only half a dozen yards from the end of the car chute.

  Charlie was a bounding shape, down on the beach. Sugar was beside Xícara as they hoisted a long section of lamp pole, tossing it at their animal attackers. The Elikai were past the cars now, just above the stairs that dropped down onto the beach.

  They might as well have been miles away.

  She saw Xícara look for her. Saw his eyes widen as he saw she had fallen. Then the bulky body of a pig cut him off, and she could see nothing but pink hide and filthy, floppy ears.

  “Go!” she yelled. “Run to the canoes!”

  “Tango!” Xícara’s voice. He sounded like he was getting further away.

  She looked up at the creature looming over her. Its teeth were yellow and huge, its blue eyes far brighter than even the sky and the ocean. Pigstix. Marked with flaking, faded-blood war paint.

  “Go on, then.” She bared her own teeth, but even as she anticipated the bite that would crush her skull, she was feeling for the knife strapped to her thigh. She would not die without a fight.

  Pigstix grunted, making sounds that were distinct and separate, like words. It punctuated them with an angry squeal. The other pigs seemed to be listening. Watching. She could sense their radiating malice.

  This was not a hunt. This was revenge.

  A smaller piglet, no bigger than one of the Elikai’s black dogs, shuffled up beside Pigstix. It had one black ear. It lunged forward, latching on to Tango’s forearm.

  She yowled in pain, snatching her knife and rolling onto her back, dragging the piglet against her chest.

  She pressed the blade to its throat.

  There was a cacophony of alarmed squeals, and Pigstix lunged, but Tango tightened her grip.

  “I’ll do it! Step back!”

  There was a heavy pause. The black-eared piglet squealed as the blade bit deep enough to draw a line of blood.

  “Step back!”

  Pigstix took one very slow, but deliberate, step backward.

  Tango struggled with the piglet, forcing it under one arm. It was panting, wide-eyed, the whites showing. Its muzzle was bloody from the flap of skin it had ripped off Tango’s forearm. The pain found her, and she started to pant too—so it was the both of them together, sides heaving, badly out of sync. She sat up, then almost screamed as her knee protested the movement.

  From somewhere behind the wall of pig meat, she could hear angry animal squeals and Kai yells as Xícara and Sugar tried to get back to her. She wanted them to run. To get in the canoes and get off the beach. She didn’t know if she could stand up, let along carry a pig down the beach at knifepoint. It might have been easier if she’d let them eat her.

  But Xícara was there. He was right there, a few hundred feet away. She could still feel the caress of his fingers on her skin. The steady movement as he had rocked inside her. His taste on her lips. She couldn’t leave him. She couldn’t give up if he was still going to be there waiting for her tomorrow.

  She snarled, forcing her legs under herself. If she fell now, if she dropped the piglet, it would be a bloody and very fast end.

  She couldn’t afford to do that.

  She rose unsteadily to her feet. In her arms, the piglet kicked and grunted.

  “Be still!” she snarled, but her tone only made it more agitated. She pressed the blade into its skin, and that seemed to get the message across. Perhaps now too terrified to move, it hung limp, pissing a hot stream down her side and leg.

  She tested her weight on her busted knee and bit her lip to stop herself crying out. Across the cars and the pigs’ backs, she could see Sugar dragging Xícara down the beach. He was looking back, and when he saw her standing, he fought to remain where he was. She could hear Sugar yelling, but the words were indistinct. Charlie already had the canoes in the water and was fighting the surf.

  Xícara needed to run. She couldn’t catch her breath to yell to him, though.

  She staggered forward, toward Pigstix.

  “Move. Move or I kill it.”

  There was hesitation. A grumble of discontent rippled through the gathered pigs. Then, with the same slow, deliberate movement as before, the massive swine stepped aside. Tango could feel their gaze boring into her as she hobbled between them. Sometimes they snapped and she was forced to spin quickly, reminding them of the knife and the life she held in her hands.

  Charlie had been right. She’d been right on the beach when they killed the piglet, and she’d been right today when she said it w
as a trap. These pigs were no longer entirely animal. They had come for revenge, and now they were staying their violence to save the life of another child. Their child. Probably a sibling of the one the Kai had consumed. Tango was suddenly queasy, remembering the rich taste of that flesh.

  “We didn’t know,” she muttered.

  Pigstix made a low sound that slowly rose to a kind of roar.

  Tango stumbled back, staggering out at last from between the cars. Xícara broke away from Sugar and ran a few paces toward her.

  “Don’t!” she called to him. “Go for the canoe. If they can surround you, they’ll take you.”

  Xícara hesitated, but when Tango glanced back over her shoulder, he was retreating. She kept walking backward, and the pigs followed her. A horde of furious, animal faces. The piglet, crushed to her chest, began to wriggle again. Her arm was tight across its ribs, and it was struggling to catch its breath.

  “A little further,” she murmured.

  She could hear Sugar and Xícara wading out into the surf, their splashes and grunts as they hauled themselves into the canoes. The water touched Tango’s heel so suddenly, she jumped. The pigs were only yards away, stepping as she stepped, stopping when she stopped. Waiting.

  “Now, Tango,” Charlie called.

  She dropped the piglet, which fell with a squeal and a thud.

  Instantly the herd surged forward, and Tango turned and staggered into the surf. Her leg gave, and she fell forward, hitting the sand and shallow water hard. Swine surged around her, and she dragged herself forward on all fours, sputtering as the waves smashed into her face and chest. The salt blinded her, but it worked in her favor. In the chaos, the beasts appeared to be blinded too, and then the sand gave way and she was swimming, one leg useless and roaring with pain. With each gasp for air, she looked for the canoes. Her clothes pulled her down. All she could hear were the screams of the pigs and the roar of the ocean in her ears.

  Then hands were pulling her up. She tried to help, tried to find the bottom, but there was only water. With a gasp and a grunt of pain, she was pulled from the sea and dumped into the bottom of the canoe.