by Joshua Guess
The tunnel went on for fifteen yards or so, bending in a wide curve leading toward the woods. Yes, I realize that having your own secret bunker is something close to being a supervillain. No, I don’t care. I’m a grown-ass woman with a lair and now I have a secret passage.
Eight-year-old me would be so goddamned jealous.
Nik and I eventually came to a stop in front of another set of slender steps. I raised the lantern to get a better look at the exit, making sure the door wasn’t sagging or damaged. One concern we had was something big falling on the thing and me not being able to get out.
But no, all was well. I pushed the hatch open with a careful, slow hand and stepped into the shadows cast between the trees by the morning sun.
Standing in front of me was Taylor, holding a gun to Carla’s head.
4
“If you hurt her, my dog is going to bite your dick off,” I said calmly. “Then I’m going to really make you suffer.”
I understood what must have happened in a flash of insight. The soldiers hunting down test subjects like me got smart. They had sent Taylor in first to scout the place. Once they came in, peacefully invited by us because we didn’t want to cause a ruckus, my people had no chance.
“If you come with me, no one has to get hurt,” Taylor said.
I saw warring emotions in Carla’s face. The part of her who was my friend, who had seen me through my initial bouts of the Shivers and kept me alive, wanted to speak up. To tell me not to agree. And if this were a movie, she might have.
Real life just ain’t that way. When a man has a gun to your head and the other hand on your neck, you get terrified. Piss-you-pants terrified. It’s human nature to want to live, and I’d have been a shitty friend if I held something like silence against her. Hell, I was furious this asshole put her in the position to begin with, much less hold a gun on her.
Lacking other options, I tried to stall. “How’d you know I was a Trigger? No one who has ever left here knows.”
“Not true,” Taylor said in a casually professional voice. “We got word a few weeks ago that a woman matching your description had the symptoms we were looking for. Apparently you had a bout of the shivers and hid away, and a visitor overheard someone talking about it. Quietly. I don’t think they meant to give you away, but there you go.”
I ground my teeth. “Any chance this visitor was one of yours doing scout work? Sneaking around, maybe?”
Taylor didn’t react, which was itself nearly a confirmation. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I snorted. “Yeah, and I bet you’re still telling people going with you is voluntary.”
To my surprise, he nodded. “Yes, we are. Because it keeps people off their guard. We’re not crazy, and we don’t want to hurt anyone. But people like you are too important to the research being done. We can’t risk the lives of millions of people who might be saved from god knows what kind of complications with the right treatment.”
For a fraction of a second, I saw the conflict behind his eyes. Taylor wasn’t a villain in his own eyes. Real bad guys rarely were. I understood the logic behind what he was doing even if it made me want to break his face with a drywall hammer.
“You threatened my friend to force her to bring you out here?” I asked, though the answer seemed obvious.
Taylor nodded. “Would you rather I started shooting her to get answers?”
My mouth tightened into a grim line. I felt the phantom jet of chemicals in my brain. Yeah, I know I couldn’t actually feel the release of whatever terrible shit causes an attack of the Shivers, but the rushing sensation through my veins began in the back of my head. It sure as hell felt like someone had tapped a keg at the base of my skull.
Taylor’s eyes widened as the black veins on my neck and jaw faded into existence. I knew what they looked like, how fast they appeared. The world slowed down. Not a lot, but enough to notice. My perceptions ticked up. In the course of my research career, I’d come across more than one article denouncing the apparent dilation of time caused by adrenaline. And you know what? I’m a hundred percent with that.
This was different. My perception of time was faster, and my reflexes increased to match it. For a few minutes I was an Olympic-level athlete with a blood pressure high enough to give any doctor reading it a stroke.
I could have struck like a cobra. The kid wouldn’t have time to move the gun before I put my fingers in something he wouldn’t want to lose. I’ve been there before. I know what my limits are.
But Carla would die. There was no universe in which Taylor didn’t put the last ounce of pressure on the trigger of his 1911 and rip my friend away from me and everyone who loved her before I could stop him. I knew it, he knew it, and she knew it. The hard set of her eyes, still alight with fear, told me she was willing to risk it.
I wasn’t.
“Nikola, stand down,” I said. The giant dog glanced up at me before chuffing out a breath and resting on his haunches. I took the pistol off my hip with two fingers, slowly, and tossed it to the ground. Beside me, Nik began whining so low it was barely audible. Even in my heightened state with Nero pushing euphoria into my brain, it broke my heart. “Stand down,” I said again.
I met Taylor’s eyes. “Your people leave mine alone. I go with you, no one gets hurt. You don’t come back. And I highly suggest you put that gun away before you take a step, because my dog will fuck you up if he thinks you’re a threat to me. Training only goes so far and I’d rather not get everyone at home killed.”
Taylor nodded and slid his weapon into its holster.
We started walking.
Back in Bastion, things were…tense.
In the way a piano wire is tense. A better description would be to say that violence seemed unavoidable, with soldiers standing in several tight clusters with rifles raised at the people surrounding them. Few people so much as twitched as we walked through the gate. The scene teetered on the edge of true stupidity.
“Stand down,” I said, as clear and calm as I could manage. I put every shred of authority I could muster into the two words.
My people, bless them, listened. Raised weapons—some of the people working the ground only held farming tools—slowly wilted toward the earth. When I got a little further inside I saw Jem, prone with a soldier kneeling on his back, a rifle to his head.
“Please let my boyfriend up,” I said. “He’s not going to give you any trouble.”
“I’m not?” Jem asked from the ground. “I’m pretty sure I was going to break this fucker’s jaw.”
I smiled despite myself. “One little platoon of soldiers and you’re all Steven Seagal. Calm your shit and let’s get this over with so no one dies, okay?”
On the dusty ground, amid spots of blood caked in the fine dirt, Jem nodded. “Fine.”
The soldier kneeling on him took another few seconds before slowly releasing the pressure and backing away. Jem rose slowly, though I could tell it wasn’t because of his injuries. His face was already bruising, his cheek split where something probably like the butt of a rifle had hit him. No, this was a deliberate motion born of a powerful need not to lose his composure.
He looked at me, ghastly injuries striking a high contrast with his ghost-white face. “You’re letting them take you.”
I nodded. “I’m going to stand right here while they go back the way they came. One of them will stay with me.” I pointed at Taylor. “Him. He’ll make sure we don’t close the doors or try anything stupid. Once the rest of them are out of here, I’ll go. Not much choice.”
I read a dozen emotions and restrained sentiments on his face, but all he did was nod right back. “I love you.”
“I know.”
Despite everything going on, Jem actually rolled his eyes. “Seriously, Ran? Right now? You have to make the Star Wars joke right now?”
I did. It was the only way I could keep myself from losing it. To my surprise, Taylor was the one who gave me the distraction I needed to rem
ain calm.
“You want to send someone inside to get you some clothes and whatnot?” he asked. “I mean, it’s a long drive and we’ll have to camp for a lot of it. We have sleeping bags and stuff, but you’ll need toiletries and the like.”
The words might have come from a wholly different person. The edge of violence was gone from his voice, replaced with a fumbling breed of earnestness more in line with an awkward teenager than the soldier he clearly was.
I blinked at him. “Uh, sure. Jem, would you mind?”
“No weapons, please,” Taylor said. “We’ll be searching anything you bring out.”
“Sure,” Jem said grimly.
We didn’t wait long, maybe three minutes. Everyone kept a go-bag. It wasn’t even a question. You never knew when the shit would decide to ignore gravity and take a flying leap at the fan, so preparedness mattered. I kept three different ones ready, depending on the need.
Jem came out with my winter bag, and I groaned inwardly. “You couldn’t take thirty seconds and jam all that shit into another bag?”
He stopped five feet away and tossed the bag, bright pink and patterned with Hello Kitty on the fabric, at Taylor’s feet. “Nope. Sure couldn’t.”
I shook my head. “Asshole.”
Taylor put a hand on my shoulder. “Let’s go.” I nodded.
“Carla, take care of my dog,” I said without looking at her. I couldn’t. “Jem, take care of my people.”
I reached down and gave Nikola a fierce hug. “You go with her, buddy,” I said, and pointed at Carla. “Go.”
With what seemed like true, human sadness, the big guy ambled over and crouched at Carla’s side. I tried not to look at him as I turned and faced the gate.
“Hey,” Jem said from behind us. Taylor stopped and looked over his shoulder.
“You hurt her, I’m gonna put a shotgun between your legs and blow your dick off.”
Taylor, somewhat puzzled, glanced at me. “What is it with you people and dicks? Honestly.”
He didn’t respond to the threat in any other way, just pointed to the waiting soldiers and putting that hand on my shoulder again. We walked toward them together, and I took a moment to reflect the many ways this day should have been but wasn’t. The dread weighing down the pit of my stomach with the mass of a dying star said it should be cold and dark with driving sleet. Yet here we were, showered by the morning sun on a comfortable autumn day, surrounded by growing things and well-fed people.
I took some solace in the fact that no one had been killed. Jem would consider his wounds a price worth paying for that victory many times over.
Though I’d never told anyone in the many discussions held about what we would do when this day came, I had always planned to go peacefully. Not to give up, exactly, but there were precious few scenarios other than running where I didn’t agree to leave.
Fact is, the people around me were more important than one person. I had no right to ask or expect them to make some grand but futile gesture on my part. The best outcome had always been for me to go with them, hope the tests weren’t torturous, and endure for as long as I could. The possibility the entire thing might actually do some good in helping create a cure didn’t hurt, either.
And what these jackasses didn’t know, what they couldn’t possibly understand about me, was who I was. Wracked with crippling anxiety from time to time? Check. Masking deep insecurity with jokes and false bravado? Sure.
But I was also a woman used to being in cages, and I had spent my entire adult life learning everything I could about every subject I could think of so I could never be trapped again.
These soldiers and their bosses definitely weren’t ready for me.
5
There is no single mentality you have to maintain as a prisoner. There are many kinds of prisons and an infinite variety of people, and that makes the permutations endless. When I was a girl, survival wasn’t a physical worry but a mental and spiritual one. My maturing mind and heart were more vulnerable to the damage done by my treatment than my body was by starvation or beatings.
I played it straight. I’ve always had a lot of respect for the military, doubly so after the world ended and these people kept on doing their jobs. Didn’t make me thrilled about what they were doing, but I understood their reasons.
So I did what they asked and cooperated. There are a few reasons for this. Primary among them was the unavoidable truth that resisting—or being myself, if you like—would gain me nothing. I couldn’t outrun them, killing them all seemed like an overreaction and impossible, and I didn’t want to find out what happened if I behaved badly. They were polite and respectful as kidnappers can be, but these were the hardest of the hard cases and my experience with that type was less than a good time.
The other reason: people who seem compliant without being meek are often taken at face value. A person who behaves as you expect a reasonable adult to isn’t one you tend to think of as a threat. On a purely psychological level, these soldiers were highly inclined to this behavior. After all, they were armed and armored, to a man and woman provably dedicated to their job no matter what. I was a single prisoner with no weapons. It made them less cautious than they should be.
And so I listened, watched, and waited.
The weird cubicles lining the back end of the truck were, I discovered by walking close to one, filled with Reavers. The specimens within weren’t the hulking, angry death machines I’d faced more than once. They were the runts, the weaker of the species who got scraps from the perpetually-starving leaders of the pack.
It was the end of our second day on the road. I rode in the follow truck, which wasn’t loaded with intelligent, furious cannibals. Not being one myself, the soldiers were kind enough to let me ride with them. If a few kept fingers just outside the trigger guard of their weapons the whole time, well, that was to be expected.
I stood from my perch on the back of the truck and stretched. “One of you ladies want to follow me to those trees? I need to tend the ol’ lady garden.”
One of the female soldiers smirked at the vaguely horrified reactions a couple of the male grunts let show on their faces. She jerked her head toward the woods. “I’ll take you.”
The camp was already being set up by the time we’d stepped into the trees. The practiced efficiency was a bit stunning. Rather than set up tents and defenses, sheets of thick plywood were pulled from their flat repose on the back of the second truck and slid into place against its sides to create a long, simple lean-to. All meals were in packs, so there was no need to cook. Everyone carried their own toiletries and bedroll, and watches rotated every four hours.
“What’s your name?” I asked the soldier as we moved warily into the trees, early dusk fuzzing the line between shadow and light. “I’d rather not keep thinking of you as the lady who watches me pee at gunpoint.” I tilted my head. “Though I guess for some people that’s a fetish. Isn’t everything?”
“Garcia,” she said with a chuckle. “You’re Ran, right?”
I nodded. “I’ll only be a minute.”
You might think going to the bathroom in those circumstances would be embarrassing and stressful, and congratulations! You would be right. I didn’t look at Garcia as she guarded me, but my peripheral vision told me a lot.
Her weapon was held in loose hands, not the white-knuckle grip you’d expect from someone afraid of their prisoner. Her head did a slow scan of the area to make sure the obscuring bushes and trees wouldn’t hide a threat until it was too late. She was watching me as much as she was watching out for both of us, and that attitude said a lot about her.
I finished my business and stood back up. I stayed motionless for a few seconds, then asked the one question the soldiers probably heard more than any other.
“Are they going to kill me?”
Garcia’s head snapped toward me, brown eyes locked on mine. Her answer was immediate. “No. I have personally released three Triggers like you after they underwent testing an
d donated samples. We have two more who volunteered to stay at the base permanently.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Really? Why?”
Garcia shrugged with one arm, which had the disturbing effect of making the barrel of her gun waver fluidly in front of me. “Three squares a day, some luxuries, and two hundred people with guns and no compunctions about using them to protect the base.”
I bobbed my head along with the words. “Yeah, okay. That does make sense. Same reason people stay back in Bastion. Safety in numbers, group effort and all that. Have they made any progress? I mean, not looking for state secrets here, but am I going to make a difference here? Hate to think I gave myself up for nothing.”
“That much I don’t know,” Garcia said. “The doctors don’t fill us in on details, but I’ve heard them talk about progress in the chow hall. They seem optimistic.”
“Thanks,” I told her, and meant it. The difference between my captivity as a child and now was that at least some of the soldiers treated me like an actual person.
“No problem. Now let’s get back before they start thinking you killed me and ran off.”
“How much longer are we going to be on the road?” I asked the next day when we stopped for fuel.
It wasn’t the first time we’d made one of these pit stops. Each of them required a detour, the apparatus and tanks we filled from hidden from casual observation. Whatever the trucks ran on, it wasn’t gasoline. I recognized high-pressure hoses when the soldiers topped off the tanks, which made sense considering they were attached to giant high-pressure liquid gas tanks. Methane? Maybe. But I knew too little about the vehicles we were using to hazard more than a guess.
I spent a lot of time wondering how the giant tanks got there in the first place. They were the size of tractor trailers and looked new, as if they’d been brought in recently. There were a ton of implications. If the people at the base I was going to did it, then it was probably relatively close. There’s only so much heavy lifting you can do at a distance with limited people.