CICADA: A Stone Age World Novel

by M. L. Banner

  23.

  Bios-2

  Melanie knew now what she must do. She had to kill Westerling and Lunder.

  Part of her wished that Carrington was part of this, but maybe it was better this way. The consequences of what she had to do were not something she wanted to share with him. He was a good and decent man, and she didn’t want him to go down that path of killing someone like she was forced into; it changes you, and once you do it, you can’t take it back. She hoped that she would be able to put that horrible incident in Texas behind her. And except for the occasional nightmare, she had been able to do it. It wasn’t her though; it was Carrington. He did that for her. He made her whole and gave her a hope she didn’t have after she took the lives of those men. He not only saved her physical life on that road to Laramie, he saved her whole being. Until now, she had enough hope to ignore what happened to them.

  Both of them were acting, pretending that everything was all right. Carrington did a masterful job, acting like he was fully accepting of their captors. But she knew he wasn’t. He was ever hopeful, but he was ever vigilant as well. It was why he built the bomb; this was a complete surprise to her, but when he explained his reasons, it made complete sense. “Trust but verify,” he told her. And if promises weren’t kept, they’d blow the EPF and leave.

  It was not the life they had wanted to choose, but at least it was a life. Then those plotting, backstabbing scumbags, Westerling and Lunder, made even that impossible.

  There was only one course of action for her now. She was going to have to kill them both. She was going to have to be that person who killed in Texas: cold-blooded, full of hatred, and exacting in her revenge for what they did against her. Westerling and Lunder were no different. These two had taken away the lives that Melanie and Carrington could have had together at Cicada.

  Perhaps, she thought, lying with her head back on their couch, perhaps, if everything went right, Bios-2 would be rid of these two evil men, and we could still be together.

  That was hope speaking, and it was dangerous. She quieted this most dangerous impediment and mentally went through each step of her plan.

  Carrington waited just another moment to make sure the guard was clear and considered what he was about to do. They had been promised lives of peace within a community, if they would just work with Westerling and his people. The alternative was living outside of Bios-2’s walls in a destroyed world occupied by misery and ruled by maniacs and cannibals. So what if Westerling and Lunder were evil men? Wasn’t his and Melanie’s safety, and the safety of everyone in Bios-2, worth the price of turning the other cheek and not doing what’s right?

  If it was, then what the hell was he doing? He was about to violate their rules, only hours after being told not to. They were holding all the cards, and if he was caught, he and Melanie would be cast out or worse.

  But his gut told him that he had to take a chance. There was something deeply wrong with this place; he knew it to his core. It was why he built the bomb; that was their post-apocalyptic insurance plan. If the powers that be went against their word or threatened them, he would use the device to take down the turbine, and therefore the EPF, and they would all escape. Hiding a bomb was easy, but getting into a restricted area and not getting caught was not.

  What the hell is that place? he wondered as he glared at the secured entrance to the mystery room, where the guard should have been, and then ducked back. He knew enough about geothermal power production to know that room was not a piece of the geothermal puzzle. They were hiding something and he was about to find out what it was.

  He checked once again, clumsily knocking his fedora off his head. But Harry the guard was definitely gone. Carrington had, at most, ten minutes before the next guard or worker appeared.

  He grabbed his hat and scrambled across the vast turbine room, looking up to the walkways many stories above him, making sure there wasn’t someone else who would see him. The coast was clear. He dashed the rest of the way to the secured entrance to the restricted room and pulled out of his backpack a handheld Taser. He held the Taser up against the thumb-pad and gave it a long jolt, until it gave a welcoming click. He quickly slipped inside.

  Melanie breathed slowly and deeply, closed her eyes and visualized her plan. She could see every detail, what could happen and the risks of each step. When she was satisfied, she stood up resolutely. She grabbed the knife she had pilfered from one of the guards several months ago and went to her front door. Her heart was beating rapidly, but steady. She loudly unlocked the door and pulled it open. A foot or so ought to do it.

  “Hello? Dr. Reid, are you there?” called Simon’s voice behind the door. He put one foot through the gap.

  She waited patiently, calmly, knowing precisely when to spring. She was that person she needed to be once more.

  She was a killer.

  The room was not at all what he expected.

  The first red flag was the black and yellow triangle posted just past the doorway, indicating an ionizing radiation hazard. But it wasn’t a warning sign to keep people out, since only a few were allowed inside. The sign couldn’t be for prevention. It must be a real warning, but of what?

  Then there was the whole purpose of this room, which didn’t make any sense. There was some sort of well, which he expected. He knew the Shaft Room was where they captured the superheated steam from the aquifer below them, which was naturally heated by a magma chamber. Then, he expected the cool water had to be injected back into the aquifer somewhere; otherwise, the aquifer would run dry. Of course this was the reason for their needing an alternative energy source: the aquifer was running dry, and that meant no steam for their turbine.

  He had assumed this room was where they would inject the condensed water. But there were no water pipes anywhere. And over what appeared to be an injection well was some sort of very elaborate machinery. It looked like a kind of electric generator. There were certainly moving parts inside it; he could feel the vibration. But it was remarkably quiet, not like any generator he had ever seen. Over the vent and connected to the machine was a beautifully designed conduit system with a multitude of tubes snaking out of every square inch of the conduit. These were either to cool whatever was going in… or keep it from coming out. But what was it, if not water?

  An electronic display on the machine flashed numbers. Carrington looked around, again making sure no one was there and he remained unseen. He was the only one inside.

  The display showed a bar graph with 1.00 on one side and 50.00 on the other, and the red bar was a little more than two-thirds, or a reading of around 30. The unit of measure was MeV.

  Megaelectrovolts?

  Carrington’s mind raced. This couldn’t mean what he thought, could it? This machine was generating radiation of some sort, perhaps gamma radiation. A huge amount of gamma radiation, in fact. Cobalt-60 could produce maybe 1.5 MeV, but not 30 MeV. And to what purpose? And why have some sort of gamma ray generator on top of a vent going deep into the earth?

  His face sagged, and he quavered, faltering as the weight of it all pressed down on him.

  “Oh my God!” His voice cracked. He felt faint and very scared.

  He turned and stumbled from the room. He had to get out of here now. Halfway through the turbine room, a voice yelled from the other side, “Stop! Dr. Reid, you were not supposed to go there.” It was Guard #2, coming from the Shaft Room early. “Stop!” the guard yelled, jogging to him now while pulling out his radio.

  Carrington didn’t wait; he bounded up the steps three at a time.

  24.

  On the road to Cicada

  The Teacher took a big drink of water, but it didn’t satisfy his thirst. He thirsted for something more. Ever since he saw it in a strange vision that day when the bright orange nuclear clouds erupted over that shitty little town in Illinois, he yearned for that city under the dome below the three-pointed mountain. He even saw the image of the cicada. It had taken the better part of a year, but tonight, they w
ould reach the place he prophesied. By morning Cicada would be his.

  It’d been a difficult journey.

  He guzzled some more water and continued the trudge forward with several hundred of his finest warriors. Each step along this deserted road brought them closer to the end of their long journey. His mind wandered to what had brought him to this point: his early preaching, the crowds of followers, the miraculous healings, the visions, the end of the world and then the arduous trip to Colorado with over two thousand people. But it had been more than his talents and efforts that brought them here. He believed that John and the Book were the “game-changer” for them. It was John who led him to the cave after a hike in the woods, and there they found the Book. John said that a god, not the God, directed him to this revelation, to write it down and to give it to the Teacher to give to the world. It took a week, but they arrived from the cave with the written revelation. And what a revelation it was.

  All who followed the Book would one day become gods themselves. It was the ultimate secret and yet the epitome of the human condition. It was why we were wired the way we were: to be in control, to be selfish, to have so many wants. But we could never get what we wanted because we had not yet achieved that next evolutionary leap. The Book provided the catalyst for this leap. By focusing our energies inward, we would one day achieve this perfection that we were meant to have.

  The Book changed everything for the Teacher and his followers, as epic as—or more so—than any of his visions or preaching. They now had a purpose to go along with a place.

  He knew that John had designed this from his own mind, using his own education and experience to write the Book, but where did the concepts come from? Where does any creative thought come from? Are we the creator or was someone else prior to it the originator? It didn’t matter; he and his people had an answer to whatever their question was.

  Meanwhile, John continued to have revelations. And that was the Teacher’s only concern. Would John one day lose sight of his purpose and attempt to usurp the Teacher’s rule? This worried him because the Book was bigger than any one person. It was even bigger than him.

  First they would take over Cicada, and then he would reveal the Book to Cicada’s residents and their settlers outside. Then, he would deal with John.

  He repositioned the satchel resting against the small of his back, its straps digging into his shoulders, with the Book safely protected inside. He wished that the Book was just a little smaller.

  John couldn’t help but wonder if he made a mistake with the Teacher and the writing of their new bible, which he coined the Book. There was a great need for a new kind of purpose to lift up the Teacher and his followers from their doubt. They already had the Teacher’s great preaching and his visions, but they needed something more. As it had been for most of his life, John’s own purpose was to make other leaders great. He merely needed to find what would work for the Teacher. John himself was not best at being the leader, but he found that he could raise up others to be remarkable ones.

  He did this in his Catholic high school, when he chose the school president. Part of his desire was to be part of the “in” crowd, and part of him just wanted to see if he could do it. So he recruited a popular football player and convinced him to run; John would get him the presidency. They became friends and he introduced John to all sorts of pretty people in the school, while John worked his plan over the entire school year to lift him up to the role. It was a landslide; he received one hundred percent of the vote. Of course, the new president promptly forgot who put him there and belittled John publicly. So, naturally, John did what any spurned leader-maker would do: He arranged for a convenient car accident, which ended the president’s term and life.

  The Teacher was an entirely different story. Paul Agabus Fairhaven was already a great speaker with creepy visions that often seemed to come true, but he was functionally illiterate. So, having a degree in religion from Notre Dame, John gave Fairhaven the words to speak. Later, as Paul became the Teacher, John witnessed the man’s ability to embellish with each sermon and his belief system evolving didactically; and the crowds grew. John didn’t have a plan, until then. He reasoned that so many men and women were willing to release their coin, and so many women would release themselves to a preacher and his followers who gave them what they wanted. It was a great run before and just after the Event.

  But then the food started to run scarce, and their followers were starving and everyone was losing hope. John remembered the Mormon and Muslim faiths, how they grew out of God handing down a text that they could follow. Both tribes flourished through indoctrination, often by physical or psychological force, and at their root was their faith in a made-up text, written not by a god, but man. Taking from science fiction and a little bit of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, John contemplated how he might craft the Book. It didn’t have to be complete because the Teacher didn’t really read, and John would control it and add to it over time. And then providence set in.

  John and the Teacher were hiking in the woods. They split up to see if they could rustle up some game and John found a cave, already occupied and turned into a home by some kind of metaphysical writer. John killed him and read some of what he was writing. It was a masterpiece. It was there John decided a god would deliver the Book. If everybody had a purpose, a reason to move forward, other than to get somewhere safe, they might not just survive, they might thrive.

  He moved all of the writer’s pages into his backpack, hid the body and made up the whole story to the Teacher about a vision and revelation. John copied from the Mormons, telling the Teacher that when John sat behind a curtain in the cave’s bedroom, he received the revelation from a god. The Teacher didn’t believe at first, but when he wrote the first ten pages of what would become their Book by hand and read it to him, the Teacher believed. For John, it was a combination of plagiarism from the man’s manuscript, liberally sprinkled with John’s own words, to personalize it to their situation. Most of the be-your-own-god doctrine had already been written down by the dead author; John just made it better.

  When they emerged from the cave and wandered back to their camp a week later, they amazed their followers with this new revelation. And it was the Book that brought them this far these past six months. Now they were at a precipice. The Teacher had taken three-quarters of their troops, and they were headed into a trap; John was sure of this. Meanwhile, John was left here with maybe two hundred of their troops to play babysitter to their women and the children, and of course “watch for their treason.”

  He was sure that the treason was in their show. Like the Great Oz of The Wizard of Oz, he believed there was a little man sitting behind the controls of a giant smoke screen. John just had to find a way past those controls. Regardless of what happened to the Teacher at Cicada, he would find Bios-2’s Achilles’ heel and he would take it for his people.

  John lifted up the telescope, its tripod firmly planted in the middle of the road, his men protecting him. He scanned the walls of this place called Bios-2 and considered this version of Oz. It wasn’t a scary smoke cloud they used to maintain control of its people… It was their weapons! These gave them their advantage over the settlers here. These had to be their weak point.

  He looked at each of the five weapons, studying them carefully. He thought of how Stephen had been burned to a blackened crisp and knew it was an electrical discharge, but couldn’t figure out how they controlled it. Then he remembered a strange shiny glint from what looked like a long strand of hair leading to Stephen.

  Could it be? he wondered and then concentrated on the weapon. The gun to the right of the gate was turned down and gave a profile image, while the other looked at him straight on. Then he saw it, the dish that must focus the beam of electricity, but the small barrel below this must send something metal, like a bolt that would keep the beam from jumping to ground.

  John moved his hat up and looked with unaided eyes at the small city. “You sneaky devils you. You only h
ave one good shot, don’t you?”

  A plan started to come together.

  25.

  Outside Bios-2

  Max and five other volunteers waded silently through the pines and aspens that only a year ago made up a majestic forest of green. Now dead or dying, they were all victims of no rainfall for almost that long during a perpetual summer. He wondered how long it would be before all plants and animals would perish, and with them humanity.

  Tonight’s auroras were very mild, only a dusting of the usual green luminescent clouds, barely giving them enough light to avoid a hidden ditch—or worse, a cliff. This was why Tom was leading. His eyesight was much better than Max’s and he was a good tracker, as well as a great soldier.

  A pine branch whipped back and slapped Max in the face, digging its needles into his cheek and threatening to do the same to its next victim walking behind him. With not so much as a flinch, he grabbed it and snapped it off.

  Max veered off left so as he wouldn’t be following the two rookies in front of him. Tom was a pro and had seen many battles, but his two recruits were very green behind the ears. Sue was thirty and was former US Army but had never done anything more than Basic when it came to using a weapon. She left the service as a food inspector. Rob had no formal military training but was a bit of a prepper and had taken some defensive tactics training. He was a little more hardened than Sue, having had to defend himself several times before making it here. Max’s two recruits were not much more seasoned. Felix, at least he knew, having trained him a little to accompany Magdalena from Mexico to Cicada. Pel had some hunting experience and that was about all.

  There was a whistle to his right; Tom’s signal for “eyes open.”