“We should look for food that doesn’t spoil easily and doesn’t need cooking. The lighter and smaller, the better,” said Ilya.
“I keep forgetting how long you spent out on Sombrio Beach.” Faith smiled, grabbed Ilya’s hand, and drew him in for a kiss.
“I told myself all my self-reliance would come in handy one day,” said Ilya.
“What, specifically, should I grab?” I asked.
“Crackers, dried fruit, nuts, granola, or cereal. Canned pasta and vegetables, but not too much. Cans get heavy fast. And beef jerky.”
“What about bottled water?” said Faith.
“We’ve still got a couple of flats in the back of Cole’s car. We can get more bottled water from a gas station,” said Ilya.
“Might be able to get all the other stuff from a gas station too,” I said.
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Ilya.
“We’re here now. Let’s get our food and get out before we get caught,” said Faith.
“We should split up to go faster. We’ll meet back at the front door when we’re done. First person at the front is the lookout,” said Ilya.
“I’ll take dried fruit and nuts. I’m the smallest and weakest of us. Carrying cans is going to be impossible fast,” I said.
“I’ll hit cans,” said Ilya.
“I guess that leaves me on crackers and cereal,” said Faith.
I found the snack food isle. The packages were hard to read in the dark and I kicked myself for not stealing a flashlight of my own. My eyes adjusted further and the light spilling in from the street became enough for me to read “Trail Mix” and “Hickory Smoked Almonds” along with granola bars and meal replacement energy bars.
I stuffed my backpack until almost full. I saved room for a handful of chocolate bars and wedged them in last. They would make a nice surprise for everyone when we got a chance to regroup.
Jonah, Josh, and Cole were right where we left them in front of the NCEDC when we got back mid-morning. The students and staff of Berkeley were milling about aimlessly, nothing like the flow of people I’d seen in the campus from my vision.
“Have they opened up yet?” said Ilya.
“We’ve already been in and out. Nobody cares what we have to say,” said Cole angrily.
“They told us to come back later,” said Jonah.
“Did you tell them there’s gonna be more earthquakes later?” said Faith.
“We have nothing to give them but a story,” said Josh.
“Didn’t you give them a thumb drive with a copy of everything?” I said to Cole.
“I got out-voted on that one.” Cole glared back and forth between Jonah and Josh.
“We can’t turn over material that got someone killed if we can’t get them to pay attention to the consequences of having it in their possession,” said Jonah.
“We could have popped open a laptop and added a letter, a file titled IMPORTANT or MUST READ,” said Cole with his hands in the air mimicking a sign.
“I saw the looks on their faces too. They didn’t know who we were and didn’t take us seriously. They’re still scrambling to get their own data together. I doubt they’d read anything we gave them anyway, liability or otherwise,” said Josh.
“Well, we need to tell someone. We need help!” said Cole.
“There’s no help!” I took a deep breath, before I shouted at everyone. “For our documents to make sense, they need the big picture. We don’t understand the whole thing ourselves, so how can we explain it to an academic group who doesn’t know about variants? The only way we got Wong to believe us quickly was a private demonstration of everyone’s abilities. Does anyone here feel like putting on a show in close proximity to actual lab rats?”
“This was our chance to put a dent in this Compendium thing. We can’t do this alone!” said Cole.
“So what’s our next move then, cops? The FBI? TV? Bloggers? Another journalist? Irina’s right though, we’d have to provide demonstrations to anyone we bring onboard,” said Ilya.
“This is a waste of time,” said Faith.
“I agree,” said Josh.
“Okay, say we go back to going it alone. Where do we go from here? We failed to stop the earthquake. We were lucky this time, but what about the next target? We have no real idea where Ivan and Tatiana are. Even if we had The Compendium and knew the big picture, we wouldn’t necessarily know where their next stop is,” said Cole.
“We would at least know what’s coming. And with The Compendium, we might have enough to turn it over to authorities. We can back it up by revealing ourselves. We can prove variants exist by showing off our abilities,” I said.
“Shit. I’m not ready for that,” said Josh.
“Well, get ready,” said Cole.
“We can still try to find the Innoviro office here in San Francisco. They had working computers and hard copy files and specimens last time I saw it in a vision. Ivan might not have gutted the place if he expected the earthquake to do the work for him,” I said.
“What about Nellie, Bruno, Ralph, and Adelaide?” said Jonah.
“We could keep going.” Ilya looked at me and my stomach twisted.
“That’s pretty cold,” said Cole.
“They’ve got Adelaide’s van.” I briefly considered letting everyone else in on the betrayal only Ilya and I knew could be –no, most certainly would be– in store for us courtesy of Ralph and Adelaide. Thorn’s attack on us in the woods might have been the result of getting a tip somehow. I couldn’t know for sure. I needed another vision. Ilya, you need to listen to Adelaide and find out if they’ve already sold us to Thorn.
“We’re not ditching anyone. Nellie is my friend. I vouched for all of us to get her to come,” said Faith.
“Fair enough.” Ilya looked at me and I knew he’d heard my thoughts.
Faith’s phone chimed and she fished it out of her bag. “Nellie’s got service. They’re on their way here now.”
“Then we’ll wait for them,” said Cole.
“We all need to sleep,” said Josh.
“This is too out in the open. Let’s find a parking garage, somewhere Adelaide and Ralph can walk around,” I said.
Faith tapped, swiped, and tapped her phone. “There’s a garage between us and the Bay. Can I text Nellie we’ll meet them there?”
“Underground spaces might not be safe right now. I’m thinking of aftershocks,” said Jonah.
“And you should be. We’re at risk as long as we stay anywhere near the Bay Area. If we’re going to hook up with the others and stick around to find the Innoviro office, we could be in for another earthquake. Aftershocks can happen for weeks, months, even years. They can even be bigger quakes, making the first event a foreshock,” said Cole.
“Great. But we still need to regroup. Everyone back in the cars. We’ll make this meet-up an express stop,” said Josh.
Ilya and Faith hopped into Cole’s car. Jonah gestured towards Josh’s Jeep. I smiled and beat him to the back seat.
The parking garage Faith found through her phone mocked us with a CLOSED sign when we got there. A yellow and black barrier arm blocked the entrance.
We waited until Adelaide’s van rounded the corner. Josh waved to get her attention. Cole got out of his car and discreetly pulled up the arm. I heard the hinge mechanism inside the arm’s joint squeee and crack. I looked up and down the street. We hadn’t drawn any attention.
Cole drove through, followed by Josh and Adelaide. Ilya ran back to the arm and pulled it down behind us. I hoped the closed sign would work in our favor long enough to let us plan our path to Innoviro and then out of the city.
Josh found a secluded corner of the bottom level one floor underground. We had room to park in a semi-circle closing in the corner. No
sooner than we shut off our engines, the ground began to vibrate. The sounds of glass tinkling and car alarms wailing drifted down from the surface. The world continued to rumble and rumble and rumble. Cole’s words about the duration of an earthquake rang in my ears. The shaking kept going and my chest constricted. Acid swirled in my guts. Fear wrapped around my throat. And the shaking kept going. I ran out of between Cole’s car and Josh’s Jeep as the ceiling ahead of me began to rain dust and crumbs of concrete. Suddenly a giant slab of the roof came down with a CRACK-SLAP between our corner and the path back out of the parking garage. More pieces of concrete trickled down through the dust.
“In the corner! NOW! Everyone!” shouted Cole.
I stood for a moment, watching the dust clear, watching the wall of rubble take shape in front of me. We were trapped. I snapped out of it and ran into the corner where my friends huddled, disoriented and terrified.
Chapter 21
Concrete dust permeated the air. I remembered my stepdad, Darryl telling me about the danger of concrete dust, so I pulled my shirt up over my nose. White noise rang in my ears.
“Don’t breathe in the dust! Concrete dust is like asbestos or something!” I yelled to Faith and Jonah who were huddled next to me. I waved furiously at everyone else, trying to get their attention, alternately pointing to my shirt between waves.
I looked through the dust at each of my companions in a clumsy cluster against the wall. I heard coughing and the light taps of small concrete particles crumbling and settling. I wanted to get away from the dust so badly my muscles ached from head to toe. Claustrophobia started to crush my chest.
A gust of air suddenly passed through our group, screening the dust out of the air completely like a fine invisible fabric. I could breathe. Slowly each of my friends uncurled from their positions.
“Where the hell did that come from?” said Faith.
“I think it was me,” I said.
“Well done!” said Ilya.
“Don’t get excited yet. That was a long earthquake,” said Cole.
“We need to dig our way out of here now,” said Josh.
“No, what Cole’s saying is that we don’t want to be on the surface right now,” said Jonah.
“We need to get out of the Bay Area NOW!” I said. I felt panic coursing through me.
“Irina, listen. In the next ten to fifteen minutes, a tsunami will likely hit this city. If you and Jonah together can keep the water out of this pocket, we might survive,” said Cole.
“What about the rest of the San Francisco?” shrieked Faith. “Does anybody have a wireless connection?” asked Bruno.
“You know better than that,” said Nellie. Faith and I checked our phones anyway.
“Nothing. So we sit here assuming flash flood is going to hit above,” I said.
“It won’t be a flash flood. It’ll be a raging wall of cars, concrete, street lights, mail boxes . . .” Cole trailed off looking at the ceiling.
“Anything that was loose above is ammunition for the wave as it scrapes the surface of the coast,” said Ilya, eyeing Cole, prying through his thoughts.
“We can’t seriously just sit here while millions of people die! We have to do something!” shouted Faith.
“Even if we do manage to dig ourselves out before the wave hits, we can’t survive it. No combination of telekinesis and aquakinesis will keep a tsunami at bay,” said Adelaide.
Our concrete cave grew silent. White noise and the crackling of loose pebbles gave way to a rumbling sound that raced towards us, getting louder as the rumbling intensified. I grabbed Jonah’s hand. His eyes were as full of fear as mine.
“Are you strong enough?”
“I’ll have to be. We’ll do it together.”
Jonah kissed me and I let him. He pulled away quickly and closed his eyes to concentrate. I did the same.
I pictured our disaster-made cave as an impenetrable bubble. I focused on keeping the air where it was, holding the walls in place with sheer willpower. I felt the crushing weight of the ocean overhead.
Chunks of rubble popped off the ceiling and out from the cave-in beside us. Water hissed in through cracks. But our pocket held.
The rumbling finally stopped and the sense of suffocating weight above us released slightly.
“It’s gone,” said Jonah.
“Along with most of San Francisco,” said Nellie.
“Cole. With me,” said Josh as he gestured at the rubble wall.
Josh and Cole began to dig quickly and carefully picking through the concrete chunks. As they hit the surface, bathtub’s worth of water rushed in. Then silence.
“Where do we go from here?” said Bruno. “Should we still try to find the Innoviro office?” said Faith.
“There won’t be anything left at Innoviro worth digging up, even if we still could,” said Nellie.
“We won’t know unless we try. Besides, we might get out of this parking garage today, but I seriously doubt we’ll get out of the city quickly. Not in our cars,” I said.
“If we can get the van out, Adelaide and I could leave from here and meet you in the desert. You don’t need us for salvage at Innoviro,” said Ralph.
“There’s no point in discussing this until we know what the rest of San Francisco looks like,” said Josh.
“We’ll keep digging, but we have to be careful. For now, we only need enough room for bodies to crawl through safely. We have to wait on the vehicles.” Cole walked over to the wall of rubble and beckoned for Josh to join him.
“What are Ralph and I going to do if we leave on foot? If the terrain is bad out there, my chair will be useless,” said Adelaide.
“If you stay close to me, I should be able to disguise both of you,” said Ilya.
“You can do that?” said Ralph.
“It’ll only work if you stay close to me,” said Ilya.
Ilya closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He squared his shoulders, breathing deeply. I had never watched him create an illusion before, but I knew how masterful he was. The air around both Adelaide and Ralph grew hazy, but not like the concrete dust. It looked as though they themselves were starting to blur while the world around them remained crisp and clear to the naked eye.
Adelaide flickered back to reality first. She appeared to be herself, only completely human wearing a pair of faded light blue jeans. She looked down at her legs and touched them, bewildered at what she saw.
Ralph’s form blurred further, then resolved again, only to take shape as a slim man in a collared shirt and khaki slacks. He could have been one of the teachers walking around Berkeley. Was this what Ralph would have looked like if he had been human and not variant?
Ralph looked down at his hands and surveyed the rest of his body. He touched his face. He slowly read his new features with his fingertips. Then he turned to stand in front of the van’s tinted back window. Ralph took in his new face bit by bit, looking at his reflection, prodding his eyes and lips. He turned to his right and left for the profile on each side.
“And this is an illusion? I’ll be myself again if you break it or if I go too far from you?” Ralph asked Ilya. Disbelief tempered the look of wonder in his eyes.
“I would have offered this earlier, but there hasn’t been a good time. I knew we’d split up and you’d lose the illusion, possibly at a bad time,” said Ilya.
Adelaide walked over to Ralph and kissed him passionately, wrapping a single human leg around his waist. He kissed her back, but only for a moment before he gently pushed her away.
“You could have done this back in Portland, when we first met,” said Ralph.
“Yes, but keep in mind, you’re still you. And when you break the connection with me, you’ll instantly be your old self. You haven’t really changed. I’ve simply changed how y
ou see yourself and how the world sees you. Both of you.” Ilya turned his attention to Adelaide.
The image of Ilya, tied up in the back of Adelaide’s van as the now human pair drove off into the sunset popped briefly into my mind. It wasn’t a vision, but a normal visualization. I looked at Ilya with concern and he returned the expression, mirrored perfectly on the male version of my face.
“Why don’t we dig in to some of the food we scored at the supermarket?” said Faith.
“Cole, Josh, stop working for a moment and come eat,” said Jonah.
Faith, Ilya, and I unpacked our bags while Jonah, Nellie, and Bruno reassembled our makeshift campsite. Ralph and Adelaide continued sizing each other up while the rest of us scooped handfuls of fruit and nuts and cereal and crackers onto paper plates. We ate sparingly and were even more careful with our water.
When we were done, Cole and Josh resumed work on the wall. Ralph and Adelaide retreated to the van, leaving Faith, Ilya, Jonah, Nellie, Bruno and me to sit and wait.
“So here’s what’s been eating at me, how did Thorn find us out in the woods? Has he got a sixth sense? I thought of him as a thug. A beast-man,” said Faith.
“I think he’s got a heightened sense of smell. He’s probably a brilliant tracker with so many animal senses enhanced,” said Jonah.
“It might be something else,” I said quietly.
“What are you thinking?” Nellie looked at me intently.
All I knew about her connection to Ralph was that they were like family. She might take my interpretation of my vision–which was extremely clear–as a slight on her nearest and dearest.
The Compendium Page 16