by Joe McKinney
When the figure finally turned away from the metal screen door, it turned its copper-plated face shield toward Jacob. “You need to follow me.”
The voice was oddly feminine, though still mechanical, amplified.
“You’ll be safe,” the figure said. “The doors are closed now.”
And with that the figure pushed its way past Jacob and started up the stairs.
Feeling once again like a stranger in a strange land, not knowing what else to do, Jacob followed the space-suited figure up the stairs.
CHAPTER 11
They went up four flights of stairs, following the space-suited figure in silence.
Below them, the moans of the ravenous dead faded, leaving only the heavy clomping of the figure’s footfalls on the stairs. Kelly glanced back several times, sometimes checking on Jacob with a worried frown, other times looking past him, down the stairs. He knew what was on her mind. He, too, wondered how long the barricades would hold. But the thought didn’t linger. Jacob was too exhausted for that. He’d been beaten and run ragged the entire day. He hadn’t eaten since early that morning, and now, with evening coming on, and climbing all these steps, and the danger quieting below him, he was beginning to feel the adrenaline hangover. He had to stop.
“Jacob?” Kelly said. She was at his side a moment later, her hand on his shoulder.
Above them, the space-suited figure stopped and turned. “Is your friend okay?” The voice, though amplified, was nonetheless unmistakably feminine.
“I’m fine,” Jacob said.
“No, you’re not,” Kelly said. “God, Jacob, you’re trembling.”
“He looks like he’s been run through a meat grinder,” the figure said. “My office is on the next level. I have a cot we can put him on.”
“Okay,” Kelly said. “Jacob, can you make it?”
“I’m fine,” he said again. But it was so hard to push off the railing. He felt strangely disconnected, like he didn’t care. He just wanted to rest. For the first time in a long time, he felt like sinking to the floor and staying there.
“Get up,” Kelly said. She pulled at his arms. “Jacob, get up.”
He blinked in confusion. He was on his back, looking up at Kelly, with no idea how he got that way. He tried to ask her what happened, but he couldn’t make the words come out. He could only stammer.
And then the space-suited figure was kneeling next to Kelly.
“I’ll take him,” the woman inside the suit said.
She scooped Jacob up like he was a puppy. He felt limp in her arms. He tried to struggle, but she held him fast.
When she turned to head back up the stairs, Chelsea was standing there.
“Aunt Miriam?”
Even through the suit, Jacob felt his handler stiffen.
After a long pause, the woman in the suit said, “Chelsea, is that you?”
“Yes,” the girl said, breathless, overcome with emotion.
“Oh my,” the suited figure said. Even with the mechanical amplification, her voice sounded tender and loving. “Child, I didn’t recognize you. Oh my.”
Chelsea rushed forward and threw her arms around her aunt. Or tried to. She couldn’t get anywhere close to a real hug around the bulkiness of the suit.
“What in the world are you doing here, child?”
“Aunt Miriam, I need your help really bad. My daddy didn’t wreck the Darwin. They’re telling lies about him. I have these notebooks my daddy wrote, and they’re all about his theory of what’s going wrong with the morphic field generators and as soon as the council found out about them they sent men after me to get them and we’ve been running from them all day. Oh God, Aunt Miriam, I feel so scared. I didn’t know where to go or who I could trust. I feel so alone.”
Miriam put a huge gloved hand on the girl’s shoulder and pulled her close. “You’ll be okay here,” she said.
“Will you look at the notebooks?” Chelsea said. “My daddy didn’t wreck the Darwin. I know he didn’t. He was just trying to show how dangerous the morphic field generators are. It’s all there in the notebooks.”
“I’ll look at them, child. You did the right thing, coming here. Don’t you worry.”
The next thing Jacob knew he was being placed on a cot along the back wall of a large lab. The room was a mess. There were long tables along the far wall, piled high with papers and computers and electrical cables of all sizes. He saw half a dozen chalkboards spaced around the room. Only they weren’t like the chalkboards he’d seen as a kid back in school. They were shaped like the chalkboards he remembered, and mounted on wooden frames with wheels, but the actual board part was a computer screen. They were covered with calculations so out of his league he barely recognized them as math.
Large windows dominated another wall. The sun was setting and the desert sky was on fire with molten tones of copper and red and yellow. There were plants clustered on the windowsills. An herb garden, well-maintained. A couch and a few armchairs were positioned around the windows, with leaning piles of books on the floor. It reminded him a little of the front parlor in his mother’s house. The memory soothed him a little, and though he ached all over, he let himself sink into the cot as the tension started to ebb from his body. It was almost like a great weight was lifted from his chest.
Kelly was by his side the moment his head hit the cot, brushing his sweat-soaked hair from his face. Looking into her face, for just a moment, he caught a glimpse of the sixteen-year-old girl she had once been. He saw, again, the warmth, the affection, the mysteries of a girl turning into a woman, and he wondered if they could ever go back to that place on the banks of the Mississippi, where the two of them had been perfect.
But then she lifted his hand and searched out his pulse and began counting silently to herself, and the vision, the memory, the warmth of better times, faded.
He focused instead on the space-suited figure. Two of the ugliest, the strangest-looking people Jacob had ever seen guided her toward a rack where four other suits just like the one she wore stood empty and plugged into the wall. Jacob hadn’t noticed them until that moment.
It was a man and a woman.
The man was tall and skinny. Not slender, but skinny. Almost freakishly so. His face looked like it had been squeezed in a vise. He wore a scraggly brown beard at the point of his chin, which made his face look even longer. The rest of his face was chalk-white with a splash of freckles across the nose. His brown hair was an unwashed mess. He had a sleepy, glassy-eyed look to him, and a slow, overly deliberate way of moving that made Jacob wonder if the man wasn’t high.
The woman most certainly wasn’t, though. At least not on weed. Where the man was slow and easy, she was frantic. Where the man was tall and slender, she was tiny. Her skin was as white as a plate, and her red hair had an oily, unhealthy look to it. She fussed like an old woman over every detail of the suit, checking every buckle and clasp until she found one that had snapped.
“Look here,” she said. “It broke. I told you it had been stressed beyond tolerance. Didn’t I tell you?”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” the man said.
“It’s not fine. Look at this. The clasp broke, just like I said it would. Didn’t I tell you this would happen? I stood right here and said this would happen, and now look. Just like I said it would.”
“We got her dressed in a hurry,” the man said. “Just calm down, will you? We probably just didn’t fasten it correctly. Let’s get her out of this thing and we’ll see if it’s really broken or not.”
“I’m telling you it’s broken. I’m looking at it and I’m telling you it’s broken.”
“Well then, let’s take it apart and see why. Okay? It can’t be that hard.”
“Don’t patronize me. If you’d just take the time to listen to me, you’d have been able to see this coming.”
The woman in the suit raised one arm like she was cutting the air between them. “You two knock it off. I’m starting to get claustrophobic. Get me out of thi
s damn thing.”
“You got it, boss,” the man said.
He guided Miriam to a vacant stall next to the other suits and attached a series of cables to her waist. Once she was hooked in, he and the woman started working on the buckles on the back of the suit, prying it open bit by bit until the woman inside was able to squeeze out. When they finally got her out, she was soaking wet with sweat. Her long gray hair was wrapped around her neck like a rope. She was a slender woman in her late fifties, and in her delicate face and well-muscled arms Jacob could see what Chelsea would look like in forty years. The similarities between them were striking. Like the younger woman, Miriam’s natural expression seemed to be one of great sadness. In Chelsea, Jacob thought he knew the cause. Seven years in the shackles of a Slaver caravan had worn her down to the nub. Miriam carried the same road-weary expression, though in the older woman it seemed tempered by a kindness and a patience that Chelsea had yet to master.
Miriam gathered her hair in a ponytail. She wore a white tank top and black slacks, both of which were matted with sweat to her narrow frame. Even in her late fifties, she was an attractive woman. She certainly took care of herself.
But her only concern was for Chelsea. She paused only long enough to fan her face, then went immediately to the younger woman. The two crashed together in a hug that ended with Miriam planting a kiss on the younger girl’s forehead.
“You’re safe now,” Miriam said. “Nobody can hurt you here.”
Chelsea nodded into Miriam’s shoulder.
“Now tell me,” Miriam said. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“They’re trying to frame my daddy for the wreck of the Darwin,” Chelsea said. She was explosive, her words coming so fast she sounded hysterical. “But he didn’t have anything to do with that. Aunt Miriam, you have to believe me. I have his notebooks right here. Read them. You’ll see. They tried to kill me for them this morning. And then I saw Jacob and Kelly and I got loose and they’ve been chasing us—”
“Chelsea, easy, child. Easy now. Why would anybody want to kill you?”
“For the notebooks! Everything my daddy found out about the morphic field generators is right there. Go on and read them if you don’t believe me.”
“Easy,” Miriam said. “Child, go easy. He was your daddy, but he was my brother. I know he was a good man. I know he didn’t cause the wreck. I don’t believe all the rumors I’ve been hearing—no more than you do. Now, can I see the notebooks?”
“Yes,” Chelsea said. She pointed to Kelly. “She has them.”
Kelly slid the satchel off her shoulder, opened it, and handed the notebooks to Miriam. From his cot, Jacob watched the exchange, and studied Kelly’s face. He knew her, he knew every expression she made, and he immediately recognized the look on her face as one of distrust.
“It’s okay,” Miriam said. Perhaps she sensed much of what Jacob did, for Miriam was very deliberate in leaving the notebooks out in front of Kelly, as though giving her the chance to take them back if she wanted to. “Alfred Walker was my brother. I don’t know if you ever had a brother, but that bastard and I fought over everything from where to sit at the table to the fundamental workings of morphic field theory.” Miriam took a deep breath, then glanced around the room, her gaze finally settling on Chelsea. The two shared a moment that was as painful as it was loving.
Miriam broke the gaze. She tugged at her tank top and tried to collect herself.
She turned to Kelly: “Your name is . . . ?”
“I’m Kelly Banis.”
“Kelly, have you ever known someone you loved so completely, and respected from the soles of your shoes to the summit of your knowledge, and yet argued with at every turn? Have you ever known someone like that?”
Kelly took a long time to answer.
Jacob, who thought he knew everything there was to know about Kelly, found himself watching her face, waiting for the answer. Part of him believed that she might actually be thinking of him. The two of them had certainly burned up that summer twenty years earlier. She’d told him she loved him then, and he, at seventeen, between her legs, had told her he loved her, too. He’d believed it without reservation, right down to his core.
But in the years that followed, Kelly Jackson had gone on to earn the equivalent of a doctoral degree in botany. Arbella didn’t have anything like a college, but she’d first mastered the skills of the amateur gardeners—did that as a child, in fact—and then went on to study under, and in time, most said, surpassed the knowledge of the man who would become her husband, Dr. Barry Banis, former professor of botany at the University of Arkansas. She’d distinguished herself as the best and brightest mind of her generation, and when brilliant men like Barry Banis started turning their affections her way, boys like Jacob started to fade into memory.
But she said nothing. Kelly simply closed her eyes and nodded.
And whatever that meant was a mystery to Jacob.
“I see that you have,” Miriam said. “Well, then, you know where I’m coming from when I tell you that I will look through every word of this. It’ll probably make me mad as hell, but then, that was always Alfred’s special gift.” She turned to Kelly. “Have you read through this, Kelly?”
“I have. Some of it’s a bit beyond my reach. I’m a botanist. But what I could grasp sounded pretty scary.”
“Scary?” the man with the skinny face said. He got in close to Kelly, too close for her comfort, though he didn’t seem to notice. “Did you say scary? It’s not scary when it powers your aerofluyts or lights your city, is it? Don’t tell me you’re one of those Triune nut jobs.”
Kelly backed away from him.
Jacob sat up on the cot. His head felt like it was about to burst open, but he figured he could still haul himself to his feet if the guy was going to get in Kelly’s face again.
“Stu, stop it,” Miriam said. “Calm down.”
“I’m sorry,” the man said, suddenly looking sheepish. “Was I doing it again?”
“Yes, you’re doing it again. Back up. Give the poor girl some space.”
“Sorry,” the man said to Kelly. “I wish people would just tell me when I’m being a jerk. It’s hard sometimes for me to know.”
“You’re being a jerk, Stu,” Miriam said. “Now give her some space.”
Stu did as he was told.
Miriam smiled at Kelly. “I’m sorry about that. This is Stu and Juliette Huffman, my leading researchers. It may not seem like it, but I can assure you they’re both quite brilliant.”
“It’s alright,” Kelly said, though she still looked a little doubtfully at Stu.
“We build morphic field generators here,” said Miriam. “As you can imagine, the Triune Movement gets discussed quite a bit around here.”
“There’s no discussion,” Stu said. “It’s nothing but a bunch of alarmist nonsense.”
“I don’t think it can be dismissed that easily,” Juliette said.
“Don’t even start,” Stu said.
“I’ll start with you if I want to, mister. You can’t dismiss it that easily. You know you can’t.”
“The triune brain was dismissed as hogwash a hundred and fifty years ago,” Stu said. “I don’t see why we have to keep dragging it out again. Nobody seriously believes that.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Great!” Stu said, throwing his hands into the air. “My own wife, a Triune nut job. Next you’ll be dragging out phrenology as a basis for zombie behavior.”
“Don’t be so dismissive with me. You know you can’t explain why the shepherding runs failed to turn away the herd. Or have you come up with a magical explanation for that, too?”
“You’re the one who’s going to need a magical explanation if you want to show how there’s any possible way a morphic circuit could form between the basal ganglia and the limbic system. That just doesn’t happen. There’s no commonality to act as a circuit bridge.”
“You two,” Miriam said. “P
lease. You give me a headache.” Miriam turned to Kelly and rolled her eyes with a smile. “It’s like this all day long, every day with these two.”
“It’s okay,” Kelly said. “It’s fascinating. But Stu, earlier you called me a Triune nut job. What is that?”
“What do you mean?” Stu said.
“What’s a Triune nut job?”
“Have you never heard that term before?” Miriam asked. “Triune, I mean. Not the nut job part. That’s just Stu being a jerk again.”
“I read mention of it in those journals, but . . .”
“Aunt Miriam, they’re not part of Temple society,” said Chelsea.
“Really?” Miriam said, raising an eyebrow. “Where are you from?”
Chelsea spent the next twenty minutes describing the wreck of the Darwin and everything she’d been through after that. She told her about being beaten and raped in the Slaver caravans and how her brother, Chris, had turned on her. She included everything, right up to the moment when Miriam had rescued them.
Everything except Nick.
Jacob noticed she left that part out.
“Oh child,” Miriam said. She took her niece’s head in her hands and hugged her to her breast. “These men, do you know who they were working for?”
“No,” Chelsea said. “They didn’t say. They just wanted Daddy’s notebooks.”
Miriam shook her head. “That’s not good.”
“Wait,” Kelly said. “I’m still confused. What is a triune brain, and does it have something to do with those men who were trying to kill us?”
“I think it does,” Miriam said. “Okay, I’ll run it down for you. You know that the morphic field generators are the basis of our technology, right?”
Kelly nodded.
“Okay, well, for years before the outbreak, morphic fields were used solely as a power source. The U.S. military developed it in the 2060s as a cheaper and safer replacement for nuclear power. As a form of electromagnetic energy, they have the power to make aerofluyts fly and light cities. Unfortunately, the outbreak kept the technology from reaching around the world. But that’s when we discovered that morphic fields had peculiar effects on zombies. It was called the shepherding effect. Modulate a morphic field a given way, and you could make a zombie go anywhere you wanted it to go. We’ve used it for years to guide the bigger herds away from developing communities like your home of Arbella.”