The Academy: Book 2

by Leito, Chad

  Asa pulled over, and the police bulldozer stopped behind him. The engine stayed on, continuing to put off smoke, and Robert King stepped down the steps on the side of the machine.

  He had an enormous smile on his face. His pupils weren’t just dilated, as Teddy’s had been lately, but now his entire eyeball was black. There was nothing but pupil in between his eyelids. It was unnerving because you never could know what he was looking at.

  He wasn’t wearing police clothes, either. He wore a small piece of yellow-white cloth that wrapped around his waist and covered his genitals and buttocks. His legs and torso were bare. On his chest, the word “Police” was written in a bloody, dripping series of lacerations. Below that were the words, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” On his waist, above the cloth, was a police belt, tightened so that his pale belly overhung it. On the belt there was a gun, and then a series of syringes loaded with the red serum he had injected into his foot that day in his office. Robert King was wearing sandals. The corpses groaned as he walked over them. They were dead, but many of them still held a bit of air in their lungs. As his feet compressed them, this air was squeezed out and ran over the vocal cords of the dead, making groaning noises. Atop his head was a crown of thorns.

  Then, the smoke from the bulldozer came into Asa’s cabin. It was thick and impenetrable. When it cleared, he was in the passenger seat of a police car with Officer Harold Kensing. He was back on White Bridge, but the corpses weren’t there anymore. Harold Kensing was holding a gun to Asa’s head. Asa thought, you can’t be real. I buried you out on Mount Two at the beginning of this semester.

  Harold’s neck was bruised. He was already rotting.

  “They’re making me, Asa,” tears streamed down his face. “God, forgive me. Please forgive me.” His eyes looked at a small bobble head of Jesus on the cross, mounted on his dashboard. Except, instead of the figurine being of Jesus, the face was that of Robert King’s. The entire eyeballs were as dark as the most vacant regions of outer space.

  There was a sound from the side of the car, Officer Kensing opened the door, and a dog was standing on the pavement. The dog was enormous. It had thick, matted hair and wore no collar. Its teeth sunk into Harold Kensing’s arm and pulled him to the ground.

  But there’s something else.

  Those eyes. The night the dog saved me. They seemed…different. Like human eyes that had been implanted into a canine’s skull. But it wasn’t a canine’s skull, really, was it? No. The head was much too big, and protruded on the top. Like it held a human brain in there, too.

  Whose dog was that? Someone must have sent it. And, with all he knew about gene-altering technology, he now thought that someone must have created it.

  The black smoke filled the cabin again, and the scene changed once more.

  Things were now happening at an insane pace. It was as though a fire hose was shooting bits of information into his brain faster than he could take it. It wasn’t like he saw anything, or heard anything. One moment the information wasn’t in his brain, and then the next moment it was. This is what he learned:

  Somehow, he knew that if you died in a certain place (he thought it had something to do with medicine, or the medical field), you would not cease to exist, but you’d fall on a tarp, and a bell would jingle above your head. And Santa Clause would be there…something about Santa Clause…

  But then this thing was gone. The black smoke again.

  He awoke and it was warm. He was sweaty and feverish; his head still pounded. There was a fire flickering nearby. Lilly Bloodroot was dampening his forehead with a wet hand. Her purple eyes were beautiful in the firelight. When she saw that he had awoken, she smiled, making dimples on the sides of her lips. Asa saw that her mouth was no longer dripping black. There were multiple gashes in her suit and chest from where the pterodactyl had swiped at her. “He’s awake. I told you he’d wake up.”

  Asa saw that they were in a cave. Rough walls surrounded them. From the mouth came a cool breeze that felt incredible on his sweaty skin.

  Shadows moved from behind him, and the smoke started to rise again, but then it subsided.

  Jen was then by his side. She brushed Asa’s hair and looked at him.

  “What happened?” Asa croaked.

  “I shot you with my powder on accident,” Lilly said. “It made you hallucinate; the powder is a mutation of mine.” Asa saw that her white hair still had bits of blood in it. “I was trying to shoot it at the pterodactyl and I missed. Then, soon after, you mentally left us for a bit. You convulsed and whimpered a lot. We carried you to this cave.”

  “How long was I under?”

  “Fifteen hours.”

  “Fifteen hours!” Asa sat up sharply, his heart beating fast. “Where are we? What’s happened?”

  “Shhhh,” Roxanne said. “Keep it down!”

  “Are we safe? Is our KEE safe?” Asa took stock of those around him. Bruce Thurman was propped up against the cave wall. He looked pale and appeared to have lost five or ten pounds. Roxanne showed the same development; her cheekbones were more prominent than before and she looked exhausted. Mike Plode, otherwise known as Boom Boom, was lying down, facing away from the fire. Jack Tool, a tall, lanky third semester student had his legs outstretched over the stone floor; the fire danced in his eyes. Lilly Bloodroot and Jen Dean were sitting over Asa.

  As Asa looked at Gabby Carter for the first time, he couldn’t help but say, “Oh, God, Gabby!”

  Gabby Carter lay very close to the fire, with Viola Burns nearby. Gabby was a rather small Fishie, and Asa hadn’t had the opportunity to spend much time with her. Gabby was crying and grimacing. Disturbingly, Asa saw that her foot had been removed by some recent development. Viola was changing a dressing that appeared to be made from suit fabric—Is that fabric from a suit off of one of our dead teammates? Asa looked away, nauseated by the sight of such damaged tissue and protruding, jagged bone.

  “I’m lucky, actually—ahh! Oh, be careful!” Gabby said to Viola, who had cracked open a leaf and was applying a clear liquid that ran from it to the exposed wound.

  “You don’t want to get this infected,” Viola said. “I know it hurts, but it will be worth it.”

  “Where is everyone else?” Asa asked, looking around. He counted nine people; the Sharks had twenty-five students on their team.

  Jen took Asa’s hand and squeezed it.

  “Dead?” Asa asked.

  “Possibly,” Bruce spoke for the first time. His voice was hoarse—he looked ill. “We couldn’t find bodies for everyone, but that’s to be expected. The pterosaur was eating some of us whole. I wonder about Stan, though. A couple of us saw him leave down the stairs with Janice. We haven’t seen them since.”

  Anger grew inside Asa at the mention of Stan; How stupid! Throwing a chair at me and breaking that window! What had he been thinking? It led to so many unneeded deaths.

  No one spoke for a moment. The only sounds were the crackling of the fire and Gabby’s quiet whimpering as Viola applied what she claimed to be an antibiotic from a leaf. Asa wondered if Viola had learned how to identify the plant in her Responding to Medical Emergencies Class. She didn’t have Benny Hughs as her instructor, and Asa thought it was possible that the other classes were learning things that were actually useful. In Asa’s class, most of the lecture time was spent as Benny recounted his glorious days as a Winggame player.

  The mouth of the cave was far off, and situated on higher ground than the fire. Outside it was dark. Asa was thankful to have the light of the fire after his hallucinations. He felt on edge, uneasy. The fire was five feet high and thin, despite a small amount of firewood. This burn rate didn’t seem proportional to the amount of wood that was burning. Maybe Boom Boom put some kind of chemical on this flame.

  Asa’s stomach rumbled audibly, and a wave of nauseating hunger rolled over him. “Is there any food?” he asked.

  Bruce, Roxanne, Mike Plode and Jack Tool looked at Asa with disdain that answered his question. Thes
e were the oldest and most mutated students in the cave at this time. Their caloric needs were greater than any student.

  “No,” Roxanne muttered. “We haven’t found anything labeled ‘Not Poisonous.’”

  “I found some Moutainberries, though,” Jack Tool said. He held one up to his nose and sniffed it. “It smells so good. And it’s got the plus sign on it, I don’t think that it’s poisonous.”

  “I told you to toss that!” Roxanne said, uncharacteristically frustrated due to her hunger. “You’re not eating it and getting yourself killed; we need you!”

  “You’re not the boss of me,” Jack responded. “Besides, what if Robert King was lying?” Jack held the Mountainberry directly in front of his face, examining it. His lips were one inch from it, and Asa half expected him to take a bite.

  “Don’t be stupid, Jack,” Bruce said from where he was slumped against the wall.

  “I’m just so hungry, though.” His hand was trembling as he held the fruit up to his face. A series of odd associations made Asa think about the fruit in the Garden of Eden, and then of his hallucinations in which Robert King had shown similarities to Jesus, son of David. In the end, Jack put the fruit down and then buried his face in his hands. He wasn’t exactly sobbing, but he was breathing hard in his frustration.

  “Is anyone guarding our KEE?” Asa asked.

  “No,” Jen said.

  “What’s happened in the past fifteen hours?”

  Jen was fielding the questions; as a Fishie who wasn’t too severely mutated, the hunger wasn’t impacting her as much as some of the others. “After everyone got down below the range of the pterodactyls and pterosaurs, we had a meeting. We wanted to make a plan. First, we decided that it wouldn’t be worth it for any of us to stand guard. We wanted to attack, to try and steal another team’s KEE, and we saw that the most we’d be able to leave at our Home Base would be a couple people. Deciding that wasn’t worth it, we all moved together. The strongest of us took turns carrying you and Gabby. We set out for one of the four bases directly around us. We jogged the first ten or so miles, and became discouraged when we found that the next base seemed barely closer; the facilities are much more spread out than we once thought. We kept moving, but at a slower pace.

  “Then, we came to an incline in the land that rose thirty feet or so. There were pterodactyls resting upon that hill, as it was taller than the lower limits of their electronic leashes. The hill wasn’t that tall, but it was incredibly long; it was like if you covered the Great Wall of China in dirt and grass. We walked beside it for five or six miles, looking for a place to pass and found none. We came to a spot where there were no pterodactyls resting atop the incline, and Roxanne went up and examined the top. She says that on top of the inclination was a river, with crocodiles swimming through it. She said that the water was murky, and you couldn’t see all the way through it, but there were snakes resting on the other side. She was only up on top for a few seconds when the pterodactyls began to fly towards her, and she got down just in time. We had a group discussion, and decided that the river was impassible; we then directed our attention towards another base.

  “We kept on expecting to find food, but it never came. There are strange creatures and plants, but nothing with the ‘Not Poisonous’ writing on it. We started walking; we had covered a lot of ground and were growing tired. It grew dark outside. We kept moving, though. Bruce actually passed out while walking. We found this cave and decided to rest for a couple of hours.”

  Asa looked over at Bruce, who was now asleep against the wall.

  “Boom Boom can create a web, you know? He made one at the cave opening, for protection,” Jen said.

  Asa nodded. He let the realities wash over him. The lack of food was a more serious situation than he would have thought. None of us has ever been without food since our arrival at the Academy, Asa thought. We’ve had no experience with how these mutations affect our bodies when there is a food shortage.

  “So, we’re on our way to another facility? Do we have a plan of what we’re going to do when we get there?” Asa asked.

  Jen shook her head.

  Roxanne was tired, and didn’t open her eyes to say: “Asa, if you feel alright, would you keep watch for us tonight? Would you wake us in an hour and a half? I think if we can get about ninety minutes of rest we’ll be okay.”

  Asa didn’t feel alright; he was hungry and his head still pounded. Though, he did feel awake. It was as though Lilly’s hallucination powder had made him dream heavily for the past half-day. By the look of his teammates, he doubted that ninety minutes would be enough. “I can keep watch,” Asa said. “You guys need to rest. Thank you for carrying me.”

  Roxanne smiled and nodded. Viola had finished rebandaging Gabby’s stump and both females were falling asleep beside the fire, which was now dwindling. Jen wished Asa a good night, and lay on the ground, pillowing her head with her arms.

  Asa walked towards the mouth of the cave and sat down, right next to the enormous web that Mike had spun. It completely covered the opening, leaving small windows that Asa could look out of. It glowed silver in the night’s dimmed light; it was made with an awe-inspiring amount of order and organization, just like a web constructed by a spider. Unlike a spider’s web, though, these filaments were each a half inch thick. They looked strong enough to stop a sprinting horse. Asa looked out into the Tropics; insects chirped and the wonderfully cool wind rustled through the leaves.

  Asa leaned his back against the wall. He had to urinate, but would wait until everyone was asleep before doing so. Even though you couldn’t take off your suit without being electrocuted, the students were able to open at the waist enough for him to use the bathroom.

  Asa still felt strange from Lilly Bloodroot’s powder that he had inhaled. Though he wasn’t visually hallucinating, he still heard things in the quiet night; voices from far off, the sound of footsteps in foliage. His limbs felt funny, like they were too long. He crossed his arms, leaned his head against the stone behind him, and tried not to think about his mental state; he had more important things to concentrate on.

  For starters, he wanted to think about that night in Dritt, Texas when he had been pulled over by Officer Harold Kensing. Asa had surely been dead when a giant, odd-looking dog had slammed into the side of the police car. When Officer Kensing opened the door, the dog attacked, and Asa was able to get away.

  Asa remembered the dog’s abnormally large skull. He thought about the Davids, the primates that his father was able to mutate to make more intelligent, and wondered if someone could do the same thing with a dog. And who would do that? It seemed likely that someone had engineered that dog and sent it to save Asa’s life.

  The wind picked up a bit, and Asa rubbed his temples. His headache was subsiding, but slowly. He was so hungry.

  Then there was the Hive—the supposed lair of Multipliers that Robert King’s meeting with Volkner had alluded to. How many Multipliers did they say lived there? A quarter million? Asa’s mind felt fuzzy still.

  There was no way of knowing if the Hive actually existed, but it was possible. If as much as one Multiplier broke free of the Academy, what would stop him or her from Multiplying people month after month until there were thousands of them?

  Asa reasoned that if the Hive existed, a force outside of the Academy that uses Academy technology for evil, couldn’t there be a similar force that uses the technology for good? What if there was a group of scientists out there who had broken free of the Academy? What if they were using technology to mutate humans and animals so that they could do altruistic acts, like the dog saving Asa that night?

  Yeah, but what else are they doing? And why don’t they do anything to stop the atrocities inside of the Academy, if they do exist?

  And there were, in fact, many bad things happening in the Academy. Aside from the immoral premise of the place, a Multiplier recently bit Brumi, and Multipliers are camped out around the Academy premises. Why wouldn’t this outside force h
elp with something like that?

  Asa had a sick feeling that the Academy wasn’t aware of Joney and the rest of the Multipliers around the Academy. He didn’t think that Robert King knew about them. And, it reasoned that they were from the Hive, and that they would attack the Academy.

  But why have they waited for so long?

  An enormous spider crawled over the ground just outside the mouth of the cave. Asa was glad that he had been asked to keep watch; there was no way that he would have been able to sleep.

  It wasn’t the sounds of birds and the crickets and the wind that would have kept him up. Asa had grown accustomed to sleeping through background noise. For the past couple months, Teddy had been drilling through rock up above Asa; God and Teddy are the only ones that know what he’s doing up there, Asa thought. He brushed the thought aside; he didn’t like to think too long about what Teddy was doing throughout the nights, or what was down the extra tunnel he had carved in the underwater secret passage above Asa’s dwelling.

  The reason that Asa wouldn’t be able to sleep was because of the perilous situation he was in. He looked down at his digital camouflaged suit, and remembered what Robert King’s hologram had told them about the tiny batteries lodged within his suit. At this time, he had no way of knowing whether or not someone else had stolen the Shark’s KEE. If someone stole it and returned it to their Home Base, he would be instantly electrocuted to death, like a murderer in an electric chair. The thought made him sweat.

  The deadly electric current could come on at anytime, as sudden, as unexpected, and as powerful as a lightening strike.

  Likewise, if he and his teammates were successful in obtaining another team’s KEE, and returning it to their own Home Base, they would possibly be killing a whole team. And we don’t know which team occupies which base. What if we get Charlotte’s KEE, or Teddy’s? Will I really be able to contribute to an act that will electrocute them to death? He supposed he didn’t have a choice. There was no point in turning back to guard their own KEE now. If someone was going to take their KEE, they probably already had it. The only thing to do was to play the offensive game.