by Leito, Chad
Two hours after they saw the spinosaurus drag the triceratops into the lake, Bruce halted. They were beside a steep embankment that led down into a creek. “Roxanne,” Bruce whispered. “There’s someone down there, by the stream.” Everyone paused. Bruce’s eyes were red and his hair stood up in twisted, sweaty spikes. He looked half-crazy. Asa used his eyes to try to see into the deep brush, but didn’t detect a body.
Bruce crouched down, and closed his eyes. “It’s a male, Roxy. An old guy. He doesn’t have wings.”
He is losing it! Asa thought. He and Jen Dean shared a look in which she communicated that she agreed.
But still, Asa was frightened. Roxanne stared into the creek. It was dark, with trees bunched close together and almost no break in the foliage above. “Does he have a weapon?” Roxanne asked Bruce.
Bruce kept his eyes shut tightly. “I can’t see things like that Roxy, you know that.”
It was then that Asa suspected that perhaps Bruce had an ability that he was unaware of. But so do I. He was upset with himself for not thinking of his echolocation sooner, and let out a cry.
Asa shut his eyes and let the echoed image fill his mind. He was given a vivid three hundred sixty degree image of his surroundings. He saw a praying mantis high above him in the trees. He could see the twigs and bits of bark that layered the ground, and ants crawling over a fallen tree limb. And, also, far below him, there was a body. Bruce was correct; there was a male in the brush. The person was slightly overweight, with soft tissues, and weak knees. It was the kind of body that was used to sitting in front of a computer all day. He was nearly naked, wearing a kind of savage dress made of thick jungle leaves and vines. He wore glasses. Asa’s echolocation didn’t allow him to see color, but he could see sweat gathering over the guys face.
“He’s old.” Asa opened his eyes.
“You can see him?” Roxanne asked. She had been tugging at her hair so that it was teased a few inches above her head, creating a mane of dirty blonde hair. Her green-gold eyes looked like a lion’s eyes. There was a fierceness in them—driven by the hunger—that Asa had never seen before. “How can you see him?”
“Mutation,” Asa said simply. “I have echolocation, like a bat. It’s a kind of radar.”
“Let’s hide,” Roxanne whispered. “Palmer, you’re going into the jungle, and don’t come out without that old guy.”
“Why me?”
“Because you and Bruce are the two people here with an ability to see things without your eyes. Look in the jungle. It’s dark. Your eyes won’t help much down there. And now look at Bruce. Does he look like he’s in any condition to have a struggle?”
Asa only glanced at Bruce, who looked terrible—there was no arguing the fact. “What’s the point in seeing why a person’s out there in the jungle? We don’t even know who it is.”
“Exactly,” Boom Boom said. “We don’t know who it is. Knowledge is power, and you’re the most fit to attain this little gem of knowledge.”
Asa’s mouth was growing dry, his head ached, and fear was slithering up to his throat like a cold steam. He had no way of knowing if the old man down in the creek was a Multiplier, or some kind of other trap. Also, he was weary of the jungle. “I’ll go,” he said. “But I want someone standing guard at the edge of the jungle.”
“I’ll do it,” said Boom Boom.
“And if I scream, you come to help.”
“You’ve got it, boss,” Mike said. He wished that he had a lookout with more sympathy than the mass murderer, but now wasn’t the time to argue. Besides, I need to earn my team’s trust.
Asa moved down the embankment over damp dirt that couldn’t get any blacker. Worms, beetles and ants were numerous. He moved lower and lower, closer to the creek far below, making his way between goliath trees and mossy logs so rotten that they crumbled with the lightest touch. Little monkeys chattered from above. Asa supplemented his vision with echolocation as he went further in and the light grew sparser.
He should have been coming up with a plan as he made his way down, but he was too hungry, and couldn’t muster the energy. Finally, he came to the base of a tall, four-foot thick tree. On the opposite side, his echolocation revealed the man he and Bruce had both detected. He’s older than I anticipated, Asa thought. At first he had guessed the stranger to be in his late fifties or early sixties. Now, he saw that the gentleman was seventy, at the youngest. Probably older than that.
Asa could hear coarse breathing from the opposite side of the log, and could actually smell the person. He smelled musty. Asa’s echolocation revealed that the gentleman had a fine spread of prickly stubble on his cheeks, and curly thin hairs that ran down his chest and abdomen. He wasn’t moving. He sounded out of breath, frightened.
What if he’s a normal human?
What if he’s a Multiplier, or some other kind of mutated being?
None of these options made Asa feel any better.
He wanted to turn around, to go back and tell the others that he couldn’t find the person. I can’t do that. Bruce is probably up there watching me with whatever power he has.
Asa picked up a rock and tossed it underhand so that it hit the gentleman’s bare foot sprawled out on the dark earth.
“No,” the man breathed, and he was up and running in only a moment. Asa watched him, and in the faint light saw something on the man’s chest that made him feel sick. Tattooed on his skin were the words “Not Poisonous,” on his chest. The letters were big, bold, unmistakable.
They want us to eat a human.
The old man was slow and noisy. He tripped over a fallen branch and the next second Asa was standing over him, wings spread. He felt like a rejected angel. A hungry rejected angel.
NO! I won’t eat him!
“What’d you want?” the old man said, and then he broke out into sobs. Asa’s heart broke for the guy. He retracted his wings, gathered up the old, bony man, and brought him up the embankment where he sat the human in front of his teammates. The old man was still softly crying.
Roxanne and her Sharks looked down at the thing that they were expected to eat. Roxanne no longer looked like a lion. The fierceness and blood had run from her face and she was biting her fingers, looking like a small child who has just seen a spirit of the dead. Bruce turned, walked from the circle, and then vomited down the embankment. Jen couldn’t look the man in the eyes, and neither could Asa.
He recalled his earlier resolve not to be changed by the Academy, and not to become a monster. His stomach was growling heavily, though. And some of us will die if we don’t eat.
Unlike the rest of his teammates, Boom Boom was looking at the old man full in the face. “Who’s going to do it?” he asked.
The old man whimpered.
“We’re not killing him!” Bruce said.
“Yes we are, tubby,” Mike said back. “Or, should I say, not-so-tubby? You’re not going to make it through the night unless you eat something, and it looks like grampa is our only option.”
“Stop,” Asa whispered. He felt that both Mike and Bruce were right.
“I couldn’t eat him,” Bruce said.
“We’ll cook him first,” Mike responded. “When he’s over the fire and you smell him, you’ll think differently.”
Roxanne was quiet.
The predicament made Asa disturbed in a way that he had never been before. Mike was right; they would start to die off without food. But what is my life worth, if I do this? If I kill this innocent man?
“Wait,” the old man rasped. “Just hold on a second, now, gang, please. Let’s, let’s, let’s t-t-talk about this now, let’s be reasonable.”
Asa noticed that Roxanne was now looking at the man. She licked her lips.
“I have information for you, and I’ll give it to you. Just don’t eat me. You can’t eat me,” and then the man broke into quiet sobs and they watched his dirty torso hitch up and down.
“Don’t lie to us, old man. We’re not stupid,” Boom Boom told him.<
br />
The old man went on as though he hadn’t heard. “My name is Adam Trotter,” the man said.
Asa groaned, and clenched his teeth. The man had a name, a story, a life. Asa made up his mind; if anyone wanted to eat Adam, they’d have to go through him. He wasn’t going to let it happen.
“And, I am a scientist. Used to be a scientist, I suppose, for Alfatrex. A geneticist, specifically. They put me here, in this place, so that you’d kill me, because I know something. And if you don’t eat me, I’ll tell you. Okay?”
No one said anything. Adam Trotter had their attention.
He went on even though no one had agreed not to eat him. “I worked in the Alaska location. There are a lot of secret labs, spread out around the world. And then, one night, I was kidnapped by Academy graduates and rode an underground train here. I wasn’t alarmed, it was part of the job and used to happen every half-year or so, when Robert King had a question he wanted to ask. I’m an expert, you see.
“When I arrived, I was greeted by Robert King. His pupils, they… never mind. That’s not important. I was taken deep into the southern mountain, the big one. They had trapped this person in a cage, and wanted me to study it. At first, they said he was a person. Then, they said he was a Multiplier. It was like they couldn’t make up their mind. When I started studying the thing, I could see why.
“By the time I got there, the Multiplier had been tortured and was missing toes and fingers. I was so mad about that—they ruined the specimen. He no longer trusted us.
“He had long, blond hair and green eyes. He was beautiful. Defiant. They had caught him lurking in the woods behind a mountain, wearing a suit and a tie. This is unusual attire to be out in the wilderness. He was well spoken, and extremely intelligent. Genius, I’d think, but can’t be sure. He wouldn’t ever participate in any aptitude tests.
“He spoke to us, and was cordial and polite, but never gave away any information about his past. We tried to trick him into giving us information. We even used computer software to try to pinpoint his accent—nothing got us any closer to the truth. The more we learned about this person, or Multiplier, or whatever he was—the more confused we became.
“A team of scientists and myself were brought to the mountains to test him. Interrogation had failed; so, we were asked to use experimentation to answer these questions.”
Adam looked around at his audience of genetically altered teenagers who were contemplating eating him. He shook his head and went on. “We learned a lot. He wasn’t like the Multipliers in the Academy. Electric shock experiments showed that he was as strong as a Multiplier—he certainly was stronger than any graduate. But his gums weren’t as dark as the Multipliers you and I are used to seeing. They looked kind of like if a human eats a lot of blackberries—the gums were pink but tinged with black. And, as an experiment, we would flood his cell with the scent of human blood. An Academy Multiplier will start gushing Salvaserum (that’s the black stuff that they salivate), under these conditions, and uncontrollably. But this Multiplier was immune to it. His mouth remained dry; the scent of blood had no effect on him. This made us conclude that the individual wasn’t an ordinary Multiplier.”
Trotter paused, and wiped sweat from his brow with his forearm. When he spoke again, his voice was trembling. “I am scared to think of what this means. I think that the Academy doesn’t want anyone to know about this. I think that the discovery of this Multiplier-human-thing has Robert King shaking in his cowboy boots. And I also think that…”
The flash of light and the heat were so intense and overwhelming of Asa’s senses that for a moment he thought he was dead. He thought that the electrocution had begun, and had burned up his occipital lobe. But then the thunder came and when it was over, Asa and all the other Sharks were on the forest floor.
Adam was sizzling on the ground, a twitching corpse. A swift strike of lightening had issued from the arena ceiling and killed him, instantly, as he was talking about an Academy secret.
Asa looked at the sky, and then around him. The other Sharks seemed as bewildered as he felt. He didn’t know what to make of the story, but he was sure of one thing: someone is watching us. And someone sent that bolt of lightening to stop Adam Trotter from continuing to tell us whatever he was saying.
19
The KEE
Boom Boom started a fire, and when Viola tossed in a couple twigs, he screamed and then lectured her: “Careless! You don’t just throw something into the fire like that; you’ll set the whole jungle aflame! Did you see how those twigs practically exploded? The oxygen content of this place is off the charts! If a fire starts, we’re dead!”
Viola nodded solemnly and ran her metallic, powerful nails through her hair.
No one stopped Boom Boom as he prepared the corpse for eating, but no one looked either. Asa kept feeling alternating waves of hunger and then nausea; he was sickened by his primal urges. He thought, But I must eat! Listen, if he was still alive, that would be one thing, but he’s already dead! And we’ll die if we don’t eat something!
When that didn’t make him feel better about it he thought, the Academy chose the food, I didn’t. If it were up to me, I’d eat something, anything, else. But this is the only safe thing to eat that we’ve found. It’s not my choice! It’s the Academy’s fault!
And then when this thought didn’t make him feel any better, he stopped thinking about eating Adam Trotter’s body entirely.
Mike Plode found a semi-sharp rock outlying the creek bed and cut the old man’s head off and chucked the skull with blood stained hair, deep into the jungle. “There you are, pansies!” He said to them. “Now you won’t have to look at it. Now you can eat and not think about what you’ve done, what you’re doing. It’s just a body now, see? Like a cow, or a chicken.”
Somehow, not having the face on the body did make Asa feel better about it. As Mike Plode began cooking the meat over the fire, Asa thought of what Adam Trotter said about the Multiplier.
The old man’s words had disturbed Asa. He was just a crazy old kook, thought Asa. He was lying to us. He was delusional. There’s no reason I should take Adam Trotter’s words seriously.
But then another part of him responded, if the information wasn’t true, then why did they send a lightning bolt to kill him?
Asa groaned. The Academy felt threatened by Adam Trotters knowledge, he was sure of it. Which means he was probably telling the truth.
Could the Multiplier that the Academy caught be part of the Hive? It was possible. What unnerved Asa about this explanation was that he had previously believed that Joney, Edna and Michael, the Multipliers that had killed the Davids and hung them upside down behind Mount Two, were from the Hive. And the Multiplier that Adam Trotter was describing sounds much different than these. These are dirty, unsophisticated, and uncivilized—the one that Adam described sounded suave, smart, and educated.
And he didn’t produce Salvaserum.
The food was cooking over the fire now, and Asa tried his best not to think about what he was doing. He wanted to turn his consciousness away from where his body was until his stomach was full. Then, he would do his best to forget about it.
Why wouldn’t a Multiplier produce Salvaserum? Was the Multiplier genetically altered? Or was it not Multipliers at all?
An image flashed in Asa’s mind. Travis and Volkner at the cafeteria during the Talking Ban last year. Volkner informed Travis that the young man he was sitting across from was the Asa Palmer, and immediately Travis began to drip Salvaserum uncontrollably.
It would be hard for a Multiplier to infiltrate the real world if they sometimes uncontrollably salivate black serum all over themselves. It could be possible that Multiplier that Adam Trotter spoke of was trying to get into human politics or something. I guess that he could paint his gums pink, and hide his identity.
The idea of a Multiplier getting involved in human politics, in having a say in government legislation, made Asa’s skin crawl.
Is this kind of
Multiplier a new development? Or did my father help to create this?
And what was he doing around the Academy when he was captured? What else did Adam Trotter and other Academy scientists find out about him?
A vibration in the ground broke Asa’s thoughts like a hailstorm crashing through a pane of glass.
Something big is coming.
There was another vibration and Asa looked down and saw that he had a long strip of unidentifiable cooked flesh in his hand. He was nearly full; he realized that he had been diverting his thoughts from the meal, trying not to think about the sick thing that his body was doing as he ate.
There was a BOOM and another series of vibrations. The Sharks looked at each other with frightened expressions. Their scared, wide eyes and their fast twitches made them look like squirrels on a park bench when a human approaches.
Another BOOM, and then the ground was shaking even more intensely.
“A dinosaur,” Roxanne said.
“It smells our food,” said Mike, looking up at the long line of smoke from their cook-fire.
There was a quick succession of steps and then an unearthly, irate, demonic roar hit the Sharks with the force of a tornado. They could feel the vibrations from the sound waves in their chests, in the pits of their stomachs. Some deep-imbedded instinct of Asa’s told him to Run! Run like hell!
But instead, he stood, and looked in the direction of the noise. He heard Boom Boom whisper, “spinosaurus” behind him, and then there was the shuffle of feet as the Sharks began to leave.
Asa had never seen a creature so large. In fact, no human, outside of the Academy, had ever seen a land creature so large. Each of its eyes was the size of beach balls, and it stood comfortably taller than forty feet. It cast a vast shadow on the ground below, where its two feet were making indentions in the earth with the length and width of a one-car garage. It let out another roar, and Asa stood, his feet planted by his terror, looking at the yellow, decaying teeth and the roof of the Jurassic mouth, which was black with red spots.