by S J Taylor
Children of the Event, Laria had called them. I think I was starting to understand.
Fear clutched at my heart. “Jadran, I’ve got one back here.”
He might have said something. I wasn’t sure. The creature chose that moment to lurch up the hallway at me.
Cold, steely tendrils wrapped around my chest. My breath caught and I almost broke and ran. What stopped me was knowing there was nowhere to run to.
My pulse rifle brapped over and over as I fired at this thing… this Child of the Event. The echoes overlapped in the tight space. Ballistic lasers lanced through the creature. Through its thick torso, its arms, its head. Every shot hit its mark.
It didn’t matter. My rifle pushed it back at each step, but it just kept coming.
Hellfire.
From somewhere deep inside, a calm started to press through me. It pushed away the panic, cleared my head, sharpened my senses. This was my legacy from the Restored Society. An involuntary reflex written into my DNA. They made me into a weapon. A living, genetically crafted weapon that could fight against impossible odds like—
The creature roared and lurched and squished its way down the tunnel at me.
My calm shattered. In an instant, it was gone. I felt it leave me, and then there was nothing but terror. A pure, stark, naked fear.
I was screaming. I could hear myself doing it, and I couldn’t stop. With five hastily fired shots I severed another of the things legs but it was luck more than anything. I didn’t aim, I just pulled the trigger. Again. Again.
Again.
Somehow I took off an arm. Blasted a hole through its torso. Two of its eyes were blown out.
It didn’t stop.
It was right on top of me.
The pulse rifle was hot in my hands and the creature reared up in front of me, bloody and angry and screeching so loud I couldn’t hear the ragged rush of my breathing or the pounding of my heart. Blood sprayed across the front of my chest, hot and wet, as the thing reared its head back and then down, teeth flashing and whip-thin tongue lashing out to stripe across my face.
Acting rather than thinking, I rammed my rifle up into its gaping mouth to keep it from closing its jaws around my skull. Its remaining hand closed around one of my legs and I felt it pulling me off my feet.
And then I pulled the trigger, on full automatic.
A near continuous stream of laser bolts released directly up into the creature’s brain and exploded out through the back of its head. With one final gasping screech, it slid sideways against the wall, scraping slowly down to the floor, dead.
I was breathing, I knew I was, but it took me a moment to come back to myself. If this was what we were going to find here in the Outlands how could we ever hope to survive—
The commotion behind me finally registered. MAR blasts. The quieter electric pops of the stun pistol.
The growl of an animal in pain.
I swung my weapon around, knowing it wasn’t over. I still wasn’t ready for what I saw.
The creature on Jadran’s end of the hallway was even more grotesque. It was the black color of burnt meat, its limbs less human, its head long and tapered with a mouth that split wide into four parts as it screamed and advanced on us.
One massive clawed hand reached out with rapid speed and wrapped around Laria’s waist. She doubled over in pain, dropping her weapon. Jadran couldn’t do anything but hold the beast back with his MAR as three other arms swung in at him.
The gun he had was meant to be nonlethal. At close range, it could do some serious injury to a human, but it wouldn’t kill. Against this Child of the Event, this horrific monster, the MAR wasn’t doing much of anything. Except making the thing angrier.
Rushing up to Jadran’s side I took aim and blasted into the arm that held Laria. I felt sweat begin to trickle down my skin as my weapon shredded through the muscles and bones of the thing’s elbow. Finally it gave way, attached only by stringers of flesh. Laria dropped to the floor, fighting to get out of the closed fist, the fingers as thick as her arms.
The monster roared at us, its neck bulging and extending, the bizarre head looming closer.
Screaming at the top of my lungs I pulled the trigger and just kept firing. I didn’t even bother to aim. I just kept firing as the weapon grew hotter and I felt my body begin to ache.
I think I closed my eyes at some point because the next thing I knew, Jadran had grasped both of my arms and he told me to stop, stop, relax, it’s over now… it’s over.
When I finally gave in to his gentle voice and realized he was right, that this second Child of the Event was dead as well, my rifle was burning in my hands, too hot to hold. I let it drop to the floor and then I stood there rubbing the palms of my hands against the front of my pants. Blood. There was blood on me. When had that happened? Was it mine? No. Not mine. The creature’s. Right. That’s all it was.
The creature’s blood.
My head spun. Or… maybe it was the tunnel.
“Are you all right?” Jadran asked me. His voice sounded thick, almost like I was hearing it through water. What was wrong with him, I wondered.
I was hot, and tired, and I couldn’t stop sweating. Or shaking, for that matter. We needed to get out of here before more of these things came. Children of the Event.
I knew what that meant now.
How could the Restored Society keep that from us?
“Era Rae,” Jadran called to me again, standing right beside me, sounding a million miles away. “Are you all right?”
I turned to him, sweeping away strands of hair that were sticking to the perspiration beading on my face. I wanted to tell him I was fine, just some scratches, just my heart that wouldn’t stop pounding from the terrors I had just seen. I wanted to say a lot of things. I just couldn’t make my tongue work.
When he saw my face, he gasped and shrank back from me. That’s when I realized I wasn’t all right at all. Something was definitely wrong. I wasn’t sweating from the physical exertion of this fight.
I was sweating and achy and disoriented because I’d been poisoned. When that one creature had cut me across my face. With its tongue. Some kind of venom… or toxin…
…or…
Darkness took me before my mind could finish the long list of things that might be killing me.
Era’s Journal, Entry #3035
How many times can a girl come close to death before there are no more second chances?
I hope I never find out.
I woke up. Well. Most of me did.
My mind took longer than the rest of me to get it together. There were voices. And light. Well, that was something, at least. The light forced its way in behind my closed eyelids. The voices forced their way into my brain, muffled and indistinct. My body twitched on something hard and unforgiving.
“She is waking up.”
“Rest, is what she needs.”
“And time is what we don’t have.”
“The Enforcers have not found us.”
“Not yet.”
My mind was still fuzzy but my body made me wake up. I told my body it was being a traitor but there was no going back to sleep. I hurt. The pain was a dull ache that started in my toes and stretched all the way up to my hair. Yes, my hair hurt. With a groan, I rolled over onto my side and managed to push myself up until I was sitting. My head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.
Around me, walls of stone and brick rose up, towering high above with a sort of sterile menace. Under me my hands felt concrete, rough and cracked and unyielding. For just a moment I panicked, thinking we were still down below in the tunnels. Then I realized it was worse. We weren’t in the tunnels. We were up above.
We were in the city.
When I brought my hand to my face I felt a puckered line arcing up across my left cheek. Pain flared when I traced it with my fingertips. I was hurt, I realized. Injured. I figured I should probably remember how that happened. Shouldn’t I? As I tried to recall, foggy memories started
to come back to me, the process of thinking slow and torturous.
When I sat up some sort of cloth fell away from my body and I found that my shirt was gone. The cool breeze stirring around me in the open air felt good on my skin, but it was weird to wake up half naked like this.
“I’m sorry,” Jadran said from behind me. “Your shirt was soaked in blood. We washed it for you.”
I wrapped my arm up across my chest reflexively, hiding everything I could, making sure to keep my back turned to him. We’d almost died just now, and I was worried about whether or not Jadran Rill got to see my girl parts. Well. A woman had to keep her secrets.
Laria stepped around into my field of view, the sun a golden flare in the sky behind her. She dropped my shirt in my lap. “It’s mostly dry,” she said, her voice less than friendly. “We had plenty of time to clean it. You have been asleep for hours.”
Carefully keeping Jadran behind me, I pulled the shirt up over my arms and settled it around me. It was still a little damp, and there was still spots of dark brown across the front, but it was mostly clean. “Where did you find water?” I asked. Talking made my head pound.
“We are above ground.” Jadran said, pointing out the obvious. He came around and sat with me, now that I was dressed again. “There are puddles of water to be found. Maybe not good enough to drink, but clean enough for washing. The tunnels brought us to an access shaft that brought us up here. We have made camp, before we move on.”
“Why?” Even that one word made my brain pound. The venom, I remembered suddenly. The creatures in the tunnels… that’s how I got hurt. “Why are we in the city?”
“There was no choice,” he explained with a shake of his head. “The tunnels were too dangerous to be caught in. We heard more of them coming for us while we escaped.”
Laria snorted. “While we carried you out, he means.”
I could imagine these two, supporting me between them, rushing down the tunnels as other beasts chased them. I had been poisoned and then I’d passed out and I would have died, if not for them.“Um. Thanks,” I said. It seemed like I should say more, but the constant ache leftover from the strike of that thing’s tongue made it hard to talk. Hard to think. There was something I remembered. Something important. About those things. I forced myself to think through the pain and when I remembered what. “The Children. That’s what you called those things, right? The Children of the Event.”
Jadran nodded.
“I know… I mean, I understand why you call them that.” I pushed at my hair, gingerly touching the injury on my face again. I hoped it wasn’t permanent. “The thing that gave me this… all of them. They’re mutations. The radiation from the Event created them.”
He nodded again.
I was hoping I’d been wrong, but it all made sense. The pain spiked through me, but I forced myself to go on. “So what were they… before?”
When his hand reached out to touch me, I didn’t stop him. His fingers were warm as they traced that line on my cheek, and to tell the truth it hurt me a little—okay, a lot—but I didn’t stop him.
Standing with her arms crossed, Laria scowled.
“They were the other victims of the Event,” Jadran explained in answer to my question. “The Children of the Event weren’t killed by the bombs. Instead, they suffered. They were like you and me, Era Rae. Once upon a time, they were human.”
I let that sink in. People, destroyed by the nuclear bombs of the Event on a cellular level, their DNA twisted and reformed and changed into those… things. The Event had created them. In a sense, the Event had given birth to them.
Children of the Event.
How could the Restored Society do this? How could they have destroyed so many lives and still believe they were justified? Lives snuffed out in an instant. Others left in a living Hell. The Society thought they were above the law. Above the laws that protected the innocent.
Above God, even.
“As you know,” Jadran was saying to me, “the weapons used in the Event were targeted nuclear devices. Very strategic. The radiation they spread was localized to each strike zone. The Restored Society, for all of their evil, did not want the entire planet devastated. They knew that if they destroyed everything they would have nothing to rule in the end. They only wanted to destroy the nonbelievers. Those who would not fall in line with them and accept their beliefs.”
“So everyone who wasn’t one of them,” I paraphrased.
“Exactly so, Era Rae. The first method of attack the Society used, was the nuclear fire.”
I had seen vids of the attacks in my classes back at the Academy. The devastation still boggled my mind. We’d been taught the bombs were dropped by a phantom enemy, of course, but it had been the Restored Society all along.
Even though the destruction had been too overwhelming to comprehend, we also knew it had been contained. There were still parts of the world that supported life, like the narrow strip of ground around Refuge, just a few dozen miles wide, where animals thrived and plants grew and humans lived. Habitable zones full of life. These were the places the Restored Society planned to claim as their own. Let the rest of the world fall to dust, but they would still have their kingdom.
I took up the explanation where Jadran had left off. “The next stage of their plan is to destroy any pockets of humanity still left in the habitable zones. That’s what the Enforcers are sent out to do. We were all being trained to bring order to whoever was left out in the world.”
Jadran nodded. “By destroying them.”
“Like the Enforcers did to Refuge.” The words were bitter ashes in my mouth. I had been training to be an Enforcer. That could have been me back in Refuge, bringing order at the end of a gun to people who only wanted to be left alone to live their lives. “So how do the Children of the Event fit into the Restored Society’s plans? Were they a mistake?”
He shook his head. “This, I do not know. They were a result of the nuclear fire and the radiation afterward, but more than that I can not say. I only know they are dangerous, and we must avoid them. In the tunnels, we were trapped with them. Up here, we can hide and move when it is safe. They are a danger we can not stand against.”
He didn’t have to tell me. Those things hadn’t just frightened me. They had scared me bad enough that my genetically imbedded reflex of calm had splintered apart into nothing. I’d come to accept that part of me as a good thing. As something that could save me whenever I felt threatened. Not this time. This threat had been too much. I’d given in to my panic and it was just dumb luck that I’d survived. That any of us had survived.
What would happen the next time we encountered a Child of the Event?
I looked around us suddenly, at the city, at this little alcove that Jadran had found to hide us in, walls on three sides of us, just the one opening at the other end. Out there, I could see streets and impossibly tall buildings and other structures I didn’t have names for. Jadran had said we were safer up here. Were we? This was where those things lived. They might have found their way into the tunnels in search of food or just out of curiosity but they lived up here in the broken remains of this city.
We were on their turf. What chance did we have?
“This is what the Restored Society is,” Laria said with a flip of her hand, mistaking my thoughtful silence for a guilty conscience. “I don’t know why you look so surprised, Era Rae. This is who they are, and this is what they do. They create death. They destroy all that is good. They try to remake our world in their image. Genetic freaks. That is their image! That is all they know how to create!”
Her words stung. I might not be a Child of the Event, but I was a child of the Restored Society in more ways than one. They had crafted my DNA from birth. They had tried to create a perfect soldier. Me and some of the other 2126ers from my Academy were the result. We were what the Restored Society had made us. Only, I had gone against my genetic programming. I had started to ask questions when it came to the life of one of my best
friends. I had become a disappointment to them, and they had tried to correct their mistake by experimenting on me.
My friend, Saskia, had saved me from that.
I couldn’t save her.
And I was a genetic freak.
Just like Laria said.
My blood burned hot in my veins. Not just from the lingering effects of the poison, either. I sprang to my feet and fisted my hands at my side and took two steps toward Laria.
“Shut up! Just… shut up!” I was screaming, the sound of my voice echoing away into the silence around us. It hurt to do this, but I was beyond caring. “I was created by them, too. Is that what you wanted to hear? They made me. They made me and I don’t know how and I don’t know what I am or what I’m supposed to do and… and… I just don’t know!”
Every word made the pain in my scar pulse harder. I was hot all over and my vision dimmed around the edges and I knew I had to stop or else the creature’s venom would flare up in my bloodstream and render me unconscious again.
Laria backed away from me, until she bumped into the wall behind her. The look of fear on her face… it was the way she had looked at the creatures in the tunnel.
That was what stopped me. I wasn’t one of those things. I was not! They were mindless creatures who only knew how to destroy and kill. That wasn’t me.
I was Era Rae. Created, born, or otherwise, that’s who I was.
But… who was she?
Jadran was there, his arms around me, holding me until the anger and the fear seeped away and all that was left was the tears.
“I am Era Rae,” I told him, and I tried to make those words mean something.
“Yes,” he said to me. “You are.”
From somewhere nearby, a growling screech boomed out. One of the Children of the Event, and it was close. No doubt the thing had been attracted to me shouting in Laria’s face.
Great. Good one, Era.
“We have to go,” Jadran said, letting go of me, leaving me standing on my own two feet while he collected our weapons and things. He handed me my rifle, and Laria the supply bag and stun pistol, and he carried the rest.