Alpha 9

by Rebecca Bosevski

  He was on the floor, his jacket smoldering from the shock.

  Alpha Nine immediately checked for breathing. There was none. He jumped into compressions, hard and fast he pushed on Tango Five’s chest. Alpha Nine didn’t stop, he pushed in time with his own racing heart as Bravo Two knelt beside him. She leant over Tango Five.

  “Stop for a second,” she said as she tilted Tango Five’s head back.

  Alpha did and she breathed into Tango Five, his chest rising and falling.

  “Go,” she said and Alpha Nine resumed compressions. After another twenty he stopped and Bravo Two did another breath then checked for a pulse. She shook her head.

  “Clear!”

  Alpha Nine was shoved out of the way and Kilo jabbed Tango Five in the chest with two spoons wrapped in rubber soles. He had connected the wires from the panel, the lights flickered, the television screeched and Tango Five gasped, his eyes shooting open.

  “Who hit me with the truck?” he asked, bringing his hand up to his pounding chest.

  “Hey mate, good to have you back. You feel okay?” Alpha Nine asked.

  “So did we hook up the wires?” He looked at Kilo One holding the spoons.

  “We were a little busy saving your life, mate.” Kilo One laughed at him. “Lucky you only went into V-fib and not a complete flat-line, or we might never have gotten you back.”

  “It’s all hooked up,” called Whisky Nine from behind them. “Kilo One, those spoons are safe now, I unhooked them.”

  The TV screen blinked and an image of a plain white room came into view. “Looks like a pod room, don’t you think?” He asked the group.

  He pressed a button on the phone and the image changed to the landscape they had been subjected to during the weather trial. Another button and a control room was displayed. Empty of people, there were many smaller screens lit up with images of other areas.

  “Look there, what is that?” Alpha Nine asked, striding towards the television. He pointed at a small screen on the control panel that moved when he did. It was the room they were in. The small screen had other lights on it, words lit up in tiny font, even with his advanced eyesight, he couldn’t make them out.

  “Here,” Bravo Two said as she passed Alpha Nine a glass. “Put the bottom on the screen, it will magnify it a bit.”

  He did as she said. “Power,” he read aloud. “And water.”

  “What about that one there?” Bravo Two asked, pointing at one of the small lit words.

  “It says air, it might be a way out,” Alpha Nine said, taking the glass off the screen.

  Alpha Nine used the display as a guide and he moved in the room in the direction of the word. They had to move the bed to be by the word on the screen, but the wall itself was blank like all the others. He knelt, running his hand over the smooth surface when he stopped. The wall felt cooler by a degree or so, that temperature change was enough for him to know he had found it.

  Using his knife, he scrapped at the wall, careful not to stab it and risk possible electrocution. The others joined him with their knives, scratching away the plasterboard until finally coming upon the vent opening. Alpha Nine unlatched the cover, and the panel snapped open to reveal a space large enough for them to crawl through.

  “Alpha Nine you might want to look at this,” Bravo Two called.

  Alpha Nine went back to the television screen, Bravo Two had continued to press buttons and the display now showed a room full of pods. The pods held duplicates of all of them, all of them presumably awaiting their release into the phases, many awaiting their deaths.

  “We have to get them out,” Bravo Two said. “We can’t leave them here.”

  They all agreed that finding that room was one of the first things they would try to do. They made their way into the vent one by one. Alpha Nine in the lead and Tango Five following up the rear.

  As they crawled through the air duct they looked through every vent they passed trying to find the room which held the pods. The air duct vibrated.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Alpha Nine said, picking up his pace. They all followed suit and hurried through the ducts.

  The air in the duct took on a metallic taste and Alpha Nine worried it could be a method of recycling. His heart rate rose quickly and he hastened his pace. The others followed his lead, slowing only when he stopped to push down on the next vent he found.

  It took a bit of effort to push through and when the vent finally fell, Alpha Nine fell through with it and onto a hospital bed beneath him.

  The others followed him quickly into the space, the last through, India One. She grabbed the edges of the mattress cover and peeled it back. Then quickly she wrapped it over the air vent panel and heaved it back up to partly seal the vent.

  This room was not like the others, its walls were pale green and smelled of disinfectant. Cobwebs covered surgical tools and anesthesia machinery.

  “Clearly this room has gone unused for a long time,” Alpha Nine said as he helped the others off the bed.

  “This is weird, why would they let this room go unused,” Bravo Two said, running her finger along a shelf collecting a thick coat of dust as she went.

  “Maybe they don’t care enough to fix us up anymore, you saw what recycled means, we don’t survive to need medical care,” Alpha Nine replied. “Check the draws for supplies and stock up on anything that could be useful.”

  Alpha Nine went to a door, the first they had seen that was an old fashioned, regular door with a silver door knob that was also covered in dust.

  The metallic smell from the air vent seeped into the room, so they decided to take their chances with whatever was behind the door. It wasn’t locked and opened easily but with a creak that created more noise than Alpha Nine would have liked.

  They entered a pale green corridor, its wall lined with doors. Alpha Nine motioned to them to go down, and quietly check the doors for the pod room they had seen on the monitor.

  They were ghosts. Not even one of their steps made a sound on the smooth linoleum floor.

  Opening the doors took more attention. Many handles wouldn’t turn at all and the ones that did, squeaked far too loud. Most rooms held more medical and general supplies, but they also came upon a washroom and a broom closet. All of them decorated with dust and cobwebs.

  “What the hell is this?” Alpha Nine asked after opening another door to a room filed with a dozen or so cot beds, massive cobwebs hung dripping with dust around the room.

  “Is this another phase?” Bravo Two asked, joining Alpha Nine at his doorway.

  “I don’t think so, I don’t think anyone has been down here in years. Let’s keep going.”

  They continued along the corridor continuing to check the rooms as they went and gathered what supplies they could. One room was filled with linen, blankets, towels, and sheets. Thankfully they were stored in bags and those bags were large and easy to load with the supplies they had amassed.

  Tango Five and November Seven went back to one of the medical rooms to fill a bag with more than they could carry the first time they found it. Bandages, disinfectants and whatever medication he could find, top priority.

  Alpha Nine reached the final door up the end of the corridor. He looked back at his group and waited a moment for November Seven and Tango Five to return. He opened it slowly hoping that it held something more than cobwebs. It did, it opened to a stairwell.

  With nothing left behind them except dust filled rooms, they followed Alpha Nine up the stairs. They creaked and moaned with age. The spiral staircase made its way higher and higher, though they had to have climbed several stories high, no doorways come into view yet.

  “Are you sure about this?” Bravo Two asked Alpha Nine as he continued to climb higher.

  “That room with the weather trial was massive, if it was on the bottom floor and we are underground it will take a hike to get out.”

  She nodded and continued to follow him up the stairs with the others. They shared the we
ight of the bags between them, as they climbed the stairwell and after almost ten minutes of climbing, they reached the top and a lone metal door.

  Alpha turned the handle--it didn’t budge, so he stepped back against the rail and threw all his weight into the door. It nudged open a little, but something on the other side prevented it from swinging easily. Whatever it was scraped against the floor as Alpha Nine and the others pushed harder, forcing it open enough for each of them to squeeze through one at a time.

  “Finally, the control room,” Alpha Nine said as he turned and saw what it was that had been against the door. A decayed human body laid crumpled behind it. They all turned to look.

  “He must have been bracing himself against the door,” Alpha Nine said as he came to kneel beside the body. “But why? There was nothing down there but us.”

  “And the Trials?” Bravo Two asked, joining him beside the mostly bone and cloth body. “Maybe one of those beasts got out?”

  Alpha Nine picked up a plastic tag that hung partly beneath the remains of a jacket and rib bones. “Doctor Mariette Lawson.” He turned the card for the others to see.

  They gasped.

  India One grabbed the card. “No, it can’t be,” she exclaimed handing the card back to Alpha Nine.

  The woman they had seen when they woke from their pods, the one that had been directing all their instructions, the woman pulling all the strings. Or so they thought. She smiled a peculiar smile up at him from the small plastic card.

  “It’s not possible,” Bravo Two said.

  “Why not?” Kilo One asked, turning to address the group. “We have seen what technology there was in the world, what automation they had in place; why would they man a facility that could be run remotely?”

  Bravo Two stood and walked to the window above the control panels.

  Alpha Nine joined her as the others argued about the likelihood of the rest of the facility being like this, like they had forgotten them. He gulped when he saw what had drawn her attention.

  Before them, over one hundred pods sat in blue light filled with their duplicates. Machinery buzzed and moved around the pods, raising some, dropping others. Some moved into openings on the walls, the wall closed behind the pod and the mechanics once connected to the pods released from the wall and retreated to below the stack and into a dark hole in the center of the room. When the mechanics returned from the darkness they returned with a new pod, but an odd oval shape swam in these: fetuses. The process of their creation starting all over again.

  “This is sick, we have to free them, we have to shut it down,” said Bravo Two as she pressed wildly at the controls before her.

  “Wait,” Alpha Nine said, taking her hands.

  “If you release them all, the young will die, but we might be able to do something better,” he said as numbers and symbol appeared in his mind.

  Alpha Nine sat in front of the controls. Somehow he knew the codes, they swam in his head, numbers and commands, gibberish to any normal person, a computer language that he somehow understood.

  He typed hastily, the code filling the screen. The others watched as pods moved around the space before them. They lined up seemingly by age of occupant. The eldest, lowest down and the fetuses, higher up.

  The walls where pods had released opened and the subjects inside stepped forwards.

  “Stay in the pod room,” Alpha Nine said over the speaker.

  They all did as they were told. Like Alpha Nine’s group, they had woken and been told to wait for instructions, Alpha Nine was giving them new instructions rather than have them enter the phases, he planned to release them all.

  He continued to type away and the bottom five rows of pods hissed, row by row they lowered to the floor opening and spilling the occupants to the ground. Each of them coughing as they took their first breaths. The last two rows of the five had younger duplicates. They looked about ten years old, Alpha Nine didn’t want to release younger than that in case the mind growth had not proceeded enough to allow them to survive and thrive in whatever world they were going to find when they got out of there.

  “It looks like it is all automated. The whole process, it runs off the computer software,” he said to the others as he continued to type away. “I’m redesigning it to release into this room, when they are sufficiently grown and stopping the reproductive process. According to this there are forty-six fetuses awaiting below, and many more embryos and zygotes in frozen storage. Once the forty-six have grown the remaining will not enter the growth modules. The process will end and the machines will shut down.”

  “How do you know how to do this?” Bravo Two asked. “I don’t have knowledge of computer programming like that, why do you?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Alpha Nine. “Maybe I’m faulty.” He shrugged and finished off the code he was typing.

  The first duplicates he had released helped the newly awakened get to their feet. Alpha Nine typed some more codes and a panel on the side wall of the control room opened to stairs that led to the pods in front of them. The others went out to greet and explain to the newly awakened duplicates what had happened.

  “Do you know how to get them clothes?” Bravo Two asked.

  “I’m still searching for a way out,” he said hastily as he continued to type.

  “I guess clothes are not that important if we end up stuck in here forever,” she agreed.

  “Exactly, and here we have our way out,” Alpha Nine said, pressing the last three buttons slowly for dramatic effect.

  A shudder could be felt by all of them as the whole space vibrated. The far wall behind the pods separated, light flooding the dim blue-lit room. The wall opened from floor to ceiling, bright light flooding the space. Alpha Nine and Bravo Two made their way down the stairs to the others.

  “Alpha, clothes?” Bravo Two asked again.

  “Oh right, here,” he said, running to a wall. “The panels that gave us ours should be behind here.” He pulled open a panel, the others copied pulling open other panels by the walls the pods had once entered through. The combat gear was all there, clean and pressed. For an automated system, it functioned extremely well.

  “Let’s get out of here and find out what the hell is going on,” Alpha Nine said.

  He clasped Bravo Two’s arm briefly before he took the lead and they made their way down the illuminated corridor, and into the light of the real world.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The world was not what they expected. The scattered remains of buildings beset the landscape. To their right, a dry cracked basin, littered with the skeletal remains of ships that once sailed on clear blue waters.

  “Where is everyone?” Bravo Two asked as they stepped further out.

  She turned to look at where they had come from and frowned, obviously searching her memories for the building.

  Alpha Nine looked up at it too. It’s large white triangular shapes stained by rust sparked an image in his mind. An image of it pristine. The surrounding harbour alive with people. Crystal clear water lapping at the piers and white gulls flying overhead. A vast contrast to what they were faced with.

  “The Annoronians came early,” Alpha Nine said, picking up a dry rock and crumbling it to dust in his hand. “They have destroyed it all.”

  “It can’t be true; this can’t be the world!” Bravo Two yelled.

  They walked towards the waste land that stood before them. India One jogged ahead.

  “This is surreal, what do you think happened?” she called back to them as she turned, continuing her jog backwards. “It is so…”

  There was a sharp crack and India One flew forwards in a burst of light that appeared to come from nowhere.

  She landed at Bravo Two’s feet.

  “What happened?” Bravo Two yelled as she dropped to turn India One over. Her face covered in the red dirt at their feet, but her eyes were wide and bloodshot.

  Bravo Two’s hands shot to cover her mouth.

  “She’s dead.”
>
  All of them stopped walking, took defensive stances and scanned the world around them.

  “Do you think it was the Aliens?” Kilo asked, looking wildly around for any clues.

  “It came out of nowhere, did anyone see it?” Alpha questioned.

  Zulu stepped closer to the spot where India One had flung from.

  “There is something here, some sort of shield, I can feel its vibrations.”

  “It would stand to reason that they would protect this place in some way, a force field makes sense. So how do we deactivate it?” Alpha asked, walking to join Zulu.

  “Maybe we can find a way around,” Bravo Two said as she walked to the right, keeping one hand close to the invisible blockade to feel for the vibrations it made.

  “What if this is another trial?” Alpha Nine asked, taking a step behind her.

  “It can’t be, we released the pods, you changed the codes. This is the world--or what is left of it. We have to find the way through.”

  Alpha Nine smiled at her, her confidence, authority in her voice, she was amazing. He found it hard to believe he once saw her as someone he needed to protect.

  As the others came upon the force field, they too followed it themselves until they all the met up in a bunch, not one of them able to find a way through.

  “What about up?” Tango Five asked, looking to the burnt orange sky above them.

  “Great but how?” Alpha Nine asked.

  “We must go back to the facility,” Bravo Two said.

  They all nodded in agreement and turned to return to the angular structure.

  Alpha Nine and Tango Five pulled a bin over to hoist themselves up to the first sail. The angled grey pieces where hard to keep hold of; Tango Five pulled his knife and used it to help him climb, stabbing it into the metal surface of each section and pulling himself higher. Alpha attempted the climb without using his blade, but slipped a few times as a result.

  They both reached the top together and raised their arms slowly, trying to feel the vibrations of the force field. Tango Five felt it first.