by H C Edwards
“Can you walk…or do you need help?”
“I can walk,” Mia said in a confident murmur, though she felt anything but.
The transport door opened. The security guards exited, with the one who had tased her providing a supporting hand on her elbow when her knees wobbled and threatened to spill her to the ground.
“It might be an hour or two before you feel normal,” he said, not able to meet her eyes.
Up close she realized that the cuff of his collar had dipped low enough for her to see the vaccination scar. Only one kind of medication was given enough to leave that mark.
She felt an instant wave of empathy for the security agent despite his previous actions. He was young, in his twenties, though he grew scruff to hide it, and when he walked it was with a wince as if from some unseen injury.
“Are they working?” Mia asked as she laid a gentle hand on his forearm.
The young guard looked at her with surprise and then cast his eyes downward again.
“Not so far,” he replied.
The vaccinations were an attempt to alter the genetic structure and activate the ‘breeder’ genome. It was experimental and had worked here and there over the years, but it was unreliable and the numbers were very low. Still, any chance was better than no chance at all.
The only problem was that the recipient experienced constant pain ranging from mild to debilitating, and since the alterations were at a cellular level there was no medication that helped.
“What’s her name?”
“Whose?” he asked her sharply, defensively, as he finally looked up into her eyes.
“The girl?” she said, smiling softly.
He stared hard at her for a few seconds, searching for some alternative motive, and then softened when he realized her genuine sympathy. His shoulders sagged and it seemed as if invisible hands were holding him down.
At that moment he looked like a little boy, and Mia couldn’t help but feel an instinctual protectiveness over him.
“Constance,” he replied.
There was a light in his eyes when he spoke her name, an ardor she had seen once before in a different life. He sent a paranoid glance over at his partner who seemed oblivious to their conversation but was no doubt listening. Someone always was.
“I’m walking her to the door,” the young security guard said roughly. “Make sure she gets where she belongs.”
His partner grunted his reply and sat back down in the transport.
Together, she and the young man walked to the porch, his hand a now steady brace. When they got to the door, he lingered a moment.
“Were you-“ he paused, unsure how to finish.
“Yes,” Mia finished for him. “I was a candidate.”
He struggled visibly, as if he were vying between politeness and desperate curiosity, no doubt a product of his own situation.
“What happened?” he finally asked.
She smiled sadly, opened the door, and stepped into the house, turning back to address the young man that could have been her own son.
“I died.”
The Soldier
It was ash and clouds of smoke swirling through the air; walls of fire in the distance, advancing like the frontlines of an army, lighting up the night sky in an orange dome. Every few seconds there would be a razor thin trail of blackness that streaked upwards in an arc from the horizon. Higher and higher it would go until it slowed, suspended in the sky, hovering, until with a screeching whistle it came hurtling down to the ground. There would be an explosion of dirt and metal and concrete, followed by a cloud of dust that would plume like the sneeze from some giant’s mouth.
He didn’t have much time. What came behind the walls of fire would be relentless, merciless, and anything caught in the path would be so much ash and dust when the wheels of the war machines rolled by.
Trey squatted on one knee for a moment and dropped his rifle. He unbuckled his ammo belts, his pack, threw aside the bulky night vision attachments he wore around his head. With the night sky lit up by the fires they would be useless for miles.
He withdrew all the clips from his belt and crammed them into his pockets. They would be necessary on the way back from the heart of the city, once they reached the wall. There would be panic, mass droves struggling to get to the transports for liftoff. The people would feel the flames licking their backs and singing their hair and that panic would shortly turn to violence. He abhorred the thought of having to use what he had against them but he would do what was necessary for Shai and Hannah.
Unburdened from all the extra equipment Trey stood to his feet and started to run towards the center of the city. As he did he vaulted over piles of rubble and skirted burning transports. Some citizens were running in the opposite direction towards the wall; some stumbled back and forth senselessly, covered in dust and blood, sheep lost without their shepherd. When they saw his uniform some semblance of clarity would shine in their eyes and they would go for him with hands outstretched in a supplicating manner. He had no time for them and shouldered them aside.
Bodies were everywhere, smoking and on fire, pieces scattered here and there from the rockets. A few minutes into the heart of the city and he stepped on a slick puddle that twisted his knee hard enough to the side that he crashed to the concrete with only one hand outstretched, biting back a scream even as his face bounced off the concrete. He lay there for a moment and fought off a wave of nausea then rolled over, and found that he was amidst a pile of intestines. The owner of the organs was about a foot away, or at least the upper half of her was; wide glaring eyes staring up at the sky with an expression of pure bewilderment.
Attempting to regain his feet, Trey realized that he had done something a bit more damaging than just wrenching his knee. He could barely put pressure on his wounded leg without nearly passing out.
“Fuck!” he shouted and began to pat his pockets.
Precious seconds passed until he finally found what he was looking for. He pulled out a small black roll of what appeared to be black electrical tape. He unwound a corner of it and wrapped the thin fabric around his knee and the surrounding area until the spool was gone. A little wire hung from the end and he grasped it between his two fingers and yanked.
The pain made him swoon on his feet as the fabric shrunk tightly around his kneecap, sending a slight electrical charge along the surface of his flesh that started to deaden the nerve endings from the thigh down.
Gasping, he withdrew a very small syringe from his breast pocket. He counted four more lined up like soldiers before he closed the flap on the pocket, bit off the cap of the syringe, and plunged the small needle into the flesh on the side of his neck.
Instantly a flood of euphoria spread throughout his body, chasing the pain into the furthest corners of his consciousness, followed almost as quickly by a surge of adrenaline that made his eyes feel like they were going to pop out of their sockets. Fire coursed throughout his body and made his fingertips tingle and spasm.
The pain was now a dull thump that was easily ignored, and though he found himself limping slightly, he was able to continue running through the streets, picking out a path that required the least resistance and effort.
He had to shut out the screams, the pleas. If he didn’t they would be apt to drive him mad. Once he felt fingertips grasp and tear a part of his pant leg. He flinched back and stopped for a moment, looking down at the man whose lower body was trapped beneath a small mountain of steel rebars and concrete.
“Please…” the man pleaded, just as a bubble of blood burst forth from his lips.
Trey looked at the rubble and knew it would take an hour to get the man out, and with the rapidity of the blood gathering in a pool beneath him, an hour was forty-five minutes too long.
“Help…me…”
“I will,” Trey said gently, and put a bullet in the man’s head before continuing on down the street.
At one point one of the screaming rockets rose up into the sky directl
y in front of him. Trey stopped in the street and watched as it rose past the buildings towering around him.
This was the business district, the last remnants of an old city that had existed before the wall went up and the sanctuary became self-contained. The buildings had been called skyscrapers, giants of a long ago era.
The rocket paused in midair as it turned and pointed down. Trey calculated the trajectory of it and began to run as fast as he could towards the center of town. The rocket screamed overhead as it descended and then slammed into a building behind him. What sounded like a thousand glass windows shattered at once and a split second later there was a deep resounding boom that made the ground leap beneath his feet. The shock wave launched him forward a dozen feet, slamming him into the side of a parked transport.
The wind was knocked out of him and he saw spots, but he kept his grip on his rifle and stumbled around the front of the transport as the ground rumbled to a building crescendo like a slumbering dragon awakened from the depths.
Trey gained speed in the few seconds it took to get the air back in his lungs but by then huge fissures were appearing in the street all around him, heaving up and down as if the ground were alive and breathing.
A roadmap of fissures opened up in front of him and he had to leap from one piece of concrete to another as they rose up and fell aside into the dark chasm, his wounded knee almost buckling on each landing, until finally he leapt a five foot gap at the end that brought him to stable ground.
Then he heard it, the groans and the screeching of metal and the shattering of glass. A cloud of concrete dust blew past him and brought visibility down to zero and still he ran, thunder raining down all around him, mini explosions bursting behind him, shrapnel slapping against his back and pelting his exposed head and neck hard enough to cut him.
The sound went beyond his ears. He felt it in his skull, his teeth and bones. The waves hammered his body, nearly lifting his feet off the ground each time. Staying upright was a force of will and little else. Had he stumbled once and fallen he knew he would never have the chance to get back up again.
It seemed to last an eternity, though likely only so many seconds. When it was over and the ground ceased its tumultuous thundering, Trey stopped and turned. He knew time was short and he felt the desperation of a ticking internal clock, but he also couldn’t leave until he saw it. A stiff breeze blew across the clouds of dust and enough was filtered out for him to perceive that the entire street was now blocked by a mountain of concrete and metal that towered almost a hundred feet in the air. The skyscraper had collapsed and brought down parts of the other buildings. Even the side streets were covered with streams of the rubble that had overflowed.
He had never seen such destruction in his life, not in all the wars and the battles combined. It was galling, and it made him feel small and helpless. What escape was there in the face of this madness?
Then he thought of Hannah and Shai. All other thoughts and doubts disappeared as he turned back around and continued to run.
Trey was very close now. Though the landscape had changed drastically due to the destruction, he knew where he was at all times. He heard a few more of the screaming rockets but thankfully they were in the distance. Every once in a while he looked to the horizon and the wall of fire that he knew was advancing but was blocked from sight by the large buildings. The orange red glow had grown closer, much closer. He didn’t know if it was from his own body or the heat from the massive fire but he felt a burning sensation on the exposed parts of his skin.
He skidded around a corner and there it was…the shelter.
Or rather, what was supposed to be the entrance to the shelter. It was an underground bunker, self-contained, provisioned for months, able to house a dozen people.
There were about fifty of them placed strategically around the center of the city in case of an attack, giant walk-in elevators that needed to be confirmed by at least six different voice patterns to activate and sink down into the bunker.
Each bunker was stock piled with food packs, beds, a trauma room, heating and plumbing, its own air filtration system to filter out possible toxins or poison gasses. Everything and anything that could possibly be used to aid and assist in survival had been well thought out and planned, even the communication system, whose cables were housed in a titanium alloy that was well nigh unbreakable.
It was how Trey had known where they were. Their message was brief but he had seen from the video that they had suffered nothing more than a few bruises and scratches before making it to the bunker.
Shai knew he would come for them. Her face, though strained and stained with streaks of tears, had been composed, her voice steady as she had relayed the coordinates for the bunker and the access code to the elevator. She’d held Hannah in her lap, arms protectively wrapped around her. His daughter’s head was in the crook of his wife’s neck but turned towards the screen.
“I love you, Trey,” Shai had said.
“I love you, Daddy,” Hannah had said, just before the video message ended.
I’m here.
And he was. He had the code. This was the correct bunker. Except where the street should have been, there was now a small lake, stretching nearly fifty meters in diameter.
One of the screaming rockets must have hit here and broken a water main. The bunker was trapped beneath untold thousands of gallons of water.
Trey’s eyes desperately scanned the area as he mentally calculated where everything should be. He saw a crooked sign on a pole with an emergency symbol on it, leaning to one side near the far end of the lake, just barely poking out of the water. That was the entrance to the elevator.
He dropped his gun and began to hastily strip off all his gear, leaving it on a pile at his feet. Bending over at the waist he quickly snagged a small but powerful hand flashlight from his belt and then took a deep breath before wading in.
Only a few feet and the ground dropped out from beneath him. The water closed over his head in a rush. It was so cold he almost gasped and lost all his air. He swam back to the surface, clamped the flashlight in his teeth, and kicked hard for the other side.
Once Trey was within reach of the sign, he dove down and clicked on the flashlight, moving the beam back and forth in the murky water below him until he saw what he was looking for.
The bottom of the blast crater was piled with huge slabs of concrete. Trey swam to the bottom and began to pull himself along with his free hand, focusing the light from his flashlight into every crook and cranny. Near the very edge of the crater, right before it started to slope back up again, the light of the flashlight reflected off a metal corner.
It was the top of the elevator.
He swung the flashlight all around him in the water, searching for a rebar but all the exposed ones were buried in concrete.
Trey kicked back up to the surface, mentally cursing the lost time, and swam as fast as he could back to the spot where his gear lay. He climbed out of the water and grabbed his rifle, then padded back out to the same spot and dove back down.
Once on the bottom he hooked his boots under a heavy block of concrete to brace himself then reversed his rifle and wedged the butt under the slab that covered the top of the elevator. He had to wiggle it a few times but felt it slip into the crack.
Trey then used the rifle as leverage, pulling back on the barrel and pushing forward with his feet. Nothing happened. It didn’t even budge. He wiggled the rifle butt to the other end of the opening and tried again. This time, he could feel and hear the slab as it scraped against the metal. It moved only a few inches the first time but with each subsequent yank on the rifle he felt it move more and more. Finally it picked up momentum and slid the rest of the way over the edge of the elevator.
Trey reached down with his hands and began to brush the top of the elevator off, looking for the emergency hatch. After he inputted the code to the keypad he could ride the water in and find Shai and Hannah. They would have to wait for the bunker to fill
up before they swam out but he knew they could do it. All those swim lessons were worth something after all.
They had only a few minutes to get out and then they’d have to run back through the streets to escape the wall of fire and the barrage of rockets. It would be tight but they could make it…they had to.
There. He found the circular hatch cover to the top of the elevator and the box housing the keypad on top of it. Trey opened the plastic lid only to find that the keypad and display screen was dark. He punched the numbers in anyways and waited a couple of seconds but nothing happened.
Trey almost screamed as he pounded the top of the keypad in desperation. He stopped when he felt something shift beneath his fist. Pulling back in surprise, he realized with mounting horror that the display and the keypad went dark because the hatch had already been opened.
The lid was slightly off kilter, a centimeter at most, but it was enough for him to see that the whole elevator was flooded, and if the elevator was flooded that meant…
Trey reached down and grasped the handle of the hatch and opened it the rest of the way.
Time slowed down. Small air bubbles rose from the darkness below. Trey put his head and shoulders in through the hatch opening and shone his light into the elevator, back and forth, the beam illuminating the half-dozen bodies that floated within.
The water must have reached the air filtration unit. It was designed to filter out toxins and gases but not the thousands of pounds of pressure from the lake that had formed overhead. The bunker must have been slowly flooding. In desperation they had tried to leave through the emergency hatch but couldn’t open it. By then there was already a thousand kiloliters of water overhead and concrete slabs covering the hatch.
The flashlight slipped out of Trey’s hand and illuminated the spectral figures as it sunk to the bottom of the elevator. He didn’t see them but he didn’t need to.
Trey let go of the hatch and drifted to the top of the lake. Instinct made him swim to the nearest concrete outcropping and pull himself up out of the water, but his mind was consumed with the horrifying thought of their last minutes.