“No, they should be punished for their crimes, but not tortured and mutilated!”
“Why not?” Dana shrugged. “They do that to others. It might as well be karma.”
“What about the people who believe in God?”
“What about them?” Dana chuckled. “Believe me, since the ban on religion, the country has been much better off.”
“What’s so wrong with wanting to believe that there is a higher power?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Well…no…I…” I glared. “I don’t know. Maybe there is some higher power.”
“If there is, he is long dead,” Dana shook his head with a broken laugh. He spread his arms wide. “Now, I am the higher power.”
“You think you’re God? Creating these monsters in your little confined area? Seeing what you can create?”
“No, of course I’m not God. Why would I want to have all those people coming to me begging me to explain why they have problems? I am simply a creation of my environment, just like you. Only my environment was very different. I was created by the humans who have fear of something they believe is higher in power. Something they fear,” he whispered. “Humans are the masters of living their lives in complete fear; fear of death, fear of loss, fear of hardships, fear of some higher power…fear that one day, something might happen to upset their trivial routines and they will have to work a little harder than before. It’s the same fear that leaks into the government and their churches—their so-called higher power—and infests like the plague. Fear of losing power, of stepping on a few toes for a greater result, fear of the people that they govern…and then the people become afraid of the very government that they’ve created, seeing the wound that they are too lazy to clean. Everyone is too afraid to stand up and take responsibility for the monster.”
He smiled, tilting his head to the side.
“You can blame the government all you want, but you are the one who is willing to tolerate it, deal with it, let it breed and infect like a virus. You are the one truly at fault.” He shook his head, looking at his feet. “But, as history has proven, you,” he pointed at me, “are also the most dangerous force.”
“Me?” I blinked. “I’m just one person…”
“True,” he admitted. “But one person with an idea can turn into thousands of people with a revolution.”
I was silent, staring at him with wide eyes.
“You think that these Commission escapees are going to try and make a revolution?” I whispered incredulously.
“They’ve already started,” Dana nodded. “The pop-ups, the emails…believe me, the gears are already turning. There has been a forty-one percent increase in people searching for things related to the people captured by the Commission of the People. The populous is curious, and that is very dangerous for me, because that quickly turns into fear.”
“You have a thing for fear,” I noted.
“It’s the only emotion every human feels the same way,” Dana stated. “But fear quickly turns into anger, which is what every revolution needs. Another revolution will take its course. It’s just a matter of time.” He smiled. “Anger will always lead to change. Then, hope will rebuild what anger tore down. That hope turns into contentment, and will eventually lead to laziness, which will bring problems and anger and around and around we go in the never ending dance of coexistence.”
“And you?” I whispered. “Where do you fit in?”
“I fit in wherever I need to fit in,” he grinned. “I’ve told you before. I am only what people make me out to be.”
“How?” I hissed. “How can you just…turn off everything inside you that was once human? Don’t you feel fear at all?”
“Not yet,” Dana admitted. “Maybe one day. I’m still looking for the thing that frightens me. That way, I can learn how to overcome that as well.” Dana leaned forward. “Why don’t you take the first step and let go of your fear of me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to become like you.”
“Yes, you do,” Dana chuckled. “Everyone does. Everyone wants to be this powerful, this in control…I’m sure you know the feeling. The feeling of running free, following only your instinct and your gut, being completely controlled by your nature. You probably felt it when you were breaking everyone out of the Commission cells…”
“I told you, I didn’t do it.”
“It was exhilarating, wasn’t it? How would you like to feel that all the time?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I snapped. “How would you expect me to break out all those people, kill all those guards…all in less than seven minutes?”
“Well, obviously you had help.” Dana rolled his eyes. “By my calculations, though, you could have probably done this with…five people?” He looked at me, expecting me to correct him.
“Five people?” I barked. “Five? You’re telling me that you were infiltrated by only five people and you got kicked in the ass this hard?” I laughed heartily, shaking my head. “Oh, Dana, you’re way off your game.”
Dana grinned, showing all his teeth. I found myself enraptured in our game. He knew I was gloating internally about our victory. There was a cocky part of me that wanted to correct him, to tell him that we managed it with only four people, but the more rational part of my brain immediately stamped out the desire.
“You’re enjoying this,” he noted.
“I am,” I nodded. “Seems you’re not as powerful and in control as you think.”
“Oh, I am,” he assured. “More than you know.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Because you’re not looking the right way,” Dana said. “For instance, if you were looking correctly, you would see that I am incredible aroused by your defiance.”
“Maybe I did see it,” I shrugged, “and I’m just teasing you.” I began walking toward the door. “Besides, I figured you would have been satisfied sucking your fat French friend’s cock.”
“Don’t get it backwards,” Dana laughed. “It is a rare occasion that I go on my knees.”
I opened the door and threw a cocky look over my shoulder.
“In my experience, you don’t have to be on your knees.” I slipped out the office door and closed it behind me, grinning broadly and walking confidently back to the conference room.
* *** *
Thankfully, my parents were still trying to recover from their long time in Europe, so they went to bed early. I stayed up, trying to complete my homework, though I could not focus. A part of me wanted to get it done, to pull my grades up and get into university, but there was a dark, angry part of me that told me not to. I needed to rebel against Dana, against his plan for me. I needed to focus on only that.
A few minutes before eleven, there was a small click on my window that caused both me and Dex to jump. I strode over to my window, stroking the top of Dexter’s head to soothe him before I leaned on the window sill. There were two figures standing in the driveway below, waiting for me.
I darted to Mykail’s bedroom door.
“Mykail,” I hissed. He turned to me, startled. “Mark and Clark are here. Grab a blanket. It’s cold outside.”
He pulled the blanket off the top of the bed while I ran to my room and grabbed my heavy coat, slipping it on as I fished for the gloves in my pocket.
Mykail and I slipped into the cold garage and then out to the backyard. Telling Mykail to wait, I darted through the side gate to the driveway, leading the two visitors around the back of the house.
“Did you drive here?” I asked as I latched the gate behind them, realizing I had not seen a car.
“No,” Clark snapped playfully. “Mr. Cautious over here wanted to walk.”
“You walked all the way from your house in this cold?” I hissed in shock. I turned to Mark and saw that he was dressed in nothing but his normal suit. While he was not shivering, his cheeks were tinted red and his lips were stain
ed pale blue. Worried, I led them to Mykail and then told everyone to wait, running upstairs and snatching another blanket.
Clark was talking congenially with Mykail when I returned. I walked to Mark and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders.
“Don’t get sick on us, Mark.”
He blinked, surprised, and then smiled and nodded, holding the blanket appreciatively. I focused my attention on Clark.
“What about you? Are you warm enough?”
“You didn’t get me a blanket anyway?” Clark pouted playfully.
“Your lips weren’t blue!” I laughed. “Seriously, buy him a coat.” I then let out a sigh, watching the smoke appear from my mouth and disperse into the frigid air. “Okay, I wanted to talk to you about a plan.”
“Yeah, a plan for what?”
“Well, we might have gotten everyone out of the Commission, but the only way we can ensure that we’re safe is to take down the whole operation, right? Otherwise, there was no point to what we did.”
“We broke a lot of people out,” Clark objected.
“Who can’t live in the fort until they die,” I reminded him. “Even though we have over one hundred people, we need a lot more if we want to bring down the Commission. Dana told me that the people of America have been looking up things on the internet because of the emails and pop-ups, so we have people interested. Now we just need to prove to them that the Commission is mutilating people and making them into weapons.”
“Okay, but to do that, we need something that will go viral before Central takes it down.”
“So we make sure to do it on a live broadcast,” I declared. “Somewhere where there will be a lot of people watching the live feed from their homes. Something that will really shock people.”
“The Liberation Day Parade…” Clark hissed. “I see.”
“What do you think, Mark?”
He nodded and tapped his right ear twice. I turned to Mykail for the translation.
“Keep talking.”
“The news crews are spread out, but the major, nationwide cameras are always at the intersection of Main and Delaware, right? Because that is where the parade stops for the Ankell float to perform its dedication.”
“Right,” Clark confirmed.
“That is where we reveal everyone. We’ll get people in the parade with signs and banners as if they are just part of another organization, maybe even the group representing the Commission of the People. It’s just before the Ankell float, so all the news cameras will be rolling, waiting for the dedication. That’s when everyone flips their banners around to match our previous flier with their own pictures.”
Mark lifted his head quickly and did some quick hand signals. These ones were not as subtle as some of the others he had previously used, but Mykail understood.
“He wants to know how we get everyone to escape. There is security at the parade.”
“But minimal security,” I pointed out. “We get everyone to scatter before the Commission vans show up. Everyone takes a different way back to the fort.” I explained. “We show our message and then we run. If nothing else, it will be talked about, which is much more important than sticking around. We’ll plant some regular humans and Commish Kids in the crowd to act as distractions, and we’ll get them to make a scene. That will give us time to get the experiments out of the street and into the drains, where they can all split up and take different passages to the fort.”
Clark’s smile widened.
“So, just the experiments. We won’t be marching?”
“No, no,” I shook my head quickly. “We can’t. The Commish Kids will have to act as though we are trying to capture them and cause a scene that makes things too confusing for people to do anything. The experiments disappear again and we will tell Dana we tried.”
“Do you think we can pull it off?” Mykail asked, turning to Mark. The silent experiment was looking at his feet in the snow. He shifted his weight a few times and then nodded slowly, looking at me with a small, but confident, smile.
“There’s only one problem I see…” Clark said. “I mean, besides the risk that we actually get caught. Most of the experiments look normal. We can’t have Mark, any of the others in the Eight Group, or any of the minorities. They’ll be noticed before we even get to Main.”
“I agree that Mark can’t be seen,” I nodded strongly. “At this point, Mark, you are our strongest ally. We need you to stay on Dana’s good side and keep you safe.”
“Right, so how do we convince the people that these normal-looking people are experiments of the Commission? The Commission members are going to be the only ones who know the kind of torture these people went through.”
I sighed, turning the problem over carefully. There had to be a way for us to prove that the former prisoners had been made into weapons without endangering the people who were going to be watching the parade.
I slowly turned to Mykail.
“Mykail…could you do something for us?”
Chapter Fifty-One
“Hey, where are you?” I asked, trying to hear Clark on my phone around the noise of the people chatting excitedly, gathered around the barriers on the street.
“Almost at the intersection,” Clark said. “There are a lot of news crews…is everyone in place?”
“Pretty much,” I confirmed, squeezing through the backs of two people talking to their families. “It’s a zoo out here…”
“I forgot that this is your first Liberation Day Parade in Central,” Clark laughed. “My mother was really shocked that I wanted to come here instead of watching it on television.”
“It certainly seems like the better option,” I groaned irritably. “Felicity and Dean are here. From the text, it seems they managed to get everyone set.”
“Awesome.”
I felt another buzz on my phone and pulled it away from my ear to see the text message. Moving past the message from Felicity asking me where I was—our designated signal to say that all the experiments had managed to sneak into the lineup without trouble—I saw another text from Sarah, asking me where I was.
“Sarah just text me,” I told Clark vaguely.
“Great.”
“Now, if I can just get where I’m supposed to be…” I growled, becoming extremely annoyed when a large family with three kids ran to the people at the barrier and blocked my path. Grinding my teeth in frustration, I pressed myself to the wall of the bank building and shimmied around the mother and father.
“You sound tense,” Clark teased.
“And you don’t,” I snapped. “Why is that?”
“What is there to be nervous about?” Clark asked. “Everything will be great. We have this down.”
“How is it that you can be so nervous about the first thing we did, but not this? We’re basically putting ourselves out in the open here…”
“This was your plan.”
“I know…”
“Besides, we may be out in the open, but before we were strolling into the lion’s den, more or less,” Clark pointed out. “This involves a lot less danger on our part…”
“Maybe…” I said, glancing warily over one of the guards standing by the barrier.
“Take a deep breath,” Clark instructed. “We’ve been going over this for two weeks. It will be perfect.”
“I wish we had a little more time,” I murmured. “Okay, text when you’re at your spot.”
I was extremely nervous. Even though it had been a plan I had concocted and developed with the help of Tori, Griffin, Mark, and Josh, I was still nervous about the execution. With all the innocent people around, I saw increased potential for something to go horribly wrong. I was not sure if the police were armed with real guns or Tasers, and I quickly saw the situation spiraling toward civilian deaths.
My phone buzzed with another text message.
Becca: Hey. Im at Main. Where r u?
Almost there…
Typing the quick reply, I wove around people and their camer
as and children, trying to avoid the lines surrounding the stands for hot coffee and giant salted pretzels. Seeing the Liberation Day Parade on television was very different from being in the crowd. There seemed to be a lot more people.
I saw the first crew of the major news stations. They were doing their opening reports about the weather and the turnout that year, explaining that the parade was going to start in approximately five minutes. I tried to avoid walking behind the reporters to keep myself from view of the cameras. I hid behind a larger man who was walking past one reporter whose camera was blocking my path, forcing me into the pack of people.
Finally, I saw the sign for Main Street. I pushed forward aggressively, eager to get to my position. I caught sight of other accomplices, who nodded silently when they saw me pass.
This was our public declaration of war.
Spotting Becca near a barrier next to one of the guards, I slipped between more spectators, earning a few nasty looks from people who were trying to get to the front as well.
“Hey,” I greeted, finally reaching her.
“Hey,” she smiled. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Thanks for coming,” I said. “It’s nice being here with someone.”
I got a text.
Clark: Hey. I can see you! I’m right across the road from you!
I looked up, even though I knew that it was our signal text, and saw him standing at the opposite barrier, smiling.
I took a few deep breaths, trying to remain calm.
“Are you okay?” Becca asked.
“Yeah, I’m, uh…” I looked around and motioned stupidly, “a little claustrophobic…”
She nodded, understanding my real tension.
I glanced around at everyone I knew around us, seeing them stationed near the news crews as we had planned, waiting patiently for their cue.
It was their cue that was worrying me the most.
My heart was thumping against my ribs as I worried over the fact that I was putting so many people in danger and, in a sense, outing myself as being involved in the rebellion against the Commission of the People. I peeked at the holster of the policeman next to me.
Inside Page 93