“You’ll be fast?”
Storm threaded her legs and arms into the silver suit. It would provide some protection, but ultimately there would be damage.
“I’m going to put you in a fireman’s carry now so I don’t have to waste time if you collapse.”
Storm fitted the silver hood over her head, her face round and childlike, the growing darkness robbing the dark circles beneath her eyes of their force. She pulled the sleeves over her hands and drew a mesh veil over her face, blocking herself off from the entire world.
“The vials are on the top of the pack. If you need them.”
“How will I know?”
Storm’s breathing was shallow and fast.
“If I look anything like Mac did when he got to the cabin. Or you think I’m dying.”
Maria couldn’t tell if Storm was making a joke. She didn’t think so, but she had heard enough dark humour before missions to understand the response.
“You’ll need to go at least three hundred metres away from the lines. Can you carry me that far?”
The sky behind the towers was a dull, faded yellow, the sun barely having the strength to linger above the horizon.
“No problem.”
Maria’s heart pounded as if she were already running, her legs surging with the power that arrived with the adrenaline.
“Take a deep breath.”
She leaned her shoulder into Storm’s waist, tackling her. Storm didn’t bend.
“Lean into me.”
Maria’s head was next to the boney point of Storm’s hip, her forearms braced around the back of her thighs. Storm’s weight was tentative at first, until Maria pushed up and lifted her hips. Storm grunted as she was forced upside down on Maria’s back, her legs jutting out stiff in front of Maria.
“Relax!”
This position was so much easier when your victim was unconscious. Her core muscles engaged and she pulled down on Storm’s legs, forcing them to collapse. She adjusted the weight, her legs solid and stable as she started to jog. Storm was trying to brace herself against Maria’s back, the stiff bouncing painful for both of them.
“Be a rag doll.”
She needn’t have bothered. Storm’s weight collapsed when they stepped out of the trees. Maria held on tighter, running faster and pushing farther into the field. Storm cried out, the terrorized bleat of an animal in inescapable pain. Maria ran faster, Storm’s cries urging her on as Storm’s body gave way, bouncing limp against her back. She had expected resistance to be greater at the centre of the field, yet her legs pumped as hard and the ground moved beneath her as fast as it had in the woods. The waves of Storm’s seizure convulsed against her back, muscles firing of their own accord, her legs bouncing and jerking so that Maria had to grip hard to keep from dropping her.
Maria preferred an enemy she could see, meet head on, and defeat outright. Not one that waited it out, knowing that eventually you would come to it. The fear of being in the enemy’s front line pushed one foot in front of the next faster, yet there was no enemy to see. Nothing to strike down but the unbreakable steel towers, the porters of the enemy’s strength.
She ran directly beneath the wires, the meadow falling into darkness as Storm’s body fell heavy against her. She pushed harder, frantic that the field had been too much and that once again she had rushed into a plan without thinking it through and would have another death on her hands.
Fifty metres from the edge of the woods, Maria stumbled on a depression hidden by the grass and shot forward, Storm flying ahead of her. Maria’s knees struck earth as Storm’s heavy thud sounded ahead of her without a cry of pain. She scrambled forward and found Storm partially curled on her side. Her suit glowed dully, the mesh over her face turning her into a lifeless mannequin. Maria rolled her onto her back as a pressure pushed on her ears and a vibration ran over her skin. Was this the field? Slowly electrocuting Storm as Maria wasted time? She tried to lift Storm but her knees buckled each time she tried to stand. The corridor of the towers drew out on either side of her and for a moment she was disoriented, thinking she needed to go back and run in the opposite direction.
Think.
Havernal’s voice sounded in her head.
The sky glowed in the west where the sun was setting and where she wanted to go. The shelter of the trees drew farther away as the light faded, the towers growing darker and higher. She grabbed Storm under her arms, hooked her elbows at the joints so Storm was tight to her body, and pulled towards the trees.
She collapsed onto a dark patch of what she hoped was moss, leaving Storm spread eagle on the ground. Had she come far enough? The towers were out of sight and she had been hauling Storm’s unresponsive body through shrubs and tangled branches for what felt like hours. She rolled Storm over and ripped the pack from her back. Maria’s hands shook as she undid the rope and fumbled with the latch on the plastic container.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Why had Storm let her do it? Had she wanted to die? The zipper stuck on the silver suit and Maria yanked to get it open. She plunged the needle into Storm’s thigh. No response. She waited, wanting Storm to suddenly sit up, tell her the plan had gone better than expected when in truth it had gone much worse.
Tossing the needle aside, Maria slipped off the silver hood. Storm’s neck was slightly sweaty, a good sign, as Maria searched for a pulse. She had a moment of anguish when she couldn’t find it, then the relief of a faint, erratic beat, far beneath the skin.
A slight rise in the earth provided a small amount of shelter and Maria positioned Storm next to it. She had difficulty fitting the sleeping bag around her, her limp arms and legs wilfully falling to where they weren’t put. There was no resistance, not even the hint of a muscle flexing. Storm was in a place so deep that it was like she had abandoned her physical body. Storm’s description of what it felt like repeated in Maria’s mind.
It’s an ambush of emotions, like you’re high on ecstasy, your mother has just died, and you’re being chased by a rabid dog. Until a curtain of black oil oozes over all of it and you wake up sometime later wondering what happened.
When she had Storm zipped in, and confirmed her pulse still beat low and faint, Maria lay down next to her, spreading her own sleeping bag over the both of them. The stars shone through the bare branches above them, as far from earth as Maria felt from Storm. Maria tucked her arm around Storm’s thin frame, willing the energy and health she carried to drain into her and replenish the stores that had been so brutally depleted. If the Gatherer could take energy from the world, there had to be a way to put it back. It was just a matter of figuring it out.
FOURTEEN
Storm’s eyes opened and closed, returning to sleep for brief periods before they would open again and her bleary gaze would try to focus on Maria’s face. Maria held a bottle to her lips, getting her to take small sips during her moments of consciousness. Storm was barely able to lift her head off the ground.
When her eyes finally cleared, she lay staring up into the sparse tree branches, her face drained of blood and hope and anything beyond utter exhaustion. Maria handed Storm a bar and she ate it lying down, only lifting her head to take the smallest of bites. Maria’s stomach was tight with hunger but it was their last bar and Maria doubted Storm could go anywhere without it.
“Do you know where—”
Storm’s voice was slow and slurred, and Maria hoped it was the effects of the injection and not any damage from Maria taking her beneath the wire.
“More or less. Do you need another injection?”
Storm shook her head though the motion obviously pained her. Storm tried to sit up and Maria crouched next to her to support her back.
“You need to help me up.”
Storm held onto Maria for several seconds once she was standing, waiting for whatever waves were crashing through her to stop. When she let go, Storm leaned against a
tree, looking too hungover for words.
“I can carry you.”
“Not for long.”
Maria collected their sleeping bags and garbage, the only trace of their stop a few disturbed twigs and branches.
When she had the pack loaded, she lifted her chest and let it settle onto her shoulders. Storm still hadn’t let go of the tree.
“Ready?”
Storm’s fingers released and after a glance behind them, she took a hesitant step forward. Maria stayed beside her. They started slowly, covering barely two kilometres in an hour. They walked through sparse forests and across spare open areas of low brush and grass. She expected any moment the return of the jet, or even a member of her unit stepping silently in front of them. Yet as the sun peaked low in the sky and started its fast descent, nothing interrupted their trek. The landscape was so empty of movement it was as if they walked through a world already gone quiet, one they hadn’t been able to save.
The first headlights appeared at the top of a low rise a few moments after the sun had dropped below the western range. A river valley fell below them with the straight line of a highway crossing over it. It was the main artery connecting the north with the south and she had originally crossed it further north. The glow of a gas station shone a kilometre up from the river with the lighted windows of several houses spaced around it.
Storm slumped to the ground. It was too dark to see the details of her face clearly but Maria had witnessed her peaked exhaustion throughout the day.
“We’ll stay here tonight.”
She handed Storm the final bottle. The lights of a transport moved slowly south as Storm drank and offered the bottom half to Maria.
“I’ll get something at the station in the morning.”
The station glowed stronger as the day darkened, a bright spot in the dark bowl of the valley.
“We can’t go in there.”
“I’ll go on my own. There’ll be less chance of being recognized.”
Or she hoped there would. If it was her, she would be watching every point on the highway going south. Her only hope was that they would be looking for two travellers, not one, and if she could get in and out fast enough they might get lucky.
They slept side by side, their sleeping bags zipped together, their combined heat barely keeping them warm. Maria woke frequently, thinking she heard footsteps or the approach of a jet, and was tired and cold when the slightest lightening in the east hinted at the new day.
She slipped carefully out of their bag, tucking it around Storm before she left. She might just catch a sleepy cashier at the end of a night shift, too tired to care who came in the door.
FIFTEEN
A wide expanse of broken pavement surrounded the station, with space for three or four semis behind it. The space was empty in the morning dusk, the only signs of customers a pickup parked at a shiny island of electric charging stations where the pumps had once been. Maria hadn’t seen the Gatherer from the top of the hill, the white concave box tucked on the far side of the old station—a smaller size, enough to power the charging stations and the building that housed the store.
The open space gave Maria an easy view of who came and went, but it also meant she would be wide open between the entrance to the store and the dry, shallow ditch where she lay. A single surveillance camera hung on the corner of the low building, directed towards the charging stations. A younger man, his fluorescent safety vest reflecting in the lights, clomped to the pickup and slammed the door behind him. It was several minutes before he finally put the vehicle in gear and rolled back onto the highway, allowing the morning to settle back over the station.
There was likely only a single cashier in the store, hopefully tired enough after the night shift to not care much about the hitchhiker who wandered in. For without a car and her rumpled clothes, that would be their assumption.
The morning was brightening, the glow of the rising sun getting stronger in the east, drawing away what little protection the dusk could provide. She pulled the elastic from her hair, letting it fall around her face, and pulled Storm’s ball cap down tight. She checked a final time for arriving vehicles.
She walked fast, not running, imagining eyes on her, the lookouts posted above the station waiting for this very thing. She kept close to the building and out of range of the camera.
A bell rang as she stepped through the door into an onslaught of her senses. A bank of drink coolers lined the back wall below a digital sign that flashed through a cycle of brightly coloured testaments to the choice of drinks below. Pop music played at a level just below where you could hear the words, overlaid by the blare of a loud weather forecast on the screen mounted high in the corner. The pallid, obese woman at the cash register nodded to her as she sorted through the lottery ticket display, her surprisingly small hands filing tickets into each slot. A surveillance camera was mounted behind the counter and there was a second in the far back corner.
She kept her head bent so her hair hung close around her cheeks and the hat’s brim blocked the cameras’ view. She swerved towards the far aisle where rows of what were presented as the healthy snacks crowded the shelves. She ripped open a box of granola bars, and bit into the soft chewy bit of heaven. As she chewed she checked ingredients on some of the other bars, all of them too sweet or filled with too many chemicals for Storm to tolerate. Keeping her face away from the cameras, she scanned the store for other options.
The woman shuffled down the aisle and Maria smiled as she passed. Her response was a blank, ambivalent smile and Maria felt her anxiety ratchet down. Maybe it was possible for her not to be recognized, that the whole world wasn’t looking for her. She tucked three boxes of bars under her arm and moved to the coolers, scanning for the tomato juice Storm had requested.
A news story of a coyote nipping the heels of a jogger came on with an interview of a shocked, fit young woman in a sports bra. Once they had asked her way more questions than necessary, a less attractive middle-aged man came on to try to explain the extremes in temperature and volatile weather on the west coast.
“Choose Coke!” chirped a female voice as she opened the cooler. She took three apple juices off the bottom shelf and a half dozen of the tomato juice as the clerk passed her again on her way back to the counter. Maria added chips, five packs of beef jerky, and several suspicious-looking apples to her collection.
“What kind of smokes you want?”
The woman had opened the shelf behind the counter, exposing the rows of colourful cigarette cartons.
Maria dumped her goods onto the counter, keeping her face turned from the camera.
“I don’t smoke.”
The woman finished sliding three lottery tickets into the display under the clear plastic countertop, and after unlocking the register began an excruciatingly slow process of scanning each item.
The weather man beamed on the screen and clasped his hands together before the view changed to a thin, athletic-looking news anchor sitting behind a desk.
“A new Gatherer has been installed in a test laboratory at Berkeley in California. Researchers plan to look for new ways to access the energy that supplies the revolutionary device.”
Maria turned to watch the screen, like any normal person watching the news.
The image showed a unit as large as the ones she had seen on the train being lowered by crane onto a concrete pad in the centre of a sunny green space. Storm’s mother shook hands with half a dozen university dignitaries, everyone beaming optimism and good will.
The face of Alicia Freeman suddenly filled the screen, a microphone held before her by an intense, eager reporter.
“Why has this Gatherer been provided to researchers now, when previously all research on the devices had been prohibited?”
The cashier slapped a carton of Du Mauriers on the counter beside Maria’s purchases. Maria was confused, distrac
ted by Alicia’s face on the screen.
“Providing the energy that the world needs is the Gatherer Corporation’s number one priority.”
She had the same red hair as Storm, though darker and styled in a smooth, slick bob. Her delivery was as seamless as any politician’s and Maria marvelled at the transformation of the woman who, before the Gatherer, had been a difficult, failed academic.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Sorry I didn’t hear you.”
The cashier grabbed the Du Mauriers and shuffled back to the cabinet where she slid them neatly into place.
“If we can work together to find new and more efficient methods of accessing this abundant energy, there won’t be any energy need we can’t meet.”
Alicia flashed a dazzling smile.
The woman placed a carton of Player’s Lights onto the counter.
What was the woman doing?
“How do you respond to the accusation that the Gatherer is the source of the plague?”
The woman was about to scan the Player’s and Maria finally looked up into the cashier’s passive face. Behind the woman, the door of the cigarette cabinet blocked the surveillance camera’s lens.
“The Gatherer has been put through stringent tests, and the larger ones in particular, like this one—”
Alicia pointed towards the shining new Gatherer.
“—Will provide a new level of energy supply that will make so many things possible.”
The woman laid the carton of Player’s down without scanning it through. Maria didn’t understand what was happening, which meant she needed to leave. She rifled through her bag for the money Curtis had given them, and laid barely enough to cover the bill on the counter. She shoved her purchases into the bag as fast as she could, keeping her head low in case there was a camera she missed. She hoped to God the woman hadn’t already pressed the burglary button under the counter that went straight to the local police. A bag of mixed nuts burst open in her haste to force it into a space too small. She kept packing, torn between the need for the supplies and the freedom of the door less than five steps away.
The Gatherer Series, Book 1 Page 11