Unwilling to Back Down (Survival of the Fittest Book 2)

by Shawn Keys

  Soo-Yun had dropped her bags and was perched on a chair. She smiled back. “Hopefully, I won’t have to, right?”

  Chloe murmured with a sewing needle between her teeth, “Amen to that.” She waved her own hello. “Hi, Doc!”

  Soo-Yun waved back, friendly but still feeling out her place there.

  Dazz had prowled back over to her command center, slumped down, and was sulking a little as she tapped open her lock screen.

  Kyle tossed his own bag on his previously claimed bed, then asked, “Where are we at?”

  By then, Chloe had repositioned the needle and was able to answer clearly. “Doing good,” she replied. “We got the cameras installed in the elevators, outside the instructor’s rooms, and even outside the rooms of two students. They called from the airport to confirm their arrival for tonight, so they were assigned rooms on the system. Unless they switch, we’ll be able to watch them arrive. Assuming they’ll sweep the room right after they settle in, we aren’t doing anything in there yet, but we knew that already. I filched these uniforms out of their laundry area, got us a few staff IDs, and figured out where I can get my hands on a master key card if I’m careful.” She smiled. “I think the night manager is half-convinced I work there. He’s a bit of a dick, exactly the sort of guy who wouldn’t remember anyone’s name but pretends he’s all friendly and cares. Smarmy. Wouldn’t give him a week before he qualifies for a sexual harassment case with me, from the way he looks at me.”

  Kyle glowered toward the wall, as if searching for the guy with x-ray vision. “Let me know if you need me to pummel him for you.” If the fucker gets handsy with Chloe, I’ll make a point of making that part of the mission.

  Chloe kissed the air at him. “Taking your oath to Nathan about looking after me awfully serious.”

  “Hey, I’ve taught you a dozen ways to take a guy like that part, Chloe. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t mind decking the prick if he paws at you.” He growled, but tried to shake that off. “Well, good. That’s further along than we hoped to be at this point. Do we know who the instructors are?”

  Jackie pointed up at the wall display. Two names were at the center of a thought-web drawing she had made. “Meet Darren Cox and Tasha Wilde.” She tapped on their names, which then shifted the display to show their faces. Both were video capture images from the hallway camera. Not perfect for ID purposes, but the quality was high enough to pick out details just fine.

  Leaning forward in her chair, Soo-Yun wasn’t too shy to get right into the mix. “They aren’t what I expected.”

  “How so?” Kyle asked. He knew he was often surprised they didn’t have the word ‘monster’ tattooed on their foreheads or something.

  “When you said they were eugenicists, I imagined… well, you know. Aryan supermen. Nazi ideal. Blonde hair and blue eyes, even if a lot of the Third Reich didn’t have those either.”

  Kyle smiled in spite of the dark subject. “When they first showed up, it made us think the same thing for a long time after. Niles and Lawson were the two agents who originally hunted me, and they fit that mold.”

  Chloe spoke up, since she was the most well-read on Claire Erinson’s work. “We’ve been able to decipher a little of the output they get from their so-called baseline tests. We wanted to know what they were selecting for. When their tests mentioned that they were looking for the nature of the subject’s eyes and hair, we feared they might be doing what you suggested.”

  “But we’ve seen some other agents that makes the theory fell apart,” Dazz slipped in. “I mean, look at these two. The guy could be middle-eastern, and the woman could be Irish with those freckles and red hair. That means they aren’t selecting on the basis of skin tone.” She rolled her eyes. “I’d say hooray for a lack of racism, but that would be bullshit. Instead, they’re killing people for other things.”

  “Like?” Soo-Yun asked.

  Chloe picked up the question. “Typical superhuman stuff. Taller on average. Better muscle density. Higher intelligence, both memory and rapidity of mental connections. Nothing is a guarantee, of course. Not to mention, the education and training you give a person counts for a lot. Devotion as well. Hard to select for that. You can have a super-smart guy who doesn’t give a shit about learning, and what do you have?”

  Kyle snorted and glance at Dazz, “Remember Fred back at the school? He got picked by Persterim. He’s not going to be winning any awards.”

  Chloe nodded. “Physical attributes are way easier to define than mental ones. That’s why the whole eugenics thing ends up falling apart. You can build a bunch of superhumans, but they could all be lazy assholes.” She shrugged. “They are trying to provide objectively ‘better’ building material while eliminating things like genetic disorders and other conditions. That’s what they are pushing for in everything we’re hearing and reading, anyway.”

  “But you said they were looking at the eyes and hair?” Soo-Yun prodded her.

  “The eyes are easy to guess. They’ll look to phase out myopia or cataracts. Hair is a little more uncertain. One could think they’d take out baldness, but since that is more about having testosterone, they could be just as easily be selecting for it.” Chloe shrugged. “Hard to say without reading their mail, like we want to.”

  Kyle mocked himself, “All we know for certain is they don’t want middling-height, community-college dropouts with no financial prospects and broken home life having any babies. We don’t know yet how much control they have over Persterim, but I’m certainly one of the ones they wish the diseased had culled from the list.”

  Soo-Yun graced him with a smile touched with a bit of lust. “Then us ladies wouldn’t know what we were missing.”

  Jackie glanced at the heated expression, then sighed. “Should have guessed that would happen. Had to drag him off Lily before we left the chalet. Guess he has a thing for doctors.”

  Kyle chuckled at himself, then shrugged. “Maybe not all of them, but so far I’ve been pretty –”

  Dazz cut him off, covering her eyes with her hand and looking ready to scream. “– Can we just not?”

  Deciding not to piss her off, Kyle flashed Soo-Yun a tiny grin but moved right along. “Alright. We have what we need, then. A starting point. Looks like the reservation hack is going to help us pinpoint them as they arrive. Jackie? You’re the investigator. What next? What are we looking for?”

  Glad to have something to focus on other than Kyle’s sexual adventures, Jackie said, “Data. Information. There’s only here for two weeks, and we need at least a few days to make our play. We can’t jump on our choice at the last second. Their head will be spinning so fast that they’ll be caught and executed within hours. They need time to come to terms with their choice and settle down.” She met each of their eyes, one after the other. “We need to pry in as much as we can without risking being exposed. We need to know who has a reason not to be there. Something that suggests we can lean on them. Any weakness at all might be something we can use for pressure. We won’t know until we know. Don’t think any detail is too small. If you hear a fact or a piece of trivia on any recording or as part of any conversation, log it. Favorite colors. Old pet names. Anything. No matter how mundane. We need to build files and fast.”

  Kyle nodded. “Well, there it is. We know what we have to do. We’ve fought hard to get this close to them. Let’s not waste our time now that we’re here.”

  * * *

  Fred Reigns stood at the edge of the obstacle course at the Dawn’s northwestern Farm. It was a classic, but there was a reason obstacle courses were used at everything from high schools to FBI and military training grounds. They demanded both psychological and physical grit to beat. They also revealed a lot about character and devotion to a team when you made the conditions challenging enough to strip away the veneer of civilization and shoved a group’s collective faces in the mud.

  He watched the six-month-old crop of students chop away at the course which was set in the moderate difficulty range. He was
back on a hill, aloof from the minute-to-minute pressure the instructors were placing on them. The students were fascinating to him, but they weren’t the ones he was watching. That was the job of the instructors: to keep up a steady deluge of precise, calculated pressure to achieve the desired results. Fred’s job was to watch the instructors and make sure they were following the plan. Any failure would break a student.

  Broken students didn’t leave. They were buried. Quietly. The other students would all think they had been turned away and threatened to remain silent about what they had seen. Fred couldn’t risk that. So, any failure became a difficult situation where the not only lost a resource, but then had to expend resources to explain away to their families and (more importantly) their Dawn sponsors why they had suddenly disappeared.

  A waste in every respect. And he hated waste, even more than the Trisha over in finance.

  He felt his phone vibrate. It had enough encryption that he felt secure in answering it. Their cell tower didn’t transmit directly. It collected all calls, routed them via landline to a tower back near the city, and broadcast from there. No-one would be able to trace the Farm’s location through his use of it. He answered it, “Reigns.”

  The feminine voice answering him had an unmistakable accent; not foreign, but rather a lingering hint of Boston Irish. “It’s Wilde, Sir. Calling to report the last of the students have arrived.”

  “Processing is going well?”

  “Yes, Sir. We went ahead with any test that could be conducted ahead of the group orientation and team enhancement exercises. We took a few liberties, but it became clear that there are several candidates that will be no concern. We could read them their oaths tomorrow, and they would gladly kill their own mothers for a chance at a trusted placement in the Dawn.”

  Fred gave a slight rumble of a chuckle which was about as expressive as he ever got. “Always is. Any issues with changing locations?”

  “Negative, Sir. The staff has been cooperative. The Nine Elms returned all deposits. We’ve spent enough there that I think they are hoping we will return in the new year if they don’t hold this change over their heads.”

  Fred answered with a huff. “Good. Another silver lining. Shaking them up might make them less complacent next time when it comes to offering us service. A small thing, but we should take the victories we can. Let me know how the interviews turn out. I want to know well ahead of time if we think any are going to be turned away. I won’t have to bury them, but proper threats and insurance policies will have to be put in place.”

  “Will do, Sir. No red flags so far.”

  “Good to hear.” Fred clicked off the phone and went back to watching the event unfold before his eyes, feeling satisfied.

  Chapter 7

  Jackie settled onto the bed again, fiddling with the projector until it was in-focus and showing the details she wanted. “Well, I think we have what we need, Ladies and Gentleman. I’m impressed. I’ve seen a team larger than this take a month to put this much information together. This is a lot of information to work with after only six days.”

  “Could have been faster if some of the students hadn’t been late arriving,” Chloe quipped. She was huddled into a chair, lounging in her favorite mix of a sapphire blue tank-top, skimpy black underwear and grey socks that extended up over her knees to keep her feet cozy.

  It was bravado, and they all knew it. Kyle suspected it had helped to have fewer students to focus on in the early days. They had gotten into a rhythm with the smaller number. Adding more later had been easy. He still smiled, glad to see them all in good humor. Well, except Dazz. But she’s always grouchy. “Not sure we have everything we need, but we have enough to start asking the right questions.”

  Soo-Yun was shaped around him in a most appealing way. She was lying on her side, head propped up by one hand braced by her elbow, spooned around his back as if forming him a chair, and her legs curled into his other side. She didn’t show a single trace of being embarrassed by the close proximity, though she didn’t take it any further. “We do have to narrow the field a little.”

  Kyle did his best to stoically ignore the appeal of being so near to her. He had considered getting another room, but they couldn’t safely be separated like that. If they got raided, the last thing they wanted to be is split up. Soo-Yun had happily claimed the other side of his bed for sleeping. The others hadn’t even pestered or bugged him that much, though their hidden grins about what they expected to happen had been enough to make him blush. Trying to be a good roommate, Kyle had fought the good fight, resisting the urges brought on by having the sexy doctor snuggled against him night after night. He admitted, he was near exploding.

  If Jackie noticed his discomfort, she didn’t acknowledge it, perhaps thinking it fair payback for all the free, semi-public orgies she had endured hearing while up at the chalet. She simply agreed, “Which is what we should do now before we waste any more time.” She gestured up at the display on the wall. “There you have it. Twenty students. Twenty strangers that we probably know more about than many of the people they have called friends in the past. Twenty potential traitors to the cause.”

  Kyle held a deep breath, admitting that the weight of information in front of them was daunting. Staggering, even. And this was just the surface, a mere summary of who these people were. They had so much more. They had been eavesdropping on every conversation they could find. Invading privacy beyond what any legal warrant in history would probably have allowed. The two supervising agents were always loitering about, so they hadn’t been able to penetrate quite as deeply as they might have wanted, but this was still a lot to work with.

  “Now, keep in mind, there is room for error here,” Jackie cautioned them. “One of the reasons this takes so much longer with a real DOJ or FBI team is the need for corroboration. If one of these people talked about a cat they had named Snooky, we’re taking that as truth. But they could have fibbed about the cat, and if we tried to use it as a pressure point, we’d fall on our asses and they’d laugh at us. One of those errors is probably going to rise up and bite us in the behinds. We need to be ready for that.”

  Silence descended as all five members of the group peered up at the wall, letting the full magnitude of the task beat down on them.

  Name

  Sex

  Age

  Profession

  Why Picked?

  Jasper Marques

  M

  25

  Masters Student

  Published Opinions

  Peyton Fairfax

  F

  26

  Retail Store Manager

  ID by Mentor

  Kelton Glasbey

  M

  25

  Military Officer

  Highest Metric

  Sterling Ochs

  M

  25

  Campaign Finances

  Connections

  Quinton Schmidt

  M

  27

  Speech Writer

  Legacy Mother

  Paul Lubin

  M

  25

  Accredited Journalist

  Published Opinions

  Annie Francis

  F

  25

  Novelist (Independent)

  Published Opinions

  Rebecca Bruice

  F

  25

  Firefighter Pilot

  Legacy Father

  Carlie Toff

  F

  26

  Classical Musician

  Highest Metric

  Blaine Courtney

  M

  25

  Idle: Extreme Sports

  Legacy Father

  Noah Levin

  M

  26

  City Planner Engineer

  ID by Mentor

  Nylah Phillips

  F

  25

  Police Officer

  ID by Mentor

  Dominic Stanton


  M

  26

  Professional Athlete

  Connections

  Landon Curtis

  M

  25

  Wall Street Broker

  Highest Metric

  Esmie Dias

  F

  28

  Magazine Editor

  Published Opinions

  Ada Workman

  F

  26

  Marketing Professional

  ID by Mentor

  Chastity Eskin

  F

  25

  Professional Student

  Connections

  Sanya Oleski

  F

  24

  Commercial Pilot

  Legacy Mother

  Cade Perella

  M

  25

  VC Fund Manager

  ID by Mentor

  Baylee Barns

  F

  27

  Lawyer in State Court

  Connections

  Soo-Yun leaned to the other side of her chair, crossing her legs unconsciously as she nibbled at her fingernails in thought, a bad habit she had never defeated. “I’d suggest we start by excising those who have a low probability of being viable candidates. That way, we don’t have to dive deeply into all of them.”

  Kyle said, “Alright. Makes sense. We can always revisit the ones we eliminated if none of the others work out. What do you suggest as the first criteria?”

  Soo-Yun didn’t hesitate. “Anyone listed as being over 26.”

  Chloe asked, “Why’s that?”

  Soo-Yun replied, “Please correct me if I am mistaken, but we are looking for someone who will have reason to be less than 100% loyal to these people, correct?”

  Jackie nodded. “You have it.”

  The doctor said, “From what we’ve been able to tell, entry into their farm is only permitted for those 25 and older. All rules need exceptions, and we have one up there who is 24. That person might have either fought to get there early or had their sponsor convince the instructors that their birthday was just ill-timed. But for the ones who are older, that means they missed their original chance. There aren’t many of them, which suggests exceptions aren’t easily made. These people fought to be here. They are beating the odds to get this chance. Or maybe, this is their second chance. Maybe they had to do something extra special to prove their worth. They are desperate, but in the opposite way we need. They would do anything to win their good name.”