As suddenly as the mayhem began, it's over. Milton stands in the middle of the room. On one side of him sits a pile of countless firearms. On the other side are the unconscious soldiers, stacked around Willard. The steel door yawns open, allowing harsh white light from outside to flood in.
"So, what were you saying?" Not even the least bit out of breath, Milton turns to wink at Willard.
"I think he's speechless." Luther rises and offers me a hand. I take it. "A welcome change, I must say."
Willard squirms, struggling against the bodies that wedge him in tightly where he sits. He curses and fumes but eventually grates out, "You have nowhere to go. Why are you so hell-bent on leaving? You're safe here, for God's sake."
"Safe?" I step toward him with fury boiling in my belly. I pull up the dress to expose my stitched abdomen, just above the waistline of the jeans Luther gave me. "How dare you?"
"You're the first virile survivors we've come across, in all this time. We built Eden for you—to protect the future. Our future!"
"You built this place for yourself." Luther picks up a rifle and jams a handgun into the waist of his pants. He beckons me to join him at the pile of weapons.
"I know all about you. You and your naturals." I lean in closer so Willard can see the hate burning in my eyes. But he doesn't look up. "Look at me!"
Slowly his eyes rotate upward. "From Tucker, right? Everything you think you know, you heard from half-baked ol' Tucker."
Luther steps toward me. "Don't listen to this man."
Milton glances outside. "We should get going."
Blood oozes from Willard's nose into his mustache. Arms pinned to his sides by the weight of his own men, he's unable to wipe it. "Tucker told you only half the story. It's all he knows."
I'm listening, but I don't know why. I shouldn't be.
"He's a lunatic. Been alone too long up there on the surface. My fault, truth be told. I left 'im…for the good of the many."
"Are we leaving him here?" Milton glances at Luther, who nods.
"Daiyna." Luther's voice is quiet. He touches my arm.
"You're not safe. You have no idea. It's not just the mutos and the demon-dust anymore." Willard licks his lips as the blood dribbles across them. "They know what you are. And they're coming for you. Just like they've done everywhere else." His eyes implore me.
I frown at him. What's he talking about? They who?
Luther takes my arm gently but firmly. He tells me we have to get Shechara, Samson, and another one whose name I don't recognize. He hands me a rifle. I take it, but I watch Willard. A tear leaves his eye as we step outside onto a steel catwalk suspended over an expanse of concrete littered with crates.
"I'm sorry," he calls after us. "I tried to fix you, but it's too late. God have mercy on you—on us all!"
Milton heaves the steel door shut and locks it. "Wacko," he mutters.
We're inside an enormous dome, lit by bright lights mounted at intervals high above us. I blink in the glare. The steel beneath my bare feet vibrates with the low hum of distant machinery.
"How many remain?" Luther scans the vacant floor below us, his weapon at the ready.
Milton jerks a thumb toward the steel door behind him. "Close to forty in there...so that should leave less than a dozen. Probably hiding out somewhere, waiting to ambush us." He grins.
I glance at the large bolt on the door. "Shouldn't we take their weapons?"
Milton pats the pockets of his jumpsuit, which I notice are bulging beyond capacity. "Got all the ammo."
Luther moves toward the ladder. "Margo should be finished with Samson soon." He slings the rifle across his back and heads quickly down the steel rungs.
"Margo?" I watch him go.
"Another gifted type." Milton sweeps the floor below us with his rifle as Luther descends. "She was their doctor here. More like their slave. But she's with us now."
Us. I watch him, this man who wanted to kill me. This man I saved from the spirits of the earth when they intended to drown him in sand and dust, stone him to death as he ran. He who was possessed by evil...who now has been set free. To set us free.
Was this the spirits' purpose all along?
"What is it?" He catches me looking at him.
"It's good to see you, Milton."
He almost smiles. "Good to see you too."
Luther beckons us to follow. I leap over the railing and plummet to the ground, landing in a crouched position at his side. Milton does the same, but instead of falling as I do and landing cat-like, he seems to glide, floating down the twenty meters to the floor.
I can only stare.
"Something new he's picked up," Luther says with half a grin.
"He's certainly full of surprises." I press a hand against my sore abdomen.
"Meet you guys at the recovery rooms, after I take a quick look around." Milton turns away.
"God's speed," Luther says.
Milton glances at him. "Maybe." Then he's off in a blur of speed with a blast of air in his wake.
"This way." Luther touches my side and jogs across the dome's main floor.
I do my best to keep up, but my stomach cramps immediately, and I have to slow down.
"Are you all right?" He stops.
"Fine," I gasp. "How did he find us?"
"Milton? The spirits told him. They...appeared to him as people from his past, from his sector. Good and evil, as he puts it. They showed him a way into the tunnels from the east, and he was able to enter Eden without Willard's men or cameras seeing him. He visited my room yesterday—startled me quite a bit, I assure you."
I can relate. "Eden?"
"This place." He gestures at the arched ceiling above us. "Willard's paradise beneath the earth, away from the spirits' influence."
Should I tell him I can't hear their voice anymore? Does it matter?
"Where were they keeping you?" I glance at his hands.
A somber look fills his eyes. "The recovery rooms, where we're headed. They held us there for days, ran tests on us...attempted to change us. Permanently."
I force myself to say it: "They took your gift."
He raises a hand and flexes his fingers. No miraculous talons extend outward. His eyes hold a deep sorrow.
"Luther..." Tears blur my vision.
He shakes his head. "Samson and Shechara had the worst of it." He pauses. His lips part to speak, but no words come.
We continue on in silence. Eventually, we reach another catwalk suspended above us with a ladder leading up to a row of identical steel doors. Luther starts up the ladder and I follow close behind, the throbbing pain in my abdomen keeping me from launching upward on my own.
Milton joins us as we climb off the last rung and onto the steel grate.
"Nobody." He emerges from a gliding blur of speed. "If they're hiding out, I can't find them. Maybe I spooked 'em."
"Let's hope they remain hidden until after we're well on our way." Luther steps toward the first door and knocks twice, then waits. He looks at me. "Brace yourself," he warns.
What's happened to my sister? What have these naturals done to Shechara? To Samson? If they're hurt in any way, I'll go back to that Captain Willard and rip out his throat. Why did we leave him and his men alive?
The door slides open. "Luther?" a quiet voice emerges from the darkness inside.
Shechara.
I rush forward crying her name and embrace her, folding her in my arms, pulling her close. She responds weakly, saying my name, but it sounds like a foreign word on her lips. I take her face in my hands.
Her eye sockets are empty.
I choke. "Shechara..."
"Daiyna—" She smiles suddenly. "You're here! You're alive!"
What have they done? My sister, my dear Shechara, blessed with far-sight, able to see what no one else can...
They will pay for this dearly. I'll kill every last one of them.
She touches my face. "They took my eyes, Daiyna. I don't know why they needed them. An
d they took..." Her fingers slide across my dress and find the stitches beneath the thin fabric. "You too?"
"Yes, my sister," I manage, fighting back tears. "Me too."
Luther touches us both on the shoulder. "Are you ready, Shechara?"
She nods bravely. "Yes, Luther." She slips her arm around mine. "I'll follow you."
I turn to Luther. He must see the questions in my eyes. The rage. But all he says is "This way." He leads us down the catwalk to the door at the end, the last room. Again, he knocks twice and waits.
This time, no one opens the door. Instead, Samson's voice thunders from the other side, reverberating the steel, "Enter!"
Luther glances at me, then slides the door open, stepping into the darkness beyond. Shechara and I follow, but Milton remains outside on the catwalk, keeping watch.
"Come one, come all!" Samson booms from the bed in the middle of the small room. On both sides are medical machines, blinking, bleeping. "Come and see the one, the only Samson—the human cyborg!"
He raises both arms over his head in a gesture of strength—but from the elbows onward, his arms are made of steel and hydraulics. Mechanical fingers curled into fists gleam in the fluorescent light above his bed. One of his legs is also robotic from the knee down, solid steel with bolted joints and exposed biofluid tubes. His other leg is missing, but a small-framed woman in a white lab jacket assists him, struggling to fit his second leg apparatus into place.
"You'll be a one-legged cyborg if you don't lend me a hand here," she says.
I stare, unable to comprehend what I'm seeing.
"This is Margo," Luther introduces her. "She's been a godsend."
Samson heaves one of his mechanical arms and awkwardly assists with the placement of his artificial leg. His fingers splay and curl, twitching as though he's not in complete control of them.
Rage boils to the surface within me.
"If you don't do something, I will," I grate out through clenched teeth.
Luther turns to meet my gaze. "I know what you're feeling, Daiyna. Believe me. We've all lost..." He rests his hand on my shoulder. "But we're not here to repay evil with evil. We need to leave as soon as we possibly can. That's our priority."
Samson grunts, scowling with determination as he swings his artificial legs over the side of the bed and positions himself with his arms. The one named Margo cautions us to stay back. Samson agrees with a short chuckle. Then he shoves himself forward onto his robotic legs and wobbles, waving his mechanical arms to steady himself. He grins at us briefly, then frowns at his legs, shifting one hip upward to take a full step forward and stomping down with a heavy metallic thud.
"All right!" he booms triumphantly.
"Shechara—" Margo approaches us. "I have something for you as well."
"Yes?" Shechara leans blindly toward the woman's voice.
Margo reaches into the pocket of her lab coat and removes two small metal spheres, holding them out in her palm.
"Artificial eyes." I fix her with a cool stare.
Margo returns my direct look. "Yes, Daiyna. Cybernetic." She's haggard, malnourished, unkempt. But there's sincerity in her eyes. "Would you please escort Shechara over here to take a seat? We'll get her seeing again. I know time is a factor."
I touch my sister's forehead with my own. "Do you want this?" I whisper.
She hesitates. Then she squeezes my arm. "I want to see. Will you stay with me?"
"I'm not going anywhere."
Samson stomps around, rattling everything in the room and knocking over a few of the machines with his flailing arms. Luther suggests they go outside and ready a vehicle. Samson agrees, pausing at the door to bellow, "You may not like what you're going to see, Small Fry."
He winks at me, and I can't help but smile. I don't understand his good spirits, considering all that's happened to him. But his joviality is oddly contagious.
A broad smile spreads across Shechara's lips. "Maybe I'll have X-ray vision."
His expression clouds. "No. That wouldn't be good." He stomps away, thundering out onto the steel catwalk one metallic thump at a time until he comes to an abrupt halt. "Hmmm," he murmurs, loud enough for us to hear. "Ladder, huh?"
"We could put you on the conveyor," Milton suggests.
"Don't push it, kid," Samson growls. "You're all right. But don't push it."
Margo tells Shechara to lay her head back, to relax. I hold my sister's hand, and by the strength of her grip I can tell she's far from relaxed.
"These should work fine, but if they don't, or if you want them out for any reason, we can remove them even faster than we install them." Margo applies a muscle relaxant to Shechara's left eye socket. "They'll take some getting used to, though. You'll suffer from some bad headaches at first. But you will see again."
"How did you get them—the prosthetic limbs, the eyes?" I watch her work.
She remains focused on every move she makes, but she speaks to me as if we're having a friendly conversation. Are we? She's one of them, Willard's people—or she was. I don't trust her. I won't make the mistake of trusting a stranger ever again.
"Well, we're located beneath a trade sector. It's amazing what we've been able to lay our hands on."
"Like incubation equipment." My tone is spiteful.
She carefully clamps Shechara's eyelids open. "Yes," she replies. "Your eggs are in cold storage, along with Shechara's. The men's sperm is on ice as well."
She's so matter-of-fact about it. I would punch her right now if she wasn't in the middle of a delicate procedure.
"Why?" I demand.
She sanitizes the first metal orb with a clear lubricant. "Well, it all goes back to the shortwave radio. Everything changed after that. Willard had originally wanted to exterminate everyone who came into contact with the ash on the surface—the infected. But I was able to convince him we could change them back, reverse the process of their physiological transmutations. At the time, he didn't know I was one of them. An ash freak."
Where is this going? I asked a simple question. But I bite my tongue and watch as she places the first artificial eye into Shechara's gaping socket.
"You're doing great," I tell my sister, squeezing her hand.
She squeezes mine in return. "I don't feel anything."
"That's a good thing." Margo's hands are steady. Her head tilts toward me, but her eyes remain fixed on her work as she continues, "Willard was always concerned about our future, about Eden's next generation. We were sterile, of course. The government scientists didn't want us reproducing in the bunker, using up all of the food reserves. We knew you breeders would find us, eventually. We just had to be patient. Together, we would rebuild our species and its future. That was the plan, anyway." She sanitizes the second metal orb and glances at me. "But then Willard found the radio. He learned that the hope of this world's future didn't rest on his shoulders alone, that Eden wasn't the last bastion for humanity. He didn't have to keep the next generation safe from the surface and its demon-dust. Because the world—the rest of it, all we thought had been annihilated on D-Day—is still out there." She glances at me again. "Or so he thought."
"What do you mean?"
She goes on as if she didn't hear me, leaning toward Shechara to slip the second eye into place. "The North American Sectors are now a UW Forbidden Zone. Search and rescue teams were sent in at one point, years ago, but they became infected. The origin of the mutos, we assume. Willard was determined to let them know—whoever was still out there beyond our verboten shores—that we were safe and sound in Eden, uninfected. He wanted to figure out a way for the UW to rescue us and bring us back into the world."
"But the UW no longer exists," I murmur, noticing a ring of raw flesh around her neck, close to her throat, as if something she once wore had been too tight or had melted onto her skin and been torn away.
"We thought the same. And they don't, not to the extent they did prior to D-Day. The rebels didn't destroy them entirely, but they made a valiant effort a
nd achieved some impressive results. Regardless, the United World—more or less—is still out there. Willard found this out when he made the mistake of contacting them, using a frequency adjacent to the looped quarantine message they'd been broadcasting for years." She activates one of Shechara's eyes, then the other. "Tell me what you see."
The metallic corneas stare blankly from behind Shechara's open eyelids. No iris, no pupil. She blinks once, twice, shifts in her seat, rocks her head to one side, then the other. She frowns, seeming to see something in a dark corner of the room.
"Who are you?" she asks.
"You...can see me?" A familiar voice—unfortunately—emerges from the shadows.
"Tucker?" Margo turns sharply. "How long have you been standing there?" She sounds perturbed, not startled.
I squeeze Shechara's hand and stare into the empty corner. "What do you want?"
He sniffs, shuffles an invisible step forward.
"Everything all right?" Milton leans in the open doorway.
"Is he armed?" I ask Shechara. She shakes her head.
"I was just wondering—" Tucker sniffs again. "How you managed to get your collar off, Margo. And if you could maybe..."
She blinks into the dark. Then she nods, reaching for an instrument on the cart at the foot of the bed. "Come here. Let's see what we can do about that."
Tucker's invisible feet move toward her. She reaches for him blindly. As soon as they make contact, she blinks out of my sight, vanishing. I remember being on the receiving end of that trick not too long ago.
"What do you see?" I ask Shechara.
"She's helping him take off his collar. Willard's men use them to control the daemons."
"They control the daemons?" I exclaim too loud as fury burns through me.
Another reason to wipe out these naturals!
"I was getting to that," Margo murmurs. "Hold still, Tucker! This laser will cut straight through you if we're not careful." He mumbles something in apology. She continues, "Willard figured out a way to remote-control some of the mutos so they could gather what we needed from the surface. He and Perch had maybe a dozen of them fitted, with more collars in production. Originally, that's all they were meant for. But when it became clear the UW didn't plan on rescuing us any time soon, that they were planning something else entirely—our extermination—he started raising up his own little army of collared mutos to protect Eden."
Spirits of the Earth: The Complete Series: (A Post-Apocalyptic Series Box Set: Books 1-3) Page 37
