Induction (The Age of Man Book 1)

by David Brush

  Matt rubbed his thigh again where the metal had torn through his skin. “I hope James is doing OK.”

  Megan sat down next to him in the mess hall, setting a white tray with a big mountain of grey gunk on it down in front of him. “Eat up.”

  “How’s Haley doing?” said Matt, picking up the spoon. “You saw her again last night, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, she’s fine, I guess, or as fine as she’s going to be until they release James anyway. I wish I could get her to eat something, but she hasn’t left the med center in days. She just sits there with that book he gave her, waiting. At least I can always count on you to eat.”

  Matt gave her the finger as he shoveled a spoonful of the paste into his mouth. “Glad to see your wit made it through unscathed. I heard Commander Fluron left the base yesterday with Omega Team.”

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “Well, I noticed they took a shit ton of that hypergobbalizer, or whatever the hell they call it, with them. I told Fluron when I talked to him last that he should wait for James before using any of it in the field, but he basically told me he wasn’t going to wait for a dead man to rise up and give him permission to do his job.”

  Megan shrugged. “I’m sure James would be happy to hear that his hard work in the lab is being put to good use.”

  “Yeah, well that doesn’t change the fact that Fluron is a twat. I think he’d fit better with the Crusaders personally. The dude is a nut job if you ask me.” Matt scooped up another spoonful of grey paste. “Anyway,” he continued. “We ought to go check on James later and see how he’s doing.”

  “Yeah,” said Megan, feeling the cool metal of the two wedding bands dangling around her neck brush up against her skin. “I hope he’s getting better.”

  Haley paced back and forth in the tiny, worn down lobby of the medical center at Fort Condat. She paused for a moment, then approached the front desk for the umpteenth time.

  “How much longer until one of you people can tell me something?” she asked. “It’s been six days and I haven’t heard a word from any of you. I want some information.”

  The nurse sitting behind the counter scowled. “As I’ve told you a hundred times now, all I can say is that your boyfriend is alive still. Other than that, you’re going to have to wait for Dr. Kayfez to finish up. Why don’t you go back to your room for a little bit, get some sleep, take a shower, and have a bite to eat? You look like a zombie, dear.”

  “I’m tired of waiting. You go tell Dr. Kayfez that he can either come out here and speak to me or I’m going back there to speak to him. And if you try to stop me, you’ll become a patient in your own med unit.”

  The nurse huffed, but got up and went into the back all the same. When she finally returned, a tall, weary looking man walked out into the lobby with her. His dark skin stood in sharp contrast to his white lab coat, which had been stained red and brown in the unending onslaught of patients brought to him every day.

  “Ms. Hall, sorry to keep you waiting for so long,” said the doctor. “James has kept us quite busy these last few days.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s stable now. I didn’t think he’d make it through the first night, to be honest, but he’s a fighter. We’ve managed to retrieve all of the metal from his torso and stem the immediate threat to his life. There were some complications, however.”

  Haley frowned. “Complications? Like what? Is he going to be OK?”

  “Like I said, he’s fine for now. The damage to his upper chest was severe though, and we had to use nanotech to seal off his internal bleeding and stimulate tissue repair. Normally after a round of treatment like that, the bots are siphoned back out of the body via a modified dialysis machine, but at the present time we don’t have anything like that here. Frankly, he’s lucky we had the bots in the first place. The regime left them behind when this complex fell a few years ago. The point is, I was forced to shut down the machines while they were still inside of him, using an applied electrical field. They should be harmless now, but you’ll notice a rather severe discoloration across his upper chest tracing the path of his cardiovascular system. I’m not sure what sort of effect that will have in the long run, but at least he’s alive.”

  “I can live with a scar. When will he be able to leave?”

  “Today, I suppose. He needs to take it easy for a while and give himself plenty of time to recuperate, but he should be fine to go home.”

  “Awesome,” she said, smiling. “Let’s get him out of here.”

  James ran his finger along the lightly displaced tissue on Haley’s shoulder as he stared up at the ceiling of their room, if you could call it that. The chamber was small, with just enough space for a bed and a dresser. Haley was fast asleep next to him, worn out from the exhausting days behind her and content with the fact that her love was safe and home at last. He had tried resting too, but he couldn’t escape the thought of those unfortunate men, gasping for air as they died in agony. The air caught in his lungs for a moment, but he pushed it back out and tried to calm himself. His chest pulsed, seizing lightly. He closed his eyes and saw the nameless, faceless soldier, begging for mercy that was never coming. Their twisted faces, one by one, continued to flood through his mind in graphic detail, stuck on repeat. He diverted his gaze to Haley, lying there so peacefully. He studied her, trying desperately to remember every gentle, subtle hill and valley to her form. She was so beautiful, so unspoiled by the decay that now surrounded them. As he sat there, entranced in her glow, he realized that some things were in fact worth killing for. And with that, he fell into a dark, dreamless sleep. Peace at last.

  His slumber broke off suddenly as he was shaken awake. Matt stood over him with a warped look on his face. As Haley stirred nearby, he started in. “Buddy, there’s been news while we were away. The other officers wanted to keep it on the D.L., but I thought you deserved to know.”

  “What?” James replied, rubbing the exhaustion from his eyes. “What are you talking about, Matt?”

  “Dr. Karich has been arrested. He’s being held at a detention facility for conspiracy to commit high treason. Word is he’s going to be executed in your place.”

  James felt his stomach lurch.

  Matt frowned. “Command only knows about all this because the information was leaked to us, very purposefully we believe. It’s an obvious trap.”

  James sat up. “So what’s the plan? How are we going to free him?”

  “We aren’t,” said Matt, diverting his gaze. “The facility was nearly impenetrable before. Adding to the fact that it’s an absolutely blatant trap, Command has decided that it’d be best not to throw our army against the rocks. I’m sorry, bud. We’ve been losing too many people lately and an attack like that would be the end of the CLF.”

  James threw up over the side of his bed. Haley sat there without flinching, rubbing his back.

  “You can’t be serious?” he said, wiping the spittle from the corner of his mouth. “You people can assassinate a high level chemist but you can’t help free my father?”

  “Killing a lightly guarded, high priority target in transit is one thing, but running our entire army into a trap is another entirely. In one clean swoop they could wipe us all out.”

  “I have to go. They want me, not him. This was all a huge mistake. I should have just gone through with Induction and moved on with my life.”

  Matt shook his head. “It’s no way to live. I’m sure your dad is happy you escaped. Don’t let his sacrifice be in vain.”

  “I’m going.”

  “No, no you’re not. If they mean to capture you, it’s probably because your little compound put on quite a show a while back. Giving yourself to them is suicide. They’ll find out what you know and then they’ll kill you and your dad anyway.”

  James stood up and pushed past him, making for the door. Halfway there, Matt shoved the needle of a small syringe into his neck, squeezing the clear liquid into his friend. “You’ll thank me for this e
ventually, bud.”

  “You fucking trait…” James trailed off as he slumped over onto the cold tile beneath him.

  Haley lunged off the bed, landing squarely on Matt’s back. The extra weight caused him to stumble, tripping over the now limp body of James. The entangled duo came crashing down, with Matt slamming tooth first into the bed frame. He spit out blood and chips of his teeth as he lurched to throw her off of him. He couldn’t quite get a grip on her though as she wrapped her arm around his neck and began to choke the life out of him from behind. His vision narrowed as he flailed desperately at her, but she continued to pull tighter and tighter. As the last bit of light left his eyes, he heard gunshots ring out, and the world faded to black.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He didn’t need to open his eyes to tell he was moving. James felt every bump in the road as firmly as if he was being dragged behind the vehicle that he’d been tossed into. As his mind began to race with possibilities, a familiar voice served to reground him.

  “His face was messed up badly enough as it was. Did you really have to shatter his teeth?” said Megan.

  “I honestly didn’t mean to break him like that. He tripped over James,” Haley replied. “I feel bad about it, but in fairness, he shouldn’t have tried to stop us from leaving.”

  At the sound of her voice, James sat up and opened his eyes. He looked around for a moment before realizing he was in the back seat of Megan’s jeep. There was a large brown stain running from the leather upholstery of the seat down to the carpeted floor. Outside, the world was black, but for a thin sliver of light just starting to break on the horizon.

  “What’s going on?” he managed.

  “I saved all three of you, that’s what’s going on,” said Megan, turning the steering wheel left at another bend in the road. “I tranq’d these two loud asses and made off with the lot of you before anyone else could get to your room. Command is going to be pissed off something fierce when they realize we’re gone.”

  “Three of us?” said James, turning around to find Matt still unconscious in the back seat, bound with rope. His face looked like an orange that had been wrung for juice. A few thin streaks of blood were leaking out of his mouth and pooling onto the carpet of Megan’s jeep, adding to the mosaic of bodily fluid accumulating on the vehicle’s floor.

  James frowned. “Why would anyone else be trying to get to our room?”

  “Well...” started Megan. “Right after Matt left the intelligence briefing to come tell you about your dad, reports started flowing in about an explosion that had taken place during one of Omega Team’s raids on a distribution center just outside of Alawez.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with us?” asked James, leaning forward in his seat.

  “The reports said that Commander Fluron tried adding that compound you’ve been making into some chemical container or another to neutralize the products. When he did, the entire container exploded, setting off a chain reaction that killed ten of our people. Command is of the opinion that you intentionally sabotaged the compound and they wanted to put you up against the wall for it. I knew right away that there had to be some kind of mistake, so I quietly snuck out of the meeting and came to get both of you, only to find Matt getting his ass whooped by Haley here and you blacked out on the floor already. After breaking that up, I quickly loaded all three of you into a cart, and for the second time in as many weeks, chucked your unconscious asses into my jeep and made off like a thief in the night. Haley explained the missing catalyst to me while you were out. You guys should have told me, but it doesn’t matter now, I guess.”

  “Shit…Well, where are you taking us?” he asked, looking out the window at the passing trees rising up against the backdrop of the desolate desert that stretched behind them.

  “Well, I figured we’d go get your dad. We’ve got nowhere else to be right now. Frankly, the CLF will probably be putting a nice fat bounty on all of our heads anyway, so the safest place for us right now might actually be the Charon Detention Facility. Besides, I owe you for helping me with my little excursion. As for Matt, I haven’t quite gotten his take on things yet because he’s pumped full of enough tranquilizer to sedate an elephant, but seeing as we’re halfway there already, he can either join us or walk back and try to explain what exactly he was doing in your room when I got there.”

  “They can put him up against the wall for all I care. That rat bastard tried to stop me from leaving.”

  Megan laughed. “If you call what he did ‘trying’, then I suppose. If he had any sense at all, he wouldn’t have told you about it like that, but Matt doesn’t think sometimes. I’m not sure why he thought he could wake you in the middle of the night, tell you two what he did, and then restrain you from leaving with one syringe full of sedatives. It’d almost be comical if it weren’t for the fact that he probably thought he had a really solid plan. He’s going to be pissed about his teeth, but like I was explaining to Haley here before you woke up, he was obviously never much to look at before, so he hasn’t lost too much really. Well, except for a few teeth and whole lot of his dignity.”

  She looked back at James, who was scowling out the window at the passing road. “I know you might not believe it, but I’m sure Matt thought that what he was doing was for your own good. You’re like a brother to him.”

  “It isn’t Matt’s place to interfere with my personal life. I would burn the world to ash and glass if it meant keeping my family safe. He had no right to try and stop me. With what authority did the CLF bind me? None. None at all.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, but then again what gives any group authority really? Power. Whether you like it or not, the CLF now considers you to be a saboteur. On top of that, this little trip is what we would call desertion. If they ever catch us, we’ll be suffering the same fate every other prisoner in this war faces at some point or another. I’m afraid that we’ve crossed the Rubicon. Anyway, sit back and enjoy the ride. We’ll be there in about three hours.”

  Twilight broke as the ragged band pulled into a charging station some twenty miles outside of New Haven, cradled on the border of the Brukan Desert. As Megan hooked the jeep’s power cells up to be recharged, James stepped out into the crisp night air to clear his head and escape the insufferable sounds of Matt. While Megan had had the foresight to hog-tie him, she had unfortunately neglected to gag him as well. Matt hadn’t allowed his battered mouth to silence him, despite acquiring a distinctly new accent. He’d woken up about an hour ago and had been alternating between cursing them all and making sweet promises to aid them at least twice a minute.

  The sky above swirled into a milky purple as the death throes of day gave way. James heard Matt screaming something about having to take a piss as Haley opened her door to join him. They stood there in silence, enjoying what they both knew was the calm before the storm. The group was poorly equipped for an operation of such magnitude and everyone there knew it, including Matt, who had spent a good ten minutes yelling about how they stood a better chance of vaporizing an ocean with a heat lamp than breaking into the Charon Detention Facility with their present equipment and number. If Megan was nervous, she wasn’t showing it. In fact, she looked more like she was on vacation than preparing to go into battle. She had been assuring everyone that she had a plan to sack the facility since Matt had started in about it. After finishing recharging the vehicle, she opened the trunk to find Matt squirming all over the place trying to free himself.

  “Look, if you don’t untie me and let me out of this car right now, I’m going to literally piss myself,” he said.

  “I’ll untie you if you promise to behave yourself, Matt.”

  “What am I going to do at this point? My face feels like it’s on fire and I’m unarmed in the middle of goddamn nowhere.”

  She pulled a long, sharp knife out of the sheath strapped to her side and cut the rope free around his hands and legs. He came bounding out of the trunk, half running, half hobbling off into the bush to relieve him
self. As he came sauntering back, he started in again. “So what’s this miracle plan of yours? I guess I have to help, because I’m pretty much implicated in this bullshit now either way. Besides, you three are definitely going to die without me.”

  Megan grinned. “Yes, Matt, what would we do without your flawless marksmanship and award winning smile?”

  “Hardy har har. Please tell me that your entire plan isn’t to berate me until the war is over.”

  “Look, I have a friend out here who’s been working on attacking the complex for ages. In light of recent developments, he’s going to be assaulting the facility at the same time we’re trying to. He’s assured me that together we’ll be able to sack the Toxic Truth.”

  Matt rolled his eyes. “Oh, you have a friend? Well then, please disregard all of my previous complaints and concerns, I’m sure this will go very well for all of us. And here I was carrying on, never realizing that your plan was based on having a friend. Sounds great.”

  “This friend of mine is a Crusader, and we share a vested interest,” she replied, crossing her arms. “He’s the leader of the Archangels, one of their special ops teams.”

  Matt’s face paled out into the color of curdled milk. “I know who the fucking Archangels are, Megan. I see we haven’t quite finished betraying the CLF just yet.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Michael Drake ceased his incessant pacing to look out across the bleak horizon of the Brukan Desert for a moment, before turning back into the living room of the apartment he shared with his brothers to address them. All three of the siblings had the hard bodies of men tempered in war, though Raphael, who was sitting on the saggy yellow couch next to his younger brother Gabriel, dwarfed both of the others. The rundown quarters they shared reeked of mildew, but it was inconspicuous in that.

  Michael took a step towards the ratty couch. “I’m telling you right now, Raphael, ripping a door off of its hinges because the sound annoys you has all the subtlety of shooting a man because you don’t like the color of his shirt. It’s like you’re going out of your way to draw attention to us.”