New Alcatraz (Book 2): Golden Dawn

by Grant Pies

  I turned and stared out the small hole in the cell door. My fingers could just squeeze through the metal mesh. Vesa’s question had prompted a rush of images to flash through my mind. I imagined my last moments with my dad in Buford as a child. I remembered burying him after he died from radiation poisoning. Poisoning that he got when he escaped from New Alcatraz with Red. I remembered my final moments with my mom in the warehouse in Phoenix, her limp body on the ground. I remembered removing her organs so the Ministry of Science wouldn’t discover that she stayed in the past long enough to give birth to me.

  I turned toward Vesa. “No,” I said. “My parents aren’t alive anymore.”

  CHAPTER 35

  2075

  GOLDEN DAWN HEADQUARTERS,

  BLUE CANYON, ARIZONA

  The door of our cell rattled from the other side. Vesa and I stood and prepared ourselves for a fight or confrontation. I looked over at her, and her fists were clenched, like my own. The door opened, and dim light from the hall shined into our room. The same large man who led me to my isolation tank dragged Doc’s dangling body at his side and flung him towards us. We scrambled toward Doc and braced his fall against the hard floor.

  Doc let out a short grunt when he landed. His hand gripped his side where his gun usually hung. Before I could even try to reason with our captor, he slammed the door shut and latched the lock on the other side. Doc rolled onto his back and spread his arms out from his sides. His eyes were closed and stuck together with congealed blood. After a minute he pried them open, wincing and holding his left side. A smirk crept over his face, revealing his blood coated teeth.

  “I figure I’d feel more pain if I wasn’t coming down off some weird LSD trip,” he said, rolling onto his side and pushing himself up into a sitting position. He spat blood out of his mouth. “Where’s Whitman?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” Vesa replied. “They’re probably trying to make him explain the device. Plus they know their stupid tanks wouldn’t work on an android.”

  Doc laughed. “Like they would work on anyone,” he said under his breath.

  “Powell thinks he went somewhere!” Vesa said eagerly.

  Doc scoffed at us both and grunted as he stood up, unsteady on his feet. His hand again reached for his gun, but found nothing but empty space.

  “Is that right?” he said with only a touch of sarcasm. “Where did you jump to? Whose mind did you inhabit?”

  I pondered for a brief moment whether to even respond. I knew Doc would dismiss what I’d experienced as a simple hallucination. Maybe it was.

  “He went to his childhood home,” Vesa answered for me.

  “Buford, Montana,” I said. “A small town in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Huh, I had you pegged for a city kid myself,” Doc said. I was surprised he had even given my origin any thought. “So were you ‘you’ now or were you ‘you’ as a child in this hallucination?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t a child. But I wasn’t me either.” I was trying to explain it to myself as much as to them. “I was injured. Bleeding. Then I passed out and woke up back here.”

  “Well, I just saw a bunch of lights and swirls,” Doc said. “What about you, Vesa?”

  “Yeah, same here. Just bright lights. Maybe some desert scenery that looked like melting wax. Nothing special.” Vesa sounded disappointed. “Hey! Do you think it’s because of your trip to New Alcatraz?” Vesa asked. Her question caught me off guard.

  “New Alcatraz?” Doc said. “That sounds like a story.”

  “I mean, the only way to break out is to travel through time, right?” Vesa asked. “So you travelled to the future, and you travelled back. Maybe the Golden Dawn is right. Maybe your mind is less tethered to this time because of that.” Vesa smiled and stared at me. She waited for a response. I regretted ever confirming I had been to New Alcatraz.

  “You really broke out?” Doc asked. “What was it like?”

  “Hot,” I answered. “Lots of sand. Not too different than what we drove through to get here.” Outside our cell, the lights flickered. A loud hum reverberated through the entire cave system. I looked outside the cell, but Doc and Vesa only looked at me. They waited for more of my story. I had already said too much. Even though we were all locked up together, I still couldn’t trust them with the entire story. I still couldn’t tell them my parents both worked for the government, that they were both on the run, and that they both fled into the past.”

  “So what, you built a time machine in New Alcatraz?” Doc asked.

  I shook my head. “No, we found one. The same one that sent us there,” I answered.

  “We?” Vesa asked.

  “Yeah, a few other prisoners and I found it,” I said carefully. “But everyone else died before we made it out.” I hoped the lie would put a stop to this line of questioning.

  “You must be a lot tougher than you look,” Doc said.

  I tried to change the subject. “So, Vesa, are you surprised the Golden Dawn turned on you and Whitman?”

  Vesa shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. They were the only people that could charge this device. We had no choice. Not even scientists from our group could create the amount of power the Golden Dawn can. When they are on an LSD trip, they start thinking way outside the box. They come up with all kinds of shit to invent.” Her back was against the stone wall, and she slid down until she sat on the floor.

  “We could have figured it out eventually,” Doc said, but Vesa rolled her eyes at the suggestion.

  “C’mon, are you really telling me you would have been prepared to wait possibly years for us to generate enough power to charge this thing rather than try to work with the Golden Dawn?” Vesa asked, shaking her head.

  “You don’t know them like I do, Vesa.”

  CHAPTER 36

  2072

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  Doc sat next to the bed in the hospital room and stared out at the Chicago skyline. The sky was gray and hazy, polluted like a smoke bomb had gone off throughout the city. Several stories down, red and white lights flashed as a stream of ambulances brought in new patients every few minutes. He watched the paramedics run and push long stretchers. Sometimes the people on them rolled around in pain, clutching their stomach or their head. Others just lay still.

  He turned to look at his sister in the bed. She was asleep. Tubes curled from her arms and nose, and tangled into the off-white sheets on her bed. She looked frail, like her body didn’t even have enough energy for her to sleep. Her fingernails were chipped and broken; some of them were missing altogether, exposing the flesh underneath. Entire fingertips were hidden beneath large red swollen blisters attached to her scraped and bloody knuckles. Her face was thinner and paler than Doc was used to. He couldn’t believe that she’d looked even worse when he rescued her from the caverns. He had wandered through the caves at the Golden Dawn headquarters for what seemed like days. The tunnels twisted back onto themselves. Sometimes they would dead-end, and Doc had to turn around.

  He fought any person he came across. He hadn’t killed any of them, but after finding his sister, after he had seen the shape she was in and the conditions they had kept her in, he wished he had killed every last one of them. He found her locked in a small room no larger than one by two meters. There was no light. The floor was dirt. His sister was naked. Her cell was carved into a wall that housed thirty or more cells just like it. Moans and wails bounced off the solid rock walls until Doc couldn’t tell which direction they came from, or how many different people were making the noises. He only focused on his sister.

  He lifted her in his arms. She was light—no more than ninety pounds, Doc guessed. He carried her over his shoulder like an oversized baby, his pistol drawn in the other hand. He passed the other cells and people crammed their raw, bloody fingers through the small openings on the doors, begging him for help. Some of them even formed sentences, but most only mumbled or stammered. From behind, Doc heard a voice demanding him to stop. The person t
hreatened to shoot him, but Doc didn’t even glance back. He stretched his free hand, the hand holding his gun, and fired two shots down the long rock corridor.

  He heard the bullets ricochet off the walls. They pinged and rattled around until he couldn’t hear them, or the man behind him, anymore. He turned a corner. He reversed every turn he made on his way in. Every left was now a right. Every right a left. He reached a large rotunda with several tunnels branching off of it, and spotted a pile of rocks he had left by the tunnel that would lead him out to the desert. Next to the rocks were supplies he left before venturing into the tunnels, a large shirt, more bullets, a first aid kit, and water.

  He wrapped his sister’s bruised body in the shirt, and assessed her injuries, hoping she didn’t need any immediate attention. He picked up the bullets, replaced the two that he fired down the hall, and dropped the rest in his pocket. He holstered his gun, and lifted his sister back up. It was a short jog down the tunnel to his car. He placed his sister in the back seat, and hopped into the driver’s seat. As he started his car and revved the engine, he heard people approaching behind him, their feet pounding on the ground. Just as Doc drove away, a flood of people in white came out of the tunnel, standing and watching the car speed through the desert. Doc watched them in his rear view mirror, staring like ghosts with no emotion, except one. One man, their leader Doc assumed, stood in front of the stoic ghosts screaming after the fleeing car. His mouth stretched open wide.

  The doctors told Doc that they placed his sister in a medically induced coma. For her own safety, they told him. She had large amounts of LSD in her system, was malnourished, missing two teeth, and had an untreated five-centimeter gash on the back of her head that appeared to be about ten days old. Her shoulder was dislocated, and the bones on several of her fingertips were exposed. They concluded that many of her wounds were self-inflicted. There were signs of rape, the doctors told him. After four days, his sister came out of the coma.

  “Lia?” Doc gently held her hand. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

  She rolled her head and murmured. The nurses hovered around her and checked her vitals. They looked at tablets with medical records stretching back to Lia’s birth. They looked at the monitors on the walls, not speaking.

  “You’re safe now,” Doc told her.

  “Quinn?” Lia asked. Her eyes barely opened. “Did we do it, Quinn? Did we make it?” She smiled and awaited some type of approval. Doc simply squeezed her hand, but didn’t know what to do beyond that.

  Lia slept a lot. The doctor said they wanted to keep her for observation for several days after she came out of the coma.

  “You won’t have to worry about withdrawal too much,” the doctor said. His bright blue eyes contrasted against his dark skin. “Typically there aren’t many physiological withdrawal symptoms associated with LSD. But psychologically, she will have a hard time. She’s been through a lot.” The doctor warned of anxiety and depression after prolonged LSD use followed by an abrupt stop. Mood swings and psychosis. Concentration problems, suicidal thoughts, and Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder.

  “Most of those problems she had before any of this,” Doc said without looking away from Lia. “She’s never been all that well. I suppose no one who is balanced would ever end up with a group like that.”

  Once Lia realized she was in Chicago, in a hospital, she didn’t speak. She jumped at the sounds of the city around her. The cars and sirens. So, once the hospital staff allowed him to, Doc drove Lia out of the city to his home. He fixed a bed on his couch for himself and let Lia sleep in his room.

  “I’ll be right outside if you need anything,” he told her.

  She stared at the floor and clasped her pillow around her chest. She wavered back and forth slightly. He asked if she wanted him to leave the light on. She simply shook her head. That night Doc woke to Lia sobbing. Her cries were low and deep. He made his way to the room, and found Lia curled up inside his closet. The bed had not been slept in.

  In the days that followed, Lia stayed in her room. She stared at the wall and rocked back and forth. She never slept in the bed. One morning, Doc found that Lia had pulled the carpet up from inside his closet. She was naked and curled tight into a ball on the cement floor underneath. The only times Lia seemed to relax was when she took baths. She floated in the water for hours until her skin was wrinkled and soft. Doc would come to get her and dry her off. Sometimes she fought him, but other times she simply got out. She looked at Doc and said, “Next time, Quinn. It’ll work next time.” The sister Doc had known wasn’t here now. That girl was long gone.

  He felt like a friend looking after someone else’s pet, and neither the pet nor the caretaker knew how to act around the other. Every movement Doc made and every word he spoke was a decision he labored over, wondering how it would be perceived. What ripple effect would it cause by him knocking on the door before entering as opposed to just walking in? Should he turn the television on to entertain Lia, or would the images make her more anxious? Doc was paralyzed by decisions. Each one more meaningless than the next, but he didn’t want to harm his sister any more than she already was. She was fragile—at least that’s what he thought.

  One morning, ten days after they left the hospital, Doc awoke. The sun shone through his tattered curtains and shimmered off the beer bottles scattered over his table. He rubbed his eyes and stretched out on the couch.

  In front of him, placed under one of the empty beer bottles, was a note. Lia’s handwriting was scribbled across it. The note read Brother, you meant well. Don’t come for me. I went home.

  CHAPTER 37

  5280

  NEW ALCATRAZ

  The men’s feet pounded on the solid steps leading down into the deep vault. Their feet had never felt such a substance underneath, more used to compacted snow and hardpan desert. Above their heads, the wind howled and whistled, and snow fell through the rectangular opening, dusting the stairs. As the men walked further and further down into the vault, the rectangle of faint light grew smaller and smaller.

  Ransom ran his hand along the wall. It was cold, somehow colder than it was outside, and pulled all of the heat from his body through his fingertips. It was so dark Ransom couldn’t see in front of his face, but he guessed that his breath would be visible as it billowed out of his mouth. Further ahead, he heard Ash’s and Merit’s feet shuffle along the cement floor. The sudden clicking sound of two stones striking against each other bounced off of the walls, and small sparks blinked to life in the darkness only to disappear again. The rocks brushed against each other again and again, until eventually one of the sparks caught a bundle of tinder.

  Light revealed Ash kneeling on the floor, holding a small bunch of hay and spindly strips of wood. He held the kindling up to his mouth to blow on it until flames burst into the air. Ash held the small fire under a short torch he had made from scraps collected along the way. The torch was doused in rendered animal fat that Ash brought with him to allow for prolonged burning. His light revealed only a small radius around him. It was nothing but gray surface. The hall they were in was seemingly endless, and the light from the torch didn’t even reach the ceiling.

  “Unbelievable,” Ash said in a grumbling voice as he tilted his head upward. His deep voice echoed down the cavernous hall. Ash lit a second torch using the flame from his own and handed it to Merit. The two men stretched out in opposite directions until the entire width of the hall was lit. Ransom walked between the two. Shadows danced across his face.

  “What is that?” Ransom asked. His eyes squinted in the ever-changing darkness. He pointed down the hall. In the distance, a speck of light flickered like the torches, but somehow less natural, more deliberate. “There’s a light up ahead,” Ransom said. His voice was soft and quiet. He didn’t want to speak up until he knew who was controlling the flickering light. The empty space moaned, like the earth was constantly settling.

  “Look,” Ash said. “The ground.”

  Colored lines
were painted on the floor, and ran parallel to each other. The lines were red, green, blue, black, and white.

  Ransom recalled how his mom drew shapes in the snow or dirt when he and Merit were young. Just as her mother explained to her, and her mother’s mother before that, she explained how each shape made its own sound. And when put together the shapes made different sounds. Words. Some of the words, like ‘developmental research and power’ that ran next to the black line, were completely foreign to Ransom. But some were manageable enough to sound out. Ransom pointed at the green line. Next to it was the word ‘housing.’

  “H…howzz,” Ransom sounded out. He pointed at the ground and moved his arm through the air as he tried to pronounce the word. “I think that says ‘house,’” Ransom guessed. Merit stopped to look at the words.

  “Yeah!” he said in excitement. “You’re right.” Merit knelt down and ran his open palm over the green word. “Beds.” he said.

  “Food.” Ash grinned and rubbed his stomach.

  Merit laughed like it was a game to play. “What do the others say?”

  Ransom looked at the other lines. The other words were longer, and even more foreign to him. “M…med,” Ransom said as he stared at the word next to the blue line.

  “Medical,” Ash interrupted. “Like medicine?”

  A smile crept over Ransom’s face, and he slapped Ash on the shoulder.

  “Yes!” Ransom exclaimed. “Medicine! We need to follow the blue line. Let’s go!”

  Ransom grabbed Merit’s torch, and led the group down the hall. The light they saw still flickered in the distance. Somewhere deep in the facility, a noise echoed. Like an animal scurrying across the hall, or a foot dragging. Ash and Merit paused, but Ransom continued on, each of his steps landing on the blue line. For the first time, Ransom seemed more excited than Merit. And for the first time, Merit felt a shiver of uncertainty creep through his body.