by Grant Pies
He stood in the enormous hall. Behind him the faint light from the rectangular opening grew smaller. And in front of him, the light from Ransom’s torch was shrinking in the distance.
CHAPTER 38
5280
NEW ALCATRAZ
The blue line that led to the medical ward ran parallel to the green housing line. Eventually, the green line stopped, leaving the three men in the middle of the housing area, while the blue line cut through the center and kept going. The men slowed their pace as they walked through the living quarters.
Beds lined the walls, the sheets and blankets were pulled back and messy, the pillows were smashed where people’s heads had lain on them night after night. The mattresses were slumped in the middle and stained from years of sweat and dirt.
“Who do ya think slept here?” Ash asked. He sat on one of the beds and bounced to test the mattress. “It’s nice!” he said. “Soft.” His legs hung over the edge and his arms stretched well beyond the confines of the bed. Ransom looked at the beds but never stopped walking.
“Guys,” Merit said and looked around. “This doesn’t seem right. People have slept in these beds…recently.” He pointed at the sunken beds, and the sheets that hung just above the floor. “Someone’s been here.”
“That’s not too surprising,” Ash said. “You always figured we weren’t the only group out here.” Ash’s large body sunk deep into the mattress.
“For years you guessed that Dad made his way here.” Ransom said, he was now further away from the other two men who lingered around the beds. “What’s to say he didn’t sleep here? Or someone else may have found this place too. Let’s go.” He turned back to face Ash and Merit. “We didn’t come here to sleep. We need to find the medicine.”
Ash stood, and the mattress bounced back to life. The three men continued to walk along the blue line. Ash led the way, and Ransom slowed down to walk side by side with Merit.
“C’mon, Merit,” Ransom said and squeezed his brother’s shoulder. “You were right! Dad was right.” Merit could tell those words did not leave Ransom’s mouth easily. “This place is real. That should count for something. You know?”
“It just doesn’t feel right. It isn’t normal to be so far underground, or not see the sky, or feel the wind.” Merit looked around the cement tomb. The light from their torches flickered and danced against the walls. “I thought a place like this would be a sanctuary. A safe haven for our families. But now that I’m here… it’s too still.
“I never knew you were capable of being so dramatic, brother.” Ransom walked along the blue line and left Merit behind.
Merit stood in the middle of the beds, and eventually the light from the torches left him. He stood in complete darkness, tilting his head to listen for some noise…any noise. He thought he heard something shuffle around behind him, or maybe it came from one of the halls that branched away from the blue line. Or maybe he really heard nothing. He feared this place could drive a person mad, and he ran after Ash and Ransom before he could fall victim to this place.
“Maybe you were right after all,” Merit said once he caught back up to Ransom. “Maybe we are just better off staying in the village.”
“Merit,” Ransom said. He placed each foot on the blue line that ran down the dark hall, like he was walking a tight rope. “Are you just determined for you and me to argue our whole lives? Or maybe you have never been proven right before, and you don’t know how to deal with the feeling.” Ransom turned toward Merit. “Enjoy it, cuz we both know it’s not gonna happen ever again.” Ransom smiled. “If you don’t want to stay here, don’t worry. I’m finding whatever miracle medicine they have here and turning right back around. Believe me.”
The brothers walked only a few more steps when a light, the same as the one they saw when they first arrived in the vault, flashed up ahead. It bounced and grew larger by the second. More lights flickered into view. Merit counted four. They cast a light around the walls and floor and as they got closer, Ransom made out figures jogging toward them. The light from the torches mixed with this new, unnatural light, and the hall was swept with shadows.
Ransom stopped. The figures became men and the men were clean...at least cleaner than Ransom. Their hair was short and their faces shaven. All of them were thin, and their clothing swallowed their bodies underneath. Each of the men had a single bulb strapped to their waists. The bulbs were smaller than the ones back at the village, but they were still bright. Just like the bulbs from the village, these also had no wires attached to them. The four men each held some contraption that Ransom had never seen; long devices that looked to be forged from metal.
The men pressed one end of the devices into their shoulders, and their hands held onto a handle protruding from the middle. The contraptions’ tapered ends were pointed at Ransom, Merit, and Ash.
“Welcome,” one of the men spoke. His voice was still, like he opened his mouth and the words simply spilled out. Like there was no force behind his voice. He stood at the front of the small crowd of vault dwellers. His dark hair was pushed back on his head and his skin was pale. “What is your business here?”
“Who are you?” Ash asked, and stepped toward the men with his torch. His broad shoulders almost completely blocked the view of both Ransom and Merit.
“Step back!” another man spoke. His eyes were piercing blue, and his hair was blonde, almost white. He gripped the metal contraption in his hands and pushed one end closer to Ash’s chest. Ash stopped. Merit stepped back slightly. His foot pivoted on the ground. He prepared himself to turn around and leave.
“Relax,” Ash said and reached a hand out to the blonde man. “We don’t mean any harm. We’re just looking for medicine.”
Ransom looked down at Merit’s feet and then up to his face. Merit shifted his eyes down the hall in the direction they came from. His gaze drifted beyond the slept-in bunks and the long hall that led back to the metal door in the ground, and he imagined climbing out of the underground cement tomb and making his way back to the safety of his own hut. Ransom shook his head at Merit ever so slightly. He wasn’t prepared to leave without the medicine.
“If you take one step closer, I’ll fire!” the blonde man yelled. His voice reverberated through the vault.
“Fire?” Ash responded. “What do you mean? Look, his son is sick.” Ash motioned toward Ransom.
The man with the black slicked-back hair stepped out of the way, and the blonde man raised the metal device in the air. He squeezed his hand around the device. A deafening shot rang out, and a projectile sparked out of the device, ricocheting off the cement ceiling. For a moment the three men heard nothing but persistent ringing, and their muffled breaths inside their chests, like they were under water. Merit made it two steps down the hall before Ransom grabbed his shirt, yanking him toward the ground. Ash ducked and instinctively covered his ears. The shot echoed forever. The four men stood above them in a circle, watching them cover their ears and heads. The pale man smiled with lifeless eyes, and his body was still.
“Loud, huh?” Ransom and the others could barely hear his words. “It’s called a gun, and if you make one more move, I’ll shoot you dead. You have come to our home,” the man said in a quiet but forceful voice. His lips tensed. “Everything here belongs to us, and you are no exception.”
CHAPTER 39
2075
GOLDEN DAWN HAEDQUARTERS,
BLUE CANYON, ARIZONA
Doc sighed and looked out the small hole in the door.
“You know,” he said, “for three years, I fought the urge to come back here and find Lia. I wondered what she was doing. What they were doing to her. Sometimes I was angry that she would let herself be conned by these people. She was smarter than that. At least I thought she was.”
“I’ve told you before, you can’t blame her,” Vesa said and rubbed Docs back. “They tricked her. They turned her into someone else.”
“I know,” Doc nodded. “You’re right.”
&
nbsp; I listened while Doc told the story of his sister. I wondered if it was possible these days to have a normal family. No problems. No cults or time loops. I wondered what it would have been like if I had been able to grow up in Buford with my mother and my father. Without Time Anomaly Agents tracking my mom. Without radiation poisoning spreading through my dad.
“I had folders of maps. Locations of various Golden Dawn cells that were spread throughout the country. Before I found my sister, I followed every lead I could find that would take me to any member of the Golden Dawn. I followed groups from Utah to Kentucky, tracking them to small apartments and abandoned warehouses on the outskirts of the cities. I never found anyone. I was always too late. All I found were empty rooms lined with bathtubs, all with rings where the salt water line stained the ceramic. Some of them still had a thin film of dried LSD around the drain. A few ingredients for making the shit they put in their tanks were scattered around these places: Morning Glory seeds, various fungi, ethanol. Usually one of the rooms nearby was turned into a makeshift darkroom to keep the LSD and fungus from degrading. All of the lights were broken or removed, and the windows were all boarded up. If I was lucky, someone had left a clue or an encrypted note for other members to meet them at the next city.” Doc turned to face us.
“It was like chasing a ghost, but not a single ghost. A group that most people didn’t even know existed. And those that knew about the Golden Dawn, like the Federated Government, just looked the other way.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Like everything else today,” he said and threw his hands in the air. “Because of technology. The Golden Dawn may not be that great at transferring minds from person to person, but they sure do invent some crazy shit while they’re high on LSD. This power we need, for instance.” Doc spread his hands out and motioned all around us. “It’s just one of many new technologies the Golden Dawn created. It’s wireless power that travels through the air or some shit. That’s how the bulbs stay lit. The Ministry has something similar in one of their underground vaults, but nothing as efficient. The Ministry of Science lets them build and create whatever their drugged out minds come up with, and they occasionally raid the Golden Dawn if they catch wind that they came up with something too good to pass up. Otherwise they just let them be.”
I shook my head, wondering if Wayfield and the Ministry of Science had any boundaries. They were like a cancer that knew only to devour everything it came in contact with.
“When she left, after I rescued her from the Golden Dawn” Doc continued with his story, “I threw out all my evidence. I burned the papers in a trashcan in the alley outside of my apartment. Eventually, I stopped looking for Lia, but I didn’t stop tracking down the Golden Dawn. Not for Lia. The way I see it, she’s gone. Maybe they killed her. Maybe she overdosed in one of these tanks. Maybe she just…wasted away. But even if she is alive, she is gone. The girl that slept in my apartment, that wasn’t her. That wasn’t my sister. I lost her a long time ago.” Doc ran his hand through his hair. He walked to the back of the cell near the bucket that reeked, and kicked it over, pouring whatever contents were in the bucket all over the floor. The smell spread throughout are small cell.
“C’mon!” Vesa said and pinched her nose. “What are you doing?”
“I’m getting us out of here,” Doc said and kneeled down around the bucket. “At some point, you have to give up looking for someone that’s missing, especially if they don’t want to be found. If you don’t, you’ll go mad. Your life will be paused, and you will never live. If I never stopped then that would make two of us who stopped living. I knew my real sister wouldn’t want me to keep looking for this other person.” He pulled the curved metal handle off of the bucket. Doc stood and shook his head. His jaw clenched, and he placed his hand on his hip where his gun should have sat. He bent the thin piece of metal into a zigzagged shape on one end.
“No, at some point my search shifted. I don’t care to find Lia in whatever shape she’s in now. For all I know, she could be two cells down. She could be on the other side of this rock wall.” Doc pressed his open palm on the cool wall and leaned in. For a moment he lingered there, as if Lia really was on the other side.
“But it isn’t her. Now, the only thing I can do to make myself feel better is kill anyone that had anything to do with what happened to her. And the way I see it, everyone here, these brainwashed idiots in the cells all around us, the women who run back here in some misguided belief that they belong, even Quinn’s second in command, they’re all under some spell. A spell that begins and ends with Quinn. I’m here to kill him. As soon as we charge this device that Vesa and Whitman so desperately want to test, I’m going to do exactly what I said and shoot Quinn in the head. Then”—Doc nodded— “then I can go on living the way Lia, the old Lia, the real Lia, would want me to.” He kneeled down and peered into the key hole in the door. He adjusted the bent piece of metal accordingly and twisted it into the hole. He struggled and kept adjusting the metal handle from the bucket. Each time he stuck the metal in and twisted, then he pulled it out and bent the metal ever so slightly.
I couldn’t say I blamed him. Maybe he would say I had done worse in the name of my family, but somehow I thought he’d understand.
“Vesa,” Doc said and grunted as he turned the piece of metal inside the door until something clicked. “Call that man over here,” he said, referring to the man who dragged me through the halls.
“And what? Ask him to open the door?” Vesa said.
“No I’ve done that already. I’m gonna kick the door and break that son of a bitch’s nose.” He whispered and handed me the piece of metal. “It isn’t much, but, if you have to, ram that thing into his eye or something.” Doc said, and I gripped the bent metal in my hand. It felt too light, like it could never do enough damage to bring down a man of that size.
“Hey!” Vesa yelled through the mesh metal in the door. “Help! Somethings happening to him! Get over here!” She screamed until I heard the large man shuffling toward the door. “Lay down,” she whispered to me. Doc crouched on the floor with his feet pressed against the solid door. I laid down, trying my best not to touch the spreading puddle of urine coming from the back corner. “Hurry!” she screamed.
The man stood in front of the door and looked inside. I peeked through half closed eyes, and, in an instant, Doc drove his feet into the door, slamming it into the large man’s face. The door flung open and the man stumbled and fell against the cement floor, his head cracking against the ground. Vesa ran over to him and punched him in the face, and then kneeled on him, pressing her shin into his throat. I jumped up gripping the metal in my hand, and Doc ran over to the large man’s body.
“He’s out,” Vesa said and stood over him. I dropped the piece of metal, thankful that I didn’t have to jab it into anyone’s eye socket.
“Now where?” I asked. I looked at Doc and Doc looked at Vesa.
“This way I think,” Vesa said and pointed down the hall. “We have to find Whitman.”
The three of us jogged down the hall passed the cells. We only made it a few meters when the lights flickered down the hall. The floor and walls rumbled, and a strange noise echoed through the cavernous tunnels. Vesa pressed her hand against the wall to brace herself. The deep, low rumble was a sound and feeling that I knew all too well. It was the sound of an explosive device blasting a hole through a wall. It was the same noise I heard when Federal Agents broke into my apartment and arrested me for murder five years ago. And it was the same noise I heard when agents broke into my apartment only days ago as they chased after Vesa. I didn’t need to see who was behind the noise. I already knew.
The wireless bulbs on the floor strobed, outlining a silhouette in faint light that approached us. The person moved faster towards us. We stopped and braced for a fight. We clenched our fists and planted our feet squarely on the ground. Just before we lunged at the man he came into view. Whitman. In his hand was Vesa’s bag containing the device. Witho
ut stopping he tossed the bag to Vesa, and she flung it around her body. From his other hand he tossed Doc his gun and holster. Within a matter of seconds the holster was back around Doc’s waist, and the gun was drawn.
“It’s the TDA,” Whitman confirmed. He passed us and ran in the opposite direction. “We have to get out of here. Follow me.”
He made his way down the hall. Vesa and Doc followed, and I was the last to leave. As we ran down the hall, Doc glared in each cell, possibly hoping to catch a glimpse of his sister. I guessed Doc couldn’t truly let go of Lia like he said he could. The few light bulbs powered by the wireless power source that sat on the ground flickered as more explosions rattled somewhere in the underground tunnels. Once we passed the cells, more explosions drowned out the mumbles and moans of the captives we left behind. Eventually, all of the lights went out and the underground compound was plunged into darkness.
CHAPTER 40
2075
GOLDEN DAWN HEADQURATERS,
BLUE CANYON, ARIZONA
Bits of stone crumbled and fell to the ground. A hazy cloud of rock fragments floated around the tunnels. The once-stoic linen clad members of the Golden Dawn scurried through the caves, bumping into me and stumbling. They clawed over each other, all of them running in different directions. It was mass confusion.
“Don’t follow them,” Whitman said. “They haven’t seen the sky for months. They don’t know how to get out of here.” Whitman led the group. He walked calmly, and kept a steady pace, his arms barely moving at his sides. Doc held his gun in the air in front of him, and Vesa clutched the bag that hung on her side. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, but I still could only see a meter in front of me. Someone had let the prisoners out of the cells or maybe the explosion blew the cell doors open, and now they flailed and ran alongside the frantic members of the Golden Dawn. The more coherent ones screamed and ran square into the walls, while the others simply rolled on the ground mumbling about traveling through space and time.
