New Alcatraz (Book 2): Golden Dawn

by Grant Pies

  “Probably the same place as you and me,” Ransom said. “The past.”

  “But we were born from scientists, doctors, great thinkers. These people could never have come from the same people as us.”

  “Those are just more stories,” Ransom said. “It’s more bullshit.”

  “Bullshit?” Merit said. He raised his voice slightly and then thought better of it. “Look where we are, Ransom. We are standing in the place Grandpa talked about. It’s real.”

  “A lot of good it’s done us so far,” Ransom said bitterly. He knew his grandfather’s stories weren’t just stories anymore. And he had to assume the rest of the stories were just as accurate. “My time is running out here, brother. I don’t even know how much longer Gray has. How much longer I have to get back.”

  “How long have we been down here?” Merit asked. “It seems like it’s only been a few minutes.”

  “It feels like days to me,” Ransom mumbled.

  Both brothers held on to their rifles, even though neither of them knew how to use the devices. They hung from slings around the brothers’ bodies. In the distance, the sounds of the crazed and starving vault dwellers echoed.

  “Ash,” Merit said as he sighed. It was like this was the first time he realized they’d left Ash behind. Or the first time he thought of what that really meant. “It’s all my fault,” he said, and ran his hands through his thinning hair. He shook his head.

  “It was his choice,” Ransom said. He didn’t deny Merit was always the one pushing for people to come find this place. “He sacrificed himself for us. That says a lot about Ash. It says a lot about what Ash thought of you and me. You think if he blamed you for bringing him down here, he would have let you escape without him?”

  “Do you think he could have made it out?” Merit asked his brother. The question was hollow, and echoed down the hall until the words blended together and ghosted away. Ransom had no answer.

  Ransom slowed his pace to almost a stop. The people who chased after them were not nearby. They must have been satisfied with capturing Ash, at least for now. Ransom took inventory of his injuries. His shoulder and neck pulsed rapidly where he was bitten, blood trickled down his back and soaked into his clothing. He breathed shallow breaths to keep the muscles inside his chest from compressing his broken ribs. Beyond his injuries, he was tired, his mouth was dry, and his stomach shrank inside of him.

  Ransom’s mind slipped away from the immediate danger. He thought of his wife and his son, and wondered if Gray had died yet. He wondered if his wife had had to bury him without her husband by her side. The only thing he had to go on was how long it took Higgs to die from whatever illness this was. Tannyn may have been sick, or even close to death, but he did not die from the sickness.

  “We can’t have much time,” Ransom said quietly.

  “Gray?” Merit asked, and Ransom nodded his head. “We’ll make it back.”

  “Seeing as how we have lost track of the line leading to any medicine, we are lost underground, and there is a horde of crazed people roaming these tunnels who seem to want to eat us either alive or dead, whose leader I most likely killed with a bone that was the remnant of their last meal...I doubt that I’m making it back.” Ransom’s voice grew louder with each word. He clenched his fists at his sides. “My whole life, I have tried to tell myself Dad was this one type of person. The type of person who was crazy, or selfish, or too curious for his own good. I grew up, and took the role of both brother and father for you, pushing aside any possibility that Dad did what he did for any good reason, any reason that involved us. I fought the urge to make excuses for him, to offer his memory a way out of the corner he painted himself in. But here I am.” Ransom stretched his arms out and winced as they reached as high as his shoulders. “Standing in this place. Every step further into whatever this place is...or was, I see my entire life wasted. My efforts pointless.” The two brothers kept walking down the tunnels.

  “It’s not a wasted life, Ransom. There was nothing to do. Whether you believed Dad was right or not, he was gone. It’s not like you turned your back on him. He wasn’t around.”

  “But I wasted energy on fighting his memory. I wasted time and effort. Regret isn’t always about how you treat a person, or what you say to someone. It’s just as much regret about how you react to a situation. How you respond. Time you wasted. That type of regret can eat at you and corrode your soul. Now, after seeing this place, I have a pit in my stomach that feels about as large as this abandoned place.” Ransom turned to his brother. If the tunnel were more lit, Merit would have seen that Ransom had tears in his eyes.

  “I feel like all of this is my fault. If I hadn’t been so busy tearing down the memory of Dad, maybe we would have come here earlier. Maybe we would have had medicines for situations like this. I couldn’t let myself think of Dad in any other way, or else I would have actually been upset that he left. I’m sorry, Merit.”

  Ransom walked toward his brother and wrapped his arms around him. Both of their bodies were sore. It hurt to embrace, but neither of them cared. They stood in the dark tunnel. No sound or light was around them.

  “It’s not your fault, Ransom. There is no way you could have known. You couldn’t have known Gray was going to sneak into the sheep pen. He was just being a kid. There is absolutely no way you could have stopped that.” Merit gripped his brother’s back tightly. “We are going to find this medicine,” he said and let go. He turned to walk down the tunnel, deeper into the empty facility. Ransom stood alone. His head tilting down, and his hair hanging in his face. He tasted salty sweat on his lips, and blood in his mouth.

  “What did you say?” Ransom said. A thought hit him like a shock wave pulsing through the tunnel. Merit turned and repeated himself.

  “I said, we are going to find that medicine.” He kept walking.

  “No,” Ransom said. His voice grew sterner. He swallowed a mouthful of blood. “What did you say about sheep?”

  CHAPTER 58

  2075

  BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE

  “Stay seated,” Sheldon, the Wayfield employee, said. His tone changed abruptly. Now his voice was raspy, the words coated with anger. Not anger for being deceived but anger for the attempt at deception.

  I had naturally raised myself out of the chair as soon as I knew my cover was blown. I turned to look at the General, who had drawn his own weapon at some point. I sighed and shook my head. Part of me was relieved to no longer have to carry on with my lie. We could all deal with the facts.

  I thought back to the man I helped years ago who had broken into a government facility. I tried to recall what his sentence was. Five years? Four? It was something short. Something manageable. They didn’t know why we were here. I dreamt up more lies upon lies to cover the truth. It was a dare or a joke, I could tell them. Just innocent fun. Or we were testing your security measures. We were helping the government. I hated to admit it but for the briefest of moments I considered giving up Whitman or the people back at the motel in Gray Mountain. I was ashamed for even thinking it, but I thought it nonetheless.

  I saw how quickly I could become just like the clients that came to see me in my cramped apartment. Hopeful that maybe they would be the exception and not the rule. Hopeful that they would be the ones to escape the ceaseless grinding machinery of the judicial system. That they would somehow be the small piece of stone that clogged the gears and dismantled the motor. That brief moment of hope faded as quickly as it came. I knew there was no way this would end with me not in custody. Mere hours after my detainment, the North American Government would know who I was and where I was supposed to be. Before I was in custody for twenty-four hours, the torture would begin. From there, I could only imagine how long I would hold out.

  Maybe I would last two days. Maybe four. But before the week was out, the Ministry of Science would know I was the offspring of another New Alcatraz escapee and a Time Anomaly Agent. They would look further into Agent Emery’s murder five years ag
o. The murder I committed. They would quickly piece together her involvement in the orphanage in Ashton. They would find her in the past and question her. Torture her. They may even find her pregnant. Maybe they would find her in Buford, just after I was born, before she left me there for good. Once they had her and that information, they wouldn’t need me anymore. They would likely kill me. No trial or sentence. Why bother sending me back to New Alcatraz if no one else even knew I ever made it back here? Dead would be preferable to sending me to a place I already escaped from. But I wondered if they would get a chance to kill me, or, if once they learned who my parents were, and stopped me from ever being conceived, I would simply vanish. Never exist. Maybe the silver lining was that they would force my cycle to break; something I never had the courage to do myself. Maybe they would put a stop to all of this.

  “Why did you bring an android here?” Sheldon asked. “To hack our systems? A test run for a larger facility? One with weapons? What kind of operating system is that thing running? Is he carrying a virus? Do you know the damage that thing could do if it was unleashed in one of the principle data routes? What’s in the bag?”

  He nodded toward the bag that was still strapped around my chest. General Moore ripped the bag from me and flung it on the table. It landed with a loud thud. Sheldon reached in and pulled out the device.

  “What is this? A weapon? A bomb? EMP?” He fired questions at me so quickly that even if I wanted to answer them, I wouldn’t have been able to.

  Sheldon had gone from seemingly happy, to angry, to worried. Something deep in him knew that a single android could bring this place, and likely whatever system linked these bases together, down. Suddenly I wondered if our efforts to charge Vesa’s device were misplaced. Maybe there was an easier way to dismantle this operation. General Moore gripped my wrists and locked plastic zip ties around my hands, making my detainment official.

  “Do you know what you have gotten yourself into?” Moore asked from behind me. “If you don’t answer our questions, do you know what will happen? Don’t get me wrong, things won’t be all roses if you do cooperate, but if you don’t...” Moore locked his hands together behind his back, puffed out his chest covered in military ribbons, and sighed. Maybe he wanted my imagination to reach worse conclusions than he could come up with. Maybe it was a bluff. Maybe it was the truth and even an asshole like General Moore didn’t want to say these things out loud. Maybe he was one of the military employees who still tried to pretend they were protecting people. Or pretend they weren’t simply armed thugs protecting the higher ups.

  “We’ll dismantle that thing piece by piece,” Sheldon picked up where General Moore left off and pointed back towards where Whitman was. “We’ll take every bolt and screw out of that android you brought in here. We’ll rip it apart and strip the casings off of the wires. We will—”

  “You will take what you don’t need and recycle it,” I interrupted. “You will take any parts of him that are unique to his make and model and save it. You will extract whatever DNA sample you put in him, along with the nanobots inside of him, and you will bury them deep underneath the Denver airport in a small refrigerated box catalogued and labeled, where they will sit for thousands of years...potentially.”

  Mr. Sheldon’s eyes widened out of shock that I interrupted him and that I knew exactly what they did with decommissioned androids. I had seen it for myself thousands of years in the future.

  Mr. Sheldon ground his teeth and bits of spittle coagulated in the corners of his mouth. “Well, do you know what we’ll do to you and your human co-conspirators?” he asked and took pleasure in seeing my reaction change. I shrugged and tried to act like it didn’t matter, like anything he threatened me with wouldn’t scare me.

  “Torture?” I said, never breaking my gaze.

  “Torture,” Sheldon repeated and chuckled at the same time. He looked up at General Moore, who smiled uncomfortably at the blatant mention of torture. Most people in the government and military knew what they did. They knew about the black site prisons and the cramped cells. They were complicit in robbing citizens of due process, but they didn’t ever say it out loud. They always gave it some euphemism, like rendition, advanced interrogation, information extraction. But not torture. Not what it really was.

  “Not just torture,” Sheldon continued. “Do you really know what we’ll do to you?”

  I stared and tried to remain stoic, but I doubted I was successful.

  “Most people think that heat is the worst. But the cold is much more miserable for extended periods. I once spent a month in Northern Canada. Fucking cold. Coldest I had ever been. Any time spent outside had to be short, and I had to get inside in front of a heater or else my muscles would cramp. One day I stayed outside too long. Maybe a minute too long, maybe an hour. I’m not sure. But the cold air penetrated my thick boots and wool socks. By the time I got back inside, my feet had lost feeling. I held them so close to the fire that they were practically in the flames, and, as they thawed out, I cursed the feeling for coming back. It felt like a million sharp barbs were inside of me and pushing through my skin from the inside out. The blood had frozen into sharp crystals and was thawing out slowly. If I’d had an axe, I would have chopped my toes off right then and there. But eventually it passed. Eventually the heater warmed my feet and the pain subsided. Eventually. I stayed inside for the rest of my time there. I never wanted to experience that pain again.” Sheldon cleared his throat.

  “I personally oversaw the torture of a man who we drenched in cold water and then locked in front of an air conditioner for two weeks. No breaks. The man pissed himself and it froze inside his pants. By the third day he already looked like a corpse. His lips were dried, cracked, and blue. Little drips of blood seeped out of the cracks in his lips but quickly froze inside the wounds. His skin was the color of snow. The air blasting in his face, blowing his hair backwards until it froze in that position. His teeth chattered so much that by the fifth day he had chipped and broken most of them. The guards wore thick down jackets even outside the cell. After two weeks the man’s spine snapped from his constant shivering. Well...more convulsions than shivering. But before that he gave us plenty of useful information.”

  Sheldon looked into the distance. He reminisced about this man like it was a good movie he had watched years ago, or a concert he attended.

  “Maybe that’s what we’ll do to you, but just calling it ‘torture’ is a disservice to what we actually do. One must really picture it to get the full idea.” He returned his gaze to me. “And your female friend back there.” He nodded his head in some random direction. “We have something special planned for her. We have agents that request to solely handle our female detainees. The waiting list is quite long, and those that are selected are allowed to use whichever methods they see fit to extract information from them. They are often left alone, offsite, one on one, with the female detainees for extended periods of time.” I didn’t think Sheldon could smile any bigger, but somehow he managed.

  I sprung to my feet so quickly that the chair I sat in flew out from under me and crashed into General Moore’s shins. Moore let out a short cry and dropped to his knees. I swung my heel into Moore’s jaw, and at the same time pushed forward toward Sheldon, who braced himself for impact. My shoulder crashed into his face, and we both flew towards the wall covered in old antique telephones. The back of Sheldon’s head crashed into the wall, and his body went limp, dropping to the ground and giving me just enough time to land one more kick on General Moore’s face. His eyes rolled back and his eyelids fluttered. His head rested on the floor with a small stream of spit leaking out of his mouth.

  I knelt down to retrieve the knife on Moore’s belt. The shiny blade looked like it had barely been used. I fidgeted with the blade behind my back until the plastic restraints around my wrists split and released my hands. Before I could fold the knife closed, Sheldon awoke and pounced on my back. The knife slid across the floor, and the two of us worked ourselves into
a tangled mess. Sheldon drove his knee into my chest and I landed repeated punches to his temple. He let out muffled grunts, and I gasped for air. My back pressed on top of the unconscious General Moore, who looked like a pile of dirty laundry on the floor.

  I spun around on my stomach and crawled to the unsheathed knife on the ground. Sheldon gripped my hair and pulled back hard enough to rip out several locks. I tried to not scream, so as not to alert any guards outside the room, but a short grunt escaped my mouth. My hand stretched out, and spread open. My fingers pulled until every joint spread as far apart as they would go. The knife remained just out of reach. Sheldon jumped off my back and grabbed the knife. We leapt to our feet, and Sheldon swiped the knife across my chest, splitting my shirt and skin open. Blood trickled down my stomach.

  “You are dead,” Sheldon said and smiled at me. He nudged Moore with his foot without taking his eyes off me. The general was just a lump of skin on the floor. His face was already swelling.

  Sheldon lunged toward me, but I threw the metal chair into his path. The chair rattled under his body, and he tumbled to the ground. The pocketknife closed on impact with the ground and clamped down on Sheldon’s fingers, slicing through his middle finger and cutting his ring finger off completely. Sheldon let out a shrill scream that I was sure others heard outside the small room. Blood squirted out across the cement floor. The knife bounced out of his hand, and onto the floor once again. Sheldon reached for the knife with his bloody fingers, but I stomped on his wrist. His bones crunched under my foot, and the sudden pressure squeezed even more blood out of his wounds.

  “Aaaaaahhhh!” Sheldon yelled again. I picked up the bloodied knife and knelt on top of Sheldon, returning the favor of driving my knee into his back. The last air inside of him escaped his lungs.

  “Don’t you fucking move,” I growled and held the blade to his face.