Except he knew he had. He had left. As much as he told his mind that he held her in his arms back in DC, as much as he wanted to, he knew it wasn't reality, just a memory and a painful reminder of a future he might not have.
“Hey, are you okay? Are you awake?”
Hands grasped his shoulders and tugged him from his dreams. “Just let me sleep. Just a bit more.” He tried to return to Kelsey in his sleep but couldn’t find her in the forest with James.
“We have to get the hell out of here. They shut it down. Remote shutdown. Shit. We made it a couple hours out from camp but I can’t restart the damn truck. We need to go on foot. Do you understand me? We’re going to die if we don’t move.”
He forced his eyes open. His pupils dilated, adjusting to the darkness that permeated the trees and dense vegetation. Sweat and blood soaked his clothes. His mind still felt sluggish and his skin had gone pallid. “What’s going on?” His voice sounded hollow and weak. He squinted at the tube sticking out of his arm. “What did you do to me?”
He traced the plastic tube to an opaque bag hung from the cab’s ceiling.
“I used the first aid pack, okay?” James said. “You needed blood. All they got is synthetic stuff, but it’ll work for now.”
Nick examined the bag’s label. It read B positive. “How’d you know my blood type?”
James frowned. “Are you serious?”
His mind lurched forward. “Oh, right. I suppose you would know since you’re pretty much the same person.”
“I’m not the same person.” James scowled. “We have to get the hell out of here. Your leg should be good enough. I patched it up with one of these thrombotic patches from the pack. But don’t get shot again. We don’t have any more.”
Nick rolled his shoulders and stretched his legs. As he moved, the blood pulsed back into his limbs. “I don’t plan on getting shot again.” He licked his lips, already chapped and dry. “Do we have any water?”
James nodded. “Yeah. The truck was equipped with a few packs. A little food and water. Not much. I don’t expect that they usually make long trips. From what I understand, they just shuttle Originals and us others to and from the airfields.”
“Sounds about right.” As Nick’s mind cleared, he remembered the words that had woken him up and brought him back to reality. “They shut the truck down?”
“Yeah, I managed to drive this piece of trash for a couple hours before they knocked out the power. Dumbasses must have finally realized they could do that remotely.”
His heart sank. “Maybe they couldn’t get to it until they quelled the riots.” The guards must have regained control. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the clones he’d seen, both his own and those in the barracks full of children. He wondered how many had become casualties. How many would be punished.
“Regardless, we need to move,” James said. “If they put down the other clones, they might’ve already switched the tires out on the other trucks.”
“Okay, let’s get out of here.” As he put weight onto his left leg, pain coursed through it.
“Can you walk okay?”
“I don’t think it matters whether I can or not. I have to now.”
James hopped out of the truck and hoisted a pack onto his back. He held out his hand to help Nick down.
Nick huffed as he lowered himself onto the dirt road. He hobbled forward. “Where do we go?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any idea where we are.”
“You spent two years at the place and don’t know where in the world it is?”
“Hey, I never got out much and I forgot to ask the guards.” James sneered. “This is the furthest I’ve traveled in my whole two years of life. You were the one in the army, right?”
“Right.”
“Doesn’t that mean you traveled and stuff?”
“Stuff. Yeah, that’s what it means.” Determined to move forward, Nick gritted his teeth. Without his AR lenses, without a Chip to connect him to the Net, he could not use a map. He attempted to discern their coordinates based on the stars in the sky to no avail. He wished he hadn’t taken those devices so much for granted. “Let’s follow the road. Maybe we can get a sense of where we are on the way. It’s got to lead to a town, a city, something.”
As they followed the dirt road, they clung to the edge of the forest. James continuously glanced behind them, his body tense. He appeared ready to jump into the cover of the undergrowth at the subtlest hint of danger.
“It’s okay,” Nick said. “If they come in the truck, we’ll hear the tires kicking up dirt on that road long before they find us. If they’re on foot, we’ve already got a huge lead. Besides, don’t you think they’ve got enough to clean up at camp?”
“I don’t think that matters. I doubt they want us to escape and spread the word about what’s going on back there. Besides, they’re extremely protective of Originals.”
They trudged along in the tangle of sprouting plants and roots that hugged the road. Insects buzzed and chirped in an incessant uproar around them as they went.
Nick paused, rubbing his thigh. “Why do they need Originals? Why don’t they just clone you guys?”
“To be honest, I have no idea,” James said. “It’s not like they taught us the science of...cloning.” He spat on the ground after he said the word.
“It’s strange, isn’t it? I want to know what’s different between you and me. If we share the same DNA, why not just keep making more of us through you?”
Though James’s expression did not change, Nick could tell he had agitated the man. James was sensitive about being called a clone and Nick realized the man had good reason. Calling him a clone dehumanized him. If he was a clone, his entire life existed because Nick existed. James hadn’t been born organically, nor had he lived like a normal human; he’d been artificially matured in a growth chamber. He was a product of experimental science and had been treated worse than a lab rat throughout his short life.
Nick recalled when cloning used to be a viable medical treatment. Since he wasn’t a scientist, he had found the difference between cloned cells and stem cells harvested from a patient difficult to understand. He seemed to remember that the cloning involved the use of an embryo, which had caused enormous debate in the scientific and bioethics community. That debate had reached the International Health Organization. The IHO had decided the use of cloning to create new stem cell lines to form human embryos should be banned. Not all countries and research groups had agreed, with some arguing that the new cell lines formed from cloning were superior to adult stem cells, which did not have the same proliferative capabilities as clone cells. The adult stem cells also could not as effectively differentiate—or turn into the right types of cells—compared to clone cells.
But none of that explained why the people back at the cloning facilities would keep him alive instead of replicating his clones. It almost gave him a headache trying to make sense of all the concepts.
Then again, he figured none of that mattered. He was alive and he intended to stay alive.
James stopped. His arm shot out and his hand splayed across Nick’s chest. “Do you hear that?”
“No.” Nick tilted his head. His eyes widened. “Oh.”
The unmistakable sound of heavy rubber tires crunched on the dirt road. A truck appeared, winding around a corner, its headlights illuminating a wide swathe of the forest. Diving between the trees, they scrambled through the vegetation. The truck passed by and he peeked out, recognizing the M2040 from his time in the army. It was an American truck.
Twenty-Two
Night had settled outside Sara Monahan’s office. Despite McCuller’s demand that she focus on bio-analysis, she could not take her mind off the strange encounter from Sgt. Fulton’s feed. She might not be a psychologist, but she could see no legitimate reason why Steinweg would have jumped ship to risk his life as a mercenary for the Congo Resistance Movement. His job as a consultant at Formative Connections had to have paid a rather generous salary;
Sara knew others from her college years who had chosen to forgo technical careers in molecular engineering or artificial intelligence design in favor of high-paying gigs as consultants for companies like Formative. She found it difficult to believe people would give up that cushy lifestyle and risk their lives to kill the same people they had served beside in a faraway, hotly-contested country rife with tropical disease, government corruption, and warring factions.
True to his word, McCuller had sent her a couple of reports documenting expatriates who had joined up with foreign militant groups. A former sergeant major and Army Ranger, Landon Matthews, had been killed during a skirmish on the border of Panama and Colombia. Boyd Crayton, a private first class infantryman, was identified in Laos after the military coup there.
Matthews had a history of aggression and violence, despite his aptitude as a soldier. He had been arrested for domestic abuse three times, though he hadn’t been charged, and had been dishonorably discharged from the army after a brutal beating he’d doled out on a fellow Ranger. When the police had suspected that Matthews had been involved in the double homicide of his wife and her mother, it didn’t take any stretch of her imagination for Sara to see why a man like this might be destined for a career as a cold-blooded killer. It also explained why Matthews’ Chip had gone offline shortly after authorities had reported the two women dead. The man had wanted to flee the country undetected.
Crayton’s story did not stray too far from Matthews’. While Crayton had landed in Frankfurt for a stopover before he returned home from a tour, his last known credit transaction had paid for prostitution services at an establishment called the Kitten’s Corner. At the Kitten’s Corner that same night, the police had found two prostitutes dead. Chip records showed Crayton heading east through Germany before the device had been deactivated.
As a scientist and researcher foremost, she was never convinced that only two data points could establish any viable statistical relationship. And she didn’t find these two individual reports substantial enough to disprove her hypothesis that Steinweg’s appearance in the Congo indicated more than a disgruntled expat working for the other side.
A seemingly content family man working for an international consulting company, Steinweg had displayed no violent tendencies, nor had he been found connected to any criminal activities. Undoubtedly, McCuller wanted her to think that Steinweg had fled from authorities just like Matthews and Crayton had. A shiver went down her spine as she considered that McCuller might be misleading her.
As the automatic hall lights turned off outside her office, she scrolled through a list of personnel records accessible with her security clearance. The lists were limited to cases that she had analyzed for biological warfare evidence, including Navy SEAL teams that had uncovered troves of explosives laced with chemical agents, squads of infantrymen exposed to engineered viruses, and documented cases of Marines discovering abandoned laboratories full of weaponized pathogens. Right now, she wasn’t concerned with the biotechnological components of these incidents.
She skimmed this database for service members whose Chips had been disconnected from the Net. Within the limited cases she had obtained, she found almost thirty matches. She wanted to see what patterns existed, if any, in these people’s histories and disappearances.
When her holodisplay buzzed, she jumped. The holo showed an incoming call from Lauren Corello. She accepted the call and a holo of Corello with pursed lips projected in front of the desk. The woman’s long red hair was swept back to reveal arched eyebrows and a creased forehead.
“Is something up?” Sara rubbed her eyes, adjusting to the bright vision of Corello’s holo.
“Yes, something’s up.” Corello’s voice revealed the woman’s unabashed irritation. “Four more Exo-Specialists just came down with symptoms corollary to dengue fever.”
“Is this the engineered variety?”
Corello gave a curt nod. “Yes, it is. It’s the same virus you were supposed to be tracking. The vaccinations team needs your recommendations to protect our soldiers.”
“Well, I’m trying to keep up with each new iteration.”
Corello held up one open-palmed hand to stop her. “This isn’t a new iteration. This is the same virus, with the exact same vector and genetic makeup as the one in your Zambia case that last week showed up on the west coast of Angola. Do you realize what that means?”
She felt sick, cringing. She had forgotten to submit the modifications necessary for the vaccination development team to treat the most recent strain of the engineered virus from the case. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I can’t believe it...”
“I don’t know what’s distracting you from turning in the right reports, but this doesn’t fly. If those men and women die, it’s because of you, Monahan. You could’ve prevented this. Send your modifications report immediately.”
Corello’s holoprojection disappeared. Sara dropped her head into her palms and tugged on her hair. She couldn’t mess up like this again. Once was already one time too many. It had been pure negligence to forget to alert the vaccinations team of the latest iteration in weaponized viruses from the CRM. She had focused too much on the Fulton and Steinweg case and too little on her assigned directives.
It took her a couple hours to finish and file the reports for Zambia and Angola as she fought the heaviness in her eyelids. Despite her exhaustion and the guilt now nesting within her, she reopened the list of individuals whose Chips had gone off-grid. Through bleary eyes, she struggled to make sense of any potential patterns. That might have to wait until she had gotten a few hours of sleep. But something caught her attention. Her eyes widened. Michelle Rochman’s file jolted her awake. After going missing for a year and a half, Rochman had reportedly died. She scanned the files, her pulse pounding in her ears and her lips moving as she mouthed each word. According to the automated report, Sgt. Michelle Rochman had died three times in three separate locations.
Twenty-Three
Nick cupped his hands and yelled out at the passing truck as James tackled him.
“How do you know it’s American?”
“I recognize the truck.” He stood from the patch of fallen limbs and entangling plants. Brushing himself off, he said, “Come on, before it’s out of earshot.”
“No. It might be an American truck, but how do you know that Americans are in that truck? The trucks at the camp were German and English, right? So why couldn’t these people also have American vehicles?”
His heart plummeted through the ground. He stood on the side of the road. The truck’s lights faded behind a shroud of trees. They might not have been Americans. But even if James was right, Nick could not bear the idea that he might have let their potential saviors drive on. “We’ve got to follow it.”
“Do you think that’s wise?”
Snapping around, he took a step forward and signaled at the clone to follow. He readjusted his pack over a shoulder as he trudged after the truck. “If it is American, they’ll get us the hell out of here. And if it isn’t, it’s leading us somewhere where other people might be. That could be our ticket out of here.”
James caught up and walked beside Nick. “And if they lead us right back to our captors? What then?”
“We’ll be careful.” He patted his rifle.
James spat on the ground. “I’m more and more sure that they did have to engineer logic into us. It didn’t come from your genes.”
They followed the tire tracks. Nick thought he could smell rain in the air from distant clouds lumbering over their heads. He hoped the downpour would hold out long enough for them to find the American vehicle.
The more they walked without conversation, the more the sounds around him seemed familiar. He recognized the buzz of insects and the distant calls of nocturnal animals hidden in the forest’s canopy. The trees with their winding trunks and hanging vines sparked a distant memory. Remembering his first night awake from the sleeping chambers in the cloning facility, he thought back to the Congo Resist
ance Movement officer. With the sighting of the American truck, maybe he did know where they were.
“I think we might be somewhere in the Congo rainforest.”
“Really? You think you know where we should go, then?”
“Not exactly. When I was fighting in the Congo, the borders of the country and the safe zones constantly shifted. I have no idea what the situation is like now.” Nick picked up his hobbling pace and ignored the shudders of pain in his thigh. “But that might also explain the American truck.”
“And we don’t know if that was stolen or if it’s actually American, so don’t get your hopes up.” James’s expression appeared dour, his posture limp. He lagged behind.
“We won’t know until we see for ourselves.”
Lightning flashed, illuminating the forest’s canopy and reflecting off leaves wet with dew deposited by the humid air. Thunder rolled by moments later. In response to the din, a creature howled. Several more cries joined it. Nick’s skin prickled as he eyed the trees around them.
“What the hell was that?” James hoisted his assault rifle.
“Just animals.” Hiding the fear that welled up inside, Nick tried to make his voice sound confident. “There’s nothing out here that should be hunting humans.”
James glowered. “Except for the people who kept us locked up.”
“True. Except for them.”
As they carried on, the sky filled with lightning. The delays between the flashes of crackling light and the deafening thunder decreased until a torrent of rain poured down. James seemed to scrunch up and withdraw from the falling water. Nick held out his arms and opened his mouth. He welcomed the cool shower as it soaked into his garments and splattered against his skin. For the first time since waking up to this hell, he felt almost clean. The water drenched him and made both his pack and clothes heavy, but it didn’t matter. He was free to enjoy the feeling. He was awake and alive. They had escaped and he could find a way home.
Twenty-Four
The Human Forged Page 11
