Drastic Times (Book 3): Fierce Freedom

by Rock, R. A.

  I felt like I should think about this more but in that instant we arrived at the end of the tunnel that supposedly led to the Sanctuary. Except that there was no door. There was what looked to me like a DNA scanner.

  “I’m pretty sure those aren’t invented yet,” Shiv said, recognizing the tech, too. He seemed as confused as I felt.

  “It’s probably not what it looks like. Let me see,” I said, stepping forward to examine the device. Without warning, it scanned me and I stepped back trying to avoid the beam, but it was too late.

  “Shit,” I said. “It got me.”

  “That may set off all sorts of alarms when your DNA doesn’t match,” Yumi pointed out, sounding nervous. We waited anxiously for something to happen.

  But nothing did.

  Until the bare wall slid to the side, revealing a plain wooden door.

  “Um, did that DNA scanner just open for you?” Grace said, her face incredulous. “I thought those would only open for the person who’s DNA is keyed to it?”

  “That’s how they’re supposed to work,” Shiv said. “But they’re still working out the bugs. There’s been some trouble with the technology opening for siblings, parents, cousins — even grandparents. Because of the percentage of DNA we share with relatives, of course.”

  Everyone gave him identical baffled looks.

  “Not that this tech should even exist,” he added.

  “Why would it open for Chad, though?” Grace said.

  “I have no idea,” Shiv said. “It shouldn’t even be here.”

  “What now?” I said, unable to shake the feeling that something very, very odd was going on that I ought to understand. But making sense of all of it was just out of reach.

  “What now?” Shiv said, giving me an exasperated look. “How about you knock?”

  Everyone immediately focused on the door in front of us.

  It was a very unassuming door — just made of plain pine with the sort of handles that we had on our doors at home. Polish door handles, I always thought of them, because they were popular in Poland where my father is from.

  Instead of having a round door knob, they were more of a flat lever that you pushed down to open the door. These handles were more useful than door knobs because you could open the door with your hands full, all it took was a bump of your elbow or forearm and the door would open. No need to grasp it with your hand.

  We exchanged glances and then Grace stepped forward and rapped sharply on the normal looking door. Then we waited.

  No one came.

  Grace knocked again, louder and longer this time. There was a weird echo down the tunnel of water and I wondered when it would fill in again. Surely they wouldn’t just leave it open like this if they wanted to keep this place hidden. The idea of the water filling in while we were still in here made me nervous and I wished that they would open the damn door.

  After a minute, there was the sound of footsteps hurrying towards us. I remained calm, hoping we would get a nicer reception than we had in both the Survivor community and New Winnipeg.

  I stifled a sigh.

  It didn’t seem likely.

  THE DNA SCANNER opened for Chad…What the fuck?… and he knocked on the door that was revealed. Then we stood around and waited. The swampy smell of the lake bottom permeated the air and I wished someone would answer the frickin’ door. I glanced at Madeline and the chalky colour of her face made my heart clench. After actually getting her here, was she about to die on their doorstep? Literally?

  There were footsteps and finally the plain wooden door, which supposedly led into The Sanctuary, opened. In spite of how early it was, the small man with glasses who answered looked alert and awake as if he had been up for hours.

  The glasses intrigued me.

  No one needed glasses in our time and in this time very few people’s glasses had survived all the fighting and accidents that had occurred. I couldn’t remember seeing anyone with glasses, ever, in my entire life. Only in history books. Oh and that crazy-ass little Precog back in our time, Forsythe, had worn them for looks I remembered. But he had been a complete nutcase.

  So, needless to say, the sight of this little man with glasses was slightly shocking to me. Where had he got them? And if he had preserved them since the solar flare, how had he done so when almost nobody else had?

  He studied us like we were some sort of strange creatures and then his eyes got wide.

  “Oh my God,” he said, putting his hand on his chest. “Come in. Come in. Forgive me for not recognizing you.”

  Chad and I gave each other identical bewildered looks. How could this guy we had never met recognize us? Things just kept getting stranger and stranger.

  “It’s fine,” I said, as we stepped in. “This woman’s name is Madeline. She was injured and she asked us to bring her to this place. Do you know her? Are we at The Sanctuary?”

  Surely there were no other communities under the lake that could be confused with The Sanctuary, but I wanted to be certain. As the man shut the door, he swiped his hand over a pad next to it and there was the sound of crashing water — the tunnel collapsing, I supposed.

  “Are you at The Sanctuary?” He repeated my words back to me, appearing to be as confused as I felt. “Of course you are.”

  Then he glanced down at Madeline and back up at the five of us and understanding dawned in his eyes.

  “Oh,” he breathed. “This is your first time at The Sanctuary.”

  “Yes,” Shiv said, in a voice that indicated that he thought the man was completely insane. “Can we bring Madeline in? She’s in serious need of help. Do you have some sort of hospital or medical facility?”

  “Oh dear,” the man said, putting his hand over his mouth as he finally looked at Madeline. “Of course. Please bring her in and lay her on this bench.”

  Shiv shook his head.

  “It’s okay. I would rather bring her straight to wherever she needs to go.”

  “Oh,” the man looked dismayed at that. “Really? It’s no trouble to get someone else to do it.”

  “What?” Shiv said, letting some of his annoyance leak into his tone of voice and facial expression. “Just show me where the med bay is and I’ll lay her down there. She has internal injuries and she doesn’t need to be jostled any more than necessary.”

  He stepped forward as he said this and the man was forced to move back.

  “Oh, alright,” he said, fluttering ahead of us down the hall.

  I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the place as we followed the man but what I did notice seemed vaguely familiar in a way that I couldn’t quite pinpoint — like Madeline’s face.

  When we walked in the room, the four of us froze, unable to believe our eyes. Shiv set Madeline down carefully on the bed and turned to face us, disbelief in his eyes. Then he twisted to look at the little man and spoke sharply to him.

  “You have some explaining to do,” Shiv said, his eyes glittering with danger.

  “What do you want to know?” the little man said, twitching like a scared rabbit.

  Shiv walked over to him, until every inch of his large frame was looming over the small doorman.

  “What the hell is The Sanctuary?” he demanded.

  THE LITTLE MAN had refused to answer Shiv’s question, saying that he would bring us to Madeline’s second in command and we could talk to him. The doctors had bustled in just then and began working on Madeline, so we had had to leave anyway.

  What I had seen in the medical bay took my breath away. But at this point we had way more questions than answers.

  After a minute of walking through the halls we arrived at a meeting room and were shown in. We seated ourselves around the conference table and the little rabbit man seemed glad to leave us. I admired the view of the fish I could see through the glass wall, meanwhile all my questions tumbled about in my head.

  Nobody said anything. As if we were all afraid to say what we knew. What this meant.

  Finally the silen
ce was broken when the door was opened and a man walked in. If I had been flabbergasted before, I was really blown away now.

  Gideon was Madeline’s second in command.

  HE STOPPED dead when he saw us.

  “Holy fuck,” he said, his eyes wide. “You’re here.”

  Audrey jumped to her feet and walked over to him. He smiled at her but she went up on her toes and slapped him as hard as she could, the sound a sharp crack. Then she stomped back to her seat and sat down again, crossing her arms, her face furious. He put his fingers to his face where he now had a red handprint.

  “I guess I deserved that,” he said, giving Audrey an apologetic look.

  “What the hell, Gideon?” Shiv said. “I am so confused.”

  “Are you?” Gideon said, walking in and sitting down. His hair was close cropped and he wore tailored clothes that seemed at odds with the rough Gideon I had come to know. But maybe that wasn’t him at all. Maybe that had all been an act.

  “Afrikaans?” Grace said, drumming her fingers on the table.

  He shrugged.

  “I thought it was a nice touch.”

  “You owe us a frickin’ explanation, Gideon,” Yumi said, getting to her feet. “What the hell is going on here? How do you have medical technology from the 25th century? How was this place built? Is that a force field keeping the water back? And…”

  She trailed off, suddenly sitting down, limp.

  “You know the answers to those questions, I think,” Gideon said, gazing at Yumi with compassion.

  “Us,” Shiv whispered. “It was us.”

  “WHAT DO YOU mean, Shiv?” I said, my mind unable to believe what I already knew to be true.

  “It was us, wasn’t it, Gideon?” Shiv said, staring Gideon down. “We built this place, didn’t we?”

  Gideon nodded and I felt as though I had just been hit by a stun gun blast. I glanced around the boardroom — in the middle of this place that we had built, with fish swimming by only four feet away held back by a force field from the future — and could not believe that it was true. Every one of my friends sported the same incredulous expression.

  There was a clock on the wall that said 5:58 AM and I marvelled at it. It had been quite a while since I had known the exact time.

  “Start at the beginning,” Shiv ordered. “And don’t leave anything out.”

  “Okay,” Gideon said. “But really it’s Madeline’s story to tell.”

  “We are not waiting for Madeline to wake up,” I said, using my Captain’s tone. “Tell us. Grace, translate mentally for Audrey.”

  Grace nodded.

  “So, I don’t know everything but I’ll tell you what I do know. Madeline was approached by two people in 2002. A red headed man and a black haired woman of Asian descent.” He gestured towards us. “Chad and Yumi, of course. From the future.”

  I met Yumi’s eyes. We had met Madeline in 2002? She lifted her eyebrows.

  “I guess it took you a while to convince her and I don’t know the whole story but eventually you made her believe that there were bad times coming and she should be prepared.”

  “How…?” Yumi started.

  Gideon shrugged.

  “I don’t know. She’ll have to tell you her part of the story. All I know is that you convinced her and she slowly assembled a group of like-minded people. The necessary components from the future were brought in a little at a time and this place was built.”

  He lifted his hands at the incredible feat of engineering and architecture — well, incredible for this time anyway.

  “Then the solar flare hit and since they knew when to expect it, most of the electronics were shielded and protected. The Sanctuary lost only 5% of its tech and some of that we could repair.”

  “But why…?” Yumi started again.

  “Because of what’s coming,” Gideon said. “Because of the war.”

  “What war?” I said. “The current state of affairs is hardly a war.”

  “Isn’t it?” Gideon said, his dark green eyes narrowing. “The Hidden built those cities, holed up in them, and then set off EMP bombs to shut down the world. Then once everyone on the outside is ready to do anything for some semblance of normalcy, they’re going to come out and take over. The people out there will be so desperate to have some civilization back, that they’ll gladly give the cities power over them. Sounds like a war to me.”

  “And you know this from… us?” Yumi said, appearing dismayed at the thought.

  “Why would we have meddled?” Shiv said, appalled. “I can’t believe we meddled in the timeline.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” he said, shaking his head at our stupidity. “You had to mess with the timeline. You had no choice.”

  “But why?” Shiv said.

  “Because,” Gideon said. “If you didn’t, your whole future would never have existed.”

  I FOLLOWED ALONG on the quick tour Gideon was giving us but my mind was still reeling from what we had just found out. The Sanctuary had been built by the five of us. We had created the Resistance to fight against The Hidden, as they were called, in the secret cities — like New Winnipeg.

  And it was all because if we didn’t, then our reality that we knew and mostly loved in 2481 would never exist.

  My head ached at the thought.

  Chad picked up his pace so that he was beside me and gave me an understanding glance.

  “The starship rock, our idea,” he said out of nowhere. “There are no warp drives yet. And how would anyone even know where one was located?”

  A thought suddenly popped into my head.

  “And Madeline said the end of our world. Not the end of the world, like I thought.”

  Chad nodded, still making connections.

  “And she knew that we wanted to get home. And that she could trust us. Because she already knew us.”

  “The little guy at the doorway apologizing for not recognizing us.” My mind exploded with all the clues that we had seen but not recognized.

  “And of course the tech to get in here. I can’t believe we didn’t put it together before.”

  “It all only makes sense in hindsight,” I said, then all of a sudden felt completely overwhelmed. “It’s frankly, a little too much.”

  “Well, look at it this way. At least we know we got back home.”

  I frowned.

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Of course we do,” he said. “We couldn’t have come back and built this place if we hadn’t.”

  I scowled at the floor.

  “I don’t like to think that the future is laid out for us already and we don’t have free will anymore. It’s smacks too much of fate.”

  “Yeah, it’s a little disturbing,” he admitted.

  “A little disturbing?” I said.

  “Okay, a lot disturbing,” he said, pointing to a framed picture on the wall of the five of us standing on the beach in front of the Sanctuary holding a paper that said the date that we had finished the community.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and stopped walking, trying to not freak out as Gideon’s voice got farther and farther away.

  “Tanaka?” Chad said, putting his hand on my arm. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m not,” I said, my voice sounding strangled. “I just… this is… I can’t…”

  I opened my eyes, gazing into his troubled face.

  “Friends give friends hugs, right?” he said, referring to our agreement to just be friends until we got our shit together.

  “Of course, Red,” I said, in relief.

  I really needed a Chad hug right now.

  He wrapped his arms around me, holding me tightly. I let out a shuddering sigh and clung to him as if we were on a space walk and I had lost my tether — as if he was the last thing keeping me from drifting off into space and dying a cold, lonely death.

  As usual, calm and peace seeped into me and my breathing evened out. I relaxed in his arms. No matter what crazy situation we were in right
now. It would be okay. We would figure it out.

  “We always do,” he sent.

  I pulled away, giving him a tiny smile of thanks, and we resumed walking again. Ahead of us, Gideon made the others laugh and I wondered that he had deceived us so thoroughly. I mean, I understood that he couldn’t have told us anything. But it was irritating anyway. Especially since it was probably us that put in such stringent no tell regulations in the first place.

  We passed several people in the large corridor as we strode along trying to catch up to the others. They almost always gave shocked gasps and amazed expressions appeared on their faces as they met their saviours in the hallway.

  Gideon had explained that we had the equivalent of royal status here in The Sanctuary. Because the five of us had made it possible for these people to avoid the chaos and mess that was out there. And on top of that, we were going to save them from the nastiness that the secret cities were going to rain down upon the world.

  I had to admit that I found it a bit much to be granted such star status for something I had yet to do.

  It was the height of weird and awkward.

  And if that picture on the wall was to be believed, this was only the beginning.

  I LOOKED OUT at the lake that stretched away from me past the force field. No invisible glass. I shook my head at how silly my explanations had been in my attempt to reconcile what I was seeing with what I believed was possible.

  We were convening in Madeline’s hospital room, after enjoying a delicious late lunch in Gideon’s quarters. He and Madeline didn’t live here all the time because it would arouse suspicion with the people they interacted with on the outside, but he told us they stayed here about one week out of every month — not usually at the same time, though.

  Gideon lived on the outside as what he had seemed to us — a guide and hunter — which actually was his real identity before the solar flare. Madeline had worked as a nurse before assuming her role at The Sanctuary and so she went from community to community as a travelling healer. This made it easy to disappear for a week or so every once in a while to deal with matters at The Sanctuary.