The Atlantis Gene

by S. A. Beck

  “Yes, sir,” the private mumbled, heading down the hall and out of the combat zone.

  Rapid firing from the adjoining room made the general hurry in that direction. He peered around a corner and found it was all over. A pair of soldiers lay on the floor, obviously roughed up, while Orion stood over them, his dark face beaming in triumph.

  General Meade strolled into the room, a smile on his face. “You went easy on these two. They’re still conscious.”

  Orion nodded to the general, turned, and was about to strike the nearest soldier.

  “Stop!” General Meade shouted.

  Orion stopped, his fist poised in the air, and looked at General Meade curiously.

  “Well done, Orion. You won. Come with me.”

  The Atlantean scampered over like a puppy and bent to kiss the general’s hand.

  “Don’t do that,” General Meade snapped, pulling his hand away in disgust. The mind-control drugs Dr. Jones had given him, and the hypnotic treatment he’d undergone by a crackpot mesmerist, had turned Orion into not only a willing servant but also a slave. It went against everything General Meade believed in.

  He didn’t see a way around it, though. The Poseidon Project needed a success story to keep its funding from being canceled, and the government needed a trained killer to go after Yuhle’s team and that group of rogue Atlanteans. Beyond that, Orion was far more important as the first recruit for a new army of super soldiers who were Earth’s only hope against an alien invasion.

  “You’re getting better and better, Orion.”

  “I train every day, master.”

  “Call me general, or sir. I don’t like it when you call me master.”

  “I’m very sorry, master.”

  General Meade ground his teeth. With all that mental conditioning, there were some things that couldn’t be helped. What would his proud forefathers who helped free the slaves during the Civil War think if they could see him one hundred fifty years later, having created his own slave?

  He pushed his guilt aside. More important things were at stake.

  “I’m going to send you on a mission soon, Orion.”

  “Whatever my master wishes.”

  “You’ll have to kill some people, perhaps many people. Will you be able to do that?”

  “I will do whatever my master wishes.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” General Meade mumbled. He looked around at the bleak concrete building and the ruins outside the window and remembered his many tours of duty. Things had been clearer then. It was kill or be killed. Simple. No second thoughts.

  The people he was up against weren’t bad people, they weren’t gangsters or extremists, but they were in the way. They could do far more damage to the world than the Mob or the Islamists or the Cocaine Cartel or any of them. The future of the whole world hung in the balance. The Atlanteans needed to be forced to obey, and Dr. Yuhle and his group needed to be wiped out.

  It needed to be done fast, and it needed to be done right.

  “You know, Orion, I think I just might be going with you. It will be nice to get rid of these troublemakers personally.”

  Chapter 6

  JUNE 19, 2016, THE DESERT JUST OUTSIDE YUMA, ARIZONA

  7:10 AM

  If Otto had been tired before, he was by then half dead with exhaustion. The light of a harsh desert morning jabbed into his gritty eyes as Vivian drove the car through southwestern Arizona. Yuhle lay snoring in the passenger’s seat, his endurance having given out hours before, and Dr. Yamazaki was curled up on the backseat, taking up most of the space and forcing Otto to squeeze up against the door.

  The desert there was different. In New Mexico and Nevada, it was greener, with bushes and cacti and the occasional tree. When they had passed through the Sonora Desert near Tucson the night before, he’d seen towering saguaro cacti silhouetted against the starry vault of the sky, with the Milky Way arcing high overhead. It had made a beautiful, eerie backdrop to his fitful sleep.

  Through the night, they had headed south, until dawn found them in a barren landscape. The low tan humps of sand dunes stretched as far as the eye could see, looking like the backs of half-buried camels. Not a tree or cactus was in sight. Nothing green, no color at all except for the pale brown of the land and the washed-out blue of the sky. Despite it being early, he could feel the heat pushing through the glass of the window.

  They’d taken the back roads and stayed out of sight, hoping they wouldn’t come across a patrol car and have to explain the bullet holes in their windows and the shattered taillight and side view mirror. They had no explanation handy, and Otto didn’t want to know what Vivian would do to any cop unlucky enough to stop them.

  Otto had snatched only an hour or two of restless sleep the night before, and those hours had been filled with terrible, majestic dreams of fire and burning. He awoke feeling sick, sick at himself and sick at the helpless, terrifying situation he had found himself in. When the Atlantis Allegiance broke him out of jail, he had followed them on impulse, both to get free of the chain gang and to help Jaxon.

  But clearly he was in another prison, another chain gang, and every minute put another mile between him and his girlfriend.

  It was strange to think how attached he had become to her, even though they had spent only a couple of weeks together. She was something special. He could tell that even before he learned about her powers and her strange heritage. No way would he leave her in the clutches of someone like General Meade. His men had tried to kill them the day before, and as useful as Jaxon was to the Poseidon Project, Otto had no doubt the general would kill her without a second thought if she caused him trouble.

  But how could he and the rest of the Atlantis Allegiance save her? They were having trouble enough saving themselves.

  Otto noticed Vivian checking a map. She’d turned off the GPS and all the phones in the car, saying their signals could be tracked, and was relying on an old road map like his parents used before everyone got smartphones.

  A mile marker flicked by. Vivian turned her head to read it and then drove another half mile or so, slowing down all the while.

  Otto spotted a faint dirt track heading off through the desert. It was flatter there, and the track led almost invisibly to a line of low, stony hills in the distance. He noticed fresh tracks of several vehicles along the trail as they pulled in and followed it. Not too long ago, he wouldn’t have noticed a detail like that. Today his eyes were wide open. He felt that before he had joined the Atlantis Allegiance, he had been sleepwalking through life.

  Sleep. When would he get some more? When would he get a chance to rest? Perhaps in whatever godforsaken hideout that gorgeous mercenary was taking him to next. Grunt and Edward were probably already there. They had been able to take a more direct route along the interstate and state highways and not slink along half-forgotten county roads for several hundred miles.

  They approached the hills. Vivian flicked the headlights on and off three times.

  “Someone watching us?” Otto asked, keeping his voice to a whisper so as not to wake up the others.

  “Grunt or one of his buddies will be up there with a sniper’s rifle, covering the approach. His buddies are kind of jumpy.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Tohono O’odham.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a Native American tribe. Their traditional lands straddle the US-Mexico border, and they have contacts on either side. Actually, their stomping grounds are to the east, just south of Tucson and all the way to Nogales on the border, but these particular Tohono O’odham like a bit more privacy.”

  “Were they exiled from their tribe?” Otto asked.

  Vivian looked at him through the rearview mirror, one eyebrow raised. “You’re a suspicious young man, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve been hanging out with you guys too long.”

  Vivian grinned. “I don’t know the answer to your question, but I can guess. Oh, and you probably shouldn
’t ask them. They make Grunt look like a kitten.”

  “Ah…right.”

  As the car passed through a gap in the hills, Vivian leaned forward and waved to the top of the nearest summit. Otto craned his neck but couldn’t see anyone up there. Briefly, he wondered if he was in the crosshairs of Grunt’s rifle and was surprised to realize that thought didn’t bother him anymore. He’d been through too much in the past few months to be bothered by anything short of a gunfight.

  The track meandered between several hills and dipped down into a small valley. At the bottom, Otto spotted the trailers that had made up the Atlantis Allegiance base near the Nevada Test Site. Next to them were parked Grunt’s Hummer and several battered old pickup trucks.

  Movement off to his right caught his eye. A brown-skinned man wearing jeans, a checked shirt, and a cowboy hat waved a rifle over his head from the nearest hilltop.

  “Wake up, sleepyheads!” Vivian called out. “End of the line. Again. Why can’t we hide out in Vegas or New York City or someplace fun?”

  Dr. Yamazaki stirred and rubbed her eyes. Yuhle continued snoring.

  Vivian steered the Subaru down a rocky slope, the car’s undercarriage scraping stone. Even that noise didn’t wake Yuhle.

  “We’re lucky we haven’t popped a tire with all this off-roading we’ve been doing,” Otto said.

  “Special tires,” Vivian said. “You can shoot them, and they won’t go flat. All our vehicles have them, of course.”

  “Of course,” Otto muttered, shaking his head. He’d fended off an attack by government agents, and he still felt way out of his depth.

  As Vivian parked next to the trailers, several Native American men and women gathered around. All of them carried hunting rifles and had pistols holstered at their hips. They stared at the vehicle, their expressions stony and unreadable.

  Otto stepped out of the car and smiled at them uncertainly. One man stepped forward. He was shorter than Otto but twice as wide. The rifle in his hand wasn’t nearly as scary as the scowl on his face. Otto’s heart did a flip-flop when he saw the man was wearing a dark-blue baseball cap reading “FBI.”

  Otto stopped short.

  “Jim Running Horse, special agent with the FBI,” the man said. “I’ve heard someone has been setting fires around here. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  A second Native American came up behind him. He, too, wore an FBI cap and was much bigger than the first man, with a huge belly and arms the size of tree trunks.

  “I-I didn’t set any fires,” Otto said, looking back and forth between the two.

  “We have it on good authority that you’re a pyromaniac. Do you deny it?” the big one said.

  Otto groaned and rolled his eyes. “Very funny. Grunt put you up to this, didn’t he? You’re not FBI.”

  “Not FBI!” the little one shouted, making Otto jump. “Do you even know what FBI stands for?”

  “Ah…Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

  The small one made a clucking noise, as though Otto had said something stupid. He looked back at the others, who shook their heads, then took a step forward.

  “No, it stands for Fry Bread Inspector.”

  Otto stared at him.

  The giant behind him added, “Or Freaking Big Indian!”

  All the Tohono O’odham broke out in laughter. Otto felt himself turn red.

  The whine of a dirt bike made them turn. Grunt came riding down the side of the nearest hill at breakneck speed. He had a rifle strapped to his broad back and, as usual, was dressed in full camo that could barely contain the muscles that threatened to burst out of the material. The tribal tattoo on his shaven head was clearly visible even from a distance.

  Grunt skidded to a stop inches from Otto, eliciting another flinch from him and more laughter from the Tohono O’odham.

  “Hey, Pyro! How’s it hanging?”

  “Nice to see you, Grunt. We’re still alive, as you can see.”

  Grunt glanced at the car, where Dr. Yamazaki and a sleepy-eyed Yuhle were just getting out.

  “What do you think of her?” Grunt asked in a low voice.

  “Not sure, but I think she’s okay. If she was trying to con us, she would have made up a better story and hidden the tracking device better.”

  Grunt thought for a moment before saying, “Well, it looks like we’re stuck with her now. Keep an eye on her, will you?”

  Otto nodded. “So now what?”

  Vivian came up to them. “Dunno. First we have to make sure we really got away. Now that we have both scientists, that changes things. If she turns out all right, Dr. Yamazaki will be a big help to us. And that group of Atlanteans that supposedly helped her would make good allies.”

  Otto noticed that Yuhle and Dr. Yamazaki were talking a little distance apart, casting nervous glances at the rest of them. The Tohono O’odham lounged about nearby, watching, their guns in their hands.

  “But we don’t know how to get in touch with them,” Otto said. “We didn’t even know they existed until yesterday.”

  “Yeah, but it seems like they know we exist, Pyro, or at least they knew all about where the doc was laid up,” Grunt replied. “We need to see what Edward thinks.”

  “Where is Edward, anyway? Hiding in his trailer as usual?” Otto asked.

  Grunt jerked a thumb in the direction of the largest of the three trailers. A tall aerial and satellite dish took up much of the roof. “Yup. He’s got some interesting stuff to tell us, so let’s get going.”

  They headed over to the trailer, Yuhle and Dr. Yamazaki following a little distance behind. Before they had made it ten feet, Edward came bursting out of the door, waving his arms.

  “Don’t bring her close! Keep her away!”

  Everyone stopped. Otto heard some of the Tohono O’odham chuckling behind him.

  Edward was an overweight man in his twenties, pale and out of shape from spending all his time in front of the computer. He wore baggy jeans and a stained T-shirt. His belly bulged out between them. Edward blinked at the bright sunlight for a moment and then hurried back into the trailer.

  He appeared again a few seconds later, holding an oblong black box with a couple of buttons and dials on it. Shading his eyes from the sun, he walked over to Dr. Yamazaki.

  “They already searched me,” Dr. Yamazaki protested.

  “And I’m going to search you again,” Edward grumbled.

  He flicked on the device and made a slow pass from the scientist’s head to her feet, then did the same with Yuhle, who looked confused. Once he was finished, he went over to Vivian and Otto and made passes over them too.

  “You need to relax, Edward. Why would we have a tracking device?” Otto said, laughing.

  “Hey, Pyro! Glad to see you survived. She might have planted one on you, ever thought of that?” Edward said. “Hmmm, negative on all of you. Better check the car.”

  Edward wandered over to the Subaru and started to scan it. Jim Running Horse, the short Tohono O’odham who had been teasing Otto before, and who looked to be the leader, went over to Grunt and started speaking to him in Spanish. Otto was impressed to hear Grunt reply fluently. When he had first met him, Otto had figured Grunt was just a mindless killing machine, but every once in a while, he showed something deeper. Otto joined them.

  “So, um, how do you guys fit in?”

  Jim Running Horse looked him up and down. “Grunt and I were in the war together.”

  “Which war?”

  Jim Running Horse spoke to Grunt in Spanish, and they both laughed.

  Otto blushed again. Why was he always the butt of jokes with Grunt? He turned to the mercenary.

  “So, um, how much do they know?”

  “About the Atlanteans?” Jim Running Horse asked, giving him a direct gaze. “We’ve known about them a couple of thousand years longer than you have, buddy.”

  “Do you know where we can find them?” Otto asked.

  “Ha!” Jim Running Horse nudged Grunt,
who grinned back at him. “This guy’s a comedian.”

  Edward finished his scan of the car and everyone who had been on the Albuquerque mission and said, “Okay, folks, why don’t you come on into my office? I have some things to show you.”

  As everyone moved to follow, Edward turned to Dr. Yamazaki. “And where do you think you’re going?”

  Dr. Yamazaki blushed and walked away.

  “Don’t be too hard on her,” Otto said.

  “She could be one of them.”

  “More likely she’s one of us. Let’s not split the group over this, huh?”

  Edward shrugged and headed for his trailer. The Atlantis Allegiance, plus Jim Running Horse, followed. Even Yuhle, after pausing and looking at his former boss, went along.

  The interior of Edward’s trailer hadn’t changed when he picked up stakes and moved to a new spot in the middle of an empty desert. The windows were still covered with black cloth, and the only light came from three computer screens on a desk. The rest of the trailer was filled with gadgets and spare electronic parts Otto couldn’t identify. Behind Edward’s desk stood another, smaller desk on which a shortwave radio played.

  “Seven…twelve…twenty-nine…five…” a female announcer said over the hiss of static. Even though she spoke in English, she had an accent. It sounded Slavic, Russian maybe.

  Otto wrinkled his nose. Yeah, pretty much the same, right down to the smell of old socks, rotting junk food, and Edward’s unwashed body.

  Edward sat down at his desk, the three computers and their three keyboards arranged around him. He pushed aside an empty potato chip bag, started tapping away at the keyboard, and brought up several files in rapid succession. The Slavic woman droned in the background, reciting a seemingly pointless series of numbers.

  Otto and the others stood behind him, watching. Soon all three screens were filled with images of UFOs, one of Edward’s many strange obsessions. Although most of the images were the usual blurry shots, some were startlingly clear. Many of the images seemed to be of the typical disk-shaped UFOs, the old-style “flying saucers,” while others were cigar-shaped, and one computer showed a brief film clip of what looked like a glowing amoeba passing in front of some Northern Lights.