Tremor

by Patrick Carman

  “Getting any sleep?” Andre asked.

  Why is he here? Dylan wondered. Alone, unprotected?

  “Just resting my eyes,” Dylan said as he stood. He felt a deep thud of pain in his rib cage. “Training around here is intense.”

  Andre shook his head.

  “Did you really think going after Wade would help our situation? I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “They were throwing rocks at me. I thought it was the least I could do.”

  A brief but meaningful smile played at the edges of Andre’s mouth.

  “You were already on his bad side. Showing him up didn’t help your cause. They shouldn’t have gone after you so aggressively, but I had to see what you could take. You impressed me until you tried to kill my son. Brawn is fine. Brains are better.”

  Dylan didn’t have an answer, so he let the accusation hang in the air. “How long are you going to keep me locked up in here?”

  Andre shuffled his feet back and forth, stared at the concrete floor. “I appreciate you coming here. Seeing you has been . . . unforeseen, as you might imagine. I want to tell you something.”

  “So tell me,” Dylan said. He was listening to Faith and Hawk, trying to figure out what was going on as they pressed into the sound rings, while pretending there were no voices in his head. It was challenging, to say the least.

  “The world is about to change. I mean really change.”

  Dylan didn’t want to sound too curious, but this sounded big.

  “In what way?”

  Andre couldn’t help smiling more broadly as he thought about what was coming.

  “The States are not taking the approach Hotspur Chance envisioned. Tomorrow begins a process of change, one I hope you’ll appreciate. It’s been a long time coming.”

  Andre stood and picked up the stool as if he was going to leave. Something told Dylan he might not have many more chances to talk with him privately. Dylan’s mind drifted to Hawk, whom he had come to love like a little brother.

  “What about Intels?”

  “Intels?”

  Andre hadn’t come down to the cell block to talk about that.

  “Why’d Hotspur develop Intels? I’ve got a friend who’s one. If I ever see him again, I’d like to tell him why he is the way he is.”

  Andre thought for a moment, weighed the risk, and determined that there was none.

  “The Intel project was created purely for processing power, nothing more. Technically speaking, they were and still are human computers. They have a part of Hotspur in them, a sliver of his DNA.”

  “So they’re clones?” Dylan asked, hoping he was dead wrong.

  “No, not clones. Recipients of some approximation of Hotspur’s intellect. The first ones were more closely connected. He could control them more readily, put them on complex tasks without having to spend years explaining things to them. Anything left over, I mean, any offsprings beyond the originals, are considerably removed from the hosts, as it were. They’re smart, but they’re not off the charts, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Are you an Intel?”

  “Why, yes, I am. In fact, I was the first.”

  Dylan took a moment to respond as he listened to the data coming in. Faith is doing what? Has she gone crazy?

  “Some of them don’t do so well when they get to be about your age. Wires get crossed, as it were. Others see no effects at all. It’s random, I suppose. The older ones, like me, well . . . let’s just say it can get complicated.”

  Andre’s eyes dimmed and his lips became a thin, straight line. Of course he knew what could happen to an Intel’s mind. He knew all too well.

  “Your friend, he’s farther down the line,” Andre said. “He’ll be fine, just like Clara. Tell him not to worry when you see him again.”

  Dylan felt the sincerity in Andre’s tone. He also got the feeling that the subject of Intels was something difficult for his dad to talk about.

  Andre started walking away, thinking about how he sometimes awoke in the warden’s chamber as if from a dream. At times minutes had passed, or whole hours. It was happening to him, too. Like Hawk’s parents, Andre was slowly shutting down.

  He called back to Dylan the line he often repeated over and over in his head like a funeral song.

  “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.” Dylan sat on the cold stone floor of the cell and genuinely began to wonder if his father was going crazy.

  Another thought entered his mind, one he hadn’t allowed any room for in hours and hours because it was a thought that wasn’t going to do him any good either way. It was the kind of thought that could trip him up if he wasn’t careful, a thing good soldiers weren’t supposed to stew on. He was doing what he was told, following instructions in a plan he didn’t fully understand. But now as he felt the walls closing in and time compressing, he let this thought wash over him like a suffocating wave on the sea.

  Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good idea after all.

  part three

  STATE OF CHANCE

  Chapter 12

  Departing Is Such Sweet Sorrow

  It was the night before a long-awaited plan would be put into action.

  Faith, the one who had a secret that could turn the tide, thought of Gretchen and Clara Quinn. Everything else Faith might have contemplated was blotted out under an inky stain of Gretchen’s and Clara’s presence in her mind. There was no Dylan, no Hawk or Clooger. There was no murdered friend or lost parents or even thoughts of revenge against Wade. On this night, Faith ached with an all-consuming desire to astonish Gretchen Quinn, to dominate her and ultimately to destroy her. And when she finished with Gretchen, Clara would be next.

  Clooger had a secret, too, one that only he and Hawk knew about. It was a secret that had the power to divide the team when it was revealed, and its revealing would be soon. It wasn’t as priceless or valuable as Faith’s second pulse, but it had a deceitful quality he worried about constantly. The secret was not that he and Meredith were much closer than anyone probably imagined; it was bigger than that. His thoughts drifted away from the secret to Faith Daniels, reckless and untamable, and he worried for the future of the world. Why was something so important given to someone so ill equipped? It was a conundrum he would never understand. It was he, not she, who should have a second pulse. Imagine what he could accomplish with such a thing? He thought of Faith’s admission, that she’d seen Wade not once but twice. Unbelievable. And he wondered if the information she’d been given was part of a sophisticated cauldron of lies, a deception coming to a boil. He hoped it was not.

  Hawk felt best when he was inside the HumGee, where two of his best friends in the world—Faith and Clooger—were lying awake, not speaking. Faith was in the far back, the soft glow of her Tablet bouncing off the ceiling. Clooger stared into space in the backseat. Hawk shared a secret with Clooger he wished he didn’t have to carry, but there was nothing he could do about it. Soon enough, the secret would be no more, and he would be forgiven. He thought of his parents, his mom in particular on that night. She had been a good mom while it had lasted, always there to take care of him. The last year had been the hardest, and lately it was as if she no longer existed. He pulled up a picture of her on his Tablet, allowed himself a few brief moments of melancholy, and went back to work on a complicated and time-sensitive task Faith had given him. That was when he heard the voice in his head for the very first time. It was not a voice he recognized, and the message was confusing: The day of my departure draws near. And with the sound of the voice, he knew a sudden and terrible truth: the slow unwinding of his Intel mind had begun. At some point in the near or distant future, he might hear nothing but the voice.

  Meredith knew more than most and a lot more than she was telling. She felt the planet coming apart that night, a tender tearing at the seams that would eventually split the world wide-open. She worried about her son and Clooger the most, and Hawk, too, for in his
absence, Hawk’s parents had both died within an hour of each other. They’d all known it was coming, but it was still a bad thing. Hawk needed to be told, and soon. Meredith tried not to think of Faith; it only put her in a sour mood. She tried to remember the old days, the old songs, the years in the desert when they thought they were saving the world.

  Clara lay pleased in her bed, rolling a series of thoughts over in her head, examining each as if it were a rat on the dissection table. The next twenty-four hours would alter her situation either a little or a lot. She was determined that it would be more, not less. Could Faith weaken Gretchen just enough, catch her off guard and inflict a little damage? If so, Clara could finish her off. And the bonus, which was delicious to think about, was Faith Daniels. She’d be dead for sure, her death orchestrated by Clara and carried out by Gretchen. Did it get any better? She didn’t think so.

  Wade was in his own quarters, which had at one time been a series of four prison cells at the far end of E block. There was nothing homey about the setup: a bed, a weight room, a place to throw all his dirty laundry. He was on his seventy-fifth pull-up, his mind adrift in the searing pain across his shoulder blades. A powerhouse of muscles and bones, that’s what he was. He was done feeling emotions, unless they were emotions that could get him what he wanted. When he finished his workout and sat on the stone slab that served as his bed, Faith’s smile flashed in his memory, cutting like a knife into his heart. Damn that girl.

  Gretchen felt a heightened alertness she hadn’t experienced for many months. It surprised her, this feeling of clarity and calm that had left her slowly in the course of days and days of planning. Now, with the deed so close she could touch it, she thought of how different her life would be. How long she’d waited, patiently suffering incompetence piled like cordwood in every direction she turned. At last the thing would be done. She thought of her part and wished it could be different, but she knew it was the safest, best course of action. Her part would take her far, far away from the thing that had to be done. She would be blamed for nothing. She readied herself in the highly unlikely event of an encounter with a second pulse of whom she wasn’t already aware. Mostly, she worried about Meredith. Maybe she had always been a second pulse but never said. Maybe she would be waiting, come morning. She had a way of showing up at the worst possible time.

  Andre’s mind, unlike all the others’, wandered. He’d been having more and more problems lately, especially at night. The voice in his head was, at times, unrelenting. There were many instructions, many commands. The days weren’t so bad; somehow the light gave him clarity and he could think again as he once had. Such brilliant thoughts! And so many of them, filed one on top of the other. He wondered now if it had been too many thoughts, too fast. He might have wanted to pace himself, spend more time relaxing, less time processing. But here he was, the day upon him and his mind falling to pieces. It was not the timing for which he had hoped.

  And Dylan. He was alone and thinking, too.

  He had never needed much sleep, not even as a small child. A memory of sitting on a bed in a room at the age of two or three was rolling around in his thoughts. He was having a long conversation with a stuffed animal that had seen better days. It was a gray rabbit with matted fur and a missing ear, although strictly speaking, the ear wasn’t entirely gone from the scene. Dylan had kept it under his pillow or, if he was wearing pants, in a pocket. Looking back on such memories, Dylan was surprised by what an old soul he’d been. How was it that he could sit up and hold long conversations in the middle of the night with a one-eared rabbit while his mother slept in the bed next to his?

  Years later he was still in the habit of sleeping at odd hours or not sleeping at all, a valuable trait when he found himself training Faith while she slept. All those months at the bedroom window watching her like a phantom, the glass a fragile barrier between two worlds. How often had he thought about the moment when there would be nothing left to separate them from each other? When he could reach out and touch not only her mind, but her whole body as well?

  He was sitting in the cell at the prison thinking about those long nights when he watched Faith float around the room on the power of his mind. In his hand he held the tattered ruins of the rabbit ear, rubbing the stubble of fur that remained between his fingers. He’d managed to keep it hidden away all those years. Early morning was dawning outside, but he’d already been awake for hours, thinking about Faith and Clooger and Hawk, about Meredith. What he wanted to do was call Faith on the sound ring—just to hear her voice would be a comfort—but instead he sat, cross-legged and stooped over, and felt the floor move under his feet.

  It began as a soft, frothing sort of rumble deep underground, like the birth of a fissure cracking across the earth. A tremor.

  This can’t be good, Dylan thought, standing up and stuffing the rabbit ear into his pocket. He held on to the bars of the cell, glancing back and forth down the murky hallway, and wished he could be set free.

  Faith was the first to hear the earsplitting sound of cinder and rebar and earth struggling against one another. Dawn was barely upon the woods, but her vantage point was high on the hill. Whatever was happening down below in the prison yard, she was in a position to see it if she exited the HumGee and flew just above the tree line. She went to rouse Clooger and found that he was already gone. She should have known—there was no snoring—but she was even more surprised to find that Hawk was missing also. For a brief moment she was terrified by the idea that Wade and Clara had come in the night and taken them while she slept. She rolled over into the backseat, pulled the handle on the door, and kicked the door open.

  Outside, she found the camouflage tarp missing and began to think she was in a dream. Where were they? Where was the tarp? Why was the earth under her feet rumbling?

  Faith burst up in the air, sick and tired of holding back her power and panicked at the idea of losing her friends. When she cleared the tree line she found Hawk sitting on Clooger’s shoulders, the two of them staring off toward the prison.

  “You’re all right!” Faith said.

  Clooger and Hawk didn’t answer; they were slack jawed and staring out across the trees. The sound out in the open air was even louder: a grinding of stone and metal, a thunderous explosion of fire.

  The entire prison was being lifted out of the ground. The basement floors were ripped free as the whole structure rose up in the air. Three figures were flying overhead in the sky like flies over a corpse, moving and weaving for position: Wade, Clara, and Gretchen.

  “That’s impossible,” Faith said. It was as big as a Walmart, and the entire thing had been lifted off the ground. Gas pipes, ripped in two, exploded in bursts of orange and yellow. The flames made it look as if the prison were some kind of oblong rocket, launching into the sky on its way to outer space. Chunks of metal and rebar and piping fell from the underbelly of the prison. A section of basement, which had been carried up with the rest, broke free and crashed into the ground below. Before Faith knew it, the entire formation was at eye level and moving up in the air at a steady clip, rocks and roots and chunks of debris tailing its departure. It halted abruptly, shaking the last of the big stuff free from its undercarriage, and then it started moving toward the woods.

  “Dylan?” Faith said, holding her sound ring. “Dylan, please—just tell me you’re okay.”

  A pause, then he was there, and they could all hear him: “Still in the cell, but I think we’re moving. Can you see what’s going on out there?”

  “The whole prison is airborne!” Faith said.

  “That’s impossible,” Dylan said. “No way they can lift that much.”

  “Apparently it is possible, because it’s happening,” Hawk explained.

  The prison was nearly over their heads, and Clooger, with Hawk on his shoulders, began moving slowly below the tree line. “Better get down.”

  Faith followed, but they remained right at the top edge of the green-tipped firs, holding steady. As it passed over, t
he prison reminded Faith of Darth Vader’s ship coming ominously into view. It cast a massive shadow, blotting out the morning sun as it moved silently across their field of vision. Random pieces of metal and stone and clumps of dirt fell like rain as Clooger and Faith dodged this way and that. The sound of wreckage hitting the HumGee below tinged into the open air of the woods like a broken church bell.

  “That’s a few million pounds flying through the air,” Hawk said. He was as surprised as anyone, because his calculations put the event somewhere between completely ridiculous and totally impossible.

  Clooger took his sound ring between his fingers and spoke. The situation had turned highly unpredictable and out of his control. It was time to let the secret he and Hawk had shared be known whether he liked it or not.

  “Mother ship, engage,” he said.

  Faith glanced back and forth between Clooger and the prison moving through the air.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “Mother ship, engage!” Clooger yelled the command this time, something they weren’t supposed to do to one another unless they had to. Everyone else contained in the ring of sound—Faith, Dylan, and Hawk—they were all subjected to the siren sound of Clooger’s voice at high volume, bouncing off the walls of their heads.

  “Take it down a notch, big guy,” Hawk said from his perch on Clooger’s shoulders. “Just give her a second.”

  Faith knew who was coming online before the voice crackled to life in her ear. She was, to put it mildly, not pleased.

  “Give me status,” Meredith said. “Everyone else, stay quiet and don’t do anything unpredictable. Clooger, report.”

  Faith floated to within a foot of Hawk and glared at him. “You could have at least told me she had a sound ring. Really?”