The question was answered for me. They stopped in front of our car, stopping in the light of the headlights. The sun was coming up, a soft haze to the right of us. One of the men, the one who had been waving to us before, motioned for us to get out of the car.
“I’m getting out of the car,” Ash said, not taking his eyes off those watching us. “Don’t get out. I’m going to come around the other side to get you.”
“Ash, you don’t…you don’t have to do that,” I protested softly, meeting his eyes.
“Stay in the car, Z, okay?” he asked again, and I nodded, watching as he opened the door slowly and got out of the car. He walked across the front of the jeep and came to my side. I held my breath as he did so, watching the eyes of the men in front of us, as they too watched him. He came up to my door and opened it. “Ready?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m ready.” I unbuckled the seat belt and lowered myself out of the car. Ash shut the door behind me and laced his fingers through mine. We walked slowly toward the men, though Ash made sure he was a few steps ahead of me, shielding me from the strange men in front of us.
“Hello there!” The older man, the one who had been in the passenger side window, was the one who called out to us. He waved his hand in greeting.
I looked up at Ash, and we both looked back at the man, not saying anything.
“The name’s Rich,” he said, putting his hand down. “Don’t be frightened. I’m here to help you. I’m from the government. We’ve been looking for you.”
“Looking for us?” I managed to squeak out. “Why would you be looking for us?”
“Well, because you’re survivors!” He took a step closer to us, holding his hands out. “We’ve been looking for survivors all over the place. There aren’t many of you left, and we want to be able to take care of you.”
I thought about this for a long moment. He was dressed perfectly, in a suit, and I could see the gun strapped to his waist, just underneath his jacket. “You’re from the government?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“Yes, of course. The government has managed to put together a small force to find the survivors, bring them together and keep them safe so we can start over.”
“Where?” Ash cut in. “Where are you bringing them?”
“There’s a place in southwest Colorado that everyone is heading to, and it’s a safe place,” he explained.
Ash and I exchanged looks, and I knew we were both thinking the same thing: Sanctuary. Could it possibly be real? Could they have found us before we found them?”
“How far away is it?” I asked, feeling a sense of relief.
“We’re not too far out of Deer Trail, so maybe six or seven hours. You two should grab your stuff, and we can take you there. What are your names?” he asked.
I hesitated. “Zoey. This is Ash.”
“Zoey and Ash,” he said, a smile on his face. “It’s great to meet you. I’m glad you two are safe. Grab your stuff, and we can head out.” He started walking backward to the car, and I felt a sense of unease return. This was too easy. He expected us to come with him, readily, no questions asked. And it still didn’t explain why they felt the need to ram their car into ours.
“Well, we do have our car,” I said, trying to sound breezy and free of panic. “We could follow you down there.” He met my eyes, frowning, and I continued. “We have a lot packed in the car, things maybe you could use at this…at this place, and I would hate for a working vehicle to go to waste.”
The frown remained on his features. “I don’t know if that would be wise, Miss…”
“It’s just Zoey,” Ash said, tugging my arm to pull me closer to him. “And I don’t understand. What’s the harm in us driving our own car?”
“There’s no harm…Ash, was it?” Rich said with a small smile on his face. I shivered. The smile was wide, charming, but it didn’t match the darkness in his eyes. “I just think it would be safer for you to travel in our vehicle. Don’t you think I’m right, Crosby?”
Rich’s counterpart, a large, muscled man who looked massively bored, grunted in response. He sighed, looking around.
“Well, perhaps we might just continue on our own,” Ash said, pleasantly. I could see the strain in his eyes, the tightness of his mouth. “We appreciate your help, but we’ve been surviving well so far, and I’d feel better if it were just the two of us.” I nodded in agreement.
Rich sighed, looking disappointed. “I thought you were going to make this easy, kids. I so hoped you would make this easy.”
“Make what easy?” I asked, suddenly terrified. Both Rich and Crosby reached for something in their pockets, and I reached for my gun before remembering. They were in the car. They were in the car.
They didn’t pull out weapons. Instead, they both reached for…a needle? It was a syringe of some sort, and I remembered the men coming to get Madison after the concert that night. I stepped closer to Ash and his arms went around me.
“We could do this the easy way or the hard way,” Rich said, holding up the syringe. He sighed again. “God, I hate sounding like a cliché.”
“Can we just do this already? I’m bored,” Crosby said, tearing open the package and looking at the needle carefully.
Rich waved his hand lazily, and Crosby came toward us, right to Ash. Of course he would. Ash was tall, over six feet, and muscular from playing baseball and football, and he was looming over me protectively. Of course he would be seen as the threat.
Crosby reached for Ash, and I went ducking under his arm, and right to Rich. Rich looked surprised as I threw a punch straight at his nose, and he went down to the ground. He cried out in pain, his hands coming up to cover his face. I turned around and saw Ash taking Crosby down. “Ash, Ash, let’s…”
He looked up from Crosby’s body, and his eyes grew wide. “Zoey!”
An arm wrapped tightly around me, yanking me backward into something solid. I felt the slight pinprick of the needle against the skin of my neck, and I froze. Ash had frozen too, his hand still in a tight fist above Crosby’s stirring head.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Rich said, his voice a breath on my ear.
“What is that?” Ash asked. “What’s in the needle?”
“It’ll just knock her out, but I don’t want to have to do that. I’d rather have you awake when we get to Sekhmet.”
“Sec-met?” Ash sounded it out, the word unfamiliar on his lips. It felt…familiar to me, like I had heard it before but couldn’t quite place where. “What’s that?”
“It’s where we are taking you, young Ash,” Rich explained. “It’s a place…it’s a place of dreams.” He pulled me closer up against him, and I flinched. “Would you like to dream, Zoey?”
“Leave her alone!” Ash dropped his grip on Crosby. He stepped over Crosby’s body and came running at the two of us, and the last thing I remembered was the needle piercing my skin, and then the darkness hit quicker than I could have ever anticipated.
I WAS AWAKE, BUT I couldn’t open my eyes. Sounds surrounded me. I heard whispers of unfamiliar voices and the squeaks of shoes against slick floors. My eyelids felt heavy when I tried to open them. There was a bad taste in my mouth, and I licked my lips, which felt dry. I tried to lift my hands thinking that maybe I could peel my eyelids open, but they wouldn’t move. They were held down by something.
“I think she’s waking up,” a hushed voice said with a slight accent. It was familiar, like I had heard it on the radio or over the intercom at school. It was not someone I knew. But it enticed me to try and wake up.
My eyelids opened, and for a moment, all I saw was white. The lights were burning bright, making me feel fuzzy and disoriented. I blinked a few times and then looked around at what was around me.
It looked like a doctor’s office but not quite like any doctor’s office that I had ever been in before. The counters were a spotless white, and I was strapped to a chair, like the one I sat in when I went to the dentist. There were comp
uters, machines set up all over the place. There were a handful of people in the room sitting at the computers; one of them was in front of a large touchscreen looking at a very complicated chart. An IV was attached to my hand, and there was a consistent beep ringing through the hush of the room, sounding very much like a heart monitor. Were they monitoring my heart?
The strangest part of the room though was on the ceiling, right above my head. It was an incredibly large lion’s head attached to the body of a female, with the letters SF boldly intertwined around her body. I looked around and noticed it on the computers, the machines. It was everywhere, like a symbol, like a mascot.
I didn’t know where I was, except that I felt like I was in a weird sci-fi movie or an alien was about to burst from my chest or something. What I did know was that I was exhausted. Even if I hadn’t been strapped down, I didn’t know that I could move my arms or legs. They felt heavy, like they weren’t even a part of my body. I felt dead. Was I dead?
“You’re not dead, Miss Valentine.”
I jumped. Had I actually asked that question out loud? I turned toward the voice and was met with a face, a face that was blurry in my memory, but I knew that I had seen it before.
It was a woman, probably in her late fifties to early sixties. Her skin was dark, the color of melted chocolate on a hot summer day, and her hair was deep black, impossibly black, except for the streaks of silver that weaved through it. She was tall, taller than most women that I had met in my life, but it also could be the way she carried herself, poised, ready, standing with her feet together, examining me carefully.
“How do you know my name?” I asked, my voice rough. My tongue felt like sandpaper, and I was having a hard time getting the words from my brain to my lips.
“It is amazing how easily you can find a person just by taking one simple fingerprint,” she answered, stepping closer to me. One of the other people in the room, a young man, came up to her and whispered in her ear. She nodded, and he immediately turned and walked away.
My fingerprint. Searching for the memory in my brain was like fighting my way through an impenetrable fog. And then I remembered. I had been fingerprinted when I was about thirteen years old, as a precaution. Of course. Everything my dad had done in my life had been a precaution of some sort. “Where am I?” I managed to ask.
“You are at Sekhmet Facilities, Miss Valentine, in the medical rooms,” she answered. She had an accent, British with a touch of something else, something unfamiliar to me.
There was that word again: Sekhmet. “What is…Sekhmet? Sekhmet Facilities?” Each word came out carefully. I wondered if this was what it was like to learn to speak. I was unsure of each word that came from my mouth.
“Sekhmet Facilities is my research institute. We do quite a variety of things here,” she explained. “Do you know who I am? Well, no, of course not. You probably don’t.” She laughed, and it sounded beautiful, full of chimes and bells. I had never felt so charmed by a laugh before. “My name is Doctor Cylon. Razi Cylon.”
I squinted at her for a moment, and it dawned on me where I had seen her before: a news conference on my television so many months before. “You’re from the CDC. I remember you on the news.”
She hesitated, biting her full bottom lip. “Well,” she said, carefully, “it is true that I was once affiliated with the CDC, but my primary focus is Sekhmet and the objectives of the company as a whole.”
She was speaking, but her words made no sense. She raised a hand to my face, her nails a bright crimson red, to brush back a strand of my hair and tuck it behind my ear. I recoiled from her touch. Her hands were cold, unnaturally cold, and the mere touch of her skin on mine had sent shivers up my spine.
“I don’t…I don’t understand.”
Dr. Cylon motioned for someone, and they immediately brought a chair and placed it next to mine. She lowered herself into it gracefully. “Have you ever heard the story of the goddess Sekhmet, Miss Valentine?”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t think so.”
“I am not surprised. I know that they tend to focus on the Greek mythologies in most American schools. The goddess Sekhmet is an Egyptian goddess, protector and warrior for the pharaohs. She was also a goddess of healing, very powerful. In fact, her name is derived, often times, as meaning ‘one with power.’ She was fierce, often depicted as a lioness. She’s a good likeness for the cause, wouldn’t you say?”
I was even more confused than I had been before her explanation, though it did explain the weird half-cat/half-woman that was all over the room. “I don’t understand,” I repeated. “What cause?”
She stood up abruptly. “I’ll show you.” She leaned over me and pressed her fingertips to the cool strips of metal that were encasing my wrists. She paused before unlocking them. “I must warn you, Miss Valentine, that if you try anything, there are several people in this room alone that would be on you in an instant. I would not bother to try.”
I nodded quickly. I hadn’t even thought of fighting. Was there a reason to fight? I couldn’t even think straight. There was a pounding in my head, and I still felt like I was stuffed with cotton. And I was thirsty, incredibly thirsty. I was unstrapped in an instant, and I sat up, rubbing my fingers over the sore spots of my wrists. I had no idea where I was. I had no idea what Sekhmet Facilities were or what their cause was. I had no idea…
“Ash!” I blurted out abruptly. “Where’s Ash?”
“Your companion is perfectly safe. He is in another wing of the facility,” Dr. Cylon answered vaguely, leading me through the room and out the door. We walked down a long, blinding white hallway, and I shivered. It was freezing. I realized that I was no longer wearing my own clothes. I was instead in an outfit not too different from those that nurses wore in hospitals, in plain shades of gray and brown. I had a bulky gray tunic that fit snug across my chest, and baggy brown pants. They were thin but comfortable, and yet I still felt slightly like a prison inmate.
“I want to see him,” I demanded, though my voice sounded weak even to my own ears.
“All in good time, Miss Valentine.”
I pressed my palms tight against my eyes. “Stop calling me that. My name is Zoey.”
“If that’s what you prefer,” Dr. Cylon said agreeably. We had reached a door, at the end of the hallway. She pressed her fingertip to the pad, and it blinked green. She reached for the doorknob and ushered me inside.
Just inside the door was a pair of Awakened.
I rushed backward and my back smacked into the door. My hand reached for the handle, and I turned, but it wouldn’t budge. It was locked, and I had no way of getting out. I reached for my gun, but of course, I didn’t have it. It was probably still in the Jeep, lost in the middle of Colorado.
“Relax; they cannot harm you,” Dr. Cylon said, standing very close to them. She pointed to the ground, and I noticed what I had missed before. The two Awakened were chained, their ankles attached to a chain that was hooked to the ground. They had no more than a foot or two of room to move.
“Why…why are they here?” I asked, shaking. I didn’t move from the door. The two Awakened were staring at me intently, salivating over the sight of me. I waited for them to say something, anything, but they didn’t. All I could hear was the harshness of their breathing.
“You wanted to see the cause, did you not?” the doctor asked, one perfect eyebrow raised in confusion.
“I…well, yes, but…” I sputtered. I turned away from the Awakened and met her eyes. They were a deep, dark brown, nearly black, and framed by the thickest eyelashes I had ever seen.
She gestured toward the Awakened. “This is the cause. This is my cause.”
I BLINKED A FEW TIMES at her, looking between her and the docile Awakened. I kept waiting for them to speak or attack. They were so calm; I had never seen them so calm. “I don’t know what you mean. The Awakened are your cause.”
An amused smile crossed her lips. “Ah, yes, the Awakened. That is what the civilians
have taken to calling my creations. I admit it is better than calling them by their proper name: SK-521. Much more of a mouthful, I suppose.”
“Your creations?” I asked horrified. “You created them?”
“Well, of course I did,” she said, looking over at the creatures adoringly. “They have been a central part of the plan, of my cause.”
“They’ve killed so many people,” I said, my voice shaking, thinking of the Awakened that had torn both of my parents to pieces. “They’ve torn the world apart.”
“Don’t give them more credit than they deserve, Zoey,” she said, her voice suddenly harsh. “They are my creation. They are acting on my will. I am the one with the power and the control.” She pulled something out of her pocket, a small tablet. Using her finger, she navigated through a series of menus before selecting a single button.
It was like a trigger. The two Awakened chained to the floor were suddenly loud, demanding, and struggling against their bonds. They reached for us, their voices a high-pitched wail in the echoing room.
“I just want to eat! Please, please let me eat. Her flesh smells so good. Please, oh god, please, just one bite!” The closest one to me, a male, was reaching, stretching with all his might toward me, his black eyes focused on me. I bit my hand hard, struggling to keep the bile from rising in my throat.
Dr. Cylon watched them for a moment before pressing on her tablet again, and they once again became subdued. I looked over at her in shock, and she smiled, quite triumphant.
“I control them all. Would you like to see?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she brought up a screen on the tablet, one that looked like a rough map, with blinking numbers across it. “There are groups all over the country, and I control them. I can make them hungry or docile. I can make them attack. Most of the ones out in the open are free. The ones I’ve kept to myself in here…well, let’s just say it’s a bit distracting to have them wailing about all the time.”
The Awakened Page 21
