About 45 minutes later, he returned to the office and found Maya asleep on a big upholstered chair. Anthony quietly draped the blanket on the floor, settled on it, and quickly fell asleep himself.
~ - ~
There were no windows in the office and the sun did not wake them. Maya woke before Anthony, about two hours after sunrise. She shook Anthony with her foot and the two were back on the road about 20 minutes later.
The run rose to its highest point, and had started its slow descent to the west when they reached the lab outside Wayton. Anthony lowered Maya to the ground, then dismounted.
"We better go inside. Do you want to wait here? We've been gone for almost two days. If Pryce and Savane stayed here it might not be pretty."
"I'll go with you."
Anthony and Maya carefully stepped through the building entrance way, listened for movement, walked down the central hallway, and entered the lab reception area. It was just as they had left it, except the couch was gone. Anthony continued into the lab, where he found the incubator uncovered but closed. Inside, one of the four serums was gone. He was hoping to find two missing, one taken by Pryce and one by Savane. As he looked at the three serums unmoved from their position three days ago, he felt a lump in his throat.
He closed the incubator and returned to the reception area. "I'm checking the back," he said.
"I'll go with," Maya said.
The two exited the back door and found Pryce sitting on the couch, which was placed in the tall grass just off the pavement. Next to the couch was a pile of rocks, about three feet wide and 6 feet long.
Anthony and Maya joined him on the couch.
"I'm sorry, Anthony," Pryce said. "I did what you said. Waited 54 hours but she was gone before then. Can you make more of it?"
"Yes, I can make more of it. With your help, I can make lots more."
"Then you have just changed the world."
Chapter 27
June 21 was Maya's twenty-first birthday. She celebrated by netting swarming grasshoppers for Anthony, who was struggling to keep up with the demand for his serum. Using the net she made herself, she swept up thousands of grasshoppers from an open field near her home. She carefully transferred each net-full of the insects into a five gallon lidded bucket.
~ - ~
Several years ago, after she, Pryce, and Anthony successfully wheeled the incubator and natural gas tank to a house about eight miles from Wayton, word of the serum spread among dependents.
Pryce spent his time collecting grasshoppers and helping Anthony in the lab; never again did Maya tell him to collect computers for her. She never again saw the beach house south of the salmon river, never again ate her favorite food, and never once regretted it.
At first, one or two runaway dependents would arrive at the door of their new house. After some weeks, they arrived in small groups. As the months progressed, and word spread, the groups grew larger. They all searched for the same thing. Life, release from the fear of missing their next transfusion, independence. A restoration of their freedom, lost to the mutants who abused the power of their mutant blood.
One day, those many years ago, a scout arrived at their new house to collect pints of mutant blood and to investigate rumors that had reached M/RCC of a serum that freed dependents from the chains that bound them to their mutant keepers. Pryce captured him. The next group of dependents who arrived at the beach house agreed to hold the scout until Anthony, Maya, and Pryce relocated. And so their nomadic life began, moving from house to house to stay one step ahead of M/RCC and the power-hungry mutants who ran it. Always one step ahead.
~ - ~
When the bucket was full, Maya placed it on the ground, leaned over and scratched the scar on her left ankle, caused when the tracking ankle ring was heated and then cooled until it shattered. It reminded Maya, as it usually did, of the day she received her first ankle ring. On that day, while she selfishly lay on the beach sunning herself, Pryce and Savane buried Gwen. Now, as she stood in the open field collecting grasshoppers, Maya was glad that it was she who buried Savane next to Gwen.
And although Savane was lost, Maya was glad that she is helping prevent the needless death of others.
Maya glanced upward to the sky, which was streaked in cheerful yellows and greens. She picked up the bucket, put her ear to the lid, listened momentarily to the grasshopper percussion, and turned to walk home.
~ - ~
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to Christina Adams. Without her motivation, this book would not have been conceived or written.
Thanks also to Mount Zion United Methodist Church, Bel Air Maryland for the generous use of their facility.
COMING SOON
Watch for The Power to Live, coming soon from Thomas Porter. Two sisters from Sinaloa are sold into the sex trade and enslaved in a San Francisco night club. When the younger sister is sold and the two are separated, in their desperate attempts to reunite each discovers powers she didn't know she had. The power to see. The power to change. The power to kill. The power to live.
Mutant Blood Page 11
