“Run Kizzy,” Josephine said, pushing the girl forward and shielding her with her own body.
They ran towards the trap door as the mutant busted up through the floor. The landing shook like crazy and the mutant nearly fell, but steadied himself. With a large, meaty hand he ripped the railing from the walkway and hurled it at Kizzy. Josephine pushed Kizzy out of the way as the railing pierced her through her abdomen, pinning her to the wall.
“No!” Leo screamed. He shot at the mutant who was pushed further off balance. The unsteady section of the landing broke off and toppled down to the factory floor below.
Leo ran and knelt next to Josephine.
“You’re alright, you’re alright,” he said.
She looked at him, with wide shaking eyes and tried to smile. “No, I’m not.”
“We can get you out of here,” Leo said. He tried to pull the metal rod out from the wall. Josephine yelped. The end of the railing was hooked in the wall.
Patel had come down from the surface, but stopped halfway and covered his mouth in shock.
Josephine looked down. “I’m losing a lot of blood.”
“We can get you fixed up,” Leo said. He looked back to Patel. “Can’t we?”
Patel just stood there frozen.
The mutants were climbing up the walls and the stairs, they would be upon them at any moment.
“There’s nothing you can do,” Josephine said. “You have to get Kizzy out of here.”
“I’m not leaving,” Leo announced.
“Take them out of here,” Josephine commanded Patel and tossed her old lab partner her backpack.
“Go without me,” Leo yelled to Patel and Kizzy.
“Leave me,” Josephine pleaded. She took Leo’s gun from his holster and aimed it at him.
“You’re gonna have to shoot me,” he said.
“Kizzy needs you,” Josephine said.
“I need you.”
“You survived without me.”
“Yeah, but it was hell.”
“Make it better,” Josephine said. “Be Kizzy’s father.”
“There was never anyone else Jo. There was never anyone else.”
“Don’t be sad Leo.”
Leo leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. The first kiss they had had in 18 years. The first kiss anyone had had in 18 years.
Patel and Kizzy pulled him away. Leo reached out his arm to his love. They took him up the stairs and left Josephine alone.
It was in that moment Josephine realized with the tiniest spark of joy that the kiss hadn’t killed either of them. She had fixed the world by a very small degree. But here she would die. She had never lived life fully, since she had never had any children of her own. She had never sent her genes forward through time in the form of offspring. Her purpose was unfulfilled. The mutants finally reached the landing and ran past her up to the surface. In that tortured moment she realized that these were her children, the results of her labor. What had she done to them?
She was thirsty as hell. Her thoughts grew further and further apart. Pain and blankness filled the spaces in between. She gasped and the life left her body.
Outside Kizzy and Patel carried Leo away from the trap door. He whimpered and his steps were slow. The will to live had left his body.
“How are we going to get anywhere without a car?” Kizzy asked.
There came the honking of a car horn as the constable pulled up in her jeep. Murray was in the passenger seat.
“Where’s Josephine?” the constable asked upon seeing it was just the three of them.
Patel shook his head as Kizzy got in the backseat.
“Oh god,” Leo said. Standing still outside the car. “We just left her there.”
“It’s what she wanted,” Patel said. “Now get in.”
“I don’t give a damn what she wanted,” Leo said and began to punch the roof of the car.
“Leo please stop!” Patel said.
He punched harder. “We just left her there!”
“Leo please,” Patel said. “Get in the car.”
“Officer Cartwright,” the constable said. “I order you to get in the jeep.”
But Leo was beginning to lose it. He yelled at the top of his lungs covered his face. The mutants were coming up from the trap door.
“Dad,” Kizzy said.
The man looked up at her, his eyes wild and bloodshot. His face red. The word had somehow calmed him.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Kizzy said. “Please get in.”
Patel took advantage of the calm in the storm and injected Leo with sedatives he had taken from Josephine’s backpack. The man collapsed. Kizzy and Patel pulled him into the backseat.
The mutants burst up from the ground and more were coming from the city. The constable floored it and sped out towards the canal door.
“I hear you have an ability with the crows,” Patel said.
“Yes,” Kizzy said, suddenly remembering that Diego was somewhere here in the city. “And I have to help a friend.”
“We don’t have time for that,” the constable said.
“We don’t need time,” Patel answered, handing Kizzy the crow suit he had smuggled from Morrigan’s church. He took the cross USB from Josephine’s backpack and plugged it in.
Kizzy struggled her way into the leather suit. It was shaped like a crow’s head and beak, with flat, glass plates for the eyes.
“I’m turning it on,” Patel said.
It front of Kizzy’s face was a screen. In black and white she was able to see in hundreds of smaller screens of what the crows in the area were able to see. It all seemed so much farther away somehow. She moved her arms and tried to feel what she wanted the crows to feel. The vision was foggy on the glass and the movement was clunky. As if she was moving within a suit of armor rather than just with her own arms and legs.
“How do I make them do anything?” Kizzy asked.
“It’s emphatically controlled,” Patel said. “And you use the arms to guide them.”
“Oh, then it is working, just not as well as I thought it would.”
“What did you expect?” Patel said.
Kizzy didn’t say anything. She just used the awkward controls to fly the crows above the city.
She couldn’t find Diego or Mrs. Palmer anywhere near the warehouses. What she could see was the entire mutated army of men pursuing them nearly as fast as the car was driving.
“You have to drive a little faster,” Kizzy said and took the cross from the crow suit with a rag and put it in her pocket. She would find Diego later.
22
They sat around the table in the tent outside the Uncle facility. But this time Josephine wasn’t there and the emptiness was evident. She had been the idea person. In her stead was a broken police officer laying unconscious in a nearby cot, a scientist with a conscience in a cruel world, a constable who had refused to break the law until the law had been completely broken, a computer expert in a time where computers were either extinct or impossibly complex, and Kizzy, a girl who was refusing to face the reality that soon the fate of humankind could be resting on her shoulders.
“Where are the mutants now?” Patel asked.
“Oak Ridge,” the Constable said, reading her radar screen. “They’ve come 10 miles in half an hour. That gives us another half an hour before they get here.”
“I have reason to believe,” Patel announced to the rest of the table, “that Uncle may be orchestrating this entire situation. The only thing is, we still need answers from him, so shutting him down becomes tricky.”
“Can’t we just pull the plug on him?” the constable asked.
“It’s not that simple,” Patel answered. “He doesn’t need any more power and his CPU is in a cloud network. To shut him down we’d need to destroy his neural system.”
“Would that stop the plant from overheating?” the constable asked.
“I don’t know,” Patel replied.
“You don’t know?”
“I would hope so,” he said. “But we don’t really know anything for certain.”
“Well this is not the best,” the constable said.
“That’s why we need talk to him. He could know how to stop the mutants and the power plant as well. He might just not want to tell us, and we might not like the answers we get. But if we don’t try then this is the end of the human race as we know it.”
“Me and the cops will handle the defenses and try to buy you guys as much time as possible,” the constable said.
Patel let out a quick sigh. “Kizzy, I think it’s best if you’re involved. He seemed to be distracted by your presence, and if you know what we’re doing then you’ll be a double threat.”
Kizzy nodded and watched Murray program the laptop.
“How are we going to get the program into him?” she asked.
“We can’t do it outright,” Murray said. “He’d be suspicious of that. The only option is to trick him into downloading it himself. We’ll load it on here, carry in with us and let his curiosity get the best of him.”
“Keep in mind that he won’t recognize the program until after it catches his thoughts,” Patel said. “And it won’t catch his thoughts until he lies about something.”
“We’ll ask him if he knows if there is a cure for the cure,” Murray said.
“Yes,” Patel said. “And if there’s a way to shut down the nuclear plant. We’ll have to keep him talking, we can’t let the conversation die. But we have to be careful, any lie he tells can trigger the program.”
“But asking too many questions could cloud the answers.”
“We’ll make him feel sorry for us, for mankind. He’s our only hope, and we’ll let him know that,” Patel added.
“And what if he really doesn’t know?” Kizzy asked.
“Then we deal with that then, but for now we just try to get him thinking.”
Kizzy nodded, her head swirling.
Murray handed them earpieces so they could communicate with him at the main desk. “These are encrypted so he won’t be able to hear what we’re saying.”.
“And lastly,” Patel said, picking up a small silver box and laying it on the table. He opened it up and inside was large metal syringe, the size of her arm, with what appeared to be some sort of liquid metal inside the glass tube. “If we feel that he’s not to be trusted, that he is somehow behind all this, then we use these nanobots. One injection into the CPU and they swim to the center of his brain and destroy it from within.”
“Why don’t we just do that right away?” Kizzy asked.
“Because we need answers from him. And he’s a multi-billion dollar system and the most brilliant mind the world has ever seen.”
Patel put the syringe back in the box and handed it to Kizzy. “You’re in charge of this.”
Kizzy’s eyes bulged from her skull. “What?”
“You’ll have the future resting upon you if he’s destroyed. It’s only fair you get to make that decision.”
Kizzy took the box and they walked out past a long line of computers that Patel’s men had set up outside the facility to interpret Uncle’s thoughts. They were programmed to unplug and disconnect from any wireless network the instant they received data from the confession script.
“We’ve got 25 minutes,” the constable said from her radar screen.
“Are you ready?” Patel asked as they stood before the glass entrance.
“I hope so,” Kizzy said. Her stomach in knots.
Together they entered the facility through the main lobby and walked past Charlie the robot who was sweeping the perfectly clean floor. Once in the lab they entered the door labeled “Uncle Communication Room” and it opened to a long staircase that lead them deep down into the earth, where it was perfectly quiet. At the bottom of the stairs Patel paused before the door. His eyes were closed as if he was praying. He wiped his shaky hands on his pants. Finally, he opened the door and Kizzy followed him into the small octagonal room.
It was sparse, with eight gray walls and nothing but two chairs sitting before a table.
“This is connected to the CPU,” Patel said looking to Kizzy.
She nodded.
They took their seats. The lights dimmed and the face of Uncle came onto the screen, but he was no longer blue.
He was now tan skinned, with slanted light brown eyes. The features were androgynous and his head was free from any hair. The face was strange, in that it reminded Kizzy of everyone and no one at the same time.
“What’s this?” Patel asked. Obviously he had never seen Uncle in this state before.
“It is an amalgam of every person on earth from back before the plague.”
“Why?” Patel asked.
“You brought the nanobots I see.”
“You know we have to,” Patel said.
“Yes, I know,” Uncle said. “Where’s Josephine?”
Patel shook his head in surprise. “She’s dead,” he answered, becoming sullen, as if he hadn’t realized she was gone until that very moment.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Uncle said. “She was a good woman.”
“Yes, she was,” Patel said with a nod. There was sadness in his movements as he opened up the laptop with the confession script and set it on the table.
“If you don’t mind Bryson, I think you should go,” Uncle said flatly.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re emotionally compromised.”
“I think I’m alright Uncle.”
“To be honest, I would prefer to speak to Kizzy alone.”
“I’m truly fine Uncle,” Patel said.
“I’ll only speak to Kizzy.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Uncle said nothing.
“You are serious,” Patel said. “I’m not sure how to interpret that.”
“Take it as my concern for your well-being.”
Patel slowly got up and looked Kizzy with worry in his eyes. Kizzy gulped and tried to remember everything he had told her. The briefcase that contained the nanobots sat between her feet. Patel exited the room and Kizzy was left alone with the super intelligence.
“He’s taken the bait,” Murray came in over the earpiece.
“How are you feeling Kizzy?” Uncle asked.
“I’m fine... How are you?”
“Geez, Kizzy, that’s a question,” Murray said. “If he lies we’re screwed.”
“Same as I always am,” Uncle said.
“Okay, the program is still intact,” Murray said. “Be more careful please.”
“How long have you had your condition?” Uncle asked.
“A couple months,” she said, thinking back to that day in Dr. Fuentes’ office where she learned that the Enoch Pill was useless on her.
“It’s fascinating,” Uncle said. “I never thought I would see the day when somebody like you would come along. Completely out of the Enoch Pill loop.”
“Kizzy we don’t have much time,” Patel said through the earpiece. “Start the questioning.”
“Uncle,” Kizzy said. “Is there a cure for the mutants?”
“No, there is not,” he said flatly.
Kizzy was silent as she awaited word from the earpiece.
“That wasn’t a lie,” Patel said.
What was she supposed to ask now? If there was no cure then was the point of all of this? What had they done and lost so much for? What had Josephine died for?
“Ask about the plant,” Patel said.
“Can you shut down the power plant?” Kizzy asked.
“Yes, but I won’t just yet.”
“That was still the truth,” Patel said. “Ask him more questions, but don’t make him suspicious.”
How was she supposed to do that? Any question she could ask him would, just by its very nature, make him suspicious. He sat there staring at her, a quizzical look on his face, as if he was waiting for her next move.
“Have you ever played the interv
iewer game?” Kizzy asked.
“I’m aware of it, but no, I’ve never played the game.”
“Would you like to play it now?”
“Not especially, but I’ll humor you.”
“Kizzy, we only have fifteen minutes before the mutants get here,” Patel said. “And thirty minutes before the power plant blows, so I hope there’s a plan for whatever it is you’re doing.”
“Are you ready?” Kizzy asked.
“Yes,” Uncle said.
“Then we can start. Are you someone I know?”
“No.”
“Are you famous?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a historical person?”
“I’m not technically a person.”
“Do you have a secret plan?”
“No.”
Uncle was quiet for a moment. Images flashed on the laptop screen in rapid succession and were sent to the computers outside to be printed. These must have been the thoughts stolen from Uncle’s mind. Blueprints of houses. Housing plan A, B, C. Government plan A, B, C. Employment plan A, B, C. Climate control. Farms, parks, cities. Technology. Space exploration. Kizzy stared at the pictures that came to the screen. They were beautiful, an idyllic imagining of a perfect world.
But the images began to slow and finally the laptop froze. Earth Repopulation Plan A, B, C stood on the screen, but wasn’t sent to the computers outside. Suddenly, all the light in the room turned off. Kizzy was in blackness once again. Uncle must have turned himself off to stop the breach.
“We’ve got a readout,” Murray said into the earpiece. “We have no idea what any of this means. It’s going to take us forever to decode it.”
“We’ve got all the information we can get out of him Kizzy,” Patel said. “Our best bet is to just shut him down.”
“Did you get all of it?” Kizzy ask. “Did you get the earth repopulation plans?”
Patel was silent as he examined the information they had extracted.
“The last file we downloaded was a space exploration plan.”
“We need to get the re-population plan,” Kizzy said.
“There’s no way we can get it from him now.”
“What if I can get it from him?” Kizzy asked.
“No,” Patel said. “The reactor is still overheating and the mutants are still coming. Our only hope is to shut him down.”
The Enoch Plague (The Enoch Pill Book 2) Page 24
