Visions

by Teyla Branton

  Sprinting forward, she fired her silenced pistol at the same time Jaxon did, hitting it in the larger head. The head jerked back and then went limp, but the body remained unaffected. The eyes of the small head met theirs, its yellow gaze seeming far too bright in the afternoon sun. It growled once, a high, piercing growl that made Reese shudder. In one motion, it turned and leapt, the large head dangling sightlessly, and Reese sent another bullet through the creature’s back. It didn’t stop.

  “Let it go!” Kentley said tensely. “It’s too dangerous to be chasing it with Special Forces around.” He reached them and bent down to touch the wounded man, who was moaning with pain. “Try to relax, Cooper. You’re going to be okay. It’s not deep.” The fringer calmed almost immediately, but beads of sweat appeared on the doctor’s brow. Kentley let go and unshouldered his medical case. “He needs an antibiotic. These creatures are usually poisonous.”

  “You see a lot of these here?” Jaxon asked.

  “Only this close to the South Desolation Zone,” the doctor said pressing a blue hypo against Cooper’s arm. “Especially the past year. More and more of them are venturing over. I’m not sure if they’ve lost their way, or if whatever’s been sustaining them has run dry. Or maybe their population has become so large that some are being driven off.” He gave a mirthless grin as he started to bind the wounds on Cooper’s arms. “But I’d take them over the Elite any day. At least you know where you stand with them.”

  Reese had to agree. For all the time she’d been an enforcer, she’d never seen anything like this in person, but they had erected electronic barriers in Estlantic, which were supposed to keep anything out. Dallastar was less populated, and so far that hadn’t been necessary.

  Cooper endured the doctor’s ministrations without comment, but his eyes radiated hate at Reese when she handed him back his gun. Maybe he would have been able to shoot the creature first, but his unsilenced shot might have also alerted Special Forces to their location.

  After another few minutes of walking, Kentley led them into a crumbling building and down a surprisingly intact metal ramp. At the end was a metal door. Kentley banged out a code on it, and the door lurched upward a few painful centimeters at a time, creaking loudly with each jerk.

  Two men with guns motioned them inside, and the metal door began its equally painful descent. Inside, the cement walls looked mostly intact and rubble had been cleared away. Cooper, the wounded fringer, stayed behind with the guards as they moved forward.

  “How many people live here?” Jaxon asked.

  “About forty.” Kentley hesitated. “Now.”

  Reese didn’t know if he was hinting that more were coming, or that more had once been here.

  “There are many passageways that go to various parts of the resort,” he added. “It’s more comfortable than most places you’ll find in the empty zones.”

  They turned down one short hallway and paused by a door that opened into a cavernous room whose gloom was lifted by only a few battery-operated lights. Reese recognized the place immediately. The rough walls, the sick children. The air that was still and heavy with suffering.

  Beside her, Jaxon was holding his breath, and she almost expected him to be taken by another vision, but he remained calm. So was she. For that matter, she didn’t feel any of the sketches she’d witnessed today pressing her to draw them.

  “This is the cave’s infirmary,” Kentley said. “Of sorts anyway.”

  There were a dozen children, more than she’d seen from the sketch. No, some of them were adults. They were each lying on folded blankets or scavenged mattresses. Their faces were flushed with running sores. One of the children reached out a thin hand to the doctor and moaned.

  Jaxon’s gaze met Reese’s and held. He was checking to see how she was, but right now only numbness filled every part of her.

  “You’re not surprised,” Dr. Kentley searched their faces. “Why not?”

  It wasn’t Reese’s secret to tell, but Jaxon said slowly, “I have premonitions. I saw this yesterday and then again today. Only it was different. That child didn’t make it.” Jaxon motioned to a small boy who snuggled under a tattered brown blanket, his head cradled in a man’s lap. A man Reese now recognized from the doctor’s office this morning, the short man who would do anything to make sure the doctor came with him.

  Dr. Kentley shook his head. “He’s actually the best of all of them right now. He’ll recover, if I continue to work with him. I can stop the degradation and help him heal. He did have convulsions this morning, and it could have been serious if I hadn’t come, but it was an unrelated illness that I’ve since immunized him for. As long as he doesn’t have any more radiation exposure, he’ll only have a slightly increased chance of cancer as he grows.”

  Reese could see that Jaxon didn’t believe him. Neither did she. “How were they exposed?” she asked.

  “Apparently, enforcers in Estlantic are now searching the empty zones for rebels, and they fled to Dallastar. They found this place and were living here for weeks before we discovered their presence. I told you one of the passageways leads to a cliff overlooking the ocean. Well, at high tide, the water comes inside partway and puddles in a caved-in room. A lot of fish are left stranded and are easy pickings.”

  Reese gasped. “They didn’t test them for radiation?” Only Colony 2 had the safety measures to process seafood. Even eighty years after Breakdown, there were only a few places in the CORE where it was safe to enter the ocean, and those were all in Estlantic.

  “Test them with what?” Kentley swallowed hard. “They ate them before understanding how close we are to a desolation zone. It was only after they lost half their group that they started searching for help and stumbled onto one of my contacts.”

  Silence fell over them as they mourned the unlucky victims.

  “You see why I can’t leave,” Kentley continued more quietly. “No matter how much El Cerebro needs me. There are some here who will die if I abandon them. Children especially. They have no one else. Besides, if it’s not them, it’s others. They hear about me and they come.”

  “I understand the dilemma.” Jaxon watched the short fringer stroke his son’s face. “But don’t you think it’s more important to save all the colonies?”

  The doctor sighed. “The age-old question about what’s more important—do we save the individual or the group?”

  “In this case if we manage to save the group, there won’t be any more individuals to worry about,” Jaxon said. “At least not like this. They would all be in a hospital.”

  Kentley motioned to the boy. “By the time change came it would be too late for him. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just check on my patients and then we’ll return to the house. We still need to figure out a way to get you back to wherever you’re headed.”

  Jaxon’s mouth opened to speak as the doctor moved away, but Reese put her hand on Jaxon’s arm. “He’s right. He has to stay. We have to let him help these children.”

  She could see he wanted to protest, but she also knew he couldn’t condemn the people here to death any more than she could.

  Jaxon and Reese watched while the doctor visited his patients. After the first few, his shoulders started to slump and his face paled. He began to shuffle instead of walk between the makeshift beds.

  “You can see him taking their pain,” she mused.

  “But it’s all wrong,” Jaxon said, his eyes roaming the room. “That boy was dead, and yet he’s not. And we’re not likely to come back to see them again. Why isn’t it like I saw?”

  Reese searched his face and saw concern under his relief at the boy’s survival. “Maybe if we hadn’t arrived when we did, Special Forces would have taken Kentley and the child would have died. It’s also possible we interrupted you during the premonition, and you might have gone on to see an alternate version like you did with our last encounter with Special Forces.”

  “Or maybe we were wrong about how it works.”

  Reese
wanted to reassure him, but at the same time the upset she’d felt at the sketch he’d sent her, the one of them together, sealed her lips. Why had he kept it from her? She knew he was attracted to her. Saca, she was attracted to him, but he was her best friend, and they had to work together every day, and she didn’t want anything to confuse that. Because what happened when the passion died, as it always did? Better to put the friendship first. He meant too much to risk.

  Then why was she so angry? Was it that he’d had the premonition, or the fact that he hadn’t told her?

  “We’re not wrong about anything,” she forced herself to say. “It’s all a part of the craziness we’re feeling, that’s all.”

  His gaze skidded away as the doctor reappeared. “Looks like everyone’s okay,” Kentley said. “We can go now.”

  Jaxon shifted the nyckelira case to his other side. “You said we’re near the ocean, right? That one of the passageways leads there. Is the way safe to see?”

  Reese knew he was asking not for himself but because of her. Once he’d asked her about the ocean view in her tiny office, and she’d told him about the best vacation she’d ever had at a C-lodge on a beach in Haven. Just sitting on the beach and hearing the waves battering at the shore had given her peace. The images were a reminder now of what they were fighting for, every bit as much as the water transfer station at Colony 6.

  “Sure,” the doctor said with a little smile. “They don’t trap the fish anymore, and the ocean itself leaves little residue after this long. I wouldn’t mind seeing it myself. Your friend is likely to need more time to heal anyway.” He motioned for them to follow him.

  Reese looked back at the dim room once more as they left. Most of the patients were sleeping now, and even the short man was lying with his son on the floor, his eyes shut. She wanted to remember it this way, instead of how it had been in the sketch.

  Kentley led them through one long hallway and then another, some parts blocked with partial cave-ins but for the most part largely intact. “This must have been one of the finer buildings pre-Breakdown,” he said. “It’s actually a very good place to live, despite the problem with the water. It may be that Thane and Silas’s group will join them here, once the threat of radiation subsides.”

  “Are you saying the patients can poison others?” Reese asked.

  “No and yes. No because as long as safety measures are taken, nothing will pass to others.” He stopped talking momentarily as they deviated around a slab of cement that cut through the high ceiling, revealing pinpoints of sky. “But because the exposure was internal, there is a possibility of contamination as their bodies shed the radiation. I’m giving them everything I can to help them recover. We wash them regularly, and we’re careful with bodily wastes. But we are right to be concerned. Our children are particularly susceptible. But I think those who haven’t already died will slowly recover and survive.”

  “How much further?” Jaxon asked. The smell of the ocean was closer now.

  “Almost there,” Kentley said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve been angling downward. At this point it levels out.” His steps were faster than they had been when leaving the children, as if each pace gave him back his strength.

  Reese hadn’t really noticed the slope, but the hallway was wet now. Old paint peeled away from the cement walls and shell deposits clung to odd places. Turning a corner, they came upon it suddenly—a large room with an opening nine meters high through which she could see ocean and sky.

  “It used to be covered in some kind of safety glass, which apparently didn’t survive Breakdown,” Kentley said. “I imagine it was a favorite pastime of whoever stayed here to come down when the tide was high and water covered the glass.”

  “Good thing it’s low now.” Jaxon peered out the opening.

  Kentley laughed. “The passageway we came down, as well as several others, aren’t passable during high tide.”

  Reese stepped forward, leaning out of the hole to see the ocean below. The beach was closer than she expected, only five or six meters down, and a thin strip of soft-looking sand lined the base of the cliff. She could almost taste the salt as the breeze blew back her hair. She was tempted to jump down and wet her feet, even knowing the danger of contamination this close to the South Desolation Zone. Instead, she watched the waves rolling in, and the steady rhythm brought the peace she remembered.

  Jaxon sat down at the edge, dangling his feet over. He looked more rested than he had all day. “Look,” he said. “Seagulls.” Sure enough, two of the rare birds were on the shore scavenging. Another was dead on the sand. Reese wondered if it was because of the contaminated fish, or if the bird was a twisted version like the monster dog they’d seen.

  “Doctor,” she said, leaning against a relatively dry part of the wall. “My ability hasn’t manifested since I’ve been with you.”

  He laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s still there. You’re likely able to control it, though. In my experience, gifts manifest more often and are more difficult to control as the madness encroaches. But I’ve been draining that pressure for you—and it should help for a time.”

  Reese didn’t really care to try to control anything right then. “What about you and the madness?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t feel it affecting me. Well, as long as I don’t have too many patients at once. My ability seems inherently able to fix myself as well.”

  “How long can you help people like us?”

  “It depends on the person.” His gaze was knowing. “It’s not a permanent fix, though, not by a long shot.”

  Reese sighed. “It couldn’t be that easy, I guess.”

  After watching the water for a few minutes more, Kentley said, “If you don’t mind, what is your ability?”

  “I’ll show you.” Reese stepped closer to him and concentrated, but nothing came from Kentley’s mind. For a moment panic swelled inside her. Maybe the doctor had lied. Maybe her ability was gone forever.

  No, that was ridiculous. She took a deep breath to steady her thoughts.

  “You don’t have to show me if it’s too stressful,” Kentley said, recoiling from her slightly. “I was just curious.”

  She gave a self-deprecating snort. “I usually can’t stop it. But this should give you an idea.” She pulled her notebook from her bag and flipped to the page she’d drawn last night of the sick children. “I see images from people’s minds. I call them sketches, mostly because after I see them I have to sketch them or I feel unsettled, and if I leave it too long or see too many, I lose it.”

  She didn’t add that his presence had seemed to erase all need to record the sketches she’d seen since leaving the C-lodge that morning.

  He studied the sketch, a deep furrow in his forehead. He had to notice the dead boy, but when he spoke, it wasn’t about the child. “You’re lucky you have the drawing outlet,” he said. “It’s the ones who can’t ever get a release that the madness takes first.”

  People like Jaxon, she thought, glancing in his direction.

  But what about Dani, Eagle, and the twins? Dani was in constant motion, Eagle was regularly translating his 3D through the Teev in the underground, and Lyssa and Lyra claimed their spirits physically traveled during their episodes. By contrast, Jaxon was held motionless by his visions.

  Jaxon climbed to his feet, hefting the nyckelira case. “We’d better get back.” To Kentley, he added, “We’ll talk to El Cerebro and let him know what’s going on here, but he’s not one to take no lightly.”

  “You have orders to take me if I don’t come willingly, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But instead, we’ll report your answer.”

  “If he sends you back, I still won’t go with you.”

  “I know.”

  As the men talked, Reese watched the two seagulls, now winging away in the incredibly blue sky. She waited for the birds to disappear before following the men.

  They’d passed the wet corridors and Reese now felt the incline as they
traversed the passageway. They had reached the slab of concrete and the partially caved-in roof when they heard the sounds. Pop, pop, pop! So far away that it sounded something from a child’s game.

  “What’s that?” Kentley stopped walking and tilted his head.

  “Gunfire!” Jaxon skirted the cement slab, bringing around the nyckelira case, opening it as he jogged forward.

  Kentley stared. “You have an assault rifle in there?”

  Jaxon gave him a flat grin. “I’m no musician, that’s for sure.”

  Reese drew her pistol, shoved it at the doctor, and pulled out her assault rifle.

  “Wait, what? Why are you giving me this?” Kentley demanded.

  Reese turned to see him standing in the hallway, a confused expression on his face. “To defend yourself. We have no idea what’s going on.”

  “I-I can’t shoot anyone. I took an oath.”

  “Then you might have a choice to make. Hopefully it won’t come to that.” She turned and ran to catch up with Jaxon. Thoughts tumbled through her mind. Had Special Forces found these fringers or had some monster attacked?

  Another burst of shots broke the silence, louder now as they neared the end of the hallway. Several isolated shots followed. Reese’s lungs burned from her sprint. “Careful,” she cautioned Jaxon. “We don’t know what we’re walking into.”

  He nodded and continued forward. As they reached the bend, they heard shuffling, and Jaxon threw himself against the wall. Reese did the same, bringing up her gun, ready to pick off any he didn’t take.

  “Hold!” Jaxon grunted as a man stumbled around the bend.

  Reese eased her finger from the trigger as she identified Cooper, the tall fringer who had led them to the cave. He staggered toward them, his arm bandages drenched with blood. Why was he still bleeding?

  He gasped as he saw them, taking a few more steps toward Reese, his face angling past her toward Kentley, who was still some distance down the hall.