Tomorrow

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  The woman gazes blankly over her shoulder and then expectantly back at me.

  But I’m too weary to explain. I can’t even remember his name.

  “I think that’s all we’re going to get out of him right now,” one of the men in lab coats says to the woman.

  “No,” I choke out. Because I still want to help the U.N.A. Answering the woman’s questions to the best of my ability is the most important thing I’ll ever do. But my eyelids have other ideas. They begin to close, the technicians slipping away from me.

  “We should be able to try again soon,” the same man says apologetically.

  “We will,” the woman agrees, her voice beginning to fade.

  I force my eyelids open again to see if the man in the three-piece suit is still standing behind her. Strange relief drips down the back of my throat when I confirm that he hasn’t gone yet. In fact, he’s watching me with the weight of an expectation that seems almost parental. I may not remember or understand much, but there’s this: “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” I say it slowly and in a muffled voice, every consonant and vowel a battle.

  I’m not sure why I say it. Only that it signifies something important I’ve forgotten.

  “Precisely,” the man bellows in his mossy, weathered voice. “Never forget that.”

  I can’t promise anything; I can only try. In the meantime, I close my eyes and let sleep take me.

  ***

  When I first open my eyes again, I don’t know where I am, my old bedroom in Billings or the one I share with Freya in Vancouver. My lashes feel like stinging stalks of straw and my left wrist is constricted by something wrapped tightly around it. The ache of it brings everything back in a flood. They took Freya. Then they took me. I told them everything. I fill with rage at the thought of them poking around in my brain again and making me feel things that were a lie.

  Blinking, I raise my head and struggle to take in my surroundings. Directly beneath my face, stray pieces of hay litter the ground. I’m back in the barn, the camping lights lending it an eerie glow that means it’s still night. My jacket’s gone, leaving me cold in just my sweatshirt. My wrist is in a plaster cast, probably broken, and the twin bear cages squat empty in front of me. I blink again, wondering if I’m seeing this right: my two original captors lying next to the cages like overturned turtles. The man in acid wash jeans has a thin trail of blood dripping from one of his nostrils and the other man’s eyes are open but motionless. Neither of them appears to be breathing.

  “Garren,” Minnow says, crouching down beside me. “Snap out of it. We need you with us.”

  I groan and pull myself into a seated position. A tall black man with a pointy chin is hovering around near the barn door, his handgun drawn. No tranquilizers this time. “What happened?” I croak.

  The black man glances impatiently down at me. “Maybe I didn’t give him enough to counter the other drugs,” he says to Minnow. “We might have to leave him.”

  Minnow reaches into the back of his jeans, tugging out the roll of bills and set of IDs from my duffle bag. “They took these from you,” he says, handing over the documents and emergency money. I ram them into one of my own pockets as Isaac reaches for a gun down on the ground behind him. He presses it into my bandaged hand, gets to his feet, and then leans down to hoist me up by my good arm. I’m woozy, swaying like I might fall, as Minnow stares into my eyes and says, “Tell me if you can’t do this.”

  “What’s the plan?” I mumble, steadying myself.

  Minnow motions to the black man. “Luis is with us now. He helped me get free.”

  Luis solemnly shakes his head. “I wish there was another way out of this.”

  “There’s not,” Minnow says abruptly, anger squaring his jaw. “There’s too much at stake not to do this.” His eyes zing back to mine. “We’ll get Freya. She’s in the house with the rest of them. The man who killed Seneval is with them too. We take Freya and put a bullet in everyone else. It’s the only way we’ll be free of them.”

  Luis begins to say something but Minnow cuts him off. “We’ll discuss everything else after. We need to get in there before they realize we’re missing.”

  “Seneval’s murderer?” I say, mentally a step behind. “Are you sure?”

  Minnow crouches by the barn door, grabbing a weapon in each hand—one of them lethal and the other a tranquilizer gun. “He worked at Wyldewood with me. He was in the movement. One of us. It would’ve been easy for him to get to her. He must’ve been working for the U.N.A. the entire time.”

  Why would they do that? Luis and Minnow are waiting for me; there’s no time for more questions. “We took care of the sentry already,” Luis tells me. “There’ll be no one watching the field. The first people we’ll see in there will probably be the older couple. Don’t be fooled by their appearance. They’re not civilians. Far from it. They just look that way in case of surprise visitors.”

  This is what it comes down to: People will die and I’ll be the one who killed them. But it’s us or them. Who knows how much damage they’ve done to Freya already? “We have to make sure Freya doesn’t get caught in the crossfire,” I say. My brain jumps back to the image of Seneval’s lifeless body. If I knew what her killer looked like, I’d start with him.

  “How many of them are left?” Minnow asks.

  “Eight, including a director,” our new ally replies. “But the scientists likely won’t be armed.”

  We creep into the dark, Luis bringing one of the walkie-talkies with us. The fireflies put on a dazzling lightshow as we pass, making the moment seem even more wrong, like a summer patio party instead of a gun battle. We hesitate about six feet from the back door the men carted me through earlier. It’s too quiet and the lights are off. If I hadn’t been inside the house before, I’d think we had the wrong place. Something’s not right.

  Luis reaches for the walkie-talkie, his eyes gleaming with suspicion. He freezes and looks to Minnow for guidance. Isaac shakes his head; a hail of bullets sailing through the door. One of them carves out a space in Luis’s cheek. It turns crimson and drips flesh.

  Minnow careens fearlessly towards the right side of the door, shooting back. Luis returns fire too. I raise my gun and pull the trigger, a bullet whizzing by my ear. I don’t think about what it could do to me. All I can think about is Freya inside, and when Minnow, hunching low, moves to open the door, I fire over his head.

  Inside, figures scramble in the blackness. One of them is the old woman, I think. As I follow Minnow into the house I see her on the carpet, clutching her leg and moaning. She reaches for her gun down beside her while we continue deeper into the living room and Luis finishes her off with a bullet to the head. One of his hands is holding his cheek together and from nowhere, a bullet tears into his protective hand. Minnow’s head whips around, searching for the source of the fire. I watch him lift his weapon and take the target down. The old man drops like a log. I wince as I see him hit the ground and then I’m running for Freya’s room, my gun pointed in front of me like a shield.

  Upstairs, the floorboards creak. More of them coming for us.

  Six left.

  I don’t know where the stairs to the upper floor are or how many more bullets I have. I just keep honing in on Freya down the unlit hall. The door to the basement is closed and I reach for the doorknob, expecting to find it locked. Instead it turns in my hand, revealing a small bathroom with a compact shower. I have no memory of a bathroom—just the stairwell that led me to Freya. But I’m sure this was the room and I drop, shove my gun down the back of my pants, and begin running my hands across the ceramic tile floor and then dive into the under-sink cabinet, searching for a hidden hatch.

  It’s like I hallucinated the whole thing. There’s no way down. Just the regular things a couple of old people would stick in their bathroom—pink toilet paper (reams of extras in the cabinet along with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol and tube of Ben-Gay), miniature soap in the shape of flowers, and embroidere
d hand towels.

  Unless…

  I tug the shower door open. The grout between the porcelain tiles is convincingly stained. I grab at the flooring anyway, my fingers catching on an uneven edge. As I yank at it, a large, square-shaped section of the flooring pulls up in one piece. There’s a stainless steel handle attached to the underside of it and—where the shower pan should be—a stairwell leading into the depths of the house. The hatch.

  I climb in, shut it after me, and race down the steps. Freya’s room was on the left. This time her door’s closed and opening it brings me face-to-face with a man in a lab coat. He’s the one who put in my IV and his face melts with dread when he sees me. “What have you done to her?” I ask, raising my gun to point it as his forehead.

  I can’t risk taking my eyes off him, but an out-of-focus Freya lies motionless in the hospital bed behind him. She’s hooked up to a mess of wires and my chest starts to cave in, my fingers trembling around the trigger. “Is she going to be all right?” I demand. Have I made it in time?

  Upstairs, another exchange of bullets peppers the air. The scientist’s shoulders jerk in response. “What are you doing?” he asks, his tone matching the shock in his face.

  “We’re leaving,” I tell him. “And we’re taking her with us.”

  I shove the door closed with my bandaged arm. It doesn’t hurt like it did before I lost consciousness. They must have frozen my wrist or given me something powerful for the pain.

  The man in the lab coat backs up as I step closer to him. “You don’t have to hurt anyone,” he implores. “We know you weren’t working with Monroe.”

  What does that even matter now? They saw inside my head and it didn’t change anything. They were never going to let us go with our memories intact, otherwise Freya wouldn’t be lying here in this state. My eyes flicker over to her on the bed. Physically she looks identical to when I said goodbye to her so I could get my bike at the hospital. Her eyelids are shut tight and I could almost believe she was just sleeping, if it weren’t for all the wires and monitors.

  “I wasn’t,” I tell him. “But now I am. Tell me how she is. What did you do to her?”

  “I don’t understand,” the man says. “Why bother taking her? If Monroe’s promised you a vaccine, he’s lying. There isn’t one. We could see that much on his scan. He doesn’t have the power to protect anyone. Do you think you and the girl are just going to be a lucky statistic? Because the odds are you won’t both make it.”

  I’m lost. Is he talking about the Toxo? Doesn’t he know it’s finished with? And what do Freya, Minnow, or I have to do with the virus?

  Before I can ask him, the door swing opens behind us. I switch my aim from the man in the lab coat to the unknown person at the door and come within a hair’s breadth of shooting Minnow, who lurches inside with his handgun and tranquilizer weapon at the ready. “Get her and let’s go,” Isaac barks, his head grimy and his hand smeared with blood.

  I turn to ask the man—for the third time—what they’ve done to Freya, but there’s no time for that, either, because Minnow has his finger on the trigger. The first bullet hits the man in the neck, the wound spurting like a garden sprinkler. The second burrows into his chest and transforms him into a corpse. He falls forwards, his chin hitting the bed. The weight of the rest of his body drags him to the floor, a pool of blood fanning out beneath him.

  Fourteen: 1986

  “Why did you do that?” I shout. “We need him to unhook her and tell us what her condition is.”

  “We don’t need him for that,” Isaac says, his eyes hard. He stalks over to the far side of the bed, lays his weapons down on top of the blanket, and pulls the IV from Freya’s arm. “Watch the door. They’ll keep coming.”

  I instinctively obey—my eyes shift to the door—but I’m slow to react when a middle-aged woman in a black skirt and long sweater opens it seconds later. Her eyes widen as she takes in our presence. Then she’s off like a shot, the closing door separating us as she scrambles along the hallway. In the brief moment it takes me to pursue her, hurl my left arm around her neck and drag her back into the room to help us with Freya, another man has slipped inside. Bullets volley swiftly between him and Isaac, Freya lying unconscious beneath the gunfire.

  My arm instantly releases its grasp on the woman, who sprints for the door. Standing directly behind the man in the open doorway, shooting him through the back of the head would be effortless. But I can’t bring myself to do it—the act would feel like an execution.

  He’s already wounded, blood seeping through one of his sleeves and the lower part of his shirt. I absorb all that in an instant. The moment slows in my mind, seconds stretching like a rubber band. I’m the one who finally ends it—snapping myself back into place with the bullet I fire into the man’s shoulder.

  I wrestle his gun from him as he bends at the middle, his body folding inward in reaction to the pain. Then I shove him to the floor, Isaac yelling, “Have you lost your mind?” Minnow’s eyes are fierce on mine, one of his legs oozing blood. “We can’t let them live. None of them. But he deserves death more than most. That’s Demian Hoch in front of you. Seneval’s murderer.”

  Isaac sweeps across the room, points his gun down, and delivers a bullet straight into the man’s chest. The man lies wheezing on the ground, his fingers clawing futilely at the floor. I flash back to the image of Seneval’s lifeless body in her room at Wyldewood as I bend down next to him, my veins pulsing with hate and my mind filling with darkness.

  But shadowy things have begun forming in the blackness. Questions, doubts. Why would someone on his way back to the past want to kill Seneval? And what did the man in the lab coat mean about Isaac offering Freya and me a vaccine? What am I missing?

  “Why?” I ask the dying man. “Why did you kill her?”

  Demian struggles to project his voice. “You…should understand…to keep some things safe, others have to be destroyed.”

  “He was doing their dirty work then, same as he is now,” Isaac says, moving back to Freya to continue unhooking the string of wires attached to her arm and beneath her medical gown. “They wanted to break the grounded movement apart from the inside, pit us against each other. Make others turn away from the movement.” I watch Isaac’s fingers slip beneath the thin fabric of Freya’s gown, unease growing as the shadows in my mind come into focus.

  “Why would you…choose…death over life?” Demian slurs, his question aimed at me but his eyes turning inward. Blood bubbles from between his lips.

  Demian’s dying words puncture my brain. Dizzy, I force myself back up. Somewhere in the distance, more bullets whir into the air.

  More U.N.A. security on the way. Four of them left now, as far as I know. Maybe less. There’s no time for me to question him further and even if there were, his Bio-net wouldn’t let him offer any concrete answers. He’d instantly be wiped blank.

  “Take a step away from the girl, Monroe,” a woman’s voice asserts from behind me. “Put your gun on the floor, Garren, and then not one more move from you. Believe me, I’ll still have time to get another shot off if either of you fire.”

  Isaac, still leaning over the bed, freezes. “Shoot her, Garren,” he says in a voice like cold steel, his gun roughly a foot away on the blanket.

  But in the time it would take me to turn she’d easily take me out. Or worse, fire on Freya. I lay my gun harmlessly on the ground, straighten, and then don’t so much as flex my little finger.

  “I don’t want to hurt Freya,” the woman says, her voice right by my ear. “Or you, either. It’s in your interest to help me stop Monroe. Has he even shared what he’s planning?”

  My left eyelid twitches, giving away my ignorance.

  “You know these people lie, Garren,” Minnow protests. “It’s as natural as breathing for them.”

  “And for you,” the woman says to Isaac. “If you believe your own hands are so clean, why haven’t you told him about the destruction you’re planning?”

&nb
sp; “What are you talking about?” I demand, my fingers icy and my mind whirling. My eyes bore into Isaac’s skull, searching out the truth.

  “We’ve had a look inside Monroe’s head,” the woman explains. “We know why he’s really back here.” Her words breathe into my ear again, the alarm buried within them, making me shiver. “He has his own virus to unleash. If he succeeds it’ll sweep across the globe and take out sixty percent of the population within months.”

  “Are you going to listen to this fabrication?” Minnow thunders. “Look what they’re doing to Freya. And how Demian destroyed Seneval. Manipulation is their specialty. They’d tell you anything one minute and steal your thoughts back the next.”

  He doesn’t have to remind me they can’t be trusted; I know how the U.N.A. operates. But this woman’s the second of them to speak of a virus. Could it be a story they constructed to divide us? But they couldn’t have known we’d break free and come for them. And the woman has a gun pointed at the back of my head. She could’ve put a bullet in my skull already if she’d wanted to.

  “Pure deceit,” Minnow intones, reaching for his gun on the bed as I stare at him in confusion. Without a moment’s hesitation, the woman behind me fires on him. I bolt out of the way. Their bullets pass in the air as I storm towards Freya on the bed, the horror of the woman’s statement repeating inside my head. Sixty percent of the population within months. I finish yanking out Freya’s remaining wires, gathering her in my arms. There’s no pain in my injured wrist yet but no power in it either. I can barely support Freya’s weight. Willpower alone will have to carry us back upstairs. Looking up, I see Minnow’s made it out of the room, a hail of shots ringing out from the hallway.

  The woman I grabbed earlier—the one who looked as if she were dressed for a day at the office—stands tall, one of her ears seeping blood from a chunk of missing flesh and her gun trained on Freya and me. “We’re no one in the scheme of things,” I tell her. “You must know that. Isaac’s the one you need to take out if what you say is true.”