Road to Abaddon

by Vincent Heeringa

  He felt betrayed. They were being sold like cattle!

  The prisoners were herded towards the gate while the transaction continued. At one point, Nassim was dragged over to the group and Baldie took great care to point out her features. Jonah’s anger swelled.

  As Baldie was shaking hands once more, Jonah was shoved through the gate and a glove banged him on the back of the head. “So long, little warrior. Enjoy your freedom, ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa,” the mutant laughed. Just behind him, Hugo’s stretcher was dumped onto the dirt.

  Jonah and Grace stood beside Hugo, unsure what to do. They wanted to rush to the transporter. But this didn’t feel like a rescue. The mutants were now sauntering back to the caravan, laughing and congratulating themselves on the trade while the Metricians locked the gate. A second pod had joined them and people with unfamiliar uniforms stepped out. They stood at a distance, their rifles in hand. No one came to greet the prisoners.

  “Hey you!” Jonah yelled to the Metricians. “Hurry, come help us, we’re injured. Bring us a medibot!”

  No response.

  “What the heck’s wrong with them?” Grace said, kneeling to help roll Hugo from his back to his side. He was breathing heavily, his eyes rolling back into his head. His wound had been covered with dirty bandages.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you! Metricians, bring us the medibot!” shouted Jonah.

  A loudspeaker cracked in reply. “Stay where you are!” it said. “Get on your knees with your hands behind your heads. Now!”

  A shadow flew over the prisoners and, as if out of nowhere, an aircraft descended with frightening speed. Sand and dust were kicked up by the menacing black ship, the likes of which Jonah had never seen before. Shaped like the head of a long arrow it made him think of a moray eel, with a rounded nose cone, slotted with air intakes and two laser canons for fangs. The cockpit was just visible: just tinted windows set flush against the charcoal skin. And its body spread wide and ended with no tail save for a long fin that extended along its back. Two tiny flaps stuck out near its neck like little wings and twisted this way and that as it settled onto the ground.

  The desert was quiet for a moment as everyone, mutants and soldiers alike watched the strange craft. Then the side of the eel split open with a hiss and black-masked soldiers, armed with rifles, leapt from its belly and scurried towards the motley group of kids yelling “get down, get down!”

  Jonah and Grace abandoned Hugo and hit the dirt like criminals.

  “What the heck?” shouted Jonah on his knees, his hands in the air. “We’re Metricians!”

  “Shut up! Get down and don’t look up!” shouted one of the soldiers, pointing the weapon at his head.

  Jonah lay on his chest in the gravel, spitting dust from his mouth. He tried to examine the soldier’s uniform for insignia but saw nothing except black Kevlar and sturdy boots.

  Within moments his arms were bound and he was forced to canter towards the new craft. Hugo was on a stretcher being passed into the rear hatch. Nassim and Wadid were on board too. The door was closed. The hoverpod stirred. Dust swallowed up the porthole. Clouds raced across the sky. Wherever they were headed, it was at speed.

  They didn’t have a chance to speak. The pod was settling on tarmac, and through the opening door Jonah saw a line of soldiers against the backdrop of a long, double-story structure. They must be at the set of low buildings he spied earlier, he surmised.

  The same drill. This time in reverse. The prisoners poured onto the hot sealed ground, kneeling like victims. Hugo’s stretcher passed them and hovered its way through a door into the building. This was Metrician Tek, but it sure didn’t feel like a welcoming party.

  Jonah was worried, especially as a group of soldiers started talking. The discussion turned to argument and then a tall man in a uniform that Jonah recognised as Metrician strode towards the kneeling group. His face looked grizzled as if he’d seen too much sun and he had one bionic eye. He scanned the group and walked over to Jonah.

  “Jonah Salvatore?” he said in a hoarse voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Please stand.”

  Jonah struggled up, his hands still bound behind him. The man examined his face, running his bionics over him. He nodded, satisfied by something. Then he cut Jonah’s wrists free and saluted. Jonah rubbed his wrists, puzzled.

  “I’m Commander Martin Walshe,” he said, offering a handshake. “I’m terribly sorry about the rough treatment. We get all sorts here. Welcome home, son.”

  Jonah looked at Grace. She raised an eyebrow and grimaced.

  “Confused?” she mouthed.

  ◆◆◆

  In a large, plain office near the Lord President’s quarters of Sky London, Lieutenant Hadrian Yang waited at the desk of General Kenrick.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Yes, what is it now, Yang?”

  “Your grandson, sir, Jonah Salvatore.”

  Kenrick looked up, surprised.

  “He’s been found. In Egypt. It appears he’d been captured by bandits. Or at least was. They’ve traded him.”

  “Traded? With whom?”

  “Ah, you see, that’s the curious thing sir. With us. Or more precisely with, um …” Yang looked down to his scrip. “… Abaddon Division. I’ve never heard of it, but it’s definitely Metrician. The codes check out.”

  A flicker of recognition crossed Kenrick’s face. “Abaddon,” he said.

  Yang looked puzzled. “Do you know anything about it, sir?”

  “No, no I’ve never heard of it,” said Kenrick. Yang was unconvinced – but it was not his place to question the general.

  “What shall I do?”

  Kenrick stared at the soldier.

  “What you do, lieutenant, is you get the boy and the other two that he’s with, and you get them back here to Sky London. And you bring them directly to me.”

  “Yes, sir, it’s already happening.”

  “Excellent, you’re always one step ahead, Yang.”

  The soldier turned and was about to leave but Kenrick called, his voice lowered: “And not one word of this is spoken about or recorded, do you hear. And you forget that you ever heard that name.”

  Yang paused. “What name?”

  “Exactly,” replied the general.

  Chapter 13 - Strange prisoners

  The water from the drink bottle felt so good. It drizzled down Jonah’s neck stained his shirt.

  He tried to make sense of the last hour. How bizarre, to go from foe to friend on the turn of a dial. One minute he and Grace were captives, kneeling on the tarmac awaiting whatever punishment these thugs had in store. Next, they were being hurried into a tiny, ground-level office and given a bottle of water and wet-towel for their dusty faces.

  Jonah drank greedily. The Metrician water, often mocked for its chemical accent, tasted like nectar. He held the cool, damp towel to his face and sighed aloud. He might have stayed like that for longer, but someone coughed and he let the cloth slide of his nose.

  The office had beige walls and a desk, cleared of any paperwork. It smelled of tobacco. Wall monitors showed a ‘gram of what was happening outside: a sorry rabble of children being checked by men with tabs and soldiers still pointing their guns. The aircraft still sat hissing on the tarmac, heat waves rippling from its wings. Walshe turned off the screens and leaned back on the desk, his arms folded.

  “Please sit. You must be exhausted! What an ordeal! We all thought you were dead! But here you are, found in the band of mutants.”

  He sounded flustered.

  “Rescue Squad lost touch with you a day after your crash. All they found was the wreck. It’s possible that your locators weren’t operational, I suppose. Does seem odd.”

  Odd? Incredible, was more like it, thought Jonah. The conversation with Sergeant Clunes popped into his head and, for just a moment, he pondered the possibility that the crash was no accident. But he dismissed the thought. He’d already decided Clunes was a crackpot.

  Gra
ce interrupted his thoughts.

  “Tek goes wrong all the time,” she said. “Most often it’s due to human error. Faulty workmanship, poor maintenance. Somehow we got unlucky. Or lucky, depending on your point of view. Our instructor carked it.”

  Walshe nodded and clapped his hands. “And here you are. I imagine that what you would like first is a good wash and some half decent food.”

  He showed them through a door that opened with hiss, down a shiny corridor and into private rooms with their own bathrooms and beds. Everything smelt clean.

  Standing in the shower, Jonah let the water pour over his dust-encrusted body. A whole desert washed from his hair and skin and formed a little brown river around his toes. Grace and Hugo were safe. He was safe. What a relief! Hopefully Nassim and Wadid had fared the same. His stomach flipped at the thought of seeing Nassim in clean, Metrician clothes.

  He stood indulgently under the water for as long as his military conscience allowed, then dried himself and discovered a fresh uniform, more or less fitting, hanging in his room. Outside he followed a corridor to a large, light-filled space with long tables. Commander Walshe sat with a coffee mug and two plates of food. The smell of tomatoes and garlic made his stomach rumble.

  “Ah, I hardly recognised you,” laughed Walshe. “You’re not covered in crud!” That nervousness again. Was it just his personality or was there something else? “Ready for some food? Not quite fine dining but better than that Lander crap, I suspect. And here, Mets! They don’t have the good stuff down here in Lander-ville!”

  Walshe pushed the plate of food and a viscous green drink to Jonah who devoured it in greedy mouthfuls. Like the shower, it felt like he’d entered a different universe.

  Gulping down the Mets, he burped satisfyingly and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “How’s Hugo?” he asked.

  ◆◆◆

  Walshe looked at his wrist watch. “He’ll be still in surgery, I’d say. It looks like the bullet went straight through his stomach and out the other side. No doubt done some nasty damage, but the doc says it looks fixable. He’ll need to be here for the next few weeks recovering.”

  “And what about Nassim and Wadid?” Jonah asked.

  “Who?”

  “Nassim? One of the Lander girls. She was with us.”

  “Oh, I’d have to find out. They’ll be in the register. My main priority was you three. Can't have you getting messed up with that lot!”

  “But she’s okay, right? Can I see her?”

  Walshe sipped his coffee and took a while to swallow. “Of course you can see her, and this …?”

  “Wadid. Her brother.”

  “Indeed. Her brother”

  “When?”

  “Oh, soon, soon. But first we need to get you and Grace processed. Forms and procedures and what not! Ah, speaking of which, here cometh the ladyship herself, ha ha!”

  Grace strode into the mess, flopped down and devoured the meal with gusto. She burped even louder.

  What followed were endless meetings: a thorough medical with every corner probed and poked by medibots; a briefing with the head of the Flying School, who appeared in a hologram and went over in exhaustive detail the nature of their crash and subsequent events; a briefing with the Rescue Squad and Regional Commander about the terrain and the mutants’ behaviour; they even spoke to their squad, although they were under strict instructions to reveal nothing about their location or the nature of their rescue.

  Jonah thought it odd that Walshe used the word rescue. ‘Barter’ would be more accurate, he thought.

  They even were allowed to look through a glass window at Hugo who lay asleep in a room surrounded by machines. A facemask covered his nose and mouth and tubes and wires came out of his chest. But it was him alright, his dark hair, now over a week uncut, was showing signs of curls.

  By evening they were both exhausted. It had been a massive day and Jonah’s eyelids were heavy. He asked once again about Nassim. Walshe assured him they’d be reunited in the morning and so he went to bed, laying on the soft sheets and was asleep before his head hit the pillow. He didn’t dream and when they met again at breakfast Walshe found another reason to delay the meeting. “I need to file my report about you first!” he laughed. “Feel free to kill some time in the holoroom. It’s just through there,” and pointed to a door on the other side of the corridor.

  “It’s like he’s got something to hide,” Jonah told Grace. He found her outside the mess room, kicking a vending machine. ‘Kocoa Expired’ read the sign.

  “C’mon. You’ve got to be joking. A week in the desert and you can’t even give me a single Kocoa bar!”

  “Grace, listen,” said Jonah. “Don’t you think this is a bit weird? Why can’t we see them? What’s going on?”

  She turned to him, her hands still holding the machine. “You’ve just been rescued and the first thing you want to see is some mutants?”

  “No. I want to see Nassim. She’s a Lander, not a mutant.”

  “Same thing.”

  “What do mean same thing? No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is. We just spent a week with a bunch of hunchbacks and club-foots. What do you care what happens to them?”

  She bashed the machine again. “C’mon, give me chocolate, feng it!”

  “I care what happens to Nassim,” he said.

  Grace let go of the vending device and glared at him.

  “So, this is how it happens, is it?”

  “What do mean?”

  “Stockholm Syndrome. It’s a proven phenomenon. Captives held long enough side with their captors. That’s what you’ve got: Stockholm Syndrome. You need to see a quack.”

  “Have you lost your mind? Nassim was a prisoner too. So was Wadid. Their families were killed by that gang!”

  “Or so she says. You have no way to know that’s true. For all we know it was all part of their mind-games.”

  “Eh? Grace, think about it. We weren’t rescued. We were being sold by the mutants to Metricians. What for? What was going to happen to us – to them?”

  Grace poked a finger at his chest.

  “I. Don’t. Know. And. I. Don’t. Care. And nor should you, soldier!”

  She spun, gave the machine a final boot and stormed towards her room.

  Jonah was flabbergasted. Her callousness confused him. It boarded on hate. He felt agitated. Grace had clearly flipped her lid. And Walshe had been delaying him for too long. It was time he took the matters into his own hands. Outside the confines of this tiny space he’d seen a vast complex of buildings, far bigger than what they’d experienced inside. Come to think of it, no one had mentioned what this place actually was.

  “Time to find out,” he muttered.

  He tried all the hallway doors. Apart from his own room they were locked. Not even the emergency exit to the landing pad yielded. This was a nicer prison than the mutants’ wagon, but it was a prison nonetheless.

  Jonah made his way back to the empty mess. He entered a kitchen with shinning appliances and a door that led to a small courtyard garden. One end of the garden was filled with rows of fresh vegetables and a clump of low trees with oranges and persimmons. At the other, a vine of ripening grapes climbed the solid wall and grew overhead on a small parapet. Above it, a blank wall rose one storey to the roof.

  The vine gave Jonah an idea. Checking that the mess was still empty, he grabbed the branches and pulled himself onto the parapet and rolled out of sight. The wall above was peppered with randomly arranged stones, for decoration he assumed, but also for footholds for inquisitive climbers. With a final glance into the courtyard, he hooked his fingers over the highest stone and put a toe to another. Here goes, he thought and gingerly pulled himself up and then repeated the movement like a gecko, until he could get a fingertip over the gutter edge and drag himself onto a vast iron roof that burned hot in the morning sun.

  Cooling towers and solar power units dotted the massive space but nothing seemed to offe
r a way down – or inside.

  He tiptoed across the roof to the closest tower and tested a handle on a trap door. It would lead to some kind of service port, he thought. It was locked. He tried the doors of other towers and found them all locked, though one had rusted hinges, which broke with a firm kick. The entire door lifted off and, luckily for him, its sensor had remained intact.

  “Fortune favours the brave,” he muttered.

  He saw a ladder disappearing into a dark shaft. A strange smell wafted up: a mixture of chemicals and left-over dinners. He’d smelt something like that before. The school lab, he thought.

  The ladder was longer than he anticipated, and after a minute of climbing he deduced that he’d gone well past the first two storeys and must have entered a basement. The ladder ended a few metres above the ground and he dropped into a corridor that was filled with silver pipes and the sound of throbbing engines. Again, the smell.

  Jonah snuck down the passage, staying close to the pipes for cover, and looked for some stairs or an elevator that might take him to the floors above. Nothing stirred. He reached a door which opened to a flight of concrete steps and, with his heart now pounding, he slid through. There was no sign of activity, so he climbed several sets of stairs, growing in confidence, until he reached a landing with a door containing a narrow window and a brightly lit room on the other side. He looked through.

  He’d found the source of the smell. Through the window he saw a laboratory, with tubes and flasks and equipment that flashed with red and green LEDs. He scanned the room and saw bench after bench with the same mess of scientific paraphernalia. For a moment, his heart sank as he remembered the hours spent in school labs listening to the teachers repeat the things he’d already found out himself. But this wasn’t school-time. He looked closer at a nearby bench and saw a glass vat full of clear bubbling fluid. A tangle of wires and tubes dipped into the water and connected to what seemed to be a brownish object, shaped like a large L. It was hard see, with the bubbles and distorting effect of the glass.

  Jonah tried the handle and found it turned, releasing the door with a gentle hiss. A blast of cold air poured over him and he poked his head through, checking for humans and bots. Nothing.