The Renegades (Book 4): Colony

by Jack Hunt

  “I’m not sure I follow,” I said, looking over at Ben who was tucking into a piece of jerky that he’d placed inside a roll.

  “My father and I worked for the government before all of this. My position was originally as a lead scientist at the Dugout in Utah.” She placed some corn onto her plate. My eyes glanced down the table at the others before I took a sip of water.

  “Why did you create this?”

  “Why does anyone create a biological weapon? We thought we were helping our country.”

  “So you know how it got out?”

  “No. As far as I know, no one does.”

  “What happened? Why is your father killing innocent people?”

  “He doesn’t think he’s doing any wrong by testing them to see if they have the cure. You see, the problem that we have, Johnny, is that anomalies are still very much that. Something that is peculiar and odd. We have to run tests to determine how we can use it on those that need it.”

  “How is that any different than what your father is doing?”

  “What my father believes is different to me. He is willing to bleed every single person dry in order to find those who carry the gene that can fight this, and then in turn he… well, not exactly he… but those above him want it to be used as a means to control others. Instead of liberate them. I want to do the opposite. I want to place this in the hands of everyone who isn’t immune for free. It’s simple as that. I believe humanity has a right to the cure. The government, or at least what’s remaining of it, sees this virus as an opportunity to reset humanity. Weed out the weak and leave only those who are strong and can offer something in the new world. Something better.”

  “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” I muttered.

  “I see you have spoken to him.”

  “Briefly. He’s a bit of a dick.”

  She chuckled.

  “How can you work against your father?”

  “I’m not working against my father, I’m working against what he supports: the government that released this to begin with. I’m trying to do what is right here, Johnny.”

  “He said something along the same lines.”

  She sighed and leaned back in her seat.

  “Do you see anyone being experimented on?”

  I looked around.

  “But you would have to run tests.”

  “Of course but the difference is, I don’t do it without permission and those that we have worked with so far aren’t brought to the point of death like they are with my father.”

  “You are telling me he drains them entirely.”

  “It’s not you that matters to him. It’s what’s inside you. Inside your blood, your bone marrow, your genes. They will extract it all until they can develop a permanent cure for others.”

  They were both so close to each other. Both of them wanted the same thing. And yet, her father was willing to go to extreme measures. Superseding a person’s will and testing on those that weren’t even anomalies.

  “There is one thing that I’m confused about.”

  She leaned forward, clasping her hands together. “The only way he could determine what was capable of surviving would be to let a Z bite. I mean, I was showing the signs of turning until my body fought back.”

  Her eyes dropped. I couldn’t distinguish if it was a look of guilt, embarrassment, or sadness over what her father was doing.

  “I mean all I saw back at the Hive were people inside of chambers. What was he doing?”

  “Injecting the virus into them.”

  I stared at her, hoping, no, scratch that — disbelieving that someone would do that to another human being. I thought back to what Birdy had said about people going missing in the Hive. Never returning. I remembered the way people looked. Some of them pasty and sweating. They were going through the change.

  “He tests each of them to see how they will react to the virus. Those that survive move on to a second round of testing. They extract and test on others.”

  “That’s pure medical genocide.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time, Johnny.”

  MOBY DICK

  THE HARSH REALITY of it all sank in. Government wasn’t looking to help, they were looking to select the strong and dispose of the rest. It brought a whole new meaning to survival of the fittest.

  Up until this point we had fought all manner of lunatics: rogue groups, gangs, and military personnel who had deserted. Now we were looking at going up against what remained of government.

  For Annora, it was simple, she planned on killing her father. And there was me thinking I had daddy issues. Geesh, she brought it all to a whole new level of fucked up. It’s hard to imagine a world where parents would turn against their own but it was happening.

  Fear, greed, and power could still make seemingly ordinary people lose their minds. The apocalypse hadn’t changed that, it had nurtured and given a door to commit horrendous acts in the name of helping humanity.

  Was that really what it had come down to? I always imagined that if the world was torn apart, humanity would band together for the greater good. That everything would be shared not hoarded and that included a cure.

  But it wasn’t the truth.

  Government had not only sent us back into the dark ages in one fell swoop but they wanted to reset all of humanity and pick and choose those who would survive. They didn’t care who died in order to achieve that.

  “Annora, there’s no way we can win this. There are too many of them. Even if you kill him someone else will rise up in his place,” I said. “He’s just one of many. Just a puppet. Hell, we saw Wright-Patterson. People left in different directions. We destroy the Hive, there will be others.”

  “So, we take them all out.”

  She nodded and continued eating as though she had considered this and weighed all the pros and cons. And yet that was it. She already knew what was going on but this was new to us. I was still trying to process that I was alive, let alone what our government was doing to people.

  I shook my head in disbelief, unable to comprehend what she imagined. Did she really think she could just waltz on in there and blow her old man away? That wasn’t the answer.

  “There has to be a different way. Maybe you can help him to see.”

  “Don’t you think I have tried?”

  I just stared at her as she filled her mouth with a spoon of beans.

  “When I found out what he was doing, I confronted him. You think he listened? He had his men bring me out into the city and left me for dead. No weapon. No food. He told me if he couldn’t change my mind, maybe the Z’s could. He really thought by sending me out among the undead that it would change my way of thinking. But he was wrong. We are wrong to allow this virus to govern our actions to the extent that others suffer. It’s no different than testing an animal in a lab to produce makeup. There are ways to do it without the suffering.”

  “What alternative did you offer?”

  “Humane ways of having people volunteer for testing. People don’t need to be pushed into a corner when they know they are already there.”

  “And your testing. How different is it than his?”

  “The person lives. I’d say that’s different.”

  “But do they endure any pain?”

  “Of course not. No different than giving blood.”

  “But you can’t be sure the cure is carried inside of the blood.”

  “No, we can’t at this stage but that’s where we would start.”

  I scoffed. “Is that where he started?”

  She knew where I was going with this. Perhaps her father wasn’t someone who delighted in the pain of others, maybe he too had begun at a level that he thought was humane. How quickly, though, people could be obsessed through trial and error. Even more so if they felt their life or the ones they loved were in jeopardy.

  “Have you ever considered that what he’s doing is for you?”

  She paused. Her spoon inches away fr
om her mouth.

  “It doesn’t change anything. My life is in no way more valuable than yours, or your friends’.”

  I pondered this as we finished up eating.

  A few hours later, Elijah invited me to go with him and a girl I hadn’t seen before up to what was left of the Empire State Building. It was no longer the same size. A third of it had been destroyed. Even in the midst of an apocalypse people still wanted to fucking sightsee. Jess and Izzy were going to go along with Rowan.

  I declined. I was still recovering. I guess they must have thought that I was immune to pain. I wasn’t. I was still trying to grasp the weight of the responsibility on my shoulders. Understand how I could help without becoming a lab rat. I wasn’t one for having people poke needles in my arms. I also wasn’t naïve enough to think that taking a few bags of blood was going to cure society.

  I watched the others about to head out. I noticed Rowan chatting again with Jess. And for the first time I caught something different in her. She was opening up to others. She was less guarded. Perhaps her time away from us had taught her that. I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of jealousy. The fact that she wasn’t letting the apocalypse turn her into someone who was cold and untrusting was good, I guessed.

  That’s exactly what I was becoming, cold and untrusting. But it hadn’t happened overnight. Almost every person we had met so far had screwed us over. They all had their own agendas.

  Ben stayed behind and chatted with some of the guys who were ex-police. They were swapping horror stories from their final days before the collapse of society. Older women sat with children, braiding their hair. Teens, well, they were pretty much who they were before the apocalypse; just now they had more things to moan about. I would see them whisper, laugh, and run off into the tunnels.

  I returned to the train and was looking for a place to clean up when Wren entered.

  “Where are the bathrooms?” I asked.

  “Follow me.”

  She led me down a series of corridors to what used to be a washroom, except there were no stalls. Just holes in the ground and smell that came up and made you want to gag from the moment you cracked the door open.

  “I think I will hold it.”

  She laughed.

  “Can I show you something?”

  “Sure,” I groaned, feeling a little pain shoot through my side again.

  “How’s it looking?” I lifted up my top and she placed her hand on the rag that was attached to my skin. She gently moved it back and then sealed it back up again. She grimaced.

  “That bad?”

  “Um, that depends if you like raw steak swimming in blood.” She chuckled a little.

  Before we left, she grabbed a couple of handguns and some ammo. “You taking me to a firing range?”

  “As much as I would like to say it’s safe where we are going, it’s not. Better to err on the side of caution than take chances.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Well. If you don’t want—”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  Annora looked over at us as we headed down one of the tunnels. They must have been used to seeing everyone coming and going. There didn’t appear to be any strict rules or curfews and leadership wasn’t heavy-handed. I wasn’t sure if that was good or not. Though after seeing what happened back at the fortress it made a change not to have someone breathing down our necks.

  Our flashlights swept the dark tunnels as we moved down them. It was humid down there like it always is in subways. Occasionally we would hear the sound of scuttling and the hairs on my arms would go up. Wren said it was just rats. Which didn’t exactly make it any better.

  “How did you come to meet Annora?”

  “She met us when we were being pursued by the Hive. She helped us.”

  “Rowan?”

  “Rowan is my brother and Birdy…” her chin dropped.

  “Your brother?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded.

  “Wren Bird?”

  “I know, don’t say anything. I’ve heard all the jokes already.”

  I smirked. “I wasn’t going to say a word.”

  In the darkness of the wide tunnels that swallowed every inch of light we could hear the sound of snarling but it was a fair distance away and Wren said it was coming from above. Few Z’s were down in the tunnels. At least the ones they had cleared. Most of them were the left-over of people living on the streets. They called them tunnel dwellers or “Mole People.” Most had been relocated two decades ago but the place still attracted all types of people.

  “So where did the name come from?”

  “I was named after my mother.”

  “What happened to them? Your parents, I mean?”

  Her face screwed up and she breathed in deeply as if it was painful to relive the memories.

  “You don’t need to tell me.”

  “No, it’s okay. My father was a pilot and my mom worked for a local library. When everything kicked off she was home that day. It was a weekend. I was upstairs getting ready to go out with a friend of mine.” She paused and I could see it was difficult reliving it. It was for everyone. “Birdy, was doing what he always did, playing video games. Rowan was out. I heard glass shatter then the sound of my mother’s screams. When I came down I found our neighbor hunched over her, chewing into her neck. I raced upstairs. Birdy and I locked ourselves in the washroom and I phoned Rowan. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have got out. I owe him a lot. Anyway, we were part of a group that had made our way over to the city from Long Island. There were fifteen of us at the start. That soon dropped as people died and others were taken by the Hive.”

  “What town did you live in?”

  “Montauk.”

  “Oh that’s the place with the creepy base, right.”

  She smirked. “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

  “Any truth in that?”

  “Depends what you heard.”

  “Oh, that they did experiments on people. Time travel and whatnot.”

  “Well, I can tell you the town is pretty much dull. That military installation is off-limits to the public. It’s all a state park down there now.”

  We continued pressing on for what felt like twenty minutes until we reached a huge pile of rubble that led up to an opening in a brick wall. We stumbled over the stones that were covered in dust. A rat shot out and nearly gave me a heart attack. Once we entered the large gaping hole we found ourselves in another equally dark room. This however seemed different to the tunnel we had just left. My light fell upon stacks and stacks of books. Most were on the ground but there were still some that were on steel shelving. We walked up and down the narrow aisles. The aroma of wet paper hit my nostrils. Most of the books had been drenched in water from pipes that had broken.

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s the New York Public Library’s underground vault. It mainly holds rare books and manuscripts. Quite something, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, gazing up at the tall shelving that still housed a few books. The floor was covered in paperbacks. Some were thick like the kind you would find in a lawyer’s office.

  “I like to come here. It reminds me of my mother.”

  She stopped just in front of a shelf and picked out a book and shone the light on it. It was Moby Dick.

  “That’s the same one Birdy was reading.”

  “Our mother used to read to us at night up until we were too old to want to be read to, but this was one of our favorites. You ever read it?”

  “No. I know it’s about catching some big ass whale but that’s about it.”

  “Oh, it’s about a lot more than that. Most of the decent books are. You have to look below the surface. What was the author trying to say?”

  I shrugged. “What was he saying in that one?”

  My flashlight illuminated her face. Shadows danced against her features. She had these intense green eyes like a wild forest. I diverted my gaze away towards another group of books.
I could feel my pulse racing a little faster.

  “Some will always say it was about a whale. Ahab’s obsession with catching it. But it’s really about life together among a diverse crew, an exploration of social status and class, good and evil and faith.” She paused. “Do you have faith, Johnny?”

  “You are not a religious nut, are you?” I asked then realized I might have offended her which wasn’t my intention.

  I turned to look at the books on the shelves when I answered her. “My old man was never really a churchgoer, I guess we were never exposed to it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “No, I didn’t ask if you went to a church. Do you believe in something greater than yourself? That somehow through all this shit, we are being guided towards something better?”

  “I try not to think too much into it. Overthinking tends to get you killed.”

  She scoffed and put the book back on the shelf. “You sound a lot like Rowan.”

  For a second we heard what sounded like someone coming into the library but then it went silent. I figured it was an animal that had made its way down through the tunnel system. Being stuck down in these tunnels gave me the creeps. How the hell anyone lived down here was beyond me. I would have preferred to take my chances above ground.

  “Did you have brothers or sisters?” she asked.

  “One. I lost him on the way here.”

  She nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  We continued walking around the place. It was quiet except for the odd dripping of water. I was fully expecting a Z to pop out any moment and scare the shit out of me. I had my finger close to the trigger at all times.

  “Do you trust Annora?” I asked.

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “With her being the daughter of the Warden. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “No, had it not been for her, we would have been locked up in that place and probably dead. We owe our life to her.”

  “And Birdy?”

  “That was unfortunate. She tried but they got to him before we could.”

  “But what about killing the Warden? You on board with that?”

  “I’m on board with whatever will release our friends and ultimately provide a cure for humanity.” She paused then shone her light on me. “You are part of that. Whatever you’ve been through, Johnny. Whatever has caused you to doubt others. This is bigger than you or any of us. There are more lives at stake than we can imagine.”