The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  “Skyler?”

  He turned at Davi’s low voice, coming from the doorway. “In here,” he replied. “Two down, more upstairs. And subhumans in the basement.”

  “I’ll take the basement,” Davi said, readying a pistol.

  “No,” Skyler said, “I’ve got it.”

  “You sure?”

  Skyler nodded. “Where’s Ana?”

  “Stunned from that explosion. I told her to guard the door in case we flushed anyone out.”

  “Good,” Skyler said, genuinely. “Right. Shout an all-clear when you can, and exercise caution. We still don’t know where your friends are.”

  Davi nodded and led the way down the main hall. They came to a narrow stairwell. To one side of it, an open door gave way to another set of steps leading down.

  Skyler stopped only to take a brief look down the stairs. The steps looked aged: cracked wood nailed atop older rotten planks. He crept forward, leaving Davi to deal with the second floor.

  The smell from below overpowered him—worse than the bathroom. A mixed scent of death and human waste. Skyler stopped halfway down and vomited. He could not hear his own retching above the agonizing cries from below. After a time, the nausea passed. Another four steps, taken slowly, and Skyler reached the basement.

  When his feet hit the floor, the wailing stopped.

  It felt markedly cooler in the subterranean room, enough to make him shiver. He placed an arm across his mouth and nose to quell the odor, and moved inside.

  His shoes encountered a sticky, wet patch. Skyler thrust out a hand to brace himself, just preventing a slip and fall. He paused to gather himself, to let his heart rate slow.

  The room spanned ten meters on each side, following the footprint of the building above. In the near darkness, Skyler could see poorly erected rooms—pens, or cages, he sensed—lining the other three walls. In the center of the space, an area three meters square was marked off by sections of chain-link fence.

  Inside the center cage, a naked woman was crouched on hands and knees. Her head tilted slightly when Skyler’s eyes met hers. The movement reminded him of a cat. She had the wild eyes and unkempt hair of a subhuman, but not the starved leanness. Her hands and feet were held in place by metal braces. A section of fence behind her had been cut away, allowing … access.

  Skyler swallowed, a knot of realization forming in his gut even before the thought came fully to mind. The restrained subhuman woman was filthy save the part of her pressed against the gap in the cage. A steel bucket sat on the ground just outside, a soiled towel hung carelessly over the lip.

  He shot a glance at the cells along the far wall. A female subhuman form loomed within each, save one that was empty, the door slightly ajar.

  The knot within him tightened. Skyler turned to the opposite wall. More cells, more prisoners, though these were different. He saw six naked men and women, all devoid of that animalistic glare. Immunes. Two slept or were, perhaps, dead. The others stared at him with hope in their eyes.

  Skyler didn’t need to see any more. He’d heard enough about Gabriel and his followers to guess what was going on here: breeding.

  The subhuman woman hissed at him. Within seconds, the shrieks and wails from the other cells began anew.

  Time to end this.

  He shot the subhuman woman in the cage at point-blank range, between the eyes. She made no effort to avoid it. Skyler had a vague sense that she wanted him to do it, the way she closed her eyes just before he fired.

  With a methodical march along the far wall he found six more of the poor creatures. Skyler put a bullet in each, ending their misery. The anger in him morphed, became resolute, a white-hot coal. This was evil, pure and simple, and whatever else happened he would make sure Gabriel paid for it. The world had enough problems without this kind of shit.

  Turning back toward where he’d entered, Skyler faced the immune prisoners.

  “I’m here to help you,” he said.

  Combination locks secured each cage. Skyler made a cursory search of the room for bolt cutters or anything of the sort, but found nothing. “Get back,” he said to the prisoners. The order registered for those awake and they hobbled toward the wall.

  Four gunshots later the cages were open.

  “Carry them,” he said, pointing to the sleepers. “Get outside and wait for us. I’ll try to find you some clothes.”

  One mumbled thanks. Skyler ignored them and went back up the stairs.

  Davi waited for him at the ground-floor landing, carrying a young girl in his arms, three or four years old. She hugged him fiercely, face buried in his shoulder, her chest heaving with sobs. At the door to the lodge Skyler saw a few other immunes, shuffling out into the bright sun.

  “Find anyone?” Davi asked.

  “Six,” Skyler said. “We’re burning this place when we leave. No debate.”

  Davi held Skyler’s gaze for an instant. “Okay.”

  The immunes shuffled up the stairs, carrying their brethren. Davi greeted the first one by name and a flicker of hope flashed on the man’s face. They embraced as well as they could.

  “Take them outside. I’ll look for clothing and blankets,” Skyler said.

  When the others cleared the front door, Skyler bounded up the stairs to the second floor and searched it again. Davi might have had little formal training, but he’d killed two armed men in the central hallway. Skyler stepped over the bodies and entered the first bedroom he found. In the closet he found black uniforms like those worn by Gabriel’s people in Belém. Skyler grabbed the garments and tossed them on the bed. He found one pair of hiking boots and some underwear, and threw that on the pile, too.

  As he ransacked the place for useful supplies, the rage within him turned cold. It froze into a deep resolve. Whoever this Gabriel fellow was, he’d not just held these people against their will; he’d forced them to breed. And not just with each other, but also with subhumans. Try as he might, Skyler couldn’t keep his imagination from painting what this place must have been like an hour before they arrived, and what kind of sickness lived within the people who ran it on Gabriel’s behalf. He felt no remorse at killing those he’d encountered on the way in, and would feel none when he put a round through Gabriel’s brain, either.

  Outside he found Ana cradling the young girl Davi had rescued. She wept openly, as did the child.

  The two unconscious prisoners were being tended to by the rest. In all, a dozen immunes had been freed.

  Skyler set the blanket in the dirt and unfolded it to reveal the items he’d scrounged, then walked away to let the group dress with a modicum of privacy.

  Davi brushed the hair from Ana’s face. “Wait for us here, sis,” he said, and followed Skyler over to examine the wreckage of the barn.

  Smoking debris littered the ground for hundreds of meters around the structure. Whatever explosive they stored in here was either very potent or in a large quantity. Skyler saw bits and pieces of food packaging, and signs of less critical things like toiletries and charred books.

  Nothing remained of the barn itself. Skyler could only hope no one had been inside. No one friendly, that is. He sighed. Clearly Gabriel’s people had stored their reserve supplies here, and it might have been worth rummaging through. No point in worrying about it now.

  “Your sister …,” Skyler said without looking at Davi.

  “… takes risks,” Davi said, finishing. In tone and terseness, he said he didn’t want to talk about her actions.

  Skyler let it go. He’d force the topic before they returned to Belém, but more pressing issues were on his mind. “The purpose of this place, Davi. Not just a prison.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Did you know about this before we arrived? Is this what you two escaped from?”

  Davi shook his head. “I …” He searched for the words. “Gabriel talked often about how just finding immunes wasn’t enough. We needed to create more. I thought he meant to force Ana …”

  To
breed. Breeding immunes. Skyler didn’t know if the trait even worked that way, but the presence of the young girl seemed evidence enough. She couldn’t be more than five, Skyler guessed, and that meant she’d been born after the disease ravaged the planet, beyond the aura.

  Had there been others who didn’t have the protection? Dashed against a wall or drowned for their inferiority? Skyler shivered.

  Together, Skyler and Davi walked the perimeter of the compound, and then through the field of wreckage that had been the barn. Other than a few cans of food, and a box of pain-relief pills, they found nothing salvageable.

  “The two vehicles are a gift,” Skyler said. “We might be able to sneak up on the colony in them. There are a couple of uniforms, too.”

  Davi said nothing and avoided Skyler’s gaze.

  “Pack anything useful into the trucks. We’ll move back to the clearing tonight and head to Belém at dawn,” Skyler added. He watched the young man carefully and saw the distance in his eyes. “You do intend to come back with me, right? We had a deal.”

  “Yes,” Davi said, his voice defensive. “At least give us some time to tend to our friends, after what they’ve been through. I can’t think about tomorrow right now. Even without … all this … Ana and I have been on the move for months.”

  Skyler thought of Davi sitting in a hammock on the beach in Belém, but kept it to himself. “How long are you talking? A day? A week? My people are under Gabriel’s thumb back there, and those in orbit—”

  “Just …” Davi swallowed whatever he intended to say, and then lowered his voice. “Can we just wait until morning to decide? Let my friends rest, and not have to ponder a rush into danger so quickly after they’ve been freed?”

  That’s when their thirst for revenge will be strongest, though, Skyler thought. He kept it to himself, though. Davi feared the dangers ahead, too, he guessed. Maybe some time would help him remember the purpose of their plan.

  Those who were able spent the rest of the day hoisting what supplies they could find onto the cargo racks on the tops of the two trucks. Ana sat atop one vehicle, organizing the meager goods and tying them down. Davi stood atop the other truck, rifle at the ready, scanning the surrounding countryside for any approaching subhumans.

  When finished, Skyler told Ana and Davi to drive to the clearing where they’d camped the night before. “I’ll hike out there after I’ve had a good look around,” he said, and waved them off.

  In the common room he found nothing except blood and furniture. The tables could be burned for firewood, but then so could the entire cursed building. He left everything where it lay and didn’t bother to search the corpses.

  He moved on to the kitchen. In one pantry he found a box of packaged noodles with bouillon packets, a discovery that made him think of Woon, and Prumble, and the old airport. Skyler hadn’t thought about Darwin in a day at least, and the realization filled him with a mixture of guilt and sorrow. He may have had next to nothing left there, but he’d abandoned it all, and for what?

  For Tania. For Tania, and the future.

  She’d be desperate by now, he guessed. Air and water would be running short. He wondered if she knew anything about the situation on the ground. Maybe she’d taken the stations back to Darwin, for sheer purposes of survival. He couldn’t blame her if she had.

  In a drawer Skyler found a bag of hot sauce packets. Past their expiration date, but if he’d learned anything in the last five years it was that expiration dates were grossly underestimated. The ubiquitous Preservall could keep most foods safe for many years, something food manufacturers must have found bad for sales, so they shaved months or years off the printed date. The hot sauce went into his bag with the freeze-dried noodles.

  Out the back door he found a small garden, blissfully free of mango. Skyler left the plants untouched, deciding he could send someone else back here to pick anything edible. Next to the planters he found gardening tools, and a hefty axe that had been recently sharpened. This he kept in hand as he circled the building.

  He went upstairs again. A methodical search of each bedroom produced a few additional items: ammunition, two modern handguns, and a suitcase full of women’s clothes. Skyler put the weapons and bullets inside with the clothing and tossed the whole thing out the window to the dirt below.

  In the master bedroom he found a sleek black briefcase on the top shelf of the closet, pushed way to the back. The locks were in place and required both a combination and a thumb-print to open.

  Or an axe.

  Skyler set the thing in the middle of the hardwood floor. He brought the blade down with all his strength, aiming for the front edge just behind the locks. It took two such swings to sever the front of the case. Sweating, Skyler dumped the contents onto the bed.

  A passport spilled out, along with a thick leather wallet, two stacks of crisp one-hundred-euro bills, and a bag of cocaine.

  Skyler flipped open the passport and read the name. Gabriel Zagallo.

  The passport had stamps from every drug-infested hellhole on pre-disease Earth, along with travel visas for China and India. Skyler studied the photograph. The worn passport was dated a decade earlier, so he couldn’t be sure how much the man in the picture had changed since then. The man he saw had well-groomed black hair, combed neatly to one side. His head was tilted down, giving his eyes an animal quality that chilled Skyler.

  This man had been a gangster, before.

  The contents of the wallet contradicted that conclusion. A credit slate, its screen dead due to a lack of spooling, had chipped corners and grime on the screen, implying heavy use. A stack of receipts for small meals, and a few small bills in the local currency. A driver’s license that confirmed the name on the passport. Most important, though, was the badge. The words across the top read POLÍCIA FEDERAL.

  Gangster, or cop? Maybe both. Skyler wondered if the man had worked undercover. That might explain the bag of narcotics, and the money. Strange things to pack in the face of an apocalypse, but Skyler had seen plenty of odd choices in the belongings people tried to bring on their flight from the disease.

  An undercover role also explained Gabriel’s ability to draw others to him. He would have the acting skills needed to lure people in. The ability to make up lies on the spot.

  Skyler slipped the passport and wallet into his bag, and left.

  Exhausted and hungry, he hiked along the ridgeline above the lodge. Dusk fell, and with it came a wild symphony from the rainforest that ringed the valley. Birds sang a countless variety of songs that all blended into one constant chatter.

  The group of immunes sat around a small campfire nestled within a copse of trees, a few hundred meters past the ridge. They ate noodles in a spicy chicken broth and raw vegetables plucked from the garden behind the house. Skyler sat near the edge of the ring, and stuck to the noodles, in hopes of settling his stomach.

  Between swatting insects from his neck and slurping broth, he stole glances at the prisoners they’d freed.

  Aside from the child, the others were all adults and in relatively good health. The oldest, a woman with tired eyes and a quiet manner, was perhaps fifty. Skyler doubted she could help in retaking the colony, nor the young girl, but the other ten looked every bit the hardened survivors that he would have expected, five years on since SUBS scoured Earth.

  At the end of the meal a bottle of rum was passed around; it had been found behind the driver’s seat in one of the armored trucks. By the second time the bottle reached Skyler, much of the somber mood had lifted. Davi laughed freely at a comment from one of the other men, while Ana played an improvised game with the young girl, using rocks and a stick.

  Skyler wanted to talk of the next step in the plan, but Davi had been right. There was no harm in letting the freed immunes have a quiet evening before the storm that would follow.

  The insects grew increasingly worse as the evening turned to night, and no one wanted to sleep outside. So they divided up into two equal groups and slept inside
the armored trucks. Skyler took a driver’s seat that, though cushioned, did not recline, and his legs were pressed painfully against the dash. Eventually he gave up and climbed to the roof of the truck.

  For a while he kept watch, but when an hour passed with only the constant din of birdsong wafting down from the tree line, he nestled himself amid the frayed backpacks and ragged canvas bags the group had cobbled together. Skyler pulled his jacket up around his head and lay down with his rifle cradled across his chest.

  The smell of toast and strawberries greeted him when he woke.

  Dawn had long passed, and the sun hung above the eastern horizon in a crisp, clear blue sky.

  Half the group huddled about a cook fire, warming toaster pastries on a slab of charred wood. The sweet, buttery smell made Skyler’s stomach growl loud enough for others to hear and turn their heads.

  A blue box lay near them, its edges charred. The lid had been torn open, and Skyler could see more of the breakfast pastries within, still wrapped in Preservall bags.

  “Found it near the ridge,” someone said, munching on one of the golden squares. “Must have been blown a hundred meters by that explosion.”

  Skyler set himself down beside one of the men and smiled. They offered him two of the pastries straight from the fire.

  “One second,” Skyler said. He unzipped his backpack and rummaged through it until he found what he wanted. Straightening his face, Skyler produced a handful of instant-coffee packets. A cheer went up around the circle, and Skyler traded with the man offering him the pastries. Two of the treats for a dozen silver-foil packets of powdered coffee.

  Within ten minutes, the others came to join them, called by the irresistible smells. Ana and Davi arrived in unison. They were dressed, armed, and breathing hard. Patrol duty, Skyler recognized. He smiled at them. Ana smiled back, Davi did not.

  Tomatoes from the garden were roasted on the same wood plank, and Skyler felt like a magician when he produced a fistful of white packets from his bag—salt and pepper. The red fruits were sour and not quite ripe, but with the seasoning they made a perfect counter to the sickly sweet pastries.