The Dead World (The Dead Room Trilogy Book 2)

by Erickson,Stephanie

  But there was no reason to worry. Her cancer was gone. They’d gotten it all. Every last cell. They’d done minimal damage internally once it was gone. What they had done—chew a bit around her intestines near where the cancer had been—could be repaired.

  As he pored over the blood work just outside her hospital room, Hope looked at him expectantly. He looked up, feeling like he had a bigger purpose in his life for the first time ever.

  “A success,” he breathed.

  9.

  Approximate year, 2346

  Lehman’s home was in a lovely spot. She didn’t have an expansive ocean view like some of the other elders, with the waves constantly crashing and the salt air ruining their porches and leaving a film on their windows. She didn’t need all that. Her home was right on the edge of the woods, closest to the preparation stone, which was why she often got the task of carrying a body to the stone.

  She tried not to mind it, since it was such a short walk home, but bodies were heavy. One of the men could do it, if they weren’t such pansies. Ashby forbid they had to walk an extra mile just to spare her carrying a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight.

  But that wasn’t what was on her mind that evening as she sipped her tea on the back porch, watching the stars twinkle at the edge of the woods. She was thinking about Mason. She knew Mattli had made the right choice in him. He would be a good second in command. So why did she feel a little slighted? Nothing was promised to her. She wasn’t entitled to anything, and the moment she started thinking that way was the moment she reduced herself to Branneth’s level.

  She groaned inwardly as she sipped her tea. Branneth. Now there was an elder she could live without. Nothing but a whiny pain in the ass.

  But Mason, he was different. He wasn’t raised to be an elder. He would shake things up, and that was just what they needed. In spite of her slight melancholy, she smiled.

  It wasn’t as if Mason made it easy to be upset with him. He was so gracious, and he’d even offered to give her the position if it meant that much to her. He said he didn’t want it anyway.

  But she’d given it to him without hesitation. He needed the protection of that spot, and she didn’t. No one threatened her the way they would threaten him once the news spread that a convicted murderer was leading the island.

  Lehman sighed. It was well past getting late and advancing on early. She’d been contemplating things far too long, and she had nothing to show for it. No answers, no suggestions to make things easier. Nothing.

  Reluctantly, she stood with her cup in hand and went inside. As she stood at the sink rinsing out her mug in a basin of cold water, she heard it. The distinct sound of gunshots rang through the woods, and the birds took to the air.

  Checking to see that her gun was in place, she took off running into the woods, toward the sound.

  Nothing. No other sounds followed. After a few moments, she had no idea where to turn. She hadn’t thought to grab anything useful, like a kinetic flashlight or shoes sturdier than slippers.

  She stood in the center of the woods, listening hard, but hearing nothing. So, she decided to cut through to the path that led to the preparation stone. If she didn’t find anything on her way, she’d loop back home and let it go. It was probably just some kids hunting for extra rations. Kids who had somehow gotten a hold of a gun, when only the elders had free access to them…

  Shaking her head, she tried to let the uneasy feeling go. But it took hold and settled deep in her stomach, propelling her feet forward a little faster. Despite the darkness, she found her way easily. She’d lived near those woods so long she could walk them with her eyes closed, path or no path. Reaching her hands out as she went, she lovingly brushed the big trees.

  Rather suddenly, she was on the path to the stone, and if she’d kept going, she knew she could walk straight across it and disappear once again. But she didn’t. She turned right and walked toward the stone. She just wanted to get a look at it, make sure nothing was amiss, and then go back home. Her mind was restless, so she knew she wouldn’t sleep anyway. And, as much as she loved the woods, wandering around in them in nothing but slippers and her pajamas at three AM wasn’t her idea of a good time.

  A voice stopped her just short of the stone. She couldn’t see its source, but she knew it had come from around the next bend.

  “Who’s there?” it asked. It was a man’s voice. An old man.

  “Elder Mattli? What on Ashby’s island are you doing out so late?” she asked as she jogged around the corner.

  “Elder Lehman,” he said, the relief in his voice making her quicken her pace even more.

  If she expected to see anything at all, what she found wasn’t it. She thought maybe Mattli was just sitting on the stone, contemplating his friend’s death and preparing for tomorrow’s funeral. But what she saw was the old man kneeling by the stone, glistening in the moonlight, with hands pressed tightly to Mason’s middle.

  Lehman went to her knees near Mason’s head. “What happened?”

  Mattli nodded toward another figure lying just behind him. She stood and squinted toward it. “Is that…?” She couldn’t be sure, not in the darkness, and the way the head was turned away, but it sure looked like…

  “Elder Branneth made some poor choices,” Mattli said

  “That much is plain.”

  “Help me get him back to your house. We need to get a doctor. He might bleed to death before…” Mattli’s desperation choked his words.

  “We won’t let that happen,” Lehman assured the old man. “Give me your robe,” she said, holding out her hand. He shed it in record time. She tore long strips of it, tying them around Mason’s waist, hoping it would be enough to staunch some of the bleeding while they moved him.

  It was a struggle. And when she lifted him, he cried out in terrible pain, making her almost drop him. She was well versed in carrying dead weight, but not people who cried out. It broke her heart.

  “I’m sorry, Mason. I’m trying to help you.” But the poor man wasn’t conscious enough to comprehend what was happening to him. All he registered was pain.

  She took his top half, just under his shoulders, and she let Mattli take the legs. Their progress was agonizingly slow, but they were going as fast as they could. Still, it took more than double what it took to walk the path unhindered. The whole time, Lehman walked backward, keeping her eyes on the makeshift bandage, watching it get more and more saturated with blood as they walked. With each step, it seemed like his skin grew more ashen looking, but she tried to tell herself it was the moonlight.

  By the time they arrived at her home, his heartbeat was faint and his breathing was shallow.

  “Run and get a doctor,” Mattli commanded once they had him laid out on her kitchen table.

  It was the first time in quite a few years she wished her match was still alive. He’d been a doctor. He was a good man, but cold. He never looked at her with love, never offered a warm embrace, or a gesture of affection. He did his duty when necessary, but that was all. He’d died of an infection he caught from a patient almost fifteen years ago, and she’d been right on the edge of being rematched. She was only a year away from being too old to have children, and they hadn’t had luck so far, so she passed on the option. She’d lived happily alone. Until that moment, she’d never missed him.

  The nearest doctor lived three blocks over. She nodded fervently and took off running in her slippers, hoping Mattli would be able to find what he needed in her home to keep Mason alive until she got back.

  The doctor took an intolerable amount of time to answer the door. True, it was four AM, but still.

  Clumsily, he adjusted the glasses on his face, hand-me-downs, no doubt, that merely sharpened his vision, but never quite made it perfect, since they weren’t made for him. “Elder Lehman, this is a surprise.”

  “One of the elders has been mortally wounded. We need your help. We can’t let him die. Not another one,” Lehman explained, a little breathless from her r
un.

  “Of course,” he answered as he snatched his bag off a chair near the door and followed her down the walkway to the driveway and out into the street.

  They ran at a good pace. Lehman had no idea where her energy came from after carrying Mason all that way. She thought she’d never lift another thing. But his life depended on that run.

  She never looked over her shoulder to make sure the doctor was keeping up. He was younger than she was by about twenty years. He’d better be keeping up. He’d better not even be winded when they got there.

  They burst through her front door. She led the way to the back, where Mattli had Mason laid out on the dining room table. Mattli had quite a few candles lit, and Mason had soaked through his makeshift tourniquet. His breathing was shallow and intermittent. He was letting go.

  “No,” Lehman said as she went to him, grabbing a clean towel from the closet in the hall and pressing it hard to his side.

  The doctor went to work right away, and gently, but firmly, pushed Lehman out of the way.

  “Elder Lehman, please bring one of those candles over here, I’m getting a shadow,” he said as he cut some of the clothes and makeshift dressings away.

  “What happened here?” The question was a clear sign of his youth. He hadn’t learned not to ask such things of the elders.

  Mattli started the automatic response. “You do not…” A funny look came over his face as he straightened. “What has that answer ever gotten us before?” he asked, looking at Lehman. She panicked, thinking he wanted an actual answer.

  “He was stabbed by another elder. Branneth, if you must know. She’s lying dead in the woods. We have a bit of a mess on our hands here, Doc.”

  Lehman was shocked by his words. They were so forthcoming. So unlike him.

  “I see,” the doctor said, trying to cover his surprise by burying himself in the work.

  Sporadically, he asked for different items—towels, scissors, scalpel, water, and a few items from his bag.

  After hours of toiling, the sun started to rise as he sewed the last stitch on the outside of his skin.

  “He needs blood,” the doctor said.

  “Fine,” Lehman said. She rolled up her blood-soaked sleeve.

  “It’s not quite that easy. If you’re not the right type, it could kill him.”

  “How do I find out what type I am?”

  “We don’t. We don’t have that capability anymore.”

  “So, what? We just let him die?” Lehman asked, getting annoyed with the man.

  “Well, we could see if he recovers on his own, but that would take forever, if he even comes out of it. He could die at any moment. His heartbeat is faint, and his breathing is almost nonexistent. I can’t believe he even lasted long enough for me to sew him up.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Mattli said, his tone measured. Clearly, he was getting irritated with the man too.

  “Since he’s likely to die anyway, I’m suggesting a transfusion. Ideally from you, Elder Lehman. Elder Mattli is too old, no offense intended. Taking blood will unnecessarily weaken you.”

  “Fine. I already have my sleeve rolled up.” She held out her bare arm, showing him just how on board she was with the idea.

  “Great. I just need to run home and get a few extra tools to start the transfusion.” He ran out without another word.

  “Well, he’s a bit annoying.”

  Mattli didn’t answer. He looked up at Lehman. “I’m done, Elder Lehman. I’m done playing the games. This ends here, tonight. No matter what happens to Mason, we’re done.”

  The finality of what he said scared her. “What do you mean by done?”

  “I mean, the elders are over. There are too many of us. It’s become a power play, not the balance it was meant to be.”

  “So…” Lehman wasn’t sure what that meant for her or the island.

  “So, from here on out, you and I will govern the island with the input of the people. If Mason here survives, he will help. No one else. In the future, when one of us dies, the island can elect a new official to take the place. There will be no more career elders, no more grooming children to run the island. And no more secrets. Mason is right.” He looked over at the man, who looked like he might already be dead. There was so much time between each breath that it scared Lehman. She gasped when he finally breathed, not realizing she was breathing with him.

  “What was Mason right about?” Lehman asked, partly out of curiosity, and partly to keep Mattli talking. She feared he was on the verge of a total breakdown. The things he was talking about were so radical for such a traditional man, who was so set in his ways. The evening’s events had rattled him, and she wasn’t convinced he was making rational choices.

  “He always wanted more transparency from us. Not as much as his friend Ashley did, but they were both right. What good did keeping all these secrets do us? The dead room? Turning our people to ash? Nothing. It did nothing.” He turned away from Lehman rather dramatically and glared out the window on her back door.

  Struggling to keep up, she shook her head. Dead room? Ash? “Fine. So, we dissolve the elders,” she said, going to his side and staring out into the new morning.

  “Tonight, Mason may not have died, but the old way of life on this island did.”

  10.

  November, 2024

  Ashby’s next four patients were a total success, just like the first. He was declared a miracle worker, with a stack of patients taller than him waiting for treatment. Doctors were begging him to go wide with his bots. Teach us how to do it so we can save the world, they pleaded.

  However, Ashby still felt it needed more work. The bots needed one last tweak before he felt comfortable unleashing them on the world.

  “We have to teach them to stop once they’re done. They should be learning bots, able to identify when their task is completed. We trained them to eat a specific disease. But their appetites are insatiable. Once the disease is gone, they’ll eat anything. And if I’m not there to supervise, things could get ugly with this many bots in play.”

  Hope nodded in agreement. “But how?”

  “There’s the rub.”

  He toiled over it for weeks, not getting to focus as much as he wanted on the problem with more and more patients knocking down his lab door. Who knew so many people were sick? For every Mrs. Loretti, there was another one right behind her, waiting for his miracle cure. It was exhausting.

  But eventually, something occurred to him.

  Programming. It was all about programming. They’d programmed them to eat the cancer. But he’d never gotten the programming quite right in teaching them to eat nothing but the cancer. It was time-consuming work, and he had to halt seeing patients for weeks while he worked on the bots, much to the chagrin of the medical community.

  Just when he thought he had it just right, a misplaced forward slash crashed the entire system, or an incorrect connection rendered the bot entirely useless. He’d fried more bots than he wanted to count by the time he finally got a result he wanted.

  He wanted to test his superbots on a chimp first, he did have one with cancer left, but the patients demanded help now. There was no time. So, against even his better judgment, he let them go into humans first. As he watched them make their way into the first patient, he somehow felt more anxious than he had with Mrs. Loretti. If this didn’t work, and they found out he hadn’t tested it first, he could lose everything, and Mendi would win. He hadn’t followed procedure. But he was simply giving them what they wanted. Or so he told himself when he was having trouble sleeping. He wondered if Mendi said similar things to himself, while he was lying in Judy’s arms.

  The night before the first insertion, he’d gotten the divorce papers back from Judy. Everything was final. She’d taken half of everything. He took the car, and he let her have the house. It was over. Anything he made from here on out was his. He’d even written that into the stipulations, and she’d signed them without pause. He wasn’t even sure she
’d read them all. He wasn’t sure she even cared. He’d been replaced. Or maybe, he’d never even had a spot in her heart.

  He hoped that starting this new enterprise as a free man was a good sign as he lay awake listening to the lonely chimp in his lab that night.

  The procedure went off without a hitch. He’d selected a patient with a less-aggressive cancer so as to use fewer bots. But fewer bots meant more time to see results. Over the next several days, he monitored the man closely as his cancer shrank predictably. After about a week, it was gone entirely, and Ashby initiated the removal sequence. Only after they were out would he be able to tell if they’d stopped once the cancer was gone.

  To Ashby’s surprise, the man was not only cancer free but unharmed. It worked.

  Almost overnight, Ashby was made into a celebrity. The miracle man. The savior.

  Funds poured in as he struggled to keep up with production. Each hospital that could afford them got twenty bots. Enough to save five patients at a time with aggressive cancer, or up to ten with a lesser type. The price tag for that many bots was astronomical, and by the time Ashby paid for supplies, he ended up making a comfortable living, particularly now that he was on his own.

  The university allowed him to sell the bots this way because he’d included them in everything, even the patent application process. He struck a deal with them before agreeing to anything with interested hospitals. Each hospital agreed to make a donation to the university as part of the cost of the bots. Ashby didn’t know the details of Mendi’s deal, but Ashby hoped his had been better.

  As a result of their combined successes, the university was doing quite well. They were making plans to build a whole new wing on the school with the money. And it kept rolling in.