The After Days Trilogy

by Scott Medbury

  He heard the voice behind him again. Fainter now, but somehow worse because of the creepy sing song quality it took on.

  “Come out, come out wherever you arrrreeee.”

  Luke wasn’t sure if Ragg was now in the ducts and following him or still calling out from the vent, and he didn’t plan to find out. He took off, crawling and scrabbling back the way he had come. He didn’t stop to rest until he reached a junction of three shafts and even then it was through necessity. He had forgotten to mark this spot with his chalk. He sat there, frustrated and cursing for valuable seconds trying to figure out which one it was. The stakes were high…if he took the wrong duct he could end up anywhere, and it would mean almost certain discovery if they did a head count.

  In the end it was his own wound that saved him. By the light of the phone he was able to spot a small smear of blood on the lip of one of the narrower ducts. Yes! He crawled into it and moved as quickly as he could in the more confined space, spurred on by the fact that he was almost back to the dorm.

  “Well, you know the rest.”

  “You did well Luke,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.

  I could see he was still traumatized by what he had seen and I had the terrible feeling that there would be more of the same trauma to come. “So they’ve got the virus and killed Sonny to test it. How do you think they’ll get it out there though?”

  “No idea…”

  “When will this shit ever end? I hate what the Chinese did as much as anyone, but how will killing more people help?”

  I reflected that it was funny how a person’s opinion could change. Just two months ago I would have been all for an ‘eye for an eye’… and Luke would have cheered me on. I guess Indigo and Huian and what we had experienced in the Facility, the worst of human nature by our own people, had influenced us more than I thought.

  “Don’t you get it, Isaac? It’s what human beings do. We make war over and over and over again. Man won’t ever stop fighting until there’s just a handful of us left on the whole planet…and even that won’t stop them. Then it will be over a girl, or food or shelter. Albert Einstein said he didn’t know what weapons would be used to fight World War 3 but he knew that World War 4 would be fought with sticks and stones.”

  We were silent for a few moments.

  “You know we have to stop him, right?”

  “I don’t see how we can stop him, Luke. We couldn’t even save Sonny.”

  “Isaac, we can’t just let them unleash the virus, no matter what their government did to us. What would it achieve to kill all those people? We know there are people like Huian fighting their government, if the people here and any others could get in touch and work with them, there might be some sort of future for us. After all, we can’t stay in here like rats in a sewer forever…”

  “I know, but we don’t have the firepower to do it. There are too many of them and they’re too well equipped. If we had Randall’s men on our side it might be possible, but there is zero chance they would side with us in a fight over saving the Chinese. I think we have to look after ourselves and get the Hell out of here. And soon…if we happen to give the Professor and his plans a bloody nose in the process, then I’ll be happy.”

  Luke was silent for a moment and then opened his mouth as if to argue. In the end he closed it again without saying a word. He knew I was right. There was no way we could rally US soldiers to fight the Professor because he planned to use the virus on the Chinese. And definitely no way we could do it alone.

  “All right. What’s the plan? How are we going to get out of this rat hole?” Luke seemed to shrug off the heaviness that was upon him and looked at me with a familiar fire in his eyes.

  Before I could answer him, we were interrupted. The soldiers on the evening patrol opened the door and allowed Ben, Paul, Beau and Toby in. After the door was closed, Luke and I invited the boys to gather around. The three boys didn’t actually know Sonny, but were shocked to learn he had been murdered. Ben, of course, was extremely upset and angry. I deliberately left out the part about Sonny being infected. The fewer of us that knew the Professor had created a weaponized virus, the less chance of the wrong ears hearing and working out who had trespassed on the upper level.

  I allowed him to storm and rage for a few minutes before I stood up and grabbed him in a bear hug, as much to contain him as to comfort. It worked. He struggled for a few moments before he eventually calmed down and sobbed into my shoulder before breaking away awkwardly, embarrassed by his tears and saying he needed to wash his face.

  He came back a few seconds later and sat back in on our conversation.

  “By the way Paul, you were right. That other guy didn’t die…the survivor adult you saw in the hospital. Luke saw him in the cell next to Sonny’s and he’s alive as you or I. They must have hidden him the first time they allowed me to visit Sonny.”

  “I knew it,” Paul whispered.

  Even though I hadn’t mentioned Sonny’s deliberate infection, I could see Paul’s mind ticking over and the look on his face told me he had put two and two together. I gave a quick warning shake of my head. He nodded and stayed silent. At the moment only he, Luke and I knew. I would tell Ben in private and also tell him of our decision to escape the Facility.

  Our conversation dried up. I suddenly felt absolutely drained. I wasn’t the only one—Luke looked worse than I felt.

  “I better get back down to the barracks, you should go to bed.”

  22

  In the end I decided to head to the Rec room before I went back down, just to add some sort of alibi in case my long absence was noted. It probably worked out to be a blessing that Bowman had been dispatched to investigate what had happened to the scouting party, otherwise I’m sure it would have been difficult to shake him off, especially given our run in with the Professor’s men.

  As it was, I found two soldiers, Fisk and Meeks, playing pool. I decided to play a couple of games of pool with them so I could pick their brains and see how much they knew about what had happened earlier. They told me that John and Bowman had gone out two hours before, just after the alarms from Luke’s adventure had been silenced. Neither of them seemed to know exactly what that had been about.

  “I heard it was a false alarm,” said Fisk.

  “No, it was some sort of breach,” said Meeks. “Cocksucker, who knows what he’s doing up there. We should be the ones breaching his ass.”

  “Well, you might like breaching ass Meeks, but leave me out of it.”

  We all cracked up.

  Right then a couple of Homeland Security men came into the room and headed to the gym equipment. They were in black T-shirts and track pants but still had their holstered weapons on their hips. Meeks’ buddy gestured that he should be quiet.

  “No, fuck them!” he spat, and looked at the two men challengingly. “Didn’t you see what that little asshole Ragg did to Spence?”

  The Professor’s men didn’t rise to the bait. One jumped on the exercise bike and the other began pummeling the punching bag. Meeks kept up his hostile staring, perhaps trying to goad them. If they were bothered by his enmity, they didn’t show it and focused on what they were doing.

  “Come on Meeks, it’s your shot,” said Fisk, grabbing his arm gently.

  The bigger soldier shook it off but finally turned back to the game he had been playing with me. We played for another twenty minutes before the Homeland guys finished their exercise and left.

  “Gutless bastards,” Meeks called, as they went through the door.

  One turned and smirked at him. I felt pretty sure they weren’t gutless. More likely they had been instructed to maintain a presence but to stay well clear of the soldiers.

  After the Professor’s men had left, I asked Meeks and Fisk what they thought might have happened to the scouting party that Bowman and Hurst had gone out to find.

  “The Chinese got ‘em for sure,” said Meeks without looking up from the shot he was lining up.

  “We
don’t know that,” said Fisk, who seemed to be the more reasonable one. “Anything could have happened. Hell, they might be on the way back now.” He didn’t seem very convinced.

  When Fisk told us he was heading to bed, Meeks said he was hanging around. I told him I would join him. It seemed like a good opportunity to probe Meeks further. We shot the breeze for a few minutes. He was talking almost as though he were drunk, and to my surprise when we sat down in the darkened alcove, he pulled out a glass flask of dark brown liquid and asked if I wanted a swig.

  I thought about saying no, but in the end took the bottle and raised it to my lips. A few seconds later I was coughing and spluttering as the fiery liquid tried to find its way back up my esophagus. Meeks laughed and patted me on the back.

  “You’re alright Race…even if you’re not a real soldier.”

  I didn’t actually learn anything new, but I did learn a little bit about Meeks. He wasn’t quite as boorish as he came across most of the time. He didn’t even seem to mind that I refused to drink anymore of his liquor.

  After another half hour or so of small talk and another game of pool, I begged off and headed back down to the barracks. Meeks stayed behind and I wondered if he did that every night.

  23

  The next day passed slowly. Because Bowman was still outside, I was partnered with Meeks for the next morning’s patrol. Thanks to his liberal intake of moonshine or whatever he had been drinking the night before, he was quiet for most of our duty. I was okay with that, I had a lot of thinking to do.

  I didn’t get a chance to talk to Luke during my shift, even though I did spy him in the rec room. Given our close encounter with Ragg and the Professor the evening before, I thought it was probably a good idea to avoid each other for a few days. I didn’t want to heighten any suspicions about us that they may already have, especially as there seemed to be more of the Homeland guards on the middle level that day.

  I had a vague sense of uneasiness as we patrolled the middle level. It wasn’t really to do with Sonny’s death or the increase in numbers of the Homeland Security on our level, it was more like a sense of impending disaster. In the end I decided that it was because I knew that we now had to try and leave Drake Mountain. The option to stay and work something out had been closed to us by the hands of a killer. I also knew that when we did try, there were only two possible outcomes.

  1 - we would fail and most likely some of us would be killed, or 2 - we would succeed and possibly lose some of our people and end up right where we had been six weeks ago. I felt the weight of leadership settling on me again, only this time it felt like there was a lot more at stake.

  After my shift I went and showered before heading back to my bunk and grabbing a pencil I had secreted in my pillow slip. I took it to the bathroom with me and sitting down on the toilet, pulled a square of paper out of the dispenser and began to scrawl a note on it.

  Indigo.

  Sonny’s dead. Luke and I are working on a plan. Stay strong and look after the girls, more news soon. Be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

  Love Isaac.

  I read it back and then screwed it into a ball, dropping it between my legs into the water. I wrote it again, this time leaving out the word love. I was too embarrassed to leave it, to expose myself to possible rejection. A stupid, schoolboy thing to worry about, I know, but back then it had seemed an enormously risky thing to do.

  That evening I deliberately made my way up to the cafeteria early so I could line up by the time the girls finished eating. In my pocket I had the note for Indigo.

  With hand in pocket, I fiddled with it nervously as I waited in line. The mining shift had joined our queue and I turned and waved at Paul, Ben and the others. Luke was at the very end of the line and returned my brief wave.

  Finally the women finished their meal and started filing out. I waited anxiously until she came into view and then slipped the paper into the palm of my hand. As she got closer, the smile froze on my face. An ugly, purple welt marred the flawless skin of her cheekbone.

  She smiled at me and my stomach turned, the smile seemed so at odds with the evidence of recent violence. I had planned to just slip her the paper, but I couldn’t suppress the urge to step out of the line and grab her arm, pulling her into my embrace.

  She gasped in surprise and I thought for a second she might pull away, but then I felt her arms encircle me and hug me close. Her body melded to mine and the closeness of her, the scent of her, was intoxicating. My heart jumped in my chest and when she was pulled away by the Homeland escort, a wave of anger swept over me.

  I held her and tried to push the guard away. He gripped me by the collar of my army issue shirt, but seemed reluctant to engage me.

  “Back in line, lovebird,” he said, straining.

  I held his eyes, on the verge of striking him, and at the same time noticed over his shoulder another guard advancing along the line towards us. It was Leroy. Great. His face was bruised around his eyes and the bridge of his nose, courtesy of his face plant during our confrontation. He recognised me, and with his eyes burning with dumb malice, made a beeline for us. I tensed and felt Indigo’s soft hand find mine.

  “It’s okay Isaac... I’m okay. You should see the other girl…”

  “Oh…it was between you and another girl?”

  She nodded again, smiling reassuringly at me. Relieved now that the more sinister scenarios I had considered were put to rest, I slowly relaxed as did the guard holding me. Indigo began to pull her hand away and I grabbed it, slipping the paper into her palm before stepping back to take my place in the line again.

  The guard that had stepped in to separate us held up his hand like a traffic cop.

  “I got this Leroy.”

  “You sure? That one is trouble.”

  I turned away from his aggressive stare, letting him know he was no threat to me, and watched Indigo go. When Allie and Brooke walked by, looking at me with secret smiles on their faces, I felt my own face redden. Obviously they were more interested in me hugging Indigo than the fact that I nearly got into a fight.

  Beyond them I saw Luke move back into the line too, he had apparently been ready to come to my aid. I nodded, letting him know everything was all right. Ben waved to his sister and then gave Luke a funny look when the taller boy with the poorly done haircut bowed flamboyantly to Brooke, causing her to laugh shyly.

  My smile faded as I saw Paul again try to catch the eye of his sister as she passed us a few places further down from our girls. My heart went out to him when she didn’t look up. It seemed impossible, but she appeared even more withdrawn than she had been the last time I had seen her.

  I felt anger and helplessness overtake me. It was wrong that we should be kept from our family and friends like this, the sooner we got out of there, the better. I made a promise to talk to Paul about it as soon as I could. I wanted him and his sister to come with us, and of course Toby and Beau too.

  Leroy stared at me as he walked by but didn’t say anything. I thought I saw a little respect mixed with the hatred in his eyes and that was fine by me.

  I ate my meal apart from the other boys, sitting with Sergeant Dawes who had come in just as we were entering the cafeteria. Again, I wanted to minimize suspicion in case anyone was observing us, but also I liked Dawes and knew he would be good company. He was a good talker. I asked him a question about ‘before’ and pretty soon he was telling me his family history. It was kind of comforting and after a while I switched off and began to think about things, still half listening and nodding in the right places.

  I was intrigued that the matter of the security breach seemed to have been abandoned, or at least not pursued. Had they decided it was too hard to get to the bottom of? Or were they waiting for more intel before they made a move?

  “Well?”

  I looked at Dawes who waited expectantly.

  “Huh?”

  “You’re not listening to me, are you? A penny for your thoughts?”

/>   “Oh nothin’…sorry, just tired is all.”

  “That’s okay son. I’m going to head back downstairs anyway, you coming?”

  “Um no, I might go shoot some pool.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you later.”

  While I had decided to lay as low as I could when it came to socializing with Luke, I didn’t see a problem with being together while we were around all of our other friends during leisure time. I took my tray back to the dirty pile and nodded to Luke as I went out.

  I desperately wanted to talk to him so we could begin to work on our plan of escape and get his thoughts on bringing along Paul, his sister and the two boys. I had given more thought to Luke’s wish to stop the Professor from using the virus on the Chinese, but no matter how much I tried to come up with something, there didn’t seem to be a way we could do it. Trying to overthrow him was impossible, as was sabotaging his labs, they were just too well guarded. We had to hope that they would fail because they didn’t have an effective delivery method.

  I went into the Rec room. It wasn’t too crowded, but to my dismay, I saw Maddox, the Homeland guard that had escorted me away from the confrontation between the Professor and Randall, playing pool with a buddy. There was also another guard working out on the weights in the gym area. Maddox looked up at me when I entered. I gave him a friendly smile and wave that was far from genuine and walked to the alcove, claiming a spot on the unoccupied sofa. They didn’t seem to pay any further interest in me.

  I selected a magazine from near the bottom of a messy stack beside the sofa. It was a dog-eared, two year old issue of People magazine and on the cover was President Ryan shaking hands with the Chinese president. ‘Marriage of Convenience’ was the headline.

  I guess someone wanted a divorce, I thought. I didn’t feel like reading, especially not something that reminded me so painfully of the past. I put the magazine back on top of the pile, knowing there was a good chance it would be vandalized the next time I saw it.