Out of Sight (Progenitor Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Go to Magdalena’s. Give her the package. Leave. Easy. I can do this. I’m not breaking the law. Nalas never told me what’s in this box. I’m not knowingly breaking the law. She bit her lip. Of course, the EGSF would say that she should’ve suspected illegality when he needed a bomb collar to keep her obedient. Even the very nature of the arrangement reeked of illicit endeavors. Though she’d only made it partially through sixth grade, Sima wasn’t stupid. When she had actually gone to school, she did quite well. They’d look at her profile and know this, and they wouldn’t believe her saying she had no idea what she did.

  Grr. I’m making it worse! And I’m taking too long!

  Eyes open, she pushed away from the wall and resumed heading toward Magdalena’s. Thoughts of what she could do with a hundred glint helped take the edge off her fear of exploding or being arrested.

  Unfortunately, Magdalena’s brothel sat at the edge of a demolition zone two Blocks to the west, about three miles away. Much of Earth had been covered in city. In history class, she’d learned that cities used to have lots of open space between them back before the End of Nations. Now, without ‘countries’ to name places, the government divided the city into districts roughly 300 miles square, and each district had thousands of blocks.

  Various places in the city had been demolished, either due to deliberate demolition for construction or as lingering aftereffects of the war that brought about the End of Nations. The purposeful ones tended to be tamer, as the others had been left to fester for centuries. Those held the treasures that scavengers could make a good living on—if they survived. Like layers of paint, some areas of the city had grown upward over the centuries. Scavvers could also explore the depths, occasionally finding antiques left behind. However, one misstep could send them plunging down a shaft they’d never escape.

  Before Sima had been born, a swath of three or four Blocks near Mag’s had been razed to the ground in preparation for rebuilding that still hadn’t started. All manner of rumors circulated about the dangerous thugs living out among the rubbled high-rises and collapsed buildings. Though, Magdalena’s palace occupied the very edge of it, closest to the city, and she had mercenaries working for her. Only an utter fool would venture past it and go out into the demolition zone. A fool, or an escaped prisoner who needed to flee a death sentence. The EGSF didn’t go in there. Probable death beat definite death.

  Side street after side street passed. Sima tried to act as casual as possible, hiding her face with her raised hood, avoiding eye contact with people, and keeping her attention focused on her surroundings. Any sign of blue and grey armor would be a major problem. Finding Magdalena’s didn’t take much effort. She had only to head west until she reached the border of the destruction, then figure out if she needed to go north or south along the edge. No Citizen dared go there, but someone like her wouldn’t have much trouble. At least, not unless a pack of men decided to take interest in a lone young woman.

  Blue in the crowd ahead caught her eye. A trio of EGSF officers emerged from a coffee shop about two blocks away. She calmly continued to the next cross street, the officers only one block distant, and crossed to the other side, continuing in that direction like she meant to go that way all along. A furtive glance to the right allowed her to relax: the officers hadn’t mystically sensed her criminal activity and come running.

  Heart pounding, she continued to the corner and hooked a right past an office building. Two slender black cameras on the wall panned to follow her. Sima shrank in on herself, unsure how loaf-shaped electronics could convey such disdain, as if the cameras themselves didn’t trust ‘someone like her’ near the building. She hurried onward, once again heading west. Sweat coated her palms, her hands overly warm inside the pocket. She left them there, as she knew she’d not be able to resist fidgeting at the death locked around her neck.

  People from Citizens to Outcasts milled back and forth on the street around her. She occasionally bumped shoulders, but no one paid her much notice. Eventually, she managed to scrape up a reasonable amount of confidence that she didn’t look as terrified as she felt.

  Just a girl with somewhere to be.

  About a half-mile later, another set of EGSF officers came around the corner. Sima stopped short, the crowd continuing to flow around her. She stared at them for a second or two and did an about face, heading back the way she came.

  She peered over her shoulder out of the corner of her eye, and her breath stalled at the sight of them looking right at her. Crap! Stupid! Could I have been any more obvious? The instant both officers started walking toward her, she nearly hurled the ramen she’d eaten all over the street. Struggling to keep her jaw clamped shut, she rushed across the street and headed for the nearest alley.

  The officers picked up their stride, clearly interested in checking her out.

  Dammit! What was I supposed to do? If I walked too close to them, they’d have picked up the explosive… or the drugs. Panic set in and she broke into a sprint. The officers followed suit, likely convinced she’d done something wrong since only the guilty ran away.

  Tears streaming from the corners of her eyes, Sima barreled around the corner into the alley. She jumped a series of vagrants asleep out in the open and grabbed the edge of an ORC bin to avoid wiping out on a hard left turn. Clomping EGSF boots echoed off the walls, drawing closer and closer.

  The third alley she swerved into had a whole line of broken windows on the right side, barely a foot above ground level. Taking cover and hiding sounded like better odds than running, so she leapt through the first window and landed on an ancient floor of faux wood boards.

  Tattered decorative paper hung from the walls. Little remained of any furniture, but the room held decades of windblown trash and dirt. The huge chamber must’ve been some sort of lobby or restaurant seating area. Frantic, she looked around for anywhere to hide. Only a decrepit counter and a hallway at the far end offered any sort of concealment, and the counter stood at an angle that would let anyone at the window still see her.

  With the plastic clatter of EGSF armor rushing up to the alley outside, she sprinted across the room, straining to make it to the dark hallway before the cops got close. Going inside had been a gamble. This building would either offer a hiding place or be a trap.

  Her sandals sent puffs of silt and dirt into the air as she dashed across the room. Seconds away from the opposite side, the old boards under her feet gave out when her foot plunged through a weak spot.

  Sima fell in a flailing mass of limbs and broken bits of synthetic wood. The back of an old couch hit her in the gut, knocking the wind out of her and reducing vision to blank whiteness. She lay draped over the rotting furniture, unable to breathe in or out. Existing terror at the EGSF chasing her piled on top of her fears about the bomb. Sheer panic at her lungs no longer working pushed her over the edge.

  The next thing she knew, she stared down at the floor, her body still draped over the couch. She could breathe again, though her stomach throbbed in pain. Realizing she must’ve blacked out, she scrambled back to her feet and looked up at the hole. At not seeing EGSF officers staring down at her, she almost fainted a second time from relief. When she swallowed saliva, the snug metal ring around her neck reminded her she had a time limit.

  Tears ran down her cheeks. I’m such an idiot! Why did I do this? Shaking, she gathered her tunic over her mouth to shield herself from the heavy cloud of dust hanging in the air, and took in deep, slow breaths. Freaking out wouldn’t keep her alive. She had to think.

  I can do this. I’ll be okay. Never again. I won’t let it kill me!

  The concrete-walled chamber she’d fallen into appeared to be a storage room for furniture. Dozens of decades-old sofas, loveseats, divans, end tables, and other things stood around in clusters. This must’ve been a hotel or something. Guess I’m close to the demolition zone. Only one opening offered a way out, unless she tried to build a ladder out of old chairs. Considering the floor had already given out under her, s
he didn’t trust it. At least, not when she had a doorway to check first. With any luck, she could find the basement stairs and get out that way.

  After a quick self-exam for splinters and wounds, which found only a bruise on her stomach, she limped toward the exit into a corridor of cinder blocks and mildew. Squiggles of black graffiti covered everything, including the ceiling. Plastic narcotic inhalers and needles crunched under her sandals. That a gang likely made its home in this place added another level of anxiety she didn’t need. Her heart raced so much she became light-headed.

  Karma… What am I doing breaking the law?

  Naturally, everything possible would go wrong to punish her for flouting the promise she’d made to herself about the law. Life lessons and stuff. Okay. I swear I’ll never do anything like this again. I’d ditch the box and run if I didn’t have a damn bomb on me. I don’t have a choice. Please don’t kill me.

  Sima crept forward, holding her breath as she entered a patch of awfulness that reeked like a sewer, though heavier on the acridness of urine. Holes in the ceiling let scraps of daylight in, enough to make out the general shapes of things but not give much detail. The darkness comforted her, since it helped hide her. She approached one room after another, peering around the doorjamb with one eye in search of stairs while expecting to find a gang. The first space had boilers, the next appeared to be a storage room full of boxes with no way out. She advanced with a slow creeping gait, trying to avoid stepping on crunching plastic that would give her away.

  Distant voices murmured somewhere ahead, but echoes made it difficult to tell which direction she did not want to go. A group of mostly men laughed and howled, though a handful of women cheered or whooped along with them. She caught a random snippet about Newstar, a drug that put the user in a trancelike state for several hours. For all she knew, she might be carrying a whole box of that stuff.

  Crack.

  With a gasp, she whirled behind her toward the noise.

  A man with lime green hair in a spiky sphere stood only a few paces behind her, frozen, having evidently been attempting to sneak up on her. Knife scars decorated his face, shoulders, and arms. Black mesh covered his chest, leaving little of his sinewy pectorals to the imagination. Below the waist, he wore a black skirt decorated with random metal fragments over dark blue pants. Both tall boots held giant blades in sheaths on the outside.

  “Tasty,” said the man.

  She ran like hell.

  Heedless of noise, she stomped across the inches-deep trash, crushing inhalers and take out cartons.

  “Scathers!” roared the man. “We got rats!”

  Sima knew screaming wouldn’t help, but couldn’t stop herself. She feared the Scathers more than any other gang—with the possible exception of the Blanks—due to murder games being their primary form of amusement. The man chased her from one corridor to the next until she wound up skidding around a corner into a dead end. With nowhere else to go, she sprinted through a double-door-sized opening on the right.

  And ran straight into a pack of Scathers.

  Men and women grabbed her, cheering and screaming as they pushed and tossed her back and forth. Sima clutched the box to her stomach with her left hand while feebly throwing punches. A never-ending sea of hands pulled and squeezed. Ugly faces, many covered in glowing colors from phosphorescent cosmetics or electronic tattoos, leered at her. Many chanted “Fresh meat.”

  She shrieked when her feet left the ground, the crowd drawing her up over their heads. Flailing and kicking, she flowed like a log upon a river of humanity, helpless to fight the current carrying her along. The chaotic swirl of bodies ended with a few seconds of freefall.

  Her scream barely started before she landed flat on her back upon a damp mattress, ending her cry with a noise like a kicked chicken. Sima lay stunned, gazing up at the walls of a concrete pit about fifteen feet square. More spray paint writing surrounded her. ‘Despair,’ ‘Fresh meat,’ ‘death,’ ‘Scathers rule,’ and other heartwarming phrases weaved among crude renditions of skulls, Grim Reapers, and stick figure sex.

  She lifted her head to peer past her feet at blurry lumps that focused into shapes she did not want to see. Gasping in disgust, she cringed away from mutilated hunks of dead bodies—or possibly bloody blankets. On the chance she might be sharing a pit with corpses, she refused to look.

  Somehow, the Scathers had been so overjoyed at finding a victim for whatever depravity they intended to inflict upon her that they didn’t search her. Nalas’ precious cargo remained in her tunic pocket. She stared in horror at the top edge of the pit easily ten feet over her head or more. Perhaps they didn’t search her yet because they’d have all the time in the world to pick over her corpse.

  She raised a trembling hand to the front of her neck and clasped the detonator choker.

  How long before I’m ‘late,’ and he kills me?

  Stuck in a pit with no way out, surrounded by murderous Scathers, and with certain death locked around her neck, Sima curled up in a ball, shaking and crying.

  Mommy! Help!

  8

  The Pit of Despair

  Scathers overhead continued to party… or do whatever it was they’d been doing before she arrived. Shouts of elation, screams of anger, and wild howls of abandon echoed off the grey concrete over hard music with shrieking vocals. She couldn’t tell if someone played a guitar or fed it into a grinder.

  Sima didn’t dare yell out for her mother. Her instincts kicked in, specifically the need not to draw any attention to her existence. Quiet meant life. In a few minutes, she distanced herself from total panic and felt foolish. Her mother wouldn’t lift a finger to help her, even out of this situation. In fact, the woman likely preferred that she had run away, as it spared her the financial burden of supporting a child.

  A minute or two passed of incessant noise. Sima stood and looked around at her prison. The left wall had a bunch of broken-off pipes. To the right, what may have once been a narrow stairwell had been covered up with cinder blocks, converting the sunken hole into a true pit. Large pipe openings in the wall at the ground level hinted that this room once did something with water or other liquid, but she couldn’t imagine what. Unfortunately, those pipes would be a tight squeeze even for a little boy as scrawny as Sayed. Sima had no chance of fitting, even if they would go somewhere useful and not be simple dead ends.

  Three mattresses lay about, though she did her best not to look toward the wall behind her. Again and again, she told herself she’d seen only bloody blankets. Whether or not the stuff back there really was filthy cloth or actual dead bodies, she didn’t care. As far as she allowed herself to think, she shared this hole with stained fabric and nothing worse.

  I have got to get out of here. She peered up at the edge again. No telling how long the Scathers would keep her down here. Maybe she’d languish until they captured more people for whatever sick ‘murder game’ they would play. Of course, she wouldn’t last too long thanks to the bomb.

  Fear and desperation ganged up on her timidity. Having a few options with most of them ending in death made for a great source of artificial courage. Sima grabbed the mattress she landed on and dragged it up on edge. Since the Scathers decided to ignore her, she’d risk trying to escape. Doing nothing translated to death in at least two ways, so she had no reason to simply sit there and accept whatever fate had in store for her.

  She didn’t bother holding back grunts as she hauled the mattress to the side with the small pipe fragments. No one would hear her over the continuous shouting and awful music blaring overhead. After upending the mattress, she pushed it against the wall and grabbed the upper edge. Her sandals slipped over the padding as she tried to climb it. By sheer arm power alone, she pulled herself up enough to get a foot on one of the pipes. Fortunately, she didn’t weigh enough that the mattress slid out from under her.

  Using pipe handholds, Sima climbed until she stood upon the narrow end of the mattress. She stretched up to get her hands on the r
im, set her foot on a six-inch pipe, and pulled herself up over the edge. The instant her chest passed the level of the floor, a man roared and grabbed two fistfuls of her hair.

  Sima pounded her fist into his groin. He bellowed a wheeze, abandoning his grip on her hair as he doubled over cradling his crotch. She reached up, seized a fistful of beard, and wrenched downward, pulling him over the edge. The Scather screamed as he fell into the pit, landing with a meaty smack on bare concrete where a mattress used to be.

  A woman with wild pink hair and a metal bikini top sprang at her, grasping her by the tunic and inadvertently helping her climb up out of the pit. The second Sima had her feet on the floor, she rammed her forehead into the woman’s nose, setting off a waterfall of blood. The Scather staggered backward. Sima gave her a shove into the others coming toward her, which knocked them all back a step.

  Surrendered to desperate panic, Sima lost all hesitation. She ducked another hand coming for her and sprinted three steps before driving a field goal kick into another man’s crotch. He went down to his knees as a second woman grabbed her from behind. Thrashing and kicking, Sima flailed at her abductor. The woman lifted her off the ground, allowing Sima to mule-kick another man in the face with both feet, knocking him tumbling into the pit.

  The woman tried to squeeze the air out of her lungs. Gurgling, Sima grabbed at the ganger’s body until she got her hand on a knife. She tore the blade from the sheath and jabbed it backward. A scream of pain blasted the stink of cheap alcohol over her hair. The powerful grip around her chest released.

  Sima stumbled forward, vaguely aware of the woman falling sideways, clutching her thigh. She swiped the twelve-inch blade at another man coming in to grab her, but he leapt back, avoiding her strike. Still, his hesitation gave her enough of an opening to dart past him to the door.

  A gunshot rang out behind her and a spray of concrete dust showered her face from the left. Sima ducked and ran into the corridor. The gun went off three more times, but she had no idea where the shots went. Thirty or so Scathers piled into the hall behind her, delayed by so many attempting to squeeze into a single doorway at once.