New Alcatraz (Book 1): Dark Time

by Grant Pies

  CHAPTER 63

  5065

  NEW ALCATRAZ

  DAY 9

  The green and blue lines stayed parallel for a long time. I carried my pistol and supported Hamilton with my free arm wrapped around his back. He placed more and more weight on me with each step, moaning and grunting as he left a trail of blood behind him. Ellis carried one of the rifles in his hands, and Red held onto a long blade. They walked ahead of us, and glanced back every few minutes. I wondered how many bullets were left in my father’s rifle, if any.

  “This way,” Ellis whispered from up ahead. The blue and green lines veered off of the main hall, and led to another. We turned the corner, glad to be out of the direct path of the other men. Nolan was hopefully knocked out, and Gaines probably didn’t have much time left; I’d no idea if Deslin was dead or not. But they would surely come after us with whatever energy they had left, even if their chances of escape were all but vanished. They would follow Hamilton’s trail of blood and would guess correctly that we were headed to the medical area. They would find us.

  More than myself, I needed to protect my protectors; Red and Ellis. If Ellis died in New Alcatraz, then I would never be born and never be raised in Buford. And I would not be here if Red died; the wolves in Yellowstone Conservation Zone would surely rip my skin from my bones, and I would die as a young boy. If the other prisoners succeed in killing us, if I failed in stopping them, then I would suffer something possibly worse than death. I will never exist and the atoms and stardust that Hamilton talked about that rest in my bones would be distributed elsewhere. I wouldn’t be born; I wouldn’t die, and I wouldn’t be recycled. I would just never be. Gaines, Nolan, and Deslin may as well have been the pack of wolves hunting me as a child.

  This new hallway was almost the same as the main hallway; only slightly smaller. Instead of more hallways branching off into the sinking black air, there were what looked like cells the size of bedrooms lining the hall. Some had bunks in them, and some were empty but for a sink and toilet installed in the corner. The cells were encased in cement walls except for the shattered or cracked glass walls lining the hallway.

  I hobbled and repositioned Hamilton as he slipped and slid down my body. His legs carried less and less of his own weight with each step and his breathing grew shallow. I gripped the pistol in my hand firmly enough not to drop it, but loose enough not to accidentally pull the trigger. In the distance, I heard Gaines and the other men cackling. They would reach our hallway in minutes.

  Up ahead, Ellis ran his hand over the wall opposite the glass cells. That wall was also glass; at least it had been at one point in time, but entire panels of it had fallen off the wall and shattered on the ground to reveal wires and large panels with computer chips on them. Our feet crunched on the glass spread across the floor. Hamilton merely dragged his left foot behind him, pulling an ever growing pile of glass with him. Ellis slowed down.

  Suddenly he stopped and stood facing the long wall of wires. He placed his hand on the green circuit boards littered with tiny cylinders. Silver lines spread over the circuit boards, looking like a map of untraveled roads. He ran his hands over the chips soldered onto the boards, and he seemed to look beyond the wall; as if it was a window into another place. Another world. Another time.

  He turned around to face one of the cells. He walked towards it, pressing his hands against the cracked glass; it creaked but stayed in place. He walked through the open door of the cell and stood in the middle. Wires hung from a hole in the ceiling; a single bed sat in the corner with no sheets or pillow. Just a mattress. Hamilton held tightly onto me as Red wandered into each cell, maybe checking for supplies or an escape route.

  I walked to the cell that Ellis was in, ducked under Hamilton’s arm, and leaned him against the wall outside of the cell. He moaned in pain and his face looked pink under the red lights. By now his shoe was covered in blood, and he slid down to the ground like a puppet that lost its strings. Ellis wandered slowly in the small room before he sat on the bed and looked out the glass wall; he smiled.

  “We should go,” I said quietly, like I interrupted a conversation.

  “This is the place,” Ellis said, with no other explanation. He looked at me and smiled. “You know what I am going to do when I leave this place?” Ellis asked and I shook my head. “I am going to get lost. Really lost. Truly lost.” He stood from the bed and walked to the glass wall. He placed his open palm on the wall and looked down the hall. Like he was watching something. Or waiting for someone.

  “I am going to find a town that time forgot. A place that no one is looking for, and that no one would find even if they were. If I make it out of here, I will never return to a society that would create a place like this. After this prison I will only do what I want to do. What I choose to do.”

  Ellis placed his hand on my shoulder. For a moment, I forgot when and where we were, and who was chasing after us.

  “Powell,” he said. “I don’t blame you, and I think you are innocent. I think you were simply an unfortunate side effect of something bigger than the two of us. The person you supposedly killed, I knew her; this is the place that I first met Emery and this is the place we first kissed.” Ellis grinned and reminisced. The cut over his eye was starting to heal, and soon it would just be a deep scar that I would trace with my finger. But that wouldn’t happen for another few years.

  “I don’t know why she was in twenty seventy, in your time, but that is the beauty of time travel isn’t it? When I leave here, not only will I find a town that no one is looking for, but I will find a time where no one will find me. I can only hope to find Emery.” He looked down and realized how distant his chances of finding Emery in some time before she was murdered really were.

  “You will find her,” I told my father. “You will find Emery and you will find that town, and the two of you will make a life together there.” I didn’t know if I was lying or telling the truth, if that had already happened or was going to happen. At what point in this cycle was I standing? If Emery died in 2070, how could she also die in Buford after giving birth to me? I could only imagine that I still had a chance to prevent her murder from occurring. I needed to leave this time and return to 2070. I needed to find the person who killed Emery and stop them, so that I would not vanish from all existence.

  CHAPTER 64

  5065

  NEW ALCATRAZ

  DAY 9

  Down the hall, after we passed by all of the glass cells, the facility opened up to a single large room. In the middle sat a large circular desk with phones and old computers patiently collecting dust. Parts of the room were sectioned off by curtains and short half walls. Behind the light blue curtains were beds, heart rate monitors on wheels, IV stands, and storage carts. Everything was organized as if no one left this facility in a rush, and no one had been here since the Ministry of Science abandoned what Ellis called Project Oracle.

  We rummaged through each semi-private room, collecting as many supplies as we could find. Red and Ellis went in search of some thick nanobot liquid that the Ministry apparently used on its test subjects before each jump into the future. I sat with Hamilton in one of the rooms blocked by a blue curtain and carefully cut his jumpsuit from the bottom up to reveal his injured leg.

  The scissors struggled to cut the wet blood-soaked fabric, and Hamilton shuddered in pain each time I pulled the sodden cloth against his wound. Eventually, I cut enough away to reveal a large hole in the flesh where the bullet burrowed its way into his leg.

  Dark crimson blood ran out of the hole, and dripped onto the floor. Hamilton panicked more at the sight of his injury. I wrapped rubber tubing around Hamilton’s thigh, above the gunshot wound, and tied a knot as tight as I could. Hamilton let out a short cry, but quickly covered his mouth with both hands. At first, more blood poured out of the hole in his leg, but eventually the tubing was tight enough to stem most of the blood flow.

  Once the tourniquet was secure, I emptied half of a bottle of hydro
gen peroxide onto his leg, but the liquid had long since reacted with the surrounding air, reducing it to plain water. This was obvious when the disinfectant failed to foam or bubble around the bloody hole. Most of the liquid ran down his leg, washing the remaining blood with it. Under the blood, his flesh was dark and bruised around the point of impact. I looked but found no exit wound. I wiped the excess liquid from his leg as gently as I could, and wrapped his wound in gauze. As I wrapped the gauze around his leg the blood already soaked through and spread out on the white bandages.

  “You’ll be alright,” I lied. We found a crutch that Hamilton propped under his armpit. For now, Hamilton would survive, but not for much longer, and he would die even sooner once he was a fugitive on the run. That was the only choice Hamilton had; to run either from Gaines and the other men here in New Alcatraz, or from the Time Anomaly Agents in whatever time he traveled to. I supposed the same could be said for all of us.

  I dumped the remainder of the inactive hydrogen peroxide onto my bleeding and burnt hand. Nolan’s teeth marks were imprinted in the skin around my thumb, and the cuts were deep. My white bone glimmered under the red haze of the emergency light bulbs on the ceiling. The cut from the sharp rock was buried under a layer of burnt red skin on my palm; the scalding barrel had actually cauterized the wound underneath. I wrapped my hand in more gauze and held my hand against my chest to keep it elevated.

  “You know, I hope I am wrong,” Hamilton said as he winced with each movement. He spoke like he was picking up where we left off. Before Gaines and his men arrived. We wandered the medical area and looked for Red and Ellis. “I hope our universe isn’t in some endless cycle. I hope that when things end, it is not just our beginning.” Hamilton fumbled with his single crutch, his shredded pant leg trailed behind him.

  “If I’m right then we are all stuck in some uneventful reincarnation of ourselves, and our atoms and particles will disperse after our death, stretching out and stagnating until they curve back around and collide with all of the other particles in this universe. If I am right, then those particles will intermingle exactly as they did billions of years ago. They will combine to make the same stars, the same meteors, the same planets, mixing and reacting with each other to create the same species on earth. And they will make the same versions of us that stand here right now. We will be reincarnated, but not as another species and not even as another person; we will be ourselves once again.”

  Hamilton and I walked past gurneys and empty biohazard boxes. We wandered past defibrillators and locked medicine cabinets. I heard Red and Ellis talking in the distance.

  “But we won’t get a chance to fix our mistakes. We will still make the same choices that we have made before. Our atoms will be trained to create the same neural pathways in our brains. Our nerves will react in the exact same manner as they did during this lifetime. If I am right, this is exactly how we interacted last time. This isn’t the first time I have been shot or the first time you have been bitten. If I am right, there really is no way of knowing how many times our entire universe has reset itself.” Hamilton’s crutch clicked with each step as he placed it on the floor and swung his injured leg out in front of him. It took him some time, but he got used to walking with the crutch.

  “And that is why I hope I am wrong. What good is it if we can’t change anything? What good is it if I have to relive the death of my wife over again countless times? Or if you are framed for murder repeatedly? I hope I am dead wrong, and when this is over I hope my body rots and the microscopic particles that sit inside of me bleeds into this planet. And I hope that this planet eventually is pulled apart and scattered across the universe, and some part of me will experience things that I could never imagine. And go places that no one even knows exist. I hope that there is an end to this universe; a real end and an exact conclusion. That is the happy ending; the comforting ending. The ending I predict sounds like a Greek tragedy, like we are all Sisyphus rolling our own rock up a hill forever. I don’t want that, Powell; that ending scares the shit out of me.”

  Hamilton looked up at me with fierceness in his eyes; as if he thought that if he willed it enough he could change the nature of our universe. That he could stop this cycle from occurring over and over again.

  “We are fucked!” Red’s voice stretched from a back corner of the medical lab. Ellis walked out of the dark corner holding a box and Red followed behind him.

  “We have a decision to make,” Ellis said as he walked closer to us holding out the box. Inside were six syringes, made of metal and glass with long needles. The top of the syringes had two metal loops to place your pointer and middle finger in. These syringes looked just like the ones Ellis said were used on him and Beckett, and the other surveyors. Except these syringes were missing the most vital component; there was no thick liquid with gelatinous nanobots squirming inside them. There was no life-saving radiation cure; the syringes were bone dry. Empty.

  UNIT 5987D V.

  FEDERATED NORTH AMERICA

  CASE NO. 2070FN99823

  Prosecutor Klipton: OK, so you signed the autopsy report?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Can you read the comments at the bottom of the report? The hand written portion please.

  A: “…organs removed in a crude manner, with no real precision. Upon examining the tissue of the body and the tissue of the organs, it cannot be discerned whether the organs were removed pre or post mortem. Therefore, the organs could have been removed between thirty minutes before death or thirty minutes after death.”

  Q: Do you still contend that you waited an hour before removing the victim’s organs?

  A: I do not know precisely; I suppose it could have been sooner.

  Q: Besides your testimony, is there any evidence that you can think of that conclusively shows that Pierson’s organs were removed after his death?

  A: No.

  Q: I would like to move on to the android technology that you acquired. You claim that you were either given the android bodies or you found them in a recycling barge?

  A: Yes.

  Q: You do not know the names of Pierson’s friends who gave you three android units, do you?

  A: No. Pierson dealt directly with them. I did not -

  Q: Many parts of each unit have serial numbers on them don’t they?

  A: Yes, the major portions of an android are marked.

  Q: And those serial numbers allow for easy tracking back to its owner, correct?

  A: Yes.

  Q: But not all parts have these serial numbers, do they?

  A: No, the smaller parts that are meant to be component parts of a larger system are not etched with the serial number.

  Q: Isn’t it true that at the time of your arrest none of the parts in your possession had serial numbers on them?

  A: Yes, that is true, but -

  Q: You only had parts that were not etched with a serial number, and could not be tracked back to their original owners, true?

  A: Those were the parts that I was interested in studying.

  Q: It just so happens that of all the parts that make up your specific model of android, you are not interested in studying a single part that would be etched with a traceable serial number?

  A: I did study those parts but they were discarded once I was done studying them.

  Q: So which is it? Is it that you were not interested in those parts or was it that you did study those parts but discarded them prior to your arrest?

  A: I was interested in all of the parts, but I had completed my studies of the traceable parts of the androids and discarded them.

  Q: But, at the time of your arrest, you still had only the parts that the authorities cannot trace to the unit they belonged to?

  A: Yes.

  Q: And without knowing what unit the parts belonged to, the authorities cannot trace the unit to its owner, correct?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Without knowing who the original owner was, no one can corroborate your story as to how you acqui
red these units?

  A: Correct.

  Q: And, to your knowledge, have any of Pierson’s friends or colleagues come forward in your defense and stated that they were the ones who gave you their discarded android units?

  A: No.

  Q: Is it still your testimony here today that you did not remove any of the parts that were in your possession directly from Wayfield Industries?

  A: Yes.

  Prosecutor Klipton: I have no further questions your honor.

  Court: Okay, Unit 5987D, you may step down. The Court will take a short recess and then continue on with closing arguments.

  CHAPTER 65

  5065

  NEW ALCATRAZ

  DAY 9

  “So what does this mean?” I asked Ellis. “You said that Wayfield and the Ministry never gave the surveyors the same dose. Maybe you never needed it at all?” I sounded convincing, but only because I wanted to be convinced.

  “I never heard of them not giving it to anyone. Different doses, yes, but Beckett told me that even Wayfield didn’t want to risk a true control group.”

  Red paced back and forth. He ran his hands through his hair and gritted his teeth. Hamilton stood there and bled, not saying a word. Ellis opened the box that contained the syringes and inside, next to the syringes, were several large green capsules with no markings or labels. I grasped one of the syringes in my hand; it was heavy and solid, and a clear sheath sat over the long metal needle.

  The syringe was untouched by the millennia of dirt and dust inside this facility. With the syringe in one hand, I reached in the box to examine the large green capsule. They were about twice the size of a large black bean; small enough to swallow, but large enough to make it difficult.

  I guessed that these were the pills Ellis told us about that each surveyor was given. The pill they were to take if they were injured or captured in the future, and unable to return. This large green pill would apparently rapidly dissolve inside of them. Its contents would unpack and infuse into the cells of the host and would multiply at an alarming rate infecting every corner of the person’s body, disintegrating every nucleus and every cell. It would dissolve every organ and every blood vessel. Within minutes it would travel throughout the body and turn a person’s bones to dust.