Paint Over the Stars (This Filtered Sky Book 1)

by Letitia Glade

  “She’s gone…dead.” The air was heavy in Zeke’s lungs. He swallowed past the atlas stone and forced more words out. “A van crashed into us.” He gave a lopsided shrug and pushed past Stuart. His feet knew the way to the lab, so he let them carry him there.

  When he arrived and realised the door wasn’t labelled ‘Stuart Turner’, Zeke just stood there staring through the plate-sized window at the unfamiliar scientist busy at work.

  “It’s this way,” Stuart said. Of course he had followed. “Come with me.” His eyes were glistening as if literally brimming with desperate questions.

  Zeke’s vision narrowed to Stuart’s sky blue lab coat as he doggedly followed the scientist through a pair of yellow double-doors. This area had always been forbidden to his kid-self, but he felt no surge of excitement on exploring new territory, just the absolute need to complete his objective. His eyes remained fixed on that blue coat until it stopped moving. They had arrived.

  Stuart’s new lab was large and futuristic. That was the most Zeke could make of it as Stuart—being careful to make only the barest physical contact—helped him out of his jacket and guided him into a chair before draping a musty blanket over him. A machine hissed. A mug of something hot and herbal was worked into Zeke’s still-clenched fists. He studied the curling steam.

  “Drink it,” Stuart said, “please, Ezzy—Ezekiel.”

  Zeke drank slowly, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to see the hated man crouched in front of him. As some of the tension drained away, he unwittingly looked at Stuart, who seemed to be waiting for this moment.

  “Better?” Stuart asked.

  Zeke made a sound that suggested ‘yes.’

  “Are you in any pain?”

  For the first time since leaving home, Zeke really looked at himself and saw the muck and the blood smeared into his clothes.

  “I feel fine,” he said. It was the truth.

  “Good. That’s good…” Stuart’s gaze took on a thoughtful quality, but almost instantly became tormented again. He sat heavily in the opposite chair. “Tell me what happened. Don’t leave anything out.”

  As much as Zeke didn’t want to talk to him, he knew for his mother’s sake he had to, so he took a deep breath, choked on his first sentence then tried again.

  He told Stuart everything, from the barking terrier and the missing stars, right up to the loss of his mum and his trek to the lab. He said other things too, hurling at Stuart all the accusations that had mounted over the years, waiting for this chance to be voiced. Through it all, Stuart was silent. Zeke’s words eventually ran dry leaving him an aching husk. Still, he pulled together a few more.

  “While you were safe down here, everything was taken away! There’s nothing you can say—”

  “I know.”

  There was silence for a time until Stuart stood and went to the door.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I need some time to…you know.”

  Zeke knew. He wanted Stuart gone for the same reason. In fact, as soon as he had the energy, he would leave Ridtech, travel far away from the man, but for now he kept his gaze fixed on his sodden shoes.

  “You’re something,” Stuart muttered.

  “What?” Simmering furry bubbled up, pushing Zeke to his feet.

  “You said everything was taken away, but you’re still here…I’m glad for that.” Stuart left.

  Zeke teetered like an old man buffeted by a cruel wind. Gravity finally buckled his knees and he crumpled back into the chair. The atlas stone inside him ground its way upward and out, splitting apart into bitter, wailing sobs.

  * * *

  All sense of time was lost in Ridtech’s fluorescent-lit basement levels. Zeke’s childhood knowledge of the various passageways riddling the place made it easy to escape Stuart’s attempts at making contact, but he wasn’t prepared for the medical team that was sent to corner him.

  An x-ray revealed an old injury, fractured ribs neatly healed. Odd. He’d never broken them before. Sure, he hurt his chest in all the chaos, but the doctors insisted the remodelling was too advanced to have anything to do with the attack on the house or the subsequent crash. Stuart, loathsomely present at the time, told tale of a bike accident his son had a few years back. Zeke didn’t have the energy to expose this blatant lie or the fact Stuart had never even seen him ride, so while the adults argued, Zeke slipped away. If he bothered to be such a family man the day of the attack, things would’ve been different. Mum might even be—She wouldn’t be…This is all so messed up!

  He was still certain of his decision to leave, but rationality said to plan. Food, equipment, information, all were necessary for his survival out there, especially with hostile, invisible…aliens? One of the scientists he confronted was adamant the enemy was not extra-terrestrial, citing an intelligent species that existed in at least one spatial dimension beyond the human three. Everyone in the facility had taken to calling them ‘quads’ for that reason. Zeke sort of understood. Being a budding engineer, he’d come across a few maths and physics lectures online on the fourth dimension. Now, passing curiosity had become a fervent need to know more about these ‘quads’; where they’d taken his mother, how to reach them, how to kill them. His intel-gathering was hampered by the arrival of other survivors.

  First they came in one big clump—those who had set up camp outside—then a steady trickle, bringing whatever belongings they had managed to salvage or steal along the way. The news and personal accounts they shared confirmed the quads weren’t only targeting the UK, but the entire world. Soon everyone in Ridtech had seen the viral material that was persisting through the ongoing breakdown of mass communication. Scoring the highest views were satellite stills of the Great Wall of China reforming into a series of concentric rings; video footage of the London Eye hovering flat above the Millennium Dome, still spinning; and clips of the CN Tower disappearing from Canada only to reappear at the centre of the Colosseum in Italy.

  Zeke hoped there was actually a reason for these bizarre feats other than the quads finding sport in destruction. People were dying. If this fixation on circles could be used against them somehow, Zeke intended to use it. The military personnel stationed at Ridtech were thinking along the same lines. They wanted to go out there and fight, but the facility managers had more immediate concerns.

  Ridtech’s little underground farm and their precious stock of medical supplies would not support the growing population, so teams of able-bodied volunteers with military escorts were sent out like raiding parties to find what they could. They were equipped with a bulky, hand-cranked device that allowed them to travel beneath quad radar. Everyone called it Cranky, except the man who built it, Ridtech’s lead researcher. He used its official name, Apate-II. Weird how familiar the word was to Zeke, ‘apate.’

  The very same man had been the first to threaten strike action if the survivors weren’t allowed in, rallying the majority of other researchers to his cause. The centre managers had no choice but to acquiesce and even then, only when the lead researcher presented them with Apate-II as a means to address the inevitable supply shortage.

  No sooner had the device been put in operation than the lead researcher started slaving away at Apate-III, while using every spare second to aid in solving whatever problems the other researchers—scientist and engineers—encountered with their own projects. Apparently he had been working this way for years, to the extent that a small team of medical staff made it their duty to make sure he didn’t keel over and die. Why would someone risk literally working themselves to death? To save the world through the research of interdimensional technology, ‘RID Tech.’

  Yes, very valiant this lead researcher, the man Zeke once called, ‘Daddy’. All that time and effort and he couldn’t even save the wife he claimed to love, let alone thousands—no, millions—of people according to the media. Still, everyone in Ridtech worshipped him like a God—almost everyone.

  Inventory: tinned pineapple, chopped tomatoes, baked beans, sweet corn…
They were heavy and useless to Zeke, but had become valuable to others. He traded them along with his messenger bag for lighter, longer-lasting rations and a sturdy military-grade rucksack. Being the son of the lead researcher also gave him a small measure of sway, enough to get his hands on spare tools and equipment. He also gathered up whatever scraps of technology he could find, squirrelling them away to various tucked away places throughout the facility. It was a habit Stuart used to encourage.

  “Don’t let them know what you’re doing, or you lose the game, son.”

  “Who, Dad?”

  “The people in green uniforms, black suits and yellow coats. You see Daddy’s coat? What colour is it?”

  “Light blue!”

  “That’s right. If you lose, then you have to play, ‘escape the secret base.’ The blue Azureus team are your helpers.”

  Zeke was beginning to think the warning went beyond some strange reverse scavenger hunt game. He had seen the looks of suspicion and too keen interest from Ridtech’s staff. Why? What was so interesting about a young guy with an interest in gadgets when that was pretty much the job description of over half Ridtech’s population? Surely, not just “neatly healed” ribs. Either way, catching sight of blue amongst all the greens, blacks and yellows was oddly reassuring.

  Privacy was an issue. Zeke had been given a room to call his own, which was great at first, but one screaming night of waking to his father’s embrace immediately sent him looking for somewhere else to crash. That’s what sleeping was for him now, a vivid replay of the night he lost his mother. He staved off sleep when he could by working on his wi-fi camera, poring over academic journals and pulling the seatbelt ring out of his pocket. The strange porous texture along its broken edge was a mystery he couldn’t solve no matter how much he turned it over and over in his hands.

  More recently, he had started tinkering with what he hoped would become an Apate, the last thing he needed to survive outside. It had briefly crossed his mind to steal Cranky, but no. What would that mean for the people he would leave behind? He wasn’t about to add to the global death toll, so the only option left was to build his own. That meant spending quality time with the original. Joining one of the raiding parties was the obvious option seeing as the rest of the time Cranky was kept under military guard. Zeke asked several times to join their ranks, but he was denied point-blank on every occasion. He soon discovered this was his father’s doing. No matter, he had a plan B.

  Apate-I was the leviathan of a machine built into the centre of the facility, ensuring Ridtech’s safe haven status. Like its successor, it could be partly manually operated. With an aim to conserve power, the centre managers formulated a rota. Anyone not a member of the research department or management team was assigned a place on a crank crew. Even medical patients were given short shifts in the name of exercise.

  Zeke was exempt owing to his father registering him as a research assistant. No one questioned this because clearly he was working on something the way he scurried about with his hands full of cables and electrical components. The bluecoats from Team Azureus who knew better didn’t rat him out, but the yellowcoats from Team Misumena…Zeke did his best to stay out of their way.

  A half-eaten packet of chocolate biscuits, his last morsel of home, bought him a seat on a crank crew. The ex-personal trainer he traded with was happy to let him have it. Zeke soon realised why. Apate-I was very noisy and the faint tang of ozone surrounding the machine gave weight to the rumours that an hour on the crank was an hour off your life. Zeke, however, agreed with the propaganda scored into the walls of several toilet cubicles, ‘fair price to pay to keep the quads away.’

  Instead of a hand crank, the colossal machine featured a bank of hard plastic seats and pedals for both hands and feet. The general idea was to pedal with your hands until they got tired, then switch to your feet, then back to hands and so on. Clearly, kinetic energy was being transformed and amplified into something more useful, probably with similarities to electromagnetic radiation if it could disrupt whatever signals the quads were using to coordinate their attacks. Zeke would’ve loved to see the blueprints, but he contented himself with studying everything he could lay eyes on during his first shift and the countless others that followed.

  * * *

  Pedalling was hard on the hands, but someone had slipped a pair of fingerless gloves into one of his many trouser pockets that day. Zeke wore them as he worked and tried not to think about where they’d come from; most likely Stuart via one of the bunker brats, kids that prided themselves on having quick hands. They earned various treats like snacks and clothes for delivering mail…or stealing.

  A series of short beeps signalled the end of the crank shift. It was knackering to be sure, but he didn’t feel half as dead as his crew mates looked by the end of it. ‘Mates’ was the wrong word. He didn’t have friends down here. Friendship required talking which required energy that he couldn’t afford to spend on anything other than figuring out how to get out there and defeat the quads.

  He set off for one of his stash points. He would pick up some gear to make modifications to his apate project and maybe something extra for Stuart. He hated the thought of owing anyone anything, especially that guy. I owe Georgie too. Hope he’s okay. He’d known Georgie since year seven at school and they’d both stayed on into sixth form, even taking similar subjects although Georgie was more science-orientated. The guy’s such a conspiracy nut he’s probably holed up in his apocalypse bunker with all his self-sufficiency inventions. Zeke caught himself rubbing his itching hands against his jeans. Stupid, germy gloves. Mind you they itched last shift too. Great I’ve caught refuge-rot. If Georgie were here, he’d be hawking some kind of petri dish cure at me. There was comfort in that thought, but not enough to outweigh the bone-deep ache Zeke felt whenever he thought of the crash.

  He had reached the midpoint of a narrow passageway crowded with thick cables. Without making a scene, he slid his arm between the thickest two and felt around for the small bundle of scrap materials he knew to be there. He felt nothing. He checked that he was searching in the right place. There was the rusted safety sign to one side and the spot where some cabling had been removed leaving their fixtures behind. He hadn’t made a mistake. He searched again. There was absolutely nothing, not even dust. Some maintenance guy must’ve found my stuff, or worse, a bunker brat. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  He kicked the wall in irritation and headed for the next closest stash point, the forgotten, bolted-from-the-inside, dark room, where he stored his work in progress. He figured he had enough material there to suit his immediate needs. The tools he always kept safe on his person granted him access to the ceiling crawl space not far from his destination. It was a tighter squeeze than it had been for his childhood self, but he was by no means a big guy.

  As he drew close to the stash point, he realised something was off. The air held the stench of melted metal and he could hear movement where all should be still. There’s no way the brats found this place, but Stuart…he might know where to look. Always interfering. Zeke scowled and inched his way to the defunct air conditioning tube that served the room. Over time it had lost its alignment with the ceiling’s filter panel, providing Zeke with the perfect vantage point.

  Down below, in a bubble of lamplight, a man in a murky green uniform, complete with a grey beret, was using a combat knife to slice through the mismatched cushions Zeke used as a bed. What the hell? A plasma cutter, no doubt used to gain entry to the room, lay beside a transparent, digital safe containing Zeke’s handheld apate prototype. Fury tightened Zeke’s muscles. The ceiling shifted and some small piece of it fell and skittered across the floor. Beret-man immediately dropped the knife and drew a gun. Zeke froze. A second soldier stepped into view, gun at the ready.

  “Ezekiel?” he called.

  His voice was tremulous, fearful even. Zeke couldn’t spare a thought to puzzle out why. He was too busy fighting the urge to escape. The slightest twitch would give hi
m away and the ceiling here wasn’t made to stop bullets. I don’t understand! How is shooting me an option? Beret signalled something to his colleague who left the room, passing right beneath Zeke, whose heart was thumping so hard he was sure it would betray him. Beret continued scanning the room, his wary gaze inevitably drifting upwards along with the muzzle of his gun. Zeke shut his eyes so they wouldn’t reflect the lamplight. Do I wait for them to leave and then go? What if I don’t have that long? They’ve been tracking me. How? The cameras sure, but that doesn’t explain how they found this place. Zeke felt a chill as his brain volunteered an image of a syringe needle entering his arm during a recent medical check-up. A vaccine or one of those tracking chips he saw Team Misumena working on? No time to explore that thought. The second soldier had returned and was back to rifling through Zeke’s belongings. Zeke used the noise to mask his escape.

  A call was put out via the PA system for Zeke to collect his bonus rations; a crank shift perk. He ignored it and whatever trap lay in store and headed straight for the next most important place in the facility, the large, disused, industrial furnace where he kept his bug-out bag. He was a child again; avoiding surveillance cameras, darting from cover to cover and playing his father’s game of hide and go seek tag with the people in yellow, green and black.

  Reaching the pokey cloakroom with the old metal grate took more patience than Zeke had to spare. Unscrewing said grate and having a screwdriver bit chip in his haste was truly vexing. Crawling through the sooty chute on the other side was another joyless task as was climbing down the aged brick flue, especially when he missed a foothold and fell the last black metre, landing with a ‘whumph’ in a pile of ash. His mouth and lungs were instantly filled with the stuff. He coughed and spluttered while feeling for the small LED torch he kept in one of his pockets; very handy for lights-out curfews. He had toyed with the idea of installing a remote-activated light down there which certainly would make the climb easier, but with the increase in nosey children, he’d decided against it.