Silverwood

by Betsy Streeter

  That’s when Helen realizes: the card. When she closed the cell, it was filed away into the vast system. What if that process works in reverse? Can she bring the lab to herself?

  She stops running and slaps the card on the wall. Footsteps echo from both sides now, coming closer. She can hear agitated voices, but in the white expanse she can’t tell how far away. Now: How to look up the lab?

  A keypad appears on the card, and Helen flips through the display. She sees cell addresses, accompanied by faces and names. Dozens of them. Hundreds. All here, somewhere. Where? Where is the lab? What if…

  She pulls up a picture of one of the molecules on the card. It’s got to be part of the vaccine chemistry. Now she grabs the card she confiscated from Dinkle and sticks it on top of the first card. Surely Dinkle has access to the lab—they haven’t thought to shut that off yet.

  Sure enough, Helen hears a rumbling sound, a whirring, and then—silence. The footsteps have got to be within fifty feet now, just around the curve of the smooth white hallway.

  A space opens in the wall. The lab. Helen leaps inside, reaches out and peels off the cards. The space closes behind her, fading to a solid white wall again, just as she can see people appear outside. If she’s lucky she’s got a few seconds before they can gain entry.

  The lab consists of a semicircle of probably a hundred tables and desks all facing a large screen at the front. This must be mission control. It looks like a room that would normally be full of people, but someone has shut down the screens, the lights, everything. Where is everyone? Did they evacuate for some reason? Helen looks around for a clock or some indication of the hour, but she can find none. She runs down the aisles amongst the rows upon rows of tables, each covered in glass vials, blank screens, handwritten notes, printouts, and diagrams. She rifles through a few piles of paper, but she can’t read them in the dark.

  At the far end of the lab, though, a glass cabinet glows with blue light.

  Helen draws close to the cabinet. She can see a vial of blood, or some mixture that looks like blood. Could this be her blood? Or is it the completed vaccine?

  She sticks a light card onto the glass and it fills with data. She sees photos of herself. How flattering, she thinks. There is also information on her dad, the only other living Silverwood known to have the Tromindox anti-venom in his blood. There are pictures of him here that she has never seen before. Are these recent? The pictures look like he’s underground, in some sort of a cave.

  Next she sees list after list of compounds. Versions of the vaccine, probably. Perhaps these were tests or trial runs?

  Helen’s knife sits in the bottom of the cabinet, folded closed.

  A whooshing noise comes from the opposite end of the room. Helen peers through the glass of the cabinet. The entry opens and white coats pour in. She has run out of time.

  Helen grabs a microscope from a table and smashes through the glass. She grabs the knife and drops to the floor, sitting with her back against the case.

  At that moment, for the first time ever, the bio-indicator on the handle of the knife comes to life and flashes with green light.

  Helen is so surprised she doesn’t know what to do at first. She flips out the blade. A tiny, digital message scrolls across the shiny surface of the metal.

  PORTAL IN HANDLE—USE ONLY IN EMERGENCY—PRESS BIO READER—DAD

  What? In the handle? It’s never occurred to Helen to hack the knife. It’s always been a treasure, something not to be taken apart. A toaster, you can hack. But a gift from your dad, no way.

  “She’s behind there!” someone yells. She can hear people moving through the room on all sides of her. No time to deliberate.

  Helen presses her thumb down on the bio-reader, and a tiny portal slides out from behind it. The reader lights up again, another message scrolling across the blade.

  GOT THE PORTAL—NOW HIT BIO READER AGAIN—YOU WILL BE TRANSPORTED TO MY LOCATION—BE CAREFUL—DAD

  Now why hasn’t this option ever presented itself before? All this time Helen has carried around this knife, never knowing any of its capabilities. She feels like an idiot.

  Helen stands up. Wow, there must be fifty people closing in on her.

  “Now just stay there…” says one lab coat. Everyone is moving toward her with hands outstretched, as if they are trying to calm an escaped zoo animal.

  “Actually, I’m afraid I have to go,” Helen says. “I’m sorry I can’t stay for your little party.”

  She grabs the vial from the cabinet, simultaneously punching the bio-reader with her thumb.

  As she fades away, she sees angry and panicked faces. People leap across the tables, sending papers flying everywhere. They stretch out their arms, trying to grab her—but she’s gone.

  “Helen, get down!!”

  Helen drops to the hard, dusty ground as something whizzes over her head. Gunfire? She hears wood splintering somewhere behind her.

  That’s her mom’s voice. But where the heck is this place? And where is her dad?

  Helen stays down but attempts to look around. It looks like she’s lying face down in a dirt street in a town similar to Brokeneck, but different. It seems older and more beat up. The light seems strange. Then she realizes she’s seen all this before. It’s exactly like Henry’s drawings. That kid is amazing.

  Is she under the lake now? She has to assume so. This is where her mom was headed. This is what Henry said was here. She just couldn’t see it before. The portal, her dad’s portal, must have let her in.

  “Helen, over here! Quick!” For the first time she hears her dad’s voice. Clear and close by, not like those transmitted messages she’s been listening to her whole life.

  Helen goes into a crouch and runs toward the voices. There’s a beat-up old building in front of her with a wide wooden porch, kind of like the old Brokeneck bookstore—only, different. She scrambles for it. More gunfire, the frame of a window shatters in front of her and dirt and dust scatter in all directions. She runs up onto the porch, stumbling through the doorway.

  “Hey, it worked! Welcome to the Wild West, kid.” Gabriel is sitting on the floor. A huge grin spreads across his face.

  In a flash Helen is holding on tight to her dad, as if she were four years old again. She always gave him such fierce hugs when she was small, arms wrapped around his neck, hand gripping his ponytail. Gabriel rocks backwards with the force of her embrace. He looks her in the face, brushing her bangs from her eyes.

  “Hi kid,” he says. “Sorry I took so long.”

  “Dad, Christopher is safe.” Helen’s words tumble out. “Uncle Christopher. He showed up, I don’t know how. But he’s safe. He’s a person. I saw him. I got him out of the Tromindox.”

  Gabriel gathers up his daughter in his arms again. “That’s great, kid. Well done. Well done.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the knife?” Helen asks. “I had it the whole time, and you never told me…”

  “About the portal? The portal that was tethered to me? Well, think about that for a minute, kid. That’s good for a really huge emergency, right? But you would’ve used it way before now. You probably would have popped up in my prison cell or something like that. Right? Am I correct?”

  Helen just looks at him. It is not in her nature to back down, so this is the best he is going to do.

  “Fine,” Gabriel says to his daughter. “You’re here, now. And, I have another gift for you. How’s that?” He rummages in his pocket and pulls out a piece of glass. He holds it out to her, but before she can take it another bullet ricochets through the window and blasts a chunk out of the back wall. They all duck.

  Helen takes the glass from her dad. It resembles the bottom of a soda bottle. “What do I do with this?”

  “You look through it. Take a look at one of our friends out there. Carefully. Keep your head down,” Gabriel says.

  Helen creeps toward the front window, wood splinters crunching under her boots. She puts the glass up in front of her eye and sl
owly, carefully, raises her head up until she can just barely see over the sill. Nobody’s out there. Wait, there’s a Tromindox across the way on another porch. It has a digital face and long, black robes. Maybe that’s the one doing the shooting. Everything looks wavy, like the view out the bottom of a glass when it is held up to drink.

  “Okay,” Helen says, “if I look through my eyes I see a Tromindox, and if I look through the glass I see… a Tromindox through the glass. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

  “Look again, and don’t get shot,” Gabriel says.

  Helen holds up the glass again and peers through at the Tromindox. For a split second the outline of a human being reveals itself, like an X-ray superimposed on the Tromindox body. It’s a kind of pasty, regular-looking man.

  “Whoa, what was that?” Helen says, ducking down again.

  “That, my dear, is a human trying to get out,” says Gabriel. “Now say hello to your mother.”

  “What? Where is she?”

  Something hits the front of the building with a bang. The force knocks them both back onto the floor. That was not a bullet.

  “Well-fed Tromindox apparently can throw energy around down here,” Kate yells from somewhere in the back. “They’ve got a power source, somewhere.”

  “They also seem to know you’re in here,” Helen says. There’s a burning smell, like welding.

  “Yes, they will really know it in a minute,” Kate says. She emerges holding up a makeshift weapon and grins.

  Helen grins back at her mom.

  “Okay Helen, here’s the plan,” Gabriel says. “Since you were so kind as to join us, your job is…”

  Another energy blast hits the building. Its power hits Helen so hard she has to catch her breath.

  “…to get the humans out,” Gabriel says.

  “What? How?” Helen asks. She assumes that it won’t be practical to go out and distribute anti-venom in the middle of the street like she did with Uncle Chris.

  She thinks of Chris—and Daniel. Boy, are they going to be angry that she disappeared on them. She fervently hopes Henry doesn’t get any big ideas about following her. She wonders, between the trip to the land of the weird white walls, and then here, how much time has passed. Please let Henry stay there with Clarence. She pictures her brother’s face and her stomach tightens.

  “Helen? You listening?” Gabriel asks.

  “Yeah, sorry,” Helen says.

  “Okay,” Gabriel says. “Our problem is, we can’t just turn people into humans willy nilly, they’ll be confused and get blasted to bits and then we’ve wasted our time. Right?”

  Helen nods.

  Another energy blast. More splinters fly. Dust rises from the floor.

  “So we’ve got to get them to the edge of town,” Gabriel says. “All of them. That’s your job. Find the humans, get them out. All the way out. Up the hillside. Any hillside. Get them to the perimeter of the town. Got it?”

  Kate comes forward and crouches next to Helen. Her weapon is fashioned out of pieces that look like about half plumbing and half car parts. She rests the barrel on the windowsill and peers through her viewfinder.

  “What about the ones that are one hundred percent Tromindox?” Helen asks. “The ones with no human bits inside?”

  “Leave those,” Kate says.

  “Just… leave them? Do nothing?” Helen says.

  “Right,” Kate says. “Don’t worry about them. Just worry about the humans.”

  “But…” Helen says.

  “Really,” Kate says.

  “I mean…” Helen says.

  “Leave them!” Kate barks.

  “Okay, okay!” Helen says.

  Another blast, this one tears off a chunk of porch railing. There won’t be much left of this building shortly, it’s so brittle it might as well be made out of toothpicks and dry pine needles.

  Kate fires. The weapon makes a deep whomping sound. After a second or two they hear a crackling sound like far off fireworks.

  “Got one,” Kate says.

  Gabriel goes into a crouch and heads for the doorway.

  “Dad, where are you going?” Helen yells. Another blast hits, another chunk of the wall is gone, wood and nails flying across the room. “You can’t just run out there!”

  “Oh, yes I can,” Gabriel says. “I’ve gotta go pull the bathtub drain on this thing.” He grins, and runs out the front door. “Get the humans out!” he yells over his shoulder.

  “Helen,” Kate says, “I know you can do this.” She hands Helen a device like a syringe encased in metal and mounted on a handgun. “This has everything you need built into it. It’s your dad’s. I’ll cover you. The viewfinder on my bazooka here has that same glass. I can see which squids have human parts. I’ll only take out the ones with no human ingredients left.”

  “Okay, just a second.” Helen runs into the back room and rummages around on the table. There has to be something in here—a strip of leather, a belt. As she suspected, her mom has created a makeshift metal shop. Helen grabs some twine and a bit of metal. After a few moments of focused tinkering, she’s mounted the glass in a round frame and attached it to a strap that just fits around her head. She pulls it down and clicks the glass into position in front of her left eye. Now she’s ready to go.

  Helen rejoins her mom at the front window as Kate fires on another Tromindox, this one on an upstairs balcony. It dissolves into a cloud of dust that blows into the street.

  She looks over at her mom with her new headgear in place.

  “Nice look,” Kate says.

  “I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got,” Helen says.

  “The ones with humans left in them will appear more sluggish,” Kate says. “So look for the slow ones. Shoot them with the syringe, then extract the human out of there. Okay? Work your way down one side of the street, then the other side.”

  Kate fires again. Another whomping noise and distant crackle. Another Tromindox gone.

  “What happens when we get the humans to the edge of the town?” Helen asks. “What do I do then?”

  “That’s when we signal your dad,” Kate says, “and that’s his cue to blow this whole operation right back to wherever it came from.”

  “Okay,” Helen says. She peeks out the doorway at a sliver of the street. “You know what I need first?”

  “What?” Kate asks.

  “I need to do just a couple seconds of hacking,” Helen says. “Do you have any blank portals?”

  Channel Open

  Gabriel Silverwood >>> Christopher Silverwood

  G: hey bozo

  G: i heard my kid got you outta the squid

  C: hey bro—how do u know that—i’m at this weird hotel—thought you were here—where the hell are you?

  G: do you have henry there?

  C: yes henry is here—another Guild member too her name is rosie she just showed up—eleanor woods is here posing as hotel manager—what the hell is this place?

  C: henry is freaking out—drew a picture—some kind of explosion—says everything is going down a hole—what is he talking about—helen is missing

  G: helen is here—she used the tethered portal—eleanor intercepted you

  C: where are you guys?

  G: chris need your help—tell eleanor we need a field at the lake NOW NOW NOW

  C: can’t reach eleanor

  C: what lake—where are u?

  G: stop typing—no time bozo

  G: tell eleanor

  G: we need a field so we can get people out—she will understand

  G: DO IT NOW

  C: eleanor not OK

  G: tell henry we are all safe—keep henry with you—you need to protect him

  C: oh you mean like i did with helen

  G: not exactly—not your fault she left

  C: i feel like an idiot

  G: you are an idiot—that’s beside the point

  G: NOW SHUT UP AND GO TELL ELEANOR WE NEED A FIELD

  C: di
dn’t you read eleanor is—

  Line Not Secured

  C: we got company

  G: GO NOW

  Channel Closed

  Helen rummages around on the table surface until she finds enough portals to get started. These are blanks from her mom’s supplies. She scrapes them together in a pile.

  She pulls the light card from her pocket and swipes a finger across it. Daniel’s notebook appears, the one filled with the list of names and dates. She pages through it, yes, it’s all there, every page. Back at the hotel she put the card on the cover, and it sucked all the entries right out of the notebook.

  She grabs a square device with wires sticking out and a screen on one side. Her hands move quickly now. She needs a way to encode these portals—some kind of signature. She clamps the wires onto the light card and the screen lights up on the device. Names, faces, dates are flashing across the light card, so fast she can’t read them. Each person in the list is being copied into the device.

  Next Helen grabs a blank portal and stuffs it into the slot on the side of the device. It makes a whirring sound, and when she punches the button the portal pops back out onto the table. She repeats this for another. And another.

  “Helen, I can’t just shoot out the window all day. Whatever you’re doing, do it fast. They’re getting closer,” Kate yells from the front room.

  “Okay, mom.” Helen shoves in another portal, whirring, out it comes. She dumps a handful into her pocket. Each portal is encoded with signatures for all of the people listed in the book. She hopes that if she finds any of these folks, she will be able to activate the portal with their information. That’s the idea, anyway. Now if only the portal will match the person. That part of the process, she can’t test. She will just have to see when she locates her first victim.

  Soon she’s stuffed a supply of portals into each of her pockets. She clicks the glass back down in front of her left eye, picks up her syringe-on-a-stick, and heads back out front.

  Except…

  “Mom, The Book of the Future… it’s just lying here!”