Stasis (Book 1.2): Beta

by Osborne, E. W.

  Ariene grabbed her wrist and gave it a squeeze. “No! It’s sweet. I’d love that, thank you.”

  “I can’t believe you’re actually going next week. It felt like forever away when you told us, but this has all made it…”

  A shout stopped her short. “What are you doing?” Both girls looked up, the screams coming from far above their heads. They exchanged concerned looks with people close by, all silently agreeing that it was weird. Teenagers could get loud and boisterous, but that yell had been tinged with definite panic.

  Ebony shook her head and looked down to the food hall. “I’m hungry.”

  “Yeah, I could definitely use some sushi. Oh shit,” she said with a mock gasp. “Do you think they’ll have good sushi over there?”

  Ebony chuckled and gave her friend a comforting pat on the shoulder. “I love that this is the most concerned I’ve heard you about your trip.”

  Another round of screams echoed through the central part of the mall, this time more voices joining the chorus. Fear rippled through the crowd. Though they were far removed from the commotion up above, they could see signs of people running away from something on the upper levels. With an unease growing in her gut, Ariene tried to ignore her desire to leave. She didn’t want to give up one of the last chances she’d have to get lunch with her best friend.

  A shout from above. “Look out!”

  Ariene looked around then up. At first she didn’t understand what she was seeing. It looked like a display hung from the ceiling had come loose. Then her mind tricked her into thinking it was a balloon. Whatever it was, she wasn’t directly beneath it and didn’t feel in immediate danger. But if it wasn’t for Ebony’s quick thinking, she would’ve been frozen to the spot as he hit.

  Ebony yanked her back by the elbow. She swung her head around to look in her direction and that’s when she heard the impact. Hearing it was almost worse than seeing. For a split second, she convinced herself some kids and thrown a melon from the top levels. The sound reverberated through her brain like a gunshot trapped in a canyon. Even when the world around her exploded in screams, she still heard it.

  In the chaos, she was knocked to her knees. She dropped her shopping bags as she threw out her arms to brace the fall, causing her to trip even more. When she came to a halt, she reached back to collect her things and saw him.

  The crowds had immediately thinned, leaving her a clean line of sight to the dying man not ten feet away. His wide open glassy eyes seemed to look right through her. He’d landed horribly, feet first, causing his entire skeleton to collapse in on itself. Ariene watched in horror as tremors turned to convulsions. In the throes of death, his heels drummed against the blood-slicked tile. It sounded like a boot slapping the water of a thin puddle.

  Ebony was in her ear, at her elbows, pulling her to standing and out the door. She kept turning to look back, hoping to see someone step up and help him.

  They ran because everyone else was running.

  “Why would someone do that?” Ebony kept asking as they put distance between them and the scene.

  “I don’t know,” was Ariene’s constant response.

  Panic spilled out onto the street. A flood of people running from a shopping mall in the center of a city wasn’t something most people ignored. They put a few streets between them, far enough they looked out of place for jogging at such a clip.

  It was until later when Ariene saw the videos from above that she realized the man hadn’t jumped. He’d been pushed. And while that detail was horrible enough, what came out over the next few hours made it that much worse.

  San Francisco, CA

  May 29th

  Penelope slammed the lid of her laptop down and squeezed her eyes shut. Some things will never be unseen and that video, for a variety of reasons, was one of them.

  It’d actually been Joey who got it to her first. When he saw what the assailants did after pushing the man over the railing, he immediately sent it over.

  You might want to see this.

  Penelope watched it three times and it was forever imprinted in her mind.

  The video she saw was split into three frames, three different angles of the same event synchronized. The top left was the closest angle, albeit still off centered in the start. Who could blame the cameraman? It’s not like he knew he was about to witness a horrific murder. He was trying to record his pregnant wife posing with baby clothes over her round stomach.

  The top right was much further away. A couple kids messing around on a bench, only after watching the video once through could you pick out the assailants in the distance.

  The bottom shot was taken from a middle floor of the mall over the railing. This appeared to be the only of the three that was deliberately turned on to record the event. It captured the man’s fall, impact, and the crowd fleeing into the streets.

  Even after piecing it all together, the picture didn’t make much sense. The foot traffic on the floor was steady but not crowded. In the top left, you can see the victim stop at the railing with his wife or girlfriend. They looked tired and irritable, possibly arguing about where to eat or some other mundane thing. It wasn’t a heated argument by any stretch of the imagination. He leaned his back against the railing, bracing himself with a hand on either side. She didn’t seem to like that, because she pulled one hand away and shifted so his full weight wasn’t against the side. It was a motherly gesture, one borne of concern.

  On the upper right video, you can barely make out the couple in the corner of the frame. There’s a blur of a red jacket behind one of the kids goofing off in the video. The jacket disappears to the left only to reappear a few feet away as the wearer walks in the opposite direction. A child, maybe five or six years old, walking beside his mother. His hand is high above his head, clinging to hers. She has her nose in her phone and isn’t paying much attention to their surroundings.

  The top left shot shows another child about the same age approaching from the opposite direction. The girl is running ahead of her family, curly ponytail bouncing with each hop. They look full of energy, as if only just arriving for their day of shopping. The child looks back to her parents as they walk into frame, constantly checking with them.

  In every sense, it looked like a normal, insignificant day. In a flash, it was anything but.

  The two camera vantages showed that both children reacted at the exact same instant. Both stopped mid-stride and turned toward the man by the railing. By the time either parents noticed, the children had already started closing in on their target. With clinical savagery, they attacked from either side. At first, the couple laughed, thinking it was a joke or they were playing around. But when the children were able to lift him off the floor, their smiles quickly disappeared.

  The girl’s family gave a shout. The children crouched, readjusted their grips around his knees, and stood as one. They managed to lift him a few inches from the floor this time, throwing him off balance to the point he had to steady himself on the railing. The man shouts out of alarm and surprise.

  As the parents close in, the children begin shoving him with all their strength. They take turns slamming into his hips, rocking him this way and that. His girlfriend screams, “What are you doing?”

  The shift in her body language is so subtle, it was only on the third watch Penelope caught it. It’s hard to tell from the angle, both cameras jostling and moving with the increasing panic, but it appears as though at least one of the children says something to her. The slope of her shoulders change. She stops fighting them. And then in one swift motion, the trio hoist the man into the air.

  There’s a brief moment when he manages to grab onto the railing. His terrified expression will forever haunt Penelope. It was like he knew there was nothing he could do, but couldn’t stop himself from trying. That urge to survive even in the most dire of circumstances ran incredibly deep.

  Someone shouts, “Look out!” His fingers slip. The top two cameras go shaky as the bottom one picks up his fal
l and his impact. There’s a moment when the top left cameraman stops running, now at a much greater distance from the attackers, and refocuses. There’s a lot of commotion around the trio of strangers, but it’s obvious that they’ve all sat down on the ground and aren’t resisting in any way.

  After her fight with Cameron, Penelope had fully extracted herself from working in the emergency psych department. But as a necessity, she had to be around when an incoming wave was expected. That was a direct order from Hung, who apparently caught wind of Cameron’s predictive ability. The party line was still hyper-rampant botulism, which was why the video gave Penelope a smidgen of relief. However they’d been able to cover up hundreds of deaths and psychiatric commitments over the past six weeks, it’d be a hell of a lot harder now.

  When the emergency ward filled up downstairs, they wheeled the patients to the waiting rooms for further assessment. Any patient who exhibited even one of the signs of this illness was quickly swept away, out of sight from the general public and staff. Behind closely guarded doors lurked a mystery Penelope was tired of dealing with.

  Yet, that’s where she found herself on that afternoon when two children and a young woman she recognized from a shaky video were admitted.

  In the back of her mind, she knew every single patient in that ever-increasingly populated floor was a murderer. But seeing it first-hand made it ten time worse. Logically, she knew they appeared the exact same way as any other. But when she entered the room with the two children, she couldn’t help but think their blank stares were sinister.

  They now had eight rooms almost full to capacity. As she made her rounds of the newly admitted patients, she also took a mental note to thank the nurse who had reorganized each room. They now had two rooms filled with minors, three for men, and three for women. She understood it was more for the staff’s benefit, but it’d been a good idea.

  Penelope gave each officer stationed outside the room a small greeting. Their post was more frustrating than hers, an indefinite station protecting immobile murderers.

  When she reached the room with the newly admitted girlfriend she’d watched online, Cameron strode in hands up defensively.

  “I just want to talk,” he said without greeting.

  Penelope turned her back to him. “You have nothing I want to hear.”

  “Then watch this,” he said as he swiped a video onto her tablet from behind. She saw the first few frames and closed with a snarl.

  “I’ve already seen it.”

  “Then you know how important it is,” he insisted, drawing closer.

  She tried to concentrate on the patient chart and failed miserably. “I’m not getting sucked into this again, Cam.”

  “They’re working together now. This is huge,” he whispered. “This is something else entirely and I don’t entirely understand the implications.”

  Penelope squeezed her eyes shut and fought that little voice in her head that said, He’s right. You saw it.

  “We don’t know anything about anything at this point.”

  “I’d like to see Hung fucking say this was because of some tainted canning process.” When Penelope didn’t react, he grunted loud enough the officer outside poked his head in. “Everything’s fine,” Cameron waved him away.

  Penelope moved to the next bed, taking the opportunity to glance over. He looked horrible and whatever residual anger was left from their argument disappeared with concern.

  “You need to stop this,” she begged. “You need to take a few days off. Sleep. Eat. Get out in the sun.”

  He waved the suggestions away like they were gnats in his face. He’d gotten what he wanted from her; attention. “These are the facts, yeah? No one else seems to be doing anything about this, so it’s up to us. We’re running out of time.”

  Penelope snorted at his doomsday rhetoric. “I think you might be overreacting just a touch.”

  With fingers digging into the sensitive flesh of her upper arm, he grabbed her attention. “You aren’t reacting enough.”

  She tried to wrench her arm away but he only tightened his grip. “You’re hurting me,” she told him flatly. She struggled another moment more before adding, “I will call for help.” She tried to keep the tremor of fear from her voice and failed.

  “This has something to do with Steele Industries, I can feel it. Deep, down in my gut. You used to trust my gut,” he said. His attempt at nostalgia fell short of its mark.

  “And you used me to get inside access.” She finally tore her arm free and charged angrily at him.

  “It was for the greater good. It was to stop this from happening!” he gestured around the room, their blank eyes unflinching.

  Standing nose to nose, she unleashed a torrent of anger years in the making. “The seed technology is the most studied, researched, and tested creation in human history. It has not only passed, but exceeded, every single safety regulation created to control it. There is nothing wrong with my father’s invention.”

  He rolled his eyes but remained silent.

  “Do you have any idea how much you fucked up my life? Do you even care? I almost went to prison because of you. This life I’ve worked so hard to build almost didn’t come to happen, because of you. Conspiracy. And you did such a good job with it, even my own family turned against me.”

  “It’s not like you got along with any of them anyway,” he scoffed. His inside knowledge was a thorn she’d never be able to dislodge.

  She trembled with anger now. Her voice grew softer as she continued for fear of alerting the police outside. “You cost me my brothers. You cost me my reputation.”

  Cameron finally balked. “It’s not like I got away with it.”

  “Conscripted into the military in lieu of prison time? I’d say you got off pretty light,” she spat back.

  “You’d think,” he replied cryptically.

  She took a deep breath and held it, counting the thumping heartbeats in her chest to calm down. “Even if I still had access inside the family company, I wouldn’t go near the place, especially not for you.”

  With their anger vented slightly, their argument dropped down a few notches. Cameron put some space between them and softened his posture. “Imagine, just for a second, that the seed was malfunctioning.”

  “Impossible,” she replied with a shake of her head.

  “Hacked, controlled, whatever you want to call it. Can you imagine what sort of unholy terror someone could inflict on the world with that power?” His wild eyes reminded her of so many patients she’d treated.

  Maybe it’s time I went to someone about him, she thought.

  “That’s impossible, Cam,” she whispered.

  “Why? Nothing is impossible!”

  She glanced at the door, waiting for the officer to come through. “This is. There are so many fail-safes in place, I can’t even tell you. Besides, you know as well as I do that the second the seed detects any amount of tampering, it dissolves. It took over ten years of development and testing before they were able to insert it into the first person.”

  “And now everyone has one,” he replied, looking at the patients around them. “Except you… and your brothers, is that right? Your father wouldn’t let you get them installed for some reason. Doesn’t that make you wonder how safe they actually are?”

  Cameron was able to touch one of the few exposed nerves Penelope had left. But she was exhausted. Instead of raging, she shut down. “I’m officially done. You have a problem with Steele Industries, that has nothing to do with me.”

  “Stasis,” he said clearly.

  Every woman in the room, including Penelope, refocused their gaze on him. This time was no less disturbing than the first.

  “It’s a command,” Cameron insisted. “We’ve tested in all across the country and they have the same exact response.”

  Penelope backed up, uneasy standing in the middle of their blank scrutiny. She hated that he was beginning to make a little sense, however convoluted and paranoid it might
sound. Still, she didn’t believe it necessarily had anything to do with the seed implants.

  “Lots of things can create a conditioned response,” she offered. “Not least of all, people willingly doing it themselves.”

  Cameron looked at her with as much intent as the patients stared at him. “Please. Go through your brother, find an old family friend who still works there. Anything.”

  Penelope shook her head. “No. We need to go through the proper channels.”

  “The proper channels refuse to listen, Pen. They’ve been compromised. Please.”

  New York City, NY

  May 29th

  Christopher wanted to rage against the size of their room. There was no place he could go where he wouldn’t see Kristine getting ready for her date. She wasn’t exactly flaunting it, but she wasn’t going to any great lengths to hide either. He was painfully aware it’d been far too long since he’d taken her out. That didn’t help. But it was the principle of the thing.

  As he was trying to zone out and watch the baseball game, Kristine walked by four times. Each time, she was wearing fewer and fewer clothes until he couldn’t stop himself from speaking up.

  “Where you going this time?” he snapped.

  Kristine looked at him through the reflection of the mirror. “Don’t know. He likes to surprise me.”

  That was definitely a dig, Christopher thought.

  “Think I might get a chance to meet this guy? If he’s one of your sources, than it shouldn’t matter.” It was taking a lot of energy to keep his temper from blowing out of control.

  Kristine clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Yeah, I’m not sure that would help me much if I’m honest.”

  “But he’s just a source, right?” he asked, throwing his arm over the back of the sofa.

  She laughed as if to think otherwise was absurd. “Of course he is. Don’t tell me you’re getting jealous.”

  Christopher’s laugh was devoid of humor. “Of course not,” he said returning to his game.