“That is a stupid plan. I can’t hide forever.”
“You only need to stay hidden until I re-establish my ranking.” He lowered his voice. “If they knew what you really are, they’ll destroy you in ways far worse than if Fitzgerald still had you.”
“They have scanners, Diesel. Unless you plan on shooting every robot in the head?”
“Just… let me fix this.”
“Well, your plan better not send me back to the bunker.” I turned, frustrated. “How did you end up here as well?”
“They found me on the cliff. Not that I could do much other than blink cursive Morse code at them. And what about that bitch who shot me?”
“Her name was Quinn but I lost her in the woods before I was grabbed too. I’m not sure where she is.” My eyes trailed to his red collar as he yanked on it frustrated, “Do you know these people well? Are they your friends?”
“Friends?” Diesel laughed at the word. “There’s only survival here. I know Miranda from before. She used to be a Filip or some shit like that. The other two are new, but it’s not hard to guess what they are like. Only the truly deranged are able to claw their way to the top.”
Like Krane? I felt myself itch to speak, but bit my lip. Instead, I asked, “When was the last time you saw these people?”
He huffed, contemplating the number. “Could have been nearly forty years ago.”
“I thought you were in Alpha for eighty years?”
“Over my series of lives, yeah.” He shrugged at my raised eyebrow. “What?”
“So, Krane was your most recent previous life?”
He nodded, seemingly unattached to the name. “Yes, but things have changed now. Enough of this.” He suddenly turned and reached for the doorknob.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving. Filip—I mean, Miranda, must only see you as some useable product, nothing more.” The words stung. Diesel must have seen the pain cross my face as he ruffled his hair awkwardly. “No, I said that wrong. She can’t know you mean anything more to me, okay? I’m trying to protect you. Just…do as I say and stay here with Miranda.” He turned to leave but stopped and swung back around. He pinched the end of my chin, lifting my face up. “I won’t lose you. Not to them. Not to anyone.” Even his kind words felt like threats. Then he was gone.
I went to the door and watched Diesel disappear behind the turn of the hallway. The armed man patrolling the corridor also watched Diesel go, then turned and looked at me. I quickly stepped back into the room.
“Hey, you awake?”
A hand shook my shoulder. My eyes snapped open, blurred from sleep. I immediately sat up. I reflexively swung my fist out, but my hand was caught.
“It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt you.” Large green eyes stared through chopped brown hair. The boy sat back away from the edge of the bed. He was pretty, too pretty to be slumming it out with a bunch of whack jobs. A dog’s whine came from beside me. I turned to a large German Shepard gnawing its way through a bone. It lifted its dark beady eyes and panted its hot breath over my face.
“Hello?” The boy waved my attention back. His voice was high, but spoken from the back of his throat. “I’m Riki. Miranda said you’ll be here.”
“What? What do you want?” I didn’t take the hand he offered. He eased back.
“Call this your welcome to the club party. I hear you got pulled from the bunker.” He checked me over, impressed. “No major damage I can see. If you can survive a night in there, you can survive anything. Follow me. I’m sure you want to scrub all that gunk off yourself.”
Riki took me out into the halls and led me back down the channel toward the bathhouse. The German Shepard followed at his heels the whole time. At the showers, he handed me a towel then turned his back to me. I eased into the cubicle, suddenly aware of the amount of dirt, sweat, blood and who knows what else tailored into my hair and clothes.
“Welcome to FRIM, short for Forging Resistance and Influence Movement. Top thing to know about FRIM is we are a community, and we must obey the rules and obey the leaders. There’s Miranda, of course, but there’s also Le’Ron and Bernie. It’s been a while since we had a girl recruit joining us. Don’t worry about the guys here. They know that Miranda’s girls are untouchable. If they try anything just let me know and I’ll sort them out.” He smacked his clenched fist as a show of force.
I turned the shower on and shivered beneath the sting of cold water. Crusty blood chipped off my back and face and pooled by my feet, quickly swallowed down the drain. I scrubbed hard.
“So, what does FRIM do exactly?” I asked over the water.
“We are doing God’s work. This world is unclean. We are here to set the order back and end the rein of the Elite’s sadism.”
“You plan on ending sadism with violence?”
“We are fighting to destroy a corrupted organization that fuels greed and war and continues to dirty our souls. It’s obvious we are being punished by God, and sacrificing our bodies will clean our minds and spirit. God will welcome us back once we clean ourselves. Clean everyone.”
“You believe God has done this to us?” I thought immediately to the word Soulless. Maybe he is right.
“No. This is our doing, our punishment.” His tone then shifted. “But enough about that. What do I call you?”
I hesitated for a moment. “I’m Nadia.”
“It’s good to have you here, Nadia.” The dog suddenly barked. “Yes, yes, I’ll get to you. Well, I’m Riki and this is my buddy, Hound.”
I twisted around at the name. “Hound?”
“Not the most creative name, I know, but it’s well suited. From the Fox and the Hound. You know, that old as hell movie about the unlikely friendship between the fox and hunting dog?”
“No, sorry. Never heard of it.”
“It’s from one of my earliest lives and is usually the first thing I remember during my transitions. Anyway, I’ve had Hound since a pup, only dog allowed past the pens. He is our sniffer, helps find explosives, drugs, runaways, and pretty much anything we need.”
“Sounds useful.” And unfortunate as Hound has no doubt had a good whiff of me. I finished showering and towelled myself dry. Riki then passed over some fresh clothes and my confiscated boots.
“When you’re ready, I’ll give you the tour.”
Dressed in dark green pants and a black singlet, I followed Riki around the winding halls. The substation was massive and entwined like a stretched out web. The space seemed equipped to fit an army and felt too large for the fifty people who occupied it.
“The pens are where we train our dogs.” He slowed as we neared a wide hall with a low ceiling. Cages lined the back wall as obstacle courses, crates of bagged dog food and wooden stumps were carefully set out in front. Tied to one of the wooden poles was a shirtless drifter, his red collar bright against his white skin.
Wait, so the red collar means… “You use drifters as dog fighting bait?” It suddenly made sense.
“Among other things. Blues are good for harvesting, like blood transfusions or skin grafts or whatever. Greens are our bombs. Blacks are good to eat and yellows usually are for the girls. Oh, look, they are bringing a dog out now.”
On the other side of the room, a man walked out with a large Doberman frothing and yanking so hard on its lead, it choked. His jaws snapped and sprayed spit beneath its large paws. The drifter it was led to didn’t seem aware of the dog, but sang cheerfully above his head.
I quickly turned away. “I don’t want to watch this.”
Hound whined next to me, perhaps sharing my unease. “No problem. Maybe another time. This way.”
Riki took us further toward the centre and slowed as we neared a brown door surrounded by men. Smoke and cheering leaked beneath the gaps, but once Riki opened the door the noise intensified. Men stocked right up to the walls, shoving and pushing against each other to get a better view of the activity in front. Riki leaned against the door edge, amused.<
br />
“Here is the ring.”
In the centre of the roaring and spit-flying crowd was a fighting ring. Two men brawled in the middle. Bare fists raised and their shirts torn. Blood spotted the ground. Their faces swelled beneath the bruising, turning them lumpy. They danced around each other, shoulders hunched to their necks and their skin slapped red.
“Fighting is strictly forbidden outside of the ring, so anyone who has any issues with someone else, or wants to climb ranks and show how tough they are, fight it out here. It also helps to impress the bosses, gets you the best missions and whatnot. Anyone caught fighting outside gets tied up with the reds or sent to the bunker as punishment.”
“They act like animals,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but not as kind.” Riki patted Hound fondly. “We can’t just show our belly and have mercy.”
“Do people die in the ring?”
“Sometimes. The men here don’t know how to back down. If they’re not killed instantly, then they’ll die later from head trauma or whatever. Unfortunately, blues can’t help with that.”
“Have you been in the ring before?” I looked Riki over, noticing his much smaller structure compared to the other men. He barely carried any muscles, his clothes too large they hung loose from his shoulders and his clean- shaven face gave him a youthful look.
Riki’s smile weakened. “None will fight me. Come on, I’ll take you to Miranda.”
Miranda sat with a large robot’s head between her legs, drilling into its cracked skull. Yellow sparks flew over her shoulder. Riki led me in then indicated with a tilt for me to sit.
I sat on a swivel chair. She didn’t look up or acknowledge my entrance. My fingers tensed over my knees. I waited as Diesel’s words of advice pinged against my inner ear. You have to be useful.
“What’s your name?”
I jumped, not noticing Miranda’s attention had shifted. I answered quickly. “Nadia.”
“Soul code?”
“My soul code it’s…err…” I stalled, thinking. The only other soul code I knew that wasn’t Annie’s had belonged to my old best friend, before she remembered her war years and fell into PTSD. She had tried to stab me with her pen, convinced I was there to kill her. We were both twelve at the time. “E5F1886.”
Miranda nodded at Riki who typed the code into a tablet.
“Drink?” She turned and placed the robot’s head on the ground.
I swallowed. I was so thirsty, I would have drank the dirty water out of a puddle. “Water. Please.”
She poured me a glass and I drank it faster than I had planned. She poured me another, not dropping her gaze. I recognised that look. Doctor Fitzgerald had it. Walter had it. Even Diesel had it. The look of opportunity.
“How do you know Krane?”
“I don’t.” She rose her eyebrow and I quickly corrected myself. “What I mean is, I know him as Diesel.”
“Is that what he calls himself now?” She glanced sideways, pursing her lips. “You said you had no soul imprints?”
“Not exactly. I’m… a transplant experiment. As you guessed before.”
“Krane cut your prints out?” I nodded. “How?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighed. “Our scouts said you were knocked out cold in the middle of the woods when the poachers found you. Krane was on a nearby cliff, also knocked out. Care to explain?”
I answered carefully. “We were on our way here when we got separated. A woman tried to rob us and poisoned us with a paralysing agent. I managed to escape into the water and washed ashore.”
“You were on your way here? Why?”
“To join your rebellion and to cleanse the world.” I glanced at Riki. He was frowning nervously.
Miranda smiled. “Those are Riki’s words. Not yours.”
I swallowed subtly. “But they are true. The Elite have taken everything from me, and I want to make them pay. Diesel… I mean, Krane, he was a leader here, right?”
“We were many things under the thumb of the Mad Dogs.” Miranda relaxed into her seat. “It seems like Krane is indestructible after all. I had hoped his mind would shatter in Alpha but I’m also not surprised to see him survive it. Despite all of his quirks, he was a great leader and an even greater fiend. But that boy is only a soft shell. So skinny. So much angst in that pent up body.” She sighed, disappointed. “He’s not Krane, not yet. Tell me, what are your qualifications?”
“Well, I can read and write, I can—”
“Have you ever dealt with machinery before? Software engineer? Mechanic or chemical knowledge? How about medicine? Explosives?”
How about high school drop out? I thought, feeling myself shrink. “I can shoot. I can fight.”’ She licked her lips, unpleased. You have to be useful, the words clicked again. “I’m fast too. I work hard.”
“I’m sure. Riki, take her to the greens. Show her what to do.”
Riki walked over and eased me out of my seat. Miranda stood too and quickly snatched my shoulder. She flashed a knife, slitting the blade upwards close to my throat. The yellow band fell in half to the ground.
“Work hard and don’t disappoint me,” she warned me, “or I’ll send you back to where you came from.”
Chapter Six:
Greens were what the green-tagged drifters were referred to. The bombs. Riki took me into their pens set up much like the guard dogs. They were separated into large, animal-sized cages with nothing to sit on but the bare concrete floor. At least there was enough room for them to stand with a hunch.
My fingers felt clammy and stiff as I walked in. The overcrowded storeroom stank with humidity and urine.
“It’s okay. They won’t hurt you.” Riki took my hesitation as fear instead of disgust. He led me in, and then showed me an injection gun with a small microchip stuck to the end of the needlepoint. He demonstrated on one of the drifters.
“We gotta tag them.” He pressed the gun to the back of the drifter’s head, at his neck. He fired. The point stabbed into the skin, leaving a pink bump.
“What’s this for?”
“When we send them out into the zones this helps us track them.” He handed the tool to me.
I’ve held guns before, but they had never felt as heavy or as awkward as this one. It didn’t fit in my hand properly. I shifted it around. “Hit the back of the neck, but avoid the spinal cord. Don’t want to paralyse them.”
“Can they feel it?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged, stepping back so I could take his spot. “Does it matter?”
I stepped up to the next drifter who lay on his side. He huddled in, rubbing warmth into his arms despite the sweat glistening his forehead. I searched his eyes for human emotion but saw nothing beyond the iced stare. I placed the gun to the back of his neck so the needle gently poked his skin. I don’t know why, but I felt the need to close my eyes as I pulled the trigger.
Riki watched for the next few hours. After I successfully tagged all of the drifters, he showed me how to feed them. Feeding them was a lot harder to do than stabbing them with a needle gun. They were lost to reality and apparently unattached to their body. Hunger went ignored. Pain was ignored. To feed them, I had to shove a pipe and funnel down their throat. Which meant I had to open the cages and climb in.
Riki showed me how to secure them first so their wrists and neck were bound to the bars. Not that it really stopped their thrashing or spitting a string of swear words at me. Most choked, but under Riki’s instruction I kept pouring the slush through. The dog food I used was mostly mush, making it easier to shovel it down. During one of the feedings, one of the drifters snapped back to reality.
He shoved me off. “Please, stop. Stop! No more.”
I lowered the funnel as Riki stepped up. “What’s wrong?”
“He asked me to stop.”
“It’s just gibberish. Keep going.”
“But…” Be useful to her. My fingers flexed around the funnel, sloppy in dog meat. My stomach curdled
at the stench of the gravy. It ran in between my fingers and caught in the tangles of my hair. It glistened on the drifter’s chin, mixed with salvia. Diesel’s face popped into my mind, and then Annie’s, imagining the soul within the body would remember me. They would wake, six years old again, screaming from the taste of dog meat shoved down their throats. I did this to him. I tortured them to save myself. The drifter vomited down his front, saturating his shirt. His eyes glazed over, sliding his fingers through his own puke.
“Darcy, what have you done to the walls?”
“He’s done.” I put the funnel down, resisting the urge to pitch it across the room. “If he’s going to throw it up, let’s not waste it on him.”
“Fair enough.” Riki smiled. I hoped I had passed.
After my shift with the Greens, Riki took me back to the communal bathrooms and gave me my own toothbrush and toothpaste to use. It had been so long since I had brushed my teeth, I barely noticed the furry skin that covered them. It felt wonderful to clean them, and I tried to ignore the blood that hit the porcelain after I gargled and spat. Guess it is hard keeping up with dental hygiene while on the run. My gums ached where I had flossed.
After a quick shower, Riki took me back to base. My entire body felt tight. I was unable to properly loosen my shoulders. I wasn’t sure what was worse, being the one tortured or being the torturer. Guilt ripped up my insides, devouring my humanity and any strain of self-respect I may have had left. By the time we returned to the room, Miranda was there with two other women.
None of them looked at Riki or me as we walked in. Riki ushered me against the wall, indicating for me to be quiet. Dirt and oil stained their discoloured jackets while gasmasks hugged their faces, shielding their identities.
“Are you sure?” Miranda sat on the kitchen bench, her hands gripping the edge.
“Absolutely. Three carloads moved in around 3 a.m. I saw them unloading the cases myself,” one of the raiders answered through her headgear. Both carried large rifles swung across their chests and backpacks plunging off their shoulders. The packs looked heavy as the bag budged to its tearing point.
Soul Finder (The Immortal Gene Book 2) Page 4
