by James Harden
He began pacing back and forth in front of us.
We were on our knees in the desert. Alone in the desert. The tank tracks had disappeared. But they had led us to a mad soldier. Someone who had been banished from his team. His words, his movements were wild. His eyes were wild.
He was heavily armed. It looked like he was prepared to last a few days on his own. Maybe a week.
“Please don’t hurt us,” I said. “We came here looking for help. We came here to find someone.”
“We all came here to find someone,” he answered. “We are all looking for someone. Searching. And my search is over. I have been rewarded. I found you. Maria Marsh. The one. The only. You’re a goddess, you know that? You’re an angel. The savior. I’m certain some of the guys fell in love with you the moment they saw your photo. How could they not? You represented everything that is good with the world, everything that is worth fighting for. You represented hope and innocence to these men. These men who are not innocent and never will be. You were something worth saving because you could save us. Do you see? That is why you’re an angel. That is why you’re a goddess. And now the General will have to let me back in. Now that I have you.”
“How?” I asked. “How do we get in? Where is this place?”
“It is far. It is big,” he said as he looked up to the desert sky again. “We need to contact him. Get his attention. He is always watching. He sees all. But first, we need to hide you. We need you out of harm’s way. It is too dangerous out here.”
He bent down and picked up a chain that was hidden in the dust. The chain was attached to a trapdoor. There was a keypad on the door. He punched in a code and opened it up. A ladder led straight down into darkness.
We must’ve come across another outpost, I thought. Or a bunker or something. Maybe this is where he was getting his supplies from. Food and water and ammo. There must be hundreds of these bunkers hidden all over the desert.
“Where are you taking her?” I asked.
He ignored me and retrieved a black hood and two plastic zip ties from one of his pockets on his vest. He tied my hands together and then tied Maria’s hands together in front of her body and slipped the black hood over her head.
“Go,” he said to Maria. “Start climbing. You stop, I shoot. And then you’ll get to the bottom real fast. You catch my meaning?”
Shoot? He was just talking about how she was a goddess? “You won’t shoot her,” I said, trying to call his bluff. “You need her. We all need her.”
“Doc never said nothing about getting her alive. But I don’t feel like carrying you all the way back. We got a long way to go. Especially now the trains are out.”
“I can’t see!” Maria said. “How do you expect me to climb?”
“You don’t need to see where you’re going. Just hold on real tight. You just need to climb straight down. It’s a piece of cake. Now, if you fall, you will fall to your death. It is a long way straight down. A long way. So you better hold on tight. When you reach the bottom. You wait. You stay quiet. Like a good girl. The door is locked. Can’t open it from the inside. You should be safe. But you stay quiet just to be sure. You never know what is lurking in those tunnels.”
He helped Maria onto the ladder. She began climbing.
“Maria, be strong.” I said.
“It’s going to be OK,” she answered.
She was trying to be strong. She was trying to be brave. But I could see her knees and hands shaking. I could hear her voice tremble.
She began the climb. A few seconds later, the mad soldier slammed the trap door shut. He looked at me with his wild eyes. And I knew he was going to kill me.
Chapter 8
The mad soldier stared at me for a few seconds. His eyes were glazed over.
“When nuclear weapons were first invented,” he said, “They tested the effects of them on humans. They would chain up prisoners and criminals and test subjects. They would put them at various distances from ground zero. The people closest to the blast would be incinerated and vaporized immediately. Further out, they would be burnt to a crisp. And even further out than that, they would still be burnt, but they would survive. At least they would survive for a few days. Over the course of a few days, or a week, they would slowly die from their burns or from radiation poisoning. Some would take longer. Some lived long enough to develop cancer. What is worse? I don’t know.”
“Please,” I begged. “I can help.”
I said I could help even though I wasn’t entirely sure that I could.
He had Maria. She was all he needed.
“But all of that,” he continued, ignoring my plea. “All of that pales in comparison to what is going on down here. Down here, in this place, in this desert, it is hell. And General Spears is the devil. Don’t get me wrong, he is a brilliant man. A genius, really. But don’t you dare cross him. You don’t do it. It is better his way.”
He looked up to the sky. “Now, where is that goddamn drone? I know he’s watching.”
He spun around, looking, searching and shielding his eyes from the sunlight. “Where are you!? I found her. I have the goddess. I have Maria Marsh. You have to let me in!”
There was something I didn’t see before. A short distance away from the trap door was a whole bunch of severed hands, arranged in a message.
The message said:
Let me in…
Big letters. Big enough to be seen from the sky.
He was now arranging more hands. Another message.
It took him about ten minutes to get the severed hands in the right position.
I have Maria Marsh…
“Please,” I said again. “Maria wants to help. Believe me. She does. But she will be more likely to cooperate if I’m there with her. She won’t fight you. She won’t struggle if I’m there.”
The mad soldier looked up to the sun. Stared at the sun. After a few minutes he lowered his gaze. And when he looked at me his eyes were unfocused and bloodshot. His pupils were pinpoints.
“No,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. You cannot be allowed to live. The General would not want it. He doesn’t like weakness. He doesn’t like outsiders.”
“I’m not weak. I will help. I will.”
He took out a knife.
He held it up.
And I knew he was going to do it. He was brandishing the knife. Waving it back and forth like an evil and crazy conductor.
I looked away and focused on the desert horizon. Adrenalin surged in my chest and made me feel sick.
I remembered this one time, when me and Jack and Maria went fishing in this isolated cove of Sydney harbor. Well, it was supposed to be isolated and protected. The wind picked up in the afternoon. The swell picked up. We were only in a small boat. It started rocking back and forth. I immediately felt sea sick. Jack told me to stare at the horizon. Pick out one spot and focus on it. Maria caught a fish. Big enough to eat for dinner. Jack scaled it and gutted it, which made me feel even worse. But the longer I stared at the horizon, the better I felt.
So, as the mad soldier brandished a hunting knife and looked at his teeth in the reflection of the blade, I stared at the horizon. I picked out one spot. A small black mark on the horizon.
I saw a shape.
A dark blob.
I felt less nauseous.
And then I heard a gunshot. It was faded and distant. The noise echoed across the desert. Two seconds later, the knife fell at my side and stuck into the dirt.
Blood dripped down the blade.
It was not mine.
I looked up.
The mad soldier was holding the side of his neck, like a mosquito had bitten him.
He was confused.
He took his hand away. Blood spurted out in a huge red arc, spraying the desert ground. He looked at his hand. It was completely red. And then his head snapped backwards. Suddenly and violently.
And he fell to the ground.
I looked back to the horizon. The dark blob was getting closer.
I realized the mad soldier had been shot in the head. It was an expert shot. By a marksman. A sniper.
Kenji?
The shape moved closer.
It was a man.
A man with a gun. A rifle. It had to be Kenji, I thought.
It had to be.
The shadow moved closer, coming for me.
It was a man. A Large man. Wide. Tall.
It was not Kenji.
It was Ben.
Chapter 9
Ben cut me free with the mad soldier’s hunting knife, saving my life for the second time. I tried to thank him but he just ignored me.
“I mean it,” I said. “I really am grateful. I don’t know how to repay you. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay you.”
“My father once told me that you should do things for people that they can never pay you back for,” Ben said. “You should do these things as often as possible.” He paused, as if remembering something. “Besides, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Don’t thank me. Thank your lucky stars. And this guy was obviously a psycho. Pushed over the edge.”
“So what the hell are you even doing here? What happened back at the outpost? Have you seen Kenji?”
“I’m here because I’m pissed off. I’m here for my revenge. It’s selfish really.”
“What?”
“The people in charge. They took something from me.”
“What did they take?”
“My life. My freedom.”
Ben knelt down over the mad soldier and relieved him of his shotgun. He also took his sidearm and several magazines of ammunition. He handed me one for my rifle. He threw away the hunting rifle he had used to shoot the soldier with. It was out of ammo. His movements were slow but methodical, almost mechanical, like he was working and moving on autopilot or something. I noticed that Ben did not look good at all. He looked pale and weak. I had to remind myself that he had been unconscious back at the outpost. He had undergone emergency surgery to remove a bullet from his chest. He was obviously not fully recovered.
He continued to search the pockets of the dead soldier, picking him clean. In the soldier’s vest he found a couple of energy bars.
“Here, eat this,” he said as he handed me one of the bars. “Don’t know when we will get another chance to eat.”
I took the energy bar. But I wasn’t hungry. I still felt sick. “How did you get out?” I asked again. “What happened back at the outpost? Did Kenji make it out?”
“Don't know. I woke up. Pain in my chest. Heard the alarm. I got out of there. You get a feeling in your gut. A cold, sinking, awful feeling. You come to trust that feeling. Trust it with your life.”
“So you don’t know where Kenji is? You don’t know where he went? You don’t know if he made it out?”
“No. I’m sorry. The place was abandoned. I heard the alarm. I got the hell out of there. I figured you people had done the same.”
“We came back for you. We wouldn’t just leave you.”
“Whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’s in the past.”
“How did you get here? How did you find us?”
“I just followed the tracks. Same as you, I guess. I wasn’t looking for you.”
“Oh.”
The mad soldier also had an automatic rifle slung over his back. It was similar to the one I was carrying. I picked it up and offered it to Ben. But he didn’t want it.
“Don’t like automatic weapons. They jam. I’ll stick with the shotgun. It’s got plenty of stopping power. And I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need stopping power.”
“We need to get Maria first,” I said. “She is all that matters. We need to get down there.”
I pointed to the trap door.
Ben was already moving, one step ahead. He pulled up the chain that was attached to the trap door. He looked at the man hole.
He shook his head. “No good. Need a password. And we can’t ask him. Dead men tell no tales.”
“So what now?”
He moved over to the ditch of severed hands. He started looking through them, tossing them aside.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a key.”
“A key?”
“Yeah.”
He picked up a hand that looked less dirty than the others. Fresher.
He moved the fingers back and forth.
“Now what are you doing?” I asked.
“Checking for rigor mortis. The keys have a time limit. This one is still fresh.”
He moved over to the pole and moved the hand in front of it. “It’s a scanner,” he said. “Reads the barcode.”
He scanned the barcode on the wrist of the severed hand back and forth. Nothing happened.
“So the barcode is the key,” I said.
“Bingo.”
“Wait, don’t you have a barcode? On your wrist? I saw it.”
He showed me his wrist. The barcode was gone. It was replaced with a messy scar. It was inflamed and swollen. “Someone took it. Need to find another one.”
The barcode was the key, I thought to myself. The dreadlocked woman in the creek bed, she had one. Ben had one. And someone took it. Someone cut it off his wrist. Someone who knew they needed a key.
He kicked away a few hands. Found a small square piece of fabric or sand paper or something.
“Well, look what we have here,” he said as he held up the small rectangular piece of fabric.
He held it up to the sunlight. And that's when I saw what it was. It wasn’t a piece of fabric. It wasn’t a piece of sandpaper.
It was a piece of skin.
A piece of skin with a barcode tattooed on to it.
“Wait, what is this place?” I asked.
He showed me his forearm again. It was burnt and disfigured. He showed me how the square piece of the skin fit into place on his arm. “This is the Fortress.”
Chapter 10
“What?” I asked in disbelief. “This is the Fortress?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, where the hell is it?”
“It’s underground.”
“Underground? The whole thing?”
Ben nodded.
This is why the dreadlocked woman and why Ben had said we would never find the Fortress. It was hidden. Off the grid. It was underground.
“And what the hell is that?” I asked, referring to the square piece of skin.
He showed me his forearm again. “My barcode. My access code. This should work.”
“Who did that to you? Who cut it off you?”
“Don’t know. I woke up. I was bleeding from my arm. I was bleeding bad. Tried to stop it. But several veins and the artery had been cut. Had to burn them to seal all the vessels shut.”
“Burn it? With what?”
“A blowtorch.”
I shook my head. I could not even imagine the amount of pain that would cause. Taking a blowtorch to an open wound? Voluntarily? It made me feel sick just thinking about it. But I suppose the alternative was bleeding to death. Sometimes I got the feeling that Ben was a machine or a god or maybe he just didn’t feel pain the way normal humans did.
“Who the hell would do that? Who cut, who…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.
It was too much.
Someone had severed all these hands. Maybe hundreds. Someone who knew they needed a key, the barcode, to get inside the Fortress. There were so many hands.
Was it the crazy soldier? Or was it someone else?
“Where are the bodies?” I asked
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know. They’ve either been eaten. Or they have turned.”
“Eaten?”
“By the nano-swarms. By wild dogs. The fact that there are no bones here suggests maybe the nano-swarms got to them. Or maybe someone buried them or hid them somewhere else.”
He was cleaning his own piece of skin, carefully brushing the dirt off. He moved over to the pole and scanned the barcode back and forth. He did
this multiple times. And again, nothing happened.
“How long has it been?” Ben asked.
“Huh?”
Ben closed his eyes. Thinking back. Counting the days in his head. Counting the days since he left the Fortress. “Six days. There's still time. This should work.”
“What should work?”
“My access code. It shuts off after a week. Once you leave, you got a week to get back. If you’re gone longer than that, you're gone for good.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, remembering what the man in the attic of the barn had said. “It won't work.”
“Why not?”
“They issued a Code Black. A Lockdown. No one gets in.”
“Lockdown?” Ben asked. “No. They wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t. Lockdown would mean shutting down…” He trailed off, thinking of the implications of what the Lockdown meant.
From the way he was acting, I got the impression that a Lockdown was a very bad thing.
“What happens when they order a Lockdown?” I asked.
“It’s not good. It basically means game over for everyone.”
He flattened his piece of skin out. Tried scanning it again. “This has to work,” he said with a hint of desperation in his voice. “It has to.”
