The Sentient Corruption (The Sentient Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian Williams

  Why had Luke not warned him this could happen? Being told he had been trapped in another world for a year-and-a-half had been bad enough. With this on top it was starting to feel like time had a problem of some sort with him. Why else would so much of it be gone without a trace; it was punishment for something.

  “Bullshit!” Graham said.

  Alex gasped in response.

  Chapter 2

  Revelations

  The chair creaked beneath Elliot as he once again fidgeted in place. With every escalation to Graham’s long story he had moved a little bit closer to the edge of his seat. He was not the only one either. Jane’s grip on her husband’s hand had increased. She was now squeezing with all of her strength.

  During the hour or so after Graham found out about his prolonged sleep, he tried his best to tell his family everything he had seen while inside the Sentient world. Doing so without scaring the life out of them proved more difficult than expected. But he was now making progress and moving them beyond the most shocking parts.

  “So all this time we thought you’d died down there, Luke had somehow frozen your body and preserved it?” Elliot said.

  “Exactly.” Graham could feel the burden of that terrible time lifting with each part he covered in his highly elaborate explanation. He was releasing himself from its grip with every word he shared. “And once we made it back to the maze thing, the surviving Sentients took refuge inside. They’re safe from Isaac’s patrols. But there’s no way of telling for how long.”

  “How on earth did you get through it?” Jane asked.

  He paused before answering. There were two things in particular that had dragged him through the other side of it all, although saying it proved hard at first. It had not been the only time over the course of his story that he had to stop to catch the raw emotion in his throat. He was swallowing so much air during these moments that he was sure he would burst if he took anymore in.

  Raising his wife’s hand to his mouth, he kissed it softly, then spoke. “You did, and Alex.”

  “I don’t understand, Daddy, we weren’t there too,” Alex queried.

  A short and unexpected laugh made its way out of Graham. He tried to hold it back, but just as with before, the more he tried the more it grew. It came out more like a burp.

  “I wanted, more than anything, to make it back here to see you again. And I’m very happy I did,” Graham said for his daughter’s benefit only. He turned back to talking to the grown-ups. “I was hoping Phoenix would have told you some of it already. Is anyone going to tell me now where she is?”

  Once again the others could not answer this question easily. For the first time, though, they were willing to try.

  “When did you last see her?” Ruth said from beside Elliot’s rickety chair.

  “Like I said, she appeared for a short while inside the Sentient world. I thought she’d be here; it sounded like she was with you guys.”

  “She has, or she had been.” Ruth then looked to the others.

  “What’s happened to her?”

  Jane pulled his head to face her before she answered. “Graham, after you disappeared we all left the city and stayed at Phoenix’s parents’ old farm. We were there for eighteen months or so before we learnt you were still alive somewhere. Phoenix went into the city to find out where you were. Apart from the video message she left for Elliot, we haven’t heard from her.”

  “So why not go and find her? Actually that brings me to another question; where the hell are we anyway?”

  “Maybe we could go for a walk and show you after the doctor has checked you out first?” Jane asked, although it sounded more like a command.

  “I told you all, I feel absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with me at all.” Graham paused for a second before adding one symptom to his previous answer. “Apart from this bloody headache, I feel absolutely normal.”

  Oh shit, he thought as the pickaxe wielding men once again began their attack of the inside of his brain. It happened the same as before, with exactly the same swiftness too. The pain returned with a vengeance, and yet it was over in half the time. Before he could even raise his arms to his head and yell for Jane to go get help, it ended and he was once again struggling to understand how things had changed so rapidly.

  “And what about your speech, do you find it easy to talk?” the doctor – who had not been there a split second ago – asked from his position on the edge of the bed.

  “What? When did… What’s going on?” Graham asked, retracting away from the sudden arrival.

  In the blink of an eye everything had changed again. Now Jane had somehow teleported instantaneously to a chair in the corner of the room, where she watched the doctor work. Alex, Ruth and Elliot were no longer there at all. In an instant they had seemingly vanished into the ether.

  This time, thankfully, he had not ended up in a dark room somewhere in the bowels of the hospital. He had changed position, however, and was sitting at the head of his bed, his legs stretched out straight in front of him.

  “Finally, he speaks. You’ve been awfully quiet, Graham, do you feel OK?”

  Graham looked about him, ignoring the doctor’s question.

  “Graham, what’s wrong?” Jane asked from her new location.

  “I don’t remember you coming in,” he said to the doctor. “A second ago I was talking with my family, then you showed up suddenly.”

  The doctor stopped in the middle of his inspection of Graham’s right arm and looked into his patient’s eyes. It was the same man from before, as he was possibly the only doctor in the place.

  Up close his face appeared much darker than before, what with the five-o’clock shadow that had spread across it. His facial hair appeared much thicker than most, the same for the lavishly styled sweep of brown hair atop his head too. It was thinner in the middle and greased back, obviously concealing an area of baldness.

  “Has it happened again?” the doctor asked. “How long have I been in here with you?”

  “A couple of minutes maybe? Where are the others?”

  “Elliot’s outside waiting and Ruth took Alex home; it’s late,” Jane answered. She stood and walked over to the bed, clearly worried about her husband again. “Don’t you remember?”

  “What? No, that’s not right.”

  “They stepped out while I checked you over.” The doctor quickly added, “That was half an hour ago.”

  He took a small pen-sized torch out of his chest pocket and began to shine it into Graham’s eyes, flicking between the two a couple of times until he was satisfied. It evidently did not help much.

  “Graham, you’ve been in a coma for three whole months, that’s going to have an effect on you. Most people don’t make a full recovery for weeks, maybe months after they wake up. Quite frankly it’s amazing you’re in such good condition. But if you’re starting to lose time then I’m going to have to insist on a more thorough check-up.

  “All the time I’ve been in here with you, you’ve appeared responsive. You’ve made eye contact, moved when I’ve asked and even smiled at my witty doctor banter. Do you remember any of that?”

  “No. What does that mean?”

  “It could be nothing, perhaps something temporary while you recover. But, considering what your family has told me about your recent – what they called a severely traumatic event – it could be something more. If you’re becoming confused or losing time, then there may be a serious problem.”

  Jane asked the obvious question first, “What do you mean, losing time? Is there a problem with his memory?”

  Pulling a notepad from his trouser pocket, the doctor scribbled something ineligible onto a page and then tore it off. “I can’t answer that here I’m afraid.” He handed the small sheet of paper straight to Jane.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “That is the number I want you to call. Dealing with something this specific is not possible here, considering the chaos we face. Give them a call and arrange a
visit – preferably a home visit – as soon as you can.”

  “Can I leave here?” Graham asked, anxious to know this more than anything else.

  The doctor gave a subtle nod to Jane. It gave Graham the distinct impression that the answer would have been a big fat no if not for the obvious support he very clearly had in his family.

  “That should be fine in a day or two. Without sounding too blunt, we could use the room for other patients. I would recommend you rest as much as you can, and don’t leave him alone for a second.” The last bit was added for Jane’s benefit alone.

  A young nurse leant in through the door and quietly called for the doctor’s attention. He looked up, then quickly stood and made his way to the door.

  Without saying a word, the doctor had been summoned for another patient’s benefit. Such was the way of things in what appeared only a make-shift hospital setup. Once one patient was stable they were only getting in the way the longer they remained.

  “Sure, thank you,” Jane replied as the doctor walked out. She took Graham’s hand into hers and held it tight again. “Wanna take a walk outside?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good, I’ll get Elliot to tag along too, if you’d like.”

  Graham nodded his approval. In truth he was about to ask Elliot join them himself. If he decided to wander off like some mindless zombie like before, he did not think it fair to put that all on his wife. Elliot could use his more muscle-bound physique to overpower him if the need arose.

  * * *

  It was icy cold outside, much more so than Graham’s borrowed dressing gown could keep at bay. He only found it a little uncomfortable. It was now the middle of December after all. He liked that the sensation reminded him he was in the real world, so he preferred to feel it for now. There was no possibility he had slipped back into the other somehow. He remained safe.

  He, Jane and Elliot had taken the nearby metal staircase on the outside of the small medical facility and were strolling along the flat, gravel covered roof together. They were his strength, his real source of power, as they had been inside the other world too.

  “Smell that?” Elliot asked with a cheeky smile on his face.

  “Seriously?” Graham replied.

  “No, not like that. I mean it smells weird around here.”

  “That’s what the countryside smells like,” Jane added. “It’s fresh air.”

  To confirm it himself, Graham sucked in the passing breeze like a greedy vacuum cleaner. “Does have an air-freshener sort of scent to it, doesn’t it?”

  Jane let out a tut. “It’s like you two came straight out of a swamp as kids.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Elliot retorted with a smirk.

  They each found a moment to enjoy the company, the conversation having evolved as any had in the past. It was time to make up for what they had missed out on. The healing process had already begun. Graham could even laugh a little too.

  Although still hanging around the back of his mind was the worry that at any moment he could black out again, and this time possibly never come back out of it. The uncertainty this created for him made the second or two he was distracted from it so much more precious.

  “So,” Graham said, to move his thoughts beyond what haunted him. “Why are we freezing our asses off up here?”

  “Here, look.” Jane gently directed him toward the edge of the roof, where below he could see the white tents – now deserted – and then on passed the buildings acting as a perimeter for their small area. From up here Graham could see what the open space had once been for; it was a car park. He spotted a few of the worn out white and yellow lines denoting a parking space below.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “You asked earlier where we are,” Jane said. “This is where we live now, where we’ve been for the past three months, us and many other families too. Everyone here came from New Chelmsford. There’s probably a few hundred families here. We’re refugees, living each day as it comes. We get supplies brought in once a week from the Army.”

  That explained the scene Graham had mindlessly wandered into the middle of earlier in the day; he had witnessed a weekly supply drop. That’s happening each week? he thought with a flash of heat across his face. Things had turned bad sometime in the last three months, time he spent ignorant to the world and its descent into madness.

  Quickly he began to see Jane’s point. Looking out to the tiny houses, all lined up in neat rows and separated by crumbling roads, he tried counting the lights. Most of the houses appeared to have been given to an escaping family, their presence easy to see from the temporary lights they used to illuminate their rooms. It was brightest around the immediate area, which served as the epicentre for the relief effort.

  Houses that had stood abandoned for two decades at least were being put to use once again. These dying structures could probably hardly believe their luck after being forgotten for so long; the country simply had not needed them anymore. Yet no-one had thought to turn off the life-support, instead leaving them to a prolonged demise.

  “Why come here though? I mean, what are they running from?” Graham asked.

  “No-one’s sure exactly. The Army was brought in to help evacuate the city. Well, the parts they could reach anyway.” Jane shot a nervous look to Elliot before going on. “We lost contact with Phoenix the day she sent the message that helped us find you. That was three months ago. The same goes for anyone else inside the centre of the city too.”

  “OK, so what is going on in the city? Getting out of the Sentient world was supposed to be the end of it for us. Are you telling me it’s still not over? Let me guess, Isaac has done something.”

  “There’s no way of finding out for sure; nothing is getting in or out of that area, no radio signals, TV reports, not even data and power. The relays can’t link up to the ones inside the city centre.”

  “What’s blocking them out?”

  Elliot took his turn to guide Graham toward an answer, again through a visual prompt. He gently moved Graham with a hand on each shoulder, leading him from behind. Then, when roughly in the centre of the roof, he pointed out to the horizon to where a faint glow seeped into the night-sky. It arched across in a large, but distant, oval shape.

  “That’s New Chelmsford, over there,” Elliot explained. “You can’t really see it properly from here, but that’s what’s keeping people out of the city. Three months ago a large part of the city was covered by some kind of force-field. People inside it are trapped.”

  Jane stepped in and took over filling in the rest of the details. “Everyone here was lucky enough to miss being caught in the force-field. No-one’s sure of the threat inside it, so they moved everyone away as a precaution. This town isn’t the only one either, there’s more just like it. Those of us that couldn’t move to another city while this is going on came here or to one of the other refugee camps around the city.”

  “Jesus, that’s got to be hundreds of thousands of families.” Graham struggled to cope with the numbers. He could barely even imagine what that many people would look like as they escaped the city. Were there enough Mag-Lev cars in the entire city to cope with that much in one go? “How did the Army bring you here?”

  “We had to take you somewhere safe to find you some help, so we took you to the nearest hospital on the edge of the city,” Jane said. “The Army cleared us all out of there and brought us here on their vehicles.”

  “You’d have loved them, G.” Elliot grinned from ear to ear as he recollect. “They had massive tank tracks, like the same height as me,” he said, holding an arm up to the top of his head to demonstrate, “and they carried a whole load of us at a time. They said they use them to ferry troops around because there aren’t always Mag-Lev lines where they go. Thing was a beast.”

  “I bet.” It was all the excitement Graham could muster over this. He still could not wrap his head around the job of housing that many families in such a hurry. Although the mention o
f the military’s presence had elicited a curiosity in him. “Has the Army tried getting past the force-field?”

  “They’re still trying, have been since it went up,” Jane answered. “They’ve set up a temporary base right beside it.”

  “But they have no idea what caused it?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because there was something I found out while trapped in the Sentient world: Isaac found a way out. Luke discovered that Isaac was placing Sentients inside humans in the real world. He’s been creating soldiers in our world. It has to be him.”

  “My god, he’s crazy.”

  “If the Army gets through the field, what’s their plan?”

  Jane shrugged, followed by Elliot a second later. Neither of them had considered this before.

  “Chances are,” Graham continued, “is that getting inside will be too hard anyway. But if by some miracle they make it inside, they’ll kill every single Sentient in there.”

  “Good,” Elliot interrupted. “The sooner the better.”

  “I’d agree with you there if it weren’t for something else Luke told me. The people inside are still alive. If they kill the Sentients, they kill the humans inside too. That’s possibly hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people. If Isaac has kept going with the process, then it’s most likely thousands by now.”

  “Maybe we could get a message to them and explain all of this?” Jane suggested. She saw where he was heading before he could say any more.

  “I don’t think they’d believe us, Jane. How would we get that message to them anyway? They probably won’t let us anywhere near that base.”

  “There is someone who could help with that.” Elliot confirmed this with Jane through another heavily loaded nod, one returned in reply immediately after.

  “Who?”

  After a few seconds of reluctance, Jane eventually answered. “Stephen, he’s at the base now.”