by Leito, Chad
Asa expected Mama to choke on her tea at such an obtuse and seemingly unwarranted speculation, but she nodded slowly, sipping. “Tell me why, Mr. Palmer. Why do you fear this?”
Asa took a deep breath, trying to gather his thoughts. Seven o’clock came with a parade of chimes and bells from all of the clocks on the wall. One of the doors on a massive cuckoo clock opened up and two wooden lumberjacks sitting at a wooden table shot out on a platform. The figurines lifted tiny glass mugs, toasted, drained a foamy yellow liquid made to look like beer, and then the whole procession was drawn back into the clock. When it was quiet, Mama was sniffing her tea and waiting patiently for Asa to answer.
“A lot of things. Before we start, I want you to know that I told Jen about the contract my father made with the Academy and Alfatrex. I told her about the crows; I told her everything. I think that Conway might be upset about that, if he finds out.”
Mama shrugged. “He couldn’t have expected you not to talk about it. I bet those secrets have been burning through you; you’ve been carrying them like Jesus carried his own cross. You needed someone to share the burden with, and Conway’s made it clear that he’s not that person. He wouldn’t talk to you. I don’t blame you for your decision to reach out to find others.”
Asa nodded, and did not talk for a long time. A lump of fear was building up in his throat. He waited for it to subside; he didn’t want to cry again today.
“There’s been many things that have happened—odd things—none of them prove that there’s going to be a Multiplier attack on the Academy, but…”
“You feel it,” Mama interrupted.
“Yeah, exactly. They kind of add up. I want to start from the beginning of this semester…” And so, talking fast, the information flowed out of him. The clocks struck 7:30 and he was still talking. Talking about his fears was like opening up an abscess with a scalpel; every time Mama nodded it felt as though more of the infection had seeped out.
He began by explaining about the Multipliers that he and Jen had found on the back of Mount Two—Joney, Michael, and Edna. They were dirty, uncivilized people. “And there were all these monkeys—Davids, I guess—tied up and hanging dead. Their throats were slit. It was so disturbing. And they were wearing clothes, just like a human would.” He explained that these Multipliers had mentioned Conway, and seemed scared of him. He detailed his trip with Jen up to Robert King’s office and explained what they had learned about the Hive, and of Volkner’s condition. Even though he spoke for a long time, he had to give the reduced version; there was so much to tell. He didn’t include things like how Robert King had the picture of Edmund Palmer and Francine Black beside the desk, or how Robert King had injected himself with a drug that made his pupils and mannerisms mirror Asa’s roommate, Teddy. He did, however, remember how Robert King had asked questions, insinuating he was toying with the idea of viewing himself as a deity. “And then,” Asa went on, “there was what happened in the Task,” and he told Mama all he could recall about what Adam Trotter had said. He retold the accounts of the strange Multiplier that had been found on the backside of the Academy’s mountains, and ended by saying that Adam Trotter had been struck dead by artificial lightening. “I don’t think that the Academy would have used the lightening to kill him if what he had been saying wasn’t true.”
Mama nodded. “That makes sense,” she said, and then she sat back in silence for a long while. It was now dark outside the cabin windows, and the little wolves that lived in the mountains were howling at the moon. Asa drank his tea—minty, dark—and looked at Mama, trying to discern her facial expressions. She was so still in her pondering that he feared she had fallen asleep when she spoke.
“Forgive me, Asa, if I don’t address what you’ve said in order. My old brain isn’t as organized as it used to be.
“We need to consider the fact that Robert King is alarmed. You said that he looked alarmed in the meeting. And, do you remember Hubert Boistly?”
Asa paused for a moment, and then felt his heart rate rise. “Yeah! He’s the president of the Academy.”
“The what?” Jen asked.
“Exactly,” said Mama. “Jen hasn’t seen him. And you haven’t seen him this semester, have you Asa?”
“No.”
Mama scratched her chin. “I think that Hubert Boistly did a fine job managing the day to day activities of the Academy for a time; he is kin to The Boss, you know? But now, I think that Mr. King, The Boss, wants to take leading the Academy into his own hands. Hubert Boistly was, frankly, an idiot. I think that Robert King wanting to take the reigns is proof that he is becoming more tightly wound; he may think that there is more on the table as far as the Academy is concerned than he used to. I think that it means he is scared.”
“What happened to Hubert Boistly?” Asa asked.
“I don’t know. I bet that he’s dead.”
There was another moment of silence before Mama spoke again. “And then, the monkey that Robert King is keeping in the cage beside his desk also makes me think he’s nervous. He’s a David. Your father, Asa, wanted the Academy to be run by Davids. Robert King didn’t agree with this, he thought that they weren’t intelligent enough. I think that he was frightened of the idea that there might be a life form that is smarter than humans, and didn’t want to face that fact. Him going back on that belief makes me feel as though he is scared, also. I bet he’s thinking, ‘what if the Davids are smarter than me? Maybe one can help me out of this mess.’ He’s scared, all right.
“And then, of course, you have the fact that his clone was killed by that cop earlier this year, and then that video was put online.
“And then there’s this thing you speak of—the Hive. A place, outside of the Academy where there are over two hundred thousand Multipliers.”
Mama closed her eyes, trying to think. “If the Hive existed, why wouldn’t they have already attacked the Academy?”
She answered her own question—“Oh, I don’t know! There are so many reasons.” She was just talking to herself now, and Asa and Jen were observers of a mental process. It was like she had forgotten they were there. “First, the Academy is still putting the Wolf Flu virus into the world’s water supply. If the Multipliers wait to attack, to come out, there will be less human’s alive in the world to resist them, and domination will be easier. In other words, it will be easier for them to Multiply. And Multipliers can only turn a human once every month. So, maybe they are waiting for the number of humans to lower to some critical figure.”
She closed her eyes again, and ran her lips over her teacup, thinking. Asa and Jen didn’t want to move; they didn’t want to break the old woman’s concentration.
“Yes!” she put her teacup down and smiled—almost laughed. “They are going to attack the Academy first!”
“First? Who?” Asa asked.
“The Multipliers.” In the excitement of discovery, Mama looked momentarily younger. “They are growing in this, this Hive thing, right? Maybe on one of the earlier missions, when Multipliers were allowed to go out and help with Academy work with the graduates, one ran off. Or, in Africa when the Multipliers broke out, maybe the graduates thought they caught all of them, but hadn’t. I don’t know. But anyways, if the Hive thing exists, you have to assume that there is some kind of critical figure. Sure, maybe they have a quarter million now, but they can’t continue growing underground, and not expect to be found out. And when they are found, what is going to happen? The Academy will shut them down. I know it sounds crazy, but the graduates are very formidable when they are on a mission.”
Asa’s head tilted as he listened.
Not seeing, Mama went on: “And this Hive-thing, they may have numbers, but what kinds of technologies do they have? Even with a quarter million, they couldn’t take over the world right now; I really don’t think so. But…” she shrugged, “if they were able to take over the Academy; to use its weaponry, the facilities, now that’s a different story.
“Just think,” Ma
ma said, “where do you think the Hive is hiding? Maybe a small town in a third world country? Maybe some of them are underground? Maybe they are spread out. They are probably excellent at not being noticed; they probably do their best to stay indoors with their shades drawn, wherever they are; Mexico, Peru, the U.S., Australia, Somalia. But their plan is a ticking time bomb. Just think; all it would take is for one of them, just one, to have a suspicious police force break into their home, find that the residents aren’t entirely human, and then the whole operation is over with.”
Asa interrupted now: “What do you mean?”
Mama’s bushy white eyebrows drew together. “If some police officer finds a human with black gums, he’s going to tell the leaders above him. Word will be communicated out through telephone conversations and e-mails; the news will spread like a virus. When the Academy got word, they would step in, and the Multipliers don’t want that. That’s why this Hive thing has taken such pains to stay hidden; that’s why no one has heard about it before.”
“So they want to get out of these hiding places? Is that what you’re saying?” Jen asked.
“Yes! I think that they’re not only trying to get out of these hiding places, I think that they’re trying to get into the Academy. If they could take over the Academy, they could grow so much more. These mountains and the Town can hold well over a million people, easily. They’ll want this place, and they’ll try to take it. The question is when. It scares me to wonder if Volkner was feeding them information. They are probably very well informed about this organization. And there might be other traitors too; Multipliers, graduates, humans working for Alfatrex. Anyone could be helping the Hive.”
Asa thought of Harold Kensing; who had he been working for, if not the Hive? It made sense. Who else would threaten to kill a police officers family if they don’t kill Asa?
“So what do we do?” Jen asked.
The clocks ticked on the wall for a moment. “What do you mean?”
“How do we stop them?”
Mama’s face fell and she suddenly looked old again. The roll of intellectual discovery had slowed. “I don’t know.”
The three of them fell into silence again. The fire crackled and the cuckoos along the wall ticked off the time as they went deeper into the night. At first, Asa suspected that Mama might be pondering what to say next, but after several minutes she began to snore. Asa’s frame found a comfortable niche in the corner of the couch and he wondered when Conway would come home. They had nothing to do now but wait.
The wolves continued to howl outside and Asa was glad to be locked in doors. He thought of the other predators out there; Joney, Michael, and Edna are probably cooking a deer over a fire right now, licking their lips with black tongues. And who knows how many other Multipliers are waiting in the wild? Will Robert King send out a search party to comb through the forests? These aren’t benign Multipliers; they’ve already bitten Brumi, and if the past is a way to predict the future, they will bite more students.
Asa’s body was exhausted. His joints were sore from the terribly long run earlier in the day, and his head still ached from the hallucinogenic drug that Lilly had sprayed him with. His back hurt from where he had been slammed down by a pterodactyl.
Slowly, his eyelids fluttered down and then he shot them back open, sitting up.
I must not sleep.
Mama was snoring on her chair, and Jen was curled up on the other side of the couch.
Asa relaxed.
Conway can wake me up when he gets home, if I do take a small nap.
He leaned back against the soft cushions and rested his head on the fabric. Within ten seconds his eyes were shut and his breathing was slowing down as he fell into a deep sleep.
21
Beautiful Months and the Multipliers’ Nighttime Visit to Asa Palmer
When Asa awoke, he saw golden beams of sunlight shining through the windows onto the floor. He stirred, and found that his arm was around Jen as she slept next to him on the couch. He stood slowly, trying not to wake her. Confused, he saw that he was still in Conway’s cabin. On the tree stump coffee table was a silver cassette player with a sticky note on it that said:
Press play,
Mama
Asa did so and was greeted with Mama’s African accented, croaky voice: “Good morning, Asa. I would have written you a note, but with my eyes I sometimes write over what I’ve already written and the meaning gets all jumbled. Conway called last night. He’d been sent on a mission. He didn’t say where, but he’ll be gone for a while. There’s some eggs, bagels, cheese, and all sorts of stuff in the refrigerator. Help yourself. I would have made breakfast for you, but Ozzie and I had to clock in at The Shop before seven this morning. Stay as long as you want. You and Jen won’t have class today ‘cause many students are still in the Task. Have a good day, Asa. I want to see you soon.” And then Mama’s voice cut off and the tape kept reeling.
Asa and Jen had breakfast on the small, dark wood table and then cleaned their dishes and put everything away. They made sure to leave the cabin cleaner than they found it and then went off to spend the day together.
March came, cold and sleeting, and led to April, which Asa enjoyed. Flowers began to bloom throughout the fields and valleys tucked away in the mountains, and brown grizzlies came out of hibernation and roamed over the land. The snowy summits began to partially melt away under the sun, making clean, crisp streams that ran down the mountainsides into the steaming Moat. The frightening portion of April began at the end of the month, when Multipliers banged on the door of Asa’s dwelling, demanding to see Teddy Jujune. The time leading up to this event was the best Asa had had in over a year.
The period wasn’t without unfairness and sorrow—this was present in any stint at the Academy—the twisted moral foundations of the place made it so. Asa learned that a dozen students had refused to compete in the Task in the Tropics; all of these had been killed. Stan, having saved the Sharks by returning another team’s KEE, was more obnoxiously cocky than ever. He refused to look at Asa, and he and Janice were absent from every practice and team meeting. Teddy was acting stranger than usual. His pupils, as impossible as it seemed, grew even more dilated. He twitched compulsively, got A’s on all his tests, and disappeared into the secret compartment over Asa’s dwelling so much that Asa rarely saw him. Over the course of time, rumors came to Asa about more students being bitten by Multipliers. Through March and April, five more had been bitten, and the Academy seemed to do nothing about it. But these things were like flies sprinkled over the icing on the best cake you’ve ever eaten. If you could brush the insects away and get over mental blocks and normal notions of good (which Asa was becoming proficient at), you’d find that the cake wasn’t as tarnished as you first thought.
Though Stan and Janice didn’t cooperate much with Roxanne’s instructions, and the Sharks had been cut down to a team of ten players (one of which, Gabby, was missing a leg), they were performing well. They technically won their next five games, although they only had to actually play three. Two of the teams they had been paired against were completely eliminated in the Task. From there, they lost a game, and then won the next one, ending the season with a record of six wins and two losses. With these wins alone, Asa had earned one hundred twenty points.
During their final two games, Asa noticed that Stan had lost weight. He would have attributed it to the tremendous stress he was under, but then there were the bruises—they popped up on his forearms, his neck, and under his eyes. Stan hated Asa, and was perhaps more scared of him than anyone else in the Academy. Because of this, Asa never considered asking Stan where the bruises were coming from.
Though the majority of Asa’s teammates had gotten over the myth that he was a murderer, most of the Academy’s students still feared him. This played to his advantage, as defensive players were less likely to put their bodies in his path as he zoomed over the Moat. He scored in all of the Sharks’ last five games, and in one of the matches he zigzag
ged in and out of the hoops to score three goals at once. Having scored seven goals in all, he was the league’s ninth highest scorer and was featured in the Academy paper.
The Sharks were headed to the playoffs. If they won the championship, it would then be possible for Stan to live, having earned one thousand points. Though the Sharks record was good up until that point, it was doubtful that they would be successful in the playoffs. They had been playing teams that were, like themselves, competing with fewer players than usual due to the deadly nature of the semester’s Task. In the other conference, however, one team had made it out of the Tropics without a single casualty. The Wolves. Before the Task, they had been a good Winggame team. Now, as they played with greater numbers than all their opponents, it was thought that they were impossible to defeat. They had a perfect eight win and zero loss record going into the playoffs.
Regardless of how the Sharks performed in the playoffs, there would be a dance held after the championship. This was more of a source of anxiety to Asa than even playing in the championship game would be. He had never been to a dance before—he didn’t know exactly what happened at dances or why they were enjoyed. And who would he ask? Was he expected to ask someone? He felt he had no one he could confide these questions in.
School continued to go by, and Asa was becoming more successful in his classes than ever before. Even Professor Stern’s Science Class was manageable. All of the hours Asa had spent cooped up in his dwelling, reading the textbooks on the fabric of his armband by firelight, or scratching out equations onto yellow paper at the library were paying off, and in unexpected ways. Asa’s brain was being molded towards scientific reasoning like an unsightly chunk of metal is hammered into a statue. Studying that would have previously taken him four hours was now taking him one hour. And at the end of the semester, there was a scheduled summer break.
