Damon thought of his own son. Rodrick’s assessment was sad but true.
“Did your wife tell her parents how they plan to smuggle her and the children out?”
“No.”
“Do you know when Beacon plans to pull this off?”
“No, but it obviously has to happen before next Monday. That’s when Billy, my son, is scheduled to be put to sleep.”
Damon felt a sudden need to reconnect with Cassidy. If Rodrick had no insight into the timing, it meant the plot might occur at any time. Full-scale surveillance was needed immediately. As he pulled his earbud radio from his pocket, he said, “Where is your family now, Mr. Hearns? I mean like, right now, this instant.”
“At home, but not to worry, Major. I have a house full of androids with instructions to prevent anyone from leaving or entering until I return. Besides, at this hour, they’re all asleep anyway.”
Famous last words, thought Damon. “I hear you, sir, but I can’t take the risk. Beacon is as slippery as any criminal organization on the planet.”
As Damon wedged the comms device into his ear, Rodrick said, “Before you call anyone, Major, do we have a deal?”
Damon stroked his stubbled chin. Although Rodrick’s insight into Beacon’s plan was paper-thin, his claim that the network was demanding the boy as payment was alarming. If true, it portended a new escalation in Beacon’s agitations — an escalation with sickening implications. Damon had no choice but to cut a deal with Rodrick. He needed as much cooperation as he could get from the evvie to snare the Beacon operatives involved in the plot before they tried to smuggle the family out.
“All right, Mr. Hearns. I’ll agree to your assurances provided you give me your full cooperation. That means surveillance inside and outside your home, access to all electronic communications and private data for you and your wife, plus any other assistance I may require.”
Rodrick extended his hand. “You will have my unqualified cooperation. Just make sure you catch the scumbags before they get their hands on my family, Major. That’s what’s most important to me.”
“Deal.” Damon shook Rodrick’s hand. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to kick my team into gear on this pronto. I’ll be in touch later today.”
CHAPTER 3: HARSH LESSONS
Gutant refugee village
Limahuli, Kauai, the Hawaiian Islands
A rap on the door stirred Natti awake. Curled on a mattress on the floor, she squinted through half-open eyes and saw glints of sunlight emanating from beneath the bedroom door.
RJ’s angelic voice beckoned her to wake up. “Natti, oh Natti. Chief Akela is here. He wants to talk with you. Natti…can you hear me? Are you awake?”
“Yes, I’m awake. Tell him I’ll be out in a minute.”
Lowering her head back to the mattress, she clutched her blanket around her body and thanked the four gods for another sunrise. Natti, like many other citizens of the world, was a devotee of Unity, a religion with Taoist roots that arose during the worst days of the Genetic Revolution. The four gods at the core of the religion were representations of the Taoist principles of compassion, harmony, the inevitability of change and trust in the flow of all things.
With her prayer complete, she pushed aside the blanket and crawled onto the floor. With the assistance of a nearby chair, Natti dragged herself to a standing position and limped to the bathroom.
Once there, she grabbed the robe hanging on the back of the door and put it on. As she tied the terrycloth belt into a knot, she gazed up at the mirror above the sink. It was a painful but necessary ritual, one that helped Natti “keep it real,” as they used to say in olden times.
The face that looked back at her was scarred and dotted with large reddish blemishes. Along with her nearly bald head, she looked like a chew-toy doll ravaged by a dog. She smiled, revealing the gap where her upper front teeth had once been before jakalis had knocked them out. “Hello, you gorgeous gutant. Ready for another day in paradise?”
She winked at her reflection and donned a baseball cap embroidered with the logo of a long-forgotten farm equipment company. As she left the bathroom and made her way toward the bedroom door, Natti winced with each step. It took a while each day for her reconstructed leg to limber up. Looking down at the leg’s disfigured toes, she praised the four gods again. If not for the kindness of the island people, she would have lost the leg altogether…and probably her life. She owed them everything.
In turn, Natti did her part to contribute back to the village community, spending her days tending the needs of others. It was exhausting but Natti didn’t mind. As a member of the village, she was protected from jakalis and the sportsmen from other lands who hunted gutants for kicks. In return, she gladly served as a mechanic, nurse and stand-in mom to RJ and Avana. Given the village had endured another jakali attack the night before, Natti suspected her mechanical skills were the impetus behind Akela’s morning visit.
When she opened the door, Natti found the great Hawaiian chieftain sitting on the floor, RJ perched on one of his crossed knees. Akela was helping the gutant boy tie his shoes. Still too young to display any deformities or aberrant behaviors, the fair-haired, freckled RJ looked like he ought to be running about on a playground. Instead, he had multiple jobs like the rest of those who found refuge in the village.
“Aloha, Natti,” said Akela.
Akela scooted RJ off his knee and stood. Natti returned the greeting and approached him. Placing her hands on his shoulders, she leaned forward and touched her forehead and nose to his. After the traditional Hawaiian embrace, she said, “Let me guess. Some Makoas need fixing up.”
“Your intuition belies your young age, Natti. Several of our Makoas were damaged in last night’s attack. It seems the jakalis are becoming more proficient in the damage they inflict.”
Natti found it funny to hear Akela refer to her as young. Given everything she had been through since she was outed as a pre-jakali and banished to the islands by her father, Natti considered herself old in body and soul…even though she was still in her mid-teens.
“All right. I’ll go see what I can do.” Turning to RJ, Natti said, “Where are Kaleo and Avana?”
“Helping with the clean-up from last night,” RJ said.
“Did they bring you anything to eat before they left?”
The young boy shook his head.
“Are you hungry?”
RJ nodded. Natti reached out her hand. “Come on, we’ll get you something to eat on the way to the garage.” She turned to Akela. “Is that okay with you?”
“Of course, but take the back way to the dining hall.”
“Gotcha,” Natti said.
Although it was impossible to spare the youngsters in the village from all the sights and sounds of the jakali attacks, Akela and the other elders in the village did their best to avoid exposing the youngest of the children to traumatic situations wherever possible. Natti knew it would be hard enough for RJ to cope with the loss of more friends from last night’s attack, and he didn’t need to walk through the latest scene of carnage until it was cleaned up.
After filling a sack with fruit, bread and milk in the village dining hall, Natti and RJ climbed the red clay path to an old automobile garage that sat on the top of a hill overlooking the village. About halfway up, Natti turned to look at the ocean. The shimmering, royal-blue water was as beautiful as ever.
As a child, long before she was abandoned, Natti had dreamed of visiting such a tropical paradise. It had been an impossible dream, for travel beyond the continent had been outlawed thirty years before Natti was born, but that had not stopped Natti from cherishing scenes she had seen on holovids; people sunbathing, playing in the surf, watching stunning sunsets. It had looked fun, carefree and exotic. Little did she know at that time that such paradises had already started to become colonies for gutants and feeding grounds for jakalis.
Oh, how she hated the term gutant. The name was almost as demeaning as the identi-chip embedded in
her neck and the scars left when the doctors neutered her. Was it not bad enough that she bore the physical manifestations of her gutations? Did they really have to go the extra mile to “brand” her physically and socially?
I’m not even responsible for the gutations!
“Ow!” RJ said. “Let go! You’re hurting my hand.”
Stirred from her thoughts by RJ’s plea, Natti looked down to see her trembling hand squeezing RJ’s wrist. She let go immediately and knelt. “Oh, RJ, I’m so sorry. Is your hand okay?”
The boy rubbed his wrist and nodded. “Why did you do that?”
“I…I…got angry. Not at you. Other stuff. I forgot I was holding your hand.”
“Jakalis?” RJ asked.
“What?”
“Were you thinking about jakalis? Is that what made you angry? They make me angry.”
“They make me angry too,” she said, stroking RJ’s hair.
“Are they ever going to go away, Natti?”
The hopeful eyes accompanying RJ’s question saddened Natti. She desperately wanted to say yes. She smiled and hugged him. “I pray for it every day.”
When they arrived at the garage, Bali was the first to greet them. The Makoa-class android smiled and said, “What’s shaking, guys?”
With long, braided black hair, tanned skin and a penchant for walking around bare-chested and barefoot, Bali looked like many of the human Hawaiians who ran the refugee village…except for the fact Bali was eight feet tall, as were all of the Makoas that protected the village. Beneath their eerily human exoskin, however, Makoas were military-grade fighting machines.
From what Natti had been told, for a time after Old America dissolved, Makoas had been the androids of choice for many of the world’s armies. But once countries started dumping their unwanted gutants and jakalis on the islands, the Hawaiians had stopped exporting Makoas, partly to protest the dumping and partly to defend themselves against the burgeoning number of jakalis. Eventually, the loss of exports led to a shutdown in new production of Makoas, meaning the village had to make do with their current inventory of androids and spare parts.
“Hey there, Bali,” said Natti. “Akela sent me to patch you guys up.”
“And I’m here to make sure she does stuff right,” said RJ.
Natti turned to RJ. “I thought you were here to eat.”
“I can do both at once.”
He smiled, took the bag of provisions from Natti and walked inside the garage.
The still-smiling Bali gestured to Natti to follow him. “Last night wasn’t too bad. We did some of the component swap-outs ourselves, but there are still some delicate repairs needed.”
“Uh-huh,” said Natti. Makoas had a way of making the horrific sound benign, and Bali’s appraisal was no exception. As Natti wound her way around the scattered limbs piled on the cement floor, she looked toward the recharging docks lining the wall to her right. Of the ten docks, all but two were occupied by standing Makoas. On the opposing wall, there were another ten docks, of which seven were currently in use. Most of the androids looked battered. “Geez, Bali, if this is your idea of not too bad, I’m not sure I want to see what you consider bad.”
“Hey, look at the bright side, Natti. We didn’t lose any Makoas last night, just some limbs. That’s something, right? We all still have our brain cores and the limbs are repairable. All in all, I’d say I provided a fair assessment.”
“What about your weapons?”
“Meh…a few scratches and dents. No biggie.”
“Yeah, right.” Natti immediately formed a vision of twisted barrels and shattered targeting consoles. Turning the bill of her ball cap around to the back of her head, Natti proceeded toward the water hose spigot near the garage entrance.
The grossest part of repairing the Makoas and their weapons was the noxious oily slick oozed by jakalis. It was somewhere between the odor of rotting food and the sickly smell of dead animals. During her captivity by the beasts, Natti had become nose-blind to the stench, but after she was freed and her sense of smell readapted to the pleasant aromas of the lush Kauaian surroundings, her sensitivity to jakali odors returned. It was a good thing too. In the jungle, they were easier to detect by smell than by sight.
After washing down the pile of limbs, Natti went to work, swapping out joint components, reconnecting hydraulic lines and electronic sensor modules, reattaching the limbs and testing the functionality of her repairs. As she toiled at her workbench, a comment Akela had made earlier bubbled up in her mind. He had said the jakalis were becoming more proficient in their attacks, and Natti could see what he meant.
The severed Makoa limbs were not haphazardly ripped off as they had been in the past. Whether a foot, leg, arm or hand, the jakalis appeared to have developed a clear strategy. They now made clean incisions into the Makoas’ skin at the joints. Once the joint innards were exposed, they went after the hydraulic lines and electronic wiring. Clean cuts, once again, rather than the frenzied-looking tears of old. The only damage Natti observed that showed the application of brute force was the rending of the ends of the metal limbs that once connected to joints. Natti called Bali over and asked, “How are they doing this? All these straight cuts.”
“They’re working in teams now. A bunch of them swarm, get one of us down on the ground. Then, some of them concentrate on a limb and immobilize it while another one of them starts cutting with makeshift knives, or knives they’ve taken from us. When the deed’s done, they swarm again and rip off the limb.”
Natti frowned. “How can they hold one of you down? You’re strong enough to knock a dozen of them away with one swoop of your arm.”
“They sacrifice a lot of their kind to do it. For every one of our limbs they get, we get thirty, forty jakalis. It’s very inefficient, but they don’t appear concerned with their losses.”
Unnoticed by Natti, RJ had come up beside her. He said, “Have they tried to take your guns?”
Bali nodded. “Yeah, not just our laser pistols. They go after our rifles, laser long-guns and our knives. Most of the damaged weapons over there were broken by Makoas. Better to make them inoperable than let the jakalis get hold of them.”
Natti stared at the pile of gnarled weapons. A jakali with a laser pistol. What a terrifying thought. She didn’t see how these new coordinated behaviors were possible. From her time as their captive, she had never seen them work together when on a rampage. Male or female, it was every jakali for themselves. They were too filled with fury and lust to cooperate. The only times Natti observed them demonstrating teamwork was after they’d finished satisfying their sexual desires and their hunger to kill. It was as if they got high from their savagery. Only then had Natti seen glimpses of their humanity…tending to each other’s wounds, sharing the leftovers from a kill, setting the defenses of the caves where they slept. But it had never lasted for long.
As memories of their abuse began to flow into her consciousness, Natti turned from the weapon pile and went outside to take in some fresh air. RJ followed her out and said, “Are you okay, Natti? You look angry again.”
She put her arm around him. “You sure know how to read me, don’t you?”
RJ shrugged. “Sometimes. Mostly when you’re mad.”
“I get mad a lot I guess, huh?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay. There’s lots to be angry about.”
“There’s lots to be happy about too.” Natti smiled and mussed his hair. “Come on, help me fix up the guns and then let’s get out of here. You still have homework to do.”
Later that afternoon, Natti felt her anger rising again as she watched RJ turn to look out the window for the umpteenth time instead of focusing on the book in front of him.
“You won’t find the answer outside,” she said. “Now, come on, answer the question. When did the Genetic Revolution begin?”
RJ turned to look at her. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it does.”
“Why?”
“Becau
se we have to make sure future generations know the past. It will help them avoid the same mistakes in the future.”
“Sez who?”
“Sez me. Now, answer the question or your butt’s on kitchen duty all weekend.”
RJ sat up straight. “Hey, that’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair, buddy. The sooner you realize that the better. Now, when did the Genetic Revolution begin?”
Natti suppressed a laugh as the boy’s face turned red. Finally, with a dramatic flop of his arms against the table, RJ answered. “I don’t remember. Somewhere around 2070.”
The answer was close enough for Natti. “Okay, and when did the first really bad gutation occur?”
RJ’s sigh was thick with irritation. “For cripes sake, who cares, Natti? It was like fifty, sixty years ago. Long before I was born, or you.”
“That’s not an answer, RJ. If you want to move on to the next level, you have to complete this level first. That means nailing your history facts.”
“Look, I know it was the necro outbreak, okay? A skin gutation that made it possible to spread flesh-eating bacteria to other people. I know necro broke out in multiple countries and killed millions and millions of people around the world. Who cares what year it started?”
RJ’s point was hard to argue. Knowing the relevant facts seemed more important to Natti than the date the gutation began. RJ knew the name of the gutation and the nature of the disease. But the teaching guide required her to enter a date for RJ’s answer. Given that he had the approximate date range right, she penciled in the answer on her grading sheet. 2082, fifty-five years ago.
Moving onto the next battery of questions, Natti asked, “Define gutation.”
The GODD Chip (The Unity of Four Book 1) Page 3
