Directive 17: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

by Nicholson, Scott

  He opened the rear door and staggered out, nearly forgetting to be paranoid. When he realized he was outside and vulnerable, he snapped his rifle barrel alert and checked his perimeter.

  Gee, Franky Baby, are you developing a death wish in your old age?

  The passenger door opened and DeVontay joined him, staring at the column of smoke that was tinged by blue light from underneath.

  “She’s there,” DeVontay said, and he didn’t have to say Rachel’s name. “I just know it.”

  “Yep,” Franklin said. “Looks like trouble. And wherever there’s trouble, there she will be.”

  “Let’s go get her, then.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Rachel thought she’d been in the wet blackness for days, but it could’ve been only minutes.

  Goldberg was right behind them, splashing and slopping his way through the pipe. Because he was larger than Rachel, he was having a hard time navigating the circular tunnel, despite Rachel’s bulky burden of Kokona. For her part, the mutant baby kept largely silent, perhaps contemplating what lay ahead while Rachel worried about squirming another few feet forward.

  The hissing sounds of the Zaps and the cacophony of the flames were now behind them, replaced by the constant drip and trickle of water. It didn’t have the offensive odor of the stream, which led Rachel to surmise that it was rinse water of some kind, or perhaps the drain-off of some massive dehumidifying machine. Since Zaps didn’t really need water for consumption, cleaning, or waste management, she could only imagine it was exploited for some technological process.

  At least it’s not blood.

  “I heard that,” Kokona said.

  “And you’re hiding whatever we’re going to encounter. That’s not fair.”

  “I’ve always let you know what you need to know in order to fulfill your duties.”

  Rachel bent extra low and let the papoose touch the water’s surface. “Don’t forget that I might slip. That would be awful if I fell on top of you while you were underwater and I couldn’t get my footing.”

  “I love you.”

  Even with the glow of their eyes radiating the pipe a few feet in front of them, Rachel felt constricted and in danger. What if the Zaps flushed whatever monstrous machine that was connected to the pipe? What if thousands of gallons of water rushed through the pipe without leaving so much as an inch of airspace so she could breathe? What if she popped up out of drain onto the alloy floor of a Zap convention?

  “Do you see the signal flare?” Goldberg asked from behind, his voice muffled and hollow.

  “Nothing but a lot of nothing,” Rachel called back over her shoulder.

  “Keep moving, then.”

  As if I have any choice.

  She lost all sense of direction while crawling through the pipe. She could’ve been traveling in a circle for hours, or made an elbow turn and was headed right back out under the dome. Just when she thought she’d detached from the present reality and drifted off into a senseless void, she saw a faint circle of gray far ahead and crawled faster.

  The pipe widened and came to a catch basin, where a series of smaller pipes poked out from the sleek alloy above. The basin was at least ten feet deep, and a shiny grate overhead allowed in a weak haze of the same blue light as radiated from the dome. Water poured from the many pipes in small rivulets, pooling in the bottom of the basin on its way through the main discharge pipe.

  Rachel stepped out into the catch basin, stretching her cramped muscles. There was no sign of the two men who’d entered the pipe before her. She peered up through the grate to orient herself.

  “Time to kill Goldberg,” Kokona said over the trickling water.

  “What?” Rachel hadn’t really considered Goldberg and his scruffy band allies, but they were humans. Rachel had much more in common with them than she did the violent, regressive Zaps in the valley. She wasn’t like Kokona, either. She was a thing apart, a halfling torn between two worlds.

  But neither of those worlds accepted her. She thought of DeVontay and Franklin, as well as the others she loved. They seemed part of the past now, even though only weeks had passed since she’d last seen them.

  Now Kokona wanted her to make a stand. To declare for Zaps once and for all, even though she wasn’t even sure what Zaps were anymore—they’d apparently split into two warring factions, the technologically advanced and super-intelligent mutants and the devolved animals.

  “I can’t kill him,” Rachel said. The space above the grate was indistinct, vast and open, with only a hint of the bluish dome high above.

  “Can’t, or won’t?” Kokona said.

  “They took my gun.”

  “Easy enough. That knife he keeps in a holster on his boot—”

  “Why do you want him dead? Has he finished the job you needed him for? Protected you until you reached the inside of the city? And now you’re done with him?”

  Rachel tried to read the mutant child’s mind, but Kokona’s powers seemed to have grown since entering the city while Rachel’s weakened.

  Kokona smiled at Rachel’s realization. “You can’t read me anymore. That’s one reason why I wanted you to carry me here. I can’t control you, but you can’t exploit me.”

  Rachel stooped beside the pipe and called Goldberg. No answer.

  To Kokona, she said, “Without him, we’re stuck. That grate’s at least ten feet up. Even if I could climb these metal walls, I doubt if I could remove it.”

  “We don’t need his help”

  “Then let him live.”

  A deep metallic hum filled the air above them. The basin shook and the clear water trickling from the pipes dribbled in erratic rhythms. Rachel braced herself against one of the slick alloy walls, spattered by the industrial rain.

  Behind her, Goldberg wriggled from the opening and sat in the pooled water, his knees up to his chest so he could rest his rifle across them and keep it dry. He panted with exertion, sizing up the situation. “We made it.”

  “But we can’t go any farther,” Rachel said. “No way out but back through the pipe.”

  “We can’t go back. The Zaps have probably found the pipe by now. They might even be checking it out.”

  “Then we can’t stay here,” Kokona said.

  Rachel didn’t understand the baby’s deep fear of the Zaps. They were part of her tribe, mutated by the same solar storms. Perhaps Kokona’s inability to communicate with them frightened her. She only loved what she could control. And all else had to be destroyed.

  “Any sign of my men?” Goldberg said.

  Rachel shook her head. “I don’t see where they could’ve gone.”

  “Up there,” Goldberg said, jabbing a thumb toward the top of the basin.

  “But how did they get through the grate?”

  “What grate?”

  Rachel glared at the man, her eyes radiating enough of a glow to fill the basin. “You might like being trapped in here, but I want out. Are you going to help me remove it?”

  “If you can tell me what I’m supposed to remove.”

  “Why, that up there—” Rachel pointed, then stopped. The grate had vanished, and now all she saw was the high blue curve of the dome, lightning crawling across it in flickering strands of light.

  She immediately knew Kokona had tricked her. The baby could cast optical illusions. Rachel wouldn’t be able to trust anything she saw, nor could she believe the baby’s words. She pushed the tip of her book against Goldberg’s shin.

  The bearded man grunted. “What did you do that for?”

  “Seeing if you’re real.”

  Goldberg picked himself up from the shallow pool of water. “As real as anything else around here.”

  He tested the handholds of the smaller pipe openings, making sure he could maintain a grip. “A little slick, but I think I can make it.”

  He gave his rifle to Rachel and began to climb, pulling himself up while the soles of his boots slid on the damp alloy wall. Rachel wondered if Kokona would forc
e her to shoot the man, but Kokona said, “No, a shot would make too much noise. The knife.”

  Goldberg secured a new handhold and pulled himself higher. The holstered knife was right in front of Rachel’s face. All she had to do was unsnap the Velcro band holding the hilt, and she could—

  But I have no reason to kill him.

  “You have the only reason you need,” Kokona said. “Because I’m ordering you to do it.”

  Then it was too late. Goldberg was up to the top of the basin, flipping one leg and then the other onto the next plateau, and moments later his face appeared over the basin’s edge.

  “I see wet boot prints,” he said. “The others came this way. Just wait until you see it.”

  “How do I get up?” Rachel asked.

  He scooted until his arms were over the edge and said, “Wrap the rifle strap around one wrist and reach the barrel up to me. Then see if you can pull yourself up on one of the pipes until I can grab hold.”

  When Rachel followed his instructions over Kokona’s protest, she realized she had yet another chance to kill him. The gun was practically pointed right at his face. All she had to do was pull the trigger and his brains would be sprayed all over—all over what?

  She still couldn’t see anything overhead but the high translucent curve of the dome. If they were on a lower level of the city, she wouldn’t expect to see that. Where were the buildings? Why hadn’t any Zaps detected their intrusion?

  “They’ll detect him,” Kokona said. “That’s why he needs to die. You and I are Zaps, so our brainwaves are on a different frequency. His monkey mind is going to ruin everything.”

  “So what happened to the other two guys?”

  “How should I know? I can’t read their minds.”

  “You can do it, Rachel,” Goldberg said, his creased face nodding encouragement. His goggles were now around his neck, the lenses covered by the brown tufts of his beard.

  She eyed the distances between pipes, plotting her ascent. Although the interior the dome was slightly warmer than the November air outside, she shivered due to the water evaporating from her clothes. She jammed the tip of her left boot into the mouth of a small pipe, levered herself up enough to get a handhold six inches above her head, and then she stretched up her arm holding the rifle.

  Goldberg caught it near the muzzle and pulled. Rachel’s arm was nearly yanked from its shoulder socket, but she held on and clawed for another grip as Goldberg pulled her up the wall. Kokona, snug in her papoose, was spared most of the impact. Rachel instinctively turned sideways to absorb the blow on her left side while protecting the baby.

  When Rachel slapped a palm onto the edge where Goldberg lay, she found the surface just as hard and slick as the basin walls. It was likely made from the same alloy. Indeed, for all the Zap advances, they seemed to have settled on one composite material for all their construction needs.

  Goldberg grabbed her wrists and dragged her up beside him, Kokona grunting softly as she was nearly smothered. Rachel untangled the rifle strap from her arm and rolled onto her back, gazing up at the dome high above and skeins of lightning crawling across its surface. Sheer silver walls rose around her, doorless and windowless, devoid of light or activity.

  “Where’s the city?” she asked.

  “You’re lying in it,” Kokona said. “Welcome home.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Why didn’t they set off the signal flare?” Goldberg asked. “They left us down there in the dark.”

  “Maybe they saw something,” Rachel said. “Something that lured them out of the pipe and into the city.”

  She wasn’t even sure she should use the word city. It was evident that Kokona had fooled her into seeing the buildings. Perhaps the baby assumed Rachel needed the allure of human architecture, and that a design for six-foot-tall humans was the pinnacle of geometry’s purpose.

  The walls resembled buildings in a loose sense, in that they were rectangular and rose many feet into the air. The rows of landscaping Rachel thought she’d seen now revealed themselves as an array of serrated alloy, fabricated into different shapes. The material in the walls and underneath her feet had that same rigid flexibility, as if it were elastic and partly organic.

  As Rachel and Goldberg followed the wet footsteps down the wide alley between parallel walls, they kept the basin in sight. It was likely their only escape route.

  The metallic hum pervaded the air, its source causing an almost imperceptible vibration beneath their feet. Rachel couldn’t rightly call what they walked on a street, since it bore no markings and featured no sign that it might once have carried traffic of any kind. The human footprints were already vanishing, which struck Rachel as a metaphor for the human race’s walk in a world now dominated by Zaps.

  “Do you feel like somebody’s watching us?” Goldberg asked, keeping his voice low. He swung his rifle barrel from side to side as if expecting someone to leap from a doorway at him, but of course that was impossible.

  “Impossible? Are you sure you want to use that word, Rachel?”

  “Not now, Kokona,” Rachel said. “You’ll have plenty of time to gloat after I’m dead. Except I have to wonder, who will carry you after that?”

  “Somebody is watching,” Rachel said. “You can be sure of that.”

  Aside from the meticulously arranged architecture, there was no sign of the vaunted Zap technology. Rachel wonder if whoever operated this city had taken the plasma sink to an exponential leap and created an energy system so efficient that it needed no machinery. Yet the subsonic throbbing beneath her feet had an origin here somewhere.

  “Maybe I should call for them,” Goldberg said.

  “That wouldn’t be wise,” Kokona said. “I wouldn’t worry about them, anyway.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” Goldberg snapped. “You’re a Zap.”

  “Touchy, aren’t we? I’m not the one who invited you, remember?”

  “I invited myself. This is my world, not yours.”

  Rachel didn’t want the situation to devolve into a fight until she knew what they were up against. She would take Goldberg’s side in the vent of a battle, but she also couldn’t be sure what strings Kokona might pull. Even now, she couldn’t fully trust her vision, and she was afraid to ask Goldberg to describe what he was seeing. He’d never believe she was human if her senses perceived a separate, wrong reality.

  And she needed to be human. Yes, she required external validation. Desire was not enough. It was the difference between faith and science—belief was not proof.

  They came to the end of the block, or at least the point where streets intersected. Their distorted reflections appeared on multiple walls, like those cast by funhouse mirrors at a carnival. The bluish cast of the dome colored the silver of the tall rectangles. Rachel searched the skyline for the light-stippled antennas she’d seen, and then decided those, too, had been illusion.

  But the drone birds were real. The others saw them. So something is in here. Some intelligent entity that wants to protect itself and is willing to kill to do so.

  Kokona was no help. She was unusually tense, her slanted eyes shifting back and forth. She appeared to be listening, but the only sound was the incessant rumble just at the threshold of hearing. Whatever thoughts she harbored, she kept secret.

  Standing at the intersection, each street looked like a duplicate of the one they had just traveled. Only the small, shadowed recess of the catch basin marked any difference. If the group moved so much as a few feet to the left or right, they would become disoriented. It was as if the fundamental geometry of the dome’s interior was flawed and deceptive.

  Of course, Rachel had no way of knowing whether Kokona was influencing her perception. She’d have to rely on Goldberg’s view of the city.

  Another reason she wanted me to kill him—so she could completely control the very nature of my reality.

  But another thought came on the heels of that one, a thought she hoped Kokona didn’t hijack: What if
it’s not Kokona? What if it’s someone—or someTHING—else?

  Goldberg headed a few steps down a side street and approached one of the sheer silver walls. He appeared to check his reflection and then reached a tentative hand forward and touched the alloy. Then he stepped forward and momentarily he melded with the material, his entire form composed of the silver alloy. Then he stepped through.

  The wall rippled slightly and then settled into its previous flat plane. Rachel glanced around, now utterly alone except for Kokona. And being with Kokona was far worse than being with no one.

  “Where are the other two people?” she asked Kokona, her voice bouncing in thin, diminishing echoes along the street.

  “I wouldn’t worry about them. They got what they came for.”

  “Are you doing this?”

  Kokona grinned, but her lips were rigid as if she were forcing the expression. Her pink gums were like a flytrap. “You’re my carrier. You don’t need to know everything.”

  Rachel didn’t know whether to retreat to the catch basin, continue down the street, or wait. Before she could make a decision, Goldberg appeared again, stepping from the silver structure.

  “You coming?” he asked Rachel.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Opened the door. It wasn’t locked.”

  Rachel didn’t trust anything. “What’s inside?”

  “A whole lot of nothing, as far as I can tell. Like it’s still under construction.”

  He turned and vanished again. Rachel followed, a little tentative. When she reached the wall, she moved her had toward it, watching as her reflected fingers grew ever larger. She recalled the vivid demise of the Zaps who’d made contact with the dome, and she wondered if she’d suffer the same fate.

  But Kokona wouldn’t let her do anything dangerous. Kokona still needed her.

  Rachel touched the surface and it yielded. Stale air wafted from the interior, redolent of hot metal and a faint, sweet rot. The Zap manufacturing facilities in Wilkesboro had carried such a scent while mining human flesh for its organic matter. Those machineries of death proved the mutants’ cold disregard for all other life forms.