“You weren’t the only one who salvaged Vaunton cubes in those tunnels I called home. There were some important people who’d sought refuge there. High-ranking government officials. Anyway, we’ll need something potent to breach Halley’s Hangar,” Orissa said. She received a blank look from Leon and added, “It’s where our ship is.”
“Is this an actual place, or a fictitious one like the munitions depot?”
“It’s real,” she said, a touch harsher than she intended. She couldn’t blame him for being suspicious. Orissa regarded her watch, touching the display and turning the crown. “It’s… seventy-three miles east of Pittsburgh. The first time I saw it was at night, right when Halley’s comet passed overhead.”
Leon lifted his chin knowingly. “Hence the name.”
“Thought it was a good omen.” She added with some melancholy, “If those things exist.”
Leon yawned. He picked at an overhanging barberry branch, plucking a yellow leaf from its foliage. “A comet that comes around once every seventy-five years could be a good omen, or a very bad one. Surprised to hear you thought it a good one.”
“Like I said, you don’t know me, Leon. How could you? I don’t even know myself.”
He clapped his knees and laughed. “More mysteries, hmm?”
Orissa shrugged. “Not really. Just a bad attempt to segue into what I’m about to tell you next.”
“Another secret?”
She stared at him hard, eyes narrow. She imagined most people would look away, intimidated or uncomfortable. But not Leon. She both respected and despised him for that.
“I used to live in an apartment in Washington. When I was younger. I’d like to see if it’s still standing, and… if it is”—Orissa found her eyes darting this way and that, confidence shattering. Finally, she said, “I’d like to look inside.”
Leon licked his teeth, brows creased as he studied her. “Two things. This new attitude you’re trying out—it doesn’t suit you. You’d ‘like to’ do something? No, Orissa. You just do it.”
“I’m trying to be diplomatic.”
“Well, don’t,” he said with a smile. “Your lack of boldness disturbs me.”
That drew a chuckle from Orissa. “You said there were two things bothering you. Let me guess the other. How do I know I used to live there?”
He snapped his fingers and pointed at her, a confirmation that she’d guessed correctly.
“I know you don’t believe in dreams,” she said. “But they’re one of the few things that are real to me. And I trust them most of all.”
“Even more than what you see and smell and feel while you’re awake?”
“Even more than that. It might sound crazy—”
Leon shook his head and interrupted her. “It sounds crazy, all right. But I get it. Somehow, I get it. How far are we from D.C?”
Orissa consulted her watch. “One hundred and twenty-three miles.”
“So, an hour.”
“Four hours.”
A perplexed look washed over him. “This Helrider gets going to 120 mph. So you said.”
“Yes. If you want your liver to crash into and through your stomach, spilling organ ooze throughout your gut. Because if we hit a divot going that fast, that’s exactly what’ll happen. We’re not Machines.”
“Fair enough.”
“We’ll take it slow. Thirty miles per hour.”
Leon groaned. “Four hours, then. This mylosynicide—you think it’s guarded?”
“We’ll find out.”
He chuckled. “Never a dull moment with you. Well, let’s get going. We have some mylosynicide to steal. But first, we’re visiting your old stomping grounds.”
The smile that pinched up the corners of Orissa’s mouth was, perhaps, the first smile born from something other than humor since she’d been reborn. It was a good feeling, a warm feeling.
“Thank you, Leon.”
She stiffened as he put a hand on her knee. “Humans have to look out for each other, Orissa. Otherwise, we’re just Machines that haven’t turned metal yet.”
Orissa hadn’t thought much about friendship, but now it seemed something impossible to live without.
Funny how that works, she thought. A part of her, from somewhere deep inside that she hadn’t cared for in so very long, wished for Leon to keep his hand right where it was. But he lifted it off her knee and clasped his fingers behind his head, closing his eyes.
She shook away the feeling. Don’t forget who you are, she told herself.
Chapter Eight
Partway to Maryland, Leon traded the passenger seat for the wheel, letting Orissa catch some shuteye. He was still miserably tired, but he had no desire to return to sleep.
Not after the dream.
What made it all unravel from the brief but terror-filled nightmare that had plagued him every night to the long, drawn out events culminating with Leon calling in an airstrike to utterly destroy an entire neighborhood?
It was as if he’d found a key to unlock the dream’s true contents, right after his gunfight with the Prime.
Maybe Orissa was on to something with her deep belief in the power of dreams. Or, more probably, the Machines had rigged their brains and a side effect was the terrorizing nightmares; that he finally glimpsed further into his was mere coincidence.
Leon chose to put his faith into the latter, rather than risk the belief that dreams were real, a memory shard of his past. The less he knew of his previous life, the better. It was gone and never coming back, after all.
He glanced at his watch and the suggested route he take to Washington D.C. He consulted it regularly, adjusting the relatively slow-moving Helrider to keep it pointed in the right direction. Thirty miles per hour was a pipe dream. Most of the time, he kept it fifteen, taking care over hills and around the edges of cliffs, scooting cautiously through forests of towering conifers and giving wide berths to vast craters.
Occasionally, evidence of old roads would reveal themselves like a moon among the clouds, splotches of pavement woven between the weeds.
Leon tried to not let his mind wander too far, too fast. But when the trees began to blend together and grand mountains on the horizon lost their luster and faded into a haze; when the thrusts of the Helrider’s thermal engines sounded like a word said too many times as to become meaningless… it was then his thoughts became unshackled and went to places he didn’t care to go.
What if, against the long and unlikely odds, humanity could be reborn? Would it be too late? Could man cleave his way out of the primordial soup once more? To forge cities in a world that had been taken back by the slow, meandering hands of nature seemed a monumental task.
Impossible.
This was the side of Leon Orissa hadn’t seen. If he could help it, she’d never. Better for him to appear as the positive one, a man who believed in the long, upstanding truths of the world: that the wheels of justice rolled slowly but always true, that kindness trumps evil in the end, that if you try hard enough you’ll always get what you want.
Looking back on history, it was easy to be of that mindset. Society had always progressed, if occasionally taking steps back before leaping forward.
Until they made the Machines. Then, the facade of humans being the ultimate adapter, the race that could overcome anything and everything—well, that came crashing down, didn’t it?
You’ve gotta have hope, Leon told himself.
That line was starting to wear thin. He needed more than self-reassurance. He needed to see results, to see that there was reason to have hope.
His tortured thoughts continued to prick him until he threw the Helrider in park at the top of a cliff overlooking the sprawling womb of Washington D.C. A mid-afternoon sun shined bright on that decaying capital.
Few things in life had taken Leon’s breath away, and even fewer that weren’t Primes. But to stand before his country’s capital and the home of every great leader who had taken the title of President—it sent electricity cou
rsing through his veins.
Yet, with the excitement and disbelief came also a striking melancholy. The White House and Capitol Building, the Supreme Court Building and the Washington Monument—all of the fabled sights and historic importance suffered devastation in their own ways.
From partially collapsed walls to broken statues, from facades dyed the green of vines to the pearly veneers turned brown and ugly—Washington D.C. had, like all parts of the country, not been spared from the Rise.
Leon nudged Orissa awake. She surged forward, fist clenched.
“Whoa,” said Leon, passively raising his hands. “It’s just me.”
Orissa blinked the tiredness out of her eyes. “Sorry,” she said, concealing a yawn.
“We’re here. It’s a big place. You have any idea of where your old apartment is?”
“There,” said Orissa automatically, pointing. “See that complex way over there? Looks sort of like a U.”
With a hand shielding his eyes from the sun, Leon squinted. “The one with trees growing on the roof?”
“…Yes. That one.”
Leon exited the Helrider for a much-needed stretch. He opened a steel chest anchored in the bed—a parting gift from the Machines they’d jacked the ride from—and took a stick of dried squirrel. He and Orissa had stored their food and canteens inside the chest.
Chewing the salty snack, he unlatched his binoculars from his belt and slowly swept them over the city. “I don’t see a single Machine,” he said, lowering the binoculars. He regarded Orissa thoughtfully for a minute. “Something’s been gnawing at me.”
Orissa gave him a look that suggested something always gnawed at him.
“Halley’s Hangar—you’ve been there.”
“Once.”
“And it’s well-guarded?”
Orissa frowned. “That’s why we’re here. To blow things up and make it easier for us to get inside.”
“All right, all right. Calm down and stay with me. Why are there Machines guarding the hangar? Why are there Machines guarding anything?”
She climbed out of the Helrider and stretched her arms high over her head. “Most aren’t,” she said, yawning. “Most are sleeping.”
“Were sleeping,” Leon corrected. “They’re waking.”
“The ones near Pittsburgh are. We don’t know if that holds true for the rest of the country.”
Leon wagged his finger. “And we don’t know if the Machines across the rest of the country are sleeping, either.”
Orissa clicked her tongue. She crossed her arms and said, “What’s your point?”
“My point is, there’s no reason for the Machines to be guarding anything. Humans are their only threat. Right?”
She hadn’t an answer for that one.
“Come on, Orissa. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about this. You can’t tell me they’ve put up a bulwark of defenses just because you managed to escape their clutches. You can’t—”
“Stop telling me what I can’t do,” she snapped, her eyes glowering. “I’m not a damn future teller, Leon. I don’t know why the Machines do anything they do.”
He licked his lips and took his voice down a notch. “All I’m saying is that it doesn’t sit right with me. Something out there”—he gestured to the horizon, to the world—“it scares them.”
“Machines don’t feel fear.”
“You damn well know what I mean. Something out there has caused them to keep at least some units on alert. And something out there is causing more to awake.”
Orissa climbed back into the Helrider. “If you think it’s humans, dash that thought.”
Leon went silent. Then, “I don’t know what it is. Or who. But it is something.” With a shake of his head, he clicked his tongue and jumped into the Helrider. “All right. That’s enough pontificating, I guess.”
“Careful,” said Orissa. “If you keep throwing down five-dollar words, you might eventually run out.”
Leon grinned. “It’s a three-dollar word, and don’t get used to it.” He threw the Helrider into gear and eased it down the hillside, into the swamp of D.C.
Rusted rebar jutted out from walls whose plaster had been stripped to the bones of two-by-fours and steel. Massive sinkholes had caved in most of the narrow streets, and some had even swallowed entire buildings.
Deer and skunk fled the Helrider, seeking refuge in the empty hollows of crooked hotels and businesses.
Leon drove up to the U-shaped apartment building, navigating the stubs of trees growing in the lot. He parked the vehicle close to a revolving door.
“Bet it was pretty in its time,” he said, hopping out and following Orissa.
“It was,” she said with absolute certainty, marching up to the doors and giving them a push.
They didn’t budge. Not the first time or the fifth. They were stuck, rusted and solidified. Surprisingly, the glass panes had held up well over the centuries.
Orissa pulled out her submachine gun and put an end to that. She turned her head and shot out the glass.
“What the hell,” said Leon. “Do you want to ring the dinner bell while you’re at it and put a spotlight on us so it’s easier for the Machines to locate us?”
She stepped over broken glass nonchalantly. “You said yourself there were no Machines in the city.”
“That I saw. Jesus.”
Orissa turned, frowning. “How far up your ass have your briefs crawled?”
“That’s funny,” he deadpanned. “Hilarious.”
They clicked on their flashlights and routed their way around the lobby and toward a staircase. Besides plants and weeds, there wasn’t much to sidestep. They climbed the stairs whose carpet had been reduced to thin, frayed fabric covered in black mold.
That can’t be good to breathe in, thought Leon. “There’s likely to be hundreds of rooms in this place. Do you know which is—”
“413,” said Orissa automatically.
We’ll see if dreams mean anything, thought Leon as they approached the fourth floor. Selfishly, he hoped she’d come to room 413 and recognize nothing. He hoped they’d leave this apartment complex without having learned anything further about Orissa’s past.
The alternative was that dreams did mean something, and that terrified him.
At the landing of the next floor lay a placard that once hung on the wall. A bronze “4” was carved into its canvas.
Leon took up the right side of the hallway, illuminating every door he passed. Most didn’t have any numbers. Realizing Orissa was no longer beside him, he glanced back to see her toddling along.
Her teeth bit into her lower lip, and her throat flinched with each painful swallow. Her eyes trailed up the walls and across the floor, flashlight a touch slower behind them.
She’s scared, thought Leon. An unsurprising elicitation of emotions if she truly believed this dilapidated apartment wrangled in by nature was once her home.
What had she expected to find here? Pictures, unless they were kept in unshattered frames, would have long gone yellow and unreadable. Whatever computers or tablets might await her would be defunct and useless, unless there was a Vaunton cube inside. Which there wouldn’t be. The average citizen couldn’t afford Vaunton cube storage and security; they were used mostly for scientific and militaristic applications—which explained why he’d found some in those tunnels of Orissa’s refuge, since high-ranking government officials had apparently fled there.
Leon came to room 413, the missing metal numbers having left impressions in the door. The top of the frame had sunk down, crushing the door and making it lopsided. Leon waited for Orissa, then gave it a push. While it budged, it didn’t allow him entry. So he stood back and booted it.
And again.
On the third attempt, the door swung open, prying away wood and paint. Inside he and Orissa stepped, over a toppled tray of shoes and around an overturned coat rack. A television lay on the floor, its anchor still partially in broken plaster.
Orissa
went to the couch. It looked of black leather and before it stood an angular coffee table of matching color. Leon swiped a finger across it, wiping away a trail of dust. Probably once it was sleek and considered modern.
Now? It felt like a relic. In a way, Leon supposed it was.
“I remember this couch,” said Orissa.
“In your memories? Or in your dreams?”
She reached out a hand, holding it cautiously over the armrest but not touching it. “I’ve seen it in my dreams, but I… feel it too. It’s like I’ve stumbled on a favorite toy from my childhood.” She looked up with wet eyes. “Except it’s darker than that.”
“Darker?”
She flipped one of the cushions over and beat away the dirt and grime. There were deep stains in the leather.
“Blood,” whispered Orissa. She shook her head, then turned to Leon, chin on her shoulder. “My father was an abusive man.”
Leon looked at his boots. “I’m sorry.”
“I killed him.”
He wasn’t sure how to reply to that, but felt that he ought to. The words, however, never came.
“I shot him one night,” continued Orissa. “After he beat my mother. I shot him and I killed him. My mother helped cover it up, but I don’t know how. That memory… that dream… is still locked away.”
“A man like that,” said Leon, “ah, you shouldn’t be ashamed of doing what you did.”
Orissa wheeled around. “I’m not ashamed.”
He cleared his throat. “Right. I meant—” He went quiet. Shut up, Leon.
Orissa navigated the apartment with the ease that comes only with familiarity. Leon followed her into a bedroom, the drapes eaten away by time and probably silverfish and moths. A laptop sat on a corner desk, the screen cracked.
Orissa unplugged it and turned it upside down. She fetched her screwdriver from her pack and unscrewed the bottom, shining her flashlight inside. A smile crept up on her as she stood aside for Leon to have a look.
Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1) Page 7
