“The infection must be harder to kill off then we realized,” I said quietly.
Avian turned the page, finding the next one to be full of notes. I didn’t even bother reading it. I wasn’t going to understand what it was talking about.
He read through four more pages of notes. After a few minutes he kept flipping back and forth between a few of the last ones.
“It’s not finished,” he said as he looked up at me. “It’s here, I think. But it’s not complete. The notes on how to create the core, the thing that makes the whole thing work, they’re not here.”
“He got infected before he could complete it,” I said quietly. West had told me how his grandfather and his father had evolved fairly early on. How could they not, being so involved in everything?
“Why didn’t West tell us he had this?” I asked as I narrowed my eyes on the pages. “We could figure it out. West had the instructions on how to save us hidden away in his jacket the whole time. Why has he been hiding it?”
“Hang on, Eve,” Avian said with a little sigh. “I’m not positive that is what this even is. We don’t know the scale of this thing. For all we know it’s for nothing more than our very own CDU.”
“Still,” I said, the pitch of my voice rising. “Why didn’t he tell us? Why has he been hiding it?”
Avian didn’t have anything to say to that.
It started building up inside of me. An unfamiliar sensation. It took me a while to recognize it.
It was distrust.
Every moment I had spent too close to West flashed through my head. All the times I had let him kiss me, touch me in any excessive way, filled me with regret. I had been so stupid. I hadn’t trusted him in the beginning. I had let my guard down too quickly. He was human, he knew the peril we were all in. So why would he hide something like this?
“He’s not getting this back,” I said as I stood and started pacing my tent. “How can he even call it his? This kind of information belongs to us all.”
“It doesn’t do us a lot of good,” Avian said as he stood. “If we can’t understand what any of it means. How to use it.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said through clenched teeth.
“You know where an electro-physics engineer is?” I was surprised at the tone Avian used. It wasn’t harsh, but it was still unexpected. It felt like he was taking West’s side.
“No, but I’ll find one,” I said as I glared at him.
“Good luck,” he said as he stepped toward the door. “I’ll see you at dinner.”
I headed to the gardens after that. I needed something to distract myself. I was afraid what I might do with all this angry energy built up inside of me. Ripping weeds out of the ground seemed to help a little.
West wasn’t at dinner that night. I felt like I should feel guilty or something for what I’d done. I wanted to throttle him though. Why did West have to keep so many secrets?
Avian kept ahold of the notebook, which was fine with me. None of it made sense to me and I had no desire to look over the parts about me again. I remembered every word like they had been branded into my partially cybernetic brain.
Alone on the watch tower that night, I paced from one end to the other. The night was passing slowly, as they had been for the past few. I kept thinking about the notes, wondering how we could use them, if we could even use them. My brain hurt from thinking about all the things I could do nothing about.
My eyes scanned the trees.
Something felt off. I couldn’t explain it, but I could feel something.
I shifted the rifle in my hand, too on edge to sling it back over my shoulder. My pack was cinched tight to my back. In my agitation, I had sorted through it all twice. Food, water, ammunition. Everything I needed to survive on my own out in the wild. For as long as it would take me to reach a city and take what I needed.
But Bill and Graye claimed it wasn’t safe to go into the cities anymore. I didn’t think I could fully believe that though until I’d witnessed it myself. Maybe it wasn’t safe for them, but it might be for me. I was at least not in danger of getting infected.
They could still blow me apart though.
This dangerous world was becoming impossible.
NINETEEN
My breathing came in steady rhythm as my bare feet beat against the gravel. I checked my surroundings as I ran. The houses were starting to fall away and trees rose up around me. The sound of another set of feet was catching up to me.
I brushed leaves out of my tangled hair as I ducked into the bushes. It felt unnatural for it to be so long.
My feet were agile as I leapt over a fallen tree and crashed through the undergrowth. My pursuer continued to chase after me.
I analyzed the terrain before me, picking out the best path. My hesitation was too long though. The next second I was tackled to the ground.
All I saw after that was red and gleaming metal parts.
The dream haunted me as I joined the others in the gardens the next afternoon. I’d never had that one before.
Red.
There had been so much red.
“Set this in there, will you?” Sarah said as she extended a cucumber toward me. I grabbed it from her and set it in the basket at my feet.
The heat was getting intense, made all the worse by the clouds that were coming in. The air was heavy with humidity. Several people begged for it to rain.
With summer midway over, the garden was producing well. This was our second round of early harvesting. There was an abundance of squash, peas, beans, cucumbers, and other delicious vegetables. The kitchen crew had been busy canning the last week or so. Our new cellar was getting its shelves filled quickly.
“Do you know what it is Avian’s been working on lately?” Sarah asked as she handed me another cucumber. “He’s been obsessed, but he won’t tell me what it is he’s doing.”
Avian and I had both agreed to keep our discoveries quiet. Until we understood what it was we were looking at, we didn’t want to give anyone false hope. I was ignoring the fact that maybe that was the same reason West had never told any of us about the notes.
“Why does this project seem so strange?” I diverted. “He gets into different projects sometimes.”
“I don’t know. He’s just being so secretive. And he’s been weird lately. I don’t know how to describe it.”
I did. Desperate hope filled with total inept ability.
“I wouldn’t worry about him,” I said as I reached for the next vegetable she handed me. It slipped through Sarah’s fingers before I grabbed it.
Sarah cursed under her breath, shaking her hand.
“You alright?” I asked as I bent and picked it up off the ground.
“Yeah,” she said as she shook her head and went back to work.
“You sure?”
“I’m fine!” she snapped at me.
I watched her closely after that. I didn’t understand what the fact that Sarah seemed to be having a hard time keeping her grip on things meant.
But I was sure it wasn’t good.
That evening, I watched as one of the afternoon scouting groups arrived back at camp. Among them was West, who wouldn’t even look me in the eye as he grabbed a bowl of soup and headed straight for his tent.
Good. I didn’t want to talk to him either.
I didn’t know if I would ever be able to trust him again.
That night as I went up the tower for watch duty, Avian followed me, West’s notebook in hand.
“I recognize these things here,” Avian said as he sat on the bench. “These things here could be found at any hardware store. Most of these,” he said, pointing to something else. “Could be found in just about any lab. But these,” he said, indicating another few things. “I’m not even sure what they are.”
My eyes scanned the trees. I had that feeling again.
“There’s got to be someone out there who knows what it is,” I said distractedly.
“Have you talked to West
about this yet?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I can face him without doing something stupid again.”
“He may know what we’re looking at,” Avian said quietly. “We should talk to him.”
“Feel free,” I said as I paced.
“I’m serious, Eve. He might know something. I think he’s a lot smarter than any of us realize. What he said about the infection having been designed to spread. It makes sense. He’s bound to have picked up on a lot of things from his family.”
“He was thirteen when everything happened. I doubt he learned too much about electro physics, or whatever.”
“Don’t underestimate inherited intelligence. I think we should talk to him.”
“Fine,” I sighed. I fought back the urge to send Avian back to his tent. It was setting me on edge to have him talking at me. I needed to be on full alert.
As darkness overtook the light Avian fell asleep on the bench, the notebook balanced on his chest. I sighed in relief when I heard his heavy breathing. Finally, silence.
The air felt thick as the clouds kept building. There was a charge running through the atmosphere, like the sky was ready to split apart at any moment.
Two hours before dawn would have broken, the thing I had been waiting for finally happened.
The sound of a chopper buzzed through the air. A few moments later I picked up on the sound of another. I barely made out the tiny black dots in the sky to the west of Eden.
I cursed under my breath. They were slowing down in their approach.
Twenty seconds later, the glow of a stream of fire blazed through the pre-dawn sky.
“NO!” I screamed, true horror filling me for the first time.
Avian jerked awake as the scream ripped from my throat. His eyes followed my line of sight.
Both helicopters had fire billowing out from them.
They were burning the gardens.
“Gabriel!” Avian bellowed as he leapt down the ladder and started sprinting through Eden. I flew down after him, heading directly to the tree line.
I had to be careful not to crash into any trees in the nearly nonexistent light as I plowed through the woods. I pulled my pack in front of me, digging though it for more ammunition, putting it into a side pocket.
The glow of the flames told me I was getting close. It took me a while to realize the sound of the helicopters had disappeared.
I was about fifty yards away when it came running at me. A nearly all metal Bane leapt at me from the trees. I pulled my gun and blasted its head open before it got within ten feet of me.
I had just gotten to the fence line when another tackled me, its hands closing around my throat. My gun flew clean from my hands. I rolled, coming on top of it. Getting my hands free, I attacked its head with my clenched fists. As soon as the outer metal was broken I started pulling at wires and gears. Its form grew still a few seconds later. I pried its dead hands away from my throat, picked my handgun up from the dirt, and fired.
Finally, I turned back to the fence, my fingers linking in the chinks. I could only stand there and watch as the rows of peas, spinach, tomatoes, and pretty much everything else, burned. The fruit trees were totally engulfed, the flames reaching up into the night from the branches.
Shouts started racing toward me in the chaos the early morning had become. There was nothing we could do but stand at the fence and watch everything we had built the last five years burn.
Maybe there was a God out there. The sky finally couldn’t hold any more pressure and the rain started to fall. As I watched the fires sizzle out, a hand slipped into mine. I didn’t even have the will to turn and see who it was. It felt like nothing mattered anymore.
We were finally done for.
TWENTY
Even though no one had died, the feeling of death and despair hung in the air like a ghost.
We salvaged what we could out of the garden. Two tomato plants, half a row of squash, a small patch of potatoes, and one broccoli plant was all that had survived. The amount of food it would eventually produce would feed everyone in Eden for less than a week.
Inventory of our stores was immediately taken. We had enough to last about four months if we all went on starvation diets.
Two days after the burn, I had taken Bill with me on scouting duty. He got the truck that I had found at the cabin to start and together we filled the back with everything that had been in the storage room beneath the house. That would buy us another month or so if we were careful. Nearly everyone cried when we drove the truck back through the forest and showed them the supplies.
Three weeks after the burn, I came back from my morning scouting duty, joining the others for dinner. We were each given a roll and half a scoop of canned corn. After receiving my plate, I sat next to Sarah. My skin was turning a light shade of pink under my normally tanned tone. The sun had been brutal the last few days.
“You should go see Avian about that,” Sarah said as she looked at my arm that rested next to her pale white one. “He has some aloe he could put on it.”
“I’m fine,” I said as I tore a small piece off of my roll. “I’m sure someone will need it more than me. It’s not like it hurts.”
Sarah nodded her head, not wanting to argue with me. She scooped her corn into her spoon and raised it to her lips with a shaking hand. I looked at her closely as she chewed the bite carefully.
Sarah looked like a skeleton. She had started dropping weight even before the burn happened, and then when we all went on starvation rations, she started declining even more rapidly. She was frightening to look at now; I didn’t want to know how she would look in a few more weeks, let alone a few months when the food ran out.
“I’m not very hungry,” I said as I picked my plate up and scooped my corn onto her hers. I broke half of my roll off and set it there as well. “Why don’t you have mine?”
“Eve,” she said as she looked at me with tired eyes. “You have to eat too.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said again as I stuffed what was left of my roll into my mouth. As I stood, my stomach growled. Before Sarah could protest further, I walked toward the medical tent. Just as I was about to step inside, West stepped out, nearly crashing into me. My eyes dropped to the tear in his shirt. His sleeve was soaked in blood and there were fresh stitches in his arm.
“You alright?” I asked stiffly.
“Fine,” he said shortly. “I just fell.” He walked away without saying anything else.
A strange rock seemed to form in the pit of my stomach as I swallowed hard and stepped inside.
“Hi,” Avian said as he looked up at me with a small smile. He pulled off a pair of bloodied latex gloves.
“I have an hour or so,” I said as I sat on a stump, pulling my knees to my chest and resting my arms on them.
“You should be sleeping,” he said as he busied himself with cleaning up. “You’re going to over work yourself.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“Of course it is,” he said as he finished up and sat across his examination table from me. “You’re still human. Look how much weight you’ve dropped already.”
I didn’t look, but I knew Sarah wasn’t the only one who had dropped a few pounds. We all had.
“Are you still eating your rations?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I lied. But I sensed Avian knew I wasn’t telling the truth.
He knew better than to argue with me though, so he just turned and pulled the notebook off of a shelf.
Over the past few weeks, we had been studying the last pages of the notebook. Avian had been trying to match its parts to those of our own CDU, but he wasn’t making much headway. It all just ended up leaving him frustrated.
I watched him as he studied the illustrations.
How was it possible for someone to be so good? We’d been so fortunate to have Avian in Eden. He’d given up his life in a way to keep us alive, tying himself to this one place, a constant prisoner. How had I been
so lucky to have him come into my life? It could have been anyone who found me, some twisted man who could have taken advantage of a young girl who didn’t know who she was, didn’t know anything.
My chest felt tight when he looked up at me. I realized he had asked me a question and I mumbled something I hoped would serve as an answer. A weird feeling formed in my stomach. I didn’t know how to identify it. I had that hollow feeling but also had a burning desire to fill it back in with something. And I couldn’t seem to look away from Avian as he continued studying. I found my eyes studying his hands as he flipped through pages of the notebook. I recalled the day he had held my hand. The oxygen seemed to freeze in my lungs.
“I have to go,” I suddenly said. I stood and walked out of the tent before he even said anything.
The hollow feeling continued to get worse as I walked toward my own tent. I soon felt sick from it.
What was wrong with me? Where was this coming from?
I lay on my bed and squeezed my eyes closed, forcing myself not to think about anything as the back of my eyes burned.
The glass felt smooth under my fingers, flowing perfectly, one molecule into another. How was it possible to make something so perfect and even? It warmed under my hand, a ghost of my flesh forming in fog as the heat of my body met the cool of its surface.
I realized then that the air around me was freezing.
Turning, my body chilled as my eyes scanned the cinder block walls. No outside light tricked in, only a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling cast a cold shadow on everything. My chest tightened as I searched for an escape. There wasn’t even a single door, just the window. A bed was pushed into one corner of the room. This was as good as a prison cell.
As I turned back to the window, a pair of earthy eyes stared back at me.