Broken Worlds Super Boxset (58 page)

***

The sun greeted Todd’s sullen, pale face with the vigor in which he received it: lethargically. He scratched the side of his beard, pushing through the thick bracken on his face. His barren left ring finger twitched uncontrollably. He sat there on the edge of the bed, watching it spasm randomly. A reaction to another sleepless night.

The pop of his knees brought a twinge of pain but mostly relief, as his body was thankful to be mobile and active once again. Todd quickly dressed and washed two caffeine pills down with a glass of water. He slipped on his shoes and picked at the flap forming from his loosened sole.

Todd shut the door and stepped onto the grey ash of dirt that was his front yard. All around the country, there was nothing but dust. The winds had carried GMO-24 to every corner of the country. Whatever patches of fertile soil were left were guarded by tanks and soldiers.

Todd checked over his shoulder a few times, keeping an eye out for the inspector from the day before. Once the coast was clear, he started his trek east. Todd adjusted the shoulder straps of the small sack he brought with him, which carried government synthetic food sticks that were provided to community members, and a bottle of water. The food sticks were the government’s response to the soil crisis. Designed and created in a lab, then shipped in bulk to every corner of the country. It was what most people lived on now.

The only issue with the synthetic foods was the human body’s ability to process it. Humans had evolved to their current state on fresh fruits and vegetables, red meat, and seafood. The human body could only absorb a fraction of what the sticks offered. Its original intent was to act as a supplement, but as the soil crisis grew more severe, it became a meal replacement.

Starving was the slowest death Todd had ever seen. One by one, your muscles, bones, organs, and other tissues weakened. The nerve, immune, and other bodily systems became less efficient, struggling to perform their basic functions. A person’s motor skills would start to fail them, along with the ability to think clearly.

For Todd, that was the hardest part to watch. The mind deteriorated. He could see the light behind each pair of eyes dim. Once the mind devolved to the basic necessities of survival in locating food and water, people became animalistic.

Three years ago, when the relocation efforts were put into place, there were only two types of faces on the people that arrived in the community. The first had a blank glare, a mind fogged and sluggish, a breath away from death.

The other face concealed a mind lowered to an animalistic ruthlessness. The territorial gorillas and bears that guarded their ground fiercely had found their way into the communities, towns, and cities limping along. The capacity for reason and logic had long escaped them. All that was left was instinct.

Instinct.
Such a vile word. Todd detested that word. For decades, he was forced to listen to scholars, educated men and women, use that term to describe the actions of people.

“
It’s our natural instinct to be violent. It’s our human instinct to destroy. It was his instinct to react that way. It was her instinct that caused her to go down that road. You have to listen to your instincts.”

Well, those firm believers in instincts had finally been given what they had clamored for. The pillars of choice and reason had crumbled. People now lived in slums, forced to work at gunpoint, separated from their family and friends.

Everything Todd had done over the past year was in laborious effort to rebuild those long-forgotten structures. He wanted to return to a time of acumen and intellect. To be able to walk down a street, a paved street, with new shoes. He wanted to look at the faces of the people around him and see their exuberant souls greet him through their eyes. He wanted to go through his day without the mention of the word hunger. He wanted to sleep like he did when he was a child, unafraid and peaceful. He wanted people to act of their own free will and not based off the repercussions from some thug with a rifle. He wanted a world better than what he inherited.

What made it all worse was the fact that they had squandered it. The human race had so many chances to get it right, and time and time again they continued to kill each other. They beat their neighbors. They drained the sources of life around them for the pointless pursuit of empty pleasures.

But he was so close. His research was on the brink of a breakthrough. All of the tests he’d run to ensure it was safe were coming to an end. His body’s nutrition levels were the highest they’d been since before the soil crisis. But if anyone from the Soil Coalition found out about his work, all would be lost. They would return to a world of squandered resources helmed by the same type of men and women who had brought the country to its current state. He couldn’t let that happen again.

Todd was building more than just a cure. He was building a movement, but patience and time were running out. And the new inspector was only going to exacerbate the situation. Something needed to be done. Quickly.

***

Sydney had never been so happy to be back in Topeka. Every piece of equipment in his lab seemed to glow upon his return. The sturdy walls, the locked door, and the cold air blowing through the vents all made him feel safe. He treasured the security of familiarity.

He opened his briefcase and pulled out his notes from the project he was working on before he was allocated to the field. Upon his search for his work, he stumbled across the data from the blood sampling in the town he visited.

The small personal thumb drive where he kept old pictures and projects contained the raw, untampered data. Sydney drew the blinds to the windows in the lab and locked the door. He stuck the drive into the side of his laptop and downloaded the information. He reached for his notebook while the loading bar inched from sixty to seventy percent.

Sydney flipped through the pages of the notebook, searching for the man’s name who had the high nutrition levels. It was on the tip of his tongue, but it eluded him. The computer beeped, signaling a finish to the download, when he finally found it. Todd Penn.

He traced his finger over the name, feeling the indentation from the ink on the paper. That name, and the man it represented, was a mystery to him. He needed to solve it.

The resources of the lab here in Topeka far exceeded any of the field labs that the Coalition used during blood tests. He had the finest equipment the country had to offer, which was a fabricated truth, because many of the scientific tools that could have helped him solve the puzzle had been destroyed in the violence that thundered after the first failed harvest.

Most of the equipment was actually quite old. And anything that broke down took a very long time to fix. The soil crisis didn’t just kill plant life, it also killed most of the brain power that was trained in repairing these delicate instruments.

However, Sydney’s resources were far greater than anything that Todd Penn could have had access to, and if he was in fact the missing link to the country’s problem, then he was confident he could decipher the hidden codes inside Mr. Penn’s blood.

A knock at the door made Sydney jump, and he spilled the water from the mug in his hand over the keyboard. He desperately patted the keys with his shirt, trying to wipe up the water before it seeped into the circuits. More pounding shook the lab’s door.

“Just a minute!” Sydney cried out.

He closed the programs on his computer and removed the thumb drive. He stuffed it into his pocket as he unlocked the door.

Jared wore a stony expression that contrasted with his three-piece suit and poked his thick forefinger at the wet splashes on Sydney’s lab coat. “What is that?”

“Water,” Sydney answered.

Jared stepped inside, his large frame almost taking up the entire doorframe. “Why was the door locked?”

Sydney twirled his fingers around one another, keeping his head down. He fidgeted from side to side, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. “All of my work here is considered confidential. You know that.”

“I was told you were sent out into the field? Is that true?”

Sydney nodded, but Jared still had his back to him, so he didn’t see.

“Sydney!” Jared bellowed.

Sydney gave the same startled jump as before. The stern, commanding voice had always caused him stress. There was always a disappointed tone underlying Jared’s every word.

“Y-yes. I was,” Sydney answered.

“I put you here as a favor to your mother, not because of your expertise in the field. Now, the next time Gordon tells you to head out, I want you to tell him no, do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For God’s sake, grow a backbone. Stand up straight!”

Jared grabbed his son by the shoulders and practically lifted him off the floor and dropped him from midair. Sydney’s heels smacked the floor hard, and a jolt of pain rushed up his spine. He rubbed his lower back as he attempted to reach the height he never seemed to be able to as a boy.

“Have you spoken to your mother recently?” Jared asked.

“No, sir.”

“I want you to call her this afternoon. I’m tired of her asking me about you.”

Jared looked around at all of the closed blinds and the water dripping from Sydney’s desk from the earlier spill. He shook his head.

“Do you have any idea how many other qualified candidates I had for this job? Hmm? And here you are, spilling your drink all over the equipment. Do you have any idea how hard it was to obtain all of this? And do you know how difficult it is to have it fixed? Sloppy,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve always been sloppy!”

“It won’t happen again.”

“Hmph. Well, make sure it doesn’t. I have a meeting to attend. I’ve already vented my frustrations on Gordon, so he will most likely swing by later. Be sure this place is cleaned up. I don’t need any more embarrassment from you.”

Once his father was gone, Sydney grabbed a rag and began mopping up the water on the counter. His father’s words were a specific poison that he’d yet to find an antidote for. It had been that way ever since he was a child. Always too small and too weak for success at anything his father deemed as manly, such as sports, fighting, and hunting. The resentful eyes of his father always seemed to find him, no matter how successful he was in the lab.

Of course, his father was right: there were other qualified candidates to run the lab, and all of them would jump at the chance. But despite his father’s nepotistic appointment, Sydney had developed himself into a competent scientist. Before the crisis, he had just received a grant to work at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a researcher in their leukemia department.

When Sydney brought that news to his father, he was too distracted by a new prototype of weapon that his company was marketing to the Marines. He remembered how excited he was to finally have something to tell him that his father would be proud of, but it didn’t matter.

Upon hearing his son’s news, he looked over to Sydney, and this was the moment he thought he would finally receive approval, finally see a look of pride on his father’s face that was the direct result of his achievements. But his father only asked him one question.

“What did you do?”

“I don’t… W-what do you mean?”

“I mean what have you made and created for them to grant you such an opportunity?”

“Oh! My research. I recently wrote a paper on the theory of blood vessels and their capac—”

“Theory?” his father interjected. “What proof do you have that it’s true?”

“Well, I haven’t had the oppor—”

“So, let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly. You wrote a paper, that no one is even sure is correct, with no tangible product to show for your efforts?”

“Dad, my paper could be the first step to—”

“Ah!” his father said, holding his finger up, silencing Sydney. “‘Could,’ Sydney. Not ‘will,’ or ‘yes,’ but ‘could.’ You can’t eat ‘could.’ ‘Could’ can’t put a roof over your head. You can’t drink ‘could.’ So why would you waste my time with ‘could?’”

It was in that moment Sydney realized that no matter what he did, no matter what he accomplished, it would never be good enough for his father to recognize him as a man, as an individual. His world consisted too much of theories and what-ifs, whereas his father’s world was of metal and steel.

Sydney reached back into his pocket and pulled out his thumb drive. He closed his fist around it and gripped it tightly. If his father wanted something tangible, then that’s exactly what he was going to give him.

The farm camp was surrounded by rolling hills, with nothing but open land for miles around. They were all designed that way. In the earlier days, the Soil Coalition was afraid of the workers escaping, and if someone were to escape, they wanted to make sure there wasn’t any place for them to hide. All the sentries would have to do was bring the sprinting skeletons into their crosshairs and pull the trigger.

Escapes weren’t as common anymore, at least from what Alex heard through the grapevine. Everyone was too tired and weak to fight back now. Because of that, security had grown light, with nothing but Class 1 sentries here. The Coalition didn’t expect a fight from a moaning sack of bones.

Alex had been hiding, concealed under a layer of dirt, for most of the night. Only the whites of his eyes contrasted against the black and grey dust. But since the sentries weren’t paying attention to anything beyond the ten-foot radius around their own bodies, he wasn’t concerned.

One of the sentries came full circle on his patrol, and Alex counted him at seventy-three seconds to walk all the way around. In the last few hours of night, three different sentries had come outside to relieve him, which gave him a total of four sentries that he knew about. Judging by the size of the camp, he figured that’s all there was.

Each sentry was armed with an AR-15 with three full clips of ammo and protected with Kevlar from neck to waist. Even though the riots had stopped, they were still armed to the teeth. The rifles he carried with him had a total of twelve bullets between them. Seven in the .22 and five in the .308, but he wanted to keep the element of surprise for as long as he could, so he’d be relying on the knife to take out the first sentry.

The only problem was once he stole the rifle off the sentry’s back, his buddies would eventually come and check on him, and when they found him dead, it would trigger an alarm that would sound all over the state. And if the alarm was sounded, there would be no doubt that the sentries around Meeko’s farm camp, which was quite larger and undoubtedly had triple the number of sentries this one did, would be on high alert, making it even harder to free him and Harper. Alex would have to kill the sentries quickly.

Once the sentry turned the corner to the back of the farm, Alex would have roughly thirty seconds to catch up to him, kill him, and get inside before he passed the entrance again. When the sentry finally disappeared around the back, Alex pushed himself off the ground. His elbows and shoulders popped from the sudden movements, and the grey dirt he was covered in cascaded to the ground.

Alex sprinted to the structure. Each step that dug into the ground kicked the dirt back violently into the air as he pushed his way forward, leaving a trail of grey mist in his wake. Despite the amount of effort, his body felt slow after being immobile for the past six hours. Once he made it halfway, the muscles in his legs loosened, and he picked up speed. He skidded to a stop just before he reached the back corner where the sentry had turned.

Large, quiet breaths escaped him as he tried to control his breathing. The lack of food and water was already taking effect. His body was running on empty. He peeked around the corner and saw that the sentry had just made it to the other side. Alex had to make his move now. He pushed through the exhaustion and sprinted down the back side of the farm.

Alex took quick, light steps over the dirt, keeping his eyes on the sentry’s back and methodical stomp through the dirt. Alex was twenty yards away, then fifteen, then ten, then five. He extended both arms in preparation to wrap them around the man’s throat. He was only fingertips away when the toe of his shoe smacked against a rock that banged into the steel siding of the farm camp, echoing a very loud whack, which alerted the sentry to his presence. But before the sentry could turn all the way around, Alex lunged toward him.

The sentry had fifty pounds on Alex. Being well fed and well rested gave the physical advantage to the sentry, but years of training evened the playing field for Alex. Even though the sentry nearly knocked him to the ground, flinging Alex off his back, he managed to hang on and keep his hand covering the sentry’s mouth, muting his cries for help. The sentry swung wildly and tried bucking Alex off his back. The rifle swung erratically from the strap on the sentry’s shoulder. Alex extended his free arm, trying to grab it, but the sentry slammed him against the farm camp’s wall.

The blow sent a hollowing crack through Alex’s back. His grip on the sentry loosened a bit, but he countered the blow by gouging his finger into the sentry’s eye. Alex could feel the soft membrane of the pupil and the warm gush of organs and blood.

The two collapsed. Blood poured from the sentry’s eyes and splashed in spurts on the ground, blanketing the dirt in a crimson slush. Alex yanked the rifle from the sentry and fired a shot that split through the back of the sentry’s skull, ending the arduous cries.

The gunshot attracted the other sentries, and two of them sprinted around the corner. Alex dropped to his right knee and rapidly squeezed the trigger. Multiple .223 rounds ejected from the AR-15’s muzzle and struck the sentries’ Kevlar, knocking them on their backs.

More shouts sounded behind Alex. He jumped for the sentry’s dead body and propped it up in front of him for cover. The thump of bullets vibrated through the Kevlar and flesh of his human shield. Alex peeked over the top of the sentry’s bullet-ridden arm and saw three sentries converging on his position. He aimed and fired the rest of the clip into the approaching death squad. They scattered left and right, but one of them kept up the charge. Alex paused, took careful aim, then fired a bullet right through the attacker’s left eye.

Alex quickly turned back around and fired more rounds at the gasping sentries behind him. Even though the Kevlar stopped the bullets, the rifle still had enough kick to knock the wind out of them and possibly break a few ribs. He watched the two of them crawl around the corner for cover. The other two that attacked him from the rear retreated back to where they came from. Now was his chance.

Alex dashed for the front. He turned the corner, and the two sentries he’d shot had their backs to him. He stopped. Planted his feet. Aimed. Fired.
Three down.
He turned his attention to the next sentry. Aimed. Fired.
Four down.
As long as the two hiding at the rear of the building were the only ones left, he was in good shape. He didn’t remember seeing any radio or communication gear on them, so that meant they’d need to get inside to call for help.

Alex’s exhaustion had dissipated and was replaced by adrenaline. The rush brought his mind and body into focus. It would wear off soon though. And when it did, his body was going to collapse like a wet noodle.
Two left.

Alex kept the butt of the rifle snug against his shoulder, with his finger itching over the trigger. The entrance to the camp was only ten feet away when he saw a bony shoulder reveal itself in the early light of sunrise. Alex quickly sidestepped to his left to get a better angle. “Don’t move!”

The body froze, and Alex saw the frail, naked body of an elderly man. His knees wobbled, and he squinted, his pupils unsure of the foreign sunlight peeking over the eastern horizon. When the old man saw Alex with the rifle, he stepped back into the darkness of the building.

Before Alex could lower his weapon, the two sentries that had hid at the rear of the building stormed the front. One of the bullets grazed Alex’s left arm, putting him off kilter. With his arm bleeding, Alex lined up the first sentry in his sight and fired into the sentry’s chest. Alex winced from the pain in his arm as he quickly swiveled right and fired at the second sentry. The first sentry fell; the other only stumbled. Alex brought the adamant sentry’s face into the crosshairs. He squeezed the trigger. The sentry collapsed into a pile of lifeless meat. He rushed over to the first sentry, who was gasping for breath from the stun of the bullets and seeking cover behind the corner of the building, but Alex fired a bullet into the back of the sentry’s skull, which sent a spray of brain matter onto the dirt in front of the sentry’s face.

With his arm still bleeding, Alex quickly turned around and took aim at the door. He stood there, waiting for any other sentries to rush outside. No one came. The old man took a few small steps until he completely emerged from the building’s entrance. Then, two others revealed themselves from the shadows with the same hesitation as the old man.

Alex lowered the tip of his rifle. If there were other sentries, they would have shown themselves by now. Alex rested the rifle on his shoulder and rolled up his shirtsleeve to examine his arm. He touched it gingerly, and blood wet his fingertips. The gash had cut his flesh open at least two inches across his arm. He’d need stitches.

The old man that had first stepped outside nudged the shoulders of the dead sentries with his foot. He looked back up to Alex and pointed at him. The old man’s finger shook; he no longer had the strength to keep it steady.

Slowly, the other workers emerged from the belly of the farm camp. One by one, they took their first steps outside in God only knew how long. Just like the old man, all of them were nude. Each of them was silent at first, but soon whispers rocketed through the group. It was as if they were all finding their voices for the first time. There was no talking in the farm camps. Only work. A young woman came to the front. Her voice cracked as she spoke. “You did this?”

“Yes,” Alex answered.

The woman dropped to her knees. The first few tears shed from her eyes and streamed down the smudges of dirt on her cheeks. She clasped her hands together and squeezed them so tight that her whole body shook. Her bones were so thin Alex thought her arms might break in half from the pressure. The woman keeled over on her side, still sobbing, still shaking. An elderly woman finally came up behind her and joined her. Alex wasn’t sure if the two women knew each other or not, but they just sat there in the dirt. Crying together. Holding each other. Trying to regain and remember any semblance of humanity they had left. Most of it had been stripped from them, but maybe there was enough to rebuild. All they needed was the slightest spark that could bring them out of the haze they’d been lost in.

As more and more workers poured outside into the morning sun, the old man came up to Alex and examined his arm. The old man’s face was covered in white whiskers and wrinkles. What was remarkable were the old man’s green eyes. Alex didn’t think eyes stayed that vibrant as you got older, but this man’s eyes did.

“There’s a first-aid station inside,” the old man said.

Alex let the old man guide him. The adrenaline had run its course. He was too tired to resist. As the old man took him inside, the workers divided and opened a small path that allowed him to pass. Then, one by one, each worker reached out their hand to touch him. Fingertips brushed his arms, neck, back, hand, leg, whatever they could reach. It wasn’t forceful, but simply a light tenderness of acknowledgement of what he’d just given them: freedom.