Broken Worlds Super Boxset (70 page)

***

When Alex made it back, it was already past curfew. He trudged up to the house where Ben was still awake, working on one of his crossword puzzles with Brent. Alex froze awkwardly at the door when he saw the two of them.

“Bring anything back?” Brent asked.

“What? Oh, um, no. Not today,” Alex answered, quickly heading to his room.

“Oh, Alex,” Ben said, “I wanted to check your bandages and show Brent here a few things. I’ve been teaching him a little about medicine. Do you mind?”

“I don’t know if now’s the best tim-”

“It won’t take long. I promise.”

Alex sat on the edge of his bed and lifted his shirt so Brent could get a good look at the healing lashes on his back. Ben handed Brent some fresh gauze and instructed him to remove the old ones. “You see how the abrasions here are more prominent?” Ben asked.

“Yeah,” Brent answered, his voice slightly faint from the sight of the scar tissue still healing on Alex’s back.

“That’s where you’ll want to focus the majority of your bandages. Being a good doctor these days is just as much about the proper distribution of your resources, as it is in your diagnosis,” Ben said.

Alex could feel the slow peel of the old bandages off his back. He winced. The flesh on his back was still sensitive. Once the rest of the bandages were removed, Ben helped Brent apply some of the medical cream that had finally arrived. Alex just sat and listened to the old man talk to Brent, his voice calm and steady, never shying away from a question or answering it with an even harder one.

It didn’t take long for the cream on Alex’s back to diminish the pain that still remained from his wounds. A cool, numb, icy sensation overwhelmed him. It felt as though everything that had hurt him over the past few years was slowly eroding away.

“What’s that?” Brent asked. “It doesn’t look like the rest of the lashings.”

Alex had only pulled his shirt up to below his neckline. His shoulders were still mainly covered, but a small portion of disfigured flesh on his right shoulder had revealed itself. Alex quickly lowered his shirt and jumped off the edge of the bed. “Nothing. Just an old injury.”

Ben patted Brent on the shoulder and slowly got up. “Fine work, boy.” Ben handed Brent the rest of the cream. “Now, I want you to take this and start looking up some of the properties the medicine is comprised of with the book I gave you.”

“Right. A breakdown and explanation of each like last time?” Brent asked.

“Perfect.”

“Thanks for letting me get some practice on you, Alex.”

Alex adjusted the back of his shirt. The cream on his back caused the shirt to stick to his skin. Ben turned him around and helped adjust it.

“You know. You should really let me take a look at your shoulder,” Ben said. “It’s a burn scar, right?”

“It’s fine.”

Before Ben could pry further, they were interrupted by a knock at the back door. Ben went to answer and when Alex stepped into the living room Todd was there, clutching a small bag in his left hand.

“Ben, I was hoping I could speak with Alex for a moment?” Todd asked.

Ben simply nodded and left the two of them alone. Alex walked over to the oil lamp on the only table the living room offered. Alex eyed the bag as Todd set it down and the two men took a seat.

“How’s the back?” Todd asked.

“Ben got a new shipment of medicine in the other day, so the cuts that are still bad should be healed up any day now.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“How’s Emma? She still nursing that hangover?”

The creases at the corners of Todd’s eyes crinkled and the whites of his teeth penetrated the thick brown beard around his mouth as he smiled. “She’s doing fine. It was a rough morning for her the next day. She cut her fingers a few times on the sewing machine.” Todd’s eyes focused on the bag he brought with him. He drummed his fingers then rubbed his beard. Finally, he pushed the bag to Alex.

“What is this?” Alex asked.

“It’s an opportunity.”

“An opportunity for what?”

“Do you remember how we got here, Alex? Do you remember what it was like before two men had to sit at a rickety table of plywood in the glow of a lamp light after a day of slave labor?” Todd tapped the bag. His finger thumped hard against the weak table. The thin man in front of him looked as though he could break the poorly crafted piece of furniture in half. “This is our way out,” Todd said.

This was it.

“What do you need me to do?” Alex asked.

“Come with me.”

***

Alex did his best to remember the path to the lab from his house, but in the pitch black it was difficult to see, and with no real landmarks other than the same sprawling fields, he knew it was going to be difficult to find his way back.

When Alex descended into the lab, the first thing his eyes fell on was the computer that Nelson sat at. Emma came and gave him a hug, Nelson shook his hand, but Ray remained in the back with his only form of greeting being a curt nod.

“So this is where we did it,” Todd said, gesturing around him.

“Alex, what we’ve done will change the world. And with your help, we can let everyone know,” Emma said.

“How many people in the community know about this?” Alex asked.

“Outside of us, it’s only Ben, but he doesn’t come here to work. We just wanted an alternate in case something happened to one of us,” Todd answered.

“How did you get all of this stuff here with the Coalition watching you?”

“It was already here,” Nelson said.

“Four years ago, I was part of the research team that was put together by the government to start work on the original GMO-24 project, which back then was called something else. After a few months of work, what we came up with wasn’t completely stable. We scrapped the work and turned in a report that said we needed more time. What I didn’t know was that the major GMO companies that were backing this project had invested quite a bit of money and were looking for something other than ‘more time.’ When I found out they were pushing forward with trials, I moved out here with Emma,” Todd said.

“We thought it was a place we could start over. We cashed in all our investments and used it to purchase what you see here,” Emma said.

“I continued my own research here even after the end of the first project, and when GMO-24 was released and started causing all of the side effects, I contacted Emma’s brother to see what was happening,” Todd said.

“My brother is a Commander in the Navy, and he worked with one of his superiors in helping us get access to some of the supplies we needed to continue our work, which was before the Coalition had any real reach out here. He was able to get the computers needed to process the data we were compiling,” Emma said, gesturing to the computer Alex had eyeballed earlier.

“By the time the Coalition did make it out here we were too entrenched in our work, and we didn’t want to cause any suspicion by moving. So we stayed,” Todd said.

“Nelson and Ray were colleagues of ours, and we knew we would need their help in fixing this. Ray has his doctorate in Statistics and has been a huge help in narrowing down successful soil solutions. Nelson handled all of the analytics, programming, and security,” Emma said.

“Security?” Alex asked.

“When the Soil Coalition came into being, they started tracking data on everyone,” Nelson said. “The moment they started setting up communities, we knew they’d investigate us, so I wiped our records clean. Making sure they had no way of knowing who we were when they came knocking.”

“He even changed my last name back to my maiden name, so the Coalition didn’t know we were married,” Emma said.

“There are twenty other communities in our general area of Wyoming,” Todd said. “I have contacts in each of them. The bag I gave you is the final message for our plan to be set into motion. We have a solution, and now we need to act on it.”

“My brother has a unit of men that will roll through here in two days once we give him word our people are good to go,” Emma said.

“We’re taking it back, Alex,” Todd said.

“It’ll take a full day to deliver all the messages, and we can’t risk missing a curfew check or roll call at the factory without raising suspicions,” Emma said. “Our old hunter delivered the messages before.”

“Why don’t you just give your data to the President?” Alex asked.

“Look around you, Alex,” Todd said. “The President approved the Coalition in the first place. Outside of this room, there are only a few people I would trust with this information. And the President, or anyone that works for the Coalition, aren’t among them.”

“Please,” Emma said. “We can’t do this without you, Alex.”

Never in Alex’s entire life did he want to tell them everything he knew. But now wasn’t the time. He still had no word from Sydney about his father getting his community to safety, and if Emma’s brother was two days away, it wouldn’t give him enough time to get to Meeko. The moment Gordon found out about what Alex did, he’d kill them all out of spite.

“I’ll do it,” Alex said.

Before Alex made it back to the house, he made sure to bury the bag of messages beyond the front gate so he could pick them up after he checked out. He knew the sentries wouldn’t say anything regardless, but he couldn’t tell Todd that.

Alex walked into his room to check the laptop before he left, and a surge of hope came over him when he read the message Sydney sent him. A picture of the signed order to have troops invade his community was the only content. But that was all Alex needed to see. He closed the laptop without powering it down and shoved it back under his mattress, but he was in such a hurry he failed to completely tuck it all the way underneath. A small sliver of the computer was still visible, something he failed to notice in his rush out of the room.

The sentries gave him a few questionable looks since he was leaving again, but that was as far as it went. The morning was clear and cool, and about an hour in, he made it to his first drop off. A small cluster of rocks sat six hundred yards from the first community Alex visited. He removed the three rocks in the center just as Todd described and placed the small piece of parchment inside and positioned the rocks back in the formation he found them. The landmark was fairly easy to spot, and he hoped that it would continue for the rest.

***

Alex crunched on a protein stick that he couldn’t feel through the thickness of his gloves and scooted closer to the fire. Each breath that Alex exhaled sent a frosty mist into the air. He pulled the bag of messages over to the compact piece of dirt that he lay on, sifting through them. Only two left. He reached for one of the pair and pulled it out.

The parchment Todd had used was old. The paper was brittle, and Alex thought the paper would disintegrate right there in front of him if he pressed it too hard. After the delivery of eighteen messages, his curiosity had grown. Each landmark had seemed to have its own unique identification.

Did Todd have hunters in all these communities? No. All of the drop off locations for the messages were close enough for anyone in the community to sneak out late at night to check. Todd just needed one hunter in his community to get the other messages close enough to the other communities, so his contacts there could make the trip in one night.

The landscape provided an interesting backdrop for his walk. Despite the ravages of GMO-24, Alex could see the potential for natural beauty still etched upon the rolling hills and mountaintops in the distance. The grey ash hadn’t polluted all of the lakes, and a few that Alex passed still had that clean shine that reflected the sky above like a mirror. It was the first time since before the soil crisis that he’d seen anything like that.

And then, in the middle of the lake, a small swirl appeared and rippled through the water, breaking the calm glass around it. At first Alex thought it was the first drop of rain, but the sky above offered no clouds to prove the claim. The ripple repeated itself again, this time closer to the shoreline, and Alex saw the distinct flash of a tail fin. Even now, looking back on what he’d seen, the thought brought a smile to his face, which quickly diminished the moment he heard the click of a revolver’s hammer snap backwards.

“Don’t move, asshole.”

Alex lay there frozen. He slowly closed his fist around the parchment in his hand. Through the flames, he could see three faces appear from the other side of the fire. All three of them were too small for their clothes and despite the masks they wore, Alex could still see the indentations from the hollowness of their cheeks. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the butt of his rifle lying next to him. As quickly as his hand hit the stock, the tip of the revolver pressed against his skull.

“I said, don’t move.”

One of the men came around and picked up the rifle while the other two flanked him on his right. The pressure from the gun on the back of his head eased.

“On your feet.”

Alex pushed himself off the ground, keeping his fist closed around the parchment with both hands in the air. The two men on his right immediately patted Alex down and rummaged through the sack he had with him. The man who held the revolver to his head walked around Alex to face him.

The man’s mouth and nose was covered with a dark bandana, and the fire glowing behind him cast the rest of his face in darkness.

“Nenaasestse!” The word came from one of the men rummaging through the bag. At first Alex thought it was just gibberish, but when the two started going back and forth speaking in odd tongues, Alex knew it was more than just sounds. Both of them were looking at one of the parchments in the bag. The man brought it over to Alex and shoved it in his face.

The man yanked down his bandana, revealing the dark, tanned face of a Native American. “Where did you get this?” Still Alex remained silent. Finally, the man pressed the barrel of the revolver on Alex’s forehead and Alex watched the man’s finger slide over the trigger. “Where did you get this?”

“Todd,” Alex said. “It was given to me by him.”

The pistol remained pointed at Alex, but the man had removed his finger from the trigger. He spoke to the others in the same dialect as before, and the men lowered their masks. All of them were Native Americans. Their leader handed the parchment back to Alex.

“I’m sorry. We haven’t seen or heard from Billy in over a month. We didn’t know what happened.”

“The other hunter?” Alex asked.

“Yes.”

The man pulled off the bag around his back and pulled out a fresh package of meat. “Deer. Killed this morning. I’m sure it’s better than what I saw you eating earlier.”

Alex hesitated. He had no idea if these men had a connection with Todd, and he didn’t know what they were doing here. The Indians weren’t spared in the relocation efforts when the Coalition came along, so they were here illegally.

“Take it,” the man said. “A peace offering.”

Alex grabbed it and stuffed it into his bag. “Thanks.”

“What are you doing?” the man asked.

“I thought it was a peace offering.”

“It was. But I’m also hungry.” He slapped Alex on the shoulder, and the five of them sat around the fire, which crackled as juices from the deer meat dripped into the flames while it roasted.

The four of them had met Todd when he first moved out here. They traded goods and supplies and were able to give Todd tips on the surrounding area in regards to soil, which Todd was thankful for.

“When the Coalition came here, Todd was the first to warn us. It gave us enough time to prepare. Once the winds carried the disease here, it wasn’t long before we could no longer live off the land that our people had done for hundreds of years. Food grew scarce. Todd helped us work with the local hunters to provide food for our families. He is a great man.”

Each of them had similar stories. All were centered around Todd and how he helped them in some way. The more he heard about it, the more Alex was thankful that he’d had a chance to meet the man. But tomorrow he would deliver the rest of the messages, then rush back to steal the very thing that Todd had worked so hard to create. He just hoped that doing this before handing over the data was enough to balance the scales.