Hope (Book 2, Harvester of Light Trilogy; Young Adult Science Fiction) (5 page)

“
You have…fourteen
minutes…to evacuate before detonation of self-destruct.”

Zoe and I spent two
minutes, at least according to the automated voice’s rather annoyingly calm
countdown, changing into warm clothing and packing up what we could grab
quickly.  I searched under my pillow and pulled out the one thing I was not
going to leave the city without: the small heart shaped rock Jace gave me.  I
slipped it in the front pocket of my jeans for safe keeping.  When Zoe and I
met my father in the living room, I noticed he was only carrying a small black
bag, not big enough for anything substantial.

My father banged
on the door of Ash and Kale’s apartment when we left ours.

They both came to
the door with backpacks over their shoulders.

“Come on boys,” my
father said.  “We don’t have much time.”

By the time we all
walked out of the apartment building, there was a mad crash of people in the
street running for escape.  Gun fire could be heard in the distance but I
couldn’t see who was firing at whom.

“Where are we
going?” I yelled to my father over the noise of the crowd and siren.

My father grabbed
one of my hands.

“Don’t let go,” he
ordered. “Doc Riley should be waiting for us in the park with a transporter.”

I grabbed Zoe’s
hand and she tugged on Blues leash to pull him in closer to us to make sure he
didn’t get trampled by the throng surrounding us.  Ash and Kale followed close
behind.

The scared crowd of
people around us made walking difficult.  The sound of gun fire seemed to get
closer and closer the further down the street we went. 

“Damn fools,” my
father said only loud enough for me to hear.

“Are the guards
shooting people?” I asked, having only seen the guards of the Southern Kingdom
be allowed to carry guns.

My father looked
down at me.  “No.”  But he didn’t have time to elaborate.

“You have…
seven
minutes…to evacuate before detonation of self-destruct.”

Finally, we broke
through the crush of people and entered Central Park.  The park area was almost
deserted, only a scattering of people were running through it.

“Where are we
going?” I asked my father, running along beside him doing my best to keep up.

“The pond.”

I didn’t have
enough breath to ask why Doc Riley was meeting us at the pond.  Two minutes
later I had my answer.

Doc Riley and Ian
were standing on the end of the pier which reached out to the middle of the
pond.  Behind them floating along the side of the dock was a black armored
vehicle I had never seen before.  It looked like the spurious child of a tank
and a boat.

“You have…five
minutes…to evacuate before detonation of self-destruct.”

“Glad to see you made
it,” Doc Riley said, giving me a brief hug.  “Climb in children and buckle up.”

The interior of
the vehicle was larger than I expected.  There were ten bucket seats built into
each side wall and a driver seat and passenger seat up front near the glowing
blue control panel.  Ash helped me buckle Blue into one of the seats while
everyone else grabbed a seat of their own.  Doc Riley took the drivers chair
and my father sat up front with her.

“You have…four
minutes…to evacuate before detonation of self-destruct.”

Ash made to help
me into my chair but I pushed him towards the empty seat across from me. 

“I can take care
of myself, Ash, just get in your seat.”

I felt Ash put his
hands on my shoulders.  Before I knew it I was turned around and facing him.

“You have…three
minutes…to evacuate before detonation of self-destruct.”

In a blur of
motion, he put his hands behind my head and pulled me towards him.  His lips
crushed mine in a desperate kiss.  His mouth opened to deepen the kiss causing
my already racing heart to pump even harder inside my chest.  The warm feel of
his lips and tongue almost made me forget we were on the verge of being blown
up.

“Dude!” Kale said,
breaking the moment.  “There’s time for that later!”

Ash reluctantly
pulled his lips away from mine.  When I looked into his eyes, they seemed
almost glazed over like he was intoxicated.

“Just in case,” he
said to me.

He didn’t have to
finish the sentence.  I knew what he meant:  just in case we didn’t make it.

Chapter 5

“You have…two
minutes…to evacuate before detonation of self-destruct.”

I dropped into my
seat and quickly buckled the safety harness.  When I looked over at Ash, he was
staring at me like he might not ever see me again.

“Hold on,
children,” Doc Riley yelled from the front.  “The first drop is a doozy!”

Doc Riley was
never one for over exaggeration.  Whatever she did up front instantly caused an
almost free fall effect.  I involuntarily grabbed the harness criss-crossing my
chest as the light from the Southern Kingdom was lost, plunging us into a darkness
so thick I thought it might suffocate me.  The force of the fall made me feel
like my stomach had suddenly been lodged inside my throat. Our landing must
have been cushioned by water but it was still jarring.

“Everyone all
right?” My father yelled through the pitch black.

Everyone
acknowledge they were fine in mumbled “yeah”s and “yes”s.

“Dude, where’s the
light?” Kale asked. 

“This is only the
first step of our journey,” Doc Riley called back.  “We’re in an aqueduct underneath
the mountain.  It will take us to a neighboring lake.  I have to use night
vision goggles to see where I’m going so we can’t have any lights on.  Sorry
for any bumps along the way, children, but it can be a bit tricky driving
through a hole as narrow as this one.  Just make sure your harnesses are
secure.”

I tugged on my
belt to make sure it was still buckled.  As Doc Riley weaved us back and forth
through the tunnel, the motion of the vehicle made me feel like a bobble head
doll. I could only presume she was doing her best not to run us into the rock
walls of the tunnel but still get us as far away from the blast zone as quickly
as she could.

Suddenly, we all
felt the vehicle vibrate and zoom forward by an unseen force.  It had to be an
aftershock from the bomb going off in the Southern Kingdom.  I prayed Kirk and
Teegan made it out in time.  I couldn’t afford to lose any of my friends.  They
kept me sane in a world which was anything but.

I felt Zoe grope
in the darkness trying to find my hand but finding a leg instead.  I placed my
hand on top of hers and squeezed it reassuringly.  To say I felt protective of
Zoe was an understatement.  Since she had entered my life, I felt like she was
my responsibility to keep safe and out of harms way.  She may have looked older,
but I knew the frightened seven-year-old I first met was still inside her.  We
held hands in the dark allowing our human contact to reassure us everything
would turn out all right even if it was an illusion.

I’m not sure how
long we were in the tunnel but my guess would have been at least half an hour. 
Finally, it felt like we were angling upward.  The vehicle lurched forward to
break the surface of the water allowing murky rays of moonlight to enter
through the front glass.  After being in total darkness for so long, the light
felt like the sun glaring into my eyes forcing me to let go of Zoe’s hand to
shield them.

“Over there,” my
father said from the front.  I peaked between my fingers to see him pointing to
a spot to our left.

“Hold on,
children,” Doc Riley said.  “Almost there.”

The gentle sway of
the vehicle on water was soon disrupted as we emerged onto dry land. We rolled
on an incline then came to a flat spot before coming to a complete stop.

I heard my father
and Doc Riley unlatch their harnesses and took that as my queue to do the
same.  Everyone else in the back followed my lead.

Doc Riley emerged
from the cockpit first with my father standing slightly behind her securing the
black briefcase he brought with him firmly behind his seat.

“Time to see who
else made it out alive,” she said, walking to the hatch and unhooking the latch
to open the door.

Ash took my hand
when we stood giving me a quick, reassuring wink.  Whenever things seemed their
bleakest during our travels through the Eastern Kingdom, Ash would sometimes
wink at me, squeeze my hand and say, “Come on.”  It was his way of giving me
hope. 

By the time we all
made it out, a dozen other vehicles like ours were in different stages of
making it to the same spot.  As people emerged, Doc Riley took on her role as
physician and made sure the others were physically unharmed.  My father
delegated jobs for the rest of us.  He asked Ash, Zoe and I to gather up as
much dry wood as we could to make a fire against the cold. 

“We’ll be staying
here for the rest of the night to take inventory and make a list of everyone
who made it out.  Tomorrow we’ll travel to the alternate settlement,” my father
told us.

“Alternate
settlement?” I asked.

“There’s another
underground facility further south of here,” he explained.  “But we need to
wait for the others so we can all travel there together.”

“So there are two
Southern Kingdoms?” Zoe asked.

“The alternate
site isn’t as nice as the one we just lost,” my father told us.  “But it has
everything we need to survive.”

Two Southern
Kingdoms…

I wanted to ask
why the leaders of the old world didn’t use the alternate site to save more of
those left behind in the Eastern Kingdom, but I didn’t really need to ask when
the answer was so obvious.  They wanted to save the alternate sight for the
scenario we found ourselves in now.  They wanted to make sure that if they lost
their first nirvana, there was a second one ready for them to use as a back up. 
The selfishness of such a plan wasn’t lost on me.

Ash, Zoe and I
walked toward the woods to do as we were asked.  We were all silent as we
gathered up fallen branches to take back to camp.  Zoe was a few feet to the
left of me when I felt Ash rest a hand on my shoulder and turn me to face him.

“Are you ok?” he
asked.

“Probably better
than I should be considering things,” I admitted.  “This might sound stupid but
I’m more comfortable here on the outside than I was down in paradise.”

Ash’s lips spread
into a grin.  “Were you feeling a bit too pampered down there?”

“You think I’m
silly to feel more at home in a wasteland, don’t you?”  I sighed and didn’t
wait for his answer before I continued.  “It’s just that everything down there
was an illusion.  They tried to remake the old world but nothing ever felt real
to me.  Things were just too perfect.”

“It may have been fake
but at least it felt safe,” he said.

“Even that turned
out to be an illusion,” I reminded him.

“Stand still.”

The click of a gun
made both Ash and I freeze where we stood.

“Put the wood down
and turn back towards the lake,” the man ordered.

We did what he
said.  As I turned, I saw Zoe facing the same situation we did with another
armed gun man.  In that instant I wished I had mental telepathy instead of the
power to heal.  I wanted to scream to Zoe to not use her power.  I knew if she
erected a shield around herself our captors might not ever let her go.  They
could have all our food and transportation for all I cared.  Things could be
replaced.  Zoe couldn’t.  If these were the same people who invaded the
Southern Kingdom and ultimately destroyed it, I feared what they might do to us
if they knew we had supernatural powers.

With our hands on top
of our heads, we walked back to the lake.  Lit torches made a circular jail for
the survivors from the Southern Kingdom.  My father was anxiously waiting for
us within its perimeter.

“What’s going on?”
I asked him as we walked inside the circle of torches.

“Outsiders,” he
whispered.  “They’re the ones who invaded the Southern Kingdom and set off the
self-destruct.”

 “Why would they
want it blown up?” Zoe asked.

“My guess is to
force us to do what we had to do to survive:  come outside.”

“But why?” I
questioned.

“Why do you
think?” I heard the man who brought Ash and I back ask from behind me.

I turned around
and saw that he was in his mid-fifties with white hair balding at the temples
and a shaggy white beard and mustache covering over half of his face.  His dark
brown eyes felt like they were boring holes into my skull.  He was shaking
slightly, but I couldn’t tell if it was because he hated us that much or if it
was a medical condition.

“I don’t know,” I
said, refraining from giving a smart ass retort to a man holding a gun.  If I
had known the answer to my question, I wouldn’t have asked it.

“I’ll tell you
why,” he said refusing to look away from my eyes like the act would make me
feel some sort of shame.

“Ben,” a woman
walked up and put a hand on the man’s shoulders.  His shaking became less
violent as he looked at the woman by his side.

The woman didn’t
look much older than thirty.  She was thin but who in the outside world
wasn’t?  Her dark brown hair fell down past her waist.  Years of malnourishment
stretched the skin across her face into a thin mask.

“Why don’t you go
help the others and see what’s in the transporters these good people brought
up?”

“Ok, Margaret,” he
said completely submissive to the woman as he slowly turned his back to us and walked
to the vehicle we had escaped in.

After Ben walked
away, Margaret turned to face us.

“You’ll have to
excuse some of us,” she said.  “We’ve been planning this for quite a while and
the excitement of everything that’s happened is a bit overwhelming.”