Revelations (The Elysium Chronicles) (12 page)

“What is that?” I ask.

“It’s a car. Like they have in Rushlake. But it’s all rusted and falling apart.”

Peering over his shoulder, I see more of them. They line up in an almost straight line behind the first one, reaching as far as I can see. All in various stages of falling apart. I try to get a good look as we pass; then I gasp.

“Asher!” I say, pointing excitedly. “Look. Inside the cars. More statues.”

Even in the dark, I can see his eyes widen. “What the hell?”

But there’s no ready explanation and we continue forward, ogling at the strangeness of it all. As we continue, we see more dispersed between the cars. Some are posed as if running from something. Running in the
opposite
direction we’re moving. Others are holding smaller, child-sized statues in their stone arms. Some are huddled close to their cars, their arms over their heads. I can’t understand why anyone would build something like this. It’s creepy.

I shudder and wrap my arms around my body. “What
is
this place?”

“I don’t know,” Asher responds, and even he has a slight waver in his voice. When he squeezes my knee in comfort, there is nothing comforting about the tremor in his hand.

And while I can’t help but think we should turn around, curiosity has me gripped tight. We push forward. The closer to the center we get, the more haphazard the placement of the cars and statues. It is as if the child playing with his toys got tired of setting them straight and just tossed them about and left them however they fell.

I stare at yet another statue as we pass by so closely I can see the expression on its face. Its mouth is wide open as if screaming and terror is etched all over its face.

When we finally get to what appears to be the center of town, the building that stood there is completely gone. The only thing left is a huge crater where it stood. Bits of metal, concrete, and glass litter the circle.

Asher leaps from the horse and strides toward the crater. Curious and unwilling to be left alone in this morbid city, I follow at his heels. When I make it next to him, he reaches out and grips my hand tightly in his. And this time I don’t pull away. In fact I squeeze harder, clamping both my hands around his. In this dead city of fake people, it’s nice to have a connection to someone alive.

Together we walk to the center of the crater, then stop. He releases my hand and kneels down in the dirt to sift through the wreckage. After a minute or two he lifts something up and studies it, then sighs, and hands it to me.

I take it and look it over. It appears to be a human hand, carved in stone and cut off at the wrist.

“What is this? A piece of one of those statues?” I scrutinize the piece. It feels like stone, but it’s different. More porous. It makes my skin crawl just holding it.

“Yes. And no,” he says, studying more of the debris. “They’re not statues.”

“Then what are they?”

“They’re … they
were
people.”

I drop the hand, a sour taste filling my mouth. When he looks up at me, his eyes are filled with horror. I almost wonder if it isn’t just a mirror reflecting back what I’m feeling.

“This town was destroyed with a nanobomb.”

“Nanobomb?” For some reason the term sounds familiar to me, but I can’t place where I heard the term.

He stands, brushing the dirt from his hands. “They were used during the War when they wanted to overtake an entire city, but didn’t want to completely destroy it, or wanted to keep it useable. It was the quickest way.”

“How?” I wheeze out. My chest feels like there’s a band around it compressing until I’m breathless.

He meets my eyes and I know what he’s going to say before he does. “When the bomb explodes, it disperses nanobots—tiny robots so small that they’re invisible to the human eye—into the air like an aerosol. When a person breathes the aerosol in, they breathe in the nanobots, and they start attacking the body from the inside out. Sort of like a virus. In this case, it caused the body to calcify at an accelerated rate. Virtually turning them into stone statues.”

C
HAPTER
N
INE

Toward the end of the twenty-first century, nuclear weapons were almost completely abandoned in favor of the more effective bioweapons. These weapons could easily clear out entire cities, without making them uninhabitable for invading soldiers.

—
E
XCERPT FROM
A B
RIEF
H
ISTORY OF THE
21
ST
C
ENTURY
, “
B
IOWARFARE”

Evie

“Oh, Mother,” I gasp, but a band of fear must be compressing my chest, because when I suck in a breath it catches in my throat and I start coughing. Coughing so hard that blackness creeps in the sides of my vision until all I can see is a pinprick of the scene in front of me.

Asher slaps my back as if I’m choking, but it doesn’t help. It only makes it worse, a metallic taste coating the back of my tongue. But finally I stop and, while I’m catching my breath, I look around at the statues that stand outside the circle. It’s all so hard to believe, but explains a lot of things. The way they’re dressed in real clothes, the poses, the looks of terror.

“But … why are they still here? Why did they just leave them like that?” Tears sting my eyes and my voice shakes, but disgust is almost as prominent as the sadness ripping through me that anyone could be so callous.

Asher won’t meet my eyes when he says, “I don’t really know, but considering how much damage there is to the surrounding buildings, I have to think this was one of the sites where they tested the prototypes. They probably realized that this city was too far gone to do anything with it and left it.”

Now the disgust is definitely more prominent than the sadness. It makes me speechless. The lack of respect is just mind-blowing.

Asher is watching me with a strange look. “Did you ask for your mother a minute ago?”

At first I have no idea what he’s talking about and the change of subject is a little jolting; then I realize he means what I said before I started choking.

I wince and slump my shoulders, ducking my head so I don’t have to look at him when I say, “It’s just something I say … sometimes. When things surprise me.”

“Why?”

It doesn’t sound anything other than curious, so I relax a little. “I don’t know. Gavin says it’s something from … before. One of the things that stuck in my head even after I lost everything else. I don’t know why I do it, and Gavin doesn’t tell me…” I trail off when I realize how silly that sounds. My saying something and expecting someone else to tell me what it means. It’s ludicrous. I hate it. Feeling helpless like this.

Asher stares at me with this strange look on his face, before he shakes his head. I think I hear him mutter, “Despicable,” but before I can question him, he smiles at me and says, “You’re a strange one, Princess. Come on. We need to find somewhere warm to sleep before you shiver yourself into pieces.”

It’s then that I notice I’m a bundle of tremors. Every muscle in my body aches, especially my heart, which is beating furiously in my chest. My lungs feel like they’re being compressed against my ribs. I rub the heel of my hand against my rib cage.

My teeth are chattering again, but I can’t tell if it’s from fear or the cold. Either way, I just want to leave this city. There’s no way I’m staying here. Not with these statues watching over us.

When I say as much to Asher, he says, “We don’t have much choice. This is the safest place until sunrise.” As if to punctuate his claim, a howl disturbs the quiet of the town. I rub absently at the scratches on my legs. “Besides,” he continues, “this is where I told Gavin we were heading.
If
he’s coming, he’ll try to meet us here.”

I can tell he doesn’t really believe Gavin is coming, but I’m not willing to take the chance. If waiting in some creepy town is what I need to do, then that’s what I’ll do. “Where do we start?”

“Let’s try to find a spot inside one of these buildings.”

That, of course, proves easier said than done. Almost all of the structures are so badly damaged they’d either provide us no protection from the elements, or are in danger of falling over. It isn’t until we get to the other side of the town, as far from the bomb blast as possible, that we find one relatively intact. It’s the smallest of them. Just a squat block building with a flat roof.

Asher kicks open the door, and peers inside, like he has at least a hundred times in the last hour. But this time, when he emerges, he has a smile in his voice.

“Found one.” His voice is scratchy from exhaustion.

While I get down from Starshine, he pulls a flashlight from one of the packs. “Come on, we’ll check the rest of this building out together. I don’t want to leave you out here all alone.”

I don’t want to be alone either, but … “What about Gavin?”

He frowns. “What about him?”

I make a disgusted sound in my throat. “What if he comes while we’re inside? How will he know where we are?”

He rolls his head on his shoulders and rubs his eyes. “Evie…”

I know what he’s going to say, but I don’t care. I cross my arms over my chest. “Look, I don’t care what you think. He got away from the birds. All right? He got away and you’re not going to convince me any different. Now how is he going to know we’re inside?” Even I can hear the desperation in my voice, but I ignore it.

His eyebrows have winged up under his hair and he just stares at me. Finally, he sighs. “Starshine. She’ll wait here until we get back.”

“Wait.” I glance over at her and see her staring at us with sad eyes. “We just can’t leave her out here.”

He mutters something under his breath, but says aloud, “We won’t. We’re just going to check this place out and make sure it’s safe. We’ll come back out for her in a few minutes. I’m sure no one’s around here to care whether we bring her in the building to stay warm. And by that time,” he continues when I open my mouth, “I’ll have figured out a way to mark that we’re here.”

Uncomfortable with leaving her out here and still doubtful Gavin will find us, I don’t immediately follow when Asher disappears through the open door.

Only when he pokes his head back out and asks “Coming?” do I make up my mind and follow him in. It’s only for a few minutes. We’ll be right back out.

Inside, our flashlight reveals glimpses of the place. It’s a strange mishmash of a house and some type of military outpost. As if someone lived here until the very moment the army took over. I wonder if that happened before or after the bomb drop. If it was before, that would explain a lot—the calcified statue people, and how they were just left. They were probably used as a deterrent to keep people away from this area. The statues certainly gave the abandoned city a creepy feeling and if I could have avoided it, I would have.

I follow Asher as he wanders around the tiny building until we locate a steel door set into the wall of a long hallway.

He hands me the flashlight and forces the door open. Surprisingly it opens without so much as a squeak or squeal. I hand him back the flashlight, then follow closely behind him as he walks through the door.

It’s nothing but a pitch-black corridor. No light reaches in here, and my nerve endings go into overdrive. I try to focus on the area illuminated by the flashlight, but a memory is tugging at my mind.

Without warning, the lights flicker and go out throughout the complex. The red emergency lights stay lit, but ahead the hallway is dark. I reach into my pack and pull out my flashlight pin.

When I click it on, the light cuts through the darkness. It’s actually brighter than the lights that would have lit the hallway, but it isn’t big enough to dispel all of the gloom.

We keep our guard up, sticking close together. Our arms brush together, and at first I have to fight the urge to jerk my arm away. I bite my tongue, hoping the pain will be enough to distract me from my homicidal thoughts, but it isn’t until he squeezes my hand—a simple gesture of his promise to protect me—that I’m able to push the thoughts to the side.

I can’t fight this much longer. I hope we reach the submersibles soon.

After a few minutes, he releases my hand and I have to resist the urge to grab out for him again. It’s the only thing grounding me from going crazy, but we can’t take the chance of holding hands. We don’t know what’s ahead.

Suddenly my foot slides in something wet and I almost fall to the ground. I throw my hands out to the side to catch myself with the walls.

When I lift my foot, my shoe makes a sucking sound. I tap Gavin on the shoulder, then point to the floor. “There’s something here,” I say.

He nods and stands watch over me, while I kneel to shine the small light onto the floor, careful not to let my knee dip into whatever the sticky mess is. It’s a puddle of something dark red, almost purple. I tilt my head, then stick my finger in it and bring it nearer to me to study. It’s slightly tacky, like wet glue or drying paint.

Bringing it to my nose, I sniff at it. It has a metallic scent, like rust. Then it hits me. I know exactly what this is. It bothers me that it took me that long to figure it out.

When I turn to show Gavin, he’s already staring at the puddle with a look of horror on his face. “Blood?” he asks.

“Oh, Mother,” I whisper, staring at my hands. They’re covered in blood. “No. No. It’s not real. Not again.”

“Evie?” Asher asks, turning toward me. When he does, he illuminates the walls, revealing a patchwork of gory handprints.

I shake my head. “No. No.”

I stare, unable to blink while a rivulet of blood escapes and trickles down from the tip of one print’s thumb. They’re fresh. Whoever made these isn’t far away.

A sound comes from behind me and I spin around, finding more prints. Some of these are near the floor and aimed upward, as if someone had crawled up from the ground. I press my hands to my eyes. This can’t be real. Not again. My hands are wet—tacky—and I remember the blood on them. I yank them away with a whimper.