The Academy: Book 2 (38 page)

             
Asa saw that they were in a cave. Rough walls surrounded them. From the mouth came a cool breeze that felt incredible on his sweaty skin.

             
Shadows moved from behind him, and the smoke started to rise again, but then it subsided.

             
Jen was then by his side. She brushed Asa’s hair and looked at him.

             
“What happened?” Asa croaked.

             
“I shot you with my powder on accident,” Lilly said. “It made you hallucinate; the powder is a mutation of mine.” Asa saw that her white hair still had bits of blood in it. “I was trying to shoot it at the pterodactyl and I missed. Then, soon after, you mentally left us for a bit. You convulsed and whimpered a lot. We carried you to this cave.”

             
“How long was I under?”

             
“Fifteen hours.”

             
“Fifteen hours!” Asa sat up sharply, his heart beating fast. “Where are we? What’s happened?”

             
“Shhhh,” Roxanne said. “Keep it down!”

             
“Are we safe? Is our KEE safe?” Asa took stock of those around him. Bruce Thurman was propped up against the cave wall. He looked pale and appeared to have lost five or ten pounds. Roxanne showed the same development; her cheekbones were more prominent than before and she looked exhausted. Mike Plode, otherwise known as Boom Boom, was lying down, facing away from the fire. Jack Tool, a tall, lanky third semester student had his legs outstretched over the stone floor; the fire danced in his eyes. Lilly Bloodroot and Jen Dean were sitting over Asa.

             
As Asa looked at Gabby Carter for the first time, he couldn’t help but say, “Oh, God, Gabby!”

Gabby Carter lay very close to the fire, with Viola Burns nearby. Gabby was a rather small Fishie, and Asa hadn’t had the opportunity to spend much time with her. Gabby was crying and grimacing. Disturbingly, Asa saw that her foot had been removed by some recent development. Viola was changing a dressing
that appeared to be made from suit fabric—
Is that fabric from a suit off of one of our dead teammates?
Asa looked away, nauseated by the sight of such damaged tissue and protruding, jagged bone.

“I’m lucky, actually—
ahh! Oh, be careful!” Gabby said to Viola, who had cracked open a leaf and was applying a clear liquid that ran from it to the exposed wound.

“You don’t want to get this infected,” Viola said. “I know it hurts, but it will be worth it.”

“Where is everyone else?” Asa asked, looking around. He counted nine people; the Sharks had twenty-five students on their team.

Jen took Asa’s hand and squeezed it.

“Dead?” Asa asked.

“Possibly,” Br
uce spoke for the first time. His voice was hoarse—he looked ill. “We couldn’t find bodies for everyone, but that’s to be expected. The pterosaur was eating some of us whole. I wonder about Stan, though. A couple of us saw him leave down the stairs with Janice. We haven’t seen them since.”

Anger grew inside Asa at the mention of Stan
;
How stupid! Throwing a chair at me and breaking that window! What had he been thinking? It led to so many unneeded deaths.

No one spoke for a moment. The only sounds were the crackling of the fire and
Gabby’s quiet whimpering as Viola applied what she claimed to be an antibiotic from a leaf. Asa wondered if Viola had learned how to identify the plant in her Responding to Medical Emergencies Class. She didn’t have Benny Hughs as her instructor, and Asa thought it was possible that the other classes were learning things that were actually useful. In Asa’s class, most of the lecture time was spent as Benny recounted his glorious days as a Winggame player.

The mouth of the cave was far off, and situated
on higher ground than the fire. Outside it was dark. Asa was thankful to have the light of the fire after his hallucinations. He felt on edge, uneasy. The fire was five feet high and thin, despite a small amount of firewood. This burn rate didn’t seem proportional to the amount of wood that was burning.
Maybe Boom Boom put some kind of chemical on this flame.

Asa’s stomach rumbled audibly, and a wave of nauseating hunger rolled over him. “Is there any food?” he asked.

Bruce, Roxanne, Mike Plode and Jack Tool looked at Asa with disdain that answered his question. These were the oldest and most mutated students in the cave at this time. Their caloric needs were greater than any student.

“No,” Roxanne
muttered. “We haven’t found anything labeled ‘Not Poisonous.’”

“I found some
Moutainberries, though,” Jack Tool said. He held one up to his nose and sniffed it. “It smells
so
good. And it’s got the plus sign on it, I don’t think that it’s poisonous.”

“I told you to
toss that!
” Roxanne said, uncharacteristically frustrated due to her hunger. “
You’re not eating it and getting yourself killed; we need you!”

“You’re not the boss of me,” Jack responded. “Besides, what if Robert King was lying?” Jack held the
Mountainberry directly in front of his face, examining it. His lips were one inch from it, and Asa half expected him to take a bite.

“Don’t be stupid, Jack,” Bruce said from where he was slumped against the wall.

“I’m just so hungry, though.” His hand was trembling as he held the fruit up to his face. A series of odd associations made Asa think about the fruit in the Garden of Eden, and then of his hallucinations in which Robert King had shown similarities to Jesus, son of David. In the end, Jack put the fruit down and then buried his face in his hands. He wasn’t exactly sobbing, but he was breathing hard in his frustration.

“Is anyone guarding our KEE?” Asa asked.

“No,” Jen said.

“What’s happened in the past
fifteen hours?”

Jen was fielding the questions; as a Fishie who wasn’t too severely mutated, the hunger wasn’t impacting her as much as some of the others.  “After everyone got down below the range of the pterodactyls and pterosaurs, we had a meeting. We wanted to make a plan. First, we decided that it wouldn’t be worth it for any of us to stand guard. We wanted to attack, to try and steal another team’s KEE, and we saw that the most we’d be able to leave at our Home Base would be a couple people. Deciding that wasn’t wor
th it, we all moved together. The strongest of us took turns carrying you and Gabby. We set out for one of the four bases directly around us. We jogged the first ten or so miles, and became discouraged when we found that the next base seemed barely closer; the facilities are much more spread out than we once thought. We kept moving, but at a slower pace.

“Then, we came to an incline in the land that rose thirty feet or so. There were pterodactyls resting upon that hill, as it was ta
ller than the lower limits of their electronic leashes. The hill wasn’t that tall, but it was incredibly long; it was like if you covered the Great Wall of China in dirt and grass. We walked beside it for five or six miles, looking for a place to pass and found none. We came to a spot where there were no pterodactyls resting atop the incline, and Roxanne went up and examined the top. She says that on top of the inclination was a river, with crocodiles swimming through it. She said that the water was murky, and you couldn’t see all the way through it, but there were snakes resting on the other side. She was only up on top for a few seconds when the pterodactyls began to fly towards her, and she got down just in time. We had a group discussion, and decided that the river was impassible; we then directed our attention towards another base.

“We kept on expecting to find food, but it never came. There are strange creatures and plants, but nothing with the ‘Not Poisonous’ writing on it. We started walking; we had covered a lot of ground and were growing tired. It grew dark outside. We kept moving, though. Bruce actually passed out while walking. We found this cave and decided to rest for a couple of hours.”

Asa looked over at Bruce, who was now asleep against the wall.

“Boom
Boom can create a web, you know? He made one at the cave opening, for protection,” Jen said. 

Asa nodded. He let the realities wash over him. The lack of food was a
more serious situation than he would have thought.
None of us has ever been without food since our arrival at the Academy,
Asa thought.
We’ve had no experience with how these mutations affect our bodies when there is a food shortage.

“So, we’re on our way to another facility? Do we have a plan of what we’re going to do when we get there?” Asa asked.

Jen shook her head.

Roxanne was tired, and didn’t open her eyes to say: “Asa, if you feel alright, would you keep watch for us tonight? Would you wake us in an hour and a half? I think if we can get about ninety minutes of rest we’ll be okay.”

Asa didn’t feel
alright;
he was hungry and his head still pounded. Though, he did feel awake. It was as though Lilly’s hallucination powder had made him dream heavily for the past half-day. By the look of his teammates, he doubted that ninety minutes would be enough. “I can keep watch,” Asa said. “You guys need to rest. Thank you for carrying me.”

Roxanne smiled and nodded. Viola had finished
rebandaging Gabby’s stump and both females were falling asleep beside the fire, which was now dwindling. Jen wished Asa a good night, and lay on the ground, pillowing her head with her arms.

Asa walked towards the mouth of the cave and sat down, right next to the enormous web that Mike had spun. It completely covered the opening, leaving small windows that Asa could look out of. It glo
wed silver in the night’s dimmed light; it was made with an awe-inspiring amount of order and organization, just like a web constructed by a spider. Unlike a spider’s web, though, these filaments were each a half inch thick. They looked strong enough to stop a sprinting horse. Asa looked out into the Tropics; insects chirped and the wonderfully cool wind rustled through the leaves.

Asa leaned his back against the wall. He had to urinate, but would wait until everyone was asleep before doing so. Even though you couldn’t take off your suit without being electrocuted,
the students were able to open at the waist enough for him to use the bathroom.

Asa still felt strange from Lilly Bloodroot’s powder that he had inhaled. Though he wasn’t visually hallucinating, he still heard things in the quiet night; voices from far off, the sound of footsteps in foliage. His limbs felt funny, like they were too long. He crossed his arms, leaned his head against the stone behind him, and tried not to think about his mental state; he had more important things to concentrate on.

For starters, he wanted to think about that night in Dritt, Texas when he had been pulled over by Officer Harold Kensing. Asa had surely been dead when a giant, odd-looking dog had slammed into the side of the police car. When Officer Kensing opened the door, the dog attacked, and Asa was able to get away.

Asa remembered the dog’s abnormally large skull. He thought about the Davids, the primates that his father was able to mutate to make more intelligent, and wondered if someone could do the same thing with a dog.
And who would do that?
It seemed likely that someone had engineered that dog and sent it to save Asa’s life.

The wind picked up a bit, and Asa rubbed his temples. His headache was subsiding, but slowly. He was so hungry.

Then there was the Hive—the supposed lair of Multipliers that Robert King’s meeting with Volkner had alluded to.
How many Multipliers did they say lived there? A quarter million?
Asa’s mind felt fuzzy still.

There was no way of knowing if the Hive actually existed, but it was possible. If as much as one Multiplier broke free of the Academy, what would stop him or her from
Multiplying people month after month until there were thousands of them?