The Academy: Book 2 (41 page)

“Why me?”

“Because you and Bruce are the two people here with an ability to see things without your eyes. Look in the jungle. It’s dark. Your eyes won’t help much down there. And now look at Bruce. Does he look like he’s in any condition to have a struggle?”

Asa only glanced at Bruce, who looked terrible—there was no arguing the
fact. “What’s the point in seeing why a person’s out there in the jungle? We don’t even know who it is.”

“Exactly,” Boom
Boom said. “We don’t know who it is. Knowledge is power, and you’re the most fit to attain this little gem of knowledge.”

Asa’s mouth was growing dry, his head ached, and fear was slithering up to his throat like a cold steam.
He had no way of knowing if the old man down in the creek was a Multiplier, or some kind of other trap. Also, he was weary of the jungle. “I’ll go,” he said. “But I want someone standing guard at the edge of the jungle.”

“I’ll do it,” said Boom
Boom.

“And if I scream, you come to help.”

“You’ve got it, boss,” Mike said. He wished that he had a lookout with more sympathy than the mass murderer, but now wasn’t the time to argue.
Besides, I need to earn my team’s trust.

Asa moved down the embankment over damp dirt that cou
ldn’t get any blacker. Worms, beetles and ants were numerous. He moved lower and lower, closer to the creek far below, making his way between goliath trees and mossy logs so rotten that they crumbled with the lightest touch. Little monkeys chattered from above. Asa supplemented his vision with echolocation as he went further in and the light grew sparser.

He should have been coming up with a plan as he made his way down, but he was too hungry, and couldn’t muster the energy. Finally, he came to the base of a tall, four-foot thick tree. On the opposite side, his echolocation revealed the man he and Bruce had both detected.
He’s older than I anticipated,
Asa thought. At first he had guessed the stranger to be in his late fifties or early sixties. Now, he saw that the gentleman was seventy, at the youngest.
Probably older than that.

Asa could hear coarse breathing from the opposite side of the log, and could actually smell the person. He smelled musty. Asa’s echolocation revealed that the gentleman had a fine spread of prickly stubble on his cheeks, and curly thin hairs that ran down his chest and abdomen. He wasn’t moving. He sounded out of breath, frightened.

What if he’s a normal human?

What if he’s a Multiplier, or some other kind of mutated being?

None of these options made Asa feel any better.

He wanted to turn around, to go back and tell the others that he couldn’t find the person.
I can’t do that. Bruce is probably up there watching me with whatever power he has.

Asa picked up a rock and tossed it underhand so that it hit the gentleman’s bare foot sprawled out on the dark earth.

“No,” the man breathed, and he was up and running in only a moment. Asa watched him, and in the faint light saw something on the man’s chest that made him feel sick. Tattooed on his skin were the words “Not Poisonous,” on his chest. The letters were big, bold, unmistakable.

They want us to eat
a human.

The old man was slow and noisy. He tripped over a fallen branch and the next second Asa was standing over him, wings spread. He felt like a rejected angel.
A hungry rejected angel.

NO! I won’t eat him!

“What’d you want?” the old man said, and then he broke out into sobs. Asa’s heart broke for the guy. He retracted his wings, gathered up the old, bony man, and brought him up the embankment where he sat the human in front of his teammates. The old man was still softly crying.

Roxanne and her Sharks looked down at the thing that they were expected to eat. Roxanne no longer looked like a lion. The fierceness and blood had
run from her face and she was biting her fingers, looking like a small child who has just seen a spirit of the dead. Bruce turned, walked from the circle, and then vomited down the embankment. Jen couldn’t look the man in the eyes, and neither could Asa.

He recalled his earlier resolve not to be changed by the Academy, and not to become a monster. His stomach was growling heavily, though.
And some of us will die if we don’t eat.

Unlike the rest of his teammates, Boom
Boom was looking at the old man full in the face. “Who’s going to do it?” he asked.

The old man whimpered.

“We’re not killing him!” Bruce said.

“Yes we are, tubby,” Mike said back. “Or, should I say, not-so-tubby? You’re not going to make it through the night unless
you eat something, and it looks like grampa is our only option.”

“Stop,” Asa whispered. He felt that both Mike and Bruce were right.

“I couldn’t eat him,” Bruce said.

“We’ll cook him first,” Mike responded. “When he’s over the fire and you smell him, you’ll think differently.”

Roxanne was quiet.

The predicament made Asa disturbed in a way that he had never been before. Mike was right; they would start to die off without food.
But what is my life worth, if I do this? If I kill this innocent man?

“Wait,” the old man rasped. “Just hold on a second, now, gang, please. Let’s, let’s, let’s t-t-talk about this now, let’s be reasonable.”

Asa noticed that Roxanne was now looking at the man. She licked her lips.

“I have information for you, and I’ll give it to you. Just don’t eat me. You can’t eat me,” and then the man broke into quiet sobs and they watched his dirty torso hitch up and down.
              “Don’t lie to us, old man. We’re not stupid,” Boom Boom told him.

The old man went on as though he hadn’t heard. “My name is Adam Trotter,” the man said.

Asa groaned, and clenched his teeth. The man had a name, a story, a life. Asa made up his mind; if anyone wanted to eat Adam, they’d have to go through him. He wasn’t going to let it happen.

“And, I am a scientist. Used to be a scientist, I suppose, for Alfatrex.
A geneticist, specifically. They put me here, in this place, so that you’d kill me, because I know something. And if you don’t eat me, I’ll tell you. Okay?”

No one said anything. Adam Trotter had their attention.

He went on even though no one had agreed not to eat him. “I worked in the Alaska location. There are a lot of secret labs, spread out around the world. And then, one night, I was kidnapped by Academy graduates and rode an underground train here. I wasn’t alarmed, it was part of the job and used to happen every half-year or so, when Robert King had a question he wanted to ask. I’m an expert, you see.

“When I arrived, I was greeted by Robert King. His pupils
, they… never mind. That’s not important. I was taken deep into the southern mountain, the big one. They had trapped this person in a cage, and wanted me to study it. At first, they said he was a person. Then, they said he was a Multiplier. It was like they couldn’t make up their mind. When I started studying the thing, I could see why.

“By the time I got there, the Multiplier had been tortured and was missing toes and fingers.
I was so mad about that—they ruined the specimen. He no longer trusted us.

“
He had long, blond hair and green eyes. He was beautiful. Defiant. They had caught him lurking in the woods behind a mountain, wearing a suit and a tie. This is unusual attire to be out in the wilderness. He was well spoken, and extremely intelligent. Genius, I’d think, but can’t be sure. He wouldn’t ever participate in any aptitude tests.

“He spoke to us, and was cordial and polite, but never gave away any information about his past. We tried to trick him into giving us information. We even used computer software to try to pinpoint his accent—nothing got us any closer to the truth. The more we learned about this person, or Multiplier, or whatever he was—the more confused we became.

“A team of scientists and myself were brought to the mountains to test him. Interrogation had failed; so, we were asked to use experimentation to answer these questions.”

Adam looked around at his audience of genetically altered teenagers who were contemplating eating him. He shook his head and went on.
“We learned a lot. He wasn’t like the Multipliers in the Academy. Electric shock experiments showed that he was as strong as a Multiplier—he certainly was stronger than any graduate. But his gums weren’t as dark as the Multipliers you and I are used to seeing. They looked kind of like if a human eats a lot of blackberries—the gums were pink but tinged with black. And, as an experiment, we would flood his cell with the scent of human blood. An Academy Multiplier will start gushing Salvaserum (that’s the black stuff that they salivate), under these conditions, and uncontrollably. But this Multiplier was immune to it. His mouth remained dry; the scent of blood had no effect on him. This made us conclude that the individual wasn’t an ordinary Multiplier.”

Trotter paused, and wiped sweat from his brow with his forearm. When he spoke again, his voice was trembling. “I am scared to think of what this means.
I think that the Academy doesn’t want anyone to know about this. I think that the discovery of this Multiplier-human-thing has Robert King shaking in his cowboy boots. And I also think that…”

The flash of light and the heat were so intense and
overwhelming of Asa’s senses that for a moment he thought he was dead. He thought that the electrocution had begun, and had burned up his occipital lobe. But then the thunder came and when it was over, Asa and all the other Sharks were on the forest floor.

Adam was sizzling on the ground,
a twitching corpse. A swift strike of lightening had issued from the arena ceiling and killed him, instantly, as he was talking about an Academy secret.

Asa looked at the sky, and then around him. The other Sharks seemed as bewildered as he felt. He didn’t know what to make of the story, but he was sure
of one thing:
someone is watching us. And someone sent that bolt of lightening to stop Adam Trotter from continuing to tell us whatever he was saying.

19

The KEE

              Boom Boom started a fire, and when Viola tossed in a couple twigs, he screamed and then lectured her: “
Careless! You don’t just throw something into the fire like that; you’ll set the whole jungle aflame! Did you see how those twigs practically exploded? The oxygen content of this place is off the charts! If a fire starts, we’re dead!”

             
Viola nodded solemnly and ran her metallic, powerful nails through her hair.

             
No one stopped Boom Boom as he prepared the corpse for eating, but no one looked either. Asa kept feeling alternating waves of hunger and then nausea; he was sickened by his primal urges. He thought,
But I must eat! Listen, if he was still alive, that would be one thing, but he’s already dead! And we’ll die if we don’t eat something!

             
When that didn’t make him feel better about it he thought,
the Academy chose the food, I didn’t. If it were up to me, I’d eat something, anything, else. But this is the only safe thing to eat that we’ve found. It’s not my choice! It’s the Academy’s fault!

             
And then when this thought didn’t make him feel any better, he stopped thinking about eating Adam Trotter’s body entirely.

             
Mike Plode found a semi-sharp rock outlying the creek bed and cut the old man’s head off and chucked the skull with blood stained hair, deep into the jungle. “There you are, pansies!” He said to them. “Now you won’t have to look at it. Now you can eat and not think about what you’ve done, what you’re doing. It’s just a body now, see? Like a cow, or a chicken.”