The Academy: Book 2 (94 page)

             
Asa wished so badly that he could have given Teddy the Multiplier cure and watched him change. Teddy was Asa’s best friend; no one understood Asa quite as Teddy did. Asa would also miss Teddy’s help with homework; he doubted that he could have gotten through this past semester without his friend’s help.

             
Asa still had Jen, whom he was close too, but there seemed to be a cold and invisible barrier between them now. Jen didn’t smile as easily when she was around him. A heavy weight hung between them.

             
A cloud drifted between the sun and the earth, making the forest a shade darker.

             
“Francine Black, Francine Black, Francine Black.” Asa repeated the name aloud, thinking about her. It was hard to imagine his father having such respect for a monkey. Logically, Asa understood that with bigger brains than typical primates, the Davids were capable of expression and logic that was similar to humans. But, intuitively, he couldn’t imagine what such a relationship would be like.

             
Asa zig-zagged through the woods.

             
He wondered about the condition of the world outside of the mountains. He wondered if people still thought Robert King was dead. He wondered if Alfatrex was still a company.

             
He wondered if Teddy was being treated well in the Hive. Asa suspected that they would probably recognize his intelligence and expedite his process of moving through the social hierarchy. Asa shuddered to think that Teddy would probably be able to make the vaccine that allowed the Multipliers to Multiply every day, using Asa’s blood on Allen’s shirt. Then what? There would be millions more made in a matter of weeks.

             
But how long will it take for the Multipliers to synthesize the vaccine? Weeks? Months? Years?

             
“Francine Black, Francine Black, Francine Black.” The words moved unconsciously over Asa’s lips.

             
Asa’s mind drifted further back to the night before he learned about the Academy, and was brought to his new life. He thought about how Harold Kensing would have shot him dead, but a giant, mutated dog intervened and saved Asa. Asa still did not know who had sent the dog; Conway and McCoy had sincerely denied knowledge of the strange and heroic animal.

             
“Francine Black, Francine Black, Francine Black.”

             
Finally, Asa found what he was looking for. This one was fresh. Others he had found were merely piles of three and four bones, already picked over by wildlife in the area.

             
Hanging by her feet, was a dead David; she was a chimp with black hair. Joney had most likely killed her. She wore a tutu; she appeared to be only a child. A bloody tiara with plastic crystals was still hanging from her thick, black hair. She only weighed fifty pounds. Her throat was slit, and there were giant puncture wounds on her abdomen, and her hands, which hung down and almost brushed the ground.

             
Flies were eating out her eyeballs, and Asa stifled a gag as he reached for the vine above and untied her. The smell was unpleasant, and Asa hated touching the dead bodies.

             
Honestly love them,
his father had said. Asa knew that he wouldn’t let the smell get in the way of burying his own mother, whom he honestly loved.

             
Asa laid the dead chimp with the enormous head and empty eye sockets down on the dirt floor and began to dig. With his Winggame earnings from the championship, he had bought ten extra strength mutations, and he could feel their benefit now as he sliced the shovel through the hard earth as easily as if it were butter (he could also feel the caloric cost of the new mutations in his rumbling stomach).

             
He dug like that for five minutes, until he had made a grave, four feet deep and wide enough that the chimp would be able to lay spread out, in her eternal resting place. Asa picked the David up and gently sat her down into the grave. He leapt out and looked down at her.

             
“Joney, you bastard,” Asa whispered. “Why did you have to kill all these Davids?” Asa had a shovel full of dirt and was about to drop it onto the chimp’s body when he paused. He put the dirt back in the pile, and walked around the clearing, his eyes searching.

             
Asa still didn’t feel any different from the white stuff Robert King had injected him with. A tickle of nerves began in his abdomen, and he brushed it away. “Not now, I’m working,” he told himself.

             
Asa found yellow sunflowers growing out of little incline of dirt not far off. He took two handfuls with him back to the burial site. Asa stopped, looked down at the little David, and then jumped into the grave with her. He bent down, placed sunflowers over her chest, and one behind each ear.

             
Then, he climbed out of the grave, grabbed the shovel, and sprinkled the first bit of dirt over her body. For some reason, Asa found this burial more emotional than the others. He wasn’t crying, but there was a morose lump in his throat.

             
When she was buried, he put more flowers atop her grave, along with a couple of stones to keep the wolves and rock dragons from digging her corpse up.

             
Asa Palmer stood, looking down at the grave for some time. In truth, he did sympathize with the Davids. Though they were animals, the things they did reminded him of humans. He recalled the David giving him the polaroid in the arctic jungle.

             
A thin tear rolled from his left eye. Asa pulled his shoulder up and brushed it away. He checked his watch, and sighed. It was time to get back. He picked up his shovel and walked out of the clearing, towards the mountains.

             
There was something that Asa wasn’t aware of; had he used his echolocation while in the clearing, he would have seen that he wasn’t alone. High above, there was another David, clinging to the top branches, watching Asa silently.

             
The wore a t-shirt with a snowman on it. It was old and raggedy; he had found it last year in the pile of clothes the Fishies had thrown out when they were given their Academy issued suits. The clothes were always littered on the back of the mountains, and were stolen away by the Davids. This was one of the ways the Davids got their clothes.

             
This David’s name was Adam, and he, like Asa, had a lump of sadness caught in his throat. Adam had been watching Asa for the last three days. The little David Asa had just buried was Adam’s sister.

             
Adam looked towards the West, and could see Asa trudging through the forest back towards where he lived. Adam sighed, made a decision, and then took off, jumping through the treetops so that he could get another look at the strange human who had the compassion to bury the slain Davids.

11 February 2013 to 15 February 2014