The Repossession (20 page)

the hell someone was doing out here puzzled her. This wasn’t the way to anywhere. Then again she’d already seen one boy out in the forest that day – and look what happened to him!

Rian stopped momentarily and Genie drew level, trying to get her breath. Rian’s face was red and his lungs felt tight. There were still scars from his illness.

‘Listen.’

Nothing but the sound of water dripping off trees.

Not even birds. Nothing.

Genie stared into the trees, looked behind her too to make sure they knew the way back. It was dark now and she was still a townie and slightly afraid of the forest at night.

The howl, when it came again, practically stopped their hearts.

‘This way,’ Genie declared. ‘This way.’

She set off, ready for anything. No idea what to expect.

She was becoming a wild creature. Who would have ever thought she could go feral, end up chasing coyotes? It made her feel astonishingly good about herself.

They pulled up at the edge of the forest. The ravine was before them, a vertical drop of some hundred metres. Thick power cables straddled it, suspended from giant metal towers. At the bottom of the ravine, a few

kilometres further on, would be the dreaded Fortress.

Rian took Genie’s arm. The coyotes were standing in a semi-circle by a rock outcrop over the ravine. They seemed spooked. They knew Rian and Genie were behind them but they didn’t move. There was someone or something on the rock. It was hard to see anything clearly now but there was definitely something there.

‘What do we do?’ Genie whispered.

Rian wasn’t sure. The animals were behaving strangely.

They didn’t like the position they were in and the leader of the pack was looking for a way out. Rian knew they didn’t normally attack humans. They preferred small prey.

This was altogether strange.

‘This way,’ Rian whispered. He moved away in a big circle. Genie followed. It would allow the coyotes to slip away without confrontation.

Genie turned back. Sure enough the leader of the pack led them away and they vanished into the undergrowth. She looked at Rian and was amazed he knew how to do that.

‘Watched a lot of wildlife shows on TV when I was fourteen,’ Rian informed her. ‘One of my many secrets.’

Genie squeezed his hand with affection.

They moved back to the rock. There was no one there.

‘Hey? What? Where are you? Hey, we’re here to help,’

Rian was shouting.

No one. Genie was up on the rock. There was no blood, no evidence anyone had been there.

‘I don’t get it,’ Rian was saying.

‘Someone screamed,’ Genie was saying. ‘We both heard it.’

‘Sometimes a coyote can sound like a kid crying.

I’ve heard it. Spooky, but they’ve got all kinds of different sounds and expressions. They have to so they can communicate with each other in the pack.’

‘So what
did
we hear?’ Genie asked.

Rian wasn’t sure. Whatever it was had gone or jumped, and if it had jumped it was dead now.

Genie was shining the flashlight over the edge, convinced she’d seen something. Rian pulled her back.

She let him. It was stupid to take risks like this. ‘Come on.

We’re heading back.’

A low rumble of thunder echoed down the ravine. The late summer storm hadn’t left the forest yet. Lightning momentarily flashed and travelled along the power lines, snapping violently on its way.

‘Let’s go. Dangerous place to be in a storm, Genie,’

Rian told her.

Genie wasn’t sure which way was home, but she

sensed it was north-west. She couldn’t get her bearings.

She switched off the flashlight because it was confusing her. ‘You know the way?’

‘This way, I think,’ Rian was saying. Suddenly he tripped and fell hard.

‘Ri!’ Genie shouted and was down beside him in a flash. ‘What the . . .’

It wasn’t Rian. It was something else entirely.

Warm and shaking with terror. Rian had tripped over it. Genie took out her flashlight again and shone it on the creature.

Rian sat up, brushing dirt off his face and then stared at the thing on ground.

Genie’s heart thumped wildly. It was a dog, but seriously deformed. The head seemed about right but the back legs were fused together. How had it got here?

Still alive. Barely. Clearly terrified, it stared at them both.

Some time or another it had started life as a Labrador.

But it was clearly half the size and just plain wrong. Its neck was bleeding, a coyote bite most likely. She couldn’t believe it had made so much noise, but then again, she could – she felt like crying.

Genie suddenly knew exactly what it was. And where it had come from. ‘They’re using dogs, Ri. It’s like with the kids, the Fortress is using dogs.’

Rian looked at her and the unlikely dog and instinctively knew it was true.

‘But how did it get here?’

‘Why didn’t the coyotes eat it?’ Genie wanted to know.

‘There were enough of them.’

She tried to stroke and soothe it but it flinched, afraid of her.

‘My guess is they were as scared of it as it is of them.

The poor thing. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe it’s here. I mean, it can’t have crawled from the Fortress or the other place. This is like – utterly impossible.’

Genie agreed. She kinda wished the coyotes had eaten it. At least it would be out of its misery. ‘We have to show it to Marshall.’

Rian nodded. He was a bit reluctant to pick the dog up. Clearly it couldn’t walk; it had to drag itself along.

Who knew how far it had come?

Genie tried to pick it up, but it was heavy. Rian took it over and slung it over his shoulders. The dog whimpered, but seemed to accept it. Genie couldn’t look at its imploring eyes. Once this dog was complete, some kid’s pet maybe, and now it had no idea what had happened to it.

‘Hell, this is what is happening to the kids, right,’

Rian stated, only now realizing the full horror of what

the Fortress was doing. ‘Renée is lucky this didn’t happen to her.’

‘Lucky? They lost
all
of her body, Ri. It’s criminal.

This is like, what’s that old movie . . . I know I started it once and couldn’t watch . . .
The Island of Dr Moreau
.

He was turning animals into humans.’

‘What was the point of that?’

‘I never found out, but it was gross. Believe me.’

The thunder rolled closer. Lightning flashed.

‘Rain’s coming back,’ Rian announced.

Marshall was incensed. He photographed the dog, took measurements and then, well out of sight of Genie, humanely put it down. He had pointed out to her that it couldn’t live and every second it did it was in agony.

‘It doesn’t have an asshole. If it ate it would have nowhere to go.’

Genie turned deathly white. There wasn’t going to be any magic to fix this.

Rian was sitting in the kitchen. More upset than he cared to admit to anyone. Seeing the dog in the harsh kitchen light had made him queasy. He just sat quietly, drinking some water, hoping his stomach would settle. Genie was sitting in silence at the end of the table, thinking.

Marshall came back in later and washed his hands.

He didn’t say anything for a while. He knew they’d want to ask questions. He wasn’t sure he had the answers.

‘What I’d like to know,’ Marshall said at length, ‘is how it ended up in the forest.’

‘Couldn’t have been there long. Few hours maybe,’

Rian muttered.

‘Much less. The coyotes would have smelled its fear, but it was interesting they didn’t finish it off.’

‘You think someone dumped it?’

Marshall wasn’t sure. ‘No road up there. Not even a track. Seems unlikely.’

‘It couldn’t fly there. No one shot it out of a cannon.

Someone must have taken it there. It couldn’t walk,’

Genie said.

Marshall walked over to a map at the end of his kitchen wall. He was looking at it quite intently. ‘Genie, you say you were at a rock outcrop by the ravine?’

‘Yeah. You can see the power transmission cables, they’re real close. We saw lightning travel along some. Crackled and snapped, looked angry. Never seen that before.’

Marshall was studying the map still lying on the table, looking at the distance between the Fortress and its partner, the Synchro building.

‘There’s a point just about five hundred metres from

that rock where the power cables swing over the forest.

It’s pretty low. They cleared a whole lot of trees to get it over the hump.’

‘So?’ Rian asked.

‘Let’s say you were there at around eight-thirty tonight.

You didn’t leave until the storm passed.’

‘We went to the barn first,’ Genie reminded him.

‘You would have taken about fifteen or twenty minutes running in the forest to get to the ravine. If the dog had been there about an hour, it would mean he arrived in the middle of the storm. Lightning’s always pretty fierce around here.’

‘Then no one is going to go out in that,’ Genie said. ‘It was like a monsoon.’

‘Exactly. No one did.’

Rian snorted. ‘The dog got there on its own, with no back legs?’

Marshall turned to face them, his face filled with conjecture. ‘It did. I wonder . . .’

‘What?’ Genie asked.

Marshall looked at the map again. ‘You have to take me out there. Now. We originally installed ground receptors there and they’d still be there. In case of information drop out. They’d enable the Fortress to boost transmission. If the storm somehow

activated them or reversed the flow . . .’

Genie looked at Rian and shrugged. They didn’t have a clue about what he was muttering.

He was still thinking aloud. ‘Lightning can carry up to a hundred and twenty million volts. Say it strikes during a transmission from the Fortress. They are transmitting photons using light waves, but what if, at the exact time they transmit, the line of transmission was struck with a hundred and twenty million volts? It could either just disintegrate or shed its load.’

Rian looked at Marshall. The man looked quite excited.

‘Marshall, we’re kids, were still at high school. Explain in English.’

‘The purpose of the experiment is the jump from one place to another.’

‘Like in
Heroes
. I used to watch it when I was younger. Hiro could stop time and go anywhere he wanted by just thinking about it,’ Rian explained.

Marshall clearly hadn’t ever seen
Heroes
. ‘That would obviously be impossible. You can’t just instantly be in another place, the G-force would kill you. Genie, you believed you had been inside the Synchro building, remember? You were, but not in the flesh. I absolutely believe that you have a special skill. But
no one
can

physically jump from one place to another, a distance away, unless their DNA is transformed into photonic light pulses and squeezed through an electron tube to a defined destination. That’s the whole point of the Fortress experimentation. Teleportation is matter transference and because it is unstable, bodies don’t hold together.

At least, none have till now.’

Rian got it. ‘So the dog’s transmission was interrupted.’

‘It was, and at least most of it materialized in the forest. It didn’t disintegrate.’

‘But it was deformed.’

Marshall was thinking about that too. ‘What if the deformation takes places at some point between A and B? The integrity of the original dog remains intact but . . .

It has to be the receptors.’

He was quite animated now, thinking about it.

‘We know, thanks to Genie, they have managed to transmit a whole live animal or person to the end destination, but it’s somewhere along the last stage that things fall apart. The sudden surge of power somehow enabled transmission to shed its load. It acted like a boost. Your dog materialized on the ground. It could only do that if the receptors are up and running and acting like an end destination. Diverting the load. It’s exciting.’

‘Exciting?’ Rian queried.

‘The transmission worked. That dog is proof that they can really do this now.’

‘Except for the bit where they fused his legs together,’

Rian pointed out.

Marshall sat down. ‘Yes. Except for that. But perhaps the lightning storm had more to do with that.’ Marshall grabbed the flashlight. ‘Come on. Take me there. I need to see the exact place it happened.’

Rian looked at Genie. She shrugged. She was too spooked to move.

Rian left with Marshall and Moucher. Genie stayed in the kitchen, but in the quiet of the farmhouse she realized she felt scared to be alone. It creaked in the wind and she didn’t like the thought of the dead dog left outside. She hoped Marshall had buried it.

She suddenly had to leave and ran out of the house into the open. Marshall and Rian had already disappeared, but she could see the flashlight bobbing in the trees as they walked ahead. She took off, praying she wouldn’t trip on any tree roots in the dark. It was stupid, she was bound to fall or crack her head open, or something.

Thirty minutes later, Marshall sat on the big rock trying to get his breath back and massaging his leg stump. It had been hard for him to walk so far.

‘You sure this is the place?’

‘Yeah.’ Rian splashed the light around. ‘We found the dog right here. You can see where the ferns are crushed.

The coyotes were totally spooked.’

Marshall nodded. ‘OK. Turn around. Walk twenty paces west and stop.’

Rian did as he was told, aiming the flashlight just ahead of him.

‘OK. Stop. Bend down, shine the light around. Can you see any instrumentation in the ground, maybe some cables?’

Rian was looking at the forest floor. It was pretty dense, the plants had long taken over.

‘No, nothing . . . wait . . .’ He put the flashlight down and pulled at some ferns. The unmistakable light of a flashing red diode was blinking at him.

Marshall was beside him in a second. He whistled in surprise. ‘Shine the flashlight on it.’

Moucher suddenly dashed off into the trees.

‘Moucher? Don’t disappear,’ Marshall called after him.