The Seeds of Man (3 page)

Lora was in pain when she awoke. Everything hurt. So she hobbled into the bathroom, swallowed a pain pill, and began to take inventory. There was a scratch on one cheek, her upper lip was swollen, and an angry-looking bruise appeared as she removed her tee. She touched it, winced, and turned to the shower. Having kicked her panties off, Lora stepped in under the pulsating spray. It hurt like hell. She made the necessary adjustment and uttered a sigh of relief. She knew that soaping herself would be painful, so she let that step go and just stood there, water running down her body, wondering if that was the last hot shower she would ever have.

After toweling off and getting dressed, Lora listened to see if her father was up and around. He wasn’t, and that was just as well, because there was something she wanted to do—no,
had
to do. Something he wouldn’t approve of.

School was going to start in an hour, so when she sent the text message to Matt, she was pretty sure that he would respond; the reply came seconds later. Lora put her comset in her pocket, slipped out of the apartment, and made her way to the central elevators. Each step was painful and made all the more so by her attempts to walk normally. There wasn’t any way to conceal the fat lip, but the last thing she wanted to do was attract attention by limping across the sky bridge.

However, most of the people she encountered were on their way to work and not inclined to pay much attention to those around them. Still, when Lora got off on Level 7, she took a quick look around to make sure that she wasn’t under observation. As far as she could tell, no one was paying attention to her.

So she crossed a sky bridge to the east side and followed the circular walkway to the spot where she and the rest of the students in Agro 105 were installing the new irrigation system and where Luke had attacked her. There was one last hose to attach to the manifold, and she was determined to finish the job before leaving the Sanctuary.

After removing a screwdriver from a plastic toolbox, she went over to the spot where she’d had been working the day before and lowered herself to the ground. Various parts of her body still hurt, but not as badly as before. Maybe a little bit of exercise would be good for her.

And that’s where she was, making the final connection, when Matt arrived. He was dressed for school and sat down next to her. “I’m sorry about what happened yesterday. They arrested Luke . . . and a good thing too.”

Lora completed the hookup and then sat cross-legged. “He deserves it—that’s for sure.” She was silent for a moment. “Matt . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Can you keep a secret? An important secret?”

“Sure. How ‘bout that time you cut school? I never told.”

“No, you didn’t. And I appreciate that. Well, here’s the deal. My father and some of his friends are going to leave the hab about nine o’clock tonight. And I’m going with them.”

“Holy cow! You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Nope, I’m not kidding. We’re going to take some seeds to people who need them. But I couldn’t leave without telling you. You’re the only friend I have.”

Matt looked embarrassed. “Yeah, well, that goes for me too. If you leave I’ll be all alone.”

“You’ll have Cory.”

“Do me a favor . . . Take him with you.”

Lora laughed as she stood. “Thanks for everything, Matt. And remember, don’t tell.”

“I won’t,” Matt promised. “Take care of yourself.”

Lora turned and walked away. Tears were flowing by then, and she didn’t want him to see.

The rest of the day passed slowly—from her perspective, at least. Because unlike her father, who had lots of mysterious errands to run, all Lora could do was place some personal items in a case her father gave her and wait. They had dinner at six and tried to take naps, but Lora couldn’t sleep.

Finally seven forty-five rolled around and George gave Lora a final briefing. “Okay, hon, we’re going to leave at eight o’clock straight up. Bring the case I gave you but nothing else. It would look suspicious if we were seen carrying all sorts of stuff through the habitat. That’s why everything we need was assembled over a period of months and is stored close to our point of departure.”

“What about clothes?” Lora wanted to know.

“Like I said, everything you’ll need is waiting for you. Now, when we leave the apartment, we will follow the walkway to Corridor Four, and that will lead us back to the emergency stairwell.” Lora was familiar with the stairwells, having used them for short trips from level to level and during fire drills, so she nodded.

“We’re going to follow the stairwell all the way down,” her father declared. “I have a key to the door at the bottom. It will allow us to access one of the catwalks that we use to maintain the biofiltration plant.”

George was a biofiltration engineer, one of a team responsible for the habitat’s septic system and wastewater treatment plant. As such, he had access to the area under the Sanctuary’s lowest level. “Once we reach the central column,” George continued, “we’ll board a service elevator.” That was important because the regular elevators were transparent.

“Once we reach the very top, one of our people will be there to let us into the A Deck maintenance area,” George continued. “That’s where we’ll gear up prior to opening a hatch and leaving the Sanctuary. Do you have any questions?”

Lora had questions. Lots of them. Would the leavers be able to leave? Would the barbarians kill them? Would she freeze to death? But Lora couldn’t bring herself to voice her fears, not given the look of bright-eyed excitement on her father’s face. So she shook her head. “No, I don’t have any questions.”

“Okay,” George said. “Let’s take one last look around. It’s the last time you’ll see this dump.”

But it
wasn’t
a dump. It was Lora’s home, the only one she could remember. She knew there had been an upper-level apartment once, back before her father began to express his political views, back when her mother was alive. Lora felt a momentary longing for the mother she had never known, double-checked to make sure that the picture of her was in the case, and wondered if her death had something to do with her father’s radical views.

But there was no time for further contemplation as George led her out onto the walkway and the door closed behind her. The click seemed unnaturally loud to Lora’s ears as she followed her father to Corridor 4, where they took a left. From that point, everything went just as he said it would. He opened the door marked “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” and led her across a long catwalk. Greenish water swirled below as huge blades kept it moving, just part of the complicated machinery that made the habitat possible.

Having reached the central platform, they boarded a service elevator, which carried them up to the very top of the structure, where a uniformed protector was waiting for them—one of the same men Lora had spoken with the night before! Except now he was armed with an assault rifle and a pistol. Lora’s heart nearly stopped, and some of her fear must have been visible on her face, because the protector smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m on your side.”

George chuckled. “He sure is. Officer Fry has been extremely helpful. In fact, it’s safe to say we wouldn’t be able to carry out our mission without him.”

Another lift arrived and five people got off. Lora recognized three of them as friends of her father’s, meaning individuals who came to visit once in a while. It wasn’t long before even more leavers arrived—sixteen in all, counting the Larsys. That was when Lora realized something important, to her at least, and that was the fact that there weren’t any other teenagers in the group. She was all alone.
That shouldn’t bother you,
she told herself,
because you were alone at school too.
But somehow it did.

There was a lot of excited chatter, which stopped when George spoke. “Keep it down, everybody—we’ll have plenty of time to talk later on. Larry? Lead the way.”

Officer Fry opened a door, and one of the leavers held it as the rest of them trooped through and stepped onto a circular road. After following it past a number of alcoves and bays, the group arrived at the point where the path passed between opposing sets of doors.

The one on the left was labeled “HATCH 5,” and a sign on the one directly across from it said “VEHICLE STORAGE.” Fry slipped a key card into a slot next to the vehicle storage bay. Two vehicles were revealed as a corrugated door rumbled up and out of sight They were orange, boxy, and equipped with four sets of tracks each—two in front and two in back. “They’re Sno-Cats,” George explained. “The keepers haven’t allowed anyone to do anything more than maintain them for the past twenty-five years. Our gear is aboard and they’re ready to go.”

It soon became apparent that two of the leavers knew how to drive the machines, because they were quick to open doors, climb aboard, and start the engines. They pulled out onto the circular road, where they paused to let the rest of the group board. Suddenly, a phalanx of protectors surged into sight with weapons at the ready. One of them shouted, “Stop!” and fired a warning shot. There was a clang as the bullet hit metal and ricocheted away.

And there, at the very front of the group, was council member Hal Mackey, Matt’s father. That was when Lora knew the horrible truth. The entire group had been betrayed. And it was her fault.

Jackson, Wyoming, USA

E
xcept for the yellow bruise off to the west, the rest of the sky was gray. And according to the tiny gauge clipped to his ragged parka, the temperature was thirty-eight degrees, a warm spring day.

Tre was lying on his stomach under an old tarp. It was a standard part of his kit and could be used as a shelter or, in this case, a hide. And hiding was an important skill in a world ruled by predators. Tre had spent the last day and a half watching the town of Jackson, Wyoming, through a pair of highly prized Nikon binoculars. They were small and light and had been found lying next to a skeleton. Two skeletons, actually, an adult and a child, spooned together in the stained remains of a cheap sleeping bag. Had they been sick? Or died of starvation? Either was possible in post apocalyptic America.

Tre pushed the memory aside in order to scan the town below. He had a good vantage point about halfway up Snow King Mountain, just off what had been the path of a chair lift. Some of the cables were down now, as was one of the towers, and trees were repopulating the former ski runs.

The downtown area was laid out in a grid pattern that made it easy to draw on the notebook near his right hand. Because while Tre had a much-creased map of Wyoming, he didn’t have a map of Jackson.

It looked as though half the town had been ravaged by fire at some point, and it was safe to assume that it had been looted as well, but there were very few tracks in the snow-covered streets. Tre figured that three, maybe four people lived in Jackson now, each of whom was probably aware of the others. Did they get along? Or were they trying to kill one another? There was no way to tell. But Tre hadn’t seen any signs that gangs roamed the ruins below, and that was important, because while he could handle one or two assailants if necessary, a group could take him down. That’s why more than a day had been spent watching the town from afar.

Satisfied that he knew as much about Jackson as he was likely to learn from the mountainside, Tre put the binoculars away and began to make the necessary preparations. The plan was to go down, find a hidey-hole, and fort up. Then he’d get up early and go looking for tech, books, and food, in that order—not because he didn’t need food but because he was very unlikely to find any in a town that had been picked over by thousands of people for a period of fifty years.

But tech? Lots of people lacked the knowledge required to use or repair it. And books, well, that was where Tre’s knowledge of technology had been acquired.

So Tre folded the tarp into thirds and rolled it into a tight tube, which he attached to the bottom of his aluminum pack frame just above the precious mummy bag. The Whittaker Marmot sack was filthy, and home to a rank smell, but it could keep Tre warm down to forty below, a very important asset found in a compartment under the floor of a wrecked van. It was why Tre always looked inside vehicles—even if there was every reason to believe that countless other people had already done so. All it took was one Marmot bag to make hundreds of such investigations worthwhile.

Tre strapped the aluminum snowshoes onto his boots, struggled to stand, and bent to retrieve his pack. It felt lighter than it had when he set out from home. But if luck was with him, it would soon be heavy again.

The last step was to open his Savage model 311-A double-barreled shotgun and check to make sure that it was loaded. The weapon was, like everything else, a compromise. Being a .410, it didn’t pack the punch that a twelve-gauge would. On the other hand, the ammo was lighter, and Tre could fire the sawed off weapon one-handed and was likely to hit something if he did. Then he could fire again or run, the second option being the one he favored most.

There was a comforting click as he closed the gun and returned it to the holster strapped to his right thigh. That left Tre’s hands free to use the hand-carved trekker poles. They helped Tre maintain his footing as he made his way down through a scattering of evergreens toward the flatland below. The widely spaced trees weren’t much; however, some cover was better than none.

There were tracks, but not many, since it was hard for animals to find enough food. Tre saw some elk scat, what might have been raccoon prints, and the kind of scratch marks that birds make, but nothing human. And that was the main concern as Tre arrived at the tree line, where he paused to look around. There were no pillars of smoke to be seen, which was a good thing. It was important to cross the open area as quickly as possible.

Except for the occasional caw of a crow, the crunching sound the snowshoes made as they broke through the crusty snow, and the rasp of his own breathing, there was nothing but silence. Having crossed the open area, Tre removed his snowshoes prior to entering a half-burned house. Some partially charred stairs up to the second floor where he took a look around.