Torn Apart (6 page)

“
No,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. You
cannot be allowed to live. The General would not want it. He
doesn’t like weakness. He doesn’t like outsiders.”

“
I’m not weak. I will help. I
will.”

He took out a knife.

He held it up.

And I knew he was going to do it. He was
brandishing the knife. Waving it back and forth like an evil and
crazy conductor.

I looked away and focused on the desert
horizon. Adrenalin surged in my chest and made me feel
sick.

I remembered this one time, when me and Jack
and Maria went fishing in this isolated cove of Sydney harbor.
Well, it was supposed to be isolated and protected. The wind picked
up in the afternoon. The swell picked up. We were only in a small
boat. It started rocking back and forth. I immediately felt sea
sick. Jack told me to stare at the horizon. Pick out one spot and
focus on it. Maria caught a fish. Big enough to eat for dinner.
Jack scaled it and gutted it, which made me feel even worse. But
the longer I stared at the horizon, the better I felt.

So, as the mad soldier brandished a hunting
knife and looked at his teeth in the reflection of the blade, I
stared at the horizon. I picked out one spot. A small black mark on
the horizon.

I saw a shape.

A dark blob.

I felt less nauseous.

And then I heard a gunshot. It was faded and
distant. The noise echoed across the desert. Two seconds later, the
knife fell at my side and stuck into the dirt.

Blood dripped down the blade.

It was not mine.

I looked up.

The mad soldier was holding the side of his
neck, like a mosquito had bitten him.

He was confused.

He took his hand away. Blood spurted out in a
huge red arc, spraying the desert ground. He looked at his hand. It
was completely red. And then his head snapped backwards. Suddenly
and violently.

And he fell to the ground.

I looked back to the horizon. The dark blob was
getting closer. I realized the mad soldier had been shot in the
head. It was an expert shot. By a marksman. A sniper.

Kenji?

The shape moved closer.

It was a man.

A man with a gun. A rifle. It had to be Kenji,
I thought.

It had to be.

The shadow moved closer, coming for
me.

It was a man. A Large man. Wide.
Tall.

It was not Kenji.

It was Ben.

Ben cut me free with the mad soldier’s hunting knife, saving my
life for the second time. I tried to thank him but he just ignored
me.

“
I mean it,” I said. “I really am
grateful. I don’t know how to repay you. I don’t think I’ll ever be
able to repay you.”

“
My father once told me that you
should do things for people that they can never pay you back for,”
Ben said. “You should do these things as often as possible.” He
paused, as if remembering something. “Besides, I just happened to
be in the right place at the right time. Don’t thank me. Thank your
lucky stars. And this guy was obviously a psycho. Pushed over the
edge.”

“
So what the hell are you even doing
here? What happened back at the outpost? Have you seen
Kenji?”

“
I’m here because I’m pissed off.
I’m here for my revenge. It’s selfish really.”

“
What?”

“
The people in charge. They took
something from me.”

“
What did they take?”

“
My life. My freedom.”

Ben knelt down over the mad soldier and
relieved him of his shotgun. He also took his sidearm and several
magazines of ammunition. He handed me one for my rifle. He threw
away the hunting rifle he had used to shoot the soldier with. It
was out of ammo. His movements were slow but methodical, almost
mechanical, like he was working and moving on autopilot or
something. I noticed that Ben did not look good at all. He looked
pale and weak. I had to remind myself that he had been unconscious
back at the outpost. He had undergone emergency surgery to remove a
bullet from his chest. He was obviously not fully
recovered.

He continued to search the pockets of the dead
soldier, picking him clean. In the soldier’s vest he found a couple
of energy bars.

“
Here, eat this,” he said as he
handed me one of the bars. “Don’t know when we will get another
chance to eat.”

I took the energy bar. But I wasn’t hungry. I
still felt sick. “How did you get out?” I asked again. “What
happened back at the outpost? Did Kenji make it out?”

“
Don't know. I woke up. Pain in my
chest. Heard the alarm. I got out of there. You get a feeling in
your gut. A cold, sinking, awful feeling. You come to trust that
feeling. Trust it with your life.”

“
So you don’t know where Kenji is?
You don’t know where he went? You don’t know if he made it
out?”

“
No. I’m sorry. The place was
abandoned. I heard the alarm. I got the hell out of there. I
figured you people had done the same.”

“
We came back for you. We wouldn’t
just leave you.”

“
Whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’s in
the past.”

“
How did you get here? How did you
find us?”

“
I just followed the tracks. Same as
you, I guess. I wasn’t looking for you.”

“
Oh.”

The mad soldier also had an automatic rifle
slung over his back. It was similar to the one I was carrying. I
picked it up and offered it to Ben. But he didn’t want
it.

“
Don’t like automatic weapons. They
jam. I’ll stick with the shotgun. It’s got plenty of stopping
power. And I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need stopping
power.”

“
We need to get Maria first,” I
said. “She is all that matters. We need to get down
there.”

I pointed to the trap door.

Ben was already moving, one step ahead. He
pulled up the chain that was attached to the trap door. He looked
at the man hole.

He shook his head. “No good. Need a password.
And we can’t ask him. Dead men tell no tales.”

“
So what now?”

He moved over to the ditch of severed hands. He
started looking through them, tossing them aside.

“
What are you doing?”

“
Looking for a key.”

“
A key?”

“
Yeah.”

He picked up a hand that looked less dirty than
the others. Fresher.

He moved the fingers back and forth.

“
Now what are you doing?” I
asked.

“
Checking for rigor mortis. The keys
have a time limit. This one is still fresh.”

He moved over to the pole and moved the hand in
front of it. “It’s a scanner,” he said. “Reads the
barcode.”

He scanned the barcode on the wrist of the
severed hand back and forth. Nothing happened.

“
So the barcode is the key,” I
said.

“
Bingo.”

“
Wait, don’t you have a barcode? On
your wrist? I saw it.”

He showed me his wrist. The barcode was gone.
It was replaced with a messy scar. It was inflamed and swollen.
“Someone took it. Need to find another one.”

The barcode was the key, I thought to myself.
The dreadlocked woman in the creek bed, she had one. Ben had one.
And someone took it. Someone cut it off his wrist. Someone who knew
they needed a key.

He kicked away a few hands. Found a small
square piece of fabric or sand paper or something.

“
Well, look what we have here,” he
said as he held up the small rectangular piece of
fabric.

He held it up to the sunlight. And that's when
I saw what it was. It wasn’t a piece of fabric. It wasn’t a piece
of sandpaper.

It was a piece of skin.

A piece of skin with a barcode tattooed on to
it.

“
Wait, what is this place?” I
asked.

He showed me his forearm again. It was burnt
and disfigured. He showed me how the square piece of the skin fit
into place on his arm. “This is the Fortress.”

“What?” I asked in disbelief. “This is the Fortress?”

“
Yeah.”

“
Well, where the hell is
it?”

“
It’s underground.”

“
Underground? The whole
thing?”

Ben nodded.

This is why the dreadlocked woman and why Ben
had said we would never find the Fortress. It was hidden. Off the
grid. It was underground.

“
And what the hell is that?” I
asked, referring to the square piece of skin.

He showed me his forearm again. “My barcode. My
access code. This should work.”

“
Who did that to you? Who cut it off
you?”

“
Don’t know. I woke up. I was
bleeding from my arm. I was bleeding bad. Tried to stop it. But
several veins and the artery had been cut. Had to burn them to seal
all the vessels shut.”

“
Burn it? With what?”

“
A blowtorch.”

I shook my head. I could not even imagine the
amount of pain that would cause. Taking a blowtorch to an open
wound? Voluntarily? It made me feel sick just thinking about it.
But I suppose the alternative was bleeding to death. Sometimes I
got the feeling that Ben was a machine or a god or maybe he just
didn’t feel pain the way normal humans did.

“
Who the hell would do that? Who
cut, who…” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

It was too much.

Someone had severed all these hands. Maybe
hundreds. Someone who knew they needed a key, the barcode, to get
inside the Fortress. There were so many hands.

Was it the crazy soldier? Or was it someone
else?

“
Where are the bodies?” I
asked

Ben shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know.
They’ve either been eaten. Or they have turned.”

“
Eaten?”

“
By the nano-swarms. By wild dogs.
The fact that there are no bones here suggests maybe the
nano-swarms got to them. Or maybe someone buried them or hid them
somewhere else.”

He was cleaning his own piece of skin,
carefully brushing the dirt off. He moved over to the pole and
scanned the barcode back and forth. He did this multiple times. And
again, nothing happened.

“
How long has it been?” Ben
asked.

“
Huh?”

Ben closed his eyes. Thinking back. Counting
the days in his head. Counting the days since he left the Fortress.
“Six days. There's still time. This should work.”

“
What should work?”

“
My access code. It shuts off after
a week. Once you leave, you got a week to get back. If you’re gone
longer than that, you're gone for good.”

“
Wait a minute,” I said, remembering
what the man in the attic of the barn had said. “It won't
work.”

“
Why not?”

“
They issued a Code Black. A
Lockdown. No one gets in.”

“
Lockdown?” Ben asked. “No. They
wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t. Lockdown would mean shutting
down…” He trailed off, thinking of the implications of what the
Lockdown meant.

From the way he was acting, I got the
impression that a Lockdown was a very bad thing.

“
What happens when they order a
Lockdown?” I asked.

“
It’s not good. It basically means
game over for everyone.”

He flattened his piece of skin out. Tried
scanning it again. “This has to work,” he said with a hint of
desperation in his voice. “It has to.”

“
Why?”

“
Because. They took from me. They
...” again he trailed off. “Come on!”

He dropped the piece of skin and started
kicking the pole. “Come on!”

Suddenly a light on top of the metal pole
turned green.

The ground began to shake.

And then it began to sink.

Is sink the right word? Maybe not. It was like
the whole ground began to lower. Descend.

The desert floor gave way.

It was like a massive elevator
platform.

It was an entry point into the
Fortress.

“
It worked,” Ben said, relieved.
“We’re in.”

I couldn’t get over the size of this platform. It was
massive.

“
This is massive,” I said in
complete shock.

“
Vehicle entry point,” Ben said.
“Tanks. Humvees. Transport vehicles. Aircraft. Drones.
Everything.”

The desert floor continued to give way,
descending slowly. It was a large, rectangular area. Bigger than a
football field. Bigger than several football fields. It was like
the ground, the entire desert was sinking. How far down did we go?
I’m not sure. Hundreds of feet. Maybe deeper.