“What do you mean?”
“On the surface. You went through so much. I
can’t even imagine.”
I didn’t dare respond. Was she hoping I
regretted my escape? Certainly my actions after being returned here
ensured that she didn’t mistake my current docility with any sort
of relief at having been captured.
“Did you love her?” asked my mother, and I
knew exactly who she was talking about.
I considered saying that I wasn’t sure,
because I’d never loved anyone before and that it was impossible
for me to understand such a deep emotion. I thought that was what
she wanted to hear, but I knew that I couldn’t express that with
enough honesty to convince her I wasn’t lying. She needed to trust
me.
“Yes.”
My mother stared out at me, studying me. Then
she looked away, as if focusing on something else that I couldn’t
see. “She was quite pretty.”
I nodded, and the emotions that threatened to
surge through me caused my hands to tremble.
“Would you like to see her again?” asked my
mother.
My lungs momentarily lost their ability to
draw in breath. I seized up, as if time itself had halted.
“What?”
“Not her, exactly,” said my mother,
recognizing in my reaction that I’d misinterpreted her. “We have
the video from your escape. Some of it is rather unsettling.” She
cringed as she stared down at something I wasn’t privy to. “Most of
it is unsettling, but I could find a moment in this somewhere that
I could capture for you. Something free of violence. Would you like
that?”
I needed to stick to my plan. I’d been
practicing this for several days, planning my response to each
rebuke she might offer. Nothing was supposed to matter to me other
than convincing her to let me meet with another Dawn. Yet now, I
was all but speechless. I uttered a weak response, “Yes.”
She was still looking down, and I took the
opportunity to wipe away the tears that glassed my vision. “Is
there any particular moment you can think of that you’d like to
have? Something that would help you remember her. Something that
will help soothe you.”
There was, but I hesitated to tell her. I
knew that seeing Hailey again wouldn’t help me get over her loss,
but all I had left of her were memories. Mother was offering me the
chance to see her again, and I couldn’t refuse.
“Outside.” My voice escaped as little more
than a whisper. I cleared my throat and spoke louder, “When we got
outside. When she walked out into the sunshine.”
I knew there had been a camera there to see
us. I remembered the guard that Hero had shot talking with someone
else on his radio. The voice on the radio had spotted Hailey and me
trying to escape.
My doppelganger was staring down again as she
watched the video I desperately wanted to see. It must’ve been the
first time she’d seen it, because she became momentarily startled
and I guessed it was from when the guard had been shot. A moment
later it looked as if she was about to say something, but then her
attention was grabbed and she watched the video intently. A smile
crept across her face and she snickered when she said, “Well what
do you know about that.”
“What?” I asked.
“I’d heard you met Levon,” she said with a
coy grin.
“His friends call him Hero,” I said and she
nodded.
“Give me a moment,” said my digital
representation before the screen went dark.
My heart raced, and I cursed myself for not
sticking with the plan. Her diversion had been too powerful to
ignore. The hope of seeing Hailey again was almost physically
debilitating. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to see her.
The screen came alive again and mother walked
into view. I stood straighter in expectation.
“We were able to isolate a nice picture of
Hailey Dawn, right as she stepped out into the light. Her beauty
was…” she halted in search of the proper adjective.
“Remarkable.”
“Can I…” my question trailed off as my heart
continued to pound.
Mother lifted her hand and expanded her
fingers, causing a new window to appear on the screen. Within the
new window was a picture of my lost treasure.
I gasped and my eyes filled with tears. I
wiped them furiously and then stepped forward. Hailey was turning
back to look at me after just passing from the shadow of the
facility’s entrance. Her red hair was aglow in the sunlight, giving
it a fiery life it had never known under the buzzing halogen bulbs
that lit our existence. Her emerald eyes were wide with fear, and
her lips had parted as if she were about to call out my name.
Then, as suddenly as her beauty had come back
into my life, she was gone. The window closed and disappeared into
my mother’s clenched fist.
“Bring her back,” I said.
“Perhaps,” said my mother through that wicked
interpretation of myself. “But you have to do a better job of
working with me.”
“Please let me see her again.” I was
disgusted by the desperation in my own voice.
“Then do as we ask,” she paused before
exemplifying her point with my old name, “Cobra.”
It stung.
The only success I’d enjoyed since being
locked up back in this hell was forcing them to start using my new
name. Now she was exerting her dominance, and I was complacent. As
much as I hated her for it, she’d beaten me.
I nodded.
“Good,” she said.
“Can you show me the picture again?” I asked.
“Could I watch the video of when we…”
“Not now,” said my mother sharply. “You do as
you’re told, and we’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
“But I…”
“Don’t get greedy,” she said before the
screen went black.
I was left alone again, and the silence
caused my own heartbeat to drum in my ear. I placed my hand on the
screen where Hailey’s picture had been, and closed my eyes. It was
hard to believe that she was prettier than my memories of her, but
she was. I concentrated on the fading image in my mind, determined
to memorize as many details as possible.
I thought of her lips, and how they’d just
started to part in the picture mother had shown me. I tried to
recall that moment. What had she said to me? Had she called out my
name?
“Celeste.”
No. That couldn’t have been what she said.
Hailey never knew me by that name. She knew me as Cobra.
That realization is what I needed to snap
myself free of the despair mother had manipulated in me. She’d used
my love of Hailey to beat me down. Just the promise of the sight of
Hailey had been enough to cause me to curtail any rebellion I’d
hoped to start.
I wouldn’t be cowed so easily.
Mother would learn that.
Jerald Scott
“I don’t think that was a good idea,” I said
to the stuffy old bitch. When we’d first brought her to the
facility, I assumed it was as a prisoner, but things change
quickly, especially when the world’s gone to shit. And our world
had most definitely fallen straight into the porcelain throne, even
more so than it had been before. Now that the Tempest Strain was
out, all bets were off. Any plan we’d been cooking up had been
tossed aside. Now we were all just trying to figure out a way to
survive.
We were on the Administrator’s level, beside
where the Dawns were kept. I didn’t come down here often, or at
least I didn’t used to. Nowadays it felt like I was stuck in this
damn cube-hell, like one of the worker drones that died off when we
hit the restart button on society.
This was where the women managed the Dawns.
They monitored everything, and communicated with the girls during
their exercises and occasionally in their rooms. The majority of
contact between the Dawns and their digital reflections in the
morning was done via a link with The Electorate, allowing the women
that would eventually be transferred into the Dawns a chance to
connect. This was part of the extensive process that was required
to facilitate a transfer. Other than that, any contact that the
Dawns had were with the women that worked on this floor.
No detail about the Dawns’ lives was
considered insignificant. These were the harbingers of a new age,
and the historians of the last. In a way, they were the history
books we were writing, and would shepherd the new world order.
That’s how it had been planned anyhow. But plans change.
“What wasn’t?” asked Beatrice with an air of
consternation. It was as if she was offended that I dared disagree
with her.
“Showing her the picture,” I said. “Might not
have been the best thing. Reminds her about what she lost; what we
took from her.”
“What
you
took from her,” said
Beatrice with an accusatory finger pointed at me. “The fact that
you and your thugs have murdered three Dawns in such a short period
of time is not something we’re going to forget, Jerald.” She said
my name with such spite that it caused one of the Administrators
standing nearby to glance away in embarrassment.
Beatrice wasn’t the only member of The
Electorate that was here now. After her capture, we feigned that
the transfer facility was operational and brought in a few more
members of her caliber, all of whom now resided here. Our original
plan had been to use their lives, and their Dawns, as leverage in
negotiations with The Electorate. While we were prepared for an
all-out attack, we preferred to avoid that. Our goal was immunity
from the coming plague, in every way imaginable. We wanted the
vaccine to the Tempest Strain, and we wanted assurance that
wherever we decided to live would be protected from any future
aggression. Beatrice and the other captured Electorate were an
insurance policy for us.
Then we found the body of Audrey Winchell, a
member of The Electorate and personal friend of Beatrice who had
flown to the transfer facility shortly before the start of winter.
Her pilot had landed despite there not being a guard to wave them
in. He escorted Audrey to the house, but they were attacked and she
was killed. He fled, and escaped to relay the experience to his
superiors, setting in motion the collapse of our scheme. The
Electorate discovered our deception, and realized that we were
feeding them false reports.
We claimed that the facility was secure, and
that there was no possibility that the Tempest Strain had been
released, but we soon discovered that wasn’t the case. Infected
blood had seeped down into a mine shaft, and something living down
there had come in contact with it. The new plague was out, and we
were forced to admit the truth to The Electorate.
Covington and I hoped that The Electorate
would work with us now that we’d kidnapped a number of their
members, and we were right, to an extent. They had to work with us,
but we’d lost our advantage now that the Tempest Strain was out.
Despite our best efforts to burn the contaminated area, we were
still finding infected animals outside of the initial zone. A
particularly harsh winter helped stymie the progress of the
disease, killing off some animals while forcing others into
hibernation, but now that spring was fast approaching we knew that
the disease would sweep the land before the onset of summer. A new
growing bloom would color this land, and it would be blood red.
“Let’s talk about this somewhere else,” I
said, attempting to get Beatrice to follow me out of the
Administrator’s area. She’d been using one of the stations here to
connect with her Dawn, and was taking off the various connectors
that attached to her and allowed the computer to transfer her image
into movements through the digital recreation of Cobra Dawn on the
screen.
“I don’t have much to speak with you about,
Jerald.” Again, she fused my name with a heaping helping of
spite.
“I think we should consider what she asked
for.”
“Let me handle Cobra,” said Beatrice with
barely a glance of regard in my direction. “I know her better than
you or anyone else here. I’ll dangle the picture as a prize, and
she’ll do as we ask. I promise.”
“I’m not talking about the picture. I’m
talking about letting another Dawn meet with her.”
That got her attention. Her brow furrowed as
she stared up at me. “Are you daft? The last thing we need to do is
put a potential victim in that room with her. What if she takes the
girl hostage, or threatens to hurt her?”
“She won’t. She doesn’t hate the other girls.
She hates you.” I said, relishing the fact.
Beatrice ripped off the second glove and
tossed it into her empty chair after standing. She walked away from
me, and I grabbed her arm to pull her back.
“Let me go,” she said as if being
assaulted.
“We’ve got a meeting with General
Covington.”
“No we don’t,” said Beatrice as she tugged
her arm free of my grip. “What are you talking about?”
“Yes, we do. He wants to talk about Levon,
and how long before he’s useless to us.”
“Useless?” asked Beatrice.
I redefined my meaning, “Before he dies.”
This upset her, and I knew it would. For some
unfathomable reason, she cared for the man. Or at least she wanted
us to think she did. The only thing you could trust about Beatrice
Dell was that you couldn’t trust her.
“Do you think he’s reaching his expiration
date?”
Her choice of words seemed purposefully
distant, as if she were trying to convince me that he didn’t matter
to her any more than a jug of old milk. It amused me to hear her
use such terms; a reminder that her fancy life on that island far
off was so dramatically different than the wasteland where I’d
suffered these past twenty years. Perhaps she meant for me to feel
that sting; a barb to assure me of her continued dominance. I grit
my teeth and forced a smile as I nodded.
“Won’t be long, babe. The LiMM chair can
usually kill off the virus, but they keep finding more in him. It’s
like his body’s recreating it somehow. And with the levels of
poison they’re pumping into him, he can’t last.”