The Eden Project: Humanity's Last Chance (14 page)

The water died down to nothing and was quickly replaced by a hard blast of air from all sides. The doctors fought to keep their balance against the thrusting air and still keep their hold on Doctor Quarna.

Yet another flicker and the light switched back to its original yellow. The process was complete. The inside steel doors slid open allowing them entrance to the dome.

They were all there. All 117. They were standing in small packs. Their manic chattering echoed loudly throughout the commissary. Everyone had seen or heard about the boy outside, the infected boy, the boy with the golden weapon. They had heard too of Doctor Quarna’s fall in battle.

The original eight were the only kids sitting down and they were not talking. They had already had their discussion and none of them knew anymore what to say. They waited. It’s all they could do.

Isaac weaved his way through the crowd carrying a step stool. When he reached the buffet area, he set the stool down and stood next to it.

Milo walked out of the crowd and stepped onto the stool. He faced the kids who were spread haphazardly about the commissary. No one noticed him. He cleared his throat, but they could not hear him over the din of prepubescent voices.

Ozzie noticed Milo’s struggle to get attention and so he stood up, put his thumb and index finger in his mouth and let out a screeching whistle. The room quieted immediately. Next to Ozzie, Tuna held his still-ringing right ear while everyone turned toward Milo.

Milo cleared his throat again, this time feeling the weight of all those uncertain eyes fixed on him. He pulled his scrollpad from its holster and turned it sideways to read something he had prepared.

“Thank you for your attention,” Milo said stiffly reading from his scrollpad. “I have a message from the doctors. The intruder has been subdued and contained. There is no cause for alarm.”

“What about Doctor Quarna?” a boy in back yelled out.

Milo pretended not to hear the question, but it threw him off. He glanced at the audience and then scanned his scrollpad trying to find his bearings. “At this point there is nothing evidential leading us to believe there will be any other intruders.”

Adam noticed the young ones were more alarmed by Milo’s last statement than they were calmed. “He means that the boy was alone,” Adam announced at the top of his voice. “No one else is coming.”

Gen saw the fear leaving little Ada’s face after Adam’s words. She smiled across the room to Ada to reassure her. When Gen turned back to her table, there was still something of her smile remaining. She found Adam’s eyes then. Her smile faded, but something warm and joyful persisted within her as his eyes lingered a moment with hers. Eyes, Gen learned, had the ability to touch as tenderly as fingertips.

“Doctor Quarna is in stable condition. It may take some time, but his wounds are all treatable.” Milo smiled while he read these words. He looked out on the crowd full of his friends and the young ones. “He will be fine.”

Milo nodded. He was sure his words had helped to soothe the fears of all. He stepped down. Isaac picked up the stool and they walked together out of the room.

Unlike the rest of the kids, the original eight had already been briefed on these matters. Their fears were left unchanged and as words began to flow freely all over the commissary, conversation had yet to begin at their table.

Zeke sat back with his arms folded on his chest. He avoided making any eye contact with Gen and instead focused hatefully on Adam. He shook his head at him, making sure Adam saw him doing it. For his part, Adam fought the urge to respond to Zeke’s non-verbal challenge.

“It won’t do any good to place blame at this point,” Tuna said, trying to deflect Zeke’s obvious condemnation of Adam.

“Oh, wouldn’t it?” Zeke said, spitefully. “That works great for you, Tuna. Tell me, what tech geek first figured out how to reach outside the dome and hack into other frequencies?”

Tuna sat back, feeling worse than he had already.

“That’s enough. This is not the time or the place,” Cassie scolded. “The young ones can hear us.”

“My apologies, Cassie,” Zeke said in a quieter voice, but a voice still laced with contempt. “We all know your Tuna is a special guy who would never betray the protocol.”

Gen shook her head, very upset with this new side of Zeke.

“No, Tuna is nothing but faithful,” Zeke conceded. “Unless someone took advantage of him and used Tuna’s sense of loyalty to manipulate him by means of friendship.” Zeke let everyone make their own conclusion before he said it. “We’re all thinking the same name. Admit it. Only one word was in any of our heads. Adam.”

Zeke returned his hateful stare to Adam. “None of us have been fooled by this new pretend version of you, dude. You do nothing but manipulate and destroy. That’s your nature. That’s the true you.”

“Give it a rest, Zeke,” Gen commanded. “You are not innocent in this.”

Zeke began to laugh and he sat back in his chair and slapped his knee. “There it is,” he said. “There it is. Another girl comes to the defense of her man.”

The implication of Zeke’s words hung over the table. Gen and Adam. Not possible. They were not intended. What was Zeke talking about? Before the shock and outrage could be directed back in universal reproach at Zeke, the other kids noticed something. Neither Gen nor Adam was shocked or outraged. They in fact, looked like they wanted to hide. Zeke’s implication was true. Of course, it was true.

Zeke could see the table’s contempt shifting slowly away from him and onto Gen and Adam. Zeke went in for one more hard shot. “And you, Genevieve Fifthborn, you of all people speak to me of innocence. Huh!”

And then the strangest thing happened. Adam leapt to his feet to defend her, ordering Zeke to stop, but Zeke rose slowly. He rose slowly with tears welling in his eyes. He had no fear of Adam. He had no desire to fight Adam. In fact, he stared into Adam’s eyes a long time. Adam softened when he noticed the hurt welling in Zeke’s eyes.

“Leave me alone,” Zeke said. “I’m tired. Find a way to get us all killed on your own.” He brushed past Adam and left the commissary.

* * *

THE BOY LAY CLEANED and naked on the examining table, covered partially by a white sheet. He was very slight, but his arms were hard and muscled for such a small boy. His skin was extremely pale, except for his face which was mostly tanned. You could see small circles of pale where his goggles had covered his eyes and narrow stripes of pale running back to either of his ears.

Doctor Becker and Doctor Pappas stood over the boy wearing somewhat less bulky chemsuits. They examined the boy’s many pink scars on his chest and abdomen.

“This one here,” Doctor Becker said running her gloved finger along a crescent-shaped scar on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s a bite mark.”

Doctor Pappas leaned in and used his finger to quickly estimate the bite width. “That’s interesting. It’s human.”

“What’s the chances a non-infected human would bite a boy?”

“Anything is possible out there,” Doctor Pappas said.

“That may be, but the probability level is extremely high that he was bitten by an infected human and as you can see this bite is not recent.” Doctor Becker looked up from the wound to regard Doctor Pappas through her face shield. “Why is he not infected?”

Doctor Pappas deliberated on her question with a deep sense of curiosity. How was it that the boy had not been infected? The virus traveled exceedingly well in saliva especially when coming in direct contact with another human’s blood stream.

“It’s amazing he has survived out there at all,” Doctor Pappas said.

Doctor Becker brushed the boy’s brown hair back and regarded his almost angelic face. How could this small, delicate creature turn so lethal? She pulled the sheet up to cover his chest. Doctor Pappas helped her to put the boy’s wrists and feet back into restraints.

They stepped away to retrieve their blue, extra-wide medical scrollpads from a nearby console. They both began to enter data into their scrollpads glancing occasionally back to the boy.

“Perhaps the boy is Clive’s grandson,” Doctor Pappas said. “He might have made it to him.” He said the words without conviction and Doctor Becker immediately shook her head.

“No, I have seen an image of little Louie on Doctor Hossler’s scrollpad. He had blond hair and would be five years old now. Our subject must be eight or nine.”

“Then who and what is this boy? Do you think he could have killed Doc Hossler?”

She turned back to consider the still sleeping little soldier of fortune. Nothing about him seemed lethal while he lay there still tranquilized. She put down her scrollpad and walked across the room to a counter. On top of the counter was the golden weapon.

A trumpet.

She picked it up and examined it. It was bent in spots and scuffed up and down the piping. The mouthpiece lay next to a dirty sack on the counter. She picked up the mouthpiece and fitted it into the trumpet.

She smiled slightly and lifted the trumpet to show Doctor Pappas. “He saved the mouth piece in his pocket. It means he can play it.”

-20-

Doctor Quarna limped slowly into the doctor’s lounge wearing a white robe. His hair was disheveled and sticking up in the back. Doctors Becker, Pappas and Naseer did not notice him. They listened to instrumental music and chatted over cups of coffee.

“Where is the boy?” Doctor Quarna said, groggily but pointed.

The startled doctors twisted around on their cushioned chairs to spot their boss lurching painfully near the door. Doctor Naseer jumped to his feet and hurried back to help Doctor Quarna who had used what energy he had to make it that far.

“What are you doing out of bed?” Doctor Naseer scolded. “You have three broken ribs, a severely bruised kidney and your blood is still trying to flush out deadly opiates.”

Doctor Naseer helped Doctor Quarna down onto a chair.

“The boy is secure,” Doctor Becker said.

Doctor Quarna’s sudden anger immediately caused him pain. He reclined back onto the chair. “You decided to bring him inside? The wolf in sheep’s clothing.” He coughed causing him to wince and grab his ribs.

“The boy is not infected,” Doctor Pappas chipped in.

Doctor Quarna regarded Doctor Pappas with disappointment. “Not all infections are biological, Kosta. There are mental infections or worse, moral infections. Before we had the C1 virus, the people had an infected morality that eventually gave birth to an agent of destruction.” He pushed himself up from the arm of the chair. “I have seen and felt this boy’s infected morality. Believe me, he means to undo us all.”

The chill of his words resonated in the silent room.

“What did you expect him to do?” Doctor Becker said. “He weighs 51 pounds. A grown man in a bizarre yellow suit came for him with a gun.”

Doctor Quarna just shook his head, too angry to talk.

“He has been bitten,” Doctor Pappas admitted. Doctor Quarna’s anger shifted quickly to concern.

“He’s been bitten, but there is no sign of the virus,” Doctor Becker quickly clarified.

“It’s true,” Doctor Pappas continued. “The bite is not recent. We see no trace of the C-1 virus. Zero mutation. And his T-cell count is robust.”

Doctor Becker noticed Doctor Quarna becoming enticed by the scientific data on the unusual boy. “It’s as if he was born in another world or time,” she said. “His levels are higher even than our kids’.”

“This is unusual,” Doctor Naseer contemplated. “He has no doubt been scavenging his whole life, ingesting a bacterial virus in every filthy mouthful and then coming in contact with those fevered cannibals, being bitten by the infected and yet his blood is clean.”

Fighting a body full of aches and pains, Doctor Quarna tried to absorb their words and consider the possibilities, but he quickly dismissed that line of thought. He waved the back of his hand at the others shooing away their words and data.

“We could learn from the boy,” Doctor Naseer urged.

Doctor Quarna buried his face in his hands. “Yeah, but you are all forgetting something.” He looked up from his hands, sick and frustrated. “We are not a research facility. Our objective is to keep our 117 kids safe until they leave this infected planet. And did you forget that your precious specimen would have sliced me open without a second thought?”

“Oh, come on, Nathan! You can’t be so dismissive of this. The possibilities here are endless. His blood could very well hold a key.” Doctor Becker stopped to control her emotions. “We can’t just walk away from him.”

“No, we should not walk away from him. We should run.”

* * *

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON the dome was being lit only by the natural light from outside. When the sun left the sky, the dome would go dark. They were told it was a precaution, but they knew better. The boy may not be alone or the boy may have been followed or someone may have heard the kids broadcasting messages out to the DJ or the DJ himself may be coming and bringing friends.

Gen walked through the empty dome made calmer by the half light. Three extra boys were stationed at various elevated positions helping Milo and Isaac with security. They were looking through telescopes pointed at the sea.

Milo had a fourth telescope next to the lookout post. He slowly scanned the horizon for any sign of seafaring vessels. She felt a sense of reassurance that, in the day following the appearance of the boy, they have yet to find anything out there.