Wayward, page 10
Kate filled the screens. She wore a summer dress, sunglasses, a straw hat. She strolled toward the camera between rows of raised flower beds. A woven basket dangled from one arm, bulging with vegetables and fruit.
The back of someone’s head filled the lower part of the screens.
“Is that Alyssa?” Ethan asked.
“Yes.”
Ted upped the volume.
Kate: “No more apples?”
Alyssa: “No, they went fast.”
Kate reached into her basket and handed something to Alyssa.
“Freeze it,” Ethan said.
The image held—Kate’s arm outstretched.
“What is that?” Ethan asked.
“A green apple?”
Ted rolled video.
Kate: “You’re always bringing the loveliest fruits and veggies to us. I thought I’d bring you something from my garden.”
Alyssa: “What a gorgeous pepper.”
Kate: “Thank you.”
Alyssa: “I’ll have this tonight.”
Kate moved out of frame.
“Wanna see it again?” Ted asked.
“No, play the next one.”
They watched Kate and Alyssa rendezvous three more times.
Next day, on Main Street, the women passed each other and Alyssa shook her head.
The day after, at the riverside park, their paths crossed again.
This time, Alyssa nodded.
“Wonder what that was all about?” Ted said. He glanced at Ethan. “Any ideas?”
“Not yet.”
Ted played Alyssa and Kate’s last encounter.
It happened the day of Alyssa’s death at the community gardens, and the interaction was identical to their first.
Kate stopped at Alyssa’s vegetable stand.
They exchanged a few words.
Then Kate handed her another bell pepper.
Ted paused the video.
Ethan said, “There’s probably a note in that pepper.”
“That says what?”
“I don’t know. Meeting place and time? Instructions for Alyssa to remove her microchip? Explain something to me. I understand that when these Wanderers remove their chips you can’t track them. But don’t the cameras still pick up their movement?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Our cameras only key off microchip proximity and motion.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
“Look, there’s no way to monitor this town using the thousands of cameras all running at once. Most of the time, we’d just be scrolling through empty space. So our cameras key off the microchips. In other words, until a chip moves within range of a sensor, the camera is in sleep mode. It only transmits a video feed when a microchip pings it. And even then, when a chip is motionless for fifteen seconds, the camera reverts to sleep mode.”
“So what you’re saying is—”
“The cameras don’t run all the time. When a resident removes their microchip, for all intents and purposes, they become a ghost. Somehow, these Wanderers have figured out a way to game the system.”
“Show me.”
Ted brought up a new image, said, “Here’s the last thirty seconds we have of Kate on the night Alyssa was murdered.”
On the screens, a bedroom appeared.
Kate entered the room wearing a nightgown that fell to her knees.
Her husband followed.
They climbed into bed together, killed the lights.
The overhead camera switched to night vision.
The Ballingers lay absolutely still in bed.
After fifteen seconds, the feed went dark.
Next time it picked up, morning light filled the room, and both Kate and her husband were sitting up in bed.
“Reinserting their chips,” Ethan said.
“Yes. But all night, from approximately ten fifteen until seven thirty the next morning, they were ghosts. And in that period of time, Alyssa Pilcher lost her life.”
“This is why Pilcher really runs the fêtes, isn’t it?” Ethan looked at Ted. “Am I right? It’s not only because he wants the town to police itself. It’s also because when someone removes their chip, he actually needs our help to find them.”
* * *
Ethan called for Marcus.
When his escort arrived, Ethan said, “I want to see Alyssa’s quarters.”
They climbed the stairwell two flights to Level 4.
Five steps into the corridor, Ethan knew which doorway opened into Alyssa’s room by the bunches of fresh flowers scattered across the floor. He wondered if Pilcher had sent someone into town for them. All around the doorframe the wall had been papered with notes, cards, photographs, banners.
Whoever and whatever else Alyssa had been, at least inside this mountain, she was a loved woman.
“Sir,” the escort said, “I got those reports you asked for.”
Marcus handed Ethan a manila folder.
“I’d like to go inside,” Ethan said.
“Of course.”
Marcus took out his keycard and swiped it through the scanner.
Ethan turned the doorknob, walked inside.
It was a tight living space.
Windowless.
No more than a hundred square feet.
A single bed had been positioned against the far wall. There was a desk. A chest of drawers. A wall of bookshelves, half of which held books, the other half framed photographs.
Ethan studied them, the photos all of the same woman at varying ages—young girl to fifty-year-old woman.
Alyssa’s mother?
Ethan sat down on Alyssa’s bed.
The wall across from the bookshelves was a masterful mural of a beach—palm trees, green water over dark reefs, white sand, a sky that went on forever.
Ethan leaned back into the pillows, kicked his boots up on the bed.
Smiled.
From this angle, when you stared at the mural it felt like you were there, reclining in the sand, staring off into that false line on the horizon where the sea touched the sky.
The folder was entitled “Mission #1055 Contact Log.”
He opened it.
Five pages.
Five reports.
Day #5293
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055
Contact Report #1
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
First contact made at approximately 1125 at the corner of Main and Ninth. Note slipped to Kate Ballinger that read, “Sick of being watched.” Brief eye contact made. No words spoken. No further contact was made on this date.
Day #5311
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055
Contact Report #2
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
Eighteen days post-initial contact, Ballinger approached me at the gardens and gave me a bell pepper. The pepper had been sliced open and there was a note inside that read: “Tracking chip on hamstring in your left leg. Cut it out in a closet, but keep with you until further notice.” Two potential rendezvous times were given for me to confirm I had removed the chip. The first at 1400 on Day 5312. The next at 1500 on Day 5313. If I failed to remove the chip by Day 5313, we would have no further interaction. No further contact was made on this date.
Day #5312
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055
Contact Report #3
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
At 1400, I passed Ballinger walking south on Main Street near the intersection of Sixth. I shook my head. No further contact was made on this date.
Day #5313
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055
Contact Report #4
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
At 1500, I passed Ballinger walking south on the riverside trail. I nodded to her. She smiled. No further contact was made on this date.
Day #5314
From: Alyssa Pilcher
To: David Pilcher
Mission #1055
Contact Report #5
Subject: Resident 308, a/k/a Kate Ballinger
Ballinger returned to my stand at the gardens with a second bell pepper. The note inside read: “Tonight. 1:00 a.m. The cemetery mausoleum. Leave your chip in your bedside table. Wear a jacket with a hood.” Will follow up with a new report tomorrow.
* * *
Ethan moved through the Level 3 corridor with his escort in tow.
Halfway down, he stopped at a pair of double doors. Through the glass, he saw a full-court basketball game in progress. Shirts versus skins. The impact of the ball on the hardwood. The squeak of shoes. For a millisecond, he had the mad thought of joining in the game.
They walked on.
“Mind if I ask you something, Marcus?”
“Shoot.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“And how long have you lived here in the superstructure?”
“Mr. Pilcher brought me out of suspension two years ago to replace a guard who was killed on a mission out beyond the fence.”
“Everyone in the mountain knew what they were getting themselves into when they signed on with Pilcher, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“So why’d you do it?”
“Do what?”
Ethan stopped outside the doors to a cafeteria.
He faced Marcus.
“Why’d you throw your old life away for this?”
“I didn’t throw anything away, Mr. Burke. In my life before, you know what I was?”
“What?”
“A tweaker and a drunk.”
“And what? Pilcher found you? Gave you a chance to be all you could be?”
“I met him just out of prison—a three-year stint for vehicular manslaughter. I was high and drunk and killed a family on New Year’s Eve. He saw something in me I never knew was there.”
“Didn’t you have a family? Friends? A life that was at least your own? What made you trust him in the first place?”
“I don’t know, but he was right, wasn’t he? We’re a part of something here, Mr. Burke. Something that matters. All of us.”
“Here’s the thing, Marcus, and I don’t want you to ever forget it. Nobody fucking asked me or anyone in that valley if we wanted to be a part of this.”
Ethan walked on.
At the bottom of the stairwell leading out into Level 1, a noise stopped him.
Marcus was already swiping his card at the glass-door entrance to the cavern.
Ethan started down the corridor.
“Mr. Burke, where are you going?”
The noise was something screaming.
Banshee-like.
Tortured.
Inhuman.
He’d heard it before and it chilled him to his core.
“Mr. Burke!”
Ethan was jogging down the corridor now, the screams getting louder.
“Mr. Burke!”
He stopped at a wide window.
Stared through the plate glass into a laboratory.
There were two men in white coats and David Pilcher.
They surrounded an aberration.
The creature had been strapped to a steel gurney.
Stout leather restraints buckled down across its legs, below its knees and above.
One across its torso.
Another across its shoulders.
A fifth securing its head.
Its thick wrists and ankles had been clamped down to the sides of the gurney with heavy-gauge steel bracelets, and the thing convulsed against the leather straps as if in the throes of electrocution.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Marcus said, sidling up to Ethan.
“What are they doing to it?”
“Come on, let’s go. Mr. Pilcher won’t be happy if he sees—”
Ethan pounded on the glass.
Marcus said, “Oh geez.”
The men turned.
The two scientists scowling.
Pilcher said something to them and then walked over to the lab entrance. When the door opened, the abby’s screams amplified, echoing up and down the corridor like something calling out from hell.
The doors whisked closed.
“Ethan, how can I help you?”
“I was on my way out. I heard screams.”
Pilcher turned toward the plate glass. The abby had calmed down or worn itself out. Only its head swiveled under the strap, its screams reduced to croaks. Ethan could see its massive heart beating furiously through its translucent skin. There was no detail. Only color and form and motion, all obscured as if behind frosted glass.
“Quite a specimen, no?” Pilcher said. “He’s a three-hundred-seventeen-pound bull. One of the largest males we’ve ever seen. You’d think he’d be alpha male of a sizable swarm, but my sniper spotted him coming down the canyon this morning, all by his lonesome. Took four hundred milligrams of Telazol to bring him down. That’s the full-grown adult male jaguar dosage. And he was still only sluggish by the time we reached him.”
“How long did that keep him sedated?”
“These tranqs only work for about three hours. After that, you better have them locked up, because boy do they come back angry.”
“He’s a big boy.”
“Bigger than the one you tangled with for sure. I think it’s fair to say if you’d met this bull in the canyon, we wouldn’t be speaking right now.”
“What are you doing with it?”
“Getting ready to remove a gland at the base of its neck.”
“Why?”
“Abbies communicate through pheromones. These are airborne signals that give information and trigger responses.”
“Don’t humans do the same thing?”
“Yeah, but it’s at a much more instinctual, broader level for us. Sexual attraction. Mother-infant recognition. Abbies use pheromones like we use words.”
“So why are you effectively cutting out that thing’s tongue?”
“Because the last thing we want is for him to tell all his friends he’s in trouble. Don’t get me wrong. I love the fence. I trust the fence. But several hundred abbies on the other side trying to figure out how to save their brother makes me a little uncomfortable.” Pilcher glanced down at Ethan’s waist. “You still aren’t wearing your revolver.”
“I’m here. In the mountain. What does it matter?”
“It matters, Ethan, because I asked you to do it. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? Wear a gun at all times. Look the goddamn part.”
Ethan stared back through the glass.
One of the scientists was leaning over the abby’s face, shining a penlight into its left eye as it hissed.
It looked to be between six and seven feet tall.
Arms and legs like cords of intertwined steel fiber.
Ethan couldn’t take his eyes off the beast.
Its black talons as long as his fingers.
“Are they intelligent?” Ethan asked.
“Oh my, yes.”
“As smart as chimpanzees?”
“Their brains are larger than ours. Because of obvious communication barriers, testing their intelligence—on our terms—becomes problematic. I’ve attempted a battery of social and physical tests, and it’s not that they can’t do them. They just refuse. It would be like me trying to test you and you telling me to stick it up my ass sideways. That sort of a response. We did capture a somewhat compliant specimen several months ago. She’s down in cage nine. Low hostility rating. We call her Margaret.”
“How low?”
“I gave her recall tests sitting across a table from her in her cage. Now I did have two guards behind me pointing shotguns loaded with twelve-gauge slugs at her chest. But still—she displayed no signs of aggression.”
“How’d you test her?”
“With a simple child’s memory game. Walk with me.”
Pilcher knocked on the glass and held up one finger to the scientists.
They moved down the corridor toward the glass doors at the far end, Marcus trailing ten feet behind.
“I use small cardboard tiles. One side is blank. The other has a photograph—a frog, a bicycle, a glass of milk. I arrange them all picture-side up on the table and then let Margaret see them. We start easy. Five tiles. Then ten. She gets two minutes to study them. Then I turn them over so she can’t see the picture. I reach into a bag containing duplicates of the tiles. I show her, for instance, the one with the glass of milk. She touches her talon to the corresponding tile on the table, and I turn it over to see if she got it right.”
“How’d she do?”
“Ethan, we worked our way up to one hundred and twenty tiles, with Margaret only getting thirty seconds to memorize their positions.”
“And she got them all right?”
Pilcher nodded, pride in his voice. “Total recall.” He stopped and pointed at a small window in a door whose only point of access appeared to be a keycard entry. “I keep her in here. Would you like to meet Margaret?”
“Not even a little bit.”
There was a glare off the glass from the overhead fluorescent lights.
Ethan cupped his hands around his face and stared into the cage.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Pilcher said. “But I don’t believe she’s an anomaly. Her intelligence I mean. She’s only different in temperament. Which is not to say that she wouldn’t tear my throat out if she thought she could get away with it.”
