Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1) (9 page)

I went to sleep that night, in my own tent, not too far from Obadiah’s tent where he and the matriarch of their house, Ruth, slept. I crept out of my tent to go relieve myself in the woods and became aware of someone stalking along behind me. I was sure it was Rebekah, darting from tree to tree, keeping an eye on me. By the time I returned to my tent, she was nowhere to be found.

The next morning, I awoke to find my bag had been rummaged through outside my tent. My lantern, stove, and a variety of other items were missing. Obadiah gathered the clan together and ordered everyone to return my items to me. “Thou shall not steal,” he chided them, “even from outsiders.” By noon, everything was back in front of my tent.

Rebekah invited me to spend the afternoon picking berries with her. Of course, I had been invited to go hunt game with the men and was expected to partake of more “manly” responsibilities with the group, but I again warned Obadiah against shooting the bison. Even if they had ranged off the official boundary of the Yellowstone Preserve, the animals had been placed there by the Republic research outpost and were the property of the Republic.

I learned more about her family. Her aunts and uncles and cousins who travelled with the group. Since her parents were dead, Obadiah and Ruth had taken her in, and promised her a better life in the West.

While we picked berries and dug up wild tubers, she told me more of stories from the Bible and how those stories helped people live better lives. I couldn’t deny that to primitive societies like Israelites—or even the Zionists—that book was invaluable. It had fables with important morals. It had laws for dividing property, and fairness in business dealings. It offered hope of something better beyond a life filled with sorrow, suffering, and a lack of meaning.

I couldn’t help but reflect on the desires of my society and the culture of the Zionists. We both wanted a better world. We both wanted to find the meaning of the world around us. We both wanted eternal life. We both wanted to serve a greater cause. We were not so different. My lightweight tent may have been a twentieth of the weight of their tents, but it kept the rain off just the same. My clothes may have been brighter and more durable, but they served the same function. We were just more evolved. Our societies could have learned a lot from each other and grown together, had they not been so fearful of the other.

Rebekah took off her bonnet in the midday sun. She said she was supposed to wear it at all times, but since no one else was around to chastise her for uncovering her hair, and I wouldn’t tell, she was going to get away with it. Her simple act of rebellion was endearing. I wished I could have told her about my act. Rebelling against the expectation that I’d undertake the surgery. Racing across the continent to save Semper.

Semper. Rebekah was the only thing keeping him out of my mind. When my mind would start to wander to him, and his death, I would look at her with all of her simple beauty and try to keep the anger and fear out of my mind. I started wondering if the Zionists were right. What if there was a Heaven? Maybe Semper was there, waiting for me. Maybe keeping an eternal life on Earth deprived us of an eternal life in some other plane of existence.

I shrugged that out of my mind. I had studied astrophysics. I knew how the tiniest of sub-atomic particles worked. I knew how vast the universe was. If there still hadn’t been a glimpse of Heaven or God, I doubted there ever would be.

But then, when I looked at Rebekah one more time, I wondered to myself how something so beautiful could have happened purely by chance.

The next morning we sat around the fire, eating a breakfast of small-game stew and berries. It was surprisingly delicious for consisting of squirrels and rabbits. In my world, adults couldn’t judge the right amount of spices or flavorings to put into things because their sensors were so oversensitive that they couldn’t tell what would taste good for the kids. Instead, our meals were very basic—nutritional, but bland. Every meal I’d had with the Zionists had been a treat, even if odd or exotic. I licked every last drop of sticky broth from my bowl and took it over to the wash bucket to be boiled clean.

The sonic booms startled me and I instinctively dropped to the ground. There were a dozen thunderous cracks in rapid succession and, looking up, I could see the streaks of fire overhead. They might have been meteors streaking through the sky, but in an instant, their formation told me what they were: warrior forms.

I had seen a documentary on them once, but few people had ever seen them in person. Our society had to deal with the zombie threat, far-flung colonies that might have rebelled, and even the potential for encountering hostile species on other worlds, so the warrior forms were created. Those who had excelled in tolerating their enhanced forms, and who had the desire to serve our society for eternity, were removed from their enhanced forms and reinserted
again
into warrior forms. These massive robots look only remotely like a human being. Reflective face-shields cover an array of sensors instead of an actual face. There is no hair or synthetic skin. There are no blinking eyes or moving lips. They are ten-foot tall alloyed killing machines with hyper-advanced sensors and unimaginable strength. They have built-in lethal, nonlethal, and explosive types of weapons. Electronic jammers. Tear gas. Gauss rifles. Mini-missiles. Each warrior can easily destroy a city block…and there were a dozen being inserted from orbit at the GEO station.

“RUN!” I yelled, and grabbed Rebekah’s hand, dragging her to her feet.

She hesitated, staring skyward like the rest of her clan. Twenty seconds later, it was too late, and over almost as quickly as it began.

The silvery teardrops unfolded into giant robots about a hundred meters over our heads. The warrior forms decelerated just a few meters above the ground, deploying air brakes and firing retro rockets that literally stopped their descent the exact millisecond they would have otherwise crashed into the earth. The warriors began indiscriminately firing into the crowd, and I could only catch glimpses of misty sprays of blood as they began killing the dozen or so people huddled around the smoky fire. The Zionists didn’t even have time to grab their guns or defend themselves. Not that it would have helped. I ran, dragging Rebekah, who tripped behind me. She was light, and I yanked her to her feet. We ducked past trees being ripped to splinters by supersonic projectiles. I could feel the heat from the exploding missiles behind us. The camp was utterly destroyed. We ran in jagged swerving patterns, dodging the bullets and debris, Rebekah’s hand in mine. We ran from the carnage…with a warrior in hot pursuit.

Suddenly, Rebekah screamed and fell to the ground. She had been grazed on the outer thigh by a bullet There was a lot of blood but her leg would be okay. I hoped she could move, but she couldn’t run any farther. She cowered in fear, so I crouched in front of her body, hoping to shield her from the on-coming warriors. I was certain it was the end for both of us.

The closest warrior form raised its arm to fire a salvo at us and then stopped. It lowered its arm.

“Pax?”

The voice sounded vaguely familiar, and then I realized who it belonged to.
Confused
doesn’t even begin to describe the emotions surging through me.

“Pax, it’s me. Adara.”

I shook with fear. Rebekah was crying. The shiny metal monster stood staring directly at me.

“Pax, what are you doing out here?” she demanded.

“Adara, how can that be you? Semper said you were dead.”

“No, Pax. I excelled at the enhanced form. I completed all the tasks required and mastered all the skills in three months: a new record. So they offered me the warrior form.”

“Why would you agree to that?” I asked.

“Originally, I said no, that I’ve never been aggressive and never killed anything in my life, and I couldn’t do it. They said that was why they needed me specifically, because I could control myself. They offered me so many opportunities. The chance to live at GEO. The chance to travel. The chance to run for political office. The chance to really make a difference. So they plucked me out of my new body and put me in here. One hundred years of service and then I can decide if I want to go back to a regular enhanced form and a normal life.”

Rebekah, sobbing, finally regained enough composure to scream at Adara.

“You killed them! You killed my
whole
family!”

Adara lifted her weapon-clad forearm defensively. “I had orders. The GEO Ops Commander was monitoring an incursion of primitives into the Preserve and ordered our drop on your position. You still haven’t answered me, Pax.
What
are you doing here?”

I told her everything. About Semper’s surgery and his escape from the hospital and his death. About finding the Zionists. About how the Zionists weren’t the mindless zombies that the government had portrayed them as.

“Pax, there really are zombies out here. They hardly speak English anymore. They are deformed by the Plague. They will kill you or anyone they come across. I know this because I’ve killed dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. This isn’t my first drop.”

“What are you going to do to us?” Rebekah asked angrily.

By now a few of the other warriors had gathered around curiously. Adara looked at them. I could only imagine she was using her neural web to talk to them.

“We usually leave one primitive alive to spread the word. We won’t kill the girl. And Pax, you’re still a citizen of the Cascadia Republic, with no charged crimes, so you’re free to go.”

“Go
where
, Adara?”

“Wherever you see fit. Wherever you want. You can go home, if you like,” she said, pointing to the west. “But don’t take her back to the capital. My biological scanner indicates that she’s carrying a few disease variants that would spread quickly and be fatal to children back home. You’ll probably even need to be quarantined.”

“Where are you going, Adara?”

“A dropship will be here in four minutes to retrieve us and take us back to GEO station. I suggest you clear out before they get here. I’m sorry, Pax, for this. They were encroaching. I had to do this, I had orders.”

Rebekah started to protest and I put my hand over her mouth. She got the hint. The warrior forms began walking away toward a clearing to the south.

Adara looked back over her metal shoulder as she strode out of sight, “It was good to see you, Pax. Take care out there.”

I couldn’t have given her a hug if I wanted to. Adara—that soft skinned, sweet-smelling girl who I’d always felt funny around—was now a two-ton hulk of metal and death.

I helped Rebekah hobble back to the remnants of our camp, strewn with the bodies of the very nice people who were kind enough to take me in. I felt angry at the government for ordering an attack on such nice people, but at the same time, I understood that anyone entering the boundary of the Preserve would be seen as a threat and needed to be eliminated. The Republic had very few settlements on the planet, but protected each of them vigorously.

I quickly ripped some cloth from a blanket and made a bandage for Rebekah’s leg. I stripped the belt off of a faceless body and tied it tightly around Rebekah’s leg wound. We’d have to sterilize the injury later, but for now, we had to get clear of the camp.

I grabbed my bag and stuffed a few more items in it. Rebekah did the same with her beat-up rucksack. We heard the sonic boom as the dropship entered the atmosphere and I knew that I had only a few more minutes to get clear of the site. Food. Clothes. I wadded my undamaged tent into a ball and tucked it under my arm. I’d repack later.

“That’s their ship. We need to go,” I ordered Rebekah. “Now.”

She sniffled at the sight of her family, dead on the ground. I tried tugging on her arm but she wouldn’t move.

“We can’t leave them like this,” she said. “It’s not right.”

“You believe in heaven, right?” I asked. She nodded.

“Then they’re there right now, waiting for you. They’ll understand. We need to go.”

Her feet started moving and we walked as quickly as we could down the hillside, following the creek away from the grisly scene above us.

We walked all day and she said nothing. She limped, but didn’t complain. I stopped to change her bandage and was relieved to see the wound had clotted. She winced when I applied direct pressure. She still said nothing.

By nightfall, we must have hiked fifteen kilometers, so we were now well outside of the boundaries of the Yellowstone Preserve. I felt like it was safe to set up camp. I set up the tent and put all of our gear inside. Then I set up the cook stove and heated some salted bison meat over the flames. Rebekah wasn’t hungry. I was famished, and despite pointing forkfuls of food in her direction, she wouldn’t eat.

I finished the meat and then coaxed her into the tent. Rebekah lay down on her sleeping bag and immediately fell asleep on the opposite side of the tent.

The next morning, I awoke to find her awake and poking at the cook stove. She said she was hungry, so I set about getting some food out of the backpack. I should have rationed what little food we had, but this was still my first time out in the wildlands and I didn’t know exactly what I was doing.

Rebekah nibbled on some dense, nutty bread that I can only imagine was baked by one of the women in her clan. Her eyes had that far-away look and glistened with what might have been a waterfall of tears at any instant.

“Good morning,” I stated, trying to get her to speak.

She grunted in reply: a small step.

“We probably need to figure out where we’re going to go,” I suggested.

She said nothing and just kept chewing.

“We really need to figure out somewhere to go,” I repeated.

Rebekah shrugged. “Where can we go?”

“Do you have any other family?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Where are they?”

She shrugged.

“Rebekah, I’m not kidding. We’re not going to last long out here by ourselves.”

She stared coldly at me. “If you had just let that thing kill me, I’d be with my family.”

“I couldn’t let her hurt you,” came my timid reply.

“How did you know that thing?!” she screamed.

“That ‘thing’ used to be a friend of mine.
Is
a friend of mine. Her name is Adara. We grew up together. Went to the same school. She was a year older, so she underwent the surgery before I could.”

“Where did they come from?”

I told her about LEO and GEO. The space elevator. The space colonies. It was all way too advanced for a girl who probably couldn’t even spell her own name. She seemed incredulous.

She said, “Daddy told me they tried to fly to heaven hundreds of years ago and that God became really angry and that’s why he smote the Earth with plagues and famines.”

I shook my head. “I’ve been there. When I was a little kid I rode the elevator up there.”

“Are you for real?”

I nodded.

She looked even more dismayed than before.

“So is God real?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Probably not. Scientific theories prove more than the Space-God myth ever could. That’s why my society is flying across the stars and yours is….”

I stopped myself, but it was too late.

“Dead?!” She yelled in my face. “Mine is dead! But you know what? At least we don’t become gross metal robots! We become angels and we sit with the Lord!”

She stormed off into the woods. I contemplated chasing her but felt like giving her space was better. She didn’t have any gear, so she’d be back. What I didn’t anticipate was that she’d be gone so long. It was hours before she wandered back into the camp.

“I hate you,” she said. “Grampa said there’s no place for hate in our hearts because that’s room we don’t have for Jesus. But I don’t care. Your people are why my family is dead. Your robots are why I’m all alone in this world.”

“I’m the only reason you’re alive! Think about it. You’re a smart girl. If there’s no God…if this life is the only one you get…then you just got another chance because of me. And you’re not alone. I’m here too.”

I could see her eyes darting back and forth as she struggled with the mental gymnastics of undoing seventeen years of religious dogma and brainwashing.

“You and I…we’re all that’s left,” I continued. “I can’t go home either. You can’t go home. We have to go somewhere together. I don’t know much about life out here in the wild, but you do. You don’t have the equipment that I do. We have to work together. I’ll help you get home. That’s the least I can do.”

She stewed over the thought in her mind for a bit, and finally agreed.