The Yellow Pill (13 page)

Frey
frowned at the spectacle. She had held the thing plenty of times but never been
able to get it open.

There
were two things that now lay in Tina’s open palm.

A tiny memory card, and a Yellow Pill.

They
both stared at it. Frey didn’t know what to think. She had been walking around
with a Yellow Pill this whole time, tied around her neck without knowing it.

Tina
was the first one to gather
herself
. “Oh, my
God
!
Do you know what this means
?!
” Tina said, her eyes
filling up with tears again. “He did it! He got it out!” She held her hand out
to Frey as if she would be able to see them better pressed under her nose. Frey
only nodded as she tried to comprehend how this could have been. She shook her
head. It was almost too much. “I don’t understand… How come you were able to
open it?”

Tina
closed the small, and now empty capsule again and handed it to Frey. Her voice
was soft. “Fingerprint sensitive.”

Frey
held the white thing. You couldn’t even see the opening anymore.

Tina
stared at her hand again. “I can’t believe it,” Tina said. “I really can’t
believe it.”

“Neither
can I…” 

 “He
got it out,” she said in a husky voice. Tina turned her face up to the sky, big
tears running down her cheek. “He did it.”

Li was back when
Frey and Tina stepped into the white room. Everyone was gathered except for
Luke, still with the desert dwellers.

“Oh!
Good news, ladies!” Li called to them as he heard them approach. He held up one
of those sheets of glass screens. “I have the structure you asked for already.
I was lucky there was a conference, which gave me enough time to make a decent
copy.”

“And
we have good news as well!”
Lallie
exclaimed as her
brother grinned. “We can crack the code!”

“Its
goanna take us some time, but we think we might have found a way inside,” Her
brother added.

“We
still have the best news,” Tina said as they came up to the table.

Frey
looked over her shoulder as she felt a presence close by and looked straight
into Jon’s chest. She met his eyes, but didn’t return his smile.

Tina
opened her palm, letting the two objects clatter to the table without further
delay and the others gasped. There was a flood of questions that didn’t stop
until Tina held her hands up for silence. “One at the time!”

Frey
felt Jon’s hand on her shoulder and saw Joy wrinkle her nose. “Where the hell
did the two of you get this?” He asked.

Tina
looked over at her. Frey knew they couldn’t reveal Tina’s connections to this…

Didn’t
really think this far, did I…

She
breathed in and held the breath there for a while. In the end she told them as
much of the truth as she could.

“Wait,
so you have been
carrying
these around
the whole time?” Joy shot
at her, her voice shrill in the big room. “How could you keep that from us
?!
”

“I
kept nothing from anyone. I had no idea what was in the capsule and it wasn’t
really easy to open. Since I arrived, I had other things on my mind. Can’t deny
I forgot about it until-“

“How
could anyone
forget
something like that?” Joy sneered, and Frey could
feel the blood pump into her arms. “The little
pup
might even have kept
it from us on purpose!”

Frey
was ready to answer. Hell, she was ready to pounce on the delicate woman doing
some serious damage, but Jon’s hand was on her shoulder, squeezing hard and
keeping her in place.

“Stop
it.” His voice was calm, but it rang out with a silent command. Frey had heard
Jin sound like that only a couple of times. It wasn’t nice being on the wrong
side of his anger when he was like that.

Joy
froze.

Frey
stared straight ahead, wanting to push his hand away, but knew it would be
glued to her shoulder the way he was now.

Li
finally broke the silence. “Youngsters! We have work to do, and in my eyes we
now possess all the tools to do them. Frey, Jon and Tina. You come over to the side
with me and lets leave the other to keep working. Time is of the essence, as we
all know, and I would like to be briefed on our status.”

The
trio followed Li to the back of the room while
Lallie
,
Harry and a furious Joy went back to work.

Tina
must have seen Frey’s reaction because she easily brushed his hand off and put
her own arm around Frey. Jon seemed surprised, but wisely didn’t argue with the
big woman.

“Now.
I want a full debrief please.”

The
three of them took turns to update him on their plan.

“That
would definitely buy us more time,” Li said, scratching his chin. He spent a
few moments lost in thought. “When Luke is back we will have another meeting
and go through everything we-“

An
alarm went off suddenly. As Frey was getting her hands up to cover her ears, it
was already gone.

Harry
growled and
Lallie
hung her head. “Okay, bad news
first,” he said over his shoulder. “The Yellow Pill is coded as well…”

“Good
news,” his twin said, lifting her head. “The code’s the same as on
our
pill, so if we crack one, we crack the other.”

“That
leaves the memory card…” Joy said, not looking at any of them.

“Coded,”
Lallie
said.

“Same
code again,” her
twin
added. “This might take some
time.” Then they turned their attention back to the screens.

Li
turned to the three of them. “Oh, and one more thing… I was at a pharmacy
today, and there were about twenty people waiting to get their generating
pills. But there wasn’t any…”

“What
?!
” Tina and Jon said at the same time.

“I
called Stanly, and he said that all pill production to
Alya
had stopped completely while the pill production to Hole have escalated
insanely.” He scratched his cheek again, and Frey noticed there was some stub
there. “Stanly had reported it as a malfunction, but gotten back a reply that
all was in order and that he was to make sure the pills to Hole kept flowing.”

Frey
recognized the clenching and heaving feeling in her stomach. It was all
connected.

She
looked at Jon, standing there, a split image of Jin, and for the first time she
suspected she might not want to find out what the hell was going on.

He was looking
down the street below. The bars were blocking his view, but still allowing
enough for them to see the chaos. Constant gunfire and screams seemed to fill
every passing minute of the day. It wasn’t a distant sound anymore, where you
could walk down another street to avoid it.

Piles
of froth lay scattered over the streets from the discarded pills. Cars and
buildings were on fire and bodies lined the gutters to feed the multiplying
population of rats.  There didn’t seem to be one single person who didn’t
own a gun anymore. He shuddered at the thought at what the gang areas might
look like. Everyone fought one and the other, thinking the “true” Yellow Pill
was hidden behind the neighbor’s walls. People had gone crazy.

Jin
squeezed Kirk’s shoulder, trying to reassure the boy when he himself felt like
the world was coming to an end. The boy looked up at him with wide eyes full of
fear, and Jin bent down to pick him up, walking away from the window. “Lets go
see if anyone
wanna
play something,” Jin said as Kirk
clutched at his shirt with claw-like hands.

With
every package there had been more and more pills, but they’d all had the same
markings on them and were discarded until the roads were trampled full of
froth. But with every package there’d also been weapons.

Now it
seemed to be the only thing the city had left. No more food arrived, as if the
Yellow Pill had needed all the extra space.

Father Patrick
followed him up on the roof. A grunt escaped him with every step steps as if
walking pained him. But the old man didn’t complain. Jin tried to do most of
the work, but knew the extra lines in Father Patrick’s face came from worry.

“We
have enough to make us last a while longer,” Jin said as he helped the old man
down on their usual spot. Wailing and roaring from flame and fighting, was like
a nightmarish background noise. Father Patrick didn’t let the kids up on the
roof anymore.  

Jin
didn’t know what they would do when they ran out of food. If not for Frey’s
constant gathering, they would have starved long ago. Jin could see the great
garage burning from where they sat and wondered if his and Frey’s Volvo was
covered in flame yet.

“You’re
right Jin,” Father Patrick said as he looked up at the fading dome. “You’re
right.”

He
could feel himself getting stronger every day, and his mind was clear for the
first time in what felt like years. Jin knew the old man had feared for him as
they had barred the doors, since there were no pills to fall back on if he
became crazy from the craving.

Sometimes
the nightmare version of him seemed like distant memory. 

“I had
a strange thought today.”

“What?” Jin asked.

“Well,
I thought, whoever had tried to take Frey would have been in for a surprise,”
he coughed a few laughs and Jin couldn’t help but join him.

“Yeah,”
he agreed. “She’s not an easy one to corner, that’s for sure.” He smiled,
thinking of all the times he would pull her out of danger. She had always
laughed it off after.
And how many times haven’t I pulled
you
to
safety?
He heard her say in his mind, and had to agree that was true.

“Maybe
she did it…”

Jin
turned to Father Patrick. He was leaning his head back, looking up at the dome.
“I don’t think they caught her. I think she got away.”

Jin
felt worried. He wondered if the old man was getting a fever. He
had
been coughing a lot lately. “Well. If someone would make it, it would be Frey,”
he agreed and knew that to be true.

Li was waiting on
them in the meeting room. Luke was already there, his big frame leaning against
the wall as usual.

“Gone
long enough, you big log,” Tina said and smacked his hard stomach like a
strange personal greeting. Luke just grunted in reply.

Tina
and Frey sat down next to each other.

Li had
placed the holographic map of the building on the table, showing Dome. The east
wall was marked green. Luke nodded at the bag next to the map and Frey pulled
it towards her. “I bought what I thought you might need.”

Frey
looked inside to see chalk powder and climbing shoes. There was a white robe
inside as well, like the one she had stolen to get out of Dome.

Frey
nodded her thanks. As she put the bag next to her, Jon and Joy came in. Jon’s
hair was ruffled and Joy purposely pulled her blouse straight with a nasty
smile.

“Thought
you were down there pulling your weight,” Tina shot at Joy.

The
woman’s face got red at that.

“She
was,” Jon said, sounding very defensive.

Tina
raised her eyebrow. “Oh yeah? What? Both of you working on the organic
structure of the body or something?”

Jon
went bright red, Joy only crossing her arms, sniffing loudly. Li choked on his
coffee, and Luke looked up at the roof with a moan. “No fighting.” But Frey
thought it looked like the end of his mouth came dangerously close to something
that could be called a smile.

She
looked at anyone and everything except Jon and Joy.

Li was
wiping his robe as he put the coffee cup down. Before he had the time to remind
them all that they had more important things to do than bicker, Harry and
Lallie
came bursting into the meeting room. They were both
bent over and breathing hard. Harry held a glass screen with information in his
hand, half pointing it at them. He and
Lallie
looked
up at the same time, and Frey now saw how much they resembled each other. “
We
cracked the bloody code!
” He yelled at them as if they were forty feet
away, and not four.

“We
bloody cracked it,”
Lallie
said, as if to
herself
. She finally looked up at the rest of them. “We know
what the hell’s going on… and it’s not good…”

When the two of
them had finally calmed down enough to sit, they put the glass screen in the
middle of the table, moving the projection of Dome to the side.

Harry
placed it like it was leaf thin, and then pulled his hand upwards to reveal a
holographic image of a human, a small animation playing before them. “We all
know our pills are cell generating. They repair matter with new and fresh
cell’s, right?” He didn’t wait for a response. “The cell’s come from a cell
bank that are
grown
right there in the cell bank… or that’s what we’ve
been told anyway…”

“There
is no
cell bank. There is no generator that creates and stores them in
Base,”
Lallie
said, her voice silent and her eyes
distant. “There never was.” She looked at them all in turn, stopping at Frey.

Frey
felt
herself
go cold. She knew what
Lallie
was going to say. She realized in that moment that,
in a way she had always known… All those questions. All those times she’d
shaken her head and asked “why”. She felt frozen inside, her very blood going
cold. “There’s no cell bank, since they don’t need it… the cell matter is taken
from the humans in Hole…” She looked up. “The Yellow Pill is eating the cell
structure right out of the person taking it.”

Frey
saw the bodies in front of her again. Saw their dry skin and hollow faces, as
if the very flesh and fluid had been drained away.
Which is exactly what
happened…

“B-but…
but how is that
possible
?!
” Tina stuttered.
“How would they transfer the cell structure to Base
?!
”

Harry
spoke up. “They translate the cell information to a digital signal.” He looked
at Frey. “But to do that the micro organisms in the Yellow Pill needs to
consume
the cell to gather the information.”

Everyone
was very silent.

Frey
could feel her stomach clench as if she was going to be sick, a cold sweat
breaking out and making her insides shudder. But she firmly pushed the feeling
aside. She needed to know these things, needed to know the truth of it!

“The
information is translated into a perfect copy of that cell in Base.”
Lallie
flicked at the screen to show animations that
reinforced her meaning.

“That’s
why the production of our pills stopped when Hole went berserk. As soon as the
people of Hole stopped taking the pill, the cell information stopped coming in,
making the creation of our pills impossible…” Li concluded, looking off at
nothing.

Frey
looked at Jon. She saw it all to clear now… she just prayed that the others
wouldn’t notice, because if they did, Frey had no idea what the consequences
would be.

“You
are needed by the main entrance,” Luke reminded Jon. “We need to get the gates
open for the desert dwellers, or it won’t matter that attention is turned away
from Dome.”

Jon
had his hands on the table, staring Luke down. The giant didn’t look away.

“I
know you can handle things without me just fine-“

“And
Frey and I can handle Dome fine! The fewer we are, the better. You know that,”
Tina said, her arms crossed.

“I
can-“ Jon started.

“Don’t.”
She knew her voice was cold, but she really didn’t care. He had no right to
treat her like a child. She had lived in a place like Slum City her whole life.
He hadn’t. She and Jin had been through hell and worse together, and survived
it. Whatever Jon thought he knew about her wasn’t so. He had no right talking
to her like he knew her… 

Jon
was staring at her, and she felt the anger and sadness well up until she
wondered where it would all go. She bit down hard on her emotions and cursed
the government for playing with human lives.
They’ll pay.

Jon looked
away from her. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

The
room quickly filled with people as more from the resistance started filing in.
Everyone didn’t have room to sit, many standing or leaning against the walls to
the sides.

Li let
the silence hang for some time before he pushed the screen, presenting the
secrets of the pill, to the side to give room for the Dome map again. “If we
wait another twenty-four hours, it will be too late. I just got hold of our
Intel at the border, and they have already sent out spies to sweep the desert.
Very soon they will have found the desert dwellers. We have to act
now
!”
They all shifted, like one great mass of movement. You could almost feel the
tension.

“This
is it…”
Lallie
whispered, and her brother grabbed her
hand in his.

“Tina,
Frey. You will have team two at your disposal. Luke has briefed them. Your team
will be small, but we all know that’s how it have to be,” Li said, letting his
eyes rest on Jon. “Luke, Jon and
Lallie
will be going
to the border. You know what to do.” They nodded. “Harry. When you reach the
power circuit, make sure you time the power cut. When you’re done, get out of
there. They will know were you are. Let’s hope the code proves to be the same
to access their network as well.” Harry nodded and this time
Lallie
reached out to reassure her brother. Harry was the
only one who was going to be alone.

Li
turned to each and every one of them, giving them orders, assigning their tasks
and teams. No one interrupted.

“There
will be twenty-four more groups spread out around
Alya
to cause disturbances,” Li continued. He took a short breath before continuing.
“Me and Joy are moving into Base with Stanly. He can get us in, and we are
going to shut down Base.”

There
was a heavy silence after that. This wasn’t news. They had gone through it all
before. Getting into Base would be the easy part. Getting in
anywhere
tonight would be the easy part, and they were all aware that they might not
make it out again.

Now,
it was really happening. This was their chance, and they only got one try. Li
didn’t have to tell them that.  He stood up straight, looking at them in
turn. “I’m so proud of all of you.”

“Frey!”
Jon called after her. He grabbed her arm, hindering her from moving away.
“Frey, I just have to let you know… If something was to happen to me… I haven’t
felt like this about anyone before…”

No,
please don’t. It’s not
you
talking. These aren’t your feelings!
She
wanted to yell the words in his face.
You’re
not
Jin!

“They’ve
found the desert dwellers! They’re attacking as we speak!” Someone yelled. The
chaos that followed ripped Frey free from Jon. Tina pulled her towards the
surface, while Luke pushed Jon towards the underground garage. Frey couldn’t
see Li or the others, and instead focused on not loosing her bag as she bolted
after Tina.

She
hadn’t been outside the building since the day she was shot. Frey felt her
hands shake, the adrenaline not having anywhere to go. She shuddered with the
stain to hold it all back. When she had escaped Dome, there had been little
time to pay attention to the monuments around her. Now she saw them. Really saw
them.

Tina
didn’t give her any time to fall behind, but dragged her along the streets,
keeping to the side of the buildings. She let her thumb hover above a glowing
blue square and the glass slid upwards to admit a slick black beast of a
motorbike.

Tina
grabbed a helmet and tossed it to Frey then, swinging her long leg over the
motorbike and starting it with an ear splitting roar. Frey jumped up behind
her, and just had the time to twist her arms around the Tina’s middle as it
lunged forward into the night.

Frey
decided that riding a bike was something else she might never get used to.

The
city flew past at blinding speed, the stationed advertising becoming lines of
light, while the projections on both sides of the rode match their speed. Frey
looked above the smiling woman displaying her jewelry, to the immense
skyscrapers. They towered above them easily three times higher than any of the
skyscrapers in Hole.

Tina
followed the wide road to the right, and the buildings disappeared as they
entered a tunnel.

“Group
two are positioned and waiting for us already,” Tina’s voice said into Frey’s
helmet. She sounded calm and Frey wished she could sound the
same,
sure her heart was drumming in the speakers.

“Will
anyone know I’m out in the city?”

Tina
knocked at her helmet with a finger, not turning her eyes away from the road. “
Lallie
made sure the line was secure, but that doesn’t mean
it can’t get hack into it. That’s also why we need to find the main server as
we get to our location. Hacking it would mean they would know what we were up
to.”

Frey
glanced up again as they exited the tunnel. No stars could be seen past the
city glare blended them out.

No
stars. This time on the outside…

Tina had parked
the black monster at the edge of the great park, and they walked the rest of
the way on foot. She led Frey back almost the exact way she had escaped. By now
all the government soldiers would be backing up the main entrances to
Alya
.

Frey
kept close to Tina, keeping the hood of her jacket pulled up. They moved off to
the left, onto a smaller road with less people. As soon as there was no one
close by, Tina veered off towards the Dome.

She
made a tiny notion with her head as they walked past another bench. Frey looked
over, but could see nothing out of the ordinary.

“There
is a camera there…” She reached into her front pocket and Frey could hear a
small click. Two seconds later there was a loud buzz as the lights went out
behind them. Lamps flickered out and the advertisement projections along the
road disappearing with them. The same went for the glass screens the people
were carrying.

Loud
complaining could be heard all around as the sudden darkness pressed in. The
sound of cursing, surprise and fear grew fainter as Tina and Frey moved away
from the park and into Dome territory.

“Nice,”
Tina said. “He’s inside the network.” She laughed, but kept her voice down.

Frey
had no trouble seeing the contours of the park around them. She turned around
and was amazed the electricity had been cut off as far as the eye could see.
Whatever was charging the
city,
it obviously powered
everything from the great billboard projections to the individual glass screens
that people were carrying.