Hunter felt the warmth of the sun on his face behind closed eyelids. He looked down at his leathered reflection through the ripples of crimson tainted water. He dipped his hands in the thick copper smelling liquid, taking a moment to feel it flow between his fingers, before cupping his hands into a vessel. When they were filled, he splashed it on his face. Instead of the relief of cool water, the viscous sticky liquid left a film over Hunter’s eyes that he wiped away with his shirtsleeve. When he was done, Hunter stood, grabbed the handle of his axe, and picked off bits of flesh left on the blade, before he slung the tool over his broad shoulder and started the walk back towards the tree line.
He heard the crack of the tree before the scream.
Hunter rushed forward, towards the tree line, and tore through the underbrush until he came to the large White oak tree that he and his brother James had been chopping down. It was laying in a crater left by the impact.
Hunter frantically searched for his brother as an axe still gripped in a hand caught his eye. He ran forward and fell to his brother’s side.
“James!” Hunter gently caressed James’ face with his hands. His eyes were closed. If not for the blood that had already soaked through his shirt in the spots where the rough bark had dug into James’ flesh, Hunter could have sworn his brother was asleep. “Come on, buddy. You’re gonna be alright.”
Hunter pressed his shoulder into the tree truck, dug his feet into the ground, and pushed with all his might, but the tree wouldn’t budge.
“Hunter.” A calm voice rang out.
“Hello?” Hunter scanned the surrounding woods, searching for anyone that could offer aid. “I need help! Please!”
“Hunter.” The voice called out once more.
This time, the owner of the voice clicked in his mind. It was James. Hunter threw himself down next to his brother, wrapped his arms around his neck, and sobbed into James’ shoulder.
“James. I’m here. Please open your eyes. I’m so sorry. I should have never let you come on this job with me. It wasn’t safe, and I knew that.”
“Hunter.”
“James?” Hunter sat back up and looked at his brother lying motionless on the forest floor.
“You need to save her.”
Hunter squinted at his brother’s lifeless form. The voice was James’, but it wasn’t coming from James. It was echoing inside Hunter’s mind. “Who?”
“Ella. You need to save her.”
“I’m trying, but I can’t.” Hunter wiped a tear from his bloodshot eyes. “Just like I couldn’t save you.”
“You don’t have a choice. She needs you. Everyone needs you.”
“How? What should I do?”
“Wake up!” James’ eyes shot open. Instead of the deep green eyes that normally transfixed anyone James came in contact with, his irises had turned into a milky white with gray veins that spread across the whole of his eyeballs like rivers of liquid mercury.
Hunter scrambled away from his brother’s unflinching form. “No.”
“Wake up!”
“Wake up!”
“Wake up!”
The words swarmed in Hunter’s mind like fire ants from a freshly destroyed colony. He covered his ears and dug his face into the decomposing leaves.
“Hunter, wake up!”
Thad shook Hunter’s shoulders until his friend sprung from his slumber like a viper uncoiling for a kill.
“Holy shit, man.” Thad bent forward and rested his hand on his knees. “You scared the crap out of me.”
Hunter quickly scanned his surroundings. “What happened?”
“You mean, other than giving me a heart attack?” Thad gripped at his chest. “You passed out. Honestly, I thought you were dead.”
“Not yet.” Hunter slipped the sleeve up his bionic arm and let the green led status lights fill the darkness around them. “How long have I been out?”
“It’s hard to say. Maybe thirty to forty-five minutes.” Thad ran a hand through his hair. “But it could be longer.”
“Why did you let me sleep so long?”
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“One, I didn’t have a choice. I tried to wake you up, but you crashed hard. Two, there was nowhere for us to go until those psychopaths left.”
“What about those two?” Hunter pointed at the two men lying on the stretcher.
“Michael started making noises a bit ago. But the other guy, nothing.”
“Is he…”
Thad shook his head. “He’s still breathing.”
Hunter puffed out a breath. “Good.”
“What happened out there, man?”
The memory of the guards being vaporized flashed through Hunter’s mind as the light from the metal collar lashed to the man’s neck slowly blinked. “I don’t know. But make sure that collar stays green until we can figure it out.”
“Well, that, in no way, sounds ominous.”
Hunter chuckled. “Astute observation.”
“Thank you. What do we do if he wakes up?”
“Improvise.”
Thad rubbed his forehead. “I should have known.”
“But no matter what happens, we need to keep him alive. Something tells me we’re going to need him if we want to get everyone out of this mess.”
“Sure. Why not? What’s next?”
“We get out of here, grab Ella, and find a new safe place to hide.”
“What about Jake?”
Hunter moved towards the boulder covering their exit, and began moving it out of the way, inch by inch, until the gap was large enough to look through. “Ella first. Then we worry about Jake.”
When Hunter was satisfied that the coast was clear, he pushed the stone further away from the opening and poked his head out.
Hunter squeezed his body through the opening. “Stay here.”
Thad nodded as the darkness filled the space once more. A few minutes later, the rock fully slid out of the way, and Hunter motioned his friend forward. “Let’s go. We need to stay as quiet as possible. There could be Republic drones anywhere and my guess is they have thermal imaging sensors, so we need to be careful.”
“Of course they do.” Thad moved to the stretcher and lifted one side as Hunter took the other. “We’re going to die.”
“Probably.”
“You know, sometimes it’s okay to lie to me.”
“What fun would that be?”
“I’ll show you fun.” Thad mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” Thad rammed the stretcher into Hunter’s back. “Can we just go, please?”
“Alright. Let’s go.”
The two men stepped forward and into the open air.
***
Episode 25
Jake woke to a throbbing pain in his head and a burning in his neck. He tried to move his hand, but it was no use. Something was keeping him in place. A loud groan escaped his lips as Jake leaned his head back on the chair he was sitting on. Unconsciousness threatened to overtake him once more until a wave of memory washed over him. Hunter and Thad had escaped and then all hell had broken loose. The fight he had put up before the sheer number of guards had overwhelmed him. The jolt of electricity that coursed through his body made everything around him smell like burnt flesh. The beatings that followed. They each filled his mind in slow motion like hot, sticky tar. But there was still one that hid behind the rest, peaking out ever so slightly.
A vial of orange liquid passed from one hand to another.
They had injected him with the mind opening liquid.
Panic rushed through Jake’s body. He tried to stand, but cold metal straps around his wrists, waist, and legs kept him planted firmly in his seat.
“Jake, Jake, Jake.” Stanton hissed as he stepped into the light, causing Jake’s eyes to snap open. “You’re a fighter, I’ll give you that. And you’re stronger than I gave you credit for. Incredibly stupid, but I digress.”
Stanton stalked around his prey like a shark circling its meal. “You’ve cost me everything, boy. The girl, the greatest scientist I’ve ever worked beside, and now the single greatest gift for all of humanity.”
Jake closed his eyes and focused all his thoughts on one truth. “You caused this, you bastard.”
“Look at me!” Stanton leaned forward, gripped Jake’s face in his hand, and squeezed until his eyes fluttered open. “You caused this. I was about to save what was left of this rotten planet. You didn’t have to live through the fear that your father and I had to live through. To watch as the world you loved tore itself apart. To watch the effects of plague and nuclear winter, eat the flesh from the bones of the woman you loved. All the while, dictators from across the globe sat on thrones in their ivory towers and played their war games. You never felt the hopelessness that comes with realizing your species had become nothing more than a leech that the land it lived on wanted to belch past the clouds of smog and into the sun. I refused to sit back and do nothing! With the Caladrius by our sides, we could have re-written it all. You could have been a king.”
“And you could have been God?” Jake spat.
“God? No.” Stanton snarled and squeezed harder until his nails dug into Jake’s skin so deeply they drew blood before twisting his head so the older man could whisper in his ear. “Better than God. The savior of it all.”
“You’re no savior.” Jake whipped his face from Stanton’s grasp. “You’re a sick son of a bitch that will destroy anyone and anything that gets in his way.”
“You’re damn right, boy.” Stanton backhanded Jake’s left cheek, sending a broken tooth flying across the room. “Enough games. Tell me who the two men are, where they took my son, and where the girl is.”
Jake spit a large wad of blood from the fresh wound in his mouth, nearly landing on Staton’s clean black shoes. “You can go to hell.”
“How about I meet you there? But first…” A wicked smile curled over Stanton’s teeth as he stepped back and held out a hand until a woman in a lab coat placed a towel in his palm. “Unfortunately, we are running out of time. It won’t be nearly as fun as watching you suffer, but your friends also stole our current original for the cloning program. So why not just upload the details of your tiny little brain into an entire army? There is some poetry in that, isn’t there? The one thing you’re trying so hard to keep locked inside is the thing that will set us all free. And thanks to your father’s hard work with DNA engineering, we don’t even need the full host to complete the clones.”
Stanton turned his attention to a person standing behind Jake as he wiped his hands on the towel and nodded. “So, thank you, Jake, for your sacrifice for our greater good.”
A shuffling and sudden prick of pain in his neck shifted Jake’s attention away from Stanton leaving the room. He tried to speak, but his words melted away into a pool of searing pain in his legs, burning flesh, and inky blackness.
