The Empowered, page 25
My eyes widened. His skin gave off the same static hum the killer tree-things had.
I aimed my stunner at him. I still had charge left in the second battery. My mouth was dry. I got a better look at him. His eyes were black, with no irises, like a fish, and his mouth was open, like a fish, slowly gulping air. He shambled closer.
Where his hair would be was green furry moss. Dark gray-green lichen covered his crotch and the front of his legs. My eyes watered and my stomach churned. He had a cat-piss stink to him. Ammonia stench made me gag.
I wanted to vomit. The rest of my team looked like they also wanted to throw up.
"A stinking nightmare on two legs," Simon whispered. He covered his mouth with a rag.
Yeah, you could say that.
I told my fear to go lie down in a corner, and I ran my power over the green fur and the skin.
A strange piping sound ran through my head, and a feeling like the weird tree-things, of facing walls of glass with nothing beyond.
"He's like the tree-things."
"Oh my god," Keisha said.
Coldie backed up, fear filling her face.
I aimed the stunner at him, finger on the trigger.
But he kept on walking down the other road, and headed off to our left. Frond-like things trailed from the backs of his legs.
The green moss fur grew down his back. He wore faded flip-flops that smacked the asphalt as he shambled away.
Bile filled my mouth.
Behind me someone threw up.
“Bloody hell." That was Simon.
I lowered the gun.
It hadn't seen us.
"A zombie!" Coldie said.
Keisha wiped her mouth. She looked embarrassed. I ignored the vomit on the ground. I wanted to hurl, too.
Some mad scientist in a company lab down here, experimenting on people.
I pulled out my data pad. The data pad showed the map of the area—and a satellite photo—according to Ashula. We had to reach the warehouse.
"Let's get moving.”
"All things considered, I'd rather be in New Jersey," Keisha said, the blood still drained from her face.
Yeah, I'd rather be in the crappiest dive in Portland, but a job was a job.
We walked down the road into the little village. What looked like giant sunflowers, the petals huge and triangular, glinted in the sunlight.
Another green person was out there; a tall teenaged girl, her breasts covered with moss fur. I swallowed bile. Her black hair was covered with more of the green moss-like stuff. She was sprinkling water on the mutant sunflowers or whatever they were.
Her eyes were black, like the green man’s. She was almost as tall as me. She could have been my sister Ava or Ella. I clenched my fists. She ignored me, went on sprinkling water.
We kept walking. Tall, conical plants lined the road and sparkled where the sunlight reached them beneath the tall trees.
"Cycads," Simon said. "Very ancient plants.”
"But these look almost like crystal," Keisha said.
They did. They were crystal-like things soaring eight feet high. Fluid moved inside them. My stomach twisted again.
Coldie had her stunner out, while Keisha's fingers were twitching, like she wanted to conjure steel.
"No time," I said.
We huddled on the path. Webbed fronds rustled, and another green man-thing moved, this one crawling along the ground, its fingertips and toes had sucker-cup like things on them.
Who the fuck would do this? We were in the middle of a nightmare, a horror show.
"God damn." Keisha's voice was a sharp whisper.
"Indeed." Simon nodded.
We reached the first hut—it was made of wood with a corrugated tin roof beneath a mossy carpet. I noticed tiny green threads running along the edges of the roof and dangling from the eaves like cobwebs.
A little boy sat in the doorway of the first house, like a garden statue, only you could see his chest rise and fall. His skin was shiny green scales, like the bark of the weird-tree things.
His eyes were all black, like the other people we had found. His mouth was open, and his tongue was covered in green fur.
A little monster. A little victim. He couldn't have been more than five years old.
His fingers held a sticky green-gray lump.
Keisha and Coldie were both crying, while Simon looked away.
I stepped up close to the boy. He didn't seem to notice me until my shadow covered him, then he got up and walked into the sunlight, stopped, and sat down.
His scaled skin gleamed. My eyes watered at the cat piss stink. Yellow-green droplets covered his hands. I reached out with my sense and heard the same alien ringing in my mind, felt the same glass wall, with living energy just beyond it.
I swore to God that I'd kill whoever had done this.
We started walking again and found more green people, children and grown-ups, in the doorways of the shacks, and leaning against walls, their mouths open, scaled skins gleaming.
When I was a girl, my grandmother read me the Island of Doctor Moreau because I wanted a grown-up story, and because I wanted to hear one of her favorite stories. Ruth said I was going to have nightmares, but she read the story to me anyway, about an island filled with monsters created by a nut job. I don’t remember having nightmares from the story, but I would after seeing this village.
Simon turned to me. “I believe I know what the scales are for—biological solar cells."
I unclenched my hands. "What the hell for?" The real monsters were the scum that had done this to these people. “Why would you do that to people?”
“Perhaps because they could.”
I wanted to tear the heart out of the bastard who thought up that idea.
The sun was hot on my skin. My mouth was dry, and all I could smell was that ammonia stink.
How could we save these poor people? We couldn’t. Not now. Not when I had no idea how to fix them, how to return them to what they once were.
“Aliens!” Coldie looked around, wild-eyed. “That’s what they are.” She was having a major freak-out.
I grabbed her shoulders. “Don’t freak. There are no aliens.”
“These sure look like aliens. And you said the tree-things were alien.”
“What they felt like was alien. Not that they were.”
“Same thing!”
Keisha shrugged. “She’s got a point.”
“Let’s go,” I said through clenched teeth. When Ava and Ella were tweeners, they’d had a thing about aliens. They read books and stories about them, and always wanted Ruth to buy any tabloid in the grocery story with aliens on the cover. I had talked with Professor Insight, back when I was in the Renegades. He said there was no evidence. It was just wishful thinking.
We continued on the path, and the village disappeared into the rain forest.
Ten minutes later, we entered a clearing.
Ahead of us, maybe a hundred yards away, a huge gray building rose up.
Our target.
3
The warehouse was a huge two-story gray building that looked like it had been dropped into the jungle from an industrial area in Portland or Seattle. It had no windows. There was a row of big doors and what looked like a standard person-sized entrance in the middle of the side facing us. Black glass blisters were perched on the upper corners of the warehouse.
“Likely those are camera blisters,” Simon whispered to me.
Great.
We crouched in a grove of not-plant things, cylindrical in shape, wood colored, topped with flower-like green-black petals.
I tried not to reach out to the not-plants, but it was like a fire you just had to touch. An electric tingle, no noise, the feeling of black glass everywhere, harder than anything I knew, but nothing else. I pulled my sense away, biting down on the anger rising up in me. This place was as much a twisted freak show as those bizarre tree-things back in the field.
“Why aren’t there any signs on the building?” I asked Simon.
He looked at the building. “I don’t know. I suppose why hang a sign on your secret installation?”
There was a wooden hut on the far side of the paved road across from the warehouse, next to a tall pole with all sorts of communications stuff on it.
I glanced at Simon. “That has to be a guard shack.”
“Clearly. But where are the guards?”
Keisha looked around warily. “I want to know what the guards are.
Good question. No sign of vehicles, either. But why have a guard shack if your guards weren’t people? The guard shack had polarized windows, so it had to be for human guards.
“Let’s go see what the back of the warehouse looks like.” I led the others through the not-plant grove, trying to avoid brushing against the cylindrical plants, but still touched one with my hip. An electric shock shot through me. My legs and arms jerked and my jaw clenched. I staggered away.
“What the fuck?” Keisha shot me a worried look. “Are you okay?”
“Those cylinder-shaped plant thing are real live wires.” I shook myself. “They’re packing serious voltage.”
The rest of my cell gave those a lot of room after that.
We got to the near corner of the warehouse. No doors along the side of the building. A narrow paved path ran around to the back. It was probably for goon guards in a goon golf cart. Assuming there were any actual goon guards.
We stayed in the not-plant grove, creeping along until we reached the rear of the warehouse. The rest of the ground was covered with little white stones. It must have been a real pain to keep the forest and all the plants from growing closer to the warehouse, and getting tangled up with the not-plant grove. But even without trying I sensed the rain forest’s fear. It was afraid of the not-plants.
There were no doors along the back at all, either.
The whine of an electric motor approached from behind the opposite end of the warehouse. On cue, a golf cart with two uniformed goons riding in it came around the far end.
Shit. “Get down,” I hissed at the others.
We crouched in the not-plant grove. “Who has charges left in their stunners?”
“I do,” Coldie said quietly.
“Take these guys out,” I whispered as the cart came closer. Our jungle suits’ camo should make us hard to see, and the two goons looked bored. Stupid to not pay attention, but they must have done this a million times with nothing to see.
She handed me her stunner. “No, you’d better do it.” Now I knew Coldie wasn’t back to normal. She should want to pop these guys. She sure as hell wouldn’t have given the stunner to me.
But I didn’t argue, just handed the stunner to Simon. He and Coldie were the snipers in the cell.
Simon held the stunner two-handed, aimed.
The golf cart hummed toward us.
Simon waited.
“Fire anytime,” I whispered.
He ignored me.
Keisha scowled at him, but Simon ignored her, too.
My muscles tensed. Bored guard goons suddenly woke up when they saw us crouching in the not-plant grove.
The golf cart braked suddenly, the goons fighting to stay inside, grabbing at their guns.
The stunner went zap, zap! The two guards slumped out of the cart like cooked spaghetti. Electric motor cut off. The little vehicle thudded against the warehouse, and stopped.
“I did not want the cart to crash,” Simon said, like he was telling us the weather for a nice day.
Keisha and I duct-taped the guards’ mouths and zip-tied their hands together behind their backs. I was betting they wouldn’t be left like this too long. But hopefully long enough.
Simon pointed up at the glass blister on this corner of the building above us, like the ones around the front. “Another camera.”
Great. “Then we need to haul ass.” Again. I wasn’t waiting any longer. We jogged down the access path, back to the front of the building.
“Simon, check the guard shack.” If the video feed went someplace other than there, we’d have company real soon. Simon ran over to the shack at a crouch.
“The rest of us need to get inside, now,” I told the others.
But the big doors had no way to be opened. There were no handles. No locks. Maybe they were opened remotely. I took the electronic lock pick off my belt. It looked like an electric toothbrush. I thumbed it on. The thing was magic as far as I was concerned, but science wasn’t my thing. What mattered was it could open keycard-controlled doors, keypad-controlled ones, remotely-operated doors, you name it.
“It isn’t going to work,” Keisha said.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
The lock pick had a simple green light for unlock, red for still locked. I waved it over the nearest door, trying to detect an electronic lock. The indicators stayed dark.
“Step aside.” Keisha made a show of pushing past me. She ran her hands over the door. It looked like your run-of-the-mill warehouse door, without any handles. Guess it wouldn’t have been a secure warehouse if it had easy access. Keisha should be able to get through it easy. She closed her eyes, still running her hands over it. She paused, tapped the door. Slid her palms slowly down, her fingers fluttering against the surface.
“Open it, not make love to it,” I said.
She scowled. “Funny.”
“Then what’s the deal?”
Keisha opened her eyes. “Those doors aren’t metal.”
“Aren’t metal?” That didn’t make any kind of sense. “Then what are they made of?”
“I don’t know, but it’s not metal, so I can’t do the can opener thing.”
“Let’s try the employee entrance.” At least I figured that’s what it was. I ran along the building to the normal-looking door. There was a keypad next to the entrance.
No surprise there. Of course it would be locked.
Keisha touched the door like she was reaching for a pan on a hot stove, real carefully. Then she stroked the door and smiled. “Metal. This I can work with.”
She stretched out her fingers, and closed her eyes, concentrating. “Titanium,” she said, sounding surprised. The metal began to glow. Steam rose from the door.
Titanium wasn’t cheap. Someone really wanted this place secured.
More steam rose. Sweat beaded on Keisha’s forehead. “That’s twice in an hour I’ve had to bust my butt using my power,” she said through gritted teeth.
“You love it,” I said.
Eyes still closed, she stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth, in my direction.
The door finally came apart. Strips of metal floated past Keisha, dropped to the pavement, clinking as they hit the asphalt.
A living smell rushed out of the warehouse, something like growing plant life, but with something else in it too, something I didn’t have words for, but that made me sick to my stomach.
“God damn!” Keisha swore. She and the others looked like they wanted to puke.
Funny, but we’d been given filtration masks. Maybe we should use them. I slapped mine on.
I waved my hands at the rest of the team. “Don’t throw up, put on your masks.”
Coldie retched, then pulled hers on, as did the others.
I clenched my jaw and stepped through the door. It wasn’t what I expected. It was like walking into a hangar. The space inside was huge. In the middle, what looked like cradles, black cradles were bathed in a sickening puke-green light.
I went to the nearest cradle and looked inside. There was a tangle of cables attached to pod-things, that looked like avocados only smooth.
I opened my hand over the pod-things, and reached out with my power.
A thrumming in my mind like the kind I’d get from a field of berries, but with no emotion in it, no joy, or worry. Plant-like but not plants. I stretched my fingers until I almost brushed one of the pod’s. The air tingled with static electricity. These pods must be the “experimental batteries” Ashula had told me about when she handed me this job.
“Are they alive?” I heard Keisha ask.
“Sort of. Not really.” There was life of a kind inside of some sort of plastic, with chemical blood moving. Alien life, more walls of glass, pressing at my mind. The room began to spin around me, and I pulled my power back in, took a deep breath.
My face hardened. “Let’s grab what we’re supposed to grab and get the hell out of here.” I stumbled over a cable on the floor. Couldn’t see worth shit in this place.
“If only we had better lighting.”
Overhead lights flickered on, and the room was suddenly bathed in blinding white light. Damn. I rubbed my eyes.
I blinked and the room came back into focus.
Simon stood next to a light panel. “It turns out that we do.”
“You could have given us some warning. And weren’t you supposed to be guarding the guard shack?”
“It was empty.”
“What about the security cameras?”
“I discovered an amazing piece of technology there,” he said, straight-faced. “An off switch.”
“Ha-ha,” Keisha said. “For a limey, you are hilarious.”
He ignored her
Hundreds of cradles filled the warehouse. Cables snaked from the cradles across the floor to a crazy concrete pillbox-like structure in the center of the huge space.
Simon walked over to me, while Coldie craned her neck to look around the warehouse, her eyes wide.
Keisha snickered. “You’re gonna sprain your neck,” she said, and laughed.
Coldie frowned. “You act all tough, but you’re freaking out inside,” she said. Her eyes were lit with her usual pissy fire. She had to be feeling better. Which meant we were stuck with Miss Bitchy. Great. Couldn’t win for losing.
“You know what that is?” Simon pointed at the blocky pillbox-like structure.
The cables all snaked into ports on the side of the little building. “Must be a power plant, but it’s not big enough.”
“My guess is that is a mini-nuclear reactor, or even a tokamak fusion reactor.”
“Here?”
