Rage

THIRTY-SEVEN

Raine spun to face whoever had grabbed him.

Cheers and sirens still boomed from the arena, Stiles milking his unlikely success.

The figure was barely visible, but it was definitely a woman-her eyes catching the scant light. She had a rifle slung over her shoulder and two handguns at either side.

Armed and ready to play.

“What are-”

“ Stop. You can’t go back there.”

“Got an interview to do. And who are-”

“Did you see the Enforcers all over? They have a hovercraft outside ready to take you away. You’re dead if you go back there.”

“How do you know?”

“Look, I’m Dr. Elizabeth Cadence. I’m with the Resistance. We have people in places and we got word that you were here. I came to pick you up right after the Bash.”

The cheering outside had subsided. Stiles would be wondering where his new star was.

“You are dead if you stay. I can get you out of here if you come now. Right now. ”

“Why should I trust you?”

She took a step closer, her eyes locked on his. “Because I’m an Ark survivor as well, Lieutenant. Sally said this was what you wanted.”

“You know Sally?”

“She’s a brave woman-she gave me your stuff.” Elizabeth looked around, eyes nervous. “Can we go now?”

Raine looked at this woman. From his own time. From an Ark.

Suddenly-he didn’t feel so alone.

He took a breath. “Lead on.”

Instead of heading back to the other end of the arena, the woman took him in the opposite direction. Before he could ask, she whispered, “They have other exits down here.”

“No guards?”

“Not when I came in. Here-”

Elizabeth stopped by a light and Raine could make out a door labeled SERVICE AREA 19. A recessed handle was the only other adornment.

She used a knife on the latch and the door opened up. He followed her in and she shut it behind them. Then they ran down a corridor with pipes and wires overhead, the innards of the TV complex.

Elizabeth led the way to another door, unlocked this time, and to stairs.

“We have to go down,” she said as she raced ahead of him. “All these old cities have tunnels, passageways. Mostly abandoned except for the stray packs of mutants who hole up in them.”

Down one level, then another.

“They let infrastructure go. But I guess you’ve seen that.”

“That’s not all they have let go.”

“Yeah-okay-”

She stopped and froze. A finger on her lips. Listening. Raine also tilted his head, trying to pick up any sounds, but heard nothing.

“Okay-thought I heard something. They’ll be hunting for you now. Are you okay to keep running?”

He didn’t tell her how much he hurt.

She ran down the bottom level of this area, turning one way, then the other, a mad dash down corridors that seemed erratic and haphazard. But then one basement corridor led to an open sewer area, the gully dry now, though still full of the smell of whatever the Wellspring people dumped into it.

“Follow me. On the ledge. You don’t want to fall into that… shit.”

“Literally.”

She threw him a quick smile.

The ledge was narrow, and it was hard for Raine to keep his balance. But seeing the piles of filth in the trench of the sewer below was plenty of motivation.

Elizabeth kept up a steady pace, moving full out, and it took all of his strength to keep up with her.

Got those nanotrites working overtime, he thought.

They came to an area with no light at all, but Elizabeth had put on a headlamp, and suddenly he had a speck of light to follow.

“We’re close. Nearly outside the town’s limits. You okay, Raine?”

“Fine,” he lied.

And they kept up their brutal pace through the tunnels and sewers of Wellspring.

Finally she stopped at what appeared to be a dead end.

“Okay,” she said, the headlamp aimed right at him, and he had to shield his eyes. “Sorry.”

She switched it off.

“I’ll go out first. Make sure the site is still secure. Then I’ll signal you. You follow me, get in, and we’re off.”

Raine imagined she had a buggy waiting, and he wasn’t at all sure how they could get away in one, not with all the Enforcers spreading out, searching for him. This was her show, though, and he was too tired to care.

He watched her climb up a ladder, then push at a manhole cover, grunting as she did so.

A few moments of silence followed, and then she took a step back down, looking at him.

“All clear. Let’s go.”

He started up the ladder.

When he got out, Raine could see Wellspring behind him, the area they were in dark and deserted, the bright lights of the inner city miles away.

This part of the city was abandoned, destroyed-more a piece of the Wasteland than anything else.

He turned to see where Dr. Cadence had gone…

And he didn’t know what he was looking at. There was a strange blackish shape in the shadows, large enough that he had to tilt his head back to try to see the top. Somewhere in the middle, on an open space, he could barely make out the doctor running back and forth.

He hurried to… whatever it was.

As he drew closer, he saw what looked like the deck of a ship. Some kind of boat? But when he climbed into it, he saw exactly what the large black shape above the deck was.

A balloon.

Like a dirigible. Something out of a Jules Verne novel.

They had no jets, but they had this.

An engine roared to life. Dr. Cadence came up to him. “Okay,” she yelled over the engine. “Boiler’s running. We’re ready. Just hold on-in case we hit any currents heading up.”

Raine noticed then that she hadn’t turned on any running lights. They’d be running dark-which was probably incredibly dangerous-but it also might let them slip away without being seen.

In a world of buggies and cars, it would be as if he had disappeared.

The thing began to rise. Raine firmly attached himself to the deck and held on tight.

The balloon ship wobbled on the way up.

A steady breeze turned into something choppy, and-like a dinghy in a rough sea-the ship rocked back and forth.

But then, when they were well above the ground, Wellspring fading in the distance, it steadied. The moon had come up, Raine again seeing the scarlike gash on it that he first saw in the Wasteland. A visual reminder that this world… had changed.

Stars glistened, though. Ancient, unchanged.

Suddenly he felt cool, chilly at the altitude. And he was aware that he was still covered with mutant blood.

After making sure the ship was running smoothly, Elizabeth came over to him.

“Let me get you some clean clothes. Some water.”

“Thanks.” He looked up at her. A dark figure, worried about him. It felt strange to hear that concerned tone.

Yes, she wanted something from him. But she was of his time. She remembered.

He told himself…

For Ark survivors that must be a special bond.

For those who had been there before it all ended.

Elizabeth nodded as if she had heard his thoughts, then disappeared into what had to be a small belowdecks area.

The ship sailed evenly. Raine drank water from a cup that she brought up, and he shed his jacket for a clean one Elizabeth had found.

He stood next to the woman as she steered the balloon ship, the engine producing a steady roar that mixed with the whistle of the wind moving over the balloon.

“Okay to ask where we are going, Dr. Cadence?”

“Tell you what. You call me Elizabeth, and I won’t call you ‘Lieutenant.’ ”

“Great. Just Raine will do.”

She pointed ahead. “Out there… there are more settlements. Some closer to Capital Prime.”

“Capital Prime?”

“The fortress city of the Authority. Those settlements really serve the Authority. They live and die… at the Authority’s whim.”

“And we’re going to one of them?” he asked skeptically.

“No. We’re not. I’m taking you to our main base. Underground, in a place called Subway Town-right under their noses. The Authority ignores it and hasn’t learned that we hide there. Least, not yet. We will have to move soon. We always have to be on the move.”

For a few seconds Raine just stood there, listening to the sound of the wind, feeling the breeze as they sailed through the night.

“Nobody down below can see us?”

“No. Just got the fire in the boiler. And it’s pretty much covered by the deck.” She looked off into the distance.

He looked at her. A woman from his own time. He couldn’t even begin to think of the questions to ask her.

She turned and looked back at him. “You had a rough couple of days, hm?”

“Hasn’t been easy.”

“Going to take us an hour or so, Raine. And I know you’ve got questions. So let me start… from the beginning.”

As she spoke, Elizabeth looked at the man she had rescued.

Already she wondered if he’d be up to what lay head. Amazing that he had survived the few days he’d been here.

But did he have the strength, the basic health, to do what had to be done in the next twelve hours?

Could one man-even with all his training, his experience, now battered by the Bash, shaken by the arena-do what she was going to ask of him?

She was not at all confident.

“My field is-was-molecular biology. I was one of the core teams working on the nanotrites project.”

“They’ve been very helpful, by the way.”

“Well, don’t get used to them.”

“I’ve heard-”

“My husband helped create them. We didn’t know… what they could do. How they could change.”

“Your husband? He didn’t come with you?”

She turned away. “I was sent in an Ark with my husband-a physicist-and our son. The three of us.”

“They let children go?”

“If they wanted us, our son had to go, too. That was our stance. And I imagine they thought the gene pool might be promising.”

“And your husband is…?”

“We were all picked up by the Authority,” she said quietly. “My husband, son-they were taken away. I was sent to the Dead City to work. The deal-”

“They like deals here.”

She smiled wanly. “The deal was, if I helped them, then we could be reunited. At first I was diligent. But there were rumors… rumors my family was dead. And the work I was doing, I didn’t understand. It seemed… sick. Using nanotrites on the mutants. Yet I only dealt with a piece of the puzzle.”

She took a breath.

“Hopefully, what you got on that hard drive… will explain what was being done. What is still being done.” She looked right at him. “Could be very important, Raine.”

“And so you left.”

“I couldn’t keep helping the Authority. I had to leave. And I didn’t believe they would ever let me see my family again. If they were still alive.”

Raine went quiet for a few minutes.

So much to take in, she thought. She’d had years. This world no longer held surprises for her.

But for him?

Raine broke his silence. “How did this all happen? The Authority, the Enforcers? What happened to the plan to rebuild humanity, to make a new world?”

This was the question she had been waiting for. “You know what they say about plans,” she said. “This one had a flaw that doomed it from the beginning. That, and a big surprise.”

She then told Raine about the asteroid, how its course had shifted, whatever was inside it reacting to the planet. And how General Martin Cross and Colonel James Casey had commandeered an Ark.

How they made sure they were the first out.

Made sure that they would run this world.

“Most of the survivors that came after them were either killed or captured. The ones that could be used were put to work. A few, like myself, escaped. But not many.” She looked at Raine again. “Now, there’s only one other like you that we know of.”

“Like me?”

“A soldier. Captain John Marshall. Leader of the Resistance.”

“I look forward to meeting him.”

She nodded.

Not yet, she told herself… she wouldn’t tell him yet. Instead, she simply said:

“Me, too…”