Children of Evolution (The Gateway Series Book 2) (38 page)

The waste was mind-boggling. Nikki just couldn't wrap her brain around it. Every time she tried, she started thinking about all the good that money could have done spread around the free zones. Granted, there hadn't been any free zones back then, but she'd bet her unbeatable seat for the show tonight that there'd been plenty of down-and-outs who could have benefited. That's just how the world worked. If you had a lot of something in one place, then somebody, somewhere, didn't have enough.

If there was one good thing to come out of the Event, it was the collapse of the greedy old behemoth that was the movie-making industry. Of course, the towns that relied on movie money were some of the hardest hit in the days following the Event. They had a surplus of people with high-dollar skill sets who were about as useful as nipples on a chicken when survival was on the line. No surprise most of those people ended up in the first free zones.

Hollywood didn't drop off the map completely though. Instead it adapted. It evolved. One of the smallest studios—known for a series of snoozy science documentaries—took a single piece of experimental research equipment and remade the industry. They were the first to attempt to record a story directly out of someone's brain—and they were laughed at by the big dogs. But as theaters Stateside emptied, or morphed into shelters, the major studios realized overseas markets alone couldn't support them, not when it cost the price of a small island—and took the population of one—to make a single flick. Meanwhile, the little guy started cranking out feature films from a one-room office with a handful of people and a microscopic fraction of the budget. The laughter stopped, and the movie world changed forever.

Of course, recording a clear, crisp movie out of somebody's brain was a bit of a trick. Not on the technology front—that part was laughably simple, all things considered. The hard part was finding someone with the imagination and mental discipline to create your vision without random thoughts getting in the way. Your performer could be shit hot at imagining ship chases and complex dialogue in minute detail, but if images of her breakfast or her boyfriend's six-pack popped up every few seconds, you were in for a long session. Turned out only a tiny percentage of the population could pull it off, and even the best of those could maintain their focus on the story only for a few minutes at a time. That's where a good editor came in, someone who could take the segments and blend them into a seamless whole.

 
Then along came Max.

Max was the one, the only one, who could imagine a movie from start to finish without pause, crisp and clear in every detail. And he could do it live.

Surrounded by over a hundred thousand screaming fans, Nikki felt a rush of exhilaration with a growing undercurrent of discomfort, which was a bit of a dizzying mix. Being a part of a roaring crowd was invigorating, a borderline euphoric experience. But being the focus of all that attention was another thing entirely. Nikki was glad for the barrier between them, a clear open-topped dome surrounding the platform, surrounded in turn by a handful of guards spaced out along the perimeter to keep the overzealous from scaling the dome.

Nikki breathed a little easier once she reminded herself she wasn't the focus of the attention anyway. Every eye was on the man behind her, one step up on the platform, standing in front of his broadcast chair, one hand picking distractedly at his pants, that specter of a smile on his face. Max looked around at his adoring fans, but he was chewing on his upper lip and his eyes had a distant look that made Nikki wonder if his mind was in the theater at all.
 

Wherever his mind was, he was aware enough to not keep his fans waiting. Max turned to the chair and sat down, and silence rippled out from him across the theater like he was a stone dropped in a noise puddle.
 

Nikki sat down on the step below the chair. She wouldn't trade her seat for the world, but it wasn't the most comfortable spot she could imagine. The step was smooth concrete, no padding to speak of, hard enough and cool enough to remind Nikki of her rooftop stakeout.
 

She didn't care. The second Max started the show, all thoughts of comfort fell away. For the next hour, all Nikki cared about was the story.

*
 
*
 
*

Nikki was on the edge of her seat, butt-numbing concrete step that it was, as Kyle walked reluctantly toward the crowded school yard. Most of the other kids in the yard were in T-shirts, a few in shorts. Not Kyle. He was hunched inside his hand-me-down leather jacket, his hands shoved tightly into the pockets. He shifted his gaze constantly from one clique to the next as he entered the yard, trying to spot Lilly before she spotted him.

Nikki had identified with Kyle right away. He was no fan of school, he was different from the other kids in a way most of them would never understand, and despite what he thought he knew, his origin was still a mystery. He was a little like Nikki, a little more like Michael, so naturally she didn't want anything bad to happen to him.

The object of Kyle's paranoia, however, wasn't the source of Nikki's tension.
 

His dad had spent years making Kyle suspicious of any- and everything, for good reason maybe. But Nikki didn't think the new girl at school and her bizarro brother were as dangerous as they seemed. Nikki liked to think she had a nose for these things, and Max had a well-known talent for planting seeds of trust and doubt in just the right places in his stories, so Nikki was confident Lilly and what's-his-name would turn out to be good guys. They didn't mean Kyle any harm.

Nikki, however, was still wound as tight as one of Mos's T-shirts for some reason she couldn't nail down. She just couldn't shake the feeling that something bad was coming. Something worse than what Kyle feared. The funny thing was she had no reason to be afraid. Unless Max was slipping in subliminal messages, her fear had nothing to do with his movie.
 

She shifted on her step, looking down by habit even though she couldn't see where she was sitting. With the theater's emitters at full blast, Max's story was all she could see or hear. The other attendees would have been issued a specially coated pair of glasses they could put on to find the aisles and the way out if nature or emergency called, but Nikki hadn't received hers, slipping in the VIP route the way she had. She did have the inhibitor thingy, but the nonexistent chance of finding a more comfortable spot on the concrete wasn't worth missing a minute of the show.

She looked back up just in time to see a shadowy figure disappear behind a pack of students clustered around a picnic table. It was just a quick glimpse, but it was enough to tighten Nikki's belly. Kyle didn't seem to notice anything odd, even though he was looking in that general direction. His pace and posture didn't change as he made his way past the table. Nikki turned and craned her neck to try to get a better look at the figure, but the table fell out of focus as Kyle moved on. She turned back around, her feeling of dread rising.
 

The other students hadn't reacted to the figure either. They had to have seen it, but none of them looked surprised or interested in the least. Maybe she'd imagined it.

Nikki shifted her butt again.
 

From the corner of her eye, she saw a flutter of black. She looked over, but nothing was there, just more students talking and laughing and occasionally shooting glances at Kyle.

Nikki cleared her throat, rolling her shoulders to relax them, and started to look away. Then she saw it. The figure crept out from behind a couple of teachers up ahead and paused in front of Kyle, giving Nikki a clear view of it. Her dread spiked into full-blown fear with one painful thud of her heart.

The creature was blurry even though she was looking directly at it, like her eyes couldn't focus on it properly, but it was unmistakable. Insubstantial as it appeared, its hard, glossy black skin still caught the afternoon sun, taking on a reddish tinge, a pale reflection of the glowing red eyes that scanned right across Kyle and Nikki without pause.

Again, Kyle didn't notice. He paused, but only because a flash of red hair across the yard brought him up short. When it turned out to be one of his classmates instead of Lilly, he walked on, right past the creature.

The creature lifted its head and tilted it one way, then another, almost like it was sniffing the air as Kyle walked by. Nikki and the rest of the audience went with Kyle, pulled along behind him. The creature faded from sight, but not before it moved off among the students without a single one of them taking notice.
 

Nikki?
Michael's voice made her jump.
Are you OK?

Nikki blinked and rubbed her eyes. Maybe it was just her imagination getting the better of her and futzing with the movie signal, infecting it somehow. That had to be it. She couldn't get away from thoughts of the creatures. She took them wherever she went.

Nikki?

I'm fine,
she thought back.
I'm just—it's just a movie.

Michael didn't feel any more convinced than she did.
 

Kyle entered the school through a propped-open set of double doors. The halls seemed darker than Nikki remembered from earlier in the movie, but maybe that was just her eyes adjusting. The walls were still the same dull eggshell color, the floor the same slate-blue tile, the lockers the same aluminum gray. The overhead fluorescents were on, but their light seemed weaker, more muted than before. Had to be her imagination.

Nikki, something's not right
. Michael's voice was cool and low, the way it sounded when he realized a fight was imminent. Nikki's fear was getting to him.

Students were scattered about in the halls, but nowhere near as many as in the yard. This seemed to make Kyle more nervous. He picked up his pace, passing identical sets of doors on either side, separated by rows of lockers with the random clumps of kids in twos and threes lounging against them. Nikki called them kids, but they weren't all that much younger than she. The fact that they were in a pre-Event school made the age gap seem wider than it was.

Kyle turned down an intersecting hall and stopped outside the first closed classroom on the left. He reached for the door knob but hesitated, his hand hovering just above it. After a quick glance up and down the hall, he turned his hand up and pulled back the sleeve of his jacket, revealing the symbol he'd carefully drawn on his wrist that morning.

Nikki didn't know what this rune was supposed to do. It wasn't one of the few Kyle had used so far in the movie, and he hadn't said what it was for while he was working on it, only that he intended to use it on Lilly.

Kyle covered the rune, took a breath, and opened the door.
 

There she was. Third row over, right in the front. Lilly looked up as Kyle walked in, her eyes lighting up as her bow-like mouth twisted up at the corners. Her statuesque brother was sitting in the seat behind hers, as usual. The look he directed at Kyle was stony and cold, also as usual.

Ignoring the look, Kyle took the seat next to Lilly's, but how he put his plan into motion Nikki didn't see. She had eyes only for the blurry creature moving slowly down the aisle from the back of the room.
 

Not counting the three main characters, there were only a handful of students spread among the desks. Just like in the yard, none of them noticed the creature.
 

Nikki's heart double-timed as the creature slowly closed on Kyle and Lilly. It wasn't looking at them though. It was looking between them at nothing. Right at Nikki.
 

We need to get out of here, Nikki,
Michael said slowly.
We need to get out of here now.

Don't be such a boy,
Nikki thought back.
It's just a movie.
But her words were barely a mental whisper. She scooted back a little on the concrete step.

The creature crouched lower as it neared the front of the row, dropping to all fours and moving smoothly forward like a stalking cat.

What are you doing, Max?
Nikki thought, swallowing hard.
How do you know about these things?

The creature stopped between Kyle and Lilly and looked up at Nikki. Then its red eyes widened slightly.

Nikki!
Michael shouted.

The creature pounced with a blurring leap.

Nikki fell back with a shout, but the creature didn't reach her. It crashed into an invisible barrier right in front of her and fell to the tiled floor, twitching and thrashing like it was receiving a shock.

Nikki scrambled back onto the platform, fumbling with the inhibitor on her ear, her heart pounding in her throat. She found the power button and mashed it so hard the inhibitor clicked on then back off. She got a brief glimpse of the dimly lit theater and a flurry of motion before she was back in the classroom with the thrashing, roaring creature trying to regain its feet. She clicked the button again, forcing care into her shaking fingers, and she was back in the theater, out of one horror and into another.

The creature thrashed on the theater floor right in front of her. The real creature, not a blurry, shadowy movie version of it. Two of the security goons were jabbing at it with stun sticks, keeping it off balance and making it angry more than doing any lasting damage. The creature snapped and slashed at the men, but its attacks were clumsy and off target, like it couldn't see them at all, like it was fighting blind.

Nikki scrambled to her feet and backed toward Max.
 

The clear barrier had saved her life. Blind or not, the creature had come for her, or maybe Max—maybe both. Even now, with two security guards flanking it, jabbing it with jolt after jolt of electricity, the creature from Nikki's nightmares was still trying to reach the open-topped dome.
 

And it wasn't alone.

A hollow thump made Nikki duck to the side, her heart jumping into her throat. A second creature had hit the barrier to her right. It scrabbled furiously but blindly at the smooth plexiglass, unaware of the guards rushing toward it from either side.