Rage (29 page)

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 …”

S
he turned and looked at him. She had already decided on a slight detour before they came to Subway Town.

This survivor needed to see things.

“Raine, take a look down there.”

The airship felt steady enough for Raine to walk to the edge and lean over. With the moonlight, he could make out the landscape below.

It reminded him of grainy photographs of the trenches from World War One. The devastated landscape, farmhouses burnt to the ground, the terrain turned into a series of long, desperate lines as men charged at each other, day after day, so many falling uselessly to their death.

“What is it?”

Elizabeth had to speak loudly to be heard.

“Used to be the Cane Settlement. It was independent, made
up of basically goodhearted people. But some of the Cane leaders started working with us. Supplies, information. They knew the risks.”

Raine looked back at Elizabeth. He could guess the rest of the story.

“Someone—could have been one of their family, maybe another trader who overheard something—turned them in to the Authority. And instead of arrests … they did that.”

“Killed everyone?”

“Every last one of them.” She took a breath. “Then burnt it to the ground.”

It made Raine remember something he was thinking about earlier, about the French Resistance: did the Resistance feel any responsibility for what happened?

It was a classic scenario … a resistance does something, and innocent people pay a heavy price. Was any of it worth it?

Historians debated that.

“They wanted to make an example. For all the other far-flung settlements. Cross us, and
this
is what will happen. I’d say, based on the level of cooperation we’ve been getting, it worked. We’ve had to be more careful, more underground than ever.”

Raine kept looking down.

The landscape had been left as pure desolation.

“How many people?” he asked.

“Depends on who might have been in the settlement. There were always migrant traders passing through. Our guess … nearly a hundred.”

Raine nodded. A massacre, taking its place in line with others throughout modern history. He stepped back from the edge, for a few minutes saying nothing. He noticed that the airship had turned now, returning to an earlier course, the moon sliding to his left.

“You brought me there … for a reason.”

“Could be.”

“To show me what you are fighting. And why.”

She turned, her face determined. This woman from his time who didn’t know whether her own family was alive or dead, prisoner or free.

“I hoped it would help you understand.”

“And that I would join you?”

She held his gaze. “They did send you back with a mission, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah.”

“I have to figure … 
this
wasn’t what they imagined for that future. Slaughter. Fear. Terror. The goddamned Authority.”

He looked away. “No.”

“So—”

Back to her. “Say no more.” Another deep breath of the chilly night air. “I’m in.”

And Elizabeth nodded.

The airship began dropping in altitude well before Raine could see anything like signs of life.

Just more deserted buildings, chunks of metal walls, upturned cars.

They now glided a mere hundred feet above the ground.

“What is this?”

“Crescent City. Ever been here? I mean, before?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“The city got destroyed by Apophis. But they had built a small subway line, and people took refuge there. Lawless, dangerous; it wasn’t a great place to visit before. Definitely not a great place now.”

The ship dropped a few more feet.

“But it’s a good place for us to hide. For now. Definitely a place where no questions are asked.”

“This is Subway Town?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“And the Authority tolerates it?”

“They could wipe it out. But that would mean going through every square inch of the tunnels, into tight spaces where people have amassed a lot of weapons. So it would be a costly, deadly operation. Besides, Redstone—”