Revelations (17 page)

By eight o’clock the next morning, after hacking into a secure Air Force website at a cyber café in Santa Monica, California, I had everything I needed to find Christian; an address, a phone number, and I’d gone even so far as to get his Social Security number, though it’s doubtful it was the same one he had when he first met me. He lived in New Mexico and was stationed at a place called Clovis Air Force Base. He’d originally been stationed at Cannon AFB, which had since been unused by the Force but was still used by the government. It was that name that struck a chord with me, and it took me a while to realize where I’d heard the name before.

Jonas was driving, and we just hit the state line between Arizona and California when I finally remembered where I’d heard the name before.

“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.

“What?” Jonas asked, having heard my curse.

“I remember where I’ve heard of Cannon before.”

Jonas only raised an eye ridge really quick before putting his attention back on the road. His mind was something of a jumble. He didn’t know what to think or how to feel. He felt angry, sad, hateful, and even a little guilty. After all, he’d gone with me to the hospital, had been with me when I healed that little girl, Sarai. He knew what I was capable of, and my secret was safe with him.

I realized I’d been reading his thoughts and jumped out of his head to say, “My mother said it once.” I racked my brain, trying to figure out in what context she’d mentioned the name. I couldn’t exactly remember. I said, “I remember her telling me about it. I must have been no more than five. Maybe younger.”

“What did she tell you?” Jonas asked, his mind partially distracted now by my ramblings.

I chewed my lower lip. “I think maybe my grandparents were born there.” The ideal word would have been “made” instead of born, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that. “I want to go there.”

“To the AFB?”

“Yes,” I said, now staring out the window. “I think we might find some answers there.”

Jonas sighed. “I don’t recall having any questions.”

“Maybe you don’t,” I said. “But I certainly do.”

Jonas didn’t bother to protest my request to hit the base first. I made him stop in a town in Arizona whose name I cannot remember so we could find a computer to use to get some info on the base. Once again, I found myself hacking into the Defense Department, which is easy once you’ve done it once or twice, and I pulled up as much top secret info on Clovis AFB, formerly Cannon. The base had been moved from its original location and the buildings housing the original AFB when it was Cannon were mostly gone. The few buildings remaining were still in use by the government, though I could not find out what their purpose was. It seemed like the gov didn’t even know what they used those buildings for. I had an idea all my own, and my ideas drifted off to secret creations. That’s where we would go, to the remains of Cannon Air Force Base.

“Why go there instead of to the new base?” Jonas asked when we were safely back in the truck.

“I have a hunch,” I said.

“A hunch?”

“Yes, a hunch,” I repeated. “You know, an idea based on nothing but the thoughts in your mind?” It was a lame attempt at humour, but it brought the smallest smile to his face nonetheless. That smile faded rather quickly though. It hadn’t been long enough after all we’d seen for such a smile to remain.

“What does your hunch think we’ll find there?” he asked.

“Answers,” I said. “At least, I hope. It’s worth a shot.”

“What about Christian?”

I once again chewed on my lower lip. “He can wait,” I said. “I don’t even know if he’s back in the States.”

Jonas once again lapsed into silence. This time it was a silence I didn’t try to break. Instead, I retreated into my own head, replaying images I never wanted to see again but knew I had to face. I went back into my childhood, remembered the moment when I’d gotten a young friend murdered by the police. I ran to her in the middle of a gunfight, in a place where I didn’t belong. Certainly it was place where she didn’t belong either. I’d led her there.

The details of how and why she and I ended up in a warehouse in the midst of a gang of drug dealers are not important. That is a longer story than I have the time or the strength to tell. The main fact is I lived, and she died. She died because of me. She was not the first though. My mother, or rather my mother’s twin sister, was the first. Though the gods only know what happened to my mother. Of course, I didn’t know at this moment in time that it had not been my mother whose head had been blown off in a car.

Anyway, we drove and drove as I replayed the horrors of my life. I forced myself to watch those scenes over and over again. I went back over the accident that wasn’t that left me in a coma lasting over three years and made my father disappear. I fought with my emotions as I heard the crunch of metal, the snaps of bones, and the punch of an explosion from the truck we hit. I could almost feel the fire as I imagined moments I could not remember, moments that occurred after I lost consciousness. I did not know what happened to me after my head shattered against the dashboard, or how I got out of the car. All I know is someone pulled me from the wreckage and an ambulance or a Good Samaritan got to me before the gov soldiers in the sedan did. Otherwise I would have ended up in a gov base back with my creator rather than in a hospital under the care of a very watchful and knowledgeable Doctor Michael Daniels.

I lived when I should have died. I survived being shot while trying to get to my friend after the police put a bullet in her brain. I healed after the accident left me comatose. After the Commune was blown to smithereens I continued to breathe. I lived. The ultimate question was why?

Later that night, after hours and hours of driving, I made Jonas stop at a motel somewhere in New Mexico so we could get some sleep and hit the AFB early in the morning. Getting in to the base would be easy. Snooping around would be just as easy. Jonas knew what my mind was capable of and I could have done it that night. I wanted to make sure my mind was clear and fresh when we broke into the base.

He didn’t question my motives, only followed my lead as I got us a room and took him to it. I will say I seduced him into making love to me again that night even though his heart wasn’t quite in it. When he lay spent beside me, his gorgeous scaled body lit by the only lamp in the room, I sat at the edge of the bed with my legs curled beneath me. I sat and examined him in all his naked glory, spread out and sleeping before me.

Jonas, as I have mentioned, is the love of my life. I love everything about him, head to toe, inside and out. I would fight and die for him without question. I’d stand up against anyone who even looked at him funny. He was everything to me. He still is, but I would have given anything for him to not be with me, for him to be back at the intact Commune with his friends. I would have given anything to have never met him, to have never brought him into this situation with me.

I would have given anything to have been alone.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The next morning, before the sun rose, I got Jonas up and we headed out. We weren’t far from what was once Cannon AFB— though I’ll call it Cannon from now on though it’s now just a base with an ID number that I don’t know but would find out, given a few minutes time…anyway. The out buildings still remaining were few, and when we came to them, I took a few minutes to examine the layout.

A couple of soldiers guarded the base, and a chain link fence surrounded the place. No problem for me. I can climb. I told Jonas where we could safely park the truck, and we began a long walk, lit only by a flashlight, to the outskirts of Cannon.

At the very brink of dawn, we reached the edge of the base on the north side. I have no idea what this place looked like when it was an AFB, all those years ago, but at that moment in time it was two very large, unconnected buildings, a metal hanger of enormous size and two smaller out buildings. An exposed electrical tower sat off to the south and a small water tower dominated the east.

I scanned the minds of any I could reach. A lot of the soldiers still slept; it was well before six a.m. when their call to duty would be made. Not that it mattered if they woke. I would hide Jonas and myself from anyone and everyone we met.

While watching the morning sentry march up and down a small concrete walkway by the front gate, I followed a soldier making his rounds inside the largest building. I plowed quickly through his memories, picking out the information I needed most; the location of a room filled with filing cabinets. A room filled with answers. However, this soldier was afraid to go into the filing room, hated having to fulfill requests to get this folder or that. His fear stemmed from the fact that, to get to the file room, you had to go through another room: one filled with bodies.

I swallowed and pulled out of his head.

“Are you okay?” Jonas whispered in my ear.

I nodded for I couldn’t find my tongue. I felt like I might choke on it.

“Sure?”

“Yes,” I said after a moment. “I’m okay. Let’s go.” With that said, I hooked the toe of my boot into a link in the fence and began to climb. I reached the top, flinging myself over without a thought towards broken bones. I hit the ground easily, a bit cat like, and scanned the base. Jonas hit the ground beside me, and I nodded to him. He followed in my wake, putting every ounce of trust he had into me. For him, this was a distraction from the events that proceeded. For me, it was a way to find answers.

Getting inside was easy. Finding the file room proved to be harder than it looked. The hallways were dim and dank. The lighting overhead wasn’t much; just enough to see by— yeah, if you were a bat. I found my way around mostly by touch and by telepathy. Jonas looked in a few other doors, expecting me to keep him invisible and safe, but he spoke of nothing he’d seen. I wasn’t interested in anything save the files. Nothing interested me except answers.

We passed metal door after metal door. What we didn’t pass were people. I kept waiting and waiting for the moment we would be discovered, when someone would open one of those doors and pounce on us. That moment didn’t come. Then we reached the door I sought.

I didn’t warn Jonas when I opened the door. I didn’t warn him about what we’d be stepping into. Back at Holt’s base in California, I’d seen things like this. My memories of them are very vague, but vague is good enough. Bodies lying on metal tables. Lined up one after the other, filling the room from wall to wall. Some had monitors taking vitals, reading brain waves, whatever the scientists desired from that particular experiment. Many had wires all over their bodies running to those machines. Some had no wires at all. Each was lit by a light overhead, some on and some off, so, when a scientist came to work on that particular person, he or she could have better lighting to work by.

I didn’t bother to look at most of them. I simply steeled myself and walked past them. Jonas, however, stopped past the door.

“Shut the door, love,” I said in a raised whisper.

Jonas, shocked into silence, reached behind him and silently closed the door. He looked around the room, his eyes wide and his mouth agape. Jonas remembered being an experiment. His life was not like this. He was not a silent body on a cold, steel slab. A plaything for the soldiers, Jonas had been tortured and tormented by men and women who used him as a household slave. They had whipped and beaten him. He had been branded by the butt of a cigarette on his neck, just below his right ear. He was five-years-old when he got away. He’d lived through five years of horrible cruelty. Never had he seen anything like this during his time in the lab.

“What is this place?” he asked after he got over his silence.

In the middle of the room, I examined the face of a particularly beautiful young woman deep in a comatose state. The girl had been like this all her life, was never allowed to wake to experience life. A monitor above her head played out images from her mind, images I did not fully understand. I realized the Technicolor images of random patterns were probably her dreams, and no real world images were on the screen because the girl had never seen the real world. Standing over her, I could do nothing but bow my head and take a deep breath. Jonas’s voice saying my name pulled me out of it.

“This is where they house experiments,” I said. “Each one is a different twist on the normal human being. Each one is being used in a different way.”

“Are they alive?” he asked, slowly beginning to walk towards me.

“They’re alive,” I said. “To various degrees.”

“Why would anyone do this?” he asked me.

I looked down into the face of another experiment, this one with its eyes wide open, and I say “its” because the bald head and facial features gave off no indication of sex. “Because they can,” I told him. I faced Jonas and said, “Because eventually, by accident mostly, they make something like me.”

Jonas eyed me for a moment then moved to my side protectively. “What are we looking for?”

“Here.” I headed off to the lone door at the far end of the room. The door had a small window in it at just above my eye level so I stood on my tiptoes to look in. The room was empty, as I knew it would be, but there was a camera in one corner. “Stay here for a sec.”

Jonas obeyed my request and simply watched as I went into the long file room. I locked my mind onto the man watching the camera monitors, somewhere in another corner of this vast building, and erased his memory of seeing me on the monitor ever so briefly. I ignored the rows and rows of metal cabinets for a moment. When I got below the camera, I climbed onto the nearest filing cabinet and yanked it out of the wall. Before doing that, I made him indifferent to the fact that one of his monitors now only showed snow. I stored him in the back of my mind as I gestured for Jonas to join me. I didn’t want the soldier to realize something was wrong, nor did I want some random person to walk in and surprise him. By keeping a little bit of control over him, I kept Jonas and myself safe.