The Seven (17 page)

"Rations are down in the lab," said Sebbins. "I can't guarantee they're the best stuff in the world, but until we can get to a grocery story, they're all we got."

"So there is a grocery store?" Holly asked.

"In Barnsdale, not too far away. It's not huge, really a glorified convenience store, but it's got what we need." Dr. Sebbins walked to the door of the cabin and pulled. The door, wet and rotted, fell away. The interior of the cabin was musty and filthy from what looked like animal and flood damage. John took a wary sniff and choked.

"It's still part of the façade," said Sebbins. She found a log in the corner of the cabin and slipped her fingers into a groove in the wood. She tugged hard and part of the log came away revealing a ten-digit keypad. Sebbins typed in an intricate number and then pressed the star and pound keys at the same time. A small part of the cabin floor slid back revealing a circular metal door. The metal door had another keypad which Sebbins quickly disarmed. The door opened and a dim light at the base of the secret entryway flickered to life.

"It's about twelve feet down. John, can you make that climb while carrying Posey?"

"No problem," said John. He shifted Posey to one arm. "She's really light."

"Then I'll go first," said Sebbins, "and you follow immediately after, okay?"

"No," said Indigo suddenly. "I'm going first. Then you. Then John. Holly, you okay to help Kenny down?"

"Sure," said Holly. "No problem."

Indigo gave Sebbins an indignant look. "I don't know if I trust you yet."

"Fair enough," said the doctor, holding her hands up. "There is nothing down there that will hurt you."

The lab was a miniature version of the lab in the Home, but dusty and filled with the smell of plastic, industrial rubber, and computer components that had just been removed from a box. In one corner was a hyper-womb, a long, low bathtub version, not nearly as technical or as pretty as the vertical cylinders at the Home. The rest of the room was filled with monitors, machines, and boxes of parts and tools. As Holly and Kenny clambered down the stairs, Sebbins quickly went to work readying monitors and finding syringes and bottles of serum and sedatives. She began filling the hyper-womb with a neon-orange syrup.

"Holly, undress her. Put her in hyper-womb, John," said Sebbins. Holly helped remove the clothes Posey was wearing and John carefully set Posey's body on the bottom of the hyper-womb. The serum began to rise up around her naked form, coating her in the orange slime. Her eyes fluttered a bit as the serum reached her eyelashes. Her eyelids opened halfway and John saw a thin, plastic-looking covering over her eyes.

"Secondary eyelids," said Sebbins. She was standing over his shoulder, hooking monitors into Posey's body. "It's almost like a nictitating membrane. Some animals have them for doing things like diving underwater or sweeping clear debris from the eye. Dr. Cormair had them surgically grafted to her about a year ago. He wanted her to be able to use her vision underwater without distortion, if needed. The secondary eyelids will help her do that. They'll also protect her eyes from wind at high velocity so she will be able to fly at incredible altitude and not worry about having to lose sight of anything while she flies."

"So she is going to fly?" Holly asked.

"If everything works as planned," Sebbins said quietly. She slid a needle into the vein on the bottom of Posey's foot and hooked it to a large bottle of a murky fluid. "I don't know how much longer the transformation will be taking place. Cormair tried to program it to go very fast once it started. That's why he devised the hyper-wombs. After it's over, that's when we find out how much she will and won't be able to do."

The serum engulfed Posey completely and finished filling to the top of the chamber. John helped Dr. Sebbins pull a heavy, glass top over the tank and secure it down, making sure it created a strong seal all the way around. "I'm going to pressurize it now," said Sebbins. "It will help her heal." Sebbins hooked two long, black, snake-like tubes into the head end of the tub. She flipped a switch and a generator began to hum. Sebbins turned on a few computer monitors and images flashed to life. One had several cross sections of a crudely rendered brain. Sebbins pointed at it. "This shows me what parts of Posey's brain are active. Her pituitary gland is practically on fire trying to get her through this change. However, if you look at this image," Sebbins' fingernail tapped the glass over the three-dimensional image of brain that was vibrantly pulsating with orange and red light. "This shows activity in the pain receptor areas of her brain. Red is the worst. Orange is almost as bad. You can tell she's in agony. If she was awake right now, she'd probably go insane, go into immediate shock, or go into cardiac arrest and die."

"How come the rest of us haven't suffered like Posey?" asked Holly. "I never had pain when I was getting my abilities."

"Me neither," said John.

"I did," Kenny croaked. They looked over at him. He sitting along the wall with his knees angled up and his head hanging between them. His eyeglasses were pushed up onto his forehead. "Migraines. Like you wouldn't believe. I had 'em at night. Never woke anyone up about them, though."

"I got headaches, too. I don't think they were related to these powers, though," said Holly. "How do you know your headaches were related? Everyone gets headaches."

"All of you will have different experiences," said Sebbins. "Some, like Andy and Posey, will go through major body modification and growth. It will be more painful. Others, like Holly and Indigo, will not have body changes, only sensory changes and stimulation of dormant sections of the brain."

"Let's get some food going," said John. "We need to walk to Barnsdale, I guess. The van isn't going to move and unless Holly can find us a horse to ride, we'll have to go by foot. Too bad Sarah isn't here. Probably only take her a minute or two."

There was a deep silence after John finished speaking. He shouldn't have mentioned Sarah. "I'll go," said John. "If I run flat-out, I should be back in less than an hour."

"It'll be dark by then, John," said Sebbins. "There are some emergency MRE's stored here somewhere. We'll have those for tonight."

"I'm not worried about the dark. I see really well at night."

"We don't want to attract attention, John. You're not...uh...Oh, how do I say this? You're not the kind of person that people around here are used to seeing."

"What?"

"She means you're black," said Indigo. She had a scowl on her face and she was hunched in the corner by the ladder. "We're deep in
gwai loh
territory."

A light dawned in his head and John slumped into an office chair by the monitors. He'd heard about racism. He'd read about it, and he'd been taught about it. He'd even watched movies and TV shows that showed it, but in his life, he'd never had to deal with it. He had lived a protected life, accepted for who he was by the six people with whom he was housed. They never treated him as different and he'd never looked at any of them as different. Only Indigo, for whatever reason, held racial boundaries as important, often researching her Japanese heritage and doing heavy reading on Heart Mountain and the other Japanese-American internment camps established during World War II.

"So, I can't go out because having a black man in town would make people in Barnsdale nervous?"

Sebbins looked embarrassed. "Yes. I'm sorry, John. We'll have the MRE's---they're not great, I know, I'm sorry---and tomorrow, Holly and I will go into town and get more food. And we'll make a plan on our next step."

"We go get Sarah and Andy back," John said. "I don't leave my friends. That's our first step."

"No," Indigo said.

"What?"

"Dr. Sebbins owes us the explanation," said Indigo. "That's our first step. We need to know everything now, Doc. Or did you forget about our deal?"

Sebbins took in a deep breath. "Fair enough. Give me a few hours to situate Posey and give her a full scan, and then check all of you over for injuries and get some scans. Then, we'll eat. Then I'll tell you what I know."

The MRE had been filling---high in calories and carbs---but tasted like old socks. Sebbins had choked it down the best she could. She didn't need a lot of food, not like the kids. She watched as the four of them force-fed themselves a few meals apiece. They groused and whined like normal teenagers, but they finished every crumb and licked their plastic forks clean. They didn't have much of a choice.

After they finished, Indigo put a chair in the middle of the room. "You sit there," she said.

Sebbins took the chair and the four kids gathered around her. Kenny still sat against the wall, looking haggard. John stood off to her right, his arms folded across his chest. Indigo sat in the corner by the ladder, her dark eyes constantly studying Sebbins' face. Holly sat on the floor in front of Sebbins.

Sebbins took a deep breath. "Where do I begin?"

"Why us?" said Holly. "Why pick the seven of us? What makes us so special?"

Sebbins sighed. She licked her lips and chose her words carefully. "Dr. Cormair was light-years ahead of his peers in the study of the human genome. You all know that DNA is like two sets of stairs circling each other, a double-helix, right? Well, the double-helix is comprised of many sets of genes. Normally, they're tightly connected, however Dr. Cormair began to notice something unique about some of those strands. In his studies he learned that some sets of DNA were 'looser' than others, some chains of DNA had greater strength, while the looser ones were poised for change. Cormair believed that it was evolution in action. The DNA chains were waiting for the stimulus to force change. You seven were chosen because your DNA strands were ready for splicing. The bonds between each separate set of genes in your DNA were incredibly elastic. You were selected for the rarity of your genetic profile. You would all be easy to change. You were selected from a pile of literally more than a million genetic profiles because you had the correct genetic flaws to make you susceptible to the splicing process."

"Flaws? So we were less than human?" asked Indigo.

"No, Indigo. You were all on the border of being
more
than human."

"Why take us as kids, then?" said John. "Why take us away from our parents?"

"Children heal faster than adults. We had to wait until you were old enough so your bodies could survive the strain of change, but couldn't wait until you were so old that your body wouldn't change. You were taken at the age of seven because you hadn't begun puberty or your adolescent muscular-skeletal growth."

"And our abilities?" Indigo piped up. "What are we supposed to be?"

"This will take more time to explain," said Sebbins.

"I'm not sleepy and I'm not going anywhere," said Indigo. "I want to know what sort of military project we are."

Sebbins rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Your individual DNA profiles, along with your musculature and your skeletal composition chose what sort of abilities Dr. Cormair could develop within you. Indigo, you would never have survived Andy's strength transformation. John, your brain wouldn't have been able to handle the implants Kenny received. Dr. Cormair studied your chemistry practically from birth. He knew what you could become. For instance, Andy had an extremely rare genotype. He was the first one identified, Subject One."

"Subject?" Holly frowned. "It's Andy!"

Sebbins nodded at Holly. "That's what I would have called him if I were running the show, but the people funding the project, and Dr. Cormair, wanted to keep it at what it was initially intended to be: A project, cold and faceless, with no humanity. You were to be experiments, not people. Andy was the first to be identified and he became Subject One. His project codename was 'Brawn.' He was an experiment of hyper-strength and healing. He can heal from trauma at an incredible rate and his bones were enhanced to withstand exponentially more force than the average human bone. Right now, his bones are nearly unbreakable."

"How unbreakable?" asked John.

"The average human femur---the strongest bone in your body---can withstand something around six hundred pounds of pressure. It was projected that Andy's body might withstand nearly six hundred-thousand pounds of pressure, give or take."

"You mean we could drop a truck on him and he'd be okay?" John gaped.

"You could drop several trucks on him. And he could probably lift the trucks off of himself, too. His muscles have been genetically and artificially boosted to give him strength beyond anything humans conceive. His bones had to be enhanced otherwise his muscles would have crushed them to pulp when he flexed. He's not invulnerable, though. The problem comes with his skin. That's one of his weak spots," said Sebbins. "His skin is normal skin. It tears like everyone else's. His eyes are vulnerable. He's vulnerable to bullets like everyone else. The only difference is that he'll be able to heal from multiple shots without medical care. The muscles on his body can stop bullets. It's like he's wearing a bullet-proof vest. He is nearly invulnerable to physical damage, but Dr. Cormair hypothesized that he may have a damage limit. Drain Andy of enough blood, or drop him out of a plane and let him fall far enough and he might die, plus his swimming days are over. He no longer has buoyancy in the water. He'll drop like a stone."

"Why did they do all that to him, then? What's the point?" said Holly.

"Imagine him as a human crane or a human bulldozer. He can move machines, rip trees out of the ground, and carry massive amounts of weight. In a forward military area, having one person capable of doing the work of a piece of heavy equipment would be a great boon. He's also a shield. He can protect targets or lead assaults."

"We're all military projects, aren't we?" said Indigo. "We're weapons. Tools for warmongers."