The Seven (27 page)

John grabbed her and sat her up. His large, strong hands held her by the shoulders and he looked at her. "Indigo, don't do this. I need you here. Now. We don't have time for this. This is war. The first rule of war: People Die."

"But nowhere in that rule does it say that I have to be the one who kills them!"

Kenny came out of the woods. "There's another one dead," he said. "Looks like he dented a tree with his body."

"I killed two of them!"

John shook Indigo. "This is not the time to fall apart, Indy! We need you here and now!"

"I killed two men!"

"What did you think you were doing when you sent him flying into a tree?"

"I wasn't thinking! I just did it! I didn't think about where he would go, or if he would hit a tree!" Indigo was blubbering now. She was angry at herself for crying, and even angrier at herself for killing those men. Killing didn't feel like she thought it would. It was hollow and empty and dark.

John pulled Indigo to his chest and held her. "Indigo, calm down. It will be okay."

"Says you!" said Indigo. "I don't have ten years' worth of military programming rolling around in my brain. I'm not some advanced weapon ready to kill everything I meet."

"Then think about our philosophy classes: Soldiers understand that death is a part of their job. These men were professional soldiers, paid to give up their lives if need be. This wasn't a couple of innocent bystanders. They weren't a pair of eighteen-year-old kids sent to a foreign land because their government was ironing out grievances; they were hired guns, willing to kill for their cause."

"It doesn't make what I did right."

"It's going to be part of this whole mess we're in, Indigo. These men are dangerous. They want to capture us, torture us with tests, and eventually kill us. Once they decide that they have enough information for their research, we're going to be killed unless we fight back. We can run for a while, we might even be lucky enough to get Andy and Sarah without combat, but eventually the day will come when we have to fight. When that happens, people are going to die...whether it's us or them."

"I won't kill again," said Indigo. She meant it. "I can do other things with my telekinesis. I don't need to kill."

"If that's how you want to play this, that's fine. I don't blame you," said John. "Maybe you'll be able to do that."

"It's not like G.I. Joe, is it?" said Kenny. Indigo looked at him with a raised eyebrow. Kenny shrugged. "Remember when we were kids, John? We would watch G.I. Joe cartoons on TV?"

"Yeah," John smiled slowly. "I loved those shows."

"Every time one of the Joes would fire a rocket or a laser at a Cobra vehicle, the vehicle would blow up, but every pilot would bail out and parachute to safety. Laser blasts flew everywhere and no one even got nicked."

"And I show up and kill two men with a whim, a thought. G.I. Joe never did that," said Indigo.

"That's why I said it's not like G.I. Joe," said Kenny.

"You going to be okay, Indigo?" asked John. Indigo looked up into his brown eyes and nodded.

"Do I have a choice?"

"No. We've got work to do. Can you help Holly with Sebbins' grave while Kenny and I tie up the other soldiers in the shack?"

"I'm burying the soldiers, I killed," said Indigo.

"We don't have time for that."

"John, I'm taking care of them," Indigo glared at John. "I killed them. I am going to bury them."

"And I said we don't have time for that! We get Seb buried, and we roll."

"John!"

"Indigo! I am leading this team! We have to go. We can't waste time digging holes for those men. It's taking enough time to bury Sebbins! I am sorry that you feel guilty, and I will help you get through that some day in the future, but right now we must leave."

Indigo felt a snap in her brain and she spun on her heel toward the area where Holly was digging. She grabbed chunks of ground with her powers and ripped plots of earth from the ground, creating three neat, square holes in the ground, each nearly five feet deep. She let the mounds of earth fall at the heads of the graves with a thud.

John did a double-take, looking from Indigo, to the graves, to Indigo again. He opened and closed his mouths a few times like a guppy. "Okay, I guess we have time to bury them."

"It's the least I could do," said Indigo. A shotgun blast of pain coursed through her skull and she turned her back to John so he wouldn't see her crying because of it.

John lowered the first of the two guards into the grave Indigo made. Indigo lowered the second one telekinetically. John crawled out and watched Indigo fill in the two graves with dirt. Then, he looked at Dr. Sebbins' body.

Dr. Sebbins had been different than the other researchers and scientists that had made their way through the Home. She had reached out to John on a personal level. She had made the time to get to know each of the seven individually, to find out what they liked to do and what they liked to watch on TV. She threw a football around with John and Andy. She taught Holly and Posey to put on make-up. She even showed Indigo how to sew so that she would be able to make her own clothes. John knew she had even reached out to Kenny, though he didn't know exactly how.

As he watched Indigo gently lift Sebbins' body with her telekinesis and lower it into the ground, he felt a gnawing in his chest, a hollow, painful emptiness. He didn't feel like crying, though. Maybe that was part of his programming, part of his training, but he knew there wasn't going to be tears. Kenny's eyes were wet. Indigo had stains down her cheeks. Holly was a wreck. But John just stood there like a statue, a soldier standing honor guard.

Sebbins lay in the grave. Her face looked different, changed. There was no worry in her face anymore, only a simple serenity. Indigo lifted the final mound of dirt and began to move it into place above the grave.

"Hold it, Indigo. Someone should say something," said Kenny. The dirt gently drifted back to the head of the grave.

"Does anyone know what religion she was?" asked Holly. They looked at each other and shrugged. Holly looked at John, "You are the best speaker."

"I don't know what to say," said John.

"Make it up. Just say something, anything," said Indigo.

John took a deep breath. He had never attended a funeral. He had only seen a few on movies. From what he'd seen, there didn't seem to be a right or wrong way to do a funeral. John looked at the sky for a moment. Nothing was coming to him. He focused on the star Deneb. Sebbins had been the teacher who taught them about astronomy, taught them the names of the stars and the constellations. "Sebbins wouldn't have wanted us to be sad," he said. "She would have wanted us to go on and do what we needed to do. She came with us at the risk of her own life. She knew that she could have stayed at the Home and been safe. Maybe she could have even gotten a new job. Who knows? But she chose to come with us because she really cared about us, and because it's what was right. She didn't deserve to die. She deserved a better life than what she got. She was one of the good guys."

"Do...do we say 'Amen'?" asked Kenny.

"I don't think so," said John. "It wasn't a prayer."

"Remember that movie we watched last month?" asked Indigo. "The one where the cop died? Remember how everyone who was at the funeral walked up and threw a handful of dirt onto the coffin? Should we do that?"

"I don't see why not," said John. He stepped forward and took a fistful of black dirt. He stepped to the edge of the hole and let it sieve through his fingers. "Good-bye, Seb." The dirt spotted her white coat.

One by one, the other three stepped up and followed suite. Then, Indigo slowly lowered the dirt back onto Seb's body, letting it settle gently over her corpse. Indigo stepped back and touched her hands to the side of her head for a moment. She seemed to sway.

"You okay?" John asked.

Indigo shrugged. "I'm better than Seb," she said. She wiped her hand under her nose and a long smear of blood appeared on her wrist.

John grabbed her wrist. "What's that?"

Indigo yanked her hand back. "It's nothing. Leave me alone."

"Are you bleeding?"

"No."

"Is that because you used your powers?"

"No!" Indigo snapped. "Leave me alone, John."

"John!" Kenny called out. "One of the soldiers is awake!"

John gestured toward the soldier and beckoned Indigo to follow him.

"If you're going to interrogate a brawny soldier, a five-foot, ninety pound Asian girl is not really the muscle you bring along to intimidate someone," said Indigo.

"Just follow my lead," said John. He walked into the cabin, grabbed the soldier by the edges of his flak jacket, and lifted him to his feet in a single move. "How did you find us?" John hissed through gritted teeth.

The soldier glared at John but said nothing. John glanced at Indigo; she thought she saw him wink. Suddenly, John dropped his right arm, and brought it back across the side of the man's face. The crack of bone-to-bone was like a thunderclap. The soldier huffed for breath.

"How did you find us?" John asked again.

"You realize they're not going to just let you go, right kid?" the soldier wheezed. His spoke with a thick Russian accent. "No matter where you go, no matter what you do, they're coming for you."

"You see this girl over here?" John said jerking his head toward Indigo. "You know who she is?"

"The brief said she was called 'Anomaly.'"

"Then you know what she can do?"

"Telekinetic."

"She can sculpt your brain into a new shape inside your skull," John said. Indigo started to say that she couldn't, but John silenced her with a look. Even in the dim light of the still-crackling flare, she could tell that John didn't need her input.

John continued, "She can squeeze your heart into a tiny ball inside of your chest. She could crush your balls with her mind. If you don't start talking, I'll let her do it."

The soldier relaxed. "You think you scare me, kid? You think you're some sort of big, bad scary man? You don't know what you're up against." There was a crunching noise and the soldier's face broke into a wide smile The man's body went rigid and his face went slack, his eyes became vacant and dull.

"Damn!" John shouted. He threw the man to the ground and jammed a finger into the man's mouth. In a second, he brought out a small piece of crushed plastic. "Suicide pill. These guys don't mess around."

"They carry them in their mouth?"

"Only place to do it. Stuff it between your cheek and your gums by your molars. If you're caught and captured, bite down and it makes certain that you never give away any secrets."

"That was impressive, John," said Indigo. "I never knew really saw you as a hero type, but you really handled that situation like you knew what you were doing."

"I don't," said John. "I'm channeling Clint Eastwood."

"How do you think they found us?"

"I don't know. No idea, really. If I had to guess, I'd say they had GPS in our brains or something. Or maybe something got flagged when Seb bought the new car. They probably had to run checks on her license or something. That would show up to anyone doing a vigilant computer monitoring. They probably tracked her to this spot with a satellite or something, flew the soldiers in with a helicopter. I don't know for sure, though. I don't know how many resources these guys have at their disposal."

"If they know that Seb bought a car, then they know what we're driving and they'll be looking for it."

"And if the Trust is as big as Ken said it is, then they'll be coming after us and they'll be everywhere."

"So, what do we do?" asked Indigo.

"Occam's Razor," said John. "The simplest solution is best."

"And what's the simplest solution?"

"We drive. We get in the car and drive. We go back to the Home, find Andy and Sarah, and wreck that place. If we can make enough smoke, someone important who isn't involved with the Trust will see it and investigate."

"So the four of us are just going to storm a small, fortified army base?"

"Got a better idea?"

"I think there's probably some quote about being backed into a corner that's appropriate here, but I can't bring it to mind," said Indigo. "We could run, but they'd kill Andy and Sarah and still come after us, wouldn't they?"

"I don't doubt it for a second."

"It's our only choice, isn't it?"

"If we run to the U.S. Government, I'd be willing to bet they'd experiment on us themselves to figure out what the Trust did."

"So, it's us against everyone else?"

John nodded. He looked over at Holly and then to Kenny. "Seven of us against all of them...and three of us are missing right now."

"But, we have Holly. She can get animals to come help."

"'Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.'"

"You watch Indiana Jones movies way too much."

"All we need is the 'Raiders March' in the background."

Indigo sighed. "That's the problem with real life: The soundtrack sucks."

-- End of Book II--

Book Three

Razing Hell

Ten Years Ago

T
he bus pulled up in front of the Victorian building and the soldiers on board herded the seven, scared children toward the front door. Posey was crying loudly; Holly was crying softly. Indigo just looked mad. Kenny looked frightened, but said nothing. John had set his jaw and stared fiercely at the guards. Sarah wavered between being angry and crying, but the big kid, a rotund, obese little boy who had sat in the back seat drawing funny cartoons in an old notebook for the whole ride spoke up in a loud, brazen voice. "Hey, great! A house! I hope they have lunch!"