Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) (42 page)

SIXTY-EIGHT

Matthew watched the gruesome tale unfold as he sat with Elizabeth viewing the recordings and listening to the narrative Humphries must have spliced together in his final hours of life. The pilot refused to participate in the gory mess around him any longer, so he returned to the hangar promising to remain until Matthew and Elizabeth were aboard.

“A few days after you and the freighter crew left to return to Earth, I broke into the lab,” he confessed. “I had watched you enter the code and committed it to memory. I needed to access the database he I had been using to catalog the samples of ore the Segregants had been mining.

“I finished cataloging the new ore samples when I glanced at the mysterious container behind the glass door of a cabinet. You had placed it there before leaving and asked that no one disturb its contents until your return, but I’m a curious man and I’m known for leaping before I look.”

In the display, Humphries looked over his shoulder as he opened the cabinet door and retrieved the sealed container.

“The cylinder was heavier than it looked and still cold to the touch from sitting in that unconditioned storage room where we had found it.”

Bright yellow lettering was printed on the top and sides of the container in a language no one recognized.

“I wondered if you had lied to us about its contents,” Humphries’ voice continued. “We only had your word that it was an old Earth cure to a long-gone disease, but I couldn’t help but wonder if it had another value, or if we could use it to trade for supplies.

“I decided to open the container and see for myself what was inside.” Humphries’ voice was filled with pain and regret as he continued telling his story while the display showed his every action within the lab.

He took the cold, metal object and returned to his seat at the console. The lid to the can was pressure sealed and did not offer any hint of opening as he tried to twist it off. There was an odd-shaped impression on the top of the lid that looked like it may have required a specialized key to release the seal. Humphries was not in possession of the key, so he used a laser to cut along the top edge of the container.

Matthew’s body froze and he gripped Elizabeth’s hand. “That damned idiot…” he whispered, his mouth hanging slack. Elizabeth bit her lip and watched the feed, just as horrified by the old man’s actions.

Humphries lifted the lid by its glowing edges using a pair of medical tongs. He waved at the air in front of his nose.

Matthew grunted as he watched the feed. “Old fool. He’s probably getting a good whiff of seared metal and burnt plastic, opening the container like that.” As if on cue, Humphries pinched his nose as a sour look clouded his face, and he leaned forward to take a closer look at the container’s treasure.

Within the container, Humphries spied multiple vials of a thick, yellow liquid that resembled rancid mustard. Many of the vials along the periphery of the container had been sliced open by the laser, and the custard-like fluid was bubbling over and running down the container’s metal hull. The yellow ooze threatened to spill over onto Humphries’ workbench, so he used the tongs to remove the container and set it over the table drain next to the stasis chamber.

With a loud bang resonating from the display, Matthew and Elizabeth witnessed the remaining uncompromised vials explode, raining yellow slime down in thick droplets, splattering all over the lab.

Matthew groaned as he watched Humphries raise his hands above his head to shield himself from the liquid that spewed in all directions throughout the lab. “This is like watching a severed head rolling down the street,” Matthew gritted through his teeth. “So horrific, yet I can’t look away.”

“In a moment of panic, my mind hatched a brilliant plan,” the voice of Humphries laughed. “I decided to clean up the mess, retrieve a duplicate container from that far storage room, and pretend that nothing had ever happened.

“I grabbed a box of disinfectant rags and wiped down every spot of the exploded liquid I found. The stasis tube had received the brunt of the explosion and it became difficult to remove the drying liquid from the seams between the panels. I opened the tube in order to wipe away all the evidence of my shortsightedness. Just as I lifted the lid, a blob of yellow dropped from the overhead lamp and onto the Angel’s chest.”

Matthew and Elizabeth watched awe-struck as the drop landed with a low splat and dripped down the Angel’s side. A yellow trail meandered through the downy forest of arm hairs until it met a piece of scarred flesh.

“I heard a sizzle and found a pool of foam enveloping the reddened scar tissue. I was surprised as the yellow foam evolved to a white, milky liquid before it rolled away from the area, revealing a patch of unblemished skin.”

Another drop fell from above and plopped onto the Angel’s leg. Again, Humphries witnessed the transformation of gory, damaged flesh turn into soft, smooth tissue like the skin of a newborn.

“With the yellow-soaked rag in my hand, I noticed the scar on my forearm. I had gotten the scar when I was a boy working on my grandfather’s farm in the LTZ. I remembered the early morning I had gotten up to herd the cows into the milking machines when one of the bulls had startled and kicked me into the side of the corral next to a piece of broken railing. The jagged edge of pipe had cut a gash into my arm, but my family couldn’t afford to take me to Olympus to have it treated. Instead, they had their neighbor, who was a veterinarian, stitch up the wound himself. It never bothered me to have a scar. It had become a good way to start up a conversation with girls.”

Elizabeth chuckled and rolled her eyes at Humphries’ wandering memory. The distressed look in Matthew’s eyes quickly made her wipe the smirk off her face, and she focused again on the display.

Back on the display, Humphries glanced between the new flesh on the Angel and the scarred tissue on his own arm. His narration commenced.

“I wondered if that mystery liquid would have the same effect on my own tissue as it had on the Angel’s. I thought that if I had stumbled across a cure for skin damage, my fellow Segregants and I could stop mining for ore. We could trade the miracle healing ointment for our supplies, and there was an ample quantity of it back in the storage room. I braced myself for the pain and dabbed my scar with the moist rag.”

Nothing happened on-screen.

Humphries gripped the rag with a tight fist and a gush of fluid erupted from the cloth. His scar, and the tissue surrounding it, became bathed in the yellow goo as it trickled down his fingers and arm. Still, no reaction from the scar. On the display, Humphries’ face fell and he shook his head.

“I finished cleaning up the yellow mess on the stasis tube to the intermittent hissing sounds of droplets falling from above my head. Once the tube was spotless, I climbed on top of the table and wiped off the stains from the overhead equipment.”

“I climbed back down from the table and started to reclose the stasis tube when I saw the milky pool that had accumulated underneath the Angel’s body. I picked up a new rag and began mopping up the white fluid. As my hand passed underneath the Angel’s arm, I felt a prickle on my skin. It started out as pain, like the prick of a needle, but a wave of warmth and numbness expanded from the initial spot.”

On the display, Humphries pulled his hand away from the Angel. His face wrinkled with horror as the milky fluids trickled down his arm. It seemed where the yellow serum had had no effect on the old man’s farming scar, the white serum created an instantaneous reaction.

“Panicked, I dropped the rag and ran to the sink to wash off the contaminant,” his voice said, rising with excitement on the recording. Humphries stepped on the floor pedal to activate the flow of hot water, rubbing his arms up and down in his attempt to get it all off.

“After a few seconds of vigorous cleansing, I heard a soft thump in the basin of the sink. I looked down and saw a small patch of pink material circling around the drain. I began to scour over my hands and arms to locate the spot where my flesh had fallen off, but was unable to locate the wound.

“I continued to wash my hands, rubbing soap across each one, when it dawned on me that something was missing. I noticed the absence of a familiar sensation.”

His hands slowed and he rubbed the area in gentle circles as he tried to find the spot, but it was gone. “I could not believe my eyes. The scar on my arm, the one that had been a part of me for most of my life, was gone. It had vanished. In its place was a patch of pure, Angelic white skin. I could not fathom how it had happened. I touched the sliver of snowy flesh and felt a tingle of sensation. It was not a dream. I had new skin where a jagged scar had once lived.”

Humphries looked down into the sink and watched as the patch of skin baring his scar slipped down the drain.

Over the next few minutes Matthew, Elizabeth, and the pilot watched the clips Humphries had pasted together during his last days.

Humphries logged complaints of redness and itching, and then he documented the new skin on his arm falling off, leaving an open wound that grew rapidly over the course of a few short hours.

Camera footage from different sections of the facility flickered on the display. Swan had quarantined Humphries in the lab, but evidence of the disease was found throughout the entire underground facility.

Scenes from the area outside the mess hall showed Swan barricading anyone else who showed symptoms within. One of the last clips showed a few Segregants who appeared unaffected by the disease carrying a reddened Swan into the mess hall on a gurney.

The camera from the launch pad showed those same unaffected individuals boarding the lone Segregant shuttle, fleeing to save themselves and abandoning their suffering comrades.

The final video clip showed Humphries turning off the audio recorder, hobbling over to the foot of the door and collapsing down in front of it with a glimmering rod in his hand. He held up the signaler to his blood-encrusted lips and recorded his final message before the pain caused his hand to spasm closed. He lost consciousness and slipped away without another sound.

Matthew and Elizabeth stared at each other. Neither was able to find the words to express the whirlwind of questions that whipped through their minds. The display went blank, and nothing could be heard but the fragile sounds of their own breathing.

Amid the eerie silence of the facility, Elizabeth’s voice was the first to break the tension.

“How did he survive longer than the others?” she asked, too stunned from the gruesome scene to think straight.

Matthew lifted his eyes from Humphries’ body to look at his frightened wife.

He took a breath and answered with grim certainty. “Somehow he had a stronger immunity to the disease. But, he was patient zero.”

SIXTY-NINE

Jack and Evangeline could not move after Matthew finished revisiting his encounters with the Segregants on the far distant moon so many years ago. Evangeline tried to cover her mouth, which hung open in shock, but she was only able to place a hand over her face shield. Jack sat still as a statue. Nothing in his life could have prepared him for the macabre tale of the demise of the Segregant miners.

He held up a hand and said, “Wait, you’re saying that the Angels never came from another galaxy? That was all a lie? I’ve worked with AI all my life and never once suspected….” He couldn’t finish his sentence. He just sat there, staring at the Angel claiming to be Matthew Chapel. If Jack’s eyes had been lasers, Matthew would have a hole burned through his head. Matthew’s focus, however, was only on Evangeline.

She remained perched on her stool in a pseudo-catatonic state, staring past the walls. Her eyes blinked and her chest moved in a slow rhythm, but otherwise Evangeline was not present with Jack and the Angels. Her mind was wholly enveloped in the tales she had just heard, the story that had been the catalyst for the life she had known all these years.

Matthew pulled his sorry eyes away from Evangeline and turned his attention over to Jack.

“Yes, Jack, their origins are far more nefarious than you could ever suspect.” He took in a deep breath and met Jack’s gaze squarely.

“They’re clones.”

Jack’s mouth fell open.

Matthew cocked his head to the side, considering. “Well, recombinant clones would be a more accurate label.”

“Recom…what?” Jack spat out. “You’ve given my mind too much to digest already, so if you wouldn’t mind dumbing it down to layman’s terms for me….” The Angel posing as Elizabeth sat up straighter and spoke in a mellow voice.

“Recombinant clones are not exact copies of each other,” she began. “After Matthew and I returned home, we started doing more research on the Angels. Their DNA had been engineered to be perfect, but they needed to be discernable from each other. If they all looked the same, Humans would have known right away that they were not from another world. The original Quorum had decided to make several initial models based on themselves, blending and recombining their own DNA to create enough variety to pass off their creations as unique individuals. And the recombination has continued to this day.”

Jack nodded, but his furrowed brow betrayed his confusion.

“So, why the AI operating packages?” he asked, more confident in a conversation geared toward computer systems. “Why remove their brains just to replace them with AI?”

With a start, an imaged pierced through Jack’s memory, a piece of paper rolled into a scroll on the floor of the apartment. Jack started patting his pockets, reflexively trying to retrieve the slip of parchment. He was not able to retrieve it from under his suit, but the words had been etched into his mind.

“They are living, but there is no life,” he muttered, staring straight into Matthew’s eyes.

Evangeline began to stir next to Jack, shifting in her seat as if she had just woken up. She snapped her head towards him, a glistening tear running down her cheek.

“How do you know those words?” she whispered.

Jack took a deep breath. “Remember when you’d been abducted from the LTZ and the phony Angel counsellor tried to kill me? Your family clock fell off the wall and crumpled into nothing more than toothpicks.”

A pained look surged across Elizabeth’s face, but Jack continued. “And among the debris was this rolled up piece of paper. I picked it up and stashed it in my pocket. I’d all but forgotten it until now. I didn’t know what it meant at the time; I just picked it up on impulse.”

Evangeline turned to the Angel who claimed to be her father.

Matthew was nodding his head, his grim eyes fixed on the floor. “I wrote that on the title page of a book I happened to have with me when I encountered the Segregants,” he began. “Ironically, the book was the ancient story of Pinocchio, the tale of a lifeless puppet brought to life by magic.” He smirked at the parallels between the old folklore story and the sordid beginnings of the existence of Angels.

Evangeline shook her head and wrung her hands, trying to clear away all the clutter of so much information flowing in all at once. She swore her brain was going to overheat with all the input that had been forced upon her in the past several hours. There was just one thing she needed to know before they answered any other questions.

“Why didn’t you come home?” she snapped, a waver to her voice. “Why did you leave me alone like that?”

Elizabeth choked back a sob and moved toward her daughter, yearning to embrace her. She thought better of it and paused a few feet in front of Evangeline, crouching down to look into her child’s eyes as she had done countless times when Evangeline had still been quite small.

“Because we were infected too,” she said in a low, morbid tremble. “If we came home to you, you also would have become infected. The disease could have spread to all of Olympus! There were too many unknowns.” Elizabeth wiped a tear from her eyes.

“Besides, the authorities had already associated our recent travels with the Dissident movement. Of course, that accusation couldn’t have been further from the truth, but we felt it would be better for you, in the end, to continue with our back-up plan. The best future we could provide for you to have you denounce us with no knowledge of our whereabouts.”

Evangeline had her arms wrapped about her middle, rocking back and forth atop her stool. Resurging waves of the old betrayal cut through her afresh, as if her parents did not believe she could have been strong like them. The flood of emotions heightened her awareness of the unfamiliar faces staring into her eyes with love.

“Wait,” she cried with a sniffle. She pushed Elizabeth away and stood up. “How are you now Angels? You said you got infected when you went back in that lab.”

Matthew and Elizabeth exchanged glances, and then Matthew stood up and walked toward the long metal cylinders behind them. He pressed some buttons on the console and the cylinders hissed open.

Inside rested the ghostly figures of a man and a woman. Both had translucent layers of clear fabric wrapped around their non-existent skin, revealing their musculature underneath. They lay motionless, immersed in a dim fog swirling around them like clouds in the high mountains. Matthew lifted his eyes from the console to face Evangeline.

Elizabeth placed a gentle hand on Evangeline’s back and guided her toward the transparent enclosures. Evangeline touched the glass and whispered.

“Is that you?”

Elizabeth moved her hand to rest on Evangeline’s shoulder.

“Yes, sweetheart….” She sniffled back a tear. “What’s left of us, at any rate.”

Evangeline turned to face Elizabeth with a look of surprise at her choice of words. Elizabeth did her best to give her daughter an encouraging smile.

“The fluid from the containers - once mingled with the regenerating tissue of the Angel - quickly mutated. The Angel’s immune system is much more aggressive than a Human’s is. What was once a cure had become a plague; we’ve been working to stop it before it spreads out of control and obliterates the population.”

Elizabeth gestured to her Angelic body. “We tried for years to find a cure, but contemporary medicine could only keep us going for so long. We had to resort to more drastic measures.” She reached up, touched the back of her neck as a reflex, and then looked over at Matthew. Evangeline’s eyes followed and she, too, was gazing at him with an expectation of the answers to her unspoken questions.

“It was your choice of career that gave me the idea,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders. “There’s an AI interface between a pilot and the TRTV armor. It occurred to me that it could be done with an Angel; we just didn’t realize it at the time that it had already been happening.”

Matthew started to explain how the TRTV selection process was not a process of weeding out those not fit to become pilots. Candidates dismissed from the program were later recruited by Campbell to become operators for Olympus and the Quorum.

Felicia’s voice echoed through the lab - Evangeline had forgotten about her on the other side of the room, as well as Kevin.

“Kevin was the one to put that part of the puzzle together when he encountered an Angel that had the same fighting skills he had taught to new recruits before the procedure. He reasoned that there was a connection between the procedure and the mysterious agents.”

“We were able to falsify some maintenance records and smuggle ourselves into a procedure chamber,” Matthew explained. “And now, at least until we find a cure, we’re trapped in our own bodies. The only way we’re able to continue our work is through these, for lack of a better word, puppets,” he said, gesturing across his entire body.

Jack missed the subtly in Matthew’s statement, but Evangeline did not.

“What do you mean, until you find a cure? What happens after you find one?” she demanded.

Elizabeth walked around her daughter to stand beside her husband.

“Then our time will be up,” she said, pointing to her frail body in the transparent chamber beside her. “This is no way to live, sweetheart. It was only because of a miracle that we’ve survived this long. We can’t stay like this forever.” She reached out her hand and caressed the side of Evangeline’s face shield.

Evangeline openly wept, and Elizabeth joined her. Matthew choked back his tears at the reunion of his family. The pain of knowing they were also saying goodbye to a future they could never enjoy together overshadowed the joy each of them felt.

Jack approached Evangeline from behind and wrapped his arms across her shoulders. Through the tears, Matthew and Elizabeth had begun sharing their surprise when they had been notified that Evangeline was on her way to their location. They were gently harassing Kevin and Felicia for the rough manner in which they had handled the one thing that meant the most to them in the universe.

Suddenly Jack’s arms went tight about Evangeline’s shoulders. “Where did you get all your information about the real origins of the Angels?” he asked.

Elizabeth’s face was masked with mock horror at Evangeline’s account of her kidnapping, especially at the part where she admitted she had thought about blindly kicking at her kidnappers to try to free herself. Matthew’s laughter pierced through the lab as he said, “All these years later and she hasn’t changed at all, has she, Elizabeth?”

Neither of Evangeline’s parents had heard Jack’s question. Jack looked over to Kevin and Felicia across the room. Kevin’s posture became more erect and his serious expression cast an air of reverence about him. Felicia looked up at Kevin, her demeanor also noticeably more sober.

Kevin squared his shoulders and cleared his throat, barely speaking above a whisper.

“The Book of Hestia.”