Creators (14 page)

Abrams sighed and leaned her head back against the tree. “And I thought you had a good question for me. I do get so incessantly tired by these mundane ones.”

Something inside of me broke. I flew at Abrams and snatched her by the collar of her shirt, pulling her tight against the ropes that kept her entrapped. My father had taught me how to kill, and I had never felt the desire to do so burn so brightly inside of me. “You listen to me, you maniacal monster! I know it was you and your kind! You did something to them. Put some damn chemicals in the water supply or poisoned them with those damn vaccinations. But I know you did it. I want to know what you did.”

“Look at those tears,” Abrams purred. “Such weakness.”

I hadn’t even realized I was crying. “Shut up,” I yelled, slamming her head against the tree. Part of me expected my father or his men to intervene, but they all stood by and watched.

Abrams chuckled. “Do you want me to shut up or do you want me to answer your question?”

I slammed her head again. Her eyes rolled up to the back of her head. I unclenched my hands from her shirt and staggered away, then paced back and forth. My hands clutched onto my hair to keep from wringing her neck. Never before I had felt anything like this. The fire was getting strong, burning out of control.

“You’re asking the wrong question,” she managed to squeak out between coughs.

“What are you talking about?” I kept my feet moving. As long as I was pacing, I wouldn’t resort to violence.

“It’s not how but why.”

It’s not how but why.
I had always thought the council could be responsible for the death of so many women, but to hear it confirmed, to know my sister’s death could have been avoided, was staggering in its simplicity.

I fell to my knees. “Why?” My head dropped into my hands. I couldn’t look at Abrams; it was one thing to dream of confronting your enemy, but it was entirely different to do so in person. This weak, deathly ill thing had taken my sister from me. My enemy was human.

“They were already sick.”

I lifted my head, narrowing my eyes. “You mean you didn’t make the women like this?”

Abrams gave the slightest shake of her head. “No, we didn’t do this, but we didn’t do anything to stop it, either. Actually, I had very little to do with the illness that plagues the women. My father, and men like him that made up the council’s team of scientists in the early days of the war, noticed that more and more women were dying during childbirth. Dying at alarming rates. They searched out the reasons everywhere. Maybe it was the effects of the nuclear war. Maybe it was a biological attack from the eastern sector. Maybe it was something in the water.”

“So, what was it?” I asked. My heart picked up speed. It was as if I were at the edge of the mountain, and whatever Abrams said next would send me to the bottom of the ravine or save me. Was it possible that I could absolve the council of this?

“Rubella.”

“What the hell is that?” I looked over my shoulder to find my father towering over me, glaring at Abrams.

“You see, child, I find it much nicer to talk to you than him. He beat me for hours trying to get me to talk, but he should understand that a woman never does anything she doesn’t want to do,” Abrams said with a sly smile and a wink.

With a growl, my father aimed his gun at her. “My daughter Louisa almost died! Now, answer Tess’s question!”

Abrams’s eyes lit with delight and she gave a lazy shrug of her shoulders. I got back onto my feet and placed a hand on my father’s shoulder. His gun trembled in his shaking hands, and I knew, without a doubt, despite his questionable ways, my father had feared for Louisa’s life. He dropped his gun, taking several steps away from Abrams.

“What is rubella?” I asked.

“I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it. For hundreds and hundreds of years, most naturals received shots to protect them from it. Nothing more than a case of measles that science learned to control. But here’s the thing that man always forgets about nature: it’s a real smart bitch. She’ll wait. Hide until you think you’re safe. Morph into a new beast while your back is turned, and just when you’ve almost forgotten her power, she’ll come back for you with a vengeance.”

“So a virus killed my sister?” I asked. “Not the council?”

“Yes and no. The virus mutated, becoming almost an entirely new beast. It held many of the same properties of its original parent. With the primary strand, sometimes people didn’t even know they were carriers. Our rubella shared this trait, showing no outwardly signs. Seemingly harmless. But its real threat, even back then, had been to unborn children. It caused birth defects, premature births, and even miscarriages. Some children survived back then but not with this new strand. It kills the baby, taking the mother with it,” Abrams explained. Gone was the glee that oozed from her as she talked about the power of science. Her eyes took on a far-off look.

I knew that look.

“Who did you lose?” I asked, my throat suddenly dry.

Abrams blinked as if her eyes were pooling with tears, but there was nothing there. An old habit, perhaps. “My mother. I watched as my father wept over her body for days. He and I had never been close before then. He had always belonged to the council; he had never been a father. Always off in a lab doing God knows what. In those moments after my mother’s death, I saw his human side. I thought we had connected. It was years later that I discovered what a monster he had become, and that was when I discovered I would have to become an even bigger monster to survive.”

I swallowed. My throat still burned because I knew Abrams wasn’t done with her story, and I knew it would only get worse. “You said the council didn’t stop it. But could they?”

“I don’t know. All I know is they didn’t try. The whole world was falling apart. Nuclear war happened because the government couldn’t control its people. People—that’s always been the variable the scientists couldn’t predict. And here was a virus that promised to wipe them clear off the earth. They had already begun attempting to create life—chosen ones as you have called them. The originals were disasters. Deformed. Monsters, really. They had no idea what they were doing.”

With a shudder, I thought about the creatures that attacked us in the woods.

“You’ve seen one?” Abrams asked, reading something in my facial expression. “I heard my son had used my father’s plans to create an army of exterminators. I haven’t seen them myself. Not since those early days. I always liked my creatures a bit prettier. What can I say.”

“You liked them prettier?” I asked, unable to stop myself from walking closer to Abrams. I knew I was way past my five minutes, but my father, seemingly entranced as I was, failed to stop us.

“I was four when my mother died. After that, I spent every waking moment in the labs with my father. Watching and learning as they created life. When I wasn’t with him, I studied everything I could get my hands on. It’s a hard thing for a man to see his daughter become smarter than he is. Especially when he and the rest of his simpleminded chums went around blaming the whole lot of the world’s problems on female existence. But he didn’t understand—that was the way genetics, science, had made me. It wasn’t my fault. I was fourteen when I found the fault in their formulas. I was fifteen when the first chosen ones were created based off my work. Back then, we could create and awaken a fully grown chosen one in three years. Three years. That was a mistake; I rushed it. They weren’t ready. That was my mistake. We all made mistakes back then. My father was underestimating me. He never saw it coming.”

“Why would you let the council use them against us? Why would you make the world like this?” I desperately grabbed onto her shirt. Abrams pressed her lips together and avoided meeting my eyes. “Please! I have to know.”

“I fell in love with one of them,” she said quietly.

I froze, my hands falling from her shirt. “A chosen one?”

She nodded. “But he betrayed me in the worst possible way. He said he loved me, and yet he knew about the women. He was my father’s right-hand man. He watched them die and came to me in the night. Both he and my father used me to get what they needed, all the while teaching the world to hate who I was. Watching as we all died. My father had always told me they had tried to find a cure, and I had believed him. But fathers lie,” she sneered, darting her eyes toward my father.

“So, you killed them? The creators?” I gulped, remembering the legend that had surrounded Abrams.

She nodded. “They killed my mother. They told the whole world I was weak and dangerous when I was the one who created the world they wanted to live in.”

“So, knowing how the women were dying, why didn’t you try and find a cure?”

Abrams’s eyes met mine. She leaned forward, pulling on her ropes. “Because I finally saw the world my father and his men feared—a world filled with betrayal and hate and darkness. A world not worth saving. I killed those men, and the minute I did was the minute I realized how weak mankind was. The council was appalled by my actions, but they couldn’t kill me. They needed me.”

I felt sick. She could have stopped it. She could have found a cure. My sister could have been saved. “To create more chosen ones?”

She nodded.

“But now they know how. Why still keep you alive?”

“Because I ensured they would need me. I invented a fail-safe. Protection against the council built into the chosen ones themselves.” Abrams grinned.

With the mention of a fail-safe, my father appeared at my side. This was the information he had been seeking out. My chest heaved with my unspent energy. “What are you talking about?”

“When I helped my father build the chosen ones, I believed we could make a newer, better world. And when I found out the world wasn’t worth saving, I made sure I could keep that power to myself.”

“That’s God’s choice. Not yours,” my father barked.

Abrams pulled against her ropes, leaning her frail body even closer to me. “God has abandoned you. If he is master of the universe, then he’s responsible for what has happened to our species. And when you realize that,” she continued, “then you realize that the thing you hated for so long—us—is gone. Then you’ll be like the rest of us…empty.”

“Five minutes is up,” my father interjected.

I felt dizzy. Like I still wasn’t quite awake—that odd in-between place between sleep and consciousness where everything seemed possible and impossible all at once. It reminded me of the morning I woke up after escaping the compound. I had reached for the numbers lasered onto my arm by the council, taking comfort that something of my old life still existed.

I cleared my throat, forcing the words out. “The virus… When I went into my inspection, they found out I was immune. I wouldn’t die in childbirth. How?”

“We’re done here. Step away, Tess,” my father demanded.

“Won’t you let me answer her question?” Abrams said like she was asking him to pass the milk. “It’s the least you could do, considering everything I told you.”

“I want to hear what she has to say,” I begged without looking up at my father.

“One more minute,” he said.

“You’ll have to come closer. It’s a secret only you can know.” Abrams smirked.

“The last time I did that, a girl stabbed me,” I replied.

“I have about five guns pointed at me. I don’t think I’ll be stabbing you,” she countered.

I leaned closer to Abrams as she pressed her paper-thin lips against my ear. Her words slithered in and traveled down to my very soul. “Nature, my love. Science never could control it. It chose you like it chose me. There is no rhyme or reason to it, but you’re special. Unique. It is a blessing and a curse.”

So I was a freak. I began to pull away from Abrams when the short cluck of her tongue stopped me. “I’m going to tell you something. Something your father wants to know, and I’m going to let you decide whether you want to share it.” With these cryptic words, she whispered a series of numbers into my ear.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

“Because when you’ve seen everything I have, playing games is the only fun left. Besides, I am so very tired of carrying this burden.”

Before I could respond, an object darted out of the tree line from the corner of my eye. A monstrously loud ripping noise filled the air, accompanied by the clicks of five guns. Men shouted at me as I covered my head with my hands.

Once I was sure the sky wasn’t going to fall straight down on me, I lifted my head to find a disheveled Robert standing in front of me. A tempest of emotions came alive in his eyes. His brow was furrowed, and his lip was curled in a sneer. Blood was splattered across his face like raindrops. My eyes traveled down to his hands. He was clutching some sort of dense object. He dropped it to the floor.

I looked past him to find Abrams slumped forward. A strand of salvia dripped out of her mouth down into the dirt ground. Like a spider web that had lost its spider. It went down to where her heart lay.

Robert had ripped her heart straight out of her chest.

I covered my mouth with my hands. I wasn’t sure if I did so to keep from screaming or stop from throwing up. My father pressed his gun into Robert’s chest.

Robert slowly, gently reached up and pushed the gun away. “You aren’t going to shoot me, Charlie. Don’t you remember when you broke me out? What you whispered into my ear?”

My father lowered his gun. “I promised you that one day you could kill those responsible.”

“But why? Why?” I asked.

“She let Emma die,” Robert answered, his voice taking on a tone I had only heard once before—a tone of utter helplessness. I had heard it the day Emma died. He offered no other explanation. Somehow, those four words were enough.

I turned around without speaking another word. I walked away from them all, wondering if I knew anything or anyone in the world I called home. Every time I thought I understood the world, my world, it changed. Felt less mine. Nothing was as it should have been. Everything I thought I knew was wrong. Up was down. Right was left. Light was dark.