Hammerhead Resurrection (25 page)

Sofía Fields sat under a silvered emergency blanket with Luciano in her arms. Emilia lay alongside her watching the sky beyond the pine boughs paling with dawn. The three nights they’d spent under the stars had been cool, but they’d stayed warm enough huddled together. The day before, she’d found a hose bib on the side of a utility shack where she refilled their water containers. Marco had packed the bag with survival rations. At first, the children had turned their noses up at the chalky food bricks, but as hunger came on in earnest, they’d eaten one and asked for a second. But Sofía, to make the supplies last, had only allowed them one in the morning and one in the evening. While the bricks were nourishing, they left her stomach hurting. Marco had included no other food, presumably to preserve as much room as possible for the dense calories of the bricks. Sofía estimated that she and the children could survive in the hills for several weeks if need be, but she was unsure what she would do beyond that.

They’d spent the first night tucked into the ravine of a ridge valley. She’d made them a nest of leaves, and when Luciano began to cry, she told him they were playing hide and seek, which their father had told her he wanted to do should his ship arrive. While she tried to sound lighthearted, when she fell quiet, her mind wandered through disturbing questions. What was that ship, and where
had Marco gone?

At dawn on the second da
y, she made her way to the tree line near Griffith Observatory where she found the same type of barrier the ship had laid down surrounding the parking lot. Where the glistening fencing crossed the road a pile of metal and chunks of rubber lay as though a car had attempted to drive through the barrier and been sliced to palm sized pieces by it. She did not approach the fencing. Beyond it, the parking lot was filled with cars, several with doors open. She saw no one.

The next day, she ventured east to find the barrier at the base of the hill and then north to find the barrier again. She continued west and found, as she’d guessed, a barrier running along
Barham Boulevard. In the distance, moving along an empty freeway, she saw a large, black vehicle, perhaps as long and twice as wide as a tractor-trailer.

She and her children were cut off on the island of the Hollywood hills. They saw no other people. The human race seemed to have been lifted off the surface of the planet, and she knew that she could not allow her children to be found.

Luciano shifted next to her. Looking down, she found his clear, brown eyes on her. She gave him the best smile she could afford.

“’
amá,” Luciano said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Yes my love?”

“I know papa is not looking for us.”

She struggled to settle her thoughts at being caught in the lie. Finally, she asked, “Why would you think that?”

“He would want to hug you too much to stay away.”

At this tears welled in her eyes.

The boy’s little hand touched her face. “Do not worry ’amá. I will protect you.”

Leif had been working with his team for eight days. Each time Jeffrey checked in with them, they’d been either sitting over tablets reading, or in quiet discussion, drawing and noting with graphite pencils on sheets of paper. No matter how much he wanted to move forward, no matter how he wished he could leave with a transport full of pilots to get Lakota fighters, he forced himself to stay calm. When he looked out on the low hills, dense with rainforest, he felt sure that, beyond that horizon, something horrible was happening to the human race. He had no idea what. When his mind attempted to imagine it, he shoved the thought away. This was a time for facts, not conjecture. Knowing what was happening would have to wait.

In the evening on that ninth day, Jeffrey made his way down to the river. The day had been hot, and he had several day’s sweat and grime coating him. Near their camp they’d found a tributary roiling down from the hills, sparkling and bending over rocks before it joined with the muddy river lower down. At the base of a huge boulder, a waterfall had cut a deep swimming hole.

Jeffrey carried his kit down the trail tied up in a rough, Navy-issue towel. He’d walked barefoot down the trail often, until he’d gotten a beetle’s jaw stapled into the side of his foot. Nasty little bastard wouldn’t let go even when his body had been removed from his head. Nail clippers applied directly to the half-inch mandibles were the only thing which had set him free. Now Jeffrey wore boots wherever he went, even to the swimming hole.

The air hung muggy among the trees and plants along the trail, but when he came into the swimming hole’s clearing, the temperature dropped as the sound of the waterfall filled his ears. The scent of the misting water, and sunlight catching the channels of the falls calmed his heart. Leif stood beside the water in his underwear, scrubbing his hair with a towel. A woman, whom Jeffrey did not at first recognize, stood beside him. She had olive-Italian skin, dark eyes, and long, raven-black, hair, which was towel messy. Her slim figure was striking. As they spoke to each other, Jeffrey saw in their easy smiles that they enjoyed each other’s company.

As there was no one else in the pool, he decided to give them a few more minutes alone. He walked back up the trail, found a place to sit, waited, and returned perhaps ten minutes later.

He found them now, fully dressed, sitting on the long buttress-root of a kapok tree, their backs to him. The woman had her hair wrapped in a towel, which exposed the delicate arc of her neck. With an excitement, she touched Leif’s leg and pointed to a place where ripples ran out on the calmer water below the falls. A fish had jumped. She turned to Leif and caught sight of Jeffrey. Heavy, upswept lashes framed her eyes, and with her chin held at an angle just high enough to be regal, but not so high as to be haughty, she had the look of a classical movie star,

In a thick Italian accent she said, “Admiral Holt, how are you?”

Only when she spoke did Jeffrey recognize her as the ship’s surgeon, whom he’d only seen previously wearing glasses and a lab coat.

“I’m well, Doctor Monti, thank you. I came looking for Leif. I’m sorry to intrude.”

“No, please,” she motioned with her hand that he should come sit with them. “Please, call me Caterina.”

“Thank you, Caterina,” he said.

As he sat on a root facing them, the doctor took her hair from the towel. As it cascaded over her shoulder, he felt somewhat stunned. Here, sitting with the backdrop of the deep greens of the jungle behind her and her dark hair down, she was positively beautiful. On a normal day a father would love to see his son sitting with such a woman, but today—so near Sarah’s death—her presence brought a primal uneasiness, as if she was somehow infringing upon decorum.

Leif looked very tired, but in his eyes Jeffrey saw the dark obsession, which he had sunk into after their conversation. The doctor seemed more at ease.

“How goes the project?” Jeffrey asked.

Caterina looked to Leif, who sat with his eyes on the river. She nudged his arm.

“I’m sorry?” Leif looked to them, almost surprised, as if Jeffrey and Caterina had just appeared before him.

Jeffrey asked again, “The project… how is progress?”

A genuine, if not weary, smile came to Leif’s face as he said, “Very well. We should be able to begin tomorrow.”

“Really?” Jeffrey asked with unhidden surprise and relief. “That’s excellent.”

…

Whitetip lay on a cot, which had been elevated to hip level on crates to give Caterina, Leif, and two nurses easy access to her.

Caterina placed her hand on Whitetip’s shoulder. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m good,” Whitetip said with an easy smile and a wink.

Jeffrey saw in the paleness of her face that she was definitely not fine. She was scared to death. He wanted to tell her that she’d be okay, that it wouldn’t hurt, but he couldn’t bring himself to outright lie. If it went well, this would be the worst experience of her life.

Someone had to go first, but Jeffrey wished it wasn’t her.

Caterina brushed a bit of dirt off the young pilot’s face. “In the first stage we will inject nanites, which when triggered, will drill along the surface of the axon tissue of your somatic nerve fibers. They consume a layer of material and, in the space created, lay down a single sheet of graphene.” She patted Whitetip’s hand, “It isn’t dangerous, but is apparently… painful.”

“Painful…” Whitetip looked to Jeffrey. “You’ve lived through this. How bad is it?”

Why did you have to ask me that?

Flicking the air out of a vial filled with a metallic liquid, Caterina connected it to the IV attached to Whitetip’s arm.

Jeffrey sat down on a crate beside her. “I’d love to tell you that you’ll be slightly uncomfortable, but I can’t. It’s going to hurt like hell. Thousands of tiny machines are about to eat the outer layer off every strand of your nervous system. It’ll feel as though your flesh is being ripped off and burned at the same time. When it happened to me, I thought my muscles were being eaten by rats.”

Whitetip gave a nervous smile as she glanced at the needle in her arm. “So it’s going to suck.”

“Yes.” He looked to Caterina, who stood starting at him, her lips somewhat parted. “What?”

Caterina’s accent amplified her anger. “This will be difficult enough without you frightening her.”

“She’ll be fine,” Jeffrey said. Yet, as he looked back to Whitetip’s pale, worried face, he wished he could have lied to her, but he couldn’t bring himself to tell her it would only pinch before sending her through hell.

She’ll get through…

“I am sorry,” Caterina told Whitetip, “that we cannot give you pain medication as that would impede the function of the nanites.”

Jeffrey took hold of Whitetip’s hand. Fifty years ago, several recruits had gone into severe shock. A few had died. Caterina might be mad at him for saying it would hurt, but at least he hadn’t said it would hurt so much she might die from the pain. He felt scared for the young pilot and proud of her as she’d insisted on being first. By doing so, Whitetip had put herself at severe risk. This process was not precisely what they’d used in the past. No one knew if the nanites had been properly engineered. If Leif’s team had made an
error, Whitetip had effectively agreed to be put to death. Jeffrey had been shoving that thought out his mind ever since she’d laid down on the cot. He understood it was sexist to worry more about killing a young woman than a young man, but Jeffrey couldn’t escape the truth that it bothered him more.

Caterina had agreed to have her go first because a smaller subject was theoretically better, as the machines would finish sooner. She also suggested that women handled severe pain as a genetic prerogative better than men.

“Are you ready?” Caterina asked Whitetip.

When Whitetip gave her a quick nod, Caterina motioned to the nurses. They strapped Whitetip’s legs and hands down. When they moved off, Jeffrey took hold of her cold hand.

Caterina opened the valve on the Y connector and pressed in the gunmetal-gray liquid, which flushed down the rubberized tube and into the needle in Whitetip’s arm.

With a nervous laugh, Whitetip said, “Just a walk in the park, right?”

“Just a walk in the park,” Jeffrey said.

Just a walk in the park if you were being electrocuted every step of the way.

Guilt washed over Jeffery at what was about to happen to the young woman. No matter how tough, she was about to have a life-defining experience. For the rest of her days, no matter how horrible things got, she could look back and say, at least it’s not as bad as this.

Whitetip looked from one face to the next, all eyes on her. Her fingers twitched in Jeffrey’s hand, and her lips pulled back as her eyes narrowed. She drew a seething breath and said, “It’s starting in my arm.”

Jeffrey slid his crate closer and brushed her hair from her eyes. “It’s going to be okay. Just take slow, deep breaths.”

She nodded and gave him a brave smile, no longer the tough military pilot, but a scared kid, only a few years out of public school.

Her grip crushed down on Jeffrey’s hand as she screamed a sharp bark of pain. Caterina wiped her forehead with a white towel. Leif stood on the other side, arms crossed, biting his thumb.

Whitetip breathed in little huffs.

“Try to draw slow breaths,” Leif said to her.

She closed her eyes and her belly rose in a slow arc and descended. Her jaw tensed as she let out a quiet growl. As she gripped fiercely on Jeffrey’s hand again, her breath returned to quick puffs.

“It hurts,” she said through her teeth.

“I’m sorry,” Jeffrey said.

Her eyes came open and locked on Jeffrey’s. “It’s okay,” she whispered. She screamed again. As her legs curled, yanking at the cot’s restraints, she gripped down on Jeffrey’s hand so hard her short fingernails cut into the side of his palm. Her mouth came open as if to scream again, but nothing came out. Her face began to tint blue.

Caterina came forward, leaning over her. She touched the monitor next to her, which read pulse 130, blood pressure 193/74. “She’s okay.”

Whitetip gasped for air, her face flushing red as her eyes widened in a primal fight or flight expression. “My right arm and shoulder,” she said through her teeth, “feel like they’re being melted with acid.” Her eyebrows tented up as her eyes reddened with tears.

Jeffrey knew he couldn’t keep the worry he felt from his face, so he simply let it show. “I understand. It feels like you’re going to die. I’ve been through it. But you have to trust me, there’s nothing physically wrong.”

She arched up on her heels and the back of her head, straining against the strap around her chest. Jeffrey wondered if she’d heard him. As her pulse reached 185, sweat beaded across her forehead. Her face blued again. Jeffrey leaned over her just as she let out a horrific scream, sucked in as much air as her small chest would vacuum up and screamed again and again.

“It’s reached her chest,” Jeffrey said, “It’s going to get bad fast from here. He pointed to a tray on a crate nearby. “Now’s the
time to get her tongue and jaw secured. Whitetip had begun to toss her head from side to side. Leif came around above her and gripped her head, but she thrashed free. He pinned her skull down with his body weight and Dr. Monti shoved the mouth guard in and strapped it around the back of her neck. Her breath now whistled through the breathing hole in the mouth guard. Her screams came muffled in her throat. She kicked viciously at the end of the cot, her boot bending one of the metal bars. As her eyes came open, she looked like the subject of an exorcism, her hair drenched and eyes rolling upward until only the red-traced whites showed.

She screamed and thrashed for ten minutes. In the past, some had lost consciousness, but with microscopic machines eating away at every nerve fiber, no one stayed out long. Whitetip though, stayed with it. Her pulse had spiked to 200 several times, and her blood pressure was moving above 230. If she had any vascular weakness in the brain, stroke was a real possibility.

After ten minutes, the screaming faded to groaning gasps of air. She lay drenched in sweat with her eyes clamped shut and chest heaving. Jeffrey soaked a towel with cool water and pressed it to her forehead so the water squeezed from it, running down her temples and the sides of her nose.

As Jeffrey draped the towel across her forehead, her eyes came open—blood shot and weary. She blinked at him as though she couldn’t quite focus.

“Are you okay?” Jeffrey asked her. “The worst is over. You’re going to be sore for days, but the burning will only get less from here.

She whispered something through the
mouthguard, and Jeffrey unstrapped it and drew it out.

She whispered again, so quietly he could not make out what she said.

He put his ear next to her mouth.

“I hate you,” came just over the sound of her exhaled breath.

As Jeffrey leaned back, she, despite looking as though she’d nearly died from drowning, winked at him. Her tenacity of spirit overwhelmed Jeffrey. Resting his hand on her belly, he felt the flat muscles rising and falling. She’d passed through the eye of the needle and would lead the way for the next generation of Hammerheads.