Lady Grace & the War for a New World (Earth's End Book 2) (8 page)

They’d been sitting in the opening of the container. The lady’s eyes landed on a spot on the ground some distance from them.

“Jeremy, where did you put the box with the parts of the eye in it?”

“Under the container in the back.”

“Well, it’s over there now.” She pointed at the open space in front of them. “I just saw it move.”

The box with the eye in it moved a foot while they watched, heading in the direction from which Sam and Jeremy had come.

“It’s going back.”

“Yeah, it must have a recall function.”

“Its track will lead them straight to us.”

“Yes, eventually. But it’s not fast.” At the rate it was going, the box would take a couple of days to get back to the big meadow.

“Where will it go?”

“To the canary chute? The back door? I don’t know.” Jeremy’s eyes narrowed. “Did they destroy all the computers, Sam?”

“Computers were in the library and in Arthur’s room. The Bigs closed those. I don’t know what is there now. I was not allowed near.”

“Jeremy, could you take a picture of the inside of the shelter?” the lady said.

“Ninety percent probability that I can. The audio and video surveillance devices should be operational. If I can find a live satellite, I can activate them from here. What are you thinking?”

“Remember the way they used to market real estate using holograms in the old days? It was like being inside the house, a 3D view of the room. If we had one of those of the interior of the shelter, we’d know how bad it is.”

“Doesn’t the way Sam looks tell you?” Jeremy asked.

“Yes, very clearly, but it isn’t a complete view or something we could broadcast. And I have an idea that could solve some of our problems. It’s a long shot, but it may work.”

Sam could barely hear them. He sat paralyzed, watching the box move.

9

They moved the metal box back under the storage container and surrounded it with large stones. That halted its homeward progress and gave them a limited sense of security.

“Let’s get down to business. We have to figure out what to do with that nasty thing.” Veronica moved the plastic table and chairs to the other side of the container, as far from the box as possible. “We’ve got to get to safety. We need the weapons in the other container. We need Eliana and the others. We’re likely to perish without those things, and very soon. I’m going to call the golden planet again.”

“You’re going to call Eliana’s people for
help
?” Jeremy said.

“That’s how I got here,” she said.

“But you don’t know them. They’re really bad.”

“They weren’t to me.”

“You don’t know the goldies like I do. They sneak and lie. You can’t trust them.” She could see Jeremy’s hackles rise. He looked like a cat who’d run into a killer dog and was going to have to fight for his life. Veronica could feel their old patterns rearing up. “But maybe you
do
understand the goldies, Mom. You got Arthur to hack into my computer. Did you have him do anything else?” She could see a screaming fit on its way. Might as well tell him the rest.

“Yes. I had him monitor your room at the Hermitage, Jeremy.”

“You had my room
bugged?
You spied on me?” he snarled. “I can’t believe it. But maybe I can. That is so
you
. Did you get an earful?”

“Yes … but you did the same thing to the village, Jeremy. Maybe you should have thought about how they …”

“You
steal
my laptop,
bug
my room,
and
turn my friend Arthur against me. Now you want to contact the assholes who stole Ellie and tried to kill me. Really swell, Mom.”

“I didn’t turn anyone against you. Arthur was my friend, too. He knew how things were for me.” Jeremy opened his mouth to start shouting. “
Listen to me, Jeremy!
I was alone in a foreign country, watched twenty-four hours a day. I couldn’t go anywhere or talk to anyone who wasn’t in the general’s pocket. Your voice was all I had.

“They were trying to rescue me, Arthur and our military, but they couldn’t. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” His face was unreadable.

“I know how you feel about me, Jeremy. You’ve made it very clear in person, and over those transmissions. You swore at whatever you were programming and me in equal measure. But that’s all I had to keep myself sane. Your curses were the best part of my life.”

“Yeah, right.”

She turned the side of her face to him and lifted her hair. Fine white lines ran along her jaw and hairline. “Do you know what those are?”

“He
hit
you?” Jeremy’s mouth opened a bit.

“The beatings weren’t the worst. He did things to me that were so bad that I will
never
, ever tell another soul about them.” She lost her poise, struggling to explain. “Please, Jeremy. Try to understand.”

“But I saw you on TV and in magazines, at fancy parties. On yachts. Smiling and laughing.”

“Oh, yes. When the bruises faded, I’d get all done up and make a show of being the fabulously happy paramour of the worst mass murderer in history. It was staged, Jeremy. I was acting.”

“But you married him. He took you with him in the bunker.”

“I put myself there, Jeremy. He picked me over thousands of others, because I was the best. I went through a military training that made whatever Arthur did with you look like kindergarten. I did that in the hope that I would live—and one day get free, so I could be with you. And I did it. I’m here.” She felt like whatever had held her together for all those years was blowing to smithereens.

“Why don’t I feel triumphant?” She raised her head proudly, ignoring the way she trembled. “Oh, I forgot. You hate me.” Her eyes misted. “Shit. I can’t deal with this.” She dashed away from the container.

Jeremy hesitated, then went after her.

He caught up with his mother within a hundred yards. She was bending down with her hands on her knees, panting. She looked up at him.

“I can’t run for beans. I haven’t recovered from being frozen.”

“Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry, too, Jeremy. I hoped that this homecoming would be very different. In all my dreaming about the future, I forgot that I don’t know how to be with you.” Her shoulders dropped and her hands turned toward him beseechingly.

“I don’t know how to be with you, either, Mom. But let’s try. Please tell me how things were for you. OK? I don’t really know you.”

“Yes, let’s try. And I want to hear what you’re feeling, too.”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

“It blows my mind that you want to contact the goldies for help. They pretend to be all peaceful and kind, but they’re not. They use other species, and they’ll use you. Don’t trust them at all.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. But I don’t see that we have much choice. Any time now, those monsters in the underground are going to figure out that they can live outside. When they do, they’ll come straight for us. We have no weapons. We’re outnumbered. We saw what they did to Sam. What else can we do but contact the golden planet? We have no options.”

“Sorry, Sam. A little old business between Jeremy and me,” Veronica said when they got back to the container. “I propose to broadcast to Ellie’s people again and ask for help.

“If you can get images of the inside of that place showing exactly what’s going on, Jeremy, I’d like to send them to Ellie’s world and show them what we’re up against. Maybe I can persuade them to give us the munitions crate.”

“Mom, do you think they give a shit? They tossed me out to die.”

“There’s got to be something good in them. They kept you and the rest all those years. They came for you before the conflagration. They helped me. And maybe they’ll fear what those monsters could do …”

“Why? They’re up there, and we’re down here. It won’t affect them one bit.”

“Oh, Jeremy. We’re helpless. And what can they do to us if we ask?”

“You’d be surprised. They’re so far ahead of us, you can’t believe it. But, yeah, you’re right. What choice do we have?”

She turned to Sam. “Did you see any weapons down there? There’s an absolute arsenal. Terrible weapons that the general gave Jeremy. Did they show them to anyone?”

Sam shook his head. “They talk about them. They said they’d kill us with them if we did not obey. But they never showed ‘em.”

“That means they can’t get to them. Or they don’t know how to use them,” she said.

“Or they’re smart enough to know that if they used them down there, they’d blow the shelter to bits and kill everyone in it.” Jeremy looked concerned. “Did you ever hear anything about really big guns?”

“No. But they scream about using them to take over the world. It’s the first Command.”

“You said that before, but I don’t remember saying it.”

Sam held himself erect and struck a theatrical pose. His voice boomed, “And the great
Tek
stood before his Lab,
lightning
blazing from his hair. His eyes shot
fire
. Light surrounded him and the computers in the Lab. And he said, ‘
Nay
to the snake men!
Nay
to the hooch!
Nay
to…’” Sam paused; he couldn’t say “no boingy boingy with your cousins” in front of the lady.

He resumed with, “The great Tek
rose
into the sky in the yellow light, becoming one with the
heavens
. ‘I
will
return, Sam of the village. When you get out,
take over the world
.’” Sam mimicked the voices of the Book Readers. “That’s how the Readers speak it. That’s what we believe, down below.”

Jeremy raised his hands over his head. “I was just a screwed up kid. The planet was about to be destroyed. Sam would never let what I said turn into a religion. It wasn’t a religion.”

Sam spoke with the booming, syncopated voice of a Reader. “The great golden light took the Angel and the Tek. ‘I will come again, Sam,’ the Tek promised. ‘And we will take over the world.’” Sam imitated the cadence and the worshipful fervor of the Readers. “That’s how they say it, and that’s what they believe.”

“Do you believe that, Sam?” Jeremy asked.

Sam looked at him guardedly. When he spoke, it was in the dialect of the village. Jeremy’s commands had forbidden its use, but everyone underground spoke it anyway, as well as regular English. “Ye have done more good to me than any in ma life. Ye took that out of me,” he jerked his head toward the box with the eye. “Ye washed me an’ gave me food. Ah’d be dead but for you.”

“But I’m just a guy, Sam, like you. I’ve had some education. My mom had learned how to take out the eye. What we did was stuff anyone would do.”

“But ye an’ th’ lady did it.”

Veronica cut in. “Sam, whatever you think or believe is fine. Please know that I’m an ordinary woman. I’m not supernatural. We need to make a plan, not discuss theology.”

“It is different than it was, down there. They
say
they keep the Commands, but they don’t. They have hooch and mushrooms, and they hurt people.”

“We saw that,” Jeremy responded.

“Worse than w’ me,” he said.

“Let’s get some pictures of it so we’ll know what’s going on,” the lady said. “Jeremy, can you get the cameras on the computers going so we can photograph inside and see it here, as well as broadcasting images remotely?”

“Yeah, if I can find a live satellite. There are some huge Russian ones that are nuclear powered. They’ll work forever.”

“If you could find one that wasn’t Russian, that would be good. The general’s son …”

“Say no more, Mom. I’ll find one that he can’t trace.”

“Can you photograph the interior without light?”

“I’ve got night vision on some of the surveillance cameras, but not all. Do the lights work, Sam?”

“They work in the main room, where Sam Big stays. And in the pit where the women are. The rest of us are kept dark, unless Sam wants someone. We are kept in rooms and canna leave.”

“The women’s
pit
?
Kept
in rooms? He wants them for
what?
” Veronica was appalled.

Sam looked down. “The women are kept for the Bigs.”

Veronica stopped the conversation. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. I saw it in the general’s camps. The worst element, the sadistic goons, take over and terrorize the camp. They do whatever they want to the rest. They get the food, entertainment. Sex. Clothes. Keeping people in the dark is a good way to terrorize them.

“I want some really nasty pictures to shock your in-laws, Jeremy.” She paused a moment. “I thought of something else. A visit from the soon-to-return Great Tek might be a nice touch, if you can broadcast into the shelter.”

“On the screens?”

“Yes. I was also thinking of a hologram in the middle of the main hall. Weren’t you working on holograms before everything blew up? Could you create something that would look real? I could do some wonderful things with makeup and your hair. We’ve got lights. What do you think?”

“Well, I could do a flash from the computers and the overhead lights at once. One blast of light and we’d get the pictures of what we want. The computers would send them to the satellite, then relay them here, and to Ellie’s world. If I get any lasers up, I can broadcast a hologram. What should I say with the hologram?”

“Something on the order of ‘I’m coming and I’m mad.’ We’ll work on that once we know if we can do it.”

“I’ll get to work right now. What about the eye?”

“Can you reverse it so we can broadcast through it? We could program it with some message.”

“I can do that. Probably.”

Jeremy settled into his computers. They brought the eye and its box inside. Being blocked in its homeward journey seemed to irritate the thing. It rattled against the inside of the box.

As Jeremy disappeared into the tech world, Veronica approached Sam. “Sam, I want to change your bandage.” After doing so, she patted his shoulder. “OK. Let’s eat and go to sleep. I’m exhausted.”

He had something to say and felt so self-conscious that he could barely open his mouth.

“What is it, Sam? Think of me as your mother. You can talk to me.”

Sam had almost no memory of his mother, but he could never think of the lady as his mother. “Ah … If ah could …” How could he ask? “Underground, we sleep together. Could ah …?”

“Sleep with Jeremy and me? Certainly. We can have a nice slumber party.”

They put mats and sleeping bags down for three people. She put her fur coat over them. Sam had never slept in a nicer bed. He could hear Jeremy on the computer and see the light from beyond their corridor of boxes.

“He’s wired in, Sam. That’s computer wizard talk. He’s concentrating so hard he doesn’t know we’re here. He won’t stop until he’s done. We might as well go to sleep.”

He could barely lie near her. He knew that she was utterly forbidden to him, above him in every way.

Something kept coming out of him, feelings, and energy. Images of her face and lips haunted him. The way her chest protruded and her waist tucked in. He couldn’t stop thinking of her. Sleeping next to her was impossible, and leaving her was impossible. He heard Jeremy talking to himself as he worked.