Overrun (4 page)

"That kid you brought in,
he's been a coma since coming into the ward. I've talked to the case doctor.
They don't think he's going to make it."

Dome Physician Jack Everson
watched his patient's body tense and waited a second before administering the
final shot of protective radiation serum. It was the last medication required
to clear his friend, John Kirken, for his prolonged outer-dome excursion to see
his stepchildren in the outside town of Beuford, Washington.

"I'm sorry, John."

"It's probably for the
best," Kirken said morosely.

Everson jabbed the needle into
his arm making Kirken wince slightly. The serum coursed through his system like
a runaway fire. Kirken closed his eyes and waited for the pain to pass.

"Yes, it probably is. They
identified the group he belongs to by a tattoo on his leg. They’ve been causing
problems on the outside for a long time. A lot of people just want to throw him
back out."

Kirken nodded knowingly.

"It's starting to get
really bad out there. People are starting to get desperate."

"It's always been bad out
there, John. There's nothing new happening."

"I know," Kirken said
swallowing hard. "Can you blame them?" He asked looking up at
Everson.

"I can sympathize with
people feeling abandoned out there. I can also sympathize with the fright every
person must feel living out there trying to keep their families alive. But what
I can't condone is any attack on government personnel. We live in here for a
reason. We're trying to build a safer world. They can't fault us for
that."

Kirken let out a disconsolate
grunt.

"You disagree?"

"Have you ever even been
out there Jack? Have you ever seen what living out there can do?"

"Everybody makes do, John.
Just like everybody in here."

"That's bullshit, Jack, and
you know it," Kirken said irritably. He remembered saying something
similar to Lt. Wagner before they were attacked.

Everson looked away from his
friend’s face. Kirken stared down from the examining table at the rectangular
designs of the tile along the floor. The burning of unwanted tears settled at
the corners of his eyes.

"Could you really live with
it Jack, the way they do? Could you watch your family slowly die from the
radiation sickness?"

"I don't think I could
answer that question, John, unless I found myself in that situation,"
Everson said slowly. "Nobody can."

"That's what I'm talking
about, Jack."

"Except maybe you."

Kirken didn't answer. He reached
across the table to the counter where his clothes were being kept. He dressed
silently not looking at his friend.

"I'm hearing there might be
legal repercussions for what you did yesterday," Everson then said to him.
"There are rumors that Wagner is going to jump all over you with charges
of troop endangerment, facility contamination and the like for bringing that
kid back."

"He won't do it,"
Kirken said. "There were witnesses. If it even goes to court, I have
plenty of people that saw a United States soldier step over the wounded body of
a ten-year-old kid without even showing one thought of looking back.

“He wouldn’t risk that being
brought up. Even if he did, I don't think it would even matter anymore."

Everson looked questioningly at
Kirken but ignored his last comment.

"I don't think the courts
are as sympathetic as you might think. At least not anymore. That ten-year-old
kid fired on dome troops. I don't think…"

Kirken held up his hand to cut
him off.

"You know John, you can get
in a lot of trouble for thinking and talking the way you do. Obligation to consider
that kid's life ceased the instant he picked up that gun and pointed it at your
squad."

"No one ever saw him with a
gun," Kirken said lowering his legs into his pants and onto the floor.
"Not me. Not Wagner. The only thing anyone saw was that kid hitting the
ground. So close to Wagner he could have probably caught him. But that guy
didn't even look. In front of his own troops, all he could do was run. And you
know what? That's what those new troops are going to remember. That's what they
saw their commanding officer do."

Everson walked to the other side
of the room and took a seat in a corner chair while Kirken continued to talk.

"The only thing those
troops learned that day was that life on the outside is second-rate. Not
important. Well, what happens when that idea really spreads? What if it already
has? What happens when everyone in here finally decides it’s o.k. for those
people to die? What happens to them? What happens to us?"

"I don't know, John,"
Everson said to him. "I really don't know."

Kirken raised his arms and
tucked in his shirt. He looked around on the floor trying to find where he
kicked off his shoes.

"What I do know, John, is
this. You've done everything in your power to bring your kids to come live here
with you."

"That has nothing to do
with this," Kirken snarled doing nothing to conceal the effort it took to
keep his voice under control.

"It has everything to do
with this, and you goddamn well know it," Everson shot back. Despite the
rising tone of his voice, he remained seated in his chair. "No one that I
know thinks like you. And no one I know has a situation like you do. It was
unfortunate and inadvisable for you to become involved with the people on the
outside. I said that then, and I say that now. But you went ahead and married
Deanna. You lived on the outside for awhile. You saw more than most of us will
ever see. And you were lucky enough to be allowed back. But life on the inside
and the out is too short for us to dwell on the bitterness of it. You can't
just give up hope."

"I gave that up a long time
ago, Jack," Kirken replied somberly.

Everson became quiet for a
moment. The only sound was the padded footsteps of the nurses shuffling outside
the door.

"Well, then maybe you
shouldn't be working in here anymore. Maybe you belong with them out
there."

"Yeah, maybe," Kirken
said walking past Everson towards the door. He pulled his coat from a hook, and
after putting it on, turned to look one final time at his friend.

"John…"

"You're right, Jack."
Kirken moved toward the door and wrapped his fist around its handle.

"John, what you do here is
important. You don't have to be ashamed about coming back. Both your kids know
that you didn't abandon them. I know they know that, and you should too."

"I shouldn't have left,
Jack. Even for that. I should be out there with them,” Kirken said slowly
reaching through the air with his eyes for the right words to say. “To help
them get through this."

"You should be out there to
help them die, is that what you're saying?"

"I don't know."

"John, your kids wouldn't
want that. It would make all your lives a waste, and I know you know that deep
down. Your job here and the reason you came back here is to keep people safe.
You're teaching others how to keep people safe. You're allowing those of us with
the knowledge to conduct our research and experiments. We're here to make a
safer world, one where everyone gets to live. I promise you that, John."

Kirken didn't speak. His eyes
glistened as he turned to leave.

"If not for your kids,
maybe for someone else's."

"Yeah, maybe," Kirken
said.

Even from where he stood behind
him, Everson saw a tear slide down Kirken's cheek from the corner of his eye.
Kirken pulled the door open slightly and slipped out into the hallway. Everson
stepped out after him and watched his friend walk down the corridor.

"Make her sign the papers,
John," Everson called after him.

Kirken never stopped walking and
soon disappeared from sight.

It had been five hours since he
had left the dome. With a crunch, his car bounced up the embankment and into
the driveway of his ex-wife, Deanna. His tires left a sticky residue behind on
the decaying pavement. Kirken was surprised there was still pavement left at
all. The house was already ten years old.

He saw her then waiting for him
in the large window facing the yard. At least what there was of it. Like all
the others around the neighborhood, it was mostly dirt and rock.

Kirken punched the latch on his
car, and with a groan of metal the door reluctantly lifted up. Heat rushed into
the car destroying the artificial atmosphere and forcing Kirken to take a
second to catch his breath. His body jerked slightly as it accustomed to
bringing the burning air in and out of his lungs.

With a scowl, Kirken planted his
feet on the hot ground. He could feel its warmth even through the soles of his
shoes. He pushed his dark shielded glasses as far as they could go up the
bridge of his nose and slowly pulled himself out. The harsh rays of the sun
hurled themselves across the top of his head and at his eyes. In his twentieth
year of traveling on the outside, he still couldn't believe the heat.

Kirken stood at the edge of the
lawn and watched his ex-wife through the window stroll carefully the length of
the house to greet him at the front door.

The sight of her still
infuriated him. With each trip to visit his stepchildren, he thought the
feeling might one time go away. Every time he saw her face, he was surprised
and a little scared that it didn't.

He reached into his pocket for
his vial of outer-dome medication and threw the tablets to the back of his
mouth.

The pills were intended to
complement the radiation injection he received from his physician friend and
far different from the meds dispensed to his men when out on their brief
patrols. The effects of these were much more pronounced. They redirected body
energy to the immune system creating a stronger biological shield against the
radiation poisoning.

In doing so, the medication
produced a narcotic-like calming effect. It slowed mind and thought processes
while redirecting energy to the body's outer defenses. On trips to visit his
ex-wife, Everson always gave him a little more. It wasn't harmful to the body,
meaning you couldn't really overdose, and it usually made conversations with
his ex-wife a little more tolerable.

A creak from the heat battered
screen door turned Kirken's attention to the front of the dilapidated house. A
few pieces of paint flaked off and fluttered around the shoulders of his
ex-wife as she stepped out.

Despite the even higher dose he
always gave himself on these visits, Kirken could still feel the adrenaline
rush through his veins and pound in his head.

He could never understand what
he had been thinking the day he met her on patrol more than twelve years ago.
Like Everson had always told him, he should have just walked away and let her
go. But he didn't. He couldn't. Something more powerful had anchored him to
life with her on the outside.

Kirken had fallen in love with
her two young children, Brandon and Mel. Their father had fallen early to the
sickness and orphaned them before the oldest, Brandon, was even five.

Kirken had found an innocence in
their youth, something far different from the rest of the world. And when they
began to grow, he had also found an inner surging strength. It made him believe
he still had a soul after all these years of living within the domes.

They had made him feel for the
first time in his life not guilty for being one of the living. Every day he was
away from them in the domes, he yearned to have it all back again. His mind
ached for the peace they gave his battered heart.

"How are you John?"
his ex-wife asked when she had finally stepped out.

"I'm good, Deanna,"
Kirken lied. He hadn't been good in quite some time. And he had no idea how to
make himself right.

Kirken walked to meet her
halfway in the front of the house. Neither spoke when they faced each other.
Deanna stared up into the darkness of his glasses while Kirken looked over the
top of her head and surveyed the decomposing structure behind her.

"The house doesn't look
good," was the first thing from his mouth.

In an instant, the look of
courtesy and tolerance Deanna wore across her face, the same one she pulled out
every time Kirken came to visit after the divorce, transformed into a flash of
seething anger and vengeful hate. Kirken knew the feeling well.

"What do you expect,
John?"

Then something Kirken hadn't
seen in quite some time from his ex-wife happened. Her expression quickly
changed again. Rage became sadness. Her lips began to tremble, and sudden tears
brimmed over her eyes.

"I think the house looks
good,” her voice shook when she spoke. “It's lasted a good long time. More than
most." Her tone seemed to beg Kirken for peace.

Kirken found he still did not
care. He despised her for her spite.

Deanna detested the feelings he
had for her children and the fondness they returned back. She hated him for
coming and then leaving her life and was willing to sacrifice the health and
future he could offer by taking them back with him to the domes.

At least that was how he had
always seen it. With a vengeance, like he always did when he first saw her, he
let his tongue run loose.

"Let me take the kids,
Deanna. Let me take them back with me, today, away from all this.” He raised
his hands and gestured despondently at the dead lawn and weather-destroyed
house. “I can give them a good place to live. You know that. Much better than
this."

Deanna didn't look in his
direction. Biting her nails, she walked past his car and stared absently down
the street. Tears dropped from her eyes and made a soft hiss when they hit the
scorched pavement.

"How can you expect me to
sit and watch my children die?" he asked lowering his voice slightly.
"They might not even be far enough along where their systems can't be
healed. I can take them back and give them much longer lives than what they can
expect to have out here. Among all this death."

"Among all this
death?" she said walking to him and pulling him towards the street. He
reluctantly let her take his hand and slowly followed.

"Look at this," she
pointed down the street at the rest of the dying neighborhood. "There is
death everywhere you look, John. It's called living on the outside. You chose
to leave it. To leave us."

"I left you, Deanna. You
gave up. Not on me, but on life on this planet. And if that's what you want to
do, that's fine, but your two children haven't given up yet. And I couldn’t
stomach the fact that you try to convince them that they should give up too. I
had to go back while I felt there still was something I could do."

Sobs racked Deanna's body, and
tears fell in abundance from her face. But Kirken did not stop. He went at her
with the fullness of his wrath for all the years Mel and Brandon had already
lost because she kept them from living with him on the inside.

"Do you realize that by
letting them come with me, they will live much longer and in less pain? I can't
take them unless you let me. Otherwise they would have been there a long time
ago."

Finally regaining control over
the sorrow that wracked her body, Deanna was silent. Her eyes were red and her
lips still trembled slightly.

"They're my kids,
John," she said shortly. "We go over this every time. They are not
your children. They're mine. They choose to be with me. Why can't you be happy
with the time I allow you to be with them? Why do you always have to insist on
more?"

"Because," he said
walking to stand in front of her. He reached out and gently turned her face
until their gazes met. Her skin trembled slightly beneath his touch.

"Because, you know as well
as I do that you have the power to save those kids. You choose not to. That's
why we go over this every time. You would rather your own children die than
come live with me. And god damn you to Hell for how you choose to act."

Kirken turned away from her then
and walked back towards the house. There was much more he wanted, he needed, to
say to her, but he could feel the medication finally seizing its control over
his senses. The energy to continue the conversation had vanished.

"The kids will be home any
second," she said timidly after him.

He walked past his car and left
his ex-wife to cry near the street.

He stood facing the house that
he had helped build a few short years ago when he still lived with them on the
outside. It was coming apart. Wood was crumbling and falling everywhere. The
plastic around the windows oozed in a slick decayed slime, and paint chips
littered the yard.

Like all the houses in the
neighborhood and all the houses in the city, it was being beaten into the
ground by the sun. Soon it would be time to build a new one before it came down
around them. And he knew it was not something Deanna could afford.

But maybe the time had come
where it didn't matter anymore. Mel and Brandon were at the same stage of the
radiation sickness as others their age. Like their mother, they were slowly
dying.

What pained Kirken the most was
that they both knew it, just like every member of every other family that lived
on the outside. They had already come to grips with the death that plagued the
outside world unlike Kirken who had not yet been willing to accept any of it.

He knew he never would.

Every visit he noticed the
subtle changes in their skin and found himself looking for the indigestion,
stomach aches and the countless other symptoms of the radiation sickness. He
felt like a ghoul every time he scrutinized them for some kind of indication as
to when they were going to die. What sickened him worse was that he didn't know
if he feared for the end of their lives or something far worse.

With his children gone, he would
have absolutely nothing left. They were the only thing that gave him hope in
this world. Following each of the times he spent with them, he could feel that
hope becoming weaker and weaker. As if eaten away along with their bodies by
the radiation sickness.

He could see the end in their
eyes. The pain and loneliness harbored there haunted his thoughts daily.

Outwardly, their stoicism and
unwillingness to acknowledge this death troubled him more.

Kirken remembered hugging his
son the last time they said goodbye. He had accidentally knocked his baseball
cap to the ground with his elbow. A clump of hair twice the size of Kirken's
fist fell with it.

At sixteen, Brandon didn't have
much more to lose. The sickness had already stripped most of his skull
completely bald.

Reliving it each night in his
dreams, Kirken remembered bending to retrieve the cap and putting it back on
his head. Brandon only smiled and pretended not to notice what fell off in
Kirken’s hand when he did. He looked away quickly when Kirken opened his hand
and let the hair fall to the ground.

Watching Mel was even harder.

Only a year younger than
Brandon, she even more epitomized the bravery and unwavering desire to live
that was necessary to survive in a world slowly dying around her. There was
something about her Kirken noticed that many including himself did not have.

There was a bravery in her
gentleness and an unquenchable defiance to accept the bleakness of her fate. It
was something Kirken found himself tapping into when he was with her. Sometimes
it would last a week or month past his visits. Sometimes it was just enough to
help him ward off the demons that haunted his restless sleeps and laughed at
his fear.

Mel hadn't given up like Kirken
almost had.

She believed in a pain that was
not constant and in a faith that would keep herself, family and friends alive
forever. She made him believe an escape from this world was possible and that
one day life would be healed.

Kirken had gone with her many
times to the funerals of her friends and classmates. Each service made him feel
even more dead inside, but Mel always appeared unaffected by the sorrow they
were there to observe.

She always seemed to rejoice in
the time that she spent with the family and friends that exited her world on a
frequent basis. She was not afraid of the unknown. She seemed just happy to be
alive in the present.

Kirken knew how much he loved
his stepdaughter and how much of the same she felt back.

"Dad," Mel came
running from the back yard.

The lawn was a different shade
of brown, one not usual for this time of year Kirken noticed. Grass had never
grown on the property, only different grades of dirt.

"What took you so
long?" Mel asked when she came closer. "I skipped out of school an
hour early just to see you."

"Hey, baby," Kirken
said hugging her.

Her long blonde hair did not
look as healthy as he remembered, and her skin was slightly more pale. But her
spirits seemed high. Kirken choked back his tears and tried to smile.

"Where's your brother,
honey?"

"He's not here,"
Deanna said to him. She walked briskly towards them from the street. Her anger
was evident by her step. "I don't know where he is. But he said if it gets
too late to leave without him."

"Well, I surely doubt he
said that," Kirken said casting a tired glare at his ex-wife.

"Let's go inside,
Daddy," Mel said pulling him toward the house.

Kirken gladly allowed his
daughter to lead him inside. He still wasn't quite yet at an equilibrium with
his medication, and he eagerly looked forward to the chance to sit down.

He took a deep breath and walked
inside taking slight reprieve from the deadly sun blazing overhead.