The Awakened (25 page)

I BLINKED A FEW TIMES
at her, looking between her and the docile Awakened. I kept waiting for them to speak or attack. They were so calm; I had never seen them so calm. “I don’t know what you mean. The Awakened are your cause.”

An amused smile crossed her lips. “Ah, yes, the Awakened. That is what the civilians have taken to calling my creations. I admit it is better than calling them by their proper name: SK-521. Much more of a mouthful, I suppose.”

“Your creations?” I asked horrified. “You created them?”

“Well, of course I did,” she said, looking over at the creatures adoringly. “They have been a central part of the plan, of my cause.”

“They’ve killed so many people,” I said, my voice shaking, thinking of the Awakened that had torn both of my parents to pieces. “They’ve torn the world apart.”

“Don’t give them more credit than they deserve, Zoey,” she said, her voice suddenly harsh. “They are my creation. They are acting on my will. I am the one with the power and the control.” She pulled something out of her pocket, a small tablet. Using her finger, she navigated through a series of menus before selecting a single button.

It was like a trigger. The two Awakened chained to the floor were suddenly loud, demanding, and struggling against their bonds. They reached for us, their voices a high-pitched wail in the echoing room.

“I just want to eat! Please, please let me eat. Her flesh smells so good. Please, oh god, please, just one bite!” The closest one to me, a male, was reaching, stretching with all his might toward me, his black eyes focused on me. I bit my hand hard, struggling to keep the bile from rising in my throat.

Dr. Cylon watched them for a moment before pressing on her tablet again, and they once again became subdued. I looked over at her in shock, and she smiled, quite triumphant.

“I control them all. Would you like to see?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she brought up a screen on the tablet, one that looked like a rough map, with blinking numbers across it. “There are groups all over the country, and I control them. I can make them hungry or docile. I can make them attack. Most of the ones out in the open are free. The ones I’ve kept to myself in here…well, let’s just say it’s a bit distracting to have them wailing about all the time.”

I stared at the screen for a moment. The numbers were so many; they overlapped each other. The country was far more overrun with Awakened than I could have possibly imagined. I wondered if any of them had managed to die in the nuclear blasts. “But how do you control them?”

“It is simple,” she said, walking away from me and up to the Awakened. I gasped at her close proximity to them, but they just stood there, silent and calm, not noticing her. She turned the male around, showing me the back of his neck. With her finger, she pressed on the base of his neck, and a piece of flesh popped out.

I was going to throw up. There was nothing left in my stomach, but I knew I was going to throw up. This was sickening. Between the tiny bit of flesh was a piece of metal, gold and shining. It looked exactly like…

“A computer chip,” Dr. Cylon said, finishing my thought. “It is in the back of the neck of every SK-521 out there. It is what awakened them, and it is what gives me the control that I have. They each have their own individual signal, and those individuals have their groups as well. I can control their every action…or simply those of the group they belong to.”

“But…but why?” I demanded, my hands rolled up into tiny fists. I wanted to shake her, punch her and throw her against the wall. Why on earth would she ever create something like this? I watched her place the cube of flesh back in its place, right at the base of the neck. No wonder that was a prime spot to aim for when trying to take one down.

She placed the tablet back in her pocket. “Come,” she said. “I will show you.”

We left the room, and I heard the click of the lock behind us. I was on autopilot. My feet were doing the work for me, making sure that I walked alongside her as she took us down a different hallway, which led to an elevator. This time, she typed in a code, and the doors immediately opened. She stepped inside, using her hand on my arm to guide me inside with her. The elevator glided smoothly upward and immediately opened at a new floor.

I gasped.

She nodded, looking proud. “These are our research labs. They are quite impressive.” We went through a series of doors and walked alongside a hallway until we reached one last door. She typed a few numbers into the keypad and pressed her thumb to another pad, and the door slid open.

We were inside an office, not unlike any other office you would see. There was a large desk, on top of which sat a sleek, high-tech computer. The walls were covered in frames, most of them degrees of some sort. I saw Harvard, Oxford and a few others that I couldn’t make out. There were bookshelves along the walls filled to the brim with books, scores and scores of books. The back wall was completely glass and looked out on a huge room. I peeked out, and saw dozens of people, all in white lab coats. Some were on computers; some were working with what looked like chemicals. I even saw a group, bent over an Awakened with a scalpel, cutting into its blue flesh.

“This is where everything started, Miss Valentine,” Dr. Cylon explained, her voice barely more than a whisper. Her eyes were intent on the scene below her, watching it with a mix of adoration and pride, like she was watching her child learn to walk for the first time. “This is where Sekhmet was born. This is where the Z virus was created, and the victims were…awakened, as you would say.”

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts, to get a sense on the situation that was in front of me. This was too much. “You created the virus as well?”

“That was the beginning of everything. That was the plan from the beginning,” she said. She ran a hand through her hair and gestured for me to sit down in one of chairs in front of the desk.

There was a loud thump as I sunk into the chair. I felt like I was going to pass out and immediately ducked, putting my head between my legs.

“Are you not feeling quite well? Do you require anything?” Her accent made everything she said sound so incredibly charming, but her words were toxic and hard to process.

I shook my head and sat up. “But why? Why would you create the virus? Why would you awaken the victims? It’s sick! People are dying!”

“As they should,” she said softly, but fiercely. Her eyes fell on the lone picture frame on her desk, and her expression softened for a moment. She flipped it around, and I saw the face of a young man, handsome, looking much like the woman sitting across from me. “This is my son. His name was David.”

I swallowed hard. “Was?”

“He died.” Her words were hard, blunt. “Four years ago, when he was eighteen years old.”

“I’m sorry,” I blurted out without thinking.

She nodded, a hard sadness in her eyes. “Ever since he died, I’ve been on this cause, working my way up the ranks at the CDC, creating this facility, doing what I can to change this world.”

She took a deep breath. “David was a beautiful person, the most beautiful person I have ever met in my life, and I do not say this only as his mother. He was intelligent and kind and so incredibly selfless. He could have done so much.”

“I worked hard, going to school, doing everything I could to give him the best life I was capable of. His father wasn’t around. But we did the best we could, the two of us.” Dr. Cylon sighed, remembering. “When he was fourteen years old, he came to me and told me that he was gay, that he had known for a while that he was gay and could not keep it a secret from me any longer.”

I was mesmerized, addicted to the story. I had no idea what it had to do with the Awakened or the existence of this facility, but I had a feeling I was going to find out.

“I was shocked, but I think deep down I had always known this about him. We had come from a traditional family, but I loved my son, more than life itself. I loved him no matter who he chose to love.”

Her hands reached for the portrait again, and she picked it up, looking down at the face of her son adoringly. “The world, it would seem, did not feel the same. He always had a hard time being accepted, but he took it with so much strength. He held his head up high. When he left for university, I had no doubt in my mind that he would succeed.”

“It was two weeks before his winter holidays that I got the phone call. He had not shown up for finals, none of them. I hadn’t heard from him in a few days, but he was an avid student, and I assumed he was too busy studying. It was no matter of concern; I would see him in a few days.”

“What happened?” I whispered.

“He was killed, murdered by two of his fellow students,” Dr. Cylon said, her voice returning to its harsh nature. “They followed him one night as he left the library late at night. They invited him out for drinks, but they had no intention of friendship. They beat him until he stopped breathing.”

I gasped. “That’s horrible.”

“Yes. It tore me apart. David was the beginning and the end of everything that mattered to me. His death nearly killed me.” She took a deep breath and straightened herself up. “But it gave me a mission, Zoey.”

I felt my heart sink. 

“The world is wrong. The world is broken. When we came to this earth, whatever way you believe, we were a clean slate. But over the thousands of years that we’ve been here, we have dirtied that slate. We’ve become an embarrassment, an abomination of the species. We are weak. We need to start over.”

“I created the virus. It was so easy to do,” she said, a note of pride in her voice. My sympathy over the loss of her son was dissipating quickly. “It was created to target the immune system. Those with the strongest immune systems would survive. I wanted the strongest of us all to survive. We released it in the water supply. So simple.”

“I don’t see the point,” I admitted, my voice low. “Why kill off those with weak immune systems?”

“I wanted the strongest of us to live. I wanted to rebuild the world, to start fresh, but I still needed people. So I worked out a way to have the strongest of us all survive,” she explained, looking at me as if I were simple. “Free of disease, free of alcoholism and affinity to drugs, free of the darkness that creeps up and makes us so evil.”

“So you created the virus,” I said, feeling anger rising in my throat, “to rid the Earth of the so-called weak ones. But the Awakened? What was the point of those?”

“That, I must admit, was a stroke of genius, on my part.” She smiled widely at me. I stared at her, my face hard, refusing to show her any form of emotion. I was angry, furious and terrified at the woman standing in front of me. “We stole the bodies, because we wanted to study them to see the effects of the virus, but we didn’t need so many. We had been working on these chips for so long, and it suddenly clicked together. It took a while, but we managed to use the chips to reverse the effects of death. We had our own built-in army.”

She stood up and walked back to the window overlooking the labs. Her hands were folded behind her back as she surveyed the scene below. “Of course, they turned out a little differently than we had expected. The unfortunate look of them, well, they ended up looking quite scary. I’m not quite sure what caused the blue tint to their skin pigment, but frankly, it wasn’t that important.” She shrugged her shoulders elegantly.

I stood up as well, my fists clenched. I could be across the desk and have her down on the ground in less than two seconds. I wanted to. “You’re not making any sense, Dr. Cylon…”

“Razi,” she cut in. She smiled over her shoulder endearingly, as if smiling at her daughter. I felt the fire of anger in my stomach and had to resist the urge to punch her.

“Razi, fine,” I said, dismissively. “Fine, you had an army at your disposal. But why release them? Releasing them caused even more people to die, especially after they dropped bombs on the major cities. I thought you wanted to rebuild the world with the survivors.”

“Oh, I did. I do.” She turned away from the window and came over to me, her dark eyes meeting mine. “But I wanted the strong, the strongest of the survivors. I wanted those who could survive no matter the conditions. Those who would survive the outbreak of the SK-521s, sorry, the Awakened, would be the strongest. The bombs were unfortunate but that was outside my control.” She sighed, a sorrowful look on her face. I had never seen such a forced expression.