The Human (The Eden Trilogy) (12 page)

THIRTEEN

“We can’t afford to wait any longer.”

I knew that voice and it made my fists ball.

“You rouse her too quickly and we could lose her,” a voice said.

And suddenly everything in me flooded back to life.

I was off the table in a frantic scramble.  Finding Margaret at my side, my right hand closed around her throat.  Grabbing a shining blade from the table, I backed her into a corner and held the blade to her throat.

“Let me go,” I hissed.

There were three others in the room.  A man who looked like he must be a doctor, and two soldiers.

“Calm down, Eve,” the doctor said.  “Or you’re going to make yourself bleed to death.”

As he spoke I felt a wet, warm trickle work its way down my neck.  I glanced down just a moment too long.

One guard snatched Margaret out of my grip, but not without the blade nicking her jawline.  She cursed loudly.  The other guard rushed me, pressing his shotgun across my throat, pinning me to the wall.

It had been a line of blood that had distracted me, running from the back of my head, down around my throat and in between my breasts.

“Please calm down,” the doctor said, wild fear in his eyes.  He held his hands up as if he were surrendering.  “You’re already tearing the stitches.”

“What are you doing to me?” I barely managed to get the words out.  My body shook with rage and uncertainty.

“Gaining knowledge,” Margaret said with a growl.  “Look, there isn’t much time.  As much as it pains me to say it, we need your help.”

“Haven’t I already been helping you?” I spat back.

“Could you just shut up for a moment?!” she bellowed, crossing the room and getting in my face.

My mouth closed and I stared back at her.

“Alistar and his team went out for supplies last night and have gotten themselves trapped in a building.  The Bane weren’t supposed to be awake.”

“You know that rule is quickly dying, right?” I said as the guard stepped away, releasing my throat.  “That only applies to a few of them now.  The older the Hunter, the more they’re awake.”

Something passed over her eyes that told me she had only recently discovered this.

“It’s because of the clouds here, isn’t it?” I said as the pieces started to fall into place.  “It’s delayed their Evolution.  They’re only just now starting to be active at night, aren’t they?”

It took her a moment to respond.  “Yes.”

“They’ve been waking up at night everywhere else I’ve been for months now.”  I recalled the first time we’d learned that lesson.  We’d lost Tye that night, a good soldier, and Avian’s best friend and cousin.

“We weren’t expecting it,” she said, her voice weak sounding for the first time since I had met her.  “And now one of our teams is trapped inside a building.  We need you to go and get them out.”

“Why would I ever help you?” I hissed.

“Because West’s surgery is scheduled for tomorrow and I swear on my mother’s grave we will let him Evolve if you don’t do as we say.”

My insides swelled, filling with hot ash and burning coals.  I wanted to snap her neck and continue breaking every bone in her body.  Rage was becoming a part of who I was lately.  I was a caged animal and I’d been backed into a corner.

“What time of day is it right now?” I asked.

“It’s ten in the morning.”

“And you want me to go out there right now?” I demanded.  I couldn’t help it as my hands rose and I shoved her away from me.  She wasn’t expecting it and tripped backwards into the arms of the soldier who had pulled her away from me.

“If we wait any longer their location will be breached,” she shouted back, righting herself, once again getting in my face.

“They will pull me apart, limb from limb this time of day.”

“It’s raining heavily,” she said.  Her eyes told me she knew this was a poor defense.  “They’re less active when it rains.  Some of them are too Evolved to go out in the rain without being shorted out.  You stand a better chance.  And we’ll send a soldier with you.”

I just kept her eyes for a long moment and finally shook my head.

“I want to see West again,” I said.  Something in my body sagged, knowing I had no choice but to bend to this woman’s will.

She took a second to answer.  “Give us a minute.”

And then she and the doctor left, leaving me with the guards.

I couldn’t help it as my hands rose to my head.  At the crown of my head, there was a three inch circle of hair that I found shaven away.  It was sticky with blood and my fingers ran over careful stitches.

It was more horrifying than it should have been.

Finding a hair tie still around my wrist, I carefully pulled my hair back into a ponytail, hiding the bald spot.

My hands came out streaked with sticky blood.

“This way,” Margaret said, opening the door again and nodding down the hall with her head.

The guards stepped behind me, pointing their guns at my back as we walked.  We snaked through a maze of crumbling passages, passing doors and openings into other rooms.  We stopped at a wall with a glass window.

“Don’t let him see you,” Margaret warned again.

“I won’t,” I said as I carefully peered around the window through the dark.

West sat on a grubby, broken-down couch.  He looked relaxed, leaning back, his ankle crossed over the other knee.  A smile broke out over his face and he laughed.  He was talking to Tara.  She laughed back, a dimple forming in her right cheek.  There were others in the room too, eating small meals, talking quickly and nervously.  This must have been some sort of a mess hall.

“He’s fine,” Margaret said, placing a hand on my arm and pulling me away gently.

“I need a shotgun, a handgun and a few grenades if you’ve got them,” I said.

I swore under my breath as I stared up at the metal hatch above my head.

My head was pounding.  It must have been really bad if I could actually feel it through my chips pain blockers.

My legs were wobbling and I could tell I’d lost more blood that was safe to go out running about a Bane-infested city.

During the day.

“You ready for this?” I asked.  I looked back.

The man behind me nodded his head.  In many ways he reminded me of Avian, with his closely shaved hair and lean frame.  But he was younger than Avian, probably closer to West’s age.  I’d guess twenty.

He carried not one, but three shotguns and one assault rifle.  He had probably eight grenades attached to the utility belt around his waist.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Why?” he questioned.

“Because if we die today, I want to know the name of the man I’m going down with.”

This might have rattled a lot of people.  Even a lot of soldiers.  But there was a darkness behind his eyes that seemed to understand.

“Tristan,” he said.

“Let’s go, Tristan.”

Gripping the lock of the hatch, I twisted it and pushed it open.

My arm was instantly soaked as the rain started falling into the hole.  Checking to make sure the road was clear, I climbed out of the hole and onto the sidewalk.  Tristan followed me an instant later and closed the hatch again.

“This way,” he said, pointing with his rifle up a street, away from the water.

The roads rose quickly the further we went from the water.  The rain ran down the gutters furiously, creating a small river.  My hair instantly stuck to my face, washing the blood from my face and neck.

We hugged buildings as we ran up the road.  But I cringed every time I looked inside a storefront and saw the Bane, standing there, staring emptily out at us.

“You know they’re not going to stay like that for long, right?” I said as we crouched behind a car.  “The Sleepers are going to wake up.”

“That’s what we’ve been theorizing,” he said.  “That’s why Margaret’s gotten so crazy.  She’s desperate.”

We dashed across the road and hugged the building again as we worked our way up the street.

“You mean she wasn’t always this…hostile?” I said, keeping my voice low.

“She’s always been a little intense, but you have to understand, you being here, TorBane, it’s all personal,” he said as his eyes swept the buildings around us.

“What do you mean?” I asked, scanning the roofline across the street.

“Margaret had two daughters.  The oldest one, Bridget, she was fifteen when she was infected last year.  There was a breach,” he said.  We both saw movement at the same time and ducked behind a car.  I peeked through a window and watched a boy cross the street.  He still looked human except for his bare, mechanical feet.

“But she also had a three year old who was dying of liver failure before the Evolution,” Tristan whispered.  “No organ donors came up, no transplant came available.  Margaret sold everything to pay for her to get a TorBane upgrade.”

I’d seen the evidence of everyone who had turned, who had been infected.  But it was always so much worse hearing stories about the first generation, who embraced TorBane without knowing what it would shortly do to them and the rest of the world.

“So you understand why Margaret hates you so much,” he said, his eyes meeting mine.  They were green.

“I can’t blame her,” I said.  “I hate myself too sometimes.”

“Sounds to me like it wasn’t your fault,” he said, his voice more understanding than I deserved.

“Road’s clear again,” I said, looking out the window.

We bolted down the road as the rain continued to fall.

I couldn’t help the instinct to fire when I heard the clatter to my left.

A Bane hurtled itself at a window when it saw us moving.  I fired in its direction, shattering the large glass window and took it out.  But there were a dozen others standing next to it, staring out at us, their muscles, or whatever they still had flexing and twitching to jump out after us.  This group was almost one hundred percent mechanical-looking.  Most of them didn’t even have skin anymore.

But they stood frozen just under the cover of the building.

“The rain,” I said in awe.  “They won’t come out because of the rain!”

“Let’s move!” Tristan shouted.

We sprinted, turning down another road.

Glass continually shattered as we moved, Bane throwing themselves out at us, only to twitch and short out as the rain crept into their mechanical innards.  They could only stand under the cover of buildings and race along after us or die.

“How much further?” I asked.  I was heavily weighed down with ammunition, but the amount of bullets I had didn’t equal the number of Bane that were surrounding us.

“Two more blocks,” Tristan called.