Unity (5 page)

“Why did you dip your hair in orange?” It’s about the tenth question from Gizmo since we struck out from the beach, but it’s the first I bother to answer.

“I like orange.” Probably not the insightful answer he was hoping for.

“I like green,” he says. “But I wouldn’t put it in my hair.”

I step over a fallen palm that’s leaning on a large rock, blocking our path like a security gate. I pause to help Gizmo climb over, lifting his light frame under the armpits. He smiles as I put him down, like we’re out for a casual nature hike. Daniel handles the obstacle on his own, leaping it with his hands on the trunk, whispering a ‘Wha-cha’ sound effect in time with the jump. While I haven’t felt like a kid in a very long time, it’s clear that Daniel and Gizmo are not only young in age, but also at heart. Gwen accepts my hand and moves carefully over the tree. While my balance, and full-body pain, have returned with the morphine’s fading effects, Mandi’s limp form has Gwen in a permanent state of instability. And she refuses to let me take the girl. They were either good friends, or Gwen is over-committed to the Support dogma.

Daniel, in the lead now, says, “People modify their bodies for a variety of reasons. The first was likely spiritual. Circumcision, for instance.”

Gizmo pauses to shake his body and say, “Ugh.”

“Gross,” Gwen says. It’s one of the few things she’s said since we left the beach.

“It’s not like people don’t still do it,” Daniel says. “And there are other reasons. Social. Aesthetic.” He lifts his right hand, showing his Base brand. “Identification. The most recent and soon-to-be prevalent body modification is technological upgrading. And I’m not talking just the 3D-printed replacement organs. Full-on cyborgs. Enhanced physical capabilities.”

“Like ExoFrames inside the body,” Gizmo says.

Daniel thrusts a finger in the air, head down, watching his step. “Exactly.”

“Sign me up,” Gizmo says. “I don’t want to be weak forev—”

“You’re a Base,” Gwen says. “Strength is not a requirement.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be a Base,” Gizmo says, waiting for me to lift him over another fallen trunk. This one is low to the ground, and I think he could easily make it over, but he pauses, lifts his arms slightly and waits for me to hoist him over.

Are we bonding? Is this what bonding feels like? Is he doing it on purpose or is this a natural thing? Survival bonding?

“Body piercing,” Daniel says, unfurling a finger with each word. “Tattoos. Scarification. Subdermal implants. Tongue splitting.”

“Okay,” Gwen says. “Enough. Seriously.”

“That’s not even the grossest stuff,” Daniel says. His voice has become higher, almost bird like. He’s getting a kick out of this. I think he meant to razz me, but he’s satisfied with grossing out Gwen. To his credit, he doesn’t push the subject any further into the obscene. “The point is, people change their bodies for a variety of reasons, but not simply because they like a color. It’s an outward expression of the psyche, or psychosis, depending on the person. Which brings us back to Gizmo’s question, why color your hair orange?”

I sigh. In addition to being smart, another Base trait seems to be persistence. “This is the most I’ve had to talk in years.”

“You’re doing great,” Daniel says with fake exuberance and a smile, turning around and giving his fist a chipper thrust. The move nearly spills him on his butt and gets a laugh from everyone, including me.

“Fine,” I say. “My foster-mother hates it.”

“Is she nice?” Gizmo asks.

“This one is. Most of them weren’t.”

“Oh.” His forehead furrows, but he continues onward and upward. “Why not?”

“I was a way for them to get money.” I take a few steps and realize there’s more to it than that. “And I wasn’t an easy kid.”

“None of us are,” Gwen says and then clarifies, “Unity recruits. Daniel, Sig, even me. We’re different. Most people don’t understand the way we think.”

“But we do,” Daniel says. “It’s why you and Sig became friends. It’s why you like us.”

The argument against this statement comes and goes like a breeze. I
do
like them. Having friends feels alien, and while I can admit it to myself, I don’t really want to talk about it, or rehash the ping-pong match between foster homes that was my childhood.

So I deflect like a pro. “The orange streak is a warning.”

Daniel looks at me with wide eyes and a half grin. He likes the sound of that.

“It says I’m different. I’m unpredictable. It says I’d rather not knock your lights out, but I will if you mess with me.”

“Like a poison dart frog,” Daniel says. “Other frogs hide. Try to blend in. But the poison dart frogs are brightly colored. They’re easy to spot, but no one messes with them because the color says, ‘Eat me and die.’ So it’s the frogs who try to hide that get eaten.”

I smile. Always an example with this one. “Doesn’t always work out that way, but yeah. That’s the idea.”

Gizmo stops at a log I know for sure he can make it over and lifts his arms. “Cool.”

I lift him up, but stop short of putting him back down. The jungle ahead has caught my attention. We’re nearly at the crest of one of many hills, all rising toward the barren volcanic cone several miles inland. Fifteen feet ahead is a line of destruction, where the flood waters deposited their passengers and slid away. Beyond the piles of debris is the untouched jungle.

I put Gizmo down, looking at the trees.

Gwen stops beside me, sweaty and out of breath. “What is it?”

“Look at the trees,” I say. “The water line ends here, but the trees ahead are thin. You can see the sky through them.”

Daniel hops on top of a large rock, scanning the treeline. “You’re right, but maybe the jungle is thinning because of the elevation?”

“We’re not
that
high,” Gwen says.

“I still don’t see the problem,” Daniel says.

“It means there’s a clearing,” I say. “And in a jungle like this, that doesn’t happen naturally.”

“Oh,” Daniel says, and then his face brightens up. “Oh!” He leaps down from the rock and charges up the hillside, scrambling over the last few feet of torn up terrain. Then he’s in the trees, bolting into the shadows.

“Daniel! Wait for us.” Gwen shouts after him, but then Gizmo breaks for the trees, too.

“I’ll get him!” the small boy says.

Gwen isn’t as worried as she is annoyed. “Can you stay with them?”

“You sure?” I ask, thinking more about how much it’s going to hurt to chase after them than I am about not leaving Gwen behind.

“I’ll catch up,” she says.

The pain in my legs flares hotter as I double-time my walk. But my pace isn’t nearly fast enough to catch the spritely boys. So I shift into a jog, and the invisible cleavers slicing through my muscles nearly make me cry out. But by the time I leave the awkward footing of the debris field behind and step on the more cushiony earth of the jungle, my legs have already begun to limber up. As my eyes adjust to the jungle’s shade, I find relief from the hot sun. Moisture trapped beneath the canopy collects on my face.

“Guys,” I say, keeping my voice hushed for some reason.

No reply.

I look ahead to where the sky once again cuts through the green ceiling. The trees have definitely been cleared. The question is why. As I near the jungle’s edge, I crouch walk, moving with caution. Again, I’m not sure why. Something about this doesn’t feel right. Of course,
nothing
has felt right since I was roused from a sound sleep and tossed on a transport. So this is just one more thing in a growing list of wrongness.

The jungle ends at the crest of a downward slope. I drop to my hands and knees, crawling up to the edge. Still in the shadows, I lie on my belly and take in the scene below.

A bowl of vegetation in the center of a valley has been cleared. Every plant and tree has been mowed down and dragged away, leaving patches of tall, windblown grasses and lumps of embedded stone. At the center of the clearing is a flat rectangle of concrete, bleached by the sun, but still dark enough to see the white lines painted on the surface. The paint divides the concrete into three equal-sized squares. Each segment contains a large Unity triangle with a T in its core. It doesn’t take a Base to figure out that this is where the transports were supposed to land. Three transports. Three landing pads.

We nearly made it.

Whispering to my right pulls my attention away from the landing site. I put my hand atop a large fern and slowly lower it. Daniel and Gizmo are lying on the ground, just a few feet away, staring into the clearing and having some kind of argument.

“Hey,” I whisper, and both boys go into some kind of spasm, like they’ve just been on the receiving end of a taser, trembling arms, rolling away and very nearly screaming.

“It’s me!” I say, still trying to whisper, but also trying to be heard over their thrashing. I sit up, my outstretched palms urging calm. “Keep it down!”

Both boys end up on their backs, breathing hard, smiling up at me.

“That was awesome,” Daniel says. “How’d you sneak up on us?”

“Sneak? Did you not hear me calling you?”

The boys look at each other. Geniuses both, but in the wild, it wouldn’t be long before they went the way of the dodo bird. In their world of laboratories and computer labs, there’s no reason to be on guard. But out here, and even more so among the darker bits of human civilization, their good natured naiveté could get them in trouble.

“Why are you worried?” Daniel asks.

“We crash landed on an island that none of us knows anything about.”

“It would be rare to find large predators on an uninhabited Pacific island,” Daniel points out. “If that’s what you’re worried about?”

“First, you don’t know how large this island is. Second, you also don’t know if it’s uninhabited. There could be roving bands of cannibals, for all you know.”

“Roving bands of cannibals?” Gizmo looks amused. “This island seems normal enough to me.”

I sweep my arm out to the empty landing site. “Does this look normal to you?”

“Looks like a traditional Unity landing pad to me,” Daniel says.

“Then why were you whispering?” I ask.

They have no answer, and honestly, neither do I.

“Let’s check it out,” Gwen says from behind us, making all three of us flinch and spin around.

This place has me spooked. Given the fact that I’ve nearly been killed several times, I’ve hallucinated and I’m lost in the middle of nowhere, a little paranoia is understandable. But something about this place is making me squirrelly. Like I can feel danger and I should be in a tree, twitching my tail.

The others don’t seem to feel it, though, and they start down the cleared hill without a second thought. After a moment of scanning the jungle on the far side of the valley and finding nothing to cause alarm, I follow them. I keep my hand on my holstered gun, like I’ve done this before. Like I know how to fight. I’m pretty sure the only thing I’d be able to shoot is a vision of Howard.

“You guys aren’t hallucinations, are you?” I ask.

Daniel just chuckles and continues on with Gizmo.

Gwen pauses and looks back at me. She notes my hand on the gun. “Feeling okay?”

“Just making sure,” I say.

I’m about to joke it off. Gwen is starting to feel like a younger-than-me mother. Always concerned for my wellbeing. Always ready to help. She probably would have been a great mother, but she wasn’t any of mine. And I don’t want her to be now. But before I can speak, an inhuman shriek echoes through the valley.

The gun is heavy, but I still manage to lift it into a two-handed grip, the kind they use in movies. I assume that’s something actors are taught from people who know. I can picture the scene. The camera moves around me to the left, shooting in slow motion. I spin to the right, looking over the site, eyes squinted, scanning for danger. Cue the sweeping music. Turn on the fans to blow my hair. And that’s how it plays out for about a second. Then my weary arms start to tremble, and long before I’m sure Gizmo’s scream was unjustified, my arms drop.

At least no one saw my dramatic-turned-feeble display. Unless we
are
being watched. I look at the jungle perimeter surrounding the valley.

Gizmo and Daniel look down at a stand of tall grass, faces screwed up in fear, but bodies rooted in place. Gun back on my hip, I follow Gwen to the scene, expecting to see a snake. In fact, if it’s anything less than a snake, Gizmo’s going to need some kind of ‘man up’ pep talk. But who’s going to give him that? Daniel? Maybe. He didn’t scream.

The boys step aside, and as I once again think of them as ‘boys,’ I decide to cut Gizmo some slack and not mention the scream. While my childhood was cut short by about a decade, I understand the importance of playing—and innocence. Judging by the look on Gizmo’s face, he’s losing his right now.

Tall grass bends as I approach, keeping the secret a moment longer, the reeds shushing in the breeze. Is the thing in the reeds warning us away, or luring us into a trap?

Gwen steps to the side, letting me closer. She can’t see past the grass yet, either, but with Mandi over her shoulder, she can’t do much about it. I raise a foot next to the grass, and Gizmo takes a step back like whatever is in there might leap out and attach itself to my face. “Am I safe doing this?”

“Yeah,” Daniel says, leaning forward for a second look, despite his obvious fear.

I move my boot through the grass, bending it over.

A face stares up at me, bleached white with hollow eyes. A human skull is half-buried in the earth, grass growing from its void sockets, as though it were a plant pot. Gwen fails to contain a gasp, and Daniel flinches, despite knowing what was coming. Gizmo is penguin-stepping away, eyes wandering everywhere but down. But he looks, and nearly screams again, when I bend down, take hold of the grass growing from the skull’s eyes, nose and mouth, and pull. The green tendrils come up with balls of dirt held in place by tangles of roots. I toss the vegetation aside, revealing an unobstructed view of the unfortunate deceased.

Earth holds the jaw open in a permanent scream, but it’s not the only thing that suggests a horrid ending to this person’s life. There’s a neat hole in one side of the head, leading to a jagged, baseball-sized opening on the other.

“He was shot,” Daniel says.

Gwen shuffles on her feet. “You don’t know that.”

“Pretty sure he’s right.” The bullet hole is impossible to miss, and the jaw structure is pretty masculine. I put my hands beneath his chin and drag the soil away. A chunky band of dirty bone is revealed. This isn’t just a skull. There’s a whole body here. I look up at Daniel. “Help me.”

He doesn’t say a word, but he starts pulling up grass when I do. We work downward from the skull, clearing a three-foot-long, two-foot-wide rectangle.
Far enough
, I decide, and I shift to dragging dirt away. Daniel stops helping me. Touching something like grass is probably a foreign experience to the boy, never mind dragging dirt away from a rib cage. Not that
I’ve
ever done it before. The question of why I’m doing it now rattles through my head, and before I can answer the question for myself, Gwen asks it aloud.

My response is a grunt and a doubling of effort. The soil working its way under my fingernails feels familiar, reminding me of a half dozen backyards, where I spent a good portion of my childhood. But that dirt probably wasn’t full of a dead person’s lingering bits. When the thought of having someone’s DNA trapped under my nails starts to make me shiver, I lean back.

The rib cage is exposed, and like a shaman divining with bones, the white arches rising from the ground tell me a story—but this one reveals the past, not the future.

“Holy crap,” Gizmo says, working up the nerve to look again.

Something heavy and sharp cleaved a path downward through the right side of this man’s rib cage. The bones are bent downward, a jagged gap separating the two sides. It would have been a mortal blow. Whoever killed him either shot him in the head and then savaged his body, or swept a blade through his chest and then finished the job with a gun. Either way, the man I’m now thinking of as a victim wasn’t just killed, he was overkilled.

The gun in my go-pack makes a little more sense now. This island, in the recent past, has been a violent place.

But is it now?

I’d rather not find out.

“Any of you have forensic training?” I ask.

Daniel takes a step back. “Eww.”

“I think what killed him is clear enough,” Gwen says. A scowl now resides on her face.

“But we don’t know who he is,” I argue, and then correct myself. “Was.”

“He’s been out here for a while,” Daniel says. “There isn’t any clothing left.”

It occurs to me that the man might not have been wearing clothes. This could have been an execution. We’re also in a jungle that’s buzzing with insects. Given the humidity and temperature of the place, the body could have decomposed and been consumed within a few weeks. The only real passage-of-time indication is the grass growing from his orifices. But grass spreads and grows quickly. Best guess, he’s been out here between six months and two years. Tops. I keep these thoughts to myself.

“We’re losing daylight,” Gwen says. Her words have an immediate effect on the boys. Their shoulders lower and they look away from the body. Her words have given them permission to move on. When she meets my eyes with the most serious gaze I’ve seen from her mostly-serious face thus far, I know that her disinterest is a charade.

“We need to search the area before leaving,” I say.

“What?” Gizmo’s voice has raised an octave. He wants to get as far away from the dead man as possible. “Why?”

“If this landing pad was built by Unity, there might be a way to contact them nearby. A callbox. Emergency beacon. Supply drop.” I’m fishing for reasons, but Gizmo and Daniel look sold already, until I point further inland and say, “You two check that end. Gwen and I will search down here.”

“Why are we splitting up?” Daniel asks, trying and failing to mask his fear.

“Faster we search the area, the sooner we can leave,” Gwen says.

We’re on the same page.

“Just walk the perimeter,” I say. “We’ll meet on the far side. If you see anything weird—”

“Like another dead dude?” Daniel asks.

“Or a way to call home—”
I’m trying to keep things positive, Daniel.
“—just call us over. We won’t be far, and we won’t lose sight of each other.”

A dejected looking Gizmo tugs on Daniel’s arm. “Let’s just go, so we can leave.”

Daniel squints at me, letting Gizmo pull him. He knows something is up, but he doesn’t say anything. “Make it quick,” he says, and then turns to follow Gizmo.

When they’re out of earshot, Gwen steps atop the concrete pad and heads in the opposite direction. Walking on the smooth, flat landing pad is both harder on the legs, and easier. While my ankles get a reprieve from the constant twisting of uneven ground, each step sends a jarring impact through my bones. What I wouldn’t give for an island-sized trampoline.

“He hasn’t been dead very long,” Gwen says, supporting my conclusion. “Maybe a year.”

“Yup,” I say. “But it doesn’t change much for us.”

Gwen’s reply isn’t emotional, despite the content. “How could a brutally murdered man not change much for us?”

“One body doesn’t mean we’ve been dumped on an island with a tribe of head hunters, cannibals or even a serial killer. For all we know, the person who killed him was acting in self-defense.” The grass along the length of the landing pad grows even and lush, so I stop looking at it and focus on the end of the concrete slab, still fifty feet ahead, where the grass is uneven. “Besides, what could we do differently? We still need to find food, shelter and water.”
And Sig.
“If there’s a reason to be afraid for our lives on this island, we’re not going to spot it if we’re running around like frightened turkeys.”

Gwen lets out a little chuckle, and it catches me off guard. When she sees me looking, she explains. “I grew up on a farm. We had a lot of turkeys. Dumbest animals on the planet, I swear. Get them worked up and they’d practically throw themselves on the chopping block.”

I can picture rugged Gwen on a farm. Working the land. Bored out of her skull. She’s been lugging Mandi around all day like she’s accustomed to carrying sacks of potatoes.

“I’ve seen what kind of force is needed to cut through bone, Effie.” She gives me a sidelong glance, her smile retreating. “Whoever did that back there... We
don’t
want to meet him.”

“‘Him?’”

“Call me a sexist if you want, but I’ve never met a woman capable of doing that to a man. Not even my mom, and she was a big woman.”

I’m not sure if she means physically capable or emotionally capable, but I don’t argue the point. While I haven’t met any women physically or emotionally capable of such a thing, I
have
met men who are both. Are there brutally savage women in the world? Without a doubt. But I’ve never met them, which leads me to believe that the male variety are far more pervasive. History and its wars agree. Even now, women generally aren’t on the front line or part of any special forces. What kind of women would want to be?

Feet scuff over concrete as Gwen and I slow to a stop in unison. We’re just five feet from the far end of the landing pad strip, and the flecks of white hidden among the uneven grass are easy to see.

Now
this
...

This changes things.