Abandoned, p.45
Abandoned, page 45
part #2 of Donovan Series
Just the thought of it, the memory of her sweat-glowing skin, the way she’d hammered herself against him, conjured a tingle at the root of his penis.
“Now that,” he told himself as he strolled down the main avenue, “is as good as life gets.”
He chuckled, glancing up at the morning sky. Partly cloudy. Patches visible of that curious turquoise blue that had so charmed him from the first day he’d set foot on Donovan. Already, he could read the signs: Rain tonight.
He passed the spot where Talina Perez had shot Deb Spiro. Stopped, stared at the hard-packed gravel. Still hard to believe.
Dan had been standing in his doorway, not ten paces away. He hadn’t seen Spiro’s hand move, so fast did she draw her pistol. One instant the weapon was in her holster. The next it was pointed at Talina Perez’s face.
A sure thing. Just shoot.
But Spiro had to talk.
How the fuck had that slit Perez crouched and shot so fast? Again, though he’d been watching, Dan hadn’t seen it happen. Hell, the way she dropped, he thought Perez was shot through the head. The first thought was that somehow, with a bullet in her brain, Perez had shot through reflex.
Only to find out it was a graze.
And then Talbot takes out Chavez.
“So much for insurance.”
Damn it.
“Alas, poor Spiro. So today you rot up in the cemetery just downhill from good old Donovan, and I who could have so used your services am left high and dry. With nothing but my own wits. Of course, you’re dead, and I’m still aglow with the greatest sex a man can stand.
“God, what a waste on your part. If you’d shot the bitch like we planned, just the threat of turning you lose on Mosadek or Dushane would have handed me the whole fucking town. And not a word of resistance uttered along the way.”
So saying, he scuffed the gravel where Spiro had fallen. The blood, of course, had long ago washed away in the rains.
“Alas and alack.”
He strode for The Jewel’s door, opened it, and stepped inside. “How are we doing, Art?” he called as his heels rapped on the chabacho-wood floors as he passed the tables on his way back to the cage.
“Took hours, but we’re cleaned up and ready for business again, boss.” Maniken was seated in the back, a cup of mint tea steeping on the table before him. “Got to tell you, I’m so glad Aguila let her people come back. Pulled in a couple thousand SDRs last night.”
“Yeah, well the good Supervisor is no one’s fool. She can understand the simplest of messages.”
Dan stepped to the back of the bar, poured a cup of hot water from the pot on the hot plate. He crushed some mint between thumb and forefinger. God, he wished for coffee. Rued the day the last cup had been drunk. Word was the seedlings were still alive in the greenhouses, but it would be years before they bore.
“Um, boss? Found a backpack on the floor when we were cleaning up last night. Had Desch Ituri’s name on it. I didn’t know if you’d want me rummaging through it, so I set it on the counter in the cage.”
“Ituri, huh? When was he in?”
“Beats me. I don’t remember seeing him last night.”
Dan used a spoon to stir his tea and stepped over to the cage door.
It sat on the counter as Maniken had said. A regular old backpack. Black. With Ituri’s name stenciled in white.
“No telling what wonders might lie within. Plans? Construction info? Some secret to the good Supervisor’s empire down at Corporate Mine?”
He did, after all, have the slit scared half to death. Tompzen reported that she’d found the pebble, drank the water. And the fact that she’d immediately reinstated crew rotations to The Jewel was proof enough that she understood exactly what her position was.
Dan unsnapped the restraints and lifted the flap, finding an envelope marked To Allison.
“Indeed.” Wirth opened it. On the sheet of paper, it simply said, Desch won’t be coming to see you again.
Well, not every goose continued to lay golden eggs.
Reaching into the pack, Dan removed a curious device that filled most of the interior. A plastic-wrapped square of what looked like clay was topped by a small power pack. On the front, a black duraplast screen flickered to life, the numbers 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, flashing in countdown. Then the letters BANG! flashed on the screen.
“What the hell?”
A piece of paper had been taped to the side. This Dan pulled loose, reading: I, TOO, HAVE AGENTS. SHOULD ANYTHING EVER HAPPEN TO ME, YOU AND THE JEWEL WILL BE A SMOKING CRATER.
A curious tingling of fear raced around his guts. His hair was standing on end, and it was with difficulty that he forced a swallow down his throat.
He glanced at the fake bomb. Then considered the note again. Crumpled it up. Carefully he replaced the fake bomb and letter to Allison. Taking the backpack and his tea, he walked out.
“Art?” He set the backpack on his enforcer’s table. “I want this delivered back to the Supervisor next time she’s in town. You do it. In person.”
“And what do I tell her, boss?”
“Tell her . . . Touché.”
“I don’t get it. Touché?”
“Trust me. She’ll know what it means.”
And with that, he raised his cup in salute. It was, after all, a good morning. First Allison had gotten him off in a way that had left him wondering if his skull was going to explode, and now he discovered he had a most worthy adversary.
“Okay, so it’s a stalemate. Makes the future a lot less boring place.”
EPILOGUE
Yesterday, the shuttle came again. I heard its arrival from where I hid deep in the forest, and then its departure at dusk. They took more trees.
Flash and Diamond are worried. It’s not like we didn’t give them a perfectly clear message, right? Mundo is no longer theirs.
The fact that every time a shuttle comes back, it’s guarded with armored marines means they’ve taken the lesson to heart.
“Actually, it’s a good sign,” I tell the quetzals. “Each time they’ve come, it’s been to take equipment, different plants they need. If they ever come back and start fixing the buildings, bringing in new material, that’s when we have to worry.”
I’m not sure how I feel deep inside about Dya, Su, Mark, Damien, and the rest of the kids going away forever. There are a lot of things I’m not sure about.
Like why I ache on the inside when I think about how Rebecca and Shantaya died that day. It had to happen, right? I know that Flash and Diamond are looking for answers. It wasn’t like they were being vindictive when they ate Rebecca and Shantaya. It was Rebecca, years ago, who told me, “Sometimes, Kylee, sacrifices have to be made in the name of science.”
Flash and Diamond thought that by consuming Rebecca and Shantaya they’d gain an understanding of why the experiment went wrong. They were as upset as I was when they didn’t get any answers from the digesting bodies.
That meant that Rebecca and Shantaya died for nothing.
Despite the ache and hurt that causes the human in me, I know it was part of the scientific method. Knowledge doesn’t come without a little pain, regret, and a few mistakes.
And back then, I was still pretty broken apart inside. The quetzal part of me was still growing, enraged at what they’d done to Rocket.
Part of me is Rocket. And I remain enraged. Unlike among humans, the desire to kill isn’t muted over time. It can, however, be buffered by other stimulae. Like Talina desperately trying to keep Rocket alive. Communicating her desperation and hope as he died.
And she carried Rocket’s last feelings, shared them with me through her saliva. But for her I would never have lived his fear, pain, and disbelief. Let alone his surprise that Talina cared so much that she held him as he died.
Talina proves that not all humans are beyond preserving. The problem is that too many of them are monsters like Spiro, the Supervisor, and the rest. In Flash and Diamond’s eyes this makes saving the few not worth the effort.
The part of me that is Kylee would save the few.
Some days I teeter, but most days the quetzal perspective wins.
As the morning brightens in the eastern sky the old quetzal I named Flash and I walk out from the tree belt and across the seared surface of the shuttle landing pad.
Flash and the rest remain awed by the humans’ ability to ride the skies. Technology perplexes them. It’s beyond their conception. I constantly astound them by making the simplest of tools. Even to the point of using a stone to crack a walnut.
The buildings are looking a bit more shabby. Around the edges, sunflowers, amaranth, and lettuce are starting up.
I need Mundo’s plants. None of Donovan’s native plants are digestible in the human gut. Most are downright poisonous. Although the quetzal inside me can process heavy metals, the human part of me is still highly susceptible to toxicity. Almost all of my food comes from the fields here. A fact that ties me forever to Mundo.
Stepping around the side of the shop building, I stare with curious detachment at what remains of the dome; it collapsed around the main shaft of the tower. From the looks of things, the west side let loose first, tilting the whole, and then the rest of the floor gave way. As it plummeted down, the tower punched up through the roof.
Hard to believe that used to be our home. Rocket and me, we both miss it.
Flash chatters at the sight; yellow, green, and pink patterns of color paint the big quetzal’s hide.
“It hurts,” I tell him. “It was our home. We were happy here.”
Flash makes a deep-chested clicking, his sides alternating in patterns of violet, mauve, and orange that communicates his curiosity. Especially about how the part of me that is Rocket could have been happy there.
“Humans feel things quetzals don’t. And the other way around, I guess.”
Flash clicks and chatters his confusion. Humans remain unfathomable to him. He asks if I will ever go back to the humans.
“Humans have a word: amputate. It means to cut off. They have another word: cauterize. Which means to seal by means of fire.”
I lead the way, walking wide around the collapsed dome to the cemetery. Here I drop to my knees so that I can finger the dirt on Rocket’s grave. “This is why. When they killed Rocket, they amputated the human part of me. Because it was purposefully mean, that cauterized it.”
Flash half-flares his collar, his three eyes gleaming as they study me. A barely audible whistle sounds behind his serrated jaws.
“Of course I still love my mother. I love all of them. But they’re not . . . us. Rocket made that clear as he was dying.”
I close my eyes to better see the woman in my memory. “Ta Li Na. I always liked that name. She gave me Rocket’s last message. He told me to get away. That’s why I can’t go back. They’d try to get what’s left of him out of me. Wash him from inside. Make me one of them again.” I pause. “I can’t let that happen.”
A curious chittering utters from Flash’s mouth.
“Because I know how Turnienko, Cheng, and Dya think and work. They dissect what they don’t understand. Experiment. Like Rebecca did with death fliers, roos, and hoppers. And you did with Rebecca and Shantaya. There’s a cost to science.”
Flash replies with a clicking, his hide dancing in golds and blacks mottled with tan that express his incomprehension and at the same time his distrust and contempt for human beings.
“Dya always used to tell me not to burn bridges. It’s what she called a metaphor. Words that make a symbol. They would have killed Rocket in Port Authority. First Spiro, then the rest of the town. Talina is part quetzal. She got us away. And then they came all the way here and killed Rocket anyway. It’s my fault. I sent him down to see what was happening.”
I sniff, fighting back tears. But there have been too many of those already. “So, the bridge is burned. It’s just us now. Rocket and me. He tells me not to, but I hate them.”
Again the clicking.
“That last day, when we met Talina and my mother in the forest, Talina should have shot me. I’ll grow up. And when I do, I am going to make them afraid like Rocket was.”
I place a finger to my lips as the saliva flows in my mouth. “I can taste Rocket’s death here. I’ve let you taste it. So you know what I mean. But what you can’t know is how deeply my hate runs.”
I knot a fist full of dirt from Rocket’s grave. “But they will. One day, when I’m an adult, they’re going to feel the same terror Rocket did.”
Flash chatters a question.
“Because I swear it,” I tell him. “Right here, on Rocket’s grave.”
And in my imagination I hear people screaming, see them dying in blood, with torn guts, and in fear. Just like Rocket did. My mother taught me to be a scientist, so I know just how to make it happen.
I stand, the dirt from Rocket’s grave still clutched in my fist. I look to the north, far away, toward Port Authority. Too bad for them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. Michael Gear is the author of fifty-seven published novels, many of which are co-authored with his beloved wife, Kathleen O'Neal Gear. He is a New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author whose work has been translated into 29 languages and has over 17 million copies in print worldwide. Both an anthropologist and archaeologist, he brings extraordinary depth and complexity to his characters and settings.
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W. Michael Gear, Abandoned
