Lethal Seasons (A Changed World Book 1) (10 page)

Wisp felt them sizing him up. Angus’s words had layered a new worry into the mix. Neither Martin nor Nick was sure of the implications of the information they were getting. Wisp wanted them to calm down. He gave them a minute to come to their own conclusions. Whether he grew another inch in a few years wasn’t going to endanger the settlement. He sat quietly, passive, accepting.

“So.” Angus broke the silence. “You are one of the older ones. What lab?”

“Hendricks.”

There was a heavy silence after that. Wisp could feel the distrust and a thread of anger welling up in Martin. Nick was thinking hard, perhaps trying to remember the rumors and reputation the Hendricks Labs accrued.

“Not Cyrillic?” There was a touch of alarm in Angus.

“Greek.”

“Ah! Excellent. And your designation?” The alarm melted away, thawed by the onslaught of curiosity.

“Tau.”

“Well, that's a relief. Hendricks did have some rather unstable creations.” Angus was pleased, but Martin and Nick remained unsure. “He created in batches if I remember correctly. I never understood how they were able to design a person to order.”

“It was not an exact science,” Wisp offered. Angus leaned forward eager for information. “He designed for increased intelligence, but the specific skill came after awakening. He could design a dozen geniuses, but they might all be mathematicians or neurosurgeons. There wasn’t any way of telling until we began acquiring knowledge and communication skills.”

“Born as an adult,” Angus said with a touch of awe in his voice. “I can’t imagine how that shapes the psyche.” He shook his head and leaned back into his chair. “So tell me about your generation, the Greeks.”

“Not many of my brothers were retained. The ones that were kept were already reserved by their keepers.”

“Brothers?” Angus's curiosity piqued. If that was possible. Wisp almost smiled. The man was bubbling with eagerness. “Please, tell me about them.”

“Khi went to the army. He is a biologist. Epsilon went to a private institute. His specialty is patterns. Lambda is a neurosurgeon. He went to the Navy. Theta went to a hospital, but his gift is linguistics.”

“That's four and you make five. The Greek alphabet contains 24 letters. What of the others?”

“Some did not achieve life. Some didn't thrive. Some were not as expected, and they were terminated.” The word came out harsher that he'd intended. His audience went still. Startled. There was the brief taste of emptiness, minds stunned beyond feeling for a fleeting second.

“What does that mean?” Angus's bubbling joy guttered with disbelief.

“Executed.” Wisp said softly. He was surprised at the emotion that rose with his explanation. A gunshot and the smell of blood. An aching loss and fury. The potency of the flashback unsettled him.

“Awful,” Angus barked. He threw up a hand in disgust. “Reprehensible! The man was insane. It's no wonder his own creations killed him off.”

Wisp held back a smile. It wasn't his generation that ended the man, but it was satisfying all the same. “Ocho.”

“Yes.” Angus pointed at him. “It was the Spaniards. His last generation.”

“You don't look Greek,” Martin's voice was as heavy with suspicion as his mind.

“I'm not. It is simply the counting system for our generation.”

“And what is your gift?” Angus asked. His mind swelling again with that ineffable buoyancy.

Wisp hesitated. Not many people called them gifts. “I'm a double E.”

“Fabulous!” Angus jumped to his feet. “Fascinating. I will have a million more questions for you.”

Wisp thought that maybe Angus's questions would be fun. But the other men in the room were not as happy.

“What does that mean?” Martin asked. Nick was jittery with suspicion, but Martin was on the verge of anger again.

“Extrasensory Enhancement!” Angus crowed. “Oh, this is going to be wonderful!” He started away only to jerk back. He shook a finger at Wisp, his eyes alive with mischief. “But Hendricks didn't believe in that. He never tried for double Es.”

Wisp measured the feelings and the facts. He couldn't wait too long, or they would think he was plotting. Did it matter anymore? With his strength and training, he could easily disable Martin and Nick and be in the hills before others were alerted. But that was unlikely to happen here. Angus would not want that to happen here. He chose to answer Angus honestly. “No. I was an error. That's why I was slated for termination.”

“Hospitals were the first to suffer from the devolving of distribution networks. Great gaps had developed in industry from the sudden demise of so many people. All the way up the line from delivery men to truck drivers and packers, back to the manufacturers themselves. There weren’t enough hands to do the jobs and food, medicines and materials stopped moving across the country.”

History of a Changed World, Angus T. Moss

Who am I? Mm, mmm, me. Not right, but close.
Another morning of cotton-headed numbness. She opened her eyes to absolute darkness. Even through the numbness, she felt a slight thrill of fear. This was out of the ordinary.

The lights came on flashing bright against the white walls. That was right. But she still felt off. Her arm ached. A tiny spot of blood on the sleeve of her pale green shirt brought a bad feeling on. Something she didn’t like. Something wrong. But she couldn’t remember what it meant.

She put her feet on the floor. Cold. The bed was warm. The floor was cold. She wanted to get back under the blanket and sleep. But when the lights were on, she should be awake. That was a rule, but she didn’t know whose.

“Tile.” Sometimes saying the words out loud were the only sounds she heard. Her voice was dry and scratchy. As she stood, a wave of dizziness hit. The white walls blurred, sliding past her eyes. She sat down breathing hard. Again that bad feeling rose up. Something wrong. Something she didn’t like.
Make them stop!

Them?

Stop what? Those thoughts were too slippery to hold on to. They darted into her head and away before she could fully grasp their meaning.

“Them.” Saying the word out loud didn’t help. She couldn’t remember who
them
was or why she wanted them to stop. Or what they did that she did want them to not do. Thinking about it made her feel queasy.

She stood more carefully this time and shuffled over to the lavatory. The faucet squeaked. Water splashed into the sink. Normal morning noises calmed her trepidations, but a shiver of wrong still wobbled in her brain. She had woken in the dark. That hadn’t happened before. The lights were always on when she opened her eyes in the morning. Listening and looking found nothing out of the ordinary in her small white room with the gray floor. Over the sink was more white wall. Today that didn’t seem right. She touched the smooth white surface. Just wall. There had always just been wall. Why did she think there would be something else?

She was already seated and waiting when the food door opened. She wasn’t usually waiting when the food arrived. Or was she? Waiting didn’t feel right, but she couldn’t imagine what else she would be doing. Sleeping, eating and trying to remember who she was took up all of her time. The tray made its scratchy noise as it slid over the shelf. That sounded familiar, but something had changed. It wasn’t right. A bottle of water and a white package was all that sat on the tray. She stared at the items unsure of them. There were no good smells from the tray. That was wrong, too.

Her arm ached when she reached for the bottle. A large bruise in the crook of her elbow showed when she pushed up her sleeve. Dark colors that clashed against the paleness of her skin. That was wrong. The bad feeling came back a little stronger. Something had been taken from her. Something very important. But thinking made her head ache. And the white package caught her attention again.

She drank water and ate the crunchy bars that were in the package. They were sweet. Chewing them was noisy. It almost made her laugh, how loud the sound of her food was. The tray sat in front of the little door for a long time. Usually the tray went away after she ate. Or so she thought. After food...breakfast, the tray went away and clean clothes came through the little door. She waited, but no clothes came. She tapped on the door, but nothing happened.

Waiting became tedious. Time stretched long and weary before her. The room felt smaller suddenly. And she noticed new things. Her bed was a mattress on a steel shelf. Something about that seemed very familiar, but out of context. The door was flush to the wall and she couldn’t say whether it might open in or out. She couldn’t remember ever seeing the door open. But that couldn’t be right. She wasn’t born in this room.

Born.

The word opened up a chain of memories. Misfitting images of people and places dashed in and out of her head tantalizing and confusing. Faces that looked so sweet it brought tears to her eyes. Rooms that she was sure she must have seen once. She tried to pin them down, to find names and feelings to go with the shattered images. It only made her head hurt more.

She paced the room wondering how much time had passed since breakfast. She counted her footsteps, laying one bare foot exactly in front of the other on the cold tile floor. Walking slowly to the wall until her nose touched the cool surface. Turning, she put her back against the wall and started back. She got the same number every time, but counted again, just in case it might somehow change.

“In some parts of the country money became obsolete overnight. It no longer stood for anything. People’s needs had changed. They wanted safety above all else. And with the drastic drop in population, goods were easily acquired without money. Stores and homes were empty, unattended. Once could walk in and take whatever was needed.”

History of a Changed World
, Angus T. Moss

“But you ran away,” Angus said with full certainty.

“Yes.” It was close enough to the truth. Wisp didn't want to go into the details of how that had been arranged.

“Because you knew it was coming!” Angus added cheerfully. His supposition about Wisp’s skills set off a ripple of reaction in the other two men.

“Are you reading our minds now?” Martin demanded. Anger steamed off him with a dark thread of outrage twisting through it.

Wisp kept his voice level and calm. “No. I deduced it, and one of my brothers overhead the preparations. I'm more empath than telepath. And I can't feel anything at a distance.”

“We were about a mile from Riverbank when he warned me that there was trouble,” Nick added. A glimmer of pride flavored his statement. Wisp wasn’t sure what to think about that.

“A mile!” Angus was wide eyed.

“There were many people, very frightened.” Wisp chose his words carefully. “That...large of a...an exertion of energy is easily located.”

“But he couldn't tell me how many people,” Nick added.

“No. The fear blanketed the underlying emotions. If they had been calmer, I might have sensed the people that didn't fit.”

“Yes. A tragedy. A whole settlement wiped out. Just these few left, Nicky? No one else?” Angus took his seat again. His joy had cooled to concern.

“They left a trail of bodies. It wasn't a very big group to start with.”

“We left no one living behind,” Wisp assured them.

“Please, start at the beginning,” Angus asked.

Nick began with the fire in Clarkeston.

“We sent a crew,” Martin interjected. “You think these mercenaries set the fire?”

Nick gave him a hesitant nod. “Maybe to burn down the house where they killed Iris?”

“That's cold.” Martin's anger had banked down to resentment. “Set fire to a house in a settlement? This time of year with the winds so unpredictable? Reckless.”

“They killed off a settlement and tortured a child,” Nick snapped back. “They're monsters.”

“Why?” Angus asked. “What did they want?” He was suddenly bereft. The loss of so many lives weighing heavily on him.

“The notebooks, I assume,” Nick said.

Wisp felt all the attention turn to him. “I can only feel intent. The men had a mission. They were concerned with achieving their goals. I cannot tell you what those goals were.”

Angus walked over to his desk and picked up a small notebook. “Then I will have to agree with Nick. It was because of this. I’ve been through these, and I think they were written by the person who released the virus.”

Martin didn’t react. It was obvious Angus had already spoken to him. Nick shook his head, skepticism growing. “How could that hold any importance now?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know, Nicky.” Angus’s words carried a weight of emotion—frustration, concern, grief. He pointed across the room to a family tree worked out on one of the whiteboards that lined the walls. “Lily and William may be all that is left of this family. But I don't understand why anyone would want to kill them.”

Martin's anger ratcheted up. He gave Nick an angry glance. “Were the mercenaries human?”

“What?” Nick asked, momentarily baffled.

Martin shot a smoldering glance at Wisp.

“Ah, Martin, you have insufficient facts. The virus kills us all because we are all human.” Angus said in a soothing voice. “There might be animosity, or even a thirst for revenge among our newest brethren, but
think
, how could they field a small army like this? There aren't enough of them left. There's barely enough of us. That's why this just doesn't make any sense to me.”

Nick turned to Wisp, an honest question in him. “What do you think?”

He didn't want to say. He'd been giving it thought since he'd felt William through the compass. Despite turning the problem over in his mind dozens of times, he only had supposition. “They hunted children. I have no doubt they wanted to kill them. They tortured and killed without compunction to find Lily. A little girl. Easily captured, easily held. But to kill, not hold? The way they hurt William says they didn’t care if he survived. You say she and William may have some connection to the person who released the virus. That information would only be of interest to someone who is working in that field.”

A spike of unease shot through Martin. “Have we gotten this year's vaccine, yet?”

Angus let out a breath as though he'd been punched. “No.”