Project Aquarius (The Sensitives Series Book 1) (11 page)

“I woke up this morning and had a strong feeling that I shouldn’t go to work. So I called out. I stayed in bed for a few minutes and then felt a wave of anxiety take over. When I started to panic, I came down here to relax. This place is my little sanctuary, believe it or not. Everyone else in the building avoids the musty basement so it’s perfect. I came down here around 8:45. Played some of my game. Had some coffee. But I didn’t feel any better.”

“I can relate. My anxiety was sky-high this morning. It was around nine when things got really crazy at school.”

Darnell looked up from his game. 9 a.m. was around the same time that he had felt the overwhelming urge to flee. Weird.

“It was a little after nine when my video game started to blink. I felt the rush of something coming toward me, so I instinctively covered my body, crouched down and practiced shielding. When I closed my eyes, I saw a large mass rocketing toward me. I put up my bubble and sprayed out light as fast as I could. The fast-moving wave parted in the middle and went around me. When I opened my eyes a minute later, the power was off and the world was quiet. I knew that something big had happened. I went upstairs to check on my roommate who usually sleeps in. And there he was… dead in the kitchen. I kicked in the other apartments to find the rest of my neighbors weren’t home. I didn’t waste any time getting my guns and provisions. I went right back down to the basement and that’s where I’ve been since.”

“Wow. You shielded yourself?” she said in disbelief.

“Yeah, same way I taught you in college. An energy bubble can protect you from a lot of things.” He placed his hand gently on Ms. Harding’s shoulder.

The guy was a real creeper.

“No wonder I always feel so safe in your presence,” she cooed.

Barf. If they started banging energy bubbles, Darnell was out of there. He mashed the buttons on the console extra hard.

“I tried to tell you all this would happen some day,” Big Jim said.

“Yes, you did, but I always thought you were a little bit nuts,” she mused.

“I know. But you stuck around anyway,” he said while rubbing her shoulders. “You must have shielded yourself too.”

“I hadn’t considered that possibility. I think I’m in shock. It’s just registering now that I’m even alive.”

Darnell could relate. Shock was always riding shotgun in his brain. It kept him alert. Feeling safe was the dumbest thing a person could do.

“I don’t know how I kept going despite the blinding pain. I don’t know how I pushed through it,” Ms. Harding recalled.

“You never give yourself enough credit, Laura. We’re Indigos. This is our birthright.” Big Jim gestured to the bunker.

Was this dude seriously trying to get with this woman in a nasty basement? He was getting on Darnell’s nerves. Darnell passive-aggressively turned the game volume up to an obnoxious level.

“There’s a good reason you’re still alive,” Big Jim insisted, nodding in Darnell’s direction.

“Him? No. It was a weird coincidence. He was being a troublemaker and I was just doing my job.”

“He’s always been a troublemaker, Laura. You’re the one who––”

“That’s enough!” Darnell threw the game to the ground shattering its screen. He was tired of adults talking about him like he wasn’t in the room. “You don’t know shit about me Mr. White Ass Biggie Smalls!!!”

Big Jim let out a bellowing laugh, which infuriated Darnell. “Don’t laugh at me. You wanna run your mouth? I’ll gun you down while you sleep son!”

He ran at the man, throwing wild punches at the lumberjack’s midsection.

“Stop!” Ms. Harding screeched. Her voice seemed far away as though she was yelling through water.

Darnell’s mouth continued to throw punches as his fists beat on the big man. “Shut up! You don’t know who you’re messing with. I’ll kill you son. I’ll kill you!”

His fists bounced off Big Jim’s rock hard stomach and chest. Darnell jumped and went for a face shot, but Big Jim caught his arms mid-swing. The big man picked Darnell up and pivoted around, wrapping him up in his own arms like a straight jacket. Darnell couldn’t move. His feet swung wildly, dangling off the ground. He kicked and kicked.

“Let go of me! Let go!”

“Oh God, Jim. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know he was going to act like this,” Ms. Harding apologized as she tried to control Darnell’s wild legs.

“Let me go you perv!”

Big Jim ignored Darnell’s shouts and talked over him. “Think about it, Laura. In some strange way, he’s the reason you’re still alive. He’s a gift.”

Darnell’s shouts became louder and louder, fueled by Big Jim’s asinine words. “That’s right I’m a gift. I’m gonna give you the gift of a kick in the nuts.”

Darnell fought hard. He was going to push and wiggle and scream until the adults gave up. “I’m gonna give you matching black eyes… and VIP tickets to the hospital!”

He wasn’t going to give up. He struggled until his muscles burned. He shouted until his voice was hoarse. But the big man didn’t lessen his grip.

“You know you’re gifted, right?” Big Jim asked in a soft, but deep voice.

“Gifted at what, Cartman?” Darnell responded.

“Surviving.”

“That’s true, Darnell. You are a survivor,” Ms. Harding said as she looked in his eyes.

Darnell stared back with carefully crafted emptiness. It wasn’t working. She wouldn’t break her gaze. He needed a new plan.

Finally, he fell quiet and stopped struggling.

“That’s what you’re doing in my arms right now kid, surviving,” said Big Jim.

Darnell had never thought of it that way, but it was true. Even now, he hadn’t given up the fight, he had just shifted tactic in order to survive. He went limp in order to get released. His docility was an illusion. Survival.

“Kid, you’re only nine years old. Being mean and nasty to us won’t undo all the wrongs that have been done to you. You can’t regain control of your life by getting rejected again,” Big Jim advised.

How did this dude know so much? Darnell’s life had been one big string of rejections.

Though he was silent, the embers of Darnell’s anger continued to burn. No one said anything for a long time.

Ms. Harding looked lost in thought. Glazed over.

Finally, Big Jim said, “You are both alive because of each other. You survived together. You’re linked together now. You have to consider that maybe there is a reason you are both still here.”

Nope, there was no reason. It was a mistake. Darnell had been spared unfairly. He was bad inside, damaged goods. He was the bad kid. The troublemaker. Broken. Hopeless. Damaged. Social workers had said it. Too damaged. Teachers had said it. Too damaged. Darnell was beyond help. So why had he survived? He didn’t know.

“Nah. They was other good people God coulda saved instead,” Darnell muttered under his breath.

Suddenly, Big Jim released him. Darnell’s feet hit the concrete and he let his body collapse on top of them. He lay on the rough floor feeling heavy, alone, and useless.

***

A half hour later, Big Jim emerged from his small bunker room with a stack of loose papers.

    “I want to show you guys something,” he said.

The big man spread out a series of papers on top of the cardboard boxes. Ms. Harding peered over his shoulder. Darnell lay unmoving. He half looked up from the floor.

Big Jim urged, “You too. Come over here, kid.”

After Darnell had tried to hurt the guy, after he had called him names, after he had broken his video game, the big man still wanted to share something with him? That was a first.

“C’mon, I need both of you to see this,” he insisted.

Darnell picked himself up off the cold concrete and walked over, his legs still wobbly from the exertion. He looked at the images— page after page of charcoal drawings–– figures and cityscapes. Some of them were really good, in a black-lines-on-paper kind of a way. Darnell recognized some of the building outlines, everything from famous Boston landmarks to the best hot dog stand on the Common.

“You drew these?” Darnell asked, his voice still hoarse.

Big Jim nodded.

“Jim, I remember these! You drew these in college when you were homesick for the city. Your dorm room used to be covered in them. You kept them for all these years?”

Big Jim nodded again. “They weren’t relevant until now. Look.”

The large man began to rearrange the papers into an order. There were dozens of scenes. Each paper overlapped the sides of the last. The figures and buildings started to show a purposeful progression.

“Dude, I get it, it’s a story,” Darnell said as his eyes widened.

Two figures were walking through the city on an adventure. In the early drawings the figures weren’t clear, but as the drawings progressed there was more and more detail. There was a kid about Darnell’s age and a woman. They were exploring different neighborhoods in Boston. The kid wore a Red Sox hat and some sweet-ass sneakers that could only be Jordans. Darnell liked the kid’s style.

Ms. Harding picked up one paper, holding it up to the lantern light. “Didn’t these come from visions you had in college?”

“Mmm-hmm. Visions in meditations and dreams,” Big Jim confirmed. “I want you both to look at this one in particular. Something you said earlier.”

It was a drawing of a bus on its side, people strewn on the ground. Just like the Number 60, the driver was pinned under the front.

Darnell’s legs went wobbly. In the drawing, the woman figure had her face in her hands and the kid was ahead of her, running away. Darnell’s brain wanted to fight it. It couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense.

“Was this what you saw today?” Big Jim asked.

Darnell half nodded. He hadn’t just seen it. He had lived it.

“Flip it over, Laura,” Big Jim instructed.

On the back was a message written in smudged charcoal:

This is when you will finally be a mother, when the world looks like this. Remember the bus.

Ms. Harding dropped the paper. It fluttered to the ground slowly as if it knew it was a historic moment.

“But… you drew these ten years ago. I don’t understand,” she protested.

While Ms. Harding blubbered on about college, Darnell bent down to examine the papers, to really look at the details of the drawings. Somehow, it was true; he was the kid in the picture. The kid had the same hat and shoes. And something about his nose… It was unmistakable. And the way the woman walked, her posture, it had to be Ms. Harding. Big Jim had foreseen this moment.

Ms. Harding sat on a stack of boxes and the big man knelt next to her. He spoke in a low voice. “Think about it, Laura. You always wondered how you would have kids with your fertility issue. This is it.”

“I teach kids Jim, I don’t raise them. I don’t know how to be a Mom.” Tears streamed down her face, falling absently onto Jim’s shoulder below.

For once, Darnell didn’t feel like running. He felt drawn to them, like he wanted to be a part of something. The drawings proved he was here for a reason. This was his story too.

“It’s okay Ms. Harding,” Darnell assured. “You don’t know how to be a Mom… and I don’t know how to have a Mom.”

Mr. Harding and Big Jim sputtered into laughter.

“What? Ain’t it true?”

The adults smiled. There was a new feeling in the room, something sweet and light. It was a feeling Darnell could get used to.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Sara

The hallway outside the lab had been turned into a makeshift dorm room complete with metal bunk beds and lockers. Sara sat on her bunk, as commanded, folding sets of GenetiCorp issued clothes, pretending everything was okay.

She closed her eyes and attempted to find solace in deep meditation. Breathe in. Breathe out.

“Sara, we’ve got to get out of here,” James interrupted. It was a statement he had made at least once per hour since the meeting had ended.

He paced back and forth at maddening speed. He was working himself up into a panic.

“Shut up,” Sara said through gritted teeth as she neatly stacked the clothes in her bedside cubby.

“Look at this place! They have us in prison. Bunk beds and cubbyholes. Assigned clothing, for Christ sakes! Even the underwear is monogrammed! Oh God, I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

Sara thought her supervisor was being a bit of a pansy, but she couldn’t tell him that. She had to be reassuring.

“Try to relax. We can choose to suffer or we can go with the flow,” she advised.

It was true that the sterile hallway turned dorm room was a bit on the creepy side. Everything was black and white with aqua accents and a military-issued flair. In fact, everything was scarily precise down to the embroidered names on the white jumpsuits. Hers read: Dr. Sara Owens, in crisp aqua block lettering.

“Go with the flow? Are you nuts? This is nuts! Secret Team Apocalypse did all this while we were corralled in the auditorium,” he said pointing at the sleeping quarters.

The transformation was jaw dropping. The colors, the precision, the newly expanded fleet of security guards, it certainly was prison-like.

“James, leaving this place is going to be as easy as escaping prison,” she hissed. “Don’t you think they thought of that?”

Suspiciously, a GenetiCorp security guard walked by, uncomfortably close. Sara smiled and nodded.

“We can’t talk here,” Sara whispered. She grabbed her supervisor’s arm. She was tired of using all her energy to shut him up.

Sara dragged James away from the bunks and down the corridor. She made sure no one was watching and then pulled him into the women’s bathroom.

“What the hell? Why here?” he protested.

“Because as far as I can tell there are only three other women left at GenetiCorp. The odds are pretty good that we have privacy.”

To be safe she checked under each stall and turned on the tap to cover their voices. Her superior’s constant paranoid babbling was a safety concern.

“Okay, go ahead. Say whatever it is you’ve been dying to say,” she prompted.

“It’s hot in here. Are you hot?” He tugged at his collar.

Sara had found James’ anxious tendencies a tad endearing in the normal world. Now, it was plain annoying.

“Spit it out, James.”

“Out lives could be in danger!”

“Shhh.” Sara stressed with her eyebrows that they needed to watch their volume. “I’m sure they are.”

“You don’t care? We’re in danger and you’re sitting around folding laundry and doing crossword puzzles.”

“Yes, I’m acting relaxed and I strongly suggest you take that approach too,” she asserted.

“But the situation is fundamentally psychotic. Our families are likely dead… and our friends too… the entire city of Boston…  Did you see those pictures?”

“Exactly. Any group of people that can pull off a mass genocide in the name of science and then hold a staff meeting about it is indeed very dangerous.”

“What I can’t figure out is how they got the electromagnetic pulse machine to be strong enough to kill. I mean I’ve read research about underwater military experiments with electromagnetism that killed whales but…”

“It doesn’t matter how they did it James. It’s that they did it.”

“They used our research for evil just like the military did with Long Range Acoustic Devices! They are controlling people. Hurting them. Predicting who will live and controlling who will die. That’s pathological. They’re probably going to kill us, too.”

Sara had already come to this conclusion. “That may be so, but relaxing and going with the flow is the only solution. Dr. Shin said those of us who were called in early on Monday were chosen. That means the psychopath still has a use for us. And that means he isn’t thinking about killing us yet. We’re safe for now.”

“What do you mean? We aren’t safe here. Getting out of here means freedom. We need to distance ourselves from danger.”

“We don’t know what’s out there. We don’t even know who our true enemy is,” Sara clarified.

“Dr. Shin is the enemy, we never would have used science to destroy—”

“— Whether or not we intended to, we helped wipe out the population, James. Our research highlighted genetically superior humans, setting the stage for genocide. The truth is that we are guilty of crimes against humanity.”

“But we didn’t mean to…”

“The world won’t see it that way. If we leave, we will be the enemy. To the world, or whatever is left of it, we are the evil scientists. We need a lot more time and a lot more planning before putting distance between ourselves and GenetiCorp.”

“I hadn’t thought of that…”

James sank down to the cold white bathroom tile. He hung his head in his hands, using the sleeves of his shirt to wipe away tears as they came.

“We’re partially responsible. There’s no other way to look at it,” Sara said with finality.

She swallowed hard. Some vomit washed up into her throat. Her stomach had been off since the staff meeting. She doubted it would ever return to normal.

“Now, we need to go back to our bunks so that no one notices. Can you please try to play it cool?”

James nodded.

In a weird role reversal, she was giving him orders now. “Collect as much information as you can about the state of the world outside as well as the current workings inside Project Aquarius. I need you in research mode. Can you do that for me? Gather information. It’s our only hope.”