The Academy: Book 2 (40 page)

“When we first looked out the windows at the Tropics, we thought that we were outside. When you’re outside, you can only see so much earth at one time. At a point, things just drop off the horizon, due to the curve of the earth—this point is around twenty-seven miles from where a person is standing. So…”

Suddenly understanding, Asa interrupted, “The horizon is different because there is no curve. The whole thing is flat. The designers of this place didn’t think to make the arena curve with the earth.”

Boom
Boom nodded. With his recent weight loss, he appeared to be suffering from an acute illness. “Exactly.”

They moved on and no one spoke for a while. There were the sounds of their shoes on moist dirt, the trickling of water beside them, and a symphony of animal noises from the surrounding jungles. They passed one of the giant, buffalo like animals that Asa had seen out the windows of the Home Base. It was standing on the other side of the river (which was being supplemented by adjacent streams and was growing much wide
r as they traveled on), and was eating without noticing the Sharks. Mosquitos circled it, and it whipped at them with a short tail. Its feathers were beautiful: Metallic green, yellow, purple, blue, orange, and red. It’s feet made deep imprints in the dirt on the shore opposite Asa. The animal was licking moss off of a boulder with a purple tongue as large as Asa’s foot.

That thing probably has to eat all day,
thought Asa, appreciating the animal’s size. It looked comfortably over one ton.

Then, remembering the carcass of the same species that he had seen during his first few moments in the Tropics, he felt cold. The animal had been just as big as this one, maybe even bigger, and had been taken down by a predator.
Whatever killed that thing is lurking in this arena.

A dragonfly zoomed over Asa’s head and he was shocked to see that the wings were each three feet long. Boom
Boom saw Asa looking at this creature and patted him on the back. “In prehistoric times,” Mike said, “animals were much bigger. There are dragonflies with bigger wingspans than this one in the fossil record. A lot of people think that the oxygen concentration in the air was much higher back then; they think that’s why the brontosaurus, and T-rex were able to get so large. With more oxygen, they had more fuel to grow. Do you know what else oxygen is good for?”

Asa shook his head.

An evil gleam danced in Boom Boom’s eyes and for a moment, he didn’t look tired or malnourished. “Oxygen is good for explosions.” A sick smile played on Boom Boom’s lips, and Asa thought about how the U.S. courts had given the human he was talking to the death sentence for blowing up a bank.

As they moved, Asa’s hunger took hold of his stomach, gripping it with a nauseating force, begging him to eat. At one point, Roxanne bent over a fallen tree and dry heaved until a spew of lime-green bile spilled into the dirt. She didn’t comment on this, but just stood and kept on moving at a slightly slower pace. Asa looked up at the Base they were approaching and thought
,
we’re not going to make it without food.

A few miles later they could hear the roar of a waterfall, and the river that the Sharks were following suddenly dropped straight down into a vast lake. They crested a hill and took in the view.

The water was moving frantically towards the one hundred foot drop off on their right, and before them was a massive body of blue water. More impressive than the water were the animals that flanked the shores.

“Triceratops,” Boom
Boom said, and Asa thought,
he knows a lot about dinosaurs.

The creatures were lined along the water, many of them with their heads down so that they could lap
up a drink. Some stood so that the slow gentle waves came up to their knees, which were comparable to elephant limbs. The animals were like reptilian hippos, with green-brown scales that blended with their surroundings and three huge horns protruding from their skulls for defensive purposes.

When A
sa heard about the Task, he had been scared of zombies, or genetically altered animals, but he had never thought of dinosaurs. He should have guessed, though. The extinction of dinosaurs was only permanent as long as genetic technology wasn’t able to resurrect them. Asa felt his wings, folded up beside his spine.
Obviously, the Academy has the technology.

The Sharks
stood watching for some time. It filled Asa with wonder to see such large and graceful creatures move over land. Near the tree line he saw a mother dinosaur standing guard over her young child as it chomped on foliage from a small bush.

Asa thought of what Jen had said yesterday, about the pterodactyls and pterosaurs being able to land on the ground atop the sharp incline of dirt that housed a river.
Why then, are they not able to come and attack us, as we stand adjacent to this huge waterfall? We are high above the ground and the lake below.
Asa did not know the answer to this. Perhaps the sensors along the elevated river weren’t communicating with the flying creatures’ neckbands properly.

“Let’s move,” Bruce said impatiently. He looked as pale as the dead, and Asa thought that he would collapse again soon.

“You can go,” Mike told him, “but I’m staying up here. I don’t want to get eaten. We should cross the river and walk along the opposite bank, as soon as that one is done eating.”

“Triceratops are herbivores, they’re not going to eat us,” Bruce said.

“I’m not talking about the triceratops,” Mike responded, pointing out into the water. “Look. There, you see it? It’s moving in from the center towards the bank.”

“An alligator? What are alligators going to do?” Bruce asked.

Asa tended to agree. He saw the creature that Mike was pointing to, but wasn’t worried about it. The alligator moved through the water, only its eyes visible. It was hard to see from so high up.
If it tries to attack, we are much faster than it.

“That isn’t an alligator
. I think we’re looking at spinosaurus,” Boom Boom said.

Asa and the rest of the Sharks watched mesmerized as the
beach ball sized eyeballs moved through the water towards the unsuspecting triceratops. Each triceratops weighed more than a school bus. He was about to ask what a spinosaurus was when the animal struck.

The eyes moved
forward at a blurring speed. At the last moment the triceratops yelped in surprise. It wasn’t nearly fast enough.

For just a second, Asa saw the top half portion of the
spinosaurus’s body. Just seeing a creature of such size and power was fear evoking. Its mouth was big enough that Asa believed it could comfortably fit the entire Sharks team inside. It had a shape similar to the tyrannosauruses that Asa had seen in movies, except it was much larger than he had ever seen a t-rex depicted. The creature latched onto the triceratops with claws longer than broom handles a set of massive teeth. Blood ran from the triceratops’s heavy body into the water and it continued to squeal. The spinosaurus drug the triceratops out into open water with such speed that Asa believed the creature could have taken two triceratopses at a time. When the screaming, yelping triceratops was in the center of the lake, the spinosaurus pulled it under. A circle of red blood flowed to the surface, but the Sharks didn’t see either animal come back up again.

“Spinosaurus is the biggest predator to ever walk the earth,” Mike whispered. “Much bigger than
the t-rex.”

“Let’s hope we don’t run into one,” said Gabby. People had been taking turns carrying her, and she was now on Lilly Bloodroot’s back, her bandaged stump now soaked with blood.

“Let’s cross to the other side,” said Bruce; his voice was hoarse and his eyes bloodshot.

Time dragged and no matter how far they walked, the next Base never seemed to appear any bigger to Asa. In his hungry delirium, his thoughts turned to the outside world, and to history. He had once read a letter written by George Washington that was wr
itten as he reflected about an upcoming battle with the British. The quote had moved Asa, and he had unintentionally committed it to memory from reading it over and over again. Washington had written: “The reflection upon my situation, and that of this army, produces many an uneasy hour, when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in, on a thousand accounts; fewer still will believe, if any disaster happens to these lines, from what cause it flows.”  Thinking of the outside world, and of the non-mutated humans caring for those inflicted by the Wolf Flu, Asa could relate with General Washington. Few knew the despair he felt. Few knew the Academy existed, and few would ever know if he died here in this underground arena. He looked at Gabby, her bloody stump, and the pale faces of his fellow teammates. He looked at the distance he still had to travel, and at the surrounding jungle. Even though his teammates surrounded him, he felt incredibly alone.

The difference between Washington and I is that he was engaged in
cause of his own choosing. I was kidnapped. I was brought here by force, and am here so that I might be trained to murder and help murder for the worst organization in the history of mankind.

Asa was beginning to become emotional with these thoughts, but he didn’t share his feelings with his teammates. They were too hungry to bother them with such things.
Asa suspected Bruce had lost another ten pounds this morning.

Keeping his thoughts to himself, Asa thought,
they can’t break me. I won’t work for them. I’m going to remain mentally intact, and leave this organization at the first opportunity. I am not a monster.

When he thought this, he was
still ignorant as to what the Task’s food source was. He also underestimated his own will to survive and the immoral things he would be willing to do to compete in the Task.

Two hours after they saw the spinosaurus drag the triceratops into the lake, Bruce halted. They were beside a steep emba
nkment that led down into a creek. “Roxanne,” Bruce whispered. “There’s someone down there, by the stream.” Everyone paused. Bruce’s eyes were red and his hair stood up in twisted, sweaty spikes. He looked half-crazy. Asa used his eyes to try to see into the deep brush, but didn’t detect a body.

Bruce crouched down, and closed his eyes. “It’s a male, Roxy.
An old guy. He doesn’t have wings.”

He is losing it!
Asa thought. He and Jen Dean shared a look in which she communicated that she agreed.

But still, Asa was frightened. Roxanne stared into the creek. It was dark, with trees bunched close together and almost no break in the foliage above. “Do
es he have a weapon?” Roxanne asked Bruce.

Bruce kept his eyes shut tightly. “I can’t see things like that Roxy, you know that.”

It was then that Asa suspected that perhaps Bruce had an ability that he was unaware of.
But so do I.
He was upset with himself for not thinking of his echolocation sooner, and let out a cry.

Asa shut his eyes and let the echoed image fill his mind. He was given a vivid three hundred sixty degree image of his surroundings. He saw a praying mantis high above him in the trees. He could see the twigs and bits of bark that layered the ground, and ants crawling over a fallen tree limb. And, also, far below him, there was a body. Bruce was correct; there was a male in the brush. The person was slightly overweight, with soft tissues, and weak knees.
It was the kind of body that was used to sitting in front of a computer all day. He was nearly naked, wearing a kind of savage dress made of thick jungle leaves and vines. He wore glasses. Asa’s echolocation didn’t allow him to see color, but he could see sweat gathering over the guys face.

“He’s old.” Asa opened his eyes.

“You can see him?” Roxanne asked. She had been tugging at her hair so that it was teased a few inches above her head, creating a mane of dirty blonde hair. Her green-gold eyes looked like a lion’s eyes. There was a fierceness in them—driven by the hunger—that Asa had never seen before. “How can you see him?”

“Mutation,” Asa said simply. “I have echolocation, like a bat. It’s a kind of radar.”

“Let’s hide,” Roxanne whispered. “Palmer, you’re going into the jungle, and don’t come out without that old guy.”