The Day The Sun Fell From The Sky (6 page)

Passage

“Myc!” Someone is whispering fiercely into my ear.

I open my eyes to see
Zeb, who has apparently volunteered himself for the program.

“What?” I gasp.

“Shh.” He shushes me because there is every chance that we are being recorded somewhere.

“We don’t have a lot of time.” He continues to whisper into my ear. “I have just one question to ask you. Are you willing to die?”

Too shocked for words, I just stare at him.

“Are you willing to die so that you can live?” He asks me.

“Yes.” I reply. My subconscious is comprehending more than what I am aware of and I start to run on autopilot.

“Good.” He says, relieved. “Now, I need you to slap me.”

Again I can only stare at him.

“For the cameras.” He prods me.

I lash out at him wordlessly and I hit him harder than I had meant to.

“What the hell?” He yelps loudly, waking some of the other test subjects.

“What?” Some of them ask groggily.

“She hit me!” He protests.

I am supposed to be feigning anger but I can barely keep my eyes open.

“What’s going on?” Someone asks, opening the door.

“She hit me.” Zeb repeats, feigning frustration.

“Come here.” The night supervisor gestures to me.

I stand up on shaking legs and I follow them out of the recovery room.

“The rest of you stay put.” Says the supervisor.

After we get out of the recovery room, I am taken into an empty office. I think I’m dreaming but I swear that the doctor who is on the graveyard shift is Hash. He can see that I recognize him, even though I’m too weak to actually say anything to him. He just smiles at me without speaking.

“Did they buy it?” Asks another vaguely familiar voice.

“Yes but we need to be quick.” Says Zeb.

“Here, let me put this on you.”
Iv is holding a tube of some sort of paste.

What is going on?

“I’m really sorry, Myc, but we’re going to have to kill you.” Hash tells me.

Then he injects me with a substance that causes my whole body to go numb. I can feel the absence take over my body and then sleep takes me away.

*_*

I am gasping for breath. I feel like I’ve been held under water for a long time and am resurfacing to breathe for the first time.

“Where am I?” I ask loudly, sitting up too quickly.

“
Myc, calm down.” Says Iv as she pushes me back. “You have to relax or the medication might cause you to have a heart attack.”

“What happened?” I ask them.

After my vision clears, I can see that I am in the back of a small van. Iv is hovering over me, trying to straighten my top which has been creased by my sudden upward motion, and Hash is in the front passenger seat. There is another person driving that I don’t recognize.

“We got you out.” Says
Iv.

“Where’s
Zeb?” I suddenly remember.

“He’s going to cover for us.” Hash tells me.

“That’s horrible.” I reply. “They’re going to kill him.”

“They might not.” Hash laughs. “Have you noticed how good he is at talking himself out of situations?”

“How can you laugh at a time like this?” I say with disbelief.

“Don’t you want to know what happened?”
Iv reminds me.

“Yes.” I nod.

“Pav shot you.” She tells me.

“Who’s
Pav?” I ask her.

“The driver.” Says Hash.

“When Hash told you that we were going to kill you, he wasn’t kidding.” Iv explains.

“What?” I ask them, trying to comprehend the impossible.

“You were clinically dead.” Hash informs me. “We got Iv to add some makeup for realism but makeup can’t fool machines and monitors. Only drugs can do that.”

I remember the drug –
whatever it was that he shot into my arm.

“What did you give me?” I ask him.

“A very advanced depressant. It repressed all your systems enough to fool the machines but not enough to actually kill you.” He explains.

“You were in the in-between.”
Iv tells me.

“That was so dangerous.” I tell them, angrily. There was every chance that the drug might have worked too well and actually killed me.

“Consider the alternative.” Says Pav.

He was right in that had I stayed at the prison, I would have died from the final phases of that program and there would have been no way to come back from that.

“Hey be nice.” Iv protests on my behalf.

“People are dying. I’m sorry if I don’t have the time to be
nice
.” He replies.

“Don’t mind him.” She tells me.

“So, you put makeup on me. Pav provides the gunshot sound for everyone to hear. Zeb takes the blame. And once we’re out, Hash injects me with some sort of a stimulant to bring me back to life again.” I tell them what I understand of their elaborate operation.

“Yes, that sounds about right.” Hash laughs.

“Can you do me a favour?” I turn to Iv. “Can you slap that crazy doctor across the face for me?”

“Come on Myc. The important thing is that you survived and you’re alive now and out of that prison because of what we did.” She tries to reason with me.

“What about Zeb?” I ask her. “How is he going to explain what he did with my body when there isn’t one?”

“We gave him your DNA mixed in with ash
and bone. He’s going to start a bonfire.” Hash tells me.

“Did any of you think that I might have actually wanted to know about the plan before it was implemented?” I ask them loudly. “Sur
e, we don’t need to consult Myc – she’s halfway to insanity anyway.”

“I told you she wouldn’t take it very well.” Says
Iv.

I should be grateful that my friends have somehow managed to find me at all, let alone come up with a way to get me out in what I assume to have been a very short amount of time. But in my current frame of mind, I can’t. At least not until I’ve calmed down a bit.

Iv had dressed me when I was “dead” and it’s taking some getting used to. I haven’t worn clothes at all since my capture and I’ve become sensitive to touch. It actually feels weird to be wearing something.

“Who is he anyway?” I point to the driver.

“He was a truck driver for the army.” She tells me.

“I’m still a soldier.” He calls out from the front.

“But you’re not going to do what the army tells you to anymore.” She reminds him. “He’s on our side now.”

“How can you tell?” I ask her.

“Because he was the one that got me and Hash out.” She replies.

Resistance

“He saved our lives.” Hash confirms.

“How?” I ask him.

“When the selection process got disbanded, they decided to cut down on extraneous resources (like us). Pav was supposed to drive us to some place out of the way and shoot us.” Iv explains.

“Except he didn’t.” I nod with understanding.

“No, he was about to but Hash talked him out of it.” Iv tells me.

“No, I just gave him the excuse he was looking for. He didn’t really want to do it in the first place.” Hash affirms.

“How long ago was that?” I ask them.

“About a month.”
Iv tells me. “It was about two weeks after you were moved from the base.”

Two weeks and a month. This means that I was incarcerated for about six weeks. Since I had completely lost track of time, it felt much longer than that to me.

“We wanted to get to you earlier but we didn’t know which institution you were put in.” Iv tries to explain.

“How did you get in touch with
Zeb?” I ask her.

“Actually, he reached out to us.” Hash tells me. “He’s been doing the crosswords at the back of newspapers. We were trying to salvage old papers for information and we found the crosswords. They all look incomplete – like there are entries
missing in them. The missing letters can be rearranged like an anagram.”

“He was sending out code from inside the prison?” I exclaim in awe.

“Yes. Based on what he was giving us in the crosswords, we knew that something was being done at Hvin Prison. We just didn’t know the specifics of what it was. We started monitoring the traffic going in and out of the prison. We noticed a young girl who made regular trips to visit someone and Iv befriended her.” He explains.

Iv
continues. “I gave her one of the crosswords and I asked her to get her friend in the prison to show it around to everyone. Then she helped us to arrange a meeting where I pretended to be Zeb’s wife and I visited him. We learned that he had stopped seeing you and based on what he knew about the program you were in, we guessed that you had been taken to the research facility.”

“Why did you make him stay behind?” I ask, feeling depressed.

“We didn’t.” Hash tries to explain.

“He wanted to.”
Iv affirms. “We were all for knocking out one of the researchers (Hash has tranquilizers) and pinning it on them but Zeb said that that was too risky. He said that it had to look like there was something personal going on between you and him that has nothing to do with the system or the program that you were in.”

H
e was right. Of course he was. He’s always right. He knew exactly what was going to happen to him and he did it anyway.

“The girl that you befriended.” I turn to
Iv. “Was her boyfriend called Gav?”

“Yes.” She replies, startled. “You knew him?”

“He was Zeb’s cellmate.” I tell them.

I had to smile. The girl that I had been feeling sorry for because she had an
arse for a boyfriend was actually instrumental in saving my life.

“Where are we going?” I ask them.

“Headquarters.” Hash replies.

“Of?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“Our Resistance.” Iv smiles.

Why
am I not surprised?

*_*

“This is the HQ of your Resistance?” I look around me in disbelief. We are standing in the middle of the morgue under the Hvin Imperial Hospital.

“People don’t come down here if they can help it.”
Iv shrugs.

“You don’t find it slightly disturbing that you’re
workspace has dead bodies in it?” I ask her.

“How is that any different to what we were having to work with before?” She asks me.

She has a point. We’d all been surrounded by death since the army began their crusade against our “kind”. As though there was a way in which you could easily differentiate a Knax from a Venry. We don’t actually look that different from one another. I almost never know for certain until somebody starts speaking in Knav to me because although a Venry might know or understand Knav, they will always refuse to speak it.

“So how do you guys plan o
n bringing down the Hven Army from in here?” I ask them.

“We’re obviously not going to be able to do that.” She laughs.

“We’re only a few tanks short of being a serious challenge to them.” Hash agrees with his usual sarcasm.

“Then what is it that you do?” I reply. “How are you resisting?”

“Well, we’re not surrendering. That’s for sure.” Says Iv.

“Th
is was never about taking back Hven from the Knax for the Venry, was it?” I ask them.

“When did you believe that that was the real reason we were being hunted?” Hash laughs.

“You’re right. I never did believe it.” I reply, trying to keep my voice calm.

“Hash, I think we should take a break.”
Iv is worried.

“No, she needs to hear it.” He shakes his head. “She needs to get it out.”

“So what’s the real reason we’re being hunted?” I ask them.

“The guys in power have enemies. Real enemies. They want to get rid of them but that would draw attention to themselves.” Hash explains

“They destroyed us so that they could take out their rivals and hide those murders?” I ask them with suppressed rage.

“This is what happens when you have too much power in your hands. You get very paranoid.” Hash tells me.

“I went through absolute hell for nothing. No reason! We weren’t even the real targets!” I am shouting now because I’m not able to hold it back any longer.

“
Myc, you died today. Think about what that means. You can’t go on raging like this. You will overload your system.” Iv is trying to calm me down.

“Right now, I bloody damn well want to overload my system.” I tell her.

“Then you were right. We should have left you back there and saved the male. He at least would have made a brilliant strategist. You’re just annoying.” Says Pav.