The Neo-Spartans: Altered World (32 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Grisner made his way to the upper floor where Grant Hughes was being kept. Lower level Social Defense Force officers recognized him and snapped to as he brusquely passed by. Beeping machinery beckoned him into a room where a harried looking Dr. Mallory glanced up at him and wilted. A legion of nurses and attendants monitored the monitors.

“Oh God, what now?”

“What are you talking about, doc?” smiled Grisner. “You’re the one who’s always bringing me bad news.”

“The boys will be recovered in forty-eight hours. Everything can proceed.”

“How is he? Can he talk?” asked Grisner.

“He can barely breathe.”

“Barely is enough. Clear the room.”

“We can’t clear the room,” Mallory scoffed. “Everyone here is essential.”

“Not for the next five minutes they’re not. By the way, you’re going to have to get by with one less boy.”

“That’s not the plan,” huffed Mallory.

“It just came down from upstairs,” smiled Grisner. “Now, out!” he barked.

Mallory quickly gathered up his team, apologizing as he ran through a litany of epithets for Grisner’s erratic behavior. Grisner waited until he was alone with the richest man in the world. A sleeping man who couldn’t stand or breathe on his own, but all Grisner needed him to do was apply a signature, and Grisner was there to help, after all.

Grisner was leaning over him trying to separate the human being from the sea of pipes and cables that kept him alive. When that wheezing wired up corpse of a human being turned his head toward Grisner and croaked at him, Grisner missed a few heart beats. Hughes used a finger to gesture at the respirator. Grisner loosened it so that Hughes could speak.

“Grisner… solid as a rock,” he rasped.

“Yessir, that’s me.”

“I don’t think I’ll last much longer,” pleaded Hughes.

“We’re doing our best… but nobody is God here. Things could go south. It’d be a shame if all that you’ve built weren’t properly looked after.”

Grant Hughes stared at him.

“You know how much I’ve always believed in what you stand for, all the good work you’ve done,” Grisner continued.

              “It’s not my work. I’m an heir. I carry on. Or not.” The machines to which he was attached began to beep and quiver. His system was headed for a crash.

“No, Mr. Hughes, it will work out,” Grisner said quickly.

“I’d always hoped for a son…”

“Your vision can continue. All you need is someone to make sure it does. Someone solid as a rock.” He smiled as benignly as he could as he produced a high-tech tablet and a sensor pen that would put a permanent digital signature on any document. Grisner could hear Mallory’s team gathering just outside the door and readying to enter.

Grisner could see Hughes fading. He reattached the respirator. He took up the pen and signed the opened document, and presented the tablet to Hughes, but Hughes was falling asleep fast despite the cacophony created by the monitors.

“Sign, right here,” Grisner whispered hoarsely.

Hughes looked dazed but curious.

“It says I’m to carry on your work as you… in case of the worst.” He shoved the pen into Hughes’s frail hands. His fingers failed to wrap around the device. Mallory’s team pushed open the door.

“Thirty seconds!” shouted Grisner. As the team paused, Grisner helped Hughes wrap his bony digits around the pen and guided his hand into a signature. “You won’t regret this, Mr. Hughes. It will right many wrongs. Enter.”

Mallory and team raced into the room and assembled around the crashing Hughes. Grisner stepped aside and let them have at it.

“He’s all yours,” he said as he pushed off, electronic document in hand.

* * *

Quinn looked out the window of Grisner’s private lair. It was night now, so only a little of the city was lit up and it was depressing. It was a struggle to overcome the visual evidence of human failure represented by the lifeless city, but she also struggled to get a grip on whether or not she’d achieved anything. She’d found Gabriel, and locating him and seeing how he’d changed was the only thing keeping her going at this point. His cool in the face of the insults designed to make him crack had made her proud. Seeing him wrestled away had broken her heart… and she was amazed by the change that had taken place within herself. When she’d embarked on this journey she’d been out to save Gabriel, save face, and to prove to Kilbert and the Elders that putting faith in her would be justified. Somehow the journey had transformed that motive into a longing to understand her family. Seeing Gabriel had heightened that. Of all the times and places to be looking for answers about her parents and family dynamic this was probably the most ridiculous. Her reverie was broken when the door to Grisner’s lodgings hissed open and the man himself filled the frame. Grisner had the strangest look on his face. He stood there for moment savoring her bewilderment, stepped aside and shoved Gabriel into the room. Quinn’s face lit up but then sagged, knowing full well the presence of her brother didn’t mean freedom; it meant another malevolent ploy to torture the McKenna family members.

He approached her slowly and held up the tablet with the electronic document he’d created with Grant Hughes. “Do you see this?” he asked rhetorically. “Do you know what it makes me?”

“A very powerful man?” she kept shifting her gaze from Grisner to Gabriel.

He took pleasure in slowly rolling out his next word. “What this agreement effectively does is make me Grant Hughes’s heir. All that he owns and controls has been passed on… to me.”

“What does this have we to do with me and Gabriel?” asked Quinn.

Grisner gestured both of them to sit. Reluctant, but anxious to get on with whatever he had in mind, she sat. Grisner pointed Gabriel to an armchair across from his sister.

“I know you think you’re special,” said Grisner. “I know you think you’re the pure kind. And that only you will save the planet. It’s the kind of sanctimony Kilbert would heap on you. I admit there is some truth in it. I will also admit that the philosophy chosen to be followed by the Eugenics may have been a mistake.”

Quinn was on the alert, waiting for the trap to be revealed.

“But did it ever occur to you that for some of us it wasn’t a choice?”

“What do I have to do with that?” asked Quinn.

“You, my dear, are offered the chance to correct a personal and social wrong. I know justice doesn’t always exist, but a proximity of it might, depending on you. You have the ability to bring back the years I wasted, letting my life drift into the role of something I never meant to be.”

Grisner rose and poured himself a drink.

“The Neo-Spartans ostracized me. It wasn’t right. I didn’t do anything wrong. Your dad and I were friends. I didn’t rat him out when he was bringing wheat grass juice to school. I didn’t rat him out when he taught me how to hit toxin points. We were best friends. I accepted this knowledge. And then… the only thing I did wrong was fall in love with Rose, but do you think somebody allowed this to happen? No! I was discarded like some lower life form.”

Quinn listened breathlessly to this strange confession. She looked at Gabriel, and he was equally stunned by the revelation about his parents.

“You still wonder what you have to do with all that.” He smiled at her naiveté. “You see, Quinn, you’re very much like your mother, not just in appearance but in mind. You’re different. The myopic Neo-Spartan brainwashing hasn’t affected you. I can see Rose’s free spirit in you. You believe in co-existence, you believe in fixing the world somehow. Why else go to all that trouble to clean up the Vaqueros? Tyra told us everything. To you there’s a future there. Am I right?”

Quinn’s blood drained from her face. He was right. The deep secret, she couldn’t even admit to herself, he had managed to read it loud and clear.

“Co-mingling. You’re all for it, and that’s what I’m suggesting. That’s my offer.”

Quinn could anticipate his next words, but chose not to.

              “Be my partner here. I’ve been living your way. We’ll let Grant Hughes die. It’s nature after all, and who are we to interfere with nature? I’ll take the leadership and with you as my partner we have power to change this world and tell people that we can co-exist. If you agree to this, I won’t touch your community. Your brother here will live like a prince. Hell, I’ll make a real man out of him, teach him how to be a leader.”

Quinn and Gabriel squirmed as Grisner laid out this disturbingly sick plan.

“You’ll be doing a great service to both Eugenics and Neo-Spartans. You accept and I’ll let the ten kids go. No organs harvested. They’ll live. We’ll all begin to live again,” he continued, “So, now is your chance to live up to what you believe. To live up to your duty.”

“What are you talking about?” gasped Quinn.

He moved across to her, took her chin in his hands. “You’re going to take the place of your mother. I’m going to get what was denied to me so long ago. And the two of us are going to make a better human race.”

“You want her to do what…?” Gabriel almost gagged, but Grisner ignored him.

“Marry me. Imagine what it would mean.”

As clinically as she could, Quinn diagnosed what he was saying. She would be sacrificing herself in a major way, but maybe this was the way to peace and a future. For a moment the heroic actions that got her father killed coursed through her. She tried to imagine it… but the revulsion suddenly pushed the whole idea away.

She shot to her feet despite herself. She looked at Gabriel and could see the confusion racing through every muscle of his face, vacillating between the desire to live, to be spared, and the repulsion he experienced at the thought of his sister marrying this beast. Her fast-beating heart was almost choking her, she was singlehandedly going to seal the fate of her brother and all the boys that were trapped in the Citadel. What would her father do? The thoughts raced around her head but no answer was made available. What would her mother do? And it hit her, Rose had said “no.” True, Kilbert had played the decisive adviser, but Rose had known, even before this man became the ominous threat to her community, that he was not the right choice.

“No,” she said. “I won’t take my mother’s place. You’re obsessed with her. That has nothing to do with me. And the rest of it is empty promises.”

“No!” It almost came out as a shout and Grisner reined in some of the rage that had so spontaneously escaped. “You call my offer to spare your brother an empty promise? Hear that, my boy?” He turned his snaky charm toward Gabriel, who sank deeper into his chair.
“S
he is personally condemning you and the rest of the boys to death. The almighty Quinn! She must be vying for that Neo-Spartan leadership after all. What road to power isn’t littered with corpses, after all?” His sardonic laugh made Gabriel shudder.

“Stop!” Quinn struggled to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“Reconsidering?” Grisner whipped his head around to face Quinn.

S
he shook her head silently but firmly.

“Then look him in the eye and tell him that your high-minded precious independence and pride will send him and those boys to a horrible death. Tell him how you refuse to make a little personal sacrifice so he could live. Look at the boy, he has barely embarked on this wonderful journey called life. He hasn’t even kissed a girl.” Grisner turned to Gabriel again with the pretend sympathy of the truly uncaring. But his words, as insincere as they were, still lodged their hooks into Gabriel. His sagging, pleading face turned to Quinn and when he saw her resoluteness, the glint of sibling challenge flickered in his eyes. Quinn had to look away. Grisner savored the moment that passed between sister and brother.

“You’re going to ignore your father’s promise to keep him safe?”

“How do you know this?” Quinn flared up.

“People face death differently. Your father blabbed a lot about how his tough heroic daughter would avenge him, continue his legacy and save everybody and everything. Too melodramatic if you ask me. But I guess he was wrong.”

“My father would never want us to compromise and form unions with…”

“What? Impure, human material like the Eugenics?” He held her gaze for a moment, and turned to Gabriel. “Lies, all lies, my boy. She doesn’t believe one single word of that crap.” Grisner directed his attention to Quinn to drive in the final lance of victory. “Go ahead, tell him you refuse to accept my proposal because you’re in love with another Eugenic. Tell him that just like your mother you’ll rip apart the Neo-Spartan community because both of you delight too much in humiliating John Grisner.”

G
abriel stared in disbelief at his sister. Rage, betrayal, pain—it all mixed in a sticky poisonous concoction that suffocated him and made him hate his family. Quinn saw he was drowning and threw all caution away.

“Leave my parents out of this. My mother was young and naïve and didn’t see the sleeping monster in you. Kilbert was right to tell Rose to stay away from you. And my father was right to try to stop you. You’re a dangerous disease, you’re a disservice to your own kind. You never had Rose and you’ll never have her.”