Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) (28 page)

During the forty minute break before my final scenario, in fact my final
anything,
my logger chirps. Belgrade’s face appears as soon as I lift it to check the screen.

“Report to my office in the reaction center before entering the briefing room,” he says, his image disappearing before I can reply.

Everything hurts. Sometime after I saw Strega, Respite stopped helping. They still give me vials, and I still drink the contents, but nothing dulls the throbbing ache in my thigh or the fiery sizzling pain that randomly shoots through my temple. Nothing I ingest, be it food, water, or medicine, helps the fatigue. If I were a car, I’d say I was running on fumes. I don’t know what exactly I’m running on now. I don’t even feel afraid anymore. Disposal? Not a ripple of fear, not even when I picture Ritter standing on a slivving plate, disappearing before my eyes.

I wonder if
this
is the effect of the medicines I’ve taken today. Instead of numbing my body, they’ve numbed my mind, my feelings. I wonder whether it will wear off.

Belgrade doesn’t even scare me anymore. I sit across from him in his office, trying to figure out why I was afraid of him. I know there’s a reason. He studies my face for a long moment and then pushes something across his desk.

“The final scenario is the most important for your factors. It holds twice the weight of any other exercise you’ve completed. You’ll wear this earpiece in the reaction center, and you’ll follow my commands. Is that clear?”

I nod.

“You will follow any command given, no matter what you may think or feel to the contrary. Is that understood?”

I nod again. “Yeah. Sure. You say it, I do it.”

“That’s right,” he nods. “This exercise is cooperative. Your fellow candidates are your friends, not your enemies. Four of you must make it to the rear meld, or you all fail the exercise. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” I say, wondering why he keeps asking me that. His instructions are simple. He says it, I do it. Four survivors to the rear meld is a win. Anything else is a loss.

“You follow my instructions,” he says again, rising.

“Okay,” I agree, fitting the earpiece.

“It should be snug,” Belgrade suggests. “You shouldn’t feel it move at all.”

I twist my head from side to side, up and down. It doesn’t move. There are no wires that might cause it to be pulled out.

“Proceed into the hallway,” he says, “but stop before you get to the briefing room meld.”

I do as he asks, and suddenly his voice is in my ear, as clearly as if he were standing beside me.

“Do you hear my voice?” he asks.

Apparently it’s not just an earpiece but a microphone, because when I say yes, he tells me to enter the briefing room.

I don’t know what else there is to brief us on, but there are thirty of us altogether. I glance at each face in turn. I know them all, even if I don’t know all their names. I’ve seen them all, fought with them all before. A stillness drops over me.

“Krill.”

He looks at me but doesn’t speak. A smirk creeps across his face, and it feels like he’s laughing at me. Well, at least he has to work with me and not against me. That’s a plus.

The briefing room windows go black the way they always do when the scenario begins to set itself, and the room itself quakes as the landscape forms. It was unnerving the first few times, like being caught in an earthquake. I barely notice it now. I no longer have to hold the rail along the perimeter of the room to keep from falling down.

The sixty second countdown begins. The only sound in the room is the rustle of fingers flipping through the different camera views as we try to find what there is to be afraid of. Arrows? Paintballs? Rabid dogs? Tornadoes? Tidal waves? A blizzard with white out conditions?

But we see nothing. Everything on camera looks calm, serene. The landscape is natural…Pacific Northwest, as if we were leaving the proving grounds to board the slides to our keepings. A stab of longing hits me as the view shifts again and shows us that we are, in fact, about to exit the briefing room and step into our own quadrant. I can see the slide station outside the proving grounds and the various shops and function halls in the vicinity.

The meld whispers open and the candidates in the first row filter out cautiously. I always like to be near the middle so I can see what’s coming, surrounded on all sides by other people. Too close to the front or the back, and you’re open to ambush.  The baffling thing is that rather than fight for the middle, most people jostle to be anywhere else.

Belgrade is silent.

I’m baffled, and I’m not the only one. The night around us is utterly still. Serene. All of us creep steadily toward the south. We’re all familiar with the proving grounds and the slide stations immediately surrounding it. I’m not sure if any of us know the area any better than that, but we agree it’s best to walk in a line, staying close to the buildings, ducking down to crawl past large windows. The leader pauses at each meld and again at each street corner.

The night around us is inky dark. The streetlights seem weaker than they are in real life. Or maybe fear of what may lurk in the shadows makes it so.

There’s no telling how far the concrete pad is, but as instructed, our loggers are set to chirp every fifteen minutes, signaling the time elapsed in the two hour countdown for the scenario.

When there are obstacles, this is helpful. The positioning screen is also helpful, because with the changing landscapes, it’s impossible to tell where the pad is and all too easy to get turned around when you’re ducking arrows or paintballs.

Without warning, the leader drops. A darkness spreads under his body, pooling. This is no paintball. The paintballs don’t hold that much liquid.

Blood?

Dye, I decide. It has to be dye. No one has ended during a reaction center scenario before. The arrows are timed well enough to cause minor injury. They don’t kill. They don’t even maim. No one’s lost body parts.

I duck, searching the rooftops as the others scatter. A girl falls just as she’s stepping over the heap that was our leader.

“Break the glass behind you.”

Belgrade’s voice makes me jump. I do as he says. There was no sound to warn us. If these are bullets, the guns firing them must have silencers. There’s not even a whisper of sound like there is in the movies.

I assume I’m to step through the window I’ve just broken. Belgrade does not disagree.

“There’s a sleeper dart pistol under the counter,” he instructs.

I find it easily, checking to see that it’s loaded with darts. I glance at my logger. Twenty of us are still living. Four of us need to make it to the meld. Only four?  My heart races.

“Move to the window and locate the sniper. Consider where the shots came from,” he orders.  He’s not going to tell me where they are, though he must know.

After three minutes of silence, I begin to wonder if I’ll have to step back through the window to get a fresh angle. A flash of light gives away the sniper’s position, like a mirror catching the sun. Except it’s almost pitch black outside, so I don’t understand where the light came from. And it’s gone now. He’s a shadow among shadows.

The sleeper dart catches him somewhere. In the silence I hear the soft suggestion of a grunt, a faint thud.

“Continue,” Belgrade says.  He doesn’t tell me which direction.

I make my way past the leader and the girl, trying not to notice how the stains really do look like blood. How do the movies do it? Corn syrup?  I think that’s it. Corn syrup.

Maybe their eyes are sightless and staring because those are
their
orders from their facilitators.
If you are deemed a fatality, you must fully play the part.
That has to be it.

I can’t see anyone else. I can’t hear footsteps or quiet rustlings to suggest someone’s close.  Belgrade says nothing as I continue southward.

It feels like we’ve been in here forever, but my logger’s only chirped twice. I glance down at the screen. We’ve lost two more.  I didn’t see or hear them go down. I wish, suddenly, our loggers wouldn’t chirp the time. It makes us vulnerable.

It occurs to me that continuing directly south might be leading me into trouble, so at the next corner, I turn left. I don’t recognize any of the buildings now. I’ve never had reason to travel in this direction, past the proving grounds.

The slides.

I haven’t seen a single slide. Are they not running today? I shake my head, remembering that this is a scenario. We’re not really outside the proving grounds.
And that’s why they can’t really be dead. Ended.

I roll my eyes at myself for correcting even my own private thoughts.

“Duck!”

It’s not Belgrade’s voice, but I duck just the same. Good thing, too, because the meld behind me shatters. Krill fires up at the building across the street. I flinch and recoil in horror as a body crunches on the pavement.

I once saw one of those behind-the-scenes shows on television that demonstrated how the sound effects for movies are made. Knives stabbing through crisp heads of lettuce next to super sensitive microphones make a delicious crunching sound, for example. I think of this now as I blink at the unmoving body dressed all in black. Lettuce. Just a knife through a head of lettuce.

“Don’t look,” Krill says, dragging me past the fallen man.

If he hadn’t said that, I may not have. But now I do, and he has to fall back and push me ahead of him to get me to move at all. The man’s skull looks like a smashed jack-o-lantern at Halloween, with pulpy bits of his insides pluming out like a dirty halo. I think of Wilti, the woman who stepped in front of the slide. She had a halo, too.

I am obscenely fascinated by this but also repelled.

“Keep moving!” Krill hisses. “You’re going to get us both killed!”

“This is real,” I tell him. Somehow, we really
are
outside the proving grounds. We really are being fired upon.

People are really dying.

“It might be,” he mutters close to my ear, still dragging me.

I risk a glance at my logger. “Five. We’re down to five!” I hiss back, running on my own now. How did we lose so many so quickly?

There’s movement above us. I shove Krill behind me and fire at the roof across the way. This shadow goes down on the roof, sparing me the gruesome imagine of more brain matter on pavement.

Sleeper darts?  If this is real, why have they given us sleeper darts instead of bullets? Why are we ending while the enemy merely sleeps?

“Turn right at the corner,” Belgrade’s voice rings in my ear.

I drag Krill with me when he would have gone left.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you I’m terrible with directions,” he whispers, firing at another rooftop.

The sniper nearly tumbles off the roof the way his comrade had, but in the end only his weapon crashes to the pavement. I flinch and duck back against the building, afraid the impact will cause it to fire.  It doesn’t.

“Use the butt of your gun to break the window,” Belgrade says, having stopped me next to a closed up shop on a dark street with no lights.

The glass gives way loudly. Every sounds seems amplified now that I’ve decided this is real. Krill and I both cringe at the slightest sound, knowing we’re broadcasting our location.

“Go into the back,” Belgrade says. “Do you see the staircase to your left?”

I’m already heading there. At the bottom he tells me to go to the right and open the meld.

The meld leads to a long corridor that turns several times. Gradually, as we make our way through it, the dark bricks forming the walls and ceiling show increasing signs of wear until we’re stumbling over a rocky path littered with crumbled bricks. Soon we’re forced to crawl over the debris.

“Hurry, Keith. You’re being followed.”

I send Krill in ahead of me, knowing I’ll be slower.

The gash in my leg protests as I crawl faster, dragging it over the sharp edges of brick. A wetness spreads. I’ve torn open the liquid sutures. I can hear footsteps now, which means we’re losing ground. And someone else is gaining it.

“There’s another meld coming up, but it’s in the floor. Start digging.”

I squeeze in next to Krill and blindly toss bricks behind me. I can’t see a thing. He follows my lead. The light from my logger screen would help, but it would also bring them right to us.

We drop down the dark hole under the meld and find ourselves running up a long dirt ramp. Soon we’re on pavement again, and I think I can see the concrete pad and two shadows in the distance. Krill has fallen back to fire in the direction of our pursuers.

As I turn to find him, Krill’s left shoulder explodes. Something warm and wet sprays my face. As he falls, I fire behind him.

This man is on the street, not a rooftop. My dart catches his neck. He staggers. Drops.

“Go get his gun,” Belgrade orders.

I look down at Krill, caught by the gurgling sounds he’s making. It’s just like a war movie.  He’s pale, sweaty and shaking. His eyes find mine as I point my logger toward his face. They’re hazy, losing focus.  I drop to my knees beside him, setting the dart gun on the concrete and plastering my right hand against the gushing wound.