The Condemned (35 page)

     
‘Leci? Tell me you went back there to check on them...’

     
‘I didn’t want to go back there.’ Her voice was small,
meek and childish
.

     
‘I took off right away, hid until I was healed up and then I just set off looking. I never went back there again. I couldn’t. Everyone travels. I knew they’d have moved out already.’

    
He was looking at her in complete disbelief.

     
‘You spent a year looking for a group of men but never went back and checked the place you’d already seen them twice?’

    
Ok, fine, when he put it like that it did make her seem
kind of stupid. She pouted; he took that as her reply.

     
‘For fuck’s sake
,
Leci! Where is it?’

    
She didn’t understand how he could think it would be so simple, but
,
more so, she didn’t feel she could ever return to the place that held so much bad history for her. She shook her head stubbornly, refusing to tell him.

Amato shrugged and kicked the horse into motion, turning it in the direction that would lead them on the long journey back to the cabin.

     
‘Where are we going?’

     
‘Home.’

      ‘No, Amato,
I told you. I have to do this!’

     
‘If you have to do this Leci, and if I’m doing it with you, we do it right or we don’t bother at all. We start at the beginning or we just give in and go home. You
can
either tell me where we’re heading
,
or I’ll take us home. You don’t have another choice.’

    
Leci chewed on her lower lip, torn. The need for revenge had become almost an obsession but the fear of facing her past was just as strong. Could she abandon the quest to find Xavian’s killers just because she was scared of returning to the place he had died?

    
She sighed heavily and leaned back against Amato.

     
‘Coleville.’
She muttered
, defeated
.

    
It was one of the larger mining towns, several of which
existed and it was fairly well known.

    
Amato reached down and pulled a tattered sheet of paper from one of the pockets in the pack attached to the horse. It was a crudely drawn map and Leci stared at it in wide-eyed wonder. Maps were hard to get hold of, kind of rare and most of the time even if you did get your hands on one they were inaccurate, mostly because stuff moved so often. The bigger towns were easy enough to map out but the smaller trader sections were transient and fleeting. A lot of people scrawled up fake maps covered in random pictures and marks and then sold them on for a huge profit. Countless people had ended up walking off a cliff or getting dragged down into some swampy bog or even passing through into toxic territory where your lungs burned with every breath you took
as a result of buying from unknown sources
. Unless you were confident of the
origin
of a map you knew never to trust one. Leci trusted Amato and didn’t ask where he had gotten this one from.

    
He planted his finger at a place marked with a small green X and ran it along several lines until he arrived a larger green X.

    
He tapped the point and nodded.

     
‘About three days.’
He said, more to himself than to Alecia, folding the map and siding it away.

    
She stayed quiet, sullen and brooding and he left her to her own thoughts as they rode through the night and towards
the place where Alecia had lost everything she had ever loved.

Chapter 32

Official Statement of Events Regarding Potential Breach of Prison Security

Report Number: 00403

Date of Occurrence: August 27
th
2154

Occurrence Type: Inaccurate outside propaganda leading to misinformation regarding prison business.

In the early hours of the morning of the 27
th
, at roughly 02:00am, a female Renegade calling herself ‘Alecia Walker’ a name previously unknown in an Official capacity, claimed to be an escapee of the maximum-security facility located in Ricksonville.

    
The female
was noted to be positioned on the
roof section
of a
four storey
building. Eyewitness reports confirm that slanderous and unsubstantiated claims were made by the Renegade, implying the existence of Cloned individuals within the facility.

    
At no point did the woman in question speak of accomplices.

    
Two Officials present at the scene, one Gareth Stallman and one Casey Jackson have both given accurate accounts and
their testimony stands as official record.

    
The woman, clearly suffering some mental degradation, became a threat to the general public when it was revealed that she carried a weapon and intended to start shooting civilians.

    
Stallman used his own firearm to disarm the woman. She was uninjured in the process but
,
apparently unhinged by the loss of her
weapon,
she jumped from the building.

Simultaneously, the pistol she had dropped misfired as it hit the ground. A spark from the errant bullet set fire to the clothing worn by the falling woman and her body was in flames when she hit the ground.

    
Cause of death was determined as massive blunt force trauma.

    
Due to the
disturbing
nature of these events, several civilians in the vicinity panicked upon seeing both the woman fall and the fire caused by the gun.

    
The civilians who witnessed these events have been debriefed thoroughly and are no threat to the organisation.

Official Admittance RE: Potential Clone Subjects

Admittance Form ID: 01537

Date of Admittance: August 28
th
2154

Number of Prisoners Admitted: 54

Reason for Arrest: Maintaining the peace by halting a violent demonstration and apprehending those responsible.

On the afternoon of August 28
th
, 13:42pm, a shipment of 54 Prisoners, genders varying, was delivered to the secure unit at Ricksonville.

    
Every Prisoner was subjected to a health examination. RE the results of said examination, 22 prisoners were deemed too ill to be allowed to live comfortably within the facility and were terminated.

    
The remaining prisoners are awaiting further examination, at which point it will be decided whether they are fit for manual labour or are suitable candidates for Cloning.

Chapter 33

Alecia was tired.

Not only was she tired, she was also hungry, dirty, frustrated, cold, a little bit wet, uncomfortable, had a numb ass and, well, if you wanted to sum it up and make things simple; she was pissed off.

    
They had been riding
endlessly
for the last three days.

Ok, maybe not literally, but it sure as hell felt that way. They had avoided all towns, trader stalls, campsites, pretty much any sign of human life whatsoever.

    
The food in their packs was long gone but Amato had insisted they live off the what they could salvage from the land around them, he was still wary about showing their faces anywhere at all just yet. She didn’t know why, she was fairly sure that the plan would’ve worked, she was actually quite proud of herself, figured it had gone d
own better than she had hoped, b
ut he was insistent that they remain cautious and so she submitted. It was easier than arguing.

    
When the food they had brought with them was gone
,
they lived off what they could glean from the area around them.
Luckily
,
most of their travelling time was spent in places that weren’t as barren as they could have been, if they had found themselves travelling through the desert things would’ve
sucked e
ven more than they already did.
There were plants and shoots to pick at
,
but much better there were a few wild animals roaming around aswell.

    
The first
one
that they had killed had been a wild dog that had burst from a nearby bush, snapping and growling, spooking the horse and causing it to dance and skitter in panic.

    
Amato had killed the hound with a single shot to it
’
s head
,
but when they had inspected
,
it he had allowed Leci to burn the body but had forbidden her from eating the meat.

The dog’s muzzle was caked in a frothy, foamy looking
substance
, its eyes were bloodshot
,
and bulged from its skull as though an intense pressure were being applied from behind them.

     
‘It’s got the sickness.’ He had muttered, prodding it with the toe of his shoe.

     
‘Burn it Leci, to a cinder, to ash. We can’t eat that.’

    
She had done as she
was
told, her stomach protesting loudly against the destruction of possible food, watching forlornly as the animal caught fire and then intensifying the heat until nothing but a blackened pile remained.

    
Then she set fire to a tree.

    
Just because.

    
Because she was tired and hungry and pissed.

    
Amato had raised an eyebrow but said nothing
,
she had
climbed back into the saddle and prepared to be bounced and jostled and have her thighs rubbed raw from riding the horse for far too long all over again. She knew that there was a good cause to all of this, that they were doing it to fulfil the only goal she had ever had. She knew she ought to be grateful to Amato for being willing to put himself through the same discomforts she was experiencing
,
just to help her. She knew she should stop being so childish, quit whining and just suck it up.
He was tolerating her exceptionally well,
all things considered. He h
ad only snapped at her a couple of times, told her to shut the hell up
before he made her
. She knew she was being irritating to the point of deserving a good slap and so when he requested it
,
she managed to keep her mouth shut for at least a couple of hours at a time.

    
She was fairly sure that a lot of her mood was caused by fraught anticipation, she had endured worse conditions than this without making anywhere near as big a deal
about it,
and she was sort of blowing things out of proportion. She was acting up because she was afraid
,
she knew that he understood that, wanted to tell him she loved him for it but couldn’t, the words wouldn’t come.

    
She was nervous about the prospect of finally meeting her nemesis and putting to rest what had been her only driving force for so long
,
but at the same time she was terrified of what would happen afterwards, if she was successful
, i
f they
arrived in Coleville, found the men who had killed Xavian, if she killed them...

    
Then what?