Unity (4 page)

Gripping my head against a sudden stabbing pain, I stare down at the weapon. It’s black and ominous. A knife can take a life, but it’s also a tool, used more for practical, everyday living. But a gun? There is no other use for it than taking a life, deserving or not.

Why did they give me a gun? Outside of video games, I’ve never fired one. Never handled one. I have been on the receiving end of one, though. So I understand the fear that small black barrel can generate. I also remember how powerful the person holding it can appear.

I don’t want to shoot anyone. But maybe I don’t have to.

I lift the weapon out of the foam and find the reason why my go-pack weighed so much more than the others; guns are heavy. There are two magazines in the foam. I pluck out one and pocket it. I fumble with the second, but figure out how to slide it into the gun’s handle.

The voices on the far side of the debris wall reach a crescendo, everyone speaking at once, the comingling sounds more like a howling wind. Something horrible is about to happen.

I holster the gun and scramble over the piled trees, reaching the top in five strides. The sun stabs my eyes, setting off a flare of pain. The voices explode, reacting to my arrival. With a hand raised to block the sun, I look down to find Daniel, Gizmo and Mandi cowering behind Gwen. She’s wielding a branch like a long sword, holding off a man I can’t clearly see.

“Hey!” I shout at the man.

His fuzzy image resolves a little. He’s wearing a red, plaid, flannel shirt and blue jeans. There’s a shotgun in his hands, now leveled at me. His face is still a blur.

“They letting just anyone become Points now?” he says.

“Leave,” I tell him. “Now.” I’ve got my right hip turned away from the man. He can see the sheathed knife, but not the gun. This knowledge bolsters my resolve, though I’m still not sure I can kill a man.

He chuckles like a man who gets his kicks from torturing animals.

I know him.

The memory is old. But clear. It’s the man with the gun. A foster-father’s brother. My ‘uncle’ for a year.

His face resolves, hairy from not caring and red from alcohol.

“Howard?”

He grins. “Never were the sharpest tool in the drawer.”

“How did you... What...”

My head throbs with pain. Waves of sound crash through me. Howard’s rough smoker’s voice grates on me.

He breaks into song, adding a fake Southern twang to his voice. “Somebody’s darling, so young and so brave. Wearing still on his sweet yet pale face. Soon to be hid in the dust of the grave. The lingering light of his boyhood’s grace.”

He cracks a chipped-tooth grin at me and raises the shotgun at Daniel.

“Stop!” I shout, and I draw the handgun, pointing it at his head, trying to keep it steady. I’m trying to keep my eyes open against the pain in my skull.

“Somebody’s darling, somebody’s pride. Who’ll tell his mother where her boy died?” Howard does a little jig and looks over the barrel of his shotgun. In a moment, he’ll say, ‘Pow!’ like he used to do to me, or he’ll really pull the trigger—like he did to his girlfriend. I have no memory of those events, but I heard about it and a mysterious lone witness, on the news before I was sent to another home, where TV was forbidden and psychologist visits were frequent.

I pull my trigger before Uncle Howard can.

The loud crack cuts through the roar in my ears and hits the spot between my eyes like a bullet. I drop to my knees atop the awkward pile of debris.

Then I hear screaming, and I know the danger isn’t over. I shove myself up and aim toward Howard again.

Only Howard isn’t there.

Did he run away?

I search the area, but see nothing.

“Effie,” Gwen says, but I ignore her.

Howard is nowhere to be seen. How did he get away? I can see for at least a mile, and the ground is so torn up that running anywhere fast should be impossible.

He’s behind the tree,
I think.

“Effie!” Gwen shouts, annoyed.

“What?” I yell back, looking down at her.

Looking down at nothing.

Gwen is gone.

Daniel, Gizmo and Mandi, too.

How...

“Effie,” Gwen says again, her voice like a ghost’s, coming from nowhere. “Ease down.”

“Where are you?” I ask, looking up at the tree, thinking they must have returned to their high hiding spot.

“You’re hallucinating,” she says, calm now.

The pain in my head spikes. I hear screaming voices. I raise the weapon toward them. Howard’s laugh mocks me.

“
Effie.
” It’s Gwen again. “What you’re seeing and hearing isn’t real. But the gun in your hand is. And I would prefer you not shoot me.”

“I wouldn’t shoot you,” I say.

“You might, if I looked like Howard.”

“He’s not really here?”

With a serene calmness that sounds practiced, Gwen says, “It’s just you and me.”

“The others—”

“Are safe,” she says, “though to be honest, they’re feeling a little afraid right now. Of you.”

The gun grows impossibly heavy in my hands. My arms go slack, my fingers just barely holding on to the weapon’s handle.

“I’m going to take it from your hand now,” she says. I feel her fingers, rough and gritty, slide over mine. Then the weight of the weapon leaves my hands. To my surprise, I feel its weight move to my hip. She holstered the gun.

“You didn’t take it,” I say.

“It’s your burden to bear.” I feel Gwen’s hands on my shoulders, reassuring and redirecting my body, turning me around. “It’s your job. I can add my strength to yours, but the actions you take—right or wrong—can be determined only by you.”

Gwen’s face comes into view as I’m turned around. Her blonde hair is caked with mud. Her face is covered in flecks of blood. She holds up her hand, showing me her brand. “I can only offer support.”

In that moment, the roles of Base, Support and Point become a littler clearer. Since things went bad, I have been the one directing our action, naturally leading, while Gwen has been helping me. Supporting me. And Daniel, a Base, has been using his intellect to help guide my actions. Part of me loathes the idea that Unity was able to accurately separate us into these natural roles, but I also see how it worked. And it’s not that Gwen and Daniel are incapable of taking action, but they follow my lead. Unless I’m shooting at imaginary people.

Gwen’s face goes in and out of focus. Her strong hands keep me steady and upright. “Point... Is that like in the military? Being on point? Leading the way?”

“That’s one way to look at it,” she says, trying to guide me back down the debris pile. “Careful. Big step on your right.”

She buffers me as I nearly topple over and then straightens me back up. “But I think the intended analogy was that of a spear. The point.”

The red color at the top of the triangle takes on a different meaning.

“I’m...a weapon?”

“Not quite,” she says to my relief. But then she adds, “Not yet.”

Before I can reply, my vision narrows. I feel gravity’s pull, and a fresh wave of pain pummels me from the inside. Oblivion returns, and I plunge headlong into its merciful grasp.

My life hasn’t contained a lot of what I would call ‘traditional beauty.’ No manicured gardens. No stylish décor. No pristine landscapes. I’ve never been in a forest. Never climbed a mountain. Never been to an art museum. I’ve seen the inside of a lot of haggard homes and a few mediocre ones. In fact, the nicest place I’ve probably ever been was Brook Meadow. The building was new and they seemed to have state funding up the wazoo. Everything was clean. The lines were smooth. The architecture interesting. But I never really appreciated it.

By the time I reached Brook Meadow, I saw the world through resentment-skewed lenses. The flashy building and the new tech made available to every student simply reminded me that life, as I knew it, was malignant. On the surface, I was prodded to join Unity, but on the inside, I wanted to join. Time and distance would be the scalpel that finally separated me from my life.

And now, three weeks later, despite the tumorous sixteen-year-old growth still fresh in my mind, I find myself appreciating beauty.

Blue water stretches to the horizon, where lines of white clouds slip through the sky. Gentle waves roll against the reshaped beach, commingling with lines of soil pulled out by the retreating waves. The contrast of white, blue, tan and brown is captivating. Even the salty scent of the water contains a kind of beauty. The concept of a beautiful smell had never once occurred to me before. It draws a laugh from me.

And then a frown.

I’m drugged,
I realize, trying to sit up and failing. The pain that wracked my body has faded, but it’s been replaced by numbness.

I’m not feeling
anything
.

My head lolls to the side as I take a look around. To my right is all beach, bending away. It’s littered with bits of jungle. So is the water. I’m supported by a lounge chair of go-packs. Above me is a fluttering stretch of plastic, held up by two branches. It’s blocking the sun.

I turn left and flinch backward when I come face-to-face with Daniel.

“I think you gave her too much,” he says.

Gwen sits up behind him, looking me over. “She needed to rest.”

Gizmo approaches; each step through the sand is labored. He drops to his knees beside me and holds up a water bottle. “Your body and mind can’t recover if you’re not hydrated.”

I understand now that this is a Base’s way of saying, ‘You’ll feel better if you have a drink.’

I take the offered bottle, unscrew the cap and chug the contents in four gulps, squeezing the water out the way Howard used to do beer from cans. When I’m done, I find three shocked faces staring back at me.

My voice sounds like a frog’s croak. “What?”

“There were four bottles of water in the go-packs we recovered,” Daniel says. “Now there are three.”

“We need to ration what we have,” Gwen says.

“Or,” I say, “We find more.” I try to push myself up again, but only make it a few inches. “What did you give me?”

“Morphine,” Gwen says. “Immune boosters. Electrolytes. The works. The painkillers will wear off in an hour. I wouldn’t move until then or you risk injuring yourself further. You’re okay, by the way. No broken bones. No internal injuries. There are five stitches in your forehead.”

I touch my head and feel the prickly ends of the wire sticking out of my skin. “Thanks.”

“Wasn’t me,” Gwen says.

I’m surprised to see Gizmo smiling, his teeth brilliant white. “I like to fix things.”

“But...your nickname. I assumed electronics were your thing.”

“People and machines aren’t that different,” he says. “Moving parts. Electrical impulses. Wires. Cables.”

Daniel moves away, looking paler. “Ugh. If you can handle the blood. Computers don’t bleed.”

“You play violent video games,” Gizmo says to Daniel, a smile on his face. Of all of us, he seems to be the most resilient, like this is...fun.

Isn’t it fun?
I ask myself, horrified by the idea.

Aren’t you enjoying this?

Don’t you feel alive?

It’s the morphine,
I decide, and I push the offensive questions from my mind. People died last night. Kids.
I
almost died last night.

But you didn’t.

You survived.

You found friends.

“The blood in video games doesn’t smell like dirty pennies,” Daniel says. “If it did, I wouldn’t play them.”

Looking past Daniel and Gwen, I see a pair of small booted feet. “Is that Mandi?”

The joking boys lose their smiles. Gwen looks over her left shoulder, and then back to me. She gives a straight-faced nod.

“Is she...”

“In a coma,” Gwen says. “I think. She’s breathing, but that’s about it. Without a way to get fluids or nutrients in her, she’s not going to last more than a couple of days.”

“We won’t be here a couple of days,” I say.

The three stony faces staring back at me sour my stomach.

“They’ll know we crashed.”

“We can’t assume that,” Gwen says. “We need to prepare for the worst.”

I don’t want to ask, but I do. “Which is?”

“The size of the wave that struck the island last night, the time it took to arrive after the impact and the fact that we could see the impact’s glow over the horizon, all suggest that it originated perhaps six miles away. This island is volcanic. We’re basically sitting on top of a mountain. So when the wave approached, it didn’t rise up the slope of a continental plate, it crashed against a wall of stone. But when that wave reached a true coastline, it would have grown. Maybe a hundred feet tall and moving five hundred miles per hour.” Daniel sags under the weight of his own knowledge. “The point is, the Unity carrier was off the coast of San Diego, where the wave has certainly already struck. Even if they were alerted when our transports lost power, which is possible, and even if they discovered that we’d survived the crash—unlikely—there might not be anyone left alive who even knows where we are.”

Gwen brushes sand from her hands. She’s not looking at me, but she’s definitely speaking to me. “Unity taught us to react to every situation like it was a worst case scenario, because it’s the best way of preventing them. But in this case, we can’t prevent what has already occurred. We can only react. But we need to do it smart. And that means we need
you
to think before you act.”

“I was only there three weeks,” I say.

“I’m not reminding you of something you already learned,” Gwen says. “I’m
teaching
you something you haven’t.”

My impulse is to argue. To defend my intellect against a girl who is younger than I am. But I long ago accepted that Sig knows more than me. Why not Gwen? I’ve been subjected to more than a few IQ tests over the years, and the ‘superior intelligence’ results have been waggled in my face in response to low grades. But now my 137 IQ is probably the lowest on this island.

“Okay then, teach me,” I say. “Tell me what to do.”

Gwen rolls her eyes and groans. “Teaching you and telling you what to do are different things. If I could confidently decide on a course of action, and take it, I’d be a Point. But I’m not, I’m a
Support
. Did you even finish testing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you receive any hand-to-hand combat training?” Gizmo asks. The words ‘hand-to-hand combat’ sound funny coming from him, but the implications aren’t funny at all.

“No.”

“Flight simulator?” Gwen asks.

“What? Are you serious?”

“What about psy-controls?” Daniel looks from me to Gwen. “That comes before flight sims, right?”

“I don’t even know what psy-controls are,” I say, feeling suddenly inadequate.

Gwen squints at me. “Three weeks, you said... Why would they group you with us?”

“If they had no other choice,” Daniel guesses and raises his hands to me, placating. “No offense.”

I give my head a slow shake. “I’m as confused as you.”

Silence returns to the beach. I close my eyes. My mind feels dulled by the morphine.
Maybe this will all make more sense when it wears off?
I doubt it. So I let my thoughts drift. I hear the waves, gentle and soothing. The stiff shaking of plastic in the ocean breeze. And nothing else. No hum of civilization. No signs of life beyond this beach.

Sig.

My eyes snap open. “How long was I out?”

“Six hours,” Gwen says.

“What time is it? How long until nightfall?”

Gwen turns her head toward me, eyebrows furrowed. She’s confused by the sudden determination in my voice. “Four in the afternoon.”

Daniel has a slight grin on his face. “This time of year, sunset will come in roughly five hours.”

I push myself up and am consumed by dizziness. I hold still, wait for it to pass and then move again. Getting to my feet feels like it takes the same effort as clinging to that water-propelled palm trunk last night, but I manage it with just a single stumble. Once I’m up, I stretch, take a deep breath and say, “Pick up your gear and Mandi.”

“What?” Gwen says. “Why?”

“We don’t know what caused that wave,” I say. “We don’t know if it will happen again. If we’re treating this like a worst case scenario, the beach isn’t a safe place to be. We need to find shelter in the next five hours.” I point up past the ruined hillside, where the trees were untouched by the wave. “Up there. Tomorrow, we’ll find food and water.”

And Sig.

“There isn’t time to sit around waiting for me to feel good.” I pick up one of the go-packs that I had been leaning against, put it around my shoulders and strike out inland, focusing all 137 points of my IQ on not face-planting in front of everyone.

As the others gather their gear, and Mandi, I hear Daniel whisper, “See, that’s why she’s here,” and I’m glad at least one of us has faith in me.