EXODUS

— by Jeff Karamales

Chapter 3
Of Light and Dark
 

Emily Lesko watched as the plane taxied from the end of the aged runway and turned towards her, its hydrogen fuel cell engines whining along with a subdued thwop thwop thwop of its propeller blades as it moved through the frigid wind, the large rubber tires of the landing gear crackling of the frost rimmed gravel of the airstrip. It was the fifth plane to land in the past hour, the previous four depositing their load of steel, coffin-like tubes and other supplies before taking off for the windswept grey Alaskan skies. No sooner did the aircraft lurch to a halt than staffers and support personnel that were there to aid her research or working as security staff ran forward to unload as quickly as they could. Crates were loaded into hybrid powered pickup trucks while the tubes were carefully loaded into vans. Once the plane was unloaded, the vehicles headed into a dark, tight entrance that had been built into the side of the rough, raw rock of the island, the concrete that showed around the opening aged and pitted from decades of exposure to the tumultuous North Pacific weather.

As soon as the last of the vehicles vanished into the nearly ancient bunker structure, Lesko nodded and followed the vehicles, the grey uniformed security guards closing the rusted steel door as soon as the woman was inside. She snapped her fingers at the ranking guard and motioned the man over, a frown pulling her already dour, slightly wrinkled face into a caricature of an old, angry woman. She slipped a cigarette between her pale, parchment dry lips before fishing a gold lighter from a pocket in her parka.

“Go ahead and get the tubes down to medical so the contents can be revived. I wantmy team to proceed with preliminary evaluation. Once the subjects are catalogued, get them into their cells. Understood?” the woman asked tersely.

“Yes, ma’am,” the guard said with a sharp nod.

Emily Lesko kept walking then paused, blowing out a cloud of blue smoke before leveling her cold, grey eyes at the guard. “Go ahead and give your people the rest of their toys, Lieutenant. The sooner the subjects understand that we are in control, the better.” She stepped back towards the guard and pointed the two fingers that held her cigarette at the man. “But, make it very clear that the first one of them that kills one of my test subjects for no reason, he or she will be taken as a replacement. Are we clear, Lieutenant Peterson?”

“Crystal clear, Doctor Lesko,” the man said, swallowing hard once the woman resumed her stroll into the bunker’s depths. He waited until she was well out of earshot before muttering to himself. “Creepy old hag…” 

*** 

Fort Freedom had been the name of the facility prior to the place being handed over to Emily Lesko’s team of researchers. It had started its life decades before at the height of WWII as a support station for US Navy submarines as they fought against the Japanese incursion of the Aleutian Islands. Later, after the end of the second World War and the beginning of the standoff with Soviet Russia and the Cold War, the existing workshops and sub pens had been expanded into a bunker system designed to survive the ravages of nuclear war and provide survivability for high ranking military and government officials with provisions for keeping the President of the United States and the First Family safe should the need arise. With the continued downsizing of the military and the declination of the global economy, the individuals financing Doctor Lesko’s research had picked up the island and its facilities for a mere pittance.

Emily had been surprised when a pair of representatives from the Terran Colonial Coalition had showed up at her office with an offer to get out of the university she’d gravitated to and return to real, cutting edge research. Something she hadn’t done since her early days with Oliver McEwen. The woman never had been one to waste her time in a lecture hall, but the falling out of Oliver’s good graces had left her no other options then a teaching position.

Then the meeting with Andre Bolivar had changed everything.

Emily was old enough that a handsome young man with a silver tongue was ineffectual. She was beyond the age where caring about the attention from a male could tweak her fancy. Despite the smile that could weaken the knees of a woman half her age or the suave words he used to stroke her ego, Andre had offered her the one thing that would snag her attention. Lead researcher for a new project that would put her back on the forefront of the only thing that mattered to her.

Bolivar knew of her contribution with the process that had been named for Oliver McEwen, knew that she’d graduated at the top of her class at MIT with a PhD. in genetic research, and knew that she felt the application of Oliver’s breakthrough with goetezine could do even more. He told her that he would like to utilize her knowledge and experience to improve the TCC’s mandate of extraterrestrial exploration. The icing on the cake was the promise of almost unlimited funding for the research he asked her to do, and all of the test subjects she could need or want with no moral constraints that might hamper progress.

For four years Emily had worked on the process that Oliver had perfected, taking it in the direction she always knew it could go, not only repairing the genetic makeup of people suffering from cancer and eliminating it from their bodies, but making humans…better. Improving them. McEwen had been a fool, looking at only what his breakthrough could do to heal people. When Emily had proposed her thoughts of using the application of goetezine it had caused the blowout of the century with her and Oliver swearing heatedly at each other across the lab and Emily finally storming off to pack up her belongings.

Now here she was, her own facility, financial backing, and absolute carte blanche. Doctor Emily Lesko couldn’t be happier, if she’d ever truly been happy. She’d demonstrate to Andre Bolivar that what she proposed could be done, though it had cost her the one thing in the world that she cared about, though the sacrifice of her favorite cat had been a small price to pay when Petra Vogl had been turned into something that had only been written about in stories or seen in movies. Things would be different now, however. She now knew that to generate the necessary amount of DNA altering solution didn’t require the complete loss of the donor animal and her options only expanded. With the zoos and different preservation facilities located around the globe, Emily could make almost any kind of hybrid she desired. In fact, what was to say that she couldn’t eventually use alien genetic materials to augment humans even further after successful extraterrestrial exploration. It was like waking up on Christmas morning and finding that the tree had been replaced with a pile of bright, shiny presents, and all of them had her name.

As she stepped into the lab proper, Emily glanced over at the bank of security monitors that looked along the expanded tunnels that had been dug out of the bedrock itself and had holding pens and individual cells carved into the sides. Every pen had a monitoring unit, as did the tunnels and each juncture. The woman nodded at the preparations that had been made and nodded in satisfaction. Any security breaches would be handled by Lieutenant Peterson and the rest of his personnel from Jannisaries LTD, one of the less morally constrained PMCs that were available. Emily secretly loathed the mercenaries and felt that private military contractors were one of the true banes of the modern world, but they had their uses. Eventually she hoped to use her own creations as her security force. In fact, if things went well, Emily was sure that by the time she was done her test subjects would be as compliant as pets.

Turning away, Emily let her gaze rove over the rest of the lab, computers manned by a few of the more gifted individuals that she’d been able to recruit or had been given by Andre Bolivar after he assigned TCC scientists to her project, and smiled as the first of the transit tubes was wheeled in. “Excellent,” the woman said as two uniformed guards maneuvered the stainless steel tube into the nearest of ten medical cubicles that were walled in glassteel with electronically locking doors. “Wheel that one into the first cubicle. I’ll start there,” Lesko ordered perfunctorily.

As soon as the transit tube was parked, Emily slipped the data card that was stored in the casket and inserted it into the port on her personal slate, the information of the occupant flashing onto the screen almost instantaneously. It was only after she glanced over the pertinent medical information that the woman looked at the name of the individual.

“Well now,” Lesko said, her left eyebrow rising with surprise, “Wyatt Renner. This is a surprise.” She looked at the pair of guards. “The Morning Star Murderer.” She turned to one of her assistants that had started towards the transit tube to begin the revival process. “You heard of this guy?” Emily inquired to her assistant.

“Um…isn’t he the one that went crazy in the nursing home his mother was in and killed her before doing the same to fifteen other patients?”

Lesko nodded with a mirthless grin. “That’s the one. Seems we have a scrapper on our hands.” The woman looked down at the unconscious form as she leaned her hands on the open edge of the tube. “Being a scrapper might turn out to be just what we need.” Lesko turned to regard her assistant. “Wake him up and get him cognizant. I want to start with Mister Renner here. I think this is precisely the kind of person that we want,” she said turning back to the unconscious form with a cold, mirthless smile. “Schedule him for Group One.” 

*** 

He was supposed to be dead. At least, that was the last coherent thought before the world went dark, but as Wyatt Renner blinked his eyes open, squinting against the bright LED light shining in his eyes he realized that he was supposed to be dead. Had the execution gotten botched, or intentionally sabotaged? Would he now find himself in the same condition his mother had been when he traded his freedom and very life to end her suffering? It was possible as several states had enacted laws that said after the first execution attempt failed a person would get commuted to a life sentence. It didn’t happen often, but it happened enough, perhaps one out of every five hundred executions.

Wyatt tried to lift his hand to shade his eyes against the blaring light but found that he was still shackled and couldn’t even get his wrists past his sternum. He tried to turn his head to the side, anything to alleviate the glare that stabbed into his head but found that he was in some sort of bed that prevented escape from the light.

“Relax, Mister Renner,” a raspy, feminine voice ordered. “You’ll hurt yourself if you keep trying to thrash around, and I don’t want you hurting yourself.”

Wyatt tried to do as he was told, though his heart had started to hammer with the confusion he felt at still being amongst the living and his mouth and throat were also painfully dry with a sickening taste that was both cloyingly sweet and nauseatingly metallic. The strange taste only seemed to get stronger until it gagged the man and he felt his stomach clench as it tried to empty itself of nonexistent contents and the only thing that Wyatt was able to bring up was bile and digestive acid. Strong hands lifted his shoulders so that he was pulled out of his own mess and into a sitting position and willed either the stomach churning nausea to pass as he retched again, or for death to finally find him.

Emily Lesko watched as two guards and one of her lab coated assistants tended to the former inmate, holding him up in a sitting position until the heaving passed before giving the former prisoner a small disposable cup of water. She then motioned for her staffers to get the man out of the transit tube and into a chair, leaving the restraints on for the moment. Emily wasn’t overly concerned for her safety, but leaving the young man cuffed and shackled should keep him more compliant and less likely to try something brash that could possibly deprive Lesko of a prime test subject. She waited until the man was sitting in a chair before perching on the edge of the cubicle’s lab table and pulled a cigarette out and fired the end up, unmindful of the oxygen that Wyatt had been given, or the highly flammable anesthetic gas.

“This is what’s happening, Mister Renner,” the woman began calmly, finally looking the other man in the eye with an intensity that made Wyatt shiver. “I am Doctor Emily Lesko. You and the others, all forty eight of you for the moment, are dead as far as the world is concerned. Each one of you has been officially executed in front of witnesses. Ergo you and the rest are gone and of no consequenceto the rest of the civilized world with most people rejoicing in your various demises. You are alone with no family or loved ones to fret over you. So I want you to understand that if you balk at what you’ll be doing for me, I will have you punished without a second thought.

“You see, Mister Renner, there are enough other people on death row that I can get replacements for you or any of the others here. And the US isn’t the only country that I have access to. Now with that, if you truly are tired of your existence, then please feel free to act up, be a hero and piss me off. But,” the woman said with a grin that was more like the bare rictus of a skull than anything else, “in the end, what I’m offering is the chance for a life as something new,  you’ll become something better. Something faster, stronger.Something that the world has never seen before.” Emily stood and drew in a lungful of smoke, held it, then expelled it in a great blue-grey cloud towards the ceiling. “Or you can defy me,” she drawled on, her look and tone both becoming frosty with a complete lack of anything resembling compassion or warmth. “If you do choose to defy me, then I want you to know that I will make your every moment a living hell and you will beg for death until I finally deign to grant you said death.”

Wyatt looked at the woman and realized that she wasn’t jesting when she said she’d either kill him or have him killed if he failed to comply. As the haze continued to dissipate, Wyatt had the thought that perhaps he had died and that he was now in his own personal hell already. “I…I understand,” the young man answered after another sip of water.

As the woman nodded, Wyatt wondered if life as an insane woman’s guinea pig would be any better than death.

— NEXT CHAPTER —

Unless otherwise noted, all material © Ted R. Blasingame. All rights reserved.