by Ian R. Faulkner

He glanced down at Kolly.

When he looked back up he was surrounded.

*

The room in which they were placed had no windows. The unadorned plaster walls formed a perfect cube, broken only by the single door, barred and bolted; a flickering bulb hanging from the ceiling; and a grill-covered drain in the centre of the chipped concrete slab floor.

They had been escorted from their blasted and broken refuge into an old abandoned factory. The timber-gated unit had, in a previous life, been used as a workshop of some kind. The interior still contained huge unlabeled vats and tanks of liquid, tarp covered workbenches, and bizarre steel constructs. At the rear, two thirds of the way in, a rusted spiral staircase twisted up to a suspended platform seven or eight metres above their heads. The platform supported five rooms in a U shape, two rooms to a side, accessed by twin narrow corridors, and one room at the base of the U, directly in front of the stairs.

It was this isolated centre room that became their cell.

Kolly had regained consciousness back at the wrecked building, although the Sim solider
who had set the flag for Coombs had yet to come around. He had been carried back by the insurgent troops and had been the last to be placed in the cell before the door was locked and they were left alone.

“Are you going to be all right?” Carson asked, pointing at Kolly’s shoulder.

“I believe so,” Kolly said. He had wrenched the rebar free of his shoulder, stripped out of his Blastex armour and plugged the wound with a strip of malleable pink putty from his medic kit, sealing the flesh from infection and stopping the bleeding, before the insurgents had confiscated it.

“How’s the other Sim?” Coombs asked.

They had been in the cell over sixty minutes.

“I do not know,” Kolly answered. “Physically he is sound and, with the exception of minor cuts and bruises, there are no exterior symptoms to explain his continued unconsciousness. Without the benefit of my kit, I can only surmise that Melgant-Keemut’s injury is cerebral in nature, perhaps, caused by propinquity to the EMP.”

“No kidding, Sherlock,” Coombs said. “Christ, between the infected and you Sims, it’s no wonder the human race is so screwed up.”

“Hey! Cool it, Coombs,” Carson snapped, sick of the man’s attitude. “Kolly’s doing his best.”

“Kolly?” Coombs sneered. “I just knew you were Sim loving freak, Carson.” He stood up from where had been crouched and advanced upon Carson.

“You think you’re such a new man, don’t you?” he raged. “But all your liberal philosophies and bleating for equality and freedom don’t mean shit. Who do you think is gonna wipe your ass and clean up your mess without indentured Sims? What do you think will happen if these,” he threw a poisonous look at the locked cell door, “disease-ridden animals are let loose to spread their plague to us true humans?”

Coombs pushed his face forward, backing Carson into the wall until they were practically nose-to-nose. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Our way of life will be over: the human race will be extinct. That’s why we can’t let these bastards out from under the heel.”

The clack of the door’s bolts being thrown back saved Carson from responding and probably, he thought, getting his face punched in.

Four people entered the cell, a young woman and three men. Two of the men carried guns and kept them pointed at Coombs and the Sims. The third man, although armed like his compatriots, left his weapon holstered and stood, arms folded, blocking the doorway, whilst the woman stepped forward and studied each of them in turn.

She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, tall and slim, with short dark hair and piercing, violet eyes.

“Mr. Carson,” she said. “Please come with me.” She turned and headed out of the room without waiting for Carson to answer.

The man closest to Carson waved his gun.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The room he was taken to was four metres square and empty except for an old oak dining room table and three chairs. Behind the table sat the woman and an old man with a crown of white hair. The man had deep lined and weathered skin and, where the woman wore combat gear, the old man had on a well-worn charcoal grey suit with a white open necked shirt.

“Please sit down, Mr. Carson,” the woman said, pointing at the empty chair opposite her and the old man.

From behind him, Carson heard the door close. He glanced back as he sat down and saw the man who had escorted him from the cell now standing, arms folded once more, in front of the closed door.

Carson turned back to the woman. “What do you want?” he asked.

“The truth,” she answered. “Nothing more.”

“About?”

“Everything, Mr. Carson. The truth about everything.”

Carson was confused. “You think I know the truth?” he said.

“You misunderstand, Mr. Carson,” the old man said. “What Helena meant is, we want to give the truth to you.”

Carson looked back and forth between the old man and the woman, Helena. “What truth?”

“The truth about the Omni-ware virus; about the Government’s real agenda for the camps; and about us, Mr. Carson.”

“Why?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Why tell me?” Carson said. “I’m a nobody.”

The old man tilted his head to the side and regarded Carson for a moment before answering. “You’re Samuel Paul Carson,” he said. “You’re father is the right honourable, Laurent James Carson MP: a fact you try to obscure, and occasionally deny, given his pivotal role in setting up the camps. But primarily because you are the only one who can help us.”

“What do you expect me to do?”