An intermittent beeping intruded on the pleasant, all-encompassing silence. The sound was distant at first but seemed to get louder the more I focused on it. As it reached a crescendo, my eyes fluttered open to a bright, clean room that smelled of antiseptic. It certainly wasn’t the basement. I reached a hand up and tentatively touched my head. Bandages. So, a hospital. Hmm, not dead then. That was a surprise. I groaned and turned to the side, looking for a way to silence the beeping. There was a little light flashing on the IV pump, so that was probably the source. I reached out to poke at one of the buttons, but before I could a voice interrupted.
“Ray? Are you awake?”
The man was sitting in a chair off to the side of the hospital bed, his clothes were rumpled, and it looked like he had been sleeping himself, until a moment ago. He sat up straighter as I looked him over.
“Simon?”
“Hey, you recognize me,” he sounded encouraged by this turn of events. “That’s new. The last couple of times you thought I was Carmine.”
“Oof, sorry about that. I genuinely can’t think of a worse insult.”
“Haha, it’s alright. You weren’t especially lucid at the time. I imagine that you don’t remember waking up before now?”
“Not at all,” I shook my head, winced and decided not to do that anymore.
“Well, they said it might take some time as they weaned you off the medication. You will probably remember this conversation, though. How are you feeling?”
I thought about that question for a long moment,
“I’ve been better,” I groaned. Though, considering the cast on my arm and the bandaging on my head and ribs, the fact that I wasn’t in indescribable agony spoke to the quality of the drugs they had me on. “How long have I been out?”
“Well, you’ve been in a medically induced coma for over a month now. The head trauma was pretty serious, the doctors said you needed time to heal. You had us pretty worried.”
“I’d say ‘was it that bad?’ but I figured I would be dead by now, so…”
“Well, you did have a building collapse on you, I understand why you felt that way. It was touch and go for awhile, but the doctors are confident you will make a full recovery, some scars excepted. Do you remember the explosion?”
“Yes, that much I remember,” I chuckled. “I am the on who triggered it, after all.”
“What? You did? Why?”
“It’s a long story. Let’s just say Carmine didn’t leave me any other option. I’ll get into the details another time. But why didn’t that kill me?”
“Ok…. Well, I am going to want more details on what happened with you and Carmine, later, but as for how you lived let’s just say that Carmine wasn’t exactly a structural engineer. If you want to kill someone in an explosion, don’t tie them to a support pillar, unless you are also planning to collapse the support pillar. He rigged the ceiling to collapse, but not the pillar. So, when everything came down, the pillar stayed in place, and held a little pocket in the debris for you,” Simon explained. “And it helped that we got to you quickly. We showed up just in time to hear the explosion from the street. We got emergency services involved and started digging right away.”
“Ok, pause. Why were you there?”
“You are kidding, right? We were there for you. Jessica showed up after you left, she said you had been captured. Gail, Liz, Mark and I went to investigate.”
I groaned,
“I can’t believe you actually went. I was banking pretty hard on at least Gail being too smart for that. Surely you could tell something was off with Jessica?”
“Sure, we could tell she had been gotten to, but what else could we do? We had to at least look into it.”
“Ugh. Well, at least you were slow enough not to be caught in the blast yourselves,” I sighed. “But seriously, we all need to get better about walking into obvious traps. It is, apparently, a real problem. Where is Jess now?”
“Well,” Simon rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s sort of a tricky question. We don’t exactly know.”
“What? How is that possible?”
“When the explosion happened, things got kind of chaotic, for a time. We had someone watching her, but in the confusion, she managed to slip away. We have had people looking for her, but no luck so far.”
I sighed. I wondered if she had gone back to the Domini. Or maybe she was just hiding out, too afraid to seek help from either group, after all that had happened. It wasn’t her fault. But I imagined convincing her of that would be challenging. Hopefully she would turn up soon, either on her own or during the search for the remaining Domini. Nothing I could do about it now, so I moved on.
“And Carmine?”
“Oh, he is very dead. Reconstruction suggests that he was near the middle of the room when the explosives detonated, his skull was crushed by a chunk of concrete.”
“Good. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
“Yeah,” Simon nodded. “World is a little safer without him in it. Though he is far from the only one.”
“Are people working on rounding up the rest?”
“Yeah, the Domini are being sought worldwide, but after the announcements they mostly went to ground, flushing them out has proved challenging. I’ve been watching a lot of surveillance footage these last few weeks, trying to pick people I know out of crowds in airports and bus stations. But they are careful, and it is slow going. Not to mention there are plenty I wouldn’t recognize.”
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“What about the Immune, the rest of the Organization?”
“Most of them disappeared with the Domini. Wallace is heading up a team of ‘deprogrammers’ to find them, bring them in and hopefully break the influence the Domini have on them. It has had… mixed success thus far.”
“With Wallace heading it up I am not surprised. Why on earth would they put him in charge?”
“The talent pool isn’t very deep at the moment, Ray. Pretty much anyone who has any experience with ubarae is highly sought after. If it helps, I think Tom and some of the other Immune who remain are also helping.”
“That’s good, at least. What about Gail, or Mark?”
“Most of the others have been formed into an emergency task force for peace keeping and management, until they come up with a more permanent solution. It is basically doing what the Organization did, but with less people, less resources, and more problems.”
“Sounds about right. Speaking of problems, how is all that going?” I waved my hands vaguely at everything.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Simon. If it has been over a month, I imagine a lot has happened. How has the fallout been from the announcements?”
Simon cleared his throat awkwardly,
‘Well…”
“Do not lie to me, Simon.”
“I wasn’t going to…”
“I can tell you were planning sugar-coat it to spare my feelings. Worried about dropping too much bad news at once, hampering my recovery. Blah blah blah. But I have to find out sometime, and I am going to be really pissed if I find out you kept something from me. So, out with it.”
Simon sighed,
“Well, truthfully it hasn’t been going great,” he admitted. “A lot of people are very angry that their governments kept this from them. Perhaps justifiably so. I may have preferred the secrecy for my own safety, but I can sympathize with everyone who feels betrayed by it, as well. There has been… some rioting, arson, bomb threats. People are protesting in most major cities. It is very unlikely that any government that had direct knowledge of this is going to stay in power much longer. People are out for blood.”
I sucked my breath in through my teeth. It was not unexpected, but it was still unpleasant to hear. He continued.
“There are several camps forming at the moment. There are the people who refuse to believe any of it this is actually real, they have decided that this is all some kind of massive conspiracy by the government in order to… well that part isn’t exactly clear. That group is, for the moment, stubbornly ignoring the whole thing. Then there are the people who do believe and are furious that ubarae have been allowed to exist at all. They are pushing for an organized extermination effort. So far this has only manifested as small groups pitching themselves as ‘ubarae hunters,’ but they mostly seem to be people who have watched too many vampire movies, and they aren’t especially effective.”
I rubbed my face with my hands. That was precisely what I been most afraid of. The extermination of the entire species.
“But it isn’t all bad,” he continued quickly. “The people ready to immediately commit violence do seem to be in the minority. There is a substantial group that seems to be on the fence, waiting to learn more before they determine a course of action. We are hoping that they can be reasoned with. And then there is the faction that is extremely pleased with the existence of ubarae, some of them to a slightly unsettling degree. Nobody is quite sure how to interact with them, yet. So, in summery things are a bit of a mess out there, and we can’t yet know how things are going to settle, in the end. But it hasn’t been that long, and the Domini were, admittedly, not the best ambassadors. The Council has people working on campaigns to improve our public image, get people comfortable with the idea of cohabitation. There is hope that things will stabilize, eventually. Until then, most of us are just laying low and trying not to cause any trouble. Liz and Oliver have been organizing the evacuation and relocation of anyone who feels unsafe in their current place. They are doing excellent work, and it has kept anyone from being exposed, yet.”
I nodded, processing. It seemed unlikely that all of this would be smoothed over any time soon, if ever, but then again, it wasn’t exactly smooth under the Pact either, was it?
“Speaking of relocation, where are we, exactly? This clearly isn’t a normal hospital.”
“No, this is an Organization medical facility, usually used to treat ubarae injured during arrests. Gail thought you, and others, would be safest here.”
“The Organization is still functioning?” that surprised me.
“Not exactly. Officially, it has been shut down, and most of the responsibilities have been transferred to Gail and her new task force. But some of the old resources are still in use, because Gail said they were necessary for the task force. That includes this facility, all of the prisons containing dangerous ubarae criminals, and a few other odds and ends. I am not privy to all the details. Oh, and because I know you would hate the idea of this all being for you, there are other injured being treated here, too. Some are still recovering from the initial Domini attacks, and others who have been injured in the riots or the protests that happened since.”
That actually did make me feel better.
“Why here and not a normal hospital? Are they worried about people retaliating against us?”
“Not ordinary people. They don’t know who any of you even are, so you are safe, there. The names of the Organization agents are still being carefully guarded. But the Domini might know. That’s who Gail is worried about. Figured you would all be safer here, since this is a secret facility. And me too, I suppose. I have a room down the hall.”
“Gail seems to have things well in hand. How are she and the others doing?”
“Gail and her people are all seem to be doing fine. But you will be able to ask her yourself soon enough. She has been here to visit you several times, whenever she has a free moment. I imagine she will be back soon, once she knows you are up and about, probably with a job offer. As I said, they are desperate for people.”
“Hard pass,” I laughed. “I am officially retired.”
“Officially as of when?”
“As of the moment I hit the trigger on the detonator,” I leaned back and closed my eyes.
“Well, I suppose that is understandable,” Simon mused. “But what will you do, instead?”
“No idea. I hadn’t really planned on living this long, so I will have to figure something out. I wonder if this is how people in doomsday cults feel?” I mused. “When they quit their jobs and sell all their possessions in anticipation of the world ending and it just… goes on, and they have to find a way to go on too. I can tell you one thing, whatever I do next, it is going to be easy, and inconsequential. I have had enough of life and death situations for one lifetime.”
“Gail will be disappointed. Experienced agents are a bit thin on the ground, at the moment. And other countries fared even worse than we did. Which means a lot of her people have had to be dispersed abroad, compounding the problem.”
“She’ll survive. I’m no good to anyone like this, anyhow. And by the time I am out of this hospital, I am sure she will have all sorts of new people trained.”
“Fair enough. I shouldn’t have even brought it up, especially right now. You just woke up from a coma, after all. Don’t even think about it, for the time being.”
“I’m not going to change my mind later, Simon.”
“I didn’t say that you would.”
“You were thinking it,” I mumbled. “Now, I am tired, I think am going to go back to sleep for a while. We can talk more later.”
“Of course. Get some rest,” Simon rose from his chair, but paused. “And Ray? I’m glad you’re still with us.”
I watched Simon leave, shutting the door softly behind him, then I leaned back on the pillow again. Whatever else happened from now on, I was done. There was no way they were going to convince me to get back into that mess. Smarter, better people than me were going to have to sort all this out. I had done what I could, the rest was up to someone else. That decided, I leaned back and tried to go back to sleep. Dying would have made things a lot simpler. Figuring out how to live in the new world that was waiting outside was going to be a real challenge. For the time being, I closed my eyes and escaped back into darkness. The new world could wait for another day.