“Let’s go! Get that thing in the cell!” ordered Mitchell. His helmet on and rifle thrust out in front of him, he forced Lacy and the other Gus toward the Med Hut. Charles walked by her side and when they reached the door, removed the keys from a pocket and opened it. Once inside, he led her and the dog into the adjoining room and unlocked the cell door, Mitchell and Kay followed.
Other Gus was locked inside. Panting, he whined once Lacy stepped away from the cell. “It’s okay, boy,” she said, instinctually soothing the animal. The discovery of the doppelganger rocked her reality, as well as everyone else’s, she assumed, but that didn’t mean they had to treat it as anything other than a living being. “Can we give him some water?” she asked Charles.
He nodded and retrieved a basin from a nearby cabinet. He twisted off the cap from a bottle of water.
“Whoa! No way we’re going to waste our water on that thing,” shouted Mitchell.
Charles halted, looking at Lacy, then Kay.
“I’ll give up my ration,” said Lacy.
Mitchell stared blankly, still with the weapon at the ready. Kay, also donning a bio-suit, looked up, having been staring at the animal. She appeared to be in disbelief. “Sorry, Lacy,” she said. “I’m with Mitchell; we don’t give up rations for something that might be a manifestation of whatever contagion is out there.”
“What if he’s not contagious? What if he’s…something else?” asked Lacy.
“Something else?” blurted Mitchell. “It’s a goddamned duplicate. You foolish enough to think that’s natural?”
Lacy sighed. “No, but…what if there’s some other reason for it being here?”
“Like what?” interrupted Charles.
Searching her mind for something profound to say, something that might convince them to believe her and her gut feeling that the Other Gus was not a twisted form of her Gus, Lacy eventually came up empty. She understood it was ridiculous to risk everyone’s safety and go with a hunch. It was right to quarantine the dog. And his existence was more than just baffling, it was disturbing.
“You’re not going to kill him, right? You’ll wait and see if he’s sick?” she asked Kay.
Kay responded, “No, we won’t kill it. In fact, I’m sending Mitchell to go get Isaac. He needs to see this.” She nodded to the brute and he turned to leave but stopped in front of her.
“Let’s get one thing straight: you don’t order me around, lady. I report only to Grant and Isaac.”
“Fine, Mitchell,” Kay answered. Lacy shot a side glance at Charles and he returned the look of concern.
After a prolonged stare, Mitchell left the room with Kay on his heels. Lacy glanced at the Other Gus again, then turned to leave but the door had been shut. The lock engaged and she and Charles were confined.
“What’re you doing!” she questioned.
On the other side of the glass, Mitchell sneered through his helmet’s visor. “You two were idiots to get near that thing. You’ll be quarantined with it to be sure you’re not infected. If it was up to me, I’d banish you from Community for bringing it anywhere near the silos.”
“Kay?” insisted Lacy.
She shrugged. “Put yourself in our shoes, Lacy. It’s the only reasonable thing to do. I’m not risking the lives of my children or anyone else.”
With a defeated posture, Charles took a seat on one of the two chairs. “They’re right, Lacy. We may very well have contracted something from this dog and we just don’t know it yet. This makes sense.”
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Mitchell’s figure receded into the gloom of the adjoining room, then came a burst of sunlight as he opened the exterior door. He and Kay left the building. In the cell, Other Gus paced, then released a sigh as he curled into a ball on the floor.
*********
With dusk only an hour or so away, Alex left the smaller garden he’d been tending to and headed for the barn, which sat about fifty yards from the farmhouse. It was time to recall the autonomous tractors, which were designed to patrol the crop fields and detect any abnormalities in the vegetation. They also were capable of spraying pesticides if the need arose and repair, via robotic arms, broken stalks in the fields that Alex was prohibited from entering.
When he reached the wide wooden door to the barn, Alex stepped inside to his worktable. On it was an array of neatly arranged devices, most of which he hadn’t been taught to use just yet. He opened a laptop computer and the screen brightened. He was about to input instructions into the computer but lost his focus. Again, as he’d done before, he pondered the reasoning for the restrictions regarding access to the fields. Why was he forbidden to venture out there? He didn’t believe he was ever given an explanation.
Alex grunted as a pain surged in his right temple. He dropped to one knee and cupped the area. His curiousness vanished and his mind returned to “rightness.” He picked up the laptop he’d dropped to the ground and set it back on the table. In a blank field on the screen, he typed “Recall” and hit enter.
Outside Alex heard someone approaching. He stepped to the open door and in the golden afternoon light, saw two figures, one of them a large armed man, the other a woman. They were conversing with Isaac. After a few minutes, he sent them off and walked briskly toward the barn. The large man gave Alex a disapproving look. He seemed familiar and Alex instinctively rubbed a bruise on his forehead, which he’d been told he’d sustained from a fall.
With a concerned expression, Isaac spoke to Alex. “There’s something I have to deal with over at the silos, Alex. You’ll have to close up things yourself, like the other farmers.”
Alex nodded. “Everything alright?”
Presenting a smile that seemed disingenuous, he assured Alex that it was no reason for alarm and then was on his way. When Isaac had gone, Alex’s thoughts returned to his task as heard the approach of the returning tractors. He couldn’t yet see them, but their icons on the screen showed they were only a hundred yards from the barn.
Frowning, Alex noted that the icon for Tractor Four was missing from the screen. He glanced out over the fields, but a tree line in the distance obscured his view. Rumbling through an opening in a fence came Tractor One. Soon after, Two and Three emerged through the trees. Although he was not permitted to leave the grounds of the immediate farm without authorization, Alex felt that this was an extenuating circumstance.
Once the tractors were safely in their corrals, Alex locked the barn. In the driveway of the farmhouse was an old pickup truck. Inside the house, he snatched the keys from a hook beside the cabinet. He hopped in behind the wheel, surveyed the area for any sign of Isaac, then started the engine and shifted into Drive.