Day 24

-III-
8: Meeting

“I hope you'll forgive me Keith. I'm never going to find Orin, I can barely get myself out of this mess, but I'll do the next best thing. I'll find your son, and I'll get this journal to him. I just hope I'm doing the right thing. I hope it's what you would have wanted.”

“He nodded at me.” Dana spoke quietly, slowly. I was sitting across from her, and she hadn't moved since her admission to me. She looked at me dully, something within her compelling her to speak. All of the tense energy she'd had while infiltrating the building had vanished, replaced with a creeping lethargy. She needed to tell her story, though, and I couldn't deny her it. Truth be told, I wanted to know myself.

“I told him my name, and he nodded at me. He knew he could trust me. Then he ran, darted back down that hallway toward the garage. And I just stood there. I wanted to come out with him, help him escape. I know that I'd have been cut down if I'd tried, I knew that then and I know it now and it doesn't make any difference, because maybe we would have made it.” She shook her head. “But I was frozen. I was young then, I'd joined up with the reserves because I thought I'd make a difference and they offered financial help for college students.” She gave somewhat of a choked laugh at this.

“I was dumb and had no idea what to do. The place was going to burn down, they'd set up explosives all over the place and it was only a matter of time before everyone evacuated, and they'd see me there in front of the prisoner – sorry, your father's – cell, and they'd know what I'd done.

“That's when I heard the gunfire, and that's what got me moving. I ran, then, ran out toward the garage. He'd made it out of there, clear past the gate, but someone up in the guard tower had to be a god-damned fool and stay on duty even though the whole place was going to burn down. He shot him. The fucker shot your dad in the back. I froze again, watching as a disinterested Trooper came up to him, felt for a pulse, shrugged, and left him there. I honestly don't remember much of what happened next, I was in some kind of shock. They got me onto a jeep and got me out of there while the place burnt up behind me. I don't even know what they did with the body, Derek, I'm so sorry.” she looked directly at me, her remorse palpable.

What could I say? Part of me wanted to be angry with her, to blame my father's death on her, but I knew it wasn't her fault. I'd always blamed the Troopers, all my life, but even they were individuals, and Dana had been the very best they'd had to offer. Other Troopers had done this. Dana had done the best she could.

She spared me the trouble of speaking by continuing herself, as though she hadn't expected a response. “I was shipped off to the front lines, fighting against the Old Line. It wasn't as dangerous as I'd thought; we had the stunners then, and we always had the sleep-bombs go in first to knock everyone out. They couldn't even use our weapons against us, we had chips that protected us from the stun effect. Our air support could drop a sleep-bomb right on our heads and we'd be fine and the enemy'd be down. The war effort didn't even need me, and I sure as hell didn't want it. I deserted the first chance I got.”

She smiled then. “I don't know if you'll understand, how free I felt that day. Probably the way you felt when we first smuggled you out of that quarantine zone. I could go anywhere, I was free. But I knew I wasn't – your father had laid a task on me before he died. I used your journal as my journal for a while, kept notes of where to find rebel contacts, that sort of thing. None of them panned out. As far as they were concerned, I was a Trooper still and not to be trusted.”

“Then the Accords were signed. Troopers ruled most of the midwest, and that was that. War was over, quarantine had put the plague under control, and I could re-enter society without worrying about being executed. I made my way to Carson; I knew I'd never find Orin at this point. I'd decided to just find you.” she smiled at me kindly.

“I'd made some contacts that trusted me, ex-trooper or no. They're the ones that got my name changed. They helped me adopt you, at the age of six or so.” She looked keenly at me, questioning. “Do you remember the conversation we had, about your father, that first day?”

I shook my head, it was only a vague memory at best. She'd told me what I'd feared all along, that my father wasn't coming back. My mother had died two years before that to the plague, so I'd known what death was at that point. That was all I remembered.

“We talked,” Dana said. “I asked you if you knew who'd taken your father. Even then, you knew it was the Troopers. You blamed them, and you were right to. But I'd promised your father I'd help him, and I could only do that by helping you, so I didn't tell you then what I was. Instead I removed my entries from the journal except that last one with my voice – I'd thought it already gone, I didn't know it had kept a backup to play alongside the entry – and I gave it to you, so you'd know. I told you I knew your father and was here to care for you now. And ever since then you hated the Troopers and both of us did everything we could to hurt them.”

“You're right, we did.” I replied.

She looked hopefully at me, but her mind wasn't even letting her accept the possibility that I'd taken in her true history and forgiven her. I stood up and reached for her hand. “Come on,” I said. “You came here to say goodbye to my dad, and so did I. There's a lot of this place left to look over before we head back.”

She took my hand and stood up. “You... you really don't care?”

I shook my head. “Of course not. You raised me, protected me, and most importantly taught me how to fight back. I know you. Who you were before I knew you isn't important. Right Jamie?”

Jamie hadn't been as accepting as me, that much I could tell. Dana's hurricane of emotion had receded, allowing me to sense my surroundings again, and Jamie was deeply worried. She was worried more on my behalf, though. She thought I should be hurt by the deception. She herself cared as little as I did, apparently more concerned with Dana's recent deeds on our behalf than what she'd done in college.

Jamie forced a smile, still worrying for me. “Wait until John finds out.”

Dana laughed. “Oh my god, and I thought he was mad before.” she shook her head. “I hadn't told anyone about my past, until just now. I suppose everyone should know now. Back in haven, when we met Gallow, I acted so angry that they'd let a Trooper in, but really I was relieved. I'd be welcome there, even if they did find out, and I knew I'd have to tell you sometime, Derek. I'm just sorry it happened this way.”

I was about to repeat the fact that I'd forgiven her when Jamie glanced back at the now opened safe behind Dana. “So about the safe that started all of this...?”

“Oh, of course!” she said, turning back around. She reached into the open safe and pulled out a paper sleeve, inside which was a small silver disc about two inches in diameter. Recordings, I knew instantly. “I was hoping that some of the equipment had survived. I know the format's probably obsolete by now, but hopefully Chad's people can whip something up to read it. One way or another we'll be able to get the information off of it.”

“As it happens, we can do that now.” I offered. “You forget, this PDA is decades out of date. It's from right around the time where those discs were in use.”

Dana handed over the sleeve, and I took the disc out and examined it. It was shiny, unlabeled. Impossible to tell whether something had been recorded onto it without putting it into the journal itself. Unfortunately, there might be some kind of encoding or, at worst, a virus designed to destroy non-familiar systems. Still, I had nearly the entire journal memorized, and we needed to see what was on the record. I put the disc in, and the first entry began playing without any prompting on my part.

The three of us crowded around the PDA's tiny screen. We saw the same experimentation room that we could see now, only in a far less burnt state. Off-screen, the door opened and my father was lead in, blindfolded. His guide, obviously a scientist even if he didn't have a trademark doctor's smock, sat him down in a chair then motioned another man in. This man was a guard wearing a very early version of what would become the Trooper uniform. The scientist had him sit down in a desk, his back to the camera. The view then changed abruptly to over the Trooper's shoulder, focusing on the surface of the desk where an envelope was.

The scientist spoke. “Mr. Perkins, I know we already ran you through this but you understand we have to repeat the experiment. We'll have it recorded now, so there'll be proof of your ability. Do you understand?”

My father replied with a simple, “No problem, I know how testing goes.”

“Good. Now, our volunteer is going to open this envelope, and pull out a number of cards. He's going to shuffle them together, then pull one of the top and look at it. When he does this, tell me what card he's looking at.”

“Understood.”

“Very well. You may begin.”

As per the protocol, the Trooper opened up the envelope, shuffled the cards, and then picked the top one.

“Circle.” my father said.

He was, of course, right. As terrifying and exciting as it must have been for the people sitting in that room at the time, I couldn't sympathize with them, knowing what was to come.

The recording continued for a full five minutes, as the trooper went through the deck, then cut off abruptly. Before another could start I pressed a button on the PDA, listing all video recordings on the disc. There were too many to count.

“Play it again.” Jamie said, in a strange voice. I glanced over at her, and she snuck an arm around me. Suddenly she was close to me, and I could tell there was something wrong. What now? I wondered. I was fairly sure that Jamie had never been a Trooper, at least.

Obliging, I selected the first recording and played it.

“Look at the date.” she whispered.

As a matter of course, it appeared, there was a timestamp in the lower-left of the frame. I hadn't noticed before because the screen was so small and I was watching the cards.

Dana was the first to speak. “That's impossible! I knew this place had been set up for a while, but it was for plague research. They sent me here right in the middle of it. That date doesn't make any sense – it's a year before the earliest break-outs.”

I started scanning through my father's journal entries, but none of them had been dated. Eventually I turned back to the disc, searching for one of the experiments he'd mentioned and trying to correlate it to the dates on the video. Eventually I found an entry:

“Today they went from just taking blood to actively injecting me with things. I don't know what result they expected, but they kept me in the damn experimentation room for I'd estimate a whole day before sending me back. The doctor who injected me was fully suited up, hazmat gear and everything. I think it was just some kind of placebo, though, as it didn't end up doing a damn thing.”

There was only file referencing patient#24601 – my father – that was that long, and the journal entry it likely corresponded to was the last one before plague was mentioned. I played it, and again witnessed my father sitting in a chair. A few moments went by and then suddenly there was audio.

“Patient 24601, here we'll be testing the Illyria compound to see what effects it has on the host we created it from.”

At this, a doctor in a fully-functional hazmat suit entered the room.

“Naturally, we expect it to do nothing, but after recent outbreak rumors we're not taking any chances.”

I watched the suited doctor administer the drug, or whatever it was, and leave the room in a hurry. My father mostly sat there. I began stepping through the file, which itself changed from a continuous recording to a shot-every-minute variety. Nothing notable happened; at the end of exactly twenty-four hours, a non-suited-up doctor came in and let my father out.

The timestamp was disturbing; obviously the people in the video had been aware of the plague, and I was expecting they'd have done this experiment – apparently exposing my father to it – at about the same time the plague was becoming more widely known. I was wrong – this was months before any outbreak was made public.

All this time I'd thought my father had volunteered for a study on the plague in an effort to find the cure. Now, though, it appeared as though he'd volunteered for something else, something before the plague had even started. I thought back to that very first entry. It hadn't been doctors taking a blood test or examining him to see if he was contagious. It had been verifying his powers.

He'd come because he was a telepath, already, before the plague even created the Afflicted. And I was beginning to suspect that I knew where that plague had come from, as well.

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