Kayla sat beside Jack the next day as they blasted across the desert. “We’re heading back in the direction the old crackpot pointed to,” he told her. “I’ve spotted some tire tracks. I don’t know — it’s something to follow, anyway.”
“Okay.” Kayla’s mind was far away, trying to sort out all she’d learned.
August, dead? Like Allyson, she couldn’t believe it.
Guilt gnawed at her like a hungry animal. He had been such a close friend to them in the mountains. She should have searched for him after the Global-1 attack in Washington. She’d simply assumed that because he’d been seen leaving the city he was all right. But he might not have been. And where did he have to go to? The trip back to the Adirondacks would have been difficult, especially if he’d been injured.
“Dusa told me about your friend,” Jack said as he drove. “I was sorry to hear it.”
“Thanks. This bar code tattoo has brought so much suicide and death with it.”
He nodded. “And now David Young is in the pits. Drakians consider his methods a little passive, but we admire him. He’s a stand-up guy. I’d hate to see him cave.”
“Or worse,” Kayla added.
“Yeah, or worse,” he agreed somberly.
She’d cried after she received Allyson’s letter. Dusa had been comforting, staying with her until she fell asleep from exhaustion and grief.
She’d dreamed of her parents who had died because of the bar code. Amber’s mother, who was now near death in a hospital because of it, was also in the dream. Gene Drake joined them, his bullet wounds still oozing blood. He was walking with August. It wasn’t a clear dream but hazy, full of ghostly figures who all murmured unintelligibly at the same time, making a maddening babble in her ear.
She’d awakened full of anxiety, remembering what Dusa had told her about the birth of KM-1-6. Had her mother not actually been her real mother?
Was her father really an older brother?
Had her original name been a code that sounded more like a designation of some kind — KM-1-6?
Fear had threatened to paralyze her until she recalled her fire walk. If she could conquer that terror, she could walk through anything. Steeled by the memory, she had gotten up, determined to find Amber. She wasn’t going to let another tragedy occur because she hadn’t taken the time to search.
A large blue tent appeared in the distance. She suddenly sat forward, diverted from her ruminations, alert with interest. Jack steered the ship in the direction of the tent. As they closed in on it, it appeared to be big enough to hold six or seven people. It seemed so bizarre for it to be there, with nothing else around it.
The craft whirred to a stop in front of the tent. Jack and Kayla looked at each other, wondering what to do next. “If she really did just start walking, maybe someone here would have seen her,” Kayla speculated.
“We should be careful,” Jack cautioned as he climbed out. “We don’t know who we’ll find in there.”
At that moment, the flap of the tent parted and a young woman about seventeen years old emerged. It took Kayla a few seconds to recognize her old friend, she was so changed. Amber’s hair, once bleached silver and always worn in meticulously sculpted curls, was now wild and brown, and she had become excessively thin. But her distinctive huge blue eyes blinked into the sunlight, and her familiar smile spread across her face.
“Amber!” Kayla shouted, nearly tumbling out of the craft.
“Kayla? Oh, my God! It’s you!”
Kayla grabbed her childhood friend in a tight hug. Tears of joy brimmed in her eyes.
When Amber pulled out of the hug, her face was also wet with happy tears. “How did you find me?” she asked. “And leave it to you to show up in a spaceship. What’s the deal with this?”
“It’s an individual airborne transport,” Kayla said, repeating Jack’s words. “It’s the next big thing.” Kayla explained how they’d met with Aunt Emily, who’d pointed them in the right direction. She then told Amber how she’d driven out west with Dusa and how she was staying with the Drakians.
“Drakians!” Amber cried incredulously. “Do you actually know Drakians? I’ve heard of them. They sound so crazy. They worship that nutty neighbor of yours or something like that.”
“We don’t worship him, but we try to follow his example,” Jack explained.
“What? You stink of Chinese cigarettes and scream at dogs?” Amber asked skeptically.
Kayla had missed the way Amber’s outspokenness sometimes belied her warm heart. Even when they didn’t agree, which was often, she always knew Amber was on her side.
“Drakians are active against the bar code tattoo,” Kayla explained, “the way Gene Drake was active. He was strange, I know, but he took a stand.”
“Whatever you say,” Amber gave in, rolling her eyes. “You’ve always had a soft spot for oddballs and activists.” Amber had never wanted her to get involved with Decode or the rebellion. Kayla thought it was ironic, considering how the bar code tattoo had ruined the Thorn family. The genetic imperfections revealed in their tattoos had sent them spiraling quickly to the bottom of society.
Amber threw her arms around Kayla again. “I’m just so happy to see you.”
If Amber had been depressed, Kayla didn’t see any sign of it now, though her expression grew serious. “Speaking of oddballs — you have to meet the lunatic who owns this tent. And there’s something else. You’re not going to believe it. I couldn’t. But you’ve been on my mind all the time lately, and you’ll know why the minute you go inside.”
“What?” Kayla asked.
“See for yourself.” Amber gestured for them to follow her into the tent. Food and water were laid out on a blanket by a sleeping bag, on which a teenaged girl in camouflage-print shorts and a black sleeveless T-shirt lay sleeping on her back. Elaborate, colorful, swirling tattoos were wrapped around her legs, arms, and chest. Her T-shirt had risen, exposing her midriff, which was also completely covered with colorful ink designs. Even the sides of her neck and face boasted tattooed adornments. There were designs of every kind: exotic birds, dragons, chains, barbed wire, waves, flowers dripping from heavy vines, angels, devils, daggers dripping blood, the moon and sun, skeletons, fire. And it all led to the black lines of her bar code tattoo, emblazoned on her forehead.
Kayla stared at the sleeping figure, fascination mingled with confusion, even as some inner voice screamed at her to run.
It was not the macabre tattoo designs that held her so rapt. Another person might have missed the resemblance in the dazzle of vivid art surrounding the facial features. The dyed neon blue hair and heavily lined eyes could easily distract someone less intimately acquainted with the face than Kayla was. But she knew her own face well, and she saw it again facing her.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Jack whispered, his voice filled with the same stunned amazement she felt.
Kayla nodded.
“He’s final level,” Amber whispered, once she and Kayla were again outside the tent.
“I know,” Kayla agreed. Jack was handsome — spectacularly so — a fact that wouldn’t be lost on Amber. But Kayla had other concerns at the moment.
“Listen,” she said. “I need you to tell me how you got here and who this person is.”
“I don’t really know who she is. After Mom tried to burn off her tattoo and landed in the hospital, they held her there, saying she had TMP. So it was just Tarantula Woman and me — together and hating it. You can imagine — I was totally banged out. All I could do was take off or I would have totally lost it and become as freaky as she was.”
Kayla nodded; her own harrowing meeting with Aunt Emily had made Amber’s point easy to understand. “How did you wind up here?” she asked.
“There was no one I could call to come get me,” Amber explained. “So I just grabbed as much water as I could and headed into the desert. I walked until I conked out. When I woke up I was in this tent with Kendra. She found me and dragged me in. She lives out here alone. I’ve been with her ever since, about two weeks now.”
“Haven’t you noticed something about her?”
Amber’s blue eyes widened as she nodded. “Of course I have! I’m not blind. That’s why I said you’ve been on my mind lately. Remember? When I woke up in her tent at first I even thought it was you — that you’d gone completely wacko and covered yourself with all those tattoos. If you erased all that tattoo stuff, she could be your sister.”
“Only I don’t have a sister!” Kayla told Amber about meeting Kara and about Kara’s vision of the palm reader who looked just like both of them. Then she recalled the frightening vision of the raving person in the desert. “I think that could have been Kendra,” she said.
“It sure sounds like it was her,” Amber agreed. “She’s one sick ticket, but she has a reason to be.”
“What’s her deal?”
Before Amber could answer, Jack appeared at the tent flap. “Both of you should get out of the heat,” he advised.
They followed him inside, where Kendra still slept. “Kendra is writing a book about her life,” Amber told them in a whisper. “It’s some story, though I’m not sure if it’s true or if she’s making it all up. I think she wants me here so she can tell me what’s happened to her.”
“That’s insane. Why are you staying here?” Kayla asked.
Amber’s eyes widened, as if to say that the answer to that question should be obvious. “There are miles of endless nothing out there. I have no money and no family that’s still functioning. Where else am I going to go? It’s not like I have a single friend.” She paused, tilting her head thoughtfully. “It’s kind of ironic — don’t you think? — that the only person resembling a friend I wind up with out here is a twisted version of you, my best friend. Life is weird.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Jack put in with a sardonic laugh.
“Well, now I’m here. You’re coming with us,” Kayla told Amber firmly.
Amber smiled at her and nodded. “I’ve never tried to leave, so I don’t know how Kendra would feel about it. I’m not her prisoner or anything.” A puzzled expression came over her. “At least I don’t think I am. It’s possible, though. I guess I should wait for Kendra to wake up to say good-bye. It would be only decent since she did save my life — crazy or not.” She picked up a computer notebook that lay on the ground near Kendra and handed it to Kayla. “This is her story. I don’t think she’d care if you read it, since she lets me see it. She works on it all night sometimes. That’s why she’s sleeping now.”
Kayla switched on the notebook. The rectangular screen glowed to life as she sat on the blanket beside Jack where, together, they began reading it.
The Bizarre Story of Kendra Blake, the Avenging Spirit of the Desert
From the time of my birth on April 16, 2008, in Salt Lake City, Utah, I was aware that I was a freaked off-shoot of the human strain. Unlike those around me. What else would explain the howling I’ve been told I incessantly inflicted on my devout Mormon parents? I suppose it was this assault on their ears that set them against me from the start. Other children stayed away as well, sensing I was not one of them.
Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I think I’ll eat some worms. Big ones! Small ones! All kinds of different ones! Ones that squiggle and squirm!
As a young child I was excruciatingly aware of their eyes boring into my mind day and night, attempting to gaze into the depths of my thoughts in a futile attempt to know me. As if anyone could know me. I felt them, though, like fingers attempting to probe my psychic depths. Eventually I could bear their maddening stares no longer. Early one Sunday morning, I spread gasoline on the living room floor and tossed a lit match into it as I walked out the front door.
Fire! I bid you to burn!
I stood outside and watched. So pretty!
Shine, little glowworm, glimmer, glimmer.
My goal had been freedom, absolute autonomy. Instead, I was tossed into the Global-1 Center for Pediatric Rehabilitation.
I was seven.
The team of G-1 doctors and research scientists tried to conceal their glee at my arrival, covering it with murmurs of concern couched in pseudoscientific jargon, not realizing that I was wildly perceptive and heard the cackling of manic victory just beneath their facade of therapeutic crap. I had stumbled into their clutches and they were ecstatic.
Rehabilitation?
No.
Not that it would have been possible, but it was not even attempted.
Experimentation.
Mutilation.
Annihilation.
Those things were on the agenda at the Global-1 Center for Pediatric Rehabila-blah-blah. That was the prescribed course of care for Kendra Blake.
My parents’ thought-probes were nothing compared with the instruments they used to test my mind. Daily, I was slathered with electrodes on every inch of my skin, medicated, subjected to strobe lights, shocks of every imaginable kind, and the surgeon’s knife. This private torture chamber was my only home.
With puberty, the visions began.
At seventeen, the final indignity was forced upon me. They tied me down with nylon straps and inflicted their brand on me, making me no more than their cattle, one of their herd. They tattooed my wrist, but with a laser. I copied the bar code tattoo onto my forehead so all the world could see what they had done to me.
Their tests and experiments intensified. I felt no more human than the laboratory rats, the knockout mice they used for their other experimental abominations. And one day I learned that they saw me as no more human than those mice. Opening my file, I discovered that I had another name to them, an inhuman name.
I will write of my escape and how I scathed my skin, squeezing through the narrowest of cracks in a thick, outer wall, contorting my body until it writhed in agony and claustrophobic, breath-starved terror.
It didn’t matter. I would have gnawed off my own arm like an animal in a trap to escape them.
In future writings, I will also tell how I learned to armor myself against them by inking my being with the protective totem symbols of the wide world, tattoos of my own choosing that would counter the shame of the bar code tattoo.
Images of the real world have power. The spirit world of the dead has power. The animal world has power. Images of these things I wear, and they empower me.
I am not an experiment. A mutilation. An annihilated freak.
I am art. I am the one with the bright plumage.
I am not KM-5, their name for me.
I am Kendra, the Avenging Spirit of the Desert.
The Phoenix.
The one who will not be caged.