PART TWO

 

--AVIAN--

I fired seven shots.  The first two shattered the front window.  The fourth bounced off one of the chopper blades.  The rest disappeared into the body of the helicopter.

Countless other shots were fired, but the helicopter continued to rise over the side of the building.

The adrenaline burning through my system brought everything into focus.  I watch as a cybernetic thumb hovered over a trigger.

The moment before it fired, Royce yelled something I couldn’t understand.

A piercing ring cut through the air.  I wasn’t one to put down my firearm, but I couldn’t fight the instinct to drop my weapon and cover my ears against the sound.  Bill, Tristan, Elijah, they all did the same.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dr. Evans crumple to the ground and then the building shook.  I looked over the ledge just in time to see the helicopter explode as it hit the ground.  The building shook tremendously and all of the windows below us exploded.

Out in the distance, the slight movement of the landscape stopped.  A giant cloud of dust rose into the air.  The Bane sweep ceased.

I looked below us once more, and saw dozens of bodies lying still on the ground.

“It worked,” I breathed.  A startled, disbelieving chuckle rose up from my chest.  “It worked!”

I turned back to the Nova, ready to cheer and celebrate with our team. 

And my internal organs disappeared into oblivion.

“Eve!” someone screamed and I would later realize it had been me.  One second I was standing at the edge of the building, the next I was at her side.

Eve was half in, half out of the Nova in a crumpled heap.

I rolled her over, pushing the hair out of her face.  “Eve,” I said again, tapping the side of her face.

Her eyes remained closed.  Her mouth hung just slightly open.

Her entire body was limp in my arms.

“Eve?” my breath barely came out.

“What’s wrong?” someone behind me questioned and others gathered around.  “What happened?”

Tristan knelt next to me, his hands extended but not knowing what to do with them.  Royce stood above us, a radio held in his hand, like he knew he was supposed to be doing something with it.  But it just hung limp in his hand as he looked down at his niece.

It must have been muscle memory or instinct or some other force of nature that made me raise my hand.  My skin felt dead as I pressed two fingers to the side of her neck.

Her skin was as still as the rest of her body.

“Eve?” I said, giving her a shake.  “Eve?  Come on!  Open your eyes!”  I shook her again.  Rougher than I should have.  Something was birthed in my stomach and clawed up in my skin.  A rabid beast that wanted to escape that very instant.

“Eve!” I growled, shaking her again.  “Open your eyes!”

Her head lolled back as I stilled her, her mouth falling open once again.  My hands felt numb.

Royce knelt next to us, and placed two fingers against her neck, just as I had done.

His hands shook worse than mine did.

His radio crackled and then a voice rang over it, loud and true.

“The test subjects are dead, sir.”

No one moved.  The air around us hung dead and stagnant—no one breathed.  Every pair of eyes was transfixed on Eve, who lay in my arms.  No one took notice how the shooting had ceased.  How the plundering footsteps of the invading Bane had died away. 

“Is she…?” a voice from behind asked.

We all turned to see Vee step out from the lead room.  Creed slept peacefully in her arms.

The breathing I hadn’t done up to that point suddenly kicked into overdrive.  My chest started rising and falling rapidly and my entire body broke out into a cold sweat.

“No,” I said shaking my head and looking back down at Eve.  “No, she’s fine.  She’s just unconscious.  The transmission just took a lot out of her.”

I shook her again.  “Eve,” I said, my voice calm but urgent.  “Wake up Eve.  Come on.  It’s over.  It worked.  You need to open your eyes!”

“Avian,” Bill chastised and I realized how hard I was shaking Eve.  “She’s not—”

“She’s going to be fine, Bill!” I bellowed, glaring back at him.  “It isn’t like she doesn’t have a reputation for blacking out!  Just give her a minute.”

I met each of their eyes with red in my own.  They all backed up half a step, resignation in their faces.

“Sir,” a voice crackled over the radio again.  “We’re mobilizing the solar tank with a long range radio to see how far the transmission worked.  But every Bane we can see is dead.”

Royce cleared his throat and gave a sniff.  “Very good,” he responded.  His voice sounded like gravel.

“Is everything okay up there, sir?” the voice cut through the radio again after a moment.

Royce squeezed his eyes closed for a moment and turned his face up to the sky.  His composure broke for a few seconds and his shoulders shuttered.  He took a sharp breath and wiped the back of his hand across his nose before raising his radio to his lips again.  “Today is a day to move forward.  Let everyone have their moment to celebrate.”

I’d been numb these past few moments.  Finally, I looked back down at Eve.

Her chest wasn’t rising and falling.  She was pale as a ghost.

My medical instincts went into fight-or-flight mode.

Covering her mouth with mine, I puffed five solid breaths into her.  Positioning myself over her, I placed my hands on her sternum and tried chest compressions.

Except I couldn’t make her chest rise and fall to squeeze her heart into working.

Her cybernetic lined body wouldn’t let her bones flex.

“Shit,” I swore, pounding on her chest as hard as I could.  It didn’t flex one millimeter.

Moving back to her mouth, I breathed into her ten times.

“What the hell happened?” I bellowed at Royce, taking a break from breathing into Eve.  “Dr. Evans said they were different generations of TorBane, that this kill code wouldn’t affect her!”

Royce shook his head, some of his sense seeming to return to him.  “That’s what he’s always said,” he replied, looking up at the Nova.  “He said otherwise she would have been killed the first time she transmitted the kill code.”

I looked up at Addie who stared at us from next to the Nova with horror in her eyes.  “Well?”

She shook her head and glanced back at Dr. Evans’ body.  “Dr. Evans always insisted it wouldn’t hurt her.  I don’t know…”

“Something went wrong,” I said, trying once again to do chest compressions.  Nothing.  “But she has to recover.  If that code couldn’t kill out her generation, the TorBane inside her will repair whatever damage has been done.”

“I think we’d better get her back to Dr. Beeson,” Tristan said, placing a hand on my shoulder.

Grateful that someone was thinking more logically than me, I stood and slung Eve over my shoulder.  She hung limp.

“We’re coming down,” Royce said into his radio as we all started down the stairs.  “Tell Dr. Beeson to meet us on the blue floor.”

My legs didn’t want to work and it was a struggle not to crash down the stairs as we stampeded down them.  Royce continued to talk to the hospital over the radio but I wasn’t in tune enough to distinguish what he was saying.

Dr. Evans had been so sure that this kill code was completely incompatible with the first generation of TorBane.  There was literal evidence that it wouldn’t kill her, since she had survived it before.  Even Vee had survived it, though she didn’t come out unharmed.  It had nearly melted her brain, but it didn’t kill her.

She couldn’t be…

She couldn’t be…

We broke from the building out the front door and I nearly tripped over the Bane Eve had ordered to stand outside.

They all lay in a crumpled heap.  Every single one of them.

“It worked,” Tristan said, his voice disbelieving.  “Eve did it.”

By now I was sprinting toward the hospital, leaping over bodies of dozens of other Bane who littered the streets.  Eve’s arms bounced on my back, swinging up and down with each step I took.

“Take her in through the back,” Royce said as they all ran behind me.  “Everyone’s bound to be gathered outside the front doors.”

I changed direction as we approached the hospital, headed for the underground garage.  Darting through the lined up vehicles, I nearly collided with the steel doors of the elevator as I pushed the up button. 

It opened immediately.

Bill, Royce, and Addie wedged themselves inside with me and everyone else shouted that they’d meet us upstairs in a few minutes.

None of us said a single word as we took the slowest elevator ride in the history of man up to the seventh floor.

Finally, it dinged, and we were immediately greeted by Dr. Beeson.

“She collapsed as soon as the transmitter went off,” I started explaining the second the doors opened.  He ushered us down the hall to one of the labs.  “I can’t find a heartbeat right now.  I’ve been doing breaths.  Chest compressions are impossible.”

Dr. Beeson nodded and held a hand out toward a door.  We shuffled inside and I found a huge scanner.  With his help, I laid Eve on the narrow bed.  Addie strapped a breathing mask around her mouth and nose.

Eve felt so still and empty.  Her muscles gave no resistance as I laid her left arm next to her side.

“The scan will show us what is going on,” Dr. Beeson said, placing an arm over my shoulder and pulling me toward the door.  My feet didn’t want to move.  They wanted to be in here with her.  My instincts screamed at me to be by her side, to tell her everything was okay, because she would wake up at any moment.

“Avian,” Dr. Beeson said, pulling me a bit harder this time.

With dead feet, I exited the room and followed him to the next door down.

We watched from behind a glass window as Addie pressed a button and the table Eve lay on moved into the circular tube.

She started up the scanner and the room filled with clicking noises.

The screens before us jumped to life.

There was the solid outline of her skull, the shape of her brain, her eyes.  The scan continued to move down.

I had seen plenty of scans before during my medical training in the Army.  But nothing like Eve’s scans.

Her entire skeleton was nearly black looking, exactly how someone with screws or plates on their bones would look.  The cybernetics in Eve’s body coated every one of her bones.

Eve’s body was a tank.

But as the scans showed other things, all the blood in my body seemed to exit out my feet.

“None…” Dr. Beeson started to say.  He cleared his throat and glanced over at me.  By this point, Tristan, Vee, Creed, and Bill were just outside the doors, observing the scan as well.  “None of her organs are functioning right now.”

A steel band seemed to form around my throat and my vision blurred.  “She’s been badly injured before.  Her body has always been able to fix itself.  TorBane will heal her.”

Dr. Beeson met my eyes and shook his head.  His own eyes had reddened and there was moisture pooled in them.  “That’s the thing.  TorBane, it’s a live technology.  A normal scan would show it immediately.  It’d be brilliant white.  You’d see it in her blood, in her organs, in her brain.”

Just like Creed’s scans had looked.  But there wasn’t a single trace of that on the scans.

That high pitched sound started in my ears again.  I didn’t have a body anymore.  I was just a numb consciousness floating in unconnected space.

“Avian,” Dr. Beeson said quietly from very far away.  “Eve is dead.”