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“Go.” Titus thuds the gun against the man’s back, nudging him forward, and we keep on toward yet another set of doors.
The man opens them onto a dimly-lit room, inside which the sound of compressed air echoes. Around the space are enormous capsules that reach from the floor to the ceiling. Contained within the capsules are human bodies, suspended in some sort of liquid, with an apparatus attached to their face that has tubes extending upward.
Men. Women. Children. Perhaps a hundred, or so, capsules that glow a fluorescent light.
I look around the room at all the faces that seem to be asleep. “What is this?”
“They’re in a hibernation mode. We call this latency.”
“Latency for what? What have you done to them?”
“They’re the future. The hope of our species. We’re not expected to survive the next decade.” Lab Coat nods toward the capsule in front of him, in which a young boy, perhaps only six years old, or so, twitches, sending bubbles into the surrounding water. “He will live. And thrive. And carry his name into the future.”
“When? When is he set free to do that?”
“When his body stops fighting the injections. All the years of research have brought us to the pinnacle, the assurance of mankind.”
I examine the boy through the glass, the scaling of his skin, the slight discoloration that gives him a bluish hue, as if he’s not really alive, at all. “You’re stealing children from their families. Women and men without their consent. They didn’t ask to be placed inside these capsules.”
“One in three children dies out on the Deadlands, whether by famine, disease, or brutal mutilation. I don’t need to give you the statistics on women.”
“How do your injections save women from rape and murder?”
“We can’t save them from rape. The yearning for dominance is an age-long affliction. But we can allow their bodies to carry a Rager child to term.”
The response he offers is ludicrous, yet at the same time believable. The Szolen church has always been against abortions, no matter how abominable, how wrong the circumstances of the pregnancy might be. “And why the hell would any woman want to carry a Rager child to term?”
“The virus remains latent in a child for the first few years of life. It only begins to manifest at age three.” He glances back at the boy suspended in fluids. “He is the product of a human mother and Rager.”
“And the mother?”
“She perished. Our science is still quite new, but with a bit more research, we can begin to co-exist with the infected. Imagine a world where the infected look like this boy.”
“His mother …. She was raped by a Rager out on the Deadlands?”
“No. She was mated with one in the safety of our facility. We ensured that it did not bite her, though.”
I scowl at the man, teeth clenched in anger. “You forced her to be raped by a Rager. To bear a child, for which she inevitably died.”
“It wasn’t inevitable. We’ve had a number of women survive the childbirth.”
“You’re savage bastards.”
Titus steps toward him, muscles rigid with tension, as if changing the subject is all he can do to keep from throttling the man. “Show us where to find the Alpha.”
With a glance toward Titus and the gun he continues to hold on him, he nods and shuffles past us, guiding us toward the back of the room, where he comes to a stop in front of a capsule carrying the familiar Alpha.
The man’s body appears to be battered, the index finger of his right hand bent in such a way that it must’ve been broken and healed wrong. His shoulder is cocked, as if it was also broken and left unattended. Numerous scars mar his body, ones so grisly I can’t bear to stare too long.
The pained look on Titus’s face is a contrast to the belief that Alphas are heartless and cold.
“We didn’t do these things to him, I want you to know that. He was in awful shape when Legion handed him over to us. We fixed what we could and placed him in hibernation.”
“Get him out,” Titus growls. “Now!”
Flinching at his words, the man scampers around the capsule to the back and throws a lever. A loud click and the sound of suction precedes the movement of water, as it begins to lower around Atticus, who sinks toward the bottom of the capsule.
Shots ping off the capsule’s metal frame.
