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“He is. When his epinephrine levels rise, he’s uncontrollable. He’s rabid, angry, and murderous and nothing will stop him,” Axel whispered.
“What makes him so angry?” I asked.
“Saleos was different than me. While I passed the scientists’ tests, gaining access to more and more freedoms as I grew older, Saleos was the opposite. He spent longer and longer in his cell, contained and a prisoner for much of his life. He saw me and grew jealous. His fury toward the humans only amplified with time. The doctor in charge of his care was adamant about keeping the project going, about not terminating Saleos in hopes of achieving greatness, that he was one genetic mutation away from his very own Nobel Prize. The old fool had been blind. That doctor should have killed Saleos when he was a child,” Axel said softly.
“Saleos isn’t behind bars anymore,” I replied, stating the obvious.
“I know. Everything changed when Saleos broke out of his cell, some three weeks ago. He forced a stolen knife into the door track, ensuring it didn’t close completely. He’d snuck out in the dead of night and killed everyone who’d been in the building at the time, including the doctor in charge of him who’d been sleeping in his apartment nearby. Given his first taste of blood, he’s been out on his own ever since. Last night, he killed the last outpost of human soldiers left. You’re the last human survivor in Echelon 67 right now,” he whispered, the sadness in his tone heartbreaking.
He paused for a long time. I didn’t say anything at all, feeling the gravity of his words.
The last human in the area. I swallowed and lifted my eyes to meet his.
“All the scientists that created you are gone?”
“Every single one,” he murmured.
Even though I wasn’t that close with my parents, they were still there for me. Axel had no one, not even his creators. No family. No one. Every last one of them was gone.
Somewhere deep inside, I yearned to be his family too, but I pushed that wayward thought as far away as I possibly could.
We didn’t say anything more for a while, until he splayed a hand on my belly.
“I haven’t seen your face here before. Where did you come from and how did you get here?” he questioned, his tone expecting immediate obedience. My tummy quivered a bit at its power.
I explained my story to him, how I’d decided to become a scientific journalist. My path in life wasn’t typical by any means and my parents weren’t particularly pleased in what they called, ‘my midlife crisis career change.’ All my life, I’d been an all-star student, straight A’s and all that nonsense. I’d gone to graduate school and gotten my PhD in molecular biology and immediately upon graduation, switched careers. Instead of operating my own lab and teaching classes to bleary-eyed undergraduate students for the rest of my life, I became a freelance journalist who specialized in scientific stories. My work had been featured in newspapers around the world.
He listened to every word, quietly, just letting me ramble on and he didn’t look bored for even a second. When I had finally finished, he nodded.
“You’ll stay here in the cave until I can take care of Saleos. It’s not safe for you out there,” he commanded.
“Isn’t anyone else coming? Any other armies to vanquish him?” I asked.
He met my eyes and shook his head.
“They already have. There’s no one else coming,” he replied. “I’m the only one that can keep you safe from him now, until I can get you very far away,” he replied.
For a long time, he was quiet, and I left him to his thoughts while I explored mine.
I’d known a lot about Echelon 67 before I had come here, but now I felt like my knowledge had been outpaced by a long shot. Before I’d come here, there were a quite a few things I was able to find out on my own. I knew the area used an incredible amount of energy, be it solar, electric, wind, or hydrogen proton technology. I also knew that zero publicly accessible satellites gathered any information about the landscape or anything even remotely close to the area. I hadn’t even been able to find anything on the dark web about it.
One of my many connections had contacted me a week prior to my trip here and had invited me to examine a human corpse that had been found and collected near the border of Echelon 67.
Initially, I had thought it was a modified human male, but when I ran the genetic material through an Illumina HiSeq 12000, I’d been alarmed at what I found. Instead of twenty-three chromosomes like a normal human, there were fifty-two, as well as a number of chromosomes that kind of resembled a Y chromosome. The shape of them was slightly more robust and there were several of them, unlike a normal human male, which only has one. I also found an unknown genetic component that was similar in structure to adenine and guanine, constituents of normal human DNA.
That component wasn’t human. It had taken me a long time to accept that. The dead body wasn’t human. He was an alien, or, at the very least, a freak of nature created by science. Axel and Saleos were beings very much like that corpse I had examined, but now, I knew so much more.
Axel stood up then and lifted me from the ground and I curled into his chest, still reeling from the pleasure he’d bestowed on me. My arms circled around his neck and I pressed my cheek against his warm skin.
We journeyed back to the fire together. He put me down and I explored around the cavern. I found a swath of cream-colored cloth, likely an abandoned sheet for a twin bed in his things and twisted it around my body, covering me like a wrap dress. He raised his eyebrows when he saw me put it on, but he didn’t fight it.
It was soft and smelled of the outdoors. It was strangely comforting.
I found another blanket, put it over top of a rock next to the fire, and sat down. Axel was stoking the fire beside me and I simply watched him for a while.
He pulled another bottle of water out of a bag he had nearby, handed it to me, and I drank some of it down. It wasn’t very cold, but it was still refreshing anyway.
I wondered what time it was, if it was dark outside or if anyone was even looking for me. I brushed my hands against my wrist and remembered my comm device. I moved my fingers over it, and it blinked once, then twice and didn’t turn back on again.
