~Chapter Twenty Five: Who the Hell is Bert?~

Lanni released her aura and ran to Mitch. He had stopped writhing by the time she reached him, and lay still, staring with unseeing, blood-filled eyes. What remained of his body was flat and distorted, with craters almost like a melted or deflated wax figure. Toya reached her side next.

“What the…” Toya began. She was interrupted by Rico, following a pace behind.

“Poor bastard,” Rico said. He hooked an arm around Toya’s waist to catch his balance. He actually leaned forward over Mitch, with his feet anchored in place like he was standing on a high cliff.

“That wasn’t our Mitch. It was someone else.” Toya’s head turned from side to side mechanically, but her eyes were locked on the mess that had once been her friend.

“I know he betrayed us, but… Jesus. That there is some harsh shit. Ouch! Watch my hand, Toya.” Pulling his arm back from her waist, he looked at his hand and swore again. Holding it out as far from his body as he could, he staggered backwards a few steps, like he wanted to get away from it.

“Stand still, Rico. It’s OK. The girl can fix it. She can fix it.”

Small bloody holes and pockmarks covered Rico’s arm from his fingers halfway to his elbow. He wasn’t as bad off as Mitch, but he wouldn’t get much use out of it in that condition.

“You can fix it, can’t you?” Toya asked her.

Lanni’s face betrayed no emotion as she stared at Toya. Alex must have felt this way often. She had no idea if she could heal Rico’s wound. At the moment, she could barely tell if her aura was there. Pulling it in so she could balance his nanites seemed well beyond her weakened capabilities.

A small rectangle of white light appeared on the green box behind Rico. About the size of a paperback novel, it projected a holographic grid with three glowing spheres. Lanni pushed past Rico and touched the spheres in sequence, sliding each to a new position. All three winked out as the last orb moved into place, followed by the grid and the rectangle.

Ignoring the fact that she operated the control panel purely on instinct, she focused on trying to open the lid. Who or what was in there? Could it be Alex? Another of the silver-skinned children? With a burst of nanites against Lanni’s aura, the lid slid open and a human woman sat up.

“Denise!” Rico shouted. He and Toya ran to her and pulled her from the box, squeezing her in a tight group hug. They cried together, and laughed, and said how happy they were to see each other.

The nanites that erupted from the box vanished like shallow water in the desert sun. She hadn’t been able to feel her aura since the explosion, but as the last nanites died against it, she realized that she wasn’t simply numb to it. Except for these, there were no nanites impacting it. At all.

“You guys look kind of sick. Are you okay? What happened to you?” Denise asked.

Denise was right. Lanni hadn’t noticed until now, but neither Rico nor Toya looked well. Their skin color was muted, almost ashen.  She looked closer and saw tiny flakes forming on their flesh. Denise started going grey, too. The remaining nanite particles in their bodies were being drawn out.

“It must be a residual effect from the blast,” Lanni muttered to herself. The others were caught up in the excitement and messy emotions of their reunion and didn’t hear her. She looked at the other boxes, all but a few still sealed. Were there more colonists in them?

She went to the nearest unopened box and held her hand near the control panel. It didn’t activate as she hoped. Instead, she discovered that nearby nanites flowed directly to the panel. It attracted them just like the token she’d found in the bone room had done. She sensed John and Rumiko watching through her eyes, working out the implications.

“What if this thing opens up and another Alex pops out?” John asked. “He helped you against the host because it was a threat to him, but we can’t know his true motivations. It’s a big risk for your three friends.”

“John is right,” Rumiko added. “If Alex can pop into any body he chooses, he could be in all of the boxes. Meanwhile, those three colonists are literally falling to pieces while we wait to find out. How much longer will they last as nanites that acted as blood cells or bone come apart and slip out their bodies?”

“Yeah, I know,” Lanni said. “We’re leaving.”

She turned to the others and found them staring at her.

“What’d you say, Lanni? Leaving?” Toya asked.

Great. Now that I’m talking to myself they can hear me.

“We’re getting out of here. Now,” Lanni said. She ignored the fear and confusion in Denise’s face and walked past them toward the door.

“What about my hand?” Rico asked, holding it up for all to see. “I think it’s getting worse. I think it’s spreading.”

“I can’t help you here,” Lanni began, but Denise interrupted her.

“Hey, look. Another box just lit up. Maybe somebody else is in there.”

The control panel Lanni had just examined came to life with another holographic grid.

“We aren’t waiting to find out,” Lanni said. “I don’t know who or what’s in that thing, but I can think of more bad possibilities than good ones. Leave it.”

“Wait,” Denise said, planting her feet and grabbing Rico’s arm to stop him. “I know who’s in there. It’s Bert. He can fix your hand, Rico. He saved me, and he said he’d lead us to the others as soon as our pods opened.”

“Who the hell is Bert?” Toya asked.

This time, Lanni didn’t mind that Toya swore. She wanted to know the same thing. What she didn’t want was to watch the humans slowly disintegrate while they waited to find out. Their nanite ratios were all very low, but that was no guarantee they would survive losing them all. Regardless of Bert’s identity, they still had to get away from the boxes and out of the city.

The control panel winked out, and the lid slid back. A silver-skinned child sat up and climbed out of the box, apparently oblivious to the people around it. Denise’s smile told Lanni that this must, indeed, be Bert.

He looked identical to the body Alex had used. Lanni watched his every move, ready to spring into action if necessary.

Bert looked at each of them and at the shattered crate. He held his hands up and examined them, too, before turning his expectant gaze back to Lanni.

“Bert, I presume?” Lanni asked.

A hazy, slightly glowing nimbus grew into place around Bert. Denise stepped toward him, but he stopped her with an outstretched hand. “Talking must wait until sector zero is behind us. Please follow me with all possible haste.” He jogged past them through the doors, waving for them to follow. After a brief exchange of befuddled glances, they jogged after him.

“I had hoped he would have removed your mnemonic blocks,” Bert said as Lanni caught up to him. The exertion of running had no noticeable effect on his breathing.

“Mnemonic blocks?”

“Yes. Mental barriers that isolate and conceal harmful or traumatic memories. In your case, they were intentionally implanted to hide certain truths from you.”

“I know what the term means,” Lanni said. “What I don’t understand is how or what you know about my memories.”

“You have perfectly illustrated my meaning. You’ll have to solve that mystery without my help, I’m afraid. If I may change the subject, am I correct to surmise that Alex assisted you against your foe, in the process destroying his Con and thus himself? If I’m correct, this is a severe tactical loss.”

“Can you slow down a little? Rico and Toya are injured, and I don’t want to lose them.”

“Unless we get away from here before I deplete my nanites, we are all already lost. But we may yet escape our doom by escaping the Con void Alex created before it vacuums all of our nanites into it. Are my assumptions about Alex correct?”

“More or less. I feel like you and I are well acquainted, Bert. You probably know how important it is to me to protect these humans. If you don’t slow down so they can keep you in sight, I’m going to stay back with them.”

They were moving at a slow jog, but he dropped his pace, and Rico, assisted by his two companions, caught up. Bert led them to the stairs and hurried down. With each step, sounds of flowing water grew louder. Rising water in the stairwell forced them to stop just before reaching the bottom level. The entire basement was submerged.

“We’ll have to take the streets,” Lanni said, turning back. “Come on.”

“No,” Bert said. “We’re going this way. There’s no time to turn back. Stay close to me. I won’t stop for anyone who falls behind.”

“Where are you leading us?” Lanni asked. “Into flooded sewers? You do understand that we can’t breathe water, right?”

“Alex kept the tunnels beneath the safe zone dry. I will do as he did, but on a smaller scale. I may have enough strength to get us out safely, but I’m growing weaker every second. If I must explain everything to you, we will not survive. I am leading us out of the sewers to the west. We will skirt the city to the north and meet up with the other survivors. Now, please follow.”

The water receded as Bert descended the stairs. It parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses, and they followed him down the stairs. Enveloped in a bubble of air with water on all sides, they walked toward the maintenance rooms and the sewer access tunnel.

The surface reflected their images in the faint but increasing glow around Bert. An epic amount of nanites radiated from him to keep the water at bay, and Lanni guessed that even he was struggling to keep it up. Since she was walking at the back of the bubble, water splashed on Lanni’s neck and back from the start. Everywhere but around her the water wall was calm and fairly glassy. Behind her, above her, and to her sides it rippled at best, often frothing or lurching at her in thin, wet spikes.

Her stomach twisted with each step. This was a mistake. If there were more colonists in the boxes, she was abandoning them. The disruption her aura was causing Bert meant that he was expending energy he couldn’t spare to keep it stable. Her presence brought added risk to the people she wanted to protect. She knew what she had to do.

She decided to trust her instincts about Bert. He was a total blank spot in her memory, but she felt an inexplicable connection with him. Despite his dire threats of leaving stragglers behind, he would keep the humans safe. As much as she longed to meet the other colonists and become one of them, the timing was all wrong.

“Keep them safe, Bert. I’ll catch up if I can, but don’t wait for me.” Bert kept walking, waving a brisk salute to acknowledge he heard her. The three humans all looked back, questions written on their faces, but no time to ask. They had to keep walking to stay in Bert’s bubble. Lanni took a deep breath and waved good-bye with a reassuring smile. As the wall of water engulfed her, she wished she felt as reassured as she hoped she looked.