Chapter 13

"All it takes is a few bad people to ruin a community."-- The Teachings of Gran Ch .27 Line 23.

Dahra woke up screaming. Never in her life had she ever felt such pain in her life. It started in her head, and crashed through her body like a hurricane. It was as if all the anguish and pain she had ever felt in her life had been rolled up in one package, and force fed into her brain, and then doubled, then tripled. Her bladder and bowels emptied. She fell off her bed and writhed on the floor, with her soiled bedsheets still partially twisted around her. If she had had any kind of knife in her hand, Dahra would have gladly slit her throat right then, to end the agony. But the pain was so intense, that she couldn't have grabbed anything.

As abruptly as it had started, the attack ended. It had only lasted a few minutes, but to Dahra, it seemed a lifetime. Dahra lay on the floor twitching, bathed in sweat for about an hour, then shakily got to her feet and staggered back to her bed.

What in hell was that? thought Dahra. She had heard of sadistic master level minders, who would forcibly expose people to shameful memories and thoughts, and force their victims to say blasphemous, obscene, things in public. And master emoters who would force people to re-experience past pains, or feel abnormal emotions toward people they knew and trusted. The feeling of violation and pain that the victims of these events were said to feel seemed similar to what she was feeling now. But this didn't seem like the attack was singled out just for her. It was more like a insane minder or emoter lashing out at whoever was in range. But she was so isolated, buried under ten meters of rock, two and a half miles from the nearest sentient being. What minder would have a range like that?

Something was not right. Dahra quickly bathed, threw on an olive jumpsuit, ran a comb through her hair, and portaled over to the university plaza in Fahrlot, in front of the archeology museum.

It was raining, a steady downpour. The noon sun could barely be seen through the gray overcast sky. The monsoon season was starting about a week early. It would last for almost a month before the usually fair weather of Fahr would return. The rain festival, a university tradition, would start three days after the rain started.

Dahra stepped out of the portal, facing the museum, her back to the plaza. She saw in front of the door a minder laying on the ground, about five yards away. Dahra took a step toward the woman, tripped, and fell flat on her face.

She had tripped over a girl, an emoter, no more than a year old. Dead. She had platinum blond hair, green eyes and a round face. What would have been a cute face was marred by the contorted look of anguish, pain, and terror. Her eyes were wide open. She was laying on her side. There was a puddle of blood around the ear that lay on the ground, and there were more spatters of blood, almost camouflaged by her little red uniform. The rain had already diluted the puddle, and it was starting to run off into the drainage channels.

Dahra had fell in that puddle, the watery redness had splashed her clothes, hands and face. She took one look at what she had tripped over, and then vomited what was left of her dinner onto the sidewalk.

She shakily stood, looked up, and saw carnage the likes of which she had never imagined. Within her line of sight, across the plaza, there were at least one hundred bodies. All dead. All with that same look of terror that the child had.

Dahra staggered into the archeology museum, nearly tripping over the leg of another body that was inside the doorway. She staggered across the foyer, up the stairs, and down the hall, to her office. Everywhere she went, there were more bodies. More death.

She found Krinan laying in the doorway of her office. Her head and torso in the hall, the rest in her office. Her colleague was wearing the same frumpy outfit she had worn six months ago, when they had that hostile confrontation. Krinan's eyes stared blankly down the hall at Dahra, as she approached her.

Dahra couldn't bear to touch the body of her former friend and rival. She inched down the hall, with her back to the wall opposite Krinan, stepping over an outreached hand. She then ran down the hall and round the corner to her office. Dahra tried to open the door, but her hands were shaking so much that she fumbled the latch. On the second try, she managed to get it open. There was no body in her private room, of course. For that, Dahra was grateful, she didn't think she could take sharing her office with a corpse.

Dahra sat down at her desk, numbly, and realized for the first time that she was gasping for breath. She fumbled through her drawers, searching for a bag to breathe into, but couldn't find one. The thought of leaving her office to find one, was out of the question, so she tried to slow down her breathing on her own, with limited success.

What happened? What happened? What happened? The thought circled round and round her mind. It definitely was some kind of emoter or minder attack, she reasoned. But what person has enough power to reach from Fahrlot to the small isle of Fvoglu on the other side of the world. It probably had something to do with the recent upheavals in our society. But what? And how far did this destruction reach? Surely the whole planet wasn't affected. The thought made her heart skip a beat. Surely she wasn't the only person alive. Was she? If she survived, surely someone else had too.

Sure, answered a cynical voice in her head, another person who was isolated on a sparsely populated island, buried under ten yards of rock.

Dahra stood up and tried to portal, and start her search for survivors, but found she couldn't do it. The thought of seeing another tortured corpse frightened her so much that she couldn't summon the will to portal. She just sank back into her padded chair, played her many unanswered questions over and over in her mind.

Lissa! The name suddenly shot through Dahra's skull. How could she have forgotten about Lissa? The shock of this disaster had made her forget her daughter. Please God, prayed Dahra, let my Lissa be alive.

She portaled directly into Lissa's apartment, no time for the niceties of knocking on the front door. "Lissa!" Dahra cried out, startled by the loudness of her own voice. There was no answer. She searched through her rooms. Lissa was not there. She started searching through papers, reading notes posted on the wall, rifling through books lying around, and finally pulling books off their shelves.

The sound of a bookshelf crashing over, and the crash of the ancient vase she had given Lissa for her last birthday, that been on the top shelf of the bookcase, startled Dahra. She realized that she was the person who had toppled it. You're getting hysterical, girl, she chided herself, calm down and figure out where Lissa would be, if not here.

"Of course!" shouted Dahra, startling herself. "In the middle of the day, she wouldn't be here. She'd be at work!"

Dahra portaled to Lissa's office in the geology college. It was empty. Must have been at lunch, she thought. Dahra looked at Lissa's planning schedule on the desk. Printed on the schedule was the words "Atelan: Noon" Atelan? Lissa's old portaler roommate? Dahra didn't even know that Lissa had kept in touch with her, and didn't have the first idea where she lived. She seemed like a nice enough girl, but she knew next to nothing about her. She seemed to remember Lissa mentioning something about her getting a job with a construction company. Not much to go on.

She searched Lissa's drawers for her address book but couldn't find one. She then portaled back to Lissa's home, and searched through the rubble that once was Lissa's home. She found the address book after a quarter hour of searching, under an overturned coffee table.

Atelan's office turned out to be on the other side of town in the hills that surround Fahrhep. Dahra knew the area fairly well, from her hikes around Farhep, and portaled within a hundred meters of the office.

Dahra walked into the office, and for the first time in several hours confronted the horror of facing a corpse. The secretary in the foyer was laying beside her desk, curled around a desk leg. There were six offices in this building, all upper management of this construction firm. One of the doors was ajar, with an arm sticking out. Dahra didn't investigate it further. Dahra came to the door marked "Atelan Kahlarfalas: Head Geologist", and opened it. There was no one inside. The room was littered with foundation models and maps of geologic surveys. The calendar on the wall was marked under today's date, with the words "Lissa, Noon. Home"

Dahra had no idea where Atelan's home was, but had had the foresight to bring Lissa's address book with her. She quickly found out. It was in a neighborhood over a mile north of the university complex. Dahra was not familiar with that area and the best she could do was portal about three blocks from the address. Her portaling point was on a major intersection.

There was a massive wreck there. Two mover-driven buses had gone out of control, ran into each other, then tipped over. Another bus, not thirty yards away, had jumped the curb, and run over at least ten people before crashing into a building. The rain ran off the side of the piles of twisted metal, as if it were some kind of grotesque abstract metal statue.

Dahra fled the scene, up the side street on which Atelan's home lay. The home turned out to be a large two story house with a white adobe exterior, and several large windows. The lawn out front was small, but well groomed.