Up until this point, I had been sprawled on my back, only sitting up slightly to examine Sarah's neck My whole body ached like I'd fallen off a skyscraper, after effects of the explosion, it would seem. I required the little girl's help just to get to my feet.
As I already surmised, I'd been brought to Hydroponics, just a yard away from that charming dragon fountain.
So much death here. So many bitter memories. The bitterest of all: Sarah's sudden case of amnesia.
Well, at least she was alive.
But to forget her best friend! "If you don't know me, why did you bring me here and try to help me?"
Sarah bit her lip, expression like someone trying to put together a puzzle with most of the pieces missing. "I...I don't know. I was lonely and afraid, and you called my name in your sleep."
I trembled uneasily. Was my trip to heaven merely a dream created by my injured brain? Is that why Sarah heard me calling to her? Did she hear me doing that before or after I went to heaven?
I did remember calling for her a few times when I departed from heaven, but was that what she heard? Or did God use my body as a puppet, to bring Sarah to me while I was away from the flesh?
I had no answer to these questions, but one thing appeared to be certain: She either remembered something about who I was, or felt sorry for me, otherwise I doubt she would have helped a scary bug-like monster with sharp claws, no visible eyes and two nasty looking sets of teeth. "Where is this machine, Sarah?"
"It's in a big room."
"Which way is that?"
She pointed to the door at the end of the chamber.
I made a step in that direction, but she didn't move.
"Sarah, I need your help to find this place. I don't know how to find it on my own."
Sarah shook her head. "I'm...scared of that room. There's...things in there. Horrible scary things." She shivered in fear.
I gently placed a claw on her shoulder. "Scarier than me?"
She chuckled a little.
"Sarah. It's okay. I'll be with you. I'll protect you." I offered a claw.
She swallowed and took it.
First goal, besides getting an explanation to Sarah's puzzling return from death: Meet up with Rebecca again, make sure she was okay, try to reunite her with her parents.
I didn't expect to see her marching up to me the moment we stepped out the door.
Rebecca took one look at Sarah and fainted.
It took awhile for her to wake up. Kihoon, in the meantime, had decided to grace us with his presence. He had been watching silently from the stairs the whole time.
"Oh my God!" Kihoon exclaimed when he saw Sarah up close. "It's Number Neck!"
Sarah made a face like she had just eaten a lemon.
When Rebecca's eyes opened, they filled with tears. "You're alive!" She turned her attention to me. "Both of you!"
She grabbed Sarah around the neck, hugging her as she whimpered, "I thought you were dead!"
She kissed her, crying on her shoulder, but Sarah reacted rigidly, frightened and confused by this emotional outburst. She cried for different reasons.
"I don't know what you're talking about. Why do you think I'm dead?"
"Sarah," Rebecca sobbed. "That alien, Squidjyeehah..."
The rest came out as a string of hysterical sobbing mumbles, which scared the poor girl even more.
Sarah pulled away suddenly, staring at us in horrified bewilderment.
Taking a deep breath, I spoke slowly, telling her what happened with Sydjea.
The girl paled. "But I'm alive! My leg is fine!"
"I don't know," Rebecca croaked. "But you're alive now. That's what counts."
"I was never dead! This doesn't make any sense!"
Rebecca looked just about as frustrated as Sarah about the situation. "Pull up your pant legs."
More color drained from Sarah's face. "Why? What are you going to do?"
"Nothing. I just want to see something, that's all."
Sarah refused.
She backed away from us, looking like she intended to run, but stayed put, possibly because she trusted me for some reason.
"Just your shins," Rebecca insisted.
Sighing, Sarah rolled up her pant cuffs.
The other girl examined her calves with astonishment, poking the flesh. "There's no scars! You were bleeding...all over, but it's completely healed!"
Sarah rolled her pant legs down again, looking even more uneasy.
She broke into tears again. "You're telling me all these stories and I don't remember a single one of them!"
The girl dropped to her knees, sobbing into her hands. "I don't understand! What's happened to me? Why can't I remember?"
For a long moment, Rebecca just stood gazing lovingly at her, tears in her eyes, overjoyed at having her friend returned to her.
She folded her hands and bowed her head, mouth silently forming syllables.
"Wait," said Kihoon. "You're actually praying?"
Rebecca didn't stop, she just nodded.
"Why are you praying?"
She looked up at him with annoyance. "God just brought my best friend back to life. Why wouldn't I be praying?"
"That's...not what happened," Kihoon protested.
"Yeah?" she cried. "What happened then? How would you explain it? If it's not God, then what is it exactly?"
"I..." he stammered. "I don't know. Something else."
Rebecca smiled at me. "I bet you think it's God too, don't you, Ernie?"
"Well," I sighed, still contemplating the numbers on her neck. "I think God doesn't always need to use miracles to do great things. At least not in the traditional sense. Which is why I would like to see this `room' she came from."
"Room?" Kihoon said. "What room?"
"Sarah said she woke up in a strange room. She's going to show me the place. Maybe we'll find some answers in there."
Rebecca nodded, wiping her eyes. "Let's go."
Kihoon glanced back at the power plant. "Those things are gone, aren't they? All of them? Even the big bitch?"
I growled in annoyance at the boy speaking ill of my mother. "They're all gone. We have nothing to fear. Could you please not speak ill of my poor mother?"
The boy rolled his eyes. "It just means female dog...or animal."
I sighed, letting the subject drop.
"I saw the bodies," said Rebecca. "Ernie's mother looks like a sikada shell." She gazed sadly at the floor, probably thinking about Brice, as we all were.
"Let's go investigate this mysterious `room'. I think we all need to know what's going on."
Nodding, Sarah took my claw again, leading the other children and I past the doors of a chemistry lab and a room labeled Automation. A few yards down lay the debris from the explosion.
"Rebecca," I said. "Did you ever manage to fix Barbara?"
She shook her head.
"I asked if I could go get the body," Kihoon said. "But Brice wouldn't let me. Too dangerous, he said. We tried to use a remote to bring the drone in, maybe use it to stick something in the android's lower half to make it walk around like a zombie, but the dust storm fucked it up."
He shrugged. "Barbara's head is maintaining the system with Mara's help, but we're going to have to get that body sometime."
"We can do that next. It shouldn't take long just to peek at this `room'."
The boy nodded.
Just then, the power went out.
"I have night vision," I said.
"Great," the boy groaned. "Can you see where the room is?"
I frowned. "I...don't know which way to go."
"Gee. That's a lot of help!"
The lights came back on.
"We need to hurry."
Sarah lead us around a corner. "This way."
We entered a long narrow cinder block tunnel featuring nothing but a steel security door at its far end. It strangely reminded me of that scene from The Wizard of Oz when the heroes stood in the green palace, approaching the room with the giant floating head.
A closed security gate, no midgets with bushy mustaches present to give us aid.
I stared at the military style stenciled image on the door, a mouthless serpent's head framed with daisy petals. Army letters below it bore the enigmatic caption, `DAMBALLAH Project.'
"What's Damballah?" Kihoon asked, but none of us had an answer.
Sarah tried to open the door. Locked.
I sighed. "Now what."
Kihoon shrugged. "Well...We saw it. Let's go fix the generator before the life support equipment fails."
Conveniently enough, we had another blackout. In my heat vision, I saw Kihoon backing away. "Wait. Sarah, do you have any plastic key cards?"
The glowing heat signature of her head shook no, but then she tugged on the door handle and it clicked open without us having to do anything.
When the lights came back on, an alarm bell blared at us.
"How'd you do that?" Kihoon cried, but the noisy bells drowned out his voice.
We stared through the opening with fascination and nervous trepidation.
A laboratory of sorts, though much of it resembled a hospital, complete with wards and a nurse's station.
No nurses appeared to be present. The place, built out of a cavern, had an irregularly shaped roof, its far walls swollen and misshapen from natural processes, but carpets covered the floor. We stared through the glass windows of offices and labs.
"You came out of here?" I asked.
Sarah shuddered, clenching my claw tightly. "I don't like it here."
"What's this, a hospital?" Kihoon asked. Again, we couldn't hear each other very well over the alarm.
The power plant failed again, but, to my surprise, I discovered they had a backup generator. A set of orange lights switched on around the floors and upper walls, illuminating the chamber enough for my companions to see.
Sarah froze, refusing to move any closer.
"C'mon, Sarah," I said. "We're all here for you. We'll protect you."
Rebecca squeezed Sarah's hand. "Ernie's right. We got your back."
"I don't even know you," she protested.
"Look," said Kihoon. "We're human beings, we're kids, and we don't hurt people. If anyone in there wants to hurt you, we'll kick them in the nuts, and I'll sic Ernie on them, okay?"
Sarah seemed to accept this, for she nodded, marching into the chamber.
"Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" I muttered.
Sarah stared at me. "What?"
"Nothing." I glanced at the rows of closed security doors. "Where to now?"
She nervously pointed around the corner of a ward with a curtained window, where a rock tunnel, part of the original cavern, drilled smooth and carpeted, curved off to somewhere out of view.
Whilst in the Rosedale Square, Gretchen Goose had shown me old ViewMaster slides of Hoover Dam. With its eerie orange lighting and unusual shape, the tunnel I saw in this secret locale reminded me of some of those slides of access corridors, minus the workers in hard hats.
I mentioned this to Sarah, in attempts to calm her down.
"That dam doesn't exist anymore. Gretchen Goose always gets old stuff from Mr. Hooper's shop."
I stared at her in shock.
Kihoon was staring too. "How can you know all that shit and not even know who we are?"
"I don't know! Stop asking me things I don't understand!"
"Fine," the boy groaned, pushing past us. "I'll get my own answers." He disappeared around the curve.
"Ignore him," Rebecca said. "Kibble has no home training."
Sarah squeezed Rebecca's hand. "Bet you think I'm being silly, don't you?"
Rebecca shrugged. "I don't know."
The lights brightened, and a set of fluorescents switched on above us, a sign that we had working power again.
The tunnel led us to a second security door, stamped with an identical logo.
"Damballah," Rebecca muttered. "Sounds like the name of a circus."
"I have no idea," I said.
"You're thinking about the Ding-Ling Brothers." The boy leaned against a wall, arms crossed. "Incidentally, it's locked."
Sarah let go of Rebecca's hand, scaling a wall with the naturally occurring indentations she found there.
A spot near the ceiling of the tunnel featured a little recess, in which one could see a number of gnome shaped rock formations.
From behind a cluster of these unusually shaped stalagmites, our friend produced a key card.
"Thought I might need this again," she said as she hopped to the floor.
Kihoon frowned. "But you didn't think to bring it outside."
Sarah just glared at him.
"We should hurry," Rebecca said. "The air doesn't feel right. I think the machines aren't working."
"It's stale," Kihoon agreed. "One quick look, and we should run to the plant."
Sarah's hands trembled when she ran the plastic key through the card slot, her nervous expression clearly indicating she didn't want to stay there very long, either.
The lock beeped, a light turned green, and the door slid open, bathing us in blue light.
Immediately, I thought of recordings I've seen of people ordering live seafood at restaurants.
All along the wall ahead of us stood tanks. Aquariums of various shapes and sizes, all filled with blue liquid.
Hundreds of them, each containing a live human being at a different stage of development.
Small tanks at the top contained fetuses, hooked up to umbilical equipment, the larger ones held one year olds, two year olds, and then came the larger tanks.
As my eyes traveled downwards, peering into cylindrical tanks big enough to house a baby shark, I began to recognize...faces.
Or rather, a face, for all the tanks contained only one type of person: My best friend.
Floating naked in the bubbling blue solution, wreathed in long hair, little girls, identical copies of Sarah curled in a fetal position, thumbs poised at their mouths, despite some of them looking old enough to be past that phase.
"Jesus!" Kihoon said. "It's just like The Matrix!"
"Amen." I frowned. "Is that the movie with the sunglass man in the trenchcoat?"
Kihoon rolled his eyes. "Yeah. That one."
He glanced at Rebecca, who now stood gawking open mouthed at the display. "You still think God did this?"
"I..." she stammered. "I...don't know what to think."