The Academy: Book 1 (7 page)

             
Asa felt sick. He looked ahead of him and saw that the road was just a few hundred yards off. The man in black wasn’t even breathing hard and when they were near the road, he skidded to a stop, kicking up dirt and dead leaves beneath him.

             
He sat Asa down and Asa just stood there, stunned.

             
“Don’t try to run, or I will catch you,” said the man in black. “Make it easier on both of us and just stay put for a moment.”

             
Crows covered every inch of White Bridge for as far as Asa could see in either direction. There was a car sitting idle on the shoulder, and Asa wondered if it was his mother’s Volvo, still abandoned from the night before when Harold Kensing had pulled him over.

             
Asa stood still while the man’s head snapped back and forth, as if looking for something in the vegetation. Asa noticed that the man in black had a band covering his forearm. The numbers “5:55” were stitched in the fabric and Asa thought that it was an amazing coincidence that it was just about that time in the morning. “Ah, there it is. C’mon! Follow me!”

             
The man sprang across the road and Asa found that his legs carried him over to the strange person. The crows made a path for both of them to cross.

The crows protected me from Harold
Kensing, so what are they doing now? They’re just standing there.

They stood on White Bridge, opposite Asa’s mom’s Volvo. The man turned to Asa and said through his mask, “A lot of birds out today, huh?”

Asa’s mouth was dry and he didn’t respond.

The man pressed on his forearm and was staring into the fabric. “King Lake is this way. We’ve got about a mile left to go.”

“Where are we going? And who are you?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there, but we might not make it. Conway said that the boat was leaving at six sharp. We would have left sooner, but the crows were a bit distracting. Up you go.”

Asa was in the man’s arms, and in a flash they were sprinting through the woods again. The man’s legs moved in a blur, and Asa held on around his neck so that he didn’t fall. Asa knew that there was no use fighting it; if the man could run this fast, he could certainly detain Asa.

In a couple of minutes, they were out of the woods, and King Lake came into view ahead. The man in black had
ran the mile impossibly fast.

King Lake stretched out of view like an ocean. Robert King (Or as some call him, The Boss), the
trillionaire owner of Alfatrex had had the resevior built for his son, Cobb. It was the biggest reservoir in the world, and it stood at the center of Dritt Texas; it was a symbol of who was running the show. Cobb could buy nature; he could control the elements. All of their money practically made them gods to the Wolf Flu ridden, poorer population.

The man carrying Asa came out of the woods and they began to sprint over the dirt surrounding the lake. Crows were swarming overhead. A long, wooden dock stretched out ahead of them, and a two story fishing boat was setting off out into the water. The motor on the boat was humming in the dawn, and the vessel was ten feet from the end of the dock.

Asa tightened his grip and the man in black sprinted over the wooden dock. The crows flew out of the way, and some cawed from the land behind them. When they reached the end of the dock, the boat was twenty feet from the dock and still moving. The man carrying Asa planted one last foot on the wood, and leaped out over the water. They flew so high into the air that Asa felt his stomach drop as they began to descend.

The water rose up to meet them, but they kept on moving forward, propelled by the jump that the man in black had made with his impossibly strong legs. The man landed on the deck, with Asa still in his arms.

He looked behind him and saw that the boat was floating away from the dock. “That was pretty good, wasn’t it?” the man said through his mask. He had a British accent.

The floor level deck of the boat was all white, with thin metal rails surrounding the edges, and benches to sit on and fish off the
sides. The man in black walked to the door, stepped inside, and he began to descend down a dark, damp staircase with Asa still in his arms. The boat kicked into a next gear, and Asa felt that they were moving over the water much faster now.

Before they reached the boat’s basement, Asa could hear crying coming from below. “Please, let me go. You don’t have to do this! Please. Please.”

The man who was carrying Asa stepped off of the last stair and they were standing on the bottom floor of the boat. It smelled like fish, metal, and lake water. There were old coolers around the edges, and a single light bulb twisted in to a socket on the ceiling. Besides that, everything else was mostly either flat metal, or huge, metallic nuts and bolts that were holding two surfaces together. In the middle of the floor there was a closed metal hatch with a wheel above the door. It looked heavy and secure. You could open it and drop things into the lake below.

There were two other people in the room. The first was the crying person; Asa thought that she was beautiful. She had clear porcelain skin, and thick brown hair that came out of her scalp in thick waves that fell to her shoulders. She was slender, with high, defined cheekbones and ocean green eyes. Asa could see why she was crying immediately; she was tied up. She had thick ropes around her wrists and ankles, with knots that didn’t move no matter how much she writhed and wiggled. A length of chain went from metal cuffs on her wrists, and ran through a series of ten forty-five pound circular weight plates that were stacked up to make a big, four hundred and fifty pound cylinder. The chain wrapped from the bottom of the plates and connected back on the top.

Asa saw that the girl’s eyes kept on moving from the weight plates to the closed hatch door on the bottom of the boat.

The other man was wearing the exact same clothing as the man who had carried Asa except that his mask was off. He wore unmarked black shoes on his feet, and his whole person except from his neck and head was covered in tight, fitting fabric. He was taller than the man who had carried Asa, and much leaner. He was a black man, with graying hair. There was a knot of scar tissue beneath his left eye and Asa thought that the man looked oddly familiar.

“What took you so long, McCoy?” The
maskless man asked the man who was carrying Asa.

“There were more crows than I expected,” said McCoy. He sat Asa down next to the girl.

Asa tried to stand, and McCoy pushed him down. Asa then hit McCoy in the face, and then Asa’s hands and ankles were in cuffs; just as he had in running, McCoy could latch handcuffs at a remarkable pace. The man’s hand moved impossibly fast, tying long lengths of rope to Asa so that he wouldn’t squirm.

“Has she been any trouble, Conway?” McCoy asked.

Asa tried to remember where he had heard that name.

“I tried to explain to her what was going on,” said Conway, but she didn’t believe me.

“Let me go! Please, let me out!” said the girl.

Asa followed the chain attached to his handcuffs and saw that they too were attached to a four hundred fifty pound bulk of lead. He jerked, and tried to twist, but it didn’t work.

“Who are you?”

McCoy, the man who had carried Asa through the woods, took off his mask and shook his head. He had short, blond hair, and a much younger, stronger face than Conway. “I wish that I could tell you, but we just don’t have time.” He was looking at his forearm again.

“Time for what?”

“Time before I have to drop you two. You two have to be in the water as quickly as possible. We don’t want to miss the next train. We’re almost there. Conway, open up the hatch.”

Conway twisted the big metal wheel on the hatch in the middle of the floor.

“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU’RE INSANE!” Asa was screaming, the words echoing around the small, metal chamber.

Conway stopped twisting and lifted the heavy door of the hatch. The boat was still moving at a fast pace, and water was gushing into the basement from the opening in the floor.

McCoy acted as though he didn’t hear Asa. “We’re on a very tight schedule. We’re supposed to check in at 6:10 to
Alfatrex Station Number 63, and if I sit here and try to explain everything to you, we’ll be late. I’ll offer you a bit of advice, though—take a deep breath; it’s a long way to the bottom. You’ll have to fall about four or five hundred feet until you hit bottom. If you don’t get a deep breath, you’ll be in trouble.”

“Please, let us go!” screamed the beautiful girl beside Asa. She looked at Asa for a moment with her piercing green eyes.

McCoy was staring at his forearm. The boat was slowing. “We’re in the target zone, Conway. Drop them.”

Conway moved over to the ch
unk of lead attached to the beautiful girl, lifted it, and sat it down into the water. Asa watched as the girl with the blue eyes slid across the wet floor.

“Deep breath!” McCoy called out.

She looked at him like he was crazy, but then took in a lungful before she went down into the water. There was a splash and then she was gone.

“No! You can’t do this!” Asa screamed.

The other girl is dead,
he thought with horror.
The lake is empty, she’ll go right to the bottom.

“Actually, we can,” said Conway. Asa looked at the man in the eyes and would have sworn that he had seen him somewhere. The man lifted the bulk that was attached to Asa and dropped all four hundred and fifty pounds of it into the water of the biggest reservoir in the world.

Asa was screaming and crying and he slid across the floor.

“It’ll be fine!” called McCoy. “Just remember, deep breath.”

The weight was too much. Asa struggled and tried to stop himself from going into the water by applying traction to the metal with his shoes, but the floor was covered in water and he was slipping. Finally, his body slid to the edge of the hatch, and he looked down into the deep water below. The chain that was attached to him went straight down, and twelve feet below he could see the weight plates pulling him down into the water. Beyond the weight plates, there was a seemingly endless depth of water; Asa could not see the bottom. He sat there in limbo for a second, his back flexed with adrenaline pumped strength, trying to keep him alive.

“Remember,” McCoy called, “d
eep breath.”

Asa took a deep breath and then plunged into the water. He opened his eyes. The lake was clear and he could see for a good distance; a hundred yards below was a sinking shape that Asa thought was the brunette girl.

              I’ll never know. I’ll never know who sent officer Kensing, or who those people are, or who sent that dog to save me. I’ll never know why the crows love me, or why they’re killing me.

             
He was certain of these things. He looked up and saw that the boat above was already small. The top of the lake shimmered and sunlight shown through. Asa looked down and saw that he was falling into an abyss. There was nothing but black underneath.

             
He jerked at his hands with all the strength that he had, and saw that it was no use. He was tied up so well that he couldn’t use his back to gain leverage, and even if he managed to get the cuffs from either his hands or feet, both were attached to the chain that was dragging him to his death.

             
He looked up again and saw that the boat was still traveling. He couldn’t see the hatch anymore, and the object was still shrinking in his vision. His lungs were beginning to hurt. A perch swam a few feet from his head, unaware and unperturbed by they drowning person. They were not crows; the fish didn’t care about him.

             
Asa went like that, down and down and down until he was in the darkness of deep depth. After a minute, his lungs were crying out for oxygen, but there was none. He kept on going down. His ears hurt with the pressure and he struggled with the cuffs even though he knew it was useless.

             
And he kept on drifting down.

4

Alfatrex Station Number 63

It began as a low hum. As Asa went lower and lower into the vacant waters, away from the surface where all of the boats and engines
should
be, a mechanical sound grew louder. Asa had been holding his breath for over a minute now, and he wondered if it was all in his head—if this audio hallucination was the first sign that his system were shutting down.

Asa’s hair floated and waved in the deep water as he continued to descend. His ears hurt with the pressure and his lungs were tight and begging for air. He looked around in the darkness for the beautiful girl who was submerged before him, but couldn’t find her. The handcuffs were digging into his skin, and he jerked and pulled on them. The chains rattled and moved some, but the metal wasn’t coming off. Asa looked above him to the surface of the water. The sunlight was reflected among the small waves and Asa couldn’t see the boat anymore. He thought that even if he was able to get the handcuffs off that he wouldn’t be able to swim to the surface before he drowned. The weights continued to pull him down.