Unbecoming Humans: Part 2

Chapter 21

Nero played his fiddle while Rome burned. I didn't even do that much. I gaped out the window in shock at the bright orange glow that pierced through the roiling veil of black smoke and steam. People were dying down there in that hell. Real people that I would never know.

The extinction of humanity was not a vague idea happening to someone else, somewhere else anymore. It was the people in quarantine in North Dakota: Aan, and his mother, and the parents who had lost their child. It was Gilliad and the people she was fighting to protect in Winona. And now, it was the people of Toronto suffocating, burning beneath me.

They were dying so that I could be the queen of the Earth, whether I wanted to or not. Though, at this rate there would be nothing left to rule. I felt unbridled rage and hatred towards my mother and her sick games boiling up from deep inside me. I needed to do something, anything to distract myself from my murderous intent.

I pulled the data drive from Winona out of my pocket and shoved it into the helicopter's dash computer. If I couldn't stop what was happening, at least I could try to find someone else to blame for it. I found my prize in a matter of moments. The world map dotted with undulating splotches of color popped up on the screen.

A large, black patch hovered over the Great Lakes Basin, an oil spill that had permeated the entire watershed. The notes that accompanied the visual aid detailed the minutiae of poisoning the water supply on a grand scale as if it were routine maintenance of a plumbing system. A remark at the bottom mentioned that clean-up attempts were ongoing, but so far unsuccessful, not that it mattered anymore.

The sound of Nima's voice distracted me from the nuclear rage that was threatening to burst forth from within me. I had come to recognize her aviator tone. Her words were clear and flat, a string of words and numbers that held no meaning to the untrained ear. She was manipulating knobs and levers with unwavering intensity.

"What are you doing?" I asked for no other reason than to distract myself from the horror below. Nima looked at me confused, and then pointed to the headset hanging on the dash in front of me. She couldn't hear me over the roar of the aircraft. I should have realized, but my brain felt sluggish, like a wet blanket soaking in a bog. I slipped the headset on and asked my question again.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to contact Tess...Gilliad," Nima replied in her flat aviator tone. I watched in silence as she called out through the airwaves over and over, my chest tightening with each unanswered syllable. I could hear Nima biting back the growing desperation in her words.

"There could be a hundred reasons for them not answering..." I said softly into the headset. My voice sounded as tinny and hollow as my words. I rested my hand on her shoulder out of a desperate need to bring something other than death and destruction to everything I touched. I could feel the tension growing beneath her soft, warm skin. I caressed her arm with the intent to soothe, but the venom I felt towards my mother infected my nerves and caused me to pull away.

"We could go back and look for them."

Nima let out a derisive snort at my suggestion. "I'm sure Eden wouldn't catch us the second we set foot in Winona again. We can't go back." Nima's tone was cold and hard as steel. Her gaze shifted to the screen where the map of the oil spill glared like a poisonous digital slug. "They did this?" She framed it as a question, but her tone made it clear that she already knew the travesty below us was the work of Eden, of my mother. I didn't bother answering. We may have been free from the compound, but Nima and I were a quivering thread in their intricate web that they could trace and use to inflict their will. They were using us like a wild flame to set the embroiled world alight.