Chapter 18
Chapter 18
Downtown Atlanta smelt like burnt toast and ash. The air was heavy with heat, an oppressive blanket that smothered Dan’s senses. His clothes were drenched in sweat after mere seconds, and the feeble breeze did nothing to cool him. Dan stared down at his glistening hands in consternation.
“This is… real?” he murmured, clenching his hand into a fist. He felt the muscles tighten and strain, he felt his body protest against itself. Dan relaxed, and the pain resolved into a dull ache.
“It most certainly is not,” Marcus spoke into his ear. Dan flinched backwards, spinning around in surprise. Charred buildings met his gaze, their burnt out husks still smoldering. Smoke billowed out of open windows, casting a shadow over the sky.
“Be calm. I am not there,” Marcus soothed.
Dan paused his frantic searching. Of course Marcus wasn’t here. This was Atlanta. Georgia. Earth. A villain had just destroyed a chunk of the city. Dan was here for search and rescue, to lend what aid that he could. He’d just left Abby’s; he had seen the devastation and wanted to help.
Except… that wasn’t quite right.
He glanced at his surroundings once more. Destroyed buildings loomed large over him, crumbling and broken. The surrounding streets were warped from the blast, leaving the ground unstable. Dan could see a pair of ATVs in the distance, dragging small trailers filled with supplies towards a hastily erected pavilion. Volunteers were to gather there, to be briefed on how they could assist the police and firefighters in the area. Beyond the tent, officials rushed about with clipboards, frantically making notations and shouting orders.
Dan could practically sense the controlled panic that filled the air. He could see the determined anger on the faces of the distant volunteers. He could hear the sounds of sirens in the distance. It felt real.
“I’m… not here?” Dan stated uncertainly.
“No,” Mercury’s disembodied voice remarked calmly.
Dan furrowed his brow, murky memories swimming to the front of his mind. “You said I wouldn’t forget.” He tried not to sound angry—he was a little bit too disoriented to be angry—but he couldn’t keep the accusation out of his tone.
“You are entirely too accepting of other realities. I… did not expect that. You didn’t fight the simulation at all.” Mercury sounded as apologetic as Dan had ever heard him be.
“I suppose I am,” Dan said slowly, “but this is far from the strangest thing that’s happened to me.”
“Yes. I expected you to immediately question your surroundings. I should have taken your previous experiences into account.” Marcus admitted.
Dan closed his eyes and counted to ten. The world seemed to stabilize more with every second. His confusion faded, slowly replacing itself with purpose. He could lambaste the doctor later. Hallucination or not, there were people that needed help.
Dan took a deep breath and started walking towards the nearby emergency tents.
“So, this is your training exercise. What am I supposed to do?” he asked quietly.
“It seems like you havesome ideas of your own,” Marcus chuckled. “The scenario is this: You are licensed for disaster relief and have arrived to assist in the aftermath of the Atlanta attacks. You’ll find a card in your wallet with your credentials. Speak to any of the official looking fellows with clipboards and they’ll get you sorted.”
“I’m not licensed for disaster relief,” Dan argued, as he altered his path toward a woman matching the doctor’s description. A small queue of people formed in front of her, and a crate of orange vests sat behind her.
“Quite right. This little exercise should perfectly illustrate why such things are necessary. Fear not, however, for I will walk you through it.”
Dan grimaced as he stepped into line. His hand dipped into his pocket and withdrew his wallet. A few errant flicks, and Dan retrieved his crisis license. The amount of information listed on it was startlingly short. His name, gender, and age, a personalized serial number, and a garbled sequence of letters, symbols, and numbers next to his upgrade description.
“What does S-HP17* stand for?” Dan asked with bemusement.
“That is the shorthand notation for your upgrade. The poor woman in front of you has to memorize every single one of them available to the public. The star indicates a mutation, the specifics of which cannot be condensed into short-hand. The number is the upgrade version.”
“There have been seventeen iterations of the Short-hop?” Dan clarified quietly.
“Mm, yes. Not much interest in it after the first dozen or so failures. Unlimited, unrestricted teleportation is the Holy Grail of transportation, but the Short-hop lacked potential.”
Dan swallowed heavily and remained silent. The line moved quickly, and soon he was facing the overworked woman at the front.
“Credentials,” she demanded impatiently, holding out her hand.
Dan passed over his crisis license and his non-driver ID card. The woman glanced over both with alarming alacrity, pausing very briefly at the Dan’s upgrade description. Her eyes flicked to him.
“Mutate?” she asked.
Dan nodded meekly.
She scowled. “Well?”
Dan glanced between her and the volunteers behind him. More scowls appeared, much to his confusion.
“She needs you to describe your power, Daniel,” Mercury informed Dan with not at all hidden exasperation.
“Oh.” Dan said aloud. His eyes widened as the woman’s scowl deepened.
“Oh! Right, my Short-hop range is increased to about five miles, and doesn’t require line of sight. I also haven’t found a limit on the number of times I can jump,” he babbled quickly. Even in this false world, he would rather keep his power a secret.
He thought for a moment, then added, “I can move up to my weight in non-living materials.”
The woman’s scowl faded minutely. She visibly pondered the specifics of his power, then turned to the crate behind her.
“You’re on call for medical,” she told him frankly, digging a bright orange vest out from the box and passing it over.
“What? I don’t know anything about medicine—” Dan tried to interject, but a handheld transceiver radio was shoved into his face.
“Take this, pick up a map by the rear, and head towards the hospital tent,” the woman told him in a voice that brooked no argument.
Why was he arguing with a simulation? Clearly Mercury was railroading him somewhere, the surly bastard.
“Yes ma’am,” he replied, accepting the vest and radio. He turned to leave.
“Green as grass,” he heard the woman mutter furiously behind him.
Dan moved stoically forward, struggling not to flush. It was just a simulation. There was nothing to get offended over. He shrugged on the vest, clipped the radio to his belt, and snagged a map as he left the pavilion. He could feel hostile glares on his back.
“A little much, don’t you think?” he said into the air. Programming the simulation to be needlessly antagonistic was just petty. Marcus likely saw it as some sort of insane test, or maybe he was simply trying to discourage Dan.
“Every second you waste costs lives in this situation,” Mercury snapped. “Do not be confused or offended when people dislike you for wasting their time. Efficiency is the only thing that matters.”
Dan’s stride hitched. He reminded himself that this was just a simulation and no one would actually die. He told himself that he would’ve known what to do in the real world.
His little brain fart at the front of the line had taken thirty seconds. How long was thirty seconds, to someone in a burning building or buried beneath rubble?
Dan didn’t want to think about it
He accelerated his pace, moving quickly towards the distant medical tents. They were large, bright white, and labeled with red caduceus symbols, proclaiming their purpose to all and sundry. There were very few ambulances within sight; the roads were simply too damaged to support them. Instead, massive trucks with oversized wheels were parked outside the tent. Dan could spot volunteers hauling patients in and out of the vehicles on stretchers. Dan paled as he caught sight of a bloody body.
“Yes, indeed, this is not a game. You realize this, but you don’t comprehend it,” Marcus whispered into his ear. “People are dying as we speak. They are burning to death. They are suffocating. They are calling for help.”
“I know,” Dan replied stiffly.
“Do you? Then why are you walking!?“
Dan flinched at the admonition, the reminder. He should’ve remembered, should’ve known. He couldn’t afford to dally. He stared at the distant tents and blinked his eyes.
Dan appeared at the entrance of a medical tent. The smell from within hit him like a physical blow. The area stank of cooked flesh and antiseptic, all but overpowered the ash that suffused the air. He could see people inside, covered in bandages. There were bodies, beds, people, more than Dan had ever seen in one place. Doctors and nurses swarmed throughout the tent, and Dan finally realized the sheer size of it. What he had assumed was multiple tents was one single structure. Or, more accurately, multiple structures linked together from within. Though the ceiling was less than ten feet tall, the conglomeration sprawled outwards for almost half the block.
A nearby nurse took in Dan’s sudden appearance with nary a flinch. She glanced at his vest, down to his radio, then up to his face.
She smiled grimly. “Here to help?”
Dan snapped to attention, furiously stamping down on his budding fear. “Yes ma’am. I’m a teleporter. I can transport goods up to my weight with almost no limits on distance or repetition. They told me to come here.”
She nodded at his explanation. “You’ll be acting as an emergency resupply then. Set your radio to channel four.”
Dan unclipped his radio and fumbled for the dial. As he did so, the nurse stepped past him and moved to a nearby desk. She scooped up some scattered papers and quickly leafed through them. By the time Dan had completed his task, she had scribbled down several notes and produced a radio of her own.
“Control, this is Stephanie zero-zero-three. I’ve got a teleporter with me, here for emergency resupply. Put him on call, would you please? His radio is,”—The nurse absently snatched away Dan’s radio and scrutinized the bottom label—”serial number: six seven niner zero one.”
She passed the radio back to Dan, and listened intently to her own device as a voice crackled back a reply. “Copy that Steff. Putting him down as Bravo-one-seven. Make sure he’s on channel four. He goes active in five minutes. Good luck.”
The voice clicked off. Stephanie gave Dan a stern look. “You get all that?”
“Um. I hope so?” Dan offered with a weak smile.
The nurse did not smile back.
“Repeat it back to me,” she insisted.
Dan smoothed his expression and his anxiety. “I’m Bravo-one-seven. I’m on channel four. They’ll… direct me once I’m called, presumably?”
The nurse sighed. “Your map is separated into grids. Go where they tell you to go. Bring what they tell you to bring. You’ll find the resupply over there,” Stephanie pointed to a far corner. Rows and rows of shelves and plastic containers occupied the space. Each shelf was labeled with a letter, large enough for Dan to see from over fifty feet away. The items on the shelves were also labeled, though Dan couldn’t quite make them out.
“For emergencies, you’ll get a label and a quantity. For basic resupply, we have kits on the outside of the tent that you can bring. Any questions?” Stephanie’s voice was terse and rushed.
Dan couldn’t blame her.
He shook his head in the negative and she bustled off to do her job. Dan could figure things out from here.
He took a moment to look around the tent. Doctors moved from place to place with purpose. Injured men and women moaned and shook and wept on their beds. Nurses wrapped wounds in thick layers of gauze, muttering soothing words to their patients.
They seemed alive. Real. All of them.
Dan wiped sweat off his brow. He breathed in the dank air.
Simulation or not, he didn’t want to let these people down.
Whatever came next, he’d get through it. He’d learn fast.
He would have to.