Infiltration (Implanted Book 2) Read online

  Copyright

  Implanted – Book 2: Infiltration

  by Chris B. Porter

  Copyright © 2015 by Chris B. Porter

  All rights reserved.

  www.chrisbporter.com

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without expressed written permission from the author. To contact the author, visit author website

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought the book, or telling your friends about it.

  Book title by Chris B. Porter – 1st ed

  Images licensed through ©DepositPhotos/rolffimages

  Dedication

  To my father who never let me give up. Thanks, dad, for everything.

  Also by Chris B. Porter

  Implanted (Disconnected - Book One)

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Jamie was behind everyone and watched as Cecily slid on one side of her body, latching her arms around an almost invisible hatch wheel. Steven reached her next, crouching down, drenched to the bone. They both turned the wheel and, by the time Jamie caught up, everyone but Cecily and Jenny were down below.

  “Shove her,” Cecily commanded.

  “What?”

  “Just do it. She’ll die out here for sure, at least she has a chance and may survive the fall. It’s not—oh, for crying out loud, just do it!” She poked his chest, anger and fear pressing it deep. “I’m not strong enough, dammit. Do it!”

  Jamie saw her logic. As quickly as possible, he angled Jenny beside the huge hatch door and put all his weight on her shank. She moaned at him and pushed back, whining softly.

  “I’ll get her shoulder,” called Cecily and moved to the other side of the animal. Together, they dropped the burro into a dimly lit cave, and in moments they were within the cavern behind her.

  “She landed on her side, she’s fine,” Emily explained, stroking the soft fur.

  Cecily sealed the hatch from the inside. “Nobody will be able to get through there, if they are even lucky enough to find it.”

  Light somehow filtered through the hatch, although it had seemed opaque from the outside. “It looked like part of the desert rock,” said Jamie, admiring the artistry for a moment. He took great gulps of air, forcing oxygen into his lungs.

  “The entrance is so wide and has all three ladders because it was supposed to…” Katie trailed off, her face a mask of regret. “Well, more people could escape something. Fast.” She held an unlit electric lantern.

  Jamie looked around. They were in a small, round room which had been carefully carved with good instruments as to leave the sides smooth. There was a door with no window to his left. On his right, he saw more lanterns as well as food and water supplies.

  He looked at the rest of them. They were a wet, bloody mess.

  Steven was furious. “What was that about? Huh? What the hell, Cecily? What you doin’ out here? Are you involved with them people from way back again? You said—”

  Emily cut him off. “Mama’s not with them. I’d know.” Her voice was tight and cool, like a hint of fall coming in August.

  “What are you talking about?” Jamie asked, not understanding the exchange. “Where are we? Who attacked us?”

  “Yeah,” Steven grunted, stepping closer and getting in his sister’s face. “Who attacked us?”

  “Not here,” Katie said holding her voice down to avoid shouting. Her eyes were piercing, looking from Steven to Jamie. “We have to gear up and move into the tunnels—get to the survival rooms. There’s rope we can use to tie stuff to Jenny.”

  As though infuriated by being shoved into a pit and then immediately required to carry a bunch of stuff, Jenny huffed, tossed her short mane, and hooved the sandy earth.

  Jamie stood in front of the door. “Not until you explain who that was and why they were bombing you.”

  Cecily lowered her head, glancing through eyelashes at Steven. She looked up at Jamie. “That was them.”

  Steven cursed and spit.

  “I can’t explain who they are right now. Just know they want me—and anyone associated with me—dead.”

  Katie interrupted. “Let’s get moving. Load up Jenny. Get your own torches. It’s a long walk.”

  “Wait,” Emily said softly. “Jamie needs to clean his head. It hasn’t been changed and Mama, if you taught me anything, it’s to keep cuts clean cause you never know.” She looked pointedly at her mother.

  Cecily rubbed a dirty, heavily-knuckled hand across her forehead, trailing blood in a sunset smear. “Of course. Let’s do that, then we’ll go.”

  Jamie smiled at her for the first time, and she slowly returned the gesture. It didn’t quite reach her eyes; he couldn’t blame her for that.

  He felt for her. All those people in the compound…all gone. People she’d known and probably cared deeply for. She was amazingly strong.

  Chapter 2

  Jamie’s head itched and burned from the cleaning. They walked quickly and quietly through the caves. And they were caves, many of them. Jamie had no idea how they knew where to turn. He was completely lost. Tunnels branched out once in a while, seemingly at random.

  Nobody spoke, and Jenny’s hooves were as loud as the bombs, echoing off every rock surface. Down here, the walls weren’t carved as expertly, and in some places, he could see that the base of this network was a real cave. The tunnels leading off—the ones they didn’t use—were dark pits of unearthly nothingness.

  After about three hours of walking, Cecily, who was leading them, stopped and let go of Emily’s hand. “Okay, Katie, you take them the rest of the way to the survival rooms. Clean them up, dress them. Feed them.”

  “Mama!” Emily yelled.

  Katie nodded, looking ahead.

  Steven glared at Cecily. “What are you talking about? What are ya doin’? You ain’t goin’ anywhere without me.”

  “And me,” Emily added with narrowed eyes.

  “Look,” Cecily said, pausing to look at each one of them. “They don’t want you. They want me.”

  Jamie couldn’t help himself. “Who are they? Please, tell me.”

  “Yeah, tell us, Cec,” said Steven. “Why are they even in your life?”

  “Who are they?” Jamie repeated, pleading with his eyes for Cecily to give him some nugget of what was going on. He was a big guy, and these tiny tunnels were driving him crazy. Please, he mentally begged her, tell me something. Anything!

  “It’s a group I used to be involved with.”

  Steven shook his head. “Used to?”

  “I swear I’m not anymore.”

  “Then why you still got that thing in your head?”

  “I have to know what they’re doing. I have to keep it. For protection.”

  Steven’s eyes bulged. “Well, it sure as hell didn’t help you today, if that was them with the bombs. Bombs!”

  Cecily snapped, barking, “Don’t you think I know that?” She kicked loo
se sand and stones with a blood-stained foot. “Dammit!” She ran fingers through her hair, knocking the rest of the ponytail out. Her dark hair fell around her angular face and she seemed softer somehow to Jamie. She let out a deep breath. “I’m sorry, alright? I don’t know how this happened, on this day, of all days. Don’t you think I give a shit about all those people who are dead now? They’re dead…” She bent down and picked up her hair tie, stood straight and tied her hair back into a ponytail, casting shadowed eyes downward as she yanked at the loose, dirty hair. “Because of me.”

  Steven softened. “Oh, hun, I’m so sorry. It’s okay, don’t think I don’t know you care. I’m frustrated is all. I need answers. Hell, can you imagine how this guy feels?” He gestured at Jamie. “He doesn’t know anything that’s happening to him. He doesn’t know how we grew up. He was one of the lucky ones.”

  Cecily looked at Jamie with a solemn expression. “You really were. But you became one of the most unlucky ones.”

  Jamie stepped up to her, staring down into her black eyes. “Why,” he asked as gently as he could, “am I one of the unlucky ones?”

  She shook her head. “We don’t have time for this right now. You all have to go. I need to take this left turn.” She looked down the dark cavern path behind her.

  “Let me go with you,” Jamie said.

  She gave him an inscrutable expression. “You don’t want to do that.”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I’m going.”

  Emily sneaked up and grabbed one of Cecily’s hands in one sweaty grasp and one of Jamie’s in the other. “You take him, Mama. He can fight good. He even gave Uncle Steven the knife when the coyotes came. He was ready to get ‘em with his bare hands.”

  Jamie didn’t point out that Emily hadn’t seen him fight at all.

  He felt he had to go with Cecily. In a weird way, he wanted to protect her. Maybe it was because she seemed to have all the answers to the hundreds of questions still swirling in his mind.

  “Why do you want to go?” Cecily asked him, letting Emily’s hand go. Emily’s grip loosened in Jamie’s hand and he gave her palm a squeeze before releasing her.

  “Because of what you told me. In the ditch. About the twins.”

  She stared levelly at him for a moment as though sizing him up for the first time since they met. “You do deserve to know. You deserve more than that. You need to get them, take care of them. They were born into your world, but on the inside. My world.”

  “How do you know so much?”

  She shook her head, ignoring the question. “Okay, fine. You come with me. The rest of you, we’ll meet up…you know where, Katie.”

  “When?” asked Katie, her face drawn with anxiety.

  “Give us three days.”

  “Three days!” Steven said. “What’s gonna take you three days? You goin’ to them? What the hell, Cec?”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  Katie murmured, “You want revenge.”

  “No,” Cecily said quickly. Too quickly?

  “Yes,” Katie pursued. “I want it too…” she paused and looked at Cecily, her face hard as stone. “So you get them.”

  Chapter 3

  “You do look like you know fighting.” Cecily glanced behind her at Jamie.

  He held up his lantern. The cave tunnel they walked was narrow and the earth bumpy. “I’ve only done it once for real. Didn’t even fight as a kid.”

  “In your world, nobody does. I guess the time that was real was for your wife.” Her voice sounded hollow.

  He let time pass as they took a seemingly random turn and went down a slippery slope. The air was cooling down as they went deeper. Finally, he asked, “You done much fighting? With that handgun?”

  “I’ve done what I had to.”

  “If you have, and you still have your implant, then how did you get away without shutting down like I did?” His head throbbed, a reminder that life would have been much easier if he’d left everything alone and stayed in Amsterdam.

  She stopped suddenly. Tipping her lantern this way and that, she mumbled, “It’s around here somewhere. There’s a spot we need to drop down at.”

  He waited.

  “It’s not the same kind of implant you had.” She glanced at him, looking afraid for the first time.

  He touched her arm. It was dry now. “Why are you scared?”

  She shook her head. “Because…because I don’t talk about it. The people who know, well, they already know. People who don’t, usually never do.”

  “Know what?” he asked, letting his hand drop to his side. He got the feeling she didn’t like to be touched. “I want to understand. How can it be another kind of implant? I feel clueless. I’m not here to judge you. You’ve given me some of the best news of my life. I can find my children. See Amanda live on in them.”

  She looked down, and then squatted by a chest-high pyramidal rock formation. “Ah, it’s here. I know these stones. Jamie, help me. We need to get them out of the way.”

  Jamie was surprised to find the rocks were piled there on purpose and were loose. They both moved the stones from the tight spot to the tunnel ahead of them.

  As they worked, Cecily spoke between increasingly labored breaths. “What you know is what the history sites teach. Same as in schools. There’s more.”

  “Let me take over from here. Take a break, drink some water.”

  “You know,” she said, grabbing one more head-sized rock and dropping it on the new pile. “We both should rest. This next bit is tricky. We have to climb down what’s basically a cliff. Don’t worry, there’s nylon rope behind the stones.”

  “Okay.” He hoped as they sat down in the cool cave, hips touching, knees nearly in their own chins, that she would tell him more now. Every minute of waiting to hear Cecily’s version of the magical truth was like watching ice melt in a snowstorm. He pressed her as she took a deep drink from her canteen. “I’ve been taught the implants control violent behavior, but after what I learned when mine was taken out, I know there’s more. Seeing your…” he was about to say “compound,” but he didn’t want to remind her of what happened a few hours ago… “your daughter’s neck with no little dot-scar, stuff like that. So alien to me. I need help. Cecily, I’m glad I found you.”

  “Even though I was a total bitch when we met?” Again, there was the wry smile that didn’t touch her eyes.

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t. No, not at all.” She stretched her legs in front of her, eyes cast on the new rock pile. In a softer tone, she said, “It’s complicated. There’s so much.”

  Jamie was reminded of Katie repeating that at the station in Apache Junction. “If you don’t have…the regular kind of implant…then what do you have?”

  She pulled her legs back up under her and folded them, resting her knee on Jamie’s thigh. She fisted her hands in her lap. “I was born a little over thirty years ago, and my family was different than most. My mother, she was…involved in things.” She stopped.

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s odd to talk about.”

  “Like I said, it’s okay. I don’t think there’s much you can tell me that will shock me. I’m starting to remember a lot of things after the implant was taken out.”

  “It’s not that. I’m not worried about shocking you. You were a part of the machine until a heartbeat ago.”

  He thought that was strange wording. Creative, and he liked it. “Then what are you worried about?”

  She sighed. “It’s not so much worry. It’s more like… I don’t know. Like I said earlier, I don’t talk about this.”

  “Take your time.”

  She breathed deeply again and looked at him, her expression serious. “My implant was designed by some of the same people who put yours in, but the UNE was afraid people would keep rebelling against the implants. When it all became mandatory surgery, you know?” She sifted dark sand through her fingertips. “The
UNE didn’t want a rebellion. They suspected them. The ones Steven spoke of. The ones who…bombed us. They don’t have a name. They are just ‘they’.”

  She paused for a moment and took another drink of water before continuing. “They started up before the implants. As I said, some of them were involved in the implant program. Insiders. My mother thought they were right.”

  “About what?” he asked.

  “About the system being flawed. About how it was an easy control mechanism for the populous. And she had me. She didn’t want me or herself to be in such a grip of the government. She had conspiracy theories about everything. I remember her talking about it all the time before she went.” She groaned. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t know how to tell this story.”

  Jamie thought for a moment, listening to the utter nothing of the cave. “Start with what you remember about getting your implant.”

  “I don’t remember,” she spit out. “I was only a year old by the time she’d gotten involved with them. She’d been hiding out, trying not to get an implant. But she got one and I got one, and then when Steven was born, he got one, but they were all from them. Their implants are like the one you had, like most have, and they were just a small group back then. The leader of the Company, as I like to think of them…” She said the word “company” with sarcasm and an expressed capital C. “Well, he was one of the ones deep in the UNE. Deep in with the implant system on the technical and medical sides. His name is Michael, like the archangel. He must be pushing eighty, but nowadays that’s not too old. I haven’t seen him in years.” Her eyes misted with memory and she stopped talking.

  Jamie didn’t want to push her. He opened a bag and found some granola packets, and held one out to her. “There are two of these. One for you and one for me. Have it. You need it.”

  She took the plastic bag. “Thanks.” For the first time, she grinned wickedly at him and her eyes caught the lantern’s hue, twinkling. “Think it’s okay if we litter?”