The Golgotha Initiative

Chapter 4: Eric

I don't know which is worse- that I only have one leg, or that I only have one bed instead of a second one where Caleb is supposed to be. Probably the leg thing. He's going to tease la mierda out of me when he finds out I can't fight anymore.

Frick. I can't fight anymore.

"Garcia."

Baahir is standing in my doorway. Well, actually, it's not my doorway, it looks like a hospital, but that's mostly because of the IV and a beeping machine with little dials I probably shouldn't touch.

"What are you doing here, frickin-"

He strides over to my bed and slaps my face.

"You have a colorful mouth. Shut it and let me speak."

I glare at him, but hush up. The slap, surprisingly, wasn't very hard.

"You like computers, correct?" Baahir asks.

That was unexpected. "Si. Por que-"

"Porque Compass te necesita. We can't use you as a fighter because of your leg, but if you're as good with technology as we've been told, we can train you as a tech agent."

"Compass?"

"Pay attention, boy," he snaps. "That's where you are."

No. Oh, no. "What about everyone else?" I demand. "Did you take them too?"

Baahir hesitates. When he speaks, his voice has dropped along with his gaze, sliding away from my face.

"They're dead, Eric."

Compass gives me crutches. Then they put me to work in a computer lab. Lines of code dance in front of my eyes as I set up firewalls and bypass them, hack systems and rebuild digital cages. I'm not very good at it. I can replace a hard drive or win Halo, but I can't create programs.

There is no time in this place. Day and night blend together as the work moves on endlessly. Other technicians fade into the gray walls, maneuvering around my station or disappearing to one of the cots in the back room. There is nothing here but the dimness of routine and a dull realization that I am not a person anymore, I am not alive, I am not me. I left Eric back in Puerto Rico with the corpses of his family.

"Hey. It's supposed to be '1dI', not 'Ib1'. Dude, you okay?"

The speaker who catches my mistake- another face, shrouded in grayness- shouldn't be looking at my screen. He should be looking at his own. But it's not my problem, so I erase the incorrectly coded material and replace it with the proper sequence.

"You can transfer that," the speaker says. I think it's the same one, but I'm not sure and it doesn't matter. "To the network. There's a back way-"

I tune him out by mentally humming Salsa Tequila, which is what I used to do when Caleb went on rants about Logan. Then I stop, because if I think about Caleb and Logan I might start feeling things again and I don't want that.

"Hey. Dude, you alright?"

I nod.

The person who, for some reason, is still here, leans toward me. "You don't know how to do any of this, do you?"

I let my fingers fly across the keyboard, my mind working to forget. The person will be gone soon.

"If you need anything, ask."

The voice disappears. It won't be back.

It's back. He's back- this geeky boy with bones jutting out of his dark skin, and even though I haven't said a word to him he acts like we're best friends. His mouth is no different from his typing hands- constantly moving, spilling out information. Our computers, unfortunately, are stationed next to each other.