Of Freedom's Fall (Death Prediction Project #3)
John Ricker

I don’t know what I expected when they moved me from Pennsylvania to Staten Island. At forty-two years old and being out of commission for most physical operation jobs in the military after being injured overseas I didn’t have many choices though.

I packed up the tiny apartment I had moved into after my divorce from my wife, two years previous. I hadn’t seen my seven-year-old daughter since then either, I guess she would be nine now. I was given a bunk and it felt like I was overseas again. Sleeping next to my fellow soldiers, in a much warmer and dryer environment but I wasn’t complaining.

They brought me to the camera room on the 11th of February, the morning after I arrived. They instructed me to watch the guy in the cell, I think they called him Ryker, odd name. The guy, he looked like a kid really, I would have pinned him at fourteen, maybe fifteen was inside a concrete cell, which I assumed was down the hall through a metal door with a passcode lock.

I was wondering why they were holding a kid. If he was a kid, I wasn’t exactly given a memoir on the guy. He was passed out for much of the first day and until midday on the 12th. When he finally woke up.

The glasses that had been left smashed on the floor had disappeared, he approached the camera as if studying it.

“If you’re going to hold me here, the least you could do is tell me what happened to the others,” he exclaimed.

I had no clue what he was talking about, was he a child soldier from some foreign country, he didn’t have a recognizable accent and seemed to be able to speak perfect English though. I don’t know why they’d hold a foreign soldier, either.

“That’s not how this works, kid,” I state.

He didn’t protest the kid part so I guess he was younger than eighteen.

“And who are you? Who died and made any of you king?” he questioned.

“No one died, the government just said we could,” I reply, he wouldn’t be here otherwise, he must have done something to land himself here.

“And that makes you better? What if I was your kid? My mother and father are out there. Whether they willing gave me up or the DPP took me, I was a baby. I should have been enjoying my childhood instead I spending the first two years of it locked up in a lab, drugged, poked and prodded with needles and then for fifteen years after I had to live with being called crazy because I could hear songs coming from people,” he fired back. “Because of them, I could have been normal.”

This guy must have been off his meds or something. What was he talking about? Who was the DPP?

“Normal is overrated, kid,” I reply.

It was true, normally.

“Not when normal was taken away from you,” he continues. “All I’ve wanted, all my life, is to have friends, a lover, and play the piano. Is that too much to ask for? Everyone wants most of those things, in some capacity.”

Something hit me in that sentence. I realized I had no clue who this kid was but he seemed familiar. I brushed it off in this instance though. I was not his judge or jury, I was just the security guard hired to watch him.

“Things don’t always work out the way we want to,” I answer finally.

“Don’t quote cliché lines to me, you don’t know anything, they probably pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for you to sit up in your little camera room and watch me. You can do whatever you want as long as you don’t talk about what goes on here, right?” I counter.

He was right, I knew nothing and the paycheck was decent. The kid took a seat on the floor and I didn’t say any more for the rest of the day.

Later that day, Frazer, one of the younger soldiers was let in to bring him food. It was the first meal he had here that I knew of. In the days following, he only got one meal per day. I saw another soldier, Pigment go in a kick him around, too.

“How long do I have?” he asked.

Was there a hit on this guy? Ryker wasn’t giving up the information he wanted regardless.

The next morning, I looked up the name Ryker before returning to my shift, his face and name were really starting to bother me, I thought I had heard them before and I had.

A video popped up, some news article and missing persons’ photos for him, another boy and a girl, Maya. I remembered the Maya Flores case, she disappeared from a school in Nebraska with two boys, I thought they ran away. How had this kid ended up here and what did they want from him?

I clicked on the video, it showed the girl, Maya and the other boy Porter pleading for the safety and freedom of seven test subject from some science experiment and the release of Ryker, I looked closer at the photo, Porter, the other boy, was holding. It was definitely the kid in the cell. They also wanted information about a Harriet Hollow who they suspected was injured or dead.

A few days later the kid brought out a piece of glass and started to make three streaks on the wall.

“What are you doing, kid?” I asked.

“Carving my way out of here with a glasses lens, why do you care?” he questions sarcastically.

I could tell he didn’t like me but I didn’t know whose side to be on. I didn’t have enough information from either party.

Another few days passed, I had been there almost a week when Commander Mercer came storming in and dragged me out. He was seething.

“What do you know?” he asked.

It was maybe 11:30 am, I had been looking forward to my lunch break in thirty minutes or so. Was this about the videos or the few words Ryker and I had exchanged? Was I not supposed to talk to him?

“About what, sir?” I asked.

“The video,” he exclaimed.

One of his lackeys held up a phone with the video we’d been to called to watch this morning. It wasn’t Frazer or Pigment.

“Nothing,” I quickly exclaimed.

I didn’t really, or at least nothing more than anyone else here or out in the public.

He threw me at another lackey, a woman, with short wavy blond hair and the word Hybrid tattooed on her neck. Maya had said that one of the test subjects was identifiable by a tattoo like that. I was terrified immediately, because she also said this was one of the ones tracking Soren, the last free test subject that neither the DPP, which I learn stood for the Death Prediction Project nor the Freedom Brigade had managed to get their hands on.

She and the other lackey dragged me off down the hall, she handed me off to another two soldiers who escorted me outside into the cold. My coat had been left back in the camera room so it was a little chilly. They led me to a boat off the shore of Staten Island, my heart had slowed once I was handed off but now that I was going out on the sea I was terrified again.

I had always had an unreasonable fear of the water, maybe it stemmed from the number of times my father had thrown or pushed me in as a kid, trying to show me there was nothing to fear, who knows? I had been flown in on a private plane to a tiny airstrip on the island. Even flying over it had made me nervous we were going to crash and drown.

They cuffed me and I watch waves lap at the side of the boat. They escorted me into a little area below deck. I didn’t ask any questions and maybe I should have.

They shut the door leaving me alone in the tiny area. I looked around for any indication of where we were going and what we would be doing. A map, a manifesto, a file, anything. But this boat looked purely like a mode of transportation, everything was spick and span.

They started up the engine and I could hear the bow cutting through the waves. I sat figuring, I was here and, there wasn’t much I could do now considering I was cuffed. So, I waited to see what would happen.

After maybe thirty, maybe forty minutes of driving, the engine cut out. The door opened back up and one of the soldiers came down and got me. I expected to see the mainland or something when I emerged but we were still surrounded by the ocean. They sat me down on the side bench of the boat.

“Stay,” the soldier ordered.

He didn’t look older than thirty. But the other one, a young girl couldn’t be far out of high school. She looked scared.

“Juniper, get over here,” the first one ordered.

She jumped as if coming to and scampered over. She grabbed some ropes and tied them tightly to my ankles and wrists. The other soldier brought over something that I would have been a lot more scared of if I had noticed it when I first got on the boat. Four concrete cylinders with metal handles sticking out of them, each about twelve inches tall and six inches wide. I swallowed.

“What are your orders exactly?” I asked.

Juniper didn’t answer, she did pause before continuing to tie the ropes around my ankles.

“Your job is done, we’ve been ordered to dispose of you,” the older one answered.

“Dispose of me?” I questioned.

We were in American, right? I would expect this to happen to people who committed treason in third-world, war-ridden countries but not in America.

“I have a kid,” I exclaim. “A family, you can’t just kill me. I haven’t done anything.”

“We have our orders,” the older one shrugged.

I was panicking, I missed two of my kid’s birthdays already and all I was thinking about was how many more of her birthdays I was going to miss if I died here.

“Just drop me off on the mainland. I won’t say anything to anyone, I promise,” I beg.

“Should have done that when you had the chance, you’ve said too much now,” the older one replies again.

Juniper continues and ties the concrete cylinders to the ropes.

“Please, please, come on. You can’t do this,” I reason.

When Juniper is done she steps back. The other steps forward and picks up two of the concrete cylinders.

“But we are,” he states, his voice devoid of emotion.

Where was this guy’s sympathy and humanity?

He drops the two cylinders off the side of the boat and I follow them over the side of the boat, he picks up the other two and throws them down after me. I shank slowly down into the depths of the ocean away from the sunlight. It’s true what they say, the oceans really are bottomless and we really don’t know what’s down there.