The Hollow City

by Dan Wells

  I won’t run away anymore. I came here to find answers. Let’s go find them.

  I nod at the farmer. “I remember most of it. I’ve come back because I need your help. Can you protect me?”

  “Of course,” he says, pulling me toward the fence. “Hurry—they can’t come through without a warrant. This is so exciting, Doctor! You must see the compound—we’ve accomplished so much!”

  So much. It’s a statement of change; they think I’ve been here before. Is this what Vanek was talking about—the two lost weeks he was desperate for me to remember? What if Vanek did take over, just like he’d threatened to, and he came here and introduced me as him? That could explain why they’re calling me by his name. Then when the police found me we jumped out the window, and they gave me an MRI and accidentally wiped Vanek back out. The MRI put me in charge again. Could that be it? Is that even possible?

  I smile at the farmer as we climb the fence; the other side is lined tightly with tall, leafy trees. “You’ve accomplished so much in just a few months?”

  He stops in surprise, cocking his head to the side. “A few months?”

  Now I’m even more surprised. “Wasn’t I just here a few months ago?”

  “I suppose it may have seemed like two months, trapped as you were, but it’s far more.”

  I know how long it’s been. As soon as he says it I know, but I ask him anyway. “How long?” I dread the answer.

  “Twenty years.”

  Twenty years. He’s not talking about a recent visit, he’s talking about me, about Michael Shipman. This is the farm where Milos Cerny lived—this is where my mother was kidnapped and murdered. This is where I was born.

  He thinks I’ve been Vanek since before I was even me.

  “Show me,” I say. “Show me everything.” I was right. They put something into me—they put Vanek into me—and for twenty years they’ve been waiting for him to take control. It happened to the others, and now it’s happening to more, and I was saved by … by schizophrenia. A chemical imbalance in my brain. It’s almost funny.

  How big is their Plan? How many more people will they take over—and what, exactly, is taking us over? What is Dr. Vanek? Whatever it is, whatever they’re doing, I need to find it and stop it.

  “Quick,” he says, “they’re almost here.” I climb down the fence and another man meets me—his face another blank mask. “Take him to Ellie,” says the farmer. “I’ll hold the police here.”

  “Come with me, Doctor,” says the man, putting a hand on my arm. I feel that strange familiar buzz at his touch. “My name is Peter. Ellie will be so pleased to see you.” He leads me carefully through a small copse of trees, holding branches aside for me to pass. Behind me I hear a terse shout.

  “You! Who just crossed this fence?”

  “This is private property,” says the farmer calmly, “owned and lawfully operated by the Children of the Earth. You cannot enter.”

  “We’re looking for someone,” says the policeman. “We think he came this way.”

  “There’s nobody here except our brothers and sisters of the faith.”

  “Then one of your brothers is a wanted fugitive!”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We’ll get a warrant,” says another voice. “We’ll be back.”

  The voices fade, and Peter and I break through the trees into the commune beyond: row after row of houses—not barracks or cabins but real houses—all plain and dark and identical. The windows are dark, the yards are vacant; there are no lights or sounds. It looks like a vast, empty suburb transplanted to the middle of a country field.

  Another hollow city.

  TWENTY-SIX

  WE WALK BETWEEN THE HOUSES, kicking up clouds of dust with our feet. There is no pavement or grass. It feels like an old Western ghost town filled with modern tract housing, and as we walk I begin to see them—faceless people in mismatched clothes, locked in a rote imitation of suburban life. A man pushes a lawn mower across a barren patch of dirt. Two women stand facing each other, holding empty brown bags from a grocery store. A child bounces a ball, up and down, up and down, and beyond him another child does the same. There is no talking; there are no lights. It is the trappings of life in a pale, lifeless body.

  “What is this place?”

  Peter nods. “Your predictions were right, Doctor: we have found it impossible to integrate ourselves back into society without social therapy. Many of them have never lived on the outside—your plan has proven highly effective. Without all of this,” he gestures at the houses and yards and people, “we could never hope to lead normal lives.”

  “You’re doing social therapy?”

  “Thanks to you,” he says. “In another generation, perhaps, your plan will have succeeded and we will have no more need for these—ah, here’s Ellie now.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Ellie!” shouts Peter. “Come quickly! Look who’s returned to us!”

  An old woman turns and I almost cry out: Lucy! But it’s not Lucy; she has no face, and her long, brown hair shimmers silver and white in the moonlight. She looks at me for a moment, then shouts with joy and shuffles toward us. How do I know her? “Ambrose!” It’s Lucy’s voice. She takes me by the shoulders and pulls me into an embrace; her body hums like a generator, and though I can’t see her face I can feel something—not happiness, but something like it. Pleasure, maybe, or satisfaction, but joyless. It is the pleasure of a successful calculation, cold and inert. She pulls away and the feeling disappears.

  “Ambrose,” she says, then pauses. “You’re confused.”

  Don’t let her know. “It’s been a long time.”

  “It has. Thank the Earth that you’ve returned to us.”

  I nod. “Thank … the Earth.”

  “It’s been too long, in fact, and we had nearly given up hope that you would ever come back. Then when Nikolai died and you disappeared, naturally we feared the worst.” She puts a hand on my arm and turns to Peter. “Thank you, brother; call the council together. They’ll all want to see him.”

  “Of course.”

  Peter jogs away, and Ellie leads me farther down the road. “We had such high hopes for Powell,” she says. “Their work with you was more complete than we’d ever been able to do on our own, and the reports were immaculate. We couldn’t have done better with our own doctors.”

  I speak carefully. “None of the doctors were … ours?” I need more information, but I’m terrified of giving anything away. Who knows what they’ll do if they find out I’m not Vanek?

  Or am I?

  “We had a security guard,” says Ellie, “and a janitor. The janitor tried to extract you, but he’s…” She hangs her head. “Lost. The hospital is blaming it on you, naturally, but our man in the guard room turned off the cameras and I’m afraid nobody knows exactly how he died. We assume he got him.”

  I look at her quizzically. “‘He’?”

  “The Red Line Killer. I don’t know how much you’ve heard of him, locked away like that, but he’s hunting us. He’s already killed fifteen, all lost.” She stops walking, worried. “We don’t know how much he knows.”

  The Red Line murders again. But her story doesn’t agree with the FBI’s. “You said fifteen victims.” She nods. “The agent from the FBI told me there were ten.”

  “There were five they never found,” she says. “We were able to reach them before anyone else, and hide the bodies here. Obviously we want as little investigation as possible.”

  “Obviously.” She doesn’t seem to think I’m the killer, but I need to draw her out. “The FBI thinks you’re behind the killings.”

  “Me?” she asks.

  “All of you,” I say, glancing around. “Their current theory—if the man I talked to can be believed—is that you’re killing the victims yourself. Culling dissenters from the ranks of the faithful.”

  She laughs. “Did you laugh in his face?”

  Of course
it’s a ridiculous idea—there are no dissenters from the cult because their minds are literally being replaced. No dissenters but me. “Give me some credit,” I say. “I’m more subtle than that.”

  “I assure you, Doctor, we have not diverged so far from your plans as to start murdering our own. The flesh is weak, as they say, but we are still its masters.”

  I nod, struggling to grasp the underlying meaning of her words. The flesh is weak, but we are still its masters. Is it generic religious dogma, or something more? If they’re not flesh, what are they? I change tactics. “Has the killer ever come here?”

  “He’s tried,” says Ellie. “At least we think it was him. In thirty-odd years we’ve had our share of angry parents and teenage pranksters and even some garden-variety burglars try to break into the compound. There’s a couple of drunk interlopers every year or two. Three journalists have been foolish enough to try to join us, thinking they could send out reports.” She points to a woman by the front door of a house, pretending to sweep with a long, broomless stick. “There’s the latest. I wish they were all that easy.”

  I watch the woman as we walk past her, sweeping and sweeping, back and forth. She’s barely more than a silhouette in the dark, but Ellie steers me around the next corner and I catch a quick glimpse of the woman’s profile.

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Ellie nods. “Most of us are. Phase three of your plan has proven far more successful than the others.” We come around the corner and she points at a large central building. “That’s the nursery, but there’s no time for a tour just yet. Please, come in here.” She gestures to a large house, a small crowd of faceless supplicants trickling in through the door. I take one look back at the large building—the nursery, she called it. An entire building of children, born here just like me. How many?

  How long has this been going on?

  She says she’ll take me on a tour later; there’s no need to make a scene about it now. I can’t do anything to make them suspicious, or they might not show me anything. I turn back to the stairs, and my eyes slide across another house—smaller than the others, and older. A small, squat farmhouse in the middle of this already-incongruous city. I stop in mid-step.

  “I know that house.”

  “What?” asks Ellie. She follows my gaze. “Ah, yes. The Home.”

  “I’ve seen that house in a hundred newspapers and textbooks,” I say, almost to myself. “The same photo, over and over. That’s Milos Cerny’s house.”

  “Cerny,” she says, dragging out the sounds as if mulling them over. She steps closer to me. “Not just Cerny,” she says slowly, “all of us. You were there too.”

  “Of course,” I say. I glance at her and see that she’s watching me—even without eyes, somehow I can tell that her entire attention is focused on me. “It’s just that Cerny…” I don’t know how to finish. Will I start crying? Will I give myself away?

  “How much do you really remember?” asks Ellie. “How much of you is Vanek, and how much is Michael?”

  I look at her in surprise; this is the first time anyone on the compound has mentioned Michael. I shake my head, taking my best guess at what she wants to hear.

  “Michael’s gone,” I say, “but I’ve been in his head for years. Some things have certain … associations … that I don’t always filter very quickly from one mind to the other.”

  Ellie says nothing, watching me. I look back, imagining where her eyes would be—Lucy’s eyes, I think, but older and sterner. She starts to speak, but another woman plants herself between us.

  “Dr. Vanek! How wonderful you’ve returned!”

  I smile. “It’s good to be back.”

  The woman stands expectantly, waiting for something. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “I…” I do recognize her, the same way I recognized Ellie and Nikolai, but I can’t remember how or where. Do I say yes and try to fake it? Do I use the same excuse about not quite getting all the memories back? Ellie seemed very suspicious when I said that before. “I … it’s been a long time.”

  “It’s Arlene,” she says warmly, putting a hand on my arm. “Arlene Miller. I was in the first group, with you.”

  The name is familiar: in my mind I can see it in a crime report; in a newspaper article; on a list of names from the FBI. “You were one of the other children,” I say. “You were born here, like,” I almost say “me,” “like Michael, twenty years ago.”

  She has no smile, but I can tell she’s pleased—the same lifeless pleasure I felt from Ellie. No, not lifeless; not completely. Arlene feels things more warmly than Ellie does.

  “Come inside,” says Ellie, pushing us gently toward the door. “It’s time for the meeting to start.”

  I climb the stairs and go inside, shooting one last glance at Cerny’s old house. How do these people know me so well, and yet not know me at all? I haven’t seen Arlene since we were three months old—there’s no way she could remember me, as Michael or as Ambrose Vanek. And yet she does. Whatever replaced her remembers whatever replaced me.

  Then why does she still have her own name?

  The room is full of people, their blank faces blurring almost imperceptibly as they whisper and turn their heads. Ellie pushes me into a back corner and picks up a lamp—not an electric light but a real, oil-based lamp. A match flares to life, the brightest thing I’ve seen since I got here, and she lights the wick carefully and caps it with a glass tube. The blank faces follow her as she walks to the front of the room.

  “I don’t like her,” whispers Lucy.

  “I think you are her,” I whisper back, being careful that no one overhears us. “I can’t see the face, obviously, but the hair and the body are pretty exact, not to mention the voice, and the … feeling.”

  “I’m not that old,” Lucy protests.

  “Not now, but you will be in about twenty years. I’m guessing she was here with Cerny, helping with his abductions and his murders and everything else. When I created you, I must have based you on an old memory from this place.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Ellie reaches the front of the room, sets the lamp on a table, and addresses the crowd. “Thank you all for coming. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors, so there’s no point trying to build up to a dramatic reveal: after twenty years, Dr. Vanek has returned to us.”

  Given how excited everyone seems to be I expect them to cheer or applaud—something to express emotion—but they simply turn and look at me, silent and watching. I smile nervously, nodding. After a moment they turn back, still silent, to look at Ellie.

  “Who do you suppose she is?” I whisper.

  “She might be your mother.”

  I shake my head, suddenly hot and angry. “My mother’s dead.”

  “That’s what they told you,” says Lucy, “but how do you know for sure? You were three months old.”

  Ellie speaks again. “As I’m sure you’re all aware, the doctor’s return heralds a new age for us. There will be many blessings, but there will be work as well. We have much to do.”

  “The police said there were two mothers left alive when they raided Cerny’s house,” I say softly. “Both women were shot during the raid.”

  “So where was Ellie?” asks Lucy.

  “I have no idea.”

  Ellie points at a man in the first row. “Charles, section reports.”

  The man stands up. “The crops are strong, the animals are healthy, and food stand sales are strong. We expect the orchard to produce a bumper crop this year, and we’d like to expand the operation to start making apple juice as well.”

  “And our money?”

  “The Children are completely self-sustaining. With the third well finished, we don’t need the city’s water anymore.”

  “Then stop using it immediately,” says Ellie. “I want every one of us drinking well water exclusively, starting as soon as possible to get us in the habit. Assign some of the Phase Threes
to fetch and carry.”

  I ignore the words and focus on his face, musing quietly to Lucy. “Somehow the blur is replacing our faces,” I say, “just like the mind behind it is replacing our minds. All my life I’ve seen things that others couldn’t see—and it was real all along.”

  “That’s why you solved it when nobody else could,” says Lucy. “You can see what the rest of us can’t.”

  “Can you see their faces?”

  “I only see what you do.”

  I fight the urge to look at her, still keeping my voice down. “What do you see when you see me?”

  Lucy doesn’t have to hide her movement like I do; she steps in front of me, staring into my eyes. “A memory, I think. Your own image of yourself.”

  “Then I’m sorry.” I look down. “I must look horrible.”

  “It’s not the way you look now,” she says, “it’s the way you want to look. You created me to see the best in you.”

  I laugh—a short, voiceless huff. “Even the best can’t be all that great.”

  Lucy puts a hand on my face, and I close my eyes at the aching softness of her fingers on my skin. “You’re better than you think you are,” she whispers.

  “Phase Three is progressing well,” says the man at the front of the circle. “Most of our women are pregnant, and there have been no miscarriages since Adrianne’s in May. We think she’s ready to be safely impregnated again.”

  “Good,” says Ellie. “I trust you’ll assign one of the Halseys?”

  “Normally yes,” the man says, “but we’ve grown concerned lately about the limited genetic variance we might be creating. I recommend we go with someone new.”