The Hollow City

by Dan Wells

  The maggot’s a hallucination—there’s nothing there. That’s how she knew it was me. I watch the monster come closer, ringed mouth gaping open.

  “I’m—I’m Vanek, Ellie, I’m Ambrose Vanek. You know me.”

  “You know me now,” she says. “Just like you know everything else. And now that you do, we can’t let you leave again.”

  I try to sound innocent. “What are you talking about?”

  “Dr. Vanek, can you hear me?”

  “I’m here,” says Vanek. He’s standing near me, maybe ten feet away; I glance at him and Ellie follows my eyes.

  “Can you speak?” she asks.

  “Not through him,” says Vanek. He scowls at me. “Not right now.”

  “Of course I can speak,” I say. “I’ve been talking to you all night.” The worm shuffles closer.

  “If you can hear me,” says Ellie, walking slowly toward the spot I glanced at before, “I want you to know that I’m doing this to help you, not to hurt you. I have no desire to usurp your position.”

  I step toward her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Hit her,” says Vanek, his face growing pale. “She’s going to attack you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a threat, Michael, to her power and to the entire plan. She’s going to kill you, now hit her!”

  “We’ve suspected for years that you might be trapped for good,” says Ellie. She stops right in front of Vanek, looking near him without looking at him. “I apologize that it has to be this way.”

  “Now, dammit!”

  I dive to the side, hiding behind a wooden table as a flash of blue light fills the room. I feel a pain in my shoulder, like a bright electric shock, and my mind spins wildly at the contact. I turn to Ellie; she’s braced with her feet wide apart, breathing heavily.

  “Traitor!” Vanek shouts, his face a red mask of rage. “How dare you use the power against your own kind!”

  A blue bolt of lightning arcs out from Ellie’s face, and for a split second the blur snaps into focus and I see Lucy’s face, old and lined but perfectly recognizable, and then the electrical surge slams into me and I choke back a scream, losing control of my muscles and collapsing to the floor. The world warps and curdles around me; my body grows and shrinks and my senses explode in a hail of sparkling shards. I gasp for breath, struggling to remember that I even have lungs, that I need them to keep me alive. The world swims back into focus and I feel pressure on my back—Ellie is kneeling on me, pulling my arms behind me to tie them.

  “Get up,” says Vanek, growling through clenched teeth. He swallows the pain and snarls again. “Get up and hit her.”

  Ellie leans forward, reaching for a rope, and I throw my arm backward, twisting my torso as much as I can to slam my elbow into her face. Her arms flail out and she tumbles to the side. She hits the ground and the rope flies out of her hand, skittering across the wooden floor to stop in front of the maggot. It sniffs it, glistening maw sucking at the air. I roll over and leap on Ellie, trying to pin her to the ground.

  “Children!” she shouts, trying to wrestle me away. I punch her in the face, feeling my hand hum with a surge of energy. The contact brings pain—both mine and hers, impossibly transferred with a swirl of fear and desperation and hot, rabid rage. “Get off of me!” She raises her head and I slam it again with my elbow, hammering her head against the floor; she slows, coughing for air, and I grab her head in both hands. Emotion runs up my arms like bolts of electricity, emotion and thought and memory and rage. I see darkness and earth; I feel confusion and pain; I wail with a desperation so ancient my mind crumbles to ruin at its touch. The sensation locks me in place, holds me in a vise of unknowable sadness, and I struggle to escape. I can’t let go. Our minds are merged and frozen. I force my arms forward, feeling them budge a fraction of an inch. I can do it. I’m trapped in an eternity of emotionless, alien thought, and then in a burst of motion I slam Ellie’s head against the wooden floor. She falls limp.

  I pant for breath, letting go of her head. I scramble away, watching her body, but she doesn’t move. The maggot is gone. The rope lies abandoned on the floor.

  Did I kill her? I creep forward, expecting her to leap up at any moment—expecting a maggot to come bursting out of her chest in a bloody assault. But no, it’s in her face, not her chest. Is it a maggot? A microchip? I could cut her open and find out; I could discover once and for all what’s hiding inside them.

  Is this how the other cultists died—beaten to death by a crazy man and his living delusions?

  Am I really the Red Line Killer after all?

  The door handle turns. Someone is coming.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “LOCK IT!” SHOUTS VANEK. He snarls and points at the door. “Quickly! They’ll see!”

  The door starts to open, and I scramble toward it in an awkward flurry. A face peeks through:

  “Ellie?”

  I slam into the door, knocking it closed. The angle of the opening was such that whoever it was probably hadn’t seen Ellie’s body. Probably.

  The voice is more urgent now, more confused. “Ellie?”

  “Tell them you’re me,” says Vanek. “They’ll trust you—they were raised to trust you.”

  “It’s me,” I say quickly, “Dr. Vanek. Do you need something?”

  “We heard shouting, Doctor, is everything all right?”

  I say the first thing that comes to my mind. “Ellie wants to call off the evacuation.”

  “No!” shouts Vanek, rushing toward me.

  “Go and tell the others,” I continue. “We need everyone to stay in the compound.”

  “You can’t do that!” cries Vanek, reaching for the door, but I block the lock and handle with my body. “We need to evacuate,” he insists. “Ellie’s treachery doesn’t change that!”

  “Her death does,” I say, staring him down. “I’m in charge now, and I want this entire thing shut down—the compound, the children, the ‘Process,’ whatever the hell that is. The cops are coming back, and they’re going to find this, and they’re going to end it.”

  “And what do you think they’ll do to the man in charge?” asks Vanek. “Pat you on the head and send you away?”

  “They don’t know anything about you,” I say, “and they saw me arrive an hour ago. The FBI’s been watching me for years—they have so much proof I’m not involved in this that they actually sent a guy to ask me why I wasn’t.”

  “So the council goes to jail,” says Vanek. “Hooray for you. What are you going to do about everyone else?” He gestures at the shadowed nursery. “A hundred children—two, maybe three hundred others. You can’t ‘save’ them; you can’t reverse the Process. Your legal system will spread them out, drop them into hospitals and foster homes all over the world; your government will spread the Children wider than the Children could ever hope to spread themselves. Do you think we don’t have people on the police force? In the courts? You’ve already lost, Michael.”

  “Are you trying to make me kill them, then? That’s the only answer left!”

  “I’m trying to make you see them as they are.”

  “What are they?”

  “Inevitable.”

  I watch him in the lamplight, listening to the cries outside. The compound is in chaos. I look at Ellie’s body, then at the rows of children. “What are they really?”

  “The same thing you are.”

  “Then what are you?” I demand. “That thing you did in the car—that thing Ellie did to me just now. Those aren’t normal things, they’re barely even real things. Maybe they’re not, I can’t even tell anymore.” I stare at him, wide-eyed. “Are you aliens?”

  “We are more native to this Earth than you are. We are its Children.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  He shrugs. “You know where the answer is.”

  The old farmhouse, the one Ellie called the Home—Cerny’s home, certainly, but something else as well. Whatever these people are,
whatever the Process is, the root of it is in there. “We don’t have much time,” I say. “I can’t let the police find me.”

  “Running away again? Is that all you ever do?”

  “I’m going to the Home,” I say, “but I have to get out before the police come.” I point at the body. “This is what, the third person I’ve killed now?”

  “She’s not dead.”

  I listen at the door, making sure there’s no one waiting on the other side, then open it cautiously, peeking out at the compound; people wander through the dirt streets in confused, ragged groups. I glance back at the sleeping children. I can’t save them, but maybe I can make sure it never happens to anyone else.

  I look back at the lock on the door, fiddling with it; it’s crude, but I can probably leave it locked behind me. I don’t want anyone to find Ellie and raise an alarm.

  I step outside and lock the door behind me.

  A man walks past me, holding a leash; the collar drags along the ground behind him. I wait for him to pass and step out into the street, weaving my way between the slow rush of a dozen disorganized mobs. A woman stands in the middle of the road, holding a grocery sack upside down in her arms. She stares at the empty bag in silence, pondering it; behind her a confused swarm of people rush madly from place to place, trampling underfoot a row of toy plastic vegetables. I step around her and keep going.

  “Dr. Vanek!” It’s the one called Arlene—she’s weaving toward me through the crowd. “Dr. Vanek, what’s going on?”

  I don’t know what to say. I can’t let them hide those children from the police, but Vanek was right about letting them be found—they’ll be spread all over the city, maybe all over the country. Can the cult be spread like that? Whatever they are, trapped in our heads, can they get out? Can they make more? I have to get to the Home.

  I point to the main gate. “You need to watch that, okay? You need to watch that gate and shout an alarm if anyone gets close.”

  “But we already have guards.”

  “I don’t trust them in this chaos,” I say. “What if someone pulled them aside to help with the evacuation? What if they got a different message entirely? We have to post a watch, and it has to be someone I can trust. Can I trust you?”

  “Of course, Doctor.”

  “Then go.”

  She turns, stops, then turns back and puts a hand on my arm. “Doctor?”

  “Yes?”

  She hesitates, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “Is it over?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “There were people I used to live with.”

  “Your family?”

  “Not mine.” She frowns, looking down at her body. She shrugs. “Hers.” I stare at her. She shifts her weight again. “Will I see them again?”

  I don’t know what to say. “Do you want to?”

  She purses her lips, searching for words. She starts to speak, then stops, then starts and stops again. I put a hand on her shoulder, feeling an electric hum of confusion.

  “Watch the gate.”

  She nods and goes. I watch her back, trying to decipher her meaning, but there’s no time—they’re bound to find Ellie soon, locked door or not, and then they’ll come looking for me. I weave through the chaos to the Home and try the door; it’s locked. Even within the cult, it seems, there are secrets. I go behind, to a back door hidden in shadow, and shatter the window with my elbow. Glass shards fall and shatter further on the floor. I reach in carefully and turn the knob.

  I hear a shout in the distance: “He’s here! The Red Line!” They found Ellie. I grit my teeth and open the door; maybe I can find a weapon inside to defend myself. I walk in and close the door behind me.

  I’m standing in the kitchen of a small country house—at least, it was built as a kitchen, but the Children of the Earth have turned it to other purposes. Maps line the walls. A gap in the counter, probably intended for a stove, has been filled with filing cabinets. The large table in the corner is covered with papers. I walk to it and try to read some, but the room is too dark; there are lamps on the counter, but I’m trying to stay hidden and don’t dare risk a light. I pick up the nearest stack of papers and carry them to the window, pulling back the curtains and holding them up to the moonlight: financial records. Birth records. Employment records for cultists in government, law enforcement, medicine, the military. Vanek is watching me from the shadows in the corner. I hold up the papers.

  “What is this?”

  “Gainful employment.”

  “But the farm’s already self-sufficient,” I say, leafing through the stack. “They’re getting the jobs for other reasons, like Brandon stealing ingredients for cyanide, or Nick keeping an eye on me at Powell.” I pull out a page. “You have a city councilman—he could help keep the farm autonomous.” I pull out another. “You have a police officer to keep it protected.” I pull out another, holding it to the light and tapping it with my other hand. “You have a man in Public Utilities, but … I don’t see what he does for you. Do you get free water?”

  “Water is the only thing we pay for.”

  “But you have wells.”

  “Well water is so much cleaner, don’t you think?” He smiles coldly. “There’s no telling what’s floating around in the city water system.”

  So that’s it. “The cyanide. You pay for water to make sure they keep it flowing through the farm, and while it’s here you lace it with cyanide.”

  “Not yet,” he says, shaking his head. “Not until the infrastructure’s in place. Not until the Public Utilities director sorts out what is downstream from what.”

  “And then you kill everyone in the city.”

  “Only one city? Please, Michael, show a little ambition.”

  I swallow. “Phase Four.”

  Vanek says nothing.

  “You can’t possibly have that many people,” I say, “you haven’t been doing this long enough.”

  “Phase One began in the early 1950s,” says Vanek. “We took an entire family: Milos and Nikolai Cerny; their sister Eliska and her husband Ambrose Vanek; a dozen more who lived and worked here on the farm. Once we adapted to the first group’s physiology we split into teams—I was in charge of the merging Process, but the others set out almost immediately to infiltrate every aspect of your lives.”

  “By murdering the world.”

  “By cleansing it.”

  I glare at him. “You’re monsters.” He says nothing. “You really are—you’re not human at all, you just … move us, like puppets.” I set down the papers. “You said the answers were here, so here I am. What are you?”

  He nods toward the door to the next room. “We’re right in there.”

  I hesitate, watching him, suspicious of so much free information, but I know he won’t kill me. He needs my body alive. I walk to the door, pausing with my hand on the doorknob. What will I find? I see again in my mind the row of cradles, the sprays of blood, the wild-eyed woman with the knife. I push the thought away and open the door.

  It’s dark in the new room—far darker than the kitchen, for the front door is tightly shut and the windows are completely boarded over. I find a lamp in the dark, and a box of matches next to it, and I fumble with them until I manage to spark a flame; the room glows orange, a tiny globe of light pressing out against the shadows, and then I light the lamp and the globe expands to a bright, wide yellow. Vanek follows me in and closes the kitchen door behind us, hiding the light from the rest of the compound. I can hear shouts and chaos echoing dimly through the walls—the Children of the Earth running in panic at the specter of their killer. Is it really me? Have I come to destroy them? I ignore the noise; I’ve come for answers. I push all other thoughts away.

  There is no one here, but I’m not alone. I can feel it in my legs, vibrating like the hum of an engine—there is something, or someone, nearby. The true Children of the Earth are close enough to touch. But where?

  The room is nearly bare, containing nothing but a few ch
airs, a bed, and an elaborate rig of chains and pulleys. I walk around them, touching each item; the chairs are solid wood, reassuringly sturdy. The thick, metal chains are cool to the touch, neither smooth nor rough, running up from the bed to a system of gears and wheels on the ceiling. The bed has a thin mattress and a rough woolen blanket, and the sides are fixed with strong leather restraints, just like the ones I had at Powell. I pick up one of the manacles, turning it over in my hand. I drop it. I walk around to the front of the bed—

  —and then I feel it. This is where the hum is coming from, directly below my feet. It’s the same pulsing jolt I feel with cell phones, the same hum I feel from touching the cultists, but a hundred times stronger—a thousand times stronger—and instead of being painful it feels sickly euphoric, like the cranial buzz of a narcotic or a general anesthetic. It calls to me; it pulls me down; it feels more familiar, and more alien, than anything I’ve ever felt. I realize I’m lying on the floor and I struggle to stand up. Vanek takes my hand and pulls me to the side.

  “There are still so many of us down there,” he says, leaning me against the wall. He’s panting. “The sensation is … stronger than I remember.”

  I can see an outline in the floor—a trapdoor hinged to fold open and closed. The chains make more sense now—with the trapdoor open, the bed could slide forward and drop right down inside. I clutch the wall and pull myself to my feet.

  “What are you?”

  “We are the Children of the Earth.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  Vanek stands motionless. “It means we were here before you. In ancient eons before the rise of Man we lived in the depths of the Earth; we plumbed its secrets; we thought and we watched and we learned.”

  “You’re the maggots?”

  “The maggots are a construct of your imagination,” says Vanek. “They represent us in your mind; you were aware of something you couldn’t fully process, and created a hallucination to give it form. In reality we have no form at all.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he says. “What is intelligence but an organized matrix of electrical impulses? In you it evolved through flesh, but it is typical human arrogance to assume that it could not evolve in other ways for other forms of life.”