Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

“Nothing.” Sweat trickled into my eyes. “I can’t feel anything down there.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Don’t panic. Let me just . . .” She wiggled into the hole headfirst. “There’s some debris,” she announced. “This is going to take a minute.”

  I waited, dust choking my throat and sweat burning my eyes, while Mercy cleared the wreckage. I lost all sense of time as she worked. Finally she removed whatever was pinning me, and with her help I crawled through the hole. I lay on the floor beside the mound of broken concrete, staring at a sputtering light in the ceiling. The cool air opened my throat after the stifling weight of my almost grave.

  Mercy crouched beside me. “It’s your ankle,” she said. “I wouldn’t look if I were you.”

  I looked, and then wished I’d listened to her. Something, maybe steel rebar from the concrete, had pierced the Achilles tendon of my right foot, the open wound oozing chalky blood. Seeing the torn flesh just beneath the metal control cuff chased away the numbness, replacing it with bone-deep pain. “How are we for supplies?” I said, trying to change the subject.

  “No water, and the pistol’s a pancake, if that’s what you’re asking. I assume the protograph is defunct too?”

  She searched through the pile, laughing humorlessly as she pulled the device free. The miniature screen had snapped in two, the pieces held together by a couple wires. She let it drop to the floor.

  “How are we going to find our way out?” I asked.

  “That remains to be seen,” she said. “You wait here. Don’t run off.”

  She stood and paced down the tunnel. I tried not to think about the pain, which had begun to crawl up my calf and was working its way into my knee. Within minutes she was back, looking strangely excited.

  “I know this place,” she said. “Or at least, I’ve heard of it. The tunnel widens just ahead, and there’s a monorail leading west. This must be one of the old bomb silos they built back in the day. To shuttle warheads from place to place. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  She wrapped a strip of cloth as best she could around my ankle, then hooked my arm over her shoulder and pulled me to my feet. I swayed, tried to balance on one leg. I wouldn’t have succeeded without her arm around me. With me leaning my entire weight on her, we limped down the tunnel until it curved and widened. Unlike the tunnels we’d been in so far, this one was circular, and much taller, maybe fifteen feet at its apex. Most of the lights were out, but the few that were left provided enough illumination for me to see that a rail ran down the center of the floor, along a broad red stripe painted on the concrete. A rhythmic throbbing as if from buried machinery sounded just at the threshold of hearing. The tunnel, Mercy announced, headed due west, straight under the impact zone.

  “Should we go that way?” I said.

  “We’re sure as hell not going back the way we came.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “So let’s explore.”

  She left me for a moment while she searched the tunnel. She wanted me to sit down and rest, but I leaned against the wall instead. The effort of walking had made the pain climb all the way up my leg, and getting off my feet might have been a relief. But if I returned to the floor I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stand again.

  Sheer exhaustion threatened to break my vow when Mercy returned, dragging some kind of cart down the rail. It was small, but the two of us could just squeeze in, with her helping me every inch of the way and then practically climbing onto my lap.

  “I think this is what used to move the missiles,” she said. “Now we just have to hope the power’s still on.”

  I doubted it would be, but miraculously, it was. She pressed random buttons on a control panel, and the cart inched forward on its own, picking up speed as it went. It glided forward at a comfortable rate, faster than we could walk but not as fast as the trucks we’d once had in Survival Colony 9. As we moved deeper into the tunnel, the throbbing sound became louder, seeming to come from all around us, or from inside my head. Our path wasn’t entirely straight: it curved gradually this way and that, though Mercy insisted our direction was still basically west. If she was right, the solid black weight of the impact zone rested above our heads, with the base and our companions falling farther behind with each passing moment. I searched the tunnel for exit routes, but it was all smooth gray concrete.

  “Sit back,” Mercy said. “This is as close as we’re going to come to a roller coaster, so enjoy the ride.”

  I tried. But the thought of what lay above, and the lancing pain that now consumed one whole side of my body, made it hard for me to relax. It didn’t help that Mercy had wrapped her arms around me and laid her head on my shoulder, and in the cart there was no room for me to move away.

  The rocking motion of the cart made me drowsy, and I felt Mercy’s soft breath on my neck, her fingers mechanically stroking my hair. I had no idea how much time had passed or whether I’d stayed awake through all of it when her voice startled me. “What the—?”

  She untangled herself and slammed a button on the control panel. Our personal means of transportation eased to a stop.

  Mercy climbed from the cart and stood in the tunnel, hands on hips. She wasn’t looking ahead. She was looking above, where the tunnel walls curved to the ceiling. We’d reached a place where almost all the lights were out, and the pulsing sensation was strong enough to make the floor shake. In the opaque light of a lone, flickering bulb, I followed her gaze.

  “Are you seeing this?” she murmured.

  I was.

  The tunnel had changed over the distance we’d traveled, not only in color but in composition. The concrete had been replaced, or maybe covered over, by something that glistened in the faint light. At first I thought it might be water leaking down the walls, but it was thicker than that, a coating like gel. Rather than the concrete’s solid, nondescript gray, this stuff had a pearly hue, with faint threads of pink woven through it. When I took a deep breath, I realized the cool, dry air of the underground silo had thickened, becoming slightly humid. My nose twitched with the hint of an odor I knew all too well: rotten, decaying. The smell, like the throbbing sound, threatened to grow stronger the deeper we went.

  And that wasn’t all. The light was so bad I couldn’t be sure, but the walls of the tunnel seemed to be moving—pulsing rhythmically, as if they were the gullet of some enormous creature. Slowly, the painful stiffness in my limbs making me think I must have slept part of the ride, I climbed from the cart and hobbled over to stand beside Mercy, who instinctively put her arms around me and saved me from a fall. From close up, there was no doubting it: the walls shifted, slithered, surged. The tunnel swam with shapes that seemed to be trapped beneath a membrane stretching up the curved walls from floor to ceiling.

  The shapes of Skaldi.

  Their bodies hung suspended all around us. They moved, held by the living tunnel, rolling and squirming as if they were drowning. The skin of the tunnel bulged and rippled where their limbs pressed against it. One creature thrust its blunt, empty face against the membrane, which strained outward, finally bursting to let the head free. I saw then that its head was smaller than usual, a knob barely larger than my fist, and that the scar that should have snaked down its face was closed, only a faint line visible where it normally would be. Before the rest of the thing’s body could emerge, the membrane sealed again, sucking the creature back into place with the others.

  The creatures in the walls bulged and retreated like the beating of some misshapen heart. Something told me why they couldn’t get loose.

  They weren’t ready yet.

  Not ready to be born.

  “Oh my God,” Mercy said, as if she’d picked up on my thought. “Querry, look at the cart!”

  I turned. Dimly visible in the half-light, I read the single word in raised red letters on the cart’s side.

  SCAVENGER.

  “This silo is for Scavenger missiles,” Mercy said. “Grandpa used to talk about them. They’re called that because they deliver their payload to
multiple targets at once. He always made it sound like they were nukes, but . . .”

  “They weren’t,” I said. “They were delivering drones.”

  “And the altar,” she said. “It must have formed over the silo when Athan’s—when my dad’s device failed. Do you think we’re underneath it now?”

  “We couldn’t have come that far,” I said, not at all sure of our coordinates. “But I’m guessing the tunnel goes all the way there. That’s where they emerge. When they’re ready. When they’re called out by a strong enough burst of energy.”

  Holding me upright, Mercy edged closer to the tunnel wall. The Skaldi swarmed toward us, locking onto our life-force, restrained only by the membrane. Her face turned toward mine in horror.

  “He must have known, then,” she said. “Grandpa must have known about this place all along.”

  I smiled, though that was the last thing I felt like doing. “Maybe he wanted to forget.”

  We stared at the things hanging above us, the monsters that had devastated our world. Mercy’s arm tightened around me, and this time I didn’t try to move away when she rested her head on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure anymore if she was holding me up or if I was holding her. I remembered discovering the Skaldi nest in the desert, the network of tunnels that enabled them to move through the land undetected. I’d thought the nest was their home, until Udain told me they’d come from another world, spinning around another sun. Skaldi City, a place beyond time and memory.

  But he was wrong. Wrong, or lying, whether to me or to himself.

  “There’s no rift, Mercy,” I said. “This is the Kenos laboratory. This is where it all began.”

  19

  Leaving the cart braked behind us, Mercy and I scouted back the way we’d come until we found a door in the tunnel wall.

  It swung open at a touch. Lights blinked fitfully on, revealing a room not much larger than Udain’s office. But it was filled with so much equipment there was barely space to move beyond the couple feet at the entrance. Machines like giant metal cabinets stood against the walls, lights flashing on their surface. Metal gurneys blocked the center, while other machines hovered nearby: some with knobs and dials and clear plastic tubing, others with sharp gleaming instruments that looked like saws or knives. There was a metal chair by the door, and a large metal desk crammed between the towers at the far end of the room, with a chaos of vials and tubes and syringes strewn across its surface. A lamp curled over the instruments, its bulb unlit, looking as if whoever had sat there had left the room for the night and would be back the next day.

  And distributed against the corners of the room, suspended in vertical glass cylinders that contained a pale ocher fluid, were four bodies.

  Lifeless bodies.

  One of them was Skaldi. Fully Skaldi. Featureless face, skeletal arms, body cavity, paddle tail. It hung in its tube in a posture of frozen menace, as if it had been sealed in the act of making its jump to a human victim.

  The other specimens weren’t quite Skaldi. But they weren’t quite human, either. One had the Skaldi’s empty body but humanoid arms. Another had a face, though it wasn’t the kind of face you’d want to see on anyone you knew. The fourth had the beginnings of legs, as if its tail had split and feet were emerging from the severed ends. Taken together, the four looked like a series of pictures showing the evolution from Skaldi to human, or a slow-motion sequence of the Skaldi taking over a human body.

  And there was one more, strapped to a gurney with its arms and legs splayed. It looked like a cross between a human being and a Kenos drone: oversize head, empty eye sockets, spidery limbs. Its chest collapsed inward like a sinkhole. The expression on its withered face was one of outrage, as if the instruments that lay on the gurney beside it were still probing its lifeless body.

  I knew this place. Knew it like a nightmare deeper than memory, from a time before I was I.

  This was the place I’d been born.

  Or maybe not born.

  Made.

  Athan had found the remains of the Kenos laboratory, as he’d dreamed of doing. What he’d found there was the project that had started the wars, then been stalled by the wars: the breeding of monsters to use as weapons and warriors. He’d taken as much of the previous generations’ research as he could to advance his own. And when the device he’d built at his father’s bidding had destroyed him and he’d fled into the desert, he’d left the lab, the immature Skaldi, everything. Not living, not dead. Not finished.

  Waiting. Thousands of them, in a place that could breed millions more. Waiting for the day the Scavenger of Souls would return and release this final plague on our world.

  “Mercy,” I said. “We should get out of here.”

  “Is it your leg?” She looked at me with concern, but I could tell her thoughts were elsewhere.

  “No,” I said, though the truth was I could barely stand. “It’s just . . .”

  “Give me a second,” she said. “I promise this won’t take long.”

  I lowered myself into the chair while she squeezed through gurneys. “Hard to find good help, isn’t it?” she said to herself as she surveyed the cluttered desktop. Then she squinted, frowning. “Well, look what we have here.”

  She raised her hand, holding another portable protograph. This one was in perfect condition, without a scratch or dent to mar its shiny surface. But it was even smaller than Aleka’s—suited for a child’s fingers, not a man’s.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “Athan’s? No doubt.” She fiddled with the screen, trying to get it to come on. “Maybe it’ll show us the way out of here.”

  “I think . . .”

  Her eyes rose to mine.

  “I think there’s only one way out,” I said.

  She shook the protograph as if that might make it respond, then swore silently and dropped it in her pocket. “The altar?”

  “I’m guessing.”

  A noise made us both jump. Mercy spun to take in the room. “What was that?”

  “I’m not sure.” My eyes flicked around the crowded space. “But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a pony.”

  She looked blank for a second, then smiled. “Why, Querry,” she said. “Did you just make a funny?”

  She helped me from the chair, her arm bolstering me, our attention shifting to the room’s hidden corners. We had reached the exit when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I stared hard at the experimental subjects in their cylinders, but all were still.

  Yet in one of the tubes, bubbles climbed slowly through the yellow fluid.

  “Mercy,” I said. “The Skaldi—the specimens. They’re alive.”

  “I sure hope the crazies aren’t catching,” she said. “Those babies are stone-cold dead.”

  “No, they’re not,” I said. “They’re in suspended animation. Look”—and I pointed at the wires running from each cylinder. “They were being kept sedated by the energy beam. But someone must have cut the power.”

  “Who?” she said. “The evil janitor?”

  “Whoever,” I said. “We’ve got to get back to the cart.”

  We backed out the door. The lights died as we exited. A faint luminescence exuded by the tubes showed the creatures flexing as they came out of their comas: clawed fingers opening weakly, blunt heads swiveling toward us. The pitiful monster strapped to the gurney pulled feebly against its bands, its sunken face stretching in the motion of a silent scream.

  Mercy lingered in the hallway outside the door. I knew what she was thinking. There were so many secrets here, and once we left, we’d never discover them all. “Let’s go, Mercy.”

  She looked longingly at the room, but didn’t resist as I pulled her away.

  “This was a trap,” I said.

  “No shit, Sherlock. Any chance you’ve got turbo boosters on those spindle shanks of yours?”

  “That’s next year’s model.” I clenched her hand, and she pulled me back toward the cart, my useless leg dragging behind me. I swore I h
eard footsteps that weren’t ours trailing us, but with the noise of my boot scraping the floor, I couldn’t be sure.

  We reached the spot where we’d left the cart. The embryonic monsters struggled with renewed vigor above our heads.

  But the cart was gone.

  Mercy turned to me with something like a smile. “I’m beginning to think ours is not an entirely healthy relationship.”

  She left me sitting on the tunnel floor while she searched a short distance ahead for the cart, but we both knew she wouldn’t find it. When she returned, her face and eyes were calm, with a look of inevitability I didn’t like to see.

  “You go,” I said. “With luck you can outrun them.”

  “Still trying to get rid of me, huh?” she said. “Maybe I like unhealthy relationships.”

  She sat, wrapping her arms around me. When I turned to her, I found her lips on mine. They moved invitingly, drawing me in, while her hand on the back of my head pulled me closer. It was all I could do to break away and whisper a single word. “Mercy—”

  Then the footsteps I thought I’d heard resolved themselves into a steady drumbeat, and Mercy jumped to her feet as a figure stepped from the shadows.

  “What the hell,” she breathed when she saw him. I couldn’t blame her.

  It was Geller.

  His pimpled face spread in a smile. He held two objects: an energy rifle, and the bone-white staff. Behind him, clustering out of the darkness at the edges of the tunnel, came ten or more of Asunder’s warriors, armed with spears and stone knives.

  “Kind of a private moment here,” Mercy said.

  Geller’s smile didn’t change. But when he spoke, his voice was rapid and jittery, and his eyes shone with fearful enthusiasm.

  “It is as our lord Asunder foretold,” he said. “The children of the despoilers have fallen into a snare of their own devising. The day of the Scavenger of Souls is upon us at last.”

  They tied us with the brown ropes and hauled us far up the tunnel, where the cart was waiting. Mercy told me to blast them, but even if I’d been able to summon the energy, I couldn’t do it with Geller’s rifle trained on her. “Thought you true believers weren’t into techno toys,” she gibed, but he merely smiled. The smile turned to a manic laugh when he discovered my mother’s mangled pistol, and he handed it mockingly back to Mercy, shoving it in her holster while she recoiled at the touch of his hands. My biggest fear was that he’d touch her with the staff, and I tensed every time he approached. But he did nothing but hold it up for the others to admire, waving it wildly over their heads as if he was their new king.