by Zack Parsons
The giant’s body crossed over the fulcrum of the crane, and gravity carried it the rest of the way onto its back. The corpse flopped over with a jarring impact that shook the vault. The cranes gently slackened the cables holding its arm and leg upright until they settled onto the floor as well.
Bishop, Grinch, and a few of the bolder men and women from the maintenance crew approached the giant’s head. It had only surfaced from the Pool in recent hours, and yet the smell of decay was overpowering. The barrel of its chest was banded with muscles, but the skin was falling away, slipping off the muscle and bone like wet cloth, peeling to the floor in glistening strips. There was a soft hiss audible as they approached. Faint tendrils of vapor rose from its flesh as if it were cooking.
“It is disintegrating,” said Bishop. “The air in the vault is reacting with its flesh.”
“That smoke could be poisonous,” said Grinch.
Bishop continued closer to the giant, his footsteps splashing through the pool of viscous fluid surrounding the creature. The others followed a few wary steps behind him. The smell permeated the cloth Bishop held over nose and mouth and set his eyes to watering. It was the miasma of ocean rot, of strange, deep things on stranger shores.
The maintenance crew was very quiet as Bishop crossed the last few paces to the giant’s head. Even the Pool, so tumultuous of late, was calm beneath their feet.
The giant’s shoulders and back were so massive and its head so small that the back of its head, though dangling, did not touch the floor of the vault. The immense beast’s physiology was less similar to a man’s than it at first seemed. The arms were jointed only once at the elbow, with no wrists and very crude hands. The sloughing flesh revealed slabs of withering muscles far more numerous than a man’s body might possess. The legs were powerful to be sure but were dwarfed by the arms. The creature possessed no visible genitalia between those legs. The face was dark, its features concealed by the membrane of the cowl.
Bishop crouched beside the hillock of its shoulder, intent on removing the cowl covering its head.
“Don’t touch it,” said Grinch.
“Quiet.” Bishop flexed his hand and reached for the cowl. He pinched the yielding husk between thumb and index finger and lifted it slowly from the beast’s face. The suction released, and the creature’s visage was unveiled.
Bishop’s stomach lurched at the sight. A gasp rose from the maintenance crew, and a few of their number backed away.
The flesh of the giant’s face was gray-black and covered in stiff bristles. Two bulbous black eyes dominated the upper half of its face. Several smaller eyes were located on either side of its head and in a row of four beneath the large, domed main eyes. A pair of segmented chelicerae, like those of a venomous spider, dangled from the lower half of the giant’s face. Black fangs, big as knives, tipped each grotesque limb and curved inward to rest against the creature’s disintegrating chest.
Bishop furrowed his brow and studied the horrible face. Revolting though it was, he did recognize something of it. There was a long-ago dream, forgotten until this moment, of creatures like this, stitched and restitched, howling as they charged across a twilit battlefield zippered with trenches, slagged emplacements, and shell-pocked bunkers.
He imagined this muscular giant among them, moving at great speed, bellowing from its arachnid mouth as it charged and leaped over earthworks, taking hold of beams of tilted steel and brachiating through the tangled frame of a ruined fortification. He was caught in the midst of a savage battle between these creatures.
Mortars thundered through the air and shook the earth. He heard the pop and whoosh of poison canisters, smelled the acrid purple gas that crept across the trenches. The fighting giants became ghosts moving silently through the clouds of poison. He felt the sudden oven heat of invisible rays sweeping through the air, passing overhead, and incinerating whatever they touched.
A giant loomed above him, straddling the trench where he emerged from a chugging culvert of white liquid. It peered down at him curiously, its eyes polished marbles of black, its huge chest heaving beneath a uniform of bloodied rags. It reached down into the muck for him, its hand large enough to enclose his chest.
In a rush of smoke, vaporizing sinews, and popping, cooked bones it was split in half by a heat ray, its entrails spilling out, its sectioned body flopping into the trench all around him. The giant yet lived. A smoldering mound of flesh dragged itself toward him with one arm. It screamed at him, its face split open and drooling green-black fluids. Bishop screamed in answer and could not draw breath. He looked away, looked away and cradled the bottom of the trench. He suffocated in the stifling air, his skin smoldering and effervescing like that of the dead giant.
“Do you recognize this thing?” asked Grinch.
The question dragged him back to the vault, to the rot-softened face of this dead thing. No. He could not be sure. Increasingly he believed that these moments, creeping back into his memory, were real events occurring on the other side of distant Pools, distant and fading death dreams across the trunk space, indistinguishable from lies conjured by his desires. Or maybe they were nothing. Maybe just his fear creating a fiction of this monstrosity and his knowledge of the Westward capsules.
He discarded the fleshy membrane of the cowl and turned to confront the type one from Anomalies.
“It’s just another one of your freaks,” said Bishop. “Maybe a bit bigger than usual. Haul it—”
Grinch shouted a wordless warning. Bishop half turned in time to see the decaying paw of the giant reaching for him. It caught him around his chest and squeezed hard enough that he felt his ribs compress. He was dimly aware of flying. There was a hard landing. Hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to do any lasting damage.
The giant howled and was up and moving around the vault. Men and women screamed, first in terror and then in agony. There was a sound like tearing cloth that Bishop later discovered was the shredding coveralls of workmen as they were pulled apart by the giant. One of the cranes was felled with a resounding crash.
When Milo and his Gardeners finally arrived, they found the giant once again, and finally, deceased. Having rampaged through the maintenance vault, it had spent its final moments beating uselessly on a hatch separating the vault from a surface access tunnel. Grinch and a few workmen survived, and Bishop, somehow unharmed, was found buried in a heap of entrails. Gardeners helped him up from the grisly debris.
“Am I alive?” asked Bishop, wiping gore from his face.
“You are, sir,” said one of Milo’s white-haired clade brothers. “Shall I get you a doctor?”
Bishop was already walking away, slopping loops of someone’s intestines from his shoulders. His hair was stuck flat with blood. He stopped and looked at his shaking hands.
“Patrice,” he said to no one in particular. “I need pills.”
Polly took them where she was supposed to take them. She drove them downtown and paraded them through the Enhanced Care facility managed and operated by Bishop’s pharmaceutical subsidiaries. They sat through brain-numbing videos describing the facility and then witnessed, firsthand, the advanced procedures being used to save victims of the spores.
The UN team asked questions of their appointed tour guide, Dr. Chandrasekar, a portly Indian physician in a white coat. He wore thick glasses, and his face was defined by angular lips and pronounced jowls that belied his youth.
“Where do you get these patients?” asked Dr. Roux.
“What are the survival rates for your treatments?” asked a dark-skinned African UN doctor.
“May we view the remains of the deceased?” asked the pathologist, Dr. Nandy.
Dr. Chandrasekar answered the questions deftly. When he could provide a positive answer that reflected well on Bishop, he brought attention to it. When a line of inquiry threatened to expose an unpleasant truth, or one of the scientists demanded more evidence than he was providing, Dr. Chandrasekar relied on his clearly honed public-relations skill
s to deflect their questions and distract them with additional information. The UN team was provided with storage boxes filled with medical records, test results, and descriptions of the success or failure of various treatments.
“It will take year to read this,” said Konstantin Sokov. “Eh ... maybe ten year.”
Dr. Burns watched from the back of the tour group, glowering at Polly when their eyes met, clearly dissatisfied with the stage-managed introduction. Near the end of the tour Dr. Burns took Polly by the elbow and escorted her into the women’s restroom. Once inside, she wheeled on Polly, jabbing her fingertip into Polly’s sternum.
“This production does not satisfy the agreement,” said Dr. Burns.
“I heard some very effective treatments described,” said Polly. “You met the little girl who was cured by—”
“I met one little girl out of how many?” Dr. Burns folded her arms across her chest. “Just giving me a clear and current infection rate would be more helpful than the past two hours.”
“I am taking you places that I was told would be helpful.”
“Told by whom?” Dr. Burns did not wait for Polly to answer. “This is a field study, Miss Foster. An inspection cannot be led around by its nose, and our results will not be crafted by such obvious public- relations efforts.”
Polly sighed and said, “What do you want from me?”
“A chance to get at the truth,” said Dr. Burns.
Their next stop was even less satisfactory.
Reclaimed park, read the item on Polly’s itinerary. The park was located three blocks off the walled ramparts of the I-10, on La Cienega in Culver City. The vans and UN vehicles parked in a line along a street shaded by living trees. The park comprised a few acres of healthy vegetation including grass, lush trees, and planters full to bursting with vivid flowers.
“Just three weeks ago this park was the site of several casualties and a serious spore storm,” said Polly as she walked the UN team into the bucolic park. “There are photographs in your packet of the storm. As you can see, the park was saved from destruction and serves the community once more.”
“Where is community?” asked Konstantin Sokov.
Polly was stymied. It was a fair question. The park was empty, and the surrounding businesses, although nice, were open and vacant or, more often, were shuttered. The situation deteriorated quickly. One scientist realized the green grass was freshly sodded. Dr. Nandy pointed out that the trees were larger in the original photograph.
Liam, the paranoid man from before, discovered the most damning evidence. Black scoring was apparent in the cracks between the paving stones of the park’s walking path. Whoever had power-washed the stones had not completely scrubbed the proof that fire had been used to clean out the park.
“And we’re supposed to be impressed by Bishop’s scorched-earth policy?” asked Liam.
Dryson and his Marines had remained respectfully separate from the scientists, observing their actions and watching for danger. Dryson clearly enjoyed watching Polly struggle.
Annoyed by the itinerary’s failed attempts to mislead, Polly corralled the scientists back into the vans and started the convoy moving again.
Their hotel was downtown, atop Bunker Hill in the former Palisades Hotel building. When the pandemics made convention-going in Los Angeles unfeasible, Bishop bought the luxury hotel and had it renovated to his own tastes. The twenty-story tower was refurbished in austere, dark, ultra-modernism, with recessed lighting, echoing spaces, and brutalist fixtures visible through its glass façade of smoked glass.
The staff was mostly duplicates with an apparent dress code of pale skin and severe hair styles. The concierge, a young type one with an arrow of hair atop his shaved head, sported an intricate facial tattoo depicting stylized winds. The rooms were on the second floor, facing north toward the dreary military emplacements in the Hollywood Hills. They were well-appointed in the European fashion.
Hotel porters and the drivers began unloading and hauling luggage and personal equipment from the trucks and into the hotel. The scientists became preoccupied with directing their own belongings to the correct room. The hallway was packed with people moving in different directions. Frayed nerves and a long flight soon gave way to shouting.
Dryson and his Marines, intending to camp in the lobby, nevertheless entered and searched each of the rooms. Polly watched them work, curious as to their intention. Were they expecting a firefight?
“Miss Foster.” It was Dr. Roux. “I need to speak to you.”
The doctor approached her through the twisting flow of porters and scientists. The busy confines of the hall forced her close to Polly. The Frenchwoman seemed too young to be a doctor. She was beautiful, her curly auburn hair glamorous, her utilitarian clothing worn in a complimentary fashion. Her smile was untouched by the grind of the day.
“Uh.” Dr. Roux’s closeness and gaze made Polly uncomfortable. “Yes, of course, we can go down to the lobby.”
“Just there.” Dr. Roux gestured to the door of one of the rooms. “We can speak privately in there.”
Dr. Roux’s fingers brushed against the back of Polly’s hand. She followed Dr. Roux but remained wary of the woman’s intent. She was stopped in the doorway of the hotel room by someone calling out to her.
“Hey! Miss Foster!” It was Liam. “What the hell are you on about? We need to have it out. You’re wasting our time.”
“We wanted to talk.” Dr. Burns appeared from the flow of porters. “In here is fine.”
She chased Polly into the room and seemed surprised to discover Dr. Roux there as well.
“Madeleine.” Dr. Burns addressed Dr. Roux. “I need to have a few words with Miss Foster. If you could, take Dr. Cochrane down to the lobby and see if you can get everyone situated with meals. I’m sure they would appreciate that.”
Dr. Roux creased her lips to hold back any objection. She nodded curtly and departed with her arm hooked to the reluctant Dr. Liam Cochrane’s elbow. Dr. Burns shut and locked the door behind them.
“I approached this from the wrong direction with you,” said Dr. Burns. “You’re trying to do your job and protect your employer—I understand that. It’s what anyone would do in your position. I’m not one of the conspiracy theorists who believe duplicates are part of some hive mind. I’ve worked and been friends with several over the course of my career. There are duplicates working with the United Nations.”
“We get around,” said Polly.
“Yes, that’s rather the point, isn’t it? As you have multiplied and distributed yourselves globally, you have brought with you waves of pandemics to which you are immune but native populations are not. This latest, these spores and their accompanying. . . habitat? Ecosystem? This is more troubling. And that is why we are here.”
“I understand that,” said Polly.
“I hope so. We are here to save lives, perhaps millions of them. We are not here to embarrass Mr. Bishop or any of his subsidiary entities.”
“I said I get it.” Polly was growing tired of the lectures. “And I said I would do what I can to help. Anything within my power.”
“Get me inside.” Dr. Burns spoke quietly.
“We have lab facilities in the Pit. I will take you there tomorrow.”
“No.” Dr. Burns waved her hand to dismiss the offer. “We need to see how your process works. I have read that you are generated from a liquid medium and—”
“That is off-limits even to me.”
The Gardeners tightly controlled access to the Pool itself. Even the maintenance teams were forbidden from getting any closer to the surface than the maintenance vault above the Pool.
“If we could take samples of the medium, it might unlock every one of these mysterious diseases. Ten minutes. You do not even need to allow all of us inside, just myself and Dr. Nandy.”
“No.” Polly started toward the door. Dr. Burns grabbed her wrist and turned her back.
“Get us to the Fane.”
&nbs
p; The use of the word shocked Polly. The Fane was a rumor even among the duplicates, presumed to exist but never seen. She had never imagined she would hear it mentioned by a flake.
“That ... what you’re talking about is not real.” Polly’s laughter concealed her unease. “I can’t take you somewhere that doesn’t exist.”
She opened the door and set foot into the din of the bustling hall, nearly bumping into Captain Dryson in the process. The taciturn Marine was joined by Sergeant Funkweed. Dryson was holding a small cardboard box against his chest. It rattled when he shook it and held it out to Polly. It was mostly empty, but the bottom was a tangle of wires and transistors.
“In the telephone receivers, in lamps, stitched into pillows,” said Dryson. “I think we found them all. I’m sorry you won’t be able to snoop on these people’s personal communications any longer.”
COMINTERCEPT – TELEPHONE - NOENCRYPT - GREEN LABEL
06/30/06 - 06:46:22 PST - Complete Machine Transcription
Subjects: Dr. Robin Burns
