Liminal States
Page 49
CHAPTER SEVEN
Polly was drawn from the deck of Chico’s boat, moored in the crystalline blue waters off the Playa Los Algadones, by the whine of the sirens. Coming awake in her gray apartment, she realized the sound was not the distant muezzin call of nightmares. These sirens were close, though the howl was oddly muffled.
She clambered barefoot from bed. Umbral light filtered through the curtains, and wind rattled the windowpanes facing the street. She staggered to the largest picture window and drew back the diaphanous curtains.
Her window was dark with the mass of the spore grass sprouting from its surface. A network of vermicular roots crisscrossed the glass up the sides of the window frame and burrowed into the mortar between bricks. These roots supported dense thickets of white leaflike plants. In the gaps between tufts of spore grass the street was visible as a desolate snow globe.
Dead trees, cars, streets, buildings, and even telephone wires and chain-link fences were coated in the white growth. It was a living, gently moving carpet, growing over every surface. A neglected mailbox crumpled suddenly beneath its weight. She watched as the grass crept slowly up the sides of the building across the street, covered a street lamp, as roots spilled out and squirmed up to the cornices above her window. Spores circulated in the air, swirling and rising and falling like snow. The siren howled on, defiant, slowly disappearing into a beard of spore grass dangling from the electric transformer.
The spore grass was not the only thing growing. In shaded corners and from beneath garbage heaped in an abandoned lot, slender white stalks sprouted above the spore grass, at the tip of each swaying frond a dark bud no larger than a pea, soon to blossom and grow into luminous blue fruit. She tamped down the fearful memories that came rushing up.
Polly retreated from the window. She remembered Mrs. Valdez, alone in her apartment, sleeping with the window open. The imagined plight of Polly’s neighbor gave her a proactive way to focus her thoughts.
“Mrs. Valdez!” She bounded down the stairs to the elderly woman’s apartment. “Mrs. Valdez! You need to come out.”
The door was locked. She beat the heels of her hands against the door and screamed for the old woman until her throat hurt. There was no answer. If only she had the ram Fetch had used to break open that door in Bad Tower. She used her shoulder instead, running it into the door again and again. It hurt, but at last the upper hinge broke loose, and she was able to kick out the lower hinge. The door fell into the apartment with a crash of breaking glass.
“Are you okay Mrs. Valdez? It’s Polly! It’s—”
The window was open in the cluttered main room of the apartment. Spore grass was growing over tables and chairs, across the carpeting, over light fixtures, up and over the many precious photographs of Mrs. Valdez and her family and to the ceiling. White stalks tipped with buds grew from a bowl of candy as if placed there in decoration. The sweet, fleshy scent of the spores was overpowering. Polly covered her face with her nightshirt to keep from gagging.
The spore grass blurred the divisions between rooms, consuming the natural lines of the apartment in its homogenous mass. It struggled to grow more than a foot onto the floor of the kitchen, but thick tufts sprouted from open cabinets, filled the sink, and covered the ceiling with tiny leaves. The hallway leading to the bedrooms was dark. It was damp and plaint beneath Polly’s feet.
“Mrs. Valdez?”
The door to the bedroom was ajar. A TV was playing a cartoon, casting shifting blue light over the unmade bed and unkempt floor. The spore grass was growing intermittently. It encircled the television, reaching down to border the screen and dripping from the dials. The bedspread was dark with blood. The spore grass was growing visibly across it, unfurling pale threads and creeping up them like frost, reinforcing the treads with more, creating a solid mesh of underlying roots for the dense fungus that would soon follow.
There was a sound from the bathroom. A sound like shifting, wet fabric followed by a thunk. The door was closed, the crack at its base clogged with more of the growth.
“Mrs. Valdez, are you in there?”
A weak voice answered her.
“I can’t hear you, Mrs. Valdez. You need to come out of there. We need to get you somewhere safe.”
Polly’s shoulder was hurting after breaking through the front door. She did not know if she had it in her to smash through another door. If it came down to it, though, she would find out rather than leave her neighbor to die in the bathroom.
“Please, open the door.”
“Go away,” the voice faintly gurgled. “Go away, Miss Polly.”
“If you’re infected with the spores, it’s okay; they can remove them.” She thought back to the little girl cured at Bishop’s Potemkin hospital. “There are treatments that work. Please open the door.”
Liquid sloshed, and a groan echoed through the bathroom. Wet cloth slapped against the tiles. She imagined Mrs. Valdez heaving herself, fully clothed, from the bathtub. Instead of the sound of the turning doorknob, there followed a loud, organic ratcheting sound and a pained cry.
“No, no, please, Jesus,” said Mrs. Valdez, her voice wet with fluid. “Dios me libre.”
There was no further answer, so Polly began to kick the foot of the door. It was not so sturdy as the front door, and the lock tore out of the plywood frame. The door only opened inward a few inches before colliding with something soft. It was dark and smelled of candle smoke and human filth. The light of the cartoon on the television spilled into the bathroom, living in the mirror and revealing the long-expired prayer candles covering the countertop.
“Stay back,” said Mrs. Valdez, heaving herself into the darkness of the bathtub.
Polly switched on the overhead light, and it spilled through the stained drum of the fixture as murky red. The tiles of the bathroom were smeared with blood, the toilet heaped with red-black filth and draped with torn clothing.
Mrs. Valdez was an unrecognizable horror inhabiting the bathtub. She was bloated to three times her stout frame, her body split open as if burst from inside, naked flesh rancid with blood and sores and livid stretch marks. Her inner meat—clotted yellow fat and scabrous muscle and even organs—lay exposed beneath the useless flaps of her skin. She wallowed in a tub of excrement and blood, her eyes black with renal failure, her lips pulled back from gory
teeth.
“He did not mean it,” she said.
Mrs. Valdez’s plump tabby cat lay with her in the tub, bits of fur still clinging to the loathsome, fleshy body beneath. It was attached to her breast and flayed abdomen by numerous hooked barbs that covered its bloated, limbless, caterpillar-like body. Its head was an eyeless black button equipped with a pair of flexible tubes through which it sucked fluid from Mrs. Valdez’s dying body.
Polly vomited into the sink. Her sickness drenched writhing animals. The sink was a cradle for miniatures of the creature in the bathtub, squirming creatures with short, fat little legs and bodies covered in barbs. Some rolled on the floor and wriggled in the bathtub, crawling up the ruins of Mrs. Valdez’s legs.
“Go away,” moaned Mrs. Valdez. “Go away. I love him. He doesn’t mean it. Go away!”
The largest of the creatures suckling from Mrs. Valdez retracted its feeding appendages from her flesh and lifted its smooth head to face Polly. It began to rhythmically flex its body and emit a ratcheting sound that filled her with dread. She fell back, closed the bathroom door, and stumbled out of the apartment, vomiting again across the white fur of the spore grass. It had nearly entombed everything in Mrs. Valdez’s apartment.
“Some things rear up and hiss at ya,” Patrice had once explained about bayou wildlife. “Quiet is when you got to be afraid. If a critter mean business, he gwon juss bite.”
Patrice stood beside the door with his shoulders leaned against the wall. He was chewing a hangnail. It was a laconic posture that Wesley Bishop reckoned made Patrice the latter sort of bayou animal.
Wesley sat in the room once used for meetings of the now-defunct shareholders. High in the spire, the room’s wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows afforded a breathtaking view of the port and coast all the way to Long Beach. Not on that morning. The city sprawling below was lost in the gray haze, like poured smoke, and only a black crescent of the Pacific showed through the vapor.
The oversized table, meant to seat twenty, hosted only three. Bishop sat at the head, Bethany at his side, and at the far end of the table, Milo Gardener sat with his back to Patrice.
“Have you ever been up here?” asked Bishop.
Milo folded his gloved hands on the table.
“Your predecessor did not feel the shareholders needed to know about my activities for the corporation.”
“I agree,” said Bishop. “I have even more contempt for them, which is why they are no longer here. But I suppose you’re wondering why you are. How rare is it that I call upon you and not the other way around?”
“It is infrequent.”
“Yes.” Bishop snapped his fingers. “You’re usually very self-sufficient. I suspect that if I dropped dead and another of my clade climbed from the swamp to take my place, you would hardly notice.”
Milo said nothing.
“I was awakened from a very happy dream by a telephone call from Admiral Haley.” Bishop leaned back in the chair and propped his Illio Maglia wingtips on the table. He picked a piece of lint from his suit. “Do you know what he had to say?”
Milo did not react to the question.
“He gave me forty-eight hours to allow someone named Captain Dryson and the UN inspectors, whom I was assured would be dealt with, into the depths of this facility. Into”—Bishop bared his teeth as he overenunciated—“the Fane.”
One of Milo’s white eyebrows flicked involuntarily.
“I didn’t know what to tell him. He was very belligerent, and he has that little flotilla parked out there in the Pacific. Very threatening. I said I would think about it, because I was mad. I do not react well to ultimatums like that.”
“I am at your service, Mr. Bishop.” Milo bowed his head obsequiously. “What would you like me to do?”
“Pack the Republic up with explosives and drive it into Haley’s aircraft carrier,” said Bishop.
Milo nodded and began to stand up.
“Seriously?” Bishop looked to Bethany for support. “This guy was going to drive my boat into an aircraft carrier. Are you a moron?”
“It was your command,” said Milo.
Bishop struggled to remember his center and not throw something at the old man across the table from him.
“Sit down.” Bishop waited for the old wraith to settle back into his chair. “I was practically smashed into jelly in the maintenance vault yesterday by a freak, and I am not going to be bullied by some flake with fancy epaulettes today. He has given us a deadline. Forty-eight hours to bare our darkest secrets.
“Here is what I want you to do: fucking kill them. Dryson and the UN team. Zero that bitch from Corrections Emergence. No more waiting for the right moment or making it look like an accident. I want you to put these people in a room and fill them with holes until their fucking hearts stop pumping blood. Is that clear enough? Do you get what I want you to do?”
Milo nodded. At a gesture from Bishop, he flowed out through the door. Patrice followed him into the hall. There was something else Bishop wanted from Milo. Something he did not want Bethany to know about.
Something had to be done to help him relax.
Polly discarded Milo’s itinerary. Studio City? Lunch at a three-star restaurant in Santa Monica? That sort of distraction became sickening in light of what had happened to Mrs. Valdez.
She rallied Captain Dryson and the UN inspectors, and the convoy rolled out, headed south for the cordon. She did not explain where they were going or what they would see. She could feel Captain Dryson studying her from the passenger seat and did not care. She was resolute. Silent. Her expression carved in cold stone.
“Miss Polly.”
The manner of address caused her to slam on the van’s brakes. It was Rukundo in the backseat, blue beret in his hand, his long arm draped over the back of the seat and his body leaned toward her. He peered at her from beneath a brow stitched with concern.
“What?” she asked.
“Please, you seem very angry. You do not tell us where we are going.”
“To the Pit,” she said.
The van fell back into silence, and she continued driving. It was what they had demanded, at least the best she could do, but they now realized what they were getting. The streets were emptied of all people. The neighborhoods closest to the cordon showed signs of fires; entire blocks were gutted, and the streets were discolored by vivid stains from the toxic chemicals used to kill the spores.
They reached the military cordon, and a young National Guardsman, barely more than a child, stepped up to the window. He demanded their business. Satisfied with their answers and credentials, he read a script from a white card that warned, “Exiting the cordon may not be possible. If you test positive for spore contamination or attempt to bypass the cordon, you will be dealt with by military authority as established by Presidential Order. Do you have any questions?”
“Yes,” said Konstantin Sokov, leaning past Dr. Burns to be heard by the soldier. “Could I please use your gun to shoot myself at this time?”
No one laughed at the joke, least of all the boyish guardsman. Polly rolled up the window and continued on into the dead zone and beyond, through the squalid expanse of Creeptown. The streets, suddenly boiling with life, smells, and sounds, bewildered the UN team. Duplicates threw stones and trash at the vehicles as they wound their way through the confusing network of side streets.
Captain Dryson communicated on his radio to the other vans for his men to stay alert. He lifted his weapon from the foot well and scanned the shanties and walkways for danger. Konstantin Sokov appeared sickened, Dr. Burns observed more clinically. Only Rukundo did not appear upset.
“I know this place,” said Rukundo. “It is like Biryogo of Kigali but more. It is market and living place where the unwanted go. Those with not much.”
“A ghetto,” said Dr. Burns.
They passed beneath the ominous tower blocks with their base towns and elaborate murals. Face gangers appeared to challenge the convoy. They displayed th
eir tattoos and showed menacing gang signs. Some held guns but were smart enough to keep them pointed at the sky. Polly did not doubt that Dryson and his Marines would flood the base towns with automatic gunfire if the convoy came under actual attack.
“They have places like this in Soviet Union.” Konstantin was oblivious to the danger. He pressed his cheek against the window to peer up at the buildings towering all around them. “They plan the city with many apartment from the start. Without so much ... ah ... what is word for things around these building?”
“Garbage,” said Polly.
Just beyond the tower blocks the detectors in the vans began to sound a spore warning. The scientists and Marines hurried to don their gas equipment.
“Should you stop?” asked Konstantin.
“Spores move,” said Polly. “We need to move too.”
The detectors flashed yellow and then red. The convoy passed through a stretch of rusted shacks and stacked shipping containers. White spore grass was climbing the corners of the structures, devouring wood and rubber features of the improvised architecture more quickly than the bottle-glass windowpanes or corrugated metal. It was not nearly as bad a storm as the one that had engulfed Polly’s street, but she could see the spore dust drifting in the air; aggregations like snowflakes burst apart on the van’s windshield.
“Look there,” said Konstantin. He pointed at two men, shirtless and laboring to cover a rain cistern with a tarp. Their identical physiques suggested a pair of type twos. They stopped in their task, eyes covered by goggles, noses and mouths hidden beneath flapping scarves, and they watched the convoy drive past. One of them men waved at the passing vehicles.
The UN scientists knew of the hyperbolic towers and the immense, angled cantilever of the Bishop Unlimited building looming over San Pedro. They had seen such places in videos and photographs; meager preparation for what they beheld. These were man-made Grand Canyons, awe-inspiring when their scale was revealed in person. Birds wheeled beneath the spire’s overhanging rookery. Sunlight broke diagonally through the upper layers of the glass and cast an acre of pale rectangles of green light over the chapped hull of the nearest cooling tower.