Dead Space: Catalyst

by Evenson, Brian

  “If Istvan isn’t removed, the consequences will be dire,” said Callie. “Go tell Briden that. And tell him it was from me.”

  For a moment the guard looked confused, and then he shuffled off again.

  This time he came back with Briden. The latter looked irritated. His hair was a mess and his jumpsuit smelled. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in days.

  “What is it now?” he asked through the slot.

  She tried to explain, but halfway through he cut her off. “Istvan’s fine,” he said. “We need him. The Marker speaks to him.”

  “But he’s changing the signal,” said Callie. “The Marker’s becoming more enabled, but in the wrong way. The signal was weak before. Now it’s tuned and affecting nearly everybody, and symptoms of dementia, which were subdued before, seemed to have become more acute, even torturous. It was always sending out something that encouraged dementia, but it’s suddenly become much, much worse.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Briden. “The Marker is glorious. And Istvan is its prophet.”

  Callie shook his head. She bent down, brought up an audio log, played it for him. It was Istvan’s voice, rambling slowly on.

  We must be made whole again. You must take us and carry us and make us again. And when we are in that place and new-made, from there you must carry us and make us again.

  She clicked it off.

  “So?” said Briden.

  “Can’t you hear what he’s saying, Briden?” Callie asked. “The Marker is teaching him how to reproduce it. And what’s more, my data suggests the Marker is rewiring his warped brain. Look at how many dead we already have, how many suicides.”

  “Collateral damage,” Briden said.

  “Collateral damage? Really?”

  “Besides, I don’t think there have been that many more suicides or dead than usual in circumstances such as these.”

  “Are you serious?” said Callie. “Briden, you’re willfully turning a blind eye.”

  “It’s you who are blind,” said Briden.

  “No,” Dexter said. “Briden, you have to believe me: the Marker is dangerous. And with Istvan near it, it’s probably even more dangerous.”

  “Blasphemy,” said Briden.

  “It’s not anything of the kind. Besides, if you won’t stop it, I will.”

  Briden smiled. “Do your worst,” he said. “You’re imprisoned in a cell.” And then he turned on his heel and left.

  * * *

  Through it all, Istvan stayed there, beside the Marker. This, the ghost of the murdered Fischer told him, was where he would be safe. If he were to stay here, beside the Marker, then it would protect him.

  “From what?” he asked.

  The Marker did not seem to have a ready answer for this question. All around him, through the haze that was the real world, swarmed the other world; swirling and dynamic, full of ghosts and beauty. Now when the veil fell, it fell quickly and all at once. He could see in the Marker the shape and image of himself. He belonged here, with it, with the Marker. Though he looked human and flesh and blood, he felt he was more akin to this twisting tower of stone than to these people gathered round him, staring at him. They were built wrong. He could tell just by looking at them. The Marker wasn’t talking to them. It was talking to him.

  It will keep me safe, he told himself. And saying that somehow made him think of Jensi, whom he hadn’t thought of for a long time. Jensi had protected him, had kept him safe. Or had for a while, anyway, until suddenly he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it anymore. When he thought about that part of it, it made him angry. He had needed Jensi’s help, but where had his brother been? Jensi had even been there when the joke with Councilman Fischer had gone wrong—he had seen him in the crowd, but had Jensi saved him? Had he prevented them from dragging him away and here? No, he hadn’t. He had failed him.

  But the Marker would not fail him. It had said it would protect him and so it would. The Marker had power and it was giving its power to him. He was, in some senses, becoming it.

  We need to reproduce, the dead were saying, the Marker was saying through the dead. There need to be more of us. We cannot live on this planet all our lives.

  No, thought Istvan. You can’t.

  We must call out louder, and hope for them to hear us and take us into themselves. As you have done, Istvan.

  Yes, thought Istvan. As I have done. He could feel the form and shape of the Marker imprinted in his head, a delicate and beautiful structure, as entrancing as his numbers had been. It was the Marker, and he felt an almost overwhelming urge to try to bring it out of his head and to reproduce it in life. Soon others, he knew, would be feeling the same urge.

  The dead were there now, in numbers, swirling all around him. All of their mouths were opening and they were singing. It’s time, they were singing, it’s time! Yes, he thought, it was time. He stood and the scientists around him looked rapt upon him. Briden was beside him, reaching one hand out and touching Istvan’s shoulder.

  And then Istvan felt it coming. He lifted his hands high above his head. When he brought them down the pulse came with it.

  37

  In the penal colony, the prisoners reeled and collapsed. Henry, too, found himself clutching his head, waiting for whatever was happening to pass, and when he lifted his head again it was to see most of the prisoners confused and wandering, much in the same state as he.

  But then a few of them became more focused. One man grabbed another and tugged him over to the hole Briden had dug and then both stared down into it. Henry turned on the audio feed, trying to hear what they were saying, but by now they weren’t saying anything, they were just staring into the hole. The corruption had spread, Henry realized, growing quickly and rapidly with the last burst, and had squirmed its way down the hole. Perhaps that was what they were looking at? He did hear other sounds, though: a few of the other men groaning, a few scraps of speech, and then also something else, something that he didn’t know quite how to interpret. A strange sound like the breaking and snapping of sticks. Wood? he thought. There was no wood out there, maybe no wood anywhere in the compound. But it definitely sounded like that. What could it be?

  He turned up the volume a little, but no longer heard the snapping sounds. Instead there was a sort of damp, squelchy noise.

  And then one of the men closest to the hole flinched and stepped back. He opened his mouth and began to scream.

  * * *

  It was a strong one, and different than what Callie had felt before. When she came to, it was to find that she had unconsciously been beating her head against the cell wall. Her forehead was sore and bloody. I could have really hurt myself, she thought. She stumbled back to the machine and observed how it had graphed the pulse, saw how it had shot off the range of the chart. Her cell, too, suddenly had a lot of those tendrils winding through it. They hadn’t been there before.

  Something new is happening, she thought.

  She stood and peered out the slot to see if she could see anything, but the hallway seemed empty. There, too, were more patches of corruption and tendrils, one of them big and long enough to almost seem like a cable.

  She called for the guard but he didn’t come. She called again, louder, this time beating her hand on the metal door, and this time he came, walking slowly and ponderously, with a strange dragging sound. She heard him long before she saw him, and when she saw him, he was clutching his head, a strange frenzied look disrupting his features in such a way that it seemed like his face was made of parts of the faces of four very different men. He stared through the slot, one eye clenched tightly shut, the other eye darting nervously about in its orbit.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. Instead he brought his face down hard against the door, splitting his forehead on the lip of the slot. Startled, Dr. Dexter stepped back. He raised his head and she saw, through the narrow opening of the slot, blood cascading down his forehead. He took a strange swooping step and struck his hea
d again, even harder this time, and she was spattered with his blood, blood oozing down the inside of the slot as well. And then he fell out of sight.

  She heard a scraping sound that she couldn’t place, then the sound of him pulling his way back up the door. Suddenly Callie was concerned he might try to unlock it and come in after her. She backed deeper into the cell, her hands feeling for the wall behind her. The guard’s face appeared, the flesh over his eye torn away to reveal a stretch of pinkish bone. He swayed, and then tilted his head back.

  “No!” shouted Callie.

  But it was already too late. He brought his head down hard and fast and this time she could see the lip of the slot break through his head with a crunch and when he fell away he left, along with the blood, shards of brain and bone. He fell as heavy as a sack and then did not move again. Callie still stayed pressed back against the wall, holding her breath, waiting for him to move again, wondering fleetingly what had been wrong with the man, what had driven him to do what he had.

  Then her glance fell to the now blood-spattered monitor, the graph with the lines stretching off it and lost beyond the edge of the screen, and then she thought she knew.

  * * *

  In the interrogation room, they had left the body covered by a sheet and then had forgotten about it. It had started to smell and the body had grown sodden and had begun to change, parts of it clinging to the sheet and soaking it through with a grayish ichor. Here there were no flies or insects and little bacteria beyond that in the body itself, so the decay was strange and unusual; the one guard who had looked into the room, searching for somewhere to take a quick nap while he was on duty, had quickly gone back out again.

  Underneath the sheet something was happening. A tendril of corruption had curled up the leg of the table and felt its way to the head. There was a snapping sound and the body seemed to sit up, the sheet still clinging to it. A leg snapped and slid out at a strange angle. And then the body contorted and fell off the table.

  It lay there half-wrapped in its sheet, still changing. The head twisted and opened up. The jaw dropped downward and pushed deep into the body. The legs broke and the skin of the chest stretched and fused between them in a kind of sheet. Soon what had once looked human looked more like a flesh-colored bat.

  And then the creature, groaning, no longer human, began to crawl. A moment later, it tested its wings.

  * * *

  The screaming brought some of the other prisoners over to the hole. Henry watched them peer in, his hand near the button to call the guards. One of the men had his friends hold his arms and then he leaned out over the hole and looked down from a different vantage.

  And then suddenly something strange happened. An odd batlike creature flashed up out of the hole and wrapped itself around the man’s head. The men holding him let go in surprise and he fell into the hole, and everyone who had been close began running back and away, scattering all through the circle and moving toward the cells. Some were even, he could see on another of the screens, up against the large door leading out to the ring in which Henry and the guards were, screaming, pounding against the door, begging to get out.

  What the hell is going on? wondered Henry. He summoned the guards and kept watching, zooming in close on the hole. What had it been? How had it gotten in? He kept the camera focused on the hole.

  When the guards arrived at their station, he sounded the alarm for the prisoners to return to their cells. He let his eyes flick around to the other monitors. Some were already there; the others, though, made no move to do so. The number of prisoners pounding on the door leading out had increased. They weren’t moving.

  His earpiece crackled. “All assembled, sir,” the leader of the guards said. “Open the door.”

  “Just a moment,” said Henry, his attention back on the hole. He stared at it perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps slightly longer.

  “This isn’t going to be another of those false alarms, is it?” the leader of the guards asked.

  “No,” said Henry, half distracted. “I just have to figure out a way to get them away from the door.”

  “How many of them are there?” asked the leader. “We can take control of the situation, I bet.”

  “Kill them, you mean?” asked Henry.

  “We don’t have to kill all of them,” said the guard. “We can stun some of them.”

  Henry opened his mouth to reply, and then stopped. Something was happening on the monitor. Something was stirring in the hole.

  38

  This time when it came, it took Ensign Haley’s breath away. She hesitated, swaying for a moment, and then slipped from her chair and passed out.

  She was standing with a woman dressed all in white, who it took her a moment to recognize as her mother. She was younger than she remembered her, and not ill, but there was no doubt about it: she was her mother. She had the same way of tilting her head when she asked a question and the way she moved and rubbed her hands, too, was just like how her mother had done it. No, it was her mother. There was no reason to doubt it.

  Except that she was younger.

  And not ill.

  But surely there was a way to explain that. She was thinking of ways to explain it, thinking of explanations, when her mother asked, “Would you like to see my garden?”

  “I’d be delighted,” she said.

  And she was. She imagined her mother walking her through rows of vegetables, or walking her through flower beds humming with bees. They would walk and talk just as they had before her mother had gotten sick. But no, wait, her mother wasn’t sick now: she must have recovered. That was the explanation. That must be it.

  But there were no flowers. There were no vegetables. Instead her mother took her around the corner and she saw, there, sprouting up from the earth a two-pronged thing that looked like long horns twisting around one another. It was gigantic, filling the whole plot of the garden and stretching high into the sky. That wasn’t a garden, was it? But her mother was guiding her to the thing and touching it, talking to her about how she grew it, how she cared for it. And then she simply stepped inside the thing and brought her daughter along with her. There she was, touching everything, pointing to each cell and bit of it, feeling her way around and through it.

  “Because, you see,” said her mother, “the reason I’m telling you this is so that you can be an even better gardener than me.”

  “Better than you?” she said.

  Her mother nodded. “When you grow it, when you have your turn, it will be even better.”

  * * *

  When she woke up she was not on the floor but at her desk having scrawled into it her pad pages and pages of notes. They had all gone, she knew, to Grottor. But what would he do with them?

  She tried to go back and look at old scrawls from earlier, to try to understand what was happening to her, what lesson she was supposed to learn, but they were no longer on the machine. They had been removed. Had she removed them? She didn’t remember. Maybe she had, but why would she? Grottor, then? Yes, maybe. But she trusted Grottor. Was she right to? Perhaps Grottor had taken the information from her, removed it and made it his own, and had thought he’d taken it away from her as well.

  But she had it all inside, had it all in her head. She could feel it: it was part of her now.

  Maybe she would go back to her room and write it down again, write it for herself this time, so that when the time came she could decide what to do with it. She would write it down and send it to friends, people she could trust.

  No, Grottor would not be allowed to keep the information to himself. Anybody who wanted to be a gardener was welcome to it.

  * * *

  “I’ll be there in a few days,” the gray man insisted. “There’s no use arguing about it. We need her.”

  “But she’s good at her job,” said Grottor. “She’s ambitious and smart and now that she’s given you what you wanted, she deserves to be left alone.”

  The gray man shook his head. “There’s al
ways more that we want,” he said. “And I think she has more to give. I think there’s more hidden inside of her than meets the eye. I need to crack her head open in person and get at it. If I’m right, she now carries the key to the next stage of the project.”

  “But you can’t—”

  “I can and will,” said the gray man.

  39

  She was going over the figures, looking at the other machines, trying to make sense of all the data and how it related, when she heard something. A kind of flapping. At first she ignored it, then something struck her door and she thought of the guard who had beaten his own head apart. Maybe he was not dead yet after all. Maybe he was trying to get up.

  She stood slowly and made her way to the slot, even though it was not cut in such a way as to allow her to see the bottom of the door. But something was happening there; she could hear something, a crackling sound, like the sounds that logs make when they pop and crack in the fire. Not that she had ever seen them—wood was too valuable to waste on a fire—but she had watched the vids when she was a kid.

  But that didn’t make sense. Who would start a fire here? And if there was one she’d smell it and see the smoke. And if not that, what could it be?

  She knelt down and pressed her ear to the door. She could still hear sounds, but not much more clearly. It didn’t help any. She stood up again, tried again to look out, still saw nothing.

  The noises continued for a while, and then stopped. She still waited, wondering what to do. And then a different noise started, the sound of movement, something sliding up the door. Yes, it must be the guard, she thought. He must be still alive after all. He must be standing up now.

  She backed up a little, just to be careful. Would he be violent like he’d been before? Had the signal faded enough that he might have escaped whatever was troubling him?

  His head rose to where she could see it in the slot and she caught her breath. His face was streaked with blood but something else had changed about it, too: the jaw was loose in a way it shouldn’t have been. It was hanging wrong. The head was oddly lumpy, perhaps where the skull had been broken, and the eyes had slipped farther in than they had been before.