by Darcy Coates
“Sure, of course you do. But we can talk and not drip blood on the carpet at the same time, eh?” He winked at her, but Clare couldn’t muster the energy to laugh. She let Dorran help her up, though. He moved her back on the couch and wrapped the blanket around her. Peter jogged to one of the cupboards near the door and searched through its contents.
Dorran nestled himself at Clare’s side, one arm around her back, the other holding her hand in his. He stared at her shoulder, which oozed fresh blood.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
Dorran bent close so that only she could hear him. “Don’t apologise for being human. If you want to know the truth, I was close to doing the same.”
Peter reappeared beside them. He held a kit—plastic, modern, and larger than the one Dorran had kept in Winterbourne. He flipped open the lid and settled it onto the table, beside the pile of snack food.
“You’re a couple, right?” He pulled his chair closer. “That’s nice. It’s good to see… I guess you’d call it life. Sounds awfully miserable, though, right? As though it’s a surprise to see people being happy. I’m glad you are, though. D’you want to take care of this, big guy?”
Dorran mutely took the cloth from Peter and pressed it over the tear on Clare’s shoulder. She flinched but didn’t complain as he applied pressure.
Clare’s brain felt as though it had been put on ice. Thoughts were frozen there, painful but refusing to budge. She took a stuttering breath. “Is it going to get worse?”
“Hah. I have no idea.” Peter pulled his legs back under himself. “Right now, I’m really just taking each day as it comes. I’ve been trying to calculate how many people might have survived the stillness… that’s what they’re calling it, you know? The stillness. At first, I thought it was a stupid name. There’s nothing especially still about those hollows. I can’t stand going down to the lower levels because of how loud they are. But now I’m starting to think it’s actually kind of appropriate. The hollows aren’t still, but the humans are. Once, you could turn on the radio, turn on the TV, turn on your smartphone or laptop, and have instant contact with other people. Now, you’ve got to search for it. Hunt through the radio, looking for any kind of life you can find. I feel it here, in the city, especially. You used to have to fight for even ten minutes of peace. But now…”
Fresh lightning, painfully bright, spilt through the windows. Clare found she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the blinds. A horrible paranoia wormed through her. “We’re in the city.”
“Hm?” Peter lifted his eyebrows, following Clare’s eyes to the window, then looked back at her curiously.
“The… the thanites, there are going to be more of them in the city—” Why didn’t I think of this before? Why did I let us come here? Are they infecting us right now?
Her throat burned, and her eyes stung. She became convinced she could feel them, scratchy and rough, clinging to the mucous in her lungs.
Peter stared at the window. Clare wanted to scream at him. He’d pacified her before; she wanted him to do it again, to promise that, despite all the signs, they would be safe.
“They’re not active right now,” he said.
Clare fought the urge to hurl her water bottle at him. “What do you mean? Are they infecting us? Are they going to become active?”
Peter blinked rapidly, seeming to shake off some bad memory, and chuckled. “No, no, don’t panic. We’re fine. I’ve been living here for weeks, and I’m still human. See?” He held up his hands and wiggled his fingers, grinning broadly.
“But there are thanites here. You said they collected in cities. Is it a matter of time? Did you call us here so that we could die with you?” Clare leaned forward. She knew she sounded aggressive, but she couldn’t calm down. Dorran’s arm around her shoulders was normally comforting, but at that moment, it only made her frenzy more urgent. If she was being infected, then so was he. The image of his beautiful face, deformed and mutated, haunted her. She needed to expunge it. She needed Peter to tell her everything would be okay.
“Hey, hey, relax. I know how stressful this must be. And I can only imagine what you’ve been through already. But I swear, I wouldn’t have called anyone here if the city was toxic. You’re right—there are thanites everywhere. After the stillness event, they started to replicate themselves again. Like they were designed to. But they’re not hurting us right now, and they never will, if I have anything to do with it.”
Dorran stirred uneasily beside her. He was equally wary. Peter picked a candy bar out of the pile of food and tossed it to Clare. She caught it with her good hand.
“Eat that. Get some sugars into you, because you could probably really do with some right about now.” Peter’s smile was sad. “There isn’t much left to my story, but once you’ve heard it, you’ll probably understand everything a little better.”
Clare gave a short, stiff nod, encouraging him to go on. Peter pointedly stared at the bar she held, and she struggled to open it with shaking fingers. Dorran eased it out of her grip, tore off the top, and handed it back to her. He then reached for the first aid kit and examined the supplies while Peter resumed his tale.
“Okay. You know how the thanites were created. And you know that at one point during the development period, one of them escaped containment. Not one of the earliest models, but not the more recent ones, either, from what I can work out. Once outside, it populated itself without Ezra’s knowledge. Meanwhile, he was under immense pressure. The end of his grant was racing towards him, and he needed a working model. He’d been so paranoid about having his work stolen that he hadn’t breathed a word to anyone—not even the Aspect commissioners, or else they probably would have imposed more stringent safety measures. He’d confided some of it to me, but even I didn’t know the extent of his experiments. About three weeks before the end of his grant, he woke me in the middle of the night.”
The chocolate bar was too sweet. Clare’s stomach threatened to revolt as she chewed it, and she put it aside half eaten and picked up the water. Dorran splashed some antiseptic across the cuts, and she hissed. He murmured quietly as he dabbed the liquid, then he began wrapping a fresh bandage across it.
Peter watched from a distance, shifting his position. He looked uncomfortable. The memories were probably unpleasant for him. To be so close to the source of the stillness and be unable to stop it…
“Like I said before, I spent most of my nights here. Not because my own work was very high pressure, but, well…” He laughed, but it sounded pained. “Easier to stay here in rooms cleaned by janitors than travel home to my own poky apartment. I guess it saved my life. Most of our other co-workers were home that night. Ezra had been routinely sleeping at the tower for efficiency’s sake. He woke me around four in the morning and said he needed my help. He wanted a witness.”
Dorran tied off the bandages but kept his hand resting over Clare’s shoulder. She was grateful for the warmth.
“I guess I was excited for him.” Peter took a deep breath then let it out as a heavy sigh. “After how hard he’d worked, I was hoping his invention, whatever it was, would succeed. So I followed him up to the labs. At his request, Aspect had constructed several containment units. Airtight glass rooms where you could watch your experiments. Inside one of them was an older Korean woman. Wrinkled, wearing her best coat and hat, sitting on this white plastic chair patiently. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘My neighbour,’ he said.”
Peter chuckled, but the sound wasn’t cheerful. “He must have been violating a hundred ethics regulations. You need all sorts of permissions for human trials—but I guess Ezra didn’t have time. He needed proof of concept. And he was willing to cross a few lines to get there. He explained that his neighbour had a terminal lung cancer and had agreed to test the thanites. If they worked, they would repair the damage it had already created. ‘It’s very safe,’ he kept saying.”
Clare didn’t want to hear the rest of the story. She could see the direction it was taking, and the n
ightmare was too close and too painful to stand. But Peter’s eyes were turned to his feet, distant and tight as he unravelled his memories.
“He had to upload some code to activate the thanites. They might have been mostly biological, but they still had enough machine in them that they needed a command to switch on. Ezra explained what was happening as he worked. Thanites had been released into the room with the subject. They floated through the air, being inhaled and expelled with every breath, but ultimately dormant. When activated, they would seek out a host. Their biological nature meant they needed to find a hospitable environment to survive—specifically, a human. They could enter the body through any mucous membrane, such as the eyes, throat, and lungs. They would be nearly painless. Ezra would allow them to work for several hours and had a second code lined up to deactivate the thanites before his neighbour was allowed out of the room. Then we would run tests to see whether any repairs had been made, and if so, how much.”
A shot of light came through the slats, thunder rolling after it. In that second of brightness, everything in the room had an unnatural appearance; the chairs, the discarded jackets, even Peter took on an otherworldly glow.
“We watched and waited. For the first minute, nothing seemed to happen. The little old Korean lady kept sitting there, smiling patiently. Then—” His voice choked as he stood. He crossed to the window and leaned against the sill, staring through the slats at the sky. When he turned to face them, his grin was resolutely back in place, but strained. “Well, you can probably guess. And I’m sure you could do without the details. But it didn’t go well. As soon as she started screaming, Ezra put in the deactivation code. Only, it didn’t work.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Peter pushed one of the window’s slats up with his finger and peered down at the street. His face twitched, and he dropped the slat back into place. “At the time, Ezra didn’t know what had gone wrong. But looking back, I have a pretty good guess. The earlier model of his thanites—the broken ones—had populated everywhere by that time. Including the air in the isolation chamber. Ezra had been feeding carbon and compounds into the room to grow the machines, without realising he was essentially populating two versions, one which was already present in high numbers. The termination code worked exactly as it was intended, but only on the latest strain. It did nothing for the rogue version.”
The rain had settled into a steady drumming pattern. Lightning bursts were frequent but distant. The crackling thunder blurred underneath Peter’s voice.
“As you can imagine, Ezra was frantic. He’d thought his thanites were harmless. Instead, he’d had to watch his subject—his friend—die in one of the most unpleasant ways imaginable. I was beside myself. Ezra kept pacing, swiping a tissue over his face to mop up sweat. It took us a while to compose ourselves enough to face what we’d done. It was a little after six by that point. Our morning-bird colleagues would be arriving in an hour. Ezra asked me to help him hide the body. But before we could open the chamber doors, I got a phone call from my sister.”
Dorran spoke, his voice so low that it barely disturbed the room’s stillness. It was the first time he’d addressed Peter directly. “You were going to hide the body?”
Peter turned away from the window, blinking rapidly. “Well. It was complicated. No matter how many precautions you take, it’s impossible to ensure complete safety in any kind of human trial. People do occasionally expire in the name of science. They’re made aware of the risk before signing up, as Ezra’s neighbour would have been. I know it sounds callous, but the reality is you have to endure occasional death in the pursuit of something that might save countless more lives.”
Dorran was so still that he could have been a statue. “A woman was dead. Murdered. And you would have hidden it.”
Clare blinked. “He’s right. That… that’s so…”
“Oh, no, no!” Peter held up his hands, chuckling. “I’m sorry, you misunderstood me. I didn’t mean hide her body as in hide it. Not like in a shallow grave or anything. I’m not a criminal. We were going to cover the observation room’s windows, so that our co-workers wouldn’t have to see it while we waited for the authorities to arrive.”
Clare managed to smile. “Right. I guess I let my imagination run away on me.”
“No, that’s understandable.” Peter came back to his seat and stood behind it, hands braced on its back. “Ezra wanted me to help him hide it from our colleagues. Can you imagine coming into work and seeing a woman with tumour-like growths across her face and hair pouring out of her mouth? It’s enough to give anyone nightmares. But we didn’t even get that far. My sister called me. She lived a couple of hours away. She’d heard the earliest news reports on her radio while walking her dog and wanted to make sure I was okay. And I turned to Ezra and asked him, ‘Are you sure it’s contained to the lab?’”
It was surreal to hear about the world’s end told from the perspective of one of the people behind it, and how the news had reached him from such a mundane avenue. Clare frowned. “But if it started here, wouldn’t you have known about it? There must have been screaming—”
“Not in this city. Not at that point. From when Ezra put out the activation code, it would take nearly three hours for the thanites in our area to respond. Because they work in tandem to come online, areas with the thickest population were more likely to activate sooner. The isolation chamber came on nearly immediately since Ezra had been feeding in fuel to artificially increase the numbers. Outside needed more time to respond. I think Beijing fell first, with New York thirty minutes later. It escalated from there.
“Ezra and I were relatively safe inside the airlocked room, since the space only held a limited number of thanites, unlike the test chamber and the outside world. We called our families and then the news stations, trying to get the word out to take shelter inside airtight areas. Our phones died pretty quickly. Then it was just us, trapped in the room, listening to humanity dismantle itself thirteen floors below. We stayed there until the following morning, when our thirst was so severe that we were forced to leave. By that point, the activation cycle had finished, and any thanites that hadn’t found a host were either broken or dormant.”
Clare didn’t want to imagine it. Secluded in Winterbourne, she hadn’t learned about the mass extinction until weeks afterwards. She didn’t know if she could have coped with being aware of it as it happened—listening to it, perhaps even being able to watch it from a window—while unable to do anything to help.
“At first, the thanites only affected their brains.” Peter’s eyes were glassy. “It took a few days for the stem cells to start… growing things. The hollows on the first day looked much more like humans, though they lost their humanity pretty quickly. The brain stem was broken down and rapidly rebuilt, several times over. It removed most of the conscience, memories, personality. It also removed the need to sleep and the ability to feel pain. Well, no, that’s not really correct. I believe they feel it. They just don’t respond to it.”
Clare saw Marnie again, swollen, her bellowing cries full of misery. She wanted to cry for what her aunt had gone through. Thunder boomed, the closest yet. The lights flickered then went out. Suddenly, the room was so dark that Clare couldn’t even see Dorran at her side.
Peter swore under his breath. Clare heard him move between the desks. Items fell to the floor as he knocked them over, but he didn’t try to right them.
Uneasiness rose in her. “Peter? What happened?”
“Generator’s out.” He sounded like he was choking. A drawer slammed open. “Where the hell did I put it—”
More lightning flooded through the windows, turning the space into an over-saturated plate of whites and blacks. She caught a snapshot glimpse of Peter digging through the drawer. He no longer smiled.
Clare stood slowly. She had the awful sense that Peter’s panic wasn’t due simply to the sudden darkness. “What’s happening?”
“We’ll be okay. It’s going to be fine.” The wo
rds were comforting, but the voice wasn’t. Something heavy fell to the floor. Then Peter took a sharp breath. A moment later, a beam of light appeared as he turned on a flashlight.
Even without the harsh light, his face would have been colourless. He turned the beam towards Clare and Dorran, and they both squinted. Peter lowered the flashlight. “Come with me. Quickly. We need to restart the generator.”
“Oh…” Clare barely had a moment to catch her thoughts before Peter jogged for the door. She kept her grip on Dorran as they followed.
Peter forced open the door and waited just long enough for them to slip through in his wake before turning towards the stairs. “Sorry. We’re short on time. The generator’s out, which means the backup locks downstairs are no longer engaged.”
“The locks?” Clare stubbed her toe on the lowest stair and grimaced.
Peter turned his torch downwards to help her see. “Helexis Tower has bolts on its ground-floor windows that can be activated remotely. It was meant to be cutting-edge technology… but it was designed to automatically unlock if both the power and backup generator died. A failsafe in case of fire. No one expected we might have worse concerns than an inferno.”
Clare blinked, picturing the swarm of hollows gathered around the tower’s ground floor. Her voice turned croaky. “Can the hollows get in?”
“Technically? Yes.” Peter turned the corner and entered the second flight of stairs. In the erratic light, Clare caught sight of thick metal doors blocking what had to be the lab. “But they would need to lift at the same time as pulling to get them open. And they haven’t figured out how to yet. But… I’d really rather get the bolts re-engaged than trust in their stupidity.”
“This has happened before?”
Peter was breathless as he turned another corner. “Twice. Storms. Knocks out the generator.” He paused to suck in a deeper breath then continued racing upwards. “Doesn’t get any less stressful, though.”
