Kyle stared into his pale, furious eyes. He couldn’t force his tongue to move.
“I cannot allow that to happen, Kyle. You shall not publish any papers or otherwise further your research on these children.”
Kyle shook his head. “If you’re worried about that company or organization coming after them, we can get them protection. I cannot stress enough the value these children could have to science.”
“To hell with your science! I will not let you endanger them!”
Kyle saw a savageness in his eyes that frightened him. All he could do was tremble as Mark drew closer until they were face to face.
For a moment, Mark just glared into Kyle’s soul. Then, he began to speak with a menacing rhythm. “Because you’ve allowed us to stay here, I shall be kind enough to give you fair warning. You will not try to publish any of that research. You will not even think about taking any photographs. You will not be leaving this house unless accompanied by myself or Annika. You will not be calling anyone. And you will use common sense on matters I did not just explicitly mention. You will not do anything to raise suspicion regarding the existence or whereabouts of these children. And if you do,” he said, eyes flashing and voice growing vicious, “then I will kill you.”
Kyle’s skin went icy. He took a huge step back from the man, body rigid. “You’re threatening me? You’re telling me that I’m a hostage in my own house?”
“Listen to me, Kyle,” Mark said. “A lot of people have died over these children already. Protecting them and keeping them from NIDUS is our greatest concern. If you jeopardize their security in any way, then you are our enemy. If you prove yourself to be our enemy, then I will deal with you as such.” He turned from Kyle with a last venomous glance and made his way out of the study.
Gripped by dread, Kyle stood there with his book of notes hanging in his limp hand. He turned around and began to stare into the dancing tongues of flame in the fireplace. He let the surreality of the situation sink in. The children of the Wolf were the greatest scientific discovery he could have ever stumbled upon. They were a set of outliers that turned evolutionary understanding on its head. And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. That such a set of children could exist—let alone exist without the world knowing—was utterly unthinkable.
Where would his life go from here if he had the courage to make a break for it with those notes? Would he be showered with fame and fortune for bringing such a miracle to the scientific community’s attention? No, he thought with a sigh. If those siblings were truly as important as Mark seemed to think, then he would surely come face to face with the shadowy NIDUS if he made the attempt. The more he thought about the facts, the more inescapable that conclusion became. No matter how he tried to rationalize, no matter what hypothetical set of circumstances he set in motion, he saw no way that he was going to get out of that situation alive.
An arachnologist forbidden from publishing such a revelation, he realized with a dawning sadness, had no reason to even document it. He wasn’t even an arachnologist—he was a prisoner. With a pained sigh, he tossed his notebook into the fire, sending a shower of sparks flurrying up the chimney. The fire grew dark, but soon the luminous tendrils began to devour his notes, and with them his peace of mind.
What a fucking joke, Ralph thought. It was from one hospital to another, just like back in the old days. Outpatient this, outpatient that. He was used to the blood tests, but this was a different beast entirely. Ralph cringed. Beneath his hospital gown, the latest in an endless parade of medical pros and cons was rubbing a warm gel around the target of the examination.
“Alright, we’re ready to start,” the doctor said after the site had been adequately greased. “You’ll feel a mild discomfort in just a moment.”
“Is that what you call this? Mild?”
The doctor forced a polite laugh and pressed the transducer against Ralph’s body. Ralph bit down on his own teeth. His eyes darted to the screen overhead to try to distract him from the violation. The black and white and gray screen crawled with scan lines, growing darker and lighter in an evolving mosaic as the wand slid across him. “That hurts,” he said.
“Apologies.” The doctor lightened the pressure of the transducer and began to move it in an upward direction. “That better?”
“No.”
A few moments later, the doctor removed the instrument. “Alright, going to try another angle now. Need a break?”
“Just do your fucking job.” As the second pass began, he watched the screen. The doctor was sputtering some words of encouragement, or was talking to himself, or something; Ralph didn’t hear a thing he was saying. He was too distracted by the black shape that appeared in the center of the ultrasound image. Hovering between the curved gray edges, it was a flickering egg-shaped mass.
“What the hell?” he heard the doctor mutter.
The transducer shifted again, sending a harsh pain through Ralph’s lower half. But he didn’t care. His eyes were quaking, focusing on the abnormal growth reflected on the monitor. As the angle of the image shifted, his quiet malaise exploded into cacophony. First, a single bulbous segment that grew out of the egg-thing came into view. A series of hooks appeared, reaching out from the central mass and clinging about what he thought looked like a pair of tubes feeding into the aberration.
Ralph’s lips quivered, and as the shape unfolded before him his mind went blank. Blank, fragile. The last conscious thought he had was a silent prayer to God to allow this phantasm to be a dream, a hallucination, a divine prank.
And then he began to scream.
Somehow, he was standing again, and the doctor had fallen onto the floor. The wand clattered to the tile along with him, and though the image on the screen had changed, Ralph still saw the spider hovering in the center. He screamed again. In a mad rush he grabbed a jar of cotton balls from the counter before smashing it against the edge. Blood ran from the fresh cuts in his fingers and he let the broken shards fall away and clatter to the floor. They sounded like angels, singing—fallen angels, laughing, dying, shrieking. His body moved in an uncontrolled shudder. Ribbons of pain sliced through the tender flesh of his abdomen.
Within moments of his first strike, the walls of the doctor’s office seemed to swim, as though crawling with legions of the parasitic invader whose form now flashed before his eyes with each random thrust of the glass weapon. A pair of heavy hands tore his arms free of their frantic assault, and he flailed his limbs as the remnants of the broken jar shattered. He began to laugh, staring into the walls that crawled with nightmares and the reflection of the hungry thing within him. His thrashing grew in severity. He laughed and yelled and kicked his legs, knocking bottles and equipment from their places and sending shadows dancing across the floor. The shouting of the doctors became a chorus that rang off the living walls of his collapsing awareness.
And at the center of that shrinking universe, there was only the nightmare in the sonograph.
The first thing May noticed when beckoned into the small examination room was the shattered glass and cotton swabs that had been swept into an approximate pile in the corner of the floor. She swallowed hard. The sight was oddly symbolic of the state that she then found Ralph in. Reclining unconscious over the exam table, his lower stomach was covered in bloodied bandages. His glasses had fallen off his face and been left where they fell at the foot of the table. Even in unconsciousness, his teeth were bared in a grimace.
In the center of the room, the doctor sat upon a small stool. “Please have a seat,” he said, gesturing to a chair that had been pulled out from the corner.
Nervous, May sat and wiped her brow with a tissue. The second doctor in the room, the one who’d beckoned her inside, eased the door shut behind them and leaned against the wall. She glanced back and forth between Ralph and the pale doctor sitting across from her. “Is he alright?” she asked at last.
The doctor nodded, though he seemed uncertain. “He’s fine now. We sedated him and cle
aned his wounds. There’s mostly nothing serious considering what he was after.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
The cream-colored doctor in the chair cast an uneasy look to where the second doctor stood. The man shrugged, looking Ralph over. “We believe he was trying to castrate himself.”
“He what?”
“Everything was fine when we started the sonograph,” the man whose name tag read Bothe said. “And then . . . Wanna show her the image?”
The first doctor nodded and handed Bothe a glossy monochrome printout. He considered it for a moment before passing it into May’s waiting hands.
She gasped when she saw the thing in the image. A bulbous black shape was suspended in the field of view with eight stubby hook-like legs clinging to a pair of tubes, seeming to guide them into the center of the mass. “A spider,” she said to herself.
Bothe and the other man looked at one another. “I don’t even want to think about how that got there. I might’ve snapped myself if someone found something like that in me. This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
May squinted at the image in her hands. “Is it alive?”
“Not as far as we can tell,” Bothe said. He gave a throaty chuckle. “In all my years, I’ve never seen or even heard about anything like this. I don’t even really know where to begin trying to explain it. Does your husband suffer from arachnophobia?”
She ignored the question. “What do we do about this?”
“This is highly irregular,” Doctor Bothe said after a moment, “but given the circumstances, we are prepared to operate immediately to remove the, uhh, object you see here. All we need is your permission.”
She glanced up from the image. “Why would you need my permission?”
“I simply assumed you would have his medical power of attorney. Given his attempt at exorcising the thing himself, I think it’s rather clear he wants it removed.”
May drummed her fingernails against the gloss of the image and let her eyes drift back down to it. Somehow, the thing floating in the ultrasound seemed to be staring at her, though it had no eyes with which to stare. She knew that whatever the alien invader was, it was evil. “Fine. Take it out.”
Chapter 17
Slaughter
Silt found Kaj within the Vault, as he knew he would. He was standing there, yellow robe still torn and stained in blood. He had one leg up upon the octagonal base of the reflective column in the center of the chamber. His hood was peeled back, his forehead pressed against the metal. A curtain of dark, greasy hair fell against the folds of fabric.
The auxiliary lights overhead flickered, and the whirring of the deep machinery rumbled through the catwalk. And as the door hissed shut behind him, Silt cautiously descended the stairs to the grated floor. “Kaj. I must speak with you.”
Kaj did not turn from where he stood. “Have you come to bask in its vitality?”
“No. I’ve come to ask you. How did you know this plan would work?”
The other Vant’therax snickered. “Plan? To what are you referring?”
“Nemo. How did you know infesting his brain with Nothem would turn him into a Conduit?”
“It is not so complicated if you understand the considerable research into the Nothem. You have read it, have you not? Well, I cannot blame you. Not many have the patience for such dry academia. The answer is quite simple. In the absence of a Conduit, what do you have? A distributed network of fragments and memories, no more. And yet that network desires unity, continuity. And that’s why there is a failsafe hard-coded into their DNA; in the absence of a master Conduit, a plurality of cells in a single host mind will eventually reach a critical mass and trigger the spontaneous evolution of a slave Conduit.”
The words sat heavy in Silt’s ears. “Slave Conduit?”
“Oh, yes. That thing up there. It’s different from Dwyre and his predecessors. Because this time it is subservient to the network.” A rotten grin parted his lips. “And that means to us. No more than the tool it is meant to be.”
Silt’s heart sank. “A tool that exists out of necessity. A far cry from the other Helixweavers.”
Fury sharpened Kaj’s gaze. “Do not speak that word to me!”
The outburst echoed off the steel walls of the Vault and left a dull ringing behind. Silt shrugged in acquiescence. “Conduit, then.”
For a moment Kaj maintained his glare, and then he returned it to the reflective surface of the great pillar, as though examining his own hideous reflection. “How is he? Has he stabilized yet?”
“Depends how strictly you’d define the word. It seems whatever process turned him into a slave Conduit has greatly taxed his mind. When he’s lucid he speaks erratically. He repeats things Dwyre and Griffith have spoken verbatim. There has been little change since the second day.”
“As long as the network is stable, I do not care about his well-being.”
“Of course.”
Another grotesque smile crossed Kaj’s lips. “Do the rest of NIDUS have any idea?”
“I cannot hear them clearly, but they are definitely afraid of what we are doing. Concern seems split between this new Conduit and that video from the Warren home. Gothe had it pulled as soon as it hit the air, and I’ve heard vagueries of him regrouping Psi for another raid. The others seem hesitant to support him, especially until the dust from the video has settled. In any case, it is clear they will not allow us to continue this course unchallenged.” Silt allowed his eyes to wander along the angled walls of the Vault, across the odd machines and the corrugated hoses leading from the chemical tanks to the hanging infeeds ringing the top of the column. Beneath the rumbling, he could hear the faintest echo of the beating from within. “Kaj,” he said at last, “we do not need to do this. The Eleventh Project is nearly complete.”
A chuckle. “You’re sounding an awful lot like Dwyre, you know.”
“All that remains is for her to grow strong enough to breathe on her own. Once that is accomplished . . . ”
“If it is accomplished, we will all be dead by then. Do not pretend not to understand that.”
Silt licked his lips. He’d prepared for that answer. “Arachne has gone to the Web. That means at best you’ll be taking Nexara. And you know what that means, do you not?” Again Kaj looked up from his reflection, and Silt caught the hint of brewing malice in his eyes. “Even if we take Nexara, we are going to be waiting. For years, perhaps.”
“There are ways to advance her. The scientists will see to that.” He smirked and turned his gaze to the upper reaches of the metallic cylinder. He laid his hand upon its surface and closed his eyes with a deep sigh. “Do you ever wonder what he saw?”
The non sequitur put Silt at once on edge. “Him? Dwyre?”
“I’ve been thinking. Ever since he died. About how he’d always lock himself in here, alone with the King. About the visions he had.” An odd reverence had come to his voice. “All I ever got was the odd spark, afterimages. Strange thoughts, disembodied. How about you, Silt? Have you ever seen these visions that Dwyre claimed?”
The words chilled the pit of his stomach. “How could I have? I am no Chosen.”
Kaj barked a throaty cackle. “Chosen. Of course. Though I must wonder, was he truly as chosen as he believed?”
Silt narrowed his eyes. His fingernails cut into his palms. The magic automatically flowed to kill the nerves, resulting in only a numb tingle. “Surely you are not insinuating that the King does not exist?”
“Moron. I do not doubt the King. I doubt His messenger. The man suffered mental death once that we know of, from Griffith. In all likelihood, he suffered it a second time from the younger Repton before him. If Nemo’s state of mind is any indication, living through death must take a horrid toll. And if the man were mad, would that not explain much?”
“What is your point?”
Kaj turned from the holy cylinder and gave his head an aggravated shake as he pulled his cowl up again. “Do you not see? Our blood i
s the purest of all these abominations. Our diseased bodies are proof of that. Moreover, we were the first. The first exhumed from the King’s blood. That makes us the chosen ones.” He began to cross the room toward the entrance of the Vault. “Come, brother. It is time to pay our friend Nemo a visit. To put him to use.”
A dread began to drip down Silt’s throat, and a tingle licked its way up his back. “What are you going to do?”
Kaj smiled, a look of unadulterated insanity sparkling in his poisoned eyes. “It will not be long before NIDUS again moves against us, to claim our birthright. That is why we must seize it for ourselves.” His grin grew wider, somehow more terrifying. “It is at last time to cast off the shackles of NIDUS, and burn everything between us and the Coronation.”
Sweat poured down Nemo’s face. His arms, restrained against the cold machinery behind him, were racked by painful cramps. The muscles in his neck throbbed. Shards of ice tore through his brain and sent ghosts of memories swimming through his peripheral vision. Visions not only of memories, but of other lives. He saw the past as seen by Dwyre, as seen by Griffith, as seen by Repton. He was Talm, but so too was he the three. In him, all were nameless and broken. Flashes, alien thoughts. The neural network was buzzing, pulsating with too many thoughts and sights to carry. The other disciples of the King were still speaking and condemning the Vant’therax—condemning him—for the death of the Tanners. The Tanners! The part of him that was still Dwyre could only laugh in orgasmic release. He hadn’t done it himself, but at last the Tanners were fucking dead, the throat torn from one and the skull of the other smashed into sopping splinters on the ground! He could even peer through the memories of Kaj and Silt and Nal, and witness their deaths from as many angles as he pleased.
“You can hear it, can’t you?” a harsh voice asked from above him. Nemo lifted his strained eyes to the face of the False One, Kaj. He must have shadowed into the room when he wasn’t paying attention. “The others are worried. They are afraid. And they are angry. Listen to the soul of NIDUS, Nemo. What do you hear?”
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 19
