Twig

by wildbow

  It hardly mattered.

  “If you really want to hurt Shipman, I can tell you how,” I told her.

  There was no response, no recognition. She moved one hand to grab me by the ankle, then swung me back over her shoulder. I realized where I was, fumbled for my knife, and didn’t find it. She changed the angle she held me, and I realized what she was doing.

  This is the part where she swings me into the ground and dashes my brains out.

  That’s kind of fitting.

  It was eerie, the quiet that came over my thoughts, even as my body was caught in the grips of almost pissing itself, hand scrabbling for a knife that I cognitively knew was out of reach, my heart pounding, breath catching in my throat in preparation to say something, or maybe to scream one last time.

  For the first time in a very long time, my thoughts weren’t noisy or conflicted or stumbling over each other in a constant interweaving. My brain was a spot of tranquility in a setting of fire, meat, blood, and chaos. That world moved in slow motion.

  I wanted to say something witty, but the words caught in my throat, because I didn’t have enough time, because I knew the others would take my words for more than they were supposed to be.

  Instead, I let out a long sigh, and I felt my body find the stillness, or something approximating it. I stopped searching for the knife. My arms dangled.

  I heard the crash.

  I felt her tense, moving me, swinging me up and forward.

  She released her grip. In the end, I wound up doing a backflip or two before cracking my head on the floor.

  I saw her move, her hands clutched into claws, back arching. Foam was bubbling up where the liquid had landed.

  She was covered in burns, and burns hurt. Whatever Lillian had provided for Mary to throw, it was one of those things that stung like nothing else when poured over an injury.

  I knew, because Lillian had used those ones on me when I’d spent the day annoying her and happened to get hurt in the field.

  It had taken me a few times to catch on.

  I lay there on the ground, belly up, staring at Sub Rosa.

  “Move, you imbecile!” Gordon bellowed.

  “Run!” Mary shrieked.

  Oh. Yeah.

  With the passing of that endless quiet, I felt almost sick to my stomach. My body felt disconnected, as if I were at the controls of some monstrosity of flesh and metal and something had jarred me, leading me to forget which lever moved which extremity.

  I figured out the controls. I flipped myself over, crawled, then ran away, while Sub Rosa was still standing there, twisting in place, as if there was some specific configuration of her body that she could discover that would make all the pain stop.

  We just keep making her madder.

  Gordon and Helen had opened up the ceiling. Gladys, Helen, Jamie and the other scientists were already up, and Lillian was in the process of climbing up Gorger’s arm.

  It struck me that the ceiling escape route wasn’t an escape route at all. It wasn’t a ventilation tube or anything of the sort.

  No. That would be one of the channels that gas, water, or other sterilization measures would use to cleanse an area of any ongoing problems.

  Sub Rosa knew the security measures. She knew how to disable them, and it stood to reason she knew how to enable them. I’d seen glimmers of residual intelligence in her. However much damage those bullets had or hadn’t done, I didn’t like the gamble we were making here.

  I hope Gorger can handle this, I thought.

  Except Gorger is one of those measures.

  Mary made her way up. Gordon, ever the gentleman, averted his gaze as her skirt brushed past his head.

  I still had to scale Gorger’s arm to reach the ceiling. “Go!” I called up to him. “Help me up when you’re up!”

  He obeyed. The moment Mary was clear, he hauled himself up.

  Sub Rosa chased me, though it was hard to tell. With the fire dying, the world around me was rendered in black and slices of a grey that was best described as almost-black.

  Funny thing, when being chased, when one had to run toward the threat. Much as Gordon had, I had to step on Gorger’s body to get up to his shoulder and arm, though I was a touch graceless in the process, dropping to all fours to find a surer grip.

  Sub Rosa drew nearer. A few feet away, reaching around the arm for me—

  Gorger dropped his arm, swinging clumsily at her. I nearly lost my balance, grabbed at his thumb, and when I felt myself nearly falling, all the same, I stuck a foot out, planting it on Sub Rosa’s face.

  It made for a terrifying moment.

  What drove me to move, the thing that set every nerve to firing well before Sub Rosa lashed out or before Gorger started raising me up toward the section of ceiling where the stone tile had been pulled free, was a horrible, core-of-my-being fear of that alluring quiet I had experienced. I felt that uneasy sickness accompany my movements as I made my way up.

  I found Gordon’s reaching hand, slapped my wrist into it, and gripped his wrist. With his help from above and Gorger’s from below, I found my way into the shaft.

  Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Sub Rosa backing off.

  I saw her point.

  “You’re kidding me,” the convict leader said.

  Another point, a sharp gesture, pointing.

  Oh.

  They were her measure against Gorger.

  I saw the convicts approach Gorger, spikes held out, jabbing, their movements uncertain.

  I saw Sub Rosa turn, lurching down the other direction, to the far end of the hall.

  We needed to get as much distance as possible from them before that measure worked.

  “Sy. Are you okay?” Jamie called back.

  “Head hurts. Tailbone hurts. Body hurts. I legitimately thought I’d die,” I said.

  “You and us both, Sly,” Gordon said.

  I thought of Mary. Of how despondent she’d been. She needed a win. “Mary saved me there, I think. Or Lillian did. Or both.”

  There was only silence.

  “For the record, Gordon, you’ve officially lost the right to call me out on mistakes and bad calls.”

  “We needed to save Gladys.”

  “Right, because we’ve never had to deal with acceptable losses before.”

  “Who are you?” Gladys Shipman asked. “I know that girl interviewed me before, but none of this- What was all that? What acceptable losses have you dealt with before?”

  The channel was narrow, only about two and a half feet by two and a half feet. Two of the others further up had some light, and it reflected off of moisture that clung to the walls and floor, giving me some illumination.

  Of course, all I had to look at was Gordon’s butt.

  I really hoped that Sub Rosa didn’t manage to activate the sterilization protocol we were presently navigating. I didn’t want the last thing I saw before I died a fiery or drowning death to be Gordon’s butt.

  Mary’s butt? Maybe.

  Lillian’s butt? Now that would be my pick. I imagined Lillian would hate it if she died knowing I was staring at her butt.

  I felt giddy after my near slip from death, and the musings on butts of all things made me giggle a little.

  “Gladys,” Gordon said. “You said you knew her?”

  “Yes. Anyone who’s been down here for twelve or so years knows her.”

  “How old are you?” Lillian asked.

  “Sixteen.”

  “Your uncle had you down here as a kid?” Helen asked.

  “Yeah. I heard the stories.”

  “Who is she?” I asked, impatient.

  “She’s the woman who built the Bowels,” Gladys said. “She made the initial decisions on how to design Gorger, though she didn’t do the actual work. Which is how she operated, really. Or so I heard.”

  “Not useful,” I said. “Clarify, explain.”

  “I am,” Gladys said, her voice sharp.

  I was glad I didn’t have a vi
ew of her butt.

  “She made this place, she designed the security, she designed Gorger,” Gordon said, voice calm, as if trying to guide by example. “And when it all came down to it, she became an experiment? That’s dedicated.”

  “It’s… no,” Gladys said.

  We stopped, and I managed to avoid headbutting Gordon.

  “No,” Gladys said. “She didn’t make this place. She oversaw it all. The deep excavation of the shaft and individual labs, she decided the protocols for security and what Gorger needed to be, and she decided who got to work in the Bowels. She was the overseer more than anything.”

  “But?” Jamie asked.

  I snickered to myself.

  “Ignore him,” Jamie said. “What happened?”

  “It’s a long story,” Gladys said. “I only heard bits and pieces. I remember seeing her as a kid. I’ve seen pictures that are mounted in the stairways at Claret Hall. She was a tyrant. She demanded security protocols that nobody could follow, and canceled working projects when those protocols weren’t followed. Everyone hated her, and it got… it got bad. A lot of things that are wrong with Radham Academy today, they can be traced back to her.”

  Helen managed to open the grate. Easier from here than there, apparently. Light flooded the shaft from the lit hallway below.

  Helen dropped down. We began to edge forward, each of us dropping down, one by one. The adults would be able to catch the rest of us.

  It was painfully slow, and I didn’t know what was going on with Gorger and the woman that had decided how he would work.

  When I finally dropped down, Gladys was still explaining, “I didn’t put the pieces together until I saw her. I knew she died down here… not so long ago. More and more, as time went on, she became an administrator. But she was always this horrible tyrant. Things have been better since, less stringent, workable.”

  According to your uncle, I thought. It was a biased, one-sided story, and I didn’t like Gladys enough to take her side.

  Still, I kept my mouth shut for Gordon’s sake.

  “She died, and my uncle always said these cryptic things after…”

  “He kept her alive,” Jamie said.

  “Yes,” Gladys said.

  “He kept her alive, eyes open, mouth clamped shut, trapped, with her brain mostly in working order,” I elaborated.

  I saw the woman who’d worked with Gladys raise her hands to her mouth.

  “Yes,” Gladys said, and it was a testament to her humanity that she sounded as upset as she did. Her fingers clutched at her lab coat, right over her heart.

  Gordon reached out to take her hands, reassuring.

  I was right! I cheered in my head. Go, Gordon!

  “Look,” Lillian said, pointing.

  Ever the killjoy.

  Gorger’s back. He was retreating.

  “We need to go,” Gordon said.

  There was no disagreement.

  But, being the last one down, furthest back from the direction we wanted to go, I also happened to have the best view of the group and our surroundings.

  On Gordon’s back was a bug.

  Looking down on me, I saw two. Akin to a honeybee, but black from head to hind-end.

  “Bugs,” I said, almost absently.

  I saw Gladys turn, her eyes widening.

  At the vent above us, more swarmed.

  A scuffling sound echoed. We were being followed.

  The scuffling became a snuffling, a snort, a grunt, and then a nails-on-blackboard scrape of something against stone.

  I saw one of the other scientists in our group blanch.

  She’s letting everything out, now.

  How fitting, that the woman who argued so fiercely for better security down here was the one exploiting it all.

  We didn’t dare shout, for fear of agitating the swarm or luring something after us.

  Silently, collectively, we ran.

  Previous Next

  Lips Sealed 3.7

  Reaching the main shaft of the Academy’s dungeon-laboratories did remarkably little to quiet the creeping feeling of claustrophobia, if that was even the right word.

  Before, the Bowels had been a deep, complicated hole, sealed tight, that just so happened to have hostile enemies in it. I could process it as I would with any other place in Radham. There were always dangers. Sometimes less, sometimes more, and sure, a nine foot tall, undying killing machine with a deep understanding of how this place functioned was more, but it wasn’t too far from business as usual.

  We immediately headed up, winding our way around the interior of the cylindrical shaft. We had people of different sizes and ages, some old, and some, mainly us were young.

  Short legs sucked. I couldn’t wait until I grew.

  The madness that spilled out of the corridor we’d left a few minutes ago was why I felt claustrophobic now. The surroundings were actively hostile, and they were hostile in a way I couldn’t grasp yet. It was already dark there, where Mary had destroyed the lightbulb, but the darkness now came alive. The dark bodies of large bugs spread out to nearby stairs, railing, and wall, and they were soon followed by small humanoid figures.

  The humanoid things were sleek and black, like eels, gaunt, the things crawled on the walls. Where they touched a surface, earthworm-like tendrils snapped out, each tendril turning regularly at sharp right angles, never overlapping or coming too close to one another. The walls beneath their hands and feet became maze-like patterns, snapping out into existence in a half-second, then disappearing just as fast as they moved forward.

  I’d seen something like that in some sea creature.

  Their eyes were as dark as their skin. They snorted and snuffled, and they scampered along the walls with a surprising speed, more visible from the way the light caught on the tendrils than for their actual bodies.

  I saw some pause and crane their heads around almost one hundred and eighty degrees to look back and up at us, as we continued to make our way upward. Three of them immediately started moving directly up.

  We were making our way up the spiral staircase, and by going straight up, they were able to reach the section of stairs we had yet to reach, further ahead of us.

  “Who made those!?” Gordon asked.

  “We did,” one of the scientists with us said. He had an accent. German, possibly, or Dutch. Jamie would know, if I were to interrupt and ask.

  “Explain! In brief!” Gordon said.

  “They’re weapons!”

  Great.

  “Less brief!”

  “The tendrils are supposed to maximize surface area. They saw into flesh on contact and on leaving, and they apply a contact poison. It’s injected through the injury, and it breaks down the fat in the hypodermis. It’s meant for night raids, Phobos and Deimos approach.”

  “Lillian,” Gordon said. “Translate.”

  “Cuts skin into—um, into those patterns you see them making on the wall. Breaks down the part under the skin, enough to make it slough off?”

  “Yes,” the scientist said.

  “Skin comes off in strips and squares?” Lillian said.

  “Yes.”

  The things had reached the stairs above us. As they climbed on the underside and railing, the tendrils snapped around, forming a weird, geometric, spiderweb-like connection between the individual pieces of the railing, before they hauled themselves over.

  Our forward progress slowed. They were waiting for us, two of them climbing up the wall so they would be above us, the other standing on the stairs, tendrils wrapped around the railing.

  “I can’t,” Lillian said. “I can’t, I can’t.”

  Mary seized her hand.

  “The projects are down here. They’re not done,” I said. “Why? Why haven’t you been able to finish these little bastards and give them to the academy?”

  “The Academy—”

  “No,” I cut him off. “No dilly-dallying, no shifting blame, no ego. What’s wrong with your work? Be straight, b
e fast, or we might die.”

  The doctor huffed. “Control. They go to the battlefield in boxes, yes? We use pheromone, drive them away, they run, far, to enemy camp. After time, or full belly, pheromone smell good, draws them back in. Straight to cage. Out, wait, back in. Every night, until the enemy breaks.”

  “But?”

  “But too unpredictable, Academy says. Do not move out in straight lines. The weapon is not devastating enough to be worth using without ability to aim.”

  The cloud of bugs below had stopped expanding, but they were now buzzing around in the darkness of the shaft, impossible to catch unless the light just happened to fall behind them in the right way. I felt one land on me, and decided on the usual approach for bees. Leave it alone and hope.

  The small black creatures below us were crawling more aimlessly, grabbing and snapping for bugs. Their gums were black, but their teeth and tongues weren’t. The teeth weren’t white, though, but gnarled nubs, eroded, ill-cared for. It made the stark pinkness of their tongues all the more alarming.

  Above us, one of the creatures stuck out its tongue. The member moved just like the tendrils did, snapping out, all right angles, without seeming rhyme or reason, clinging to a surface. In this case, the surface was the creature’s face.

  Those same tendrils would snap out all maze-like and unpredictable over their victim’s skin, they would cut, break down the exterior layer, and then recede, sawing in again. Shortly after, their skin would fall off in pretty patterns.

  “Got any of the stuff? Pheromones?” Gordon asked.

  “No. It’s not like what you describe.”

  The cloud below was growing thicker, drawing closer, and I was pretty sure some of the little bastards below us had realized we were above them.

  The ones that had crawled onto the wall above us were inching closer, tentative. Still, every little movement of their hands or feet prompted the tendrils to snap out and cling to the side of the wall.

  “How. Do. You. Kill. Them?” Gordon asked.

  “Fire.”

  “We used all the fire.”

  “Then, we don’t kill, we disable. We… if we can get to room with something we might rub on skin, affect taste, smell…”

  Mary gave Lillian a bit of a push. It seemed to get Lillian moving where she’d been shutting down.