by Peter Clines
He pulled open the fourth-floor door and held it for her. The guard in the hallway directed them a few doors down to the pathology lab. Connolly was sitting in front of a microscope attached to a battered laptop computer. She glanced up as they entered, then back at the screen, as if she was worried what she’d been looking at would vanish. Her face was a mix of emotions.
“This had best be important, doctor,” Stealth said. “We do not have much time.”
“It’s important,” said Connolly. She waved them over to the counter and tapped a few keys on the laptop. She turned it so St. George and Stealth could see better.
On the screen St. George saw a trio of delicate shapes. They looked like silver spiderwebs, or maybe simple snowflakes, set against a white background. Each arm or branch looked like it was made of short segments. They drifted in the image, like underwater plants. One of the shapes shifted and St. George realized the arms extended out in several directions, like a Christmas tree ornament.
“Are they some kind of bacteria or something?” asked St. George. “Is it the ex-virus?”
Connolly shook her head. “They’re macromolecular complexes. Those arms are nanotubes, like flagella, but they’re all composed of different chemical compounds. The center mass is a mix of proteins and DNA, like you’d find in a virus. This whole structure’s approximately forty microns across.”
St. George blinked a few times and his mouth twisted up. “None of that means anything to me.”
“They’re nanites,” she said.
“A what?”
“A piece of nanotechnology,” Stealth said. “Machinery built or grown on a cellular level. Where did you find them?”
“They came from Madelyn.”
St. George looked up from the screen. “What?”
“Yesterday morning I decided to do a straight visual inspection of her blood at a higher magnification. Since the ex-virus mimics white blood cells, I thought it might be a way to spot a possible variation. I know it’s not supposed to mutate, but it was the only thing I could think of. That’s when I realized none of her blood cells were actually blood cells.”
She tapped her keyboard and a new image came up. The nanite webs had rolled their arms into coils and wrapped themselves into double-layered discs that were thicker at the edges. “These are from another one of her blood samples.”
Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “Their form now resembles erythrocytes. You are certain they are the same structures?”
Connolly nodded. “That’s why I didn’t notice them before. They were shaped like red blood cells and acting like them.” She hit a key and called up another picture. In this one dozens of webs were stretched out long and thin. The arms were gathered in parallel bundles. “These are from a tissue sample we took. Hundreds of them linked together to form bone muscle fibers.”
The doctor cycled the pictures back to the extended spiderweb and took in a controlled breath. for sofA c“These things reshape themselves to mimic different cells, depending on where in the body they are. Blood cells, muscle cells, skin cells. They can even work together to imitate nerve cells.” She paused for a moment. “Do you have any idea what that means? An artificial neuron? That’s past Nobel Prize, that’s just … It’s impossible.”
“Clearly it is not,” said Stealth.
St. George tipped his head at the microscope image. “So these are in Maddy? They have something to do with her … condition?”
“They’re not in her, George,” Connolly said. “It’s all she is.”
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean …” The doctor took a breath. “Okay, I’m just guessing here because this is all way, way out of my league, and at this point I haven’t slept in two days.” She looked at Stealth. “You super-genius types can do what you want with this. Maybe you’ll come up with another way to interpret all the data.”
She took another slow breath and collected her thoughts.
“I think Emil Sorensen invented something amazing,” Connolly said. “He figured out how to biochemically engineer the dream nanite sci-fi writers have been talking about since the seventies. Almost a self-guided, synthetic stem cell, if you will. And, for some reason, he used them on his daughter. Maybe she had some injury or a disease or something. I don’t know her history well enough to guess what happened. But they ended up in her body, and they started multiplying and fixing things. Maddy got older, became athletic, and they supported and enhanced her whole system. If anything went wrong—muscle tears, injuries, whatever—the nanites would zoom in, multiply, and replace it until her own systems could catch up.”
“And then she died,” said St. George.
The doctor nodded. “And then she died. And they tried to fix it.”
They looked at the spiderweb on the screen.
“From what you and the captain have told me,” continued Connolly, “she was probably mangled, missing a lot of tissue mass. So the nanites did what they’re supposed to do. They replaced the damaged and missing sections. And they kept replicating and replacing until they made her whole again. But the body was decaying, maybe getting eaten by scavengers. It was an uphill battle, and by the time it was done … there wasn’t much left of the actual body.
“Plus they weren’t designed to do the job they were trying to do. Not something on this scale, anyway. So there were gaps. They built memories that were hardwired instead of flexible. They replicated a cardiopulmonary system, but it doesn’t work. And it doesn’t need to.
“This is also why she sleeps. After watching them for a while, I can see a regular pattern where the nanites expend all their electrochemical energy and then become dormant until a sufficient gradient rebuilds. As they start to shut down she gets tired, and then when they start back up they reset themselves.”
“And she forgets the previous day,” said Stealth.
St. George thought of the smiling girl he’d left a few hours ago. The Corpse Girl. “So you’re saying Madelyn’s … wh remember falling asleep. ? togetherat?”
“Maddy Sorensen isn’t real,” s for someone t
MADELYN’S BICYCLE SKIDDED to a stop and she double-checked the address. Hector had run a piece of duct tape down the arm of her jacket and written out the street number with a fat Sharpie marker. “Don’t want you getting halfway there and forgettin’ where you’re going,” he’d said. He’d also given her a few map pages from something called a Thomas Guide that lined up to show her the route out of Hollywood and into the Valley.
It hadn’t been hard to convince him to help her. Despite her mom’s constant warnings, Madelyn was pretty sure not everyone in Los Angeles with a tattoo would slit your throat if you asked a question or flashed your headlights to remind them theirs were off. Hector de la Vega was gruff, and he stared at her boobs just a little too long for her liking, but he got the urgency of the mission a little more than St. George did. Hector had a cross on each arm, and the numbers of a Bible verse on his collarbone. She wondered if he was religious and had a better idea of what the demon represented.
By the same token, she was also pretty sure Hector wouldn’t be too broken up if she never came back. She’d seen the big man recoil when his fingers brushed the back of her hand. Nobody liked the feel of dead flesh, and he’d been one of the ones giving her looks at the big meeting.
Getting out of the Mount hadn’t been half as hard as she thought it’d be. It reminded her of a line from an old Houdini movie her mom loved—had loved. Nobody made safes to keep people from breaking out of them. She’d scaled the Wall while the guards were facing the other way and slipped down into the crowd of exes below. It’d been creepy as hell, being surrounded by them, but it wasn’t any worse than a school hallway between classes. Hundreds of people around you but not one of them seeing you while they moved. They jostled her, but none of them reacted to her.
Stepping past the seals took a little more work. She’d stood on the sidewalk with the tips of her sneakers against the inv
isible line for almost five minutes, staring at the circular symbol ahead and to the right. Inside the Wall it was easy to tell herself she was safe, but out here, with chunks of meat and pale limbs scattered across the ward, she’d found herself wondering what it would feel remember falling asleep about of picture like to catch fire and explode.
It was just like a high dive, she’d told herself. Just like being on the board. A hundred things could go wrong, but none of them really would. She could do it. Her team was counting on her to do it.
“I’m the Corpse Girl,” she told the exes around her. “It can’t see me. It can’t touch me.”
She closed her eyes and took three quick steps. There’d been a brief moment of panic, the knowledge she couldn’t go back. She squeezed her hands into fists, ready to fight however she could.
Nothing happened. An ex bumped against her and wandered past, its teeth clicking away. Another one tripped over the curb in front of her and sprawled on the sidewalk.
She’d found a bike with a rattling chain a block and a half from the Big Wall. Most of the bike’s owner was a few feet away, but she’d decided to skip the helmet. It took her an hour to get to the address.
Denny Avenue looked like a pleasant place. Yeah, there were a couple of dead bodies and a burned-out pickup truck, but the houses were nice and there were lots of trees. Even the exes shuffling in the street looked a little cleaner.
Hector’s grandfather lived in a cottage behind the main house. She followed the driveway around the building and found a garage and a tall wooden fence with a matching gate. There was a mailbox on the fence with the street number on it. She checked the address on her arm again and knocked the bike’s kickstand down.
Something thudded against the far side of the fence. It made Madelyn jump back from the gate, but she didn’t flinch at the second or third sound. She was getting into the whole “invisible to exes” thing. She stepped forward and flipped the latch.
An ex staggered out of the gate. It stumbled past her without a look and crashed into the parked bicycle. The bike fell over, but the ex managed to stay on its feet.
It had been an older man, an inch or two shorter than Madelyn. The bristly hair was the same gray as its skin. It was dried out and leathery, but still weighed twice as much as she did.
The dead thing had the same jaw and cheekbones as Hector. She decided right then to say she hadn’t seen any sign of the old man. She wouldn’t want to know her family was still walking around.
She left the ex standing in the driveway and walked through the gate. There was a flowerbed that had grown out into the small yard. A few cobblestones in the grass led up to the big wooden door. It swung open when she pushed on it.
She was looking for a wooden box three feet long and eight or nine inches square. It was padlocked shut. Hector thought it might have a little plaque on the lid, but he couldn’t remember for sure.
The cottage was small, and there weren’t too many places to hide something that size. Madelyn looked in both closets, under the bed, then went through each drawer of the dresser. She checked under the couch and behind the washer and dryer.
There was a loft above the washer, but it was just filled with dusty paperbacks. Hector’s grandfather had loved science fiction. She wondered how he’d felt when the dead started to walk.
The fridge was disgusting. The kitchen cabinets were jammed full of pots and pans of every size and a huge selection of dishes. She even looked in the dishwasher. Someone had run it before the end of the world. The remember falling asleep ? togetherglasses and silverware were still sparkling clean.
The cottage didn’t have a basement, which seemed weird to her. Growing up on the East Coast, almost everybody had a cellar. It just felt like the old man’s home was missing something important.
There wasn’t a real attic, either. She found a small hatch in the ceiling of the bedroom and got up into it with a footstool from the kitchen. Twenty minutes convinced her there was nothing but old clothes and Christmas decorations up there.
Madelyn checked her watches. She’d spent an hour biking into the Valley, and another hour searching the house so far. According to watch number two, sundown was in ninety-three minutes. And Max’s deadline was in four hours.
There was a small shed in the backyard, one of the ones that looked like a big Tupperware container, but it was nothing but garden tools and a lawn mower. She even tipped over a few bags of potting soil and fertilizer to make sure the box wasn’t hidden behind them. Nothing in the tight gap between the shed and the backyard fence, either.
Even though the garage was connected to the cottage, it didn’t have a connecting door. She tugged on the big door but it was locked. Or maybe the motor was holding it shut. She walked around the garage and found a side door opposite the cottage. It was also locked.
A quick trip back inside let her find the basket by the door. It had a very overdue parking ticket, some loose change, two key rings, and a small remote with a single button on it. Madelyn squeezed the remote a few times before she remembered the power had been off for a few years at this point.
Back outside she started testing the key ring against the door. Hector’s grandfather had shuffled down the driveway and found a friend. A tall ex with a plaid shirt and a limp. They’d bumped shoulders and were turning together in a creepy slow dance. They didn’t notice her or the sound of jingling keys.
And how is that, she wondered. There was a certain logic to them filtering her out, but shouldn’t they see and hear other things she had contact with? Were the exes seeing an empty suit of clothes walking around, or a set of keys floating in the air, or did the filter have range?
The first key she tried on the second ring fit the door. She glanced at her watches again. Fifteen minutes trying to get into the garage. If she didn’t find the box soon, it’d be dark by the time she got back to the Mount. She pushed the door open.
The garage was a lot like hers back home, an example of controlled chaos. A huge Lincoln filled most of the space. There was a trio of bikes parked—stacked, really—against the back wall. Metal shelves held some canned food, jars of nails and screws, a plastic toolbox, and a few more paperback books. It looked like Piers Anthony and Alan Dean Foster had been banished from the loft. An upright piano stood under a drop cloth and some empty flowerpots. An old painting—a guy with a mustache and a sash—hung on one wall next to a pair of rakes and a folding ladder.
Madelyn pulled everything off the piano and opened the lid. She pressed her hands against the Lincoln’s windows and looked in the backseat. She got down on all fours and looked under the car. It wasn’t until she climbed back to her feet that she bothered to look up.
Just like her own mom and dad, Hector’s grandfather had saved space by putting stuff up in the garage’s rafters. He’d even wrestled a sheet of plywood up there to use as a huge shelf. She could see suitcases, old boxes, and what looked like a big stuffed bear.
Stretched between two of the beams, right over the big door, was something wrapped in a black trash bag. It was about three feet long.
It took her a minute to get the ladder off the wall, and another two to get it in front of the Lincoln. As she was trying to set it down, one of the legs swung up and broke the Lincoln’s tail light. Nobody would ever know, but she still felt bad. She kicked out the ladder’s leg201D; asked St
“ARE YOU SURE this is the best way to go, sir?” asked Freedom.
“This is where Josh got away,” said St. George. He gestured at the railing, then nodded across the street to the blood-splattered SUV the prisoner had been shot against.
“That’s not quite what I meant.” The huge captain glanced out at the street. “There’ve been no sightings of Cairax from the south.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Max. He’d pushed up the sleeves of his suit and unbuttoned his shirt to display more of his tattoos. “Like I said, he’s all around the Mount. He saw Josh leave. He’ll see us leave.”
“How ca
n he be all around the Mount at the same time?” said one of the guards.
“Bilocation,” Max said. He shook out his hands while he talked, letting his fingers bounce and snap at the edges of his palm. “It’s not just for saints. A lot of the higher and lower entities can manifest that way.”
The guard’s lips twisted into a frown. “What’s that mean?”
“It means he can be all around the Mount at the same time.”
St. George shifted his hips again. He was used to carrying various pouches and pieces of gear on his belt, but the sword was something different. It swung like a lopsided pendulum and pulled at his waist. Even with his strength, it felt odd.
The weapon they’d settled on had come from one of the old prop houses. Ilya had found it in a barrel with two or three dozen others and—after Max’s halfhearted approval was given— remember falling asleep I was of picturespent an hour putting an edge on the safety-dulled blade. It looked like a classic knight’s sword, with a square crossbar for a guard and wire wrapped tight around the hilt. The pommel was a big wheel of metal with a large ruby in it, although St. George was pretty sure the gemstone was cut glass at best.
It looked like a real sword when he held it in a shaft of sunlight. It felt like a real sword. Hopefully that would be enough.
Stealth stood off to the side. Her cloak had settled around her, and she’d let her hood sink over her head. She said nothing as they made the final preparations.
Max finished his hand exercises and looked at the cloaked woman. “Look,” he said to her, “I know you’re not going to like this, but if something happens … well, don’t come after us. No matter what you hear or see, don’t come out.”
Stealth stiffened beneath her cloak. St. George was sure he was the only one who caught it. “Why not?” she asked.
“We’re either going to stop Cairax or not. If we do, you’ve got no reason to go out past the wards. If we don’t, well …” Max shrugged again. “The walls and wards will give everyone a small degree of protection. Not much, but use them as long as you can.”
