Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus

by Grant, Mira

  “We have too many experiments in progress, and too many people who’ve never dealt with a teardown, much less an actual relocation,” I said. “We stand our ground. If it looks like we’re losing, we reassess. But we both know that if we run, we’ll suffer just as many casualties as if we stand, and I don’t want to be the reason for that many graves. Understood?”

  “Understood,” said Tom. “I’ll see you on the Wall, if I don’t see you before.”

  “Honey, one day we’re all going to see each other on the Wall,” I said. “Get to your post.” And then I turned and walked away, a vial of volatile chemicals in my hand and a big black dog pacing at my side. What I was going to do next might be unforgivable in the annals of the world…but Clive had forced my hand, and I wasn’t sorry. Maybe that’s really what makes me a mad scientist; maybe it’s what has always put me on the path to becoming a monster.

  I’m never sorry.

  4.

  Elaine was awake when I returned to the observation room. She was lying perfectly still on the bed, but her eyes were fixed on the ceiling, and they darted toward me when the door opened. She stiffened a little as she caught sight of Joe. Joe, who clearly remembered her, tensed and slicked back his ears, jowls lifting just enough to serve as a reminder that he had a great many fine, sharp teeth just longing for a leg to be buried in.

  “Down, boy,” I said, tapping the top of his head. “We’re not eating our guest today. We’re here to offer her a trade.” I turned my attention to Elaine. “How are you feeling, Miss Oldenburg? Awake and peppy? Ready for your new master to sweep in and carry you away?”

  “Please don’t call me that,” she said quietly. She sounded more resigned than anything else. The minute traces of drugs remaining in her system were starting to clear out; soon, she’d be fully sober, maybe for the first time in years. “That hasn’t been my name since Evergreen.”

  “I know. It was a neat trick, disappearing from your life and then disappearing from your own mind. The Monkey helped a lot with that, didn’t he? All those chemicals he mixed for you, to help you hide yourself. I’m sorry you felt the need to do that. We’ve all had to do things that weren’t necessarily good for us, just so we could stay alive.”

  Elaine chuckled. It was a brittle, brutal sound, filled with ghosts I’d never seen but whose names she clearly knew. She probably called roll for them every morning before she opened her eyes, counting off the children who didn’t make it out of the school. “You have no idea. Whatever it is you think you’ve done, whatever crimes you think you’ve committed…you have no idea.”

  “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but either way, I’m here to offer you a deal.” I looked at her flatly. “You don’t work for Clive. You were doing what he told you to do because you thought it would get you what you needed, but you’ve been a free agent since you left the Monkey, haven’t you? No one’s been able to keep you in the pharmaceutical style to which you had become accustomed.”

  Elaine’s brow wrinkled as she looked at me. “You’re getting at something. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take such a long way around.”

  “Time is short, but that’s no excuse to be shoddy. Are you a free agent? Yes or no. I need to know if you’re loyal to Clive and staying strapped to this bed, or whether I can make a deal with you.”

  “I wouldn’t trust me,” said Elaine. She smiled slightly, although the tension didn’t leave her eyes. “Everyone knows I’m crazy.”

  “And everyone knows I’m a mad scientist. It’s amazing what everyone knows, isn’t it? Usually what everyone knows is insulting and sort of ableist, because the people who know everything always seem to think of themselves as being perfectly normal. But that’s neither here nor there. Are you a free agent? Yes or no. I’d say I could keep asking all day. I won’t insult your intelligence like that. As soon as the shooting starts, I’m gone.”

  Elaine sighed deeply, sinking back into the bed. “Yes. Yes, I’m a free agent, yes, I came here because Clive said that this was where the drugs were, yes, I knew he would probably follow me and use me as a distraction, yes, I was all right with that, because he has people who would know how to synthesize more drugs if they could get their hands on samples from here. As long as I was willing to become his attack dog, he’d take care of me. That’s how it is for me. I go with the ones who’ll give me what I need.”

  “How loyal are you?”

  She shrugged. “How far under can you put me? Because that’s all I want. I just don’t want to be Elaine Oldenburg ever, ever again. The Monkey understood that. He made sure I didn’t have to know the woman in the mirror. He made sure I forgot their names.”

  I didn’t have to ask her which names she meant. No matter how many people she might have killed since she’d become the Fox, none of them were ever going to matter as much as the students in her first grade class back at Evergreen Elementary. There are some losses that don’t get easier with time, and some costs that you never stop paying. She and I had that much in common. Maybe that was why I was willing to take a chance on her capacity for loyalty.

  Or maybe I was a mad scientist after all. I withdrew the vial Tom had given me from my pocket, holding it up so that she could see. “One of my people was able to extract and analyze some really interesting chemical compounds from your blood. And then, because he’s an overachiever, he synthesized them for me. This is one dose of pure bye-bye logic, and it should be enough to keep you flying for a few days. Long enough for us to toss Clive out on his ear, and for my people to break down the structure a little further, give you something that burns cleaner for longer and without as many negative side effects.” Given that kind of time, and knowing where she came from, I might be able to find the Monkey’s original supplier. None of the information on him said that he was a drug dealer. Whatever he’d been feeding Elaine, he’d been getting it from outside his little compound, and that meant that I might be able to get my hands on her original brand.

  We’d still make our improvements, of course. If she wanted to chemically divorce reality, I wasn’t going to judge, but that didn’t mean I had to help her melt her own liver.

  “Give it to me.” She tried to lunge forward. The wrist straps holding her to the bed stopped her. She was scrappy, though: she kept trying, straining against her restraints like she thought she could dissolve them with the sheer force of her need.

  “Not quite yet. See, you may be a drug-addicted killer, but there’s nothing on you, in either of your identities, that implies you don’t keep your word. So here’s the deal. I want you to work for me. I want you to kill for me. I want the gun in your hand to be pointed where I aim it, and I want your word that you don’t hurt anyone who’s on our side. I’ll give you what I have if you agree to my terms. If you don’t want to stay after Clive’s people have been driven back, we can talk about it. I’m not keeping you against your will. But first, I want your word that you’ll help us.”

  She frowned. “Why do you want me?”

  “Because we’re scientists. We know our way around a gun, and we can hold our own, but we’re not killers. We’re not you. And because I don’t really care yet whether you live or die, and I have the feeling you don’t either, as long as you die flying.” I gave the vial a little shake. “I can get you off the ground. All you have to do is work for me.”

  “I didn’t used to be a killer, you know,” she said. “I was a schoolteacher. I wore dresses with little flowers on them, and I hated that they made me carry a gun. But they taught me how to use it. I was top of my class in all the marksmanship rankings. I passed self-defense with flying colors. It was like the universe was getting me ready to turn into someone else.”

  “Is that a yes or a no?” I asked.

  “Give me the vial, give me a pair of good, stompy boots, give me a gun, and you’ve got yourself a killer,” she said.

  I smiled.

  Chapter 5

  Can’t Stop the Slaughter

  Weapons of mass destruct
ion are not, in and of themselves, evil. The evil comes from what you use them to accomplish—and how much collateral damage they do.

  —Dr. Shannon Abbey

  I don’t gotta do anything you tell me, mister guy. All I gotta do is sing a little song, dance a little dance, and make a little murder.

  —Foxy

  1.

  The Shady Cove Forestry Center was designed with the tourist experience in mind, intended to be open and airy and welcoming to the classes of schoolchildren and buses of retirees that were destined to come pouring through its doors. I’m sure all those people had a grand old time before the Rising came along and shut down casual woodland excursions forever. Since the Rising also shut down Shady Cove forever, the locals probably had better things to worry about than what was going to happen to their forestry center. They had left it open and abandoned, with all those lovely windows glittering in the sun, and all those big, echoing rooms just waiting for something to come along and fill them up. That had been the condition of the place when we first rolled in, following an old map and a bunch of rumors. Indiana Jones and the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, coming never to a theater near you.

  So far as I was aware, while Clive might have spoken to people who had been inside my lab, he had never been inside himself. That meant that he was probably still picturing that old center, on some level: the big, empty spaces, the even bigger, even more vulnerable windows. And to be fair, if we’d still been trying to stay off the CDC’s radar like we used to before the change in administrations, he would have been at least superficially correct. We used to make our modifications with an eye toward the satellites passing overhead, trying to minimize the visible changes to the landscape. Once Danika and Joey took over my former place of employment, all of that went out the window. Secrecy was replaced by security.

  It had taken us a little while to adjust. It’s hard to throw out the lessons of years, and we were never going to flaunt our presence. But if Clive had been looking for an easy kill, he should’ve shown up years ago.

  The big picture windows were gone, not boarded over, but entirely replaced by metal plates and armored hatches that were too high for any normal infected to reach. The roof was a sea of solar panels, sucking in sunlight and producing electricity—the only way to cut us off was to block out the sun, and that was beyond the military capabilities of any small-time black-market king. And while we might have cleared the grounds to such an extent that it was now possible to move both vehicles and troops in closer than I liked, those same grounds concealed a wide assortment of defenses. No land mines, sadly. Land mines don’t really differentiate friend from foe, and we had animals. We also had damn near everything else that could safely be planted in a garden, from radio-triggered barbed-wire caches to retractable spikes.

  Give me a group of easily bored scientists and engineers, and give me a couple of undisturbed years, and I can build a stronghold that will never be breached. At least that was the hope. We were about to see just how secure my little modifications had really made us.

  Scientists, engineers, and interns lined the interior of the metal “windows,” their guns pointed out the hatchways and their faces as protected as possible. More of my people were in the trees and hides outside, although they wouldn’t be shooting. They’d be operating the remote defenses and trying to stay out of sight for as long as possible. Jill was on one of the catwalks, shouting instructions and making violent hand gestures whenever people didn’t move quickly enough. For the most part, they moved quickly enough. Jill worked for me, and I wouldn’t have wanted to cross her when she was in this mode.

  Joe paced by my side, a deep, sonorous growl resonating up from his chest and shaking his entire body. He knew something was wrong, and while he may not have fully understood what it was, he was prepared to protect me until his last breath. Loyalty like that is rare and precious, and I hated that I was having to abuse it by taking him toward a confrontation that could require him to make good on his promises. Good dogs should never be asked to prove that they’re good dogs. If there’s anything in this world that we should take on faith, it’s good dogs.

  “Dr. Abbey, they’re coming.” The call came from one of the engineers, a balding redhead I couldn’t name on sight. That wasn’t important. What mattered was the situation.

  “How close?”

  “Quarter mile out. They just passed Liza’s hide. She managed to trigger two of the camera drones, and then she dropped off the radio.” The redhead’s voice was grim. He knew as well as I did what Liza’s sudden silence was likely to mean. We’d go out later, after the shooting stopped, to check on her. If she was alive—unlikely but still possible—we’d offer whatever medical care she needed. If she wasn’t alive, we’d make an effort to recover her body, if she hadn’t already risen. It wasn’t much of a retirement plan, I’ll admit, but it was the best that we could offer.

  “Got it. Keep your positions. Where’s Tom?”

  “He’s at the lookout.”

  “Got it,” I said again, and kept on walking.

  The designated lookout point was halfway around the forestry center lobby, situated above what had once been the front doors, before we boarded them over and plastered the seams with fast-drying concrete. They were still one of our weakest points if someone came along with, say, a tank, but they were no longer a day-to-day risk. A metal ladder leaned against the sealed doors. Tom was standing at the top, a pair of binoculars held up to his eyes, staring out at our euphemistically named “lawn.”

  “Situation?” I asked.

  “Bad,” he replied. He looked over his shoulder and down, shaking his head. “Clive’s actually marching on us. He’s actually marching on us, with actual men carrying actual guns. What is this, the Rising?”

  “It’s that or it’s the wild, wild West,” I said. “Hold the wall as long as you can, Tom. That’s all I can really ask you to do.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to negotiate,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder toward the PA system. It would broadcast from the speakers outside the building, drawing the attention of every living creature—infected or not—within half a mile. If Clive and his people didn’t take us out, the zombies I was about to attract just might. “Well, that, and I’m going to pray that we’re getting a miracle today.”

  “Do people like us get miracles?” asked Tom dubiously.

  I thought of a gaunt, dead-eyed woman with oddly dyed hair, lying in my observation room and holding a vial of clear liquid like it was the most precious thing in the universe. “We might,” I said, and moved toward my station. It was time to talk to the bogeyman, for all the good that it was going to do.

  2.

  Clive’s people marched right out into the open, as cocky as you please. They stopped at the edge of the trees, too far out for us to shoot and too close for us to ignore. They weren’t that cocky, then: not cocky enough to believe that we would have left ourselves undefended. As I watched on the monitor next to the PA, three of Clive’s men began setting up portable workstations that would no doubt allow them to perform full magnetic resonance scans on the ground. Soon they’d know about every trap, underground cable, and earthworm within a hundred yards. Once that happened…

  “Screwed” was a word. So was “totally and completely thunder-fucked,” although that may have been more of a phrase. It was time to stop sitting around waiting for a miracle, and start doing something.

  I flicked the PA on.

  “Hello, Robin Hood and your Merry Men, this is the lab of Dr. Shannon Abbey regretfully informing you that the free vaccination clinic is closed this week. Please take your guns and your grim-looking mercenaries and head on home. We’d be happy to treat whatever STIs you’ve picked up during your adventures next month, when we open our doors to the public at half-past never o’clock in the afternoon.”

  There was a brief scramble at the front of the mob, and then Clive himself stepped into view.

  He w
as good-looking, in a tough, “tattooed to the point of losing all individual images” sort of a way: like a children’s coloring book that walked, talked, shaved its head, and scowled at anyone who happened to cross its path. He was wearing tactical gear that he somehow managed to keep from looking silly through the sheer dint of being six and a half feet tall. It’s amazing how much you can forgive with height.

  He was carrying a whiteboard. He scrawled something on it, and held it out for me to see: the number of a common radio frequency. So that was how he wanted to play it, huh? Well, I could play along.

  “I’ve got a radio right here, Clive, and I’m tuning it to your station. Now, how about you call in and tell me what’s on that portable black hole you call a mind?” I fiddled with the radio next to my transmitter as I spoke, flipping through half a dozen channels of static and the local number station before settling on his chosen frequency. Then I took my finger off the SEND button, and I waited.

  It wasn’t a long wait. One of Clive’s men brought him what looked like a tricked-out walkie-talkie. He brought it to his mouth, and a moment later his deep, surprisingly smooth voice boomed out of the radio: “We demand your immediate surrender, Dr. Abbey. If you open the doors and let us in, we won’t even feel the need to shoot you. Make us wait, and…” He clicked his tongue, saying wordlessly what would happen to anyone who resisted.