Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  “Look at this,” she told him, holding fast to his wrist. “ISS. They have an office here. We have Piero’s ID; maybe it will get us through the door.”

  “Misato,” he said, shaking his head. “We have to find her. Look at this. Look at it. We have to get a signal out. We have to send a warning.” He spun and laughed, a little crazed, half tripping on a corpse covered with purplish-blue growth, colonized and consumed.

  “And we will get a warning out. But there’s more to this, we know that. Piero was trying to cover his tracks, and he was working with my dad’s company and ISS and Merchantia.” She licked her lips nervously, pulling him away from the left-hand side of the corridor and toward the less hideously overrun area leading to ISS. “I’ve been thinking about this. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. What if they already know? The man I spoke to in HR this week at Merchantia seemed suspicious of this big new partnership. He wanted me to investigate the Brigantine for him. What if they all know? What if Foxfire wasn’t an accident but . . .”

  She stopped herself. It was too evil to consider.

  Edison nodded along as she spoke, listening intently, letting her guide him toward the large, black doors, INNOVATIVE SHIPPING SOLUTIONS spanning them both in bold, red print.

  “But?” he prompted.

  Checking her suit pockets, Rosalyn shoved aside her schematic and message chip, finally finding the copy of Piero’s ISS badge.

  “But an experiment,” she said. A box at about shoulder height flashed with a holographic beam and ID reader. There was no telling if the 3-D printed copy would be enough to get them through without trying, so Rosalyn took a deep breath and placed the badge up to the scanner.

  The scanner beeped once, twice, then chimed, and the doors to her left began to open. Something had jammed them, Foxfire growth no doubt, and she rushed forward, bracing herself in the gap.

  “Help me with this,” she said, and they each took a door, throwing their weight against it until the blockage gave and the doors screamed open, locking in place.

  “Welcome, Danny Russo. Please have a productive day!”

  The voice that drifted down over reception had once been bouncy with enthusiasm, but the recording had corroded, twisting the message into a broken whine.

  A body slumped forward in its chair, leaning against the surface of a half-circle reception desk. It was covered in a thin, blue skin of mushrooms, and Rosalyn couldn’t tell if it had been a man or woman. She skirted around the edge of the desk, holding her breath as she eased over the frozen body and carefully moved one of its hands aside. A puff of spores drifted upward, and Rosalyn stifled a scream, watching the fingers all but disintegrate.

  “Sorry,” she whispered, then booted the computer. It woke up, already logged in, one spot of luck. “I practically grew up at Belrose,” she told Edison while he watched the doors for them. “Summer job at reception. Not paid, of course, because hard work is its own reward according to my dad.” After a brief pause and a stuffed urge to babble nervously about her internships, Rosalyn found Danny Russo, Piero, in the employee ID log.

  “He came through when the Brigantine docked here,” she said, squinting through the haze of spores lingering in the air. “Just a quickie. Picked up a package for them.”

  “Working all angles,” Edison muttered. “That definitely sounds like Piero.”

  “And making a mint, too.” Whistling, Rosalyn shook her head, glancing up from the monitor. “They paid him a small fortune for this. Package included . . . let’s see . . . ah! Perfect. Single-use experimental vaccination. Beta Tech–brand rebreather. Dangerous biocontaminant. Xenobiological samples. There’s just an address here, but it’s this same station, only a different suite.”

  Rosalyn looked up again, consulting her AR, checking the floor schematic against the suite address.

  “It’s on this floor,” she said, unfocusing her eyes from her display, training her eye not on Edison but what lay beyond him, through the doors. “One guess where it is.”

  “Piero knew what he was doing. Bastard. He brought the Foxfire on board knowing it was dangerous.” Edison swore again and again, pacing in front of the open doors. “And the dates we found with his badge?”

  “He’s a bastard, certainly, but there are a lot of bastards here. ISS is a shipping point, a middleman.” She backed out of the manifest proving Piero’s mission and called up the complex calendar, layered with icons. A small box in the corner, like a map key, allowed her to choose what information the calendar displayed. “Scheduled pickups.” She had memorized the sequence of numbers that coincided with the Merchantia launch dates, only a quick scroll through the calendar away. “There.” She poked the screen. She felt like she might choke. The dates were too close to be a coincidence. “There. Danny Russo had a stopover with ISS before each of those doomed launches. They weren’t accidents, Edison, all of them took deliveries from this place, and all of them went dark. Shit.”

  Rosalyn pulled back from the computer, bumping the receptionist and watching as it dissolved into a flurry of bluish-white specks, like a dandelion blowing into the wind. She stumbled back toward Edison, pointing frantically at the back of her environmental suit.

  “My filters. They’re not handling this level of contamination. I’ve probably got another hour, maybe two.”

  “That’s more than enough to send a warning and leave,” Edison told her, taking her by the hand as they ran out of the ISS lobby and back onto the main floor of the corporate level, bringing them face-to-face again with the horror that had taken place. “We find Misato and get that hard drive, we send whatever warning we can, and then we get out. Bringing these assholes to justice will have to wait; you’re more important.”

  Rosalyn wanted to scream, but held it in. Every step they took toward the other office suite degraded her oxygen filters further. She didn’t want to bump another body and watch it float away. There was the terror of the ship, and then there was the terror of this place, almost too bizarre, too inhuman to fully take in.

  “They might be one and the same,” she whispered. “Misato is in there somewhere, and that’s where ISS got the Foxfire samples. It’s ground zero.”

  Edison took her arm again, waiting until she walked of her own volition to lead her toward that office door and the octopus-like explosion of thick tendrils that had forced its way through the glass. The whole seething mass of it and every thickened growth around them pulsed in time, the same way it had on the ship, not steadily, but with a hitch, with the rhythm of a human heartbeat.

  “You need to tell me something,” Rosalyn whispered, no longer trying to hide the deep tremor overtaking every inch of her. “You need to tell me if these things . . . if they’re still alive. Still . . . still human.”

  She watched his chest expand with a stabilizing breath and knew the answer. “Yes.”

  “Can you sense them like you did the others?” Rosalyn hadn’t looked closely at his face in a moment, but saw now that he was as tremulous and damp as she was. His eyes swept anxiously back and forth, his neck and shoulders stone stiff.

  “Yes.”

  “How is that possible? They’re . . . practically muck.”

  He chose each word carefully, articulating himself with great effort. “I’m doing my best just to hold it together, but they’re waking up now that we’re here. Imagine five hundred voices all talking at once, right into your ear. Some are your mother. Some are your ex-wife. Your best friend. They all want you to join them. They’re all confused. Afraid. Hungry.”

  “What?”

  It at least shocked her out of the gripping panic. Edison paused, looking down at her blankly, and then he frowned, realizing what he had said. His eyes slid gradually to the right, and Rosalyn heard the sound of flesh unpeeling from flesh, a wet, swampy slide and slip that corresponded to a mossy blue body rising from the ground. There was no face to see, no eyes
to look into, just a fur of tiny mushrooms covering a naked body.

  “Run. Now.”

  Edison took his own advice first, sweeping her down the corridor at a speed she could barely match. The thing that had woken up moved slowly, shaking itself out before pursuing at a crooked lurch. But it wasn’t alone. More bodies in every state of transformation and decomposition began rising around them, finding their mark and following. Rosalyn stopped glancing over her shoulder, screaming as a human-shaped mass of stems and twinkling, sucker-shaped fungus pulled itself up out of the sludge in front of them. Edison didn’t slow down, and Rosalyn braced with her elbow out in front of her face as they plowed through it, showered in a flurry of heavy blue sparks.

  “Not again. Help me push!” They reached the door, sliding up to it and throwing their weight against the panels, the glass creaking from its compromised core, the pulsing tentacles speared through its center adding unbelievable density.

  Rosalyn kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to see how close doom crept. Edison roared as he gave another full-bodied shove, and at last the door began to move, inch by inch, allowing a space just big enough for them to tumble through and then back up against.

  She spun, watching as a blond, short woman with half a face covered in growth walked right up to the glass, her nose bumping against it. Then she went still, as if the light in her head had dimmed. Nothing pursued them inside this apparent sanctuary, they simply froze in place, silent, pulsing watchers.

  “Let’s go,” Edison said, taking her wrist gently. She glanced toward him, her feet so heavy with pitiless terror they felt fused to the floor. “We’re close now. For better or worse, we’re close.”

  41

  Like an aquarium, teeming and blue, the office pulsed with growth all around them. Rosalyn picked her way across reception, finding there was almost nothing to explain where they were or what was meant to happen there. All of the employees, it seemed, had fled, then succumbed to Foxfire out on the landing or elsewhere in the station.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Edison, watching him closely as they moved deeper through the junglelike tendrils, the living blue sinews as thick around as a tree.

  “No, are you?”

  “No,” Rosalyn said. “If you’re going to give in—”

  “I won’t,” Edison promised her, helping her over an overturned desk. “We’ve come too far for that.”

  “I don’t think that will matter. If this is where it all began, it will only get harder and harder. But I’m here. Just don’t listen, okay? Whatever it tells you, whatever it promises you . . .”

  Edison nodded, and from the draw of his brow, she could tell he was nervous, or maybe embarrassed. His eyes flitted quickly along the walls, and his hands shook as he and Rosalyn helped each other over tumbles of ruined and scattered furniture. They traveled deeper, through doors lodged open by thick blue growth. The mottled light glittered down on them through an unbroken web of thin turquoise threads, adding to the sense that they were wandering through a fish tank.

  Holding her hand, he squeezed it often, too hard, but Rosalyn refused to show him how much it hurt. She imagined each squeeze was an attempt the Foxfire made to sway him, and if he needed to pulp her fingers to stay with her, then so be it.

  “I hope that money was worth all of this, Piero,” she whispered, gazing around at the utter destruction. “That vaccination tab in the manifest? A rebreather?”

  “I know,” Edison replied, strained. “I don’t want to think about it. Let’s keep moving.”

  Rosalyn could think of nothing else. That someone had willingly taken a payment to unleash Foxfire on unsuspecting crewmates made her heart wither. How could anyone be so selfish? So shortsighted. It didn’t give her satisfaction that Piero had succumbed to the Foxfire first and hardest, but it did seem like a sort of dark, cosmic justice.

  “Are we getting closer to Misato?”

  “Yeah,” Edison said. “She’s not far.”

  At the sound of her name, the living blue vines and mushroom clusters surrounding them shivered. Rosalyn went silent, hardly breathing as they stepped carefully through the office suite, stopping when they reached a split corridor. One way led in the same direction, another door, open, waited to their left. Rosalyn watched the Foxfire shudder as she wiped her hand across the wall near the doorway, searching for a label.

  “It isn’t storage,” she said. “It’s a rented lab.”

  The shivering of the walls intensified, a rattling sound chasing around the room. The two of them huddled close as the shaking took form, creating words and then a beat, a song. Glowing with each hum and word, the office lit up around them.

  Busy the bee goes, “Buzz, buzz, buzz!” Dizzy the dog goes, “Woof, woof, woof!”

  “I know that story,” Rosalyn murmured, easing through the doorway and away from the sudden buzzing song. “Angela told it to her kids. I saw it in your bunker.”

  “Mother recites it all the time,” Edison replied, blinking rapidly. “Candace would tell it to Joey . . . or maybe not. I’m . . . it’s hard to remember now.”

  “Stay with me,” Rosalyn pleaded, keeping him close. “Keep moving. I don’t think we should give it a chance to make a plan.”

  Busy the bee goes, “Buzz, buzz, buzz!” Ollie the owl goes, “Hoot, hoot, hoot!” and Mother goes: “I love you” . . .

  Rosalyn couldn’t imagine anything more unnerving than a thousand sizzling voices chanting a child’s rhyme at her, but it kept on, louder and louder, chasing them into the rented lab. Two hallways opened up around a shared wall and desk, and Rosalyn chose the right fork, which seemed less choked with singing vines.

  As they went, as the song followed them, Edison squeezed her hand harder and harder, until she couldn’t help but wince.

  “Stay with me,” she told him again. “Don’t forget the plan. Misato. Hard drive. Warning. Then we run.”

  He grunted, nodded, sweat pouring down his face. It hurt to look at him, to see him struggling against the voices. If it was that bad on the outside, she dreaded to think what he heard in his own mind.

  The narrower hall opened up into a familiar sort of space for Rosalyn, a lab similar to the one she had spent countless hours in at Belrose. Even the layout echoed the labs at her old job, a coincidence that worried her more and more as they navigated between the evenly spaced rows of desks, piled with equipment for experimenting and recording. The little pipettes looked the same. The trays. The mugs.

  Everything could have been picked up from their labs in Montreal and put down there, on a distant station overrun and destroyed. Rosalyn felt her hand go numb, and then her lips, her oxygen and Edison a distant thought as she raced up the alley between the desks and to where Misato knelt as if praying to the woman seated at a central, lower desk, shimmering and blue, perfectly preserved.

  She might have been a statue, still but completely lifelike, a paler blue light emanating from her chest, beating slowly, a bright glow of a pulse. The children’s rhyme filtered through the blue-tinted lab, the vaulted ceiling and kneeling Misato giving it all the strange, cold reverence of a church.

  “I . . . I know her,” Rosalyn whispered. Was she hallucinating? Had Foxfire taken her? How was it possible that she knew this woman, the clear, obvious heart of the infestation? The tendrils of blue that grew to overtake the lab and then the station sprang out from her fingertips, spiraling down from the desk to spread and spread.

  Edison inched up behind her, then leaned hard against Rosalyn’s shoulder for support.

  “She looks just like the woman from my dreams,” he said.

  “That’s because she is the woman from your dreams,” Rosalyn whispered, afraid to take another step toward the epicenter of all this destruction. But it really was her friend. They shared a birthday, a passion for work, a love of singing silly songs to her kids over video chat. Strange fla
shes of familiarity, almost déjà vu . . . “The poems, the rhymes, the smell of lemons? Parts of her were in your head. Angela. She was a mother, a mother who took this job so far away from her children. God, no wonder she wanted to convince you all to join some family.” A shocked sob escaped her throat. “We would go out together sometimes . . . and get lemon drops. That’s why I seemed so familiar to you. You recognized me because she did.”

  Rosalyn felt her knees buckle. More of it slotted into place in her mind. Edison had used a saying she had only ever heard from Angela. Her kids, her family, were everything to Angela, and leaving to oversee the first Belrose lab in space had torn her to pieces.

  “We did this,” Rosalyn breathed, seeing but unseeing, feeling more of her heart break each time she looked at Angela’s soft, blue face. She had a cherubic look, always, curly blond hair and plump cheeks, a permanent, wry smile and pixie chin. “Our company did this.”

  “No,” Edison managed through clenched teeth. “She did this. This lab did it. It’s all around us; they had no idea what they were experimenting with, but they sure found out. You couldn’t have stopped it, not if you stayed, not if . . . agh.”

  “Edison!”

  He collapsed, both hands clamped over his helmet. His mouth dropped open in a contorted scream, veins bulging from his temples. Misato didn’t budge, frozen, still in a prayer position. Rosalyn dropped down next to Edison, trying to force his hands back down, wiping her hands over his visor. But his eyes were shut against her, and his scream drowned out the lilting children’s song drifting up from the choking vines.

  “I’m here! Edison? Edison? Come back to me! I shouldn’t have brought you this close, I shouldn’t have . . . Angela! Let him go. Let him go.”

  His screams abruptly ended, and his hands dropped to his sides. Going still and calm, his face relaxed and then his eyes opened, a blazing, terrible silver.