#Bathhouse Omens | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hypnoticwinter · 4 years

Text

Down the Rabbit Hole part 12

“Mak,” Peter is saying to me, but I’m way, way too busy heaving to pay any attention. I can’t get the image of the fucking amalgam out of my head, writhing bodies glued together, pictures of agony. My insides shudder again and more of my dinner spills out into the pool, but I have my eyes screwed shut. If they were open it’d be worse, I could see the vomit drifting on the current and I’d puke more, but with them shut I can see the amalgam.

“Jesus Christ,” I mutter thickly. I spit, trying to clear the taste from my mouth; it doesn’t help much. I can feel how tacky and sticky my tank top has gotten beneath my suit all of a sudden and I reach up, unzip it about partway. I’ve been so damn stupid, I never should have fucked Peter, it wasn’t the time, it wasn’t the place, it was a bad omen…

I can feel my lips draw back and a laugh, a mad, insane laugh, scrambling up my throat, but this isn’t a time for laughter. I want to stay here bent over a little while longer, my hands on my knees, but Peter reaches back blindly and taps at me. “Mak,” he says again, and I squeeze my eyes shut and then open them and spin around, glare at him. “What the hell is so important?” I start to bark, but then I see what Peter’s looking at and I stop thinking.

The amalgam isn’t dead; it’s right there, rearing up at us, a mess of bodies, animal, bird, even a few fish, and people, so many people. I look upwards at the ruined mess of the ceiling and realize that all of these people must have gotten stuck there, must have gotten trapped in a digestive gland in their mad panic to escape, they must have slipped under a fence somewhere and ventured out into the Pit when the convulsions started, trying to find their way out.

The amalgam is looking at us. I don’t know what kind of conscience lives in there, nor how many, but none of its gazes are even remotely human. I stare at the eyes set deep in the sockets of an old, grubby-looking man, a thin goatee coating his limp mouth, and he looks back at me. One of his eyes has a thin trickle of blood leaking from it and in the other it seems as though the pupil has popped as though it were the yolk of an egg and is now merging downward, staining the iris like black ink…that isn’t how pupils work, though, so –

“Help me,” the man whispers. I see his mouth move, I barely hear him speak over the lapping water and the sound of very close, very heavy breathing that I realize after a moment is my own.

“Oh my god,” I say.

“Makado, we need to –“

I can hear more of them now, begging, pleading, crying, confused, angry. They’re all starting to wake up. I can see horror on the face of one of them as she looks down, as she looks at her new body, jutting flopping halfway out of the flank of the roughly quadruped amalgam. I can see the face of a bear, its neck and shoulders free of the rest of the creature, turn and with purpose bite into the neck of the man growing just below it, sending a geyser of blood into the air, making half a dozen various faces cry out in pain.

I’ve already taken a step or two backwards and I reach out and tug at Peter’s sleeve, but before I can do much more than jostle him I hear a noise, a small, subtle noise, somewhat like a pin dropping, and I look around before I realize that I didn’t actually hear it, it was just there popping into existence in the middle of my head. There’s a trickle of liquid down my upper lip and I reach up and wipe at it and my hand comes back daubed in red and I realize that the nosebleed is back, whatever the hell is going on is back, and fear stabs me in the gut and shakes me.

Peter finally turns and without a word I turn as well, and we sprint to the door to the Dome, pressing out of the oversized double-door shoulder to shoulder. I can feel my head throbbing in time with my heartbeat, each pounding pulse sending another minute trickle of blood down my face, but I can’t worry about that right now – the amalgam is stomping after us, crying out a myriad of voices, calling for us to come back, begging us with palpable anguish to come back and help it, telling us that we can’t leave it here like this. We make it to the stairs before something seems to change, a stealthy sort of decision comes over the amalgam’s voice, and it tells us in a thousand different voices that it won’t let us leave it here like this, and the way they say the same thing but echo in a discordant unity, some ending early, some trailing off menacingly, sends a chill scurrying up my spine, and I shake my head, the blood from my nose spattering.

“Goddam it,” I say, glaring back down the stairs at the monster. We’ve managed to get a little bit of a lead; despite its size it’s able to fit up the stairs, it can compress itself. I heard a few different voices cry out as it did, along with the snapping of bones, but clearly that isn’t bothering it too much. It’s still down there, seething, digging its many, many hands into the chain-link grating surrounding the stairwell, surging upwards at us. It stumbles and falls but a thousand feet catch it, it missteps but a thousand hands push it upwards again.

“Come on,” Peter tells me, grabbing my hand and tugging me upwards.

“Peter,” I say, my voice heavy, “where the hell are we going to go? The –“

“No time,” he says. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

The amalgam is only two landings below us now. We make it another three, it makes it another two.

“We’re gaining on it,” I tell Peter. “Oh!”

“What is it?” he starts to ask, but I see that same dopey blank look steal over his face, same as before, I know that it’s happening again. My forearm is twitching, all the muscles in it contracting seemingly at random, my fingers flashing curious gang signs beyond my control. My foot whips forward and I nearly fall but Peter, with a great effort, reaches out and steadies me.

There’s a whining scream from below us; it sounds confused and piteous. It seems the amalgam can feel it as well; maybe that’s why it hadn’t fallen upon us the instant we’d entered the Dome, maybe it had been knocked out by the - by the whatever it was.

I spit; my head is throbbing and that combined with the nosebleed is making me feel glassy, like if I move too quickly I’ll shatter. “Keep going,” I say, trying not to let my mind linger on how ragged my voice sounds. I can feel my heart pounding in my throat when I swallow. We make it another flight before it gets too intense and we have to catch our breaths, try to control our rebellious bodies. I keep laughing, just like I had before, the sound ripping itself out of my mouth even though I try to stop it. The convulsions have spread down the entire left side of my body and I have to hug my leg to myself to keep it from jabbing me in my chest.

An unpleasant thought occurs to me and I wonder for a moment whether this is what the Pit feels like. Those convulsions haven’t stopped; if anything they’ve gotten a little stronger. Not enough to knock us off our feet like before, but if I put my hand flat on the ground I can feel the world rocking beneath me.

Peter is laying on the grimy floor of the landing, staring at the ceiling above; I glance up while I still have full control of my eyes. We’re about three landings from the top, and then from there it’s through the bathhouse, and then upwards…

My shoulderblades nudge each other and then my back arches. I manage to grimace before my mouth twists into a snarl. I can feel a very strange sensation in my mind, something abstract, like sparks flying, like what I imagine a short circuit might feel like. “Peter,” I moan. He looks over at me, utterly blank. There’s another groaning whine from below us but I can’t make myself get up to look over the edge of the railing to see if the amalgam’s recovered yet.

“Help me,” I tell him, reaching out for him as best I can, and he rolls, his face contorted with some unknowable internal effort, and slowly, carefully, comes to his knees. He gets to me and scoops me into his arms and even in spite of everything I feel a delicious little thrill in the pit of my stomach as he rises, gripping on to me tightly as another sweeping convulsion pounds at me, stretching my leg out and then bringing it snapping back into his arm. He grunts and I wince as best I can. “I’m sorry,” I mutter.

“’S’okay,” he slurs. I look at him carefully but I can’t tell how this is affecting him exactly. It makes me wonder what’s going on up on the surface, whether it’s only happening inside the Pit or –

There’s a sound like shattering glass and I look around wildly for a moment before Peter stumbles and we nearly fall. “Goddam it,” he growls. The blank look is gone; in its place is worry, fear, determination, a rapid flutter of emotions like he’s making up for lost time.

“You good?” I ask. He nods.

“Yes. Can you walk?”

He sets me down and I put weight on my legs gingerly, but when they don’t immediately betray me and send me flopping to the floor I flash him a thumbs-up. Below us the amalgam cries out, and we can hear the telltale crunching and skittering as it resumes its climb up the stairs, and then there is nothing to do but take one step at a time and hope that we remain faster than it is.

We manage to maintain our lead through the bathhouse, but it catches up when we emerge out into the long, heavy corridor that would ordinarily lead back to the LVC. It stands there, its ‘legs’ compressing outwards to bear the weight, bleeding blood and ichor from cuts and abrasions and bruises. Some of the pieces of it have succumbed already, I can tell; I see several men and women with their necks snapped, heads turned at odd, unnatural angles, made even worse from the way they sprout from the flesh of other people and other things halfway down. The ones left alive either whimper or moan or cry but a few, mostly the ones situated higher up, are still looking at us with something of the hunger they’d shown before, down in the Domes.

Amalgams aren’t known for longevity. A wolf bloodstream and immune system isn’t really happy with trying to hook up to a human one, or one that a bear uses. It can function for a time but infections and autoimmune responses are common. That’s what usually does the more stable amalgams in, the ones that have a regular enough body plan and enough coordination that they’re actually able to gather food.

There’s a tendency, supposedly, towards centralization, when an amalgam fuses together. You might have a dozen bodies flopping outwards like a grotesque pinecone, like the upper body of the one before us, glaring daggers at us down the corridor, but whatever it uses for a stomach to feed the many metabolisms each trying to survive as though they were still disparate units, that’s going to be somewhere inside it, somewhere important.

This is the biggest amalgam I’ve ever seen. Usually they’re pretty pathetic things, just a couple of animals fused together, unable to move, unable to do much more than frighten tourists. Even the larger ones usually aren’t much of a threat; it takes a lot of luck for the amalgam to fuse in such a way that it can actually move around in anything resembling an effective manner, and most of the time they’re unsuited for being the sort of ambush predators they’d need to be to thrive as unmotile lumps of flesh.

Usually.

“This thing’s going to be quicker than us on a straightaway,” I mutter to Peter out of the side of my mouth. He has his pistol out, holding it down at his hip, but I don’t think it’ll do much to the monster.

“This whole fucking corridor is a straightaway,” he mutters back.

“Please,” a dozen voices babble at us, a hundred chests heaving, greedily sucking down air.

“We need to go,” I say.

“Where the hell are we going to go?” Peter asks, glancing behind. It’s another couple hundred feet to the end of the corridor and with no turns, no corners, not even any debris laying around to put between us and the creature. This tunnel has weathered the convulsions remarkably well. “Even if we make it to the end of the corridor,” he points out, “we’d have to climb up the –“

“Accessway 34-B,” I tell him. “Goes straight to Bronchial.”

“And if it’s collapsed? It’s a dead end.”

“What other option do we have?” I ask, trying not to sound annoyed. I keep my eyes locked on the amalgam down the corridor, retreating when it advances. It seems unsure of the reinforced glass bottom of the corridor, prods at it gently as it moves, half its eyes and faces angled downwards to snuff at it. “We can’t climb up quick enough, we only have one kit, one axe, only a couple pitons. It’s either 34-B or nothing.”

“We could go through the Cord.”

I shake my head. “We’ll never make it there in time.”

The amalgam ripples, tremors running through its flanks, and ambles into a walking pace. Peter raises the gun.

“You’re just going to make it mad.”

“We’re running out of options,” he says.

“I don’t even have goddam earpro, you’re going to –“

The amalgam shrieks and rushes at us and terror seizes me in its jaws and shakes me around like a dog with a toy and Peter is shooting and it’s so goddam loud but I don’t care, there are more pressing issues at the moment, and I seize him once he’s run the magazine dry and the gun is just clicking uselessly when he pulls the trigger. I look over at him and his eyes are wide and frightened and he looks nearly mad with fear and together we sprint down the corridor, our reinforced cleats making ugly, clanking noises on the glass, noises I’m terrified are going to turn into crunching shatters any moment with the force I’m putting down with each step.

As predicted, the amalgam doesn’t give a damn that it just ate twelve bullets straight to center mass, they might have stung but they certainly didn’t put it down, just made it angry. It scrambles now, extra ‘limbs’ branching off of it to seize onto the ceiling and the walls and hurl it forward even more quickly. It’s gaining on us; whatever lead we built up during our mad rush up the stairwell is evaporating too quickly. I still have my gun and a full magazine in it but although my hands are itching to pull it out and spin and just unload on the thing I’d lose way too much goddam time for no reward. I can feel a stitch in my side like how I’d imagine a knife would feel.

Next to me Peter’s labored breaths are getting more and more ragged, and then he stumbles and in an instant I’m a dozen feet ahead of him and turning, skidding to a halt, and I see the amalgam rearing up over him as he scrambles to his feet, but he isn’t goddam quick enough, nobody could be quick enough, and the amalgam reaches out and seizes him in one bifurcated, multiplicative appendage, hauling him off the ground. Peter screams and amid the scream I can hear his leg snap like a twig and something in me snaps as well and as an orifice begins to open in the amalgam’s center of mass, a ragged irregular hole, red-lined and wet and weeping, opening with a small pop of anticipation, I can hear a feral growl rumbling in my chest, a noise I wasn’t aware I was able to make, and then I find myself sprinting towards the amalgam and it pauses, reassessing the situation perhaps, and it drops Peter and he howls with pain but I can barely spare him a glance. I’ve drawn my utility knife, rarely used, out of its sheaf, hidden in a cleverly recessed slot in the ranger suit’s breastplate, and I’ve got it in a reverse grip, arm raised above my head, and then I’m in the air, jumping a little awkwardly with all the goddam extra weight clinging to me, the armored plates, the cleats, the utility pack slung around my back, but I jump regardless. I’m hurtling towards the thing and then I land on it, warm spongy flesh beneath my fingers and arms and feet and teeth and I’m plunging the knife into it again and again, stabbing and tearing and twisting and the amalgam is roaring and batting at me with its arms but they’re too large and I’m right on top of it so it can’t reach me.

“Run!” I scream at Peter. I manage to get a glimpse of his face, pale, wide-eyed, mouth a raw grimace of pain. I can see him hesitating, I know he doesn’t want to fucking leave, goddam it, every fucking hormone and impulse is screaming for him to save me from the fucking amalgam.

I twist the knife again and the amalgam roars and finally grabs ahold of me. I can feel a dozen hands and hooves and paws and wings clenching painfully around my torso, I can feel a couple of ribs splinter and break as they dig in.

Peter’s eyes are very bright.

“That’s an order,” I tell him, and then the orifice closes around me and a thunderous wave of peristaltic action drags me down roughly into the belly of the beast.

Inside the amalgam a thousand hands and tendrils and creepers are writhing over me fleshily and it smells like death and rot and decay. The walls of the thing squeeze at me and shift me down further and I realize that they’re studded with faces, with faces of people that have ingrown into the thing, pressed inwards at crazy angles. I can feel the outlines of faces against my back, my chest, rubbing against my face like a dog snuffling against me. I can hear nothing from outside the amalgam, no sound, nothing to indicate whether Peter’s managed to get away or if the amalgam is currently in the act of ripping him to pieces, all there is is the soft sound of liquid gurgling and straining flesh. It takes every ounce of willpower I have not to whimper.

I manage to snake my arm down to my waist, wincing as the motion tugs on my ribs and another stab of pain echoes through me, and flip open the pouch there. I find the three cloth slots within it. One is empty, two is empty, three is…

My mind goes blank. I run my fingers over the slot again.

Three is empty. I gave my distress beacon to Fitzroy and never got it back from him.

I slide down the amalgam’s gullet further. My knife is still sticking inside the damn thing’s hide somewhere on the outer skin of it. I’ve got my gun but I don’t relish the idea of blowing my own eardrums out. I could -

“M-Makado?” a voice whispers and my eyes snap open.

“No,” I mutter. “No, no, no, no.”

“I can’t – I can’t move, I can’t feel anything, where am I?”

I reach out for the face pressed against my stomach, feel a cheek spread out into a smooth ribbed flatness. “Makado?” the voice asks again and then I wrench downwards again. I find my flashlight and manage to navigate it to my mouth and turn it on and then the light is shining straight in Eileen’s face and she shuts her eyes, or tries to; part of her face has been eaten away by acid. I can see teeth through the thin membrane of her cheek and one of her eyes no longer has a lid, it’s only barely recognizable as being her, but her voice is the same, a little slurred, a little incoherent, but still her, still the girl I had tried so hard to save.

“Oh my god,” I say, looking at her, the flashlight falling out of my mouth. I try to catch it but a twinge in my ribs makes my hand snap backwards, and then we’re back in the dark. I reach down with my other arm, across my body, and unsnap the holster, then take the gun out, bring it up, clutching it tightly as the amalgam swallows again and churns me downwards. My feet are getting warmer and I kick them experimentally; that must be its stomach down there, they’re passing through liquid. I reach up, find Eileen’s face again.

“It hurts,” she tells me. I press the gun to her forehead and pull the trigger. The noise is deafening and once I’m done all I can hear is ringing. The amalgam roars, so loudly I can hear it from inside, and then it’s pulling at me, arms are tearing at me, the tendrils are wreathing up to my face. I try to scream but someone puts their fingers in my mouth and I choke and spit and bite down and then there’s another, smaller roar. One of the faces surrounding me opens its mouth and vomits on me and I realize from the smell that it’s ballast, it just vomited enough ballast on me to nearly drown me, and then a fleshy cap covers my face and I can’t breathe, I can’t do anything but scream, and when I open my mouth to the tendrils race down my throat and I convulse and try to heave but I can’t, I can’t do anything, they’re forcing my mouth open, and even if I could bring my arms up to try and claw the thing on my face off of me it’s too thick and too strong, I don’t think I’d even be able to scratch it. The tendrils flicker over my face and force one of my eyelids open and then I feel something hard and sharp press into my eye and I scream and scream and scream until the amalgam freezes and I freeze and for a moment I don’t know why, but then I hear it, like a door slamming somewhere very far away, a sound sprouting in the middle of my brain.

The organic plugs in my nose feeding me oxygen quiver and withdraw and I can feel the bone pull away from my ruined face, and the familiar sizzling feeling of ballast starting to repair damaged tissue, but inside my head this is all very distant. I feel as though I’m being drawn magnetically someplace, as though I’m about to bend in half and rip out of the side of the amalgam like a missile, but there’s no actual motion.

One of the faces near me screams, and then another and another. I can hear them very dimly through my ruined ears. “Shut up,” I murmur in a horrible, slurred voice, “shut up, shut up, shut up –“

There is a sound like glass shattering, and the echo of it resounds off the curved walls of my skull, and all the faces cry out one last time then fall silent, and I am jostled as the amalgam falls heavily. I can feel the horrible, horrible catch as one of my ribs pierces into my lung and all the breath rushes out of me. The sound is still echoing and growing louder and louder and I scream uselessly, barely more than a vibration in my throat, and just when I think my head will burst with the pressure of that titanic sound it subsides and so do my thoughts.

* * *

“Jesus,” I breathe. Makado nods. She glances at her watch again and shrugs.

“Anyway,” she says, “after all that…unpleasantness, I spent a very long time in a hospital, and came out of it looking like this,” she gestures to her face.

“What happened to the amalgam?”

Makado starts to say something, then stops. “Heart attack,” she says finally. My eyes narrow and she grins at me. “There are some things I really can’t tell you,” she says.

“Alright, that’s fair. You recovered pretty well, it seems.”

She shrugs again, makes an indeterminate gesture. “So-so,” she tells me. “My depth perception is fucked and the nerves in the eye socket are dead so I can’t even get a prosthetic. And I have to wear hearing aids,” she adds, turning her head to the side and tucking her hair back so I can see the off-brown lump of it lurking in her ear.

“I’m a little surprised,” I say after a moment, “that you ended up back here. Peter too, I don’t know why you’d come back and work for this place.”

“There are different motivations,” Makado says, shrugging. “At the most basic, the benefits and pay are good. Much better than practically anywhere else in the National Park System, and that’s even assuming that you could have found a post elsewhere. Say what you want about government jobs but if you show up with the Pit on your resume a lot of places will give you the cold shoulder.”

“Why’s that?”

“Trauma, mostly. The Disaster was…” she starts, then stops. There’s something far-off in her eyes, something unknowable. I watch her quietly, waiting for her to speak, committing every moment to memory with the familiar mental stomp I used studying in college. “It was hell,” she finishes. “And everyone had their own little share of it.”

“I thought Peter had said something about a pension, or a settlement or something.”

“Oh, there was one,” Makado nods, “but it didn’t last forever. Only if you were permanently disabled cause of the disaster. Which neither of us were, although in my case it was a near thing.”

I lick my lips, think about how to phrase my next question. “Peter…told me some things about what happened to him after the disaster. Mentally I mean.”

“Yeah?”

“I, uh. I just wanted to know if, well, if he’s okay. While he was telling me his story I never would have guessed that all that happened, he seemed perfectly normal, but, like…I guess I just wanted a different perspective. I didn’t know the guy, I mean, but…”

As usual I make a complete hash of it. Makado stares at me and I can feel my cheeks coloring. “I didn’t mean –“ I start, but she cuts me off.

“I know what you mean. While he was in treatment his personality evaporated. He was like a robot. I’d call him every day and talk to him and it was like talking to a pre-recorded message. Exact same intonation every time, no creativity, no nuance. It was painful, for both of us, I think. He doesn’t like to talk about that time and I know that he still feels bad about not being able to be there for me while I was recovering from all the repair they had to do on my face. I’ve told him over and over again that it doesn’t matter but he still feels guilty.

“He was lucky, though. He got discharged with a clean bill of health a week before a full-on outbreak. Funnily enough the mental hospital burned down about a week after that. They managed to get out most of the people working there but couldn’t save any of the patients.”

She raises an eyebrow at me. “Now isn’t that a strange coincidence?”

“Are you implying that –“

“I’m not implying anything,” she assures me, too smoothly. “Just pointing out what an odd and timely coincidence that was. Now, was there anything else you wanted to know? I have a meeting in a half hour.”

“What’s the job you’re getting Peter to do?”

“Use your imagination, I’m sure it’ll be more interesting than the truth.”

I shake my head, bewildered. “You really don’t believe me, do you? You really think I’m –“

“You’re a journalist,” she explains. “How could you not be writing a story on this? Only reason I told you what happened to me is because I think you’re probably a decent person. But you’re still a journalist, and that means you’re going to write a story.”

“I have HIV,” I tell her. She looks at me. “I found out two days before I first heard about the Pit. I figured nothing matters any more so why not just – just enjoy myself? I got a plane ticket and flew down here just because I’m goddam curious, took some photos and shit, but I’m not writing a story.”

“So it’s because of the ballast, then?”

“No!” I say, trying not to get angry, and then I shake my head. “Yes, I guess. I don’t know. I read about it and I thought that maybe…I don’t know what I thought.”

I can feel myself flushing and I look away, glare at the wall, stamp down mentally on the feeling until it falls away.

“There are easier ways to control HIV, you know,” Makado points out.

“Not for me.”

Makado frowns. “What do you mean?”

I explain briefly what I mean and her face falls. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Makado nods. “Well, ballast might do it. It might not, I don’t know. They never tested it on diseases like that.”

“Do they even still take any out?”

“Oh, a little bit,” she says. “But it’s so, so little. If you’re really lucky and the hospital you go to is a very big, very important one, and the department is trying to justify its budget for the year, you might get some. Otherwise…for instance, I would have trouble getting some even if I was seriously injured. God,” she groans, “that sounded so bitchy, I’m sorry.”

“It didn’t sound bitchy,” I tell her. “I knew it was a stupid idea. I didn’t have a plan or anything, I just thought…I don’t know. Maybe someone in town sells it,” I laugh.

“You know,” Makado says, taking another surreptitious glance at her watch, “I didn’t even know you could be allergic to HIV medicine.”

“It’s really rare, apparently, is what the doctor said. Didn’t make me feel much better.”

“That’s a shame. And there’s no other treatment, no other medicines?”

“Oh, of course there are. Experimental, expensive ones that my insurance company would never fucking pay for.”

I can tell I’m sounding bitter and I try to clamp down on it, but I know it’s going to come leaking out anyway, poisoning my voice with a taste of rust and iron, like I’m choking on blood.

“You could pay for them out of pocket,” Makado suggests in a muted voice, as though she doesn’t want to argue with me.

“I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Take out a loan,” she says. “Pay with a credit card. I mean, there are options.”

“I don’t –“

“Why don’t you –“ Makado cuts herself off. “Never mind,” she says. “It isn’t my place.”

“You can say it.”

“I don’t want to get in an argument with you.”

“You think I’m giving up.”

Makado looks at me and I stare back into her one good eye. I can see what Peter liked about her, what he still must like about her, why he still loves her. She must know, surely. One eye gone, specks of – of pre-digestion, I guess, on her arms and probably the rest of her body, who knows what her hand looks like beneath that glove, and Peter would never have wavered, not even once.

“Yeah,” she says finally. “I don’t understand why you’d give up. Maybe it’s because I never would. I never did.”

I nod slowly. “Somehow I didn’t think it’d be in your character.”

Makado laughs, a little gusty snort from her nostrils. “Why’re you giving up, then?”

“I’m not.”

“It seems like you are.”

“I’m not!”

“And this,” she says, pointing at me, glove finger extending out and then back down again, lip curling upwards in a lazy grin, “is why I didn’t want to talk about it. Because I knew you were going to get angry and defensive –“

“I’m not –“ I start, then stop myself. “Alright,” I say, trying not to smile at her. “I get your point.”

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” she says, starting to rise.

“One last thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Is that thing about the disease…about how it spreads, is that true?”

“Yes, it is.”

“And is -“ I shake my head. “Is this really the best way to deal with it? Let people sneak in so they can - kill themselves? And Peter, is he…I don’t know,” I shake my head. “Why didn’t he just get as far away from this place as he could? Why didn’t you?”

My voice cracks on the last bit there. I swallow hard, hold Makado’s gaze.

Makado blows her breath out. “That’s a difficult question,” she says. “I think – okay. I think there are two different ways to deal with trauma.”

I raise an eyebrow. She sees it and laughs. “I’m making a point, I promise. I think that you can either take the hit and get up and not dwell on it, I think you can, you know, accept that something terrible happened to you and accept that your life will have to change because of it, and then make adjustments and move on. The other option is to dwell on it, to let it become you, to let the trauma become who you are. Not that, you know, you shouldn’t acknowledge it at all, that you should pretend it never happened, cause I don’t think that’s healthy either, but I think there’s a middle ground that you have to strike in. And I think I – well, I think I tend towards maybe the upper area of that middle ground. I don’t think Peter’s in the middle ground at all.”

“You think he dwells on it.”

“Yes,” Makado says. “That’s why I came back here, that’s why I started as a supervisor in Security, that’s why I put my time in and when Bruce retired I took his spot as head of the department. Cause I do feel for these people. I really, really do. But I think you can effect more change working from within a place like this,” she says, gesturing at the walls around us, “instead of trying to work at it from the outside. It might not be perfect, it might be deeply flawed, but there’s still a system, and it’s easier to work with it than against it. It’s easier to change it if you’re embedded inside it.”

“But don’t you think,” I say suddenly, just as I think of it, “that if you’re embedded inside it, it might also become embedded inside you?”

“That is some Nietzsche shit that I’m not going to entertain,” she says, grinning at me, but I think that for a moment I can see something in her eye, a ghost lurking there, that might agree with me more than her bluster would suggest.

She reaches into her bag and takes out a smaller plastic bag and tosses it to me. I catch it and look inside; there’s my phone, voice recorder, and camera. “I’ll be back tonight to get you out of here,” she says from the door. “Like I said, I’ll run interference with the Feds. You should be fine. Just don’t come sniffing around again, alright?”

I laugh, trying to mask the sound of my hope dying. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“And you’ll have to log on to the wifi if you want to do anything and it’s pretty closely monitored, so you know, don’t fuck up.”

“I’m picking up what you’re putting down.”

“You’re smelling what I’m stepping in?”

I snort. “What the fuck, who even says –“

“Me, I say that.” She tells me the wi-fi password and reminds me she’ll be back to collect me at ten or so and leaves me to my own devices, the door clicking softly behind her. I look at my phone, look at the distorted reflection of myself glowering back, and then I shake my head lightly, let the planes of my face scatter and refract off the glossy surface.

I spend the next hours getting halfway through Jane Eyre before it’s dark and my stomach is rumbling and Makado comes and hustles me into a tan Desert Storm surplus Humvee and then we’re making our crawling way along the road towards the gate, and I look over at Peter, sitting next to me in the back, and he smiles at me but even though he looks excited, I just give him a little half-hearted grin cause everything is settling into me now, everything is starting to ache, and I can already tell I’m going to need a lot of time to digest what I’ve seen and done the past couple of days, and then of course I’m probably never going to see Peter or Makado again.

But I keep that to myself and we make the ride in silence. I look out the window, watch the weird, industrial shapes of the sedative plant and then the angular block of the administrative building slip by on the other side of the glass, watch the way Peter keeps looking over at Makado and the way Makado occasionally catches the edge of that glance in the mirror and looks away quickly, smiling secretly to herself, the corners of her lips turning up just a little before she smothers it.

The Humvee nudges outside of the gate and the same guard in the same MP helmet is there in the gatehouse, and he does a doubletake when he sees me wave at him after clambering out of the back of the car, and then Makado pops her door open and slips down, managing to look dignified as she does, and he snaps a salute that she returns with an eyeroll. “I’m not in the damn National Guard,” she says, sounding tired, and he puts his hand down sheepishly. Then she summons a rugged grin, and shrugs at him. “At ease,” she tells him. “And you can even go back in and sit down; we won’t be more than a minute.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Always makes me feel old when they call me ‘ma’am,’” she mutters.

Peter puts his hand out to shake and I pull him into a hug which he returns after a moment. “Take care of yourself,” I tell him, and then Makado shakes my hand and I don’t pull her into a hug. “Last chance,” I tell her.

“For what?”

“To hire me for – for whatever you guys are doing.”

She laughs at that one, but quietly. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she tells me in a low voice, and shake my head at her.

“I would never,” I say. I try very hard not to see the bullet puncturing the back of Rey’s head as the words pass my lips but I can’t stop the vision from bubbling up out of some crevice in my mind. I force a smile and she doesn’t comment on it. Her phone buzzes and she draws it from her pocket; I can see her eyes darken as she reads who it is. Peter and I are both giving her a questioning look but she shakes her head.

“I have to take this,” she says. “Back in five.”

We nod and Makado climbs back into the Humvee, giving me one last lingering glance as she does. She knew, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to hide it, that smile was fake as hell. But she doesn’t question it at least, she lets me have my dignity. The door shuts and I can just barely make out her silhouette through the tinted glass, bringing her phone to her ear.

“You doing alright?” Peter asks, and I nod.

“Yeah. It was, you know, a little scary but it seems like everything’s worked out as well as it could.”

“It definitely has,” he agrees.

“Any chance you’ll tell me what she’s got you doing?”

“Not a chance.”

I nod. I could say something biting, something about his guerilla spirit being so easily quashed, but that’d just be pathetic and petty. I feel like something’s dying inside of me but then that’s just being dramatic.

I am a blob of human meat standing here, slowly dying, wondering at what the electricity in my brain means. I smile at Peter, really mean it. “I’m happy for you,” I tell him. He looks at me, trying to judge if I’m serious.

“Yeah?” he asks, and I nod.

“Yeah,” I tell him. “I don’t know what I expected the end of this story to be but this is a good one.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to tell you the rest.”

“Makado did.”

He raises his eyebrows, surprised, looks back at the Humvee. “Well,” he says. “I guess I changed her mind about you.”

“Don’t fuck it up,” I tell him.

“Huh?”

“With her,” I say, cutting my eyes over at the Humvee. “Don’t fuck it up.”

“I don’t –“

I let a little amused gust blow out of my nostrils. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “Just be – be yourself. I know you still love her.”

He looks at me then, really looks at me, and I can see in his eyes that he is reevaluating me, twisting apart the jigsaw puzzle he built of me inside his brain and rearranging it in a different shape. He opens his mouth to say something but before he can the door to the Humvee bangs open and we both jump and Makado hops down, her mouth a grim line, the phone clutched loosely in her hand, her eyes fixed on me. “Change of plans,” she barks. I’ve already got my ears pricked up, but then Makado looks over at Peter, and then back at me. “Are you sure about her, Pete?” she asks him. Then there are two pairs of eyes on me and I feel uncomfortably like I’m a rather bruised and sorry-looking apple being picked over at a supermarket.

Peter says something to her that I can’t hear and then Makado shakes her head. “Fine,” she says. “You’re in,” she calls to me. “We need you.”

“Who was that on the phone?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” she tells me. “This is your one chance. You either turn around and go back to your hotel and forget about this place, or you get in the Humvee, and then you can see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I don’t have time to let you phone a friend about it,” she says. Her eye is boring into me like a laser and I can’t for the life of me tell whether she’s helping me or hurting me.

I look back behind me at the long, dusty walk back to Gumption, and then I turn. “What the hell,” I say, and then Peter is grinning at me and Makado gives me a look that’s supposed to be dangerous, that’s supposed to be a ‘don’t fuck this up’ kind of look, but she still looks a little pleased in spite of herself.

Peter puts his hand out and I grab it and he hauls me back into the Humvee and the gate yawns wide ahead of us, and then we pass through it, and it shuts behind us like a mouth closing, like before me the worst is yet to come.

And yet if I believe that, why can’t I stop myself from grinning? Why can’t I stop my heart from racing like I just won the lottery?

The driver turns the radio on as he rounds the bend and heads along the road with the signpost reading ‘Barracks’ and for an instant, just an instant, I think I hear the very end of We Didn’t Start the Fire, grinding to a long, shuddering, 80s-fade exit.

END OF BOOK 1

Continue with Part 13

Back to Table of Contents

#mystery flesh pit #michael crichton #disaster #acid #amalgam #caving #thriller #alt lit #spilled ink #novel #original writing #horror

24 notes · View notes