by Adam Vine
Zaea shrugged. “I used the facility’s Link. Every resident is given a private access node in their biosphere the day they’re admitted to the program. Or, they used to be given one… obviously, not anymore. I simply logged in with my student ID number. As I said before, the old systems are still running.”
Barn Owl gesticulated a slow, silent clap, then held out her hand and said, “Lead the way.”
We moved through the belly of the tower with Zaea taking point, our weapons drawn, but relaxed. There was no one in the building, at least the part that was above ground. The place was much larger than it appeared from the outside, full of cavernous, twisting hallways that anyone unfamiliar with the floor plan would’ve easily gotten lost in, but Zaea knew the way, and soon the four of us stood gathered around the black, empty vessel of the basement stairs awaiting Barn Owl’s command.
“Mouse is the only one of us who knows what’s down there. I’ll take point. Mouse, you follow me, and then Leech. Gator you take rear guard.”
Gator’s unintelligible complaints resounded softly behind me for the whole descent. Zaea stopped us at the landing of the first basement level to peer through the barred porthole in the stairwell door. She shook her head for us to keep moving. “This used to be the armory. Looks like they’re using it for cold storage.”
“Storage of what?” Barn Owl said. Then she sniffed the air and said, hanging her head in solemn rage, “Oh. Goddammit.”
The sweet, biting smell of rot hit me, too, and I understood. This is where they keep the corpses. The ground is too hard to bury them. They probably burn them, which means they either have a set day of the month (or… the week?), when they burn them all at once.
Gator made the sign of the Wanderer. “Glory be to the heroes…”
“May their bravery carry them up the Spiral,” Barn Owl said softly. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
Zaea stopped again at the landing of the third basement level, where harsh, flickering light fell in striped shadows through a barred iron door. Zaea stood on her tiptoes to get a glimpse, careful to lean into the light so she wouldn’t be seen. “Have a look,” she said, popping down.
Barn Owl went first, pressing a stealthy eye to the bars. Her scowl deepened. “They’re there.” She counted quickly in her head. “Thirty-two prisoners. Our people. I only see four cells. Snowmen got ‘em packed into cages like animals.”
Gator scratched his beard with the edge of his great sword, flinching when he accidentally cut himself. “How many Frosties?”
“One,” Barn Owl said. “Leech, you wanna look?”
I took my turn at the window. A single Snowman strolled lazily up and down the hall, tapping the cell doors with his bone club. There were two doors on each side of the hall. Ragged, human arms spilled through the bars, retracting when the Snowman’s club swatted at them, then extending again once he’d passed.
They’re waiting for food? No. They’re hanging their arms out because they have nowhere else to put them.
The kidnapped Burrowers were being held eight to a cell, and the cells weren’t much bigger than a small bedroom. Their faces were grimy and sunken, their eyes full of pleading and madness. The smell of unwashed bodies, human waste, and general despair cloyed in the air, as pungent as the rankness of death had been on the floor above.
I stepped away from the window so Gator could take his turn. He scowled. Barn Owl waved for us to continue down the stairs.
“We’re not going to free them?” I whispered once we were out of earshot of the guards.
Barn Owl shook her head no. “We’ll work our way from the bottom up. Easier that way. We’re just getting the lay of the ice, kid.”
But there was only one other floor to clear. The levels below B4 were flooded, the stairwell filled with dark, stagnant water.
“Must have seeped in from Lake Bagra once regular maintenance stopped being done on the lowest floors,” Zaea said. “Levels B5 and B6 used to be the library and fitness center.”
We huddled next to the stinking, fetid pool and prepared our weapons while Barn Owl surveyed the hallway beyond the barred door of the landing. When she was done, we each looked. I counted two Snowmen, both alphas; towering, muscle-bound abominations with faces full of black, wide-open eyes, each leaning against the wall opposite the other and cleaning the filth from his teeth with a bone dagger.
This floor didn’t appear to be a prison, but some kind of infirmary, with brighter lighting and solid metal doors with thick glass windows rather than bars. The windows were too small and far away to see inside, but a sick feeling gnawed at my gut. I suddenly didn’t want to find out what lay beyond those doors.
Barn Owl gave her signal and Zaea cut the lock off the stairwell door. We raised our weapons and charged.
We hit the Snowmen hard. We’d already covered half the ground before they knew we were there. The nearest rushed Gator with his axe. Gator broke the bone weapon with a horizontal slash of his huge Wyvernwood blade, a single stroke that split the creature and its weapon in two. Barn Owl took the other one out with a feint and a thrust, plunging her spear through its bladder. She pinned the dying creature to the floor with her boot as she pried it free, pressure-washing the tiles in a steaming deluge of red.
Four more Snowmen heard the racket and came running, rounding the corner of the hall in time to see their comrades fall. Barn Owl and Gator barely had time to take defensive stances to deflect the oncoming rain of blows, axes and spear points filling the space between the walls with cacophonous bladesong.
A harsh screech rose above the din. The ghost’s black beam split free of Zaea’s palm, slamming through the open mouth of the Snowman attacking Barn Owl. The Snowman’s snarling face stilled in an instant. Gnashing jaws fell slack, and a sputtering croak rattled in the creature’s throat. Its death throes were short and violent. The ghost returned to her palm, and Zaea cried out in painful triumph.
I watched these events unfold in a matter of seconds, my knuckles wound white around Metatron’s hilt. Yet even in that short, infinitesimal period, another Snowman had closed the distance toward me and lunged in attack. The razored edge of his axe head flew at my carotid artery, and my instincts fired. I cast Metatron into a high block, then down with the full force of a killing head cut. The Snowman’s axe slid off the red tongue of my blade with a shower of sparks, a crimson canyon opening in his skullcap as Wyvernwood met pale, mottled flesh. The dead Snowman crashed into my legs, his feet still moving with the momentum of his charge.
Several thoughts occurred to me in the uncanny valley of that moment. The first was that I hadn’t fought as Len. I had used the power of Len’s muscles and the tree limb reach of his arm, but the instincts I employed to make that block and cut had been mine. Whatever share of skills and knowledge that remained in Len’s body or brain, which I was now able to draw from, I must also have imprinted equally on him, though he would never live again to use them.
As I would learn many times over the millennia to come, you cannot be touched by someone else - in your world or any other - without you also touching them.
The second thought I had was about the laboratory. Whatever sort of “research” was going on here, the Snowmen were only meant to serve as watchdogs, a crude sort of alarm system to warn against intruders. Whoever was running the place and performing the actual experiments, the doctors or scientists or whoever, had to be fully human.
Anyone still on this level would have heard the fracas and had time to escape. The possibility of an endless stream of Snowmen flowing down the stairs within mere minutes, cutting off our only exit out of this place, instantly removed the fog of combat from my mind.
“Get a taste for that smell, kid. There’s going to be a lot more of it,” Barn Owl said.
Gator wiped the blood from his great sword off on one of the dead Snowmen’s fur tunics. “Aye. That was a decent cut, though, cousin. Shouldn’t we be impressed? The boy’s got a flashy counterstrike. Would’ve made old Vojciek proud.
Red’s a good color on him.”
“Not now.” Barn Owl crept along the wall and peeked into the adjoining corridor. Seeing nothing of interest, her posture eased and she patted Gator on the shoulder. “Here’s hoping we didn’t just bring the roof down on our heads. We ready to see who’s hiding in there? You know we didn’t just clear this entire floor.”
She motioned to the door with the sign reading Surgery. The other door was labeled Recovery, but a newer plaque next to the door read Prion Immunity Research.
What the hell…? I thought.
“Guess that means I’m taking point,” Gator said, heaving the crimson pylon of his greatsword up into a high guard and slamming his heel into the door.
THE INFIRMARY
WE RAN into a nimbus of hard white light, ready to cut apart anyone or anything waiting for us. But the ambush never came. My eyes adjusted and a large, brightly-lit basement with ceilings of vaulted, mirror-smooth stone took shape. An array of freestanding stage lights cast looming half-moon shadows in the high arches. Rows upon rows of stone operating tables stood beneath them, riddled with nebulas of old blood the color of dead autumn leaves.
This was the overflow room, which would only have been used once the main infirmary was full. It was now being used for medical storage.
Glass jars holding body parts suspended in some clear fluid I could only guess was brine crowded the shelves lining the walls: hearts, bladders, stomachs, diaphragms, vocal chords, eyes, and brains. Except, they looked wrong.
I had never studied anatomy, but I remembered enough high school biology that I could tell these weren’t human organs. The eyes were too small; beady, pale little marbles, like the eyes of a wolf. The hearts and bladders were grossly oversized, like those of a cow. The diaphragms and vocal chords were fluted, the stomachs triple-chambered. The brains had about ten to twenty percent less volume than the brain of an adult human, like the brain of a child. The largest vats held specimens of dense, rubbery membrane, all in various stages of growth or decay. I realized with a bubble of rising vomit in my throat that this last, strangely familiar organ was the inner husk of a Snowman.
All of them were. These jars contained the Snowmen’s vital organs, or at least the ones that differed significantly from those of human beings. I had known the Snowmen weren’t fully human, but witnessing the actual, biological differences infected me with indescribable unease.
There were other objects on the shelves, too; preserved fetuses in various stages of gestation, rabbits, wolves, and a strange, white-haired ape that looked similar to a chimpanzee. There were vials, drums, and kegs of sedatives, cleansers, and preservatives, trays of unused scalpels, speculums, bone saws, and clamps; and spools upon endless spools of surgical thread and medical tape.
“Adaptation,” I said to no one in particular.
Zaea raised an eyebrow at me. “What are you talking about?” she said.
“These all show adaptations meant to help an organism survive in an extremely cold climate. The big heart is to pump more blood to the extremities. The three stomachs are to better digest cold, raw meat. The fluted vocal chords are to produce high-pitched sounds for optimal communication during a blizzard. That oversized bag of a bladder is to hold large volumes of superheated urine…”
I shuddered, remembering the Snowman I’d watched cannibalize the frozen body of a child outside the Night City.
Barn Owl had been listening to our conversation from the other side of the room. She came over to join us.
“The Snowmen… they’re not some other, alternate species, are they?” I said. “They’re not some product of divergent evolution, not some distant, biological cousin of us? They are us. Except someone engineered them to be different, so they could survive up on the Surface. Someone made them.”
“Pretty keen, Leech,” Barn Owl said. She didn’t sound impressed at all, only distant, and a little sad.
Zaea folded her arms and shivered.
An anguished moan echoed from behind the door to the infirmary proper. It was human.
Barn Owl, Gator, Zaea and I exchanged a round of nervous glances, then Barn Owl turned and marched toward the source of the noise. The rest of us followed her through the swinging double doors of the infirmary proper.
I can’t say I was excited to see what we all knew awaited us beyond those doors, but the reality was a thousand times worse than what I had imagined.
Gator whined.
Barn Owl stuttered, “No, no, no, no…”
Zaea hid her mouth inside the crook of her arm.
I fought back my vomit, so I wouldn’t disrespect the still-living, fully vivisected woman lying on the operating table in the center of the infirmary.
THE INFIRMARY
THE SAVAGE GLOW of the spotlights spared the poor woman no secrets, on the outside or in. Her arms and legs were held in place by thick leather straps; the clean, bloodless flaps of skin where her torso had been opened from clavicle to groin carefully secured by long steel pins.
She didn’t struggle - not that she could have, if she had wanted to – the woman on the table only lolled her head toward us so she could see who had come in. Her eyes fluttered weakly. The quiet, muttering sounds that came from her lips weren’t actual words, but there was a spark of recognition in her gaze. Though heavily sedated, she was aware enough to know we were there.
I admit that I looked away. But in the madness of that moment, as the potential for absolute cruelty that we human beings are truly capable of dawned on me for the first time, I thought that this woman deserved more than my weakness. I faced my fear and opened my eyes.
Some of her parts had been replaced. The new Snowman parts appeared similar to the organs I’d seen in the specimen room, but some were better, more streamlined. They’d been grafted in. The machines that kept her alive gave constant measurements of how the grafts were taking. Some scrolled seemingly infinite strings of symbols that I thought could be some kind of real-time genome mapping.
Testing to see how the new models work, I thought. They made her into a prototype.
Barn Owl was the first of us to speak. “Help me get the straps,” she told Gator and I. “Gently.”
Gator, Barn Owl, and I carefully undid the leather restraints from the woman’s wrists and ankles. Once they were off, Barn Owl knelt by the operating table and cleared the greasy, sweaty tendrils of hair from the woman’s forehead. Then, she started to pray.
“Dan,” Zaea whispered. Her voice was a tiny, high-pitched whine. “I’m scared.”
“I don’t think we should stay here,” I said. “Whoever did this left in a hurry. They’re going to come back.”
Barn Owl must’ve heard me, because she rose and said, “I for one ain’t going to leave her like this. This is something I gotta do, and I don’t give a damn what you people think about it.” Barn Owl drew her dagger and slowly placed it on the woman’s throat.
“Wait,” Zaea said.
Barn Owl paused.
“I… I… It has to be me. Please,” Zaea said. Her face was slick with sweat. I had never seen her so worked up before.
Barn Owl nodded and stepped away. Zaea took her place, gently setting her palm on the dying woman’s forehead.
There was a hiss and a soft drip, drip, drip, beneath the operating table. The woman’s gaze slowed, then stilled. Her heart stopped beating in the open cavity of her chest. The machines pumping her blood and lungs began blinking silent alarms as she flat-lined. The woman herself was gone, her suffering ended by the ghost’s eternal kiss.
Zaea leaned on the edge of the table and hung her head. Her breath steamed in the stark, sterile light. She grabbed her temples and screamed.
“GYAAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“Hey, hey! Shut the hell up!” Barn Owl moved to grab Zaea.
Zaea hissed and thrashed, trying to break free of the taller woman’s grasp. The ghost fired, its blade carving a dusty line from the ceiling and wall, finally coming to rest in Ba
rn Owl’s collarbone. Barn Owl gasped and doubled over.
Zaea’s eyes went wide. The ghost evaporated back into her trembling hand. “I’m sorry… oh, god… I’m sorry…” Zaea said.
Barn Owl fell to one knee and clutched her ruined shoulder, breathing the pain out slow. Blood bubbled through her fingers. Gator hastily cut a strip from his tunic and stuffed it over the wound. “Knew… that bitch… was crazy…” Barn Owl said through hard-clenched teeth.
“It’s just a scratch. Try not to talk,” Gator said.
“Why shouldn’t I talk, dumbass? She didn’t hit my neck,” Barn Owl said. Gator cut more strips from his shirt, and Barn Owl let out a stifled shriek as he tied off the slapdash bandage. “Ow. Wanderer’s fucking wisdom. Who taught you how to do first aid?”
“You did, sir,” Gator said.
Barn Owl rose. “We need to get outta here. Now. You. Wait.” She pointed to Zaea. “Accidents happen. I take full responsibility for letting you in the field without proper training. You’ll face some punishment when we get back to the Burrow, most likely corporeal. I’ll do what I can to make sure it isn’t harsh. But this will be your last mission with the Vermin. You understand?”
Zaea nodded.
Barn Owl stumbled, found her feet, and the four of us left that starched white cloister of death, returning to the tall shadows of the specimen room, where Zaea burst into tears.
“Dan, I don’t know why I did that. I can control it... you know I can. I just… I didn’t mean to hurt her. It’s these memories. Why do I have them? They’re not mine. They’re not…”
Zaea’s plea was cut short by a sound in the hall outside.
The four of us froze. There was someone out there who wasn’t a Snowman, who moved slow, whose footsteps were silent, but who did nothing to hide the telltale clink, clink, clink of a heavy chain dragging on the floor. They’d heard Zaea’s screams. We were done.