Splintered

by Jon McGoran

  “Okay?” she said.

  I nodded, twisting my wrist and flexing my fingers in front of my face, mesmerized by the movement. “It’s pretty cool.”

  “When you need to get out of the suit, you can wiggle your arm free and use your actual fingers to push the release button under the chest plate, or just hold your right arm up, with your fingers extended, and count from five down to one, pinky first and thumb last.”

  We went through opening and closing the suits twice, then I looked at the ground, at the almost comically large handguns at our feet. “I guess we shouldn’t leave those there,” I said quietly. I had been reluctant to carry a lethal weapon before, but it seemed reckless to leave them lying there. The fact that they had almost just been used against us brought home the danger in what we were about to do. The odds were probably not in our favor, and I figured maybe I shouldn’t be so casual about giving any advantage to those we’d be coming up against.

  I reached down with my metal arm and closed my metal fingers around the gun lying on the ground in front of me. The feeling of the gun on my fingertips was convincing, and sobering.

  Claudia raised an eyebrow—more questioning than disapproving—as I fingered the trigger, then clipped the gun into the empty slot on my hip.

  “The dart guns should be our default,” I said quietly.

  Claudia nodded in her suit, and her mechanical hand unclipped her suit’s oversized dart gun and held it up so she could look at the cartridge. “Whoa. Two-hundred-dart capacity.” She turned to me. “We should test them.”

  I unclipped mine, aimed at a tree about twenty yards away, and hit it easily. Claudia fired at one farther away, and hit it, too.

  “Not bad,” she said, then pointed a huge mechanized thumb in the direction of the gaping portal beside us. “Okay, what’s next?”

  She knew the plan as well as I did at that point. She seemed to be saying she had done her part. Now she was following my lead.

  “We go in,” I said.

  “Good,” she said, turning toward the entrance. Then she looked back at me. “And hey, just so you know, these suits aren’t made for running, but the guy in charge of them at my dad’s plant said you can get up to twenty miles an hour with them, easy.”

  I felt a crooked smile creep across my face, even with everything else going on. The thought of running so fast with such artificial support was both appalling and exciting.

  “What?” Claudia asked.

  I shook my head. “Nothing.” The wind gusted again, bringing a momentary barrage of sleet, and my smile fell away as I looked into the darkened opening. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 49

  We stepped through the entrance and into the mine, slowly at first, as our eyes got used to the dim light. I tried not to think about the toxic atmosphere enveloping us. Just inside the entrance, a pair of squat, heavy-looking metal carts with fat tires were parked against the wall. On the wall above them was a small red box with a big red button that had LOCK DOWN printed across it.

  The ground sloped down in front of us, curving to the right, just as Devon’s map said it would. The walls around us were the same kind of exposed rock we’d seen in the chamber, glassy black and vaguely iridescent, with stalactites overhead and stalagmites near the walls, where they hadn’t been cleared. A thin strip of lights ran down the ceiling, casting a dim orange glow that barely reached the floor.

  According to the map, we were at one end of the main branch. At the other end was the main chamber, with the elevators. Based on where OmniCare sat above ground, I estimated it was maybe a mile and a half away. A hundred yards or so in front of us would be the processing units—and inside one of them, the control room with the master lock that Devon had accessed via the vent.

  Hopefully, the fact that the doors opened meant he had made it there okay.

  We took off at a light jog that the exosuits magnified into a sprint. It was unsettling at first, like when you first step onto a moving walkway, but again I quickly got used to it. We passed a few more mine carts, so fast it seemed like they were moving in the opposite direction.

  The suits were surprisingly quiet. They must have weighed hundreds of pounds, but our feet didn’t make more sound than Rex would have running in his socks.

  At the thought of him, maybe up ahead, I sped up even more. Claudia quickly matched my pace.

  We’d only been running for a minute or so when I noticed a rumbling, clacking sound that grew louder as we progressed. A bright spot appeared in the tunnel up ahead. I turned to Claudia and she nodded, having already seen it. I unclipped the dart gun from my hip and held it out of sight behind me. Claudia did the same.

  As we got closer, I could see a second light strip intersecting with the one running down the ceiling. A wash of light came from the right, where another, brighter tunnel intersected the one we were in. Another mine cart was parked just past it. Beyond that, the tunnel seemed to level out.

  We slowed to a walk, moving along the wall. The rumble had grown to a roar. We were thirty feet away when another exoguard stepped out of the other tunnel.

  “Hey,” he called out over the background noise. “You guys figure out what’s up with the doors?” Next to his head was another lockdown button. Hopefully Devon had disabled them, but I didn’t want to find out.

  I raised my hand in greeting, taking a few more steps before I risked taking a shot.

  “Did you find anything?” he said.

  I fired my dart gun and heard Claudia’s fire as well, followed by a single ting as one of the darts hit metal.

  “Hey, what’s the matter with you guys?” he said. In the dark, in the exosuits, he hadn’t yet realized we weren’t his coworkers. Then he did. He clamped one mechanical hand onto his gun while the other one slapped the red lockdown button. Then he went still.

  One of the darts had hit him.

  Claudia stepped up to him, closed her mechanical thumb and forefinger around the control panel on his chest, and crushed it, so he was trapped inside the suit.

  As we peered around the corner, down the adjacent tunnel, the machine sounds doubled in volume. This tunnel was shorter and smaller that the main branch, about ten feet across and roughly thirty feet long. At the other end of it, hopefully, we’d find Devon. But we knew there was another exoguard around, and he was probably down there, too.

  At the end of the hallway were two large doorways, one on the left and a little bit farther, one on the right. As we crept toward them, we saw they were both still open. Meaning the lockdown had failed.

  The closest door had a small sign that said PRIMARY PROCESSING UNIT. We both peered around the edge of the doorway, into a large chamber filled with industrial-scale vats and tanks and grinders, all connected by conveyor belts and ducts and pipes. There was a row of carts, like the one by the entrance, filled with piles of the glassy black rock we’d seen being mined. One of the carts had been raised by a metal arm and was being emptied into a grinder. A pair of massive metal rollers studded with teeth ground the rock into powder. A conveyor dumped the powder into a huge vat connected to a complex tangle of pipes. The din was brutal on our ears.

  Dust hung in the air, and the room was hot. Seven chimeras of different types were working on the floor, their faces covered with black powder and gray dust, except for where their tears or snot or sweat had cleared it away. Up on a big catwalk, three people in coveralls who didn’t appear to be spliced were monitoring equipment. They wore ear protectors and breathing masks. There was no exoguard.

  One of the chimeras looked up at us, and I held up a metal finger in front of my mouth.

  We darted the three technicians. As we waited for the darts to take effect, a few more of the chimeras looked over at us, saw our dart guns, then looked up at the technicians as they collapsed—one, two, three—onto the catwalk.

  On the far side of the room, a huge tank rumbled and groaned. It had two pipes coming out of it. The large one, a couple of feet across, was pumping gray dust i
nto a huge vat set in the floor. The smaller one, maybe four inches across, rattled as a small chunk of shiny silver metal tumbled from the end of it and into a gray box.

  The metal looked just like the yttrium the interviewer had held up while grilling Howard Wells. The box looked just like the ones the exoguards had carried out to the truck the first time we walked past the mine. It even had the orange square surrounding a bold, black Y.

  This was where they were extracting the yttrium from the slag.

  All the chimeras were looking at us now. Their eyes were haunted and wary.

  I held up my finger again, telling them to wait one minute. Then Claudia and I crossed the tunnel to the doorway on the other side, at the very end of the tunnel. A sign next to the door said RECLAMATION PROCESSING UNIT.

  Peering inside, we saw a room much like the primary processing unit, with a maze of ducts and conveyors.

  But there were differences, too, differences so horrifying that if it hadn’t been for the exosuit I would have fallen to my knees.

  CHAPTER 50

  The vat producing the yttrium was vented into a large duct that ran across the ceiling of the chamber and out through a hole in the wall. The duct was buckled and split in a few places, and the broken seams released pale smoke that rose to the ceiling, and a cascade of soft white flakes that settled to the floor. Like snow.

  And instead of glassy black rock, the conveyor belt was carrying a body. A chimera.

  As we looked on, stunned, the body reached the top of the conveyor and fell into the grinder, which fed into a vat marked SOLVENT BATH, and from there into the maze of pipes and tanks at the bottom, and at the top, the duct that vented the snowy flakes to the surface. The conveyor stopped, and down below, the tiny pipe spat two tiny, silvery pellets into a container. Devon’s words came rushing back to me. I probably absorbed thirty bucks worth of yttrium when I was down there.

  Claudia took a step back, looking nauseous, her exosuit trying to compensate for her sudden unsteadiness as the awful truth of that room hit her.

  I felt nauseous, too, but I wasn’t the one who had caught a fake snowflake on my tongue—a flake that was clearly some sort of residue from this horrifying process that dissolved the people these bastards had altered and enslaved and worked to death. And it was all driven by greed. Howard Wells’s insatiable need to extract the last little bit of precious yttrium from these miners’ broken bodies.

  As Claudia stumbled back into the corridor, clawing at her face plate, I spotted an open door on the far side of the room with UTILITY ROOM written across it. Through it I could see a bank of industrial-type electrical panels.

  I turned to look at Claudia, standing out in the hallway with the top half of her exosuit and her breathing apparatus thrown open as she vomited onto the floor. Tears streamed down her red, blotchy face. I wanted to comfort her, to pat her back and hold her hair out of the way and tell her everything was going to be okay.

  But when I turned back inside, I saw the other exoguard emerging from the utility room.

  “Man, I hate coming in here,” he said. “Place gives me the creeps. And it’s gonna freak them mixies out, having that door open. We’re going to have a hell of a time getting them settled down.”

  In the exosuit and the breathing mask and the coveralls, he hadn’t realized I wasn’t his partner.

  “Any word on that?” he said, as he reached into the cart and lifted out a body. “The doors?” He dropped the body onto the conveyor, which automatically started moving again.

  In that moment, there was a part of me that wished the gun in my hand was a real one. Part of me thought that if ever there was a time to shoot to kill, it was now. If ever there was someone who deserved to die, it was him.

  But I was holding my dart gun, and for the most part, I was glad. I was raising the dart gun when his head turned and he looked at me. “One of the master breakers is busted off in there,” he said. “You think that could be it?”

  Our eyes locked for a moment, and just as I squeezed the trigger, he ducked away and whirled, crazy fast, pointed his gun, and fired.

  Sharp pain ran up my arm. For a second I thought I’d actually been shot, but the suit had absorbed the worst of the impact—that and the dart gun I’d been holding, which was now shattered and useless.

  The exoguard was closing on me, his face snarling behind his breathing mask. I fumbled for my gun, but he smacked it out of my clip, then he grabbed me by the arm and threw me against the exposed rock wall. Again, the suit absorbed the bulk of the impact, but there was plenty left over to jar my body and leave my brain spinning in my skull.

  As he closed on me again, I saw that he still had his gun.

  He was just a few steps away from me, and I was trying to climb back onto my artificial feet, when a loud clatter erupted from the utility room behind him.

  The duct work running across the ceiling had collapsed and smashed onto the floor. Emerging from the jumble of pieces was what looked at first like a ghost: paper-white from head to toe except for a dozen vivid red trickles from the nicks and cuts that covered him, and with eyes almost as red from rage and tears.

  It was Devon.

  He jumped out of the pile of broken ductwork and charged, straight at the exoguard. He had a wrench in his hand and he threw it. The wrench bounced harmlessly off the metal frame of the exoguard’s arm, but it drew his attention from me. He swung his gun in Devon’s direction.

  I still hadn’t managed to get back on my feet, but I kicked out my foot and connected with the exposed side of his thigh.

  The exoguard screamed and his shot went high. The bullet pierced a set of pipes and conduits running along the ceiling, releasing jets of hot gas and a shower of sparks that cascaded down onto the floor.

  The exoguard pivoted on his good leg, so he was standing right over me. He pointed his gun at my face, but before he could pull the trigger, the rage melted from his face and his body went still.

  Claudia stood in the doorway leading to the corridor, dart gun in her hand. Even through her breathing mask I could see that her face was almost as white as Devon’s.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She nodded, but didn’t seem ready to talk.

  Devon shook with a deep and violent cough. “Glad you made it,” he said. Then he ran to the wall and hit a switch that shut down the conveyor.

  I had already been impressed with his willingness to come back down here, but I hadn’t fully appreciated it. Not even close. I knew he’d been returning to confront a nightmare, but it was a nightmare infinitely worse than I had imagined.

  “Devon, I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  He shook his head, wiping the ashy flakes off his face, brushing it off his clothes. “It’s okay. You couldn’t have known. I didn’t tell you….I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Can we get away from here?” Claudia asked, her voice hoarse.

  Devon sniffed the air, and looked back at the gases jetting from the pipes behind us. I couldn’t smell anything other than the canned air I was breathing. “Yeah, we better get going quick,” he said, pointing at one of the ruptured pipes. “That stuff is incredibly flammable.”

  Before I had a chance to ask if anything could even burn down there, in that atmosphere, he pointed at the ruptured pipe next to it and said, “And that’s pure oxygen.”

  We turned to go, but stopped to look at the guy in the exosuit, still standing there with his gun aimed where my head had been. His name tag said SEBASTIAN.

  “Sebastian,” Devon said, looking up at him with disgust. “He’s a mean, sick bastard.”

  Claudia wiggled her arm out of her exosuit and reached her bare hand under Sebastian’s chest plate. The exosuit and breathing mask sprang open, and Sebastian crumpled to the ground. His leg was bent where I had kicked him, where it should have been straight.

  “Do you know how to work these exosuits?” Claudia asked Devon. Her voice was flat and quiet.

  “I’ve seen
them enough.” Then he looked down at Sebastian. “If you take him out of there, he’ll suffocate.”

  Claudia shrugged. “You’re going to need that suit to keep up with us. Besides, he”—she spread her arms to indicate the ghoulish scene behind her—“was doing this.”

  Devon nodded, thinking. “The breather comes off,” he said. “I don’t need it.”

  “You’ll be more conspicuous without it.”

  Devon thought another moment, “Give him the mask.”

  Claudia shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

  She unhooked the breathing apparatus and handed it to Devon. He placed it over Sebastian’s head. Then he said, “Okay, show me how this works.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Claudia’s color returned as she gave Devon an abbreviated version of the exosuit tutorial she had given me. When we turned to leave, the chimeras from the main processing unit were standing in the doorway watching us.

  “Who are you?” demanded one of them, a woman with intense eyes and a long neck, faintly patterned like a giraffe.

  “I’m Devon. One of you,” Devon said. “I got out, and I came back.”

  “You came back?” said one of the others, not quite believing, and maybe not approving.

  Devon smiled. “Crazy, right?” He gestured at Claudia and me. “These are some friends of mine. We’ve got a plan to get you out of here.”

  “You are crazy,” said the woman with the giraffe splice. “There’s no place for us out there.”

  Devon nodded. “There is. Not far. It’s an abandoned town that’s poisoned by the gases seeping up from this mine.”

  “Centre Hollow?” said a voice from out in the tunnel. “I’ve heard of that.”

  “I’ve been living there the last couple months,” Devon said. “We’re going to get you out, and we’re going to shut this place down.”

  They regarded him for a moment and looked us up and down in our exosuits. Then the woman shrugged and said, “Okay, then. How can we help?”