Exoteric

by Philip Hemplow

  Once in position near the resort entrance, he left the engine running and made his ungainly descent from the cab. He felt almost giddy at the prospect of getting away from the Zubgorai, away from Molchanov and the dead, back to where things made sense. It was failure, but it didn’t feel bad. Russia had failed him long before he failed her.

  The other two were waiting in the lobby, suitcases at their feet. Galina looked queasy, sitting on the stairs, elbows on knees, staring at the cigarette burning down between her fingers. Sophia stood nearby, fiddling with the zipper of her jacket, looking nervous and distracted. Arkady gave her a reassuring nod and was rewarded with a feeble smile.

  “We need to get your brother, Doctor,” he said to Galina, unbuttoning his coat. “Do you want to come, or do you want to wait here?”

  Her lip curled in disdain. “I’ll come,” she said, dropping the cigarette to the tiled floor and grinding out its fire with her shoe. “We need to collect his notes and computers as well. I’m not leaving without proof of what he accomplished—and of what happened to him here. The world will remember his name, Colonel, I promise you that.”

  Arkady took a respectful step back as she stood up, and allowed her to lead the way towards the gymnasium and clinic. As the door swung closed on the tiled, echoing lobby, an oppressive silence pressed in upon them, the carpets and acoustic panelling of the resort’s claustrophobic corridors muffling their footsteps. Arkady’s mouth was dry, his neck stiff with tension. When he blinked, he saw Votyakov’s face, roaring with fury and pain, the moment before he pulled the trigger. When he slept, he knew, the torturer would join the roster of dead Chechens and bomb victims who periodically invaded his dreams.

  The two women pushed through the gymnasium doors ahead of him. Zapad’s cryostat stood waiting for them, a menhir-like shadow, its readouts blinking in the gloom. It had been returned to its space in the middle of the room, surrounded by haphazardly-stacked crates of supplies and anonymous humps of exercise equipment. Arkady ran his finger down one row of light switches, dispelling the deepest shadows and bringing half the overhead fluorescents to buzzing, flickering life.

  Shoes squeaked on the polished wooden floor as the trio approached the towering, silver cylinder. It still sat on the motorised porter’s-trolley, ready to be moved. Arkady hoped the truck he’d selected had a loading ramp though, or he couldn’t imagine how they would ever get it on board.

  The two women stopped walking some ten feet from the tank, waiting for him to catch up, momentarily uncertain. As he reached them, a loud clattering noise from somewhere off in the shadows made all of them jump. Arkady span on his heel, peering into the shadows for the source of the disturbance. It had been the sound of something falling to the floor, but the way it echoed around the cavernous gym made it impossible to pinpoint its origin. Whatever it was, it had occurred somewhere out of sight. Was Molchanov in there with them, perhaps concealed behind the exercise equipment and supply crates? Arkady was taking no chances. He drew the PSM from his pocket and checked there was a round in its chamber.

  Without instruction, the two women moved closer to him, instinctively forming a triangle, back-to-back, watching every direction.

  “Something’s wrong,” said Sophia, her voice rising in panic. “We should get out!”

  “We’re not leaving without my brother!”

  “Quiet, both of you!” Arkady strained his senses, looking and listening for any further sign of movement.

  There was nothing to see, and nothing but the rapid pounding of pulsatile tinnitus to hear. There was a smell though: a sickly, putrefactive stench now creeping in at his nostrils, threatening to make him gag. It was a smell he remembered from Chechnya and Georgia, so familiar that for a second he wondered if was imagining it. But, no, he heard Sophia sniffing the air as well. It wasn’t his imagination. It was the distinctive odour of carrion.

  “Oh, my God!”

  Galina’s shocked exclamation prompted him to turn round. She was staring at the cryostat, mouth open, one trembling hand raised and pointing.

  “What is it?” asked Sophia, hurrying to her side.

  “Listen!”

  This time they all heard it: three slow, hollow knocks, faint but unmistakable, like knuckles on a door.

  “Is—is that—”

  “Impossible!”

  Three more knocks, louder this time, but more deliberate. Now there was no mistaking the source: they were coming from the cryostat. Arkady wanted to believe it was a water hammer in some pipe, or the sound of metal adjusting to a change in temperature, but knew it wasn’t. It was purposeful. It was a signal.

  “It can’t be! He can’t still be alive, can he?” gulped Sophia, her voice faltering.

  “We’ve got to get him out!” said Galina, shaking her head, all colour drained from her face.

  Still, none of them moved. Arkady had no doubt the man they’d put in the cryostat had been dead. On the Zubgorai, though, death had become a nebulous and tractable condition, its parameters mutable, its definition subject to negotiation.

  He inched to his right, ready to raise the pistol if anything moved, trying to see around the body of the cryostat, in case Molchanov lurked on the far side. The hammering resumed and became a continuous, urgent, double-fisted drumming. The cloying, gangrenous reek of putrescine was growing stronger. From somewhere away to Arkady’s right came a splattering noise, as if something wet and heavy had slopped onto the floor. He turned his head that way in time to see a dust sheet twitch. There was someone under it. Swivelling on his heel to face it, he took aim with the gun.

  “It’s an ambush!”

  His words emerged as a husky croak. He took a step backwards, closer to the two women, keeping his eyes fixed on the dust-cover, which looked to be draped over some kind of weight bench and was now moving again.

  “We need to get out, now. We’ll come back for that,” he added, nodding in the direction of the cryostat, anticipating Galina’s objections.

  “Oh no, we won’t!” replied the doctor, fervently. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here!”

  “Yes. You all must leave—though not without your passengers!”

  The three of them turned their heads as one.

  Molchanov stood framed in the gymnasium’s entrance, holding the double doors open with the palms of his hands. He was naked, hospital gown discarded, blue veins and tattooed medical instructions standing out against ivory skin. Streaks of dried faeces stained his thighs. His face wore an expression of grinning malevolence, eyes narrowed, teeth bared.

  Arkady turned the gun towards him, drawing a bead on the purple scar running down his chest, and the looted heart behind it. He heard shuffling somewhere off in the shadows, but kept his eyes fixed on Molchanov.

  “We are too many now,” continued the oligarch. “The eternal gaoler will find these vessels and drain them. We must be allowed to live! Surrender now, and let us enter you! Be our salvation! Be our anchor! Be our meat!”

  An ear-piercing scream rent the air, startling Arkady, who almost pulled the trigger as he flinched. He ducked and turned as Sophia fell to her knees behind him, cringing and pointing at the hulking figure now rising into view from behind one of the lumps of equipment.

  It was Votyakov, bloodless and pale, still wearing the gore-soaked clothes in which he’d died. The ragged, red hole where his nose should have been was fringed with chunks of pink cartilage and orange dental pulp. His lower jaw gaped open, resting on his chest in a permanent, silent scream. One eye was half closed; the other had ruptured when Arkady’s bullet shattered its orbit, nothing left there now but a congealed mess of blood and vitreous.

  He took a lumbering, unsteady step towards them, trouser leg flapping where Galina’s robot had slashed it open. Still on her knees, Sophia took cover behind Arkady, hanging onto his coat with both hands, the air still humming with the echo of her shriek.

  “Shoot him! Please, please, shoot him! Don’t let him come near us!”

 
Galina, too, looked panic-stricken, backing up until she was behind him as well, shaking her head in denial and muttering under her breath. Votyakov took another halting step. Sophia’s tugging at his coat made it impossible for Arkady to take a steady aim. Should he fire at Votyakov, or at Molchanov? Or at—dear God—or at the third monstrosity now crawling into the light? He swivelled again, pitching Sophia onto her backside, so he could confront the new threat.

  The dust-cover he’d seen twitching had been raised, and from beneath it crept a nightmarish mass of twitching decomposition. The air, already pungent, became unbreathable with the stink of the thing, and when she saw it, Sophia’s screams became uncontrollable and unending.

  It was the test subject: the addict’s cadaver, in the last stages of decay. Clear, glistening slime seeped from fissures in the boy’s blackened, ice-burned flesh. Loops of rancid intestine spilled from a rip in his abdomen. A shrivelled tongue lolled from the debridement wound in his cheek. It was struggling like an overturned tortoise, pushing itself towards them with its one intact arm and leg, smearing the floor with grease and putridity.

  Galina retreated, retching, as the slithering abomination swiped at the air in front of her, missing her leg and collapsing on its back. Grabbing Sophia’s arm, the doctor dragged the screaming girl away too—but there was nowhere for them to go. Votyakov was one side of them and the festering, black golem the other. Molchanov barred the room’s only exit, and the air still reverberated to relentless thumping from the cryostat. They were surrounded.

  Arkady turned from one target to the next, paralysed by indecision, unable to think. His mind was swamped by horror, beset by fresh atrocities wherever he looked: the fine spray of mucus jetting from the chest of that crawling, dripping carcass with every beat of its pig’s heart; the twitches of exposed muscle fibre in the centre of Votyakov’s face; Sophia’s panic-stricken features, contorted by terror as she screamed, a tribal alarm call ringing from the most primitive depths of her brain. Galina was saying something to him, her lips were moving; he couldn’t hear her. Wait—yes he could.

  “Shoot him! Fucking shoot him!”

  His paralysis suddenly lifted. He turned his head, raised his gun arm like a duellist, and fired at Molchanov three times in rapid succession. The oligarch ducked and retreated into the corridor, pursued by plaster chips and flying splinters. Once in cover, he peered around the door’s edge, a manic, delighted grin on his face.

  Arkady turned and emptied the rest of his clip into Votyakov. The lumbering hulk was too close to miss, and all four bullets passed clean through his upper chest, their cumulative impact making him stagger. The air rang with a succession of vicious, zipping ricochets as the steel slugs slalomed around the gym’s farthest corner.

  Dark, jellified blood began pulsing from the holes in Votyakov’s torso, and he sank to one knee as if winded. Arkady ejected the spent magazine from his pistol and took the spare from his pocket, sliding it home and chambering the next round with practised, unhurried efficiency. His training and muscle memory had taken over, shouldering fear and confusion aside. This was just killing; and he knew how to kill.

  The horror on the floor lunged again, and succeeded in fastening its sloughing fingers around Sophia’s foot. She kicked and stamped as it turned itself over and began dragging its way up her leg. Arkady tried to line up an unobstructed shot, but her thrashing made it impossible.

  The motorised trolley under the cryostat buzzed and jerked as Galina grabbed its control yoke, forcing it around until she was behind it, aiming it straight at the trailing leg of the abomination crawling on the floor. She leaned around the cylinder’s bulk, shaking hair away from her face, and shouted at Arkady.

  “Get out of the way!”

  Arkady took a swift step backwards as she drove the cart and its shuddering cargo directly towards the charnel monstrosity. He had time to stoop and grab Sophia’s bicep as the doctor activated the trolley’s tilt-plate and, with a strained, mechanical whine, the towering, silver cylinder began leaning towards them.

  Sophia let out a howl of revulsion. Her heel had punched clean through the devastated flesh below the corpse-thing’s ribs, plunging her foot into a morass of corroding viscera. Arkady dropped to one knee, placed his own foot on the creature’s shoulder, and tried to push it away from her. The cryostat’s shadow fell across them as it approached the tipping point, its occupant’s frenzied drumming uninterrupted. Sophia was pulling herself free; the ghoul was ravening, drenching them with unspeakable, septic exudations; the cryostat was wobbling, was slipping, was falling—

  Arkady lunged backwards, breaking the monstrosity’s grasp, pulling Sophia’s arm and dragging her free as the giant cylinder slammed down. It landed with a crash that shook the floor and made the rafters ring. Bone and wood splintered as the dead thing’s torso was crushed beneath it, floorboards snapping like twigs.

  In the shock and deafened silence that followed, time seemed to slow to a nightmare’s crawl. The cryostat rolled a few inches, then fell back. The writhing, deliquescent corpse pinned beneath it twitched and stretched, its one good arm roaming after Sophia, groping at the air. Galina flung the control yoke away with a shout of triumph.

  Sophia scrambled to her feet too quickly, and went careening into a pile of military-surplus shipping crates. Votyakov, too, was rising again, swaying like a drunk, arms outstretched to steady himself. Arkady pointed the pistol and shot him again, once through the clavicle, and again, through the top of his stooped head. The Ogre froze, then he, too, crashed like a felled oak to the ground.

  Arkady turned just in time to see Molchanov bolt, the patter of his feet receding as he fled down the hallway, back towards the medical clinic. He considered pursuit, but decided against it. He didn’t want to leave the unarmed women alone, and escape was the priority. Let the devil take Molchanov.

  Sophia lay quivering on the floor, staring at the undead thing still trying to reach her, transfixed by horror. There was no more noise from the cryostat, and Votyakov lay still. Wreaths of gun smoke drifted on the air, adding spice to the foetor of blood and decay.

  Galina was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating, fists clenched, ready for further battle as she surveyed the shattered cadavers at her feet. There was a wildness in her eyes when they met Arkady’s, but it dissipated as he held her gaze.

  “Help her,” said Arkady with a tilt of his head towards Sophia. His voice sounded tremulous and pathetic after the cacophony of action, but the doctor took a deep, steadying breath, and nodded her assent.

  Arkady went ahead of them to the door, and looked warily up and down the corridor. There was no sign of Molchanov.

  “Come on,” he hissed, anxious to be gone. “Quickly!”

  Galina just grunted. She had her arm around Sophia’s shoulders and was shuffling her towards the door. The youngster staggered, stiff-legged, and her face had the same glazed, stunned expression Arkady had seen on bombed civilians and shell-shocked recruits, still living out an instant of ultimate terror.

  He stepped into the corridor ahead of them and planted his feet, facing the direction Molchanov had fled, ready to raise his gun and shoot should he reappear.

  “Go,” he called to Galina. “Get her to the truck. I’ll be behind you.”

  “You’re not going after him,” cautioned the doctor as she led Sophia out of the gym. “Leave that bastard thing here to rot, with the others.”

  “I’m not going after him,” agreed Arkady. “Press the horn when you’re in the vehicle, and I’ll be straight out.”

  He waited until they’d reached the lobby before abandoning his stance and heading for the kitchen. Escaping the Zubgorai was still foremost on his mind, but eliminating as much evidence of what had transpired as possible was nevertheless essential—and the most efficient way Arkady knew to destroy evidence, was arson. The facility’s owners would probably be glad to write the place off against their insurance, or so he told himself as he stacked bags of flour and sugar, tea
towels, plastic bottles of cooking oil, and rolls of kitchen paper on the stove. If not, Sophia Molchanov would just have to buy the site off them. He imagined she would agree readily enough, if it meant putting events there fully behind her.

  There came the braying of the truck’s horn, two short, impatient blasts. Arkady wedged both doors to the kitchen open, and lit the smallest of the stove’s gas rings.

  An anguished, inhuman scream from the direction of the clinic made him stiffen and freeze, his mouth instantly drying, heart beginning to race. The noise keened and quavered, then plummeted through the octaves to become a persistent, baritone roar.

  “It comes!” A medley of voices bellowed the words, and Arkady couldn’t tell whether they came from the clinic or the inside of his head. “The black vortex opens!”

  The kitchen shimmered about him like a mirage, walls, floor, and door suddenly insubstantial and wavering. Things that should be solid were rolling and undulating, the world becoming a phantasmal hall of mirrors. He tottered, disoriented, arms outstretched to steady himself. A ‘pop’ and flare of yellow light signalled ignition of the paper towels behind him, even as the overhead electric bulbs flickered and failed.

  The fire’s glow seemed to follow the room’s rolling geometry, photons flowing like mercury, pooling at intersections of the vertical and horizontal. Smoke and soot pulsed across the ceiling, spreading without seeming to move. As the first bottle of fat melted and caught light, a dozen streams of twinkling flame raced from it to the floor…to the drawers…to the hose which connected the stove’s propane supply.

  “Necrosaceriliac! Have…mercy…”

  Arkady fell into the hallway pursued by firefly scraps of burning paper, charging the opposite wall with his shoulder and falling to his knees. He raised his head to see a corridor which seemed to extend for miles, its walls curving away from him, first one way, then another. His vision swam, eyes unable to focus. The fire alarm now resonating in his ears sounded flat, and slow, and very far away.