Dead Mann Running (9781101596494)

by Petrucha, Stefan

All undressed with no place to go, I listened to the stillness, then pushed the door halfway open. A lack of wind coupled with the feeble glow of a distant emergency exit sign told me I was inside. I rolled out. My eyes, or maybe eye, as adjusted to the dark as it was going to get, I stood. My legs wobbled precariously, the muscles stiff from the trip.

  The space was cool, tall and wide, the air mixed with the smell of concrete, gas, and oil. Calling it a garage would’ve been an insult. I was in a full-fledged vehicular depot. A huge vent system, for exhaust fumes, ran above three buses, four vans, two utility vehicles, and three golf carts.

  Otherwise, it was empty as a tomb.

  I made for the exit sign, eventually hearing a soft buzz. I thought it was the sign, but it came from behind the gray fire door below it. Either the door seam was completely sealed, or there was no light on the other side either.

  I put my ear to the metal. The hum was louder, but I didn’t hear anything else. Not seeing any alarms connected to the handle, I pushed. It opened into a cinder-block hall, dim, but not completely lightless. Stepping in, I lost any sense of the hum’s direction. It was all around, like generators, or warp engines.

  Twenty yards to the right, a set of double doors oozed bright light at the edges. Once I was in the lab, staying out of sight for long would be tough. But staying out here would be pretty useless.

  The hall beyond the doors was wider and more finished, lined with two-tone drywall, lit by fluorescents. Faux wooden doors sat at regular intervals, each with a chart hung in the center. Wheeled metal carts sat near the doors, all with instruments like scalpels and probes. At the end of the hall stood a tall canvas laundry cart, a sign designating the contents as medical waste. But you could say that about any chak.

  I crept to the closest door and had a look at the chart. The name at the top rang a bell. One of the chakz from the camp. Checking more charts, I found Jonesey’s, but decided to keep moving. Bad Penny might be around, but I didn’t know her real name. Hudson was here, and that was about it for names I knew.

  I was almost at the end of the hall when the handle on the door to Hudson’s room turned. I’d barely ducked behind the laundry bin when the end of a gurney emerged. Judging from the way the legs vibrated, Hudson was on it. He shook so much, the gurney slammed the sides of the doorway, making it tough for whoever was pushing to get it into the hall.

  I heard tsks of disapproval, then male grunts. The gurney straightened and wobbled into the hall, revealing Hudson’s struggling arms, one wrist sporting a thick plastic tag. His head appeared last. It looked like my former roomie had a lot to say, but the black strap holding the gag in his mouth made it tough to make out.

  Two strong men, one pale white, the other African American, but otherwise looking like a matching set, manned the gurney. Behind them, a troll-like figure emerged. It was my first glimpse of Maruta’s widow, Rebecca, the dominatrix.

  As her men straightened the dolly, she marched in front of them. Petite describes her size, but compact’s a better word. She was compact with razor blue eyes, red hair coiffed with deadly seriousness and a nose so pointy you could impale fairies on it. Her thin arms elbow deep in black rubber gloves, her yellow lab coat flowed around her shapely figure like a gown. But even her curves looked like something you’d cut yourself on.

  Once in the lead, she looked back. “Keep the gag on until he’s in prep. Make sure the doors are sealed and the monitors off. I don’t want any records of this.”

  Her tone had the even clarity of an instruction manual, but as that last bit sunk in, her lackeys eyed each other.

  “Come now, it’s the end of a long week. I’m allowed some fun, aren’t I? I just want to see what exactly causes the dyssynchrony. It will be the only useful thing he’s done since he died.”

  She passed me, then disappeared around the corner, allowing the men a moment alone. The white, sandy-haired one looked like he was about to puke. The other’s expression said, forget about it now, we’ll talk later when she isn’t here.

  They steered the gurney into the boss lady’s invisible wake. A few more rattles from Hudson made them hit the bin I was hiding behind. It tilted right in front of me, but not enough to tip over.

  I heard elevator doors open, the rubber wheels roll inside. When the doors closed, I got up and followed. The light told me they’d stopped on the second of three floors. A sign next to the elevator said, IN CASE OF EMERGENCY USE STAIRS, so I did. All the stairwell doors had tall vertical windows, so I had a peek at the second floor. Beyond a high-ceilinged area was a set of thick, windowed specialty doors made of some sort of high-end plastic, or composite material. According to the sign next to them, they were sealing off something called the Sterile Zone.

  From the looks of things, the Sterile Zone was having itself a hygienic hoedown. Figures with gloves and face masks kept moving past the windows. It didn’t take a genius to guess Hudson was in there somewhere. Whatever Ms. Maruta had planned that she didn’t want recorded, I doubted it was Jonesey’s miracle cure. Granted I didn’t like the guy, but I already liked her less.

  Rescues have never been a specialty, but I knew if I waltzed in and tried to stop them with my clever banter, I’d likely wind up getting the same treatment. There were other possibilities, such as creating a distraction like they did in the movies. A red plastic button sat beside the mega-doors, marked IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. If I slapped the sucker, bet it’d make some noise. But what about after that? Where would I hide? Their safety protocol would send them all running into me. The building was big. There’d have to be more buttons. All I had to do was find one.

  I headed up another flight, to a carpeted office suite full of plants and potted trees, like it was pretending it was outside. I was on tiptoes at the stairwell window, trying to see if there was another EMERGENCY button around when a thirty-something female in a smart business outfit popped out of her office. I ducked as she passed. When she got on the elevator, I slipped through the door she left open and locked it behind me.

  Most of the room was taken up by one of those glass desks with a metal frame. I thought they were supposed to make things look neater, but aside from the mess on top, the glass provided a great view of the mess beneath. Next to a coffee mug in a light brown pool, and a photo of a chubby-faced eight-year-old, sat a laptop, which meant I had a shot at actually finding out about the vials.

  There were two open documents, one was Hudson’s file with notes from the boss lady. Mistress Maruta had actually done some homework, she even had a theory about why he was so irritating. Maybe she wasn’t as second rate as her reputation indicated.

  There were a lot of ten-dollar words describing how Hudson’s nervous system had the “peculiar ability to disrupt interactional synchrony.” I gave myself a pat on the back for following as much as I did. Apparently, every conversation has a rhythm that creates expectations. Hudson was perpetually offbeat, disorienting and ultimately infuriating to anyone who talked to him for long. His arrival in the Sterile Zone was listed, but the list didn’t give me any idea whether they’d be giving him a CAT scan or yanking stuff out just to see what happened.

  The second document was a quarterly overview of the lab’s various projects. There were enough incomplete sentences to tell me it was a work in progress, but it spelled out the boffins’ best guesses on how chakz worked. Since it was an internal ChemBet document, it was the first thing I’d ever read about chakz I thought maybe I could trust. I was fascinated to say the least.

  Before he tap-danced off the mortal coil, Travis Maruta theorized that we chakz had something in our brains, previously known only to exist in sharks, called the ampulla of Lorenzini. Sounds like a nice Italian beach, but it’s actually a set of nerve clusters that detect living things through their electrical activity. Sharks use it to find prey. Travis was pretty sure it also existed in LBs, but geared toward sensing the presence of fellow humans, explaining the way people can often tell when someone’s watching.

  In ch
akz, the ampullae are overactive, something Rebecca had proven just last week. Not only that, she’d demonstrated that chakz give off less than half the electromagnetic field of a liveblood, making us tougher to sense, especially when we go motionless. We sense LBs easy, they can’t sense us.

  I wanted to say cool, but there wasn’t anything about how she’d proven this stuff, an omission that irritated my ampulla of There’s Something Fucked Up About This Place. Fun fact: Doctors still use the data Nazis collected by dunking people in freezing water to help treat hypothermia.

  I felt dirty, but I kept reading, especially a section on the chak limbic system. That’s part of the brain that controls behavior, emotion, and, you guessed it, long- and short-term memory. In chakz both were totally screwed. Our “myelin sheaths” were way thin and “exhibited extreme peculiarities” maybe explaining the distance we feel from our own bodies.

  At the same time, in “emotionally charged situations” those peculiar neurons go into overload, lighting up like a switchboard, explaining that electric syrup sensation I get. Continued sheath degradation could be what made chakz feral. A particularly long sentence suggested intensive amino acid therapy, but by then my attention span for the big words had been exhausted. Most of what I was learning only confirmed what I’d suspected all along—even ChemBet didn’t know all that much about us for sure.

  I rubbed my brows, looked away, and happened to catch my reflection in the window. Finally, a little good news. The lid looked droopy, like a pillowcase a size too large, but my eye was still there. Three cheers for depth perception.

  But as long as I had the belly of the beast open in front of me, I had to focus on what I needed. Which was…what? An interoffice memo about a missing arm and a briefcase?

  Finished with the open documents, I accessed the network, excited to find what looked like the late Travis Maruta’s personal directory. At least it had his name on it. Unfortunately, the only file, called “StarStuff,” was password protected. I tried “password” and “admin” but the boffins were smarter than that.

  Another folder caught my eye. It was full of test subjects half a year or more old, predating the Chak Registration Act. They’d been poking chakz before Camp Kyua existed. No big surprise there. Getting volunteers is easy when a grunt can just as easily mean “yes” as “no.”

  The name on one of the files was familiar, though: Ashby Shinkle. Ashby was the reason I doubted even flames could destroy a chak. He was a juvie executed for killing a cop during a convenience store holdup. A security tape turned up, showing that the officer’s gun discharged accidentally. The poor bastard shot himself. So Ashby was ripped. I met him in Bedland, one of the biggest zombie towns. He was hanging with another chak, Frank Boyle. They’d both still be around if it wasn’t for me.

  Long self-flagellation story short, Frank ended up D-capped and Ashby was dumped in a vat of acid by a certain psychopath hoping to destroy him permanently. It was one of those sure things that didn’t work. Ashby’s skeleton, no cartilage, limbic system, or ampulla of whatever, climbed out and wreaked some unintentional havoc. Jonesey and I tracked him to Collin Hills, where I had to beat his skull to powder with a baseball bat before he killed any innocents. Even the pieces looked like they were shivering.

  Turns out Ashby was part of an early experiment that involved a second RIP. They were thinking it might repair some of the postmortem damage to our bodies. Made sense. Ashby was always drifting in and out of reality, so, Frank volunteered him. After that, ChemBet, like a child who didn’t take care of its toys properly, lost track of him. Score one for my incompetence theory.

  It seemed as if the Marutas were trying to fix us. But I also found some later abstracts chronicling efforts to discover a better way to terminate us. One, from the killing-two-birds-with-one-stone school of thought, proposed that with the right kind of pressure and instigating enzymes, chakz, like the dinosaurs, could be turned into crude oil.

  There were thousands of files, most with coded names. I kept looking, thinking if I tapped into the right directory, I’d stumble onto all nine circles of hell. I was still searching when a high-pitched electronic whine put me out of my misery.

  The lights in the office blinked on and off, on and off. Through a window, I saw all the lights in the building doing the same. I heard livebloods rushing along the hall. While I’d been sitting here reading, someone else had set off the alarm. Had they realized I was here? I didn’t see any cameras.

  I grabbed the laptop, crouched close to the door, and opened it a crack. Slivers of flapping jackets and lab coats were making for the stairs. Once the floor looked empty, I stepped out.

  With the stairs busy, I hit the elevator button, hoping it hadn’t automatically shut down. When it opened, empty, I got a weird tingle, a little thrill at the thought I might get out with the laptop. It vanished when I remembered Hudson was still in the Sterile Zone. Instead of heading for the basement, I groaned, sighed, and pressed two.

  At the second floor, the car didn’t just stop, it slammed to a halt. The doors opened with a dying sigh. The lights in the car went off. And there I was, facing the mega-door to the Sterile Zone.

  Through its window, I saw Mistress Rebecca and a sizable entourage. They hadn’t left yet, but were headed my way. I threw myself against the side of the elevator, my body concealed only by the two-foot bit of wall holding the floor buttons.

  The fancy doors to the Sterile Zone opened with a haughty hiss. A gurney wheeled out onto the tile. Whatever was on it wasn’t struggling anymore.

  “Another day, another lockdown,” Maruta said. She sounded cheerful. “I keep telling admissions they should either embed the tracking tags in the abdomen or stitch them on. Half the time the senseless things gnaw them off by accident.”

  The next voice didn’t sound happy at all, more like sick. “Where should we leave…the subject?”

  “Oh, out here in the holding area’s fine. Hurry along. Good thing we had that espresso machine put in the safe room. Demitasse, anyone?”

  They filed past me, pulling off their gloves, she discussing lattes and cappuccinos. When I stuck my head out, they’d reached the opposite end of the hall. The door there was held open for her. Beyond it, I caught snatches of rent-a-cops in black uniforms, on their way to handle whatever had caused the alarm. The doors closed and I was alone again.

  Parked in an open space beyond a dividing wall, I could see the edge of Hudson’s gurney, its silver flashing in the lights. When I heard a dry rasping, I couldn’t pretend they’d left him watching TV.

  Remembering his first name, I called, “Palmer?”

  The rasping quickened as if in recognition. I stepped past the wall and realized I didn’t need a computer to access the nine circles of hell. They were all here, right in front of me. I dropped the laptop. Its casing cracked against the tiles.

  Hudson was beyond naked. He was laid out flat, every bit of his skin slit open and pinned to the side, exposing his innards. Most of the muscles had been severed from the bone, laid neatly to the side. His skullcap was open, too, sharp instruments still poking into the brain. His trachea was detached from the lungs, twisted up like a black rubber hose covered in goo. His lungs, still attached, puffed air through the hole that was left. That’s where the rasping came from.

  And the son of a bitch was still twitching.

  All open like that, entrails out of place, he was still twitching.

  This wasn’t about interactional synchrony. Mistress Rebecca didn’t like him. She’d cut him up for fun. If I was looking for new monsters, I’d found one.

  18

  The world’s full of pain and body parts, but if I’d seen worse, I didn’t remember it. I wanted to turn my head, but couldn’t. Not that it would’ve mattered, the image had moved into my brain and kicked everything else out. My chest, arms, and hands tingled. All ten fingers straightened and swelled, like they’d been filled with toothpaste and were ready to burst.

  Hudson had been d
isassembled. He was opened up, then whatever was inside him had been opened up, and so on, until there was nothing left. I wanted to put him out of his misery, but without a crematorium handy, all he could do was suffer, all I could do was watch.

  I understood savagery, a primal instinct that could misfire. After all, I’d killed a guy with an axe. But it wasn’t something bestial on display here. I’d seen the work of serial killers fulfilling a grotesque sense of art. But this had no aesthetic. It lacked any passion at all. These were mechanical cuts made by a seamstress with a razor. The opposite of Jonesey’s wide-eyed idealism, the work said, in no uncertain terms, that all existence was pointless except for the shape it had.

  The lights kept flashing, the alarm kept sounding, a high tone followed by a deeper one. True to form, Hudson’s rasping was offbeat with both, a fingernail raking a blackboard. At first I thought that was all I was hearing, but there was something else.

  Beep, flash, beep, rasping breath, flash, beep…and then a shpp.

  The long wide space was orderly and lifeless. There were instruments, hampers and garbage, a row of steel cabinets, and other gurneys, whatever on them covered in sheets.

  Beep, flash, shppp…

  It wasn’t footsteps. It wasn’t mechanical. The area I was in ended in a half wall, but there looked to be about another ten feet between it and the exit. There was someone in there. Another subject, kept away from the rest?

  Rasping breath, beep, flash, shrppp…

  I stepped away from the gurney, far back enough to see a coffee table covered with magazines, and the edge of a lounge chair. A figure was sitting in it, reading, turning pages. That was the sound—shrp.

  Struggling to control my vibrating arms I grabbed the biggest, sharpest scalpel I could find and headed toward the figure. I don’t know if I actually would have killed someone, but I was so pissed, I wanted to. It didn’t matter if it was a boffin, a lazy guard, or a bagel lady. They were all cogs in this madhouse. Someone should pay.