by Matt Carter
Briefly, I considered making a joke to defuse the situation, but when I looked up (at least, I think it was up), my ability to make jokes completely disappeared.
We were in a vast chamber, greater than the stadium, so great that I could see neither ceiling nor walls. Stretching into the sky were stone pillars, walkways, and structures shifting in position mechanically across all three of their axes like a constantly moving, giant puzzle box. The sound of great gears far off made sense now since I could see several large gears bisecting the floor, ranging in size from just taller than me to at least a hundred feet high. Hanging from many of the structures were thousands of man-sized, egg-shaped pods, all glowing as faintly green as the millions of light blobs that floated through the air. Nothing about this room made sense. None of the angles should have worked, but there it was before our eyes, so wrong, so impossible that it took everything I had not to go mad just from looking at it.
Greeting us just in front of the entrance tunnel was a large, crumbling statue of an ancient monster. It was improbable and lumpy with long, lethal-looking claws and folded wings. I wondered if he was supposed to be a warning or a representation of one of some ancient society’s gods. Neither would have surprised me.
“So, this is the Warehouse,” Mina said in awe. I looked at her, questioning. “It’s what I’ve heard Dad call the place where humans are taken after they’re captured, where they’re taken over and made into Splinters.”
Upon further consideration of the large green pods hooked into the structure, I said, “So those are . . .”
“Only one way to be sure,” Mina said as she looked down, found the trail of footprints, and began to track them along a narrow stone walkway. Following the trail turned out to be a task easier said than done. With the next mechanical groaning of gears, our walkway shifted horizontally, pointing us in a new direction, in a new part of the expanse. The way we had come from shifted away as well, and the floor began to spin and connect with new adjacent pieces. One of them allowed us to skip across to the base of part of the pod structure, giving us some semblance of stability, but the realization that this Warehouse shifted its orientation every few minutes was not particularly comforting.
Up close, each pod was maybe eight feet in height and covered in purplish veins that met at the top in a large bundle suspending it from the structure above. Within the nearest translucent pod, I could see a person floating in a viscous fluid, vague and shriveled in the gloom, barely even a person anymore, as if his body—or her body; it had become difficult to tell—had been drained. At once I felt a fresh surge of pity and anger for this person, for Haley, for every single person who had ever been taken by the Splinters. They had to pay. We had to make them pay for what they were doing.
Idly, Mina walked up to the pod and rapped upon it with her knuckles. Though the pod appeared soft, its surface sounded hard, even hollow. As she touched it, it lit up like a television.
It was almost as if we were in someone’s head. A man, middle-aged judging by his reflection in the glass, waiting in line for a café to open. His eyes drifted off to the side, looking up as the rising sun backlit a massive, gothic cathedral. Faintly, we could just hear him chuckling.
After a few seconds of that, the picture disappeared.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I think . . . I think we just saw inside the Splinter’s mind. I think we just saw where it is right now. Could you identify the location?” Mina asked back.
The cathedral looked familiar. I racked my brain before I could find a name that matched up with its impressive architecture. “That was Cologne Cathedral. In Germany.”
Mina nodded, writing that name down on her arm with a question mark. She looked at the next nearest pod and proceeded to touch it, but I grabbed her hand before she could.
“We’re here to find Haley, remember? I don’t think we’ll be able to just by trying each of these pods one at a time. Let’s try to find those footprints while they’re fresh.”
She nodded, a bit dejected, but all the same helped me search for any part of the structure that contained fresh Splinter footprints. Still, it was hard to stop her from touching the occasional pod, seeing flashes through some monster’s eyes as they pretended to be human.
An elderly woman carrying groceries on the Tokyo subway.
A medic with a group of Canadian soldiers fighting some skirmish in the middle of a desert.
A young woman drunkenly stumbling down the Las Vegas Strip.
Seeing the number of pods, considering how many lives were stolen so these Splinters could take over . . . it made me sick.
After maybe five minutes of searching and dodging the structure’s constant shifts (though sometimes we were forced to ride up or down a few stories), we finally picked up the trail again. It was fainter, the veiny carpet slowly healing back to its intended shape. We followed the path with greater urgency, dodging more shifts and often nearly being knocked over by more pods as they swung around on their glowing tethers, climbing various curling staircases and pillars.
More of the tethers connected to each other the farther we went, some joining into large, pulsating tubes, all of them leading in the same direction, toward something. We reached it after about fifteen minutes. The center of the Warehouse, a clear, circular area where all the tubes attached to the pods coalesced and merged, feeding into . . .
Honestly, I’m not quite sure what it was they fed into. I don’t know if there’s a word in any language capable of describing it.
Floating maybe a foot off the ground was what looked like a window, maybe twenty feet high and sixty feet wide. All of the purple tubes fed into the top of it, pulsing as if this window were their very source of life. Looking through this window, I could see what appeared to be a dark sky, and a landscape that stretched on forever in an endless sea of gray. This ocean roiled and moved as if it were alive, the nearest portion seeming to rise in our direction as we approached before crashing back in on itself. Mina was transfixed by the sight, touching the window, even taking away a glob of the night sky before it splashed through her fingers and back toward the window.
I was about to tell her not to touch it again when I heard a faint, childlike voice behind us.
“Help me.”
I turned around, so certain the voice was nearby, and padded down the nearest row of pods.
Finally, I found it. A lone pod with empty tubes on either side of it where two more pods should have been. Mina caught up with me just as I saw the face beneath the swirling green mire was Haley’s.
This was it. It was over. They had her. Everything we had done, everything we had fought for, it was pointless. They had won.
I dropped the chainsaw and collapsed to my knees, pounding the ground with my fist.
“Damn it, damn it, DAMN IT!” I yelled, my voice bouncing off the ground and nearly flinging me back to my feet. “THEY GOT HALEY!”
Mina approached the pod cautiously and put her hand upon its surface. The image that appeared on it was dark and confused, but after the shapes began to make sense, a sick feeling of dread hit me in the stomach.
It was an image of both of us from behind, staring at this exact same image on the pod’s surface.
“Got me?” Haley’s voice purred from behind us. “Oh, Ben, they never lost me!”
23.
I Can’t Feel That
Mina
Ben didn’t pause nearly as long as I would have expected him to before revving up his chainsaw.
Its vibrations made deep, shimmering ripples in the too-thick air that stung when they broke over me. Haley winced at the first wave of them, but she was still smiling when she leapt out of the way, as lightly as if she were on wires, and landed on the side of one of the pods, standing at perfect ease, parallel to the floor.
Those massive gears gave another crunch, and the pods began another of their grinding shuffles.
Ben silenced the saw and cursed, his voice muffled by that air. H
e lunged to grab the pod with the real Haley in it, missed it by inches, and locked his arms around the stem of the next one. He reached out for me as it swung away, but I only saw this in the reflection on the shimmering pods in front of me.
At the same moment he’d jumped for the real Haley, I’d jumped for the fake one.
The moment Ben was out of sight, already shuffled away from me in some un-trackable set of moves, I knew I’d picked the wrong target.
But at least I didn’t miss.
I crash-landed right on top of the Splinter Haley, pinning her to the vertical wall of a pod as if it were the floor. And I was going to make the most of it.
She coughed when my elbow collided with her throat, but then she laughed, Haley Perkins’s laugh, contaminated with a sort of baby-giggle, the kind that comes from someone who hasn’t quite gotten the hang of lungs yet.
“Can’t kill me,” she sang at me. “Can’t kill me without killing her.”
I could feel her shifting and changing under me, preparing some sort of attack, probably deciding whether to grow spikes out of her chest or force some debilitating, nauseating image into my head. I had to subdue her quickly, and I couldn’t let go of her to do it. The moment I did, I was sure she’d be gone. There was just one awful option.
I pulled the switch to electrify the cattle prod Billy had given me, glad for the moment that if this was how I was going to have to do things, at least Ben wouldn’t have to watch. I held the prod up, or down, or sideways, next to where Haley’s face met mine.
“I’d prefer to avoid that,” I agreed. “But I won’t leave her buried in here alive. Feel free to present me with a third option.”
Haley screamed when I touched the prod to her shoulder, not like a girl or a baby, more like a beetle hiding in firewood when it’s lit, a squeal of pressurized air between wooden cracks of breaking and re-forming joints.
I may have screamed a little too when the current ran from her body through mine, but I held myself together. Just barely, and only by knowing that every bit of it was that much worse for her, for a Splinter.
I wasn’t in full command of my muscles just then, never mind my spatial comprehension, but I was able to jerk the prod away after just a few seconds, and I waited until my jaw had stopped seizing before asking again.
It took Haley that long to regrow her ears anyway.
“How do we get her back?!”
Haley was cracking and twitching under me, bits of her bulging and sinking into and out of unnatural shapes, but that baby laugh was back.
“You just disconnect her at the source. And then you take her!”
She nodded over my shoulder at the unfathomable, boundless space of endlessly shuffling pods, inviting me to leave her and join Ben in searching that effective infinity.
The fact that she was still breathing almost certainly meant that he’d already been hopelessly separated from her host’s pod.
I didn’t stop to think about how I’d find him again, or how we could possibly find someone who couldn’t even call for help. I just pretended to think about it for long enough to brace myself before giving us another jolt.
“Take me to her!”
My whole body buzzed with the charge, each cell trying to rip itself in half with its spastic little dance, but there was no time to brace for the next shock. Haley grabbed me by the shoulders, her arms shaking but strong, growing themselves thicker and longer for extra leverage, ready to throw me off, and I jabbed the prod into her neck in the vital few seconds before she could.
The surge stopped her controlled transformation, but with my grip still weak from the last one, even her involuntary spasms were enough to send me pinballing away, bouncing hard off of four different pods before I could remind myself to call one of them “floor,” the cattle prod clattering off in another direction.
The pods shuffled again.
Mine shifted backward four spaces and up another three by my present orientation, and for one panicked moment, I couldn’t see Haley.
She was going to get away. She was going to leave me alone in this endless, labyrinthine hell, catch up with Ben before he could take back the real Haley, and then she would take him, too, just like they had wanted all along.
Then, with the next crunch of gears, she swung lightly back into view, hanging in a handstand on the bottom of a pod.
She wasn’t trying to lose me.
She didn’t have to. This was her territory. The Reaper probably hadn’t gone far after “kidnapping” her, and there could be any number of other Splinters waiting in any shadow for Ben.
There was even the chance that she was trying to distract me from trying to help him, but even if that was the case, she was still my best chance of finding him before something else did, of finding the real Haley, of finding anything. She was all I had, my only reference point in the sea of identical pods.
I tightened my mental hold on my imaginary gravity, drew the first bang stick from my bag, and launched myself at her again, burying the shell in her shoulder, which splattered across the pod behind her.
She cried out and lengthened her other arm at me with more velocity than the real Haley could have thrown behind her best punch, knocking me back three pods while she rebuilt.
“Take me to her!” I repeated.
“No!” she watched me reproachfully as I gained on her, drawing another stick.
She ran a hand over her newly repaired shoulder, her imitation of Haley Perkins’s. “This one’s mine!” She giggled again triumphantly and leapt off in a new direction, staying just one pod ahead of me, choosing each step with care. “And when I’ve done my job, they’re going to let me keep it!”
“Your job? You mean bringing Ben down h—”
I jumped and stabbed another shell into her forehead without finishing my sentence. She wasn’t ready for it. I grabbed an air freshener flamethrower while I waited, kneeling on her chest, for her head to regain a recognizable shape. Underneath us, the sun glinted brightly off of Sydney Harbor for some other Splinter’s stolen enjoyment.
Blood, bone chips, and gray matter melted back into generic Splinter goo and then hardened into new parts of the same humanoid illusion.
Ben’s distant voice called out my name after the shot, then again a few seconds later, a few shades closer. Maybe he had given up searching for Haley without clues and started searching for me by the sound. Or maybe The Reaper had caught up with him, and he was screaming for help. The Warehouse’s stifling acoustics made it impossible to guess just where or how far away he was.
As soon as Haley’s hair found its normal, thick, silky texture, human enough to make that horrible, acrid burning smell, I ran a long, purple jet of flame through it. I missed at first and had to compensate for a warp in the space between us.
“If anything happens to Ben,” I explained when I was sure she could hear me, “I will incinerate you, hostage or no.”
I’m sorry, Haley.
That thought arose very clearly in my mind, but didn’t change what I was willing to do.
The Splinter Haley jerked her head to the side to minimize the space near her hairline where the skin kept bubbling off of the bone and re-growing. “I don’t give a damn about Ben!” she screeched.
“Then take me to him, and Haley, point us to the door, and go back where you came from.”
“No!”
“Why him?” I grabbed her one-handed by the hair and knocked her head against the pod, hoping to keep her too dazed to fight. “Of everyone in . . .” I was going to say Prospero, but the scene glimmering under us changed my mind, “ . . . everyone in the world, what do you want with him? What’s happening to him right now?”
“Nothing!”
“Is it Kevin? Is he going to take him? The one with the scythe? Are you using Kevin?”
“Kevin?” Haley didn’t seem to expect that guess. “No! I said we should take Kevin, but no one would listen to me! He knew Haley Perkins, and he knows about us! If Ben had let him hang
around us, he could have ruined everything!”
Kevin was still clean. Probably. I tried to hang on to that relief, let it calm me a little, but there were too many other details, losses for me, wins for her, for them, reasons I wanted to rip her into tiny pieces and watch them burn whether it would do anyone any good or not.
I needed to stay on task. I needed to learn, to understand, to find Ben, find Haley if I could, see if I could find anyone else who could be saved, and escape knowing better how to fight another day. That was the only possible positive outcome, and I couldn’t lose it to the swelling feeling in my chest, in my skin, as if my blood were heating and thickening like jelly on a stove, ready to boil over and split me open along every vein in my body if I didn’t do something very violent to keep it stirring.
It was a feeling as strong and almost as dangerous as the one I couldn’t have for Ben, and just like that one, I’d felt this only once before, to catastrophic effect.
That didn’t mean I had to ease up on Haley. She was durable. But I couldn’t finish her while there was a chance she could be made to help.
“Your people attacked us with that deer! It went straight for us!” I recalled, willing her to tell me something about their claim on Ben, something about Creature Splinters I didn’t already know, anything that would make me accept her continued existence for a few more seconds. “Ben needed stitches!” I rammed the wrong end of the bang stick into her chest until I heard two separate snaps. “It could have killed him!”
Haley looked pained and confused from the shifting of her ribs as they knitted back together, but she smiled at me. “You needed him to believe you, right?”
“Oh, of course!” I knocked her against the surface again and saw a fresh smear of blood there for a moment before it healed away. “It was all for my benefit! You called me to say, ‘stay away from Ben Pastor, Ben Pastor is ours,’ just to make my life easier!”
“No.” Haley shook her head and winced when her hair reached the end of its slack. “I told you to stay away to make sure that you wouldn’t, even if he told you to!”