by B. C. CHASE
“Maybe you should have dropped something less valuable.”
“Yeah, thanks for the input.”
“Are you going to drop your other shoe?”
“I’d say that’s a no. I’m going to tie it to my belt loop for safekeeping.”
“That will be a kick in the pants.”
“Ha ha. You’re very funny.”
Kelle giggled.
Wesley said, “Kelle?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you in the truck. About mom, that you didn’t help. I was just upset. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”
“That’s all right, Wes.”
The fact that he now had a nickname didn’t escape his notice. He cleared his throat and snorted. “I thought I should make my peace before I tried to climb down this part and fell to my death.”
“Good idea.”
“Okay, here I go.”
Kelle said in a strange voice, “May the force be with you.”
Wesley started the difficult descent. “You like Star Wars?”
“Yesir.”
“Really?”
In the strange voice: “Love Star Wars, I do.”
Wesley chuckled. He turned his attention to blindly groping for the ladder again. There was simply no way for him to hold onto the rungs. Not even the side rails. He said, “I can’t grip the ladder here. I’ll have to use the cage.” He felt the nearest bar that ran in a semicircle all the way around from one side rail to the other. He stuck a foot out to try to locate the next cage railing. But he found none. Behind him the cage had a single vertical pole. He grasped it with his hand, thinking he might slide down it to the next bar like a fireman, but it was so damp that he dared not try it. He leaned backward to press his back against the pole, his feet braced on the ladder rail. Slowly, cautiously, he put his foot on the next rung down and lowered his body, his back sliding on the pole. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, tensing his body. So far so good, he thought, yet wondering if maybe it would be best just to climb back up and try to escape some other way. He gingerly brought his other foot to the next rung and again lowered his body. He said, “The only way to go down here is to brace yourself against the cage and use your feet. Be careful.”
“Okay.”
As he proceeded to the next step, his hands were free and he felt vulnerable with nothing to hold onto.
Suddenly there was a sound from above them and a square of light appeared. A flashlight switched on and probed down toward them. “I see them! They only made it about a hundred feet!” a voice called. “C’mon!” There were some metallic clicks and bangs that reverberated down metal poles. Then several men began to clamber down the ladder.
“Wesley, hurry!” Kelle frantically cried, climbing down with reckless speed.
“Don’t panic or you’ll fall!” Wesley warned.
“Just hurry up!” she screeched. Her feet were on the rung near his head and she wasn’t stopping. Wesley slid down as quickly as he could, stepping to each lower rung at dangerous speed, his feet barely catching the slick surfaces.
Doctor Compton’s voice shouted from the opening, “You can’t escape!” Then, not as loud, “I’ll use the elevator.”
Flashlights the two climbers held were lowering toward them alarmingly quickly. But then, if they were climbing, how were they using flashlights at all? And how were they so steady? Wesley realized with horror that they were not climbing down the ladder at all.
They were rappelling down.
Within seconds, the first of two pursuers was upon Kelle. With her back braced against the pole, she tried to stab him with her knife, but he grappled her wrist and slammed it against the ladder. The blade shot past Wesley’s face on its way down to the black void.
Still not knowing what, if any, effect the liquid inside it might have, Wesley quickly pulled the plastic top off one of his syringes and reached up to try to inject the man in the leg, but he was too far away. Wesley wasn’t sure if he could climb up the ladder, stiffened as he was against the pole, but he pushed with all his might and was able to go up one step. With the man’s legs kicking around as he wrestled with Kelle, Wesley couldn’t get a good angle. Finally, at the risk of being flung to his death, Wesley grabbed his leg with one hand and jabbed the needle deep into his ankle. The man howled in pain and struggled for a bit, then gradually went limp in his harness.
The pursuer above him saw what had happened and saying, “To heck with that,” leaned over to aim a rifle at them. He fired, but a dart stuck the unconscious man instead of his intended target. The shooter cursed, fumbling with his rifle as he loaded another dart. That gave Kelle enough time to clamber up with surprising strength and plunge a hypodermic into his thigh.
“Let’s keep going down,” Wesley said.
“No, they’re not dead. I can feel this one breathing,” Kelle replied. “Give me your knife.” Wesley complied. She said, “Get out of the way,” to Wesley and began to furiously saw the rope that held the first man. Wesley lowered himself down until he reached a semicircular bar and grabbed it, swinging out of the way. He looked up, “Kelle, you don’t have to do that. When he falls he could hit me.”
She didn’t reply.
“Kelle!”
As the strands snapped free, the man’s eyes almost indiscernibly widened. He was awake and could see what she was doing, but was paralyzed and unable to stop her. A guttural cry came from his mouth, louder and louder as she cut. Finally, there was a loud snap and the man shot down, his head banging on the semicircular bar. Wesley watched as his body knocked on the wall, flopped onto the next bar, and flipped out of the cage. He freely tumbled end over end into the darkness, the light clipped to his harness flashing in all directions like a strobe light. He fell for about fifty feet before his body cracked as it landed on what appeared to be a concrete surface.
Without warning the second man plunged past Wesley and followed the path of the first out the cage and down to the ground. “Good grief!” Wesley said, looking up annoyed at Kelle. “You could have killed me.”
“Sorry, sorry,” she said. “At least now we know how far down it is.”
“Yeah. At least that. Let’s go,” Wesley repositioned himself. “You should have just undone his harness. Then we might have been able to rappel down ourselves.”
“You didn’t say that when I was cutting the rope.”
“I’m just saying we could think before we do things,” he said, uncomfortably wedged against the pole.
“I can’t think anymore. I’m not going back up there.”
They were about thirty feet down, Wesley had a severe pain in his back where the pole pressed into him, and his legs felt like they were about to give out. He put his weight on his left foot and began to slide his back down one more time. But his foot slipped.
He was falling straight down the cage, a total freefall with his gut in his chest. His hands slapped a bar, instant pain. Kelle’s voice was screaming his name. And he hit.
He couldn’t move his legs. But he was still alive. Paralyzed, he thought. I’m paralyzed.
He was paralyzed. He wondered grimly how this would play into Doctor Compton’s gruesome experiments, if he found him again.
He called up to Kelle, “Don’t jump down here. It’s too dangerous!”
He might be paralyzed, but his nose apparently worked just fine. What’s that smell? It was something awful, horribly rank. Like feces.
He moved his hand up to his nose to cover it and was relieved to find that it responded. But when his hand reached his face, he groaned, “Oh crap!” out loud. The feces was on his hand. The smell was choking, unbearable.
“WESLEY!” Kelle’s panic-stricken voice called from the blackness above.
“I’m alive!” he responded. “But I can’t move my legs. I think I’m para—“ he burst into a fit of coughing. The stench was literally choking him.
“Don’t move!
I’m coming!” Kelle cried.
As he rested his head back on the ground, he felt something wet that made a squelch sound. He felt the ground with his fingers. It was wet and mushy. Then he realized the truth.
He was lying in a giant pile of oozy dung. Whatever had made it must have been sick.
He reflexively tried to roll over with revulsion, but his legs wouldn’t move. He felt down around them and discovered that they were trapped in the muck.
Revolted, he staggered away toward the two flashlights where the dead men lie. He said, “I’m okay. There’s a big pile of—”
He heard the splosh as she jumped down from the last step onto the edge of the pile. “Ew!” she said. Taking long steps, she hastily jumped out to him. “Paralyzed, huh?” she laughed, watching him struggle frantically to extricate himself. “Looks to me like you’re just trapped in a giant pile of doo.”
“When you’re done mocking what could have been a very grim situation, could you please help me out,” he said.
As she soon as she had pulled him out, he slapped away as much of the goop as he could and staggered away toward the two flashlights where the dead men lie. As she followed, he grinned at her, “You’re lucky to be wearing boots.”
“You’re lucky to be wearing boots,” he said, grinning.
“Yeah,” she smiled. “What made that?”
“I have no idea,” he said, reaching for one of the flashlights. The corpses were a gruesome sight in the darkness. He detached the flashlights as speedily as he could. As he raised up and shined the light into the distant darkness, he just caught the edge of a bipedal gray figure that vanished just as the light reached it.
Wesley jumped back with an involuntary exclamation, almost dropping the flashlight. His heart thumped in his chest and he quickly darted the light from left to right looking for any sign of it again. But there was nothing except iron bars like one would find in a dungeon.
Kelle was by him, “What? What is it?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
Her eyes narrowed as she stared at him. He only saw her out of the corner at his eye because he couldn’t stop watching for whatever he had seen.
“Something walking. But it’s gone.” He noticed that the floor was vibrating rhythmically beneath his feet. There was an extremely low, guttural moaning sound from above Kelle’s head. Wesley directed his flash light toward it and illuminated a giant, slow-moving form. The skin was patterned, and it had an immense neck which was swinging a horned head down toward her. He quickly searched the ground for the rifle the man had been using. “C’mon,” he said to Kelle, encouraging her forward.
But she stood there shivering with terror as the creature examined her crown, sniffing. It snorted, flicked its ears. Kelle whimpered. Wesley sighed with relief as the creature raised its head back up to its full nineteen-foot height and resumed its graceful gate toward the ladder. Wesley said, “It’s a giraffe.”
She narrowed her eyes and looked off to the side, gingerly turning her head. The giraffe turned itself around on its stilt-like legs and slightly squatted to the extent that was possible. Then it began to defecate, its dung plopping onto the enormous mound of manure. It was diarrhea, and very bad diarrhea by the looks of it. The giraffe loudly released trumpeting gas.
“That’s just disgusting,” Kelle said.
“Looks like it’s … using the litter box?” Wesley said with incredulity. With a snort of satisfaction, the giraffe started to walk away. As it left, Wesley shined his light around their surrounds to get his bearings. Up was only hazy blackness as far as the light went. Behind was the ladder attached to the concrete wall. To the right, at the edge of the light was a herd of giraffes, mostly juveniles. Straight ahead were the outsized bars that clearly were designed to contain the large animals, and to the left were more bars, closer. There was no sign of the gray figure.
“Let’s see if we can find a way out of here,” Wesley said.
A strong voice that echoed in the blackness made Wesley freeze in terror.
“I might be able to assist with that,” the voice said. It was Doctor Compton, some distance away. Wesley shined the flashlight at the voice, illuminating Doctor Compton, in a lab coat, as he slowly stepped toward them. He was behind the bars to the left. Wesley grabbed Kelle’s hand and ran straight away from the wall. When he shined the light back at Doctor Compton, he was already past the bars, but still casually walking.
Walking would not have gotten him that far, that fast.
Doctor Compton stared at them with eerie confidence, striding with a calm and almost graceful gait. His eyes were dark and they glinted with the reflection of the light.
Wesley ran with total terror, allowing his body’s less civilized instincts to take over, and practically dragging Kelle. Ahead, the light reflected off glass which curved around a bend. It went up for forty feet. As the light darted in all directions with Wesley’s frantic flight, it became apparent that this glass wall was part of a gigantic tank with concrete pillars punctuating the glass every twenty feet. Red pinpoints of light were traveling through the blackness inside.
Wesley and Kelle turned to the left to follow the tank. To the right were more bars, through which a pacing tiger was visible.
“What is this place!” he panted.
Suddenly movement from the left caught his eye and he directed the light just in time to see a pair of enormous, toothed jaws set in pink gums swooping down toward them. They staggered away, still running. The jaws closed and turned away, the creature that owned them edging the glass as it swam. An orca, and, fortunately given its apparent menace, behind glass. Its eyes glowed unnaturally red, a striking contrast to its black and white skin.
Suddenly Kelle let loose a gut-wrenching scream as she glanced behind them. Doctor Compton was alarmingly close, loading a dart into a rifle.
A rifle which Wesley would have sworn he had not been carrying before.
“Just so that you are aware,” Doctor Compton called, stepping forward and aiming. “If I shoot, I will hit my target.”
Kelle pulled free from Wesley’s grip and rushed to a concrete pillar where a fire kit was affixed.
An axe.
She freed the axe and turned to face Doctor Compton.
He, still striding toward them, said in a controlled, unemotional tone, “If you agree to come willingly, I will not put you to sleep. There will be no surprise; no waking up on a table as you previously did. Everything will be explained to you.”
With an animalistic scream, Kelle ran forward with the axe raised high. She was upon Doctor Compton in seconds and swung it down violently to his head. The axe struck and his head turned and lowered—as if he had merely been slapped. Slowly, he raised his head, and it almost seemed to perch a little higher over his shoulders than it had before, his neck seeming longer and more sinuous. The flesh and been shorn from one side of his face, revealing bone. He peered down at Kelle from his startlingly taller stature, his gaze arrogantly disdainful, his eyes widening with severe and unmitigated rage.
He took a step back. The shredded flesh on his wound began to creep over the bone.
Wesley approached, shining the light in disbelief. Muscle was building, fat bubbling, and skin stretching over the wound. He was healing before their eyes. Within seconds, the process was over and he appeared perfectly whole, though his cheekbones seemed more defined, his eyes more gaunt.
He continued stepping backwards and then turned to the tank where he reached for an axe of his own.
An axe Wesley had not seen before.
With the bony, white fingers of one hand gripping the axe, he said, “You cannot fight me and win. You cannot escape me and hide. We are advanced beyond the mortality of mere humanity.”
There was a loud clank as Kelle’s axe hit the ground. Her bravado had apparently left her and she was paralyzed with fear.
“That is good,” Doctor Compton said, reaching out his other hand as if to take hers. “Come willingly and thin
gs will be better for you. Genetic power has given us the keys to the kingdom of life. We are only just beginning to step onto the threshold of possibility.”
Wesley rapidly grabbed Kelle’s hand again and pulled her back. But she was fixed in place like a statue.
“Come,” Doctor Compton said, his lip curling as he simultaneously raised the axe and opened his other. *(other what?)
There was a sudden hoot behind them, “Reebok!” The orangutan was standing there. He quickly tore off one of his Reeboks and hurled it at Doctor Compton, striking him in the abdomen.
Without flinching, Doctor Compton threw the axe. Reebok fell backwards, the axe protruding from her chest. Doctor Compton strode over and extruded the axe from Reebok’s struggling body. As he walked away, she rolled over to reach for his legs, coughing on her own blood.
“No!” Kelle shrieked.
“Excellent. Now come with me, the two of you.”
No!” Wesley screamed, and pulled Kelle backwards. “Kelle, we’re getting out of here.” The fact that Doctor Compton was so determined to persuade them to go willingly was enough to make Wesley determined to do the opposite. He was able to help Kelle to find her legs again, and he shouted, “DON’T LOOK BACK!” as they took off.
They ran in blind terror, Wesley following his own advice. The flashlight illuminated a concrete wall ahead, bare except for a sign above a pair of double doors which read, “LOADING.”
His legs tore across the ground, and he was amazed that, although smaller, Kelle was keeping up. Terror could do almost anything.
Doctor Compton’s voice sounded like it was just at the back of his neck as it said, “You’ll never get out!”
They were at the doors, pushing the bars. The doors swung open to reveal an illuminated area with caged animals of all sizes, fork lifts, and several semi-trucks. Wesley dropped the flashlight, spinning around and slamming the doors shut against the darkness. As they closed, he just made out a pale gray hand reaching toward him out of the blackness. He twisted a bolt locked and stood back, watching anxiously. Nothing happened, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He jumped when he felt a rough tap on his buttocks. He spun around to see Reebok standing bowlegged in her Nikes with an expression of impatience.