by Ee, Susan
Dee-Dum stares at us, stunned. Despite his hard-core attitude and his pickpocketing skills, he’s clearly not from a world where mothers hit their children.
I put my hand out to him. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” I turn to my mother. “He’s helping me find Paige.”
“He’s lying to you. Just look at him.” Her eyes fill with tears. She knows I won’t listen to her warnings. “He’ll trick you and drag you down a filthy hole into hell and never let you out. He’ll chain you to a wall and let the rats eat you alive. Can’t you see that?”
Dee-Dum looks back and forth between me and my mother with shocked eyes. He looks more like a little kid than ever.
“That’s enough, Mom.” I walk back to the metal door beside the gated driveway. “Either be quiet or I’ll leave you here and find Paige by myself.”
She runs to me, grabbing my arm in supplication. “Don’t leave me here alone.” I see in her wild eyes the rest of the sentence—alone with the demons.
I don’t point out that she seems to be the most frightening thing on the streets. “Then stay quiet, okay?”
She nods. Her face is filled with anguish and fright.
I gesture for Dee-Dum to lead the way. He looks at us, probably trying to make sense of it all. After a moment, he takes out his keys, keeping a careful eye on my mom. He tries several keys in the lock before one finally works. The door swings open with a squeak that makes me cringe.
“At the far end of the garage to your right, there’s a door. Try that.”
“What can I expect in there?”
“No idea. All I can tell you is that there are rumors among the servants of…something that might be kids in that room. But who knows? Maybe they’re just midgets.”
I let out a deep breath, trying to calm myself. My heart flutters in my chest like a dying bird. I hope against all odds that Dee-Dum will offer to come in with me.
“It’s a suicide mission, you know,” he says. So much for my hope for an offer.
“Was that your plan all along? Show me where to go, then convince me there’s nothing I can do to save my sister?”
“Actually, my plan all along was to become a rock star, travel the world collecting fan girls, and then getting really fat and spending the rest of my life playing video games while the girls keep comin’, thinking I look as good as I did in my music videos.” He shrugs as if to say, who knew the world would turn out so different?
“Will you help me?”
“Sorry, kid. If I’m going to commit suicide, it’ll be a lot more showy than being cut down in a basement trying to rescue somebody’s kid sister.” He smiles in the dim light, taking the sting out of his words. “Besides, I have a couple of very important things that need to get done.”
I nod. “Thanks for bringing me here.”
My mother squeezes my arm, silently reminding me that she thinks everything he says is a lie. I realize I’m saying goodbye to him as though I, too, believe that this is a suicide mission.
I stuff all my doubts down where I can’t feel them anymore. This is a lot like leaping over a chasm. If you don’t think you can do it, you can’t.
I step through the door.
“You’re really going to do this?” asks Dee-Dum.
“If that was your brother in there, what would you do?”
He hesitates, then gives my arm a gentle squeeze. “Listen to me carefully. You have to get out of the area within one hour. I mean it. Get as far away as you can.”
Before I can ask him what’s going on, he fades into the shadows.
An hour?
Could the resistance be planning to attack so soon?
The fact that he warned me at all puts the pressure on me. He wouldn’t risk a leak, which means there’s not enough time for me to do much damage if I get caught and interrogated.
Meanwhile, I can’t shake the image of Raffe lying helpless on a surgeon’s table. I don’t even know where he is.
I take a deep, calming breath.
I head into the dark cavern that used to be a garage.
After a couple of steps, I swallow panic as I stand in utter darkness. My mother grips my arm with enough force to bruise.
“It’s a trap,” she whispers into my ear. I can feel her trembling. I give her hand a reassuring squeeze.
There’s nothing I can do until my eyes adjust to the blackness, assuming there’s anything to adjust to. My first impression is that it is a pitch-black, cavernous space. Standing still, I wait until my eyes adjust to the dark. All I hear is my mother’s nervous breathing.
It’s just a few moments, but it feels like hours. My brain screams hurry, hurry, hurry.
As my eyes adjust, I feel less like a blind target in a spotlight.
We’re standing in the underground garage, surrounded by abandoned cars hunched in the shadows. The ceiling feels both vast and too low at the same time. At first, there seem to be giants spread out in front of me, but they turn out to be concrete pillars. The garage is a maze of cars and pillars fading off into the darkness.
I hold the angel sword in front of me like a divining rod. I hate to go into the darker bowels of the garage, away from what little light comes through the bars of the gate, but that’s where I have to go if I want to find Paige. The place feels so deserted, I’m tempted to just call out for her, but that’s probably a very bad idea.
I step gingerly into the almost total darkness, careful of debris on the floor. I stumble over what I think is a spilled purse. I almost lose my footing, but my mother’s viselike grip on my arm stabilizes me.
My footsteps echo in the dark. Not only does it give away our location, it also interferes with my ability to hear someone else sneaking up on me. My mother, on the other hand, is as silent as a cat. Even her breathing is quiet now. She’s had a lot of practice sneaking around in the dark, avoiding Things-That-Chase-Her.
I bump into a car and I feel my way around a long curve of cars in what I assume is a standard zigzag pattern of cars parked back and forth down rows of slots. I’m using the sword more as a blind man’s stick than as a weapon.
I almost trip over a suitcase. Some traveler must have been dragging it around when they realized there was nothing in it worth carrying anymore. I realize I should have tripped over it. I’m deep enough in the belly of the garage that it should be completely dark. But I can see, just barely, the rectangular shape of the luggage. Somewhere in here is a very dim source of light.
I hunt for it, concentrating on which direction the shadows seem lighter. I’m hopelessly lost in the maze of cars now. We could spend all night wandering through these rows of abandoned cars and not find anything.
We take two more turns, each turn lightening the shadows almost imperceptibly. If I wasn’t looking for it, I would never have noticed.
The light, when I see it, is so dim that I probably would have missed it if the building wasn’t so dark. It’s a thin crack of light outlining a door. I put my ear to it but hear nothing.
I open it a crack. It opens onto a stairwell’s landing. A dim light beckons below.
I close the door behind us as quietly as I can and head downstairs. I’m grateful the stairs are cement rather than the metal kind that make hollow, echoing clangs underfoot.
At the bottom of the stairs is another closed door. This door is outlined in bright slivers of light, the only light in the stairwell. I put my ear to the door. Someone is talking.
I can’t hear what’s being said, but I can tell there are at least two people. We wait, crouched in the dark with our ears to the door, hoping there’s another door through which these people will leave.
The voices fade away and stop. After listening to the silence for several long moments, I crack open the door, cringing in anticipation of noise. The door opens silently.
It is a concrete space the size of a warehouse. The first thing I notice are rows upon rows of glass columns, each large enough to hold a grown man.
Only, what’s in these
tubes are more like twisted scorpion-angels.
CHAPTER 36
They may look a little like angels with their gossamer dragonfly wings folded along the contours of their backs, but they are not. At least, they’re not like any angel I’ve ever seen. Or ever want to.
There’s something twisted about them. They float in a column of clear liquid, and I feel like I’m peering into the disembodied womb of an animal that shouldn’t exist.
Some of them are the size of large men, bulging with muscles despite the fact that they’re curled in the fetal position. Others are smaller as though struggling to survive. A few of them look like they’re sucking their thumbs. I find the human-ness of that gesture particularly disturbing.
From the front, they look human, but from the back and the sides, they look utterly alien. Plump scorpion tails grow out of their tailbones to curl over their heads. They end in needlelike stingers, ready for piercing. The sight of those tails brings back echoes of my nightmare and I shiver.
Most of them have their wings folded, but a few have their wings partially unfurled, spread along the curve of the columns and twitching like they’re dreaming of flying. These are easier to look at than the ones whose scorpion tails are twitching as if they’re dreaming of killing.
Their eyes are closed with what look like underdeveloped eyelids. Their heads are hairless and their skin is nearly transparent, showing the network of veins and musculature beneath. Whatever these things are, they’re not fully developed.
I block as much of this view as I can from my mother. She will freak if she sees any of this. For once, maybe her reaction is the sane one.
I give her a hand signal to wait here for me. I make my face intense so she knows I mean it, but I don’t know if it will do any good. I hope she stays. The last thing I need is her freaking out. I never thought I’d be grateful for her paranoia, but I am. There’s a decent chance she’ll hide in the dark like a rabbit in a hole until I come for her. If something happens, at least she has her cattle prod.
My stomach clenches with icy fear at what I’m about to do. But if Paige is in here, I can’t leave her.
I force myself to step into the cavernous room.
Inside, the air feels cold and clinical. There is a formaldehyde-like smell to the air. A scent I associate with long-dead things trapped in jars on a shelf. I step gingerly between the glass columns to get to the rest of the room.
As I walk by the columns, I notice what look like piles of lumpy cloth and seaweed at the bottom of the tanks. A creepy feeling crawls up my back. I quickly look away, not wanting to look closer.
But when I look away, I see something that curdles my creepy feeling into terror.
One of the beasts holds a woman in a lover’s embrace in its tank. Its tail arches over its head down to the woman, burying its stinger in the back of her neck.
One strap of her party dress has been shoved down her painfully thin shoulder. The scorpion angel’s mouth is buried in her sagging breast. Her skin crinkles against her drying flesh as if all the fluids are being drained from them.
Someone has forced an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. The mask’s black tubes reach up to the tank’s cap, looking like a twisted umbilical cord. Her dark hair is the only thing moving about her. It floats ethereally around the cords and stinger.
Despite the mask, I recognize her. She is the woman whose children and husband waved goodbye to her from the fence when she came into the aerie. The woman who turned to throw a kiss to her family. She looks like she’s aged twenty years since I last saw her a few hours ago. Her face is sallow, her skin sagging over her bones. She’s lost weight. A lot of weight.
Below her floating feet lays a discarded pile of brightly colored material and what I now realize is skin over bones. What I initially mistook for seaweed is actually hair waving gently at the bottom of the tank.
This monster is slowly liquefying her insides and drinking it.
My feet won’t move. I stand like prey waiting for a predator to grab me. Every instinct I have screams at me to run.
Just when I think it couldn’t get any worse, I see her eyes. They look strained and unnatural in their oversized sockets. I imagine a spark of desperation and pain in them. I hope she at least died quickly and painlessly, but I doubt it.
As I’m about to turn away, a cluster of small bubbles escapes from her air mask and floats past her hair.
I freeze. She couldn’t possibly be alive, could she?
But why would someone put an air mask on her if she was dead?
I wait and watch for any signs of life. The only motion I see is caused by the scorpion as it greedily sucks her dry. Her once-vibrant skin shrivels almost before my eyes. Her hair dances in slow sweeps every time the scorpion moves.
Then, another group of air bubbles float up from her mask.
She’s breathing. Extremely, impossibly slow, but still breathing.
I tear my eyes away from her and force myself to scan the room for something I can use to get her out of this tank. Now I can see other tanks here and there that have people trapped in them too. They are all in different stages of the deadly embrace with some still looking vital and fresh, while others look drained and close to empty.
One of the scorpions has a fresh woman in a party dress in its arms and is kissing her on the mouth with her oxygen mask dangling above her. Another has a man in a hotel uniform. His scorpion beast has its mouth latched onto his eye.
It’s not a systematic feeding. Some tanks have a large pile at the bottom while others have very little. It shows in the various scorpion angels too. Some are large and muscular while others are puny and malformed.
As I stand there feeling stunned and ill, a door opens on the far side of the basement and I hear something rolling on the concrete.
My instinct is to hide behind a monster’s tank, but I can’t force myself to get close to one. So I stand in the middle of the glass column matrix, trying to decipher what is happening on the other side. Trying to see the room through the glass columns is like trying to read a note on the other side of a shark tank. Everything looks distorted and unrecognizable.
If I can’t see the angels, they shouldn’t be able to see me. I sneak around one of the columns and get a different perspective on the room. I steel myself to ignore the victims. I’ll be no use to anyone if I’m caught.
On the other side of the matrix, an angel is berating a human servant. “The drawers were supposed to arrive last week.” He wears a white lab coat draped over his wings.
The human stands behind an enormous steel cabinet balanced on top of a flatbed cart. It’s three drawers high with each drawer large enough to hold a person. I don’t want to think about what is meant to go into them.
“You picked the worst night to deliver these.” The angel vaguely waves his hand toward the far wall. “Stack them over there against the wall. They need to be secured so they never tip over. The bodies are over there.” He points to the adjacent wall. “I’ve had to pile them on the floor, thanks to your tardiness. You can put the bodies in the drawers when you’re done setting up.”
The servant looks horrified but the lab angel doesn’t seem to notice. The man moves to the far wall with the cabinet, while the angel walks the other way.
“The most interesting night in centuries and this idiot has to pick tonight of all nights to deliver furniture.” The lab angel mumbles to himself as he heads for the wall to my left.
I shift to stay hidden from the angel as he moves. He shoves through a pair of swinging doors and disappears.
I inch forward, looking around to see if there’s anyone else in the room. There’s no one other than the man unloading his cadaver drawers. I wonder if I should expose myself to him and beg for help. It could save a lot of time and trouble if I could get someone on the inside to help me.
On the other hand, he might decide he could earn brownie points by turning in an intruder. Frozen in indecision, I watch him roll his empty cart ou
t through a set of double doors across the room.
After he leaves, the empty room gurgles with the sound of air bubbles from one of the tanks. My brain screams—hurry, hurry, hurry. I have to find Paige before the resistance attacks.
But I can’t leave these people to be sucked dry by these monsters.
I sneak through the matrix of fetal columns to look for something to try to get the victims out of the tanks. At the far end of the matrix, I see a blue ladder. Perfect. I can open the tops of the tanks and try to pull the victims out.
I slide my sword back into its scabbard to free my hands. As I run to the ladder, a new mass of colors appears and starts growing to my right. The columns of fluids distort the image, giving the impression of a blob of flesh with a hundred hands and feet, with grossly distorted faces dotted all around the mass.
I edge forward cautiously. A trick of the light makes the dancing distortions look like a hundred eyes following me.
Then I step out of the column matrix and see it for what it really is.
My chest constricts and I stop breathing for a few beats. My feet stick to the floor and I just stand there in the open, staring.
CHAPTER 37
At first, my brain refuses to believe what my eyes see. My brain tries to interpret the scene as a wall of discarded dolls. Mere cloth and plastic, created by a toymaker with severe anger issues. But I can’t convince myself of the illusion and I’m forced to see it for what it is.
Against the white wall are stacks and stacks of children.
Some stand stiffly against the wall and on each other, half a dozen deep. Some sit propped up against the wall and against the legs of the other children. And some lie on their backs and stomachs, stacked on top of each other like cords of wood.
They range from toddler size to about ten or twelve years old. They are all naked, stripped of anything that might protect them. All have distinctive autopsy stitch marks in a Y shape starting at their little chests and going down to their groins.
Most of them have additional stitch marks along their arms, legs, throats, groins. A few have stitches across their faces. Some of the kids' eyes are wide open, others closed. Some of their eyes have yellow or red instead of white around the irises. Some only have gaping holes where the eyes used to be, and others have their eyes sewn shut with big, clumsy stitches.