The winding cavern often lead to dead ends heaped with bodies, their limbs tangled through each other like a gruesome puzzle. Vaughn nearly gave up on finding a dwelling fit for the living when his flashlight reflected a glint of metal and a steel door appeared on his right. He fumbled with the knob until it opened into a small, dingy apartment. He shined the light through the eerily quiet room in search of gas torches until he noticed a light switch. Amazed at the novelty, he flicked the small button and a bare, incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling drenched the room with electric light. He set Kora down on a dusty cot and searched through the cupboards where he found a wide variety of tea boxes, an electric kettle, blankets and a space heater. He plugged the heater into a nearby socket and fiddled with the levers until it gave out a dull heat, then rolled it as close to Kora as the cord allowed. Her clothes were soaked so he carefully removed her pants and shirt, doing his best not to look, and laid them over the heater to dry.
“Where am I?” she asked in a hoarse voice.
Vaughn sat down beside her. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“What are you doing here?” She looked fearfully around the cramped room and sat up so the blanket fell away exposing her wet bra.
He handed her a cup of black tea and pulled her blanket back up. “We’re in the catacomb. I found you about three quarters of the way up the pipe. Do you remember anything?”
Kora gazed at him blankly until memory stirred back into her eyes. “I couldn’t make it. I thought my strength would kick in, but it never did.”
“You mean the strength you used to toss Caleb like a frisbee?”
“I didn’t meant to throw him so hard,” said Kora. “I swear.”
“I believe you. I've experienced it myself, remember?”
She searched his face. “You're not angry with me like the others?”
Vaughn resisted the urge to push her wet hair off of her cheek. “I think you and Caleb have a complicated past. I’ve decided to be patient and not jump to conclusions.”
Kora smiled with her mouth, but not her eyes. “I wish Gus felt the same way. He'll never forgive me.”
“He’s the one who sent me to rescue you.”
“Really?” Kora looked relieved. “It broke my heart when he told me to go back to Mirafield.”
Vaughn tried not to get too excited, in case he misunderstood. “You don't want to go back anymore?”
Kora looked down at the blanket covering her. “I don't belong at Mirafield, and I don't want to marry Randall.”
A wave of joy crashed over him, but it was short lived. Vaughn liked Kora, more than he should because no matter what he did, she would always look down on him. He was near the bottom of that damn ladder, so any relationship with her was pointless. “You almost ended up in that pipe for an eternity, though I’m sure you would have washed out eventually.”
“During the next ice age.”
Vaughn wished he could kiss her, but it would probably just freak her out.
“This isn’t how I pictured the catacomb,” continued Kora. “Seems more like a prison break room.”
“I think someone lived here who definitely liked a good cup of tea from the old country. The cupboard is full of PG Tips.”
“Mud.” Kora sat up straight and looked around. “I bet this is where he lived.”
“Are you beginning to remember things?”
“Slowly…and painfully.”
She stood up with the blanket from the bed wrapped around her and Vaughn saw flashes of her stomach and legs as she moved across the floor. He turned his back to refill the teapot in the sink. “It’s strange because everything here is electric,” he said, straining to listen as she dressed herself in a dry pair of pants from her plastic bag. He was so used to girls in nothing but string bikinis and psychedelic body paint that the idea of her in plain white underwear drove him wild.
Kora finished her tea and brought him her cup. “Obviously Ruby never came down here much. Everything with her has to involve fire.”
“We came through a frightening maze that looks more like how you’d picture a catacomb. That part definitely fits her taste.” He brushed his fingers over hers as she handed him the cup.
“I want to look around but you’re soaked. Aren’t you cold?” she asked.
“I’m fine. Unfortunately there isn’t any sugar.”
“I never use sugar.” Kora pointed at the broken table against the wall. “Doesn’t that sort of look like a larger version of the one in Caleb’s tea party.”
Vaughn studied the table. “Looks just like it.”
She shivered and moved closer to the heater. “How did you managed to get me out of that pipe anyway? Gus mentioned that you don’t swim and hate the ocean.”
He paused as he tried to find the right words to explain the strange experience. “I didn’t swim. I walked.”
“You walked?”
“That’s the only way to describe it.”
Kora laughed. “Are you trying to tell me you just strolled up the pipe and saved me?”
“Yep.”
“That’s insane. You’d have to hold your breath for at least half an hour, probably more.”
“I didn’t hold my breath.”
Her eyes opened wide. “You didn’t breathe?”
“Not at all. It seemed so natural, it took me a while to notice.”
“I could never have made you that way…could I?”
“Do you want me to prove it?”
“I believe you, but it’s terrifying how brilliant I used to be. I think I forgot a lot more than just my sordid past.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?”
She drifted up to him and though he knew she was examining him like a curious specimen, he still basked in her attention. A shiver went through him when she pressed her head against his chest to listen to his heart. Several times he reached up to stroke her soft, electric hair, but he always stopped himself.
“I wish I’d poked around a bit more when I had you asleep on that gurney the night I fixed your stomach,” she said. “I've got a lot to learn from my old self.”
“I’ll have to keep an eye on you from now on.”
She winked at him, grabbed the flashlight, and walked out into the grim tunnel. At that moment, Vaughn would have followed her off the castle roof but once out in the tunnel, he looked around uneasily. The first body he saw outside the door had teeth growing out of its nose. “I like it better in Mud’s pad.”
Kora bent down to study a corpse that looked half coyote, half man. “This room has many from the early period when she was combining humans with animals.”
“Like Humphrey?”
“He’s probably the only one that survived.”
“So you never made any pig men or horned devils with twenty rows of teeth like a shark?”
Kora shot him a withering look and he decided to keep quiet as he trailed along behind her. He watched in horror as she smoothed her hands over tortured faces and grasped shriveled hands that seemed to reach for her.
She called him over, at one point, to help her turn a body over so she could look at its back. “Many of these creatures have been stabbed right through the heart with some kind of long, jagged blade.”
“Must be how rejects got disassembled down here. I imagine you used something more sophisticated?”
Kora stared at the gash in the corpse's chest for a long time. “We use a special gun.” She turned her face up to him, her eyes searching his. “I know you must think I'm cruel, but I don't think I always was.”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “I'm sorry. That was a low blow.”
“I deserved it,” she said, gazing at the line of bodies that seemed to go on forever. “But whatever you think of me, I never harmed these creatures.”
They stood in silence while Vaughn struggled to come up with a new subject. “So what's up with the old skull in your bag?”
Kora gasped and ran back to the apartment with the fla
shlight, leaving Vaughn alone in the dark. He could hear a squeaking, scraping sound on the floor along the wall and imagined a team of rats scrabbling up his pants. It seemed a long time before he saw the light in the tunnel once again.
“Thanks for reminding me. I almost forgot.” Kora set the skull down on a shelf and stood appraising it as if it was a vase of flowers. “I wish I could place it with the rest of its body.”
“I’m sure it won’t mind. Where did you find it?”
“Humphrey gave it to me. He said it was mine. At the time I didn’t understand what he meant.”
“And now you do?”
Kora nodded her head. “I cared for them.”
Vaughn laughed. She had to be joking. “These guys all make Ivan and Caleb look like runway models and a few days ago, you were ready to toss them into the trash.”
“I know. It's hard to explain.” She ran a hand over the skull as if memorizing its shape. “That was what I learned at Mirafield, from Randall. When I lived here, it would never have occurred to me to destroy any creature. I healed them and loved them. That was my whole purpose.”
Vaughn felt as if he were in a free fall. He wanted to just dive into this girl and never surface. He followed along after her, wincing when she squatted down next to a two-headed creature with one face that looked normal while the other was lost in a gruesome knot of hardened flesh like a diseased tree. “I’ll bet the guy on the left was the one who got laid.”
“They share the same body,” replied Kora without looking up.
Vaughn needed to act more serious, but he felt better if he pretended they were touring the backstage of some macabre show. “So were they all stabbed to death?”
“I’d have to perform full autopsies on each one but from what I can tell, many died from severe deformities. The stab was just an extra step to make sure they were dead.”
They continued into the next cavern where, in addition to the cut recesses, metal shelves crowded the center of the floor, each level overflowing with corpses. Despite the increased numbers, Kora made a thorough check of each body and spent an unusual amount of time examining one with gnarled tentacles protruding from its head and chest. Vaughn closed his eyes to block out the misery while Kora pushed her unflinching hands into the nightmare up to the elbows.
“How do you do that?” he finally asked, watching as she stroked the forehead of a disgusting corpse with an arm protruding from the side of its head.
“I’ve been hiding in the light for so many years: clean white rooms, white clothes, grinding out beautiful, near-perfect synthetics. But I feel more like myself here. I think I've been haunted by these mutants for years. Seeing them like this, as they truly are, is amazing.”
“I think they’ll be haunting me from now on,” mumbled Vaughn.
Over three hours and hundreds of bodies later, Vaughn was exhausted. He collapsed against the wall across from Mud’s apartment so he could bask in the faint glow of the light bulb. He loved Kora. He couldn't tell her that, of course. Not yet. But right now, in that cold place full of death, he could feel the heat of it on his skin like the sun.
She appeared from one of the caves with the flashlight, her face tired with large circles under her eyes. “I just searched the last room and there’s still no sign of Mud.”
“How do you know none of the bodies were him?”
“When I worked down here, I tagged each one with a name, number and dates.”
“So we came all this way and no Mud.”
“I want you help me take a look at something.”
She guided him to the furthest point of the tunnel and shined the flashlight over a slim opening that was blocked by a heavy piece of wood. Vaughn pushed it aside so she could slip through and followed her into a room that had the feel of an ancient tomb. A chair and a small table with a lantern stood against one wall covered in a thick layer of dust.
Vaughn lit a match and held it over the wick, then turned a knob on the lantern. The room filled with a warm glow more familiar to him than the cold light from the electric bulb. Unlike the other caverns, the bodies here lay on soft pads with pillows under their desiccated heads. The first creature had bulging eyes like a fly and though he found it unremarkable, considering the horrors he’d seen over the last few hours, Kora was trembling.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
He placed a hand on her shoulder but she scrunched down as if the weight of it was too much for her to bear. “These were my good friends.”
“Oh,” he gazed at the shriveled bodies. Kora's friends had been a gruesome lot, even when they were alive.
She backed away from the bodies and sank into the chair, eerily aware of its position directly behind her. Then she lowered her chin onto folded hands and stared at the corpses. “I don't have friends anymore, except for Ishmael.”
Vaughn nearly cracked a with friends like these joke, but wisely changed direction. “Gus likes you, and when I went to visit Joshua, he said all kind of great things about you.”
That got her attention. “You went and saw him like I asked?”
“I'd even make friends with these guys if you wanted me to.”
It was a bad answer, but luckily Kora was too preoccupied to notice. “They were the first ones I helped survive down here, but it was back before I had medicine or training, so they eventually died. Their deaths are what drove me to master all of Ruby's knowledge so I could fix her mistakes. It wasn't long before I knew more than her. More than anyone about how to construct an artificial human.”
“What were you like back then? Do you remember?”
Kora gazed up at him, her eyes swirling with new memories. “I was the opposite of how I am now. I was good, kind, and ten times more brilliant.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It's true, but I was horrible looking. I would never have wanted you to see me.” Kora fixed her eyes back on the corpse in front of her. “But in the end, I just changed from one kind of monster into another.”
Vaughn couldn't move. Was she saying what he thought she was saying? His reoccurring dream bloomed before his eyes: the gray, heavily scarred face, staring down at him through his tank water. He reached out and his hand hovered a mere inch above her head. There was so much he wanted to say to her, he didn't know where to begin. He could barely get his voice above a whisper. “I’ve only been in love once.”
Kora didn't look up, and when she finally answered, he could hear the pain and longing in her voice. “Who was it, one of the girls in the Food?”
He ran his fingers gently down her hair. He knew it would be soft, like strands of fine silk. How many years had he dreamed of touching her? “It was you, Kora. I didn't realize it until now, but it was you.”
Chapter 26
Berta was the first to see the trucks. They roared past as she hid below the hill and blanketed her in dust. They had the same smell of shit and sweat that she remembered from that day, ten years earlier, when Randall's police had arrested her whole family. She closed her eyes, struggling not to cough, and saw her mother pressed into a corner with baby Iris in her arms. Berta watched, helpless, as Ramon fought to hold back the tilting mass that threatened to trample them to gain more room and air.
When the trucks had all made the turn up the long drive toward the compound, Berta slid out of her hiding spot and cut up the hill to the back of the workshop. She peeked around the side and saw men dressed in camouflage jumpsuits with automatic weapons, pounding across the yard toward the house. She was too late. She slipped through the back window into the workshop and looked around the cluttered worktables for anything she could use as a weapon. She heard shrieks from the direction of the house and hurried to the grimy window. The soldiers were already lining up the children. Iris was helping the little ones as the wailing mothers looked on, held back by a wall of guns. Iris kept shouting at the women and though Berta couldn’t hear her words, she knew Iris was trying to reassure them that everything would be okay. That
she would take care of them. Her baby sister had grown up so quickly.
There was nothing in the shop that would stop so many soldiers, but then her eyes landed on the garage where her truck was parked. The engine wasn’t finished but she could get it started. Berta darted across the driveway, but one of the soldiers spotted her and barked at the others. The garage door was half open so she slid under the door and slammed it closed with her foot, turning the stiff bolt. Some of the men tried to pry the door up while others ran around the garage looking for other ways in. She leapt into the truck, turned the key in the ignition, and burst through the garage door in an explosion of wood.
Berta smashed into one soldier, who’d failed to get out of the way, and dragged his body for several yards before he fell to the side of the road. She tore down the driveway, looking in the mirror to see if anyone was chasing her. Soon the high-pitched wail of motorcycles filled the air as they careened down the hill after her.
She pressed her foot on the accelerator and burned toward the mansion Vaughn had mentioned Joshua lived in, hoping her newly rebuilt engine didn’t burst into flames. When she neared his driveway she slowed down, nearly taking the turn on two wheels. She blasted up to the house, honking her horn, and slid to a stop directly in front of the main entrance. Joshua popped his head out the door like a dopey lizard.
“Get the hell in,” hollered Berta.
He ran down the steps and yanked open the door. Berta could hear the motorcycles roaring down the driveway. Before Joshua could even get the door closed, she shot back up the driveway. When the motorcycles saw her coming they tried to swerve off to the side to get out of her way, but she followed them, slamming into three at once. One bike smashed into the windshield and tumbled over the roof, landing in the truck bed. The rider stood up and stared at Joshua through the back window as blood poured down his face. Berta hit the brakes and he smashed into the glass, then fell back unconscious in the truck bed. She looked in her rear view mirror. The final rider was idling his bike before the house.
Synthetic: Dark Beginning Page 21