Outside the Zees are piling up against the entrance, doing their best to follow us inside. Even with inches of stone and wood between us, I still can’t help hearing the horrible noise they make. Sounds like a sickly cat being strangled.
Bron is checking us over for bites and none too gently I might add. He sees the bandage on Sneak’s arm and I catch the change in his expression at once.
“She’s fine,” I say, already feeling the strength coming back into my body. “It isn’t a bite.” Ret’s standing over me. He’s got that same look on his face he had years ago, on the Holson job. A wealthy Trader had hired us to rescue his eldest son from a band of kidnappers. We found the kid all right, except he was stuffed into a chest, his legs folded in at odd angles. A note on his body said: “This is what happens when you don’t listen.”
Ret had been the one to deliver the bad news and that somber look he’s wearing now is nearly identical. Like somebody died.
I look him square in the eye. “Something tells me that concern on your face doesn’t have anything to do with losing Gunnar.”
“I don’t like losing anyone,” he says. “Especially not to those… things. Not that way.”
“Sneak did what she could.”
“I’m not worried about Sneak. You’ve trained her well.”
I catch his fingers fiddling with the loose straps on his ammo vest.
“You wanna know what’s happening to me, that it?”
He nods.
“And if I tell you I don’t know?”
His voice is quiet now, just below the racket coming from outside.
“I’ll find it hard to believe. You don’t think I saw those Zees break their heads open? Maybe you take me for an idiot. Bet you probably didn’t have a clue that your hands were in the air before you yanked them down like a troupe of marionettes.”
My hands slide up to the curve of my hips, a defensive posture I’m barely aware of. “They communicate with one another, the Zees,” I say. “If Oleg wasn’t trying to catch his breath, I’d pull him over and have him explain it to you. They’re all connected to one another.” I point to my face. “And now so am I.”
“Like that Zee we found in the laboratory?”
“Yes, plugged into the signal. I see that signal too, but I don’t need a salad bowl on my head to tell you what it’s saying.”
“And what is it saying?”
“Let’s just say they think of me as the one that got away.”
Ret’s eyes drop. “That Zee in the listening post. He could only send and receive signals. He wasn’t able to…intervene.”
“That’s right, once the ones that turn completely become passive receivers and transmitters.”
“But Azina, I saw you control them. Make them bash their own brains into the gravel.”
“And it nearly killed me.”
“Maybe, but let’s cut the bullshit. You know as well as I do what this means.”
I catch the glare in his eyes and I’m sure the others can hear us just as well. My hands rise, the urge to plug my fingers in my ears and block out what he’s about to say is strong, but I’ve got to face it, face what I’ve become.
That grieving look settles over Ret’s face again as he says it.
“You’re becoming a Hive leader.”
-20-
We gather our things and head through the room with the severed leg. Bodies are piled everywhere. Most of them Zees or Keepers, killed in the process of turning. Oleg keeps mumbling about Skuld’s doomsday machine, that we need to stop him and I’m worried the old guy’s gonna give himself a heart attack. I’m feeling more and more myself with every step. Threads of my conversation with Ret are still buzzing around in my head. That’s when something occurs to me. That very first time I’d tapped into hive central and used it to pry that red scumbag’s fingers from around Sneak’s throat, I’d recovered in a matter of minutes. This time took so much longer, and for a while my thoughts had been cloudy and almost muffled. Shouldn’t I be building up a tolerance to it, the way people build a tolerance to alcohol? Whatever the full scale of this ability is, with every use, I seem to be losing more and more of myself.
I’m up at the front of the group. Dhal’s beside me, looking over some kind of diagram he’s pulled from the sagging cloth backpack strapped to his shoulders.
“I thought you knew this place inside out?”
“So did I.”
I reach over and flip the map around. “For starters you’ve got it upside down.”
“I knew that,” he chirps back and I’m wondering whether it was a mistake to drag this kid along in the first place.
“You will be able to reverse the effects of this thing Skuld’s building, right?”
Dhal smacks the bottom of his backpack with his free hand and all I hear is the metallic clang from a bunch of tools banging together. “Hardware’s in the bag and I’m the best coder I know.”
He isn’t even that short, but he’s talking directly to my breasts. I’ve never met an adolescent boy who wasn’t boastful or oversexed. According to them, they’re the best at everything they do and think they’re going to live forever. Reminds me of a younger Bron.
“Here,” he shouts and draws to a stop. At our feet are more bodies, these ones Wardens. One of them is rough-skinned and stirring, ever so slightly, and I use the six inch blade in my boot to make it stop.
From the rear, Bron pipes up. “Why are we stopping? There isn’t anything here but a few dead shitsacks.”
The boy’s gliding his hand along one of the smooth white walls. I’m starting to think he’s lost his mind when Oleg steps up and explains. “He’s looking for a seam. Apparently there are secret entrances to the lower levels all around here.”
A distant booming noise makes us all freeze. Sounds like it’s coming from behind us.
Sneak’s already backtracking down the hall, head tilted slightly. A second later she signs back. “They’re inside.”
And I don’t need to ask who she means by ‘they’. I turn to Dhal. “I really hope you know what you’re doing, ‘cause sometime in the next two minutes, things are gonna get real crowded around here.”
He nods, removes that floppy hat of his, and uses it to wipe away the layer of sweat that’s beading his forehead. “I know it’s around here somewhere.”
I send Ret in the other direction to keep watch. We’re like sitting ducks in this hallway. Ret clicks the safety off his shotgun and looks at me with those piercing eyes of his and I feel the sudden impulse to pull his head back and kiss him right on the spot. And just as quickly I’m struck with a horrible epiphany. The Zee chemical isn’t only surging through my veins, it’s also in every ounce of my saliva. A kiss from me is a kiss from death itself. As a child I remember The Keepers reading us a story they said was thousands of years old. About a king named Midas whose touch turned everything to gold. Seemed like a blessing, at first, until he touched his daughter and she was turned into a golden statue. Even the food that touched his lips turned to gold. Devastated, the king prayed to an ancient god named Dionysus for help. Dionysus told Midas to bathe in the river Pactolus and when he did, it washed the curse away. If this kid’s as good as he thinks he is, I’m hoping Skuld’s little apocalypse machine can become a kind of Pactolus River for all of the infected.
The racket in the distance is growing louder and tiny bits of Zee code are zipping through my mind. They’re honing in on me like a beacon. I should leave the group, but I know Ret, Sneak and Bron will have none of it. Dhal’s fingers tremble as he sweeps them across the wall, back and forth, muttering to himself like an old drunk, swaying from too much hooch.
Then hissing from down the hall. They’re close and I watch the blood drain from Dhal’s face. Out of nowhere he shouts in triumph. “Here it is! I found it!”
Ret and Sneak are on their way back, Sneak at a brisk pace and I know the Zees only seconds away. Dhal reaches into his knapsack and pulls out an eight inch prybar. Bron snatches
it from his hands and digs the tip into the thin groove. Bits of plaster fall away as he works it in as far as it’ll go. Ret and Krantz take up defensive positions.
“Any time you’re ready, Bron,” Ret snaps.
“If you think you can do this any faster, medicine man, give it your best shot.”
There is a sound of metal under stress, but this noise isn’t coming from Bron’s arms. It’s coming from the prybar, which snaps in two.
Bron curses. “I should have known better than to play with a child’s toys,” he says and punches a ten inch hole in the wall. His eyes grow wide.
He must have found a clump of metal rods in the reinforced concrete wall and he uses them as leverage to wrench the door open.
“It’s moving,” Dhal says. He’s ecstatic, and only I can see that the legs of his trousers are stained with piss.
“Course it’s moving,” Bron snaps. “But no thanks to you.”
I hear the breath hitch in Oleg’s throat. Zees turn the corner and Ret and Krantz open fire. The hallway is narrow and the first few Zees are torn to shreds. Dark blood fans out behind them, painting the walls with a horrible image of death. But the stream doesn’t end. With Zees it never ends, and it won’t until every single last one of them lies on the ground with their brains pouring from their ears.
They’re less than twenty feet away when Bron jars the cellar door wide enough for us to slip inside. He’s the last one in and lays down a volley of punishing fire to buy us some time. The rest of us are descending into darkness when I feel those flashes of pain stop stinging me. Above us, the door slams shut and it takes the others a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the ambient light. All but me. The darkness is where I see best now. Details jump out at me. The low, recessed ceiling. The precision of the stonework. Our feet whisper down the cool steps as we make our way into blackness.
-21-
Up ahead a glimmer of light. We’re inching through the darkness, single file, with me in the lead. Oleg is right behind me. Someone at the rear, maybe Ret, trips on something and curses. Bron bellows laughter. The big guy lives for others falling flat on their faces. Slapstick, they used to call it, although I don’t see how the two words relate to the kind of joy Bron experiences seeing someone stumble.
I tilt my head back to Oleg and whisper. “You’ve been quiet since we freed you from Skuld’s men. We usually can’t shut you up.”
Oleg’s hand tightens its grip on my shoulder and his body begins to spasm.
Uh oh.
“It’s your family, isn’t it?”
His voice is heavy with emotion. “Yes.”
“You don’t just want to stop Skuld from waking the Hives, do you? You want revenge.”
“He tortured them and then hung their bodies outside the city gates. Wouldn’t you want revenge?”
I remember seeing them strung up like a pack of thieves, although at the time I hadn’t a clue who they were. “Want it worse than you know. It’s because of Skuld that Glave and Pennies and Jinx are dead. Because of him that I’ve become…” My voice trails off.
“Then you see.”
“Oh, I see. But you and I are gonna have to get in line. Krantz wants a piece of Skuld too and no doubt Bron is anxious to blow him into tiny bits, even if it’s just on principle. Ret may be the only one who’s let it go.”
“Yes,” Oleg whispers. “He’d make a fine Buddhist.”
The light’s getting closer, we’re almost there.
“Buddhist?”
Oleg laughs, more to himself. “Oh, nothing. One of the old religions. They believed in pacifism and were one of the first to go when the human race began to devour itself. Some were said to have sat in blissful meditation as they were eaten alive.”
I grimace and ask what is probably a silly question. “What’s the opposite of a Buddhist?”
Oleg doesn’t miss a beat. “The man we’re trying to kill.”
The light in the room is dim, two emergency fixtures on either wall. Inside everything is white, or at least used to be, making it appear brighter than it really is. There’s a heavy gray film coating the walls, desks and chairs. Dhal’s checking his map again, a confused look on his face; he doesn’t have a clue where the hell we are.
I look at Oleg and Krantz.
“The Keeper museum has a display room that looks an awful lot like this,” Oleg says.
I run my finger along a table, stacked with shriveled pieces of what was once paper. My finger comes away dark and then I feel stupid. The skin on that side of my entire body is dark and shriveled, just like the stuff in this room.
“What do you make of it, Oleg? You’re the expert on that dead world.”
He’s already busying himself opening squeaky drawers and shuffling through bundles of rotting paper. “It looks like an old office. Special rooms within tall buildings, where Dusters used to busy themselves moving papers around.”
“Sounds thrilling,” Ret says.
Dhal clears some room on one of the desks, spreads out the map, and traces his finger along the path we’ve already taken.
“So I take it you’ve managed to get us lost already?” I offer encouragingly.
“There’s more than one way to the underground bunker,” he replies. “Weird thing is, this room isn’t showing up on any of the schematics.”
I peer down. He’s right, but I can see that each entrance leads to a central room.
“What’s this?” I ask, tapping my finger on that point.
“That’s the main access elevator.”
“How deep down are we going?”
“All the way.”
Behind us, Krantz emerges from behind a desk, waving something in the air.
Oleg rushes over and the others follow suit.
I’m the last to arrive. “This isn’t the time for a museum field trip,” I say, but no one’s listening. Oleg and Krantz are blabbing to each other like a couple of old ladies.
“What have you found?” I ask.
“This was an administrative office for a company called Kempers Inc.”
Bron’s eyes light up. “Did they sell chicken?”
“No,” Oleg replies curtly. “They were a bio-chem firm.”
I can practically see that one sailing over my head.
“Bio-chem?” Ret asks.
“Biological and chemical.”
“And look at the company logo,” Oleg says. “In the old world it was called the atomic symbol. A powerful, and luckily for us, a lost technology.”
I study it and realize I’ve seen that symbol somewhere before.
Oleg notices and asks: “What does that look like to you?”
I’m drawing a blank and frankly, not in the mood for games. “Just spit it out old man.”
Oleg lowers the paper until the company logo falls in line with The Keeper symbol on the breast of his robe. They’re close enough that I can’t believe I missed it. Three overlapping elliptical rings and eleven empty spaces within. One for each of the territories radiating from a central core. The Patriarch.
Krantz calls out from the other side of the room. He’s elbow deep in the bowels of a filing cabinet. “You’re not going to believe this.”
-22-
He lugs over a number of heavy manila folders and plunks them down on the table. Dust motes swirl around us.
I’m not sure what point they’re trying to make, and right now all I can think about is getting to Skuld before he manages to finish off the human race for good. And if that weren’t enough, somewhere above us is an army of Zees, led by something that will sooner or later figure out how to open that trap door and catch us here with our pants down, holding reams of crumbling paper.
Krantz is flipping through page after page, handing them to Oleg one at a time.
I peek over his shoulder and see that dead language arranged in neat columns from top to bottom, enough to give me a headache.
“What does it say already?” I ask.
Krantz scrat
ches his forehead. “An initiative called Adam 930. Looks like the people who worked for Kemper Inc. were really pushing the boundaries.”
Oleg’s face suddenly looks ten years older. “One of the old world’s creation myths spoke of a man called Adam, who was created in the perfect image of their god. A man who lived to the ripe old age of 930. That was what they wanted, for men to become gods, to never grow old or get sick and die. They wanted to play almighty Newton and instead, their arrogance destroyed the world.”
“Kemper Inc. poisoned the water supply to help kick start their version of Heaven on Earth?” Ret asks.
I shake my head. “I thought you said the Duster governments were responsible?”
Oleg glances up at me, looking dazed and shell-shocked. “That’s what we were taught.”
“Yes, and when things went horribly wrong,” Krantz says, disgusted. “My forefathers were there to pick up the pieces, weren’t they?”
“We need to burn this,” Oleg says.
Bron stiffens. “Are you crazy, old man? Do you know what you’re holding in your hands? Proof that The Keepers killed billions of Dusters and then hung around to scoop up what was left.”
“Yes, but you can’t convict a group of people for something their ancestors did two hundred years ago. You start down that slippery slope and you can make a case for every one of us to hang. Besides, who are you going to show this to? The Patriarch? Ha! You’re better off digging a grave now for yourself and everyone you’ve ever known.”
Ret glances at the folders on the desk and then looks away. “Judging from what’s going on upstairs, I’d say that right about now everyone I’ve ever known is either dead or a shitsack. No offence, Azina.”
Hive II Page 5