the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  “He wanted you to see this,” she says.

  The woman dips the card into the reader and quickly pulls it, and then a green indicator light blinks and there is the sound of the latch whirring. She pushes the door open to its limit, the point at which the bike cable catches—maybe a foot’s worth of space—and immediately there are pale and emaciated limbs erupting from the gap. Reaching out, scrabbling blindly at the frame, the molding. Faces start to press into the space. Lidless eyes and long, gaping mouths trailing saliva. There is no sound coming from the room save the scratching of ragged nails. The stench wafting through is almost physically staggering.

  As Park watches, horrified and transfixed, the woman sets the keyring down on the carpet and takes the lid from one of the paint buckets—inside are the remnants of a carcass, most likely one of the broken fossa cats. Nothing but bones and rubbery cartilage and congealed fat and gristle, the connective tissue of the thing. She drops a hand into the bucket and starts tossing out handfuls of carrion through the gap into the room. One after the other. Past the desperate hands and onto the suite floor.

  The limbs, the haggard faces, they disappear from the entryway. Every soul inside is busy feeding on whatever they can find amid the trash and the human waste scattered over the interior, and the woman pauses her grim distribution when the bucket is emptied by about a third. She puts the lid back on and straightens. Park looks past her shoulder and sees that there are nine, maybe ten more identical closed doors in the hallway, secured the same way as this one.

  The woman looks at him. Her wide black eyes are underscored by the dust mask.

  “It won’t be so bad,” she says.

  All at once she unhooks the loop of the bike cable from the nail and pushes open the door, and before Park can react he is seized from behind by a set of arms that feel like iron and he is driven hard into the room. The door closes behind him.

  chapter ten

  From time to time, they will come cautiously to him. They approach in the same way a wild animal will after it’s been fed by hand a number of times. Skittish, wary. One step forward, two steps back. When they finally reach him they sniff closely for his scent, and over the past few hours he has felt several of their rough and coated tongues on his arm, his cheek. There is a woman somewhere in the room with half of her face missing who took the time to kneel down next to him and stroke his scalp with her fingers. He holds the knife closely, but he’s too terrified to use it in the confined space, in the midst of the crowd of infected around him.

  The only saving grace is this: for most of his time here—somewhere around five or six hours—he has been ignored. Accepted as an individual competitor, one out of thirty-eight, in this community of common disease, just another fighter over the scraps tossed down. Mostly he has been left alone to crouch in a far corner of the dark room, wedged between the wall and a dresser unit, and to watch as the inhabitants spiral, wheeling, through their own tailor-made versions of the sickness.

  After a time there is a light knock on the door—three quick raps. Park looks up, startled, and wipes both eyes. He waits, listening, and when the knocks come again, he gets to his feet. No one else notices, or maybe it’s that they don’t have the energy to give a damn; a few of them are shuffling through the filth, oblivious, and the rest are curled fetally or fully laid out, comatose.

  Park goes to the door and he whispers for whoever is there to help him. Please, I can’t be here, he says. His body is pressed up against the paneling. He tries looking through the fish-eye lens but the glass has been blacked out from the exterior side.

  There’s silence for a time, and then he hears a voice, a woman’s. The thick, slurred pronunciation. “When they hear the locks opening, they’ll come,” the voice whispers. “You’ll have to be fast.”

  “Thank you,” Park says. “God, thank you so much.”

  “I’m serious. If one of them gets too close to me, I walk. If I think one might get loose, I walk.”

  “Okay, yes. I understand.”

  “Okay,” says the voice. “Ready?”

  “Yes. Please. Yes.”

  There is a short pause and then the sound of the padlock clearing.

  Behind him, an eruption of activity. Bodies moving quickly from supine to upright positions. Heavy footfalls sounding through the debris. Park is gripping the L-handle of the door, pushing down hard and pulling inward. The bolt of the floor-lock pops, and soon the privacy chain is dangling, clacking against wood, and then he is shouting for her, telling her to hurry the hell up, goddammit. Open the goddamn door.

  Park feels one of them at his shoulder, pushing past him, and he drops the handle and turns and shoves the figure back. He straight-kicks another in the gut and it doubles over and falls to its knees, but then two more of them come, and then a third and then a fourth. He finds himself throwing hook punches with both fists, trying to keep his head shielded, and in between blows he shoots glances behind him at the door but nothing has changed. Without thinking, he grabs the knife and starts slashing wildly in crisscrossing motions, and the blade makes contact with a number of reaching limbs and the blood starts to flow.

  The group is working itself into a frenzy—transforming from a collection of invalids into an undeniable mob. Rabid, swelling. The passivity has drained from them, replaced by a distilled form of pure-grade aggression, and the horde pushes forward, pressing him toward the door, trying to pass. Park swings the knife and he lashes out with front-kicks and he keeps checking the door, and after a time he sees a slight gap and the cold blue light from the hallway spilling in. He shoves his way forward to the opening, and as he slips through, the woman yanks the door closed behind him.

  Park can hear them now on the other side. Their restless bodies. The writhing, the searching for a way through. The sound reminds him of a burlap sack full of snakes.

  One of the women in masks relocks the door from bottom to top. Park watches her. She’s the Hanna who led him to the Jumellea to talk with Nil—he knows her by her back-length black hair and her cornflower blue dress, slightly deeper-hued than the dresses that the others wear. The woman makes sure the door is secure, and when she finishes she turns to him and presses the cold lump of the keyring into his palm.

  “If you don’t find the medicine in your suite, it will be in the Calanthe conference room,” she says. “That’s where he sleeps. Everything he owns is there.”

  Without another word she turns to leave.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “Somewhere else.”

  “Hold on,” he says. He goes after her. “Dammit, wait. Why did you do this?”

  The woman stops. She turns and looks at him, bringing one hand up to the mask on her face. Quickly, she lifts it. There is an open view of the remains of her mouth, her nose, the scarred skin around both.

  Park sprints up the stairwell to the fifth floor and bursts through the heavy fire door into the hallway. Blue outage lights lining the carpet, runway-like, on either side. He follows the wall placards. Suite 504 is all the way on the far end.

  The guest-room doors he passes are all closed, solid and nondescript, comfortably identical, and for a brief moment everything seems almost normal, as though he’s found the single area spared by the collapse, but the look of the doors begins to change as he approaches his own. The security modifications have been made to them, around fifteen rooms total, including 504. Bike cables or lengths of thick cord are running from the paneling to the adjoining walls. Floor-bolts and laminated padlocks and privacy chains.

  Park stands in front of the door for a moment, weighing the options, and then he looks down at the keyring in his hand. Each padlock key is labeled. He finds 504 and goes to work freeing the locks.

  When he finishes, nothing comes to fill the gap between the door and the jamb. No groping hands, no hollow, vacated expressions. Park waits. The cable is still securely attached across the entryway, as a precaution.

  He listens for as long as he can, but th
ere’s no time—eventually he pulls out the knife and unthreads the wire loop from the thick nail in the wall, letting the cable fall, swinging. He pushes open the door, his free arm extended in front of him, the knife-arm cocked back.

  The meager hallway light spills in, and he can see that the room has been stripped bare—no carpeting, no fixtures, no furniture—and all of his and Lee’s possessions, including the suitcase, are gone. There are figures scattered across the floor, motionless. Ten or fifteen of them. Dark figures—bluish-black skin. All of them are Mirasai, by the looks of them, and all of them are unclothed and malnourished, painfully thin. Some are tethered together at the wrists. Impossibly, he sees the whites of a few blinking eyes.

  Park steps into the room and moves quickly from body to body. Get up, he says. You have to go now, do you understand me? The door is open. You need to run.

  There isn’t any time for this. Park leaves the room and starts down the hall toward the stairwell. The Calanthe—that’s what the woman in the mask told him—if the medicine isn’t in the room, it’s in the Calanthe, with everything else Nil owns.

  Park is nearing the grey fire door when a voice calls out sharply from behind him. He turns, and there is an unclothed Mirasai woman standing in the hallway in front of 504. Her arm is held across her chest and she has a hand at her groin.

  “Key,” she says to him.

  “What?”

  “Key, galashao,” she says. “Put to I.”

  The expression she’s wearing could only be interpreted as hate-filled, and she uses the Mirasai word for white man—foreigner—to address him, and the combination is almost enough to make him turn and leave without another word, but he stops himself. After a moment he goes to her.

  The woman uncovers herself long enough to reach out a hand, open-palmed. “Put,” she says.

  Park shakes his head. “I need them.”

  “I need.”

  “Why the hell do you need?” he says.

  The woman nods toward one of the other doors. “More. Us more.”

  Park looks at the other locked doors for a time and then he curses. If there are more of these people caged here, he can’t just leave them behind.

  “All right,” he says, nodding. The truth is that having an independent group of escapees loose in the Makoa could help him in the end.

  She opens her palm again. “Put.”

  “No,” Park says. “I’ll do it. I.” He points to his chest. “I will do it.”

  The woman hesitates as though considering the idea of making a lunge at him. But after a moment she steps out of his way, watching closely as he goes to work on the locks of the first door.

  There are three guest rooms in total—each with another ten or fifteen Mirasai captives inside—and once the doors are all open Park leaves the haggard assembly behind. Fend for yourselves from here, Mirasados. If he was planning on leaving the Makoa directly, he wouldn’t hesitate to use the group as cover, run with them long enough to see himself free, but right now he needs the group to draw attention away from him, to pull Nil in another direction. Park bolts downward through the stairwell. He is gripping both handrails and taking the steps two at a time.

  At the second-floor landing Park stops and waits a few beats, breathing hard. He is thinking about the locked door of the Calanthe conference room. He imagines himself opening it with the master keycard and stepping into an unknown darkness where Nil may be waiting, awakened by the sound of his entry. He can’t have that; he needs Nil to be gone before that time. The Mirasai may be enough to draw him out of the room, but they may not be. Even with their sizeable numbers—there are maybe fifty of them in all—their exit from the building might be too well concealed, too quiet.

  Park eventually decides that he can’t rely on them alone. He turns around and begins climbing back up the stairs.

  At the fourth floor, he exits the stairwell and goes back to the locked room—the mortis room—the place where he was kept prisoner.

  The occupants haven’t settled. Park can hear them still, scrabbling doggedly at the wood on the other side of the door, seething, but he tries not to pay attention to it. He starts at the top, the padlock, and works his way down, unlocking everything that secures the door with the exception of the main lock, the lock that opens with the master keycard. He leaves the door as it is, with the single lock in place. He moves on to the next door in the line, unlocking it in the same way, and when he finishes he goes to the next door, and then the next.

  When all of the doors are unlocked, Park stands in the hallway with the master keycard in hand. At the first door, he dips the keycard in the reader until the mechanism whirs and then he jacks the L-handle down, opening the door just enough to set it against the jamb. He hurries down the line, doing the same at each door—including the one for his own temporary prison—and when every door is open he runs full-board for the stairwell. At about the halfway point, he glances over his shoulder and sees the skeletal bodies pouring out into the hallway.

  Park was hoping that they would disperse, scatter randomly throughout the building, once they tasted freedom. But right away he can hear them padding stiffly down the hall toward him. These devils have gotten used to acting as a whole, taking cues from one another. Sharing a common psychosis. As he enters the stairwell, he catches sight of the mass surging toward him.

  Park is faster, but their pursuit seems almost ideological—a matter of committed belief. It’s as though they were appointed to the task of laying hands on him, of bringing him back into the gentle fold, of taking him home.

  They follow him all the way down to the ground floor. He bursts through the stairwell door, sprints down the hall, and ducks into an alcove where two vending machines stand gutted, their weighty doors cracked opened with a prybar. He wedges his body between them, pulls the knife and crouches down. His pulse is throbbing. He struggles to regain his breath, to silence himself.

  The infected start to come soon after. Noiseless except for their padding footfalls. From his position he is completely blind—he has no line of sight on the corridor—so he just stays huddled low, waiting. He says something to himself that vaguely resembles prayer, and then he takes the set of keys in his palm and slots four key-blades in between his fingers, and he balls the hand into a fist.

  One of them staggers drunkenly into the alcove with him. A man, alone, peeling away from the pack, drifting wayward. Right away, the man sees Park huddled between the fallen vending machines, and they make direct eye contact, but the man simply trudges past him and then collapses into a seated position. His back is flat up against the wall in the corner.

  For a while the man is motionless, posted there on the floor like a woeful panhandler, and Park tries to stay completely still, staring forward, watching the man in his peripheral vision, but after a few moments the man lifts his arm up from where it rests at his side. He brings the arm to the level of his teeth and gazes at the inside of his wrist almost longingly, as though he’s been waiting for the chance to find himself alone with it, and then he leans in and widens his mouth to a terrifying degree and bites down, breaking skin. He begins gnawing at the site of the wound, and Park can’t bear to watch it, so he closes his eyes.

  Soon he hears liquid splashing heavily against the tile. A smell like hot gunmetal—the man must have tapped into something turgid, a life-giving conduit. Everything vital is rapidly ebbing from him. Before long, the alcove is completely silent.

  Park forces himself to stand and take a few tentative steps out of the space between the machines. He passes a pool of blood; in the darkness, it looks a lot like spent-up engine oil. He glances down at the sick man on the floor, just long enough to see that he’s motionless—either dead or unconscious—then he moves to the hallway and looks both directions. There’s no one. Without hesitation, he starts in the same direction that the group took, the direction of the main lobby area.

  He moves as quickly as he’s able to. More and more, his legs are feeling rigid and wei
ghted, similar to the way his mind has felt lately. Every moment is becoming a struggle against some implacable inertia, strong as the pull of a current.

  He pushes past the defunct elevator bank, and as he approaches the Makoa lobby he hears the sound of Nil’s voice roaring out monosyllabic commands. Doors opening and closing forcefully. One of the women in masks is shouting out a string of inspired profanity. From every direction, the echo of hurried footfalls.

  Park takes the corridor that leads to the conference rooms. The hallway is barren—all of the clamor is coming from behind him, from the wing that branches eastward off the lobby, the part of the building that houses the guest room he was given.

  He comes quickly to the Calanthe, and for a brief moment the door looks the same as the rest of them, like any one of the faceless doors in any given hallway of the Makoa, but then he sees a single metal hasp installed across the frame gap. The U-shackle of a padlock is threaded through the eyelet.

  Immediately, he takes out the ring of keys and pages through them, skimming one after the other along the arc of the split loop. His hands are shaking. He studies the bow of every key but there is no label that matches the Calanthe. Halfheartedly, he tries a few of them, but nothing takes.

  There isn’t time for this. He lifts his shirt hem and pulls the hand-trowel from his waistband—the pointed scoop blade and the wooden handle. He raises the trowel and bores the tip of the blade between the hasp and the wood, working it in. Gouging a wide track into the fiber. Once the blade is positioned deeply underneath the hasp, he levers the handle upward, steady and hard, prying the screw threads from their settings. Up and down, up and down. Finally the hasp breaks free and falls to the carpet, padlock and all.