Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  Walken wandered for what seemed an eternity in miniature, meeting no one. There was ample evidence that the complex had been recently inhabited. He found a laundry with stacks of fresh medical scrubs at one point and a break room whose table was still host to styrofoam takeout containers — but of any living body there was no trace. It was as if whoever had been here had vanished suddenly, just reached for and taken by the hand of some wrathful god. That made Walken extremely nervous.

  Eventually his wanderings led him to something different, something new. The wide, twisting corridor which Walken had assumed to be the main now terminated, not in a slab of greying white steel as before but in a vast, matte black portal, vaulted and impossibly thick. He stared at it; there were no markings, nothing else that could foretell its purpose. Like everything else in his life these days, it was mystery in solid form.

  Walken canted his head and searched around the door's frame with his eyes. He saw only a flat pane of glass, as black as the door but glossy; he remembered the medic's words and reached into his pocket for the gazelle's hand. It was a limp thing, a lukewarm spider with glossy pearl-colored nails, the stump a weird blue-white color from the artificial blood. He frowned at it, this evolved monkey's paw and laid it palm-down against the panel. Silence stretched on around him for several seconds. Then the hatch slid open, merely spreading as if it were made of nothing more substantial than darkness and exposed beyond a new corridor.

  Unlike the hospital's crumbling halls, the corridor that lay beyond the black door was expertly crafted, flat gray steel panels forming a wide hexagonal umbilical. There was another, identical door on the other end. Pale recessed lamps glowed along the black carpeted flooring leading toward it. The air that blew out from it was cool and dry.

  He took a deep breath before stepping forward, fingers tightening on the grip of the C-J as he started down the hall. The angles of the wall panels gleamed dully, ribbons of faint shadow lancing between spaces where the weak halos of the running lamps couldn't reach and Walken felt a strange sort of claustrophobia as he walked toward it. It was as if the angles were slightly off, not to the eye but to his mind, a very slight inward turn in different places that made something in the back of his head panic slightly. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes and then opening them again began to walk down the hall.

  It felt like some kind of airlock, Walken thought as he brought the C-J up to shine its lamp directly on the door. Light seemed to dim by half within five feet of it, then died before it even made contact — just falling into it, the inky metal a hungry void. A shiver worked its way involuntarily across Walken's skin as he approached it. It wasn't normal, even for this fucked up place. It wasn't right.

  There was another panel and again with his free hand Walken laid the gazelle's severed palm against the polished glass. This time the black door took time to undo; he heard bolts work, saw spurts of pale steam or vapor emitting from its corners. He took a step back, the pistol up, as the doors hissed slowly open.

  What he had anticipated would be a massive chamber was instead a low, wide series of chambers, all connected by open hexagonal doorways; the walls were polished dark gray metal, the floor made of nonslip, textured steel panels. Walken noted the architecture first, the angles sharp and mathematically precise, a micron-perfect work of precision construction. Just looking at it, he somehow knew of the chamber's perfect symmetry, felt it as instinctual fact. Like the room before, it also felt wrong to him, alien in a way that he could not describe. It was as if at the deepest core of his brain, the primordial lizard-mind, the thing which reveled in the haphazard and the brutish, winced at such mathematical tyranny. The hair stood up on the back of his neck.

  The rest filtered in afterward, not because it was less disturbing, but because his brain didn't seem to want to process it. The absolute precision of the angles still wove its strange disconcertment in his guts, making his head lag behind in filling in the gaps. But fill they did, if slowly, as he blinked around the first room.

  Lattices rose on either side of the room, structures of polished surgical steel that looked very much like garden trellises in long, square Lexan tanks. The fruit that grew in this bizarre orchard was nothing he could identify. Strands of white, pale, fibrous what? ‘A knotwork of pale, fibrous strands, studded with veined globules, floated peacefully in the light amber bath of nutrient fluid. Thin ribbons of tubing led from the trellises to the floating vein-works. Something was being extracted into them, milky, yellow-white fluid draining away into the frames. Walken thought of the gazelle's blood and shuddered.

  He walked down the row, peering at each system of branches — through that room and into those beyond each tank was full of the same. They were like ghostly vines, drifting faintly in the current and Walken thought there was something familiar about them that his mind didn't seem to want to recognize; he stopped before one, stepping up to the glass, peering hard into it as if to divine the future. Out of the corner of his eye he registered how his reflection overlaid itself upon the vines to his left and it made horrible, crushing sense to him. These, too, were from people; lymphatic conduits, nodes, long webs of interconnected fascia harvested from many bodies.

  He leaned against the tank, eyes closed tight for a moment as he managed to draw his breath. The horror of it, compounded upon his nerves already so frayed by the nerve crusher, was hard to withstand. Walken took a deep breath, then two and pushed the welling tide of chaos down. When he opened his eyes again, he looked down into the last chamber of the corridor.

  There he saw more tanks, filled with something more readily identifiable and yet somehow worse. Human brains floated in the tanks lining this section of the corridor. In the pale amber of the nutrient baths they drifted, tethered to the base of their tanks by conduits and electrodes, a species of cyborg jellyfish. Like those specimens that had been attached to the previous webs of tissue, these transparent lines penetrated each organ; likewise, nameless fluids were occasionally drawn out in pale spurts.

  Walken stared, beholding this serenely grotesque display and felt his guts suddenly shudder. It was not their presence that suddenly served as such an extreme affront to his sensibilities. It was that they were being used as something less, something to be milked, as if the very seats of human reason — splendid engines of individual thought, of identity — were mere chattel.

  Despite the monstrosity before him, the corridor had yet another chamber to explore. Walken took a moment to steel himself, forcing down the animal panic which attempted to rear up in his heart and with the gun heavy in his hand proceeded into the last section of the hall.

  Here the lights were very dim. The tanks themselves were dark, though Walken could perceive shadows bobbing inside them. He proceeded with the C-J in hand, drawn forward by its weight as if by inertia.

  Slowly he scanned the chamber, looking over each vessel. Though he felt a certain intellectual curiosity about what floated about in them, that animal apprehension rose in him anew. Don't look, the fear whispered to him. Don't look; you'll only regret it. He could have turned away right then — certainly he had seen enough — but the stubbornness of the detective pushed down that reptile-brain keening. Walken stepped up to one of the nearest tanks and bent down to peer into the murk... and as he did, the lights in the tank sprang to life.

  He found himself staring face to face with an abomination.

  To say it was a body would be to sully the term. Floating in the tank, like so much butchered beef, it was more of a forgotten vivisection. Only partially intact, the subject — for it could only be described that way, considering how it had been treated — drifted dreamlike and terrible in the amber fluid of the tank.

  That it had been male could be seen by the half of its face that remained; the genitals and the majority of its skin had been flayed away, muscles woven red and livid over bone. Caverns remained where organs had been removed, puckered voids incised and cauterized with surgical care. Sensor leads streamed from many places to m
oor it to the tank floor. Its limbs floated around the head and torso like a gory halo, wired up in a similar fashion. This was a grotesque tableau of uncaring, laboratory cruelty, made unfathomably worse by the realization that despite its artfully savaged condition its chest rose and fell with the slow rhythm of living breath.

  He stared at the subject. His eyes refused to take in all the details at once, as if doing so would make the dam of his mind - so very worn now - break entirely. His head fogged up with disbelief and his vision swam. This was no body shop as he had thought, not even a very advanced one. Gazing upon the hapless man, he knew that he witnessed a piece of something somehow not meant for anyone of sanity or good heart to behold.

  As if on automatic Walken pressed his free hand against the tank, partly to prove that it existed and partly in the hope that it did not. The tanks began to quickly light up. One by one more subjects were revealed, men and women and children, the latter floating as many as two or three to each tank. All had been disassembled as the first had been, many to the point that they were largely gleaming bone.

  All at once they began to move, the remainders of their bodies writhing in the slow weightless fashion of the submerged and sedated. Walken could only stare as the man beside him turned his face toward him, a half-bared rictus of teeth gleaming pallid beneath the weak lights and opened a rheumy brown eye to stare at him.

  There was nothing in that eye — not recognition, not awareness. Nothing but unrelenting, mind-destroying pain.

  Walken's mind quailed, twisted and he sagged to vomit his horror out across the base of the nearest tank. The smell of it — of his own stomach, his own fear — shocked him back into the abyss of reality and he struggled to stand. The chill of the C-J's cold metal frame against his forehead fortified him further. "Jesus," he muttered, thinking about the bloody gazelle on the morgue floor, her eyes going empty. "Death was too fucking good for her."

  I'll kill them all.

  This one thought surged to life in his mind like a newly-ignited star as rage took him, something calm and unwholesome like stagnant water as he turned his back on the mutilated assembly still twisting in their agony.

  They all need to go.

  Walken stumbled out of the organ garden with his limbs numb. Paranoia roared in his ears at this abhorrent revelation and the shadows of the hall beyond seemed to leer at him, to reach for him; he ignored them with difficulty, trying to walk off the dread that threatened to pull him down. He staggered down the corridor, all the way down and past the morgue — inside which, he realized with a stab of savage pleasure, the medic could still be heard sobbing — and down the other end. The voice in his head whispered that perhaps he should kill the medic for the offenses he must have committed; Walken remembered the ruined visor on the concrete beneath his boot, his helplessness, but thought better of simply executing the man. The voice inside him seethed in protest, clamoring for blood.

  Walken moved on. He found nobody else as he probed the complex, though the lights were now brighter; flowers of bravery rose and throve inside him under those lights and he found the terrible truth of the organ farm shaded beneath them. He would get out. He would find her, the other gazelle. He would put a bullet through her pale skull and end her. He would kill everybody else attached to this Godforsaken project, scour them all from the Earth. He could not help their victims, but at least he could do this.

  Walken worked his way backwards through the fading, tile-clad guts of the hospital basement, the C-J held before him like an avenging angel's flaming sword. He sought targets, found nothing but empty rooms and passageways and more signs of recently-interrupted activity. Nothing else like the terrible farm could be seen.

  Eventually he found the elevator. As the medic had said, a genetic security module had been bolted to the door. Walken frowned at it, again took out the pale killer's severed hand and pressed it against the module's glass input panel. It buzzed and the doors swept open.

  Walken put her hand back in his pocket as he pushed the button for the first floor with the end of the C-J. The elevator groaned into action and began the climb from his current position, revealed with a glance at the elevator panel as Sublevel Four. He heaved a deep sigh as he tried to prepare himself through the adrenaline buzz for what might come next. Let's hope nobody's right outside to get the drop on me.

  The elevator trundled upward at a frustrating crawl. He bounced on his knees, looking at the dingy walls, weighed the pistol in his hand. As it passed the third sublevel the elevator panel began to chime softly. The buttons strobed. Walken looked down and found to his surprise that the floor indicators, little displays set into the panel next to each yellowed button, were flashing a message two letters at a time.

  TU RN YO

  UR CO MP

  UT ER ON

  Walken stared at it. A flash of hope found him — Bobbi — and he hit the elevator stop, bathed in the pale blue glow of the emergency lights as motion ceased. "Thing's going to explode, I just know it," he said to the Sony as he opened it up and saw, on the display that took up its upper half, Bobbi's face staring up at him. She was pale, her eyes tense. Livid.

  "Jesus Christ, baby," she hissed, a mix of angry consternation and concern in her tone, "What the hell? I thought we were gonna hit these motherfuckers together."

  Walken blinked. "What?" he asked, feeling stupid.

  "That's a Genefex facility," Bobbi shot back. "You said you'd wait for me before you hit one of their sites. That whole fucking place is shielded from any kind of communications — you've been walking around blind!"

  "Don't I know it," he muttered, then seeing Bobbi's face hardening in retort cut her off. "Look," he said, "I don't have a lot of time for explanations here, honey, so hear me when I say I didn't come here on my own."

  She frowned, but something in her green eyes softened. "All right," she said, "That makes sense. You hadn't moved for a long time, long enough that I decided to hack what's left of the network over there and find out what the hell was going on."

  "What's going on," he snarled. "Bobbi, I have no idea. I just killed some crazy bitch that sounded like Exley did before he blew Brighton's fucking head off. Where the fuck am I, anyway?"

  Never before did Bobbi look like she had more questions than now, but to her credit she only answered his. "Orleans Hospital," she told him, "In the Verge. You know it?"

  He paused, but nodded. Orleans was an old hospital in the northern end of Beacon Hill, not too far from rim of the New City. It had been decommissioned since the 2050s, though he didn't remember why. "I do."

  "Good," she said with a firm nod, "Then you won't get lost getting out. I got Scalli heading up the street from there, a few blocks over. You know his truck, right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Right, so you gotta get over to him once you get out of there. Only..." She frowned, looked off-camera.

  A familiar weight landed into his gut. "Only what?"

  "Only I freaked out a little, baby. It's kinda hectic upstairs."

  "Oh yeah?" He reached for the stop switch and flicked it off. The elevator continued its trundle upward. Walken flipped the screen around so that he could hold it like a telephone, tilting the C-J upward loosely at the wrist of his other hand. "What kind of hectic?"

  Bobbi looked sheepish. "I kinda called the cavalry," she called up from his hand.

  "Cavalry?" He blinked down at the Sony when the elevator chimed its arrival, heard the chatter of automatic fire somewhere nearby. "Bobbi, what the hell's going on?"

  "I got nervous," she said, speaking low despite her being on the other side of the city. He held up the Sony to frown at her. "So I did like I did before, phoned in a false report. Only this time I did it to Civil Protection instead, see. They were pretty damned happy to jump over the Bureau and land the score first this time."

  He thought of Davis in his slate-colored suit, rubbing his hands together and cackling over his commset at the thought of doing one over on the Fed. A pang of disappointment
fought with the relief brought on by the realization that he might just get out of there. "Smart girl," he said, voice dipping as the sound of gunfire drew nearer. "All right, what do we have?"

  "Special Tactics is in the building," she said, cheery under his praise despite herself, "Tangling with the locals. From what I can tell through what's left of the hospital security monitors, they got a pack of really juiced up hired cannons out there mixing it up with the armored boys. Doing a pretty good job holding them down, looks like; they got one girl in there who's a real spook with her hands."

  "Pale girl?" He asked. "Blonde hair, almost white?"

  She nodded. "That's the one. She's tuned up like you wouldn't believe, man. Boosted reflexes or something, nothing like I ever seen. She's incredible."

  "I took out her sister downstairs," he said. "At least I think it was her sister." The pang of sadness hit him again, unwelcome and unknown. He swallowed it down hard, hated it away. "Maybe. She's dead in any case."

  "No shit?" Bobbi's brows arched. "Well, if she was anything like that one then good for you, baby."

  "Pfft." He grunted. "I think I got the weaker one." His eyes shifted toward the corridor, at the end of which the elevator stood patiently open as he blocked the doors. Down the hall he thought he saw a flicker of movement.