Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  She stood as close as she dared to the edge and looked down.

  The part of her that had clung to the hope that she would find Dreger climbing triumphantly up the rigging died when she realized that no one could have survived such devastation.

  Mariah collapsed to her knees and started to cry, the mere act of which caused her to sob even harder. She’d always been strong, not a pathetic, blubbering mess like she was now.

  She laughed out loud at her own stupidity when she had to scrape the ice from her lashes to open them.

  Dreger would have had a good chuckle at her expense.

  The thought of him nearly started the tears flowing again. There was nothing more for her to do out here. He was gone, and if she stayed out here much longer she would be, too.

  She pushed herself up from the ground and turned around.

  The windswept snow crunched underfoot as she headed back toward the open door to the garage, which materialized from the storm in a different place than she’d expected, reminding her just how easy it would be to lose her bearings. Her head wasn’t right. When the helicopter arrived, she needed to be on it.

  She was nearly to the door when she saw the gouges around the seams. It looked like someone had tried to use a crowbar to force it open. She would have dismissed them as a consequence of the corridor breaking away from the building had those marks not been so clearly evident surrounding the remainder of the circular seal.

  Mariah ran her fingers over the deep scratches, then looked back toward the shaft. The wind had already scoured her footprints clean, leaving behind little more than elongated dimples. There was another nearly identical set of impressions leading diagonally toward her from the edge of the cliff.

  “Ron?”

  The wind stole the whispered word from her chapped lips.

  She whirled back toward the garage. The button to activate the door was covered with pinkish smudges of what could only have been frozen blood. There were smears on the door itself, as though someone had attempted to manually shove it into the recessed wall. Was it possible . . . ?

  The hand she’d seen . . . the blood . . . maybe someone else had lost their fingertips in the fall. Or maybe they were just pinned underneath the hand and she couldn’t see them from the angle of the camera. If anyone could have survived, it was Ron Dreger.

  Mariah entered the garage and closed the door behind her. She switched on the flashlight app on her cell phone and pointed the beam at the ground. She’d been so overcome with grief that she hadn’t noticed the water on the floor, which could have melted from the bottom of someone’s boot or—

  She stopped and stared down at a spattered drop of blood. She knelt and dabbed it with her fingertip. The edges were dry, but the center was still damp.

  “Please, God,” she whispered and crossed the garage as fast as she could without losing sight of the tracks.

  There were more smears of blood on the inside trim around the door to the Skyway. Now that she really thought about it, the door had already been open when she passed through the first time. From here, there was only one way to go. She ran through the glass tunnel toward the complex. Blew through the opposite door and stopped halfway up the iron stairs.

  She must have missed something. If he’d come this way, he would have walked straight past her, unless he’d done so before she even left the library, in which case he would have entered through the main foyer where everyone would have seen him.

  The stairwell was silent and dark.

  She shined her light over the bare walls and up the stairs. The beam highlighted smears of blood on the railing. She climbed up the stairs until she reached it. There was a smudged palm print on the wall high above it.

  Something tapped her shoulder.

  She reached for it and felt the cool dampness.

  Looked up.

  The grate over the heating duct hung open, revealing a square of darkness.

  Mariah glanced again at the rail. If she climbed up on it and braced her hand against the wall, she could probably—

  Another droplet struck the top of her head.

  She raised her eyes again to the open duct.

  The darkness descended upon her before she could scream.

  41

  ROCHE

  “What do you mean you can’t just call them?” Jade said.

  “We have an intercom system, but without the power . . .” Connor said, and tapped the button on the wall a dozen times to illustrate his point.

  “Don’t they have walkie-talkies?”

  “They’re just down the hall, for Christ’s sake. Why would we need to send them with walkie-talkies?”

  “In case something like this happened.”

  “We’re going in circles. There’s no point—”

  “I’ll go,” Roche said. “Tell me you at least have a flashlight.”

  “Yeah,” Graves said. “Give me a sec.”

  He ducked into the server room and retrieved a rechargeable flashlight from its charger. It was thin and black and so small Roche could have closed it completely inside his fist. Graves must have read his expression.

  “What?” Graves asked. “If I have to use it, nine times out of ten I’m holding it in my mouth so I can use both hands.”

  “You know what they say about the size of a man’s flashlight,” Evans said from where he leaned against the wall beside Jade.

  “Very funny.”

  “I haven’t been into the engineering wing,” Roche said. “Walk me through it.”

  “Take Mr. Wolski.”

  “Joachim’s not getting up anytime soon,” Anya said.

  “Will?”

  “Uh-uh. I don’t leave your side, and you’re not going anywhere.”

  “Just tell me where to go,” Roche said.

  He was running out of patience. Something about this situation didn’t feel right. Maybe he could consciously write it off as the shock of losing four men in such a horrible fashion and barely escaping with his own life, but he simply couldn’t shake the feeling. It was primal, an instinct honed by millions of years of evolution and sharpened to a razor’s edge by his tenure in the service.

  “It’s a mirror image of the wing where you’re staying,” Richards said. “Go downstairs and through the cafeteria. You’ll enter on the upper level. Take the stairs down to the lower level. The utility room is all the way at the end of the hall.”

  “Someone should check on Mariah, too,” Friden said.

  “Are you volunteering?” Connor asked.

  “I’ll do it,” Jade said.

  Evans scoffed.

  “I take it you have a problem with that?”

  “Problem? Nope. I just didn’t see you as the touchy-feely type.”

  “You don’t think I can be compassionate?”

  “I’ve only known you for a few days, but I was kind of under the impression that you’d been sent back from the future to save us from the rise of the machines.”

  “A robot joke. How original.”

  “Technically, the Terminator was an android,” Graves said. “It has living tissue over a mechanical endo . . . skeleton . . .”

  Jade speared him with her stare.

  “I’m going to need a flashlight, too,” she said.

  Graves was only too happy to vanish back into the server room.

  “I’ll bring Mariah back with me if I see her,” Roche said.

  He left the bickering behind him and headed for the stairs.

  “Wait up,” Kelly said, and hurried to catch up with him.

  “You should go back with the others.”

  “They fight like my parents used to. I’ve had enough of that for one lifetime.”

  “Then stay behind me.”

  “We’re just going into the next building.”

  She was right and he knew it, but he couldn’t suppress the irrational sensation that something was very, very wrong.

  “Are you guys going downstairs?” Bell called from the library
. He shed the blanket he’d wrapped around himself like a cocoon, set aside his book, and met them at the top of the spiral staircase.

  Roche clicked on the tiny light and a surprisingly strong beam shot down the steps ahead of him. He hadn’t noticed the ubiquitous thrum of machinery until it was gone. The stairs thumped hollowly under his weight. He could already feel the cold air beginning to radiate through the shell of the prefabricated structure and wondered how long it would be able to contain its finite supply of heat.

  “I need to water my plants,” Bell said. “Without electricity to the hydroponic system, I’m going to have to manually replicate the proper conditions.”

  “We’re going to the utility room to see if we can find out what’s going on with the power. We don’t have time—”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that I needed your assistance. I have a torch in my greenhouse. I just didn’t want to blunder down the stairs in the dark.”

  “Isn’t the smoke bad for the plants?” Kelly asked. Bell stopped and stared at her curiously as she descended the final few stairs. “What?”

  Bell caught up as they rounded the staircase and approached the greenhouse.

  “The British call flashlights torches,” Roche said.

  “Why?”

  “It was invented by an Englishman,” Bell said.

  “And what did he call it?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  Roche shined the beam onto the door of the greenhouse. Bell unlocked it with a key he wore on a chain around his neck and slipped inside. A light appeared through the glass before the door was all the way closed.

  The cafeteria was eerily quiet. The equipment sat dark and lifeless on the tables. It seemed like forever since they were all gathered down here to watch Rubley turn on the machine. So much had happened in the hours since.

  Their footsteps echoed ahead of them, through the short corridor, down the stairwell, and into the silent wing. A part of him had thought for sure the lights would have been on by now, but the little voice in the back of his head insisted that they wouldn’t be coming back on anytime soon.

  Roche and Kelly descended the stairs into the narrow, pitch-black corridor separating the rooms from the outer wall, which was already cold to the touch. There was no banging of tools or frustrated cursing from the open door at the end of the hallway.

  Roche stopped and listened.

  “Wha—?” Kelly started.

  “Shh.”

  There was no sound whatsoever.

  The fine hairs stood up on the back of his neck. Something was definitely not right. He could positively feel it. His instincts took over and his military training kicked in.

  “Stay close to me,” he whispered.

  Kelly must have sensed it, too. She took hold of the back of his jacket and followed him as he inched cautiously toward a room that smelled of detergent and chemicals, beneath which he detected the faintest hint of fried wiring. He resisted the urge to call out to Devlin and Proctor, the engineers who’d been tasked with maintaining the generator, and instead moved all the way up against the wall.

  The bulk of the utility room was to the left of the entryway and remained out of sight. The partially closed door concealed whatever might have been behind it.

  When they reached the threshold, Roche crouched and listened for several seconds before going in low. He took a mental snapshot. Ducked back. Scrutinized what he’d seen even as the image began to fade. There was an industrial washbasin beside a wire rack stacked with bottled cleaners. A laundry cart with canvas sides in front of a washer and dryer. An open closet door past them, in the back corner of the room. A large rectangular cabinet that had to be the standby generator dominated the rear wall.

  No sign of the engineers.

  Roche turned and shined the light down the corridor behind them. All of the doors were closed and the hall was empty. There was no movement whatsoever.

  “You stay here,” he whispered.

  Before Kelly could protest, he went through the doorway, low and fast. The door ricocheted from the wall behind him as Roche swung his light from one side of the room to the other.

  Nothing moved.

  He rose to his full height and crept slowly into the darkness. Pushed the laundry cart out of the way. Its wheels made a sound like peeling masking tape and left behind thin red trails that led to a much larger pool on the tiled floor, above which a spatter of blood dribbled down the generator. One of the panels had been removed from the front and the inner workings exposed. Wires were torn, components unplugged, and pipes disconnected. Blood shimmered from just about every surface.

  A broad smear led away from the puddle and to the open closet door, where droplets swelled from the wet handle.

  “Oh, God,” Kelly whispered.

  “Don’t come in here.”

  Roche couldn’t afford to take his eyes off the closet. The trail led straight inside. There was no way anyone could have exited the room by way of the lone egress without leaving tracks all the way across the floor and down the hall.

  A broom stood in the corner. Roche grabbed it by the handle, snapped it with a solid kick, and flipped the remainder over so he wielded it above his shoulder like a stake. Held the flashlight backhanded in his left hand. Kicked the door open. Lunged forward, prepared to strike.

  There was no one in the closet. Only floor-to-ceiling shelves, their contents strewn across the ground, their edges sticky with blood. The unit at the back had fallen forward and rested against the side of the one next to it.

  Plat.

  Roche froze and listened. Where could the men have—?

  Something warm and wet struck his cheek. He slowly raised his eyes toward the ceiling, and the open vent directly overhead.

  Another drop streaked from the edge of the duct and struck the ground in front of him.

  Plat.

  42

  JADE

  Jade shined the flashlight down the upper-level corridor of the scientific residential wing. The bulb was remarkably bright, especially for its size, but did precious little to illuminate anything outside of the beam itself. She and Anya called for Mariah and opened the doors one at a time, pausing only long enough to sweep the light through each small room before moving on to the next. They checked the stalls and the showers before descending to the lower level. They were about to head down the hallway when Anya abruptly stopped.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  “Hear what?” Jade said.

  “I don’t know. I can’t describe it.”

  Jade held her breath and listened.

  “I don’t hear any—”

  Thump.

  The sound was barely audible and reminded her almost of the sound a car door made when someone leaned against it.

  She turned to her right and found herself staring down into the stairwell that led to the subterranean labs. The beam illuminated the stairs and the bare wall of the landing.

  “She must have gone to her lab,” Jade said.

  “I should have guessed,” Anya said.

  The temperature dropped with every step they took. The cavern wasn’t nearly as well insulated as the rest of the station, which hadn’t been a problem when there was heated air circulating through the exposed ductwork, but without power the coldness of the rocks permeated through the floor and a cold breeze trickled from somewhere ahead of them, presumably where the pipes shunted the exhaust to the opposite side of the mountain.

  “Mariah?” Anya called.

  The geologist’s door was open and there was no light inside. Jade stood in the threshold and shined her beam across the impeccable workspace. The chairs were aligned with the computer station and even from a distance she could tell that Mariah hadn’t crawled underneath the desk.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” Anya whispered.

  Jade could sense it, too, but she wasn’t about to lend credence to something as irrational as a feeling. The human body was conditioned to respond to any
number of external stimuli in nearly identical ways. Goosebumps rippling up the back of one’s arms or the hackles prickling from one’s neck could just as easily be in response to the decreasing temperatures as the instinctive reaction to impending danger.

  “Dreger has—had—a lab down here, too, right?” Jade asked.

  “Next one on the left.”

  Jade led the way to another dark doorway and shined her beam onto a mess of mechanical parts. Again, there was no one inside, nor any sign that anyone had been there recently.

  “It’s possible what we heard was just the heating ducts responding to the sudden shift from hot to cold,” Anya said.

  It was a viable theory. The heat would have caused the thin aluminum panels to expand, and the sudden transition to cold would have triggered contraction, making the flexible metal buckle. And why wasn’t the power back on yet?

  Thump.

  Jade shined her light straight down the hallway and toward the source of the sound. It had come from the open doorway at the very end of the hall.

  “Dr. Peters?” Jade called. “Mariah?”

  There was no echo from inside the dark room, as though the sound had simply gone in there to die.

  “What’s down there?” Jade asked.

  “That’s my lab,” Anya said.

  Jade walked toward the end of the hallway. She shined her light into Friden’s lab, which looked like a hurricane had torn through it. For all she knew, Mariah could have been buried under the mess and she never would have known. She was about to move on when she smelled it.

  She turned and swung her light toward Anya’s lab.

  There was no doubt in her mind what that smell was. She’d encountered it many times in the course of her work, only it was totally unexpected in this context, which made her revelation all the more terrifying.

  “Oh, God,” she gasped. “Mariah . . .”