Orphan of Mythcorp

by R. S. Darling

  “What did she say?” Kana asked.

  I told her. After convincing the group that unhooking the hoses and wheeling my father down to the med lab were all Marie would tell me (‘for now’ I added, hoping it was the truth), Faustus proceeded to unhook all the hoses.

  A few of them, those that could be yanked out after depressing their brass collars, hissed and spat liquids and gases, while others unscrewed and simply flopped to the floor, limp as—

  “So,” Faustus said, thrusting a spitting tube away from his face, “this won’t kill him? Unhooking all these?”

  “Isn’t he already technically dead?” I said, eliciting a snort from Faustus. “I don’t know, okay? Marie said unhook them, so we’re unhooking them. What happens if when we try to leave, Nimrod is standing outside the door?”

  Faustus dropped the last tube and clapped. “Man, this is just like Forever Young, when those two brats are unfreezing Mel Gibson. Anyway, you shouldn’t worry about Nimrod. What should be giving you the heebie-jeebies is the thought about what will happen after we leave and they find the door locked and the key card gone.”

  “Ash isn’t going to like that,” I sighed. I hadn’t thought about it until then. The hissing had stopped by now but the machines were all beeping like mad, setting my jitters off.

  “We’ll have to leave the door open,” Izzy announced from behind me on the platform.

  Faustus wiped his hands on his jeans as he walked up to Izzy. “And why do we ‘have to leave the door open’?”

  “Think. We need time to wake Knox,” she said this to Faustus in her snarky voice, which gave me a warm gooey feeling. “If we lock the door behind us, Ash will come after us. Are you following me?” She waited. Faustus said nothing and Kana looked confused, so Izzy continued. “If we leave the door open, they will enter and get busy working on the sorcerer.”

  “I don’t think I’m following you,” Kana said.

  Izzy stomped her crutches. “For crying out loud. Ash doesn’t have ghosts who formerly worked here to guide him through the process of waking Crowley, sooo . . . he’ll have learned how to do it himself. We could probably wake Knox here too, if your frigging ghost wasn’t so daft. With Ash lurking here, we’ll have time to—”

  “Thaw out the Knoxicle in the med lab without anyone trying to shoot us,” Faustus interjected, beaming. I was just glad I hadn’t needed Izzy to clarify.

  “Hey,” Kana called out. “That crystal stuff surrounding Knox doesn’t look so pink anymore.”

  I followed her up onto the platform and peered through the glass door at my father. It was true. Maybe the thawing process had already started—hopefully in the correct way.

  “We better get going then,” Izzy said. “Um, how do we get it off of this pedestal?”

  “We don’t,” Faustus smirked, and looked over at Kana, who returned his smirk. “She does.”

  Once the platform was free of us hangers-on, Kana leapt off to the floor at the foot of the tank, grabbed the base, and lifted with her back as if she were doing a dead lift. Groaning and creaking as security bolts gave way. She did the same on the other end. Once she’d bent the bars out of the way, Kana yanked the ramp out of its place from underneath the platform. The tank was on wheels, which made me wonder.

  “Why is the tank on wheels?”

  ‘Probably a security thing,” Faustus declared, getting out of Kana’s way as she slowed the tanks descent down the ramp. “Fire code states: If there’s a fire, you have to get everybody out.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  At the door, I paused, and shoved. I’d almost forgotten how dark the rest of Mythcorp was. But as far as I could tell, no one was waiting to clobber us. No one, that is, except for Sanson’s spooks, who dove into the room in an effort to restrain us. Other than inciting an excessive amount of sneezing, the spooks failed to harm my team.

  Castor and Marie had fled a while back, so they too were safe.

  Sanson was still obviously close by, but he didn’t seem interested in stopping us. So I said, “It’s clear. Let’s go.”

  Once the tank and everyone was out and Kana was pushing it down the hall, I made sure the door was unlocked, and then ran down the hall after them.

  We were ten feet from the stairwell exit when Izzy asked, “How do we get it down the stairs?”

  Chapter 38

  Sanson

  “I don’t get it,” I said as we drifted out from our hiding place. “Why did they leave the door open? Why would they make it easy for us to wake the sorcerer?”

  Ash entered the Cryonics lab first, zipping a peek inside to make sure it was clear. “They left it open, because at least one person in that group has a brain. In fact, I was counting on this. Agravaine, Lamorak, you know what to do. Let’s get to work.” He led us inside.

  While the other Morai set about grabbing trays of syringes and adjusting dials on the machines, Ash led me up to a huge white tank nestled on a platform.

  There was another platform across the room to the left. That one was empty.

  Ash climbed the steps and set his elbows onto the lid of the great white tank. He gestured me to come up. I did. “Look in there,” he smiled.

  I leaned over beside Ash and peered through the thick running the length of the top. A very long, lanky old man lay encased in some kind of hardened pink solution. “The sorcerer Crowley,” I whispered, as if it was a hallowed name. “Jeez. How old is he?”

  “Nimrod believes he was around a hundred and nine years old when they froze him fifteen years ago.”

  “Holy crap.”

  “Exactly,” Ash seemed pleased by my response. “Come on. Let the boys work.” He stepped down off the platform just as Lamorak was replacing one of the thick red hoses with a thick black one.

  I had a thousand questions, and my thermal beeped every fifteen minutes, but I kept silent, sitting on a stool off to the side while the Morai—teens no older than myself—performed procedures beyond our teachers’ capabilities. I didn’t want to know how they knew these things; it was more than likely it had something to do with Nimrod.

  More than an hour passed like this.

  My limbs were growing progressively stiffer, but I was hoping the sorcerer would be awake before I was forced to inject another vial of nanites.

  Sometime around one in the morning, Ash came over to me, a smile cracking his face. “Can you believe how close we are? Another hour or so and he should be free of that crap. Another hour after that he’ll be talking, and then I’ll convince him to bring our parents back. We’ll finally be able to go and find every last monster responsible for slaughtering our folks during the War.”

  “After he lifts my curse, right?” I did not want to be around for that whole retribution deal.

  “Right,” Ash sounded surprised. “After he lifts your curse. Obviously.”

  I gawked at the little Morai yahoo. He did not look at me. I stood. “You were never planning on lifting my curse, were you?”

  He still refused to look at me.

  “Hey! This was all to get me to help you—that business with Kant and the whole seducing of Lexi? You’ve been playing me this whole time!” When he didn’t respond, I grabbed his shoulder and whipped him around to face me. “Haven’t you?”

  He slid out of my grasp. “Don’t be so superstitious. There is no curse. You contracted a rare medical disorder—that’s all.”

  We stared each other down, seething rage and all that. To keep from throttling the colossal jerk, I changed the subject. “Where’s Nimrod anyway?”

  Ash let the air between us fill up with silence before answering. “He’s probably down in the forging labs.” As if revealing a tantalizing and awesome secret, he whispered: “He’s kept an M2 drive of Alexander, downloaded the day before the Purge. Combining this memory and personality profile with stored samples of Alexander’s DNA, Nimrod will be able to forge a second Alexander Icon.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Who d
id you think was going to run Mythcorp?” Ash said. “Us? A bunch of teens? No. Alexander was the perfect man. He was going to—”

  “That monster’s rise to power is what caused the War!”

  “No! Knox caused the War,” Ash slammed the wall with his right hand. He took a moment to calm himself, and then softened his voice. “Stand with me and you’ll have nothing to fear.”

  “Would you two shut it,” snapped Agravaine. “We’re almost done.”

  Ash walked over to help his pals.

  Panic crept in. Ash had been playing me all along. I may have been immune to his Mesmer, but he’d duped me all the same. I couldn’t remain in the same room as this arrogant prick for one second longer.

  I turned, snatched up my backpack from the floor, and ran out of the lab.

  Behind me Agravaine yelled, “The zombie’s bolting. I told you we couldn’t trust him.”

  “Keep working,” Ash said as he started after me.

  What was the maniac planning on doing? He couldn’t Mesmerize me, and I was done being his dupe. All that left was physical violence, and he wasn’t strong enough to . . .

  Oh crap. He wasn’t chasing me—he was going to get Nimrod. Ash was going to sic his Hunter on me!

  Where could I go? As I rounded the corner and picked up the pace, a picture of Morgan appeared in my mind. Morgan had despised Ash longer than I had. And Morgan had that lethal little woman and the demon on his side. Yes. It sucked, but joining Morgan was my only option.

  And I had a pretty good idea where they had taken Knox. Two opposing considerations vied for acknowledgement in my head: would they take me in, even if I told them what Nimrod and Ash were really up to? And, would I reach them before Ash found Nimrod and sent him after me?

  Chapter 39

  Marie—through the constant intervention of Castor—spewed a sort of spook instructional manual for waking the frozen. I hoped to forget the grosser details of this cryonic revival.

  It involved reworking the wiring of the capsule—which we could have avoided had Marie given us instructions inside the Cryonics lab!—reprogramming the capsules’ quantum brain, and other technical hoopla way over my head. Hours of tense waiting, expecting Nimrod or some Ash-hole to come by to give us hell at any second, passed uneventfully.

  It’s not even worth mentioning the bodily fluids my father’s system evacuated during his awakening.

  “What time is it?” I asked Kana, who was sitting beside me on a gurney, polishing one of her dirks. Her legs were so short that she’d had to hop up—an act I may have enjoyed a smidgen too much.

  She handed my question to Faustus, who was preoccupied with avoiding the icky stinking goo mucking the floor. He huffed and checked his watch. “Well, Morgan, it is half past one in the morning. Why, do you have some pressing engagement? No? Goody.”

  We’d manage to thaw my father out sufficiently to safely remove him from the tank and to lay him flat on a gurney. After injecting him with a myriad of colorful liquids (I was the only one who seemed concerned that these fluids were fifteen years old), Izzy had covered him with heated blankets. She was still with him, readjusting the coverings with tender and finicky care.

  I envied my father this attention from the cute girl, almost enough to be willing to get myself frozen to receive the same treatment—almost.

  Maybe it was the blasted DT’s, but I could see heat waves rising from my father’s body, pink and phantasmagoric. I watched for a few ticks, mesmerized, until my gut started grumbling again. I ran off to the bathroom and evacuated my own fluids. While in the bathroom, I noticed an outlet and decided to try and recharge the cane. First I stupidly shoved the tip of the sword into the socket. My arm trembled as I was electrocuted. Fortunately I clopped to the floor and the sword clattered down too. Turned out all I needed to do was press the silver crow-head against the outlet, and it would gather electrical energy from an arc summoned out of the wall. Naturally, I happened to be holding the metal when I did this, so I got another quick jolt. The purple crow-peepers began to glow: the weapon was fully recharged.

  Arm still numb, I wandered back into the other room. Everyone was gathered around my father, and some blasted machine was warbling.

  I rushed over to them. “What’s going on?”

  “Something dire is happening,” Faustus shrugged. “It was always this way around Knox. We couldn’t go more than a few hours without something—”

  “What’s happening to him?” I asked. “Why is he convulsing like that?”

  “Hold on, let me check the manual,” Faustus patted his pockets. “Oh that’s right, I forgot to bring my Unfreezing the Dead for Dummies book.”

  Silence followed this remark for a few ticks. Then a familiar voice said from the door: ‘It’s ischemia.” I’d thought Kana had locked it, but apparently she’d been too busy polishing her blasted swords. We turned to discover the source of the voice.

  “Sanson?” Izzy and I gasped. “What are you doing here?”

  “Later,” waving his hand. “I recognize the symptoms,” he held his backpack out before him as he approached us in a rigid, funky shuffle. “He is suffering from ischemia; it means he has inadequate blood circulation. It’s depriving his tissues of oxygen and nutrients. He’ll die in minutes. He will die . . . unless you promise to protect me. I know how to save him.”

  I rushed forward, ignoring my bruises and buggered knee and the spooks hovering just behind the zombie. When I reached him, Sanson stood stiffly, backpack thrust forward. “You know about my hypogun?” he asked. I nodded, hoping he wasn’t making a glib reference to our encounter in the tool shed.

  “Good. Inject Knox with it. The nanites should kick-start his system and . . . oh, just do it.”

  Once I’d loaded the hypogun with Sanson’s guidance, I toddled over to my convulsing father, set the cane down on the gurney beside my father’s right hand. Kana and Faustus traded looks before passing them onto me, no doubt wondering if I knew what I was doing, trusting Sanson. I shrugged.

  “Hold his arm still,” I commanded Kana. The little woman obliged and I set the silver fanned nozzle against the cold flesh of my father’s forearm. Pulled the trigger.

  For a few ticks, nothing, then his jitters began to recede in stages: jitters to flutters, flutters to fiddles, fiddles to squirms, squirms to twitch’s until at last he lay still.

  “I got a pulse,” Faustus whispered, his fingers on my father’s neck. “Slow and steady.”

  The machines stopped their beeping. I turned to Sanson, relaxing. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah,” Kana put in, hands clasped. “That was a mother-humping close call.”

  “Yep,” Faustus added, “we have a lot of close calls. In the movies they call that suspense. Think about it. If Sanson had walked in here like two minutes earlier, we all would’ve stared at him and been like, ‘too late,’ or ‘Get him!’ But instead, he arrived just in the nick—”

  “We get it,” I said. “But not everything is like the movies.”

  “Admittedly, it’s probably got a lot to do with my insane good luck,” boasted Faustus.

  Sanson was silent and motionless. I glanced back at Izzy.

  “He’s seizing up,” she surmised. “He needs his medication.” She reached up, ripped the empty gun from my hand and hobbled over to Sanson. You couldn’t help but pity her and fall in lust with her as she struggled to manipulate the crutches and hold the gun in her tiny hands.

  At the zombie’s feet she loaded the gun with a vial of meds, and grabbed Sanson’s outstretched arm. Once she’d yanked his arm down sufficiently, Izzy pressed the nozzle against his exposed wrist. With a hiss that sounded like the production of a hickey, she injected him. When Izzy released his arm, it remained where it was. If he hadn’t been so pale and buggered looking, it might have been funny. I considered posing him inappropriately, just for kicks.

  As the others waited for the resident zombie to reactivate, I fled to the bathroom for another round of dry heave
s. Drained and dehydrated, I rejoined the group in time to observe Sanson’s fingers beginning to twitch. In mockery of my father’s transition, Sanson pulled a reverse-Knox, evolving from finger twitches all the way up to a full bodied jiggle in the span of a minute.

  Calm and limber now, he stared at us and we stared back.

  I dropped into a chair to stew in my withdrawals while Sanson explained what he was doing here.

  “Kana,” I said when Sanson was finished. “Would you close the door and maybe even make sure it’s locked this time?”

  “No problem,” she headed for the door with a smirk. “Mister Sarcasm.”

  The smirk—and all other levity—drained out of the lab as Ash stepped through the open doorway. He was not alone.

  Kana froze about a few feet away to my right, about ten feet from Ash and his no doubt Mesmerized cop victim, who had his gun trained on Kana. The temperature in the room plummeted, masking the stench of my father’s recovery but augmenting the funk of my own sweat and breath. No one moved until Ash turned his head sideways to peer at Sanson, standing between him and Kana.

  “Charlie,” in a whisper. When combined with his cocked head, Ash gave a fine rendition of a crow, the creepiest and most sinister of birds, sure as sure. “I told you what would happen to those who chose not to stand with me.”

  “You’re too late,” Sanson did not even bother turning his head to look at Ash. In that moment, seeing Sanson toss such an insult at the littlest Morai, I began to warm up to the zombie. “I’m going to tell them what Nimrod is really doing here.”

  Ash sighed. The officer’s aim did not deviate from Kana’s head, but his hands were shaking and his peepers were mimicking a tennis ball in a whiz-bang tournament. Ash noticed my father. He seemed put-out by Knox’s presence, silent and conked out though it was. His lips curled, and he spoke clearly to the officer; a Mesmer if I ever hear one.

  “Officer Graham, please kill that man.”

  The officer trembled. His aim slowly shifted from Kana’s noggin over to the gurney where we’d laid my father.