THE FLENSE: China: (Part 3 of THE FLENSE serial)

by Saul Tanpepper

  She turned her body away from the door and returned to Jamie's side, hiding the syringe in her hand. She didn't know how much of the nanites would be needed to save her, or how quickly they'd spread and differentiate in her body. Aston had said days for an amputation. The surgical damage Angel was inflicting should be considerably easier to fix than that. The girl mostly needed blood. Would the nanites make it?

  You've no idea what you're doing. You could just end up killing her quicker.

  The girl was going to die if she did nothing. She needed to at least try something to save her life. If the nanites did as he said—

  Don't do it!

  She set the syringe on the table in the space between Jamie's hip and her thigh and began to prepare the retractor to hold the abdominal muscles open. The tool wasn't critical for finishing the job, as the bones had already forced themselves up through the incision, widening it and keeping it open.

  She wiggled one of the growths experimentally. It didn't appear to be anchored to anything; rather, it seemed to be free-floating, as if a cluster of nanites had migrated into her belly from her leg and begun to generate the tissue they had been pre-programmed to make. She would need to cut away the blood vessels feeding it, but otherwise it should come out easily. If only she had a cauterizing scalpel.

  "What's taking so long!" Aston snapped, jabbing her in the back with his cane.

  Angel slapped it away with an angry shout, spraying blood onto the floor and the hem of the madman's pants from her glove. But he was already covered in Norstrom's blood and didn't seem to care. He tapped his watch with the gun and reminded her that time was wasting.

  She reached around behind her to retrieve the scalpel. As his eyes tracked it, she slipped the syringe into a small space in Jamie's abdominal cavity with her other hand. "They're attached by blood vessels," she explained. "I need to cut—"

  "Spare me the damn details. And hurry it up! You've been at it a half hour already!"

  She turned back and wrapped her fingers around the first bone. It was thin and curved, and as she pried it free, slicing through the blood vessels holding it in, she thought that it resembled a rib. In fact, they were all shaped the same way, and she realized with a jolt of recognition that the shard of bone the doctors had removed from her thigh in Bairin Zouqi had the same characteristic curve to it.

  It knows what kind of bone it is!

  The rib came free. She held it up, then dropped it into the drawer with a wet clatter. How many nanites had it taken to build it? How many had infected Jamie? How had they known to travel up her leg and come to rest here?

  But Angel realized then that it hadn't just been the bone in her thigh. Jamie's body was covered in lacerations. She'd been infected multiple times, all over by the smaller shrapnel of the bodies torn apart by the force of the crash. Blood and teeth and who knows what else. The bone was the biggest, but it hadn't been the only thing.

  Angel swooned and nearly fell imagining what it meant for the girl. It all seemed too incredible. It was so utterly, unthinkably horrible.

  She pushed it out of her mind so she could continue.

  She released a second. And then a third. There had to be at least two dozen bones inside of her, all oriented without reason, a mesh of ribs of various sizes, unmuscled, lacking attachment tendons. Just ribs growing where they weren't supposed to be, like terrible, monstrous cancers.

  Whoever these people were, they weren't helping anyone but themselves. They were creating terrifying new ways to make artificial tumors.

  She worked her way down through the ossified nest. In their place, the cavity filled with dark, sticky blood, masking her work, blinding her. Beneath and between the rope of the intestines, she felt the strong pulse of the descending aorta, and she knew that it was time. She placed her fingers beneath it and gently pried the vessel up, giving her a target for the injection.

  What the hell am I doing? This is crazy! These things aren't natural! Don't do it!

  But before she could second guess herself, she emptied the contents into the blood vessel, maybe twelve or fourteen milliliters' worth of undifferentiated nanites. Then she resumed removing the rib bones.

  The work took on a sort of peculiar monotony: find, lift, cut, remove; find, lift, cut, remove. The further down she went, the smaller the bones became, as if they were newer, pushing the older ones out as they grew. Would she find the source? What would she do when they became too small?

  Aston had pulled the stool over to the door and was sitting in it now. It squeaked as he shifted. Angel hoped it would collapse beneath him, but it held.

  "The thing I don't understand," she said, dropping another bone into the drawer. It was about a quarter of the size of the first, and she sensed that she would soon be unable to continue as they'd be too small. "Why did you have to kill all those people on the train?"

  "I told you already," he snapped, and when he didn't go on right away, she thought that would be the end of it. But he couldn't seem to help himself. "We needed to test the full range of trauma that could be inflicted on a person and yet still be reversed."

  "But a train crash?" She had to suppress the urge to spin around and stab him with the scalpel. She wanted to slice his face off, slit his throat. But she knew she wouldn't reach him before he pulled the trigger. She wanted revenge, but she also needed to live, and the only way to do that was to keep her wits about her. If she were to die here, no one would remain to tell the world what these people were doing. "Why not just continue . . . amputating."

  "Real life scenarios, my dear. That's the real proof. And doing the tests one by one just takes too damn long, requiring more resources than we had. And, I'll be honest, our nurse was having a little, what you might call, a crisis of faith. She refused to do any more surgeries and had to be . . . terminated. The company was pushing me to speed things along. They wanted to move onto the next stage, so I had to improvise."

  Improvise? And then, with dawning horror: Next stage? What next stage?

  "You're a monster."

  "No, the monster is whoever sabotaged that train so it would crash at full speed!" Aston snapped.

  Angel turned. "You just can't see it, can you? You blame other people for your failures—"

  He jumped to his feet and slammed the cane down onto the benchtop. "Enough! Finish what you're doing and shut the hell up!"

  She dropped another bone onto the pile, this one about half the length of her pinky, and felt around inside, gently pulling away Jamie's viscera. She was pretty sure she'd managed not to perforate any of the intestine, but there was too much blood pooled in the cavity to be sure.

  She finally found what she was searching for, but as her fingers curled around the descending branch of the aorta, she realized that there was no longer any pulse. The tough vessel was limp and still.

  Stepping back in alarm, she looked over to check Jamie's face. The skin was pasty white, and her eyes were closed.

  "She's dead!" she cried.

  "Just as well," Aston replied, sounding relieved. "Your time's up, too."

  Chapter Fifty

  "Our scientists will be most appreciative," Aston told her, as he dumped the bloody contents of the drawer into a large plastic bag and gathered the opening to seal it shut. "So much easier than transporting a whole body, especially through Customs."

  Angel collapsed to the floor in the corner of the room. She didn't think she could stand any longer. She hadn't eaten much of anything since her meal in the yurt the night before, and her mind was numb from shock and exhaustion. "I don't think I got them all," she whispered. "I'm sure there are more."

  "Oh, you're probably right about that, but I can't afford to waste any more time here. Now, get up!"

  He checked his watch again, then dug into his pocket. With his eyes still on her, he jerked the pistol up. "Johns," he said into his phone, "just finishing up in here. Any word from the crash site? They are? Good. That's exactly what we had hoped. Go ahead and set the charges. I wa
nt them timed for ninety minutes from now. Then prep the chopper."

  He scowled at her still sitting on the floor. "I told you to get up! We're not done here."

  Angel cried out when he yanked her to her feet by the arm. He was a lot stronger than she expected, certainly more than he appeared, though she realized that buried beneath all that mass there had to be enough muscle to move it.

  He twisted her around and shoved her toward the hallway. But when she stumbled toward the door, he barked at her to turn around. "In there," he said, pointing toward the room with the refrigerated vials. "Start pulling out those racks."

  "Do it yourself," she snapped back at him. "I'm finished—"

  The round didn't come any closer than a decimeter of her head, but the shot was close enough that she felt the hot air of it exploding out of the pistol. She dropped to her knees and covered herself with her arms.

  "I can either shoot you where you lay," he calmly told her, "or you can do as I say and I'll consider not shooting you at all. It's up to you. Now get up and start pulling out those carts."

  Somehow, she managed to get to her feet. She didn't believe him for a second that he would let her live. She had always assumed that he'd kill her the moment she finished doing his bidding, which is why she'd been wracking her brain trying to figure out a way to escape. But she'd come up with nothing. He had been too wary of her and too reckless with that gun to make running a viable option.

  He watched her as she pushed through the glass door and went over to the first refrigerated unit. When she pulled out the cart, the bottles clinked inside their boxes. "All of them?"

  The room was too small to accommodate all eight carts at once.

  "One at a time. Roll it outside," he instructed, as he tried to jam the plastic handle of a broom into the hinge of the door to hold it open. It was too fat, so he used the broken vortex mixer as a doorstop instead. "I'm taking them all with me."

  Angel stole another glance at Norstrom as she passed him, pulling the cart after her. She could feel Aston's eyes on her back, leading the way, the sight of the pistol a red hot dot on her skull. Both of the gunshot wounds in Norstrom's body appeared to have stopped bleeding, but she couldn't see any sign that he was still alive. His face was slack and his chest motionless. He's dead, Angel. If he were alive, he'd have done something by now, moved or tried to escape, maybe tried to take Aston out.

  And it was then that she realized she was completely on her own now. Jamie was dead, as was Norstrom, and no one else knew she was here.

  She remembered that Cheong had said he'd send someone else out. But a voice inside of her told her not to count on it. Nobody knows you're here at the factory.

  "Everyone dies the same," Aston told her, startling her with his laughter. "Even the tough ones. We're all made of the same vulnerable flesh and blood. Of course, that's soon to change. Soon, this gun and its bullets will become practically harmless. A couple wounds like those and the new-and-improved Norstrom wouldn't have died so easily. Too bad he didn't live to see the day."

  Angel continued backing up without replying. When her foot came down wrong on something behind her on the floor, twisting her ankle, she began to fall. The cart tipped, and several of the boxes started to slide out.

  "Watch it!" Aston screamed.

  She let go and fell onto the dead man. The cart righted itself with a loud rattle.

  "Goddamn it, bitch! Watch where you're going!"

  "You could have warned me," Angel shouted back. She jumped to her feet and happened to look up just in time to see Aston swing his cane down at her. She ducked, but it caught her on the arm and sent a flare of pain rippling down to her hand.

  "Move him out of the way!" he screamed at her. The missed hit had caused him to stumble into the wall, which only made him angrier. He pushed himself away and threatened to hit her again. "Hurry up!"

  Angel pulled the dead man over to the side. His blood had already begun to dry, and his hair had stuck to the thin carpet. It made a sickening sound when it tore away.

  The remainder of the trip went without incident. Angel had been expecting a car, and indeed there was one parked behind Jian's just outside the door, but when Aston put a bullet into each of the front tires, she realized that it must have been Norstrom's.

  "Around the corner," he instructed.

  The cart rolled unsteadily over the gravel surface, threatening to upend several times. She expended more energy than she could spare just wrestling with it. And yet she managed to keep going.

  When she reached the corner, a helicopter came into view, parked on the flat. Its engines were silent. Several light blue metal boxes, just like the ones she'd seen inside the supply truck at the crash site, were piled up beside the chopper. Two were open and empty; two remained sealed shut.

  The pilot was nowhere to be seen.

  "Hurry up!" Aston pulled the door open. "Load them up inside."

  She finished transferring the boxes and began to drag the cart back to the building, but he told her to push it out of the way. "And, Christ, can you move any faster? You're taking too long!"

  The next three trips passed in a blur of fatigue and barely restrained terror. Bringing out the fifth cart, she noticed that all of the metal cases by the chopper were now empty. That's when she realized where the pilot had gone and what he was doing.

  "You're going to blow it up!"

  Aston didn't reply.

  "I suppose it shouldn't surprise me. It's all you people seem capable of doing, destroying things."

  He jabbed her hard between the shoulder blades with the cane. "Shut up."

  "You won't be able to get away with this. Someone will find out. Somehow the word will get out. You can't keep something like this a secret."

  She finished unloading the cart and wheeled it away, pushing it into a shallow ditch to join the others.

  "Do you really think I care about that?" Aston asked her. "Finish up. You've got eight minutes to get the last few loaded up."

  She saw the explosives going back inside this time, set along the base of the wall in the hallway. They'd been spaced roughly five meters apart. One was situated right by the dead man's head, another opposite Norstrom's body. The timers read sixty minutes, and they were counting down.

  By the time she'd wrestled the sixth cart out to the helicopter, the pilot was back in his seat, his helmet on. He looked over at Aston and tapped his wrist, then spread out the fingers of one hand.

  "Leave it here," Aston told her. "Johns'll load it up. One more. Quick!"

  She heard the chopper's rotors begin to turn as he herded her back inside.

  The last two carts were mostly empty. He told her to carry the four remaining full plastic boxes out to the lab and set them on the bench. He then ordered her back into the inner room.

  This is it, she thought. He's going to shoot me now.

  "Those are incendiary devices out there," he informed her, "not explosive. They're intended to burn this place down, leaving nothing but an empty shell, if that. Looks better to snoopy officials than an explosion, which would raise more questions and suspicion right now, especially after the recent spate of warehouse fires. They'll be igniting in less than an hour."

  He pointed to one of the refrigeration cabinets and told her to open it up. When she did, he tossed a couple objects inside onto the floor and told her to get in. After she entered, he shut the door, then thrust the broomstick through the handles. "You won't be able to break through the glass, so save your energy. If you're lucky, the fire won't come inside this room for another fifteen minutes after the place starts to burn. The broom handle will melt soon after, releasing you."

  "Why don't you just shoot me?" she shouted at him through the glass.

  "I told you I wouldn't if you did as I said, and you did, so I intend to keep my end of the bargain."

  He pointed to the floor beside her feet, where she saw one of the nanite bottles and a syringe. "Differentiated epidermal," he said. "Skin. If you're qu
ick enough with the injection, and if they're quick enough getting to where they need to be in your body, you may just survive the fire. Of course, there will also be the long term side effects for the ones that go to the wrong place. After today, I'm sure you'll be able to imagine what those might be."

  He turned to go, but paused when he reached the door.

  "And in case you're wondering, yes, we've done burn tests. You'd be impressed at how well our little marvels work to repair flesh. Unfortunately, we still haven't figured out how to program them to grow hair again. Shame, though, as there's billions to be made just in that one segment of the market." He shrugged. "People can be so vain about their looks."

  Chapter Fifty One

  A heavy mist had begun to fall by the time Alvin Cheong's personal car pulled up to the front gate of the de l'Enfantine estate on the outskirts of Lyon. A wooden sign had been attached to the stone wall reading CHÈVREFEUILLE, but the paint was faded and beginning to chip away.

  It was already midmorning by the time they'd left the airport, and behind the tinted glass of the car the world had turned into a blur of gray and swirled pastels. Between intermittent wipes, the windshield looked as if it were cratered by a million tiny missiles.

  Once they had gotten outside of the city and were away from the morning commute traffic and the stench of diesel fumes, Cheong opened his window several inches and breathed in the wet smell of the countryside. The rich organic pong, rife with life and rot, smelled natural to him. Wet sheep and grass and dirt. Trees and pollen. How long before the entire world smelled like this again after man and his machines were gone?

  But the rain was growing heavier, so he rolled his window up again, leaving it open barely an inch to keep the stink of his own vomit from completely filling the car again. Now he stared up the drive to the silent house behind the iron gate, a faint ghostly form in the drizzle . No lights were on inside, though the lamps along the path were still lit. All except one, whose bulb appeared to have blown out. For some reason, his eye kept returning to it.