Fabrick

by Andrew Post

  Clyde went a shade paler.

  “Is there more?” Flam called.

  Rohm noticed the two companions coming up the bend and shook its head.

  Flam and Clyde joined Rohm, but Clyde kept his head turned away from the horrible sight.

  Flam reached into the cockpit of the dead men’s auto and killed the engine. The street was silent again. A strong wind tore down the street, the exhaust washing away.

  “Did you . . . eat them?” Clyde asked, hand on his twisty stomach.

  “We did, yes. They were both human, not normally something we have in our diet, but with the amount of protein found within them, we should be sustained for quite some time. We’ve found it’s beneficial on occasion—eating fresh meat.”

  Clyde frowned.

  Flam opened the trunk on the bandit auto, rifling through the collection of junk they had scoured from Geyser—a lot of the same things he himself would opt to steal. Clothing, jewelry, the occasional piece of electronics. But nothing of true value to the mission at hand. He closed the trunk. “Where are their weapons?”

  “They weren’t armed,” Rohm answered.

  “Bandits without guns. Now there’s a new one. What do you suppose they would’ve said when we came up on them—‘Give us your loot or we’ll tell you knock-knocks till you soil yourselves’?”

  “They were large for men.” Rohm puffed himself up to replicate one bandit’s girth. “Even bigger than you, Mr. Flam. Undoubtedly you would’ve had a struggle with them, especially if Mr. Clyde isn’t the type to join you in the exchange of blows.”

  With their auto off, the smell of the dead men was now reaching Clyde, making him even more nauseated. “How far is the medical ward?” he blurted.

  “Just up ahead.” Flam turned to Rohm. “Care to lead the way again? I hate to admit it, but that turned out relatively well.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Rohm fell into a heap, dispersed, and scampered en masse up the street.

  Flam and Clyde followed, taking their time. They watched as the pack made its way around the corner. A sign welcomed them to the medical ward, and beyond there were no more shops or newspaper dispensers. The buildings were taller and made of glass, reflective in the early afternoon suns. There was still the occasional auto blocking the road, but most were the emergency medical sort. Signs announced medical treatment specialties—diseases, accidents, the morgue—as well as general practitioners’ offices. Every building remained dark even when the streetlights flickered.

  At the very westernmost side of Geyser, in the heart of the medical ward, was a massive building. Clyde craned his neck to view the top. It was the main hospital facility, where only those of high governmental rank and the most affluent of Geyser’s citizenry could be treated.

  This was where they found Rohm waiting for them, standing in the collected human form in front of the doors. It appeared to check the time on a wristwatch that wasn’t there.

  Flam hopped up on the curb and pulled the blunderbuss strap off his shoulder. He gazed in but saw only his reflection in the glass doors. “Should’ve figured the elevator would be in here.”

  “It wasn’t often that a patient couldn’t be treated by any of Geyser’s doctors,” Rohm said. “Only on occasion did they actually send anyone out of Geyser for treatment. Among those, they were always those who could foot the bill. I spent a lot of time in here. This is where we were given life, up on the research floor.”

  “So you know the layout of this place pretty well?” Flam asked.

  Through the doors, Clyde spied only the edges of things, as if they were drawn with chalk on a slate.

  “Well enough. I know the elevator through the bottom of Geyser’s platter is in the fourth subbasement, and to get down that far will require electricity.”

  “What about stairs?” offered Clyde.

  “There aren’t any,” Rohm said. “Not down to the subbasements. Security was tight here. They couldn’t treat the prime minister or anyone in his cabinet aboveground and risk an Odium rocket striking them while they were having their reflexes checked. They were always taken downstairs by elevator, accompanied by Patrol guardsmen, where the platter worked as a natural protective wall.”

  “Either way, we might as well get inside and see what we got to work with.” Flam wedged the barrel of his blunderbuss between the glass panel doors and pried them apart a foot. He wedged one of his hoofed toes between. “We need to get off the street. Rohm, you care to prove yourself indispensable once again and scout ahead for us?”

  “Certainly,” Rohm said with enthusiasm and tumbled apart, coursing in single file into the opening Flam provided. Flam cringed and looked away as the mice crawled over his foot. The whole collection of rodents got inside, and Flam let the doors ease shut.

  Flam and Clyde waited outside while the rodents did a quick survey of the hospital’s main floor.

  Up the road, the chirrup of the Patrol autos sounded.

  Flam’s eyes went wide, and he twisted to face the bending avenue.

  Clyde spun on his heel and saw on the storefront faces, up at the street from whence they had just come, the terrible flashing lights of the Patrol on speedy approach. He felt the soul-deadening effect immediately, as he had from the grenade of gray light but not as severely. Still, he had to shake his head to clear the cobwebby nets they tangled his mind with. He turned to Flam, but he was already frantically trying to pry the facility doors open again.

  There was a tremendous set of bangs, even louder than that of Flam’s blunderbuss. Clyde watched, stunned, seeing the shattered wreckage of the bandit auto spiral aflame above the shop roofs. It twisted at the peak of its ascent and fell in a lazy arc. Shattered and burnt metal boomed onto the street. The Patrol guardsmen cheered.

  “Hurry,” shouted Clyde.

  Flam grunted, struggling with the door. The hydraulics squeaked, holding fast. Another set of dull thumps, and the sidewalk trembled beneath their feet. The Patrol cannons fired a second salvo. Heavy, heart-shaking blasts. The street was curved, but a swatch of the carnage could be seen. The guardsmen fired upon a storefront, glass shattering, black smoke and orange fire blossoming into the sky.

  Clyde helped Flam, but the door resisted. The glass cracked, the frame bending.

  Sweating, Flam violently tugged. “Well, Pasty, it was nice knowing you.”

  Chapter 11

  Morning Suns

  Flam wrenched the doors apart and pulled Clyde along behind him, out of sight of the approaching Patrol vehicle. In the shadows off to the side within the hospital lobby, they huddled among a collection of wheelchairs. Clyde listened as the Patrol auto drove by mere feet away. It crawled along, the guardsmen behind the thick, tinted glass searching up and down each building for looters, bandits, possible squatters.

  As the vehicle passed the doors, Flam lifted a flattened hand to shield his eyes from their flashing gray light beacons.

  Clyde did the same.

  They remained in place until they were sure the guardsmen were a good distance down the street.

  It took Flam two tries to get the words to cooperate with his parched throat. “That was a close one.” He stood and dusted himself off. “They’ll be back when they do their rounds in the late evening. But with any luck, we’ll be long gone by then.” He guided his light stick’s blue glow over their new surroundings.

  There was a waiting room, a nurse’s kiosk, an overturned refreshment dispenser. A few brown dots littered the floor near the entryway to the nurses’ station.

  Clyde pointed out the mouse droppings.

  Flam entered the area behind the kiosk counter, calling for Rohm.

  The lights came on and died out again. There was no sign of Rohm, any part of them at all, not even in the long hallway.

  Clyde remained behind Flam as they walked a few yards to where the hallway divided in four separate directions.

  “Rohm,” Flam shouted, his voice bouncing down the lengths of the halls and re
turning to them a moment later. There was a sound of scurrying, and then a flood of white rodents filtered from under a door labeled Maintenance.

  Rohm assembled into their towered form. “We tried to find a way to turn on the power in there, but it’s just cleaning supplies.”

  “It’s probably somewhere else, then,” Flam said. “Not that it would do us any good to flip the breakers anyway. Not without a steady supply of juice.” He grinned at Clyde. “I suppose we could always load up in the elevator, cut the cable, and see where that gets us, eh, Pasty?”

  The surge came and went, and in the momentary splash of illumination, a flickering stood out brighter than any others: the fluorescent glow of a refreshment dispenser at the end of the main corridor.

  They headed that way, deeper into the hospital, Flam’s light stick guiding. They walked the cluttered hospital halls to a surgery waiting room, where they found some seats. Magazines on a coffee table reported old news of Geyser.

  Flam dropped the light stick onto the floor and approached the vending machine with hands out, like a boxer squaring up to an opponent. With a grunt and one solid pull, he ripped its plastic face clean off. He piled the prepackaged loot into his arms and then dispersed items to Clyde and Rohm.

  Clyde held the plastic-wrapped sandwich with confusion.

  Flam took it back from him. “Right. I forgot.” He took his own division of the bounty to a corner seat and collapsed into it, letting the candy bars, bags of chips and pretzels, sandwiches, pastries, and cookies shower about his feet.

  Rohm tumbled into a pile, and each of its members worked at its share, eating at a polite volume and with closed mouths.

  “There are no windows in this place,” Flam commented, ripping open his third semi-decomposed submarine sandwich. “Hard to tell what time it is, even. I wonder if we should just crash here and sort out the whole elevator business in the morning.”

  The rodents that weren’t eating answered, “That would probably be advisable. Regain our strength, get a good night’s rest, and see if we can tackle the elevator power supply issue in the morning with fresh eyes.”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?” Flam grunted.

  “You use too many colloquialisms, and we weren’t sure.”

  Clyde, without anything to do while the others ate, took up one of the magazines and turned it toward the light stick. Inside, pictures displayed what Geyser looked like when the city was populated and functional. Everyone in the pictures smiled, standing at the base of the town square geyser, having ice cream or pushing buggies loaded with chubby babies, who also looked like they were smiling.

  He flipped the page to a section about government reform following King Francois Pyne’s death. The journalist had articulated the fears of the townsfolk of Geyser, saying that since none of the king’s children had been present for the moment of Pyne’s death, the passing of the soul and of the ruling torch had gone to the prime minister instead of the heir. It wasn’t anything new to him, but seeing a photo of Gorett—his silver hair parted in the middle, his neatly manicured moustache and pointy beard—he could understand why people didn’t trust him. Gorett showed a row of long teeth and a pair of cruel brown eyes. He was smiling for the picture, but something about it made Clyde think that beyond the camera, something savage was taking place. He didn’t like making eye contact with the man even though it was just a photo, as silly a thing as it was.

  “It’s cold,” Clyde said, closing the magazine.

  “True, the winter cycle is a few short weeks away,” Rohm said. They had finished eating, and several of the rodents were now slumbering. A handful of new mothers in the brood were nursing their young. A few of the buck rodents were sitting up on hind legs, pulling their whiskers into their tiny mouths with their paws and licking them clean. “Perhaps if we weren’t indoors, a fire might be nice.”

  Flam tossed the wrapper of his last sandwich aside. With a fist, he beat his chest until a belch dislodged from his guts and boiled up through his throat. “I think, and this is just my opinion, but I think that once we get through with all this Odium business and you get what you’re after, Clyde, we should retire to a world that doesn’t have winter. A couple are still inhabitable closer to the suns, where it never gets cold. That’d be a place I’d like to make a home.”

  Home. Clyde sat up and sighed, remembering Mr. Wilkshire. Skeletal in his own gardens, facedown. He wished he could’ve done something to protect him. Of all his masters, Mr. Wilkshire was the only one who deserved his undying devotion and dedication. He was the only one who had never taken a lash to him to vent deeper frustrations after a confession.

  He cursed his ignorance, especially the fact that he had momentarily thought the gray light grenade’s detonation was some sort of birthday surprise. He gritted his teeth. “I wish I knew the Odium were to blame. If only I had some proof.”

  “I saw the man’s body,” Flam said. “He was clearly gunned down.”

  Rohm offered, “We could always return to the scene of the crime, gather some evidence. Perhaps you two missed something we would be more prone to spot, equipped with so many more eyes as we are. We would like to offer our services. Half of us could remain to assist with finding a way to power the elevator, while the other went back to investigate.”

  “You can do that?”

  A thousand little cocksure nods.

  “Okay, then. That might be a good idea,” Clyde replied.

  “Well, there’s no point in talking about it now,” Flam said. “Not like anyone’s going to be traipsing about in the city tonight. Are you all settled in? I’m going to shut the light off if you are. Batteries for this thing don’t come cheap, you know.” He didn’t wait for a reply, took up the light stick, and with one swing through the stale hospital air, shut it off.

  As with food, Clyde didn’t need sleep. He wished he could just turn himself off for a few hours, even possibly dream, whatever that was like. He assumed it was a lot like zoning out in front of the television, as he saw Miss Selby do without fail every midmorning. Maybe he’d wake up feeling like all the bad stuff was eroded away.

  Not so. He spent the entire night with his thoughts, fresh recollections of Mr. Wilkshire’s dead body parading around like demonic puppets over and over and over again. He wanted to get away from them.

  Clyde assumed it was close to morning. It felt like it’d been a few hours of sitting in the dark, picturing things moving in the shadows, but it was impossible to tell so deep within the hospital. The others were still asleep, so Clyde decided to check outside on his own. He put on his dinner jacket, which he’d been using for a blanket, and stepped into his loafers.

  He ventured to find the front doors to take a look outside. Getting lost in the dark hallways only a couple of times, he turned at each intersection that led to a brighter area. Soon he was at the front doors again. Morning was a welcome sight, even though the sky was full of gray. He didn’t dare step outside, though, fearing the Patrol could come rumbling past again any moment, so he remained at the cracked glass and peered up one way and then down the other. Apparently it had rained in the night. The street was dark, the asphalt collecting shallow puddles here and there.

  When he returned to the waiting room where they had set up camp, Rohm was still a pile of slumbering mice, but in Flam’s place was just an outline of food wrappers in the rough shape of a Mouflon.

  Would he abandon him so soon? Did the Mouflon custom work like the legend about leprechauns? Did they remain true to their word only so long as you kept them in sight?

  His heart pounded. Clyde left the waiting area, going to the intersection of the four hallways. He peered down all the hallways and saw no sign of Flam. He wanted to call out to him but remembered the Patrol morning routines. He swallowed a deep breath, stuffed his cold hands into his slacks pockets, and kept walking.

  “Flam?” he whispered, passing door after door. All the rooms were identical, with their adjustable beds and thin curtains. Dead mach
inery, vases of wilted flowers. He walked along to the end of the corridor and found a stairwell that led upstairs but not down. It was true what Rohm had said: there was no way besides the elevator to go any farther down. Clyde stood at the bottom of the pitch-black stairwell and called up for Flam, his voice reverberating in the boxy space. No answer.

  As he turned around, though, he did hear something. A voice, female, calling out a single warbling note. He listened, holding his breath for as long as he could, his ears aching for the sound to repeat itself. It came just as he was going to give up, but this time it didn’t sound so much like singing. It was a groan, like that of someone in pain or some sort of distress. Clyde found a ventilation duct on the ceiling and got on tiptoes, turning his ear toward the grate. The sound didn’t come again. He’d read a book about ghosts once and wasn’t the least bit eager to meet one.

  He returned to the waiting area and found Rohm partly awake—about halfway, by quick estimation. Some were sitting up, stretching, yawning mouthfuls of sharp teeth that almost looked scary—especially since they were so cute otherwise.

  Clyde swallowed. “Have any of you seen Flam?”

  At once, the rest all perked up, tiny ears rising and eyes bolting open.

  “We haven’t,” they said in unison. “I’m sorry. Have you checked outside? It’s rumor that Mouflons adore the first morning light and will be grumpy all day unless they get to see the sky at least once.”

  “It’s overcast. I don’t think there’s any point in looking for morning suns in that weather.”

  “Well, best to check regardless. Oh, by the way, give us the address of Mr. Wilkshire’s residence. We’ll leave at once to investigate.”

  “It is 4970 Wilkshire Lane.”

  A few of the mice smiled. “Should be easy enough to remember. Well, off we go.”

  Half of the pack went with Clyde to the front doors of the hospital, needing his help with the doors. He struggled to open them, and the frisk mice started down the street.