Hellbender

by King, Laurie R.

  I’d hoped the older voice, the guy in charge, would be first, but I figured he was probably the man I’d seen drive up in the red Jeep, and sure enough, the head of white hair was barely visible past various shoulders. The big guy whose back I’d seen was at the front, carrying a shotgun. The two other guys, both with that rumpled look of being dragged out of bed, seemed like people who spent their days in a lab torturing mice, more at home with scalpels and microscopes than with the weapons they carried.

  Didn’t matter: They were all targets.

  I opened fire. The big guy saw me a split second before my finger went down and dove through a doorway—I thought I winged him, but it was one of the scientists behind him who fell. The white-haired guy and the skinny assistant on the left vanished into other doorways.

  A shotgun went off, spattering the hallway but not making it through my wooden door. There was a lot of shouting and cursing, and finally a sharp order from that first voice I’d heard. Silence. Then: “Who is there?”

  “Guess,” I called.

  “Which one of you is that?”

  “Oh, I’m a whole new nightmare for you.”

  Silence again.

  “I don’t know what you want, young man, but—”

  “What do I want? I want you to die, in a whole lot of pain.”

  Silence, longer this time.

  “Well,” he said at last. “You can probably understand that we don’t wish to oblige you.”

  “Tough.”

  “Apart from our deaths, why did you come?”

  “Because you’re a monster, and monsters need to be slain.” I don’t know why I said that. Probably because it didn’t matter what I said: the longer he talked, the farther his lab rats could scurry.

  “And you are our modern-day hero, rescuing the creatures?”

  “They’re people. Unlike you.”

  “They’re valuable resources, whose unique heritage could save countless lives. Think of all the soldiers whose limbs might be regrown, the blind who might see, the—”

  “Yeah, and because Hitler’s doctors and dentists learned things in the concentration camps, that justifies Dachau and Buchenwald? What say we put you in a lab and pull you apart, see if we can find a cure for evil?”

  Jesus, I thought; stay here any longer and I’d start singing “Kumbaya.”

  He answered, his voice all sad and patronizing. “I can see your mind is made up. Although I’m sorry your little friends have abandoned you here.”

  “My choice.”

  “And now you’re trapped.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Oh, very well. Andrew, you get ready to shoot our visitor when he puts his head around that doorway. Jonah, you’re on his blind side of the hallway: when I give the word—”

  My gun went off, six times. The first tore up the floor next to the nose of Andrew’s gun and made it jerk back; the rest of them took out the four lights overhead, leaving a couple down at the far end.

  I slapped in another clip and risked putting my eye to the crack, but nobody was moving.

  “There,” I said. “Now it’s nice and dark, like creatures prefer.”

  “Um, boss?” Andrew said. “What do we do now?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said the boss man. He sounded annoyed, more than anything, which made me nervous. I strained to hear, but I couldn’t tell what he was up to—until his voice came again, talking. On a phone.

  “Manny? Dr. Curtis here. We have an intruder, with a gun. He’s in the office just inside the west door, the first room to the left. If you open the door, you and Jack can stand back in the darkness and blaze away, you can’t possibly miss him. But make sure you take care, we’re right down the hallway. How long? Okay. Yes, we’re not going anywhere, but then, neither is our intruder.”

  That put a whole different picture on the situation.

  I sighed, and reached for the knapsack.

  When I was ready, I watched Andrew’s doorway. I didn’t figure him for a patient man, and indeed, after a minute the end of his shotgun eased around the frame. I let it come four inches, and then fired, at his door and at the other two for good measure. And once they had all ducked back in their holes, I stepped into the hallway, and threw.

  Andrew’s curses almost hid the first sound of breaking glass. But my second bottle, aimed ten feet farther down the hallway, made an unmistakable noise, and the third one as well.

  Dr. Curtis figured out what it meant first. I could feel him staring at the dim hallway, looking at the liquid and smashed glass, and then he must have smelled it.

  He waited just long enough to see that the bottles had all landed on the far side of his door, long enough to figure out what I had in mind, long enough to make his choice between a chancy bullet and a sure burning to death. The old guy came out of his doorway so fast I almost wasn’t ready.

  Almost.

  The lighter in my hand snapped into life, the rag in the top of my last bottle flared, and I backhanded it into the corridor. Before the bottle hit the wall, the corridor exploded into a wall of flame.

  The doc screamed as he ran, and he might have gotten the door open if I hadn’t managed to get off a couple of shots in that direction. A slightly more solid shape among the flames went down, and although I had to slam my own door shut then, I could hear him screaming for a while before he went still. A few minutes later, the others stopped, too.

  And some time later, so did I.

  Except . . .

  If I died, who is telling this story?

  Interesting fact—a last one: Some of the myths about salamanders are more or less true.

  The room burned around me, my hair and clothing crinkled and burned, the beams overhead groaned and burned. The fire department got there, snaked their hoses into the inferno, and found five dead people. Or so they thought.

  Then one of them moved.

  Myth has it that a salamander can extinguish fire with the cold dampness of its body. Aristotle believed it, and some of the other old Greeks. Nonsense, of course, as even Pliny pointed out—but strangely enough, not entirely.

  I lost my fingers, three toes, my voice, and most of my skin. A normal man would have died. They kept me in a coma for weeks. My looks disturbed hardened nurses for months.

  But that was a year ago.

  By the time I was in any shape to be questioned, there were really no questions left. They sent Frank to do the interview, even though he’d had nothing to do with the case other than passing on what I sent him. I don’t know, maybe I made them nervous.

  Anyway, Frank told me a lot more than he asked me.

  I knew about the scandals and the headlines, of course—when you’re in the hospital, they leave the television on a lot. So I’d sort of vaguely heard about the police raids and the government shakeups; I’d heard the outraged speeches and the wild rumors and the dueling news stations. Even wrapped in my blanket of pain and drugs, I was aware of the shift of public opinion that made every SalaMan into a hero.

  WeWeb closed down, after nine out of ten users canceled their pages, even though WeWeb did nothing but sell the ads.

  A bill went in front of Congress to ban targeted ads, although no one thought it would pass.

  What was expected to pass was a slew of bills reforming how science was done. Labs across the country were shut down or raided because of the links Dr. Curtis had formed with organized crime—nothing glues people to headlines like a modern-day Mengele: high-ranking scientist hires thugs to kidnap the raw material for his experiments; thugs go on to search the victims’ houses for more raw material; thugs set fires to discourage snoops.

  And there’s nothing that makes the lawyers drool like a case linking universities and government agencies and organized crime and weird, mostly beautiful people like the SalaMen. It’s going to make the Nuremberg Trials look like squirrel food.

  And you want to know the thing that astonishes me most, in all this? That Uncle Sam had in fact done
exactly what it said it would: lock the door on the SalaMan files and make sure no one knew who we were. Which would’ve been a good and fair thing, except it meant that when we started disappearing, the FBI didn’t notice, since there was no reason to tie the disappearances together. The police didn’t notice, because the victims were so spread out. The media didn’t catch it, because even if they’d heard, who would believe it? Nobody noticed but Harry Savoy, and Harry was too paranoid to trust the FBI, the police, or the media.

  Me? I kept out of everything. I had to shut my office, although I could’ve been busy a thousand hours a week if I’d been in any shape to work. I’m thinking that when I open again, I may actually call myself SalaMan Investigations. I might even try just working for my own people for a while.

  But when might that be? Well, last night, while Lizzie and I were . . . well, as we were occupied with things that married people do, she said “Ow!” and sat up, rubbing her ribs. When she pulled her hand away, we both saw the red welt, up the side of her pale skin. I held the stubs of my fingers under the light, and studied them.

  Sure enough, there among the scar tissue was a tiny rough protuberance. It looked for all the world like a baby’s fingernail.