by Sam Sisavath
A flash of pain and anger flicked across the woman’s face just before Quinn slammed her right forearm into her exposed neck. She pulled her arm back and hit Shorty in the exact same spot again.
The second one did the trick, and Shorty gagged and dropped the staff and reached for her throat. Quinn staggered back and let the woman fall out of the cratered glass door and to the floor on her knees.
Goddamn. That worked. I can’t believe that worked!
Then:
Snap out of it and grab her weapon!
Quinn looked around for it, but couldn’t locate the fallen staff—
There it is!
She snatched it up from the floor, the cold metal sending a sudden rush of electricity through her, and she thought again, What is this thing made of?
The staff should have been heavy but it was impossibly light in her hand, as if she were holding a plastic baton instead of something made of metal. And yet as she hefted it there was amazing balance, and despite the slippery-looking smooth surface, she had no trouble getting a firm grip even with just one hand.
Shorty was still on the floor on her knees, her face turning a shade of blue as she struggled to breathe. To Quinn’s surprise, Shorty managed to croak out, “You’ll never leave this place. Never.”
“Where am I?” Quinn asked.
The smaller woman laughed. Or tried to. It came out mostly as a choked, gagging sound. “You’ll never leave this place…”
“You said that already.”
“You’ll never…” She blinked at Quinn and struggled to speak. “You’ll never…”
Shorty finally gave up, closed her eyes, and gradually slid down on the floor and lay on her side. Her face had almost completely turned navy blue, and Quinn thought about checking the woman’s vitals, but that would mean getting too close, not to mention putting the staff away because she only had one hand to work with.
If the other woman was faking it, she deserved an Oscar.
Quinn stood perfectly still and listened, but aside from the continuous humming of machinery in the background, there was no indication Shorty had alerted anyone else, that people were swarming the warehouse at this very moment.
I guess she really did want me for herself.
Thanks, Brandon, whoever you are.
Quinn held her broken arm against her side and gripped the metal pole in her other hand before taking a moment to look around her.
Dammit. She really had lost track of where she was going during her retreat and no longer had any clue which part of the room she was in. There was a wall to her right, its white color easy to make out against the continuous lines of black matte server containers.
It took her about thirty seconds to reach the wall, all of that time spent trying not to black out from the pain. God, her arm hurt. It hurt a lot. Continuously walking kept it at bay somewhat, but sooner or later she’d have to stop. Either that, or the adrenaline would run its course. Whichever came first…
Don’t think about it. Not yet.
Keep going!
She turned left and kept going when she reached the wall. This time she hadn’t been walking for very long before she finally came across a door. Or, at least, she didn’t think it had been very long.
Ten seconds? Twenty? A minute?
Who cares.
She blinked the pain away and focused on the door.
It wasn’t the same one she’d come through earlier, because that one didn’t have the markings she was staring at now: 5RS.
5RS? What the hell is 5RS?
There was only one way to find out.
Maybe it was the pain affecting her decision-making ability, but she didn’t think about it for very long at all (Another ten seconds? Another twenty? Who cares? You’re about to die out here) before grabbing the lever and pushing the door open and stepping through.
“Hunh,” she said when she saw what was on the other side.
Chapter 27
Now that’s something you don’t see every day.
It was beyond anything she had expected to find, but for some reason it didn’t strike her as being overly shocking, either. Then again, that reaction could have been the result of the haze of pain she was struggling through at the moment, not to mention the constant threat of falling down from it.
There were three of them—two men and one woman—and they were nude and suspended inside what looked like water tanks made of clear thick glass that stretched ten feet into the air toward the arched ceiling. The liquid holding them seemed to shift color every few seconds, from pale white to slightly gray to a blue-greenish tint.
The room itself was a much bigger version of the one she had woken up in—five times as big, if she had to guess—with the same immaculately clean white walls and floor. There was a door on the other side, which made sense. That was probably the front entrance, while she had entered through a back or side door.
She forgot temporarily about the throbbing pain in her left arm and walked closer to get a better look. There was a computer panel in front of each vat, along with winding catwalks that stretched up along the sides and up to the dome-shaped tops. If not for the see-through glass that revealed their contents, they could have passed for grain silos.
Except, of course, there wasn’t grain inside them, just people.
And one of them was John Porter.
She smiled at the sight of him in the center tank. His eyes were closed, and when she neared the computer panel, it turned on by itself. A graphical user interface flickered on the screen, showing a basic image of the tank, a “person” inside it, and the words PORTER, J. at the top. Below that, in blinking green letters, were the words RESEQUENCING IN PROGRESS.
Porter looked either asleep or unconscious (or somewhere else entirely, for all she knew), and his eyes remained closed even when she rapped her knuckles on the glass as loud as she could, producing little more than dull thuds.
“Well, hello there, sailor. You come here often?” she asked anyway, feeling giddy at the sight of a helpless Porter.
She wanted him to be conscious, if for no other reason than to give her something over him later. It was a small thing, but after being led around by him and everyone else for the last week or so, she would take any leverage she could get.
Quinn moved over to get a better view of the woman in the tank to Porter’s left. She looked to be in her early forties and was in amazing shape, with hair that flowed behind and to one side of her. In her nude form, the woman reminded Quinn a little bit of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, except as a blonde instead of a redhead. There was something classically beautiful about her, and that sense of familiarity that Quinn had felt with JS reared its head again. And like with JS, she couldn’t put a name to the face.
Who are you people?
She backtracked to the woman’s computer panel, which lit up the way Porter’s had earlier as she approached it. The same GUI appeared onscreen, but with a new name at the top: GLENN, F.
Quinn glanced back at the woman, but as with JS, the name (or, in this case, a last name and one letter in a first name) didn’t ring any bells.
And yet there was something so hauntingly familiar about the woman…
Who are you? What are you doing here? What are you doing inside that?
More questions, with even less answers.
Quinn moved on to the third figure, to Porter’s right. Unlike Porter and F. Glenn, the man was obviously injured and his face disfigured to such a degree that it took Quinn standing in front of the container and staring at its occupant for a good thirty seconds before she realized who it was.
“Sonofabitch.”
It was Ringo. Pete fucking Ringo.
She didn’t know why, but a part of her never believed even an entire building dropping on top of him would kill the man. After all, he had survived two gunshots to the chest and two more to the back. What was a pile of debris compared to that?
But Ringo hadn’t escaped the warehouse unscathed
. Far from it. His head was partially shaved, and she could make out scars along his skull where something had cracked it open. His nose looked artificial, overly opaque, and while one of his eyes was open, the other appeared to be sealed tight. When she leaned closer, Quinn swore the open eye looked almost artificial—or very new, like it was in the process of growing itself back.
Quinn didn’t have to peek at Ringo’s panel to know who it was. She would recognize him anywhere. The man who killed Ben, and who wouldn’t stay dead. Why the hell won’t the man stay dead?
“You’re talking about genetic engineering,” she had said to Porter back at the warehouse. “Is that what you’re telling me? You and Ringo were born in labs?”
“No. We were conceived and given birth to just like you and Xiao and Aaron. But we were perfected in labs,” Porter had answered.
The stabbing pain from her left arm pulled her back to the present, but Quinn couldn’t look away from Ringo. Like Porter and F. Glenn, the man was naked and helpless on the other side of the thick glass. If bullets wouldn’t kill him and dropping a ceiling on him hadn’t done the trick, could he survive if she shoved the staff through his skull?
“They did things to us, made us more than men, but you can’t play with the brain the way you would a human body. Inflict enough damage to the head and we would go down just like any other man. Destroy the brain and it’s permanent.”
The brain. That’s all it would take. A bullet (or a metal rod) to the brain and she wouldn’t have to deal with Ringo ever again. Ben’s death would be avenged, and maybe, just maybe, she might finally feel some satisfaction.
Quinn looked over at Porter, adrift in his own tank next to Ringo’s. He was either asleep or unconscious or…something else. She had no idea because she didn’t know what these things they were submerged in were. Another machine that shouldn’t exist, but did? Like the chair?
“There are a lot of things that exist that you couldn’t possibly imagine,” Porter had said. “That’s what makes the Rhim so dangerous. That’s what makes them so lethal to their enemies.”
Things like the ability to genetically engineer a human being into a lethal weapon, or a chair that somehow held you in place without the need of restraints…
…Or a tube filled with some kind of goop that brought you back from the abyss?
She walked over to Porter’s computer panel. Revenge could wait; right now she had to get out of here. Nothing mattered if she couldn’t get out of here.
“I bet he’s still up there trying to impress the higher-ups with what he found about you. He’s like a little boy on the night before Christmas, but with a Power Point presentation,” Shorty had said.
That led Quinn to believe Hofheinz was momentarily distracted, which would explain why no one was looking for her yet: because no one knew she had gotten loose from her room. And she wouldn’t have even managed that if not for the faceless woman who had freed her, then sabotaged the cameras.
But her grace period wasn’t going to last forever. Sooner or later, Hofheinz was going to finish his “Power Point report” and come looking for her. And when that happened, it wouldn’t just be one petite woman with a metal staff after her.
Quinn refocused on the panel and wiped at sweat that had broken out along her forehead. Like the computer in her room, there was nothing overly complicated about this one. The trick was finding the right buttons to push.
Even a monkey could do it.
There. Just underneath the large block of letters declaring RESEQUENCING IN PROGRESS. A single word: PAUSE.
She pressed it and RESEQUENCING IN PROGRESS blinked once, twice—five times in all before it was replaced with: RESEQUENCING PAUSED.
Now what?
But she hadn’t completely finished the thought when PAUSE was replaced with EJECTION.
Quinn stared at the word for a moment. The thought of “ejecting” Porter out of his imprisonment and into the air made her hesitate.
“Better you than me, Porter,” she said before pressing the button.
The large blocks of RESEQUENCING PAUSED was replaced with: CYCLING…
Sounds about right, Quinn thought as she took a step back.
CYCLING soon became PROCESSING in blinking green letters.
She looked up at Porter, but whatever “processing” was and “cycling” before that, they didn’t seem to have done anything to wake him up. Was he even still alive? Maybe she was looking at a dead man in some kind of cryogenic containment. She’d read a story about it once in a science magazine—
Porter blinked.
“Or not,” Quinn said out loud.
He stared at her through the glass for a brief wide-eyed second before his eyes snapped left then right, and eventually returned to her. His arms and legs began to move; slowly at first, but gradually treading water—or whatever the thing that surrounded him was because it looked much too thick to just be water. It was liquid, she could tell that much, though why Porter didn’t appear to be holding his breath, or need to, was less clear.
The text on the computer panel had changed again, this time from PROCESSING to EXPULSION, along with a countdown clock that started at 10 and was now down to 9…8…7…
Expulsion? That doesn’t sound good at all.
If Porter was fearful of where he had found himself after waking, it didn’t show on his face. If anything, he looked surprisingly calm, as if he had expected this, and continued to tread the thick ooze that surrounded him. She had seen recruits at the academy almost drown when they miscalculated their abilities, and you could always tell when they were in trouble. She didn’t see any of that in Porter now.
“Well?” Quinn asked.
Porter stared questioningly back at her.
She took a step forward and this time mouthed the words, “What now?”
Porter began swimming upward. As he approached it, the domed lid slid open and Porter’s head broke the surface, and the sound of him sucking in air echoed off the large room’s high ceilings.
Quinn hurried to the stairs at the side of the tank and climbed up. A small surge of adrenaline helped her to (mostly) ignore the continued pain from her broken left arm, and she found that if she held it very still against her side she could go more than two seconds at a time without thinking about it. Even so, she was about to faint by the time she reached the top. Ten feet might as well have been a hundred.
Porter had snagged onto the side opening and was gasping for breath when she grabbed one of his arms and helped pull him out. He was covered in thick, oozing liquid and she flinched involuntarily at the contact, like dipping her hands into a jar of warm butter, only more disgusting.
It would have been easier if she had both arms, but she managed to help him out of the tank and onto the catwalk with a lot of grunting and grimacing. He landed with a loud thump! and rolled over onto his back before sitting up and vomiting enough of the blue-and-green goop from inside him to fill at least a couple of buckets. Without a solid floor to contain them, the liquid poured down the catwalk and splashed the side of the tank before dropping to the floor below.
“That’s gross,” Quinn said. She sat down on the metal grate next to him to catch her own breath. She didn’t know what hurt more—her broken arm or her good one, from the exertion of dragging him out of the vat. Porter was deceptively heavy. “You don’t look, uh, so bad for someone who’s supposed to be dead.”
Porter looked too preoccupied with trying to slow down his breathing to answer. Which was probably the smart approach, because every time he opened his mouth he just ended up wheezing, with more of the slimy fluid dripping from his lips.
God, that’s disgusting.
“You okay?” she asked.
He shook his head before settling his eyes on her. Both pupils were dilated and glassy, and he was making a lot of effort to…what?…remember her?
Then, finally, recognition. Or something that might have looked like it.
“What…” He sucked in another de
ep breath before expelling it slowly, and with some effort said, “…are you doing here?”
“Is that your way of saying thanks?” Quinn asked. “Because if it is, it sucks.”
He shook his head, was about to say something else, but didn’t. Or couldn’t. Instead, he glanced at the other two water tanks that flanked them.
Now it was her turn to really look at him.
Physically, Porter looked fine—he wasn’t missing a limb and didn’t seem to have any extra holes in him from his skirmish with HRT at the warehouse. But mentally she could tell he wasn’t completely there, that every action or thought process was suffering through some kind of a delay.
“Porter,” Quinn said. “You okay?”
He turned back to her, and as if he hadn’t even heard the question, said, “Service center.”
“What?”
“Service center. We’re in a service center.” His words were slightly slurred even though he was making an effort to enunciate every word. He was about fifty-fifty on that front.
“You’ve been here before.”
He nodded, though a bit too hesitantly for her liking.
“Then you know how to get out of here,” she said.
“I don’t…remember.” He blinked at her before seeming to look past her. “Service center. We’re in a service center.”
“You said that already.”
“Did I?”
“Yeah.” She waited for him to say something else, but he kept staring past her. “So service center. Like where you’d go to get an oil change, that kind of service center?”
“Yes,” he said. Then shook his head. “I’m not sure.”
“But you recognize where we are.”
“No.”
“No?”
“They all look the same.”
“What does?”
“These places.”
“Service centers.”
He nodded. “Yes. We’re in a service center.”
Oh, great. I just woke up Dustin Hoffman from Rain Man.
Quinn sighed, said, “You sure about that?”
“I… Maybe.” He squinted, thick drops of the fluid dripping from the hair matted to his forehead.