Working Stiff tr-1

by Rachel Caine

  One entire wall of the room was thick, tempered glass. Outside the window, a portable camera had been set up, and a red light showed it was recording. I’ll be sure to have them record every moment of your deterioration for my home viewing later, Harte had said. She was living up to her commitments.

  The only other things of interest about the room were the spray nozzles and pipes across the ceiling, and the drain in the floor. Bryn considered that, and the shiny, slick walls.

  This place was designed for easy cleanup.

  Stay calm, she told herself. They’d taken her clothes. She was in a baggy, thin coverall, snaps up the front, that rustled uncomfortably with every movement. It, like she, was disposable. There was a number printed on the breast of the coverall: 00061.

  Bryn’s legs suddenly folded as the reality of it overwhelmed her.

  They were leaving her in here to dissolve, under the merciless stare of that camera. Nobody was coming to help her. Nobody would care. She was 00061, not a person. She was a dying lab rat. Once life left her rotted remains, they’d flush the room, disinfect, and throw her bones in some incinerator somewhere.

  She’d just vanish without a trace.

  Get up, she told herself. Get up and fight.

  But there wasn’t anything or anyone to fight. She couldn’t fight for her life. She didn’t have one. Without the shots, she had no chance at all.

  McCallister—

  She couldn’t count on him, not anymore. Fideli was out of the picture; McCallister was missing, maybe on the run. She had no allies here, no help, and no hope.

  They didn’t put you in here just to kill you. Harte wants to know what McCallister is up to. They’ll question you. When they do, there will be an opportunity.

  She didn’t really care. The bleakness of the situation was overwhelming.

  Get up!

  She did, just because it was something to do besides lie down and die.

  A careful inspection of the room didn’t make her feel any better. There was a door, but it opened only from the outside; there wasn’t even a hint of a handle or hinges in here. Bryn tried the drain, but it wasn’t nearly big enough to fit her head through, which meant it was useless for escape purposes, even if it didn’t narrow below the floor. Plus, a nightmare crawl through a drain full of the decomposing tissues of numbers 1 through 60 … No. That was definitely a last resort.

  The glass was ballistic quality, and she had nothing to use to break it in any case. Battering her fist against it would only snap her own bones.

  As she stared out, she realized that she did have a view, after all—of another room, identical to this one, except that it contained a fixed metal table with thick restraint straps. I guess I didn’t fight hard enough to rate that, she thought. Bryn wasn’t sure whether she should feel happy about that, or disappointed, but all that fell away as a briskly walking figure suddenly crossed her field of vision outside.

  “Hey!” Bryn yelled, and slapped the glass. “Hey!”

  It wasn’t one person, but three—two blue-jacketed security men, and a third person being escorted in. He looked nervous. Very nervous. Tall, good-looking in that bland GQ way; he was wearing suit pants and a crisply ironed white shirt, a snazzy tie, suspenders, but no jacket. She couldn’t hear him, but he was talking to his guards, trying vainly to pull away. He had a Pharmadene ID hanging from his belt, one with a green stripe; one of the guards took it, ran it through a scanner, and put the ID in his pocket.

  Then they unlocked the room across the hall and hauled the unfortunate man inside.

  He screamed and fought when he saw the table, but it wasn’t any use, and he wasn’t very good at it anyway. He was yelling so loudly now that a faint whisper traveled to her through the glass. When she pressed her ear to it, she could make out some of what he said.

  “—can’t do this! I’m not some nobody you can make vanish; I’m an important man. Do you hear me? I’m a vice president, damn it! Take your hands off of me!”

  The guards nodded to each other, and in one smooth move had him down on the table. They were a well-coordinated team, locking down his arms and legs in fast, sure motions. He kept on yelling, but Bryn wasn’t listening anymore, because a new person had entered the picture.

  Irene Harte.

  She’d changed into a different suit, and her hair and makeup looked fully restored. Not even a spot showed to prove that Bryn had marked her—and she didn’t so much as glance Bryn’s way. Her full attention was on the man strapped to the table across the hall.

  Bryn didn’t need to hear him to know what he said next; his lips were easy to read. You bitch! The rest was probably threats, not that it would do him any good; maybe next he’d try to bribe her, if intimidation didn’t work. The last thing would be begging.

  It didn’t get that far.

  Bryn had been expecting this to be some sort of interrogation; maybe Mr. Vice President had made a serious security error, or was even the leak they’d been looking for … but instead of pulling out interrogation drugs, or even a decent torture tray, one of the guards pulled out …

  A clear plastic bag.

  Bryn gasped and stepped back from the window. “No …”

  The bag slipped neatly over the man’s head, and was cinched in place with a deft twist of the guard’s wrist.

  “No …”

  She saw it from two angles, like some nightmare … from where she stood, watching the man’s panicked eyes widen under the film of plastic before his breath clouded the bag, and from inside the bag at the same time. Déjà vu. Panic roared up inside her, flattening her defenses. She pressed both hands against the glass, trying desperately to help him, help him, because she knew how it felt; she knew the agonized terror that drove him to suck in all the available air and compress the plastic around his skin.

  She knew the taste of that toxic panic, and how it felt to gasp for the last tiny bit of oxygen. To watch the diffused light go out.

  It hurt—oh, God, it hurt—and it seemed to go on forever as the man struggled, twitched, thrashed, and fought against death.

  No one helped him.

  When he finally relaxed, Harte looked at her watch. The guards didn’t move as the minutes ticked by, waiting for her word. When she finally nodded, the bag came off, leaving the dead man’s damp, stark face, eyes wide and bloodshot, lips blue. A trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth. He’d probably bitten his tongue in his panic.

  The guards left, taking the bag with them, and took up posts outside the room. Now a medical team came in, three gowned and masked people who hooked up monitors and oxygen and all the things necessary to saving a life.

  Not that there was a life to be saved. Not anymore.

  Not until they gave him the shot of Returné.

  The scream of his revival penetrated even the solid barrier of the glass to Bryn’s death cell. She watched him come back, full of horror and pity and anger, and then, then, Irene Harte finally turned and looked at her.

  She triggered some kind of intercom outside of Bryn’s room.

  “You seem to have something to say.”

  “You have a funny way of retraining people around here.”

  Irene Harte laughed—a real laugh, full of amusement and little bit of admiration. “I’m consolidating my position, that’s all. One thing we cannot have, from this moment on, is any hint of disloyalty. We can’t take any risk of harboring traitors and whistle-blowers. Like, I suspect, Patrick McCallister.”

  “You’re killing your own people!”

  “I’m ensuring they’ll never betray us,” Harte said. “From the moment our researchers discovered that this drug could revive and maintain dead tissues, there was no going back. It isn’t about a market share; it’s about power. Someone’s going to have it. Someone will control how this drug is manufactured and used. It will change the entire world. Wars will be fought. Whole civilizations will be destroyed, because right here, in these rooms, we have stopped the one thing that man nev
er conquered: death.”

  There was a glow in her face now, an almost religious ecstasy that Bryn found scarier by far than the corporate bullshit she’d seen before.

  “As long as Pharmadene controls how this gets out, we have a chance to make this change rational. To dispense revival to the people who can make a difference. And that’s what we’re going to do. Choose who lives on, and ensure their loyalty.”

  God. Harte made an eerie kind of sense, from a megalomaniac’s point of view. If one power—say, Pharmadene—controlled the release of the drug, they could pick and choose the movers and shakers in all areas: politicians, bankers, technologists, the capitalist and political royalty of the entire world. They could manipulate markets, topple—or simply puppet—governments, rig the entire game of life and death in their favor.

  And she was right about something else: if Returné got out uncontrolled into the world, it would cause chaos— every grieving parent screaming for his or her children to come back, every husband, father, wife, sister, daughter. Politicians would tilt revivals in their political favor. Armies would become indestructible.

  It was a vision of a future in which everybody died, and everyone lived, and nobody really survived. No matter how it played out.

  “Pharmadene can still control all this,” Harte said. Her voice had gone soft now, and very sure. “We will control it. First in our own house; then we broaden our goals to include political and financial leaders immediately after. We’re starting with our top ranks today. We’ll work our way down through the corporate structure and have everyone on board in the next few days.”

  The man across the hall had finally stopped screaming, but he was weeping, a desolate and lonely sound. Irene Harte moved to shut off the intercom.

  “I’m not dying in here,” Bryn said. Harte hesitated, smiled, and shook her head as she flipped the switch. Bryn hit the glass. “Hey! I’m not dying in here! I’m going to stop you!”

  Harte turned to watch as the newly reborn vice president was led away, and another executive-level victim arrived to take his place.

  For two days, the room across the hall saw a steady parade of people, and it was always the same—the indignation, the don’t you know who I am, the fear, the terror, the death, the scream. Bryn stopped watching. Stopped listening, except to note the scream and keep count of how many had been … processed. It went on twenty-four-seven, and after a while she fell asleep. It felt obscene to sleep while people were dying, but all the self-loathing in the world couldn’t keep her awake.

  She got thirsty first, then hungry.

  No one came. She received nothing at all.

  On the morning of the second day, she noticed that her skin was starting to get dry. It might have been the lack of humidity in the room, but she didn’t think so. The nanites couldn’t manufacture water or energy for her muscles; dehydration would render her helpless first.

  But what scared her much, much more than the dryness and her cracked lips and parched mouth were the ominous dark bruises that formed under her skin. She woke up from a restless nap on the afternoon of the second day and noticed discoloration on the side of her palm, where it had been resting against the floor. She rubbed at it, and it gradually faded; when she unsnapped the coverall and checked the hip she’d been lying on, it, too, had a bruise.

  Lividity.

  “No.” She massaged the bruise away with trembling fingers. “No, no, this isn’t going to happen. It’s not.” He promised.

  She couldn’t count on him anymore. McCallister was on the run, a fugitive at best. She was inside Pharmadene, in a fortress, and they were killing everyone here, systematically. McCallister would be an insane fool to set foot in this place ever again. He had to cut his losses and run, get help from the government or the military or the FBI or the fucking SEC. Anyone, to shut this down before it was too late.

  Harte’s plan was moving along nicely; someone had posted an org chart printout on the wall that Bryn could just barely make out, and it looked like they’d gotten through the executive ranks. Now there were two rooms in use, one just visible at an acute angle down the hall—two that Bryn could see, constantly processing live people in, revived people out. She couldn’t afford to care, not even when one of the women—only a little older than Bryn, pretty—broke free and ran screaming and ended up banging uselessly on Bryn’s glass, staring into Bryn’s face. In her struggles, she hit the intercom, and for a deadly thirty seconds Bryn had to listen to the woman plead for help, for mercy, for her children.

  Then, pathetically, scream for her mom, like a terrified child.

  After that, Bryn didn’t stand at the window anymore. She huddled in the corner, back to the view, head down.

  Waiting.

  By day three—as best she could count it—her muscles were starting to shake, and her skin wasn’t dry any longer. It was moist, but not in a healthy way. And it hurt. Her nerves caught fire and burned, a low boil at first but growing worse with every breath, every minute.

  She had two more days of this, maybe three. Maybe even four.

  I am not dying here, she told herself. I’m not.

  But she was, with every second, dying a little bit more.

  And the expected interrogation didn’t come.

  Bryn lost count. It wasn’t sleep so much as unconsciousness that took her the next time; she woke up with livid red marks on her blotched skin where her weight had rested, and the torment of her nerves was like a blowtorch being applied all over her body, without respite or mercy. She couldn’t stop crying.

  Walking was better than sitting. She was starting to lose the ability to do it smoothly; it was more of a stumble now, and she trailed her violently shaking fingers over the wall to keep herself upright as she moved around the room, around the room, around the room. People dying and screaming and dying and screaming and she was going insane, she knew she was, and oh, God, it hurt. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

  Patrick had promised. Promised.

  She was halfway through her tenth methodical circuit of the room when something … changed. A shift in the room’s pressure, a breeze. Fresh, cool air moving against her skin, stirring her hair.

  She sighed and wavered on her feet, then clumsily turned to look.

  The door was open, and three masked medical personnel stood there. Maybe Harte was going to show a little mercy. Maybe she was going to end this, after all. Better being cut apart like a chicken than another three or four days of this, and worse.

  Bryn tried to walk to them, but her legs gave out, and she fell. Two guards stepped around the medicos and stoically picked her up, dragging her out of the room and down a pristine white hallway. Bryn’s head sagged backward. She watched the lights flicker overhead without any real idea about what was happening, until she was lowered into a chair, her damp, filthy jumpsuit stripped off and replaced with a clean one, and a gowned, masked, and gloved woman gave her a shot.

  The needle didn’t feel like a little stick; it felt like impalement on a red-hot iron, and Bryn screamed and cried and tried to pull away. They held her in place. Another shot followed. Then another.

  The woman sighed and stripped her mask down. “That’ll do it,” she said. “It’ll take time for her to come back, though. I’m not sure she’s really rational at this point. You’ll have to wait for her cognition to return.”

  Bryn hadn’t seen her come in, but there was another woman in the room now, without the mask or gown. She was wearing a suit. Her name was … was …

  Harte.

  “Keep her strapped in, just in case,” Irene Harte said. “I’m going to go check progress on the org charts. I’ll be back to question her in an hour. Be sure not to give her too much; there’s no need to drag this out for another entire week. I need a few hours of lucid interrogation, and then you can put her back in the room until she’s finished.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The woman nodded. She was a pretty lady, with shiny black hair bobbed around her jawline and a mobile, k
ind face.

  And she was familiar. Bryn studied her, blinking, trying to force her sluggish brain back to action. The woman started fastening big Velcro restraint straps around her arms and legs, watching Irene Harte as the woman pulled out a cell phone and dialed on her way out of the room.

  As soon as the door clicked shut, the woman ripped the restraints open again with furious strength. “Bryn? Bryn, are you with us? Can you understand me?”

  Oh. She knew her. Flower, some kind of flower. She was Manny’s girlfriend….

  “Pansy,” Bryn murmured. “Pansy Taylor. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. Nobody should be here. I know it hurts.” From the appalled look on Pansy’s face, Bryn gathered that she wasn’t looking very good. “You’re going to be all right. I gave you boosters. You’ll feel better soon.”

  “We can’t wait,” the other man said, looking toward the door. He also lowered his mask. His face was pale and set, and she knew him, too. Joe. Joe Fideli.

  “You were shot,” Bryn said.

  Joe laughed, but it sounded all wrong. He glanced at her, then quickly away, and she saw muscles jumping in his tight jawline. “I checked myself out once Pat told me you’d gone missing.” He moved his shoulder a little, and winced. “I’m not supposed to be getting in any wrestling matches. Doctor’s orders, so don’t go kicking my ass like you usually do.” He sounded like the old Joe, but his eyes were haunted and worried. Not for himself, Bryn realized. For her. God, how bad was she?

  Worse than she’d thought. The blowtorch of pain was dialing down a little, but when she glanced down at her hands, she saw how discolored they were, how … inhuman.

  “We have to move,” Pansy said. “We don’t have much time left.” She nodded to the two security men still in the room with them, and Bryn’s sluggish brain woke up enough to wonder why Joe wasn’t worried about their overhearing. Pansy said, “Gentlemen: this is a Condition Diamond situation, and I’m invoking your protocols. Protect our escape at all costs; do you understand? Acknowledge these orders. You first.”