by Gary Gibson
Sieracki had supposedly been engaged in running secret military research programmes even before the LA Nuke. Now he had carte blanche to do as he wanted. Kendrick had also come to understand that Sieracki’s attitude to the prisoners was simple. They had been destined for execution, and to Sieracki this constituted a waste of valuable resources for his research.
Kendrick glanced down at his hands. “They were feeling wrong,” he said at length.
“Yes?”
“They felt ridged, strange – like something was growing under the skin. I thought what happened to Torrance was going to happen to me.”
“Did you have any unusual thoughts, experience any notable delusions when Torrance was dying?”
Kendrick opened his mouth to speak, suddenly remembering the sense of connectedness that he had felt when Torrance died.
“What is it?” Sieracki demanded, his voice impatient. “There’s something else you’re not telling me.”
Two others had died – less spectacularly – since Torrance. There were new faces in the Ward now, people whose names Kendrick hadn’t even found out yet. “I thought he was trying to say something to me, just before he died,” Kendrick lied.
“You’re not telling me the truth. One of the doors malfunctioned at that precise moment.”
Kendrick shrugged non-committally. “I don’t see the connection.”
“If you’re lying to me, I could have you transferred,” Sieracki warned him. “The choice is yours.”
Kendrick looked down, avoiding Sieracki’s gaze. “I . . .”
“Yes?”
Give up, said a voice somewhere deep inside him. Let him transfer you to one of the Wards where none of them survive. Do anything, but just end it. Did it really matter, after all, whether or not he lied to Sieracki? He was going to die anyway.
But it was still up to him to do his best to have the choice of how and when: that shouldn’t be just Sieracki’s choice. There had to be another way.
A calendar hung on the wall by the door. On it was a photograph of a spring day in the Rockies. A lake was visible in the photo’s foreground. Kendrick studied the patterns of clouds and light and tried to remember what it felt like to stand outside in the open air.
He looked back to Sieracki. “I can’t think of anything,” he replied, making his tone apologetic. “He died. We talked about it afterwards, sure. None of us understood what was happening. I don’t know what else you want.”
The next day they were separated from the rest of the Ward.
There were just four of them: Buddy, Peter, Robert and Kendrick. Soldiers came and led them out of the Ward and along past Sieracki’s office into a low-ceilinged room with a glassed-off partition beyond which Sieracki himself and several others sat watching. Technicians strapped them into new cots while the guards kept their rifles trained on them.
Then they were left all alone briefly.
A few minutes later, other technicians entered. Kendrick twisted his head and saw Sieracki still watching through the glass, his face expressionless. Kendrick bellowed with anger as a woman approached him with a hypodermic. He felt the needle slide under the skin of his forearm and almost immediately his limbs began to feel as if they were slipping into warm cotton.
Bemused, he watched as if from a distance while devices were strapped over his face. Then came the icy prickle of more needles stabbing into the flesh of his scalp, and monitors were attached to his wrists and across his chest. Earphones were placed over his ears, and finally goggles whose eyepieces were stuffed with wads of cotton wool were forced over his eyes to blind him from the world.
Static filled Kendrick’s ears and he slipped gently into a limbo-like void.
“Can you hear me?” said Sieracki through the earphones. “Answer.”
“I – yes.” His lips and tongue were numb and foreign-feeling. Random points of light played in the darkness.
“Kendrick, I want you to talk to the others.”
Talk to the others? But he was lost, alone, dead . . . surely he’d died. Now he floated . . . here. There was nobody else here.
No, there were others. He could hear them around him, mixed in with the chaotic, ceaseless buzz of electrons passing through the filaments of the electric lights that illuminated the chamber. He could hear so much, even the faint surge of energy through the laser-sights on the guns carried by the nearby guards.
Kendrick was only distantly aware that Sieracki was still asking him questions, and that he was still answering them. But for the life of him he had no idea what he was actually saying, could not begin to guess if there were rhyme or reason to the words pouring out of his insensate mouth.
After a little while he could hear the other voices more clearly: McCowan distant and blurred; Buddy sharp but unfocused, a torrent of images from the civil war, of flights through hazardous fire zones, his chopper downed while he fled on foot through the outskirts of some Mexican slum; Robert’s mind . . .
Kendrick felt his body twist on the cot, his muscles filled with distant agony. He could see them . . . the Bright, spilling through their shared void, filling his mind with intimations of some other world.
Beyond the muffled hiss of his headphones, he could now hear the muffled screaming of the others. Hands grabbed at him roughly and the goggles covering his eyes were dislodged.
He could see the others, nearby. Wires trailed between the four of them, linking them together. He saw Buddy foaming at the mouth while McCowan convulsed in a fit.
And in the heart of it all, like the calm eye at the centre of the storm, lay Robert, his expression as peaceful as a Buddha’s.
The next day Robert achieved the impossible. He escaped.
The four of them had been drugged yet again and placed back in the familiar environment of Ward Seventeen. As Kendrick lay in a stupor through the night, Robert had somehow managed to loosen his restraints. No one had seen or heard a thing; the cameras and microphones infesting the Ward had apparently failed to record anything but static. Even the guard had somehow failed to notice. He was replaced within just a few hours.
Three new guards – all heavily armed – were assigned to the Ward on continuous rotation. They hugged matt-black weapons to their chests. In the meantime, Robert’s cot remained empty.
There followed an intensive round of fresh interrogations inflicted on everyone in the Ward still capable of communicating. These interrogations dissolved into a series of direct threats, sometimes implemented. Several men disappeared, presumably “reassigned” to other Wards; the rest were left to starve, without food or water, until one of them decided to reveal where Robert had gone.
Meanwhile they were all changing. But some of the changes were more subtle than others.
They spoke among themselves in tones so low that they believed – they hoped – they could not be overheard or recorded. The truth was, as much as Kendrick hated what was being inflicted on all of them, the balance of power between the prisoners and guards was shifting slowly but perceptibly.
Buddy sat on the edge of Kendrick’s cot, his expression still haunted since he’d begun to recover his motor skills. He’d lost a lot of weight, though the same could be said for all of them.
“So do we have the faintest clue where he went?” Buddy was referring to Robert. His voice was less than a whisper, barely the faintest exhalation.
“Nobody has a clue, not even Sieracki and the rest of them. That’s why these interrogations. Robert . . .” Kendrick shrugged. “He was right there one moment, then he just up and vanished.”
“The question is, can we all do the same?”
“Christ, I hope so.”
Buddy glanced over at two guards positioned at the far end of the Ward. “Are they watching us?” he hissed.
Kendrick murmured, “Well, it’s not as if they’ve got anything else to do.”
“Robert kept saying how he wanted to go home – maybe he already knew he was going to get out of here. So where did he go?”
“Yeah, I thought of that too. Unless there’s some other route out of here we don’t know about.”
“We don’t even know what’s through those doors. But wherever he went, he’s not here any more.”
Kendrick dreamed that night, that he was in a dark place – no, more than that, a place with a total absence of light.
Somehow, however, as he ran along corridors whose walls kept shrinking and growing closer together, he knew what obstacles lay in his way. Somewhere in here lay the way home that he had been promised.
He followed Robert as the boy ran onwards through lightless desolation, his heart full of an inexplicable joy. Going home! The words echoed in the cavern of Robert’s skull. Going home.
Kendrick realized he was dreaming, but he became a silent passenger for Robert’s thoughts. And in the blackness that surrounded them came a hint of something else: a silent crescendo of pale light and wisdom and acceptance that never quite made itself known.
Something beautiful, something bright. Something vast looming just ahead, verdant with the promise of new and unimaginable freedoms without boundary, without limit.
And as Kendrick’s mind slid towards morning consciousness the memory of this dream lingered so that, when he finally woke to the familiar surroundings of the Ward, he could not be sure that it had not been real.
More tests, more interviews, but no more trips into surgery – no more long days of recovering and hoping that they might live where so many others suffered long and anguished deaths. There were few of them left now, less than a dozen out of the scores who had passed through the same Ward during Kendrick’s time there.
And, for the first time since they had been brought into the Maze, each of the prisoners of Ward Seventeen began to feel bored.
Days continued to pass, but Kendrick did not spend them in silent contemplation. Instead he made a decision: he was not going to wait around to find out what Sieracki’s intentions for him were. How he might escape he had no idea – but a precedent had been set.
Yet, as more time passed, he wondered if an opportunity would ever present itself.
“They can’t hear us.”
“Are you sure?” Kendrick realized he was holding his breath.
McCowan shifted on the edge of Kendrick’s cot, reaching up to touch his own nose with one hand. The motion of his fingers towards his face became slower, almost halted; time slowed for Kendrick, at least from his own perspective. Everything around him – the pores of McCowan’s face, even the sound of his heartbeat – jumped into sudden and powerful relief.
Then, in a blink, everything returned to normal.
“I’m sure. Just listen. Can you hear it? Isn’t it beautiful?”
Kendrick listened hard, hearing the endless cascade of energy around them, throughout the structure of the Maze. Sometimes, when he looked at the other surviving Labrats – the nickname that in time they had come to choose for themselves – he almost didn’t see their flesh. He saw another layer below that, a buzzing network of energy: partly biological, partly machine, each one of them reduced to an engineering schematic outlined in ruby red and flashing white.
Sieracki and his people clearly realized that something was up. Guards arrived several times over those next few days, pulling security systems and spycams apart and replacing them with new equipment. These guards seemed even more brusque, their weapons always held at the ready.
Kendrick looked over at Buddy, and McCowan, who was sitting nearby, registering the look in their eyes, knowing that they were thinking the same thing. There had to be some way out, some way to escape.
Kendrick woke in a panic, unable to see anything at all. He tried to twist his head but found that it was impossible. Something rough was chafing against his nose and cheeks.
He attempted to lift one arm but felt as if he’d sunk to the bottom of the ocean, a thousand tons of water pressing down on him. Then he felt a hand grab his wrist, pushing it back down again. Someone was strapping him tight.
Faint light began to show through the narrow space between his blindfold and the bridge of his nose. They were wheeling him somewhere else. He could hear the wheels squeaking and rattling over hard concrete, doors clanging noisily as they passed through.
And then, suddenly, Kendrick realized that he’d been taken through the Dissection Door. Dread filled his soul, and even though he opened his mouth to scream his strength deserted him so completely that he could muster little more than a faint moan, which was lost in the echoing din of the corridor down which he was being transported.
After twenty minutes they finally stopped. Nightmare scenarios flooded his mind. They’ve drugged me. They were going to leave him here, strapped to this pallet, to starve and die; or else they were going to take him apart, stripping muscle and flesh from his bones without the benefit of anaesthetic.
A long time passed during which Kendrick could hear other moans and faint cries around him. In the dark and the cold any sense of time slipped away from him.
After an eternity he heard a faint metallic click – and his bindings were suddenly loose. He reached up, pulled away his blindfold, and stared into a blackness so thick that he imagined he could reach out and grab fistfuls of it from the air.
He lifted a hand to his face, and at first he couldn’t see anything. After several seconds, however, he could see a faint outline becoming gradually more distinct. In time, his fingers became pale shadows against the pitch dark.
A shuffling sound of movement nearby. Again Kendrick heard distressed voices calling to each other. Beyond his own hand he began to discern other faint shapes, so close to being lost amid the blackness that at first he believed he was imagining them. They gradually resolved themselves into the outlines of men and women stumbling around him.
He looked up and recognized the familiar concrete covered by steel piping that characterized the Maze – barely visible but with a ghostly monotone translucence, like everything else he could just about see.
It took a little while for Kendrick to really grasp that he could actually see in the dark.
He made out other wheeled cots around him. They had been lined up on one side of a long, wide corridor. One or two of the prisoners still lay unconscious, others rose from their cots to stare blindly around them, calling out names that Kendrick didn’t recognize.
It was cold, very cold, as Kendrick stood upright, squinting at those whose faces he could see, their faces ghostly in the non-light. He was looking for Buddy, or for any familiar face among the scores moving around aimlessly in the darkness.
“Excuse me?” A woman’s voice, faltering and unsure. She put one hand out to him, clearly able to see as well as he could. “I’m trying to find someone.”
“I don’t know where we are,” Kendrick replied. “I don’t know who any of you are.”
“I was in Ward Seventeen. Where are we? Where are the guards?”
Kendrick glanced at her. Her features were a luminous semi-blur. “I was in Ward Seventeen, but I don’t remember you. I don’t remember any women there.”
She shook her head. “Each Ward is split into two sections – didn’t you know that? One for the men, one for the women.”
“Oh, right.” The fact of their segregation had always struck him as oddly prudish. “The guards have gone. I think it’s just us Labrats.”
“Labrats?”
Kendrick shrugged. “It’s a nickname someone came up with.”
“Look, I don’t know even which Ward my brother was sent to. I need to know if he’s here somewhere. He . . .” She hesitated. “I just need to find him.”
“What was his name?”
“Robert. Robert Vincenzo.” The woman paused and then added, “I’m Caroline Vincenzo.”
Kendrick stared at her. “Robert Vincenzo?”
Her eyes, two blurred dark circles, widened. “You know him? I can tell from the way you said that.
Just tell me!”
“Yes,” Kendrick admitted.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said, her voice toneless.
“I don’t know.” How to say it? “One day he was there, the next . . .” He shrugged again. “I don’t really know. I’m sorry.”
She nodded wordlessly and looked away.
Kendrick opened his mouth to tell her about Robert’s apparent escape, and then closed it again. Now wasn’t the time or the place. First, they had to find out what was going on here.
They joined a crowd of several dozen that had formed nearby. Some people were laughing, others crying, just happy and relieved to have found familiar faces or voices. However, it became clear to Kendrick as he began to explore the endless corridor in which they found themselves that the ability to navigate in this pitch dark was limited to just a few among them. With deep relief he spotted Buddy standing nearby, with McCowan and a few other people he knew. I should be with them, Kendrick decided.
He turned to Caroline and smiled gently. “We’ve all of us lost friends and relations. You’re not alone.”
“But it’s more than that. I knew,” she insisted. “When I woke up here I thought maybe I was wrong, but somehow I knew – you understand what I mean? It’s not like something you can explain. You just know.” She shook her head. “So stupid.”
Her face was no longer quite so blurred, although everything around Kendrick retained, to his perceptions, a certain ghostly quality. The way she held herself suggested a well-honed body, someone who might have once been a soldier herself, or perhaps a bodyguard.
“Our parents aren’t around any more, so I always had to look out for him. He . . .” Kendrick could picture the course that Caroline’s thoughts were taking. She believed Robert was dead, and therefore – in her mind – she had failed him. Kendrick felt a stab of sympathy.
A shout carried above the growing tumult of voices and he looked around. Kendrick could make out men and women weeping: others were kneeling on the hard concrete, hands clasped together, as barely audible prayers spilled from their mouths. Either they were asking for salvation or giving thanks that they were free of the Wards.