by Rick Yancey
“I don’t understand.” Tiny figure in acres of brown, dressed in denim overalls, barefoot, running through the wheat.
He misreads my confusion. “The device inside the child’s body is calibrated to detect minute fluctuations in carbon dioxide, the chief component of human breath. When the CO2 reaches a certain threshold, indicating the presence of multiple targets, the device detonates.”
“No,” I whisper. They brought him inside, wrapped him in a warm blanket, brought him water, washed his face. The group gathered around him, bathing him in their breath. “They’d be just as dead if you dropped a bomb.”
“It isn’t about the dead,” he snaps impatiently. “It never was.”
The lights come up, the door comes open, and Claire comes in wheeling a metal cart, followed by her white-coated buddy and Razor, who looks at me and then looks away. That got to me more than the cart with its array of syringes: He couldn’t bring himself to look at me.
“It doesn’t change anything.” My voice rising. “I don’t care what you do. I don’t even care about Teacup anymore. I’ll kill myself before I help you.”
He shakes his head. “You’re not helping me.”
57
CLAIRE TIES a rubber strap around my arm and taps the inside of my elbow to bring up a vein. Razor stands on the other side of the bed. The man in the white coat—I never got his name—is by the monitor, holding a stopwatch. Vosch leans against the sink, watching me with bright, flinty eyes glittering, like the crows’ in the woods on the day I shot Teacup, curious but curiously indifferent, and then I understand that Vosch is right: The answer to their arrival is not rage. The answer is rage’s opposite. The only possible answer is the opposite of all things, like the pit where the farmhouse once stood: simply nothing. Not hate, not anger, not fear, not anything at all. Empty space. The soulless indifference of the shark’s eye.
“Too high,” murmured Mr. White Coat, looking at the monitor.
“First something to relax you.” Claire slides the needle into my arm. I look at Razor. He looks away.
“Better,” White Coat says.
“I don’t care what you do to me,” I tell Vosch. My tongue feels bloated, clumsy.
“It doesn’t matter.” He nods at Claire, who picks up the second syringe.
“Inserting the hub on my mark,” she says.
The hub?
“Uh-oh,” White Coat says. “Careful.” Eyeing the monitor as my heart rate kicks up a notch.
“Don’t be afraid,” Vosch says. “It won’t harm you.” Claire gives him a startled look. He shrugs. “Well. We ran tests.” He flicks his finger at her: Get on with it.
I weigh ten million tons. My bones are iron; the rest is stone. I don’t feel the needle slide into my arm. Claire says, “Mark,” and White Coat clicks the stopwatch. The world is a clock.
“The dead have their reward,” Vosch says. “It is the living—you and I—who still have work to do. Call it what you like, fate, luck, providence. You have been delivered into my hands to be my instrument.”
“Appending to the cerebral cortex.” From Claire. Her voice sounds muffled, as if my ears have been stuffed with cotton. I roll my head toward her. A thousand years go by.
“You’ve seen one before,” Vosch says, a thousand miles away. “In the testing room, on the day you arrived at Camp Haven. We told you it was an infestation of an alien life-form attached to the human brain. That was a lie.”
I can hear Razor breathing, loud, like a diver’s breath through a regulator.
“It is actually a microscopic command hub affixed to the prefrontal lobe of your brain,” Vosch says. “A CPU, if you will.”
“Booting up,” Claire says. “Looking good.”
“Not to control you . . . ,” Vosch says.
“Introducing first array.” Needle glinting in fluorescent light. Black specks suspended in amber fluid. I feel nothing as she injects it into my vein.
“But to coordinate the forty thousand or so mechanized guests to which you will play host.”
“Temp ninety-nine point six,” White Coat says.
Razor beside me breathing.
“It took the prehistoric rats millions of years and a thousand generations to reach the current stage in human evolution,” Vosch says. “It will take you days to achieve the next.”
“Link with the first array complete,” Claire says, bending over me again. Bitter almond breath. “Introducing second array.”
The room is furnace-hot. I’m drenched in sweat. White Coat announces that my temperature is one hundred and two.
“It’s a messy business, evolution,” Vosch says. “Many false starts and blind alleys. Some candidates aren’t suitable hosts. Their immune systems crash or they suffer from permanent cognitive dissonance. In layman’s terms, they go mad.”
I’m burning. My veins are filled with fire. Water flows from my eyes, trickles down my temples, pools in my ears. I see Vosch’s face leaning over the surface of the undulating sea of my tears.
“But I have faith in you, Marika. You did not come through fire and blood only to fall now. You will be the bridge that connects what-was to what-will-be.”
“We’re losing her,” White Coat calls out, tremble-voiced.
“No,” Vosch murmurs, cool hand on my wet cheek. “We have saved her.”
58
THERE IS NO DAY or night anymore, only the sterile glow of the fluorescent lights, and those lights never go out. I measure the hours by Razor’s visits, three times a day to deliver meals I can’t keep down.
They can’t control my fever. Can’t stabilize my blood pressure. Can’t subdue my nausea. My body is rejecting the eleven arrays designed to augment each of my biological systems, each array consisting of four thousand units, which makes a total of forty-four thousand microscopic robotic invaders coursing through my bloodstream.
I feel like shit.
After every breakfast, Claire comes in to examine me, tinker with my meds, and make cryptic remarks like, You better start feeling better. The window of opportunity is closing. Or snide ones like, I’m starting to think the whole very-big-rock idea was the right way to go. She seems to resent that I’ve reacted badly to her pumping me full of forty thousand alien mechanisms.
“It’s not like there’s anything you can do about it,” she told me once. “The procedure is irreversible.”
“There is one thing.”
“What? Oh. Sure. Ringer the irreplaceable.” She pulled the kill switch device from her lab coat pocket and held it up. “Got you keyed in. I’ll push the button. Go ahead. Tell me to push the button.” Smirking.
“Push the button.”
She laughed softly. “It’s amazing. Whenever I start wondering what he sees in you, you say something like that.”
“Who? Vosch?”
Her smile faded. Her eyes went shark-eyed blank. “We will terminate the upgrade if you can’t adjust.”
Terminate the upgrade.
She peeled the bandages away from my knuckles. No scabs, no bruises, no scars. As if it hadn’t happened. As if I’d never pounded my fist into the wall until the skin split down to the bone. I thought of Vosch appearing in my room completely healed, days after I smashed his nose and gave him two black eyes. And Sullivan, who told the story of Evan Walker torn apart by shrapnel and yet, somehow, hours later, able to infiltrate and take out an entire military installation by himself.
First they took Marika and made her Ringer. Now they’ve taken Ringer and “upgraded” her into someone completely different. Someone like them.
Or something.
There is no day or night anymore, only a constant sterile glow.
59
“WHAT HAVE THEY done to me?” I ask Razor one day when he carts in another inedible meal. I don’t expect an answer, but he’s expecting me to ask the q
uestion. It must strike him as weird that I haven’t.
He shrugs, avoiding my gaze. “Let’s see what’s on the menu today. Oooh. Meat loaf! Lucky duck.”
“I’m going to vomit.”
His eyes widen. “Really?” He looks around for the plastic upchuck container, desperate.
“Please, take the tray away. I can’t.”
He frowns. “They’ll pull the plug on you if you don’t get your shit together.”
“They could have done this to anyone,” I say. “Why did they do it to me?”
“Maybe you’re special.”
I shake my head and answer as if he were serious. “No. I think it’s because someone else is. Do you play chess?”
Startled: “Play what?”
“Maybe we could play. When I’m feeling better.”
“I’m more of a baseball guy.”
“Really? I would have guessed swimming. Or tennis.”
He cocks his head. His eyebrows come together. “You must be feeling bad. Making conversation like you’re halfway human.”
“I am halfway human. Literally. The other half . . .” I shrug. It coaxes out a grin.
“Oh, the 12th System is definitely theirs,” he says.
The 12th System? What did that mean exactly? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s in reference to the eleven normal systems of the human body.
“We found a way to yank them out of Teds’ bodies and . . .” Razor trails off, gives the camera an abashed look. “Anyway, you have to eat. I overheard them talking about a feeding tube.”
“So that’s the official story? Like Wonderland: We’re using their technology against them. And you believe that.”
He leans against the wall, crosses his arms over his chest, and hums “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” I shake my head. Amazing. It isn’t that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It’s that the truth is too hideous to face.
“Commander Vosch is implanting bombs inside children. He’s turning kids into IEDs,” I tell him. He hums louder. “Little kids. Toddlers. They’re separated when they come in, aren’t they? They were at Camp Haven. Anyone younger than five is carted off and you never see them again. Have you seen any? Where are the children, Razor? Where are they?”
He stops humming long enough to say, “Shut up, Dorothy.”
“And does that make sense: loading up a Dorothy with superior alien technology? If command decided to ‘enhance’ people for the war, do you really think it would pick the crazy ones?”
“I don’t know. They picked you, didn’t they?” He grabs the tray of untouched food and heads for the door.
“Don’t go.”
He turns, surprised. My face is hot. The fever must be spiking. That has to be it.
“Why?” he asks.
“You’re the only honest person I have left to talk to.”
He laughs. It’s a good laugh, authentic, unforced; I like it, but I am feverish. “Who says I’m honest?” he asks. “We’re all enemies in disguise, right?”
“My father used to tell this story about six blind men and an elephant. One man felt the elephant’s leg and said an elephant must look like a pillar. Another felt the trunk and said an elephant must look like a tree branch. Blind guy number three felt the tail and said an elephant is like a rope. Fourth guy feels the belly: The elephant is like a wall. Fifth guy, ear: The elephant is shaped like a fan. Sixth guy, a tusk, so an elephant must be like a pipe.”
Razor stares at me stone-faced for a long moment, then smiles. It’s a good smile; I like it, too.
“That’s a beautiful story. You should tell it at parties.”
“The point is,” I tell him, “from the moment their ship appeared, we’ve all been blind men patting an elephant.”
60
IN THE CONSTANT sterile glow, I measure the days by the uneaten meals he brings. Three meals, one day. Six, two days. On the tenth day, after he sets the tray in front of me, I ask him, “Why do you bother?” My voice like his now, a throaty croak. I’m soaked in sweat, fever spiking, head pounding, heart racing. He doesn’t answer. Razor hasn’t spoken to me in seventeen meals. He seems jittery, distracted, even angry. Claire’s gone silent, too. She comes twice a day to change my IV bag, look into my eyes with an otoscope, test my reflexes, change out the catheter bag, and empty the bedpan. Every sixth meal, I get a sponge bath. One day, she brings a tape measure and wraps it around my biceps, I guess to see how much muscle I’ve lost. I don’t see anyone else. No Mr. White Coat. No Vosch or dead fathers pumped into my head by Vosch. I’m not so out of it that I don’t know what they’re doing: holding vigil, waiting to see if the “enhancement” kills me.
She’s rinsing out the bedpan one morning when Razor comes in with my breakfast, and he waits silently until she’s finished, and then I hear him whisper, “Is she dying?”
Claire shakes her head. Ambivalent: could be no, could be your guess is as good as mine. I wait till she’s gone to say, “You’re wasting your time.”
He glances at the camera mounted in the ceiling. “I just do what they tell me.”
I pick up the tray and hurl it onto the floor. His lips tighten, but he doesn’t say anything. Silently, he cleans up the mess while I lie panting, exhausted from the effort, sweat pouring off me.
“Yeah, pick that up. Make yourself useful.”
When my fever shoots up, something in my mind loosens, and I imagine I can feel the forty-four thousand microbots swarming in my bloodstream and the hub with its delicate lace of tendrils burrowed into every lobe, and I understand what my father felt in his dying hours as he clawed at himself to subdue the imaginary insects crawling beneath his skin.
“Bitch,” I gasp. From the floor, Razor looks up at me, startled. “Leave me, bitch.”
“No problem,” he mutters. On his hands and knees, using a wet rag to mop up the mess, and the tart smell of disinfectant. “Fast as I can.”
He stands up. His ivory cheeks are flushed. Deliriously, I think the color brings out the auburn highlights in his blond hair. “It won’t work,” he tells me. “Starving yourself. So you better think of something else.”
I’ve tried. But there’s no alternative. I can barely lift my head. You belong to them now. Vosch the sculptor, my body the clay, but not my spirit, never my soul. Unconquered. Uncrushed. Uncontained.
I am not bound; they are. Languish, die, or recover, the game’s over, the grand master Vosch mated.
“My father had a favorite saying,” I tell Razor. “We call chess the game of kings because, through chess, we learn how to rule kings.”
“Again with the chess.”
He drops the dirty rag into the sink and slams out the door. When he returns with the next meal, there’s a familiar wooden box beside the tray. Without a word, Razor picks up the food and dumps it into the trash, tosses the metal tray into the sink, where it lands with a loud clang. The bed hums, maneuvering my body into a sitting position, and he slides the box in front of me.
“You said you didn’t play,” I whisper.
“So teach me.”
I shake my head and say to the camera behind him, “Nice try. But stuff it up your ass.”
Razor laughs. “Not their idea. But speaking of asses, you can bet yours I got permission first.”
He opens the box, pulls out the board, fumbles with the pieces. “You got your queens and kings and the prawns and these guard-tower-looking things. How come every piece is like a person except those?”
“Pawns, not prawns. A prawn is a big shrimp.”
He nods. “That’s the name of a guy in my unit.”
“Shrimp?”
“Prawn. Never knew what the hell it meant.”
“You’re setting it up wrong.”
“That could be because I don’t know how to freaking play. You do it.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“Then you’re conceding defeat?”
“Resigning. It’s called resigning.”
“That’s good to know. I have a feeling that’ll come in handy.” Smiling. Not the Zombie high-voltage type. Smaller, subtler, more ironic. He sits beside the bed and I catch a whiff of bubble gum. “White or black?”
“Razor, I’m too weak to even lift—”
“Then you point where you want to go and I’ll move you.”
He’s not giving up. I didn’t really expect him to. By this point, wafflers and wusses have been winnowed out. There are no pussies left. I tell him where to place the pieces and how each one moves. Describe the basic rules. Lots of nodding and uh-huhs, but I get the feeling there’s a lot of agreeing and not much grasping. Then we play and I slaughter him in four moves. The next game, he falls into arguing and denying: You can’t do that! Tell me that isn’t the stupidest damn rule ever. Game three and I’m sure he’s regretting the whole idea. My spirits aren’t being lifted and his are being totally crushed.
“This is the dumbest-assed game ever invented,” he pouts.
“Chess wasn’t invented. It was discovered.”
“Like America?”
“Like mathematics.”
“I knew girls just like you in school.” He leaves the point there and starts to set up the board again.
“That’s all right, Razor. I’m tired.”
“Tomorrow I’m bringing some checkers.” Spoken like a threat.
He doesn’t, though. Tray, box, board. This time he sets up the pieces in a strange configuration: the black king in the center facing him, the queen on the edge facing the king, three pawns behind the king at ten, twelve, and two o’clock, one knight on the king’s right, another on his left, a bishop directly behind him and, next to the bishop, another pawn. Then Razor looks at me, wearing that seraphic grin.
“Okay.” I’m nodding, not sure why.
“I’ve invented a game. Are you ready? It’s called . . .” He taps on the bedrail to produce a drumroll. “Chaseball!”