by R H Nolan
He peered down at the door handle. Next to it was a thin space between the door and the door jamb. Max could see the outline of the lock bolt, just one inch wide.
“We all agree there’s no other way in, right?” Max asked. “I mean, you don’t have anything else to try, do you?”
“Why?” Ayla asked suspiciously. “What are you going to do?”
“…just an alien magic trick…”
Max pressed his pinky finger into the thin space and began to disintegrate the edge of the door. As his fingertip ate away at the metal, his fingers slipped farther in until it touched the lock bolt itself.
Three seconds later the bolt was disintegrated, and there was a finger-sized hole in the door edge. It was small enough that hopefully no one would notice it unless they were paying attention.
“Holy crap, that’s awesome,” Trox said gleefully.
Max cautiously pulled the door open, expecting sirens to go off –
But the only sound was the sound of the door pulling back a few inches.
The handle didn’t even turn—it was technically still locked.
“Nice,” Lyra said admiringly.
Max grinned. “Just trying to use everything at our disposal.”
“Hold on,” Ayla whispered. “There might be someone inside.”
Max froze and put his ear to the partially open door. “I don’t hear anything.”
“That doesn’t mean no one’s in there.”
Max opened the door a crack, keeping his hand on the door just in case there was someone inside and he needed to disintegrate quickly.
But after he peered through the crack for a few seconds, then opened the door all the way. “We’re safe… I think.”
The group entered the room and closed the door behind them.
The laboratory was massive, with steel floors and steel walls, cleaned and shined and buffed until he could almost see his own clear reflection in them. The fluorescent lights were so glaringly bright, Max thought about pulling his goggles back up. Instead, he stepped out into the lab—which was devoid of people—with the others and gazed around.
Control consoles lined the left wall of the lab except for where the main entrance doors dissected it. Everything was pristine and bright and beautiful here—all the things Max wished he could have had access to with his dad. Then he looked at the other side of the lab.
Four metal exam chairs, all without padding, sat in a row about a dozen feet from the right wall. Round metal clamps lay open just above the footrest and every armrest. Straps attached to the side of the chairs dangled down the sides, and at the top of each, a huge metal bowl hung at an angle over the backs of the chairs. They were attached to a hinge bolted to the top of each chair, with a series of wires, electrodes, and something that looked a lot like giant needles on opaque yellow tubes dangled from those bowls. Scattered intermittently behind the chairs were half a dozen pairs of manacles on chains bolted into the wall.
This didn’t look like scientific research for the betterment of the human race. Not even a little.
Herk let out a low whistle and slowly advanced across the lab. The others fanned out, taking in the off-putting sight but still heading toward the third door on the other end of the lab.
“I’ve seen something kind of like these before,” Ayla said in a high voice. “I found a few magazines in the storage rooms when I was little. Women used to sit in these chairs to… do something to their hair.”
Max paused to look at her, and when she caught him staring, she offered a timid shrug.
“I don’t think anyone’s coming down here for their hair,” Lyra muttered.
None of them wanted to say what this really looked like, but Max couldn’t get it out of his head. People sat in that chair, all right, but their brains were being messed with somehow, and something required those chains to keep the people from bolting or attacking—either before or after the chair.
“Just keep going,” he said, moving quicker now across the lab toward the door on the opposite side of the room. The others followed him without a word.
The next door had a glass panel next to it, too, but this one opened with just Trox’s ID.
As Max opened it a crack to look through, the smaller boy stuffed the ID back in his pocket.
The next room was empty of people, as well. It looked a little more like a long hallway lined with rooms. Again, those rooms were intersected in the middle by the main entrance on the left-hand side, but at least there weren’t any more chairs or chains. The place was intensely quiet, the only sound just a thin hum from the fluorescent lights overhead. The rows of heavily reinforced steel doors were placed maybe six feet apart, each of them with a square window just above center.
The group entered the room and closed the access door behind them.
When they moved past the first reinforced steel doors, a muffled thump came from the one on the left. Lyra started and skipped sideways, staring at the door with wide eyes.
“What was that?” she whispered.
“Plumbing?” Trox said, his voice breaking just a little.
Max stepped toward the door and peered through the thick window. At first, he didn’t see anything. Then something gray and mottled and completely disgusting leapt up from against the other side of the door.
Max jumped and lurched back, but the door was keeping the thing inside the small room. He took another look, and what he saw made him both terribly confused and incredibly uneasy.
The room held a Sandwalker, but the mutant didn’t act like any Sandwalker Max had ever seen. And in the last few days, he’d seen a lot.
This one glowed, a fiery red streaking beneath its flesh from what looked like the thing’s veins. It leapt around the small holding cell, bashing its head against the walls before flopping onto the ground and writhing.
Max couldn’t hear anything from outside the room—except for when the thing smacked its head on the door—but there was no doubt in his mind that this Sandwalker was screaming.
Its arms and legs flailed in all directions at every second, its huge mouth open wide in a rictus of agony. If it had been able to fully close its lids around the bulging orbs of its eyes, it might have clenched them tightly under whatever torture it endured. Instead, its eyes were wide open, as if it had no lids at all, and they were streaked with glowing red blood vessels. Max half expected them to explode from its head.
Despite all this, the Sandwalker’s Health remained at 91%.
“Max?” Ayla asked behind him.
“Sandwalker,” he said dryly. The others took in sharp breaths behind him. “I don’t know how many mutants you guys have seen, but they’re not supposed to look like this.”
Herk stepped up beside him, and Max moved to give the big guy a better look.
“What’s wrong with it?” Herk asked.
“Everything, probably.” Max swallowed the nausea rising in his throat.
Yesterday, he’d killed his fair share of Sandwalkers in the ship Zryk had sent him into for the energy core. He had no problem with killing them, especially when they were running at him in droves to kill him first.
But this was something completely different. This was in a lab, in pretty much a cell, and it looked very much like torture.
“They’re all empty on this side,” Trox said, peering through the windows one at a time.
Max checked the other doors on the left, which were also empty. Then he crossed the lab hallway to join Trox. He caught Ayla’s eye on the way, just after she’d had her own good look at the red-glowing Sandwalker trying to kill itself inside its prison. She looked incredibly pale and maybe like she was about to cry. But she didn’t.
“Uh… remember what I said about them being empty?” Trox whispered as he stared through another window. “Scratch that.”
The door in front of Trox held a Sandwalker too, but this one suffered a different fate. The thing was just as scrawny and malnourished, but it lay on its back in the center of the cell,
almost completely still. Its wide eyes gaped at the ceiling, and its chest heaved rapidly, the breaths miserably shallow. The worst part was that its skin seemed to be melting all around it on the floor—like a piece of tin held under a welding torch, rippling and running down itself until it cooled somewhere else.
Max had watched his dad weld a few things when he was very young, and now that the memory had returned to him, he wished it wouldn’t always be connected to this awful thing in the room.
Just like the other Sandwalker, this one had incredibly high Health at 92%, considering what it was experiencing right now.
“This is messed up,” Lyra whispered. “Yeah, they’re Sandwalkers—but still.”
“I know,” Max said. He glanced at the others, then nodded toward the opposite side of the lab and the connecting door. “Next lab is through here. We’ll grab the emergent and get out.”
“Yeah, I’m already gonna have nightmares,” Trox added with a thick swallow. “Probably.”
Together, they left the empty cells—and the two occupied ones—to use the ID card to open the door into the third lab.
19
Max didn’t know if he could imagine anything worse than what they’d just seen. But when they stepped into the final lab where his map showed the glowing green dot of Zryk’s emergent, he didn’t have to imagine anything. It was all laid out right there before him.
This last lab was much larger than the others—wider and longer and at least a dozen feet higher.
Four metal science stations formed a corridor in the center of the room. The metallic boxes were each three feet high, four feet wide, and ten feet long, with sinks and cabinets and electrical outlets, not to mention various scientific equipment sitting on the metal surfaces.
There were cells in this room, too, only they were mostly open to the air, made of reinforced steel bars and in a variety of sizes.
The bars, floors, and ceilings of each cage hummed with an electric current Max couldn’t see but thought he could feel in each cell of his body.
And every single one of these cages held some distorted version of a Sandwalker.
It was just a little too quiet in here for Max’s comfort. The mutants sprawled across the floor of their cages, or sat up against the bars. None of them moved, as if they were sleeping, but that didn’t last very long.
The Sandwalker in the closest cage lifted its head, sniffed, and turned toward Max, Ayla, and her friends.
Max had never seen anything as grotesque and terrifying—even the pumped-up Sandwalkers in the wrecked starship looked like amateurs compared to this one.
The thing was twice as tall as the biggest he’d ever seen, muscles bulging not just at its shoulders, arms, and neck, but literally everywhere. Even the thing’s cheeks were swollen with hard, flexing muscle, its eyes looking almost sunken set against the rest of its face.
That gray-blue Sandwalker tinge now took on a deep, bruised purple in the mutant, and when Max looked into its eyes—normally layered in a milky film—he found a terrifying intelligence staring back at him in that glowing yellow gaze. And this one held onto a baffling 99% Health.
Then the Sandwalker spun around and launched itself toward Max. He would have been tackled to the ground if those thick steel bars weren’t in the way.
The Sandwalker SLAMMED into the metal bars and howled.
“Holy crap!” Trox squeaked.
The Sandwalker pounded on the steel bars and snarled, but it kept its gaze fixed firmly on Max.
The giant mutant’s noise had stirred all the others in the cages around them. There had to be at least two dozen in those cages, all of them turning now toward the five teenagers in the lab and starting to come out of whatever stupor they’d been left to endure.
All of them were in some stage of hyper-mutated form.
Some were the same build and horrifying color as the first one.
Others’ veins glowed like the one in the sealed room, and they snapped their jaws and sent thick spittle flying against the bars of their cages.
None of the creatures had Health lower than 89%.
Max was able to distance himself from his nauseated horror when he finally noticed the flashing green light against the wall on his right, just behind a few of the cages.
The emergent.
He was here for Zryk’s prize, not these monsters. That’s what they were now—not just irradiated Sandwalkers, mutated from whatever had charred the Earth after the war.
Max took off toward the right side of the lab, giving the cages a wide berth. Every Sandwalker he passed snarled at him and threw itself against its cage, which fortunately held them back.
When he reached the flashing green marker in his augmented vision, he found himself staring at what did actually look like a miniature, hastily designed version of the energy chamber on Zryk’s ship. It was made of steel and glass, with smooth edges and parts bolted together. Nothing in this place had the same strange design as anything on the Qirinian starship—not even close. That made it a lot easier for Max to find the emergent cradled behind a clear glass door at the bottom of the laboratory’s attempted energy chamber.
Moving toward it so he could grab it and get out of here as quickly as possible, Max stopped when a new sound caught his ears.
A chill ran down his spine, because the new shriek didn’t sound like a Sandwalker at all.
It sounded human.
He turned away from the mini energy chamber and looked right at the thing in the closest cage. Only it wasn’t a thing. It was a woman, or at least it had been a woman.
Max stared at her, finding an odd familiarity in those fierce, glowing blue eyes. She was covered in blood, her hair matted with it and a few other substances Max didn’t want to know about.
Her jaw hung slack and slightly skewed to one side, limbs rippling with lithe muscle where her shirt and pants had been torn—either by herself, the other Sandwalkers here, or their captors. But her Health was quite high at 90% for how unnaturally deformed she looked.
Then it hit him full-force—he knew this woman. Not well, but he definitely recognized her face.
She’d been one of the first Peacewinds to go missing from the settlement.
The realization made him step back quickly, his mind reeling with what he couldn’t deny. His people hadn’t been picked off by the Bloodletters or the Chaotix. They hadn’t even been snatched up by a few errant Sandwalkers roaming too far from their nests.
Neo Angeles—whether it was the guards, the scientists themselves, or someone else—had been kidnapping Peacewinds all this time, and this was what they’d done to his people.
“Some of these are… people.” Trox’s voice carried a hollow echo through the lab, followed by a few more snarls from either massively enhanced Sandwalkers or whatever these Peacewinds had now become.
Max couldn’t stop himself from staring at the woman in the cage. Her eyes bored into his, then her mouth hinged farther open and a deep, low growl escaped her.
“Youuuuu!” she roared, drawing out the one word like she meant to scream it forever.
The hateful, desperate madness in her voice broke Max out of his temporary freeze. He launched himself toward the lab’s small energy chamber, bent down to open the door at the bottom, and removed the eighteen-inch, etched rod. It felt so light in his hands, and hummed with a soft energy.
Max slipped off his pack, gingerly put the emergent inside, and stood to shoulder his pack again.
“Max?” Ayla asked again.
“Yeah, I got it,” he said, then stood and turned back toward the others.
“Boy!”
The dry, strangled croak came from Max’s right. He paused to look over his shoulder.
“Nice boy. That’s right.”
A man, clearly altered by whatever these deranged scientists were doing to them down here, shot his hand through the steel bars of his cage. Long, twisted fingers reached toward Max, their tips glowing a sickly green. Max recognized him as a
nother Peacewind too, and his horror flared anew.
“You got something I need, boy. Oh, yes. You got that fire. Mine’s going out over—”
A violent fit of hacking coughs cut the man off, then he hocked a massive glob of something onto the floor of his cage. When it splattered there, the man looked down at the thick, black-red mess, then hunkered into a squat. He stared at Max the whole time as he lowered his hand, smeared his fingers into what he’d just spit out, and sucked them with a sickeningly wet slurp.
Max turned away and went back to his friends. The man in the cage cackled over the other overwhelming screeches, calls, and shouts flying through the lab now. “Come on, boy. Get over here!”
“Sandwalkers,” Max said as he rejoined the group. “The people, though…” He glanced at Ayla, who looked both sick and uncomfortably sympathetic, and he had to look away. “They’re Peacewinds.”
“Never heard of ‘em,” Trox said, his eyes wide.
“Yeah, I’m not surprised. They’re a tribe of Scavengers. My tribe.”
“What?” Ayla whispered, covering her mouth with her robotic hand.
“Max…”
Max felt a heavy hand come down on his shoulder, and he looked up to see Herk standing just beside him. The kid shook his head with a frown of concern.
“I’m so sorry.”
Max winced when another barely human voice rang out against the snarls, shrieks, and unnatural wailing of these imprisoned monsters. “Get me one of you! Just one!”
“Yeah. Me too,” Max said. “Let’s get out of here, huh?”
Before he’d taken two steps toward the door, the main entrance at the center of the room opened.
Four men in white lab coats stepped inside, clearly in the middle of some important discussion; Max and his friends didn’t have even a second to try hiding.
They all turned toward the entrance as one, wide-eyed and frozen and totally caught.
All Max could think about now was how much he didn’t want to have to kill humans again, especially here with Ayla and the others.
“Hey!” one of the scientists shouted, breaking away from the other three to storm toward them. Thick, polyurethane gloves covered his hands and forearms all the way up to his elbow, and he raised his hands now like he was about to grab them. “This is a restricted area—what are you doing down here?!”