Against Gravity (20 page)

There was an entrance there that some of the other prisoners had nicknamed the Dissection Door. It was made of steel, designed to slide into a recess in the wall. But now the door was slamming
open and shut, over and over again. Opening, shutting, opening, shutting.

I’m doing it
, Kendrick thought. No . . . it wasn’t just him. It was Peter McCowan and Buddy, both of whom had already been confined in the Ward when Kendrick had arrived.
Robert was part of it too. It was . . .

It was all of them.

The door stopped its hideous slamming. The ensuing silence was immediate, shocking.

Kendrick recognized the new arrivals as members of the Maze’s medical staff. Or perhaps they were merely technicians – their exact role was never quite clear, although they spent
much of their time taking blood samples or X-rays of every prisoner in the Ward, always well disguised behind plastic visors. Two of the men who had arrived during Torrance’s death throes now
kicked down the wheels on the dead man’s cot.

They wheeled Torrance out through the Dissection Door. Nobody ever came back from there. The guard followed them, his eyes still wide behind his transparent visor.

Kendrick realized that they had been left unguarded.

McCowan pulled himself up from his narrow cot and hobbled over to Kendrick. “Jesus, did you see that?”

Sieracki had a policy of keeping prisoners in restraints for up to forty-eight hours after they emerged from the operating theatre. But Torrance had been strapped to his cot for over four days,
while Robert had been under restraint since almost the beginning. Ever since he’d woken up he’d lain there shivering and sweating, nonsense syllables spilling out of his mouth at
irregular intervals.

Out of the sixty-odd men kept in Ward Seventeen since Kendrick’s arrival, perhaps thirty-five had so far survived the ordeal of surgery.

Kendrick licked his lips. “That depends what you’re talking about.”

McCowan studied him carefully. “I saw
that
,” he replied, nodding towards the vacant space where Torrance had been. “I’m talking about . . .” He looked as
though he was searching for the right words but couldn’t find them. In the end he reached up and tapped the side of his head, a furtive look on his face.

Kendrick nodded in understanding. So he hadn’t been the only one to see what he’d seen. “I saw something, too,” he said carefully. “But I’m not sure
what.”

“In your head?”

Kendrick nodded. “In my head, yeah.”

Peter McCowan’s journey over to Kendrick’s side of the Ward had been precarious. His sense of balance seemed to have disappeared since his most recent surgery. Sieracki’s
augmentations had grown long roots into the fertile flesh of McCowan’s nervous system and, as a result, he lurched like a drunkard every time he took a step and he fell over frequently.

McCowan moved his hands along the side of Kendrick’s cot for support, until he could sit himself carefully on the edge. “I knew we’d all seen it. I
knew
.” He
glanced over at Whitsett, whose eyes darted around frantically under closed eyelids.

Kendrick looked over at Buddy Juarez: the surgery had reduced him to a shambling wreck, his head constantly tipped over to one side, his eyes rheumy and distant. He shook uncontrollably, and for
a long time – several days now – had lost the power of speech. He appeared to be recovering slowly, however, which had saved him so far from being wheeled through the Dissection Door.
Unlike Torrance, Juarez still had a chance.

“Yeah,” said Kendrick. “But was it real? It
felt
like I was . . . inside—”

“Inside Torrance’s head, yes,” McCowan finished. He looked as if he was about to cry.

Despite his restraints, Kendrick managed to touch the other man’s hand, laying his own gently on McCowan’s scarred fist. That seemed to calm him, and after a little while the
man’s expression smoothed again. But he still could not look Kendrick in the eye.

“Dear Christ, what I would give. What I would give to . . .”

Get out of here
, Kendrick finished in his head. “I know, I know.” It remained an obsessive desire for all of them, even as they became resigned to the knowledge that it was an
impossible hope.

“I saw them! I saw them!” This time it was Robert, struggling against his restraints. He writhed pathetically on his cot, his expression flickering between terror and delight.
“I saw them.”

McCowan pushed himself around in his half-kneeling position to stare over at the boy. There was still no sign of the guard. “Saw what, Robert?” he asked.

“The Bright,” Robert whined. “I saw them.”

McCowan shook his head and looked back at Kendrick. “What d’you make of that?” he asked softly.

“He doesn’t talk about anything else.” Kendrick glanced along the ward. Another prisoner stood up and stared angrily at Robert, his fists clenching spasmodically, one side of
his face hanging slack. He tried to take a step forward, then started to slump to the ground, catching hold of the edge of someone else’s cot. Other men – wherever the women prisoners
in the Maze were, Kendrick had no idea – conferred in low murmurs. They too were aware that their guard was suddenly absent.

“Robert,” Kendrick called out. The boy took no notice of him. He tried again, a little louder. “Robert, are you okay?”

Robert twisted his head up to stare at him. “I saw you. I saw you from the inside. Did you see them?”

“I’ve seen a lot of things, Robert. Take it easy. You’re making people frightened.” The man who had been clenching his fists sat now on the edge of his own cot, staring
at his hands with an expression of utter despair on his face.

“I’m going to escape,” the boy shouted excitedly.

“We’re all going to escape,” Kendrick promised him.

“You mean we’re all going to die. I want to go with the Bright. They showed me the way!”

“The
what
?” asked McCowan.

Kendrick let his head drop back down. “He’s been muttering about that for the past couple of nights.” Robert still muttered and moaned and twisted on his cot.

“They’ll show me the way,” the boy continued. “The Bright. Only us.”

Kendrick looked away from him, settling his gaze on the ceiling above. He could sympathize with Robert’s desire for freedom. They all could.

“You were studying your fingers.”

There was a screen mounted on the wall behind Sieracki’s shoulder. He had cropped his hair close to the skull since Kendrick had first encountered him in the garage. His thin lips barely
moved as he addressed his prisoner. On the screen Kendrick could see an overhead shot of himself, from an angle, sitting on the edge of his cot and, indeed, studying his fingertips.

Sieracki’s office was located off a long corridor linking Ward Seventeen with all the other Wards. Kendrick had never been inside any of those other rooms, but sometimes Sieracki gave away
more during his interrogations than he perhaps intended. By this means, Kendrick had discovered that the experiments carried out in Wards One through Twenty-three were relatively benign, in that
the death rate rarely rose above two or three in five.

Through whispered conversations with other prisoners Kendrick had heard stories that the entire population of some Wards had been known to die in a single twenty-four-hour period, keeping the
dissection rooms busy through the night.

After a while, Kendrick began to suspect that Sieracki himself was disseminating much of this information deliberately as part of his ploy to get the most accurate information from his
experimental subjects during their interrogations. Sieracki was careful to make sure that they all understood that failure to cooperate almost certainly meant transferral to a Ward where the
survival rate was approximately zero.

What Kendrick knew about Sieracki’s past was minimal. Still, some basic facts had emerged over the long weeks of Kendrick’s confinement. There was no way to substantiate any of these
rumours, but nonetheless he held on to such brief snatches of information as though they were precious jewels.

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.