Prisoner 52 (12 page)

Day 8

             
The atmospheric craft shuddered around him and outside the viewports the skies thundered as they passed through them and the suppression cannons at the base of the pod fired loud and continuous below his hanging feet. But the men across from him and around him unstrapped themselves from their restraints and like wraiths drifted through the air and out the loading ports above him that were opened, but through which none of the rain and wind blew and contained only cloudy darkness like smoke. These disappeared into its haze and he asked of them where they went, but they said nothing. He tried to undo his own restraints to follow them, but they would not move. Then he himself shook more violently than the pod around him and awoke to bright light and cold. A great hand rocked him roughly by the shoulder and he looked up at the wide, grizzled face of the man whose it was.

"You looked like you were having a bad dream." He said to him, an Enforcer by the look of his uniform and exo-suit.

"I always got bad dreams." He said and sat up on the med bay's slab, extended out over the emptiness of the infirmary and the Enforcer sat upon the guest seat hinged to it and drawn up now beside it. "Who are you?"

"Tezac." The man said and made no move to shake and Sejanus was glad of it. "Hotchkins. Hotchkins or Tezac, I don't care which. I'm the guy who saved you."

"Does that make me your buddy?" He said and for a long time they watched each other. "How come you did that?"

"How much do you remember," Tezac said. "From the war?"

"Is that what this is about?" He said. "Listen: I'm not the guy to speak to."

"Hotchkins!" A voice said, garbled over the transmitter of his bracer.

"Hotchkins here." He said into it. "What is it?"

"
Kellan here, your night dispatcher. You need to get down to engineering." The man said. "Sounds like somebody's having a real attitude problem."

"So have local security handle it."

"Well I'd love to bother standard Arbitronix personnel, believe me. But they can't get him any way but close and there's a price comes with being the biggest guy on the station."

"Well how big is he?"

"Big. And high on something."

"Alright, Hotchkins out." Tezac said and looked back to Sejanus. "Listen: I've been reassigned for what I did and I can't say to a certainty what's going to happen to you. But I have a friend here that can help while I'm away. She'll fill in anything I've left out."

"I don't need anybody's help." He said.

"I'll get in touch with you any way I can." Tezac said and slid off from the guest seat into the magnetic buoy of his
MagLev boots and slid it back beneath the slab.

"You didn't answer my question." Sejanus said.

"I don't need to."

Day 8

He made his way down the dim catwalk and passed through the interspersed columns of overhead lamplight like some mechanical giant, the hinges and brackets of his exo-suit at turns squeaking and clacki
ng. He made no move of greeting to the faces that watched him from afar, attired in jumpsuits only and having for weapons only concussion cannons. He drew up to them and the threshold around which they were crowded and peered through the material scanner suctioned onto the door. Thus he watched the electromagnetics pulse into the dark squared-off expanse beyond, studied the objects that it contained and the persons therein. There were two in number, one that cowered in the corner and the other moving about as though he were searching for something on which his life depended.

"Kellan wasn't lying." Tezac said and turned round to the men behind him. "He's big. But he didn't say anything about a hostage."

"He didn't have a hostage when you got called up." A man said – young, skinny and sweating through his security uniform.

"Why's he got one now?"

"Well Ed always had a thing for Arissa." A bearded man of deep eyepits in an engineer's jumpsuit said. "She ain't much to look at, but she can whip up a good batch of swill."

"She's set on not being much at all on your accounts." Tezac said and turned back to the viewer. "What the Hells am I supposed to do with 200 pounds of pissed off and a hostage?"

"You can try asking him." The man said and he looked between the rest which turned upon him. "What?"

"Does anybody have a communicator?"
Tezac said to the group.

"Here." The officer said that had spoken first and handed him the transmitter. "But don't count on him answering. He'll talk alright, but don't count on him answering."

"Edmund," He had started to say into the device, but his words were drowned out by the deranged babble that came back at them who listened.

"Told ya." The kid behind him said and he looked at him.

"How long has he been like this?"

"Well he didn't show up for detail this morning." The engineer said. "So we checked in on him about midday, after consumption, and here he was. As is."

"You make any sense out of this?" Tezac said and brandished the communicator.

"Not a godsdamned lick." The officer said.

"He say anything about this stuff before?" He said and turned back to the material scanner. "Gave any of you a look?"

"Gave anybody a look?" Another engineer said.

"Anything strange." He said and watched the man inside the room and how he didn't watch the door from which anyone could come, but the duct work.

"He's been having trouble concentrating, sure." The bearded engineer said. "Been looking a little pale, but I just thought he wasn't getting enough sleep. That happens down here."

"And he didn't say anything about voices?" He said. "Or why he might be watching the vents more than the door right now?"

"You work in the dark by yourself 16 hours a day and you tell me if you don't start hearing things. Everybody hears things. How could we know it was going to turn into this?"

"Edmund Raines." Tezac said into the transmitter and loud enough to be heard over the man's ramblings to himself. "This is Enforcer Tezac Hotchkins. What are you doing in there?"

"Hm? What?" He heard the man say. "Where's that? Who's that coming from?"

"The door." He said and the man at last looked to it, cocked his head as though it were some foreign object. "Your friends are worried, Edmund."

"I don't have friends, or maybe I used to." Edmund said and rushed the door and slammed
against it, matched his eyes somehow through the material scanner. "You're one of them, aren't you?"

"One of who?"

"They always say that." The man said and turned away from the scanner, wandered to the girl crouched and sobbing in the corner and traced the knife he held across her cheek. "Outside they look the same."

"If you're looking to have a bad day, you keep on doing what you're doing."

"A bad day." Edmund said and took Arissa's other cheek in his hand and forced her face to look into his. "What can you do they haven't made me see? I wish you could understand. If you knew what I've seen; if I could tell you."

"Then tell me." Tezac said. "Come out here, let the girl go, and you can tell me everything. Anything you want."

"I don't want to see anymore." He said and pressed the knifepoint beneath the woman's skin and she cried out and slapped at his arms and made to get away, but he held her where she was with his free hand. "I'll show you what's underneath and then you'll understand."

"Get this door open." He said to the officer beside him and stepped back.

"Right." The man said and submitted his override bio-credentials to the door's reader and it chimed, but it didn't open. "Why isn't it opening?"

"This is your post. You fucking tell me."

"It's not safe down here anymore." Edmund said over the transmitter beneath Arissa's screams. "It's too late for me, but you can get out. I know you're not one of them; they don't talk about you."

"Get out of the way."

"You can't break that down." The bearded engineer said. "That's solid steel, guy."

"I said
to get out of the way." Tezac said to the officer and he did so.

He backed to the railing that cordoned off the edge of the walkway and took two heavy steps and rushed forward. His shoulder met the door and it dented beneath the blow, but remained fast. The woman screamed still over the transmitter, only half-conscious of the terrible sounds she made, and Edmund whispered to her. Tezac reared back again and ploughed into the door and this time took it from its locking emplacements within the wall, bent it into the room thus. He commenced to force it the rest of the way with his brawn and the augmentation of the exo-suit and so peeled it away enough to maneuver through.

"I tried telling you." Edmund said as Tezac approached him from behind and turned round, dropped the knife and held up his wrists to him that bled profusely. "But now you'll know about the others."

The man fell as he laid his hands upon him and so he cast him away and bent knee to the woman propped into the corner. Her face hung in shreds from round her temples and jaw and the sinew beneath contracted and spasmsed where it hadn't been severed and the eyes wheeled glassy in no true display of seeing. Blood ran in rivers that gushed with the fading beats of her heart and all her sounds were gurgles. One moment she breathed in quick, shallow seizings and then stopped and the eyes went still, went distant.

"Just look at her." The man in the room with him said and his own blood pooled beneath him. "Check the vents if you still don't believe me. You don't want to, but I know you do; they don't talk about you."

"Who doesn't talk about me.
" Tezac said and let the girl fall back into the corner and pivoted where he knelt to look at the man. "You rat-crazy fuck."

"You'll see." Edmund said. "I won't anymore."

"If you think those cuts'll kill you," He said and nodded at the man's wrists. "I've got news for you."

"Don't." The man said and shook his head and something in his face then at last cut
through the pall of madness. "Please don't."

"Get him to the infirmary." Tezac said over his shoulder to those assembled outside the door. "Throw him in nullgrav soon as they paste those slits over."

"You can't." Edmund said and the malaise of his ending lessened and he raised himself up where he lay against the bed as the security officers entered the room. "No, no. You can't!"

But they took him up where he had tried to get to his feet and resisted them with the failing strength of his great limbs. He bled the more for his activity and so the youngest of them moved round before him and fired the concussion cannon into him. Edmund flew from the arms of the officers and against the wall above the bed, fell back down onto it with his face first. Then they took him up again and dragged him from the mattress and out the door, unconscious.
Tezac looked back to the corpse of the woman before him and made as if to touch her mutilated face that he might inspect, but took the hand away and shrugged only.

"I haven't even been here a week."

"Wait til you're here a month." The bearded engineer said and he heard his footsteps across the carpet behind him, but they faltered. "Gods."

"Aint much to look at now, if she ever was." Tezac said and stood to his feet to face the man there before him, pale and sweating. "Were you close?"

"Close as you get living and working in the same space long as we were." He said and peered round Tezac's big frame at Arissa. "I thought he was roughing her up maybe. But nothin like this."

"Well." He said and glanced back over his shoulder. "Crazy's crazy."

"I'm Keenan." The man said and extended his hand to him. "James Keenan."

"You know me." Tezac said and took it and they shook.

"I like to think," Keenan said. "I like to think you don't know a man til you drink with him. What say you?"

"I say a drink's a drink, and you look like you need one."

"Just me?"

"It ain't much different where I'm from."

"And where in all the Hells is that?"

"Maybe some other time." Tezac said and turned away from him and brought his bracer to his lips. "Hotchkins to HQ: situation resolved, but we got a body down here; going to need a bagger."

"HQ's reading you, Hotchkins." Kellan said over the transmitter. "You are cleared to leave. What's the deal with the fatality?"

"Raines jammed the doors." He said and looked down at the defaced body. "Couldn't get to her in time."

"Shit. Well, we should be getting a shipment of fresh meat in soon anyway. Can't save everybody. Kellan out."

"Acknowledged." Tezac said and turned round to face Keenan. "How bout that drink?"

Day 8

"I ought to hit that button." Tezac said and to no one, louder than he would have liked for the drink in his gut and the metal emptiness that pervaded the air of the corridor before him. "Go right back up."

But he stepped out of the lift
and into the engineering sublevel for the seound time that night and no sooner had his boot first met the grating than was he confronted with the coldness of the place, the overwhelming desire to depart and forget that he had ever intended to take the elevator back down. He, who had seen the uncounted ways men could die and had come fresh from as many battlefields.

The overhead lamps flickered on at his presence in their energy conservation mode that would last the night and it seemed to him that they were as reticent as he to acknowledge the place existed, that they knew full well of what was for him a vague notion only and were amused with him. He squinted into their stabbing white light, then into the shadows that lay beyond and beneath
the lamps that had yet to activate and walked on.

His steps rang against the metal at his feet and something inside bade for him to keep quiet and in the face of it he stomped the more. In sequence the lights of the corridor kicked on above him and heralded his coming for whomever watched and there was then a muffled rumbling of metal and he wheeled on it at his right. But the noise had gone and the wall there remained as opaque as if it had not sounded at all.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and took a light-disc from one of their slots across his vest and toggled the switch on its underside, cast it into the darkness ahead.

Its golden light
clicked on about its edges and showed forth against the grimey metal that closed him in and nothing more. He shook his head at himself and made to call it back on the holographic interface of his bracer, but instead fell to piloting it as he walked and into any intersecting hall or recessed doorway that appeared too filled with shadows for his liking.

Moment to moment he reached the threshold of the residence hall that for him stank still with the knowing of death and he peered through it at the weak glow of the lamps that were set above each of the doors on either level and that in any other circumstance would have invited some sense of reprieve and
safehaven from the dark, metal underbelly that wound labyrinthine around him.

He crossed into the atrium and at once froze beneath the steel that shook as before, only now somewhere out of sight above him. He commenced to guide the light-disc up over his head and probe the gloom there and it hardly reached the height of the ceiling before the sound had gone again. He kept his eyes upon the random reaches of it that his light uncovered and made for the stairs that would take him to the catwalk of the second level of rooms.

He mounted to the top of the stairs and circled round the railing of the walkway and went down the line of doors on his lift as if at any moment one was to spew forth some hidden horror before which all his experience would be naught. So he went until he came to the door that lay open still and which issued into the quarters of the man he had apprehended in his way only some hours ago.

He stuck his head through the doorway and guided the light-disc inside and looked about at the room, stale with the smell of old happenings. The body of the woman, Arissa he remembered, was gone and all that remained of her was the blood that lay as a stain like rust in the corner where she died. He looked away from it and at the duct in the far wall, high and at the center, and stared into its grating as
Raines had stared before him. Then he stepped into the room.

He drew up before the vent and looked up at it again, guided the disc to it as if he could see more than the
latticed shadows it cast into the conduit behind the grate. He piloted it away to hover beside it and climbed atop the nightstand that sat beneath it and set to prying free the bolts of the vent-cover with the autotool he had brought with him.

It popped free as he undid the last fixture and he caught it by its rim and let it down lightly to the floor. The warmth that flowed throughout the ducts washed full over him and he retched at the smell that
was carried with it, buried his nose in the crook of his elbow. He glanced thus at its mouth and then took the light-disc out of the air, deactivated and stowed it away again.

He took the flashlight from his belt and placed it inside the vent ahead of him and pu
lled himself inside. He grabbed the light out from underneath him and began to maneuver forward through the ventilation, against the heat and its stink. His light at turns wobbled across the metal as against some signal mirror for how much it flashed back at him and plunged forward at odds with the dark.

A terminus appeared ahead at which the duct split to either side and he stopped at first sight of it. He glanced back as best he could at the light of the room he left behind and which seemed as inviting as it had been unwelcoming and then looked back to the end of the duct, shook his head and crawled on.

He came to the edge of the 'T' and the metal began to quake and rattle around him. It was nearer now and louder, no longer muted as it had been. He added to it as he began to squirm back through the awkward, tight space and then it quit again. The end of the duct in which he lay sat as quiet and as empty as before and threw back the light of his flashlight. He could hear his own breathing and no more.

He waited and, when nothing more came from the unknown that seemed to hound him and
so, possessed of the same madness that brought him there to begin with, he crept forward again and with quaking light looked out beyond the turn. Cold, dirty steel shadows stretched out interminably to his right and he let go the breath he held and then looked to the left and faces leered back at him with dead eyes and tortured, quivering expressions.

He shot back into the duct and fumbled at his hip for his pistol as the rumbling commenced again. Something passed through the light ahead and filled the vents with its mad groans of many mouths, many voices of conjoined flesh of persons
untold and that he saw at last when he looked up at the thing which propelled itself through the ventilation with as many arms as there were trapped within it, within this dismal worm of parasitized souls that shook the metal with its slither.

It disappeared down the stretch of ductwork and he retreated in its wake and in his rush fell from the vent, onto the floor of the room and kicking the nightstand over. He rose and paid no mind to the vent cover, but ran out the door and back to the lift. Inside the duct the flashlight rolled in place and illuminated what the lights outside had thought it better man didn't see.