Red Cells (5 page)

“Yeah…for a second. Then he seemed to snap out of it and acted normal again.” Stake shrugged. “Something’s in the air.” He turned to face the other two occupants of the room, both seated on the edge of a bunk: Billings, and the mutant called Blur, who of course was convulsing and whipping his head madly.

Billings smiled apologetically. “So how’s your nose?”

Stake ignored him and said to Null, “Now I want to talk to your pal Blur.”

“You can try.”

“I have to. He’s our only witness.”

Stake stepped closer to Blur, looking down at him. “Hey, buddy. You know who I am?”

“Jerry…Mistake,” the mutant garbled. “Jerry Mistake…”

“Close enough. Do you know I have
Caro turbida
, Blur? I’m like you.”

Spittle flew from the mutant’s mouth as he became more agitated. “No…no…I’m like
everybody
…everybody’s inside me…”

“We’re prisoners in our own bodies, aren’t we, Blur? But we have to fight this thing…this curse we have. Try to make it work for us, right? Try to make it into a gift, instead.”

“I saw the ghost…ghost…saw the skeleton ghost…”

“Yeah, that’s what I want to talk with you about. But I want you to settle down so you can think clearly. Can you do that? Can you slow yourself down?” Stake reached out and laid a gentle hand on the mutant’s juddering shoulder. “Look at my face, Blur. Focus on my face and calm down, brother. Hey, I can do it. I don’t have perfect control, but I don’t let this thing control me, either. Can you slow it down? Can you look straight in my eyes?”

Null began to say something, but cut himself off when it became obvious that Blur’s head was not thrashing as fast as it normally did. As his head motions became less rapid, the other three men caught clearer glimpses of his repertoire of faces. There was an elderly woman (his mother?)…a small child (himself at an early age?)…a black man…a woman Stake thought he recognized as a porn actress. But the succession of changing visages slowed, as well, until Blur’s head finally stopped whipping, and his features stopped altering. Yet instead of Blur revealing his true self—as if that were irretrievable to him, as if he had never even owned his own countenance—the face that ultimately looked into Stake’s eyes was
his
face, that of “Jerry Mistake” as Blur called him, in Stake’s neutral “factory setting.”

Before Stake could protest, Blur spoke in a surprisingly level, quiet tone. He said, “Before I saw the skeleton, I saw a fish. A white fish, swimming around in the air near the ceiling.”

“A white fish,” Stake echoed, glancing up at the cell’s ceiling, where there were inset light strips and a single air vent.

“Yes. And then…and then a bigger shape stepped out of the air, stepped out of the air right inside our cell. The fish swam down to the bigger shape and became
part
of it. It was like a skeleton, but not a human skeleton. It was like a demon’s skeleton. And it wasn’t really solid. It glowed like a ghost.” Blur’s eyes started darting back and forth. His eyelids fluttered.

“Then what happened?” Stake encouraged him, to keep him from slipping back into chaos.

Blur’s gaze snapped into focus again. “The skeleton stood there in our cell and it looked at me…
it looked at me
…it knew I was awake. But it didn’t come here to my bunk.” He patted the mattress he sat on, then pointed across the room. “It went there, to Chowder asleep on his bunk. It stood beside him. It looked around at me…with that demon head…that skeleton demon head.” Darting eyes again.

“Yes, Blur? And?”

“Then it reached down with its hands…it touched Chowder’s head with both hands…and I tried to scream but I couldn’t! I couldn’t scream!”

“It’s all right, brother.”

“Then Chowder was gone…
boom!
...but no sound! Chowder was gone and the skeleton was gone, too! Both of them gone! Gone…gone…the ghost…I saw the
ghost
…”

Blur flung his head from side to side with greater violence than ever, as if he might throw his tormented skull right off his neck and against the wall. Stake turned away from him to meet Null’s eyes.

“Either he’s totally insane, or this prison is a haunted house.”

Null sighed, blew out his cheeks sadly. “I think you got it right the first time.”

“Hold on,” Stake said, spinning to look toward Blur again. “A white fish swimming in the air.”

“Yeah?”

“That sounds like those things that move around out there in the pocket,” Stake said. “Those interstitial life forms.”

Seven

Guard Down

The organic guards were encouraged not to remove their intimidating featureless helmets in the presence of the prisoners; not only to ensure their safety, but to prevent being perceived as too human. They had their own, smaller cafeteria in which to let down their guard. Nonetheless, many of them had taken to the habit of sitting at a particular table in the general mess hall, where they took off their helmets to drink coffee and grab a quick bite. There were four guards seated at this table, where no prisoners ever sat, right now as Jeremy Stake walked toward them. They all looked up warily, their grins and chatter fading, when Stake was only a few paces away. One of the men had the name HURLEY on the left breast of his uniform, and Stake could now put a face to that name. A youngish black man with closely cut hair and a neat mustache. Stake had taken note of the man before, because he appeared patient but firm with the prisoners. He’d never seen Hurley lose his cool, flaunt his status or become bullying.

“What do you want, mutie?” one of the other guards, bearing the name FLAQUITA, asked around a mouthful of imitation burrito. “You lost?”

“I was hoping you guys could talk to the warden about letting me speak with him again,” Stake said. “I think I might know something about these deaths.”

“What deaths?”

“Come on,” Stake said. “Everybody with the ‘what deaths.’ You know what I mean.”

The short but heavyset Flaquita looked about ready to rise up from his chair. “Don’t get belligerent with me, dunghole.”

“What do you know about these deaths?” Hurley asked sternly. “You tell us, and we’ll tell you whether we think the warden needs to hear it.”

“That mutant Blur, who was in the cell where the last victim got it…he says he saw a fish kind of thing floating around in the air. Then a figure appeared, that he interpreted as a ghost, and—”

“What the hell is this dung?” Flaquita cut him off. “Why are you wasting our time with this? I don’t know who’s crazier—Blur, or you for listening to Blur. Man, I know you’re new here but you should know by now that freak is out of his mind.”

“What I’m saying is,” Stake went on, “that fish-thing sounds just like some of those creatures swimming around out there in the interstitial matter. Is it possible they could get inside the facility? Through a vent, a port…or maybe right through the walls? Maybe they’re attacking…trying to feed on us, and something about their nature causes a violent reaction, like when matter and antimatter meet and annihilate each other.”

“I’m going to annihilate
you
if you don’t get your ass back to the mutie table and stop bothering us when we’re trying to have our lunch,” Flaquita snarled. For unneeded emphasis, he rested his hand on his holstered pistol. The guards carried firearms, unafraid that the prisoners would take them; a gun was configured to recognize its owner, the only person who it would respond to.

Hurley ignored Flaquita, and asked, “If that was true, then what’s that ghost Blur is going on about? That doesn’t sound like those animals swimming around out there to me.”

“Yeah,” said another guard, “and we’ve been out here two years now. If those life forms could get in here, why would they start doing it only a few months ago?”

“Who knows? Maybe they weren’t hungry enough before, but they’re getting more stressed and desperate. It could be we’ve trapped them in this pocket with us.” Even as he said this, some words came back to Stake; words spoken by the glitched robot guard. “
Your kind are not the only prisoners
.” Could the machine have been trying to relate these same thoughts to him? He wished now he’d taken note of its identification number, so that he might try speaking with it further.

“What are you, a biologist?” the fourth guard at the table said. “You know all about these animals, while nobody else does?”

“Sir, I’m just trying to show some concern here. It’s a serious matter, don’t you think? For all you know, it could happen to one of you guys next.”

“You think the warden isn’t already looking into every possibility? Why don’t you let him worry about it? Remember, Stake—you’re not a detective in this place; you’re just another prisoner.”

“So you won’t tell him I’d like to talk with him?”

Flaquita started to speak up but Hurley spoke first. “I’ll tell him, all right? But don’t get your hopes up; he’s a busy man.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it, sir.” Stake nodded, and started back in the direction of his own table, where Null and the other Muties had been watching him intently from a distance. When he turned, however, he saw that a robot guard had been standing near enough behind him to listen in on their conversation. As Stake walked past the machine, they both turned their heads to regard each other. Did the robot’s glowing red eyes flicker for a second?

He halted to talk to the machine, wondering if it were a different robot from the one he had just been thinking of, but it walked away from him to resume its rounds. Stake watched its back for a few moments, then continued on to the mutie table. There, he began relating what he had discussed with the guards. As he did so, a growing number of nonmutant prisoners from neighboring tables drew closer to listen in. Null looked around at them with hostile eyes. “What do you all want?”

One man, a Choom, held up his hands and said, “Easy, Null, we just want to know what your man Stake here has found out so far about these guys blowing up in their cells. It has us all spooked, man. We hear your boy is trying to find out what it’s all about.”

“It does concern all of us,” Stake said. “And maybe if the warden doesn’t want to talk to us, we might have to demand it as a group. Show some solidarity to get the answers we need.”

“I’ll bet those mother-loving guards already know what’s going on, all too well,” that brain corral mutant spat.

“I didn’t get the impression that they do,” Stake said.

“
Impression
,” brain corral said. “You’re good at impressions, aren’t ya, shapeshifter?”

“Listen, brother, I have to say my instincts and intuitions are pretty good from being a hired detective and a deep-ops soldier, so you might want to give me some credit.”

On his own train of thought, the Choom prisoner mused, “Friend of mine named Athul went into solitary for fighting. I haven’t seen him since. I’m sure he’s one of the ones who got it.”

“The medical chief did tell me that one of the victims had been in isolation,” Stake confirmed.

“That makes five guys in about four months,” another prisoner said. “It’s almost like a regular thing, isn’t it?”

“Like it’s…scheduled,” the Choom said.

“Scheduled,” brain corral scoffed.

“Well, the last few have been closer together,” Null added, “so things are getting a little ahead of schedule, aren’t they?”

“Bottom line,” Stake said, “is right now we don’t know when this might happen again.”

Eight

Pavor Nocturnus

Stake had tried convincing his two cell mates, the black man Kofi and the bipedal doglike Dacvibese, that they should take turns staying awake in three-hour shifts, to stand guard over each other. After all, Null had ordered all the members of the Mutie gang to do this if they could get their nonmutant cell mates to agree to it. But Stake’s two cell mates had resolutely refused. So it was that he lay on his bunk unable to sleep, listening to Kofi snore and smelling the foulness of the Dacvibese’s drool, while a parade of thoughts passed through his skull. He thought about the various types of interstitial creatures he had glimpsed out the windows on his way to the warden’s office. He thought about how the warden hadn’t sent word that he would grant Stake an audience. He thought about the ill-fated day Edwin Fetch had come into his little office. And he thought about a Sinanese woman named Thi Gonh, whom he had met and fallen in love with during the Blue War.

Finally, with thoughts of blue-skinned Thi in his arms, he drifted off, but whether for a matter of minutes or moments he didn’t know. All he knew, when he unaccountably snapped awake again—the hair on his arms and the back of his neck standing on end—was that a white apparition was standing just inside the cell, as if it might have passed right through the doorway’s energy barrier. The apparition gave off a soft radiance, like bioluminescence, that reflected off the walls.