Rise Again Below Zero (49 page)

•   •   •

They walked down linoleum-floored halls. The lack of ornamental trim suggested this was the employee level; then Topper smelled food and heard the clatter of big pots and it was confirmed. The kitchens ran off underneath an entire wing of the place, and he caught a glimpse of several people scrubbing down industrial-sized cookware in big stainless sinks. They didn’t glance up as he went by with his guards. It must have been a common sight. Or maybe they didn’t want to see. Again, the fear took a firmer grasp
on him, driving the warmth off his skin. They took a couple of turns, the hallways getting narrower at each branching, and then there was a flight of stairs.

“After you,” one of the guards said. Topper could hear children’s voices coming down the stairwell. He didn’t move.

“I said get the fuck going,” the guard added.

“I’m listening to the kids, man,” Topper said. “They sound . . . happy.”

The guard shrugged. Another gave Topper a shove. He ascended the stairs.

At the second landing, there was a door with a diamond-shaped window cut into it. The noise of children was coming through the door. Topper hesitated.

“You want a look?” the guard said.

Topper didn’t respond, but ducked his head so he could look through the pane. He was seeing the dining hall. It was a big room with decorative columns and a carpet patterned with roses and vines, white walls and ceiling, chandeliers blazing with light. Long tables were set up in rows all through the space; a vast stone fireplace at the far end contained a log fire that leaped and danced. At the tables, or sitting cross-legged near the fire, or skylarking around the room because they were done eating, were hundreds of kids. They looked happy and well-fed; Topper saw some hadn’t finished their meals. Mashed potatoes, some kind of meat, peas. Real food, it looked like. Topper’s stomach wrung itself against his backbone. He could do with a plateful of that. He didn’t see any kids from the Tribe in there, but they probably hadn’t been processed yet. What he saw was laughter and play and an absence of fear and hunger.

Something tickled his face. He realized it was tears. He stood up.

“Thanks,” he said to the guard. There wasn’t anything else to say.

•   •   •

They walked along a hallway that ran the entire length of the dining hall. At the end was a freight elevator. Topper assumed they were going up, but the guard nearest the panel thumbed the button labeled B2. So they were descending to the waterline, or below. The elevator rumbled and Topper felt the long-forgotten tug of gravity as they dropped deep into the building.

He noticed the guards weren’t looking him in the face any longer. They weren’t answering his occasional remarks. The fear that had taken root in him began to branch out. The mood had changed. He wasn’t with these men anymore, just among them. And he noticed the guns, which had relaxed
their vigilance, were now concentrated on him again. He tested the bonds on his wrists and thought about how he was going to escape. The elevator doors opened, and they stepped into a concrete room with a couple of doors let into it to the right and left. Straight ahead was a corridor with stone walls. They were inside the hill.

Topper allowed himself to be led as before, but he found he was walking more and more slowly. The guards had to prod him to keep up. Being underground was driving home the desperation of his situation. The rock of the walls radiated cold and the concrete ceiling was dappled with mildew.

“Where are we going?” he asked, although he would rather have acted tough. He couldn’t stop his mouth from forming the question.

“Debriefing,” the guard said.

They reached a metal-clad door marked
COLD STORAGE
at the end of the corridor. One of the guards rapped on it with the heel of his hand, and it was opened from within by a man not dressed like the guards, but more after the fashion of a medic. Topper’s heart sped up.

“When is the last time you had a meal?” the medic asked.

“Eight hours ago,” Topper said. “Why?”

“Do you need to move your bowels?”

“Uh—no. Dude, what is this?”

“We like to keep things clean,” the medic said. Then he swung the metal door wide, and Topper’s guards half-wrestled him through into the space beyond, a low, concrete room with some peculiar equipment in it—frames and tables and plumbing he didn’t recognize. A lance of panic cut through the fear. Topper gave no warning, but swung around and kicked the guard to his right as hard as he could. He caught the man on the hip; he fell heavily, shouting with pain, and Topper head-butted the man to his left in the temple as he reached down to pick up his comrade. An instant later, fists and knees flew into action, and more men came from behind somewhere. Now there were eight, and although Topper struggled and swore and kicked, he was immobilized within a couple of minutes.

The men dragged him into the room. In the middle of it was an upright X-shaped frame with straps dangling from it at intervals. There was a sort of skeletal table beneath this, and it appeared to be hinged. Topper went wild at the sight of this thing, he roared his threats and struggled against the men who dragged him to the cross. Then he pleaded with them, promised to help them fight back, even offered to join them. They were polite but disinterested. They simply did not care, any more than a slaughterman
cares what the cows are thinking. Despite his struggles, they got his legs strapped to the lower half of the X, and three men held each of his arms while the others guided them into the straps and attached him to the upper half.

“Easier to tranquilize you,” said the medic. “But we don’t want to poison the meat.”

The entire world blinked out for a second, then returned, but it was different now. Topper knew how he was going out. Then one of the guards operated a crank and the frame went from vertical to horizontal, so that Topper was staring up at the light fixtures on the ceiling. Then the guards passed scissors and box cutters around, and among them they were able to cut off all of Topper’s clothing.

He lay there naked, spread-eagled, arms stretched out to the sides, and writhed against the Velcro straps that held him down. The tubing of the frame was narrow and cold, so it quickly became unbearably painful to lie on, digging into his spine and limbs.

Now his imagination had caught up to events. It was going to happen. There was nobody but him, and he wasn’t going to get rescued or bust out. Topper wondered if he could swallow his tongue or stop breathing, kill himself somehow. Anything but what was coming. Hope was extinguished.

Poisoned meat,
he thought.
Maybe I don’t taste good.

It was the living who had broken his spirit. They were human beings like himself, working for the undead in this godforsaken place like servants. Not slaves. These were people who went home at night, commuted to work. They didn’t live in cages with leather collars around their necks and suffer floggings for impertinence. They were maids, butlers, and footmen. Mere subservient employees. He saw it when the guards brought him into the presence of the weird guy in makeup before.
The Architect
, they’d called him. They’d treated the Architect like he was rich and powerful.

Then he saw the Architect was in the room with him, looking on with a blank expression, as if deciding which lobster in the tank would be his dinner. But there was only one lobster. Topper had no allies. He was already dead, but had yet to die.

Now he wept. He could not recall having done so before. He must have cried as a child, but his memory didn’t go that far back. And with his father being such a hard case, he might not have cried at all. This was different. He was blinded by tears. They ran down his upturned face and collected in his ears, spilling down the back of his head and falling to the concrete floor.
It was sorrow he felt for himself, not quite pity. All that life he’d had, all that surviving he’d done, and it came to this. He had to die the hardest way a man could in this ugly world. His destruction would go unrecorded. He was already nothing. The Architect looked silently on while the guards and the medic filed out of the room. Then he, too, walked out, and for a long time Topper was alone, the pain in his limbs gathering strength.

An hour later, three undead filed into the room. He could hear them forcing their lungs to inhale, sniffing the air with their sunken noses as they entered. But with his neck strapped down, he couldn’t see them until they stood around him, their slack faces devoid of hunger, of interest, even of malice. There was nothing inside to animate them. Just skulls clothed in flesh. Their stained eyes gazed on him unblinking. Cold hands touched his skin. Their shoes squeaked on the polished concrete.

Then another entered, and the rest stepped back. Topper twisted his eyes to see. It was the Architect, and with him he had two people who had an undead look to them, but who were sweating and nervous. So not undead—but almost as if they were halfway there. From Topper’s perspective, they were upside-down. He felt the blood racing under his own skin, the heat and sweat of himself, and knew it was about to be taken from him.

The Architect took the cigar from his mouth and drew a long, rough breath. Then he began to speak.

“We are gathered here to feast upon man. We shall feast according to the just law. We are not monsters. We are not barbarians. Are not we civilized?”

“We are civilized,” the others breathed, in a chorus like a prayer.

“You fuckers,” Topper spat out. All eyes turned to him, not with interest, but as human eyes would turn at the sound of a window slamming. He thought he saw a little sympathy in the face of the female who wasn’t quite undead. “You fucking monsters call yourselves civilized? You’re cannibals.”

“We have risen from the dead,” a female corpse said. “We are no longer creatures made of sex and desire. We have come from death and go to eternity.”

“Fuck you,” Topper said. He had no gift of speech. If they couldn’t be reasoned with, he wished they possessed feelings he could hurt, or that it was possible to make them take offense. But they cared for nothing. All he knew was he wouldn’t beg for mercy, no matter what happened. He was going to go out the way he lived: no prisoners.

A door opened and the medic circulated around the room, studiously ignoring Topper, and handed out cushions. Each of the undead took one.

“They’ll eat you, too,” Topper snarled at the medic. There was no response. He went out and shut the door. Once again, Topper was the only entirely living thing in the room.

“Tonight is a special evening,” the Architect said. These two”—here he indicated the man and woman who looked ill, but not undead—“are new to the taste of man-flesh. They are becoming immortal. They are transforming. Tonight they release their fears and taboos and learn to be one with the eternal, unmoved by the feast. He is Cad and she is Nancy. Human names, a legacy of their fading humanity. Let’s begin.”

The Architect lowered his knees onto the cushion he’d been given. Mustn’t harm the knees. Topper looked down past his body and could see the desiccated head with its cloudy eyes now hovering between his thighs. He felt his genitals shrinking, cold sweat running through the hair on his legs. His heart was smashing against his ribs and he wished it would explode. He made another furious attempt to escape his bonds, twisting his body, pumping his limbs. But there were straps around his ankles, knees, thighs, belly, and on up his body so that he could only shift his weight a little. He couldn’t even bang his head against the bar that held him aloft.

“Watch and learn,” the Architect said, glancing over his shoulder at the trembling inductees.

And with that he bared his long, dry teeth, and ate Topper’s testicles.

The undead formed a vague line after that, in order of rank; they each chose a favorite part. One of the others held a basin beneath the mutilations to catch the blood, which was passed around to the half-undead. Cad and Nancy sipped timidly from it. Topper saw the hunger in their faces after the first taste, but he didn’t make anything of it. The pain was too great. As the Architect had opened his jaws, Topper promised himself that he would not scream, but with the first agonies of teeth crushing and slicing through his living flesh, he shrieked at the top of his lungs, and continued to scream until no sound came out except a hoarse whistle. The pain was a flower of fire that bloomed new and bright every time his heart beat, always increasing until it seemed impossible that he could survive another moment of it.

When they began working with knives, Topped begged for mercy.

Gauze was stuffed in his wounds to keep him from losing consciousness;
they slit open the skin of his chest and excavated one muscle at a time, cold fingers tugging at the meat, blades carving away the anchors and tendons that held the muscles in. First they mined out his pectoral muscles, the cuts bisecting his nipples; then they skinned and ate his calves. His buttocks were next, the blood flowing so freely they had to interrupt the feast to have the medic enter the room and bind the larger blood vessels with hemostats. Topper heard the knives grating against the exposed bones of his pelvis.

He was insane with agony, but he did not fail to see the living man working on his injuries, and the emptiness in his deliberately blank face and averted eyes. Topper wanted to beg for a cut throat or a thrust to his heart, but no coherent sound emerged from his mouth. He was an animal now, capable only of experiencing pain.

He lost consciousness only after they had greedily pulled out his intestines and the two new recruits were struggling to pull out his hot, heavy liver.

•   •   •

When Topper awoke, there was no pain, only hunger. A feeling of cold—not quite the sensation, but the sense of it—pervaded his mind, like a frozen landscape viewed through the window of a chilly room. He knew who he had been before, but that memory was all that remained of himself.

He was not an individual, but a bland consciousness devoted to its hunger. The world was filled with objects he could not consume, but there were living men present as well, and they stank with richness. He wanted to feast on them.