Cottonwood (53 page)

Because it was death.

Yang’ti hung from hooks over metal tables where humans worked to pull their chitin away, catch up their decaying blood, separate out their organs. Yang’ti arms on trays, finger-plates peeled back to expose their receptor-pads, tiny needles touching carefully-mapped nerves and tendons. Yang’ti heads, mounted in a ghastly row, their eyes poached white and palps cut away to expose their gaping, lifeless throats. And on a countertop, in a line of six, yang’ti abdomens, belly-flaps excised to allow their reproductive organs to hang, each one labeled: Adult, good health; Adult, protein deprived; Adult, chronic dehydration; Adult, electric stimulation treatment (5 yrs); Juvenile (10 yrs), good health; Juvenile (?), deformed (?) And that last was most terrifying of all, because it was no spermatogus preserved and displayed, but a female’s ovipositor, and the humans knew enough to know that it was different and put those question marks beside it.

“How could you do this?” Sarah staggered, her eyes too full, her voice broken by horror. “How could anyone—? These are people!” she screamed, and the humans in their plastic aprons and white coats looked at her, startled. “These are people that you’re butchering! These are
people
! You not-sees! You monsters!”

“Dr. Chapel, please, come.”

One of the humans set down his tools and came curiously forward, stripping away his bloody protective gear.

“Please to take our Miss Fowler,” the dark man said, propelling Sarah forward and into the other’s grip. “And give her thorough examination. I will arrange copies of her medical records to be sent. I think you find them interesting. Very thorough. Omit nothing,
ja
?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not-see!” Sarah screamed again, and was taken from him.

“And you, my friend, we go just a little further to your new home, but you look around,
ja
? You look and see what we have here. Think of your little one.” The dark man’s hand reached out as he walked, twitched back a cloth that covered a metal table. The tiny body with his chest-plate pried away and his little heart exposed stared up at him, not dead even long enough for the eyes to blanch. “He died screaming for his father too,” the dark man said, still walking.

It took guns at his back to move Sanford on. He was forced out into the hall without ever really leaving the lab. He stared at the back of the man-monster, the dark man, and could still taste blood and chemicals and death. He did not see the cells they passed, or even the one they opened for him. One of them slipped a noose around his neck and pulled it tight, bringing him almost instantly to the grey edge of unconsciousness while they removed his binders and hobbling bar. Then they pushed him inside and the opportunity never came, never once, to lunge out and bite.

“Now you sit,” the dark man said. “And you have good long think. You come to the right decisions and I can be your best friend in the world. Your little one is crying for you tonight. Tomorrow, we show him the laboratory. This is the last thing he will ever see before we lock him away forever.”

Sanford threw himself forward. They beat him back, of course, of course, and slammed the heavy doors as he fell.

* * *

They put her on one of the tables, one of the metal autopsy tables, after cutting away her clothes and tying on a hospital gown. The gown was white, with a dark blue pattern she first thought were polka dots, but which at second glance proved to be tiny, round I-B-I’s. The metal was very cold where she touched it, all her adrenaline-fired nerves could feel. There were no restraints—their usual patients were already dead—so they checked her struggles with duct tape they found in a drawer. A thousand and two uses. She had to laugh.

“How thorough an exam?” she heard one say after she was down for good.

“Omit nothing,
ja
?” the doctor replied, in a very passable van Meyer.

They didn’t.

Pulse, blood pressure, respiration rate, oxygen levels, all recorded. Eyes, ears, nose, throat, all examined. They took blood, scraped her skin, cut hair and fingernails, swabbed her pelvis and probed her anus. They took x-rays from her feet clear up to her head, hooked up electrodes for an EKG, and while the doctor sat beside her with an ultrasound wand pressed to her side, an intern arrived with a digital jump-drive—her medical records from Sacred Heart.

The examination was put on pause while everything was printed out.

Then there was a much longer pause.

“This can’t be the right chart,” someone said.

Sarah closed her eyes.

“It has to be,” the doctor said. “That’s the right genetic tag.” His voice was climbing, astonished. He stood up, looking from the lightboard where her latest x-rays had been pinned up to the monitors where the digital feeds of Sacred Heart’s x-rays steadily scrolled. “This has to be…” His hand on her shoulder, shaking her until she opened her eyes on his flushed, excited face. “How did you do this?”

She pressed her lips together and glared at him.

“Oh, this is big, this is
huge
. Where’s the—Rachel! More blood! And I want spinal fluid! Maybe…maybe marrow…look at her bones! Holy God, look at her ribs!”

“Dr. Chapel.” Van Meyer entered the lab, smiling, flanked by soldiers. “I was right,
nee
? Interesting reading?”

“You knew about this? My God, when did she—? How did you—? What have you people been working on over there?”

“
Nee
,
nee
. She does this herself, with little bug friend. I have the device she used. You tell me what it does, perhaps our little Pollyanna will tell us how it works.”

“What it does…” The doctor bent over her again, his cold hands fumbling impersonally under her gown and his eyes fever-bright. “I can’t say for sure, not yet, not without getting a closer look, but…look at the x-rays! You have to see this!”

And he was away, catching at van Meyer’s impeccable sleeve in his enthusiasm to drag him to the lightboard.

“This is Sacred Heart’s last series of images from when she was released, right? And you can clearly see the fractures there, there, there, and there. Now this is, this is today, this is five minutes ago, and there are no fractures. They’re not healed, there’s no sign of healing, they’re just…gone. I’d really like to cut her open, sir.”

Sarah sighed.

“No, I mean, I
need
to, because look at this, look at the screen. This is eight days ago. You see the rupture in her liver? They removed—what does it say, Rachel?—twenty-two percent of the lobe. And look, I can show you the difference right now.”

Cold gel on her belly. Sarah kept her eyes shut.

“It’s not whole…you can see this entire section is…uneven and lumpy, but I’d say…I’d say maybe fifteen percent regrowth and it’s all healthy. And down here…Sacred Heart says there was a bruised spleen, gone. Here…Sacred Heart says five tears in the peritoneum, gone. Here…Sacred Heart says massive bruising and swelling of the large intestine, gone. Even her skin…I mean, you can see where the sutures were removed, but the incision is entirely gone! And except for the liver, there is no evidence of healing, only new, clean tissue. I have got to get inside there and look at it, because what I’m seeing here…this isn’t something that’s been repaired, it’s all brand-
new
!”

“Mm.” Van Meyer’s leathery hand stroked along her cheek; she opened her eyes and looked at him. “Tell me now,” he said, “and no more be done. Tell me how you took it from me. Tell me how you know to take it. Tell me how you convince bug to use it.”

She closed her eyes again.

He patted her head. “Cut her open. For samples only. I wish her alive for now. Good night, Miss Fowler. Do sleep well.”

Piotr’s voice in her ear, his stubbled cheek scratching hers: “I’ll be in later, beautiful. You wait up. Don’t make me wake you.”

They left, van Meyer and his soldiers. The doctor and his assistants stayed, exclaiming over her charts and preparing for her vivisection as for a slumber party.

Over the past few weeks, Sarah had learned that she was actually pretty good with pain. Relatively. She wasn’t invulnerable, wasn’t super-stoic about it, but she could cope. She hoped she could cope with what was coming now. She hoped that if she was going to die, she could do it with some dignity, but she was afraid she couldn’t. Worse than that, she rather suspected she wouldn’t die.

Yesterday…Yesterday, she’d been in bed with her man. His arms were around her, his thighs pricking at hers, and his heart was a drum at her back. Only yesterday, sleeping after love and waking up with T’aki jumping on the bed. How could yesterday bring her to this moment?

“Doctor?” A nurse’s voice, hushed with apprehension. “Doctor, I’m running the first slide and, um…there’s something here that…please, come look at this.”

He and all his aides went, like children rushing across the playground, to crowd up next to the microscope and look.

They weren’t used to patients who weren’t dead. One of them hipchecked the surgical cart into her table. It rattled up against her side, all shiny clamps and forceps and saws and scalpels, so perfectly within reach with everybody’s back to her that she thought at first she must be hallucinating.

Then she reached. Her wrists, bound to the table’s frame, gave less than a quarter-inch, but her fingers were plenty long enough. They closed silently, with ridiculous ease, upon the long handle of a scalpel and no one noticed. They were still clustered at the microscope, every one of them whispering and wanting a turn, fascinated by whatever they saw in whichever sample they’d taken, as she turned the scalpel around and sliced through the duct tape. She cut herself a little, not deep, no big deal. Then she held the scalpel right, sliced it across her other wrist, and then her chest, and then sat up.

‘Stay busy,’ she thought, cutting through tape at her thighs, her knees, her ankles. ‘Look at that blood. Fascinating blood. Really make it work for you. Don’t look at me.’

“That isn’t human,” the doctor said, and all the others seemed to sigh at once, the burden of naming taken ably onto his shoulders. “That’s…I know what that is, but that’s got to be from one of…them.”

She padded barefoot across the tiles, each slap of her feet like a cannon and how could they not hear it? But they didn’t. They didn’t and they were shocked when she grabbed the doctor by his collar and thrust the scalpel under his throat.

She cut him. She didn’t mean to and it wasn’t deep, but it poured blood in curtains over his white smock and made his nurses scream, just like it was the only blood anyone had ever seen in this chamber of horrors.

“Show me your hands,” she said. “All of you. Let me see them, or I swear to God, I will end you.”

They put up their hands fast, like yang’ti do in Cottonwood, flinching with fear and breathing fast, too horrified to make a sound. Their eyes were all the same—a great, glossy confusion over terror, as if she were the maniac in the room.

There was a freezer in the far wall, where they kept the bodies, she assumed. It needed a keycard to unlock, which the doctor did at her command, fumbling so that it took him three tries. On the inside, a hanging Hell of alien corpses, but no key-console and no latch.
Door Does Not Open
said a helpful sign.

“Get in,” she said.

They tried to argue with her. She cut the doctor again, this time on purpose, across his hands, his livelihood, as deep as she could go. She felt the scalpel grate on bone, saw his fingers wilt when his tendons severed, heard him and all his assistants shriek. They got in. She slammed the door. Leaned on it. Looked down at the blood on her hand and her feet and her hospital gown, and threw up without warning. Not a lot, she hadn’t eaten anything, but she felt better when it was done.

There was no time for this, no time. She kept the scalpel and the doctor’s keycard and ran out into the main bio-lab, the butcher’s lab.

No one was here. She guessed they were all in the freezer now. Hoped so, because she couldn’t stop to explore. Van Meyer had brought them in through one door, the examining room was behind her, and that left only one way to go. The doctor’s card worked for her just fine and she was out in the hall.

Doors, on every side of her, in the longest hall in the world. She ran, right to left, pressing her face to the tiny glass windows of each. Cells, nothing but metal boxes with yang’ti in them. She started to open the first she came to, realized the prisoner within would almost certainly kick her in two as soon as she gave him the opportunity, and left him, anguished, to find Sanford.

He was here, he had to be here. She careened from one wall to the other, banging on glass to make the occupants look at her, then racing on. No Sanford, no T’aki, but they had to be here.

“What the—Hey! Hey you!”

Oh Christ, a guard. Sarah ran faster, her breath coming in little gasping screams she did not hear, frantically peering through windows and banging her fists as running boots ate up the hall and that itch grew between her naked shoulderblades, the itch where the bullets would go.

Sanford! He saw her, leapt up, hit the glass where she did, his eyes as wild as hers must be. She swiped the doctor’s card, changed the LockLite from red to green—

And was yanked backwards by one arm, feeling the snap of the fracture all the way up to her teeth. She screamed and the scream was barbed wire ripping out of her throat. Her vision greyed and the temptation to dive right in and faint was strong, oh yes, it was likely to be the only escape coming to her and only an idiot would try to fool herself into believing otherwise, but then again, she hadn’t been making a lot of smart decisions lately, had she?

Sarah fought back. Not being a fighter, she fought like a girl, reaching back with her good arm for a fistful of hair and pulling until she heard the tearing sound of his scalp coming up. She stomped on his feet. She banged the back of her head repeatedly into his face. She elbowed him in the groin. And at the very first slackening of his grip, she lunged for the door again, swiping the keycard and fumbling at the latch.