Pandemonium (20 page)

“Now, now,
shinka
!” He glared at the men. “What have you to say about this?”

“Um, we did find a passageway to the room Sasha was in, Chief, and we thought we should check it out. We didn’t know she was inside!”

“You’re Peeping Toms!” Sasha shouted, pointing at each of them. “They totally heard me and they barged in anyway. Didn’t you?”

“All right, what about this, damn it?” Maxim demanded.

“We did not mean to intrude on her, Chief. We were looking for Nell Binswanger.”

“We’re very sorry, Miss Dragolovich!”

“I was
naked
! Just like the
last time
you barged in on me!”

“We closed the door as soon as we heard her, Chief!”

Maxim glared at the men with ominous fury.

Sasha ran around his desk and kissed him. “Bye,
Papochka
!” Then she trotted to the spiral stairs and waved at the guards before flipping them off and leaving them to fend for themselves.

“I can’t believe she got here before us, Chief,” said one of the confused men. “We came straight here.…”

“She’s explored more of this palace than anyone,” Maxim fired back in Russian. “Find Nell Binswanger instead of spying on my
naked daughter
! You are to leave Sasha alone, do you
hear me
? How many times must I tell you! Can you
manage that
?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks, Chief!”

“What if—?”

“What?” Maxim snapped.

“A ghost may have gotten her.”

“They seem to be everywhere in the city, Chief.”

“She might have wandered off by herself and—”

“
Get out!
Find her! Before I feed you to a ghost!”

4:45 P.M.

The scientists in the maternity ward cranked the latch of the door to the storage room and pulled it open a crack.

Geoffrey dumped a can of Vienna sausages into the room, and they slammed the hatch shut.

Otto listened to the door with a stethoscope, noticing his cloven right thumb, the nail deformed after a Henders rat hatchling had split it down the middle on Henders Island. He placed the head of the scope to different parts of the door and closed his eyes as he osculated.

“What if Henders animals don’t like the salt in the Vienna sausages?” Dimitri said.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of sodium in those things,” Katsuyuki agreed.

“For that matter, why do they like to eat us?” Otto said. “We’ve got salt in our blood, sweat, and tears, just like the ocean.”

“It’s a myth that we have the same amount of salt in us as the ocean,” Geoffrey said. “Seawater has three and a half times the concentration of salt that we have in our blood. We might have the same amount of salt in our blood as the ocean did when our ancestors crawled out on land. But now there is enough of a difference in seawater to trigger a warning signal in these things and not enough in our blood to keep us off the menu. They probably have about as much salt in their blood as we do. They just can’t slough off excess salt, so when they’re exposed to saltwater the magnesium buildup anesthetizes and kills them. Hear anything, Otto?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“OK, so next, a visual test.” Geoffrey turned. “Anyone have a camera with a flash?”

Katsuyuki produced a small camera from his shirt pocket.

Geoffrey charged the flash, and when they opened the door, Geoffrey stuck the camera in, pointed it at the floor, set off the flash, and pulled his hand in as they slammed the door. They saw the picture of all seven Vienna sausages lying unmolested on the white tile floor of the storage room. “The room’s clear,” Geoffrey said.

“What makes you so sure?” Dimitri asked.

“We’re sure,” Otto said.

“Let’s rig a way to open the far hatch, let in some Henders critters, and then close the door, all from here,” Geoffrey said. “Then we’ll set up saltwater sprayers to collect their repellent.”

“Hey!” Dimitri noticed a security camera view on his laptop sitting on the nearest lab counter: two limousines were arriving in front of the hospital. Maxim and his entourage got out and rushed up the stairs from the street.

“Great,” Otto said.

Maxim entered through the far hatch. “Have you figured it out, Geoffrey?” Maxim asked.

Geoffrey turned to him. “We will need saltwater, Maxim.”

“We have our own ocean,” Maxim replied. “What else?”

Geoffrey held his eyes. “Got any ice chests? Big ones? Fifteen of them would be good. And something we can spray water with.”

“Throw in duct tape, rope, and string. And some plastic bags and cable ties,” Otto said. As a former NASA systems engineer, Otto considered these items essential prototyping materials.

“And cheesecloth,” Geoffrey said.

“E-mail a list to me,” Maxim said to Dimitri. “I’m very glad to see you’re making progress, Geoffrey. Very good!”

“Where’s my wife, Maxim?” Geoffrey said.

Irritation returned to Maxim’s face. “We will bring her to you soon. If you do not complete this task, it won’t matter, Geoffrey.”

“God damn it, where is she, you son of a bitch!” Geoffrey glared at him. “Are you trying to blackmail me? Where is she?”

Maxim looked at him, a startled look in his eyes, which surprised Geoffrey. “Carry on, Dr. Binswanger,” he said gravely. “I only meant that all of us are in danger if you fail. Your wife has managed to get herself lost in Pobedograd. I cannot guarantee her safety. Only you can do that, by doing what you can to stop these creatures.”

“Why did you bring them here?”

“For insurance.”

“To use as weapons?”

“When your enemy has very big weapons, you need them, too.”

“You can’t
aim
these weapons, Maxim! Not at a country or even a continent. They will destroy everything, everywhere, if they ever get out! What were you planning to do with them?”

“If they ever tried to attack this city, they would trigger their own destruction.”

“Who is
they,
Maxim?”

Maxim leaned forward, his ice-blue eyes piercing Geoffrey. “The human race.”

After a brief word with Dimitri in Russian, he departed. As he passed, his two armed guards replanted their feet against the wall behind them.

4:49 P.M.

Only when Sasha brought food in and called her name did Nell come out of hiding. “Thank you, Sasha,” she sighed. “I think Ivan saved me! He’s a very smart dog.”

“Of course,” Sasha said. “Dogs are as smart as their owners.”

“You may be right.” Nell smiled. “Interesting theory.”

“I brought you chocolate cake. But you have to give me a bite. Here is your dinner, madam,” Sasha handed her a plate of piled food with a dramatic flourish. “I even brought you a fork.” She handed her a silver fork and then ran, dive-bombing the lavender bed.

“Thank you,” Nell said. Through the floor and walls behind Sasha, she saw the mega-medusa’s arms now opening on the lake bottom.

Nell sat with her on the edge of the bed, absently nibbling on a couple of eclectic forkfuls of food, finding herself eating a green bean, chocolate cake, and chicken simultaneously and not minding it. She was famished. Ivan whimpered in front of her, sitting as still as one of the Queen’s guards.

Sasha scooped a piece of chocolate cake with two fingers and ate it gluttonously in front of the frozen Samoyed. “You shush, Ivan! I’ll have to take him for a walk in the farm, again.”

Ivan barked and Sasha laughed.

“Sasha,” Nell began.

“I got you two bottles of water.” Sasha pulled the small chilled bottles from her purse.

“Thank you.” Nell reached for one and took a grateful swig. “You said Geoffrey’s in a lab with the other scientists on the other side of the city. Right? Can you communicate with them?”

“Hmm. Maybe.” Sasha lay back and Ivan leaped onto the bed next to her, licking her face. “We could use the Undernet. Right, Ivan?” She squealed as she pushed off the dog.

“The Undernet?” Nell asked.

8:01 P.M.

Maxim looked into Pandemonium through the oval window embedded in the wall of the small room fifty feet above the conservatory. On the other side of the thick glass was the steel gondola deck, which had been cantilevered from the cave wall. The surface of the subterranean sea was eighty feet below.

On the deck, six men in hazmat suits reeled up buckets of salt water beside the large gray gondola, which looked like two airplane noses fused together and suspended by thick cables reaching out into the gloom.

The men pulled up plastic jugs dipped in the lake and strung on ropes. One man capped and stacked the filled jugs on the landing. In the darkness above, flocks of pink and orange bubbles rose to join a mass like a sunlit cloud near the high ceiling.

“Hey, Chief, it looks like a crowd of gammies are coming,” came a voice across an intercom speaker. “Start moving the water in before they get here,” Maxim said. He opened the hatch and waved at them. “Come on, come on!”

Maxim slid the plastic jugs one after another across the floor as one man passed them through the hatch.

Two orbs dangling crimson streamers like the tentacles of Portuguese man-of-wars drifted down toward the men on the landing. “Chief!”

Galia reached the top of the spiral stairs and saw Maxim pulling jugs in through the open hatch. Galia looked through the window to the right of the hatch and saw two floating man-of-wars release a shower of red embers over two men on the gondola deck. He heard them scream as the flaring embers burned through their suits and the paralyzing nematocysts touched their skin with circuit-blowing agony.

Even as both men fell over the rail into the lake, Maxim yelled, “
Keep going!
They are gone! Keep going, damn it!”

“Maxim!” Galia hissed.

Maxim turned, his eyes glinting at him like knifepoints, before he turned back to the men on the landing.
“Come on, come on!”

The other men hauled in their last jugs of water and began capping them with fumbling hands. Then, from all directions, a tide of gammarids brimmed over the landing like beagle-sized army ants. They tore into the men’s suits and climbed over their bodies, covering them up to their heads.

Maxim grabbed the last bucket and shut the hatch on them. He cranked the wheel and gave Galia a look as bloody as his murder. They heard the dying shrieks fade away on the intercom. “Get some men to carry this water, Galia,” he said, turning off the intercom with his fist.

“Maxim—”

“
NOW,
Galia!” Maxim screamed.

9:20 P.M.

Twenty 2.5-gallon jugs filled with salt water were carried into the lab by five of Maxim’s men. They also delivered ten large blue Igloo ice chests and two backpack agricultural sprayers that had come from the farm.

Otto inspected these last items. The sprayers shot through a nozzle at the end of a lance to cover a wide area while a pump on the other side of the red backpack tanks was operated by the other arm. “Yeah, these should work.”

Maxim came through the hatch from the garage downstairs and approached Geoffrey. “So, you have all you need, yes?”

“To each according to their need,” Geoffrey sneered.

“And from each according to their ability,” Maxim replied fiercely.

“You said you were a capitalist,” Geoffrey said.

“Don’t underestimate how serious I can be, Dr. Binswanger, when I must be. This is an emergency. And in emergencies the rules change.”

“That’s what every dictator says,” said Geoffrey.

Maxim reached down and grabbed Katsuyuki’s neck with his giant left hand and produced a handgun with his right. He placed the barrel of the gun on Katsuyuki’s forehead. “Next time I will pull trigger, yes?”

The biologist fell to the ground, making choking sounds.

“Now get it done!”
Maxim turned and left the room, closing the hatch to the garage behind him.

“He’s out of his fucking mind,” Otto said.

3:19 A.M. BRAZILIA TIME

Hender, Andy, Cynthea, and Zero flew twenty-nine thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean.

The humans slept as Hender quietly typed an entry on his laptop to soothe his worries, translating more fragments of the sels’ past from memory.

The 5th Darkness

Before the fifth darkness came, 29,498,517 years ago, one tribe had united and forced all other sels to follow Alok, their angry god.

But the giant waves tore off the last petal of Henderica—the place where the tribe of Alok had lived, and all its leaders were swallowed by the poison sea—all except for one. All of Kuzu’s tribe descended from him.

12:01 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

Kuzu reviewed YouTube videos of Hender neutralizing his attacker in the human city of London, approving of his technique. But the hulking sel was increasingly angered by what humans were saying about Hender on the Internet.

Some humans continued to protest the sels’ imprisonment, and suggested their rights according to the “Geneva Conventions” and the “Constitution” were being violated. But others protested that sels were not people at all and that they were not protected by any law of man, and they used Hender’s act of self-defense as evidence that sels were dangerous.

“These beasts were not meant to live with us!” shouted one human on YouTube. “Their island was sinking until we interfered. They don’t belong on this planet with us. They are an abomination against God!” Kuzu’s fur boiled reds and purples as he journeyed through the Internet, a mounting rage banking in his mind.

9:53 P.M. MAXIM TIME

Hardly speaking to one another, the four scientists connected nozzles made from pinpricked latex gloves with surgical tubing attached to the drains of ice chests set on the top shelves of the storage room.

Working side by side, they clamped the tubes with old Soviet-style paper clips Maxim’s men had supplied. They used duct tape to patch garbage bags together, draping them down each side of the room to catch the water and drain it into six ice chests placed on the floor.

They carefully cranked open the lock of the far hatch and tied one rope to the top of the dog wheel on the door, hooking the rope around a pilaster of the shelves to the right of the hatch so that when they pulled on the rope, it would turn the dog wheel enough to unlatch and open it. Then they tied another rope to the center of the wheel to pull the door open wider.