God, the things she and Doug had done to him.
Liv floundered forward, Mist clipping the plastic fern and tossing it, her elbow knocking arts-and-crafts projects from the wall, each item catching the blink of the holiday-light television before darkness ate it. She had to enter that darkness, sink into its tar pit. She dove into it. Doors appeared on either side. Her breath screeched through a pinholed throat. The first door was open, and it was, indeed, a bathroom, inside which three sets of eyes shone from the dark next to the toilet, though who could say it was three people? It could be one man with six eyes, couldn’t it? She felt thin, gray. The scant “biologic evidence” her dad had ranted about in the town square oozed from everything down here, just as it oozed in Liv’s backyard shed.
“Olivia? Olivia?” Faddon was in pursuit.
Other doors were open, too. In a room on the right, she discerned the outlines of what looked like bunk beds with shapes shivering beneath covers, as if she were the dreadful one, the cold-blooded invader. The last door on the right was shut, but a sound came from behind it that struck Liv as especially chilling. It was a throttled wheeze coming in the pattern of inhale, exhale.
A lone door waited at the end of the hall. Liv kicked it open. Her hand flew to the wall for a light switch. Light flooded from the ceiling, a bank of fluorescents ten times brighter than anything in the bunker, and that made sense, for this was the operating room, where it all happened.
A surgical table with wrist and ankle harnesses held the room’s center, while cabinets and shelves gleamed with instruments more threatening than the Armory’s weapons: scalpels, forceps, syringes, hemostats, scissors, tweezers, needles, suction tubing. Liv’s heart skipped, skipped. There was a low hum, and Liv turned to see a refrigerated cabinet, inside which rested, in painstaking rows, bottles of solutions in a vivid array of colors.
“He was sick.”
Faddon’s voice, right behind her. Liv whirled to face him, swiping Mist through the bluish light, missing Faddon’s tunic by inches. She backpedaled into the operating table. Faddon’s white mask was blinding in so much light. He held out two hands in an appeal for calm.
“Lymphoma,” Faddon said. “Stage four. You may have noticed unusual behavior in him at home. An inability to sleep or eat? Spells of inattention? Bursts of uncharacteristic emotion? He wasn’t going to live, Olivia. Lymphoma spreads rapidly. He had one year at the outside. But he had a friend. A friend who knew of the Biatalik Program, what we were doing down here, what we were capable of doing.”
The bullet-caved face of Major Dawkins again raced through Liv’s mind, and she mourned its gored tatters.
“This was practically Lee’s home,” Faddon said affectionately, surveying the room through his mask. “He received more treatment than most. I saw to it. We’d barely begun, of course, when he first ran away—without clothing, I might add. He was in a terrible state. He wouldn’t have remembered a thing. As I said, we were not equipped to go after him. But I was happy when he returned. The cancer had spread so terribly by then.”
Liv thought of how sick her father was that last year, how, during the final hunt in Black Glade, he’d had to pull himself along with tree trunks.
“But let me tell you something, Olivia. We did beat that cancer. It was everywhere, in every organ, and we erased it. Other changes occurred, of course, but change is good. Change is progress. Dr. Nance didn’t see it that way, but she lost faith. She’s the one who brought the reporter here. Is he how you found us? It’s a pity, the only great failure of Biatalik. Dr. Nance betrayed every man down here, your father included. While all I did was try to make him a better Lee Fleming than ever.”
Liv couldn’t help but follow Faddon’s wandering gaze. Gripping the railing of the operating table, she shared the same view her father had had all those times he’d lain prone atop it, and suddenly, with an almost audible snap, everything came together, each piece of legend he’d doled out to students. Lee’s tall tales had been remarkably accurate, only confused by the formulas Faddon and Nance had pumped into him.
The Floating Pumpkin wasn’t some mystical alien globe, radiating anesthetic before retracting into the ceiling. It was the adjustable surgical lamp that hovered over the table. The skinners didn’t shed their blue skins, they shed their blue scrubs, and the reason Lee had insisted they didn’t have mouths was because they’d worn surgical masks during operations. The two giant tubes Lee had said suctioned him into the skinner spacecraft were, of course, the twin silos. And the Green Man? That towering, silent, omnipresent loomer? It was an old-fashioned movie poster tacked to the wall, Frankenstein with a lime-colored Boris Karloff shambling toward the viewer. It was an incongruous detail that would have leaped out at any man secured to this table.
“A gift from Dr. Nance.” Faddon’s hands were clasped at his chest. “Her little joke. She called me Dr. Frankenstein. I keep it there in remembrance of happier times.”
“You turned my dad into a monster,” Liv gasped, even as she knew that what had happened in her shed was just as foul as what had happened here.
“Your father achieved a higher state. To release one’s grip on one’s physical form—it’s what I’ve been saying: It’s freedom. Think of it. Wars, terrorism, radicalization, all of it would disappear if every human being was their own individual race, if there was no more this group versus that. The men down here have become the very idea and spirit of humanity. The divine spark itself. The closest to angels the world has ever known.”
Faddon smoothed a crease in the poster.
“I only wish I could join them. But someone has to mix the solutions. Operate the instruments. It’s why I wear the mask. So they aren’t discouraged by the unexceptionality of my face. The orphans are my children, and any good father sacrifices for his children. You know that more than anyone, don’t you?”
She did, and it would haunt her for as long as she was cursed to live, but instead of shrinking back against the cold steel of the table, Liv took advantage of Faddon’s distraction and plunged forward, slashing with Mist to make sure he kept away. What he’d said struck her like a spear. Children, a father. The Biatalik prisoners had a mother, too, didn’t they? The woman who’d given Faddon the Frankenstein poster: Dr. Nance. Liv ought to flee, get out of here before being turned into one of these things, yet the final uncoded detail from Lee Fleming’s ravings teased her.
The Whistler.
Liv rushed from the room into the hall and threw open the first door, the one from behind which she’d heard the wheeze. The room was very dark, and there was no light switch she could feel. She entered anyway, sensing beneath her feet dirt, not concrete. She bumbled forward, blindly swinging Mist, until her shoe struck a hard object. She looked down. It was stone. She knelt. A stone block, and carved into it were figures the darkness didn’t permit her to read, though her fingers identified them as letters.
It was a grave marker. This was a cemetery. Liv stood and staggered, and her eyes, still adjusting, found another marker, then another, then, popping like mushrooms, a dozen more spread across the dirt. Not all of Biatalik’s subjects had survived, and here was where they were buried, here was where Lee Fleming, if he’d been luckier, would have ended up.