It wasn’t as silent as a cemetery should be. The whistle was there, clearer now, a sibilant gasp followed by a flapping exhale like air spluttering from a balloon. It was the sort of squeaking, repetitive noise, she thought, that would have penetrated the brain of anyone on the operating table. Liv took another step, tripped past another stone. Something smelled bad. Like sweat, like urine. She noticed that her own body blocked the light from the open door behind her. She stepped to the side to let the light reach the back wall.
Liv never got a good look. The light was never bright enough, her eyes never acclimatized. But she got a glimpse, and for that she’d forever be sorry. Little was left of Dr. Nance that could be considered human. The outline of her body, visible against the wall, had the contour of a beached seal, a shapeless blob lacking observable limbs. What Liv could see of her skin suggested a rhinoceros texture speckled with scabs from continual injections. The Nance-thing rippled as she shuddered with wretched life. Embedded in the fatty tissue, like raisins into dough, were the scattered vestiges of obsolete parts: a pinkie finger, an eye, a nipple, a sprinkle of teeth, and there, in some random spot, a mouth, a gash that puffed labored breaths with a birdlike whistle.
Faddon’s shadow moved in front of the light source, blotting out Nance. He’d insisted his orphans were angels, but here in the cemetery, his shadow only shrugged.
“Dr. Nance still plays a vital role. She’s the alpha tester of every serum I make. Yes, she’s being punished, but honestly, I couldn’t do this work without her.”
Liv ran. She booted a grave marker, and the pain in her toe was explosive, but she didn’t stop, shoving Faddon, taking no ownership of Mist as one of its blades sank into the doctor’s shoulder. Faddon yelped and fell against a wall, taking Mist with him. He grappled for Liv as he fell, but she ripped away, snapping the cord on the smiley face mask. For a second, she saw Faddon’s face, a soft, revoltingly ordinary face, and then he was twisting in pain, clamping a hand to a wound that had begun to well blood.
Liv turned and shouted. “Run! All of you! He’s hurt! Get out! Get out now! Go!”
She leaped to the next room, heart at triple time, and kicked the door.
“Get out! Get out!”
At the next room she shook the post of a bunk bed.
“Go! Go! Go!”
Room to room she ran, shouting until her voice broke. Most men remained in place. But a few, steeled criminals not fully bent into subservient beings, took heed. Liv felt the motion of warm bodies like circulating blood. She flapped her arms, herding them, and heard the scrunch of their bodies colliding near the kitchen, the moans from their gnarled palates, the uncertain thuds of legs no longer built to scale the rungs of a ladder.
“Olivia?”
Liv turned, and in the backlight of the operating room saw Faddon, his smiley face askew, coming down the hall, trailing blood. Liv, her nerves on fire, suffered seconds of struggle. Should she help him? No, he was a surgeon, Dr. Frankenstein, and would sew himself back together. A more critical thought: Should she go back and help Dr. Nance the only way she knew how, by finding Mist and driving its blade into the boneless lard of her body, over and over, until she was finally dead? The decision was made for her: After what Faddon said next, she ran and didn’t look back.
“Bring back your father?” he begged. “I miss him so much. And you can join us, too, Olivia. You can be one of us, too!”
31.
The sky was molten metal that dusk was cooling to embers. Still, it was real light from a real sun, and Liv found herself blinded upon passing through the silo’s hatch. Her knee rammed the metal lip, and she fell to the dirt, her broken toe shooting pain up her calf, her palms skidding across gravel. She rolled onto her back and held her hands above her. They bled, but they were hands, human hands, with smooth skin and five fingers, and she wanted to kiss them and taste the clean, untainted blood.
She gripped a rung on the outside of the silo and hauled herself up. She thought she heard a buzzing from below, and her heart punched. What if Faddon had hit a fail-safe button that would rouse the military to belatedly mop up the mess of the Biatalik Program? Hurry, she told herself. She took a step. Her foot flared in agony. She gasped and sobbed. She thought of the cross-country meets, the long jogs up to the Dawkins place, the endless miles she’d run for no good reason when now, right now, was the only run that ever mattered. Run, she ordered herself. Run!
She did. The pain came in rapid, hot blasts, like the bang-snaps Doug tossed in for free with firework orders. She pushed herself across the lawn and into the front yard, where she collapsed against the car’s still-warm hood. From there, gasping, she saw lonely, lumbering forms, just three of them, visible against the vast cavity of Black Glade. These were the only three brave enough to escape Biatalik, beings who’d known flat floors for so long they pitched and heaved on outdoor surfaces. One moved in a sideways skitter. Was he the one with multiple legs? One pulled himself along, branch to branch, with gibbon arms. Did he have any legs at all? Still another crawled on his belly, his serpentine spine cresting from and diving into dead grasses.
She felt nauseated, grappled at the station wagon door, and dropped down inside. What if Faddon had been right? The Biatalik prisoners seemed to have deduced their only real option, the same one taken by Frankenstein’s monster: dissolve into the woods and become Black Glade myth that would plague generations of children to come.
Carbajal’s jeer crackled from the dead car radio.
You think you know what’s best, do you?
Carbajal was correct, and with the subtlety of a swinging scythe. She hadn’t risked everything to save A when A was just some creature from a distant place. She was no better than any other torturer who followed Doug’s Army Field Manual 2-22.3, people who chose, with self-serving brutality, who deserved to be treated with humanity and who didn’t.
Liv cranked the ignition to cover the journalist’s cackle and shifted to reverse. She might have had trouble getting here, but she knew just how to get to Doug’s house; the whole world tipped that way—you only had to let the decline pull you. Dragons of dust spread their wings behind her. Fifteen minutes later, she was seeing the landmarks that hadn’t changed over the three years since she’d been there. The empty, baleful piggery building. The abandoned church over which graduating classes spray-painted their years. The dirt strip that led to Doug’s home.
Trees here were a dying species, weeds their conquerors. Even in the early twilight she could see the oily black half acre into which Doug had said he’d shot a flare before having to call the fire department. The damage was worse than he’d suggested. His damage usually was. She pulled into his driveway and stood there in the stillness.
The fireworks garage had fallen prey to an explosives malfunction Doug had never mentioned. The roof was an improvised patchwork of plywood. Doug’s car was gone, which meant there was no point in going inside. There would be no Doug, no A, nothing. The only proof he’d been here over the previous months was half of a Ping-Pong table that he’d set up against the wall to play by himself. Rain had softened and scrunched the table into an arachnid fist of metal.
Liv got back into the station wagon and sat there, engine idling, watching new dragons grow in the taillight crimson. She thought of the Biatalik runaways. If they were found, they’d be shoved into cells, the same kind that Doug had wanted to create for Subject A, Subject B, and so on, sketched alongside Lee’s Resurrection Update margin notes. When Liv recalled those sketches now, she connected them to stickler eraser burns and revision lines of Doug’s corn maze designs. She might have even thought of it herself, the secret of where Doug was hiding, if her phone hadn’t vibrated right then.