Ash Mistry and the World of Darkness (17 page)

Ash frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He plans to kill her. It is Savage’s nature to betray. Surely you know that?”

Yes, of course he did. Savage had conned Parvati out of her father’s scrolls back in the nineteenth century. He’d killed Ash before the Iron Gates. He’d tricked him in order to get into Lanka. For all his grandeur, power and ambition, Savage was just a thief. Plain and simple. “I’ve got to warn her,” said Ash.

“Why would she believe you?”

“If it just makes her mistrust Savage, even a little, puts her on her guard, that’s good enough.”

“Why do you want to? She’s as evil as he is. They deserve one another.”

“No, Rishi. I know Rani. She might call herself queen of the demons, but she’s been my friend for hundreds of reincarnations. She’s my friend in this one too, but she just doesn’t know it yet.”

“It must be a most powerful friendship.”

Ash stopped. How many times had she saved his life and he hers? Countless times, over more centuries than history knew. “It is.” He walked to the iron door. “When is she down next?”

“Who knows? This is the first time she’s been here in months.” Rishi hobbled over. “But what’s the rush?”

“Savage has perfected his drug. He’s going to launch it in a few days. What you have here is going to happen all over the world.”

Rishi went pale. “He is insane.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

Ash looked down into the deeper caverns, into the blackness. He licked his lips. What had Rishi said? Wind on his face.

“What is it, boy? What do you think?”

What was down there? There was only one way to find out. He made up his mind and grasped Rishi’s arm. “I think it’s time we got the hell out of here.”

“D
on’t look,” said Parvati, but much too late.

They hung from hooks, swaying, cocooned in plastic. Ashoka’s flashlight caught on pallid faces and empty eyes.

But what was worse was the way they … sloshed. Fluids had run from the bodies and collected at the bottom of the bags. A few had sprung leaks so the blood and fat and gore dripped steadily into pink puddles on the hard, ceramic floor. Thin rivulets ran to chrome drains and Ashoka felt sick thinking about what they must have swum through to get here. The odour of disinfectant burnt his nostrils, but it still failed to mask the putrid, humid stench of decomposition. A chunk of bile stirred high in his throat. “Those chimneys …”

“They’re burning the bodies.”

Ashoka stumbled back into the lift. He stared at the floor, trying to clear his mind. “You knew?”

“I suspected. I’ve come across this sort of operation before.”

“Oh, Jesus – Lucks!” Was she here? Or his mum? His dad?

No. No, not after all this.

He couldn’t raise his gaze. He was too terrified of what he might see,
whom
he might see. But how could he not look? He needed to know. What was better? To live in ignorant hope or to risk seeing Lucky hanging upside down in one of those bags?

“You go back. I’ll look for them,” said Parvati. But even her voice faltered.

“No, I have to come. I have to see.”

Parvati took his hand and led Ashoka into the lab.

They weren’t human any more. Not just in death, but in what had been done to them. Their flashlights shone upon scaled skin and fur and there were feathers and odd, misjoined limbs, sometimes human, sometimes not, that had grown out of bellies or chests. One old man had teeth within his eyelids.

But no one Ashoka recognised.

They walked silently among the corpses. Goosebumps prickled over his bare arms as the chilled air blasted out, and yet Ashoka sweated, lost in this inverted forest of the dead.

The lights came on. Parvati pulled him behind a storage cabinet. Blue neon tubes flickered and hummed and then bank upon bank awoke, filling the white chamber with cold irradiance. The doors at the far end slammed open, a trolley clanked over the threshold, and Ashoka heard voices talking in what he thought was Cantonese. He peeked a glance as they walked by.

The trolley was three decks high, stainless steel, and the two men with it unhooked and lay a body on each shelf. They might as well have been picking the Christmas turkey for all the interest they took. They heaved and got the trolley rolling back out. The last man flicked the lights back off.

A few seconds later Ashoka and Parvati followed through the same big double doors and found themselves in a corridor of red-painted brickwork and concrete. Drainpipes ran along the ceiling and Ashoka spotted the dark stains where joints had leaked. The two men and the trolley vanished around a corner.

They crept along the corridor, eyes peeled, Parvati ahead with her knife out. Ashoka felt he was leaving a trail of sweat; every muscle was tight and his nerves were shredded. The doors off the corridor were stainless steel and heavy, down a tall step to prevent contaminants running out into the corridor. The entire underground complex stank of antiseptic. Ashoka caught the distant roar of a furnace and gulped. The pitch rose and he knew what was being burnt within.

They were getting nowhere. Sooner or later those two guys they’d taken out would be missed, or would wake up, or be found wrapped under the desk, and then all hell would break loose. What they needed was a set of floor plans.

Ashoka peered through a glass panel in one of the doors … and met the gaze of a man looking back. The man frowned through a pair of thick spectacles, then his mouth dropped open. A clipboard clattered on the floor.

“Parvati!” Ashoka shouted.

She moved, hurling the door open. She jumped over a steel table as the man dashed towards the far wall and the red alarm button upon it. He stumbled over a stool and it clanged like a hammer on tin as it bounced on the tiles. Parvati sprang in front of him and wove her hands around his arms, twisting them over his shoulder and driving him to his knees so he screamed.

Ashoka checked the corridor, then locked the door and hung a coat over the glass panel before joining them.

He stared at the line of cold steel tables. They weren’t flat, but sloped into a central gulley that ran to a small drain at the foot. Not just tables – dissection slabs. Over each hung a small camera and microphone, and a gas mask dangled from a valve. The slabs had four sets of straps, one at head level, then shoulders, waist and ankles. But you didn’t need to strap down corpses.

They’re for live experiments.

Neatly arranged beside each was a tray of medical instruments, including electric saws and drills. The slabs were thankfully empty, but even walking past them Ashoka felt sick. Jars filled nearby shelves. He didn’t dare look at what was in them.

“You’re breaking my arm!” cried the man. He panted with fear and panic, and stared from Parvati to Ashoka and back. “This is restricted access.”

Parvati held him with one hand and peered at his security tag. “I can see why, Dr Wells.”

Ashoka went to the man’s desk. The laptop was open and there was a paused video clip on the screen. It showed Dr Wells, dressed in a head-to-foot blood-spattered bio-suit, standing over a man strapped to the slab. Or what was left of one.

Dr Wells paled. “And that is not for public viewing.”

This is real. This is not some computer game or movie or fake footage. That is a person on that slab.

“Who was he?” Ashoka asked, his voice tight.

“Who was who?”

“The man lying there.”

Dr Wells frowned. “I don’t know. He just had a test number. It says so on the log.”

Rage pounded in Ashoka’s temples. “What did you do to him?”

“Please,” whispered the doctor. “I just work here. I don’t make the decisions. I just—”

“Follow orders?” hissed Parvati. She bent his arm back a little more. Dr Wells whimpered.

“What did you do to him?” said Ashoka. “Or should I press ‘play’?”

Sweat covered Dr Wells’s face and it was an unpleasant ruby hue, almost as pumped as his bloodshot eyes. “We were testing Lord Savage’s new cure. A retro-anti-virus. Number one.”

“RAVN-1,” said Parvati. “Savage’s sick joke.”

“What’s it do?” asked Ashoka.

“Cures. Everything.” But he was hiding something.

“That’s not possible.” Ashoka glanced at the screen and the twisted mess of a human. “Those bodies, they had scales. Wings. That doesn’t look like any sort of cure to me.”

Dr Wells cleared his throat. “We’ve been experimenting on melding the DNA structure from different species. Adding their strengths and abilities to those of a human. There have been some … negative results.”

“What are you turning them into, if not humans?” asked Parvati.

Dr Wells didn’t reply until she twisted his arm some more. “It turns people into demons. Rakshasas.”

Parvati leaned over the man, her face centimetres from his. “You can’t.”

“We’ve found a way. Given early enough, the drug infects the child with a rakshasa soul.”

Ashoka grabbed the man’s throat. “You’ve tested this on kids? I should kill you right now.”

Parvati touched his hand and Ashoka reluctantly forced his fingers apart. “But the person on the video, he’s an adult,” he said.
And all those bodies hanging in the storage chamber.

“The effects on adults are … varied. They’ve not had the initial dose, so it’s a tremendous shock to the system. Some transform, partially. Most have a psychotic breakdown as the rakshasa soul tries to enter them.”

“You mean it drives them mad?”

“Yes. In layman’s terms, they turn into bloodthirsty crazed monsters. Usually with cannibalistic tendencies.”

“So what’s the cure?” Ashoka asked.

“Cure?”

“How do you save the ones infected?”

“There isn’t one. Savage never wanted one developed.”

How utterly insane. “How long to make one?”

Dr Wells blinked in surprise. “Years, if it’s even possible. You don’t understand – this is the melding of magic and science. Everything we do is groundbreaking. We have no map of where this will lead, let alone any real idea of how to get there.”

Ashoka gazed at the screen again. Then he searched the desk until he found a data stick. “I want everything copied on to this. Everything.”

“I can’t—”

Ashoka snarled. “You do as I say or the next person on that slab will be you.”

Dr Wells needed no further encouragement.

“Test subjects,” Ashoka said. “You said you have test subjects.”

“A few left.” Dr Wells pointed to a door at the far end of the room. “We were going to euthanise them now the tests are over.”

Ashoka started towards the door. “Over?”

“Yes, we’ve finished developing RAVN-1 now.”

Ashoka glared at the man. “My sister … my parents were brought here.”

Dr Wells glanced over. “I only work the evening shift. I … I don’t know who’s in there.”

Ashoka was by the door. “Give me the code.”

“1839. They’re all the same.”

The corridor was narrow, with doors down either side. Each was barcoded and had a small shutter and key pad. He went to the first cell.

1839.

Bolts hidden between two solid steel plates slid out of their sockets within the door frame, and Ashoka took hold and heaved.

“Hello?”

Empty. There was a basin and a toilet and a mattress on the floor. The place was bare and cold and reeked of misery.

Ashoka took another step further down the corridor into the darkness.

A
shoka’s eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom. The dim lights were hazy and red and sickly. The heavy antiseptic didn’t hide the other smells that lingered there: the sweat, the stale air and the damp dread. An air-conditioning vent droned and rattled over his head like a wave of insects. He cleared his throat, trying to loosen the tightness he felt there. He forced himself further in, even though every instinct yelled at him to run and run far, so afraid was he of what he might find.

“Is anyone there?” he asked.

Voices murmured. Someone scratched at the door from within, and cackled. A fist banged frantically against the metal, and sobs shook inside.

1839. 1839. 1839. 1839. 1839. Ashoka punched the numbers into each door, pulling at the handle before rushing to the next. “Come out. Come out. Please.”

One by one, blinking and afraid, they emerged. They wore medical smocks and paper clothes and were dishevelled and frail-looking. Men and women and children, mostly local Chinese, taken by Savage and his lackeys for his experiments. And these were the lucky few.

Lucky.

“Lucks?” Ashoka whispered her name, afraid if he said it too loud his hopes might shatter. “Lucks?”

One man came up to the doorway, stared with slack-jawed amazement, sobbed and pulled at his own hair as he dared to step out into freedom.

“Lucks?” Ashoka raised his voice. “It’s me.”

A woman clutching her son brushed past Ashoka, stopping only to look at him with a mixture of fear and relief. Her son pressed his face against her and looked nowhere.

Ashoka’s heart beat so loudly he trembled. This beat was the thump of some dance. He was breathing hard, trying to stay focused, trying to stop the horror from overwhelming him. Or perhaps the dance, this mad frenzy within him, was making him gasp. Ashoka wiped the sweat off his face. “Lucks?”

Please let them be OK. I don’t care about anything else.

What would he give for them to be OK? Everything. Here in the gloom, with the corpses in plastic bags and the ash rising from the chimneys, Ashoka promised all he had to any god that might be listening.

Mum. Dad. Lucks. How could he live without them? It was too horrible to contemplate.

Contemplate it now.

No. He couldn’t think like that, but as he opened door after door and didn’t see them the dreadful thought wouldn’t go away. Some cells held captives, afraid and ill and blinking in the light, but others were empty. He’d come too late for them.

Was he too late now?

As Ashoka crept forward, so did the nightmare that they were gone.

All that he’d taken for granted now came back to haunt him. Those times he’d barged past his mum in his rush to be somewhere else. Those times he’d ignored his dad while he concentrated on some new computer game. Those times he’d shut the door on Lucks because he didn’t want to play with her. Those times he’d wanted to be alone.