Dead Space: Catalyst (26 page)

And then the creature, groaning, no longer human, began to crawl. A moment later, it tested its wings.

*   *   *

The screaming brought some of the other prisoners over to the hole. Henry watched them peer in, his hand near the button to call the guards. One of the men had his friends hold his arms and then he leaned out over the hole and looked down from a different vantage.

And then suddenly something strange happened. An odd batlike creature flashed up out of the hole and wrapped itself around the man’s head. The men holding him let go in surprise and he fell into the hole, and everyone who had been close began running back and away, scattering all through the circle and moving toward the cells. Some were even, he could see on another of the screens, up against the large door leading out to the ring in which Henry and the guards were, screaming, pounding against the door, begging to get out.

What the hell is going on?
wondered Henry. He summoned the guards and kept watching, zooming in close on the hole. What had it been? How had it gotten in? He kept the camera focused on the hole.

When the guards arrived at their station, he sounded the alarm for the prisoners to return to their cells. He let his eyes flick around to the other monitors. Some were already there; the others, though, made no move to do so. The number of prisoners pounding on the door leading out had increased. They weren’t moving.

His earpiece crackled. “All assembled, sir,” the leader of the guards said. “Open the door.”

“Just a moment,” said Henry, his attention back on the hole. He stared at it perhaps thirty seconds, perhaps slightly longer.

“This isn’t going to be another of those false alarms, is it?” the leader of the guards asked.

“No,” said Henry, half distracted. “I just have to figure out a way to get them away from the door.”

“How many of them are there?” asked the leader. “We can take control of the situation, I bet.”

“Kill them, you mean?” asked Henry.

“We don’t have to kill all of them,” said the guard. “We can stun some of them.”

Henry opened his mouth to reply, and then stopped. Something was happening on the monitor. Something was stirring in the hole.

38

This time when it came, it took Ensign Haley’s breath away. She hesitated, swaying for a moment, and then slipped from her chair and passed out.

She was standing with a woman dressed all in white, who it took her a moment to recognize as her mother. She was younger than she remembered her, and not ill, but there was no doubt about it: she was her mother. She had the same way of tilting her head when she asked a question and the way she moved and rubbed her hands, too, was just like how her mother had done it. No, it was her mother. There was no reason to doubt it.

Except that she was younger.

And not ill.

But surely there was a way to explain that. She was thinking of ways to explain it, thinking of explanations, when her mother asked, “Would you like to see my garden?”

“I’d be delighted,” she said.

And she was. She imagined her mother walking her through rows of vegetables, or walking her through flower beds humming with bees. They would walk and talk just as they had before her mother had gotten sick. But no, wait, her mother wasn’t sick now: she must have recovered. That was the explanation. That must be it.

But there were no flowers. There were no vegetables. Instead her mother took her around the corner and she saw, there, sprouting up from the earth a two-pronged thing that looked like long horns twisting around one another. It was gigantic, filling the whole plot of the garden and stretching high into the sky. That wasn’t a garden, was it? But her mother was guiding her to the thing and touching it, talking to her about how she grew it, how she cared for it. And then she simply stepped inside the thing and brought her daughter along with her. There she was, touching everything, pointing to each cell and bit of it, feeling her way around and through it.

“Because, you see,” said her mother, “the reason I’m telling you this is so that you can be an even better gardener than me.”

“Better than you?” she said.

Her mother nodded. “When you grow it, when you have your turn, it will be even better.”

*   *   *

When she woke up she was not on the floor but at her desk having scrawled into it her pad pages and pages of notes. They had all gone, she knew, to Grottor. But what would he do with them?

She tried to go back and look at old scrawls from earlier, to try to understand what was happening to her, what lesson she was supposed to learn, but they were no longer on the machine. They had been removed. Had she removed them? She didn’t remember. Maybe she had, but why would she? Grottor, then? Yes, maybe. But she trusted Grottor. Was she right to? Perhaps Grottor had taken the information from her, removed it and made it his own, and had thought he’d taken it away from her as well.

But she had it all inside, had it all in her head. She could feel it: it was part of her now.

Maybe she would go back to her room and write it down again, write it for herself this time, so that when the time came she could decide what to do with it. She would write it down and send it to friends, people she could trust.

No, Grottor would not be allowed to keep the information to himself. Anybody who wanted to be a gardener was welcome to it.

*   *   *

“I’ll be there in a few days,” the gray man insisted. “There’s no use arguing about it. We need her.”

“But she’s good at her job,” said Grottor. “She’s ambitious and smart and now that she’s given you what you wanted, she deserves to be left alone.”

The gray man shook his head. “There’s always more that we want,” he said. “And I think she has more to give. I think there’s more hidden inside of her than meets the eye. I need to crack her head open in person and get at it. If I’m right, she now carries the key to the next stage of the project.”

“But you can’t—”

“I can and will,” said the gray man.

39

She was going over the figures, looking at the other machines, trying to make sense of all the data and how it related, when she heard something. A kind of flapping. At first she ignored it, then something struck her door and she thought of the guard who had beaten his own head apart. Maybe he was not dead yet after all. Maybe he was trying to get up.

She stood slowly and made her way to the slot, even though it was not cut in such a way as to allow her to see the bottom of the door. But something was happening there; she could hear something, a crackling sound, like the sounds that logs make when they pop and crack in the fire. Not that she had ever seen them—wood was too valuable to waste on a fire—but she had watched the vids when she was a kid.

But that didn’t make sense. Who would start a fire here? And if there was one she’d smell it and see the smoke. And if not that, what could it be?

She knelt down and pressed her ear to the door. She could still hear sounds, but not much more clearly. It didn’t help any. She stood up again, tried again to look out, still saw nothing.

The noises continued for a while, and then stopped. She still waited, wondering what to do. And then a different noise started, the sound of movement, something sliding up the door. Yes, it must be the guard, she thought. He must be still alive after all. He must be standing up now.

She backed up a little, just to be careful. Would he be violent like he’d been before? Had the signal faded enough that he might have escaped whatever was troubling him?

His head rose to where she could see it in the slot and she caught her breath. His face was streaked with blood but something else had changed about it, too: the jaw was loose in a way it shouldn’t have been. It was hanging wrong. The head was oddly lumpy, perhaps where the skull had been broken, and the eyes had slipped farther in than they had been before.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He didn’t say anything, just stood where he was, staring at her through the slot.

“You should get immediate medical attention,” she said. “You’re very hurt. Perhaps in shock, too.”

She moved a little closer and suddenly he thrust his arm through the slot and tried to grab her with it. Only it wasn’t his arm exactly, she realized, but a long scythe. Where had he gotten a scythe?

And then she realized that it was made of bone. It was not a scythe at all, but a part of him.

*   *   *

It scrabbled at the door, trying to get out. It was dragging the sheet behind it, parts of the sheet still adhering to it. It kept scratching, butting against the door.

Down the hall were the guards, still gathered outside the door to the next ring, the inner ring, milling about, getting more and more irritated and anxious as their leader spoke to Wandrei over vid. One of them, a young blond man named Millar, was more nervous than most. For days now, he’d been itching for a fight, something to sink his teeth into. And now was his chance to have one. But Wandrei was refusing to open the door.

“Calm down,” said Ramirez, the guard standing nearest to him.

“I can’t calm down,” said Millar. “I have to be out there.”

“You can’t be out there yet,” said Ramirez. “We can’t go until we’ve been given approval. It may not even come at all.”

“Like last time,” said Millar.

“Like last time,” Ramirez agreed.

Millar continued quivering: shaking, stretching, nearly bouncing off the walls.

“You’re driving me crazy,” Ramirez finally said. “You’re getting everybody wound up. Look, if you need to get some energy off then take a walk. We won’t leave without you.”

Millar was off like a shot, rushing down the hall. It felt good to move a little, maybe it’d help. He moved as quickly as he could, following the slow curve of the hall. It didn’t help much, but it helped a little.

He went to the end of the hall and the locked door there, and stopped. He was just turning around and starting back again when he heard a strange scrabbling sound inside the door.

“Anyone there?” he asked.

The scrabbling grew louder. A kind of hissing, strangling noise joined it.

He unhooked his truncheon from his belt, hefted it in his hand. Someone or something was in there, and he was going to find out what it was.

He reached for the door, and then stopped. Whatever it was, was it dangerous? Should he be doing this on his own?

But no, he told himself, he was wearing full riot gear. What could possibly happen to him?

*   *   *

At first glance, it seemed to Henry like he was watching a man’s back, the spine clear and pronounced, but there was no head. No, it couldn’t be a man, he told himself, he was experiencing some odd sort of perspectival shift, was seeing things wrong. And there were no arms, either, but rather strange flaps of skin, wings almost. And then he saw that yes, they were wings, and the creature took off. He followed it from monitor to monitor as it flew short distances and alighted, searching for something. What was it searching for?

And then another one came out of the hole, too, half fluttering its way to the top and then alighting there on the rim of the hole, waiting for a moment. It was still enough that Henry could see it clearly and see now something that at first he couldn’t believe. He understood now why he had first thought it was a human’s back: it was because whatever the creature was now, it had once been human. It was formed out of one of the corpses in the hole.

How was that possible? Henry wondered. He shook his head. He must be hallucinating, he thought. But no, when he opened his eyes, the creature was still there.

And then there was further movement in the hole and he saw a strange swordlike object slide out and anchor itself against the floor. More like a scimitar really, though not that exactly, either. And attached to something that was strangely banded but still evidently flesh.

A face and body followed. He could recognize it as the face and body of the man who had leaned over the hole and fallen in, could even see bits and scraps of his prison clothing. He
knew
it was him, but still couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe how the man had bent and changed, had been taken apart and then put back together in an incomprehensible way. It was a face and body unlike anything he had ever seen.

40

The creature that had once been a guard roared, clawing at her through the slot in the door. It either did not remember it had the key to the door or, in this state, did not know how to work it. In any case, it did not open the door.

At first she crouched against the back wall, afraid, eyes squinched shut. But slowly her scientific curiosity got the better of her and she began watching it, even coming a little closer. Whatever the thing was now, it had once been human, but she could see little human response left in it, little to suggest it still had a connection to its human side. Even its movement seemed almost programmed, a repetition of certain patterns along a search for living bodies. She could move to one side of the cell or the other and it would turn to follow her, like a flower following the sun.

After a while she was convinced that it wasn’t human any longer. Not only that, she wasn’t certain that it was a thinking creature at all: it was more like something constrained to draw from a limited set of responses. Was it really alive? It was moving, yes, but it didn’t seem to be breathing. If it was alive, it was not alive in the way that it had been before, back when it had been human.

But the important question was first how to get out of the cell and second how to get past it. She had lots of electronic equipment here; maybe she could construct something to broadcast out with, make some kind of distress signal.

She was just starting to sort through her equipment to see what she had when from down the hall she heard a shout and the creature turned. Several shots rang out, and she even saw one of the bullets tear through the creature’s chest before it started down the hall. The bullet didn’t seem to affect it much at all. It didn’t seem to experience any pain.
Interesting,
she thought, as it lumbered down the hall and out of her vision. A moment later, she heard a series of additional shots, and then a series of screams, the latter cut suddenly short.