End Time (38 page)

That did it. The lethargy shattered into a thousand pieces.

Nothing Eleanor could do for these women. Not the dead ones, not the living.

She bolted from bed; her finger clamp wired to the biometric monitors yanked her back. If she pulled it off would anybody notice?

Of course not, Eleanor!

Half the monitors in this ward weren't running. Nobody watching, nobody cared. This batch of women too far gone.
I'm sorry,
she mouthed to Mrs. Quaid
. I'm sorry,
she mouthed again to the woman's frantic eyes,
but I just can't—

No point in talking. Eleanor's bare feet slapped out the glass door as she clutched her hospital gown. Which way now? She hurriedly looked for a hallway map with a
You Are Here
arrow. No, only a tunnel slanting up and a tunnel leading down. She tried up first. After a dozen yards the tunnel broadened to the habitable areas: operating theaters, control rooms, workstations. She heard the hum of voices. A public address system announced,
“Team Leaders to Synthetic Biology Section. Progenitor cell manufacture and red blood cell pharming. Scheduled briefing at oh-eight-hundred hours
.
”

Eleanor shrank against the wall. Somehow she knew the word
pharming
was a portmanteau, of
farm
and
pharmaceutical
. Had she seen it etched on a glass wall during her fits of delirium? Who knew? So this is where the technical ants observed the guest ants, where the master ants monitored the pregnant ants. But in any case—

Not this way.

She retreated down and out, flapping past the postnatal death room of the Van Horn women. The tunnel went on, slightly downhill. Before she walked half a city block, she came upon another glass-walled ward dug into the side of the passage. This room was labeled
INCUBATION TRIMESTER ONE.

A dozen transparent containers with human embryos in amniotic fluid sat on long metal tables. Big eyes stared from tadpole bodies. Too soon in the process for eyelids, but the offspring were developing arms and feet from amphibious flippers. Some of the fetuses moved in their artificial placentas; one actually seemed to be waving at her.

A terrible fear crept into Eleanor. A kind of knowing certainty about what lay ahead. Two more brightly lit glass-walled wards farther down the tunnel shone out from either side of the smooth walkway.

INCUBATION TRIMESTER TWO
—unborn children, but more developed. Some kicked and turned. Eleanor remembered reading that even in the second trimester the child's taste buds worked, and whatever their mother ate, they tasted as well. But without mothers, what did these little things taste? She fled from the wall, shrinking before the last enclosure.

INCUBATION TRIMESTER THREE
—fully developed infants. Slender intravenous feeding tubes entered the children's veins from panels in the sides of their incubators; tubes snaked from underneath, waste disposal. Human contact restricted? Maybe a once-a-day check to see if they were breathing? The whole setup exuded automated indifference.

But why real children? With blood pharming, synthetic biology, with the harvesting of unlimited stem cells, adult and embryonic, what the hell did the Ant Colony need live infants for anyway?

She paused to watch every baby in the bright glass room bawl away in their cute plastic crates, the chubby, angry bambinos caterwauling behind the soundproof transparency, beet-red faces moving like in a silent movie. Her first impulse was to yank open the door, leap in, and rescue as many as she could; throw them under her arms and bolt for freedom. But the transparent door was secured with a retinal scan and keypad.

Suddenly, a ventilation duct in the tunnel wall began to whir loudly. She felt the air suck past her face. Inside Trimester Three a large vent with Venetian slats clapped open, and Eleanor could see a bright blue ribbon windsock fluttering into the room.

And that's when Eleanor saw the reason the infants cried. A brown cloud shot out of the slatted vent and spread across the room on tentacles of forced air. Mosquitoes. Skeeterbugs.

They hovered over the infants in their transparent cribs for a moment. And then in a smothering rush the insects descended to feed. Thousands of mosquitoes swarmed over little bawling bodies. They planted their stingers over and over, pausing for a moment, then sucking back for more. The babies' faces became mottled, swollen, unrecognizable. Some babies totally covered, an undulating swarm of living bloodsuckers blanketing their bodies—

Another Venetian vent slapped open; an exhaust vent in the rock ceiling. Air rumbled through the tunnel. In a few moments the Skeeterbugs were drawn to the new vent. Having fed, they were being sucked outside the complex. Eleanor turned away in revulsion.

She staggered on, her bare feet slapping the concrete floor.

If the mosquitoes could get free so could she.

The tunnel narrowed, the overhead lights becoming less and less frequent. Eleanor emerged into a cavern of missile silos in an underground barn. She paused for a moment, taking it in. No, not missile silos; what remained of the deep substrata, the subbasement of the Whiteside meat-packing operation. Not originally part of the labs and control rooms above, but still used by them nevertheless.

Stainless-steel silos, chutes, and tubes flowed into hoppers—an assembly line of pumps, cookers, and centrifuges harvesting the last shreds of meat byproducts. A conveyor belt that siphoned off bonemeal, rendered fat, and dumped the gristle into mine carts on rails.

The end of the line for all the busy work upstairs; the final process for the women dragged here, like Mrs. Biedermeier and poor, insane Mrs. Quaid trapped inside a useless body. The place the infants, the outbreeders in Trimester Three went after feeding Skeeterbugs. When they'd served their purpose or died of neglect.

For several minutes Eleanor stood there in the midst of the rendering machines shaking uncontrollably, the cold seeping into her bare feet from the concrete floor. She clutched the hospital gown around her body. The reek from it all staggered her, a thousand miles of bad intestines, bits, and grits on an endless slippery road. A train of mine carts on railroad tracks led down to one last cramped tunnel and disappeared into the dark. The only way out.

In a dingy corner she saw a huge pile of refuse. Clothes, stockings, skirts, coats—more than anyone could burn or throw away. As though whoever in charge of disposal worked in fits and starts, discarding clothes by the pound, not bothering to sort them or finish the job. An iron furnace door yawned open, exuding the ugly smell of burnt cloth.

But she'd found
clothes.
In a few moments she snatched a pair of dirty sneakers, a T-shirt, a pair of Tartan boxer shorts, and a terrycloth bathrobe that didn't smell too bad. As she picked through the dirty clothes a broken high heel Prada pump fell out of the pile and tumbled to the floor. The busted lady's shoe looked strangely familiar, stirring a memory. She picked up the fancy patent pump, trying to remember.

Then a bright bit of flaxen hair caught her eye: glimmering blond hair. Eleanor drew it out of the mound. A wig, a lady's blond wig. A mess of shrieking hair.
I think I'm lost. Can you tell me which way is Los Angeles? Are you from the studio?

So that strange, distraught Broderick Fallows had finally left by the back door.

Tying the belt in a knot, Eleanor staggered toward the narrow rail tunnel along the mine cart train. A narrow concrete walkway ran along the tunnel wall, with a handrail bolted to the rock. She gripped the rail and stepped onto the narrow ledge. Once upon a time this mineshaft had been lit with electric lightbulbs, one every ten feet, but most had burned out. She spotted a dim forty-watt bulb up ahead, but it threw light on nothing. She passed it and shuffled on, holding the handrail for safety. Every so often her feet stumbled over broken concrete or rubble, the shaft darker than sin.

A mine cart that had jumped the tracks rose up from nowhere and blocked her path. Blindly she stepped down from the safety of the ledge and groped her way around the metal bucket. Panting, Eleanor climbed back on the ledge looking for the tunnel wall. She found the handrail and gratefully leaned against it.

A few steps farther on the handrail vanished, and with it any sense of security. Broken? Fallen off? Maybe they just ran out of pipe. She shuffled onward, one hand grazing the damp tunnel wall, the other reaching out hesitantly in the dark. The stench became overpowering—a physical mass that you had to push your way through. She tried mouth breathing, but it did no good. Finally, she saw a last dim lightbulb up ahead. Her pace quickened, but she tried to restrain herself; too easy to stumble, too easy to fall.

She halted in the dim cone of light and peered about her. The tunnel ended; the rails and mine carts ran over an edge of another abyss, a yawning trench. The stench here, beyond overpowering. Another cavern yes, but this one filled with moist, wet, gelatinous mounds. Once upon a time Whiteside plant's private dump, now where the Ant Colony poured all the guts they couldn't harvest.

She stared at the forty-watt bulb, wishing it threw more light. If only it threw a little bit more light; her fingers reached to the glowing bulb as if to coax a little more light from it, just a little more light—

The dim forty-watt bulb flashed once and died. The dark enveloped her. Eleanor sagged against the rim of the tunnel, knees to chest, hugging herself, despair drowning her like a living force. Crouched beside an enormous pit of rotting flesh, she'd gone as far as she could go.

She began to weep, tears running down her cheeks. But she stopped short of total mental collapse; something brushed up against her leg. She kicked out wildly and heard the angry squeal of a rat. She wasn't alone. An even greater revulsion filled her, and she planted her backside against the rock tunnel wall. Crawl up to the surface? She hadn't the will to move another inch. If she died here would the rats take pieces of her outside?
Don't think like that.

She brushed the damp tears from her eyes and stared out into the nothingness, damning the dark. Then caught her breath. The dark was dying.

Yes, the dark itself: a patch of light twenty feet away and a dozen feet off the ground, an opening in the trench of meat—a hole or a gap. Daylight from outside; daylight showing Eleanor the way.… She stifled her first impulse to rush to it. No, she might step off into the slimy abyss. With all her will she waited, waited for the light to broaden, to reveal her surroundings. Ten aching minutes crept by. Then twenty.

The hole grew brighter. Pale dawn.

The gap was about the size of a large bay window. The endless pattering of rat feet and nameless scavengers had tramped down a path, right down to the bedrock. From the rail lines and the tunnel's end the rat path hugged the wall, around the stinking pile of meat and filth.

Eleanor stumbled forward, first walking, crawling, then clawing out into the light. Fresh air wafted over her face, dampening the cloud of stink.
But she was outside, sliding down a grassy slope. Free!

Dawn had come to Ohio; the most beautiful dawn she'd ever seen or felt. The cool morning air braced her, and lavender clouds touched a fair blue sky. In the high grass a thrush sang its first morning song: a hopeful, expectant flute, the day's first herald telling heaven that in this one pasture all was right with the world.

Eleanor blessed the bird, and thanked God for the first time in as long as she could remember. She rubbed her sneakers on some fragrant grass to get the slime off, washed her hands in the dew, and looked around to get her bearings.

Above the grass-covered meat seam she saw the dirty brick smokestacks of the Whiteside Meatpacking Plant. A mosquito hummed into her face, and she batted it away. Down below she spotted the rusty fenced parking lot where she first arrived, however many weeks ago.

She carefully picked her way toward those old landmarks along a weedy dirt road. In a few minutes she passed the battered chain-link fence and the compound lights at the rear end of the factory and the large dented metal company sign. Eleanor's car sat exactly where she left it among a dozen other abandoned cars. Maybe they'd eventually be sold for spare parts, but who cared?

What really mattered—her Prius wasn't blocked in. Mrs. Stanton's small lamé silver purse sat on the dashboard. She snapped it open and pawed through: fifty, sixty, eighty dollars. Oh good, mad money.

She turned the key, and the engine caught. The sound of salvation. She rolled out through the metal gate as easily as she had rolled in, descending the switchbacks to the highway. As the car gained speed, a bug splatted against the windshield, then another. Eleanor hit the wipers and windshield fluid, sweeping them away. Clouds gathered overhead as the highway rushed under her car and the trees by the roadside waved good-bye.

Free at last, but free to do what? How about the insane lie she told Bhakti when she ran away?
Taking a little trip to see my sister. I have my cell.
Now she really wanted to see Lauren. Her cell lay just where she left it, plugged into its charger. Better call or text Bhakti too; gotta tell him something. Was he still looking for Janet? Had he found her yet?

Despite the exhilarating freedom, a pang of regret stabbed her:
Janet.
… She'd hardly thought about Janet. And Eleanor felt
something else,
something very bad deep down in her belly. Those Dancing Ant Men had put something in her body that wasn't supposed to be there. Something she didn't want—a little trimester tadpole that didn't belong.

Not Bhakti's, not anyone's. She carried an Outbreeder.

She could almost feel it moving under her bathrobe, feel its little feet struggling, its glassy eyes trying to stare out her belly. And with a terrible wave of fear, an image of it jumped into her head. She carried a rolling segmented tadpole with tiny human feet, that could roll like a wheel if it wanted, and after a few weeks that beak-mouthed salamander was going to crawl out of her, crawl right out of her—