The Hollow City (29 page)

“We have procedures in place,” says Charles. “Are we hiding or evacuating?”

“Hiding,” says Ellie, “but ready to evacuate entirely if we need to.”

“I need an hour.”

“Do it,” says Ellie. She clenches her jaw in a scowl. “This is not the right time for this! We can’t let them discover us.”

“What about the Home?” asks Arlene. “They’ll use their search for Vanek as an excuse to seize everything they can. If they find our files—”

“Leave the files to me,” says Ellie, “you need to deal with the nursery and the lab.”

“The lab?” I ask.

“Of course,” she says simply. “The last thing we need is for the police to find us with a half ton of homemade cyanide.” She turns to the others. “Go with Charles—we’ll need every member of the council to help corral the others. Go!”

“Cyanide?” I ask the question too quickly, too loudly; I know I’ve given myself away, but … cyanide. Kelly was right about the stolen chemicals. Ellie looks at me, sensing my shock, and I feel my charade falling apart. What are they doing with half a ton of cyanide?

“You seem surprised,” says Ellie, watching me closely. “You seem almost … concerned.”

She’s onto me. I need to throw her back off. “Not concerned,” I say quickly, “just surprised that … you were able to make that much. I was worried that Brandon’s death at ChemCom had cut off your supply.”

“It did,” says Ellie, “but I think we have enough.” She turns away, seemingly mollified, and leads me into the next room. Three people sit on a couch staring vacantly at a cardboard box; a crude human face has been drawn on it, like a child’s pretend television. She speaks to them brightly, eerily reminiscent of Linda’s therapy voice. “Time to go! Everybody stand up—that’s right, stand up. Now come with me.” She helps them to their feet, taking each person by the hand and pulling them up. The three walk stiffly, staring listlessly at the walls; one of them twitches arrhythmically. “These are new,” Ellie whispers, leading me back outside. “There are dozens more like them, all still struggling with the Process. They need guidance even to eat.”

The streets of the fake suburb are filled with people, half of them guiding the others in a chaotic, mindless horde. Ellie mutters in frustration.

“I don’t blame you for the police, Ambrose. But I wish you’d come at a better time.”

I have to find the answers. I summon my courage and ask the question. “Tell me about the Process.” Ellie looks at me sharply, and I continue quickly to soothe her suspicions. “What have you done to refine it?” If she tells me how it’s changed, I might be able to figure out how it works in the first place, and that will tell me how to stop it.

Ellie passes off the three human puppets to a nearby council member, and gestures for me to follow. We walk toward the nursery.

“We weren’t ready for the breeding program when the disaster with Cerny forced it onto us,” she says, “but it worked so well that we’re more or less on schedule anyway. See for yourself.”

Ellie opens the nursery door and we walk inside. As with the rest of the compound, there’s no electricity, but even in the dim light from the doorway I can see them: rows and rows of beds, from cribs to full-size bunks, stretching back and disappearing in the shadows. Each bed holds a child, small and still; sleeping or sedated or comatose, I can’t tell for sure. They have IVs in their arms and cloth bandages wrapped around their faces. I look at Ellie in shock, and she nods.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I step up to the nearest bed, a tiny cradle; the child inside is no more than a few months old. A small card on the side says M
ARY
. I reach toward her, trembling, touching her lightly on the arm; her skin is warm. An IV tube runs into her arm, her skin tight and crinkled under the clear tape that holds it in place. The IV stand lurks over her in ominous vigil, one of a hundred stands lined up like silent soldiers.

A light flares behind me as Ellie lights another lamp. “The IVs were one of our more successful additions,” she says. “We can keep them drugged for years if we need to, though usually it’s only a week at a time. Their minds can adapt more swiftly in the absence of outside stimuli—emotions have proven particularly problematic, and this process helps to negate their impact. Still, without regular exercise their bodies will begin to degenerate.” She shakes her head. “It’s an unfortunate flaw, but it’s a flaw we accepted when we chose this path.”

I nod, trying to keep my breath even and my face impassive while inside I’m screaming in rage and fear and frustration. How can they do this? I point softly at the bandage on Mary’s head.

“And their faces?”

“A small amount of facial pressure seems to ease the transition; most of us sleep with masks on these days. You can remove the bandage if you want, but there’s nothing to see yet—just an ugly human face.”

I nod again, trying to stay calm. I think about myself as a baby, lying in a cradle just like this—maybe this very one—screaming and bawling while outside the police trade gunshots with a killer, and inside a mother murders children one by one. A slash of the knife, a splash of blood, and on to the next cradle. It’s a nightmare I’ve lived a hundred times since I learned the truth about my birth.

This is the first time I’ve sympathized with the murderer.

I walk away from the cradle, too torn to stay near it any longer. They are destroying these children, implanting them with something that pushes out their minds and takes over their bodies. To kill them would be a mercy—but even the thought of it, of doing it myself in cold blood, makes me stop and clutch the wall for support. I feel light-headed and nauseous. I want to scream and cry and run away. I want to throw down Ellie and shatter her lamp and light the nursery on fire. I want to hide in a hole and never come out.

“Are you alright?”

Murderer!
I scream in my head.
You did this to me!
But she didn’t—it was Dr. Vanek. He started this, and then he did it to me, crawling inside of me like a hand in a puppet. And now he’s trying to get back out.

“Ambrose?”

I turn to Ellie, my eyes wet with tears. I wipe them away; I have to explain them. “It’s just…” I swallow my nausea. “I never expected that we could get this far, and in so short a time.” My excuse sounds stupid and hollow, even to me. I remember her authoritarian jealousy and add: “You’ve done an incredible job—far more than I could have done.” I curl my lips into a smile, holding back a wave of revulsion. How can I talk to her like this? How can I stand here next to a hundred tortured children? What else can I do?

She nods. “Thank you, Doctor. But I can’t take all the credit. Without your research there would have been no foundation to build on.”

I look across the room, trying not to think about the mass of children held silent and helpless. Of my apparent role in their horror. “What’s next?”

“Phase Four.”

I nod. “Of course.” I need to learn more; I need to find a way to stop it. I turn to her and smile. “I hope you’ve improved on my plans for that as well—”

I stop abruptly, listening. There is a sound in the far darkness of the nursery, a slow, wet, scuffle. I know that sound. I try to think of something else, to imagine a faceless nanny or a lost, mindless puppet, but I can’t. The image leaps unbidden to my mind.

A giant maggot.

I watch the sound, bracing myself for the sight. This is what this has all led to—this is what I’ve been searching for and avoiding at the same time. The answer. I put a hand on my head; I imagine I can feel the interior wriggle of a slick, larval worm.

The maggot slurps into view, a dim, writhing shape on the edge of the lamplight. “How are we going to hide them?”

Ellie follows my gaze, then looks back at me. “We’ll carry them into the corn. The initiates can help, with our guidance; they can hide in the fields while the police search the compound.”

“Carry them?” I ask. The thought of that maggot in my arms fills me with revulsion, and I suppress a shudder. “Is that really the best way?”

She shrugs. “There’s no time to wake them up, and the lingering sedation will help keep them quiet.”

“No, I mean the…” I stop. Something’s not right.

“The what?”

“The…” What do I say? I can’t talk about them without revealing my ignorance—Vanek would know so much more than I do; what they are, what they’re called, what they’re capable of. “The others.” The maggot crawls farther out of the darkness, a shadow coalescing into mucus and muscle. I point at it. “Them.”

Ellie watches the aisle as the maggot slumps slowly toward us. “Tell me something, Michael.”

“Yes?”

She looks at me. “What exactly do you think you see?”

Too late, I realize what I’ve done: she called me Michael, and I answered to it. She knows.

I take a step away. “What do you mean?” Can I play this off? Can I salvage this?

Ellie advances one step. “The schizophrenia is still in place, isn’t it? Dr. Vanek hasn’t escaped at all, you’re simply playing us for idiots.”

The maggot’s a hallucination—there’s nothing there. That’s how she knew it was me. I watch the monster come closer, ringed mouth gaping open.

“I’m—I’m Vanek, Ellie, I’m Ambrose Vanek. You know me.”

“You know me
now
,” she says. “Just like you know everything else. And now that you do, we can’t let you leave again.”

I try to sound innocent. “What are you talking about?”

“Dr. Vanek, can you hear me?”

“I’m here,” says Vanek. He’s standing near me, maybe ten feet away; I glance at him and Ellie follows my eyes.

“Can you speak?” she asks.

“Not through him,” says Vanek. He scowls at me. “Not right now.”

“Of course I can speak,” I say. “I’ve been talking to you all night.” The worm shuffles closer.

“If you can hear me,” says Ellie, walking slowly toward the spot I glanced at before, “I want you to know that I’m doing this to help you, not to hurt you. I have no desire to usurp your position.”

I step toward her. “What are you talking about?”

“Hit her,” says Vanek, his face growing pale. “She’s going to attack you.”

“What?”

“You’re a threat, Michael, to her power and to the entire plan. She’s going to kill you, now hit her!”

“We’ve suspected for years that you might be trapped for good,” says Ellie. She stops right in front of Vanek, looking near him without looking at him. “I apologize that it has to be this way.”

“Now, dammit!”

I dive to the side, hiding behind a wooden table as a flash of blue light fills the room. I feel a pain in my shoulder, like a bright electric shock, and my mind spins wildly at the contact. I turn to Ellie; she’s braced with her feet wide apart, breathing heavily.

“Traitor!” Vanek shouts, his face a red mask of rage. “How dare you use the power against your own kind!”

A blue bolt of lightning arcs out from Ellie’s face, and for a split second the blur snaps into focus and I see Lucy’s face, old and lined but perfectly recognizable, and then the electrical surge slams into me and I choke back a scream, losing control of my muscles and collapsing to the floor. The world warps and curdles around me; my body grows and shrinks and my senses explode in a hail of sparkling shards. I gasp for breath, struggling to remember that I even have lungs, that I need them to keep me alive. The world swims back into focus and I feel pressure on my back—Ellie is kneeling on me, pulling my arms behind me to tie them.

“Get up,” says Vanek, growling through clenched teeth. He swallows the pain and snarls again. “Get up and
hit her.
”

Ellie leans forward, reaching for a rope, and I throw my arm backward, twisting my torso as much as I can to slam my elbow into her face. Her arms flail out and she tumbles to the side. She hits the ground and the rope flies out of her hand, skittering across the wooden floor to stop in front of the maggot. It sniffs it, glistening maw sucking at the air. I roll over and leap on Ellie, trying to pin her to the ground.

“Children!” she shouts, trying to wrestle me away. I punch her in the face, feeling my hand hum with a surge of energy. The contact brings pain—both mine and hers, impossibly transferred with a swirl of fear and desperation and hot, rabid rage. “Get off of me!” She raises her head and I slam it again with my elbow, hammering her head against the floor; she slows, coughing for air, and I grab her head in both hands. Emotion runs up my arms like bolts of electricity, emotion and thought and memory and rage. I see darkness and earth; I feel confusion and pain; I wail with a desperation so ancient my mind crumbles to ruin at its touch. The sensation locks me in place, holds me in a vise of unknowable sadness, and I struggle to escape. I can’t let go. Our minds are merged and frozen. I force my arms forward, feeling them budge a fraction of an inch. I can do it. I’m trapped in an eternity of emotionless, alien thought, and then in a burst of motion I slam Ellie’s head against the wooden floor. She falls limp.

I pant for breath, letting go of her head. I scramble away, watching her body, but she doesn’t move. The maggot is gone. The rope lies abandoned on the floor.

Did I kill her? I creep forward, expecting her to leap up at any moment—expecting a maggot to come bursting out of her chest in a bloody assault. But no, it’s in her face, not her chest. Is it a maggot? A microchip? I could cut her open and find out; I could discover once and for all what’s hiding inside them.

Is this how the other cultists died—beaten to death by a crazy man and his living delusions?

Am I really the Red Line Killer after all?

The door handle turns. Someone is coming.

TWENTY-EIGHT

“LOCK IT!” SHOUTS VANEK
. He snarls and points at the door. “Quickly! They’ll see!”

The door starts to open, and I scramble toward it in an awkward flurry. A face peeks through:

“Ellie?”

I slam into the door, knocking it closed. The angle of the opening was such that whoever it was probably hadn’t seen Ellie’s body. Probably.

The voice is more urgent now, more confused. “Ellie?”

“Tell them you’re me,” says Vanek. “They’ll trust you—they were raised to trust you.”