Cronix (5 page)

The scold halted. The dogs stood alert, ears cocked, then started barking. The scold leaned back in an effort to restrain them.

“What is it?” Oriente yelled, fumbling his gun strap.

Arthur broke from the scold's grip and vanished into the ferns. The air exploded in an otherworldly howl as the barrel body of the wolf arced out of the brush. Oriente was too stunned to react. In daylight, the size of the creature was simply staggering, its snarl a brutal assault on his ears. It fell on Arthur, who buckled and seemed to snap in two. Without breaking its stride, the beast plunged straight at the scold and Jess. The woman released the dog, which threw itself at the terrifying beast in a gesture of desperate courage. Oriente finally snapped to his senses, leveled his gun and fired at the explosion of fur. He saw the scold sprinting off into the woods. Then the monster looked up from Jess’s broken body and stared straight at him. He raised his shotgun again but the mule reared in terror and dumped him in the ferns before bolting.

Oriente lay winded a moment, his spine jarred and nausea churning his guts. He pulled himself stiffly to his elbows but almost collapsed back in horror: the beast was already upon him, standing between his crooked legs, head down and eyes locked on his.

“Fitch?”

But there was no sign of humanity in the yellow eyes. For the second time that day, the hunter felt something he had thought forgotten: the fear of death, loosening his bowels and filling the clear forest air with the foul reek of his own shit as the wolf lunged at his face. His screams echoed through the woods, scattering the birds that had just begun to settle again after the animal’s unworldly howl had set them to flight.

***

He wasn't sure at first that he was awake. His eyes felt like they were wide open, yet everything was still black. Voices drifted from another room, a heater hummed close by, but he couldn’t see a thing. He tried to lift his hands to remove whatever was blocking his vision, but found his arms bound by something soft yet unyielding. Beneath his sweating palms he could feel clean, cotton sheets.

The blackness was like a cover over his face – suddenly he couldn’t trust his senses, his skin couldn’t discern whether there was really something smothering his vision. He shook his head, already crawling with the bulging, swarming roaches of claustrophobia. The wolf's face flashed before him.

Fitch.

He screamed hoarsely and found he couldn't stop. It was happening: he'd spent centuries avoiding this and now it had finally happened, he was back inside the machine. The lungfuls of sound echoing around him told him he couldn't be, but he kept on screaming anyway to prove he had a voice and was still flesh and blood. His howls echoed until they summoned the reassuring sound of footsteps hurrying toward him.

A woman's voice, close to his ear, urged him to calm down. The voice was confusing: its timbre was soft and delicate, yet the words –
Hey
,
knock it off now, would you 
-- would have grated on his ears had it not been for a needle prick, unseen and almost unfelt on his bare bicep, followed by a spacey feeling of relief and elation. His yells died instantly, replaced by a beatific smile. The woman's voice kept telling him that everything was alright, that he was in a hospital.

“You’re safe now, so you can quit your whining," she said. A delicious waft of burnt tobacco drifted through the dark space, and he slowly realized his benefactor must be puffing on a cigarette.

"You're in London now, mister, so you don't need to be worrying about a thing. Which means you can stop with the yelling." The drug she had injected melded the harsh tone of her voice into something sweet and mellow, until it felt like a steady infusion of peaceful words splashing upon his consciousness.

"What happened?" he asked. "Why am I blindfolded?"

"That's not a blindfold, hon,” she said. He could hear her blow smoke. “That there's a bandage."

"A bandage? Why, what happened to me?" He knew he should feel alarm, but the drugs muted any urgency.

There was a pause, as the nurse checked a chart. He could hear her pulling at her cigarette. Even in his drugged state, the hunter realized this nurse's bedside manner was not all it might be.

"You were attacked, it says here, by a wild animal. Wow, no shit. A forest Ranger found your mule -- you were riding a mule? Jesus" -- there was a snort of laughter, succeeded by another sharp inhalation of smoke -- "wandering near Norbiton Gulley, wherever the hell that is. This Ranger followed the path back down and found you there, unconscious and...ooh..."

"What...what is it?" the hunter was confused. "Why have you got me tied down like this? Am I under arrest or something?
"



"Hmm, guilty conscience, huh? Dontcha worry none, it’s just some simple legal precaution. Admissions couldn't find your profile on the records. So they contacted the DPP and all they could come up with was a fit from some pirate clinic in Mexico from....let me see...wow, 2037. Which, it says here, was actually 
before 
the first licensed regeneration clinic was ever even opened."

She whistled conspiratorially, curious all of a sudden: she clearly hadn't read the patient's notes beforehand. "Oh boy, and since then nothing, for...what would that be, something like 600 years? Now, 
that's 
what’s what got them going, I’m guessing." She sounded suddenly animated, pricked out of her lethargy just as he slid into his.

Although he couldn't see her, he could tell she was staring right at him.  "No wonder they got a fella down there in the lobby just waiting for you to wake up,” she said. “You gotta have quite some story to tell, eh, my friend?"

He couldn’t think for a moment. Everything was wrong. He had to change the subject, fast. He forced his mind away from the soothing stupor it was slipping towards.

"What's your name?" he asked

"Me? Lola. I see yours is ... Luis Oriente? Guess you're probably not originally from Norbiton Gulley then?” She added, in a slightly conspiratorial whisper, “You got any original genepool in you? You must be Latino, with a name like that. And I have to say, despite the bandage, you’re a pretty good looking man. In fact, the bandage makes you look kind of heroic… a handsome revolutionary about to face the firing squad." She sounded flirtatious now, something that struck him as being almost as disturbing as the fact that an agent from the Department of Profiles and Personalities was sitting outside, waiting to question him. But what troubled him most was the creeping sense of 
deja vu
. Of course, being as ancient as he was, and with so many synapse reloads behind him, that was not an uncommon occurrence, but this time he felt sure his situation actually harked back to something long, long ago.

"I have a feeling this has all happened before," he said.

He heard her stub her fag end on something by his bed. "Hey honey, everything on this dirtball planet has happened before. That's why no one wants to come back. Except me, and I’m only here ‘cos I won a return trip. Anyway, I better go tell the inspector you're awake. Would you like some more of that nice drug before I go?"

He shook his head no, though he would have very much liked some more. But he had to keep whatever wits he still had about him. He cocked his head as she walked out the room, with the click of high heels. Who was this nurse, and what kind of hospital had he landed in? But the pharmaceutical buoy kept him from sinking too deep into distress.

A few minutes later, a heavier step approached, briefly accompanied by the tattoo of the nurse’s stilettos. There was a pause, a whispered conversation, then the heels about-turned and clack-clacked off into the distance again, dismissed by the flat-soles. He heard someone walk up to his bedside, pull up a chair and sit down.

"How are you feeling, Mr Oriente? My name is Keith Demarra. I’m from the DPP. You know what that is, I take it?" It was a steady, confident voice, not without genuine concern for his well-being.

"Okay," said the hunter, cautiously. "What happened to my eyes?"

"Seems some kind of an animal ate them," said the agent, matter-of-factly. "Must have been kind of painful, no? Don't worry, we'll get you a new set in a week or so. What color would you prefer? Mine are Delft blue. Got a good deal on them, part of the service medical package. Reassures people, you know, which is handy in my job, so I counted them as tax-deductible." He laughed softly at his own joke, no doubt a trademark repeated during his interrogations.

"An animal 
ate
 my eyes?" Oriente asked. He remembered the wolf lunging at his face. He had blacked out in pain, or fear. He had no idea how long he'd been out for.

"Seems so. I thought it was pretty strange, but animals sometimes kill for choice tidbits if they're sated. Odd, though, that it went for your eyes, not your liver or some other meaty organ. Plus it's still winter, just about, so you wouldn't expect it to have had a lot of game. Mind you, the woods are full of Cronix these days. Remarkably lucky for you, though, considering you don't have a chip."

Though it was a statement, it came out like a question: why would a person be traveling alone through wild country without the safety net of a transmitter chip implanted his frontal cortex?

"I don't believe in them," Oriente said.

The agent laughed, not loudly, just enough to show he was working his way closer to his point.

"Well, Mr Oriente, that may well be so, but you sure seem to believe in something. You’re not some local yokel. Our scans show that you're about five hundred and eighty years old, and no one has seen hide nor hair of you in all that time. Now, I don't think it’s all that fresh forest air and wild mushrooms been keeping you going out there in the woods all this time, is it?"

Oriente could tell the agent was leaning over the bed now, close to his unseeing face.

"Brown," he said.

"What?" The agent's voice came from a slightly different angle, as though he'd sat back abruptly.

"I'd like brown eyes, please. Light chestnut brown. Or caramel. Same as before."

"Uh-huh." The agent pulled out a pad, deliberately clicked his pen. "I'll note that down. Chestnut brown or caramel."

A pause. "Now we've got your order, sir, perhaps you could explain to us a few details.”

Oriente lay still, his breathing shallow. He tried to imagine what the ceiling would look like, if he could see it. He imagined whorls of white plaster: no, that was somewhere else, a long time ago.

“Like how come your first remake managed to take place 
before 
any licensed clinics ever actually opened. I mean, you go 
way 
back. You know what? That strikes me as just a touch…well, 
impossible, 
shall we say? And in my experience, the impossible is very rarely legal. Very rarely. Seems that since then, you've been regenerating habitually without a license to stay earthside. Care to elaborate a little on that, Mr Oriente?"

Oriente could hear the agent’s fingernails tap a military beat on the arm of his chair.

"No," he said. With the drugs and the eyeless blackness all around him, it was easy to refuse to cooperate.

"Okeydoke." He heard Agent Demarra stand up and smooth his jacket. "We got plenty of time. I’ll be seeing you, Mr Oriente."

This time when he woke, the blackness was like a sack wrapped around his head, a deep memory floating in space. As the hours passed -- or was it days? -- Oriente found this asteroid of darkness to be infected with the pervasive bacteria of memory. Microscopic details of the past, things he'd thought long forgotten, were growing in the gloom, one image rapidly spawning another. Perhaps they had injected him with something to induce memory. Because now, the long years of forgetting were unspooling, the anxiety of captivity stripping away his carefully cultivated defenses.

The lack of sight was compounded by the restriction of his movement. He was connected to a series of tubes that painlessly facilitated his bodily functions, and the only time he was allowed to roll over was when Nurse Lola programmed the bed to gently rotate so she could strip the soiled sheets.

Deprived of his eyesight and his forest routine, the fungus of buried memory sprouted in the dark recesses of his mind.

It was possible to fight back. He would run through all the chores he normally carried out at his cabin -- feeding the dogs, chopping firewood, the hours in the canvas hide surveying the forest floor for signs of game: the late summer dance of sunlight in the foliage, the shadow of a deer in shade of a hazel. He worked these memories, like a painter trying to catch the play of light on a pond, glossing over the mossy depths that beckoned from below.

Lola proved a welcome distraction. She was coarse but guileless, evidently unskilled in the art of nursing. She was as foul-mouthed as a sailor and showed scarcely a jot of interest in the world around her, save for gossiping about other members of staff and patients, and musing about how soon her beau would agree to impregnate her.

"Hey," she said as she stormed in, an explosion of high heels and tobacco. "Guess who they just brought in to the secure unit next door? A suspected Santa Muerte. A real terrorist! I am not kidding you, he's on restraints too, only real tight, y'know, like he can't move an inch, can’t even scratch his nuts. They reckon he's been blowing up soul poles out in the woods. I read two people died because this creep destroyed the poles."