Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus (12 page)

The transmission ended. The gunfire began.

Firefights are never as clean as they appear in the movies, where even a shot to the throat never seems to coat the surrounding areas with blood the way that they really ought to. Before the Rising, it was because no one wanted to offend the delicate sensibilities of the women and children that people assumed were flocking to
Buckets of Blood III: The Bucketing
because of its complex themes of abandonment and human nature. After the Rising, it became a matter of public safety. People who saw that much blood were likely to lose their tempers, their lunches, and their sense of proportion, in that order.

Clive was not playing by MPAA rules. His men unleashed a barrage of gunfire on the front of the forestry center, shooting through the weak points in the wood and sending bullets lancing through the room. Someone cried out. Someone hit the floor. I heard Tom shout, “Return fire!” and then there were guns going off in the enclosed lobby, their reports sounding out loud and angry over the cries and screams of my people.

Joe barked, adding even more chaos to the scene. I grabbed his collar before he could start trying to bite bullets out of the air. He wasn’t fast enough—he was an experimental subject, not a miracle—but that wouldn’t stop him from trying, if he got offended enough by what was going on.

“Stay,” I hissed, hunching down. Clive and his men were still visible on the monitor. I wasn’t the only one with a view on the outside: As I watched, three of his people went down, targeted by my security. One of the shooters fell off her platform immediately afterward, targeted by someone who had been able to analyze her position based on the trajectory of her shot. Her head split when she struck the floor. Three more of my people were immediately there, one of them putting a bullet in her forehead while the other two were pouring bleach on the resulting hot zone.

Gunfights before the Rising only killed you one way. Now they get you coming and going, as the dead rise up and make the situation even worse. That might explain Clive’s bullet-spraying tactics. If he shot enough of us, we’d have an outbreak on our hands. Then he could just walk away and come back later to clean up whatever was left.

We’d weathered outbreaks before. Whatever Clive thought of us, we were tougher than he knew. But it was sort of hard to focus on that with bullets passing overhead and people screaming all around me.

There was a flash of motion on the monitor. I tracked it with my eyes, and clapped a hand over my mouth to cover my gasp as it resolved into the Fox, still barefoot and dressed in borrowed surgical scrubs, with a scalpel clutched firmly in each hand. She was approaching from the side, in Clive’s blind spot—even if he’d had people watching that zone before the shooting started, they were all preoccupied now, trying to take us out before we could do the same to them. That explained why she wasn’t shooting. Gunshots would have attracted attention.

She caught the first of Clive’s hired guns before he had a chance to realize that he was in danger. The scalpel sliced across his throat with almost surgical precision, and then she was gone again, vanishing into the underbrush, leaving him to drop his gun and clutch helplessly at his throat. It wasn’t going to do him any good. He was a dead man walking now, a dead man stumbling back toward his own people and grasping for them, grasping for
anything
that would let him hold on to life for just a little bit longer. Human beings don’t die easy. If we did, the Rising would have been a lot shorter, and would have had a very different ending.

One of the other mercenaries shouted something as her wounded comrade stumbled into her, coating her in a layer of blood that was surely hot with live Kellis-Amberlee. She fired twice, and the man the Fox had wounded collapsed. The woman had barely a second to breathe before one of the other mercenaries turned and shot at her, sending her toppling after him. She’d been exposed. They couldn’t risk it.

“Goddammit, Abbey, what sort of bullshit do you think you’re pulling?” demanded the radio. Clive sounded angrier than I’d ever heard him. It was almost comic, in a way. He was the one attacking us, yet we were the ones refusing to play along with whatever narrative he had crafted in his power-addled little mind. How dare we not just roll over and die? It was so unreasonable of us.

I’ve always been unreasonable like that. I pressed the button on the PA, and said, “Well, I don’t know. I tend to file this sort of bullshit under ‘defending my home.’ Take your people and leave, Clive. You don’t have enough men to storm this castle.”

“I’ll be back, Abbey,” said Clive. “I’ll be—”

“No, you won’t,” said the Fox, her voice coming through the radio so clearly that for a moment, I thought she had somehow gotten back inside. A thick gurgling noise followed her announcement. I turned to the monitor to see her standing behind Clive, the tip of her scalpel protruding through the front of his throat.

He gurgled again before he fell, collapsing like a sack of wet laundry. The Fox beamed, waving enthusiastically toward the forestry center.

That’s when one of his remaining men shot her.

“Dr. Abbey?”

I was sitting on the edge of the wading pool with Barney’s tentacles wrapped around my forearms, sharing a content moment with my resident troublemaker. Joe was on the floor nearby, head on his paws, silently judging me for loving a boneless squishy thing more than I loved him. Judge on, big guy, judge on. I turned at the sound of my name. Jill was standing in the doorway, a cast on her left arm and a line of stitches on her forehead. It was going to heal without a scar. Most of the wounds we’d suffered were.

Most, not all. Three of my staff were dead; the main lobby was still closed off for decontamination and repair. We’d burnt six of Clive’s people, as well as Clive himself, after we had pumped enough lead into them that they weren’t going to get up again. Not all wounds heal easy. Not all wounds should.

“What is it?” I asked.

“She’s awake.”

The Fox—Elaine—whatever the hell she wanted to be called—was back on her bed in the observation room, staring up at the ceiling. She turned her head toward me when I came in, and her eyes were just unfocused enough that I knew I was going to be speaking to the killer, not to the tender of children. That was fine by me. I’ve never really known how to talk to people who chose to spend a lot of time around kids. Bullets and blood, those are things I’m more familiar with.

“The bullet nicked your liver and perforated your intestine,” I said, skipping “hello” in favor of a status update. “We were able to repair most of the damage laparoscopically. We didn’t even have to sedate you, thanks to all the drugs you’re on. Thanks for saving us the trouble.”

“Am I going to die?” she asked. She sounded almost hopeful.

“Not this time.”

“Oh.” She frowned before looking at me mistrustfully and asking, “Are you here to throw me out?”

“Why the hell would I do that? This is where you go when you get broken. I’m a scientist. I fix the toys that other people throw away.” Toys like Zelda, who was still trying to figure out whether she was staying with me or heading back to the CDC. Toys like Tessa, who might not be trustworthy but deserved to be trusted all the same. Everyone’s a toy to somebody.

The Fox—Elaine—whatever—blinked at me, uncomprehending.

Then, slowly, she smiled.

Mira Grant lives in California, sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same. Mira Grant is the pseudonym of Seanan McGuire—winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Find out more about the author at
www.miragrant.com
or follow her on twitter @seananmcguire.

Photo Credit: Carolyn Billingsley

[The recording is crisp enough to look like a Hollywood film, too polished to be real. The lab is something out of a science fiction movie, all pristine white walls and gleaming glass and steel equipment. Only one thing in this scene is fully believable: the woman standing in front of the mass spectrometer, her wavy blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, a broad smile on her face. She is pretty, with a classic English bone structure and the sort of pale complexion that speaks less to genetics and more to being the type of person who virtually never goes outside. There is a petri dish in her blue-gloved hand.]

[She walks to the back of the room, where a large, airlock-style door has been installed. The camera follows her through the airlock and into what looks very much like an operating theater. Two men are waiting there, faces covered by surgical masks. Dr. Cale pauses long enough to put down her petri dish and put on a mask of her own.]

[The movement of her mask indicates a smile.]

[Dr. Cale crosses to the body. Its midsection has been surrounded by a sterile curtain; the face is obscured by life support equipment and by the angle of the shot. She pulls back the curtain to reveal the gleaming interior of the man’s sliced-open abdomen. The skin has been peeled back and the blood has been suctioned away, revealing a wide array of colors. Liver brown, intestinal green and glistening white, and the smooth pink sac of the stomach. Calmly, she reaches into the man’s body, pushing organs aside until the surface of the small intestine is revealed.]

[One of the masked men passes her the requested tool. She takes it, pressing down against the man’s intestine. He does not move. Her hand does not tremble.]

[The surface of the intestine splits, spilling a thin film of brownish liquid over the surrounding organs. Dr. Cale ignores it as she sets the scalpel aside and thrusts her hand into the man’s body. He still does not move as she digs through his small intestine. When she finally retracts her hand, she is clutching something. She pulls down her mask with her free hand and directs a beatific smile toward the camera.]

[She holds out her hand. The camera zooms in on the white specks writhing against her gloved fingers.]

[The film ends there. There are no notes in Dr. Cale’s progress reports relating to the eventual fate, or original identity, of the first human subject used to culture
D. symbogenesis
. The medical power of attorney referenced in the recording has never come to light.]

[End report.]