Accidental Creatures (30 page)

When the doors opened, Chango saw Benny standing inside. He was grimy and streaked with sweat. He held a welding mask in one hand, a blow torch in the other. For a moment they both stood frozen, staring at each other, and then, like the chiming of a bell in a distant land, the elevator behind her pinged open. Chango spun on her heel and dove inside it, rolling to her knees and frantically punching the close door button. From around the edge of the doorway she saw Benny drop his equipment and run after her. He reached the elevator just in time to wedge his hands between the closing doors. His fingers protruded through the crack like pink, searching tentacles, and Chango hammered at them with her fists but her efforts were in vain. The elevator, sensing something stuck between its doors, opened them of its own accord and he stepped through, filling the small space with his presence. oOo

Before she ever opened her eyes, the smell of the air told Helix where she was, and filled her with panic, longing, and rage. She sat up to find herself against a metal door in a wide hallway with a cement floor and glazed cinder block walls. It was empty and quiet except for the distant hum of the vats. She got to her feet and tried the door. The handle turned, but the door wouldn’t budge. She pounded at the unforgiving metal but the booming of her striking fists brought her to a halt. She would not be heard by anyone outside, and she did not want to be heard by anyone inside. She turned again and slumped against the door. She was whole existences away from that scene on the playground, and nevertheless, here she was, where it really happened. The force of the returning memory held her motionless against the doorway, waiting for footsteps, for screams, for rending teeth and clutching hands, but these imminent horrors did not materialize.

Taking a long, deep breath she forced the terror back down her throat, swallowed it, and crept along the wall, towards the vats.

oOo

Chango lifted her eyes to Benny’s face and what she saw there backed her right up against the wall of the elevator. Ada’s tanks bumped against the paneling and she winced. They’d probably marred the fine grain wood. Benny approached her, reaching his big hands out towards her head. “What-what are you doing? Chango gasped as one hand fell on her shoulder, pinning her to the wall. “What have you done with Helix?” she fairly shouted in his ear just before he grabbed the back of her head and yanked it forward. He leaned closer. All Chango could see was her knees, but she knew he was reading the initials on the tanks.

“Well,” he said, pushing her up against the wall again, “I guess you’d better meet Mr. Graham.” He held her with one hand splayed across her chest, and pivoted to punch the floor button. He had to turn his head to find the right floor, and when he did Chango sank down, unbalancing his already awkward stance, and loosening his hold on her. She shrugged the tanks from her shoulders and in one fluid movement born of panic swung them around into Benny’s midsection. He doubled over at the blow, and she lost her grip on the tanks. They skittered across the elevator floor, bumping into the panelling on the other side. The doors were closing. Chango ducked around Benny and grabbed for the tanks, but he swung around, still bent at the waist, and pulled her legs out from under her. She turned her head as she hit the ground, saw the doors sealing together, and felt the floor pressing further into her aching cheek as the elevator rose.

oOo

The closer she got to the vat floor, the less the place looked, felt, and smelled like an ordinary vat house. For one thing, the air was steamy wet, its warm touch welcoming to her skin. She stripped off her tunic and bodysuit, to feel it better. Once she was out of the hallway there were plants everywhere, hanging from the balcony ringing the room and standing in pots on disused instrument stands and casings. And the light was different too. Somewhere they had found purple-hued grow lights and installed them in all the fixtures.

From above her, shielded and distorted by the tall curving walls of the two vats, she heard soft splashing noises, and... singing? Or was that voice inside her, awakening now to these sights and smells, to the air that was nearly water itself? She rested her hands on the metal ladder that climbed the side of the vat and looked up, gripped by a joyous rage which overwhelmed her rational fear. For among the redolent odors of the waters was the smell of one whose call she would do anything, kill or die, to answer. oOo

Benny hauled Chango up off the floor by the scruff of her neck and pushed her into the elevator wall. He had a gun, and he poked it in her back. “Funny little Chango.” he whispered in her ear, “It’s been a real riot, watching you sniff all around the truth these past five years, but now I guess you finally found something, huh? Where did you think you were going with these, anyway?” The tanks scraped across the floor as he dragged them closer with his foot.

Chango hung in his grasp unable to answer, suddenly limp with the realization that though he was acting in ways she would have thought impossible for him, this was Benny. It was still Benny and all Benny; the person she’d thought she’d known, and this.

In the scramble since she got out of jail she’d forgotten it. She’d accepted the comforting idea that this Benny, the murderer spy, was someone new and distinct from her trusted friend. Now, pressed face first against the wall, his breath in her ear, she realized that it had been him, all along. The elevator stopped. He kept the gun in her back as he reached down and slung the tanks over his shoulders. Its muzzle bore into her vertebrae as the door opened and he pushed her out ahead of him. With his other hand on her shoulder he guided her down the hall, walking swiftly. Chango pretended to trip, and rolled towards him, striking his shins with her body. With the tanks on his back, Benny over balanced and went down. Chango scrambled up and ran back towards the elevators. There was a gun shot, and a bullet carved a deep furrow in the brass doors to her right. She swerved to the other side of the hall and grappled open the door to the stairs. She took them up, her footsteps hastened by the crash of the door as Benny threw it open. She turned the corner to the next flight of stairs just ahead of his next bullet. At the top of this flight was another door, with a trash can beside it. She sent the trash can down the stairs, and slipped through the door.

This hallway was much like the one a floor below. Grey carpeting and beige plaint utilitarian in comparison to the splendor of the ground floor. She scurried down the hall, trying doors. The fifth one was unlocked, and she darted inside.

Clean cut men and women in sylk suits turned to stare at her with wide eyes. They were sitting at a table above which glowed a holographic chart. She stood beside the door, panting.

“Can I help you? One of the men stood and took a step towards her. The door burst inward and Benny came through, brandishing his gun. Several of the suits screamed. Chango fled her spot by the wall, and Benny chased her around the table. One woman jumped out of her chair in a misguided effort to get out of the way, effectively placing herself in Chango’s path. Chango ducked under the table, squirming among the legs of chairs and people, finally breaking free to find Benny still entangled in the suits around the table. She heard their shouts as she dashed for the door, and just as she reached it, a shot and a scream. She didn’t look back. She was running again.

At the end of the hall was a narrow wooden door that read “maintenance only” in faded black stenciled letters. She tried the handle. It was locked, but there was a ventilation grating at the base of the door. A small, old square of metal covered with several layers of beige plaint. And one corner was loose. Chango worked her fingers underneath it and pried it from the door. The three remaining screws popped out. She gathered them up and pushed the grating edgewise through the hole to hide it from her pursuer. If he ever got free of the suits; she still heard noises from the office down the hall. Her shoulders barely fit through the square opening, and it took her precious seconds to wriggle her hips through. She was in a small grey stairwell threaded with wires, pipes and ventilation shafts.

Helix stood on the diving platform and looked down into the vat where she lay floating in the waters, her long dark hair streaming around her, dreaming, and opened her eyes. For a moment everything ceased. Nothing existed except for those bright blue eyes that were her eyes, that face that was her face, and then, with a scream, Helix leapt into the vat.

She plunged deep down into the emerald green spaces and rolled over, looking up at the surface like a sky quickly clouding as her sisters scrambled into the waters, creating turbulence with their limbs. They were swimming towards the queen. Several of them spotted her and broke off from the wave, diving below the surface to converge with her as she sought what they all sought, their mother, who was turning now and swimming to meet her.

Her sisters clamored between them, filling the waters with their bodies, congealing into two knots, one around her, the other around Lilith. As they surrounded and grappled her, Helix felt their panic. One of them wrapped her arms around Helix’s neck and hung on. Her face swam through Helix’s field of vision, a face like her own, but with more delicate features. Helix saw the terror in those blue eyes and felt, with no need for words, her message, “If you kill each other we will all die.”

It was true, but still Helix struggled and thrashed against the restraining arms all around her. She didn’t want to hurt them, she just wanted to get past them, but as they tightened their holds on her she bit and clawed to break free. A hand she had savaged let go of her upper right arm, and Helix reared back and butted the creature directly before her with her forehead. Doggedly, Helix pulled herself through the small wedge in the living wall around her and reached out with stiffened fingers to poke the next available sister in the throat.

The closer Helix and Lilith managed to claw towards each other, the more the others pushed them together in their frantic efforts to get back in between them. Soft, dark tendrils of her mother’s hair drifted past her face and Helix twined her fingers in it, pulling her closer. Lilith came readily enough, mouth wide and hands outstretched. She grabbed Helix by the head and pulled her face to hers, laying open Helix’s cheek with the sweep of a fang.

Helix felt her blood that was not really blood flow into the waters; felt the waters flow into her. She almost relished being cut again, it would bring her that much closer to the depths. But this language of touch, which she could not help hearing though she felt it through violence, had not yet robbed her of all sense of self-preservation. She ducked and angled under Lilith, grabbing her by her upper armpits as she went. With her forearms Helix forced Lilith’s lower arms against the shoulder joint, and they rolled together in a stately somersault, ringed now by her sisters who gave them room and waited, watching. In a small corner of her mind, Helix realized she had not breathed since she dived from the platform, but it didn’t seem important, because everywhere else, she was talking to her mother.

“This is wrong,” said Lilith through Helix’s skin. “There can only be one of us here. You have to be somewhere else to be you.”

“I know,” Helix answered. “But I am here, and we will be either one or none.”

Their struggle became a slow match of strength as Lilith grasped at Helix’s upper wrists and their hands clasped. They grappled with each other, each trying to push the other back through the waters and eventually out of the vat. But they were evenly matched, and each advantage gained by either one only served to bind them tighter together. The cut in Helix’s palm began to ache, and Lilith forced that hand back against the wrist and scissored her lower arms in towards her body, freeing them from Helix’s hold. For a moment it was all shifting limbs and reaching hands, and then Lilith grasped her by the waist, and with a nudge of her knee between Helix’s legs, sent her rotating like a spinner until her face was between Lilith’s legs, her head gripped in her knees.

Arms wrapped around abdomens, heads cradled in legs, their bodies interlocked like magnets in alignment. As Lilith spoke to her in her mother tongue, Helix lowered her face to her soft damp mat of hair, salty like the sea and full of stories.

oOo

Colin slept on a plastic sheet spread on the floor, dreaming of the sun on a warm afternoon, beating down on his hat as he dozed on the porch and waited for the stranger to come. They were all waiting. Waiting with the rhythm of the sun that was a blade of grass waving in the breeze and then the rhythm, the sun and the dream were torn apart by a scream.

Colin sprang from the floor to find himself alone, the door standing open and mist roiling in from outside. Swearing, he slammed the door shut and scrambled into his divesuit. His head was swimming. He felt as if he’d been suddenly yanked from deep water, into the air, and he’d forgotten how to breathe. He shook his head, pulled the face mask on and clamped it tight. Slipping his lips around the mouthpiece he gulped at the clean air for a few panicked moments, wondering how long the door had been open. He hadn’t had much to do in the last day and half except ponder what might be leaching through the ventilation system into the room, and what his chances were of contracting vatsickness from the exposure he had already received. Now he figured he could stop wondering and pretty much plan to die of it; maybe not right away, maybe not for years and years, but sooner or later, and for certain. All the same he double checked the suit’s seals before opening the door and going out onto the balcony. In the vat below the waters were aroil with the bodies of tetras. They were swarming so densely that he couldn’t make out anything more than thrashing arms and legs. Behind him, through the door he’d heedlessly left open, he heard the transceiver ringing.

He dashed back inside to answer it. It was Hector Martin. His hair was in disarray, as if he’d been sleeping and hadn’t had a chance to comb it. “Slatermeyer? Is that you?”

Colin checked the suit’s radio and found that it was still on broadcast. “Yes. Dr. Martin, something’s happening. The tetra’s, they’re -”