Shadow Box, page 24
Kane’s hand tightened on Brigid’s as he knelt there, looking into those featureless, terrifying eyes. “Be strong, Baptiste, be strong,” he encouraged.
Her voice came back strained, scratching at her throat, a hoarse, guttural sound. “Get off me, ape-thing.”
Kane looked at Brigid as she writhed on the couch, her hair now damp with sweat. “We’re losing her,” he said to no one in particular.
“No, we’re not,” Lakesh insisted, standing and looking around the room for what he knew not.
Kane’s eyes stayed on Brigid as she tossed and turned on the couch. “This is how they all went,” he said bitterly. “Baptiste is strong. Her will’s as stubborn as a mule, but it’s overwhelming her now. I can tell.”
“It’s not her willpower,” Lakesh said, speaking the words aloud before he had even acknowledged his own revelation. “It’s her memory. Her photographic memory is keeping her from being completely overwhelmed.”
“Say again?” Kane and DeFore asked in unison.
“She said it earlier and I just dismissed it for rambling,” Lakesh told them. “Our memory of self is all that we have, but Brigid’s memory is so accurate that this thing, this Igigi, cannot overwhelm it. At least, not immediately. It’s like trying to paint over a huge mural—details keep popping out through the new layer.”
Kane looked up from his position beside the couch. “So we have longer,” he stated, “but we don’t have an answer.”
Lakesh turned to the physician DeFore, a plan forming in his head. “Reba, make her stable.”
“Dr. Singh,” the medic complained, “I don’t think that I can.”
“I need her to remain herself for a matter of ten, perhaps fifteen minutes,” Lakesh instructed. “Increase the IV, pump her with adrenaline, whatever you feel you need to do.”
DeFore didn’t question anymore; she just began sorting through a cupboard for a glucose pack to add to the drip feed.
“And we’ll need to move her,” Lakesh stated, instructing Kane. “A stretcher, a gurney, a wheelchair. Find me something.”
“Where are we going?” Kane asked.
“Basement,” Lakesh told him, a wicked gleam in his eye. “It’s time to enter the prison city of the Igigi.”
WITH BRIGID laid out on a gurney, Kane, Lakesh and DeFore made their way down to the basement of the Cerberus facility. An IV drip on a wheeled pole was dragged along beside the gurney, the feed attached to Brigid’s arm as she lay on the stretcher, her eyes bunched tight, her muscles tense with struggle.
DeFore stood next to the IV, monitoring its output nervously. She had brought replacement bags for the feed, including some adenosine in an effort to keep Brigid’s racing heart rhythm regular.
As they descended, Kane spoke to Lakesh. “What do you plan on doing?” he asked.
“The only thing that we can do, I think,” Lakesh told him as the elevator pulled to a halt on its whining hydraulics.
When the elevator doors opened, the group was greeted by an unexpected scene. A dozen guards stood in the wide corridor, including Grant and Domi, all of them heavily armed with their weapons trained on the door to the storage room that had been transformed into a cell for their monstrous captive. Donald Bry was giving orders to a handful of scientists who were rushing pressurized canisters of anaesthetic to the scene and swiftly attaching hoses to the canisters.
Lakesh caught Bry’s attention as the elevator doors locked open at their widest point. “What’s going on, Donald?” he asked.
Bry walked across to him, a grim expression on his face. “The creature’s waking up,” he explained. “It seems that it’s building up a resistance to the anaesthetic. Gil called it in just after you left to tend to Brigid, but I didn’t want to alert you—I knew you had your hands full.”
“That’s fine, Donald,” Lakesh assured him.
Bry looked at the strange party with their sick colleague lying on the wheeled stretcher. “What are you doing down here, sir?” he asked finally.
“Keep pumping anaesthetic into the room,” Lakesh told him, “and get me four gas masks, plus as many as everyone else here needs for when we open the door.”
“Excuse me?” Bry said in astonishment.
“We’re going in,” Lakesh told him with a grim smile.
“Are you mad?” Bry responded. “You’re hardly in a fit state to…And that monster will kill you if it wakes up. And Brigid’s certainly in no condition to—”
Lakesh held up his hand to hush Bry’s stream of complaints. “True, true and true,” he said. “But I’ll still need the gas masks, Donald. It’s the only way.”
Bry turned to the group in the corridor and began giving out instructions. In a few moments, Kane and the team had been handed gas masks and rebreathers. Kane slipped his over his head and let it hang by its strap around his neck. Beside him, DeFore looked at her own rubber mask with discomfort, handling it as though it were an alien object.
“It’ll be fine,” Kane assured her.
“This isn’t my territory, Kane,” she admitted. “I’m a medic, not a…a warrior.”
“And what we need in there is a medic,” Kane said reassuringly.
As they spoke, Donald Bry’s voice called out instructions, advising everyone in the corridor that they had thirty seconds. “I want this corridor clear of nonessential personnel now, and I want all remaining guards to get as far back as possible, masks on,” he explained.
DeFore worked another rebreather mask over Brigid’s face, lifting her head gently as though bathing a baby.
With his own gas mask hanging beneath his chin, a heavy rifle clenched in his hands, Grant stepped over and spoke with Kane. “You need any backup in there, pal?” he asked.
“We’ll be fine,” Kane assured him.
“I’ll go in with you if you want me to. We’ve been through a lot together,” Grant began.
“No,” Kane corrected, “we’ve been through everything together, and we survived it all. This won’t be any different. And it will be a lot easier knowing you’re just outside, in case anything does go wrong.”
Grant shifted his Copperhead rifle to his left hand and held his right out for Kane to shake. Kane grasped his partner’s hand, clenching it tightly for a long moment—no further words were needed.
Bry was counting down from ten at the top of his voice, and the last few people in the corridor rushed for the stairwell, the guards backing away from the door to the cell.
Lakesh leaned close, his voice emotionless as he spoke to Kane. “It’s time,” he said.
Gas masks over their faces, the four-strong team entered the open door to the cell, with Lakesh pushing Brigid’s gurney while Kane went ahead to guide it inside. Wisps of foglike anaesthetic gas drifted from the doorway, reminding Lakesh once again of an apiarist’s smoke around a beehive.
Kane looked firmly ahead, his eyes locked on the now still form of the hulking, black-skinned humanoid figure that they had brought back from California. Although still, the monster’s chest continued to rise and fall slowly as it breathed, and wisps of green smoke were emitted in puffs from its closed eyes.
Behind them, guards began to take up positions, gas masks over their faces, their weapons trained on the door as DeFore pushed it closed behind her, the last to enter. His own mask in place, Bry stepped forward and locked the door. He had agreed with Lakesh that if the monster broke free, a locked door might make all the difference in such a scenario—and that it was provident to lose the four of them than to have it escape from the cell.
As they listened to the heavy bar being dropped across the outside of the door, Kane and Lakesh positioned the gurney close to the unconscious, hulking figure, close enough that Brigid might reach out and touch the foul, alien thing.
Applying the gurney’s wheel brake, Kane looked at the monster, slumbering just two feet away from him. “So, what now?” he asked, not bothering to look up. His voice came muffled through the gas mask rebreather over the lower half of his face.
“As we discussed upstairs,” Lakesh stated, “you need to touch it—together.”
Kane’s glance shifted to Brigid’s strained form on the stretcher, and then he looked at Lakesh with mournful eyes. “You think she’s up to this?” he demanded.
Lakesh shook his head. “No, I don’t,” he admitted, “but that’s neither here nor there now. This needs to be done, Kane, if Brigid is to live.”
“Can I get a guarantee on that, old man?” Kane asked, adjusting the straps on Brigid’s gas mask.
“You’re venturing into the unknown here,” Lakesh advised him, “and, if I’m right, it’s only your bond as anam-charas that will keep you from being utterly overwhelmed.”
Looking up from her work securing an IV line to Kane’s arm, DeFore voiced her own concern. “This anam-chara thing is what we used to call ‘New Age nonsense,’ Lakesh,” she said. “Are you sure you want to stake two people’s lives on it?”
“Kane’s words back in the medical bay reminded me of the soul bond that he shares with Brigid,” Lakesh said. “Their souls are forever locked, a friendship that transcends mere physical reality. If I’m right, they will act together, bolster each other as they go through the final phase of the process with the Igigi.”
“The process?” Brigid repeated quietly, her blank eyes looking around the room in confusion. “Where are we?”
Kane leaned close to her, brushing her sweat-damp hair from her forehead and speaking as reassuringly as he could through the medium of the gas mask. “Lakesh has got some crazy plan,” he told her, “to fix everything. You need to touch the creature.”
“No, Kane,” Brigid said, her voice barely audible through her own gas mask.
“I’ll be right there with you, right at your side the whole way,” Kane assured her.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she told him. “It’s like there’s two of me now. I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
“Sure, you do,” Kane told her firmly, placing his hand over hers. “Now, we can do this.”
“I’m scared,” Brigid whispered, barely audible through the mask.
“Bullshit,” Kane told her. “You’re never scared, Baptiste, never for as long as I’ve known you.”
With those words, Kane guided her hand over the side of the gurney, entwining his fingers in hers and pushing them both, together, until they teetered over the shiny black carapace of the hideous, terrifying creature sprawled out on the floor.
Lakesh and DeFore both stepped back, not intentionally, just an instinctive desire to get away, as they watched Kane’s and Brigid’s entwined hands touch the dark, armored skin of the monster in unison.
Suddenly, Kane’s body shook, and he seemed to dance on the spot where he knelt as though some kind of current was passing through him. Lying on the gurney, Brigid’s form shook, too, and she let out a whine from beneath the gas mask before falling quiet once more.
Lakesh’s voice cut into the silence of the room. “That’s it,” he said. “They’re in. All we can do now is wait.”
DeFore stepped back to her position beside the two warriors, assuring herself that the drip feeds were working. “I hope,” she began, then stopped, trying to find the right words.
Lakesh looked at her, holding her gaze with his own. “We all do, Reba,” he told her solemnly. “It’s all we have.”
IT WAS LIKE DIVING into a swimming pool, Kane thought, cutting through the stillness of the surface and feeling the surge of water rush all around, pressing against the ears. But it was more sinister than that. The water wanted to hold you, to keep you beneath the surface forever. He was choking, unable to catch his breath, and when he did breathe, his nasal passages, his mouth, his lungs filled with the inky blackness, the swarming, dark-hued insects that attached themselves to his insides.
Distantly, as though looking the wrong way through a telescope, Kane could see his hand over Baptiste’s, the two of them touching the black, chitinous carapace of the mysterious creature.
Baptiste.
She was there, of course; he had almost forgotten, just for a moment. Brigid Baptiste, that tiny part of his very being, that precious splinter embedded within his soul, within the very core of his self.
Kane turned, and, as he did so, a multitude of images overlaid one another, vying for attention in his eyes. It wasn’t the converted storage room, and yet he knew that that was here, too, all around him. It was something bigger, something more. A field. No, not a field. A landscape, no markings, just rolling hills of lush green grass, its rich smell filling his nostrils.
Brigid Baptiste was there, beside him, smiling as she always had, her hair radiant, her eyes that bright, wonderful green that he knew by heart.
“Kane.” Her voice came like a breath.
“Where are we?” he asked, gazing into the depths of her beautiful emerald eyes, so pleased to see them filled with color once more.
“This is memory.” She swept her arm out, taking in everything around them. Her arm was covered now in the black body stocking of the shadow suit, although Kane was sure she hadn’t been wearing that when they had left the storage room. Had they even left?
Kane felt the pressure of the air around him, cloying, enveloping, and he shook his head like a dog shaking itself after a dip in the sea.
But Brigid didn’t seem to mind at all. She stood before him, stretching her arms out straight from her shoulders, laughing in utter, total joy. “We’re inside their memories, do you see?” she told Kane through her joyful laughter.
As Kane watched, Brigid began to spin, her feet dancing on the spot, head in the air, a child once again playing silly summer games, turning and turning until she fell down in the grass with dizziness. And still, Brigid laughed, laughed until it hurt, until her stomach cramped and she groaned with the delightful pain.
Kane bent, reaching for her. “Baptiste,” he said solemnly, “you have to snap out of it. This place is doing something to you.”
She just laughed and snorted as though being tickled by unseen hands. “Pish-posh, Kane,” she said through her guffaws, “we’re inside memory, you understand? This is a memory playground, everything I’ve always known but somehow made real.” Slowly, her laughing abated and she just lay there, gazing into nothingness. “I see things,” she told him as he crouched beside her on the fragrant grass. “I see things in my mind’s eye, perfect re-creations of the things I’ve seen before, and that’s how my memory is. But this place, this is like…like the difference between a sketch and a…a movie image. The difference between hearing a story and being there.”
“Whose memories are these?” Kane asked, looking warily around.
“These are the Igigi,” Brigid said. “They hid here, inside the creature that we tackled. They didn’t mean to—it was all a mistake, a miscalculation. So they’re all here, vying for space, desperate to be free.”
Kane shook his head, trying to absorb her words. “I don’t understand,” he admitted. “How can they…?”
“You’re an inhabitant of two worlds now, Kane,” Brigid explained, “just like me. Two different realities, the one you knew and the one that the Igigi see and hear and touch. They see it all so differently, they don’t have our frames of reference. They are alien, Kane. This is what it is to be alien, truly alien.”
“They overwhelmed those people,” Kane reminded her, “overwhelmed the Incarnate. You’re the next one, Baptiste. They’re overwhelming you, and then they’ll come for me.”
“I know,” she told him, smiling wistfully, “and it hurts and I know that I’m not strong enough to take them, but it’s all so fascinating. I don’t want to just go, to leave here.”
“Which is probably the only thing keeping you alive,” Kane told her. “You don’t remember things the way other people do. Lakesh thinks, because of that, you must have a stronger image of self than just about anyone else on the planet.”
“The looking-glass self,” Brigid whispered, as Kane continued.
“I don’t have your ability, Baptiste,” Kane said. “I need you to remember who I am, or we’ll both wither and die, in here, in this place.”
“In this memory,” Brigid said wistfully, the girlish smile playing across her lips as she stretched out on the grass.
“I’ll need to know what this is,” Kane told her, gesturing all around, “if I’m to destroy it.”
Brigid sat up, outraged. “Kane, you can’t!”
“It will kill you, and me, and everyone it touches, the whole of Cerberus, the whole world, before it’s all played out,” Kane said. “We have to stop it, and Lakesh thinks that we—you and I—are the key.”
“How?” Brigid asked.
“Show me everything, Baptiste,” Kane told her. “Show me what it all means, what this place really is.”
Lifting herself from the grass, Brigid stood beside Kane, holding her thin, pale hand down to help him up. Together, the two of them walked, arm-in-arm, across the verdant hills of memory.
INSIDE THE GAS-FILLED chamber, Lakesh watched the dark-skinned creature as its chest slowly rose and fell. “It makes sense now,” he said, turning to DeFore in his blocky gas mask.
“What does?” she prompted.
“It was born in those caves—the man-made caves, the kiva—in Arizona,” Lakesh said. “The quake freed it.”
“How can you be so sure?” DeFore queried. “They’re two disparate events, miles and miles apart.”
“Because I dislike coincidence, Reba,” Lakesh told her. “Coincidence is only when we fail to put all the pieces of the jigsaw together, when we don’t realize that we left one piece inside the box.”
“So, if this thing escaped from Arizona—from its prison there—then how did it end up in California?” Reba asked.
“It moves,” Lakesh said simply. “It moves fast, often underground, draining victims of life, overpowering them and using them up like batteries.”
“What makes you so certain?” DeFore asked.
“The kachina that Edwards brought back,” Lakesh said, smiling beneath his mask. “This thing overwhelms personalities with its own, leaking personality into the minds of others until they are subsumed and killed. And what are the kachina but tiny representations of different personalities, different character traits? A leakage felt by the Pueblo people in their visions, their dreams, carved into form and substance.”
