“It’s back in the lab complex,” said Bunny, and we began moving that way. Stumbling at first but finding our coordination. Walking, fast-walking, running. We left the cavern and reentered the corridor that led back into the Gateway complex, and then moved quickly but cautiously between the rows of stacked boxes. The sound continued, calling us, drawing us. But it was still far away, deep inside the structure.
“Boss,” snapped Bunny, “on your ten o’clock.”
We all turned. Ready to fight. Ready to kill. I could almost hear the coming thunder of fresh gunfire. The savage Killer who shares my mind with me was poised, ready to do the things that earn him the name he wears. All of my earlier hesitation was gone.
A figure came walking around the end of a long row of crates.
It walked slowly and a bit awkwardly, but it wasn’t another albino penguin. It wasn’t another soldier, either. This time it was a thin, fortyish man wearing a lab coat over a plaid shirt and khakis. His feet were bare. His glasses were nearly opaque from the blood that was splashed across his face. It soaked his clothes and dripped from him, and he left a long line of bare red footprints behind him.
“Stop right there,” I yelled.
He kept walking.
“Sir — you need to stop right there or I will put you down. Do you understand me?” My finger was along the curve of the trigger guard, quivering, ready to slip inside and squeeze off the shot. The Killer snarled inside my mind.
The man slowed and stopped. He lifted his head as if listening to something far away, and again I thought I heard that voice cry out those same meaningless words we’d heard before. Not Russian and not Chinese. Not any language I ever heard of.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
We couldn’t see who spoke, but it was closer now. Just beyond the range of our flashlights. A hundred yards? Less? Fifty? Twenty? The echoes were deceptive.
“Put your hands on your head, fingers laced,” I told the man. “Do it now.”
The man seemed to smile for a moment. “We are always what you want,” he said in a voice that was muddy and thick. “The sequence is written in the stars.”
“Put your hands on your head,” I repeated. “I won’t tell you again.”
“It is there to be read.”
He said those words — or at least those are the words I heard — but I swear to God that those aren’t the words his mouth formed. It was so strange, like watching a foreign film with bad dubbing.
“No truth is unlearnable.”
“Tell me your name,” I demanded. “What is your ID number?”
The man opened his mouth to say something else, but this time instead of words a pint of dark blood flopped out and splatted onto the front of his shirt. He made a faint gagging sound and then his knees buckled and he collapsed with exaggerated slowness to the ground.
“Go,” said Top as he moved up to cover me.
Bunny and I broke cover and ran cautiously toward him, checking each side corridor in the maze of crates, covering each other.
“Green Giant,” I said, and Bunny grunted an assent. He took up a defensive posture while I dropped to one knee by the fallen man. I put my fingers to his throat and got a big silent nothing. “Dead.”
He was a mess. Blood everywhere. A name tag hung askew from his lab coat.
M. ERSKINE
The scientist in charge of this project. From close up I could see that his skin was as gray-white and mottled as the penguin’s feathers had been. Like the skin of a mushroom.
Erskine looked up at the ceiling with dead eyes and a slack mouth. And then he spoke again. “We are always what you need.”
We all jumped.
“He’s alive!” yelped Bunny.
“No, he ain’t,” growled Top.
I jabbed my fingers back against his carotid and got the same nothing as before. Top tried, too.
He jerked his hand back.
“We have waited for you since the lands split,” said the dead man.
We scrambled back.
“What the fuck?” yelped Bunny.
“I know, I know,” I said, my heart hammering in my chest.
“No,” insisted Bunny, and he held his BAMS unit in front of my face. The comforting little green light was glowing bright red.
We scrambled back from the dead man.
“Reads as unknown biological agent,” Bunny said.
“Yeah,” growled Top, “but what kind? Bacteria? Nerve gas? A virus? Are we hallucinating this shit?”
Bunny shook his head. “I don’t know… it paused on viruses for like half a second and then went to unknown particles.”
Top looked at his while I covered everyone. “Mine says bacteria… no, I’m wrong. It’s reading unknown, too.”
I glanced at mine just as the reading changed from virus to unknown.
We stared at each other, then at the units, then at the dead man.
We backed away from Erskine and tried to get readings from different parts of the airflow. Every few seconds the BAMS units would shift. Virus. Fungal spores. Bacteria. Mycotoxins. And even plant pollen. But each time the meter flicked back to the display for UNKNOWN PARTICLES.
“Something must be interfering with the sensors,” said Bunny.
“Can’t,” said Top. “They’re self-contained and they have ruggedized cases.”
The red lights flickered at us like rats’ eyes.
On the floor the dead man spoke again, and once more his words and his mouth didn’t match. His body trembled as with the onset of convulsions, but the tone was normal. No, “normal” isn’t a word I can use here. Normal wasn’t in that place with us. His tone sounded casual, like he was having a calm conversation with someone. The tone and words were well modulated. It sounded for all the world like a tape playback of something this man might have said at another time and under incredibly different circumstances, but somehow repeated now despite his condition.
What he said was, “There’s nothing to worry about. This is a clean facility.”
I could feel the shakes starting. They started deep, in my bones, in my muscles, and then shuddered outward through my skin.
“Cap’n,” whispered Top, “this motherfucker is dead.”
“I know.”
Bunny said, “What?”
“No pulse. He’s dead.”
“We defeat time because it interferes with service,” said Erskine. Or, at least, that’s what the voice said. His mouth formed different words. Even dead. I made myself look at the shapes his lips formed. And as I read those words I could feel — actually feel — my blood turn to ice. The words his dead mouth formed were, “I’m sorry. God forgive us. We should never have opened the gate. I can see the sleeping things. God forgive us.”
Over and over again. His dead, cold lips pleaded for mercy while the cooling meat of his body spoke to us in this vast and impossible place.
Bunny held his BAMS unit in one hand and had his M4A1 carbine pointed at the man’s head.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” repeated the voice. “This is a clean facility.”
Suddenly all of the red lights in the BAMS unit turned green.
I stared at my unit. The display read NO DETECTABLE PARTICLES.
I’ll buy one malfunctioning unit. Maybe two at an absurd stretch. Not three. And not three malfunctioning in the same way at exactly the same moment.
Then the dead man on the floor sat up.
He didn’t struggle to get up; he sat up as if he’d been doing ab crunches five times a day for twenty years. With his legs straight out in front of him, Erskine’s upper body folded forward until he sat erect. He turned his head very slowly toward me. His eyes were no longer totally vacant. There was a strange new light in them, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that says someone’s home. It wasn’t that at all.