“With all you guys did for me, I couldn’t do that.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” Razz nodded. “I’ll wait until you get here, though I’m not looking forward to seeing any of you guys butt naked.”
“The feeling’s mutual. And don’t worry, Tim’s probably fine. We would have heard something if he wasn’t.”
“Probably fell in, the dummy.”
The Sticker took off into the hall, darkness immediately folding around him. The lavatory was only a dozen yards or so from the Membrane Station, around a corner. It was surprising that Timothy even had problems with his bowels. The food delivery gleaned from their jumpsuits did cause their bodies to produce stool, but it was runny and thin and only a couple ounces every other day. It took less than a minute to be done with your business, so it was concerning that so much time had passed. He got to the lav door and pushed it open.
The door shut behind him and the blackness was absolute.
“Tim, are you okay? We’re waiting.”
The Sticker took a few steps and strained his ears. If only he had a flashlight—
He let out of shout of pain. Something had pierced through his neck and a terrible sensation flooded down his chest and into his heart. The Sticker stumbled back through the door, knocking it open. Timothy came rushing out like a bald wraith.
The Sticker tried to speak but his lips were numb, his throat passage thickened. Every inch of his skin warmed and then froze.
“I’m sorry,” said Timothy into his ear. “That fool thing Harper said won’t work. They’ll come for us anyway. They’ll find us. She’ll eat everybody here. I have to do the right thing.”
The Sticker tried to get the man off his chest, but his muscles had turned to water.
“You won’t feel it. I could have done it in the bathroom. Just cut out your throat. I didn’t. I could have let you suffer. I didn’t. You don’t deserve that. You’re a good man. We’re all good men.” Timothy picked up his knife spear. “We just have a really bad fucking job.”
With the only energy he still possessed, the Sticker brought up his hand, Fanjlion glove turning it to a blade.
The point came out the top of Timothy’s skull. The man’s eyes went hazy. His lips tried a few words, but they came out gummy nonsense. He fell off the Sticker, blood rushing from his mouth like a river at last free from a lifetime obstacle.
The Sticker got up to his knees, looking around dizzily.
The lights in the hall blinked on.
All the commotion had signaled the Princess. Hundreds of padded feet fell in the hall, coming from all directions.
He crawled around the corner. Razz stood in the threshold of the membrane station. Another river of red, this one, an army of like-minded slaves came blasting down the hall from both sides. Razz spotted the Sticker and emerged. The robots were almost upon him.
“Come on!”
The Sticker shook his head. “Go!” he hollered over the noise. “Go!”
Razz fell back inside the room, terror in his face. The door to the membrane station shut.
Good, thought the Sticker. That’s good.
And then he stopped thinking; his presence of mind ripped away and shoved itself into a colorless place.
He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep but the Sticker awoke gagging. The death smell around him was palpable. In his early twenties, working a stockyard in northern California, he’d been assigned the atrocious duty of cleaning out a dumpster that held spoiled beef livers. That was vile.
This was worse.
His eyelids sagged as he fought to open them. The half-moon shaped room took on the ominous look of a mechanical dragon — thin metal plates on floor, ceiling and walls. Several dozen robots scrubbed blood off the eastern wall, and a few scattered throughout the room worked the floors. More huddled behind him, blocking the exit.
The Sticker stood, against all warnings from his body to do otherwise. He faced a large platform that took up most of the room. On it sat, generators, supercomputers, machines tumbling drums of the digestive enzyme, steel cables flexing from dark locations; seeing it all took his eyes for a dizzy ride that landed on the most horrible part of all. Above the mass of unified machinery, an immense head stretched forth, connected to the cables by sinew and taut reams of leathery red muscle. The head had a canine shape, though there was no fur or even skin to speak of, just muscle and bone with two eyes like globes of jet.
The Princess shook from side to side and let forth a spiteful choking sound.
A robot approached the Sticker and said in a bland female voice. “Sit down.”
He looked back at the snarling head, which was large enough to snap him up whole in its jaws. “I’d love to,” he said, and did as asked, his lower back at once exploding with its normal achiness. Exhaustion rolled throughout him and he jerked his head back to keep awake.
The Princess clicked a large bloody tongue against her pink fangs, long as fence posts.
“Your friend escaped through the transport,” the robot translated. “Are you happy?”
“Yes,” the Sticker replied.
The robot clucked and snickered in the Princess’s language.
“That is fine. One friend did not get away.”
A steel caged cart pushed through the gathering of robots at the door, two other robots laboring at its weight. Pieces of Timothy were piled inside. His face looked up at the ceiling, mouth open, chin painted in brown blood.
The Sticker looked on, numbly, thankful for the surrealistic lens imparted on him by the sedative. It took him a moment to remember what had happened. A man who he thought was his friend, so desperate he’d made the wrong choice. The Sticker thought he should be more repulsed by the sight, even under the influence. Maybe it was all the death he’d seen. Maybe because he would never see Annette again. Or maybe he’d always envisioned an awful end to his life and this confirmation held him in morbid awe.
When the robots started tossing Timothy into the Princess’s mouth though, it was gratifying to the Sticker to feel his gorge rise a little. He hadn’t lost his humanity through all this.
As the Princess’s teeth slammed together and ground up Timothy, drums of enzymes twisted and twirled, lights on the computer displays dazzled like a toxic Christmas display, holograms of the food source molecular breakdowns pulsed in the air. Blood sprayed down from the Princess’s jaws and pooled on the floor near the stage. Toward the end of the meal, she made a sickening yummy sound that turned into one of her infant hunger screams.
“More,” said the robot. “Fresh,” it added.
A steel collar clicked around the Sticker’s neck and a force pitched him forward. He twisted his face back and saw several robots handling a large boom connected to his collar. They drove his body across the slippery floor until he slammed into the stage. He thrashed around to break their grip, but his muscles seized at their rock steady resistance. They pulled and he hitched back on his rear.
The Sticker threw an arm behind his neck to see if he could reach the boom. He grasped air, nothing more. As he brought his arm back something tremendous dropped over his bicep. In silent terror he watched as the Princess severed his arm just under the shoulder, ripped it away from his body and greedily chewed it up in the left side of her mouth.
The pain felt like a distant horror waiting to visit upon him. He could smell the meaty odor of the Princess’s breath. Her glassy black eyes rolled back in ecstasy as she ate.
Robots seized him by the legs and lifted the Sticker in the air for presentation.