‘Sorry. Can’t do it.’
‘Give me a paperclip. I’ll pick the lock. Tell them I broke free and overpowered you.’
‘I’m so sorry. I wish I could help. But I can’t.’
‘It’s not about me, dumbass. It’s about you guys. This whole sick cavalcade. One big, deliberate mindfuck. The team in these tunnels, the doctors, nurses and soldiers. They all took an oath to preserve life. Built their lives around it. And they are going to throw it all away.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Ekks is a nut. A psychopath. He’s laughing at you guys. Laughing his ass off. I don’t understand why you can’t see it. It’s like you’re all blind. He acts all paternal and concerned. He smiles, plays The Great Healer. But deep down, any fool can see this is the most fun he’s had in his life. The monsters dancing in his head, the dark carnival locked in his skull, finally made it out into the world. All the death and horror out there in the streets? He loves it. He’s exultant. Euphoric. Never felt more at home. It’s like his dreams leaked out of his ears and took over the world.’
‘Have you ever spoken with the man?’
‘Ekks? I’ve watched him real close.’
‘But have you actually spoken with him? Have you exchanged a single word?’
‘I’ve looked in his eyes. Told me all I need to know.’
‘Everyone respects the guy. He’s smart. He organised defences back at Bellevue. He rationed food, showed people how to drain water from the pipes. It was his idea to hide here at Fenwick. We’d all be dead a long time ago, if not for him. He saved our asses a dozen times.’
‘He saved you so he could kill you. It’s not enough to see those infected folks rip you to pieces. Too easy. He’s got something better in mind.’
‘Like what?’
‘We’ve all become killers. Every one of us. I killed a couple of folks back at the hospital. Patients in gowns. Met them in a corridor. Tried to rip out my throat. I grabbed a fire extinguisher from the wall, did what I had to do. And those 101st grunts. They expended a shitload of ammo during the run from Bellevue to 23rd Street. Hell of a body count. We’ve all got horror stories, a lifetime of nightmares. But we killed folk who had long since ceased to be themselves, people who were pretty much dead already. Shit, we did them a favour. If they had a voice, if they had a mind, they would have pleaded for a bullet in the brain.
But this is different. This is how Ekks intends to break you. He wants to see his team of ministering angels transformed into a lynch mob. He wants to see them violate every code. Descend to his fucked up level. He’s going to rub your noses in the dirt until you admit you are nothing more than pissing, shitting animals, no better than those creeps crawling around the streets outside. He doesn’t want to kill me. I’m nothing. A lab rat. A germ in a Petri dish. He’s going to push you guys until you destroy yourselves. You have to say No. You have to make a stand.’
‘It doesn’t make sense. The guy has been a surgeon for years. He’s healed thousands of people.’
‘Because he enjoys life-or-death power. That’s how he gets his rocks off. He likes to drill a person’s skull and probe inside their mind.’
‘People with strokes, people with Alzheimer’s. He isn’t some sanatorium butcher dishing out twenty lobotomies a day. He’s a world-class neurosurgeon. He’s trying to help.’
‘Everyone who got wheeled into that guy’s surgical theatre came out changed. Maybe for the better. But they got tweaked. That’s the kick. That’s the buzz. He’s a real-life Doctor Frankenstein. He gowns-up, stands over the operating table and creates something new. The guy is an insect. And this is his time. The Year of the Bug. His moment to reign.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. I’m just a guard.’
‘You have to save me, David. You have to save yourself.’
47
Galloway scrambled through tight passageways, mapped the warren of pipes.
A network of conduits built in the nineteen twenties, long before the smooth aluminium ducting and monitored flow control of modern ventilation systems. Giant plenum blades in the plant room circulated air through the pipes. Negative pressure drew off stagnant tunnel fumes, replaced fetid vapour with clean air drawn from street vents.
Galloway still had sensation. His hand and feet delivered the texture of brick and abrasive mortar. Yet he was impervious to pain. Rotted skin hung from his arms in strips, exposing muscle threaded with metallic veins.
He knelt, gripped his bicep and ripped away ribbons of loose skin. He felt no pain. He could feel his flesh stretch, peel and tear as if he were shredding paper.
Sometimes he was Galloway. Sometimes he wasn’t.
Consciousness came and went like an intermittent radio signal, but his body kept moving. He would sit, staring into darkness. Next moment, he would find himself crouched in an entirely different section of tunnel, exploring a fissure in the brickwork, probing it with his finger. No idea how much time had passed. No idea what instinct had piloted his body during the blackout. Clearly he had moved through the tunnels with deliberation and purpose. But what entity had looked out from behind his eyes? What alien intelligence had displaced his thoughts and memories?
He squatted in the darkness. He could still see. There was no light, but the tunnel around him seemed to dance with a weird bioluminescence as if it were lit from within. He perceived the bark-ripple texture of each brick, and the granular crust of mortar, with the heightened clarity of dreams.
He explored new sensations, a torrential inrush of sense data.
He was not alone.
He could feel something else deep in the tunnel network. A cold intellect, watching, appraising. It sang in the darkness. His body began to respond.
‘Who are you?’ he murmured, addressing the thing in his head. ‘What do you want?’
As if in response, his left arm began to rise. He fought the motion, battled the hijacked limb. He tried to bar the grasping hand with his mutilated right arm and force it down. It was like fighting a hydraulic ram.
He tried to ball his fist, but his fingers overcame the command, reached for his face and began to claw skin. Nails dug into his forehead and tore decayed flesh like it was the putrid, semi-liquefied pulp of a rotten fruit.
He screamed.
Stretch and tear. Epidermis slowly peeled back. He shook his head and blinked away blood as it trickled down the bridge of his nose into his eyes.
A wide strip of skin slowly ripped from his brow, eye socket, cheek and jaw. The glistening musculature of his face fully revealed. Metal-fused bone.
Galloway emitted a guttural howl of revulsion and despair. He spat blood and drool. He tried to pull his head away as the hand clawed his face and gouged skin.
Fingers gripped the back of his neck and peeled off his scalp like a ski mask, exposing the white dome of his skull. The discarded flesh-cap hit the tunnel floor with a slap.
Each ear lobe twisted free, dripping strings of pale cartilage.
A wide slab of tissue torn from his chest, exposing ribs and knitted sinew.
A sleeve of flesh ripped from his arm.
Galloway had lost the battle for ascendancy. He was a passenger in his own head. He watched, helpless, as the methodical excavation continued. Fingers raked and clawed, sloughed dead tissue from his bones as something lean and lethal fought to emerge.