Galati and Wells shared yet another look.
"You’ve … seen this thing, before? Cap?" Galati wondered.
"No … no …" Campion mumbled to them but then spoke out loud to himself while running both his hands over and along the device, opening more compartments to access more buttons, dials, gauges, and switches. "Of course, it’s simple. I set the radius of effect using the two dials; set the duration of effect with this timer … here. Then it’s just a matter of finding the correct particle balance."
Galati shrugged and sarcastically said, "Yeah, um, Cap, sounds simple to me."
"Sure," Wells chimed in. "Just find the correct particle balance. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?"
Campion fell out of his trance, looked at the two soldiers, and said to them, "I don't know. It's like I've had the instructions for this thing in my head all the time. I just had to, well, remember."
The tender sound of Beethoven’s Symphony Number Nine rolled across the small living room like the current of a gentle stream. The sounds fell upon a vacant sofa and matching coffee table, where an ancient copy of Popular Mechanics rested. Alongside the couch sat a small stereo, from which the classical music played.
Then came another sound, just below the music — never overpowering it.
A sniffle. A sob. A grunt. A pencil scribbling.
Dr. Vincent Vsalov sat at a round table in his guest quarters, writing. He wrote on a solitary sheet of paper with a number 2 pencil. The remains of a half-dozen number 2 pencils — snapped or worn to nothing — lay at his feet, across the table, and otherwise discarded in haphazard fashion.
More writing paper — blank — waited in a neat pile to his left; waited to go under his pencil, to receive line after line of harsh, sloppy scribbles to then be thrown to his right to join a growing messy mass of papers already covered in line after line of jagged script.
Vsalov gripped the pencil in a red fist so hard his fingers cramped. The letters came out mutated and mangled. But the ideas behinds those words were clear. Each broken word a clear thought in his mind before it made it to the paper; the paper then filled and discarded.
Vsalov wanted to cry out, but mental gridlock froze out any impulse other than the impulse to spill his thoughts onto the paper. He was in pain; horrible pain as something strip-mined his brain, forcing the ideas, concepts, and designs it wanted into his arm and smashing them onto the paper.
He worked with the fury of a desperate addict, and the impulse to tell became a psychological bullet, pulling out the desired knowledge but turning his mind into something as mutated and mangled as the wretched marks on the paper.
A tear splashed onto the paper as he filled the last bit of white space on a page. That sheet, the words, and the tear were thrown aside — they were no longer needed. The written words were irrelevant.
It was the thought that counted.
31
Major Gant took the last bite of an energy bar pulled from his survival kit. He washed it down with a mouthful of water that was warm and tasted metallic. Not exactly his first choice of last meals, but no one appeared willing to share the culinary bounty of Twinkies, candy bars, and MREs taken from his team's gear, so it would have to do.
The creature wearing Dr. Briggs’s flesh emerged from its room at the end of the lab, but what came out from behind the heavy metal door was greatly changed from what had gone in.
This version of Briggs seemed re-energized, as evidenced by the surprising bounce in his step. Furthermore, the scientist-turned-vessel had dressed in the charcoal gray sport jacket, slacks, and matching tie that had somehow made its way into one of Gant’s soldiers’ backpacks.
What hair was left on Briggs’s balding scalp was groomed to the point of being slick, and while it appeared the entity had made no attempt to cure its host’s hair loss, it did apparently feel that eyesight was important: Briggs’s glasses were gone.
In all, he appeared one part funeral director and one part Mafioso, although a smattering of nerdiness remained.
The self-described superior being emerged and looked about the lab until its human eyes fell upon Ruthie, who reacted to some manner of communication by setting aside her pistol and approaching her master. Jolly did the same, although the former soldier kept his gun — once Gant's HK MP5—pointed at the prisoner.
Briggs, however, gave all his attention to Ruthie, no doubt one of his prized playthings, as evidenced by the obscene "children" infesting the lower levels.
"You have been so very good to me, my dear. I have enjoyed our experiences together," he said to the skeletal woman and ran his hand lovingly across her cheek. "I have made you beautiful, have I not? You were never beautiful before — but I gave you this gift."
Gant found it hard to believe that anyone could consider the frail, broken woman "beautiful." Perhaps once, sure. But what stood there in that lab was only an echo of what had once been a woman. She — like Jolly — was less than alive, but not mercifully dead.
"Oh yes, my love," she said as she closed her eyes and rested her hand upon his.
Gant realized that this was the first time he had seen Briggs — the entity — talk to or treat any of his followers as anything other than servants or tools.
Briggs’s left hand found the back of her wiry hair, and while he moved in what appeared to be a compassionate fashion, Major Gant felt an uneasiness in the room, like watching a barometer fall as an omen of foul weather.
"So many … things …" the entity told her, "we shared so much."
It sounded to Gant as if Ruthie moaned or purred, but it came across as forced, a lie to stroke his ego.
"I know I hurt you from time to time," Briggs said with little concern in his tone.
"All wonderful," she responded.
"Do you remember back in the beginning?"
Briggs's voice remained soothing but Gant felt his muscles tense as he clearly sensed a storm about to break.
"Do you remember what you said to me, that first time?"
Gant was conscious of movement from behind, from the double doors of the lab.
Ruthie did not answer. She held her head tilted up with her eyes closed, still clasping his right hand as it stroked her cheek.
"You said 'never.' Do you remember?"
The master’s tone lost any semblance of soothing and took on a sharp, nasty edge. The creature’s hand tighten on her hair and yanked her head back. For a moment Gant feared Briggs planned to bite into her throat like a vampire.
Ruthie's hands floundered at her sides. She tried to smile, but a grimace of pain kept overtaking that smile.
"You said, 'NEVER.'"
The doors to the lab opened. First one, then two, then three of the horrible children came in, their teeth chattering, their posture bent over so that their long fingernails nearly dragged on the floor.
Briggs’s voice became angered — not louder, but stronger and cruel.
"You said, ‘never,’ you stuck-up bitch."
Ruthie squirmed. When she spoke her words sounded nearly human, a voice buried under two decades of submission, brutality, and terror.
"No … I did everything. I did everything you asked."
"Yes, you did," Briggs clenched his teeth and glared at her. "Open your eyes and look at me."
Ruthie complied.
Gant stepped forward. Jolly matched his step and raised the gun, and while he warned the major off, the way his teeth bared through his open gums made it seem like the monster welcomed confrontation.
"You did everything. You did everything, every way. You were mine, whenever and however I wanted. And you loved it too, didn’t you?"