Chapter #7Keep your secrets. by: Seuzz   "I'm on top of it, Jillian," you assure her. And that's the end of the conversation.
Ten days later, the rabbit regenerates. You get good and drunk that night, out of happiness and relief, and out of a desperate desire to avoid thinking about the rest of the plan you've evolved.
* * * * *
"I know it looks horrible, and it's going to look worse before it looks better," you tell her. "But it's perfectly safe, and will be so long as you follow the instructions I've left you." You smile wanly at her. "I wouldn't ask you to do this, but you're the only person I really trust. And I don't mean to be mysterious, but you'll see that it will work out for you, too."
Mary Johnson—your sister—looks pale and uncomprehending. "There's no one at your job to take care of it?"
"No. This is a side project. Something they don't know about. They can't know about."
"But what if something goes wrong?"
"It won't. But if it does, I've left instructions. You'll just have to come find me at the hospital."
She bites her lip. "This seems very strange."
"I know. But I'm desperate. Please, Mary."
She looks down at the horror, and shudders. You don't blame her. It's another rabbit, one you spent a week growing, so that she'll have some idea of what to expect. You'll get rid of it, first, before you put the rest of your plan into effect. But it's important to prepare her.
"Alright, Mark," she sighs. "I'll do it. What do I tell my folks?"
"Just tell them you're looking after my pet while I'm away." You smile again. "That's what it is."
"I never thought of myself as a nurse-assistant to Dr. Frankenstein," she grumbles, but she seems to have accepted the idea. Probably the hints you've dropped that it is connected to her brother's disappearance have something to do with her relenting.
It's still a terrible gamble, but Mary has always been trustworthy ...
* * * * *
After she goes back home, you carefully review the paperwork you've prepared. Straussler didn't like the idea of your taking an indefinite leave of absence, but since he's got Jillian also working at the same research line, he agreed. You've carefully hidden away all of your research notes, and you've privately told Jillian that you've destroyed all the experiments you'd been working on, so she shouldn't be snooping. As for the private hospital: The admission papers are set up so that no word of Mark Taylor's condition will reach the outside world, and no one will be able to release him or even see him without the signed letter of admittance you've placed in the envelope at the back of his desk. With Mark hidden away from the world, and the uncomprehending Mary in charge of your regeneration, you should have the two to three months you calculate you'll need to regenerate yourself.
The next day you destroy the temporary rabbit-monster you'd created and set up the newer and larger enclosure that will hold your regenerating body. The only thing Mary will have to do is collect the nutrient deliveries that the courier service will be dropping off on Taylor's doorstep, feeding them into the drip mechanism, and flushing away the waste products into the septic sewer in the basement corner—nasty work, to be sure, but well within her competence. You pick up and clean the rest of the house. As the afternoon begins to fade, you expose your last rabbit to some SX-2 and drop the wriggling residue into a stoppered tube. Then you call the hospital. The unmarked ambulance arrives within the hour.
* * * * *
"It looks very nice," you say as you glance around the room. It is a very nice room, and it should be for what Mark is paying. It's small, but comfortably appointed with a narrow but soft bed, a solid writing desk, and a flat-screen TV. The window looks out onto well-manicured lawns. "It's a pity I won't be able to enjoy it."
"Your file is very vague about this 'illness'," the doctor says.
"If I knew what it was, I wouldn't be here," you reply mildly. "A psychological disorder of some kind. As long as someone is able to take care of my physical needs for the next few months, I should be fine."
"How fortunate that you're able to recognize the symptoms of an onslaught," the doctor replies dryly.
"Don't think you'll be able to reason with me," you retort. "I doubt we'll be able to have another conversation again for a couple of months. In fact," you say, turning toward him, "I'd rather you went ahead and sent the regular orderly in. I'm not sure how long I'll be in control of myself, and I've some last minute instructions." The doctor shrugs and leaves.
Yes, you think as you look out at the purple dusk. It's expensive, but Mark's been a good home, and he deserves the best.
You blanch a little when the orderly arrives. He's a big man, burly and unsmiling, and you wonder if you'll be able to take him quickly enough. He also declines your invitation to sit. But there's nothing else to do. Once the door is closed, you jump him.
Luckily, you seem to have caught him off guard, and you vomit yourself all over his face before he can react. There's a lot of confusion, and you feel desperate as you try to force your way into him. But you've spent the past few days exiting and re-entering Mark, so your reflexes are at a peak, and you soon feel the man's strong body under your control. With a grunt, you push the unconscious Mark Taylor off and then drag him over to the bed. From out of his pocket you retrieve the stoppered tube and poke the rabbit-residue up his nose. A tremble passes through his body, and his eyes snap open. But aside from a twitching of the nose, he does nothing.
"The new patient seems to have suffered an episode," you tell the doctor gruffly when you see him in the hall.
He raises his eyebrows. "What kind?"
"Catatonic state of some kind."
"Alright, Anderson. Get him undressed and into a tunic."
You drop down into Anderson's subconscious mind and let him go about that and other nightly duties. Early the next morning, when his shift is over, you re-emerge and drive over to Mark's house. You pick up the newspaper and yesterday's mail, then kneel by the door, exit the orderly, and squirm under Mark's front door. (You've left Anderson with the impression that "picking up the mail" was the last request the new patient made of him before collapsing.) You slither through the house and down into the basement, where you hoist yourself into the regeneration tank and use a weak pseudopod to tug the IV needle into your flesh and start the flow. After that, there's nothing to do but wait.
For a few months.
* * * * *
You feel like your flesh is on fire.
You are dimly aware that the feeling of heat has been growing for awhile, but you lost all sense of time and reality not long after returning to Mark's house. You are vaguely aware that you had dreams, but mostly you are oppressed by an overwhelming sense of the "now"—a moment of time that might be instantaneous or might be an eternity. Nothing—not a movement or a pulse or a vibration—can help you distinguish between one moment and another. Only the heat—searing, painful burning—gives you the illusion that you actually exist.
And then the throbbing begins. You feel a tremendous pressure building somewhere—but you've no sense of location, either—and then both the burning and the pressure are relieved. You are pulsing, pounding even, and then coolness is spreading over you and inside you. It's a clammy, wet coolness, but it is an intense relief. The throbbing intensifies, then become localized. It is pulsing at a particular spot. You clench, and draw sustenance from it. And then, with a snap, it stops.
There is a world again: shapes and colors. You feel a cold, hard surface. With a twisting, you feel yourself rising. You are on legs again. You totter over the floor and up some steps into a kitchen. It's musty and unused, but you are drawn to a door behind which there is food. You must have food ...
A sense of time has returned to you, but you pay no attention to it as you spend the better part of an hour gorging yourself on stale and musty cereals and grains and pastas, augmented by cans of vegetables and fruits and sauces. You've even drained the condiments, and washed it all down with great gulps of tap water. But you still feel something like emptiness. Not here, where you're sitting, but below you. Under your feet?
With a stronger stride you descend the steps again. If you had any sense, you would recoil from the ghastly thing on the floor. It's a larger—a much larger—version of your first experiment, a hideous, pulpy mass that throbs and glows in the darkness, having spilled out of its enclosure. It can't move, you know. But even if it could, you would have no fear of it. It is, after all, you.
Guided by some intuition you don't understand but don't question, you kneel and put your mouth against its filthy membranes. Great waves of barely digested food gush from your mouth into plunge deep into its murky depths. And then all sense of hunger is sated.
* * * * *
You ought to feel something like horror as you shower. You ought to feel something, damn it. And you suppose that you do. But it's a very intellectualized kind of emotion. At most, you feel irked. Why did Mary have to miss those two feedings, and then try to make up for it by dumping all the excess material into the thing? Well, of course you know why; it wasn't her fault that your great-aunt died and she had to go out of town to the funeral. And it wasn't her fault that the thing exploded in size after being gorged with the backed-up feeding. It was probably her fault that she got too close to it, but it wasn't her fault, again, when it shot out a pseudopod and dragged her into itself. The memory is a dry and abstract thing, but you recognize it as one of terror as she found herself being eaten alive ...
Mechanically, you wash the last of the soap off and step from the shower and dry yourself. Your limbs and torso and pert, pear-like breasts feel very strong and firm. But it is with a detached sense of curiosity that you look in the mirror, and regard the face—Mary's face—that stares back at you with a dead expression. It's not her body at all, you feel certain, only a copy generated by Mark's experiment-gone-awry.
Yes, you should feel something like horror. But what's done is done.
* * * * *
"There was a message on Mark's machine when I checked in," you tell your mother. "He's ready to leave the hospital, so I'm on my way out to pick him up." You listen impassively to her reply while pulling boxes of food off the supermarket shelf and dumping them indiscriminately into the shopping cart. "No, it'll probably be late before I get back. I'll get something to eat while I'm out." You close the cell phone.
Mary's clothes disappeared, of course, and weren't regenerated when you spat out her clone, but her keys got vomited out as completely indigestible, so at least you are in her car. But you are wearing some of Mark's jeans and one of his t-shirts. They're too big for you, and you get some strange looks as you show the letter and sign the papers that will discharge the catatonic Mark Taylor into your care. An orderly—Anderson himself, you recognize—wheels the patient out to your car and bundles him into the passenger seat. He asks if you'll be okay. You ask if Mark is violent. He replies that all he does is twitch and sometimes scratch himself.
Back at Mark's place, with much grunting labor you drag his body down into the basement. You inject it with some serum that will force the rabbit-residue from his system, and when that is done you push him toward the throbbing monster. It sucks him in, just as it had sucked in Mary, but this time you get to watch the process.
With a sudden roar, the thing on the floor—the thing that is also you—comes to life. Millions of miniscule particles swarm over Taylor's body, devouring the flesh and tissue and tendon and bone, leaving nothing behind but the devouring particles themselves, which even as they tear at him, still cleave to the shape of his body. Then they disperse and all grows quiet.
For a few moments nothing happens. Then, with a sudden and mighy laboring, the thing throws out a monstrous pseudopod, panting and steaming, onto the ground. The tubes that run through the thing's membranes—your membranes—begin to throb with a virile frenzy, pumping mass into the pseudopod. A crazy latticework of bloody red and putrescent green veins spring up within the pod, only to be swallowed by a boiling pool of vomitous sludge. The pod itself throbs and twists, and a great split suddenly rends it up the middle and almost in two. More rents and fissures open. It begins to cool, and soon even ceases to tremble violently. Although the pseudopod itself retain its shape and proportions, the great tube that links it to the main mass soon shrinks and dwindles until it is no more than the thickness of a stout rope, attached to the midpoint of the pod. The pod has solidified by this point, and sheathed itself in a mucous membrane that, although at first of a livid hue, quickly dulls into a more muted paleness. The rents fail to close, however, but the resulting appendages soon take on the shape and position of arms and legs. The connecting tubule suddenly breaks in two; while most of it retreats back into the main mostrosity, a good few inches remains attached to the pod, between its "legs," where it quickly lapses into flaccidity. You are not surprised to see that it has assumed the form of a human male.
Then it opens its eyes, blinks, and sits up. It is Mark Taylor. He looks at you and says nothing. "You'll want something to eat," is all you say, but even that isn't necessary. The Mark-thing is already on its feet and stumbling toward the stairs.
* * * * *
If you concentrate, you can sense Mary's location, in the crowded lecture hall, in a state that to the casual eye would look like studious attention and note-taking. If you concentrate, you can also sense your monster-body in the basement, but since that thing is deaf and blind and mute, there's no point in wasting attention on it. So you are now concentrating on the laptop in front of you, where you are reviewing the data you'd stored away before putting Mark in the hospital. You can only look out at the world through one body at a time, and right now you have shifted your point-of-view so that you are looking through the eyes of the Mark Taylor duplicate.
"Duplicate" is the best word, you reflect; "clone" would imply that the thing at his kitchen table, and the thing in Mary's bed, are human, and it's abundantly clear that they are not. Oh, they look human, and when you're not sitting behind their eyes and driving them they act more or less like their originals—albeit, with the sense not to go telling anyone that they've been duplicated and replaced. And since they are duplicates, and know that each other are duplicates, there's nothing for them to say to each other. But through that vague telepathic link that connects your two duplicates you were able to see that Mary's behavior in the two days since has stirred no comment or suspicion in her family or her friends. There's no reason you can't let the thing that has taken Mary's place simply take over and continue to lead her life.
There's nothing in Mark's data that would have predicted the consequences of Mary's delinquency with the "pet," but it is explicable after the fact. The change in the feed rate distorted its growth pattern, and examination of its tissues—you smile faintly at the memory, of seeing Mark's hand dissolve when you reached into the monster, and reform when you drew it out again—showed that the "code" has been irretrievably broken. You will not be regenerating your old body; the thing in the basement is now stuck in its current form; it is now only a machine capable of absorbing and duplicating organisms that it catches. But at least those duplicates carry all the information of their originals.
You put your chin in your hand and frown. You don't understand how you are able to maintain a psychic link with "body parts" that are not physically connected to each other. You wish you understood it better, and you wish you could confirm or disconfirm your suspicion that these duplicates are linked through the "mother pod" (as you've taken to referring to it) in the basement. If anything happened to it, you suspect, you'd be dead. That engorged body of yours is far too large to hide inside a host body, and, anyway, it's pretty clear that it has lost the ability to "possess" other people. Not that it matters. With a screen of docile duplicates can keep it safe and hidden and fed. It shouldn't grow any larger; the stuff you feed it by first ingesting and then vomiting out ordinary food is only enough to keep it—you—alive.
You cock your head: Mary, you sense, is talking to her boyfriend. You've never liked him. He might make a good meal.
But you dismiss the thought, at least for the moment. The question is what to do about the mother pod.
You can try to keep it hidden in Mark Taylor's basement. The problem there is Jillian; you can probably keep her out and away from it, but maybe you should replace her with a duplicate, just to be safe. But it might be safer to move it. If you duplicated and replaced your family, you could hide it in the basement of your old house, where it's likely no one would ever find it.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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