Between a Bear and a Hard Place(68)

“Stop here,” he said, straightening his normally hunched back. When he did he stood taller than either Claire or Fury – he was about the same height as Stone or King. “We are close.”

Claire took the opportunity to sit down and pluck a piece of fake grass from the ground. It was all fake. The trees, the vines, the grass underneath. She stuck her fingers into the ground and pulled up dirt made of some kind of packing material – that green foam you can use for sticking fake flowers into and making an arrangement.

Speaking of that, over to the left was a bush of fake flowers. She didn’t bother to touch them, but could see from the way the light caught in the threads that they were carefully crafted, silk roses.

“Why?” she wondered aloud. “Why does this exist? Why go to all this trouble? I just can’t wrap my head around what the hell someone would have to think to come up with putting a fake forest inside of a real forest.”

“Makes it much easier to hide all the other things,” Eighty-Three said. “Quiet. They are close.”

By “they are close” what he actually meant was “look out, because here they are.”

“Where is King?” a roar – Rogue’s roar – burst through the trees and slammed into Claire’s ears. “Where did you take him?”

“Uh-oh,” Eighty-Three intoned. “I think they got here first.”

The crunching sound was sickening, deafening, and somewhere near the top five most grotesque noises Claire could recall hearing. Breaking bones as Rogue flew backwards into an ancient live oak, and bent around backwards were muffled only by the deep thud of his flesh smacking the bark.

She expected a howl of pain, but the silence that came instead was far worse.

“I. Am. King!” the creature, who looked almost exactly like the one which had taken Stone’s place, screeched. Right down to the taut purplish-blue skin-muscle combination and the patchy, matted, knotted-up hair that ran from the crown of its head halfway down the creature’s back it was indistinguishable from the one Eighty-Three had so easily dispatched.

From behind, Claire heard Fury pull a deep breath through his nose, and then immediately, he flew into a rage.

“That is not a very good idea,” Eighty-Three criticized reasonably. Of course he was reasonable. He’s always reasonable. “Though you did survive the last one, so perhaps this one will not—”

As much as a gasmask can wince, the black-clad figure winced. Fury was batted aside with a careless swipe of a half-mutated paw as the beast turned, drooling, toward Claire and her lanky friend.

“What are they?” she asked, breathlessly.

“Clods. That is what we call them anyway. The actual model name is a Graftable Service Automaton.”

Eighty-Three and Claire just watched the creature as it watched them. None were willing to commit to any movements. “Move slowly. This is an older model. They are graftable, but they are largely brainless.”

“That... sounds disgusting.”

“It is,” he said. If he could smile, he was smiling. “Very. You shoot them up with platelets from a subject, and they can take their form, but only for a limited time. It gets longer with each iteration, though.”

The thing started tugging at its own skin. “Jesus,” Claire swore under her breath. “All this time I worked at the place and thought all they did was make overpriced drugs. How the fuck is all this going on? And anyway, what are they, though?”

It twitched, gurgled, and took a halting step toward them. The creature did have a face, but not much of one – really it was more of a slack jaw and a pair of drooping, watery, yellowed eyes. There wasn’t much form to the creature, past the vaguely humanoid, muscular lump that made up its body.

Eighty-Three shrugged. “Company secret. They never told. I always thought they were more zombie than anything, though... that is a poor comparison. They are crafted in a lab that has one door in and one door out, and the guards are stationed there for life. I have a feeling that... whatever I am, I am not so far from that. As far as how? Money makes the world turn, as they say.”

Fury stirred from his little skid mark in the dirt. He sat up, holding his head in both hands. The clod didn’t move much, just glanced at him dismissively before returning its bulging, dripping eyes to Eighty-Three.

“You... unregistered,” the wad groaned. If a meatball could talk, Claire was staring at a talking goddamn meatball. “Out of... warranty?”

“It is trying to reason,” Eighty-Three said. “They can be vaguely cute, do you not think?”

“Cute as a pit-bull with half a jaw and no skin,” Claire said.