“Hey Eighty-Three, I think, uh—wait, what did you just ask?”
“I asked if you dropped anything into the hole.”
“How’d you know?”
“Because your feet were dirty and you always rub them together. I’m hyper analytical, remember? The answer is that you have until the object in question intersects the crisscross of infra-red security beams which lie ten feet from the floor and prevent anyone from going out or in without being detected. That counts clods of dirt.”
The blaring siren just about split her eardrums in two. Fury jumped to his feet in panicked alarm, and started looking around for somewhere to go. “Did you not say you had a plan?” Eighty-Three asked in his obnoxiously calm, even voice. “I thought you said you had come up with a plan to infiltrate the place once you opened it up?”
“Yeah, well, that was before I had to come up with one right this second. I was thinking, you know, take the long way around. Get a rental car, take in some sights and then go in through my old office entrance. Sam, that’s the door guard’s name. We’re good buddies, I could have...”
“Claire?” Eighty-Three cut her off. “I know I am a very witty... whatever I am, but I am afraid this might not be the best time for joking. Unless they call that alarm off, you will be swarmed rather soon by some very unsavory types.”
“Clods?”
Eighty-Three made something approaching a snicker. “What they send will make you wish for Clods. There are particular models of sentinel guards that have air guns in their chests which fire syringes. They were initially made to control our bear friends, I think, but if they get ahold of you? First your skin will start to tingle, and then it will begin to liquefy from the inside out and then—”
“Yep! Got it, great! That’s fantastic, buddy!” Claire was still looking down nervously into the hole at her feet, but nothing seemed to be going on. Not yet anyway. She took another look at the phone and then decided to throw that down the hole, you know, just to test the waters. It couldn’t be much worse, after all, the alarms were already blaring. And this way she wouldn’t have to listen to anything else about the horrors that awaited.
Eighty-Three voice came crackling through. “Claire? I think I lost you!”
“Sorry! Dropped the phone!” she shouted, as her once prized possession careened down into the laboratory and exploded onto the cold matte gray tile.
“Two hundred twelve feet,” Fury said, with a surprisingly smug, sage-like tone in his voice. “I picked up a few science tricks in the lab.”
Something whizzed past Claire’s head. She felt a torrent of air and pulled back at precisely the right time so that instead of imbedding itself in her face, the dart only left a scratch on her forehead. It burned – oh God did it burn – but that was better than a head full of whatever shit was in that syringe.
Immediately she remembered Jacques’s wound and wondered if he’d had a taste of this stuff.
“What the hell do we do?” she asked Fury, who had already stripped off his shirt, and was unbuckling his tightly-stretched jeans. “Uh... are you nuts? You really want to—”
“Shift!” he shouted. “And jump!”
She opened her eyes wide, nodded, and then in one moment that represented a mixture of absolute clarity, undying duty to her friends, and complete, unabashed stupidity, she jumped first and shifted second.
-22-
“That was... a long drop.”
-Claire
All Claire knew when she hit bottom was she was really glad there was a tank of water down there, and that Fury saw it somehow before he jumped. Otherwise there would have been a couple of bear-shaped grease stains on the steel tiling where they landed.
The burst of adrenaline coursing through her ursine body was difficult to handle, but a crane arm snapping open and closed above her did the trick, especially when it caught a pinch of fur, ripping it out of her back.
She opened her mouth to squeal in pain, which gave her a mouthful of completely tasteless water, as though every single thing that once lived in it had been filtered, distilled, or otherwise somehow removed. She sputtered, grabbed ahold of Fury’s leg and yanked him free from the claw that had snatched him.
One deep breath later, the pair burst from the pool and landed on the cold tile-shaped steel they’d seen from above. The suits were marching slowly down their hellish conveyor, on to whatever horrible purpose they’d eventually serve. She looked at one of them, letting her attention fix for just a moment.
Were all of these... these bodies, were they all like Eighty-Three at some point? A person in some kind of horrible suit? A human being turned into some kind of brainless puppet? Staring at the conveyor, which was still running on and on, a never ending march of horror, she wondered if they were ever normal or if they were maybe grown for this purpose?