End Time (69 page)

“Don't let 'em know we're coming,” Beatrice said quietly.

Cheryl hesitated and lowered her pistol. She looked from Bea to Eleanor and then to Billy. Nobody spoke, and Eleanor wasn't paying attention, withdrawn again, petting Janet's metal urn. The half-mad woman looked vaguely at the Rolpen, then down the long tunnel, the caged lightbulbs marching off into the distance.

The Rolpen went
Click
for the last time and dropped from the ceiling with a flat thud. Everyone leapt away. Billy banged the worm once for good measure with his rifle butt. The creature's armor cracked and oozed grayish red-veined goo like a squashed centipede. It writhed once and went very still. The glimmer died from its green glassy eyes.

“Are we there yet?” Cheryl asked, and everyone almost laughed.

Except for Eleanor, who said deadpan, “Yes. We're almost there.”

The half-mad woman led them down the tunnel. After a hundred steps, they came upon clusters of sick or dead Rolpens who had fallen off the walls. A handful struggled to move, but Billy crushed them as before. Stepping on them took some grit; you went for the head, breaking the casing around the neck. If anyone wondered why the creatures were sick and dying, they didn't say. Difficult enough just killing them.

They emerged from the grimy tunnel into the operational areas: the Hatchery Observation Unit with its battery of screens and groupings of clean desks, the Antenatal Chambers, with their abandoned, empty beds. Farther on they passed the sealed labs, the surgery theaters; the complex was far larger than anyone had imagined or Eleanor remembered. Not all of the Rolpens were dead. Some still crawled around dark corners, lying on desks or keyboards, but what everyone noticed first was the lack of people. The people were missing—the lab technicians, the scientists, the staff. Ominously, jackets, pants, pantsuits, watches, and jewelry lay about in discarded heaps.

A Rolpen crawled out of a sports coat sleeve hanging on the back of a chair. Cheryl leapt away. “Oh, God.” Everyone realized more or less at once that the Homo sapiens who ran the Pi R Squared complex might have been eaten by these humanoid caterpillars; food for slugs.

“What the hell are they?” Beatrice demanded, meaning the Rolpens.

“Who knows?” Billy said. He examined a dead one under a desk lamp, one with weirder hands in the odd shape of lobster claws—flesh-colored lobster claws, with human bone and tissue, not hard shell. A test model? A carnivorous worm.

As if to answer everyone, a voice came out of the public address system.

“We call them Rebreeders, Major Howahkan. A quickly evolving species, with a nearly instant reproductive cycle, a short lifespan, each one a piece of the larger puzzle; we take what we need from them and ignore the rest. They live for a while like fruit flies and then die out.”

They looked around for the source of the voice, but all they saw were empty desks and dark screens. “After we caught our dear Webster talking out of school, we went to some trouble to find out who each of you were,” the voice explained with some pride. “You see, we're the area of a circle. Everything
is
inside. We possess the machinery to vaccinate, inoculate, repopulate the world. Remake humanity. How could anyone really stop us? But we had to be sure.”

At the far end of the operations bay, a wall of black glass gently changed shades; dim lights revealed an office. The group cautiously gravitated to it past dark screens and workstations.

The professor sat with his back to the glass at a long governor panel, overseeing the complex's operations. “We've found any number of useful improvements,” he said. “But human flesh lobster claws weren't one of them.”

There was something very strange about the professor's hands; they emerged from his white lab coat and moved across the control panels as he typed some kind of instructions on a keyboard. Then they noticed the change; his hands were not human hands anymore, now just three elongated fingers and an opposing thumb. No superfluous pinkie.

Satisfied, the professor turned from his operations panel and faced the window. His head had lost all the white fuzz, that halo of white hair, and seemed swollen, as though his body was trying to grow a bigger brain. His eye sockets seemed to have enlarged as well; a large pair of Hollywood sunglasses partially covered them. A repellent look, eyes larger than the frames; he tapped the dark lenses with his perfectly tapered new fingers:

“Forgive me; my new eyes simply refuse to adjust to the light.”

He paused for a moment, considering the people staring at him through the shaded glass.

“You are welcome to stay and evolve along with the rest of us.”

Everyone looked up and down the empty operations room. Who were
us
? Gauging their initial reticence through the transparency, the professor licked his lips.

“We're expecting an outside advisor very soon.” A short pale tongue darted in and out. “A specialist is flying in from New York for additional consultation, bringing enhanced genetic material from multiple donors. I think you know who they are. Then we can go from prototype to production. Of all the people outside the circle, you managed to find us. So consider yourself invited to join the Celestials. The Anointed. The not-so-meek who shall inherit the Earth. Survival of the fittest on a molecular level.”

Stunned to silence, no one spoke, but the desire to burn this wormhole into the ground, leave it a smoking ruin, was overpowering. Billy, Big Bea, and Cheryl scanned the ceiling for nozzles, sprinklers—signs of a fire-control system. To their disappointment they found them; dozens of circular pucker holes no bigger than fisheyes. They had to get onto that operations control panel, disable the system. There had to be a plug to pull. Beatrice's voice brought them back to the immediate present.

“You killed Webster,” she said to the thing behind the transparency. “You killed my brother and never thought twice. If that's how the fittest survive, I don't want it.”

The mutation turned away from the glass, returning to his keyboard and his panel of screens, losing interest in them. His weary explanation:

“Killed him? Not really, Big Sis. A genetic deficiency killed him. He lacked the protein suppressor that keeps your average human being from turning into Model-A, then to Model-B, then to Model-C, and so on. Once isolated, we learned to manipulate, to direct the protean protein suppressor so the Wild Three comet dust could do its work. Making us all open to the change. Pretty soon everyone will be walking around with big heads and three fingers. There's something to this progressive evolution that's quite liberating—lose a useless digit on one hand, gain virtual immortality on the other—”

Without waiting for an invitation, Cheryl drew her gun. She'd heard more than enough. A gunshot wracked the underground room. A bullet appeared right at the back of the professor's head, stuck in the transparency, flattened out like a button. The professor didn't even bother turning around, saying merely, “There's really no such thing as death down here. When the snow lifts, we will send Rebreeders out to breed on their own, to devour and recycle every cadaver from California to the New York Island, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters. This land was made for you and me.”

He fell silent, kept working. They'd been dismissed.

A movement caught their eyes; a figure gliding along a glass-walled hallway beside the operations center. An elegant tall figure in a tattered white lab coat loped along with the gait of a gymnast on stilts, then vanished beyond the edge of the glass wall toward the trimester rooms.

Beatrice turned and stumped across the operations center; the others followed, knocking over chairs. They rocked down the metal-floored hallway. Trimester One—nothing but empty plastic jars. No embryos, no tadpoles, just spilled amniotic fluid. Trimester Two
—
nothing there either, not even one little preemie waving from the safety of its fluid. They caught up with the tall loping figure inside Trimester Three—the tufts of blond hair gave him away, which meant you didn't have to read the name stitched on the worn and dingy lab coat.
No such thing as death around here.…

Beatrice backed away from the glass wall, hand pressed to her mouth, strangling a scream, and stared at her brother. For a moment it looked like she wanted to touch Webster; she put her hand to the transparency. Then drew it away, leaving a foggy five-fingered outline; gray-faced, she closed her fist. The enhancement that had once been Webster Chargrove, PhD, paid no attention to the gawkers gaping through the glass wall.

At some point the eggheads must have decided to allow Mother Nature to take a hand—no more incubators, no more feeding tubes. Automated indifference had been eliminated in favor of real mothering with real mothers. Now four women sat up in four hospital beds nursing their children while the reconstituted Webster in his white lab coat tended to their every wish and need. A fifth hospital bed lay empty, as if the Celestials expected another woman to return and occupy it.

It slowly sank into everyone on the other side of the glass that all those women from the subdivision had also cheated death, and now the women of Van Horn breast-fed their hungry young 'uns. Last time Eleanor saw Mrs. Biedermeier she was a bloated whale, but she'd lost some weight—now merely an average overweight American woman. A healthy baby suckled at her breast, and she smiled contentedly down at it.

As for the skinny Mrs. Stanton, she was no longer skeletal. She had filled out; put on twenty healthy pounds for good measure. Her complexion pink and her infant just as hearty as Mrs. B's. The child cradled to her breast slept with eyes squeezed shut, its face pressed against the gold cross hanging from her neck.

The shy Mrs. Perkins seemed to have beaten back the flesh-eating orange mold that had covered her body; she showed no sign of her previous condition whatsoever. Here again, the woman held a fat healthy baby, gently suckling. The only peculiar aspect, the infant's peach fuzz on its crown gave off a distinct orange glow.

None of the women acknowledged the faces staring at them through the glass wall. At least one of them should have recognized Eleanor, but so far, none did. The women were apparently content to breast-feed their babies, staring into a middle distance like glassy-eyed cows totally at peace with their lot in life.

Except for the widow, Mrs. Quaid.

The silver-haired Mrs. Quaid seemed very much the same—the nerve thing, whole-body paralysis; her mouth twisted into a rictus of a smile. As before, her eyes zinged back and forth in her head. For a second she zeroed in on Eleanor behind the transparent wall; sentience and intelligence blazed inside the woman.

Along with an emotion: pure hate.

Damning Eleanor for leaving her in this helpless condition, all this time, while the maniacs in the white coats spread her legs and inseminated her; brought her to term and placed a squalid baby on her tit. Her arms lay useless by her sides, not even a finger twitch.

Here, the ever-useful ex-Webster Chargrove, PhD, justified his existence. The mantis-thin arms carefully held Mrs. Quaid's baby to her breast, cradling the head so it could suck. He'd finally grown a bigger brain all right; the exposed portion looked like an emerging grapefruit from his skull, with a thin, protective layer of leathery epidermis covering its folds. A mop of blond hair flopped across it as he moved. An extra bit of brain, but it didn't seem to make him any smarter; perhaps he hadn't really put it to use yet. He didn't seem to recognize anyone beyond the glass; or perhaps ex-Webster simply didn't care about them anymore. He gazed blankly at Big Sis Beatrice for some moments, then the Model-A turned his attention to the baby at Mrs. Quaid's breast. Unlike the other children, Mrs. Quaid's little Rebreeder paused sucking to stare curiously at those watching from the glass wall, bright glassy green eyes in its little head darting from one face to the next. Then back to the teat.

Smart little bugger.

The child finished feeding; ex-Webster Chargrove, PhD, removed the infant from Mrs. Quaid. As his long arms lifted the child from her bosom, the creature clung to her pap, sucking so hard as to lift the whole bag. Finally, the udder snapped free, but with a chunk of flesh missing at the nozzle. Mrs. Quaid's breast began to bleed, and the infant's moist mouth went
Click
. Behind pert pink lips, the child had a parrot beak. Glassy green eyeballs, pert lips, and a bird's beak. A nipple biter.

The faces at the transparent wall looked away in revulsion, but an irresistible hand pulled them back again. The
new and improved
Webster in the frayed white lab coat carefully patted the bleeding nipple with a gauze pad. In a few moments, the wound had stopped bleeding. In a few more moments, it scabbed over, and those watching knew what would happen in the next few moments after that. The scab would flake away. Accelerated epidermis regeneration. Skin was the largest organ in the body, a natural choice for enhancement, and the female nipple—a muscle, a nerve, a glandular cluster—would grow back in moments every time.

Webster patted Mrs. Quaid's breast clean, then tossed the gauze into an overflowing wastebasket stuffed with hundreds and hundreds of used, dirty pads. In a few more moments, the missing chunk of skin had completely filled in, and Mrs. Quaid's eyes were leaping out of her head.

The hate had evaporated; instead, her frantic eyes implored everyone standing behind the glass, pleading for anyone to come inside. The helpless woman was begging for her life—no, for someone, anyone, to come and kill her. Mrs. Quaid had not changed; same message as before.
Don't leave before you kill me. Just kill me.

Then reality came full circle. The enhancement with the protruding gray matter in the dirty lab coat, the thing that used to be Webster Chargrove, PhD, quietly glided to the transparent reinforced door of Trimester Three, put his three-fingered hand to the palm reader for clearance, and opened the door. The door obeyed him, and he looked at Eleanor as if inviting her in. No one knew what to say or even do. The creature was inviting Eleanor back inside to occupy her old bed again. To maybe have a little Rolpen inserted in her, to become a mommy once more.