Inkers (27 page)

Lily tightened her mouth into a thin line. “I won’t help you,” she said.

“If you don’t,” Mary said quietly, “We will blow it all up. We’ve got the equipment to do that. A lot of important people want us to do just that right now. And after we’ve blown it all up, we’ll take you away and lock you in a very small room, and if the world doesn’t end in a few hours, you’ll stay there for the rest of your life.”

The fear must have shown in Lily’s face.

“You’ll be put in a prison cell and you’ll never leave, never have ink again, never see the outside again.”

Lily imagined being trapped in a room until she died. It gave her a rush of the fear that she always felt in the nightmares, the forever–fear, the fear there was no cure for except ink. What did she really have to live for? Tom was dead. Brian she wanted dead. But Annie was still in there.

“Could I be outside? Sometimes? If I helped?” she said, quietly.

“I can’t promise anything,” Mary said. “But I promise you, if you refuse to help us you will be locked away for good.”

They took Lily back outside the van. Her watch read 4am. She felt like she’d been awake for days. They gave her heavy overtrousers to wear over her jeans, a pair of boots a size too big for her, heavy body–armour with long sleeves, thick gloves, a gas mask.

“It won’t help much,” the man said, ‘the ink burns straight through the filters. But you already know that.”

Lily nodded.

“You’ll have to run. We’ll warn them you’re coming in. What’s your surname?”

“Brook,” she said. She hadn’t used it in a long time.

“Lily Brook. OK.”

He gave her a communicator, too, and showed her how to use it.

“Mary will want to talk to them. Just hold it up and press the button when they talk. Who’s in there?”

“Brian. And Annie.”

“OK. If they talk hold it up and it’ll pick up their voices, no problem. Just make sure you get out of the ink as fast as you can. Anything it’s touched, get it off you. But I guess you know that too, right?”

Lily nodded.

“OK. Let’s walk up to the front jeep. We’ll let you know when we’re ready. Just stay with me until I say.”

Lily walked ahead of him through the gate that she had walked through a thousand times before, along the track past the cow barn. The cows were mooing madly, roaring at all the new sounds and smells.

“Shh,” Lily whispered, stopping for a moment to lean in to them. “It’s OK.”

“Keep going,” the man said.

Mary was standing with a group of about ten other soldiers, halfway to the farmhouse. Lily could see many others dotted around the edge of the farm, making a circle around, long guns and SMGs pointed at the ink barn. There was a big hole in the bricks where the door had been and it was all dark inside. Lily could just see the green and yellow vats, both bent and open. The vats had emptied onto the courtyard, and everywhere there was a layer of yellow intertwining with green perhaps two inches deep. The bodies of the ITSA soldiers and Leonard and the Tom–thing seemed to have collapsed. They looked hollow.

The group of soldiers turned to look at Lily as she approached. Mary stepped out to meet her, a reassuring smile on her face.

“Ready?” she said.

Lily shook her head.

“You’ll be fine,” Mary said.

The police spread out in a line. Mary looked at Lily one last time and nodded.

“We have Lily out here,” Mary said, facing the ink barn, her voice distorting a little through the amplification, “She’s going to come through the ink and bring you a walky–talky so we can talk to each other. She’s not armed, I don’t want anyone else getting hurt, we just want to talk and figure out what to do next.”

There was silence. The trees rustled. The smoke from the grenade had cleared, and stars were visible, winking overhead. Looking up, Lily could see many lights moving about the sky, very high, very far away. She wondered if there were cameras watching her; she supposed there were. Mary nodded at the man standing with Lily, who pressed a hand gently into the small of Lily’s back and pushed her forward.

“Lily is coming in now,” Mary said, amplified. “She’s unarmed.”

Lily walked slowly towards the edge of the expanse of liquid. She could smell the ink in the air. Despite her fear, her heart raced at the thought of transdermalling. She looked back at the soldiers. They all had their guns trained on her. She took a step into the liquid and then another. She could feel it pressing on the boot from the outside. This part was all yellow, the ink of excitement and alertness; a favourite amongst beginner recreational users. She stopped, looked back again. Mary waved her on.

She could see what could only be a dead soldier, completely covered in the bright yellow liquid, and the collapsed Tom–thing about three metres ahead. It was between her and the barn. She could hear fizzing as the ink started to burn through her boots. She gasped as the aerosolised drug rushed through her system, garlic taste strong in her mouth. The pleasure was overwhelming. She wondered, her thoughts accelerating, if the ink would burn through her boots. If she would die and dissolve like the soldiers, or turn into a monster like Tom.

She heard a hissed “Keep going, go forward!” from behind her and snapped her head round. Mary had put on a gas mask and come right up to the edge of the ink.

“Get back!” Lily said, her voice fast and loud now, the yellow fully taking hold. She was shaking with pleasure. She strode forward as quickly as she dared, passing through a swathe of green and back into more yellow until she reached the corpse of the Tom–thing. Part of its upper body and face had not been covered by the ink when it flowed out of the barn, and she could see its huge mouth, eyes above them, the shape perhaps just a little reminiscent of Tom, spiky hairless head, grotesquely muscled chest. Her heart was racing.

Lily stared down, her vision distorting under the influence of the yellow. She thought her left foot felt a little damp. The grotesque face of the Tom–thing, black skin stretched taut under great jutting bones underneath, teeth white and razor–sharp, seemed to get larger, and she could suddenly see it twitching slightly, drops of ink rolling over the surface, disappearing through the skin…

She stepped over it and walked hurriedly towards the steps to the barn. Her feet slapped at the ink – she was sure her left foot was touching ink now, she could feel it rushing up her leg, more and more of it, green now too, the overwhelming thrill of desire mixing with the excitement of the yellow. She ran, sprinted the rest of the way to the steps and up them and slammed into the wall next to the hole where the door had been.

Lily looked back at Mary, across the ink.

“Are you OK?” she shouted.

Lily nodded, and stuck up a gloved thumb. She could feel the green in her left boot. Naked shapes were moving in the trees that she knew could not be there.

“Brian, Annie, Lily’s OK, she’s going to come in now. You need to help her, she’s got a lot of ink on her, she’s going to come in in a second. Go in, Lily.”

Lily put her head around the corner. The only light was from the moon through the skylights. She could see nothing, just the ink barn, the vats, and darkness at the end where the computers were. There was more ink on the floor, around the destroyed vats, and bricks from the wall everywhere. She swung her foot around and tried to step on the bricks to keep her out of the ink, but they seemed to be moving and her vision was swimming, so she slipped off one and in the end just ran in, past the ruined empty vats of green and yellow, into the darkness.

After a few feet the floor was clean of ink, and she pulled off her mask and threw it away, shouting “Hello? Brian? Annie?” as she pulled the body–armour over her head, kicked off her boots, and pulled off the over–trousers. Her left sock was completely soaked in yellow, so she carefully peeled it off, heavy gloves still on, and threw it on the pile of hissing clothes. She wiped the worst off her foot with the glove, amazed she was still alive, let alone conscious, and threw the gloves on the pile too. She looked up into the ink barn. There was silence from outside. She checked her jeans and her t–shirt —they looked OK. She pulled the walky–talky that they had given her out of the pocket of her jeans. Pressed the button.

“I’m inside,” she said. “I can’t see anything,” she added. Mary’s voice crackled through the set.

“OK, have you got all the contaminated clothing off?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Move forward carefully, call out to them.”

Lily took a couple of steps forwards, the concrete cold and dusty under her bare left foot.

“Brian,” she called, and then she shouted as loudly as she could, “Brian! Where are you? Annie!”

There was a noise up ahead, what sounded like a footfall. Lily jumped slightly.

“H–hello?” she said.

A figure lurched out into the gap between the final two vats ahead of her, moaning quietly.

“Annie?” Lily said, her heart racing.

With a bang the lights went on and the air conditioning and computers whined into life. Annie was bleeding out of the side of her mouth and she was not standing straight. Her eye was drifting about unfocused. Brian was standing behind a desk at the back of the room, pointing a handgun at Annie’s back.

“Are you OK?” Lily said. She took a step towards Annie, who flinched a little.

“Stop,” Brian shouted, and he sounded panicky. “What’s happening? I’ll kill her, I swear to god.” His eyes looked huge, wild, his skin very pale. His slick hair was a mess.

“No!” Lily said, “They just want to talk!”

“Come up here,” he said.

Brian stepped around the desk and put his arm around Annie’s chest. He pulled her back, pointing the gun at her head, which lolled forward a little.

“Come here,” Brian said. “If they come through I’ll kill her.”

“They won’t,” Lily said. “Annie, are you OK?” Annie didn’t respond.

“What have you done?” Lily said.

“She wanted to surrender,” Brian said. “We can’t surrender. If we surrender they’ll destroy everything, the whole world will be destroyed. If we just wait, we can stop it, destroy the GSE, do anything we want.”

“What have you done?” Lily repeated, walking slowly towards him. “What have you done to her? What have you done to me?”

“Just a mild sedative,” he said, “She was going crazy, she was at the door when they killed Leonard, she saw it all. She wanted to come and look for you, keep you safe.”

Lily stared at Annie’s bloodied mouth. Brian glanced at Annie.

“She fell, when I sedated her. She’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine if we can just hold out long enough.”

“Long enough for what?” Lily said, but she already knew.

“You’re going to be the mother of a god,” Brian replied, a fierce grin on his face. “You’re going to save the world. It’s a new kind of human, a hybrid of singularity and man. It’ll protect us from the GSE, it’ll be able to give us everything we want. Anything we want.”

The radio crackled.

“Are you OK?” Mary said. “Let us know what’s happening, Lily.”

“Stall them,” Brian said. “We have to stall them until it’s strong enough. They’ll kill it otherwise, they don’t understand, they’re scared of anything new, just because the GSE went wrong.”

“Is it part you, too?” Lily said, nauseous suddenly.

“What?” he said. “The baby? No, it’s artificial, pure ink, the human part will be all you.”

“You drugged me and injected it into me.”

“Yes, I’m sorry, I had to, that was the last part. Most of it was done with the primer, earlier that night, a mix of all the inks and some sedatives. I’m sorry, but I knew you’d never agree, I knew Tom wouldn’t want it. Annie would have carried it, wouldn’t you dear?”

Annie’s head lolled against him.

“But she’s infertile, so it wouldn’t have worked. She wouldn’t have the ink resistance, anyway, although we’d been trying to build it up, her thighs are all stained from it.”

His eyes were very wide.

“You’re crazy,” Lily said.

“No I’m not,” Brian said. “Come up here, now. Come up here or I’ll shoot her.”

“Please, no,” Lily said, taking a step towards them.

“Good,” Brian said, “Good, now, just sit down over there.”

Lily began to walk over to the desk he had pointed at, and then several things happened. First, the lights went out, plunging the barn into darkness, and the computers and air conditioners whirred down and stopped. Before they had fully quietened, there was the roar of an engine outside the barn. Lily shouted, “No!” almost at the same moment as Brian shouted the same thing, and Lily lunged towards Brian. There was a terrible crack as the gun went off, and as the muzzle–flash lit the room Lily saw Annie falling away, Brian’s face grotesque and filled with horror and anger. Everything slowed. Lily felt a rush going through her body, like an ink–rush only stronger, and she suddenly saw the whole barn in stunning clarity, the sheen on the undamaged vats, Annie’s blood and skull fragments and what was inside falling through the air, Brian’s sweat, her own ink–infused left foot.

“No!” Lily screamed, and there was a burst of light in her eyes and in her head, and everything seemed to turn suddenly.

Then she was on her hands and knees on the concrete, and she could see, even in the darkness, Brian staring at her, aiming his gun at her, and then jerking it away again as he remembered the baby. He jumped left, into the computers, and she saw him hitting his palm onto something on a desk, and as the jeep slammed into the hole in the barn, the soldiers pouring out, leaping over the ink and towards them, the four remaining ink vats erupted in air and flames, and there was another flash of light. She was in a ball of air while the whole world burst into flames. And then Annie was staring brainlessly at the stars while pieces of masonry fell on her.

The roof was gone. Lily was on her back. She pushed herself up on her elbows. She was intact, even her bare foot. All around her were huge pieces of metal and wood from the roof, and great globs of burnt ink, and what looked like parts of people, a gloved hand and she was pretty sure the remains of a masked head. The end of the barn where the soldiers had been coming in was completely gone, and she could see the farmhouse outside and the jeep burning on its roof next to it.