Light Shaper (44 page)

And the bodies, of course. The bodies of the dead.

Some of them had been shot, as Rigel could see from the holes in their clothing in strange and random places. Some of them appeared to have burned to death, judging from the disgusting charred wounds a few still had. The majority, though, had been dismembered. Rigel forced himself to walk around severed arms, legs, hands, and feet still clad in boots, the jagged end of a bloody bone still poking forth from a sock. There were people that had been split in half, the desiccated entrails that had once belonged to them lying smeared on the wall next to their corpse. A couple of heavily armored corpses hung from the upper walkway, their bodies twisted at unnatural angles and one of them still clutching his rifle with stiff dead hands.

Everywhere he looked for Steve, terrified of finding him in the same state as everyone else. Rigel had no idea what had happened here or who these people had been, but they had come with weapons as if expecting a conflict of some kind. Evidently, they had found it.

Rigel was halfway across the building when it occurred to him that whatever had killed these people might still be out there. Or rather, in here. The thought scared him, and suddenly he was looking at every shadow as he passed, straining his hearing to the limit to catch the faintest sound. Nothing moved toward him, though. Nothing crawled or crept forward to try to get him. He walked ahead, step by slow step, and as long as he kept away from the more disturbing remains, he managed to hold the growing panic at bay and make his way to the very end of the building where the entry door was locked down tight.

Rigel tried opening the door from this side but to no avail. He started breathing faster, feeling locked in with the dead and with no idea of where Steve had gone, and he pulled on the heavy door handle with the meager strength of his hands until the pain of the effort forced him to stop.

Trapped.

He was trapped in here, and there was no way he would walk the entire length of the space again. The smell threatened to overpower him, and the horrified expressions etched upon the corpses seemed directed only at him. He edged to the side, and his foot crushed something brittle. He looked down and saw he had cracked the discarnate remains of a hand. Everything around it had burned, the wedding ring its owner had once worn now only a congealed puddle of molten metal on the floor.

Rigel jumped away, horrified, and stumbled onto something else. He did not fall, but it was close, and he cried out again, a wordless moan of terror.

Then he heard a voice. Somebody was shouting, and Rigel’s first instinct was to scan the glassy eyes of the corpses, dreading to find a remnant of life among the discarded weapons and awful remains. He stayed perfectly still, listening, every muscle tensed, and his eyes opened as wide as they would go. It was completely silent in the building, and when the voice called again he heard it clearly.

“Rigel? Rigel!”

Rigel let out a shaky breath as relief flooded through his body. Steve was calling from outside, judging from the faintness of his voice. Rigel looked in the direction the call was coming from, and he saw a smaller door he had not noticed before. It had been set to one side of the building and was partially blocked by debris, but when Rigel reached it, he saw he could easily push it open. Out in the courtyard of the compound, he saw Steve standing in the sun, a gun in his hand and obviously looking for him. Trembling yet enormously reassured now, Rigel climbed over the debris to get out of the building of death.

Something moved inside, at the very edge of his peripheral vision.

Rigel stopped with a foot outside and the rest of his body still in. He looked back, puzzled. Nothing happened, so he looked away—

Again. This time he had seen it better. At the far end of the space, among the shadows of the darkest corner, something even darker had moved. Rigel stared hard at the place, seeing nothing but blackness, but after a couple of seconds he had the horrible feeling that something was looking back at him from that corner.

A shadow twitched. Rigel fled.

The brutal heat of the sun’s rays felt like a blessing as Rigel rushed out of the building calling Steve’s name. The other man heard him and hurried to meet him, and when Rigel was close enough, he saw that Steve’s expression was a mixture of anger and relief.

“Where were you?” Steve demanded. “I thought—”

“I went looking for you. I heard a shot, and I saw….”

Steve gestured at the door Rigel had just come out of. “You were in there?”

“Yes. I just… I don’t…. What’s going on, Steve? Why is everyone dead?”

Steve put a reassuring hand on Rigel’s shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Where were you? Why did you fire your gun?”

“I thought I saw something come at me. I followed it into that building with all the bodies, but then it just… changed. In a way. It’s hard to describe. I’m not even sure I really did see something to begin with. Maybe I’m just too strung out, and it was a heat-induced hallucination. After that I went over to the building over there to check it out, maybe see if there was anybody left alive. No luck.”

“How could something like this happen? Who or what killed all those people?”

“I have no idea what happened to those people, Rigel, but I know who they are.”

“What?”

“They are with CradleCorp. Or were, I should say. Not all of them, obviously. Some of them looked like mercs to me. From the way they had their camp set all the way back there, up out of sight, they had to have been planning an ambush of some kind. For us, most likely.”

“So Tanner sent them?”

Steve nodded. “And they would have gotten us too. These people were professionals, and they were heavily armed. We wouldn’t have stood a chance. Tanner knew that we would try and come here eventually, so he prepared everything. We played right into his hands.”

“Except for….” Rigel shuddered, unable to finish his sentence. He closed his eyes to try to block the memory of the carnage he had witnessed, but it was no use.

“It’s awful, but it gives us a shot at completing Atlas’s mission. I even think I found the place where you’re supposed to go. It’s in that last building over there.”

Rigel looked where Steve was pointing. He remembered the building from the vision Atlas had shown him. That was where the control center of the compound had been.

Steve led the way to it, and Rigel followed. He stood aside as Steve yanked on a heavy set of double doors and tried to open them.

“Dammit,” Steve muttered, pulling harder when they resisted. “They’re stuck. I was just in there!”

He gave them a shove with his shoulder, then another. On the third one, something cracked on the other side, and the doors opened a little bit.

The something plopped down to the ground, motionless and broken. It looked like part of another person, only this one had been wearing a lab coat over his uniform. A lab coat that was now a deep shade of rust from all the dried blood.

“Shit,” Steve said. “That’s disgusting.”

He edged inside, and Rigel made as if to go after him, but his foot wouldn’t move. Rigel could not tear his eyes from the corpse on the floor.

“Rigel? You coming?”

But Rigel started shaking his head no, slowly at first and then more urgently, eyes on the dead man always.

“I c… I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

He backed away, out of the shade of the building and back into the merciless sunlight, but he scarcely noticed the heat. Instead he felt cold, scared, and panicky. His breathing came in quick gasps.

“Rigel?” Steve asked, coming back out. “What’s wrong?”

But Rigel couldn’t speak. It was just too much. Too much running, too much fear, and now too much gore. His mind could not take it. This was not the way the world was supposed to be.

He closed his eyes again and remembered glassy eyes, severed limbs, and the stench of death. He did not hear Steve approaching and started violently when he felt Steve’s touch.

“Hey,” Steve said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “You okay?”

Rigel opened his eyes but kept them on the ground. “I can’t.”

“You mean go inside?”

Rigel nodded.

“Tell you what. Let’s go sit down by the shade. You don’t have to go in yet.”

Rigel followed only because he could not think of anything else to do. He sat down next to Steve on the hard concrete, resting his back on a wall that was not as hot as it should have been. He stared out into the distance, past the fence and back the way they had come. He could not see the city from here, but Rigel knew it was there. A city that hated him, ahead, and behind him ancient buildings where something horrible had happened. He could not go forward, and he could not go back. Rigel felt suddenly overwhelmingly trapped.

A tiny sound escaped him, halfway between a sob and a cough. He choked it back immediately, but Steve had already heard.

“It’s okay, you know,” Steve said eventually, once Rigel had managed to compose himself a bit. Rigel risked a look at him, but Steve had also been staring out and away. The bright reflected sunlight made his eyes look flecked with gold. “I’m surprised you’ve lasted as long as you have without cracking.”

Rigel made a grimace of self-deprecation. “Because I’m a weak city boy?”

Steve turned to look at him, his expression surprised. “No, the opposite really. Because you’re so much tougher than anyone could expect.”

The compliment threw Rigel off guard. It dulled the edge of the building panic inside him.

“The first time I saw a dead man, I wet myself,” Steve continued.

“What?” Rigel said, sure he had heard wrong and for a while forgetting his own fear.

“It happened on my first ever airship trip. We touched down at Haven Prime, and, of course, I had to go out and see the sights. I got lost, went down a neighborhood where people go looking for trouble. I heard gunfire, got scared, ran away straight into a dead end, and I bumped into a corpse. It looked old, its eyes were open, and it was sort of slumped against a dumpster. It was also completely naked, the flesh blue and gray and black. It startled me so badly that my bladder just let go. Eventually I found my way back to the ship, but it took me a long time to live down the telltale dark stain running down one of my trouser legs.”

Rigel couldn’t help but picture a younger Steve, embarrassed and wet. He could not bring himself to smile, but he started to breathe a little bit more slowly.

“You’ve just seen something a hundred times worse, Rigel. You’ve got every right to freak out. Hell, I’ve beaten a man to death with a pipe, and I am also pretty shaken by what happened in there.” Steve took Rigel’s right hand in both of his. “But we’re still here. Whatever did that, it did us a favor. And we’ve got really nowhere else to go.”

“But…,” Rigel started, heard the whine in his voice, and tried again. “But we don’t know who or what did it, Steve. What if it’s still here? What if it attacks us? You said those people were trained professionals, and look at what happened to them. They never stood a chance. What are the two of us going to do if… if we get attacked?”

“I guess we’ll just have to take our chances.”

“I wish none of this had happened. I wish Atlas had never spoken to me in the first place.”

“It chose you for a reason, Rigel. Your mind is special in some way.”

Rigel barked a sarcastic laugh. “Great. I’m so special that my reward is to come to this hellhole following orders I don’t understand for a machine that ruined my life.”

“It is pretty bad,” Steve conceded.

“You think? And you, you don’t even have to be here, Steve. You could just leave.”

“Again with that. I told you already, I’m here because I want to be.”

“But….”

“And I’ll tell you something else too. I’m not sorry that Atlas got you into this mess. If it hadn’t, then I would have never met you.”

It was the one thing Steve could have said that could have driven every other thought out of Rigel’s mind. He felt a rush of warmth at the admission and a thrill of nervousness that had nothing to do with the fear in the background of his mind. Steve was here, with him, and he didn’t even have to be. He was staying because he wanted to.

Okay. I can do this.

Rigel stood up before he could change his mind. He was still panicky, but he could keep a lid on it. For a bit.

“Let’s go in.”

“You sure?” Steve said, standing up too.

“No. But it’s what we came here to do, right? So let’s do it.”

To show that he was not a whining wimp, Rigel led the way inside this time. He stepped over the corpse with a shudder, but he made it in. He backed out of the way so Steve could walk past, and then they surveyed their surroundings.

The control center was vaguely recognizable from the way Rigel had seen it when Atlas had showed it to him. Many of the consoles that had once stood in rows were broken, some of them little more than dust. A few others had withstood the passage of time better, but archaeologists had probably been at them, and lots of pieces were missing. An entire corner of the building was roped off and filled with diagrams and labels from whoever had been in here before. Rigel walked cautiously down the main aisle between the rows of consoles, trying to match this derelict wreck to the high-tech environment he had seen when it was still working. Over there, on the far end, there had been a window. Only it must not have been a window, since Rigel saw only the cracked remains of a monitor of some kind that had encompassed nearly half the wall. Another bigger monitor occupied the last wall, and it was in much better condition. It had been isolated from the rest of the room by the archaeologists, presumably, since somebody had set a kind of metal cage around it that prevented direct access.

The fluorescent lights on the ceiling turned on automatically as Rigel and Steve made their way to the roped-off section. They cast a lifeless white glow over everything, throwing sharp shadows on the floor. The air smelled different in here, also. It was kind of damp and moldy, which made no sense once Rigel reflected on it. They were in the middle of the desert. Why would it be damp? Unless the strange plants growing in the next building had crossed over into here somehow. Rigel saw no sign of green, though. Other than the door they had just used to get inside, there was no other way into the space, and it showed in the relative lack of dust and other debris that should have accumulated inside, over however long it had remained abandoned.