[Original Novel] Pressure 3: Beautiful Corpse, Part 8

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“One more thing” Olivia pleaded, “release your grip on my mind. That was part of the deal.” Only silence. The heavy presence in the room then seemed to evaporate. Withdrawing in all directions like wispy tendrils of nothing, finally settling into the corners as shadows which looked as if they belonged there.

It left her feeling intensely violated. But as she searched for reasons why, she came up with very little that would stick. She was after all remade by it, from flesh animated by its own energy. There was no real degree of separation anymore, and so, nothing for it to violate which was not simply another of its appendages. It had crept into her, becoming her, so gradually that there was no definitive point of transition she could pin down.

This epiphany struck through her chest and pierced her silent, leathery heart. The whole time on some level she’d clung to the hope of disentangling herself from all of this and returning to her life on the surface. Only now could she fully accept that there was nothing to escape that she was not one in the same with. Its interests were indirectly, and in some cases directly consonant with her own.

If somehow she could kill it, she too would die. As would Violet. If she could escape with her to the surface, what then? It would drag itself out of the sea, every weapon tried against it would fail, and in time the whole of humanity would be remade, consumed or entranced by it. With none left alive to cannibalize for parts, Olivia realized, they would all slowly wear down and fall apart. It could only sustain itself by spreading beyond the Earth in search of new life, outrunning the decay.

Reason afforded her no hope. Only a glimpse of a dead universe, rendered so by a sort of perverse necrotizing contagion. Down that path lies madness. So her hindbrain took over. To Hell with reason. The fate of the universe was not her immediate problem. She knew very well how small and feeble she was, and that her goals should be proportionate.

The wound from finally giving up on James had not yet closed, the thought of his indignant misery if removed from the fantasy world constructed for him still pained her. But Violet was not yet so lost as that. For however long it allowed, Violet might still be saved from all of this. It was something Olivia felt bound to, a promise she’d made and could yet fulfill. Redemption.

She was yanked from her reflection by a growing commotion outside. The peephole revealed very little except the opposite door, and someone running or briskly walking past every couple of seconds. Whatever it was, only one way to find out.

As she trekked down the long corridor past sections intermittently lit by flickering lights, others passed to her left or right in apparent excitement to reach that cylinder’s common area. But it turned out to be empty save for listless sub pilots and engineers milling about. The real action, whatever it was, appeared to be happening in the central sphere.

“They called me a lunatic! And maybe they were right!” The crowd laughed. There Dietrich stood atop the disabled central fountain, using it as a sort of impromptu podium. “But what I seen is no hallucination. I damn near had to force Greg to put on them fuckin’ thermal goggles but he did, and the rest were more liable to listen to Greg than crazy ol’ Dietrich. Now you can all see. The night vision goggles work too, just not as good. They look all mangled, fucked up. The shadow hides it, but if you amplify the light, boom, it’s a fuckin’ freak show.”

The men surrounding the fountain wore the black goggles she’d seen on the men from the corridor earlier. All were armed, as if circling their wagons around the man they believed would deliver them. Futile, she thought. If they still felt deliverance was possible, it could only be because they did not yet know the extent of the enemy which even now enveloped them.

“He’s telling the truth!” one of the goggled men offered. “Anyone who doubts it can have a look for themselves. Put on the goggles and walk around, see how many among us appear blue instead of orange. It’s that simple. The impostors are cold blooded. Their hearts do not beat. Dead men walking.”

A volunteer slipped on the goggles, scanned the room and then shrieked. “That one! That one’s cold!” The armed men charged and surrounded a young man in blue mechanic’s coveralls. “Bring him here” Dietrich shouted over the commotion. “You ain’t gonna believe this till you sees it.” He withdrew a long serrated knife. The crowd gasped and some implored him to stop, but once he had ahold of the young mechanic he swiftly cut his throat.

Some screamed. Others fainted. By the shouts, murmurs and wailing Olivia gathered that what they saw was illusory blood pouring from the wound. “Smoke and mirrors!” Dietrich bellowed. “Don’t be fooled! Do you see that he doesn’t choke? He’s still with us! And if you put on the night vision goggles, there’s no blood at all!” Some in the crowd passed around infra-red headsets, tried them on and confirmed that the blood was illusory.

“Mutation! Deviation! Aberration from nature’s plan! I cannot say what they are, but I can tell you what they’re not! Living, warm blooded, honest to God human beings!” She had to hand it to him, he knew how to stir up a crowd. In the deep recesses of her brain, flight won out over fight and she began cautiously backing out of the crowd the way she came.

Events were unfolding more quickly than expected. She cursed herself for being so dismissive of Dietrich and the threat he posed. Nor could she engulf him in shadow. The communal deck of the central sphere was bathed in light to support the trees around the fountain. The sphere also had an independent power supply with backups. Somehow they’d have to be lured away from it.

She was more careful than ever before to check for umbilicals on the crewmen she passed. Nothing to do for the time being except lock herself in her room, lay low and try to ride out the worst of it. With fabricants in full control of security, Dietrich’s little inquisition should be crushed soon enough. Once more she scolded herself for failing to foresee this. And then again, when she opened the door to her room and was greeted by a pair of large men standing inside, wearing thermal goggles.

When Olivia regained consciousness she found herself strapped to a gurney being wheeled down a long, dark corridor. Aside from the sound of the wheels there was a distant, incessant sound of water dripping. When they passed under the occasional working light she glimpsed the faces she assumed belonged to the goggled men from her apartment. They were accompanied by doctors in full surgical garb.

Struggling proved predictably useless. As did screaming, on account of a gag lodged tightly in her mouth. She occupied herself instead with reflecting on all of the possible ways she could have evaded capture.

It was all too swift, she’d stumbled directly into their trap. But there was no sense in dwelling on it now. Her body went limp as she resigned herself to the conclusion that whatever they had planned for her was out of her control.

Her head was pinned between two cushioned plates. Like a sort of medical vice. Olivia couldn’t survey the whole room because of it, but what she could see suggested that it was originally a storage area that had recently been converted into an operating theater. White drapes of some kind served as walls, the dim lights inside casting shadows from the surgical bed.

“You wheel her in, this is as far as I go.” One of the men let go and turned back. “You pussy. It’s the blood, isn’t it? You know it ain’t real. They just got this black shit inside, like oil.” Didn’t seem to help much, he only fled the room faster for it.

“Fresh meat! You do your thing, I’ll be standing guard outside.” A grunt of affirmation from one of the surgeons sent him on his way. The first doctor parted the drapes while the other cautiously transferred her from the gurney to the segmented bed somewhat resembling a reclined dentist’s chair.

She took a swipe at him once her arm was free but his upper body strength made it a futile gesture. She was soon restrained even more thoroughly, ideally positioned for what she dreaded would happen next.

The overhead lights, mounted to an articulated boom, were absolutely blinding. One surgeon stood by while the other loomed over her, visible only as a silhouette. He removed her gag. “Anything you feel like telling us about what makes you tick, you should go ahead and share now before we get to workin’ on your brain.”

She lay still and glared at him. He laughed. “Suit yourself. We’ll find out anyway.” His assistant wheeled a small metal table to his side. There was a tray on it with a variety of small sharp tools. Some were recognizably scalpels. The rest she was unfamiliar with. Olivia began to scream.

“Now now, we can’t have that. Fucks up my concentration.” In the span of a few seconds he propped up her head, made slices in spots she couldn’t see, and her voice cut out. “Woah, woah hold up. Did you just cut her vocal chords?” The assistant reached out as if to intervene. “The last six didn’t tell us jack shit. Just screamed the whole time. I dunno about you but my eardrums hurt. If you want, go ahead and report this to Dietrich. I’m a hands-on learner anyway.”

The assistant tensed up at the mention of that name, and backed off. Oliva tried to scream again but found she could only emit a long, low gurgle. “You ever seen any zombie movies? You were human once, sure you have. Of course when we found out what we were surrounded by, first thing we tried was a bullet to the head. Fucks you up real bad but you keep coming. Then we tried cutting off the head. The body keeps coming and the head keeps moving on its own.”

Her eyes followed the gleaming blade in its arc, from the table to her chest. They’d opened her shirt but didn’t bother with antiseptic gel. “Then we found Doctor Bizen’s work. You’re a stupid bitch, you know that? Stupid dead bitch. If you’d thought to delete his research we wouldn’t have figured out what was going on for another week, at least. You’d have swallowed up the rest of us by then.”

The scalpel pinched as it penetrated her skin but no pain followed. While the surgeon presumably saw illusory blood, Olivia saw only thick black ooze dribbling from the wound as he made the Y incision typical of autopsies. “Didn’t believe it at first. I mean, the living dead? Come the fuck on, right? But it got real for everybody when the first one we shot in the head didn’t go down. Seeing is believing.”

Olivia feverishly scanned the room looking for any way out of this. But it just continued in spite of her panic. It wouldn’t stop. Soon her ribcage was exposed, and he produced something resembling pruning shears from a lower shelf of the wheeled table. Still there was no pain, but the unprecedented anxiety of being taken apart before her own eyes was quickly undermining her sanity.

A loud, reverberating crack signified each successfully broken rib. Olivia tried and failed to cry. Finally he lifted the ribcage away. “Good God. You’re a fucking mess inside, you know that? The Egyptians at least had the good sense to take the organs out.” He lifted a mass of jiggling, putrid black tissue and dumped it into an unseen waste container.

“Already tried cutting these out one by one. No effect. So whatever keeps you up and walkin’ around, it’s not in the heart, lungs, liver, pancreas or kidneys.” He began unraveling her intestines and laying them to one side of her midsection in a pile. “Cut open the stomach and lower intestine of the last two, didn’t find anything. Kind of assumed you were eating us before that. Do you eat? You move around but have no measurable metabolism. Do you appreciate how fucking confusing that is?”

She recalled Dr. Bizen’s own mixture of frustration and confusion as he described his difficulties determining why Violet wasn’t simply a corpse. As if reading her mind, the surgeon went on: “The good doctor had a handle on why you don’t decay. There’s precedent in nature for that. But it’s completely impossible for you to move, to talk, to do much of anything. Yet there’s God knows how many like you out there walking around wearing some kind of illusion we don’t understand yet, contradicting everything known to medical science about how living things function. Since none of you will enlighten us as to how your bodies work, the best we can come up with is to take you apart and destroy the pieces one at a time until you die. Process of elimination. Can’t imagine what that’s like for you, but you had your chance to stop it. If one of you would just fucking spill it already I wouldn’t have to do this.”

Olivia heard distant gunshots. The assistant looked worried. One of the men who’d helped wheel her in returned, sweaty and visibly panicked. “The stronghold in hydroponics isn’t answering. Tried to raise them over intercom and terminal. Heard a lot of screaming over the comms and that was it. We have to assume they were overrun.”

Oppressive silence permeated the room. The man, who she could now see was wearing body armor and bandoliers of ammunition, covered his mouth and nose with one hand while struggling not to retch. He repeatedly stared at Olivia, spread open as she was like a fish being cleaned, then looked away. “Oh for fuck’s sake” grunted the surgeon, “You’ve seen me do this a dozen times now, harden up already. Wish I could tell you I’ve made progress but this one’s just like the others.”

The man decked out like a mercenary settled on closing his eyes, but kept speaking. “The other strongholds are still standing but if we lose another, we won’t have the numbers to assault level 20. That’s where the new ones keep coming from. Raised Zach in engineering on terminal, he says the door code should still be 6184. Who the fuck knows what they’ve got down there. Portal to Hell? Some kind of hatchery?”

The surgeon waved him away. “You won’t be able to get close until I can work out how to kill these things. That’s when we make our final push, not before.” The merc nodded, and backed out of the room. “Damndest fucking thing. Thought I’d seen it all, stitching up our boys in Syria after their limbs got blown off. Whatever your secret is, I could’ve used it then. None of that motorized myoelectric prosthetic bullshit. Just pick up the first arm or leg we find in the rubble and stitch it on. However you do that, I can see why the doctor was obsessed with it. Soldiers who can take a bullet to the head or heart and keep fighting. Fuck, let’s call it what it is. A cure for death.”

If she weren’t so scared she might’ve laughed. She recognized in him the naive excitement she’d felt before realizing the steep price of her deathless condition. If only the room weren’t so thoroughly lit. Not a single shadowed crevice anywhere.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 9!}