Paul McEuen - Spiral

You can’t not breathe; breathing is involuntary .

You swallow .

He felt the Crawler progress down his esophagus, the sharp burning as the legs tore at the soft tissues. He tried to scream, but he couldn’t move his jaw, couldn’t lift his tongue. He was locked down, frozen, the sound of his scream trapped inside his head.

She removed her hands, and he gasped for air through clenched teeth, chest heaving. He tried to make sense of what was happening.

She pushed the button, and his mouth again opened. She used a small flashlight to look inside. “Good,” she said.

She repeated this agonizing procedure three more times, until he had a total of four Crawlers in his belly. Liam fought to get control of himself, to quell the panic. He had to stay strong. He knew what she wanted. He couldn’t let her have it. No matter what it took. No matter how much he would have to suffer.

She held her gloved hand up before him, fingers curled, as if her hand were a spider. “Ten seconds,” she said.

She wiggled her fingers, bringing the Crawlers to life.

His entire body lit on fire, his teeth cracking together with brutal force. His stomach convulsed, twitching from the pain from a burning sun suddenly ignited inside him. His vision went white. He had never felt a pain like this, the twisting, roiling monster in his stomach sending out wave after wave of agony. Time slowed down.

He became unstuck, drifting in time. He saw birds, flying birds, chased by men with very large guns. A distant bell rang. He saw the ship, the line in the sky, the mushroom cloud, like it had happened yesterday. He saw thousands of tiny spirals spreading across the firmament like sparks from a fire.

Far away, he heard her voice, counting down numbers: “Three, two, one…”

The pain slowly subsided. It took what seemed like hours for his body to recover, for the convulsions in his stomach to fade. His eyes were squeezed shut. His cheeks were cold. He was crying.

He returned to himself. He opened his eyes. The woman was there, her gloved index finger tapping at her lips.

“TELL ME,” ORCHID SAID. “BLINK TWICE IF YOU ARE READY.”

She studied him, watching for the signs. The signs that he was breaking. She glanced at his hands. When they gave up, the hands relaxed, became dead fish. Connor’s were clenched. Connor had not given up.

“Professor Connor, listen carefully,” she said as she picked up the roll of medical tape. “You may think what just happened is the worst I can do to you. It is not. It will get much, much worse.”

She taped his eyelids open, pulling the lids straight up. A powerful technique on many levels. The physical discomfort was excruciating as the eyes dried, but ever more critical was the denial of one more form of resistance. The stripping away of another layer. Removing the ability to block out visual stimuli, to make the outside world go away.

She snapped a photo of him in this state, then opened her satchel, removed a laptop computer. She typed in a few commands and then held the screen up before his face. She could tell from the twitches of his cheek muscles that his eyes were beginning to burn.

“I’m going to read you a list of names. Just listen. Just watch.”

She opened a small flip pad and read the first name. “George Washington.” An image of the first president appeared. “Charles Darwin.” Darwin flashed up. His head was shaking. He could hardly see now, she surmised, his eyes drying inexorably.

She took a bottle of eye drops from the table, Murine, bought at a drugstore more than six hundred miles away. Never purchase anything local. No receipts. No remembered face.

Connor’s eyes darted back and forth between the computer screen and her face. She felt it coming off him: the fear of knowing. He saw the infrared lasers and photodiodes mounted along the edges of the computer screen. He understood. Smart man, Liam Connor. She had never tortured a Nobel Prize winner before.

The computer was her truth detector. Advertising firms had developed sophisticated programs to monitor human reactions as people watched commercials on a computer screen. They traced eye movements. Pupil dilation. The blood flow in vessels in the sclera, the whites of his eyes. The military used the same technology for interrogations. She had adapted the technology for her own needs. She had found it effective.

Darwin stared up from the computer screen. Test names, these were tests. Calibrations. To see how Connor responded to stimuli, developing a map of his responses.

She started in on his colleagues. “Mark Sampson.” A picture of his longtime scientific collaborator appeared. She had taken it from his website. No response. She continued reading, a new picture with each name. “Vlad Glazman.” Nothing.

“Jake Sterling.”

The little red indicator bar on the bottom of the screen flickered. A small signal but easily discernible above the noise. She made a note. Good . He was already high on her list—she had his home, his lab, his phone fully instrumented.

Now , she thought. To the heart of it .

NO, NO, NO, PLEASE, GOD, NO…

She worked her way through his colleagues, his friends, then finally his family. Block your thoughts. Stop thinking. Stop feeling.…

“Martin Connor.”

“Ethel Connor.”

“Arthur Connor.”

“Maggie Connor.”

The bar at the bottom of the screen jumped.

The woman glanced at him, then to the image of his granddaughter, Maggie, on the screen.

She made a note.

Liam was drenched in sweat. He shivered uncontrollably. He was freezing in his own sweat.

She leaned in until she was inches from his face. He smelled her. She smelled of wood and creosote. “Tell me where it is, Professor Connor. Quit fighting. You must already know how this ends.”

She tapped the screen. “Your granddaughter,” she said. “I will torture her right in front of you. Tell me or she dies.”

Liam wanted to kill her. He wanted more than anything in the world to rip his arms free and strangle her.

She pushed a button and a new picture appeared on the screen. The little red meter spiked.

Dylan.

“When your granddaughter is dead, I will start on her son. Do you think you can watch that? Do you think you can be brave then?”

No, he couldn’t be brave then. But he also couldn’t give her the Uzumaki. The choice was stark, binary: watch them die or tell her.

She moved in close. “One minute. Tell me. Then everything will be over. You die. They live.”

He refused to accept it. There had to be another way. He couldn’t save them, he knew that now. No more than he could save himself. But there was something he could do. With his suffering, he could buy them a little time. If he was stronger than he’d ever been, Liam could do this one small thing.

They would have to do the rest.

“Ten seconds,” she said. “Tell me now.”

Liam readied himself. With this suffering…

The clocked ticked down. She held up her right hand, wiggled her fingers. The Crawlers came alive inside him.

Liam Connor screamed.

MAGGIE CONNOR DOVE DEEPER UNDER THE COVERS. “NO ONE’S home,” she mumbled.

The pounding on the door continued.