Paul McEuen - Spiral

Liam’s agenda was his own, except for the pieces he’d fed to Jake. Jake now knew that there had been a Japanese biological superweapon, destroyed by the fourth nuclear explosion in history. Liam had spoken the name: the Uzumaki. Liam had not said the word aloud for decades.

But Jake didn’t know more still. He didn’t know what that bastard Lawrence Dunne had started. Jake didn’t know that Liam had in his possession one of the seven brass cylinders. Or that after over sixty years, he had finally found the Uzumaki’s weakness.

Click .

Liam froze. The noise came from just outside the lab.

“Maggie?”

He wouldn’t put it past her to come back and make another attempt to pull him away.

No answer.

“Jake?” He was a night owl, too. Liam often found him in his labs past midnight. “Jake?”

Liam listened. Nothing.

He looked around his lab. The Crawlers were in the gardens. The computer screen had put itself to sleep.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Click!

The lights went out.

TINK, TINK, TINK.

When Liam Connor came to, the sound was the first thing that broke through.

Tink, tink, tink .

He was confused, unstuck in time, flashes coming quick and disjointed. He was twelve, walking the green hills of Sligo, hunting new species of fungi. He was twenty-two, on a warship in the Pacific, contemplating a small brass cylinder in his hand. He was thirty-one, in their first house in Ithaca, watching his wife crawl out of bed, completely naked. He was fifty-nine, the king of Sweden hanging a medal on his neck. He was seventy-seven, seeing his great-grandson for the first time, Dylan’s little beet-red face scrunched and screaming.

Tink, tink, tink .

After a moment, he settled down, becoming his current self. He was an old, old man, an Irish gnome. Eighty-six. Emeritus professor of biology at Cornell University.

He tried to move, but everything was wrong. He couldn’t lift his arms. He couldn’t open his mouth. He had the sense he was upright, but he couldn’t be sure. His vision was blurry, smudges in black. He couldn’t see anything, save for a faint glow coming from behind him. It was a mix of yellow, green, and red, each color ebbing and strengthening to its own rhythm.

Tink, tink, tink .

The sound was familiar. He knew the sound. What the hell was it?

He tried to remember what had happened. He had been in his lab, he was sure of that, tending to the gardens of decay. The gardens. He was fiddling in the gardens, then—then nothing. A blank spot in his memory. Was it still the same night? Still Monday?

He couldn’t move his head. He was upright, but he couldn’t move. Someone had struck him; he remembered that now. He could still feel the blow.

He heard another sound. A rush of air, slight, gentle. Silence. Then again.

Breathing.

He was sure of it. Someone was sitting right behind him. In the darkness. Very close.

Tink, tink, tink .

He tried to open his mouth, to speak, but he couldn’t move. His mouth wouldn’t open. Something was wrong with his tongue. It was trapped against the bottom of his mouth.

He studied his surroundings, fighting a pain like a knife blade between his eyes. He was in a huge room in the shape of a half-cylinder. The concrete roof twenty feet overhead curved in a smooth semicircle to the floor. He faced the back end of the cylinder, the flat, stained concrete wall no more than ten feet from his face. Liam realized where he was: an old munitions bunker on the abandoned Seneca Army Depot site, completely isolated from the rest of the world. Liam had spent months at the depot over the past four years, secretly toiling over his last great—and highly secret—project.

A woman stepped in front of him, her face illuminated by the dim, pulsing glow coming from behind. He recognized her immediately as the woman who had been following him. She was Asian—Chinese, he was nearly certain. Somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing small, round glasses. She leaned forward, her face no more than twelve inches from his, features illuminated by an ever-changing mix of yellow, green, and red light. She was pretty, made more so by the flaws of two thin, perfectly symmetric scars that ran along her cheekbones. She wore all black, down to the gloves on her hands.

She flicked on a photographer’s light, mounted on a stand beside her. He blinked against the sudden brightness, waited for the blotches of white to settle down into shape and color. He tried to speak but couldn’t open his mouth. He felt as though his head were in a vise.

Once his eyes adjusted, she held up a small mirror so he could see himself. She adjusted the angle until he caught his reflection.

He was a shocking sight. His head was encased in a metal frame, with struts and bands holding his skullcase like a patient with a neck injury. A rubber-and-steel clamp held his jaw rigidly fixed. He looked old, incredibly old, even older than his eighty-six years. The wrinkles on his face were a cracked riverbed, and tufts of white hair stuck out every which way from his skull. He was a corpse, a ghost, strapped into headgear from a Frankensteinian nightmare.

She lowered the mirror. When she spoke, her English was excellent but still bore traces of her native land. “A mutual friend sent me,” she said.

She was Chinese, from the north, he guessed. He felt a tremor at the base of his spine. What she said next nearly stopped his heart.

“I came for the Uzumaki.”

Tink, tink, tink .

The sound. He knew the sound.

He looked down. A glass petri dish sat in her lap. Four sparkling objects were in the center of the dish, scurrying about, each no larger than a dime.

MicroCrawlers.

They skittered around in the petri dish with terrifying speed, colliding with the walls, tink, tink, tink . Their legs were segmented etched silicon, sharp as razor blades.

He closed his eyes, but he could still hear the tink of silicon against glass.

“I’ve taken this place apart. Where is it?”

He forced himself to focus. He hadn’t yet seen a gun. If he could get loose, he’d have a chance. He was a small man, impossibly old, but he was still quick, and he could be brutally vicious when he needed to be.

Tink, tink, tink .

She reached toward him and touched a spot on his headgear. A whirring sound. The headgear pried open his jaw with a mechanical precision, rigid, like the door of a safe. The air was cold on the back of his throat.

Tink, tink, tink .

She lifted her right hand and closed her fingers into a fist. The Crawlers stopped their incessant scurrying in the glass dish. The sudden silence was jarring. Somehow she controlled the Crawlers with her gloved hand.

She picked up one of the Crawlers with a pair of tweezers. She placed the little robotic creature deep inside his mouth, on the back of his tongue. He had to fight not to panic, not to gag. The legs were like tiny scalpels, cutting into the tissue with even the slightest movement. He could taste droplets of blood rising up on the back of his tongue.

She touched another button and the piezo motors buzzed, closing his mouth for him, clamping his teeth together with an audible tock! She placed a hand on his mouth, sealing his lips. With two delicate fingers, she reached out and pinched his nose closed.

“Swallow it,” she said.

The seconds ticked away, probably a minute, before he panicked. He struggled violently against his bonds, his body rebelling against the lack of oxygen. He felt as though he might break a bone at any minute. His will was strong, but he knew his body couldn’t take this kind of punishment. He held out as long as he could, thrashing and pulling, but then his vision started to go.