Brian Evenson - Dead Space - Martyr

“Hammond?” said the smallest one, the only one of them wearing glasses. “Charles Hammond?”

“Who wants to know?” asked Hammond.

“Someone would like to have a word with you,” he said. “Come with us.”

“Who?”

“I’m not at liberty to say,” the man said.

“I’m not on the clock,” Hammond claimed. “Business hours are long over.”

“You’re on the clock for this,” said another of the men.

He nodded. He pretended to relax, beginning to move toward them, then suddenly spun on a heel and ran as quickly as he could in the other direction.

Shouts rang out behind him. He ducked into an alley and ran down it, a ragged dog barking at his heels for half the length of it. He leapt over a makeshift fence and crashed through a pile of trash. Up and running again, he left the streets of the town proper and entered the shantytown.

His head was throbbing. He looked back — they were still behind him, gaining. He kept running, a stitch starting up in his side. Slower now, but still running.

By the time he reached the edge of the shantytown, they were close enough that he could hear the sound of their labored breathing. They’re going to catch me, he realized, there’s nothing I can do. He stopped suddenly, whirled around, holding the small knife in front of him.

The three men quickly fanned out, forming a triangle around him. Hammond, panting, kept moving the knife back and forth from one hand to the other. The others kept their distance, their hands up.

“There’s no need for that,” said the man with the glasses. “They just want to talk to you.”

“Who’s they?” asked Hammond.

“Come on,” said the man with the glasses. “Be a good boy and put down the knife.”

“What’s wrong with him, Tom?” asked the first of the other two.

“He’s scared, Tim,” said the second, said Tom.

“I’d be scared if I was him, too,” said Tim. “Nobody likes a thief.”

“Thief? Can you really steal secrets?” said Tom.

“Now, boys,” said the man with the glasses. “You’re not helping the situation.”

There they were again, the voices in his head. But why did they need to send voices into his head if they were there in front of him? And then a terrible thought occurred to Hammond: What if there were two groups out to get him? DredgerCorp and another one as well? Or maybe even three. Or four. What did they want with him? Would they beat him? Would they kill him? Would it be even worse than that?

“Now just calm down,” said the man with the glasses, looking a little nervous now.

Someone, Hammond realized, was making a noise, a high-pitched squealing. It was a terrible thing to hear. It took him a long moment to realize that that someone was himself.

“I told you something was wrong with him,” he heard Tim say behind him.

“You’re right about that, Tim,” said Tom.

They were still there, the three of them, standing in a way that made it impossible for him to see all of them at once. He could turn and turn, but he couldn’t see them all at the same time no matter what he did. And then there were the ones in his head, too, slowly extracting things from it. God, his head hurt. He had to stop them, had to get them out of his head.

“Put the knife down, friend,” said the man with the glasses.

But that was the last thing Hammond was going to do. Instead he lunged forward and flashed his knife at the man with glasses. The man jumped nimbly back, but not nimbly enough; the knife opened a gash just below his wrist. He stood holding it, blood dripping through his fingers, his face suddenly pale in the dim light.

But Hammond had forgotten about the others. He turned and there they were, still a little way away, but moving closer. They stepped quickly back when they realized they’d been noticed.

He was still surrounded, both inside his head and outside it. There was no getting out of it. He would never get away.

And so, realizing this, heart thudding in his mouth, he did the only thing he could think to do.

“I didn’t expect that, Tim,” said Tom.

“I didn’t either,” said Tim. “This one was full of surprises. What’d they want him for, anyway?” he asked the man with the glasses.

“A few questions,” said the man with the glasses. “Nothing serious. Just a few questions.” He had wrapped his wrist in one of his shirttails. It was slowly soaking through with blood.

“Never seen anything quite like that,” said Tom. “And I hope I never do again.”

“Same here,” said Tim, shaking his head.

He took a step back to avoid the puddle of blood that was spreading from Hammond’s slit neck. He’d never seen anyone cut themselves quite so deep and so quickly. There was a lot of blood and it was still coming. He had to step back again.

How could anyone do that to himself? Tim wondered. He must have been very frightened. Or simply crazy. Or both. He squinted, massaged his temple.

“All right, Tim?” asked Tom.

“Better than him, anyway,” said Tim. “Just a little headache.”

“Me, too,” said Tom. “Terry?”

“I’ve got a headache, too,” said the man with the glasses. “Been one of those nights. Step lively, lads. Let’s get out of here before the law arrives.”

“He killed himself, just like that,” the man on the vidscreen said. It was less a question than a statement. He had a square-cut jaw and white hair that was swept back and plastered down. Even on the small vidscreen, he was an imposing man. He was wearing a uniform, but his screen had been set to dither out his insignia, to make it impossible to say just what branch of the service he was part of.

“That’s what they tell me, sir,” said Tanner.

William Tanner was head of the newly established DredgerCorp Chicxulub, the semisecret branch of the organization that had been set up hurriedly as soon as they’d had some indication that something was going on in the center of the crater.

Tanner had a military background and specialized in running black ops through dummy corporations. He was running this one under the name Ecodyne. Enter the right command into the system at the right moment, and any sign of a connection to DredgerCorp would instantly vanish from the company files. Then Tanner would vanish and reappear under another name. So far, his operations had gone well, partly because of good luck, partly because he was very good at what he did, which was why he’d been with DredgerCorp for ten years.

He didn’t know the name of the man on the screen. All he knew was that, three days before, he’d had a vid conference with Lenny Small, the president of DredgerCorp, who’d explained that they were bringing someone in from the outside. When Tanner asked who it was, Small had just smiled.

“No need for names, Tanner,” he said. He flashed a vid still of the man onto Tanner’s screen. “Here’s your man,” he said. “You tell him anything he wants to know. And you do anything he says.”

Once Small disconnected, Tanner had shaken his head. Why bring someone in from the outside? Just one more possible way for something to go wrong. Just one more hole he’d have to plug after the operation was over. Small was getting soft in his old age, drinking too much maybe, getting sloppy. Which put everyone at risk. Which put him at risk. Tanner didn’t like that.

But when he saw the guy on the screen, first heard him talk, first heard the coldness of his voice, he realized that he’d misjudged his boss. This wasn’t just anyone. This was military, someone who’d clearly seen a lot and knew better than any of them what was going on. Privately, Tanner started thinking of him as the Colonel, though he had no idea what the man’s actual rank was, or if he even had the right branch of the service. It wasn’t even possible to guess at where he might be — the background had been deliberately pixilated out, which lent an odd shimmer to the edges of the Colonel’s body. It was the Colonel who had taken the data they’d intercepted from various scientists’ reports and generated a model that gave them an idea of what might be waiting for them at the heart of the crater. It was the Colonel who immediately had the security system replaced, who had seen the potential for the technician who had installed the first system to leave a back door for himself. And when that young geophysicist named Altman started asking around about anomalies in the crater, the Colonel immediately had his phone tapped.