Nick Cutter - The Deep

He flinched.

But there was nothing. The drifting snow. That impenetrable wall of black.

“Are you catching much of it?” Luke asked his brother. “Will it…”

Will it let itself be caught? was the question he thought but did not say.

“We don’t have to catch it anymore,” Clayton said.

“You have enough?”

“Oh, you can never have enough, Lucas.”

“Then why don’t you have to catch it?”

“Because it’s coming to us.”

He snapped the lights back on. Luke saw that Al had gravitated toward the door marked LW. Her face had a disconnected, swimmy quality—the look of a person suspended in a wonderful, all-consuming dream.

“Al…?” said Luke.

Her expression didn’t change. She trailed one finger over the hatch of LW sensuously, as she might over a lover’s sensitive flesh.

LB gave a short bark. The fog over Al’s eyes lifted.

“Sorry. Off in my own world there,” she said sheepishly. “This is Westlake’s lab, right?”

“Of course it is.” Clayton waved his hand edgily. “Come away from there.”

Obediently, Al did so. She was grinning and rubbing the back of her neck, as if she’d been caught doing something embarrassing. Luke watched her circumspectly, a little weirded out by her detached expression: too much like the zoned-out look that would enter an animal’s eyes once the Euthasol took hold. LB padded over and sniffed at Al’s pocket. She produced a half-eaten energy bar, snapped off a piece and tossed it to LB, who snatched it out of the air and wolfed it down.

From another part of the station arose a dull, monotonous knocking.

“Is that Dr. Toy?” Al asked.

Clayton’s shrug said: Who else?

“You figure he’s dangerous, Doc?” said Al. “We can’t have him running around trying to punch holes in the damn walls.”

“He’s staked out his fiefdom, Lieutenant,” Clayton said. “He’s squatting in the animal quarantine. He’s not bothering me. I’m not bothering him.”

Luke said: “What is he doing?”

“Pursuing scientific inquiry, I assume,” Clayton said. “What else?”

Luke’s gaze tracked from Clay to the hatch marked LW… suddenly it hit him. LW: Westlake. LT: Toy. LN: Nelson. These must be their private labs. Luke could see into Dr. Toy’s through the porthole—orderly and empty. He could even see into Clayton’s.

But Westlake’s porthole was obscured by that slick black coating. And there was that odd hum from behind the hatch.

“Has anyone been in Westlake’s lab since…?” said Luke.

Clayton shook his head. “It’s locked. Only Westlake knew the keypad code to gain entry.”

“ Should we take a look inside?” Luke said, eyeing that black stuff critically.

“That is unwise,” Clayton said. “Westlake was working with… certain toxic compounds, I believe. There may be a contamination risk, but we’re perfectly safe if it remains shut. That hatch is hermetically sealed.”

Clayton folded his hands complacently, smiling at them both. Smiles always sat badly on his face: too often he appeared to be snarling. Luke thought his brother looked haggard. Exhaustion was etched into the flesh around his eye sockets.

Something’s happened to everyone down here. And it’s still happening.

But what? It refused to be pinpointed, no more than a dark speck in Luke’s brain, growing steadily and gathering weight.

“Why are you here again, anyway?” Clayton asked Luke icily. “Why you , precisely? I mean, of all people.”

“Like I said, they called me. The government . They thought you might…”

…Lucas come home we need you come home…

“…need me here. Need something from me.”

“I can tell you that you’re not needed here,” Clayton said simply.

A sheet of anger draped over Luke as he was ripped back through time, a younger brother knocking on the door of his big brother’s basement lab. He was holding a small gift—a glass of chocolate milk—and in return only hoped for a glimpse of Clayton’s sorcery or, far better, an invitation to help out. But inevitably the door would open a crack, his offering hurriedly snatched away and the door slammed shut in his face.

You’re not needed.

Luke was furious that his brother would still treat him so shabbily. That fury crystallized into anger at himself—why did Clayton’s predictable scorn still wound him? He wasn’t here for his rat-shit brother. He was here for the people up in the real world, the ones who had human feelings and needed the help Clayton might be able to provide.

“You don’t know what you need anymore, Clay,” Luke said. “You ever consider that—that you might be in over your head? Oh, no, not the legendary Clayton Nelson. Not Cute Clay, onetime pinup boy of bubblegum magazines from coast to coast—”

Luke swooned. The lab tilted under his feet, the lights streaking across his vision.

“You’re dead on your feet, Luke,” Al told him. “You need to get some sleep.”

When had Luke last slept? An eternity ago. He’d powered through on fear and adrenaline. But now the fatigue hit him like a hammer blow. The Nelson Brothers’ Death Match—the same battle they’d been engaged in off and on for their entire lives—could wait.

“Yeah. Maybe just an hour or two,” he said. “Recharge the batteries.”

Al took his hand—her grip was strong and calming. “I’ll take you somewhere you can rest.”

Luke grabbed his bag. Clayton watched in stony silence as Al led Luke down the tunnel marked Access 2. LB padded behind Luke, her head darting side to side alertly.

“How are you feeling?” Luke asked Alice. They’d been inside the station only a few hours, but oh God it felt much longer.

“I’ll manage.” But Luke could hear the fatigue in her voice.

Flee , Luke thought. Jet. Blow this Popsicle stand. Use your feet to beat the street…

Don’t be a worm, Lucas , his mother spoke up. You could as soon outrun your own skin. What are you, scared? A little fraidy-cat?

They came to a hatch that opened into a cramped bunk room. A cot, a stack of journals, a heap of dirty clothes. LB sniffed around the cot, chuffed dubiously, and curled up on the floor.

“It was Dr. Westlake’s,” Alice said. “Will it do?”

Luke thought: Whyever not? The last body to lie on this cot now lies in a vault.

“Yes,” he said, tamping down his revulsion. “Thank you.”

“Sleep. Then we’ll put our heads together and figure things out.”

Luke stowed his bag and sat on the bunk. LB leapt up, prodding Luke with her snout and eventually settling over his thighs. He shooed her off; she went reluctantly, her eyes shining wetly up at him.

The floor under the bunk was scattered with Westlake’s research. A laptop lay atop one pile. The silver casing was sticky with dark matter. He scraped at it with his fingernail; it peeled away in a long ebony curl. It reminded him of the half-set coating on a toffee apple, so sticky it could rip the fillings out of molars.

He sniffed it. Ugh. A sweet decay, like the pool of mystery juice at the bottom of an amusement park trash bin.

Clayton’s voice drifted through his mind: Westlake was working with certain toxic compounds…

Luke opened Westlake’s laptop. Files were clustered at the bottommost left-hand corner of the desktop. Luke used the trackpad to spread them out.

Three audio files. Contact 1, Contact 2, Contact 3.

Curiosity overruled exhaustion. He clicked on the first file.

THE BUZZING.

That was the first thing he heard. Low and ragged, the burr of a malfunctioning servo motor—hundreds of them on the fritz at once.