Nick Cutter - The Deep

Clayton offered a gravedigger’s smile. The guinea pig was melting out of its icy encasement; a small pool of water had already formed around it.

Thhhwiiiilppppippit!

Luke craned his head around. Where had that noise come from? A dripping tap? They wouldn’t have running water down here, would they?

The sound stirred a memory, yet Luke couldn’t lay his finger on it.

Wait a second. The guinea pig’s leg. Had it… twitched?

LB spun in an agitated circle, whining pitifully.

The guinea pig’s leg twitched again, obviously this time.

“Clay,” Luke said. “What’s it doing? What’s that dead thing doing?”

“Who said it was dead, brother dear?”

It had to be dead. The laws of nature dictated as much. Some creatures could be frozen for a short period and be reanimated. Flies, crickets. Not warm-blooded animals of an elevated biological genus.

And yet…

The guinea pig’s sides began to heave as it took the smallest breaths.

This is not happening , Luke thought. It’s not possible .

The coating of ice over the guinea pig’s face melted. Its eyeballs were vibrantly red—the color of blood leaping from a torn vein. It flipped to its feet and trundled awkwardly over the lab bench.

Clayton picked it up and offered it to his brother. Luke was beset with a profound revulsion.

Why? There was nothing obviously the matter with it, other than the fact it had just come back from the dead. A perfectly ordinary guinea pig, shivering in his brother’s cupped palms.

Don’t you touch it, Luke , said the voice of caution. It’s… diseased . It’ll infect you—it doesn’t even have to bite you. Touching it will be enough.

“It’s a little-bitty, fluffy-wuffy guinea pig,” Clay said. “I take it you’re afraid?”

Luke’s jaw tightened. He held his hands out and Clay gave it to him. God, it felt awful: like holding a throbbing bezoar—a tumorous hairball, one of which he’d once removed from the stomach of a narcotized leopard at the Des Moines Zoo.

The creature just sat there in his palms, its pert nose twitching. An odd notion came into Luke’s mind: it was trying to look cute, the same way a calculating child could become doe-eyed and saccharine when there was something to gain from it. Its teeth— old man teeth; the nicotine-stained teeth of a three-pack-a-day smoker —clashed like tusks in the wet hole of its mouth.

Clayton opened the cage. “Put it inside.”

Luke did so with great relief. The other two guinea pigs, both quite small, avoided the unfrozen one, burrowing into the cedar shavings and squeaking in consternation.

“How…?”

“Oh, come now,” said Clayton. “You’ve spoken to Felz, haven’t you? So you know perfectly well how.” He retrieved a kit from beneath the table. Luke had used the same kit thousands of times. Inside you’d find two syringes and a vial of Euthasol.

An EK—Extinction Kit, as it was known in the veterinarian biz.

Clayton unwrapped a hypo and affixed the needle. He extracted 2.5 ccs of Euthasol, enough to flatline a Great Dane.

Agitated squeals broke out inside the cage. The unfrozen guinea pig was now attacking the other two. It lunged at the sensitive webbing of the much smaller guinea pig’s legs, hamstringing it. The third guinea pig clambered up the cage to hang in screeching, stupid shock from the upper bars.

The unfrozen one flipped the small one over; its head darted between the small pig’s legs, teeth gnashing at the poor thing’s exposed privates. Its victim shrieked in terror and pain.

LB advanced on the cage with a growl building in her throat.

“Keep that damn thing away,” Clayton said, pulling on a pair of vulcanized rubber gloves.

Luke gripped LB by the scruff. Clayton reached into the cage and vised his fingers around the zombified (except that wasn’t really the case, was it?) guinea pig. It squealed as he pulled it off the smaller one. Luke caught a glimpse of the victim’s shredded sex organs and blanched.

Clayton pinned the guinea pig to the table. Its face was a mask of blood, its head whipping in crazed paroxysms.

“The needle,” he grunted.

Luke handed it over. He wasn’t about to question his brother—he’d just as soon protest Clayton driving a stake through a vampire’s black heart.

An ungodly shriek bubbled out of the guinea pig’s throat. It bit Clayton’s glove and tore a groove out of the rubber.

It shouldn’t be capable of that . Luke was gobsmacked. A pit bull would have a hard time biting through those gloves .

Clayton sank the needle into the guinea pig’s flank.

The needle bent.

Jesus Christ. It actually bent , as though Clayton stabbed it into a car door.

Clay jabbed it again and the needle snapped with a singing tink , the spike of metal spinning through the air.

Luke’s mind was reeling but his brother remained calm—calm ish . Greasy balls of sweat dotted his brow, but whether that was from dread or exertion Luke couldn’t tell. Luke’s own body was bathed in sticky heat that radiated up from the balls of his feet, panic ghosting through the ventricles of his heart.

“Screw on the other needle-tip for me, would you?” Clayton said.

Luke did so—an action he’d completed thousands of times, thank God, his fingers working instinctively. Clayton flipped the bleating creature onto its back, located its rectum and stabbed with the needle. It sank in deeply, the guinea pig hissing like a cockroach as Clayton depressed the plunger.

Clayton injected the full 2.5 ccs. Luke thought of telling him to save some for the guinea pig with the bloodied privates… but right now, he just wanted this big bastard dead.

The guinea pig’s body relaxed. Clayton quickly ducked underneath the lab bench and came up with what looked like a pair of sterling silver bolt cutters. They were Bethune surgical rib shears—an instrument used for splitting the cartilage between human ribs during open-heart surgery.

Clayton was singing now. A familiar children’s song, sung in a toneless, dial-tone voice.

“The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout; down came the rain and washed the spider out…”

He brought the shears down. The blades formed an inverted V around the guinea pig’s neck.

“What the hell are you doing, Clay?”

“Look closely.” Clayton’s eyes glittered. “Part its hair so you can see the flesh.”

Luke didn’t want to touch the thing again, but curiosity overrode his squeamishness. The guinea pig’s fur was stiff like the bristles of a dirty broom, the flesh under it pink and oily. Its body pumped off the noxious warmth of a compost heap.

“Do you see it?” said Clayton. “That shine?”

Its skin held the barest scintilla, as though dusted with powdered diamonds.

“It’s the ambrosia,” said Clayton.

“Is it leaking out of its body?”

“I don’t think it was ever inside its body. I think it covers bodies in the thinnest skein, so thin it would take electron magnification to spot it. Think of a spider’s web. It doesn’t take much pure matter at all; an ounce of ambrosia, stretched into skeins, could cover the entire population of our home city.”

Luke couldn’t help but picture it. The citizens of Iowa City covered in downy threads of ambrosia, finer than baby hair, unnoticeable to the naked eye but coiling deep into their bodies, fastening around their organs and bones. Everybody shimmered in the sunlight, their bodies aglitter…

“It might send roots inside.” Clayton wiped the feverish sweat collecting above his lip. “Roots so slender that they can slip between molecules of flesh and blood; so small they can even twine around atoms . Think about it.”