David Nickle - Eutopia

“We’re the Harpers,” said Mrs. Harper, cajoling. “Aren’t you a pretty little girl. What’s your name?”

“Lily,” said the girl. And she boosted herself up and flung one leg over the dining room table.

“Hello Lily,” Garrison Harper said.

She gave him a sniff, and then she dropped to the floor. She was wearing a filthy slip of a skirt; her feet were splayed and callused. She approached him and Mrs. Harper, and sniffed again.

Lily looked straight at Andrew Waggoner. “You,” she said, “got some song to tell.”

And then, she started to sing.

There were four tall, rain-streaked windows in the dining room and men outside, flinging rocks. The windows all smashed at once. One of the rocks struck Mrs. Harper in the side of the head; it cast her to the floor amid a lawn of broken glass. Andrew dropped to his knees to see to her, but he didn’t get much chance; strong arms reached down and yanked him to his feet, bending his bad arm hard and sending long spears of pain up his spine.

Men stepped through: big men, in buckskin, armed with blades and sticks.

The fellow who had hold of Andrew lifted him like he was nothing, and hauled him over the sill of the window and Andrew couldn’t see, but he could surmise. The men went straight for Garrison Harper. There was a sound that might have been a scream, and then a smashing sound, and what sounded like more gunfire—

—and then Andrew’s face was in mud, and he was struggling to breathe. He was lifted into the air again, and a thick finger dug into his nostrils and his mouth, clearing an airway for him. Andrew blinked, and looked up into a long face, with patches of beard and some discolour, and wispy black hair that snaked across a broad forehead.

He saw other things too. A man face down in mud, a Remington rifle a few feet off his splayed and grasping fingertips; the sky, roiling with storm; the ground itself, seeming to move with the wet, scrabbling backs of things that whistled and cried as they fled; and at last, flames, licking the sides and crossing the roofs of the Harper mansion, while the girl sang a song whose words blended together into a long and triumphal note.

Jason made his way by candlelight from the room where Germaine Frost lay bleeding, down the dark stairwell to the hospital’s basement. The pickle-juice stink of formaldehyde carried along the corridor there, and grew unbearably thick by the time he reached the autopsy room. Jason didn’t heed the stink, though, as he hurried into the room and saw what he suspected. There was the door to the storeroom—the one place in Eliada that Jason knew was cut off from all the others, even better than the quarantine.

The door was padlocked. And as Jason stepped to it, someone pounded weakly from the other side.

He set the candle down, and put his ear to the wood.

“Help us!” It was unmistakably Ruth’s voice. “We’re trapped!”

“Hold on, Ruth. It’s Jason. Don’t tire yourself out. I’m getting a crowbar.”

Minutes later, Jason had the lock off and the door open. The room was dark, and damp, and he held the candle over his head he saw them: Ruth, crouched as if in prayer, hands held together and eyes wet—and behind her, Louise; lying on the floor, curled around herself.

Ruth stumbled to her feet and ran to him. Jason caught her in one arm, as he stepped inside and pulled the door shut.

Ruth pulled back and looked at the door. “Wh-what are you doing?” she said. “We have to get out of here—warn my father and Mr. Green and the Pinkertons! Your aunt—”

“Just a minute.” Jason squinted around the room. The shelves were still filled with jars containing the grotesqueries of the Eliada surgery. It didn’t take him long to find the other, tiny earthenware jar, sitting on a shelf near the door, its lid removed.

“We can’t leave,” said Jason, letting go of Ruth and stepping up to the jar. He peered into it—there was a tiny twist of something that looked like a root, but streaked with white. He carefully picked up the lid and screwed it back on—and then, although he knew it was pointless, Jason dribbled some candle-wax over it. He looked at Louise, who was beginning to stir from a very deep sleep, and turned back to Ruth.

“We have to stay here,” he said. “It ain’t safe outside.”

Louise sat up and coughed. She regarded Jason, or at least the candle that he held, with narrowed eyes. “You shouldn’t leave that going in here, if we’re to stay, she said sleepily. There’s not much air circulation here.”

Jason blew the candle out. “We’re to stay here,” he said. “So we’ll leave the candle out.” The darkness was suffocating and disorienting. Jason groped in it, until he found Ruth’s arm. He drew her to him.

“You do mean to stay,” said Louise quietly. “That’s kind of you.”

Ruth stood close to Jason. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. You—”

“It’s all right,” said Jason.

“I so pushed you to come out last night; mocked you for being afraid. But I know—there are some things that you should be afraid of.”

“It’s all right.”

Jason led her away from the door, taking care not to knock anything over. “But as dangerous as it is out there—we can’t wait here. They’ll come back!”

“We have to wait here,” said Jason. “No choice.”

“Jason is right,” said Louise weakly, in the dark. “No choice.”

A shiver went through Jason. “Hey Louise,” he said, “you remember what happened to you?”

Louise sniffled. “Yes. I took the material back to my room and was reading it by lamplight. Your—your aunt came in. She was accompanied by—”

“Say it,” said Ruth, acidly. “She was accompanied by Mr. Harris. The very fellow who had brought us her bag in the first place. What a traitor.”

“She didn’t say anything,” said Louise. “I tried to apologize, but she struck me. I woke up here.”

“You all right?” asked Jason.

“No,” said Louise, miserably. “No.”

“She hit Louise on the head,” said Ruth. “It’s a wonder she didn’t kill her.”

Jason didn’t think that Louise was being troubled by a sore skull right now. And he thought she knew that as well as any of them.

“Louise,” he said, “how far did you get in Germaine’s letters?”

“Not far,” she said, a little too quickly. In the dark, Jason nodded.

She knows, he thought. She knows that we’re locked in here with the Cave Germ. She knows what it did to Cracked Wheel; she knows what it is likely to do to both her and Ruth, and she’s probably figured out what it is already doing to her .

And for whatever reason, she’s not told Ruth a thing about it .

“That’s too bad,” he said to Louise. And to Ruth: “Let’s go sit down and rest a spell. You can tell me what happened to you.”

“Ah, of course,” she said as they settled down against the cool stone of a wall. “You must have so many questions.”

“Last I saw you, you were bustin’ into the quarantine,” he said. “Did you—hey!”

Jason rubbed his shoulder where she’d punched it.

“So many questions,” she repeated.

“Sorry,” said Jason, and she hit him again—not as hard this time, but still firmly.

“Stop apologizing. All right, then—let me set an example. This, Jason, is how one answers a question honestly put. I didn’t bust into the quarantine. I fled there. The forest—it seemed to me that it was filled with beasts. That thing that had attached itself to the girl in the woods… there were more of them. Countless…”

“I know.”