Unknown - The_Growing_589064

“Good,” Morgan says, touching Koda’s arm briefly, Kirsten’s more gently, lingeringly. Then she backs again into the darkness, and they wait.

The first sentry passes. Koda shifts slightly as his footsteps fade, trying again to ease her leg. Carefully she shifts the flashlight and the two small bottles that hang at her waist. Filled with gasoline and fused with rag run through holes in their metal caps, they may not be regulation grenades but will do the job at hand. From somewhere across the parking lot comes a faint whimper, a low sound that might be made by a puppy or a newborn kitten. Either is likely enough. The droids have shown no interest in any non-human beings, either for good or for ill. The shrubbery around the long, low clinic building, with its offset rooms in the patient wing, provides plenty of sheltered nooks where a pregnant animal might bear and nurse her young. The sound comes again, louder, is repeated in a broken cadence that rises in volume, finally becoming the full-throated wail of a human baby in distress.

“Goddess! There’s kids—!” someone behind her exclaims and is cut off abruptly by Morgan’s rough, “Go! Go, dammit!”

Koda levers herself up to her feet, the cramp in her leg still hampering her, and sets off across the pavement at a shambling run. Kirsten paces her, with Morgan and Beatha on their heels. Morgan and the three women in her squad peel off to the right, making for the main entrance. Sarai and Inga, backed by two more Amazai, split and make for the rear, the backpacks that hump against their shoulders bearing the explosives and the timing devices that will bring this obscenity down in a cloud of dust and mortar. Except, now, they have to find the children first, and bring them out.

Koda skids around the corner of the building, Kirsten on her heels, running flat out now that the cramp in her leg as loosened. The wailing sound comes again, fainter now with the angle of the building in between. Behind Koda, Beatha shouts, “Windows! Go for the glass!”

The side entrance was also, apparently, once the emergency entrance. As they pound up the ramp, Koda can make out the sheen off the sliding pocket doors and beyond them the second pair that leads into the wide receiving bay. She shifts her rifle in her hands as she reaches the head of the incline, ready to smash through the doors with its butt. To her shock, the doors simply slide open on their well-oiled rails, and she half stumbles into the airlock space between the two entrances, Kirsten and the other women barreling into her from behind. “Well,” says Kirsten as she regains her balance. “That’s convenient. They’re expecting us?”

“Or dead sure they’re not expecting anybody,” Beatha adds. “Whole damned atmosphere’s pretty casual.”

“Whole damned town’s pretty dead.” Koda lowers her gun and stands for a moment before the inner doors. “Trap, maybe?”

From somewhere toward the front of the building comes the sharp rattle of automatic weapons fire, punctuated by a high-pitched scream. Koda cannot tell if the sound signals pain or triumph. They do not have time to think about it, nor about a trap. Koda takes two steps forward, and the glass panels slide back.

Heat rolls over them, the pent up heat of a closed building that has stood for months in the summer sun without air conditioning. With it comes, faint but discernable, the distinctive odor of human infant, a hint of warm milk and the riper smell of unchanged diapers. And under it all, fainter still, runs the stench of blood and rotting flesh.

Kirsten coughs, a small, strangled sound. This clinic must bring back the horror of Craig, the hideous confirmation of the incinerator at Salt Lake , but there is no time to take or give comfort. Motioning the others to stillness, Koda stands for long seconds, letting her senses expand into the space around her. Hunter-sight, shaman-sight. Along with the odors that signal the presence of live infants and the underlying stink of death comes the sharper tang of alcohol, the acid-tinged smell of formaldehyde. She has no sense of physical human presence in the rooms stretched out before them; the only living things, it seems to her, must be further down the corridor, perhaps in the rooms on the other side of the main entrance at the center. But there is something, something. . . .

Something not living but conscious, waiting for them to move down the corridor. Something with death on its mind.

“All right,” she says softly, switching on her flashlight. “We’re going down that hall, checking each room as we go. They already know we’re here. There’s no point in secrecy now.”

The beam of yellow light precedes them down the corridor, sliding over a bulletin board with tattered announcements still dangling from bright red pushpins, over the fire extinguisher in its glass box on the wall, over a floor that shows hardly a mote of dust. So the facilities in this wing are still in use, which means that women are still delivering here. Rape does not need a clean floor. Neither does the butchery of infants.

A door opens off the hall to her right; a quick sweep of the room with the torch shows the a low table and a tangled witch’s cradle of black cables snaking down from the ceiling: Radiology. The door opposite remains closed and locked; playing the light through the narrow, wire-reinforced window, Koda sees only shelves of neatly ranged bottles and boxes. Beatha, on tip-toe behind her, whispers, “Pharmacy?”

Koda nods. “We need to come back here and collect as much as we can before we blow the place up.”

On the other side of the hall, Kirsten leans into a room whose door stands ajar. She says softly, “Koda. Over here.”

“Over here” is a delivery room. Koda sweeps the light around its tiled floor and walls, all spotlessly kept still. An autoclave stands on a counter to one side, its LED bright crimson in the semi-darkness. She touches it and draws her hand sharply away. Still hot, still in use. Carefully she unlocks and lifts the lid; forceps, clamps, hemostats, scalpels, all neatly ranged inside, ready for use. Kirsten, staring down into the sterilizer as if she is gazing into the pit of hell, says in a flat voice. “So what do they do with the women after they deliver? Send them back to the34 jails to breed again?”

“Are they even that organized?” Beatha asks. The controlled substances cabinet swings open to her touch, not locked or even latches. Androids, after all, cannot become addicted.

“We’d better check the incinerator out back,” Koda says grimly. “Look for adult remains, too.”

Despite the sterile atmosphere, the stink of decay is stronger here. Nothing in the room seems to be the source of it. Koda plays the light over the acoustic tiles of the ceiling; it is possible, just possible, that a possum or other uninvited resident has gotten into the roof space or the air conditioning ducts and died. But if that were the case, here on the downside of summer, there would be flies. There are none. “Something,” she says quietly, “something—”

“Is dead,” Kirsten finishes for her. “Somewhere close.”

“Next room,” Beatha says. “Let’s try there.”

The smell hits them full force as they push open the door to the adjoining examination room. Kirsten gives a small, strangled choking sound; Beatha gags, covering her mouth and nose with her free hand, sweeping the room with the muzzle of her rifle with the other. Nothing.

At first glance, the small space seems as clean as the delivery room. Table, counter, blood pressure cuff dangling from the wall, oxygen tank, all spotless. A steel trash receptacle stands by the table, its lid down. The edge of a red plastic bag shows under the edge of the top. A five-gallon can, it might hold bloody bandages, used dressings, discarded gloves.