WnW 3.16

I took out two flashlights from my bag and handed one of them to Nell. The twin beams flicked on and cut through the dark, illuminating chairs and desks stacked against the walls. Alek walked ahead, leaving footprints in the thick layer of dust.

Nell shone her light on a pile of stacked boxes that were labeled with strings of numbers. I took in the room in its entirety, trying to recall the details from my past. It wasn’t lining up. The walls weren’t a sterile white and the dimensions of the room didn’t match either.

Nell opened a box and found a piece of some larger machine inside, cradled by crumpled up newspaper.

“This isn’t it,” I said. “We’re not on the right floor.”

“There’s stairs in the back,” Alek said, coming back towards us. “Up or down?”

“Down,” Nell and I responded at the same time.

The stairwell had no windows and as we descended, everything not within the flashlight’s beam became a black void. Alek went down in front and I followed after Nell. I didn’t say it, but this positioning made sense. Nell couldn’t heal herself like we could.

“What are we looking for, anyway?” Alek asked.

“Not sure,” I answered honestly. “Any clue as to what they were doing.”

“Hmm,” Alek said as he reached the bottom step. “Not a great start.”

I came around the landing and saw that Alek was faced with a bare concrete wall. He turned towards us and raised an eyebrow. “Guess it was up after all?”

“No, that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The lab was down here. I’m sure of it.” I ran my hand over the wall, hoping for some hidden switch. There were a few superficial cracks in the concrete but nothing more.

“Nick, keep your hand over that crack,” Nell said, pointing at the largest one. I did so, holding still as something moved out of the palm of my hand. 

“You might not like this next part,” she said, brow furrowed in concentration.

She was correct. I shuddered as sensation spread out from my hand, like I had grown an extra finger that was now worming its way through the wall. Then the appendage breached the other side, no longer pressed against stone on all sides.

“Can you feel the end?” she asked.

I grimaced. “Yeah, it got through. The wall isn’t very thick.”

Nell nodded and I felt the sensation die out. I quickly pulled my hand away from the wall, roots as thin as hairs snapping off of it.

I turned to Nell. “That doesn’t do us much good if we can’t find a way to-”

Crack.

Alek wrung out his hand, stepping away from the hole he had just punched in the wall. “Quit pussy-footing around, Nick. You still aren’t grasping the base of Shaping.” He held up his fist, displaying the bloody, broken skin around his knuckles. “Everything is temporary. Our bodies. Our pain. Stop caring about stuff that doesn’t matter.” He grunted and swung again, breaking a large chunk off of the wall. Cracks spread across the surface as the integrity gave way. Alek waited and eventually the wall crumbled, kicking up a huge cloud of dust.

He swaggered onwards, kicking aside bits of rubble. I watched him move on with distaste. Alek’s familiarity and assumptions irked me. Surely there was more than one way to be a Wolf.

Once we moved far enough inside to be clear of the dust cloud, the flashlight beam moved across the wall like a white full moon traveling across the sky. I felt a familiar nausea rise in my throat. A white hallway. This was it. That stomach-churning metallic scent still lingered in the stale air even after all these years.

We moved down the hallway and Nell pulsed reassurance even as her own face turned a little pale from feeling what I was feeling. Alek pushed the double doors open and we stepped out into the large open room. Machines were piled high in all corners, looking like the rising seating of an amphitheater.

Nothing whirred or beeped. There was no power. There were no experiments that had continued in secret. A few empty tables still stood around the room.

Nell’s flashlight beam created a tunnel of swirling dust particles. Alek whistled sharply and the keening sound bounced off the walls.

“Not even crickets,” Alek said, amused. “We’ve unearthed a tomb with nothing in it.”

I walked around the tables, feeling lost. What did I expect to find? Coordinates to an evil lair? Some manifesto left behind for anyone to read?

Absently, I ran my fingers underneath the table, then paused as they crossed something rough. I bent down and shone the flashlight at the underside. Near where the leg met the top, words had been scratched into the metal. Organ was here.

The name suddenly came back to me. Chase, that murderous psychopath, he had known that name. Back in the car, I could only remember bits and pieces but he had talked about being captured and ordered to inject himself, gaining powers after doing so. And at the farm Aaron had been giving people ‘gifts’ using some vial, given to him by this organization, Organ.

“They were making something here,” I muttered. “Prototyping some sort of Shaping drug.”

Alek turned to me, eyebrows raised in surprise. “Really?”

“You don’t know about it?” I asked suspiciously.

Alek’s eyes roamed the room. “I’ve heard rumours of a drug, but I’ve never laid eyes on the stuff. Supposedly that’s the reason there’s so many Casts popping up in the city.”

I watched Nell go to one of the windows and trace her finger through the dust on it. She didn’t seem to be listening.

How did it all connect? The drugs. The Casts. The Tree. There had to be more pieces to this puzzle I was missing, some critical bit of information that would make the entire picture clear.

Nell opened the door to one of the side rooms and went inside. After making sure Alek wasn’t eavesdropping, I followed after her.

She stood in the middle of the room, staring up at the black lens of a camera that sat in the corner of the ceiling. I eyed it distrustfully even though I knew nothing here had power.

“You okay?” I asked softly.

She nodded.

“I didn’t think you would want to be back in here, in the place you were trapped.”

“It was just one of many rooms like it,” she said, shrugging. “Nothing so special.”

“If it’s okay for me to ask, what did they make you do here?”

Emotion crept up my limbs, making the room feel darker. “Same as always. They didn’t ever explain it,” she said. “It was always just: ‘Shape this. Shape it again. Again, again.’ They would keep telling me to do it until they got the reaction out of me they wanted.” 

Cold seeped into my bones as I listened. “Eventually I figured out that they wouldn’t relent until I had poured all my anger, all of my resentment into it. I would twist and bend until it was unrecognizable. Only then were they satisfied.”

Nell looked up at me, eyes moist. “They made me do it, Nick.”

I glanced through the window, so dirty I could only see through it where Nell’s finger had made a trail through the muck.

“I realize now that they were preparing me to make the Tree.”

“What was ‘it’, Nell? What were you Shaping?” I asked, eyes fixated on some motion I had seen in the dark. What was Alek up to?

“Please don’t hate me.”

“What were you Shaping?” I repeated, shining the light through the window. Something reflected the light, not the white walls but a blur of something shiny and black.

“People,” she whispered.

“Nell,” I said, trying to fight off the wave of sadness that threatened to overwhelm me.

“I’m sorry.”

“Nell,” I firmly whispered. “Do you sense anything?”

She looked up confused, tears trailing down her face. “Just you and Alek. Why?”

“I’m not sure. I just thought I saw something,” I murmured. “I’m going to go check it out. Stay here.”

I reached for the door handle and froze. It rattled.

I stared at the handle as it jerked again, like someone couldn’t quite get a grip on it from the other side. Nell’s alarm flared loudly in my head and my heart quickened. This isn’t Alek playing a trick on us.

The handle curved down, slowly completing its path. A click and it was open. The door swung aside.

A figure stood in the doorframe, so tall it would have to stoop to get inside. But instead it stood completely still. Nell’s flashlight shakily shone towards it, revealing its full profile. Its legs bent backwards at the joint. Six limbs hung from its sides, each ending in three clawed digits. Like a black beetle the thing shone, covered head to toe in segmented pieces of armor of uneven sizes. 

A vice-like grip settled on my forearm and I gasped from the pain as I stared up at an oval head, utterly covered in massive compound eyes like that of a fly.

The window broke, shattered glass spraying across the room. Another creature extended its limbs through the opening, one limb ending in a massive black pincer. It moved jerkily, with unpredictable pauses followed by another burst of motion. Nell let out a gut-wrenching scream as the monster lunged for her.