Chapter Eleven
“Seriously? ‘HBRS’? You know that looks like ‘Hubris,’ right, honey? The DOD’s gonna think you’re angling to be the next Einstein.”
“Who says I’m not?”
–Dr Ava Sherman. Manchester, New Hampshire. 5 Years Before.
* * *
What a dangerous web that she must now weave.
“Mother!” a nurse shouted. “This one won’t stop shaking and we can’t figure out why!”
She went over to the patient. Male, late thirties, if not early forties, and advanced necrosis of the skin. His eyes were dimmed but not hollowed, and stitches in his chest had been ripped during the seizures.
Mother dabbed her finger into the wound and gave it a sniff. The taste was unmistakable. “You’ve been abusing Wrath, haven’t you?”
The patient grit his teeth.
She turned back to the nurse. “Tie him down and give him a hundred milligrams of saline straight into the spinal cord.” That would offset the chemical deficiency.
No sooner had this patient started to level out than another voice rolled her way.
“Please, Mother!” a doctor called out. “This woman’s leg won’t reattach like it’s supposed to!”
The fault was amateurish to her experienced eyes, as they had accidentally rotated the limb by about five degrees during the rejoining phase. She pressed her arms against bone and crunched down with all her might. The patient grunted as her flesh moved like clay.
“She’ll need compression and rest,” Mother said. “The nerve endings won’t form again for a few days.”
An echo rolled down the hall. “Hollow!”
Mother recognized the patient on sight. Well over three hundred pounds, he was one of the more colossal workers who’d been subjected to construction work. The kind of rezzer so large that the standard-issue distribution diet couldn’t keep pace with his body’s demands, and with a form of employment that never paid him enough to get ahead of his own hollowing.
Staff and patients alike shrieked as the gargantuan hollow stumbled down the hall, but Mother maintained her serenity. Where all others ran, she faced the patient head on, meeting the empty, white gaze of HBRS-15.21 in its purest form with her hardened own. She would not let it claim victory here.
As the patient made his predictable lunge, she sidestepped the attack and delivered a riposte to his leg. He floundered into the ground with a smash.
Mother threw all her weight onto his back and secured his arms between hers. “Handcuffs!”
A pair of doctors rushed over and tied the patient’s arms in place. His teeth clattered this way and that until a nurse managed to throw a bag over his head. The troupe began the arduous task of shepherding him back to the rehabilitation center.
Mother let out a sigh. Of all the work in her medical center, triage was the most demanding. Like bailing water out of a sinking ship a cup at a time, the holes kept forming, and the Hollowing kept rising. It couldn’t be helped. There weren’t enough qualified physicians in Pandemonium, and rezzer anatomy was as foreign to them as anyone else.
Except her. Mother knew every nuance of HBRS-15.21. There was no one more qualified to patch these holes and handle the infinite threat of the Hollowing. Everyone else was gone, whether through the outbreak, or the destruction that followed.
That was why she could not lose.
* * *
“Thank you, Mother,” Elsa said. “You didn’t have to do this yourself.”
She patted her on the forehead. “We take care of our own here. You know that.”
Mother went back to stitching. Elsa was one of her more recent nurses, and was still adapting to her work in post-hollow rehabilitation, but between her previous job as a maiden in Elysium’s Lust pits, and an injury she gained during her HBRS-15.21 exposure, her lungs filled with fluid over the course of the day, and had to be sliced open and drained, thrice a week, lest her own mental degradation accelerate. Mother had made a habit of personally overseeing the procedure whenever she had the chance. Her people deserved to see that they mattered.
As the last stitch fell in place, Elsa began to cry. The reddish fluid ran down her cheeks, a mix of tears and blood.
“Don’t cry, Elsa,” Mother said. “We’re done for today.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t! Every day I feel the pressure, and every breath keeps getting worse and worse. I can’t do this anymore!”
“I’ve told you before, there are options. We could apply a stent to let it drain naturally, or we could contract a Hunter to find a worthwhile replacement.”
“Oh sure,” she mocked. “One is to carry a bag filled with shit everywhere I go, and the other will force me back to Elysium just to pay off the debt. Such good choices!”
“They’re the only ones we have.”
“No, they’re not. I’ve been talking to some of the others, and they told me about the basement. I know.”
Mother said nothing. Every power broker in Pandemonium had their secrets, and she was no exception. Not all patients were guaranteed to survive, and not all operations ended in success. Beneath the refuge of Mother’s Grace was a labyrinth of freezers and laboratories, and it was in those hidden cells that she performed the necessary acts to keep Pandemonium afloat.
“You shouldn’t ask about that,” Mother said at last.
“It’s okay. You can trust me. I understand why you do it.” Elsa closed her eyes, and a fresh wave of fluid spilled free. “Which is why I’m willing to join voluntarily.”
Mother’s chest tightened. To see Elsa speak this way hurt more than she could know. She was really coming to like her, and her sad, innocent eyes reminded her of Evelyn. It would be devastating to see Elsa go.
But Mother was also the matriarch of this hospital, and could not show weakness under any circumstance.
“Is that what you want, Elsa?” she asked. “You really want to let it end?”
She shook her head. “Anything is better than this. Even nothingness. I can’t keep living like this!”
“Living”. What a strange and ineffable concept to those who had never truly known it. Rezzers weren’t like their human frames. They were just dead meat puppets with a semi-functioning cerebrum attached. Parasites whose hosts had long since died out. Could they ever contemplate such a phenomenon?
Mother reached into her lab coat and pulled out the bottle of her private pills. Hades had his Sins in Elysium, and she had her Bliss. Where the Sins stimulated parts of the native nervous system to give them a heightened sense of emotion, Bliss performed the opposite. It was her crowning achievement of rezzer-specific medication. A drug that could give them the one thing they couldn’t gain naturally: peace of mind. A single pop, and even the most nourished undead would drift off into a state of comfortable hibernation, never to return if the regiment was maintained.
“Are you absolutely sure you want this, Elsa?” Mother asked, her tone firm. “There’s no going back once you’re down there.”
She met her in the eyes, unblinking. “Yes.”
“Then take one of these.” She handed her the pill.
Elsa gripped the Bliss between her soft, fragile fingers. For a moment, the two just sat in silence as the severity of the act weighed on them. She might not have known what was to come next, but Mother had stared enough hopeless patients to know the burden that she was subjecting them to. Her research was seldom clean.
Elsa swallowed the pill. “Thank you for everything, Mother.”
“It is I who owes you. You’re braver than you know, Elsa, and our kind owes you a debt that it will never be able to repay. Thank you for your sacrifice.”
Elsa nodded. Within minutes, her eyes glazed over one last time and her awareness became expunged.
Mother threw a sheet over her face with a sigh. How many more would have to be sacrificed on the altar of science? Her operation in the basement was a far cry from that which she had rebuilt in secret out east, but there was no telling just how many of her patients had been dragged down below, never to be seen again.
All for the greater good, of course. Understanding the mutations that HBRS-15.21 inflicted required experimentation, and there were no subjects more efficient to utilize than rezzers. Every development, from the Sins of Elysium, to Bliss, to her breakthroughs on nutrition science, had all come at a high blood toll.
And still it had not been enough.
One of her surgeons entered, his arms and scrubs caked in blackened viscera.
“What is it?” Mother asked.
“We have a visitor.” He gulped. “It’s Hades.”
* * *
He was wandering around Mother’s office, examining all in sight with the extemporaneous curiosity he always had when bored. His bright red eyes narrowed on hers when she entered. Of all the infected she had encountered over the years, there was none with a stronger reservoir than him.
“Hades,” she said with a nod, closing the door behind.
His mummified cheeks stretched into a grin. “How’s it hangin’, Mommy? Still cutting up corpses to sew onto other corpses?”
“Spare the pleasantries. We both know why you’re here.”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re no fun. It’s Saturday and the night is young. You should enjoy yourself for once! I’ve always wanted to see you on your back and in the thralls of Sloth.”
“No. There’s your answer, to both offers.”
“See, now I’m starting to get upset. At least Leah played along. But you? Too much time stuck in this shithole has made you a stick in the mud.” He sighed. “Fine then, I’ll make this easy for both of us. No deals, no negotiations. There’s a living human in this building, and I want to know where you’ve stashed him.”
Mother raised an eyebrow. “Leah didn’t tell you?” Perhaps there was hope yet.
“Forget about her. You’re wheeling and dealing with me now, sweetheart. Tell me where he’s hiding or I start bashing skulls.”
She could see his signature weapons at his hip – a LeMat revolver with its buckshot centerbarrel and black powder firing main cylinder, and a high carbon, stainless steel machete with a bolo design and grip reinforced. Hades wouldn’t bring either out of Elysium unless he was planning to use them. His Hunting days were long since passed.
But still, Mother couldn’t break. “No. He’s our only hope.”
“Hope, huh? Been hearing that word a lot lately.”
Between the natural decomposition of his neglected skin and the loss of all moisture to the muscles beneath, reading Hades’s emotional state through his facial expressions was difficult for even the most seasoned poker player. He was like her, and did not show anything more than he chose. But Mother had been dealing with him since the beginning of her own resurrection, and had learned to read the tiniest twitches that slipped free.
So when Hades went to the door and snapped his fingers, she knew that this would not end well.
“You!” he called out. “Yeah, you. Over here! There you go. That’s a good girl.”
One of the nurses walked in, and Hades shut the door behind. She looked nervously from one to the other.
Mother grimaced. “You don’t have to do th–”
Blackened ichor exploded as Hades cleaved his machete through the nurse’s neck. Before her body had even hit the ground, He dug his gloved hands into the base of her skull and wrenched out a fist full of brain. He began to gorge on the chunk, all while the nurse’s dead eyes bulged from her head.
“WOO!” Hades roared, the juices running down his chin. “What a fucking rush!”
The tears came before Mother could stop them. “Her name was Kimberly. She liked romance novels and crochet. Once a week, she would convince someone new to go to the movie theater with her. Sometimes ex-patients, sometimes friends.”
Hades munched on more of her brain. “Can’t say ‘ole Kimberly was much of a heavy thinker if you ask me. So where’s the human?”
More tears began to form, but Mother blinked them back. “I can’t let you do this.”
“Well, alright then.” He went back to the door.
“Wait,” she said, the word heavy on her tongue. Before she could regret her decision, she went to her desk. “You want to talk? Let’s talk.”
Hades took the queue and sat across, still scooping more grey matter free. “Don’t mind me. Killing indiscriminately always gives me the munchies.”
She tilted her head. “There are more than twenty-five thousand rezzers in Pandemonium, jammed in a space designed to hold a third of that population. Every single one of them requires an average of five hundred calories of living flesh per day to keep their bodies sustained, and a variable quantity of grey matter per week to keep their reservoir stable, books or not…”
Hades slurped some of Kimberly’s spinal fluid. “This again?”
“…Even with the industrial cattle farm that you set up and the hundreds of Hunters that scour the wastes, there just isn’t enough living matter to keep us sustained, let alone growing. Hollowing won’t stop no matter how hard you make everyone work…”
“Boring.” Hades jammed his hand back into Kimberly’s skull.
“…And this comes before our technical needs. Solar panels can only last for so long. Our plumbing system is rusting from the outside in. These buildings are crumbling around us. We can only do so much to reinforce them against minor tremors. Never mind if a major earthquake strikes again…”
Hades manipulated his fingers into Kimberly’s severed head. “Look at me, I’m Mother,” he murmured with a feminine voice, moving the jaw like a puppet. “I like droning on and on about boring statistics and dead chicks.”
“It doesn’t matter who you strongarm or how many enemies you destroy. Ten years, maybe fifteen, and this is all gone.” She stared deep into his eyes, hoping to inject some semblance of reason. “Our world is dying.”
“No. It’s already dead.” He winked, still holding the head. “Come on, Mommy. You and Hades used to be in this together. What happened to you two?”
Mother grit her teeth “What you’re doing is different from when we were young, Hades. This is no longer defense. It’s genocide.”
He crunched down Kimberly’s head an inch. The muscles in her brow tightened, almost angrily. “You’re lucky that Lord Hades likes you so much. He’s a big fan of the sciences. Got him all the Sins, didn’t you? Well, don’t think that gives you a free ride.”
More tears sprung free. “Please stop doing that.”
“Talk to the head,” Hades said in his normal voice.
She turned to Kimberly. The eyes were still locked in that cold, shocked death stare. “Please stop.”
“Thank you,” he muttered one last time before tossing her severed head across the room. “So as I was saying. I like you, Mother. In many ways, you’ve made me who I am, and I’d like to think that I did the same.” He winked. Mother massaged her Mark and shivered. “But don’t think for a second that I won’t burn this place down if I have to.”
Why are you like this? There was once a time when Hades had a conscience, where he only killed anyone who threatened them and not the other way around, but somewhere along the way and after destroying too many human hideouts, he seemed to know no other way. No longer was there any goal, any aim, nor sight for anything more than the current day. It was like he’d become the physical embodiment of HBRS-15.21 itself, and was capable of nothing other than death, destruction, and faux resurrection into something lesser than before.
What could Mother do against such mindless fury? What could anyone do? To stand against this unstoppable wave was akin to facing the Hollowing itself. The end was inevitable, and the only choice offered was between a short or agonizing demise. Unilateral surrender was the rational option, and the one she had chosen again and again.
But maybe it didn’t have to be this way. Maybe intellect could surpass infinite cruelty.
“You win, Hades,” Mother said. “I will bring you to him myself.”
He beamed. “About fucking time!”
Mother moved down the halls with care and straddled the time as best she could. Hades marched by her side with a group of his loyalists to their flank, knocking through the doctors and patients alike as though they were brush in a forest.
Only Kurt stood in their way, his sledgehammer in hand. Leah had recruited him as a Hunter personally, and now Mother could see why. Even outnumbered, outgunned, and with no explanation at hand, he stood opposed to Hades, a monolith against the rising tide.
“No one gets in here unless Leah lets them,” Kurt said.
Hades grunted. “Are you shitting me? You do know who I am, right, asshole?”
He nodded. “Of course, Lord Hades. I’m forever thankful for what you’ve done for Pandemonium.”
“Good. Now step aside.”
“Not without hearing from Leah.”
His eyes bulged and he drew his LeMat. “You motherfucking piece of sh–”
Mother threw herself in between. “Enough! Kurt, this isn’t worth getting purged over. We wouldn’t be here if Leah hadn’t made her choice.” She raised her voice, loud enough to be heard from within. “Now let Hades get inside! This is my hospital, and you will do what I say!”
She must have overdone the act because Hades shot a venom-laced glare her way and bolted for the door. Kurt was thrown off balance by the sudden charge, and could not stop him from entering. Mother ran in after, with Kurt following in her wake.
Hades stood with his fists squeezed into balls. Kurt rubbed his head in confusion. And Mother grinned.
The room was empty.
“Find him!” Hades ordered “Find anyone! Lock down this whole fucking place if you have to!” He turned to Mother. “Don’t you dare fucking start. I’m not done with you!”
And neither am I with you. She had won the night, but the war was just beginning. Whether Hades knew it or not, Mother held the advantage here, and she would do everything and anything to leverage her end.
This world would be saved, and nothing would stop her.
