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she'd simply lost her legs. It was as if a giant guillotine had dropped on her
with unimaginable force, cutting her diagonally, from just below her left
armpit through her groin to the top of her right thigh.
What made the sight even more bizarre was that the flesh seemed to have sealed
and healed itself. There was no stitching or scarring. Just the dreadful clean
cut.
Mildred gently closed that grille and moved to the other side of the small
passage. Tears were gathering at the corners of her eyes. She was barely
winning the battle to keep herself from puking on the floor, dreading what
awful abomination of nature she might stumble on next.
The sound of conversation was a little louder, seeming to come from the last
cell in line.
The first cell was empty, though the floor was covered in a strange,
translucent coating of gelatinous slime. Mildred stared at it, trying to
convince herself that it wasn't moving.
The grille on the next cell showed a large man sitting on the toilet in the
corner. His body was covered in hair, and both hands were gone, replaced by
brutish paws with yellow claws.
He had only eye, set close to the center of his forehead.
The movement of the grille attracted his attention, and he stood, revealing
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grotesquely large genitalia that hung almost to his bowed knees.
To add to Mildred's horror and shock, the creature spoke, in a deep, melodious
voice.
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"Hello."
She cleared her throat. "Hello."
"Yes. Hello."
"Hello."
It had moved to stand close by the door, head to one side, smiling at the
woman. "Hello, yes."
Mildred looked into the deep-set brown eyes and realized that nobody was home.
Whatever had been done to the man had totally robbed him of his intelligence.
"Hello, yes, hello, yes, hello."
Mildred managed a smile as she closed the grille. The person inside
immediately fell silent.
One more door.
Now the conversation was louder, as though an argument were taking place. The
voices were female, and
Mildred wondered why two women had been locked up in the same cell, when one
of the others was vacant.
The grille showed her the unbelievable, unspeakable answer.
There was a naked woman sitting on the bed. Her body seemed fairly normal,
though the right arm and leg looked to be better developed, as though she had
played some strange sport that favored just the one side.
But it wasn't the woman's body that drew Mildred's appalled attention.
It was her head.
Both of her heads.
One was set on an ordinary neck, slightly to the right of the shoulders. It
had cropped blond hair, rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes.
The other head was visibly a little smaller, its neck sprouting off to the
left side. The hair was lanker and longer, colored like wet straw. The eyes
were of a duller shade of blue, and the complexion was noticeably more pale.
The two heads were having a conversation and seemed oblivious to the eyes
watching them through the grille.
"Patience is the great virtue," Insisted the larger, more dominant head.
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"We have waited an eternity too long already." Even the voice of the smaller
head was quieter and weaker.
"As long as I have the strength, you will never be able to take our life."
"When you sleep I can strangle us."
"You tried and it woke me, and it was all empty and pointless." A bitter
laugh.
"Our dreary existence is empty and pointless."
"The whitecoats have promised to try and reverse what they did to us in their
laboratory."
The smaller head shook from side to side. "And you believe the lies of the
whitecoats."
"There is nothing else to believe."
"After the horrors they perform on us and others? After their endless
failures?"
This time the larger head shook. "No. They tell us they are close to success.
The copying is working better every time."
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"It could not work worse even" The rheumy eyes suddenly widened as they
spotted Mildred's face peering through the grille in the cell door. "A
watcher," it said.
Now both heads were staring at Mildred. The body rose and walked toward the
door, with a slight sway and limp that favored the right, dominant side.
"Hello," Mildred said.
"Hello," came the reply, simultaneously from both of the woman's heads.
"Who are you?" asked the larger head.
"And why is your face so black? Are you a failed experiment like the rest of
us?"
"No. I'm an outlander. Just visiting the institute with my friends."
The chorus of laughter was perfectly synchronized. "Visiting? We were all
visitors here, you know."
The small head tried to push in front of its larger twin. "If you can run,
then run as far and fast as ever you can. And your friends. This is a bad
place of wicked, wicked godless evil."
Mildred suddenly felt a hand grip her shoulder, the muzzle of a blaster dig
into her ribs and beard a man's voice, whispering in her ear.
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"Well, well, admiring our freak show, lady?"
Chapter Twenty-Nine
"Don't work so hard," Ryan said, patiently cutting with his cleaver at the
fifteen-foot-high wall of drifted snow. "Take it easy."
"But it's nearly dark and the temperature's dropping. We'll all die."
Professor Dorothea Gibson was on the ragged edge of mental and physical
exhaustion. Using her bare hands, she worked alongside Ryan and
Trader.
"I'm not going to fucking die, just because of a little snap of cold and
dark." Trader laughed. "Fact is, lady, I'm not ever intending to catch that
last train to the coast. No, not ever."
Ryan paused and straightened. "If you work too hard, you get in a sweat. You
get in a sweat and your clothes'll get wet. Make you colder when you settle
for the night. So just go slow and easy, all right?"
They had been working on making a snow hole for the past half hour.
Trader had gone to collect some fallen branches from a nearby grove of
spruces, spreading them across the snow to form a binding layer for the roof
of their shelter.
Now there was a hollow about six feet across and four feet deep, floored with
some more green branches that Ryan had hacked down.
"Help to insulate us," be said. "Cold can get you from all directions. When
you crawl in, try to avoid getting loose snow on your clothes. It could easy
turn to ice in the night. Keep dry and keep warm."
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