Chapter Sixteen: The Other You
Bright electric light filtered through Lanni’s eyelids; a harsh welcome back to the waking world. Struggling to move, she slid her left arm across the cold metal surface beneath her. Even the slightest movement required heavy concentration, but her body gradually obeyed. She found herself sitting on the edge of a metal table, like the ones in the morgue on police shows.
Sounds were distorted and distant, and a fuzzy, sleepwalking sensation clouded her head. A husk woman cowered in the corner, staring alternately at Lanni and the palms of her hands.
She hopped down from the table and padded to the door, bare feet slapping on the tile. The door had no knob or handle, but through her mental haze, she recognized the simple amplified light trigger that controlled the magnetic lock.
A part of her found it very odd that she knew how to operate such a thing, but she traced a few lines on the blank pad, rotated the black, quarter-sized hemisphere about twenty degrees and slid it to the right. A light blinked on the control panel, and the door swung inward.
The room beyond was well-lit by more electric lights in the ceiling. No dim, flickering, bulbs, like in Tina’s infirmary room, these were strong and steady. As before, it was exactly as she expected it to be, but still very strange.
Stepping purposefully into the large, high-ceilinged room, Lanni had to make herself stop and look around. Her body seemed to be acting on force of habit since her mind wasn’t giving it orders. She had to clear her head. She had important work to do.
Large green boxes, the sort that would hold rocket launchers and high-tech weapons in an action movie, were stacked throughout the room. There were four stacks of eight boxes, plus one outside each cell door. Several individual boxes were scattered in various locations, as well.
Directly across the rectangular room, Mitch stood beside a wheeled cart with a police-style collapsible baton. Another husk woman crouched in front of him, eating what appeared to be a thick sausage.
A chime rang, and the husk tensed. It backed away from Mitch, still holding its meal protectively, but no longer eating it. Mitch extended his baton with a snap of his arm, and stepped closer, eliciting a frightened growl from the cowering creature. A second chime starting dinging, lower in tone than the first, and a circular area of the floor beneath them glowed red.
The husk screamed as Mitch advanced on her, raising an arm protectively over her head while clutching her food with the other.
“Drop it,” Mitch commanded. He struck without hesitation, repeating his order between blows. The husk fell into a fetal position, screaming every time he struck her, but she didn’t relinquish her prize.
Lanni watched the brutal scene in calm silence, but blow by blow, her calm dissipated. The continuous violence was like bright sunlight burning her mental fog away, shocking her from her stupor. Her pulse quickened, and the fog lifted, taking the odd sense of familiarity with it.
I’ll show him a thing or two with that baton.
“Mitch!” She didn’t care that he was a fully grown man and still two hundred plus pounds. Much of it was fat, anyway. He was probably the last chubby guy on the planet.
Startled, he spun to face her, ignoring his victim. It wasn’t until that moment that Lanni realized she was standing in her underwear. But that couldn’t be helped now.
She couldn’t tell if his surprise was in seeing her out of her cell, or if it was because she was mostly naked, but either way he stopped beating the husk. He stared at Lanni like a deer in headlights, his baton dangling at his side.
That worked. Now what?
“Press him,” John said. “Don’t give him time to think.
As if in answer to her question, the husk tackled Mitch, knocking him onto his side. She landed on top of him, trying to rip his flesh away with her bare hands, and savagely biting his arm. Now it was his turn to scream.
I guess that’ll keep the pressure on.
Lanni ran to join the melee, vaulting one of the boxes and leaping with a flying kick. She knocked the husk off of Mitch with a firm kick to its shoulder. It was more a shove than a kick, really, but it did the job.
The husk quickly regained her feet and searched frantically around the room, probably for an escape. She didn’t seem to notice the red, foot-shaped burn on her shoulder where Lanni’s touch destroyed the nanites in her skin. With such a high ratio, the wound would heal before she could say ‘ouch.’
Mitch, on the other hand, clutched his bleeding arm. He rocked back and forth like a toddler with a splinter, spewing a torrent of profanity that would have impressed even her uncle Jimmy. His high-pitched, squealing voice gave it a decidedly comical edge.
“What’s the matter with you, Mitchell? Let me see your arm,” she said.
He tenderly peeled his hand away, like he expected his arm to fall off if he let go.
Still a few feet away, Lanni leaned forward for a closer look. Mitch watched her face for her pronouncement of his condition.
Good grief. Even I am a bigger man than that.
Disgusted as much by his weakness as his treatment of the cowering husk-woman, she kicked his wounded shoulder about as hard as she had the husk’s. His wail and the ensuing prayer to the gods of vulgarity made her smile.
“Is that really necessary? I’ve seen worse hangnails.”
“I’m sorry, Lanni,” he said. His speaking voice was nearly as feminine as his screams. “Gah! That f… really hurts! I’m sorry. I… know you don’t like swearing. She f… That monster bit me!”
She had already tuned him out. Had she heard him right?
He said my name! He knows me. He even knows I don’t like swearing.
His knowing wink and the warning when she woke up in the cart made more sense. Barely. She still didn’t see how it was possible. She had seen him around, of course, but had certainly never met or spoken with him.
“How do you know my name?” she asked, forgetting that he had just bludgeoned a woman in front of her.
He stopped rocking and grumbling and looked up at her. His puzzled expression turned to fear, and he started stammering.
“I didn’t. I don’t… I didn’t say…” He collapsed onto his back and raised his arms towards the ceiling in a dramatic gesture of desperation. “Ah, Christ! She opened the f-- fricking door. How was I supposed to know?” he asked, addressing the room.
“I don’t have time for this,” Lanni said, mostly to herself. “Get up and quit crying. I’m the teenage girl, here, not you. What are you, like forty or something? Get up!”
The husk backed a few paces towards the only hallway leading from the room, but apparently didn’t like that option. She scooted by with her back to the wall in the opposite direction, passing within a few feet of Lanni and Mitch, and vanished into the only cell on that wall with an open door.
Mitch refused Lanni’s hand, and stood up on his own. “I didn’t know it was you. How could I? He said you could never find this place.” Blood flowed freely through his fingers as he clutched his wounded arm.
“Who said? Was it Leonard? What does he know?” Lanni asked.
His voice lost its defensive edge. He shook his head and continued. “But you didn’t find it, did you? We brought you here. I couldn’t tell Leonard it was you. He might have done something stupid. He said to put you in a cell and he’d start your training tonight. Oh, God. I’ve really screwed up this time. Your clothes are over there.” He pointed to a long counter in the center of the room with rows of drawers. Her clothes were folded and stacked on top.
“I have to go, Mitch, but I want to know what’s going on here when I get back. I want to know how all of this stuff got here. I want to know why you’re catching husks and training them like dogs? How do you have electricity and fancy computerized locks on both sides of the cell doors, when the infirmary has to ration power to keep Tina and the other women alive? And why, why, why did you and Leonard attack me and bring me here, when any idiot can see I’m not a husk?”
This brought Mitch to a state of near panic. “Please. Please don’t tell him I brought you here. Oh, God. He’s going to kill me. He probably already knows. He knows everything. He’ll kill me. Leonard, too. Or worse!” He pointed at the husk’s open cell.
She assumed he’d been talking about Leonard, but it was all coming together. It was Alex who had him scared out of his mind. Who else could it be? What was his role in all of this? Mitch clearly knew her, or at least her name, even though she had no memory of ever talking to him.
It made no sense, until she added Alex to the equation. Alex must be using her for something, and then changing her memories. How much of her life was being hidden from her? How long had it been going on?
Mitch stared at her like a kid caught red-handed, waiting for her to let him off the hook.
“Mitch!”
He blinked.
“Turn around so I can get dressed, pervert.”
His expression was priceless.
“I’m not… It’s not like that!” he said, utterly horrified. “You know what we’re doing here. Well, the other you does. You don’t like it, but you’re okay with it. This is important work.”
The other me? This is getting scary.
Her mind wandered as she dressed. She heard Mitch say something else, but it might as well have been in Klingon. She was too busy questioning how much of her reality was real, and how much was an illusion created by her brother.
She had no choice but to believe that her current reality was the truth. What else could she do? For the first time, she truly understood the unique fear that humans had of hosts.
“Do I trust you, Mitch? The other me, I mean?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I think so. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t.”
“Alright. Then I trust you, too, because I need you to trust me back. And because I don’t have much choice. How about it?”
“Anything, Lanni. What do you need?”
“A lot. Tina is going to have her baby any time. I think she was going into labor when I left her. Tell Diane that everyone has to be ready to leave as soon as the baby can be moved.”
“But she already knows that. That’s been the plan all along. In a few days…”
“No! Listen to me. Not in a few days. Not even in a few hours. The second they can be moved, they have to go. A host is coming for me, for all of us. I’m going to find it and kill it before it gets here, but you can’t hang around and wait to see which of us lives. Understand?”
Mitch looked puzzled for a moment, but he nodded. “But… What about Sector Zero? The Safe Zone? No one can find us here, not even a host.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You said you’d trust me, so trust me. The safe zone is gone. Any minute, now, this place could be overrun. The most important thing we can do is get Tina, her baby, and everyone else out of the MPC before that happens. If I stay here explaining this to you any longer, the host will be knocking on the front door.”
“It’s gone?” Mitch asked, dumbfounded. “It can’t be! We aren’t ready yet. Most of them don’t even know a safe zone existed. They are more worried about you than offspring or husks. ‘The Ghost’ is a serious threat to them; to the normals, anyway. They even blame you for the missing colonists. If this place is about to be overrun, we’re in real trouble.”
“Quit rambling, Mitch. I need my spear. And my backpack. Is there anything else in here I can use?” She glanced around at the boxes. She smelled cooked meat, of all things, but food held no appeal for her at the moment. It must have been nerves.