chapter six: a bit reactionary

"The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?"

--W.B. Yeats

Mike's hand trembled only slightly as he unlocked the rats' cage, not even enough so that he noticed it. The wire caught briefly on the bandage around his finger, and he pulled it loose absently, turning away with a frown to search out safety gloves. Yes, he was still a little anxious with the rats, though he'd seen no further outbursts in their behavior over the last few weeks. As for himself... well, he was feeling better, and that was about it. The strange ideas -- almost like whispers -- that had begun to plague his mind had all but stopped, and he was beginning to be able to believe himself sane again. Well -- mostly.

But he wasn't taking any chances with the rats. That was for damn sure.

Mike had to smile wanly to himself, pulling on the gloves, as he thought about how Ellis had reacted to his own minor breakdown. Telling me to come talk to him... He must really want us all to get through this. Well, duh -- but I think he really feels guilty about what happened. Dunno why; it's not his fault. But he and Kal

//blank//

Mike started, looking around himself wildly. Trying to regain his bearings.

What the--?

He was on the other side of the specimen room now, almost against the back wall; the last he could remember, he'd been by the door. The scab on his finger pulsed and throbbed suddenly, as though infected.

What the hell was that -- blank spot? Like I blacked out, or something. How long could I have been --

But the thought cut off halfway, with an almost audible snap. The door was closed now, he saw through the dim; the only light in the room issued from the single bare bulb that dangled from the ceiling, now swaying gently for no immediately obvious reason. In the stark, shifting light, he saw suddenly -- and with cold, mounting horror -- that every cage in the room was unlocked, and stood wide open. Tiny eyes glinted from out the traveling shadows. Small feet scuffled.

A low, pulsating sound filled the room, seeming to vibrate behind Mike's temples, and the light-bulb burst in a shower of sparks.

Mike broke and ran for the door. He got perhaps two steps before they reached him, and he did not even have time to scream.

*

        [undated and unmarked page; final document in the mining expedition       
          report] 
         
                she is She and she the One and we HALE and TRemble in her  
        glorous name amen. 
         
                two of the LO wer ChildRen fell withe SIN and i said "let them  
        be bUrned               we gave th fLeshe to HER she did blesss with  
        BEN e Dicton and we oFfer Thanks.  i She has GIVen Bles ings i am  
        purfyD and GlORY Be.  In Her Name.  a   MEN. 
 
        AS I WALK THRU THE VALLEY OF I WILL FEAR NO FOR SHE IS 
 
                i cann fEel hER in my sKIn the maNy VoiceS PRAISE BE i am ttoo 
        unworhy vessL. 
 
                                jenovajenovajenovajenovajenovaIn 
 
                                                her. 
 
                        Name.

*

Ellis finally completed his doctoral thesis and mailed it back to the review board at the end of the second week of July, shortly after concurrently performing his autopsy on Mike Nechan (whose death was ruled as an unusual suicide; the determination was somewhat difficult to make from a corpse devoid of skin, eyes, a few vital organs, and several layers of muscle tissue) and reaching the end of the mining report he had discovered. He was careful to include his full opinions on both matters in the paper, which he titled "The Threat of Discovery".

And as always, in the Shinra mansion, life went on.

*

"All right, good enough. Now an electrophoresis on the cells mixed with the restriction enzymes, if you don't mind?"

"Certainly." Wil brushed blonde hair from his eyes, pouring droplets of slightly luminous liquid from the respective test tubes into wells in the tray of gel, and then looked up at his partner with a small mischievous smirk. "A culture shock, as it were."

Fred shot him a withering look, then only shook his head and turned back to his own work. "That would be unacceptable at any hour of the day, Wil," he remarked drily, "but it's doubly so at two in the morning."

Wil smiled, wholly unrepentant, and switched on the electrophoresis chamber. "Terribly sorry. Did the karyotype work out?"

"Yes, in a manner of speaking." Fred frowned down at said sheet even as he spoke this, actually turning it upside down to make certain he was seeing it right. A strand of straight chestnut hair escaped the short tail resting on his neck, and he batted it absently away.

"How's it look?"

"Strange. Very strange."

Wil shrugged. "Well, that's about what I expected. Strange how?"

Fred beckoned him unthinkingly, with a careless flip of his hand. "Come here."

"Not now, Freddy, we're working," Wil deadpanned. Fred at last raised his head to look at the other man, with an expression of mingled amusement and stretched patience.

"Allow me to rephrase that," he said in arid tones. "If you don't wish to experience the fascinating challenges that a stool stuffed down your throat would present to your production of smart remarks, come here." Wil sighed theatrically, still half-grinning, and made his way across the lab to where Fred sat, resting his hands comfortably on the back of the chair. The other man added, considerably more subdued, "I don't know how you can keep making jokes down here anyway, considering."

Wil looked down at Fred sourly, quite swiftly sobered, locking their gazes. "Would you like to know?" he asked, perhaps a bit acidly. "Because it's the only way I've found to prevent myself from losing it entirely." He looked at the floor. "Mike was just a kid, Freddy," he continued quietly. "Him and Ruth both. And Ellis is looking like he could fall apart at any moment. So you can call me an insensitive bastard if you'd like; but personally, I think cracking jokes is a hell of a lot more useful than having screaming hysterics. Which I'm also feeling a lot like doing lately."

Fred reached up to lay his hand atop Wil's patting it briefly. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "I feel precisely the same way; I always seem to forget how -- differently you and I deal with things."

Wil looked back at him, managing a small smile. "Quite all right," he accepted warmly. "I'm used to you being a bore by now."

Fred chuckled slightly. "Oh good. Now take a look at this." He held up the karyotype, with another transparent sheet laid over it, so that Wil could see it over his shoulder; the other scientist frowned and squinted, reaching down to take hold of the corner.

"What am I looking at?" he asked. "I couldn't make heads or tails of genetics, Fred; that's why I have you."

Fred ignored that. "A cross-reference of Jenova's karyotype with a fairly standard normal human karyotype." Wil nodded slowly, and his frown deepened.

"Why don't I like it?"

"Probably for the same reason I don't," Fred answered, a little grimly. "Because it's all wrong. And I do mean all." He stabbed a finger at the overlapping sheets. "There's no correspondence to human geneology, or even mammalian, from what I can determine; it's just -- apples and oranges. I can't even attempt to number the chromosomes accordingly -- it's that bad. This thing may look humanoid, but on the genetic level... it's just something else entirely. And from what I'm seeing, though it has a slightly higher chromosome count than a human, they all seem to operate only on the cellular level."

"That's utterly impossible," Wil said flatly. Fred offered him a weary smile.

"It gets better. The genes also appear to be shifting along and between the chromosomes. This is the fourth karyotype I've done, and they've all been similar enough to rule out some kind of massive error, and just different enough to... well... be utterly impossible. It's not meiotic crossing-over. It's not gross mutation. They're just... moving around."

Wil stared at fred, his frown now seeming graven permanently into his forehead. "Genes don't do that, Freddy," he said very quietly. "And if they do, they shouldn't."

Fred spread his hands. "I'm just reporting what I see," he said simply. "I do genetics; I'm the letters and numbers. You're the processor. In evolutionary terms, what does this imply? In your professional opinion, of course?"

"I can only think of one thing, to tell the truth," Wil said reluctantly, after a long moment's thought. "Apparently, this thing's genotype violates just about every law we've managed to figure out about genetics on this planet -- laws everything on the planet obeys. Laws that have always been around, moreover, and any violations of which just wouldn't have come from the things that live here on their own. So the most logical conclusion, I am forced to admit, is that Jenova is not of terrestrial origin."

Fred looked at him for a long moment... and then only sighed, and nodded. "I thought you might say that," he said, his voice low and hopeless. "Though admittedly, I was hoping there was a more logical explanation that I was missing."

Wil managed a half-hearted laugh. "Well, at least we're both crackpots," he tried to joke. "But hold that thought; we've got more to do here. We may get to the bottom of this yet."

So they set back to work, shuffling through tests and results upon more tests upon more results; and if anything began, softly and stealthily, to move in the room behind them, they were far too busy to notice.

For the time being.

*

Ellis stumbled down from the upper floors at some indefinite hour of late morning, stomach lazily churning and head feeling like a sack of wet dough poorly taped to his body. He'd been drinking the night before, and most every night; it was to the point where he could no longer sleep if he wasn't drunk, and couldn't begin to face the prospect of the lab if he wasn't too hung over to care. He supposed Mike's death had hit him harder than he'd first realized, or supposed he supposed it. Everything was foggy these days, and indistinct; and in a way that was his only blessing.

He bumped into the door once before managing to fumble it open, and blinked owlishly into the darkness beyond. Surely someone should have turned the lights on by now, or at least left them on last night? Even at this advanced hour, it was possible that he was the first one up, but it was much more typical for there to be others still up, or someone to have awoken early to monopolize the equipment. Frowning, Ellis groped a hand into the room, fingers scrabbling over ther wall until they hit the light switch, and flicked it on.

The first -- and, once he saw it, only -- thing he saw as the lab flooded with light was Wil, sitting quietly at the central table, facing the door. There was a pistol in his hand, which Ellis realized through dreamy disbelief was the one weapon kept in the lab lately for security reasons, and he was looking reflectively down its barrel, as though some great mystery were explained within. That, however, was not what made Ellis freeze, gripping the doorjamb, hangover abruptly forgotten; it was Wil himself. The elder man was so pale he was slmost gray, his clothing and skin splashed with patches of dry blood and what might have been visceral matter, and his hair, dark blonde the day before, was now pure white.

"Wil --" Ellis managed to whisper. The scientist looked up at him, his eyes serene, sad, light-years distant.

"We were wrong about Jenova, Ellis," he said thoughtfully, turning the gun over in gore-spattered hands. "She's not mutualistic; her cells are viruses, and they're parasites just like viruses. But they're clever parasites, much smarter than any normal disease. They just use their host, don't kill it... and they keep using and using it..."

"Wil," Ellis repeated, clinging to the door unconsciously, found his voice and airless croak, and tried again. "Wil, what happened?" A new horror settled suddenly around the back of his mind. "Where's Fred?"

Wil looked at him for a moment... and then, horribly, gave him a sad smile. It was the least sane expression Ellis had ever seen anyone wear in his life; it made him want to turn and run, just run and run until the vessels of his body burst and he died bleeding inside. "She killed him," he said simply. "I saw the whole thing. She just got up and killed him. We got too close. We knew the truth." He sighed, softly, looking out into the distance as though suddenly distracted. "She would have killed me, too, but she didn't have to." Wil's eyes returned to Ellis, and he slowly raised his forearm so the younger man could see. The fabric of his shirt had been torn away, the ragged edges soaked with still more blood... but Ellis thought, still with that faraway, clouded horror, that this was Wil's own, where the rest was not. The skin under that hole was marred deeply, torn open in four heavy, ragged tracks, like claw-marks made by a tiger. "She's in me now," Wil explained calmly, as though it all made perfect sense, as though that rationalized everything. "Things will start happening to me, unless I fix it. Like Kal."

The mention of Kal's name shook Ellis from his daze, made Wil's intentions hellishly clear. He took a few involuntary steps into the room, toward the table. "No, Wil," he half-whispered. "No, you don't want to do that -- "

"I do, though." Another sad, small smile that made Ellis feel like screaming. "You know what Jenova does, Ellis? She causes damage to brain matter. Or not even that; she changes it. Like the other cells. Only those changes don't make the host stronger. They make it crazy; and hers. Crazy like her. That's why she killed the rat, and kills humans, but the bacteria are fine; bacteria can't go insane." Wil's hand rose to his face, absently scratching at a crusted patch of dark brown something, probably best unidentified. "But sometimes that's not enough, so she does it herself. Like Fred. I saw her kill him, did I tell you that?"

"Wil, put the gun down," Ellis cut in desperately, trying to sound reasonable. "Come with me, we'll get help; you're not well."

"No, I'm not," Wil agreed, sadly. "But I'll be better soon. Will you promise me something, Ellis?"

Ellis closed his eyes. He was vaguely aware that he was shaking. "What's that, Wil?"

"Promise me you'll tell the rest of them that. What I said about her. Especially Gast. That you'll tell them to stop the Project. It's over already anyway. And to put her away somewhere safe." The hand holding the gun began to tremble a little, Wil's unearthly calm cracking at last. "Please, Ellis, tell them to put her somewhere safe."

"I'm not sure how well I can explain it," Ellis tried again, a bit wildly, taking another few steps forward and stretching out a placating hand in Wil's direction. "Why don't you come with me; we can find Gast, and you can tell him yourself -- "

"Just tell them, Ellis," Wil repeated quietly, then tucked the barrel of the gun under his chin and fired.

There was a sharp crack, and a wet, meaty thud; a short, dull spray of blood, bone and gray matter burst from the top of Wil's head, and his eyes rolled up for the last time ever. His body slumped, struck the table, and toppled to the floor, the gun skittering harmlessly away from his fingertips.

Ellis staggered back, the back of his hand pressed to his mouth, making weak gagging noises against his own skin. He had almost backed up to the wall when his foot struck something behind it, tripping him, nearly making him fall. He looked down, slowly, and saw a head looking back up at him with dull, sightless eyes. It was Fred's, and the mouth was locked open in an eternal, soundless scream. The rest of his body lay on the other side of the lab. The ragged gash where the remainder of his neck should have been looked to have been made by enormous claws. Like a tiger's, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

Then blackness crashed in on Ellis's mind, and he saw nothing more; and that was the only blessing that remained.

*

The door to Jonathan Shinra's office flew open, would have banged open if allowed to go a few inches further, and for a moment Gast only stood in the doorway behind it, his face a mask of stone. The vice-president looked up, raising his eyebrows, but did not comment on the forceful entry, only seizing the opportunity of the other man's silence to take control of the moment.

"Jeffrey. Good." He gestured to the seat across from him. "We need to talk -- "

"No." Another look of surprise. Good, Gast thought, as though from somewhere distant; this would be better if he stayed surprised, stayed off-balance. The younger man's face seemed hardly to have moved, his mouth as firm as if it had never spoken; the low, commanding voice he had put on might as well have come from a speaker just behind his shoulder. "I don't think we need to talk, sir," he continued after a moment's silence. "I think I need to talk, and you need to listen. I think you are going to pick up that phone, call the tower, dial the extension for your father, who actually knows right from wrong on a good day, and tell him that the Project's a waste, half the team's dead, and you're calling it off before it can do any more damage. It'd be nice if you took some responsibility for it, but I don't expect it; I think you'll most likely put all the blame on me, and most likely I'll lose my job, which will make you very happy, but I don't care. In any case, I still think you're going to make that call, because you may be an idiot but you're still not a lunatic, and you've got to see when you're juggling grenades with the pins out." He stepped slowly into the office, and leaned forward with his hands on the desk, staring Shinra down with unblinking eyes. "Make the call, Jonathan," he repeated softly. "It's over."

Shinra looked back up at Gast; for a long moment they stared each other down, old-time gunslingers in a dusty street. Then the vice-president folded his hands on his desk, smiled his unpleasant smile, and said, quite genially, "No."

He let that sink in for a moment, and then, still at his boardroom best, continued: "The Project isn't a waste, and it surely isn't over. It can't be over even if it is a waste. And do you know why, Jeffrey? Certainly you do. You're a big boy. Projects cost money. My father's money. And that money is spent with the expectation of making more money. We haven't made any money yet, and that's going to reflect very badly on me if I stop it early."

"We're beyond that now," Gast cut him off coldly. Not this time, you don't. Not this time, and not ever again. "You must know that. This isn't about power anymore, Jonathan. It isn't about your problems with me, or mine with you. It isn't about politics, or money, or science, or knowledge, or one job, or two, or a hundred. It isn't about you, or me, or your father, or those people downstairs, or what any of us wants; it's about life and death. You have a very simple choice to make. You can call off the Project and walk away safe if very slightly damaged professionally, or you can keep it going, and more people will die." He still didn't move, his eyes boring into the older man. "Make the call. We both know you're the only one who can. I'm not fool enough to appeal to your better nature, assuming you have one, and I won't threaten you or blackmail you or insult you; I'll just ask you, in the name of self-preservation if nothing else. How would you like to be the next one with his brains pasted to the far wall, written down as an accident the next morning? Because it will happen, Jon. Someday, it will."

Shinra tilted his head, the little smile long gone, his eyes now hard and deadly. "Do you actually mean to tell me you believe some thing that's been dead for thousands of years has been walking around killing people?"

"I believe what I see, sir," Gast replied evenly.

"Well, I don't," Shinra returned with equal calm, and picked up a stack of papers on his desk, shuffling them with feigned but nonetheless effective boredom. "You're wasting my time, Jeffrey. I wouldn't advise you to waste my time; this project can go on with or without you."

Gast shoved himself back from the desk, explosively, eyes full of thunder. "Fine," he half-snarled, his voice cold and brittle. "Throw me off the Project. See if I care. Throw away everything, while you're at it; it doesn't mater, you'll still have your money. People are dying -- "

"People die," Shinra cut him off coolly. "People do that every day. But if it happens to benefit someone else when they do so, it can make all that tragedy worthwhile. Wouldn't you say?"

Gast stared at him numbly, his whole body gone cold; when at last he spoke, his voice again seemed to come from somewhere just behind him. "I don't know if there's a monster in that basement, but there's one up here," he spat. "With all due respect, fuck you, sir."

"You're dismissed, Jeffrey," Shinra said boredly, shuffling his papers once more. Gast snorted bitterly.

"I'll see you crash and burn for this," he bit out, lowly. "One day, I'll see it."

The boy looked up, with an expression of mild annoyance. "I said, you're dismissed."

"I heard you," Gast snarled, and stormed out, banging the door this time behind him.

*

Ellis's hand trembled only slightly as he opened the envelope from his thesis review board; the intern was only a little drunk this evening, a condition which he planned on shortly remedying. Especially if the result was what he thought it would be: a polite decline to ever give him the right to save lives, simply because he had objected too strongly to their destruction.

There was no copy of the thesis itself enclosed, of course; the high-quality medical school was above the like of writing comments directly on a paper. There were simply a few typed sheets, compiled by the entire board, with signatures on the final page, discussing a few key points.

On top -- and stopping him completely -- was an effusive cover letter congratulating him on passing his review, and hoping he was looking forward to receiving his doctorate upon his return to school.

Barely half-believing, Ellis sat down at the small library desk, scanning over the sheaf of papers in his hands. There was little of value among them: "fascinating points on the topic of" here, "could possibly be improved by the inclusion of" there, and much to the same effect. But it was all, he saw with mounting dumb shock, largely positive, and approving -- if, he thought ironically, a little uncertain, and not entirely understanding.

And indeed, there was proof of that as well; on the very last page, one of the reviewers -- he supposed he could figure out which from the signatures, but none of the names meant anything to him anyway -- had scrawled a few lines across the bottom of the page, in faintly accusatory red ink.

"A very well-written summary of events, Mr. Maseke; congratulations," they read. "But don't you find these conclusions just a bit reactionary?"

Ellis stared at them for a few moments; he read them once, twice, perhaps half a dozen times. He felt something strange, tight, beginning to rise through his chest, and wondered dazedly if he were about to weep... and then, so suddenly he actually jumped, began to laugh, and laugh hard.

"No," he managed to choke out, speaking directly to the letter; "no, I do not. I find them bloody fucking psychotic, you goat-raping nitwit."

And that was all he had time to get out before collapsing on the desk in helpless, whooping hysterical laughter.

*

He wakes again in a bed that is not his own, watching the flat gray light that comes sliding through the curtains. Is it Kal's bed? Ruth's? Some other's, whoever might fall next? It doesn't matter anymore. All that matters is the fear that comes, the dread that crawls its icy fingers up his spine.

Out. He just has to get out.

He sits up in the bed, ready to fly, to just run out the door, to run and run and run... but a scrap of paper catches his eye from where it lies beside him. It is dabbed in places with fingerprints of blood, written in Ruth's sprawling hand.

Wow, what a trip. Guess I really found out what the graveyard shift is all about, huh. Ha ha. Ha ha.

Ha.

I'm just writing to tell you it's not so bad, Sawbones. Being dead. Kind of nice. And when she takes you, that's not so bad either. I mean, sure, you scream, you scream a lot, but after a while you're really laughing. laughing and laughing and laughing.

I mean. BEN e Dicton. you know?

The note falls from nerveless fingers. He looks up above the headboard to see four fresh tracks gouged in the plaster, almost like marks made by nails. They curve in an arc down toward the space behind the bed... and he can hear something stirring back there.

He thrashes out of the bed -- but so slowly, so slowly, everything has slowed down -- and pushes his way to the door, trying to run and not quite able to. He throws it open --

Mike stands outside in the hallway, his body hanging limply from itself. Mike's skin has been gnawed away, and so have his eyes. The tiny toothmarks are clear on the glistening raw meat and exposed tendons. His stripped skull bears an obscene death's-head grin.

"Something's wrong, Ellis," he says in a choked, gurgling, wet voice, as Ellis tries and tries to scream. "Something's wrong, and I don't know what it is, but you do, you do, you do --"

And then he wakes up.

His whole body starts upward, his head jerking itself up off his arms; he looks around himself wildly. Back in the lab, at the central table. He must have fallen asleep during his work, he tells himself, and relaxes slowly.

Somewhere, a baby cries.

Ellis looks up to see Hojo across the table from him, looking over his shoulder to scowl at the younger man. "Do try to keep alert," he scolds sharply. "We all have to be on our guard down here; it's very dangerous."

When he turns, Ellis can see that he is holding a small bundle in his arms; it is moving slightly, under the fabric, and bleeding -- not blood, but some thick, faintly luminous fluid that leaks out between the blankets. Behind him lies a body, on the tray that had been Jenova's... but the hand that protrudes from beneath the covering sheet is human, and wears Lucrecia's wedding ring.

A shadow falls over his shoulder, and sudden white terror gnaws his gut. It's her, he knows, she is behind him, standing over him; and when he turns and sees her, she will take him, she will take him then, and he will feel those not-tiger claws, and the stinking hot breath, and the penetration, and he will scream and scream but he will really be laughing all along, laughing, laughing, laughing.

*

And then Ellis truly woke, his sheets soaked, heart pounding, breathing in deep, sobbing gasps.

Afterward, he would never know how he managed to reach the hall bathroom and get his head over the toilet bowl in time, only that it somehow happened, and he had that, at least, to be thankful for. He threw up over and over, until he was dry-heaving and praying for it to stop so that he wouldn't tear himself apart from the inside, clinging to the nearby sink like the last hope of salvation.

Dear God, get me out of here, he thought over and over through his sickness, like a mantra, a shapeless prayer. God, anything to get out of here. Please, out of here.

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