Nothing is inflammable, p.13
Nothing Is Inflammable, page 13
And Dziga brought the pipe down hard in the middle of the creature’s head.
Chapter Thirteen
Wherein Dziga awakens to find Judas dead and becomes even more confused
The corridor seemed to be broken, lit erratically by the light bulbs Dziga had smashed, nothing left of the walls. From one hole electrical cabling had been torn out and lay complacently in the darkness like strangled snakes.
Dziga had a hold of Judas’ limp arm, dragged him along towards the others.
A corpse. Another corpse. Another.
Who was creating who?
There were spiral patterns of dark and bright blood on the floor from where he had moved what was left of Jakobsen’s body and extricated Dmitri’s from the bubble. His brother’s skin had taken on an odd green tinge to it as if it were overreacting to the sudden exposure to the toxins in the air it had been protected from for so long. Dziga touched the man’s forehead and his eyebrow split but no liquids came out. It crossed his mind to pick away at Dmitri’s face until all the skin was gone and he should become a member of the Nu-Evolution.
He smiled.
The ranks were growing so quickly.
And as he arranged them against the wall he thought to himself nothing but puppets.
“You think you can trick me?” Dziga said to Judas, propping the monkey’s emaciated form up a little more. “Turn me against myself?”
He stood, pacing the corridor, twitching at every sound, casting hateful stares at the dead betrayers as he tried to make some sort of order from it all.
“I want to know where my creature is. You,” and he stopped before Jakobsen, “you started all of this.
“No.” Jakobsen said. His head remained hanging precariously from his neck. “Try looking to your brother for the blame. He was sick and tired of caring for you and getting nothing in return. He asked me to do this. He was in it right from the start. I was only doing what I was told to do.”
“Liar.” Dmitri now, his fat, purple lips unmoving. “I was the only one who did care for my brother. I’ve only ever wanted to help him. I came to you for help but in the end it was you I needed to protect him from! You betrayed both of us, Jakobsen!”
Judas laughed quietly.
“And him!” Dmitri suddenly announced. “The damn monkey’s been playing us all as pawns from the start. I’ve watched him, in that cage. I’ve seen the way he looks at us all. He is a Protohuman, Dziga, don’t you see? He is more-than-human, both before and after our own evolution at the same time! You think it is he that you kept in that cage, he that you studied but you’re wrong.”
“It was you that he had caged,” Jakobsen concurred.
Judas continued to laugh then stopped abruptly.
Dziga watched the puppets in their momentary silence. “Is this true?”
“We just said . . . ” Jakobsen began but I cut him off.
“Shut up! Judas?”
“I’m just a monkey,” he murmured.
“So are we!” Dmitri cried out.
“This is getting us nowhere . . . ”
Dziga paced, paced, willing them quiet. Shut up! Shut up!
He listened to the sounds of the hot water system working away behind the walls, the sounds momentarily taking on new meaning—not the gurgles of heating fluids but test tubes processing samples of his blood and urine that minions would dutifully analyze.
Judas said, “They built you this cage just as they built me mine.”
“That’s not true, Dziga!” Jakobsen shouted, his head still drooping clumsily to one side. And Dziga thought, if I was a better puppeteer, I could make his lips move . . . “Don’t fall for his lies. This place is real—I brought you here to help you get better. I knew your work could heal you! You remember your journey here? You remember?”
“Of course I remember,” I snapped.
“No you don’t!” Judas shouted. “You couldn’t! The only journey you took was from one wing to another! You seriously think they would release you, Dziga?”
“I . . . ”
“You don’t remember Nadia lying her head on her iron pillow and you don’t remember coming here. You just woke up here one day. Look at the walls!”
And Dziga did and the padding was still visible beyond the cracks, the padding from the asylum.
“There’s nothing there, Dziga, he’s tricking you!” Dmitri countered. “Look at the walls!”
And Dziga did and the padding had gone, replaced by damp, crumbling plaster.
He stopped pacing, stopped moving altogether, pressed his fingers to his head, juicing the exposed flesh. “I can remember . . . ”
“You’re right, Dziga,” Dmitri reassured me. His skin had begun to pucker further in the poisonous air. “Don’t listen to them, they’re lying to you, trying to confuse you. Jakobsen brought you here, I should never have let him but I did. This place isn’t a construction, brother—it’s real. It is Jakobsen who is a fake! They’re lying to you, Dziga!”
“You’re all lying to me! Shut up!”
“Dziga, listen to me!”
“No!”
“I was only trying to help you Dziga!” Jakobsen cried out in defense. “I thought it would make you better, to take you out of the asylum. But your brother wanted the control he had over you while you were inside back! He insisted on installing the monitoring equipment!”
“No! I only insisted that we could keep an eye on him!”
“Spying!” Jakobsen retorted. “The cameras . . . ”
Judas laughed again.
“Shut up you fucking monkey!” Dziga screamed.
“Hush,” another voice said and it was gentle but overpowered all the others. Everything went quiet.
The lights flickered.
Dziga looked up from the corpses towards the end of the corridor. The shadows shivered, parted.
The Protohuman stood in the darkness, bloodied head glistening. He walked towards Dziga, past the inanimate corpses, turned. He pointed to the back of his neck, just above the hairline. Dziga reached out and pulled at the hair and it came away in a small clump and there was something burned into the flesh there.
“Do you see it, Dziga?” the Protohuman said.
“Yes,” Dziga replied, and read the numbers described by the brand. “101.6”
“Do you remember, Dziga?” the Protohuman asked, stepping back into the shadows.
Dziga nodded in the silence. “I remember.”
Chapter Fourteen
Wherein Dziga is left with no other choice than to organize his escape
I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d last had anything to eat or drink.
One by one the lights in the lab had extinguished, the bulbs hissing into darkness or abruptly shattering for no reason, yet somehow the darkness was not complete and I had been unable to find the remaining sources of illumination.
There were smells; and silence.
They were tormenting me now, slowly letting me pull all of my legs off like a demented fly, waiting for the blood flow to stop. Suddenly I was aware that the world is military.
But nobody was coming. I was alone there with the corpses and the rubble and the fragments of my work.
There’s so little left.
My notebooks were all piled up in a cardboard box outside the main lab and I stared at the front door, waiting. Occasionally I listened and sometimes I heard the churning machines of the scrap yards but other times I heard the squeaking of orderlies’ rubber soles on the plastic flooring. I didn’t know which was real, if either.
And soon enough I realized I had no other choice but to find out.
I sat by door of the lab, staring at the rusted bolts that kept everything safe. I kept expecting a banging to start, someone banging, banging on the thick metal.
I stared and images of the Apocalypse formed in my head. Great cold fires and an endless parade of army vehicles blurred the horizon, the concrete beauty of a mushroom cloud filling the air. A thousand troops marched past my lab without even noticing it, without noticing me, and there I was on the other side, looking out at the repetitive scarring on each of their faces. They felt nothing. There was nothing left there.
They marched because they were soldiers and there was no reason for them to do otherwise. They did not feel fear beyond that which was efficient to their survival.
I could see through the lab’s shell as if it were constructed from the same skin as Dmitri’s bubble and watched one of the soldiers come to a halt. I looked into his eyes.
He smiled at me because he knew I was there. He knew he had touched God.
Then he raised the barrel of his rifle, adjusting his grip before his red, re-fabricated face, aimed the crosshairs and blew me away. And it happened so slowly that I could see the fragments of bone and brain matter expunge themselves from my head and noticed the flakes of iron and fibrous chrome that nestled there. My corpse fell back to the floor and the Protohuman stared down at me.
“I’m still here,” he said.
But this was in my head, or mostly it was.
The Protohuman was gone again, for now, lying on the table in my surgery, breathing softly and as peaceful as a cancer patient awaiting death. The others remained slumped against the wall.
The stink was worse now.
Amongst the notebooks of paper I had gathered from around the lab there were scraps that I didn’t recognize as my own. I put them in front of Judas to see if there was any reaction but his head had softened too much and he just lay there limply. I tried to make sense of the equations scribbled upon them but failed, smashing one of the few remaining intact shelves in the laboratory and pouring the broken glass onto the floor. Everywhere there seemed to be broken glass and debris and I knew the lab wasn’t going to wait for me to leave. It had begun to force me out of its own accord.
I stared down at the broken glass and an army of me stared back. I couldn’t help but think of the soldier I saw. Or hallucinated. Or dreamt.
Or foresaw?
I suddenly panicked and went to the door, listened for the uniform footsteps of a battalion of soldiers, of my children. My breath stung in my sunken chest and I noticed bloody scratches on the door. Had one of the puppets tried to escape me while I let their strings hang by their sides?
Or perhaps the marks were mine because my face had started bleeding again.
I laughed at the metal.
I was moving, we were moving. Everything must go.
I’d lifted the Protohuman that morning and brought him out into the corridor, laid him against the crumbling walls. His eyes fluttered, blinking bloody tears away. It had been an effort that had left me shaking with weakness and I wondered if it would be necessary for me to carry it far once I had left the lab.
Yet I still had no idea what awaited me.
I stuffed the puppets into a storage closet, briefly wishing that I could stand and watch them rot fully. My brother’s skin had already begun to blacken in places where his hypersensitive skin bruised at the merest touch. I had racked them up against each other and looking at them, Judas to Dmitri to Jakobsen, was like looking at an illustration detailing evolution. I had to laugh for just down the corridor was the next stage in our biological progress and it would not lock itself inside a bubble, chain up those who would steal genius for capital gain or beat its head again steel bars until it bled.
And neither would it be endlessly affected by the death of those around it.
I locked the closet behind me, and stood before it for a moment.
They would never leave that place, I knew as I looked at it. That would be their eternal resting place, trapped in the hole of their deceit just as Nadia had been trapped on the train tracks all those years ago.
I felt the creatures’ eyes upon me as I removed the final few plates from the front door that I had hammered in front of it . . . when . . . when was it I did that? I pressed an ear to the cold metal and listened to the sounds of the factories and machines filter in from outside.
The lab was real, wasn’t it? The monkey had been tricking me. He had wanted to scare me into staying here, to study me—not the hospital. Not the hospital.
I disengaged the first lock.
There were no doctors. No ECT.
I disengaged the second lock.
There was no pain. Nothing could hurt the Protohuman.
I disengaged the third lock.
Nothing could hurt me again.
The weight of the door came back off its hinges slightly and a breeze crawled through the millimeter-thick gap that was opened. The Protohuman made an odd noise, perhaps a whimper. I could smell the tarry smoke of the breweries and waste management plants; hear the immense metallic screech of mining pumps having intercourse with the cold, hard ground.
From what had become my prison of near sensory deprivation I found myself subjected to a world that was full of noise and dangerous movements and bacterial armies. But my fear was distant, dislocated. It no longer sat inside my chest but trailed behind me like an IV unit – still feeding my veins and arteries but only in a light trickle, fighting against gravity.
I turned the handle slowly and the mechanism cried out, a true part of the machine-city that lay beyond. And as the door opened and I took my first step outside, my thoughts were no longer of impatient assassins or orderlies ready with sedatives, the lab was no longer a haven but a cage—and everything began to clear.
The air was warmer than I had expected though a good ten degrees less than inside the lab. It was thick with smoke, in such a way that there were no sharp edges—everything blurred into its neighbor, be it chrome, concrete or the night sky. I saw how it was all interconnected and I knew then that the Protohuman project would go on, somehow, because it had a part to play in the organism of evolution.
My spirits lifted, I breathed deeply, tasting the acid in the air at the back of my throat. Of course it was all real. Of course I would be free.
The city went on for as far as I could see, the factories becoming smaller and smaller, intermeshing at the horizon. In the midst of the patchwork of steel that lay there I saw a bright red light, perhaps a warning beacon for the governmental helicopters that occasionally flew overhead.
That would be my star. That would lead to me to the place of safety where the Protohuman could be finalized in peace and safety.
I suddenly wondered why I had waited so long to try and get out of the lab. I hadn’t needed Jakobsen or anyone else, at least not for a long time. All my reliance on him and my brother had done was loosen the foundation upon which I balanced precariously.
I began to make plans in my head as I took another few steps from the doorway across the dusty clearing in the front of it. There were bundles of barbed wire and piles of tires delineating the area from the exposed pipes of the nearest production plants Further ahead, great stacks of oil drums and hazardous waste transporters.
No orderlies. Never again.
I smiled inwardly, already beginning to formulate in my head the design for a contraption which would allow me to transport the Protohuman to the beacon, and our new research base.
But my smile fell when I heard the crash of metal as the lab door swung shut behind me.
My hands sprayed blood onto I began to lose control of my shrieking as I frantically scrabbled at the door. My feeling of comfort had been precarious, the fall from it fast and hard. As soon as I had realized what had happened I had grabbed at the door but there was no handle on the outside, as I had had it removed at my own request upon my arrival all those months ago. There was a little give in the frame but nowhere near enough for me to hope to lever myself in.
My heart raced, my blood filling with the poisons in the air.
The noise of the factories seemed to increase, the whistles of steam shafts piercing my ears and making me dizzy. The acid sting was like nails against my skin. I grabbed a fractured girder from the rubble at the edge of the clearing and struck the door once, twice, three times, barely denting it on each attempt.
I cried out for the Protohuman but I knew already that it was useless. It wasn’t capable yet of such a response. And even if it had been . . .
My skin froze as the image of those who would come for me creeping across through the rubble of burnt-out cars and smoldering fires flashed before me and I suddenly knew I would see the glint of their eyes, the glint of their needles, coming towards me.
I should never have let my guard down and become distracted by the outside so quickly.
“No!” I cried into the metal, slamming it with my bare fists helplessly, my head snapping in every direction as I heard new sounds—crunching and breathing and the clack of pistols being cocked. I could almost feel their arms upon me.
I hit the door.
Hit the door.
Hit the door.
I clung to the lab as I would have my mother.
Noises. Movement amongst the electronic trash, whispers.
I closed my ragged eyelids, bleeding over the world, my body shaking from the effort.
I felt like I had to run but had nowhere to run to, a kind of fearful energy building up inside me that I knew would explode at any moment. I could have just run from the lab, away across the wasteland—but not without my creature. My work was the Protohuman and my life was my work. If I didn’t have it then I had no need for my own life.
And as I lay slumped against the door the whispers transposed themselves and now they came from inside the lab. They were inside the lab.
Who was inside?
“No!”
The Protohuman.
And this time I banged on the door not to escape back into the safety of the lab but in a sudden fury that I had been separated from my work.
“No! What are you doing?!”
Footsteps, lots of them. An army of them.
I peered into the small window but there was still a piece of metal plating hammered across it and what I could see was distorted by grease and dirt. But there were people moving around in there again.
