Horde (Razorland #3)(37)

But Fade was looking at him in amazement. “My dad told me stories about the old wonders. And you got them working?”

“It’s not so great a thing, the least of my discoveries,” Wilson said modestly.

It was clear Fade had a burgeoning case of hero worship. Tegan would love to meet Wilson, I thought, and ask all kinds of questions about doctoring. But the colonel had said he wasn’t a medical man, so maybe his knowledge about windmills meant he couldn’t tell her anything about fixing the human body.

“I can report limited success in the trials,” he said, “but I wasn’t able to weaponize the pheromones as Emilia hoped, and there were … complications.”

That was only so much gibberish to me, but before I could say so, a snarl echoed through the warren of hallways. I froze; I knew that sound down to my blood and bone.

Somehow, there were Freaks in here.

Shock

I expected the old man to panic, but he didn’t look worried. He waved a hand dismissively, still rummaging in his papers. “That’s just Timothy, nothing to be alarmed about.”

Fade said, “Where we come from, sir, Muties inside a dwelling means big trouble.”

The scientist sighed. “You won’t be satisfied until I prove there’s no threat, will you? Come then. Let’s get this over with.”

He led us out of the main room, which was full of equipment for which I had no name, but I recognized the articles as belonging to the old world, which I had believed to be lost. I was a little awed that any of the things still worked and that Dr. Wilson employed them as a matter of course. Soldier’s Pond had more such artifacts than Salvation, where they eschewed old technology by choice, but this was a veritable treasure trove of functioning equipment. The Wordkeeper—the man who guarded our relics down below—would’ve been astonished.

The same bright bulbs—long strips of light that flickered—lit the halls, lending the pale walls a milky tremor. Fade stayed close and I noticed he kept a hand on the knife strapped to his thigh. Wilson opened a door on the right, and the reek was unmistakable; this reminded me of the tunnels, where the Freaks had lived and bred for years undisturbed apart from the occasional run-in with our Hunters.

I expected to find a breach in his security. Instead, I saw a row of man-size cages. They were all empty, save one. To my abject shock, a Freak occupied it. The monster rattled the bars, prompting a sigh from Dr. Wilson.

“Yes, all right. It’s past feeding time. Just be patient.” He went to a white rectangular unit and withdrew a bucket, then hauled out a substantial portion of bloody meat, which he then tossed into the cage as if the Freak were his pet.

The beast fell on the food with its claws and it ate voraciously, hunched over because the cage wasn’t quite tall enough for it to stand upright. I watched with a growing sense of horror. What was the purpose of this? Tegan had said once that she would like to study the Freaks to understand how their bodies worked and possibly to work out what drove them. Maybe that was what Dr. Wilson was trying to do here?


“This seems cruel,” I said.

“Don’t fret. Timothy is old, only a year or so left. In the wild, he would’ve already been slain for his weakness. And he’s contributing to my ability to understand their culture.”

“My friend Tegan is curious about them too. What have you learned about their eyesight?” I recalled how she’d wondered when she heard the story about the way I slipped past the horde to rescue Fade.

“It’s on par with ours, meaning not good. They rely on their olfactory senses more.”

“What do you mean, ‘not good’?” Fade asked.

“Compared with some animals, humans have terrible vision. A hawk, for instance. The mutants have an advanced sense of smell, however, akin to a hound or wolf.”

At that, the Freak glanced up from its gruesome feast, strings of meat threaded through yellow fangs. Now that Wilson had pointed it out, I could see that it was missing four teeth, crucial ones for ripping and tearing. From context, I figured he meant their society—and once, I’d have found the idea absurd—that they could have customs and rituals similar to ours, but that was before I’d glimpsed the Freak village hidden in the trees. I realized that Dr. Wilson could probably give us a better picture of what happened to the world … and what we could do about it.

So I put aside my shock and asked, “We came to retrieve information for the colonel, but I wonder if you could answer some questions first.”

“As long as it’s not about Timothy.”

The Freak looked between us as if it recognized that Wilson was talking about it. I shivered. “It’s about what happened before, actually.”

“You want a history lesson? Well, I have time to indulge you. Let’s have a drink then and I’ll answer your questions.”

Fade was still staring at the Freak, but he followed when we left the room. The thing whimpered as Wilson pulled the door shut, like it was lonely. That bothered me too. I didn’t want to sympathize with the monsters, not even a little; that would make it harder to kill them.

This time Wilson took us to the kitchen, though it was unlike any I had ever been in before. There was no hearth for cooking, only more rectangular units like the one where he’d gotten the meat. It was bright and clean, though, and he gestured for us to take a seat at the table. I did, feeling like the world had once again stopped functioning according to the rules I knew. Fade perched beside me; he looked every bit as flummoxed as I felt.