Contagion (Toxic City, #3)(22)

Fleeter had flipped out as soon as they'd moored and left the boat, saying that she was going to scout the way ahead. Jack hadn't even bothered trying to call her back. She had her own agenda.

“That's far enough!” Miller called. There was something wrong with his voice; a growl, rough-edged.

Jack laughed. “What, Miller? Have you got us covered?”

“Monsters,” Miller muttered. His words echoed from the container piles around Camp H.

“Yeah, right,” Rhali said. “We're the monsters.” Her voice was quiet. But there was fear and fury there, and Jack had never heard her so alive.

“I said that's far enough!”

Jack and his companions stopped.

“Why?” Jack asked.

“I don't want to be seen,” Miller said.

“What did he do to you this time?”

“Your father, you mean?”

“Reaper,” Jack said. “He's no longer my father.”

“Oh, he is, boy. And you've got it in you too. I can see it in your eyes, the way you stand. You're dripping with power, and when you use it, you'll become a monster as well.”

Jack tried to blink away the memory of those three Choppers he'd killed. He was afraid Miller might see it.

“Why aren't you dead?” Rhali spat.

“I am!” Miller laughed. It was a horrible, high giggle, made more dreadful because his body and wrapped clothing barely moved at all.

“We don't have time to piss around, here,” Jack said quietly. He started walking forward again, trying not to see the human parts scattered around his feet, and trying not to remember the terrible things he had seen inside those containers. In the larger collection of containers, the research rooms where the unfortunates had been dissected and stored. And in the smaller unit, the prison where they'd kept those due for experimentation. Monstrous. Almost unthinkable. And the man responsible for all of it was this wretched thing before him.

Jack's anger rose again. He'd already held a gun to this bastard's head and refrained from pulling the trigger. But he had greater weapons than guns.

Far greater.

“Stay back!” Miller said. A hand emerged from the clothing, palm out. Two fingers were missing, their stumps ragged and wet.

Jack stopped. “I can help you.” The idea of fixing some of Miller's wounds was reprehensible. Yet even thinking that way gave Jack a sense of inner peace. I'm better than him, he thought. But there was nothing superior about that idea. It was a fact, and even entertaining the idea that he could help Miller was proof of that.

“Help?” Miller said, and then he laughed again. He slumped in his chair as he did so, as if each time he exhaled he shrank a little more.

“I can't help him,” Rhali said. Jack wasn't aware that she'd advanced with him, but he would not tell her to wait. She'd been through too much for that. There was no violence in her, but she still had rage to expend somewhere, somehow.

When they drew close to Miller, and he threw back the jackets and hoods covering him, everything seemed to change.

There was barely a human left. Reaper must have worked on Miller for some time after Jack and his friends and family had left, and perhaps some of his Superiors had taken a turn as well. The woman who could freeze flesh with a breath. The knife man. Perhaps someone who could pin life to something that should be dead.

He wore a white surgical mask across his face, but it could not hide the mutilation. His ears had been torn off. One eye was missing, and both eyelids had been sliced away, leaving his remaining eye wide and white and frantic, and flowing with moisture. His nose was broken and caked with dried blood, and beneath the mask his jaw seemed to protrude too far to the left. It moved constantly, as if he were chewing cud.

“Oh, my God,” Rhali whispered.

Miller chuckled. “Like what you see?” He moved more clothing aside.

Reaper had taken more from each of his legs, removing the left all the way up to the groin. His left arm was twisted and broken, thumb and three fingers removed so that only the middle finger remained. Perhaps Reaper had thought it an amusing gesture, though Jack doubted he had any humour left in him at all. Miller's shoulders were bruised and lacerated. There was nothing visible that was untouched, and no telling what horrors the bloodied, fouled clothing still hid. He stank. It was pitiful and sickening, but Jack looked deep for any shred of sympathy.

“No,” Rhali said. “No, I don't like it. But you deserve it. Every cut and stab and gouge you've made on another innocent has been visited upon you. I could never hurt you, Miller, much as I want to. I kept my humanity, even through everything you did to me. The starvation, the deprivation. The humiliation. So I could never avenge myself on you. But I see you now…” She went close to him, too close for Jack's comfort, but Miller merely winced back into his chair. “And I hope it hurts.” Then Rhali turned her back on Miller forever and glanced sadly at Jack as she walked away.

“Okay,” Jack said. He nodded at the ruined shell of the vivisection suite. “I think in there would be an appropriate place to talk.”

“You're going to torture me?” Miller drawled, totally unconcerned.

“No,” Jack said. “No, probably not.”

There were still bodies inside. They might have died when Jack and Fleeter first pushed them over—when flipped, gentle movements would translate as incredibly fast, violent actions in the real world. But he thought it likely the Superiors had returned to finish the job. Jack averted his eyes, but the stench of rot was cloying.