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Michael A. Stackpole

A Gathering Evil

Awakening in a speeding ambulance, with the scream of its undulating siren ripping your brain apart, is not a pleasant experience. It becomes even less so when you realize you're in a body bag zipped up tight and you can't move. Trapped in suffocating darkness, with the rubberized canvas pulling at your flesh, you realize that if this is death, eternity in a grave will be hell itself.

The strap across my chest and another just above my knees bound me tightly to the gurney. They kept me with it as it crashed around in the back, jouncing up and down or smashing side to side with the fast turns. The driver, mercilessly pushing the whining engine to its top end, sadistically pounded his way through potholes as if on a divine mission to crush them all.

The irritating stink of rubber and the lingering scent of decayed meat filled my nose. I tried to breathe through my mouth, but I could not make my lips part. I fought against the paralysis locking my jaw and quickly discovered the condition extended to my whole body. I could still feel the straps dig into my flesh and the slick roughness of the bag against my fingertips, but I could not make my muscles work. Try as I might, I could not even open my eyes.

It took no genius on my part to know I was in severe trouble. Being in a body bag meant the ambulance folks thought I was dead—and that conjured up all sorts of horrible images of premature burial or a seriously distasteful cremation. I started to panic, then fought against it because a clear head was all I had to get myself out of this situation.

And getting out of it was even more important than wasting brainsweat on figuring how I'd gotten into it.

The siren snapped off and the ambulance began to slow. I heard the crunch and ping of gravel beneath the tires, then felt the jolt as the gurney clanked against the inside of the ambulance as we rolled to a stop. The sound of passenger doors opening and closing cut off the static from the radio, then I heard the doors in the back open. I rolled forward, then landed hard on the ground.

"Take it easy, Jack."

"The stiff won't care."

"Yeah, but Harry will charge us for damage to the gurney." I tagged this speaker as Gruff-voice.

Jack hacked out a cough. "So, we take it out of petty cash. This guy was loaded. His cards will be worth something."

"No need to spend what we don't have to." Gruff-voice took a couple of steps away from the ambulance, his footfalls moving from my feet toward my head. "Where are they?"

"They'll be here." Another hack. "See, there they are."

Both men fell silent as I heard another vehicle drive up. Its engine had a nasty ticking sound and the door slid open. I immediately imagined it to be a van or delivery truck.

Jack greeted the newcomers. "Evenin', tulmen."

"The last batch was unsatisfactory." The voice had no compromise, and even less humanity in it.

Jack managed to keep fear out of his voice, but he radiated it so palpably that I could feel it from within the bag. "I know, and I'm sorry about that, but look, this one will make it up to you."

I heard a pair of clicks and the pressure on my chest and legs went away. I felt a tug near the top of my head, then heard the rasping sound of the zipper being undone. For a half-second the air rushing in felt cool; then it turned hot and very dry. I smelled dust in the air and the sharp scent of burned-out engines and steaming radiator fluid. My nasal passages dried out immediately and I could feel myself desiccating as they stood there.

Gruff-voice tried to let laughter override his anxiety. "Look, he's mid-30s, clean and in good shape. No scars. You can get kidneys, a liver and a heart out of him. His eyes should be good, too. Hell, you could even take his lungs and give them to Jack, here."

Panic again surged through me. They're selling off my parts, but I'm not even dead yet. They can't do this, I have to let them know I'm still alive!

"Why? He'd just ruin them as well." I felt fingers poke and prod me. Hands slipped beneath my right shoulder and lifted me enough to get a brief glimpse of my back. My head fell back, opening my mouth, and I gasped aloud. Jack and Gruff-voice jumped back, with one of them clunking against the ambulance.

"Jesus!"

Yes, there, now they know I'm still alive.

The inspector laughed harshly. "Come now, aces like you know gasses build up in corpses. Only time you'll see this deader again is in your nightmares."

My heart sank.

"Well, we don't spend as much time around them as you Reapers do. We generally get them before they become spare parts."

"So you do. Still warm. Good. Looks clean. Where did you get him?"

I heard Jack swallow hard. "Call came in an hour ago. He was in a squat-shack hotel in Slymingtown. Setup looked staged, like he had been dumped there. No one was asking questions, but Scorpion Security was on its way, so we snatched him and called you. How much?"

"A meg, plus 10% of anything unusual we get."

"A meg? Are you kidding? I could get three megs piecing him out, and still get a point on DNA applications."

Jack had sounded angry, but the Reaper called his bluff. "If you can, do it. You'll find it is a buyer's market, Jack, not a seller's. I could see going 1.5 megs, but you'll drop to 7% for exotics."

"With two points on DMA aps?"

"One, and only because I've forgotten how the last two maggot-ranches you gave me weren't fit for dog food. Literally, we left them in the desert and the coyotes wouldn't touch them."

"And we keep the effects?"

"Yes, Jack. We care not for his earthly possessions." I felt a hand grasp my forehead and work my head side to side. "Good bone structure and no cranial damage. I think we can save the brain. This is good. Do we have a deal?"

"Done. Always enjoy doing business with you Reapers."

"You lie poorly, Jackson, but we tolerate you because of your product." The Reaper snapped his fingers. "Gord, Kenny, red tag this one and put him in the back. We want to do him quickly, before he spoils any more."

The zipper closed again, shutting me away in the stuffy world of rubber and stale flesh. I sagged into a U-shape as two people grabbed the handles at my head and feet. I swayed between them as they carried me along, then I heard the rumble of a roll-away door sliding up into the truck's ceiling.

"Which side do we put him on?" one voice asked thickly.

"You sar him; he's vanilla."

They rocked me three times, then I flew up into the truck and landed solidly. Something shifted below me and I half expected to be buried beneath an avalanche of corpses. I slid a bit sideways, but nothing crashed down on top of me. The door slammed shut and the engine coughed to life. Gears ground and we lumbered forward.

I heard another sound in the back of the truck above the ticking idle of the engine. I first caught it as a cyclical pinging and noted it remained constant. I wondered what it was, but not for long: I felt a chill nibbling at my toes and fingers. The logic of icing down a truck full of corpses did not surprise me, but the reality of it sent a jolt of adrenaline through my body.

The cold and adrenaline combined to do what all my willpower had been unable to manage. I started to shiver. My limbs trembled uncontrollably. I found myself no longer locked in the grasp of paralysis.

I tried to move my hand under my conscious direction, but still found myself unable to do so. Too ambitious, I decided. I tried to open my eyes, but realized, in the dark, in a body bag, I could not tell if I had been successful. I made an attempt at breathing through my mouth, but found I still could not open it.

Despair opened its jaws wide to swallow my spirit whole, but the hope inspired by my shivering saved me. Before you can run, you must learn to walk. Before you can walk, you need to shiver. Shivering is good. Shivering is progress. Think cold. Make your body want to do what you cannot make it do.

I abandoned myself to cold and panic, repeatedly having to overcome unconscious efforts to control myself. I knew each burst of adrenaline that pumped into my system was helping, yet I felt constitutionally averse to admitting panic. It represented a total loss of control, and that spelled disaster. It felt as if part of me believed that by admitting I was in serious trouble, I would not find a way out of it.

Though I knew I should have been paying attention to the motions of the truck, I decided against it. I knew it would have been simple—a child's game—to keep track of twists and turns. By counting slowly and estimating speeds, I could have easily cataloged our journey and had an excellent chance of backtracking it. I had done it before, but not knowing where we had started, and unsure if I ever wanted to return there, I let it go.

I also found, for the brief time I did keep track of things, that the driver was doing his best to take us through a very evasive and difficult-to-follow route. We changed levels several times and traveled both city streets and highways. We made no more stops, which I pridefully saw as a reflection of my own value, and ended the journey with a long downward slope.

My shivering stopped instantly as the truck door opened. I felt all my senses come alive as if I were trying to project my mind outside the bag to see where I was. I could not, of course, and my attempts were interrupted by the jerk on the handle at my head. My body limply slithered over other corpses, then I slid free of the truck and my legs slapped stiffly on the ground. "Key-ryest, Gord, don't let the legs hit!"

"Geez, Kenny, the guy ain't complaining."

"But the doctor will. Soft-tissue damage, she calls it." There was nothing soft about the way my legs and heels felt as Gord hefted me up. Hitting the ground had hurt and I would have screamed had my jaw not been locked. Anger twisted my belly up and burned like fire. I wanted to let it run wild like I had the panic, but I immediately shunted that energy away and calmed myself.

Then I noticed that the rage—or pain—had caused my fingers to claw inward. They felt stiff, but they had moved. One by one I willed them to straighten out again. The paralysis fought me, but the commands got through. On my right hand, my little finger snapped to attention first, then the ring finger and the index. I reissued the order and the middle finger complied.

My left hand responded more sluggishly, but it did respond. I tried to curl my toes inward and they also worked. Concentrating hard, I forced my fingers back in again and the right hand got almost all the way down into a fist. The left hand tried, but failed. The fingers did straighten out again on command, and I managed to flex all the muscles in my right arm, which gave me great cause for joy.

So concerned was I with regaining the use of my limbs that I was unprepared for Gord and Kenny dropping me on a table. I smacked the back of my head on the surface and saw stars in front of my eyes. As they sizzled off like Technicolor comets, I heard the bag being unzipped, then I was tipped right and left so they could whisk it from beneath me.

They left me lying naked on a cold metal table. Despite my eyes still being closed, I could see a golden glow from outside my eyelids, and I could feel the warmth of the lights on me. I brushed the fingertips of my right hand across the surface and felt a shallow groove running from beneath me toward the edge of the table.

A door opened and I heard a woman's voice. "Oh, this is a fine specimen. Thank you, tulmen. Andre, roll tape on this one. We want to document him."

"Yes, doctor."

I heard a wheeled cart roll closer to the table. The clink of instruments accompanied its arrival and I did not like how close to my head it all sounded.

...