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Sunil, the sadistic bastard, clobbered me with the fighting stick for a long time after Von Zimmer left to do whatever billionaires and evil masterminds do. There wasn’t a part of me that didn’t have a bruise or a welt or wasn’t bleeding when he dismissed me. Don’t even get me started on how hungry I was.
In pain, and with a grumbling stomach, I wandered the cavernous halls of the castle, trying to find my way to my room. Every passage look exactly like the last. It was only once I came to a narrow, spiral, stone staircase that I was ready to admit I was well and truly lost. It was time to go looking for another human being who could tell me where I was supposed to go. Only problem was: I hadn’t seen anyone else since I left Sunil and I sure as shit wasn’t going to go looking for him so he could take me back to my room.
I took the stairs down, probably not the smartest move, but when have I ever made a smart call?
With each step down the temperature dropped a few degrees. That should also have made me turn back, but no, I kept on descending deeper into a freezer. I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps hell had indeed frozen over.
Thankfully the stairs, like the rest of the castle, were well lit. The problem was that there was no chance to exit the staircase. They kept going down and down and down. If my thighs hadn’t already been killing me before, they definitely were now. There was nowhere to go but down. I thought about turning back and making that trek all the way back up, but I’d already gone so far and I couldn’t be arsed to turn around. What can I say? I’m a lazy bitch. So I decided to keep going and hoped the stairs would eventually come to an end and there would be a door leading somewhere. Maybe, if I was lucky, there would be a lift to take me back, or another person who could direct me to my room where there’d hopefully some food and warmth. Warmth would be nice.
My face was starting to turn numb and my teeth were chattering. I hugged myself tighter and tried to rub some circulation into my arms as I carried on down, down, down...
Since I’d arrived in Von Zimmer’s castle all passage of time seemed blur. I had no idea how long I’d been there; I didn’t know what day of the week it was, or whether it was day or night. I also had no clue how long I’d been in that downward spiral, but when I finally hit the bottom step and saw a wooden door, it felt as though I’d been trapped in the frozen tundra for a century. Snot ran down my trembling upper lip. I could no longer feel my face or my fingertips.
With numb fingers, I reached for the brass door handle. Giving a silent prayer that it wasn’t locked. I pulled down and pushed it open. The squeak from unoiled hinges reverberated all the way up the spiral staircase and down another bright corridor.
I wondered how much Von Zimmer’s electricity account was every month.
Peering around the door, I looked to see if there was another living soul. No such luck. Maybe they’d all gone to sleep and I was the only one stupid enough to be traipsing around where I had no business being. There was nothing I could do except go forward.
“Hello,” I shouted as I walked on. “Is anybody there?”
I felt a bit like Adele singing Hello.
Nothing. Not a sound except for the annoying echo of my own words, my breathing, and the patter of my feet on the cold floor. I kept putting one frozen foot in front of the other.
What else could I do?
I considered turning back, but fuck that shit. Climbing up those stairs would be worse than going on.
Fuck no!
The passages down in the basement were different to the ones in the upper levels. They seemed labyrinthine, and instead of marble floors it was all concrete. It wasn’t just a straight shot to the end. I couldn’t even see the end of it. After what seemed like hours of walking down the corridor I heard someone else’s heavy tread echo towards me. I stopped, waited, and listened to them approach.
A guy wearing a green Parker jacket with a German flag on the arm marched around the bend towards me. He looked shocked and I was ecstatic. I was saved. The barrel of his machine gun pointing at me dampened my spirits a bit though.
“Halt! Hände hoch,” he shouted. “Was machst du hier?”
“I don’t suppose you speak English?” I said putting my shivering hands up, because it seemed like the thing to do under the circumstances.
“Du darfst nicht hier sein,” he said as he walked towards me, the barrel pointed at my chest and his finger on the trigger.
“Dude,” I said. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. English, please.”
“Komm mit mir,” he said and gestured with his head and rifle in a way that I think meant that I had to go with him.
He marched me down the passage in the direction he’d come from. He kept ramming the muzzle of his rifle into my back to make me move faster. I had to resist the urge to bitch slap him, mostly because I wasn’t sure if I could move quicker than a bullet and I wasn’t in the mood to get shot. I also wasn’t sure if Doctor Mannheim would be able to fix me again.
We walked along the corridor, round a couple twists and turns, before we reached a metal door. It scrapped concrete as he opened it. The noise echoed through the tunnel, making my eardrums wince.
The room he pushed me into was, thankfully, warm. But the change in temperature made my skin hurt and my snot dribble even more. It didn’t matter how much I sniffed, I still got a taste of salty snot, and sounded like a cocaine addict with a bad habit. At least the uncontrollable shivering stopped.
Doctor Mannheim stood in the middle of the room, which wasn’t unlike the one he’d had me in, except this one didn’t have the weird water tank or any of the equipment he’d used to fix my arm or turn me into an advanced freak. This room looked more like a morgue than a lab.
The reason it looked more like a mortuary was the body, well...what looked like a body, on a metal slab in front of Doctor Mannheim. As I was pushed closer into the room by the German goon with the gun I got a far closer look at the body than I wanted to. The bloody mess looked familiar.
“Ah! Hallo Fräulein,” Mannheim said looking up from the mangled corpse. “What can I do for you?” He thrust his hands into the chest cavity. The squishing sounds made my stomach turn, as did the smell of rotting flesh. “What is the matter?” he asked while his hands rummaged inside the cavity and peered up at me with concern.
I simply shook my head. I couldn’t get a word out.
They may have tinkered with my body, but clearly hadn’t done anything to fix my gag reflex. I wasn’t able to look at that bloody mess without turning a lovely shade of green. Killing to survive was something I could handle, but what Mannheim was doing to that body was a whole other story.
While I tried to swallow back the bile that was burning its way up my throat I tried to focus on the face. What was left of the face only made me feel worse.
“Why are you fucking around with Zelda’s corpse?” I asked once I’d finally found my voice. “I thought what was left of her was left on the island for the wildlife to feed on. You know the cycle of life and all that.”
“The Graff was kind enough to pay to have her remains brought home so she can have a proper burial. If she had been a novice, like you were, or an inexperienced Runner as you are now, her remains would have been left on the island for the vultures, but she was neither. She was one of us.”
“But I still managed to kill her, so she wasn’t that experienced,” I said moving closer to the table. My curiosity got the better of my sensitive stomach.
“It was her hubris that killed her,” the Doctor said, looking down at Zelda’s face with what resembled paternal disappointed etched on his face. “Unfortunately you, and the infernal creatures inhabiting that wasteland they insist on using for The Race, destroyed any chance I had of re-animating her. Did you have to destroy her brain?” He tsked-tsked at me while he stuck his arms even deeper into her body cavity. “Ah!” he exclaimed as he pulled out an organ with a sucking sound. Blood and other bodily fluids splattered. I scarcely managed to dodge getting sprayed. “I may be able to salvage something from this debacle. There is possibly some genetic material in her spleen, which has not degraded, that I can make use of.” He held the organ up as though it were a trophy.
“What do you mean I destroyed any chance of re-animating her?” I asked, unable to believe I’d heard right. “How is that even possible?”
I felt as though I was in my own version of Frankenstein. Did that make me Frankenstein’s monster?
Fuck!
“Of course it is possible,” Mannheim said walking away from Zelda’s corpse and taking her spleen with him.
“Wait! What?” I said, my voice raising a few octaves.
“Fräulein, I do not have the patience or the time to discuss this with you and you have a very busy day ahead of you tomorrow. I would suggest you get some rest.” He turned his back on me in an attempt to dismiss me.
“I would be happy to get that rest, but I don’t know how to get back to my room. So...” I shrugged.
“Ah, yes. That is a problem,” Mannheim said and looked around the room, the spleen still in his hands. Blood and other liquid I didn’t even want to identify dribbled between his fingers and down his hand. “Bernhardt,” he called to the guy who’d pushed the rifle into my ribcage earlier. “Nimm sie zu ihr Zimmer, bitte.”
Soldier boy nodded.
“Bernhardt will take you to your room. I will see you tomorrow morning.”
Before I could say anything else Mannheim’s attention was firmly on Zelda’s spleen and the scalpel he was using to slice into it.