Spiral

Liam typed in a few commands and stood back to watch the Crawlers, then put his arthritic fingers to work at the thousand little tasks that the Crawlers still couldn’t do. They couldn’t, for example, set goals, choose which fungi to cull and which to propagate. They didn’t have an agenda to guide their actions. Agendas mattered a great deal. Liam’s agenda had been clear for more than sixty years, since that spring day in the Pacific. An agenda he kept entirely to himself.

Liam thought of Jake. On the pretext of showing Jake a rare herd of pure white deer that roamed the premises, Liam had taken him to Seneca Army Depot, an abandoned military facility thirty miles north and west. But the real reason for their trip was different. Liam had started to tell Jake things, peel back the layers. Jake was a student of war, he understood.

Liam’s agenda was his own, except for the pieces he’d fed to Jake. Jake now knew that there had been a Japanese biological superweapon, destroyed by the fourth nuclear explosion in history. Liam had spoken the name: the Uzumaki. Liam had not said the word aloud for decades.

But Jake didn’t know more still. He didn’t know what that bastard Lawrence Dunne had started. Jake didn’t know that Liam had in his possession one of the seven brass cylinders. Or that after over sixty years, he had finally found the Uzumaki’s weakness.

Click.

Liam froze. The noise came from just outside the lab.

“Maggie?”

He wouldn’t put it past her to come back and make another attempt to pull him away.

No answer.

“Jake?” He was a night owl, too. Liam often found him in his labs past midnight. “Jake?”

Liam listened. Nothing.

He looked around his lab. The Crawlers were in the gardens. The computer screen had put itself to sleep.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

Click!

The lights went out.

2

TINK, TINK, TINK .

When Liam Connor came to, the sound was the first thing that broke through.

Tink, tink, tink.

He was confused, unstuck in time, flashes coming quick and disjointed. He was twelve, walking the green hills of Sligo, hunting new species of fungi. He was twenty-two, on a warship in the Pacific, contemplating a small brass cylinder in his hand. He was thirty-one, in their first house in Ithaca, watching his wife crawl out of bed, completely naked. He was fifty-nine, the king of Sweden hanging a medal on his neck. He was seventy-seven, seeing his great-grandson for the first time, Dylan’s little beet-red face scrunched and screaming.

Tink, tink, tink.

After a moment, he settled down, becoming his current self. He was an old, old man, an Irish gnome. Eighty-six. Emeritus professor of biology at Cornell University.

He tried to move, but everything was wrong. He couldn’t lift his arms. He couldn’t open his mouth. He had the sense he was upright, but he couldn’t be sure. His vision was blurry, smudges in black. He couldn’t see anything, save for a faint glow coming from behind him. It was a mix of yellow, green, and red, each color ebbing and strengthening to its own rhythm.

Tink, tink, tink.

The sound was familiar. He knew the sound. What the hell was it?

He tried to remember what had happened. He had been in his lab, he was sure of that, tending to the gardens of decay. The gardens. He was fiddling in the gardens, then-then nothing. A blank spot in his memory. Was it still the same night? Still Monday?

He couldn’t move his head. He was upright, but he couldn’t move. Someone had struck him; he remembered that now. He could still feel the blow.

He heard another sound. A rush of air, slight, gentle. Silence. Then again.

Breathing.

He was sure of it. Someone was sitting right behind him. In the darkness. Very close.

Tink, tink, tink.

He tried to open his mouth, to speak, but he couldn’t move. His mouth wouldn’t open. Something was wrong with his tongue. It was trapped against the bottom of his mouth.

He studied his surroundings, fighting a pain like a knife blade between his eyes. He was in a huge room in the shape of a half-cylinder. The concrete roof twenty feet overhead curved in a smooth semicircle to the floor. He faced the back end of the cylinder, the flat, stained concrete wall no more than ten feet from his face. Liam realized where he was: an old munitions bunker on the abandoned Seneca Army Depot site, completely isolated from the rest of the world. Liam had spent months at the depot over the past four years, secretly toiling over his last great-and highly secret-project.