Cold Hell - 21. Chapter 20

Calvin awoke, lying on a threadbare couch. Someone had thrown a raggedy blanket across him. The room he looked around was unfamiliar to him. It wasn't Danni's apartment, which was still sparsely furnished, and it wasn't his mother's, which had too much furniture. The apartment was kept neat: There was a rickety wooden coffee table, a bookshelf with tattered volumes, and a well-used armchair. Sitting in the armchair sat an old man. He wore spectacles and held a leatherbound book in his hand.

Calvin was too tired and too relieved to be alive to feel frightened just yet. The memory of the thing that had attacked him was too fresh in his mind. He could still feel the cold seeping through his clothes, still feel the weight of the creature on top of him, still smell the foulness of the creature's breath. The last thing he remembered was clawing his way into the dormitory and fainting out in the hallway.

"Good," the man said softly, putting the book down on his lap. "You're awake. You've been out for a while. Several hours at least. You look like you've been through a terrible ordeal."

"I was walking home when someone attacked me," said Calvin. Gripping the top of the couch, he managed to pull himself into a sitting position. He winced. His body still ached.

"Where am I?"

"You're safe, I can promise you." The man looked upon him with kindly dark eyes. To Calvin he looked familiar but Calvin couldn't place how he knew him.

"The blizzard is still going," said the man. "My guess is it will be a while before it stops. From the looks of it, you were caught in it. I had to wrap your fingers in bandages due to the frostbite. I'd say you're lucky to be alive."

Calvin examined his hands. Sure enough his hands had been wrapped in gauge so that it looked as if he was wearing mittens. "Thank you for taking me in. You didn't have to do that."

"On the contrary I'm quite glad to have the company. It's been pretty lonely the last few days and this damned blizzard hasn't helped. Sure, I have my books but I've read them so many times they're practically falling apart." The old man sighed. "My son, Everest, has been gone for a few days. I know he is more than capable of taking care of himself but I can't stop worrying about him." He chuckled good naturedly. "I suppose it's the curse of being a parent."

Oh shit. This man was the father of the man who was former friends with the man who had raped him. Calvin felt his blood run cold. And yet Everest and this man couldn't be more different than each other. Calvin had only encountered Everest a few times, but it had been enough to feel intimidated by the man's towering, stoic countenance. Yet his father was completely different: soft, warm, and kind. And Calvin noticed one of his legs was gone from the knee down. This assured Calvin further that the man wouldn't hurt him - wouldn't be able to. Not unless his son decides to come home at any point and finish what he started, Calvin thought.

The man noticed Calvin looking at the remaining stump of his leg. "I lost it in the accident at the processing plant several years ago," he said in a conversational voice. "At first it was damned hard to move around and the effects of the accident left me crippled in more ways than just physical. But now I get around just fine without it."

"My mother was in the same accident," Calvin said in a shaky voice, unaware he was sweating. "Her back is pretty messed up."

The man nodded. "The accident hurt a lot of people and took a lot of lives. I'm Steig by the way."

"I know who you are," Calvin said coldly before he could stop himself. "Your son is friends with one of the men who raped. Or was, I should say." Calvin didn't know why he was so angry or why he was taking it out on this innocent old man who had done nothing so far but try to help him. All he knew was his insides felt cold and rigid. But was his son truly innocent? There had to be something wrong with him if his son could hang around men like Mikael Mannu, didn't there?

The man took off his glasses and fixed Calvin with a contemplative look; his face was completely somber. "You're talking about Mikael Mannu, aren't you?"

"Yes," Calvin spat. "My friend killed him. And your son threatened his life for it." If Calvin's fingers hadn't felt so stiff he would have clenched them into fists.

"I'm sorry for what happened to you," Steig said in the same gentle inflection. "I know it doesn't change how you must be feeling right now about what happened. I can assure you my son is nothing like what Mikael was. Ever since he was just a baby, when his mother put him in my arms, I have tried to raise my son to be better than the people on this planet. To have morals. To know right from wrong. Unfortunately - and know I am not making an excuse for what happened to you or who Everest associates with - we live on a harsh planet amongst the harshest of people. Like you, like all of us, my son has had to do ugly things to survive. It's why I think he drinks so much, to comfort himself. But there's one thing I do know and have absolute faith in: my son is ultimately a good person. Confused and idiotic at times maybe, but he would never do to you what Mikael did. So please don't condemn him for the actions and choices of someone else."

Calvin found himself nodding. There was validity in what the old man was saying he admitted to himself, if not grudgingly. Yet a part of him wanted to stay angry, to place blame - even when he was angry, even when it was eating him up inside. Would this anger ever truly go away or would it stay nestled inside him for forever?

Steig had slid his glasses back on his nose. "I imagine you must be hungry. Would you like something to eat?"

At the mention of food, Calvin felt his stomach growl; he couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. He smiled. "Some food sounds great right now."

                              …

Danni didn't believe in ghosts, at least not in the literal sense of the word. To him there was no such thing as life or death, no divine deity in the sky, no mythic realm outside of this one. But things did get left behind. Emotions, if strong enough, could stain a place. Especially the negative ones: jealousy, rage, fear, and grief. Skottalina had left behind a lot of fear and a lot of pain.

Natalia stood over the body of her young assistant, sobbing quietly. Danni and she had wrapped the body as best they could in a white hospital blanket. Danni was disturbed by the dot of blood, the size of a dime, staining the blanket where the nose was. Everest stood to his left, as towering and silent as the mountain he'd been named after. Dinah stood over by Natalia, hugging her, caressing her shoulder with a loving hand, doing her best to comfort her lover. It was so strange to see Dinah being something other than a cold hearted bitch.

The crematorium room was stuffy from the heat of the furnace. Danni's eyes were beginning to itch from being dry. The light from behind the door filled the room with an orange glow.

"I can't," said Natalia. She looked to Danni. "I can't...Will you…?"

Danni nodded. He opened the furnace door, squinting his eyes against the blinding light of the flames. Slowly he pushed the body into the furnace and closed the door. It would take two to three hours to burn, maybe less. But it was the best chance they had of eradicating the possibility of exposure.

He vividly remembered killing Skottalina: the impact going up his arms as the axe cut deeper and deeper into her neck; the spurts of blood that rained on the ground with wet splattering sounds. This shouldn't have happened to her, he thought. He hadn't known Skottalina long, but while he'd been in the clinic she'd treated him well.

"This world is a cruel place." Everest's deep rumble interrupted Danni's thoughts. The big man was looking at the furnace door with a mournful expression on his face. Danni hadn't seen Everest look so sad, not even after Mikael died. Not even after I killed him, Danni corrected himself.

"It is," Danni said. Who knew better than he?

"Is it any better on Earth?"

"Not really. People there like to think they are. Human beings are the same no matter what planet you stick them on." Danni could feel sweat dripping down his back, in between his shoulder blades. It was too hot to be in here. He couldn't be in the room, not for a second longer.

The hallway was no better. Everywhere he looked there was blood and signs of death. Danni held up his hands. They too were covered in blood and shaking. He couldn't stop them from shaking. I need to wash my hands. He went into a bathroom and washed the blood off his hands with scalding hot water. He scrubbed them furiously with soap until his flesh was red.

There were the other two bodies that needed to be dealt with. Danni changed into a pair of scrubs and pulled on some gloves. He pushed a gurney into the pantry and carefully wrapped the body in the sheets he'd grabbed from the supply closet.

"Need some help lifting the body?" Everest asked from the door.

"Sure," Danni replied with a shrug.

Everest grabbed the arm, Danni grabbed the feet. Even with the both of them lifting, the body was incredibly heavy. "Fuck me," Everest grunted, "this body weighs a ton."

"Probably from all the extra limbs it has inside," Danni replied as they set the body on top of the table. "Who knows how else it's mutated."

"Have you seen anything like this before?"

Danni looked down at the body wrapped in the white sheet. A stray appendage hung over the side of the table. To him it rather looked like an eel. Though he did not know it, he wore a haunted look on his face: His eyebrows were creased together, his jaw was clenched, his eyes stared at nothing. "Once, when I was in Mexico. But what I saw there doesn't compare to this. What I saw in Mexico was human...mostly. This thing was human...but now it's not. There's nothing on Earth that could change the human physiology to this extent, so it must be something extraterrestrial." He shivered at the thought. Could it really be possible that something had been discovered, perhaps buried underneath the ice, frozen underneath the ice? Adwele must have discovered it and done something to wake it up, Danni thought.

Natalia stepped into the room. Her eyes were reddened from crying but judging from the look of determination on her face she had composed herself. "I want to hold onto this body, to examine it. I want to see more on what we're dealing with. The more we know the better."

Danni waved a hand at the body on the table. "Knock yourself out."

                                 …

Natalia took a deep breath and threw the sheet onto the floor. The smell coming from the body was foul. Sharp and chemical.

She stood in the surgery room covered from neck to toe in blue scrubs. She pulled a visor over her face. The last thing she wanted was getting hit by a stray fleck of gore and getting infected. She swallowed the golf ball lodged in her throat, forced herself to take another deep breath. Time to get to work.

She took a scalpel and began to make an incision, starting at the edge of the collarbone. She noted mentally that the collarbone seemed to protrude out more than what was normal for human beings. Was this another mutation or malnutrition? She could only hope a detailed autopsy would yield more answers.

The scalpel continued to carve its path from just beneath the center of the collarbone, down the chest, to the stomach. She was careful not to touch the tendrils that protruded from the chest. Her hands were surprisingly steady considering the emotional trauma she'd been through and the lack of sleep.

The scalpel stopped just above the corpse's bushy patch of pubic hair. The penis was slightly below average size and uncircumcised. Nothing inhuman there, she thought.

With the incision made, she pulled the flaps of the skin apart, showing the chestplate and ribs. As she worked Natalia found herself reminiscing about her younger days. She recalled fondly that her parents owned a great many books. It seemed every wall had a bookshelf and every bookshelf was filled end to end with books: novels, thesauruses, dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbook and manuals. Where her parents had gotten all these books, which were rare and expensive on Planet Redemption - so few knew how to read; education was not a priority on the ice planet - Natalia didn't know.

Her father, Aadrik, toiled day and night at the processing plant, cleaning out animal pins, trying to give his wife and daughter the best life he could. Never once did he make them feel bad for it, even on the nights when he shuffled into their cramped living quarters with dark circles under his eyes.

While Aadrik was at work, Salia would read to her, teach her math, and philosophy. "Reading is important," Salia would tell her. "Knowledge is vital, even in a place as barren as Planet Redemption. My parents taught me how to read and write, and so did their parents. So on and so forth. I will make sure to keep the legacy going. I will not have you working as a white at the brothel."

There weren't too many positions a person could work in Clan Wuxia, unless it was the brothel or the plant, so this left her the clinic. On her thirteenth birthday, the day when she was considered old enough to get her tattoo claiming her as a member of the clan and begin looking for trade work, she went to the clinic seeking an apprenticeship. Natalia vividly remembered how Salia had braided her hair and given her the dress she had been working on for months. "You will make us proud," Salia said, looking upon her daughter with such love and adoration it made Natalia uncomfortable.

But what if I fail? she'd thought as she marched through the cold towards the clinic. What if I'm not as smart as Ma thinks I am?

The head of the clinic in those days was a middle-aged woman named Minerva Krige. The moment young Natalia met her, she immediately felt a sense of calm, of peace wash over her. The woman, with her bushy brown hair and kindly hazel eyes, had a mystical quality about her. The tattoo marking her as a member of Clan Wuxia hovered just above her right cheekbones

ne. "What is your name girl?" she'd asked gently.

"Natalia."

The woman smiled. "Natalia. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl. I understand you seek an apprenticeship with me."

"I do," Natalia said.

"Do you think you have the stomach for it?"

"I do," Natalia said with more certainty. She didn't know where this sudden swell of confidence came from but she was glad it was there.

"Good." Minerva smiled. "Let's go and find out, shall we."

In the present, Natalia removed the man's chestplate.

In the past Minerva led Natalia through the halls of the clinic, into a room. There a man lay stretched out on a metal table. His face was scrunched up in pain. Minerva smiled sweetly at the man.

"This young woman is Natalia," said Minerva, putting a hand on the girl's shoulder. "She's seeking an apprenticeship at the clinic. She's going to watch me perform surgery."

"Good for her," the man growled through gritted teeth without so much as glancing at Natalia. "Now will you pull the damn glass out - it hurts like bloody fucking hell!"

"In due time," said Minerva. She picked up what looked like a pair of tongs. "Do you know what these are?" she asked Natalia.

"Forceps," said Natalia.

"Very good." Minerva nodded approvingly. "Mr. Johansson here was involved in a brawl at the brothel. His opponent took a glass, broke it to make a weapon, and stabbed him in the hip. I've already examined the wound. Fortunately it isn't fatal, however there is a piece of glass in there I have to remove before I can stitch the wound up. Do you want to watch?"

Natalia nodded. She walked around the table and examined the wound. It wasn't as bad as she'd thought it would be, not bad at all. The wound was two inches long; the piece of glass was visible, lodged in the wound.

"I've already sanitized the wound with saline. Now I'm going to use the forceps to pull it out."

"Are you going to knock me out first?" Johansson asked wearily.

"Why whatever for?" Minerva asked, surprised. She winked at Natalia. "You didn't have to come to me to dress the wound, the glass barely grazed you. Perhaps this will teach you not to get into fights."

"You bitch!" Spit flew from Johansson's mouth. "You ruddy bitch!"

"Now," said Minerva sternly, "there's no need for that kind of dirty talk." Then she took the forceps and pulled the sliver of glass out. Natalia had not blinked, not once.

Minerva had died five years ago from a brain tumor. For fifteen years she'd mentored Natalia, taught her everything she knew.

Almost twenty years later Natalia sawed off the appendages and set them in a metal tray. The appendages landed with a sickening wet splat! Blue-grey fluid seeped out from the holes where the limbs had been. As she dealt with them she felt a mixture of revulsion and fascination. She spotted the tiny little parasites in the fluid, no bigger than grains of rice. Thankfully they were dead, which made sense. If they were a parasitic organism that attached itself and depended on its host for life then naturally it would die with the death of the host.

What would Minerva think about all this? Natalia wondered as she began reaching into the opening she'd made through the removal of the breastplate. She gripped the heart in her gloved hand, squeezing the muscle experimentally. Something was hanging out of one of the heart's valves. Squinting, Natalia gripped the end of the thing with the forceps and pulled it out. The parasite dangled from the forceps, almost a foot long. Numb with shock, Natalia dropped it in the tray with the other appendages.

After another hour of digging and examination, Natalia found further signs of mutation: the lungs and kidneys had fused together and the intestines had begun to change into something else...what the thing was or what purpose it served, Natalia could only guess. It dawned on her for the first time, even after everything she'd witnessed in the last twenty-four hours that she was way out of her depth.

She spent another hour snapping photos, entering data into the computer, then cleaned up the mess she made. As she did so she looked at the man's face, which was bloated with rigor mortis. The tattoo of Clan Mureen was visible. Once this person had been a regular man, a human being just like her. So what had Adwele discovered? Natalia decided it was time she and Dinah had a real conversation.

She found Dinah sitting at her desk in Natalia's office with a bottle of whiskey. Dinah's face was red, her eyes were misty. They turned to Natalia. Focused on her. "Did you find anything out?"

"Not really." Natalia lowered herself into the seat opposite Dinah. She realized she no longer felt the love she used to feel for the woman. In the beginning, when she had been much more foolish and much less bitter, the love she'd felt for Dinah had bordered on reverence. Now she felt only exhaustion and an undercurrent of loathing. "If anything I only have more questions than answers."

Dinah sighed. "Fuck." She scooted the bottle towards Natalia's hand. Natalia shook her head and passed it back, setting the bottle down with an audible thud. "We could have found out more," Dinah said, her voice tight with anger. "If Danni-fucking-Aamodt hadn't killed Adwele we could have had more answers."

"It's not Danni's fault. I asked him to kill Adwele."

"I know you did," Dinah said softly. There was no anger in her voice, only the same weight of exhaustion Natalia felt. "Why? Why did you do that?"

"Because you wouldn't and I knew Danni would. I knew he would know what needed to be done in the end." Natalia's voice trembled with barely suppressed anger. "And twice you tried to have Danni killed. To what end?"

Dinah didn't answer. Her face was hard as stone.

"The first time you sent Mikael to kill him because you wanted to see what he was capable of; you read his memoir and you wanted to see if you could use his gifts and skills as a weapon to win the takeover in your insane mind. And the second time was because he undermined you. Both times he undermined you." Tears of anger poured down Natalia's cheek. Her chest felt tight. She didn't just feel anger and resentment but a deep sadness as well. Not sadness but grief, she thought. I've lost the woman I loved. She's gone, replaced by a madwoman.

Natalia rose to her feet, standing on legs that felt made of wood. She backed away several steps, stopping halfway between the desk and the door. "I've loved you for almost half my life, Dinah Fezalf. I've given you my loyalty; I've supported your every decision, without question. I've given you my heart and my body. There was nowhere you could go where I would not follow. It's only now I see what a foolish, foolish woman I've been. You're not the woman I thought you were. You disgust me."

Without another word, Natalia left the room broken hearted.

                                …

Dinah downed a gulp of whiskey, then another, and then another, until she could no longer feel her throat. "When did my life turn into such a piece of shit?" she muttered. Only the banshee shriek of the wind answered her.

In her mind, Dinah replayed all the words Natalia had said to her just a moment ago. This hadn't just been one of Natalia's fits as a result of holding her emotions in for too long - this was much more serious. A wedge had been driven between them, a bridge burned, and Dinah had a feeling it was irreparable.

Dinah felt the urge to bury her face in her hands and cry. Her eyes burned with tears, threatening to overflow. When was the last time she'd just allowed herself to have a good cry? She couldn't remember.

Towards the end of his life, Joseph Fezald hadn't looked like himself. His face and belly had become bloated, his eyes jaundiced. He would piss and shit himself and flounder around helplessly in the middle of the night, unable to find the bathroom. Dinah's mother refused to help him. As far as Ninah Fezald was concerned, Joseph had died a long time ago. So the responsibility of caring for her father fell solely on Dinah's shoulders. She helped him in the bathroom when he needed it, helped him out of his soiled clothes and into fresh ones, and nursed him as best she could.

"Why do you even bother?" Ninah asked her one night, after her daughter had finished cleaning up one of Joseph's messes. She looked at Joseph's face with the purest look of hate. "I could just slit his throat with a knife and spare ourselves this mess. I can't stand to see my only daughter scoop up her father's shit."

"We are not barbarians, Mother," Dinah said patiently.

"We are barbarians, daughter," said her mother. "Always remember that. We wouldn't be on this planet if we weren't."

Dinah remembered the day she'd ran through the cold of night to grab Minerva Kreig, the head of the clinic. The pain in Joseph's abdomen had been so bad he'd fainted while sitting upright at the kitchen table. It was one of the rare occasions Minerva made a house call, bringing her young assistant, Natalia, with her.

It was as Minerva stooped over Joseph to examine him that Dinah noticed Natalia's beauty. She'd glimpsed the young woman before but was only now truly seeing her for the first time. Her dark hair, glowing with youth and vitality; her soft, clear skin; her dark eyes full of gentle strength and quiet determination. It was this moment, this simple yet unforgettable moment, when Dinah fell in love.

Almost fifteen years later Dinah was sobbing for real now, her shoulders shaking. She felt as if her heart was splitting in two.