End of Women: Part Five

Working With The Enemy

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The greenish tint colouring the inside of Balian Howard's eyelids read like a credit scroll at the end of his dream. That steady tapping of water droplets on his forehead was his alarm clock, the smell of rust and prickle of goosebumps on his arms the signal that it was morning once again.

He could hear movement nearby, slow and gentle bare footsteps, and the squeak and strain of rope on metal fasteners.  With something close to superhuman effort he reached up and pulled the thick coverings off himself and rolled his feet off the edge of his hammock, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. It felt ecstatic.

The world came sluggishly into focus. His feet were resting on a metal plate, about the size of a vehicle registration, striped yellow and black and bearing the word "DANGER" in Ukranian. The bunk room itself would not have looked out of place in the bowels of some enormous cargo ship, riddled with copper piping and pot-bellied drums of coolant. There were only two other hammocks in the bunk room; one was a little higher above him on a mezzanine with a glass floor, currently empty, and the other was directly across from him. A woman sat there, young, pretty and with a lithe, pale body, dressing herself in black leggings. Scattered around the flat surfaces beside her bed were bottles and tubs of various ointments she would rub into her skin or work into her sleek red hair. Balian looked away from her as she dressed, leaning back into the bed for a few merciful minutes.

"Don't do that." Alina said quietly as she brushed her hair. "Atminoff does not like laziness. You know this."

"Yeah, yeah." Balian rested his eyes for a moment in defiance of her. He still listened as she padded barefoot across the bunk room to the wash basin, ran the water and doused herself in all the important places. Not for the first time, Balian wondered how she took care of her monthly issues, given how discreet she had to be about her female condition around Atminoff. There were a good number of things about Alina he wondered, but had never asked.

"You think it will work today?" She called over her shoulder towards him. 

Balian cracked an eye.

"If it does, what will you do?"

She turned her head away again and threw her hair back over her shoulder, folding one leg over the other as she sat on a short stool.

"I guess that will be it for me, then. I can go back home, and wait."

Balian clenched his jaw, staring at the ceiling, then jumped up out of his hammock in one big bound. 

"Maybe then you'll tell me why you came here to begin with?" He asked her as he pulled on a green hazmat suit. She scoffed and ignored him.

A few minutes later they both entered the lab, dressed up in hazard protective gear. Even through the pyrex screen of his visor Balian could smell the curious mixture of rot and sulphur that he still had not gotten used to after six months of working with Atminoff. On his left was an immaculate workstation, every tool, dish, test tube, centrifuge and fusion power cell stowed and stored to a perfectionist's standard of neatness. On his right was a catalogue of failure.

Six fluid containers, about the size of a wardrobe, filled with a viscous green-tinged liquid and the suspended corpses of their previous attempts. The first, the one they had made when Alina had first arrived, barely resembled anything human. It was the size of an apple, had an overdeveloped spinal cord but a pea-sized skull and no organs. The second and third were more along the lines of a foetal dog, with the semi-formed claws to boot. The final three all had human appendages and skull shapes, but none of them, nor the three before them, had ever shown signs of a heartbeat. The fact that they had never lived was as much a relief to Balian as it was frustrating to Atminoff.