This week's prompt is 'sapphire dogs' from Xpholia and put me in the mind of jeweled statues and from there, we got another excerpt of live under a hollow mountain, where men keep monsters at bay... but some of the latter might include the former, too. Enjoy!
Learning Curve:
The instant Jack saw the morning duty roster he knew someone was once again trying to kill Stacey. Hector’s mother-in-law had taken a bad fall and she was in the hospital. The prognosis was good and she was expected to be in there for just a day or two, but he still needed the time off to be there for her and his wife – and all jokes aside, Hector’s mother-in-law was a sweet woman. Everyone in Hector’s division was already working; in the wake of the CS-1147 incident, everyone was on edge and doubling down on their work. Breaches like that weren’t supposed to happen, but Hector still needed that time off.
Jack had had no problem signing off when Stanley Argyle from his section volunteered to switch shifts with Hector. Stan was a good, dependable man who’d worked in multiple containment sections. Jack had never had a problem with him, but his name was close enough to Stacey Agrain’s that someone had swapped it in the shift rosters, expecting it to slide by.
Up until that point, Jack had just about convinced himself that Stacey slipping through the intake process and getting assigned to some of the most dangerous care levels really was a series of mistakes. Until Barry could sort out the personnel situation, he’d been keeping her under his wing, making sure she didn’t get herself killed. She was a good kid. Earnest, ready to help and breathtakingly stupid. At least her brand of dumb was a complete lack of common sense and not an inability to process information like some of the absolute morons Jack had run into throughout his life. Most important of all, she wanted to learn. He couldn’t say the same for many of the latter, and that was the only reason Jack had kept her around instead of washing her out of security into a secretarial role. Plus, it didn’t hurt to have a board member’s daughter in your division.
Stacey had been doing well over the last couple weeks. She was getting a little too friendly with Ophydia, but Jack’s section was one of the safer parts of the mountain. None of its residents were predisposed to random murders. He figured she’d she’d be safe here and learn enough to break through that air-headedness.
Until he’d turned his back for one damn minute.
Jack had been looking forward to a little vacation. Not much, just a day or two to himself. God knows he’d earned it and his section was tightly-run, one of the few that could spare personnel in the wake of the recent breach, so he hadn’t seen any problem with taking some of his leave over the next couple days. It’d be a chance to just relax during the opening of fishing season, bag himself a few nice trout and come back refreshed. He’d just come up to the mountain to drop off some paperwork before heading to the lake. That was when he’d caught the duty roster out of the corner of his eye and realized that it wasn’t the one he’d signed off on.
Stacey was in the Treasury.
Each section of the mountain had its own official and often unofficial name. The oldest sections, the ones carved by hand and still used thick steel bars to keep their inhabitants safely contained were called ‘the caves’. The lagoon’ were the sections where the aquatic guests resided and so forth.
The Treasury was where the inanimate mimics were kept, the ones that imitated rocks, plants or human artifacts. You could often find them in tombs, ruined cities, shipwrecks and even underwater. Smaller ones might look like books, lamps, or canopic jars. Larger ones would be treasure chests, furniture, crates and other paraphernalia. They could go for decades without eating, waiting for something to wander too close. A good sign, Jack had been told, of whether or not you were looking at a mimic or an actual artefact was if the site had been previously explored. Grave robbers would take everything of value and leave the site open to infestation by animals more dangerous than rates, spiders and fungal spores. Finding an intact treasure chest in a room where everything else had been stolen was either a miracle, or you weren’t really looking at a treasure chest at all.
There were also mimics that took the forms of statues, staying still for entire human lifetimes, waiting for prey to come to them. Others hedged their bets. In the highest-security cells of the treasury were statues of gold and silver, laced with expensive stones or seemingly carved from gems larger than a man. At least, so they appeared. The only way to know for certain that weren’t truly what they appeared was to get close enough to touch them... and then you’d have far more pressing problems than whether or not that six-foot dog was truly carved from sapphire or not.
These creatures didn’t just appeal to curiousity, avarice and greed; some of them had an additional hunting mechanism. They produced alpha-wave sounds just below normal human hearing, but not perception. These created sensations of relaxation, reducing fear levels and drawing humans towards them. If you were prepared for it, it didn’t have any impact on you, but the staff who maintained the treasury still used sound-cancelling headphones and white noise generators to block out the mimics’ lures.
Each mimic was fed once every six months. They only ate live prey, so the feeding crews brought in a variety of livestock – chickens, rabbits, goats and mid-sized pigs – for them. Though the animals weren’t drawn to lamps and treasure chests like humans were, they’d eventually wander too close and that would be that. Once a mimic had you, it was almost impossible to escape. Most of the time you were dead before you knew you were in danger and all the kicking and thrashing that happened was just spasming muscles from a misfiring nervous system.
If you didn’t know what you were in for, you could very easily get caught not only by the beauty of a gemstone stature, but lured in by its assuring subsonic trilling. Jack was hurrying, half-expecting at any moment to hear the shriek of an alert and the blare of the intercom calling for a medical response team. The feeders knew what they were doing, but all it took was one moment of inattention, especially for a young woman who, despite all her book knowledge, had as much common sense as a sack of doorknobs.
Jack’s heart didn’t stop pounding in his chest until he reached the Treasury and saw the situation for himself. The mimic cells were small rooms honeycombed by narrow walkways between them and above. Standard procedure for feeding was to lower the animals through the ceiling into the enclosure and let things happen from there. When the cell needed to be cleaned or maintenance performed, security officers with heavy plexiglass shields went in, staying between the mimic and the service personnel.
The section chief saw the feeding team and their wagon moving along the reinforced upper walkway. They were just about done; in some of the cells the feed animals were wandering around, inspecting their new - and very temporary – environments. In others, grisly feeding had already begun, blood dribbling from fanged maws as prehensile radulae and teeth reduced meat and bone to scraps with grim efficiency. The team was just about to head into the secure sections where the most dangerous mimics waited.
Stacey was walking alongside them, her head turning as she saw Jack approach. Her hair was tucked under her cap. She did learn... eventually. Jack just wanted to make sure she survived those experiences. “Sir?” she asked. “I thought you were off today.”
“I was,” he said. “Just decided to drop off some papers and check in before I left. Saw you were escorting the mimic feeding teams today and thought I’d come see how it’s going.”
Maybe he was being alarmist. Stacey had studied every inhabitant under the mountain and then some. She knew how dangerous these monsters were. He was worrying over nothing...
...and then he saw her kneel by the open hatch to an enclosure, staring down at a statue, her eyes possessing the same glassy edge as others being caught in a mimic’s subvocal calls. He could feel them too as he drew closer, a hum just below the threshold to truly hear it. It made his muscles loosen and the knot in his stomach unwind. He didn’t look into the enclosure, putting a hand on Stacey’s shoulder.
That was enough to break the spell and she blinked, standing up and closing the hatch. “Sorry,” she murmured. “I just got caught up by the worksmanship. How do they know to put that level of detail? How do they know to make it?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Just stay focused, all right? That one was singing to you and you were listening.”
“Oh.” Her face reddened. “I’m sorry sir, I didn’t-”
“Be careful,” he told her. “All it takes is a fraction of a second. That’s how fast they are.” Behind him, the other staff were whispering. If Stacey had gone in, none of them would have been able to help her. If any of them tried, they’d be risking their own lives. He was going to get a talking-to from Dupree, the treasury’s section chief.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you though the last of it. Looks like you’re almost done anyways.”
She nodded, taking extra care to be cautious, but the damage had very nearly been done. Just a minor system snafu, that’s what Barry had told him the first time. Once was an accident, twice was a coincidence. Three times was enemy action, but Jack didn’t need to wait for a third incident. Someone in the mountain was out to get Stacey Agrain. He didn’t know why and he didn’t have any proof that he could point at, but he knew it in his gut. He was going to have to figure out who wanted a clueless young woman dead and put a stop to it before they succeeded.