BioShock: Rapture

Rapture Detention 1956

Sullivan was worried about Head Constable Harker. The HC was breathing through his mouth like a man who’d just finished a two-mile run, but Sullivan knew damn well he’d been sitting at that desk at least half an hour. One of Harker’s cigars, still smoking, was just a butt in the seashell ashtray. Harker sat there, panting, staring into space, drumming his freckled fingers on the desk. The head constable was a short, thick, jowly man with receding red hair, a shabby black suit. Looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

“You asked me to come over, Harker, remember?” Sullivan said, sitting across from him. “You okay? You look kinda worse for wear.”

“Sure, I’m… I’m okay.” Harker reached up, unconsciously fingering the constable’s badge on his lapel. “I just sometimes wonder”—he glanced at the door to make sure it was closed—“if I made a mistake coming to Rapture.”

Sullivan chuckled. “Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger on that one. Don’t know many who don’t feel that way sometimes.”

Harker nodded, too rapidly. “But there’s still some true believers, Chief. Like Rizzo. Wallace. Ryan, of course. That crackpot, Sander Cohen. Maybe McDonagh. ’Course, we lost some too—like Greavy…” Harker sighed.

“Yeah, shame about Greavy—too confident, strutting around like he owned the place. They nearly got Bill McDonagh too.”

“I dunno, I don’t have a good feeling about it, Chief. I’m grateful you got me this post. But I shoulda stuck around in the States and, I don’t know, gone into something else…”

“Me and you, we’re badges, pal. Too old to change.” He could see Harker was scared, plenty scared. “What is it? I mean—there’s something that’s got you off-balance here. Something in particular. Why’d you call me over here?”

Harker rubbed a thumbnail raspily over his two-days’ growth of beard and reached into the desk drawer. He took out a pistol, stood up, stuck the pistol in his coat pocket, and said, “I’ll show you. Come on.”

They went into the corridor. Karlosky was waiting out there, a pump shotgun in his hands. Sullivan kept the Russian close when the Great Man didn’t need him. Yesterday that pump shotgun had cut a spider slicer nearly in half—and saved Sullivan’s neck.

Karlosky nodded at Harker, who just grunted and brushed past him, stumping down the hall on his short, thick legs, one hand in his coat pocket on that gun.

The head constable led them around a corner, past a black guard who unlocked a hallway door to let them into the cellblock. They strode past a series of insulated, locked cells, all on the left-hand side, where splicers—low enough on EVE to be containable—babbled and begged for their plasmids. A feral-looking woman, her face etched with plasmid lesions, spat at them through a barred cell-door window as they passed.

This place was grimier and crazier than Persephone. The “isolation facility” wasn’t full of splicer crazies, anyhow. Just political eccentrics.

At last Harker stopped near cell 15, where a hulking constable with nervous blue eyes and a leering smile leaned on the hallway’s metal wall, a tommy gun cradled in his arms. “Howdy Chief,” Cavendish said.

“A little over an hour ago,” Harker said, in a low voice, as Sullivan and Karlosky caught up with him at the cell door, “we bring in an unconscious splicer, right? Half-naked, lotta plasmid deformities on his face and all. Well, when we found this cocksucker he had some kind of fish-gutting hook in one hand, all covered with blood. And in the other hand he has a woman’s head. Her head—cut off her body, you get me? Sliced off just under the chin! Slick as a whistle! A brunette. Mighta been a pretty woman. I think maybe I saw this chippie dancing over in that strip joint, in Fort Frolic.” He licked his lips, glanced down the hall toward cell 18. “Well, this splicer, he’s kinda squeezin’ her head to his chest, looked like a kid hugging a baby doll. And he was sawing logs, this guy, snoring! Pat Cavendish there gets him cuffed and tries to wake him up, but the guy’s too sacked out. So Patrick gets some help, brings the son of a bitch up here, puts him in cell seventeen over there. We got the broad’s head in the freezer, in case you want to ID her.”

“Okay,” Sullivan said, shrugging. “Not the only homicidal splicer we’ve had. Pretty crazy, but lots of ’em are. He must’ve run outta EVE, got tired, plasmids needed recharging, took a snooze… so now you got ’im. Ryan’s talking about turning guys like this over to Gil Alexander for his… experiments. We’ll get him to a judge in the morning—”

Cavendish gave out a sniggering sound of contempt. “Boy-o have you got it wrong!”

Sullivan didn’t like Cavendish’s tone. But he didn’t like Cavendish at all. One of the bad eggs. Half Irish, half Suffolk Brit. Grin like a wolf. Liked to beat up prisoners. But a good man in a fight. “He ain’t run out of anything,” Cavendish went on. “Drank himself to sleep, I figure—that’s what it smelled like. Woke up still charged. He was in eighteen, last I looked.”

“What do you mean, last you looked?”

“There’s a new plasmid on the market,” Harker put in, almost whispering, eyes darting to the door of 18. “Only—it’s kind of black market. Fontaine hasn’t released it publicly. It’s supposed to make them extra crazy in record time, for one thing. For another—might be the most dangerous one around, if you think about it. Only, I figure these guys are probably too nuts to use it against the council. They’re all about goin’ with their impulses…”

“Use what?” Karlosky asked, impatiently.

“They can disappear,” Harker said. “And… go somewhere else! This guy, he comes in and out of that cell as he pleases. Pat—what do they call that plasmid?”

“Teleport.”

And at exactly that moment a sucking sound made them all look toward cell 18. Specks of free-floating blackness appeared in the air, sparkles of energy took on the approximate shape of a man—and the sound increased till it ended in a shoomp!—as a man appeared out of nowhere. He was a pale man, barefoot, naked from the waist down, wearing only a filthy, bloodstained work shirt. His hair was patchy brown; the angular face was hard to make out under all the plasmid excrescences. One of the growths had nearly blotted out his left eye. “Hey, you dog humpers is keeping me awake out here!” he snarled, spraying spittle past his snaggly yellow teeth. “I’m trying to finish my nap, for fuck’s sake! Well ain’t you the pips with your pretty badges! I want me one!”

Karlosky, Cavendish, Harker, and Sullivan were all bringing their guns to bear. A tommy gun, a shotgun, and two pistols—pointed at an empty space.

Empty because the splicer had teleported out of it. He still had plenty of EVE in him, and he had vanished —and reappeared behind Karlosky. He pulled Karlosky’s hair, hooting gleefully, and as the Russian spun toward him with the shotgun… the splicer vanished again, twinkling away…

Only to reappear, bringing a nasty smell and posing like a dancer, between Sullivan and the wall, yanking Sullivan’s right ear and cackling, “Hiya Chief!”

Bastard acts like one of them cartoons at the movies, Sullivan thought. He made a grab for the splicer—and felt his fingers pass through air that crackled with departing energy.

He turned to see the splicer grabbing the pistol from Harker with one hand, with the other tearing the constable’s badge off.

Sullivan got his pistol into play and fired at the splicer, squeezing the trigger a split second too late—the bullet passed through the place where the teleporter had been, ricocheting off the steel walls near Harker. The sucking sound came again, and then a flash of light from the cell window of 18.

Harker made a plaintive little eep sound, a noise you’d never expect from him— then he gasped as he slid down the wall, leaving a smear of blood. He fell on his face, squirming, groaning. The ricochet from Sullivan’s gun had hit the constable, and hard.

“Dammit, Harker!” Sullivan sputtered. As if it were Harker’s fault. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Just…” Harker gasped again. “Get the fucker…”

Tommy gun raised, Cavendish was stalking toward the window of cell 18. He peered through the small