Okay, guys. Are you ready for some angst and exposition? Or as I like to call it, "angstposition"? You're not? Well…sorry, I guess. If you don't want to bother with that, you can just skip to the end, which is a rather good bit. I'll admit that part of my delay in posting this is that I wanted it to meet everyone's expectations, but some chapters are like brownie batter – the more you fiddle with them, the more you end up with brownies that are really tough and full of tunnels. I'm not so good at metaphors, okay?
Edit: I realized after I uploaded this that FFN didn't like the little dividers I'd added, so I had to re-upload this a few times. Sorry for weirdness.
Chapter 8 – The Descent
Dib spread his hand on the DNA scanner. Quivering apprehension far worse than the actual pain settled in him as he waited for the machine to pick a finger. A needle pricked the tip of his middle finger, drawing a quiet yelp from Dib as it jabbed beneath his sensitive, tooth-gnawed nail. The readout dinged happily at him, as though having his father's DNA was an accomplishment.
"Identity: Roger Membrane. Status: Approved for entry."
The door to the basement labs opened with a hissing whoosh, dampness escaping from the lower levels. As much as he resented that his father's chromosomes swam in his cells, Dib had to admit that there were certain benefits to being a clone. Like having access to the entirety of the Membrane Research Center.
Dib began his descent to the fourth underground floor, down into the darkness where what remained of Zim was preserved. Any leftover anger from his outburst at the restaurant had vanished like smoke, leaving only an empty, aching queasiness. The patient dread before an operation, the quiet grief of sitting down to an ill-prepared-for test, multiplied a thousand writhing times like a nest of snakes.
Here the air was stagnant, bitter - Dib felt the dust and bacteria so indicative of decay rattle around in his lungs as he breathed. The insulation was much poorer so far into the earth. Combined with the chill of refrigeration units, it was nearly as cold inside these labs as outdoors. Dib wrapped his arms around himself as he walked.
Doors passed by, lined up in perfect neatness with tiny windows revealing their inner secrets. All identical stainless-steel-and-plastic rectangles, save for the labels on each one.
"Robotic Weasel mRNA Synthesis"
"Super-duper Toast Molecular Crystallization Machine"
"Time-travelling Bacteriophage Incubation"
None of these interested him. They were just side projects, Ph.D. factories for his father to sign off on. He had three more floors to go before he accomplished his mission.
Mission. That's a filthy word. Nothing good comes from missions.
For once Dib had to agree with his whispering subconscious. That savage Hunter that was curled quietly inside of him had a thing for missions, but the waking, black-haired teenager who kept it carefully caged did not. Nothing good had come from Zim's mission to conquer earth and nothing good had come from Dib's own mission to thwart him.
He'd mostly shoved his thoughts about the whole incident into a cardboard box in the basement of his mind - just as well hidden and difficult to access as the storage lab Dib was making his way toward. It had become exhausting to brood over. His outbursts and conniptions and paranoia had gotten nearly unmanageable after Zim was captured. For the better part of two years three different doctors had played kitchen with Dib's body chemistry, prescribing antidepressant after sedative after antipsychotic until he could work himself out. Or at least until he began sleeping on his own again.
Self-repression worked the best. Ignoring it every time it reared its ugly head. Distracting himself with research or television or his job whenever his throttled emotions emerged for a talk.
"You're not there if I don't see you," he'd think childishly, looking away from the slavering pink elephant in his brain the same way he'd resented so many adults for doing when he insisted that Zim was an alien.
The box was coming open as he walked. Every thunk of his boots against the linoleum peeled off a piece of tape. The medicinal clean reek of disinfectant was taking a razorblade to the cardboard. Dib was beginning to realize he'd have to look inside if he wanted to face Zim in any vaguely-sane mental capacity.
Dib had hated Zim. Hated him with all the impotent rage that only a neurotic boy covered in the bruises of bullies' fists could imagine. It had been all-consuming, suffocating, to hate another being so completely.
And from that hatred the Hunter was born.
Staring across the cafeteria in Gradeskool at Zim's pathetic attempts to eat the school lunches, Dib remembered feeling the Hunter kick and scream with frustration as he resisted the urge to tackle the alien right then and there. Here was the reason no one listened to him. Here was the reason they would all be so damned sorry when he proved them wrong. Here was the horror Dib was selflessly saving them from (in his head, anyway). Along the line Zim had become a symbol of everything that was unbearably wrong in his life. So destroying the alien was the only solution.
The fact that he was twelve-damned-years-old and had the perspective of a brain-damaged mole person had never occurred to him.
Perhaps a better-adjusted boy, one with friends or an attentive father, wouldn't have fallen so easily into the trap of hatred and obsession. But Dib had never been particularly well-adjusted. The rest of the world had shut him out, crammed him in lockers, water-boarded him in toilets, all while he tried so desperately to show them the error of their ways.
It had gotten a little maddening, being so ignored. Pointing at shadows, screaming without a mouth: that had been his life. Somewhere amidst the loneliness and frustration a dogmatic violence had gotten the better of him, one that cared far more for vindication than heroics.
Seventeen-year-old Dib was reaching the end of the hallway. He glanced nervously behind him as he opened the door to the stairwell, listening to the metallic creak echo down into the darkness.
The clammy coldness of the lab only worsened as he stomped down the steps. Dib wasn't sure if his queasiness was caused by the shifting chemicals in the air or his own mental self-examination. A wet, wool blanket of foreboding was inching further over him as he relived the rivalry he and Zim had shared.
It wasn't uncommon that he would get tired or discouraged. Dib could only have so many people call him insane before he began to wonder about himself. The scientist in him watched failure after failure and insisted that he was mad to keep repeating the same attempts over and over again. Whenever things seemed at their darkest, whenever he and humanity seemed doomed, the Hunter would rear its head. It would knock his inner scientist out of the way and demand vengeance and blood and pain for what Zim was putting him through. And Dib found that the Hunter's arguments were often convincing.
At the end of the day, it had more to do with being right than doing right.
Corny bullshit? Certainly. True? Absolutely. A minor difference that nearly put him in the nuthouse? Check-freaking-mate.
Dib had reached the fourth basement floor by now. The musty smell of dust had overridden much of the chemical tang from the upper levels. Low-energy bulbs provided only enough light to stumble by, and Dib found himself groping at the walls as he walked. His legs were getting all noodly as he approached Lab (-)4-R.
Note to self: avoid excessive running right before an emotional baggage-claiming session.
The door didn't look any different. There was no neon sign announcing that Dib's greatest regret, his most feared trophy, was residing just beyond the reinforced laminate. He braced his feet squarely in front of the door. He found himself chewing at the flaked nail of his little finger on one hand with the other resting on the handle, trying to remember the last time he'd been down here as he worked up the courage to turn it.
Capturing Zim had been an accident, really. There had been no Independence Day-style planning involved. Dib had just managed to kick Zim in the head during one of their particularly violent after-skool brawls. He hadn't woken up that day and said to himself "today is day that it ends." The end had just snuck up on him. Or, rather, the end had collapsed unconscious with a bootprint to the temple two blocks from his dad's laboratories.
Dib had used his DNA to get into the labs that day, too. Only he'd been dragging a knocked-out alien behind him at the time. Once he'd gotten Zim's disguise off, there weren't a lot of places left for the Irken to hide. Dib had even gotten to host his dad's show that night, when Professor Membrane revealed to the world that "my insane son's foreign friend is actually a horrible extraterrestrial!"
A week had gone by between turning Zim in and his biomedical examination. For seven days, Dib had ruled victorious. Photos of the alien (his alien!) were plastered on the news, every magazine, and eventually in a ghost-written book once Zim's base was torn apart at the hinges by government agents. Dib remembered being annoyed at how much Zim's plans for world domination were downplayed - no one seemed willing to acknowledge how close they had all come to destruction. No one congratulated him quite enough. The fact that Zim was, at the end of the day, just a single tiny alien going to seventh grade seemed to overrule all of Dib's insistence that his nemesis was an intergalactic Hitler.
Oh well, he'd resigned himself. A moment was all you could hope from perfection. He'd been right, hadn't he? Wasn't that all that mattered? Sure, international fame and recognition for discovering an alien was nice, but his personal battle was finally over. The Hunter glutted itself on his victory. Zim was captured, and Dib would be able to enjoy watching his enemy dismantled piece-by-piece. He'd even worn a tie to the special occasion.
Sitting between his father and sister in the front-row of the medical amphitheater had been awesome. There really wasn't any other word in his twelve-year-old mind for it. Years of work about to culminate in a bloodbath of vindication. Gaz kept getting annoyed at how he was standing up and leaning over the railing, trying to get the best possible view of Zim's spread-eagle form on the examination table below.
The doctor overseeing the operation had been very polite. He thanked everyone for coming in a mildly-British baritone and went cheerfully about this vivisection business as though it was a Sunday picnic. The juxtaposition between the doctor's narration and the horror itself reminded Dib of a demented nature documentary.
Zim had screamed. High-pitched and grating and punctuated with pure agony. Beyond physical pain, a tone that Dib expected only he could hear - it was a shriek of fear and failure. The Invader's eyes had widened and rolled in their sockets as all of his freakish organs were arranged around him. Pupils weren't necessary to watch the comprehension and sanity slip out of a being's eyes.
"I'm dreadfully sorry for the noise, ladies and gentlemen. My people are now working on silencing the creature," the doctor had said pleasantly, when Zim's shrieking evidently became bothersome. Dib didn't understand why it had taken everyone so long to realize how awful the sound was. How traumatic the hollering of such an arrogant and intelligent creature reduced to a science project. From the first un-anesthetized cry Dib had felt a strange, uneasy sickness. A sense of dread tapping at the door of his pride. Must have had something to do with the frequency of Zim's voice.
One of the assistants gagged him with a bandage. The muffled moaning was quieter, but being silenced just seemed to make the alien thrash around more with every scalpel taken to his green skin. Irkens bleed green. Every time a technician nicked an artery Dib would see a flash of viridian before someone would staunch the flow of blood, prolonging the ordeal even further.
Zim looked at him. Dib stared back, trying to convince himself that the would-be Invader was too delirious from pain to actually see him. The twenty feet between the examination table and the amphitheater railing became a few inches. Somewhere in the magenta eyes, beyond the haze of madness, a recognition shone. Zim glared at him through blood and gurgling viscera and Dib saw the silent message clear enough:
You did this.
Dib's gleaming tower of ambition had come crashing down around him. The Hunter thumped him proudly on the back with bloodied hands. Some resigned part of his psyche realized that even this victory was failure. Dib had sold his soul for the sake of conquest, and this was his reward: a three-foot-tall alien torn into four pieces and the knowledge he was capable of damning a sentient being to death by torture for his own satisfaction.
Dib gazed into the abyss, and looked away in shame when it gazed back.
He remembered trying to leave the amphitheater. Being afraid of getting sick over the side of the banister. His father's black-gloved hand had grabbed Dib's arm as he tried to push past.
"Where are you going, son? They're just about to dissect the nervous system, which I'm sure you won't want to miss. Isn't this what you wanted?"
Professor Membrane didn't seem to find anything odd about bringing his children to watch Zim's evisceration. Dib slunk miserably back into his seat, leaning as far away from the railing as possible. He popped the collar of his jacket and tried vainly to cover his ears against the sound of Zim's whimpering. Dib's appreciation for the crime against nature going on below was his alone.
They hadn't killed him. Zim was much too valuable a specimen to euthanize. They investigated all his organs and then haphazardly replaced them like Legos in a box. Took a few that he didn't need or that could be imitated by machines. And then he'd been stored in the bowels of the Membrane laboratories in suspended animation until another question about aliens needed answering. At least, that's what Dib's father would later tell him - by then he'd begun his guilt-ridden insomnia and was knee-deep in a total mental breakdown.
It became the Professor's second full-time job to handle the analysis of Zim's anatomy and technology. Dib was too drugged on anti-psychotics to contribute too much beyond drooling on the couch beside Gaz as she played video games. That was about the time that his sister had started cooking and doing laundry, managing his medications and babysitting his half-lobotomized ass. Some big brother he'd been.
At least acting stoned all the time had calmed him enough that he stopped drawing the attention of the bullies at school. Dib had pulled himself together eventually - working out a system for shoving every ugly thought and disturbing image down into the deepest storeroom of his mind - until only his nightmares and nail-biting remained. At least they didn't medicate you for that.
His love of the paranormal never really slept, especially not when he'd received an offer for an internship from Agent Bill a couple of years later. Dib just tended to prefer cases with ghosts, or demons or poltergeists - things that were hard to dissect once they were found.
Snap out of it, asshat. That's enough why-me self-pitying bullshit. None of your whining is going to get that door open any faster or get this whole case over with any sooner.
Dib really wasn't sure why his abrupt inner monologue tended to sound like Gaz. Maybe his sister was just a schizophrenic hallucination herself - who the hell knew anymore? It was getting difficult for him to keep track of his life's non sequiturs. At any rate, the door needed to come open. He needed to move forward. If Zim was in there he'd turn himself into a psych ward on the way home. If the Irken was missing...well, that was a flaming tooth-pick bridge he'd have to cross when he came to it.
Squaring his shoulders in a show of mock confidence (despite the fact that he stood alone in the gloomy hallway), Dib reached out, turned the handle, and opened the door.
The darkened lab was surprisingly quiet. He didn't know what he'd expected - a carefully crafted torture chamber? A refrigerator full of alien guts? - but what Dib found was a single, isolated tank in the center of a small prep room. There were counters against the far wall, shelves of neatly labeled boxes, paper towels at home in their rolls. The whole place seemed so normal for housing Zim's tortured, half-conscious remains.
Normalcy is deceiving, Dibshit.
He crept around the tank, eyeing it from top to bottom. The part facing the door was opaque, likely to keep any specimen within from being blinded by the light of the hallway. What an asinine little kindness to have on a vivisected alien. The tank was cylindrical, with quarter-inch plastic walls and machinery at the top and bottom to monitor the living thing inside. The whole thing was full of some nutrient-rich pink goo; occasionally a bubble would froth to the few inches at the top free of liquid.
The clear half of the tank rotated slowly into view. Dib saw a lumpy shape floating in the center. His stomach seized and fell like a bird having a heart attack mid-flight. What had he seen in the forest? It couldn't have all been his mind screwing with him, could it? Gaz had smelled the paper, seen the Irken writing...
Dib needed more proof than a shapeless blob floating in goo. He inched his way closer to the glass, unsure if the thing inside could see him. Pressing his face against the tank, carefully avoiding crushing his glasses, Dib looked inside for a chunk of green skin or a roving pink eye.
Instead he saw cyan and metal. The tiny robot waved a claw-like hand excitedly at him.
"Dib-human! Master said you might show up! You got you any bacon?"
GIR's high-pitched voice warbled through the thick liquid. Dib stared fixedly for a few seconds at the squirming robot that seemed to be dancing inside the tank. Some stuttering mix of anger and shock roiled within him, like writing a ten-page-paper and forgetting to save the document. He heaved his fists above his head and brought them crashing down onto the side of the tank with all the force his twisted muscles could bear.
The thing gave. Not even in the hairline-cracks-slowly-spreading-like-mold sort of way. Dib felt the plastic crumble beneath his knuckles as if it had been rotting for years, and in a bursting whoosh the pink fluid dumped out into a quivering puddle on the floor.
GIR seemed ecstatic at his sudden violence. The little robot bounced out of the hole in the tank, stood squarely in front of Dib and started breakdancing.
"Where is Zim?" Dib demanded, unimpressed by GIR's performance. His antennae drooped sadly or a moment as GIR thought (for as much as he was able), and then perked up as he seemed to realize something.
"Zim's hangin' out at the Crazy House! He got a new friend over for dinner." GIR began sniffing at Dib's boots curiously. He felt the miniscule weight of the thing press down on his toes.
"The Crazy House? You got that ri-"
Dib stopped himself mid-sentence as realization choked him, studying GIR's curved, steely head and pronged fingers as he undid his shoelaces. The screaming-metal, tiny-footed ghost that Zita had mocked him with at school a thousand years ago rocketed to the forefront of his brain.
She and Torque must have heard Zim fumbling around on a different floor when they were making out in the abandoned asylum. The fact that they'd made it out of the place alive was certainly a much more impressive accomplishment than Torque taking the football team to state last semester.
Turning a decrepit mental institution into his new lair? Sounded very Zim. The Irken had taken up residence in quite a potent symbol of Dib's mental state, he had to admit.
"Since when you get so TALL?" GIR squeaked, snapping him back into the dark laboratory.
With a speed that surprised even him Dib bent down and snatched the robot's warm, metallic body. Amidst GIR's hysterical screaming Dib slammed him against the laboratory wall, one hand spread across the robot's chest as he held him still. All four of the springy limbs flailed uselessly against Dib's aching palm.
"Who does he have with him? Answer me!" he hissed, when GIR's panicked whimpering reached a fever pitch. GIR stared at him with pitiful, half-moon eyes that summoned no sympathy from Dib in his current mood.
"AaAaahHH! LEGGO!"
GIR began to emit sparks in his terrified fit - the prickling tickle was enough to make Dib release him. GIR collapsed into a clanging heap on the floor, his turquoise eyes flitting back and forth for a second or two. He threw his hands in the air in a poorly-timed imitation of the Wave, until Dib realized GIR was grasping for the stick-like communicator that had erupted from his back.
"Hey, you think I'm going to let you talk to Zim?" Dib snapped, boots grinding against the filthy linoleum for an instant before he launched himself towards the robot. He grappled at GIR's arms, sweaty fingers sliding off the slick metal, trying to hold the thing still.
GIR spasmed about in what looked something like a seizure before Dib saw the jets emerging from the robot's feet. He'd forgotten the little android could do that.
That was all the musing Dib managed on the subject. With a sputtering sound, as if the jetpack was clogged with fluid (or tuna, just as likely) GIR's thrusters ignited. GIR kicked violently back at him, releasing a scream of "CHURRO BLAST!" as a burst of flame erupted from his jetfeet.
The fire was more surprising than dangerous - but a flash of heat in his face was enough to knock Dib backwards. His fingers slipped off GIR's wrist and he narrowly avoided falling on his ass in the pile of broken plastic and pink amniotic imitation.
"MASTER! DIB IS HERE! HE ACTIN' ANGRY!" GIR screamed into his communicator. He hovered just below the ceiling, right out of Dib's reach - though he wasted plenty of calories (standing on his tiptoes, arms flailing like a moron) trying to grab the flying robot.
"Excellent! Try and distract him, GIR. I very nearly have the Dib-human's sister in captivity" came the grating voice from the communicator. And then in the background, muffled and angry:
"Get your fithly paws off me, Zim, before -" With a gasping choke, the second voice cut off.
An icy hand wrenched at Dib's intestines - clawing, twisting, summoning pain from nowhere and nausea in his gut. Zim's voice sounded tinny through the little speaker, but it was recognizable enough to settle dread in him as if he'd walked through a ghost. The alien was still alive. And he had Gaz.
Rage started to mingle sickeningly with Dib's fear at the sight of Zim's minion hovering six inches above him. There was some part of him that used to be fascinated by GIR's sophistication. That part sat silent.
Dib bent his body like a coiled spring and snapped into the air, grabbing GIR's communicator mid-stalk. He hurled the narrow pipe downward - GIR squealing excitedly in tow - and screamed into the microphone:
"Don't you dare touch her. I swear to God Zim, I'm going to find you and -"
"Hahaha! Find me! I laugh at your PATHETIC joke, Dib-filth. I highly doubt you will be able to stop running away long enough to save your DISGUSTING littermate."
With a soft click the transmission ended. Dib's grip on the stalk weakened as Zim's words started to seep into his overclocked brain. Without his notice GIR restarted his jetpack feet and the sudden pulse of fire was enough to make Dib release the communicator.
"DISTRACTIOOON!" GIR screeched. Giving no warning, the android kicked his thrusters into high gear, flame burning white hot from the soles of his feet. A tiny shockwave rippled through the lab, rattling delicate machinery and knocking an already-disoriented Dib nearly to his knees. GIR threw his arms out in front of him like Superman and rocketed out of the lab, screaming all the while.
By the time Dib pulled himself to his feet, GIR's manic giggling was fading down the hallway outside.
Dib sprinted pointlessly to the lab door, managing to catch a glimpse of red as GIR jetted into the stairwell. The little robot was gone, likely halfway across town to join his master by now. A master with a captive.
So this was the game. The spider had gotten tired of chasing its prey. This time it had carefully chosen some bait and waited. A clever plan. Very simple.
Except that the bait was his goddamned sister. Dib fought the images of Zim holding her down, tearing her open, cradling her head as they scrabbled for attention in his mind. The idea of the alien touching her made his hands shake as a clammy coldness settled over him. Gaz wasn't supposed to be involved in this. It wasn't her battle, and it certainly wasn't her mistake. Dib leaned against the lab doorjam, eyes fixed on the tiled floor, and felt in some strange way that Zim had violated an unspoken law of war.
You turned him in five years ago. Maybe he's just repaying the favor. Sister for a vivisection - sounds about even, I'd say.
"You don't know what you're talking about" Dib snapped, listening to his voice echo sadly down the hallway. There was nothing even about taking Gaz. What did Zim know about family? About love? She was his little sister, and at the end of the day, Gaz was his to protect.
Dib didn't want to play Zim's game. He didn't want to face down the enemy who he'd undone and been undone by. The past few days had shown him the horror and inhumanity that Zim was capable of. But what else could he do? There wasn't another person on the planet who understood Zim the way he did. No one else was really his equal.
He had to try. He had to undo some small part of the destructive chain-reaction he'd begun in sixth grade, from the first moment he pointed at Zim across the classroom and screamed "ALIEN!"
This needed to end. He was going to finish it, once and for all - save his sister, save his sanity, save the world - or die trying.
Geez, Gaz is right. You really do have a savior complex. Alright, genius. Let the game begin. Again.
Dib scraped his boot on the floor, rubbing off any remaining sludge from the broken tank. He fixated for a second or two on dusting off his jacket, which by now reeked of smoke and gasoline from GIR's jetpack. Every muscle in his body tensed like a tightly-wound watch, ready to spring. With a rushing release of energy, Dib tore down the laboratory hallway and thundered back up the stairs, leaving the remnants of Zim's prison behind him.
I guess the cast has been reunited, finally. Dib's really fooling himself if he thinks this is going to be a standard, "Bloaty's Pizza Hog"-esque rescue mission, though. We've got several more chapters to go, quite a few more loose ends to tie up, and they're all going to be quite the ride.
I've been staring at this chapter for so long that I'm really not sure anymore if it's any good, so I'd love some feedback on it, if any of you all have the time. Otherwise, stay tuned for Chapter 9, coming up as soon as I finish these three essays and take an Evolution exam.