BioShock Rapture

Redgrave grimaced. “We only looked away a couple of seconds. We were watching for splicers—”

“I know—forget it. What about Sam Lutz?”

“Come on.”

Feeling leaden, Bill went with Redgrave to the tavern’s back rooms. Number 7’s combination door was open. He stepped in and immediately saw the two of them stretched out on the mattress, on their backs, side by side: two corpses holding hands, barely recognizable as Mariska and Samuel Lutz. There were a couple of empty pill bottles lying on the floor nearby.

The sunken eyes of the cadavers were closed, eyelids like wrinkled parchment, their faces yellow and emaciated. The shriveling of death had given their lips the same pinched expression of disapproval, as if they were silently judging all the living. They wore their best clothes, he noticed.

“Suicide. And there’s this…” He pointed—beside the bodies was one of the ubiquitous tape recorders.

Bill pressed Play on the tape recorder. Mariska Lutz’s voice came distant and tinny from the little recorder, as if speaking across the gulf of death: “We saw our Mascha today. We barely recognized her. ‘That’s her,’ Sam said.” Mariska gave out a strange little sobbing laugh. “‘You’re crazy,’ I told him. ‘That thing—that is our Mascha?’ But he was right. She was drawing blood out of a corpse … and when she was done, she walked off hand in hand with one of those awful golems! Our Mascha!”

Bill stopped the recording.

Redgrave cleared his throat. “Well. I expect … they knew they couldn’t get her back. She was already … gone. You know, changed so much. So they…”

He gestured limply at the pill bottles.

Bill nodded. “Yeah. Just … just leave ’em here. I’ll seal it up. This’ll be their crypt, for now.”

Redgrave stared at him as if he might object—then he shrugged. “Whatever you say.” He looked back at the bodies. “We only looked away for a moment or two.”

He shook his head and walked out, leaving Bill alone with the dead.

Atlas HQ, Hestia

1959

Walking up to Atlas’s office, Diane was still sweaty, shaky from the raid.

She’d had some training from Atlas’s guerillas, and she was almost used to slipping through the wire, waiting as the other team created the decoy, dashing past Ryan’s men. More than once she’d followed the other guerillas up a side passage, up the stairs, through some old maintenance passage—all of them carrying GI backpacks, to fill with supplies stolen from one of the constabulary armories.

But this time, when the guards broke in on them, just as they finished their “harvest” of the ammo—and just as Sorenson got control of the Big Daddy—the chaos had been exhilarating and nightmarish at once. Firing her own pistols, one in each hand, her heart slamming with each shot, she’d watched a constable go down, shrieking, dying. I’ve killed a man …

She’d cringed from blazing return fire, seen three of her comrades falling …

She decided, now, to record some of her impressions on her audio diary—she had decided she was going to be the historian of the revolution. She switched the recorder on with trembling hands, as she walked along. “We went on a raid outside the wire today. We snagged thirty-one rounds of buckshot, four frag grenades, a shotgun, and thirty-four ADAM. We lost McGee, Epstein, and Vallette.” She swallowed hard at that. She’d particularly liked Vallette. Too easy to reel off a list of the dead: the butcher’s bill, the guerillas called it. She went on, “We got one of those goddamn Big Daddies in the bargain, though. It was something awful what they had to do to that little girl to get the ADAM, but we didn’t start this thing. Ryan did. I can’t wait to tell Atlas. He’ll be so pleased…”

Diane stepped into Atlas’s office to let him know they’d gotten a Big Daddy—and stared in surprise at the stranger sitting at Atlas’s desk. He seemed to be recording an audio diary of his own. After a breathless moment, he was no longer a stranger. She hadn’t recognized him at first.

Something … the cold, cynical expression on his face and that sneering voice talking of long cons … made it seem impossible he could be anyone but Frank Fontaine.

He turned a look of angry shock at her—then put on Atlas’s expression. His voice became Atlas’s. “Miss McClintock … what are you doing here? Let me just…” He dropped the Atlas pretense, shaking his head—seeing in her face that she knew. Finishing in Frank Fontaine’s voice, “… turn this off…”

He switched off the tape recorder. It occurred to her that she should run. She’d found out something he would kill to keep secret.

But her feet seemed frozen to the floor; she was barely able to speak. “They trusted you! How could you let them die … for a lie?”