The Lore of Prometheus

by Graham Austin-King

  “Too bloody right,” Turner spat. I didn’t need to look around for him—half the squad were making their way along the hallway with us.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice quieter this time.

  I sighed, giving her a long look that didn’t seem to have any effect. “We were cornered. Well, captured, really.”

  “Bloody disaster is what it was,” Johnson muttered from behind her.

  I bit my lip at the interruption she wouldn’t have heard. “They were working their way through us, shooting them one by one in front of me.”

  “Oh my God!” her eyes went wide. “What happened to you?”

  “The bullet stopped,” I admitted. It felt good to talk about it with someone who didn’t instantly think I was crazy. “In mid-air, right in front of me.”

  “Oh, it was a neat trick, don’t get me wrong,” Turner put in. He poked at the bullet-hole in his forehead. “Your timing was well shit though, Roasties. I mean, it wouldnae have hurt you to decide you were Harry bloody Potter a wee bit sooner, would it?”

  She fell silent at that, though she watched me as we walked, making our way past the labs and offices. She was probably trying to decide if I was going to snap. If I was an asset or a liability. To be honest, I was probably both.

  A haunted expression slowly grew on her face as we walked. She glanced at the windows often. She knew this place, that much was obvious. Something had happened here and by her expression I suspected it was more something she’d done, rather than something that had been done to her. I didn’t ask about it. We didn’t have time, it was none of my business, and some things are best left buried—it’s keeping the bastards in the ground that seems to be where my trouble is.

  We moved quickly, there was no point in being subtle now that at least one person had seen us. I heard doors slamming twice, but we didn’t see anyone until we reached the lift. The smell of the blood and gunshots reached us before we even saw the bodies. Half a dozen guards lay strewn across the hallway, broken and twisted next to the splintered remnants of the door leading out to a stairwell, but it was the figure in the wall that stopped me cold.

  The body was half-encased in the substance of the wall itself, as if he’d been thrown against the surface and he’d somehow sunk into wet cement. One leg hung almost fully free of the wall’s embrace, with his pelvis and lower torso completely encased. An arm reached, clawing at the air in a desperate, silent plea, beside a face that spoke of a pain I could only imagine.

  “Christ,” Mackenzie whispered. “Elias!”

  I leapt back, snapping the gun up as his eyes opened, which was better than letting out the girly scream I’d kept locked behind clenched teeth. His pained gasp was followed by a bloody, hacking, cough as his eyes locked on Mackenzie and he sucked in another ragged breath.

  “I’m sorry, Mackenzie,” he managed. “About everything. I can’t tell you how sorry.”

  “Shhh…” She stepped in, reaching for his cheek but stopped herself, biting her lip and glancing down at her feet for a moment as her face grew hard. She ran her gaze along the length of him, taking in the blood on his lips, and the bruises on his face until she sighed and her eyes softened. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said, shaking her head.

  I don’t have that level of compassion. Sometimes I wonder if I ever did. She turned and gave me a hard look, glancing down at the gun. Her meaning was clear enough. We couldn’t spare the ammunition really, but even I’m not that cold.

  He looked at the gun for a moment before he met my gaze. The smile was small, but it said enough.

  “Get out if you can, Mr Carver,” he wheezed. “Janan deserves to keep the things we created to himself.”

  I nodded. I’m not above granting a man’s dying wish when I can.

  There are a few ways to muffle a gunshot if you really need to. A pillow works reasonably well, so does firing through water. I didn’t have either of those to hand, but a gun pressed hard into flesh will do the same job to an extent. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was the best I could do.

  Mackenzie didn’t look away as I did it. I suppose I’d expected her to, but she watched, holding his gaze until the end.

  “I want to kill him,” she said then.

  I frowned for a moment before I spoke. “Afridi?”

  She nodded, pulling her gaze from Elias’s body. “He needs to die, Carver. I’ve spent my life learning how to help the wounded and the sick, but some things you simply can’t cure. He’s a cancer on the world, and I’m going to burn him out.”

  “Now this,” Turner said, grinning at me. “This, I can get on board with.”

  I sighed as I pressed the button for the lift. Between Mackenzie and the visitors, I was completely outnumbered.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I crouched low in the lift, pressed close to the wall by the doors. It wasn’t much cover, but it was the best I had. Mackenzie huddled down in her corner, eyes fixed on the lights of the lift buttons. It was only the broadest of assumptions that the lift would even take us all the way to the top floor and deliver us to a way out. This was a passenger lift, but there was nothing that said it had to go all the way up. I already regretted not taking the cargo lift, but that would have meant going back down to the lowest levels to find it, and I wasn’t about to risk that.

  “You ready, Roasties?” Johnson stood in the centre of the lift, tooled up with an FN Minimi machine gun. He looked ridiculous, with the ammunition belt draped over one arm and hanging down to the floor, like an actor from a bad 80s action film.

  I shook my head with a tight grin and focused on the door as the lift slowed. This was probably going to go one of two ways. I didn’t move until the door had opened fully. If I’m honest I’d expected the bullets to start flying long before then. Crouching low was the only thing that would have saved us; people tend to shoot at chest height.

  As it was, the door opened onto an empty hallway leading off to the right, and silence. Not what I’d expected, and everything I’d hoped for. I leaned far enough to make sure the hallway was truly empty, and that there were no surprises on the left, and then dove out in a low roll, ignoring the pain in my thigh, gun trained and ready.

  Mackenzie watched me until I relaxed and then let out a snort.

  I gave her a black look as she stepped past me. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said, still laughing. “Come on, Rambo. Let’s get out of here.”

  Johnson let out a snigger as he stepped past me. “Rambo!”

  It took me until we were almost at the end of the hallway to notice that the red emergency lights were no longer flashing. I frowned up at one as we passed. Did that mean that the escape we’d engineered had been dealt with? Or was Afridi just controlling the flow of information, averting a panic on this floor? Or maybe, the damned lights had just got on his nerves and he’d turned them off.

  Mackenzie followed close behind me, moving when I moved, seeking cover where I indicated. I doubt she’d thank me for this, the nurses I’ve met have tended to have a low opinion of military types, or maybe just a low opinion of me, but she had a real knack for it. If you’d have given me six weeks I could have made a decent soldier out of her.

  The first resistance we encountered was panicked and ugly, a lone guard that blundered through a set of doors and found my bullet before he knew what was going on. I didn’t feel bad about it; he only had a taser, no gun, but his radio was more dangerous than any weapon he could wield.

  I ignored the look Mackenzie gave me and went to check the body. I needn’t have bothered, I knew I’d hit him in the head, but the amount of people who still manage to reach for a radio after they’ve been shot might surprise you. Some people just don’t have the decency to die quietly.

  “Did you absolutely have to do that?” Mackenzie hissed at me.

  “Yes,” I shrugged. “I did.”

  She opened her mouth to argue but I cut her off with a look. “We’re not going to be able to sneak out
of here, Mackenzie. You know that. If shooting a poor bastard like this means we don’t have to cope with another fifteen chasing us down then I’ll do it, every time. You can hate me for it later.”

  Her mouth might have closed but her eyes told me that she’d do just that.

  The doors were good and thick, which I suppose was one thing to be thankful for, but I would have given a lot for a silenced weapon. The gunshot had probably been muffled but we were already on borrowed time.

  We moved as quickly as we dared, shifting into a run when the hallway was straight and clear. The place felt like a hospital—sterile, white, walls that all looked the bloody same. The rooms we passed seemed to have no sense of order. Store-rooms sat next to medical bays that smacked of triage and intake, which then sat next to empty rooms with no discernible purpose. Either this place was designed to be busier than it was, or it had gone operational in a hurry, and they’d never really caught up with themselves.

  I glanced back at Mackenzie, meeting her gaze as we slowed.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “I don’t have a clue where we’re going,” I admitted. “We could be heading out as easily as we could be heading further in.”

  A set of doors crashed open further along the hallway, and I yanked Mackenzie through a side door as gunfire tore the wall to shreds. I’m normally critical of poor shooting but, right now, I wasn’t about to complain.

  “Jesus wept!” Johnson shouted over the gunfire. “Would you look at the state of this?”

  He had a point. The guards had some kind of fully-automatic weapon and were firing in long bursts. This is usually a complete waste of time; your aim goes to hell after the first two or three shots. The only thing they were really accomplishing was keeping us trapped in the room.

  I peered out long enough to snap off a couple of shots, more to stop them moving in closer than any real attempt to hit them.

  “You stay there and you’re dead, mate,” Johnson advised as he stood in the hall.

  “You think I don’t bloody know that?” I snapped.

  “Carver?” Mackenzie’s voice was level, but too controlled to be anything other than terrified. “Carver, talk to the real people here for a minute. What do we do?”

  Shit, Rule Three was in bloody pieces by now, and she’d seen me twice!

  “I’m open to ideas!” I snapped back at her.

  “I thought you said you stopped a bullet?”

  “Yes! I stopped one!” I stabbed a finger in the direction of the guards. “Does that sound like one bullet to you?”

  “Sometimes, mate,” Johnson muttered, suddenly crouched beside my ear. “You’re just so bloody negative.”

  “Sexual frustration,” Turner put in, picking at something in his teeth. “I’ll bet that’s what it is. How long’s it been, Carver?”

  “Jesus Christ,” I risked another glance out into the hallway. “Just kill me.”

  “Come on, Johnson,” Turner said, glancing down at me in disgust. “We can take ‘em.”

  “Best idea I’ve heard all week,” Johnson grinned.

  There have been two or three times in the last few years when I’ve genuinely wondered if I’m losing my mind. Watching the hallucination of two dead people standing in that hallway, with improbably large guns, and blasting imaginary bullets at the guards as I burst out laughing probably tops that list.

  “Carver!” Mackenzie screamed.

  I huddled down inside the doorway, as bullets ripped holes in the concrete wall, and put my head in my hands. My body started to shake, tiny shivers at first, rising to full shudders just shy of a convulsion.

  I was lost.

  I was done.

  The stress of being taken, of the torture, and then finally getting bloody free of that cell only to end up pinned down in here was suddenly all too much. I balled my fists and ground them against my eyes, acutely aware of how much like Pearson I must look. I’d failed her.

  I’d failed them all.

  We were going to die. Just as soon as they got tired of shooting holes in the walls and came down here to get us, we were dead.

  The pressure grew, and I felt a searing pain as the stress found the crack in my sanity and ripped it wide. Voices poured out—my squad, my visitors, friends I’d pushed away, people at home with their sad eyes and pity—it all came roaring out and engulfed me.

  I snapped.

  “Will you all just shut the fuck up!”

  The force of my fury flew out of me in a wave, throwing Mackenzie back across the floor, ripping the door from its hinges, and hurling it out into the hall.

  I didn’t stop to think. Thinking leads to doubts, and this really wasn’t the time for doubts. Legs that seemed intent on ignoring the small sensible voice screaming at the back of my mind, carried me out into the hallway—and then my hands shot forward again.

  This time the force was no wave, it was a battering ram. It blasted into the press of Afridi’s guards, a visible distortion to the air as it hit, and tore through them like leaves before a hurricane.

  Johnson lowered the FN Minimi, smoke still pouring from the muzzle as he surveyed the mess of guards scattered across the hallway. “Damn it, Roasties. Why didn’t you just do that in the first place?”

  I grabbed at Mackenzie and ran.

  Somewhere behind me I could hear Turner as he made his way through the tangle of fallen guards. “Take that ya feckers! Yer just lucky I didnae get to you first!”

  *

  I crashed through another set of doors, leaving the mad bastard behind me. The fact that Turner was just another part of me, and that I might actually be the one who was insane, wasn’t important right now.

  The corridor widened as we turned a corner and joined another hallway. I threw a grin back at Mackenzie and pointed at the floor.

  “What?” she frowned as we ran, looking at me with a curious mix of confusion and concern. I didn’t have the time or the breath to explain, but the twin lines of rubber and dirt were as good as any signpost.

  Pain throbbed through my leg, working in concert with the ache in my chest, to create a symphony of hurt that ran in time to my footsteps. My leg was the worst, what had once been a dull ache had been abused until it had grown to a fiery agony. I ran in a lurching hobble, one hand pressed to the wound. The fabric of the uniform felt hot and wet, even through the bandage. I needed time to look at my leg, but time was something we simply didn’t have.

  “Carver!” a voice roared down the hallway behind us and I twisted, almost falling as my thigh gave way.

  A figure stood just inside a distant set of double doors. Even at this distance I could sense the fury that emanated from him, rolling off him in waves. The doors burst open behind him as a black mass of guards rushed to catch up with him.

  “Carver, you bastard. I’m going to kill you slowly!” his voice rose from a shout to a hoarse scream as he launched into a sprint.

  I levelled the gun slowly, taking my time with it.

  It wasn’t even that hard of a shot, though I’d much rather have had a rifle for this range. Afridi was less than two hundred feet away and closing fast. I squeezed off a round and swore as it buried itself into the wall. Even allowing for the drop it should have easily taken him in the chest.

  I fired again, and again. With every shot Afridi staggered, jerking a hand forward with a grunt, and every shot was taking chunks out of the wall or the floor.

  Somehow the bastard was deflecting the bullets.

  I saw the snarl on his face as he grew closer, watched him throw his hands down towards the ground as his fists burst into flame. His eyes were savage. This was never going to end peacefully, but there are fights and then there is carnage. This wasn’t going to be a normal fight.

  The cry came from behind me. A scream that was more feral than anything I’ve ever heard, made all the more terrible by the fact I knew it came from human lips. The kind of sound that bypasses the ears and speaks directly to the legs, urging them to
get you the hell out of there. I turned but I already knew what I would see.

  Mackenzie had cracked.

  Elias and Afridi had forced open the cracks in our minds, burrowing down into our grip on reality to draw power to our gifts. But Mackenzie had let go. She had torn the fissure wide and power surged through her as her mind shattered.

  She glared at Afridi with utter contempt for the length of a snatched breath, and then she ripped the flames from him. That’s the only way I could describe it. She made a savage clawing motion in the air before her, and the flames blazing around his fists guttered and died.

  “You wanted me to find my fire, Janan!” she shrieked as flames curled up through her fingers, wrapping around her arms like ivy embracing a house.

  It wasn’t a scream, or even a shout. There was no control in this woman. She wasn’t furious, she was the fury. She was rage incarnate, and the flames writhed and clung to her as they revelled in her power. I backed up until I hit the wall, watching wide-eyed as she faced Afridi. I wasn’t scared. I was shitting myself.

  “You made me into this… thing!” she spat. “You wanted me to burn. You wanted me to call the fire? Then taste it, Janan. Feast on it, and fucking choke!”

  Flames rose around her, leaving her clothes, her hair and her skin untouched. I could feel the heat on my face, but clearly it didn’t touch her. Afridi snapped something over his shoulder at the guards as panic swept over his face. I saw the rifles level at her as I reached for my own power, but I already knew it was useless. I was spent. The force I’d thrown earlier had taken all I had.

  This was how it would all end. In a hail of bullets in some forgotten corner of Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or wherever the hell they’d taken us.

  I missed the first click, but I heard the others. Firing pins striking unresponsive bullets as Afridi’s men pulled triggers on guns that now did nothing. The sound of their panic was lost in her laughter. It rose, cold and terrible, like the broken laughter at a funeral, as hysteria carves a channel for tears.

  “Bullets need a spark, Janan,” she whispered, in a voice that somehow still managed to carry. “I own the fire!”