by Greg Hanks
Voices echoed downward. A shuffle of feet four stories up.
She aimed her shield upward and magged her pistol. With her free hand, she tapped her shell and used the wall as another arm to catch it before it fell. She carefully took out her pistol suppressor, reattached her shell, and touched the suppressor to her pistol’s barrel. The inner magnets connected the two. Pistol in hand again, she moved carefully up the stairs, suppressor sticking through her side of the shield. Her ears gnawed at a chance to catch the moving air of a thrown grenade, the click of a magazine, or anything from Balien.
Four stories up, the metal railing wobbled. The terrified, rising pitch of a man’s yell shook the building. A body fell through the middle of the stairwell, clipping the railings as it went, and landed with a bone-crushing smash at the end. V’delle looked over, her pink light casting a shadow upon the dead man with a dashed skull. No Khor’Zon. V’delle looked up warily. A struggle. Shouts of pain. A pistol discharging that shook the entire shaft like someone had taken a massive bat and hit the sides of the staircase.
V’delle leapt up the stairs. Had Balien been subdued? He hadn’t called out to her. The stairs remained free of other corpses. Each floor entrance was covered in mismatched boards and double-padlocked in chains. More beads and yarn hung from the walls and railings as she climbed. Dead animals, or their pelts, dangled from underneath the stairs. The air became tighter, warmer. The second-to-last floor appeared, its door unblocked and free of chains. Painted blood red in too many sloppy coats that it looked like bark. The dim light of her shield made the red door haunting and malicious, a horrifying crimson she would never forget. She retracted the shield, leaving pink embers to dissipate. She crouched and listened.
A few sounds caught her attention. First, there was a repetitive, distant clanking, coming a few stories below her, deep inside the building. Like someone was banging a hollow metal pipe against an anvil. It came and went in strange intervals. Second, there was movement on the tenth floor above, creaky wooden boards that sighed every other minute. No muffled voices or distinct sounds followed, only the unnerving sway of footsteps. She guessed they were waiting for her to make a move.
She crouched in the silence. Being in someone else’s turf gave her a massive disadvantage. They knew the building and they were unpredictable. In fact, anyone other than Preen’ch, Khor’Zon, or Calcitra was a mystery to her. Their tactics, their skill. These people had lived outside for twenty years, likely having run-ins with Preen’ch many times. The odds weren’t good.
Instinct. That could be the key. Instead of kicking down more doors and spraying her pistol through the darkness, she would go against every faculty in her body. She would wait. Fifteen minutes, to be exact. She had to believe Balien wasn’t going to be killed straightaway, though as each minute passed, her worry level rose.
Oddly, the footsteps above continued to sigh and groan.
The red door seemed too easy, too inviting. As quietly as she could, she crept toward the next set of stairs and began climbing to the final landing, a prowling cat in the darkness. It was time to find out who those footsteps belonged to. Her eyes began adjusting to the dark. The tenth-story door seemed identical to the ninth, except it didn’t have a doorknob. The space before the door was cleared of debris, like people had come and gone. The chemical odor she smelled earlier became paramount, as if she had plunged her head into a bowl of ammonia.
She waited another fifteen minutes in complete darkness. The footsteps had ceased.
It was now a half hour since Balien was taken. Anxiety rose. The same distant clanking noise. Tink. Tink. Tink. No voices. No poundings.
And then, just as she was about to take a step toward the door, a thud came from the hallway before her. Scattering footsteps. Crunching paper. Then silence.
That was her cue to screw waiting.
She gripped her pistol in one hand and crept to the door. Her other hand gently pressed the door; it didn’t creak, thankfully. The new hallway was pitch black except for a boarded window at the end letting thin planes of light through. Concrete became flat carpet. Crouched, she pressed her back to the corner where the wall met the threshold, arms to her chest, pistol pointing out. As small as she could make herself.
Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink.
She froze. What was next? Where were her trainings of malevolently dark buildings with unseen enemies like these? The gagging smells, the decaying surroundings, the distant clanking, the shuffling of unknown feet. Where were the tells? The mistakes made by tense, war-crazed soldiers? The brash decisions?
She felt fear pervade her battle-ready body, seemingly bursting from her adrenaline seams. Treading water through molasses. Immense darkness clogging her vision, her mind’s eye. Stagnant urine, rotting meat, and harsh chemicals, unfiltered through her helmet.
A glass bottle crashed inside the room to her right, followed by a high-pitched giggle. Quick pattering feet crossed down the length of the building. They stopped in the fourth room. The rooms must have been connected.
Trying to wrap her mind around the psychotic laugh, V’delle sidled along the wall. She squinted, shadowy images slowly forming understandable shapes. The grayness of the adjacent wall suddenly turned black. It was as if the wall had been removed.
Directly in front of her, a few yards away where the second room would have been, she heard breathing. Soft and clear. Then a light, breathy voice spoke.
“Mm. Mm. Perfect.”
There was a short giggle at the end.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
The person in the room ran toward her. Through the cloudy darkness, pale skin erupted. The figure was thin as a stick. Two flashing arms outstretched. Out of fear and instinct, V’delle clenched her right fist, igniting the bangle shield, and fired her pistol in the same moment. The bullet struck the being in the throat, and he was kicked back onto the floor. It was a tall, inhumanly pale man whose muscles had eroded, revealing prominent bones underneath stretched skin. Upper arms raw from nail marks. Face sunken and yellow and stained with light green and brown gunk. Wearing a pair of tattered, soiled underwear. His hands didn’t even try to clamp onto his neck. Blood drained out, thin and oily.
She turned. Indeed the wall had been removed with what looked like a sledgehammer. Tables grunted across the floor, glass broke, furniture flung against the walls. Thumping footsteps flew in her direction. Muttering and gasping and giggling voices. Four pallid bodies charged toward her.
She fell back against the wall, firing off six rounds. Two rounds missed their targets. One body dropped. The rest kept coming. The first attacker slammed into her shield, pinning her against the wall and floor. The next three bodies slammed into them. V’delle watched with disgust as the woman’s face pressed up against the shield. Yellowed, wide eyes, a white-flecked tongue, and a mouth of missing or blackened teeth. She gnawed against the shield.
“Feed me!” she screamed, a tooth breaking against the shield. “Give! Give!”
The weight of the squirming bodies pushed V’delle backward. She retracted the shield knowing it would become a hindrance if forced away. Limbs and fingers whipped her, consuming her. She unloaded her pistol into the writhing mass of bodies. A flurry of sharp fingernails raked her armor, her arms, her neck. After her clip was empty, most of the bodies had fallen to the sides. She pushed off the last one and smashed his skull with the butt of her pistol.
She scrambled to her feet in the middle of five bodies. Most of them were naked, some with scraps of underwear, one with a long, orange t-shirt. Warped and raw skin, rashes peppering the surfaces. Residue covering their mouths. V’delle touched underneath her neck to relieve her mask and vomited. She caught herself on the wall, took a moment to breathe, then reloaded.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
Wanting nothing more than to leave running, her damned conscience propelled her deeper into black. Inside the carved-out rooms she found desks supporting intricate chemistry stations with dirty beakers and cloudy basins. A few b
urners left with blue flames. She felt something crunch under her boot. A small glass pipe. Ratty bedding and couch cushions lined the walls. All the windows were covered by slabs of wood. She opened a cooler at the base of the fourth room’s kitchen. Bread, water jugs, and meat, still fresh from what she could tell. In another corner, rotting food piled almost to the ceiling, rejected. She tapped her neck again to bring up her mask.
V’delle searched the rest of the top floor. Either these drug addicts had found food by themselves, or they were aided by the vagrants who took Balien. She had to stop at the end of the hallway to try and come up with an answer for all of this. She tore away the boards blocking the window at the end of the hallway. Crisp light burst into the corridor, giving her comfort. Claustrophobia lifted slightly. The carpet was a sickly green pattern bordered by black floral stencils. The corridor was more disgusting than she imagined. Trash piled the corners and parts of the walls. Black mold streaking through the cracks and peppering the ceilings. What kind of hell . . .
Before walking back to the staircase, she heard someone moaning from the sixth room. Accustomed by the filth and her oppressors, she waded brashly through the trash-ridden gauntlet. In the far corner against the wall, a woman lay naked on a sleeping bag, half-curled, her knees touching the wall, the soles of her feet black. She turned her head toward the ceiling. Her eyes glassy and black-rimmed. Her mouth opened with toothless gums. She spoke without much body, a wispy, frail expulsion.
“Do you have more?” she asked.
“Is there another way downstairs?” V’delle asked, not expecting much.
“Do you have . . . do you want me to make you happy? I can give you anything you need.” She propped herself up, her hand outstretched to V’delle.
“I can give you more if you tell me another way downstairs. I can’t go down the staircase.”
“Stairs . . . I can help. I can help.”
“Go on.”
“Elevator. You need to take the elevator. Take it. Down. Fly. Take it down.”
“I don’t think there’s power for that.”
“Take it down. Hurry!” She crawled to V’delle’s feet. “Give me. Give it. Give it me. I want. Please. You had more!”
“I have to get it,” V’delle said, stepping back. She felt a sudden rush of warmth. Looking at the sick woman—naked, bleeding from open sores, sparse stringy hair—gave V’delle an unobtainable sensation. She couldn’t interact with the emotion because it wouldn’t let her move on from it. She turned around.
“Where is it?!” the woman yelled, her voice barely reaching a rasp. “Where?!”
V’delle kept walking. She didn’t want to look back. She’d seen heads blown off, bodies layered with full magazines, necks stabbed through, a child’s neck snapped, but watching and hearing that woman writhe and screech with the same constitution as a shriveling fetus made her sicker than anything before. She was used to blood and war. It was simple, albeit horrible and deranged. But this was uniquely urban, mental, and too claustrophobic. Lightheadedness took her. Bracing against the wall, she found her breaths. Slow. Steady. Anxiety out. Putrid decay in.
A quick jog to the window. She busted the pane and sucked deeply.
The stairs were behind her. The light of Berlin’s streets, waiting. She would have to walk to Urholm, but it was possible. Her objective could still be completed. All she’d have to do was leave Balien.
It didn’t feel right and felt right at the same time. What did she owe him? She thought of Maora back at Beliveilles. Of Farin, who wouldn’t be having this dilemma. Through the window, Berlin looked tired, quiet. A sky so haughtily blue it angered her. Why did she have to do this? There were thousands of fields and forests and oceans and rocks in the world, but she was here, trapped without a leash, impaled without a spear. Faint aromas of a late summer haze glided through the broken glass, until toxic fumes serrated her nose. With an explosion of rage, she recoiled her metal fist, and drove it straight into the drywall. Her forehead tipped to the windowsill. Hand inside the hole. All the dust in the tenth floor seemed to settle.
The woman’s croaks finally ceased, returning to faint murmurs and sniffles.
V’delle slowly looked at the elevator’s closed metal doors to her right. Could the woman be telling the truth? She dislodged her hand from the hole in the wall and approached the doors. She looked them up and down and ran her index finger along the crack. Out of flippant suspicion, she inserted both sets of fingertips and pried. Loud, scraping metal discharged throughout the floor but soon the doors gave way easily. The light from the widow showed a newer ladder attached to the close wall of the gutted shaft. More chimes and carved trinkets hung from the walls. A tiny updraft caused the chimes to rattle. Like hundreds of little hollow wooden balls dropping upon a wooden floor.
She glanced down the darkened hall at the stairway door, then registered the weight in her hand, her pistol.
Tink. Tink. Tink. Tink.
V’delle kept her pistol out descended the shaft.
It wasn’t long before the air turned cold. The light of the broken window had become a mere dot above. When she went to place her foot on the next rung, she hit metal floor instead. Voices were speaking in conversation probably twenty yards away, behind closed doors. She held on to the ladder with one hand and swept her foot around to feel for any drop-offs. The sides didn’t sit flush against the wall, but nothing to worry about; she must have been standing on the elevator’s roof. Her hands licked the walls for support. Another crease in another pair of doors. She holstered her pistol and started to pry.
Through the sliver she saw a well-lit service corridor of scuffed, off-white industrial tile. A pair of double doors at the end. A nook on the left-hand wall contained two vending machines with their glass long broken, their contents picked clean, and a deep laundry hamper stained brown and black and crimson.
The voices were coming from behind the far doors.
V’delle pulled the elevator doors apart and grabbed her gun. Her hard, rubberized soles squeaked a little on the tile. When she passed the laundry hamper, a zap went down her spine. It couldn’t be possible. She stepped back to the hamper and looked inside.
Arms. Legs. Torsos. A bloody pile of amputated limbs and body parts. V’delle recoiled and held her throat. She stood in the center of the corridor, reeling. It made sense, of course; withering drug-addled skeletons upstairs, severed limbs downstairs. Perfect sense. She looked over the hamper again. Clean cuts. Each part seemed blackened, deformed, burned, or wounded. No stench of death. Only the smell of blood and meaty, cold flesh permeated the room. They must have been cut recently. She scanned the pile for Khor’Zon parts but remembered human and Khor’Zon looked identical save the skull.
The voices in the next room grew in pitch. One of them guffawed.
It was the straw that ignited a balefire. She lifted her pistol and charged.
She kicked her way inside. Two men in brown leathers spun, surprised. She shot them in quick succession. A third man rushed out of an adjoining room and V’delle eliminated him, too. Interrogation was probably the smarter option, but she didn’t give a shit. The chamber was a foyer to a large laundry room. Tables were pushed up against the walls, scattered with books, maps, folders, cups of pens, and a few wooden statuettes not yet finished. Cardboard boxes piled to the ceiling in one corner. Brown drapes shrouded a couch and derelict dryers. She approached the windowed doors to the main laundry room. Rows of machines bigger than a cow, lit by industrial flood lamps. Spotless tile floors.
She turned around and checked the bodies. Old-world weapons, cigarettes, and blood. A yellow piece of crumpled paper stuck out of one of their hands. She plucked it from his fingers and read:
It’s going down tomorrow. Ferret’s done. Clean up her projects tonight.
-T
V’delle let it fall to the floor. She wished she’d paid more attention to their conversation. There was another door. Pistol up, she continued.
Thin cor
ridor, merely a transfer hallway with nothing interesting except the wall murals. Skulls, naked bodies, and snakes swirling skeletons. These people had a fetish with white paint and wooden chimes. Dried blood smeared the end of the hallway floor, creating a giant face with hollowed out eyes and exposed teeth. A psychotic grin.
Through the door was a circular room with three desks at the far end stacked like a pyramid. On the top desk was an office chair, its legs bolted to the solid surface. Two ashtrays stood on either side of the bottom desks, and a cotton t-shirt hung from the top desk with an insignia of a white animal—a furry snake-like creature.
A crash of metal. Someone kicked V’delle in the lower back and she went down. She accidentally fired her pistol. Quick, filthy hands pried the weapon from her grip and the rifle at her side.
“How the hell did you get down here?” said a woman’s voice with an accent like Ketterhagan’s, only softer.
V’delle rolled to her back. A grimy woman probably in her mid-thirties pointed the pistol. Shaven head, two wooden chime earrings, a septum piercing shaped like a crab claw, and dark stains trailing from the sides of her mouth. Tight, brown canvas pants with kneepads and high-top boots. Fingerless gloves. A chestpiece made from a cracked cast iron frying pan covered a tank top that exposed a lean upper body consumed by tattoos. Black lace choker concealed the entirety of her neck. When she spoke, V’delle saw a little gap between her front teeth.