by Matt Carter
“Like what you see?” she purred, running a regrown finger up my chin. I remained silent. I would not dignify her taunts with a response. The Haley-Splinter laughed at me. “I never thought I would like it. Back home, we don’t think much of these bodies. They’re a way to fulfill our never-ending desire for sensation, but at the same time ugly, imperfect machines. A lot like you would look at an old, rusting car. Everything in you screams, Don’t get in, it’s not safe, but you get in anyway because you need it to get where you want. But when I got this body, I knew it was beautiful. It’s nothing like back home.”
She stretched the last word out like it was an insult. “You don’t know how good you have it. Back home all we do is exist. There is no feeling, no identity, barely any independent thought. We don’t get any of what you would consider simple pleasures—sight, taste, sound, touch . . .”
She ran her hands up and down her body, her Medusa-like tentacles moving with them suggestively.
“. . . You can touch me, if you want. Anywhere you want, any way you want,” she suggested, flashing me her innocent eyes. “I’ve tried many, many things since I got this body, but there are a few I need help with. I did always think you were cute, you know.”
“You’re damaged goods,” I spat back.
“Maybe,” she said sweetly, too sweetly. “But then that’s what you like, isn’t it, Ben? The girls with the sad eyes, the ones with the tempers and vendettas, the ones with the night terrors and the absentee fathers and the—”
“You’re not Haley!” I cut off the list of her acts.
“No, I’m better than Haley!” she roared at me, her eyes flashing red. “Haley was like all of you, squandering the gifts life in your world allowed her, ignoring every opportunity she had to enjoy sensation because of your pitiful human ideals of restraint and morality. If she knew how bad things could be, she would have enjoyed this more.”
She exposed herself to me lewdly. I looked away, closing my eyes tight, trying not to think about how the real Haley would feel if she could see this. I could feel her sliding behind me, wrapping more of her tentacles around me, caressing me, trailing sticky mucous up my arms. It took everything I had not to vomit.
“When you’re one of us, you’ll enjoy this more. Trust me,” she laughed. I opened my eyes long enough to see a vacant pod slot rotate into place next to me. I looked back at her, watched her rubbing herself closer, more insistently against me, her tentacles starting to undo the clasps of my flamethrower. I looked down at those monstrous claws holding my feet in place.
A plan formed. It was going to be unpleasant, to say the least.
I pinched my eyes shut, and gritted my teeth against the pain to come.
“Not likely,” I said as I pressed the trigger on the flamethrower. A ball of fire erupted around my legs and feet, nearly engulfing my lower body. Haley leaped back, shrieking madly, chittering and popping in that alien tongue. My pants, my shoes were on fire. More importantly, the claws holding me down let go, running away like wounded animals. I jumped forward, preparing to do the good-old stop, drop, and roll, when I heard her begin to transform behind me.
Before she could, I turned to face her with the flamethrower ready, seeing her fierce and pitiful eyes boring into mine.
I let her have it. She became a living fireball, thrashing and rolling around on the platform as she screamed and screamed and screamed her alien scream. This bought me enough time to drop to the ground, shed the flamethrower, kick off my burning shoes and pants (glad for having worn boxers that day), and toss them away. My legs were pretty thoroughly burned. Nothing permanent, I wagered, but there’d be pretty extensive blistering for a while. Seeing flames licking around the base of the flamethrower, I instinctively kicked it over the edge of the platform.
I only realized how stupid that was when I heard the charred Haley-Splinter let out a loud, painful moan behind me. She was between me, the chainsaw, and the real Haley. I had to free the real one before her Splinter died, and I had no way of doing it.
“HEY!”
The voice calling behind me was the most welcome sound in the world. I turned to see Billy Crane at the end of the platform, standing firm in his jeans and sweatshirt and holding his ancient revolver. I didn’t know how he’d gotten down here, and I was sure there was one hell of a story to go with it, but I couldn’t have been more grateful.
I made to call out to him. She beat me to it.
“Billy!” the Haley-Splinter croaked dryly. I turned to her, watching her try to reform as she shed away burnt flesh and reached out to him. “I did it! I got Mina Todd in, she’ll be one of us soon, and Ben, I got him too! I did it!”
I looked back at Billy with dawning horror. He smirked at us as he tossed his gun into the abyss, casually pulling the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. His eyes glowed red as his body began to contort, his legs lengthening and snapping backwards, his face becoming horrifically insectoid as one arm became a thick, bony sickle.
He was The Reaper.
“A new era is dawning. Your death will mean many great things to come,” he said as he bounded toward us.
I ducked in time for him to leap over me. The Haley-Splinter screamed as he landed upon her, cutting her neatly in half with his sickle-arm. He bounded away from her, leaping to another nearby platform.
I had my chance.
I ran between the two struggling, reforming halves of the Haley-Splinter and picked up the chainsaw. The pod was hard, Mina rapping her knuckles on it proved that, but looking at the purple veins that suspended it, I bet they were pretty soft. I revved the chainsaw, dodging the hard wave of sound that shot from its blade, and leapt through the air toward Haley’s pod.
“NO!” the Haley-Splinter cried out, too late.
The chainsaw messily cut through the veins that held the pod suspended, snapping the chain in a spray of sparks when it finally cut through. The pod slowly dropped to the platform. The two halves of the Haley-Splinter thrashed and screamed in agony, still confusedly trying to rejoin as they slowly melted into a puddle of the same non-descript gray ooze we had seen in the great window. Soon enough, there was nothing left of that either.
As the Splinter disintegrated, the pod around Haley melted into a thick slurry of green and purple slime. Haley lay limply in the middle, face-down in the muck. I tossed the ruined chainsaw aside and ran to her, rolling her onto her back. It was Haley, all right. A little malnourished, a little drained, but definitely her, dressed in a tattered, almost completely deteriorated nightgown.
“Haley?” I asked, shaking her by the shoulders. She wasn’t breathing. I panicked, wiping the muck from her mouth and nose, checking her airway. I was running through the steps from my CPR certification when she coughed. First weakly, then raggedly, expelling a large amount of the thick green slime.
Haley Perkins blinked weakly up at me.
“Ben?” she mouthed, barely a whisper, looking at me like she hadn’t seen me in five years. With a sad, guilty twinge, I realized she hadn’t.
I nodded silently, smiling down at her. “Yeah.”
She smiled faintly before she passed out.
I considered trying to rouse her before I went off to search for Mina, but decided against it when I realized the Warehouse was falling apart.
The entire structure shuddered around us as if it were in pain. The regular, mechanical clockwork sounds of the great gears sounded strained. The regular movements of the shifts were jerky and less predictable, if that were even possible. The pods around us throbbed, their occupants writhing about in agony. The swirling, floating lights looked confused as they merged and split apart from each other, moving like frightened schools of fish.
Whatever we had done . . . it was bad.
Climbing the structure while carrying an unconscious Haley in my arms wasn’t easy. The strange gravity certainly helped, but it was an exhausting ordeal made all the more difficult by the constant shifts. If it weren’t for the directions Mina shouted, I woul
dn’t have been able to find her. As time passed and the Warehouse began to shake more violently, her directions became more infrequent. I feared that when I got to her, I would not find the Mina Todd I knew.
By the time I found her, she was nearly unrecognizable. She’d been half absorbed into the pod. Fibrous, slimy tendrils wrapped around her body, some of them appearing to puncture her skin. The pod writhed and thrashed around on its own painfully. Thick, wormlike shapes moved beneath Mina’s vacant-looking face, her eyes rolling back into her head. It was trying to take her, but she was fighting it. Hard.
I set Haley down and went to Mina, thrusting my hands into the pod and trying to sever its link to her. Mina grabbed at me, trying to push me away.
“Wait, just another second,” she protested.
“There’s no time!” I pleaded as I ripped at her bonds.
“I’ve almost found him!” she shouted, unmindful of the tentacles that tried to force their way into her mouth.
I didn’t know who she was talking about. I didn’t care. Wrapping my arms around her, I ripped her from the squealing, shivering pod. It retracted away quickly like a deflated balloon, and the last remnants of the tubes that invaded her skin melted away in trickles of green and purple muck.
She lashed out at me in my arms, kicking and struggling to get her feet on the ground. With a look of pure rage, she punched me in the eye, knocking me flat on my back. In spite of her size and the blood oozing freely from her hundreds of puncture wounds and a deep gash in her side, she was incredibly strong.
“I had him, I had him . . .” Mina repeated as she looked back at the shriveling remains of her pod, shortly before it shifted away with the rest of the Warehouse.
“We have to get out of here!” I yelled, “This place is falling apart!”
“But . . .” she looked back down at the retreating pod. She then looked at me, confused.
“Where’s Billy? I heard him down here with you,” she said.
“He’s one of them. He’s The Reaper,” I said. I didn’t need to say any more. Within the space of three seconds, Mina looked uncomprehending, devastated, and enraged before falling back to her thoughtful standby.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“No,” she said simply, looking off into nothingness. “No, I’m not.”
“How do we get out of here?” I asked, trying to get her to focus. Though her attention came back slowly, eventually her face dropped into its blank, thoughtful mode. She watched the various malfunctioning shifts of the Warehouse, then grabbed me by the arm.
“This way!” she said, running off down a nearby staircase that had shifted our way. Scooping Haley back up into my arms, I ran after her. She traced an odd, twisting path across various shifting platforms and stairwells, taking us up a few pillars, even forcing us onto one of the great, spinning gears as we made our way to the entrance.
The glowing green portal taunted us in the distance, a shimmering beacon in a sea of darkness. I could see the stone altar built around it, the shadow of that great, terrible statue in front of it. It was at least a hundred yards away, probably even more given the way light was distorted around here.
The sounds of many wet collisions behind us stole my attention. Patches of the fleshy carpeting started to rip themselves off the ground, colliding with the floating lights and forming a massive, cell-like organism that began to float toward us.
“What is that?” I asked.
“A defense system. Like white blood cells fighting off an invading organism,” she said with absolute certainty. I didn’t want to ask how she knew that.
“And we’re the invading organisms,” I said.
“Yes,” Mina replied, looking back at the portal in the distance and the impossibly long gap before it. Beneath us there was nothing but blackness that could very well have gone on forever.
“Do you trust me?” Mina asked.
“Of course,” I said. Then I figured out what she meant.
“Wait . . .” I said as I stared down into the abyss.
“We have to,” she said simply.
The defense system lurched through the air towards us. She was right. At that moment, I wished she wasn’t. I wanted to hold her hand as we took that leap of faith, and I could tell she wanted to as well, but with Haley in my arms, that would be impossible.
We took as many steps back as we could without getting too close to the defense system, got a running head start, and leapt through the air toward the portal. The shrieking mass behind us followed, but I could not focus on that. No, I had to focus on a safe landing, on staying in flight, on not dying. The portal got closer to us. The inky blackness beneath us was not going to take us. We would make it. The shrieking came closer. I looked back. It was almost upon us.
It can’t beat us.
We’re going to make it.
We’re going to make it.
We’re going to—
We landed on hard stone at the base of the great statue. Mina was off faster than me, running into the portal. I was right behind her.
The world shifted sideways again as I went through, flung to the ground in a heap in the great stadium. Mina helped me to my feet, goading me along as we saw the defense system begin to pull itself through the portal behind us. We began to jump up the levels of the stadium one at a time, passing by several archways.
ISTANBUL
ULURU
BOSTON
I stopped after the third city I didn’t recognize.
“We’re going the wrong way,” I said, pointing to the signs. “We didn’t pass by any of these!”
Mina hazarded a glance back at the growling, thrashing beast behind us. We’d gained some ground on it, but it was catching up quickly.
“Let’s keep going along this level, see if we can find something we recognize, then head up from there!” she yelled over the din of the beast’s roars.
I nodded, following her as we ran along the level of the stadium, passing by archways that seemed too far apart.
THEBES
ST. PETERSBURG
JERUSALEM
XI’AN
That name was familiar. I shouted, “Xi’an! Start going up!”
Again, we ascended the steps, counting down the familiar archways as the defense system grew louder and larger behind us. It whipped out a heavy, barbed tendril that smashed a section of landing next to us, sending boulder-
sized pieces of stone flying in every direction. We were able to dodge them, just barely, just as we reached the archway for PROSPERO.
It was strange, running up that narrow crevasse of a passageway again, getting used to how things like gravity and sound were meant to work. The exhaustion of our voyage into the Warehouse began to wear on me. Mina, too, for that matter, looked heavily winded and ready to fall over at any moment. The defense system roared behind us, but pursued no further. It seemed it could only exist in its own world. That much, at least, was a comfort.
It was difficult getting Haley through the narrowest section of the crevasse, but after some careful pushing, we got her back into the real world.
I went out last, struggling in the darkness to see Haley and Mina and figure out just how we were supposed to get out of here. Then I really looked at Mina, noticing something that made me smile.
“I see you held onto your bag, at least,” I said, pointing to the tattered satchel she had somehow kept through the attempted assimilation process.
She smiled at me, vaguely, before reaching into the bag and pulling out a flashlight, “It has its uses.”
Mina kept a quick pace in front of me in the mine, and though my burns were screaming for me to slow down, I kept up with her. We’d gotten Haley, and we’d escaped from the Warehouse, but this was not a place we wanted to be caught. Especially if Billy was still lurking around us somewhere. I tried to wrap my head around what he had done. He had hidden in front of us all this time, but he helped us. I didn’t know what to make of it. I don’t think Mina did either,
not just then. She was angry, I knew that, but beyond that I could not tell. At the time, I didn’t feel like fighting her. I was tired, I was in agony from the burns on my legs, and I was dreading walking all the way back to town barefoot, and—
“Wait,” Mina said, stopping dead in her tracks. We should have been able to see the mine entrance, open and bright with the night sky.
Instead, we saw the pulsing hulk of a Splinter redwood tree blocking the mine entrance, its roots reaching out for us like the arms of the damned.
“Oh, come on!” I exclaimed. “Can’t we catch just one break?”
“We just invaded the Splinters’ Warehouse and escaped with our lives. I’d say we’ve caught an anomalous number of breaks so far. Statistically speaking, we were due for some bad breaks by now,” Mina explained, looking at the tree, then at me.
“You don’t have the chainsaw,” she said.
“Neither do you,” I said a bit too angrily. She looked at me sympathetically, then turned about on her heel and started running into the mine.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m getting us out of here!” she exclaimed.
Burns be damned, I was willing to follow her if she could make good on that. She led us down about a hundred feet back into the mine, into the crudely dug side tunnel we had passed by earlier.
The escape tunnel.
If it hadn’t meant dropping Haley, I think I would have hugged Mina then and there.
We climbed through the awkward, narrowing tunnel that had clearly been dug by desperate men (or Splinters, as it may be) with no particular focus on comfort and every focus on getting out. Soon the tunnel narrowed to a point where we were crouching, then crawling. I had to set Haley down and let Mina inch her slowly forward while I crawled painfully ahead, pushing the flashlight out in front. After maybe fifty or sixty feet of this, the tunnel narrowed to a point where it felt like it had caved in, but I was sure, so sure that we were close, that if we just pushed and kept digging . . .
I scooped handfuls of dirt and threw them behind me, clawing for freedom, not caring that it might all cave in around us at any moment. I was so sure, so certain . . .