by Anna Lewis
For his part, Maksim seemed fairly unconcerned by the presence of a woman wrapped so intimately around him. He moved smoothly and carefully, with an attitude of complete confidence and control, as if he regularly clambered out of elevator shafts like this. He repeated the same process that he'd used to open the doors below, though this time, he was doing so while suspended in the darkness by his tactical harness. The door opened slowly, the heavy, unpowered mechanism resisting him all the while. No doubt such resistance was a safety feature, to keep people with more mischievous curiosity than brains from falling to their deaths. But Maksim was unconcerned by the door's unyielding inertia. Soon, he was holding the elevator doors apart with both arms. He forced one foot onto the ledge, bracing the door open, then hooked the other door with his other leg so that the lower half of his body stood on the concrete edge even while his upper body hung out over the darkness. He gestured for Reilly to climb down with a curt nod.
Reilly grimaced, but she shimmied down his body, gingerly reaching out with one leg until she could touch the solid ground. Then, with a little shout, she flung herself off him and into the hallway beyond. If her leap had disturbed Maksim's hold on the doors, he didn't show it. Instead, the mercenary changed his grip on the door, taking most of his weight into his arms and off the harness. Then, with a swift, deft motion, he disconnected his tactical harness from the ascender mechanism and tipped himself into the hall. Before he let the elevator doors slammed shut, he reached back into the darkness and disconnected the little, geared mechanism from the severed cable, and hung it from his harness by a small strap.
Reilly breathed out a sigh of relief that they were both standing on the solid floor. She looked out along the dark corridor. Black, crumpled forms lay at the end of the hall, just below a feebly flickering emergency light. Shadows played across the twisted shapes so that it was impossible for Reilly to see what they really were. Maksim grunted and stepped past her, his rifle in his hands again. “Some of the creatures that came from the mirrors. I killed them on my way down, but I should check them again before we pass, just in case.” Without waiting for a response, the mercenary glided smoothly down the hall in a curious, bent-legged posture, keeping his upper body utterly still and level. The rifle and its attached light aimed at the first creature, and then the second. Maksim straightened up and looked back at Reilly. “Okay, we're—”
Something exploded out of the wall beside Maksim in a shower of debris and plaster dust. It hit him so hard that he was slammed bodily into the opposite wall. He might have gone through the wall and out the other side, if the creature, its shape shrouded in the haze of white dust, hadn’t seized him in a great, clawed hand. It snatched him back with incredible speed and hurled him into the room from which it had come, tossing the large man with the same ease that Reilly might have thrown a softball. The scientist didn’t have time to react. Before she could even process what she had just seen, the massive, broad-shouldered shape turned toward her and roared.
The sound was incredible; it was so loud that she could feel it pressing hard against her eardrums, against her skin, against her eyes. For a moment, she thought she might be crushed by the sound alone. The alien beast took a step forward, and she got a clear look at it. It was built like a silverback gorilla, with a musculature to match, though its body and waist were too narrow to belong to any ordinary specimen of the species. It might have been covered in fur, but it was hard to determine through the stinking black muck that coated it from head to toe. The only details she could discern in the midnight daubed face were the glitter of its furious eyes and the great stained fangs that jutted from its gaping jaws. It raised its hands, which had only two fingers and a thumb, rather than a primate's five. Where it should have had thick fingernails, it instead had long, wickedly curved claws, more like the talons of a predatory bird than those of any mammal. It lumbered a step closer to Reilly. She froze, unsure of what to do. Was Maksim dead? If he was, how could she hope to escape such a monster? She was no fighter, and besides, she had no weapon! She groaned with despair as she realized that she didn't even have time to try to come up with an answer to the question. Any moment now, it would—
The monster lunged forward, exploding toward Reilly with all the inevitable force of a locomotive. With nowhere to run, no Maksim to help her, and no hope of fighting the thing, Reilly acted completely on instinct, sure that she was about to die. She held out her hand as if the monster might see the gesture and stop, and a terrible scream of her own ripped its way out of her throat. Her scream was equal parts fury and fear, despair and defiance. She was certain that these were her last moments, and she would be damned if she died whimpering in a corner.
Then something completely unexpected happened. Instead of smashing Reilly into a pulp, the monster stopped, as abruptly as if it had run headlong into a concrete wall. There was sound like someone striking a massive iron gong, and the walls, the floor and the ceiling all around the monster were pulverized by a tremendous force, warped and crushed in the shape of an enormous disk too wide to fit in the hallway. Bones crunched beneath the horrible ogre's matted fur, and it let out a scream of rage and pain as its weight and momentum snapped its limbs and crushed its spine. This time, however, the sound of its anger did not reach Reilly directly. Instead, she heard it muffled as if she and the monster were separated by a very thick pane of plate glass. For a moment, she just stared as the beast writhed on the shattered tile before her. Her body was alive with a strange, buzzing sensation, as if she'd bitten down on a live wire. Then, as suddenly as the sensation of terrible, vibrating power had come, it disappeared.
Something dripped onto the floor at Reilly’s feet. She looked down, her ears ringing with deafening silence, and was confused to see that something bright red had spattered the floor at her feet. Her face felt warm, and she tasted copper. The same brutal migraine that had struck her during the opening of the Door seared its way into her mind, like a super-heated knife lancing straight through her brain to cleave her head in two. The world seemed to tip sharply sideways, and she lost all grip on what was happening besides the all-consuming pain.
***
Reilly woke to fathomless dark eyes staring down at her. They were strange and confusing. It took her a moment to identify them as Maksim's eyes, and a few moments longer for her to realize that the reason they unsettled her was that they were dilating and focusing in a way utterly unlike the behavior of normal eyes. Instead of expanding and contracting, the blue-black rings that were the mercenary's irises moved and rotated and focused more like the lenses of incredibly fine and intricate cameras. In that moment, as her brain began to pull itself back into consciousness, she knew with utter certainty that she understood the answer to her question. No ordinary man could ride a plummeting elevator car and survive. No normal human mercenary could kick a steel reinforced door out of the wall. It all made sense, the smoothness of his movements, the firmness of his grip, the precision of his every action. She took in a deep breath and spoke the answer, softly, into his concerned face. “Maksim Sokolov is a cyborg.”
The eyes, and the face surrounding them, pulled away. Reilly blinked several times and sat up. Her head was pounding in time to the beating of her heart, and she ached all over as if she had just run a half-marathon. Maksim knelt beside her, concern written all over his face. Then something twisted his broad, handsome features, and he turned away and stood. As he straightened up to his full height, Reilly could see that he had not survived the ogre’s onslaught unscathed. There were numerous cuts over his face and neck, and his shirt and trousers were half-shredded all along his right side. The skin along that side of his neck was similarly tattered, and something too dark and thick to be blood was leaking from the lacerated skin and oozing down toward what remained of his collar. Reilly stared up in wonder at his battered right side. Where his skin had been torn, she saw dull gray metal, fashioned into the shape of a man’s arm and leg, and composed of hundreds of tiny bundled cables and connectio
ns. These lines bunched and released as he moved. Just like muscles, Reilly realized. Maksim’s body, at least on the right side, had been augmented, or perhaps wholly replaced, by bionic prostheses more intricate than any she had ever seen before.
Maksim smiled bitterly, his cheeks red with shame, and Reilly could see the bionic muscles in his neck bunching as he tightened his jaw with tension. Neither of them spoke. Reilly wiped a thin runnel of blood from her nose and stood, painfully. She faced Maksim, who seemed not to want to meet her eyes. After a long, awkward silence, she said, “Are you alright?”
The mercenary grimaced, showing his teeth in an expression that was most certainly not a smile. “I’m fine. I can patch the skin myself given the right equipment. Everything seems to be moving well enough, and any damage done was minor.” His not-smile grew a little wider. “When they put me back together the first time, they decided to make me a lot harder to kill.” Then, as if he noticed the ring of destruction wreaked on the hallway for the first time, he frowned down at Reilly, his expression troubled. “Are you alright?” He looked toward the pulverized, still twitching shape of the ogre, then swiveled his gaze back to Reilly. “What the hell did you do to it?”
Reilly was suddenly struck by a wave of vertigo, and she swayed on her feet. Instantly, Maksim was beside her, getting his arm—the metal one—beneath her shoulder and propping her up. She shook her head, blinking until the vertigo passed. “I don't know. I don't know what's happening to me. This happened when the Door opened too.”
Maksim swept the battered hallway with his fierce dark eyes. “We need to get you to a doctor. Who knows what kind of damage…this…did to your brain.” He helped her shuffle toward the end of the hall where the monster lay destroyed. At one point, he made an abortive move to pick up his rifle from amidst the rubble, but he spat in disgust as he realized that it had been bent into a forty-five-degree angle during the ogre's ambush, and it was utterly useless now. He swore.
Reilly's thoughts began to clear again as they passed the ruined beast. Maksim led them to the maintenance roof access door around the corner and pushed it open. The latch had been taped over so that it could not auto-lock. Only a short flight of utilitarian stairs separated them from the roof. They were only wide enough for one person to use them at a time. Reilly disentangled herself from Maksim and plodded heavily up the stairs until she reached the door at the top. She turned the latch and stepped through onto the roof. Maksim followed close behind her. “Where is your friend?” She asked. The roof was wide and flat, and utterly devoid of aircraft, gunships or otherwise.
Maksim didn’t seem concerned. “Abdul was a combat pilot during the third Gulf War. There’s no way an old veteran like him could stay in one place during a mess like this. He’ll be circling, trying to make himself and his bird a difficult target until I call him.” With that, he drew a slim rectangle of silicon, aluminum, and glass out of his pants pocket and put it to the side of his head. “Ready for pickup. LZ is clear for now.” The mercenary listened for a moment, then nodded once and returned the nondescript black phone to his pocket. “He’ll be here in ten minutes.”
For a while, the two stood together in silence, not sure what to say. It was Maksim that spoke first. “I’m sorry I implied that your team did this on purpose. I know your colleagues must have died, and what I said was inappropriate.” His tone was flat and uninflected. There was no emotion in his words; he was simply stating the facts as he saw them.
Reilly took this for what it was worth. Some kind of emotional appeal from the mercenary would honestly have been more disturbing than mollifying at this point. “It’s alright,” she replied quietly. “It’s been one hell of a day.”
“It has.” A long moment passed in silence.
“Mack,” Reilly said. “Why did you think we'd meant things to happen like this?” She held up her hand. “Wait. I'm not mad; I'm just trying to see it from your point of view.”
“Why?”
Reilly considered. “You have experiences I don’t. Maybe you saw something about the whole situation that I didn’t.”
Maksim grimaced. “Most of it is probably my own bias.” He lifted his bionic arm by way of example. “I’ve been burned by government sponsored scientists before.”
Reilly frowned. “The US government did that to you?” Looking out over the smoke-shrouded city, she didn't find the idea so far-fetched. Her experiment hadn't just gone wrong; it had been a catastrophe of epic proportions. Her studies into wormholes had always been a passion for her, but the precise nature of the project had been the idea of the government agency that had sponsored the contract. She wondered again if the Department of Energy had been her true patron.
Maksim was once again smiling that bitter not-smile. “Not the United States, though I have no doubt they were doing their own work in this field at the same time. No, I was a soldier with Russian Special Forces.” He stared out into the sky, which had taken on the quality of a funeral shroud; a thin gauzy veil of smoke and dust roiled in the air between them and the sun. The city was alive with screams, the sounds of crashing destruction, and the hunting calls of creatures that had never before seen the light of day. Maksim pointed out into the haze, and Reilly saw, silhouetted against the spoiling sky, the tiny shape of an aircraft coming in from the direction of the sea.
Maksim watched the little speck grow larger for a moment before he continued his story. “We were deployed to some sandy hellhole in the Gulf. We were supposed to…it doesn't matter what we thought we were supposed to do. We were supposed to die—or at least we were supposed to almost die.” He grimaced, rolling his tattered right shoulder so that the skin stretched, and the places where the metal muscle of his bionic arm showed through were all the more stark and obvious. “Our bird was hit just as we were preparing for the drop. We were seventy, eighty feet above the ground. All of us, just over a dozen of us, fell screaming amidst the pieces of the chopper. Not sure if the ground or the wreck hit us first.”
The distant shape of the gunship was growing larger and larger. It passed between two tall buildings, making swirling eddies of the smoky haze. It was not, as Reilly had expected, a conventional helicopter. It was cutting edge tech, stuff that only the mega-corporations were using—the kind of vehicle not even the government could afford to use. Its body was much like that of an attack chopper, but it had no great rotor, and its tail was stubby and graced with tiny fins. Instead of the iconic whirling blades were four articulating arms, which suspended the body of the vehicle between four metal cylinders. Blades must have been whirling inside them, but Reilly could not see them. It looked like nothing so much as a giant drone, like the kind she could have bought off the internet. Each one of its miniature rotors tipped individually, this way and that, so the gunship traveled in the precise path that the pilot desired. It was fascinating to watch it fly. She realized suddenly that Maksim had just told her an intensely personal story, and she hadn't responded. She looked up at the big Russian expat. “You survived the crash. How?”
Maksim shrugged. “The rescue bird was there. It got to us so fast. I don't remember much. I just remember waking up blind and in so much pain.” He trailed off. Clenching and unclenching his jaw, he tilted his head from side to side, and the exposed prosthetic muscles beneath the shredded right side of his neck tensed and released in a hypnotic rhythm. The gunship was getting closer. It altered its course slightly to avoid the side of a nearby tower, the headquarters of another corporation, done all over in smooth hexagons of glass. The tower, itself a hexagonal pillar, reflected the sun and shattered the light across its many facets, leaving the gunship in shadow as it was illuminated from behind. “They replaced my eyes, my right arm, both legs, and much of my spine. The rest they reinforced and strengthened. Found out later that was what they'd intended all along.” Maksim grimaced again, as the light of the sun seemed to waver in the great glass tower, and he could see the gunship more clearly. “At this point, I'm about forty percent meat. The rest
is metal. Any more taken away and the U.N. won't legally consider me a human anymore.”
Reilly reached out and awkwardly put a hand on the mercenary's broad shoulder. “You seem human enough to me.” He turned and met her eyes, his face empty of expression, but for the barest flicker of bitter humor around the corners of his eyes. There was something hollow in that expression as if at any moment the man might collapse in on himself and vanish. Reilly continued, blinking as the glare from the other tower disappeared, and she stopped having to squint against it. “Maksim, you just called in what I assume was a personal favor, flew through a catastrophe, and then fought your way down into a building filled with monsters from another dimension, just to help me.” She grinned at him, despite his flat expression, and her tone turned lightly mocking. “And I get the feeling that you did it at least in part because then you’d get to be all heroic and manly and ‘rescue the damsel.’”
Mack’s empty gaze softened, and a little genuine warmth crept in around the edges. He let out a quiet chuckle and his lips quirked with the barest shadow of a smile. “The thought may have crossed my mind.”
Reilly grinned triumphantly, her green eyes bright with laughter. “There you have it! Only a human could be a horn dog during the apocalypse.” Then, surprising herself as much as Maksim, Reilly stepped forward and kissed him on his lips. He was startled at first, but then he returned the kiss, plus a little extra, his metal hand resting gently against her back and pressing her against him. His other hand ran over her, down her back and toward her ass. The kiss was good. It was really good, and Reilly let it linger for a long time, enjoying the salty, sweaty taste of Mack’s lips. After a moment, she broke away, grinning, her eyes alight with excitement and adrenaline. “How’s that for a thank you, ‘hero’?”
Mack snorted, and his mouth began to spread into a real smile. But then the expression froze. Reilly followed his gaze and turned, and her heart dropped into her stomach, all her laughter forgotten. The nearby tower no longer reflected the light of the sun. All of its mirrored glass had turned black as sin, an oily, viscous darkness that reminded Reilly forcibly of mold and rot, of grave-dirt and charcoal. The glass began to distort and stretch, pressed outward like a syrupy, thick membrane. Something truly massive was warping the side of the building, something impossibly large. From the twisting glass, there grasped a great, eight-fingered hand, stretching and twisting at the end of a vast, muscled arm as it forced its way into reality. The gunship hung in the air, just between the two buildings, frozen in that single moment, in that single instant of dawning horror, framed by fingers as massive as subway trains.