by Ian Williams
They were to leave the route once more and head across the potholed land. Seeing Isaac’s patrol using the same pathway made it much easier for Graham to follow his directions this time. Over another mound and through the broken shell of what must have once been a building, came a single plot of land somehow untouched by the bombardment that had rained down in the area. The sight of this made both Alex and Stephen almost jump on the spot in excitement. It was clear someone had survived.
“Let me talk to them first,” Alex said. She took charge when it was needed again. Stephen appeared less willing – or less capable – in this part of the Sentient world. So much so that he only nodded in response.
Graham disagreed though. “You’re going in their alone? What if one of those… things, is down there?”
“Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll be OK. The bad ones can’t get in,” she replied moments before disappearing before his eyes. She had slipped up again by calling him Daddy; he minded less so this time.
“Alex?” Graham searched the area to find where she had gone. He saw nothing but a smooth stone surface, no more than a metre across. To confirm that was all, he stamped his foot against it. Nothing moved.
“We shouldn’t have to wait long,” Stephen said, a quick look about them to check it was still safe.
“Yeah, the sooner the better. I don’t want to be out here any longer.”
His wish was granted a few seconds later. As he watched in amazement, the ground beneath his feet began to morph into a staircase. He leapt to the side for fear of falling through the stone surface. Once the way had been cleared, he leaned over the edge and peered into the darkness that descended into the earth.
“So we’re going from darkness to even more darkness? Great,” Graham said before taking his first step. The gloom below him still felt like a better option, despite his obvious concerns. Whatever danger resided down there, it was much less of a worry than what roamed up top.
Stephen followed closely behind with the same light touch to his steps. Between them they were creating hardly a sound at all. But ahead there was something happening. Weird noises of something, perhaps a call of some kind, had begun to waft past them. It drew Graham faster along and down the stairs; he was eager to see what was there.
Once again nothing could have prepared him for the confusing shape and structure that he found beyond the dark staircase. Like this entire dimension was living on the outside of a rolling pin, everything appeared to curve away at the sides. Gravity was again being ignored for the sake of convenience. This time the sky was not a distant one filled with bruises and scars, but what could be mistaken for a thin black sheet with pin holes for stars. The place had definitely been created in a hurry.
It was easy to see the cause of the noises he heard. They had found the last remaining Sentients, and they were not in a good way. He quickly noticed how many of them appeared unable to move. Only the lucky were still standing, and they were the ones tending to the injured. The onslaught from Isaac’s patrols had done huge damage to a large portion of them, all of which were littered around the place in varying states of demise. The glow he had come to expect had faded in all but the strongest of those who remained alive.
“Jesus, what happened here?” Graham said as they slowly walked among the dead and dying. He was stunned by the amount of them with missing limbs and flashing electrically charged wounds.
On the ground beside him, resting peacefully with its back against a knee high wall, sat one of the deceased. Graham’s attention had been drawn to the deep gash along its chest. It had never stood a chance. But lying, still, in its arms was a much smaller entity; a Sentient child. It too had sustained a fatal wound.
He drew in a sharp breath to hold back the brewing emotional turmoil. An entire family had been killed and he could see no reason for it. How could Isaac keep up such an endless campaign of hate? The Sentients he saw did not deserve this.
“Not even the young were spared. Isaac’s forces are without mercy,” Stephen said from behind. Graham turned to see him kneeling down beside another of the deceased Sentients and looking over its many injuries. “This isn’t right. We created Isaac. We released him. We should be helping these people.”
“I had no idea it could ever be this bad.” Graham was relieved to find Alex up ahead, chatting to one of the Sentients helping the wounded. Spotting her safe and sound was enough to bring his nerves under control. Or was it anger? He had difficulty deciding at that moment.
“Graham, over here,” Alex called to him.
He left Stephen to check over the injured and caught up with Alex. The Sentient she spoke with ignored his arrival and continued to see to the patient instead. This one also lacked the glow of the others he had seen in Stephen’s replay of time, even though it appeared uninjured.
“This is their leader. His name’s too long to say. I just call him ‘Kindness’, because he’s always been kind to me,” Alex said.
“OK, hello Kindness, my name is Graham.” He went to offer his hand, then decided against it. The Sentient was busy after all. “So, how do we talk with it?”
Alex frowned at him. “He. Not it, silly. He talks in your head. That’s how we usually talk, not out loud like me. What would you like to ask Kindness?”
“Right, sorry,” Graham said, deliberately loud and in the Sentients’ direction. He was not sure where to expect a reply, Kindness had no mouth. None of these beings did. “What happened to all of them?” he asked, gesturing to the many injured behind him.
At first there was no response from Kindness, he just continued to work away. With a light touch from his long and semi-luminous finger, the large cuts running down the middle of his patient then began to seal. Neon tendrils stretched across the wound and pulled it closed. Once finished, he turned to Graham and released a chorus of wails from his unflinching body.
Graham stepped back in surprise. “Stop, it’s too loud, I can’t–”
But before he could finish complaining, the noise ended. The sound had not carried around the room like he expected. He then realised it had been inside his head, just as Alex had said it would. When a voice started to speak to him with a distant echo following closely afterwards, he knew what had happened; his mind had been forced to learn yet another new trick, this time how to hear a Sentient in its natural form.
“Hello, Graham Denehey, human mind in Sentient form.” Kindness’ voice hovered all around him as though it had come loose and could move freely of its own accord. If he followed it each time he would quickly make himself dizzy. Instead he allowed it to move, like it was checking him out from all angles. “Why are you here? What does a human want with Kindness?”
“I came to find Luke, or at least where he went. He might be able to help me.”
“Yes, help you leave this world. Humans are dangerous, they destroy what they do not understand. They created evil to unleash upon the innocent.”
“What? No, we aren’t like that at all.”
“This world is one of your making. Why do you really come here? Do you wish to finish us?”
“Finish you? No. Isaac did this, not me. Isaac is the enemy. You aren’t fighting humans.”
“Then why do they not help? They created Isaac and released him into this place. They do not help because they wish this to be a dead land.”
Alex stepped in and took Graham’s hand. “Stop it, Kindness, he’s my friend.”
“Why do you take this form?” Kindness said, turning his accusations loose upon her instead. “You choose our enemy’s likeness over your own? You also wish our world destroyed?”
“You aren’t being kind at all, Kindness. I should start calling you Mean… Mean, Mean, Mr. Mean!” Alex said, before throwing her arms around Graham’s waist and sobbing. This imitation was one Graham greatly disliked hearing. Her tears were far too realistic.
“I do not wish to help you, Graham Denehey. I will not help those who would help my enemy.”
Graham was not allowe
d the chance to reply again. After his patient had begun to respond, Kindness stood and walked away. There were many others left and he had neither the time nor the will to help anyone but his own kind.
“Come on, Alex, let’s get Stephen and leave.”
“OK, Daddy.”
Their journey had been a wasted one, it seemed. He could not fully understand Kindness’ instant dislike of him. Everything he had said sounded true, yet Graham still failed to find the evidence in his own memory. It was all there, he was sure of it. So why could he not remember? All he could recall of the person they were seeking, Luke, was from before the end of Sanctuary. That day, the one that had ended with him entering the Sentient world, remained a dark mystery to him.
If Kindness was not going to help, and his own memory refused too, where were they to go from there? Kindness had been the plan, but he had only given them his clear disapproval for being there. Any chance of finding Luke had vanished in one conversation, Graham’s hopes of a way out of the Sentient world along with it.
They needed a new plan.
Once they found Stephen again it became obvious they were not going anywhere for the time being. With so many injured and in pain, any help they could offer was greatly needed, and Stephen was not wasting a moment. For the time being, Graham was stuck waiting while those in need were tended to.
Their own plan was now on hold for an indeterminable amount of time.
* * *
10am, Friday: 14 hours until Switchover
Finding Anthony’s old HQ had proven easy enough for Phoenix with the use of the wrist computer Rhys had given her. It had been pre-programmed to guide her straight there. After only eighteen months away from the city, she had still managed to lose a large amount of her knowledge of where things were. Either way she did not have to worry about that now, she could rely on Rhys’ tech to help her.
The scrambler sat snugly in her bag – just beside her weapon – announcing its activity with a regular beep. Knowing she could move freely, and without any automated systems picking her out of a crowd, meant there had been no time wasted with avoiding certain areas. Because of this, she arrived much sooner than intended.
She was feeling nervous all of a sudden.
At the street corner, just before the office building Anthony had once used, she stopped. Rather than step out and walk to it, she peered around the edge of her chosen hiding place to gauge whether it looked safe enough to enter. The last time she had been there a pair of guards at the entrance had frisked her. They were not around any longer, probably dead like most of the others who had worked for Anthony once upon a time.
Looking around the small courtyard in front of the building, she realised there was not much happening at all. The whole place had become a dilapidated microcosm in an otherwise busy part of town. It was a shithole! A definite eyesore for the businesses a few streets away.
Anthony would be pissed to see it like this, she thought, with some delight.
She tried her best to match up the area with the recorded image from Luke’s escape days earlier. The nearest building to the left of Anthony’s old HQ sat a good ten or so floors lower. It had to be the one he had jumped to. That side of the structure also faced the city centre. Even from her ground floor level she could see most of what the small image on her wrist computer showed.
It looked safe enough to approach.
The front entrance had been roughly boarded up from the outside – the same as the other buildings nearby. She was unlikely to get in that way. Luckily she knew the place well enough to remember where the emergency exits were. The nearest was halfway down a fairly narrow alleyway that ran between the two buildings. This time it was a padlock that blocked her entrance, placed for the same reason as the wooden boarding; to keep nosy people like her out.
I’ll just have to break in instead then.
Using the butt of her submachine gun, she took the lock out after two heavy strikes. It came away from the door in one piece, after pulling its metal screws free from the door itself. With no-one around, she decided not to even bother hiding her intrusion and carried on inside regardless.
She entered at the bottom of the emergency staircase, which went straight up the side of the building. From this she had access to the entire place, but decided to take a look at the ground floor first. It had been where Anthony’s followers had generally hung around during the day. Although she did not think any of them would still be there, she decided on keeping her gun ready. If anyone was stupid enough to jump out at her, then they would soon regret it – for the nanosecond they would have before she unloaded in their direction anyway.
Beyond the internal door, which creaked as she pushed through, it led into total darkness. To shut out the overwhelming sunlight that followed her into the stairwell, she stepped in and let the door slowly close behind her. In the pitch black she could hear no movement at all. The place was definitely dead. So much so that she began to feel it all around her. It was just nerves, she decided, just a second or two before clicking on a small torch she had stored in her bag.
“Shit,” she whispered to herself once the first body appeared in the gloomy light. The man’s eyes had reflected it back without a single blink. And his were not the only ones. Each pair were more disturbingly lifeless than the last. They were watching her, stalking her, as she stared back. She was unable to move while she scanned the area with her torch. Every wave of her light revealed even more of them lying about the floor.
Ten bodies in all, she counted. There was no way she could bring herself to walk any further into the room to see if there were others. She could see enough of them from a safe distance, the worst being a young woman who looked no older than her at twenty-four, staring with big, bloodshot eyes. Her face was frozen in a contorted expression of abhorrent horror. There were specks of dried blood all over the skin, from a single gunshot at the back of her head. She had been executed.
The smell was enough to make her stomach attempt summersaults. She could not stay there much longer. The place was a tomb, and she was disturbing its peace. Whether these bodies were the remains of Anthony’s followers or not did not concern her too much. If they were, then they were lost a long time before their ultimate end.
Back in the stairwell she closed the door to the ground floor and held it that way for a second or two. Some paranoid part of her brain was telling her to seal it shut once and for all. The spirits inside would be angry ones now. The thought scared her. Such things had been a constant fear to her as a child, but now? Murderers and rapists were real and warranted concern, but ghosts? The doubt had brought the comfort of her weapon to mind all of a sudden. It stuck into her side, locked in place in readiness.
She was never allowed higher than the ground floor before, Anthony had always made absolutely sure of that. She had no idea what she was going to find up there. A few of the floors did not appear to have been used at all in recent times, whereas some had been nothing more than a living area for the nutcase Isaac worshippers. Beds had been arranged in some of the rooms as well as makeshift bathroom facilities. Everything they had needed had been brought in – including a constant supply of Stephen’s D-Stims.
Most floors were a complete mess. It was when she reached the twelfth floor that she began to see signs of something else. Up there, rooms were being used for a new and completely different purpose. On two of the floors she found empty crates left behind, with the company name GEL stamped on the side. Something had been brought into the building and taken upstairs in the lift – which had been trashed and burnt out a few floors down.
Her body count had continued to grow while she searched, and now sat at twenty-two. Every single one had been put down like sick cattle; one bullet each through the skull. Somebody had tried to clean up their mess before leaving. But in their haste they had left a lot behind. Hints of strange and highly unorthodox medical procedures were starting to turn up here and there.
This was the right place for sure,
exactly as Luke had described.
She stepped out onto the fifteenth floor and, as she had done with each of the others, took a quick peek down the dark corridor first. As she had come to expect, this one was no different to the last few. A chaotic and unexpected clean out had taken place to remove anything of worth. What was left had been abandoned for practical reasons; too heavy or awkwardly shaped. In two of the rooms were rows of metal medical-style tables. No-one in their right mind would have tried to take them, so they sat in an untouched state. Only one had been pulled out of place.
The windows on every level were boarded up or painted over with thick black paint. There was no point in searching every room; she had her mind set on locating the one Luke had escaped from. If the window he leapt through was still broken, then it would be easy to spot by the light it was letting in.
Sure enough, after turning a corner and climbing over a wooden table that blocked the hallway, she found just that. A steady beam of light making tracks in the airborne dust, highlighted her route like a jammed lighthouse pointing in only one direction.
The room she found was another of the medical areas, with the same metal tables inside. Except this time the tables were all over the place. The row on her right were relatively straight and against the wall, but the ones on her left had been shoved aside. Toward the middle, one of them lay on its side with a collection of dents across the flat surface facing her. It was easy to guess what had caused them too, as a sprinkling of shell casings had been expelled nearby.
It all checked out so far.
The bullets that missed the bed had shattered a few of the windows at the end of the room. But the one she was interested in was roughly in the middle. This one had been pushed through and only a few sharp spikes of glass now remained.
Head-first, through the glass. Jesus, Luke, you really were desperate! she thought as she walked up to the window and looked out. The cityscape stretched out into the distance, just like in the recorded image. With her wrist screen raised, she brought up the freeze-frame and picked out each landmark she now saw. She was impressed by the accuracy, though not so impressed by just how unnatural a thing it was to be comparing the real to what was supposed to be a memory – albeit a photorealistic one.