by Alan Averill
“Or a lie,” he says to no one in particular. “Could just be another lie.”
But, of course, it presents him with a whole new set of problems. The addition of four new floors means that the holding cells are likely not where he expects them to be; if he has to fumble around with only a lighter and his increasingly frayed wits, he might never find them. The Machine, however, is a different story. Even if it’s in a different location, he can just follow the sound.
Tak takes another piece of candy from his pocket and sucks on it as he thinks. He was hoping to hit security first, but that’s not really an option anymore. Better to find the Machine and see what’s going on there, then strike out if the need arises. He crunches down on the butterscotch, enjoying the way it dissolves between his teeth, and opens the door.
The emergency lights are functioning down here, although faintly, and the entire hallway is bathed in a dim red glow. The first thing he sees when his eyes adjust is another body. He moves his gaze away to avoid consuming more nightmare fuel, but then slowly slides them back. There’s something different about this corpse. First of all, it isn’t shredded into a thousand pieces, nor is there a hole in its head. And more important, it appears to be breathing.
“Hello?” asks Tak quietly. When there is no response, he moves a couple of steps closer and tries again. “Um…hey there. You okay?”
The body on the floor, which appears to be an older woman, stirs. One arm flaps out for a second before coming to rest in a pool of blood on the floor. The liquid is most likely coming from her, but Tak doesn’t want to get close enough to confirm that suspicion. The way everything had gone so far, she was likely to leap up and plant a pair of sharpened teeth in his neck.
“H-help,” gasps the woman. Her voice is rough, barely above a whisper, but it echoes around the empty hallway all the same. “Can’t…feel myself. P-please…”
Ah, screw it. If she kills me, she kills me.
Tak moves forward and kneels next to the woman, ready to leap back at the first sign of trouble. But once he gets close, he sees that this won’t be necessary; the woman has what appears to be the leg of an office chair sticking from a ragged hole in her chest. Blood drips from an opening in the end and pools on the floor below—by the looks of the crusted bits on the end, this has been going on for some time. It’s a wonder she’s even alive.
“H-help…” says the woman again.
“I will,” lies Tak. “I will. Just be calm, okay? Who are you? What happened here?”
“The…devil.”
“Was it a bird? A big bird with huge black eyes?”
The woman nods, then coughs. A gout of something goes flying across the hall, and Tak is suddenly glad the lights are so dim. “Okay, listen. This is very important. I’m looking for a young woman named Samira Moheb. Have you seen her?”
“S-still here…You have to…run.”
“Okay, I will, but I need to know about Samira.”
“It’s coming. I hear it coming.”
Tak stops talking and listens, then he hears it too—a series of slow, thudding footsteps ringing out from one of the floors above them. “Oh, shit on a sandwich. Okay, so forget the bird for a second. Do you know Samira? Do you know where is she?”
The woman gazes out blankly, eyes roaming back and forth like they’re searching for something to grasp on to. “H-hurts. M-make it…Make it stop.”
“Ah, shit. I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t do that.”
“P-please,” says the woman. This time her eyes stop roaming and lock onto Tak’s with blazing ferocity. “Make it stop.”
Tak stands up and runs his fingers through his hair. He feels something wet and sticky lodge in there somewhere and forces himself not to think about it. Below him, the woman coughs again, huge, wracking things punctuated with sobs.
“Fuck!” screams Tak, slamming his fist into the wall. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
He turns to leave, but the woman snakes her arm out and grabs his foot. It would be the easiest thing in the world to shake her off, to kick the hand away and just continue on, but he knows he isn’t going to do that. Instead, he kneels next to the woman and runs a hand through her grey hair, smoothing it down to her forehead.
“What’s your name?” he asks as he keeps stroking her hair. His other hand snakes into his jacket and closes around a pocketknife that suddenly seems to weigh a million pounds. “Tell me your name.”
The woman doesn’t respond. Her eyes have gone rogue again, and are slowly scanning up and down the hallway. “Petey?” she croaks. “Petey, no. Mom is going to be mad.”
Tak pulls out the knife and opens the blade. He reaches one hand around the back of her neck and feels for the base of the skull, searching for the little space between the bone and the first vertebra. Once he finds it, he brings up the weapon with a trembling hand and positions it, point first, at the spot.
“Petey, you’re a bad dog,” says the woman again, looking directly into Tak’s face. “Bad dog.”
“Close your eyes,” says Tak in a shaking voice. “Oh God, please close your eyes.”
To his relief, she does, letting the lids flutter and fall as Tak leans forward and kisses her gently on the forehead. Her breath suddenly hitches as if preparing for another cough, but then Tak brings his arm forward, and the sound falters and dies.
He stands up, leaving the knife behind, and shuffles backward down the hall. Whatever composure he might have had suddenly breaks, and he begins running through the dim red hallway as fast as his legs can take him. He sees things as he runs, horrible things, impossible things, but Tak’s brain has decided that he’s had enough and mercifully refuses to give them form. He crashes through doors at random, moving through laboratories and barracks and dining halls in a wild frenzy. He’s trying to cry, but his body seems to have forgotten how that works as well, so all that comes out is a kind of crazed, hoarse whoop. He doesn’t know where he’s going, and he doesn’t care. He can’t take this timeline anymore, and he certainly can’t take the pressure of repairing it. All he wants to do is find a dark hole where he can curl up and let the rest of his sanity take a permanent vacation.
Suddenly, his legs stop moving. He doesn’t tell them to do so; they just seem to think it’s a good idea. Standing in front of him is a familiar white door, made red by the overhead lights. It has the words air lock stamped across it, and below that a single, perfect set of eight letters: CONDUITS. Dimly, he hears the bird scream out from somewhere high above him. He knows he should be scared of this, but all he can think about right now is the air lock.
Tak extends a hand and pushes hesitantly on the door. To his amazement, it opens, the power outage apparently having killed the air-lock mechanism. He lets his legs carry him past a series of computers and other dead equipment and through another door, where he finds himself in a room the size of an airplane hangar. It’s filled with empty metal beds, some of which have been overturned. Sheets and pillows litter the floor, giving the entire room the appearance of a med-school fraternity after an all-night bender. Thousands of feet of wiring snake out of holes in the walls and lead to nowhere. Some of these have chunks and bits attached to their ends, but he doesn’t bother to look more closely. He knows where they came from.
He’s about to turn around and leave when he notices something: on the side of the room, pressed against the wall, is a bed with a large lump. He shuffles forward, stepping over and around the discarded prisons of the other conduits, until he’s close enough to be sure that what he’s seeing is real. But even seeing isn’t enough—he has to reach out and touch the lump before his mind finally accepts the reality of the situation. At his touch, it stirs. A pair of pale brown eyes flutter open, cross briefly, then lock in on a familiar face floating above them.
“Hey, Sam,” says Tak, as the hitch in his throat threatens to turn into a sob. “I told you I’d come back.”
chapter twenty-five
Samira’s dream is deep and complete. She’s o
n the back deck of the house, sneaking one of her father’s cigarettes. As the first drag travels down her windpipe and into the virgin territory of her clean pink lungs, she begins to cough. She raises a hand to her mouth to still the hacking, but it does no good—and that’s when the glee of trying a forbidden thing turns to fear.
“Sam! Oh my God, Sam, it’s you. It’s you, it’s you.”
Because her father will hear her, of course. He will hear her hacking up here in the cold night, he will ascend the stairs to see what is going on, and when he finds his little girl with a cigarette in her hand and a face red from coughing, he is going to be royally pissed off.
“Christ, Sam, come on. You have to wake up. Please wake up.”
It’s not a particularly pleasant dream, but the voice that keeps interrupting it is even more annoying: high-pitched, with just the tinge of an accent that you wouldn’t notice unless you listened extremely closely. Go away, she thinks, as a dim portion of her mind clicks back to life. Let me dream. Let me go. Anything is better than what’s waiting for me back there.
“Jesus Christ in a sidecar, Sam! Come on! Don’t you dare check out on me! Don’t you fucking dare!”
…I know that voice.
Her eyes flutter open. A blurry shape above her turns double for a moment, but then re-forms into an image of a dopey-looking young man with spiky black hair and fear in his eyes.
“T-Tak?” she manages to say.
Beaming is not a strong enough word to describe the smile that breaks out on her friend’s face: it’s goddamn luminescent. Samira blinks a few times and waits for him to say something, but he just stands there like the village idiot, grinning as if his heart is ready to burst.
“Heya, Sam,” he finally croaks. “You look all right.”
“Wh-where…?”
“You’re in the Axon building. Back in the solid timeline. Come on, I’ll explain everything, but we have to get out of here. It’s not safe.”
As if in response, a deep metallic clang rings out somewhere high above them. This is followed by a low groan, as if the foundation of the building were being put under immense pressure. The noise rumbles on for a while before ending in a high-pitched squeal. Tak slips his arms under Samira and tries to lift her off the bed, but the wires in the back of her head hold her fast. It takes him a couple of tries to realize what’s going on, and when he turns her head to the side and sees what Yates has done, the happy grin of a moment earlier dissolves into rage.
“No,” he says quietly. “No, no, no, no.”
“S’okay,” whispers Samira. “…Doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Ah, Christ, Sam. I didn’t want this to happen to you.”
“I know.”
He reaches for the wires and then hesitates, one hand hovering above the back of her head. “I don’t know if—”
“Yes. You can. Just do it, and let’s go.”
She has an image of him worming the wires from her head one at a time, but to her great relief, he grabs them in a single bundle and yanks as hard as he can. A thick, stabbing pain shoots though her head before fading away. Like a bandage, she thinks, as Tak slips an arm behind her back and helps her to a sitting position. Always better to tear it off.
Once Samira is upright, the nausea starts to fade. She takes a few deep breaths and looks around as her blurred vision tries to normalize. The room is bathed in the dark red light of emergency overheads, which causes the numerous blood spatters on the wall to appear black. There are trays and office furniture and medical supplies scattered everywhere. In the corner, someone has removed the guts from a security guard and strewn them across the floor. She tries to remember if that was the same guard who went flying over her just before she blacked out, but her memories are muddled together and untrustworthy.
“You feel okay?” asks Tak. “Are you gonna hurl?”
She starts to shake her head, but the motion brings the nausea back all over again. “No,” she says. “I think I’m going to be all right. I just…I just need a minute.”
“Yeah, sure. Take all the time you want. We’ve got—”
Tak is interrupted by another noise from above. It sounds like a set of jagged fingernails scraping back and forth across a piece of sheet metal. This is followed by a ragged, wet scream. Tak and Samira look up at the ceiling for a moment, then back at each other.
“Okay, maybe not all the time you want,” says Tak. “Actually, you know what? We should probably get the fuck out of here.”
“Where are we going?” asks Samira. Her voice is hoarse and ragged, and sounds to her ears like the voice of her father after forty years of smoking had worked their magic.
“Seattle. There’s a timeline there that can undo all of this. I know that sounds crazy, but—”
“Yates put something inside me,” says Samira as she swings one leg over the edge of the gurney. When this seems to work, she moves the other leg into position next to it. “He called it the Beautiful Land. He was going to take me there, but then…I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.”
“Oh my God,” says Tak. “He gave you the Beautiful Land?”
“He said we were going to go there and it would be perfect or something like that. But he said a lot of crazy stuff, so I’m not really…Here, look out. I’m going to try and get up.”
She drops her feet to the floor and moves to a standing position. Tak reaches out an arm, which she gladly accepts, and helps her to wobble in place. Her legs are jelly, but she thinks they’ll work as long as she doesn’t have to run.
“You okay?” asks Tak.
“My head’s cold,” responds Samira. “In the back where he…Never mind. I’m okay. We should just—”
A huge bang rings out from somewhere above them. It is followed by a series of shorter, louder bangs that seem to grow closer with each successive one. They have a dull, echoey quality to them, like a child slamming a spoon against the side of a large stewpot.
“Ah shit,” mutters Tak. “I think it’s in the elevator shaft.”
“It’s the bird,” says Samira. “It was here. I saw it right before…I don’t know why it didn’t kill me.”
“I saw it too,” says Tak, dropping Samira’s arm and moving toward the door. He cracks it open and peers out, then turns his head to continue speaking. “When I was coming here. I saw it on the road. It flew right up to me, but then it killed some other guy instead.”
“Weird,” croaks Samira.
“Yeah, it’s weird. But I figure it’s going to get around to us eventually, so we should probably go. Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
“Can you climb stairs?”
“If we go really slow.”
“Yeah, I don’t think we have time to go slow,” says Tak, as the banging intensifies. “Okay, new plan. We’re getting out of here.”
“How?”
“We’re going to use the Machine.”
He hurries back to her, jumping over a dry bloodstain in the middle of the room, and puts her arm over his shoulder so she can lean on him. Then he slowly steers her through the destruction of the room and out the door. The scene in the hallway is horrifying, but Samira just keeps her focus straight ahead and tries to ignore the scattered bits of what once were living, breathing people.
“Where’s Yates?” asks Tak, as they shuffle down the hall. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” responds Samira. “He was next to me when that thing came in. It might have killed him.”
Tak doesn’t seem to believe that, but he says nothing. When they reach the end of the hall, he leans Samira against the wall and approaches an imposing metal door. It once boasted a substantial series of locks but now rests on a set of twisted, shattered hinges. He reaches out and pushes it gently, expecting at least some resistance, but the thing simply falls into the next hallway with a dull thud.
“Nice,” mutters Tak. “I love it when a plan comes together.”
A loud screech suddenly e
choes behind them. It is followed by the sound of something large and heavy battering against a door. On the fourth or fifth try, a harsh metallic sound rings out as something goes clattering to the ground. Tak knows that he shouldn’t look but can’t help himself. Glancing back, he sees that the elevator doors at the far end of the hall are now bending out. Before he can turn away, something throws itself at them yet again, causing the top of the lift to buckle like tinfoil.
“Fuck me gently,” he says, throwing his arm under Samira again. “Come on. Don’t look! Just move. Move, move, move.”
They shuffle down the hall with maddening slowness until they arrive at yet another door. This one seems to be intact, but unlike the other doors, it contains no locks, thumbprint scanners, or optical readers. Clearly, if you made it this far, you were supposed to be here.
Tak kicks the door open with one foot and pulls Samira through and into a room almost as large as the one they just left. There’s a new kind of light here, a brilliant blue glow that seems to come from cracks in reality itself, and it takes her eyes a few moments to adjust. But when they finally do, the sight that materializes before her takes her breath away.
Sitting in the middle of the room, as if it has been waiting for them all this time, is the Machine.
The device is a massive cylinder of shimmering silver steel that rises nearly three stories above the floor, surrounded at the top by gossamer-thin planks of transparent scaffolding. Thick, clear wires ring its surface and emit faint pulses of light—blues and whites and greens and a thousand other hues all sparkling in the darkness of the room. The air above twinkles white, as if it were projecting its own little galaxy against a black night sky. It looks nothing like the mental picture Samira had drawn for herself. A lifetime of military service had led her to expect something highly functional and terrifically ugly, a huge conglomeration of steel and sparks and rusted-metal gears. She never dreamed it could be so beautiful.