Abyss (Songs of Megiddo)

by Klieve, Daniel

  “Palatine Hill’s in Pueblo...?” Dio murmured, confused. He looked out the car’s tinted window, scanning blearily.

  “No. It’s under it.” Smoke replied; presumably sarcastically – her tone flat and cold – not bothering to look at either of them.

  “What's your problem?” Yvonne asked. Dio was surprised at how she asked it – not to mention that she asked it – her voice light; as if any potential answer was going to amuse her.

  “Ex-fucking-scuse me?” Smoke returned acidly, turning to look straight at Yvonne, who simply snorted.

  “You’re not frightening, you know. I’m sure you get all sorts of respect from the rank-and-file, but...lady? Save it for the tourists.” She paused, looking to Dio: “Americans say that, right? ‘Save it for the tourists’?” Dio nodded.

  “Yeah. Americans say that.” he confirmed.

  “Do you two know what they call you?” Smoke cocked her head, laughing a cruel, knowing little laugh.

  “Us specifically, or...?” Yvonne sat back in her seat, shooting her a look that said: ‘c’mon; let’s see what you’ve got’.

  “All the intakes.” Smoke clarified. “Fucking ‘lab-rats’. Care to hazard a guess at why the fuck that might be?”

  “Oh come on.” Yvonne spat. “We’re Israeli. What do you think of ‘lab-rats’, Dio?”

  “I’ve heard worse. Much worse.” Dio shrugged.

  “Palestinian toddlers can do better than that.”

  “Gold star for effort, though...” Dio smirked. Yvonne’s attention snapped to him – mildly shocked – and remained there; eyes glued disapprovingly towards his.

  “Ya’boozdinak...” Yvonne muttered in Hebrew: “Ata dibeel...”: ‘holy crap...you idiot...’.

  “What? What’d I say?” Dio’s brow knotted in confusion. He was well aware that Yvonne typically – as a rule, in fact – only spoke in Hebrew when she was angry, or having a particularly strong emotional reaction to something. It was one of her many and myriad attempts to embrace her new life, and to push back against her old one. For Dio – for this reason and others – the understanding ensured that hearing Yvonne’s tongue making those sounds was both a very rare event, and a deeply disconcerting one.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t take ‘history’ in school, then? Crack a fucking book, kid. Seriously.” Smoke shook her head. Dio glared at her: beyond the mockery in her voice, the tangible amusement playing across her face looked...wrong on her. In a brief moment of commonality before remembering that they – apparently – hated one another, Dio caught Yvonne and Smoke sharing a bemused, incredulous eye roll.

  “Hrmn.” he growled under his breath; confused and embarrassed...though completely oblivious as to why.

  “Anyway. It’s the fucking implication,” Smoke sighed, returning to her point. “Lab-rats: expendable? Interchangeable? Marked for fucking testing? Not...really...Human? I’d have thought, given your heritage,” She sounded the word out – ‘heh...rit...ij’ – like she was speaking to very small children: “You’d have the instinct, if not the fucking brains, to find something dark enough there to make you want to run a mile. Or ten-fucking-thousand of ‘em, more like.” She paused, sneering dismissively at Dio: “But I guess shit-for-brains here kinda just illustrated the contrary with an extreme level of fucking efficacy, didn’t he?”

  “What do you mean, ‘heritage’?” Yvonne asked. Dio thought he knew. And – from the look in her eye – he concluded that Yvonne knew, as well. But he could see that she wanted to make absolutely sure – to hear Smoke explicitly use all of the necessary words together in a single sentence – before deciding whether or not to attempt to tear Smoke’s throat out. Dio was surprised to discover that, for the first time since meeting Yvonne – and since beginning to consider, as he had, many times, what the outcome of a physical confrontation between her and another individual they’d encountered might have been – Dio wasn’t entirely certain of who he would have put his money on.

  “I don’t think you’re lab-rats. I didn’t say it.” Smoke clarified, seemingly aware of where Yvonne’s thought process was headed. “What I’m saying...is that they do. And yet, here you are: eating Wright’s bullshit and drinking his Kool-Aid like it’s a fucking five-course meal.”

  “You’re part of this, too, y’know.” Yvonne reminded her. “You do realise that, right?” Smoke’s focus narrowed to, specifically, Yvonne. Their eyes latched, as if magnetically attracted, and the gaze held. Blistering antipathy boiled the air.

  “And? I’m much, much more important than a base-level intake, just for fucking starters, so...if nothing else, I actually have a decent fucking reason to be invested, here.” Smoke paused, continuing in a calmer tone: “But, more significantly, I’m not looking at some fuck who kept me locked in a fucking bunker for a whole...fucking...year...like he’s my long-lost father. You wanna know what my problem with the two of you is, Yvonne...fucking...Kafni?” Yvonne’s entire body tensed as Smoke used – correctly – her full name: “It’s that I think you’re both deeply fucking stupid. Ally yourselves with whoever the fuck you want to, and for whatever reasons you want to...but I’m hardly gonna go out of my way to be all sugar and fucking spice, with moronic – ” and she pointedly raised her hands to form quotation marks: “ – ‘lab-rats’, who don’t even seem to want to know what experiments they’re being tapped for.” Dio had only seen the look that he now saw in Yvonne’s eyes twice before. He found both memories extremely uncomfortable to dwell on.

  “You and I...” Yvonne said...slowly and quietly: her eyes one hundred percent squared on – and boring into – Smoke’s. “We’re going to need to address...some of these issues...in a more productive...context...” She hissed the final two words out from between gritted teeth: eyes narrowing to tight, vicious slits.

  “Careful what you fucking wish for.” Smoke raised a challenging eyebrow, sinking back into the seat.

  It was uncanny, Dio noted, the similarity between some of Smoke and Yvonne’s mannerisms. He found that he was able to read Smoke, in some ways at least, simply by applying what he knew of Yvonne to her. For example...by sinking back into her seat and placing a hand to each side of her, Dio saw that she was issuing a challenge: she was exposing weak points on her body to the possibility of attack; indicating that she saw nothing in the situation that was adequately threatening to actively defend against.

  A small snarl soaked into Yvonne’s features...meaningfully embossed on the lower portion of her face, and slowly bleeding out...infusing the rest of her glowering expression and excessively tense body with its infuriated energy. She sat back in her seat, arms crossed tightly over her chest. Dio noticed that – although both women seemed to be looking out their respective windows – their eyes kept flickering back; remaining angled toward one another in such a way that neither woman, at any point, gave up their solid peripheral blueprints of every move that the other made.

  §§§

  The rest of the trip passed in silence. Based on the looks passing between Smoke and Yvonne, Dio expected an eruption of hostility to overtake the car’s interior at any moment. Thankfully, they arrived at what appeared to be their destination only a few minutes after the initial confrontation. He breathed a sigh of relief as the three of them disembarked.

  Smoke, silently, navigated them across the road and into a seemingly innocuous corporate lobby. Dio noted the frosted ‘Manus Incorporated’ logo on the glass panes that were set into shining, angular steel of the main entranceway. The building was, as a whole, fairly small and architecturally minimalist, both inside and out. It didn’t seem likely that this was the ‘largest and most sophisticated’ hub of The Organisation that Wright had been talking about. Then again: in its very inauspiciousness, Dio realised, it would have been hidden in plain sight.

  Smoke led Dio and Yvonne to the bank of elevators on the far side of the lobby

  “So...this is Palatine Hill?” Dio queried. Smoke looked at him, again, like he was a small, stupid child.<
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  “I already told you, Haifa – ” Dio scowled: less surprised that Smoke knew where he was, originally, from, than he was annoyed that she managed to make it sound like a girl’s name: “ – It’s under...Pueblo.” She rolled her eyes, manoeuvring Dio and Yvonne into the first elevator whose doors opened. Leaning in – and wedging her body against the gap into which the door had retracted to stop it from sliding shut – she craned around, and flipped open the small security panel below the three vertical rows of floor numbers. She clawed her hand into the large, red, intercom button, and held it down – provoking an angry, static crackle – waiting.

  “Uh...some sort of problem? Lifts appear to be working as-per-usual?” A gruff, put-upon male voice stated. Leaning a little further into the lift, Smoke recited:

  “Sierra, Mike...” she paused; her eyes flickering shut with an embarrassed grimace. Dio noticed Yvonne’s smile expanding as Smoke’s face fell. “Fuck. Hold on, I forgot.”

  “Highly professional, operative Smoke.” Dio raised an eyebrow. The voice – still the same voice, on a basic level – had become crisper, more authoritative, and less rough-around-the-edges. Dio recalled the regard that one of the first Officers he’d served under in the IDF had had for voices.

  “They trick your brain,” he’d said. “If you can change how you sound, you can have people questioning what they’re seeing. You can have people who’ve seen you before; who’ve spoken to you before, questioning their memory. There’s no camouflage like accent and intonation.” Dio had never quite understood what he meant until that precise moment. Comparing the two voices he’d just heard: the same voice twice, that is...if he hadn’t known better, he would have confidently assumed a sizeable age difference; a definite class difference; also, very probably, a height and weight difference. He shook his head. The Human brain was a strange and gullible thing, indeed.

  “Yeah?” Smoke snapped, jolting Dio out of his thoughts. “And fuck you too, dickhead: you try remembering twenty of these fucking codes, every single day.”

  “The code please, Smoke.”

  “Yeah, it’s...” She squeezed her eyes shut, thinking hard: “...Oscar...Alpha, Zulu, Charlie...Golf?” Smoke’s attempt was followed by a pause that must have been in its third trimester. Dio found himself reflexively holding his breath, until:

  “Confirmed.” He exhaled in relief. So, less noticeably, did Smoke.

  “Thank fuck, right?” She said, with a bland chuckle.

  “Just do what everyone else does and write them down?” The voice suggested in a secretive stage-whisper.

  “Now who sounds fucking unprofessional?”

  “I’d rather be unprofessional than get a first-hand look at what happens when you fail one of these checks.” Smoke paused, considering.

  “Yeah. I might just write them down, then.”

  “Good call, ‘Sierra Mike’. Until next time.” Smoke let her finger slip off the button, before closing the panel and deftly dancing her fingers up all the buttons on the left side of the rows of floor numbers. “Have a swell trip, you guys,” Smoke feigned excitement with deliberate ineptitude; her syrupy smile melting into a gritty, irritated scowl before she’d even completed the sentence: “See you down there.”

  §§§

  After about a minute in the elevator, the doors had opened. The entrance to another lift – a much, much larger one – had gaped, directly ahead, separated from Dio and Yvonne’s by a slim platform that tapered off to either side. A voice – a female voice, coming seemingly from everywhere at once – had instructed them to step into the second elevator. As they did so, a bright, scanning light had swept over them from the narrow, upward gap. One more step and they were inside; the doors sliding promptly shut behind them. A steady metronome of mechanical sounds – grinding and whirring – began to vibrate and shake the elevator around them. Strangely, Dio noticed, there didn’t seem to be any sensation of movement. All the better, in his opinion: The drop-and-stop of typical elevators made him nauseous.

  “Do you really not understand why I had a reaction to hearing you talking about ‘gold stars’?” Yvonne asked, seemingly out of the blue. Dio slowly shook his head, glancing at her nervously, feeling like a shame-faced puppy being taunted by its own leavings. “Nazi Germany...?” She hinted. He nodded, signalling that he was aware of it. No recognition of a connection between the two concepts registered on his face. “Huh.” She shook her head, eyebrows raised.

  “What?”

  “No. Nothing. Maybe do a search, sometime. The internet’s there to help, Dio.” He shrugged bashfully. They both fell silent.

  After a significant period – Dio wasn’t sure exactly how long it was – the doors to the elevator opened once more, revealing a broad, polished stone platform...and beyond that, a ledge, dropping off into what initially appeared to be an vast chasm of uniform darkness. As the light in the elevator dimmed, allowing their eyes to adjust...those same eyes widened in complete and total shock.

  “So much for ‘resourcing impediments’...” Yvonne hissed, repeating the phrase they’d both heard Wright use on numerous occasions to justify their mediocre accommodations. Dio couldn’t speak. All he could do was nod mutely. They were both awestruck. Looking upwards, and then downwards, and then from side to side...Yvonne twirled around in a little circle, taking it all in. Dio wanted to respond, but even opening his mouth and attempting to...all he could manage was a few ineffectually gapes. Yvonne was right. Wright was wrong. Or he had been – more accurately – almost certainly lying.

  They stood between the open doors of the large elevator. It really was a very, very large elevator. It would have been large enough for machinery, or mid-sized trucks, or, as Dio’s semi-delirious initial thought process noted: at least two animals of any species currently in existence. The elevator, as it turned out, also had doors on the other side. Doors which had, helpfully, also slid quietly open, allowing them access to not one but two bewildering panoramic outlooks onto the most startling, impossible, ridiculous, nightmarish, dreamlike cave-scape they could have possibly imagined the possibility of imagining.

  Stretched out below and all around them – the long period in the elevator, however absent of inertia it had seemed to be, informing them that they must have been at least a few hundred metres below ground – was a city. A dark city. A dark, vast, metropolis of a city...that stretched out in every direction, to the gauzy, pitched coalescence of the far, cavernous horizon-line. There, the smooth stone overhead appeared to converge with the flat stone beneath, creating the illusion of the cavern narrowing to a single point. Dio knew, instinctively, that this was his eyes playing tricks on him: that there was, in fact, no telling exactly how far the cavern extended.

  There must have been hundreds of thousands of individual structures populating the space below; each pricked with tiny holes – windows; doors – emitting dabs and swathes and circlets of golden-white light. Some were a single storey – or only several storeys – in height. Most were much taller; broad-based and monolithic, like the buttressed bases of gargantuan, canopy-filling rainforest trees, tapering into the more conventionally tower-like designs of skyscrapers as they rose towards the vast caverns’ ceiling. Some made it. Many made it. Like support columns – as they undoubtedly also were – these structures spanned hundreds of storeys...exceeding; exploding the definition of the word: ‘buildings’...and bridging the gap between the bottom and the top of the cave. Filling out at either extreme, they created an illusion of – somewhere in the middle – a perfectly still, perfectly reflective body of water mirroring the bottom as the top, or the top as the bottom. For the two bewildered Israelis, this would have probably been about the same level of ‘plausible’ as what they were actually seeing.

  Dio, squinting, could have sworn that he could make out gardens, filled with gently glowing foliage of all types, colours, and heights...ethereally contouring the perimeters of a variety of structures. Off in the distance, there were other buildings. Or perhaps
‘buildings’ was a poor choice of words, in their cases. These were the structures that were less easy to reconcile with the known and familiar of the world above. Towering spires seemed to spawn thousands of lesser spires, crowded around their bases like trembling supplicants. An enormous, perfectly rounded sphere sat – seemingly suspended in mid-air – between the top and bottom of an up-growing tower and a giant, stalactite-like, down-creeping one. An astonishing variety of strange, presumably experimental, and hauntingly non-Euclidean architectures perforated the cities’ initial, Human, recognisability: tearing...shredding the previously unnoticed veil that sat between the normal and known, and a new, uncertain world beyond. A world of doubt and uncertainty.

  In Dio’s mind – and, he assumed, Yvonne’s as well – expectation had been washed clean. Maybe that was the point, here: a demonstration? A test? Because this grand lookout; this dizzying ingress...was clearly designed for show.

  “‘In this house at R’lyeh...dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’.” Yvonne quoted...the timbre of her voice infused with an eerie flatness that made Dio’s skin crawl.

  “What the fuck, Eve?” Dio’s disturbed response seemed to surprise her, because her awestruck expression melted into a vaguely patronising leer.

  “What? Did I make it weird?” She raised an eyebrow, folding her arms over her chest and nodding, pointedly, out toward the city.

  “Just...strange thing to say...” He murmured, quickly becoming – again – transfixed by the sprawling vista below.

  “Yeah. Okay. And this from the Jew who thinks gold stars are for ‘effort’.” She said quietly to herself, shaking her head and smiling wanly.

  “I’ll have to tell Galt about that reaction – he’ll get a real kick out of it.” Wright’s voice echoed out from behind them. Dio and Yvonne turned: startled. Wright embraced Yvonne warmly, and took a firm hold of Dio’s hand, giving it a brisk, masculine shake. For a second, Dio felt his unease slipping away. Though he hated to admit it, Smoke had been right about one thing, if nothing else: there was something protective – paternal, even – about Wright’s body language. And it did have some level of hold on him. It was, however...something that hadn’t been there before. A side of Wright – and a response from Dio – that had only surfaced earlier that day. The effect seemed easily shaken off, though: as Dio realised he found this realisation made the dynamic more disconcerting, as opposed to less. He tried to shake it off. After all, he conjectured...a year in a bunker made virtually everything seem as if it were happening disturbingly, unnaturally rapidly.