“Maybe that’s what I need to be able to do, then. But my mind and every nerve and cell in this phony body of mine keeps telling me to go up.
Until I can’t go up any more.”
Michael sighed and held up empty palms. “Hey, we aren’t going to stop you. But after you get that nice new outfit of yours all torn up again, feel free to come back here where it isn’t really so bad, as far as Hell goes, and I promise I won’t say I told you so.”
Vee turned to face Adamn. “It’d be nice to have somebody to explore with me, you know. Aside from a talking gun.”
“Ha!” He grinned broadly and shifted from one foot to the other, plainly flattered at her suggestion. “Me? Oh, Vee, come on…I’d be too scared for that. I’m not much of a fighter, and outside Freetown you’re always going to need to fight.”
“I’ll cover your ass. Me and my ‘gat,’ here.”
“Oh no, no.” He shook his head, looking sad now. “I have my work, you know. My digging project and all.”
“I know, and it’s important—of course. But you couldn’t put it aside just for a short while?”
“I’d like to, Vee, really…but…”
“I understand.” She touched his arm. “Forget it. I’ll be back. And I’ll help you with your project then, like I said I would.”
Adamn visibly brightened with sudden inspiration. “Maybe there’s something I can do to speed you along, if it’s getting to the top of the Construct you’re so obsessed with. A little shortcut, unless your plan was to explore each and every damn level.”
“That might be my long-term goal, but there are a lot of floors I missed below this one, too, by riding in elevators and all.”
“Well that’s what I had in mind. The elevator we move the Black Cathedral on only stops at a couple of floors, like I told you, this being one of them and of course there’s the sub-basement, but we also have a door disguised on the 175th level. That’ll take you right into the ruined section, only twenty-five or so levels short of the top floor, if the top floor is even accessible at all. The 175th level had some machinery one of the robo-Demons knew about, that we cannibalized to complete the Black Cathedral’s makeover to a super drill.”
Vee shrugged. “Okay, that’s cool—I’ll bum a ride, then. There’s always eternity to explore the floors I’ll be skipping. But maybe getting to the top quick will satisfy this urge or intuition of mine. For now, at least.”
Adamn turned to the security chief. “Think we can clear that, Michael?”
“I think so, as long as some of my people go along with you. Let me talk to the board about it. I’ve got nothing against it myself.”
Adamn looked back to Vee and said, “I’ll go that far with you, then.
Sound okay?”
“I guess it’ll have to do.”
40: THE ASCENT
There was a cramped control room, or “cockpit” as Adamn called it, at the far end of the Black Cathedral from where they entered—the “back” of the cathedral actually being its front when it was moving along its tracks. An abundance of levers were set into the walls and steam valves were prevalent as well, while a large glass tank of green fluid gurgled above a circular, flaming gas burner. Vee settled into a seat beside Adamn, watched him flip some toggles on a console in front of him. Before them was a large view screen which outside the cathedral appeared like one of its red stained glass windows. Through it, Vee watched the back of the elevator as it jolted into motion, and began its stealthy, silent ascent.
“The cathedral won’t be leaving the elevator—we’re just going to drop you off, I’m afraid,” Adamn told her.
“So what are you doing here at the controls now?”
“I’m the one operating the elevator. We can control it remotely from the cathedral itself. Not to mention, from here I can open our disguised door for you on the 175th floor.”
“Ahh.”
Aboard with them were two of the mechanical Demons—one of them the same creature that had escorted Vee to meet Adamn in person for the first time—plus four of Michael’s security people, including those two female guards with the alarmingly pierced bodies and alarming eyes, and even Dan Alighieri’s wife, the severely beautiful dark-skinned Demon Olisha. Maybe Alighieri was suspicious of Vee’s intentions, and wanted Olisha along to keep an eye on her. Or was it possible he was feeling supportive of her quest? Had she roused the man a little, reawakened his sense of curiosity with her own?
The numbers of the floors they passed were painted on the back wall of the elevator shaft—by Adamn’s people, he told her, for their own reference—and Vee watched them in a partial hypnotic state as they sank below her, wondering what kinds of lone scavengers, or bands of nomads, or mini-civilizations lay on these levels they bypassed so easily. As they proceeded past the 134th level, even inside the Black Cathedral they heard the rhythmic pounding of some kind of machinery on the other side of the wall. And as they rose past the 148th level, they heard a wild chorus of high-pitched screaming that couldn’t, she hoped, be human.
Briefly she dozed, then opened her eyes and sat up in her chair with a start. Outside the view-screen the number 162 lowered into view. The elevator moved slowly, but so smoothly that it felt like it was standing still and the Construct sinking into the earth around them.
“Not long now,” Adamn said, noticing she was awake.
Vee pulled Jay into her lap, and spoke to him in the soft voice of a confidant. “So you still can’t tell me anything about what we might expect up here?”
“As I told you when we first met, madam,” the Demonic weapon replied patiently, its pink lips moving in their socket of bone, “the Construct has continued to evolve during the time that you were imprisoned, and I was immersed in the Mesh. I can only with accuracy tell you about various buildings of Tartarus, and the states they were in before they became the Construct. It is news to me, even, that the top floors have partially caved in as our hosts have told us.”
“Well, we’ll just have to find out the hard way, then.” She patted his bone flank. “Hey, I wanted to thank you for helping me out there, when my father attacked me in the Mesh.”
“You needn’t bother. It might not be for me to say this, but I really don’t care for the man, anyway.”
Vee smiled. “No offense taken, believe me.”
At last, the number 170 appeared, and Vee saw cracks in the back wall, dark glistening streams of water trickling down the surface from some rupture still above them. “This is it,” Adamn announced, swiveling toward her in his chair. “We’re into the ruined sections now. Actually, the elevator can’t go any higher than the 175th floor; we capped the shaft with a few strong layers of metal mesh and crossbeams to catch any heavy debris that might drop into it, while still keeping the shaft open for ventilation purposes. But I’m sure it’s bent and blocked and inaccessible, anyway, for the top ten levels at least.”
“But is there still a service ladder up there?” she asked. Though not within their present view, she had seen metal rungs affixed to another wall of the shaft when they had mounted the steps of the Black Cathedral.
“Um, yeah, but how far it goes beyond the ceiling we made, I couldn’t say.”
“Did you seal the doors to any of the levels above this point?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Okay, good to know. Maybe another shortcut,” she explained.
“Good. Take all the shortcuts you can. The faster you’ll come back to Freetown.” He looked away, busied himself with peering at some gauges set into his console, obviously trying to appear casual despite his words.
Vee smiled at his averted profile. Actually, he did make her want to return to Freetown all the sooner.
41: THE LAST STOP
The elevator came to a halt, with a shudder, at the 175th floor.
“Now watch this,” Adamn said, throwing a lever beside his seat.
Vee felt the building begin to turn on an axis, to swivel around clockwise. She had noticed previously tha
t the cathedral rested on a circular section of mesh apart from the rest of the elevator’s tight mesh floor, but hadn’t thought about it consciously. Now she knew this was how the structure reoriented itself, so that when it emerged from the elevator onto its rails the “back” of the cathedral, with its array of drilling equipment, would be to the fore.
But Adamn’s intention now was to monitor the door to the 175th floor through his view screen, and watch over Vee as she disembarked here.
The rotation completed, Adamn waited for the security people to leave the cathedral first and take their positions, guns held ready. A set of high intensity lamps retrofitted onto the cathedral above the drilling apparatuses shone on the door like spotlights.
“All set,” Adamn told Vee. “Guess this is it.” He looked up at her. For a few moments, she didn’t move away, and their eyes didn’t stray.
At last, Vee smiled and said, “See you again, Adamn. Thanks.”
She left the cockpit, moved to the front doors of the Black Cathedral and descended its steps, walked around the side of the building to where the four security people waited, two to either side of the door to the 175th level. She saw the guards look past her a second before she heard foot-steps thumping across the floor’s metal web. Turning, she saw Adamn jogging toward her.
“Fuck it,” he said, stopping beside her. “I guess I can take a little break from my drilling, huh?” He addressed the security personnel. “I don’t suppose anyone would be willing to part with a gun?”
One of the scary women came forward and handed over her own assault rifle, with its smoky buttstock and overabundance of bewildering detail on its mean black body. She added some spare magazines that Adamn slipped into pockets in the legs of his green scrubs pants. She said,
“I’ll let them know you went with her.”
“Thanks.”
“Who’ll control the cathedral on the ride back?” Vee asked him, suppressing the grin she felt inside.
“Gort.” When he saw her lack of recognition, he explained, “One of the robots. It knows what to do. Now, I hope you’ll cover my ass like you promised.” He held up the assault rifle. “You know this is just for show.”
“I’ll take care of you, little boy, no worries. So, are you ready to do this?”
“Guess so.” Adamn turned, and waved at the stained glass window that was the cockpit’s view screen. He called out, “Open the door, Gort!”
Vee saw that Olisha, Alighieri’s wife, had debarked also and stood off to one side watching the proceedings ominously. Her goddess-like figure was nude but for a leather belt from which hung a long, straight-bladed sword in a scabbard. Vee nodded at the Demon but she didn’t respond, so Vee looked forward again as the door to the 175th floor slowly began to crank upwards.
“Let’s do this fast, people,” the scary female guard advised in a tense voice, having pulled a pistol to replace her donated rifle. “Open and shut, quick-quick.”
The door was halfway up when Vee heard someone call out, “Wait!” behind her. Looking back, she was surprised to see it was Olisha—the first time she had heard the dark-skinned Demon speak. Olisha’s head was cocked, her features more intense than ever, and Vee realized she was hearing something the rest of them couldn’t yet detect. But gradually, the sound became audible to the others. It was a distant but mounting discordance of many individual sounds, each one of them profoundly unsettling.
There was something like the wailing of an infant, mixed with the snarling of feral dogs, mixed with the ranting gibberish of a madman, mixed with cackling laughter and shrieks of agony. Growing closer, closer, as the door continued up and up. Beyond its threshold, the cathedral’s spotlights were the only illumination in evidence on floor 175.
Then, before anyone could suggest abandoning this endeavor, the door was all the way up and the first wretched figures emerged from between shadowy machines, bounding wildly into the spotlights’ glare.
Some sprinted on human-like legs, while others loped along on all fours like dogs. One creature hurled itself across the floor by slapping down rubbery pseudopods like the flippers of a seal.
The guards framing the door had begun firing, letting loose automatic bursts and pistol shots. A creature hit the floor and rolled almost to Vee’s feet, twitching horribly in its death spasms. It had raw pink/red flesh and a face like a clenched fist. Another being—dead on its feet but propelled onward by manic momentum, ripped through by a full magazine before it went down—possessed a knobby head with a face of gnarled little tendrils, like a celery root. No two of these things were alike.
“What are they?” Vee shouted to Adamn over the painful racket of gunfire. Pointing Jay at a figure bolting toward her, she reluctantly emptied the last of the Demonic gun’s bone bullets. The weird humanoid figure, stark white but covered in glossy red nodules like embedded beads and globes of glass, never made it through the broad doorway.
“Mutants!” Adamn shouted back, trying to fire his new weapon but finding the safety was on. Later, when this chaos was behind them, he would further explain that these disparate entities were either the rejects of former Demonic production, somehow escaped and still surviving after all this time, or else automated processes up here continued to churn out product, albeit defective. Unless these mutant Demons manufactured more of their own kind, themselves.
Vee couldn’t tell if it was hunger, or territorial instinct, or sheer madness that accounted for the ferocious intensity of the mutant Demons’
charging attack. A few of the creatures were too swift, or else there were just too many of them, and made it through the line of fire—but then Olisha would leap forward and cut them down with wide, powerful swings of her sword.
“I’m out!” Vee cried, setting Jay on the floor beside her with the intention of digging inside her pouch for her Beretta, or maybe even her remaining grenade. Before she could withdraw either, Adamn pushed his new assault rifle into her arms.
“Here!” he said, then turned and raced back toward the cathedral. Vee glanced after him in confusion. He’d said he was no fighter, but he wasn’t cowardly enough to retreat from a fight without her, was he?
In looking back at the Black Cathedral, she saw that the other of the two robots had emerged to lend its support, those limbs that ended in weapons emitting strobe flashes of hot gas and shaking with a metallic jangling chatter, spent shells cascading. Even still, two Demons had leapt onto its body—one looking like an orangutan turned inside-out, the other like a decomposing gargoyle. They were trying to tear at and actually bite into the robot, and in their frenzy might have eventually succeeded, but the robot reached back with a claw hand and seized the orangutan, swung it down onto the floor with great force three or four times until the creature went limp. Vee dislodged the other mutant from the robot’s back with a couple of careful, short bursts from the rifle Adamn had abandoned as quickly as he’d acquired it, using the gun’s scope so as not to hit the machine Demon itself.
Then, a voice boomed from the cathedral. “Fall back! Fall back! I’m hitting the hoses!”
It was Adamn’s amplified voice, and by the time Vee guessed what he meant by hoses, the nozzles that aided the drilling operations were already sending jets of acid over their heads—straight through the open door to the 175th floor. The nozzle arms panned left and right, following concentrations of the oncoming mutants, sometimes even jerking suddenly to spray one charging Demon in particular.
If the mutants’ cacophony of war cries had been terrible, their screams of pain were doubly so. Some were already half dissolved before they fell.
One creature, lacking arms and tightly bound in filthy bandages that bared only one red eye and a lipless mouth of gnashing teeth, came hurtling straight at Vee shrieking like a woman on fire. She smashed it in the face with her rifle butt to save on ammo, and stepped back quickly as it rolled on the floor still shrieking until the acid that had spattered it had eaten into its throat. Its rolling and screams ended at the same
time.
Either the acid killed the rest of the mutants back amongst the machinery, or the survivors had sense enough at least to turn and flee from its sweeping, far-reaching arcs. Of the mutants that had already appeared, the fighters picked off the ones that hadn’t been sprayed or finished off those that had been sprayed but hadn’t yet succumbed. Vee saw the robot step on the skull of a Demon with a head like a mummified jackal, flattening it, apparently trying to conserve ammo, too. Olisha chopped and slashed at a number of the wounded or dying, at one point stopping to look up at Vee with another of her grim, impenetrable stares.
Cupping a hand over her nose and mouth, her eyes tearing from the acid fumes, Vee slung the assault rifle over her shoulder with her free hand and then retrieved Jay. When she rose, she saw Adamn striding toward her. He had found a pouch of his own inside, and held up a flashlight to show her, though Vee already had one attached to the body of the assault rifle.
“Looks dark in there,” he explained.
She raised her brows. “You’re still going with me, after that?”
She saw him look over her shoulder at the gaping blackness leerily, his face blanched, and knew it was the last thing he wanted to do, but that he wasn’t willing to back down in front of her. Wasn’t willing to let her go in there, and onward, alone.
“Let’s just do it before I change my mind,” he told her. “And before those things come back.”
42: THE WASTELANDS
It was a long, tense, furtive undertaking weaving their way through the machines that dominated the 175th floor. Early on, they held their breath against the stink of the acid fumes that formed an acrid mist, swirling in their flashlight beams, and the stench of the freakish bodies strewn around them. A few of these still gave jerks, twitches and inhuman groans, despite the steaming and bubbling of their liquefying forms.
Further in, the bodies, fumes, and bullet holes punched into the machinery were left behind. It became oppressively, heavily quiet. Vee would have preferred to hear at least a few distant cries, just to know the deformed Demons weren’t crouching behind this next rank of machines.
The Fall of Hades Page 20