by Peter Clines
It seemed to be glossy, but Nate wasn’t sure if it was just his eyes trying to focus on it. He tried to estimate the distance and height off a few lone palm trees and guessed the tower might be fifteen or twenty feet tall, which meant it was about ten feet wide.
Xela hobbled over. The blade of glass was still in her leg, but didn’t seem to be bleeding much. “Looks old,” she said.
“How so?” asked Nate.
She shrugged. “Just the lines of it. I might be totally wrong.”
“Doesn’t look like they’re coming back,” said Veek.
Nate glanced over his shoulder. “Assuming they’re the only ones.”
Roger leaned past the railing. “Found the sun deck,” he said. He tipped his head at the ground below.
The broken planks and beams stood out against the bleached soil. The wood spread out in a trail starting at the base of the hill and leading north. A lone deck chair stood right side up in the middle of it all.
Nate strained his eyes. “Anyone see any sign of Oskar? Anything? Any...any parts?”
“I think,” Xela said, taking her time, “if one of those things ate him, they wouldn’t need to bite.”
“Wouldn’t need to,” muttered Roger, “but they might do it for fun.”
“But if we don’t see anything it means he might be alive, too,” said Nate. “We can’t write him off yet.”
They stared at the sun deck for a moment. Veek pulled off her glasses and wiped the line of blood onto her shirt. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll bring it up. All you guys heard those things talk, too? It wasn’t just my brain crashing, right?”
“I heard it, too,” said Nate.
“Almost pissed myself,” Roger said with a nod.
“Me too,” added Xela. She didn’t smile.
“No question about how they see us,” Nate said.
“Yeah, but they’re smart,” said Veek. “They speak English.”
“I don’t think they were,” said Xela. “I mean, I don’t want to sound all new-age, but they were speaking right to our minds, weren’t they? Telepathically?”
Roger shrugged. “It was loud,” he said. “Really loud.”
“It could’ve been in our heads,” said Nate. “That might explain all the bleeding.”
Roger nodded. “Right. Getting stuff done to your brain makes your nose bleed. I read that in a book once.”
“You read a book?” said Veek.
“Wait for it…” said Roger. “Annnnd...fuck you.”
“What I mean is,” said Xela, slapping Roger on the shoulder, “I don’t think we were hearing English. I mean, I don’t know about you guys but I was getting a lot of ideas and images more than actual, y’know, words.”
Veek nodded. “Same here. Just lots of things like ‘food’ and ‘prey’ and—”
“Cattle,” said Nate. “It called us cattle.”
“We’re hamburger, you mean,” said Roger.
“No.” Veek shook her head. “It means we’re something they raised on a farm to turn into hamburger.”
They all looked to the northern hills for a few moments.
Veek moved toward the back of the building. Xela limped back over to the remains of the machine room and Roger went with her. Nate followed the path of the whale-beasts with his eyes. The shattered deck made a fine guide for half a mile. He scanned the horizon in every direction. He didn’t think they could sneak up on the building, but he wasn’t so sure about being able to get away from them if he did see them.
Xela tossed a half-brick through one of the holes. It clattered on some of the machinery and then the sound of it faded as it fell down the elevator shaft. She looked back at them. “D’you think all the tunnels came over, too? Do they count as part of the building?”
“No clue,” said Nate.
“Might be a good place to hide out.”
“Good place to die,” said Roger. “One of those things collapses the building or lands on it, bet you anything all those tunnels cave in.” He walked back to Nate and crooked his chin up at the sky. “Don’t think the sun’s moved since we got here,” he said.
“I think you’re right.”
Roger waved up at the distant dunes. “D’you notice the shape of the hills?”
Nate followed his gesture. “What do you mean?”
“There aren’t any of the other buildings or anything, but the land’s a lot like it is in our world. We’re still halfway up that same hill. Got little mountains up ahead of us, just like the Hollywood Hills.”
Nate studied the hills and realized Roger was right. They were scoured down to dirt and stone, but he could see the curves and dips that made up the view from his apartment. He could even see the small plateau where the Griffith Park Observatory would sit.
“Up there to the right, that ridge? That’s where Vermont Avenue would be.” Roger waved his arm in the other direction. “That’s all Hollywood over there. Bet if we went a couple miles that way we’d find an ocean.”
“Yeah,” said Veek, from the far side of the roof, “but what’d be in it?”
“Nothing,” said Nate. “That’s the overriding factor here, isn’t it? Everything’s dead.”
“Not dead,” said Xela. “Killed. Eaten. Those squale-things have sucked the life out of this whole world.”
Veek tilted her head. “Squale?”
“Squid whales,” said Xela. “A stupid name makes them a bit more bearable.”
“Squale it is, then,” said Roger.
The door scraped and they all jumped. Clive stepped out onto the roof. “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “The machine’s off.”
Veek’s eyes went wide. “What do you mean?” asked Nate.
“I mean it’s off. The sparks, the hum, it’s all stopped. Ever since that big thing flew by.” Clive took a moment to breathe and slow himself down. “The machine’s not protecting us anymore.”
Sixty Nine
Nate wiped the blood from his face with a damp paper towel. “So, here’s where we stand,” he said. “We’ve got some bottled water, and enough in toilet tanks for anything else. We’ve still got power, which means everything in the tunnels came over to this side with us. That also means we don’t have to worry about food for a little bit. All our refrigerators are going to keep working, so we should be good for a couple of days at least.”
They were back in Clive and Debbie’s apartment. They’d straightened some of the surviving furniture so people had somewhere to sit. Mandy was curled up silently on one end of the couch with her arms wrapped around her legs. The bodies of Auntie and the two men were down in the lounge, out of sight.
“And then what?” asked Xela from the other end of the couch. She’d dropped her pants so Tim could pull the glass from her thigh. She squeezed Roger’s hand while it happened. Tim put a few drops of superglue on the gash and then wrapped her leg with some gauze pads and a long bandage from Clive’s first aid kit. It was messy, but it wasn’t getting any worse.
“By then we’re not going to be here,” said Nate. “There’s a way to reverse what they did. Oskar was sure of it, so I’m sure of it.”
“Oskar’s dead,” said Andrew. He knelt on the floor near the kitchen area. “He’s joined the Great Ones.”
“I don’t think you know as much about all this as you think you do,” Nate said to the bound man.
Andrew pasted on his smug look.
Nate looked back to his neighbors. “There’s a chance he’s out there hoping we’ll rescue him. We don’t know for a fact he’s dead.”
“We don’t know that he isn’t,” said Clive. “Hell, even if he is alive, he could be a hundred miles from here, the way those things move.”
Nate nodded. “I know, but I think we need to check. The squales flew off over a ridge out by the hills. They might have a nest or something up there.”
Roger cleaned the last of the blood out of his ears. “So what’s the plan?”
“I think some of us should go over all the
pictures from Tim’s room. Maybe we can find a connection between the circuit diagrams and the actual machine and figure out how to get it running again. The rest of us will go up to that ridge and look for a sign of Oskar. If there’s nothing, we come home. If there’s something, depending on what it is, we’ll figure out what to do next.”
“How are you going to get up there?” asked Xela. “We don’t have cars and I’m pretty sure there aren’t any buses.”
“Thank God for the subway, then,” said Veek with a smirk. A few of them chuckled.
Nate smiled. “We’ve got four or five bicycles in the building, right? The ground’s sandy, but it looks solid enough to ride on. We could be at the ridge in an hour. Less time to come back because it’s all downhill.”
“We could just sit tight, too,” suggested Tim. He ran a piece of white tape across Xela’s bandage. “We’ll all get reported missing in an hour, tops. There’ll be a lot of really smart people looking for us on the other side.”
“I thought it took three or four days before somebody could be declared missing,” said Debbie.
“Most people aren’t under twenty-four hour surveillance,” said Tim. “If the guy in the green car or part of his team doesn’t lay eyes on me inside of sixty minutes there’s going to be a shitstorm. Pardon my language.”
“Ummmm...” said Roger, “Think that guy’s dead.”
Tim’s face dropped. “What?”
Roger angled his head towards the front of the building. “Saw it when I was running up here. Green Taurus with the airbag set off. Looked like blood on it.”
“Plus, remember what Oskar was saying,” said Nate. “The Kavach Building’s still in Los Angeles. It’s still in the lock. I bet nothing looks that unusual over there. It’s just wrong for us because we were in the building when it happened.”
“Were a lot of weird lights when I got home,” said Roger. “People noticed that.”
Nate shook his head. “I just don’t think we should be counting on anyone except us. We’ve got food, but not enough to risk sitting around doing nothing.”
“You’re right,” said Tim. “But I’m still not sure going out there’s the best choice. No offense to Oskar.”
Nate nodded. “Okay. What do you think we should do?”
“Taking care of this place, the machine, was Oskar’s job,” said Tim. “Let’s search his apartment for schematics or an owner’s manual or something. He’s probably got better information than us. Hell, for all we know he’s got the reset instructions posted on the back of his door.”
Seventy
Clive wiped his hands on a towel. There wasn’t much blood on the bodies. He’d expected them to be leaving rivers of blood in the hall and on the stairs. It wasn’t much worse than dealing with a leaky garbage bag.
That thought bounced in his head for a moment and his empty stomach churned. He paused to get his thoughts back under control. The last thing they needed was someone else losing it. He took a few very slow breaths, thought about Debbie, and pictured how they’d rebuild their home again.
It’s just like any gross job, he told himself. He’d been a dishwasher in high school and a janitor for the two years he was at college. There’d been awful stuff to deal with in both jobs. The trick was to put a little mental distance between yourself and whatever it was you had to touch.
God, a drink would be great right now.
His jaw still ached from Andrew’s backhand. Clive tapped one of his molars with his tongue for the umpteenth time and felt it shift ever-so-slightly under the probe.
Moving the smaller men hadn’t been a problem. None of them weighed much more than Clive, so it’d just been a matter of tying their ankles together—a tip from Tim, and it also wasn’t good to wonder how Tim knew that and how many times he’d done it himself—and dragging the men across the lounge and down the stairwell. That went slowly until Clive assured himself the first man’s head wasn’t going to crack open as it bumped down the stairs one at a time.
The large man had been more troublesome. Aside from the extra weight, he was built wrong. He had the large eyes and over-wide mouth, but there was more to it than that. When Clive lifted the corpse’s legs to tie them, they bent in the wrong place. The knees were too high, and the hips too loose. And the fingers were long. Not alien monster-long, but just long enough. It was most noticeable on his left hand, where Tim had broken two of the fingers.
There was a term some of Clive’s friends used, the ones who did a lot of computer gaming—”the uncanny valley.” It was a psychological threshold where things looked very human, but still weren’t quite human enough. It was why some mannequins were creepy and others weren’t, and CGI monsters looked better than CGI people.
The large man was in the uncanny valley. He was a living person—or had been—whose features were almost human but not quite human enough. He was creepy as hell. Andrew had said the man’s name, but when Clive stopped to look at the body the name that came to mind was “Grendel.”
In a way, the old woman was easier. There was no way to mistake her for a normal person. Her face looked like a frog had stretched a human mask over its head. Her skin was pale gray and slick, like an eel. When she died her body had stretched out flat and let them all see how off her proportions were.
All five bodies were in a line for now. There was a fair-sized ledge of concrete behind the building. Most of the slab had come through with them. The back fence hadn’t, though, and there was a ten-foot drop to the ground below.
Clive cleaned the last of the woman’s clammy slickness off his hands and tossed the towel on top of her body. The idea of Debbie touching it, or using it on dishes, made his stomach swirl again.
* * *
Oskar didn’t have instructions on the back of his door. What they found was an apartment which stretched over the entire corner of the building. All three floors were connected by an ornate spiral staircase. Roger searched the top floor bedroom while Nate went through the kitchen and Veek ransacked the first floor office. Twice.
She stomped back upstairs and the wrought iron clanged under her footsteps. “Okay,” Veek said to Nate, “how can he not have a computer? There are people living in mud huts who have laptops.”
“Maybe he doesn’t have one for a reason,” said Nate. “Maybe his apartment is at some magnetic juncture or something in the machine. They might not work in here.”
“Or maybe he’s just an old guy who never got a computer,” she sighed. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”
“We’ve only been looking for, what, an hour?”
She nodded. “Yeah. We’ve been searching these three rooms for an hour and none of us have found anything besides the key ring.”
Veek had found it in the unlocked top drawer of the desk with Oskar’s checkbook. Most of them were for the various apartments, the numbers written on small cardboard circles wired to the keys. There were four mismatched keys bound together with yellowed tape. A manila tag on the largest was labeled 14 in blue ink. It crossed Nate’s mind one of the keys fit a padlock that was still tumbling toward a pair of alien suns.
Along with Mrs. Knight.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. He’d rooted through the kitchen, moved through the bookshelf, and even pulled the couch apart.
“Nothing upstairs,” said Roger. He’d come down the spiral staircase. “Box under his bed with some old pictures. Lots of World War Two stuff with tanks. Went through his dresser and his closet, found a few old letters, box of tax stuff going back to the eighties.” He shrugged. “Nothing like what we want, though.”
“Toilet tank?” suggested Nate.
Roger shook his head. “Checked it.”
“There has to be something,” said Veek. “How can you be in charge of all this stuff and not have something written down somewhere?
“Might’ve tattooed it on his arm if it was that important,” said Roger. “Who knows?”
“Or,” said Nate, “maybe al
l he knows is ‘pull this lever in case of emergency’ or something like that.” He shook his head. “I think this is the final nail in the coffin, though.”
“Bro,” said Roger, “not the right expression.” He shook his head.
“Sorry,” said Nate. “We’re going to have to go out there and try to find him. And if we’re lucky he’ll be okay enough to tell us how to get out of here.”
Seventy One
Veek, Roger, and Tim already owned bikes. Nate found one in the back of the building, chained to a drainpipe. He made a point of not looking at the bodies while he smashed the lock open with one of Clive’s hammers. An hour later they stood at the base of the stairs. Nate looked up at the faded sun hanging in the sky. According to his internal clock, it was coming up on midnight.
“Go on,” said Roger. “You go first.”
Nate looked over at him. “What, you’re scared of a three-foot drop?”
“Not scared,” said Roger. “I’m just not the guy in charge.”
“And you keep saying I am, so get down there and I’ll hand you a bike.”
Roger took another look at the ground below the last concrete step. It looked like beach sand, but there was something off about it. The grains were too large and too gray. It looked like someone had tried to make a desert from an off-the-cuff description.
“What if there’s sand worms or something?”
“Sand worms?” said Nate.
“Big worms that move through the sand like it’s water.” Roger’s level arm went up and down in a smooth wave. “Or the big thing in Star Wars. What if we step down there and the sand just turns into a big pit with a mouth at the bottom?”
“For the record, it’s called a Sarlacc,” Xela said.
Roger snorted. “Geek.”
“Chicken,” said Veek.
“I’m just—”
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Tim. He stepped off the stairs and sand puffed out from his feet as he landed. “The damned sun doesn’t move and we’re still going to run out of daylight before you two grow up.”