14

by Peter Clines

  Nate had seen the box she was looking in and ignored it because it was new. The cardboard was flat and smooth. The corners weren’t blunted and the tape was still clear. Veek hadn’t been so dismissive.

  The inside of the box was divided into twenty tall slots. Each one held a package wrapped in a thin sheet of foam. Veek slid one out, broke the paper seal around it, and unrolled the bundle.

  It was one of the glass tubes. She held out the one she’d pulled from the machine. Unlike hers, this one was clear and spotless. The brass gleamed and the filaments and tiny circuits inside shined like new.

  Too new, thought Nate for a moment. But only a moment. He saw something coming at him from the door. A foot wearing a faux-leather shoe lashed out and smashed into the box of tubes. It skidded across the floor and Veek scrambled after it.

  Andrew took another step and slammed an awkward punch down at Nate. He got his head out of the way but the fist cracked against his shoulder and a wave of pain washed down his arm. Another punch caught him in the elbow and he felt something crack.

  “You filthy, degenerate heathens,” spat Andrew. His eyes were wide and angry. His voice was thick and wet, as if he was drowning in his own rage. “How dare you interfere with my Lord’s plan? How dare you ruin my wonderful day?”

  His foot came back and he drove a kick into Nate’s stomach. Nate woofed out some air but managed to grab hold of the leg. Andrew lunged back and dragged him across the floor. He shifted his weight and his free foot swung in and caught Nate in the hip. He roared and the adrenaline let him wrestle Andrew down to the floor.

  Nate threw himself on top of the other man and landed a couple of punches, but Andrew didn’t even notice them. He brought his hand around and slapped Nate hard in the side of the head again and again. Nate slammed his head down. His forehead cracked against Andrew’s nose and drove the man’s skull back to clunk against the concrete floor. Andrew’s eyes glazed over for a moment, blood gushed from his nostrils, and Nate pushed himself away.

  Nate reached down for the bucket of tools near the door, grabbed a solid looking handle, and swung his arm around. Andrew was already up and lunging forward. The hammer caught the edge of his hand, just under the little finger, and Nate saw the palm crumple.

  Andrew howled and brought his other arm around. It wasn’t a punch, just a wild, angry flail, but the blow hit Nate like a baseball bat. He staggered back and the room spun. One too many in the head, he thought. His legs felt weak and then the floor slammed up against his knees.

  “You will not pollute my Lord’s divine form with your filth,” growled Andrew. His face was a mask of blood below his crooked nose and one of his wide eyes was puffy. “You will not ruin this glorious day with your heresies.”

  There was a blast of noise and Andrew twisted back. He straightened up and Nate saw the dark spot below his shoulder. While he watched, it spread and soaked out through the sweater vest. The stain caught the light and showed the same red as his face.

  Veek clutched her blocky pistol in both hands. A tiny wisp of smoke slipped out of the barrel, thinned, and vanished. The smell of powder wafted around her.

  Andrew snarled at her. For a moment his twisted face looked more like one of the overseers than a man. He took another step toward Nate. She fired again. The sweater vest unraveled across the top of his other shoulder and they heard the sharp chime of the bullet ricocheting off the concrete walls. He stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” said Veek. Her eyes were wide. “I didn’t want to.”

  He glared at her, then at Nate. He reached up and swept his hair back into its helmet-like perfection. Then he turned and staggered to the door. He glared back at her.

  “I would’ve made it quick for both of you,” Andrew said. “Now you can die in the rubble of this place.”

  He vanished into the basement hallway. His shoes scraped on the concrete stairs for a moment and the sound faded away.

  “The tubes,” said Nate. He tried to shake the dizziness out of his head and realized that was not the way to go. “Are they okay?”

  “Yeah, they’re packed really well,” she said. “He only broke three of them. I didn’t want to shoot him. I really didn’t.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  She helped him to his feet and tucked the box under her arm. There was no sign of Andrew in the hallway. They went up the stairs cautiously. Clive’s rope lay on the landing in a tangle. The back door was open, but pulling itself closed.

  Veek shook her head. “He went out?”

  Nate shrugged. “Maybe this is his idea of heaven. If he wants to stay, let him.”

  “Guys!” This time it was Roger yelling down the stairwell. They looked between the railings and saw him up above. “Move it! The Squale’s coming!”

  Seventy Nine

  When they reached the second floor they could look straight down the hall to the front window. They couldn’t see the Great Squale itself, but they saw the landscape going dark in the distance. They ran to the control room.

  The others had cleaned out the remains of the broken tubes. Veek set the box down on the floor in front of the array. She pulled the new tubes from their slots one by one and handed them out. “Try not to touch the glass,” she told everyone. “Use the packing like a wrapper and take it off once they’re in place.”

  Clive spun his two different ways until he figured out how to slot it between the other tubes. Roger got his in position but couldn’t get it to lock. Xela’s snapped into place and sparked on the ends. She peeled off the foam wrapping and the tube was filled with a soft glow. “Get the prongs in first,” she said, “then twist the flat end into the bracket.”

  Roger’s tube sparked and he beamed at her. Clive got his and then stepped aside so Debbie could put one in under it. Veek handed the last one to Xela. The tube snapped into place and a few threads of electricity raced out across the array.

  They felt the hum begin in the floor. Sparks flashed behind some of the other controls. Clive and Debbie held each other. Roger hugged Xela. Nate and Veek squeezed their hands together.

  Nothing happened.

  “No,” said Debbie. “No, no, no, no.”

  The machine remained quiet.

  Veek shook her head. “We missed something. We must’ve missed something.”

  Nate looked around. “Where are the sketches? The diagrams.”

  “They’re on the couch,” said Xela. She broke free of Roger and limped for them. Debbie tailed her. Mandy flinched away from them. They each picked up a handful of pictures and then staggered under the weight of the Great Squale’s thoughts.

  My People My Prey My Food My Way The Way The Open Way

  Veek wiped her eyes. The hand came away streaked with red. “Maybe it’s the order,” she said. “Maybe we needed to do it in a certain order.”

  Nate grabbed one of the diagrams. He wasn’t sure which one, and something in his mind—something buried under the growing presence of the Great Squale—told him it didn’t matter. “Explain it again,” he said. “How’d you figure out which ones to reset?”

  “The dust,” Xela said. She gestured at the diagrams with her free hand and tried to ignore the drops of blood falling from her nose. “All the buttons and switches Andrew and his people touched had the dust wiped off them. With the buttons the dusty ones went in and the ones that popped out had been in the wall, so they were clean. And the dials all had dust on the top, so we turned them back so it was all on top again.”

  THE OPEN WAY MY WAY TO PREY MY PREY MY CATTLE

  Nate looked at the wall of controls. They’d forgotten something and it had been on the edge of his mind before the Great Squale hammered it back down.

  It got dark outside. The beast was close. It would destroy the building this time. They could all sense that under the dark imagery of its thoughts. Debbie wrapped her arms around Clive and they closed their eyes. Mandy sobbed behind her arms.

  Nate looked at the gaping holes in the wall th
at had been windows back when the control room had just been Clive and Debbie’s apartment. The same windows he’d first seen the Great Squale from. And he knew it was the same one. None of the others were big enough to make themselves known like that, to press up against another world the way it had that first time.

  The first time they—

  Nate looked at the control panels. At all the shiny levers and knobs and switches they’d adjusted and readjusted and—

  “Roger!” he shouted. “Which switch did you touch?”

  He blinked and tears of blood ran from his eyes. “I didn’t touch any—”

  “Two weeks ago when you hit one of the switches,” said Nate. He had to raise his voice over the noise of the Squale’s wings and the wind that came with them. “When we caused the earthquake. You wiped the dust off it then.”

  Veek stared at the controls. Xela’s mouth dropped open.

  “Your switch was already clean!” Nate yelled. “We turned it back off!”

  DESTROY SMASH OPEN THE WAY THE WAY TO PREY MY CATTLE MY PREY

  “Which one was it?” Clive shouted at Roger.

  Roger stared at the wall of controls. He looked down at the floor, then around for furniture that had been tossed away from its usual place. “I don’t know.”

  “Think!” shouted Nate. The wind was picking up. “You can do it!”

  “Just look at the controls,” said Debbie. “Where were you standing compared to the controls?”

  Sand whipped in through the window and stung their skin. The diagram flapped in Nate’s hand and he let it slip from his fingers. It flew into the air, made a quick circle around the room, and plastered itself on a panel above the bank of glass tubes.

  “I don’t know!” shouted Roger.

  “How high was your arm?” yelled Xela. “Try to remember.”

  The walls trembled. Outside was black as night. They could hear the overseers chanting under the wind’s roar.

  “Come on, you ignorant jackass!” shouted Veek. “Use your brain for once in your life.”

  Roger glared at her and then he looked at the controls. A trail of blood raced out of his nose and across his lip. He grinned. “Fuck you, bitch!” he yelled back at her.

  He stabbed out and flicked his switch down.

  The Kavach Building roared to life.

  A buzz of power filled the air as the machinery engaged. Electricity raced around the panels. The hum in the floorboards cancelled out the shaking walls.

  On the control panel, the needles rose to attention. They centered on zero.

  Xela threw her arms around Roger and kissed him savagely on the mouth.

  For a moment it was bright outside, as if unseen lightning had lit up the sky. A new tremor ran through the Kavach Building. There was a sensation of lifting—of casting off, as if an enormous mass had been tossed aside—and a wave of nausea and shifting gravity knocked the residents to the ground.

  NO MY PREY MINE MINE MY PREY MY NEW WORLD NO NO NO

  The thoughts of the Great Squale faded as if it were falling away. Energy clotted the air around them. A ripple ran through the walls, the aftershock of a quake that never happened.

  The Kavach Building took them home.

  * * *

  Andrew stood with the overseers. His voice joined theirs in song. The Lord of All Things filled the sky above them. It was the sky, and it filled their minds as surely as air filled their lungs. The winds flaying their skins were a sign of its greatness.

  The Kavach Building flickered before them. A ripple of brilliant color raced around the building like a New Year’s Eve light show, and it was gone. The dead air shook with its sudden absence.

  The Lord of All Things roared its anger. The heretical machine, the machine that kept nature from taking its course, had vanished. The way was sealed.

  The faithful had failed.

  Andrew felt a wave of nervousness wash over him as his god’s wrath became known. Still, he knew he was favored. He was blessed for all he had done, and the proof was that he stood in the presence of the Great One itself.

  He closed his good eye and angled his face to the sky. He raised his arms and smiled as he felt his god’s love wrap around him and lift him up.

  It was the most wonderful day ever.

  ADDITION

  Eighty

  “Did we make it?”

  Nate heard Debbie’s question, but didn’t know how to answer it. His arms were wrapped around Veek and hers around him. He could smell her hair and the masculine shampoo she used because it was cheaper.

  He opened his eyes and they were sticky with blood. Veek shifted in his arms and he got one of his hands up to wipe his eyelids as best he could.

  Xela yelped. “We’re not dead,” she announced. “My leg still hurts like all hell.”

  “You and me both,” muttered Veek, putting her hand on her stomach.

  Nate sat up. The seven of them were sprawled on the floor of Clive and Debbie’s apartment. Blood streaked their faces. Around them, the brainchild of Aleksander Koturovic and Nikola Tesla hummed as it had for over a century.

  “Dark out,” said Roger.

  “No,” said Debbie. She was smiling. “There’s a building in the way.”

  They got up and staggered to the shattered window like a pack of grinning drunks. A wall of rust-colored bricks faced them, even darker in the twilight hours. They looked up and saw a little girl staring back at them. She waved at the strange looking grown-ups and they all waved back.

  “Hang on,” said Veek. Her phone was powering up, and Nate saw a spinning icon as it tried to sync itself with the network it had been separated from. She let out a little laugh. “It’s Tuesday night,” she said. “We’ve been gone for four days.”

  “Fuck,” said Roger. “So gonna get fired.”

  They hugged each other and laughed. And after a few minutes, some of the laughter became tears.

  * * *

  Roger got fired, but found a new job by the end of the week. Veek had been fired, too, but didn’t care. By a stroke of luck, Clive didn’t have any work scheduled for the days they’d been somewhere else. Debbie and Xela both had classes to catch up on.

  There was no other sign anyone had noticed their absence. No news crews. No police activity. No concerned notes. Somehow the Kavach Building had kept its presence in the real world even as it carried them somewhere else. The other tenants who hadn’t crossed over were more concerned with the sudden wave of vandalism—half the windows broken, the front door wrecked, and the steps cracked in three places.

  The bodies vanished from the slab of concrete in the back. Aside from the blood in the hallway, there was no sign of them. Once Nate and Veek mopped the halls, even that was gone.

  They found sheets of plywood out back by the now-restored fence. Clive put them over the broken windows.

  Debbie went to Health Services on her campus and learned Andrew had cracked two of her teeth. She couldn’t afford crowns so they were both pulled. The gap was far enough down her jawline it didn’t show, but she talked with a lisp for a few days.

  Xela also went to Health Services and said she’d been injured while moving an oversized picture frame. The doctor told her she was lucky the glass had missed arteries, berated her for taking so long to get it checked, and explained it was too late for stitches. She was going to end up with a scar. Her leg was wrapped and taped. He said to keep it clean and gave her a pair of aluminum crutches along with a bottle of Vicodin.

  Nate’s hip got better and the bloodshot eyes he and Roger shared healed up in a week. For most of that time Veek had a grapefruit-sized bruise just under her ribs and winced whenever she laughed or breathed too hard.

  Mandy was past her shock and well into denial. She’d sat silently in Debbie and Clive’s apartment for almost a day after they got back. Then she got up and walked back to her apartment. Two days later Nate saw her on the stairs and she acted confused when he asked how she was doing. “I fell down and hit my head,
” she told him. “That’s all. Nothing else happened.”

  He decided not to push it.

  They went up one night to watch the sunset, but the roof was a different place without the wooden deck. It didn’t feel the same for a number of reasons. One of the big ones being the lack of a retired publisher-who-wasn’t-a-publisher.

  Nate and Veek stayed together every night. They worked in his room and slept in hers. Her room was once again at a constant sixty-nine degrees. Sometimes, late at night, they talked about the machinery in the walls and the things on the other side.

  One night they talked about Andrew and the Family of the Red Death.

  Two weeks passed. And when they couldn’t avoid the issue any longer, they all met in the lounge.

  * * *

  “Rent’s due the day after tomorrow,” said Nate. “Someone’s going to notice Oskar’s missing, if they haven’t already.”

  “What if we all just put our checks under his door?” offered Xela.

  “Don’t think that’ll cut it,” said Roger. “Anyone’s gonna know something’s up.”

  Nate nodded. “I’m just thinking...” He paused and wondered if there was a better way to phrase his suggestion. Veek knew what was coming and squeezed his hand. “I’m thinking maybe no one wants to be here this weekend.”

  Debbie raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

  “Because I think there are going to be a lot of questions,” said Nate, “and I don’t think we’re going to be able to answer them.”

  “You think we should all move?” asked Clive.

  “I just think you should all be somewhere else,” Nate said. “Go stay with friends out of town for a night or two.”

  Roger shook his head. “Just come looking for us, won’t they?”

  “Yeah,” said Xela. “I mean, this is all super-secret government stuff, right?”

  “They won’t,” said Nate. “Because they’re going to find me.”