Voices of the Void

by David V. Stewart

  The light caught a blank face, and Andrew froze. His prescient self had not foreseen anything. It was too late to wonder about that. The face contorted in anger and rushed forward, a hoot echoing from its gaping mouth.

  Andrew fired straight into the mouth and watched the body drop. He swung the light, looking for more. It crossed two more faces, who likewise turned to attack. He dropped both of them. He took a moment to tap his head.

  “Come-on, you,” he said. He looked to Mariela. “You okay?”

  She nodded and tapped her earmuffs. Andrew wondered if she would be able to shoot if – when – the time came.

  They continued on, hearing the working of the machines growing louder, filling the space with a droning, horrible sound. His electronic earplugs worked to silence it, but it only increased his anxiety. Soon all he could hear was his own heartbeat and ragged breath. If he stopped and held it, he could hear, just on the edge of reality, Andy in his permanent prison, begging to come out and greet the Wrtla.

  They came to a fork, of sorts. The greater part of the tunnel continued curving downward, but a small cavern was open to the side. There was some sort of refuse in front of the cavern – what looked like piles of dirty clothes. As they got closer, the light caught a pair of eyes. A slightly thin face lifted itself up from the pile. Its skin was taught and white, and it stared at the pair of them. Andrew did not hesitate. He watched the brain fly out the back and into the abyss behind it.

  The refuse was, Andrew realized with horror, the remains of humans: empty, bloody clothes and piles of bones. He reached a hand back to signal Mariela to stay put. He turned as she screamed, only to have a future vision. He was seeing double – the future Mariela, and the present girl. The future one, stepping back in slow motion, was firing into an advancing man, ripping his flesh apart with three close-range blasts of buckshot.

  The man, though, was cognizant in his face, pleading. His hands were up in surrender, not attack.

  “Mariela get back! Get behind me!”

  She was still screaming. Andrew pulled her by the back of her shirt. She nearly turned her gun on him, but froze as she saw his face.

  He could still see the future. The man’s face was open in both surprise and relief.

  Andrew pulled Mariela behind him, and the vision disappeared. He raised his rifle, pointing his light beam where he had just seen the man. He could not help but see what Mariela had in the white reflected light. Just inside the entrance to the side cavern, there were human figures. Two of them were huddled over a body, squatting like some ancient savanna tribesmen, though not in the peace of such ancestry; they were dining, ripping flesh of sanguine hues bordering on black.

  Andrew held still watching them. He didn’t care about the future vision, or if either of these “humans” were capable of independent thought. He shot the closest one in the back of the head. Two clean shots tapped in and sprayed black gore on the further one. The remaining one didn’t react for a moment, then realized that its companion was slumping over. It looked at the dead body curiously, then up at Andrew’s light.

  Andrew ended its existence with a slight pleasure that brought Andy forward hooting, only to be pushed back down.

  “They’re deaf,” Andrew said, realizing the delay with each of his enemies in the tunnel. “Somehow they’ve gone deaf.” He realized Mariela was gripping his arm with her free hand. He could feel her panting breath, though he couldn’t hear it over the eternal thrud of the machines in the tunnel beyond. “Anyone would go deaf here, if subjected to it long enough and without protection. All they hear now is It.”

  Andrew jumped and raised his rifle again as he detected movement down the tunnel. He held his fire and swung his light around to see the man from the future vision – or at least the one he thought might be from the vision. The details always became hazy and indistinct once he altered his actions.

  The man was wearing a dingy and slightly torn white shirt, a half-buttoned orange work vest, and heavy duck trousers. He still had his shoes on, but they were untied. He walked stiffly, his arms flailing occasionally as if they had their own mind. His face was twitching, and every few steps he half-turned, as if desiring to run. His eyes, though, were fixed on Andrew’s light. He started convulsing as he got closer, as if he were fighting some invisible attacker right in front of him.

  “Stop!” Andrew shouted.

  The man seemed to notice the word, but did not stop until he was a few yards from Andrew. Then he collapsed to his knees and gasped. His mouth was moving, but Andrew couldn’t make out the words.

  Carefully, he crept closer, his fingers twitching on his lips as if trying to pry them open.

  “Please!” he said, his dry voice barely audible. “Please!” His hands went to his cheeks, and trembled there against the skin, as if wanting to dig into his flesh. “Kill me. Kill us!”

  Andrew hesitated, wanting immediately to give in to the man’s demand.

  “Who are you?” he said, taking a step closer. He answered his own question as he saw the crooked name tag still on his vest. It was Ralph Esquivel, the plant manager.

  The man didn’t seem able to answer, but his eyes were desperate. He wore earplugs like Andrew’s, though they were caked with black filth and long drained of power.

  “I can’t!” he said. “He made me! Now they’ll dig him up and his voice will be everywhere! Kill us. Or he’ll eat you too!”

  “The children!” Andrew shouted. At the top of his voice he screamed, “Where are the children?!”

  The man shook his head, his terrified eyes unable to break from their lock with Andrew. He choked and sputtered, then closed his eyes. “They can’t work…” He looked to his left, into the cavern. His fingers were at his eyes, pushing into them, trying to reach behind the eyelids. “He made us eat. Can’t starve. Can’t leave. ‘Til he’s… He made us!”

  Andrew gave into temptation and stepped to his right, to where the side cave opened up. He pointed his light inside. He hadn’t really looked before. Now, he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

  He was vaguely aware, looking at the scene, that he ought to be feeling nausea, but his consciousness had become suddenly too detached to feel human. Or, perhaps, such reactions were part of Andy, and that one had been too tainted to find anything but perverse pleasure or humor in what was inside.

  He was thankful, at least, that none of the bodies inside – small, once joyful bodies – were still recognizable as human. Their eyes were gone – devoured, perhaps, or destroyed as the mockeries of life they were. Time and the evil of the p;d wrtla he had known had saved a shred of Andrew’s sanity, a sanity those empty eye sockets threatened to shatter. Andrew breathed, and his past self refused to show him anything of the victims. The seer of the past begged him not to look, but memories of the school flashed by his consciousness anyway.

  The blast of Mariela’s shotgun brought him back to the present, and Andrew spun around to see that she had shot the plant manager. He was twitching on the ground, blood flowing freely from many wounds to his chest. The girl’s face was no longer horror-struck. It was iron-hard. She was holding her gun confidently, the stock pushed hard into her shoulder and her left hand steady, as if she had gained through the shock some return of control on that side of her body.

  She stepped closer to the broken man. He looked up at her, his face almost relieved. He nodded slightly. She fired again, and his face disappeared in a spray of dark blood and bright bone that soon turned incarnadine in the beam of the flashlight.

  “You shouldn’t have looked.”

  Mariela glared at him, and he could read her face like she had spoken aloud, He deserved to die.

  “No,” Andrew said. “No, he deserved hell. What you gave him was a mercy, truly. He is free.” He knelt down and glanced into the darkness, where he knew lay a satanic butchery that threatened his sanity. “My mark is dead, surely, but we can’t leave yet. We can’t let them release the wrtla.”

  He looked at Mariela, who
gave him a hard, appraising stare.

  “I shouldn’t have let you come,” he said, “but you’re here. We’ll have to shut down their digging. Any idea how?”

  Mariela shook her head. Andrew nodded and stood up, walking straight-backed toward the infinite noise at the end of the tunnel, no longer afraid of being heard. Mariela matched his pace. The tunnel went down and down, along an uneven and crooked path. All sound besides the digging and the internal sounds of his body disappeared. Time crawled by in the swinging beams of the flashlights. Eventually, they reached a cluster of large lamps enflaming a great cloud of dust.

  Silhouettes of human figures were moving around the lights, which Andrew saw were attached to a great piece of machinery. It was like a tank, or armored vehicle, but larger, sitting on brown treads twice as tall as a man. The front of the machine was turning in circles, some diamond-faced set of tools grinding endlessly the stone in front of it, whittling it down slow centimeters at a time. A narrow drill bit sat poised above it, meant for longer excavations, not large tunnels. He didn’t know how many people it took to operate as he could not see anyone in any kind of driver’s seat.

  The cluster of people around it were working endlessly on what the machine produced: millions of pebbles and piles of dust. The pebbles they threw by hand into nearby carts, automated to run along a magnetic track on the edge of the tunnel. The dust was pushed hastily to the side, kicking large amounts up into the air.

  “Cover your mouth,” Andrew said, flipping a switch to bring his helmet back around his face. The infinite sound immediately died down. “There are heavy metals in this dust.” He saw that Mariela had wrapped her shirt around her nose and face. It would have to do.

  Andrew didn’t bother waiting. He took a knee.

  “Watch our back!”

  He began firing, holding himself in tight control. He dropped two silhouettes, and the others around it froze, then began moving toward him. He purposefully slowed his breathing as he felt Andy begging to gain control. He shot three more people. The lights began to get hazy in the background, and they were so bright his own flashlight was of little use.

  Four more dropped. Two were crawling still toward him. He’d have to get them in a second. How many were coming now? Ten? Twenty?

  He exterminated five more in five shots. He began to shake, and Andy began to laugh inside. Through his old self, he could hear the whisper of the wrtla. How close were they? Ten yards now?

  He toggled over to auto, and fired, meaning to spray the group in front of him, but only a three-shot burst came out.

  “Damn,” he said, cursing his carelessness in not inspecting the autosear. He dropped three more. He was empty. Quickly, he exchanged his magazine for a fresh one.

  His future self asserted some measure of control, and he saw a dozen forms spreading out around him. It only further confused him. Trying his best to focus, he continued to fire. He saw the shadows moving toward their slow-motion echoes, the places where they would be momentarily. With a quick appraisal, he fired as each one arrived, dropping six people, their blood blotting out the light behind them as they fell.

  Again, he fired. He was losing track of where they were. Andy was yelling with mad glee, pushing into the center of his consciousness.

  Empty.

  He dropped out the magazine and reached for another. He fumbled it and dropped it on the ground. A field of future images flew out, immediately in front of him. Their hands, sickly white, were groping him, touching him in a tingle of future dread.

  Andrew dropped the rifle and reached for his plasma gun. In the silence, he realized that Mariela was firing. He saw bodies drop to his left, but the images in front of him remained. He flipped off the safety and fired through the images. The muzzle flash of the energy weapon was powerfully bright in the dim tunnel, but the way it lit up all the dust around him was possibly worse. He was nearly blind, but he stayed focused on the images. The images disappeared as he hit the attackers which he could not yet see.

  Finally, the last motion was a shambling corpse of a man heading toward Mariela. Andrew saw she was kneeling down, trying to reload the shotgun. He quickly dispatched the wretch, then moved to help her. Her shaking hands were having trouble loading the shells into the magazine tube.

  “Next time use your pistol.”

  Andrew reached into her bag and grabbed a handful of shells. Taking the gun, he quickly popped them in, then threw one in the chamber and released the bolt. He picked his rifle back up and swung the light into the darkness behind them and saw motion that he couldn’t clearly find the origin of out in the dust.

  “The wrtla told them we were here,” Andrew said, hearing laughter from Andy. “Stay close to me. Fire on them if you have to.”

  She obeyed, watching the space behind them that was flooded with the digging machine’s lights. Andrew approached cautiously, watching his periphery as much as he could. Once he was fully in the halo of lights it was impossible to see any moving shadows. He tapped his head, hoping his prescience would alert him to any remaining enemies.

  The machine seemed more massive as he approached, like a gigantic armored beetle with its head stuck in the sand. He slung his rifle and climbed up a ladder onto an operating platform that contained several seats. Each one, he saw, was controlled by a computer terminal and operation surface; manual controls were apparently locked. He touched one panel to bring it to life and it prompted him for identification and a password.

  “Damnit,” he said. He moved to the other three. All of them were identity locked. He began looking about frantically for an emergency kill switch. He shouted down to Mariela, “Do you see any switches? Anything to turn this thing off?”

  On the ground, she turned from staring out into the darkness beyond the lights. She pointed at something on the ground level, between the treads.

  Andrew quickly hopped down, falling to his hands as he hit the uneven pebble-strewn floor of the dig site. He found the switch, a large red button behind a plate of glass. He slammed the butt of his stock into the glass, shattering it, then something inside him snapped.

  With horror, he realized he could hear laughing – it was Andy. He reached toward the switch, and his hand froze. He willed it forward, but it would not obey him. Slowly, his hand turned back, the fingers curling, as if the hand had a mind of its own and was struggling to make a fist. He could almost see a grimace there, in the lines of his palm.

  Welcome back, child of darkness.

  “I don’t know you,” Andrew said.

  You know my sister, and therefore you know me.

  “No.”

  Yes, Andrew Dalatent. Space is a small matter for us, distance irrelevant. Time belongs to us. We are inevitable.

  “No.”

  You think we made a mistake with you? No, we did not. We do not make weapons idly. It is time for us to begin our great crusade, Andrew. The great work you were created for. All that you desire will be given to you; we reward those who are strong.

  “I am free from you!”

  Laughter answered him, but he couldn’t be sure if it was the wrtla, or himself.

  The next moment he was turning, facing Mariela.

  She stood hesitantly, her eyes looking out across the dusty lightscape. Andrew felt a sudden heat in his neck, and he recognized an emotion that he had long been detached from – a consequence of his condition. Emotion was not the right word, he realized. It was a feeling, and it would have sickened him, but he was no longer in control. He was watching now, passively, and he realized that detachment from his past self no longer prevented him from feeling Andy’s desires and compulsions.

  Worse, he was Andy.

  He considered for a long moment the lustful feelings that welled in him. There was simple, human lust, and a deeper, uglier feeling. A bloodlust. A lust for pain.

  Kill her. There will be others. The demon tickled his mind with a promise.

  He fired two shots into her chest. She crumpled into a heap. Her eyes lo
oked up to regard him, sickening surprise filling the wide pupils as life left her body. Andy smiled. He had hated her from the moment he saw her.

  Welcome back to the fold.

  Andrew tried to resist, but he was failing badly. He felt gone, washed away and blended into oblivion. His fingers in his mind reached forward, trying to regain control and salvage something. He was a murderer, truly, now, but that didn’t mean he had to let the wrtla win. Mariela’s dead face recused him.

  Something snapped, and Andrew realized he had lost time.

  He was, he saw now, surrounded by the simple servants of the lord beneath. They waited on his whim, dominated by the thoughts of the being they had worked tirelessly to free. So many had died in their quest to please him, served him as food for the remaining slaves, who were hardened beyond any semblance of humanity now. They worked endlessly at his feet, pulling away the rubble from the great dig.

  At last the digging machine broke through, its many bits and faceted tools worn down to round nubs by the effort. A black abyss opened beyond, and from it emerged the wrtla in all its terrible inverted glory. It was swirling gray smoke, seething and crawling out, covering every surface with millions of smooth, lacteous tentacles. Within that mist and mass of nocturnal opalescence squirmed pieces of its body – corporeal and yet beyond the physical realm, just as the mind of the lord was unfathomable and yet could be known and understood a piece at a time.

  “Lord Dalrathag,” Andrew said aloud, relishing in the name of his lord, knowable only once he had reached direct contact with him. Countless eyes of nothingness regarded him with pleasure, and Andrew leaned back, receiving the blessing of power from his god. Command and presence, to go with his foretelling and understanding.

  Andrew – the Andrew who had withstood a wrtla and rescued himself, screamed internally at his impotence. His failure.

  Darkness swirled. The prescient mind was sending a vision of the coming crusade, obeying the will of Andy and the wrtla.