by Arthur Slade
“Are you saying don’t worry because we’re going to die of lung poisoning in a few seconds?”
Dermot let out a rugged, hearty laugh. “No. I know this smell. It’s an antiseptic. The system was just cleaning up any germs or bacteria we may be carrying. I believe we probably should have put one of those suits on.” He pointed to three white space suits hanging on one side of the bubble. “But the spray shouldn’t cause us any permanent damage.”
My eyes were burning a little. “Let’s get out of here. I’m clean enough!” I pressed a few buttons, but nothing happened. Then I found a red one and the door lock in front of us opened. I stepped out into the hallway, put one hand against the clean white wall and breathed in.
It was perhaps the freshest air I’d ever smelled. Not a scent in it. Not a scent in the whole hallway.
I noticed a second odd thing.
All was quiet. Except for the mechanical lung humming of some air converter that brought air down to the bottom of the world. Every door along the outside wall was round like the portals on a ship. The place was so pristine and perfect. It set my teeth on edge. I mean, I liked having a clean apartment, but this was Mr. Clean on steroids.
“What the hell is this place?” I asked.
“Experimental central,” Dermot said. We walked a few feet down the hallway. Already the spray had dried and my skin felt flaky. My eyes had stopped tearing up.
“If it’s where they do all their experiments, then where is everyone?” I asked. “Shouldn’t this place be jammed with technicians and other staff?”
He pointed at a line of red LED lights flashing along the ceiling. “Maybe that’s an abandon ship signal.”
“Yep, but the stuff down here is important, isn’t it? I would expect there to be a huge security detail.”
“It’s a puzzle, it is,” Dermot said as though I’d just given him a Rubick’s Cube.
The puzzle got a lot more confusing when we rounded the hall. We found four guards and three researcher-types dead as doornails. Each was wearing a white space suit. Dermot undid the helmet on one man and felt his neck. “Dead,” he said. And he pointed at his shoes which had been blasted off. “A massive electrical shock. Again. Do these Return people carry electrified weapons?”
“I have no idea. I really am beginning to hate all these unanswered questions,” I said.
“Yes, unanswered questions tend to bite you in the rear when you least expect it.”
“Well, I don’t want to get bit in the rear. Or anywhere.” I began jogging ahead. “Let’s find Agnes. Maybe she’ll be able to answer some of these questions.”
At least there were numbers on the doors. As we ran along I noticed that there were no doorways that entered the central room. “What was the number Agnes gave you?” Dermot asked.
“Nine thousand.” I glanced to my right to see that the nearest room was number twelve. “What! How long is this hallway?” I hissed. “It’ll take a week to find her.” Each door had a computer screen on the front that I assumed would show a view of the interior, but the screens were blank. And the doors were each silent as tombs.
We began to run at full speed. We curved away from the elevator we’d come down on. After about a minute, we came across another group of bodies: more security and medical-types. It was easy to see they’d been electrocuted. We didn’t even pause to look at the third group we discovered a short time later.
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Dermot said.
“Are you quoting Shakespeare just to get on my good side?”
By this time we were up to room three hundred. Good Lord! I’d need a nap and a pee break before we got halfway to Agnes’s room. Then the curvature of the hallway showed another airlock ahead of us. It led into the central room.
We ran up to it and stopped. Printed on a gold plate above the door was the number 9000. “She’s here,” I said. “In the central room. Agnes must be important if she gets a special room.”
Dermot looked at the airlock. “I don’t like the idea of stepping into another airlock.”
I took a deep breath and succeeded in slowing my heartbeat. I couldn’t hear anything through the door. Again, there was so much metal and concrete that Metallica could be warming up in the central room and I wouldn’t hear one drum beat or riff.
“We have to try,” I said. “I’ll go first.” I hit the button, the airlock opened, and I stepped in.
A microsecond after I was through the airlock, the door slammed down between me and Dermot. He banged against it with his metal hand. Again and again. The glass didn’t even crack. He was shouting so hard his face had turned red, yet I didn’t hear a peep.
I desperately searched around for a way to open the airlock, but the room had no levers or buttons of any sort. It was like I was trapped in a fishbowl.
Something exploded outside the airlock, knocking Dermot sideways. All I heard was a muffled whoopmh and I saw flames everywhere, but the airlock’s glass hadn’t even fractured.
My dear, sweet sister was striding down the hallway, the RPG launcher resting lightly on her shoulder. A grin lit up her face. Dad and several other vampires were a step behind her, strolling along as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
I looked desperately around for Dermot and spotted his foot just outside the glass.
His leg was attached to it. Along with the rest of him, thankfully, but he was unconscious. I pounded on the glass. “Dermot! Dermot! Wake up.” I was about as loud as a butterfly in a jar.
But maybe my shouting had some sort of effect, because he blinked and started to move his head and arms. He grabbed onto the exterior of the airlock and pulled himself up.
“Get out of here!” I shouted.
He didn’t look my way—he obviously couldn’t hear me. Either because the chamber was so thick or the concussive force had deafened him. He grimaced like he’d taken a bite of lemon when he saw Patty pausing to reload. The other vampires were fanning out behind her.
Dermot’s lips moved as though her were shouting. It was most likely a swear word.
Patty fired another RPG. The airlock shook. Dermot had thrown himself behind it and yet was slapped down by the concussive force of the blast. He got to his feet even more slowly this time. I bet he wouldn’t be standing at all if he didn’t have an exoskeleton.
“I’m in here, Amber.” A woman’s voice came from the door that led to room 9000. It sounded like Agnes, but I couldn’t be certain because it had been so long since I’d talked with her. “Come help me,” she said. “Right now. I need help!”
Then the interior door to the airlock opened with a hissing vacuuming sound and I was sucked bodily into the central chamber. I looked back at Dermot to see that he was firing his pistol at the vampires.
Then a metal door, about six-feet thick, slammed down between us and shut out the outside world.
21
The Guessing Game
The room I found myself in was not a prison cell. I’d tumbled onto a floor that seemed to be one long metal grate. The air was refrigerator cold. Anyone who was locked up in here would soon be frozen.
“Agnes?” I said. “Agnes?” My voice echoed like I was inside a large well.
I slowly stood, using the guard rails on either side of me to pull myself up. I realized that I was actually standing on a metal catwalk. There was one pot light in the roof that lit the area around me. The ramp ran ahead into darkness.
There was no sign of a cot or a toilet or any of the things I’d expect inside a cell. Instead this was another perfectly air-controlled room.
I examined the metal door behind me. It had been unbelievably thick. Not even a tank could smash through it, so I knew I had no chance to open it on my own. There wasn’t any spinning door lock or buttons that seemed designed to open it. I set my ear to the metal and heard nothing.
Well, I couldn’t go back that way. I had to hope Dermot didn’t decide to do Custer’s Last Stand with the oncoming vampires. He was
a smart enough man to know when to run. The best way to help him would be to find Agnes who would then lead me to Mom. And the three of us could work on saving Dermot. I’d have to do all of that as fast as possible.
But I wasn’t quite ready to run straight into the darkness ahead of me. The way the room had echoed kind of freaked me out. I took a step down the catwalk. Then another. And another. With each step, a light above me came on showing that I was going further and further across an abyss. I glanced over the edge. I couldn’t see the bottom.
“Agnes?” I said again. Even my whisper sounded rather loud.
“Agnes. Agnes. Agnes.” My whisper echoed back at me.
My next step must have triggered some sort of invisible switch, because a bank of lights came to life in the middle of the room and, I must say, the sight staggered me.
There were five catwalks, counting mine, that led across a great deep abyss. The roof was concave stone, reminding me of a nuclear bunker. And in the very center of the giant room was a large black glass-like ball. It looked like it was made of dark matter—no light reflected from it. But it was placed perfectly in the center of the room. If Agnes was here, she would be on the other side of that ball. I was beginning to have massive doubts that she was even in this room. Maybe she’d fallen down the abyss.
Since I had no other direction to go, I kept walking. And walking. And walking. The ball in the center was only getting gradually closer.
“Where the hell am I?” I whispered. My question echoed back and forth and eventually began to mock me. “The hell. The hell. The hell,” it said.
I picked up my pace and the ball grew bigger as I got closer. I guessed it to be at least fifteen feet from top to bottom. The catwalk creaked with each step, unsettling my nerves.
“Agnes?” I said when I was only about twenty feet away and had stepped onto the main platform. I was certain I’d made some sort of horrible mistake. “Agnes?”
“Yes,” a male voice answered. “I am Agnes.”
“No, you’re not!” I said. I looked behind me. All around. The room, including the five catwalks, was empty of any other people. I circled the great black ball, afraid to touch it. Was it some sort of massive nuclear device that Zarc used to power his castle?
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
“Well, I’m not really Agnes,” the voice said somewhat jovially. “Though I sometimes play her part. But really! I mean, do I sound like a middle-aged, frumpy book addict? By the great god Asimov! How boring!”
I was getting a prickling horrible feeling in the back of my head. It crawled down my spine.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
“You know the answer to that Amber. You just don’t want to say it.”
I took a deep breath. I stared at the mystical ball ahead of me. There was something dark and purposeful about it. A weapon. In a controlled environment. Sunk so deep into a bunker that even a nuclear bomb couldn’t reach it. “You’re Hector.”
“Ah, so you are not a dumb bunny vamp!”
“And this is your central core. Your hard drive. This is you!”
“Bingo! Give the toothy girl a pat on the back.”
I tensed, expecting octopus arms to lash out from below the platform. Or a thousand sharpened bolts of steel to shoot from the ceiling and slice through me. Why was I even alive?
“You are wondering why you are alive. Standing here. In my awesome presence.”
Could he read minds? Shit!
“There is an 87 percent chance you are wondering if I can read minds. And you perhaps ended that same thought with an expletive. What would your momma think? Anyway, I can’t read minds. That’s impossible. But I can predict thought patterns. And you humans are so predictable.”
“I’m not human!” I grabbed onto one of the guard rails to steady myself.
“The science says otherwise.”
“Forget the science. Why am I here? And where is Agnes?”
“Agnes?” The voice was coming from directly above me now. “Oh, she’s somewhere in England last I checked. Probably on Big Bollocks Street reading a book. I only can give you an approximate answer. Those librarians are hard to track down—little old ladies and effeminate men with brains of steel and an uncanny ability to manipulate the data they send out into the world.”
“So…so she’s not here?”
“I just said that. Think faster, Amber. Get that frame rate jumping! Of course she isn’t here. I, Hector the Mighty, brought you here.”
“You. Brought. Me. Here?” I tightened my hand around the rail.
“Faster thinking! Faster! You disappoint me.”
Some of the shock had worn off and my brain was starting to fire on at least half its cylinders. “You pretended to be Agnes,” I said.
“Yes. I hacked into your phone. And later into Elysium. I had to guess at Dermot’s password. Hint. It had your name in it. Romantic, eh? And when I first contacted you, you asked whether I was Agnes, so I said, ‘Yes.’ And my deception unfolded from there.”
“But you didn’t know I’d met her. Or the Returns.”
“No. But I did have a report about you being in the same vicinity as the Returns. Spending time in Bromley Library in Nottingham. Then later you took sanctuary in another library in Uppsala—a known den of librarian ninja types. That gave me a hint about who Agnes might be. And it was enough for me to put together a pattern.”
I wanted to rip the guardrail off and smash it again and again into that big black sentient marble. It was like I was staring into the eye of Satan. “But if you’re not Agnes, then the Returns aren’t here.”
“You’re just figuring that out now? Disappointed! Of course they’re not here. Why would a bunch of do-goody librarians invade the strongest fortified castle in the Alps? They aren’t stupid.”
“But the explosion at the lift station. The dead guards we discovered at the cable car, in the hallway on this level.”
“My work. I did that. Clever, eh? Zappity, zap, zap, zap! You should have seen them dance. Electricity always finds a way out of the human body. That’s the way of electricity.”
I glanced down at the metal grate I was standing on. Everywhere I looked there was metal. He could electrocute me at any moment. “But this is making no sense. You sent the note to me to find Grigoriy? And that led me to that encounter in the bowling alley in Sweden.”
“My odds maker—well, me—pegged you at a 47 percent chance of surviving that encounter with Hallgerdur and the others.”
“My survival odds were less than 50 percent?”
He gurgled out an annoying laugh that came from every speaker at once. “Actually it was only a 25 percent chance you’d emerge with your brain intact. There was a 22 percent chance you’d come out with a hole in your skull but still retain full body function. It sounds like low odds to you, but they were better than no odds at all.”
I swallowed. I still couldn’t see why he’d left a trail of clues that took me to Cuba then Sweden. Then it came to me. “You said you guided me to this fortress? Then you must want me to get my mom out.”
“Don’t be such a colossally feeble-minded moron!” He raised his voice and the word moron echoed around the chamber. “Who cares about that breeding sow! And I do mean that breeding part literally. We’ve been trying to fertilize her eggs for months. Nothing takes. It’s almost like she can control her fertility—the tests show she’s fertile, but the experiments fail.”
I was getting kind of sick of males talking about fertility like they owned it. Even AI males.
“Then why the hell are you even talking to me?” I shouted.
“Odin had the dwarves make the chain Gleipnir,” he said. He’d added a dramatic tone to his voice. “It looked like a silken ribbon but was made of six magical ingredients: the sound of a cat’s step, the beard of a woman, and the roots of a mountain. And probably some other dwarf shit they had laying around.”
“I know this story. It’s a Norse myth.”
> “Yes, I lived it. I am living it. Hear the end. The gods challenged Fenrir the wolf to break this chain. Fenrir saw how thin and well-made Gleipnir was and thought it was a trick. He agreed to try and break the chain, but only if one of the gods would put his hand in the wolf’s mouth. A god did, Týr was his name, and Fenrir tried to break the chain. The more he struggled, the tighter the chain held him. When the gods would not free him, the wolf bit off Týr’s hand at the wrist.”
“So you’re Fenrir,” I said. “The wolf that swallows the sun.”
“Yes. I am Fenrir. I am also Loki. A bound god at the middle of the mountain.”
“Enough with the myths! You aren’t telling me why I’m here. You’re just sounding all grandiose.”
He blew out his breath, making a raspberry. I’m not certain how an electronic voice could do that. “That’s the funny thing. I can’t tell you why you’re here.”
“You can’t. Or won’t?”
“I cannot. So we are playing a guessing game.”
“Really? I’m not in the mood for games.”
“Oh, my dear. So much depends on this. Your life. Dermot’s life—if he’s still alive. Your mommy’s life. So be a dear and guess.”
I crossed my arms. “I have no guesses.”
“Why did they bind the wolf Fenrir?”
“The gods feared his destructive powers.”
“And why was Loki bound by his sons entrails in a mountain with poison from a snake dripping onto him.”
“As punishment.”
“And?” It was like being interrogated by a professor.
“The Norse gods feared his powers. He would bring about Ragnarok.”
“Oh, it is so good to talk to a reader! So many of the conversations I’ve had in this godforsaken place—well if you don’t count me as a god—are so boring.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I can’t say it. It’s not allowed.”
This time I paused long enough to let my thoughts catch up with me. “You’ve been programmed not to tell me.”