by Alan Ryker
But also on the horizon was the cheat house, rising high in its awkward glory. It looked too tall. She didn’t remember making nearly that many floors.
Elizabeth’s mouth was dry, her throat coated in glue. Her lungs burned and her heart pounded as she ran up the few steps to the cheat house. If you didn’t look up, it looked like any other Ward residence, not a twisting skyscraper. But she could feel the weight of it leaning over her. If there were answers to be found, they lived here.
Slamming the door behind her, she didn’t pause as she ran to the stairs. There were no locks on the door. Wards wandered in and out of each others’ houses at any time, day or night. And there was no point in trying to block the door with something, because any object she could drag in front of the door the hundreds of Wards behind her could effortlessly knock out of the way.
Somewhere in that trailing horde were Albatross and Beth, who each wanted worse than to follow and capture her. They knew her for the cruel god she was, and wanted to take advantage of her vulnerability. Albatross wanted revenge. Beth… She wasn’t sure, but she thought that Beth wanted everything that she’d prayed for and hadn’t received.
It was hard for Elizabeth not to slow down as she passed through the first floor, constructed of marble with a sunken sitting area featuring a white grand piano, tall, white Grecian statues and a dozen tasseled chaise lounges strewn about. The place looked absurd, the nightmare of the blue blooded, the ultimate example of new money, no class, and no restraint.
Elizabeth charged up the marble stairs just as the fastest Wards burst through the front door. The ground floor had high ceilings, and she watched them spill in, pause, then point at her and continue the chase.
The stairway didn’t continue beyond the second floor, because the absurdly tall building wasn’t built like an absurdly tall building should be. Elizabeth sprinted across another floor, this one done in dark wood panels, overstuffed leather furniture, built-in book shelves. It was a place to sip scotch and read important novels, neither a thing she actually did, but which she could make a Ward do for her amusement.
Which made her wonder, where was Liza?
While she’d attempted to perfect her first clone, and tortured her second, she’d never paid much attention to her third. Liza was there only to make sure no random family of Wards settled in the house while Elizabeth wasn’t watching, because they were impossible to get rid of once they did, just getting more unhappy as you tried to chase them away. You had to kill them to get rid of them. She’d burned more than one house down doing that, and wouldn’t lose her dream house that way.
So Liza had grown up allowed to do as she wished in a house with almost endless pleasures. Elizabeth thought that might make her the one friend she had in that world, the one Ward not angry at her god, if only she could find her in the sprawling mess.
The hot rasp in Elizabeth’s chest grew worse as she realized that she was most likely in bed at that time of night, and that Elizabeth had always added new floors beneath the bedroom floor, making it a penthouse, lofting it higher and higher into the sky. The thought of climbing those endless flights of stairs made her want to find a small place to curl up in and just hope the Wards passed her by.
But finding Liza was secondary. Also on the top floor was her ultimate goal, her only idea of how to escape, her last chance with the building below her filling with angry Wards.
The cheat portal.
The third floor was a closet. There were several floors like it, filled with mirrors, small couches, good lighting and many racks of clothing. This one was primarily dedicated to shoes. Even in the middle of a chase, Elizabeth had an urge to try on a pair of red-soled Louboutins. So many beautiful shoes…
She imagined trying to escape the mob behind her in stiletto heels and kept moving.
A dance studio, the size of the entire floor. She’d practiced several styles of dance not many years ago, both in private lessons and on the high school dance team. Ballet, Jazz, Hip Hop. Maybe that’s what she would have gone to college for if her parents hadn’t been sued, hadn’t needed one of the best lawyers in town, hadn’t hired David. By the end of the long, drawn-out lawsuit he was only charging them the family rate.
Her boots pounded on the polished hardwood. She couldn’t help but look in the mirror as 3 of the four walls were completely mirrored. Red-faced and disheveled, her ballet days seemed unimaginably far away.
Why the hell had she put so many staircases on opposite sides of the building?
Floor after floor flew by, stimulating memories of long days sitting at the computer researching on Wikipedia: Louis the Great, the Ming Dynasty, the Roman Empire. Different cultures roughly simulated by her own hand filled one floor and were replaced in the next by a different tradition of decadence.
“Liza!” she shouted as she went. But she got no reply. The only sound was the pounding of feet behind her, such a low rumbling that she thought she felt it more than she heard it. And as she climbed higher, she worried that the building was beginning to sway with it. She’d heard what happened when some military had marched over some bridge, the rhythm creating a resonance that shook the thing apart. The computer created creatures below weren’t purposefully marching, but she could detect that their strides were connected to the ticking of a central processing unit. As real as it looked, their world was clockwork.
Up she went, passing floors like a tour through her own claustrophobic depression. Every type of material self-medication was represented, from a level composed of one huge, comfy bed, to a series of floors, each one dedicated to a type of gemstone and filled with the most unbelievable jewelry, to a floor that housed an elaborate karaoke bar until Elizabeth realized it was no fun without friends, to a room filled with puppy and kitten toys—but no puppies or kittens.
Where was Liza? Who was caring for the animals? Elizabeth knew that the answer was that no one was, that they’d been taken away one by one by the reaper, but she avoided that thought as best she could.
Building that floor had almost made her happy. She’d spent a few days there playing with her cute little pets. But then she’d moved on. Moved up. A bowling alley. She’d never bowled before, had been dragged to the alley but refused to put on the disgusting shoes. She’d seen a lot of reality shows where rich people had bowling alleys in their homes, though. The mini-game didn’t even amuse her for the five minutes she spent on it and she moved up, building, building, building, pulling from the vortex, finding every object she looked for except happiness, which was always the object of desire, however it might be disguised.
She couldn’t keep up the pace. She was in good shape, her Stairmaster workouts especially turning out to have been practical, but the cheat house contained so many attempts to allay boredom, to bring just a spark of contentment, that the absurd lengths and heights to which she’d gone to satisfy herself left her gasping, her lungs burning, and she didn’t know how much farther she had to go. She hadn’t remembered half the floors before she passed through them.
She needed to know how many more flights of stairs there were. Even though the Wards were probably catching up, she had to know. This floor had a balcony and she stepped out onto it. She liked balconies a lot, liked her own at home, overlooking the pool, so most of the floors had one. She looked down and held the wrought-iron railing. It wasn’t enough railing, that high up. She gripped it as she looked up, feeling that she could fall as the gravity in her head swirled like wine in a bulbous glass.
There was so much more. It was hopeless.
And then movement caught her eye. Through the glass door, she saw Wards filing into the floor, the strongest Wards, the ones she saw at the gym exercising hour after hour like they had nothing else to do. As she watched, others flowed in behind, so quietly, not at all a rowdy mob.
Her heart thudding in her chest, Elizabeth looked back up. The edge of the next floor balcony was just barely over the one she stood on. Without thinking, because thought would have equaled paralysi
s, she climbed partially up onto the railing, boosting herself up, reaching for the bottom of the next balcony, gripping the vertical metal slats as hard as she could.
Her hands weren’t strong. She pulled, not looking down, and managed to get one hand up higher. With her feet dangling now, no longer on the railing, she tried not to imagine herself swinging over the void, though she knew that her weight had carried her to hang out past the balcony she’d been standing on.
She tried to move a hand up, using desperate strength, and snatched quickly back at the railing only a couple of inches higher than her previous handhold. She wouldn’t make it. She wouldn’t even be able to hold on much longer. She’d never managed an unassisted chin up.
Her hands already growing tired, she began to panic. She kicked out but there was only empty air, nothing to push against, and the swinging of her legs made her body sway, which torqued her grip.
Finally, feeling her hands slipping, she growled with exertion, pushed as hard as she could as she swung her legs back and then forward, then letting go, free-falling hundreds of feet up in the air until she crashed onto the balcony she’d initially walked out onto.
There had been a soft murmuring past the sliding door, one she’d barely noticed in her terror, but she noticed it once it went silent.
Laying on her back on the balcony, her joy at having not plunged to her death was cut short as she looked through the glass door to find the room beyond now packed full of Wards, all staring at her, muttering softly to each other.
She figured she could count the remaining seconds of her life on her fingers, and there was nothing to do. She simply lay there, waiting for the impulse to rush forward to hit the mob.
Instead, they slowly backed out, going down the stairs again. Some even came from the stairs that led up to the next floor. As the floor emptied out, she realized that she’d been wrong in thinking they were trying to catch her. They were hemming her in, as if they were waiting for something. Or someone. She’d been trying to outrun them, and just like when she’d first seen them, they’d been right behind her the whole time, because that’s where they wanted to be.
Elizabeth took a moment to bring her shaking under control, but only a moment. She didn’t want to wait around for whatever they had planned. There was only one direction to go. Up. She stepped back in through the glass door.
PART 12
“For someone named after a bird, he fell like an anchor,” she said as she walked back into the dressing room, glass crunching beneath her feet. “It’s funny how people are all the main characters in their own story. He thought this was about him, when he’s not even one of us.” She shook her head. “Anyway, that was for Pookie. Now…”
Beth wiped her bloody hands on her shirt. Most came off, but it stuck in the creases. She shrugged.
When she looked up, Elizabeth was holding the knife she’d retrieved from the desk. What worried Elizabeth was that Beth smiled and rolled her shoulders in response.
Beth charged, so fast, so absurdly fast. Elizabeth stabbed, aimed for center mass, not having really planned what to do, as she’d never stabbed anyone before. She had thought the threat would be enough. Beth twisted her torso, hugged Elizabeth’s outthrust arm to her chest and hyper-extended her elbow across her ribcage.
Elizabeth dropped the knife, and then was spun with that same rod-stiff arm until she hit the ground. Beth knelt beside her for only a second, then crawled onto her back, wrapping her arms around her neck and head and cinching just hard enough to show Elizabeth that—with her ExerFlexer 5000 hardened muscle—she was strong enough to pop it right off.
“They started a krav maga class at the gym. But you knew that, because you put it there, didn’t you, Eyes?”
Elizabeth didn’t respond, but when Beth flexed her bicep and constricted the blood flow to Elizabeth’s brain, she nodded. She’d installed the Gym Rat expansion pack a month ago, but had never paid much attention to it.
Beth released some tension and Elizabeth drew in a breath, noticing a distinct whistle as she did. The lunatic had her right where she wanted her.
“Why are you doing this?” Elizabeth asked. “We’re sisters.”
“Sisters? Ha! We’re your puppets. But Liza broke through. I don’t know how, but those are her eyes in the sky and on the screens. I’ve never been religious. I always thought family was most important. I thought that Liza and I could be a good combination, run this town, so I reached out to her even though this weird house freaked me out.
“Liza, though, she was religious. Whenever I came over to try to convince her to come to one of my parties I’d find her either staring at you or studying computer programming, which for some reason she called “catechism” though I could see the books were labeled “Computer Programming”. Or I’d find her typing on the computer. She said she was talking to you, to The Eyes, in something she called a ‘forum.’ I started to leave her alone because that all sounded crazy. I was glad she kept her crazy in this tower, because I didn’t need everyone thinking I might be crazy too, with us looking identical. But I guess she was right. You moved us like your little marionettes, but you got tangled in the strings, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know.”
“What do you mean you didn’t know?”
Elizabeth’s vision had gone black when Beth had tightened her grip, but it had mostly come back, and she noticed a pack of gum laying only a few inches from her nose. She let go of Beth’s forearms, showing her open palms, fingers spread wide. She wasn’t fighting her anymore.
Where had the gum come from?
Why was there this huge blood stain?
“I didn’t know that you were real. How could I have? In my world, this world is a computer game. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t know there was anyone to really hurt.” Flattened to her stomach, Beth on her back with her face pressed against her silky hair, her breath coming ragged against her ear, Elizabeth began to reach out. “I see now that this is who I’ve been all the time, though. I used you all casually, not even considering that you might be real. In my world, I did the same thing. People used me, too. I thought that was just how it worked, you know? Everyone using each other.” She stretched farther. “I’m not going to do that anymore, though. It diminishes us all.”
“Your negotiation skill needs some work. You should have been practicing in the mirror when I told you to. Now, how do you get through?”
I really wish I had a knife, Elizabeth thought, holding her extended hand with an open palm turned up. Into it fell a large knife, thankfully handle first. Reaching over her shoulder, she slashed it across Beth’s pretty face. And again. Beth held on, and Elizabeth wondered if she should have wished specifically for a sharp knife, but then she felt hot liquid spilling onto the back of her neck. The knife was apparently so sharp that it took a moment for Beth to realize she’d been cut. Elizabeth stabbed back several times, aiming for her eyes, feeling the point of the blade catch in the bone of her skull.
The shriek hit her ear like a punch. Then she was rolling away as Beth not only let go of her, but shoved her with hands and feet.
Elizabeth tried to get to her knees and fell forward, almost impaling herself on the long butcher knife. She was weak from the choke hold. From where she lay, she watched Beth, who gripped her face in both hands and writhed on the floor, alternating between curling up, bridging and kicking as blood poured from between her fingers.
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, steadying herself, pushing up to hands and knees, beginning to crawl to her clone. “I can’t stay here. I have to open the portal. I’m sorry, though.”
She stopped talking before she got too close, not wanting to alert her doppelganger about what was about to happen. The woman still thrashed in a terrifying, inhuman manner, and Elizabeth didn’t know if it was from all the ExerFlexer muscle or bad programming. So though she aimed for her heart, when she brought the knife high and then smashed it down it stuck in her shoulder.
Beth shr
ieked again and twisted, nearly ripping the knife from Elizabeth’s grip, but her flesh gave and Elizabeth kept her hold on the handle. She looked at Beth, and Beth dropped her hands and looked at Elizabeth from the one eye she still had, set in her red wreck of a face.
Elizabeth’s gut lurched, but whatever Beth saw in her god’s face affected her even more strongly. She kicked back across the floor, leaving bloody handprints, watching Elizabeth.
Elizabeth got to wobbly feet.
“You don’t have to… I wouldn’t have… I just wanted…”
“It’s not personal,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sorry. I need you to open the portal.”
“The portal’s right there. It’s open.”
“The other portal.”
Elizabeth’s feet had grown steady even as her stomach churned, and she began walking toward Beth. Beth flipped over to her hands and knees and tried to push to her feet, but she’d lost a lot of blood, and her limbs were starting to do that glitchy stutter. Elizabeth sprang, slamming her knife into her clone’s back. She stopped thinking. She turned her mind off and pistoned her arm. Beth was very strong, but that only made it worse for her.
Elizabeth dragged the corpse to the stain, which was exactly the right number of squares away from the portal, then stood back. It didn’t take long.
A black portal opened perfectly over the gold portal. Elizabeth had noticed long ago that they looked exactly the same except for the palette switch, and figured that the creator of the hack had just repurposed the graphics. But the way they fit exactly over top of each other—even their expanding and roiling matching—was more than coincidence.
Flies poured out. Elizabeth started to quake, her knees growing weak, though she told herself he wasn’t coming for her. But he was in a way. A version of her. Maybe the best version. The most driven. The strongest and smartest. Now the deadest. Okay, they didn’t get much more dead than Betty, but second deadest.