Floor 21- Dark Angel

by Jason Luthor

  “You don’t?”

  “I . . . don’t feel any specific inclination to conduct such an experiment, though I feel that, given the opportunity, I might take it. That may sound disgusting, but I’m afraid to say that, with most of my memory gone, the one lasting drive that compels me forward is my thirst for knowledge.”

  “I guess everybody’s got to have something that keeps them going,” I tell him as he starts exploring the inside of my gauntlet with his tools.

  I’m staring at the top of the doc’s skull while he’s got these weird picks fidgeting with the circuits in my armor, these huge goggles on his head with telescoping lenses zooming in on my arm. I fidget just a little and he almost barks, “Do you want me to completely ruin your suit?”

  I cringe. “Geez. Sorry, doc.”

  “No. No, my apologies,” he says as he picks up some other kind of pick with an electric current sparking out of the end of it that he sticks into my gauntlet. “Rather, I should be thanking you for demonstrating such extraordinary talents as of late. It’s truly valuable to my research.”

  “Which is finding out more about the Creep, right?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I almost can’t believe I’m letting Mike head out there by himself.”

  “If you’re so concerned, then why do so?” I smile at the question, and when he looks me in the eye, there’s an almost worried look in his eyes. “Did I . . . say something?”

  “You know exactly why I’m letting him go.”

  “Ah.” He slowly shakes his head. “Perhaps I do.”

  “You watched it for five hundred years, doc. You should know it better than I do.” He stays quiet. Actually, for the first time, he looks . . . nervous. It’s almost funny, in a weird way. “So, are you scared of me?”

  “I . . . understand better than most what the Creep is capable of.”

  “I do too. That’s why I think it’s the right idea to let Mike put an early stop to the Northwest Creep Colony. We’re so caught up here in Central with the raiders and Fort Silence . . . People forget I’ve seen more of the Creep up close than almost anyone else could imagine. I’ve seen the stuff injected into people’s veins and watched them turn brain dead overnight. I’ve seen people transformed by it in test tubes and seen creatures so strong, they could tear walls apart with their bare hands.”

  “Yes. I did monitor essentially all of your adventures from my laboratory.”

  When he says it, I think he realizes that maybe he shouldn’t have, because he just comes to a stop. I stare at him for a long time when his hands stop moving, and I can hear him breathing hard as he sits there, a bead of sweat growing on his forehead. He’s still stone quiet when I ask him, “We haven’t really talked much since I got here. Have we?”

  “Well, no, as a point of fact. We have not.”

  My eyes follow that bead of sweat as it’s rolling down the side of his head. “You really watched everything I did in the Tower?”

  “The entire security system was . . . wired to my office. Covertly, of course, to ensure I could continue my scientific endeavors without being exposed to the forces in the Tower. I took an early interest in your exploits.” He tries to play it off with a nervous laugh. “Such an excitable, adventurous young woman you were. So interested in the mysteries of our world.”

  “But you watched me, even when nobody else could see me?”

  “. . . Yes.”

  I watch that same bead of sweat trail down his jaw and drip off the point of his chin before I ask the question I’ve been wanting to ask for a while now. A question I don’t think anybody else would even start to comprehend. “Who do you think I’m talking to when I’m by myself, doc? In the darkness. When I’m alone.” He doesn’t answer, but he sucks in another breath. I can see his pupils dilate when I ask him, “Who’s the Voice in the Darkness? The Shadow Eyed Man?”

  His eyes shoot up to me, his tools almost slamming down on the table next to us as he takes a step off his chair and backs away. “I had my suspicions.”

  I slide off the table and take a step toward him, and I watch him take another step back, his hands shaking when he does. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not on his side. I don’t even know what side he’s on.”

  “He, if it even has a gender. . . is an unknown variable. But many who spend prolonged time in the Creep hear him, particularly those who have powers. David Marshall. Judge. Sally.”

  “Me.”

  I see his throat tightening as he swallows. “You.”

  “Why are you so scared?”

  “Because he appeared before the Following Fall. During the August War. Everything we created as a society . . .” His voice is trembling. I’ve never seen him act like this. “He was the harbinger of an unimaginable era of destruction and chaos. The Creep.”

  “He came before the Creep?”

  The doctor shakes his head. “He came with it. At the same time that the Creep appeared all across the city, we started receiving reports of him. Soldiers, spotting him in the darkness. Red windows into Pocket Space opening into the world. People driven mad by his dark whispers in their ears at all hours of the night.”

  “But you’ve never thought to bring it up. You saw me talking to someone, talking to myself, and you never thought maybe it was important to discuss it with me?”

  “It could have been anyone you were talking to!” he shoots back, that old anger that’s always just beneath the surface bubbling up in him. “Don’t stand there and pretend to me, Jackie Coleman, that you suddenly stopped hearing the voices of your friends, Johnny and Anne? Or is it more appropriate for me to call them Judge and Sally?”

  I think I get angrier when he says it, and I feel my teeth grind on each other. “You know I hear them, too?”

  His eyes narrow on me as he takes a step back to the table. “I have entire audio recordings of you talking to thin air.”

  “What the hell? How?”

  “I gave you the suit, Jackie. Did you think I wouldn’t maintain some way of monitoring your growth? You, a woman who’s died and returned, who can lift thousands of pounds of weight above her head and destroy armies.” He pauses, and I see his lips stuttering for a second. “A woman who killed 573 raiders in the course of less than half an hour. Yes. All documented in your suit’s recordings.”

  When he says it, I feel my chest rising and the blood inside of me starting to burn. I can feel my eyes flash red, and he stumbles back another few steps. Somehow, I manage to take a deep breath and settle down before I say anything else. “Doctor Watson. I am not your enemy.”

  “I . . . I know.”

  “How much have you recorded of me?”

  “Truthfully? Not much. Only a few things from when you returned to Central, just to ensure you were still the Jackie we’d left behind. Before that, well, it was impossible to track you. Your exploits further out from the city . . . I don’t have any recordings of those. You were outside my ability to monitor, and the only reason why I know how many you killed is because your armor, for lack of better words, maintains a ‘kill counter’. It automatically uploaded to my computers during your time here at the lab. But no, I did not otherwise track you when you were far from Central. Still, I understand this is an intense violation of your privacy.”

  “You think?”

  “Again, I had to make sure you weren’t a threat. You must understand. No matter what visions you saw in the Creep . . . I was the only one alive when it happened. The only one who saw humanity scoured from the earth.”

  I look away for a second and take another deep breath. “You won’t record me anymore. Do you understand?”

  “Of course. I haven’t actually recorded you at all in months, but I’ll disable the monitoring program all the same.” He motions behind me. “Please. Sit down. Let me continue my work. Your . . . armor is in need of just a bit more maintenance. I promise I’ll explain something that perhaps you do not fully understand yourself.”

  “Alright.” I si
t back down in the chair, and he takes a second to calm himself down, his hands eventually steadying before he goes back for his tools. “You know what the Demons, the Shadow Men, were that you saw in the Tower?”

  “People who died in the Creep, their minds caught halfway between dead and . . . whatever it is to have your mind trapped and permanently hallucinating in that hell.”

  “Yes,” he says as he focuses on my gauntlet, his tools starting to work on them again. “The Creep never surrenders those it kills. However, those blessed with powerful psychic powers have the ability to swim, for lack of better words, in that ocean of minds. They can still manifest as full personas. Ergo why Judge was able to form new bodies from the Creep, although as I understand it, he and Sally are now entwined in such a way that he can no longer do so.” His eyes lift up to me for just a second. “The implication of what I am telling you is that you are capable of communicating with very specific minds in the Creep. Those that held powerful psionic powers in life.”

  “I can talk to the dead. But I’m not psychic though.”

  “No, but the Sally cells in your blood have somehow allowed you a similar link as if you were. Consequently, you can talk to at least some of the dead, though I would advise against doing so. To the extent that I understand the phenomena, it is much rather like being permanently detached in a never-ending darkness. A true hell, for lack of better words. Those who were not psychics simply enter a hallucination. For many of them, it’s a pleasant one, at least half of the time. They aren’t even aware of what they’re doing when they interact with our world.”

  “Doc, I don’t know exactly what happened during the Following Fall, but I know that this city didn’t have a lot of time to study the Creep. Pocket space portals opened all over the city, Creep started appearing, then Apeiron and Carthage went to war.”

  “You learned all that from Sally’s memories, I presume?”

  “Yeah. So, how do you know what people are experiencing in the Creep? How do you know what Sally’s memories were? When did you get the time to find all that out? It wasn’t before the Tower closed up to the outside world.”

  He sets one of the tools aside and picks up another one, this time a low powered laser firing from the end of it. “I was left behind to study the Creep. My genius made me invaluable, and so I was chosen to come up with inventions that could help investigate the Creep’s very nature. We’d already possessed the technology to capture mental activity, actual images a person was thinking of. I merely adapted the technology to search the Creep, which is how I discovered that Judge, and later Sally, were still active in it. They were actually aware that I was searching the Creep for them.”

  “But who left you behind, doc? If it was so important, why leave you there for five hundred years?”

  “The truth of the matter is, like many parts of my past, that I do not remember. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable to assume it was Apeiron, although who specifically assigned me to the Tower and why they never returned remains a mystery.” He hesitates for as second and looks me in the eyes. “I’m being entirely honest with you.”

  “I believe you.”

  He takes a deep breath as he sets his tools aside. “And you, Jackie Coleman, are still hiding many things.”

  “All you need to know is that I’m still hunting down how all this started, because it has to be stopped. Everyone on Central’s forgotten just how bad it can be. Even when they’re out in the Deadlands, people from the militia and soldiers from Fort Silence act like the worst thing that can happen to you out there’s that you get killed. It’s not. People like President Branagh, they get it. Maybe even Yousef gets it. The worst part about being out there’s the fear. It’s the paranoia. It’s what the Creep does to people, how it changes them. How it makes them panic and turn on their friends. Good people turn into bloodthirsty killers because the people they loved suddenly look like monsters. People you trusted to lead you start crying because they feel like a weight’s crushing them right in the chest.” I take a deep breath as we stare each other down. “You know I crossed the Alexander Limit.”

  “I do. I don’t have any audio recordings of when it happened, therefore I lack specific details, but as with your kill logs, your suit also tracks all of your biotelemetric data. Using that, I was able to determine that you’d surpassed the threshold at some point in the last year.”

  “I don’t remember what happened after I changed. I saw the result. What I know’s the feeling I remember. When I try to think about that night, I don’t remember what I did, but I feel . . . the insanity. This crazy bloodthirst. The feeling that I’m more frightened than any child could be but angrier than any monster, all at the same time.”

  He shakes his head. “Yes. We have hormone readouts, heart rates, brainwave data and the like, from both Johnny and Anna. It’s a combination of extreme adrenal stimulation and arterial tension resulting in the release of cortisol simultaneous to a highly elevated escalation of your flight response. The Creep cells in your system elevate those beyond all human capacity. Essentially, you experience maximum fear and maximum fury at the moment of transformation.” He must see something in my eyes, because the doc suddenly looks, I don’t know, sympathetic. “Jackie, you cannot blame yourself for what you did. In biological terms, you quite literally were not yourself.”

  “But my hands are the ones that were bloody.”

  “Your body was converted almost entirely into a host for the Creep. Nothing could have prevented that. And, I should note, despite your passing the Alexander Limit, you did something I have never actually thought possible.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “You came back. There has never been a person documented to return to their human state once they’ve entered their feral form. From the most base Creepers to highly evolved variants such as Judge and Sally, no one who has ever fully gone over into their feral state has ever returned. There is something special about you, Jackie Coleman. I only wish I had the instruments to measure it. However, as far as all the medical data I’ve collected on you states . . . Well, there’s nothing physiologically distinct about you that would allow you to switch between forms, which leads me to believe the key to your unique abilities may be psychological.”

  “What about the fact that my cells are from Sally? They’re mutations on normal Creep cells.”

  “True, but you know as well as I do that her cells are actually a far more aggressive strain of Creep, to the degree that they cannibalize other variants. I’ve hypothesized that their enhanced nature is why your physical strength has surpassed both Sally’s and Judge’s, but I’ve yet to identify why you are able to maintain symbiosis with such a hostile strain, let alone return from beyond the Alexander Limit.”

  I stare at the floor for a second before looking him in the face again. “Sorry for scaring you a second ago, doc. When people hide things from me . . . I mean, especially something like that . . .”

  “I understand, though you should believe me when I say that I find it equally frustrating, if not more so, that the truth of all this remain so elusive. My, ah, my nature for inquiry bends me toward the pursuit of the unknown, and there is so much that is unknown about the Creep and even your own nature. If we could find some method by which to maximize the degree to which you tap into your cells without shifting into your feral form . . . Well, that would be something extraordinary.”

  It makes me curious. “Has that ever been done before?”

  “Truly? I’m inclined to say yes. It’s almost like hearing a small voice in the back of my head telling me it has been accomplished, though I have no true memory of the event. In many cases, I don’t actually remember these things in detail until I’ve seen them repeated or at least discussed them at length.”

  “I get it. So, all we’ve got to do is find somebody who can perfectly tap into their Creep cells without going feral. I’m sure that happens all the time.”

  He laughs. “If it did, it would be a new stage in
human evolution, not the mess that currently comprises the Deadlands.”

  “Still doesn’t hurt to look, doc.”

  I sigh as I’m sitting there, his fingers still exploring my gauntlets. He must notice something in my face, because he looks up at me. “Was there something else, Jackie? You look troubled.”

  “You know about Angels, Demons . . . You know about Judge, Sally . . . You even know about the Stranger.”

  “Yes. What of it?”

  His eyes meet mine, and to be honest, I know I look scared when we lock eyes. “Do you know about . . . the eye. In the utter wilderness.”

  He leans back, looking confused when I say it. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard the phrase before.”

  My hand touches a control on my gauntlet. “Disable audio monitoring,” I say, severing the connection between myself and Highpoint. For a long second, I sit there, feeling my chest tightening up. “What I’m about to tell you . . . nobody else knows about it. I’ve never talked to anyone else about it. I’ve read journals and read audio recordings about Demons, Angels, the Stranger . . . but there’s something else out there.”

  “Something else?”

  “In the Creep.”

  “I’m not quite sure I follow.”

  “There is a mind out there. There’s . . . something. It knows me. It literally recognizes me when I’m out there fighting. The Stranger knows about it, but nobody else. Even he doesn’t seem to understand what it is, but that’s a complicated . . . Let’s just say the Stranger isn’t at full power at the moment.”

  “Fine. Fine. But what is this something you mentioned?”

  “A mind controlling the Creep.”

  “Of course. The Creep generates control clusters, like Judge or the Northwest Creep Colony, to manage its existence. That’s nothing surprising. It’s akin to a superorganism with multiple, localized control centers. You know this. Judge was one of them, subconsciously dictating the functions of the Creep in the Tower. However, the Creep is vast, spanning thousands upon thousands of miles. That’s why it requires control centers. No one mind could control it all.”