But instead he smiles.
“You will never kill me.” Li laughs, and as if pushing a piece of paper off him as he sits up, in one fluid motion Ai’s body flies off him with the strength of his abdominals and arms. Even for the size of his arms, the level of strength he displays is inhuman.
This man isn’t a human. He’s a monster. A monster that is nearly invincible.
“I’ll tear you into a million pieces.” I lunge forward, but the moment he holds up his hand, and the same surge of sparks that coursed through it earlier returns, I don’t move any closer.
Now I see why Jake is standing at the opposite side of the room, looking like he is completely lost. The sheer intensity of the electricity that rushes through his hand is enough to send chills through my body even being inches away from it. I have no doubt that kind of voltage will burst my heart on contact.
“It’s time we play a little game.” Li laughs, the electricity diffusing from the tips of his fingers as he places his arm back at his side. “I’ll show you how the whole world is going to be altered forever today. And you will have five minutes to get out, or you will be trapped underneath the crust of the Earth forever.”
I gulp. I have nothing cruel to say to him that he doesn’t know, and for the first time the Chimera Cube doesn’t feel powerful enough to get us out of this situation. If the impossible knife can’t destroy his robot self, a pistol certainly can’t. A laser gun may be our only chance, but if he thought to include an electrified arm and an impenetrable shield on the outside of this body, I highly doubt that he didn’t add any insulation shields somewhere inside him.
In other words, Li might have finally won.
He inches closer to me, raising his arm again so that as his finger nears closer to touching my shoulder, a rush of sparks dances off it.
“That cube will be mine.”
I back away from him as his electrified arm threatens to kill me. But the second I step back, my balance is lost, and I fall to the cold glass floor.
Everything spins around me as my stomach drops out of my body. I let out a scream of terror, but no one hears me that can help.
The glass floor that once held a stable position at the top of the building has succumbed to the force of gravity.
We are falling into the pit of darkness.
And there is nowhere to go but down.
Chapter 14
I’ve fallen out of planes. I’ve fallen off buildings. I’ve even fallen out of an exploding helicopter. I could go on. The point is I’ve been through some intense shit in my life.
But nothing compares to this.
In every instance that I’ve fallen, whether it be from the highest dopamine rushes I have ever experienced or from the top of a skyscraper in Beijing, it has always been natural forces dragging me down.
This time I suppose it’s no different. It’s the force of gravity that is pulling us further and further into the darkness of the Earth’s crust, but something about the fact that a glass platform is moving along a metal track makes everything feel that much more intense. The glass platform moves along the metal track a bit slower than the speed of gravity yet fast enough to make sure that it is impossible for us to stand up. As the fall continues, the platform increases in speed in a parabolic nature that brings all the food I have eaten in recent memory up to the top of my throat and then spewing out of my mouth.
Ai screams. Jake screams. And, hell, I scream too. There’s not really any other reaction to a kind of terror like this but to scream and hope the sound of your vocal chords dying is a good distraction.
President Li laughs.
I don’t expect him to respond any differently, but when I finally manage to roll over onto my back and look up at the darkness above us, I’m surprised to see Li standing in the center of the glass platform as if we aren’t plummeting to the center of the Earth at hundreds of miles per hour.
He has a smile on his face, and the muscles in his legs easily overcome the force of gravity pushing down on him. He may look like a man, but the strength of the robotics in this humanoid of Li makes his powers godly. I don’t know if a new mode is turned on inside his humanoid self or whether this clone of him is programmed differently from the rest, but my desire to kill him has only grown.
Things like him don’t deserve to exist. I don’t care if I die. As long as he dies too, I will be a happy man.
I vomit again as the speed of the platform dramatically shifts. In a second our speed varies from hundreds of miles per hour to only a few dozen as the glass platform pushes up on my body, causing us to decelerate. Li is unfazed throughout the entire movement and only laughs more as I wipe the vomit off my mouth, this hellish roller coaster ride slowly doing me in. When the vomit forces its way out of my throat, I feel a rush of blood to my head.
I can’t tell whether the black circles around my vision are from my brain signaling to me that I am about ready to lose my consciousness or whether is it the suffocating darkness of the massive hole in the earth.
After the short deceleration, the platform begins to continue its downward acceleration, causing the small amount of liquid in my gut to jerk around once again. The human body simply isn’t made to fall thousands of feet through the earth at a discontinuous yet mind-bending speed.
As we descend deeper into the hole, I can feel the air getting thinner, the available oxygen decreasing with every second we get closer to the nukes. I shiver, the cold chill of the wind from us falling pounding against my face. With my limited background of my high school Earth science class that I slept through, I deduce that as we approach the center of the Earth, the temperature should be gradually warming.
I feel even more stupid than I did before as the punishing cold only gets worse as our proximity to the core of the Earth increases.
With the deafening pounding of the air molecules rocketing by me at high speed, it is hard to discern what the loud echo from below us is. I don’t need to take too many guesses to decide that it is likely something with the beginning of the automated program Li has set that will shoot dozens of nuclear warheads into the Earth’s crust.
The ensuing reverberation that shakes the bottom of the glass platform as well as the sheets of bedrock that tower thousands of feet above me sends a series of shockwaves through every bone in my body. The frequency of the vibrations are distinct, and despite all the explosions and waves of force that have overcome my body in the past, there is something more sinister about this that brings a sick feeling to my stomach that has already vomited several times.
I use all the strength I have to bring the bag with the Chimera Cube off my back and put it onto my stomach. The air resistance is too great for me to lift my head up, but my shoulders are strong enough to will my arms forward. I put my finger on the scanner to open the backpack and prepare to deliver a command to the Chimera Cube that could save the world.
But Li spots me.
His body that used to stand at the center of the glass platform with a perfect view of us being tortured is now right next to me. The limited light that penetrates the glass from the explosion site below and the light from the surface all work to illuminate the edges of his figure and cast a dark shadow over his face.
I don’t need any light to see the currents of electricity that run across his arms like veins and even make their way into his forehead and neck, bulging out of him madly.
“Put the cube down.” Even with all the chaos and screaming, the monotone voice of his translator sounds perfectly in my ear, the echo so rich that I question if his voice is inside my head.
I have to admit that if he is trying to intimidate me, he is remarkably successful.
I am defenseless to do anything but use this cube, and with his fingers hovering inches away from my face, the prospect that I will die seems all too real. In the past, he would have scared the shit out of me. If I’m honest, he still does today.
But I won’t let him win.
Part of me can’t wait till t
he day that I can cause him the same pain that he has caused me and the same pain he has traumatized Ai with.
That day is today.
“Electromagnetic pulse.” I say the words into the cube and tap it immediately. I don’t heed to Li’s command, and as a result I feel the sparks of electricity jump off his fingers and onto my neck.
In the split second I had to make a decision, I made the one that may very well kill me.
The electromagnetic pulse will likely stop whatever electronic mechanism is causing this to plummet downward and will hopefully eliminate the threat of the humanoid of Li. The only problem is that I have no idea how long the nanobots will take to create a nuclear pulse powerful enough to emit enough radiation to tear the electronics in Li apart.
It turns out they don’t take long at all.
I open my mouth to scream, one last desperate scream that I hope Ai or Jake hear that will compel them to grab the Chimera Cube and finish the job of saving the Chinese people.
My scream never leaves, and the electric current running through the body of Li never comes into full contact with me. The electromagnetic pulse is emitted from the Chimera Cube immediately. The nanobots inside are easily able to manipulate the atoms in the surrounding air in such a way that they combine to form unstable compounds then immediately decay into smaller, more stable atoms. This process immediately lets off a large amount of gamma radiation that works to ionize the particles in the surrounding air and create an electromagnetic pulse that tears the electronics inside Li apart.
Well, that at least is my hope.
Instead, the ensuing electrical current immediately works to stop the movement of the glass platform. We all come to a sudden halt, the end of the tower of terror from hell so abrupt that I can’t help but let everything in my anus loose (this is a nice way of me saying I shitted myself).
However, the electrical current doesn’t kill Li. I should have suspected that he’d have some special metal casing around him that disperses the electrical current from ever reaching the internal components of his humanoid self. Instead of frying the electrical components inside of him, the pulse simply causes the existing electrical current on the exterior of him to diffuse, rendering his contact with me harmless.
When his cold hand touches me, it feels like nothing more than a creepy uncle saying hello (I don’t say this from experience, but I can imagine this sensation quite well).
“Electrified baseball bat.” I say the command to the Chimera Cube without a clue what it is about to produce. With the electromagnetic impulse, I at least know from skimming that section of the patent vaguely how the scientific principles behind it work and what it can do. Although I wish I read that section with a bit more detail, because with the newfound realization that there are tons of gamma radiation in the air, I can’t imagine that it is healthy. In fact, the dizziness accompanying my brain during the fall has only increased as I stand up and grab the object the Chimera Cube produces from the air.
The handle is made of rubber and the barrel of the bat is covered in nails. The backpack’s straps are still around my shoulders as I stand up, the cube safely nestled against my stomach.
This bat is the only chance I have at fending off Li. If I can make sure his body only touches the bat and not the exterior of my bullet-proof suit, then I might actually have a chance at living long enough to shut this deadly operation down.
“Give me the cube!” President Li yells and charges at me. He is only a few feet away from me, his expression still a bit dazzled from the pulse that briefly wiped out the electrical current from the outside of his humanoid body.
As he throws his body at me, I wind the bat back and plan to deliver its electrified metal barrel right into his skull. Although the bat itself won’t inflict any pain upon Li, the electrical charge in it hopefully will be strong enough to disperse the current on his body from killing me.
The bat connects with the right side of his body and knocks his arm away from punching my face. Li grunts with frustration, but all signs of pain are absent from this man’s face. He is an invincible lightning bolt of a figure.
He will kill me.
It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.
But I may have already survived long enough.
He stabs at me again. This time he kicks at me, his foot covered in electrical current as his toes threaten to uppercut me in my jaw. I spot the threat ahead of time and am able to flail the barrel of the bat into his foot in time. A normal human would fall after having their foot knocked with so much force while they are off balance. Instead, Li’s leg bends at an angle that would crack my bones in half and cause me to burst into tears, yet his stance remains rigid. The blow of the bat against his leg only briefly dissipates the electrical current in that region of the body and does nothing to affect his stance overall.
His hand can simply reach out and wrangle the Chimera Cube away from me with his grisly strength. I have nowhere to run. I am already backed into the corner, the rock sheet poking into my back as I look around in a panic.
I smash the bat into him once again. The barrel knocks into his left fist before he can have it connect with my body. He smiles. The punishing echo of the bat off his body has no effect on him, and in only a matter of seconds I have had to flail my arms around, trying to defend myself from his attacks.
“Throw the cube here!” Jake yells. I can’t even see his silhouette in the darkness. The lights from the nuclear site at the bottom of this dark shaft have turned off and the light pouring in from up above is also gone. We are smothered in darkness, the only light protruding from the veins of Li that are rushing with electricity.
The electromagnetic pulse must have worked to shut down the electrical systems of any nearby computers. The computers in charge of firing the nuclear warheads into this section of the Earth’s crust are fried. The rumbling from beneath the system readying to fire is gone, only to be replaced by a new wave of reverberations originating from the surface.
The nuclear warheads aren’t going to explode here. The electromagnetic pulse worked. But there’s no way it was strong enough to destroy the systems on the rest of the oil rigs.
There is no way that was enough to stop the inevitable.
Hundreds of millions of people are about to meet their last moments, and I am one of them.
“I wouldn’t listen to your friend.” Li laughs and attempts to elbow me in my gut. He knows well enough that all it will take is him connecting with my body in a single location to send me into a series of violent convulsions. But I push him off again with my bat, and beneath his laughter I can sense a growing impatience in his tone.
Then I take a risk that I won’t regret.
I say I won’t regret it because if it doesn’t work out in my favor, I won’t live long enough to regret much of anything.
I pivot my body to the side and explode to the left, leaving myself briefly exposed to one of Li’s limbs hitting me. When Li inevitably tries to deliver a deadly punch into the exposed side of my body, I anticipate the move in time. When I see his arm in the peripheral of my vision, I react at lightning speed, my brain processing the danger in the same way it would as the hairy, ugly hand of a zombie trying to tear my virtual skin open.
Somehow that thought alone eases my nerves a bit and allows me to immerse myself into the moment while enabling my body to take control. I know exactly what I need to do in this situation: turn my brain off and turn on the killer instinct inside of me.
With a few feet of clear airspace between me, I hurdle the bag containing the Chimera Cube off my shoulders and in the direction where Jake is. The bag itself is unzipped, and due to my uncollected movements, the trajectory of the bag is out of whack and collides into the ground.
The limited friction of the bag allows it to continue to slide across the floor in Jake’s direction, but I don’t have time to wait around and see if Jake successfully commands the Chimera Cube to do something that can get us out of here and sa
ve our lives.
I duck, narrowly dodging another kick from Li as I swing the baseball bat to hit his leg again on the way down. Although the hits don’t do much, they are the only thing I can do that slows his fierce movements down.
But with the Chimera Cube out of my hands, I can sense his attention shift toward Jake. Unlike us mere mortals, he likely has infrared sensors built into his eyes that allow him to detect Jake’s exact location.
Now Jake will have to deal with the same thing I did.
Yet he doesn’t have a weapon to protect himself.
I do the only thing that makes sense. And it is the craziest I have ever done. With chunks of rock falling down from above and the rumbling only growing louder, it is clear what is happening.
This elevator from hell is caving in. Soon we will be buried alive thousands of feet underneath the earth, my dead body closer to nuclear warheads than it is to daylight. But I won’t let Li take away our last chance at surviving.
So I take away my only chance at getting out of here alive.
“Fuck you!” I yell, those two words making my next action so much more satisfying. I jump onto his back, wrapping my legs around his waist that is unelectrified for a brief second as he gears up to kill Jake. In the same fluid motion, I take the electrified baseball bat and place it on the front of his neck so that I can with the weight of my body and leverage of the bat tackle his body to the ground.
It works.
Li’s robot body falls to the ground along with me. I wish I could credit myself for this action. Actually, now is not a time for being humble. I destroyed his ass. By using every ounce of energy left inside me and perfectly shocking his exoskeleton with the barrel of the bat, my force briefly overwhelms that of Li.
I’ve never felt so much pleasure from having the body of a man on top of me, and with the humanoid skin of Li so close to me, I can smell the distinctly metallic aroma that radiates off him. A surge of endorphins courses through me that ushers in a tremendous high. For a moment I feel that I have won. I feel that I am unstoppable.
The Conspiracy Chronicles Boxset 2 Page 40