Timelock

by David Klass

  I shiver, and my mother puts her hand on my shoulder.

  “Let’s go,” she says softly, and we randomly choose a corridor and start down it.

  We are soon in a labyrinth of endlessly corkscrewing tunnels. “So how do we find our way upstairs to Dad?” I ask. “Do you have a map of this place?”

  “No, we’ll have to ask directions,” Mom replies.

  I look around at the Dark Army life-forms walking and crawling and slithering past. “I don’t think they’ll be helpful. Do you think there’s an information booth?”

  “We’ll ask one of those guys in black with the stars on their shoulder,” she says. “They’re Fortress Enforcers—special guards. They probably know all the secret passages that are closed to normal travelers.”

  She nods toward an eight-foot-tall guard standing a short way off. He’s got six mechanical eyes spread out on all sides of his head so that as he walks he’s able to see in all directions at once. The outfit that he’s wearing is black from head to foot. A single gray “Eye” insignia glistens on his shoulder.

  “I don’t think he’s going to want to help us, either,” I tell my mom.

  “Probably not,” she agrees. “But we’re not going to give him a choice.”

  35

  We trail the Enforcer through the maze of tunnels, waiting for our chance. His job seems to be to move around constantly and watch everyone. It’s a bit ironic that this six-eyed surveillance freak doesn’t realize that he himself is being followed.

  Finally he enters a gloomy and relatively deserted corridor. Up ahead, an even darker side passage appears.

  “Now’s our chance,” my mother says. “Let’s grab him and drag him in there.”

  “Won’t he immediately send out a telepathic SOS to every guard in the fortress?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she agrees, and pulls what looks like a purple felt pad from a pocket. It’s encased in some kind of transparent wrapper, and I notice that she handles it with great care. The purple blob flattens and elongates itself, trying to escape. “This is a thought leech. Once I get it on him, it will suck up every telepathic message he sends out.”

  “But even if we do get him in our power, why would he help us?” I ask. “He’s a cyborg. I’m sure he’d rather die than betray his creators.”

  “No doubt,” she agrees. “Come on, Jair. Let’s go!”

  We creep closer to the Enforcer. His mechanical eyes, coupled with the fact that his head can rotate completely around, make him appear very robotic, but as we trail him I start to glimpse his human side. He swings his arms jauntily as he walks, and as he tromps deeper into the gloomy corridor he starts to make a strange noise that rises and falls. I listen and begin to suspect that it’s the cyborg equivalent of whistling or humming a happy tune.

  “Get ready, Jair. I’ll hit him high and you grab him low,” Mom says. “We’ve got to drag him off into the darkness before anyone else sees.”

  The dim tunnel is momentarily deserted and the dark side passage is now a few paces away.

  “One,” my mother says, inching near him. “Two.”

  I move up with her, so that we’re both just a step behind the Enforcer.

  She fumbles with the wrapper that holds the thought leech. “Three!” she announces, leaping up like a basketball player pulling down a tough rebound, and grabbing the Enforcer from behind in a choke hold.

  The cyborg is jerked backward, and for a split second he’s too startled to react. My mother yanks his head back and clamps the purple leech onto his forehead. The leech almost instantly begins to engorge, sucking up alarms.

  The cyborg tries to fight his way out of the choke hold, but it’s tough to break free when the Queen of Dann herself is holding you from behind. He rocks back and forth, but I take out both his knees with a diving tackle. He’s strong as hell and fighting desperately, but he has no idea what hit him and he can’t see any targets to punch or kick.

  We drag him into the shadowy side passage and force him to the stone floor.

  The thought leech on his forehead has swelled to the size of a softball. Old six-eyes must be trying to send out SOS calls on all hailing frequencies.

  “Hold him down,” Mom orders me, and I tie him up with one of Eko’s most reliable jujitsu holds. He’s tremendously strong, and strains and bucks wildly to get loose. I can’t hold him this way for long, but luckily I don’t have to.

  Mom releases her choke hold and spins away. In a second, she’s kneeling on the Enforcer’s chest. Her right hand dips into a pocket and re-emerges holding a small mechanical device. It has a tiny monitor screen connected to two long sharp prongs that look a bit like curved knitting needles.

  She takes a prong in either hand, snakes her body up the cyborg’s torso so that her knees are pressing down on his shoulders, and with all her strength she jams the prongs deep into his ears.

  The Enforcer goes into agonized contortions as the mechanical device switches on and makes a shrill whirring sound, like a food processor.

  “What’s it doing to him?” I ask her.

  “Draining his brain.”

  “You mean downloading it?”

  “No,” she says. “Draining it of everything. Human thoughts and memories and mechanical commands and memory chips.”

  “Will it kill him?”

  “Of course,” she says. “He will be an empty shell in less than five seconds. There, it’s over.”

  The Enforcer writhes one final time and then lies still.

  My mother disconnects the mechanical device, leaving the prongs embedded in his ears. She’s careful not to touch the thought leech, which is now the size of a basketball. The moment the cyborg dies, the leech stops growing. It detaches from his forehead, drops off onto the floor, and starts squirming around.

  “Careful, Jair. It’s looking for a new host,” Mom cautions.

  We step around the bloated parasite and drag the dead cyborg farther into the shadows, till his body is hidden.

  My mother manipulates her device and studies the tiny screen, scrolling quickly through what I assume are different areas of the cyborg’s drained memories. “He was programmed with the full blueprint of the castle,” she notes triumphantly. “There’s a secret riser for guards that will shoot us right up to the roof.”

  “Is that like a back elevator?” I ask.

  She’s studying the screen with great concentration. “The problem is that in order to go up we’ll have to go down first. We’ve got to pass through the labs.” She steps over the cyborg’s body and says, “Come, Jair. The execution is less than an hour away. If they move your father from his cell, we’ll never find him in time.”

  I follow her out. As I step over the cyborg’s corpse, I glance at his face, frozen in final death agony. I can’t stop myself from feeling a little sorry for him. He may have been a Dark Army cyborg Enforcer, but part of him was very human. I recall the way he hummed as he walked down the dark corridor. No organism that hums in the dark deserves to have its brain drained.

  36

  We follow a series of sloping passageways down into the basement of the giant fortress. My mother now knows the layout of the place, and she sets a brisk pace.

  The lower we descend, the more the security tightens. There are guard stations and scanning devices at every bend. None of them can detect us, but I find myself wondering what needs to be so closely guarded. “What kind of lab are we headed toward?” I ask my mother. “Is it their weapons factory? What exactly do they make there?”

  “What should never be made,” she answers cryptically, and then we stop before a massive closed door. It must be fifty feet high and thirty feet wide, and looks absolutely impenetrable. I remember that according to Dante, the words “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” were inscribed on the gates of hell. This massive door has no such legend, but I get a very similar vibe.

  I consider trying to hack it apart with my scimitar, or blow it apart with one of the Big Popper bombs from the Dann’s
arsenal, but my mother waves me back. “The bombs wouldn’t even put a dent in it,” she assures me. “Anyway, if you so much as brush it with your finger, they’ll know we’re here. Let’s wait for someone to let us in.”

  It’s hard to just stand and wait. My father has reached his final hour and the remaining seconds are ticking away fast. Finally, footsteps approach.

  A doctorly-looking chimera appears, part man and part rodent. He’s wearing a mask over his rat’s face, and his knee-length robe could almost be a lab coat. He stops before the door and stares up at the ceiling. A spinning circular yellow hologram descends over his head. It whirls around him for a few seconds, no doubt authenticating his iris patterns or brainwaves for one final identity verification. Then the gate to hell slides soundlessly open.

  Dr. Rat heads inside, and we hurry in on his heels.

  It’s a netherworld of shimmering darkness that not even Dante could have imagined. Vials and beakers glimmer, their phosphorescence set off by what I assume are ultraviolet lights. The black lights are beyond the spectrum visible to the human eye, but the photoluminescence of the lab equipment creates an eerie, spectral glow.

  In what might almost be the strobe light of a disco, I glimpse computers and long robotic arms with dozens of tendril-like fingers that manipulate infinitely delicate machinery. Here and there lab workers pad about, but most of the work in this place is clearly done by machine.

  We walk through the lab, which is bigger than five football fields, and frightening sounds ring out around us. There are soft animal yelps and plaintive wolf-like howls, and the whimpers of what sounds like human babies crying for their mothers. Inside test tubes and vials I glimpse glowing eyes and tiny, grasping hands, and I start to realize what is being cooked up in this vast test kitchen.

  It’s a maternity ward without mothers, a hatchery and neonatal facility and assembly line for the soulless world to come. Machines are creating new and hardier life-forms, cloning cells and nurturing them on gels, combining species and machines to create ever funkier variations.

  I can’t bear to look but I also can’t possibly look away, because if I trip on something or knock over a beaker, our presence will be revealed. So my unwilling eyes have to take in the whole freak show exhibit by exhibit, cyclopean embryos, hybrid fetuses and half-mechanical hatchlings, wailing webbed newborns that look like they were created by taking something from column A and something completely different from column B.

  And yet they’re still babies—that’s what’s most terrible about it! They still cry and suck milk from artificial teats and stare at the world inquisitively through glowing, technology-enhanced eyes.

  As the horror show swirls around me, I momentarily flash back to Eko sitting on the roof of a beach house on the Outer Banks and telling me for the first time that I was living during the Turning Point. The world I grew up in, the beautiful earth I romped around in as a child, was at a critical crossroads, she said. She looked very sad as she sat there, and I knew that she was comparing the natural beauty all around us to some nightmarish future.

  Now, walking through the Dark Army laboratory, I can’t help wondering if this could really have been averted. Was there a road not taken one thousand years ago, a last chance not grasped by my generation? Or was the downward spiral preordained—were we as a species simply not smart enough or wise enough to be entrusted with the stewardship of our beautiful planet?

  “Come,” my mother whispers, taking my hand and leading me through the maze. “We’re near the riser to the roof.”

  “Good,” I tell her. “I’ve had enough. Let’s get out of here.”

  Beyond the labs I see what looks like a black glass column rising from the floor into the high ceiling. It’s as thick as a sequoia, and guarded by three Enforcers.

  “Let’s go find your father,” my mom whispers, and steps toward an opening at the base of the glass pillar.

  37

  We pick our way between the three Enforcers and reach the opening in the black column. My mother steps inside and vanishes, like a letter into a mail chute. I hesitate a second and then follow her in.

  The upward thrust is staggering. It’s like blasting off in a rocket, except that there’s no spacecraft around me. I’m not sure what’s propelling me upward, but at this rate I’ll smash right through the roof.

  A heartbeat later I pop out into darkness. “Mom?”

  “This way, Jair.”

  I follow the sound of her voice. A wall slides open and we find ourselves stepping out into bright daylight.

  The view is dizzying. We’re on the very top of the fortress, looking down at the mountains. The razor-toothed battlements are all around us, and I can see the windowless cell tower with its guardian gargoyle.

  The demon is perched atop that windowless cell, squatting and immobile, like the grotesque figures on Notre Dame. But I sense that this gargoyle wasn’t put here to spout off unwanted water or to ward off evil. He’s intended as a last line of defense, and his glowing scarlet eyes tell me he’s fierce and ever vigilant.

  “We’re just in time,” my mother tells me. “Here they come for your father.”

  A door opens in a minaret a few hundred yards from us and four dark figures set out toward the windowless cell. Two incredibly powerful-looking Enforcers lead the way, holding doubleheaded laser axes. Their arms and legs are as thick as tree trunks and they walk hunched over, as if they are part picked palace guard and part lowland gorilla.

  A short, wizened figure in a black coat and hood trails them, swinging a censer that emits thick black smoke. He reminds me of the Mysterious Kidah—the great wizard of the future who I met in the Amazon. This is not only a world of cyborgs and chimeras, but also of spells and prophecy, when science and magic have merged. I’ve seen Kidah in action, and I can only guess what dark spells this Dark Army warlock has at his command.

  The enormous, simian guards and the micro Merlin are bad enough, but it is the final figure that makes me shudder. Even from a distance, his graceful and cocky walk, his broad shoulders and handsome, middle-aged features remind me of an older version of Dargon or a younger Dark Lord. I know at a glance that he is a member of that same bloody royal family, come to extract final vengeance on the King of Dann.

  The four dark figures head straight for the cell. My mother is right—I can tell from their purposeful demeanor that they’ve come to take my father to his execution.

  We hurry over and join the grim procession. They can’t see us, hear us, or smell us, but I have the feeling they sense that something is amiss. The two Enforcers look fidgety, the tall cowled figure swings his censer in ever widening arcs so that the smoke billows ominously, and the broad-shouldered scion of the Dark Army’s royal family turns to throw several backward glances right at us and through us.

  I look into his swirling, anthracite-black eyes and recall Dargon on the lip of the volcano, and the Dark Lord in his candirú chamber. Dargon had raptorlike eyes and the strength of a bull, and the Dark Lord was part man and part tarantula. Their middle-aged relative who I now encounter atop the fortress is also clearly a chimera.

  His handsome, chiseled features could have made him a soap opera star a thousand years ago, but when he opens his mouth I see a pink forked tongue. While his face and neck have human skin, his hands are plated with green scales. He’s got plenty of reptile in him, and something tells me he’s more cobra or Gila monster than garden snake or friendly gecko.

  As the procession nears the cell, they slow and let the hooded sorcerer take the lead. He looks up at the roof of the cell, staring right at its guardian demon.

  Now that we’re close, I can see the gargoyle clearly. It’s more than twice the height of a human, with pointed ears and a face like a feral cat. Corded muscles stand out on its long, sleek body. It’s sitting on its haunches, staring down suspiciously. It can’t possibly know that my mother and I have joined the queue, but as we approach it rises from its sitting position and edges forward. It draws
back its lips to bare its teeth and emits a guttural growl that would frighten a tiger.

  The procession instantly stops. Even the two lowland gorilla Enforcers aren’t stupid enough to take on this hell troll.

  The warlock hands his censer to one of the Enforcers, steps forward, and draws back his hood. I see his face, or what’s left of it. Mostly it’s just blood and bone—he’s a walking skeleton! The zombie conjurer waves one hand and barks a curt command, as if ordering a dog to heel.

  The gargoyle growls and refuses to back off. But the warlock shows no fear and repeats his command, and this time the gargoyle reluctantly uncurls its lips over its teeth and settles back into angry silence.

  The four dark figures move forward again and reach the narrow door to the windowless cell. It appears to be made of solid gold, and its gleaming panels are engraved like the entrance to a cathedral. To me they look like visions of hell, but perhaps they’re imagined renditions of what the world will be like under Dark Army control.

  One of the gorilla Enforcers reaches out to open the golden door and then jerks back his arm and emits a howl of agony. I see that his hand and half his arm have been burned off. He falls onto his back and rolls around, wailing and clutching the still smoking stump.

  The other members of the group seem to think this is hilarious. For a moment the tension is broken as they share a chuckle. Then the zombie sorcerer steps forward again.

  He unbuttons the top of his robe and draws it apart. His body is a moldering mess of flesh and bone, blood and pus, festering mold and crawling maggots, as if he’s been dead for months. Suddenly something flashes brilliantly from deep inside him. For a moment, his ribs and inner organs are lit from within. The flash originates on the left side of his chest, where his heart should be. Instead of a heart, I believe it’s some sort of key to this cell’s door.