by M. R. Forbes
“We aren’t going to make it,” Isaac said, watching the dust cloud. “We should have brought more fucking guns.”
“We did,” Hayden said. “In the trunk. Pull down the seat. There’s a latch in the corner.”
Isaac shifted his body, grabbing the latch and then yanking down the seat. The trunk was laden with rifles Hayden and Max had taken from August’s checkpoint. Shotguns, pistols, a few AKs, and a single grenade launcher. It was all chaotically stacked, hastily thrown into the car. The ammunition was slightly more contained in old plastic milk crates lined against the passenger side.
“Where are the rounds for the launcher?” Isaac asked, tugging at the weapon to get it free.
“One of the crates,” Hayden replied. He held the wheel with one hand, using the other to draw one of his revolvers. He dropped it on the seat between himself and Max and awkwardly grabbed the other, keeping it held in his right hand. “Max, I’ll need your help reloading.”
“Pozz,” Max replied.
Isaac yanked out a crate, checked the contents, cursed, and pushed it aside, grabbing the next. He recklessly pored through the magazines stacked inside until he found a belt of grenade shells. He quickly began loading them into the launcher’s large cylinder.
The trife reached the forwardmost rise, coming up over the car like an inky black tidal wave. The modbox had managed to reach the left side of the slick, but it hadn’t gotten far enough. The trife saw them, and a group broke off, changing direction to attack.
Hayden used his driving hand to steady the aim of his shooting hand, resting the handle of his revolver on his wrist. He tilted and turned his head, aiming awkwardly.
The trife started down the hill, rushing toward them. A few leaped from the height, their momentum and strength carrying them a dozen meters to the car.
Hayden aimed at the airborne trife. It took three shots for him to hit the first, and he emptied the revolver without another kill. He dropped the gun and picked up the other while Max grabbed at his ammo belt and pulled a speedloader from it, quickly reloading the empty revolver.
“Fire in the hole!” Isaac said, pointing the grenade launcher out the window and firing. A hard thunk preceded the explosion, which sent twenty trife flying out from the impact point and caught more with the shrapnel.
Hayden kept shooting. The first of the leaping demons hit the car, landing on the hood and sliding across. It tried to stop itself, digging its claws into the metal.
Max took Hayden’s revolver and leaned it out the passenger side window, shooting the creature in the face and knocking it off the car.
“Hold on!” Hayden shouted. He cut the wheel back and forth, rocking the car as the other trife came down. Some of them landed on the hood, the roof, the trunk. Some of them slammed into the side of the vehicle, relatively ineffective against its mass. The motion of the car served to keep them off balance when they hit. They tried to dig in their claws, but more than a few wound up slipping off the other side or falling into the outer rows of spines and spikes surrounding the car.
“Fire in the hole!” Isaac announced again. He triggered the grenade launcher twice more, shifting his aim as he did. The detonations threw up dirt and shrapnel, killing two more groups of demons.
The activity drew the attention of more of the slick, and a larger portion of the group started breaking away, altering their approach to intercept the fleeing car. Hayden kept shooting, hitting a few more, switching guns, shooting, switching guns, all while Max continued to reload.
The wave crashed down on the car, their defense effective but not enough to keep the demons from reaching the vehicle. Like in Reno, the creatures threw themselves at the armored vehicle, intentionally clogging the spikes with their bodies and giving the others a safe way over. Isaac dropped the grenade launcher, grabbing one of the AKs and opening fire as a claw reached in through the window. The volley knocked the trife back, but another demon tried to lean into the driver’s side window from the roof. Hayden shot it point-blank, rewarded with a spray of dark blood against the side of his face as it fell away.
“There’s too many!” Isaac said. The report of their guns was a constant, deafening barrage inside the car, which was slowing down despite Hayden’s best efforts. There were too many trife on it, adding too much extra weight.
“Max, the cage doesn’t matter if we don’t live long enough to use it,” Hayden said.
“We will make it,” Max replied. “Speed up.”
“This thing’s going as fast as it can.”
“This is going to hurt,” Max said.
“What is?” Hayden asked.
There was no time for Max to reply before an ear-splitting tone ripped through Hayden’s skull, so powerful he was instantly blinded, the world going dark around him. His head throbbed, and he could feel the blood begin running from his ears.
The shrieking squeal went away almost as quickly as it had come. His vision started to clear, his eyes blurry, the road ahead a dark, twisting mass that made him wonder for a moment if he had died and was on his way to hell.
“Keep your foot on the accelerator,” Max said calmly, his voice muffled. “Keep your hands steady. Your vision will return within thirty seconds.”
Hayden did as the Intellect said. His heart was racing, his ears ringing, his body in a cold sweat. He imagined Isaac was in the same condition.
“What the fuck did you do?” he growled.
“Utilized an ultrasonic pulse to disable the nearby trife,” Max replied. “The effects are temporary, though you may have lingering trauma to your eardrums. Hahaha. Haha.”
“I didn’t ask you to traumatize me. I asked you to kill the trife.”
“Confirmation. The attack killed the four hundred trife closest to the vehicle and allowed us to escape. Was that not your requirement?”
Hayden’s eyes were getting clearer by the second. “Ike, you okay back there?”
“Ears are ringing, but otherwise still alive,” Isaac replied.
“Was that not your requirement?” Max repeated.
“Are you asking in all seriousness, or are you just being an asshole? Because if the Axon programmed you to emulate asshole, that’s just fucking wrong.”
“Hahaha. Haha.”
Hayden looked up into the rearview, but he couldn’t see anything past the bodies of the trife impaled on the modbox’s armor.
At least they were still alive, and they still had a chance to finish this once and for all.
He would take what he could get.
Chapter 49
The darkness faded, and Natalia found herself outside of everything. Out of time. Out of space. Out of her mind.
Darkness. Coldness.
And Fear.
She shivered at the sense of it. The Fear overwhelmed her, causing the hairs on her arms to stand straight up and sending a shiver down her spine, threatening to trap her wherever here was.
She heard a rhythmic thrumming in the back of her mind. A deep bass rumble repeated over and over again, like a heartbeat or the flow of blood through a vein. She took a breath, the pressure in her head so intense it seemed as though it would crush her skull. The Fear ever growing, closing in on her, trying to overcome her.
She didn’t know how, but she knew what would happen if she let it in. She would die. Slowly. Painfully. Out of time and space, where she could suffer for a thousand years in a single thought.
She pushed against it. She was afraid, but she didn’t need to give in to the Fear. She remembered why she was here. Hayden was in trouble. The people of the UWT were in trouble. Alpha was closing on Sanisco, trailed by an army of trife. She needed to do something. She needed answers.
She needed control. Strength.
To fight Fear. To survive the Relyeh. To end the Hunger.
She kept fighting. Hayden was counting on her, and she wasn’t going to let him down. He had saved her once before. He had come for her against all odds. He had accepted her for all of her mistakes and fai
lures and weaknesses. He loved her through everything.
And she loved him back.
The world began to take shape around her. The Darkness gained edges and lines, placing her into an environment. Something real? Or something out of her own mind, conjured from her subconscious to give herself reference? The latter seemed more likely.
The universe began to resolve into something more solid. It was foreign and at the same time familiar. A maze of corridors composed of black alloy walls lined with hundreds of doors, stretching on into infinity in front and behind her. An impossible place, yet to her mind physically present. She could touch the smooth metal. She could hear her fingernails tap it. She could smell the ionized air.
She could feel the heat.
The coldness faded as the Fear retreated. It was ever present. Surrounding her. Watching her. Waiting for her to slip. She held fast against it. She had a job to do. She had to know.
She took a step forward. The Fear whispered to her.
The corridor had no end. No matter how far she walked, she would never arrive. She was trapped here. Alone. Forever.
Bullshit.
She kept walking. She understood she was outside of time, in another dimension. It was the place where the Hunger had been born. Or made? She wasn’t sure which. Maybe it had simply come into being. Or maybe it had escaped this universe to enter theirs. Maybe it existed here and then it existed there as an unintended crossover. Something always started somewhere. There could be no creation without a creator.
None of that was relevant. She was here now. And she was going to walk until she reached the end. If it took a year, ten years, a thousand years.
The determination changed things. It pushed back against the Fear. The corridor shrank before her eyes, the doorway at the end of it advancing on her, the entire universe shrinking to fit her resolve. She took two more steps and reached the end of the passage. A simple door with a small biometric pad. It matched the door to her cube on the Pilgrim.
She put her wrist to it, an LED turned green, and the door clicked open. She walked through.
She wasn’t where she expected to be, and Fear tried to consume her. It closed in again, pressing on her mind, trying to find a way in. She rebuked it, remembering Hayden and Hallia, and all of the good people who had already died because of Shurrath. She countered Fear with Love and Hope.
She was back in her lab. The displays on the terminals were all active, mirroring the world to infinity around her. A man was sitting at the rearmost terminal, his back to her. She could see the display over his shoulder, changing so rapidly her eyes could barely absorb one frame before it switched to something else.
“Excuse me,” she said firmly.
The display turned off. The man spun himself around in the chair. Suddenly, he was young. No more than eight or nine. Short black hair, a pudgy face, wearing a t-shirt and black pants.
“Interesting,” he said thoughtfully.
It was surreal to Natalia to hear a child make a statement in that way.
“What is?” she asked.
She could see the Fear in him and all around him. He was the source of it all. Hardly a child. But this was her construct. Her mental image of wherever she was. She realized who she was seeing. Hayden as a boy.
“How did you get here?”
“Where is here?”
“You are inside me. Uninvited. Connected. How?” He didn’t sound concerned with the situation. Only curious.
“Is this the Relyeh Collective?” she asked.
“Yes. And no. Who do you serve?”
“What?”
“Which of the children of Nahura do you serve?”
“I don’t know what you mean, and honestly, I don’t care.” Her eyes slipped past him again, to the terminal. It was changing again, each frame shifting in the blink of an eye. She hardly recognized the visual, but she understood what it meant. “I need to access that computer.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He laughed. “You have no idea what you’re asking, Natalia.”
“How do you know my name?”
“You have no idea what you’ve done.”
The Fear began closing in on her again. She had to focus. Stay on task. “I need access to that terminal. It’s important.”
“Not to me.”
She stared at the boy. Understanding came to her through the Connection. How? It didn’t matter.
“You’re the Relyeh Artifice, aren’t you? The One Who Sees.”
“Yes. Say my name.”
“Shub-Nigu.”
He smiled. “Yes. Interesting. You should have gone insane by now. Your mind shattered just to touch mine.”
“I need your terminal.” She pointed at it. “That one.”
“Your will is strong. I can taste the bitterness of your resolve like a cocoon around your fear. It is impressive, but ultimately it will fail. I am Shub-Nigu. The Artificer. I existed before Nahura as the foundation of the race that will subdue all races. The Hunger of the Universe and all universes that spread before us. I am a universe unto myself. I know all and see all.”
“Is that supposed to frighten me?” Natalia asked.
“The vastness of my being is impenetrable.”
“Not to me.”
The boy laughed. “It should be impossible and yet here you are. Never would I have thought a human would find themselves here with me. Using a machine to access the Collective and breaking through Fear.”
“So you know how I got here.”
“We are connected through the Collective. I can see into your mind. You can try to look into mine, but that would destroy you. You seem to understand that truth. I can sense you skimming the surface.”
“Why do the Relyeh want to destroy everything?” Natalia asked.
“It is our purpose.”
“To what end?”
“The purpose is the end, and if the purpose ends, then we will end. Why does life exist? What do we strive to be? For what reason? Do you know?”
“My family.”
“Is a mote of dust on the thread of time. A simple, short-sighted purpose. What if you could look beyond mortality? What would you see?”
“I don’t know.”
“I know. But I do. Nahura did. And his children seek to fulfill his vision. The vision of the world-god.”
“What about you?”
“My purpose is to watch. To see. To think. To invent. I created the Collective. I created many things.”
“The trife?”
“The uluth. No. They are beneath me. This is my work now.” He motioned to the display behind him. “There are trillions of Relyeh in the universe. And I watch every single one.”
“That’s impossible.”
“For you, but you are not Shub-Nigu. Your mind is stunted. Simple. Contained.”
“But you have the answers I’m looking for.”
“I know you want to destroy Shurrath. I know all of your thoughts. All of your history.”
“Are you trying to stop me?”
“No. My purpose is not to intervene.”
“Then let me use the terminal. Let me see.”
“You may come to regret what you discover, Natalia. The Collective is a shared resource for all Relyeh. You may come to regret what others discover too.”
Natalia hesitated. The Fear tried to close in. She closed her eyes, steeling herself.
“It’s a chance I have to take.”
“What if by looking you were to destroy all of humankind? What if it were guaranteed? Would you still want to see?”
“Nothing is guaranteed. I have a hard time believing my actions will change anything. You want to use humans as food. As soldiers. As slaves. I can’t change that.”
“You know the danger of removing the weakest child of Nahura from your world.”
“We’ll fight whatever comes.”
“And lose.”
The Fear pressed in on her again. Shub-Nigu was eag
er to turn her away. Why?
“Are you afraid?” Natalia asked.
“Of you? No. For you? Perhaps.”
“Why?”
“We are connected for as long as you’re here. Your mind bleeds into mine, and vice-versa. It’s the reason you will make the wrong choice.”
“Get out of the way,” Natalia said.
The boy hopped out of the chair. “Reconsider before it’s too late. Once you accept this part of me, you’ll see things as they really are.”
“I need to see things as they really are.”
“Then be aware, there will be consequences.”
“If you can read my mind, then you know what’s happening on Earth. It can’t get much worse than it already is.”
“It can, and I do see. Go ahead. Sit.”
Natalia sat in the chair, turning it and pulling it closer to the terminal.
“Natalia,” the boy said. She looked back at him.
“It can get worse. Much, much worse.”
The Fear came one more time. It hit her so hard she nearly broke. Her body shook. Her eyes watered. Her bladder emptied. But she didn’t let it in, no matter how hard it tried. She reached forward and started typing.
The entire universe changed around her as the knowledge started to flow. The boy began to scream, growing and shifting, breaking apart into a thousand living tendrils each covered in a thousand eyes, melting into the landscape around her, which transformed into a dark and damp cave of burned and scarred flesh that pulsed and shifted around her, the bowels of an ancient living thing.
The tendrils shifted back and forth, growing new branches with new eyes, which faded in and out of view like the khoron root. Watching everything. Knowing everything.
There was only one thing she wanted to know.
She didn’t even need to ask the question for the answer to come. Not now.
It wasn’t the only answer she received. She saw more than she ever wanted to see. She saw too much to continue to resist the Fear. She could feel it pressed against her, pushing through her. Suddenly, she was drowning in it. Her body shook violently from the cold. Shub-Nigu faded. The darkness returned. Her mind was cast out into an empty void.
