Run

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Then shuddered again as she reached the top level in the shaft, and thumbed the button. The elevator jerked to a halt, and she got out.

  Time to wait.

  ***

  Elijah almost lost his grip on the elevator cable when the elevator stopped. Two of the others did lose their grips, falling about a foot down the cord before regaining their hold and sliding to a stop.

  They waited a moment, but the elevator didn’t move again.

  He looked at the troops. They still held their guns with one hand, each pulse blaster aimed upward, each person probably praying for Malachi to pop his head out, but Elijah knew that was a hollow hope. Malachi wouldn’t do anything so foolish.

  Elijah also knew they couldn’t climb and cover themselves at the same time.

  They were stuck.

  ***

  Adam moved back and forth, trying to discern some distinguishing mark that would tell him where he was. He hated to admit it, but he was lost. He was positive the entrance to the mine shaft was nearby, but all the tunnels looked so similar that it was hard to find one that looked merely familiar, as opposed to the exactly the same as every other tunnel he had traversed.

  Then he saw something in the tunnel ahead.

  "The elevator," he whispered, and headed for the shaft, the three Controllers following behind.

  ***

  Malachi lay on his back, weighing his options.

  The Controllers had come en masse, that much was sure. He wanted to kill Fran and John. But more than that he needed to survive. That limited his range of choices.

  He resisted the urge to look out and down the elevator shaft; it was a sure bet that the Controllers were waiting for him to do just that. Nor could he reach out and fire blindly downward, hoping to hit them. They were sure to be watching the lip of the floor where it merged with the elevator shaft, and if he put out his arm he had no doubt it would be hit and paralyzed by a pulse before he got off a single shot.

  So he looked up instead.

  The elevator was up there, though he couldn’t see it. And as sure as anything, there were more Controllers above him, too. Adam was more than likely among them.

  And don’t forget the four Controllers below. Hanging below, waiting for a chance to come up and capture him.

  The more he thought about what to do, the more his mind kept returning to the elevator. At first he thought his subconscious was telling him to call it down and ride it out. He rejected the idea. As soon as he got on, the Controllers below would fire up, puncturing the lift, paralyzing him. The elevator might fall as a result, but he knew they’d be more than willing to hurtle to their deaths if it meant stopping him. He didn’t think that they’d be able to do willingly cause his death, but an accidental murder might be within their action parameters, and he’d be just as dead as if they’d done it on purpose. So he would stay off the elevator.

  The elevator.

  He smiled then as he realized what his subconscious had been trying to tell him, then wiggled out as far as he could onto the lip of the tunnel. It projected a bit into the shaft, providing him an unobstructed view straight up while still shielding him from any shots ascending from below.

  He aimed his gun up the shaft and pulled the trigger. Not once, but many times. The pinging of bullets tearing into the lift above sounded in response to his actions, and Malachi imagined the bullets punching holes, tearing through machinery.

  Shearing cables.

  The cable that trailed below the lift began to swing wildly, and he heard screams from below.

  Let them cry, he thought. Let the Controllers weep in their last moments and feel the emptiness that comes to those who have no souls.

  They wouldn’t die, he knew. They couldn’t.

  Because most of the Controllers, like the berserk inhabitants of Loston, were machines.

  DOM#67A

  LOSTON, COLORADO

  AD 1999

  10:47 AM TUESDAY

  ***ALERT MODE***

  Adam reached the elevator a moment before the shooting. It was empty, and one of the Controllers - a woman named Del - reached out her hand to open the gate. Sudden shots pounded up from somewhere down below, causing the lift to twitch back and forth like an enraged animal on an electrified floor.

  The edge of the lift caught Del’s shin, knocking her over into the center of the cage. She lay in a fetal position, arms shielding her head, as bullets shot through the floor all around her. Miraculously, none hit her, though the floor of the lift looked like a cheese grater when the firing stopped.

  Adam thought for a moment that God might actually be doing a miracle of some kind, impossibly saving the woman’s life, before a snap ripped through the turbulent air and the elevator plunged out of sight.

  A few seconds later, something else fell past them.

  Adam couldn’t really make it out. But it had glistened like a diamond.

  A long diamond, in the shape of a spear.

  ***

  Elijah was still trying to figure out the best way to proceed, how to get himself up the cable and onto solid ground again before he either fell or Malachi killed him and the three other Controllers hanging out in space below the elevator. He needed time, he needed peace and quiet for thinking and some time to decide how to proceed. But peace and quiet were not to be found in this place, it seemed, and time was the one thing he couldn’t have, for in that instant he felt the cable slacken in his hands and knew that he was falling.

  It was over.

  The thoughts in his head tumbled over themselves in an almost childishly silly patter of twists and convolutions, making no sense and all sense at once, marking his end not with the peaceful understanding that he had hoped for as he entered the eternities, but rather with confusion, with disorientation, with despair. His thoughts were jumbled even as he was, plummeting in fast loops and barrel rolls as he fell through the silence of the mine shaft. He could not see where he was going, or where the other three Controllers who had been on the cable with him were. But he could feel the wind rip through his clothing and pierce his skin as he fell, picking up speed as he dropped like a stone down a deep and empty well.

  He fell forever, it seemed, and at one point felt himself collide with the wall of the shaft, which sheared off his right hand cleanly. He was already screaming by then, and the pain registered hardly at all.

  Thousands of feet. Forever. Eternity wasn’t Heaven or Hell, it was a fall through a dark tunnel to the pit of the world, clutching a sonic pistol in one hand and nothing in the hand that fell disembodied beside you.

  Then he hit the ground, finally, and all sounds, including his own, were silent.

  But not gone. He wasn’t gone. He was alive, with all that meant, and he felt himself - now a prisoner in his body and not the owner at all - push up on hands that were shattered that were attached to arms that were broken that in turn hung off a torso whose innards were mush.

  Elijah could feel it, though. He could feel the bones re-knit themselves within him, and he knew what it meant.

  I’m a machine, he thought, and darkness rose within him.

  He looked over and saw one of the other Controllers - he couldn’t even tell who it was, so mangled was the body - also twitching. Slower that Elijah, though. More internal damage. The other two Controllers were nowhere to be seen, and the analytical part of Elijah – that part of him that was quickly disappearing beneath a soft, dark blanket of madness that he could feel settling down in his mind like black snow – reasoned that they must have been utterly pulverized in the fall, colliding with the wall of the elevator shaft so many times and with such force that they had simply disintegrated under the pummeling.

  Then he noticed the cable. It was still dropping around them from above, wrapping around the floor of the shaft like an obscenely long snake that would twist in on itself and then begin to eat the whole earth from the inside out. Elijah knew the elevator must be dropping, and he began to shuffle to the side of the shaft, hands and kn
ees working slowly as they mended themselves and tried to carry him out of the danger zone at the same time.

  He made it.

  He turned as the elevator hit, seeing it slam into the other living - or unliving, as it were - Controller, smashing he/she/it into the earth, allowing no more life, crushing the last bits of animation out of the machine. Blood splashed and dust rose in a great cloud as the earth shivered with the force of the impact.

  Elijah lay there in the dark, feeling his body mend.

  I’m a machine, he thought again. His whole life, the memories he had, the loves he felt, the friends he knew, all turned away from him as he realized that his existence was a lie. His memories were constructed, and his birth had been from in a bio-lab, not a womb.

  He began screaming again, his lungs now able once more to process oxygen (Not breathe! screamed the rapidly diminishing portion of his mind that still remembered being a man. Process oxygen.) and then stopped as he heard a new sound.

  It was a terrible, silent sound. The sound of Moses parting the Red Sea, that awful stillness before cataclysm.

  Elijah, or rather the thing that had once been Elijah, looked up. Darkness greeted him, but then something sparkled above.

  He saw the icicle that had cracked off its base thousands of feet above him a mere fraction of a second before crashed down. The needle sharp shaft pierced him, slamming through him like a pin through an entomologist’s favorite specimen. It exploded through his face in a bright flash of white, and Elijah felt it enter the tiny part of his thalamus that was all that was keeping him alive in spite of his body’s anxious desire to embrace death.

  Elijah, the man and the machine, died.

  And was not unhappy.

  DOM#67A

  LOSTON, COLORADO

  AD 1999

  10:48 AM TUESDAY

  ***ALERT MODE***

  John slammed into Deirdre, feeling her in the complete blackness of the room. The move caught her by surprise, and him too: he had expected to be gunned down in the darkness. He knocked into the barrel of her weapon, and grappled for it, gasping as the gun barrel - hot from the Uzi’s high bullet expenditure - burnt his hand. The woman tightened her hold almost immediately, no doubt aware as John was that letting go would be tantamount to signing her own death sentence.

  The struggle was a silent one as John and the woman slammed against the cave wall, each trying to gain the upper hand in the complete darkness. He felt a breath of cool air whisk by him in the darkness, and knew it was Fran, once again following his directives perfectly. He managed a grim smile even in the thick of the struggle.

  He saw a light flick on down the tunnel and again knew it must be Fran, clicking on her headlamp. At the same moment, he felt his enemy’s body tense. The woman redoubled her efforts, trying now not so much to win as to get away.

  To follow Fran, John thought. They wanted Fran much more than they wanted him, he realized, and again wondered why.

  The thought distracted him enough that the woman was able to get a hit in. She loosened her grip on the gun and slammed her palm into John’s cheek. It wasn’t a hard blow - her leverage was bad - but the contact dazed him, and she was able to push him away. He heard her running and made out her dim outline, sprinting toward the light that marked Fran’s location.

  He knew he’d never catch up in time, and his reaction was more instinct than thought.

  In one swift move, he pulled the coil of rope off his shoulder. It was thick gauge, meant for hauling miners up and down new shafts, for lashing temporary support braces and other strength work. So it was heavy, almost a cable, with a good heft to it.

  John threw the rope, dimly saw it fly through the air in tight curls like an air born tarantula. It hit the woman’s legs, tangling them, and she tripped. Her arms reached out to break her fall, and in the time she was going down, John leapt to his feet and ran toward her. She careened into a wall brace, then fell to her knees in the dusky gloom of the tunnel.

  If he could get to her before she stood, he felt sure he could kill her. But he was still twenty feet away when she jumped up, gun aimed at him. Point blank, and no way to miss.

  ***

  Deirdre’s knee hurt where she had hit the ground. Her knuckles were skinned from the impact with the wall, and her whole body was bruised from the short but intense fight in the dark. She knew her mission was to get the girl, but now she had the chance to make sure John didn’t get in their way anymore. He was in her sights, hard to see in the dim light, but still impossible to miss at this close range. She could see that his hands were raised in a ridiculous stance of defeat, as though he thought she would let him go.

  "Die," she snarled. He leaped to the side, but she didn’t pull the trigger. She didn’t want to waste any ammo, so she would wait a fraction of a second longer, then kill him when he stopped his sideways move.

  In the fraction of a second she waited, a thin trickle of dirt fell on her head.

  Then, with a deep rumble, a hundred tons of rock rolled out of the wall, slamming into her with a life-ending torrent that masked any slight noise she might have made in the millisecond between realizing what was happening and becoming a permanent fixture of the mountain’s structure.

  ***

  Fran heard the collapse behind her and launched herself forward, shielding her head with her arms and landing in a fetal position on the ground. She felt a cloud of dust roil over her like an angry and biting wind, and then there was only stillness, a silence that was as deep and profound as the darkness she had experienced in this place beneath the world. Silent and dark, quiet and deep. The mountain seemed to her as though it was holding its breath, deciding whether to let loose another torrent of rock and dirt. There was another deep rumble, and then silence again.

  She looked behind her. A solid wall of rock and rubble greeted her.

  "John!" she screamed.

  No answer.

  She looked the other way down the hall. There was nothing, just twenty feet of straight shaft, then an intersection. John had told her to wait at the intersection. No matter what.

  So she stood and walked to it, knowing she would wait there as if he were alive, because her heart would not allow her to believe he was dead. Besides, she knew that she would never be able to find her way out of this place on her own. If John didn’t appear to help her, she could wander this subterranean labyrinth for a year without ever coming close to finding the way back to the surface.

  She waited, gripped by a loneliness she had never felt before, one that few people had experienced, but which one of the miners could have told her went with being in the ground. It was the peculiar sensation that all above is gone, a dream, and only she and the earth still existed. But the existence was dark and solitary, with rock columns for companions, and the ever-present ink that painted everything the same bleak shade of black hovering beyond the reach of her small headlamp. Loneliness was the way of the earth, and now for all Fran knew she would die in this profound solitude.

  Still, she clung to the thought of John. She prayed he was alive.

  ***

  Adam stood before the shaft. The elevator was gone. So was Del, one more Controller gone from the ever-dwindling population of would-be saviors of humanity. He didn’t know how to get down without the elevator, so all he could do was guard the entrance and hope against hope that John - and more importantly, Fran - surfaced.

  The remaining Controllers knew the same thing. They shuffled nervously as they waited for Adam to move. None of them was really sure how to get back to the entrance. For all the technological advances they may have enjoyed in their own place and time, here under the mountain they found themselves bereft of advantage. The ground had stolen their skill, and left them alone to fend for themselves with only base primal instinct as their guides. And instinct was found wanting in people who had not had to use such a thing in millennia.

  A distant rumble sounded, and all of them stiffened. They didn’t know what the sound meant, but
it sounded ominous.

  "Subterranean slide," whispered one of the Controllers. Adam didn’t know what the noise was. It certainly could have been a subterranean slide.

  Then again, it could have been a giant kangaroo hopping on the mountaintop in steel-toed ballet shoes for all Adam knew. He was no expert in geology, and knew his spelunking experience was even more limited than his knowledge of the different rock strata in which he now found himself encased.

  A moment later, he started walking. They were at the elevator, he reasoned, so the tunnel opening couldn’t be far.

  At least, he hoped not.

  ***

  Fran struggled against tears in the darkness. The light from her headlamp was on, but it only illuminated a dim cone in the thick dust that still hadn’t settled completely after the cave in.

  Alone.

  Never had that word ushered such dread into her heart as it did now. Even in the dark days and months directly after Nathan had died, her sense of loneliness had been tempered by the outpouring of love and sympathy she received as a daily allowance from friends and relatives. She had never truly felt alone in the way she did now. This was how the dead must feel, she thought, locked in a silent tomb with nothing but the earth and their own steady decay for company.

  She sniffled, then coughed as the dust entered her nostrils and lungs. It was thick and sharper than any dust she was used to, composed as it was of tiny slivers of silicon and volcanic rock that could cause what the miners called black lung or the bleeding. She didn’t worry particularly about contracting silicosis, not in the short time that she had been here, but the air irritated her mucus membranes, making her nose run and her eyes water.