Pandemonium

by Warren Fahy

  After they got him to the chair behind Maxim’s desk, Nell pulled off his shoe. He noticed the screens on the wall. She pulled the bloody sock off and saw that the bullet had gone through the bone in his foot leading to his small toe. She pulled the lace out of his shoe and tied it around his ankle, cinching it tight.

  Geoffrey pointed to one of the screens in which a burning SUV had crashed into the wall across the street from the hospital. Green cyclones swirled over the bodies of two men in the street. They watched a man get out of a limo parked in front of the hospital only to be immediately smothered by wasps and drill-worms gushing out of the door.

  Sasha hid her eyes, turning away.

  “They’re from Henders Island,” Geoffrey murmured.

  “I know!” Nell said.

  “We’ve got to warn people,” he said.

  “Sasha, do you know where a first aid kit is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “In the bottom drawer of Papa’s desk.”

  Nell pulled it out and saw an antique leather-bound book on top of the first aid kit. She set the book on top of the desk and opened the kit.

  Geoffrey saw on the next screen over that the two men still stood guard outside the gate of the hospital sector. He sighed in relief. “Thank God,” he said, feeling woozy as he gripped the arms of the chair. “The gate closed in time. We can’t open the gate to Sector Three.” The screen to the other side showed the dormitory where they had stayed next to the lab. Maxim, Dimitri, and two of his bodyguards were now trapped inside.

  Geoffrey saw Maxim pointing at him through the TV screen and realized that Maxim must be able to see them. Then he noticed a webcam over the screens extending toward them. “He sees us!” Geoffrey whispered.

  “Papa!” Sasha ran to the computer. “I think he can hear us, too.” She boosted the volume as her father moved closer to the camera, climbing on a bed as his face filled the monitor.

  Maxim shouted: “The whole world will pay for what you did!”

  “Papa!” Sasha cried.

  “Sasha!” Maxim’s face recoiled.

  “You be nice to Geoffrey!”

  “We can still make it out of here alive, Maxim,” Nell said. “Help us!”

  “Why?” Maxim bellowed. “Then they will kill me, and there will never be justice for what they’ve done!” Maxim gestured behind him to one of his men, who opened a laptop on the bed and kneeled in front of it.

  “Maxim!” Geoffrey yelled. “You can’t!”

  “Let hell rise.…”

  “Where’s Alexei, Papa?” Sasha said.

  “Alexei is dead!” Maxim roared in a cruel eruption.

  “For God’s sake!” Nell said as Sasha fell to the floor, sobbing.

  “There is no God!” Maxim laughed hideously. “There is only the Devil! They killed my son! They killed my grandfather, my father, my brother, and millions more! And there was no justice! There were no charges, no trials, no convictions. As if there were no crimes! And they call me a criminal?”

  “You condemn the whole human race?” Geoffrey asked. “You would slaughter all the innocents, all the ones you love, to get back at the guilty? You sound like Koba, Maxim.”

  “They began it! I will end it.”

  “What about your daughter?” Nell said.

  “They will kill her, also. They will hunt her down like the rest! And they will go on and on and on, forever!” Maxim looked down at the laptop his guard now held for him. He typed with one hand. “But not this time!”

  “Hey!” Sasha jumped up now and pointed at two screens on the wall. “He’s opening the gates!”

  2:55 A.M.

  Dimitri watched the tycoon, who was hunched intently over the laptop at the edge of a bed in the dormitory. Maxim’s face contorted with fury as he tapped the keys, scanning security-camera views of his city. One screen showed luminous creatures flying through the opening gate from Sector Four and spigers with fiery coats leaping into the hospital sector. On another, the gate to Sector Three opened and hordes of rats and swarms of Henders insects poured into the garrison sector, overwhelming the two guards there. Another view showed the door to the main city in Sector Six opening. Then Dimitri saw the gate to Sector Seven opening at the train station across the river.

  “Maxim, what are you doing?” Dimitri screamed.

  Maxim accessed the password screen for each gate and bashed his right hand on the keyboard to set a new password—hihu9-g7890—copying it, confirming it, and closing the window as he moved to the next.

  2:55 A.M.

  “Stop, Maxim!” Geoffrey implored. “Don’t do this!”

  “I had hoped to save some souls here, Geoffrey. But that’s impossible now. Find a way out if you can. You’ll have some years left if you do.”

  Geoffrey noticed Maxim’s daughter beside him, jabbing the keyboard furiously with two fingers. Trying to delay him, he shouted, “You will be worse than everything you hate, worse than Stalin ever was!”

  Maxim lashed out at the camera, pointing at him. “You made this happen!”

  “You’re delusional!” Geoffrey answered as Sasha probed his security system. “Where were you going to take that bottle of Henders specimens?”

  Maxim was quiet, shrinking on the screen.

  “You were planning to use these species as weapons all along. You were taking that sample to Sector Seven to release them, weren’t you? You knew they would migrate through the train tunnel. All the way to Moscow, isn’t that right? That is what you were going to do, Maxim! Admit it!”

  “The deaths of millions made this place and a thousand others like it,” the billionaire muttered.

  Nell pointed at a screen that showed the gate to downtown Pobedograd opening as the letters of SEKTOP 6 disappeared into the rock wall. “Oh, my God. Sasha, you have to close that door!”

  “I can’t close it,” Sasha said. “He locked it!”

  “The city!” Nell said. “Close the door to Sector Seven, then, Sasha!” she hissed.

  “Are you going to sit back and watch everyone inside your city die? What kind of devil are you? God damn it, shut the gates, Maxim! Now!” Geoffrey shouted.

  Tears streamed down Sasha’s face as she called up window after window of security clearances until she finally got in to the password authority prompt for Maxim’s user ID. Nell watched her type in a new ten-letter password painfully with two fingers, confirming it twice: ILOVESASHA. Then the young girl confirmed it once more before clicking open the gate control interface and closing the gate to Sector Six.

  On two screens, Nell, Geoffrey, and Maxim could see the gate to the main city at the northeast corner stop and reverse its motion, as it rolled closed.

  “What?” Maxim growled.

  “Awesome, girl!” Geoffrey whispered to Sasha.

  Dimitri sighed gratefully behind Maxim.

  But as the gate narrowed, a truck tried to squeeze through from the city, and halfway through the door, the truck’s trailer was caught and pinched like a tube of toothpaste. The truck tires burned on the road as they spun. Two men jumped out of the cab and surveyed the totaled trailer wedged inside the door. In the next instant, both were struck by a glowing wave and they sprawled on the ground, writhing as the attacking creatures swarmed around the truck trailer, flying and slipping through the gaping gate into the city.

  2:56 A.M.

  Dimitri wept as he saw the door to the city jammed open. A spiger the size of a hippo vaulted onto the truck cab and wriggled through the crack on top of the squeezed trailer.

  Maxim switched to another view that showed the spiger pulling itself with spiked arms on top of the truck trailer as flying and leaping creatures burst into Sector Six.

  Dimitri bowed his head into his hands, unable to watch.

  2:56 A.M.

  Geoffrey saw that the large door in the train station’s façade was now wide open. “Sasha, you’ve got to seal Sector Seven!”

  “Close that door, honey,” Ne
ll urged her softly.

  “There’s still time,” Geoffrey said. “But hurry!”

  “I’m trying!” Sasha sobbed as she navigated the door’s controls.

  “What are you doing?” Maxim roared through the speakers, glaring at them through the screen on the wall.

  “Shut up, Papa! Shut up!” Sasha shouted as she finally activated the gate and locked in a new password. It rolled out of the wall, sealing the train station as the red letters on the door emerged: SEKTOP 7.

  2:56 A.M.

  Maxim called up another screen, this one showing the front of the train station across the river. Its large steel door was now sealed.

  “Thank God, Maxim,” Dimitri breathed.

  Maxim punched keys with his fingers. The gate control now asked for his password. They must have hijacked his own user ID and changed the door codes. Who could do that? “Sasha!” he shouted. He typed in his password again and it was rejected.

  “Thank God, Maxim,” Dimitri said again.

  Maxim swung at Dimitri, knocking him onto the bed behind him. He tried passwords now that she might have used: IVAN, SASHA, ALEXANDRA, ALEXEI, ILOVEIVAN.… Finally, the security system locked him out and he smashed his fist onto the keys.

  Dimitri almost fainted in relief as he watched the hulking back of the madman, who threw the laptop on the floor and sobbed, seizing his head in his giant hands.

  The other two men, Maxim’s elite bodyguards, glanced at Dimitri from across the room and one of them ran to Maxim now. “What you need, Chief?”

  Maxim was unresponsive as the other guard approached and picked the laptop up off the floor. “We’ll need this, Chief,” he said softly.

  “The room is secure,” said the first guard. “We have plenty of food and water to last awhile here, and even a lavatory.”

  The second guard looked harshly at Dimitri. “What happens if we lose power?”

  “An emergency generator downstairs will kick in,” Dimitri said. “After that, we’re down to batteries and that bicycle generator in the corner.” He pointed.

  “How long do we have air?”

  “Each room has separate air ducts, and the filters should hold them back,” Dimitri said.

  “All right.” The guard patted Maxim’s shoulder. “Get some sleep, Chief. You’ve been up too long. We need you to be sharp. OK?”

  Maxim fell sideways on the bed and curled into a fetal position.

  Outside the boarded windows, they heard what sounded like a haunted house of shrieks, cackles, and whining hums.

  “Let’s turn off some of these lights,” Dimitri said.“They’re attracted to light and sound.”

  2:57 A.M.

  Sasha’s ice-blue eyes melted tears as she looked at her father crumpled on the bed. “Papa,” Sasha cried. “Why don’t you know the password?”

  The room around her father darkened by degrees as the men turned off the lights.

  “He’s OK, Sasha,” Nell reassured her. “Can you shut the gates to Sector Three and Four?”

  “No! He changed the codes for them before I could get there,” Sasha cried.

  “He should be safe till we can help him,” Geoffrey said.

  A stream of howling creatures poured out of Sector Four and flooded past the hospital into the garrison sector, gushing into downtown Pobedograd. Nell hugged the little girl, hiding her eyes from the screens arrayed on the wall as, one by one, they turned into a horror show.

  A night-shift construction crew in the center of the city was besieged and chased down the street by cat-sized animals that sprang in thirty-foot leaps. In the center of the city, thirty-five stories up, workers installing windows and lights on the Star Tower were welding, showering comet tails of sparks down the face of the building. Then squadrons of flying creatures, attracted by the light, arrived and attacked, and the workers’ bodies fell from the scaffolding.

  Feeding frenzies clumped, like ants around sugar cubes, in the streets as a new kind of traffic began coursing through the streets and people ran in terror on screen after screen.

  “Geoffrey,” Nell whispered. She looked at him hopelessly.

  He shook his head.

  They saw a view from a camera on a lamppost looking east along the riverfront. Groups of people stampeded down the steps in front of the restaurant where they had eaten on their first night in Pobedograd. Some of the patrons fell down, while others ran ahead toward the screen. Three young spigers the size of mastiffs launched behind them off their catapult tails, raising their spiked arms.

  “God!” Geoffrey whispered.

  Sasha recognized Dennis Appleton, who made it closest to the camera before a horse-sized spiger bit him in half with vertical jaws.

  Sasha tried to look, but Nell blocked her view. “No, sweetie!” Sasha pushed her head against Nell’s stomach, sobbing.

  They watched helplessly as the city was inundated by a carnivorous tsunami. The mayhem spread, a premonition of what would engulf the globe if any of these species reached the surface.

  “What about the farm? Can anyone get to the farm in Sector Five?”

  Geoffrey touched the screen that displayed the steel door marked SEKTOP 5. There was no motion on the street outside the gate.

  “Can we warn the people in the city, Sasha, so they can try to get to the farm?” Nell asked.

  Then a glowing green speck streaked by the farm’s door on the screen.

  “Damn!” Geoffrey said as a dozen more shapes like large dragonflies passed the door from the right. A few stopped, hovering, their bodies hanging straight down like glow sticks. “They’ve already made it to the other side of the city.…”

  Fear pressed down on them like the mountain above as they realized their predicament. Geoffrey gripped Nell’s hand. “We’re safe here, for now,” he insisted.

  “There’s food and water downstairs,” Nell said, nodding and hiding her tears from Sasha. “Is there any way to communicate with the outside world, Sasha?”

  “No!” she yelled angrily.

  “Come on, let’s fix your foot, Geoffrey. It looks like there’s morphine, antibiotics, and even a sewing kit in here. Sasha, can you help me? Geoffrey needs our help. OK?”

  Sasha pulled away from Nell and wiped her eyes. “OK, OK!”

  Nell noticed a large lavender envelope on Maxim’s desk. “To Sasha from Uncle Galia, with love,” she read. “Have you seen this, Sasha?”

  “Huh?” Sasha said, reading it. “I hate Galia!”

  “Open it.”

  She tore open the envelope and pulled out a card. She read aloud, “I will come back for you, Uncle Galia.”

  Sasha threw it down on the floor.

  Geoffrey and Nell looked at each other. Nell took the card and saw the date written on the card: it was today’s date. “That’s good news, honey,” Nell said.

  “He left without us!” Sasha cried. “And he’s not even my uncle!”

  MARCH 26

  2:37 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

  Kuzu had not left his computer for hours. After venturing again into the World Wide Web, he was even more traumatized as he peeled back layer after layer of the humans’ boundless inhumanity. He scrolled through an endless catalog of images of murder, massacres, jihads, wars, and genocides down through ages of human history that left him dazed with pity, fear, rage, and disgust. They even killed their gods, Kuzu thought.

  Indeed, in their short time on Earth, humans had discarded the vast majority of their gods. Kuzu came to realize that humans were like everything on Henders Island—except for the sels. They survived the violence and carnage they unleashed only because their rapid birthrate continuously replaced them.

  Kuzu reviewed the video of Hender fighting the human who attacked him, reading the latest comments left by humans, many of whom called Hender dangerous for simply defending himself.

  Kuzu brooded as long-still depths stirred in his mind. The other sels were probably playing online video games with humans now. Two of them had become Worl
d of Warcraft celebrities. His fellow sels did not seem to mind the death in human games: they thought they were funny. They had not seen what he had seen. They had been corrupted by their gifts of games and toys.

  Meanwhile, the other sels convened a secret meeting in Hender’s house to discuss their concerns about Kuzu, who had increasingly shut himself in, appearing more erratic each time he emerged. Normally, they would never have paid any heed to what another sel chose to do. This time, they had no choice.

  6:30 P.M.

  Kuzu arrived and noticed the others were already there at Hender’s home, which roused his suspicions.

  Andy waved him over. “They should be here any minute, Kuzu.”

  Hender observed Andy’s tension and the paleness of his skin. Andy had lost weight and had rarely spoken for the last week. When Hender tried to console him, Andy only smiled weakly and tried to console Hender instead. “What’s the matter, Andy?” Hender asked him now.

  “Well.” Andy bowed his head. “We still haven’t gotten any news about Nell and Geoffrey. And nobody knows where they are.”

  “Oh!” Hender said, clasping four hands together. “Are they OK?”

  “We don’t really know,” Andy said. “They called us here to give us some news.”

  The sels gasped, clicked, whistled, and growled.

  Hender’s birdsong doorbell rang, and they all swiveled heads toward the door. Joe and Bo opened the door a crack. Hender waved them in with two outstretched arms. Special agents Jane Wright and Mike Kalajian entered the room. Both of them waved jovially as they came in.

  “It is a great honor to see all of you again,” Jane Wright said.

  “Just tell us,” Hender said.

  “Where are Nell and Geoffrey?” Nid asked.

  Agent Kalajian cleared his throat. “I hope that you will all listen to me closely because what I am about to tell you could not be more important to both humans and hendros. We have received information from a reliable source that Nell and Geoffrey were abducted and taken to what is apparently a salt mine located in a mountainous region of Kaziristan. Everything I am about to tell you from this point forward must never leave the people in this room.”