by Cole Anders
Simon elbowed Luke, “I think we just got lamped, it was some kind of automated system, pale yellow and green alternating but they’ve stopped so you might be in the clear.”
Luke crept open his fingers and opened an eye, “I have no idea what that color pattern is supposed to do, who knows, look I’ve got few pairs dampener contact lens on, they aren’t perfect and may not help against everything, but it’s something. Only problem is that they wash all the color out of my vision so you only see in black and white. Interested?”
Simon considered it for a moment before saying, “No, I’d rather keep my color vision, come on let’s get up outta this grass and find out where exactly we are.”
Once more Luke helped Simon to his feet, fortunately he had so much adrenaline pumping through his veins that he didn’t even feel his twisted-up ankle anymore, all he could feel was the blood pounding in his ears and the cold handle of his pistol in his hand. Inching closer to the red bathed hallway before them Simon got a better sense of the decline it had, steep enough to alter a normal stride. The walls and ceiling were the same corrugated metal surface, yet slick with moisture, and hot almost to the point of burning to the touch, the floor was made up of metal grating hung over a murky pool of what might have been water, the chamber looked purposely designed to sweat and weep moisture constantly. The occasional drop of liquid could be heard dripping into the pool beneath the grating. Both Simon and Luke began to sweat immediately, the humidity and temperature were oppressive to the point of choking, and Simon could feel his throat close against the oven like air hanging in front of his face.
Simon looked over at Luke as saw his expression shift from confusion to grim realization, “This is the same environment from when the Firewall compound was attacked years ago, the exact same. Whatever we find past that hatch Simon, we’ve got to destroy it, nothing else matters. Are you with me?” Luke spoke in a low choking voice.
Simon had already committed his mind and body to breaking whatever lay before them, but now he could join with Luke in that covenant, “Luke I swear it.”
They reached the pressure hatch, it looked to Simon just like a bulkhead pressure door from a huge iron ship. Simon felt his mind reel for a moment as he swore he could see claw marks on the hatch for a moment, but he blinked away the sweat from his eyes and they were gone. His mind divided itself between his memory of reality and the memory of a dream, Simon lost track which one was which until he managed to reach out at touch the scalding hot wheel lock. His skin hissed and visible steam puffed off his palm when he jerked it back.
Simon, so close to completely collapsing into himself nearly screamed but managed to whisper instead, “OH FUCK ME! This fucking door is red hot, how are we gonna even think about getting through this without melting our own palms off!”
Luke reached out just to feel the heat coming off and jerked his own hand back without even having to touch the wheel himself, “It’s boiling hot, look we gotta do something…”
Just then, the lift began to rise again, and fast. Simon attempted a few steps towards it before realizing it was already more than halfway back up in only a matter of seconds.
Luke touched his shoulder to steady Simon, and himself for that matter. “We don’t have a choice now, let’s just hope it’s this hatch that’s hot and not the air on the other side of it or we’ll get steam boiled when we get the thing open. Come on, I’ll take my shirt off and we can use it to grip the wheel together and spin it open.”
Simon stood staring at the empty space where the lift used to be and shrugged, “Let’s do it, we’re in a nothing to lose situation now.”
Returning to the door, Luke removed his shirt and wrapped it around the wheel enough for two good hand holds, “Ok, this shirt is not going to protect us for more than a few seconds, but it should be enough, as long as this hatch isn’t locked or otherwise inoperable from this side, it which case we’re screwed.”
“Ready on 3” Simon said.
Luke counted, ”2..1..pull!”
Thankfully, the wheel wasn’t jammed and the hatch wasn’t locked. Luke expected an ambush the moment the wheel popped open, but none came. It spun freely, releasing the hatch from the bulkhead quickly. The other side was indeed pressurized but not with broiling hot air as Luke had feared but only with highly pressurized air. Inside was more red lighting filling a large rectangular chamber, a thick mist crept along the floor bellowing out of vents along the edges of the room. In fact, this room was decidedly cool compared to the entry hall, but the contents make it much worse.
18. Abomination
Hanging there inside the room where the bodies of the men who robbed the bank back in Texas. Thick wrist sized cables that looked like woven metal wire or mesh came out of the ceiling and plugged into large metal gaskets. These cables hung down a few feet until they fitted into a similar metal gasket that that was located on the insides of each of the men’s mouths. Their tongues and teeth were gone, replaced with clamps and wiring to the connector that was fastened to the roof of the mouths and the back of their throats. They made wheezing gurgling sounds and were, all of them, completely conscious. As soon as the hatch swung open enough for them to see the two men standing at the door they began to moan and screech as best they could, reaching out, gasping for air desperately trying to get their hands on either Simon or Luke. Their clothes had been removed and just below the line where a normal shirt neckline would fall, the things hanging here like sides of beef stopped being men. Gruesome lumps of scar tissue and metal plating mockingly forced into the vague shape of a human body. Their torsos were blackened and stretched over what must have been a basic cylinder shaped metal frame, instead of hips there was a tangle of pistons and metal ball joints. Hanging where their legs should had been, hung two impossibly thin rods with exposed muscle fibers stapled and bolted together with wires and mesh running all the way down to a three-toed claw like feet. The man-things kicked and gurgled and spun on the gaskets clamped into their mouths and tried to bite and chew themselves free. They were suspended off the ground just high enough so that the remains of their feet could only scrape the plating on the floor. The eyes were the worst part, wholly nature looking, along with their hands, their faces, once their mouths were closed, were completely unblemished and looked just like the faces of natural men. But their expressions weren’t natural. A mixture of rage and horror. Luke had already seen that look before, but to Simon seeing the face of someone who’d seen Hell was just a step over the line for him. Simon took only a few seconds to soak it what was in front of him before his body began to react the only way it knew how. He leveled his pistol at the closed one and began to fire.
“Two bullets into the head of each one, five of them in total. I’ll have two bullets left in this clip after I’m done, I’ll drop down and slap my last clip into the magazine and worry about reloading later.” Thought Simon, firing with lightning speed and grim precision.
“One, two, three, four, fi..” Simon counted out loud.
But before he could level his pistol at the last farthest one Luke reached up and disarmed him in a single fluid motion. So, smooth that Simon still held his hand out and even pulled a trigger that wasn’t no longer there.
All at once Simon snapped back, he could hear Luke yelling at him in the distance, but it wasn’t the distance of being far away, but instead of being far away from reality.
Luke wasn’t yelling at all, it had only felt like it to Simon, “Simon take it easy man, look I’ve taken your pistol from you, but I’m going to give it back as soon as you acknowledge you can hear me.”
It was the ringing in his ears from the gunfire in a small metal room more than anything that made him take a second to look at Luke and realize what he was hearing was his voice and not his own minds version of Luke’s voice. “Luke, I’m...I reacted faster than I could even think. I’m sorry. But God, look at what they are!”
“Simon there is no need to apologize, look at my own hand, I shot two of them i
n the neck myself before I could get myself to stop and then stop you. We’re not going to be leaving that last one alive by any means, but we might be able to learn something from it before what kill it.”
Luke handed Simon his gun back, Simon forgot to reload it, leaving four bullets in the magazine, one less than he’d be needing soon.
“Come on Simon, let’s get through this and finish with this nightmare.” said Luke, crossing into the rectangular room.
The four Simon had shot had stopped moving the instant the bullets passed through them, they hung there lifeless, as if they’d even been alive moments before. The last one at the rear of the chamber, however, continued to kick and hiss and rock on its plug trying to reach them. It was beginning to pull the clamp in its mouth loose and blood began oozing out of the corners of its lips and down its neck. It began to make choking sounds and with each breath it drew it pulled a mouth full of blood into its lungs. As Luke and Simon approached it, its movement shifted from grasping to seizing as its brain and lungs began to get less oxygen than it needed to survive. Two large gulping bubbles formed out of its gaping mouth as it began twitching and the suddenly clenched every organic muscle left in its body. Then an instant later it hung there motionless, having choked itself on its own blood in its fury to attack the two men that where approaching it.
Simon stood there with Luke for some time, numbness washed over him and he felt very distant from the environment around him. Finally, Luke’s voice, brought him back through the haze in his mind.
“So, without specific orders for a mission, these things are just rampaging sacks of violence. It killed itself trying to pull free of the clamp holding it to the ceiling just trying to get at us. Its good I suppose, there is no way a thing like this will sneak up on us or use tactics, not unless it’s been given instructions.”
Simon glanced up at the back wall and noticed that part of it was actually a metal sliding door with what looked like a control panel.
“There Luke, that looks like a door deeper into this place, this whole thing feels like a trap but what else can we do? This place is like hell!”
Luke raised his own pistol and put a round right through the already dead things head, leaving a wide hole large enough to put a fist through, neither of them flinched.
“I don’t believe in hell Simon, besides I don’t think our guns would work if we were in hell.” And with that he started toward the rear door, Simon took an extra second and followed him.
Standing before the door Simon looked over at Luke, “It’s just doors and rooms so far, this really doesn’t seem like a place people would actually be able to work in, unless it’s completely different deeper in. Why are all the surfaces boiling hot, but that last room is cooled? And why are those inhuman things just hung there in the entry way? You can’t get past them with them conscious as the room was too narrow, and they weren’t very effective as guards strung up like that. I don’t get it.”
Luke paused and considered Simon’s words, “I don’t really get it either, hopefully we can find some answers somewhere soon, but let’s get going, I can’t spend another second in this fucking tomb.”
Luke reached out and pressed the control button with the mussel of his pistol. The sliding door slipped open with a buzz to one side, revealing the horror of where they were, and fundamentally changing in their lives forever.
The octagonal chamber was shaped much like the inside of a big top circus tent, the floor declined slightly toward the center while the ceiling arched overhead into the darkness. Metal support struts ran from each corner in turn and reached up into the unlit center of the room easily forty plus feet in the air. Hunched in the center of the room, some fifty feet away in the otherwise empty room stood a squat metal platform with shallow metal stairs facing them that rose onto the elevated surface.
Coiled there on the raised platform, it all its mockery of natural form was a quantum fog box just like the one Nerva used, only this one was mounted onto an organic frame, a collection of human bodies twisted and stitched together with cabling and wiring into the vaguely recognizable shape of an enormous centipede. Some thirty feet long, with dozens of arms, legs and heads running along its underside, its form was long and thick. The tissue seemed to be stretched over an internal metal frame and was stained a deep reddish black from countless burns and dried blood. Weaving everywhere were cables that dived under half bolted on steel plates, or woven together and connected to large patterns of webbed wires stabbing into exposed patches of muscle like over-sized IVs. Tiny arcs of blue electricity crawled along the cables and dispersed into the wire webbing. Each arm, leg and head moved with a kind of chaotic rhythm, each limp twitching almost at random yet still in unison with the ones around it, like a school of fish all moving at once yet each one separate and nearly rebellious in its movement. Its entire body roiled with waves of motion coming from inside it, unseen machinery working beneath the skin that was stretched over it. Whatever, internal anatomy this creature possessed, it seemed at odds with the skin pulled over it as if whatever was inside could possibly be more horrible than what was outside. Where a neck should have been, instead was a huge mechanical gimbal with haphazardly arranged pistons and joints. This gimbal system was then secured onto top of the organic part and served to connect the fog box to the nightmarish thing like some kind of head. The fog box itself, a nearly featureless cube two feet square, sat mounted with a few bolted hinges along the sides securing it to the pistons and joints below it. Out the back of the cube, down through the center of the gimbal neck and on into the interior of the organic part was a wild tangle of thick black and white cables, crackling electricity constantly washing over the bundled cabling, giving the cube and gimbal supports enough back lighting to make out all of its mind rotting details. In front of the horror stood a series of human sized control panels and monitors. In waves, heads and arms, and occasionally feet would pass by one of the keyboards and begin furiously typing keys, while the nearest few heads would stare intently into the display above it, only for its seemingly involuntary movement to roll the limbs away from their task so that they could be replaced by adjacent limbs a moment later. To the side of the panels stood a human sized iris, identical to the one located in Firewall, running out the back of it and below it, neatly bundled cables either ran straight into the floor or across the floor and into the far wall. The only light sources in the room were the sparking cables on the centipede’s body, the half dozen monitors directly in front of it, and the bright light pouring out from the open iris.
Their training failed them, their instincts failed the, and their bodies failed them, Luke and Simon just stood there in silence, both dropping their pistols in shock and terror.
They had not surprised it either, the intelligence driving the thing on the platform had planned this meeting for years, everything conducted perfectly to snap its trap around its target, Simon. When it spoke, each head spoke in its own former voice, creating a chorus.
“You’ve come to me at last mortal. You are the key to my domination of this world once and for all, come, come and be of me.” Its many heads spoke, some turning towards them, others not moving at all.
An instant later six human shaped machine-things crawled out from under the raised platform and began running, arms outstretched, towards them.
“I will possess you mortal, your entire being.”
Simon heard Luke scream from somewhere far away again and Simon heard what he thought might be a gunshot, then two.
“Simon, get your pistol and FIRE!” Simon looked over at Luke crouched on one knee and saw his mouth moving to form those words, his face briefly illuminated by muzzle flash. It seemed he’d dropped to his knees for some reason but Simon didn’t know why. He looked down and his hand and in the dim light another muzzle flash lit his bare palms up so he could see them. Each line, each bump visible on his palms in the brief light. He felt that something was missing, but everything was moving so slowly he felt like he had ages
to just sit down and think about it, so he did. Simon dropped down and crossed his legs, he felt no pain as he did so, and couldn’t remember if he was even supposed to. He felt something just under his leg and casually reach down and scooped it up. It was black and metal and shaped like a slanted L with a little loop on the inside of the bend.
“Huh.” said Simon bemused, turning to Luke, “Hears what I was missing from my hand all this time, and it looks like you’ve got one too.” Another muzzle flash illuminated the area around him. Just within reach, three skinless red faces loomed into view in front of him, Simon thought they looked scary with no skin, those lidless dull eyes staring straight into his. Their mouths hung open as if to say hello, but Simon knew better than to say hello back.
“No one with metal shards for teeth says hello.” He thought.
Again, he heard Luke’s voice in the back of his mind.
“FIRE!”
Simon thought, “Luke’s my friend and partner, so he’d never steer me wrong, I’ll be sure and do what he says because he’ll always look out for me.”
Like crashing water, Simon’s mind came rushing back. The innocent child mind of his inner self merging his conscious mind with a lifetime of training and instincts. The yellow and green Gorgon lamps from the lift had failed to do any permanent damage after all. To live, to protect himself, no to protect his friend. No, to protect everyone everywhere, Simon had opened his mind to everything thing he was capable of all at once, and in the quarter of a second he made thirty years count for something.
“One bullet each, I’ve only got four left and Luke’s got three, that’ll leave four for the thing on the platform.”
Simon Snapped his pistol forward slamming the man-thing directly in front of him squarely between the eyes, pulling the trigger. Swiping his pistol left, he planted the nose of the gun into the temple of the second thing and fired again, its motion began to slump and Simon knew there was only one to go. But the final one was so close, to close to spin in time. It reached out with its vise like hand, palms and bony fingers full of razor sharp metal shards that flayed Simon’s arm from wrist to elbow, it bit down on his hand causing the final two bullets to fire out worthlessly into the darkness. Simon cocked his left arm back to punch the creatures head off but before he could begin Luke’s last bullet passed through the back of its head.
