by Ryan Notch
“What,” he asked, echoing his thoughts. “What it?”
“I don’t know,” she said with that earnest look of dead seriousness she sometimes had. “Some kind of creature. I’ve been hiding in here for hours. When I saw you through the keyhole, I grabbed you before it could get you.”
Jack laughed, or started to anyway. Her expression stopped him. Was this a joke, or was the pressure of the situation too much for her?
“What are you talking about? Is someone in the apartment?”
“Haven’t you seen any of them,” she asked.
“Seen what? I mean no, I just woke up a little while ago.”
She touched her hand to his head with a look of concern, guessing at the reason he’d been out so long.
“Jack, things have changed a lot in the last twenty four hours.
“After they knocked you out, Collin and Seth left me locked in a closet for a long time. Luckily most of the doors in these apartments are hollow, and I was eventually able to just kick my way out. Whatever was happening to the residents before, it’s accelerating. It’s different for everyone, but some of them you can’t even recognize anymore. I wanted to come find you, but they’re everywhere...”
“Terra, listen to yourself,” Jack said. “Are you sure it’s not just your nerves? How long has it been since you slept?”
She smiled a rueful smile.
“I was sleeping just before I started hiding in here. It was the noise of something in my apartment that woke me up. I don’t know how it got in, but I caught a glimpse of it in the shadows next to my bed. It’s shape was mostly human, but in the rays of light shining from around the shades I could see there was something wrong with its skin. It was dark and blotchy, looked almost slimy. I jumped up and ran in here. I’ve been occasionally hearing it move around out there every since...”
Jack noticed for the first time the haunted look in Terra’s eyes. Dark and gaunt, as if she was exhausted. He placed a comforting hand on her arm.
“Just as well,” she shrugged with a half smile. “I was having the most awful dreams. Something about a giant spider, and a dark sound. The sound was somehow part of the spider. I tried to run but the sound followed me from room to room, drowning me. Only after a while it was like I could almost understand it.”
Jack thought about his dream, how similar is was in so many ways.
“That’s creepy, because I had dreamed about a sound like that too. But when I woke up it was still going on, it was coming from the intercom. Pat had rigged up some kind of device on it to broadcast the sound.”
Terra took this in with a look of puzzled thought, but didn’t immediately reply to it.
“Well I couldn’t have heard it from up here...” she said. “Maybe we should go down there so I can hear if it is the same sound or not.”
“I’d rather just leave it and get out of here.”
“Assuming we can,” she said.
“Well we should at least get out of this bathroom.”
“Totally,” she said with a smile. “I’m really thirsty.”
He laughed at that, but it came out as a sort of dry hacking sound.
“OK,” he said. “I’ll go search the apartment, make sure it’s clear.” He wondered if that sounded as brave to her as it did to him. In truth he didn’t believe there was a monster out there. Probably Mrs. Cunningham’s dog had got in looking for scraps. And yet, was it stupid to be so cocky when there were actually tentacles growing in the pipes?
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.
“Me too,” he said. It was mostly true. Though he wished he was literally anywhere else in the world, he was glad he had at least found her.
“But I’m not letting you go out there alone,” she said. “Cover your eyes.”
He thought for a confusing and entertaining moment that she was going to change her clothes for some reason. Instead she surprised him by picking up a heavy water mug from the sink and smashing it into the mirror. Before he could think of a single thing to say, she had picked up one of the shards of mirror and wrapped a washrag around the base, forming a handle for what was apparently to be a shank.
“Jesus!” he said. “Spend much time in prison?”
“Shhhhh,” she whispered, finger to lips. She pointed at the door. He got the hint and slowly unlocked it and opened it, his own kitchen knife at the ready.
Edging into the hall, Jack tried to look everywhere at once. Even though he didn’t really believe anything was out there, he had to admit that Terra’s paranoia was catchy. In fact he also had to admit that when he had first come in, he did have the feeling something was in there with him.
He walked first towards the bedroom. The sun had finished setting and the room before him was almost pitch dark, the only light coming in from the other end of the apartment down the hallway. He flashed briefly at all the violent military movies he had seen since coming to America, and wondered if there was some proper way he was supposed to be brandishing the knife. He would have much preferred to have the cricket bat from his apartment. Something he knew how to swing, and which he could double as a crutch.
He arrived at the bedroom and without taking his eyes off it, reached his free hand around to turn on the light switch. After a few seconds of not being able to find it panic started to build in him, like when he was a kid and trying to...well basically doing the same thing.
“It’s on the other wall,” Terra whispered behind him.
Feeling like an idiot he reached across and found the switch, flipping it on and surveying the room. At first glance it was empty. Further reenacting his childhood monster search he checked the closet, behind the clothes, and under the bed.
“All clear,” he said smiling at her. He was about to make a snarky comment about no monsters when they heard a sound coming from the kitchen. Something being knocked over.
Jack moved towards the other end of the apartment, knife ready and trying to make as little noise as possible. As they approached the living room he could hear it clearly, something rooting around in the kitchen. Very close, but not quite visible beyond the divider. It was an open-bar styled divider, so he could clearly see the kitchen itself, meaning that whatever was in it must be on the floor below that divider. He debated the twin options of moving around it or peeking over it, and quickly decided on the latter. He approached cautiously, slowly so that the thing came into view slowly. Slowly enough so that he couldn’t guess at it until he had seen all of it.
Jesus, he thought when he had truly fathomed it. Jesus...
Terra was right. There was no doubt this thing had once been human. And no doubt it was that no longer. Gray skin with black blotches. Wet with sweat or some other excretion. It wore dirty white underwear briefs and nothing else on its highly emaciated figure. The head had flattened strangely, and the jaw itself kept unhinging as it chewed on cereal it had torn from a box in the pantry. Its fingers had somewhat grown together, leaving two large fingers and a thumb on each hand.
It hadn’t seen Jack yet, and he tried to move back before it could. But his knee on his bad leg made a loud and painful popping sound as he bent it. The thing turned its terrible visage upon Jack. Its eyes were twice their normal size, and milky white.
It skittered around the corner of the divider, moving extremely fast. Only instead of turning on Jack, it saw Terra first and went for her instead. Terra screamed and scrambled back. Jack dived at it, loosing his balance completely. He managed to slash it across the ribs as he landed, drawing blood that leaked red with green streaks. It jerked away, making a screaming hissing noise. Jack pushed himself up on one arm to try and defend himself from it, but Terra ran in first and slashed at it with her shiv.
It dodged the cut and, instead of charging them, ran out the door. Terra ran forward and slammed the door after it, locking it and then jamming a chair under the handle.
Jack pulled himself up onto a chair and sat staring at the door. His mind was numb, disbelieving what he had
seen. Terra sat on the couch, looking at him. After a little while he noticed a new soreness in his right hand. He looked down to find he still gripped the knife handle, white knuckled. He set the knife down on the arm of the chair next to him and massaged his right hand with his left, which was shaking some.
“It must be the water,” Jack said. “We’re really lucky we had a separate supply.”
“Collin must have had a separate supply also,” she said. “But what about Alex and Noel? In all the parties they’ve thrown, I’ve never seen a single bottled water.”
“Well I think Alex lives entirely on beer, but I take your point. They’ve seemed largely unaffected by all this. But it kind of makes sense if Collin is behind the whole thing, and by the way he was talking it seemed like he was. Besides, he’s the closest thing to a scientist in the building. And this is definitely some science gone wrong shit.”
“He’s a mathematician, not Dr. Moreau,” she said. “But I take your point. Just before he sicked Seth on us, it really seemed like he had the master plan.”
“And if so, he wouldn’t let anything happen to Alex, his best friend.”
She looked at him oddly at this.
“You really think that’s how it is,” she asked. “Seems to me he’d be more interested in keeping Noel safe. She’s the one he cares about.”
“What do you mean? I’ve never seen any indication she would ever cheat on Alex. She doesn’t seem like the type.”
“No, I’m not saying they’re cheating. But I think he’d like it if they were. I know Collin’s your friend, but maybe I can see things more clear because I guess I never liked him that much. He’s charming and clever and all, but he always seemed kind of arrogant to me. When he looks at Noel he gets this smile, this look... Any other time he smiles it’s really just a type of sneer. But when he looks at her it’s a smile. They spend a lot of time together you know.”
Jack did know. He’d stopped by more than one night to find Alex gone and just Noel and Collin hanging out. He’d never once got the awkward feeling that he’d walked in on something untoward going on. And yet the scene had put him in mind of his proper British grandparents and what they would’ve said about unmarried men and women being alone together.
“Collin and I aren’t friends,” Jack said with resolve. “I don’t know what’s going on between him and Noel, and I don’t much care. If I find him he’s either going to show us a way out of here or I’m going to kill him. Maybe both.”
With that he pushed himself to his feet and went to the kitchen.
Jack looked again at the slashed container of water. It was slashed near the base, but there was still a bit of water at the bottom. He got a cup out of the cabinet and poured it out of the spout. Despite his efforts to control himself, he gulped it down so fast some spilled over the edges of his mouth. He quickly filled and downed another, and was going for a third when the stomach cramps hit. He doubled over and gritted his teeth until the sharp pain faded. Even then he was ready for a third when he looked and saw that there was perhaps only a half a cup left in the container, and it wasn’t even his supply of precious water he was drinking.
He looked up a Terra with a feeling of guilt, though her look back wasn’t accusing.
Just like the alley, thought Jack. It seems like the only time I’m any good at protecting her is when I’m afraid to be alone. I wonder how I can ask if there is anything to drink in the fridge without sounding like I intend to drink it all.
“It’s all there is left,” she said as if reading his mind. “It was slashed when I first got back here, I have no idea by who. I drank the juice and milk first, since I figured they’d be going bad. I wish I’d been shopping more recently...”
“There’ll be more back at my place...hopefully anyway.”
“If they got to that one too, we could be in real trouble. We can’t go long without water.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll probably be killed by one of our neighbors first.”
He meant it as a joke, but she shivered when he said it.
Yeah, not that funny, he thought.
Chapter 29
********************
Shaw chose his materials with care.
He knew this machine he’d built would have to be one of the most reliable computers in the world, because it was the most important one in the world.
He also knew that would be impossible. If you needed a system that never crashed you put it in a data center. Fire proof, power outage proof, lighting proof, terrorist proof. Data centers were the best security you could get without going to Fort Knox. However a data center would not only involve actually going outside and risking arrest, but the data would have to be sent to the servers over the internet, which might be close enough to three dimensions for the Dark Thing to track down.
No, everything he could do had to be done in that hidden little bootlegging storage space below the Parish. He had to build a PC that could go for years without crashing, when the average home PC crashed about once a week. And he had to do it with over-the-counter parts.
This wasn’t as hard as it sounded. People set up servers that went years without crashing as a hobby. Shaw’s personal best on one of his servers was nine months, but that had been cut short by his having to move. It started with the hardware. Fast, yes. But everything was fast these days. Which is why he didn’t need to buy the latest and greatest processors and graphics cards. Instead he ordered ones that had been out at least 6 months, long enough for rigorous testing to have been done by the general public and reviews posted by the angry and satisfied alike. Though custom assembled from scratch, the computer itself was fairly plain, except for the extra fans and heat sinks. Lower heat would extend the life, and high heat would guarantee a crash. He even thought about a super efficient liquid cooling system, but those occasionally leaked and he didn’t want a planet full of mass suicides just because of a few drops of coolant on the CPU.
Hard drives eventually got old and the sectors demagnetized, so for hard drive backup he used a standard Raid array. Several drives all with the same information cooperating. If and when one went bad, it would have its friends immediately take over with the same information.
He didn’t neglect the environment. An FE-36 fire extinguisher nearby that wouldn’t damage electronics, though of course it would need someone to be around to use it. UPS battery backups that, in the event of a power interruption, could jump in and take over so quick the computer wouldn’t even notice. On the other end of the scale, he had surge protectors should lighting zap the power lines. He put in a strong air conditioner to push the heat down the tunnel. And all of this powered by heavy duty extension cords run from different parts of the Parish, to spread the load to different fuses.
And so with the hardware in place, the software was no less important. He needed this thing to be the digital version of the Rock of Gibraltar, and you just can’t trust that kind of thing to Windows. Luckily what was arguably the world’s most reliable and efficient operating system was also free. Called Linux, it was the darling of nearly every computer expert in the world. Any network engineer worth his salt was an expert in it, and Shaw was no exception. It was quite possibly the single greatest factor in the widening gap of understanding between the average person and the consummate computer geek. All of the latter wondered why anyone would use anything else, and all of the former couldn’t get it to so much as load Solitaire.
So the computer wasn’t so much different than many you could find all over the world. It was his program that was special. One he’d programmed using the mathematical patterns of the creature’s own recorded voice, downloaded from his protected online archives he’d made while working in the asylum. Patterns he didn’t think he’d ever learn enough math to understand, but it turned out he hadn’t needed to. Collin Althaus had mentioned in his articles the work of a certain Dmitri Tymoczko on four dimensional music, and Shaw had used his contacts to get an illegal beta copy of a certain
music generating program based on that research. After that he hadn’t needed to master the math, just reverse engineer the program and feed in new data.
All of this he had documented extensively as he went. And now, near completion, he explained it as best he could to Father Mason. He didn’t want all this knowledge to exist only in his own head, though he had deep misgivings about Father Mason’s ability to repair any of it if he had too.
“So what I’m doing here Father is programming in something pretty close to assembly code,” he explained while pointing to the indecipherable strings of commands on the screen. “That is a low level code that speaks very quickly to the computer processor. It’s a slow way to program and will take me much longer, but I think it will be worth it for reliability. I’ve put comments all through it explaining what the different sections do, in case anyone ever needs to understand it.”
“Surely you don’t expect me to be that person,” said Father Mason, someone who only used computers begrudgingly. “I hope you’re not planning on going anywhere Shaw.”
Shaw thought about responding that the Father would have to learn, but he couldn’t afford to let himself have any illusions on this. He believed anyone could learn the computer, but only a small percent of people could operate at his level.
“No, I just want you to know where to find the information in case you ever have to bring anyone in on this. What the equipment does, where the backups are, how to monitor it, I have printouts of all of that for you to keep safe. And I’ll program the diagnostic to send information to both our pagers if ever something goes wrong with any of this.”
“Ok Shaw, I promise to do everything you tell me,” the Father said with a smile and a pat on his shoulder. “But what I still don’t understand is how this will banish the demon.”
What a funny way to put it, Shaw thought. We see this alien entity in entirely different ways. I wonder which of us is more right...
