Merciless

by Robin Parrish

  The answer came to him at once. The difference is that he would not have the satisfaction of killing them himself. Letting them die was not the same as ending their lives. And beyond the personal gratification, he had to admit that all of them had certainly earned the honor of dying by his hands. Despite his hatred for all life, it was because of the living that he had been birthed into this world. He despised the thought, but the completion of his work was made possible entirely because of their efforts.

  Devlin sweated visibly. He seemed to be slowly trying to shrink into the ground beneath him, as if it would help.

  Pathetic.

  The bomb had dropped to five hundred feet and was falling fast when Oblivion stretched a hand skyward. At once, the missile jerked backward as if caught on a fishing line, and began flying into the sky in reverse. Oblivion cast it backward, sending it far beyond the dark clouds in seconds.

  Almost as quickly as he'd focused his power upon it, the bomb exploded somewhere in the upper atmosphere, setting off a grand, potent shock wave that flared against the clouds beneath it, but could not disperse them.

  Done, Oblivion rotated his head to face Devlin and flashed a menacing glower at the man, his fire-filled eye sockets flaring bright until the man shriveled from his presence.

  It would be a long while before the human asked anything of him again.

  Oblivion was turning his attention back to what remained of the battlefield when something within his perception changed. Hundreds of miles from the battle, the DarkWorld had spread to London, England. There, Oblivion's mind touched the consciousness of a young Ringwearer named Trevor, hearing an echo of Trevor's final thoughts before he was overtaken by Oblivion's will.

  Oblivion always found the moment of connection disorienting. It was potent enough to transmit the emotions and thoughts of the mind he touched-but only the Ringwearer's feelings and thoughts from that exact moment. There was something in Trevor's mind at the moment of connection ... A complication, an irritant.

  The battle winding down, his enemies all but obliterated, Oblivion called back from the front lines two of his most useful soldiers. He had orders to issue, and these he would give personally, with his mouth and not his mind.

  He looked up into the sky at his dark clouds, which stormed and swirled with ever greater agitation. At his urging, they grew even more unstable, stirring with a turbulent velocity.

  Faster, he willed the clouds. You must spread faster now ...

  "I FEEL . . . DEATH," SAID Grant Borrows, his voice far away. "A lot of people are dying-so very many."

  "And how does that make you feel?" his doppelganger asked. "Guilty?"

  "Are you saying these deaths are somehow my fault?"

  "There are those who might think so."

  "But why?" Grant asked. "A crime of absence? Is it because something's happened and I'm not there to save them?"

  "Perhaps. But do you honestly believe that preventing their deaths saves them from anything?"

  "It saves them from dying."

  "But I've already told you," mirror Grant replied. "Death is not the end."

  Grant looked away, confused and frustrated. What was he doing here? What did this strange entity want with him?

  "How poetic," mirror Grant mused. "I'm boring you with the most important question in the universe."

  Grant didn't know what to make of that. None of this made any real sense to him.

  "All right then, back to work," the other man said.

  Once again, Grant had no choice but to watch as a series of moving, three-dimensional scenes unfolded before his eyes.

  Three years old, his sister was hugging him after just telling him that their dad was killed in a car accident and he wouldn't be coming home. Julie, her light brown hair pulled into the pigtails she sported as a grade-schooler, glasses much too big for her face, was sobbing. Grant, a toddler, stood emotionless, his face scrunched up in confusion as his young mind tried to process what his sister had just told him.

  A few days later, a man he recognized as a much younger General Harlan Evers paced through an office-a space much more regal and lavish than the one Grant had met him in, several months ago-dictating orders to a young male officer who must've been his attache. "Specific instructions, very specific instructions. That's what Frank left me in a locked box, and asked that I carry out his wishes in the case anything should ever happen to him," Evers was saying, pacing up and down his office. "I don't pretend to understand his instructions, but they are very, very explicit in regards to what is to be done with his children. He wants them placed into foster care immediately as wards of the state. And he wants their names changed, to protect them from-" he stopped abruptly, gazing thoughtfully at the young man seated across from his desk, taking notes-"well ... for their protection. None of it makes any sense to me, but Frank always has-er, had-good reasons for everything he did. And I owe him my life, many times over. So I don't care how many strings we have to pull. If his last wish is for his children to be placed in an orphanage under fabricated identities, then that's exactly what we're going to do ..."

  Five years old now, and Julie was hugging him again, this time after delivering the news that she had been adopted by a couple who desperately wanted a child but couldn't afford to adopt him too. In the darkness, grown-up Grant's cheeks flushed as, unlike everything else he'd seen so far, he remembered this moment vividly. He clenched his fists again, recalling how that would be the last day he allowed himself to cry until he was an adult.

  "So," mirror Grant said as the moving scenes vanished into nothingness, "let's see. That's three immediate family members who left you, one after another. First your mother, then your father, and finally your sister. Tell the truth, Grant: It never really mattered to you that none of them left you of their own accord. Did it?"

  Ashamed, Grant shook his head, then looked away.

  His double's eyes danced. "All that mattered was that everyone who loved you ... left you. They left you all by yourself. Poor little Granty-wanty, all alone and missing his mommy- wommy .. .

  Grant looked up, fierce anger overshadowing his face. "Why are you showing me this?"

  "To prove my point," mirror Grant replied, suddenly calm. "You're hopelessly self-absorbed. And really, it's not entirely your fault. It's who you were programmed to be, by all those who abandoned you early in life. At least that's what you told yourself. Isn't it?"

  Grant didn't answer. He didn't have to. Somehow he knew, deep within his soul, that he couldn't lie to this strange mirrored being, whoever or whatever he was. There was no need to deny what was known to be true. He felt his jaw clench, his temperature rising ...

  "How much more This Is Your Wicked Life am I going to have to look at?" he spat.

  "How easily provoked you are," the duplicate Grant said. "But then, this is hardly the first time that temper of yours has gotten you into trouble, is it? Don't lose yourself quite yet, Grant. We haven't even gotten to the part about your `violent episodes' yet. Look, here's a good one ..."

  A new scene materialized in a floating cube before Grant's eyes, this one depicting his nineyear-old self rolling around in the dirt, fighting with Finch Bailey, the orphanage bully. Finch was a head taller than Grant and a few years older. Grant and Finch antagonized one another frequently, but for whatever reason, this day Grant had snapped and started tearing and clawing at every inch of his nemesis. The scene soon shifted to display the two of them standing in front of the orphanage administrator, sporting an assortment of busted lips, black eyes, and bloodied knuckles. Little Grant tried to maintain his best aloof sneer, though the Grant watching in the black space knew what that sneer concealed.

  The images dissolved and reformed, and Grant saw himself as a young adult, starting out at his job as a computer technician. This was the man he was before the Shift, when he still thought his name was Collin Boyd; the bald spot had not appeared yet, and he wasn't as overweight as he would become in later years. But his surly disposition w
as well in place and quickly gave way to a red-faced shouting match with a difficult customer who was shouting back. The fight escalated until Collin picked up the laptop belonging to the customer and threw it out of a third-story window.

  "Wait, wait, this is my favorite part ..." said his doppelganger from the darkness, leaning in to speak softly into Grant's right ear.

  The same scene continued to play out, but now Collin was standing before his employer, being publicly berated in front of the whole office. Before his boss had the chance to fire him, Collin's temper flared again and he quit on the spot, cursing his employer and a few of his ancestors. He ended by storming out with a door slam hard enough to break one of the hinges. It was dark by the time he got home to his tiny apartment, where he sat in his recliner, in the quiet dark, never bothering to turn on any of the apartment's lights.

  The scene they watched had become so still and quiet that it might have been paused in freeze-frame, but Grant remembered all too well that he had sat there in the darkness for quite some time that night. And it was hardly the only time it had happened.

  "Poignant, don't you think?" the duplicate Grant asked, walking slowly around the boxlike frame of the 3-D scene. "There's something about this image that's just so perfectly symbolic of your life, your frame of mind, your outlook on the world. `Nobody likes me, everybody hates me ...' " his double sang.

  "But everything you've showed me is from my old life," Grant pointed out. "I'm not like this anymore. I've changed. I'm not the person I used to be, and not just on the outside."

  "Be careful, Grant. If I were you, I'd pay serious thought right about now to lying. Here in this place, lying can have ... disastrous consequences."

  "Ha!" Grant exclaimed. "'If you were me . . . You admitted you're not me at all! Why don't you just tell me who you really are?"

  "That time will come," the double replied. "But not until we find out who you really are."

  Los Angeles

  "Can I ask what makes you think we're going to be able to reach this place?"

  "You mean," Daniel said, shooting her a bemused smile, "can you ask again?"

  "Wasn't it destroyed?" Lisa pressed on, her words coming faster. "Deep-sixed? Buried under tons of earth and forevermore inaccessible by any living soul?"

  There was something in Lisa's voice ... Looking closer, he noticed that she was pale and clammy.

  Daniel took her hand to steady it. They were seated side by side in a lonely Conveyor Pod hurtling toward their destination. Ethan had brought them to the London entrance and explained how to get to L.A. They were astonished at the scope and power of this transportation system of tunnels buried deep underground. The Conveyor created a hum that was on the high end of the auditory spectrum, but not ear-piercingly so. Daniel contemplated the heightened senses the entire human race was experiencing, thanks to the absence of time, and wondered if the Conveyor's hum was normally this loud, or if this was a byproduct of his newfound enhanced hearing.

  "We know they had a Substation in Los Angeles, beneath the Wagner Building," he reminded her, "but the last time we were there, none of us knew that these tunnels existed. It's logical to assume there would be a tunnel stop near the Lambda Alpha Substation, providing access to the site."

  "But `the site' isn't there anymore. We were there, Danielwe saw it fall. We barely escaped it. As we so often do."

  "True," Daniel replied. "Grant leveled the place. But as I recall, the facility itself was a tall, pristine building standing in the middle of a large cavern. The cavern could conceivably still be standing even if the building is not. And if that's the case ..."

  " ... then maybe we could sift through the rubble," Lisa finished, frowning with understanding. "Wonderful. I hate it."

  Daniel offered her his best brave smile and threw an arm around her shoulder. It was such an easy gesture, so natural feeling, he couldn't imagine why he'd fought it for so long. "Someone has to do it. Who else is there?"

  She didn't respond, just settled into his arm, covering his hand on her shoulder with her own. After a few silent minutes, she gazed up at the Pod's curved metal ceiling. "I wonder what's happening out there," she said, her voice barely a whisper.

  The Pod began to slow, and the display screen at the front of the Pod indicated they were coming up on their stop. As he helped her to her feet, he decided not to tell her that her question was the same one that had consumed his thoughts for the duration of the ride.

  The Pod opened to a subterranean platform halfway up the side of the enormous round tunnel. They stepped out onto a silver metallic grate. A small archway in the side of the tunnel waited, and seeing no other options, Daniel took her hand and led her through it.

  The opening brought them to a small, round tunnel. It was a gloomy place with illumination coming only from either end of the tunnel. It was longer than Daniel felt comfortable entering, but the light at the other end kept them moving forward. The tunnel angled upward a good twenty degrees, meaning the Conveyor system was deeper underground than whatever they were moving toward.

  "This is so weird," Lisa commented, shaking her head.

  "Which part?"

  `All the parts," she replied, getting wound up again. "The whole world is slowly turning into some kind of nightmare, people just won't stop trying to kill us, three of our friends are dead, the rest are under the thrall of the thing living inside the skin of one of our dead friends, Ethan's gone off to get himself killed in the mother of all apocalyptic battles, and I don't even know what the two of us are doing down here ..."

  Daniel squeezed her hand. "We're here looking for the broken fragments of the-"

  "I know that! But what makes us think this is going to help our lives become any less crazy? We're down here on the whim of some post-pubescent who thinks he may have heard something or other about the Secretum possibly being frightened of the Dominion Stone! It could be the biggest rabbit trail in the history of rabbit trails."

  "Or it could be the key to stopping an unstoppable man .. , Daniel reminded her as they neared the end of the tunnel, "or whatever Oblivion is."

  The tunnel emptied into the mouth of the large cavern, but it was nothing like Daniel remembered it from his last visit. Twisted and destroyed, the once-immaculate research facility was nothing but ruined wreckage now, having crashed completely to the ground and spread its rubble throughout the space. Much of the cavern's high ceiling overhead had come crashing down as well, depositing tons of boulders and rocks on top of the decimated building. As a result, what remained above them was a craggy mess of cracked stones and sod that looked as though any piece of it could break free with the slightest provocation. It wasn't as big as the cavern containing the underground city, from the way Ethan described it. But it was breathtaking nonetheless.

  "Oh, well okay, then," Lisa quipped. "We got this. Piece of cake."

  Daniel wanted to admonish her, but what would be the point? The landscape before them was bleak, offering virtually no hope of success. It was also eerily silent.

  On the far side of the cavern, Daniel could see the elevator access he remembered using when following Grant and Alex down here months ago, along with the Loci. They were standing directly opposite from it, entering the underground space from an entrance that was blocked to their vision the last time they were here.

  "Well, we may as well give the sifting a try," Daniel said hopefully, scratching an itch on the back of his hand.

  Lisa rolled her eyes in an exaggerated kind of way, but she followed him loyally as he moved into the cavern proper. They waded carefully over some of the smallest bits of rubble on the outskirts of the destroyed building. Daniel's eyes scoured the ground beneath his feet for any sign of the telltale brown stone, while Lisa couldn't stop staring timidly upward, as if waiting for one of the loose rocks or clumps of earth high above to smash her into a lump on the ground.

  "I don't know how you do it," she said softly.

  "What's that?" he asked absentmindedly.
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br />   "Keep going," she said, and he glanced at her before returning to his ground search. "Everything that life keeps throwing at you-you never stop. You keep searching for your scientific proof, your answers to whatever puzzle you're facing right now. I've never known anyone so focused, capable of being so singleminded ... come what may. Of course, none of this is counting that two-month period where you hid in your office out of guilt and refused to talk to anybody."

  He glanced at her again, not quite smirking. "I guess I just don't know how to do anything else," he replied. "I always keep going, I always have. Didn't I tell you about how I was always getting into dangerous situations as a kid?"

  Lisa had stopped searching and was now held in rapt attention. She loved it whenever he divulged secrets from his past, because he so rarely did it. "All that stuff about how you used to stick your fingers into electrical sockets as a toddler and stuff?"

  He nodded, smiling sheepishly with the memory. "My mom used to say that she believed there was a reason I was pulled from death's clutches so many times. She actually told me one time that I must have some kind of important role to play when I grew up, and that's why God continually spared my life. If you can believe that."

  Lisa didn't hesitate. "Of course I believe it. She was totally right! Look what you did for Grant and all his friends. Look at what you've done for me ..."

  Daniel chuckled. "What, get you into more trouble than you ever wanted or needed?"

  "No, silly man," she said, sidling over to him, and before he knew what was happening, she had clutched his hand in hers, soft but confident. He turned at her touch and she was right there, her face just inches from his.

  Her eyes were searching his, hungry. Funny how he had never noticed before just how red and full her lips were. So, so tempting ... How could he have missed something that prominent in her features? In all the time he had known her, how had he not noticed her perfectly spaced and proportioned brown eyes, her pink cheeks with just a hint of down-home freckles, her flattering bone structure-