by Seth Patrick
Jonah pulled Tess to her feet. ‘We’re going.’
Barlow put his hand on Tess’s shoulder and forced her back into her seat. ‘You do what I fucking tell you to do.’
Jonah saw that Barlow’s eyes were having trouble focusing. ‘I guess you didn’t drink much champagne, Tess,’ Jonah said. She gave him a puzzled look, but Barlow lifted his glass and looked at it, then flung it across the room.
‘What did…?’ said Barlow.
Jonah brought his knee up into Barlow’s groin with as much force as he could, then pushed him hard to the floor. Barlow did some unworthy suffering of his own for a moment, then lay still. Drunk or drugged, it didn’t matter; Barlow was out cold, and Jonah had ticked off a long-held ambition.
‘Now,’ said Jonah, holding his hand out to Tess. ‘We have to get out of here.’
‘What about the others?’
‘We warn them when we’re safely away.’
They moved towards the door, then stopped dead as slow hand-clapping started behind them. As they both turned, Jonah wondered if – hoped – it was Barlow, consciousness somehow regained. The one alternative that occurred to him was so much worse.
‘The gallant hero,’ said Andreas. He was at the back of the room. Jonah couldn’t see him yet, but then he rose from behind the grand piano, hidden in shadow in the dim lights. Jonah realized he’d been there all this time, watching.
Jonah held firm to Tess’s hand and took the two strides to the door, twisting the latch. Impossibly, Andreas’s hand slammed hard into the door before it was open more than an inch.
Jonah looked from Andreas to where he’d been sitting an instant before, his shock clear for Andreas to see.
Andreas smiled, the cold dark in his eyes unmistakable. This was not Andreas anymore. He turned his head, looking at the fallen Will Barlow. ‘Poor Will,’ he said. ‘He wanted to be the one. But Andreas has the money, and Will could not be risked. Besides, Will had had to rule himself out of becoming like all the others. He knew what they were, you see. Why would he want one of those inside him?’
‘Michael…’ said Tess, trembling. ‘Is Michael … is he dead?’
‘No, Tess,’ said Andreas. ‘We’re all getting to know each other in here.’ He tapped his own skull. ‘Michael will live within us. Always.’ He smiled, the expression on his face terrible. He opened the door with one hand. The other hand shot forward, wrapping itself around Jonah’s throat, holding with immense strength. Instantly Jonah had a vision of the blackened terrain, the burning city, the creature howling its pleasure as it picked up handfuls of living flesh and watched it burn.
The vision dissipated as Jonah felt himself thrown. He hit the far wall of the corridor and fell to the ground. Andreas walked towards him, gripping Tess’s arm, her face twisted in pain. He looked at Jonah and walked to the nearest of the double doors crossing the hallway, thirty feet farther on.
‘Some privacy, I think,’ he said, taking a pass card from his pocket and touching it to a reader by the door. The door unlatched and swung shut to seal the corridor. Andreas keyed the pad on the reader, and the green light on the pad turned red.
Jonah quickly glanced at the other end of the corridor, the one that led back to Annabel and Never: still a clear path.
Andreas came back and threw Tess to the floor. He stepped towards Jonah.
‘What are you?’ Jonah managed, rubbing his painful throat.
‘Didn’t you listen to Will? I am One and Many. Within us, within me, you shall find eternal life. They couldn’t kill me then. I took their world and thought them powerless, but they had one last trick. Binding me through sacrifice. One Elder and twelve guardians, each creating a shell to enclose me, another wall on their prison. But they would weaken, in time, and time was my ally. They didn’t understand how old I am. The eons passed. Ten thousand years. Ten million. Each like a second to me. Endless lifetimes to them. They lost themselves.
‘Their thoughts spilled out into the dreams of men. Reflections of the war we’d fought. Echoes of their sacrifice, and of what they had faced and defeated. The Eater of Souls. The Great Shadow. Humankind has known me of old and feared me since the first shamans told their tales in the dark, brutal nights. Every creed had their name for me. Yama. Apophis. Ahriman. Devil. Not until the walls thinned between the realms could I reach out too. Reach out, and feed.
‘What am I, Jonah Miller? Your scientists argue over how to define life. They ask if a virus is alive, a bacterium, an ant. I give you a definition. Something is only alive if it can experience pain. Life is pain. Life is suffering, until death. Is that not the lesson of evolution? And I am life itself, in its purest form. Within me, life is eternal. Torment without end. There are many that would embrace it. They will have their chance soon. And the rest I take by force.’
He leaned down to Jonah and picked him up by the throat again. Jonah could hear the wind of the blacklands surround him, but he concentrated and managed to block the vision, staying focused on where he really was. Andreas began to squeeze. The grip tightened. Jonah was clutching at Andreas’s arm, barely able to breathe now, but that arm was like steel.
‘Leave him alone,’ Tess said, stepping closer. Andreas lashed out at her; she was thrown back through the doors of the function room, falling against a table, glasses smashing on the ground.
Jonah knew he had only seconds of consciousness left.
‘MICHAEL!’ Tess screamed, and Jonah saw her swing her arm, an empty champagne bottle in her hand. It connected with Andreas’s head, the sound a sickening crack, the thick glass stronger than the bone of Andreas’s skull.
Tess dropped the bottle and stepped back, hands up to her mouth.
Jonah felt the grip around his neck loosen. Blood began to seep through Andreas’s hairline and trickle down his face. Andreas let go, staggered back, fell to his knees.
Feeling like he was still choking, Jonah tried to get his breath back. Tess edged towards Andreas, horror in her eyes. The back of his head was pouring with blood.
‘Michael…’ she said. ‘My God, what have I done?’
Andreas looked at her, and Jonah could see from his eyes that the creature had gone.
‘Tess…’ Andreas said. ‘Run.’
Andreas fell forwards to the floor, his eyes closing. Tess stared, but Jonah had recovered enough to know what they needed to do. ‘Come on,’ he said, and led Tess to the open door, back towards the only way out.
They reached the stairwell, Tess ahead of him. She paused a few steps down and turned.
‘Maybe we can help him, Jonah,’ she said, desperate. ‘Maybe he can resist it.’
Jonah glanced back down the corridor. Andreas lay where he’d fallen, unmoving. Jonah looked at Tess. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him. We –’
And as he spoke, he sensed movement and glanced back again.
Andreas was beside him. Blood-covered face and wide grin, eyes cold and dark. Jonah stared, unable to move, unable to think.
Andreas reached out suddenly, grabbing them both by the hair, dragging them back to the corridor. He stopped by the doorway and threw them hard. Jonah landed heavily. Winded, he watched Andreas lock the door just as he’d done to the one at the opposite end. No way out.
‘Where were we?’ Andreas said, putting his hand to the back of his head, bringing it round in front and looking at it. He wiped the blood over his own face and smiled. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, and grabbed Jonah’s throat again, plunging him into the blacklands, the face of Andreas now merging with the face of the dark creature towering above the scorched ground.
‘Do you understand, Tess? Do you understand what you are?’
Tess’s eyes widened with horror.
Andreas looked at her. ‘The Elder is within me now, screaming its despair. But I want to leave as many of you alive as I can, to witness your failure as I take this world. You tried to stop me. You were my jailers. My wardens. I had to wait you out, wait for an eternity, until you lost what you were. Unt
il the walls weakened and I could find the cracks, widen them over the centuries, reach out enough to find someone who would listen. Someone who would help.’
‘No … please … please stop. You’re killing him…’ Tess stood and took a wary step closer to Andreas. Jonah’s shallow breaths were harder and harder to take.
‘At last, the Thirteen were found, pitiful and desperate, not knowing anything of themselves, but knowing they had something important that your people needed to be told. Something they couldn’t quite recall…’ Andreas smiled, his eyes cold and amused. ‘One by one they abandoned their posts without realizing what they were doing, thinking they had found salvation, freedom from that dark void. Leaving that place meant being tied to mortality again. The sacrifice was annulled. When the last of my jailers left, I was free. I hitched a ride, and now the prison is empty. Here I am.’
‘Let him go. Please…’
Andreas hit out with his other hand, catching Tess on the side of her head and sending her to the floor. She looked up, beaten.
Andreas lifted Jonah off his feet, squeezing tighter and tighter, grey sparks at the edge of Jonah’s sight as oblivion crept up on him.
Tess stood. She took a step forward. ‘Leave him alone.’
‘Look at you, Tess,’ said Andreas. ‘Within you is the strongest of them, of those Thirteen still left. And even now, even now that you know, it still stays dormant. It knows it has lost.’
She stepped forward again. Andreas raised his hand, then paused when he saw the look in her eye. Jonah saw it too. Rage filled her face. ‘No,’ she said. Something seemed to build within her. Jonah felt the hairs on his arms stand, the air around him alive with static electricity. Tess screamed: ‘NO!’
With the scream came a pulse of sheer force, a visible shockwave spreading out from her. It flung Andreas to the ground, sending him sliding on his back far along the corridor, thumping into the first door he had locked. Jonah collapsed, coughing and gasping for air. Tess stumbled, then her legs gave way and she fell. She managed to lift her head. Down the corridor, Andreas seemed incapacitated. Then Jonah heard him call out.
‘Tess…’
‘Michael?’ she said.
‘It’s too strong. I can’t fight it.’
‘Michael…’ Her head dropped down again. She was unconscious.
Jonah hauled himself up to his knees. Andreas had done the same, but he looked impossibly weary. Even at distance, Jonah could see his eyes, see that Michael Andreas was himself again.
And then it started.
35
The glass wouldn’t break.
Once Annabel had made the suggestion, they’d hunted for the nearest unlocked room with an exterior window, finding a small office along a short side-corridor near the store room. Yet whatever they tried against it, the thick, double-glazed glass held without a scratch.
‘You know,’ said Never, ‘I get the feeling Julia Hannerman knew this shit was tough.’
There was a sudden noise – the sound Never had been wanting to hear, of glass breaking. But this was coming from somewhere else.
‘The store room,’ said Annabel, and they ran.
As they opened the door, they took it in quickly – the white-coated woman, moving fast from the base of the shelf; the brown formamide bottle, shattered; a bloody shard of brown glass where Julia Hannerman had been sitting; tape, still stuck to the leg of the metal shelf, a ragged tear where the glass had cut through.
Annabel and Never ran to the end of the shelving after Hannerman, to see her crouch momentarily by the metal cabinets, her white jacket spattered with blood from the wounds she’d inflicted setting herself free. Wisps of smoke were rising from her shoes where they’d been covered in formamide as she’d kicked at the bottle to break it. Both hands were blistering now, especially around the fingers of her right hand.
‘Gun!’ hissed Never at Annabel. For a moment she didn’t grasp what he meant, then she remembered. She took the gun she’d pocketed and offered it to Never.
‘You stay right there,’ Never said, waving the gun at Hannerman.
‘Shut up,’ said Julia with contempt. She turned and stood. She was holding the plastic box containing the incendiary device. ‘I can trigger this right now and we all go up.’
‘But you won’t do that,’ he said. ‘One little room burns, and your targets all get away.’
‘I’ve got a chain of devices through the building. One goes up, they all go. It’ll take longer, but trust me. It’ll burn the building to a shell. So back off.’
‘I’ll shoot.’
‘No, you won’t. I can see it in your eyes.’
He waved the gun in an attempted show of confidence, but it didn’t come off. He looked at Annabel and handed the gun back to her. ‘You shoot her.’
Julia Hannerman stepped forward. Annabel and Never backed off until they were all out of the store room.
‘Seriously,’ said Never, nodding at the gun. ‘In the leg or something.’
Annabel glared at him and aimed the weapon at Hannerman. ‘Julia, this is pointless. We have your remote. Give us the code to the door and we can all leave. We can stop Andreas another way.’
‘Further back,’ said Hannerman, holding up the incendiary device. They did as they were told.
Julia Hannerman kept stepping away from the store room, back along the corridor, back to the centre of the building. She reached into her other jacket pocket, and as she did it occurred to Never that Annabel hadn’t looked in that one. As he saw what Julia brought out, he understood the look of fear that had been on Julia’s face as Annabel had searched her pockets. He understood what it was Julia knew that they didn’t.
There was no timed countdown. Julia was holding another remote.
‘Felix tried to get to me for help,’ Julia said, still moving backwards, her voice giving away her exhaustion. ‘He tried to get to me, then he knew it was too late. But he always had a backup plan. He always carried a spare.’ She held up the second remote, grinning, pulling the aerial out with her teeth as she’d done before. ‘And so do I.’
Something occurred to Never. Julia Hannerman could have just pulled the remote out and triggered it at any time. Why the threats? Why was she still moving?
‘Reception,’ he said, and he saw a flicker of annoyance on the woman’s face. ‘If you trigger it from here, the signal won’t be strong enough. You probably need to be by the stairs. Maybe even on the same level.’ He snatched the gun from Annabel, knowing that when push came to shove, he was capable. Let her see it in my eyes NOW, he thought. ‘My friend is in there. So you put the fucking thing down. Now.’
Julia Hannerman smiled. ‘You got me,’ she said. ‘Here will have to do. We can all go together.’ Her thumb touched the button on the remote.
The moment it did, the incendiary device she was holding erupted. Annabel and Never flung themselves back, watching in horror as burning liquid covered Hannerman’s upper half. She fell screaming as flames engulfed her.
They ran to the store room and grabbed the fire extinguishers, then doused the burning body in foam until the extinguishers were empty, but the fire kept burning. The screaming went on and on. At last, the flames stopped. Julia Hannerman’s arm twitched for a moment, then she was still.
Annabel leaned over her. The eyes were wide open, and very dead; the horror in the face said all that needed to be said.
There was one question in Never’s mind. He looked to Annabel. ‘Was she close enough? Did the other incendiaries go off?’
They listened. Above them, they could hear the answer.
* * *
Andreas turned his head to look behind him. Jonah followed his gaze. He could see a flickering light in the window in the door Andreas was standing by, and he could hear the screaming start. Andreas moved towards the door, shouting out, taking the security card from his pocket. Suddenly he stopped and backed off as an intense yellow light flared behind the glass panel, painful to look at.
‘
No!’ Andreas yelled.
And then he stopped. He took a long breath and hung his head. Slowly he walked to where Jonah was still kneeling.
‘I am become death,’ said Andreas, his voice hoarse, looking at his hands as if for the first time.
Jonah watched in fear as Andreas’s head came back up, waiting for those cold, dark eyes to look at him once more before the end came.
But no. It was still Andreas. The only thing in those eyes was despair.
‘I can feel it grow, Jonah,’ Andreas said. ‘It’s taking me and there’s nothing I can do. The Elder within me is too weak; all I can sense of it now is desolation. There is no hope. My God, Jonah … I wanted to put an end to grief. I thought that whatever they would show us, these beings, it would surely bring us closer to that goal. And now I am become death. The destroyer of worlds.’
A burst of light caught their eye, and they looked along the corridor. Liquid fire began to drip from the ceiling above the far doorway.
‘It was frightened,’ Andreas said. ‘When Tess hit it with the bottle. The Unity process grants mortality, Jonah. It didn’t think it would be affected, but it was. I think it can die now. That might not be true for long.’
There was another set of double doors latched open beside them. Andreas went to them and used his card. The doors began to swing closed.
‘Look after her,’ Andreas said. He set the card on the floor by Jonah and walked to stand on the other side of the closing doors. The side on which the fire was raging, and getting nearer. ‘The code is 5972,’ he said. The doors shut and locked.
Jonah stood and walked over to the door, looking through the glass panel in the middle. Andreas was looking back. He nodded, turned and walked towards the inferno.
He knows what has to be done, Jonah thought, not knowing if he could have done the same.
The sound of distant screams was growing, but so was the roar of the fire. Jonah watched. Andreas was halfway to the far doors, one arm raised to shield his eyes from the intensity of it, the white ceiling above him blackening. Jonah heard a curious cracking sound, and suddenly the ceiling erupted, a third of its length collapsing in flame, catching Andreas full-on. The scream was horrifying, as Andreas thrashed at the flames covering him.
