“All I need for you to do right now is help me find my way two levels up,” she said in a flat voice.
“I am sorry, then. I will not print out the blueprints. I will not share that information. I can not take part in these actions, because they are in no one’s best interest. Not the Damned, because you can’t possibly do anything for them, not my own, and yes, not these Demons’ either. And certainly not in your own best interest. You want me to help you? I will help you find Freetown.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Vee cursed. “I’d like to think you’re worried about me, but right now I don’t know about you, Jay. You’ve gotten pretty cocky since I first met you. You were afraid of me then, but you saw me help those two purple Demons back there and now you think I’m soft. Or else it’s you who’s soft. A cowardly, pacifist gun.”
“I am only being logical where you are being impulsive.”
“Maybe I liked you better when you were afraid.”
“You may like me or dislike me as you please,” the Demon said cooly.
“Nobody likes a disobedient gun.”
“If a gun is all I am, then you may pull my trigger all you want and I can’t stop you, but I don’t have to talk with you any longer.”
Vee spun away from the screen. “Okay, so don’t help me, then. But I’m coming to get you now—and I’ll find my own damn way up there.”
She strode to the open doorway of the laboratory, stepped out into the corridor, and stopped short only several feet away from a strange white figure, shorter than herself. It whirled in her direction, the pink globes of its eyes luminous. Up close, she saw that the exoskeleton of the locust Demons had a rough, spackled texture, looking oddly more like plaster than glossy chitin.
In one of its four upper limbs, the creature carried a kind of metal truncheon, that it swung at Vee’s head viciously, though the creature itself—without any features below those huge eyes—made not a sound.
Vee ducked under the swing. Jay was in the other room, and the Beretta was inside the stitched-skin pouch slung over her shoulder, but the Ka-Bar combat knife was in its sheath on the outside of her leg. Still in a crouch, Vee drew the knife and lunged forward with it, punched the long blade into the creature’s thorax. One of the multiple arms seized her hair in its pincers, and another clawed at her cheek, raking her skin deeply, but she pulled the knife out, drove it in again, and again, snarling as she did so. The Demon tried to bring its iron club down on her head, but she blocked its arm with her forearm, stabbed the knife in one last time and then the two of them fell away from each other. Vee dropped back onto her rear, her hands braced behind her, while the mute entity crashed onto its back, kicking crazily with all six limbs until they gradually stilled, gnarled in the air like the fingers of a giant skeletal hand. The pink glow of its eyes faded away, leaving its orbs dark as dead light bulbs.
Vee got up, bent over the thing to retrieve her knife from its mid-section, saw how the overlapping wounds she had inflicted had torn the creature open. Its interior was like the paper layers of a wasp’s nest, no viscera—or much of anything, really—inside, though she had obviously inflicted enough damage somehow to kill the insect golem.
Lest the Demon be too soon discovered, Vee sheathed the knife and then took hold of its legs, dragged its scarecrow-light body into the laboratory in which she had left Jay. She then turned to see his Cyclops eye watching her actions from the static-shot screen.
“We had best be going quickly,” his distant-sounding voice advised.
Was his tone a touch chilly?
“Why?”
His eye was replaced by a security camera shot of a cluttered corridor, two patrolling drone Demons advancing along it, both of them carrying those black submachine guns she had witnessed in the recorded memories Jay had unreeled for her. Jay’s voice said, “This is a corridor that adjoins the one directly outside. The drones are headed in this direction. If you move quickly, we can return to the elevator and hope that it’s resumed working.”
“And if it hasn’t?” Vee asked, and then she froze, as one of the drones stopped abruptly in the corridor and turned its face up toward the camera that was obviously set close to the ceiling.
The image flicked back to Jay’s eye. “Stupid of me,” he said. “It noticed that the camera had become active. Really, we need to go.”
“Right,” Vee said, but she had another idea. She disconnected Jay from the Mesh and let his interface cable snap back into his gun’s body.
Then, she darted back into the corridor, but instead of heading toward the bridge that crossed over to what had once been a neighboring building, she plunged into the other laboratory she had investigated. She dropped down to the floor, dragged the fallen file cabinet closer to the ventilation shaft she had uncovered, and then crawled into the shaft itself, through the thick, dry bed of weeds that grew up from its floor. She reached out awkwardly and pulled the file cabinet a bit nearer to the opening, to hide it from a casual observer, and then faced forward again to scurry deeper into the shaft’s cramped darkness, its cool breeze stirring up the musty smell of the colorless vegetation she crushed under her palms and knees.
24: THE SHAFTS
She crawled in utter darkness, wincing at the crunching/rustling sound her progress made but there was no avoiding it. Soon she became aware of occasional slithering motions across the tops of her hands that did not seem to be merely tickling stalks of the vegetation. In her head flashed images of the huge red millipedes she had recalled nibbling on Damned imprisoned as flagstones, but Vee had the intuition that these were instead something generated from the Essential Matter, simple creatures like those barnacle-things she had seen, except mobile. She shuddered, but despite her revulsion hoped she wasn’t squishing any of the creatures, in case they were indeed something born of the Creator’s essence.
The only light that entered the shaft, far-spaced and feeble, came from other ventilation grilles that looked into illuminated rooms. More labs and offices, stripped and trashed, a few even with bright urban-style graffiti on the walls like the “tagging” of youth gangs.
Then the shaft came to a dead end, which Vee discovered by bumping her forehead into a metal wall. She cursed under her breath, thinking she might have to backtrack (and move backwards to achieve this) until a subtle breeze made her realize that a vertical shaft opened above her head.
She was able to stand and stretch her back, and stare upwards into the shaft, dimly lit by the light of more grilles. There was no ladder affixed to any of the sides, and the grilles were too widely spaced to use for handholds.
Fortunately the shaft opening was low enough that she was able to climb up into it by bracing her hands and feet against the sides. To gain better purchase, she had removed her tall, heavy boots and crammed them partway into her pouch, or her “pocketbook from Hell,” as she now thought of it. Once into the shaft, she braced her back against one side and bare feet against the other, and began pushing herself laboriously upward, this enterprise causing her to grimace and curse more to herself. But again, fortune was on her side that she didn’t have to climb up this chimney-like branch of the ventilation system very long before encountering the opening to another horizontal section. She maneuvered into it gratefully, further grateful to find that its floor was devoid of any vegetative growth, cool bare metal alone under her palms.
Progressing forward again, she was able to slide her lower body across the smooth metal plates rather than crawl, and found this caused the plates to creak less under her weight. Again, some of the grilles spaced along either side permitted some degree of light into the shaft. Behind the grates, more of the same: research units emptied or turned upside-down by looters, salvagers, or in the heat of ancient battles.
But one grille she paused to glance through made her recoil sharply, before leaning closer again more stealthily so as to gaze into the room beyond…a room that was neither trashed nor unoccupied.
A figure in a white lab smock sat in a chair
in front of a handsome computer with a translucent amber-like casing through which one could view the machine’s brass mechanisms, black rubber hoses and the orange-glowing embers of its circuitry. The figure’s form was entirely anthropomorphic, at least appeared so in its smock and the white dress shirt and dark pants it wore underneath, except for the jarring effect of its head.
From its white collar sprouted a bouquet of squirming tendrils, black and glistening, as if some kind of sea anemone had been grafted onto a man’s neck. But Vee saw that the hands were in keeping with the head: numerous boneless tendrils spread across the computer’s brass keys.
More unsettling yet was that another of these beings occupied the room, apparently at rest, though at first she had thought it was dead or the victim of some torture. This figure hung upside-down, bat-like, from a pipe running across the ceiling, the tentacles of its feet coiled around it.
Weirdly, its arms were flat against its sides, as if to keep its lab smock from turning inside-out, but the Medusa-like tentacles of the head hung straight down, motionless in sleep, and had swollen perhaps with blood to twice the thickness of those of the seated figure.
Vee heard the plate under her knees buckle a little, and drew back from the grate as a single tendril of the seated figure swivelled in her direction like a periscope. She held her breath, didn’t dare move even to withdraw further. After several moments, however, the worm-like appendage relaxed its rigidity and returned to its normal undulations, along with its neighbors.
Vee inched away slowly, slowly, then returned to her sliding advance.
Well, now she knew, anyway, that the simple drone Demons were not the masters of this territory, that somehow some of the Research and Development Tower’s scientists still survived, still maintained equipment, maybe even continued in their diabolic experimentations.
Further on, the shaft ended in a T, merging with a crosswise shaft. It was like a fork in the road. From the right-hand branch came a cool, pleasant breeze. From the left issued a stink like ammonia that made Vee’s eyes sting. Acid fumes, she realized.
“The vat is to the left,” Jay told her softly.
Vee had already deduced this, but nevertheless said, “Thank you, Jay.” And though she hadn’t been sure she still wanted to find the acid bath—had only been intent on not being found by the Demons’ patrols—she took the left-hand branch.
25: THE KITCHEN SINK
When Vee peered out through the grate, cupping a hand over her nose and mouth against the eye-watering fumes, she realized she was still one level below the rim of the acid bath.
The high ceiling of this level was the mesh floor of the one above, with which the lip of the circular cauldron was level. The main body of the vat itself, however, was suspended below this platform. A system of pipes ran down from its belly into the floor, and Vee had the impression of being a mouse inside a cabinet below the kitchen sink. There was even a U bend in the trunk-like central pipe, though she imagined it wasn’t to prevent the rising of sewer gas, as with a kitchen sink. Smaller pipes intersected with this major pipe, besides, and she couldn’t make sense of any of it. She spied huge valves, and at the base of the central pipe, a control panel of some kind with arrays of lights and pressure gauges. The floor under the huge basin was a quilt of mismatched metal plates, obviously patches to repair damage from slops and spills of the acid from above.
On the high mesh platform, Vee could vaguely see the drone Demons as they silently went about their business, guarding the edge of the unmaking pool and breaking up, with their iron pikes, the primordial ooze that ceaselessly struggled to coalesce and resume the forms of humans.
She took further stock of her surroundings. On this level, beyond the drainage (and replenishment?) pipes, a huge window ran along a nearby wall, but it looked only upon the solidified lava that was flush against it.
A ladder was bolted into the same wall, leading up to the mesh platform, but she noted that halfway up there was a small metal hatch set into the wall beside it. Access to a utilities shaft, perhaps?
Vee tested the vent by pressing against it with both palms, but it was screwed into its frame. There was room enough for her to maneuver her body around, and once she had slipped her boots back on, she planted her feet against the grille and pushed. It didn’t give. After a few moments of reluctance, she bunched her legs then shot them out, pounding her heels against the grille—one, two, three, four times. She winced with each crash she made. Finally, the screws wrenched free of their sockets and the grille was dislodged. It fell onto the floor outside with a tinny clatter.
Vee peeked out again, up at the platform, but couldn’t tell if any of the entities above had taken notice of the sounds far below. She slipped from the shaft, retrieved the grille and pushed it back into its frame as best she could.
She straightened, turned, dashed across the open floor and reached the cluster of plumbing. The fumes were stronger than ever, burning her throat despite her covering hand, her eyes streaming. She leaned close to the control panel, trying to make sense of its switches and knobs.
Jay whispered to her. “If you open a valve, the acid might well drain away somewhere, but then the Damned within it could end up worse off than they are now. They might end up in some other tank from which they will never have a chance to escape.”
He had a point. A number of horrible scenarios flashed through her mind. She envisioned a great clot of sludge becoming mired in a narrow stretch of pipeline somewhere, the Damned souls as they sought to regenerate compressed against the confines of the pipe and each other’s bodies, reforming just enough to feel pain.
Vee wagged her head at the instrument panel. “Don’t they have label guns in Hell?”
“I can’t figure it out, either,” Jay told her discouragingly. “I tell you, we should go now. We can only make things worse for them…and for us.”
“Please let me think,” she said.
Vee looked up at the mesh ceiling again, the shadowy indications of the insect Demons. She flashed another scenario: her climbing the ladder to the platform, throwing one or two grenades, then mowing down the remaining drones in a wide crescent of gunfire before they got their bearings. Yet even if she could take out the thirty or so drones surrounding the pool, there were surely many more on this level and maybe the neighboring floors as well.
But her thoughts lingered on the grenades. Three of them in her handbag from Hell…
“Vee!” Jay hissed. “Behind you!”
Vee whirled, saw that someone had entered the large chamber: a tall figure in a long white lab coat and black trousers, and an incongruous mass of writhing black tentacles in place of a head. At first, she feared her clamor had attracted attention after all, but then noticed the scientist carried a clipboard.
She ducked down behind the base of the control panel, but to her dismay the Demon was coming in her direction. Its shoes clicked importantly across the concrete floor, and then upon the layers of overlapping metal plates.
The scientist leaned over the control panel and put a hand of tendrils out to the knobs, and as Vee popped up to its right it wheeled toward her in alarm. She doubted it could cry out, but a Demon of its station surely needed to be able to communicate and she wouldn’t put telepathy past it, so she struck as quickly as she could—swinging her combat knife down in an overhead arc directly into the hollow of the jugular notch, above the clavicle. Or, where she would have expected a clavicle to be. Instead, the momentum of her strike carried the blade further, carving downward with no bones to resist or impede it. She split the front of the being open, and it fell back away from her with arms pinwheeling. As it struck the floor, it came apart. It was as if a nest of hundreds of snakes, twined all around each other, had been stuffed into a scarecrow sack of human clothing, and now spilled free. The headless, snake-like forms slithered frantically in all directions, some coming at her either blindly or with mischief in mind.
She stomped a number of them and they thrashed wild
ly in death, while the rest spread out and disappeared into the shadows.
“We’d better be quick,” Vee said. She fished a grenade out of her pouch, and quickly surveyed the system of pipes. After jumping up onto the control panel itself, she wedged the grenade between the spokes of a horizontal valve positioned at the area where the thick central pipe broke into its U bend. Then she asked Jay, “You said you know about weapons.
How much time do I have once I pull the pin?”
“The M67 grenade has a fuse of 4 point 2 seconds.”
“That long, huh?”
“It has a blast radius of 45 feet, but it can throw shrapnel 700 feet.”
“It gets better all the time.”
A clatter of running feet. Across the room, from the same doorway the scientist had emerged from, came three drone soldiers carrying submachine guns. Even from here, Vee could see the foremost drone’s white body was swarming with black snake-like creatures: some of those that had made up the scientist’s body.
Vee expected the drones to open fire, but it occurred to her that they were afraid to rupture the pipes. This gave her the seconds she needed to hook her finger in the grenade’s pin while she steadied it with her left. When the pin came out, the grenade’s safety lever flew off. She let go of the grenade, leaving it there on the valve, jumped down from her perch and bolted toward the ladder fastened to the wall, sprinting for all she was worth.
As she left the shelter of the pipes, the drones let loose with their submachine guns. Bullets whined off the concrete floor, but before the Demons could correct their aim the grenade detonated with an ear-clap-ping boom.
Vee didn’t look back, but drew her head into her shoulders in anticipation of shrapnel whistling into her back. None found her, however, and she launched herself into the air, caught hold of the ladder and began climbing madly.
Vee was well up the rungs when she allowed herself a look behind and below her. What she saw was more dramatic than what she had expected or hoped for, and mesmerized her.
The Fall of Hades Page 13
