Time seemed to have slowed. Scole almost had him in his sights.
Knile bit back on the compulsion to fire wildly, knowing he had one more chance to make the shot count. He dropped the muzzle, gripped the rifle firmly with two hands.
The next shot hit Scole in the chest, sending red sparks flying and knocking him backward. Knile continued to advance, took another shot, aimed for the same place. Scole cried out in pain and surprise.
Knile pulled the trigger again and again, continuing to advance, almost right on top of the Redman now. Scole had dropped his pulse rifle, and now he too lay on the floor.
Knile must have pumped fifteen rounds into him before he finally stopped. As the smoke cleared from Scole’s armour, Knile saw that a hole had been carved in the breastplate, and there was a ragged, wet tear in Scole’s chest.
It was over.
Panting, Knile turned back to Lazarus, whose armour was looking almost as bad as Scole’s. The helmet had been smashed and there was blood on his face, and the breastplate had been scorched and looked ready to fall apart.
Lazarus blinked, trying to clear his head.
“You okay?” Knile asked.
Lazarus stared up at him, perplexed, then nodded.
Knile extended his hand down toward him.
“Come on,” Knile said. “We’re not done here yet.”
43
Ursie felt van Asch’s hideous thought tendrils snaking after her, no matter how many twists and turns she took. Even though she was stretching her body to its physical limits she could not seem to shake him, and worse, she had no idea where she was going. Any second she might come to a dead end, and then it would be all over. He would close the gap between them and use his proximity to crush her mind like it was an empty aluminium can under his boot heel.
Gathering a coherent thought in her head was not easy. She was expending so much of her energy just trying to keep van Asch out of her mind that all other processes seemed to have ground to a halt. She could not come up with a plan, a strategy to throw him off her tail, and she did not know of anywhere that would offer her safe haven. Neither the Redmen nor the Consortium officials would have any interest in her plight. Why would they? She was basically a fugitive with nowhere to go, and that fact alone would likely result in her being sent back to Earth even if she did escape the grasp of Jodocus van Asch.
She dodged through another bulkhead and came to a part of the habitat that she had not seen before. The walls were a lighter colour, almost white, and the segmented walkways longer. The unfamiliarity of it alone was enough to make her want to turn and head back the way she had come, but as she hesitated she could not only feel van Asch’s mind encroaching behind her, but hear his footsteps as well. She had no choice but to keep going.
She reached the next bulkhead and stepped through, and a stabbing pain shot through her head with enough force to almost knock her to her feet. Looking back she could see van Asch had achieved line of sight again, thanks to the longer walkway. He was moving in for the kill.
Ursie stumbled around the next bend, somehow disentangling herself from him again, and then began to run.
This walkway was much shorter, and, unlike the rest, terminated in a clear perspex door.
Ursie panicked that she would be trapped, but to her great relief it offered no resistance when she pulled on the handle, swinging open freely. She went inside.
She’d arrived at a small observation deck. At a more appropriate time it would have been a pleasant place to visit. There was a large window along one wall that looked out upon a breathtaking view of the Earth, and a line of telescopes were positioned to allow observation of the mountains, rivers and old cities through the hazy atmosphere.
There was one feature distinctly lacking here, however, and Ursie’s heart sank.
There was no way out.
A young couple had been staring out the window, sharing some private joke, and now they turned to look at her curiously.
“Are you all right?” the young woman said, concerned. Her smile slowly disappeared.
“Get out of here,” Ursie said, waving at them forlornly. “You need to go.”
The door slammed open and van Asch stepped into the room. He said nothing, but it was clear from his demeanour and his body language that his intentions toward Ursie were not kind.
The young man began to move forward to intercept him.
“Hey, creep, leave this kid–”
Van Asch sent out what Ursie could only describe as a psychic shockwave, a pulse of mental energy that shuddered out of him like a thunderclap. It slammed into those around him, including Ursie, and she blacked out, much as she had done back at the departure gates. She felt as though she had been dropped into a pool of syrupy black liquid and now had to fight her way to the surface, thrashing her arms ineffectually against the murk. As she slowly climbed upward, the darkness began to lessen, and then as she broke the surface her vision cleared and she found that she was on her knees on the floor of the observatory. When she looked up, she saw the young couple were lying crumpled by the window, either unconscious or dead.
Van Asch moved toward her. “Enough of the games. You resist again and I won’t be so gentle.”
“Screw you.”
“I’ll break you apart if I have to, Ursie,” he said ominously. “I’ll reduce your brain to mush if that’s what it takes.”
“Do it,” she said bitterly, climbing to her feet. “The only way you’re going to get me out of here is in tiny little fragments. We’ll see how much use to you I am after that.”
Van Asch pressed his lips together into a disparaging grimace, then nodded.
“Then that’s how it’ll be.”
His mind came at her again, and this time there was so much force behind it that she felt as though it were a hurricane of boiling hot steam. She tried to scream as the skin on her cheeks, her forehead, her neck was flayed from her body, as her eyeballs turned to hot coals in their sockets, but she was in such agony that she could not even force a sound to pass her lips. She felt the talons of van Asch’s mind scrape against the top of her head and scratch it open, felt him rip into the soft, fleshy innards of her mind like some bird of prey, tearing and gouging and forcing his way toward its centre.
He meant to tear the very essence of her into pieces, destroy her from the inside. And she knew that she could not stop him.
She fought him with every fibre of her being. She threw up every door, every gateway, every barricade she had ever erected in those early days when she had first been assaulted by the minds of the passersby in the streets of Link. These were the safeguards that had kept her sane all these years, the exquisitely crafted firewalls that kept her innermost sanctuary free of harm, but van Asch bashed them aside as if they were nothing but plywood. She lashed out at him, tried to hurt him, make him turn back, but it was no use. He was already too far in. It was like trying to swing her arms at someone who already had her in a bear hug.
Against every instinct, something inside of her told her to stop, to drop the barricades, open the gates.
Let him in.
She was past rational thought now, but a remote part of her had decided that this was it. Her mind had been defeated, and now it simply sought the cleanest and least agonising end, an escape from this giant tick that was burrowing into her skull.
She imagined herself falling, pictured her mind as a chasm, a thing of unspeakable depth and volume, an abyss with no end, and into that she found retreat. She imagined that van Asch was here too, that as far as he pressed in, he would never find the bottom. He would never plumb the depths of her mind. He would never reach her. This chasm in her mind was too vast, even for him.
She allowed van Asch to thrust his mind deep within her, as far as it would go.
Then as she felt him enter her fully, she realised that she could close the gates in her mind after all. She could close them behind him.
She clamped her mind shut like a vice, just as she
had learned to do years ago on the streets of Link. She separated the internal from the external as she had done hundreds of times every day since, only this time she held it with such force that she felt as though she might burst at the seams.
She sensed van Asch’s mind within hers, still struggling for purchase, trying to find the next handful of her to rip apart, but then abruptly he stopped. He twitched and spasmed, then seemed to turn himself about, like a man who had stalked into a gold mine, pick in hand, searching for riches, but suddenly realised he could no longer see the light of the entrance anymore. He thrashed and kicked, screamed in fury, tore at Ursie with all of his might.
Ursie had drawn herself into a ball. She felt like a cage made of tungsten, an impenetrable prison which nothing could enter or leave, and she focussed every part of her mind on keeping that seal intact.
Van Asch’s scream intensified as he must have felt his own mind separating from his body, as his physical form began to fall out of reach, but his attacks grew weaker. He was being ripped out of himself, his essence torn in two, and his powers began to diminish by the second. The scream turned to a horrible keening sound, then a warble, and his motions became feeble.
Ursie did not relent, squeezing the cage downward and drawing it inward, compressing it further and further until it began to crush van Asch’s mind into a pulp. She did not stop until she pictured the cage as a tiny, infinitesimally small dot, and then it winked out of existence altogether.
Ursie gasped and cried out, flinging her eyes open as she came back to consciousness. She was lying on the floor of the observatory, and she could feel blood trickling down her face. Alarmed, she clutched at her cheeks, her brow, remembering the burning sensation when van Asch had attacked her, but it had all been in her mind. Her skin was intact.
It’s a bloody nose. That’s all.
Across the other side of the room, van Asch’s body lay up against the perspex door at an obscene, unnatural angle, surrounded by a pool of blood. He had fared much worse than Ursie. He was bleeding from every orifice – his mouth, ears and nose – and it also appeared as though he had been gouging at his eyes with his fingernails. His hand lay propped against the door as if he had been reaching for the handle when he’d succumbed, and she realised that he must have been trying to physically escape the room when she had trapped his mind.
She looked away, disgusted. If he wasn’t dead, he was a vegetable. No threat to her. That was all she needed to know.
She got to her feet shakily, wiping away blood and mucus and who knew what else from her face.
She needed to figure out where to go next.
44
Duran knew what was waiting for him at the bottom of this elevator ride, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Their first stop would be the ground floor of the Reach. From there his escort would drag him through the gates and out into the streets of Link. The journey over to the Cellar would take another half hour or so. He’d probably make it there right about sunset.
He doubted he would be alive to see the morning.
Enforcers were never thrown into the Cellar. It was a melting pot for all of the worst kinds of criminals the world had to offer – the murderers, the rapists, the thugs and the drug lords who were too poor to bribe their way out of trouble. It was the home of the desperate, the lost, the lowest of the low.
And they hated Enforcers. The Enforcers ran the place; they were the ones who had put those lowlifes behind bars to start with. Most of the thugs wallowing in the Cellar could only dream of getting their hands on an Enforcer, or an ex-Enforcer as the case may be, to exact some revenge. Release some of their frustrations on an easy target.
And so the Enforcers who earned expulsion from the barracks were generally stripped of their credentials, cast out as commoners, but never taken to the Cellar. That was a death sentence.
But that was what Prazor had decreed as punishment for Duran.
Word would get around; they’d know that he was on his way. They would know who he was. And they would know what to do with him.
He might as well have put that revolver to my head and pulled the trigger, Duran thought. Would have saved some time.
But it was obvious that Prazor had wanted him to suffer. He’d wanted Duran to feel every excruciating second as he descended to the ground floor, every agonising step that brought him closer to the Cellar as he traversed the streets of Link.
It was Prazor’s revenge for the suffering Duran had caused him.
You rotten old bastard. Zoe was right, I should have pulled the trigger when I had the chance.
The two Enforcers who were to provide his escort, Adams and Burress, had fallen silent as the elevator descended. He was grateful for that at least. Perhaps they were envisioning his arrival at the Cellar and how he would be greeted, and wondering if a similar fate might befall them should they ever fail Prazor in any way.
The elevator went past one hundred and into the nineties, the levels flicking by rapidly.
It wouldn’t take long now.
Duran thought of Knile again. No surprises there. Who else would appear in his mind in his darkest moment? The man was like a nightmare that wouldn’t go away, coming back time and again to haunt Duran and throw his life into chaos. If he had one regret in all of this, it was that–
The elevator stopped suddenly, jarring its three occupants and almost knocking them off their feet. Adams fumbled for his sidearm and held it toward the closed doors, clearly spooked. The look on his face suggested he was expecting something nasty to be on the other side of those doors.
“Relax, dipshit,” Burress said. “You accidentally hit the wrong button.”
“Like hell I did. No way.”
The three of them looked as one at the floor selection buttons, where the number eighty-seven flickered on and off spasmodically, seemingly of its own accord.
“See? You hit eighty-seven.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Whatever. Punch in Ground again, will you?”
Adams pressed the letter ‘G’ on the selection panel, but it remained dark. He tapped again, then rapidly several more times, but the floor would not light up.
“So we’re stuck,” he proclaimed, exasperated, “on Level Eighty-Seven, which is what? Something in Gaslight?”
“Yeah. Hang on, I’ll call maintenance.” Burress lifted his holophone to his ear, but as he did, the elevator doors slid open, revealing an empty black void outside. Burress forgot all about the phone call. “Did you open those?” he said to Adams.
“Hell no.”
Now Burress had his .40 in his hand as well, his calmness quickly eroded. They both edged to the sides of the elevator car to find cover, sensing that this was not some kind of routine elevator malfunction.
Duran stayed where he was in the centre of the compartment, his expression unchanged.
“Holy shit, I remember this place now,” Adams said, petrified. “This is the level that went up in smoke like… twenty years ago or something. A fireball ripped through and burnt everything and everyone inside.”
“Never heard of it, man,” Burress said, his eyes wild. “What the fuck are we doing here?”
“I’ve got no friggin’ idea. This level was meant to be locked off. The engies made it so you can’t even get here anymore. The button isn’t supposed to work.”
“Heh, these things break down all the time, man,” Burress said, putting on a brave face. “We just caught a bad break.”
“Didn’t you hear about the disappearances a few years back? A couple of constables came here on a dare and only one came back, said the place was haunted.”
“Okay, just stop it with that shit. Right now.” Burress directed his gun at Duran’s temple. “Is this you? Did you fuckin’ do this?”
Duran jangled the cuffs behind his back. “Do I look like I can control elevators with my mind? My hands haven’t been anywhere near those damn buttons.”
Adams peered out into the pi
tch blackness of Level Eighty-Seven.
“I’m telling you it’s haunted, man–”
“Shut the hell up, you idiot.” Burress flicked his handgun at the doorway. “Get out there and try hitting the call button or something.”
“No, thanks.”
“Shit,” Burress said. “You’re a pussy, you know that?” He shot Adams a disgusted look, then took a deep breath. “Wait here.” He stepped into the doorway.
Burress’ brains exploded against the back of the car and his body thumped against the floor so hard that the elevator car bounced. Adams shrieked in horror and tried to press himself even further against the wall as his partner lay there staring up at them sightlessly with a gaping hole in his forehead.
Duran stood where he was, never moving a muscle, displaying no real surprise or concern. Adams took one more look at his dead colleague and then steeled himself, ducking behind Duran and placing his pistol against his head.
“I don’t know who the fuck is out there,” Adams yelled, “but if you think you can get away with this, you’ve got another thing coming! You just killed an Enforcer. You know that?”
“No point hiding behind me,” Duran said casually. “We’re both dead men.”
“Bullshit!” Adams hissed. “That’s your friends out there–”
“No. This is a hit, not a rescue mission.”
Adams poked his head up just above Duran’s shoulder.
“Well, if that’s true–”
He never said another word. A bullet whizzed past Duran’s ear and smashed through Adams’ eyeball with a sickening, meaty thud. He was thrown against the back of the elevator and then hit the floor, dead.
Duran finally raised his eyes to the darkness outside.
“Nice shootin’, Zoe,” he called out. “Inch perfect.” He widened his stance and loosened his shoulders. “One more to go.”
Beyond the small circle of light cast outside the elevator doors, there was not a thing to see within Level Eighty-Seven, not a sound to be heard. It might have been a bottomless pit for all Duran could tell.
Landfall (The Reach, Book 2) Page 31
