by Tad Williams
"I dreamed last night that the great burning light of my own blinding came streaming out of his wound. I dreamed that I fell into a darkness even greater than the one I have known.
"I cannot stand this place. I cannot live with this madness. I ran away from all of this years ago. I am not meant to care this much. I do not want to be terrified anymore, to see my friends threatened and hounded and killed.
"I do not want to meet Dread again.
"There. That is perhaps the greatest fear. I admit it! Even should some improbable thing happen, should we drag ourselves out of this stinking pit, away from these cannibal monstrosities, it does not take magic to know that any road back to the real world must run through him. He handled me as though I were a child—made me whimper. Made me beg him to stop, and all without needing to cause any physical pain. Now he has the power of a god, and he is furious.
"Oh, merciful Heaven, I don't want this.
"It's all too much. I wish could turn off these senses. I want to cover it all over, bury myself in the dark—but not this dark! Escape . . . I don't want this!
"They're coming toward us, a great group of them. Are they . . . singing?
"Paul is gone—Florimel says so. Have they already taken him?
"T4b! They're coming! Get over here with Florimel and me!
"I wish he had his armor. I should . . . if this is the last . . . I should . . . but. . . .
"Oh, God, not this. . . !"
CHAPTER 17
Breathing Problems
NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 5.5 (Eu, NAm)—"HOW TO KILL YOUR TEACHER"
(visual: Looshus and Kantee reading the Reality Scroll)
VO: Looshus (Ufour Halloran) and Kantee (Brandywine Garcia) have discovered that Superintendent Skullflesh (Richard Raymond Balthazar) is the reborn prophet of the Stellar Knowledge cult, and is preparing a blood sacrifice of the entire school population to bring on the end of the world. Casting 4 hall monitors, 7 cult members. Flak to: GCN.HOW2KL.CAST
It made a very small pile when she looked at it, all the things she had bought, all the things that she would carry with her into this last and strangest country of a life that had seen many countries and many strange things.
The new telematic jack was small, of course, no larger than the standard variety despite its additional range. It had cost a decent fraction of her bank account, but the salesman had sworn that it would keep her in touch with her fancy Dao-Ming pad at a distance of several miles—"even in the middle of a high-usage telecom area during an electrical storm," he had cheerfully promised. Olga didn't know about storms, although she had spent enough days now near the Gulf of Mexico to know that even on a clear day lightning never seemed more than a breath away, but she guessed that an island with its own army and air force would probably qualify as a "high-usage telecom area."
Beside the jack sat a small but extremely powerful LED flashlight, a piece of high-tech paraphernalia usually sold to businessmen with too much money, and despite its dramatic name—something like "SpyLite" or "SpaceLight," she couldn't remember which—seldom used for anything much more dramatic than finding dropped keys in a parking lot, she guessed. She had also bought something called an Omni-Tool from the same store, then changed her mind and exchanged it for a more familiar Swiss Army knife. She had always meant to buy one, had thought dozens of times what a handy object it would be for a woman living on her own, but for some reason had never done it. The fact that she had finally bought one, a top-of-the-line model with all kinds of clever hidden devices and built-in microcircuitry, helped mark the occasion. Things had changed. She was not the same Olga Pirofsky.
What did one bring on an infiltration of one of the world's largest and best-guarded corporations? She supposed there were many more things she could have bought, guns and cutting torches and surveillance devices, but it all smacked too much of boys playing war games. Besides, she was fairly certain she would be arrested at some point, and a pocketful of plastic explosives or wall-climbing pitons would make it hard to pretend she had wandered away from a tour group.
So her pile of tools to take behind enemy lines was a small one: the new jack, the knife, the flashlight, and the one object of sentiment she had not been able to leave behind in Juniper Bay with the rest of her old life. Thee curl of white plastic was certainly not going to arouse anyone's suspicions. Olga's last name and first initial, as written decades ago by some nurse who might very well be dead, had almost faded away. Olga herself had cut the bracelet to remove it, but had never thrown it away, and through all the years in her top drawer it had retained the curve of her wrist. Many times she had come within inches of tossing it in the trash, but the O. Pirofsky who had worn that hospital bracelet was a different person, and the tiny snake of pale plastic was her only tangible connection to that Olga, a girl with her life ahead of her, a young woman with a husband named Aleksandr still alive, so very much alive, a young woman about to give birth. . . .
Something rapped quickly and authoritatively on the motel room door. Startled, Olga dropped the bracelet back onto the small pile of objects in the middle of the bed. After a moment's hesitation, she stepped to the door and looked out through the fish-eye peephole. A black woman and white man stood there, both in dark suits.
For a moment she leaned breathlessly against the door, heart racing for no reason she could say. Missionaries, they must be—this whole region was acrawl with them, people with nothing better to do than walk around in heavy clothing on the hottest day, trying to convince others that there was somewhere hotter yet they might be going if they didn't embrace the doorstepper's faith.
The knock came again; something in its weight drove all thought of ignoring it out of her mind. She tossed her motel bathrobe over the things lying on the bed—irritated, despite her fright, that these people would now think she was the kind of person who normally left things strewn around the room.
It was the black woman who took the lead when the door opened. She smiled at Olga, although it seemed a little perfunctory, and drew a long flat wallet out of her coat pocket. "You're Ms. Pirofsky, is that right, ma'am?"
"How do you know me?"
"Manager gave us your name. Nothing to worry about, ma'am, we just wanted a few words with you." The woman flipped open the wallet, a brief glimpse of something that looked like a hologram of a police badge. "I'm Officer Upshaw and this is my partner, Officer Casaro. We'd like to ask you a couple of questions."
"Are you . . . police?"
"No, ma'am, we're security officers for J Corporation."
"But I. . . ." In her fear and surprise, she had been about to say that she didn't work for J Corporation anymore. She managed to keep her mouth shut, but only at the expense of looking like a slow and stupid old woman. But, she thought, perhaps there could be worse ways to look.
The man Casaro had only briefly made eye contact with her, and unlike his partner, he made no effort to smile. The black pinholes in the center of his pale eyes looked past her into the room itself, as if he were some kind of machine recording everything he saw for future study. Olga suddenly remembered her grandmother describing the old Polish secret police. "They didn't look at you, they looked through you, even when they were talking to you. Like x-rays."
"What . . . what could you possibly want to ask someone like me?"
Officer Upshaw grudgingly used the smile again. "We're just doing our job, ma'am. We heard you were asking some questions in various places about the J Corporation campus."
"The campus?" She could not shake the feeling that they had been following her ever since she had walked out the doors of Obolos Entertainment—that this was only a bit of cruel pretense, and at any moment they would throw her to the floor and handcuff her.
"The buildings, the facilities—that's what we call it, ma'am. Some of the local merchants, well, they let us know when people are asking questions." She shrugged, and for the first time Olga saw how young this woman really was—perhaps just past college age, and with a bit of insecurit
y in the measured way she spoke. "Now could you please tell us what brings you to the area and what your interest in J Corporation might be?"
Officer Casaro's long inspection of everything behind Olga finally ended. His eyes found hers and locked. She felt her knees go a little weak. "Certainly," she managed to say after a moment. "Why don't you come in—all of the air-conditioning will get out, otherwise."
An almost imperceptible look flicked between the two. "That's fine, ma'am. Thank you."
After Olga gathered up the things on the bed, under the guise of tidying away the bathrobe, and deposited the bundle on the counter in the tiny bathroom, she was able to relax a little. None of the objects that had been lying there were illegal or even particularly suspicious for someone who had made her living in net entertainment, but she didn't really want her possession of a telematic jack that cost as much as a small car to become a topic of conversation.
As her initial terror ebbed a little, she began to believe that things might be no worse than they appeared. She had been asking questions in what was, after all, a company town, and the company itself was famously secretive. Similarly, if they had her name from the credit information at the motel, she couldn't very well pretend to be someone different, could she? Somewhere on that island—perhaps in the black tower itself—were the records of Pirofsky, O., employee.
"You see," she told them, "I worked for a J Corporation subsidiary for years—you've seen Uncle Jingle, haven't you? I worked on that show." Upshaw nodded and smiled politely. Casaro didn't bother. "And since I was in the area—I'm taking a car trip across America now that I'm retired—I just thought I'd come see it. After all, they've been paying my salary for years!"
She answered a few more questions, all from Officer Upshaw, and did her best to pretend she was enjoying the break in routine, the importance of a visit from security officers. She struggled to remember the innocent taxpayer's serenity she had always been able to bring to her encounters with police in Juniper Bay.
You're an actress, aren't you? So act!
It seemed to work. The questions got more perfunctory, and even Casaro's surgical examination of Olga and her room gradually dulled to something like bored routine. She had no urge to rekindle his interest. She started telling a true but circumstantially pointless story about her dog Misha, which finally did the trick.
"We're sorry, but we'll have to get going, Mr. Pirofsky," said Upshaw, rising. "We're sorry to have bothered you." Feeling almost pleased with herself now, she hazarded the tiniest return of serve. "Maybe you can tell me, since I haven't been able to find out for certain. Is there any kind of tour of the . . . the campus, as you called it? I'd hate to come all this way and not get to see it except from a distance."
Casaro snorted, then stepped out the door to wait for his partner in the motel parking lot, under hot gray skies.
Upshaw shook her head. For the first time her smile seemed honest—an amused grin. "No, ma'am. No, I'm afraid there isn't. See, we're not really that kind of corporation."
Jeremiah was up in the sleeping area, changing the dressing on Del Ray's head wound, so Joseph had become the official watcher of the monitor screens. All of the men upstairs were in view on one camera, still in the same place beside the elevator doors. At the moment they were resting and smoking, but dusty chunks of concrete lay piled all around and the man standing in the hole, leaning on the handle of his pick, was a good half meter below his fellows.
Joseph supposed he and his companions should be grateful at least that they were so far out in the middle of nowhere, or the men upstairs would probably have fetched in air hammers and a compressor by now.
"Coward bastards," he said, half-whispering. Just what they were doing that was so cowardly he couldn't quite define, but waiting was difficult, especially when you were probably waiting to be killed.
He looked down to the floor of the lab where the silent V-tanks lay. How strange, to think Renie was so close. And her friend, too—both of them sealed in the dark, like those little oiled fish in cans. He missed her.
The thought was so surprising that he had to stop and try it out for size and feel. Yes, he did, he truly missed her. Not just feared for her, not just wanted to protect her, do the fatherly duty of keeping her safe from bad men—he wished she were here to talk to him.
It was something he hadn't thought about much, and he had trouble holding it together to consider it. It was all wrapped up somehow with Renie's mother, but not with the awful helplessness of watching her die, as his feelings of protectiveness were. He missed having someone around who cared about him. He missed the company of someone who understood his little jokes. Not that Renie liked them very much, and sometimes she pretended they weren't jokes at all, that he was just being stupid or difficult, but there had been times when she was just as amused by him as her mother had been.
Now that he thought of it, though, it had been a long while. Not many jokes in the last few years, at least not the kind you could laugh about.
She was funny herself when she wanted to be, but it seemed to Joseph it had been some time since there had been much of that from her end either. She had got so serious, somehow. Angry, even. Because her mama was dead? Because her father couldn't work, with his bad back? That was no reason to lose your sense of humor. That was when you needed it most of all—Long Joseph knew that for a fact. If he couldn't have gone out and had a drink every now and then with Walter and Dog and found a laugh or two with them, he would have killed himself a long time since.
When she was a little girl, we used to talk. She'd ask me questions, and if I didn't know, I'd make up some foolishness just to see her laugh. He hadn't seen that laugh in a long time, that surprised laugh where her whole face lit up. Such a serious little girl she'd been, he and her mother couldn't help but tease her sometimes.
Come back, baby girl. He stared at the silent tank, then turned back to the monitor. Break time was over: three men were digging now in the hole in the concrete floor, dust billowing up like they were devils in the smokes of hell. Joseph had the strangest feeling, like he was going to cry. He reached out and took a swallow of his last, dwindling bottle of wine. You come back soon and laugh with me. . . .
The ringing of the telephone startled him so badly that he almost dropped the precious squeeze bottle with its cap open. He stared at the device for a moment as he would a black mamba. Jeremiah was upstairs, but he must be able to hear the ring—with the floors all open to the high central ceiling, the underground lab complex was like being in some big train-station waiting room.
Maybe I just leave it alone until he gets down, Joseph thought, but the thought of being frightened of an antique telephone was too much. As it rang again, he stood up and snatched it off its dented metal cradle.
"Who is that?"
There was a pause on the other end. The voice, when it came, was ghostly and distorted. "Is that Joseph?"
Only after the first superstitious chill had raced across his skin did he remember, but he wanted to be sure. "You tell me who's calling, first."
"It's Sellars. Surely Mr. Dako has told you about me."
Joseph didn't want to talk about Jeremiah. Joseph was the one who had answered the phone; he was the one in charge of this emergency. "What do you want?"
"To help, I hope. I take it that they haven't managed to break in yet."
"They are trying. They are surely trying."
In the silence that followed, Joseph found himself suddenly worried that he had done something wrong, driven off their benefactor. "I don't have much time," Sellars finally said. "And, I must confess, not a lot of ideas, either. You managed to get the armored elevator doors closed?"
"Yes. But those men are digging through the floor now—started out with a grenade, I think, but now they using picks, shovels. Coming right down through the cement."
"That's bad. Do you have the monitors working?"
"I am looking at those men right now. They are digging like dogs after a bone."
Jeremiah had appeared, a look of worry on his face. Joseph waved him back: everything was being taken care of.
Sellars sighed. "Do you think you can help me connect to your surveillance system? That would give me a better idea of what's going on."
"You mean these cameras and so on?" Joseph felt his competence suddenly under heavy fire. "Hook you up? To those?"
"We should be able to do it, even with that old equipment you have there." There was a strange, wheezing laugh. "I'm pretty old equipment myself, after all. Yes, I think I can talk you through it."
Joseph was disturbed. Every cell in his body told him to take charge, to make something happen, but he knew Jeremiah had spent much more time with the machinery than he had. In fact, he knew he hadn't even bothered to learn anything about the monitors at all. With real regret, he said, "I will let you talk to Jeremiah." But he could not give up without even a show of involvement. "It is that man Sellars," he whispered as he passed the receiver. "He wants to get hooked up with the pictures."
Jeremiah stared at him quizzically, then leaned forward and tapped a button on the instrument panel. "I've put you on the speaker, Mr. Sellars," he said out loud, then hung up the receiver. "That way we can both hear you."
Joseph was caught off-balance. Was Jeremiah being kind to him, like to a child? Or was he treating him as an equal? Joseph wanted to be irritated, but could not help feeling a small glow of pleasure.
"Good." Sellars' voice sounded even more strange now, scratchy on the small speaker. "I'm trying to think of things to do, but first could you patch me in to your monitors?" He gave a list of instructions to Jeremiah that Joseph could not quite follow, which left him feeling annoyed again. Who had been the mechanical one in this group, after all? Not Jeremiah, a kind of glorified lady's maid for a rich old white woman. Not Del Ray, an overgrown schoolboy who wore suits and sat behind a desk.
By the time Joseph had summoned up the meditative calm to shrug off the unintended insult, Jeremiah had apparently done what Sellars wanted.
