by Tad Williams
"No shouting!" His sudden cry seemed loud as a thunderstroke. It bounced against the walls of their prison, broke into echoes. "Shouting . . . shouting . . . shout . . . out. . . ."
Renie was clinging to the ledge. The surprise of his explosive bellow had almost toppled her. "Stephen, what. . . ?"
" 'That's some vicious-bad wonton!' said Scoop."
Renie felt her heart skip, stumble. He was quoting from the Netsurfer Detectives story she had read him in the hospital—but that was not what made it hard for her to breathe.
"He left his holo-striped pad floating in midair as he turned to his excited friend. I mean, there must be major trouble—double-sampled!'. . . ."
Darkness hemmed her in, a narrowing circle. She felt dizzy and sick.
Stephen was speaking to her in her own voice.
"What . . . what are you doing. . . ?"
"That's enough, boy!" It was Long Joseph's snappish tone now, perfect in every way, as though recorded and played back. "Had enough of your nonsense. You get it done or I beat the skin from your backside! Damn, if you make me get up again when I'm resting I'll slap your face around the other side of your head. . . !"
Worst of all, Stephen was laughing with his own voice even as he was speaking with his father's.
"Don't do that!" Renie was shouting too, now. "Stop it! Just be Stephen!"
"But why in the name of God would anyone have a security system like that?" Suddenly, staggeringly, it was Susan Van Bleeck's voice that echoed up from the floor of the pit, waspish and shrewd, but Stephen was still laughing, a cracked hilarity that was almost a sob. "What on earth could they be protecting?" Doctor Susan, a person Stephen had never met, from a time after he had been in his coma. Susan Van Bleeck, who was dead. "Have you got yourself involved with criminals, Irene?"
And for a moment she felt she could bear no more, that the horror was too great. Then, abruptly, she understood. Her fear became a little less, became a fear only for herself, but what diminished was replaced by a desolation so large as to be almost incomprehensible.
"You're . . . you're not Stephen, are you?" Abruptly, the voices died. "You never were Stephen."
The thing that looked like her brother still sat by the river, hunched, shadow-draped.
"What have you done with him?"
It did not reply, but seemed to grow less visible, as though slowly merging with the stone of the great pit. An expectant stillness grew in the air, the crackling tension before a lightning storm. Renie felt her skin tingle and crawl. Suddenly there did not seem to be enough oxygen to fill her lungs.
Anger began to rise again inside her, a bleak fury that this bizarre thing, this conglomeration of code, should pretend to be her brother—the same inhuman thing that had taken him in the first place. She pushed it down and concentrated on breathing. She was in the heart of it, somehow. Everything around her must be part of the Other, part of its mind, its imagination. . . .
Its dream. . . ?
She would accomplish nothing if she infuriated it. It was like a child—like Stephen at his very worst, two years old and full of screaming resentment, almost beyond language and rationality. How had she dealt with him then?
Not very well, she reminded herself. Patience—I was never as patient as I should have been.
"What . . . what are you, exactly?" She waited, but the silence remained unbroken. "Do you . . . do you have a name?"
The thing stirred. The shadows lengthened. Overhead, the stars seemed to grow fainter and more distant, as though the universe had suddenly hastened its expansion.
But it's not the real universe, she told herself. It's the universe inside . . . inside this thing. "Do you have a name?" she asked again.
"Boy," it said, using Stephen's voice again, but with a strange, hitching cadence. "Lost boy."
"Is that . . . is that what you want me to call you?"
"Boy." A trudging aeon seemed to pass. "Have . . . no name."
Something in the way it spoke pierced her own misery, her terror, even her rage at the theft of her brother.
"Jesus Mercy." Her eyes welled again with tears. "What have they done to you?"
The thing at the bottom of the pit seemed to become even less visible. The wash of the river was loud now, a continuous rush and mumble; Renie thought she could hear voices twining through it. "Where are we now?" she asked. "What are you doing here?"
"Hiding."
"Who are you hiding from?"
It seemed to consider for another long moment. "The devil," it said at last.
For an instant, even though she did not know exactly what it meant, Renie felt she could feel what it felt—the hopeless, uncomprehending fear, the abused, devastated resignation.
Why me? she wondered. Why did it let me in? Into . . . whatever this is? Was it because of the way I feel about Stephen?
And even as she considered, her thoughts a thin membrane of rationality over deepening terror, she understood something about the thing that spoke to her—understood it in a deep, almost instinctual way.
It's dying. Its light, the flame of its existence, was flickering. Not just its words but everything around her, the lading light, the thinning air, proclaimed it. Such weariness could precede nothing but extinction.
It may be using Stephen to speak to me, she thought. Wearing him like a mask. But not just a mask. The way it reacted when I mentioned Papa, somehow it knows what Stephen knows, and even what I know. Feels what he would feel.
"I think you can get free." She did not entirely believe it, but she could not simply wait here for everything to end, abandon herself and her friends and all the children this thing had devoured to the destruction she felt sure would come if the operating system stopped functioning while they were still imprisoned inside it. "I think we can escape. My friends might even be able to help you, if you let us."
The shadowy shape moved again. "Angel. . . ?" it asked plaintively. The voice was less like Stephen's than it had been. "Never-Sleeps. . . ?"
"Certainly." She had no idea what it meant, but she could not let that stop her. She thought of how she had kept the Stone Girl moving even when the child was almost paralyzed with fear. Patience, that was all that worked. Patience and the illusion that a grown-up was in charge. "If you can come to me. . . ."
"No." The word was flat and weary.
"But I think I can help. . . ."
"Nooooooo!" This time the very walls of the pit seemed to draw closer, the shadows grown so deep that for a moment the darkness seemed too great for the space to hold The echo went on for a hideously long time, blending with the sound of the river as it died away, the river-tongues very clear now, cries of misery and fright and loneliness in a thousand different voices—children's voices.
"I want to help you," she said loudly, speaking as calmly as she could when what she really wanted was to shriek and then keep on shrieking until the air was gone. Her nerve ends were on fire—for a moment she had felt the grip of that cold fist again, the squeezing heart of nothingness. Patience, Renie, she told herself. For God's sake, don't push too much. But it was hard to hold back. Time was speeding away from them, the cries of the children desperate, hopeless. Everything was slipping away. "I want to help you," she called. "If you can just come closer. . . ."
"Can't get out!" the thing shouted. Renie fell to her knees, clapping her hands over her ears, but the excruciating voice was inside her, in her very bones, shaking her to pieces. "Can't! They hurt! Hurt and hurt!" The thing was building to a terrified rage, something that would crack the world in half. "Very angry!"
The voice—nothing like Stephen's now—thundered in her ears.
"Angry! Angry! ANGRY!"
Darkness lashed out at her with an obliterating hand.
Jeremiah sat staring at the clock on the biggest of the console screens, wiping the sleep from his eyes. 07:42. Morning. But what morning? What day? It was almost impossible to keep track, here in the pit under the mountain, hundreds of meters from the
sun. He had tried, had managed to keep things ordered for weeks just as if he were still above ground, still living a life that made sense, but the events of the last several days had broken down all his careful arrangements.
Sunday morning, he decided at last. It must be Sunday morning.
Just a few short months ago he would have been up making breakfast in his clean, well-stocked kitchen. Then he would have washed the car before he and Doctor Van Bleeck went to church. Pointless, perhaps—Susan went out so little that the car seldom needed it—but it was part of the routine. Those days he had sometimes felt he was drowning in routine. Now it seemed like the most beautiful island a drowning man could imagine.
Long Joseph Sulaweyo should have been sitting at the monitors taking his turn on watch. Instead the tall man was sitting on the edge of the walkway, dangling his feet and staring at nothing. He looked lost and miserable, and not just because he had no wine to drink. Jeremiah and Del Ray had finally decided the only sensible thing they could do with the corpse of the mercenary Jeremiah had killed was to put it in one of the unused, unwired V-tanks. They had all done it together after wrapping it in a sheet, but as soon as the lid was bolted down and the seals airtight Joseph had walked away to sulk.
Oddly, for once Jeremiah was sympathetic. Turning the V-tank into what it so strongiy resembled, a coffin, could not help but remind Joseph of his daughter Renie lying nearby in another almost identical casket. She and her Bushman friend might still be alive, but at this point the difference between them and the dead mercenary seemed largely academic.
And then there's the three of us, Jeremiah thought glumly. What's the difference between us and Joseph's daughter, except that it's a bigger coffin?
The thought abruptly popped like a soap bubble and disappeared as Jeremiah stared at the monitor. "Joseph, what the hell is this? You're supposed to be watching here, aren't you?"
Long Joseph looked at him, scowled, and turned back to his contemplation of the laboratory floor and the silent pods.
"Del Ray!" Jeremiah shouted. "Come here! Quickly!"
The younger man, who had been scavenging some breakfast from among the supplies—Jeremiah had been too tired and depressed to cook even one of the rudimentary meals he had been making—hurried up from the floor below.
"What is it?"
"Look!" Jeremiah pointed to the monitor that showed the feed from the front door camera. "The truck—it's gone!" He turned to Joseph. "When did this happen?"
"When did what happen?" Joseph levered himself to his feet and walked over, already defensive. "Why you making such a fuss?"
"Because the damned truck is gone. Gone!" His anger was leavened by an exhilarating, almost dizzying breath of hope. "The mercenaries' truck is gone!"
"But they're not," Del Ray said heavily. "Look." He pointed to another monitor, the one which displayed the area beside the elevator upstairs where the men had been digging. A cluster of sleeping forms lay beside the hole, which was fenced with chairs turned on their sides.
"Then where's the truck?"
"I don't know." Del Ray stared at the screen. "I count three. So one of them took the truck somewhere. Maybe to get supplies."
"Maybe," said Joseph, with a certain gloomy satisfaction, "to get more killers."
"God damn you Joseph Sulaweyo, you just shut up." Jeremiah barely resisted the urge to hit him across the face. What am I turning into? "We should have known this hours ago. He probably took off at night. But you weren't doing your job!"
"What job?" Even Joseph did not seem himself, the opportunity for an argument provoking little interest. "What difference it make? You going to run out and stop him driving away? 'Please, Mr. Killer, don't go get some more men with guns.' So what are you complaining for?"
Jeremiah sat down hard in the chair in front of the monitors. "Just shut up."
"You expect me to stay up all night, looking at some little screens," Joseph suggested, with the reasoned calm of a schizophrenic explaining a worldwide conspiracy, "then you better learn to talk nice with me."
It was late morning when the truck reappeared on the front door monitor. Jeremiah called the others over and they watched with sickened fascination as the mercenary swung himself down from the front seat, adjusted a massive sidearm in his shoulder holster, then went around to the back of the big gray offroad vehicle.
"How many you think?" Despite the hundreds of meters of concrete separating them from the scene, Long Joseph was whispering. Jeremiah didn't bother to say anything—he felt like doing it himself.
"Who knows? You could get a dozen men in there." Del Ray's face was damp with sweat.
The driver swung open the back door and climbed inside, When he had been invisible almost a minute, Joseph said, "What the hell is he doing back there?"
"Briefing them, maybe." Jeremiah felt like he was watching footage of some terrible fatal accident on the net, except this accident was happening to him.
The door swung open again.
"Oh, Jesus Mercy," groaned Long Joseph. "What are those?"
Four of them leaped out in succession, sniffing the ground eagerly. When the driver climbed down they circled him like sharks around a deep-water buoy. Each massive dog had a crest of bristling fur along the top of its spine between the shoulders, adding to the sharkish look.
"Ridgebacks," Del Ray said. "The mutant ones—look at how the foreheads stick out. It's illegal to breed them." He sounded almost offended.
"I don't think that's the kind of thing these men worry about." Jeremiah could not tear his eyes from the screen. Even in the daylight outside the front gate the creatures' eyes were sunken too deeply to be seen beneath the protruding brows, giving their faces a lost, shadowy look. A memory came to him, bleakly terrifying. "Hyena," he said quietly.
"What you talking about?" Long Joseph demanded. "You heard what he say—they are ridgeback dogs."
"I was thinking about the little Bushman's story." The gate was opening. The driver snapped heavy leashes onto the animals' collars and let them draw him through the entrance and into the base. "About the hyena and his daughter." Jeremiah felt sick. "Never mind. Good God, what are we going to do?"
After a moment's heavy silence Del Ray said, "Well, I've got two bullets. If we position ourselves just right, get the dogs to stand properly, I can shoot through one and get the one behind it, too. Two bullets, four dogs."
Long Joseph was scowling fiercely, but his eyes were wide, his voice hoarse. "That is a joke. You are making a joke, right?"
"Of course it's, a goddamned joke, you idiot." Del Ray slumped into the other chair by the console and put his face in his hands. "Those things were used to hunt lions—and that was before anyone really started messing around with their genes. They'll find us even in the dark and then they'll tear us to pieces."
Jeremiah was only half-listening. The dogs and the mercenary were making their way across the garage level of the base, but Jeremiah wasn't paying attention to that either. He was watching a small readout at the bottom of one of the console screens.
"Sellars isn't answering," he said dully. "No message, nothing."
"Just what I thought will happen!" Joseph exploded. "Telling us what to do, telling us, telling us, then when we need him, gone!"
"That smoke idea of his saved our lives," Del Ray said angrily. "They would have been down here days ago."
"Saved us to be eaten by monster dogs!" Joseph declared, but the energy had gone out of him. "Maybe we should build another fire, see how those dogs like smoke." He turned to Jeremiah. "Dogs, they need to breathe too, don't they?"
Jeremiah was watching the monitors. The mercenaries by the elevator had wakened and were huddled with their returned comrade. The dogs were sitting now, a row of muscled, ivory-fanged machines waiting to be turned on and set to work. Jeremiah realized that the mercenaries must have all but finished digging their way through the floor, and planned on using the mutant dogs as insurance against another toxic smoke attack or armed resista
nce.
If those men only knew, he thought. With what we have, we couldn't drive away a group of determined schoolchildren.
"We can't do that trick again without Sellars," he said aloud. "We don't know how to operate the vents. I don't think we can even access them from down here." He frowned, trying to catch an idea that was already threatening to dissolve back into the fear and disorder of his thoughts. "And we don't have anything left to burn to make that kind of smoke. . . ."
"So we are just going to wait here?" Joseph, too, was staring helplessly at the screen. "Wait for . . . those?"
"No." Jeremiah stood up and started across the lab, heading for the stairs. "At least I'm not going to."
"Where are you going?" shouted Del Ray.
"To find something to make another fire," he called back. "We can't smoke them out, but even a dog the size of a house is afraid of fire."
"But we used everything!"
"No. There is still more paper. There's a cabinet full of it where . . . where the mercenary tried to kill Joseph. And we need to make torches!"
Even as he began to run, he heard Joseph and Del Ray hurrying after him.
For an instant—and mercifully, only an instant—Renie felt herself seized again in the implacable grip of the void. There was no restraint this time, only unthinking rage, explosive and all-powerful. Then the pit was around her once more. She was on her hands and knees on the ledge, retching, bringing up nothing but air. The voices of the river were rising, a weeping, begging choir.
"He's coming!" The cry was a childish thing of pure terror that vibrated inside her skull like an alarm bell. A cascade of images battered her, huge shapes, howling dogs, a room full of blood and shrieking white shapes. Pain sizzled through her like electricity. Renie screamed, writhing, adding her own thin shrieks to the weeping children of the river as the voice in her head shrilled again, "He's coming here!"
