King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2)

by Grist, Michael John

  "Roger that. Brace hard." She hits the bricks again, and this time they implode inward, a torrent of rotten black brick alive with maggots chased by a vomiting flood of clotted black water and sludge.

  Doe is ripped off the ladder by the weight of it, crashing into the others below and flattening them like trampled blades of grass. Someone screams out through blood-mic, as a tide of thick putrid muck shits down upon them, burying them in mire, locking them tight like souls lost within a cooling pyroclastic flow.

  Ray cannot think as the weight of the onslaught fills in the conning tower with putrid black muck, until everything is muffled, stilled and silent, and then he can't budge his heavily-suited body an inch.

  "Fuck," he whispers through blood-mic.

  AETHERIC BRIDGE B

  I'm torn rudely out of darkness, like an infant birthed prematurely from an artificial womb, and into the light. Something is hauling me upward like bait on a line and I can't slow it down.

  Where am I?

  "Doe," I call out, but no answer comes. "Ray!"

  Into heat, and burn. This is the Molten Core, and it chars my skin. It consumes me at the edges, eating down through my many layers, until I burst clear, and the Solid Core dawns massive above. It is all girders and black iron, and I am gathered hard up toward it. The line cores me through the Gate of the Dead we blew out so long ago with candlewax, up through the Napoleonic battlefield where So went mad alone, up and into the heart of the Solid Core.

  "I already came this way," I shout out, but no one is listening. "I already got out!"

  The line drags back through the rotational maze, flashing along undulating corridor-tubes in a blur, past the bloody jags of torn Lag still scattered on the RG-beveled flooring. I am torn through the purple clot-ball-stopped rooms of giant books, propelled deeper and deeper through nested levels of the fractal maze, all the way up to the great gout in the blast-door wall where we tore open the aetheric bridge.

  The edges are jagged like torn meat, a ruptured organ in my own mind still raw and leaking ichor. This is what I did to myself. I peer through the gap and within see Doe, Ray, and Me. They are standing with bayonets embedded in their chests, screaming and screaming. They can't seem to stop, they just keep screaming, while Far watches them, as though he's judging them in some kind of contest.

  The line lets me go, and I stagger through the torn blast-door to take my place beside Far, where I listen to them scream. It is an endless harmonic threnody, every note cried out at once, a horrific kind of dirge I am hopelessly part of. I realize that I am screaming too, as there's a bayonet in my chest, and one in Far's, and we're all singing for the loss of some kind of innocence, in the hope it'll push the blades out and undo what we did, but all our voices do is drive the blades in deeper. I can feel the bayonet fusing into my body like an infection, hastened y or perfect harmonics, spreading via my nerves and veins, taking me over and moving me like a I am the Bathyscaphe with a new pilot inside.

  I hear a voice in the air, and recognize it is spoken in my own voice, it is moving up my own throat and out of my own mouth.

  "Hello, Ritry Goligh."

  I scream, into the noisy hammering of a black room and an EMR machine.

  thump thump

  It sounds like an insectile pulse. I'm sweating, terrified, and I can barely see anything but the dim glow cast by the EMR control station's monitor. I try to brush a hand over my eyes and rub away the sweat, but I'm pinioned hand and foot and I can't move. Cold cuffs bite into my wrists as I struggle in position. There's a pain that I can't understand in my right palm, but I can't move to find out what it is, can't see it n the darkness.

  "Hello," I call into the black, my voice a croaky rasp. "Don Zachary? Where's Don Zachary?"

  The figure at the EMR shifts position. I can barely see it from within the EMR tunnel, can make out its outline only, a man, illuminated by the spilled light from the control deck. There's something familiar about the lines of it, about the way it moves, but…

  "Why did you call me, Rit?" it asks. The voice is familiar too, deep, but different. I'm confused and can hardly remember from where. If I did know it, I don't think it was ever so despondent.

  "I was-" I begin, then shake my head. The EMR is still going, and I can barely think outside it. I try to reach out through the bonds, but I can't penetrate the whirring electromagnetic shell. I try again, harder now, but am rebuffed like I'm trapped inside a Molten Core. Panic floods me, as I realize I can't influence anything. I am completely trapped, and contained. I throw myself against the magnetic barrier again and again, each time only dazing myself against it harder.

  What am I? Where am I? Fear steals in through the panic. I thought I escaped them on the train, whoever they were. Marines in black combat gear. I killed them all or their heads were imploded, but did I actually escape? Did they take me? Am I their prisoner even now?

  "Where's the Don?" I repeat, barely managing to hide the fear in my voice. I remember this, a phone call, a Lag. "Where is Don Zachary?"

  The figure shuffles closer. Now the weak light illuminates it only from behind, showing solid shoulders, thick arms, a square-shaped head.

  "Where do you think he is, Rit?" this black shape says. "He knows about you. He knows about your friend. He's been waiting for you, and now he's watching while they try to keep him alive."

  I am puzzled through the fear. The voice seems more familiar, but I have no idea who 'my friend' might be, until the obvious thought hits me.

  Mr. Ruins.

  "Apparently the two of you killed his son together," the voice goes on. "Ten years ago. But the Don never gets, Rit. I don't care about that though. I just want to know, why did you call me into this?"

  He called me Rit, and there's something about the way he said it that's painfully familiar. It helps me remember the calls I made on the train station after the attack. While the toxins raced in my body, after Lagging every bond I could think of to keep my family safe, I made the only calls I could imagine might save my life, to Don Zachary, and...

  "Carrolla?" I whisper.

  He laughs, deep and without any trace of humor.

  "Fuck you, Rit," he says. "Fuck you very much."

  The EMR gets stronger, and I'm swallowed into it.

  Mr. Ruins is standing over my family, and they're cowering. He's holding an invisible ink pen and drawing on their skin, across their faces and chests, down their arms and their legs, connecting them with a secret line only they, he, and I share.

  When it's done he turns to me with that awful shark-grin, and he says the magic word.

  "Alakazam!"

  The invisible line pops into sharp relief, splitting skin in every place it touched, and my family cry out. My children cry out. Their blood pours down from long interstitial wound like dribbles of wet paint.

  "Please!" I cry, but Ruins is grinning so hard I barely hear myself.

  "Too late Ritry," he says. "A day late and a fucklot short."

  He starts to dance.

  I wake in the EMR again.

  The pain is sharper in my right palm, and I can't move, but now the lights are up and I can see people in the room. There are three thuggish men in dark jackets standing around me, there's a pale and sweating Carrolla at the EMR monitor, 10-years older than when I last saw him and wearing it poorly, and right up in my face like a loving mother, there is Don Zachary.

  "Now we talk, yes?" he says.

  THUMP THUMP

  says the EMR, still. I'm less confused, more controlled, and try to slit the Don's thoughts through the bonds, but still I can't do it. I can't break the shield around me, just as I could barely dislodge the EMR-HUDs the marines on the train wore. I don't have the strength to break through, and I don't have the strength to dive the aetheric bridge again and go into him direct.

  I can't do anything. Hapless and helpless, my body begins to convulse, as if somehow it can break itself free.

  Don Zachary watches nonplussed. "You're strapped with p
lastic ties," he says. "You can't break them, you can't rip them. You're here, son. You're stuck with me, and I have one question for you."

  I stop my body from bucking. Instead I lie there panting as a fresh sweat breaks out on my forehead, trying to make sense of how things came to this pass. I told him to come and help me, I implanted the drive deep in his mind, and there is no way this is help.

  I don't know how he's done it.

  "The question is this," says the Don, "and it's very important to me. Where is my son's body?"

  I look up into his wrinkled old face, marred by the big broken nose, cataracty eyes, a chin too small for any crime-boss to have, and can't think of a word to say. What will it mean to him that they dropped mind-bombs on my train? What will it mean to protest ignorance, without the weight of the bonds like reins in my hand?

  "I told you to help me," I say instead, barely a rasp. "On the node, you agreed. I felt it. You wanted to do it."

  Don Zachary leans back and smiles. "You keep trying, don't you?" He turns to Carrolla at the EMR monitor. "Is he trying now?"

  Carrolla nods. I have no doubt he's monitoring my brain activity, watching my every effort to punch through a weakness in the EMR shell. I am trying all the time, though I'm lying very still."Can he break through?"

  "There's no way," Carrolla says flatly. And he's right. I couldn't break through to save my life on the subglacic when Ven and all the others died, and I can't break through now. they've got my body and mind both in a straightjacket.

  "Good." The Don turns back to me, and rests one hand almost tenderly on my chest. "If you hadn't killed my son, and stolen the memory of stealing my son from my own head, then I'd probably want to hire you, Ritry Goligh. You'd be an excellent agent in what's to come. But we're far past that now. Instead, there's my question."

  "I told you to help me," I say again, as if somehow repeating the words will make them true, perhaps revive the thoughts I put in his head. "Why aren't you helping me?"

  He snorts. "Because I was prepared. I know you took all my memories of you, what's it called, Lagged?" he turns to Carrolla, who nods. "You Lagged me, years ago. You Lagged my men. But you left a hole behind, and you didn't fill it with anything else. Did you really think I wouldn't notice? I felt something missing, so I went looking for graysmiths who could've done it. It didn't take long to find you, with all the holes you'd left behind. Just gone, the people on your skulk said. I went to see your graysmithy, and found the marks I'd left behind, because I'd already been there hadn't I. There were some bloody nails lying around. I'd left a repossession notice. Can you imagine what a puzzle that was? We'd made marks on the walls for how we were going to refit it!"

  He pauses to take a breath, and I understand that he's enjoying this. Recounting how he outsmarted me.

  "Then one of my speedboats turns up, the Oricipulis. I had forgotten about it, but there it was, floating abandoned along the tsunami wall. We used the navigation record on it to backtrack your path to a ruined arena on 53, where I found three of my men's bodies. I don't know what you did to them, but they were Lagged all the way, brains turned to soup. You didn't tidy up your trail at all."

  As he speaks a deeper fear begins to well within me. He's right that I didn't clean up my trail then. I hardly cared, believing there was no way they could have followed me. But perhaps I haven't cleaned it up now. That thought starts a slide toward terror. I was drugged and confused after the attack on the train, Lagging everything I could think of, but did I get it all?

  Did I get it all?

  Don Zachary slaps my face. "Look at me, son. Good. After that, it was easy. We found you in Calico. Nothing we could do about that, not then. We weren't equipped. So we watched you, and we waited. Nice family, cute kids."

  My breath stops in my throat.

  He shrugs. "I will, if I have to. If you make me. But she kicked you out, so it hardly seems fair." He laughs. "We lost you for a year after that. I felt sure you were near, but we couldn't find you."

  I feel like telling him I was on the skulks the whole time, already in my own hell, but it would mean nothing to him that I've been hurt by Mr. Ruins too. Mr. Ruins must have been protecting me, shielding me, to suffer only for him. It wouldn't have suited his plans for the Don to scoop me and make his revenge permanent.

  I have too many enemies.

  "Then one day, out of nothing, you call me directly!" he says, clearly still pleased with this development. "You try to influence me again, but this time I was prepared." He points at Carrolla. "I get a scan every day. He dives me looking for outside influence, and until yesterday there was none. Then he found you."

  My mind reels. I look at Carrolla, putting the pieces together in my head. I called Carrolla too, asked for his help, but of course he wouldn't tell the Don. Why then did he tell the Don about me from his dive?

  Don Zachary seems to read this question in my eyes, and waves a hand. "I know he used to work for you. Maybe you're hoping he's still loyal?" He shrugs. "We have to trust others, don't we? But what have you got on him, Ritry Goligh, Calico graysmith, some spotty history together? I've got his wife, just like I've got yours. I've got his children. I've got men I've known since they were babies watching me for any sign I'm being manipulated. If they even think Carrolla there is going against me, bang, he's gone and so are you. So don't think he's going to help you. He works for me."

  I look at Carrolla, and despite everything the Don has said I will him to lower the EMR. Only a second is all I need, long enough to drop everyone in the room, to get out of the machine and reach out to Lag all Don Zachary's loyal thugs. But I can see that he won't. I can see that he's broken. I have ruined his life again, and left him to pick up the pieces alone.

  The Don slaps me a second time. It stings. "So he knows the cost. You know the cost now too. You're not going anywhere, and neither are your kids, are they? Nice boy, nice girl, strange names. So answer the question. Where is my son?"

  I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do. I have no idea where his son is, and I can't dive my way out of this.

  "Tell me wrong, I'll take another finger," the Don says, "then another, until they're all gone. Understand?"

  I remember the last time he made this threat, when Carrolla stood pale-faced and staring at his hand like a pin-cushion, a nail embedded in his hand in the place of a finger.

  I turn to face him. Poor Carrolla. "I'm sorry."

  Carrolla shakes his head. "It's not me. Rit," he says.

  Don Zachary laughs. "We got started when you were under." He does something to loosen the pinion on my right wrist, then holds up my hand for me to see.

  All four fingers and thumb are gone. They have been severed at the base, and jutting out in their places are five fat and rusty black nails.

  Nausea floods me. I start to scream. Halfway through I gag, and vomit on myself.

  The Don is watching. His men are watching.

  "You'll be awake for the next one," the Don says.

  Things start to swirl, from the fresh ache and nausea. The world veers gray and I try to dive into it. My fingers and thumb are missing. I reflexively try to move them, pulling on tendons that now connect to nothing, and only grate against the scarecrow metal in my palm. I can see the dark black nail-lines shift underneath my skin, like parasites.

  I gag and start to faint.

  "No," says the Don sharply, and points at Carrolla. "Keep him awake."

  The wooziness passes quickly, as the EMR cycles shift, vibrating the transponders huddled next to my core cerebellum. Instead of dulling into blackness, my senses are heightened.

  "For that effort, we take one right now," says the Don.

  His men come closer, and hold up a pair of shears already spotted with blood. They unfasten my right hand and hold it up, brace the blades either side of my little finger's base, then snip.

  I bite my lip so hard it bleeds. It isn't the pain, which is short and sharp, or the profusion of blood. It is my finger lying the
re before me on my chest, separated from my body and dying on its own, that fills me with so much sick revulsion I can't tolerate it. I vomit again.

  Next they hammer in the nail. That hurts a lot more.

  I tell the Don everything. I tell him about Mr. Ruins and the aetheric bridge, about the power of broken bonds, about his son dressed up as Napoleon. I tell him I was mind-bombed on the train, that none of us are safe even now, and I don't know where his son is buried any more than he does.

  He listens and nods along. When I'm done, he pats the back of my nail-fingered hand, spiking a special kind of pain.

  "Thank you. That's good. But I don't care who's coming for you; they'll never get in here. It won't get you out. The only thing that will is the coordinates for my son's body."

  He looks at me a long moment. I look back, knowing my eyes are glazed with terror, my shoulder crusted with vomit, the stink of it all around. I want to tell him something, but what can I say?

  "No?" he asks, "not yet? Alright." He signals for the shears, and they come forward.

  "Wait!" I shout, beyond desperate, already repeating myself. "The last time I saw him I was drunk, the day before I took you to the shark arena. He must be somewhere near there, that's all I know."

  The Don shakes his head with a sad smile. "We searched the whole of that burned-down skulk, son. I had divers dredge the waters underneath for a month, and they found nothing. There's nothing there."

  The shears open around my ring finger.

  "Wait, please wait!" I call, reaching out desperately for something else to hold onto. There must be something I can do. Then it comes to me. "I can find out! Let me dive the man I was with, you think he's my friend, and I'll find it. He's the one who killed your son, and he knows where he put him. I'll find where that is, I promise. That's what you want isn't it?"

  The Don raises his hand, and the shears pause, hovering around my finger. He looks at me with interest, then turns to Carrolla.

  "You dived the comatose one, didn't you?"