by Sara King
In the hallway outside, the scratching sound had stopped.
“What’s she doing, Mickey?” Slade demanded.
“Uh,” Mickey said nervously, “standing in the door.”
“In the headlights?” Slade demanded.
“Uh, yeah.” Mickey swallowed hard.
“Pack!” Slade cried. He threw a last few things into his pile, mentally sent a prayer to the post-surgery recovery gods, bent down, and flipped the unconscious woman over his shoulder. Grabbing the bundle of surgery tools and his flashlight, he gestured for Mickey to follow him out the back of the surgery. “This way,” he said.
Mickey’s eyes immediately widened. “We’re leaving the bike?”
“And the batteries,” Slade confirmed. “Let’s go!”
But Mickey didn’t move. “Why are we leaving the bike?”
“Because I’m counting on the physics that two males, more or less in their prime, can outrun a female who never worked out a day in her life.
Mickey blinked at him. “But she’s dea—”
“Let’s go, goddamn it!” Slade shouted, throwing the door open. “Run, or I swear to God, when she kills me, I’ll haunt your ass until you have to tug me in.”
Mickey went so utterly pale Slade had to wonder if he was bleeding from his feet. Then the little guy snatched up the backpack and dodged out the open door with him.
“Now go!” Slade cried, lunging out the door and hurtling up the hallway with him. Then they were bolting around the corner and up the hall. And Slade, even carrying a hundred and thirty pounds of unconscious, drooling woman, at six-foot-seven and having recently fallen under the cruel microscope of a sadistic Congie, was still able to keep up with the wiry little twit.
Behind them, they heard a shriek and the clatter of headlights and batteries as something knocked the bike over and started shredding the electronics of the room they’d just left.
“Go, go, go, go, go!” Slade cried. They bolted for the surface, through hallways that Slade had left intentionally dark…to attract ghosts. A minute later, the darkened hall connected with one of the well-lit corridors and they burst out into the light with relieved gasps.
Behind them, they heard cackling.
“Run!” Slade cried, pushing Mickey ahead of him. If they could just keep going, they were home free. Mickey jumped, then gave another impressive burst of speed for a little guy.
Then they were lunging over rancid bodies and Mickey was starting to slow, the obscure green door looming ahead of them. Behind them, much too close for comfort, the sound of razor blades digging into concrete was catching up.
“Run, you little twit,” Slade snapped, shoving him.
Mickey stumbled, blinked, and ran.
“Which way?!” Mickey screamed, as they neared an intersection.
“Left, go left!” Slade cried, accessing his mental snapshot of the compound.
Mickey turned right, and he was too far ahead for Slade to grab him and tug him to the left.
“Your other left!” Slade shouted at his back. Mickey either didn’t hear him or was too caught up in his terror to care. Seeing him bolting down the wrong hallway, Slade academically considered leaving him behind to distract the psycho with the knife. Then that empathy the psychologists loved to disregard clunked into focus, leaving him with a heavy weight in his chest, and, the sound of knives etching the concrete behind him, Slade faced a life-or-death split-second decision.
If Slade left him here, Mickey was going to die alone and scared in the very same place that, if there were any justice at all in the world, he should never have had to return to in the first place.
Yet, if Slade ran after him, both of them were going to die. Horribly.
Then the sound of laughing began to echo in his head and Slade thought, God hates a coward. He cursed and ran after the lizard-faced twit.
As they hurtled through the hallways at full speed, their boots squeaking on the polished floors, Slade analyzed the map of the facility in his mind, trying desperately to plan a loop to get them back to the surface. “Take a left!” he shouted, putting on a burst of speed to grab Mickey by the shirt and shove him left when he again tried to go right. “We’ll work our way around her!” Then he was leading the pack, turning them in a wide arc, mentally plotting a course through the maze in his mind.
They came to a sudden halt when they met a brick wall where there should have been a door. Slade’s mouth fell open. “That wasn’t on the map!” he cried, feeling betrayed.
“She’s still behind us!” Mickey screamed, shoving Slade to the side, toward a door set into the wall marked OBSERVATION.
Slade frowned at the door, recognizing it as a short hall that dead-ended in an observation deck from his map, but Mickey was already blasting it open and pushing them inside.
Instantly, the stink of rot and decay hit them in an overpowering olfactory assault that made Slade’s stomach spasm. He tried to slow, but Mickey was shoving him forward with his mind, now, probably buoyed by sheer terror.
Immediately in the hallway on the other side, Slade’s flashlight picked up the unmistakable shapes of bodies. All of these, however, were dressed in government uniforms, lab coats, and expensive suits, all stained with the juices of decay. Unlike the bodies in the outer halls, however, these had not been consumed by flies, and the stink was overpowering.
“Oh my God,” Slade gagged, holding his hand to his mouth. He tried to stop, knowing that, for so many officials to have died in one place, whatever was back here could not be good, but Mickey was shoving him relentlessly onward. “Mickey, stop!” he cried, seeing that, sure enough, they were headed into a dead-end room that was even then propped open with dead bodies.
But Mickey kicked the door shut behind them and then shoved Slade farther through the clusters of bodies, shoving a corpse blocking the second door out of the way so he could wrench that one shut, too. The stench from the dislodged body was unbelievable. This time, Slade couldn’t resist the urge to retch.
Dropping to his knees, he had just enough time to lower Emerald to a spot devoid of corpses before he emptied his meager breakfast out over the floor in a visceral response to the rot around him. “Mickey, goddamn it,” he gasped, “now we’re stuck!”
But Mickey was now wide-eyed, staring at the corpses littering the room. His flashlight was darting from the individual bodies, then to the huge, tinted observation window overlooking what Slade assumed to be the Dark Room.
“They’re dead?” Mickey whispered.
“I’m more interested in the poltergeist at the moment,” Slade snapped. “You realize this is a dead fucking end, right, Mickey?!” He picked Emerald up and carried her away from the clusters of bodies around the door and put his back to the wall, panting. His heart was hammering. “Where is she?”
Mickey was still staring at the corpses, the flashlight once again trying to fall from his fingers.
“Mickey!” Slade shouted. “Where is Ten-F?!”
Mickey swallowed and tore his eyes from the lab-coated corpses. “Ten-F?” He sounded like a scared little kid.
“The one that’s trying to kill us,” Slade reminded him.
Mickey seemed to shake himself and glanced behind them at the door. “She’s still back there.” Indeed, now that Slade was paying attention, he could hear the rending of sheet-metal over the hammering of his heart.
“Mickey,” Slade said evenly, “we need to figure something out, and fast.” He gestured at the window. “Can you get us through that?”
Mickey glanced at the sheet of glass, then walked over and warily put his hand to it. He frowned and grunted, then bent slightly, holding his head.
“What?” Slade demanded.
“It’s not breaking,” Mickey gritted.
Of course not. Because the researchers in their nice, cushy chairs monitoring the experiments inside wouldn’t want to be disturbed by minor unpleasantries like exploding glass or self-propelled scalpels. They would have made it thic
k enough to hold back a tank. Maybe one of the eleven or twelve series could have broken through, but Mickey had told him it was Eight-F. A lackey that Codgson had clearly picked for his psychotic properties, not his latent talents. It wasn’t until the Eleven-Series that things really started getting interesting…
“Dammit,” Slade muttered, listening to the poltergeist carving her way towards them with an ethereal scalpel. “Damn, damn!” He swallowed hard, thinking. Glass could be broken with sound, differences in air pressure, heat, or electricity. It could also be melted with acid. He didn’t have any industrial strength acid, and he was fairly sure they didn’t have what it took to scream at the right pitch to break the glass—even with the threat of scalpels. And, if Mickey couldn’t simply break it, then he doubted getting him to shove air out of the room was going to do anything other than suffocate them. He glanced at the empty workstations with their blackened display monitors. The Dark Room was, unfortunately, not one of the places that Slade had considered a priority for electrical power.
That left heat.
Slade glanced at the backpack that Mickey even then carried on his shoulder. Stepping up, he yanked the pack from his friend’s back and started digging through it. “Watch her,” he ordered. “I’m gonna pull something out of my ass.” He yanked out the various bottles of lab goodies he’d taken from the supply rooms, eying each before tossing it aside. He hesitated when he found the bottle of pure zinc powder, which he set aside. Saying a prayer to the gods of fun, explosive science experiments, he went through the last four bottles, then let out a little giggle of relief when he found a bottle of powdered sulfur.
“All right,” Slade said, “I need you to form half a bowl with your mind. A regular-sized bowl, cupped against the glass. Right here. Now.” He pointed to the center of the wall of glass, then hastily cupped it with his hand for emphasis. “You’ve gotta let air get to the fire or it’ll go out. Got it?!”
Mickey glanced at the glass, gave him a look like he had monkeys coming out of his ears, then turned to look over his shoulder at the progress of the knife-wielding maniac. “But she’s almost—”
“A bowl,” Slade shouted. “Now.”
Blinking, Mickey glanced again at the floor in front of him. “Just a bowl?”
“Yes, do it. I’m going to set it on fire, then you’re gonna hold it there. Got it?”
Mickey frowned at him, but thankfully did as he was told.
As soon as Slade felt the ‘bowl’ solidify against the glass, he dumped all of the zinc and all of the sulfur into it and mixed it with a scalpel. “Okay, keep holding it,” he said. He got a whole pack of matches, flipped the paper protector back, then swiped them across the ignition band of another pack. Before the matches had a chance to fully light, he dropped it into the bowl. “Hold on!” Slade cried, eying the bowl, then the exit. The poltergeist had reached the second door and was clawing at it with her knives. “Things are about to get interesting.”
“But she’s—”
“Yes, I know she’s coming,” Slade snapped, grabbing him by the face and forcing his head back around to look at the ‘bowl’ of zinc and sulfur. “Focus on what you’re doing or we’re both gonna die.” As he had hoped, the igniting potassium chlorate and red phosphorus of the match heads made enough heat to ignite the zinc and sulfur combination. Seeing the sudden blue flame leap out of the ‘bowl,’ Mickey jerked backwards.
“Keep holding it against the glass,” Slade warned him.
The sheer amount of zinc and sulfur that Slade had poured into Mickey’s ‘bowl’ began burning so violently that a sheet of blue-green flame two feet high was lighting up the entire room, making the grisly faces of the corpses glow and flicker almost like they were in motion. The glass behind the zinc-sulfur flare was starting to heat a molten red.
Then, like an ice cube dropped into a glass of warm water, the entire pane of glass split and cracked, creating a jagged thunderbolt-shaped fissure across the surface.
“Push it out!” Slade cried. “Shove it!”
Mickey gave a sweaty frown, then he was pushing the glass—fireball and all—into the room beyond. At the same time, Ten-F’s high-pitched giggling hit his mind like a twenty-foot gong. A fast learner, Slade dropped and rolled, and a moment later, the wall near his head became a furrow of pulverized concrete.
“Fuck!” Slade screamed, rolling over one of the decomposed bodies. He had a mental spasm of horror at the way the corpse seemed to squish gelatinously underneath him, but he was already scrabbling up, crawling towards Emerald. “Get out through the window!” Slade screamed at Mickey. “Go! Run!”
But Mickey was standing there staring in at the hemispherical space that was inside of the Dark Room—now brilliantly lit up with a continuing reaction of zinc sulfide—with the same terrified eyes of a scared little kid.
Then another insane, shrill scream reverberated through his mind and Slade hastily rolled out of the way. For his part, Mickey was backing away from the window with a look of total horror. Realizing that Mickey wasn’t going to willingly enter the room while conscious, something knocked the rest of the rust off Slade’s mental gears. He remembered the cluster of bodies on the far side of the green door, willing to starve to death before they passed the door. As Slade crab-crawled away from the otherworldly furrow cutting its way through the floor, towards his feet, something clicked for him.
The Dark Room, he thought. She’s gonna be afraid of the Dark Room.
Making another split-second decision, Slade grabbed Emerald, threw her over his shoulder as gently as he could in his haste, and launched himself at Mickey. He hit the little man in the back with a linebacker’s move and the three of them went tumbling through the window, narrowly avoiding the burning sulfur on the floor.
“No!” Mickey shrieked, kicking at him. “No!”
“Come on,” Slade shouted, tugging the smaller man. “We can still get out of here!”
“Let go!” Mickey screamed, desperately trying to get back in the room with the deranged dead person.
Unwilling to deal with his horseshit with a knife-wielding maniac nearby, Slade grabbed him by the hair and started yanking him towards the exit.
Slade wasn’t sure if it was desperation, animal fury, or sheer, unadulterated terror, but Mickey yanked off his glove with his teeth and grasped Slade’s forearm with his glowing fingers, a heart-stoppingly sinister look in his single amethyst eye. Slade immediately collapsed, his legs going completely numb, his back caught under the body of the woman he’d been carrying. Realizing that Mickey was about to try and kill him again, Slade tried to twist away, attempting to tug himself out of the hiveminder’s grip. And, in that instant, a naked woman appeared in the busted window, staring in at them in pale-faced terror.
“Wait!” Slade cried, barely even paying attention to the man who was trying to kill him. He held up a trembling, numb hand. “Just wait.”
Mickey seemed to blink, but only momentarily. Then his face tightened in a frown again and the purple glow in his hand became almost as eye-searing as the zinc sulfide reaction. Slade felt the rest of his body going numb.
“No, goddamn it, stop trying to kill me, Virginia, I can see her,” Slade snapped. “She’s right there!”
Mickey hesitated, tentatively meeting Slade’s eyes, then nervously followed his gaze back to the window.
The woman standing at the broken glass was naked, but looked almost like a solidification of stationary, fuzzy mist—or dust particles. The colors were rich, but at the same time less intense, as if there were infinite space between each speck of ‘dust,’ leaving her looking almost washed out. Her visage was utterly unaffected by the flaring zinc and sulfur that was even then sputtering and dying in the center of the Dark Room. If anything, the sputtering flashes of light made her less visible.
“You see her?” Mickey whispered, once the zinc and Sulphur reaction had gone completely out, leaving the only light that of the flashlights that they’d left back up in the obse
rvation deck with the ghost.
Something about the appearance of the apparition was suddenly making sense to him, and Slade felt his mind churning in an exciting new direction. Back inside the window, the specter dropped her scalpels and slumped into a fetal position, hugging her knees and staring at the room, crying. In a fifteen-foot perfect sphere all around her, the walls, glass, and even the air seemed to carry their own luminescence, something that was definitely not there before Mickey grabbed his arm. He and Mickey, at least for the time being, had been completely forgotten in favor of the greater horror of the Dark Room.
“Why didn’t you say the walls were glowing around her?” Slade cried.
“I thought it was obvious,” Mickey said, frowning at him. In this new light, Mickey, too, had a glimmering sphere of energy around him, though his was a shade of purple and had no hard lines, instead fading outwards until it was imperceptible.
Excited, now, Slade ineffectually tried to get to his feet. Irritated that he couldn’t move, he gave a weak tug of his arm and said, “Let me stand up. But for the love of God keep holding onto me.”
Mickey reluctantly released whatever mental hold he’d taken on him, allowing Slade to numbly get back to his feet. Mickey followed him, still gripping his arm.
“Look at it,” Slade said, gesturing. Now that he was standing, Slade could see the edge of the bluish luminescence on the floor at his feet, running in a circle around the terrified woman. “She isn’t even seeing us right now. See?” He waved his hands and her head didn’t even turn to look.
Mickey blinked at him. “What?”
Slade was so excited now that he could barely form words. “She no longer sees us, Mickey. You know what that means?”
Mickey just gave him a blank look.
Slade groaned. “Okay. See that sphere?” he insisted. “I’ll bet you anything that’s the imprint of her consciousness, or what’s left of it. A psychic time-capsule. And we’re outside it, so we just ceased to exist to her. Watch.” For Mickey’s clarification, Slade put one hand to cup his mouth and shouted, “Hey! Ten-F!”
