by M. K. Gibson
“Fuck you!” she yelled, her voice only a throaty roar now. “She would be alive if it wasn’t for you!” Caitlin pointed the cybernetic arm at me, and several high-powered submachine gun and energy-based weapons sprang up, all poised and ready to take me down.
I just stared at the weapon like I was supposed to. In fake shock and fear. I knew, as Caitlin did, that all the plasma and conventional munitions for her bio-mech arm were confiscated when she was arrested. Otherwise, she would have already blown a hole in this place.
No, this was only for show. But I had to play along. I wanted to yell at the crazy bitch. Tell her I didn’t kill Theresa. Tell her that Theresa betrayed me. But I didn’t say any of those things. I only stood there and waited.
Part of me just wanted to find the munitions, grab her weapon, arm it, and hold all the barrels to my head, giving her a clean shot. But my sorrow for the situation wouldn’t help anyone. So I just held Cat’s gaze with my own, refusing to look away, taking all the punishment her eyes gave me.
After a moment, she retracted the weapons and walked over to me, slapped me as hard as she could in the mouth with her human hand, and then hugged me and cried. I put my arm around her and cried with her.
“Your fault, all your fucking fault,” she said, her voice muffled by my chest.
“Yeah,” was all I could say. She needed to blame someone. I let it be me.
Grimm broke the silence. “Ms. Spinoli. I deeply regret your loss, but we must get you and the rest of the survivors out of here. Did you see any way out when you were brought to the citadel?”
“Who the fuck are you?” Caitlin demanded as she sniffed and released me. She turned on Grimm, raising her weapon arm.
“Whoa, easy, Cat. He’s a friend. He’s with me. Archduke Abraxas sent troops last night to raid Dante’s and Cyberai to pick up Grimm and me.”
“I remember now. He’s the spooky guy who’s has been hanging around the bar recently,” Cat said as she started to compose herself. “Why do they want you?”
“Long story. But he has a point. We need to get you all out of here. Did you see the way into this place? And have you seen Jensen?” I asked, hoping to make her calm down and use her brain. Poor Theresa was the only person I knew of who could keep her short-fused sister in check.
Caitlin let her eyes linger angrily on Grimm for a few awkward moments and turned back to me. “No. They put black sacks over our heads and gassed us. I never saw Jensen after that. Next thing I knew I was waking up in that cell. I had to watch as they did those horrible things to those people and my sister.” Caitlin’s voice cracked. She was barely hanging on. Poor kid had been through damn near literal hell.
“Cat, what the fuck is wrong with you?!” I yelled in her ear. She snapped her gaze at me, eyes wide and angry. “Boo freaking hoo. Your sister’s dead and you’re pouting like a little girl. Theresa held out against torture and being ripped apart, while you cry and shit on her memory?! There are people here who need help and you’re the only crazy bitch I know who’s present AND has a freaking bazooka for an arm. So cut the shit, whip out them lady-balls and get your sweet ass into gear!”
It was a risky move. But Cat always responded to loud and direct. For a moment, she appeared like she was going to launch herself at me. Then she relaxed. Her face and eyes became attentive.
“What do you need?” she responded, now focused.
I unpuckered my ass. That could have literally blown up in my face. Too bad she was so young and missed out on the wars. She would have made a hell of a soldier.
“Grimm and I are going to find a way out of here. But we can’t take you and all these people with us. So you all are gonna hole up here. Block off the entrances and wait for backup. You see something not human, blow its fucking head off. In fact, fuck that. Anything that isn’t us, you ventilate them.”
“You got it,” she said smartly. She immediately began organizing the thirty or so freed prisoners. They all started by arming themselves with scavenged weapons from the chamber and then began moving the torture devices to the doorways, blocking them off. No one questioned her. Odd, because she was still dressed as she was from the previous night, in her volt blue synth-skin bikini and matching thigh-high boots. I guess a near-naked hot woman with a cybernetic war cannon for an arm and temper to match was hard to argue with.
“Salem,” Caitlin called to me, “we’re not through.” I knew a reckoning was coming with her and me. I nodded. “Also, I think the way out is that way.” She pointed to a small arched door I had nearly missed in the firelight of the chamber. “They took several prisoners through there and I never saw any of the guards return.” I nodded again and then Grimm and I headed to the door.
As I opened it, Grimm was beside me speaking quietly. “You didn’t need to take her abuse.”
“Yes I did. For so many reasons, I did.”
“It was not your fault,” he said back to me.
“I never said it was. Someone just had to take the abuse.”
The door led to a small hallway lit by more fire sconces. At the opposite end was a large wide stairwell leading up. However, halfway down the hall was a stairwell leading down. I saw the same cabling from the great hall coming from down those stairs and leading up and out along the stairwell we were facing. I switched my eyes into the same spectrum from earlier and saw the flow of energy coming from downstairs and going up. Before I could tell Grimm, he stopped me.
“We need to go down those stairs,” he said. His voice was deadly serious.
“Yeah, there is some type of weird energy coming from down there. I think it is the same stuff that was powering Abraxas.”
“Then it could only be one thing,” Grimm said.
“Yeah. A well of souls.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Neither Living nor Dead
We made our way down the stairs, which seemed to lead from the bottom of the citadel to the top of the great skyscraper it rested upon. The architecture changed from stone hellwork to human corporate. A reinforced steel door with an ambient passive-laser personnel scanner blocked our way. The green wave of light passed over Grimm and me. The HD-OLED screen by the door registered a denied entry. I tried the door and the magna-lock clamps slammed into place.
Grimm’s eyes began to light up, and I stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. “Save your energy, and just watch my back for guards.” I stood in front of the control panel and activated the holo-terminal on my left tech bracer. The icons floated in the air, and I selected what I needed. I ran a hack program my father had written and I’d added onto over the years. The wireless interface connected and in a few moments, the light on the display screen turned green and the steel doors slid open.
Closing the terminal projector, I extended my arm and bowed. “After you.”
Grimm walked past me into the arch of the steel doorway, paused, and regarded my tech bracers. “Electrical charge, nano wire filament for rappelling, concealed blades, wireless computer net hacker, shield generator, mass inducer, and a few other tricks. But a clock was just too much. Hmm.” He then continued through the arch and into the next room.
“Oh, fuck you, Gandalf,” I said as Grimm walked past me. “Oh, and T added those last couple of items. Get on his ass for not adding a bloody watch.”
As I followed him through the door, I swore I heard him laugh under his breath.
We walked down a short modern hallway. The OLED luminescent wall panels lit the way in soft warm light. The air was very brisk from the building’s industrial air conditioner running on high. Why did they need it this cold? The cold air made me miss my density coat. Besides being a technological marvel that had saved my life many times, it was temperature regulating, and it was kick-ass vintage. But leaving it on poor Theresa was the right thing. I could always make another coat. May it protect her body long enough to see it to a proper burial. My sleeveless black Social D t-shirt and bracers would have to do for now.
Before the hallway
ended, I felt great heat. Waves of heat came rolling down the hallway, as did the loud hum of machinery. That explained the heat and need of AC. The room we entered was cavernous. It was nearly the entire length and width of the building itself. Reinforced support columns were staggered evenly, holding the weight of the citadel above it.
“Where’re the people?” I asked. “The guards or the technicians?”
“I do not know. Be on guard.”
“Oh, is that what I am supposed to do in the super creepy machine room that rests below a Hell torture chamber?”
“You are not funny. At all. You may in fact have a brain disease,” Grimm said with a slight smirk.
“Yeah yeah. What do you make of all that?” I asked as I gestured around the huge room.
Rows upon rows of stacked rectangular machines lined the entire space, from nearly floor to ceiling. Each machine was glossy jet black, was about seven feet long, two feet deep, and four feet wide, and had an ARCTech logo stamped on the side.
Each stack of machines was mounted to a custom scaffold with a redundant power supply and computerized monitoring. Bundled wires and cables led to a central hub in the middle of the great room. The room was dark, lit only by giant computer monitors and the color-shifting scrawl of luminescent Denochian script etched into the walls and the machinery itself.
Grimm stiffened at the demonic writing. He moved to the nearest glyph and I could hear him mumbling. “No, no, no,” he rasped. He moved like a man possessed, checking each of the symbols. Then he walked off in a frenzy, angrily muttering.
“Grimm! Hey! Where are you going? Remember don’t do anything stupid? Walking off in giant scary room is stupid!” I yelled after Grimm, but he ignored me and vanished into the shadows of the vast dark room. I all but threw up my arms. I lit a smoke and made my way to the nearest computer terminal, where I started a wireless hack from my tech bracer.
Once I was in the system, I started sifting through the data. What I found made me sick to my stomach. I quickly moved away from the screen and went to the nearest rack of machines. I checked the computer there, comparing the readings there with what I had just seen on the master computer. I found the release sequence and tried it, but nothing happened.
I stared at the machine. There was something about it. Something familiar. If I stripped away the extra wires and the modifications I could see what the machine was. I should know, because I helped build some just like it. My hands moved on their own as I felt the essence of the machine, like a puzzle falling into place. I activated the release.
The machine slid back an exterior layer to reveal a transparent secondary layer. Inside I saw what I feared.
A person.
Each of these machines contained a person. The one in this machine was a man, maybe forty, and he had so many wires and cables going in and out of him, I didn’t know if he even counted as human anymore. I checked another, and that one held a woman in her mid-twenties. Another held a grandmother. Another held a fat eight-year-old boy.
A freaking kid.
This was it. This was the source of Abraxas’s power.
I saw that the wiring itself held tiny glowing Denochian glyphs. Following the main power lines, I found the central hub of the room. There was an industrial freight elevator, no doubt to move the machines in and out. At the center was a massive cylindrical next-generation supercomputer. I located the access terminal and began a hack. This was an ARCTech DRAGON XV series. Top-of-the-line thinking machines that could eat hackers for breakfast. And the lines from all the machines on this floor seemed to be tied to this one.
My dad had been bugging me for months to get one of these bad boys for our own home lab. The DRAGON series were initially designed to maintain and regulate lifecycle functions for hospital patients while running the power grid and every other critical function. Truthfully, I wanted one also. It would be perfect for our needs. With my parents’ bodies in their suspended states and brain functions constantly being mapped by AI machines, the DRAGON would regulate it better than the homemade version we had back at the lair. I just didn’t really have a way to haul the massive fucker down to my lair without detection.
The XV refused my hack over and over. I had partial access only. I could see that beyond the few thousand people in this room, the top thirty stories of the skyscraper had been converted into rooms just like this one. Thirty floors full of people like this. Almost a hundred thousand souls, all being drained.
I heard someone behind me and I turned, popping the collapsible blades in my tech-bracers. Grimm held up his hands to stop me before I started swinging. I retracted the blades and then had a thought.
“I never hear you coming,” I said, confused. He smelled horrible, like rotting meat. “Take a look at this,” I said, turning my back on Grimm.
I heard him move suddenly and I turned back just in time to see his eyes go black and his mouth open wide to impossible size. Three rows of needle-sharp teeth lined the upper and lower part of his now elongated mouth. He darted at me, and I moved quickly aside. He swung his hands out, claws now in place of his fingers and a greenish pus-like fluid flying from the tips. I covered my eyes quickly. Whatever this shifter demon was, I was sure that goop was meant to fuck up my day.
As the faux Grimm advanced again, I moved in under its wild-clawed swings and punched straight at its sternum. I heard the bone crack and the demon hissed in pain. I popped the blades again and brought both my arms up strong and fast, severing the connection of the pectoral muscle and shoulders and rendering its arms useless. The creature wailed in pain and I kicked its knee, sending it to the ground. It tried standing up, but I never gave it a chance. I brought the heel of my boot down hard on the back of its neck, breaking its spine. The beast stopped and went still. It started to shift, reverting back to its normal state of being.
The creature was large and muscular, with soot-black skin with light brown markings. It had curved tusk teeth protruding from the upper and lower jaw. Some type of demon I was not familiar with. I wish Mom had been online; she would have told me in a moment.
“Salem?” I heard Grimm’s voice call out. I began to call back, to let him know where I was, and then I thought better of it. What if it was another of these things trying to finish the job? But at the same time, Grimm was out there no doubt dealing with something similar. There was no way only one guard was watching over this place.
“Salem? Where are you?” Grimm’s voice called out again.
“Over here, by the elevator and the large glowing computer,” I called back. I closed my eyes and listened for anything approaching. I heard nothing, which was a good sign.
“What are you doing?” I heard Grimm’s voice from a few feet away and to my left. I opened my eyes, and Grimm stood there with a severed head swinging by its hair, grasped tightly in his fist. The head was almost identical to the creature that lay on the floor by me.
“Stop!” I ordered. “When I was in your lair, and you held me prisoner for nine days. What was my final response to your question?” Grimm looked at the body on the ground and the head in his hand and got the point of the question.
“You said you no longer wished to be alone,” he responded. “What attacked you on the building when I hired you to deliver that package?”
“T’s mechanized ants,” I said. That seemed to suffice for identifying who we were. But neither of us relaxed.
“Well, seems like you had a run-in with something that looked like me. What gave it away?”
“Nothing. I have wanted to stab you for some time. This was just lucky,” Grimm joked. I looked at him and scowled. “The creature did not have your way of being. Your swagger. And when it did not try and tell a joke, I knew something was wrong. And yours?”
“I heard it approach. And the smell.”
“Yes. I noticed that too. At first I thought it to be some sort of ghoul.” Grimm raised the severed head into the light, studying it. “However, when I saw its true form, I knew it then to be
a raksasha.”
I shook my head. “New to me. What are they?”
“Demonic creatures from India’s folklore. Shape shifters and cannibals. They like to take the form of someone their victim knows to get their guard down, then eat them while they are still alive.”
“Well, that’s just gruesome. A hundred plus gods weren’t enough for India? They need shape-shifting cannibals?”
I pointed to the DRAGON XV behind me. “Between this supercomputer and the—raksashas, was it?” Grimm nodded. “That explains the lack of technicians and people needed to run this place.”
Grimm arched an eyebrow, questioning my meaning.
“This computer can regulate everything in this room and all the subsequent thirty floors just like it. No need for people. And the raksashas to guard, and my guess dispose of, any lost stock.” I walked Grimm over to one of the machine pods and showed him the person inside.
“The glyphs along the walls, on the machines, and in the wiring itself are similar to the Whitechapel spell,” Grimm said. “But something is different.”
“What’s different?”
“It is hard to explain. Certain factors need to be in place for this rite to work. Previously in Whitechapel, the whores never quite perfected it. There is a unique state of being the victim is required to be in.”
“Neither living nor dead,” I said in a quiet whisper.
“Yes. Exactly. How did you know?”
I lit a smoke and closed my eyes, then opened them and nodded at the machines. “Those machines. They are a fancier version of my phase stasis boxes. The reason I can keep things in pristine condition is because they exist slightly out of time. Neither living nor dead.”
“The design your father created?”
“Yeah. And that’s not worst of it.”
“What is?”
I gestured to the machine’s side. Along the sleek black exterior was the stylized three triangles coming together to form an inverted red triangle with a Y-shape in the negative space. The ARCTech logo. These things were already in mass production.
