by Seth Patrick
Sly reached the stairwell but as Jonah followed he caught a glimpse of movement of the head of one of the shadows, and a corresponding movement from its host. He kept going, but had a clear feeling that the head had been turning because it had sensed them.
Then he realized that Kendrick wasn’t following them down the stairs.
‘They see me,’ hissed Kendrick, being careful not to turn towards Jonah and Sly. ‘Keep going. As long as they didn’t see you I can draw them off.’
Kendrick raised his gun and fired two short bursts before turning and running.
Sly was already at the base of the stairs but she held a hand up for Jonah to stay still. He felt it, then – a single shadow, moving past behind him, giving chase to Kendrick. Nothing else came. Jonah wondered if they needed to keep the circle unbroken, or if it was just another sign of the arrogance Andreas and his people possessed.
Sly and Jonah ran, reaching the floor below as they heard Kendrick’s gunfire recede down the corridor; there was a cry of pain, Sly looking back for an instant, torn but not stopping.
The walls were bare concrete; fifty yards along, the wall to the left took on a curvature just as the corridor came to an end at a metal door. Jonah presumed it led to the lower part of the circular area. The mechanical whine was so loud now it had to be coming from there. The machine, Jonah thought.
‘That has to be it,’ said Sly, approaching a box on the wall: five feet across, thick cabling leading to it as Never had suggested. She took a charge from her belt and paired it to the trigger, waiting until the light went green, then removing a layer of plastic from the back, revealing an adhesive strip. She placed the charge against the box. ‘Here,’ she said, handing her trigger to Jonah. ‘Faster, if you pair them and I place.’
She took the remaining charges from her harness and set them on the floor. Jonah started the pairing process, quickly getting through all of Sly’s charges and starting on those of his own. The rapid pulsing of the dim lights was overwhelming now. Jonah kept half an eye on the base of the stairs they’d come down, knowing that whatever had happened to Kendrick, there had to be a good chance of that shadow, or another, deciding to investigate.
‘That’ll do,’ said Sly. ‘Check that door while I place these.’ She nodded to the metal door thirty feet from where they stood. ‘We’ll need to take cover when we trigger this.’
Jonah pocketed the trigger and ran to the door. It wasn’t locked, but it was obviously strong; the frame was metal too, and it looked like the door could form an airtight seal if need be. Inside was an empty narrow room, a row of four monitors on a table along the wall showing grids of slowly changing digits that meant nothing to him. The only other door led inwards, presumably towards the circular area. Within the room, the mechanical whine was extremely loud. Almost a scream.
He emerged from the doorway, and Sly looked towards him. He nodded – the door seemed sturdy enough to provide the cover they required. As Sly turned back to place the final charges, Jonah caught movement high on the stairs forty yards behind her.
A shadow was descending.
‘Sly,’ he called. ‘Get over here. Now.’
Her head flicked to the side for an instant, then back to the task in hand. ‘I see it,’ she said. ‘Just one more to place.’
It was already at the base of the stairs, coming slowly, walking with a casual, arrogant hostility.
‘Come on,’ yelled Jonah. He took position at the other side of the door, leaning out with one hand ready to pull the door shut. As Sly stuck the last charge to the hub, she looked at the creature, and just as she did, it picked up speed.
Sly ran towards Jonah. Behind her he could see the shadow striding towards them, faster now, rapidly closing the gap on Sly. He took the trigger from his pocket and tensed, keeping the doorway as clear as he could, ready to close the door behind her. He thought of the screams of the shadows in the inferno Kendrick had engineered at the safe house, and desperately wondered if the charges Sly had laid would have any effect on this creature.
‘Run, Sly,’ he called. ‘Don’t look back, just run . . .’
Five more strides and she leapt for the doorway, the shadow almost on her. Jonah pulled the door closed as quickly as he could, seeing Sly falling and the shadow’s claw coming around the door to take her.
He pushed the button.
61
Jonah opened his eyes to total darkness, so disoriented that, for a terrible moment, he thought he was back with his torturer, Hopkins. Only for a moment, thank God. He could hear nothing but the high-pitched ringing in his ears caused by the explosion. The pain in his left shoulder and wrist was severe.
‘Sly?’ he said, hardly able to hear his own voice. He waited for a few seconds, until his hearing recovered a little. The mechanical roar of the machine – impossibly loud when he’d opened the door – had changed to a stuttering wail, rapidly decreasing in volume and pitch. ‘Sly?’
‘Right here,’ she called, very close by. He looked in the direction of her voice, and as he did, red emergency lighting flickered on in the ceiling. She smiled at him. ‘Cutting it fine, wasn’t I?’ She looked at the door, suddenly wary.
Jonah stood, and as he did so he moved his left arm to test his shoulder. It hurt like hell, but it was still in working order. The pain in his wrist was settling, and he could flex it. He thought of the explosion: feeling his arm forced back along with the door as it slammed hard shut, the instant after he’d seen Sly falling. And the claw, the dark claw coming into sight . . .
He faced the door, feeling like it could be torn from the frame at any moment. It looked somehow off, and it took him a second to see why. At the top it had been forced inside the frame by at least an inch; in the middle of the door the tip of a shard of metal shrapnel protruded. Yes, it had been strong enough to shield them from the blast, but only just.
He realized something else.
‘I can’t feel it,’ he said. ‘The shadow. I’m sure I could feel it before, feel that it was there.’ He moved his hand towards the door handle, certain that under the noise of the explosion he’d heard a truncated shriek from the shadow outside.
‘No,’ said Sly. ‘No. Just leave it. If it’s gone, great, but I’d rather we found another way out.’
Jonah looked at the door again; buckled slightly and wedged in the frame, he suspected it wouldn’t open even if they wanted it to. ‘OK. Can you walk?’
Sly winced. ‘My foot was caught badly by the door. I can feel the bones grinding in my ankle. You’ll need to scout ahead, OK?’ She looked at the other door in the room, the one that led into the circular area.
The pitch of the mechanical whine was lowering as they spoke. There was a sudden deep thump and the sound stopped completely.
What replaced it was silence. They both strained to listen. For a few seconds there was nothing, then another sound began: a scream growing from beyond their only other exit, a deep, inhuman cry that filled Jonah’s head and made him crouch for protection for the long seconds before it ceased. It was a cry similar to one he’d heard before, in his visions of the Beast striding over the dark landscape, but now there was an edge of pain to it. An element of despair.
‘Oh Christ,’ said Sly, looking at the door. ‘Was that what I think it was?’
‘Andreas,’ said Jonah, weary. ‘Has to be.’
‘Hurt, right? It sounds hurt.’
Jonah nodded but said nothing. They needed it to be more than just hurt.
‘Shit,’ said Sly. ‘The radio.’ She fumbled at her side then brought it to her mouth. ‘Boss? Annabel?’ Just the eerie interference they’d heard before, Jonah getting the same unsettling feeling that he could hear whispers in the noise.
‘Turn it off,’ he said, not wanting to hear it. She did, and he could see the anguish in her expression. ‘He might have made it, Sly. If anyone could . . .’
She nodded.
‘You and Kendrick must have a hell of a history.’
‘Co
mplicated,’ said Sly. ‘Long story. Family. Kind of.’
Jonah nodded, thinking of Never. Family, kind of. It wasn’t that long a story, and it was one Jonah knew well.
Sly sat up, gritting her teeth against the pain. She untied the bag of medical kit she’d scavenged and looked inside. ‘All intact,’ she said. ‘It fared better than me.’ Then she offered her pistol and flashlight to Jonah. ‘His people will still be there, wondering what the hell just happened. Disoriented, with luck. This might be your only chance.’ Another cry came from beyond the door, drawing her glance, and Jonah’s too. ‘Finish him, if you can,’ she said. ‘Ignore the others.’
Jonah took the gun as though it was poison. He could still feel the warm blood pour from the man in the pool, flooding over him, the guilt and revulsion following close behind. He still had one charge left in his harness. He gathered the trigger from where it had fallen, then walked to the other door, towards the circular structure. With a last nod to Sly he went through, closing the door behind him and keeping low.
Within was a large chamber; small panels with LED indicators were the only lighting in here, but it was enough to give him a sense of the space he had walked into – a wide circular room at least a hundred feet across, the panels attached to large objects spaced around the circle in concentric rings. There had to be dozens of them, he thought. Towards the centre of the circle was something different, but the room was too dark to make it out.
It was cold, his breath clouding in front of him.
He went to put on the flashlight but another sound came, from above him. A long, low moan this time, mournful and angry, accompanied by a strangely wet thumping, like a large fish floundering on the deck of a boat. Thinking darkness might be safer, he lowered the flashlight and started to make his way around the wall of the chamber, looking for another exit.
He heard a noise, a rustling within the room. Instinctively, he took cover between two of the objects around the perimeter. The noise had come from the centre of the circle, but just as he was about to move closer he recognized the object he was crouching beside.
The cryogenic unit, the one Annabel had uncovered plans of a lifetime ago. Kendrick had identified it as the first missing component in Andreas’s plans, and had assumed it was a one-off intended for Andreas himself.
But the room was full of them. Jonah stood. He decided to risk the flashlight and switched it on, seeing now the large torus suspended above the circle’s centre, a white ring perhaps three feet in height and thirty wide. Something about it made him think of MRI scanners, the look of large, clean plastic hiding something deeply sophisticated within. He moved the light around the chamber, tallying the units. They were about eight feet long, five wide, the windows on them obscured with condensation. Arranged in four concentric rings, a quick count gave him an estimate of twenty or more per quarter-circle. At least eighty. Maybe a hundred.
He knew he was delaying it. Delaying the moment when he looked inside the unit next to him. There were pieces of a puzzle asking to be fitted together in his reluctant mind. The missing revivers. The aftermath of surgical procedures that they’d chanced on, the blood on the cotton swabs too red – he’d known it even then – for it to be the result of preparing corpses for revival. Too fresh.
Everything around him was part of the machine Andreas had built. He knew it instinctively. Kendrick had guessed that the cryogenic unit had been the machine’s first missing element, but his guess had been wrong.
The first missing element had been what went inside.
Jonah turned to the unit beside him, flashlight pointing at the glass. The condensation was on the outside, and he wiped it away. He had to know.
Inside he could see a face. Still alive, he realized. Kept on that line between life and death. He couldn’t tell if the eyelids had been removed or merely stitched open, but he could see there were no eyes in the now-empty sockets. The mouth was wide, held in a frozen scream. Above the ear, a three-inch-long part of the skull had been removed, exposing an area of brain. Thin needles protruded from it, garish wiring on the end of the metal.
The very sight of it was the first shock. The second shock came because the lips were moving. Barely, but undeniably, they were twitching. Jonah stared, wondering if he could sense the rhythm of speech, as if the victim was locked in a scream of prayer. He thought of the whispers he’d heard in the static, and wondered if he’d found the source.
He turned to the unit behind him and cleared the condensation; another eyeless face, but as with the first, one he didn’t know. He went from unit to unit, wiping the glass, seeing the pain underneath. Faster and faster he went, bracing himself for what had to come.
What function they served Jonah couldn’t even begin to guess, but one thing seemed clear. The true purpose of the new Baseline hadn’t been about getting revivers out of circulation. It was a pretext to gather them together, ready for the living death Andreas had arranged for them: a key component in his arcane machine.
And then he found one he knew. Jason Shepperton. One of the two Richmond FRS revivers invited to Winnerden Flats, one of those Never had hoped to warn off. In a unit two away from Jason he found the other Richmond reviver. Stacy Oakdale’s mutilated face was locked in the same silent scream as the others, but it hit him harder than any; he remembered the day she’d joined the FRS, when she’d come back at a typical slice of Never’s wit with something far more barbed and far wittier.
And he thought of Never. He wondered if his friend was still alive. He thought of Stephanie Graves, floating in the pool. Throughout the chamber he stood in, there had to be other revivers Jonah knew from conferences and training. He was surrounded by dead friends.
It felt like the cold air had penetrated down to his soul.
He closed his eyes. In the stillness he heard the rustling sound again and made his way to the centre of the circle, towards the white torus. It sat mounted on four-foot steel poles, obscuring his view of what was inside. Only when he was past the innermost circle of cryogenic units did he crouch down to see.
It looked like a table.
No, he thought. An altar.
His mind made the unwelcome leap from altar to sacrifice.
There was someone lying on it. And there was blood.
Please, he thought. No more dead friends.
It was Tess.
62
He stepped closer. The blood on her face had streamed from her nose, her mouth, her eyes. Those eyes were closed now. He wondered if there was anything behind the lids.
Then she moved, her feet and legs pulling against the restraints that held her in position, making the same rustling sound that had drawn him to the centre.
‘Tess?’ he said, barely above a whisper. He unfastened the strap holding her left arm, and as he went to work on the other, her eyelids flickered open, the eyes unharmed. She looked around wildly until she focused on his face, then brought her free hand up to his cheek, staring at him with disbelief.
From above their heads came more sounds, a wet thrashing and a scrabbling of claw on floor, the noise horribly close to them. The sounds stopped. Jonah looked at Tess and put his finger to his lips, then undid the remaining straps.
She sat upright, dazed and weak. He gave her the flashlight to hold, and helped her off the table. Slowly they made their way out of the circle, under the torus. They threaded their way between the cryogenic units, passing some of those Jonah had wiped the condensation from. Tess stared at what was inside.
They reached the outer wall and sat. ‘You’d not seen them until now?’ said Jonah, his voice low.
She shook her head. ‘But I’d heard. I’d heard Andreas talk about what went into their machine. The revivers. All of them needed to tear open the door, and let Andreas’s power return to him.’
‘And you. You were the final missing element, weren’t you?’ She nodded. He reached to her face and wiped some of the blood from her cheek. ‘When I saw you I thought you’d been a sacrifice.’
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‘No,’ she said. She looked up at him, eyes tearing, desolate. ‘It was the Elder inside me that was the sacrifice. They needed it to find the door, before the revivers opened it. The Elder is gone, now. They hollowed me out, Jonah. Hollowed me out.’
The noises from the floor above came again. Jonah looked up, knowing he had to face whatever it was. When he looked back at Tess her eyes were on him. ‘You thought it could be killed,’ he said. ‘We blew the power. It’s hurt. I can feel it.’
‘Jonah . . .’ she said, dismay in her voice. She looked at the ceiling again. Each sound that came from above made her flinch. ‘I felt its power, running through me. I was drowning in it. Then I felt it shift somehow, out of control. A surge. An overload.’
‘When the machine failed.’
‘Yes. It felt destructive, so maybe . . .’ She sounded almost hopeful, but then shook her head. ‘Yes, the power surge hurt it, but I don’t know how badly.’
‘I can kill it,’ he said. ‘I know I can. Somehow.’ He looked at her, needing her to agree, because the reality was cold and simple: he had to try, whether there was any genuine hope or not.
Tess nodded at him, but she didn’t seem able to speak. She gave him back the flashlight.
‘Stay here,’ he said. He walked to the far side of the chamber: a metal stairway, a sign on the wall reading ‘Control/Obs’, with an upward arrow. He took out Sly’s pistol and started to climb the stairs.
63
Two tiers of metal stairway led to an open door. A figure was sprawled across the threshold, motionless. The woman was dressed in the black that Andreas’s people had been wearing. Her face was covered in blood, and Jonah could smell a strong odour of decay and bile, the same acidic stench he’d encountered in the pool when the shadow had finally perished in his hands.
