The Angel of the Abyss

by Hank Schwaeble

  “And you're saying that's how you see it? In slow motion?”

  “As I said, compared to the way you see it, yes. But I've never seen it any other way. I just know that I see things others can't. And when you move, you and everyone else, it seems very deliberate to me. I see the flinching, the twitching, the cocking. Sometimes the biggest challenge can be to get my body to move quickly enough to take advantage of it. I can tell by the way you're looking at me that you don't believe any of this.”

  “I've seen you move – or didn't see it, to be honest. It's the age part I'm not sold on. You don't talk like an eleven year-old.”

  “That's because I'm not, Mr Hatcher. Not really. To make a pedestrian analogy, how mature is an eleven year-old dog?”

  “Dogs of any age don't speak like they've had decades of education.”

  “Yes, well, again, it's all relative. Every part of my physiology is accelerated, that includes my mental processes. Do you know how long it takes me to read a book? Maybe an hour, if it's long. Not only is the information processed from my eyes four times faster, it's processed in my brain exponentially faster after it gets there.”

  “If that's true...”

  “I know what you're going to say. And you'd be right. I did not have a childhood, did not have any time to develop emotionally. Fortunately, I don't have any real emotions, not strong ones, anyway. More like inklings. Except for one. And a rather significant exception it is. Empathy. Perhaps it's the empathy of the child I never had the chance to be. I don't know. I just know I carry it around like my very own cross. So to speak.”

  “And this is all because of your medical condition.”

  “I wouldn't say that. Yes, it's connected. But I think it goes much deeper than that. My mother died a few years after I was born. My father began to decay not long after that. It was on his death bed, when I was just four years old – but, he knew, already a grown man inside – that he confessed it all to me. Made me promise I would not tell my brother why this came to be.”

  And we know how well deals with the devil always work out.

  “What was that?” Micah asked.

  “Nothing,” Hatcher said, not realizing he had mumbled Deborah's words under his breath. “I was just remembering something. So, whoever your father made this bargain with double-crossed him.”

  Micah shrugged. “As far as I can tell, all that was promised was my brother's health. Not my parents', and certainly not mine.”

  “You think whoever it was is coming to collect on the deal, then?”

  “I don't know. What I do know is, something is going on. Whatever this connection is, this link, it is triggered by proximity. I am not sharing my mind at all times with whatever is on the other end of it. But it's as if some things act as signal boosters, like I'm a live wire that absorbs demonic energy, and powers up a com-line directly to my nemesis. The closer I get, the stronger the link.”

  Hatcher looked at the screen again. “What about now?”

  “I can feel it, like the tingle of thunderbolt before a strike, static electricity goosing my flesh. But it's not an open line. Not quite. I don't want it to be. I've experienced that before, and I hope to avoid ever doing so again.”

  “Which is why you can't do it yourself.”

  “Yes. I would if I could.”

  “In that case, why me? How do you even know who I am?”

  “I was wondering when you were going to ask. I have some well-placed individuals who are willing to part with information for money. I can see me saying that surprises you, but I have money at my disposal. When events move at a rate that is a mere fraction of how fast the rest of the world interprets them, there are plenty of opportunities to cash in. I took them.”

  “And your sources told you about me?”

  “More or less. I actually had them disclose the information that I had found the perfect person to interrogate a demon, let word circulate. Then I had them listen.”

  Hatcher walked the words through his mind. “You let others speculate as to who that might be, and my name came up.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Who was it? Who dropped my name?”

  “According to my sources, someone who seems to know you very well. A man I've had my eye on for some time. His name is Bartlett.”

  Chapter 21

  By the time Amy got to the control center – soft cat steps easing up to corners, frequent pauses to listen for footfalls, cover story about looking for the kitchen at the ready – her bare feet were caked with dust and dirt. One hand held her shoes, swinging in tandem from two hooked fingers, the other formed a fist around the strap of her purse, the bulk of it nestled snugly between her ribs and her elbow. Each press of it against her side caused the bruising to claw at her nerve endings in protest, but she was too wired to care.

  There had been only one instance where her blood pressure spiked. An open door, extra light painting the hallway, voices bouncing off the opposite wall. She had to cross, walk by in plain view. A few alternatives flashed through her head. She rejected them each in turn. There was no way to hang from or crawl across the ceiling above the door, and slithering along the floor would just make her even more conspicuous. There was almost certainly a different route to get where she needed to be, another set of narrow corridors she could take, but those would take her through the main areas, past the rec room, past Bartlett's office, past the places everyone else was likely to be. This was her best bet.

  Ultimately, it was a deep breath, a forward lean, and a casual stride that did it. In her periphery, she thought she glanced three of them, t-shirts and trousers, two sitting at a table, one reclined, a tube in his arm, blood flowing into a donation bag. It seemed certain at least one of them would have noticed her. She'd braced herself as she marched down the center of the hall, waiting for the shout, the questions, the looks. But the idle chatter continued, names she didn't recognize, fragments of stories with unrecognizable contexts. No one had stopped her.

  It surprised her, she had to admit. She hadn't truly trusted Sahara, still felt wary of the woman, and even now couldn't stop questioning her motives. But, so far, everything she'd told Amy was proving true. And trusting her was a function of lacking any alternative, not a choice.

  The primary control center was housed in the middle tier of the far end of the complex opposite the silo. According to Sahara, there was an emergency escape portal on the third, or lowest, tier. To get to it, she needed to descend a stairway from the middle tier in the control room. After dusting the dirt and debris from the soles of her feet, Amy slipped on her wedges and stepped through a doorway that was more like a ship's portal.

  A door loomed ahead at the end of the cableway corridor, large and sturdy. Black letters stenciled onto the wall above it identified it as the Launch Control Center. Behind her, she could hear movement. She froze, listening, thought she could make out voices, distant, non-distinct.

  She opened the huge door to the control center a fraction and slipped inside, tugging it gently behind her, like the access to a vault. The room glowed dimly in the horizontal wash of a bank of small video monitors, fixed images of the main entry she'd used, two more broad angles of the surrounding lot. She used the flashlight function on her phone to look around. Sahara had warned her not to turn on the light, because at worst it would alert them to her presence, at best it would make them realize she'd been in there once they started looking for her.

  The cast of the room in the phone's illumination made her shudder. There were panels in adjacent rows, heavy-duty controls, knobs and buttons and levers. Round protruding speakers, goose-necked microphones. Hardened metal wall units that housed blinking computers programmed with punchcards. The contents of the space, even the space itself, all smacking of equal parts industrial, military, and mid-century, its layout and technology and sensibility reeking of the space age and men in grey flannel suits
and a sense of nuclear destiny, all added up to a significance far beyond their sum. She could feel the weight of it on her skin.

  This empty, cluttered shell of a room was where a suicide pact held sway, a staging ground, one of many, for a man-made Armageddon, the inevitable arms-race apocalypse that somehow never happened. The end of civilization, boxed and prepped and manned, logged and monitored and inspected with pencil marks on checklists, sterile and workmanlike and paid for by budgets voted on by balding men staring through thick, black-rimmed glasses.

  Thinking about it sent a shiver of comprehension through her, an understanding of the sheer magnitude of what this place represented. Insanity, institutionalized.

  And yet, she reminded herself, the world was still here, so maybe insanity wasn't the right word. She made her way around the workstations and found the metal railing to the stairwell.

  According to Sahara, the first tier contained more sleeping quarters – Bartlett's and Calvin's and a few others – and a galley. That meant she needed to be extra quiet. She negotiated the metal grating of the stairs with tentative, probing steps, settling her weight onto each foot slowly. The light from her phone brightened sections like a splash in the shadows.

  The stairs cut back in the opposite direction and she soon reached the floor. She shone the phone light ahead, swept it from side to side. Mechanical areas, sections of ribbed metal tubing, rusting and corroded, weaving a web of pipes and conduit along the wall and ceiling, walls lined with dormant, monstrous machinery of the type Amy realized she didn't begin to understand, square frames of steel mounted on enormous coils like springs, stagnant arrangements of sturdy metal housing complex arrays of fortified cylinders and motor works and hydraulic systems, parts of systems long decommissioned. Everything she saw had the heavy, coated stillness of a relic, the subdued colors of things long forgotten, time leaving evidence of its passage on each surface in layers of dust and scum.

  The light caught a shiny piece of red fabric attached to a shape that made her immediately think it was a woman in a dress, but when she snapped it back she saw it was a bolt of shimmering cloth, propped against a stack of metal sheets. Miscellaneous storage. Behind them, a large wooden cross leaned against the wall, which struck her as strange, until it occurred to her the facilities may have housed a chapel at some point. Images of missile crews praying during a crisis came to mind, hoping for the best.

  She moved the light over the objects, trying to scan the walls. The space was cramped. Rows of boxes three deep and five high with markings indicating they contained bulk blood donation bags, fifty-five gallon drums set one atop another, cartons of MREs, with descriptions of the meal contents in fine print. Various cuts of wood, beams and posts and boards, wedged and stacked efficiently to make the most use of the space available.

  A few more steps, the light sweeping past all the items being stored, and she found what she was looking for. A portal door, round, a few feet off the floor. If there had been any doubt, the stenciled letters spelling out Emergency Escape Hatch would have erased them. The smooth metal sphere, bulging like a wrecking ball stuck in the concrete, was set about chest high. It had a handle protruding toward one edge and was secured in a circular mount with intimidating mechanical implications. It took her several minutes of inspection before she figured out how to disengage the locking mechanism, allowing the mounting assembly to slide apart, freeing the bulging hatch. She pulled on the handle. The metal gave a high pitch whine and she felt the suction of the seal releasing in her ears, like a change in cabin pressure.

  The hatchway led to a vertical cylinder, with an ascending succession of embedded iron rungs. A vertical shaft, extending in both directions.

  She adjusted her purse over her shoulder, bent through the hatch, and grabbed one of the rungs. She stepped one leg through and brought the sole of her wedge down until it found purchase on a lower rung. Ugh! She cursed herself for the stupid choice of footwear as her ankle wobbled and foot slipped. She pulled the other leg through, supporting as much weight with her arm as it would allow, gingerly finding her footing on the rail. The cylinder was tight, but she wished it were tighter. Using the walls for support was awkward. It was going to be all ladder.

  The glow of the phone brightened her immediate area, but did not reach far. She raised it above her head, pointing it up, but it faded out after a few yards into complete black.

  Time to start climbing.

  There was only one way that seemed workable. One foot to the next rung, insinuate her phone hand through the current rung and transfer her rung hand to the next higher one. Then a big pull and step. Repeat. She took a deep breath. This was going to be exhausting. Her feet slipped each time, requiring her arms to stabilize her body by tensing up. It was easy to imagine her muscles giving out by the time she reached the surface.

  But then she fell into a rhythm. Her hands and arms gradually became more proficient at supporting her as she stepped, a careful aligning of her feet reduced the ankle wobble. She was moving, ascending. She wasn't certain how far she had to go, but it was clear she could keep this up for quite a distance.

  She was thinking she had to have made it most of the way, started to hear a moan of air, something flowing through openings above, when the phone in her hand chimed.

  The flashlight app flickered out, replaced by information about the incoming call. Amy twisted her wrist to look at the screen. Unknown number. She realized she must be close to the surface, or much closer than she had been, at least. That prompted her to remember she also had Jake's phone in her purse, so this could be him, trying to reach her. She hooked an arm through the rung and stretched a thumb over the screen to answer it.

  And then her ankle buckled, the sole of her wedge slipping on the iron, and she dropped six sudden inches, her legs swinging beneath her, the arm she had fed through a rung catching her weight. For a moment, she managed to hang on to her cell phone, which had slid down her hand and was held in place by her fingertips pressing the upper edge of it against her palm. She knew it would not stay that way very long. She slowly moved her arm to let her other hand reach it, and then it was gone, the glow of its screen plunging and tumbling down, bouncing off a lower rung, eventually disappearing, the electronic chirping of it fading and echoing until she heard a faint, harsh clatter, followed by nothing.

  Son of a bitch.

  She regained her footing, looked down at her shoes. They had been on sale, she reminded herself. Two-hundred and ninety dollars.

  Climbing down to find it, check if it worked, wasn't an option. She didn't know how long it would be before someone realized she was gone, but she had to assume her head start would be minimal.

  Why, why, why hadn’t she simply tucked these hopelessly impractical torture devices into her waistband or something? She wanted to tell herself she'd never buy anything from the people who made these damn things ever again, that whoever designed them should suffer a slow, painful demise at the hands of someone who would actually wear them, but she couldn't pretend they weren't Prada, knew the pledge wouldn't stick, so she simply mumbled repeated curses under her breath and resumed her climb.

  Chapter 22

  Hatcher replaced the phone into its charging cradle. Still no answer. The girl who was with the group earlier handed him a wooden cup full of water, then brought another over to Micah.

  “Thank you, Felicia,” Micah said. “Please wait outside.” The young woman left.

  “She doesn't talk much,” Hatcher said.

  “She's taken a vow of silence, as penance. Before you get upset, it wasn't my idea. Totally hers. Like I told you, no one is here by force. They are all concerned about their futures. About what they believe is about to happen to the world. Why they're gathering here, acting like I'm somehow part of their destiny, is a mystery to me.”

  “Force isn't the only way to rob people of their freedom.”

  “Ah, a philosopher
as well. As much as I would like to discuss the finer points of sociology and group dynamics, I must request a rain check. Time is somewhat of the essence. It's been several hours.”

  Hatcher turned his head in the direction of the monitor. The girl was still on screen, but was now staring straight ahead, unmoving.

  “Why is it always a little girl,” he said, whispering the words to no one in particular.

  “In this case,” Micah said. “The spell required it. A virginal girl within a year of her first cycle. It was quite specific. But I know what you mean. It is very disturbing. The movies seem to have gotten that part right.”

  Hatcher didn't respond. He watched the image on the screen. There was only one reason he was considering it. “What, exactly, do you want me to find out?”

  “I want to know why I'm being targeted. Why demonic activity is so prevalent. I can only surmise these people are here because they feel the same thing. They all arrive with a similar story. I want to know what is going on. We all do.”

  Hatcher sensed there was more. “And?”

  Micah lowered his gaze and studied the floor. “If you have the chance, I want to know why I have dreams, dreams so vivid, so three-dimensional, I can't tell if it's reality and the rest is my brain asleep. Dreams where I walk a world, this world, torn apart by carnage and mayhem. Dreams where I look into a mirror and see my face, smiling back at me, knowing it's not me, but a boy about my true age. And somehow not me at all. Dreams where I don't even exist. But I'm still there.”

  “Are you sure this is the way to answer those questions?”