Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  Suddenly he had an image in his mind of a clearing in the jungle . . .

  He lingered, feeling a powerful urge to look over his shoulder as if someone – or something – was standing there watching him. Something malevolent.

  Buddy stepped past Kendrick and on into the cave. More threads glinted from deep within, making it appear that he was walking into the innards of some great metallic worm.

  Kendrick gave in to the urge to glance over his shoulder. Nothing there – just the deep, darkening jungle behind them.

  But it felt so strongly as if someone had been right there. He walked back towards the fading daylight. The clearing he’d seen in his mind’s eye, like a scrap of someone else’s memory . . .

  “Where are you going?” Buddy demanded, staring after him with a bewildered expression.

  Whatever it is I felt when I touched the thread, it knows we’re here. Not Peter McCowan, but something else.

  Kendrick crossed the banks of a stream that drained the pools beneath the cliff, his boots splashing noisily through the shallow water.

  Over – there.

  The jungle around him suddenly felt full of an overwhelming sense of presence.

  Buddy shouted after him. “Kendrick! Where are you going?”

  “Two seconds.”

  He pushed deeper into the jungle, past trees and bushes, almost slipping and twisting his ankle on wet rocks. He cursed and pulled himself upright, moving past more trees. Then he saw it.

  He stared at it for a long time. After a little while, he heard Buddy come up next to him, breathing hard.

  “Kendrick, what the fuck are you— Oh, hell.”

  Threads had gathered together to form a vast woven bowl extending between the tree trunks, filling a wide glade beyond. Thick ropes, comprising thousands of filaments clumped together, extended downwards from the underside of this bowl, entangling themselves in the living soil below.

  Kendrick had seen it earlier, when the threads had first brushed his skin.

  “Do you know what it looks like?” Buddy breathed.

  “I know what it looks like. Like a transmitter – or a receiver.”

  As they looked up, through the thick matting of strands glistening in their millions, they could make out the dusk’s sky and the sparkle of its stars.

  A few dozen metres into the cave they came to a familiar shield door. The sight of it sent a riot of memories surging through Kendrick’s mind.

  “The question is, can we still get it open? The electronics might be shot.” Buddy shone his torch across the surface of the door.

  “Damn,” he exclaimed, jerking his hand away.

  “More threads?” asked Kendrick.

  “Yeah.” Buddy’s face was pale, even in the darkness.

  Kendrick reached out and touched the shield door’s rusting metal. Nothing happened, although he was surprised to detect a faint glimmer of current. Then he slid his hands across the surface and sensed something shift subtly, deep within the metal.

  Something inside him reached out and twisted.

  The door rumbled, filling the humid air with an appalling groaning sound. At first it looked as though this entrance had been too long neglected to function any more and all their efforts would come to nothing. But then it creaked again and slowly, slowly began to slide open. Then it stopped, leaving a sliver of space barely wide enough for one man at a time to slip through.

  “Okay,” said Buddy. “I’m going to die underground.” He shrugged. “Suits me.”

  The two men worked their way through the gap to find themselves in a near-absolute darkness that brought back unpleasant memories for them both.

  Kendrick looked around him. It was almost as if he’d never been away, or as though the whole complex had become indelibly stamped into every cell of his brain. He shivered, only partly because it was cooler behind the shield door.

  “Like a haunted house,” said Buddy, coming to stand beside him. “Have you seen how there’s these other threads – gold ones – as well?”

  Kendrick nodded, and reached out to one stretching along a wall. As soon as he touched it, he felt again that strong sensation of being watched. But, although it seemed deeply irrational, the gold threads felt somehow friendlier.

  He turned, suddenly half-expecting to see Peter McCowan standing there just behind him. He almost imagined he could smell the man’s warm, beery breath – but he saw only Buddy.

  “Okay,” said Buddy. “What now?”

  “Might as well keep moving,” Kendrick replied, and they set off.

  Several minutes later, Kendrick noticed that Buddy was behaving oddly.

  The shield door was now far behind them, but with their augmentations they could see well enough. The sense of being watched only grew more intense the deeper into the tunnel they went. At first Kendrick dismissed this as merely his own nerves playing up. But in truth this did seem like a haunted place, just as Buddy had said, full of the spirits and the memories of the dead.

  “I remember when they tried to cordon off this whole area,” said Buddy. Kendrick knew that he was referring to the nanotech infestation.

  “I remember.” They’d seen the first intimations of that when they’d escaped the Maze. “For something so dangerous, you wouldn’t expect it to look so – I don’t know.” He shook his head. “So beautiful, I guess.”

  Buddy laughed harshly. “It isn’t what it looks like that matters. It’s what it can do to us. This was a bad idea.”

  “Take it easy there, Buddy. Are you feeling okay?”

  Buddy stared at him, his face pale and sweating. “No, I keep . . . I keep hearing things, like . . . oh fuck, like whispering.”

  Kendrick could hear nothing and saw only the empty corridor, silent and dark ahead. “Can you make out any words?” he asked carefully.

  “No.” Buddy put his head back and yelled, letting loose a series of expletives that rattled down the corridor and echoed for long seconds afterwards.

  “Buddy—”

  “I can’t go on.” Buddy shook his head, as if a swarm of wasps were buzzing around it. His breathing was rapid and ragged. “I just can’t.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just . . . I can’t. Not beyond this point. Something won’t let me, Kendrick. Let’s turn back. You’ll have to think of something else.”

  “Look, we’re almost at the end of this section. Try going a little further, see how you are then. It’s probably only nerves,” Kendrick assured him.

  Just ahead of them rose another shield door, barely visible in the murk. It stood half-open, and the heart of the Maze lay beyond.

  Buddy shook his head, sounding more reluctant with every passing second. “I can’t, Kendrick, I swear. I don’t have any choice in this matter. If I take one more step, I’ll die, or . . .” He started to retch, leaning over, his hands on his knees. Kendrick could see that he was shivering badly.

  Then Buddy looked up. “I’m heading back.”

  “I can’t go back myself, Buddy. Wait for me at the stream, by the cave mouth. Stay hidden. I won’t be long.”

  “If I go any further, I’m going to die,” Buddy repeated, looking at Kendrick with an expression that said So will you, if you go any further.

  “Go back,” he urged Buddy. “Go back and wait for me.”

  The other man didn’t need any more prompting. “Good luck,” he whispered, and handed Kendrick his wand, the map of the Maze still displayed on its screen. “Keep it. I’ve got another one back at the ’copter. If anyone appears while I’m waiting and I have to take off, this way we can make sure we stay in contact.” He also gave Kendrick the backpack. It still contained most of their water and the torch.

  Then Buddy turned and moved as fast as he could back towards the entrance and the fading light beyond. Kendrick watched him go, cold dread filling his stomach.

  He shook his head, turned back and began walking deeper into the Maze.

  Once Kendrick passed through the se
cond shield door he finally began to hear the voices.

  The walls and ceiling were still covered with the same rusting pipes, making it harder to suppress a niggling fear that he had never actually left the Maze in the first place. He had forgotten how absolute the silence could be, and how easily it lent itself to such delusions.

  Kendrick stopped and punched the wall next to him, hard. The impact sent shivers through the air around him and it felt as if a spell had been broken. The sound filled the darkness like the first words of God echoing through an unformed universe.

  He had to get rid of his fears, the ghosts and nightmares that still populated his mind. He kept on walking, knowing that the tiniest hesitation might send him running back towards the cave entrance.

  The threads, he noted, were much denser now, almost completely coating the wall surfaces around him. They made crackling sounds under his boots as he walked over them and he stopped a few times, unsure if he really had seen them moving, their loose ends drifting in the dark like sea anemones sifting for plankton.

  When Kendrick reached out and touched the threads the voices became much clearer. It was like tapping into someone’s thoughts, but those of a madman: random fragments of memory chasing each other like a blizzard of half-formed images, faint intimations of things that he recalled experiencing during his seizures.

  Kendrick also detected an anger that threatened to overwhelm his own thoughts, tempered by a sense of childish delight that chilled him to the core.

  He broke the contact with the threads and kept on walking till he came to a stairwell and worked his way down. There were light switches at hand, but none of them worked.

  On their way here Kendrick and Buddy had wondered whether they would find Los Muertos inside the Maze. Kendrick learned the answer as soon as he reached the Wards.

  From a distance the body looked as though it had been there for a relatively short time. It wore the familiar ragtag uniform of a Los Muertos soldier, a crucifix crudely sewn on the jacket. At first Kendrick wondered if the man was merely sleeping, but as he came closer the smell of putrefaction was evident. The corpse lay with one hand outstretched, as if reaching towards the rifle lying a metre away. The dead man’s face was turned to one side, his desiccated mouth open in a silent scream, the eyes now reduced to dark pits. He was encased in silver threads as though he’d been wrapped in the cocoon of some enormous metallic spider.

  Kendrick glanced up and, for one terrible moment, felt sure that he could see something hovering in the darkness before it flitted away on fragile wings. He peered around himself for a long time, listening and watching, but there was nothing more.

  Moving on, he found two more corpses. One lay slumped in a corner, while the other had both hands to his face as if he’d been trying to claw his own eyes out.

  It was getting harder now for Kendrick to keep the fear at bay, fear of what he might find if he went any further. If I lose it now, I might never make it back out.

  He took the precaution of pulling a pair of heavy gloves out of the backpack and sliding them over his hands before stepping through a door that led into a Ward. The rusting skeletons of beds stood in uniform rows around him. Most of their mattresses had rotted away, but he could still clearly make out a number painted above the room’s entrance.

  He was in Ward Seventeen – or Ward 17b, to be precise: it had been reserved for the male inmates. Ahead of him, the Dissection Door lay open, empty blackness beyond it.

  The notion came to Kendrick right then, that something there had been waiting for him to return all these years. He pushed this thought away and stepped through the door.

  Not even the teams of researchers and war-crime investigators who had arrived at the Maze immediately following its liberation had managed to penetrate these deepest parts of the complex. The nanotech infestation had already become too widespread for any further exploration to be possible.

  A no-go zone had subsequently been placed around the Maze, and for a while UN forces had patrolled it. But once it became clear how bad things were getting back in the United States, these troops abandoned the task and left. Sieracki’s soldiers finally emerged from their jungle strongholds, metamorphosing over time into Los Muertos.

  Kendrick arrived at a series of ruined elevators, most of them now reduced to gaping shafts. He peered down one to see silver threads lining every surface, the occasional gleam of gold visible among them. At the corner of his vision, something crawled . . .

  He looked down and saw that the fine filaments coating the concrete had broken under his boots. Their loose ends twisted and spasmed with tiny movements.

  Cold sweat broke out on his brow as some of the threads reached up over the tops of his boots, as if they were seeking out his flesh.

  He jerked his foot away, heard a ripping sound, and overbalanced, catching at the side of an elevator shaft with one gloved hand. He spotted shapes darting about far below, black on black, coming closer.

  Kendrick ran, eventually finding a stairway. He slammed a half-rusted door shut behind him and kept running. Several seconds later he heard a sound, making him think of a ton of feathers flung against a sheet of steel at high speed. He gulped down air, knowing he was dangerously close to outright panic.

  You need to be here, he reminded himself. You’re not here just for yourself, but for everyone else who was dragged here to die. Think of it that way.

  He continued to descend till, stepping through an open shield door, he knew instantly that he had finally reached the lower levels.

  This was the place where Kendrick had almost died. Where thousands had died. But something was different, and after a minute he worked out what it was. Down here, many more of the threads that coated the walls were gold-coloured, although the silver ones still predominated.

  He pulled off a glove, and somehow found the strength of will to reach out and briefly touch a thick strand of the pale yellow filaments.

  Kendrick whirled around, sure that Peter McCowan was standing there.

  “Peter?”

  His voice seemed to echo for an unusually long time.

  This way, he imagined McCowan saying.

  He turned to face down one particular corridor.

  Suddenly he knew he had to go . . . that way.

  A rusting gun turret still stood on its mount beside a shield door, the filaments that coated it giving it a strange bejewelled look.

  Kendrick stepped closer to the large weapon and, as he watched, some of the gold threads glistened noticeably before slowly taking on a distinctly silver hue. As he waited and watched, he saw more of the gold absorbed into the silver all around it.

  At that moment, Kendrick realized that he was inside McCowan. The Maze had become Peter McCowan’s body, the corridors his arteries. Which left the question of the identity of the silver filaments. Someone or something else – Robert Vincenzo, he was sure – was in the process of eating away at McCowan, like a silver cancer.

  Beyond the shield door there came a sound like fluttering wings. Again he caught half-glimpses at the edge of his vision, lost in faraway shadows.

  All in your mind.

  But what if it was real? Something had killed those soldiers back there.

  The fluttering faded and Kendrick found his way to yet another stairwell that led far, far down. Somewhere down there, at the very lowest levels, people had died, some of them his friends.

  Robert Vincenzo himself had died, somewhere down there. And Peter McCowan, too.

  Summer 2088 (exact date unknown)

  The Maze

  Kendrick searched until he came across the promised cache of provisions and water in a place that he could have sworn had been empty the last time he’d looked there. He stopped and gorged himself, making himself violently sick, even though there was not all that much food. It was in any case mostly freeze-dried protein, dry and tasteless. Enough to keep him alive for a few more days, however.

  He allowed himself some fleeting dreams of freedom, of
great metal doors sliding open at the wave of a hand, as obedient as well-trained dogs.

  Then he gathered up as much as he could of the remaining supplies and found his way back up through the levels.

  On reaching one of the shield doors that was open, waiting for his return, a voice sounded from a speaker. “Leave the food.”

  “Who is that?” Kendrick called out, aware how hoarse his own voice had become. “Where’s Sieracki?”

  “Drop the supplies or you’ll die,” the voice insisted.

  Kendrick heard the sound of well-oiled machine parts rotating. A gun turret swivelled towards him and briefly spat bullets. The concrete above his head exploded into fragments that rained down on his shoulders.

  He cowered on the ground, abandoning the food and water where they fell.

  The voice continued, “Now, exit, please.”

  “I remember what happened when the Dissection Door went crazy.” McCowan scratched at his chin. “I didn’t attribute too much to it at the time. Not a lot of the stuff here works too well, apart from the guns.”

  Buddy shook his head. “No, I felt it, too. We did something to make that happen.”

  Kendrick nodded agreement. “If we could make that door open, what about the shield doors? Could we do the same with them?”

  McCowan laughed. “Talk all you like, but I still don’t see you having too much luck getting out of here.”

  “Maybe that’s why they locked us down here,” Kendrick replied bitterly. “They’d be mad to let any of us leave here alive.”

  Peter McCowan had been summoned the next day.

  The voice over the speakers was a different one again. Just before it clicked off, Kendrick thought he heard shouting or screams in the background.

  He’d gone back to squatting by one of the shield doors. McCowan reappeared a little while later, and for more than an hour just sat staring hollowly into the darkness.