Against Gravity

by Gary Gibson

  Kendrick waited to see what the other man would do. If McCowan refused to enter the killing levels, he probably wouldn’t last more than another day or two. Like the rest of them, his torn clothing hung on his emaciated frame like rags on a scarecrow. His eyes were bright even in the darkness, like jewels in the eye sockets of a cadaver.

  McCowan’s name was called for the last time. A few seconds later Kendrick’s name was also called. McCowan’s eyes glinted in the dark as his gaze fixed on Kendrick’s. Then he got up and walked away.

  “Ken?”

  Kendrick forced himself to turn slowly. McCowan stood only a short distance away, at the far end of a storage area like the one that Robert Vincenzo had died in.

  Kendrick noticed that the other man wasn’t carrying a knife.

  McCowan’s gaze fell to the long blade grasped in Kendrick’s own hand. He shook his head ruefully. “So, you going to use that thing on me?”

  Kendrick opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a kind of stutter. Then he shook his head, as if he could as easily shake loose the confusion and near-delirium that plagued him.

  Then he started to laugh until tears rolled down his face, and this laughter transformed into a violent, racking sobbing that sucked up every last remaining dreg of energy left within him. He sank down onto the cold, hard concrete, clutching his head in his hands, while the knife clattered down beside him.

  Kendrick felt a hand drop onto his shoulder. “I guess you know the rules better than I do now,” McCowan said. “That raises a couple of questions.”

  “Peter—”

  “We’re not doing this,” McCowan said firmly. “Right?”

  Kendrick nodded. “I’ve been thinking that there must be some way out of here,” he said at length.

  “Well, you’ve not yet had any success trying to magic those doors open. Look, if I’m going out, I can think of ways better than doing so for Sieracki’s personal entertainment.”

  “Sieracki is dead.”

  McCowan cocked his head quizzically. “What makes you say that?”

  “You can hear it whenever they summon people in. It’s different voices. They sound . . . out of control, I think. This has nothing to do with testing military technology, not any more. It’s about killing us, in the most sadistic way possible.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to explore even a tenth of this place the first time I was here. And if things are falling apart up above us, then maybe there’s somewhere they can’t see us, or find us. Or perhaps there are weapons we can use against them.”

  “I heard stories about what happens to people who don’t do what they’re told once they’re down here.”

  “You mean gas?”

  “That’s what I heard. You can’t run away from gas.”

  “Maybe so, but if we don’t find some way out, we’re going to die one way or the other.”

  McCowan nodded. “Listen, before we do anything else, I want to ask you this. That knife you had in your hand a few minutes ago – were you really going to use it on me?”

  Kendrick felt his face grow hot, and looked away while McCowan continued. “I’m not playing this game, Ken. No matter what the consequences may be.”

  Kendrick nodded slowly. “If we can’t find a way out, they’ll gas us both.”

  McCowan shrugged. “We’re dead men anyway, aren’t we?”

  They searched, together or separately, calling out to each other through the infinite darkness. A tentative map of the lower levels was now beginning to grow in Kendrick’s mind, but they found no secret entrances, no bolt-holes in which they could hide away from the soldiers who controlled the Maze. Kendrick felt a frustration burning in him: it would take too long to explore the lower levels thoroughly.

  At one point, he heard Peter McCowan’s voice echoing through the corridors, calling his name.

  “I found something.” McCowan grinned when Kendrick found him in what looked as though it had once been an office complex, a maze within the Maze, a warren of cubbyholes and empty rooms stacked with mouldering paperwork. A long green metal case lay open at his feet. The contraption of rubber and glass in his hands was a gas mask.

  “Not so fucking thorough after all, eh?”

  “Are there any more of these things?” Kendrick circled the room, kicking aside trash, vainly searching for another of the green boxes. “Let me take a look at that,” he said, reaching out. Some inner clock was telling them that they had little time left before the next batch of victims would be cycled into the lower levels.

  McCowan glanced around thoughtfully. “Did you notice how there are hardly any cameras down here? Seems like the lower the level, the less thorough the surveillance. There have to be blind spots.”

  “We should do something about the cameras,” Kendrick muttered.

  “Yeah, why not? Let’s blind the sons of bitches.”

  A brief silence fell between them. “Peter, if we can’t find ourselves another mask—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” McCowan snapped. Kendrick averted his gaze.

  “We’ll find one,” McCowan continued eventually. “But standing around yattering won’t do it. Start looking again. Maybe we missed something.”

  They pulled a couple of ruined chairs apart and wielded the metal legs like clubs. It was a strangely joyous experience, smashing the cameras wherever they found them, even though the devices were tougher than they looked. But the two men destroyed sufficient numbers for them to achieve a powerful sense of satisfaction.

  Unless some other means of tracking their movements existed, there were now whole areas of the Maze where their progress could not be tracked.

  It had occurred to both of them that they would have no warning when the time came for them to die. Kendrick left McCowan to carry the mask, an act of implicit trust. For them not to trust each other would mean winding up with one of them dead for certain.

  Kendrick had hoped, perhaps, for an ABC suit, a logical thing to find in such a place. Or else an airtight vault where they could seal themselves in. But their search was fruitless.

  At some point, Sieracki’s soldiers would need to pump their poisoned air back out in time for the next batch of combatants to be thrown in.

  Exhausted, Kendrick and McCowan found themselves at the deepest level. Robert and Ryan had died near here.

  “I don’t think we’ve got much longer to go.”

  McCowan’s eyes flicked upwards at the ceiling. “You think they’re still alive up there?”

  “Who?” asked Kendrick, puzzled.

  “Your family. Your wife and your kid.”

  “I just don’t know. Sometimes I convince myself they must be, other times . . .”

  “I understand.”

  McCowan nodded. “I found something else.” He pointed down the network of corridors that he had just been investigating.

  “What did you find there?”

  McCowan hauled himself up again. “I should show you first. C’mon.”

  The room was round like an upended bowl, extending above their heads for about a dozen metres. In its centre stood an enormous engine of some kind, and they had entered onto a circular catwalk extending all the way around the open space in which it stood. The floor, a few metres below them, was accessible by ladders.

  “Over here.” McCowan pointed with the gas mask that he still held loosely in his hand. Kendrick followed him down a ladder and over to some kind of control area. Banks of rusted machinery stood all around them.

  Kendrick gazed around. “I don’t see anything.”

  He didn’t see the steel chair leg swinging towards his head until it was far too late. His vision blurred under a wave of agony. McCowan’s fist slammed again and again into the back of his neck, smashing him to the floor. Just before all thought and awareness abandoned him, something cold and hard was pressed against his face. The last thing Kendrick heard was the sound of McCowan’s laboured breathing.

&nbs
p; He dreamed.

  Fantastical creatures floated through the empty blackness of the lower levels like monsters from a Bosch nightmare. A burning figure ran screeching along the corridors, the surrounding flames golden yet cool so that they did not burn. It cried out his name, sometimes imploring, sometimes harshly angry.

  He tried desperately to find a way out. He ran through doors that slithered open at his approach, ran past robot gun turrets that melted into slag as he passed. He was now nothing more than skin and bone riddled with metallic threads, more machine than human.

  Kendrick woke up to find something pressed against his face. He screamed, still half-caught in a nightmare of drowning at the bottom of a deep, dark ocean. The thing was still pressed against his face, and he couldn’t get it off.

  Staggering to his feet in a panic, it took him a moment to realize that it was the gas mask strapped over his face. His thoughts numb, he instinctively reached around the back of his head and, with unsteady fingers, began to unstrap the mask.

  Then he stopped as he remembered the rumours of gas. Refastening the straps, he sucked air into his lungs, the sound loud and claustrophobic in the confines of the mask. A canister had been carefully strapped between his shoulder blades.

  There was no sign of McCowan himself.

  A dull vibration rolled through the ground under his feet. But low enough so that at first Kendrick thought it was a product of his imagination.

  Half an hour later, he found McCowan. The other man hadn’t gone far. From a distance, he looked almost peaceful, sitting with his back against a wall. But, as Kendrick drew closer, what had appeared from a distance to be a contented half-smile resolved itself into a rictus grin, the lips drawn painfully back across the teeth, the eyes showing mostly the whites.

  Safe inside his gas mask, Kendrick licked his lips nervously. It was easy to picture himself lying there instead. And, even though he hated himself for it, it was impossible for him to deny the thrill of gratitude he felt at knowing that someone else had died on his behalf.

  He remembered that dream, the way every door had slid open at his merest whim. It had all felt so real, so . . .

  Kendrick left McCowan where he lay and worked his way back up through the levels until he came to the same shield door through which he had twice entered these killing zones.

  The closer he came to it, the louder the shield door buzzed with an invisible energy that made him want to reach out and twist it with his bare hands. He felt an indefinable something shift in it at the thought.

  Open, damn you, he thought. Let me out of here.

  This time the tannoy remained silent, the unbroken camera lenses glinting down at him. Kendrick wondered if they’d let him out.

  He stepped up to the enormous steel slab and pushed it, aware how futile this gesture might be. Then he sank to his knees and pressed his head against its surface.

  Something inside it gave: like a release of pressure, or a bubble bursting.

  He pressed against the door again and found that he could sense the lines of electrical energy connecting the cameras in a network. The gun turret that stood nearby became perceptible as a faint skeletal shadow, a pattern of controlled lightning that flowed out of and joined with the electrical systems that controlled the entire complex of the Maze.

  Kendrick pressed his fingers harder against the metal and wondered if he had only imagined feeling it tremble.

  The door shuddered, then grew still, although he could hear gears and levers clicking deep inside. No wonder Sieracki and his men were so afraid of us.

  A small sob escaped his throat as, finally, the door laboriously swung open.

  25 October 2096

  The Maze

  “Who’s there?”

  It felt like being in a crowded room where everyone else was invisible and silent. The sensation of another presence was palpable.

  Kendrick was back now in the place where Robert had died. He flicked the torch on, having so far used it only sparingly in order to conserve its batteries. But here he needed to be able to see clearly, to be sure that the figments of his imagination really were just figments.

  Under the steady light of the torch, the distant walls shimmered, transforming a military storage facility into something more like a fairy grotto. To Kendrick’s astonishment, Robert’s corpse still lay where it had fallen all those long years ago.

  I should have died down here with him and Peter. I didn’t deserve to survive this nightmare.

  As Kendrick played the torch’s beam over Robert’s remains, it struck him that the corpse had an eerily beautiful quality to it. The skeletal form was wreathed in silver threads that converged upon it from all corners of the vault-like space, their slender lines twisting together in great bales that erupted from both the walls and ceiling. Threads crawled across the floor in uncountable millions, and Robert’s gaping, fleshless jaws glistened with fiery brilliance as the light moved across them.

  Kendrick sensed rather than heard the gentle beat of a thousand wings, the source of that almost inaudible sound somehow always out of range of his torch beam.

  He forced himself to step towards the gleaming skeleton, even though his mouth was dry with terror. He imagined that something was shifting in those empty sockets as if it was observing his passage. He could feel something constantly prying at the edge of his awareness, making itself known through a furious tingling in his skin.

  Then wings began to take shape in the periphery of his vision, a thousand million malignant hornets, each with the face of the same dead boy.

  Kendrick moved away from the eyeless skeleton – and then he started to run.

  Kendrick turned a corner; then another corner. He ran further, found a stairwell and descended quickly, encountering a greater proliferation of the gold threads there. He leapt down more stairwells, noting how rapidly the gold-coloured threads around him were now being subsumed into the silver. He stopped, momentarily uncertain, at an intersection and saw how the silver threads right above his head began to drop down, towards the top of his head. Yelling, he ducked away from them.

  Far behind him there was a sound like rushing water. Kendrick’s blood ran cold to think what might be coming after him in the dark.

  The gold threads led ever downwards, and he followed them.

  Kendrick reached the same great domed room with its central engine and banks of equipment, as silent as the day he’d left them.

  Passing through it quickly, he discovered Peter McCowan’s body slumped exactly where he remembered. Kendrick felt the sting of tears in his eyes, along with a deep and indelible sense of loss.

  Golden threads sprouted in thick plumes from McCowan’s exploded skull, reaching up in twisted bundles to the ceiling far above. The corpse shone like a jewel.

  Even as Kendrick glanced to one side, he noticed glints of silver beginning to spread through this river of gold. Near McCowan’s remains the air smelled of beer and cigarettes and sweat, all overlaid with a lingering musk of death.

  “Peter?”

  Right here. The words seemed less than a whisper, deep in Kendrick’s mind.

  “Why can’t I see you? I could see you before.”

  Used up all my resources trying to keep him out, but soon it’ll all be gone. Then I’ll be gone.

  Kendrick gazed down into the golden skeleton’s empty eye sockets. “What do you want me to do?” he pleaded.

  Take me with you.

  “You told me I could get all the answers I needed down here.”

  Not down here. No, the evidence you need is on the Archimedes.

  Kendrick blinked, and a chill ran through his spine with such intensity that he almost cried out. “Then why the hell bring me all the way down here?”

  Because you need me up there with you. You’ll never find what you’re looking for if you have to deal with Robert on your own. Put out your hand – or I’ll die without your help – and you’ll die without mine.

  “What makes you think you can
do any better with Robert up there than you fucking did down here?”

  He has an advantage down here that he won’t have up there. I can handle him, I swear. Now touch me. Put out your hand and touch me.

  “You tricked me, you lousy shit!”

  I told you I could get you what you need to bring Draeger down, if you came here. And I will. But if you walk away from me now I won’t be able to help you. Take me to the Archimedes and you’ll get what you need.

  Kendrick wished that he still had a functioning heart so he could hear how loudly it was hammering.

  “You misled me, damn you. You could have been fucking straight with me.”

  As no answer came, he shook his head and swore loudly. Then he knelt down next to McCowan’s corpse. As he did so, he realized with a shock just how fast the silver was spreading, and again he heard that distant rushing sound.

  Kendrick removed one of his gloves and reached out to McCowan’s skeletal cheek, for the first time noticing that even the surface of the bone was covered in cilia-like threads, like golden fur. Reaching further, he closed his eyes and felt a sting as the filaments brushed against his skin.

  He opened his eyes again, stifling a scream. Golden threads slithered across the back of his hand, coating it in an instant, as if he had just combed his fingers through a cluster of aureate spider webs.

  Stumbling backwards, his foot caught against a bony elbow. The skeleton collapsed in front of him, the skull toppling with a clatter.

  Kendrick pulled himself upright and stared again at the back of his hand, watching in horror as the golden filaments melted into his flesh.

  The rushing sound was growing louder, more frenzied.

  And then McCowan was standing there in front of him, his face twisted in a grimace. “That’s more like it,” he growled. “Right, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “What have you done to me?” Kendrick screamed. “What’s this stuff getting inside my skin?”

  “That stuff is me,” Peter replied. “Trust me, I’ll get you what you want. But first you’re taking me to the Archimedes.”

  As Kendrick retraced his path, invisible wings assailed him. Yet when he waved a hand in front of him he found that there was nothing there.