Cain awakens. The airbag is still outstretched. He tries to fight it, force his way out, but for a moment he cannot yet move. The time is 4:38. Clara’s ghostly outline peers through him from the window’s reflection. He needs to move. He struggles, trying to escape, unable to find his breath or his strength.
“You… You aren’t real... Go away,” Cain weeps in a raspy tone, just beginning to find his voice.
“Whether I’m real doesn’t change anything. I am your past, come back to haunt you. You have run all your life, but justice has caught up to you.” Clara’s tone slows, her expression narrows, and her willowy figure turns unnaturally thin as she points a finger of skin and bone at him. “You are a murderer.”
Cain’s hand fumbles for the door. It opens and he crawls out of the car. He somehow finds the strength to stand. In the distance is his laboratory; this is where it all began and where it would end. A faint sound, as if of a rushing stream, wisps against his ears, and his head throbs. The reflected Clara flits between windows and mirrors as Cain hobbles, slowly regaining strength and checking the time.
4:40. His pace quickens.
“You lied to everyone!” Clara begins to appear in multiple reflections at once.
“You stole everything that they were!” He can’t escape her gaze, and a newfound pain is piercing at his side. He clenches his stomach, breathing lightly and progressing with clunky steps.
“You murderer!” It’s that voice–that same horrible voice from when he took her life when he took all of them.
His head swims, and his breath leaves him. The throbbing at his side is excruciating. His body stiffens and his limbs turn heavy. The burden of it all is too much. He loses his footing and crashes, skidding across the concrete floor.
The racing sound of water intensifies.
“Was it worth it?” Clara inquires in the tone of a little girl. The naive innocence in her voice is twisted, poisoned. Surfacing in the reflection of a small puddle beside Cain’s distraught face, she looks different. Her features are warped, her hair is missing–she looks younger. Perhaps this is her from another time, free from worry, free from his corruption.
Cain’s eyes fill with tears. His quavery hands make a fist. Body shaking, his mouth opens and expression turns tight. He pushes down the bitter pain with resolve. He needs to move, he needs to complete the mission.
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In a wink, the puddle is empty, reflectionless. While Cain rises to his feet, he sees Clara in the voided reflection of an unplugged screen.
She steps nearer and nearer as she speaks. “You were wondering if I was real. How is this for an answer?” She reaches a hand out. It obtrudes from the screen. She keeps walking, passes the glass encasement with some difficulty. Her ghostly figure stands in the white and grey moonlight, transparent yet seemingly tangible. She progresses toward him with growing haste.
The sound of rushing water is now screaming out, echoing in the surroundings. Shadows seem to move and stretch across distant reflections. But they’re not shadows. They run; they have limbs, bodies, faces, the faces of those that once were. They are his victims, the dead, and they are coming for him.
Cain reaches for his amalgamation gun, turns a knob, fires. On the base floors of buildings, metal bends and windows shatter, but the figures are still advancing. He puts the gun away, then clutches his ears and runs without looking back. Fatigue and pain vanish in the consuming panic.
The reflected forms grow in numbers, approaching faster and faster. Noise muffles, feeling halts, vision focuses, yet ever closer is the wave of the lost. It is time.
Cain reaches deep into a coat pocket and pulls out a small, box-like cylinder. “Reawaken the old initiative!” The object slowly folds outward and lights up in response as the man finishes, “Send the Probes, Wardens, Hunters–all of them!”
Immediately, the noises of rumbling, creaking, and turning fill the senses.
A flat, unhuman voice replies from the contraption, “Scans register no life forms to attack.”
“Attack the city.”
The wave of ghostly ruin is nearly upon him. The earth cracks, buckles, undulates under the power of these phantom beings. The rumbling, creaking, and turning grow louder.
In an instant, the blurs of metal automatons hurdle from buildings, glide through the sky, and streak across the surface. Groups of reflected forms depart from the film of glass that holds them, piling over slim, multi-legged machines. Buildings fall and the remnants of robots fly through the air. A bulky automaton jumps behind Cain and is shredded by an invisible force. Robots and shadows collide, and in the chaos, the throng begins to slow.
The entrance is soon before him.
The doors of the laboratory swing open and Cain rushes past a desk, toward the elevator inside. A robotic maid of humanoid form steps rigidly over to him, its spindly fingers extending, then reaching for a circuit board on the wall.
It knows what he wants without him asking.
The circuit board makes a clicking sound, the doors of the elevator slide open, and Cain steps inside.
By the desk on the other side of the doors, Clara leers at him, her figure once again changed to a younger self. “Where did all the people go?” she says in an almost girlish voice, a wicked grin staining her milky white face. She is mimicking, mocking.
The metal enfoldment wraps around the opening until there is nothing left, and the contraption ascends.