V.

After the better part of an hour drudging through muck and weeds beneath the road, Vagari finally found reprieve in the form of a collapsed offramp. Enough of its rusted frame was still connected that he was able to sidestep his way to the top. Once there he looked for any sign of the creature. The bioluminescent birds croaked and cawed noisily to themselves in the night’s sky, idly and without edge. It was, in truth, only a small comfort as he had since discovered. The unseen thing was a predator, stalking, quiet as death when needed. He had to keep his eyes open.

A few hundred feet down the way Vagari found what he was looking for: another emergency callbox. This time, in a welcome stroke of luck, and unlike the fragmented sign it was attached to, it was intact. Vagari quickly tore away the encrusting moss and ivy before prying it open. He let out a sigh of relief, finding everything inside in working order. “Authorization Code: Vagabundum-52-B-8972,” Vagari called up to the A.I., half expecting its speaker to be destroyed along with the sign. It seemed that his luck was finally turning as the A.I.’s voice sputtered a reply. “AUTHO…TION: GRANTED,” The system answered robotically. “WEL… DOCTO… HOW MAY I-Help me…”

“Access the VIP travel network,” Vagari instructed. “Find me the fastest and safest route out of the city. The East Exit.”

“ACCESS: DENIED,” the artificial intelligence announced. “CITYWI… LOCKDOWN IS STILL… EFFECT.”

“Override it?” he suggested with more than an edge to his voice. “Everyone else is dead.”

“ACCESS: DENI… AUTHORIZATION: REVOKED…” The A.I. announced. “PLEASE CONTACT YOUR ADMINIS…TOR FOR DETAI… No – you can’t go! Please!”

Vagari froze upon hearing the voice bleed through. He had nearly forgotten his guardian angel – that second voice that had warned him and tried to guide him in his flight from death. Vagari let out a hiss while glancing over his shoulder, anxiously tapping a sharp nail on the callbox. He was as divided as the roadway behind him; he didn’t have time to make any diversions, pressed as he was, but too he couldn’t deny that, whoever they were, they did save his life. Vagari pressed the call button. “Who are you?” he questioned bluntly. “Why do you have administrative access? Are you blocking my code?”

“I AM THE NEW HOUSTON AUTOM… ASSIST… NODE – AAN FOR SH…” The A.I. system began cheerily before the other voice broke through. “Shut-up Aan! No – not you, I’m mean… I mean yes, I am – I’m sorry,” the voice admitted before adding as a promise, “but, if you help me, I’ll help you. Okay? Please?”

Vagari didn’t have time to weigh his options. With a sigh he nodded sharply, though he doubted they could see him. “Deal,” he said firmly, “I suppose I owe you that much for the heads-up. Where are you? We need to hurry.”

“Thank you – thank you – thank you!” the voice blared before adding in a much less giddy tone. “You’re not going to like it… but you need to head back.”

Vagari stared back down the roadway with a hiss and a denial at the tip of his tongue. Instead, he let loose another sigh, stood, and reluctantly complied. With another hour lost he found himself staring back over the divided freeway at how very close to death he had been. Claw marks gouged out the edge of the roadway, twelve in total, with each about a foot deep into the asphalt. It had nearly gone over after him but pulled away at the last second – no doubt to find an easier route. Vagari doubted greatly that it had given up its meal of him, so an ever-vigilant eye was frequently tossed over his shoulder despite the robotic voice’s assurance that it wasn’t near.

As per the voice’s original guidance Vagari turned left down the branching roadway – a central city route that took him above and beyond the boggish innards of the blighted area he had passed. The cacophony of insects and other water creatures permeated the air there nearly as loud as the ghastly sonance of his pursuer. It was a song sorely missed in most places of the world – the song of life – and a tune Vagari took comfort in as he passed it by on his way down the darkling path.

The inner-city route was proving to be a much quicker one than his direct approach. It had seemingly already reimbursed the hour he lost, and maybe even tipped him one – an advance on their deal as it put him much closer to what he knew to be the east exit. All the same, despite the obvious gain, Vagari couldn’t shake a growing sense of dread welling up inside him. It was a foreboding feeling that reminded him entirely too much of that cold foreign dread he had felt at Alto’s. It was distant however and he did his best to push it even further.

Eventually the bog below broke way to solidity again as the ground and bridging roadway came to meet once more. Soon after, Vagari reached his destination. ‘Our Lady of Respite – Memorial Hospital’ the overarching sign announced in bold gilded letters, with a subtitle reading – “Mathew 11:28 – Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest”. Two marble statues supported the sign, but just barely. They were pitted and pocked things, worn beyond recognition; two angels fallen far from grace.

Sandbags and barbwire were bundled up tight around their legs. At one point the entrance had been secured and blocked, but whoever had fortified the place clearly hadn’t figured speeding trucks into their design. Vagari could see it further in, crashed up against a brick wall with the gate and tangles of wire underneath. Upon closer inspection, he found it riddled with bullet holes and burned down to its frame. The driver had probably died on impact, but the damage was done, the wall had been breached. Vagari slid his hand across the rusted frame and tried to picture the event taking place.

He had been far outside when the fall came – outside the city and outside of time. Twenty years had passed by the time he had awakened from his metamorphosis, and by then, the city had long since been lost. The battle that had been waged there was now a tale taken to the graves of its participants. Despite being over two-hundred years old, there was so much he didn’t know, so much time that was lost in those short twenty years. And like all too many, the rusted frame spoke a sad tale. It was one of desperation and hope – baseless hope, but most hope was.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

The hopeful dead had made their final stand there; plain to see by the military vehicles littering the parking lot. Tanks, transports, even a couple gunships made the car park something of a labyrinth to break through. Why they defended this place so heavily was a mystery no doubt lost to time, but it must have been someplace important to the effort before the effort became too much. Like the rest of the city, all it was now was rusted bones reclaimed by nature; more hill now than anything. Just bones. And yet, Vagari paused before venturing into the labyrinth.

That nagging dread had begun nipping at the back of his mind, a certain foulness he was becoming all too familiar with. The place, it just felt wrong, a wrongness that swelled up like a bruise standing there. As he lingered, every instinct was telling him to back away, to turn around and try to find his own path out of the city. It was no small part of him that wanted to do just that. It was a notion appealing enough that it caused Vagari to steal a longful look back. It wasn’t too late to turn around, to leave. But, would Soprano forgive him if he did? Did he even care? A whisper at the back of his mind insisted that he didn’t – a whisper of the man he used to be.

He might not have cared, but Vagari did – Vagari the wanderer, the man who righted his wrongs, the man who chose to care. Someone was alive in that forsaken place, and they needed his help. Soprano would never forgive him if he abandoned them for her. Vagari stepped forward. “Vagari…” he uttered to himself, stilling his racing heart, quieting that baneful whisper. “I am Vagari… and I choose who I am. I choose. There is no going back,” he stated firmly, pushing forward. “Once more unto the breach…”

Vagari made his way through the maze of wreckage in silence. He was making the choice to help, but that wasn’t to say he was throwing caution to the wind. The creature that had chased him through the city might not be the only monster that lurked those streets. It wasn’t the devil he knew that worried him, just the devil he didn’t. Soon enough, Vagari found himself at the hospital’s entrance, standing before two large doors that responded instantly to his presence, sliding open with a dull mechanical groan. It was a slight comfort knowing the facility still had power, but the dim yellow lights flickering to life as he crept into the lobby did nothing but add to the foreboding atmosphere that seemed to radiate from the place.

Vagari scanned the lobby for any substance to that feeling. To his relief, he found naught but what he hoped to find in a two-hundred plus year old building: signs of structural decay, invading flora, the nests of bygone critters littered here and there. All in all, it seemed like your average ruin of the old world. With the exterior’s grim tale plain to see, Vagari had some expectation that the interior would finish that tale with morbid cruelty – destruction, bodies, the finality of a frightful end. But, there was nothing. There wasn’t a single body, not a single bone, human, animal, or otherwise. It was almost too clean, in fact. Was this place still lived in? He wondered as he made his way to the center of the room.

The hunched man turned about on his heels and regretfully found the signs he had been looking for. Inside, he could see that the door frame and the wall around it was riddled with bullet holes. Strangely, however, the glass double-doors had apparently escaped undamaged. “Bulletproof glass… in a hospital?” Vagari pondered out loud. “Who puts transteel in a hospital?”

The question was a rhetorical one, steeped in knowing disgust. There was only one reason to put panels of see-through steel in a hospital – because it really wasn’t one. It was a cage, one built by men who’s ambitions of godhood outweighed their moral obligations; men who didn’t want their abominations escaping into the wider world. Men like him. He couldn’t yet say for sure, but Vagari was putting the pieces together. The assault hadn’t come from the outside, but inside. Something, maybe even the creature he had run into, had escaped.

As to where he was, in his past life Vagari had heard rumors about a Site-B. Supposedly it was a lab like his own, with their own tome to decode, but within the city limits. It had been an idea so foolishly negligent that he hadn’t given it a second thought – chalking it up to cloak and dagger nonsense. A highly volatile research and experimentation facility inside an immensely populated city? The very notion of it was insane, too insane to believe – as so much then was.

Now, Vagari knew the truth of it, that insanity had been at the very heart of what they were doing, a selfish, evil insanity. No matter the precautions they took, be it bullet proof glass, aggressive A.I. systems, or working in a potential trap that, once sprung, would never open again, their abominations always got out in the end. “Site-B…” Vagari hissed under his breath as he let his gaze sway once more over the lobby, seeing it now in the morbid light he had expected. “Disguised as a hospital. You wanted people to find you, didn’t you? You needed people…”

Vagari ground his teeth. At first it was in anger, but that quickly gave way to the mounting fear that he had just walked into a trap. “Does it still need people?” he wondered darkly, the idea that perhaps the stalking thing hadn’t been the true monster at all worming into his mind. Was that what happened to the explorers – not preyed upon by flesh and blood but by wires and circuitry? Were they lured there by a mad A.I. trying to keep up its dead masters wicked demands? Was he? Whatever the case was, he had to know for sure. He wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if he left another one of his colleague’s monsters haunting the world.

Vagari knit his brows and stepped forward towards the entrance desk at the back of the room. It had been an unmanned station two-hundred years ago, with most facilities like this one having been entirely automated, controlled by an extension or ‘child’ of the city’s A.I.. It was more out of caution and curiosity that he checked behind it. There was no one there, like expected, but there were signs that there had been. Cans and packets littered the floor behind the desk, pried open by means of what looked like burs of bone or discarded teeth perhaps. Someone had been living there rather recently – a notion that relieved the tension of his growing paranoia.

Vagari pushed away and turned his attention to one of three dusty terminals mounted at the face of the desk upon adjustable necks. One had quite obviously been used more recently with it wearing a much thinner blanket of dust than the others. With one swipe of his long fingers, he wiped the screen clean while bringing the device to life. The screen hissed and popped as a discolored and pixelated image seemed to burn into it like spreading embers. “WEL-WEL-WEL…COME,” the A.I. announced with a distorted musical chime, “TO: OUR LADY OF RESPITE - MEMORIAL HOSPITAL. PLEASE S-S-STATE THE NATURE OF YOUR MEDICAL EMERGENCY.”

“Rescue,” Vagari answered with a huff and a few quick taps on the mic. “Mystery voice, can you hear me? I’m here.”

“I’M SORRY, BUT CAN YOU REPE… Yes, I can hear you!” the A.I. began before quickly being cut off by the other voice. It was much clearer now, allowing him to hear life through the static – breathing, a heavy sigh, both relief and desperation in the voice – belaying Vagari’s fears further. “I was so worried you wouldn’t make it. Aan never worked in the swamp. But here! Here I have much better control over the system. See? Thoth doesn’t fight me like Aan does. Well, alright, first you need to-…”

“First,” Vagari said sharply, cutting them off, “what I need is for you to answer some questions. Can you do that?”

“Uh – yes, I think so…” the voice replied softly, before adding, “What do you want to know?”