VIII.
In the time BP had to herself, she admitted she had entertained breaking Xu’s rules, going into those forbidden chambers, and seeing what he didn’t want her to see. Not once, however, had she dare even think about going to the subbasement. That was where the ‘Her’ was kept, the dreaded one she had mentioned in passing. BP didn’t know exactly what it was, if it really was a ‘Her’ or if that was simply just a familiarity she tacked on. All she knew for sure was, whatever it was, spoke to them – those like her, but not her. She radiated chaos up from the depths into their minds, a chaos they then brought into the world. A measurable event, BP claimed, which led Vagari to believe whatever the entity was, it was psychic in nature.
Psychic abilities weren’t unheard of before the world had ended. While they were once thought of only as pseudoscience and the stuff of science fiction, with the aid of technology among other factors, psychic abilities had found footing in reality. Now such abilities were growing more common and ‘natural’ with every new twisted generation of mutant thing the wasteland spawned. Unfortunately, even as rare as the power was, it didn’t narrow down the host of undesired possibilities in the least. It could be a demon, some kind of aberrant horror, or even some monstrous thing cooked up in the lab as that first report might have suggested.
Whatever the case, what BP could confirm, was that the ‘Her’ and the horrid thing that had chased him weren’t one in the same. Beyond that, everything was purely up to fear begotten imagination. Armed only with that to prepare them for what lied ahead, they stepped into the elevator. BP cleared her throat as the doors closed, this time out of nervousness rather than a shift in pitch. She sighed and closed her bulbous eyes before saying clearly, “Take us to the Subbasement, Thoth.” That nervousness was a feeling shared between them, her and Vagari. At some point in time that wrongness he had felt before had diminished and was mostly replaced by a claustrophobic inkling – but only mostly. It was still there, distant again, but ever present, feeling like eyes boring into the back of his skull.
The elevator hummed to life and began its descent into hell. It was a thirty second ride at worst, just two levels down, but it had felt like a lifetime, all nine levels of the abyss ending in the ice leaden lap of the Devil himself. The door chimed as it opened, a dying drone through decaying speakers as the lift came to a halt. The light inside flickered, causing a sharp spike of dread to dart up Vagari’s spine. Of course, he thought grimly, today would be the day the ancient facilities power decided to fail, abandoning them to darkness. But then those familiar clicks echoed out from the shadowed room before them as the power situated itself.
Each light ignited with an electric crackle as the subbasement illuminated sector by sector. More a warehouse than anything, the subbasement soon shown to be a singular room, a wide stretch of concrete and reinforced steel, seemingly spanning the entire hospital grounds above. It was supported by immense pillars, adamant beams of spiraling rods coated in concrete. Many of them were purposefully removed, probably to harvest their plasteel cores, but several bore the marks of violent destruction. Vagari stared in a mixture of awe and trepidation as he dared to imagine what terrible strength could make such things possible.
BP pointed down the length of the hall, uttering softly, “This way… Aan says there’s a hole here that will lead us outside.”
“A hole?” Vagari exclaimed with an incredulous glance. “Must mean the city has eyes down here… Strange. These lots were always internalized – no access to or from the outside world. A self-contained system can’t be hacked from anywhere but inside, and only with a direct uplink – a neural-control-interface.”
“What does that mean?” asked BP, tapping at the screen. “I can access Aan just fine, and Thoth is the native system.”
“It means, little friend…” Vagari replied with a pause as he scanned the ceiling and walls, not really expecting to find anything, “that this system was put in after the end of the world. You see, we were at war, or… well the tail end of one. At least a dozen groups from here to Titan wanted to find a reason to start it up again – pulling at every little string they could find. They would have found it here in the vats.” Vagari eyed her sidelong. “Cloning was made illegal system-wide as a part of the RCA, the Resource Conservation Accord. But Xu and his friends here weren’t worried about being found out when they put the system in, so they bridged the systems.”
BP followed his gaze nervously, trying to see what he saw, but failing to spot anything out of the ordinary. Vagari on the other hand noted several dozen twinkling stars, glimmering from each corner, pillar, and every possible angle. The devices themselves were probably the size of pinheads, too small for even him to see from any real distance, but their infrared glare shown bright to his eyes. Aan wasn’t the only one who had eyes where she shouldn’t. Vagari smiled and waved for the cameras, just in case someone was watching. “Lets keep going,” Vagari suggested, a sudden urgency lacing his voice as the hair on the back of his neck stood up and a chill crept down his spine. The more they lingered, the more that alien dread seemed to lean into him. “I don’t like the feel of this place.”
BP nodded surely and they walked the rest of the way in a silence, one broken only once they reached their shadowed destination. Sensing their approach, the final set of lights clicked on with a bursting bulb and an electrical whine that bounced from one end of the hall to the other, like a tinnitus drone. BP nearly dropped the tablet as she clapped her hands over her ears. Vagari, on the other hand, was too preoccupied with what the working lights had pulled from the darkness to take much notice.
To call their passage out a ‘hole’ hadn’t painted an all too accurate picture. At that far wall was an immense chamber: a transteel containment cell of three-foot-thick glass with an adamant backing against the wall. This was the unit those first printouts had mentioned – the one the ‘Subject’ had been transferred to, and the one it very obviously had escaped from. It was an escape route they were to follow. The hole was in the glass and led through the back of the unit. Vagari couldn’t help but utter a curse at the sight of it. “Why would anyone need something like this?” He hissed in disbelief as he slid an inquisitive hand down the jagged opening in the transteel facing. “You could hold an archfiend in this thing… The sheer amount of force to break through…” Vagari paused and turned his black-eyed gaze to the strange creature at his side, to the maw of jagged tusk-like teeth. “Break?” He realized, “no… Chewed…”
BP seemed to notice his stare and caught on to the implications quick. Her already bulbous eyes shot wide, and she began sputtering. “I – I didn’t do this,” she pleaded. “I didn’t! I wouldn’t have… Please believe me!”
“I do,” Vagari answered instantly. “The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. I doubt you would have had half as much trouble with a regular door if you had done… this.”
“Yeah…” BP said with a sheepish laugh, “I suppose not, huh?”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“No supposing about it,” Vagari said as he turned to peer through the hole. “Transteel was made to withstand orbital strikes from dreadnoughts… And even then, three-feet of it seems like overkill – not to mention unbelievably expensive.” Vagari ducked into the hole and started across the chamber, counting the feet as he went. “Three-feet-thick and twenty across on all sides…” He noted astonishedly as he slid a finger through the numerous scratch marks in the glass, “… and still wasn’t enough… Insane. Whatever they held in here really wanted out.”
BP waddled past him to the opening in the wall, their path to the surface. Climbing up to lean inside she let out a gasp before calling back. “I can see light! The sun’s coming up!” BP said as she clambered into the tunnel. “I’ve never seen the sunrise in person, only ever on the screens.”
“Well, it’s beautiful,” replied Vagari with a sigh of relief, eager to leave the darkness of that place behind. He made to follow her, kneeling down before the mouth of the tunnel. “One of the few things the apocalypse couldn’t take from us… BP?”
Vagari looked up into the tunnel to where she was. BP was frozen still in her ascent and as quiet as the dead, but only for a moment before she burst to life. BP began shuffling backwards, waving her hands wildly as she rolled about to make a full and hasty reverse. “It’s here!” She whispered with utmost urgency and eyes wide with fear. “I can feel it… I can – can hear it! Shouting… in my head! None of it makes sense… W-we need to hide!”
Without missing a beat, Vagari reached in and pulled her free before making an instant retreat into the chamber beyond. “Hide?” Vagari echoed in thought as he frantically scanned the room before them. “Hide where?” He let out a nasally hiss before ducking behind the nearest pillar. Maybe they could wait it out, wait and then make their escape through the tunnel. Vagari grit his teeth. They would be trapped is it took notice of them – there was no way BP could outrun it. Vagari would have to leave her. “NO! That was what He would have done,” Vagari insisted, banishing the thought, “and He was dead – gone! Dead and buried in the dust of ages just like the rest of the Old World. Just like Her… Bones on the lakeshore, washed up with the tide. Choose to do right.”
Vagari could hear it now: the harsh sound of crushed earth and scraping stones as the creature dragged its bulk down the bored passageway. Its telltale call was soft now, a whisper, but unmistakable – that sound of grinding glass. “Stay down…” he cautioned BP, those reaffirmed words echoing in mind – “Choose to do right.” Vagari took a deep breath and chose. “When I distract it, you make a run for the tunnel, okay? Get out of here. Don’t look back. Once you’re clear I will be right behind you. And… if not… Go East – straight through the marshes. Tell anyone at the Market I sent you and they’ll see you where you need to go.”
BP made to protest, made to say valiant words, but Vagari cut them down with a look. “It’s here now…” Vagari uttered. “Do as I say – or the deal is off. Alright?” She nodded quietly and sat low against the pillar, waiting for her chance. BP watched with fear veiled poorly by tears as Vagari stood and walked out into the open, to what she was sure of would be his demise. He wasn’t very confident that it wouldn’t be. Two grotesquely large hands reached free of the darkness, scratching trenches into the transteel as they found hold. They were vaguely humanoid, looking like mottled clay matted haphazardly upon a wire form – harsh approximates, calloused and raw, with long boney spears for fingertips. For the most part it made little sound for something quickly proving to be truly monstrous in size as well as appearance. All Vagari could hear now as it pulled free its body was the sound of grinding glass, which had since come to his attention wasn’t anything of the sort. No, it was the gnashing of teeth, hundreds of them clashing together like a boar’s tusks.
The creature was an abomination in every sense of the word. Seeing its horrid form now head on, Vagari realized why there hadn’t been any corpses to be found – not a single bone nor tear of cloth. The creature was an amalgamation of stolen flesh, a patchwork horror of what used to be human, all melted and melded together into a golem of cancerous growth. Truly a horrific sight to be seen, even partially hidden behind the scratch-fogged glass.
Vagari would have never described himself as brave; he wanted to run away. He wanted to find the nearest darkest corner to cower in. He wanted to be anywhere else in the world but standing right there. Desperate, but not brave. Desperation was what drove men to do what brave men would justly label as insanity. It was insane, but sanity was a luxury Vagari could no longer afford. Sanity, just like brave men, died with the Old World. Held firm in his madness, Vagari watched in horror as the Amalgamation wrenched itself free from the veil of its transteel prison and into plain sight.
The Amalgamation stood before and above him, a grotesque slug-like creature risen high upon two pillarlike arms – the last possible remnants of the original creature. The rest of it, the calloused ‘foot’ the made up the length of its body, was a confusion of ethnicity and sex, with the skins of its victims allocated seemingly at random until they covered its bulk entirely. The mosaic of faces mottling its hide all contorted in a painful show of mixed emotions – some writhing in fear, others cackling soundlessly, or crying as they mouthed what Vagari could only imagine were pleads for death. Even with all that, those aspects paled in comparison to the ghastly creature’s most horrific feature – its mouth. The Amalgamation’s head drooped forward, swaying just above the ground like an inquisitive hound. It was made up of rolls of contracting flesh that poorly hid the jaws beneath. Thousands of teeth, human and monster alike, all gnashed together in a maw as wide and terrible as a megalodon’s – that glass-grinding sound the conflict between them. It just stood there, seemingly oblivious of Vagari’s presence, but only seemingly.
The Amalgamation swiped out one of its massive arms, lightning fast, and with enough force behind it to plant a crater deep into one of the cement pillars. Vagari narrowly ducked, turned on his heels and ran – sprinting as fast as he could towards the furthest wall away from the horror. He had to lead it away from their exit, away from BP, to give her enough time to scale the tunnel and escape. Thankfully, it appeared truly oblivious to her, not hesitating to take up chase. With an ear-piercing shriek, the monstrous thing lurched forward, intent on claiming the kill that got away. It was a scream that didn’t simply deafen him as it echoed across the length of the hall, but assaulted Vagari’s very mind with a hail of psychic imagery and impression. Fear, fear was what it felt most next to hunger. There were minds left inside it, or rather the ghosts of them – their fear and confusion as it made them into it. It hadn’t stopped at flesh, it seemed, it had taken them wholly – mind, body, and soul.
Vagari glanced over his shoulder with a mix sense of relief and regret – relief that BP was escaping, and regret at seeing how damnably close the charging creature was. Vagari dodged to the side, narrowly leaping out of the way of clashing jaws. He rushed behind a pillar to catch a breath, but only had it snatched from him again as two monstrous hands clasped around it. He dove under them, feeling the heat and air as they clapped down where his head had been. Quickly he darted to the next and to the next the amalgamation rampaged, roaring with horrid fury, mimed soundlessly by the hundred faces that speckled its spine. It was fast, too damned fast.
Vagari knew he couldn’t run forever, but a plan began forming at the back of his mind as he dodged from pillar to pillar. Eventually the wound at his side would get the better of him, and he doubted he could take the creature in melee – one hit would crush him just as easily as it crushed the pillars holding up the complex above. That was it – Vagari knew what he had to do. “Hey, over here!” Vagari shouted, daring to linger a moment in front of a pillar. “Come and get me!”
The mutant horror charged towards him, lurching forward in leaps and bounds that shook the earth. It raised one gnarled mess of a hand high and brought all its might down upon him. Vagari glared sharply, watching unmoving as the monstrous thing’s claws swept towards him like the reaping scythe of Death. He watched, waiting for the right moment before diving under its elbow just as it struck the pillar. Vagari hit the ground running, no time to measure his success. It was felt in the form of concrete shards pelting his back like bullets. The world had shaken before with each monstrous step, but now it had truly left its mark and the world felt as if it were about to tear wholly in half. The room was coming down.