The door clicked shut behind the hallway expedition, and utter silence fell. The only sound that remained was that of Dale's nearby breathing, heavy, mournful, and slow. He should have gone with them, she knew. As much as she admired his unwavering sense of duty, he should have concerned himself just as much with the living. She wished she could tell him this, to help him to move on.
Perhaps she could help, in her own way. While she was being wound inside the rug, Kerren had enough forethought in her pain-dazed state to lift up one hand and rest it on her collarbone. In the time since her binding, she had been worrying that wrist back and forth as her tolerance for pain would allow, trying to gain some kind of control, even if it were merely the ability to slip her arm back and forth inside of her constraints. She now could feel the cool air outside the winding rug on her fingertips, and knew that she had been making progress. It might be the time to see if she could push it free. But even then she still would need help.
Kerren had known that her mother had fond memories of the Deertail Lodge -- hadn't she been the one to suggest that Kerren and Sheryl spend their conciliatory anniversary trip there? -- but she had no idea that Sarah had made such an impression on the people who frequented and worked there. To hear it from Bruce, any man she came across back then was suddenly struck with artistic inspiration. Kerren had always suspected that her mother had a kind of special energy around her... hadn't she spent many insecure adolescent days wondering if any of it was ever going to rub off on her?
Now, it seemed like that collective inspiration Sarah had created here had gathered somehow, been collected and... what? Brought a supernatural creature from a book to life? She would hardly known what to make of that, even if she hadn't been currently immobilized an in pain, injured in an avalanche. The surreality of it all, she supposed, was the very thing that made her not reject the idea that Harmon was capable of telepathically communicating with her.
With this in mind, she now called on Harmon to help her; she could feel that he had not fully retreated from her mind after he spoke through her lips. He had left some kind of door open a crack, and through this she put out a mental entreaty for him to return. What she had in mind was going to take not only physical strength, but mental as well. Perhaps he could lend her some.
She found him lurking inside her prefrontal cortex, present but distracted. There was something else going on that he was focused on, but she needed him, and thought of increasingly more surreal mental pictures until the random flashing of her synapses got his attention. When it did, she found it easy to transmit her request on pure thought.
The response came faster than she expected, and the sheer volume of information he was able to pass to her in the span of half a second made her breath catch.
Out in the exterior world, Kerren's fingers finally managed to slip across her collarbone and out of the binding rug. From there, she could swing her arm up and out with less resistance than she expected. What she didn't expect was the pain the motion caused in her broken legs, as if the slight change in the way her body was balanced on the stabilizing board was enough to irritate them. She bit her cheeks to keep from crying out, and extended her freed hand toward Dale and Glenda.
The security guard didn't see what she was doing until Kerren's hand came to rest on the top of Glenda's head. His eyes flicked up from staring at the deceased woman's face, and found Kerren's. She tried to whisper something that sounded approximately like "It's okay," and then closed her own eyes in concentration. He looked wary, but otherwise didn't object.
With Harmon's guidance from downstairs, it wasn't too difficult to enter. The method seemed obvious once he told her how it was done, but she knew that she wouldn't be able to do it without his assistance. At least, not without more practice.
Having never been inside another's mind before, Kerren didn't know what to expect. Even so, she knew that was she was seeing was a once stunningly beautiful system gone horribly wrong, distorted beyond repair. Glenda's mind, devoid of flowing oxygen-rich blood for so long, had totally collapsed in on itself in places. Sections the size of cities had gone dark and withered, and in other places arching voids stretched out for light-years. Kerren had never experienced such an overwhelming physical sense of loss, of a place once filled with truth and beauty, now irretrievably stolen forever.
Somewhere deep, deep in the recesses, there were still a few tiny surviving glimmers of light, and Kerren instinctively pursued them, moving-but-not-moving in that way that Harmon had passed to her in mere milliseconds, but had been unable to fully prepare her for. She swung past entire lobes of thought that had dwindled to almost nothing. The only way she could handle the sorrow was to distance herself with a little humor; she recognized the areas of Glenda's brain as she passed them and mentally listed their statuses like a sci-fi battle damage report. Language: gone. High-function capability: gone. Comprehension: barely active. Life support systems: obliterated. Even as she tried to distance herself from the devastation, it almost made her want to turn back. She had to push on, though, if there was going to be any light left by the time she reached deeply enough into Glenda's cerebellum, which seemed to be the only partly active place left.
There. She could just make out the brightest patch remaining, although it was fading even as she approached. The light was retreating farther and farther as usable tissue continued to die off, back toward Glenda's brain stem. Once it got that far back, Kerren knew there would be no more communication. It felt like diving after a person who was sinking in the ocean, desperately chasing her as she disappeared down into the dark.
Glenda...
The response was barely a flicker, but whether it was in recognition or just some dissolving mental process, she couldn't tell.
Glenda, it's Kerren. Are you still here?
The flicker came again, and this time there was also a word.
Yes.
-14.4-
Kelly's mouth dropped open when she saw Manoj fall out of sight, but no sound came out of it. Her first instinct was to run after him, as if there were any possibility of her reaching him in time, but the ponderous mass of the Qoloni's thorny antlers -- the very thing that had knocked him back and down -- stood between them. Her felt her heart turn cold when she heard the first sound of his body hitting the stairs; in the strange silence that accompanied the thing's attack, she clearly heard the air being forced out of her boyfriend's lungs as a horrible series of meaty tumbling sounds began.
The creature, for its part, didn't even seem to notice that it had swept one of its foes off the field of battle. It was still reacting to the heavy weight that had hit its body, the fat, cylindrical object seeming to flatten and slip around its form, emerging unchanged from the other side. Kelly had to force herself not to be fascinated by this process, garishly backlit by the light coming up from the lobby below, where she could hear Manoj's body continuously bumping, as if it would never come to rest.
Sound came finally, a furious and animalistic howl that she only dimly realized was hers. With it came the extension of her arms, the sudden claws at the ends grasping for the tiny things she had brought with her and set down on the table's edge -- a chunky red napkin holder and a heavy spray bottle of cleaning solution. She turned and threw, adding them to the barrage. She wished she could have landed a solid hit right in what passed for the dark thing's face, but the bottle was oddly weighted and errantly flipped end over end, right past its shoulder. The napkin holder, however, was more true to the mark. It hit the Qoloni squarely in the center of its chest, its bulk immediately spreading across the thing's entire torso.
Once it its chest had been coated, the creature belatedly started to recoil, backing up toward the balcony railing that it had just vaulted over, and Kelly couldn't help but watch as the spreading, flattened shape of the holder opened up like a donut, the flat plastic red shooting out from the darkening center like ripples on a pond. She intuitively realized that an instant after it escaped her view, the holder would emerge, completely re-integrated, from the center of the thing's back, and sail out high over the lobby. The Qoloni was like the physical embodiment of a funhouse mirror.
The mirror! She had a mission to fulfill, no matter how badly she wanted to pelt the creature back over the railing with her revenge. Her head whipped around, and saw that Carlos had not deviated from their original plan; he was already reaching up and starting to rock the big round mirror back and forth on the wall, sweeping a pale searchlight of reflection across the hallway over and over again. She reached up to join him, the end table thumping painfully against her hip, and tried to catch a few of the wobbling sunburst tines in motion, so she could add her force to getting the thing down from the wall. She didn't notice until together they began seesawing the mirror back and forth that her eyes were clouded with tears.
Unfortunately, she had been right about the mirror; the avalanche had loosened it from its mounting, but it was still somehow attached to the wall. It could rock wildly back and forth, but doing so was only bumping its edges against the wall and doing no work toward prying the mount loose. Still, the only thing she could think to do was keep at it, and yell across the table to Carlos: "Harder!"
As if in response, from behind her Kelly heard Sheryl scream "Take this, fucker!" and produce twin grunts of effort as she hurled her own handheld missiles. From the Qoloni there was no reaction; it remained perfectly silent, whether the projectiles ended up hitting their mark or not. Kelly was sure that she would feel the razor tips of the thing's bewildering antlers pushing their way between her ribs any second, and at the same time was just as certain that she and Carlos were only going to succeed in crushing their fingers between the edges of the mirror and the wall, if they kept with their current process.
She let go, and ran around to his side of the table, wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of the sweaty ski jacket she had kept on. She had to get this to work, if for no other reason than finding out what happened to Manoj. Fortunately, Carlos seemed to know what she was coming to do because he nodded, lifted his grip higher on the tines at the mirror's edge, and pressed his side hard against the wall, making room for her to stand next to him.
As she moved next to him and placed her own hands on the same side of the mirror, she heard shuffling on the carpet nearby. Things had been oddly quiet since Sheryl's triumphant yell, but now her feet -- and Bruce's, since he was the only other person left in the hallway -- were scuffling. Kelly wanted to turn to look, but understood that knowing what was going on would only make her lose focus. She began to push against the mirror steadily, trying to lever it away from the wall, and Carlos immediately followed suit. Their combined effort made an immediate improvement in how far they could push its edge, and Kelly hoped that this would be enough to finally snap whatever the mirror's back-mounting was made of. She heard Carlos start to audibly groan with effort next to her.
Meanwhile, a new sound erupted in the sound-deadened hallway. "Stop!" Bruce's voice sounded even and strangely in control. "You will harm none here! Get back!" Silence fell again, during which Kelly distinctly heard a dim, dull crack from somewhere deep within the wall.
Bruce continued. "As your creator, I banish you! You are a sloppy, nonsensical excuse for a villain, the mere product of too many pills and a hard publishing deadline." He grew calmer as his admonishments picked up steam. "If your intention here tonight is solely to harm, then there is no one but I that you wish to harm here. So why do you hesitate? Turn your hellish horns upon me!" Kelly wouldn't have imagined such flowery phrases coming from someone who she had only seen so far as a jittery psychotic, but she could also tell that he was starting to channel his authorly voice.
A low, promising creaking sound began, closer behind the mirror this time. She and Carlos dug their feet even harder into the plush carpet, and the mirror's edge came out another half-inch farther from the wall.
"What is it that you're waiting for? An invitation?" Bruce antagonized his monster. "Here!" He must have thrown one of the small objects he carried, because the thin sound of rushing air followed, then the strange effect of that sound being pulled out of existence. An instant later, the sound was back, farther away. Sheryl could only imagine that Bruce's thrown object had done much the same that her own had.
Before Bruce could throw his next projectile, a final snap came from the back of the mirror, and it fell with a thud onto the hard top of the end table underneath it. Carlos's fingers lost their grip on it, but hers did not.
No comments:
Post a Comment