The Solution (12 page)

Unexpectedly
the lobby lights cut off. Along with a freezing, sour breeze that smelled of fresh wounds and rot, oily darkness infused the lobby like liquid smoke. The blackness could seep into their pores, Randal thought. He recognized this world all too well; he faced something similar when he’d met Tetrax. Though, this was far worse. It originated from a place much deeper and stronger. 

Because the soldiers murmur
ed such expletives as “shit” and “hell,” Randal gathered the dying lights were not part of Solution protocol in dealing with intruders. Randal almost laughed at the absurdity of the horror, until his better senses came back to him. 

Randal expected carnivorous bullets or particle cannons to tear him apart inside this oceanic dark. Instead, he heard the RMS powering down with a droll whine. He heard nothing of the soldiers, nor did any blue particle beams set fire to the air over his head. There was only the living, breathing dark.

Silence.

Suddenly the soldiers screamed in the blackness, and their cries were so awful that Randal had pity for them, realizing them not as Solution digits or an enemy, but as human beings. The sound agonized Randal. The blackness wavered around him and Georgia as though the amplitude of the soldier’s yells precipitated sonic quakes in the air.

The screams sto
pped.

Immedia
tely the auxiliary power kicked in and dim, red light spanned the room. It was dark and blurry until the Randal’s eyes adjusted properly. Though, Randal wished his eyes had not taken in his surroundings, at all, as he saw the soldier’s mangled bodies. Snapped ribs protruded from blobs of pink flesh, and yellow, fatty tissue clung to indistinguishable vital organs. The bodies were flipped inside-out. Randal noticed a macabre gift lying on top of the pulpy blobs: lungs. The bronchioles squirmed, and the lung’s tubes reached outward like spreading fingers, hoping to grasp anything at all.

Breathe me.

“What the hell is going on, Georgia?” Christopher M wanted to maintain a sense of coolness, but he was finding it quite impossible.

“We’re aborting t
his mission. Now!” Georgia reeled. The sarcastic side of Randal, even during the havoc, deemed Georgia ridiculous for putting this on the same standard as a mission, which suggested they were professionals. They were far from it.        

Please, don’t leave. Stop me!
Stop us!

From the auxiliary power cutting on, t
he RMS came back alive, spreading a wave of fire on the front and back entrances with ion rockets, destroying the RMS outside before they could respond if any commands had been sent from upstairs. Solution soldiers were torn apart with one great sweep of bullets and shrapnel. Elizabeth controlled the machines now.

You don’t have a choice.

Randal was forced to stand and move fast as the two RMS locked him in, opening fire with pounding chain guns. Before the Randal realized where he was heading, he and Georgia were already hurling themselves into an elevator. Christopher M was caught behind in the lobby as bullets shredded the marble in front of him, only two feet away from the elevator’s threshold.

“Georgia!” Christopher M screamed.

“Come on,” Randal yelled, “Let him in!”

Christopher M dove into the elevator unscathed. The elevator door shut and began
its upward sequence, acting as metaphorical Death, paddling Randal up a new River of Lost Souls. All three of them breathed faintly, otherwise standing in near comatose states. Neither of them seemed to notice the elevator actually moved as they mentally replayed the images of what just happened.

With each floor they pass
ed, they heard screams of horror and machinegun pops along with plasma blasts.

Explosions.

More screams and more audible horror.

The elevator rattled, but they didn’t f
ocus on it. The three of them still couldn’t compute.
Three Blind Mice
, Randal thought.  

Georgia said, “Where the hell did we go to,
Randal? Where have we come?”

“
Somewhere…”

“Somewhere way under the damn rainbow, Georgia,” Christopher M
belted.

“You still got the Code Charge”, Randal asked. “Do you? We have to stop this.”

“Yes.”

***

When the lights had shut off and the red backups cranked on, Mr. Spires said, “She’s going to kill us. Very badly.”

Dr. Temple said. “Don’t be a coward.
She can’t.”

The doctor
rushed out of Room 432 and toward the All’s command center. On his way through the corridor he stopped. It had been a long time since Dr. Temple was in awe of something other himself, but the walls were taking on a fleshy texture, like it was a living thing. The corridor also seemed elongated, darker, and desolate, like a labyrinth.

Growi
ng irritated, Dr. Temple reached inside his mind, trying to connect with the All, but he wasn’t allowed access. He snagged his personalized plasmagun from holster in his suit, brandishing the weapon at nothing in particular. He proceeded down the corridor, turned a throbbing corner and headed to the command center and entered.

There mu
st be an answer to this madness, Dr. Temple assured himself. The All’s monitors were portraying Ms. Elizabeth Reznick, sitting absently in her chair in Room 432. At first the sight startled the doctor.
Startled!
A Dysfunction he dismissed years ago. He covered the emotion and dashed to the main controls and entered a few commands on the holoboard, but the All didn’t react.

Imperious
ly, Dr. Temple transmitted a few orders to the commanders’ stations on the lower floors but he was only answered with gurgling groans and moans and the cacophony of what sounded like the worst part of hell manifested. The voices encompassed Dr. Temple’s mind to the point of where the screams became visible barriers and he must sever the link.

Glenn
Wiseman, the council, they will be displeased. I must regain control.

The doctor opened his mind and spread
his consciousness, once again trying to communicate with the All on a metaphysical level. He received nothing in return but dejection and absence, as though a loved one has fled for a supposed better life. The All’s power had abandoned the doctor, leaving him no other avenue to tap in. Instead of many men into one, he was now one biomechanical man.

Again the doctor looked
at the monitors.
Elizabeth.
Mr. Spires was walking slowly toward her.
Tread and Mix, the operatives, barged into the Room 432 beside Mr. Spires.

“Affliction,” Mr. Spires said, “Such affliction. I know I’ll never see them again, my family.”

Elizabeth still appeared to be sleeping, but something more terrible and awesome than a nightmare any sleep could produce was happening in front Mr. Spire’s eyes.

The anguish o
f bearing such raw supremacy had become so intoxicating, so transcendental it was beyond Elizabeth’s physical capacity to undergo the experience. Her very atoms grew little mouths, little portals to translate the Ultimate Reality’s dimensional language and let the All inject it into her marrow. Each portal-mouth spoke horrendous actualities and reanimated her comprehension to a more suitable level for her new state. She was redeveloped to withstand an ultimate mental level. 

Dr. Temple b
urst in to Room 432, surprised to see an indigo nimbus radiating around Elizabeth now and Mr. Spire’s corpse slumped by her knees. She was still strapped in the chair, network plugged in. Ghostly images of Elizabeth slithered in the air and into Dr. Temple’s lungs.

Elizabeth gave the doctor a contrarily polite glance, and
a wave of power rolled over him.

Invisible, cold fingers dug
through his skin, inside his biomechanical brain, and to his organic bones. As his flesh started to lift, to fall from ligament and tendon, he aimed the plasmagun at her head and pulled the trigger, making a perfect hole in her forehead.

His skin kept
peeling, stretching into thin sheets until he saw tender pinkness covering his body. His clothes shredded, and he soon stood naked, watching the next layer of flesh yanked away. The doctor found the will to stay alive to see his muscles, starting at the pectorals and down to the calves, be shredded into fine strips which wobbled to the floor like confetti.

Dr. T
emple’s last wonderments were of how he failed, and death is his punishment.

His spine snapped
into pieces, dropping to the floor cortical by cortical. 

My
work has just begun
.

Elizabeth stood
, breaking the nylon straps with ease. She freed herself from the network of cables and bondage and towered over the remnants of Dr. Temple, peering at him with amusement.

“Why don’t I just reach out, infect the world.”

Elizabeth concentrated, expanded, and created more tunnels and witnessed millions of citizens all at once. Hundreds and thousands lounged in front of the television, watching and listening to Dr. Reverence. Elizabeth strained, attempting to infect Dr. Reverence, to get her saying the Solution is a bunch of foolish, careless monkeys—
but so are you, dear citizen!

And so she did, and the public was thrown for a loop.

Infect the soldiers, the living
or the dead. Learn more about what I can do.

She contracted
the tunnels until her sight spanned the All building. Not many soldiers were left alive, and the ones that were left were destroyed by the horrors she birthed from their own psyches; she made them hallucinate the same charred hands that she’d dreamt of tearing her apart long ago. 

Elizabeth slipped
into the soldiers’ heads, finding it quite like a fun park. A few dead soldiers arose and began roaming in a trance.

***

Two floors from now Georgia, Christopher M and Randal would be forced to endure not only possessed soldiers but the most profound darkness in their lives. The three couldn’t put in words what they’d face, but they knew it was about to begin. The three of them sensed an appalling energy rising around them.

Randal had
a deep urge to take the Code Charge from Georgia and detonate it now. He went against. It wouldn’t work, yet. The point was to install it in the All.

And Elizabeth
… she said to kill her before she gives reality a virus.

“Georgia, check your computer, see if you can get Alex,” Christopher M said.

She did. Typed
on it and sent a message. She couldn’t get through to him. “No. Not working.”

Randal combed
his hand through his hair, then whispered, “Georgia, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but good luck.”

“Good luck.”

The elevator stopped at floor forty.

Randal and Georgia gave
each other a cursory look, then, concentrated on the door.

“
We don’t have weapons,” Christopher M said in an irked tone. 

The elevator door slowly slid
ajar, revealing a deep blackness and erratic, red strobe lights. In the distance Randal saw an indistinct figure, getting closer. Ostensibly, as if in slow-motion, it became a shape.

“Something’s messing with my head,” he said lowly. “She’s messing with our perception of time.”

Before Randal could register, the figure lunged into the elevator on top of him, sending him to the floor. The figure was a mangled male Solution soldier. Its eyes were full of rage, and his strength was enhanced to inhuman levels induced by an explosion of adrenaline.

“Get ‘em off me!”

At once Georgia fell
back against the wall, frozen. Her first instinct at this point was to turn away and close her eyes. If she couldn’t see the danger, maybe the danger wouldn’t see her. She was bound in fear and her courage retrograded into that of an infant’s.

Christopher M kick
ed the soldier in the head. The possessed solider somehow applied more weight to his attack, besting Randal with a series of psychotic punches to the head and staving off Christopher M.

Georgia snapped
. She stepped forward and thrust her boot square in the soldier’s temple. The action was accompanied with a crunching, ephemeral percussion, like she’d just smashed a sledgehammer into a honeydew melon.

The
possessed soldier dropped and his head hit the floor like wet sod.

Randal stood
up with the help of Georgia’s proffered hand. His dizziness turned to clarity. Randal formed a lopsided grin, and that was enough for Georgia to know he was saying thank you, and also enough to know that she almost really screwed up.

“Let me have the Code Charge.”

Georgia handed over the charge.  

The three of them stepped
onto floor forty behind Randal. Now they followed his lead.