Atomic Underworld: Part One (12 page)

Sophia, be ready.

Tavlin
picked his way through the rubble, trying to keep to the shadows along the
walls. Green fire ate at several of the buildings and he was forced to take
wide detours. Groups of survivors huddled in hiding spots, which were not very
good if he could spot them. Some motioned for him to join them, some made
threatening gestures when he came too close, others just studied his
gore-coated body. His shirt and pants were both sticking to him, and he smelled
something foul. He thought dissolved bits of flesh had gone up his nostrils.
Some had definitely clogged his ears. He constantly spat out what tasted like
blood, and chewier bits caught in his teeth and under his tongue.

At
last he reached Sophia’s tenement. Warily, he entered the smoking doorway, past
the sagging, half-melted doors. Screams and fumes already issued from a lower
floor than the one he had entered on, but if his orientation was right Sophia
lived on the level above. Not daring to hope, he mounted quickly and found her
door. Knocked hard. Then again. No one answered.

“Shit.”

He
began kicking down the door, calling her name as he did. The door splintered
open and he stumbled in, blinking his eyes in the darkness. She had doused all
the lights.

“Sophia!”

No
one answered.

He
found her in the bedroom. She had crawled under the bed and clutched a ridiculously
large pistol in her hands. He thought she was going to take his head off with
it when he got on his hands and knees to look under the bed. He could barely
see her face around the enormity of the barrel.

“It’s
me,” he said.

“I
know. Why do you think I’m pointing a gun at you?”

“The
G’zai are on the floor below. They’ll be here soon. We need to leave.”

“Why?”

“Because
they’ll kill us.”

“No,”
she said. “Why are they
here
?”

“Because
they’re pre-human monsters with no human motivation.”

“Bullshit.
They’re doing this because of you, aren’t they? I don’t know how, or why, but I
know it’s you.”

“Soph
...”

“If
I shot you now and left you for them, would they be satisfied? Or perhaps I
need to hand you over to them alive.” The blackness inside the barrel looked
very dark. He could just see one of Sophia’s eyes glimmer slightly around one
side of the bulging bullet chambers.

“We
don’t have time for this,” he said.

The
gun continued to point straight at him. “They want your briefcase, don’t they?
That’s what all this is about. But you’ve hidden it somewhere. So if I shoot
you, they won’t get it, and I can only think that would be a good thing for the
world.”

The
same thought had occurred to him. “They’re underwater creatures, Soph. I hid it
underwater. Finding me will probably hurry up them getting it, but they’ll get
it one way or another. But if I live, maybe I can think of something to
do
about all this. Some way to
stop
them.”

The
destruction on the floor below grew louder.

“Sophia,”
he said, almost growling.

She
sighed. He heard a click and realized she was shoving the hammer back. She had
actually drawn the hammer!

“Well,
it was a thought,” she said. She crawled out from under the bed, and he stepped
back. She glanced him over, wrinkling her nose. “What the hell happened to
you?”

He
grabbed her free hand and pulled her from the room. She shook loose of him and
said, “They’re in league with the Octs, aren’t they—the G’zai?”

“Less
talk, more running.”

He
stuck his head through the splintered front door, looked one way, then the
other. He stepped through, his own gun drawn and ready. Motioned for her to
follow. The smell of smoke was very strong now. The vibration of the tower
beneath them trembled up through the soles of his feet.

He
and Sophia ran up a flight of stairs, then another. He didn’t know this
tenement well, but he assumed it would have exits onto all of the major
platforms it abutted. All around him he heard the sounds of residents barricading
their doors and sealing up any windows onto the hallways. A few realized the
tower was doomed and were fleeing upwards, the same as he and Sophia. They
encountered more and more deserters as they rose.

“You
have a plan?” Sophia said, as they mounted one tight, smoke-filled stairway.

“Go
up.”

“Fire
rises, and there’s no escape.”

“There
might be. Just follow me.”

“You’d
like that, wouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t I go off on my own?”

They
emerged from the stairway, coughing and rubbing their eyes. Tavlin saw the
stream of people headed in a certain direction and knew that must be the way
out. Before following them, he turned to Sophia and said, “We used to say we
were in it together, remember?”

She
watched him, cold and furious at the same time. “We’re not in it together
anymore.”

“Maybe
for just a little while.”

The
tower shuddered.

“Maybe,”
she said “For just a very small while.” Then: “This better work.”

With
more conviction than he felt, he said, “It will.”

He
pushed his way through the crowd, and Sophia followed—perhaps reluctantly, but
she followed. They emerged, coughing from the fumes, onto a hanging bridge that
shook and trembled under the weight of so many people. Clearly it was not meant
to support the number that currently trampled across it, trying to escape the
burning, G’zai-infested tenement. Tavlin winced at the sounds of snapping
cables around him. With each twang and pop, the bridge trembled.
Please hold, please hold.

They
made it across. Judging by the sounds of pounding feet and heavy breathing
behind him, the bridge did not immediately collapse behind them. That was good.
Of course, it also meant the G’zai could follow them over it.

The
press of people led into a series of plazas, bridges and ramps. This was the
busy metropolitan area of Taluush, and platforms mounted by all manner of
shops, restaurants and bars arced through the thick junkheap towers like
mushroom tops, or perhaps lily pads, each one higher than the next and
connected by bridges and walkways, even rope swings. From below came the glow
of green fire.

It
all stank of smoke and panic. The air was filled with the sounds of rending
metal, crackling flames and screams. To Tavlin’s left a gang of mutants looted
a clothing shop. To his right another group barricaded their own shop.

A
great, unanimous scream issued from behind, and Sophia clutched Tavlin’s hand.
“The bridge fell,” she whispered. She realized she was gripping his hand and
dropped it.

“This
way,” he said and ran toward a particular ramp, then into a tower.

Sometimes
he had to push and shove his way through the crowd, but at last they stepped
from an upper level onto the high, vertigo-inducing walkways of the Ale-Maru, a
large, tubular section that, like the Singh-Hiss, hung suspended horizontally from
the cistern cavern ceiling. The Ale-Maru sprouted from the tower Tavlin and
Sophia had just left and merged with a great, dripping stalactite, coated in
slime and ash, on its far end—a thick stalactite that must drop to its point
seventy feet or so below the ceiling. Flails flew around it, their undersides
lit by the weird green glow of the fires. It was the stalactite the great town
clock was set into, and the clock faces—all three of them, at equidistant
points all around—blazed the time, with the second hand ticking down the fate
of the city, as if to say,
The end is
coming
.

Wind
tore at Tavlin’s clothes and hair, a breeze spurred by the flames. Few people
occupied the scaffolding that supported the walkways, and he knew that most
would be barricading their doors within. He and Sophia passed darkened shops
and dives, all seedy and depressed-looking. This had obviously not been a
thriving area of the city. The ground looked very far away, and the many
towers, platforms and flames between this hanging branch and the water level
gave the perspective a certain franticness that made Tavlin feel queasy.

He
and Sophia picked their way toward the far end of the Ale-Maru, where it was
pressed into the giant clock stalactite, just as the whole structure began to
shake violently. He glanced back to see that the tower it sprouted from was
crumbling. Green flames licked most of the way up its length, climbing higher
by the second. Soon it would reach the Ale-Maru and begin eating into it as
well. Tavlin wondered if the Ale-Maru could stay intact if the tower collapsed.
Many thin wires, and a few thick ones, held it up, and they were bolted
securely into the stone and metal of the cistern ceiling. But
how
securely?

“Where
are we going, damnit?” Sophia asked.

“The
boy said to meet him at the end of the Ale-Maru. He must’ve meant where it
joins the clock face.”

“There
are chambers in it, I know that much. People work there, in the clockwork.”

“I
guess there must be a secret passage from the machinery rooms into smugglers’
tunnels.”

He
pressed on, heart pounding, sweat weeping from every pore, keeping the blood
that caked him from solidifying. His eyes scanned the way ahead for signs of
the boy.

Nothing.

That
was when events took an unexpected turn.

Suddenly,
Tavlin heard a peculiar hiss, as of waves breaking along a shore—a strange
shore, as if formed of some unfathomable material, and a strange sea, as if the
water moved too slowly, too thickly, and the sound only heard over a radio
broadcast, full of metallic crackling. At the same time, the lighting changed.
Green-white illumination pulsed off the walls and scaffolding around him.
Shocked, Tavlin drew back, nearly tumbling off the walkway into the oblivion to
the left of him. Sophia grabbed him. Her eyes were wide, too.

“What
is it?” she said.

Tavlin
opened his mouth to answer but could only fumble for words.
No, not her, not now ...

The
air crackled behind them, a great hissing vortex of energy. Tavlin and Sophia
spun. Out of the vortex flowed a form, all of white, phantasmagorical vapor
spilling everywhere, taking strange shapes. The vapor drifted forward, tall and
roiling, then it parted in the middle like some alien, ghostly flower, and the
girl appeared—the witch-girl, the girl in white—beautiful, naked, otherworldly.
Light shone from her eyes.

A
finger stabbed at Tavlin.
“You took it.
Why, oh why did you take it?”

Her
voice seemed to come from far away, and it had an odd echo to it. The way she
said the words almost sounded as though she cared for Tavlin, as if by taking "it"
he had betrayed her in some way.

Tavlin
backed away, Sophia at his side. “I—I—”

Sophia
raised her gun. Fired. The bullet punched through the ghost-girl as if she were
made of air, and perhaps she was, or nothing more solid at any rate. Sophia
fired again, and again, to the same result.

Behind
the ghost-girl, green fire consumed the tower. Leaping flames began to eat into
the Ale-Maru, silhouetting the girl in surreal tones. The flames could just
vaguely be seen through her luminous form.

“Where is it?”
she said. “
Where did you take it?
”

Tavlin
backed way, careful not to tumble off the edge. “Y-you should know,” he said.
“You seem able to follow me anywhere. What
are
you?”

The
phantom threw back her head and screamed,
“Here!
Here he is! Take him!”

The
G’zai must have heard her, for Tavlin saw them pour out of the tower, tall and
white, their tendrils whipping the air about them, black eyes unblinking. The young
ghost woman drifted forward, but even as her fingers locked about Tavlin’s
neck—with him thrashing and throwing himself backward—she dissipated into white
smoke, then not even that.

The
G’zai took her place, scuttling forward through the scaffolding, both
awkward-looking and amazingly limber. And
fast
.
They closed the distance with horrifying speed. People within the structure
fired at them—Tavlin saw the flashes through shop windows—and the G’zai
responded. Tendrils dipped inside cavities of the Ale-Maru and dragged out
screaming, thrashing victims, who were promptly engulfed in flames or ripped
apart in bloody showers.

Sophia
raised her gun to fire at them. Tavlin let loose, too. The G’zai drove on, not
even pausing.

Tavlin
shoved the gun away. Still one bullet left.

“Run!”
he said.

He
scrambled toward the clock face. Cursing, Sophia followed. The hissing and
chittering of the G’zai grew louder. Closer. The scaffolding thumped and shook
as they climbed. The roar of fire grew louder. Tavlin heard a loud snap and
spun to see that one of the four main strands of cables that held the Ale-Maru
up had torn.

The
Ale-Maru vibrated underfoot. People screamed inside.