Those That Wake (24 page)

They piled into the elevator, and the door closed.

Remak stuffed the revolver back into the holster and looked up at the buttons. His mouth was open, to ask Mal again which floors he'd been to, but froze in that position, silenced. It was quite clear which button mattered. The top floor, the button by itself, crowning the double rows beneath it, was unmarked. Just looking at it made their stomachs weak, dried their throats.

The four stared at the button and were still.

THE BUTTON STARED
back at them. It challenged them like an eye staring directly at their fears, at the things in their lives that they buried away and never even looked at themselves.

Laura held Mal's hand. Hers was fully a quarter smaller, but he could still feel it crushing, compressing his bones and tendons with the strength of fear, the same fear that held him numb and shaking. The force must be practically breaking her delicate fingers; he could only imagine what it was doing to the rest of her. Why didn't she look away?

Then he saw why. Her other hand was rising toward the button, moving slowly as if it were dragging a great weight under it. Mal looked at Remak. His fear was a quizzical thing, his head tilted at the button, trying to figure it out. Mal looked at Mike, and Mike was looking down, shaking his head.

Laura's hand rose.

And Mal's hand came up, too. He would not make her do it alone. Her above all.

Their hands were up, their fingers extended, the button before them, its only true weapon what they carried in their own heads. And when he felt her squeeze his other hand, when he knew it was time to close his eyes and lurch forward, when they had decided but before they could move, the button glowed hazy orange all by itself and the elevator hummed smoothly around them.

Their arms fell back to their sides, the muscles aching and twitching. Now there was also the feeling that there wasn't enough air. Mal felt a trembling first in his stomach, and then he could see it in his hands. Someone was crying, and he looked up, expecting it to be Laura, but it was Mike, gripping his face, still shaking his head. Laura was making fists, pressing them into her legs, making an effort at steadying her breath. He could see muscles in her throat clenching. Remak's eyes were closed, and he breathed deeply and steadily, mechanically, forcing his body to obey.

There was a loud sob of fear, and Laura clutched Mike to her. They embraced and shook so hard, Mal could practically feel it from where he was. Mal reached around and hugged them both, as though to protect them, but really to protect himself. He reached one of his powerful, bloodied arms out and grasped Remak, and pulled him to them as well.

Remak opened his eyes and let out a wail that they all knew from their own hearts.

And the door opened.

Remak was the first to pull away from the embrace; he straightened his back and turned around to face the door. The others, hearing nothing from him, came apart from one another slowly, rubbing tears from their faces and following his gaze out the door.

There, in an office, was a man in a suit.

And truly, it was
a
man in
a
suit. All you could say of the suit was that it was a suit—cloth cut into a recognizable shape, that shape being "suit." It had no particular color, no particular style. It was much more the idea "suit" than it was actually a suit itself.

So, too, was the man. Even when you were looking straight at him, it was impossible to describe him. He wasn't old, young, tall, short, thin, fat, dark, light, handsome, ugly. Like the suit, he was just a familiar shape that served a universal purpose, to move and, perhaps, to speak.

The office, unlike the space downstairs, had no exposed surfaces of plaster or masonry or drywall. But it, too, was a blank form onto which any style could be placed. It was "office" and nothing more or less than that.

The shape of the man looked at them in the elevator. They knew he did because things they recognized as eyes were directed at them, not because there was any indication of acknowledgment or impatience or humor or pity in his face, because there was no expression there at all. How could there be when there was no true face for those expressions to play upon?

Remak, standing straight, not wiping at the dampness on his cheeks, stepped out first. The others followed him, their fear, at least the unreasoning fear that had built and built, gone now. Remak opened his mouth to speak, but Mal was suddenly alongside him, moving as if he were stepping into a ring.

"What are you?" Mal said.

"What are you?" Man in Suit said. "You ask me to justify my being. What is your defense for your own?"

"We are the evolved and evolving species
homo sapiens,
" Remak countered, "unique and unprecedented. You are only a genus of a species, just another form of meme."

"No. I move myself, sustain myself, communicate, thrive in a unique way," Man in Suit said. "I am Idea. The others are only notion. They are my prehistory, I am their future. And yours."

The voice, the familiar voice he had heard in the lobby days ago ... Mal finally recognized it—i ts tones, its dips and rises, its emphasis, both warmly human and distinctly artificial. It was the voice Mal heard in his head when he saw a commercial on the HD, offering him a deal, or words scrolling by on his cell, advertising exciting benefits. It was the voice that offered him happiness if he would drink the latest sports drink and perfect health through the latest pharmaceutical, that told him about the newest car that would make him a success and the guaranteed diet that would make him attractive. It was the voice of empty promise that encompassed, that inundated, that drowned human life. And looking at it now, Mal decided, this was the only face it could have.

The face, Laura decided, like the rest of the figure, was just the idea, the concept of face. The mouth moved, but no lines ever appeared to lend support when the voice suggested anger or superiority or humor. The face, in fact, was so smooth that it had clearly
never
made those lines. It didn't
look
like a machine face programmed to move in certain prescribed ways; it just
felt
like it. The smoothness, the vacuity of it was more alien to Laura than the weirdest plant, the most bizarre ocean life, the most unrecognizable mineral deposits she had ever seen.

Mike, standing the farthest back, listened to Man in Suit talk about his—
its
—own significance, its individuality. It made him think of all the faces he had looked out on, projecting an education at, every day. Those faces stared back in uniform apathy, at best ignoring him, at worst hating him for his efforts. And those same eyes were looking at him right now, out of Man in Suit's face. Not just looking
at
him; looking inside him, into his head.

"What is this place?" Mal said. "Why can't people see it?"

"The outside, the shell, is something that people made a long time ago," Man in Suit said. "But your Big Black came, and fear drove the people who occupied it away, out of the city. The shell stood empty and faded, and now it is one of the forgotten places. It is in your world, but not in your minds. People can't see it anymore because it no longer has significance for anyone."

"And there are other such places," Remak said, understanding now.

"Many. You were in one before, a place in the forest that people stopped going to and so it ceased to matter, and so I claimed it. It disappeared then, and abandoned, it started to lose things that made it real: color, smell. It will cease to exist at all eventually, and the world will be that much smaller. You think that the world exists apart from your apathy, your inadvertent disdain for things, but it doesn't. They are bound together. Your minds are far more powerful than you know. Your conception destroys things even as it creates them. As evidence, witness me."

"Why did you do this to me?" Laura thrust it out like an attack, surprised that she even had the ability to speak to the face of this thing. "Why take my parents, ruin our lives? Who are we to you?"

"I didn't single you out," Man in Suit replied, the most obvious answer in the world. "I do it to hundreds of people every day, each with their own weaknesses and traumas. I slowly defile and subvert what gives them purpose, and I do not even need to force myself into their minds. They put me there. Parents like yours in particular are quite simple. Their hope hangs on the slender thread of their children. Ronald and Claire Westlake are no one at all to me. It was just their turn. Eventually, I will have done it to everyone."

Frozen, Laura didn't know what drove the spike of fear deepest into her: Man in Suit's goal or that he had so easily, so casually renewed her sense of helplessness by simply invoking her parents' names.

"That's the outside of the building," Remak said, oblivious to Laura's tragedy, needing all his precious information, "the shell, you said. What's the inside, the doors that lead so far away?"

"The inside of this place is me," said Man in Suit. "And I grow rapidly, expanding through those doorways."

Mike realized, with a cold certainty that froze his chest, that they shouldn't have come here. By coming into the building and, thus,
into
Man in Suit, they let him into themselves just a little bit more. Mike could even feel it, wiggling in his brain, not a voice yet, not quite, but growing so that it would soon be a shout that blotted everything else out. His eyes twitched with icy fear toward Remak.

"And where do the doorways lead?" Remak pushed on.

"To where I am already, where I am beginning to be felt the most sharply and I can grow."

"A metaphor." Remak almost laughed, and for Laura, that was perhaps the most disturbing thing she had seen yet, the weird half-smile on Remak's face in the midst of this nightmare show-and-tell. "The doorways are a metaphor of what you are, how you travel from mind to mind. But your metaphor takes solid form."

"Still," Man in Suit went on, "there are not enough to propagate myself as quickly as I would like. That is why I employ agents."

"The MCT," Mal said.

"No." Man in Suit seemed pleased to say it. "Not of my making. You made them, just as you covered the ruined ground with a giant dome that reminds you every day of the event that set you all on this path. Your 'Big Black,' the blow you could not recover from, the event that proved you are losing control of your own lives. And so you retreat into your devices, hiding from the truth. The devices, the agents that I employ—they are simply more ways that humanity does my work for me."

"Agents like my brother," Mal said.

"Yes, he was one; one of very, very many. But Thomas Jericho was beginning to find hope, being pulled away from me by the girl he loved. So I sent others to collect him. But not before he could call for help."

"Why are the packages they deliver stuffed with trash?" Mal said. "Like the ones Isabel carried."

"The packages are for the courier. It is the mission itself that matters. I give them to young people, who waver between purpose and despair. I enlist them in something secret and sinister, something that causes them to question their own actions. And their doubt tips the balance into despair, and in the end, they are mine. The packages," Man in Suit continued, "are filled with stray words of doom, images of suffering. Someone finds the packages and opens them, and then they are one step closer to me."

"Why tell us this?" Laura was through being quiet. Remak was not their spokesman. "Why tell us any of this?"

"I tell you so you understand that you have no hope," Man in Suit answered Laura. "I will answer any question you have, because by merely being honest, I will defeat you. When I first notice you, your world fractures in a small way and things break, things that are close to you or that you value in some way. That is just the stress of my regard. I am everywhere, in everything and everybody, and no one even knows it. I am the secret future of your world and your kind. I will be absolute."

"You haven't taken away my hope," Laura said.

"But I will, because I have what you want: your family and your future. You said so yourself. I can more easily take away the hope of these others, perhaps, and once their hope is gone, yours will only be a sham that you are perpetuating for yourself, because you will be all alone."

"My hope will never be a sham," she said. "I have something that's beyond you. You could never understand it or tap into its power. I have these people, and each one of us is the power of all of us, and that's how it is with everyone alive. All they need is to know, and we'll all stand together."

"Togetherness is transitory. It fractures the instant that purpose is unaligned. Your commonality and multitudes are not strength; they are weakness, because they are only number, not support. You think that once everyone knows, humanity will 'all stand together,' but even the four of you do not stand together."

Laura stiffened, and Mal tensed behind her.

"What?" Laura said, mainly to herself.

"One of you," Man in Suit said, "is a betrayer. He already killed Nikolai Brath without your knowledge."

Mal's face tightened, and his eyes burned between Remak and Mike. Mike, his expression taut with fear, stuck his finger out at Remak.

"He intends to kill me now." Man in Suit didn't let up. "Can you grasp the enormity of this? He will be committing genocide, because I am the only one of my kind. He knows that it means the four of you will be lost forever, that your families will never recover their memories of you. But he thinks that destroying this place, the 'me' that you are in, the me that is this building, will show me to the world and thus destroy me, and he intends to do it now."

Laura turned toward Remak. His gun was out, and he shifted his body to encompass the whole room in its arc. Mal, or even Mike, might have had a chance at him. They were close enough, but they couldn't see beyond their feelings. Their feelings made them hesitate. It was always, in Remak's experience, the one who could act without feeling who could act fastest.