Those That Wake

PART 3





THE GUARDIAN WAITS

THERE,” MAL SAID, pointing unnecessarily—he thought—across the street.

Mike squinted.

“Which one?” Laura said. “With the two women smoking in front or the one with all the plants?”

Mal’s finger wavered as though it were the defective aspect of this scenario.

“In between them,” he said, studying the other two, bringing his finger back up more certainly. “Right there.”

Laura blinked, and then her back went straight and she blinked again. Mike was staring.

“Oh,” Laura said slowly. “That one. That’s weird. It’s like I forgot to look at it.”

Mal nodded and looked at the building and the crowds of people walking by it.

“So,” Mike said, and let it hang, waiting for someone else to bring the thought to fruition. When no one did, he asked, “Do we just walk in?”

“That’s what I did,” Mal said.

“And it went so well.”

“What else, then? Wait until someone comes out? I don’t think”—Mal watched the building in silence for a moment—”anyone ever will.”

“What if it knows we’re coming? What if it’s waiting for us in there?”

“Do you want to go in at night?”

“Night? No way in hell.”

“We should go in now,” Laura said. “If it knows we’re coming, it’s not going to un-know it by tomorrow. And we can’t afford to wait for a week or a month. What difference would nighttime make, anyway? It doesn’t sleep or go home for dinner. There won’t be, like, less of it on duty. We need to go in now.”

Mal nodded and then Mike nodded, and they turned back to the building and waited for one of the others to take the first step across the street.

Tentatively, Laura went first. She weaved between stopped cars, leading the other two at a short distance, until they came up on the opposite sidewalk and stood before the cold, metallic tower.

“You made it,” someone said from behind. They turned as one, Mal moving between the other two and the speaker.

“I wasn’t sure you would,” Remak said, and Laura instinctively lurched forward and threw her arms around him. He hugged her back mechanically, and when she let go and looked into his face, for just an instant—maybe it was a projection of her own fear—Laura thought he wasn’t pleased to see them.

“When the house went up,” Mal said, “we thought…”

“No.” Remak didn’t go beyond that. He looked away from them and at the building. “I’ve been looking for this place for hours. I remembered where Mal said it was, but I walked up and down the block and couldn’t find it.”

“But you see it now,” Mal said.

“When you walked up to it.” Remak nodded. “I feel as though I just remembered to see it,” he added curiously. “It’s not just me, either. I’ve been sitting in the restaurant across the street. No one else sees it, either. Not a single person glanced up to look at their reflection in the door or stopped to take a smoke in front. It’s like it’s not even here.”

“They’d see it if you showed it to them,” Mal said.

“Maybe,” Remak said. “But even we had a hard time seeing it, and we haven’t been gotten to yet. I assume Laura explained what it is we’re facing.”

“Should we be doing this out here?” Mike asked, the building looming right behind him.

“Why not?” Remak said. “Do you think it doesn’t know we’re coming? Do you think it doesn’t know we’re here? It’s in half the people around us, like a disease, an infectious disease of the brain.”

“Not the brain,” Laura cut in. “The mind. I mean, that’s what the Librarian was saying, more or less, wasn’t it?”

“There is no mind without the brain,” Remak said. “Nothing affects one without affecting the other.”

“But the brain is physical; the mind is intangible,” Laura said. “A disease, like Alzheimer’s or something, affects the brain physically. Are you saying that’s what this thing does?”

“Probably not.”

“Then this thing is really more like a ghost than a disease. It haunts the mind as much as it infects it.” Laura didn’t bother to camouflage the challenge in her tone any longer.

“If you like,” Remak allowed. “The point is, for whatever reason, the four of us are clear, for the time being. We can do something about it.”

“The last time I tried to go up, something big and very, very strong stopped me,” Mal said.

“I have an idea about that,” Remak said.

“Me, too,” Laura said.

“Oh?” His scientist’s eyes studied her, and a moment of tension stretched between them.

“This is what we were thinking.” Mal broke into the uncomfortable moment and explained.

Remak examined the plan for flaws with the care of a jeweler. When he found one, he offered modifications and when all of them were satisfied, they went over the plan again without embellishment.

Once they were all clear on their parts, Mal stepped in front and led them through the glass and metal door into what now felt to him like another place altogether. Not a different world or a different time, but a different way of thinking, where you couldn’t count on any of the laws and truths you knew.

It was the same as Mal remembered it: dank, gray, somehow unfinished, and uncomfortably pregnant with imminent menace. The others looked about them, at the exposed concrete of the floor, the dulled metal of the walls, the polished chrome here and there, the vastness of the place.

“There are the elevators.” Mal pointed at the concrete columnlike banks before them. “On the other side is an open space, like a lounge or something.”

Remak led them past the elevators and had a look at the emptiness beyond. He nodded at the space where there could be an internal garden or a fountain or some giant corporate insignia in sculpture. It was a space designed to strip away imagination and hope and replace them with a homogenous inertia so that individuality could die. And worse yet, it was that space in blank, generic form, making it all the easier to see how content, any content, any corporate symbol or ideology—which was to say, all corporate symbols or ideology—could be slipped in.

He stared, looking hypnotized at the panorama for a moment, until Mal stirred him with a hand on his shoulder. Mike and Laura took their places, and Mal and Remak positioned themselves at the elevator. Remak slipped the gun out and held it loosely at his side, then nodded to Mal.

Mal went over and faced the row of elevators he had used, or tried to use, on previous visits. Just before his finger reached the button, it lit a dull orange, as if it sensed his presence. He took a step back and waited.

Remak loosened his shoulder, planted his feet.

The elevator in the middle dinged. Mal’s hands flexed quickly at his sides. The door slid open slowly. He braced himself.

There was an empty elevator before him, waiting for him to board it. He glanced over at Remak and back quickly, expecting something invisible within it to suddenly appear and attack as soon as he looked away.

Remak made no move, no response, but merely waited.

Mal poked his head into the compartment, looked on both sides, pulled his head out. He looked at Remak again, shrugged, and started to step in.

His foot had barely come off the floor when a dark motion darted from the elevator opposite, at his back. That door had opened swiftly and had not dinged.

All Remak could see of the motion was dark and big and fast. It had Mal before the gun had even twitched.

Mal was in the air, his feet kicking, his hands reaching back over his shoulders to find what had him. Now still, the motion became a figure, of a sort; indistinct, not quite solid, but definitely there, like something seen through a rain-slicked window.

The gun was up. The head of the figure was either hooded or just very dark. Remak shifted to his right just enough to find the front center of the hood or the darkness.

Mal felt the force against his neck, straining it, his tendons reaching their snapping point.

The line of fire between the gun and the figure’s face came perilously close to Mal’s head. It wasn’t just aim that was critical, it was timing, because Mal was flailing and his head kept interfering with the shot. There was a chance the bullet would catch Mal square in the temple, perhaps sparing him the shock and pain of a snapped neck.

Remak fired a single, crackling hiss that reverberated metallically up and down the empty space. It found the center of that darkness, and the figure jolted.

The figure didn’t pause to consider or calculate. It tossed Mal thoughtlessly away, sending him sprawling out across the rough concrete on the floor behind him, and then it became a motion again.

Remak was already moving from a standstill to a dead sprint, pumping his arms and cutting the distance to the front door with all his might.

There was Laura at the door. She saw Remak and the motion behind him, an indistinct blur that made her stomach flutter. What she felt wasn’t just fear but a particular kind of fear, without reason or hope: that of a child caught before a speeding car with nowhere to escape. She closed her eyes, turned her head away, and pulled the door open.

Remak watched as the door opened to the world they had come from, the people passing by and not looking at them. It was something like a nightmare in which you were close enough to freedom that if you extended your fingers you could touch it while seeing all the people who couldn’t help you.

Two feet from the border between here and there, Remak’s feet were pulled off the ground. It wouldn’t be more than a second before he was dead, either from a splintered spine or from something done to him that would take his mind from him forever.

Mal, also at a dead run, the motion sending jolts up his injured leg, launched himself like a stone from a catapult. He vaulted into the figure’s back, and for an instant, just an instant, it felt like a wall made of rock or steel. He knew it would break his bones—until the instant his momentum had carried him, the figure, and Remak through the doorway and outside. Then suddenly Mal was slamming into nothing at all. The figure was gone, and he and Remak tumbled over each other as, for the second time in about eight seconds, Mal scraped his bare arms bloody against concrete.

They looked up at each other, both a little stunned. People saw them, there on the sidewalk. A few stopped dead and stared at them. A woman came a little closer and asked suspiciously if they were all right.

“Great, thanks,” Mal said, rising agonizingly from the ground. Remak helped him to his feet. Mal examined his skinned flesh, blood welling slowly in places. He brushed his chest and torso off and followed Remak back inside the building.

The bystanders watched the two men turn and walk into…

The people hurried along their way, the incident already murky and vague in their minds.

Mike waited, his foot jammed into the elevator door to keep it from closing. As Mal, Remak, and Laura appeared, he watched the other elevators uncertainly, expecting something else to come bursting out at any time.

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.