Those That Wake

FIGHTING THE NUMBERS

“I THINK IF YOU HAD any bullets left, you’d have fired already,” Mal said, and he was certainly right. It wouldn’t have been a shot in the arm or leg, either. Someone of Mal’s stubborn resilience would still be able to make trouble, even with a grievous leg wound, perhaps even with a shattered kneecap.

“Are you sure, Mal?” Remak’s face was deader than usual, like a warning set in stone. “Better be sure.”

Mal was not sure. He seemed to be figuring on what chance he had of beating Remak hand to hand with a bullet in him. Remak, betting his final chip, cocked the hammer.

“Do it.” Mal called the bluff. “If you’re going to do it, then do it.”

Remak threw the empty gun at Mal’s face and with the other hand pulled from his pocket the triggering remote for the explosives he had strapped to his torso.

Mal slipped by the gun as if it were a slow punch, and his hand shot out and caught Remak by the wrist. The pressure was immediate and extraordinary. Remak’s fingers went numb, still locked on the red and gray device, but unable to flex or maneuver.

“Mal, listen to me,” Remak said, but Mal’s hand only tightened on the wrist until Remak saw his hand turning red, saw it but didn’t really feel it. His other hand came up to transfer the device, but Mal’s other hand came up, too, and covered Remak’s, so that there was a conglomeration of four hands grasped tightly around each other, straining between the two men.

“Mal, this is outside all human experience. You can’t win by punching it. But it’s here now, solid before us, and that’s why we have a chance. We have to destroy this place. Letting that thing live so that we might save your brother and Laura’s family? That could end up costing the entire human race its existence. It’s a simple equation, Mal. Do the math.” He was looking into Mal’s eyes over the gathering of their hands. “Just do the math.”

“We didn’t fight our way here because of math. If you don’t know that, it’s already too late for you.”

Remak sagged down, giving up the battle between them, releasing the device into Mal’s hands, but in so doing, he forced Mal’s weight forward, just for an instant. In that instant, Remak crouched and swept Mal’s ankles from the floor.

Mal tumbled, tossing the device as far from him as he could, and rolled back up to his feet two yards away.

The young body was plagued with wounds. Mal’s face was yellow and purple from recent blows. At his hairline, there was a thin crust of blood. One of his shoulders hung lower than the other, his forearms were bloody hash marks, and his knuckles were more scar tissue than flesh. A fractured rib or two showed in his breathing, and he limped when he moved.

Remak himself couldn’t straighten out the fingers of his left hand, either, and the only sensation he had in that wrist was bone grinding against bone.

Mal lashed forward with a humming right cross, and Remak went under it, spearing two stiff fingers into Mal’s ribs.

Mal grunted, wheezed, and stumbled back against the desk and chair that seemed more a part of this generic backdrop than an actual desk and an actual chair. He grabbed the chair and whipped it around at Remak. Remak went flat to the floor, and the chair spun over his head, shattering something behind him. Only when he snapped himself back to his feet did he see there was a window there, now jagged and open to something Remak couldn’t see.

Remak circled away so that the window was at his side, and yet he still couldn’t seem to get a clear view through it. He did, however, assimilate the data that no wind was rushing in, no noise was rising from the city to prove that cars and people existed out there. There was just a sibilant crackle, like too many voices whispering. It raised some interesting questions: Where exactly was this building? Was it out there, in the world with everything else? Or was it only somewhat there, intersecting in certain places, but mainly occupying someplace else? If this building was, in some sense, a part of Man in Suit’s consciousness, then maybe the window didn’t lead out at all, but actually farther in.

A right hook nearly knocked the questions from Remak’s head. He darted aside and gouged the nerve juncture between Mal’s shoulder and pectoral with stiff fingers. Mal’s eyes twitched, but no sound came from him and he shot back with a jab, a jab, a cross. Remak avoided the combination and sent his fingertips for a disabling strike to Mal’s thigh. If he could strike deep enough, he could end the fight now.

But Mal shifted just an instant before contact. Remak still landed, but he landed an inch off, striking hard bone, and it sent an electric shock wave up his arm.

Mal was swaying there, dancing wearily from foot to foot, shifting weight and stance back and forth, back and forth. He was near the window, and maybe Remak could maneuver him over another foot or so and upset his weight and put him out.

Remak feinted and took a shot at Mal’s arm. Again, Mal shifted at the last instant and Remak scored a strike on Mal’s hard elbow instead of into meaty muscle. Dodging Mal’s counterattack caused a shift in position, and from the window now behind him, Remak could feel the short hairs of his neck start to bristle, as though charged by some strange, buzzing static.

Four more times they did it: Remak went in, just missed his mark, dodged away before a return blow landed. The window yawned open just a foot from both of them, hissing, airless, but somehow perpetually in their blind spots.

Mal was staggering, every injured part of his body coming into high relief; he was barely on his feet. But that had been his state before the fight started. And here he was, still barely on his feet. Remak went in again, missed his mark again, and dodged again, by a narrower margin.

Remak would find his mark eventually. Eventually. But his fingers were tormented for hitting bone instead of soft tissue, and he couldn’t switch to the other hand, because Mal had crushed that wrist.

Remak went in with a spearhand strike, but this time, Mal’s fist came down and snapped into Remak’s good wrist.

And so the numbers fell into their slots and totaled up, and Remak saw that he was going to lose. He was smart and practiced and skilled and observant and quick and calm. He divided his strength between all these characteristics. All Mal really had was, he would not give up. That was it, his one big muscle. He would not goddamned fall down.

And as the numbers totaled up, Remak succumbed to them, though in so doing was fascinated to observe himself fighting the numbers, struggling to stay up and fight despite the equation that irrefutably stated that he could not win. Maybe, he realized, he could have used more of that sooner.

Mal’s fist caught him right in the temple, and Remak blinked, teetered, caught himself, teetered again, and went down, one arm dangling out the window into open space.

Mal went to his knees and nearly fell on top of Remak, his hands wandering over the explosives packed tightly and strung around Remak’s chest.

He stripped them from Remak’s body and held them heavily in his own aching hands. He hoisted himself upright and turned and looked at the door, through which Laura and Mike had followed Man in Suit.


WEAKNESS INTO STRENGTH

MAL STEPPED OUT OF THE OFFICE and into … the office. The room on the other side of the door was nearly identical to the one he’d just fought Remak in: flat, characterless gray. There was an elevator door directly across from him, even as he knew there was an elevator door directly behind him, the one the four of them had stepped out of. There was a desk, a chair, both standing upright—clearly this was not actually the same room; no battle had been fought here. In fact, there was no window, no Remak lying before it. But it was the same generic emptiness.

“More of the same,” said Man in Suit. “Soon, the whole world will be like this: uniform, consistent. Because it will all be made of me, like the people who will inhabit it. They will all be me, too, my flesh. Billions of bodies, one being. Like your friend Michael Boothe.”

Midway between them, Mike stood, slack jawed, staring into the middle distance. He flinched sometimes, his shoulders or a muscle in his face. His eyes, God help him, looked dull and vacant.

And in his hands, Laura. She wrestled as she might against a block of concrete formed around her feet or metal shackles around her wrists, furiously but without result.

“As he has come into me, so he has allowed me further into him. And, struggling futilely against him—for an eternity, if necessary—she is lost, too,” Man in Suit said. “So, what is left?”

Mal looked at Laura, whose muscles couldn’t pull free from Mike’s dead grasp. Her mouth was moving, but no sound escaped. Perhaps Man in Suit had taken her words, too. But she looked back at Mal, and her bright blue eyes, blazing like neon against this pallid world, were still filled with fight. And he saw what she was saying, even though he couldn’t hear it.

You are not alone.

He turned back to Man in Suit.

“Me,” Mal said. “I’m left.”

“And what are you?”

“I’m the one you’re never going to get,” Mal said. “You’ve stripped me bare and I’m still here, so what chance do you have?” Mal took a step forward and waved him on. “Let’s go.”

“Of you all, your will is the most unsophisticated, the most fierce. It isn’t about what other people mean to you, or how you see yourself, or what you owe to an ideal. It’s absolutely pure, true to what a human is. Do you know why? Do you know what you have been fighting against all these years? Let me show you.”

Something behind Mal moved, and he turned, assuming the door he’d come through had closed, possibly disappeared. But it was there. Except now it wasn’t merely an office door, but an elevator door. It stood open to the shaft, and at the opposite side it was also open, revealing the identical office room they had all just come from.

But between here and there, suspended over the yawning shaft, were Tommy and Annie, frozen like statues reaching out toward each other. Reaching out, but coming up just short. Immediately, Mal understood why Annie had not been put with them in the forest before. Looking at them, Tommy’s body straining toward her, his fingers stretched to their agonizing limit only to come up a quarter of an inch away, Mal could see that Annie was the thing Man in Suit needed to break Tommy, and Tommy was all he needed to break her. Idiotically, it made Mal happy for his brother, that there was someone he loved so much that they were the difference between life and death to each other. That love, at least, made his life valuable. And, instinctively, Mal’s eyes flickered toward Laura, and back.

The two of them, Tommy and Annie, hung there immobile just beyond the doorway, their frail forms nearly swallowed by shadow, silhouetted by the light of the office room beyond them, but held aloft by nothing, over a chasm of black. What was suspending them there? Their love? Or Man in Suit, keeping them alive because he wasn’t quite finished with them yet?

“So, here is what you wanted,” said Man in Suit. “Your brother. I am going to let him die shortly, as you can see. But he can be saved. They both can. All you have to do is cross the threshold, push them to the safety of the other side. They will be free, and they will, if their hearts are resilient, re-cover and perhaps even thrive. Go. Help them.”

Mal stared at Man in Suit without moving.

“Yes. You will fall and die,” Man in Suit said. “But they will live. Not only that, but you will prove by giving up your life that hope has a chance, that human existence can come to more than…” Man in Suit looked around him at the ruins.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Correction: you do not want to believe me. But these two are no threat to me, and you are. It is preferable that you be dead rather than they. So they will live, and their hope will be reborn. You just have to give up and die to accomplish it.”

Mal could see Tommy from here, hanging, hair a little too long, face trapped in a rigor of tension. And Mal could also see Tommy through a tunnel of years: a boy he used to box with around the living room; who used to steal his little brother’s boxing gloves and give them back with a punch in the arm; with whom Mal used to hide, pressed close together beneath the covers as the sound of their mother’s voice tearing into their father penetrated the walls. But when Mal left, he had never been able to find the strength to take his brother’s hand and pull him out, too. Just like now.

“But sacrifice is not a fight, is it?” Man in Suit asked him. “No. It is a failure to fight. Truly, the ultimate surrender: death,” Man in Suit said. “That is why you will not help him. You are fighting what everybody is fighting in the end. Your father fought it, and lost. And if you go in there, you lose the fight.”

Man in Suit waited. The door to Tommy and Annie remained open.

“And so,” he said at length, when Mal had not moved for some time, “what you believed was your strength is, in the end, your weakness. Your sense of fight will kill your brother, and your race, as well. Hope has no—”

Something shot by Mal. Man in Suit reached out to impede the course of the projectile. His hands went up, but too slowly, too late to intercept it.

Mike tore away from Man in Suit, not bothering to curse him or even look over at him. He shot past Mal, then launched himself through the threshold, toward Tommy and Annie hanging in the dark.

Mike barreled into them, and Tommy and Annie came unglued from their own spots, tumbled back and out from the shaft, onto the gray floor of the office beyond.

And the darkness below swallowed Mike, and he fell down the shaft screaming. But it wasn’t a sound of fear. It was a sound of rage and fight that echoed up the shaft and made the office room vibrate. Until, abruptly, it stopped.

But the vibration it set off intensified, and the room began to show cracks and fissures, and through them echoed the sound of Mike’s fury.

Man in Suit’s face registered something, though it was an expression Mal couldn’t describe. It was an expression he had never seen on a human face. And the face and the body began to crack and fissure, like the room around them, and Mike’s echo rose to a crescendo and the figure shattered, pieces of it littering the floor. The pieces faded to gray and melted into the surface of the floor, becoming part of the building itself.

And as Mike’s echo died, behind Mal Laura screamed, claiming her freedom.

Before the scream stopped, Mal ran forward. The elevator shaft was just a doorway again, and he passed through, back into the office room, falling to his knees and gathering Tommy into his arms. He rocked on the floor, crying to the unconscious boy the way he had cried to his father years back.

“I’m sorry, Tommy.” It was all he could say. “I’m sorry.”

Laura came up and put her hand on his back. When he didn’t turn, she squeezed, and when he still didn’t turn, she came around and tipped his head up by his chin and looked into his face. His eyes didn’t see her. They didn’t see anything but his brother and his failure to act when Tommy needed him most.

“Mal,” she said right into his face, “look around you. Tommy is here, Annie is here. You have a chance to save them.”

He just looked at her.

“God damn you, Mal!” She grabbed him by the hair and forced his face upward. “My family is still lost, for all I know. You have your brother back. God damn you, don’t you give him up now!”

And she pulled at his hair, pulled up, grabbing his shoulders, trying to force this giant to his feet. She struggled, her feet scrabbling against the floor beneath, cursing at him. Then she stopped, her belly full of futile struggles and her face red with effort.

“Mal,” she said, going to her knees so she could look him square in the face. “Tommy and Annie have a chance because they have each other. And even if my family is gone, I still have a future. You taught me that. But I want my future to be with you. Please, Mal. Let yourself have a future, too.”

She put her hands on his cheeks and leaned forward and kissed him softly on the lips. And she stayed there, until she felt his breathing change on her lips, and he actually did rise. Up to his knees, up to his feet. Tommy was in his arms, held like a child.

Mal looked down at Laura, she back up at him.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Laura bent down, grabbed Annie and pulled. She was a small girl, but a human being is heavy and her progress was not particularly gentle, made no better by the fact that Laura wasn’t exactly interested in taking her time to get out of this cracked and fissured place.

There was a window here that Laura didn’t recall, shattered and letting in a weird static, like a billion voices, the voices of everyone alive whispering over one another. But the other side looked like nothing at all, like silence, like absence. And Remak was gone. Thrown out the window? That didn’t seem like Mal. Did Remak leave of his own volition, deciding that since he had lost, he might just as well pack it in? That didn’t seem like Remak.

Mal was walking toward the elevator they had all come up in to get here.

“Mal,” she said, her progress considerably slower dragging her burden. “What happened to Jon’s explosives?”

He looked at her, stopped, pulled up his shirt. He had strapped the copious load of explosives to his own torso.

“My left pocket,” he said.

She came over, delved in, came out with a small contraption. The detonator, Laura guessed. It was even more alien to her than the twists of machinery beneath the hood of her family’s car. But what else could it be? And what had Mal intended to do with it, exactly? Was he just making sure Remak would have to go through him to get it back?

She lowered Annie gently, tore the Velcro strips loose, and took the explosives gently off of Mal and carried them to the center of the room. She laid them down and looked at the detonator. It was perfectly clear. There was a catch, which you pressed, popping a clear hard top, under which was a red button. The catch was snapped and the clear top was bent askew, as though the thing had been under a great deal of pressure, but the red button glared up at her like a challenging eye.

She told Mal to ring for the elevator, then she dragged Annie over and they waited, neither voicing their fear that this place may not be working the way it should any longer.

But the door pinged and the elevator opened, and they went in.

Mal reached a finger from beneath Tommy, to press the lobby button.

“No,” Laura said. “The door that you looked through and saw Mike’s school, what floor was that?”

“Thirty-two.”

Laura pressed thirty-two.

“Mike is—” Mal began, then stumbled. “Gone,” he finished.

“I know,” she said, staring as the floor indicators lit their way down.

They had been too deep inside Man in Suit, or the situation was too much. Whatever the case, it had gotten Mike. He had grabbed her with the dumb, slack look on his face and the flat dullness in his eyes that she had come to recognize instantly. But as she had kicked and wailed against him and Man in Suit had offered Mal the deal that was intended to break him, Mike’s eyes had lost the veil and begun to focus, and his face had slowly cleared. He had looked down at Laura, shocked that his hands were on her. He’d let go and opened his mouth to say something, but no final thought ever issued forth. Instead, he had gazed at her as if she were the only thing in the world he loved. Then he had turned and took off.

Mal’s strength had been used against him. But Mike had used his own weakness against Man in Suit. Mike had taken a sense of worthlessness that had been forced on him his entire life and turned it into selfless sacrifice. He had found strength in his own hopelessness and overcome it. Man in Suit’s outlook allowed only for strength that could be subverted into vulnerability. It was his failure not to understand that it could work in reverse, as well. That was the nature of human beings.

The door pinged open onto a room of doors.

“Which one?” Laura said after they had come out.

Mal nodded over to one.

“Open it,” she said, pulling Annie along to the doorway.

And sure enough, it was true, just as everything else Mal had told them had been true. The door opened into a space, a dimly lit basement that was larger than the space beyond the door could possibly allow.

“Go,” she said.

Mal carried his brother into the other place, and Laura pulled Annie in after. She held the detonator in her hand and looked back into the room of doors.

“Your life was worth something, Mike,” she said out the doorway. “Your life was worth everything.”

She pressed the red button with her thumb. There was a thunderous roar and a searing flash of fire, and she slammed the door shut on it. And then there was only the cold, dark basement.