Artifact Read online

  I looked around the room and thought about how we could power the dais, and I noticed the emergency floodlights. “Kill the floodlights,” I said. “Split the Clean Room into the backup generator. We would be able to power the whole room – the whole floor.”

  Alice shrugged, “If we could get the whole room up and running, it would give us more tools for figuring out the cipher.”

  “Okay,” Sid said.

  Alice nodded and took another pull from her water. “So we have a plan.”

  “Sid and I will head down to the generators,” I tossed my folders onto the trolley. “You prep the Clean Room and try to find that algorithm. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

  “I could help,” Kate said suddenly, startling us. “I used to have a low voltage license, years ago–”

  “No,” Sarah said thinly, wrapping herself around Kate’s arm.

  Kate hugged Sarah close, whispering that she could come with, that she would never leave her.

  I nodded, feeling pretty good about things for the first time in a while. “Kate and Sarah are with me – Sid’s with Alice.”

  Sid hefted his baseball bat and moved into the hallway.

  Alice finished chewing off a fingernail and nodded.

  I picked up my flashlight and–

  SEVEN

  1.

  –The gun was gone.

  The clothes had been messily dumped onto the closet floor. There were several bullet holes in the drywall around the bedroom door, and the barricade that Alice and I built was pushed inward toward the bed – signs that something forced its way into the room instead of out.

  I moved to the stairway and immediately noticed that it was much quieter on the first floor.

  I quickly checked the other rooms upstairs, dreading the moment that I would find this version of Alice’s emaciated corpse death–clutching a spent firearm, or worse, transformed into one of them. But she wasn’t there, and blood slammed back into my temples. As far as I could tell, she made it downstairs. I couldn’t imagine what she intended to do once she hit the streets, remembering the spinning eddies of zombies as they literally left no space between them. The last time I looked out of the bedroom window, they choked the entire roadway plus the curtilage, as they forced themselves into nearly every house as far as the eye could see.

  Nothing would have prepared me for what I saw downstairs.

  There were at least fifty bodies scattered around the living room in various postures of death. The front door was propped open by a pile of them. There was a standing puddle of blood leading out of the door into the roadway. Bodies followed this trail until it seeped into a sewage drain below the curb. The horror of what I finally saw was beyond words. It suddenly became significant to acknowledge that each zombie, each reanimated corpse was at one time a person. And as I scanned the ground, as I looked suspiciously at the bodies lying around, dreading the moment that they would stand up and try to eat me, it finally registered that something had been horribly wrong with them. They were incomplete, reduced to complex abstracts of horror. I collapsed onto the stairs, and covered my eyes.

  Hundreds of bodies – hundreds upon hundreds – were splayed and headless. Every single one of them.

  Something beheaded every. Single. One.

  I got to my feet and stumbled toward the door, and my hand fell on the pile of ripped open mail from the night before. I sifted through the envelopes, glad to divert my mind away from the holocaust around me, and I found the letter addressed to that odd sounding place in New York. The Prudentiacapex.

  I folded the envelope, stuffed it into my robe and headed outside. I walked through an indescribable muck covering the driveway while vitreous pink fluids and chunks of skin and bone swirled around the boulevard. There were still zombies around, but not nearly as many as there were the last time I was here. They were slow and sparse enough that I could walk at a comfortable pace. In the distance, they would see me and veer my direction, hopelessly trying to follow.

  The trail of headless corpses led away from my house toward the west. Toward the city of Socorro. Toward the labs.

  For some time, I wondered what could have done that – what on Earth could have beheaded so many people?

  I walked, numb, uncertain about the distance, knowing that whatever happened, wherever I ended up, whichever reality I phased into, I promised myself that I would head toward the labs. The answers were there.

  And what if Alice was right? What if we didn’t mess up the speed or the axis? What if we were somehow dealing with the result of the artifact opening exactly when we asked it to? Would this nightmare pass if we repeated the process, like Alice suggested? I wondered if there was another Me heading into the basement of the CEM with little Sarah and Kate, or if I popped out of existence there the moment I popped into existence here. I walked in numb silence, studying the whispering minutia therein, trying to avoid the headless bodies on the ground. It struck me that if there were such a place as hell, then this was it. My worst fears, my worst dreams were coming true.

  I tried to keep those same anxieties that I had when I was a child at bay, but I was failing. I realized then that I was suddenly hugely important and essential, and the world was fabricated and false. I was immensely huge in the grand scope of things, in a world that existed outside the boundary of real terms. At the same time I became so infinitesimally small compared to the sheer volume of suffering that lay headless around me in various states of despair.

  This was a place nonetheless. It was a place where every nightmare came true. How could this truth be so utterly, irrevocably present, and not have to do with me? How could this be happening and I not be the center of it? Sid was wrong. Some things just aren’t egocentric. Or maybe that’s the point – maybe that’s what this is all about. Maybe my ego was the underlying issue. Surveying the thousands of headless corpses around me, I thought about what the last Alice said in the filing department, and I couldn’t help but feel the crushing weight of responsibility. This was my fault. The truth of that was near debilitating. If I had shut things down after the initial temperature spike, maybe none of this would have happened–

  –A low rumble that sounded like rolling thunderheads pulled my attention away from the road, and when I looked up, I noticed a thin white crack in the night sky. It started at its zenith near the constellation Cancer, and then the stars suddenly split toward the horizon. The sky was beginning to separate.

  And as I thought about names, symbols and metaphors, trying my best to make sense out of what this all meant, a monolithic chunk of the night sky broke free and started to fall. And because of the height at which it plummeted, it fell slowly, like a snowflake, and in the space that had been opened, there was only starless void.

  The world was beginning to fall apart.

  In this land of metaphors and dreams, I hadn’t the slightest idea what that meant. I thought my grasp of natural law was keeping this place together, but apparently I was wrong–

  2.

  –I could see a faint pinprick of light far above me. When the burst of synapse cleared, I was lying on my back, looking up the expanse of an impossibly deep shaft. I tried to move, but sharp pain shot through my wrist and elbow, and I realized that my legs wouldn’t work. I was paralyzed–

  –No, that wasn’t it.

  My legs wouldn’t move because they were shackled to something. When I tried lifting my head, I was immediately blinded by a stream of blood that dripped into my eyes. I tilted my face and let the dark red ichor run to the floor. I tried sitting up, but I couldn’t – something was holding me down. I heard distant echoes of clanging metal roll down the shaft, and bits of dust and dirt rained onto my face. I tried to move my arms, but they weren’t working either – another sharp pain stabbed my left wrist again, and I realized that I was handcuffed to a wheelchair.

  I looked up at the light agai
n, and it must have been miles above me.

  My vision cleared a bit and I could see what looked like torchlight playing on the stone around me. I craned my head back, careful not to upset my wrist, and saw that the shaft opened to a hallway not far from where I was lying. That’s where the light came from.

  “Help,” I rasped.

  A shadow moved in front of the light, and the sound of shoes slid across the cobblestone. The shadow looked around the corner, saw me lying on the ground, and quickly came to my side.

  “Jesus,” The shadow knelt at my side. “What the hell happened?”

  “I’m stuck,” was all I could say.

  Whoever it was spent a few seconds studying my handcuffs.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I can get you out.”

  The shadow ran back into the other room and was gone for some time – I couldn’t shake how familiar he was.

  When I was younger, a childhood friend and I would screw with people on the flex–phone. We spent so much time together that we adopted each other’s inflection and tone, so when either of us would talk to people with the video off, nobody could ever tell who was which. We would even play this trick on relatives and close friends, and fooled them every time.

  The voice sounded exactly like that – it wasn’t entirely like my own, but it sounded like the alien recording of my own voice, which sounded nothing like the voice in my head. The shadow sounded like a recording of me.

  He returned after what felt like a long time. He gently rolled me onto my side just enough to unlock the cuffs, and then he moved toward my feet as I rubbed feeling back into my wrists. “What happened…?”

  I tried moving my left wrist, but it was surely broken, and my elbow looked dislocated. “Someone pushed me down this shaft.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because,” I said, biting through the pain. “I think I may have guessed right.”

  He immediately went to work tying off a sling and then tried helping me to my feet, but the pain grew so intense that he had to stop several times so that I could catch my breath.

  “How,” I said a bit too harshly, “and why do you have the key to my handcuffs?”

  “It’s this place,” the man said. “It has everything. Everything you could possibly imagine, want or need. There’s a whole pile of keys in the other room. To be honest, I’m actually surprised this one worked – everything else I’ve found so far has been–”

  “What do you mean by everything?” I croaked.

  “I mean,” he said. “Well, I’ll just have to show you.”

  “I can’t – can’t really move–”

  “How could anyone survive a fall like that?”

  “I’m not entirely sure I did.”

  It was too dark to see his face, which remained obscured no matter where he moved it, and the flickering torch in the other room offered barely enough light to see my own hand. The way the light danced over his profile, the shadow appeared not to have any features on his face at all.

  The man helped me to my feet. “There’s a place to lie down in the next room. Maybe you can help me answer some questions.”

  “Trust me, I’m the last person to get answers from.”

  The shadow looked up at the tiny light above. “How long have you been lying here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a low vibration, and more particles of dust fell on us. We both heard a distant groan coming from far above, and when we looked, the tiny source of light went black. Dust began to fall with a bit more volume.

  “What’s happening up there?”

  “Help me,” I said, pulling myself up with his shoulder. The sound of thunder came rolling down the shaft, and the particles of dust grew to about the size of stones, and then finally rocks the size of my fist.

  “We have to move,” I said.

  The shadow wedged his neck under my arm and grabbed a handful of my beltline – he hoisted me up and started pulling me away from the shaft toward the torchlight.

  “What’s happening?” He whispered.

  “I think the sky is falling.”

  He strained through the effort of holding my weight, and the thunder got closer and louder. We urgently moved away from the shaft as a large block of something – about the size of a sedan – slammed into the ground where I was lying seconds before, smearing the wheelchair into a million pieces, sending plumes of pulverized rock and dust exploding out of the shaft, which covered us with a thick gray coat of grit. Bits of grain mixed with my blood, and the briny paste was enough to stop the blood from leaking into my eyes.

  The shadow and I lay there, swiping the sharp cloud away from our faces. “What,” the shadow rasped. “Is going on?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Here,” he said. “Let me help you to a chair.”

  I reached for him and stopped. There was something horribly wrong. I studied the man as if he were an optical illusion. I tried to find the cloudy glare of glass between us, a plastic film pulled over his head perhaps, or a light in the background that somehow obstructed the rest of him from view. He was normal build, and he had sandy brown hair, and a light birthmark that peeked just above the collar of his shirt. Everything that I could see was there, and it made sense – except when I looked at anything above the shoulders, I couldn’t hold my gaze longer than a second without feeling a sudden urge to scramble away from him in panic, screaming until my voice went hoarse. He was anatomically normal except for one major detail – he didn’t have a face.

  His face was missing.

  “What is it?” The skin where his eyes, nose and mouth should have been still pulled and flexed with sinuous muscle underneath – it still wrinkled at the spots where his eyes and lips should have been, but they were gone. I heard his voice, clear as day, but the sound lacked an orifice with which to transmit. I saw his brow furrow around an eyeless pate, as if this waxwork manikin were troubled or distressed, but without the schema of facial artifacts that are usually held to a standard by which all faces are judged, the effect was horrifying and ominous.

  “What’s wrong?” He asked, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “You don’t have a face…”

  The faceless man touched his chin and stopped. He slowly palpated where his lips should have been, where his nose should have been, and finally where his eyes should have been, and then his isolated features stretched into what could have only been shock and horror. He frantically rubbed his face, and tried to peel and push his features back into existence.

  “What’s happening?” He demanded. “What did you do?”

  When I moved into the light, he stumbled away from me.

  “Your face,” he whispered. “You have my face…”

  I was frozen solid, horrified with these turn of events. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do.

  He tripped over a small granite statue, and started frantically crawling away. He got to his feet and ran, and as I watched him go, entirely speechless, I finally noticed the cavernous, endless expanse of the room he dragged me into. It was limitless. High above me, maybe miles above me, I could see the domelike ceiling of an impossibly large cave. And as I looked around, listening to the screaming echo of the faceless man as he ran farther and farther away, I noticed that the cave was filled with thousands upon millions upon billions of… things. As far as the eye could see there were books, instruments, statues, automobiles, airplanes, stacks of films, piles of different kinds of cameras, ancient scrolls, clothing from different periods in history, old muskets and battery, a submarine, and various monuments from all over the world. There was nothing that wasn’t here. Everything that one could imagine was in this cave.

  High above, in what must have been the center of the cave, were lit braziers the size of several combined football fields, which hung from
chains that must have been as large as train–cars. They cast everything in boiling waves of firelight.

  Dazed, I looked down the narrow path between the many stacked tapestries and cultural artifacts that the faceless man had run, and rubbed the spot just above the collar where my birthmark was–

  3.

  –I followed the faceless man’s quiet sobs through darkness for what seemed an impossible length of time. Between the paths of antiques and the giant braziers, granite steps rose to a series of entresols – each in turn connected to the next entresol by an additional granite staircase – that lined the exterior of the cave for what must have been hundreds of stories above where I stood, between the endless sprawl of monuments, aircraft carriers and skyscrapers. I climbed the stairs and stumbled upon a giant letter L at the base of one of the mezzanines. There was something cut into the granite, but the size of the word was so great that I couldn’t make it out at eye level.

  I searched around for something to climb, eventually finding the stone statue of the Sphinx of Giza, which I was surprised to find roughly the size of a large rambler. I carefully picked my way up the slope of its thigh, taking care not to disturb my left wrist or elbow. When I was confident that I had sure enough footing, I turned toward the mezzanine and looked at a phrase cut into the granite, about a quarter–mile long:

  LEXICON SAPIENTIA

  Although I didn’t speak the language, I knew that it was Latin.

  I remembered the envelope addressed to New York, which was also very Latinate. I checked my pocket, remembering that during my last fugue, I stuffed it into my robe before walking toward the labs, just before the sky began splitting and crashing into the Earth. I carried something with me while shifting realities before. I remembered Patrick’s gun, and how it came with me to the filing department, where I then passed it to Alice.

  I carefully pulled the envelope out of my back pocket and studied the address for the third time.

  PRUDENTIACAPEX, New York

  I knew that prudentia meant something along the lines of prudence or wisdom.