Artifact Read online

  “Why?”

  “There’s a global hexofloroethane system a few miles from here – it’s a catchall panic–button that was installed in case things ever got bad. I have to get there and release it into the atmosphere – flush the system with etchant refrigerant. There’s no way I’m going to make it through miles of monster infested cityscape toting an amnesiac and a little girl.”

  “You’re going to flood the atmosphere with poison? How is that even possible?” A shadow passed over Sarah’s face. “What are you going to use it for?”

  “It’s a chemical. We’ll use it to dissolve those fuckers – to kill them – expedite their contagious asses the fuck out of here.”

  “Won’t you dissolve us as well?”

  “No.”

  “How so?”

  He smiled. “You still haven’t figured out what this place is yet, have you?”

  I stared at him, balling my hands into fists and opening them again. The only reason I wasn’t trying to pound his enigmatic face into something resembling an answer was Sarah.

  Patrick shook his head. “You’ll be fine, trust me.”

  “Take me to the Clean Room,” I said. “I can open the artifact.”

  “And then what? What if you corrupt the Lexicon?” Patrick shook his head. “We can’t proceed until we’ve cleared this place and made absolutely certain that none of us are still compromised.”

  “What if you don’t come back?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I glanced at Sarah and, deciding that there wasn’t any other way I could ask him without scaring her, I said, “What if you die, and we get trapped in the vault?”

  “You won’t get trapped.” He shook his head, “in the wall there’s a–”

  We all heard an echo of bending metal bounce down the corridor, and then retreat back to where it had come from. It sounded like a sinking ship – like large bundles of rebar bending under immense pressure.

  Patrick brought the rifle to his shoulder and snapped his sights down the hallway.

  “I’ve heard this before,” I said.

  “Quiet,” Patrick hissed. He took a knee and waited for the sound to retreat, but it didn’t. It began to sound very much like a hum.

  “I heard something similar in the Clean Room immediately before the artifact exploded,” I whispered.

  Patrick tilted his head toward me, and then readjusted his grip. He slowly moved down the corridor, tracking his rifle from side to side. “Maybe Alice got the roller going…”

  Sarah wrapped her arms around mine and started flicking her gaze back toward the open vault.

  I felt granules of dust fall from the ceiling and trickle down my neck. Sarah and I looked up just as it started to bulge, like it was melting, losing viscosity – like the giant bubble I saw in the Clean Room before I was blown into unconsciousness. The hum increased intensity and the floor began to vibrate. Sarah pulled me toward the vault.

  “Patrick!” I screamed.

  He spun around just as an arm the size of a tree trunk ripped through the ceiling – hair–like barbs on the tip of its fingers caught my shoulder, and it lifted me into the air, and I could feel Sarah’s fingernails tearing my skin as I was pulled away. An eyeless human head about the size of a wrecking ball forced its way into the corridor. Patrick took aim and fired.

  The giant savrataur trumpeted an ear-shattering roar and whipped me into the wall on the opposite end of the hallway. Lights burst across my vision and I suddenly couldn’t see out of my left eye. I felt the warm trickle of blood seeping down my left shoulder. Patrick ripped lead into the monster as it continued to force itself through the ceiling. It must have been tracking us the whole time.

  Sarah fell at my side and started pulling me toward the vault by my shirt. I realized that I couldn’t hear anything – but I could clearly see each muzzle flash, as each round escaped the barrel of Patrick’s gun. He was screaming something.

  I stumbled to my feet as another arm burst through the ceiling.

  Patrick didn’t have a chance.

  As Sarah pulled on my shirt – as I kept falling, completely disoriented from slamming into the wall, I saw the beast snatch Patrick in its giant fists. I fell to my knees at the vault door, and the last thing I saw before the lights went out, was Patrick being torn in half. Sarah somehow found an impossible reserve of strength and dragged me into the vault.

  The thing fell from the ceiling, shaking the ground on impact, rotating its head like a tank turret. It stuffed Patrick’s upper torso into its obscene humanoid mouth and began chewing greedily. Red faced and manic, Sarah pulled the vault door shut as hard as she could until what little light there was completely dropped out of view–

  NINE

  1.

  I watched Sarah pull the door shut from my spot on the floor just as the giant savrataur moved to overtake it – the split second it took for the time–sensitive lock to snap into place was just enough to stop the thing from bursting into the vault and finishing what it started with Patrick’s torso.

  I hadn’t shifted dreams again, I only thought I had. With the smallest fractions of light from the corridor completely gone, Sarah and I were suddenly in complete, claustrophobic darkness.

  For the longest time the only sound was a child’s deep, terrified breathing and distant banging from the other side of the steel–reinforced concrete door. I could hear Sarah sliding her hands frantically over the drywall until she eventually found a light switch – a bright explosion of white rained onto us from the ceiling.

  Sarah backed away from the door until she came flush against the opposite wall – she immediately slid to the floor, taking giant panicked breaths, never tearing her eyes off of the complex torsion assembly encasing the various locking mechanisms.

  I drunkenly inspected the spread of deep puncture wounds that ripped away from my shoulder down to the center of my back, and I figured that they were pretty bad – dark red blood was steadily oozing down my arm and ribs. The sight of it made me dizzy.

  The vault was rectangular, about two and a half by three meters in area, essentially a featureless box from the floor up. I couldn’t see while we were approaching it from the hallway because it was dark, but I imagined it would look something like the inside of a bank vault – the walls lined with safety deposit boxes, a counting table in the center, crude and utilitarian, unfriendly and solemn.

  This place, however, seemed to have been designed to hold people.

  There was a sheetless twin–sized bed with a single military grade blanket neatly folded into the mattress. There was a featureless desk in the corner paired with a simple folding chair, and a five-gallon water jug with tiny, child–sized paper cups near the door.

  The only light in the room came from a simple fixture of bare fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling.

  “Are you okay?” I rasped, my chest rising and falling quickly under my ripped and bloody shirt.

  The sudden light in the room had been a shock to her as well. It was like nuclear explosions on the sun. She nodded.

  I tried to sit up – to move – to suck more air into my lungs, but I couldn’t. The room spun away from me, and I still couldn’t clear the starlight bursting across my left eye. Sarah looked around the inside of the vault for the first time until her eyes settled onto the five-gallon container of water. She painfully got to her feet and filled two cups, carefully setting one by my head before sitting on the bed.

  I couldn’t bring myself to drink – the thought of moving made me want to puke.

  I awoke sometime later and Sarah was asleep – the lines of stress and worry eased away with the final release of hours upon hours of exhaustion.

  I lost consciousness a few more times, awaking intermittently, realizing that I hadn’t shifted realities. Hours passed between waking and fever induced dreams – dreams that were enti
rely and thankfully less than that strange place of waking hallucinations.

  I stopped shifting realities.

  It must have been the nature of the vault.

  I awoke several times to see that Sarah hadn’t moved – my heart stopped until I could see the soft rise and fall of her chest, as it ebbed and flowed with her deep, quiet, and unhindered breath.

  I brought myself to sip the ounce of water, and then I settled into a comfortable fugue, determined to shut off my mind for a while. At least until I could bring myself to care again whether I lived or died.

  Things went black again – but black in a way that was rich, unsounded and everlasting. After hours or days of panicked flight, it was merciful, dreamless, and nothing.

  2.

  No matter how far I buried myself into that long, deep, and endless tunnel, I could always see the tiny pinprick of hope.

  I kept wondering if it was even possible to escape that feeling.

  I opened my eyes and found myself gazing into the featureless ceiling. I never remembered a concrete floor to be any more comfortable than the one on which I rested. I couldn’t even bother myself to roll the meter across the floor to drink some more water. A sticky echo of blood stained the floor underneath me. My wounds coagulated into tender, rubbery divots.

  I must have stepped backwards. The dreams frenetic – the weird cutting from one hallucination to the next had stopped, and I suddenly wondered if that was it – if that vault was where it would all end. I could still hear the giant savrataur outside of the vault, tirelessly trying to make its way inside with us – trumpeting its tin canned roar as its frustration gradually spilled over to blind rage with each successive ram.

  I couldn’t tell if the fact that I stopped cutting to different points in time was a good thing or not.

  That tiny voice that only seems to make itself heard in the direst of situations kept telling me that I was alive. That I was but small movements from it all coming to an end.

  I tried ignoring it, that voice.

  No matter what it said, there was nowhere to go. Nothing for me to do. No distant focal points on the horizon by which to guide me, to shut off my thoughts, to focus on that far target and move forward. Outside of the vault was a half human, half lizard the size of bulldozer. Inside, there was nothing. Each time I entertained the idea of opening the door and letting it have me, I remembered Patrick succumbing to those giant, rending teeth as it chewed him into unrecognizable organic cud.

  But no matter how hard I pushed, that idea pulled back even harder.

  I kept replaying Patrick’s death over and over again in my mind. Sarah remained peacefully lifeless, and her legs would occasionally kick and twitch. She would startle, jump violently awake, and after making sure that I was still on the floor and alive her eyes would close and then shortly begin rolling furiously under her lids.

  There was something Patrick said before the thing grabbed me. I couldn’t remember it – I kept seeing him getting masticated to death.

  And suddenly a new possibility came to mind. A possibility that I thought about only once. Thinking back, it’s funny to remember every time I said aloud how insane this odyssey had been. Insane being the key word.

  Maybe I had lost my mind.

  Maybe I was insane, and this bizarre odyssey was my insanity.

  I tried to imagine where my next dream would have taken me if I hadn’t ended up inside the vault.

  In the final relocation, everything would have probably darkened quickly, in the same unpredicted way as when a deer suddenly dashes in front of your car. But the sudden shift of reality is closer to a large shadow moving below you in open water.

  I would feel a lurch of panic, afraid that I might find myself paralyzed again in the hospital, or bleeding to death beside my bed. Or in the basement with Kate and Sarah just after the vile savrataurs burst through the door, only this time I wouldn’t have been fast enough.

  Since waking in the hospital, it had been hard figuring out what was meaningful and what wasn’t. It was like all of this happening at once–

  – On the floor next to my bed, the blood from my open chest dried into a thick paintbrush swipe leading to my holo–mirror – the mathematician in me kept running through the allowable blood loss formula, factoring my estimated blood volume by the initial hematocrit minus the final lowest acceptable hematocrit, and then dividing that number by the initial hematocrit – I tried running this in my head the same time my other self, which was standing at the mirror, started rolling fresh bandages around his pink, nearly healed chest–

  – Through the window paned door with the smoky white Center for Energetic Materials decal, I watched Alice leaf through papers as Joseph stood by the bulletin board, looking across the lab. I was standing directly in his line of site, but he was staring right through me. I couldn’t stop thinking about how the human brain was limited to only so much processing power per second – and I bulldozed through the possibility of transmission delay, dividing the number of bits of information, some of which was me standing in the doorway, among other things, with the rate of bit transmission per second, hoping I was the smallest reduced component that slipped through his perceivable attention. That I was real, that he could see me if he weren’t so distracted, and that I wasn’t some ephemeral dream, tumbling down a rabbit hole that was not, nor could ever be real. Looking back, I have come to realize that I had never known either of these people, Joseph nor Alice. Patrick or Sid. Their features were generic, their faces preset. They were more like the statues in a public square than a group of people who I presumably worked with for the past six years–

  –From the passenger seat of Sid’s car, I decided that the eyes in the side–mirror were the eyes of someone else. More commiserative eyes than mine, belonging to someone who knew all the angles, who knew what was happening, who couldn’t be taken by surprise, who would have been able to put two and two together, who would have been able to solve this puzzle. Those eyes were real, and significant enough to me that this fraction of face could force its way through my hallucinations. As Sid broke it down, as he explained where the zombie plague originated, right when he was telling me that it had spread from the lake precisely where me, Joseph and Patrick crashed into a swirling rainbow of pollutants, I tried to maneuver in the seat to get a better view of the face in the side mirror, but the reflection remained the same. We drove past flaming cars and hordes of walking corpses – he told me that it was a virus a lot like rabies – I told him that he was a mirage – we were running toward the CEM–

  –I caught the scent of diesel spreading across the generator–room floor, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Fick’s Law. Some part of me kept trying to factor the diffusivity by the concentration of what I thought was roughly twelve gallons of fuel, divided by the dimensions of the room. From the corridor, Kate was telling Sarah that there was going to be no wire–pulling today, provided that we find the cable that could connect the Clean Room generator. She turned to me, rubbed her shaven head and said, ‘someone wants us dead–’

  –The artifact started to spin frenetic, dead but alive anyway, moving faster and faster with ultraviolet light as it raced across the surface. The hum grew to such intensity that the wall behind the dais started to melt. The floor began to vibrate. I panicked. I turned to run. My visor cracked. The lead flashing dropped over the observation tank. Everything went dark–

  –I woke up paralyzed in the hospital. A pink stuffed animal set on the sill, directly in the warm sunlight.

  –Alice loomed overhead ripping my arm off with her teeth, replacing Cronos and his unfortunate godling. The stopwatches melted over landscapes not unlike the rocky, precarious terrain of my imagination. The people that strapped me to a wheelchair said that a violin is meaningless until someone picks it up and starts playing. They said that I was a violin – a giant, man-sized violin, meaningless without pu
rpose–

  –The faceless me placed the last C–cut in the jigsaw just as the giant brazier overhead broke free, spilling its fiery contents onto the fleeting reality of artifacts atop artifacts that were wasting space, meaningless in their protective mausoleum, miles below the Earth, burning in the fire of human ambition. The faceless me grabbed my hand, and the eyes and lips and expressions bloomed across his face, before he rose with the plumes of acrid smoke up the granite staircase–

  Every dream would come fast. The changeover would feel seamless. I would self–destruct and detach one moment at a time. I would realize that each vision represented a part of me that was trying to figure things out. Each dream was simply another way for me to think things through.

  3.

  A thought occurred to me as I lay on the floor, as my joints started to get stiff. It’s the formulation I made when I was lying in bed with Alice. This whole reality was just a parable for my struggle to live.

  The reason was this. I gave up.

  I gave up, but I feel that it’s important at this point to make clear that I didn’t do so willingly. I’m not certain that I really understand that fact yet, because the moment the final decision to quit was made, I vowed not to forget about that long struggle leading up to it. That hair ripping, teeth gnashing, eye gouging fight I offered until finally sliding into comfortable failure, until the paunch around my midsection became a part of my acceptable reality, until I decided that the cancer which was dividing in my body was too strong, until the scar tissue on my heart hurt worse than not being able to breathe, until I came to the conclusion that my addiction was too powerful, until I couldn’t take another step, until I decided that it’s easier to ignore my children than to raise them, until I decided that right here is as good as it gets, until I decided that death probably isn’t that bad.

  Every fight, which was forgotten once and for all the moment each one of us gives in, is ours alone, and I don’t think that we will ever manage to share it.

  Life must be that kind of winless and unstoppable endeavor.