Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
I kept looking down the shaft, expecting to see an end to the spiraling metal staircase. Seeing an endless drop into an abyss whose lights faded to a pinpoint made my stomach drop every time, especially as we could see straight through the ventilated steel of the stairs.
“How far down does this go?” I asked Frankie, incredulous. I thought of diamond mines I had heard of that went down over a mile, and I figured we must be close to that by now. The staircase had braces attached to the wall every twenty feet, an endless procession of beams that must have been instrumental in keeping them from collapsing under their own weight. I saw no more catwalks, no doors branching off the stairs. Finally, after traveling down another twenty minutes, I looked down and saw an end to the descent.
I saw the hard, rocky ground of a cave floor far beneath me, illuminated with bright, fluorescent lights. The beams shone upwards through the shaft, clouds of dust and dirt moving in rhythmic waves through the arrows of white light. I saw a massive sign and benches. It looked like a subway station far below us, with shining steel trash cans and an empty reception desk.
“What is this place?” I asked, but Frankie didn’t know.
“I’ve never been down this far, but I’ve always found my way in the past. Don’t worry. If anyone can find his way in this city, it’s Frankie,” he exclaimed proudly.
Above us, in gold-plated letters a foot tall, read “Antonin Dolarhyde Transhumanist Center”. Behind us, a huge, black screen spanned the length of the wall, twenty feet wide and ten feet tall. As soon as we stepped off the last of the stairs, the screen lit up. It looked like some sort of news broadcast, or perhaps a historical documentary. Looking back at the stairs, I saw some tiny, red laser facing sideways on the last step- likely some sort of motion detection technology that controlled the TV.
In front of my eyes, in crisp, HD definition, tens of thousands of men goose-stepped in formation in their black uniforms. A tall man with cold blue eyes in a snow-white suit with a white visor cap and tall, black leather boots stood above them, simultaneously saluting and surveying them as they walked past, his expression grave and confident. His face looked like it had been carved from marble, his high cheekbones and strong chin reminding me somewhat of the statue of David done by Michelangelo.
“The democratic experiment started fifty years ago in Victoriat,” a woman’s voice read out as military processions continued to show on the screen. Fighter jets screeched above cities in tight formations, like eagles surveying their prey far below. After that, it changed to an image of cheering mobs, tens of thousands of fanatical, glassy-eyed people thronging around the man in white, stretching out their arms towards him and mobbing each other in the process. A line of soldiers in black uniforms held the crowd back from the stage where General Matheson stood, alone and unsmiling..
“And what were the results? For our people, hyperinflation, starvation and economic destruction. As long as we were democratic, the global elites and profiteers would pretend to come to our aid. Yet in reality, a plan devised long ago had begun- a plan to exterminate our people from the face of the Earth by underhanded means. A global conspiracy to kill off the culture creators and the great minds of Victoriat. As long as the enemy had political power, the ultimate death of our people became a certainty.”
The screen abruptly shifted from its focus on the mobs and military processions to show emaciated beggars in the streets, their sunken faces looking out at the camera with hopeless expressions. They wore torn, dirty clothes, and some of them had bags wrapped around their feet instead of shoes. Among them, I saw children, no older than six or seven, their filthy coats and dirt-streaked faces staring towards the camera with hopeless eyes.
“Seeing the desperation of our dying people, our leader, General Matheson, took upon himself the salvation of our nation. The national revolution had begun! And, in time…” The screen changed from the charismatic movements of the leader in white on a massive stage into a blur of static and colors. The woman’s voice became robotic and stretched out. “In time… innn tiiiime…” And then the screen went totally black. I had the feeling of eyes on my back. I turned to Frankie, who looked as white as a sheet, his eyes wide and horrified. But he wasn’t looking at the TV. He looked behind us, at the spiraling staircase, trembling and staring blankly around.
Green light began to stream down the stairs, the same sickly green light I had seen coming from the eyes of the soldiers, the ones whose faces had been ripped off in some grisly experiment I couldn’t imagine. I knew seeing that light couldn’t mean anything good. And then the TV came back on, starting over at the beginning of the same segment, the woman’s voice sounding far too loud, blaring out her strange propaganda. The voice echoed eerily in the great silent chamber, waves of sound overlapping and fading, turning into a nearly incomprehensible mishmash of sounds.
“The democratic experiment…” she parroted behind us as Frankie grabbed me by the arm and drew me forwards. I felt like since I had first crashed the car, this city had been trying to kill me at every turn. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could survive in the long-term in such conditions. My respect for Frankie grew immensely at that moment as I realized he had dealt with this for years, until the point it became all he knew.
We ran into the Transhumanist Center. Everything looked sparkling new, the metal still shining a bright silver and the bright red and black walls still undamaged. At every corner, I saw the symbol that the soldiers had been wearing, the backwards 7 with a line slashing diagonally through it.
I looked back at the immense chamber with the stairway, seeing more of those faceless soldiers descending. Where they had come from, I didn’t know. I felt we had securely locked the door to the hallway, but there may have been countless more on the surface and roaming the tunnels and bunkers for all I knew. They walked silently, in a soldierly fashion, their backs straight and their heads held high, but the skin on their faces had been peeled away.
There were hundreds of them now, a column stretching upwards on the spiraling stairs in their pressed dark suits, like a line of black ants marching back to the colony. I turned away, horrified, a deep sense of dread filling every part of my mind. The green light that seeped from the column made me feel sick and dizzy, and even looking at it for a few moments had felt like it physically weakened me in some subtle way.
The hallway had labeled rooms stretching off as far as the eye could see. It almost looked like an optical illusion, with the doors being perfectly symmetrical on both sides of the corridor.
The rooms were labeled in a straightforward way, with the first on the right having a large, black “1” painted over the bright red walls. A smell like medicine and chemicals seemed to saturate the air.
As Frankie moved quickly away from the threat behind us, I tried to jog next to him, but my ankle still screamed with hot pain when I tried to move too fast. I knew I couldn’t keep up with him in this state.
“Frankie!” I whispered furiously at him. He turned his head back to look at me. I pointed at my ankle and grimaced. “I can’t keep running.”
“Then we better find a place to hide,” he said, looking back. The first of the soldiers had reached the bottom of the stairwell. We were running out of time. I looked to my left and saw a random door with the number “372” painted over its top. I felt the cold metal of the handle as it turned and opened. Based on what I had seen in this place, I expected a den of horrors beyond, perhaps dead bodies or human experimentation victims, or maybe more faceless soldiers.
With relief, I saw the entire room filled with laboratory equipment, totally empty of life. Everything still looked brand-new, without any dust or grime covering the shining steel of the machinery. That same bright red paint covered the surface of the floor, ceiling and walls. Frankie came quickly through behind me, quietly shutting the door. He looked for any sort of lock, but it had none.
“Damn!” I said, a rising sense of anxiety making me feel like a trapped animal. “No lock. Should we barricade the door?” But it was too late. I heard the rhythmic clicking of heels against the floor outside. I turned to hide, seeing Frankie was already gone, disappeared among the huge steel vats and chemical equipment. I frantically ran to the corner, looking for something to crawl under in case they came in. In my hurry, I knocked over a glass cylinder and, in that moment, sealed my own fate.
I saw it falling in slow-motion, my adrenaline kicking in. But my body couldn’t move fast enough to catch it. My hand went out, as if with a mind of its own, trying to grab the cylinder in mid-air, but it slipped through my fingers. A moment later, it crashed loudly against the floor. I was breathing hard, staring in shock at the shards of glittering glass littering the floor. Even though this happened a couple years ago, the sense of shock and horror at seeing that cylinder fall still stays with me as one of the worst moments of my life. And it would lead to a hellish experience worse than anything I had yet encountered in this dead city.
After a few seconds, I realized that the heels had stopped clicking outside. A few seconds later, the door flew open, and I felt, in my heart, that my life was over.
***
They saw me standing there in the middle of the room, like a deer in the headlights. I turned to run. I started screaming.
“God, no! Stay away from me!” I yelled. “Don’t fucking touch me!”
The faceless men grabbed me, dozens of them streaming into the room, their skulls glistening under the bright fluorescent lights. After a moment, the sickening green light seemed to flow into the room with them, like thunder following lightning.
“Please!” I said, struggling hard. Their iron grip had no yield, and they frog-marched me out, my arms pulled upwards behind my back, forcing me into a bent position. “Don’t kill me! I’m not even from here!”
They said nothing, simply herding me into the hallway. A smell of ozone permeated the area around the men, mixing with the odor of chemicals to form a truly foul scent.
Standing before me, I saw General Matheson. I would have recognized him anywhere. He didn’t look like the others, and they still clearly regarded him as their leader. As soon as I found myself in front of him, the soldiers released their hold on me.
General Matheson’s whole body gave off that sickly light, but his face was intact. His skin seemed to have changed, looking like white marble. Green light streamed from every inch of his body, but his cold, blue eyes were the worst. The whites radiated it, and it seemed to stream forwards from his pupils, like rushing water. Just looking at him made me feel sick and weak, as if the light were itself, in some way, poisonous.
He still had on his pure-white soldier’s uniform, a black-and-white visor cap with the symbol of the backwards 7 with a line slashing through it. In his belt, I saw a revolver, similar to the one I had stolen and now had hidden in my pants.
The revolver! I had nearly forgotten about it during the terrifying ordeal of escaping from the city. I looked back, expecting to see Frankie being frog-marched out of the room behind me, but there was no sign of him. The last of the soldiers left the room and closed the door. They stood all around me, forming a circle. General Matheson and I occupied the center, two very different men in the middle of countless faceless monsters.
“What is your name, son?” General Matheson asked me politely, his face stoic and expressionless.
“I’m Jason,” I said.
“And do you know who I am?” he asked. I nodded, feeling unreal. The eyes of the soldiers bored into me, each waiting for a signal from their leader.
“That’s good,” he said, looking away. He appeared totally comfortable, at peace. He had the look of a true fanatic without morals or doubts, and even in his polite conversation, his face seemed to radiate that lunatic self-confidence.
“Please, sir,” I began pleading, “I’m not from this world. I came here because I was kidnapped by some madman, some strange, mutated guy who brought me here. I don’t belong here, I really don’t.”
General Matheson stopped speaking for a long moment, the entire hallway plunged into silence. He contemplated his words carefully, and for a moment, I could see the great statesman he must have been before his conversion into whatever he was now. He certainly was not a regular human in his current state, no more than Foras or the soldiers.
“We don’t always have a choice where we find ourselves,” he responded. “When I was Prime Minister, the leader of a superpower with the greatest military ever seen, I heard many of the same objections from others, such as when my hometown was carpet-bombed by the Kingdom of China and I went to the ruins.
“The survivors asked me why this had happened, why their little city was chosen for such a horrifying scene. I knew it had been chosen because my friends and distant family still lived there. But what could I say? Sometimes Providence puts us in horrible situations so we can grow, so we can harden ourselves and form an iron will. Then we can overcome all obstacles. The struggle itself creates greatness in men. Those who do not struggle in this world can never achieve anything great. This is the eternal law. All those who do not wish to fight forfeit their right to life. In this world, natural selection is the only truth.
“But I’ll tell you truthfully, when I used to sleep, I had constant nightmares of my hometown. I saw the burnt bodies of children on the sidewalks next to collapsed, blackened ruins of apartment buildings, the children still sticking their arms up towards the sky, as if hoping someone would pull them out of the fire. The odor of smoke and charred wood was so thick that I could smell it before I ever got into the place, from a half-mile away with the windows open.
“In my nightmares, I always found myself with the people I knew, the ones who had died and whose children had burnt alive. We were in the basement of some building, trying to keep the raging fire away, trying to duck down low to avoid the thick black clouds of smoke that billowed through. I remember choking, suffocating, falling over burnt bodies. And then I woke up.
“This went on day after day. And it reinforced the truth I had known forever- that there are no accidents in the world. I was being shown this so I could further harden myself against the future death and destruction that would surely come.
“Providence brought you here to us, and Providence chose that city for destruction. Providence chose Rusty Township for the antimatter bomb as well.
“Everything happens for a reason so that a new world can arise, like the phoenix from its own ashes. I will always follow the will of Providence, even to the end of my life.” He stopped, looking me up and down, then turned and began to walk away. The soldiers flowed around him as he moved through the crowd, like a single mind, opening up a gap and then closing it as soon as he had passed. As he reached the last of the soldiers, he turned.
“Take him to the Pit of the Skull,” he said, disappearing as the soldiers closed in around me, grabbing me.
They marched me down the hall for what felt like hours. Even in that moment of desperation, knowing I would soon be dead or worse, I felt a sense of awe at what these people had accomplished. I had never seen anything like this in my world. This single hallway stretched for miles and had thousands of rooms branching off both sides.
My ankle still pained me, but every time I would slow, a soldier would silently push me forwards. I fell twice, landing painfully on my hands and knees, but they would pull me back up and continue to march me forwards. They never seemed to talk, though perhaps that was just an act. I didn’t know whether they were capable of speech, or whether they were simply mindless drones, following the will of General Matheson or whatever had possessed his body and mind.
The hallway started to transform after a while, and I realized I could see the end of it. A deep, lava-filled crater bubbled far ahead of us. Beyond that, the walls and rooms disappeared into a rocky, cave-like chamber. The orderly, symmetrical construction of the hall ended in torn wood, shattered doors and melted metal when it reached the end.
That same sickly light flowed out through the cavern, much stronger and brighter as we continued forwards. I saw stalagmites and stalactites through the light, like teeth in a rotten green mouth- a mouth that would soon swallow me whole.
At the front of the transition from hallway to cavern stood General Matheson, grinning now. As soon as he saw me, he came forward.
“The Pit of the Skull,” he said. “This is where the magic happens.” He paused for a long moment, looking thoughtful.
“You know, I used to be a transhumanist, thinking we could change ourselves into higher beings with genetic engineering and computer chips.” He sighed at this, his grin fading. “What a fool I was! The true transhumanism is here in this chamber with us, and it is a far more monumental discovery towards the evolution of humanity than any implanted microchip.” He made a sweeping motion with his hand.
“Here, we have the cure for death itself. This is where the New World will begin, and you will join me in the struggle. You will become one of my soldiers.”
With my mouth dry and my heart pounding, they pushed forward, into the Pit of the Skull, where my humanity would be drained from me and replaced with something unthinkable. Tears began to flow down my cheeks as I thought of my family back home and thought of all the things I wanted to do in my life. I felt, in my heart, I would never escape this place.
Part 5