BACK   

= CITY OF MIRRORS =

a Science Horror story

by John Argo

10.

Vodak's body was in the way. As Kanon dragged his dying flesh effortfully, an inch at a time, across the floor, he realized he'd forgotten the unmen female. She had managed to raise herself up and was clawing her way toward him. Already she had a claw into one of his legs, and blood spread on the shiny floor.

Ahead was the mountain range of Vodak's dead body. Normally, Kanon would have hopped across without expending breath, but now it was a formidable barrier.

Several yards away, on a shiny floor, lay the serpentine drip. From an intravenous pouch hung over the wheelchair, a fine translucent plastic drip line snaked down and ended in a needle on the floor. There was still a bit of Vodak's blood on the floor, droplets, where the needle had been yanked out during his fall.

He felt the female unmen sink her hungry teeth into his leg, not that he felt much pain, but that he felt her tugging at him, impeding his forward momentum. Vodak's cane had fallen from the wheelchair, and lay pinned under his dead weight.

While the unmen female's frenzy increased, and she started to shred Kanon's unfeeling leg, Kanon struggled but couldn't get the cane out. Then he became desperate, and finally angry, and yanked the damned hard wooden stick out so that he slid back a foot or two and the unmen female's blood-spattered face looked up with a dull, startled curiosity.

Kanon glimpsed her sharp teeth in a gray mouth, and the blood and gore around her lips and snout. With a scream of rage, he brought the metal handle of the cane down on her head. The metal was shaped like a door handle with ornate whorls. Again and again he smashed the thing's skull, until it finally collapsed and died between his legs.

Weakly, dizzily, he reached with the cane and pulled the I.V. needle toward himself. He pulled himself forward, until he could go no further. Propped over Vodak's dead legs, he reached out with both hands. He pulled the needle across the floor and stuck it into the weakly pulsing artery in his wrist. Then he lost consciousness.

Awakening, he felt nauseous. Dribbling a constant stream of grayish-yellow liquid, he staggered to his feet.

He held on to the table as he stared at the scene around him. The dead poliz women lay where he had shot them. Vodak lay dead as before. So did the unmen female—her head battered, and the reddish gray of her exposed brain glistening through her open skull bones.

He heard pounding at the doors. The alarms had not sounded, so only now were the next shift of admin staff curiously trying to determine what was going on behind these closed doors.

Kanon pulled the I.V. off its pole and stuffed it in his pocket, making sure the needle stayed in his wrist. He kept that hand deep and safe in his pocket, while the healing nanobots and stem cell generics rushed through his blood stream and fixed all that was broken. Like his leaking blood. The bots had stopped the leaks and were busily converting ordinary water in his body into a rudimentary form of plasma that would keep him going for a while.

Picking up that key from the floor, where the unmen Rin had dropped it, he opened the secret passage and let himself out. He picked up the sphere and hid it under his coat.

As he strode away down ever-widening corridors, men and women in poliz uniforms came running past him. The alarm was going out. The sphere, though, was now with him. If he could make it down all those floors, and across those expanses of costly materials, he would hold the key to bargain with the authorities.

The gates were shut, but the sphere seemed to open a small side door that he approached. In the main lobby, women and men shrieked, maybe thinking some great disaster was about to topple the building onto them. Nobody seemed to notice the unshaven, messy looking man in that turmoil and chaos.

TOP  |  MAIN

Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.