Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (66 page)

Now butto
n3
lit up.

“And when things are at their lowest, an’ it looks like you’re not gonna make it…
just think of Shannon, all alone with me.  That’s when you think of what I’ll do to her if you don’t make it back in one piece.  Think of her alone in this cruel world without her big sister.  Think about her alone with your mother.  Think about
that
.  Let those emotions carry you.  Cradle those emotions, hold them close, and when the Prisoner or the Others come between you and making it back here, alive, you unleash high unholy hell on ’em.  Don’t hold back, not one little bit.  It’s just you against them, an’ I think you know what happens to females in prison.  Don’t let ’em do it to you.  Dig deep, an’ use those emotions of yours to tear ’em a new fuckin’ asshole.”

“I thought you said emotions make us weak.”

He shrugged.  “Maybe I was wrong in your case.”

“I thought you said you were never wrong about people.”

He watched butto
n2
light up in silence.

“Spencer?”

He watched butto
n
1
light up.  “You just watch yer ass, and don’t let anybody kill you.”

“Because only you get to kill me.”

“God damn straight,” he said.  The door opened.  “Gotta go.  Watch yer six.”

“You be careful, too.  I may need you to…”  She stopped herself.  “Just be careful.  Someone’s coming for you, and soon.”

He snorted.  “Someone’s always comin’—”

“No, this one’s different.”

Spencer considered that.  “The Prisoner?”

“No, he’s sent someone else. 
I can feel it.  An Interloper.”

“Who’s that?”

No answer.

“Little girl?”

No answer.

Spencer left Kaley in the elevator, in that other world, and stepped out into the hall.  From here, he could just see into the lobby, and he didn’t like what he saw.  There were walls hemorrhaging fluids, a churning funnel of gray smoke, and objects free-floating in the air.  He heard someone screaming in there, and backed away.  Spencer made for the other end of the hall, where, if he remembered correctly, there was another exit…

He froze in place.

At the opposite of the hall, someone stood
looking at him.  Tall and with grizzly scruff, dark hair, pale face, and a scar on one cheek.  It took Spencer a moment to realize he was looking at himself.

Reality took on an interesting bend, then.

The Other Him just looked back.  Then, the Other Him tilted his head curiously to one side.  Spencer backed away, turned to go back towards the lobby, but was confronted by another obstacle.  Another Him.  Spencer backed up, moving towards the elevator, and looked between the two Hims.  His eyes fixed on the Him Near The Lobby, and then, all at once, Spencer
was
that Him.

There he stood, near the lobby, looking at the Him Near The Elevator.  Then, he looked over at the Him At The Other End Of The Hall.  He started to say something, but very quickly he realized he had it all wrong.  He was not the Him Near The Elevator, but the Him At The Other End Of The Hall.  Now, Spencer looked between the Him Near The Elevator and the Him Near The Lobby.

“Okay,” he said.  “So we’ve got a game of cups and balls here.”  He chuckled.  “Put the ball under one cup, an’ then shuffle the cups around.  Only it’s my consciousness bein’ shuffled around, from one version of me to another.  Guess which one’s holdin’ the consciousness now, eh?  Is that the game?”

Then, he
became the Him Near The Elevator.  It had happened so seamlessly, the shifting of his consciousness from one version of him to the other, that he missed the moment that it had occurred.  “We’re in a real pickle here, boyos.  How to determine who’s what, and what’s who?”

The Him At The Other End Of The Hall responded, and Spencer realized it was his lips moving.  He had now become the Him At The Other End Of The Hall.  “I guess there’s a few ways to answer this one.”  He raised his
gun, aimed it at the Him Near The Lobby.  But, as he did, the Him Near The Lobby aimed
his
gun at the Him Near The Elevator.  And, to complete the absurdity, the Him Near The Elevator pointed his gun at the Him At The Other End Of The Hall.

Three Spencers, all aiming their guns at each other.

When next he spoke, his words came out of the lips of the Him Near The Lobby.  “That clever little girl.  Shannon.  Heh.  The Others don’t want me dead, because I still have to kill her.  They still need me.  But Shannon…she knows what I’m up to.  She doesn’t have a fix on her power yet, but she can play the games of a child, can’t she?  Get me to shoot myself.”

Somewhere along his dialogue with himselves, Spencer’s words started coming out of the Him Near The Elevator.  “An elegant solution
, for a child.  A little game o’ musical chairs.  Musical
minds
.  Heh.  Well, I suppose the thing to do is to shoot someone else as quick as the next change happens.”  The last word came out of the Him At The Other End Of The Hall, and so he pulled the trigger and shot the Him Near The Elevator in the head.

“Now there’s only two of us,” Spencer said.

Spencer watched himself slump over, then aimed the gun at the Him Near The Lobby, who also aimed back at him.  Now, his consciousness oscillated quickly back and forth between the two bodies.  Here he was, residing in the body near the lobby.  Now here he was again, his mind residing in the body at the other end of the hall.  Back and forth, back and forth, his consciousness went.

He almost pulled the trigger when he was the Him At The Other End Of The Hall, but halted a second before he
became
the Him At The Other End Of The Hall, and almost pulled the trigger again until he once more became the Him Near The Lobby.

His perspective bounced back and forth like a game of tennis.  It was dizzying, nauseating, and disorienting
in a way he would never be able to describe.  All around hims, the walls continued to hemorrhage.  One of the elevator doors opened, and a woman came falling out, her throat split open and something was climbing out hungrily.

Both Spencers ignored it all.

Meanwhile, the lobbing of his consciousness back and forth had only gotten more confusing.  Spencer was unable to distinguish when he was in one body and when he was in the other.  He was
both
, a mind shared by two.  “All righty, then,” he said calmly, his words coming out of both mouths.  “How do we work this out?  Do we just pull the trigger an’ hope?  Play a little Russian roulette?  We
are
in Russia.”  They both shrugged.  “I dunno.  Sounds like a plan.”  He/They reconsidered.  “But if we’re jumping back and forth so quickly, we might do so faster than the bullet.  Which means, if we pull the trigger, we might both pull the trigger, and kill each other.  Is that the game she wants us to play?”

Then, a third voice was added to their conversation.  The Him Near The Elevator stood up, blood still dripping from his head
where the bullet had passed through, and said, “Who says we have to play
this
game?”

The other
two Spencers smiled simultaneously, and said, “You read my mind.”

Shcherbakov’s elevator had reached the second floor and gotten stuck.  He hit the emergency button and, since he was on a floor and not between floors, the doors opened.  He stepped through, into another dimly-lit hallway with water bubbling in a current.  Gun up, he searched for the nearest stairwell.

The first victim he found was headless and crucified by their own veins and arteries.  The naked body of a man hung in the middle of the hall, arms and legs straight out, hands and feet missing, and strands of long red veins had been pulled out of the bloody stumps and went straight out into the walls, disappearing into the running water all around.

Shcherbakov turned and jogged down another hall, found the stairwell, and stepped into it.  It was like stepping into the gullet of a leviathan.  The walls had become the muscley surface of a skinned animal, pulsing and breathing, and a thick, green, mucus-like substance was sliding down the pulsating mass.  Cries of torment came echoing down from somewhere above him.  He looked up, and saw some many-tentacled thing coming down at him, maybe thirty meters up, climbing the walls and leaping from staircase to staircase, a black child dangling from the tentacles by her mouth.

Fighting back those adolescent fears, half convinced he had
passed into a fever dream, Shcherbakov ran down a flight of steps.  Foaming water still climbed up over everything, but the closer he got to the bottom floor stairs, the less of it he saw.

Hyenas.  Hyenas laughing all around him.  He burst out onto the first floor, and there, in the lobby, he saw a nightmare of a different scale.

Some objects were floating—such as couches, a color printer, a stapler, a few sheets of paper—while other objects were still on the floor but were sliding about, as though being pushed by an invisible man—a coffee table, a soda machine, a group of oakwood chairs.  Off to his right, on all fours and with her clothes in tatters, was the woman that usually tended to the front desk of Tsarskiy Penthouses.  Out of her throat, she had vomited a twenty-foot-long worm as thick as a horse, which had sprouted legs and was climbing the walls.  Out of her back side, she had shit out a second such worm, this one with a gaping, salivating mouth that made cries like a newborn baby.  The woman was the centerpiece of a long, undulating centipede.  Her eyes were wide and searching around, looking for any answers to her nightmare.

She’s still alive
.  That fact terrified him more than anything else.

Shcherbakov ran by her, making for the exit.  A waterfall of blood was falling from the ceiling, pooling on the marble floors.  He looked up. 
The two security guards that had been at the desk when Shcherbakov came in were up on the ceiling, and were being pulled apart slowly at the waist, legs, and arms as they sunk into the water.

Halfway to the door, something hit him.  A garbage can
had flown across the room, slamming against his head.  Shcherbakov landed, rolled on the floor gracelessly, and stood up.  Blood leaked down his temple, but he still had his eyes set on the exit.  “Yuri!” someone cried.  It was his cousin.  He knew him by his voice.  He turned, saw Zverev and his man coming out of the same stairwell he had just left.  Zverev was limping, and had his arm wrapped around his man for support.  “Yuri!  What’s going—”

A gunshot.  It rang out across the lobby as Zverev’s man’s head snapped sideways, dead before he hit the floor.  However, as soon as he landed on the marble, he turned to
marble himself, matching the color scheme perfectly and then cracking like heated glass before shattering.

Zverev fell to the floor.  Shcherbakov had already spun, and taken aim at Pelletier, who came dashing out of the hallway that led to the elevators.  The Grey Wolf fired three shots on his way to cover, and Pelletier fired only one. 
Conserving his ammo
. 
That means he’s low
.  Surrendering to the environment, Shcherbakov acted much like a man might in any nightmare where his legs suddenly turned into fish and swam away—you just went with it.

Shcherbakov took cover behind the large front desk.  He fired three
more shots at Pelletier, who took cover behind one of the sliding couches from the penthouse’s lounge.  They exchanged one more shot each as Zverev crawled over to him.  Something had happened to his leg.  He grabbed his cousin and pulled him to the desk, where he sat with his back to the oak.  “Are you hurt?”

“There’s something inside me!” cried Zverev.  “It’s climbing up!
 
Gaaaaaghhhhh!
”

Shcherbakov looked at the right leg, and saw what he meant.  It was swollen, but portions of it were rising and falling, like something was thinking about climbing out.  He peeked around the side of the desk, and saw Pelletier make a run for the soda machine, which was also sliding across the floor.  Shcherbakov fired at him, but Pelletier dove to the floor, rolled, and slid behind
it to cover.

Shcherbakov was about to
move towards him, but just then another shot was fired.  He looked across the lobby, and saw…
Pelletier?
  It didn’t make any sense. He had just seen the man take cover behind the machine, but here Pelletier was also taking cover behind one of the far pillars.  Shcherbakov fired a round at Pelletier and then ducked back behind the desk.  Then, he became aware of a vibration on the floor.  A loud whine.  Something crashed against the desk.  He grabbed his cousin and they ran from it.  The mammoth worm that the woman had vomited and shat out was now slithering across the lobby floor, belching out a milky substance, filled with chunks of fat organic sacks.  The breath was putrid, and made Shcherbakov gag for the second time tonight.

While Shcherbakov and his cousin moved
to find more cover, Pelletier fired two shots, and one of them clipped Zverev, who went down screaming.  Shcherbakov grabbed him by his coat and dragged him over to one of the large marble pillars that reached all the way to the ceiling.  They hid from the worm, listening to it draw near.