The 88th Floor (5 page)

But there was no light. The glass was
blacker than tar, and even the light from his flashlight seemed to
leave it untouched when it passed over the surface.

He swept the light downward. The pool of
blood from last night’s murder had congealed on the floor
nearby.

There was another sound then, somewhere on
the far side of the room; a staccato of rips that sounded like a
length of fabric being shredded. The air seemed to shift from warm
to cold with every breath he took and he felt slightly
nauseated.

He leveled the flashlight on the black void
of the window.

Another tearing sound, louder this time.

Something in the glass shuddered under the
light and the flashlight’s bulb went out with a pop.

The darkness crashed in on Rees like he’d
been tossed into the water on a moonless night. He stumbled back as
the tearing sound grew louder and nearly fell, but something caught
his arm.

“
Where are you going,
Nicholas?”

The voice was a chorus, a vast array of the
familiar and the alien. He heard Vandum and Morgan, Squibby and
Nallick. He heard voices he didn’t know, some he’d forgotten, and
others he dearly wished to forget. It was all of them and none of
them at once.

Whatever held his arm tightened its grip as
he tried to pull away.

Panicked, Rees reached for his gun.

The first shot ricocheted off something on
the far side of the room, but the second and third thumped into
something just a few feet away from him. His arm came free and he
fell backwards, firing wildly. Two more shots clanged off the walls
and a third smashed into the glass window. It shimmered for a
moment, the light from outside blinking through like a strobe
before the darkness slammed shut over it once more.

Rees scrambled to his feet and ran blindly
through the pitch-black halls. He bounced off walls, tripped over
construction equipment piled on the floor, and clipped his
shoulders on doorframes as he tried to find his way back to the
elevator.

A gust of air roared after him and flung his
stumbling body forward. His head slammed into something as his feet
went out from beneath him. He went down hard, his gun flying from
his hand and skittering off into the void.

Before he lost consciousness, Rees heard the
bizarre choir of voices again.

“
Come now, Nicholas. I
have so much to show you.”

***

“
Rise and shine,
Detective.”

Rees’s eyes responded sluggishly and it took
a few seconds for the woman standing before him to come into focus.
She wasn’t familiar, but he could tell what she was just by the way
she looked at him.

“
Detective Rees, my name
is Amanda Reilly. I’m with the city’s Special Intelligence and
Counterterrorism Agency and I’d like to ask you a few
questions.”

There was a slight, stinging pain on the
back of his head. Rees tried to raise a hand to rub it, but his
limbs didn’t respond. He was strapped into his chair.

“
Please, Detective, this
will go much smoother with your cooperation.”

Rees knew enough about SICA’s interrogation
procedures to take her word for it.

“
Where am I?”

Reilly smiled, which made Rees wish he had
just kept his mouth shut.

“
I’m afraid I can’t say,
Detective,” she said.

True to form, Rees thought.

Reilly reached into her pocket and produced
a small plastic chip.

“
Case #4563367-6638,
Addendum. Dr. L. S. Morgan,” she said. “You remember this, I
presume?”

Rees nodded.

“
Who else has seen
it?”

“
Everyone that should,” he
said. “You know the procedure for that sort of thing, don’t
you?”

“
Of course. I also know
that this isn’t a routine autopsy report. I’ll ask you again,
Detective: Who’s seen it?”

Rees shook his head. She likely already knew
the answer, anyway.

“
Just me and
Morgan.”

He remembered Squibby’s transmission then,
that last moment when something had gone wrong.

“
And Squibby,” he said.
“What happened to Squibby?”

Reilly raised an eyebrow.

“
That would be Lynn
Squibel? Ex-cyberanalyst for the department?”

“
Yeah,” he
said.

“
Dead. Found her facedown
in her rig. She’d bled out through the eyes and nose. Still trying
to work out what fried her, but there wasn’t much brain tissue left
to work with.”

Rees closed his eyes. She didn’t have to be
involved in any of this, could have gone on blissfully ignorant.
But he’d needed her for answers, had gotten her in deeper than she
needed to be.

Her death was on him.

“
No one else, then?”
Reilly asked.

“
No, just
them.”

“
Good,” she said. “I’d
hate for anyone else to get involved. There’s enough blood on this
case already.”

“
What do you mean?” Rees
asked. “Did something happen to Morgan too?”

“
Well, it seems that a few
hours after you left the precinct, your John Doe climbed off the
slab and smashed in Doctor Morgan’s skull.”

“
Christ.”

“
The killer got away
clean,” Reilly said. “Nobody even knew what happened until about
four hours later.”

“
Wasn’t anybody watching
the damn security feed?”

“
Of course,” she said.
“Trouble is, there’s nothing on it.”

“
What do you mean?” Rees
asked. “Every inch of that fucking lab is covered!”

“
I wouldn’t have believed
it either, but I watched it with my own eyes. One second, Morgan
and the body are there and then,” she snapped her fingers, “the
room is empty. Not a sign of anyone or a hint that a bloody corpse
was sitting on the table a second earlier.”

“
And nobody saw it
leave?”

“
Not a soul. And it gets
even better,” she said. “After they found Morgan’s body and
forensics swarmed over the room, the security feed still never
showed his corpse. That’s when I was called in. We never would have
found out what happened had I not been able to salvage some of the
data from Morgan’s optic implants. They showed some of what the
security feed missed.”

Reilly paused for a moment.

“
I’m… well, let’s just say
it was an image I’d rather forget about as soon as I
can.”

Although he could only imagine such a scene,
Rees shared her sentiment.

“
Wait,” he said. “Why the
hell would Morgan’s eyes record the attack, but the security
cameras were fooled?”

“
I wondered that too,”
Reilly said. “Turns out, Morgan had his eyes replaced six years
ago. Two years ago the city switched suppliers for all its optics
and surveillance equipment and every security feed in the police
department was replaced or updated. Care to guess the new
supplier?”

“
Sircotin.”

Reilly nodded.

“
My security clearance
allowed me to dig up Morgan’s case file on the John Doe and your
interrogation of Vandum out of the department’s datatrash heap.
After that there were just too many coincidences to ignore so I
came to find you. I figured an old school cop might have a useful
hunch or two.”

Rees shook his head.

“
I wish I did,” he said.
“None of this makes a damn bit of sense to me.”

She smiled again.

“
Oh, I think you know a
thing or two that’s far more useful, Detective. I wouldn’t have
spent the last week looking for you if I didn’t.”

Rees gaped at her, trying to process what
he’d heard.

“
You heard that right,”
Reilly said. “It’s been a week since you walked into the Sircotin
Technologies building. I had a feeling you’d gone back there, but
it wasn’t I tracked down Squibel and went through her search
records that I knew for sure. Didn’t make it any easier to find
you, though. I turned the whole damn city upside down and never
found a trace until you burst into the precinct three days ago
raving in some weird language nobody could decipher.”

Rees sat still, probing his mind for any
memories beyond losing consciousness on the eighty-eighth floor of
the Sircotin building. He did his best not to think about what had
sent him racing through those halls.

“
I… I don’t remember
anything,” he said.

“
No, Detective,” Reilly
said, “you mean you
can’t
remember; your mind won’t let you. Whatever you
saw in there must have had quite an effect. I need to know what it
was.”

“
Why don’t you just go see
for yourself?”

“
I can’t,” she said. “The
Sircotin building collapsed the same night you disappeared; it just
imploded like it had been scheduled for demolition. Killed plenty
of innocent people. You’re the only living soul who saw what was
going on inside that place. I might have asked your buddy Vandum,
but I expect you know what happened to him?”

Rees nodded as a door clicked open behind
him.

“
Doctor,” Reilly said,
“are we ready to begin?”

“
Yes, of course,” the
doctor said as he walked around the chair to adjust something on
the terminal beside Rees.

“
Good, plug him in and
let’s get started.”

Rees couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but he
could see the three-inch spike in his hand clearly enough. It was
connected to a fiberoptic cable that fed into the terminal. He
became aware once again of the pain on the back of his head as the
doctor brought the point of the spike closer to him.

“
Don’t be afraid,
Detective,” Reilly said. “We’ve installed a cranial datajack into
your skull so the good doctor here can interface directly with your
brain and tear down those troublesome memory blocks. It shouldn’t
cause any permanent–”

***

Rees couldn’t have been unconscious for more
than a few seconds. He knew that because he was still alive,
because he hadn’t been ripped apart by whatever energy had washed
over him and prevented his escape. But then the silence caused him
to doubt, and he wondered if that was all death would be, nothing
but a black void, silent for all eternity.

Then a soft light swelled up in the distance
and Rees realized that he was no longer where logic said he should
have been. The rising sun was a queer color, a blend of orange and
purple tinged with a bit of brown, and it cast dim light over an
equally strange landscape. It looked like nothing so much as a vast
plain of wax that had once held a far different, perhaps even
majestic, form, but now found its features heaped and lumped into
sickly, misshapen columns and piles.

As the light grew brighter, he saw bizarre,
winged shapes circling in the sky overhead. Confused, Rees
staggered toward the sun, but within a few steps he found himself
on the precipice of a towering cliff that overlooked something…
horrible.

He could find no words to describe it, none
that could convey the hideous nature and instincts of the swelling
mass of flesh, fangs, and eyes.

A few hundred of its countless eyes turned
on him and Rees screamed.

The sound of his cry echoed painfully
throughout the eighty-eighth floor and he staggered when he found
himself back in familiar surroundings. Hastily rigged work lights
strung along the ceiling provided enough illumination for Rees to
see clearly now and he quickly found his gun on the floor. He
picked it up and placed the barrel to his temple.

“
Please, Nicholas, don’t
do anything rash.”

Rees’s mind snapped back from the brink and
he turned to see a tall, striking man wearing ragged, wrinkled suit
encrusted with dried blood. The man should have been a stranger,
but the suit, and the seven bullet holes still visible on it, was
too familiar. There were two new holes as well, fresh blood
dripping from each.

“
You’re confused,” Kurush
said, “afraid. You’re wondering how it is that you could be in two
places without moving. You’re wondering how it is that I can be
standing here before you now.”

Rees pointed his gun at the man who should
have been dead.

“
Oh, come now, Nicholas,
we’ve been through this already, haven’t we? It was Vandum’s charge
to do the same so that we might be here tonight, though he knew it
not. At least give me the chance to speak.”

Rees wanted to squeeze the trigger. He tried
to squeeze the trigger. But nothing happened. His finger would not
budge and Kurush simply stood there looking at him without a trace
of concern.

He lowered the gun.

“
Isn’t it beautiful?”
Kurush gestured to the unfinished, crooked walls around him. Rees
tried to speak, but found that his voice no longer
worked.

“
Do you understand what
you’re looking at, at what generations of work have achieved? I
wasn’t always just an architect for Sircotin, you see. I’ve held
its hand since its inception, from one innovation to the next,
always working towards a singular goal. This building is the very
essence of what the company was built to achieve; it’s a
transmitter, a direct line of communication to the true essence of
the universe.

“
I once thought as you do,
that all attempts to improve man lead to folly. I resisted change
just as you have done while everyone around you reshaped their
lives to accommodate the ingenuity of great minds. But then I saw
the truth. I reveled in the brilliant, magnificent energies of
creation, of the great swirling chaos from which true greatness is
born. We think ourselves creatures of reason, of logic, but that is
not our true nature. Tell me, Nicholas, do you dream?”