Chapter Nineteen. 04:55pm
FRONT ROW SEATS.
They moved like a swarm of pissed-off bees using their sticks as stingers. Stuart took a few hits but they only made him angrier, more violent, absorbing the power or at least delaying the debilitating effect. I escaped any noticeable shocks and if any of them got Susan, she didn't let it show either. She swung the shoes like sai, parting the Nelson Sea with the stubby, pointed heels. Eyes burst and throats were pierced. A few clones got their fleshy temples stabbed, sending them instantly into spasms from which they didn't recover. Bodily fluids sprayed and splashed around like jelly and ice cream at a food fight.
My batch of Nelsons came one at a time instead of rushing like angry kids ransacking a sweet shop. They conformed perfectly to the 'gullible henchman' role, taking turns to test their abilities. I knocked them down then shocked them into the afterlife, one by one. Even with their superior weaponry they were impotent and mostly useless. I punched one in the chest and pretty much demolished its sternum, caving the chest inwards. If he wasn't rendered instantly dead, the dent would have made a fine bowl-shape for cereal or dessert.
With every subject I took down, my heart sank a little deeper. An awkward brand of shame and futility replaced my admiration of my own heroics. The way they rushed, all angry and oblivious to their impending demise was, well...if not soul-crushing, then soul-bothering. I wasn't mentally prepared. This sort of thing didn't feature on my resume. Their bones had to be made of dry clay or something. None of them witnessed the destruction of their comrades and thought 'fuck this', not one ran or pleaded for mercy.
Soon the room was clear of living, breathing Nelson clones, leaving us victorious with thirty broken bodies at our feet, missing vital parts of what made them function. Stuart had torn out several Adam's Apples, giving him a hand dripping with viscera. He baulked and shook it off, spraying like water from a wet dog.
I knelt beside a downed body with no obvious injuries but a dead glaze - and checked for a pulse. My fingers left indents like I'd pressed into plasticine. Its skin felt false, synthetic, non-human. Dry and rubbery, like a condom left out in the sun.
It was barely any effort at all to wrench its arm from the shoulder socket. I put my foot against its neck and pulled, tearing it off like a coupon slip. I'm not sure why I did it.
"Oh, no," Susan said, scouring the mess and wiping her hands off on her skirt. "I don't know how to feel about this..."
I dropped the arm.
"Where's Nelson? Our Nelson. He's not fucking here!" Stuart said, kicking aside a body to examine the spot he'd sprawled in before the short battle.
"There's prints, footsteps in the blood. A line where he slipped. Heading off that way."
He pointed to a blank wall. No door or anything for us to play with. The only visible exit from the room was the door we'd entered through, which was now open. Lights flickered on in the corridor beyond, as if inviting us through. The room we'd originally been in was still folded into the floor, hiding. I suspected there were hidden, disguised doors, ones the clones used to sneak in, but nothing marked them out. Obviously. Otherwise they wouldn't be hidden doors.
Stuart tracked the faint prints until they vanished yards from the wall. He investigated the mostly-bare portion of the room whilst Susan, ever willing, attacked the aloof computers with her fingers and made exasperated, throaty noises.
"They're dead," she said as I joined her. "Someone's pulled the plug. Nothing is on."
I dragged open a drawer and found a few reams of blank paper. Some pens and pencils and an unopened packet of sticky notes. Whatever went on down here, this computer bank wasn't an important part of it, or it wasn't paper-based. I kept searching, opening creaky cupboards and sliding out the endless amount of drawers. General office supplies strewn amid stained coffee cups and spare computer equipment; power leads and a couple of wired trackball mice without the trackballs. In the bottom drawer, furthest from the two large monitors, I found an intriguing circular pendant with a three-inch circumference. Made of rough, chalky stone and shaped by unskilled hands. It had a small etching, a crude rocket ship, zooming through an empty sky with a fiery blast spewing from its tail.
I stole the shit out of it.
"Guys!" Stuart shouted from across the room. I thought he'd found something, maybe something better than my circular emblem, but instead he pointed at our exit. The fallen walls were reappearing silently, sneakily; currently they were at knee-level, rising quicker than they'd dropped. Stuart grabbed an upgraded shocking rod and we navigated through the treacherous debris of bodies.
I dropped the stone circle into my back pocket and hopped the growing wall first, turning to help Susan over. Stuart straddled over as the wall reached chest height. She tossed Nelson's mum's shoes and whipped her own off to hasten her escape.
In the bare corridor we took a turn toward the elevator and jogged along, hurrying up substantially when footsteps echoed into range.
"There they are!" said one of the clones using Nelson's voice. The familiar sound of a wand zapping to life forced my legs to take longer, faster strides. Doors either side of me whooshed open as I passed, presumably triggered by motion censor. They were pokey, empty cells with lines of white glow highlighting plain walls. All bare but full of light. No benches, no towels, no other doors or demonic puke monsters. Nothing. I wondered if their walls dropped and revealed other rooms like the one full of computers.
"Wes!" Susan screamed. "Get back here!"
I spun and saw her poking out of a room fifteen yards behind me. I'd sprinted right past where we were headed, following my nose into trouble, thanks to the identical looks of, well, everywhere. The décor repeated itself every ten yards or so, Scooby-Doo style. The corridor dragged on forever in both directions. I had no idea how she knew which room to duck into.
Before I got myself in gear another door slipped open. This cell wasn't bare. It held five clones, each dressed like the Nelson I knew and loathed, except the sleeveless jumpers came in a range of colours. Electric blue, banana yellow, cherry red, bell-end purple and shit brown. The other difference was in their skin; it gleamed like sanded, waxed mahogany, and seemed stretched out, contorting their features like their skulls were one size too big. They stared at me, shocked and aghast, like I'd interrupted an online porn marathon.
They remained frozen until the approaching herd piped up, calling repeatedly for my capture. Then the new lot leapt to action, scrambling out of the room to give chase. I darted back to where Susan had been.
I dove in and the door slid shut for the briefest of moments, before their presence made it open again. The suited ones clashed with the gaggle of jumper-wearers, gifting me extra time in which to escape. I didn't take it. Instead I watched the chaos ensue. Each group did a sterling job of obstructing the other. The white suits pulled rank and shoved the others away, ordering them to stay back, which had all the effect of telling a toddler to stop toddling. They scuffled, then a white suit entered, waving a stun stick in the air and growling like a guard dog. I heard a 'pop' from the hall, abrupt and resounding, followed by the brief noise of liquid raining down. Banana yellow Nelson slipped through the door and leapt on the growling clone, wrapping an arm around his neck and pulling him backwards. The extra weight caused the guy's knees to buckle and bend the way knees should never bend.
My two intrepid companions made it through the water-and-wind room of death without incident. A lump formed in my throat as I awaited a flash of red light and the click of doors locking. I heard a commotion as more Nelsons piled into the room, ignoring the few engaged in battle, all shouting things like 'Hey you!', 'Stop at once!' or 'Come back here!' like polite policemen from 1970s British cinema.
One tripped over a discarded towel and landed with a splat. The others stomped him into bolognese in their eagerness to reach us, creating a flurry of squishing, crunching footsteps.
Stuart slammed a palm on the red button as I passed him into the haven of the
next corridor, which closed the door tight. The door on the far end shut, trapping a handful of the clones inside the tunnel of doom. I watched them cower and panic through the window. None wore the masks, but some had their sticks in hand. There were eight in total.
The lights turned to red and the expected engine whirred into life. A stern voice came through the hidden speakers. Not Nelson's voice this time; this one was robotic, female and tough to understand, stolen from an automated call handling service.
"Warn. Ing. Test mat. Erial detec. Ted. Please sel. Ect 'Green' cleanse routine for. Thorough clean. Ing. Warn. Ing. Green cleanse may dam. Age some ar. Ticles of cloth. Ing. Warn. Ing. Safety goggles are. Recommended."
Stuart stared me dead in the eye and punched the green button. Personally, I couldn't imagine a more thorough washing than what we'd endured earlier. To my immediate horror, the red light switched back to normal white fluorescence. I held my breath, waiting for the door to open and let our chasers at us.
That didn't happen.
Instead, we gawped through the square glass window as the washing room filled with a faint green gas accompanied by a low, tuneless hum. At first the Nelsons, who congregated at both doors in futile bids to pry them open, coughed and developed looks of 'what's that odd smell?'. They began to choke and show mild concern, growing to frantic, uncontrolled movements as realisation set in. One tried peeling the door open with his nails; his fingertips bent and snapped off, falling to the ground. He joined them a short time later, spluttering in a ball of wide-eyed, breathless terror. Another folded himself in half, loudly hocking up lung and throat morsels. When he finally collapsed his neck had imploded and a small mountain of innards piled at his feet.
"What is that stuff?" Stuart asked, breathlessly and wide-eyed. "I've never seen anything like it."
"A cleaning spray or something. I don't know. They probably can't handle anything thicker than air."
The lights clicked back to deep red and a second, louder thrum bore into my ears. The few remaining clones, the few who had somehow survived the spray with covered mouths, were beaten into submission by the high-powered jet streams. One knocked the top of a clone's head off like the edge of a spoon meeting an egg shell. Another struck the side of a face and pierced a hole like a gunshot, deep and devastating. Their skin did nothing to protect them.
The jets reduced them to mush, entirely destroying their human forms.
The water stopped.
The wind started.
We stared abhorrently at the remains blowing around under the relentless force of the dryers. The protective suits acted like body bags holding all the bones and guts and rolling around the room. Bits leaked out from the neck and wrist holes, a brownish, soup-like slurry with chunks of splintered bone. Grim human broth. A few Nelson faces appeared in the far door's window, nattering away at each other. "You!" one mouthed, pointing at us. Another 'pop' resonated, barely audible over the dryers, and their window became a solid rectangle of red.
I struggled to tear myself away. Only Susan's interaction, yanking on my stiff right arm, plucked my attention from the morbidity.
"I can't get it open!" she said. Stuart had left my side to jab the Call button of the lift.
"Not working for me either!" he yelled.
I tried it myself, in case they had miraculously forgotten how buttons worked and were doing it wrong. The only reaction I received was a square of temporary red light and an ugly error noise, 'Kkrrn!'
An etched fingerprint glowed in the polished metal, next to the button.
"...I think its security protected! And we don't have clearance."
"How did we get it working up top?" I asked.
"Nelson opened it somehow!" Stuart told me.
I tried my finger again, lining up the tip of my finger neatly with the image.
'Kkrrn!'
The female robot voice declared the quarantine wash over, followed by a single 'whoop' of a klaxon.
"Serious Decontamination Measures Complete. Cleanse over. You may proceed."
The door to the hall slid open. A formless suit slopped to the floor. I heard the splash-splash-splash of footsteps through the watery muck. Stuart, bathed in the strong light of the room, shouted "Shit!" and dove to his right. The stretched, distorted Nelson in a purple vest fired from the room and landed on his chest, pinning him down. His stun-stick clattered uselessly to the ground, the wrong side of the action for me to reach. The abomination slapped his arms around like an angry baboon, clumsily trying to claw at Stuart's face, perhaps at his eyes. He landed a frantic punch on the attacker's head but it didn't dent or crush inwards. The thing barely reacted. A brown-jumper-clad member of the freak clan appeared in the doorway, hissing, baring pointed teeth and copious amounts of gum. Susan swung her heel at its midriff and was subsequently thrown across the room by the force of the explosion.
The doorway-guy burst like a helium balloon as Susan's heel tip connected with its engorged, swollen stomach. Meat spray splattered every surface and the air filled with a foul ammonia stench. The rabid Nelson on Stuart acted like a shield, a barrier, stopping him from being covered in it.
"Get this thing off me!"
I grabbed it under the arms and yanked it up, careful to avoid the potentially eruptive torso. I felt dazed and disorientated from the bang. My ears filled with a shrill ringing that pecked at my brain. The thing struggled and screeched until I tossed it down the tunnel, into the path of a white-suited clone tip-toeing through the mess. A brief scrap ensued, then a zap of a stun-stick caused the first guy to rupture, which ultimately decimated both parties. Peering around the doorway I saw four legs hit the filthy floor, splashing in diluted remains. Then there was silence, blessed silence. All clones were down and out. Exploded, washed away, or victims of their own frailty.
I snatched up a nearby hand from a collection of parts and headed back to the door. Stuart, mid recovery, heard a shout from the other side and slammed a hand on the green button, closing both doors.
"Warn. Ing," the robot woman exclaimed, launching again into her long speech about contamination.
I pressed one finger of my prize gently against the elevator button, which promptly lit up green.
"Doors opening! Going up!" Nelson's voice said.
We slipped in and I selected the UP button before the doors finished opening, and then dropped the hand. The carpet of the lift would never again glow with opulent, unstained white. Our footprints took care of that. The mirror on the wall reflected the image of three extremely tired, extremely unhappy low-wage workers.
"Next time we see Nelson or his stupid fat mother," I said, thankful for the sensation of the ascending lift, "Just fucking kill them."