Carly thought she saw a tradce of regret in the face of her female captor – regret for what, though? “I don’t know,” she replied truthfully. She couldn’t find any rational explanation to why she was helping this monster who had killed so many people, but not the people killed. “Maybe I just don’t wanna die.”
“But you will die. We’re all going to die.”
“Robyn!” Carly shook her out of her dream-like state.
“It will get us all. We will all die by it.”
“No, we won’t Robyn. We’ll stop it before it even touches us.” Carly sounded more confident than she felt. It was just a matter of deciphering what wasw on those disks, and how hard could that be?
Mika stood over the catatonic Johnny and watched the amiable bond unfold between the two girls. Well, maybe not quite friendly, but not threatening at least. He felt a twinge of some unknown emotion – human emotion again – at watching them talking together, glad that they were getting on, hurt that Robyn should want anyone else but him.
“If we figure out what IT actually is,” Carly added as an afterthought.
“The big plan,” whispered Robyn.
Mika looked hard at Carly. “You already told us hat they’re doing.”
“If I had already told you, do you really think I would’ve sent you to get those disks/” Carly snorted with sarcastic laughter and return, wearily, to her computer chair. “I could’ve done but why waste the effort on a couple of –“
On the floor, Johnny groaned in pain; his almost unbearable hunger doing nothing to help. Mika kicked him hard in the gut, and Johnny was reclaimed once more by the blessed darkness.
“Baby needs a nap,” Mika muttered, before looking back at the flickering screen expectantly, waiting for something to happen. “You were saying?”
“We need to find out how their doing this; who’s making things happen; and what they hope to achieve.”
“A pure existence. The perfect world. Untainted by unhealthy occurrences like battle and negativity.”
“But… that’s impossible. People are always gonna hurt each other.” Carly absently pushed the first CD into the drive and began to open it. “That’s what they do. They’ve been doing –“ she noticed her mistake and corrected herself quickly, “we’ve been doing it for thousands of years and –“
“And they expect it to stop by performing some ancient rite, or something.” Mika thought about how that reflected on him – no, it didn’t reflect on him at all; he wasn’t people.
“Hitler all over again,” Robyn muttered, standing up. “Nazi Germany but worldwide. Do you remember Germany in the war, Mika? Getting rid of all the people who didn’t fit their ideal, everyone who presented the wrong image. Look what happened after he got his perfect society – wasn’t so great after all. I didn’t like the war much.”
Carly was a little lost – history had never been her strong point – and almost dismissed her monologue as mindless babble. Yet Mika knew exactly what she was talking about, he had been right there with her, after all, and easily made the association between the two events. “I don’t think anyone did, love.” He thought of all the people that had died in the war.
Carly fixed her eyes on the screen, frowning slightly as lines of code drifted along the monitor. Luckily, she had only put this guard up a few weeks ago to prevent corruption rather than access and was certain she could bypass it in a few minutes. “Guess I forgot about that one.”
“What’s going on? I thought you unlocked everything,”
“I did, but this was a hidden one. It doesn’t show itself until you get in. I just forgot I put it on. Chill, okay.”
Mika helped Robyn over Johnny’s prone form, and tenderly stroked her grazed knuckles. “I thought he was going to hurt you, baby. I would never have forgiven myself.”
“Mika,” she looked into his steely blue eyes, now soft and deep with love, “You know he could never hurt me. Besides which, he is just a child; he knows nothing of the power he could have.”
Carly looked sidelong at them, wondering how they could shift so seamlessly between sadistic freaks, completely insane and devoted lovers. She squinted at them suspiciously and triumphantly hit the enter key. “Hope this works.”
TEN
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Johnny came to to find himself spread-eagled on a cool, stone floor. It was the disused basement of the house.
“Oh God!” He yawned, not out of tiredness but out of boredom, and heaved himself to his feet. Johnny through his arms out for balance and stumbled into a wall, unsteadily, his legs would not hold his weight. The room was cold,, deathly cold and empty. He wondered if the basement wasn’t just wishful thinking and he had been shut up in the morgue. That wouldn’t surprise him - Mika made no secret of the fact he was only not killing him for Robyn – but it made him angry.
Putting his hand up to his bruised forehead, he felt a lightening bolt of pain shoot through his nervous system and a throbbing inside his skull. “Robyn,” he remembered. He couldn’t believe that he had been so easily out-manoeuvred by a girl… again. But Robyn was no ordinary girl, far from it, and yet she looked like such a tiny little thing.
Feeling the darkness begin to creep up on him, seeing little black spots dance in the corners of his eyes, he slid down the wall, fighting to keep the dark at bay. Spiders webs stretched across each corner of the room and creepy crawlies scuttled across the walls to their homes in the warm, dark corners. Johnny watched one race across the wall with the speed of an Olympic runner and shuddered. He didn’t care what horrors he saw and had seen, there was still nothing more chilling for him than spiders and things with too many legs. Unsettling, disturbing, downright creepy – there were so many descriptions for it. Johnny supposed that he was like a venomous spider in a way, except for the number of eyes legs and the being alive. A speedy predator, weaving webs to catch prey, biting when people got too close, attacking when people least expected it.. Dangerous. Yeah, that was the word – dangerous… a hunter. But he could so easily become the hunted.
Johnny covered his cheeks with his hands and stred around the stone room; the walls were stone, the floor was stone, the ceiling was stone, everything was stone. It could have been a bomb shelter or something in the war, maybe. Before it became the basement – Johnny had decided that this could not be the morgue for how could he have got there? The granite surroundings acted as a kind of sound-proofing, blocking out any sounds that might have told him that life was still going on, but panic set in when he realized that he could not even hear the sound of his own breathing. On the bright side, there were no windows in the basement to let in the fatal sun in – how could something so… ordinary as the sun be deadly? – but no doors either. Well, none that he could see.
He braced his hands against the wall and pushed himself to his feet, heavy and clumsy. There had to be a way out – there was a way in because he was here – he had to find a way out. Johnny shivered slightly with the cold and wrapped his arms around himself. The cold didn’t bother him unless he consciously thought about it, and even then, not half so much as the loneliness and… the hunger, the uncontrollable bloodlust. “Let me out!” he roared, imagining Robyn’s light, hollow-sounding laugh tinkling down to tease him. Almost as if an unseen force were saying, “You’re never getting out of there.”
Johnny was determined to prove the invented voice wrong and felt along the edges for some small groove of a hidden door he could prise open or punch the lock on.
The girl, who worked in the mortuary, sat at a window table inside the café with a steaming cup of coffee. Evening had just began to darken the sky, the sun was beginning to sink towards the horizon, but still the directionless conflict raged on. Where had it come from? Why was it here? What purpose did this serve? Were people always capable of this kind of devastation, or were they acting on something? Why were only some able to resist this emotional pu
ll, while most people gave into it completely, threw themselves at its’ mercy? Heavy thoughts for a 17-year-old, but questions that needed their respective answers.
She stared out at the chaotic scenes in the streets, scenes that didn’t seem to have changed in days. Everyday, things were more or less the same; death, doom, danger; in fact, a whole lot of other D words besides. And always that little bit more violent. She had noticed a significant increase in bodies turning up at the mortuary, not always with the hospital files and papers.
Magick, and her exposure to the Craft, had enhanced her natural defences to this kind of thing and she had no doubt in her mind that this was all supernatural. But, she accepted that she would not be able to stop this, though she wished she could do something – it was big-time dangerous.
The rabble on the street could no longer be separated into individuals – they didn’t deserve to be thought of as individuals. No matter how hard they had fought against it they had given in and were all doing the same thing. Sure it made them slightly less like spineless crowd-following sheep if they had tried to fight it but they were all, in essence, the same. She stared out again at the hot and hazy, manic evening, stood up slowly, leaving her coffee virtually untouched, and gazed wistfully at the air-conditioned relative inactivity of the coffee shop. Thank God for these small havens of calm in such chaos.
Carly rubbed at her eyes with the balls of her palms. A stinging sensation started deep in her sockets and her eyes began to water, too long had she been staring at the fluorescent display. None of the words made sense to her – her brain was just too exhausted to take in anything, much less retain anything. Her eyelids began to droop as she gave into her slumber cravings. Her eyes snapped open and she vaguely remembered that she should be filtering the computer data, but her head began to nod as sleep reclaimed her; besides, how much use would she be if she didn’t rest and recharge her batteries so to speak? The blonde girl felt loose strands of hair fall across her face but ignored them, imagining some explosive rock anthem blasting out of a speaker in the background. She was sure that she would have slept right through it if the music had been anything other than make-believe, so tired, but suddenly the music faded into a softer orchestral take on the rock song – theatrical, even.
The music she heard in her head was, she supposed, much like the voices and music that Robyn listened to. Inaudible, unheard, invisible? Asleep though she was, Carly was aware of all of the events unfolding before her – perhaps a recently developed sixth sense - and changed the mind music to suit. Her brain had effectively shut down, though her eyes were open the tiniest of cracks, meaning that she could see most of what was happening but didn’t have the added burden of analysing it. She had learnt that a person didn’t have to have their eyes closed to be asleep.
Mika was sitting on the edge of the fold-away bed, tenderly running his hands through the flowing red locks of a dazy, sleepy Robyn. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to stop these… episodes, these periods of time when she lost touch with reality, taken by the fading forces of night. He whispered sweet nothings to her. He didn’t know what he should do for her. Would these fits still take her mind when all this was over? He supposed so – she had always been affected by them, why would it suddenly stop now? Mika just couldn’t bear the thought that something was hurting his little bird, his queen, his family, and it might not be something he could knock out. But, he knew, it was hurting him too though he would never tell Robyn that because she would worry. He just wanted to protect her for fucks sake. He hated to think that there were things that he couldn’t shield her from.
“I promise you, Robyn,” he whispered in his special soothing voice he kept specially for times like these. “Everything will be okay. Nothing will tear us apart.”
The door swung open and Johnny stood, wobbling, shadowed in the doorway. His clothes were scorched and blackened in places where he had had to dodge the sunlight from windows deliberately left unshaded. The skin had been ripped away from his hands and were leaking blood from where he had tried valiantly to punch,, kick and claw his way out of the basement.
A few seconds later, Robyn lazily half opened her eyes and looked at him. “Johnny,” she began, “Are you dripping blood on my nice clean carpet?” Where had that come from? Why was she even bothered about such trivial matters as flooring?
He looked over at her, holding hands with Mika as if she had no idea he wanted him dead. Of course she knew; she had to know. His suspicions were instantly aroused, he had no specific suspicions about the pairing, but now his hackles were up and he was on the look-out for anything in the least bit off.
“Is that a problem?” he asked innocently.
Robyn squinted at him, hate and love rising up. He was a cocky old sod. But, he could never be the man Mika was – not even if Johnny lived forever. Robyn sat up and laid her head on Mika’s shoulder, both of them staring at Johnny. She could feel the tension in Mika; his muscles tight as if he were struggling against something. Which he was, really – the same thing that so often demanded her attention. The thing that Carly was supposed to be working on… instead of napping. Now, though, they could both see why humans had lived for so long – the survival instinct.
Mika wanted to hit the obnoxious little bastard, to show him what real pain felt like, but restrained himself for Robyn’s sake. “How did you get out?”
Johnny looked between the couple, who fit so perfectly together, and bit his lip. He wanted some pretty girl of his own to keep forever. Oh hell, scratch that, he just wanted some pretty little thing he could keep for the night until he made her very dead. Now that he thought about it again, his bloodlust seemed stronger, almost like a physical being growing and ready to burst out of his body at any moment, barely quenched by his half-hearted attempts to derive some sort of sustenance from his own blood. That wouldn’t work, he knew, but was so starved that he would try anything to still his roaring body. “How do you think I got out?” Johnny held his injured hands up. “You know what I can do. You know how I work. You know what I need.”
Through the brush gaps in her eyelashes, Carly was sure she sw Johnny look at her for a moment, before passing over her to the hand-holding twosome. The Disturbing Duo? Johnny seemed somehow like a spare part. Not essential to the mixture for they were just as terrifying without him, but still something you just got used to having around, always expected it to be there. Like a wart. But warts usually weren’t hazardous to your health. Generally speaking, warts weren’t so unpredictable that they could kill in half a second.
Robyn smiled a wide, friendly smile that turned her pretty, pale and attention-demanding face into a beautiful, glowing orb. “We know,” she said.
Mika stared down at her and kissed the top of her head, the way any other pair of lovers would. “We know everything.” He grinned. “And yet, we know nothing.” Demons, bodies, death, they knew. But they didn’t understand any of it. Did they have to understand everything? Things just were. He had learnt that there were so many things in this world that were never meant to be understood or tampered with. “We can find explanations and reasons but we’ll always ask why.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Robyn lifted her head and looked at Mika, taking in every weird and mysterious shadow the dim daylight threw on his face, touching his cheeks and forehead lovingly, as if this would be the last time she would be able to do so. “We know.”
As if something had jolted her out of her dreamless power-nap, Carly started awake and turned immediately back to the desktop unit, a look of resolve on her face. “Right…”
“What’s she doing on that thing anyway?” Johnny demanded. He held his torn hands up defensively at the scornful looks he received. He turned to Carly and asked the same question, feeling rather inadequate when she too ignored him. Tattered clothes, charred and torn skin and a multitude of bruises didn’t make him a very intimidating
prospect, he realised.
Mika felt along Robyn’s china-fine neck and closed his fingers around the clasp. Without even looking at him, she clapped one hand over his and squeezed, crushing his bones hard enough to make him gasp.
“Leave it!” she barked.
“Why do you wear it all the time?”
“I like it. It makes me feel strong.”
Ah, now things were starting to make sense. A sense that only they could see. “Like her? Like it made Annie strong?”
Robyn looked at him, memories clouding her vision. “I can do anything if I wear it. We can do anything.” He had been the one to do most of the work to get the necklace, he always knew how to make her happy.
“Carly?”
“Mm hm.”
Johnny was peering at the display as Carly’s fingers drummed the keyboard, trying to catch a few words before it disappeared. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” she snapped. “This isn’t even the file.”
“That’s just the menu for you to find the right thing.” Mika leaned over the back of the chair and pointed to a name on the screen. “Try that one.”
Robyn bent over her other shoulder and extended a silver tipped finger to another name. “No, that’s the one we need.” She felt pairs of eyes quizzically looking at her. “I feel it.”
Johnny turned away as Carly tried to centre the cursor, not wanting to get too close. Being close meant that he could smell her, and if he could smell her the urge to feed was… over-whelming to say the least. “Is it dark yet? I’m hungry.”
“We can’t go out to feed every night.” Robyn talked to him as if he were a child who needed to be taught the rules of their game. “People will get suspicious if people started turning up…”
“Dead?” Johnny finished.
“Besides,” reasoned Mika. He sounded impatient. “Don’t you think there’s enough death and destruction out there without us adding to it?” It was almost as if he were talking to a child whose sense of logic hadn’t quite developed.