Robyn doubled her fist and opened it again, working it like a pump. She looked like the deadly immortal she was, her hypnotic, innocent beauty easily hiding the homicidal maniac within. “The little things are more important.” She didn’t know why they were, even doubted it.
“How can the little things be more important than the end of the world? The little things won’t matter when the apocalypse comes.”
“You have to have an end before you can have a beginning.” Carly had to wonder if that meant anything to them.
The professor put the telephone back on the hook in his office at the Rashda Institute. He had just received a very pleasing call and sat down at his desk to think it over. In fact, the call had also presented him with some news that shocked him slightly. FDR Industries had been broken into on the night of Gareth Jordan-Smyths’ demise and the contents of the Crash Room had been stolen
A knock on the door jolted him from his thoughts and he glanced up. Come in.”
A familiar dark head poked his head around the door. “Can I talk to you, Sir?” Great, another whinging student was all he needed right now. “It’s about finals.”
The professor smiled sensitively and motioned to a chair. The student broke the uncomfortable silence and burst into a monotonous monologue. Prof. Wright nodded and made kind noises at what he assumed were the appropriate intervals, not even bothering to listen. Well, no-one really did, did they? People just wanted to be told they were brilliant and had nothing to worry about, after all.
He busied himself with the thoughts that would have crept upon him anyway. It didn’t really bother him that some-one might know what they were doing, it was much to late for them to do anything about it anyway. But he rather suspected that the people who had stolen the classified information had only done it to prove some kind of point. Perhaps that security was lax, or maybe because of the hype surrounding it. Was it really an issue so late in the proceedings?
Another spell had been cast, maybe it had been more of a prayer. The lines were blurred in this case – at least, they were blurred to him. He didn’t know how this worked on the supernatural side, not really, he just made sure that it had worked and made reports of how far the sun had turned on its; axis. Maybe it was the prolonged and increased heat that was making everyone more irritable and prone to lose their tempers easily. He knew that it had nothing to do with heat but it was easier to accept a simple explanation like that than the real one. Too complicated for words.
“Are you even listening to me?” the student demanded.
“Mm hm.” The student stared at him and the professor stood up and walked to the door. He had to get to the observatory.
“Hey! Don’t just walk away from me!”
It was quiet in the large empty room at the top of the building. There was no sound or movement to distract him and he strolled around the room, just enjoying the hush in the air. The room was cool in the night, bright metal casings shinig out from the darkness. A dim light from one tiny table lamp gave just enough light for him to move around without bumping into things. He breathed in deeply, feeling as if this was the closest he would get to fresh air for a good long while. He used to conduct seminars from here for the students who were interested in learning about the stars and planets but had given that up on beginning this project, discovering that he would need uninterrupted access to the observatory at a moments notice. How could he work that in when he had a group of curious students leaning over his shoulder, poking their noses in where they were not wanted? He couldn’t, so he had dropped that, to both the relief and disappointment of his students, and now he virtually had the observatory to himself, the students often choosing partying over star-gazing.
Andrew sighed in contentment and walked over to the large telescope to uncap the lens. His gaze fell onto the sleeping city below – how could something be so beautiful and calm one minute and vivid and violent the next? – and automatically searched for patches of activity. There were none. Until he heard a sudden screech of brakes below him, he tried to see what it was.
A motorbike screamed to an excruciating halt inches before crunching into a thick lamp post. It was clearly lit by the street lamp and the rider looked at his near miss, shrugged and rode of again. Straight into the front of an approaching night bus.
Andrew sighed and turned to the telescope. It was starting again.
Tears welled up in Robyn’s eyes and she looked up to the ceiling, as if she could see the sky. “He’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“Johnny. He had so much promise and now it’s gone. He became the hunter and forgot that he might be the hunted.”
“I fail to see how that could be a bad thing. For me, anyhow,” Carly added. One less person wanting to murder her had to be good, right?
Robyn looked down at her nails, suddenly finding them extremely interesting. “Something’s coming. I can feel it.”
“Yeah, the end of the world. You said.” Nervously, Carly twisted a lock of hair around her fingers, a habit she had not been able to break since childhood. “You guys ever been through one of those?”
“If we had,” Mika said, “we wouldn’t be here now.”
That was a comforting thought – not. “So, that’s a no. Then, why are you bothering with all this saving the human race – sorry, the world – crap if you wont be around to see it?”
Neither of them had an answer to that and ignored her. they didn’t know why they were doing this to save people, they didn’t do good things, just they they had to fo it. And they were the only ones that could.
Noise had started up outside again, already, though nothing like what they had heard in the daylight hours. When you could only find a few hours peace each night, then things were getting really bad. It was almost constant now. Continuous noise and lurid violence. This is what the human race was capable of? Carly didn’t think they deserved to be saved.
“So this shaman bloke,” started Mika, reading from the paper again. “He’s doing some kind of spell or something, a prayer to the spirit of the sun. So, he must be the key. And we won’t get anything out of your boss, Carly.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s dead,” Robyn cut in before Mika could answer. She hunched her shoulders in delight as she saw the look of confusion pass across the girls face.
How could he be dead with that magickal protection she had watched the shaman do? “You killed him?”
“We only wish –“
“That would have been fun.”
“No, he shot himself.”
“Oh.” She didn’t know what could drive some-one to take their own life, but wasn’t going to waste brain power thinking about, settling for the first explanation that first popped into her head - that he felt smothered by guilt from what he was doing and took the easy road out. It was probably the wrong explanation – Carly didn’t really care. If he wanted to kill himself, then just let him. Same went for outside- if they wanted to kill each other, then why not just let them get on with it?
“So, that leaves the shaman and the professor.”
“Come and take a look at this.” She tilted the monitor up a little and stared at it, puzzled. “We got pictures.” They were diagrams drawn on paper then scanned onto computer, but all three of them remained bewildered by them.
“Don’t like them,” Robyn sulked. “Where are all the colours?”
“You heard the lady – skip it.”
Carly clicked onto the main menu, finding no more files to open, and rummaged around under the desk for the nest disk.
Lovingly, Mika brushed his fingers through Robyn’s hair, remembering how she had worn it in wavy sections when they had first met. She tilted her head to one side, looked back at him and smiled. “I love you.”
“I know. I love you too. That’s why we never lose.”
“We won’t lose this time,” he vowed.
“I know.”
“The apocalypse..?”
“Doesn’t mean a thing.”
Carly cleared her throat loudly, reminding them that she could hear them, and made a point of not looking at them. She found the disk she wanted and set about cleaning the dust from it before loading it. If only she knew what on Earth they were going on about then maybe it wouldn’t be so annoying.
“We’ll beat it, Mika. Some won’t, but we will.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. Was this his Robyn speaking? The Robyn who had told him time and again how time had nearly run out, who had said that nothing would survive the violence of the world in these final hours? Yes, because this was Robyn talking. Just Robyn – not Robyn speaking for the stars. And suddenly, everything fell into place. “We can’t start something new until we end something old.”
“I said that an hour ago,” interrupted Carly, fingers tapping away at the keyboard.
“Well, now I’m saying it.”
“Don’t get angry, baby. That’s how it gets you. Makes you lose you lose your temper over the slightest thing.” Her gaze came to rest on the blonde head and, for the tiniest moment, Robyn felt sorry for the girl. Kept here against her will…
But Carlys will had changed. She almost liked it here, felt safe with two murderers – a contradiction in terms, but she knew they wouldn’t hurt her any more. And she was doing something she wouldn’t even have dreamed about if she had not been kidnapped. She was helping to save the world!
“Stop it.” Mika gripped her chin and turned her face to his. “We can’t change what’s already happened or what’s happening now, but we can change the next few days.”
That sounded spookily familiar to Carly – you can’t change what is, only what will be – and she decisively hit the open file button. The text bean to load and she swivelled around to see two heads peering curiously out of the window.
“They’re just playing,” Robyn said. “Puppets in a Punch and Judy show.” She giggled at the likeness, remembering how many children wandered around and attached themselves to her last time there had been one at the seaside. Early evening, after sunset, wearing thick clothes despite the heat. That had been… enjoyable. “But no-one is pulling the strings.”
“But they don’t know what the game is,” he finished for her, knowing that she would say that next. “First prize is a place in the bright new world, and the losers get –“
“A long stay in Hell,” said Carly.
“More or less.”
“Hell? Bad, bad place, Hell.” Robyn twisted around and listened to the sounds outside. “Worse than this. Hotter, brighter.” She shrugged and sighed
“Have you been there?”
“No, you don’t come back from somewhere like that. If you deserve to go to Hell, you deserve to stay there forever. I’ve heard stories though.”
How had she heard stories if no-one came back to tell the tale? Carly didn’t ask. “Are you gonna stop us from being sucked into Hell? Because a lot of people don’t deserve to go to Hell.”
“We’ll stop it.” Mika turned around on the bed and curled his legs underneath his body. “We’ll stop it in time,” he hoped, knowing that it was already much too late to save dozens of people, already killed by this thing.
“You remember that bad thing you said was coming, Robyn?” She fixed her eyes on a tiny green light high in the sky which blinked out a few seconds later, as if knowing it had been spotted.
“The apocalypse?”
“Possibly that but the other thing?”
Robyn nodded once at her.
“I think it’s here.”
TWELVE
Much to Mika’s annoyance, Carly refused to say anything further about it, choosing instead to stare out of the window. Robyn was not bothered about it – whatever it was, she and Mika would fight and they would win… the same as always.
“This isn’t right,” grumbled Carly. “After all the blocks I put on it as well.” Mika looked at her sharply, accusing, and she hastened to explain herself, frantically punching keys in sequence. “The file won’t load. It’s got corrupted somehow, I think it must’ve got scratched or something.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I can because it’s all… out of whack. I’m not sure what happened.”
“Try!” Mika ordered.
“I am trying.” If only she had thought to make a back-up of it. “If I can make a copy of it onto hard disk, I think it’ll turn out the same but it’s worth a shot, right?”
“Won’t it work if you just put it on hard drive and reformat it? Because sometimes things just change on different programmes and systems.”
“But the ones at FDR were the latest computers and software. Supposed to be compatible with everything.” Carly brandished an exasperated clawed hand at the desktop and grunted. “Sorry, Mika, but this just isn’t working. And I haven’t even got a back-up.”
Mika was only mildly annoyed, though. He understood how easy it was for computers to go wrong – it was not her fault. He looked away; squinted at the flaking paint on the door. “Was it vitally important?”
Carly shrugged.
“No,” chirped Robyn, reaching up for the cord on the blind. “Not important.”
Forgetting about the others in the room, Mika dropped to his knees in the middle of the floor and stared into the distance, seeing nothing but transfixed by it. “Wow. It’s just empty.”
“Erm… that’s why it’s called empty space,” Carly told him, giving her frazzled brain a break from the PC. She flexed her wrists, stiff from the keyboard, still slightly red and scuffed from the shackles. “Oow.”
“Does it hurt?” asked Robyn.
“No. It’s just sore from typing.”
“I hurt. I hurt for Johnny. He was my favourite… for a whole day. He could have been feared and respected the world over.”
“The way you are? I mean, the fear and respect.”
“No, never like us.” No-one could ever be as famously infamous as she and Mika were. It took centuries of brutal indiscriminate homicides and terrorizing whole nations to achieve their legendary status. “That’s impossible.” Robyn grinned to herself, remembering something that she would not explain. “All legends have some truth in them.”
“Huh?” Carly got the feeling that she wasn’t talking about Johnny any more but some-one she had once known. Some-one she had never really believed existed until then.
“He could never have been as awed as Mika and I, but he could have been great. We could have taught him everything he needed to know. But, he was weak.” A mild, nonchalant shrug. “He did the unforgivable – he lost.”
“He had to fight for his life?” Was life the right word to use for the existence of a dead person? Maybe it was a non-existence, or an after-existence.
“No, there was no physical struggle. He just lost himself.”
This was nonsense, right? How could Robyn possibly know that there hadn’t been a fight? But, Carly just somehow knew that she was right. Everyone was losing themselves to what they could be, the very core of their beings, why should Johnny be any different?
“So why aren’t you two..? Why are you so… normal?” Normal was very much the wrong word to describe them but they were more normal than everyone else?
Robyn drifted away from the conversation, scratching absently at her leg. She had lived so long, through so much, that she had just grown used to being pulled in several different directions and knew how to push against it. She had resisted the pull to become pure animal, the urge to become a force for evil. Stay in control. The blessed demon may have taken over her body but her will was still her own. “Just because.”
Carly thought about this for a minute and wiped her sweaty palms down the legs of the bleached jeans she was wearing. “Because why?” Had something like this happened to them
before?
“We’re not animals with no sense of reason, like people think we are. Nor are we humans who think they are the highest living things on the planet – cock-sure creatures – but still mortal. We are forever; have changed and evolved beyond life… beyond death even. Top of the food chain. Immortal.”
The word sent shivers up Carly’s spine. Immortal. Lived forever. She had been scared of dying just a few months ago, but now found the idea of eternal life more daunting.
Silently, and with wild, staring eyes, Mika began to get to his feet. “We’ve seen it all. Everything the world has to offer – the good and the bad. It stays with you forever. You can run… and run… until there’s nowhere left to go, but you can’t get away from it.” He tapped the side of his skull. “It’s all in there. All of it. What we’ve seen, what we’ve done. I remember every single thing so clearly, as if it were only yesterday.”
“Some of it was only yesterday.”
“There’s no let-up, no mercy, no escape. That used to be our motto, Robyn, do you remember? Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. We’ll get you in the end. We’ll get inside.”
“Wow,” breathed Carly, marvelling at how very not evil they could be. Schizophrenic, mental maybe, not evil. “How long ago was that?”
“Seems like forever, several lifetimes ago.” Robyn shrugged and held her hand out to Mika. “Maybe it was forever – it was such a long time ago. Hard to remember.”
“Hard to remember? I can’t forget.” Mika sat down and curled into a tight ball, so reminiscent of Robyn that Carly thought for a moment that he was about to sink into one of her trances.
“Mika?” He looked up at her, not trance-like but, Carly thought, scared. “Are you okay?”
Suddenly, he was Mika again, not the lost young man of only a moment before. “Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?”
Carly shrugged and swung back to the demanding computer. “Ugh, this is killing me.” She shivered involuntarily for reasons she could not put words to and rubbed the corners of her aching eyes. “I think I’m starting to hate technology.”