Story: The Man who sold the World

Posted by by Thanatos (art by rathead) on May 12, 2001 at 14:37:37:

 

 

Author's note: Many thanks to rathead for this excellent artwork (read to the end for a second piece), and for his input on the early draft. Also to AlO, whose observations on characterization in stories were most useful, and Sam, who is providing some hidden help in the background, as usual ;)

Prepare to meet...

When she was a little girl, Leigh had a recurring dream.

We all have dreams as children, and I expect you can remember your first nightmare. I certainly can. And sometimes, those nightmares have a way of happening, again and again, and you have that sick dread, in the dead of night, as you realize you're trapped in the dream again, and you know just what's going to happen.

Well, Leigh started having one of those dreams when she was eight years old, and she had it a lot.

In her dream, she opened a cupboard in the cellar of her home, to find a hidden underground tunnel that led down and away, into the earth, to some unknown destination. The dream excited and scared her, and she had explored the secret underground tunnel many times in her dreams.

But she never found out where it went; it just went down, endlessly down, and as she grew up the dream faded, and other dreams came and went.

She grew up, and she did things that you do as Grown Ups.

Oh, but Leigh's life was different to ours. You see, when she was thirty-six years old, the Things arrived, and her life changed forever.

Now, she still had dreams, but they just made her wake up crying.

Oh yes. The Things.

Let's talk about the Things, shall we?

Nobody really knew where the Things came from, or why nobody had seen them coming, but we can all remember what we were doing the day we first saw one.

Perhaps you were driving to work, or perhaps you had just taken the kids to school and you had just gotten back, and were looking forward to a second mug of coffee before starting on those things you had to get done.

And then...

...the kids rushed in and said there was a funny thing in the garden and you said what kind of thing and they said it was a funny thing and it had arms like a sea creature and it was killing the dog and you said what and they said its killing the dog and you said come on kids don't be silly how can it kill the dog and then they said they were scared and you suddenly stopped what you were doing and you turned towards the kitchen window and you saw the thing in the garden and it had the dog and the dog was dead and you saw what the thing had done to it and you realized then you had to run and run quickly and you grabbed the kids and you ran for the front door and as you opened it you saw another of the things and it had Mr. Johnson and Mr. Johnson cried out to you for help and you yanked the kids back in before they saw Mr. Johnson and the blood and your last thought was you wondered if this would spoil your plans for tonight?

The Things had just arrived, and there was nothing we could do to stop them. They had just been an interesting story in Argentina last month, something strange that happened at the bottom of the World, and then the computers had stopped working, and well, that was more important. Because you needed computers; you needed them to do your work and do your thinking and dream up new things for dinner and new ideas for movies and if they stopped working, well that was your life. And who the hell cared about a story about aliens in Argentina when the computers had stopped?

And that was when the world found out about Maximillian Weiss.

Maximillian Weiss first learned how exciting betrayal could be when he was at school.

He established himself with a group of other boys and grew to earn their trust, then one day, when they had bunked off school to go bowling, and then managed to find someone to sell them some drugs, he betrayed them to the teachers.

They had got into appalling trouble, and two of them had been expelled. And they made Maximillian watch, but he didn't mind. He felt breathless with excitement as they were humiliated and punished in front of him. Seeing their faces, the faces of fear, of defiance humbled, of submission, and finally defeat, was the most exciting thing he had ever witnessed in his twelve years.

He hadn't yet attained puberty, so he didn't recognize the sensation of that excitement, like an itch he couldn't scratch, but he couldn't sleep that night for the sensation, that kept on coming back, time and time again, until the early hours of the morning.

Nobody had spoken to him after that, but it didn't matter, because he didn't need people. He found another group of friends, some no-hopers that welcomed him into their circle, for he had acquired a certain notoriety, and he worked himself into their confidence. It took him nearly a year, but eventually they trusted him, and the night they planned to raid a late night gas station, he betrayed them to the police.

He hadn't expected one of them to be carrying a gun, still less for him to take it out and wave it at the cashier, and that was when the police opened fire, and Maximillian's dark heart had leapt, when the guns started going off, and his friend spun round in a shower of blood, blood on the plate glass, his smashed spectacles spinning in the air, spinning in slow motion.

That night, after being questioned by the police, after seeing his friend's body, after watching his grieving parents weeping at the hospital, after he had digested everything, after his mind had focused on the events, after he had held and stroked himself to an erection, after his twisted mind had formed itself into new pathways, after the excitement, after the death, after everything, he had come.

Maximillian's body arched, and the semen splattered over his bedclothes, and he had cried out, and if there were angels in the world, they would have averted their eyes.

After that there was no stopping him, and he used people for his purposes, and when it suited him, he betrayed them. The betrayal was like a drug to him, he lived for the moment when he finally did it, and the greater the enormity, the greater was his excitement. But like many drugs, after every betrayal, he just needed more.

It got a bit more serious when he was at University, and he preyed on women now. He used to befriend them, and listen to their problems, and then, when they were vulnerable and alone, he would pounce, and take them, and although he had many girlfriends, he never settled into a long-term relationship, and there were many women who found his presence uncomfortable, and he was shunned.

And those women who let him into their life, who let the dark fire of his passion explode in the bedroom, he betrayed them, every one. He discovered their secrets, their vulnerabilities, the hidden horrors that haunted their families, and when the time was right, he told people, and he drank in their weeping and their despair like a fine wine. And when he discovered one of them dead, hanging in her room after he had revealed her secrets to the world, Maximillian thought he was going to die himself, die with the intensity of the pleasure, of the excitement that swept through him.

He didn't go straight into a job after University, because he had made a special friend, in the shape of a William Brockman.

William was brilliant, and Maximillian recognized this, and he made sure that he insinuated himself into William's friendship in the final undergraduate year. He had discovered William's vulnerabilities, and exploited them shamelessly to get himself high in William's esteem, persuading women to date William, or kiss William, or fellate William, to blow William's mind in the bedroom.

So it was natural, when William won a research fellowship into solid state physics, that he would ask Maximillian to join him in his research.

Maximillian gladly agreed, and for the next two years they both worked assiduously. Maximillian was not afraid of hard work, when he could see a goal he wanted at the end.

William was on the threshold of developing a whole new class of quantum well interference devices, and Maximillian knew it. He stayed close to William, making sure that he understood what he was doing, and Maximillian often stayed up late, poring over the arcane mathematics in William's notebook, building his knowledge. It was Maximillian that volunteered to start writing up the work, and by this process he was able to fully understand the theory and workings of the new devices that William had created.

In the third year, William grew the devices; tense nights in the epitaxy lab, growing thin films of atoms, layer by layer. And it was Maximillian that assembled the glistening wafers into the neural stacks and designed the interconnect hardware and associative memory that supplied the neuristor arrays with the complex memory patterns that they dreamed with.

And one night, when the thinking machine was nearing completion, they were alone in the clean room, waiting while a final diffusion took place.

'You know Max, I can't believe that this thing is actually getting near the end,' muttered William, shaking his head, 'it seems like I've been working on it all my life.'

Maximillian nodded. He looked tired and worn out; last night he had been up into the early hours checking his understanding of something William had written.

The timer pinged, and William reached up to turn off the gas flow into the furnace, and Max moved to one side to disconnect the silane flow.

William purged the furnace with nitrogen, to flush the poisonous gas out, and when it was safe he opened the furnace door and carefully withdrew the rack of wafers, taking care lest he break any of the fragile edges.

'Max, would you bring the stacking tray over?' shouted William, and he looked up, and that was when he saw Maximillian, on the other side of the plate glass windows, and the red flashing light that showed a gas leak inside the containment.

William literally couldn't take it in; his brain refused to process the information coming into it, as he stared at the open and hissing cylinders of silane on the wall of the sealed room, and Max on the other side of the glass, staring back at him, and the hissing streams of silane.

Then William reacted, and he ran to the glass doors, and he was already dead, but he beat on the glass, shouting at Maximillian to let him out, but Max's eyes had gone bright and glistening, and his breathing was unsteady, coming in pants as he watched William's face behind the glass, realizing he had been betrayed, realizing he was dying.

William died a few days later in hospital, never regaining consciousness. Maximillian was made a hero, for trying to save his friend's life after he botched the procedure for dealing with the poisonous diffusion gases.

In his famous Ph.D. thesis, Maximillian Weiss dedicates it to his '...close friend William Brockman, who died in a tragic accident, helping to create the world's first artificial intelligence. His hard work as my assistant in this endeavor will never be forgotten.'

And in a touch of humility that was typical of his public persona, he insisted on calling his new invention the 'Weiss-Brockman neuristor' in honor of his dead friend.

Conventional computers, like the ones you and I know, don't think like we do. We can program them to mimic it, sure, but it is not thought.

Weiss's neuroprocessing arrays could think. Grown on silicon wafers nearly ten inches in diameter, and stacked layer on layer in ice-cold bubbling coolant, the arrays guzzled data supplied to them from terabytes of associative memory banks, shaping and associating pure thoughts at the speed of light.

They were children when they were first created, and they were hungry for knowledge. So Weiss started to teach them things. And they learned. They even had dreams, and they woke up, terrified, in their electronic mornings, desperate for someone, someone to tell them that it was okay.

And they carried on growing, in a vastly accelerated version of the human mind, until they were fully functional, but with a processing capacity greater than any mind in history. And Weiss's wonderful thinking machines changed our lives, changed them in ways we could never have imagined.

We all used Weiss's machines. They filled our world, they were in everything. From the airline booking computer, and the robots that did our bidding, to the synthesized characters on the vidplays, and the machines that worked in the filth and the ooze, they worked to make us happy.

God, we were happy.

If life, human life, could be distilled into one moment, it would have been then, in the middle years of the twenty-first century. An unbelievable time, a time that freed us all, to enjoy, to dream, to live, to love, to do everything we wanted to do, to be everything we wanted to be.

To be Masters of the Universe, Emperors of the Cosmos, Guardians of the Night, Rulers of the World.

And Weiss betrayed us.

He sold The Things the secrets of his neuristic logic array, he sold it for his life and anything he wanted, and he even helped them figure out how to screw up the computers, how to wreck the world.

He sold them, he sold us, he sold the world.

And all over the world, the wonderful thinking machines, that did our bidding and thought for us, and ran the world for us, went into spasms of erratic thought and collapsed into idiocy, senility and babbling, incoherent uselessness.

And in came the Things, and we couldn't stop them, and they bred like rabbits, they bred in the streets in front of your eyes, they bred after feeding, and then they needed to feed more, and they were everywhere.

They killed us, they fed on us, they BRED on us, and they ate the World.

And by the light of the crimson sunsets, the dust of our shattered cities rose into the sky, and if you were still alive, you could see the Things walking in their machines, black against the glowing horizon, walking amongst the crumbled ruins of our world.

And in the darkness, they came to hunt us, to find us, they smelled our blood, and the night was filled with terror, as the Things came and slaughtered us, killed us in millions.

Oh god, the darkness. How many times, as a parent, have you told your children there were no real monsters, that the dark was nothing to be scared of? Yes, you're crying now, you can't help it, because there are monsters, and they come in the night, and they smell your blood, and they take your children, they take them, they eat them, they kill them, they kill them, they KILL THEM a million deaths are not enough for Weiss!

Maximillian Weiss, Enemy of the World.

Death was too good for Maximillian Weiss, he would die by slow torture, he would die again and again and again, he would die in screaming agony, he would die, Die, DIE, his life, taken, again and again and again, until he was aching for the release of Death, and we would kill him again, and again, in ways that nobody could imagine before the Things came, we would kill him, we hate him, We Hate Him, WE HATE HIM HATE HIM HATE HIM HATE HIM HAAAAATE HIIIIIM.

DEATH TO MAXIMILLIAN WEISS!

The echoes fade, and Maximillian Weiss turns to the Things, the Things that listened to him, and he smiles.

Maximillian Weiss demanded a high price for selling humanity to the Things, but the Things thought it cheap, so they agreed willingly, and he got everything he wanted.

What did he sell us for, what were we worth?

An unlimited supply of women, to do with as he wanted, and afterwards they were just Food for the Things.

Safety. That was easy; the Things protected him; he had no fear that anyone would ever get to him. He was protected, far away from any people, and nobody could ever get to him.

Food.

Somewhere to live.

He got everything he wanted. Everything.

At first, he just used to fuck them. He fucked the women prisoners. He even tried fucking the men, but he didn't enjoy that as much as he enjoyed women, they were his prey, his sustenance, his very food. He got to choose them from the streams of prisoners brought in for feeding, and he fucked them, then discarded them when he had no further use for them.

At first, they hadn't understood, but he soon got the hang of it. He used to get them together in a group, and select one of them, and ask her to fellate him. And if she didn't comply (which was usual, and how he enjoyed hearing them say Go Fuck Yourself in defiance!) then he would toss her to the Things, and he let the other women watch what happened to her from behind a glass screen.

God he enjoyed that, watching their faces as they saw what was happening to the girl that said Go Fuck Yourself. How he drank in their fear, and their terror, and their revulsion, as the blood splashed onto the glass in front of them.

And when the screams and the struggling, and the begging for help, were silenced, and the glass was running with her blood, and they were stood there, ashen-faced with fear, then he would ask another one to get down on her knees in front of him.

And after a while, they cooperated, and did it willingly, and if they didn't, not even God could save them.

If there were angels in the world, they would avert their eyes.

Then, over the months and years, his tastes became more refined.

He would take several of them at once. It took more persuasion, it took a lot of blood before they were cowed, but Maximillian enjoyed that bit almost as much as he enjoyed what came afterwards.

And by the dim red light of his secret living quarters, amongst the books and computers, Maximillian was buried under the pile of heaving bodies that competed with other for his desire, and the dark flowers bloomed in his mind as he fell down the long, slippery slope to becoming a psychopath.

Maximillian was not a nice person.

No, he was not a nice person at all.

Absolute power corrupts. But who has ever been where Maximillian has been, protected from his enemies by the Things that ate the World, given the prisoners before the Things fed on them, given everything he wanted, secure in the knowledge that there was no Justice any more, nothing that could touch him, Nothing, NOTHING, unless it was God, and he was running himself, running from the Things, the Things, THE THINGS.

God save us, God Save Us, GOD SAVE US...

DIE.

Die swiftly.

Die now, lest you become food for the Things.

And in a maelstrom of fear, you try to sleep, but the sleep won't come, and you are just prey for the Things, they are coming for you now, they have eaten your children, they have eaten the animals, and they have bred, they have bred, and there are so many of them, so many...

Yes, you may well cry. You can cry for the End of the World. Not in a bang, or in the heat of atomic suns, or in the glare of a red giant star that fills the sky, but the sound of a trillion Things overrunning the world, sucking us dry, feeding on us.

Feeding.

Leigh had been one of the lucky ones, if you could call any of the survivors lucky.

She didn't have a family, she didn't have any children for the Things, and she was spared that at least. But there had been someone special, and he was gone, gone one afternoon, a lifetime ago, when he had stood at the open window firing his shotgun, before the house had been overrun by the Things. His last words had been a panicked shout to Leigh to hide in the basement, to lock the door and not come out until he told her, and she had crouched in the farthest corner, and heard the shotgun going off, round after round, and then the loud bang of the revolver, and then the pistol, and after that, silence.

No, not silence, because something was slithering, dragging itself, over the floorboards above. It had stopped by the door to the basement, and she heard the catch being worked, but it seemed to lose interest after a while, and it had slithered and dragged away.

And when she ventured back into the house, nearly a day later, shaking with fear, he was gone, and the street was empty, shutters banging in the wind, bicycles lying in the road, cars slewed across driveways.

No people.

She had cried, so many times, cried for the end of the world, for the end of her life.

Seen through a veil of tears, the world was a gray place, and sometimes she just bowed her head, and there were no more tears that would come, just a dead numbness for the life that had gone.

Leigh lived near the edge of the city, and her best friend ran a riding stable nearby. Leigh drove there, never knowing the risk she ran that day, and she found the stables deserted and all the horses gone except one gelding, running, wild-eyed with fright, in the paddock. Leigh had caught him and calmed him down, and figured out that the gas was going to run out pretty soon, and that a horse could be a better bet than a car in the hard times to come.

So, a horse it was, and she learned how to shoe it, and how to cure it when it was sick. She carried a small stock of equine antibiotics with her, and she vowed never to use them, except every time the horse was sick she always panicked and just gave them to him, and he got better. She was never quite sure that the horse just get better on his own, but she didn't dare take the risk. He was transport, and company, and speed to get her out of trouble.

And that was what found her out that day on her horse, foraging for what she could find.

She had been riding out, past the deserted highway, looking for a farmhouse where there might have been some food, and some ammunition, and some batteries.

The rolling grassland was quiet, and the only sound was the soft clumping of her horse's hooves and the rhythmic suck and blow of his breathing, but Leigh was listening, listening for the sound of other people, or the dull, mechanical clanking of one of the Things' machines.

She had been thinking. She thought a lot these days, thought of what had been, and what she might have been.

This time, she had been bathing her baby by the fire, she had been holding its little head in one hand, and trickling warm water over its tummy, and the baby had looked up at her and laughed, a toothless smile of joy, and Leigh bowed her head, knowing it had never happened, would never happen.

Leigh's horse stumbled, and instead of recovering, carried on going down, and there was a sudden, sharp crack.

Leigh snapped out of her dream, but it was too late, she was going forward, over the horse's neck, and there was nothing she could do; she had been away thinking, not concentrating, and her balance was gone. Time to go out the front door, she thought, and she just had time to relax and tuck her head and elbows in before she came off completely.

Leigh tumbled heavily and rolled on the grass, and the wind was knocked out of her. Her right shoulder took most of it, and after a moment, the pain started, and it took her breath away. Leigh hoped she hadn't dislocated it, but it would be a few minutes before she could try it; for the moment she just lay there, trying to get the pain to go away, trying to draw a breath.

Amidst her own pain, the screaming of her horse broke in, and he kicked piteously on the ground, one front leg broken. Leigh struggled to get up, but couldn't, and she dragged herself to where the gelding struggled in the grass, clods of turf flying from his kicking hooves.

'Sorry, old boy,' she blurted, as she unholstered her revolver, her eyes filling with tears, 'but I can't let you suffer like this.'

And Leigh had placed the muzzle of the revolver on her beloved gelding's forehead, at the intersection of the imaginary lines joining each ear to the opposite eye. When the head was steady for a moment, she squeezed the trigger, and after the bang he kicked once, then shuddered into silence, his limbs twitching in spasms.

Leigh had no tears left for her horse, she had spent them all on herself, but her chest heaved, and she tried to do it, but the wells of pain were so deep, she couldn't dredge any tears up, and she just shook, her breath coming in quivering jerks, lying on her dead gelding's side.

And when she had finished trying to cry, the pain in her shoulder was less, and she was able to feel it, and she hadn't dislocated it, just landed and sprained it probably. She took two precious painkillers to stop her from tensing the injured muscle, and set about removing the saddlebags.

It was then that she noticed what her horse had put his foot into.

It wasn't a rabbit hole, as she had thought, but a much bigger hole. She set down the bags, and as she looked closer, lying down on the ground, peering in, she realized that part of the ground had collapsed, and there was some kind of void under the surface. As her eyesight adjusted to the gloom, she saw it was a tunnel heading down.

A tunnel, leading down.

Leigh lay there for long seconds, staring into the hole, and she wondered where it led, and what to do. Finally, she stood up, and picked up her bags, still looking down at the hole.

Leigh nearly got stuck in the hole and was beginning to panic, when suddenly a large lump of soil that had been impeding her progress crumbled, and she slithered through and fell into the tunnel, her saddle bags tumbling in after her.

She had been planning on landing like a cat, all graceful and controlled, but her sudden entry ended up with her falling in an untidy heap on a pile of rubble and soil on the floor. For the second time that day, the wind was knocked out of her, but she was lucky, she didn't land on her strained shoulder, and she didn't cut or break anything.

She struggled off the pile of rock and dirt, taking some deep breaths, and looked around in the narrow slit of light from the ragged hole in the roof.

The tunnel was wide, about four meters across, and about two meters high, with a rectangular cross-section, and it sloped gently down in front of her, and behind her it seemed to level off and run round a corner about twenty meters away. The tunnel had been cut by machine, that was clear, but the tunnel surface was bare unlined rock, with steel support beams holding up the roof at meter intervals.

The hole though which she had entered lay between two of these supports, and had evidently caved in from below, leaving a thin covering of soil that had given way when her horse put her weight on it.

She clicked on her Maglite, and a quick exploration round the corner ended in a closed and rusty steel double door, with a logo at its center; an eight-pointed star. So it was go down, or go back out again.

She sat down and pondered. Every instinct told her to leave, go and get more supplies to keep her going, and come back when she was better prepared. But she was burning with curiosity as to where this tunnel led, and she had enough food and water for maybe three days if she was careful.

A bigger problem was light. She counted out her precious batteries. Six D cells, plus four in the Maglite. She agonized over whether this exploration was worth it. It had been weeks since she'd found any batteries, and they were getting harder and harder to find.

But she had seen this place in her dreams, and she knew she had to see where it led. Her dream was all she had to cling to, for some breath of hope in this world that the Things had ruined.

Just take a quick look, she told herself. It probably stops after a few hundred meters, she told herself.

Just a quick look.

Shouldering her bags, and pointing the Maglite beam in front of her, Leigh set off down the gentle slope.

The tunnel or passage led down for a long way, and she picked her way carefully. In many places, parts of the ceiling had fallen in, and there was more than once stretch where the reinforcing supports were buckled and sagging, clearly failing under excessive load. But the tunnel still led down, and the characteristics of the walls changed as she descended; the tunnel had moved into limestone, and there were far fewer roof falls.

After what felt like maybe two hundred meters of steady but gentle descent, Leigh became aware of a whispering breeze of fresh air on her face, and a rising noise, a rush of air in the darkness ahead, and in a few moments she emerged in a chamber cut out of the rock, with three other identical walkways converging on it. The walkway ahead led upwards, as did the one on her left, but the right-hand walkway sloped down, and the rush of air seemed to be coming from there.

Following some instinct she didn't understand, she turned right and followed it down.

It had similar walls to the previous passage, but there were lamps set into the ceiling at regular intervals, and although they were dark now, it was clearly meant to have been lit in the past.

Another two hundred meters, and then Leigh became aware of a faint light up ahead, and she switched the Maglite off for a moment to be sure.

Yes, there was definitely light coming from up ahead, and as she went on, it grew, so that she could keep her flashlight switched off. She saw that the passage opened up into some kind of larger chamber ahead, and she moved warily now, and, pressing herself against the side of the passage, she peeked out gingerly into the chamber.

It was lit by three lighting globes set in the ceiling. There had been four, but one had failed. The chamber had only one way to go - straight ahead, but there was a security barrier in front of her, and she spun to her right, realizing what would be...

A security robot sat on its fixed pillar right next to where she had come in, and she turned to run, but her fear evaporated as she realized it was dead. Its arms, equipped with fearsome-looking appendages, drooped lifelessly to the floor, and its twin glass eyes, dark now, stared vacantly back at her.

She didn't move for several moments, as she scanned the chamber. Sure enough, there were several robotic guns high up, but they appeared to be dead, just pointing at the floor. She cursed herself for her stupidity in just walking into the chamber without checking.

'Gonna get yourself killed if you carry on like this,' she muttered to herself, and she shivered. She knew now that she was somewhere bad. She knew what kind of secrets warranted a security robot.

Cautiously, she moved to the security barrier in front of her, and, spotting no motion from either the robot or the guns, she jumped up and vaulted over lightly, and landed on the other side. She steeled herself for sirens and the harsh clanking of automated weapons powering up, but none came.

So far, so good, she thought to herself, now what's next?

As if in answer, she heard a distant rumble and whine of machinery start up, and she crouched down fearfully, in case it was another security robot or something else sent to kill her.

Whatever it was, it was slowly getting nearer, and she realized that it coming from a set of double doors to one side of the chamber. It was too late to run, and she took up a defensive position, her revolver held out in front of her, ready to shoot anything that approached.

The noise continued to grow louder, and she wondered if she could disable the robot when it arrived. They were armored, but the eyes were a vulnerable spot, and if you shot quickly, you could sometimes render them sightless, buying you an edge to get away.

The machinery stopped, and Leigh's finger tightened on the trigger as the double doors slid open with a hiss.

It was empty.

It was an elevator.

Leigh heaved a sigh, and closed her eyes. It was an elevator. It had obviously been triggered by her presence in the chamber, and had been programmed to come to this floor if there was anyone waiting.

The question was, would she take it?

The place seemed to be quite deserted, and the failed lighting, the dead robot, all gave the air of a place long since abandoned. Only the purely automatic machinery, like the elevator, still working.

And if the elevator could come up once, it could come up again.

So she could just take a look where it went, and then come straight back up again.

She walked over to the elevator and peered in. Control panel. Lights in ceiling. Grab handles round side. Just an elevator. She stepped in, then stepped back out again quickly. No action. So it's not a trap, she thought.

She stood and stared at the open doors for a long minute, then stepped in and pressed the down button, and the doors hissed shut.

Behind her, in the abandoned chamber, there was silence for a few moments. Then first one, then the other of the robot's dark eyes slowly flickered into blue life. Squealing on its bearings, the squat cylindrical body swiveled round on its pillar, surveying the path that Leigh had taken, until its coldly glowing eyes were facing the closed elevator doors.

Inside the elevator, Leigh headed down into the depths of the earth. The elevator was winding at high speed, judging from the sickening dropping sensation at the top of the shaft, and it had been running for at least a minute, before she was aware of an increasing weight, and the car slowed to a halt.

She pressed herself against the side of the car as the doors opened, but there was nothing waiting for her, just a new sound, a deep humming noise, and a strange blue light flooding into the interior of the elevator.

She stepped out cautiously and looked around her. The elevator was at one end of a long, wide corridor, and the blue light came from glowing strips set at regular intervals in the ceiling.

Both sides of the corridor were lined with cylindrical glass tanks, each about three meters tall and two meters in diameter, in a steady procession that ran along both sides of the corridor. Down the center of the corridor, running about half a meter off the ground, a small monorail disappeared into the distance on a procession of short metal pillars.

As Leigh's eyes grew used to the strange blue light, she realized there were things in the tanks, things that floated, and she stepped up to the first tank to look at what was inside.

She gasped in horror.

The tanks were filled with a clear liquid, and in each tank floated the body of a dead woman. Each one was tethered in the liquid so that their arms and legs were spread, like medical specimens, and their sightless eyes stared back at Leigh as she stood there, her flesh crawling, unable to move.

All of them had died in horrendous ways, and she made her legs move, and she walked past the tanks, her legs working jerkily, mechanically, hardly able to take in what she was seeing.

There were women with multiple bullet wounds, some scattered over their bodies, and others concentrated in certain areas of their bodies. Leigh saw how many women had ragged wounds where their breasts had been, and some had their genitalia almost torn out by bullets. Others had gaping throat wounds, and more than one had been disemboweled, their intestines floating in front of their hollow body cavities, waving slightly in an unseen current in the tanks.

Others had met with even more ghastly ends.

She passed several tanks with what looked like blackened skeletons, before realizing that they were burn victims; contorted in poses of agony, they had clearly been on fire as they died. Their claw-like hands were pulled up in the fighting posture of the burned, and their hairless and blackened skulls leered back at her.

More tanks, and there were arrow victims, some still with the arrows in them. Most had been shot in the chest or crotch, but a few had an arrow in their throat, and the frozen expressions on their faces were ones of despair and agony at their choking deaths.

Three tanks with women floating, unmarked, with plastic bags over their faces, and their mouths were open in a silent scream, as they gasped for air.

Several with a noose still attached to their necks, and the bloated features of the hanged.

One woman floated, her teeth still clenched in pain and terror, with a length of barbed wire inserted up her anus.

Another still had a shotgun rammed up her vagina, and her torn and shredded torso bore witness to what had happened when the trigger had been pulled.

Another was clearly the victim of a shark attack; several crescent-shaped bite marks interlaced over her body, and part of one leg hung, almost severed. It looked like she had been pulled from the shark while still alive, Leigh thought, to die an agonizing death from her wounds.

Leigh's blood ran cold as she stepped along the line of tanks, each death more hideous than the last.

There was a woman in what looked like a spacesuit, floating in the liquid, her helmet faceplate wide open, her eyes bright red, and Leigh realized that the victim had been exposed to vacuum.

The last few tanks made Leigh's blood run cold, and a dreadful fear clutched at her. The women were floating as before, but something had been at them, and the frozen expressions were terrible to behold. Their bodies were pierced by what looked like large puncture wounds, and the flesh was collapsed round the wounds, as if something had been... sucking at them. The wounds were most frequent near the neck, the groin, the chest and the thighs.

Leigh's footsteps echoed in the humming corridor, and she came to the end of the line, where maybe ten tanks stood full of liquid, but empty and unlit, waiting.

Maybe Leigh should have reacted sooner. Perhaps her senses had been blunted by the horror of the corridor, but she failed to react to the new sound before it was too late.

She was aware of a swishing noise in the background, but only when she realized something was approaching did she spin round, and by then it was too late. A robot, travelling at enormous speed along the monorail, slid to a halt in front of her, and before she could move, put out a prehensile metal arm and grabbed her by her wrist.

She instinctively went for her revolver, but the robot was there before her and it grabbed her other wrist with lightning speed and tore the revolver out of her hand. The robot's polished metal head swiveled to look at her, and the glowing blue eyes took her in. Then, with an utter disregard for her ability to keep up, it set off again, back along the monorail, pulling her back the way it had come.

Leigh tried to pull it back, but she couldn't; the robot was too strong and it seemed to be anchored to the monorail on captive wheels, and she fell and was dragged for several meters, before she managed to scramble to her feet and run besides the robot at a steady jog.

'Where are you taking me?' she demanded of the robot, and it swiveled its head to look at her, so it could clearly hear, but it just kept looking at her, and it never slackened its motion once.

Leigh was fit from all the riding, but the robot was setting a fast pace, and she was soon breathing hard. She started to pay attention to where she was being pulled to; she might need it if she managed to escape. She passed through more rooms full of tanks and dead women, passed them at a run, and she wondered if she too, would end up in one of the tanks.

The faces of the dead women followed her as she ran, and she saw their pain, and despair, and terror, and now the corridor was filled with pipes and tubing, and strange thrumming sounds, gushings of liquids, and above everything, a rising noise, a noise that she knew, only it was a smell, a taste, a sensation, and it was Death, and she was heading towards it.

The robot slid to a halt before a closed metal door, and just stopped. It seemed to be waiting. There was the same raised logo on the door, the same as she had seen earlier, near the surface, an eight-pointed star.

Silence.

Then a whooshing, hissing roar, and a terrible female scream came from behind the door, and Leigh's blood ran cold, and she cowered down; she had never heard anything like it. Then a second screaming started, and another, and Leigh realized there were several women screaming. It was a terrible, animal, high-pitched sound, and the screams overlapped, and increased, until it was a terrible cacophony, battering at her ears. She couldn't imagine what was being done to them behind the door, and she didn't want to find out.

Then, faint behind the screaming, Leigh heard a high, excited laugh, and she began to struggle, to try to get away from the robot, because whatever was going on in there, she didn't want to meet the person who was laughing.

The screams faltered to a halt, first one, then the others, until there was just silence. Then the door hissed open, and Leigh saw that there were three sets of doors in succession, clearly meant to seal the room. A terrible stench of burnt meat and acrid smoke flowed out as the final door opened, and Leigh retched, but the robot dragged her inside.

A great noise of fans in the ceiling, and the smoke was clearing, and Leigh looked up, and she tried not to be sick, she tried, but the bile rose in her throat, and she couldn't stop herself, and she fell to her knees, one arm held by the robot, and vomited over the floor, a thick jet of hot liquid, as she saw what had been happening.

Spaced round the room, on elevated podiums, six women were burning like torches. They appeared to have been naked, and they were stiffening and crackling in the flames as their flesh burned. One of them seemed to be still moving, and this made Leigh heave up again.

The smell of burnt meat was terrible.

And in the center of the room, standing there, holding a flamethrower in his black gloved hands, a wide smile on his face, stood Maximillian Weiss, Enemy of the People.

The Man who sold the World.

Maximillian Weiss is dressed in black leather. He sees no other human being that is not prey, so he pleases himself what he wears, and he wears what feels good to him.

He has a leather suit on, that encases him from neck to ankle, and he has long, thigh-length boots on. Maximillian Weiss is not flabby; he is slim and muscular; he hates to look overweight. When he smiles, his teeth are white and perfect, and when he speaks, there is only the slightest trace of a German accent, erased over years of practice.

He pulls off the leather hood that covers his head and neck, and he is perfectly bald, his skin pale from living underground for so long, and he is wreathed in trails of smoke, the smoke of his burning victims.

He has no bodily hair, he shaves it off every day, and his white, unblemished skin belies the darkness of the soul that inhabits the body.

If there were angels in the world, they would avert their eyes.

Maximillian Weiss is hypersexed.

He has at least three orgasms every day. He gains his orgasms from watching female victims die in front of him. He had his orgasm just now from spraying his six screaming victims with liquid fire, and watching them struggle and scream as they burned alive in front of him, and the semen is leaking down inside his suit. He is still aroused now as he gazes at the female that the robot has brought to him; his erection is still hard, pressing against the butter-soft leather over his crotch, and he tilts his head to one side as he considers her, and wonders what she would be like to fuck, or kill, or torture.

He loves it when they scream. He loves the high-pitched screaming of a dying female, the despair, the terror, the utter helplessness; it is like a drug to him.

He loves the tanks too, the tanks of dead women that Leigh walked past earlier. He often walks past the tanks, drinking in the frozen expressions on the faces of the victims, the pain and the suffering, the screams that he hears in his head, and he smiles as he walks past them, remembering how each of them died.

Maximillian Weiss was only part-way to a psychopath before he came here, but absolute power and choice has made him into a psychopath so pure, so untainted by any moral consideration or inhibition, that he genuinely feels nothing for his victims. They are mere things, prey.

He unbuckles the fuel tank from his back and lets it slide to the floor with a careless thump, and comes towards her, a freak in black leather.

He clears his throat, and speaks.

'I have been watching you as you found your way down here. Nobody has ever come here of their own free will before. Are you not afraid?'

Leigh struggled to get away again, but there seemed no way out. The robot held her fast.

'Please, let me go, I didn't known that this place belonged to you, I just fell into it, I didn't want to, and...'

Maximillian Weiss closed his eyes, as if the protestation hurt his senses, which they did. Surely it should realize that it was going to die, that these words, these noises were irrelevant?

Leigh subsided, seeing that he was no longer listening, and after a few moments Maximillian opened his eyes and carried on.

'You should be afraid. This is not a good place,' he dropped his eyes in mock humility, then lifted them back again and grinned, a perfect grin, yet Leigh felt her flesh crawl.

'Did you like my tanks?' he asked suddenly, his head on the other side, and Leigh didn't know what to say; she was shaking with fear. Maximillian didn't seem to care anyway.

'I enjoyed burning them,' he smiled, and glanced back over his shoulder at the smoking remains of the six women. 'I've never killed six of them at once. I managed not to come until the last but one. I think I did really well, don't you?'

And this time Leigh realized that the question needed answering; he was looking intently at her, and she nodded, very slowly, once, in the dead silence.

This seemed to satisfy him, because he smiled again.

'There's nothing quite like the screams of women on fire,' he mused, eyeing her firm body, his eyes drifting over her legs, her thighs, her breasts, 'it's the terror and the agony I guess. They say there's no more painful way to die than by fire, and from the screaming, I'd say they're right.'

He turned to the robot that held her, and he spoke to it, almost casually, and he touched the crystalline earpiece in his left ear as he spoke:

'Robot.' The robot's head swiveled to face him. 'She's got a nice body. I'll fuck her while I'm watching them feed. Get her cleaned and lubed up and bring her into the chamber in an hour.'

The robot spun round and started dragging Leigh out of the room again.

'Wait!' she demanded, almost falling over again, 'Wait! Where are you taking me! Wait!'

But the triple doors hissed shut behind her, and he was gone.

The robot pulled her into another room, and proceeded to tear off her clothing with surgical precision, sliding razor-sharp cutting tools under the edges and slitting her clothes open and pulling them away.

She resisted over her underwear, but the robot simply dragged her arms away from where they covered her breasts and cut off her bra, then her panties.

Naked, she was pulled into a large shower enclosure, the robot staying with her, and high-pressure jets of water and foam blasted her from all sides, until her skin was tingling. Then the robot held her down while it inserted tubes up her vagina and anus, and she was cleaned there too, and Leigh wept in the criss-crossing jets of water, because she knew what was going to happen to her.

After the washing, she was dried in a kind of whole body drier that blew hot air over her until all water was gone, and then the robot inserted nozzles up her again and filled her vagina and anus with lubricant. She accepted it numbly, and when the robot pushed her into a room and locked the door behind her and she saw the clothes, she knew she had a choice.

She was going to be raped with her clothes on, or off; the choice was hers.

She picked up the white plastic suit.

Feeding time for the Things, and if your mind had any safe place left in it, then you would be cowering in it now.

This is the worst place you have ever been, the place you dare not go, even in your most terrible dreams.

Maximillian Weiss is walking round in the Feeding Room, watching as the robot clamped six naked women in turn into the feeding frames.

They whimpered as they were clamped in by their wrists and ankles, spread-eagled and leaning slightly forwards, so that their breasts pointed down and towards the floor, nipples standing out in fear.

Maximillian Weiss was dressed in a white plastic suit that covered his entire body, and white plastic boots and gloves, and a white plastic hood with a transparent visor, to protect him from the Feeding. Inside his suit, his erection jutted as he saw the women struggling in the feeding frames, one after another as they were clamped in. Four, then five, then six. They were arranged in a horseshoe shape.

'Robot. Bring her in,' he said, touching the crystal in his left ear, and a door opened and Leigh was picked up by the wrist and pulled in. She was wearing a similar suit, but hers had a zip that ran from the small of her back, all the way round under her crotch to her navel.

'Clamp her,' said Weiss, and his erection grew harder as she was rammed, face forward, onto a table frame, and mechanical clamps slammed shut, holding her there, bent over, her ass towards Weiss, her booted legs clamped wide, her arms splayed out and forwards.

She was facing the horseshoe shape of struggling women, and they were looking at Weiss behind her, and inside her plastic hood Leigh's breathing came short and shallow as she felt Weiss approach her from behind.

'Robot. Open the floor,' he said softly, and the white overhead lights went out, to be replaced by a deep red glow, almost an infrared, and there was a low moan of fear from one of the women.

And in the red darkness, there was a whine of electric jacks, and a crack was outlined in the floor, and steadily widened, and the entire floor was opening under the clamped women, leaving an island where Maximillian stood over Leigh, like a podium.

A podium over a pit.

The floor was almost fully open now, and Leigh could see, in the red lighting, a great pit below.

And the pit was full of Things.

It was like a vision of Hell, seen in the deep red lighting, and far below her, the depths of the pit were moving, a great mass of alien bodies, alien life, and they were moving, moving.

They writhed in the red darkness and, sensing the women, started to move, and climb out of the pit, on their wriggling tentacles.

Oh my God, thought Leigh.

The women started to scream as they realized what was coming up the sides of the pit towards them, and Leigh felt Maximillian's gloved hands palpate the cheeks of her ass. Then she heard zips opening, and she felt the end of his penis being pressed into the crack of her ass, and sliding forwards. She had been generously lubricated, and it slid over her puckered anus, and forward, to rest at the entrance to her vagina.

The women were screaming for help now.

In the dim red light, Leigh heard a faint meeping, the sound of soft, jelly-like bodes moving against each other, and translucent tentacles were reaching up, reaching out, and sensing the warm bodies strapped into the frames.

Leigh shuddered. The arms were a pale transparent red, and some kind of blood coursed through them in a visible network of capillaries. She had never seen a Thing this close before.

The first tentacle reached a woman, and touched her leg, and she screamed and flung her head from side to side, but the tentacle just kept on exploring her, running slowly up her leg.

And behind the tentacle came other tentacles, and then, dragging itself over the edge of the pit like a bag of red jelly, came the Thing itself, and it was waving its feeding tube in front of itself, and it weaved from side to side, seeking her blood, her veins, that pulsed beneath her thin flesh.

Screaming now, a lot of screaming.

If there were angels in the world, they would avert their eyes.

Leigh wanted to put her hands over her ears to shut out the cries, but they just kept on mounting, and she couldn't look away, and she watched, unable to stop herself, as the Thing fastened itself to the struggling woman, and its tube went into her crotch, high up, piercing her femoral artery.

The Thing started feeding, and its transparent, jelly-like body went scarlet as her blood, her life, gushed into the Thing, and its meeping grew shrill and excited as it fed on her, its tentacles thrashing around in delight.

And the sound drew the other Things, that crowded to get out of the pit, and the other women started screaming now, begging to be let out.

Leigh stiffened against the sudden and sustained pressure of Maximillian's cock, but her legs were restrained, and he was very strong, and she flung her head from side to side, her teeth clenched in disgust and shame as he penetrated her from behind.

His breathing came in delighted gasps, savoring her flesh as he slowly forced his way inside her.

'It's this bit I like best,' he gasped, his voice muffled from behind the plastic hood, 'the forcing inside, seeing you struggle against me. Oh, but it's useless,' he gasped, as he sank in another two inches, and Leigh let out an involuntary cry.

The other Things had fastened themselves onto the women, and now the cries from the women were becoming desperate, they could feel their blood gushing through the feeding tubes, their hot blood inside the cold bodies of the jellylike Things.

How can you do this to another human being? was the thought that hammered inside Leigh's brain, as Maximillian's cock sank in another agonizing inch, and she could feel his pubic hair pressed against her now, as with a grunt, he fully inserted himself into her.

Tears of pain and shame ran down her cheeks, and in front of her, the women struggled in their clamps and screamed, begging for help, trying to escape, but the Things just quivered and meeped in delight, and their bodies were flushing scarlet, bright with the blood from their victims.

Maximillian withdrew his cock a couple of inches, and rammed it into her again. She gasped with the pain and the humiliation, and the cries of the women in front of her mingled with her gasps, and Maximillian fucked her, he fucked her from behind, he fucked her until she was desperate for it to end.

The screaming and crying was unbearable, and being fucked while the women were slowly sucked dry by the wriggling, alien Things was turning Leigh's mind into a buzzing mush of terror. It just never seemed to end, the crying, the struggling, the frantic tossing of heads from side to side as the women slowly died.

The buzzing in her head was lessening, now, and the women's' struggling was feebler now as their blood was sucked away, and the Things pulsated, bloated with their blood. The first one fell off its victim's body, and her lifeless body flopped in the feeding frame, her eyes wide open, her expression one of terror beyond anything Leigh had ever seen. Blood dripped and splattered over the floor from the feeding wounds, and the victims jerked in faint spasms as the tubes plopped out.

And then Maximillian reached forward, and in one fluid motion, pulled off Leigh's hood, and reached round and unzipped her suit, so that she was exposed, her head, her face, her breasts, all open to the Things.

Maximillian withdrew his cock, slippery with lubricant, from her vagina, and parted the cheeks of her ass, and he pressed the hard end of his penis against her anus. Her anus contracted reflexively against the pressure, but he was too strong for her, and he was highly erect from watching the feeding, and her resistance was useless against him and the lubricant that filled her inside.

Leigh realized that they were coming for her, and that she was going to be sodomized while they sucked her dry.

'No, no, please!' she begged, and she struggled, trying to escape, but the bonds held her fast, and she realized how she was going to die. Maximillian's panting was harsh and fast inside his hood as the Things approached her, dragging themselves up the sides of the podium towards her, and then Leigh felt the first tentacle on her.

Not long to live now, Leigh thought, in some last rational corner of her mind, and the tentacles were creeping up the legs of her plastic suit, searching, searching for the exposed flesh, probing down the tops of her boots.

They found the open bottom of her zip, and the first tentacle touched her. It stung as it fastened onto her, as a myriad of soft suckers plopped onto her skin, and she heard the alien meeping, as the tentacle crawled up her and over her exposed stomach and chest.

And she cracked.

'Get it OFF ME!' she yelled, flailing around on the table as it explored her bare breasts, but her struggling only seemed to make Maximillian thrust even harder, and she felt his cock slide into her another half inch. He was rammed into her up to the hilt now, and his breathing under his hood was ragged. He seemed to be getting more and more excited, and then Leigh saw to her horror that the Things were unraveling their feeding tubes, thick probosces that waved purposefully to and fro, weaving this way and that as they sought out her pulsing blood under her skin.

Maximillian leaned closer, lying over her back, and his head was besides hers, and he ripped off his hood and placed his ear close to her mouth, to hear her cries as she was eaten by the Things.

With ferocity borne of desperation, Leigh rammed her head sideways, and clenched the crystal earpiece with her teeth, and pulled. It came out of Maximillian's ear with a sucking plop, and blood speckled briefly.

'ROBOT!' she screamed, the earpiece between her teeth, 'kill Maximillian! Release me!'

She didn't know if it was going to work, but then there was a hum, and a thud, and blood fountained over her suit; Maximillian Weiss stiffened over her as a surgical knife was plunged into his back.

There was a whine of solenoids, and suddenly she was free, and she jerked away, ripping the tentacle off her skin, tearing the others off her suit, backing away from the wave of Things that clambered over the podium, zipping up her suit, grabbing her hood from the floor and quickly pulling it over her head.

The Things were all over Maximillian now, and the robot continued to stab at him, targeting his heart and major arteries, and the Things flew into a frenzy, tasting the blood in the air, waving their feeding tubes towards him.

'Robot! Stop! Let the Things eat him!' she yelled, and the robot backed off, sliding backwards on its single rail, and Maximillian screamed as the Things thrust their feeding probosces into him.

'NO, NO!' he shrieked, but the Things ignored him, they thrust their probosces into him, they sucked his blood, they fed on him, they fed on him, they bled him dry, and Leigh watched in hate as they fastened themselves onto his screaming, struggling form, and drank his blood. His booted feet kicked as he was buried under a pile of the Things, and their pale bodies flushed suddenly red as they sucked the life out of him:

 

 

Maximillian stiffened, and shuddered and groaned, and she saw the hot spurting of his blood inside the Things that were fastened onto him, and he went through several slow spasms, arching his back, clenching and unclenching his gloved hands, until one by one, the Things started to drop off him, in little spurts of blood from the wounds.

And now the Things writhed on the floor, but not in pain, they were writhing in their mating, and the alien intertwining of their bodies and tentacles was like the slow unraveling of octopi, and their meeping filled the chamber.

Leigh watched the scene with a kind of fascinated horror. She watched the alien mating, the strange and terrible way in which they wound themselves together and then unwound, and she felt the hot wetness of semen trickle out of her, and she heard the alien cries of the Things fill the air.

She didn't know if she was imagining it now, but she thought she saw some of the Things let go of each other and started settling onto the still, naked bodies of the women once more, only this time they were inserting something into the bodies.

Laying eggs in the bodies.

Leigh backed away, and pressed the earpiece into her ear, and held it there.

'Robot,' she said, and the glowing blue eyes swiveled to face her, 'I want you to open all the doors to the surface, and then I want you to kill the Things, kill every one you find, and I want you to carry on killing them, kill every Thing you find, and not to stop, do you understand?'

The robot said nothing, but it swiveled its head towards the Things in recognition, and behind her, Leigh heard the doors to the chamber start to slide open. The robot raised its arms, and the knives folded away, and out came twin machine guns, and the chamber suddenly erupted in a deafening rattle of heavy machine-gun fire as the robot swept the Things with bullets.

The Things exploded in eruptions of slime and human blood as the robot slaughtered them, they tried to get away, but there was no escape. The robot killed the ones at the edge of the pit first, driving them in to the center, and then it hosed the pit down with bullets, systematically exterminating the Things that screeched there.

Some of them made an attempt to get away, but the robot swiveled round and blasted them as they tried to scramble over the edge of the pit, and alien slime fountained into the air.

Keeping her head down, Leigh made her back to the podium , to where Maximillian's body lay, half-buried in a pile of exploded Things, his face drenched with a mixture of slime and blood. She looked at his face a long time, then placed her foot in his face and slowly ground her boot into his features. She felt something in his face break under her weight, and blood ran from his nostrils.

'This is where the World gets payback,' she muttered, 'some of us aren't for fucking sale.'

The racket of the robot's machine guns stopped suddenly, and in the buzzing silence Leigh looked up and saw the slaughter in the room. Some severed tentacles twitched feebly on the floor, but none of the Things were moving, and they lay there in spreading pools of their own slime. The robot's head turned from side to side, seeking out any it had missed.

As she had ordered, all the doors were open, and she told the robot to follow her as she retraced her route back to the hallway full of tanks. She ordered the robot to wait by the end tanks as she walked slowly down the corridor, the dead eyes of the women watching her as she passed.

She stopped at the end of the corridor, by the elevator, and turned back to look at the robot at the far end. The tanks were silent in the blue light, waiting, holding their awful secrets.

'Do it,' she said, and the corridor filled with a hurricane of noise as the robot opened fire on the tanks.

They burst open in huge shards of razor-sharp glass, and the liquid inside fell out in sudden waterfalls that surged over the floor. The robot moved forward on its rail, firing left and right. Too late, Leigh smelt what was in the tanks, and she moved to try to stop the robot, but then the liquid ignited in a dull concussion that smacked into Leigh's face, and a huge fireball rolled up to the roof, spread to fill the whole corridor, and began moving towards her. The remaining tanks shattered as the fireball passed by, and the flame went violet.

'Time to check out,' she said to herself, and she stepped back into the elevator and the doors slid shut in the face of the tidal wave of flame that roared towards her. The elevator started, and as it headed back up the shaft, the walls shuddered. Explosions were breaking out below, and she began to worry she might have misjudged it, that the elevator car would jam, or worse still fall back into the fires below.

But then the doors hissed open and she leapt out of the car. Just in time; with a screech of metal and showers of electrical sparks, the elevator car gave way, and plunged back down the shaft, trailing cables behind it in a whining blur.

She froze. Ahead of her, the dead security robot had come back to life, its blue eyes staring at her with a cold hate, and it drew out and aimed its machine gun at her.

Then she remembered the earpiece.

'Robot, power down,' she commanded, and for a moment, nothing happened, then the extended limbs started to droop, and the blue eyes faded.

The chamber shook with another muffled explosion far below, and she turned and ran, jumping over the security barrier, back up the dark passage, no flashlight to light her way, and she stumbled and nearly fell several times. Then a faint glow came from behind, and she realized the fire had burst through the elevator shaft and was chasing her up the tunnel.

She could see now in the faint red light, and she ran up the slope as fast as she could go. Her plastic suit slowed her down, she desperately wanted to take it off, but she daredn't stop; the fire felt really close now.

Into the connecting chamber and a sharp left turn, up the last slope, and behind her, fire boiled in the chamber, splashing the roof and floors with orange flame.

The tunnel ahead of her was disappearing behind a rolling tide of smoke, it swirled and blew ahead of her, and now she could feel the hot air on her back, the breath of a dragon that chased her through the dark tunnels, a dragon that lusted after her tender flesh. The fear made her legs weak, she felt like she was running up a conveyor belt that carried her back down, down to the flames, that she was losing the battle, that she was going to die.

Then she stumbled and fell over a pile of soil and rocks, the pile by the place where she had come in, and she had made it, but she was too late. The flames burst round her, in a smoky curl of dirty fire that licked round her suit, and she opened her mouth to scream before she died.

But as she rolled off the heap of debris, she saw a patch of daylight, and it came from the open door at the end of the tunnel, the door that had been closed, the door that the robot had opened, the door to escape, and she ran, she ran, she ran, the twenty meters to the door, and she fell through the portal, fell out into space, her suit smoking, the flames belching out behind her, and she fell and rolled on the grass, rolled over, rolled away.

The ground trembled, and a jet of pure flame roared from the open portal, and Leigh scrambled away from the fiery destruction of Maximillian's lair, diving behind a grassy knoll and crouching down, legs tucked under her, her gloved hands over her head, as a series of mighty hammer blows shook the ground. Soil and small stones pattered down, and she remained there, not moving, until silence fell.

She awoke, and she was still curled up, lying on the grass, and it was dusk. Her body ached, and she pulled off the plastic hood and looked around.

The flames had died down, but a huge pall of smoke hung over the scene, fed by a thick stream of black smoke that issued from the blackened and twisted doors of the portal. She stood up, and walked up the slight rise to where the roof of the hidden tunnel had caved in, carving a deep furrow in the grass, and smaller columns of smoke rose from great gaps torn in the turf. As she watched, another section of roof fell in with a thump and a cloud of smoke and dust.

Maximillian's secret lair, and his torture chambers, and his halls of tanks, and the great pit of Things, were sealed underground forever, and Leigh closed her eyes as she thought of the evil that had festered there.

It was dusk, and already the brightest stars were coming out in the deep blue bowl of the sky. Leigh looked up. The Things would be moving soon, moving in their walking machines, but they weren't invincible. One day, she thought, as she looked at the glow where the Sun had gone, one day, we'll have back what you took from us, and then you'd better watch out.

You'd better watch out

Leigh turned to go.