Gary Gibson - Final Days

He shook his head helplessly. ‘Everything,’ he finally replied.

Albright let his cigarette fall to the ground and formed his hands into fists. ‘You’re making this shit up, Goddamn you.’

‘I can tell you what’s going to happen in a thousand years, or a hundred thousand, or ten million – the broad details, anyway. Sometimes . . .’ He closed his eyes tightly for a moment and sensed the repository there, hovering always in the back of his mind, vast and nebulous. ‘Sometimes I try to ignore it, to not always be aware of it, but I can’t. I know so much, from now until so far in the future, you can’t even begin to imagine.’

Albright didn’t say anything else for a moment, and Mitchell could hear the sound of a plane droning somewhere overhead, as well as distant voices, muffled through thick walls, passing by and then fading.

‘Assuming any of this is true, why didn’t you tell me before?’ asked Albright.

‘Because I knew it wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchell replied. ‘I’d still wind up here in this garage having the shit beaten out of me, whatever I said.’

Albright nodded. ‘You’re right, I’m afraid.’ He gestured to Scott. ‘Hold him.’

Scott moved behind the chair, Mitchell twisting his head round to try and see him. Albright meanwhile stepped over to a workbench and began to rummage through a bag. As he turned back, he held a syringe in one hand, and a small plastic bottle filled with a clear liquid in the other.

‘What are you doing?’ Mitchell demanded.

‘Something new,’ said Albright. ‘A development from the Kepler pharms. Apparently highly effective.’

Mitchell shook his head, now terrified. ‘You don’t need to do this.’

‘Oh, but we do,’ Albright replied. ‘We were worried about damaging you before, but that’s not such a priority now.’ He came closer, an expression of what looked like genuine sorrow on his face as he approached. ‘I won’t lie to you, Mitchell. This is going to hurt. A lot.’

Mitchell twisted against his restraints, furious and terrified, and filled with a horrid certainty about what was coming next.

Scott came up behind him, wrapping one forearm around his neck and planting the other hand over the top of Mitchell’s head, effectively rendering him immobile. Mitchell struggled as Albright stepped around behind him, and out of sight, but any effort was useless.

‘Please don’t struggle,’ advised Albright. ‘I don’t want to wind up disabling you when I put the needle in.’

The back of the chair was partly open, making it easy for Albright to pull up part of Mitchell’s paper uniform and feel for his spine. A second later Mitchell felt something slide deep inside the thick musculature there.

The pain was like nothing he had ever experienced. Fire spread through his muscles and, as he struggled to escape, he felt as if his bones might snap. Bile surged up the back of his throat and he vomited over Scott’s arm.

After a little while the pain faded. He drifted on a black tide under a starless sky, his skull seeming full of soft cotton wool that scratched against the back of his eyeballs.

Well, he’s still alive , Albright said from somewhere far, far away. Tell me more about the learning pools, Mitchell. Tell me what they told you about the Founders .

Mitchell woke to the dawn light spreading across the upper wall of his cell. He lay there for some minutes without moving, thinking about what it might be like to be strapped to a table and cut apart with scalpels. Albright and the men he worked for were little better than primitive sorcerers, desperate to divine their own fate from his still-warm entrails.

He brought his right hand up close to his face and opened it, keeping it cupped around the thin strip of serrated metal he’d grabbed from the workbench when Scott had taken him down. He could recall only vague snatches of what he had told Albright under the influence of whatever drugs they had pumped into his body, but he was fairly certain he had gone into detail about the Repository, elaborating on the few details he’d already given them.

Mitchell twisted around on his narrow cot until he lay facing the door. If he didn’t escape, he would die – and soon.

Mitchell unfolded himself slowly, grimacing with pain while keeping his fist tight around the blade. Do it now .

He kneeled by the door, pressing one temple against its cool metal, as if momentarily resting h head there. He used one end of the blade like a screwdriver, slowly working out one of the screws securing a thin metal plate to the door frame.

His palm started bleeding where it clutched the serrated length of the blade. He put the strip down and clenched his bleeding hand for several seconds, swearing under his breath until the worst of the pain had passed.

He started working again. It was funny how things turned out, because the locks were cheap and shoddy crap, the result of some budget-cutting exercise. Fortunately for him.

He took a fresh grip on the blade and started working at the screws once more. After fifteen or twenty minutes of labour, he had removed four of them, but the plate wrapped its way around to the other side of the door frame, where it was presumably held in place by more screws.

Mitchell dropped the blade and took a grip on the loosened plate with the fingertips of both hands and started to pull, grunting with the effort. The metal was thin and malleable but even so it took a considerable effort to bend the plate back aside and expose the delicate electronics beneath. He fell back and massaged his injured hand for a minute, before pulling himself up close to the task once more.

He studied the exposed electronics with a practised eye, then, working carefully, used the tip of the blade to tease a single wire loose, the thumping of his heartbeat increasing to a roar between his ears. He meanwhile took extreme care not to touch any of the circuitry connected to the alarm system.

The door clicked loudly, and swung inwards. Mitchell let out his breath in a rush. He hadn’t even realized he was holding it in. He stepped out into the corridor and listened carefully, but there was no sound of anyone approaching. He began to walk, slowly at first, then more quickly, the tiles cold and hard under his bare feet. His injured hand throbbed against his side, the blade held in the other.

Halfway along the corridor, he came to the stairwell leading down to the garage. At the bottom he found a door with a security keypad, where he tapped in a standard override code, then watched with relief as it clicked open.

Mitchell continued down the rest of the stairwell below, noticing the lights were on and the van had been lowered to the ground. A tool bag had been dropped next to one wheel, and the door on the driver’s side stood open. He stopped and listened for a moment, but heard and saw no one. Even so, he ducked down to take a look under the vehicle, in case someone was standing on the far side. Seeing nothing but the other side of the garage, he quickly heaved himself up and climbed inside the van, pulling the door shut.

He barely had time to think any further, when the door was suddenly ripped from his grasp. He heard a muttered curse, in the same instant that a fist struck him on the side of the head. Mitchell raised a hand to try and defend himself, moving with the same inexplicable speed as before. Bright pain flared through his body, leaving him helpless, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that his assailant was Albright’s assistant.

Scott dragged him roughly out of the seat, and Mitchell landed hard on the garage’s ccrete floor. His assailant leaned down and took hold of Mitchell’s head, apparently preparing to smash his skull against the concrete.