LOCKED (17 page)

"TANK! TANK!" Eddy
was yelling to the machine he built with his own hands, the three of us running
to the scene. Eddy pointed in the direction of the burning hunk that was once
Ortiz, and Tank understood. Sparks flew from his chest and he strained to
stand, but he obeyed his master's orders without fail. Tank had extinguished
any fires that were on the debris of Ortiz's mech by the time we reached him.
We each fell to our knees when we reached him, but Eddy was the only one who
dared to see what had become of Ortiz. I saw the steam rise off of Eddy's hands;
the metal was still boiling hot, but Eddy didn't care for the mortality of his
flesh at the moment.

The window sprang open, and
Ortiz's body slumped out. His face and half of his body were charred, and the
other half was bruised and bloody. He struggled to reach for us, and we eased
him out. He meant to scream out in agony the moment we moved him, but blood
came spurting out instead. He looked around at us, as if he was trying to say
"How could this have happened...?"

“All I need from you is to
not let my men know I died with my back turned, and to not give Miller a chance
to get away…as long as he pays, that’s all that matters…”

His eyes half-shut. His body
slouched over, and his eyes rolled back, his mouth slightly agape. I stood up,
and clenched my fists. Eddy picked up the body of Ortiz, and grimly walked over
to one of the fires that were still burning. Eddy tried to take a deep sigh but
choked. He placed Ortiz into the fire, cremating him and allowing his ashes to
rise, releasing his soul. He turned and looked me straight in the eye.

"You need to go."
Eddy bitterly commanded. I just nodded, and faced the entrance into the tower
that had been revealed when the vault slid aside. We faced the mouth of hell
itself, and took the very first step inside…

Darkness rose upward. Lances
jutted out from every direction, but had a very mathematical positioning; they
were all evenly spaced apart.  Each one was sharpened to a point, ready for
an unlucky victim. The tower itself was perfectly round, leaving a large
circular gap in the center of the spikes.

"How do we get
up...?" Danni shakily asked, still in shock from Ortiz's sudden death.

"I don't know..."
I replied, craning my head upwards to see if there was any sort of stairway in
sight... there wasn't.

"Well, there's only one
way up..." Danni gulped. She climbed up one of the spikes, took a deep
breath, and pulled herself up onto another. I stared in disbelief. Didn't she
realize that one slip would mean being impaled?

"Well, c'mon!" she
called to me from about five feet up. I noticed that she didn't look down at me
when she spoke. She must have been afraid of seeing the height and losing her
grip, and I couldn’t blame her.

I inhaled, grasped one of
the spikes, and pulled myself up, just as Danni did. We made our careful ascent
into the darkness one step at a time. Once I was moving at a steady pace, we
doubled our efforts; the longer we were up here, the greater the chance of
Miller sending reinforcements or any other nasty curse became. Unfortunately,
this curse came all too soon.

A snarling came from the
darkness. A familiar hiss... Danni's eyes and mine immediately shot downward,
trying to find the source in the pit. The gaping darkness said that we were far
from escape when we heard something moving, slithering beneath us. Now, we were
forced to climb as fast as we could, risking a fall. The hiss grew louder and
closer, and the only source of comfort we found was an object high, high up. It
stood out against the darkness, but that wasn’t enough for me to make out what
it was. Danni was much closer to it, and I realized that she was my only chance
of survival when I glanced downward again: I could see
Jahnged
slithering between the spikes below me!

"HOW DID IT GET IN
HERE?!" I cried out, knowing I couldn't get an answer. We were both
panting to escape it, but
Jahnged
masterfully scaled
the spikes with ease. Even though we were in near complete darkness, its
segments shone, giving away its whereabouts.

 Danni had already
reached the object that was high above us, and I could make out now that it was
a box jutting out against the wall of the tower, overlooking the interior. She
yanked on a small trapdoor on the underside. A blessing came out of it in the
form of a man tumbling out. A distraction! Danni crawled in, and motioned me to
hurry inside. I rushed up as fast as I could, my hands grasping the lances
faster than I could think.

I was within reach! I
reached for her hand, but our momentary blessing ended up shedding its disguise
and revealing itself as a secondary curse: the now-dead body of the man that
had fallen out was tossed up and hit me, sending me tumbling back down!

"LEO!" I heard
Danni call from the room quickly falling away from my sight. My instincts acted
fast; I grabbed onto two separate lances at the same time, stopping my plummet
into the open maw of the darkness and the snakelike beast. My hands ached from
the sudden impact, but I forced my mind to take control of my body and not let
momentary instinct triumph. Coming down from the rush and back to my senses, I
realized that I had fallen so far that
Jahnged
was
now above me! It let out a sigh of a hiss, and slithered down to me. I flew
into a panic and backed up against the wall between the spikes. Without
warning, two of the lances above
Jahnged
jolted
forward, retracting slowly in disappointment that they didn’t taste flesh. This
caught
Jahnged's
attention, and I heard Danni
faintly.

"Leo, that was me!
There's a panel that looks like the picture on the doctor's note! You'll have
to guide me!" Danni must have pressed another button, as a lance jolted
out at lightning speed even higher above
Jahnged
,
then retracting at a slow, predictable pace.

"You're going too high!
Lower!" I called. Two lances sprang out near
Jahnged
,
but still not hitting the mark. It was beginning to catch on, and it faced me
once more. It slithered down more stealthily than ever, moving down around the
tower instead of in a straight line.

"DANNI! DO SOMETHING!"
I screamed in panic. Three lances jutted out from the opposite side of the
tower, stopping mere inches from my face!

"CHRIST! TOO CLOSE, TOO
CLOSE!" I cried out. I thought I may have heard a very faint
"Sorry!" from up there, but the sounds of the serpent grew louder.
Jahnged
was about five feet from me now, and stopped
slithering down. I could see it retracting its head very gradually, and I
tightened my grip.

I sweated, wracking my brain
in a frenzy for what I wanted my last words to be. I opened my mouth to shout,
and as the very first syllable came out, I saw
Jahnged
launch forward. It was fast as lightning, and in the millisecond I could make
out the details of how many teeth it had in its maw, those teeth exploded out
of its mouth; dozens of lances gored it at once! They impaled its brains, its
throat, every segment several times, its tongue, its tail... it was a mess of
black blood and a corpse. The oil-like, vital liquid that it shared with its
horrible brothers flooded from its body. It limply hung upon the spears until
they slowly retracted, sending its body plummeting down once and for all…

"Am I good or
what?" Danni called out. I could just feel the smugness she spoke with,
but if I wasn’t mistaken, there may have been a little bit of relief in there
too. I climbed back up carefully, all the way to the tiny control room Danni
was in. Once I was inside, I found that it was a cramped, dark room. It was
dusty and plain, its only redeeming factor being a panel with hundreds of round
buttons and several monitors. Off to the left was a wooden door that looked
comically out of place in a world of steel. I opened the door, and inside was a
dark hallway with a red carpet. There was no illumination except for the light
bleeding under the ornate, richly designed wooden door at the other end of this
mysterious hallway.

"I’ll have to stay here
to keep an eye out. Go get '
im
." Danni punched
my shoulder, and smiled. I was about to take the step forward, but she called
me back.

“By the way, it sounded like
you were
gonna
say something before. Before we
managed to kill that thing, I mean. What was that?”

“I’ll... let you know
another time. There’ll be a better time for me to say it.” I grinned. She
nodded slightly and closed her eyes for half a moment, knowing fully what I
meant. As much as I wanted to cherish the moment, it wouldn’t be right to let
another second go by. I forced myself onward, closer to facing Miller and
closer to sealing this chapter of the journey in my memories and locking it up.

IN
ITS WAKE

Each step brought me closer
to the light wandering out from underneath the door. The red carpet underneath
my feet cushioned my steps, making my approach stealthy and silent. I tried
looked back to Danni, but the door was already closed. I reached out for the
knob, and its coldness burned against the slashes and cuts on my hand. My hand
was shaky upon it, and my other held the smoke grenade that Eddy gave me
before. I just took a deep breath and closed my eyes while I twisted the knob
and threw the door open.

Miller was inside! We were
in what looked to be a room in a mansion. There was a homely blaze in the
hearth to my left. The carpeted floor extended out into the room, solicitously
gripping the floor. A bookcase stood in the corner, although I wouldn't be
wrong to think that its history was of evils. Quite unlike the library in the
prison, I expected his tattered pages to recite murder and blasphemy. Miller
sat at his finely crafted Italian desk. For all of his gradual descent from
smoothness to fury, he seemed slightly taken aback. His amazement only further
increased my shock. He wasn't expecting this?

“YOU.”

My joints up froze up; I
hesitated for a split second. I pulled the smoke grenade from my pocket and
threw it at him. In the same second, Miller was already reaching for a switch
on his desk. The grenade smashed into his hand. He ended up hitting a switch
other than the desired one, and the entire floor gave out under us!

Every object in the room was
plummeting. So little time to react. I could make out blurred pipes of all
shapes and sizes whizzing by until I landed on a rusted, rugged floor,
screaming out as I heard some bone or joint of mine give an audible crack.
Miller landed nearby, giving a similar grunt. Most of the objects in the room
that had fallen must have been caught on the dozens of pipes that were now
above us. The few objects that did hit the ground shattered, resonating with an
echo that seemed to extend for miles.

I realized that we were in
some sort of squalid, rotten maze. Tunnels seemed to extend from every
direction, some open, some closed. Miller and I were in small, flat clearing,
though it was one of very few in the area. The air smelled of cold decay, and
there was barely any way to see with such a lack of light. After the few
trinkets had smashed, all that could be heard was the breathing between us two
and the hiss of steam forced from vents both near-by and far off.

Trembling, I got to my feet.
The lack of light and the humid haze made any sort of attempt at vision a
nightmare. I tried to feel my way around, keeping my tread light. I heard
Miller getting to his feet now, and I felt the vibrations through the
surprisingly thin metal floor.

 I sidled along the
floor, clinging to the wall of pipes, maintaining a distance with Miller. The
rust felt irritating against my battered hands. I squinted through the steamy
mist, making a futile attempt at getting a bearing of my surroundings. Then, I
heard the brushing of cloth.

Miller began to hack and
wheeze. His breath seemed shaky and ragged yet loud, as though he was trying to
be intimidating; trying to keep something or someone away through vehement
coughs. The behavior was entirely animalistic, as though his once-calm and
formal demeanor had devolved into a struggle for safety. He no longer had a
thousand puppets to command: he was left to fend for himself in a cruel, cold,
and dank world of endless pathways among the steam.

I heard his hands clumsily brushing
the filthy floor. Metal scraped, as though he found a fallen pipe and was
dragging it along. The next few moments passed quickly, but with an uncertainty
that kept me frozen to the spot.

The whistle of a hollow tube
being swung through the air. A loud and exasperated grunt. A heavy metal pipe
landing mere inches from my face. Steam screeching out of the now-shattered
pipe in front of me. Inhaling sharply, feeling its heat fan out.

Miller was furious. His
breaths became shorter and quicker, and I couldn’t stick to the wall forever. I
frantically looked around, finding solace in a larger open tube across the
room. I darted through the heavy fog, but not without having caught his eye.

As I took quick, light steps
toward the open mouth of the pipe, my heart leapt when I noticed Miller right
to my side. I stopped for a moment, the shock binding me to the spot once more.
He reached out to grab my arm with a malicious grip, though I dodged at the
last moment and crawled into the tube.

Inside, I found a narrow
space illuminated by several red lights. It subliminally reminded me of the
U.S.P.L. facility, but I had little time for nostalgia. I crawled inside, the
rust and sharp bits of metal nicking every inch of my skin. The tube descended
and turned the opposite way, making a sideways “U” shape.

Behind me, Miller was giving
wicked chase, unsurprisingly. Being much taller than I, he had more trouble
making his way through, though he was still able to claw his way forward with
wrathful intent.

Now at the bottom of the
“U”, the path seemed to progress onward for a much longer way. I found no other
pathways, no way to confuse Miller and find escape. He would see me clearly
bathed in the red light, and I would soon find out when this particular path
would end…or how.

Though I knew clearly the
reason of my being in this situation in the first place, there was little that
I could do at this time. Too much had gone wrong, and I found myself running
from Miller instead of the other way around. Even with the sort of fury that
filled me with, I knew that the only way to find a solution would be to
maintain a calm, clear mind…but that was easier said than done.
Burybury
and Ortiz stuck out clearly in my mind, and I
desperately wanted vengeance, an inadequate payment for crimes that couldn’t be
atoned.

Nearing the end of the
tunnel, I found a steel grate to another steel platform below. This area was
also bathed in a red light, but a different kind. It was bright; it seemed
alive, twisting, turning, burning. I clumsily shoved my fingers in the grid of
the lid, yanking this way and that to set it free. I had little room to
navigate, making the task all the more arduous. I heard Miller’s agitated
grunts as he crawled closer, his dirty, bloodied hands digging into the rust of
the pipe to move on. My hands became shakier every time I heard the
unmistakable ripping of his clothes tearing against the unrefined confines; I
was soon barely able to keep a grip on the grid.

The breathing stopped.
Before I could look back, I felt that malicious grip yank my ankle. I shouted
in surprise, trying to pull back. Miller gave a low and fiendish cackle,
shifting around in the tight spot. I heard a quiet chink of steel against steel
as he fumbled around with a switchblade!

I gave into panic, my body
moving as if I was being electrocuted. I used every ounce of strength I had to
pull away, but Miller used everything he had to keep me exactly where he wanted
me. I turned my body just in time to see him raise the dull blade. I gave one
last hopeless pull…

HISS! A thick, rich cloud of
steam instantly filled the pipe we were trapped in. All of its force was
concentrated on Miller himself, and he gave out an agonizing cry from the intense
heat and pressure. I felt some of it on the ankle he was so intent on tearing
apart, but I was able to pull away before too much damage had been done.

I had just enough time to
strain myself to pull the grate off of the pipe, finally hearing it groan with
reluctance, and finally pop off with a metallic shriek. I crawled through this
space once more, leaving the claustrophobic heat of the pipe to enter a more
searing one…

I saw the flow of burning
acid beneath with only a steel platform in its way! I tightened my body for
impact and smashed into the grate with force. Thankfully, it didn't give out.
Even after the scorching punishment, Miller followed my plummet soon after,
hell-bent on my destruction. 

I sprang up, ready for
anything. We were in what may have been an area designed to dispose of
hazardous materials. At a closer glance, it was indeed acid beneath us. It
vehemently glowed with an orange-yellow, inspired to burn like the sun. Miller
slowly rose to his feet; his age must have made the impact all the more
painful. His face looked like it had been dipped in the acid that swam beneath
us now.

"You are going to get
us KILLED!" he shouted. I couldn't help but laugh at the irony. This
elicited a primal scream of rage ripping its way out of his throat. I was
shaken by his complete descent into lunacy. 

"I earned everything
I've taken! I took it from those who were weaker than me! Doesn't survival of
the fittest mean anything to you idiots?! Why do you think your stupid friend
died out there? Do you think it was an accident?! Do you honestly think he
should’ve walked away intact after trying to take
me
head-on?!" he
continued his rant. His commentary on Ortiz was too much.

"What about everyone
else out there who worked for you and is dead because of it? Lesser men than
him, what did they do to deserve what happened to them? Everyone in those
god-forsaken hospitals, Miller!" I shouted back.

"THEY WERE THE ONES
STUPID ENOUGH TO LISTEN TO ME! People will follow me like sheep because I know
EXACTLY what they want to hear!" he yelled before picking up and throwing
my way another steel pipe that was on the grate. I ducked down, and it landed a
few feet behind me. I went over to grab it, and the moment I held it, I felt
Miller smash yet another into the back of my head. I fell face-first into the
grate, and he pounded the pipe into the back of my head again. I started to
panic when I felt a sharp jolt of pain when the second swing hit; the
medication was wearing off! I made a pitiful attempt to jab the pipe I had into
his knee, but he avoided it just in time. He kicked me onto my back, so I could
see the malignant glee in his eyes. He raised his pipe high, ready for a final
blow.

Without warning, about ten
feet away, a geyser of the acid shot up! Miller ducked down to avoid any spray,
and I took my opportunity: I used every ounce of strength I had to jab Miller
in the stomach, and he fell to his knees. While he was still huffing on the
ground, I turned to see if there was anything on the other side of the steel
catwalk. As I ran forward, I felt Miller's own steps rattle the grate. I turned
to see him limping along, pipe in-hand, still hell-bent on bringing my demise.
Every one of my own steps was getting more painful as the head trauma I endured
was starting to throb. The moment was ruthless; I couldn’t afford to feel pain
then!

My vision was getting blurry
and each one of my steps made me more unconfident. The acid flow became more
erratic beneath me, lashing out more aggressively, biting more ferociously with
every passing moment, sending flashes of orange and yellow soaring. I gripped
my pipe tightly, and awaited Miller. Every step I took facing away from him was
another chance he had to commit another deadly act upon me while I had no way
to defend myself. I turned, and when he was close enough, so close that I could
see his singed eyes, he clumsily swung it forward, hitting my own pipe
squarely. I swung my own after his blow, aiming for his wrist to knock his
weapon into the lake of fire below. This only aggravated him further. His
onslaught became quicker and much more precise until he knocked MY weapon into
the acid river! I turned away and ran again, deciding to risk the chance that
his aim would be good enough to incapacitate me.

Up ahead, I saw an end to
the catwalk. I expected to find a solid wall, no way to escape, except...
what's this? It seemed to be a mirage until I got closer and realized that it
was no illusion. Through the steam, I saw a natural bridge seemed to ascend to
the next level. That is, it seemed to be a ladder of tree roots, native leaves
and all. Its limbs twisted up to the next platform; it seemed to grow
abnormally out of the iron wall, as if nature was challenging this man-made
facility. Up there, I could get a glimpse of a control panel, also with the
trees and leaves sprouting from it. Once I got closer, I could see several
Sci'Lyk
on it! They were stomping on buttons and pulling
wires, and every action yielded a different result. Some actions resulted in
massive geysers like the one from before, some caused vents in the ceiling to
hiss steam, and others opened and closed doors on even higher levels.

I could barely believe how
these miniature creatures were able to bend nature to their will, mastering
architecture both technological and earthly, convincing Mother Nature to hand
over the keys to the kingdom. Trusting this earthly bridge that the
Sci'Lyk
no doubt created with their incredible building
ability, I grasped it, but it felt like it was bending in my hands. I took a
deep breath, and without looking back, threw myself upon this ladder of timber.
Its beams slowly started to snap, so I quickly climbed up. I reached out for
the metal platform above, but felt Miller grab my leg! He yanked on it, trying
to pull me down, but I was already too far up for him to have a good grasp. He
exhaled in fury, and put one of his legs upon the ladder. It started to snap,
but his vengeance had no bounds. He put all of his weight upon it now, and with
a deafening creek, the bottom half of the ladder fell, along with Miller.