Against Gravity

"I remember." They'd seen the first intimations of that when they'd escaped the Maze. "For something so dangerous, you wouldn't expect it to look so – I don't know." He shook his head. "So beautiful, I guess."

Buddy laughed harshly. "It isn't what it looks like that matters. It's what it can do to us. This was a bad idea."

"Take it easy there, Buddy. Are you feeling okay?"

Buddy stared at him, his face pale and sweating. "No, I keep… I keep hearing things, like… oh fuck, like whispering."

Kendrick could hear nothing and saw only the empty corridor, silent and dark ahead. "Can you make out any words?" he asked carefully.

"No." Buddy put his head back and yelled, letting loose a series of expletives that rattled down the corridor and echoed for long seconds afterwards.

"Buddy-"

"I can't go on." Buddy shook his head, as if a swarm of wasps were buzzing around it. His breathing was rapid and ragged. "I just can't."

"What is it?"

"It's just… I can't. Not beyond this point. Something won't let me, Kendrick. Let's turn back. You'll have to think of something else."

"Look, we're almost at the end of this section. Try going a little further, see how you are then. It's probably only nerves," Kendrick assured him.

Just ahead of them rose another shield door, barely visible in the murk. It stood half-open, and the heart of the Maze lay beyond.

Buddy shook his head, sounding more reluctant with every passing second. "I can't, Kendrick, I swear. I don't have any choice in this matter. If I take one more step, I'll die, or…" He started to retch, leaning over, his hands on his knees. Kendrick could see that he was shivering badly.

Then Buddy looked up. "I'm heading back."

"I can't go back myself, Buddy. Wait for me at the stream, by the cave mouth. Stay hidden. I won't be long."

"If I go any further, I'm going to die," Buddy repeated, looking at Kendrick with an expression that said So will you, if you go any further.

"Go back," he urged Buddy. "Go back and wait for me."

The other man didn't need any more prompting. "Good luck," he whispered, and handed Kendrick his wand, the map of the Maze still displayed on its screen. "Keep it. I've got another one back at the 'copter. If anyone appears while I'm waiting and I have to take off, this way we can make sure we stay in contact." He also gave Kendrick the backpack. It still contained most of their water and the torch.

Then Buddy turned and moved as fast as he could back towards the entrance and the fading light beyond. Kendrick watched him go, cold dread filling his stomach.

He shook his head, turned back and began walking deeper into the Maze.

Once Kendrick passed through the second shield door he finally began to hear the voices.

The walls and ceiling were still covered with the same rusting pipes, making it harder to suppress a niggling fear that he had never actually left the Maze in the first place. He had forgotten how absolute the silence could be, and how easily it lent itself to such delusions.

Kendrick stopped and punched the wall next to him, hard. The impact sent shivers through the air around him and it felt as if a spell had been broken. The sound filled the darkness like the first words of God echoing through an unformed universe.

He had to get rid of his fears, the ghosts and nightmares that still populated his mind. He kept on walking, knowing that the tiniest hesitation might send him ru

The threads, he noted, were much denser now, almost completely coating the wall surfaces around him. They made crackling sounds under his boots as he walked over them and he stopped a few times, unsure if he really had seen them moving, their loose ends drifting in the dark like sea anemones sifting for plankton.

When Kendrick reached out and touched the threads the voices became much clearer. It was like tapping into someone's thoughts, but those of a madman: random fragments of memory chasing each other like a blizzard of half-formed images, faint intimations of things that he recalled experiencing during his seizures.

Kendrick also detected an anger that threatened to overwhelm his own thoughts, tempered by a sense of childish delight that chilled him to the core.

He broke the contact with the threads and kept on walking till he came to a stairwell and worked his way down. There were light switches at hand, but none of them worked.

On their way here Kendrick and Buddy had wondered whether they would find Los Muertos inside the Maze. Kendrick learned the answer as soon as he reached the Wards.

From a distance the body looked as though it had been there for a relatively short time. It wore the familiar ragtag uniform of a Los Muertos soldier, a crucifix crudely sewn on the jacket. At first Kendrick wondered if the man was merely sleeping, but as he came closer the smell of putrefaction was evident. The corpse lay with one hand outstretched, as if reaching towards the rifle lying a metre away. The dead man's face was turned to one side, his desiccated mouth open in a silent scream, the eyes now reduced to dark pits. He was encased in silver threads as though he'd been wrapped in the cocoon of some enormous metallic spider.

Kendrick glanced up and, for one terrible moment, felt sure that he could see something hovering in the darkness before it flitted away on fragile wings. He peered around himself for a long time, listening and watching, but there was nothing more.

Moving on, he found two more corpses. One lay slumped in a corner, while the other had both hands to his face as if he'd been trying to claw his own eyes out.

It was getting harder now for Kendrick to keep the fear at bay, fear of what he might find if he went any further. If I lose it now, I might never make it back out.

He took the precaution of pulling a pair of heavy gloves out of the backpack and sliding them over his hands before stepping through a door that led into a Ward. The rusting skeletons of beds stood in uniform rows around him. Most of their mattresses had rotted away, but he could still clearly make out a number painted above the room's entrance.

He was in Ward Seventeen – or Ward 17b, to be precise: it had been reserved for the male inmates. Ahead of him, the Dissection Door lay open, empty blackness beyond it.

The notion came to Kendrick right then, that something there had been waiting for him to return all these years. He pushed this thought away and stepped through the door.

Not even the teams of researchers and war-crime investigators who had arrived at the Maze immediately following its liberation had managed to penetrate these deepest parts of the complex. The nanotech infestation had already become too widespread for any further exploration to be possible.

A no-go zone had subsequently been placed around the Maze, and for a while UN forces had patrolled it. But once it became clear how bad things were getting back in the United States, these troops abandoned the task and left. Sieracki's soldiers finally emerged from their jungle strongholds, metamorphosing over time into Los Muertos.

Kendrick arrived at a series of ruined elevators, most of them now reduced to gaping shafts. He peered down one to see silver threads lining every surface, the occasional gleam of gold visible among them. At the corner of his vision, something crawled…

He looked down and saw that the fine filaments coating the concrete had broken under his boots. Their loose ends twisted and spasmed with tiny movements.

Cold sweat broke out on his brow as some of the threads reached up over the tops of his boots, as if they were seeking out his flesh.