Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (27 page)

We put them to bed exhausted and happy. I went to sleep with Loralena in my arms.

When I wake, I know he's come.

I feel it in the air, a disturbance of the faint bonds in my dreams.

Mr. Ruins. I roll to the side in the bed I share with Loralena to look at the clock. 3am. The digits cast a green glow in the bedroom, making the cream walls a sickly puce. We spent hours mixing the paints, her an expert, me just trying my hand at DIY for the first time. We settled on a simple, warm shade that was halfway between both of our favorites. Compromise.

She's sleeping beside me still, and the kids are in the room next door.

I've been waiting for this moment for 10 years. I get out of bed and go to find him. In the hallway, I can tell from the open door that he's in the childrens' room. Cold thrills through me, and I steel myself against it. 

The door creaks as I enter. The pebbled carpet is soft under my bare feet. He is standing there between Art and Mem, asleep in their beds. He's wearing his old gray suit and the ridiculous Napoleonic bicorne hat. His teeth shine as white as the first time I saw him in the shark-fighting arena. 

"Hello Ritry," he says, grinning broadly. "You've been busy. Lucky for me, I suppose."

The old anger surges back at once. Now he's here, in my house, close to my children. I'll kill him this time.

Without saying a word I tongue the bomb.

I stole it from the subglacic 10 years ago, a heavy gray tube pried out of the missile-loading bay. I wired it into the house and keyed it away from the resonant frequencies of myself, of Loralena, of the children. I set the detonation pattern through the implants in my teeth. I ensured the walls and ceiling of our apartment were sufficiently insulated to contain it.

The bomb explodes.

BOOM

The shockwave buzzes over me like hard static electricity, rebounding back off the insulated walls and flooding over Mr. Ruins at the middle.

He drops flat to the floor. I drop to my knees under the onslaught. Five seconds, ten, fifteen pass as the last reverberations rattle back and forth in the echo chamber I've made.

Then there is silence, but for the soothing sound of Art and Mem sleeping. They'll have bad dreams, but that's nothing compared to what it could be. I push myself to my feet steadily, looking down at Mr. Ruins lying flat on the carpet. My heart throbs hard as the shock of what I've done hits me. He's dead.

Finally.

Then he moves. My heart skips a beat, and all feeling drains from my body as control of it is taken away.

Slowly, steadily, Mr. Ruins stands up. It is impossible, he should be as dead as Ven and Heclan after the mind-bomb dropped on us, but he is not. On his feet now, he dusts down his jacket and looks at me with an expression approaching remorse. "Anything else Ritry?"

I tongue the bomb again, but it is spent. I tongue it once more to be sure, because there is nothing else I can do. The shock of victory gives way to an all-pervading terror. He is here in my house. He is standing between my children. He survived a mind-bomb.

I try to charge him, but he Lags the weight of my intent away with ease, as though I am a weakling three-year old child, and my body does no more than lean slightly forward. The strength he can muster is awesome, overpowering, and I can do nothing underneath but begin to tremble.

"Oh Ritry," he says, disapproval in his voice. "I do feel badly about this part. But dear boy, who do you think gave you that folder? It was me, wasn't it? Everything you've got, everything you made of yourself and the choices you took, they're because of me." He nods gently, agreeing with himself. "You see that now, don't you?"

I realize then how thoroughly I have lost. I am helpless. I am Don Zachary as he lay in his opulent bed, able only to beg for the lives of his children. A cold emptiness hollows me out and squats like a solid lump in the center of my gut, thick and curdled and impossible to escape.

I am prey.

My wife, my children, my life, are all prey. My body tries to gag. I realize with certainty that I should never have allowed myself to love Loralena, should never have allowed myself to have children. I was arrogant and a fool to believe one mind-bomb would be enough, and now I am going to pay. I want to sag to the carpet and vomit all of this up, but that won't be possible. I want to close my eyes and wake from a nightmare, but I can't do anything, can't move, can't fight, can't even close my eyes.

Tears stream down my cheeks.

"Ah," says Mr. Ruins, his voice transcendent, like this is the most beautiful thing he's ever witnessed. "You begin to see."

I muster what strength I have to bark a single word. "How?"

His smile is sympathetic. "You only took one bomb, correct? Yes." He takes off the bicorne hat, and turns it so I can see the interior. Inside there are winking lights on a familiar-looking machine built around the brim. I can hear the tinny little thump-thump of the electromagnets doing their work.

A portable EMR.

"I took a tip from you," says Ruins. "Only fair, after you took so many from me."

"I'll kill you," I manage to say through gritted teeth.

He laughs. "You had your chance. Now it's my turn." He reaches down to stroke Mem's sleeping head. I try to scream but I can't make a sound. "Look around you, Ritry. Wouldn't you say this is fair recompense, for all I did? Isn't it only fair I take my share? And what's to stop me? I could Lag your whole family and drop myself in your place in a heartbeat." He snaps his fingers, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet room. "Did you ever think of that?"

The lump in my stomach only gets harder, thicker, sicker, so disgusting I can scarcely breathe.

"I could be fucking your
wife
, Ritry," he says, conspiratorially. "Your beautiful painter wife. And she'll call out your name while I do it. How would you feel about that? Your kids will call me papa. Art and Mem, what kind of names are those anyway? We'll change that. And do you know the best thing? Nobody but you and I will know. They say Job had it bad, but Ritry I'll make it so you never existed."

I gasp. A second flood of tears mists my eyes.

"Be reasonable," he says. "You must know you owe it all to me. When I found you you were only waiting to die. I gave you the world and you turned me down, but you kept everything else. That isn't fair is it? I'm only here to claim my due, to put you back where you would have stayed if not for me. You were lost and alcoholic, and so you would have stayed. Don't look at me like that, Ritry. Ask yourself, is this what I, Mr. Ruins, wanted? I didn't want this. I wanted you on my side, but you rejected me, didn't you? I can't allow that."

"Please," I manage to whisper.

He laughs. "That's a beginning. Perhaps in ten years? In twenty? I might relent. But until then, I need you to understand. You take your punishment like a good boy. You don't try to end it prematurely, because if you die, then so do they. You don't try to Lag the memories away, because if you do they'll die. If you do anything other than roll belly-up and take it until I say it's enough, they all die."

More tears, so thick I can barely see. If I had control of my body I'd be sobbing madly.

Ruins nods appreciatively. "Good, good. Now, to a point of order. You said before that I can't break open your mind, and maybe you were right. There's just too much scar tissue built up around your Core. But them?"

He nods to my children. I want to tear out his eyes. I want to drop on my knees and beg for forgiveness.

"There's nothing special about them. I can do what I want with them, and through them I'll do what I want with you."

I let out a sob. The misery is already too strong for his bonds.

He notices. I can feel him begin to feed off me. "That's more like it. Come on Ritry, let me hear you bawl. Didn't I say it would come to this? You poor child, didn't I warn you? I gave you everything, and you threw it back in my face, and now you're going to pay."

I push back against the force of his will with all the strength I can muster, and speak.

"Kill me," I say.

He looks pleasantly surprised.

"Really? Do you know, that is exactly what Napoleon said to me? When I told him how I was going to take everything from him, all his loyal friends and his beloved Jospehine, how I was going to drop him on a stinking hole of an island to while away his piss-ant life in ignominy and dishonor, unable to even kill himself, that is exactly what he said. And do you know what I said to him?"

He leaves this hanging. I am only standing now because he wants me to, because he's holding me up through the nerves in my back. Otherwise the shock would have dropped me vomiting up everything on the carpet Loralena and I chose together.

"I told him, what would be the nourishment in that?" His eyes glow hot. "But alive? Ritry, you'll keep me fed for as long as you live. Have you any idea the strength I'm going to get from your misery? You're a freak, and breaking those bonds is going to be a-fucking-tomic. You are my latest masterpiece. I fitted you for a suit, and you didn't even know it. For the past ten years you've put it on, piece by piece, and I've watched. Gods, how I've watched, and waited. Every delicious kiss, every touch on your children's hair, every kind word, every bit of it, gone!"

He is red-faced, working himself up, and now I am shrinking to a sick little nothing deep inside myself full of shame and disgrace. "You put the suit on for me, Ritry. You did it by yourself, and you thought it was a rebellion. You didn't even suspect. And you once had the gall to threaten me?" He laughs. "Who's the predator now, you fucking idiot, who's the true shark?"

He lets his grip on me loosen. I can barely breathe, barely move, but now I can speak.

"Say it," he says impatiently. "Come on, spit it out."

I know what he wants, he'll have read it in my mind, as I read enough in his. I am Don Zachary fallen to nothing.

"Please don't hurt my children," I say.

He laughs.

"I'll do whatever I want," he says. Then the Lag begins, and everything turns black.

BONDS E

We race, and days pass us by. Corridor after corridor we run, metal turning to flesh as the lips of the Lag hunt us down, going deeper than anyone ever dived before, farther and deeper still. The blip of our flashing red dot worms through the fractal maze of the Solid Core, running on faith that So calculated it right, that we're not even now speeding deeper into the heart of an off-shoot.

I think we are taking every turn we are meant to, but nothing is clear anymore, as we shed memories like breadcrumbs at our backs. Piece by piece the new life Ritry Goligh made for himself, for ourselves, wears away. We shave it into hemi-demi quavers and throw them out as chum to keep the Lag from our heels. We forget every bit.

We grow weary. We snatch sleep and food in what few moments we can, hunkered down in rooms that get darker and danker the deeper we go, with books of knowledge that get smaller and hazier, stories from a fragmented childhood, unimportant repetitions of routine life on the skulk or in the sublavic, events like drinking and eating and taking a piss.

Three days, and there's been nothing on the blood-mic but the distant fuzz of So's repeated lullaby. None of us wants to give her to the Lag, not until we can be certain she's really gone.

Doe, Ray and Far are lying in the entrance gap of the latest room. The smartly-pressed metal of the outer maze is long-gone now, the signature RGs smoothed out into veiny seams of rock.

The room is a murky cave, roughly oval in shape but far from symmetrical, riven by ridges, clefts, cracks, and banded discolorations in the rock. There are skeletons buried there, fossils perhaps, shapes of things that came before. Water drips down from above, fine droplets of it float in the cool air like gold-spray from the accelerator, condensing on the inner screen of my HUD as my breath wheezes in and out.

I tongue it to clear, but the vacuums under my eyes only whirr then fail. I take off the HUD and run my finger around the suction cups, and feel something click loose. I hold it in my hand, a small chunk of black plastic with a chip cracked off the corner.

This equipment was not designed to last this long. None of us were. I look at the others, wheezing softly in the wet air. It smells of old things here, peat and a past long-buried. Doe's skin is whiter than the book I'm standing on, her cheeks sallow and drawn. Ray twitches in his sleep, haunted by dreams of emptiness.

It's not the fear or the monsters that come for me either, in my sleep. It's the nothingness I've left behind.

Far trembles. I've tried holding him, but it does nothing. The weals on his neck shine brightly like LEDs. Even when he's walking with us, he's suffering. Half the time we carry him, because his legs won't hold him up. Sometimes when he tries to speak, all that comes out are the same five tones. The panic in his eyes scares us all.

SAVE FAR

I think back on the mission folder, what feels like a lifetime ago. I am a different person now. I still have no idea why Far matters, but I feel it. I love the boy, like he was my own son, like he was me.

Of course, I know what he went through. We all felt it, but he still lives and breathes it daily. Even as we dive, they dive him again and again. His memory is erased again and again.

I dropped the mission folder a way back, when we sloughed of all our excess weight. Everything is gone now but our HUDs, the candlewax, and one musket which Doe carries.

ONE OF YOUR CHORD WILL KILL YOU ALL

I think of the other message from the folder too. It must be wrong. Ray and Doe love me, I know that, just as I love them. I trust them with my life. Far is not capable of it, can barely think for himself.

I set my broken HUD to the side, look down at the book beneath my feet. It is far thinner now, unprofessionally made, in keeping with the depreciation of all our surroundings. It is still huge, but thin, and made of cheap yellow pulp-paper that scratches against my skin as I turn it. There is no heavy leather binding, only a slightly thicker, darker card. The pages within is blotted with dark scuff marks and ink scribblings. In places words and whole lines, sections, have been redacted with wildly etched lines of ink. I can just make out the loops and whorls of the letters underneath.