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Miles stood at the open doors of the asylum.
Early rays of sunlight shone down on the front steps. They glinted off the windshields of the empty armor trucks that were parked haphazardly in the driveway. The gate was still swinging on its hinges, as disturbed dirt floated down onto the road that led to the foot of Mount Massive.
He was back to where he’d started.
He was-
(“Billy is dead, the Walrider, the Swarm, whatever it is, unmade with him. Whether I escape or die here, I am free.”)
-not free.
Miles pressed his palm against his chest, which was dotted with holes, like a kid had been given a drill and gone to town on him. Miles stuck his thumb into one of the bullet wounds and twisted it. The wound squelched and burped up a bubble of black liquid. As Miles watched, the wound closed itself sluggishly. When it was done, it left a stretch of raw pink skin under his tattered shirt.
He wasn’t sure he was human anymore.
Murkoff had spent years of hard work and a pile of dead bodies to create a god of their very own, only to lose it to a journalist that had come to take them down. Miles had killed Billy Hope as a last-ditch attempt to destroy the Walrider, only for the Walrider to make him its host.
Miles wanted to laugh at the irony of it all.
So he did.
His laughter sounded oddly wheezy to his ears. Air was whistling out of the bullet holes in his throat.
The buzzing in his bones made it hard to stop once he started laughing. It was as if his heart was pumping in the rhythm of the ceaseless buzzing that had tormented him even before he’d found Billy Hope. He’d picked his ears, trying to get rid of the noise. Strips of flesh and torn cartilages were now dripping out of his ear canals. His eardrums had been left on the floor somewhere in the maze of hallways of the asylum. But Miles could still hear thousands of angry bees pressing against the inside of his skull.
“No one gets what they want.” Miles wiped at the black goo leaking out of his nose. “Everyone loses. Good fucking job.”
- - -
The hallways stunk of blood and vomit and piss and gunpowder.
They were hallmarks of a massacre, but they weren’t what Miles was looking for. He needed solid proof of the horrors that Murkoff had done. He needed something that Murkoff could not destroy, unlike his camcorder. He needed something better than the broken shell of his body.
Out of the windows, Miles could see the church was still burning. The flames shone less bright in the daylight than in the night, but the black smoke created a stark contrast against the clear sky. Soon, someone from a nearby town would see the smoke and send up a fire brigade.
The sight of the charred cross reminded Miles of dying. Miles remembered having his heart, lungs and most of his stomach shredded by dozens of bullets. He remembered Father Martin watching him with watery eyes and saying, “Merciful god, you have sent me an apostle.”
The swarm buzzed at Miles like the static on dead television channels. It thought in numbers and codes. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Walrider taking form in the dark mist that surrounded him. It was a god borne from a cesspool of greed and madness and exploitation. It was a vaguely sentient swarm of robots that would dissipate without a host.
It knew no mercy.
“Fuck you too,” Miles said.
Miles stepped over the remains of a group of Murkoff’s armed security that he’d torn to shreds amidst a frenzy of nanites and screams when he’d forced his way out of the underground lab. They weren’t much different from Wernicke, who was now nothing more than a puddle dripping down the side of his wheelchair.
It knew no mercy.
The hallways were quiet, quieter than when Miles had first entered the asylum. Most of the patients had either been killed by the more blood-thirsty patients or Murkoff’s security. The only ones that were alive were those that were in hiding.
As the hallways winded deeper into the asylum, Miles noticed that there were less desks and chairs that were overturned to form blockades. There was no blood. There were no signs of any violent struggle.
The swarm pushed open a grated door. Miles walked into a gymnasium, and saw why there were no bodies discarded in the hallways outside.
“So this is where everyone is,” Miles said.
Naked mutilated bodies hung from the ceiling in neat rows. The ropes that held the bodies up were tied to some metal bars on the floor. Part of the setup had collapsed, probably from the sheer weight of the bodies.
Dangling in the middle of the wreckage was a man in a tuxedo. He was surprisingly well-dressed for someone found in Mount Massive Asylum. He was caught in a tangle of ropes. His arms and legs were strung up to both sides of him, so he was in a spread-eagle position and suspended in mid-air, like one of those postmodern artworks that Miles had given up on understanding when he’d been in college.
The end of a large pole protruded from his stomach. Dark liquid was sliding down the pole from the stomach wound. Miles caught a drop of it in his hand. The swarm crawled over it. It tasted like blood and gastric juice and digested dinner.
The man coughed.
Surprised, Miles tilted his head up. The man had opened his eyes. His eyes were painfully bloodshot; dozens of capillaries had burst.
“You’re still breathing,” Miles said.
“Gug,” the man said.
“Stomach wounds are a bitch. Take a long time to kill you,” Miles said.
“Gug,” the man repeated. More of that mixture of blood and stomach acid dripped out of his mouth. He was choking on it. “Gugig.”
“You only have to ask,” Miles said.
The swarm ripped through the ropes holding the man up and pushed him down off the pole. The man came loose with a sickening squish and landed on his back with no movement. Some of the nanites gathered on his belly like a colony of ants that had happened across a fresh carcass, and knitted close the stomach wound, before joining the rest of the swarm.
Slowly, with the lethargic movements of a man recovering from shock, the man sat up and picked himself up from the floor. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, cleaning it of blood, and Miles narrowed his eyes.
“I know you,” Miles said. He’d always had a good memory for faces and names. He’d done research on Mount Massive Asylum before coming, and one name had cropped up over and over on the search engines. “You’re Eddie Gluskin.”
Gluskin turned around, as if just noticing Miles was in the room. He was smaller than Walker, but he was at least a head taller than Miles. He grinned widely. The expression pulled at the scars on his face. “Have we met before?”
“I’ve seen you on the news and half a dozen of news features,” Miles said.
He didn’t cover the story, but he’d read about it. It’d been everywhere, on the papers, on the radio, and on the television. It’d popped up in television documentaries that served old materials with a healthy dollop of hindsight and speculations.
“I heard they make fan clubs and send letters to you. How’s that working out for you?” Miles said. “I hope it is hell. Those girls you killed didn’t get to see justice done.”
Gluskin’s grin didn’t waver. It was as if it was frozen onto his face. “There are no other girls for me than you, darling.”
“You look different.” Miles eyed him. Half of Gluskin’s face was covered in scars and scabs. Miles raised his eyes to the bodies hanging above him. They belonged to dead men with their penises cut off and crude facsimiles of female genitals carved between their legs. “Murkoff put you in the machine, didn’t they? Your M.O.’s changed.”
“Don’t look. You’re safe from them now, darling. I’ll keep you safe.” Gluskin cupped the back of Miles’s neck and shielded him from the sight of the bodies. It would be a tender gesture if Gluskin wasn’t squeezing Miles hard enough to bruise him.
“You know the thing about serial killers? Everyone remembers them.” Miles didn’t struggle in Gluskin’s hold. He met his bloodshot eyes steadily. “You can’t make serial killers disappear.”
Miles had once spent months in Ghana to dig up dirt on Murkoff and their subsidiaries that had withheld affordable water and medicines from people. It’d been summer and it’d felt like he could fry an egg on his head from how hot it’d been. When night had come and the streets had cooled down a bit, he’d gone to a corner store and paid a few bucks too much for a couple bottles of water. He’d drained the first bottle before he’d stepped out of the store. When he’d been just about to crack open his next bottle, he’d noticed a kid sitting on the street outside eyeing his water and licking her cracked lips. Maybe it’d been the sun cooking his brains for an entire day, but whatever the reason had been he’d handed over the unopened bottle of water without a second thought. The kid hadn’t drank the water once she gotten it, no, she’d cradled bottle like it’d been a newborn baby and smiled at him like he’d been god. That smile had stayed with him when he’d been typing his article in a sweltering hotel room.
It hadn’t taken much effort on Murkoff’s part to put the story under wraps. People didn’t care that Murkoff was profiting off of human misery if they were doing it a million miles away from American soil. But Miles had never expected that article to be the killing blow to Murkoff. If there was one thing Miles knew from ten years in the business, it was how to spot a good story.
“We’ll disappear,” Gluskin said, gripping Miles tighter than before. “We’ll have a family of our very own. Like I’ve always wanted.”
“I think you got something wrong.” Miles wrapped his fingers around Gluskin’s hand and pried it loose from where it was grabbing the back of his neck. Gluskin struggled against Miles, trying to wrench his hand free, but Miles didn’t let go. Miles said, “You’re coming with me.”
“Unhand me, darling. I’m only going to ask nicely once,” Gluskin said.
“As far as I’m concerned, you deserve to be buried with the rest of this place,” Miles said. “But I can’t let them bury the story. Murkoff will pay for what has been done to the people here.”
“Filthy whore,” Gluskin said. A silvery gleam was the only warning Miles got. Gluskin pulled out a knife from his belt and sunk it into Miles’s forearm.
“Bad idea,” Miles said, letting go of Gluskin. The wound in his arm wasn’t bleeding. “You don’t want to fuck with me.”
The swarm surged towards Gluskin. Gluskin swung his knife at it. The Walrider loomed out of the black roiling mass as a solid mouthless thing.
Gluskin screamed as soon as he saw it, “Slut! Fucking whore! You trick me! I’m not going back into the machines!”
The Walrider grabbed Gluskin by the throat and hauled him into the air like he was no heavier than a bag of feathers. Gluskin kicked at the Walrider futilely. His eyes were bulging as he struggled for breath.
“No one is getting into any machines,” Miles said. “But don’t test me. Otherwise you’d wish I’ve left you to die on that pole like the piece of shit you are. You understand?”
Gluskin wasn’t looking at Miles; he was staring into the Walrider’s face, which was a breath from his own. There was a long stretch of silence as Gluskin turned an unhealthy shade of purple. Finally, he nodded. The Walrider released him and he landed on his side.
“You’re feisty, darling, but I’ll train you out of it,” Gluskin said, laughing between gasps for air. “I’ve turned whores into virgins. I’ll turn you into a mother fit for our children.”
“That’s right. Keep singing. Let everyone hear you,” Miles said. The swarm swirled around him. “We’ll bring the house down.”