E.N.D.A.Y.S. (12 page)

3 hours to the end of the world.

“When do I get a go?” Hayes asked, as he, Campbell and Shay watched a live feed of Carmichael's interrogation of the surviving shooter.

“You don't 'get a go', Mister Hayes. Carmichael is an excellent interrogator.” Campbell spat back.

“It's been, what, half an hour?” Hayes asked, eyeing the LED panel that was steadily ticking down past the three hour mark. “Shouldn't take half a fucking hour to get a shitbag to squeal. He's not even hitting the guy, this is a waste of time...”

“Mister Hayes, do please shut the fuck up whilst Carmichael does his fucking job.”

“Can I make you more comfortable?” Carmichael asked the prisoner, his voice calm and cool, tone warm and polite.

The prisoner was sat on a metal chair at a metal table, arms cuffed behind his back, as Hayes had been restrained earlier.

“I'll be comfortable when you and your fellow murderers have your atoms dissipated in the void between worlds.” the prisoner said, his face contorting into a cruel smile.

“I don't think that's truly necessary.” Carmichael said. “As you might have noticed, we have treated you with nothing but kindness since your capture.”

“Real kind, killing all my friends.” the prisoner spat back verbally, before spitting literally in Carmichael's face.

The agent pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the phlegm from his cheek, containing his aggravation with practised restraint. “The death of your friends was... unfortunate.” Carmichael said, turning to a camera secreted in the corner of the room and shooting it a glare meant for Hayes. “An oversight, and accident, I assure you.”

“Well, maybe your entire reality coursing into the abyss, never to be seen or heard from again is my accident and oversight.” the prisoner said, his words coated with a bitter chuckle.

“Waste of fucking time...” Hayes said again, resulting in Campbell taking hold of his arm in a scolderly fashion, and physically pushing him out of the glass cube. He placed his palm against the door, resulting in a metallic
clunk
resounding out from the frame.

“That's very rude!” Hayes said, trying to open the door, discovering it was maglocked shut. Hayes turned to a nearby analyst. “Is he always this rude to new people?” he asked, the analyst ignoring him completely. “Kali, get me a feed on the interrogation.”

'Turn around, idiot.'
she said, watching through his lens as he did so, the interrogation displayed on the large screens at the front of the room.

“Now come on, this doesn't have to be like this.” Carmichael said, maintaining eye contact with their captive.

“You can't stop us.” The man growled. “You can't stop any of this. We will go however far, do whatever it takes, to the Nth degree.”

“I've heard that before...” Carmichael said. “From one of your number the last time we encountered you, and the time before that, and the time before... this is, what, the fifteenth time in the last two years you've tried to destroy our world?”

“And if we fail now, there will be fifteen more times, and fifteen times after that!”

“That's not a very positive way of thinking.” Carmichael said. “Surely you can't plan that many incursions ahead of schedule, shouldn't all your focus be on the present threat to our safety?”

“All our focus is on
destroying you
!” the prisoner barked.

“But if not this time, fifteen or thirty more tries from now. Don't you ever get tired of terrorism? Don't you feel like sitting down and having a nice chat to explain your grievances?”

“Grievances!? My fucking grievances!” the captive shouted, fighting against the handcuffs to break free and throttle Carmichael.

“You seem stressed.” Carmichael said. “Would you like a nice, relaxing mint tea?”

“This guy doesn't seem to realise time is a factor...” Hayes said, as he surveilled the feed. “Too busy playing good cop... well, there's just the one cop... These assholes need a bad cop, real bad.”

'And of course, you're volunteering.'

“Just wanna do my bit. Serve and protect.”

'And injure or maim someone in the process.'

“Well yeah, I'm not going to protect
him
. That's just stupid. You're being stupid, Kali.”

Kali considered sending feedback bouncing back and forth across his skull, but thought better of it. She had a question that needed answering.
'What the professor said, about kenises...'
she started.

“No idea what the fuck he was babbling about. It's not important right now.”

'Have you been monitoring your nanos?'
she asked, knowing he probably wasn't.
'Every time you use those implants, the dumb-plants, the nanos circulating around your hands at the time go... well... they go crazy.'

“I'm sure you go crazy too, when you're touched in just the right way...” Hayes said, eyes fixed on the interrogation.

Kali restrained herself from punishing him for his response. The data that had come in from the nanos was making her head spin.
'Do me a favour.'
she said.
'Humour me.'

“Guy walks into a brothel.” Hayes said, not missing a beat. “Asks the Madame what he can fuck for five bucks.”

'Not what I meant, and you know it...'

“She puts a duck on the counter, he takes the duck upstairs, fucks it, comes back down and pays his five bucks.”

'That's not how brothels work, and
still
not what I meant.'

“Goes back the next week, says he wants the duck,”

'Just rub your fingers together.'

“He goes upstairs, fucks it.”

'Those magnets are doing something to the nanos...'

“Comes back down, hands the Madame five bucks, she gives him four back.”

'There's a build-up of kenetic energy every time you use them...'

“'Why's this duck fuck only cost a buck, when the last one was five?' he asks.”

'Dissipates if you're moving your fingers slowly, but if you move fast...'

“She turns to him and says 'That first duck didn't have AIDS!'” Hayes said, pulling the magnets between his ring finger and thumb apart, a pulse of kenetic energy bursting from his hand, flinging an analyst and their desk across the room, clanging and crunching as they bounced across the floor of the hub.

The entire room came to a shunting halt as eyes from every floor watched the desk's journey come to a crescendo with a squeal, and the few unbroken limbs of the analyst attempted to usher for assistance.

“See, I was listening...” he said.

'That's incredible...'

“What the
fuck
is going on?!” Campbell shouted, bursting out of the glass room with a face full of ire and disdain. “Why is one of my men battered and bruised? Why is his workstation half-way across the room?” He walked right up to Hayes, pushing his face up against his temporary recruit's. Campbell's eyes were bulging under arced, angry eyebrows. Veins in his head pounding, as if each one was attempting to leap from beneath the skin to punch Hayes in the face.

“Kali and I were doing a test.” Hayes said, calmly. “I think I passed...”

“Can I not trust you for a single fucking second, without you destroying something or breaking somebody?” Campbell screamed.

“Apparently not... Maybe you should send me into that interrogation, then at least I'll only be breaking the bad guy.”

Campbell stared at Hayes, trying to restrain himself, pull his seething rage back into the proper, prim British box it tended to reside. A glance to the clock, they were dangerously close to two hours. “If  Carmichael doesn't have anything in ten minutes, you'll go in. Agreed?”

“Great!” Hayes said, beaming at the thought of an interrogation. “I'll need a cup of black coffee, a blood transfusion kit, and a Danish”

“Do I even want to know...” Campbell muttered, as he returned to the glass box.

2 hours to the end of the world.

Carmichael's 'good cop' interrogation having been deemed fruitless, it was Hayes's turn to break the prisoner. He entered the cell with the blood transfusion kit secreted in his pocket, Danish balanced on top of a mug of coffee, becoming increasingly soggy with ever waft of steam that permeated its soft, sweet, layers.

“You want anything?” he asked the prisoner, as he sat opposite him, placing the coffee on the table, removing its pastry lid and noisily chowing down on it.

'Do you have to eat so loudly?'
Kali asked, turning the volume down on her console.

“Y'know,” Hayes said. “I've never been to a world that makes bad Danish. Ain't that curious?”

The prisoner stared at him with disdain.

“Don't like these fucks much, right?” Hayes inquired. “Know the feeling,” he said, with a scoff. “Ain't from around here neither. I was just passing through when you guys blew up my ride outta here.”

“But you work with them now,” the prisoner said. “So you will die with them.”

“That's just rude.” Hayes said, chomping down on the last of the Danish. “Whereabouts you from? Nearby? Your world as mundy as here?”

“My world is gone.” the man growled.

“Feel for you, truly.” Hayes said, with a sigh. “Can't see why that's any fault of these dumb fucks. Do you know they can barely escape their own gravity? How are they going to destroy a world?”

“They are the harbinger of death, the enders of days!”

“Yeah, I heard
that
before,” Hayes grumbled. “They're just
really
fucking bad at naming things.” he picked up the coffee and inhaled its aroma.

“Your lies won't stop what is already in motion!” the detainee said, as Hayes sipped at the coffee.

“Fuck it!” he shouted. “This coffee is too hot!” he flung the boiling black arabica into the prisoner's face, resulting in screams as his skin seared with pink welts, eyes blistering on contact with the scorching beverage. “Meltyface, may I call you Meltyface?” Hayes asked, pulling his chair closer to the captive and taking the blood transfusion kit from his pocket. “You and me are gonna have a chat with our mouths, whilst the robots in my blood are going to have their own conversation with your bones...” He inserted a needle into his arm, blood waiting for the command to wind its way down the tube. At the other end of the 'donor module' of the two-part transfusion kit, was a collection bag. He hastily ripped it from the tube, replacing the bag with the needle from the 'recipient module' part of the kit, jabbing it into the back of his captive's neck. Meltyface screamed as the needle tore into his flesh.

“Oh shut up,” Hayes said, with a slap across the prisoner's face. “It's barely a scratch.”

The order was given to his nanos to ride the blood along the tube, loop-de-looping acrobatically through the plastic maze, entering the prisoner's body.

“The fuck are you doing?” Meltyface stammered. “That's not sanitary!”

“Really? You're trying to destroy a reality whilst you're
in
it, and you're worried about hygiene?” Hayes scoffed. “Your priorities are
not
in order.” He waited a minute for the nanos to circulate through his victim's bloodstream, smiling at him with unfettered glee.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the prisoner asked.

“Do you really want to know?” Hayes asked, testily. “Let's start with; I can't go home because of you fucks. You sucked my friend into a singularity,” he stopped himself for a second. “Well, he wasn't my friend, but he was a guy I knew, whatever. Then you blew me up, trapped me here, and now you want to blow me up all over a-fucking-gain.” Hayes slapped him upside the head. “I'm fed up of people fucking with me today! Now you're going to tell me what the fuck your people are up to, ok?”

Meltyface recovered from the bitchslap and turned to him, vitriol in his eyes. “You can't stop us. You can't stop any of this. We will go however far, do whatever it takes, to the Nth degree.”

“Yeah, heard all that.” Hayes muttered, motioning to the camera. “Let's try this again without your shoulder blades...” he said, as he commanded the nanos coursing around his prisoner's body to saturate at his scapula, eating away at the molecular structure of the bone, turning it into dust. Meltyface's arms slumped, humeruses hanging loosely under the fallow cavity of skin and musculature that used to be connected to the rest of his skeleton.

“What the fuck!?” he said, trying to move his arms and discovering they were detached from the rest of his body.

“Maybe we should see how this feels without the sheer fucking agony being gated?” he asked, instructing the nanos to stop interfering with the peripheral nervous system, allowing the pain signals to be sent to Meltyface's brain.

It took microseconds for the message to travel up the prisoner's spinal column, resulting in an almighty scream. Hayes recoiled at the volume of the shrieks, sitting much closer than anyone should when such a tremendous wail is released. He re-gated the pain, in order to carry on his interrogation.

“Do you enjoy having a ribcage?” Hayes asked, with a wry smile. “Alternatively, I can probably put your shoulders back together. If you ask nicely, that is.”

“Endays are the harbingers of death, destroyers of worlds.”  Meltyface grunted.

“There you go with that repetition again...” Hayes sighed, shifting his chair further back from his captive's mouth before letting the pain run through his system again for a further minute.

“Have you ever destroyed a reality before? Successfully, I mean.” Hayes asked, condescendingly. “First of all, it's a lot of fucking effort to destroy an entire reality, second of all...” he trailed off, as their plan started to make some sort of sense to him. “There's repercussions for the rest of the grid...”

'Which is why they took you
off
the grid...'
Kali said, finishing his sentence.

“Used my entry point, the residual jump energy to fire up your bullshit DIY jump bays, seven of them, each pulling the reality at my point of arrival in a different direction...” he sent another pain signal through Meltyface's body, just for the fuck of it. “You were waiting, however long you've been here, for a trans-dimensional jump. When I got here, I set the clock ticking...”

“And soon,” the captive gasped. “This world will end, as it has ended so many others.”

“You keep saying that,” Hayes said, sending another pain signal through. “And I keep telling you, you're an idiot, and they suck at names.”

“You have no reason to protect them. And soon, you will have nothing to protect!”

“It's less about protecting
them
, as it is keeping
myself
alive long enough to get home.” Hayes said, punctuating his sentence with another jolt of pain. “Remember what I was saying about your rib cage?” he asked, instructing the nanos to begin chewing away at it.

“You will die with the rest of them! We will stop you by any means! To the Nth degree!”

“Said that already...” Hayes said, ungating the pain. “You people are all sunshine and fucking rainbows aren't you.” he sighed, whistling over the top of the screams. The nanos obeyed his command, and withdrew from Meltyface's body, siphoning themselves back along the tube, loop-de-looping back into Hayes's body.

He left the Nth Degree agent bawling and shrieking, eyes wild. as he looked down as his organs flopping and floating awkwardly in the skin sack that was once his torso.

“Thinking what I'm thinking?” Hayes asked Kali, as he returned to the EDC.

'Pretty much.'
she said.

“Well that was fucking pointless.” Campbell barked, as Hayes entered. “And what use is a
fucking
prisoner who cannot answer questions because he is constantly screaming, due to someone removing his shoulders and rib cage?!”

“They'll grow back..” Hayes said, rolling his eyes. He caught a disapproving shake of the head from Shay. “They won't?” he asked, forgetting how normal human physiology works. “I'll put him back together when we don't have ninety minutes left on the clock... we got more pressing matters.”

“Such as...?” Campbell asked, reluctantly, with a heavy breath.

“You got a leak.” he said.

“We have what?”

“A leak. Y'know, a hole with liquid, or in this case,
information,
pouring out. How else would they have known to jump out just as we got on the scene.”

“They were already jumping out, given the activity picked up before we set off...” Carmichael said.

“Exactly the type of thing a leak would say!” Hayes said, grabbing Carmichael by his neck, hoisting him into the air like a ragdoll, slamming his body down on Campbell's desk.

“Mister Hayes!” Campbell exclaimed. “You have no evidence that Carmichael is a mole!”

“What the fuck is a mole?!” Hayes shouted.

'A blind, ground-dwelling, burrowing mammal...'
Kali said.

“Right.” Hayes said. “Well, let's see if Carmichael's been digging any tunnels...” he snarled, as he bit through the tip of his left thumb and began bleeding on Carmichael's face.

“Stop that right this instant!” Campbell instructed.

“This is preposterous!”  Carmichael gargled, coughing the words through syrupy slurps of blood, his bones turning to mush at Hayes's instruction. “I didn't do anything!” he yelped, looking around the room, and out to the hub for someone, anyone to intervene. “I've always been loyal to Endays!” he squealed. “Always and always! I love my home, I don't want my world to end!!”

'He's not out guy...'
Kali said.

“I could have fucking told you that!” Campbell muttered, angrily.

“Well, y'should have spoken up...” Hayes said, picking Carmichael off the desk as the nanos undid their damage, dribbling out his nose and back into Hayes's thumb hole.

“Sorry about that...” Hayes said, reaching over to neaten Carmichael's hair, that had been put somewhat out of place amidst his manhandling.

“Quite all right...” Carmichael said coldly, ever the gentleman.

'We're almost coming down to an hour...'
Kali said, eyeing a clock on her console that was synced to the banner above the EDC screens.
'Might want to bring the troops together for an epitaph.'

“Indeed.” Campbell said, stomping out of the door without a look at Hayes.

“What?” Hayes asked the others. “Was it something I said?”