Chapter Text
The final nail in the coffin is the building closure.
It’s late February, and Avery has committed more than one cyber crime in his search for Derek. He’s learned more than he ever wanted to know about how to access badly concealed information online and has narrowed his search down to three apartment buildings with tenants named Derek Hutchins. All three have paid their rent on time for the past two months, and Avery is holding onto the hope that Derek is alive in the absence of any obituary or news publication about his death.
Ideally, his plan had been to continue searching for information and scouting the buildings from a safe distance before undertaking any kind of dramatic rescue mission. But then Derek’s final goodbye had been deleted from Google Drive and replaced with a cryptic message from the U.S. Department of Metaphysical Sciences on the exact same day that one of the three buildings was declared unsafe for habitation due to a gas leak.
So Avery buys a gun.
Normally, when he explores abandoned buildings, he does so with a camera and a multitool – maybe a first aid kit if he’s planning to climb or crawl to access certain rooms. Over fifteen years ago, his older brother had taught him how to leave minimal traces and not get caught, and those lessons have served him well until now. They’ve certainly prepared him for planning a route into Derek’s apartment building that will take him into the basement via an underground passage, though he doesn’t have a Plan B for getting up to the fourth floor if the elevator power hasn’t been turned off yet and he can’t climb the shaft.
On the day of the building’s closure, Avery watched from the library across the street as over twenty government employees, wearing yellow hazmat suits bearing a pest-control logo for a fake company, shrouded the entire building in a fumigation tent. He stayed there all day and never saw them leave from underneath it.
Hence the gun. And the silencer.
It’s not that he wants to kill anyone. He desperately doesn’t. That’s the kind of thing you can’t ever get off your hands, but it’s the also exact type of soul-selling that Derek protected him from by sacrificing himself to the King in Yellow. And Avery has had enough of being put into situations where his pursuit of kindness is made meek and small.
He will pull Derek back from whatever brink this world has pushed him to, at whatever cost.
The underground passage – really a sewer – narrows the closer Avery gets to the apartment building. It gets to the point where his shoulders are touching the wet walls, protected only by a durable long-sleeved shirt that keeps him from getting cut but does not save him from the cold damp seeping through. He pulls his mask over his face, breathing in the thick air as he finally rounds the tight corner and sees a glimmer of light coming from the top of a ladder, where a low-wattage bulb casts checkerboard squares through the closed basement grate.
Avery unscrews the bolts and pushes the metal grid up and into the apartment building, pulling his body through the small opening and scraping his knee on the way up. The pain, though minimal, is proof of life. In this world, people can bleed and cry. People can die here.
But inside the computer? Anything can happen. He won’t believe that Derek is dead unless he sees it with his own eyes, and that’s a bridge he’s decided never to come to, and never to cross. Derek will be alive. Avery will fix whatever is keeping him here and he’ll shoot as many government agents as he needs to in order to get them both out of there alive.
And then they’ll go and get sandwiches, or something.
The inside of the basement is quiet and distinctly lacking the smell of gas. If anything, there’s a sterile smell – like the memory of a hospital, which Avery absolutely hates. When he walks towards the wall, he hears an electric hum leaving a trail that he cannot follow for losing himself in the capillary path of a thousand wires just underneath the skin of this place. He wishes he had his noise cancelling headphones, but he needs to remain alert.
Staying quiet, he hugs the wall, feeling the buzz of atoms reaching out to paralyse him at his back. When he gets to the basement stairs, he takes a flashlight and the building’s blueprints from his backpack, momentarily gripping the gun before deciding against it.
The service elevator is on his left, and when Avery reaches it, his heart sinks to realise that the power is still connected. It’s far too risky to enter into the lift and ride it to the fourth floor, which would alert everyone to its movement and potentially trap him with no exit should someone stop it on an earlier floor.
He heads back to the stairs, climbing them quietly and pressing his ear to the closed door. Aside from the electric hum of the building, he can’t hear anything else – no footsteps or voices or anything that would indicate the occupation of the ground floor. Turning his flashlight off, he slowly twists the doorknob and opens it just a crack.
The lights are on, which immediately hurts his eyes, but they quickly adjust to see that the ground floor seems empty. The reception desk has been overtaken by monitors that are idling on some government logo, but as far as people go, they seem to still be outside the building. Avery quickly exits the basement and runs for cover behind the desk, shielded from view but able to see through the windows.
Not a single one of the government employees is wearing their fake hazmat suit. Some are in lab coats, others in office suits, and they seem to have a temporary settlement outside the front of the building with tents and camping supplies. Whatever is in here with Derek, even the people researching it don’t want to come face to face with it.
But he doesn’t care. In fact, this makes it easier.
Avery still doesn’t trust the elevator’s enticing electronic buzz, but he’s got no problem taking the stairs. The direction of the building’s spiral staircase means that the only way to progress upwards is by continually looking left and walking that way, a fact that is not lost on him as he breaks into a run somewhere between the second and third floor.
Deep in his heart, Avery is hopeful. Any moment now, he’ll be in front of Derek’s apartment, and then all that will separate them is a door – a door that can be kicked, or barged into, and then whatever is on the other side can be dealt with and Derek will be fine.
Deeper in his heart, Avery is terrified.
The fourth floor feels different to the others. The moment Avery pushes open the door from the staircase and emerges into the carpeted hallway, he feels as though he’s been taken to another world; one where everything is the same but all in the slightly wrong place. He remembers being a child and figuring out that if he opened and closed his eyes one after the other in quick succession, whatever he was looking at would jerk from side to side in his vision. The fourth floor of Derek’s apartment building seems, for all the world, to exist in this space between the eyes, the microsecond in which one is closing and the other opening.
But Avery had been expecting this. He opens his left hand, reading the smudged Sharpie words he’d written there for himself before leaving.
Remember who you are. Keep moving forwards.
So he puts one foot in front of the other. Though his feet sink into the carpet like mud and the electric buzz begins to come from inside his ears themselves, Avery keeps walking towards Apartment 429. And when he reaches it, he does not even flinch at the shock from the metal doorknob.
The apartment isn’t locked. At first, Avery opens the door slowly, but the moment the room is no longer separated from the communal hallway by the thin wood, the buzzing in his ears becomes unbearable. It feels like drilling, physically painful and so piercing that he squeezes his eyes shut and pushes his hands against the side of his head. Swallowing down the vomit in his throat, Avery steels himself and walks fully into the apartment, closing the door behind him. Thankfully, this seems to dull the metallic scream back to a just-tolerable level.
It’s dark inside. That’s the first thing Avery notices, and it’s strange because every other light in the whole building has been on. Flicking the switch does nothing, so he has to feel his way through the main living area and into the kitchen, noticing the change of room when he feels the grimy texture of tiles underneath his hands. Pausing for a moment, Avery tries to ignore the oppressive sound in his ears and tune in to his other senses. In the absence of sight and the abundance of sound, it takes his nose a moment to recoil from the smell of rot.
The mental image of Derek’s rotting body flashes through Avery’s mind, stronger than any visual his brain has ever produced before, and it takes him so off balance that Avery falls to his knees. The kitchen floor is unclean to the point of being sticky, but there’s a thicker, wetter substance leaving a perfect trail for Avery to follow.
Oh, God, it feels like blood. Avery doesn’t know what brain injuries look like, but he’s seen a lot of blood before. He doesn’t want to imagine it spurting from Derek’s head and then coagulating over a period of two months, festering into a mapped line for him to follow and find a body that won’t even be warm enough to say goodbye. But he has to follow it, crawling on his hands and knees with his face so close that even the piercing sound is drowned out by the smell of something dead.
Finally, he reaches the source at the exact moment that he realises he has a flashlight with him. The beam illuminates that the trail he has followed so desperately is nothing more than congealed milk, blue with mould and leading to a fridge of half-finished smoothies coated in blue-green fuzz.
Falling back onto his heels in relief, Avery turns his head up. When he looks forwards, the overwhelming feeling of something being wrong floods him again.
Because the beam of his flashlight has been swallowed.
Something larger than light is beating in front of him, but the burst it emits seems to stop exactly at the fridge, containing itself like a supernova. From the outside, Avery cannot see anything except the vibrating, burning edge of something incomprehensible, and he knows that Derek is inside. That this thing that is killing him is also sustaining him.
With this knowledge, how can he not push forwards?
The moment he enters, the light swallows him and burns his eyes, removing the smell of rot as the assault on his senses progresses to a migraine. Gasping for air, Avery tastes soap and chemicals, drowning in the aeration of embalming fluid. The mist stings but his eyes cannot produce water to soothe themselves, making him certain for a horrible moment that this is tear gas and he is about to begin convulsing on the floor. As he reaches his arm out to steady himself, the words written on his hand burn black through the haze – and it is enough to keep him going.
Squinting, Avery’s eyes adjust as he crawls through the eye of the storm and lands his hand on something
long
and
wet
and
alive.
Wires. Visceral, human wires, vomited into a pile. And more – like intestines, some heaped on the floor like the ones he is currently touching and others pulled taut, spread out so thin that Avery can see the electric pulse of blood alight within them. These ones lead up to what must have, at some point, been a desk, but is now a crawling mass of
organ
and
motherboard
and
code
writing itself with the broken clack of fingers against the keys protruding through. The light now seems contained within a burned-out screen with a shaky afterimage of text written over and over –
AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME AVERY IT’S STILL ME PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME
Avery’s eyes flit from abstract point to abstract point, unable or refusing to comprehend the larger whole – the impact of all this knowledge – the unspeakable truth which is that
this
is
Derek.
“Oh my God,” Avery pulls his hand back from the mass of blood and wires, suddenly afraid that he must be hurting him. He falls backwards, turning to see that the electric veins lead up into a man – still human, hunched over a screen with his neck unnaturally bent so that his eyes are still looking straight forwards. The skin around his eyes is scratched and bloody, and where eyeballs would normally be, a swallowing maw of yellow light pulls in the reflection from the computer monitor.
The fingers begin to type so fast that Avery could swear there are more than ten, popping up like moles next to the scattered keys.
I KNEW YOU WOULD COME
“Of course I would,” Avery says, “I’ve come to get you. To get this thing out of you.”
THIS THING IS ME AVERY PLEASE KILL ME I KNOW YOU HAVE A GUN
“What? No! That’s for in case we run into any trouble getting out of here.”
THE SCIENTISTS STUDY WHAT WE EMIT BY EXISTING. I DO NOT LET THEM COME CLOSE
“How do you stop them?”
I MAKE THEM HURT
“Why didn’t you stop me?” Avery asks.
The fingers begin to type, then pause. The computer spits out an answer.
I KNOW YOU CAN KILL ME AND END MY HURT
But before Avery can respond, Derek opens his mouth. His voice is a crackled whisper, and he says, “Whatever happens, I needed to see you.”
“Derek?” Avery questions immediately. He stands up, putting a hand on Derek’s back as if to coax him into speaking again.
But Derek’s mouth only twitches, and stays shut.
The monitor begins displaying a wall of text again.
SOME PEOPLE END THEIR SUFFERING BECAUSE IT IS TOO GREAT
I KNOW ABOUT YOUR BROTHER
I KNOW YOU MISS HIM
I AM IN TOO MUCH PAIN TO CARRY ON
AVERY PLEASE HELP ME PLEASE KILL ME
Clenching his fists, Avery feels his face twitch with a rage he’s never been comfortable owning up to. It’s grief repackaged, anger that he can’t bear to direct at his brother and can’t justify directing at the world. He’s about to throw something hard at the screen when he stops, because he feels Derek’s hand – a whole hand, not disembodied fingers – clutch his wrist.
“Your brother loved you,” he manages to say, though it seems like every word is spoken at a great cost to him. “And if he had lived, he would have done great things. I know that. I saw that.”
“What about you?” Avery asks, his anger softened by the hopeful curiosity brought upon by Derek’s real voice. “Do you want to live? Is it the King typing all those things?”
NOT exactly”
Avery holds Derek’s hand, warming the cold, clammy skin between both of his palms.
“He wants to be free froWE WANT TO DIE PLEASE if he gets out of me DEREK WANTS TO DIE DEREK WANTS TO DIE DEREK WANTS TO DIE he can try agKILL US AVERY KILL US AVERY KILL US AVERY KILL US AVERY KILL US AVERY KILL US AVERY
“Shut up!” Avery shouts. “I’m trying to talk to my friend. Derek – don’t you want to live? Don’t you want this to be over?”
…
“I want it to be over.”
“We can end it. We can unplug you from whatever this is, and you can come away from it. With me.”
“Can’t. Too… weak. Won’t survive. He will.”
“It isn’t your job to live like this! IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE YOURS It doesn’t matter what you’re sacrificing yourself for!”
Derek seems to smile weakly, though his burning eyes never leave the screen.
Maybe if Avery breaks the connection, maybe if he averts Derek’s gaze…
Avery’s problem is that he acts before he thinks, and the moment he places his hands on Derek’s face and gently turns his eyes away, the motionless body of his friend begins to jerk and spasm in agony. Parts of Derek rip from the fleshy mass of technology, snapping back into their right place on his body with a spurt of blood and a desperate sob of pain. He chokes and twitches, and Avery – terrified and frozen – has to jolt himself back to his own body in order to turn Derek’s eyes to the screen again.
It’s at this point that Avery notices Derek’s eyelids have been completely burned away.
“I’m sorry,” Avery whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Derek says, weakly. “I knew you’d need proof.”
“And it hurts that bad every time you try to look away from the screen?”
“Yes. When I’m looking it just itches.”
“It… itches?”
“In my brain.”
THAT’S ME
“You can’t live like this,” Avery says, as the image of the gun in his backpack burns in his mind. But he can’t do that. He’s too weak. It goes against everything written into who he is.
“I want you to kill me. But I can’t ask you to, Avery. Because then there’ll be nothing to keep the King at bay.”
BUT CAN’T YOU SEE HOW HE’S SUFFERING?
HE’S DOWNPLAYING IT, AVERY
HE FEELS IT EVERYWHERE
EVERY FINGER EVERY KEY EVERY CAMERA EVERY EYE
I MAKE HIM HURT
“Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up! Let me think!”
Avery stands up, backing away from the contortion of friend and enemy, desperately searching for any way to sever the connection between the two. He takes the gun from his backpack, grounding himself with the weight of it in his hand, though he does not wield it.
“So if you turn your eyes away, he makes you hurt. But if you keep looking, he makes you hurt anyway. And this is… the only way to keep him from getting free?”
“Yes,” Derek whispers. His eyes don’t move but the rest of his body twitches towards the gun in a desperate, longing motion.
“Then I say let him free.”
“wHAt?”
“Yeah. I mean, this isn’t a fair trade-off. And it’s not a sustainable one, anyway. Eventually they’re going to have to tear down the fumigation tent outside and then anyone could get in. People love exploring buildings like this. What are you going to do then?”
I’LL GET THEM TO KILL HIM
“Then I’ll kill them.”
“No, you won’t,” Avery walks back over to Derek, cocking the gun. “You’d kill the people you’re trying to protect? That makes no sense.”
“…
…”
“I say we give someone else a chance to sort all this out.”
“Is that… the kindest thing to do?”
“It’s what I want to do, Derek. I want you to not suffer like this.”
“You’re going… to kill me?”
The relief in his voice is obvious.
In one swift motion, Avery positions himself between Derek and the screen. Pointing the gun behind himWHAT ARE YOU DOING, he shoots the monitorNO! at the exact moment that he pulls Derek’s face into his chest, covering his eyes completely with the fabric of his shirt.
The room erupts into a glitch, a dial tone that rips through the atoms and rearranges the reality they present. Wires whip at Avery’s arms as he shields Derek from the blast. His back burns in two distinct places, and he pictures lasers boring holes through his organs, trying to pierce his chest and get to Derek’s eyes. It is the worst pain he has ever experienced, but this only makes him hold on tighter, thinking of what Derek has been going through over the past two months, hunching over to protect him and squeezing his eyes shut and praying.
Praying for the first time since his brother died.
Praying for fate to change.
Then, all of a sudden, the hurricane movement of the room just… stops. It pulls away from his back like it’s being sucked into a vacuum, leaving only silence. Avery’s overstimulated senses take a moment to adjust to the smell of rotting milk and the stinging aftermath of immense pain.
And then –
beautiful sound.
“Avery?” Derek mumbles into his chest. He seems a lot smaller now that he’s just a person again, shaking in Avery’s arms. “What happened?”
“You lived,” Avery smiles.
“What about the King?”
STILL HERE
“Somewhere inside the Internet, probably. Maybe Reddit.”
“The world is still here?” Derek’s voice is a little louder now, though likely permanently marked with disuse.
“Still here.”
SO AM I
“I don’t know if I can look.”
“That’s okay,” Avery says, gently rubbing Derek’s back. “I’m not going anywhere.”