A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twenty, Pt. 3
Zoe stumbled into a funeral home. Or the Manifestation’s interpretation of a funeral home.
She didn’t need to ask whose funeral. She didn’t stop to gawk at the mourners whose own flesh already hung in strips from their rotting bodies. (reverence the dead whose mourners too shall soon be—)(—you, too, soon—) She followed the trail of blood and heroin and tar and grease down the only hallway that mattered.
“Are you with the party for Jo—”
Zoe brushed past the thing with the suit and the half-missing face and entered—
—a vast hanging nothing. Or not nothing, but the optical illusion thereof, a combination of black paint and forced perspective that gave Zoe vertigo. She stood, not having realized she’d fallen to all fours, and spun around to search for her quarry.
Sung-ho sat tied to a chair. The Manifestation had already worked through his armor and his shirt. Sung-ho’s abdomen glistened with blood, no single wound deep enough to draw much but the dozens of barely-a-scrape scratches adding up to a lot.
“Drink?” the Manifestation asked, holding out a rocks glass of Scotch.
“No.”
The Manifestation drank the booze and threw the glass into the side of Sung-ho’s head. Zoe rushed at—
—the Manifestation hit her from the side—how?—and she rolled hard across the vertigo floor. She used the momentum to help push herself back upright and reached for her knife. She unsheathed it and spun in a single motion, striking nothing. Whirling, she searched for her target.
The Manifestation stood next to Sung-ho, a dozen paces away. It smiled shark teeth at her.
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” Sung-ho wheezed between pants. “You should’ve gone for Jill.”
The Manifestation’s almost-all-white gaze boiled and simmered. Zoe went for the door—
—what door?
Where was it? Where had it been?
The room was void, hanging nowhere. No, that was an optical illusion, a trick of perspective and paint. Zoe tried to differentiate one wall from another wall. She could feel the floor under her feet but her stomach refused to believe it. She unsheathed her combat knife and turned for the one anchor that stayed stable—Sung-ho.
The Manifestation had disappeared.
She sprinted toward him. She was almost shocked to reach him. Kneeling, she took her knife and started sawing at the rope tying him down.
“You need to leave,” he said. “Get Jill. Now.”
“I need ten seconds.”
“It’s toying with you!”
She freed his right arm and before she could maneuver to work on his leg something that felt like a brick slammed into her back. She tumbled sideways and rolled away, barely avoiding the stomp of an amber-spiked heel. Standing, she swiped arcs at the air to make distance. But the Manifestation didn’t care about getting hurt. Pain fueled it. Zoe felt her blade slide through its greasy skin once, twice, and—
—and she felt it jam into the Manifestation’s neck, again. Letting go of the hilt, she stepped backwards. She hadn’t even seen the thing until she’d stabbed it. Panic reflex spun her away from the monster’s first strike, but the second sliced ribbons from her armor. She parried a third blow and reached for her holster and the creature grabbed her arm and threw her five feet through the air before she could get out her gun.
She landed with a shout, spasms and pain shooting through her muscles, bruises ripening beneath her skin. Rolling over, she managed to unholster her pistol before the Manifestation reached her again. Still kneeling, not quite ready to stand, she took a breath and fired. The Manifestation charged through the bullets uncaring, wounds oozing foam. She still hadn’t gotten her feet under her when it slammed a heel into the top of her knee and sent her down again.
“Stop!” Sung-ho shouted.
“You know how to stop it!” the walls themselves screamed back.
Zoe pointed the barrel at the monster and squeezed the trigger. She managed two bullets before it spun toward her and slapped the weapon from her hand. White froth dribbled from the holes. Zoe glanced over to where her pistol had landed—two or so feet away, precision lacking in the illusory void. She turned back toward the Manifestation in time to catch a heel with her jaw.
The mandible dislocated with a sharp, iron-hot snap. Zoe howled, the noise distorted by the warp in her lips. She twisted with the blow and tried to stand up but the ache in her battered knee slowed her down. Another blow to her back planted her on the floor again.
The Manifestation dove on top of her, raking claws through the armor protecting her back.
Protecting her spine.
It pinned her knees with its long, strong legs and craned itself down to frenzy.
“Stop!” Sung-ho shouted.
Just as the fist razorblade fingertips reached the fabric of her undershirt, the Manifestation paused. “You can make the pain stop whenever you want. Have a drink, yeobo? Smoke a cigar?—”
“Keep that word out of your mouth!”
“—Some hash, weed? Go shooting?”
Zoe clawed the ground, trying to grab something, anything, even just a thought…
“I have a fifty year Highland single malt,” the Manifestation’s gravel-growl dipped lower, somehow. “You’ll never taste anything like it again.”
“No.”
The first cuts barely parted skin. They were almost surgically precise. They flirted with bloodshed, swift and sharp and shallow as paper. Zoe tried to push herself back up and something stone-dense knocked the back of her skull. The next strikes flensed the first layer, scraping and carving the epidermis in tiny sections. Blood beaded and rolled. It slicked; it sluiced.
Zoe whimpered and groaned, cursed and grunted. She spat at darkness and tried to push herself up again. This time the Manifestation didn’t stop with a simple punch to the back of her skull. It grabbed her hair in its wet-red, tar-tangled claws and pulled her forehead off the floor and slammed it down once, twice, thrice. Zoe’s vision blurred and swam.
The Manifestation stepped away from her. “Maybe she’ll break more easily. Hey, Zo’…you probably like Sung-ho better than our dad, right?”
Was that Jill’s voice? No. It couldn’t be.
Zoe wiped at the crimson streams of her nose. She tried to push herself up but…why bother? What strength did she have left?
“The thing is: the world wins. You can’t beat it. If you try, it’ll beat you and rape you and leave you for dead in a ditch somewhere. The world is big and strong and hungry and you threatened to change it, what else was did you expect it to do? It’ll hurt less if you just close your eyes. Drift away.”
“Sung-ho,” Zoe slurred, rolling herself onto one side. “What are you doing to…?”
“I don’t have to do anything, Zoe,” it sounded less gravelly than before, less phlegmatic. “I don’t have to harm a hair on his head—”
“Zoe! Don’t!” Sung-ho shouted.
Half-kneeling, half on all fours, Zoe tried to make the floor make sense to her. She heard a sharp slapping sound, a shout of pain, and a dull thud. Sung-ho groaned and spat.
The Manifestation continued: “All you have to do is give up and I won’t have to hurt anybody, anymore.”
“Hnnnnn,” Zoe groaned, managing to get back on both feet again.
The Manifestation knelt next to Sung-ho’s chair, its needle-tipped and razorbladed claws stacked on top of Sung-ho’s flesh-and-blood fingers. The sharps dug in, drawing blood, ready to drag trenches through Sung-ho’s hand. “All you have to do is have a drink or ask for a cigarette,” the Manifestation said, sounding almost-but-not-quite like Jill. “And then Sung-ho won’t get his hand sliced apart today.”
Zoe stared.
“Just ask for a cigarette. I can get you a light.”
She lurched toward her gun. Two feet away? Four. After moving two feet, she knew she still had two more to go. A Zippo hung in one palm. She dropped it clattering across the black.
“Make a choice, Zoe. Five…”
Wincing as she bent over, she grabbed her pistol; stood despite the headrush.
“Four…”
She turned. Saw that Sung-ho sat directly between her and the kneeling Manifestation. Saw that she didn’t have a sightline for attack at all. She either had to concede or…what? Shoot Sung-ho?
“Three…”
She dropped the gun. Her knees gave out.
“Fuck you,” someone said.
Zoe blinked.
Jill stood in a threshold of light, curls of crimson wrapping her whole left side, left wrist bent wrongways, bruises all over her, clutching a shard of broken mirror in her right fist. When the Manifestation turned toward her, she shuffle-stepped into the room.
“I said ‘fuck you.’”
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