The apes in silence capering from bar to bar overhead, the absence of monkey-house chatter imbuing them with even more menace than otherwise would be the case, enrobed by long black hair, pale faces bearing watchful eyes that flared maroon in the room’s light, red in the sudden flashes of stormlight…
The pressure of a leftward lean brought some small relief to the pain in Jane’s side as she backed away from the center of the big room, where she was vulnerable from every direction. She wanted her back to a wall, between two of the large windows. She was halfway there when another ape laddered down the three levels of grab bars and dropped at the side of the dead rayshaw that she had killed on first entering, the one taken in a kneeling posture. The ape jumped on the back of the corpse and slapped its head a couple times and jumped off. In great though silent agitation, the beast clutched the rayshaw and rolled it over, rolled it over again, as though furious that it would not respond. The ape seized the golem’s face and lifted the lifeless head and slammed the head against the floor, as though it was a demon arrived from sulfurous realms with an urgent commission to collect souls, but now found, to its bitter consternation, that no soul was attendant to this dead thing that looked like a man but was not a man. It seized the rayshaw’s hair and twisted and tore the mass out by the roots and with it a grisly flap of the skin and thin subcutaneous fat that sheathed the skull.
That grotesque performance, on a nightmare stage of carnage, paralyzed Jane as nothing before had ever done, until abruptly she realized that as long as the ape stood vexed and furious over the corpse, it was an easy target. Clenching her teeth against the flush of pain that the recoil would incite from her wound, she raised the Heckler in both hands and squeezed off four shots, scoring at least three hits. The ape flailed its long arms as if striking out wildly at swarming bees, shrieked once as mortal pain perhaps stripped away its controlling program, and collapsed on the rayshaw that it had been tormenting.
The thrumming and creaking of the grab bars at once swelled in volume as the two remaining chimps reacted to the death of the third by swinging faster through the steel jungle, dark forms that were at once antic and graceful. Their enormous strength and limberness, the certitude with which they flung themselves and reached for a grip and always found it was terrifying.
Jane pressed her back to the wall between two windows, where the storm strobed at the glass. She had used four of the nine rounds in the .45. She ejected the magazine, dropped it in a coat pocket, snapped another one into the pistol.
Sweating, trembling, silently cursing the pain, she wiped the sweat out of her eyes with one coat sleeve and tracked the apes as best she could, not always able to keep both of them in view at the same time. She wondered if they would ever exhaust themselves, and of course she knew the answer: They were controlled not by their own desires anymore but by their programs, and they would remain aloft at speed until their bodies failed or they conspired to distract her and then set upon her.
She had known what she’d find on the eighth floor, but although she had read about the power and speed of these apes and understood their potential for extreme violence, she had underestimated them. And she had not foreseen how the chaos of the situation would limit her ability to move and react.
Even if the bulletproof windows could be shot out with a long enough barrage, the apes would follow her onto the balcony, where she wouldn’t be able to reload fast enough. And if she tried to bolt across the open room for the door by which she’d entered, they would catch her. Besides, the stairwell was not an option, considering that they would be at her heels and able to descend the stairs far faster than she could.
She stood with the pistol in both hands but close to her body, muzzle toward the ceiling, her mind racing through strategies. One existed that would work. There was an answer to this dilemma. The world was a maze of mysteries and puzzles, but it was a world of rational design that did not present puzzles without answers. There was always an answer. If only she could find it.
Mere minutes old, the storm had not exhausted the bolts in its quiver. The sky blazed as bright as ever, and the thunder crashed as if the mantle of the planet had been cracked wide by some elemental rising force. The lights went out.