AH-477 watched his struggles with detachment, and then poured more of the liquid onto him – this time all over his genitals.
Now he really started to scream and howl and buck and writhe, and his distorted cries were saturated with a piercing and primal anguish.
‘You’re making too much noise,’ she said flatly. ‘Here, drink.’
The girl leaned over his face, pried his lips open and shoved the opening of the drain cleaner bottle between them, emptying the rest of the liquid into his mouth. She held the bottle between his lips with one hand and pinched his nose closed with the other, keeping her fingers locked until the last of the terrible substance had seared its way down his throat into his insides.
AH-477 then casually tossed the bottle aside, crawled off the bed and stood up. She retrieved Mr Wang’s pistol, which she tucked into a pocket in the bathrobe, and then she stared at Mr Ma for a few more moments. The old man was consumed by an unspeakable agony, writhing, flailing, howling and arching his spine as the drain cleaner dissolved his insides and liquefied his internal organs.
‘My mission here is complete,’ she said coolly. ‘Goodbye Mr Ma.’
With that, she turned on her heels and walked on swift and silent feet out of the room as one of the most powerful men in the world lay dying in protracted and unimaginable pain behind her.
Just as she closed the doors behind her, the lights went out.
***
It was a surreal moment; one minute the enormous dancefloor was all floor-rumbling bass and soaring synth keys, the aural morass manipulating the seething horde of costumed partygoers like a modern day snake charmer presiding over an army of warm serpents, with the blinding laser lights and strobes firing in every direction adding psychedelic visuals to the orgiastic chaos – but then, out of the blue, it all just stopped, and an oppressive darkness billowed like a thick cloak tossed over an anthill. A few inebriated patrons continued flailing about for a good few moments after the music had died, but most people simply stopped what they were doing and stood in stunned silence.
It was an eerie silence; the swathe of sound had been so overpowering that it had been a gargantuan physical presence all on its own, yet now it seemed as if that very entity had evaporated at once into thin air. It was much like watching a magician make an elephant vanish before one’s eyes, except in here it was as if you were not only seeing the vast beast disappear into nothing but feeling it vanish as well.
Floor managers began scurrying about in a panic, screaming for technicians and wondering why the backup generator hadn’t yet kicked in. Someone knew why those generators hadn’t kicked in though. Beings, rather, for these creatures were beyond human.
At one of the bars William’s heart rate began to quicken as the first hints of adrenalin probed their electric tentacles though his veins, charging his blood with a heady thrill.
‘Sorry love,’ he muttered to the Australian girl next to him, with whom he had been making conversation, ‘I’ve got to hit the men’s room.’
‘Right bloody now?!’ she spluttered.
‘When you gotta go, you gotta go,’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders apologetically, but then quickly realising the futility of the gesture as he stared at her through the green and yellow filter of his night vision goggles. The blackness that had enveloped the club was opaque, impenetrable in its denseness, and even with his tiger eyes he would have had difficulty seeing without assistance from technology. To combat the fog of black, people started pulling out their phones to use as flashlights, and soon thousands of little beams of light were punching through the inky blanket.
William pushed and shoved through the mass of people, using both his tiger senses and the night vision goggles to direct his movements. A tide of collective panic was rising by the second, and a stampede appeared imminent. Indeed, it certainly would happen when Yi-Wen and Awang’s tear gas attacks kicked in, and getting caught in that was the last thing that William wanted. Time and absolute punctuality were of the essence here; to arrive at the specified point late would not only doom the mission to failure, but possibly cause him to lose his life and forfeit the lives of his friends, and alter the fate of humanity itself. Growling and gritting his teeth, he forced his way through the throng, only too aware of how dire the circumstances were.
***
Njinga reached the entrance hall to the back area of the club a few seconds before Zakaria did. Everything was dim and dingy; blackness dominated the expanse of these subterranean tunnels, broken in regular patches by pools of hellish crimson from the emergency lighting system. With her heart hammering in her chest and pulses of iced blood carrying nerve-tingling fear through her veins, she paused upon reaching the final corner before the two bulletproof doors that stood between the Rebels and Sigurd’s headquarters. She had discarded her Witch-king props, cloak and helmet when the power had failed, and beneath this she was attired in a suit of glossy black armour, made of the same bulletproof composite of which most of the other Rebels’ armour was constructed. Included in her cache of weapons was a helmet, and while it provided supreme head protection it felt brutally stifling and hot, and with her entire head encased in it a sense of crippling claustrophobia was coiling its ghostly fingers around her throat. A suddenly crippling sense of self-doubt and terror wrenched her intestines into a tight knot, and nausea barrelled the bitter taste of bile up the back of her throat. Her tongue felt obscenely swollen in
