Recursion - Blake Crouch Page 0,62
mirrors, and staring into them creates a recursive illusion—an infinite number of Barrys and Helenas in elevator cars bending away through space.
As they begin to climb, Barry says, “Let’s stand against the wall. Want to offer the smallest targets possible when the doors open. What weapon did Slade have?”
“A handgun. It was silver.”
“Jee-woon?”
“There was a gun that looked more like yours by the terminal.”
The button for each floor illuminates as they pass through it.
Nine.
Ten.
A wave of nausea hits him—nerves. There’s a taste of fear in his mouth from the adrenaline dumping into his bloodstream.
Eleven.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
He marvels that Helena doesn’t look as scared as he feels. Then again, from her perspective, she’s already waded into the fray once before.
“Thank you for coming back for me,” he says.
Fourteen.
“Just, you know, try not to die this time.”
Fifteen.
Sixteen.
“Here we go,” she says.
The elevator grinds to a halt at seventeen.
Barry raises the Glock.
Helena shoulders the shotgun.
The doors slide apart to reveal an empty corridor that runs the length of the building, with other hallways branching off a little ways down.
Barry steps carefully over the threshold.
The faint hum of lights burning overhead is the only sound.
Helena comes alongside him, and as she brushes her hair out of her face, Barry is overcome by a savage, protective impulse that terrifies and bewilders him. He’s known her barely twenty-four hours.
They advance.
The lab is a sleek, white space, filled with recessed lighting and glass. They pass a window that peers into a room containing more than a dozen MEG microscopes, where a young scientist is soldering a circuit board. She doesn’t see them slip past.
As they approach the first junction, a door closes somewhere nearby. Barry stops, listening for the sound of footsteps, but all he can hear are those lights.
Helena leads them down another corridor that ends at a long wall of windows overlooking the blue Manhattan gloom of this raw evening, the lights of surrounding buildings shining through the misty dusk.
“The lab is just ahead,” Helena whispers.
Barry’s hands are sweating. He wipes his palms on the sides of his pants to get a better grip on the Glock.
They stop at a door equipped with keypad entry.
“He may already be inside,” she whispers.
“You don’t know the code?”
She shakes her head, raises the shotgun. “But this worked last time.”
Barry catches movement swinging around the corner at the end of the corridor.
He steps in front of Helena, who screams, “Jee-woon, no!”
Gunshots explode the silence, the muzzle flash bursting from a barrel aimed at Barry, who empties his Glock in a blitzkrieg of noise.
Jee-woon has vanished.
It all happened in five seconds.
Barry ejects the empty magazine, slams in a fresh one, thumbs the slide.
He looks at Helena. “You OK?”
“Yes. Because you stepped in front of…oh God, you’re shot.”
Barry staggers back, blood pouring down his abdomen, down his leg under his pants, flowing across the top of his shoe and onto the floor in a long, burgundy smear. The pain is coming, but he’s too jacked on adrenaline to register its full effect—only an intensifying pressure in the middle-right section of his torso.
“We have to get out of this corridor,” he groans, thinking, There’s a bullet in my liver.
Helena drags him back around the corner.
Barry sinks to the floor.
Bleeding profusely now, the blood nearly black.
He looks up at Helena, says, “Make sure…he isn’t coming.”
She peeks around the corner.
Barry lifts his gun, which he hadn’t noticed slip from his grasp, off the floor.
“They could already be in the lab,” he says.
“I’ll stop them.”
“I’m not going to make it.”
There’s movement on his left; he tries to raise the Glock, but Helena beats him to the punch, firing an earsplitting blast from the shotgun that forces a man he hasn’t seen before back into the corridor.
“Go,” Barry says. “Hurry.”
The world is darkening, his ears ringing. Then he’s lying with his face against the floor and the life rushing out of him.
He hears more gunfire.
Helena shouting, “Sergei, don’t make me do this. You know me!”
Then two shotgun blasts.
Followed by screaming.
From his sideways perspective, he sees several people run through the intersection of corridors, heading back toward the elevators—guests and other crew members fleeing the mayhem.
He tries to get up, but he can barely move his hand. His body feels cemented to the ground.
The end is coming.
It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done to simply rise up onto his elbows. He somehow manages to crawl, dragging himself back around the corner of the windowed corridor that leads to the lab.
He hears more gunshots.
His vision swings in