TR: 4

Chapter Four: When The Lights Go Out

Brian Sans stood over the bench press as he spotted the hulking figure for, what was quickly becoming, his last rep. Brian was glad they had chosen the asterene bar since there was no way the steel ones would have been able to withstand the nearly thirteen techatuller that his mentor was currently attempting to press.

“Come on Mik, you got this! It’s all you.” Brian encouraged.

“Will ye shut yer fa’elin’ trap, boy? Can’ ye see I’m liftin’ a bloody planet ‘ere?” Mik grunted at him as he struggled through the last half of the movement.

Perhaps mentor wasn’t the right word; more like tormentor.

Brian sighed and poised himself at the ready, lest Mik-the Monstrosity-Lapiez drop the weight of a small horse on himself and end a lustrious multi-metin career. As Brian watched the veins bulging out of the man’s forearms and readied his hands to assist with the lift, a motion from across the gym caught his attention. He glanced up and saw a pair of eyes watching them from the doorway, what looked to be a young boy. Brian blinked and the next moment the boy had vanished. He frowned as he looked around the gym but there was no one else there but them.

“Boy…”

“Wait, you saw it too?” Brian asked, looking down at Mik.

“No, ye arse! I’m callin’ ye, boy: help me ‘fore I crush meself!” Mik wheezed.

Mik’s arms began to shake, his muscles failing him on the lockout and the bar slowly descended down onto his chest.

“Oh, shit!” Brian cursed and grasped the bar, attempting to take some of the burden away.

His spot proved to be insufficient, however, as Mik’s arms were already snuffed from the struggle and Brian was in no position to alleviate the kind of weight that Mik was pushing. The two of them struggled to keep the bar from collapsing down on Mik but Brian’s position became more and more tenuous as the weight of the bar pulled him forward, straining his back and arms and making him increasingly unbeneficial.

“Wake up, boy! Anytime…ugh…ye wot do ye job an…ahh! Damnit, boy! Help!”

“I can’t…lift that much…” Brian strained, his face beginning to flush.

Mik hollered and angled the weight of the bar over his head, sliding himself out from under it as it came crashing down on to the bench. Brian let go just in time to avoid being flipped heels over head, but the force from the sudden release threw him backwards, tumbling off the spotting platform and slamming against the wall. Mik rolled onto the floor, coming to a stop as he collided with nearby gym equipment. Brian raised his gaze to the press, the metal groaning as it strained against the pull of the magnetic bar which lay atop it. As Mik pushed himself up off the floor, Brian imagined a dimension in which the man hadn’t been quick enough out of the path of the falling bar, his head becoming divorced from its body like a fresh cut from a guillotine. As horrific as the image of Mik’s decapitated head rolling away on the gym floor was, oddly enough Brian didn’t seem overly disturbed by the thought.

Hmm, something to meditate on, perhaps.

Regardless of the fact that he still had his head connected to his shoulders, Mik’s expression told Brian that the brute was more than just flushed from exertion; Brian knew he had it coming.

“Boy, hit the demaggers ‘fore the bloody thing snaps me bench…”

CRASH!

Too late.

Before Brian could react, the weight of the bar caused the bench to buckle and it bent in half under the force of the magnetic pull which gave the barbell its weight. The bar snapped on to the floor where two flat black slabs lay, under which Brian knew were powerful magnets attuned to the specific composition of the asterene, taking the bench along with it.

Brian stood up and winced at the mangled machine which looked like it had just been through a trash compactor. He swallowed as he met Mik’s murderous glare.

“Mik, I…”

“What were you thinkin’?” He screamed.

He stood up and faced Brian, looking like he was about to blow his lid. At nearly two-and-a-half stride tall and weighing in at a quarter-ingon, Mik made for a daunting antagonist. Ironically, his ridiculously overt brogue made it hard to take his rage seriously, even when the probability of becoming a pancake was unfavourably high.

Mik pointed at the barbell. “Do ye have any idea wha’ tha’ much a weight would’a do to a man were it to lie upon ‘im?”

Mik stomped over to Brian and grabbed him by the collar, raising him off the floor as he pressed him against the wall.

“No, course ye don’.  And ye never will ‘cause ye be weak. Yea, the lil orphan boy; mammy couldn’ stand her wee runtlin’ so she threw ‘im out on tha street. An’ I’ve got a mind to do the same, reckon.”

Brian glared at Mik as he struggled to free himself from the man’s grasp. “You know that’s not true. You were there.” He said.

“Ach, it dunna matter, boy! Weak or not, I can take ’em. But it’s the dreamers that I canna stand. Always with their ‘ead in the clouds, fantasy-in’ ’bout the things they’ll nary see; things they dunna deserve. Head up their arse, t’what it is. Causin’ all kinds of havoc to those ’round ’em ‘oo they shoulda been payin’ ‘eed ta–the ones tha’ actually matter.”

Mik leaned in, gritting his teeth as he growled in Brian’s face, his sour breath making Brian grimace. “An’ the sooner ye learn tha’, boy–tha’ ye don’ matter–the sooner we’ll all be better for it. An’ less ‘eads’ll be rollin’ ’cause yer nah droppin’ bars on ’em.”

Mik tossed Brian down on to the floor like a piece of garbage and slammed his fist into a large red button on a console on the wall. The humming whir of the magnets began to die down as they released their grip on the barbell attached to the floor, leaving behind nought but its own weight in mass. Brian stood up cautiously, watching Mik’s shoulders heaving up and down as he readied himself for another outburst. Mik turned and leered at his disgruntled apprentice, pointing at the pile of scrap metal that had been a very expensive machine just moments before.

“Tha’s comin’ out of yer paycheck, boy. An’ ye better find me a new ‘un ‘fore me next sesh otherwise it’ll be ye that ends up snapped in half. Now, clean up tha’ mess, ‘fore I regrets takin’ ye in and jus’ ‘ave ye tossed back ou’ with the other riffraff an’ gutter trash where ye belong.”

Mik stormed out of the gym, cursing under his breath. As he passed by a rack of dumbbells he grabbed the end of the rack, roaring as he raised it into the air, upending weights all across the gym floor. He shoved the rack away and it landed on its side with a loud twang. Mik exited the gym, slamming the door hard behind him. The wall shook and the two mirrors near the rack dislodged from the wall, falling to the floor and shattering into thousands of pieces. Mik’s shouts of frustration could be heard from the locker room and beyond, his simian execrations sounding all the way down the main hall of the arena until, nearly two minutes later, he was finally out of earshot.

Brian sighed and looked at the jumble of weights and broken glass spilt across the gym floor. As much as mods allowed a man to do amazing, unfathomable things, they could also make him a severe pain in the ass.

Funny how power worked that way.

Brian got back to his feet again and sighed as he took in the huge mess that lay before him. He had spent all afternoon organizing the gym and, in a single moment, there was no sign that any of that had happened. Brian thought about how similar his situation was to cooking a nice meal; a master chef could spend hours, even days, preparing a feast that would be gone in minutes, with little to no regard to the art form involved in its creation. Brian wasn’t too bothered by it though; Mik wasn’t any kind of special asshole beyond his flair for the dramatic. Besides, Brian wasn’t one to hold on to things. A heavy soul just dragged a guy down, and there was already ample gravity in life to do that. Brian knew that fact firsthand.

As Brian began picking up weights off the floor, he mentally recited a mantra by one of his favourite First Era authors–Sher Ban Cho– that often got him through his day:

A man unaffected by external pain is a man whose spirit is disaffected towards internal gain.

While Brian understood this maxim to be a reminder that one should never distance themselves from their emotional body, lest they lose their humanity, he appropriated it in an entirely different way: where there is too much pain there can be no room for more. And so, he kept the pain around so that he would remain stoic, of a sort, as a safeguard against those who should do him harm. This is not to say that Brian thought he had it rough with Mik; no, quite the contrary. Brian had seen rough. True rough. He had grown up in an orphanage after all. There wasn’t much rougher in life than knowing you didn’t belong to anyone, society included. He had earned his place at Falkner’s, even if he worked for a guy whose ego weighed more than he did. But it was a step in the right direction—in the direction he needed to go. If being at Falkner’s meant working for a moron then so be it. He was that much closer to finding out what he needed to know—finding out who he needed to know. More, it was moments like these that allowed him to be alone with his thoughts, which wasn’t something Brian got to do a lot of, despite being out in the middle of nowhere. Mik had him running around the clock, so even cleaning up a mess, however frustrating, was a welcome break.

After putting away the last of the weights he made his way over to a supply closet and pulled out a broom. As he began sweeping up the broken glass he caught sight of the punching bag hanging in the far corner. He looked from the shards on the floor to the bag and, looking back over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching, he placed the broom against the wall. He made his way over to the bag, his shoes crunching over the shards of shattered mirror. Brian guessed that there was some religion somewhere that had some superstition about how he had cursed himself for seven years or some such nonsense, but they weren’t around to protest so it was what it was. He made his way up the stairs to the platform where the bag hung along with a speed box and a wall chock-full of weighted skipping ropes hanging from hooks. He placed a hand on the bag, running his hand up and down it tenderly as if consoling a dear friend. Brian always thought it strange that he had a fascination for the sport, considering it was, at least in part, responsible for his parents’ death. He wondered if his interest was, perhaps, his way of making sense of it all, since he only remembered fragments of his time with them and his time watching the fights were among those fragments.

As long as he could remember, he had been interested in fighting, ever since he came of an age when his father started taking him to see the matches that were held in the Kan’ewa Arena–the main stadium at Falkner’s. While the stadium itself was nothing special, it was unique in that it was named after a highly revered Bannamud warrior, in honour of the local band which allowed Falkner’s to be built on their land. Well, perhaps in honour of and allowed were putting it gently; naming it after a Bannamud magnate was surely a political move to offset some of the bad blood between the indigenous and the cren businesses and the Bannamud certainly didn’t allow themselves to be supplanted. As far as Brian understood, there was a long and tumultuous history with the locals and the invading cren colonists–one that extended back to the times of the Ladryan empires and involved about as much death as it did politics. Brian wasn’t interested in being a part of either, so he didn’t question Falkner’s validity any more than the average schmuck questioned the legitimacy of an imposed culture and its aftermath. That being said, Brian often mused over the fact that Falkner’s was not only founded on illegitimacy, it maintained that status to the current day. That is–Falkner’s was, in all senses of the word, a front. 

In reality, the gym was actually an illegal underground fighting ring, owned and operated by one of the most powerful criminal organizations on the planet–the Tricolour Gang. Though any employee who had worked at Falkner’s for any significant amount of time and every law enforcement officer in the region knew as much, Brian had dug up his own dirt on the TCG. And with good reason: they were, after all, responsible for the death of his mother and father. It was why he had chosen to come back to the place where it had all happened; he needed to uncover the truth about that night long ago. Mik might have thought him weak but he didn’t know that Brian, just like Falkner’s, was there under false pretences. In his time being employed there, he had uncovered some pivotal information surrounding his parents’ murder. Unfortunately, along with that information he also discovered that the inner-workings of the upper echelons of the TCG played things close to the chest. Very close. And those were the people he needed to get to. While Brian hadn’t learned much about the gang itself beyond the simple facts, he had uncovered some condemning evidence of the illegal goings-on at the gym and had begun to formulate ways to expose it without exposing himself.

And that was how he had come to find himself in the degrading position of being Mik’s lackey–under the guise of being his personal assistant. While Brian rued every moment spent around the meat-headed fighter, Mik knew people. Important people. Which meant Brian would also come to know these people.

For better or worse, he was in. 

And while he was there he would make sure that he did his damnedest to get to the bottom of his parents’ brutal and untimely departure. He was sworn to avenge them and he renewed that oath every night, time and time again when he was reunited with them in his dreams. In his nightmares.

“The dead do not forget.” They always told him.

And nor would they let him. So Brian vowed that, if the TCG couldn’t be brought down from the bottom up, then he would do it another way:

He would tear them apart from the inside out.

Brian picked up a pair of gloves off of a stool and strapped them on. He opened and closed his fists as he worked his hands into them. Though they were designed for Mik’s sizing they fit Brian just fine since he too had strong hands. He recalled his father telling him once that he had the hands of a stonemason. His mother disagreed and said that he had articulate fingers and the reach of a pianist. Either way, masons hadn’t been a thing for thousands of years and Brian couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket so those options were off the table. And so he had taken to using his hands in a much more…direct way: he found his true calling in boxing.

As he struck the punching bag his mind began to drift.

Left jab.

An image of a large building on fire. People running across a parking lot in distress.

Right jab, left hook, pivot.

Gunfire. Automatic weapons, bodies in corridors, dropping like weighted sacks as they piled on one another. Blood. Pooling… spatters on walls. Everywhere.

Right again. Pivot, regroup, left jab, right hook. Uppercut.

A woman’s face. Kind and caring. She knows him. Speaking to him. She’s scared. Where’s his father? Gunshots from behind. More bodies falling, people streaming by, screaming. She tells him something, urges him to run. Now he is scared. A loud sound to his right, a piece of drywall explodes next to him, his ear ringing. A bullet hole. They’re using bullets. Can’t be military. Then who?

Jab, hook. Jab, jab, duck, pivot side to side. Wide hook for the hay maker.

Silence. Silence and darkness. He’s…hiding. Wait. Not silence. There’s a beat. Subtle but important. A heart. His heart. He’s alive! This is good. But what about the rest? There’s a crack of light in front of him. A door opening. No, not a door–a lid. He’s in some kind of bin. Garbage maybe? He sees her there–his mother. She’s on the floor, on her knees. There’s another body beside her. Dead. He can’t see the face but he knows who it is. Wetness on his face. Tears. He’s crying. The woman, she cries too. Harder than him. Harder than anyone in the world, he thinks. And she is pleading for her life; pleading to a hand. A hand with a gun. Pointed at her. Then it begins–the big bang. But it’s not a beginning, its an ending. There are no stars, only echoes down the hall and the stifled sobbing as he is lost in the sound that was the last thing his mother ever heard. A supernova of pain racks his brain; a deafening light which blinds him. Chokes him.

Block, left, right, footing. Don’t forget footing. Right, right, pivot, hook.

Then he’s running. Fast. Faster. Has to be faster. Never stop. Never stop. Pain doesn’t stop so either do you. But the pain is great…and fast. Faster than him but he refuses to let it catch him. Until he realizes it IS him; he is only pain and nothing else, even though he is moving. Like running on fire but from the inside. It’s too much but he keeps running anyway. There are bodies everywhere. Empty shells like him. How is he still running if he’s dead? No, not dead. At least not outwardly. Then there are more bodies. Alive this time? Yes! They’re standing. Talking. But not good somehow. Something in the tone of their voices; the way they are standing. One is on the ground. On his knees. Pleading. Like his mother had been.

Sidestep, left, right. Jab high while the guard is low. Right hook to the ribs. Block, swivel, regroup.

He is hiding again, behind something. He’s in… an alleyway, maybe? The bodies–they’re walking toward him. Not bodies. Men. Bad men. They’re talking. Arguing. He remembers their words, clearly.

“After everything we did ta-gether Jimmy, ya go behind my back and do this?” Says one man with a gun, shoving another onto the concrete as he points his weapon down at him. The man gets on his knees, facing his accuser. Looks to be trembling. Scared. No–terrified.  It’s hard to make them out. Just shadows.

“Just ’cause I let ya run this shit-hole don’ mean ya own it.” Says the man with the gun.

He rubs a hand over his face in frustration.

“What happened here tonight–that’s on you. You and your god-damned dirty deals. Aaah…”

The man grabs a handful of his own hair and paces around, cursing to himself.

Suddenly, he spins around and strikes the man on the ground across the face with the butt of his pistol. The man doubles over, whimpering.

“S…Salviattoro, please. You know I can fix this. Just give me a chance to prove it. Remember back at Donny’s place? He messed up good too, and I came through, remember?”

“I can’t fa’elin’ believe you, Jimmy. You burnt down a school. A fa’elin’ school full of children. You see, this is the problem with you: you don’t have any scruples, James. How can I be any kind of example to the other dons if I’m just piggybackin’ off of the work of psychopaths like yah-self? I’m a businessman, Jimmy, not a babysitter.”

“Come on, Salviattoro, ya know that’s not fair. I don’t need ya…”

The man fires the handgun, spraying the other shadow’s brains all over the wall. Like dandelion spores being blown from their stem. The report echoes all around, fading into the distance as it blends in with the sound of the fire in the background. There is a glint in the light as the figure adjusts something around his neck. A necklace?

“That’s good, Jimmy, ’cause I don’t need ya no more either. Say hi to Aeros for me. Tell ‘im he ain’t likely to be seein’ me anytime soon. Though I suspect ye’ll have a hard time tellin’ ‘im when he’s got ‘is pecker shoved down ya throat.”

The man turns away but stops after several steps, turning back to the body lying on the cement.

“Oh, and only my mother calls me Salviattoro.”

Several more rounds are unloaded into the corpse and the man finally leaves, his shadow disappearing into obscurity.

Then the other gunshots begin again. Maybe they hadn’t stopped and he was just too scared to acknowledge them. It reminds him of the hand pointing at his mother. The hand that took her away. He sees the image again and the sound of the trigger sets off fireworks in his brain. Then another, and another. They become explosions, then earthquakes…a star collapsing as it commits chemical suicide, a wall of treacherous radiation ballooning out, scorching the nerve-endings of the universe.

Brian snapped out of his trance as he heard himself screaming at the top of his lungs. As if waking from an out-of-body experience, he watched himself throw all of his weight into his right fist. As the punch connected with the bag, the pressure in his fist jolted him back into the moment. The bag exploded into a cloud of dust, sand seeping onto the platform, burying his feet up to the ankles. Brian coughed and backed away from the smote hanging heavy in the air. After a time, the air cleared as the particulates settled to the gym floor, leaving behind yet another mess for Brian to clean. Looking down at the product of his emotional outburst, Brian sighed, his shoulders drooping.

“What’s another pile, right?”

***

An hour later, after Brian had cleaned up everything in the gym, he left to retrieve a new punching bag from the supply closet down the hall. Brian figured Mik’s self-importance would be enough to allow him to replace the bag without notice. At least that’s what he hoped. As he hoisted the new bag over his shoulder and locked the closet after him, he noticed a strange shadow on the wall down the hall. He swore that he had seen the silhouette of a man but as he walked past the wall there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It appeared that his eyes had just been playing tricks on him. He recalled the boy from earlier and wondered if that too had just been a deception. He reflected on the fact that he hadn’t been getting enough sleep at night and that it was probably finally catching up to him.

Better stop drinking two makers of coffee a day. Surely that’s plays into it. He reminded himself.

As he made his way down the hall he noticed that one of the hall lights was flickering strangely. Brian stopped and watched the light, frowning at the strange behaviour. Glo lights never had those kinds of issues since they didn’t have filaments. That meant someone had probably been tampering with conduits in the generator room. Brian wondered if one of the construction guys had been down there rewiring for the new underground arena they were putting in on the sub-levels. As exciting as the project was, as a whole the thing had become a nightmare; caught in development hell, construction on the arena had barely progressed since Brian had begun working there, and that was nearly a decade ago. As such, it wasn’t uncommon to hear staff making colorful references to “the pit”, as it had come to be known. Along with the references came stories, ranging anywhere from the project nearly bankrupting the gym and thus leaving a gaping, unfinished pit (hence the name), all the way to the workers uncovering the doorway to Endbarron itself, and all the curses and ghouls that went along with it. Though Brian didn’t believe in any of the mumbo-jumbo that circulated around, he did find it unsettling that a string of disappearances had occurred at Falkner’s which coincided with the time they had begun carving out the foundation for the arena. Only one third-party investigation had ever been conducted but the agency’s search had come up dry and they were told it was just work-related hazards. Casualties of the job.

Casualties of the job? Fifteen years and eighty two bodies later, and that was their conclusion? Brian wondered who was getting paid off. Further reason to shut down the Gamboni crime family. Yet, like the rest, Brian was powerless to do anything about it. Whatever was going on underneath Falkner’s, he couldn’t stop it. Not yet, at least. And that left him with a constant sense of unease, especially when he was required to go down to the maintenance levels. And he wasn’t alone in those feelings; virtually nobody went down there those days unless they absolutely had to.

For those reasons, Brian was both incredibly annoyed and anxious at seeing the malfunctioning light overhead. While it could be just a wiring issue–which was not in his jurisdiction–it could also be an issue with the breaker system and that was something he could fix. More, that was something Mik would insist he fix since he had many times before. Falkner’s ran on an incredibly dated, grandfathered power system and none of their generators–although they were Glo powered–was a smart generator, as one would expect in a modern facility. This meant they did not self-regulate and overloads could still trip the lines. While the electrical techs were perfectly capable of realizing (and fixing) these incidents on their own, the hour was late and Brian knew there weren’t any more maintenance crew left in the building so it would be on him to fix it. Of course, he could always leave it for the techs in the morning but if the power went out in their sector in the next couple of hours then Mik would blow a gasket if he couldn’t get his evening lift in. In his current mood, that was likely to not end well for Brian.  Regardless of the risk, Brian had heard enough of Mik for one day and his growing headache demanded that he just get it over with. That, and Brian wasn’t too partial to running the risk of being woken up at some ungodly hour if it did persist into a larger problem. And he wouldn’t put that past Mik.

***

After reattaching the new bag, Brian went over to a terminal on the wall and logged in. A holographic screen appeared and Brian pulled up a link on the touch- sensitive display. Several clicks later, Brian had ordered Mik a new bench–on company credit. There was no way Brian was going to pay that kind of money out of his own pocket. While Mik could squat more than three strong men combined, his math skills were limited to counting plates, which meant he couldn’t follow an accounting record to save his life.

The benefits of having a meathead for a boss.

Giving the order one last look-over before he closed it, he noticed the delivery was confirmed to arrive at the gym in 4 hours time via service drone. Brian frowned at the disclaimer.

“Man, they must have a lot of back-orders if it’s taking that long. What horrible customer service.”

He shook his head and transferred the receipt to the accounting department and shut down the program. Before he turned off the terminal he made sure the cache was cleared, just in case Mik did try his hand at snooping. Brian glanced over to the place where the bench used to be.

“Well, that’s one problem solved.”

He looked over at the hall through the plate glass divide of the gym, seeing the faint flicker of the defective pot light. He sighed and rubbed the sleep attempting to creep into his eyes.

“And another found.”

Brian made his way down to the maintenance level. Along the way, he saw other lights acting up, thus confirming his suspicions about the breaker switch. When he finally reached the sub-floor he was surprised to find the main access door left open, which was doubly concerning considering it was one of the few locations in the building with a level four security clearance.

“Hello?” He called down the hall.

There was no reply, only his own voice echoing down the corridor.

He made his way down the derelict halls, navigating around construction equipment and drop sheets galore, doing his best not to step on anything and add to the tally of expensive equipment ruined in one day. Eventually, he came to the service wing which was blockaded by a set of bi-fold security doors with an optical scanner on the wall. He scanned his retina and the console chimed, the doors opening to allow him in. As Brian stood waiting for the heavy doors to open, the pneumatic pressure locks hissing as they released, he reflected on how much he hated being in the service wing. With floor-to-ceiling electrical panels, servos and other machines whirring about that he could not name, along with the panning hazard lights overhead, it made him feel as if he were on an abandoned space station during some kind of quarantine. He felt as if, at any moment, there would be that final impact of the alien enemy’s weapons, jarring the room just before the station collapsed in on him, followed by the bulkhead disintegrating away, sucking him out into the cold-hearted vacuum of empty space. Although Brian knew he wasn’t in space, and as unlikely as those scenarios were even if he was, Brian didn’t care to play the odds; he would never let himself be found off-planet. He did just fine as a land animal.

Brian came upon a lift, two glass panels barring him access. There was a bio-metric scanner on a pedestal and he placed his thumb against the flashing panel. There was only one way in and out of the generator room and that was via the lift. As per design, the room could be only be accessed from the upper level. The reason for this was that, in the event of any kind of nuclear disaster, the entire room was designed to hermetically seal the lower level–where the generators were–and any imperfection in the seal, such as a doorway or lift, could negate the entire sealing process. There was something about super-powered magnets or something, but it had been so long since Brian had done the safety course that all he could remember was, in the event of a nuclear incident–get the hell out, fast. While Glo wasn’t particularly unstable (it was fusion after all), the equipment Falkner’s used was quite dated and left much to be desired with regards to safety. Or so he was told by the few techs he had talked to.  The scanner made a friendly beep as it confirmed his identity and the glass panels opened. Brian got on the lift and rode it to the upper level where it let him out on a steel catwalk which ran around the perimeter of the room. He leaned against the railing as he gazed down at the rows of generators on the floor below him, pulsating orange lights signifying that everything was as it should be. But clearly that wasn’t the case, so Brian would need to do a walk-around just to be sure. He made his way down a galvanized steel staircase, his boots clanking on the grip strut treads. Once he was on the floor he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small square device. He turned a switch and a digital screen popped to life, a display with a bunch of numbers on the top and a wavering needle which ebbed side to side. Brian glanced out at the generators.

“All right, let’s see which one of you is misbehaving.”

He slowly paced through the aisles between the generators, glancing down intermittently at the device in his hand as he watched the readings. As he made his way over to a corner of the room, he noticed something strange on the housing of one of the generators. As it happened, the needle on his device began to align in the middle, telling him that the very machine was likely the one he was looking for. He shone his flashlight on the metal plate and frowned as he panned his light across the mottled black pattern which crept up the side of the machine from the floor grating. He shone the light down and squatted to take a better look at it. It wasn’t quite like anything Brian had seen before. Mold maybe? Whatever it was, it appeared to be some kind of rot that had come up from the floor. Brian sighed.

“Just great. Power outages and now water damage. Mik’s gonna lose it if they have to do a service call. No power means no gym, which means nothing good for me.”

Brian sneered at the strange mass and stood back up, making his way over to the generator access panel. He turned his tracking device off and opened the panel, shining his light into the interior. Blue Glo bathed the panel in a warm light as he shone the light over the breakers, searching for anything that looked out of place. None of the breakers appeared to be tripped but the a gauge at the top of the panel confirmed what his device had told him: the EMF for this specific generator was running low, so something had to be going on. And then he saw it: a small empty space between two glass bulbs inset into rows. Fuses. Someone had removed one, it looked like.

“Hmm. That explains the surging. Did one of the techs take it out and forget to put it back in, maybe? That doesn’t seem likely. He would’ve seen the same reading I did. Then what…”

Brian saw a shape move out of the corner of his eye and he spun toward it, shining his light in the direction of the motion. His light revealed only rows of indiscriminate generators humming away, as before. He glanced back at the panel and then shrugged, closing it. He made his way back toward the lift, scanning the room with his light as he walked, but there didn’t appear to be anyone else down there with him. Had he seen a rat maybe? No, not unless they had grown over two blades tall.

He really needed to stop drinking coffee.

***

As he exited the lift, he stopped to stretch and yawn. As he reached his arms up to the ceiling, he caught another motion in the hallway up ahead. This time, there was no question about it: it was a man.

“Hey, wait!” Brian shouted.

He ran at the figure but the person rounded a corner and was out of sight. Brian raced down the hall after the person but, rounding the corner, it looked as if he had lost them once more. Whoever this person was he was fast.

Too fast in fact.

So, unless the guy had walked through a wall, where did he go?

Brian walked slowly down the hall, peering into each room through the glass slat in the door, finding nothing but plumbing and cables attached to boilers and other machines he couldn’t put a name to. No mysterious man lurking. After scanning eight or so rooms, Brian grew frustrated and stopped to listen. Several long moments passed and, just as he was about to turn back, he heard footfall in the distance. He bolted toward the sound, his footsteps reverberating off the concrete around him. He rounded another corner and then he saw him: a man standing at the end of the hall before an open elevator shaft. Brian couldn’t be sure if he was seeing right in the wan light but the man appeared to be impossibly tall, well over two-and-a-half blades, and his facial features could only be described as…skeletal. In fact, with his bald head and sunken eyes, which appeared to be lost in darkness, Brian couldn’t be sure he wasn’t looking at a living skeleton. As if that were not odd enough,  the man wore a finely-tailored bespoke suit which stood out in stark contrast to his pale white flesh.

“Hey, mister! What are you doing down here? Only maintenance crew are supposed to be here. If you come with me I’ll show you…”

The man turned away from Brian and walked into the darkness of the elevator shaft, disappearing into the black.

“…back up.”

Brain stared down the hall at the place where the apparition had been just moments before. Was he hallucinating again, or did he just see a man walk into empty space? After a long moment of careful consideration, Brian hesitantly made his way over to the shaft. He placed a hand on the frame of the elevator and peered down into the darkness.

A strange thought came to Brian: was this ‘the pit’ they were all talking about?

How he had never been to that part of the construction site after having worked there for almost four years confounded him, but then again it wasn’t like his job required that he be there. That and he rarely ever came down to the lower levels, except in special cases such as the one he currently found himself in. But he was pretty sure that the sub-floor he was on was the same floor the new arena was being built on–he had seen several signs indicating as much.

So what in Rynn was down that elevator shaft?

As he pondered the thought, he heard a sound from behind and turned toward the source. The man in the suit stood there before him, not an arm’s length away.

“If you’re so interested then why don’t you go see for yourself?” He said.

The man kicked Brian square in the chest and Brian flew backwards into the shaft. The strike to his midsection forced the wind out of him,  choking off a scream that so desperately wanted to escape.  All he could do was watch in silence as the square of light, with the skeleton-man standing in the middle of it, grew smaller and smaller as he fell into the darkness. And though he couldn’t make out the details of his face, Brian knew the man was smiling.

He could feel it.