The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [11]
The sun dropped below the horizon like a guillotine blade, and it was suddenly night, as if someone had flicked a switch in heaven. Mativi had become too used to life off the Equator, had been working on the basis that night would steal up slowly as it had in Quebec and Patagonia. But the busy equatorial night had no time for twilight. He hadn't brought night vision goggles. Had he brought a torch?
As they walked up the street, a wind gathered, as if the landscape sensed his unease.
"You have to be careful," said the girl, "tread only where I tread. And you have to bend down." She nodded at Mativi's Kinshasa Rolex. "You have to leave your watch outside."
Why? So one of your bacheque boyfriends can steal it while I'm in there? To satisfy the girl's insistence, he slid the watch off his wrist and set it on a brick, but picked it up again when she wasn't looking and dropped it into his pocket.
"Where are we going?" he said.
"In there," she pointed. Half-buried in the rubble was a concrete lintel, one end of a substantial buried structure, through which the wind was whistling.
No. Correction. Out of which the wind was whistling.
She slipped under the lintel, on which was fixed a sign saying WARNING! EXTREME PERSONAL DANGER! The room beyond had once had skylights. Now, it had ruined holes in the roof, into which the geostationary UNPEFORCONG security moon poured prisms of reflected sunlight. Thirty-five thousand, nine hundred kilometres above Mativi's head, he and five million other Kinshasans were being watched with 5,000 cameras. This had at first seemed an outrageous intrusion on his privacy, until he'd realized that he'd have to commit a thousand murders before any of the cameras was likely to catch him in the act.
"Don't step any closer," said the girl. "It will take you."
The entrance had promised an interior like any other minor military strongpoint - only just large enough to contain a couple of hammocks and a machine gun, maybe. But inside, after only a few steps down, the room was huge, the size of a factory floor. They had entered via an engineer's inspection catwalk close to the roof. He was not sure how far down the floor was.
The wind in here was deafening. The girl had to shout. "THERE IS MORE THAN ONE IN HERE. THEY LIVE IN THE MACHINES. THE GOVERNMENT MADE THE MACHINES, BUT NOT WITH TECHNICIANS AND ELECTRICIANS. WITH SORCERY."
The machines did not look made by sorcery. They were entirely silent, looking like rows of gigantic, rusted steel chess pawns twice the height of a man, with no pipes or wires entering or leaving them, apparently sitting here unused for any purpose. Mativi felt an urgent, entirely rational need to be in another line of employment.
"HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT THE MACHINES WERE BUILT FOR?" said Mativi, who had.
The girl nodded. "THE DEMONS ARE IN THE MACHINES," she said. "THE MACHINES WERE BUILT AS CAGES. THE MILITARY MEN WHO MADE THIS PLACE WARNED ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN OUR DISTRICT OF THIS. THEY WARNED MY FATHER. THEY TOLD HIM NEVER TO BREAK ANY OF THE MACHINES OPEN. BUT OVER TIME, THEY LEAK, AND THE DEMONS CAN GET OUT. THE FIRST TWO MACHINES ARE SAFE, FOR NOW. BUT YOU MUST BE CAREFUL, BECAUSE WE THOUGHT THE THIRD ONE WAS SAFE TOO, AND IT TOOK CLAUDE."
"WHAT DID IT DO TO CLAUDE, WHEN IT TOOK HIM?" said Mativi. He could not see any damage to the walls around the third machine beyond, perhaps, a certain swept-clean quality of the dust on the floor around it.
"IT TOOK HIM," said the girl. "IT MADE HIM SMALL. IT SUCKED HIM UP."
"THE MACHINES," said Mativi in broken Lingala. "THEY ARE COVERED WITH ... WITH THINGS."
The heads of the chess-pawns, under the light of Mativi's