Nightside 09 - Just Another Judgement Day

Until finally he stood in the centre of the lobby and looked around him. No-one had escaped. The floor was heaped with the dead, the last of their life’s blood soaking into the rich carpeting. The only sound came from the teenage receptionist, crying loudly, hopelessly, in her chair behind her desk. The Walking Man shot her through the left eye. Her head snapped back, and her brains stained the wall behind her.
    He walked unhurriedly across the lobby, sometimes kicking bodies out of his way, until he came to the door at the far end. He paused there a moment, then picked up a dead man’s arm to press the bloody hand against the door, leaving a clear bloody handprint. A sign of where he’d gone. The view on the screen followed him through the door and down the steps he found there, to the next level. At the bottom of the steps, another heavy door, with state-of-the-art electronic locks and security devices. The Walking Man looked at them, and, one by one, the locks snapped open and the security devices disengaged. The door swung slowly open as he approached it.
    The Walking Man entered a long, narrow room full of computers and assorted technology. Someone had money for the very best. The Walking Man passed them by, indifferent. He did pause to consider hundreds of memory crystals growing in a thick, shimmering liquid bath, inside a wide glass-and-steel lattice. The equivalent of a DVD-pressing plant, perhaps. The technicians working in the room looked round sharply as he entered, then rose quickly from their chairs and backed away as they saw the guns in his hands. One of them hit an alarm, and a raucous electronic howl filled the room. Armed men came running into the room from the other end. They had semi-automatic weapons, and body armour. They opened fire the moment they saw the Walking Man—short, controlled bursts, just the way they’d been trained.
    He killed them all anyway. Guards and technicians, armed and unarmed. His bullets punched clean through the body armour as easily as through the technician’s white lab coats. Weapons couldn’t touch him, couldn’t stop him. He walked unhurriedly forward and killed everyone before him. Once again there was shouting and screaming, and pleas for mercy, and blood and brains on the air and on the floor, but the Walking Man never stopped smiling. A cold, grim, satisfied smile. When they were all dead, he systematically smashed the crystal lattice, and half-formed crystals splashed on to the floor, and the Walking Man crushed them under his boots.
    Another door, at the far end. More stairs, down to the next level. The defences there were really hard core. They would have stopped anyone else. As the Walking Man reached the bottom of the stairs, heavy-duty gun barrels protruded from both walls and opened fire on him. The din in the confined space was appalling, as the guns pumped out thousands of rounds per minute, but he strode unflinchingly through the smoke and the noise, and none of the bullets could touch him. His coat wasn’t holed or tattered, or even scorched by proximity to the red-hot gun barrels. The guns finally fell silent, and the Walking Man went on.
    Further down the hallway, energy guns slid smoothly out of the walls, future or alien technology from some Timeslip or another. They blasted the Walking Man with all kinds of energies and radiations, strange lights flaring in the dimly lit hallway, and none of it affected him in the least. He grabbed one gun barrel as he passed, ripping it effortlessly from its mounting. He examined it briefly, then threw it aside, never slowing his pace for a moment.
    Force shields sprang into being before him, shimmering walls to block his way. He strode through them, and they burst like soap bubbles. Poison gasses belched into the hallway from hidden vents, and he breathed them in like summer air and kept going. A trap-door opened abruptly beneath his feet, revealing a bottomless pit, but he kept walking, as though the floor was still there to support him.
    Finally, he came face-to-face with a massive steel door. Ten feet tall, eight feet wide. Just to look at it was to know it was thick and heavy and solid. Tons of steel, held in place by massive bolts. The Walking Man stopped, and considered the door thoughtfully. Far behind him, the alarms were still shrieking dimly. The Walking Man put away his guns and placed both his hands flat against the steel door. He frowned slightly, and his fingers sank slowly,