Clockwork Chaos by C.J. Henderson, Bernie Mozjes, James Daniel Ross, James Chambers, N.R. Brown, Angel Leigh McCoy, Patrick Thomas, Jeff Young Page B

so kind as to wait here, Miss Kelly,” the Devil said, stopping her in the corridor. “We will call for you when we are ready.”
    Mary waited patiently for half an hour, then less patiently, pacing the length of the hallway and wishing for a chair to rest her feet. She sat against the wall, and after a time, began to doze.
    She woke, her head in a muddle, to a voice at the door.
    “Excellent! The experiment is a profound success. Just one more test.” The door opened, and the Devil peered out at her. “Come, come, Miss Kelly, we’re not paying you to sleep.”
    He brought her into a dimly lit room. At the far end was a thick, metal door, and next to that, a tube that led from the wall to a chair, where a man might sit comfortably while looking through the eye-piece into the next room. He led her by the elbow to the metal door, opened it onto a blindingly bright room and pushed her through, then pulled the door shut behind her.
    What did she see first? The machine? The donkey? The naked girls? Or the blood?
    Mary stared at the scene in front of her, trying to comprehend. One of the men sat within the machine, strapped in with leather cords. Copper prongs extended from two metal-lined tubes to either side of his head. The machine buzzed lightly, and thin arcs of light crackled between the prongs and the copper-mesh crown on his head. The machine itself was a thing of wood and metal, two disks rising vertically like a pleasure wheel at the fair. Another man stood at the crank. He wore a strange helmet of rubber and lead that extended all the way to his shoulders. He’d clearly already been pleasured, as had the donkey, who now pressed himself against the wall as far from the dead girl as he could manage. One girl stood above the body of the other, wearing almost as much blood as the girl on the floor, and almost as blank and motionless. A knife hung loose in her hand.
    Mary stared, mouth open. She’d been seriously underpaid.
    The Devil’s muffled voice came through a grate in the wall, next to a thick block of curved glass. “Has Miss Kelly begun to emote?”
    “She’s just standing there like a cow.”
    “We need to see if the Influence Machine can establish control over a distance while they’re agitated. Do something to agitate her.”
    “Very well.” The man in the machine focused his gaze on the living girl, and sparks arced across his head.
    The girl dropped the knife and crouched by the dead girl, gripped her hair to lift her head off the floor, and kissed the dead mouth with passion. The man in the machine smiled and bit on his lower lip; in response, the girl clamped her teeth on the dead girl’s lip and tore. Mary screamed.
    She scrabbled at the doorknob. The door rattled against the lock. “Let me out. Oh God, let me out!”
    God may not have heard, but the Devil did. “Splendid. You may begin.”
    The man with the helmet turned the crank. The disks spun, each in an opposite direction. Electricity crackled and arced brighter over the other man’s head, glowed around freestanding copper balls. The room smelled like a lightning strike.
    A disturbingly familiar pressure began to build at the base of Mary’s skull, buzzed at her temples.
    “No, no, no! ” Mary drew her own knife, a bone-handled thing she’d had from her father before he died, and had carried tucked in her boot from Cardiff to London, and from Caernarfon to Cardiff before that. Could she reach the man in the machine before she was reduced to a mindless automaton? Before they made her do things like that ? Again ? No, the closer she was to the machine, the stronger the effects; a single step confirmed that. Instead, she pressed the blade against her own chest.
    A sound came through the grate. A popping sound, muffled like the Devil’s voice had been. Mary took a step back, away from the machine, behind the door. It swung open and a man stepped in. He fired two shots at the man in the machine, striking him in the chest both times.