Free Doomware by Nathan Kuzack Page A

morning.
    He tried to move away from her again, and at the same moment she barged into him, the momentum sending them plunging backwards into the mirrored wardrobes. A crunch told him the mirror had broken, and the back of his head screamed in agony. Her limpet-like hold on the tie was unrelenting; it tightened further, its knot pushing against his Adam’s apple. She was choking him. Trying to kill him. With his own tie.
    My own mother!
    The woman who’d given him life was trying to take it away again, like a dreadful mistake she was desperate to correct.
    He slid down the shattered door, barely noticing the shards of mirror falling to the floor on either side of him, horrified by the look on her white, wraithlike face as much as anything else. On the floor, their hands locked in a struggle for possession of the tie, he brought one leg up and placed the sole of his foot against her chest. Slowly, he pushed her away with his foot, but her grip on the tie remained steady, and he only succeeded in increasing the tension on it. Now he was choking in earnest, and strange starbursts started appearing in his field of vision. If this went on much longer he would lose consciousness. There was nothing else for it, no other option.
    Acting half on instinct, he brought his leg back as far as he could, readying it like a piston, before releasing it, kicking her hard in the chest. She gave a little grunt as the air was knocked from her lungs and went reeling backwards, losing her grip on the tie. The kick had been more forceful than he’d anticipated and he wondered if he’d broken any of her ribs, straight away feeling a bolt of remorse, but the relief when she’d let go of the tie had been just as instantaneous. He grabbed at it frantically, trying to undo it, but its knot was now so incredibly small and tight the only way he’d get the damn thing off would be by cutting it.
    Distracted, thinking she couldn’t possibly recover that fast, he almost didn’t notice in time when she came at him again. She’d picked up a large shard of mirror the shape of a scalene triangle, and by the time he managed to grab her its pointed tip was only inches from his face. Her strength astonished him now; it seemed to take every ounce of energy he had to stop her driving the improvised weapon into his face, a face he knew she – his real mother – adored.
    Then her eyes started to change. He noticed the whites darkening first, followed closely by the hazel colour draining from the irises. Finally, the cataract-like stains erupted in each pupil, completing a transformation so hypnotically terrifying he almost forgot about the glass shard she was trying to plunge into his face. The centres of her eyes looked as if they were glowing from deep within cylindrical hollows, as bright and hard and lifeless as diamonds, each one outward evidence of the corrupted technology it was bound to.
    This isn’t my mum, he thought. She’s dead. She’s gone . He hadn’t fully accepted it before, but now he had no option but to let the fact in, to welcome it even, in the face of what was to come. The quasi-robotic thing that was no longer his mother couldn’t be reasoned with, and there was no question it was doing everything in its power to try and kill him. Only one of them could possibly walk out of there.
    He was thinking the unthinkable.

CHAPTER 10
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    He hated the Tube. The questioning looks, the suspicion, the sometimes open hostility. These ten-times-a-week necessities barely given a second thought by the vast majority of people were like mini public trials for him. Trials at which the verdict was always the same: guilty. A long time ago the Tube might have been a safe haven, a relaxing place where he could have become the same as everyone else, but the advent of underground transmitters had put an end to that idea. There was virtually nowhere you could go where ordinary people’s global positioning capabilities didn’t work, allowing them to