The Knife

“Come on, come on...” Jack Allison pleaded breathless as he gripped the sides of what looked to be an ordinary air conditioner. It was mounted to one of the windows in the large room that was his but unfamiliar. Various expensive gadgets and high-tech tools lined the walls, most of whose functions he could only guess at. Just then a loud bang came from the reinforced steel door at the other end of the room and Jack jumped. His pulse quickened and he could hear harsh Germanic shouts and the robotic clomp and whirr of something massive from beyond the door. He didn’t have much time. “Why won’t you, work!” As he shouted this two things happened: The first being that the air conditioner suddenly blinked to life it’s simplistic LED display vibrant in green numerals. The second thing to happen concerned that of the thing on the opposite side of the door, the thing appeared to have adopted a new strategy to gain entry, evident by the slow moving molten line that began to form on the door tracing a large circle. Acrid black smoke began to writhe into the room. Quickly Jack used the soft plastic embedded arrows on the front of the air conditioner to manipulate a setting that had once been labeled by the manufacturer as “temp”, but had since been duct taped over with a new label that read: “time”. Jack frantically tapped the down arrow on the time setting, until the readout flashed: 07/28/20. He then slammed his finger down on the power button, just as a loud crash went off behind him resulting in a large circular cut of hissing steel on the floor outlined in bubbling orange. Through the smoke Jack could see the silhouette of something huge and misshapen looming in the circular opening. It barked something at him in German. Jack snapped back to the air conditioner console and could hear it starting up, the high pitched whine and the whirr of the fan coalesced to sound something akin to a fighter jet gearing up, and after a few seconds one-hundred fighter jets, a thousand. Jack’s skin was covered with frost now, looking