The Apocalypse Watch

by J Foster Ward

  “I’ll go first,” he said and jumped down.

  Shining a light either direction Jake saw the crawlspace had been used before, and many times. It was just as full of leaf-litter, dirt and footprints as the corridors above. Not to mention the odd bit of humanoid bone. The crawlspace was maybe a meter square and completely unlit except for the occasional patch of emergency lighting shining down from an above grate.

  He climbed up again and motioned to Synthetica. She took out the life-force generator and its soft water-drip sound of detection pulses became comforting. Aside from the crowd of obeyers the device said they seemed to be alone. Jacob set his flashlight to lantern mode and handed it to the android.

  “Stay behind me, keep the light out of my eyes but try to light up as much ahead of me as you can.”

  That way his hands were free.

  He spoke to the sword-wielding rats’ nest that was the barbarian leader. “Me first, then Synthetica. Tesla, you get the rest of your people to follow.”

  Jake climbed down and waited for Synthetica to join him before he moved ahead to make room for the others, hearing them climbing down. It was eerie, crawling along in front, his own shadow stretching past him and the nervous whispering of a couple dozen freed slaves echoing around him like ghosts in the walls. Twice he thought he saw something skittering away in the shadows. The second time he even called a halt and made everyone hold their breath, but he didn’t hear anything ahead.

  “What is it?” Tesla hissed.

  Reluctantly he moved forward alone until he reached the space where he’d seen movement, pistol clenched in a hand steady as a rock. Apparently his new and improved attitude towards dangers didn’t allow for sweaty palms. But once he was there a quick glance up the cross-junction tunnels revealed nothing but empty metal.

  “Looks clear. Keep moving.”

  They went on like that for another ten minutes that felt like ten hours. Back bent, knees scraped raw. The endless fear of something just outside the range of the lantern-light, ready to eat his face. They were over halfway there when he definitely heard something moving up ahead. At first, he thought it was similar to dog’s nails clicking across kitchen linoleum, but then it multiplied until it was a sound like hail on a tin roof. And getting louder.

  “We need to find another way out of here,” he called back. “We need to do it fast and everyone needs to hurry.”

  “How fast?” Synthetica asked, bringing up the wrist-buddy hologram map.

  “Run for your lives fast,” he shouted, scrambling back. “Wrist-buddy, translate that!”

  “You got it, ganz,” the mini-computer said cheerily. And it began spouting phrases at the obeyers in their own language.

  The obeyers listened to the wrist-computer’s tinny speaker and froze then suddenly they were shouting and shoving each other aside to get back. A few panicked and tried to push past Synthetica to go the wrong way but the android was stronger and shoved them back the way they’d come and down a sharp left up another branch of the tunnel.

  Jacob backed up, never taking his eyes from the direction of the noise until he bumped against Tesla who was stuck waiting her turn to escape. Jacob turned once to shout at the bottleneck of tribesmen in English and when he looked back it was almost too late.

  The thing was all glinting eyes and legs ending in fishhook claws and it was hurtling down the crawlway towards him. Jacob’s hand fired before he told it to. He emptied half a clip into it before it collapsed and lay twitching in an expanding pool of yellow goo.

  The crack-crack-crack of the slugthrower drove the tribesmen into more panic.

  Jake inspected the dead thing without getting too close. It had a pair of membranous wings, gigantic multi-faceted eyes and huge mandibles that took up almost half the body mass. The rest of it was a skinny, segmented, wormlike body and at least eight stalk-like legs. It resembled a kindof dragonfly and it was as big as a housecat.

  “What is it?” Synthetica asked.

  “If I had to guess, another atomic superbug. Get going. Fast.”

  The gunshots had been deafening but in the silence that followed he heard more coming. Many more of them coming. He drew the acid revolver he’d recovered from the wyler’s stash and switched hands. Pouring up and around the bend in the crawlway came a swarm. The cat-sized bugs were too big to fly in the small space, but they seemed fine at scuttling in their legs. They leaped and fought to get past each other, clattering up the narrow duct towards him. Jake shoved backwards, causing a terrified panic behind him as the swarm kept coming.

  When they were in range he opened up with the revolver.

  The five chambers of the pistol-shotgun emptied so fast Jake swore in frustration, but the five corrosion rounds had a devastating effect on the swarm of the things. It was like spraying a hornet’s nest with napalm; he just watched them burn and crisp. Like a cookie-cutter chopping cone-shaped wedges out of the mass of insect flesh.

  The light was suddenly gone, and he realised he was alone in the crawlway. He spun and crawled for his life. The obeyers were just up ahead and he was moving faster than they could. There was no time to reload the revolver and the automatic might stop one or two of the bugs but not an entire wave. He holstered both pistols then shoved at the packed humanity in the tight space ahead of him.

  “Go faster!”

  No good. It was like shoving a huge sponge that gave a little but didn’t move. Reluctantly he abandoned the idea of escape and knew what he’d have to do. Still in the cramped space, he fought to unlimber the charged particle beamer from across his back. The tribe had only moved about five meters away from the cross-corridor junction. The clattering, clicking wave of the bugs was getting closer and he aimed the gun for where the swarm would appear. He made a quick series of adjustments to the power output, turning it down to under 10%. It would have to do.

  The first of the flying bugs poured around the corner. He winced at the thought of what was about to happen and fired from the hip.

  Even with eyes screwed shut the blast left a glowing streak in his vision. The plumb-line straight bolt of lightning impacted the crawlway wall at the T junction with a crash and shudder that shook the ground and deafened him. The heat bloom incinerated the bugs, vaporized the impact point of the tunnel wall and backblast rolled up the tunnel making him yell in pain, even through the armor and jumpsuit. Is was like he’d crawled into a pizza oven.

  It was nothing compared to what happened to the naked Obeyers of the Voice. It flash-cooked the rear rank and only the fact they’d formed a human plug prevented the heat wave from continuing up the tunnel and roasting the rest of them. Jacob gritted his teeth against the pain, but the ambient temperature dropped almost immediately, until it felt like nothing worse than a bad sunburn.

  Synthetica was unscathed in her splat armor and looked wide-eyed at him then began spraying some sort of foam treatment on the back rank of burn victims.

  The threat of being incinerated did what no amount of pleading could have. The obeyers fought themselves up the corridor so fast that when Jacob looked back, he was again alone in the dark tunnel.

  He flipped the darkscope goggles down and saw the tunnel in monochrome color. The blast must have either killed or driven off the swarm of the bugs because nothing followed. He waited a long count of thirty but didn’t see or hear anything else coming. Then he went after the people he’d accidentally cooked discovering a hatch door at the end of the crawlway.

  ***

  Chapter 11

  : Tunnel Rats

  He found the obeyers inside the next chamber.

  The crawlway emerged onto a grated walkway about midpoint up a tall room; several meters below was the slowly churning surface of an open canal of water. Here at least there were some more emergency lights, glowing green under a layer of some sort of algae that coated the walls in slime.

  Some of the tribesmen were desperately climbing down the metal struts below the catwalk to bath their scalded limbs in the cold
water. The rush of the churning liquid below made it hard to hear. Jacob made his way to an unoccupied stair up the wall to another catwalk above and lay the particle beamer across his lap. His hands didn’t shake as he swung out the cylinder of the revolver, ejected the five fat shell casings and reloaded it. Then he powered down the long gun and slung it over his shoulder again. Looking around he supposed they had descended into the tween deck below Bravo. It certainly looked like the maintenance area.

  “Tesla,” he called to the tribal princess, catching her attention with a wave. “Which way do we go from here?”

  The girl looked up from where she was helping Synthetica tend to some of her wounded people. The points of her swords were red with blood, probably from prodding the tribe to move faster.

  “Narrow way, over there,” she pointed. “It’s not as direct, but it will work.”

  Another quick translation from Tesla to her people and they were on the move. Jake decided to go with Tesla this time, so she could show him the way. Without leaving the tall chamber, they followed a series of gridded metal walkways over a half-dozen vats, channels and runoff chutes that fed water in and out of pipes. And even one huge, glass-sided reservoir that Jacob at first mistook for a dim green projection screen the size of a two-story building.

  Whatever mixed feelings Jake had about the barbaric, blue-skinned ragamuffin, he could not fault her bravery or calm. As they climbed along the catwalks all signs of the giddy girl were gone, replaced with a grim concentration and cautious, hunter’s instincts. She moved almost without a sound on bare fingers and toes, pausing at every gantry and platform to listen and carefully peer ahead for trouble. As much as he would have preferred Synthetica’s company – or even Milan’s – for a conversation over a couple of emergency protein ration bars, his respect for the barbarian’s skills increased by a power of ten.

  Tesla led him to a juncture of massive pipes and valves with a wall of pressure gauges and switches set into a metal control panel. Jacob stooped to study it and the imprinted knowledge of pumping systems somehow understood it, even if he didn’t. He studied the gauges, many of them frozen and tried the switches. The electrical panel was shorted. But the manual valves were active.

  “There’s a problem here,” he said, mostly to himself.

  Tesla nodded. “What should we do?”

  “Dunno. If these are overflow containment, which they should be, then they’re all dry and the water levels are way too high. Something’s broken.”

  Curious despite himself he flipped down the darkscope and wandered off along the primary water main until he came to the first of three overflow runoffs. It was down a short ladder he found the damage. The wall of the runoff pipe was torn apart. A hatch was peeled back, and water was gushing out of it and back into the main system. Because the valve sensors showed the pipe was still in good working order nothing had tripped it shut and sent the runoff into the secondary or tertiary pipes.

  Jacob found the manual release and used one of Tesla’s swords as a prybar to unfreeze the decades of corrosion. It moved agonizingly slowly at first, then it slammed shut. Immediately the white water raging below slowed and went still. Slowly he watched the water level begin to drop as it drained away. The secondary pipe hummed into activity and after a moment’s complaint of fatigued metal the thrumming in the damaged pipe stopped.

  Jacob inspected the ripped open runoff pipe. The wall of the pipe was split and bent outwards from the inside. Something on the far side had forced it open. Reverse pressure? He had a nervous feeling it was more than that. He made his way back to the obeyers.

  Tesla had paused, peering into one of the crawlways exiting into the waterworks. The girl lifted up some sort of thick plastec barrel off the catwalk with the tip of her sword as Jacob came up beside her. It was semi-translucent yellow plastic, bent and torn.

  “Maybe a container washed into the waterworks?” he speculated. “Somehow? Or plastic lining to a vat that came loose?”

  Tesla stared at him with huge eyes; she was clearly terrified.

  “What? What is it?” Jacob asked, annoyed.

  The answer came back from the Synthetica. “Scan analysis indicates it’s an organic, long-chain polymer. It’s chitin,” the android said simply.

  “No,” Tesla said. “It’s a shell.”

  “Isn’t that what I said? Aquatic. At a supposition, something shed its shell due to growth.”

  Jacob physically shuddered. “You’ve got to be – no. No. What could be…? Fuck!”

  He automatically started looking around him for whatever could have left it behind, but nothing had changed.

  “We need to leave this place!” Tesla almost shouted.

  “For once I agree. Move. Fast.”

  He chased them along as fast as they could go. Some were limping and wounded from fighting each other in the tunnels, others burned with patches of skin blistered and peeling. Everyone kept up when Tesla showed them the piece of shell big enough to use as a raft.

  They got to the far side of the waterworks and Tesla emphatically gestured into one of the crawlways. Entering this one Jacob saw the walls, floor and ceiling of the tunnel had been scraped down to shiny metal in some places, like something big had been forced through the confined area. His sphincter tightened.

  “Is there another way?” he asked.

  “We’re nearly there. This is the only way.”

  Jake went first again.

  The last leg of the journey started off fine. They made a dozen turns inside the crawlway at Tesla’s direction and she kept re-assuring Jacob they were almost there.

  It wasn’t until the panicked obeyers started pushing from behind that he even realised there was a problem. The screams started up and suddenly Jacob knew what a champagne cork felt like. It was all he could do not to get trampled and crushed in the press of bodies. Tesla and Synthetica were pushed into a side tunnel along with some desperate tribesmen and Jacob driven straight, keeping just ahead of the pack, until he saw the tunnel dead-ended at an intact ventilation grate. He winced, preparing for the impact.

  At the last moment he slammed his shoulder into the grate as hard as he could, hoping to break it, but it held fast. He didn’t have a second chance. The press of bodies from behind, screaming and terrified with crazy fear-strength, squeezed him against it and slowly began to crush him. He began to wonder what Circe would say when he told her how he died this time.

  With a moaning of overstressed hinges, the grate burst open and Jacob and the obeyers shot out into a main corridor like an over-squeezed tube of meat-flavoured toothpaste. He was nearly trampled but the upgraded strength of his new body was superior to the blue tribesmen and he struggled to the surface, losing his darkscopers and pistol along the way.

  The obeyers continued to fight and crawl out of the opening and Jacob did his best to drag people out of the way of the trampling. When the press of bodies slowed, Jacob stuck his head and shoulders into the crawlway and saw a straggler make it around the bend; a teenage boy cradling an obviously broken arm to his chest. It was Tesla’s little cousin.

  Then… it took him. The thing.

  One moment the boy was there, and the next Bool had been yanked screaming back around the bend. Blood fountained back. Then the monster hissed into view like a steam engine, accompanied by the rattling-hammers sound of its many legs on the metal duct.

  Synthetica had been right, it was aquatic. A scintillating opaline-white shell that he’d last seen resetting spear traps and harvesting a dead obeyer before he’d met Yanco. The body was a tumorous, segmented shell like a lobster, propelled on maybe a dozen armored legs. The face, if that’s what you’d call it, was a fleshy hole surrounded by constantly moving palps, the eyes on long stalks. It had one small arm with a claw the size of Jake’s own arm, but the other was a massive, wickedly curved thing, almost the length of the entire creature’s body. The inner curves of the scimitar-like blades of the claw had serrated edges that looked sharp enough to cu
t a man in half.

  And it was currently splashed in blood, swallowing Bool’s blue legs into that fleshy palp hole.

  The last time Jake had looked face-to-face with anything like the creature was when he was ordering his lobster dinner from a seafood restaurant. Only this time is was Jake on the menu.

  “Not today, you horrible fucker,” Jake told it.

  He emptied the shotgun’s five rounds down the tunnel more to try and wipe the image of the thing from his mind than kill it. Luckily the acidic pellets ripped and burned the thing enough to make it hiss like an old-fashioned locomotive, and squirm backwards with each impact. But as soon as Jake finished shooting it advanced again, almost as quickly.

  Jake wasn’t sure but it felt like he could see hate in its eyes.

  Jacob calmly tossed the pistol aside at the retreating obeyers and swung the particle beamer off his back onto his shoulder. As the combat reflexes built into his clone body took over, it was like time slowed. His thumb hit the battery cutout, the charge-counter showed ten shots. It had two triggers, and the first trigger lit up the target with a laser beam as he brushed it that both acted as a target sight and ionized the air in a channel for the plasma beam to follow.

  He squeezed the second trigger and fired lightning into the crawlway.

  The beam took it in the neck just below the head and tunnelled lengthways down the body, illuminating it from the inside like a lantern of rainbow colors. Then the killer crustacean exploded in a fountain of steam and flesh, detonating along the segmented lines of the shell. A roasted geyser of hot monster goo erupted out of the crawlway hatch like a cake pan with too much batter when it cooked. A steaming duvet of steam-broiled guts slammed Jacob back off his feet. His head smacked off the floor and for a long moment he lay there, suffocating in the fishy reek of burned shrimp salad.