by Joe Mahoney
As a distraction, though, it worked just fine.
Jacques took full advantage of Akasha’s fleeting inattention, wrenching itself free of Akasha’s embrace in a single motion so violent that it produced a massive wave of phosphorescent goo that slammed into me like a wall of solid rubber. For the next several seconds it was as though I’d been plunged deep into a bowl of pudding. I caught a glimpse of Jacques and Akasha racing toward the wand, but I no longer gave a damn about them. Their contest had transformed the pool into a death trap, a churning mass of goo that threatened to consume me.
Before long the goo coated every part of me. Pawing at it only made it worse. It clung to me with a murderous tenacity. It got in my ears, my nostrils, my mouth, until I could no longer breathe, and I reeled at the horror of my imminent demise even as I considered that maybe it was all for the best, given that just before starting to drown I’d seen Jacques beat Akasha to the wand, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around for the consequences of that.
XXVI
An Absorbing Turn of Events
I staggered to a stop, choking and gagging. It was several seconds before I realized that I was no longer in the pool of goo. That I wasn’t actually on the verge of suffocating. That I had been expelled from Jacques’ consciousness and was back on C’Mell, at the break of that planet’s dawn. I was clutching Iugurtha in my arms.
We were standing behind the scorched remains of a Necronian reservoir, ankle deep in filthy green goo. I peered past the ruptured reservoir and saw the charred ruins of the compound a couple of hundred feet away. How much time had passed? It was difficult to say. The fighting appeared to have stopped, at least on the ground. It was impossible to see what was happening in space. The sun had yet to completely crest the horizon, but C’Mell’s avocado sky was already too bright to see stars or other celestial phenomenon. I hoped that we were far enough away from the compound to be safe should Jacques decide to open fire again.
My nephew Ridley lay on the ground nearby, curled up with his head resting on his forearm. Sleeping peacefully, if his posture was any indication. I could hear him gently snoring. The gate lay on the ground beside him in the form of a book, soaked in goo leaked from the reservoir. Because the book was closed, I could not draw strength from it. Because using it depleted suns and made me sick, I left it closed. Without access to its power, and with precious little strength left of my own, I remained upright through little more than inertia. I could not count on that to animate me much longer.
Iugurtha’s mechanical spider lingered nearby, whirring and clicking idly. It had tried to prevent me from moving Iugurtha when I’d been Jacques, but now that the job was done it seemed content to leave us alone.
A group of Necronians loitered several yards away, almost certainly the Necronians I’d used to move us when I’d been Jacques. There was one exception. That one—Jack Poirier—stood encircled by the others, captive within a latticework of interlocked tentacles. As I watched, the Necronians comprising the circle raised their wands as one.
“Leave it alone!” I shouted, because I had not forgotten Jack once trying to help me save Katerina on Earth, or attempting to succour me when I’d been thirsty.
Jacques ignored my hoarse protest and placed the tips of its wands against Jack’s scalp. The wands lit up as one. Fire danced along their shafts to clothe the doomed Necronian’s body in a coat of scathing luminescence.
I would have done more to help Jack (I’m almost sure of it) except that just then Iugurtha twitched in my arms, commanding my attention. Pale, featureless and misshapen, she looked even worse than before. She was sweating profusely, but it wasn’t normal sweat—this sweat was sticky, like glue. Exhausted, with my arms turning to rubber, I desperately needed to set her down, but when I tried, I discovered that I couldn’t get her out of my arms.
“Uh oh.”
“What is it, Mr. Wildebear?” Sebastian asked.
“I can’t let go of her.”
I knelt and rested my arms on the ground. It was awkward, half leaning over Iugurtha, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
“Uh oh,” Sebastian said.
“What? Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“I’ve seen this before,” Sebastian said. “Once, when the entity needed to repair itself.”
“Did I not just tell you not to tell me?”
“It healed itself by assimilating insects and small animals. Sounds like it’s about to do the same with you. I suggest you keep your distance.”
“Which I would gladly do if I didn’t happen to be stuck to her.”
“Cut yourself free.”
“I don’t have a knife.”
“Chew yourself free.”
“Seriously?”
“Do whatever it takes, Mr. Wildebear, or you and the entity are about to get to know one another a whole lot better.”
What Sebastian was saying was true. The skin of Iugurtha’s neck was actually spreading itself along my left arm, and doing so at an alarming rate. I suppressed a rising panic. “How much time do I have?”
“Until the process becomes vascular. Once that happens you’re in trouble. What I saw didn’t take long. I’d say you have a few minutes, at best.”
I didn’t know what vascular meant, exactly—something to do with blood vessels, I guessed—but it didn’t matter. It sounded bad. The important thing was to make sure it didn’t get to that point. But how? Iugurtha’s epidermis had become a living thing, on the prowl for foreign flesh to make its own. Whatever part of me it touched, it annexed. In less than half a minute most of my left arm adhered to flesh that had once been Iugurtha’s neck and shoulders.
As the seconds passed, Iugurtha became increasingly agitated. Soon she was writhing in my arms like a panicked animal. A swollen mass of flesh that had once been her left hand brushed my face and fused to my skin almost instantly. When I attempted to remove it, strands of pale skin trailed along behind my hand like melted mozzarella on a three-cheese pizza.
“Dear God.” Disgust briefly eclipsed fear. “I could really use some help here, Sebastian.”
Sebastian uttered some gibberish in a voice much louder than usual.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I was trying to get the entity’s spider to intervene. Unfortunately, it’s programmed to respond only to certain voices.”
“Any other tricks up your sleeve?”
“I’ve reached out for help. Someone should be here soon. In the meantime, why don’t you try burning her off?”
Such were my straits that I briefly considered it. “I don’t have any matches. And my hands are stuck.”
“Roll around on the ground. Scrape her off.”
“You really think that’ll help?”
“No,” Sebastian admitted. “But I’m running out of suggestions.”
I decided against that one. Coming to rest on my back I tried not to despair. Iugurtha was as attached to me now as a conjoined twin. Her clammy body continued to annex mine in a process that was becoming increasingly painful. Everywhere her skin made contact with mine burned as though I’d been standing out in the sun too long—naked, on a hot beach somewhere near the equator. At what point would the process become irreversible? Would I even know? What if I’d passed that point already?
I took some small comfort (it would have taken extraordinarily perceptive scientific instruments to detect such miniscule comfort) in the knowledge that the process wouldn’t kill me outright. Iugurtha wasn’t murdering me: she was simply absorbing me. I would become a part of her. Barnabus J. Wildebear would live on in the entity known as Iugurtha, with Joyce, Angelique, a bird of some kind, a bandaloot, and (from the sounds of it) several insects and small animals. After all that I had been through, I couldn’t believe it had come to this. I sure hoped we all got along.
“I see you two ha
ve become quite attached.”
A man loomed over me. If he considered his little joke the least bit amusing, you wouldn’t have known it to look at him. A sparse beard failed to conceal thin lips that looked as though they had never known the pleasure of a smile. Rags barely discernible as Casa Terra issue hung off his emaciated frame. What little hair he possessed was snow white and dangled well past his shoulders. Despite the change in his appearance, I recognized him straight away. A version of Sebastian strapped to his right wrist confirmed his identity. Like Schmitz, Gordon Rainer’s lengthy sojourn on C’Mell hadn’t done him any favours, at least that I could see.
He knelt and began pulling Iugurtha off me with surprising vigour, considering the look of him.
Thinking to save him the trouble, I said, “That’s not going to do any good.”
And then watched in amazement as he managed to separate us with relative ease. Unfortunately, once he succeeded in pealing Iugurtha off me (leaving chunks of skin and flesh behind, bits that soon detached and fell to the ground), she immediately threw her arms around him. My amazement turned to dismay when I realized why this was so: Iugurtha had found someone whose psychological and physical characteristics she preferred.
I could not help but feel a little insulted.
Rainer struggled to remain upright under the weight of Iugurtha’s body. Now I would have to help him just as he had helped me.
I willed myself upright, staggered over to Rainer, and began pawing fruitlessly at Iugurtha’s slimy flesh. I couldn’t get a grip on her. In mere seconds she’d become as slippery as a fish. Yet she adhered to Rainer as though already a part of him, hugging him close, like a malevolent blanket.
“It’s okay, Mr. Wildebear,” Rainer said. “Leave me alone. It’s as it should be.”
I stared at him in disbelief. The crazy bastard actually wanted this to happen. So he could be together with Angelique, or utilize Iugurtha’s powers to further Casa Terra’s cause, or both.
Not that it mattered. There wasn’t much I could do to help anyway. The process was occurring much faster with him than it had with me. Iugurtha quickly converted herself into one contiguous suit of naked flesh covering almost all of Rainer’s body. There was no way to stop or slow the process that I could see. In less than two minutes, Rainer was coated almost head to toe in a fresh layer of bright pink skin, devoid of clothing, hair, or other distinguishing features. Soon only the native flesh of his face remained visible. By then he looked damned peculiar. Yet he withstood it all silently, only a certain tension around his eyes betraying his discomfort.
I couldn’t just stand by and let it happen. Not and be able to look Sarah in the eye afterward. And then I had it: the eyes. Iugurtha’s eyes. The one constant in Burning Eye’s appearance over many incarnations. According to Sebastian, the source of her power. What would happen if I removed them from the equation? I needed to find out. I didn’t have a knife and there was no time to find one. It didn’t matter—I would rip them from her flesh with my teeth if need be. Still, I hesitated. What about the others? If I destroyed Iugurtha, I would also be killing whatever was left of Sweep, Joyce, Angelique, and whoever, whatever else was a part of her.
I took too long. Before I could launch myself at the cocoon of alien flesh enclosing Rainer, a familiar whirring and clicking came at me from behind. Cold metal fingers clutched me around the neck and hoisted me into the air. I hung there for what seemed an eternity, choking, strangling. Stars appeared in my peripheral vision. Just before it all went black, someone shouted words in a language I didn’t know, and my mechanical assailant released me. I bounced off C’Mell’s hard earth like a rag doll, the wind knocked out of me for the second time in as many days.
As I lay in the tall grass desperately trying to suck chlorine-scented air back into my lungs, air that took its sweet time coming, Iugurtha’s spider picked up Rainer and Iugurtha, placed them on its back, and clanked away.
More shouting. I recognized the voice if not the words. The spider stopped dead in its tracks. Yet more words in that foreign tongue and the spider reversed its course through the crimson grass. My nephew Ridley entered my field of vision. Seeing him up and about imbued me with the strength to sit up, and I watched him climb onto the side of the spider, heard him issue more commands in that alien tongue. The spider peeled Iugurtha off Rainer like two gigantic slabs of bacon and fussed over them for several seconds with a dextrous limb. Afterward it gave something to Ridley, who climbed off the mechanical creature, and the spider trotted off.
Ridley jogged over to me. “You okay?”
“Got the wind knocked out of me.” No point getting into everything else wrong with me. “You?”
“I’m fine.”
I regarded him suspiciously. Anxiety wafted off him like a stench. He couldn’t seem to keep still. He kept looking this way and that as though expecting someone to punch him.
“You sure?”
“Feeling a bit weird,” he admitted.
“How so?”
“Don’t know. Different somehow. Tense.”
I guessed that it was the experience of being in battle making him feel this way, along with the after effects of Jacques’ nightmare. It appeared to have stripped the insolence from him. I couldn’t say yet if the latter was much of an improvement, but I did know one thing: that I had a much better chance of getting this version of Ridley home than the previous one.
I climbed to my feet and staggered out of the shadow of the ruptured reservoir. It was much warmer and brighter than it had been only moments before. C’Mell’s enormous sun was well over the horizon now, a few scattered clouds doing nothing to diminish its potency. Uncomfortably hot in my vest, I wrestled it off and tossed it aside. Afterward I collected the book from where it lay on the ground, turned it into a ring, and slipped it on my finger.
I shielded my eyes and surveyed our surroundings. What was left of Iugurtha’s army was calling back and forth in the distance, but I couldn’t see them. Nor could I see any Necronians. Jack and its tormentors were gone. Did this mean that Jack had escaped its fate? Unlikely, but I hoped so.
“Looks like the battle’s over,” I told Ridley, though I had no way of knowing for sure. “We should be safe now.”
Ridley relaxed visibly. “Did we win?”
I gave it to him straight. “A lot of people got hurt. Some died. Others—” I looked toward the spider, scampering briskly away with its human cargo— “well, it doesn’t look so good for them.”
“Don’t worry about that guy,” Ridley said. “He’ll be fine. I was trained to deal with that sort of thing.”
I detected more than a hint of pride in the boy’s voice. Perhaps a few honest changes had accompanied Iugurtha’s alterations.
“Gurtha won’t be too happy, though,” he went on, “having to start from scratch.” He held up a hand to reveal two eyes sitting in his palm, bits of flesh still clinging to them.
“Not a whole lot of her left,” I observed.
Ridley stuffed the eyeballs in a pocket. “All that matters.”
“And the rest of her?”
Ridley glanced at the spider receding into the distance. As we watched, it dumped a mass of flesh unceremoniously on the ground without breaking its stride.
“Gone,” he said.
And that was it for Sweep, Joyce, Angelique, and all the other beings that Iugurtha had absorbed over time. They’d done their bit. Would it have been better if Iugurtha had taken Rainer as well so that they all could have lived on in whatever limited fashion such an existence afforded them? Perhaps. But had any part of them ever really been alive within Iugurtha, influencing her decisions, shaping her destiny? Or had they all just served as a kind of biological, psychological fuel? If the latter, then this was probably for the best.
Still, I did not look forward to having to tell Humphrey about Joyce.
I he
ard a rustle to my right and spun just in time to see a T’Klee round the reservoir. The sight of the great cat mere feet away sent a shiver up and down my spine. Ridley and I exchanged glances, and I was pretty sure we were both thinking the same thing: that in its prime, this T’Klee would have been fearsome to behold. Now, old before its time, it inspired only pity. I could see its ribs clearly demarcated against its fur, fur that once had been indigo but was now a most unflattering brown. I did not care to imagine what had conspired to make it that shade of brown.
Seeing a T’Klee so bedraggled was a shock, almost (but not quite) worse than seeing it starving. T’Klee cannot abide filth. They typically go to great lengths to keep themselves clean. A healthy T’Klee finding itself in as sorry a state as this one would have sat right down and refused to budge until it had sorted itself out. That this T’Klee hadn’t suggested that it was broken inside as well as out, and my heart went out to it.
Moving with the slow, deliberate motions of a zombie, it shambled on by without acknowledging our existence. Other cats appeared in its wake, all of them little more than skin and bones, some so frail that they were forced to use their teeth to clutch the tails of those before them for support, like children. Within half a minute, dozens of T’Klee had passed by us, leaving their prison behind, heading home to pick up where they’d left off, if that was even possible anymore.
We watched them go in silence.
“Who died?” Ridley asked abruptly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You said people died in the battle. Who?”
“I didn’t catch their names.”
“Are you sure they’re dead? Maybe they just looked like they were dead.”
“They were dead, all right.”
Ridley looked about to protest, but in the end just turned away. Maybe I had been too harsh. He would have known those soldiers, after all. Maybe I should have softened the blow, or tried to console him, but the truth was I just wanted to get the heck out of there before anybody else died, especially the two of us. I would use the gate one more time, to get us all back home. After that I would tie a rock to it, row out to the middle of Malpeque Bay, and throw it overboard.