Knee-Deep in the Dead

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  Tiny demons? I wondered . . . were they mutants? Failed experiments? Or did demons shrink when they starved? Other possibilities were more disturbing: Were these child demons? Were demons born or hatched, or created whole somewhere? I shuddered; whatever they were, they gave me the creeps more than their gigantic counterparts.

  She sprang the door with the key card, and we went right through, smooth as you please . . . only to discover another door right behind it, this one requiring a yellow card! “Egah,” I bellowed, and by God I meant it!

  An hour later we had traded a bunch of ammunition for a shiny, new, yellow key card. Don’t ask.

  We shuffled back to the mystery door, and Arlene inserted the card.

  It slid. Revealing . . . Yet another door: red.

  “You know,” I said, “there’s only one section of this whole place we’ve avoided.”

  “The dark, mazy thing we passed? Fly, we don’t even know there’s a key card in there, or that if there is, it’s red.”

  “Well . . . I shot a door open with a rocket once.”

  “How many rockets we have?”

  “Now? Six.”

  “How many does it take to kill a hell-prince?”

  “Usually six.”

  Arlene sucked air through her teeth. “Maze,” she voted.

  I understood her concern; if we used one or two rockets to open the last door, then encountered a minotaur on the other side, we’d be out of luck. I shrugged; maze it was.

  As we entered the pitch-black corridor, our flashlights barely penetrated the darkness. “There must be some kind of neutralizing or damping field,” Arlene whispered behind me.

  This bit was too close to that Jules Verne movie, where the members of the expedition get separated in the dark. I wasn’t going to let that happen to us.

  “Fly—didn’t I see a pair of goggles of some sort back in the yellow-key room?”

  “Did you? What of it?”

  “Could they be light-amplification goggles?”

  That sounded like a good excuse to get out of the dark. Actually, anything sounded like a good excuse to get out of that dark maze; I had the creepy feeling that creatures were shadowing us . . . creatures that didn’t need light-amp goggles.

  We returned the way we had come, and sure enough, the goggles were there. Arlene was right: one pair. “Will these even work in the energy-sucking field?” I wondered.

  Arlene shrugged. How else could we find out?

  At the mouth of the maze we hesitated. Who was to wear them? We settled it scientifically: my vision was 20-40, barely good enough to avoid glasses; Arlene’s was 20-15, better than “perfect.” In other words, she got the goggles.

  Besides, she was the girl. I don’t know why that occurred to me then; she seemed to get the goggles an awful lot.

  She put them on and adjusted for ambient light, then led me back into the tunnel of darkness. I don’t even like haunted-house rides at amusement parks. “Oh, spit,” she said.

  “Don’t give me any bad news.”

  “Battery’s low.”

  “I told you not to give me any bad news.”

  “The goggles keep fading in and out.” She’d stopped walking forward and I bumped up against her again. “Or maybe it’s because of the field; but they’re lower power than the flashlights, and they do work . . . sort of.”

  She started moving again, and dark as it was, I made believe I was her shadow, hand on her shoulder. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Everything is green and fuzzy. It’s like looking at the world through a Coke bottle.”

  About five minutes into the maze Arlene dived to the side, bowling me over. An exploding ball of energy lit up our surroundings for a fraction of a second; but all I saw was the back of Arlene’s head.

  “Hell-prince!” she shouted. “Fly, use the launcher!”

  “Can’t we run?”

  “No,” she said, strangely insistent, “we’ve got to fight it!”

  I unslung and waited, staring wide-eyed into the black. “Where? Where is it?”

  “I’ll guide you,” Arlene said, voice lower, more in control. Holding her shoulder so she wouldn’t be between me and my monster, I tried to aim the rocket launcher with the other hand. I couldn’t do it!

  “Still—stand still, beside me,” she urged. “Right. Now listen . . .” Another lightning ball scorched the air, pounding the wall just above my head, and I dropped the damned weapon! She didn’t miss a beat. “It’s right at your feet, Fly. Bend down, pick it up.

  “Why don’t you take it? You can see!”

  “Fly, I don’t know how to shoot it—never checked out on it. Now shoulder it, damn you.”

  “Aim me.” I was becoming impatient, but I knew she was working as fast as she could.

  “Left, to the left, more, more; elevate . . . shoot now!” I squeezed the firing ring. The flare of the rockets lit up a cone of vision around us but I still couldn’t see the attacker. “Where is he? Where?”

  “Never mind—you winged him, Fly! Glancing blow to the stomach, knocked him down.”

  “Aim me again.”

  The second shot scored a direct hit. Normally that wouldn’t stop a hell-prince. He’d only redouble his efforts. But this one must have gotten lazy in the maze, only encountering victims occasionally, and no resistance worth mentioning. Suddenly I realized we were facing a minotaur in something like its natural habitat.

  Aim me—fire!—aim me . . . I loaded my sixth and final round. “Where?”

  Arlene waited a long time. “Fly . . . you knocked it to its butt in a chair thing with your last shot; it’s still breathing, but it’s not getting up.”

  We waited; the situation remained static. “All right, kid,” I said. “I guess we’re officially clear.”

  “And now I can officially tell you why we had to fight. Look at this—whoops, I mean feel this: a key card, though I have no idea what color; they all look green to me. That slime had it in its claws.”

  “You mean it was there while I fired rockets at the hell-prince? I could have destroyed the key, too!”

  “Well, that’s why I kept it a secret. Now aren’t you glad you saved those rockets?”

  “I guess so,” I said, not bothering to point out that if we hadn’t gone into the maze at all, just used one or two rockets on the door, we’d be out of here by now, and richer in rockets, to boot.

  We started trekking back, and with the unerring instinct such items have, the batteries chose that moment to burn out.

  Arlene tipped me off with, “Damn it to hell!”

  She pulled the goggles off and shoved them into her pocket. “God, Fly, I don’t want to die in the dark.” I thought she had a perfectly reasonable attitude. The idea of being caught and torn to shreds when you can’t even see to fight back didn’t appeal to me, either.

  I had a vague idea of the way we must return. I took her hand and led her as fast as possible in that direction. Even found time to pray again. The nuns always knew the power of a dark room to inspire piety.

  After all that, I really was in no mood for a damned imp waiting for us when we’d almost made it through the maze. It hissed, and we stopped cold . . . we could hear it—but where was it? Hands shaking, I spun left and right with my scattergun, afraid to shoot lest I give away our own position. Or worse, hit Arlene!

  “Jesus!” Arlene shouted, finding religion as a fireball careened over our heads. What a dolt—the imp, not Arlene; the fireball lit our surroundings, and in the glare I fixed Arlene and the imp. When the fireball faded, I shot where the imp was. Arlene didn’t kill time when she could kill a monster instead; she fired just as I did, and the imp was toast.

  We were back in the light in short order. We returned to the three-door stack. I performed the honors of opening the last door, popping through, finding the lift, pressing the down button . . . and asking Arlene if she didn’t enjoy the music of screams and explosions behind us as the monsters took care of each other. They were r
unning out of humans.

  “This is a hell of an invasion,” she said.

  “You can say that again.”

  Deimos must have been listening and eager to confirm every prejudice we had. As the lift door slid open at the next level down, we found ourselves staring into the hugest, hairiest, foulest, and pinkest butt I’d ever seen.

  One of the demons, Arlene’s “pinkies,” was standing with its backside up against the lift door. It hadn’t even noticed that the door had opened. Cautiously, I raised a machine gun and Arlene raised a shotgun. We gritted our teeth against the noise and fired simultaneously. A Light Drop rectal suppository.

  But on the other side of Demon One was Demon Two—and it did not take kindly to our prescription. This one charged like a hausfrau on speed in a megastore.

  We hadn’t been able to see it originally because its buddy had blocked the view. Now it dived through the door after us.

  The big silly got itself stuck. We took our time blowing this one to oblivion at point-blank range. Oh, our bruised eardrums!

  As Arlene wiped demon gunk out of her eyes, she took a gander at her clothes and asked, “Does this come out or is it like gravy?”

  “Don’t ask me. I was never much of a house husband.”

  Although we felt good about our most recent bout of carnage, we couldn’t help but notice that we’d trapped ourselves between two demon bodies, each of which probably weighed over five hundred kilos; a half ton per baby. We’d have to climb out between them.

  “How are you at mountain climbing?” she asked.

  “How are you at spelunking?” I asked back.

  She owned I was right; we didn’t so much climb over the bodies as burrow our way through them. It took a bit of wriggling and writhing, and breath holding, but eventually even I made it.

  The next problem consisted of some imps. Mighty monster slayers such as Arlene and myself could no longer be bothered with something so trivial as a few imps. We mopped up the floor with them on our way

  “I think we’re getting a bit cocky,” Arlene said.

  “We earn the right to wear the haircut of our choosing,” I shot back, and she laughed louder than ever before.

  We entered a warehouse through an open door and around a couple of corners; this one was stacked wall-to-wall with pinkies, none as large as our elevator pals. They charged; having nowhere else to go, I leapt up, grabbed the edge of a huge box and hauled myself onto the top, then stretched out my hand for Arlene.

  The way the demons screamed and growled and pounded on the box, you’d think they didn’t appreciate initiative and quick thinking. They were so upset they made the box shake violently. I was afraid we might be thrown off, but by God, we hung on. Then we aimed, squeezed, and eventually the box stopped shaking. We didn’t have any trouble getting down.

  Now we had a moment to enjoy the new decor. The motif here was gleaming chrome and intricate, blued enamel. The appearance was rather sci-fi, actually . . . utterly misplaced, considering the monsters inhabiting it. But then, I didn’t subscribe to Better Homes and Demons.

  Then we kicked the door at the far end—well, I kicked it—and found the spawning vats themselves.

  Huge, metal containers they were, a heaping helping of pure evil; cisterns containing a weird, toxic-green junk, but not thick like the slime; inside each container was the body of a half-formed monster.

  Arlene, on a whim of personal revulsion against the aliens, shot one of the partly formed torsos. The wound sealed up with a giant sucking sound, and the creature continued cooking. “How do you stop something like this?” she asked.

  “I wish I knew. We can give up the hope of a finite number of the things. They must be genetically engineered soldiers. The alien mastermind, whoever or whatever it is, must be stealing our nightmares and producing them wholesale.”

  “Uh, yeah. I wonder how long it takes for a vat to finish producing a newborn monster?”

  Arlene held up her watch. Six minutes later the one she’d shot was finished, and none the worse for wear. She shot it again as it stumbled out of the vat. Again and again. Now the bullets worked. We repeated the experiment several more times at six minute intervals.

  “The fluid is life-preserving as well as life-producing,” I said. “But when a critter is born—”

  “In other words,” Arlene said, “we can’t do abortion, but we sure as hell can nail ’em as newborns.” She wrinkled her brow. “Let’s do a rough calculation: at six minutes to cook a monster, that’s ten creatures per hour per vat. Say sixty-four vats in the room, means 640 monsters per hour just from this one room. Christ! That’s fifteen thousand per day.”

  “There, ah . . . there could be scores of rooms.”

  “In a few days they could have an army of millions,” Arlene said, finishing her number exercise.

  “We still have one chance, Arlene. Find the alien mastermind and destroy it.”

  “Yeah, that’s all we have to do,” she scoffed. “Piece of cake.”

  26

  Too many, too many monsters, monsters, monsters,” I muttered.

  “Monsters, monsters everywhere,” she echoed. “I don’t suppose it matters if there are any new types. We’re doomed no matter what.”

  “Don’t say that, Arlene. We’ve been able to kill everything we’ve come up against so far. That matters. The weapons and ammunition give us a fighting chance.”

  “Rats in a maze,” she said in a tone of voice new to her. She sounded defeated. I didn’t like that one bit. “You were right, Fly. Even if we always find enough ammo, it won’t save us. There are millions of them. They are testing us.”

  They are!

  At a moment like this I realized how important it was that we had each other. I’d experienced this same sense of defeat on Phobos, and for less cause. Now it was my turn to encourage the natural fighting spirit that burned so deeply in her.

  “Then how we respond to this is part of the test, as well. We won’t defeat them by firepower. That’s only to buy us time so we can reason out a solution.”

  She looked at me without blinking and asked, “Fly, what if there is no solution?”

  “Don’t believe that!” I urged, and in so doing helped convince myself. “If they were unbeatable, they wouldn’t need to collect data on us.”

  That took some of the shadows out of her dark mood. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t let you down.”

  She’d been my buddy, my pal. We’d been careful not to confuse the issue by trying to be lovers. But this was the right moment to take her in my arms, bring our faces close together and whisper, “It’s you and me. We’ll go to the end together. We’ll make them pay for everything.”

  “Outstanding,” she said breathily, transforming the traditional Marine bravado into something very different. A moment passed between us that reminded me of the time we could have been lovers and chose buddies instead. Now I kissed her hard and she responded. We might not have another chance. And we weren’t going any farther than this; not in a place where we could so easily be reworked into dead meat, still on the hoof.

  “I’m feeling better,” she said. “My brain is working again. You know, we’re in a good spot to do some damage.”

  “Go on.”

  “The bottom level of Deimos, directly below us, is one huge tank that was eventually going to be filled with liquid oxygen.”

  “What the hell for?”

  She flashed her sneaky smile. “You’ll love this. The UAC was thinking of using the entire moon of Deimos as a spaceship, too.”

  “You’re kidding!” I said, but I could tell she wasn’t.

  “The idea was to move it to the asteroid belt and use it for a mining base,” she said, finishing the news flash. “When I first realized we were moving, I thought some of us might be back in charge here. Then I suspected the more horrible possibility of a human-alien alliance.”

  “Jesus, what a morbid imagination! How is it I never heard about this plan even
in casual talk?”

  “There’s secret, there’s top secret, and then there’s ‘rat us out and we’ll push you out the airlock.’ ”

  “Point taken. If we’re going to find out what’s really going on, then, I think we need to go the same way as before. Down.”

  We hunted through the level, but couldn’t find an exit, a secret door, anything. While we were searching, Arlene’s mood improved. That we were still alive was a miracle. Any monsters who tried to have us for lunch would get a bad case of indigestion. No matter what we were up against, I was going to bet on human unpredictability. We hadn’t spent a couple of billion years clawing to the top of the food chain for nothing.

  “Fly, have you noticed how this section is shaped?” Actually, I hadn’t. We’d been working our way along the inside of the wall in search of switches. “It’s shaped like a skull,” she said.

  “These guys are running out of ideas,” I answered.

  “Those two pillars over there,” she said, pointing, “are the eyes.”

  “Cute,” I said. Less cute was the pumpkin that suddenly came out of nowhere and began firing at us. Arlene and I hadn’t shot anything in whole minutes. We deflated the pumpkin; and this one acted more like a balloon with the air let out that any of its brothers, as it zigged and zagged on the way down.

  We chased it beyond the two pillars, where we found its limp and leaking remains sitting like a cork on a narrow ladder-tube leading down. “At last,” she said, “a guidepost.”

  “Just what the place needs,” I concurred.

  And now what? Should we still continue “down”? Or was it time to settle once and for all whether we were bugging out and reporting or going after the mastermind ourselves?

  I stared at the tube. So far as I could tell, down was still the only way out. So far, our paths still coincided.

  But there would come a time when one of us would have to prevail: either Arlene’s romantic sense of duty to the entire human race, or my more practical duty to her as my buddy, as a Marine, and—all right, let’s face it—and as a man to a woman.

  We popped the “cork” and climbed down what seemed like two hundred meters, down into the heart of the lox tank. The climb was long enough to make us tired even if we weren’t carrying all the crap that was necessary to keep us alive. By the time we reached bottom, my hands were aching and my right knee was acting up. I could imagine how Arlene was feeling from the way she tottered on her feet. I hurried over to catch her if she fell, but she recovered herself and made no comment.