Knee-Deep in the Dead

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  One touched my face with all the coldness of space. I hit at the horror wildly but struck Ritch instead, knocking him to the ground. It was joined by some of its buddies, those flying metal skulls I hoped never to see again. They dive-bombed us like kamikaze pilots.

  Then Ritch found the back of a specter head by swinging his hands; he put his revolver against its skull and squeezed off a point-blank round.

  That got the critter’s attention; it spun to deal with Ritch, turning its back on me; I blew its head apart with the riot gun.

  Somehow the idea of a ghost you can slice and dice appealed to me. I didn’t think the nuns would approve. The damned specter went down screaming like a banshee and bleeding something that stank of ice-cold graveyards.

  While I was auditioning for Ghost Busters, Arlene popped the flying skulls. They didn’t require as much firepower as the pumpkins. Ritch took care of the remaining zombies.

  “Aim for the head, just like the movie,” Arlene shouted.

  He was doing okay for a novice, and naturally gravitated to the easiest job; but he acquitted himself well. I was happy we had found him.

  Finally the wave of bad guys subsided and we could play beachcombers. There wasn’t much worth grabbing this time, however—only a bit of ammo and a Sig-Cow for Ritch from the poorly equipped zombies.

  Now seemed a good moment to find out more about Bill. Arlene thought his “goblin” might be a hell-prince and described one, but he shook his head. “Not a minotaur; it was more like a giant spider,” he said.

  “Oh, great,” said Arlene, “a new one for the files.”

  We found out Bill Ritch was a computer programmer. If we found any monsters with laptops, he would prove invaluable. To be fair, he’d done fine killing his quota of zombies.

  “How’d you get captured in the first place?” Arlene asked.

  Ritch sighed. “Classic case of ‘this can’t really be happening to us.’ When we were—” He stopped, face turning red. When he started up again, I knew he had skipped something important. Later, I thought. “We were studying the Gates, and suddenly one of them on Deimos experienced a marked drop in temperature. It started glowing, too.”

  “But I thought Deimos was deserted when all this started,” I interrupted.

  “You were supposed to think that,” he said. “When the UAC found alien electronics and started—then we all crowded in to see, and that’s when they started coming through, the goblins. Aliens, I mean.”

  “Which ones?” I asked. “Which ones came first?”

  “The first thing through was one of those things you call an imp. It looked at us and grinned, and we were all frozen in total shock. We didn’t know what to say or do—our first contact with an alien race, and we were speechless! All those wonderful plans about what we were going to say and how we were going to react—”

  “Well, how did the imp react?” Arlene was always good at cutting through the plastic to get to the meat.

  Ritch shook his head sadly, remembering something painful. “It threw one of those wads of phosphorous mucoid and killed a senior scientist and two Air Force captains. I was in the back . . . thank God. A woman screamed; I think it was Dr. Tyya Graf. Then another one came through, and we panicked.”

  “Mob scene?”

  “Like Soylent Green.” Arlene mm-hmmed, but I was confused. Must have been another old movie reference. “If I hadn’t been such a big guy, I would have been trampled. As it was, I was knocked down. I tried to get up, and they squirted some sort of webbing around me, a neurotoxin that paralyzed me.

  “I was out of it for some indeterminate time; when I came to, this spider thing was interrogating me and I was in a huge room, surrounded by hundreds of goblins of different types, and even some of those zombies. I recognized Dr. Graf, but I could tell right away she was dead and her body was just reanimated. And, well, that’s the story.”

  Speaking of which, Arlene interrupted with her own thoughts: “Fly, do you notice there’s a lot more zombie bodies here than anything else?”

  “Sure.”

  “So with all the noise we just made, why didn’t a lot more come running?”

  “Curiosity may have killed the cat,” I said, feeling flip, “but never a zombie. Or maybe this is all of them.”

  “No brains,” said Ritch, bending over one of them.

  Arlene shook her head. “I think it’s because they never do anything they’re not told,” she said. “They must stay in constant communication with someone or something, and only go investigate when they receive a command. If they’ve been told to patrol, looking for humans, then they’ll attack; otherwise, they might march right by us and not even see us.”

  “That imp who talked to me made me wonder if imps give them orders,” I said.

  “Maybe; but we’ve seen zombies where there are no imps. Maybe they get standing orders. I saw a bunch of imps come running to check out a situation once where all I’d done was get the zombies firing at each other. The imps couldn’t control them.”

  “Well, the pig-snuffling demons don’t have any intelligence worth mentioning, either,” I said. “If there’s any more of them around, they wouldn’t hear a battle over their own breathing.”

  “The skulls don’t even have ears,” Arlene said. “Look, it’s either hell-princes, the steam-demons, or that thing Bill described, the spider thing.”

  “The spider creature that interrogated me,” Ritch said, shuddering.

  “We’ll keep that in mind.” Time to move on. Hugging the right wall, we discovered a narrowing, “natural” corridor with more shotgun shells lying on the floor like popcorn. We scooped them up, but I was disappointed to discover that some were defective or spent. I was preoccupied with a handful of questionable-looking specimens when they spilled through my fingers and I dropped to my knees to recover them. That saved my life. A shotgun blast filled the space where my head had been a moment before.

  “Zombie!” Ritch called out anti-anticlimactically. No one ever shot at us with human weapons except former humans. Another shot missed high, but there was no third attempt on Yours Truly.

  Arlene turned to fire—and froze! “F-Fly . . .” she whispered hoarsely.

  I stared. Jesus; it was Arlene’s worst nightmare come true. Wilhelm Dodd, or what was left of him, lurched toward our little group, shifting his twelve-gauge to get a better shot.

  30

  Arlene stared at him approaching, her mouth open, face pale as a ghost. I didn’t want to do it, but she’d made me promise!

  Feeling sick, I raised my own weapon. I knew what would happen: I would blow the f’ing SOB away—and Arlene would hate me for the rest of her natural life . . . which might not be a very long time at that.

  Then a miracle happened.

  Just as my finger tightened on the trigger, Arlene’s face suddenly hardened. The color returned. She closed her mouth.

  Then she pumped a shell into the receiver, shouldered her riot gun, and blew the zombie-Dodd’s face off.

  Nobody said anything; Ritch took his cue from our awkward silence. I put my hand on Arlene’s shoulder, and she spoke. Her voice croaked like a rusty can tied behind a very old car. “He was already gone, Fly. And I didn’t want him to come between my buddy and me.”

  There was that damned peculiar lump again. I blinked—dust in my eye, I guess—and squeezed her shoulder so hard she winced. But she didn’t move to push my hand away.

  She knew what would happen if I were the one to kill the reworked Wilhelm Dodd . . . and she wouldn’t allow that to happen.

  Evidently, our friendship was as important to her as it was to me.

  I’d forgotten that the zombies had ever been human; I made myself forget. But the staring face of Willy Dodd wouldn’t let me get away with it any longer. He was a man, a Marine, and very important in my life. Now that he was gone—I didn’t know what to think about Arlene and me.

  Best not to think at all, I advised me; it was good advice, and I took it.r />
  Arlene was taking it hard. Sitting on the floor, she put her head between her legs and took a series of long, deep breaths. I wanted to comfort her but felt helpless. “Arlene . . .” I reached out to touch her. She shook her head and pulled away. Any other situation, I would have left her alone to mourn in private. But there was no privacy on Deimos except the solitude of the grave.

  Ritch understood what was going on and kept his mouth shut. I liked him more and more. I glanced at my wristwatch, a pointless act in this place, perhaps; but it helped somehow: a tiny act of useless normalcy.

  “Arlene,” I said, gently as I could, “we’ve got to split. You need to pull it together.”

  “Leave me alone!” she said, keeping her face turned away. “Don’t look at me.”

  This didn’t seem like a good time to push the envelope. I’d never seen her this badly shaken; without another word, I sat down, back-to-back with her, and kept watch while she got it out of her system. Ritch stood a little farther up the hallway, gun out, eyes averted.

  Every so often her entire body shuddered; I pretended not to notice. When she finished, she wiped her eyes and stood up. “Let’s move, Corporal,” she said. She was a PFC and I outranked her, but it was all right. The fighting tone of voice was back.

  Ritch rejoined us and we pushed on. Up the defile was a rise where we could peek over the rock wall to our left. The architect from hell had been busy again. A huge garden stretched out before us in the shape of a right hand. We were in the thumb.

  “Can you believe this one?” Arlene asked.

  “Better than a swastika,” I said. The hand covered a good piece of territory, with the “fingers” wide spread, each undoubtedly offering a wide selection of motion sensors and other surprises. The “ring” finger had a bizarre, wooden shack right where the ring would have been; I wondered if the “pinkie” finger would be full of Arlene’s demons.

  We started with the thumb. “Bet the only prints we find are foot-prints,” Ritch said. I’ve never liked stupid jokes, either, but Arlene laughed; anything to shake her out of her depression.

  I heard a familiar bubbling: the red “lava” liquid. The pool was in a raised, stone structure that could pass as the swimming pool from hell. I thought I saw a switch just below the lava line.

  “What’s that?” Ritch asked.

  “Toxic yecch,” Arlene answered. “Haven’t you seen it before?” Ritch shook his head. “You’ve been lucky,” she went on. “Fly and I have been through an ocean of the stuff.”

  “Looks like lava,” Ritch said, proving an old adage about great minds and small circles. “Is it hot?”

  “Not enough,” I said, “but it can still kill you.” The switch teased me, like a piece of plastic sticking up from a bowl of red oatmeal.

  “You know,” I mused, “that switch is awfully tempting . . .” I found a rock and pitched it at the button, jumping back. I didn’t want any of that spit splashing on me.

  I should have tried out for the majors when the twelve-year strike began. First try was the charm; we heard a loud click, and a door rotated open, revealing our latest take-home pay: another AB-10, and far more important, a pair of beautiful Medikits. I would have preferred another of those magical blue health spheres, but this would definitely do in a pinch.

  But my heart sunk when I picked up the first one and saw the telltale signs of imp. This was not a virgin find. Tooth marks explained why most of the drugs were missing. Apparently the imps liked the taste. A hurried investigation of the kits showed that barely enough drugs had survived for Arlene.

  Ritch helped me gather together what we needed. After cleansing her wounds, with special care for the bad gash in her chest, I gave her painkillers and put on fresh bandages. Ritch seemed embarrassed, swabbing at her amble, naked breasts; but titillation was the last thing on any of our minds.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Better,” she said, but I could tell from her strained voice and pale face that she was far from perfect. Better would have to do.

  The dregs of the drugs proved a bonus for Ritch. He didn’t look so hot, either. Coming down from the ceiling and snapping out of shock so quickly couldn’t be good for anyone, and he’d been holding his own in combat instead of resting.

  I wish I could have offered him a needle of the stimulant I’d used back in the marble room, on Deimos; but stimulant seemed to have been what the imps were after—the vials were all empty.

  Leaving the thumb, we descended on the palm as if storming heaven and began a serious housecleaning, sliding from rock to rock, blasting anything in our way . . . and scooping up anything useful. The opposition was feeble, hardly worth mentioning except to say that they died quickly.

  Arlene lucked into finding a rocket launcher of her very own. Then we helped her locate the little batterysized rockets that were nearby. She collected seven of the little darlings, and I showed her where to stick them and taught her the forbidden lore of proximity fuses and firing rings.

  We were so happy about the find that we must have sent out a subverbal signal. Monsters don’t like humans being happy.

  We were ambushed by six former comrades at arms and ex-UAC workers, four imps, three demons, two flying skulls, and a partridge in a pear tree. (I’m lying about the pear tree.) In the ensuing carnage, Arlene used up every rocket; but at least she could never again say she hadn’t been checked out on the launcher.

  Arlene and I barely worked up a sweat. Ritch was getting good at the game; he was a good draft pick. He’d been doing some thinking that he was eager to share with us. Arlene still seemed numb from the discovery of Wilhelm, but I was ready to get to know this new Ritch better.

  So, as we surveyed our latest gaggle of ex’s, I encouraged him to speak his piece.

  He’d already told us that computers were his area, but he’d been overly modest. Evidently, he was a bona-fide computer genius kidnapped from Deimos by the aliens.

  “We had already decided that the Gates were hypermass transportation devices; if they really worked and weren’t just some elaborate failed experiment from millenia past, it would blow every physics theory we had out the wash.

  “We discovered they responded to bursts of high-energy microwaves; their circuits responded for several seconds after each burst—not electronics, exactly, but something involving direct manipulations of particle streams.”

  As Ritch held court, Arlene perked up and started paying attention. She was getting that expression she wore when a boyfriend betrayed her. Suddenly, her mouth dropped. “You mean you—activated the Gates yourselves? You turned them on? Jesus Christ, you brought those things here!”

  Arlene had a romantic side that tried to believe whatever nonsense officials put out as the truth du jour. I’d gotten over that sort of silliness long before I joined the Corps—it wasn’t a long-term healthy attitude for a jarhead.

  “I . . . I think we brought these aliens through the Gate ourselves, in a way,” Ritch admitted pathetically. “But it was an accident!”

  “Ah, an accident,” I snorted. “Well, that certainly relieves everyone of any personal responsibility.”

  Ritch continued, not noticing the irony. “I think, now, that whatever these creatures were, they were listening to the Gates. Maybe they were trying to fire it up from their end, and until we ‘answered the phone,’ they couldn’t do it. But yeah, I guess we let them in.

  “Anyway, I don’t believe these are the creatures that built the Gates.”

  “That’s what we figured,” I said. “You got anything more substantial than a gut feeling?”

  “The UAC has . . . engravings that the Gate builders left behind. They are as old as the Gates, showing what the Gate builders looked like.” He paused, trying to find the right words.

  “And?” we asked as one.

  “You’re not going to believe this—” he started.

  “After what we’ve been through, we’ll believe anything,” I said, launching a preemptive stri
ke.

  “Well, they look like something out of H. P. Lovecraft,” he said.

  “I knew it,” Arlene said. She still looked furious.

  “Am I the only person in the solar system who never read this guy?” I asked, irritated. “The first one of you to talk about anything ‘eldritch’ is going to get a rocket right between the eyes.”

  Ritch looked at me like he thought I might be serious, but a big smile from Arlene put him at ease. He swallowed hard and said, “They have snakelike trunks with multilimbed upper torsos, no visible head; and they’d have to move like sidewinders.”

  “How big?” Arlene wanted to know.

  “Up to ten meters long,” he answered. They didn’t say it but I just know they were both thinking, Oooh, eldritch!

  I agreed. “I’d bet my life we haven’t met the real intelligence behind this.”

  Arlene joined in: “Bet something of more value than that, Fly. What value do you think an insurance company would put on us?”

  “I don’t gamble,” Ritch said with a straight face, “and I have met the—what’d you call it? The mastermind. That spider thing . . . it’s in charge, I’m positive.”

  “Tell us more,” I requested.

  He shuddered. I knew how he felt. Theory was one thing, close contact another. “So far as I can tell, the spider thing has real intelligence,” he said. “It spoke in clear English.” I wasn’t about to doubt him after my experience with the imp back on Phobos.

  “What did it say?” asked Arlene.

  “Well, first it started asking me questions. It started with simple, yes-no, true-false; I tried to lie a few times, but it already knew a lot, and I got caught.”

  “What was its response to a lie?”

  Ritch shrugged. “Didn’t seem to care emotionally; but it punished me. Horrible stuff, but all hallucination. You know how you’re having a dream, and you dream that you’re absolutely terrified? The spidermind thing can do that: I can see why people who encountered one of those, maybe thousands of years ago, could think they’d died and gone to hell.” He shuddered at the memory.