Atomic Underworld: Part One

by Conner, Jack

  He stared at her. His head reeled from the vodka, but somehow her words had burned away the buzz. “I ... I’m ...”

  “Don’t you dare apologize.”

  He backed away in irritation and tried to stand. His head may have been clearing, but his body was still soaked with booze, and he fell back down, gasping. Angrily, he spun back to her and said, “Then what do you want me to do? I did what I had to. I’m not sorry about it.”

  “Yeah, you never are. You’re never sorry for anything. You’re Tavlin Two-Bit Fucking Metzler, famous gambler and rogue. There’s never been a rule made that you can’t break, a law you can’t talk your way around.”

  He ground his teeth. Her anger was sparking his own, and he felt deep wounds unknitting. “What are you so angry for? What gives you the right?”

  “You ruined my life!” she said.

  That did it. The wounds opened. He sucked down a breath, and then he said something there was no taking back. He looked her in the eyes and said, “I’m not the one that killed our son.”

  Her eyes went wide, and she looked as if she’d been slapped. Then her face grew red, and she stood shakily. “Get ... out. Get out right now or so help me ...”

  He wished he could retrieve the last few seconds, but he couldn’t. He tried to stand again, but he collapsed. She stepped forward and tried to lift him up bodily, to hurl him from her apartment, but he shoved her away. They both fell in ungainly heaps, glaring daggers at each other.

  “I ought to tell the Octs you’re here and let them take you,” she said. “They’d probably spare me if I did.”

  He wiped at the blood on his ribs; with all the activity, the wound had started to bleed again. “Do it,” he said. “You always were good at looking after yourself.”

  “Fuck you. I was a good mother.”

  He started to say something, then stopped. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe you were. But you were a lousy wife.”

  “Oh, sure. Blame me for trying to provide. What was I supposed to do? After you quit Boss Vassas, we didn’t have enough for Jamie’s pills.”

  “You could’ve earned money some other way than on your back. And don’t you dare use leaving Boss Vassas against me. You wanted me to leave.”

  “I didn’t want Jamie raised in the fucking mob! If you were half a good father, you’d have realized that.”

  “That’s why I quit!” Shaking, he gripped the kitchen countertop and hauled himself to his feet.

  In her corner, she did likewise. Tears coursed down her face, but she looked furious more than she looked sad, though she appeared sad also. A deep pain burned in her eyes. “We needed money. When Jamie got sick—”

  He waved her to silence, tugging on his clothes. “Your son died without his mother by his side because you were off whoring.”

  She stood so rigidly he thought something had gone wrong in her head, maybe a stroke, but then she lifted her arm and pointed at the door. “GET—THE FUCK—OUT.”

  He lurched toward the door, still yanking up his pants. The world seemed to spin around him. He staggered, nearly fell, but she did not offer to help. He remained upright, barely, as he reached the portal, then sagged against it for support. He snapped a button closed on his pants.

  Without turning to look at her, he said, “The last thing he said in this world was, ‘Where’s Mommy?’”

  He heard a choking gasp behind him, but he didn’t dare turn around. He fumbled at the doorknob.

  A plate broke by his head. Shards of porcelain sliced his cheek. Another smashed between his shoulder blades.

  “Damn you!” he said. He wrenched the door open.

  “Damn you!”

  Another plate caught the side of his head, ricocheted and cracked against the doorframe.

  He stumbled through the door, down the stairs. She followed, hurling plates after him. She must have shoved some under an arm.

  He fled down the stairs and through the tight, winding halls of the tenement. They smelled of mold, fungus and alchemical lamps, not to mention the myriad smells of mutant cooking, cabbage and sulfur and unprocessed fish. Radios blasted newscasts of the war. Plates shattered about him as he ran. Sophia cursed him vilely.

  He made it to the front entrance, slammed the door behind him and staggered down the road. She didn’t follow. He heard her crying through the door.

  *

  He skulked through the streets. Hating himself, he buttoned his shirt as he went and drew his jacket tight. It was cold—cold, and late. He didn’t know what time it was exactly, but he was exhausted. And hungry.

  Shaking, he wasn’t sure why, he found a streetside café that advertised “safe” food and ordered a plate of spiced meat and flatbread. After he’d eaten, he smoked a bowl and sat there, staring out over the little city, trying to calm his mind. He knew he had gone too far, had cut too deep. He hadn’t wanted to. But the bitterness, the pain he had felt since that day, since his little boy had died in his arms crying for his mother, and Tavlin had had to tell him lies to prevent Jameson from knowing the truth about where his mother really was—lies, even as Jameson shuddered and trembled and his eyes rolled up into his head, and the last thing Tavlin had ever said to him in this world was a lie ...

  He had never forgiven her for that. He didn’t think he ever could.

  But he shouldn’t have said that she had killed him. That had been wrong. Jameson had been their miracle—in many ways. For one, they had always used protection to prevent Tavlin from becoming infected. Somehow, someway, Sophia had gotten pregnant anyway. Second, Jameson had survived the pregnancy itself. All the doctors had agreed that he probably wouldn’t, that they shouldn’t get their hopes up, the progeny of infected and non-infected rarely survived. But then, somehow, he had. He had been born, and he had survived his first year, and his second, and his third. Tavlin and Sophia had dared to hope, each day a battle against despair. Jameson was normal, healthy, non-infected. All the doctors warned them. A non-infected child would surely bear the seeds of infection somewhere inside him, passed on to him by his mother. But Jameson had survived his fourth year, and his fifth, and his sixth. During the seventh year, Tavlin had done something foolish. He’d allowed himself to believe. He thought Sophia had, too. Tavlin had quit working for Vassas and started gambling professionally to support them. That had been enough. Until the inevitable.

  When Jameson grew sick at last, Sophia had supplemented their income against Tavlin’s wishes to afford Jameson’s medicine. Another year had passed, and then another. Finally, though, Jameson’s frail little body could take it no longer.

  When he succumbed to the infection at last, Tavlin thought he himself would die. He’d wanted to. He took to drinking and cheating at cards. He had cheated dangerous men. Only chance and the lingering favor of Boss Vassas had spared him. Meanwhile Sophia had continued to whore, as she had done when he’d first met her, before he had fallen in love, asked her to marry him and gotten her to quit. Grief and bitterness on both sides had split them apart as surely as rot can break an oak.

  Tavlin had always blamed her for not being there, for making him lie, and somewhere in the back of his mind he had blamed her for passing on the infection in the first place, and she blamed him for not making enough to buy the expensive pills Jameson had required, and blamed him for his drinking and self-destructiveness later. Yet what could he do? His son was dead and his wife was once again a whore, and they hated each other. He thought she had almost been relieved when he had left her, when he had abandoned the undercities and returned to the upper world. His world. A place she could never feel comfortable in again.

  He stared out over Taluush now, at its lights, the boats coming and going on the water. There was little traffic out now, but there was enough. He supposed the Octunggen were out looking for him still. Where were they? Were they combing the streets and alleys? He supposed he had better be off. Back to Muscud. Sophia knew she needed to leave, she would be fine. He was sorry he had screwed things up for her here
. That would just be one more thing she could hate him for. Give her something to do, some reason to go on. In a way, he was almost doing her a service. A real humanitarian, like Sgt. Wales.

  He sighed, finished his bowl and settled up. Then he lurched off through the city streets, receiving strange looks from people about him, and he realized he was bleeding again. He had torn his sutures with all the activity. He was a bloody, ragged-looking non-infected man in a city of mutants; he would stand out like a preacher in a whorehouse—or, knowing several preachers, maybe moreso. His pursuers would find him easily.

  Yes, it was time to leave. He made his way toward the docks. He descended ramp after ramp, finally descending into the buffer zone between the upper levels and the territory of the G’zai. The activity of a plaza surrounded him. It was nighttime, and the nightlife of Taluush teemed, riotous. One three-breasted woman with conical funnels sticking up from her head in a straight line instead of hair sold glowing vials to shady-looking characters. A loud nightclub blared with noise, and Tavlin saw thumping, leaping, gyrating shapes in the smoky darkness, lit by neon strips and cigarettes. A male prostitute in tight pants and an unbuttoned snakeskin shirt lounged against a streetlamp, smoking a cigar suggestively, while moths flapped about the light over his head, sometimes covering the light completely and throwing him into darkness, sometimes illuminating him fully, as if he had his own personal strobe light.

  A boy in ragged clothes sold stolen watches. His eyes widened when Tavlin grabbed him by the back of the neck. “Hey! Lay off! What’re you about?”

  “I told you to clear out,” Tavlin hissed. “Lay low for a couple of days.”

  He released the boy, who thrashed like a wet dog, then glared up at him. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”

  “Someone who’s trying to look after you.”

  “Fuck off.”

  The boy started to walk away, but Tavlin spun him back around. He wasn’t sure how he could convince the boy to take him seriously, but he was determined to try.

  Before he could give it a go, however, something behind the boy drew Tavlin's attention, and he stood riveted, eyes fixed on the sight.

  Dripping wet, the great monstrosity oozed up from the level below, towering over the infected men and women around it. Tavlin stared at it, trying to make sense of it. It wasn’t quite shaped like a maggot, nor a centipede, nor a shrimp, but it shared attributes of all three. Its head was vaguely shrimp-like, and white shrimp-flesh covered the whole of it, shot through with pink veins. Writhing cilia. Chittering mouth-parts. A profusion of whip-like tendrils. It carried itself erect, walking on a bed of cilia, but Tavlin sensed it could also walk horizontally, crawling like a fat centipede. Black, glistening eyes stared out at the world from its head—alien, insectile, unblinking, of different sizes. Maybe six or eight of them, maybe more, it was hard to tell with the jutting pincers, the stalks of antennae that sliced the air overhead. As it moved through the crowd, people fell away from it on all sides, giving it space.

  Tavlin stared, mouth open.

  The boy took the opportunity to wriggle loose of his grasp and back away. “Never seen a G’zai, huh, mister?”

  “No. Never.”

  The white horror moved closer, towering perhaps two or three feet over the heads of the mutants, its antennae whipping several feet even higher. Tavlin could hear the cutting noises they made. Whup whup whup.

  “Don’t worry, mister, they’re harmless,” the boy said.

  “Are you sure? It looks dangerous.”

  “I’m sure. See, I’ll—”

  Two whip-like cords shot out from the G’zai and lassoed a man about the middle. It was an uninfected man, Tavlin saw, of medium height and build. Likely an upper coming down into the sewers to enjoy a night of depravity on the cheap. The man screamed and was dragged off his feet toward the abomination. Energy like green fire passed through the tendrils into the man, and his screams turned into howls of agony.

  Two constables, who had been loitering in the shadows watching for people to extort money from, rushed forward, drawing their pistols. A gun cracked, then another. Tavlin saw bursts of flesh erupt on the G’zai, and a viscous white substance ran from the wounds, but the creature didn’t seem to register any pain.

  Others appeared.

  Tavlin hadn’t noticed them, so focused was he on the first one, but more G’zai, perhaps a dozen or so, had wormed their way up from their cocoon-like lairs and now cut through the crowd on the platform. Tavlin heard a scream and spun to see three more of the chittering white abominations slice and whip the crowd about them. Green fire erupted among the mutants, spreading from one to another. Tavlin saw one of the G’zai lift an appendage with an opening at the end. The appendage rippled in a muscular fashion, like an elephant’s trunk or a throbbing phallus, and then some sort of energy passed out of the dripping orifice—the air rippled around it, though the energy was invisible—and the blast struck the nearest constable. He exploded into a thousand wet pieces.

  A second G’zai whipped its tendrils at the other constable, and the tendrils tore through him as if he were butter and the tendrils superheated knives. He collapsed into even chunks revealing perfect cross-sections of flesh and bone and fat on the floor, like a selection at a butcher shop, each chunk wrapped in a decorative layer of skin and uniform.

  People ran, screaming. Where they ventured too close to a G’zai, tendrils whipped them to shreds, or green fire burned them into strange charred shapes, reducing them to flaming lumps that still seemed to scream, or else were blown apart by dripping orifices on the end of certain limbs. The G’zai butchered the infected with no mercy or seeming motive. Tavlin saw the uninfected man they had dragged down surrounded by two more G’zai, who wrapped their own tendrils around him. His screams grew so hoarse he could no longer scream. He simply juddered and writhed on the ground, foam frothing his lips. Strangely, they did not kill him.

  The G’zai took down another non-infected man, and the same thing began to happen to him.

  Some fleeing person smashed into Tavlin, knocking him over. Boots stampeded his abdomen. Someone kicked the side of his head.

  The boy grabbed his arm and helped haul him to his feet. “Run, you idiot!”

  The boy fled into the chaos, toward a ramp leading up. Tavlin pelted after him, wondering if perhaps he should take a ramp down, toward the docks, but as soon as the thought occurred to him he shrank in horror from it. The G’zai occupied the bottom level. To go down was to die. Even as he found the boy and started up a ramp, he saw the towering, white, chittering shapes flow up a ramp from below and swarm the plaza, cutting bloody swathes through the crowd.

  They’re after me. They had captured two uninfected men of his general height and description. They could only be looking for him.

  He cut through the crowd following the boy. The youth vanished into a pool hall on the next level, and Tavlin pushed his way in through the opening after him. It was darker in here than out, and the press of people blocked many of the lights. It stank of stale cigarette smoke, mold and body odor. Fighting through the press, Tavlin mounted a pool table and scanned the crowd until he saw a small form slipping through the packed shapes toward the rear of the hall. Tavlin jumped down and elbowed his way through them, after the boy. Mutants around him were breaking pool cues into jagged-tipped sticks to use as weapons or pulling out their own guns and knives. The employees of the pool hall gathered behind the bar, the apparent owner checking to make sure his shotgun was loaded.

  With practiced ease, the boy slipped through a doorway and into a back room, and Tavlin followed.

  “Don’t follow me, asshole!” the boy shouted over his shoulder as he ran up a narrow stairway.

  Tavlin ignored him and plunged upward.

  Screaming erupted in the pool hall behind him. He heard the shotgun roar, then the cracks of smaller weapons. The screams pitched higher and higher.

  The pool hall occupied one level of a tower, and the boy was leading
up into the rest of it, which stretched out like a junkheap honeycomb on all sides. License plates stuck out from the walls between bicycle wheels and sheets of metal. People vanished into their warrens, blocking the doors behind them. One shouted to the boy, who cursed him and ran on. Breathless, heart smashing against his ribs, Tavlin followed.

  The boy pounded up another stairway, then another.

  Screams filtered up from below. More gunshots. Tavlin felt sick in the pit of his stomach. What have I done now?

  The boy led on, and Tavlin began to wonder if he had any destination at all or if he were just putting distance between himself and the G’zai. At last the boy reached the highest level of the tower and sprinted through an exit, across a ramp toward a platform.

  Running beside him, Tavlin panted out, "Is there a way out of town that doesn’t involve going down to the docks?”

  The boy hesitated, as if not sure he wanted to reveal his secrets even then. He started to open his mouth to reply, but just then a pair of G'zai appeared from a connecting rampway. People screamed and divided all around them.

  The tall white things cut through the press of mutants, smoke pouring around them. A gang of townspeople very close to Tavlin and the boy, armed with homemade weapons, rushed toward the creatures. One G'zai lifted a dripping tentacle, then another. Two separate blasts hit the mutants. Tavlin, wondering if they did in fact mean to take him alive, threw himself to the floor even as the G’zai released the pulses. He dragged the boy down with him.

  The lad screamed. There came an awful splat sound, and then something wet covered them both from head to foot. Tavlin tried to turn his mind off to it as he pulled the boy up the ramp and away from the G’zai.

  "Well?" Tavlin demanded. "Is there another way out of the city?"

  Around him the people they passed were staring at them, and it wasn’t until Tavlin had to wipe blood and oozing flesh out of his eyes that he realized why. He and the boy were absolutely soaked in viscera. The boy was trembling and crying, much of the brave townspeople that had just died now coated onto him like glue, but at the moment he looked livid enough to put his grief aside.