by Michael Shea
“You’re already moved in.”
“I mean full-time.”
* * *
Back in the church’s little rectory, Momma Grace got a nice urn of coffee brewed for the women under her care, and while they were filling their cups, she brewed herself a cup of tea.
She took this back to the preacher’s dais, and sat down near the pulpit, where Auntie Drew’s body lay wrapped in its blanket. She absently wiped the tears from her eyes, took another sip of her tea, and then spoke quietly to her precious friend.
“You know dear … about this talk of attacking the studio that’s going around. Lord knows I understand. They are all amped from battle, but so many of our sweet friends have died already, and even more would die if we did that. What do you think of it, Drew?”
Again she sipped tea, thoughtfully. And answered for her friend. “Well, Gracie, I suppose I have mixed feelings. Precious friends, yes—we’ve lost so many! But I can’t help thinking what all of them would want from us now. I think they would want us—forgive me, dear—to kill every one of those sons of bitches we could.”
Momma Grace wiped her eyes again, and smiled. “Thank you, dear. I feel the same. I suppose I just didn’t want to be the first to say it.”
* * *
Our new dead numbered forty-one, and as many again were badly hurt. But grim though this was, we took heart, because the tide had dramatically turned. They’d been slaughtering the mantids by shoot’s end.
I wrapped a hug around Jool. Her little belly snuggled against me, but the fight was still in her arms and shoulders, and it took holding her a while before she could relax against me.
We went out into the street. Some folks were reinforcing refuges, others tending the wounded. I had tears in my eyes. Even after death our friend helped us. Without his swords and shields we could never have turned the battle. I remembered first seeing him, in that packed car in the ’tube. His eight-ball head and the glint of that gold tooth, the two of us on our way to be extras in Alien Hunger, and dance with the giant spiders.
We sat on the library porch, leaned back against the wall, half-dozing together. Snugglers like us were everywhere on the street. There was a quiet rejoicing in the air. The part of us that had just carried dead friends from where they had fallen hadn’t stopped grieving, but, come moonrise, we saw only our revenge ahead of us, and no more of us dying.
Someone was gently kicking the sole of my foot. We’d passed out. The sun was near setting, and here was Chops, with Gillian at his side. People were busy everywhere, checking arms, yelling in position. Chops squatted, leaning close to talk low. “We’ve been passing this around. It’s just a thought been bothering us.…”
Gillian too got close. “We were fighting the street last act,” she told us. “Some stray fire took a chunk off the top of the bank behind us, big piece of concrete that slammed down on a gel-blob rolling toward us. Smashed it flat center-mass. The two end segments globed up and rolled away either side. Then the chunk, like, moved, and a little sheet of gel edged out from under it, thinner than paper, and it globed up and rolled away.”
She hesitated. Chops said gently, “Just tell ’em, Gillian.”
“Sometimes I … feel things in the ground. A couple times in Oregon when I was a kid. There was a little earthquake once, and I felt it coming—maybe ten minutes before it happened.”
“Like an aura,” I said.
“I guess so. And a couple years later, when it had been raining for weeks, I felt something coming from the next hill over, and I hiked over that way, and just as I got in sight of it there was a landslide, a sizeable one that took some trees down with it.
“So I’m saying I felt something up at the mine, guys. Right after the last act ended. I took an ATV up there and I swear I felt movement in it. Nothing you could see or hear, but I felt it.”
“Sounds to me,” Jool said, “like somebody should go up and check it out again.”
And I had to agree. “He’d never have meant for us to exterminate his bugs, and that’s what he’s looking at right now. Somebody better go up to the shaft and check it out.”
“Smalls is taking some three-wheelers up in a few minutes,” Gillian said. “Wants you along, Curtis.”
* * *
The greatest vid director who had ever lived. Val knew himself serenely, absently, the same way his fingertips danced on his keys, and his eyes worked his screens: enraptured, unhurried.
The enemy was strong and cunning. There, even now, was a squad of their tripods roaring up toward the mine—just a half mile away from it and closing … and just at this moment, he brought the last thread of his buried gel out of the rubbly spoil that choked the shaft.
He rivered it down into the grass, to join the braid of other threads, to pour them in one smooth, slender cable that already stretched more than a mile toward Sunrise.
His fingers deftly hastened it, but his serpent, it seemed, was a tad sluggish, a bit awkward in response. Its rivering had a ripply rhythm to it, a slight liquid lurch as it flowed, causing the grass to tremor, faintly betraying its passage even in the moon’s deceptive light. Explosive burial had damaged its synapses somewhat.… But not too much, no. It could do what he intended.
A half mile farther, and here the futile search party came, clustering round the shaft mouth. Let them grope and scratch their heads like chimps. A quarter mile farther down now he’d brought its questing tip … and yet a farther quarter mile … and now he had it snaking down into the industrial zone.…
Just then—spot on time—he saw the moon had cleared the peaks. He commed Properties. “Aidan. Deploy the APPs as we discussed, and wait for my order.”
Up the rear walls of buildings they brought the mantids, brought them low across rooftops, scuttling them out along walls in the shadows of alleys. All of them simply deploying, none striking, none showing themselves.
An interlude of pure hiatus. Moon up, the whole town clenched in readiness … and nothing happened. It made marvelous in-the-street footage: everyone watchful, the arms trucks and fire trucks cycling up and down the blocks … and nothing happening. Everywhere you felt the enemy they scanned for but did not find.
Steadily Val poured the serpent of his reinforcements to their collection point. The gel of his avenger was no longer what it had been—his directive signals had to be multiplied to impel it accurately. The stresses of its burial had taken a toll. His last-act titan might prove slightly retarded … but it would serve.
His art was Death—so what? Most die randomly, alone, without a context or grand struggle. Those who died here Val lifted with himself—their saga’s Maker—out of Death, dark and entire, into an afterlife that would blaze and battle as long as humankind sucked vid.
Time to open the ball, get the surviving bugs moving. “Aidan? Action!”
And round every corner, from the rooftops, his APPs flowed down onto the façades of the buildings and began swarming across them in all directions. The guns woke up everywhere, trying to track their crazy currents along the walls. Drawn fire blew a floodlight out and half a block went dark. One mantid dove from the wall, plunging jaws-first, and sheared an extra’s head off down to the collarbone.
“That’s good,” he told Aidan. “Scatter your kills the whole length of town. Sustain till my next com.”
He kept keying. Just a quarter mile of gel left to thread into his secret weapon.
* * *
“How many klicks can this hit in three seconds, max acceleration?” A calmly posed question—by Sandy Devlin to duct-taped Mark Millar.
“Three-fifty.” Mark was terse—still dazed, but in a remote way that left his five remaining fingers limber, agile on the keyboard. These visuals! Though this had cost him half an arm, look what he was getting here!
But suddenly the words he’d just uttered—“three-fifty”—seized him bodily, crushed him down into his seat with the forces of acceleration. Sandy swooped in a swift maneuver—had snatched with their raft’s
tow hook a mantid straight out of the air by its neck. And now accelerating skyward at a rate he thought might crush him, he saw the flailing bug hauled helplessly through the air astern of them.
They streaked down toward the trees below town, hooked a skyward arc at crushing acceleration—climbing, climbing as they arced back up over the shoot. Mark struggled to read what Devlin was doing, but was still a half beat behind when she did it—hit the hook release as she dove down over a sizeable shoot-raft, and sent the mantid, wide-winged and struggling in the air, straight down amidships of what Mark instantly knew—seeing Aidan Zadok there at the helm—was the chief APP-control raft of Margolian’s Properties squadron.
XXVII
AND THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED
The spasmodic din of gunfire could be heard all along the street, especially the dark blocks. The dizzying dance of the bugs, little squads of them darting multidirectionally across the building fronts, had tricked their machine-gun fire into destroying three floodlights, dark and lit blocks alternating now. In the pauses of gunfire the fighters’ shouts filled the air, the bugs’ erratic flow waking everywhere outcries and warnings, pulling the troops’ eyes in all directions.
It was a kind of bug guerilla warfare, Japh thought. He’d left his thirty-cal, grabbed a third twelve-gauge, and gone mobile, watching walls as he jogged for shifts in the bug-flow that he could run to meet, blowing off their legs as they came.
He heard above the boil of voices, “On your left!”—An odd note to the voice, odd too its high angle of origin. He looked left, saw nothing, looked right and saw a man facing him from five yards away, gun at ready, and saw a bug drop off the wall behind him and bite his head clean off.
He was already shotgunning it before the headless man’s knees had buckled and dumped him.
Lots of other firing now, bugs triggering a new lead-storm seemingly everywhere. He saw heavy bug-assault on the next block and ran to it, adding his twelve’s fire-tongues to the defense against the rippling squads of bugs that shifted formation and flowed back up the walls.
But they’d got enough legs off of one to drop it to the street, shield-snagged its graspers and chopped them right off—all while Japh was feeling some uncompleted thought hanging fire in his brain. Then, watching them torch the big gel-pool they’d made, it came to him.
The guy who’d lost his head, facing Japh, was turned to his left, and the voice had come down from above him. And the Sunrisers themselves had mostly deserted the rooftops because bringing the APPs down to the street was the surest way to kill them.
And the voice itself was odd. “On your left.” But really it was more like “Ong urr lefk!” He thought he heard his name shouted. Then heard it clearer.
“Japh! Someone’s trapped in here—gotta be bugs in there!”
It was Chops, standing in front of Cap’s Hardware, and as Japh ran toward him, called, “Get my back!” and went into the store.
And just as Japh got there, he heard from the dark interior what Chops must have heard: “In here!”
Except that it was slightly more like “Ing-geeere!”
Chops was standing inside in the dark saying, “Where…?”—and Japh rushed in after him saying, “Shhh!”
But Chops got it already, stood poised with his twelve up, scanning the shadows, softly saying, “Where’s the light switch?”
“By the counter I think.”
As if the dark in here dimmed sound as well as light, the uproar in the street seemed half a world away. The window sent a dim slab of moonlight a few yards inside, spiked by the three shadows of the manikins, and Chops stood poised just at the edge of it.
“They have voices,” Japh murmured, and Chops nodded. Japh came farther in to stand at his flank, struggling to think. The big double back door that opened on the loading dock showed panes of even dimmer light because the dock was canopied, but it looked firmly shut. But wasn’t there another way in here? What was it?
This was a big space in front of them, two long stock shelves splitting its floor in three lanes, the main counter and a smaller counter beyond them, the tat-chair’s nook—all full of shadow. Chops muttered, “It’ll dry-gulch us in there, we gotta draw it.”
In the pane of dim light they shared, one of the manikins’ shadows fell between them.
“Wait,” Japh hissed. He darted back to the window. After an instant’s hesitation, laid by his twelve and grabbed up one of the dummies by the waist. Unwieldy with all the tools she wore, she was some work to waltz back toward Chops.
“You stand my flank and we’ll fish with her.”
He crouched low behind and edged her into the darkness of the center aisle, advancing very slowly but turning her left and right to amplify her movement.
And just as he’d started this ruse, the answer that had eluded him leapt back to memory … the basement door was in that wall fifteen feet to his right and those basements communicated now, and there must be bugs inside many of the buildings.
Almost knocking Chops over, he jumped back from the aisle and hoisted the dummy high to his right toward a sudden chitinous bug noise, and felt a barb tear through the web of his thumb as tool-girl’s head, helmet and all, was engulfed by a bug, its graspers hauling her up out of his hands.
And then it was fighting to free its arms, the dummy’s tough plastic tightly trapping its barbs.
“Legs!” Chops shouted, pulling his second gun. When they’d blown both legs off one side it toppled. It lifted its other pair, scrabbling at the air, making them harder to blow off. And in the brief silences between shots as they whittled them away, they heard a swift scuttle of claws across the roof above their heads.
“Oh shit! Get its arms!” Japh shouted, and ran back to the window just as a mantid erupted through the front door. He had to drop his second gun to seize the second manikin in time. Heaved it up and swung it around in such lucky synchronicity with the bug’s assault that he tucked her shoulders in its barbs and her head in its mouth in one smooth thrust.
He glanced to see Chops just taking off his bug’s remaining arm. Grimly Japh unholstered his third gun. As the mantid fought to free its barbs from its prey, Japh set to work methodically, first, blowing off its head …
* * *
Aidan, the Properties chief, was a desperately busy man. Val had just commed him to “Send half the troops in—eat ’em up. When that half’s down, send in the other half!”
There was an oddly merry tone to that command—the boss had something big of his own going, apparently. But what a kill-fest his troops had jumped into. Those swords and shields began eating them up down there. He was afraid he would smile, and that Val’s monitors would catch it.
Aidan, a wiry, redheaded, and very motivated kid from the Zoo, had worked himself all the way up from mean streets to this, his present lofty post, and while his fingers danced to kill them, his heart couldn’t help exulting in the ass-kicking that Zoo-meat down there was giving his monsters.
Aidan had installed a little shunt in his cams to steal footage from his shoots. When he drank with old Zoo friends up in his crib in the Hollywood Hills, they all viewed them laughing and shouting. Thus he shared his high life with pals who might themselves sign on as extras someday. Only a man born in the Zoo himself could understand how this was OK with his friends, how they could find in it a celebration of themselves.
Dutifully and skillfully his fingers toiled to keep his bugs alive, while thinking the whole awful game was beautiful. In the darker blocks where the battle had destroyed the floodlights, the gunfire was all flame-flashes in the moonlight, orange tongues of annihilation licking the air. And in the lit blocks, indelible cameos: a sinewy arm working the slide of a pump-gun, a fire team of two small, quick women, drenching and lighting a spill of gel in the instant it had contracted into a globe, a man toppling backward, his feet locked in a quick tongue of gel, then wrenching his feet from his rubber boots and scrambling backward on his ass as another fire team flanked in on him and drove
the gel back in flames.…
Something slammed aboard Aidan’s raft. He took one glance behind him, and threw the raft into a steep, fast dive, his sole aim to topple backward the mantid reaching for him.
He felt something like the collision of a Mack truck with his neck, and he was engulfed in darkness absolute. He was … only his head! He was dissolving! Shit.…
* * *
Mark caught it all. Aidan, though he dove his raft to throw the bug backward, was the first casualty, the monster then wheeling to snatch the life of one of his lieutenants, just before the raft crashed into a building.
And Mark saw, in the same instant, Razz’s raft—himself at the cameras now, and that raft-jockey, Sharon Harms, at the controls—deliver a second bug to the raft of Slake Fincher, Aidan’s co-chief of Properties. Slake thrust up an arm to save his head, and lost that arm to the shoulder, and in his convulsion yanked his raft into a backward tumble that flung—at the first flip—his crew and the APP into empty air, and went on tumbling to crash upside down on a rooftop.
Whoa! It would all be on Val now to manage his monsters, his dwindling monsters, which the extras were killing wherever Mark looked.
* * *
Val was in it now. Home, right in the eye of the hurricane he’d conjured. From here on out, his fleet must handle all else. His whole thought was down in his storm’s vortex, keying his gel from half a dozen boards at once, letting the rest of his APPs go full-bore to attack. The crew must do as well as they could to keep them alive.
Henceforth his sole darling was the resurgent gel. The threads of it he had sneaked from all over the set, the great snake brought down from the mine—more than half of it had been sneaked into its final destination: the heaped dead of Sunrise in their hundreds.
In moonlight shadow his threads snaked unseen, crooking along the bases of buildings, crossing the old pavement along its cracks—all angling and crooking toward, all tucking in like tongues beneath that funeral pile of moon-pale faces.
Val’s keying was exquisite, the gel absorbing what it rose beneath, condensing flesh and bone into its own supple density. The bier rose, but so incrementally! All those pale, moon-aimed faces, their slight shifts and liftings made them seem to dream. The augmentation of their mass would be inevitable soon, but with delicate chiselings from beneath he kept their topmost layer intact, a long human mask just rippling faintly, rising here and there, an anthropoid lid on a bulge of death a block long.