I beat its appendages back. Pinned it with one hand. Hammered it again and again until it laid still. One last spurt of warm liquid. One final choked, wheezing gasp.
I hoped that the slender thing died hungry.
I panted. Inhaled cold air. Calmed myself.
Tried to reconcile what had just happened.
I turned.
There was light coming from farther down the tunnel.
I edged closer to the bend. I needed to look.
The tunnel branched out into an enormous hall. Multileveled. I moved closer.
The tier I was on was the first of dozens. Dozens reaching farther and farther down.
There was a fire at the center of it all.
One small, tame fire that painted the walls with the shadows of a thousand slender things.
I saw them working primitive machines. Levers and pulleys acting on stone. Saw them herding smaller slender things – children, or maybe just a diminutive part of the brood. They herded other creatures as well. Insects grown enormous. Long, black things with too many legs, acting like guard dogs.
And then their huge eyes were staring at me.
A thousand pairs of bright headlight eyes.
I ran.
Ran as they released the hundred-legged squirming beasts with faces like lampreys. Ran as they all glared, hateful. Ran as they screamed and shrieked. Ran as they set upon my trail with the spider arms that propelled them.
I stumbled, fell, slid. My lungs ached. My muscles pumped acid. I moved like an animal, seeking those chemical crumbs that marked the trail. Seeking the rope.
I popped flares. Threw the light behind me as I scrambled. Hoped the brightness would slow them down and give me enough time to let me climb back up.
I pushed myself hard through the fissure, ignoring the fresh wounds the spikes of stone gave me, and into the sublevel in my building. The things were right behind me. I grabbed the rope that dangled down from my kitchen. I climbed. Pain shot through my body.
But I made it. I fell onto the linoleum in front of my fridge, panting, coughing. I slammed the door shut. Started barricading it. My first and only line of defense.
I could hear them. I heard them then and I still hear them. The wet wheeze as they chased. The wet wheeze now behind the small door in my kitchen. The ragged breaths and frantic scratching that tests the brick and mortar and locks I put in place.
I never did see my fiancée again.
Told her there were better men out there.
Told her she’d be OK.
I was wrong.
Pills. A note. A rope around her neck. Suicide.
Her family blames me. And I do not try to persuade them otherwise.
My hand is resting on the stock of a twelve-gauge shotgun. A strong, patient Husky sits near my feet, waiting. He growls sometimes, but he’s gotten used to the ever-present threat. And I think the dog knows as well as I do that vigilance is paramount. Because this is our job. To keep watch. Make sure they don’t get out.
I feel the brush of cold air coming from the dumbwaiter tube. I hear the slender things on the other side. In the tunnel. I hear the tipping and tapping of their hundred-legged monsters.
And I know those headlight eyes are there, looking for me.
Waiting.
As I wait for them.
Whatever the cause might have been, the Elvis of 2077 was murderously insane.
Back in 2007, technical wizards created a digital Elvis for Celine Dion to sing next to on stage during American Idol. They resurrected something that had been great man. Well, resurrected something that had been a great man for ratings.
It was impressive.
Many years later, on the anniversary of Celine Dion’s death, they tried it again. The show in 2007 had been a great ratings boost for FOX, and they figured they’d do something different from the oft-lethal bloodsports that catapulted viewership during the mid-21st century.
Science had moved ahead at tremendous speed since the original Elvis-Celine duet. Now it was possible for commercial enterprises like television networks to clone dead celebrities and make them perform duets or orchestrations or – in one bizarre Pay-Per-View instance involving a briefly-resurrected Caligula – massive orgies. It depended solely on who owned whose DNA. That, in turn, depended on who had how much money. And FOX had snatched both Elvis’ and Celine’s.
Quietly, carefully, they staged the event. Rumors were intentionally leaked to the press that the network had in fact cloned hundreds of Elvises and Celines. The president of the network refused, with a smile, to confirm or deny the planted “hearsay”.
As time before the very special event dwindled, advertisements started springing up. Most involved silhouettes of Elvis’ pompadour and Celine’s nose. People wondered and gasped. Everyone made sure they either had that night off from work or were recording the show. This was going to be something to remember, they thought.
Finally, the big night arrived.
Cameras opened on an aged Ryan Seacrest – he had never given up his post as American Idol’s host. And he wasn’t visibly old, either. Even though he was over 100, technology had kept him in shape. “Now,” he said in his perpetually boyish way, “prepare to be startled. Prepare for magnificence. Prepare for a duet you thought was impossible. Ready? Here we go.”
The cameras cut away, and the opening notes to ‘If I Can Dream’ popped through millions of speakers in people’s living rooms. The curtains drew back on a titanic stage.
Hundreds of cloned Elvis-creatures clad in white suits sang “There must be lights burning brighter somewhere” in perfect unison. On the left side of the stage, hundreds of Celine-clones dressed in black sang “Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue” in perfect unison.
For once, all across America, people stopped shoveling food into their mouths. They stopped talking. They stopped fighting.
The spectacle consumed them.
But then, as the Elvises began to sing “Out there in the dark, there’s a beckoning candle,” something went wrong.
Perhaps too much of the aging mid-1970s Elvis had taken hold in the clones. The aging Elvis was fond of popping pills and shooting televisions.
Young 1950s Sun Records-Elvis was sexy and talented. 1960s Elvis started getting bizarrely off-track. 1970 Elvis shook hands with the anti-Rock Richard Nixon. He got super weird and started wearing capes. 1977 ‘King’ Elvis died fat, crapping on his throne, abusing drugs.
1950s: good Elvis. 1960s: bad actor Elvis. 1970s: crazy Elvis.
2077 Elvis was homicidal on top of crazy.
The hundred Elvis-devils on the right side of the stage charged the Celines on the left. Cameras caught the crazy in their eyes as they lunged for the throats of the never-Rock & Roll Celine Dions.
The Elvis-things fed on the Celine-things. Vocal chords were ripped out. Pools of hemoglobin coated the stage. The Elvises crooned and crowed, many howled.
The cameras cut, but that didn’t stop the Elvis-monsters.
They overran everyone at the site. Thousands died.
And more die every day.
The Elvises found a way to keep their clones rolling off the assembly line. The Underground believes that Colonel Parker is somehow behind it.
If there’s anyone out there, my name is Jack Svoboda and I don’t know how much longer I can hold them off. My batteries are dying. My ammo is running out.
There is something on the other side of the door singing ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’
I’m writing this miles above you. I’m staring out thick observation windows that keep the vacuum from sucking away my oxygen. I’m watching continents and countries grow smaller. I’m thinking about Statute 457a. I’m looking at the dirt and grime and blood under my nails, thinking of how to word this…
Jack The Ripper wasn’t even my real name, as you’re damn well aware, and while I found the pseudonym flattering, it wasn’t at all accurate. That’s my quarrel. I’m not talking about the obvi
ous – certainly, I never made reservations at a restaurant and awaited the call for a ‘The Ripper’ – I’m talking about the perceived purpose behind it.
Yes, yes, I know, the letters. Let me stop you there. I didn’t write the things. Really, I didn’t. My hand never scrawled any ‘Dear Boss’ or ‘Saucy Jacky’ or ‘From Hell’ script. Christ, the grammar and spelling errors in those linguistic abominations should have tipped you off that they were not penned by a smart person like moi.
Ego ego ego. I’ve got it. I’m proud. A deadly sin, perhaps, especially in my hands, but I have reason. And if it’s pride that’s making me write now, so be it.
Also, I wasn’t ripping. I operated more surgically. But anyway…
A more precise nom de guerre – and I do meanguerre– would have been Jack The Assassin. Maybe Jack The Warrior, or Warrior Jack.
If you insist on ‘Jack the ____,’ make it Jack The Savior. I like that. It has a nice ring to it.
Put it in the history books.
Of course, you wouldn’t know why I’d rather be remembered as a savior. Oh, dear me, no. You wouldn’t know that I’m writing this miles above the atmosphere either (except that I’ve just told you, obviously), readying this note to be fired toward London, where it may or may not be found. Although I feel fairly certain that it will be. Just as long as the projectile casing doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere.
I hope it’s discovered. I hope it doesn’t all go up in a flash. I at least want to try to set the record straight. That ego again – I hate the idea that I’m being misrepresented.
See, I’m headed home for some rest. I’ve earned my combat pay. In spades. I’ll be back, but I don’t know when, and I’d like to get a word in edgewise. I’m sick of the media’s garbage. I’m sick of all the insane things they write. I’m sick of the way the British depict me in unflattering ‘Punch’ cartoons.
I deserve a little respect for my efforts.
You were this close to obliteration.
And I’m not even from here.
Or, rather, I’m not from now.
I did you a favor.
And nobody I killed was human anymore.
I know, I know, each of the five (there were only five of the things. The poor people killed afterwards by loons and copycats, I had nothing to do with those) looked like any average street-walker. All the bits and pieces were in the right places. No doctor – no medical professional of any kind – would ever have noticed that they weren’t human. Anymore.
There are questions you must be asking now, since I am presenting myself as a Noble Killer: what of the obscene conditions of the bodies? Why leave the corpses to be found in such horrible ways? Why such brutality? Such hacking and flaying?
The short answer is: There are reasons.
The slightly longer answer is: they served as warnings to something else.
I’m serious.
And before I fully explain, ask yourself why the five ended up as sex workers.
Don’t think ‘obvious.’ I didn’t assassinate them because they had sex for money – there were plenty of people who had no choice but to sell their bodies for scratch. They couldn’t eat otherwise. I didn’t terminate the five for anything as porous or muddled as ‘morality’. Please! Whitechapel was home to thousands who were victims of the environment – econoslaves. The East End was a writhing pit of misery, pregnant (hah!) and overburdened with immigrants, crime, and racism far before I came along. Don’t scapegoat me.
Think think think.
Ponder ponder ponder.
And before anyone jumps to conclusions: It’s not because they were women, either.
Let’s get this thing going, shall we?
My original reason for coming to London was to hunt. Someone let a particularly nasty experiment loose in London’s sewers circa 1879.
And that, friends, is a major violation of Statute 457a, a law passed long ago by The Collective, which explicitly prohibits the willful infection of a populace for the purposes of experimentation. Especially across the temporal void. There’s a hazy area that gets hazier when planets or civilizations are at war, but the general point is: You can’t screw around with a population just because you want to see what happens.
Anyway, this experiment was a disaster waiting to happen. In point of fact, it was an effort to monkey with human genes. Such things never go well. The antagonist in this instance was a scientist named Samuel Zloy. His origins remain unknown. And technically speaking, those origins could have been anywhere and anywhen. He just popped up on our radar one day (we don’t use anything as primitive as radar, but you get my drift) and starting mucking up the works. We knew Zloy wasn’t human, but he did have a curious interest in how humanity would react to having its DNA spliced with the genetic workings of his pets.
He wasn’t the kind of fellow you wanted at a party, let’s say.
Zloy took a few of his worm-things and launched them from his Lunar office into Earth’s orbit. Most of them, thankfully, burned up. But five survived. And those five found their way into the London sewers.
The creatures were essentially enormous viruses. Crawling viruses. Squirming viruses. Shrieking viruses. Their heads were like lamprey heads – eyes tossed off to the sides, five or six rows of circular teeth. Ye gods, the things didn’t even have heads to speak of. They were just mouths with tooth after tooth after hungry tooth. Purpose and motive and sharpness affixed to a writhing, gelatinous, stretched body.
When one latched on, it shot its genes into you and later fell off, empty. It was a carrier, a putrid sack of desire, wanting to spread. The remnants of the thing would decompose so rapidly that it seemed to evaporate. Self-cleaning critter!
Its DNA mixed with our DNA and then took over. It turned people into monsters. I personally saw the final result of such a combination in my own headquarters. If the infection inside the five I killed had gone on long enough, London would have seen it, too, but a different game was afoot.
Picture a mewling human torso with tentacles bursting from the neck. It has no head. It has teeth. Tentacles with eyes. Ichor falls freely. It looks for the next living creature to infect.
Good, old-fashioned nightmare fuel.
But, for Earth, the scientist had refined his little experiment – and this refinement was the reason I came.
What happens when a spliced human breeds?
We had a working hypothesis. We ran simulations. The results were terrifying: If the five carrier women weren’t killed, if they were allowed to mix further, the whole planet would be infected in six months.
So it began.
Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, the first, was not an attractive gene machine. Not before they took her over (she was a flaky alcoholic) and certainly not after (still a flaky alcoholic). Before it got into her, she’d married and had five kids. That marriage fell apart, some say, because of her drinking – others say it was because her husband cheated on her.
Regardless, it was after she deserted her hubby that it happened.
She had been wandering the street one night and, through chance or design, was attacked by one of the worms. It shot her full of itself. From that point on, she was just a fleshy missile obeying the orders of her modified genes.
The order was to breed.
Find a man to put his (worm) thing inside you.
Mix it up inside yourself.
Breed breed breed.
Spread spread spread.
I tracked her along Hanbury Street after she left her Whitechapel lodging house. I walked behind her, and when I had my chance, practically breathing down her neck, I gave her a sharp right hook to the jaw. I caught her with my left hand to muffle any screams, squeezing her mouth shut.
I put my knee against her lower back and pushed her to the ground while holding her head up. I pulled my long-bladed knife from a holster hidden in my waistcoat with my free hand and, as any butcher might, slit her throat from left to right.
I pulled her head back to drain
her faster. I grimaced as things in her neck ripped and tore – thesoundsof the slay always make me a little sick.
When she stopped thrashing, I flipped her over and commenced my examination to see (a) how far along the infection was and (b) if she’d become pregnant.
Checking for the worms is, unfortunately, messy business. The vast majority of the violence done to the bodies was a result of it. Significant damage to the abdomen, for example, must be done to observe whether or not any breeding had even been attempted. I had to cut in, through layer after layer of tissue …
But you get the idea.
‘Polly’ had been infected, all right, but the worm hadn’t gotten very far. Better yet, there was no pregnancy. No fetal, humanoid, tentacle-thing mewling and crying inside her. They creep me out. I won’t lie. Just thinking about them, worrying about what could grow inside any of us.
I left that first body there on the street to be found (like all the others), hoping Zloy would see it and start to understand that his days were numbered. I wanted him to know we were on his case. That was the point of the bodies: I wanted that bastard to know that I would find him.
Annie Chapman had a similar story. And like ‘Polly,’ I bled her out and checked her.
See also: Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride, the third kill.
I didn’t have much trouble until Catherine Eddowes. I had reason to believe she’d been a carrier for a lot longer than the other women. That made her a priority. The longer the alien horror is in you, the more you change.
And unfortunately, I suspected that she might also be pregnant.
As previously stated, the longer it’s in you, the more you change. So, since Eddowes had been infected for longer than the first three had, she was more likely to be pregnant. You following? And I was right.
The spawn were what my bosses and I were concerned with. A regularly-infected human became a violent monster within a month of gene insertion. We weren’t sure what would happen if a ‘naturally’ occurring chimera was born. We couldn’t risk it.
I caught her right outside Whitechapel, in Mitre Square – technically London proper.
The Space Whiskey Death Chronicles Page 11