Monstrocity

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “I didn’t know about the body. I only knew that this church was significant in some way. I felt it. I am connected to all this, but not in the way you think...or in a way I can easily explain.”

  “Well you’d better do your best, Chris, because I’m inclined to arrest you right now.”

  I gesture helplessly. “Saleet...there’s a cult that’s doing this. This and other terrible things. Probably a number of cults, maybe only loosely connected, but united in one goal. They want to awaken and release Ugghiutu, Saleet. Him and the rest of the Outsiders. They worship the god of your people but in another way than you’re accustomed to. Not to pay him tribute, not to pray to, but to actively become his servants, his living hands.”

  “Chris...”

  “Look around you. This is obviously ritualistic.”

  “Serial killers tend to be.”

  “I thought you were agnostic, Saleet. If you can possibly believe in Ugghiutu yourself, why not that there are fanatics doing things like this to summon him? Ugghiutu permeates Paxton, Sal...he’s all around us, in everything...”

  “Your brain is zapped, Christopher. Listen to you.”

  “This city is evil...”

  “A city doesn’t need the Devil to be evil. That’s the job of the people who live in it.” She shifts her weight and the weight of her weapon. “How did you know about this place, Chris?”

  “Off the damn net!”

  “You expect me to believe that you just stumbled on this body, cut up exactly, precisely like that prosty you...”

  “There is no coincidence. There are only patterns. I’m in the weave. Look...I knew someone, all right? This person was dabbling in occult stuff. Very lightly, playfully at first. But she performed a ritual from a very, very rare and powerful book. She left a door open and forces have leaked through. Things have been getting worse since. I think they’re going to continue to get worse, until they come to a head.”

  “How is it that a playful dabbler could open this portal or whatever but these organized cults haven’t already done so?”

  “I’m sure they are doing so, but she did more damage because she had this book, and now they feel the power that surged through and they’re stepping up their activities.”

  “Why don’t they have this book?”

  “It’s unbelievably rare, and suppressed...”

  “So where did this friend of your gets it?”

  “From another friend, who was murdered. Beheaded. By who knows who – either these cultists, or other secret groups that are trying to thwart these cultists. Like I’m trying to do. Either way, they obviously didn’t find the disk the girl had the book on. Maybe they were mistakenly looking for an actual book.”

  “Where is your friend, this dabbler? You said it’s a ‘she’.” Saleet sounds not only dubious, but jealous.

  I look at the gun in Saleet’s fists, still pointing its array of barrels and nozzles at my mid-section. I hope she realizes she could cave in this whole tunnel for good with that thing. Looking back up at her face, I confess, “I killed her.”

  “You...killed her.”

  “She was my ex-girlfriend, Saleet. I didn’t kill Jelena. I didn’t kill this guy, whoever he is. But...yes...I...”

  White blur, a skeleton swinging into the frame of the doorway behind Saleet, and suddenly I’m reaching under my coat, sweeping the shotgun up, yelling at Saleet to get out of the way, and she does – I think she thinks I’m going to shoot her – and I blast the crab-thing through its middle just as its four upper limbs are reaching out for Saleet’s back. In the muzzle flash I glimpse segmented arms, barbed pinchers at their ends, and a translucent sea anemone instead of a head. Violently jerked back out of the doorway by the impact of my tight swarm of projectiles, piercing its bony armor.

  Saleet has rolled on her shoulder and come up into a crouch, and peripherally I see her gun trained on me, hearing the squeal as it becomes instantly charged for heavy fire, but she whips her head around and perhaps gets a quick look of the demon as it’s launched back into darkness. Instead of shooting me, she scoops her helmet back onto her head, and I point my flashlight into the doorway. Dust motes churn, but no sign of the crab thing, living or dead.

  Coming to my side, but facing in the other direction, gun on the far doorway, Saleet whispers harshly, “What the dung was that?”

  “A demon, the mutants call them. I think it’s something from the other side. A servitor...”

  My ears ring from the thunder of the shotgun. Everyone and everything in these tunnels knows we’re here, now.

  “It was Kalian semen in Jelena,” Saleet muses under her breath.

  “But it’s not just Kalians,” I tell her. “Earthers. Chooms. Tikkihottos. Coleopteroids. The worship is universal. Just that Kalians might be more in tune with Ugghiutu in particular. But he’s not the only Outsider...”

  “No...no...listen...that thing you shot might just be a mutant...”

  “You know it wasn’t. And I’ve seen these demons before...in an old tapestry in a bookstore run by one of these cultists. It showed Tikkihotto warriors fighting these crab things...”

  “We need to get out of here, Christopher, and get a forensic team in here. You can’t be in this place, whatever it is you think you’re doing to help. You’re a civilian...”

  “You can help me fight these people, Saleet...”

  “Do you want me to kill any more ex-girlfriends of yours?”

  “We need to talk about that...”

  “Uh, yeah...”

  “Dung!” I hiss, as I see a white shadow flash left to right past the threshold of the door I’m covering.

  “Did you see it?” Saleet whispers.

  “I don’t know if it was the same one...”

  “Let’s try the door your friends went through. Come on.”

  Saleet ducks under one of the plastic strands and starts across the room, but I say, “Wait,” and I bring my shotgun down on the string like a club. The blow pops out whatever nail or fastening attaches the end of the strand to one of the legs crucified to the wall, and the string floats to the floor, trailing limply from the central torso like an errant vein.

  “You can’t do that!” my girlfriend snarls. “This is a crime scene! Leave it intact!”

  “I can’t. This is like a battery, maybe even a portal; it’s what these demons are protecting. We have to destroy it.” And I swing my heavy gun down on another of the white threads. I have to hit it twice to dislodge the pin that fixes it to a grayish-skinned limb nailed to the white wall. “Help me!” I say.

  “I can’t,” Saleet replies, but she doesn’t try to stop me as I move around the room, severing each link to the torso in turn. I try not to look at that terrible head with its slack mouth and hair spiky and stiff with dried gore, pierced through the ears and its blood-caked sockets. When I’ve disconnected each satellite body part from the nucleus, I gingerly reach into the cavity where the heart was removed and extract the thick white candle plugged in there. I hurl it at the wall.

  The air seems to slither, suddenly. Reality is a spinning plate wobbling on a magician’s finger, and it takes a stomach-churning dip. Are those cicadas?

  “You hear that?” whispers Saleet.

  “Let’s go!” I yell, as the first of the white things plunges through the door I blasted one of them out of just minutes before. It’s like a huge bipedal insect, skittering at us, thrashing four articulated upper limbs, making an angry chittering noise though it has no mouth parts. All around us now there is a distant susurration like grasshoppers in summer grass.

  “Move!” growls Saleet, and wheeling around with her monster gun at waist level, she lets loose an intensely green ray bolt which lights up the whole room for a second. I see the bolt disappear into the being’s segmented chest area like a javelin, and emerge out the back of its shell-like carapace in an explosion of translucent fluid. Their blood is greenish and looks and smells like aloe juice. Are they more plant than animal?
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br />   I race past her toward the other door, and a second demon leaps through it to block my escape, spinning its arms like four whooshing scimitars. I hold the flashlight against the pumping arm of my shotgun, and I aim both at the creature simultaneously. The shotgun bellows, and just as I feel the wind of a missed blow across my nose the demon goes stumbling backwards, that plant-like juice sloshing out of a jagged wound in its albino chitin.

  Skirting the dying thing’s kicking hind legs, I jump through the door and jerk my gun/light to the left and right. Two corridors forming a T. One ends in a heap of caved-in roof. Down the other, a third demon comes racing toward me out of the gloom. The close walls shake with the rumble of my gun and my ears are stunned from the enclosed concussion. Forging ahead, I hear Saleet following behind me. I also hear her curse and fire another ray bolt. I hope she hit what she aimed at but I don’t look back. There are several doorways along this dark hallway and I expect slicing/crushing pinchered claws to lunge out at me from any one of them.

  Saleet braces herself in front of one doorway and lets loose three jarring shotgun blasts in quick succession from her own weapon; I don’t know what she saw but I’ll bet it’s sorry now.

  “My sign is supposed to ward them off...the symbol on my shirt,” I hiss. “I don’t know why it isn’t working...how they could tear down the signs in this church...”

  “They must be blind,” Saleet says. “They’re going on vibration, maybe. It’s how they move in the dark”

  “Or maybe this eye thing is just symbolic. Worthless...”

  We’ve reached the end of the corridor, and I wrench open its door. The room beyond is filled almost solid with debris, the roof fallen in so that I can see the tunnel’s ceiling just a bit beyond. Did my mutant friends clamber up this precarious mound and escape that way? I’m not sure I can even squeeze through the doorway...

  “In here!” Saleet commands, heading through one of the other doors in the hallway.

  “Holy dung,” I say after I’ve stepped through the threshold to join her. When I passed this room a second ago I didn’t notice the soft greenish glow on the walls, or hear the soft liquid burbling.

  Would the church have had a computer center like this? And even if they had, would it have survived the quake and the intervening two decades intact? Specifically, would these encephalons still be alive in their gurgling tanks of greenish amniotic solution? The artificial brains – three of them – are flattened into vertical frames about the size of the one at my old company: about four feet by two feet by six inches thick. But my company’s mainframe got by on one artificially-generated brain...why would a church or anybody need three?

  Tables, chairs and two old desks have been dragged in here, and numerous components of computers and machinery rest on them, hard-wired into the brainframes. Some components look store-bought, others cobbled together. Static fizzes on one monitor, but three smaller monitors show the flowing blips of the brains’ health status. Thick bundles of wires and power cables snake across the floor and through holes drilled in the wall; do they connect to a private generator? I doubt it. Somehow I know those cords connect somewhere into the energy sources and major cable lines of the city itself. Drawing from its power. And feeding God knows what data and poisons back into the entire city system.

  We are at the very center of Punktown. The heart of the web.

  There’s a second door into this room, and I think that’s more what is on Saleet’s mind, but I have got something to do first...

  Raising my shotgun and spreading my legs wide, I avert my face to protect it from flying splinters and splashing solution as I discharge my shotgun point blank into one of those dreaming grayish brains.

  Through the ragged hole in its plastic case, a flood of nutrient bath washes out, puddling around my feet. Lacerated brain matter comes sliding thickly after it, through the hole, oozing out into the air and smacking to the floor. About a third of it drools out, glistening, until the rest of its bulk clogs the blasted opening.

  Instead of berating me for damaging a crime scene, for obliterating important data we might be able to download from these brains, Saleet turns to a second one of them and fires a blast of heavy OO buckshot through the transparent casing. Then she follows that up by launching a plasma capsule through the opening. The brain catches fire with the green, corrosive plasma immediately, burning up like toilet paper in a flame. It blackens, liquefies, and the air stinks with its dissolution. She nudges past me to melt the brain that I’ve just killed, while I move on to the third encephalon, but then a demon lurches into the room from one doorway. And another, from the other.

  A wild blow from one of those serrated claws collides with Saleet’s head and I see her spin to the floor as if hit by a hovertruck. Her black helmet may have protected her skull from being split but I hope she hasn’t been jarred into unconsciousness or, worse, had her neck broken.

  BOOM! I let loose a load of pellets into the swimming head tentacles of the extradimensional entity directly in front of me. It bounces back against a chair laden with machinery and both crash to the floor, limbs flailing in convulsion and arcs of electricity fluttering. I begin to spin toward the one that downed Saleet – I can see it hovering over her, reaching down to her, it’s going to remove her helmet – when BOOM, Saleet lifts her gun and fires a shotgun blast into its belly with the muzzle nearly touching its shell. The thing practically hits the ceiling before it crumples to the floor.

  On my way to help Saleet to her feet I have to stop and spin and aim my shotgun at yet another demon whisking into the room behind me.

  My shotgun clicks empty.

  From a kneeling position, Saleet leans around me and streaks three green ray bolts at the demon. It goes down fast and hard and writhes in its last agonies. Saleet gets up on her own, apparently not even dazed. But as if to take her revenge, she kills the third and final encephalon with a load of OO followed up by a gel cap of that hungry plasma.

  “Can we go now?” she says.

  “Yeah.” Having fed more shells into the underside of my shotgun and pumped in the first round, I lead the way out the second doorway and into another narrow corridor in this dark maze.

  Swimming at me out of the murk and into my light beam are three more demons.

  Behind Saleet, I hear the cicada chirping of even more demons entering the brain center. I get the impression that they’re not so much coming from elsewhere in this church or even the subway tunnel, but that they’re pouring into our dimension from another as fast as we can kill them.

  Then, sharp awls are driven into my ear drums. I hear Saleet cry out inside her helmet. The pain is so intense that I even involuntarily drop my shotgun so as to slap my palms over my ears, dropping to the floor and curling like a fetus. Saleet collapses across my back, beginning to add her own wail to the inaudible shriek that burns up my brain the way the plasma ate the encephalons.

  And suddenly, it’s gone.

  Looking up from the floor, scrabbling in a panic for my flashlight, I see that the demons have vanished. Instead, out of the darkness a hideous black face leans down into mine. That familiar stink, but I’m hardly resentful as Falco says, “Come with us...we know the way.”

  Hoop helps Saleet back to her feet and we gather our fallen weapons. With Falco and the cradled Pete leading us, we wind our way out of the Church of the Burning Eye.

  ***

  SILVER EYES UNDER grayish cataracts of encroaching decomposition gawk up at me no more mindlessly in death than in life. Gaping mouths bare combs of brittle razored fangs. Pewter-colored scales and jagged fins against dirty beds of crushed ice. I’m reminded unpleasantly of Mr. Dove. I like my fish without heads and fins (and battered), and this thought puts me in mind of the engineered animals farmed at Saleet’s father’s place of business. Do they grow schools of headless fish in aquariums of greenish solution, I wonder, tethered by wires to a bubbling life support system? The image is too uneasily like that of those three huge encephalons
squished into their transparent frames, which I administered crude lobotomies to only hours earlier.

  As unappetizing as these whole, scaly fish are, at least I know what they are. But what about those pallid, slick bundles of flesh, their formless, boneless limbs covered in huge suckers? Their squashed and deflated faces, like discarded rubber masks, disconcertingly resemble those of obese human infants. A price is given, but there is no label. I point them out to the young man behind the seafood counter. “What are these?” I ask him.

  He only shrugs, but blandly reiterates their cost. I’d rather fry up those encephalons...

  Saleet drifts up to my elbow, and indicates that I should follow her over to the supermarket’s deli counter. She has locked her helmet, jacket, long-sleeved shirt and equipment belt in the trunk of her hovercar, and just wears a black t-shirt tucked into her dirty black uniform pants, her glossy boots almost white with caked mud and dust. I’m sure I’m just as disheveled if not more so. Neither of us cares.

  On the ride here, I asked her if she’s afraid or ashamed to be seen in public – perhaps by a colleague – with a man who has recently been questioned in connection to a murder. She told me she isn’t. But she did say she wanted to know why I killed my girlfriend. After all: (A) she’s a forcer, and (B) she’s my new girlfriend.

  Wait ‘til we get to my apartment, I told her. She said, “Let’s pick up some dinner, then.”

  So, here I am. Two hours ago I was fighting extradimensional crustacean demons beneath the city, and now I’m picking out a frozen pizza at the supermarket. Well, it’s a freshly made Mediterranean pizza, black olives and all, so it’s not like I’m complaining about that. But this prosaic activity seems more surreal to me now than the time I spent in the underworld..

  While we’re perusing some of the other deli selections I glance up at a bulky human with greasy hair and greasier mustache who is glowering at me sideways. Suspiciously, and with open hostility, from the corners of his eyes. Immediately I drop my own eyes, but when I look back up, he is still openly glaring at me, so I avert my eyes again out of instinctive meek politeness, animal submissiveness to a beefier animal. But I’m forgetting what he doesn’t know – that I’m a murderer now, a killer of one human, one fish-faced mutation and I don’t know how many servitors of the Outsiders, and I sort of wish I could convince myself that this beer-bellied plumber-looking fuck is Dove’s second cousin twice removed so I could heft a frozen (headless) turkey out of the nearby poultry section and cave in that low forehead of his with it.