I roll onto my back and gasp again at the blaze of pain. When it clears a bit, I see the ceiling is half caved in. A few emergency lights are on in the office here and there. Distantly, beyond this building’s walls, I hear the further shrieks and wails of police and emergency vehicle sirens.
After gathering my strength and my courage for several minutes, I creak myself up into a sitting position, and nearly pass out for my troubles. But sitting up, I can see more clearly around me the shambles of the large office area, its half-demolished honeycomb of padded cubicles, the idiot gaze of computer monitors. Here and there, vidphones are ringing unanswered, something that would be severely frowned upon in the customer service department under normal circumstances.
Yes, now I remember everything...
I’ve been working at Alvine Products for about a month now; winter is falling over Punktown like a misty gray burial shroud.
After my interview, after I was hired, I was given a tour of the offices and the sprawling plant itself by the head of the personnel department, Dawn Andrews, who had only started at Alvine recently herself. She was sincerely amicable for a personnel director, and I liked her cheery British accent. She even made some funny jokes about the pitiful undead animals that I saw along my tour, which made me want to become a vegetarian if only my will were stronger.
Pseudo-chickens without heads, feet or feathers were heaped upon each other inside long aquariums filled with greenish nutrient solution, each chickenish organism with a tube snaking into the rounded stump of its neck; they reminded me more of lobsters piled up in a tank at a supermarket. They also looked grotesquely like dismembered human infants preserved in formaldehyde. There were row upon row of these tanks set into the walls, said tanks being able to be slid out on runners so the chickens could be harvested or new ones added.
As I strolled with Dawn, I said, “When I was in school we toured a plant in Miniosis where they grow generic human clones for body parts and organs. I was only seven. I got so scared just looking through the door into the first farm chamber that I wouldn’t go in, so I never saw the things up close. Just seeing all those pale bodies floating in yellow fluid from a distance was enough to give me nightmares for years.”
“It offends something in us on a very primal level,” Dawn admitted, “our biological programming rebels against it. At first, anyway. But it’s all done for good. Those clones don’t suffer any more than our little menagerie does.”
There were high-ceilinged warehouse-like chambers where big headless hogs were grown from little headless piglets. In stalls lining the walls of the largest farming room, cows stood upon rudimentary half-formed legs like flippers. Without their massive placid heads they looked already slaughtered, though they shifted their weight subtly and you could see their sides pulsing (did those cables inserted into their neck stumps breathe air into their lungs, or did they even have lungs?).
There were Kalian glebbi, in lesser numbers. “They normally have scales,” Dawn supplied, “but our customers don’t need to bother with that.” Each flayed, glistening living carcass had its own bar code identification stamped on its haunch in nontoxic ink, like a brand.
It put me in mind of the glebbis shepherded by Zul, the overly-curious Kalian folk heroine who was lured into the web of the dreaming but still deadly god Ugghiutu.
I liked the people at Alvine; my immediate boss and all my coworkers in customer service, except for one Dacvibese, an alien species I’d never worked with before, who put me in mind of an albino greyhound walking on its hind legs, his pink eyes with unnerving goat-like irises (and his naked body had an unnerving goat-like smell, appropriately). He’d been hired through some kind of government-run interplanetary relations program, and whenever he imagined he’d been slighted made known his disapproval in a high screeching barely coherent voice. He would also express his displeasure by deliberately squirting mucus from glands at the corners of his mouth, this mucus smelling like rotting teeth. Once I saw him squirt my boss in the midst of a pointless dispute, and my boss mildly responded with, “Fedadar, I recognize your right to express your unhappiness to me in the manner of your culture, and we want to accommodate you in every way we can here at Alvine. I’m sure we can find a way to take a little of the pressure off you, etcetera, etcetera.” All I can say is Fedadar was lucky he never found out the manner in which I might choose to express my unhappiness if he spit on me. I was hoping to leave my murdering days behind me.
(I can see Fedadar now, in fact. He’s sitting upright like me, except that a fallen ceiling support has cut through his shoulder all the way down to his groin, so that his two halves yawn away from each other. A string of rubbery drying drool dangles from the corner of his muzzle.)
A week after I started at Alvine, I met Saleet’s father. He seemed surprisingly open and friendly, too.
He purposely sought me out and introduced himself to me. I had seen him around before and already knew who he was, but I had been too nervous to approach him. He was handsome and dignified in his nonKalian black business suit, though he still wore a blue turban. Shaking my hand, Petar Yekemma-Ur smiled and said, “Nice to meet you, Christopher...so you’re Saleet’s friend. How are you getting along so far?”
“Fine, sir, fine, thanks. I think I’m fitting right in.”
“I hear you’re doing well. You came highly recommended by my daughter. Where did you guys meet?”
Despite his bright smile and his casual slang, his question obviously had sharp probes sheathed inside it. “At the Kalian Reading Room, in the Subtown Library. I, ah, have an interest in your very fascinating culture, sir, so it was nice to meet Saleet and hear her talk about Kali and your people.”
“She’s a bright girl, my Saleet. A very willful child.” Did I detect the slightest twinge of regret or disapproval at his daughter’s stubbornness, rebelliousness? “I’m very proud of how well she’s doing in her job, though of course I worry about her safety on the streets. This is a very dangerous city...”
“Yes, sir, but she’s very tough, Saleet.”
“Yes she is. She certainly is.” He chuckled with mock weariness and wagged his head. “So Christopher, do you have any children yourself?”
Another probe. He wanted to know if I were married or involved with someone other than his daughter. “Not yet. Someday, I hope.” I tried on a quivery grin. I was terrified of incurring the anger of my girlfriend’s father, however untraditional he might appear. How long would we have to mask our relationship from him...forever? I knew Saleet wasn’t ashamed that I was her boyfriend, and it was encouraging that she was willing to risk being found out by getting me hired at Alvine, but I still hated to be sneaking around behind her parents’ backs as if we were doing something criminal.
“Well, I’m glad to have you as part of our team, Christopher. Best of luck with it.” Saleet’s father offered me his hand again; his grip was strong.
“Thank you, Mr. Yekemma-Ur.”
“Chris, oh my God, are you all right?” I turn toward a voice and return to the present. The voice belongs to Tammy, a young customer service rep, and with her is Moira, an older rep, both looking dusty but unscathed. Behind them, at the end of the room, I can see several narrow windows spaced along the wall before cubicles and debris blot the others out. Outside the windows, I see scattered flames rising from the skyline of Punktown. With the leaden late afternoon sky full of firelight and smoke, it’s like a view of the capital of Hell.
Shakily I pull myself to my feet, and the two women move forward to help me. They’re alarmed at the blood drying on my face but I wave them off. “I’ll be all right,” I assure them.
“You’d better get out of here,” Moira says, between sobs, “parts of the company are on fire.”
“I will. Go on...go...”
They pick their way toward an unobstructed exit from the offices, which will take them into the plant proper. I turn stiffly toward my cubicle and see my computer still running serenely. While it waits in bli
ssful mindlessness for my return it runs a decorative slide-show I’ve programmed into it: alternating diagrams of chromosomes that look like complex circuit boards, and mapped views of the human genome looking like intricate blueprints of an immense city. The personnel director, Dawn, once casually inquired why I had this decorative pattern, and I told her I’m a bit of an amateur scientist, though amateur sorcerer might be more like it.
I take my suit jacket off the back of my chair, slap some dust off it half-heartedly, slip my arms into it and begin to work my own way out of Alvine Products.
The exit from the office into the cafeteria is blocked by collapsed ceiling, and from here the exit to the reception area doesn’t look promising either, so I decide to follow Tammy and Moira out into the plant itself, and pursue other exits from the building there.
In the plant, with its high ceiling crossed with naked metal beams, struts and girders, there’s a mist of smoke through which emergency exit lights strobe, and somewhere ahead of me over the whooping klaxons I hear a man calling to other workers, “This way! Over here!” I also smell a barbecue. It isn’t hard to imagine the origins of that; throughout the plant, rows of pseudo-pigs and quasi-cattle are no doubt blackening right now, with no voices to give expression to pain (I can only hope that pain is beyond them) and no legs to escape with.
My curiosity gets the better of me; I trudge over to a nearby door that would be closed and perhaps security-locked under usual circumstances but which, like the rest of the doors in the plant I’m sure, was automatically opened when fire broke out, so that employees would not become trapped. From this threshold I peer into a smoke-hazed hellish gloom illuminated inadequately by emergency lights and here and there by small fires. A burst pipe near the ceiling hisses out billows of steam, and on the floor writhes a crackling, sparking power cable. Another severed power line has dropped into a shallow nutrient pool in which rests the globular torso of a hetreki, a domesticated Tikkihotto animal much like a prehistoric sloth with tendriled eyes like the Tikkihotto themselves (though you wouldn’t know that from this headless specimen); as a result, the poor blob twitches and spasms, a web of greenish electricity dancing across its hide, which is seared from its usual white-with-black-blotches to a crispy leathery brown. The nutrient bath is bubbling, boiling.
Other of these spherical hulks are undamaged; one close to me looms almost to my shoulder, and I can even see the fat squiggles of veins pulsing beneath its skin (which would have hair if this were an unadulterated hetreki). But another of these animals a bit ahead of me is crushed under slabs of ceiling and a conduit of some kind has harpooned it deeply, so that a dark red blood has poured down its flank in a thick sheet, dyeing its shallow pool and overflowing onto the floor. That very natural, very vital blood against this pitiful half-animal’s cadaverous flesh is so anomalous in contrast that I’m almost made nauseous by the sight.
I wander down the corridor of zombie hetreki, careful to avoid that wriggling power line, ducking under a propped section of the partially fallen ceiling. What am I doing? This is no time for a zoo tour. What if the fire spreads behind me and I can’t retrace my path? What if I become lost, trapped, asphyxiated, crushed under another cave in? But I am compelled to go on, and I catch myself listening for something...perhaps not so much audibly, however, as mentally. I’m drawn to the end of the hallway of meat, through another door and into a larger chamber containing the blocky bodies of earthly cattle, their hip bones jutting like the ends of poles that support the leathery tents of their hides, looking like cows with their heads lowered out of sight as they graze. These creatures rest on their short, broad, flipper-like appendages rather than loll in solution. But here, too, some burn while others bleed, and the dying ones are just as placid as the uninjured ones. None try to break free of the yokes and reins of their life support. There is no lowing, no groaning; the most I hear from a few is a kind of gurgling when their nutrient hoses have been damaged. There is a disturbing wheeze, though, from one animal with a deep wound in its upper chest, perhaps where its lungs are (or should be) situated.
I look up from the wheezing bulk with a start as a man races toward me, his hand clamped over a bleeding wound in his cheek. His eyes are on mine and without breaking stride he hisses at me, “Get out of here!” It seems partially a warning of concern, and partly a stern order. But he doesn’t linger to see how I’ll react to either; he is gone out the end of the hallway in a flash.
At the other, far end of the hall, I hear a terrible scream through another opened doorway. It sounds like an animal, though I know that’s impossible. Horribly, it’s the cry of a terrified or dying man. Or both.
Without thought or hesitation, I start running down the hall in the opposite direction of the man who just bolted past me.
Just as I am about to reach that doorway, I stumble to a halt, because there is gunfire in the room beyond. There are bursts of muzzle flash that cut through the smoky mist like lightning inside thunderheads.
Two more men come tearing toward me out of that fog, startling me so that I fall back a few steps. Both wear white jumpsuits, as do most of the workers in the plant from those who nurture this meat to those who slaughter it. But I’ve never seen an employee with guns like these two have. One has a pistol, but the other cradles a bulky black assault engine on par with the one Saleet used when we were in the subway.
And both men lift their weapons to point in my face. I can smell the burnt exhalations from their muzzles.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the one with the assault engine barks at me, his eyes bulging feverishly. “Turn your ass around and get the fuck out of here!”
“I heard a scream,” I stammer, backing away a few steps more.
“You’re going to be screaming in a minute if you don’t do as I say! This area is off limits! Now go!” He motions with his firearm.
The one with the handgun glances over his shoulder back into the murky room they’ve just left, and I don’t know what he sees, but suddenly he’s aiming his gun that way instead of at me. “Garry!” he yelps.
The one named Garry whirls around with his assault engine at waist level and then the doorway is filled with something large and the glossy purple color of eggplant. Garry’s head is suddenly transformed into that same dark purple color. That is because a thick, boneless limb has lashed out from the mass in the doorway, and coiled around his skull.
The tentacle lifts him and his legs kick and dance like a marionette’s. Either his finger spasms or he fires on purpose, but his assault engine sputters, set to automatic solid projectile mode. The one with the pistol fires as well. The combined fusillade causes the purple mass to release its grip on Garry, but when he drops into a heap his already bulging eyes have bulged grotesquely almost completely from their sockets, his skull crushed and blood pouring thickly out of his ears.
The one with the pistol keeps blasting the mass, which lashes its punctured tentacle angrily. A second and then a third tentacle squeeze past its own bulk through the threshold to whip at us. One of these thrashing arms inadvertently sends Garry’s assault engine skittering across the floor, and I dash to it, scoop it up...
I look up to see that the man with the pistol has run dry, but into the handle of the gun he slaps a fresh magazine. Before I can figure out which of the multiple triggers I should use on my weapon, and what sort of beam or projectile they’ll loose, the man with the pistol has already taken aim at the creature again – just as it has pressed half its body through the doorway. It seems to me now that there are eight of those smooth tentacles at the fore of the creature, set in a ring, and in the center of them there is a much smaller nest of tentacles, many more in number, and these writhing tendrils are a contrasting bright white in color. There are two paddle-like forward limbs that drag the hulk along, that look like they might have finger bones encased inside them, like the hands of a still-forming fetus. Along either side the monster has pulsating gill slits like those of a shark, showing starkly whit
e meat beneath the purple outer skin.
The man with the pistol is firing into the faceless face of the animal or being, and I can tell instantly that he’s using plasma rounds this time.
I have to back off even more from the smell, as black clouds mushroom out of the behemoth like squid ink under water. It’s melting, sizzling, and the arms flail even more maniacally, slapping the walls, ceiling and floor. One limb goes flying away from the body, melted off at the base. The stink reminds me exactly of the smell when I dissolved Gabrielle’s mutated corpse.
At last, the arms merely slither back and forth across the floor, and then even that stops. The man quits firing and for a moment we both watch the creature crumple in upon itself like a ball of newspapers set to light. Then, before the animal has fully vanished, the man with the pistol turns to me and says, “I’m sorry you had to see that, friend.” He lifts his handgun to point at my face again.
“No!” I cry, trying to bring up the perplexing assault engine.
A loud crack, and the top of the pistol-man’s head is sheared off. A uniform curtain of blood flows over the crater’s rim like lava from a volcano. His eyes flutter and he makes a sputtering noise, blowing the running blood out of his mouth and snorting a gout of it out of his nose. Teetering a bit, he turns to look at the person behind me who shot him. I look, too.
I see the personnel director, Dawn Andrews, standing there. She’s holding a pistol of her own, and she squeezes off a few more rounds on it.
I whip my head back around in time to see my would-be executioner collapse not far from his friend Garry. I then turn to Dawn again, and I see that she has pointed her gun at me, now. That makes things fair, because I have swivelled the assault engine to point at her. She doesn’t need to know that I’m not quite sure how to use it.
“Hello, Christopher,” Dawn says in her pleasant British accent, as if greeting me for the beginning of the work day.
“Thanks,” I tell her. “Why did he want to shoot me?”
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