by Jack Conner
It was not a creature of this world. It was every bit as translucent as the flesh it had been devouring.
Phantasmagorical, awful, the toad-being scuttle-hopped toward them, clearly meaning to devour them.
“Run!” Avery said, bolting.
Instantly he realized his mistake, and he swiveled his head to see Sheridan running after him—or trying to. Her maimed leg had been hindering her all day, and he’d had to support her for long stretches of it. Now she half limped, half hobbled away from the creature.
The thing had been designed for speed with its giant rear legs that could launch it off the ground, and it would easily overtake her.
Avery hesitated. I should let it kill her. Then he could retrieve the Device from her mangled corpse, assuming it didn’t swallow her whole.
He didn’t know why he did it, he couldn’t have said afterward, and he cursed himself while he was doing it, but he rushed to Sheridan’s side and threw one of her arms about his shoulders. With him half-supporting her, they fled the ghostly amphibian. She panted hard, and he could feel puffs of hot air against his neck.
He could also feel the jiggle of the rubbery ground bouncing under his feet as the creature pursued them. Slap ... slap ...
The slap-pounding of the frog’s feet striking the fleshy road sounded louder—louder. He could smell the thing, half dead flesh and half something that reeked of acids and brine.
“Faster!” he said. “You can do it! Faster!”
Sheridan hobbled as fast as she could. Still the monstrosity gained on them.
“Into the—buildings,” she panted. “It’s the—only – way.”
He guided them toward the nearest entrance to one of the spires, what had been a tall office building by the look of it. The door had been of glass and framed by metal. Now the glass had taken on the dragonfly-wing appearance that most of the city’s glass had. Avery prayed the membrane was thin enough to break through. They had no time to figure out how to open the door. Its handles had rotted off.
They drew nearer it … nearer—
Avery flung his weight against the material, praying that it would give, that he would feel a tearing sensation, then freedom. But, to his horror, it flung him back. Sheridan too.
“Look,” she said. “It tore.”
A thin crack had formed where their bodies had struck.
Behind them the toad hopped—closer—almost on them.
Avery and Sheridan gathered themselves once more and hurled themselves at the dragonfly material. Avery felt resistance, and then—it broke!
He and Sheridan spilled inside, landing on the rotted, awful floor of the interior. Instantly panic filled Avery—his hands were touching the stuff—his mouth was this close to pressing against it—and he reared up, climbing to his feet in a sudden lurch that made Hildebrand chitter in fear.
Behind him, the toad smashed against the door. The door frame shuddered. Buckled inward. The toad was too wide to squeeze through.
It opened its mouth. Its long, barbed tongue flicked out and drove straight at Avery. Wide-eyed, he ducked. The tongue that would have speared him passed overhead.
The tongue flicked at Sheridan next. Gasping in pain, she rolled aside, and the extradimensional gun tumbled to the floor, shaken loose. Swearing, she pulled out her conventional pistol and fired repeatedly directly into the toad’s face. This didn’t seem to phase it. It gathered itself for another push, trying to squeeze through—
Avery scooped up the extradimensional pistol and fired point-blank into its right eye—and again—and again.
The amphibian shrieked, a sound that loosened Avery’s bowels, and withdrew, shaking and leaking weird white-green fluid. Still shrieking, it scuttle-hopped away from the office building, leaving Avery and Sheridan panting and staring after it.
Belatedly, he realized he still held the gun.
Before he could even think of using it, Sheridan had her pistol pointed at his chest.
“Put it down,” she said.
He gave her what he hoped was an appropriately disapproving expression. “I did just save your life.”
“I said put it down.”
He sighed and did as ordered. Instantly the weapon vanished into her waistband.
“I wouldn’t have—” he started.
“Save it.”
He heard another noise—a sort of slurping, scraping noise. He turned, feeling cold all over, to see a sort of fantastic eel-like creature, huge, slithering out from an alleyway opposite the office building they stood in, flanges and fins sticking out all over it. Like the toad, the eel-thing was pale and ghostly, and streamers of dead flesh clung to its wide, gaping, fang-lined maw.
It didn’t move toward Avery and Sheridan, didn’t even seem aware of them, but slither-climbed up a building until it reached a certain slick spot, then proceed to eat—devouring the building.
Other creatures appeared, not all at once, but here and there, more and more as the minutes went on. Some scuttling, some clawing, some slithering, they emerged from above and below, snaking or climbing down from ruined buildings, or up from ruined sewers, or simply from down the street. They were mostly insectile or crustacean, but some had elements of the amphibian or serpent—or, perhaps more accurately, tapeworm—about them. Avery supposed them all to be beings, or the parts of beings that showed up on this plane, that had crossed over when the bomb had exploded, and that their existence now was based on feeding on the other-dimensional flesh of the city. They were parasites. Carrion things.
He and Sheridan watched them warily, but the creatures seemed to show no interest in them. They had been on the street, in the open, and had earned the hostility of one of their number, but, tucked away inside, the humans were ignored.
“Obviously nocturnal,” Avery said. “They didn’t bother us during the day. We didn’t even see them.”
Both he and Sheridan stretched on their backs on the floor, elbows propping them up, resting and taking deep breaths, watching the creatures go about the business of eating the city. He had gotten over his fear of the flesh. Rather, it was all over him anyway, so he supposed it was too late to be fastidious. Hildebrand poked about in the corners, but he didn’t go far.
“I suppose we’d better stay here for the night,” Sheridan said.
“That would be best.”
Slowly, appraisingly, she turned to him. In a quiet voice, she said, “Why, Doctor?”
“Why what?” But he knew.
He’d been wondering, too. Of course, in retrospect, he was glad he’d done it. If he hadn’t saved her, he would be all alone in the middle of a nightmare city far away from any civilization, and even if he had managed to recover the Device from her corpse (and more likely it would have been swallowed) it would be useless to him without Layanna. He needed Sheridan to get him to a place where it would be safe enough to get away from Sheridan. But he hadn’t done all that thinking at the time. He didn’t answer.
At last Sheridan broke the silence. “Thank you, Doctor.”
A moon rose to the east.
Chapter 3
“Who ... are they?”
Sheridan spoke it in a gasp, so that Avery had to lean in to hear her.
Though exhausted, he glanced where she was pointing, straining his eyes against the glare of the sun. It was the day after their flight from the toad, and the heat of the sun was baking the pools of semi-congealed dead flesh that glimmered on the fleshy street, creating a dense humid haze through which he and Sheridan staggered. The stench was nearly mind-breaking, and Avery saw flares and sparks darting all around him. The skin of the buildings seemed to ripple, the road to jump. Colors ran through the air, and a heaviness sapped the energy from his limbs and filled his head with cotton. Hildebrand had been hit especially hard, his little lungs unable to filter the putrid air, and he gasped and wheezed wretchedly on Avery’s shoulder.
At least the other-worldly scavengers had stayed out of sight.
But something hadn’t.
A
very squinted. Through the shimmer and haze he saw figures cross the street perhaps half a mile away.
“I don’t ... I don’t know,” he labored. “Survivors, maybe.”
As he drew closer, he could make out people drifting through the ruins like ghosts, all wearing insectile-looking gas-masks. Avery wanted one of those masks desperately. Though he and Sheridan had forced down some food this morning, the stench had evacuated it soon enough. He feared it would kill them before they made it out of the city.
They’d reached the fringes of Vulat. Avery began to see buildings that had only partly been affected by the detonation of the planar bomb. Brick facades—real brick—merged with sheets of the otherwise ubiquitous translucent flesh. At first it was just a brick here and there, or a wink of real glass for a window set amidst the decay, but as he went, the buildings were composed more and more of real building materials until finally there was more brick and metal and stucco than flesh. Seeing the buildings for the first time, he realized that it was as he’d expected; Vulat was colorful. Artistic. Soaring arches of multi-hued brick, sprouting pillars, lots of reds and greens and painted stucco.
The survivors noticed them. Avery flinched to see one man, then a woman in an opposite building, staring down at them from gaping windows—through the scopes of sniper rifles.
He froze. Crosshairs must be centering on his forehead.
“Keep ... going,” Sheridan hissed. She had noticed them, too. “Don’t act ... afraid. Suspicious.”
He swallowed. Nodded. Kept going.
Other, less lethal-looking survivors noticed them, too. They stood at the street corners, or around non-functioning fountains. Some nodded to them. Some backed away. All kept their distance.
“Not real ... social ... are they?” Avery said.
“Would ... you be?”
Soon they saw activity around a certain building perhaps four stories high. With an ornate stucco facade and turquoise-tiled roof, it was a handsome structure.
“Perhaps ... a trading post,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Let’s ... stop. Buy ... masks. Food.”
They had money, that was something. The train had been stuffed with various currencies in case the Black Sect needed to satisfy some need or whim. The question was whether these survivors honored paper money or if they had devolved into a barter system. Or if they would deal with newcomers at all.
The men and women near the entrance of the building stiffened as Avery and Sheridan approached, but they allowed the two to pass inside.
The first level was a tavern. A large open room, booths along the walls, tattered tables and chairs in the middle, a long bar stretched across the back. Incense stalks gave birth to curls of smoke, and strange golden gargoyles perched in the corners. Tapestries depicting colorful hunting and pastoral scenes hung from the cracked walls. Grime and dust coated everything, but at least it was of brick and wood, not dead flesh. Just being in a room with walls protecting him from the toxic reek of the rest of the city made Avery feel better, lighter, and his lungs breathed easier. Some of his nausea and disorientation began to retreat.
Boards covered the windows. A series of candles and clumsily-welded braziers lit the room. A dozen or so patrons lounged at the tables and booths, drinking, talking in low tones. They were all the shorter, darker, more petite people of Laisha, and they spoke Lai, which Avery was ignorant of. With their gas masks off, their faces looked dirty and gaunt.
All conversation stopped when Avery and Sheridan had entered. She glared at them, then nonchalantly strolled through the center of the room toward the bar, her shoulders cocked and ready. Avery followed.
She plopped down on a bar stool and rapped the bar with her knuckles.
The barkeep looked up. Oily and heavy-lidded, the fattest man in the room, he cleaned a dirty glass with a dirtier rag, some sort of purple cigarette perched on his thick lips.
He said something in Lai, which they shook their heads at, then switched to another language Avery didn’t know, then finally to Turi, which Avery knew a smattering of.
“What will it be?” the man said.
“Two bourbons,” Sheridan responded in the same language. Avery was no longer surprised at such things in her.
“There’s no bourbon,” the man said, “‘less you have some to trade. No? Then cognac will have to do. And you’re lucky to get that. Just got it in yesterday.”
He poured a finger each into two smeared glasses. “It ain’t free.”
Sheridan sipped hers with clear appreciation. “You accept cash?”
“Octunggen currency. ‘at’s what they use, ‘at’s what we use.”
“Not barter?” Avery said.
“Oh, we’ll barter. You got somethin’? Maybe in that backpack?”
“We have nothing,” Sheridan said, her voice carefully casual.
“Cash is fine.”
She nodded, unstrapped the backpack with a sigh of pleasure—it had obviously been weighing her down, and Avery knew it must be leaving welts under the straps—and leaned it against the bar at her feet.
Avery handed over the requested cash and downed another sip, then laid Hildebrand on the bar counter. The little guy took deep, ragged breaths, and Avery patted him affectionately. The barkeep raised his eyebrows but didn’t object. Some of the patrons were going back to their drinking and talking, and Avery noticed something he hadn’t before; many were amputees—a wooden leg there, a missing ear here, there a missing arm or hand.
“What happened?”
The barkeep followed his gaze. “Why, the bomb, of course. If you were hit by it but were far away enough to survive, it would turn whatever part of you it hit into that same godsdamned dead shit that’s everywhere. It hit your arm, say, and it’d rot right off. ‘course, it’d have be cut off before it made you sick, I never actually saw one rot. Though that’d be a sight, sure enough. Most that got hit by the full blast died right off, but we’re ... the lucky ones. I’m San, by the way.”
Avery and Sheridan, who had discussed the issue before entering, invented names for themselves that were cautiously non-specific in origin, and San studied them, then asked, “Where’d you come from?”
“Outside,” Avery said, deciding that he didn’t know enough to bluff his way through a series of lies. “We came up through the subway tunnels. The ones that connect to Octung.”
The man eyed them suspiciously. “You Octunggen?”
“No,” Sheridan said. “We were taken prisoner by them but escaped through the tunnels and came up here.”
The man nodded, though whether he believed this or not it was hard to tell. He went back to scrubbing glasses.
“We need supplies,” Avery said. “Masks.”
“Masks are expensive,” San said. “But you came to the right place. We got provisions here.” There was a knowing leer in the last line, as if he were a spider luring a fly into its web. His teeth were very yellow.
Sheridan turned to Avery. “We may not need masks. We’re about out of the city now. We can just go our own way.”
San frowned into his glass, which squeaked drily as he cleaned it. “It’s no good,” he said.
“Why?”
“First of all, it’s all swamp out there, and it’s nearly impassable unless you have a boat, and all the boats have been appropriated by the Octunggen. Second, we’re trapped. Locked in. The Octs have put razor wire and such along the city’s perimeter, and they patrol it regular. They know we’re in here and don’t want us out, scouring the swamps for Octunggen patrols, lootin’ the countryside and organizing revolution or whatnot. But they don’t care enough to come in here and actually finish us off. Probably wary of the ... beasts.” He shivered. “They tend to stick to the city center, though. We’re safe enough out here, between them and the Octs.”
“But you trade with the black market outside?” Avery said. The man had said they used Octunggen currency.
“Yes, there are ways through the patrols, or
under them.” San let this hang in the air.
Sheridan seized on it. “Go on.”
“I have a man that can take you through, if you’re bent on it. But it won’t be cheap.”
“We can pay.”
Avery knew she would have preferred to simply walk up to the patrols and introduce herself, but they would be hostile toward anyone approaching from the city. Better to meet with them on the other side of the containment zone.
“I’ll take your money if you want, but you’re fools, thinking it’s better out there,” San said. “You have no idea. Why, in Ayu, there’s torture, rape, murder for sport, daily executions, you name it. The she-bitch that runs it, General Carum, hates the Lai and all Laisha, and she takes it out on everyone there. Ayu used to be the brightest jewel in the Lai crown. Now? You’re mad to want to go out there. Better to stay in Vulat. It may be rotting, but it’s free.”
“What news on the war?” Avery asked, suddenly realizing he was starved for information. Five weeks, Uthua had said. What if his forces were faster than he thought? “What of Ghenisa?”
“The Octs have smashed through the Korwen Pass and are in deep inside her,” San said regretfully. “They occupy at least one major city that I’ve heard of. Sivrin, I think. The Octs have conquered West Cumnal, right south of Ghenisa, and some of the Octunggen are pushing up into her from that way, too. Others attack by the sea. Lucky she still has a navy, and they’ve accepted some naval support from the Ysstrals. But that can’t help for long. Also, I’ve heard that mutants, ngvandi I’ve heard them called, are swarming down out of the mountains, attacking from the north. Sorry to tell ya, if that’s where you’re from, but Ghenisa’s getting it from all sides.”
Avery knocked back a long drink. Something savage, however, glittered in Sheridan’s eyes.
“East Cumnal’s about to fall, too,” San continued. “It held out for as long as it could, but the Octs have some new beastie they’re usin’ against folk—in Ghenisa, too. Some great, awful things, dozens of ‘em. Huge things with limbs like an octopus and great globs for bodies, other limbs like starfish. Nothing can kill them. They burn people, poison them. Eat them.” In a low voice, he said, “Some folk say they’re the Collossum themselves. I’ve heard that the Oct soldiers worship them in the nighttime when the stars are bright, that they infect prisoners of war and sacrifice them to the things.”