by Jack Hamlyn
They fanned out in the cellar, went through it room by room, but there was nothing.
“I’d say this is a done deal,” Mooney said over the headset. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“I’m all for that,” The Pole said.
“What about the tunnels?” West asked.
“Jesus Christ,” Spengler said. “I ain’t going in there. No fucking way am I going in there.”
The Pole swore under his breath. “Yeah, shut your hole, punk.”
Kurta stood there, thinking.
He could hear the hiss of the team’s respirator masks. The kid was right. There were steam tunnels connecting most of the buildings on the block. Perfect hiding places for slugheads. Down in the moist darkness was the perfect place to find nests. Nobody wanted to go in there, but Kurta didn’t see where they had a choice.
“We need to clean them out,” he announced.
Spengler turned on West. “Good going, shit-fer-brains. You want the tunnels? Good, you can lead the way in.”
The Pole shoved West out of the way.
“Well, isn’t that what we’re here for?” West asked.
“I suggest you shut your mouth now,” The Pole threatened.
“We could have been out of here if it wasn’t for you and your big fucking mouth.”
“Oh, I’ll remember this, kid,” Spengler said.
Kurta stiffened inside his suit. “That’ll do. He’s right and you know he’s right.”
Still cursing the very idea, The Pole led the way to the steam tunnels. They panned the opening with their lights. The passage went on farther than their beams would reach, a claustrophobic space of clutching shadows about five feet wide and maybe seven in height. Steam pipes and electrical conduits ran along the walls, data and telephone lines strung between them.
“Here’s your chance, kid,” Spengler said. “You can be the big man now. Show us how good your nerves are.”
“No,” Kurta said. “The kid is with me. You got point, Speng.”
“Fuck that! I’m not going in there!”
“Yes, you are, hero. You’re going to lead us in,” Kurta told him. “Remember how Stiv used to lead us in, Speng? Remember that, hero? Remember how he’d volunteer every time? He had balls. Something you don’t have. So, yes, you’re on point. In fact, I think you should be on point for a long time. Do it for the team and do it for Stiv…okay, hero?”
There were a few moments of tense silence and Kurta just waited for it. Waited for Spengler to mouth off. Because when he did, he was going to beat his ass senseless and hand-feed him to the first drooling sluggo he met.
But all Spengler did was say, “Yes, sir,” in a very mousy voice.
Without further prompting, he led the way in. The Pole went next, then Kurta and West, finally Mooney who watched the back door as always because Kurta didn’t trust Spengler or The Pole behind him with loaded weapons.
8
They kept five or six feet between them so that they had fighting room in case things got ugly. Spengler moved forward very slowly, sweeping his Ithaca 37 pump back and forth. The tactical light bracketed to the rail atop it cast wild, darting shadows before him. He was trying real hard not to let what Kurta said rattle him. The time would come when the score was evened. But that time wasn’t now, so he didn’t waste mental energy on it.
Fucking prick, he just won’t let the thing about Stiv die. He just can’t let it go.
“Shut up,” he said under his breath.
The headset caught it and The Pole said, “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Eyes up and mouths shut,” he heard Kurta say.
Sure, asshole, you can count on me.
Spengler moved cautiously forward, just ready for the shit because when you were an exterminator, shit was your natural element: you learned to live in it, wade through it, and recognize its smell when you were about to step in it.
“Wait,” he said.
“Something?” Kurta asked.
“Thought I saw a shadow move up there…pull away from the light.” He paused, uncertain. “Hang back. I’m going to go forward.”
The others pulled back.
“Watch yourself,” Kurta said.
Spengler didn’t bother commenting on that because he knew damn well that fucking Kurta relished the idea of his death.
Swallowing, he let his instincts guide him forward. Yes, there it was again…something moving just ahead, trying to avoid the light. He moved faster now and saw a shambling figure trying to escape the seeking beam. They were clinging to the wall, pulling themselves forward with the steam pipes.
It was a man.
Or something like a man. He was hunched over, back to Spengler. A big guy in a black leather motorcycle jacket that was shiny like the shell of a beetle. It was split open in numerous places, and Spengler could see a mutiny of flesh poking out, viscid and bubbly.
“Hey, shithead,” Spengler said.
The figure turned and faced him.
He made a moaning/groaning sound and his voice had a creaky, rusty sound to it as he mumbled typical sluggo gibberish. His face was blown up, rearranged, drawn and twisted, a veritable seething puzzlebox of disease and rot, gashes and hollows and flaccid folds of skin like tiny balloons. One graying eye was filmed and sightless, rolling in its socket like a grub in an egg sac, staring up at the ceiling. The other was simply gone.
“What do you got?” The Pole asked.
“Nothing yet. Hang tight,” Spengler told him. He had something, all right, but he just wasn’t sure what. Whatever it was, he hadn’t seen it before, and his curiosity was aroused.
He got in closer, but still maintained an easy ten feet between himself and his quarry. This slughead looked like he was all done in. Still, you never knew. They could be fast when they wanted to stuff themselves with meat. Yet, Spengler didn’t think this one was interested in eating; it was up to something else and that’s what intrigued him and piqued his morbid curiosity.
The sluggo leaned there against the wall, breathing with a loud rattling sound as if his lungs were filled with metal shards and old razor blades. His mouth was a ragged aperture like the cut from a dull ax. Every time he sucked in a wheezing, scraping breath, a sort of pink slime dripped from his mouth. And judging from the globby accumulated crust down his bare chest, he had been doing that for some time.
What intrigued Spengler the most was that this sluggo did not want to reveal his rider, the slug that was attached to his belly. He was trying to cover it with his jacket, both hands cradling the bulge like a woman in her ninth month cradling the child in her belly.
Show me. Show me what you got. Because if it’s what I think it is, things are definitely looking up.
The sluggo made no threatening moves. He was like some sick animal that just wanted to crawl away and die in peace. But Spengler was not about to let him crawl away. Not now. Not with what was under his hands.
The others were calling, wanting to know what was going on, but Spengler ignored them. He jabbed the barrel of his Ithaca forward and it had the intended result. The sluggo hissed and clawed out in the vague direction of the barrel and when he did so, Spengler put the light on his belly and…holy Jesus, would you fucking look at that? Old Speng had been in the extermination game for some time but he’d never seen one of these. Kurta had more than once, but never him.
This was it.
This was the thing, baby.
“I got one,” he said, eyeing the obscenely swollen mass at the sluggo’s belly. It was like some horrendous externalized placenta, threaded right into the sluggo’s wasted anatomy by elastic strings of tissue. The slug hung there in its flesh-sling like a swollen, fat little loaf of Vienna bread. He could see it squirming in the sheath which was a leprous, transparent yellow like piss-stained waterproof plastic, pulsating and veined purple.
Poor old slughead, he was just about done in—like a living rack of crow-picked bones, a breathing, hissing carcass that w
as leaking fluids and pissing corpse gas. His skin had the consistency of watery tapioca, dripping and oozing at his feet in glops of flesh-slag. It hung from his face like blood-stained bandages. His body contorted and jerked like a rat full of strychnine. His torso looked as if it was beginning to split open. His boots skidded in the pool of drainage he was creating, one arm looped around a steam pipe, the other holding the slug-sling.
“Up here!” Spengler called over the headset. “I think…I think I got a fucking creeper! Get your asses up here now!”
There was a lot of squawking coming over the headset now. Back at the bunker, the techies and labcoat johnnies wanted all the creepers they could get their forceps on. For Spengler, it meant an automatic bump in pay and plenty of benefits like good booze, better food, maybe even a girl.
Hot damn!
But he had to secure the little monster first and its host, as damaged and drained as he was, wasn’t going to stand still to see his “baby” fall into uncaring hands.
With a sudden violent cry that became a shrill, ungodly howling that echoed like a jackhammer in the closeness of the tunnel, he launched himself at Spengler.
But Spengler kept his cool.
There was too much on the line not to.
When the sluggo jumped, he jerked the trigger on his Ithaca 37, racked the pump, and fired again.
The sluggo never had a chance.
The top of his head took the first shot. It vaporized into a blood mist of mucilage that painted the steam pipes a glistening red. Clots of tissue were mixed in with it and they writhed like maggots…except they weren’t maggots, of course, but the flukes that had hot-wired his brain. The second shot erased his face and what was left of his head flew apart in a red-pink-gray eruption of skull-bone and flesh that sprayed against the wall.
Spengler was certain that the sluggo’s filmed eye hit the wall like a juicy grape.
By then, the others were there.
“Don’t damage that fucking creeper!” Kurta said.
But there was no chance of that. The slughead had slid down the wall, limbs still trembling, flukes twisting on his leather jacket like blood guppies dying on a beach.
“Keep back now,” Mooney warned the others. “It’s birthing itself…”
And it was.
There was a sound like rotten muslin tearing and the flesh-sling sheared open, the creeper sliding free, a wriggling form in a semi-translucent chitinous envelope. It squirmed in there like a worm in a seed, the shell already beginning to crack open from internal pressure as the creeper (the end form of the slug itself) enlarged its mass daily. Now, in order to survive, it would have to emerge. Fetal and dopey and premature, it was vulnerable.
“Don’t let it hatch,” Kurta said. “West? Hose it down with your extinguisher.”
The kid stepped forward and engulfed the shell in white foam. As it bubbled and dissipated, Kurta ordered him to hose it down again. When it evaporated away, the form in the shell was not moving.
“Mooney, bag it,” Kurta said.
Mooney was way ahead of him. Using a set of tongs, he gripped the slug shell and dropped it into a red biohazard bag that The Pole held open for him. He dropped a couple of cold packs in with it, squeezing them first to activate the ammonium nitrate. Then he double sealed the bag.
“Outstanding,” Kurta told him. “Now get that back to the APC. Go ahead, Speng, you go with him. Don’t let anything happen to it.”
“Should I call it in?” Spengler asked.
“No. Let’s get this place cleaned out first or we’ll just have to come back tomorrow.”
“Roger that,” Spengler said.
“And Speng?” Kurta said.
“Yeah?”
“Nice fucking work.”
As Spengler went back with Mooney, he was more than aware of the begrudging tone in Kurta’s voice. Musta just about made him bleed to fucking say that. He grinned. If he could manage to bag a couple more creepers, the major would give him Kurta’s job.
For the first time in a long time, he had something to shoot for.
9
It was the waiting that got under West’s skin.
Sure, he was the new guy, the NFG and all that, and his skin wasn’t as thick as that of the rest of the slug-hunters, etc., etc. Still, the waiting got to him. The silence wrapped him up and filled his belly with hot tacks. When it got real bad like this, he prayed for contact. He prayed some slughead would jump out at them.
Anything but this.
His heart was pounding and sweat was beading his face. His nerves felt as if they’d been filed to sharp points. He had an image of himself in his head—bug-eyed, lips trembling, knees knocking, and hair standing on end like Moe Howard in an old Columbia short. He figured it wasn’t too far from the truth.
“Hang back now,” Kurta said over the headset. He was crouched down and he wanted the others to do the same. “Stay put until I give the word. And no shooting. Get your fingers off those triggers right now.”
West waited there with The Pole who absolutely fucking hated him. Even in his hot suit, he swore he could feel the bad vibes coming off the man. They had teeth and they wanted to bite him. Had they been truly alone, he figured The Pole would have been riding his shit about now. But Kurta could hear everything they said so The Pole kept his mouth shut.
“Okay,” Kurta said. “Get up here.”
They jogged forward. Kurta was ahead. They could see his light beam. They closed in on him.
“We’ve had some action here,” he explained.
On the floor, in the beam of his light, were some human remains. They weren’t very nice to look at. It was hard to say whether they had belonged to a man or a woman. Whichever it was, they had been split neatly from crotch to throat, skin pulled back from either side of the gaping wound. The abdominal cavity had been emptied, genitals torn away. Everything looked violently stripped, bitten, and chewed. Even the face had been worried to the red skull beneath. A loop of intestine was tossed over a steam pipe, but everything else was gone.
Kurta studied the blood trail in his light.
Smeared red footprints led away into the darkness. The slugheads had gorged themselves.
“Let’s see where they lead,” Kurta said.
He was totally unmoved by any of it; West found that disturbing. His own stomach was flipping over and over.
They followed Kurta deeper into the shaft, now and again finding a few scraps of flesh, an odd dropped finger or two.
Then, just ahead, something moved.
Kurta went after it without hesitation, his riot gun held high. What he found was an old guy with a matted white beard. It was just as dirty and greasy as he was, bits of food caught it in it. There were sticks and leaves in his hair. Kurta put the riot gun barrel right in his face.
It was apparent by that point that he was no slughead.
“Well?” Kurta asked him, his voice artificial-sounding as it came through his breathing filter.
The old guy stood there, scrawny, bent by the years. “Looks like death, all right,” he said. “Didn’t think it would be the spacemen that got me in the end.”
“We’re not spacemen,” The Pole said.
“You’re wearing spacesuits, ain’t ya?”
Well, he’s got us there, West thought.
Kurta, with his customary lack of patience, explained who and what they were.
“The government? You work for the government? Awww, shit, son, now I know you’re telling tales,” the old man said, the light gleaming off his oily, wrinkled face, illuminating his teeth which were brown with filth. “Ain’t no government no more. Ain’t nothing no more. All there is, is spacemen like you and rabbits like me and slugfucks looking for fresh meat.” He looked over towards West, squinting to see his face behind the bubble. “That’s why they leave me alone, boy. I’m old and stringy and tough.”
West smiled.
“Where are they?” The Pole asked. “Where are the slugheads?”
“Mercy?”
“She’s back there. You probably saw her. They tore her right open and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Now they’re full and fat, kind of lazy, all dopey like they get. That’s the time to get out, after they feed.”
By then, Kurta had lowered his riot gun.
“We should take him back to the bunker, boss,” The Pole said. “The major might want to interrogate him.”
“Maybe,” Kurta said.
“I ain’t going anywhere with you!” the old man said. It was clear he meant it. After all, he was standing up to three well-armed men. “I’m free and you ain’t taking my freedom away! Fuck you! Fuck all of you! You can’t tell me what to do or where to go! That ain’t how it works now! Slugs evened it all out! Ain’t no taxes! Ain’t no fucking laws! I ain’t got to take shit from jarheads like you!”
The Pole stepped forward. He wasn’t about to take crap like that, not from this old sewer rat. West didn’t speak his mind. As far as he was concerned, the old man was right. They had no real authority over him.
“Easy,” Kurta said. “Nobody’s taking you anywhere. We and about fifty other people live in a reinforced bunker thirty miles from here. We have food, shelter, medical. You want to come, you’re welcome. You don’t want to, get out of my sight.”
“You can’t let him go!” The Pole said.
“Why not? We have a job to do and that job isn’t babysitting crazy people.”
“I ain’t crazy!” the old man snarled.
“You better go,” West told him.
The old party sneered at them. There were things he wanted to say, but as he pointed out, he wasn’t crazy, so he took off down the shaft into the darkness.
The Pole said, “That might be a mistake, letting him go like that.”
“Why?” West said. “What possible harm can he do?”