New Cthulhu 2: More Recent Weird

by Elizabeth Bear

  Meredith . . . Cynthia didn’t have to get close to see the lines of black stitchery holding the crushed edges of her neck together. Her head lolled to one side, tongue drooping from her slack mouth, and her eyes were half-lidded and beginning to glaze.

  Cynthia wondered how Fiorenzo had arranged to have one of the pressure doors catch Meredith, and how long it would be before she got around to Wandrei. And how he could be so blind as not to see that he would be Fiorenzo’s next experiment.

  Hester raised and aimed her pistol. Wandrei must have glanced up just then, because he made a warning sound.

  Fiorenzo rose to her feet and turned. Light shivered along the needle of the syringe as she lowered it to a non-threatening position beside her thigh.

  The thing that had been Meredith took a shuffling step closer and Cynthia hid her cringe. For a moment, Cynthia waited, searching for words. Wondering why Hester hadn’t pulled the trigger.

  “Doctor Feuerwerker—” Wandrei began.

  Somehow, Cynthia silenced him with a glance. It must have been scathing; even her eyes felt scorched by it.

  Fiorenzo’s eyes met Cynthia’s. “You’re a doctor. A researcher. You should understand!”

  “I understand that you’re a mass-murderer, and you’re putting everyone in this sector of space at risk. Your monsters—your victims—aren’t far behind us. What are you going to do when Charlie lets them in here?”

  “I’m getting close!”

  “No, you’re not.” Cynthia waved a little wildly at Major Ngao. “Maybe you’ve made him not-dead, but you haven’t made him alive. You can’t. You can’t make Meredith alive and you can’t make that poor bastard off the Calico alive. You can animate the meat, but that’s not the same thing and you know it. This boojum isn’t alive. What it is, is wrong.”

  The Charles Dexter Ward shuddered beneath their feet, as if in agreement. Cynthia lurched into Hester, Wandrei and the two dead people went down, and even Fiorenzo had to grab at a safety-bar to keep her feet. Cynthia was reaching for Hester’s arm, to lift her sidearm back on target—

  Fiorenzo slammed the syringe with which she had been about to inject the Charles Dexter Ward through lab coat and trousers and into her own thigh.

  Cynthia stared, disbelieving. Fiorenzo straightened, smiling, and was starting to say something when she seized, crashing to the deck as stiff and solid as a bar of iron. Cynthia said over her to Wandrei, “We have to stop this.”

  “Science, Doctor Feuerwerker,” Wandrei began, and Cynthia shouted, “Science schmience!” which startled him into shutting up.

  Cynthia was a little startled herself, but she plunged on while she had the initiative, “Fiorenzo’s leavings out there aren’t science. They’re walking nuclear waste. And what she did to Meredith is murder.”

  “That was an accident,” Wandrei said.

  Hester made a bitter noise that wasn’t a laugh. “Do you really believe that?”

  Wandrei didn’t answer her. He said, “Doctor Fiorenzo has achieved a remarkable—” and that was when he made the mistake of letting Meredith get too close.

  Cynthia and Hester had not stopped to ponder the intentions of their reanimated pursuers, not with Charlie’s stuttering necroluminescence all around them and the carnage everywhere they looked. But if they had wondered, any last niggling doubt would have been unequivocally dispelled.

  Meredith tore Wandrei to pieces, starting with his mandible.

  Hester screamed; so did Wandrei, for a while. By the Queen of Hearts, is that his endocardium? Cynthia dragged Hester back, both of them sprayed with Wandrei’s blood like stationer graffiti, and said, her voice low and frantic, “We have to find the machine. Now. While the door’s still closed and Meredith is . . . distracted.”

  Hester’s gulp might have been a sob or a hysterical laugh, but she nodded.

  They looked around, trying to ignore the gory welter in the center of the room. There wasn’t much there beyond dissection tables and refrigeration units. A microscope locked down on a stand, a centrifuge . . .

  “Why would you have so many refrigeration units when the universe’s biggest refrigerator is right outside your door?” Cynthia muttered. “One, sure, for samples and emergencies, but . . . ”

  They skirted the edges of the room, both keeping an uneasy eye on their roommate, but Meredith seemed to have forgotten about them, which was all to the good. The first refrigerator unit was just that, a nice Tohiro-Nikkonen that now needed very badly to be cleaned out. The second was a jury-rigged something—from the look on Hester’s face, she had no more idea than Cynthia did. But next to that, back in the corner where it was awkward to reach, lower and bulkier—“That’s it,” Hester said. “Has to be.”

  “Can you figure out how to turn it on?” Cynthia said. She stole a glance at Fiorenzo—still seizing—and Meredith. Still . . . busy.

  “Watch me,” Hester said confidently and wiggled into the cramped space. “Or rather, don’t watch me. Watch for company.” And she passed Cynthia her pistol.

  “You got it,” Cynthia said, although it wasn’t clear that the pistol would be any more use than a wedding bouquet if the reanimated found them and Charlie decided to open the doors.

  Pursuant to that thought, she asked, “Can you communicate with him at all? Charlie, I mean?”

  “I’ve tried,” Hester said. “I don’t know if it’s just that I can’t or that he doesn’t recognize me as crew.”

  “Rats,” Cynthia said. “Because it occurred to me that the best way to get rid of the reanimated would be for Charlie to eat them.”

  “Oh,” said Hester. “Well. That would certainly be tidy. Although I’m not entirely sure that he could. It doesn’t look to me as if Fiorenzo’s reanimated can actually digest anything.”

  “Well, there goes that idea,” Cynthia said. “But he could still chew on them, couldn’t he?”

  “If they went to his mouth. But he probably can’t just . . . reabsorb them.”

  The Charles Dexter Ward shuddered again; Hester was knocked against the wall, and Cynthia ended up in a drunken sprawl against the galvanic motor.

  “I think,” Hester said dryly, “that something isn’t quite right.”

  “Do you think that’s what the second dose of serum was for?”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you think without it, he’ll die again?” Horrible, to sound so hopeful. Horrible, to be in a situation where that was the optimum outcome.

  “Ngao hasn’t,” Hester said.

  Cynthia was trying to think of an answer that was neither obscene nor dangerously blasphemous when motion caught her eye. She jerked around, but it wasn’t Meredith or Ngao; it was a tove.

  “There weren’t any toves in here, were there?” They’d encountered a tove colony several corridors away from the morgue, thick on the ceiling and walls, and starting to creep across the floor. The smell cut through even the stench in Cynthia’s nostrils, and she and Hester both had to fight not to gag at the crunch and lingering squish of toves under their boots.

  “No,” Hester said. “Why?”

  Cynthia aimed carefully and shot the tove. “Just hurry up, okay?” All by themselves, toves weren’t much more than a nuisance—at least, not to a healthy adult. But where toves went, raths were sure to follow, and raths were dangerous. And where raths went, would surely come bandersnatches, and while a bandersnatch could probably deal with Fiorenzo’s mistakes, it would happily annihilate the rest of them as well.

  “Fiorenzo’s got it backwards, you know,” Hester said in a would-be-casual voice, instead of calling Cynthia on the evasion.

  “Oh?” Cynthia said warily. Hester was under tremendous pressure and had just watched one member of her family murder another at extremely close range. Cynthia wouldn’t blame her in the slightest for falling apart, but they desperately needed it not to be right now.

  “The fresher the body, the worse the results,” Hester said. “Meredith being Exhibit A. She must have reanimat
ed Meredith within minutes.”

  Only as long as it takes to sew a head back on, Cynthia thought. Aloud, she said, “I see what you mean.”

  “So she’s wrong,” Hester said fiercely. “I had to say it to someone. The odds of having the opportunity to refute her theories in print . . . ”

  Cynthia wanted to close her eyes, but she had to keep watch on Meredith, Fiorenzo, Ngao . . . and everything else. She said, “I understand.”

  “Okay,” Hester said, scrambling back to Cynthia’s side. “The machine is drawing power, and I’ve started it cycling. Now we just have to attach the leads to Charlie’s nervous system.” She brandished a thick double-handful of cables, and Cynthia followed her gaze to the hole Fiorenzo had dug in the deck of the morgue, with Wandrei’s remains on one side and Fiorenzo’s rigor-stiff figure on the other. Ngao was standing patiently where Fiorenzo had left him. Meredith had moved to the door, which she was pawing at with obvious confusion. But she wasn’t Charlie’s crew; he wasn’t opening it for her.

  “Can’t we just, I don’t know, rip him open ourselves?”

  “It would take too long,” Hester said with a crispness that betrayed her own reluctance. “Besides, I don’t have the specialized diagnostic equipment we’d need to find a node, and Fiorenzo must have cannibalized hers—or maybe left it somewhere.”

  Cynthia swallowed her arguments. “Okay. Will the cables reach?”

  “I suspect that node is where she attached them the first time,” Hester said. “But let’s find out.”

  Hester paid the cables out carefully; Cynthia kept pace, trying to keep her attention on far too many threats at once. A cheshire’s sixteen eyes had never sounded so good. Cynthia and Hester’s movement attracted Meredith’s attention, and she started in their direction, not in the all-out berserker charge of the other reanimated, but in that slow-seeming sidle that had lethally fooled Wandrei.

  Cynthia shot her, aiming as best she could for the knee. They had learned, by the good old scientific method of try-it-and-find-out, that the pistol could not damage a reanimated corpse enough to unanimate it. But it could cripple one. The trick was to make sure any bits you knocked off were too small to do any damage when they kept coming after you.

  At this range, even Cynthia couldn’t miss. Meredith didn’t make a sound—she couldn’t, with severed vocal cords—but the silent rictus of shock (pain? Cynthia wondered bleakly, betrayal?) was almost worse. She went down, and continued dragging herself forward—but her hands couldn’t get much purchase on the deck plates protecting the Charles Dexter Ward’s tissue, especially slick as they were with Wandrei’s fluids.

  Hester had reached the dark and wetly shining hole. She knelt clumsily, then looked up, a brave if not very convincing effort at a smile on her face. “You’d better,” she started; then voice and smile failed together, her face going slack with an emotion Cynthia couldn’t identify—until a voice behind her, a grating, hollow snarl said, “Stop.”

  And then she knew, because she could feel her own face mirroring Hester’s: it was horror.

  Cynthia turned. Dr. Fiorenzo was struggling to her feet. She stretched. She examined her hands. She took a carotid pulse.

  She smiled. “All it took,” she said calmly, “was a fresh enough specimen. Really, Doctor Feuerwerker, you of all people should appreciate my success.”

  Cynthia stepped backward. Once, twice. She worried about stepping into the pit, about tripping over Hester. About edging too close to Meredith and her undead strength. But she couldn’t take her eyes away from Fiorenzo. And she couldn’t—viscerally couldn’t—let Fiorenzo close the gap between them. No matter how sweet and reasonable she sounded.

  Something brushed Cynthia’s ankle. She almost squeezed off a shot—the last in the pistol—before realizing that it was Hester, mutely offering up the power cables. They were too thick to manage one-handed. Cynthia would have to let go of the gun.

  “Not live,” she said.

  Hester said, “I’ll worry about that.”

  Carefully, watching Fiorenzo the whole time, Cynthia handed Hester the gun and took the cables. They were heavy. How had Hester handled them so easily?

  “Doctor Fiorenzo,” she said. “Stop.”

  Fiorenzo took another step, but she was eyeing the cables cautiously. Cynthia was at the limit of their length, and the pit was behind her. She could retreat no farther.

  “I assure you, I’m no threat,” Fiorenzo said. “This process will save lives.”

  Cynthia heard Hester scrambling. Did she intend to get past Fiorenzo somehow? No, she was edging to the side, still keeping Cynthia as her buffer. Thanks a lot. But if their positions were reversed, would Cynthia be doing any differently?

  “It will save your life,” Fiorenzo said.

  And lunged.

  Her strength was incredible. Cynthia swung the cables against her head, again and again, until Fiorenzo pinioned her arms. They rolled to the floor. Fiorenzo landed on top. Fiorenzo’s teeth worried at the seam of Cynthia’s pressure suit; Cynthia got a foot up and kicked, but couldn’t knock her off.

  “Incoming!” Hester yelled. Fiorenzo’s head jerked up, and Cynthia thought, What damned good is—

  The report of the pistol would have been deafening in the confined space of the morgue, if not for Cynthia’s suit filters. Fiorenzo thrashed for a second, the left side of her skull blossoming into a cratered exit wound. Cynthia threw herself free and rolled across the decking.

  “Cables!” Hester yelled.

  Cynthia grabbed them from the middle and yanked. The ends came slithering toward her, sparking against the deck. Heavy yellow sparks. Cynthia grabbed them by the insulation and lifted.

  Fiorenzo rolled to a crouch, then stood. She laughed, one eye bobbing gently on the end of its optic nerve against her cheek. She sprang forward like a racer—

  Cynthia jabbed the cables into her chest.

  Fiorenzo arched back as the current went through her, hands splayed and clawing. She didn’t scream; there was no other sound to cover the crack of electricity, the hiss of cooking flesh.

  She slumped. Cynthia jumped backward, but Fiorenzo’s outflung hand still fell across her boot. She turned wildly; Meredith was still crawling toward her. Hester crouched by the controls, sliding the master switch back to off.

  “Decomp tie-ins,” Hester said. “You use the bolt nearest the panel.” She stepped over Fiorenzo’s corpse, her boot disturbing the gentle wisps of steam still rising, and dropped into the hole again. “And hand me the fucking cables again, would you please?”

  Following orders was the easiest, most pleasant thing that Cynthia had ever done. She clipped and locked her safety line to the bolt. She slid the power control back to full.

  “Do it!” she shouted to Hester.

  And Hester must have done it, because the Charles Dexter Ward convulsed. Cynthia was jerked hard against her tether and then slammed back into the machine—and that was with only enough slack to attach the line. Everything unanchored went flying; she heard the crunch as Meredith hit a bulkhead, and then she was jerked forward again and blacked out.

  She couldn’t have been out for more than a minute, she reckoned later; she could hear things still cascading in thumps and crunches. But the ship himself was not moving, and more importantly, more tellingly, his necroluminescence was gone. The only light was Hester’s suit lamp, and Cynthia fumbled her own on.

  “Thank the ancient powers and the Buddha,” Hester said in a thin fervent voice. “I thought you were dead.”

  Cynthia swallowed bright copper where she’d bitten the inside of her mouth. “Ow.”

  “Yes.” Hester was undoing her safety line and dragging herself upright. Cynthia undid her own line with shaky fingers, and then her head cleared and she made it to her feet in one adrenaline-sour jerk. She twisted around, scanning, but Meredith was nowhere within the limited range of her light. She saw one of Ngao’s legs and part of his spine; he had been torn apart by the force of Charli
e’s convulsions. As she watched, the foot twitched.

  “Do you think we can make it back to the Caitlín R. Kiernan alive?” Hester said.

  Cynthia squared her shoulders, wincing a little, and answered: “I think we can try.”

  Epilogue

  In his (second) death throes, the Charles Dexter Ward had taken a chunk out of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, like a kid biting a chunk out of an apple. The casualties were five dead and thirteen injured, and they would have been worse except that everyone possible had been press-ganged into helping with the broken ward-mirror. The medical bay was gone, and now Cynthia knew why she’d only ever seen the one future-ghost, because there had only been one future path in which there was still a medical bay—the future path, she knew with cold uncomfortable certainty, in which she had not stood up to Wandrei and Fiorenzo, in which the Charles Dexter Ward had not died twice.

  Cynthia patched up the crew as best she could with bandages made of cloth and splints repurposed from any number of functions, and the crew patched up the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. The mass funeral was devastating; Cynthia stood with Hester and let Hester’s grip leave bruises on her hand.

  She bunked in with Hester, which was tight but doable. On her first sleep shift, after she finished brushing what she hoped was the last of the Charles Dexter Ward’s death stench out of her mouth, she came into Hester’s room and found two smug cheshires in the hammock slung crossways above Hester’s bunk. She surprised herself by bursting into tears.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said, fending off Hester’s concern. “I just didn’t expect them to find me.”

  “They know you,” Hester said, as if it were all that simple.

  The Jarmulowicz Astronomica sent out a distress signal, and before leaving the Charles Dexter Ward, they set warning beacons around the boojum’s carcass. The Universal Code didn’t have an entry for REANIMATED; Hester told Cynthia that the Faculty Senate passed a motion to submit a proposal to add it before agreeing that the best they could do for now was EPIDEMIC alternating with BANDERSNATCH, and trust that it would be dire enough to warn people away.