“Yes, yes you were. Believe me, I know dead when I see it. You were dead. No breathing, no heartbeat, cold skin, not bleeding—dead.”
“I was in anaerobic stasis.” Like she was saying she'd been taking a nap.
I took a deep breath, tried to force myself to be calm. “I don't know what that means.”
“Oh,” she reached up to take my hand. “I keep forgetting how much you don't know. I'm sorry.” A pause, and I could see her trying to dumb down the explanation so I could understand it.
“Okay,” she began. “You know I'm not human, right?”
I nodded.
“I was born human, and then . . . I got changed. Like you, with the servitor configuration on your back. But, in my case, it's a physical symbiosis. There's a, well, it's an alien plant life form living inside my body. It has the ability to restructure my body and it can synthesize various organic compounds—like what I fed you.”
I nodded. That much I could grasp.
“Now, it's more or less under my conscious control. It responds to my brain's commands, just like the body I was born with. But it's different from me in a lot of ways. It's a vegetable, and it's a pretty damned tough vegetable. Very hard to kill. Case in point—it doesn't need to breathe.”
“But you do.” I objected.
“Yes and no. See, when my body—my animal body—becomes oxygen starved it passes out. But the symbiote doesn't. Instead what it does is take over the functions of my blood supply with its own circulatory system. It's an osmotic—eh, that doesn't matter. The point is that the animal part of me was in a kind of suspended animation and the plant part of me was keeping it alive. That's why I didn't exhibit any obvious vital response.”
“So when I cut the plastic off your face—?”
“It let oxygen get to my lung tissue, so the symbiote was able to reactive my aerobic respiration cycle.” A pause. “It woke me up.”
It was incredible. She was alive. “Like sleeping beauty, only without the kissing part.”
She smiled up at me. “Sometimes the dragon does rescue the princess.” She lifted her hand to my face and touched my lips. “We can do the kissing part later.”
She started to swing her legs around and I grabbed her. “Wait! There's more. There's some kind of flesh-eating goop all over the floor.”
She craned her head to look down. “Flesh-eating goop, huh?”
“Yeah, it's like The Blob. If you touch it you dissolve and turn into more of it. Except bones—it leaves the bones. Alice called it a—” I concentrated—“meta . . . morphic anthro . . . something.”
“Metamorphic anthrophage,” Godiva supplied. “Yeah—that just means that it eats you and turns you into more of itself, which really is what any carnivore does, except the process takes a lot longer with most things. It's got to be a depolymerizing agent, probably bound to some simple free ranging intelligence. Where did it come from?”
“Catskinner killed this guy and he turned into slime, and the slime got a bunch of other people.”
Godiva bit her lip. “Assume that it's able to metabolize at least some of the tissue as a food source . . . hmm. It left the bones, you say? They were clean?”
“Nothing but bone.”
“Not good. Skin, connective tissue, muscle, hair—that's a broad spectrum agent. We've got to kill it.”
“I'm in favor of that. How? I'm guessing stabbing it won't do much good.”
Godiva looked around. She sat up, pressing my shirt to her belly. I winced in sympathy. “There might be something in those cabinets that can help.”
The cabinets in question were a good four feet away, above the steel counter that ran along three sides of the room.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don't know. Something. Can you get there and look?”
Could I? Catskinner could, I was sure of it, but he had been oddly quiet since he'd smashed through the wall in the meeting room.
Can you get me over there?
perhaps. there is risk of further damage to your pattern.
Risk? How bad a risk?
unweaving.
You mean it might kill me?
yes.
If I fall into that blob it will definitely kill me.
you can jump that far without me.
The hell of it was, he was probably right. It was a little far for a standing broad jump, but if it had just been chalk lines on the sidewalk I wouldn't even have hesitated.
“Okay, I'm going to give it a shot,” I said. “Catskinner has been using up a lot of my . . . I don't know, chi force or something. He says that it might kill me for him to take over, so I'm going to make the jump myself.”
Godiva looked at me gravely, then nodded. “I understand.”
She started to twist her body to face me, then stopped, grimacing. “Be careful,” she said, pain in her voice.
“Oh, yeah,” I agreed. “Careful is priority one.”
I got up on my knees, then on my feet, moving slowly. The table was as steady as pavement—probably bolted to the floor. I looked over at the counter top—wide, clean, probably bolted to the wall. It didn't look that far.
Then I looked down at the pink goo that covered the floor, the stuff that would dissolve me the moment I so much as touched it. All of a sudden that counter looked a lot farther away
I took a deep breath and got ready.
wait.
Yes?
bend your legs more.
I crouched a little. This okay?
and turn to your left.
I turned a little. Like this?
now jump.
I jumped. Both my feet hit the counter, and then my face hit the cabinet, but I was able to grab it. There was a moment of panic, but I was there and solidly planted. Not bad.
Thank you.
i understand how not to die.
That he did. I opened the cabinet closest to where I'd landed and started looking for things to help us not die.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“there is nothing so complete that it cannot be abbreviated.”
“Let's see. Ketchup, mustard, steak sauce—oh, here we go! Salt, a ton of salt. That's got to be good, right?”
“It's not a slug, it's an animated viscoelastic liquid. Keep going.” Godiva was lying back on the table, holding my shirt to her belly. I didn't like how bloody it was getting.
I went to the next one. “Plastic forks, spoons, cocktail napkins, plastic cups—no good, right?”
“Right.”
The next one held more of the same. “Salt shakers, tablecloths, napkin holders, candles—”
“—wait!”
“Candles?”
“Tablecloths, what kind?”
“Uh,” I poked through the stack. “Paper, plastic . . . paper and plastic, looks like.”
“Gimme one of each.”
I looked over at her. “You're going to kill the slime creature with tablecloths?”
A drawn-out painful sounding sigh. “No, I'm going to stop my bleeding with tablecloths, so I can live long enough to kill the slime creature.”
Oh, yeah, there was that. I scooted around on the counter so I was facing her. “Okay, I'll just, uh, gently lob them, okay?”
“Paper first.” She wasn't looking good at all.
I pulled out a paper tablecloth—in a plastic bag, so maybe it was sterile, or at least close. I tossed it and it landed on her chest.
“Thanks.” She pulled my shirt off her. It was soaked in blood. “You're not getting this back. Sorry.”
“I don't care about the shirt.” Under the shirt she looked worse than not good. She raised her head enough to glare at me. “Keep looking.”
Right. “Uh, big jars. Olives, cherries—”
Godiva let out a long gasp, tinged with pain. “Well, on the plus side, this is a really neat incision. If I can get the edges lined up—ow—it probably won't even scar.”
I tried to concentrate on the contents of the cabinets. “
Pickled eggs—eh, does anybody eat those? Let's see. . .” I had to scoot down the counter to the next one.
Godiva was talking, quietly, to herself. “Okay, Dr. Millerson, will you close?” Then to me, “I don't suppose you've run across a couple of tubes of super glue?”
“Sorry, not yet—”
I heard paper rustling and her body shift on the table, mixed with hisses of agony. “Rule number one, keep the insides on the inside and the outsides on the outsides. . . . Okay, toss me a plastic one, okay?”
I'd left them in the other cabinet, so I had to scoot back. I grabbed one and looked back. She was wrapped in white paper from shoulders to thighs. Red was already leaking through the front. I tossed the plastic tablecloth and she reached for it, but it slipped through her fingers and fell with a splat in the pool of flesh-dissolving goo.
“Shit! I'm sorry, I—”
Her eyes closed for a moment, then she looked back to me. “Just get another one.”
I threw the second one so it landed on her. “Good, what else have we got over there?”
I scooted back across the counter. “Coffee, filters, cream and sugar, stirrers, cups—”
“No help, go on.”
Plastic was rustling now. Her movements sounded slower, and her gasps of pain more frequent.
The next one was stuck. No wait— “It's locked.”
“So fucking break it open.”
I still had Catskinner's knives. I took the modified screwdriver and jammed it between the door of the cabinet and the frame. I leaned into it and it popped open suddenly. For a heart-stopping moment I teetered on the edge of the counter then pulled myself back up.
“Booze. Rum, whiskey, vodka—”
“Now you're talking!” The rustling paused.
“You need some to sterilize your cut?” I asked.
“Naw, I don't much worry about infection. My symbiote doesn't play well with others. It pretty much kills off anything else that tries to live in me. No, alcohol's a poison.”
“It—yeah, I knew that.” I looked over the edge of the counter. “So. . . how do I get it to drink?”
A choked laugh, then a gasp. “Just pour it in the goop.”
That was simple enough. I started with a bottle of vodka, spun the cap off and poured it over the side of the counter. I was expecting steam to rise from it, but the clear liquid just spattered onto the think pink goop and got absorbed by it. When the bottle was empty I reached for another.
“So, how do we tell when it's dead?” I asked.
Godiva rustled a little bit in her plastic wrap. “Ah, that's better. Well, it's not exactly 'alive' now, but the chemical bonds that allow the captive outsider to manipulate the fluid require a quasi-organic stability. The alcohol should break that down—it should begin to flow downhill when the outsider loses cohesion.”
I was halfway through the second bottle. “Which way is downhill?”
“Hmmm. Well, if we're lucky there's a drain under all that goop—this is a commercial kitchen, after all.”
She shifted and then sat up on the table. “Ahhh. . . . Much better. Do me a favor, use the rum last, okay? I could use a shot.”
I dropped the second bottle of vodka, grabbed one of gin. “Do you think that's a good idea? What with, uh, that cut and all?”
She shrugged. Now that her body was tightly wrapped she looked much better. “I can't go into shock—the symbiote would just put me in stasis again before that happened.”
The gin was gone. There were a couple of bottles of whiskey, I grabbed the cheap one first. No sense in feeding Glenlivet to the blob if I didn't have to.
“Rum's very high in sugar, you know.” Her voice was starting to sound better, too. “Easy to metabolize. I used to be a beer drinker, back in school. Never had much of a sweet tooth, before. Part of the change, these days I crave sugar all the time. Of course, I don't have to worry about cavities anymore—or gaining weight, for that matter. Like you, I'm eating for two.”
It turned out we didn't need the Glenlivet. After two bottles of the cheap stuff the goop started to change. The color was first, turning grayish, and then it got runnier, like an egg cooking in reverse. I watched it for a while and it was definitely flowing, slowly, towards a low spot that looked like it concealed a drain. It had lost the surreal animation and had become just a floor full of slime.
“Is it safe now?” I asked.
“Let's give it couple of minutes,” Godiva cautioned. “Best not to get it on bare skin even after it's poisoned. And I don't have shoes.”
“I can carry you,” I volunteered. She looked at me and I added, “Me. I'm not helpless without Catskinner, you know.”
you are not helpless, Catskinner agreed. you can carry her.
Godiva smiled at me, brushed her hair out of her face with a bloody hand, “Of course you're not, James. I'm just a little . . . fragile at the moment. I'd rather walk.”
“How about water?” I asked.
“I'd rather have rum,” Godiva admitted.
“No,” I pointed down, “for the stuff. We could wash it down the drain, right? It wouldn't wake it back up or anything?”
“Hmm? No, once the outsider's decoupled from the material, it degrades pretty fast.”
I scooted down some more on the counter. There was a double sink, I put a stopper in one side and started it filling, then looked around for a bucket or something like one. I found a big square stainless steel dish—it looked like it fit into a steam table.
As I was waiting for it to fill I asked Godiva, “What do we do?”
“Just rinse it down the drain. It's not—”
“No! I mean about this whole mess. I can't go on like this. They're going to keep trying to kill me, and sooner or later they'll succeed, and, hell, I don't even know who they are!”
i can protect you.
“Shut up!”
Godiva was staring at me. “I didn't—”
“Not you,” I pointed at my head. “Him.”
The dish was full. I dumped it over the side of the sink, set it back in to fill again. The water made pretty good headway on the goop.
“James.” Godiva's voice was soft.
I looked at her. She was sitting on the edge of the steel table, her bare legs dangling above the slimy floor, her body wrapped in bloody paper and plastic. She smiled at me.
“Just relax, okay?”
“Relax?” I couldn't think of any part of this situation that called for relaxing.
She nodded gravely. “Relax, and try to think. There are things that don't add up. There's more going on here than just what we see.”
The pan was full again, I dumped it over the side. More goop swirled down the drain. It was starting to smell, I noticed, like meat gone bad.
“More going on?” I prompted her.
“Keith Morgan isn't the only player in this game.”
“Keith Morgan!” The pan was full again, I dumped it. “Keith Morgan isn't a player in any game any more, unless it's bowling. As the ball.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean some woman in red had his head cut off and stuck in an ice bucket. She showed it me.”
Godiva stared off into space for a moment, chewing her lip. “Interesting,” she said slowly. Then, “A woman in red?”
“Yeah, she said her name was Agony. Agony.... something French.”
“And she said she'd had Morgan killed? Did she say why?”
I thought back. “He was foolish. He tried to get Catskinner to agree to a covenant.”
Godiva smiled and nodded, working out something in her head. I dumped another pan of water. The floor around the drain by the sink was pretty clear, just wet. I hopped down off the counter. I didn't dissolve.
It's the small victories that count.
“I should have seen that coming, after the bowling alley, but I was too focused on trying to save White, and then they jumped us, of course.”
“White's alive, by the way,” I said. “
They dropped them off at the hospital.”
“They did?” she seemed mildly surprised. “Morgan wouldn't have. He must have been overruled.”
“Or else he was already dead by then.” The pan was full again, I sluiced the water towards the table Godiva was sitting on.
“Or . . . maybe he didn't know about ambimorphs and blue metal boy. Hell, he couldn't have gotten that attack together that fast—he would have just found out the minraudim failed.”
“So two different people are trying to kill me?”
“Probably more than two,” Godiva answered absently, then added, “But not all of them want to kill you.”
“That's good news. Isn't it?”
Godiva looked over the side of the table. “Very good news—we just have to make sure the right group wins. Help me down from here?”
Her body, under the wrapping, felt warm and soft and alive again. It felt good to have her lean against me, but I could feel how injured she was. She winced and muttered, “Fucking adhesions.”
She was able to stand on her own, though, and I took a slow step back. She smiled at me. “Not so bad, really, I just have to move slowly.”
I let out a deep breath that I hadn't known I'd been holding. “Good. We can go slow. What next?”
She looked around. “Let's see if I can find some clothes. They wear uniforms in this dump?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“reality is temporary. also amusing.”
When we went out the back door—both of us wearing shirts that proclaimed us employees of Endless Night Catering and Events—the lot was a mess of flashing red and blue lights. At least four patrol cars, an ambulance, a big hook and ladder truck that seemed to have no purpose except to block anyone entering or leaving the parking lot. No one was looking in our direction, so we glanced around. We'd found Godiva's glasses and teeth, but her clothes hadn't survived.
A bunch of dazed conventioneers sat around, hovered over by uniformed personnel. In one corner was a knot of arguing suits. I figured that was my best bet for finding Russwin.
He didn't disappoint me. He and Alice were both there, being lectured by an overweight man who sat on the trunk of an unmarked car, a lit cigarette burning in one hand.
“Look, I've got thirty-seven witnesses, or possibly victims, or maybe perpetrators, but what I don't have is a fucking crime. I've got statements here that there was some kind of disturbance during a presentation, and, okay, we've got some minor injuries. There was a panic, people got stepped on, it happens. Other than that, what I've got is a colossal waste of my time.”
Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) Page 18