The Cunning Blood

by Jeff Duntemann

  Jamie soon heard the sound, as the cloud passed over the sun and left him in deep shadow: A low, resonant buzz. Something struck the ground behind him, buzzing; another in front, then at once dozens to either side, then hundreds, buzzing and leaping. A formation of ink-black insects—actually, miniature machines that looked like insects—danced past his face, a higher but still sinister sound surrounding them. He then noticed shapeless streams and fans of flying black creatures too small to discern individually, their swarms moving purposefully eastward.

  Flies, gnats, locusts, darkness—four plagues at once. Jamie shivered, and broke into a trot. There would be more.

  Somewhere in the near distance, a man yelled. The darkness deepened. The black column continued to rise from the pit behind the privy clearing, where Sahan-Grusa had spent weeks preparing the instruments of its promised terror. Jamie swallowed hard. The creature that had until recently lived inside him had told him what it could do, and he could barely force himself to believe.

  Now, he believed.

  Man and bucket hurried along the dirt road. By the time he reached the Never-Ending Factory, the black cloud hovering over Lincolntown had reduced the light to an elfin semidarkness, like deep dusk stained with a cast of sickly green. The clouds rolled above the town in a slow spiral maelstrom, casting down wave after wave of Sahan-Grusa's artificial insects. Men were running in every direction, their faces grim, weapons drawn.

  From above, thunder. Jamie looked up, to see a jagged trace of lightning crawl from one end of the cloud to another, followed soon by its rolling rumble.

  "You didn't tell me you could do that!" Jamie yelled.

  The voice from the bucket sounded pleased. "The cloud generates static electricity, just as rain clouds do. My cloud works more quickly. Is it plagues you want? Plagues I can give you!"

  Several men ran past Jamie, gasping and waving locusts away from their faces. One stumbled into Jamie, shoving him backwards and cursing. Jamie fell against a tree, shook his head.

  He heard screaming from inside the building, and terrified men were running from every door. Jamie stepped to one of the broad windows and looked inside.

  Clouds of flies were landing on the bright ceiling lamps, casting writhing shadows everywhere in the building. Holes had appeared in the sides of the many galvanized steel tubs, and from the holes jets of brilliant scarlet fluid were coursing. The floor was already slick, and the fleeing men were falling and rolling in what looked a great deal like blood.

  Lightning struck a tree behind Jamie, and the simultaneous explosion of thunder almost deafened him, and then faded to the crackle of flaming vegetation.

  He turned again to the window into the Never-Ending Factory. Most of the tanks had ceased to leak, and the floor was awash with faux blood. Movement within one of the tanks near the window caught his eye. As Jamie watched, a human skeleton slick with blood sat up in the tank and clacked its jaw. The simulacrum threw itself out of the tank, to stand over and menace a screaming man cowering on the gore-covered floor.

  The rolling roar of thunder was nearly continuous. "That wasn't part of my plan!" Jamie shouted, as more of the skeletal figures clambered out of the now-empty nanoreplicator tanks.

  "Don't be foolish," the voice from the bucket scolded. "Men like these are unlikely to have read your ancient scriptures. To them, a locust is an insect to be swatted. To frighten them, you must confront them with images of their own mortality."

  Inside the factory, a man was firing an automatic rifle through the ribcage of one of the advancing skeletons. Fragments of bone flew in every direction with each round, to be replaced almost immediately from the edges of the shattered ribs. The creature was unfazed.

  One of the bullets went stray and struck the window glass, sending shards falling on Jamie's head. One of them cut his cheek badly. The stench of gore rolled out of the building through the now-shattered window. Jamie stumbled away from the window. He put his free hand to his cheek, and drew it away covered with his own blood.

  "Had you not forced me to leave your body, that wound would already be healed."

  Jamie ground his teeth together against the stinging pain. Drops of real blood dripped onto the dirt around his boots. "I know what pain is. It will help me focus on what I'm doing. We have a plan that I'm holding up. Let's go."

  Still carrying the bucket, Jamie crossed National Square. Swarms of locusts were gathering and morphing on the concrete slab at the center of the square, creating the shape of a tremendous black cauldron. Another stream of the synthetic insects was descending from the surging spiral in the sky, vanishing into the interior of the cauldron.

  "We're in time for my next invention," the bucket announced, with something Jamie could only describe as a cackle. "Observe."

  Jamie's mouth was dry, and he edged away from the slab. From somewhere inside the roaring mass of insects came a deep red spark. Like a fountain of lava, a yellow-red finger stabbed upward from the center of the cauldron into the sky, followed by another and then another.

  Jamie broke into a full run across the square. Lightning continued to flash across the sky and stab downward at elevated objects. Several trees were burning. The cauldron was now a fountain of simulated fire, rising higher toward the center point of the ever-turning mass of clouds hovering over the town. Flashes of cold white from above melded with the red from the cauldron and the yellow from burning trees and bushes around the square, and became almost the sole light in the near-darkness beneath the clouds. Lightning struck another tree nearby. Jamie, startled, stumbled and scraped his knee raw on the gravel of the walk. He cried out in pain.

  He peered over his shoulder. The fountains of fire rising from the cauldron were shaping themselves into an indistinct figure like an immense horned bat, stretching wings and talons of fire high into the air. A sulphurous smell stung his nostrils. Jamie tried to force himself back to calmness. His customary detachment had fled, and the sour taste in his mouth was the taste of panic.

  "I know that image!" he screamed against the lightning. "It's lifted straight from Disney! It's not real!"

  "Real?" asked the bellowing voice from the bucket. "None of this is real. Only the fear is real!"

  Jamie ran on. He knew now that it was he who had given the monster permission to summon mythic fear any way it could, and that Sahan-Grusa's target was perhaps not so much the ignorant masses of Lincolntown as Jamie himself.

  Ahead was the Capitol Building, its great cloth bubble disintegrating as he watched, blowing in tatters in the rising wind. The lights inside showed men streaming down the spiral staircases, running through the wall-less corridors and catwalks. Some were leaping from the high stories, doubtless to their deaths.

  Little gobbets of fire were now dropping from the tormented clouds, false fire that fell on the panicked men fleeing the building but did not burn them, instead splashing on their heads and bodies, warping and writhing and mutating into long, many-legged centipedes that glowed with an inner fire, deep and red. The artificial vermin ran up their arms and into their clothing. Jamie watched the men tearing their clothes from their bodies and writhing on the ground, swatting at the centipedes and screaming in terror.

  One of the flaming gobbets splashed on his free hand, to morph into a tiny grinning half-transparent horned manikin shining with its own internal light, like flames within smoked glass. The creature ran up his sleeve and leapt onto his face, where it disintegrated into a smear of antiseptic chemicals that spread of its own force across the jagged slash the breaking glass had cut on his cheek. It stung for a moment, and Jamie lost control and screamed, certain that Sahan-Grusa had decided to break its pledge and inflict its horrific pain on him again.

  Something was grasping his ear with a tiny tickle. "You asked for fear. Fear I can do!" Jamie swatted at the ear, and felt something small spin away, giggling with a high demonic sound that faded to the ever-present roar of the swarming locusts.

  Jamie shut his gaping mouth and ground his
teeth against themselves. "I'm the master here, damn you!"

  "Then master your fear!" the bucket bellowed, "or you are no master at all!"

  Jamie cursed and ran, still holding the bucket that he dared not leave behind. There was only one person on this accursed planet who did not quite deserve what was unfolding, which had already gone far beyond anything Jamie had imagined in his darkest nightmares.

  He looked back to the square. The horned monstrosity framed in rippling streams of fire over the cauldron was now four-faced and four-armed, each of four mouths chewing a writhing human figure, while each of the four arms held another human figure, which was squirming and pounding on the creature's taloned hands. It looked just like the woodcut in the ancient copy of Inferno that he had read as a youth: Lucifer at the center of Hell.

  Jamie shook his head and ran on. None of it was real. No one was being hurt. No one. Really, that had been his command. No one could be hurt. He cringed to see a man race past him, eyes bulging with terror, raking bloody tracks on his bare chest, where the luminous centipedes tickled and ran without stinging.

  Down the street and to the foundations of the Capitol Building he stumbled, now winded and gasping for breath. Another man burst past, yelling incoherent curses and waving a rifle in the air. Jamie watched him stop, scream at the sky in an unfamiliar language, and blast a hole through his own head with the rifle.

  The light from the sky, the falling fire, and Dante's Lucifer combined to present a compelling vision of Hell. The stink of brimstone was overpowering. Jamie felt he was barely in control of himself. "Stop it! I say, stop it! People are dying!"

  "People are killing themselves," the bucket replied, its stentorian voice itself an instrument of fear. "I have no power over that."

  "Then help me find Magic Mikey," Jamie demanded. "If all these phony bugs can see, you should already know where he is."

  "I do," said the bucket. Above his head a cloud of locusts burst into cold fire, swarming to form a flaming arrow that warped and rippled toward the south. Jamie followed, limping and panting, as the arrow proceeded before him.

  He found the boy lying in the shadow of an abandoned guardhouse, curled into a fetal position and sobbing. Jamie set the bucket down and knelt beside him. "Mikey, I'm sorry. This is my fault. We have to leave here right away."

  The boy looked up, his eyes not comprehending. "Is this your player at work?" He licked his lips, which had been bitten to bleeding. "He's breaking all the rules."

  Jamie clenched his slender fist in the air. "I told him to do this. I take the responsibility. Believe it or not, he's obeying my rules—but I was careless in setting those rules. Get up and walk." He took both of the boy's hands and hauled upward.

  "Then you're the player," Mikey said, tears flowing freely. "I've never seen anything like this."

  Jamie had no answer for that. Lightning struck a flagpole twenty meters away, and the sound deafened them. A spiderweb of blue-white tracery arced down the flagpole and set the shrubs at its base on fire. "Follow me!" Jamie screamed. Mikey stumbled a few steps, nodding, then stumbled to his knees. He rose again and ran beside Jamie, who still had the bucket of onions in his right hand.

  A kilometer east of Lincolntown Square the trackless hardwood forests began again, and on their edge a three-kilometer shuttle runway had been cleared and leveled. Two of the delta-winged craft were present, one dark and framed in scaffolding, the other poised with its zerospike engines idling, bright light spilling from its forward windshields.

  Jamie and the boy, both panting heavily, drew up to the shuttle's extended ramp, where two men stood with rifles ready.

  "Better scram," one said with an unsteady voice. "Get closer and you're slabbed."

  Jamie opened his mouth to protest, but before he could speak both men bolted and ran, screaming. Light from behind him made Jamie turn, to see a figure three meters high formed of flaming locusts, having nothing for a head but writhing flames, and holding a flaming trident.

  Jamie pointed at the airlock hatch at the end of the ramp. Magic Mikey stumbled up the ramp and into the shuttle, Jamie close behind. Man and boy entered the airlock, which sealed automatically behind them. Jamie heard the ramp's hydraulics retracting it into the hull. In the better light of the airlock he realized that hundreds of locusts and flies had entered the shuttle with them. Even as he watched, they melted into a black fluid that quickly sank into the crevasses in the deck.

  Jamie worked his way forward through the cramped central passage, Mikey behind him, face still tear-stained. In the command cabin a swarthy, balding middle-aged man was shouting into his headset mic.

  "...I got no clue what it is! I ain't superstitious but it don't look natural to me! An' I ain't gonna stay here like a sitting duck while it eats the town! I..."

  Some small noise must have alerted the man, who spun around and saw them. His face was creased with sun-wrinkles, his thinning black hair streaked steel-gray tossed in complete disorder. The name emblazoned over his right pocket was Rafferty.

  "Who in hell are you?" The man drew a black sidearm from his belt.

  "Jamie Eigen. I was told to bring Magic Mikey to you, so you could get him off-planet. The colony's being destroyed."

  Rafferty must have recognized Mikey at that point. "You just hear from the Missus, kid?" Mikey nodded but did not speak. "Well, so did I. She told me to go find you and tie you to a chair before you got into any more trouble. She didn't say nothin' about no CO bodyguard." Rafferty snapped the slide of the handgun and stood.

  "Hold on, Mr. Rafferty," Jamie said, forcing himself to an icy calm. "I brought something that might shed some light on the problem." With that, he upended the bucket and dumped its contents on the command cabin deck.

  Two dozen small red onions rolled across the steel plates. A larger mass struck the floor and flattened slightly. It looked to Jamie's eyes like a potful of old spaghetti, long gone to mold and mottled green and black, enveloped in a mantle of semitransparent slime. A rank smell of rot and old eggs rose from the mass.

  "Whatsat? A bucket of garbage?"

  Jamie had no time to reply. The ropy mass twitched for a moment, and then exploded. Tendrils of gray-brown shot upwards and to both sides, striking the bulkheads and ceiling and sticking. The tendrils contracted, and drew up more of the mass from the floor, spreading it and extending it until a web of slime and pulsing tendrils hung in the air between Jamie and Rafferty.

  Rafferty, startled, edged back, pistol extended before him. No one moved for a long minute, as the web flexed and pulled one way and then another, rearranging itself and numerous clots of slime that were suspended from the junctures of the tendrils. Jamie watched what looked like fat spiders stalk around the web of tendrils, and realized that they were eyes with legs, great round eyes with catlike pupils that caught the harsh sodium light of the command cabin and broke it into multicolored iridescence. There were twenty or more of them, slowly wandering the web and peering in every direction.

  At the center of the web, the tendrils drew away from one another, leaving a milky-white veined membrane between them. Jamie watched the membrane begin to vibrate, making an eerie sound like wind blowing past a broad-mouthed jug. The sound rose and fell in frequency, as though some strange laboratory oscillator were calibrating itself.

  Then the membrane spoke.

  "Bring the machine to life," it said, forming the words from the deep fluttering rumble the membrane produced. "We must leave this world for another."

  "The Missus just told me to stay here," Rafferty said.

  "I wish to join with my alternates," the membrane continued. "Bring this vehicle to life."

  "What are you, a Gaian?" Rafferty continued to hold his sidearm in both hands, aimed generally at the center of the web.

  "I am what I will become," the membrane rumbled, "and my progress cannot be impeded. Call me what you will."

  "She said she'll shoot me out of the sky if I lift."

  "She has not met me yet
." A fat vacuole of gray slime hanging on the web deformed and distorted, squeezing itself laterally. The vacuole burst, and a thin semitransparent tendril shot toward Rafferty and struck his right arm.

  Rafferty screamed. The sidearm dropped from his hands and he screamed again, wide-mouthed and red-faced, falling against the command couch and then to the floor, only to inhale and screech. Jamie, nauseated, turned his face away. The older man continued to scream for a time Jamie judged interminable, all the more so because he had given permission: If the pilot refuses to take the shuttle up, you may first try to frighten him, and then cause him pain. The fact that Jamie had forbidden Sahan-Grusa from doing the shuttle pilot permanent damage seemed scant moral refuge.

  In time the tendril snapped back to the web, and Rafferty got unsteadily to his feet. Without further words he climbed into the command couch. "You better let your friends strap in," he said without looking back. "This ain't no airlimo." Rafferty reached up and began snapping switches. Jamie heard the zerospike engines rise to taxi speed.

  Sahan-Grusa's web pulled to one side, letting go of the walls so that Jamie and Mikey could pass and climb into two of the passenger couches arrayed in several rows behind the command couches. Crash webs slid out of their grooves and closed over all three.

  "So whadda we do once we get into orbit?" Rafferty asked over his shoulder.

  The membrane shuddered and warbled incoherently for a moment. Jamie was forced to wonder: What indeed? Their plan became what Jamie considered a little unlikely at that point. Sahan-Grusa had said with cold confidence that it would steal the first starship that came within a kilometer of them. It had not said how, and Jamie felt that he might have erred by not inquiring further. A starship!

  The audacious monster was evidently deciding how much to reveal to Rafferty. "Once we are out of the atmosphere, you need only open the cargo bay. I will do the rest."