by John Shirley
“We are the reinforcements!” Sarge interrupted, his voice like an ax chopping. “Now shoulder your fucking weapon, soldier!”
Portman swallowed—and looked at Reaper for support.
Reaper only slammed a fresh clip into his light machine gun. He looked at Sarge, and said, “Pray for war.”
“Pray for war!” the others chimed in.
Most of them. This time it was Portman who didn’t say it. Sarge’s look bored a hole right through him. Finally, Portman picked up his weapon, and said, “Pray for fucking war.”
They broke up into two teams, and started out, Destroyer half dragging Portman with him and the Kid.
Sarge, Reaper, and Mac headed toward a tunnel marked D4.
Reaper thought about trying to brief Mac on what they’d seen in tunnel—but you couldn’t brief someone about something you didn’t understand yourself.
Sam pried open the “imp’s” jaws and shined a light in past razored teeth.
Duke stood back—looking at the monster, then at Sam, his eyes lingering on Sam. Nice view of her from behind. Much preferable to looking at that horror on the examining table.
Sam’s hand twitched as a particularly noxious smell wafted out of the thing’s gullet, and she dropped her penlight down its throat. The light shone from down there like a flashlight from a scarlet, slimy cave.
“Shit,” she said. She turned to Duke, “Hold this open.”
He hesitated. Didn’t want to get near that thing—even dead.
“Don’t be a wuss, Duke.”
That tore it. A girl calling him a wuss. He had to do it.
He stepped in, gripped the thing’s jaws, careful to keep his hands away from the sharpest teeth—a scratch from those, and who knew what unspeakable interworld infections you’d get. He held them open as she reached into the creature’s mouth, pushing in half her arm.
“Little tension between you and the Reaper?” Duke asked. Get a girl to confide in you about her problems. Sometimes it worked.
“Why does a talented student throw it all away and join RRTS? Turn himself into a killing machine?” she asked, fishing around. Her arm made squelching sounds in its throat.
“I guess most of us are running from something.” Try to sound sensitive with the ladies. That works sometimes, too.
“What about you, Duke?” she asked, still fishing around, grimacing. Making fun of him, probably, as she went on, “What are you running away from?”
“Today,” Duke said earnestly, “it’s mostly been big ugly-ass demons…”
She couldn’t help but smile at that. She drew her hand out, clutching the penlight and, relieved, he let go of the monster’s jaws.
“What was he like before?” Duke asked.
“As a boy?” What had her brother been like? She thought about it a moment. “Empathetic. Sensitive.”
Duke looked at her in surprise. “Hard to think of Reaper as sensitive.”
“Well, I knew him before all the drop-down-gimme-fifty woo-ha stuff.” She resumed her examination of the imp, peering at its chest now.
Duke laughed. “It’s hoo-ah.”
She tapped its chest. “You have a family?”
“I have Destroyer—grew up together.”
“He seems like a good guy.”
Duke nodded—a little embarrassed.
She stared at the horror on the table, decided she needed to cut it wide open to see how it ticked.
“You know…” She tapped the other side of the imp’s broad chest, over its heart. “I bet secretly you’ve got a big heart, Duke.”
Yeah, she was definitely making fun of him. “It ain’t the only big secret thing I got,” he said. What the hell, a shot in the dark.
She looked at him, raising her eyebrows. “Little rusty, huh?”
Duke sighed. “Lady, you got no idea. I been bunked up with a buncha Marines, none of whom I find remotely attractive, for like, ever. Right now, having sex with me is practically your civic duty.”
She was careful not to smile at that. Though she wanted to.
She picked up a scalpel, began a Y-incision on the exoskeleton over the chest. And the scalpel snapped in half.
She tapped the broken handle against the imp’s thick skin. “I need a power bone saw. There’s one in the procedure room.”
“Power bone saw? Lady I been waitin’ for you my whole life…”
Who are you?
I’m you. I always have been. The animal in you. The hungry animal.
No. I’m not you. I…I am Carmack. I’m a scientist. An award-winning researcher. I’m not an animal.
You amuse me, giving yourself airs. All embodied beings are animals.
We become more than animals when we become rational.
Your rationality is like the thin coat a man wears when he’s expecting a light rain. And then comes a blizzard and he freezes to death.
No! Reason built our civilization. Reason is power. It builds weapons to destroy such as you. I know who you are—you’re a part of my mind altered by the infection!
What of it? Can you destroy me, Carmack, without destroying yourself? We are becoming indistinguishable.
Oh it’s dark here, it’s so dark. You—you’re just a nasty little voice in the dark. At least tell me—where am I?
In a safe place. As for the darkness—you are blinded with the rigors of transformation. Hiding from them while your body completes its revolution. That which has so long been hidden away in you will now come to light. The façade of civilization will tear away—underneath is the face of the beast. That is who you really are: me. The hidden part of you released by the genetic infection.
So dark…so dark here…I hurt, my limbs burn…what is happening to me? I feel as if I am pregnant with a child, bursting with new life, but I am male—I feel like that insect that is injected with offspring by its mate, so that when they hatch out they eat their own father from within. I feel like my legs are wriggling with a life of their own, breaking free of the body; I feel like my heart and liver and guts are writhing inside me, fighting one another for space, tearing their way from my skin…Oh God the pain…
We are growing, changing…
Liar! We are not one thing! You’re just some psychological fracture of my own mind. You’re the result of the pressure, the horror of what I’ve gone through…
What you’ve gone through? You mean when you locked the door on your friends and colleagues? When you shut the door on that poor woman’s arm, cut it off so you could be safe? When you let them all die so the important Dr. Carmack could live? What is your ordeal to theirs?
I had to do it—so that I could survive, and warn the others! I had to warn the world!
How you justify your negligent homicide, Professor Carmack! It is most amusing!
You’re a figment of psychological pressure—you’re not real enough to be amused. You’re a nothing—just a nothing that can talk! Go away and leave me in the darkness with my companion: my pain…
But I am that darkness; I am your pain. That is exactly what I am. Who do you think you have been conversing with?
No!
Oh yes. Your eyes are blinded with the substance of my being; your nerves sing with the vitality of my growing life. I am growing within you. I am taking you over. The phenomenon you experimented with so cheerfully is infectious—didn’t you know that?
It can be stopped. It can be…
It cannot be stopped. You are proof.
No. Not me.
Don’t you remember what happened, in that lab, after you called for help—after you summoned fresh meat for us?
I can’t remember…It’s all so dark…I don’t want to remember…
You have been infected. I am that infection—and the infection is even now becoming you. You are in a conversation with that which is slowly eating you! I eat you. I eat you! I steadily eat you even as I speak to you. I am eating you and digesting you and making you into me. Whatever is in you that I have no use for—li
ke your rationality—will become my waste product.
No, I will break free! I will break out! I will…
You will…?
I will…I am…
No: I am…
I am…darkness and pain.
Yes. I am darkness and pain. And I will spread it to all that lives.
I am darkness and pain.
“Mac, secure our line of retreat,” Sarge told him. Mac used the RRTS hand signal for assent and took up a post just outside the door of the “mudroom”—the prep room on the edge of the Olduvaian archaeological dig.
Sarge and Reaper made their way, very warily, into the mudroom. Tinted the color of rust by the strange sky outside, light angled through an observation window looking out on the windswept surface of Mars. Most of the place was taken up by worktables.
It had the look of having been abandoned in miduse, like the labs. There were tables crowded with hand tools: big power drills, small shovels and trowels, a hundred kinds of fine-work digging implements. And on one table lay a long row of heavy-duty chain saws.
Reaper thought: In a pinch, if a guy ran out of ammo, those chain saws could be used as weapons. A strange thought, bringing with it a chill of recognition.
On a debris-removal table was a clutter of half-cleaned artifacts, each surrounded by a ring of scraped-away soil. Some of the artifacts were clearly vases, bowls, small metal cabinets; others were unidentifiable: cryptic, but teetering right on the edge of familiarity…
My parents were here, working at these tables, once, then my sister, Reaper thought. I was supposed to be working here, too…
His own memory of his childhood on Olduvai was dim, an uneasy fog shot through with red lights, flickering with half-seen faces. He had worked hard since, trying to forget this place.
But one memory came back to him vividly—the day, with his father, he had visited Dig Twenty-three. Young John Grimm had seen something watching him from the shadows. A monstrous face, with a vast toothy mouth. Only it wasn’t quite there physically. It blinked in and out of existence…
Your imagination, his father reassured him. This is a spooky-looking place. Your mind is finding patterns in the chaos.
But after that young John had refused to visit the digs. He’d just wanted to leave Olduvai.
Not long afterward, his parents had died—in that same part of the digs. Number Twenty-three. Just an accident…
Reaper noticed his sister looking at him from the walls.
He walked over to the photos taped up there. Here was his sister, smiling from a photo taken in a dig. And there were his parents, in a group photo. Their names underneath: Prof. A. Grimm; Prof. D. Grimm.
Reaper felt a twisting wrench of loss inside—and he turned away from the photos, going hurriedly to the observation window, wanting to look beyond the claustrophobic confines of the facility.
Once, millennia ago, Reaper knew, there had been plants, trees, animals, lakes, and rivers here. The archaeological and paleontological record indicated as much. But now it was a desert with poisonous air: the stony landscape inhabited only by the shadows of lowering, lividly colored clouds. Dusk lay thickly on bouldered hills, misshapen buttes, and, nearer, the digs themselves—terraces cut into soil and rock; crumbling archways and doors into darkness. Heavy mining equipment, abandoned midjob, was lit up by standing arc lights.
This was the foreign landscape in which his parents had given their lives, where they’d been sacrificial lambs to the meaningless pursuit of knowledge. Or so Reaper felt in his worst moments.
“That where it happened?” Sarge asked.
Reaper didn’t answer. But he thought: Dig Twenty-three…
“You find the door?” Reaper asked, after a moment.
Sarge moved away. Reaper stared through the window at the starkly shadowed, terraced dig, till Sarge called, “John…”
He found Sarge standing by the air lock hatch. The locked exit glistened with a fairly fresh spatter of blood. On the floor under the hatch were two bodies in overalls and lab coats. One face down, and the other was facedown, but his head was turned 180 degrees around, faceup.
Sarge bent down and read off the name tags. “Thurman and Clay. Look at ’em. They weren’t trying to stop something from getting in. Something stopped them getting out.”
Destroyer’s voice crackled over the comm. “Sarge—we reached the north air lock. It’s secure.”
Reaper grunted to himself. Things pop out of the ceiling and run off into the floor here. How could anything be secure?
He shook his head. No reason to say it aloud. The team was spooked enough.
He hunkered to look at the two bodies in front of the air lock. Seeing they had no respirators, he said, “What could make you want to escape into…nothing?”
“Sarge,” came Destroyer’s voice on the headset. “Reached the north air lock.”
Mac stopped pacing, cocked his head to listen, as Destroyer went on, “It’s secure. Console indicates nothing’s come in or out for twenty-six hours.”
Mac nodded to himself. Maybe there weren’t a whole swarm of those things out there after all. Destroyer would’ve seen something, for sure.
Mac was fingering his weapon and watching the corridor leading to the “mudroom”; thinking about home, Tokyo; thinking about how his uncle had asked him to come into the synthetic saki factory. Wondering what natural saki had been made out of him. Rice, wasn’t it? Or was it water chestnuts? Should have gone into business with Uncle. Anything could happen here…
His uncle, though, kept trying to get him to marry that second cousin of his, Inki. Pain in the ass, that girl. Following him around, looking at him moon-eyed, her hands clasped in front of her. Geisha complex. Not many of those left. Most of the girls from his own neighborhood had been in the Yakuza Lady’s Auxiliary. Not the geisha type.
But then there was something touching about Inki, too. Maybe he should’ve given her a whirl. Be comforting to come home to an old-fashioned girl. Get a massage. Back rub. Never tell you she’s got a headache that day…and after all—
Something move down there, in the dark end of the corridor?
The lights were only on in half of the corridor; the farther end was pitch-black. Something big shifting down there? No. Nerves, Mac.
He scratched his nuts and turned, prompted by a noise behind, and a sudden strange vinegary smell, and…
He had half a second to see the great reddish thing that hulked over him, snarling, before it slashed out with its scythelike talons.
And with one razoring slice, it cut Mac’s head off his shoulders.
He’d always wondered if a human head remained conscious, for a few seconds maybe, after being severed from the body.
Now he knew.
Because from where his head lay on the floor he was able to watch his own headless, blood-spouting body stagger and fall…into the swelling sea of shadows.
Nine
SOMETHING INHUMAN ROARED in triumph, from back where they’d left Mac.
Sarge and Reaper looked at one another and ran back toward the corridor. “Mac!” Reaper called. “Mac?” No answer,
They dodged between tables, to the corridor—and saw Mac’s body, headless, in a growing pool of blood.
Whatever had killed him was retreating into the shadow at the far end of the hallway. There was just a glimpse…
“What was that?” Reaper asked. Not really expecting an answer. They were left standing in the open, under the corridor light, with the body of their long-time buddy gushing blood at their feet. His severed head was near Reaper’s boots; Mac’s face, going blue, staring in wonder at nothing.
Instinctively, Sarge and Reaper went back-to-back, half-crouching. Both of them felt it: more than one thing was watching them from the shadows. Whatever had killed Mac was just out of sight—and was very aware of them.
“What you got?” Reaper asked, hoping Sarge had a fix on a definite, solid target…he almost ached for it.
“Nothing.
You?”
“Nothing,” Reaper said hoarsely. He glanced again at Mac’s decapitated body. “Shit.” It had to have happened in the space of a second. The body was so fresh—still pouring blood, the puddle spreading out around their feet.
“Still glad you came?” Sarge asked.
Reaper didn’t answer.
Something was moving down there, in the darkness at the end of the corridor. A flash of yellow eyes.
“I got something,” Reaper said. “In the shadows—on my three.”
“Ten degrees cross fire on either side,” Sarge said softly. “Sweep through the shadow.”
“I’ll take the left side.”
“I’ve got the right.”
Then they turned and opened up, Sarge firing thud-thud-thud-thud with his big autorifle, Reaper thundering with his light machine gun, the weapon jumping in his hands till his fingers ached from keeping it leveled.
Sarge yelled into the comm: “We’re in pursuit! Everyone meet at the air lock!”
Reaper’s machine gun hit it: the thing shrieked and rushed into view for a moment, chewed by bullets, spewing black blood before it stampeded howling down a side corridor.
Reaper and Sarge, grateful for something definite to shoot at, sprinted after it.
“So like which one of you’s the oldest?” Duke called to Sam, casting about for sane conversation as he returned with the bone saw.
“Me,” Sam replied, not looking up from her work. “By two minutes.”
He was coming down the corridor toward the nanowall—she’d directed it to remain open for him, knowing he hated pushing his body through its glutinous-metal mass, and he could see her in the infirmary, looking at the creature on the table through an instrument he’d never seen before.
“You two are…twins? Shit. Nonidentical, right? Because that would be weird.”
“What would be weird?” she asked innocently. Pretending she didn’t know he meant having sex with Reaper’s identical twin would be too much like having sex with Reaper.
“Nothing,” Duke said, clearing his throat as he hesitated outside the door. Was this nanowall going to close on him as he was going through it?