by John Shirley
Reaper grimaced and looked away again.
She moved to a table where—he hadn’t noticed it before—Portman’s head, still in its helmet, lay in a grisly lump.
He found himself watching her again—and regretted watching her when she found a swab, collected matter from the head by the simple expedient of sticking the swab through a hole in the skull, dipping it into the brain like a candymaker stirring caramel in a pot.
She leaned over the remains of Carmack’s torso, separated the lungs, revealing another strange organ where none should be.
“This is its tongue…”
A tongue inside a chest? But that long, long tongue had to start somewhere.
She held the swab up and looked at it critically—it was lathered with brain matter from Portman, looking like moldy cottage cheese. Then she held it over the tongue hidden in the Carmack imp’s chest.
The tongue suddenly churned and wriggled, spattering them both with black blood.
“Brain matter from Portman…” she said, as if thinking aloud.
Then she took the biopsy needle, squeezed some of the red-gray sludge onto a swab.
“This is from Destroyer…”
She held the sample from Destroyer’s brain over the tongue—and the tongue just lay there. It didn’t react.
She passed Portman’s brain matter over it again—and the tongue jerked in instant reaction.
Reaper stared. Worried about the Ark but fascinated despite himself.
Sam ran through her impromptu theory as she worked. “There are genetic markers for aggression, violent behavior. The marker could be a specific neurotransmitter it’s picking up on, a ganglion. It’s choosing, John. It’s choosing who it infects.”
He shrugged helplessly. “Choosing? Choosing how?”
She considered. “Latching on to numbers in the DNA code linked to…”
“Sam…”
He looked at her skeptically. She was getting fanciful. “Linked to what, Sam? To ’evil’?”
It’d been well over the ten seconds she’d asked. But he intuitively felt this could matter—if the creatures had gotten to the other side, knowing how the things decided to do what they did could help stop them.
She spoke rapid-fire. “Ten percent of the human genome is still unmapped. Some think it’s the genetic blueprint for the soul. Maybe C-24 is what destroyed the Olduvaians. It would be why some of them had to build the Ark—to escape to a new beginning. It made some superhuman. Others—monsters.”
It felt right to Reaper. He looked at the imp. “Goat was right. Said we are all angels or devils…we become one or the other.”
They looked at each other. Which are you?
Then an implication hit him. “Oh my God…”
“What?”
He started toward the door. “The people quarantined on the other side of the Ark—”
“What about them?”
Reaper hadn’t heard what’d happened to the people who’d been evacuated—but it made sense there’d be a quarantine, for a time, back home; they’d be contained in the compound where they couldn’t spread any of this genetic infection…contained where they’d also be sitting ducks.
“He’s going to kill them!” Reaper went on. “But they won’t all be infected!”
Fourteen
THREE MINUTES HAD been used up seven minutes ago.
Sarge was done waiting for Reaper and Sam. As far as Sarge was concerned, Corporal John Grimm was AWOL.
The Marines were stripping off everything they didn’t need and loading up with all the extra ammo they could carry from the crates of munitions that’d been stacked in the wormhole chamber during evacuation.
As he took off his extraneous equipment, Sarge decided he’d made a mistake: he shouldn’t have let Reaper go after his sister. Only reason he’d done it at all was he figured the girl might’ve found out something handy—something they could use against the enemy. She could’ve been a resource.
But, of course, she was either dead, by now—or she was one of the enemy. Same probably went for Reaper. Too bad. Reaper was a good soldier.
Sarge felt nothing much, as he contemplated Reaper’s probable death. Maybe Destroyer’s dying had used up the last of his caring. It’d been a long time since he’d been able to feel much. Except satisfaction in destroying the enemy.
“System on line,” said the soothing mechanical voice.
“Get ready,” Sarge said, looking at the mercurial droplet, defying gravity in the midst of the Ark chamber. He charged up the BFG with the flick of a switch. It throbbed inwardly, as if eager to discharge its bioenergy…as if it were eager to begin killing.
He looked at Duke and the Kid. “Here are your orders. Uphold the quarantine. Nothing leaves the compound. If it breathes, kill it. Pray for war!”
Trained to the marrow, Duke and the Kid cocked their weapons. And as one they intoned in turn: “Pray for war!”
Sarge shouldered the BFG, took a deep breath, and stepped into the Ark…
On the other side, the steel door into the compound was wide-open.
That’s the first thing Duke noticed when they came through the Ark—that and the waves of nausea he was experiencing.
After the door and the sickness, the next thing he, Sarge, and the Kid noticed were the bloodied bodies of UAC employees, sprawled randomly across the floor. Some familiar faces were among them.
And at just that moment, Portman’s message came through from Olduvai, Mars. Since it came over an emergency channel the central computer piped it over the public address system:
“…Portman with RRTS 6 Special Ops on Olduvai 0310 hours…”
Jumping over the dead, Sarge jogged to the wall comm. Its small screen blinked with:
RRTS ENCRYPTED
On its monitor was Portman’s grainy videocam image from the bathroom of Carmack’s lab on Olduvai. The message Portman had sent some hours ago, only just arriving:
“…we have encountered hostile activity, require immediate RRTS reinforcements…”
“No shit,” the Kid muttered.
Duke went to the control panel of the compound, at a computer terminal near the wall comm. The monitor there read out:
Quarantine Lockdown Time Remaining…
59 min…58 min…
“We’ve got 58 minutes,” Duke said, shrugging resignedly, “before the auto lockdown is lifted…”
Sarge grunted. Thought about it a moment, then said, “Reset it for another six hours.”
Portman’s transmission was repeating again, on an emergency band loop: “…Portman with RRTS 6 Special Ops on Olduvai 0310 hours…”
Visibly annoyed—here was a recording of Portman disobeying his orders—Sarge hit the control for the PA and turned Portman’s voice off.
“I can’t reset it,” Duke said, after tinkering with the computer. “It’s been disabled. Same with the topside comm link.”
Meaning, Duke thought, there was no way to get a message out for reinforcements. The reinforcements they needed after all—Portman had been right.
“They’re disabling the computers now?” the Kid said, sounding confused.
“They’re rocket scientists,” Duke said, “remember?”
“They may be rocket scientists…” Sarge said, cocking his sidearm. “…but they’re still dumb enough to try to fuck with me.”
He slung the BFG over his shoulder, and walked over to the nearest corpse. He shot it in the head.
He went to another corpse. He shot that one in the head.
Duke and the Kid grimaced—but followed suit. Over and over again, black blood fountained and bits of bone sprayed.
Sarge had broken into a weapon’s locker, armed himself with a light machine gun. Gave the Kid an assault rifle. Dangerous in close quarters, the BFG was slung over his shoulder on a strap, like a sinister scuba tank.
Then they split up into the two corridors forking off from the main Ark chamber in the compound.
Sarge took
the Kid with him, gestured for Duke to head down the right-hand corridor. Duke gave Sarge a haunted look, just before he went—he didn’t want to set off on his own, but he wasn’t about to say anything about it, and Sarge never rescinded an order.
Guns at ready, Sarge and the Kid moved carefully into the hallway. It got darker as they went, as if the lights were getting scared to stay lit the closer they got to whatever was waiting for them in the depths of the compound.
There was a peculiar sound, coming from around the corner, at the end of the hall. Hard to make out exactly what it was. A sloppy, wet sound, with cracking, gulping noises mixed in, and low snorts.
Instinctively crouching, they turned the corner, turning their gunlights toward the source of the noise.
Demonic semihuman things crouched over human bodies. Feeding.
Interrupted, the creatures looked up, snarling, blood and tissue dripping from their fanged jaws, glaring at the source of the irritating lights. As if they resented being exposed in their feasting.
There were bits of clothing still clinging to these things. Looked to Sarge like they weren’t through transforming yet: You could see they’d once been people, UAC employees from Olduvai or the compound. Their foreheads were swollen in angry red folds, like some aquatic being’s, and their eyes were sunken, barely visible, receding into the mutated opticals of the new, murderous configuration; bone ends had thrust out through the tips of their fingers, burst raw from the flesh, dripping mucus and blood; their heads were sunken into broadened shoulders, their feet had become something quite inhuman…as they growled, their tongues flickered like separate creatures with a sentience of their own.
At their stubby, disfigured feet were what were barely recognizable as human bodies, like sides of beef gone over by amphetamine-crazed butchers. Only, one of those flayed human beings was still alive. Impossible to tell, in what was left of it, if it was a man or a woman. But a set of human eyes, missing the eyelids, looked back at them in quivering, agonized madness from the wreckage of flesh.
The Kid made a soft sound of terror in his throat. But he didn’t run. That was good. Sarge was almost proud of him.
There was that stretched-out instant, when they and the creatures, blinking in the gunlights and ruminating on human flesh, regarded one another.
And then as one the demonic things emitted high-pitched screams of pure fury and rushed at Sarge and the Kid. One of them swinging an emergency ax…
Two steps back—but the Kid wasn’t going to run, not with Sarge standing there. He and Sarge opened up at the same time, assault rifle and light machine gun blazing, filling the corridor with a hail of metal-jacketed death. The Kid didn’t neglect to put a couple of rounds between those staring eyes on the floor. That light had to be shut off.
The half-humans kept coming at them, the snarling mutant in the lead raising the ax over his head, despite being ripped by the bullets, seeming to push upstream against the automatic-weapons fire, as bits of flesh and bone and droplets of blood flew from him.
The Kid was glad Sarge couldn’t hear him whimpering when he ran through his clip, the gun out of ammo.
The creatures were almost within reach…and then all but one of them fell facedown with a sickening squelch.
That one obstinate horror was still reaching for them—it was on its knees, one of its arms hanging by a shred, pouring black blood, its right arm reaching out twitchily to rake at them with its claws—Sarge had run through his clip, too, so he drew a knife and simply stuck it to the hilt in the thing’s right eye, then twisted to slash its brain up from within.
Sarge had been clear enough.
Here are your orders. Uphold the quarantine. Nothing leaves the compound. If it breathes, kill it. Pray for war!
“Pray for war,” Duke muttered now. Wishing it were war.
But this wasn’t war. War was with people. This was some other category of butchery.
The corridor Duke had taken went straight, zigged to the right, went straight again—and then dead-ended. The door at the end was open: a rectangle of night. Duke wasn’t eager to go through it.
But he made himself push ahead, probing the room with his gunlight.
The room was piled with corpses—they were literally piled up, as if someone had tried to use them as a sort of impromptu barrier, a fortress of dead human flesh.
“Christ…” Duke murmured.
Some of the bodies were trembling a little—weren’t they? Or was that an illusion caused by his hands shaking the gunlight?
He wasn’t taking any chances. They could be transforming…
He moved into the room, and started firing, putting a round into the head of each corpse. The bodies flinched as he fired into them—just flesh reacting to impact, but in the dimness his imagination made it seem they were trying to crawl away from his gun muzzle. His stomach lurched, and he almost threw up—probably would have except it had been so long since he’d eaten. He had a nutrition bar in his pocket—but the thought of eating made his stomach contort again. He kept firing, firing…blood runneled around his feet—red blood, not black…
He paused to put in a fresh clip, coughing from his own gun smoke.
There was another sound, besides his coughing. Something moving, and maybe a moan, coming from the far side of the room.
He swung his weapon around, fired in that direction, toward another heap of bodies—which was twitching ever so slightly.
“Jesus Christ, stop shooting!”
Duke knew that voice, didn’t he? “Who the hell’s in there?”
Two arms popped up from the pile of human corpses. Duke almost fired at them, out of sheer tension, but he managed to hold back. A face came after the arms. Bloodied but human. It was Pinky.
Pinky glared at him. “Don’t just stand there, you dumb son of a bitch, get me outta here!”
Fifteen
“YOU WILL NOT hesitate, and you sure as hell won’t turn back,” Reaper was telling his sister. “Research here is over.”
They were standing in the wormhole chamber, close to the tank where the silvery droplet spun and pulsed.
“When I go through the Ark,” he went on, “you count to three and come after me. I’d send you through first, but I don’t know what’s waiting over there…”
“I’m afraid we do know,” she said softly. “I just don’t know if those things are the only enemy—”
“You understand what I’m telling you, Sam? You don’t get a sudden inspiration and go back to the goddamn lab. You don’t go looking for souvenirs or clean underwear. You follow me through. One…”
“…two, three. And I go through. I think I kinda get it, John.” But Sam was smiling sadly at him—he was just trying to protect her. She looked at the Ark. “You hate going through that thing…Maybe you’re the one who’s stalling here.”
“How do you know I hate…well yeah. Everyone does. Okay, I’m going. Remember—”
“I know, I know, one-two-three.”
He turned, took a breath, and stepped into the Ark’s field of sensitivity—as always getting the eerie feeling he was stepping into the embrace of something alive and sentient.
He shuddered, feeling again that he was diving into cold water that was instantly warm water, then icy again…
The mercurial droplet leapt at his eyes, and he was falling into infinity. Living seas swirled around him in impossible colors, improbable smells.
But suddenly he was somewhere familiar…familiar tropical colors, familiar tropical smells…
He was no longer falling—there was solid ground under his feet. He was back in that rain forest where Jumper had died. Back in the steaming jungle, with all his men. Even the ones who had died there. They were alive now…or anyway they were standing up and looking at him.
Mac was there, too. Destroyer. Goat in the background. And Portman. All standing around him, staring at him—Mac had to gaze at him from waist height, because Mac’s body was carrying his own head in his hands, holding
it at the level of his navel.
“Good to see you, Corporal,” said Portman. Sneering it. He was pretty mashed up, but his body seemed to be more or less hanging together, in a raw-meat kind of way, as if the butcher had sliced him up, then strung him back together with whatever was at hand.
“Good to see you…” Reaper said vaguely. Though it wasn’t good to see Portman or the other dead men—not like this. Walking, talking ruins.
Reaper shook his head. Where am I? Wasn’t I going through the Ark? Where’s Sam?
“We got some memories, huh?” said Mac’s detached head, chuckling. How was it talking without a voice box? “Remember that time we all went on furlough together—the whole bunch of us drunk in the same whorehouse, shouting at each other through the wall. ‘How’s yours?’ ‘She’s great—but small!’ ‘Hey yo, mine’s big enough to kick my ass!’”
Reaper dutifully chuckled at that. “Yeah. We had some times…” His lips felt rubbery.
“We did,” Duke said.
Duke was quite intact. Wasn’t dead yet. So why was he here with the dead guys? For that matter, Reaper wondered, why am I here?
“Don’t know,” Duke went on, “if we’ll have any more good times, way things have been going, Corporal…”
“Yeah well…talk to…to Sarge…”
It was hard to think, hard to talk here. This was all wrong.
“Talk to Sarge?” the Kid shook his head. “I don’t know about that. I just hope I live to see twenty-one, man. That’s all. Just get to twenty-one…”
“Remember…remember,” Portman said, “you guys were going to a ball game. Didn’t want to take me along…But then you said, Hey, come on, Portman. I remember that. You’re not so bad, Corporal…”
“Thanks, I uh…why…why are we…”
“But then again, pretty soon Duke and the Kid here are going to be looking for their head like Mac or their arms like me…And that’s all about you fucking up, isn’t it…Corporal?”
“I’m doing the best I can. Trying to get somewhere now…I’m trying to get to the compound…to get Sarge’s six…”