“You’re an idiot.”
“Goddamnit, Plissken. Just tell me then.”
“You, you jabbering monkey hump, are the end of infection.”
“....Oh Yeah?”
Neat.
Those hyper-intelligent ancient monsters are tricky bastards, huh? I’m a living kill switch.
Or are you a living Catch-22?
Shit.
Rugrat’s not crying. She’s too quiet.
I rush over to her.
Holy shit. She okay? She dead? Dying? What do I do?
Dude, relax.
Rugrat smiles up at me. Grabs at my nose. Coos.
All this from a little human poop machine not even a few hours old. I cradle her. Pull her to my chest. Brush the random wisps of hair on her head back.
I look to Plissken. Say, “I assume this is thanks to the blood.”
He dips his forecurve. “Yes. One can only hope she does not pick up your mannerisms as well.” Then he leaves the scene. Plugs into the tank.
I say to the baby poop machine: “Guess we’re kin now, Rugrat.”
She smiles again. A toothless, gummy grin.
Like she understands.
Sneaky goddamn babies.
I look around. Yeah, the tank’s cramped, but it ain’t that bad. There’s enough room to crouch-walk or crawl around. Plenty more to sleep. Layout of the tank is a bit like a donut. Two seats in front for the driver and gunner. Supplies and munitions in back with the mine layer. Spots for machine gunners on either side. The center has a cubby where the guy in charge would be, maybe with someone running comms. It’s got radar and optics.
I carry Rugrat to the back. Free some bedding from the supplies cache. Make her a little nest where she’ll be more comfortable.
I rummage for food. We got water and powdered milk. Not bad. But no bottles. So that’s fucko. I yell a list to Plissken. “We still need formula. And bottles. And diapers.”
The thought of changing a diaper repulses me.
Zombie innards, all right. Cleaving human and monster limbs off, fine. Even the idea of being molested by some unknown female assailant ain’t too bad.
But the diaper thing. No.
Plissken says, “Where are we going first. To the women or to the store for the baby?”
Rugrat plays with the edges of her bedding. Pushes em a little away from herself so she’s got more air. She’s just doing it herself. Not asking me too with howls and cries.
I go for my Colt Automatic, not the revolver. Release the mag. Flick out a .45-caliber cartridge. Hand it to her.
Rugrat grabs it. Squeezes it between her pudgy fingers. Laughs.
“Yep. Bullets used to keep dad company.” I say, “Just wait till I rub your gums with whiskey, Rugrat, we’re gonna get along just fine.” I tell Plissken: “My blood is awesome. Baby stuff first. Then the women.”
“Baby stuff will have to wait.”
“Can’t find a store? What’s happening?”
“I cordially invite you to check the video feeds from the commander’s position.”
I scramble into the cubby. There’s a million buttons and little holographic screens in here. Plus the control for the remote gun on top. “The fuck am I looking for here, Plissken?”
Plissken does it for me. The holoscreens merge into one big fucker that wraps around the front of the cubby I’m looking at like a movie theater screen.
I say, “Thanks.”
“Now watch.”
I do. A gentle “fuck my ass” escapes my lips.
I wonder if the psycho raiders knew what they were living in.
Newark. The whole goddamn city.
It’s an organism.
There’s a tower in downtown. What Plissken’s focused on. No idea what it’s called cuz I don’t know shit about Newark. It’s forty stories or so high. Dark brown and beige. Whole thing wobbles.
The windows shatter. A billion points of light in the sky.
Pulsing skin takes the glass’s place. Red flesh that balloons out the windows. Some gigantic lung that needs all the space to breathe. The roof crumbles away. An awful flower of ichor sprouts. Mottled red stem with pus-colored petals.
It rubs itself against another tower. Sorta humping it.
Which is a fetish I hope I didn’t just invent.
Another building starts to go. The windows explode. Tentacles the size of trees whip out. That same kinda red flesh pours out the top of the building. A blob of parasitic ooze. It hardens. Turns into a shell.
A lotta the buildings do this.
I say, “This is bad.”
Plissken says, “Yes. It is all of the bads.”
“We got nukes on this tank?”
“No. And given the way nuclear fallout has been changing the fauna here outside the NYC-Zone, I doubt you would really want to add to that. Our heaviest weapon is the plasma cannon. In fact, I have a feeling that the plasma blast is what woke the city up.”
“What? Like a defense mechanism?”
Plissken’s quiet for a second. Then he says, “Sure.”
I look around for a good target. Move the remote controls in the commander cubbyhole. The Rutgers building is pretty close. I tap the screen. The computer follows the movement of my fingers. It zooms in on the windows.
I pan down to the first floor. Wanna see if this is something coming from underground or if it’s in the structures already.
And there it is.
The blob.
It streams up from underground. Into the building lobby. An infectious superfluid. A megaparasite. One that seems able to take over inanimate matter and make it crazy. Or if it not take it over, absorb it.
The commander screen has options the right side. Glowly little death-making things. A heads-up display from a video game. I tap the PLASMA icon with my right hand. Move the targeting reticle with my left so it’s over the Rutgers school.
The blob there hits the roof. Shoots up into the air. Falls back on itself. It starts to ball up. Congeal. Take shape.
A skull the size of a house. A face.
It gives itself a mouth. Two eyes.
Two room-sized eyes that stare right at me.
Hair that’s a mass of tentacles sprouts.
The eyes get lighter. More human.
I hear her voice in my head.
I hear her voice coming at me from the tank’s external feeds.
Hey, Poppa Bear.
I shake my head. “Nope.”
Open fire.
The tank shudders. Blue plasma death jizz rockets away. Hits the massive skull between the eyes. Those big eyeballs go cross for a second. The abomination starts to melt away. To sizzle. Pop.
The skull screams. Bursts. All those juices boil over. Chunks of bone the size of cars fly apart. They collide with offices and apartments and destroy what’s left of em. The jaw falls last. Straight down. Makes a hell of a crater in the street.
I need a drink.
An enormous drink.
And a cigarette.
I reach for my pack. It’s just outside the command cubby.
I lose my footing when the tank bucks again. Crash down against the deck. I glance over toward Rugrat. Try to visually confirm she’s all right. That nothing plopped down on her.
She’s fine.
I wonder if I did something stupid. Like fire off a load of ordnance. “Plissken. Status?” I leave my pack alone. Settle for just a cigarette until I know I haven’t blown up half of Newark by accident.
Actually, it’s not the blowing-up-Newark that bothers me.
It’s the accident part.
Plissken says, “The city of Newark appears to be leaving.”
I light my smoke with my Zippo. Slip back into the cubby. Stare at the feeds coming in o
n the holoscreens.
And...
Newark definitely appears to be fucking off.
Well, several square blocks of it anyway. Most of the city center’s gone weird. The buildings all ooze and drip and pulse. Tentacles sprout. Each sends a tremor through the ground that shakes the shit outta the tank.
Newark pulls itself from the ground.
Six large limbs push and tear to get the bulk of it free.
We’re in the middle of an earthquake.
On a bridge.
No bueno.
I say, “Plissken, we gotta go.”
What about the women?
I got bigger problems right now.
Plissken guns it. We take off. The tank chews up asphalt.
A fresh tentacle explodes from the ground near the bridge. For a moment, it looks like the world’s tallest and most repulsive spire.
It curls. Comes down. Down.
I shout. “Plissken, get us off this goddamn bridge right now and evade the tentacle.”
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” He dodges some big cargo containers. Most of em. Runs over some of the tribal Men’s Wearhouse bodies we left on the bridge.
I go back to the targeting screen. Aim for the thickest part of the tentacle near its emergence hole. Might be able to chop it off at the source. That part ain’t moving as much as the rest.
I tap the RAIL icon. Listen as the barrels rotate above me.
Fire.
The lance of metal punches into the thick meat of it. Tears a trough that sprays gore like a dam breaking. A nasty torrent of liquid flows into the Passaic. Makes the whole river kick up a few feet and turn red.
Awesome.
But the tentacle’s not stopping.
I switch to the 260mm cannon. Pound away. Tank’s got an autoloader, so I get a pretty steady whump whump whump going.
The rounds impact. I don’t know what’s in em, but the effect’s pretty fuckin good. Imagine an axe hitting a tree. Splinters flying everywhere. Except here, it’s monster flesh.
Doesn’t take long to chop chop chop it down.
We clear the bridge. Plissken makes a hard right to keep us on 280.
The base of the tentacle snaps. Its stump gushes. Teeters. Falls.
I climb out the cubby. Pick up the bundle of blankets that is Rugrat and her cooing face. I grab the handle for the hatch above that gets us on top of the tank. Throw it open.
I wanna see it myself. Kinda want Rugrat to see too.
We’re going about forty-five miles an hour. Not bad for a tank kitted out like this. All that weight with the three barrels.
The wind whips at Rugrat’s blankets.
I finish my smoke. Flick the butt out into the air.
I point with my finger so Rugrat can follow it. Say, “Look at that big thing. That’s a monster tentacle.” Her eyes track it. “I just killed that with a tank and a lotta ammunition. What we call ‘peace through superior firepower.’” I tickle her tummy.
She laughs and that laugh...feels really... Nice?
It’s fuckin weird.
Fuck nice.
The detached tentacle slams to the ground. Sounds like a bomb. Far as physics is concerned, it might as well be a damn bomb. A couple thousand tons of angry infected flesh hammering the ground.
We’re the better part of a mile away. We still feel it in the tank.
Newark ain’t done moving yet, though.
The city howls. A deep, awful sound. One that makes Rugrat stop laughing. Makes her face scrunch up. I’m afraid she’s gonna go back to bawling nonstop. She doesn’t. She listens. Afraid, sure.
But so’m I.
Newark uses its gigantic tentacles like crowbars. Wrenches itself free. A mile-wide nightmare that stands half a mile tall. Bottom of it’s shaped like a cone. All this dirt and concrete and infrastructure stuck to whatever infected mass waits at the center. The top is a mishmash of buildings that’ve sprouted flesh flowers and tendrils and yawning skulls made from blobs.
A mile wide. And a mile away.
I watch the edges. There’s stuff falling off. But the dots don’t look like dirt. Not quite.
I get a bad feeling about what they are.
Little people, huh?
The tank slows. Stops. Plissken appears beside us. Musta used some maintenance hatch I can’t see and is probably only for VIPs—Very Important Plisskens.
He says, “People. Hundreds of people leaping from the city.”
Were the women even lucky enough to commit suicide?
I say, “At least we can’t hear em.”
Newark howls again. It walks. A monster god loosed upon the planet.
Aren’t all gods monsters in a way, though?
I say, “Where’s it going?”
“West,” Plissken says. “So I am assuming—”
“Get us rolling again. Toward Boston. Make sure we stop at a supermarket on the way.”
The bot dips around. Back inside the tank.
I light another cigarette. Just one more before I seal up the tank and crash for a few hours.
Rugrat scrunches her face against the smell of the stogie.
I cock an eyebrow at her. “Really?”
She sneezes. Makes a face so cute I kinda wanna squeeze her till she poops.
Who the fuck are you now? Big Daddy?
“All right, baby-thing.” I toss the cigarette. “You win this time.” We crawl back inside the tank and lock the hatches. “Big Daddy’s got you.”
I tear some of the bedding into strips. Wrap the mess around Rugrat in a pretty good imitation of a diaper.
The tank rolls to a stop on an elevated section of 280.
Height gives us an advantage. Seems like it’s as safe as it’s gonna get for now.
Early evening and I could use some shuteye.
I pour myself a few fingers of whiskey. Shed my guns. My carbon mesh skin. I lie down on some blankets next to Rugrat.
Old Looney Tunes cartoons play on a holoscreen near us.
I tell the baby: “Pay attention to these. They’re important historical documents.”
She doesn’t disagree.
13. Well, That’s a Thing That Happened
I dream about her.
Momma Bear.
Knew I would.
Impossible to hear her voice in Newark and not.
Thing I wonder is: Did I really hear her?
Look, I’m nuts. We all know that. But there’s a larger physiological, biological, psychological issue at hand here. We’ve seen what the infection is capable of. And I carry the same parasite in my veins. I’m just happily immune cuz of my bloodline.
And I’m not the only one.
I guess Rugrat’s one of mine now. Whoever her parents were
No... Whoever her mother was and whoever raped her mother...
I don’t feel like getting into all that.
It confuses me and I punch a bulkhead. Bust my knuckles.
Rugrat’s on my team now.
Genetically.
Maybe not biologically. Definitely genetically.
My blood takes over.
My DNA.
Plissken inoculated her by infecting her.
With me.
It’s gonna make for a weird sex talk later on.
But Momma Bear’s voice.
If the parasite’s effectively the same in my body and in the monsters’, who the fuck’s to say it wasn’t messing with me, like, telepathically? I know it wasn’t her her. I burned Momma Bear’s body on the roof of the Empire State Building. But could the parasite have been imitating her?
Mmm. Wait, no, it’s not telepathy. Quantum entanglement. Where paired particles affect each other at the same time. Spooky action at a dista
nce. Einstein. That’s more SCIENCEy.Right?
Right.
I talk to Momma Bear about this in the dream. We’re standing in our old kitchen bullshitting. She’s got a weird concerned look on her face.
Her dead and sane and me alive and insane.
Momma Bear says: You don’t really believe any of that for a second.
I say: I dunno. It’s possible. We got an infection that can make a whole city come alive and get up and walk away.
Well, you did used to say that in the quantum, all things are possible.
Yeah, but I also have a habit of ripping off people a lot smarter than me.
Okay, but that would mean this is a quantum parasite?
Nah, it’s more... Shit. That’s not bad, actually. Or a parasite with the ability to roll the quantum dice a certain way.
But that’s cheating.
Oh, it’s totally cheating.
But it’s possible. Maybe it makes the unlikely more likely?
Now you’re talking about some Infinite Improbability Drive shit.
Well, we both loved Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
True fact. But I don’t buy it. Cheating biology? Sure. Cheating mathematical laws? Hard to swallow. Especially when you consider how wacky the quantum is. I say “wacky” as a guy who’s come to terms with being related to ancient monsters.
She says: Don’t expect any answers.
I don’t.
But I enjoy the next part of the dream. Me playing Go Go Godzilla all over New York with a giant Wile E. Coyote and an enormous hyper-intelligent tit.
Wile E. stomps the shit outta a bunch of slow, fat Roadrunners.
The hyper-intelligent tit sprays acidic milk on everyone else. Melts buildings.
It’s general chaos.
What I do is pick up the screaming shapes of my old bosses and shoving them into my buttcrack. Then clench my ass so hard they’re crushed.
Why I’m doing this, I have no idea.
A whole bunch of tanks show up on the scene. Little things.
I grab a handful of squished-boss outta my ass and throw the broken bodies at em. The bodies land, squish some more, and break against the tanks.
The tanks open fire. On me.
And it hurts.
Like, really hurts.
And I can’t fuckin figure out why.
A Man and His Robot Page 10