Chrysalis Young

by Zanetti, John

  “I guess they’ve got new resources too.”

  From the roof they could see quite a way further out into the city. None of the vehicles they could see were moving. Instead, a tidal wave of zombies flowed towards them from every direction. Up until a short time ago there had been sirens constantly sounding in the surrounding streets. Now these too had fallen silent. Instead, they could hear helicopters. Moments later, out of the night, came two police helicopters and five military helicopters. Amanda started waving madly. “The cavalry has arrived,” she screamed excitedly at Chrysalis.

  The military helicopters disgorged soldiers on ropes, dropping down to the roof and to other lower roofs in the convention complex. The soldiers never made it to the roofs. On the way down they turned to zombies and fell off the ropes, smashing to the ground. Bits of them got up and joined the other zombies. All of the helicopters began to swing wildly out of control and dropped out of the sky, crashing into parts of the Horsey Centre and the car park.

  “Oh, crap,” Amanda said.

  But then things got worse. Amanda Two had got herself trapped up against the outer parapet wall of the roof. The only place left for her to go was up a short ladder onto a small metal deck that reached out over the car park below. She climbed up onto the deck and hacked desperately at the zombies, until she was forced back to the far metal railing of the little deck. She looked across to Amanda. Their eyes met. With a shock Amanda realised that she was looking at a real person. A real version of her. She had only ever deployed them in battle and hadn’t had the time to give much thought to what they really were.

  “Goodbye,” Amanda Two said, holding Amanda’s eyes. “Good luck.”

  Amanda hadn’t even known they could talk. “I’m so sorry,” she cried. Before she could say anything more, Amanda Two released a mini bomb and the metal deck, and the zombies on it, disintegrated. That was the thing about the bombs. It paid to have something really solid underneath you. The ground was best. Next best was lots of concrete. After that it became increasingly problematic.

  Amanda Two knew that. She dropped silently into the void. In a frenzy Amanda slashed her way over to the parapet and looked over. Amanda Two was nowhere to be seen.

  Chrysalis had been following this. “The resource recalled the A2 after it died, leaving you free to deploy another one.”

  Amanda felt sick. She didn’t have the heart to release another one, and anyway it was becoming frighteningly clear that it didn’t make any difference. Minutes later, she lost Amanda Three.

  Then it all fell completely apart.

  Some of the zombies began to look familiar.

  Chrysalis was also looking at the zombies, uncertainty on her face. “This is not so good,” she said.

  One of the zombies was Tracy Buckingham who had been turned again, and following her was Sarah. The rest of the top 20 were shambling along behind, accompanied by Roman Harding.

  And Sarah’s family.

  It stopped Amanda and Chrysalis in their tracks.

  “This is crap,” Amanda said. “They’re going to get caught in the crossfire. If we don’t think of something fast, it’s game over.”

  “Perhaps we could assign priorities,” Chrysalis said. “I kill those aliens first and then those people would be safe.”

  “Not anymore. They’re instantly turning them back again.”

  “We must try this. We don’t have any other choice,” Chrysalis insisted.

  Amanda liked this idea less and less. These weren’t strangers. She knew these people. Choose who lives and who dies? “Humans sort of don’t do things this way,” she said.

  “We would,” Chrysalis said.

  “Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me,” Amanda said.

  “When you’ve got a better plan, be sure to let me know,” Chrysalis said.

  Amanda had nothing to offer. Knowing it was futile, she said anyway, “Sarah’s first, as long as my family is okay because they are the number one top priority. Then Sarah’s family.”

  It sort of worked because Sarah and her family were flipping so rapidly back and forth between zombies and the ‘bewildered’ that they were lost in a no man’s land and stood staring vacantly.

  Dividing their attention like this didn’t help fight the pack of zombies. It wasn’t long before the zombies were backing Chrysalis, Amanda, and her family, up against the parapet edge of the roof, leaving Sarah and her family stranded amongst the seething mass of bodies. If that wasn’t enough, two zombies now turned to attack Sarah—Tracy Buckingham and Roman Harding.

  Amanda went to help Sarah, a sickening decision in front of her. “I’m sorry,” she screamed at Tracy Buckingham, and sliced her and Roman Harding to pieces. She staggered back, trying not to vomit. However, Sarah still wasn’t safe. Amanda turned back to her father and yelled at him, “Get Sarah and her family behind Chrysalis.”

  Before he had time to react, Joanna waded into the pack of zombies with her crowbar, towards Sarah. Amanda’s father joined her. They dragged Sarah and her family back to the parapet. Now they were in a semicircle; Amanda and Chrysalis, her father and Joanna, facing the zombies with Beatrice and Sarah and her family backed up against the parapet. Below, zombies were climbing up on one another, clawing their way up the face of the building towards the parapet.

  There was nowhere else to go.

  Game over.

  Except they had forgotten about Aunt Jemima. The battered City Transit commuter bus arrived at the parapet. In all her life Amanda had never been so grateful to see something as insane as the wobbling head of Aunt Jemima grinning lopsided through the window.

  The doors hissed opened. Amanda’s family got on board, dragging Sarah and her family with them.

  Amanda didn’t follow Chrysalis into the bus. She said to Chrysalis, who was bracing herself in the doorway, unable to get completely into the bus, “Make sure you catch me. Don’t let me fall.”

  Chrysalis had seen Amanda assembling a resource and nodded agreement. “I’ll catch you. I promise.”

  The bus lifted off the parapet, hovering about a metre above.

  Alone now with the zombies, Amanda let them press in. “Here’s a little present for you,” she said, as she released a bomb.

  A very big bomb.

  The energy wave exploded outwards. The bus was impervious to it but not the building. Beneath Amanda’s feet, the Horsey Convention Centre disintegrated. The circle of total destruction rolled out away from the complex, reducing nearby office buildings and tens of thousands of zombies to ash.

  Amanda began to fall.

  For a heart stopping moment, she fell into the black night, waiting for Chrysalis.

  A long dragon tail reached down and curled around her.

  -oOo-

  The bus flew into the night. Below in the darkness, a circle of ash 3 km across was all that remained of the Charles Horsey Entertainment and Convention Centre and surrounding buildings. On the bus, Amanda’s father and Joanna, and even Beatrice, helped get seat belts on Sarah and her family, who didn’t resist, still lost in a fugue, although they no longer turned to zombies, protected by the bus.

  However, it was a long way from being over yet. The final battle still lay before them. There could be only one winner.

  “The minder is very pleased with you,” Chrysalis said to Amanda. “Your bomb killed 75,000 aliens.” Their resources were still linked so the aliens died with their zombies.

  “That’s nice. Only several million to go,” Amanda said. “Where are we going? If it’s not too much to ask.”

  “The minder is taking us to the ship. It’s the only safe place left. The aliens are beginning to destroy everything out there.”

  Amanda said nothing to this. She was completely out of ideas.

  Mt Cravat, a dark bulk against the starry background, loomed up ahead. Without slowing down, they flew straight at the dark cliffs. As they hurtled at the rock wall, Sarah’s mother, who had now woken to the world around her, screamed, “We’re
going to crash! We’re going to die!”

  They flew straight through the rock wall into an empty black void. Now it was hard to tell whether the bus was moving or not.

  They drifted, or not drifted, in an utter stillness of nothing.

  “Are we dead?” Beatrice said. “Is this heaven?” She put her nose up to the window, shielding her eyes and squinting into the blackness, looking for angels.

  “What’s happening?” Amanda said to Chrysalis.

  “I’m consulting with the minder.”

  “Okay. We’ll all just hang around here while you do that.”

  After a time, Sarah’s brother, Frankie, said to Amanda, “That sure is one hot outfit.”

  Amanda flexed a bicep. “Glad you like it.”

  “No, seriously,” Frankie said. “You look good.”

  Amanda didn’t know what to say. She’d only met Frankie a couple of times after performances, and hunks like Frankie only ever gave her a passing glance. She framed a dismissive reply because he was joking, right?

  Still, nothing ventured…

  “You think so?” she said. She released her seatbelt and stood up and pirouetted for him in a full circle, making some moves with the sword. It was good the bus was unaffected by the sword.

  “We get out of this alive,” Frankie said, “maybe you’ll give me your number.”

  “Yeah,” Amanda said casually, sitting down again. “Maybe I will.”

  It was a nice thought, and maybe he even meant it.

  Chrysalis wanted her attention again. “I have presented a new plan to the minder. I’ve known from the beginning that the only truly effective resource against the aliens is the ship itself. But it needs a minimum crew of two to fly and fight. I think I can fly it because I’ve watched my mother do it and it didn’t look so hard. The minder is still undecided on that one. I also knew there was no way the minder would allow you access to the ship’s weapons. I think that’s changed. The minder is impressed with your fighting abilities. I think there is a good chance that you have proved yourself.”

  “Have you proved yourself?” Amanda asked. “Will you be able to hatch?”

  “I won’t have proved myself until all of the aliens are dead.”

  “Do you think the minder will agree with your new plan?” Amanda said. “I don’t know anything about the ship’s weapons. There is going to have to be a stunningly good help menu.”

  “I don’t know if the ship’s weapons have any instructions you would understand, and the minder has to consider the possibility that we will lose the ship. The aliens’ own spaceships will not be far away. My mother will have foreseen this and left parameters to help the minder make its decision.”

  “What parameters?”

  “My mother would not have put me in this situation if the ship itself couldn’t beat the aliens. Now the minder has to decide if you and I have the skills needed to use the ship against the aliens and win.”

  “If she thinks that we don’t,” Amanda said, “you get crushed to death, and my planet dies. Not to mention me as well probably, and my family and everyone.”

  “That about sums it up,” Chrysalis said.

  It felt like a very long wait until the minder contacted Chrysalis again, although in reality it can’t have been more than a few seconds.

  “We’re going to fight,” Chrysalis said, her voice a mixture of relief and excitement.

  Amanda wasn’t quite so joyful. Putting her in charge of an alien weapon system to fight millions of dragons had to be the dumbest idea she had ever heard. The alternative—that everyone in the world died—wasn’t much of a choice either. “Are you going to, like, put the instruction book into my mind? Because I have to tell you, I’m not a very fast reader,” she said.

  “You don’t have time to learn how to use the weapons pod or control system and you don’t have enough arms and legs anyway,” Chrysalis said.

  “Yeah, and I don’t want any more arms and legs, thank you very much,” Amanda said, remembering the big boobs episode.

  “The ship will provide an interface and translate this into using the weapons against the aliens,” Chrysalis said. “The ship will construct the interface from your memories. It wants to do that now so you need to start thinking about a suitable situation…perhaps something like a video game in which you kill aliens. The ship will construct the interface as that video game.”

  “I knew you had the wrong person. You need Tazzie. She’s the full-on gamer. I’m not so good at video games,” Amanda said. Although it was probably true that her reflexes were much faster now, after fighting the zombies, and this gave her an idea. “Could the interface be, like, me fighting the zombies?”

  “That’s a great idea!” Chrysalis said. “Start thinking of the convention centre.”

  Moments later, Amanda found herself surrounded by the main auditorium in the Horsey Centre. It was empty. She was in costume, the sword already in her hand. She got rid of the mask. “Okay. What happens now?”

  “I’m about to lift the ship off the surface,” Chrysalis said, as though she didn’t even believe it herself.

  Amanda braced herself against the nearest auditorium seat. And then noticed how solid it was. She wasn’t given time to dwell on this. The entire auditorium tilted on an angle, vibrated lots, and then tilted crazily the opposite way. Amanda struggled to stay on her feet, wishing now that she did have some extra hands.

  “We’re flying!” Chrysalis said.

  The auditorium bucked mightily, determined, it seemed, to deposit Amanda in an untidy heap on the floor. “You’re doing great,” Amanda said. “You were born for this.”

  “Yes,” Chrysalis agreed happily.

  Now that the ship was exposed, it wasn’t long before the aliens attacked. The auditorium filled with zombies. They all turned towards her. There were no ‘bewildered.’ Freed of that concern, Amanda immediately released a bomb.

  Nothing much happened. She tried again. Zero.

  “Chrysalis. The bombs aren’t working,” Amanda said.

  “Busy. Please call back later,” Chrysalis said.

  “The bombs aren’t working!” Amanda yelled.

  “No need to shout,” Chrysalis said. She checked with the minder. “Your bombs only killed aliens when our resources were linked because they were not designed to kill aliens directly. They were only designed to kill zombies. Our resources aren’t linked anymore because the link only worked when I was killing aliens too. You can’t use my resources directly because they’re not designed for humans.”

  “Yeah, okay, but the bombs should still kill zombies.”

  “These aren’t zombies. These are aliens. The interface is translating them as zombies because that’s what’s in your memory,” Chrysalis said.

  “Oh, that’s truly wonderful,” Amanda said, not really getting it at all, because she was preoccupied with staying alive just right now. She ran along the top of a row of seats, decapitating a long line of zombies. What she did get, was that she no longer had bombs for whatever reason. She released two clones and went to work. As she had expected, the clones weren’t all that effective in the confined space and she could only occasionally spare the time to redirect their activities and so she quickly lost them. This time, she didn’t hesitate and released more. She had to make up for the lack of bombs somehow.

  She killed zombies throughout the Horsey Centre and it certainly made it a lot simpler without the ‘bewildered,’ although she sorely missed the bombs. For every zombie she killed, two more sprung up in their place and she quickly realised she was getting nowhere and, anyway, they had already decided this was no way to kill millions of aliens. She hacked at the zombies, increasingly uncertain about whether this was even going to work. Maybe it was the uncertainty that distracted her, or there were just simply too many of them. She found herself on the floor pinned down by two zombies. Others crowded in.

  Hooked talons viciously raked down her body, leaving long red furrows and shredding her co
stume.

  It hurt. Lots. Amanda cried out.

  Worse was to come. The zombies’ heads metamorphosed to long heavy jaws with fangs, and cold eyes, and a dragon head.

  The zombies around her all became winged dragons.

  The dragons pinning her down drew back, their jaws opening as they readied to strike and tear her to pieces.

  She was about to die.

  Swamped with panic, she tried the only thing she had left. She called the sword to her other hand.

  She had never used the sword with her left hand because, being right-handed, it didn’t work for her and she’d never had the time to practice with it because it had all been on-the-job training. Maybe the dragons knew this. Maybe not. Her left hand was not so tightly pinned down, although there was still hardly any movement in it.

  But there was enough. She swivelled the sword, clumsy in her left hand and sliced across one of them pinning her down. The dragon roared in pain and fell back. The second dragon’s grip on her right wrist released a fraction as the dragon became distracted by its companion’s distress. Instantly she called the sword back to her right hand and cut the second dragon in two. It died, screaming.

  Springing to her feet, she faced the dragons. These were not zombies, mindlessly attacking through sheer weight of numbers. They were alive, with a cold intelligence in their eyes. They worked together and looked out for each other. Unlike the zombies, they felt pain when they were wounded. She threw fireballs at them. They caught them neatly in their mouths. Several of them opened their jaws wide revealing her fireball intact and now mixing with their own fire. Just when it seemed they were about to roast her, they all froze, as though suddenly their minds were elsewhere. Or maybe it was the other dragons tightly packed around her…or the wounded dragon…

  “Help,” she said to Chrysalis. “These are dragons, not zombies. What the freaking shit is going on?”

  “The aliens are seizing control of the fighting space. Your interface.”

  “They can do that?” Amanda said. She could sense Chrysalis mentally shrugging.

  “It sort of looks that way,” Chrysalis said slowly. She sounded uncertain. “The minder says that the aliens and us have similar technologies.” After a brief pause she said urgently. “You have to use your imagination. You have to make the fighting space your construction, not theirs.”