by John Varley
"Rescue a kid and what does it get you?" Conal asked himself. He glanced at Adam. There was spit dripping down his chin. "You get to be a babysitter, that's what."
He yawned, and settled deeper into the couch. He was in a corner room on the first floor of the main house at the Junction, one with a lot of windows and a good view of the waterfall. Nova was somewhere upstairs, doing something that had produced a strange smell for a while. Whatever it was, it had made her throw up. Before that, she had been running all over the house, acting like a spy. But there had been no sound out of her for over an hour.
"Too good to sit with her baby brother," he told Adam. The infant regarded him solemnly, and then threw a Titanide egg at him.
Actually, Conal didn't mind. He just got a lot of satisfaction out of feeling put-upon.
The kid was okay. Not a howler. Real smart, and real strong. He could probably start with the weights in another year or so, just as soon as he had his feet solidly under him. He had the bones for it. And in a way, Conal was proud that Robin had trusted him enough to leave the baby with him.
He had set the kid up in the middle of the floor with some toys he'd scrounged, and Adam seemed happy to sit there and throw them around, then crawl after them. His favorite was the rack of old Titanide eggs. They were round, about the size of a golf ball, and came in all colors. They were too big for him to put in his mouth, though that didn't prevent him from trying, and they wouldn't break. About their only drawback was a tendency to roll under furniture, so Conal had rigged a palisade of pillows all around Adam, four meters wide. He didn't manage to chunk too many that far. He stumped around in there, naked, not falling down much, and bouncing right back up when he did.
Conal watched Adam grow still, and start peeing on the floor. Conal laughed, and Adam turned awkwardly and started laughing, too.
"Ma!" Adam squeaked. "Tye-Nye! Ma!"
"Pee-pee," Conal told him, getting up. "Gotta learn that, kid. Say, 'Gotta go pee-pee.'" Adam laughed louder, nodding.
Conal got a towel out of the bathroom and mopped it up. It was a nuisance, but what could you expect? And it was better than diapers.
He sat down again and his thoughts turned, not for the first time, to Nova. Most likely she was sleeping up there. Hell of a problem, Nova. Hell of a problem. What to do about it? Where to start?
He couldn't think of a good place. At first he thought she hated all living beings equally. Lately he had come to believe he held a special place in her heart, just below rattlesnakes, pederasts, and spirochetes. Definitely a tough place to start from, but determination had always been Conal's strong point.
Unhappily, imagination was not. Nor was subtlety. Cirocco had told him he had an admirable directness, but that it took some getting used to.
So when his thoughts turned to Nova, they kept going around in the same unprofitable pattern. He knew it was ridiculous, he knew something radical had to happen before she could ever begin to see him as anything but a repulsive monster, but he kept having the same recurrent fantasy. It started with him getting out of the chair and going up the stairs. He would knock on her door.
"Come in," she would say. He would enter, smile winningly.
"Just wanted to see if you needed anything, Nova," he would say.
Then-he wasn't sure about the details of this part-he would be sitting on the bed beside her, and he would lean over to kiss her, and her lips would part ...
She screamed.
It was a dreadful, terrifying scream, torn from her throat. So deep had been his fantasy that for a confusing moment he tried to form an apology, and then his blood seemed to freeze as he understood this was real.
His feet touched the bottom stair, the ninth stair, and the top stair, and he was barreling down the hallway toward her room.
TEN
Nova came awake slowly, not knowing what had been bothering her. She lay there, waiting for the sound again, wondering why she had thought Cirocco was outside her door waiting to come in.
There it was again. A scratching sound. But they didn't scratch at doors here, they hit them with their fists. And this wasn't the door, it was the window.
She got up, yawning, padded to the window, and stuck her head out. She looked down.
What she saw was frozen in her memory for all time.
There was a thing climbing up the outside of the house. She saw its arms, which were made of bones and snakes, and the top of its head, which was covered with cracked parchment and scraps of long hair. But the true terror was in its hands. She could see the bare finger bones, pieces of rotting flesh, and mouths. Each finger ended in a little bund snake with a wide mouth and needle-teeth, and when the hand grasped the vertical wall the snakes bit into the wood with an audible crunch. The thing was coming up fast, hand over hand. She was fumbling for her gun, realizing belatedly that she had no clothes on, when the thing looked up. It had the face of a skull. Worms swarmed in the eye sockets.
Nova was not easily frightened. Even that horrific face was not enough to make her scream. But then she turned to get her gun and was face to face with the second thing, hanging from the wall beside the window, its face two feet away from her own. Above its eyebrows there was just jagged bone and a boiling mass of worms. It reached for her and she screamed.
It had her by the wrist. She pulled, still screaming, as the tiny snakes bit into her flesh. Then she tore free.
She did not remember how she got across the room. Time went very slowly, or racketed by leaving momentary gaps. She found her gun in her hand. The hand trembled, fumbling with the safety. She brought it around and up. The second thing was in the room coming right at her and she pulled the trigger and heard nothing because the blood had made the gun slip out of her hand, and the thing was still coming at her. She rolled over her bed and down into the gap between it and the wall as she heard the door splintering. The gun had to be down there somewhere. She fought an overpowering urge to take another look, heard something hit something else with a meaty sound, heard something else rattle the house as it hit the floor. She found the gun, steadied it with her good hand, and jerked her arms over the bed with the gun out in front of her.
Conal came within a tenth of a second of dying. The nerve impulse was already on the way to Nova's trigger finger when she realized he was grappling with one of the creatures and managed to jerk her hands up in time to put her first rocket-propelled bullet into the wall a foot below the ceiling.
There was no way she was going to get a safe shot at the one Conal was fighting, but the second monster was framed in the window, on its way in, so she gave it two explosive slugs, one in the head and the second in the chest, and paused one second to see what it thought about that.
The head exploded, pulverized, vanished. The chest wanted to fly apart, but the silvery snakes that threaded the thing's body somehow managed to hold it together.
And it kept coming.
You do that much longer, she thought, and I'm going to get scared.
The one on the floor had thrown Conal off. Nova put three bullets into it, with results not much better than before. The creature was thrown against the wall by the force of the explosions and its left arm was blown off at the shoulder. But it got up, one handed, and started toward Conal.
So did the arm. It pulled itself rapidly along with its fingers.
Nova swallowed the sour taste of vomit, and put her last three slugs into the one just inside the window. The headless one. It staggered back, hitting the sill, and tumbled out, backwards. She heard things scrabbling at the wall, receding, then a splash as it hit the water.
That's when the second zombie turned toward her.
Conal seemed stunned. He was getting to his feet, but he kept shaking his head. And the monster slumped toward her on a shattered leg, shedding bone splinters and pieces of jelly-like flesh and scuttling beetles and little fanged rodents as it came.
She threw the gun at it, wishing it was her mother's substantial Colt instead of the new, mo
dern, lightweight type. It opened a gash on the zombie's cheek and worms poured out
She picked up the bed and heaved that. The zombie batted it aside.
She was going down now, unable to stop herself from flinching away.
She threw a lamp, a vase, the bedside table, and still it was getting closer. Conal was coming up slowly behind it but it loomed over her now, she was crouched in the corner and it was going to get her. Her hand groped for a weapon. Anything. She found something and threw it.
And the thing collapsed just as Chris came through the door.
She saw Chris kick it as it fell, saw him attack the thing ... and then stop. He frowned, and Nova wondered what was wrong, then realized he couldn't figure out why the thing wasn't fighting back. He kicked it hard again. The zombie was starting to fall apart. The silver snakes that had held it together, that had seemed to animate it, were limp and lifeless.
Chris knelt in front of her. She couldn't see him very well. He glanced at her arm and seemed satisfied that her wounds were not life-threatening, then put big hands on her shoulders and looked at her.
"Are you going to be all right?"
She managed to nod, and he was gone. She heard him say something to Conal, something about Adam, and she heard him leave.
It seemed there was nothing in the room but the dead creature. She couldn't take her eyes off it. It was only about three feet away from her. Without conscious thought her feet began to push her away. Her back slid along the wall and her feet kept pushing until she hit something soft. That was no good, soft hadn't been what she'd had in mind at all, hard walls and hard floors were much better. She squeaked. It was a timid, frightened little squeak, and she regretted it, but there it was. She already knew she had bumped into Conal. The rough texture of his coat scratched against her shoulder, and that was okay. Anything warm was okay. The thing, when it grabbed her, had been terribly cold, and she was terribly cold now.
She sat there, shivering, as Conal put the coat over her shoulders. She heard shouting from the other rooms, sounds of fighting, and knew she should be helping them. But she sat quietly as Conal ripped his shirt and bound it around her bloody forearm and hand. While he did that she heard the pounding of Titanide hooves and what might have been war-cries.
Then he was getting up and she found herself clinging to his arm with her good hand. He stopped, waited for her to get up, and led her from the room. She never took her eyes off the thing on the floor.
It didn't make sense that the zombie was dead.
Dead? Well, hell, Chris thought. Of course, it's dead, it was dead to begin with, but that had never slowed them up in the past.
He wanted to kick the vile thing until what was left would have to be scraped off the walls, but he didn't have time for that. He didn't have time to figure out what had killed it, either. He really didn't have time to check on Nova, but he did.
Conal looked woozy. Blood ran from a scalp wound and he had a swelling the size of an egg on the side of his head.
"Where's Adam? Conal. Can you hear me?"
"... stairs," he muttered. "Downstairs. Hurry, Chris ... zombies."
Out in the hall there was another dead-or unmoving-zombie. It had come from the direction of Cirocco's room. Chris ran down the stairs, around a corner, through the music room-and into the arms of another zombie.
This one fought him. It was not as far gone as the one in Nova's room; dead no more than a week or two, by the look of her. Chris lifted the zombie and threw it, hoping to gain some time. The only way to really deal with the things was with edged weapons. It also helped to have the steady rhythm of a lumberjack chopping wood, and the strong stomach of Conan the Barbarian. Hitting them or wrestling with them was a good way to get killed. They could soak it up almost forever, and even if you dismembered them they kept fighting. But severing enough of the deathsnakes that gave the zombies an obscene semblance of life would eventually do the trick.
They were incredibly strong. If they got in close, the deathsnakes would tear at your flesh.
As the zombie hit the wall he was already searching for an axe or a blade. There didn't seem to be anything. He picked up a chair, planning to use it to fend the zombie off while he made his way to the kitchen, when he noticed something. It wasn't getting up.
The zombie-it seemed ridiculous to use the female pronoun, though it had bloated and festering breasts-had collapsed on the floor, crushing a fine old silver trombone.
Once again Chris didn't pause to wonder or to question his luck. He had never intended to fight it; the zombie had simply been in his way. He hurried through the music room, made it to the kitchen, where he grabbed his biggest cleaver, and raced through the house in time to see Robin poised in a windowsill, her legs bent and her arms out in front of her.
He shouted at her, but she dived out.
Robin almost beat Chris to the doorway of the Copper Room-then almost got jammed with him, which would have hurt, as he had enough momentum by then to not really need a door; he could have just punched through the wall. She broke step enough to let him through, went through herself, and, running as fast as she could, gawked at the spectacle of Chris Major moving at full speed. She didn't get to watch long. He might have been flying.
Great Mother, but this was one huge tree.
It seemed to take forever, but finally she slammed in the back door and hurried through room after room, calling for Chris, Nova, Conal ... anybody. She never stopped moving. Once, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of some horror shambling through an empty room, but she didn't pause. Nothing was going to stop her until she found Nova, and the source of that scream. She knew her daughter well, knew it wasn't a mouse that had made her shout like that.
But something did make her stop. She looked into a room with a lot of pillows and toys on the floor. She heard Adam crying, and saw a man-shaped creature-there was something badly wrong with it, but she couldn't see what in the brief glimpse-diving through the window with Adam in its hands.
Stopping in one-quarter gravity is something that needs practice. Robin wasn't good at it yet, and had to bang into a wall, push off with her hands, and swing around into the room with her hand on the door-jamb. She ran to the window, looked out, and saw the creature swimming away, one-armed. The other arm was holding Adam out of the water.
She kicked off her boots, stepped up into the window, and jumped.
Later, she would deny that she had forgotten she didn't know how to swim. Once before she had been dumped into water over her head. Something had happened to her, and she managed to reach the shore. She was counting on that to work again. But it didn't.
She hit with a stunning splash, and then struggled toward the light.
Her head breached the surface and she took a deep breath, then tried to swim. The harder she worked at it the worse it got. Her head kept going under and she didn't know any better than to try to keep her nose high-an ambition she kept defeating with her windmilling stroke. The current was carrying her in the same direction as her goal, but that didn't help, as the kidnapper was swimming with the current, too, and in the brief glimpses she got he was always farther away. They were swirling through swift water now, with rocks here and there, but it was always deep, always cold, and before long she knew she was going to die in this river. She was getting her head above water less often, and for shorter periods, and more often than not taking in a lot of water when she gasped for air.
Then an arm went around her neck and she was pulled up, on her back. She struggled for a moment but the arm tightened until she was nearly choking. She coughed up water, and relaxed. Chris pulled her strongly through the water toward the shore.
He got her to a rock in the middle of the stream where she could cling with her torso high and dry and not too much current tugging at her.
"Hang on!" he told her.
"Get him, Chris!" she shouted, hoarsely.
He was already away.
She pulled herself higher and lo
oked over the top of the rock. The kidnapper was maybe a hundred feet ahead of Chris, and the gap was narrowing. But the water ahead was extremely rough.
A kind of frozen lethargy settled over her. She was exhausted, had been near death, and it was all she could do to hang onto the rock and watch events unfold before her eyes. They didn't seem to have much relation to her. She was able to wonder if the thief could make it through the rapids and keep Adam alive, but unable to connect his survival or death to herself. A scream kept bubbling up in her throat, but it didn't have anywhere to go.
She heard the Titanides crossing the bridge, making a sound like an avalanche. She turned, and saw Serpent pointing toward Chris, saw Rocky leap over the railing and float down, forelegs first, then hit with a splash that sent water fifty feet high. His head came up and he was swimming strongly as Serpent and Valiha went through the front door of Tuxedo Junction, not bothering to open it.
There were sounds of something crashing through the brush, and Robin turned in time to see Cirocco pounding along the edge of the river. She passed Robin's rock, passed Chris, reached a suitable place for take-off and leaped. Her body followed an almost flat trajectory and she was forty feet from shore before she hit the water.
And she didn't sink. She had arched her back and held her arms in a swept-back position, like a jetliner, and held her chin high as she hit, and she skipped twice, like a flat stone, then body-surfed another precious five feet before the water had her. She was thirty feet behind her objective and swimming strongly.
Robin found herself balanced on her knees, her fists tight and her teeth clenched, willing Cirocco onward. Dimly she was aware of the sounds of Valiha and Serpent diving into the water somewhere behind her, but her eyes never left the woman she would always think of as the Wizard. It looked like Cirocco would tear the bastard into tiny pieces when she got to him, and there was nothing in the world Robin wanted to see more than that.
She heard shouts behind her. A wide shadow swooped over her with breathtaking speed, then all she could see was the skimpy rear profile of an angel, twenty-foot wings at full extension, the tips skimming the water.