by Jack Hamlyn
I fully believed that last part.
Wasn’t it ironic? PHOBIC, the new psychic supermen of a ravaged world were laid low by the lack or iron and in the process contracted this weird disease that made them into anemic, drooling, deranged vampires? If that wasn’t poetic justice, I didn’t know what was. Not that it helped me any. They were powerful; I was weak in comparison. They ran blood farms and I was imprisoned in one.
I was thinking about those bodies I saw strung up in the armory outside White Plains. And Spider knew it, too.
“That was not the doing of PHOBIC,” he said, “and neither was the unfortunate creature sucking your blood in the Bronx…whom, I believe, you then killed.”
He claimed that although there were forty to fifty active PHOBICs (or Bloodlords), there had once been nearly twice that many. All of them were transfused with X-Plasma which caused the outbreak of Porphyria in their systems. Many killed themselves, but most went stark raving mad. Even their rewired brains couldn’t save them from the dementia.
“There are still many of them out there, mostly in New York City,” he admitted. “Wild, inhuman things stalking their victims.”
I didn’t think he had much right to judge his own kind: they were all inhuman to me. Normal humans didn’t want to enslave the world because of their enhanced psychic powers and they sure as didn’t put people in blood farms to be drained by elitist monsters. Still…remembering that vampire woman in the Bronx, I could picture them out there: things that avoided sunlight, sleeping under rubbish piles in alleys, hiding from the daylight in cellars, sewers, and subway tunnels, deranged lunatics driven by bloodlust. It was scary.
“So why am I here? What do the Bloodlords want with me, besides the obvious?”
I saw he didn’t care for the Bloodlord tag. I got the feeling he and his associates were labeled that by ARM and it was used in a derogatory sense.
He ignored my question. “You want to know about Robin, Robin Arduccio,” he said. “You’re wondering if she’s still alive. If she went into the cages as you did.”
“Did she?”
“Yes. She’s here. She’s with us. She’s been unmolested as yet, untouched. She can remain so if you cooperate or she can be broken. She can be tapped, as they say or given to the zombies. Or I can strip her mind away and leave her shivering in the darkness as a frightened congenital idiot.”
“Don’t hurt her. She’s been through a lot.”
“Cooperate.”
“How about you let the two of us go. We’re no threat to you,” I tried, knowing it was hopeless. “We can’t possibly harm you.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To run free and wild like animals, to mount her and spill yourself inside her?”
“She’s just a kid!”
“You can have her. I’ll have her delivered to you, naked and ready for the act.”
I tried to control myself. I had survived this long through cunning, luck, and a lot of violence. But that wasn’t going to help me with this guy. He knew how to push my buttons and he was pushing them all right. I think if he could have just taken complete control of my mind, he would have. His faculties were not developed to that point, however. He could make things very bad for me, but I didn’t think he could make me do anything that I didn’t want to do.
“I like you, Steve,” he said. “I really do. Most of the idiots in ARM do what they do out of fear—fear of dying, fear of being alone, fear of the dead, fear of me…their inspiration is mostly selfish. You’re different. You believe that you’re ethical and moral, that you make your choices out of loyalty to your friends.”
“I’m more than believe it. I know it.”
He did everything he could to insult my core values, but I was impervious. Morals, ethics, and loyalty were not bad things to me. Along with love, compassion, and tolerance, they were what held a productive society together. Spider could not understand that. He had sifted through my mind, pointing out episodes like when I killed that guy to get his truck as an example of how my ethics and morals were a matter of convenience. Maybe he was right. Partly. Survival was still survival.
“We could use someone like you. There’ll be places for driven men like you. You won’t be enslaved. We’ll need you to control and direct the others, watch over them.”
I almost laughed. He wanted me to be a traitor to my own kind. Like a Jewish kapo in a concentration camp who kept the other Jews in line or a black slave driver who whipped the other slaves so they did master’s bidding. A traitor. A turncoat. The lowest of the low.
“I won’t do that.”
“You will. Eventually.”
But he was wrong on that count and to prove it, I rushed him.
I let all that animal rage inside me out, all the revulsion I had for him and what he represented which was the very core of evil. I charged at him mindlessly, just wanting to get my hands around his plump white throat. I startled him. I know that much. Maybe he couldn’t read through primitive emotion real well.
He nearly fell out of his chair when I rushed forward.
But I didn’t make it too far.
Maybe six or seven feet before that wall of heat hit me and it felt like ropes had tied my legs together. I fell down, trying to pull myself at him like a dumb, violent animal. Soon enough, my arms weren’t working…I was inching forward like a slug, screaming, crying, sweating with exertion. My body had betrayed me. He had crippled me. But in the very back of my mind, a voice kept saying: It’s a ruse, you idiot. A ruse. Nothing but a parlor trick, a mind game. He doesn’t have the power to effect you physically…it’s all in your head. Your legs and arms aren’t working because he placed the idea in your head that they aren’t working. You’re doing the rest. It’s psychosomatic…
That seemed perfectly rational.
I fought, God, how I fought. I couldn’t let that fucking bloated white slug overpower me or best me by turning my own mind against me. I forced my limbs to work, but even so the best I could do was sort of a slow barrel crawl and that’s when Spider turned up the heat, so to speak. You can call me Spider. It’s appropriate for reasons you’ll soon learn about. I heard those words he spoke echo through my head and I saw…spiders. Not one or two, but dozens, then hundreds. They converged on me in a crawling, leggy army, covering me and crawling inside my tracksuit, up the legs and sleeves, creeping down my back, nipping at my hands, sinking their fangs into my skin. Dozens and dozens of tiny legs tickled over my face, trying to force my lips apart so they could fill my mouth and force their way into my throat where they would bunch-up and gather in a writhing, skittering mass of soft, juicy bodies like an over-ripe pulpy plum. The fear they inspired was not only psychological, but physical. I fought. I squirmed. I felt their round bodies smash to sauce beneath me, but there was always more and more…I rolled and fought in a convulsing, jellied stew of spider-guts and spider-blood and spider-meat. I screamed inside my head. I screamed and kept screaming until there was nothing left but that scream which became a raft I rode into the darkness of oblivion.
THE HUNGRY DEAD
I was alone.
I woke up and I was alone.
I was outside. I could smell the foul air of the compound and see the fence in the distance. It was still sparkling with the blood of Jiggs, Frenchie, and Lester. I shouldn’t have been able to see it from that far away, but I could. It gleamed on the wire of the fence like red jewels. I was staked out. I was tied to a pole driven into the earth, my arms tied behind me. I couldn’t get away. There was no chance of escape.
I remembered the spiders.
I could tell myself a thousand times that they were not real, but I couldn’t make myself believe it. They were a forced hallucination planted in my mind, yet I could still feel them all over me and I trembled, I moaned, my stomach rolled with disgust.
You dumb fuck, you let him master you, own you, he caught you in his hands like a trembling mouse and crushed you. He ate you alive and you let him. You let him do this. You. No
one else but you.
I struggled against the ropes that held me. I was going nowhere and I knew it. Yet, I fought. I struggled and strained until my face was hot with sweat. I was raging for myself, yes, but also for Robin, because I was her only hope. Spider would do awful things to her just to punish me and that made me angry, it made me hate, it made me want to kill him.
I heard a sound.
The sound of lips smacking. It seemed to be right next to my ear. There was nothing there. Nothing at all. But I was wrong. The dead were coming for me. I saw six or seven zombies coming to feed on me. They stalked forward, deadly and relentless. And that was the true horror of those things; their numbers and the fact that you could not possibly hope to reason with them. They were like sharks. Eating machines. There was nothing else for them except feeding.
I looked at their dead, blank faces as they surged forward, raising their hands so they could tear at me with their fingers, and get their slobbering mouths on me.
They came in closer.
The woman who led them made me scream with terror.
Ricki.
My wife.
She was naked, her flesh mottled with grave mildew, her breasts like white water balloons. Her mouth was a crusty red-black hole, teeth stained pink from the flesh she had been gnawing upon.
“Ricki,” I heard my defeated voice say. “Oh…please, Ricki…help me…help me…”
She did not help me.
She grinned and black slime ran from her mouth.
She took hold of me, placing long fingers on me, nails tearing trenches in my flesh. She sank her teeth into me, pulling out shanks of meat as I screamed my mind away. While the other zombies watched, she kept biting me, chewing me up one bite at a time. She stared into my face as bits of my flesh fell from her mouth and she licked my blood off her lips.
“Very tasty,” she said. “Very tasty indeed.”
She went down on her knees before me as she had so long ago. She took me in her mouth and bit down.
I screamed with the agony of it all.
SPIDER’S WEB
Of course, it was all in my mind.
I was still in the Quonset, sprawled on the floor and Spider was still sitting behind the table, lording over me. I thought he would be smiling at my torment, but he wasn’t.
Something was disturbing him. Something was scaring him. He was confused. There was some vague threat, but he couldn’t be sure what it was. Great globules of greasy sweat rolled down his pallid face.
In the back of my mind, there was a voice—
Soon now. Very soon.
It wasn’t my voice and it certainly wasn’t anything I had thought. It wasn’t his voice either. It was coming from the darkness. It was very clear.
Closer. They’re getting closer.
Spider was trembling as he tried to pick up what was in my head. I heard it clearly. I was like a radio tuning into a signal. I had no psychic gifts, not like he did. But it was there, in my head, and it seemed to be getting louder.
They’re coming.
They’re coming to get you.
I didn’t know what it meant. If I had heard something like that in my mind the day before, I would have been terrified. Who? Who was coming? What did they want? Why were they coming? There were no answers, and oddly, as freakish as the whole thing was, I was not afraid. I actually felt calm. The voice mellowed me.
They’re coming.
They’ll destroy and disrupt all you have built.
Spider was really shaking now. His whole body was getting into the act. I could almost see waves rolling through him. He seemed to contort and jerk with them. His eyes were rolled back white in his head, his teeth clenched, lips peeled back. There were droplets of spit on his chin.
They’re coming and you can’t stop them.
I got it then. I think I got it. I was receiving, yes, but it was because it was coming from Spider. Some how, some way, he was pulling in the signal—if that’s what it was—and it was bouncing off his mind, reflecting off him and I was picking it up at full strength. He sensed danger…but he couldn’t home in on it as much as he tried. And he was trying. God, how he was trying. Veins were standing out at his temples. Saliva was running from his mouth. His eyes were rolled back white, as I said, and bulging like hard-boiled eggs with the strain of it all.
Beware.
Closer and closer.
They’re coming.
And I got something else, another signal: Mutants. Beware.
Mutants.
PRELUDE
A few hours later, a guard came to get me. Spider was gone. He’d been gone for some time. I’d watched him slink away like a whipped dog. The fear on him was so thick it was like an aroma…a sour, vile aroma. He knew fear now. Not just me. Not just the others he had tormented, but him. He was swimming in it, sinking in it, trying to breathe as it flooded his mouth and filled his throat. There was nothing more satisfying than poetic justice.
The guard came in and found me grinning.
He pointed his M-16 at me. “Fuck are you smiling about, shithead? Tonight you’ll probably be given to the zombies.”
“You and me both.”
“Fuck’s that mean?”
I smiled. “Where’s your boss?”
“He had other things to do.”
“No, he’s hiding. He’s hiding because he’s terrified,” I told him, enjoying the stunned look in his eyes. “See, while we were in here, he was playing head games with me. Tormenting me and having a good time of it. Then everything crashed and burned for him. He picked up something with his mind. He was still linked with me, so I saw it, too,” I laughed. “You’re fucked. Every last one of you is going to die.”
He brought his rifle up like he wanted to crack me with it. “I don’t have time for your shit, you asshole—”
“You better fucking make the time. Your boss is scared. I saw what he saw. They’re coming. They’re going to kill everyone. That’s why Spider’s terrified, you see. He knows they’re coming, but he doesn’t know when they’ll get here or even from what direction they’ll come.”
The guard had lowered his rifle. “You’re talking out your ass.”
“Maybe, maybe. But if I were you, when it gets dark, I’d slip through the fence and run my ass off because when they get here, it’s going to get seriously cored, my friend.”
He half-believed me. I think I was so confident of what was coming down, combined with the fact that I had shared a cozy uplink with his creepy-crawly boss, gave him pause. Maybe I was talking out my ass, but what if I wasn’t? My guard was the exact sort of person Spider had told me joined ARM because they were afraid.
He was afraid.
“What else do you know?”
I had him now. I had to work it. I couldn’t seem too anxious. “What I know I’ll take into the zombie corral with me. I’ll die knowing you assholes are dying, too.”
“Listen, you fucking idiot. I’m doing you a favor here. I should bust your head open for talking to me like this.”
“So bribe me.”
It was a terrible chance to take, but I figured it was worth it. He got pissed off right away, but it didn’t last. The fear overwhelmed him. And it was the worse possible sort of fear: the fear of the unknown. He hesitated, fighting with himself. I could almost hear his thoughts. What’re you listening to this shit for? Bust the motherfucker in the head! He ain’t in no position to barter! He’s nothing but a rat, a fucking crawling rat! Bust some caps into him!
Yes, I was nearly convinced this is what he was thinking, so I said, “I wouldn’t do that. You kill me and you’ll take my place in the corral. Spider has plans for me. I know things. He wants me alive. If you kill me, you’ll have to take all that mind-fucking in my place. You don’t want that…do you?”
Again, he hesitated.
It went completely against his grain to listen to shit from a prisoner. He badly wanted to kill me…but he was afraid of Spider. Deathly afraid. What if I was rig
ht and Spider took it out on him?
“What do you want?”
“A girl came in with me.”
“A lot of girls come in here.”
I sighed. “You know the one I’m talking about.”
“Yeah. She’s in one of the womens’ cages. Elena handles all that. I don’t deal with the women. Spider won’t let any of the men touch them. They go in the corral like the others or they get tapped.”
“Is Robin still alive?”
“Yes.”
“If you get us out of here, you can survive this,” I said. “I saw it. Spider couldn’t because his mind’s too cluttered. They’re coming. They’re coming soon.”
“Who?”
“The mutants. An army of them.”
That stopped him. The blood drained from his face. “When?”
“I don’t know, but soon.”
“You’re full of shit. Get going.”
“You’ve been warned,” I told him.
He shoved me out the door and marched me back to the cage. He was pissed off at me and at himself. I had put the fear on him. I had given him doubts. I had given him reason to sleep very lightly.
He was scared.
Then again, so was I.
SELECTED
Most of what I fed that dumbass guard was absolute bullshit. I just read his fears and built upon them. Maybe he carried a gun and maybe he had the authority, but inside he was scared white. He was terrified of dying. Some of what I told him was true: they were coming. Spider sensed it and I knew it. I had tried to beef it up and act like I knew more than I did to create fear…but the thing was, the really crazy thing was that I was beginning to believe it myself. They were coming. The mutants. Yes, closer and closer. I knew that much, but as the day wore on I could almost feel their approach like static electricity building in the air before a good electrical storm. By sundown, a strange apprehension had risen in me.