Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth

by Stephen Graham Jones

  To this day, no one’s ever been properly downloaded.

  Evidently that same chemical or whatever the lobster huddles infect the water up there with, it’s like mind-glue for any consciousness that comes into contact with a crustacean and then stays there long enough for the eggheads to solve death.

  Mated for life, yeah?

  I don’t need to tell you.

  Anyway, this is where I get to say it: The Sea was angry, and so was I.

  Nice, yeah?

  It’s no joke, either. The trick with water on the moon, it’s that just barely lowering your ship into the water, that creates a wave, right? No big deal on Earth. On the moon it’s not either. At first.

  Those round craters, though, something about their specific curve, they magnify the ripple, pass it back and forth a few times in low-grav, so that, next time you see it, it’s a swell, kind of rocks you back and forth, makes you reach for the rail.

  They didn’t let these craters fill all the way up, though. They didn’t want the monster lobsters crawling from lake to lake. Hard to track that way.

  So, these swells, they just crash into what for them’s a wall, then come back harder, and harder, until, about eight minutes after you set down, you’re staring down a tidal wave. One with giant red antenna whipping back and forth in it.

  Your mom, she wasn’t paying me near enough.

  The captain I’d hired, Lorenga, she’d tapped into the Service’s monitors, of course, knew which lobster had the most recent rider, but we were only just figuring out what depth it was when I looked up into a wall of water balancing above us like in a Japanese painting, where the falling edge of the water’s all curled in and dripping foam.

  Lorenga felt my silence, turned around.

  Or—okay, not exactly silence. But I wasn’t screaming either. This is back when I still carried one of those dicta-wills, that you could talk into, change on the fly.

  I was willing my remains to your mom. Just so she’d have to pony up for transport, sterilization, interment.

  It would about equal my bill, I figured. And, it wouldn’t be going to me, but she’d be paying it anyway.

  I’ve tried being not petty. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

  But then, that wave already changing the temperature of the thin, manufactured air around us, Lorenga slid her two whips off, lit them with a harsh crack.

  I didn’t even have time to step back to the wheelhouse.

  She slashed forward, using them in sequence, and cut us a hole through that wave.

  The ship rose under us, but she’d cut tall enough that we barely had to duck.

  Afterwards, I was laughing.

  She looked to me just long for me to see the complete lack of humor in her eyes, just long enough for me to wonder if she had been manufactured, if she still had to charge up at night.

  And then a thick red feeler wrapped around my waist, pulled me into the water.

  Your dad’s lobster?

  It had found us.

  Because I hadn’t thought ahead to get fitted with gills—I could have billed your mom for it, even—I had to try thrashing and screaming and drowning, finally biting into that meaty feeler.

  It didn’t care even a little.

  We were diving, diving.

  Above me I was pretty sure I could see Lorenga’s twin whips, but then a snow crab ghosted in above the lobster, its spidery legs so graceful that, right before I passed out, I think I probably smiled.

  Above us, I’m sure the surface of the water was calming back down.

  I came to with my head stuffed up into an air-filled divot that had been chipped into some underhang in the crater.

  It was barely big enough for my head.

  I pushed down from it but all around me there was just water, all lit up that eerie way you get when the atmosphere’s thin and unreliable.

  I came up for air, gulped it down, got a lungful so I could look around some more.

  A giant crab was scuttling down the wall to me. It had just surfaced. There were still bubbles of air roiling off its skin.

  Working delicately with its hind legs, it delivered three of those bubbles up past my neck, into my headhole.

  The air was warm and musty, and I loved it, breathed it all the way down to my toes.

  When the crab left, I pushed down again, my hands keeping my place, and looked around.

  All along this underhang were other people. Just bodies and legs. And arms.

  This was the refrigerator. We were in storage, and not the good kind. We were what the krill had been on Earth. We were those little pieces of meat drifting down from the unfiltered sunlight. Perfect little pieces of meat.

  I gulped, held, and looked below me.

  The floor of the sea was crunchy with crustaceans. All crawling over each other, looking, from this distance, just normal-sized.

  Way in the distance was a giant, impossible disk. One of the huddles I’d heard about.

  What were they doing?

  I wanted to laugh, I guess. I needed a drink.

  I shoved my head back up into its new home, breathed deep.

  So this was it, then.

  Rock Turner flies to the moon, goes for a swim with the pretty bugs, doesn’t come back up.

  I imagined the headline: NEW SHOW ANNOUNCED! YOUR PARTICIPATION IS VITAL!

  Nothing about me, yeah.

  Like your mom was going to report me missing and dead?

  I kicked just to try to stay warm. Watched that giant snow crab move past.

  And then it came back to where it had been. Like it was running from something.

  Lorenga.

  She was underwater, had both whips going, some kind of powered flippers on her feet.

  She cut the tip of one of the crab’s legs off. The meat was flaky, white, perfect.

  I coughed, almost breathed water, had to go up for another drink of air.

  When I came back, found her, she was on the crab’s head, one of her whips severing an eyestalk, her mouth open in rage, her last few bubbles screaming up and up.

  At which point your dad entered the scene.

  The thing about using space lobsters as storage devices for people’s minds is that it wasn’t an entirely known process. Then or now. I don’t know why we ever thought it made sense.

  My suspicion—this is now, not then—it’s that the eggheads didn’t really care about putting grandpa on ice until some later date. No, what they wanted to do was infiltrate those huddles. My guess is they were all holding their scientific breath, waiting for a storage lobster to join a huddle. At which point they’d harvest the person they’d put there, wake them up, see what was what.

  Meaning maybe that mind-glue sticking people to their lobsters, it was a defense mechanism, yeah?

  That’s not my case, though.

  Pay me to care, I’ll try. Don’t pay me, and—well, you’ll see.

  As far as storage went, anyway, putting somebody almost dead into the exoskeleton of a giant crustacean, that crustacean, it didn’t really seem to mind. It was like having a barnacle or something, I guess. An itch in a place it could never quite scratch.

  Try to stuff somebody in who’s all the way alive, though, and, yeah, one of those barnacles, it’s going to be more than an itch.

  Instead of just hanging on, existing, your dad had fought to the top of his lobster, was at the reins now.

  His giant lobster—he, him—cut up through the water like, I don’t know. Like some monster born in the depths of the universe, some monster from when the stars were young, some monster that had cut across millions of light years for just this showdown.

  With his big claws, he snipped off one of the snow crab’s legs. Then another.

  The snow crab reeled back, mute, offended, and Lorenga took its other eyestalk then dropped her whips, started doing that full body shudder of somebody who’s finally got to drown.

  Your dad pinched her delicately in his claw, kicked hard for the surface, and
, even now, I would give whatever it took to have been on the shore right then. To see this giant claw burst through the water, a limp woman in its grip, a thousand dusty galaxies as backdrop.

  Using his claws as no lobster ever had, then, he climbed the crater’s wall, left Lorenga coughing on the rim of a cliff.

  And then he came back for me.

  Evidently—this is just from something one of the eggheads said, it’s not like me and your dad talked or anything—evidently your mom’s scent had still been on me. When I’d dipped into the water, it had shot all through the sea, had woke your dad up from his long sleep.

  And he woke up mad, let me tell you.

  He knew who’d put him there.

  Not ten minutes later, he nipped my foot with his claw, pulled me down from my headshaped hole.

  Instead of saving me like he had Lorenga, though, he pulled me into his maw of a mouth, swallowed me whole.

  If you’ve never been inside a giant space lobster, well. I don’t recommend it.

  He climbed the crater wall again, stepped around Lorenga—I’ve never seen Lorenga again—perched on the cliff’s edge. Then he used what he’d found in the lobster’s backbrain: potential. Old programming.

  From the side, I’m guessing his giant lobster body must have looked like a dragonfly. At least when those massive, delicate wings unfolded from his shell, flapped to get dry.

  We lifted up, up, batting hard against the thin air—inside the stomach was dry, which made no sense to me—and then made history.

  Instead of taking a transport or a tube back to Earth, your dad flew us there under his own power.

  My eardrums burst from the pressure and I clawed at my ankles deep enough to bleed, but I was awake the whole time. And screaming.

  That’s not where this scar comes from, though.

  That’d be your mom’s handiwork.

  After we cut through Earth’s puny defenses—they were all for ships and transports, not for flying lobsters with laser eyes and killer claws—we burned through the atmosphere, your father’s wings turning to ash with us five miles up.

  We made a crater when we landed, and this crater, I crawled up from it all by myself, had no clue that, on the moon, the krill had risen to witness your dad lighting off for the territories.

  Right about the time we were crashing down, the monster crabs and lobsters and shrimp were piling onto their huddled brothers and sisters.

  Until then, we thought the way they’d locked arms, one behind the next, it didn’t matter much.

  They were a disc, though.

  The krill drifted into place below them, started glowing with power. They were the engine, apparently. The battery.

  As one, twelve discs broke the surface of the lunar seas, their backs thick with giant space lobsters, with delicate interstellar crabs, and then they turned away from Earth. Never to come back.

  People wept, reached to the sky for these creatures they’d never known to worship. The usual story.

  Like I cared.

  There were endorsement deals, talk shows, new digs for a while. My name was even on a toothbrush.

  Everything dies, though.

  Except me.

  Evidently, the unregulated pressures inside a mentally-hijacked space lobster’s stomach, especially when that space lobster’s taking on its interstellar dragonfly form, they’re unique and transformative, to say the least.

  And then there was the chemical wash part of that ride, and the exposure to cosmic rays, and whatever else nobody’s been able to replicate, especially since all our gods have abandoned us.

  What did it all add up to?

  I had died in transit. I was still dead. All my measurable life processes were flatlined, but it didn’t matter. I walked up out of that crater on my own, smiled for the cameras, winked at this one cute little number in the front now.

  And, when that parade was all over months later, I went to see the queen.

  Your mom.

  “You,” she said, standing in the doorway, her voice sharp enough to draw blood.

  I handed her my bill.

  She laughed, wouldn’t take it.

  “I don’t traffic with the dead,” she said.

  “People pay for this bite,” I told her, snapping my teeth to show.

  “And does it work?” she said.

  I found somewhere else to look.

  We figured out how to live forever, sure. Just be dead, but walking around.

  Now that there are no more space lobsters left to hitch rides in, though—well. I’ll be at your funeral. I’ll be at all your funerals.

  “You were supposed to bring him back alive, anyway,” she said, her hand to the door like she had no time for this.

  “Bring him back so you could kill him again?” I asked.

  My skin by then was pretty decayed, I guess, so it was hard to get a good smirk going. But I tried.

  It made your mom’s hand reach up to her own face. For the wrinkles she’d pancaked over.

  They’re showing even more now, aren’t they?

  Good.

  “You can’t prove I put him up there,” she said, smoking a cigarette she’d lit herself. The atmosphere somehow not turning to fire.

  She passed the cigarette to me and I breathed deep, couldn’t even begin to feel it charring my lungs.

  “That he came back is proof,” I said, blowing smoke. “If Earth’s gravity hadn’t found him again, he’d have snipped you in half.”

  “You don’t like me very much, do you?” she said.

  “You sent me to the moon to die,” I told her, just like I’d rehearsed on the drive over. “Just to tell the house detectives you’d given it an honest effort. You’d even have a receipt to enter into evidence.”

  “I don’t need a receipt anymore.”

  “I could tell them what you did.”

  “You’d trade your version of fame in for that? You’d just be a passenger then. A victim. It would be my husband’s revenge that made you like you are. Not your own . . . what did you call it?”

  “They were putting words in my mouth.”

  “We needed a hero.”

  “Needed,” I said.

  “Very past tense,” she agreed, and then I felt that tap on my shoulder I always feel about this time in a case.

  This time it was a pair of giant, vatgrown butlers.

  The one on the left came at me with a hot katana.

  It flashed out of nowhere, split me from my cheek, here, down to my armpit—is the feed picking this up?

  Here, I’ll lean in.

  Yeah, pretty ragged.

  Turns out when you’re dead, though, they can just sew you right back together.

  Anyway, in case I go infectious at some point, can make everybody else live forever just like me, the Service keeps agents in the bar, now. So I won’t go getting cut in half anymore.

  That doesn’t mean I’ve forgot, though.

  That first time your mom strutted in? I was on the phone, collecting a payment.

  That’s what this recording is about.

  If I did it live, I’m sure they’d find a way to stop me. And, I would be leaving this on your mom’s machine, but she won’t accept my calls anymore.

  With me, though, you always pay. One way or another.

  Here, let me . . . recognize this?

  Yeah, you do.

  Cute little crawfish. Been keeping it in a tank under my desk all this time.

  Oh—I mean him, not ‘it.’

  When I crawled up from that crater your dad made falling from the heavens, I’d crawled up alone, yeah. But now I had a rider. In my pocket.

  Gravity had found your father again, just like I told everybody.

  In low-grav, with the stars as backdrop, he was a monster, a giant, a space god.

  Here on Earth, well. As you can see.

  Was that a rocket in my pocket or was I just glad to see your mom again?

  The first.

  Take a transport
up, open the airlock, let Daddy here float out, and, bam, instant spaceship. Immortality. Eternity awaits. Live forever, madame.

  Or don’t.

  Funny thing about this is, I don’t even really need to eat anymore, right?

  But—here goes, here goes, into the hangar—I can still chew, as you can see.

  Legs and all, baby.

  Nice, good. Tastes like hope. No, no. Tastes like justice.

  So, if you need my services again, you can find me in the Directory, I expect. I’ll be filed under Dead, probably.

  Dead and Loving It.

  Bye, now.

  THIS IS NOT WHAT I MEANT

  What Paula tells us at the Saturday morning sales meeting is that we won’t know who it is, this inspector from Corporate, a place so remote from our little corner of things that it might as well be another world. And then, after saying that, she leaves a silence we all know how to interpret.

  For her last round of training, she spent three weeks at Corporate, and so may just recognize this inspector, this interloper, this—Corporate’s word—‘visitor.’

  “And I’ll be on the floor myself, of course,” she adds, managing somehow to look each one of us in the eye.

  Maybe it’s a trick she learned while she was away, or maybe it’s a natural ability all the women in her family have. Either way, when she doesn’t smile, I feel compelled to grin, like I’m making up for her seriousness, just trying to maintain some balance here, keep us from tipping all the way over into the absurd.

  Of course my efforts go unappreciated, but, too, it’s not like that’s in my job description either. All I’m supposed to do is man my counter, wipe away the smudges, show the customers the sunglasses they want to see, and maybe the ones that cost ten dollars more too.

  Before I know it, the week before the visit’s smeared past, simply gone, and, like we’re secret service agents, coiled white wires snaking up to our ears, we all know that the visitor is in the store. His presence crackles across all of us. Nobody whispers, but—it’s like the whole store has suddenly taken on the whimsical consistency of a watercolor, and the visitor is wading through it, stepping down deeper into the floor than any of us can, leaving swirls and eddies and ripples down whatever aisle he chooses.