I, Zombie

by Al Ewing

  - and Roscoe nearly freaked out and called the cops or the FBI when the blood sample turned into a goddamn slug crawling around the tube and the hair turned to bone and the skin crawled off the microscope slide and he spent three days throwing up until he finally burned the goddamn samples in a furnace and even then he lay awake every night for weeks afterwards -

  - and it was one of those sleepless alone nights that all the jigsaw pieces came together and he realised what Johnny was -

  - and he'd been avoiding Johnny ever since and he figured Johnny never came to the Tenth Floor, he was always in the Paradise Garage if he was anywhere, but somehow Johnny picked the one night Roscoe figured he was safe and now he'd have to tell him or maybe he could just hide in this little back office forever or until the dawn when everyone went home and slept it off -

  - and the door opens with a creak like an old tomb -

  - and Roscoe's skin nearly crawls right off his back with the fear like Johnny's skin crawling around on his desk then sprouting tiny little insect legs and Roscoe turns and nearly vomits and babbles a hello oh hello Johnny I didn't know it was you I didn't know you were in here Johnny how are you Johnny oh God oh Christ -

  "Hey, Emmett."

  - and Roscoe chokes and goes quiet because his voice is so cold and alien and dead like the ultimate Ziggy Stardust Sam Spade fusion the kids all want to fuck only it's flat granite stony as a grave marker -

  "I was looking for you."

  - and he smiles and that's the scariest thing of all because that's the smile of the Johnny Doe who made Roscoe bacon and eggs in the morning, the sexy sweet guy who's okay in spite of it all and that makes it so much worse because underneath there's something looking out at him like a snake waiting to strike -

  - and Roscoe feels something cold and wrong and bone-hard clutching at his heart -

  "What you got?"

  - and maybe it's the speed and maybe it's the raw fear crackling up and down Roscoe's nerves like neon but he opens his mouth and out it spills like poison -

  - and first it's all just crazy stuff about how Johnny's like a commune of individual cells who get together to be a collective and imitate a human being right down to the personality and how the further away from him offcuts like all the samples get, the more they show a life of their own -

  - and how the cellular imitation isn't a true duplicate because it's cold and dead and deliciously decadent here and now but there and then just freaky and the reason why Johnny wants to fit in all the time with any new scene he comes across is because he's got to lay low and not draw attention and whoever's really calling the shots in that cell collective, the alien intelligence buried deep inside his sweet human soul, keeps him in situations where being a little weird isn't going to be enough to get noticed -

  - and that's why he's mister Ziggy Decadent right here right now in 1976 and he was a hipster dealer back before that scene fell apart and the cops got wise to him and who knows maybe in the past he was in even stranger places than Bicentennial America like Monocentennial or Nocentennial America maybe if you can dig that who knows he isn't talking -

  - and maybe in the future things will get so crazy strange and information rich that he can just be normal -

  - and Johnny's looking like he figured most of that out already and that's not what he's here for, like maybe he's doped out every little nuance of what he is and he just needs to know why, or maybe he just wants to know what Roscoe knows -

  - and his eyes are like little lethal grey bullets -

  "That's it?"

  - and Roscoe knows he has to keep his mouth shut now -

  - and he opens it anyway because those eyes won't let him do anything else -

  - and in the end it's all about the brains -

  - and the reason Johnny breaks into the morgue and eats brains and maybe takes them fresh from heads too isn't any kind of crazy vampire bloodlust or serial killer compulsion because it's a lot smarter than that -

  - and it wasn't until Roscoe wondered why an alien gestalt entity would need to eat brains that it came to him that the collective absorbs brains to analyse the tissue, the synapses, the cortical development and all that jazz like it's a walking talking spectrometer or Star Trek scanner taking samples forever -

  - and suddenly Roscoe's flashing back to that late night double feature he caught when he couldn't sleep for the speed, some dumb Elliot Gould flick with a cat and a gun and a murder or something but following up with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jesus Christ if that isn't what's happening now because Johnny's the monolith and the sentinel and all of that stuff rolled into one, an alarm system waiting to signal somebody out there in the dark -

  - and instead of waiting for us all to take that trip to the moon, Johnny's sampling brains, analysing the chemistry and power of all those little grey cells up there, waiting for that one special brain that'll tell him we've got to that stage of evolution where we're worth harvesting like crops, because if you want slaves, you don't want them too smart and you don't want them too dumb either -

  - and if you want to eat a good steak you take it from a cow, not some dinosaur due to evolve into a cow in a billion years -

  - and that means that whatever's out there is going to make future man look like a dumb animal -

  - and Johnny's eyes are like two chips of black ice on a road Roscoe's skidding down with no control, steering wheel slick and slippery in his hands -

  - and Johnny walks towards Roscoe and oh-so-gently takes hold of his face like he might lean in and kiss him one last time -

  - and the sound of Roscoe's neck snapping is like the click of a door locking something away for all time -

  - and Johnny doesn't even seem to be aware Roscoe ever existed as he walks out of that room and out of the club and out of New York, heading for the airport, whatever inner voice driving him now to forget, start over, find a new country and blend in deeper, deeper, deeper as he moves towards starting his new London life as straight and normal as anyone has ever been or ever could be -

  - and Emmett Roscoe isn't found until four o'clock in the morning -

  - and nobody makes it to the funeral except his mother -

  - and the next year the club is gone and they're burning records in stadiums because it's faggot music and the good days are pretty much over and there's disease and death and hate coming hard on the new decade and word on the street is no future for you -

  - and thirty-three years after that Johnny Doe is opening one giant red death eyeball slick with alien oils and juices and shrieking in the insect language of the death angels because he finally got that one perfect special brain he wanted and the signal is travelling out in a faster than light stream of information calling the Elder Gods the Insect Nation living in no-space no-time to fold down into this dimension to burn the world to harvest the human race -

  - and that's that.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Twisted Thing

  There was no sound in the room.

  The walls were gutted by fire and the furniture had either been smashed or incinerated in the war between the two monsters. The floor was a mass of burnt carpet and mangled timber, in the centre of which lay what looked like a twisted, leathery doll, the massive head torn open, cracked like an eggshell and emptied, the eye sockets hollow and staring.

  This was what remained of Mister Smith.

  Next to the mutated, mutilated corpse, there lay the thing that once called itself John Doe. That name no longer fit. No human name could. The corpse was barely a torso, torn, partially melted and almost unrecognisable, strips of brain matter still hanging from what was left of its teeth. It was inert.

  But not inactive.

  Deep inside the charred and ruined lump of flesh, alien cells pulsed and chattered, communicating, analysing. Processes that had been primed millennia ago stuttered into motion. The command was simple.

  Analyse the brain tissue, then heal to the required form. To the soldier form.

  To
the signaller.

  The cells broke down the grey matter, swarming over it like tiny ants, deconstructing and exploring each strand of DNA. Mister Smith was not like ordinary men - his strange creator had seen to that. He was man as he would perhaps be in one thousand or one million years, a skull packed with the future.

  The swarming cells of the thing that was once John Doe crawled across the torn, tattered scraps of Mister Smith's mind, reading and devouring. This was what they had been waiting for. This was a mind advanced enough to serve the collective.

  The Insect Nation.

  The cell-collective read the DNA strands carefully. The humans had indeed evolved to a stage where they could make slaves for the Insect Nation. Or was this an anomaly? There were no other functioning cell-collectives on the planet to communicate with. The chameleon personality, used to gather information about planetary culture, was inert and offline.

  The cell-collective swarmed and chattered, turning the data over. Until further evidence presented itself, the collective had to assume that Mister Smith's brain was the normal configuration... that the Earth had matured enough to provide a slave race.

  It was time to send the signal.

  It was time to end the civilisation of this planet.

  The flesh of the charred corpse that was once John Doe shifted.

  Slowly, the pores began to ooze - a thick, white pus that slowly dripped... slithered... over the destroyed flesh, coating it in an opaque layer. The white coating thickened as the minutes passed, oozing, congealing, hardening.

  Forming a cocoon.

  The minutes ticked by.

  Gradually, the cocoon lost its shape, the humanity inside melting, flowing, until the thick white skin resembled nothing so much as a large, circular blob of wax, or a lump of slimy dough, flat at the bottom.

  In truth, it was an egg, and from it would hatch the final end of man.

  Inside the cocoon, there was nothing resembling a human being - nothing but a soup of alien cells, floating, multiplying, small bolts of strange electricity sparking from one to another. This was the next phase of the program. It was time for the simulacrum to be cast off, the disguise discarded.

  Now was the hour of The Sentinel.

  Gradually the cells began to coalesce, flowing together, hardening, strengthening, forming structures. Outwardly the cocoon seemed to expand and vibrate, the membrane shuddering as though hundreds of tiny fish were conducting a war inside it, fighting each other for dominance. The primal soup inside bubbled and strained against the shivering white skin.

  Gradually, a skeletal structure began to form. Alien organs grew like planets coming together from cosmic dust. The bubbling, boiling spew inside the thick white membrane thickened and began to solidify.

  The cell-collective had previously taken a shape necessary for collecting data on the genetics and brain structure of the prospective slave race. That phase was complete. It needed a new form.

  A form that would serve the interests of the Insect Nation.

  A form that could call them across the void of space.

  A form that could do their bidding when they arrived.

  A form that - if it became necessary - could kill the human beings in their thousands.

  Slowly, the thick white membrane of the egg-sac began to tear, a clear pus leaking out and pooling on the charred wooden floor.

  Something unfolded from within, rearing up to full height. A mass of thin, hard white flesh and bone, fully nine feet in height, stooping in the confines of the room.

  It was shaped almost like a man. The resemblance was slight, but close enough to lend it an additional air of terrifying inhumanity. There was nothing that we would recognise as a face on the thin, swaying head that bobbed slowly on the long neck. The creature had only one single eye, a vicious red orb with a milk-white centre like some grotesque cataract, and below that a mouth - a circular hole studded with hundreds of small teeth, tiny needles designed to shred and tear. The limbs were stretched and elongated, with cruel spikes of some bone-like substance extruding through the skin, and on each hand there were ten long, bony fingers, each ending in a slashing, raking claw, alongside thumbs that were little more than sharp hooks made to slash and tear. Instead of feet, the creature had a pair of large stone-like hooves. They stepped nimbly from the withering remains of the egg-sac with a gentle grace that belied their killing power.

  There was strength in those spindly limbs - strength to defend itself against attack, strength to kill without mercy or hesitation if the order came, and strength to break free of the prison it found itself in. Without another look at the mess on the ground that had once been Mister Smith, The Sentinel clattered forward on its hooves, sinking its fingers into the stone of the wall. The claws easily penetrated the brickwork, acid secretions drilling into the rock, before the fingers flexed, the muscles straining for only a moment before the stone cracked, a chunk of wall tearing away with a noise like buried thunder.

  Without hesitating or wondering at its own abilities, the creature tore another chunk out of the wall, slowly boring its way up towards the surface.

  It took one hour and forty minutes of continuous digging to reach the open air, but this did not concern the Sentinel. It had waited millions of years for this moment already, and the signal had to be clear and unobstructed as far as possible.

  It was night when it finally crawled from a hole in the shattered pavement, like a worm erupting from graveyard soil. The street outside the Tower was deserted, and there was nobody to see the hideous bone-white creature clambering up through the shattered concrete, and perhaps that was for the best.

  Nobody wants to see the end of the world when it comes.

  The Sentinel stretched to its full height in the moonlight, the single pulsing eye gazing up into the night sky, looking up and beyond. On the other side of that sky, outside of all space and all time - in the realms of un-space, of no-time - there was the terrible, endless chittering of Those Outside. The endless writhing and crawling and biting and buzzing and howling of the Insect Nation, the Un-Reality, the terrible light beside which our own reality is no more than a guttering candle. The Insect Nation waited, out beyond the borders of all that is or ever was. They waited, and they sent forth probes, lesser life forms that would fold down through space and time to impact against some forming ball of lava and primal muck. A place that would one day support life.

  Sentinels.

  Sentinels that would mimic that life, moving alongside it, growing and evolving with it, living in its shadow, taking regular samples of the seat of its intelligence. Sentinels that would wait for centuries, for millennia, waiting against the day that that humble form of life would evolve into something capable of total planetary efficiency, capable of spreading and ruling galaxies or universes.

  Something that would be worthy to serve as slaves or foodstuffs for the Insect Nation.

  That day had arrived.

  An indefinable trembling shot through the body of The Sentinel as the circular mouth widened, the needle teeth clattering against each other. The terrible mouth widened impossibly, sickeningly, the jaws stretching as no human jaws could, distorting as the first echoes of sound came from the structures inside the throat.

  It began as a scream.

  An inhuman scream - a keening wail of torment, the kind of sound human beings dread in the depths of their darkest nightmares, a hideous, bone-jarring shriek that went on and on and on into the night. Dogs howled alongside, then sank down and huddled into their paws as the scream rose in pitch and intensity, spiralling up towards some terrible note beyond human hearing. Eventually, the dogs died, blood leaking from ears, eyes and noses.

  The air was filled with the shattering of glass and for a moment Central London was engulfed in thousands of shards, falling through the air like sharp slashing rain, beautiful and deadly. The scream rose in pitch, the pulsing eye of The Sentinel rolling back as the inhuman vocal chords pierced all barriers of sound, moving into unch
arted frequencies beyond all knowledge. It could not be heard with the ear now, but deep in the clenching gut of all those within reach there was a feeling of terror, of infinite, indescribable panic. Men and women cried in their sleep, then vomited, choking on their own terrified bile as the sound moved further and further out of human comprehension.

  This was the sound of the Outer Realms, the awful music of those spheres that revolved like floating, bloated cysts in the qlippoth-universe, the anti-place where the Insect Nation gathered and flexed.

  The summoning-sound.

  The pressure in London seemed to drop as the scream passed into that Other World that lay beyond and behind and beside our own, and those who were walking the neighbouring streets began to bleed - first from the nostrils, then from the ears and eyes, collapsing as their insides hemorrhaged and began to leak slowly out of them.

  In response, the sound of a billion feeding insects began to grow, the noise rising in volume - the terrible echo of feasting creatures, monsters living and writhing in climates no human mind could possibly conceive. Then came a sound never heard before - the cracking, grinding thunder of things unimaginable to mankind folding themselves down through higher planes of geometry to come into existence in our reality.

  What must it have been like to hear that sound - to know that here and now, after all those centuries of human striving, the end had finally come?

  The first craft appeared over Hyde Park. Descriptions of it vary - to some it was a crackling, sizzling engine made of massive oiled parts, grinding against one another, lightning arcing from them. To others it resembled nothing so much as the carapace of a massive, hungry beetle, jaws clacking open and closed in a sickening rhythm. To a few - those whose minds did not instinctively protect them from the sight of something not meant to be seen - it was a grotesque, impossible construction of terrifying angles, both machine and monster, feeding tubes and tentacles dangling from the underside, pulsing with oil and slime, dribbling acid and bile on the ground below that killed whatever it touched.