by Al Ewing
BRAINS!
And by God... the God who never made me, the God who might, just might have found a use for me after all...
...do they taste good right now...
Here's a lesson for you - it's okay to commit a massive act of cannibalism if you're saving the world. That said, that wasn't really cannibalism and I did actually end the world first, but try not to point that out. Let me feel good about myself for a minute or two, hey?
And I do feel good about myself. I stretch out with my arms, arching my back, checking the position of the sun. It's been about an hour. Hopefully not too long. At the same time, my other arms reach to feel my ribs, seeing how much mass I've gained from the fifty or sixty brains I ate.
The third pair just flex.
My four new arms have the long scalpel-like nails I'm going to need to tear through that chitin before it reforms itself, but they've got four fingers and one thumb. If there are going to be guns in there, I want to be able to fire them. And the feet have been altered a little as well - once you had toes, back you don't goes. Or something. And I'm seeing through two eyes as well. The depth perception's better.
And when I kill that thing in there, I want it to see something close to a human face.
I'm shorter than I was. Squatter. More human in terms of dimensions, but still alien enough to face down whatever's lurking in there. And I'm feeling more confident than I've ever been. I'm the best of both worlds now, half zombie, half alien.
I, Zombalien.
It's got kind of a ring to it.
And finally - after centuries, after millennia of doing nothing but wasting my time and hurting anybody who ever mattered to me, I'm finally doing something right. Maybe it is too late, but this is what I was meant to do all along. For the first time ever, I'm doing something for my own reasons.
This one's for you, Emmett.
Six clawed hands flex as I move towards the black barrier. I'm humming. There's a part of me that's looking forward to this, a dark part of me that's aching for revenge for a species I was never part of but wanted to join so badly.
Then I take hold of time and crush it, squeeze it with the force of a black hole. I squeeze it until it stops dead, like a broken heart.
And then I attack.
It was intense.
Before, with my one sickly, skinny arm, cutting that wall was like dipping my fingers into a placid lake, then taking them out to leave the surface undamaged. Now, it was like burrowing into sand, having it fall into place behind you as you went. Driving forward, tearing and hacking, all six sets of scalpel-sharp claws slicing deeper into the wound before it could close up, and all the time the insect-flesh wall around me screamed in my mind with a thousand thousand voices, shrieking at me to stop, to turn back, to let myself be swallowed up and infused into their flesh... and then I was carving at old stone, taking chunks out of it with every swipe of steel-hard fingernails...
And then I was through.
And suddenly the Queen of the Insects is taking me seriously again.
She's got a right to. I'm inside her.
I guess when Morse got his information from poor old Callsign Magnet - and when I got my information from poor old Sharon Glasswell - nobody thought about where it might be going. The Queen of England replaced by a twitching Lovecraftian horror, flanked by a troupe of worker-ants with terrifying steel-black claws... that's a grim scenario, but it lets you think you have a chance, that a squad of soldiers could burst in there and take her out if they only got organised quickly enough. That might be survivable.
But of course, the Queen's black-garbed guards were just there as foodstuffs, to help bulk her up. That was why they were all off to the Palace to see the Queen - so she could absorb them into herself.
When I was carving into that big black tower, I was cutting into her skin.
Sometimes it seems like my whole life is based on one critical misunderstanding after another. Maybe that's what life is. Maybe it's at this point, right at the end of everything, right in the final minutes of your time, that you finally get an understanding of just what you're doing and what you've been doing all along.
I don't know. If there's a time for philosophy, then standing inside the internal organs of a massive star-spanning creature that could be described as your mother - or at the very least a second cousin - probably isn't it.
Once upon a time, this might have been an anteroom or a servant's quarters. You can see hints of something that might have been an armchair or a cupboard - but everything's been grown over with slimy, pulsing flesh, shimmering green and slick with alien sweat. The only light comes from clusters of glowing orbs in the ceiling, over a bulge where the light must have been. When I look up at them, a curtain of flesh slides across them for a moment, wetting them, making the noxious light flicker. A blink.
The Queen has grown itself around Buck House, turning the stone and the walls into a kind of makeshift skeleton. Is it using the electrical wiring to send and receive sense-messages? Clever, clever. Maybe I underestimated it.
Maybe not. If it was smart, it could have digested this whole building. But it's just absorbed it and built over it. Which hopefully means it's built over some useful objects. We'll see.
In one wall, there's a rectangular depression about the size of a door. I hope that's what it turns out to be, otherwise I'm going to look pretty stupid.
My new foot - a hoof with flexible toe-like protrusions coming out on three sides - smashes into the covered door, tearing the skin and splintering the wood beneath, and in my head I can hear a mewling screech of pain. It's talking to me again. But I don't need it to.
There's something in my body - in this alien cluster of cells, born to a far-off star in another plane of reality - that recognises its own. I'm being drawn towards the seat of this alien intelligence, this Insect-mind, this hive-consciousness. It's like a beacon.
Either that or I'm just a sucker for a giant brain.
The corridor beyond is waist-deep in thick black murk, dotted with white globs, as big as my thumb, all of them swimming in one direction around me. Maybe it was a corridor once, but now it's a vein or something like it - these little tykes are carrying nutrients through the dark, oozing silt, part of some massive circle of life. Flagella are growing out of the walls, striking out like whips when I get too close. One of them latches on to an arm and holds - sticky suction cups gripping the skin - then snaps back, tearing off a strip of flesh. Better tread carefully - if I get too close, they'll flay me alive.
Is that a conscious attack from the Queen, or is the organism just treating me as a blockage in the system?
Emmett Roscoe would have been fascinated by this. So would Mister Smith. Contact with a true alien life form.
I keep forgetting I'm one of those myself.
I keep moving forward. Every time I pass one of the rectangular indentations that used to be doors, I tear away the skin that's grown over them. I'm looking for a sign - a brass plate, maybe a little plastic plaque, some signifier of what I'm after. Or maybe I just like to hear the Queen screeching in my mind as I lacerate another part of it. That could be it - I'm in a pretty sadistic mood right now.
This can't last, of course. I've seen Fantastic Voyage - well, Inner Space, but it's pretty much the same deal - and when you're wandering through a massive organism, especially one that up until recently was a couple of million vicious insectile bastards with very sharp claws, then you need to keep an eye out for internal defence mechanisms. White blood cells. Helper T-cells. Antibodies.
If there's one thing dodgy science-fiction paperbacks have taught me, it's that the inside of the human body is totally and completely capable of beating you up no matter how many arms you have.
It's smart thinking. It's just a pity I'm so busy looking ahead for trouble that I don't hear the first antibody coming up behind me.
It's silent the way graves are silent. The way a pub is silent in the second after someone's been knifed in the ribs. The way t
he dead are silent.
And it's built like the fucking Thing.
A massive white hand reaches out and grabs hold of my head hard enough to crush the skull a little, then slams me hard into a wall covered in waving flagella. When it peels me off half of my face goes with it. I'm still registering what's happening when it hurls me forward like a rag doll, bellowing like a rhino in a primal scream therapy group. This time it's my back that slams into the wall of sucker-coated whips. Pulling off that is a lot like being flayed.
Not that I feel pain. But still. I'm pushing my skull back into place as I take my first look at the Antibody. Surprise, surprise, it's shaped an awful lot like a man.
I suppose the Queen recognises a good design when it sees one.
It's white as bone and as hard as stone, a massive beast, a white blood cell with an exoskeleton made for doing damage. It's just solid bone, like a medieval suit of armour, only squatter, heavier. Two legs, four arms and one eye peering out malevolently from a hole in the bone dome of its head. And of course it's going to be able to grip time in that meaty fist and squeeze, just like I can...
...why can't things ever be easy?
It charges, sloshing through the black muck, the massive blunt hands of bone reaching forward to grip me. It's not going to be swinging its fists around in a confined space like this - it's going to try to grab me, tear me into pieces and hurl those pieces onto the walls, where the flagella will helpfully keep me from sticking myself together. I'll be a nice piece of wall art for the rest of eternity.
That's what I'd do if I was in his shoes, anyway.
Eyes narrow. I get hold of time, ready to squeeze, knowing I'll only have a relative split-second of grace before it matches my speed of perception.
I remember Japan.
Choose your moment, Ronin.
Two hands reach for my head, and I lock down time, hard, then reach up and grab all four of his wrists. My body tilts backward, down into the thick black juices that run through the corridor, as my feet drive up, kicking into his midsection, using his own momentum against him.
Judo wasn't invented in Japan until well after I left. But I like to pick things up. And there are a lot of things you pick up after living for a million years.
The Anti-man goes sailing over, smashing into the wall. The flagella catching hold, like I knew they would, sticking to the enamel surface. Too bad for them. The momentum of the Anti-man's flying body is too much for the flesh they're attached to - there's a sound like curtains tearing as it rips a huge swathe of flesh from the wall.
That had to hurt.
I can hear the Queen screeching inside my mind, and I'm betting the Anti-man can too. It rises slowly, clutching its head, then grabs the skin still clinging to its back like a cape and tears it away. It's going to attack again in a second.
If I give it the chance.
I sprint forward and spring into a flying kick. I kept the hooves for a reason, toes or not. They're like having sledgehammers where my feet should be. The sound as one of them makes contact with the Anti-man's face is like a drop hammer smashing a block of concrete.
That's the problem with being made out of bone.
Bone breaks.
The Anti-man staggers back, a deep crack running up the middle of its face. I take the opportunity to insert the long, curved hooks that end my topmost set of thumbs into the gap, digging them in deep, enjoying the way the black blood spurts out to spatter against what's left of my face.
Maybe I shouldn't be enjoying this. This is cruel and sadistic. This is the last gasp against an alien culture that has effectively made the human race extinct. This is probably pointless in the long run - the Insect Nation will carry on, is carrying on, has already carried on, on the shores of no-space and un-time. This is the final nail in the coffin of a failed enterprise for them.
But this is revenge.
Revenge for making me. For letting me spend a million years with the dominant life form of this planet and then coming down and executing them all. Revenge for all the hurt and the pain I've ever felt because I wasn't just like you, and for the love and the sweetness too, because every time I had something even slightly good they programmed me to throw it all away.
I hope this fucking hurts, your Majesty.
The head of the Anti-man cracks open into two neat halves, revealing a cluster of raw nerve endings - what keeps it plugged right into the Insect.
In one swift movement, I lean down and bite the fuckers. Then I jerk my head back. They tear loose like Velcro popping apart.
The scream in my head in indescribable, and I savour it.
Because the louder you scream, Your Insect Highness, the easier it is for me to find you.
The Anti-man flops down, huge bone body splashing in the stagnant black wash. There'll be more where he came from, and soon. I need something a bit more...
...ah.
Looking back along the flapping swathe of flesh torn from the wall, I see the door I've been looking for.
The one with the little corroded brass plaque that says: ARMOURY. DO NOT ENTER.
Stands to reason there'd be a place for the soldiers and secret service to keep their guns. Let's see what they have.
The door's locked, of course, but one kick takes care of that. Then it's just a matter of looking for a skin-covered bulge and hoping it's a nice metal cabinet rather than a gun rack... here we are. Thumb-hook slits it open. Another little whimper of pain. I hope there's something good here, the Anti-men are going to come...
...running...
Oh yes.
Oh very much yes.
The gun's a Heckler & Koch LA852 sub-machine gun, as used by the army for keeping the peace, which is exactly what I intend to do with it. If keeping the peace translates as killing everything that moves. It fires over 600 rounds a minute if it has to, which means it can use up a magazine in three seconds.
It's a good job I filled a backpack with magazines because I've got four of the bastards.
Yes, since you ask, I do look like a badass.
By this time Her Royal Highness the Queen of Outer Space is shrieking in my brain. It's starting to hurt - as if that constant wail of pain is disrupting my systems. I imagine it's disrupting a few other things as well, judging by how the lights keep flickering.
It's not begging me to stop exactly - there's no emotion there beyond the drive to survive - but it's screaming at me to remember my place, to stand down... to dissolve myself into a nutritious soup for recycling.
It's not that tempting an offer, to be honest.
Out in the corridor, I can hear splashing - more of the Anti-men coming to shut me down for good. I step out of the Armoury to meet them and open up with the HKs. Normally, I'd think twice about spraying the inside of Buckingham Palace with sub-machine gun fire, but this isn't 'normally'. Nothing's ever going to be 'normally' again.
I'm never going to be just like you and I don't care.
There are three of them on either side, trying to sandwich me in. I take hold of time and the rhythm of the bullets slows to the gentle boom, boom, boom of a big bass drum at a parade. It helps me aim better. I can't afford to waste ammo if I'm going to be reloading four guns all the time.
And it's so good to watch those bullets plough into those bone faces, chipping, cracking, shattering them... leaving the vulnerable nerve endings to throb with pain in the damp air. So good watching them fall against the walls, tearing skin off with their weight... so good to hear the screams in my mind as it happens. I'm starting to get a theory about that screaming.
I'm close to the throne room now. Close to the pulsing brain of this monster. There's nothing that's going to stop me. Nothing they can do to even slow me down.
It's time to end this.
Time for Johnny to come marching home.
I don't know what I was expecting when I kicked in the door to the throne room, but this isn't it. But then, what would be?
The brain is massive. A pulsing ball of fles
h, glowing with a sickly light, pulsing in slow, random rhythms, the throne embedded somewhere inside it. Coming out from the centre of it are four huge tentacles, covered with writhing, wiggling legs, like millipedes. I keep a sharp eye on them as they weave slowly, protectively, in the air between me and her. If they work like the flagella in the corridor, I don't want to get anywhere near them.
I just look at it.
And it looks at me.
This is the conduit through which the Insect Nation give their orders. This is the means by which they can kill the planet, the driving force behind all the Wyrms and workers and eyes-on-legs swarming through the city.
This is as pure and unadulterated an evil as I've ever seen.
There is no conscience here. No emotion. No reasoning beyond the need to feed, to take, to steal. This is everything humanity fought to rise above, and it would wipe them - wipe us - out in a second.
Because by their standards, we're not just primitive, or inefficient. We're nothing at all. It's not that they think humanity doesn't deserve to live, because that would involve thinking about humanity, thinking about anything besides feeding, eating, the selfish needs of the Insects.
The sound of my own voice surprises me.
"You're not afraid of me, are you? You don't really understand what fear is. But you know. You know that when I end you - when I walk over there and tear you to pieces - everything comes tumbling apart. That ruby dome over our planet is going to dissipate into thin air. All of your children are going to drop down dead. I bet the scream when it happens - that psychic death-scream - is going to be strong enough to reach right back to where you came from and hurt them. Sting them just a little, in their place beyond place and their time beyond time. Maybe burn their fingers enough that they don't come into this universe to play their games anymore.
"I know that's going to kill me as well. You've really been hurting me with all your yelling, and I think when you finally go it's going to melt me down with all the rest of your playthings. I'm never going to get the chance to be normal. I'm never going to be just like them. But I want you to understand that that's fine by me. I don't mind being a zombie any more. I don't mind being dead.