Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  They turned a street corner, and found themselves at the end of that long, wide avenue as open as a plaza. At its other end, the huge bone orb rested in a little crater of shattered flagstones. In dropping, it had even caved in the front of a brick building facing onto the plaza. Not only had Iblis Al-Qadim prompted it to land, somehow, but that hinged skull-plate had lowered open, a hatchway. Steam was billowing out from inside. How long before those aboard the craft were able to override the mental command the governor had given, or repair whatever damage he might have caused? Might the craft be borne aloft again at any minute?

  Michael tossed Roger a glance again, and the British soldier looked blanched, the shotgun drooping heavily in his hands. But the man’s wounded stride didn’t waver, and Michael felt an odd affection suffuse him. Who was he to question his resolve, or abilities? He had obviously killed more men than himself in battle, in a war more earth-shaking than his own, which Michael was a bit crestfallen to know Roger wasn’t even familiar with. The affection Michael experienced was like that he had felt for other warriors, walking beside him many years ago. Like the affection he might have felt for a brother.

  Together, they reached the lip of the hatchway...together, walked up through the steam’s obscuring clouds.

  7: Unholy War

  Just inside the shell of the Skull, the two humans encountered three Kilcrops bent over a series of valves, one of which was leaking steam around its edges and another dripping a greenish fluid. At the sight of the men with guns, they froze with their hands on the great valves’ wheels. One of them held a large wrench, but didn’t raise it as a weapon. Despite their surprise and paralysis, the naked creatures – bony and sunken-faced as starving children – suppressed cackles and giggled behind their fixed grins.

  The men moved past them carefully, and left them behind in the steam. Michael said, “Maybe I should’ve killed them so they wouldn’t raise an alarm. But the gunshots would’ve done the same...”

  Their path branched off into different directions immediately. Narrow corridors, some with walls of metal but one with walls apparently carved or grown from the same bone substance as the craft’s exterior. A metal ramp rose toward a higher level over there, but over here was a flight of metal steps, and then they saw a metal spiral staircase in the distance, in the light from a caged gas jet in the wall. Roger was about to ask which way they should choose, when they both heard an echoing, haunting cry. It was a woman screaming, apparently off down that bone corridor. They headed that way.

  They moved through a mist not so much of steam, now, as incense. Whereas in the more mechanical sections of the Skull bluish gas jets burned along the walls, in the long bone corridor there were organic-looking sockets or hollows in the wall in which burned candles or the incense they smelled. As they proceeded, they heard more reverberating banshee shrieks, from both men and women. So far, none of the cries sounded like the voices of children.

  Toward the end of the bone corridor there were two rounded doorways on either side, facing each other. Michael and Roger exchanged looks, then Michael swung into the threshold on the right while Roger did the same on the left.

  Michael saw three white Xs floating in the murk of a smallish room. They were the spread-eagled nude bodies of three women, their wrists and ankles shackled to a trio of metal hoops hanging on chains, the ends of which were lost in the darkness of a surprisingly high shaft. When they saw the Angel, they whimpered and sobbed, no doubt thinking he was here to enjoy their torments along with their Demon captors. Their weeping alerted a grotesque tick-like creature, the likes of which Michael hadn’t seen before, bent over a table spread with gleaming metal instruments that it didn’t even seem to require, since its various pairs of arms looked sufficient for any torture it might devise. The entity whipped around, and just from the way it raised its bladed forearms – and from the way its nearly translucent belly was a bottle filled with blood, and the way the three women dribbled blood from various puncture wounds on their bellies and thighs – Michael decided to pull his trigger, and the M16 was set to fully automatic, and the stream of lead caused hunks of chitin to spring into the air like shattered pottery. He drove the tick against its counter of tools, which spilled over it as it fell dead...blood gushing from the broken bottle.

  Understanding now that the Angel was not here to partake of their punishments, the women began babbling at him, pleading to be unshackled. “Just shoot through my wrists and ankles,” one woman begged, wild-eyed, “I’ll heal...it’s okay...shoot me down, please!”

  Her request stunned him, until he was shaken by the sound of a shotgun blast, and he spun toward the doorway. “I’m sorry – forgive me,” he mumbled too softly for the women to hear.

  In the opposite room, Roger had found an elderly man lashed down onto an iron bed frame. The man’s decapitated head had been placed on a shelf several feet away, but rubber hoses and segmented metal cables had been inserted into the stump of its neck, connecting the head to the trunk. The head’s eyes streamed tears as the old man watched two ticks that had bent over him, one with a tubular proboscis plunged into his thigh and the other snipping off his fingers with one of its pincer limbs.

  Despite the horrors he had been witness to – and himself suffered – over the decades, Roger was dazed by what he saw. It was Michael’s gunfire that shook him out of his stupor, and even as the two ticks jerked upright at the sound, Roger fired at the one on the right with his shotgun. The weapon jolted in his arms, but the tick jolted even more – exploded across the wall behind it like a water balloon full of gore. The one on the left flew at him, arms spinning, so fast that he barely had time to swing the gun in its direction. He stabbed the thing with the barrel as if there were a bayonet at its end. The blow was only enough to make the Demon stagger back a little, but it gave Roger time to pull the trigger again, and the point-blank eruption of fire and OO buckshot obliterated the top half of the monster.

  Roger whirled with the shotgun leveled as he heard a third presence behind him, but he was able to restrain himself from shooting when he saw that it was Michael. “Come on,” Michael, the seemingly older of the two men, directed him, and they stepped back into the corridor and emerged from its end. Roger heard the old man’s severed head calling after him.

  The next hallway was wider, running transverse to the one they had just exited, and they entered at its midpoint. From its high ceiling, metal cocoons hung in two rows of a half dozen. They were like iron maidens, and both men wondered if there might even be spikes inside them, or if these were merely holding vessels until their human contents could be properly tortured later on. The cocoons dangled and swayed like a strange crop of fruit, emitting a chorus of sobs and pleas. The two men passed under them, toward another doorway at the right hand end of the hallway.

  The left hand end of the hall was nothing but a mass of twisting steam, and the men pivoted around when they heard a clatter of armored feet and the chitter of inhuman voices within its depths. Then, they were bursting out of it: three smaller ticks, not yet gorged and slowed with feasted blood, so swift that even though both men fired upon them simultaneously, the sound of their combined thunder deafening, they only just barely cut the things down before they reached them. The last of the creatures skidded to a stop at Roger’s feet, causing an array of spent 5.56mm and shotgun shells to scatter. Now the air was misted with gun smoke in addition to the steam and incense.

  “Who are you?” a voice called from one of the cocoons above. “Are you rebels?”

  “We’re looking for a boy!” Roger shouted, not sure which of the containers the man’s voice issued from. “Eight years old...”

  “Not that way!” the voice yelled down, meaning the right hand path they had chosen. “The other way – into the steam. There were children in these things just like twenty minutes ago, but the bugs switched our places.”

  “Why?”

  The unseen speaker seemed to hesitate. “It’s their turn.”

  Mi
chael snatched Roger by the arm. “Thanks!” he called.

  “Just kill these fuckers!” the disembodied voice replied.

  They plunged into the hot steam, apparently originating from a ruptured pipe above them, and could see nothing for several moments except for three evenly-spaced, orange-glowing smudges along their right side. When Michael got close to them, he discerned three tanks set into the wall, containing a luminous orange fluid in which three human faces – flayed from their skulls – were suspended on wires. Though the staring eyes did not follow him and the slack mouths had no muscles to move them, he knew there was a living consciousness in each of the masks. The bodies they had been sliced from had been incinerated, so when these scraps of flesh were eventually freed they would regenerate into their complete human forms again.

  Regarding the faces as they regarded him, Michael was momentarily transfixed with horror, and not for the first time felt a vague kind of shame for being an Angel. But mostly, he was just grateful that he didn’t recognize any of the faces; none was that of a child. Tearing himself away, he left the apparitions behind him.

  Roger was the first to emerge from the steam, and as he did so heard a whoosh, a curved sword missing his neck by two inches as it cleaved the air. It was a blue-skinned Apsara, her eyes and tusks gleaming. She reminded him uncomfortably of his Davina: the sensual curves of her nearly naked body, her general facial features, the large eyes and heavy brows and thick black hair, the Demon’s swimming in the air as if each strand had its own independent life. He hesitated for only an instant, but that was too long for Michael, who let loose with his M16. With just a grunt, as if punched in the stomach, the female Demon was slammed backwards into a wall. She left smears of red on it as she sank, her animated hair falling in lifeless curtains to obscure her face.

  Michael spotted another Apsara hovering in a doorway, a spear in her fists, but either his gun or the fact that he was an Angel caused her to duck back out of sight before he could swing the rifle her way. Roger approached the open threshold and peeked in, wary of the succubus, but he obviously didn’t see anything encouraging, since he waved for Michael to continue onwards.

  The hallway dead-ended in a high curved wall. The two men realized they had reached the opposite side of the Skull, but a spiral staircase with steps that clanged under their boots took them up to a metal catwalk. They crossed this, back into the fog of escaping steam, feeling their way along by holding onto the catwalk’s railing.

  Behind them, they heard more feet clanging on the steps of the spiral staircase. These new feet struck the metal with a lighter but sharper sound. In only seconds, there were many of these ringing footfalls...accompanied by the rustling sound of multiple bodies scraping against each other, and a chorus of whispering, chittering voices...

  Michael and Roger began to run, guessing what sort of creature was swarming behind them...but as they cleared the churning cloud of steam, they saw more of the tick Demons ahead of them, a small horde, razored arms spread into waiting embraces.

  Michael skidded to a halt and spun around, opened fire at their pursuers as the first of them sprang out of the wall of steam. “Get through them!” he roared at Roger. “Clear our way!”

  Back-to-back, the two men fired their weapons repeatedly, Roger bucking with the explosions from the shotgun, Michael emptying a magazine of his clattering assault rifle and deftly slapping in another.

  Two of the ticks went down under one of Roger’s blasts, the OO buckshot having dispersed into a spray of heavy slugs. Another discharge sent one of the arachnid beings up over the railing, but a barb on its foot caught in the mesh of the handrail and it swung from the catwalk lifelessly, blood raining like candy from a burst pinata. Three last ticks leapt over the bodies of their fallen brothers. Roger fired, hit one of them, and then the other two were only a few feet away. A whipping claw struck the end of his barrel just as Roger jerked the trigger again, causing the shot to go wild. He followed through with the momentum of the Demon’s blow, however, and with all his force swung the wooden stock of the weapon into the thing’s plated little face. The cracking impact sent it reeling, its back striking the handrail.

  Roger jumped back as the remaining tick took a swipe at him. He blocked a second blow with his shotgun. But the entity had multiple pairs of arms, and Roger felt one of them get under the shotgun, stab into his body and rip upwards. He grunted, fell onto his back on the hard catwalk surface.

  Looking down at himself, he saw blood welling out of him...saw that he had been rent deeply.

  He tried to angle the shotgun to point up at the thing, but it kicked the gun and its clawed foot not only sent the weapon out of his hands but nearly severed one of his fingers. It hovered above him, its arms spinning and clacking as if in a mad sign language, wordlessly speaking in tongues. The sight of his pumping gore seemed to tantalize the creature. It sank down over him, appeared to stare into his eyes a moment, and dropped its head as if to fellate him. Roger felt another deep stab, as the tick shot its proboscis into his inner thigh...heard a terrible gurgling sound as his blood was sucked up into the vampire.

  Wheezing in pain but steeling himself, Roger slipped his injured hand into his shirt. And deeper than that. It burrowed under the lip of his wound.

  Either Roger’s motions or another metallic rattle from the Angel’s M16 broke its lustful spell, but the arachnid jumped to its feet, the bloody proboscis withdrawing. It saw Roger rummaging inside his soaked shirt and descended upon him, lashing out with a mantis arm. Roger rolled to one side and the claw banged against the catwalk. The creature lifted its head and chattered, its mouthparts twitching like bloodied fingers. Roger had rolled onto his back again, and he was tearing something out of his chest. It looked like an organ, red and drooling strings of blood. He had known just where to find it. The hunk of metal had been a nagging weight inside him, an irritation and a burden – a pain now extracted, liberated, and returned to those who had inflicted it upon him.

  Screaming in a mix of agony and war cry, Roger tugged back the little .25's slide, aimed it up at the tick and squeezed off round after round. The semi-automatic’s immersion in his body had not dampened its gunpowder. The bullets were small, but they drove the tick back, shrieking. He emptied the pistol. The very last slug sent his attacker flipping backwards over the railing. He heard it crash far below.

  Michael had emptied his fresh magazine and popped in yet another, mostly firing blindly into the steam. But soon, he saw only a heap of demolished bodies at the edge of the mist, one or two badly wounded Demons screeching, the ingested blood of their victims streaming through the holes in the catwalk’s floor.

  He turned back toward Roger to see that he had gone down. A last tick was moving in on him, its cracked face oozing its own greenish ichor. He saw that Roger was without the shotgun, gripped only a toy-sized pistol that had apparently run dry. Michael sprayed the wounded Demon before it could get to him, white fire flashing from the M16's muzzle, the impact launching the vampire off its feet. He then rushed forward to Roger’s side. When he took his arm to help him up, the British soldier let out a terrible groan, and that was when Michael saw how the front of his shirt was saturated with blood.

  “Can you make it?” he asked numbly.

  “Listen!” Roger hissed, clinging to the man’s arm so as to hold himself up, staining the Angel’s robes.

  From beyond the end of the catwalk, they both heard crying voices. Watery with echoes, distant and ghostly...but distinctly, the cries of children.

  “Come on,” Michael said, slinging his M16 over his own shoulder and retrieving the shotgun from the floor. He put one arm around the Damned soul. Roger kept his left hand pressed to his chest as if to hold his split body together. Every step made him wince, every other step a stagger that almost toppled both of them. They made it through the bodies of the Demons Roger had killed, loped like a wounded four-legged animal until they could make out a polished door of bone set almost seamlessly into a wall o
f bone, at the end of the bridge-like catwalk.

  8: Avenging Angel

  The wall, when they reached it, was made up of plates separated by rippled sutures, like the outside of the Skull itself. Roger leaned against it while Michael took hold of the door’s latch. It was not hinged, but slid along grooved track into the wall.

  In the room beyond, Michael saw three Kilcrops hunkering near the foot of a row of coffin-like containers – metal, rusted and riveted – bolted horizontally into the floor. There was a hatch in each one, the hatches currently hanging open, where the faces of those inside the sarcophagi would be. It was from these open hatches that the wailing voices came. One child was sobbing hysterically, another crying for her mother, but Michael couldn’t tell if any of the cries belonged to his son.

  There was a hose with a nozzle at its end hanging from the ceiling, over the coffins, and its base end was connected to a huge glass orb in the center of the room. This orb was filled with a yellowish solution, and inside the miniature yellow sea writhed a colony of white worm-like eels or eel-like worms. Their threaded bodies almost formed one immense living ball inside the globe. Following the line of the suspended black rubber hose again, Michael could guess its use: for delivering the contents of the orb into the dozen metal coffins. They were water-tight, then. And he had no doubt the worms were ravenous.

  Though the snickering Kilcrops didn’t try to attack or flee, having heard the approaching gunfire and thus waiting to see what the two men intended, Michael treated one of them to the contents of a 12-gauge shell. When the gaunt body had stopped flopping and rolling across the floor, the other two began to giggle more wildly in nervousness, one clutching at the arms of the other. Michael jerked his gun barrel at their grinning faces. “If you don’t want to end up like your friend, open those things up now.”