by Brian Craig
You’re moving faster now, and there’s a regular thumping sound at the threshold of perception—much fainter than the shuffling footfalls—which is supposed to be the beating of your frightened heart. You know that beating will accelerate and get louder, and you know what power suggestion has.
(Let it be the beating of your heart, then—it would be cheating to deny it, and you’re no cheat. Submit!).
You can hear your own footfalls now, accelerating as you move faster and faster. You’re running, but it isn’t doing you any good because your unseen pursuer is running too, and you know full well that you can’t shake him. He’s invisible, indomitable, inescapable. There’s nothing, nothing, nothing you can do.
(In a way, that’s the worst of it, because your real self is a man of action, and the character isn’t. You’re the kind of person who wouldn’t do this—who would refuse to run. You’d stop and turn and make your stand in the middle of the street, meeting violence with violence even though the thing which is coming to get you can’t yet be seen. You just have to ignore that; try to forget it; go along with the gag.
You know you’ll see it eventually. You always get to see it, just before the end. But you’re not allowed to turn and make your stand. You have to be a coward because you’re not in control. You have to be the kind of person who runs—the kind of person who is stupid enough to run into streets that get darker and darker, moronic enough to get cornered by a blind end.
What sort of person is that? you wonder—cursing yourself, meanwhile, for being forced to wonder. Exactly who are you supposed to be?
Forget it. Submit!)
You can hear the sound of your own breathing now, and that audible heartbeat is becoming more insistent. You look round again, and see nothing, though there’s certainly something there. You run and you run, but it’s still behind you.
There are still other people about, but their faces only loom up now and again like bizarre gargoyles, illuminated for half a second, then gone. They’re all leering at you, laughing at you, licking their lips in anticipation of the carve-up.
(How many get this far? you wonder. How many even get this far?)
But you don’t have time for that, because you’re making the next turn—the last turn—into the narrowest, filthiest, most stink-filled alley of them all, and you know there’s no way on and no way out, that you’re all alone and that whatever is on your tail is going to catch you now, whether it be a face without flesh or a rabid beast or some nightmare creature straight from the pit of Hell.
So you turn, all the way around, and you back up against the wall, and you spread your arms out, exposing your breast and your belly and your balls, like nobody would—only you don’t have any choice.
(Except for telling yourself the truth.)
Out of the darkness it comes, taking on the solidity of flesh at last—and though the footfalls are gone the noises which fill your head are very loud indeed: a cacophony of slithering and scraping, a confusion of terrified heartbeats and whispered obscenities.
It doesn’t have talons or a chainsaw; it doesn’t have teeth or shears it doesn’t have hooks to pluck out your eyes or broken razor blades to shred your face.
All it has is a bottle; all it has is vitriol.
(You always see it coming; you always have time to anticipate; you always have time to…)
Don’t!
You shock yourself with the force of your silent exclamation, which bursts out of you as though you had no control over your own voice and your own thought.
You feel it, pure and intense and wholly irrational. You feel the fear, the panic, the horror.
You feel it! And you feel a paradoxical disappointment, that at last you’ve found a script which can get to you.
(A script? Is it a script?)
Its face, just for a moment or two, is astonishingly pretty: female, blue-eyed, and innocent. Its face is filled with fear, as though you’re the attacker, the monster, the horror from the shadows….
But when it throws the acid, its own face begins to dissolve and burn, its own features sizzle and smoke, its own eyes collapse like crushed grapes, its own mouth opens in a hopeless attempt to let out a scream….
Then the air around it seems to solidify, and you see that you’re looking in a minor….
And—just for an instant—you forget that you’re not a blue-eyed girl, fresh and uncorrupted….that you’re not such a sweet and pretty and spoilable creature….
Just for an instant, you believe the mirror instead of your own memory, instead of your own self-knowledge….
Seeing, after all, is believing, and that’s what you see….
And you can’t help it at all, because it’s her fear which rises up inside you, her terror which seizes and consumes you, and only because you are her, just for an instant, do you chicken out.
You find what you were searching for, determined not to find.
The lights come on. The canopy is already rolling back, as though you’re being newly-hatched from an egg. You step out, cursing. You feel that you’ve been tricked, and of course you have—but that’s all part of the game, isn’t it? Horror comes from shock, fear from surprise, and the only true test of courage is the utterly unexpected.
Pasco couldn’t believe it. In all the time he’d been playing the booths he’d never been panicked before. Despite all his determination to put himself into the scenarios, to experience the illusion as if it were for real, none of the scripts had ever got to him that way. He had been proud of that—proud of his own invulnerability. He hadn’t believed that the horrorshows could ever really test his nerve to destruction. And now…
How had the bastard booth known?
He took hold of himself. The booth couldn’t have known, and didn’t know. It was just one more script—a script which just happened to have particular significance for him. Maybe everyone had one particular script which got to them. Maybe those creaky old plane-crash scenarios the Mark Is had started out with had really scared the shit out of people who were afraid of flying. Maybe the sword-fight scenarios and the battle-tank scripts had claimed their fair share of victims. Maybe he’d allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security by his assumption that the Mark XIII was just like the X, the XI and the XII—just one more streetstalker scenario. Which of course, it was… except that this streetstalker was his own particular bete noire.
Mere coincidence? It had to be, hadn’t it?
Pasco was as healthily paranoid as the next man, but to suspect anything more than mere coincidence seemed ludicrous. For a moment, he continued toying with the notion that the whole thing had been some kind of practical joke. Maybe someone at M-M knew how fascinated he was by the horrorshows…maybe they knew full well that he would send out a bunch of SecDiv undercovers to hijack the latest model…maybe they had written the Mark XIII script just for him. But it wasn’t credible. A big org like M-M wouldn’t go to such lengths just to make a fool of someone like him.
“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, aloud. Luckily, there was no one around right now to witness his humiliation—he’d had to come out and play the thing as soon as it was unpacked because the techs would start taking the damn thing apart in the morning. M-M’s microelectronics were far enough ahead of GenTech’s to make all their new products worthy of instant and careful attention—even arcade games like horrorshow booths. No doubt M-M’s techs were just as hungry to get to grips with the products of GenTech’s superior genetic engineering techniques.
It wasn’t until he stood up, tiredly, that Pasco realized he was no longer alone. There was a man standing in the doorway of the dimly-lit room. It was Jensen—one of the SecDiv radio-men. Pasco’s heart fluttered, thinking that it might just be possible that the other guy had been there long enough to see him come out of the booth in a state of panic, but he suppressed the thought. The other man was studiously avoiding his gaze, looking anywhere but at him.
He fixed the newcomer with his bleakest basilisk stare, and
said: “What do you want, Jensen?”
“Sorry, Mr Pasco,” said the other politely. “I figured I’d find you here. News just came in from some Bio-Div field-station out San Antonio way—there’s been a leak. They had a bird handy, and sent it after the thief, but it didn’t come back. Shot down. Bio-Div want it kept quiet—the boss wants you to teach them the facts of life..”
“Aw, shit!” said Pasco, with feeling, before thinking better of it. Then, in a world-weary tone, he said: “The trouble with BioDiv is that they ain’t on the same freakin’ planet as the rest of us. What leaked, and how?”
“Not sure yet—but the guy out in the field is Doc Zarathustra. We’re still trying to contact him, and we probably won’t know what the raider got until Zarathustra can check his equipment. Could be expensive, though—the Doc’s tied up with a lot of top secret experimental stuff, and he’s the number one on our team. Could be a difficult job—you know what these scientists are like.”
“Too damn right,” said Pasco bitterly. “Freakin’ prima donna scientists think they run the freakin’ world. Can’t keep their own freakin’ files secure, but think they can tell us how to run our ops.”
Jensen shrugged. He was still looking over Pasco’s shoulder instead of meeting his eye. “It’s a bitch, all right. Is that a new kind of sensurround?”
“Yeah,” Pasco growled. “Horrorshow booth—new model. Want to try it?”
Jensen shook his head. “No time,” he said. “Not my kind of thing, anyhow. The road and the news broadcasts are scary enough for me. I heard we mounted some kind of raid on M-M while I was off-shift—I guess this is what we came away with, hey?”
“You got no business hearing things like that,” Pasco observed, without conviction. “It’s getting so SecDiv is as tight as a freakin’ sieve. No wonder BioDiv can’t hold on to its freakin’ data. We got a war going on here, y’know? World War Three is already on, and the only reason nobody has noticed is that the contenders are the corps instead of what passes for nation-states nowadays. Loose talk costs lives.”
“It looks like it was a nation-state which ripped off the Doc’s data,” said Jensen mildly, while studying his boots. “Our nation-state—the U. S. of A.”
Pasco contrived to scowl again in order to hide his surprise and his suspicion. “GenTech is our nation,” he said. “It’s our employer, our flag, our mother and our freakin’ father. The U.S. of A. would be just another enemy, just like Mitsu-Makema and Chromicon and Kid freakin’ Zero, if we didn’t own it. What makes you think the government was involved in this?”
Jensen shrugged his shoulders again. “They’re running checks on the guy who lit out with the leaked data. Seems that BioDiv didn’t check his credentials as thoroughly as they should have when he joined, way back in the eighties. Our hackers think he may have been one of Heston’s men—CIA, maybe. Looks like they put him in when they still had delusions of independence. Why he pulled himself out—I guess that’s for you to find out, if BioDiv will let you.”
Pasco hated interdepartmental politics. The worst thing about having been promoted was getting embroiled in the disputes between the sections. He still thought of himself as a field op—as a fighting force rather than a bureaucrat. He could tell that this was going to be a nasty job. He had never met the infamous Zarathustra, but he had heard plenty, and he knew that it wasn’t going to be easy taking orders from him as well as from his own boss.
“What’s the order of events?” he asked Jensen tiredly.
“As soon as they get Zarathustra they’ll bring him back in.By that time we ought to have figured out what leaked, what happened to the bird which chased the raider, and what our appropriate response should be. You’ll have to head up our operation—but first you’ll have to sell it to Zarathustra. You have to meet him when he comes in, and explain to him why we have to do whatever we have to do—then you have to collect your team and go do it. If the Doc gets pig-headed, the boss will back you up.”
Sure he will, thought Pasco. But in the meantime, who takes the flak? Who gets to be the freakin’ cannon-fodder? He put his fingers to the side of his face—the bad side—and remembered the curious climax to the horrorshow script, with its ironic mirror-imaging. SecDiv had taken him on because his face had a way of making his adversaries feel intimidated—now, it seemed, they were unleashing him against their own divisional rivals. The world in which he was forced by circumstance to operate was a very convoluted one, in which few things were as they seemed and there were always wheels within wheels.
“Okay,” he said to Jensen with a sigh. “I’m on my way.”
2
The child was by no means the ugliest that Carl Preston had seen lately, but it was nevertheless very disconcerting. It was three years old, or so its mother said, but it was as thin as a rake and hardly ably to walk or talk. The face was not particularly horrible—on a seventy-year-old man it would have seemed perfectly okay—but on the baby it was grotesquely out of place. He had learned to look at the real freaks with a steady eye, as if they were made-up monsters in a horrorshow, but this weird combination of ordinary appearances got to him somehow. It was as if the kid wasn’t a kid at all, but some kind of malevolent subhuman midget.
What if there are others? he wondered, not for the first time. What if there are ones which look just like ordinary kids, but aren’t—ones whose mutations are purely internal?
The mutants gave Carl the creeps, and he sometimes wished that the Doc had rebelled against the instruction to investigate them. He didn’t even like to be near them. Even so, when Judy took the infant out to the carrier, he went with her, leaving Doc Zarathustra to do the dickering alone. This one wasn’t going to come cheap—the word had got around, flying on the swift wings of rumour, that GenTech was laying out hard cash for freaky babies, and the mothers were getting increasingly determined to strike a good bargain.
When they had started out, Carl had been surprised by the lack of reluctance with which others sold their children—he had been clinging on to some old wives’ tale about mothers loving children no matter how loathsome they were. Now, he wondered how long it would be before people started trying to turn their healthy kids into grotesques in the hope of trading them in for jangle money. That was the way the world seemed to be going. It made Carl feel positively—but unrepentantly—old-fashioned.
The Doc came out, having done the business. The bioscientist didn’t look pleased—maybe he, too, had a trace of lingering sentimentality about him which made him feel sick every time he had difficulty negotiating his way through the minefield of a mother’s greed. It certainly wasn’t that he didn’t like parting with the money—Carl knew his boss better than that. The Doc was a very hard-headed person, but he genuinely didn’t give a shit about money. Carl respected that.
The day was a scorcher but Zarathustra’s blue eyes were cold, and his blond eyebrows were set in a frown. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, tersely, as Carl opened the carrier door for him.
The Doc always travelled in front, with Carl—he let Judy look after the kids until they were back in the lab, at which point they became numbered specimens in the great investigation, objects of fascination rather than revulsion.
Carl got in and started up, looking anxiously around for signs of trouble. The carrier had guns and armour, but it wasn’t built for serious combat. Carl was glad that the power of rumour was adequate to let the locals know just what kind of cargo this particular carrier had in back. They had done half a dozen trips through this particular NoGo shanty-town by now, and no one had tried to ambush them. For a GenTech vehicle with no escort that had to be a record. San Antonio itself was practically a Civil War zone, with the sixth- and seventh-generation teen gangs constantly fighting to hold their territory against new ims from Mexico; it could be dangerous even this far out.
“That’s a new kind, huh?” said Carl, hesitantly. He could never tell when it was safe to strike up a conversation with the Doc and when it wasn’t. So
metimes, the Doc would treat him like a human being—maybe even a friend—but other times he was made to feel as if he was only part of the decor. Lately, he’d been on the outside rather a lot.
“I’m not entirely sure it’s what I’m looking for,” confessed Zarathustra. “It could be just some form of accelerated progeria—odd, but accountable. I can’t take chances, though.”
Carl decided to chance his arm, thinking that the Doc’s hesitation over this case may have put him in a mood to talk about all his doubts.
“Are we anywhere nearer to figuring out what’s responsible for these mutations?” he asked. “Surely we have enough by now to start sorting out common factors.”
“The more we get,” said Zarathustra, sourly, “the more confused we get.”
“It’s not so surprising,” opined Carl. “The NoGos have become such hellholes, pollution-wise, that there must be thousands of variables to take into account, and there might be any number of culprits. A real puzzle.”
“You may be right,” said Zarathustra, absent-mindedly. “It may simply be a matter of having too many possible causes, and no way to sort them out.”
“But you don’t think so,” said Carl, stating the obvious. “You think there’s something new going on—something more sinister than chemical and radioactive waste.”
“Even if I knew what I thought,” said the scientist, “I couldn’t tell you. But as it happens, I don’t.”
“There’s been some talk about the laws of nature breaking down,” Carl observed, tentatively. “Some people say that it isn’t just America that’s going to hell in a handbasket but the whole damn universe.”
“That would make a lot of people feel better,” said Zarathustra, tiredly. “If what’s happening to the world is just a symptom of some ongoing cosmic catastrophe, then we don’t have to take the blame for anything and there’s no point in trying to put things right. But I don’t know exactly what’s meant—or could be meant—by the laws of nature breaking down. If it only means that some of the things we thought we knew for sure aren’t true after all, that’s okay; that I can take aboard. But if you mean all this new Millenarian stuff about evil’s empire bidding to take over the world before the messiah comes again, forget it—you know how I feel about that kind of stuff. You shouldn’t watch so much TV, Carl.”