The Puppeteer King

by Chris Ward

  By the time his parents arrived, the Baikal Oasis was nearly three hundred miles wide, and while its growth had slowed to around a mile per year, there was still plenty of work to be found on one of the farms burgeoning with oversized produce.

  Scientists had done tests; the economic worth outweighed the possible health risks, so the region began to trade with companies all across the country. As for the residents, the effects of the radiation would only begin to appear in the young.

  So large that his birth killed his mother despite modern medical care, Slav grew so big so quickly that his value as a farm worker made it impossible for his father to disown him. They worked side by side in the fields, Slav lifting and carrying double his father’s loads even while the old man berated and abused him. By the age of ten his strength was sought after, and the abuse had stopped. Already taller than his father, the hard years of growing up in the fields had given him an edge that children of his age never had. He wasn’t a man to be crossed.

  By sixteen he had tired of farm work and moved on, despite his ailing father’s protests. Nearly seven feet and two hundred kilograms, Slav hadn’t even finished growing but was already a moving, working wall of muscle.

  He was also developing a skin condition. By fifteen he had been working mostly in the early mornings or at night to avoid the sun, and while he wasn’t alone in suffering the acute, progressive albinism that seemed to be slowly taking hold, he had no family support and few friends. His decision to head for cooler northern areas outside the boundaries of the Baikal Oasis was his and his alone. No one could dissuade him.

  For a couple of years he did manual labour, mostly as road maintenance performed during the early mornings or evenings when traffic was less busy. Eventually he met someone who saw his size as dollar signs, and he began a career as a wrestler, working the underground scene in the northern cities, throwing and grappling other huge men for the delight of small but wealthy crowds of gamblers in abandoned factories and basements. He had thought about going into boxing—his size would have made him a contender as a heavyweight—but he was too slow and lacked the finesse required to be successful. Wrestling, with its physicality and reliance on brute strength, was his ideal.

  For several years Slav made himself and several promoters moderately wealthy, but with all rises come falls, and Slav’s came after a betting syndicate tried to get him to fix a match. He knew about it ahead of time, but in anger at his opponent’s refusal to put up a decent fight, Slav got out of control.

  Instead of letting his opponent tap out of a hold, he snapped his opponent’s neck.

  People lost money, Slav lost friends, and the underground wrestling world lost its anonymity in the wake of a murder investigation. Lawyers got Slav off on a manslaughter charge carrying just a community service sentence, but no one would step back into the ring with him. His career was over, and there were still people out looking for their money or a slice of human meat in its place.

  He left, heading west. Bypassing Moscow, he ended up in Eastern Europe, back in construction. For a few years in the cool climes, working mostly at night on housing projects, things went well. He saved a little money. Daylight became a thing of the past, and he found creams that would protect his skin when he needed to venture out before nightfall.

  He was almost happy.

  A new manager tried to move him from the night shift to the day shift, seemingly out of spite. He was threatened with his job if he failed to comply, but he stood his ground. The manager, a big man himself, started to push Slav around. The gentle giant reputation he had forged for himself while working construction was shed in one violent moment as he broke his manager’s neck.

  Knowing they would look for him in the north, he fled south. Someone of his size would always arouse suspicion so he laid low for as long as he could. Big men out of the Baikal Oasis region weren’t uncommon, but with each new step he took his backstory changed. He changed his name, grew his hair out, hid his true size with a stoop and baggy clothing. As a disguise it was poor, but it bought him some time.

  By the time he reached Spain, his money was almost gone, but in a country split by political issues between the ruling south and the independence-seeking north, people would be distracted.

  Taking a night job in construction made him traceable. Instead he decided to do the last thing anyone looking for him might expect: stand out in the open with a sign over his head advertising his true nature. Such an obvious statement would be ridiculed, and that ridicule might be thick enough to provide the smokescreen he needed.

  He had never thought it would work, but so far so good. And the money was excellent just for standing around all evening. Avoiding the midday sun, working in the shadows and applying a healthy layer of body paint helped protect his skin, and he began to think he might make this work.

  Then something happened to undermine everything.

  #

  While most of the union members had approved of their choice of actions, there were only five of them directly involved in the sting. Their brave leader, Peter Salvadore, had chickened out, but his goofball sidekick Merlin had been game. He had been disinclined to get his hands dirty though, so was acting as lookout. Dave Balls had jumped at the chance to be involved, as he had more reason for wanting payback than most. With his clumsy, flabby frame, however, he would be useless in a fight, so he was acting as bait.

  The other two involved were a tall Frenchman named Laurent, whose Human Caterpillar routine was a masterpiece of muscular contortion. The other, a German called Edgar, was a retired professional middleweight boxer who delighted crowds by doing a Rocky-esque training montage set to music.

  According to Merlin, the spider was moving slowly up Las Ramblas in their direction. They had chosen a dark side street in which to wait, behind a thicket of trees and a line of shuttered trinket stalls that cut off the view from the cafés on the other side of the street. Directly behind them was a building that had been closed for renovation. Its windows had been boarded up, its door padlocked. Standing on the roof was a solitary crane, large enough to haul loads of bricks up to the roof.

  Slav’s construction experience had turned it to their advantage with ease.

  Over the last few days they had been watching the spider’s movements carefully. It always appeared sometime after ten p.m., then made its way slowly up Las Ramblas, before disappearing back into the Raval Quarter just before the street opened up into Placa de Catalunya. During its nightly promenade it would scare a couple of dozen groups of people, sometimes even rushing at those sitting in the open fronts of cafés, causing them to knock over their drinks or even their chairs.

  Its actions were designed to stir up anger, and a couple of times it had been chased by irate groups of young men. On each occasion, however, it had bolted with insane speed, vanishing into alleyways or tiny side streets. The bat guy they had seen on other occasions could fly in a way they hadn’t been able to figure out, but the spider seemed able to shrink itself into fissures barely big enough for a cat to pass, as if its whole body was a construction of origami, to be folded flat when necessary.

  They would get one chance to catch it. It wouldn’t fall for the trap twice.

  Slav waved Dave Balls forward, and the idiot dressed as a watermelon stumbled out of an alleyway and slumped to the ground in front of the abandoned building. Balls had actually been drinking, partly to get into character and partly to suppress his nerves. It was a situation doomed to failure, but there had been no other way he would do it. Still, Slav considered Dave Balls expendable.

  Slav squinted into the gloom, looking for the ropes taped back against the wall of the building, hopefully hidden from suspicion. Up on the roof, Laurent’s face briefly appeared, a white orb caught by the glow of a streetlamp further down Las Ramblas, then it was gone.

  Beyond the trees to the south, someone screamed.

  The spider came into view, scuttling along on its hairy black legs, its body at least two feet off th
e ground. Slav, despite his size, shivered. It looked so authentic it could have come from a horror movie, and how anyone, even drunk, could bear to get close to it was a mystery. His first instinct was to run and not look back.

  Balls, sitting on the ground, was openly crying. He waved a hand towards the spider and blubbed something about wanting to ride it. The spider obligingly, scuttled in his direction.

  Slav’s fingers tensed over the rope. Snaking down from the top of the building, they had hidden it in the trees. To a casual onlooker it would have looked like an electric cable sourcing one of the trinket stalls.

  The spider reached Balls and rocked back on its four hind legs. The other four rose high in the air. Slav waited, hoping it would take another step forward, to get into prime position.

  ‘¿Centavo por tus pensamientos?’

  Slav frowned. The voice had come from the spider, a thin, scratchy whine like sandpaper scraped across metal. Slav’s Spanish was poor but he understood enough of the words to recognise the expression. There was a similar one in most languages.

  “A penny for your thoughts?”

  He began to haul down on the rope, working the pulley attached to the crane sitting on top of the building. A net they had tapped loosely to the ground and concealed with a thin layer of sand rose up around the spider and Dave Balls together, pulling them into a reluctant embrace. Slav grimaced as Balls started to scream. He was supposed to have rolled out of the range of the net, but there was no time.

  The spider squealed as the net rose up the side of the building. As it reached the third storey one leg got free, pushing through a hole in the net. It stabbed and struggled, trying to tear its way out.

  Slav’s arms were beginning to ache as the net came level with the roof and bounced over the lip and out of sight. For a moment he caught a glimpse of Laurent and Edgar, mallets in hand, lifted and ready to begin the demolition.

  Slav didn’t hesitate. He bounded across the street and down a thin alley between this building and the one standing adjacent, an abandoned apartment block. At the back he slipped through a door they had broken open beforehand and hurried up the dusty stone steps.

  When he burst huffing and gasping out on to the roof the fight was in full flow. The spider was deflecting the blows from the weapons as it tried to break out of the net. With four of its eight legs poking out of holes it had made in the net it was beginning to gain some ascendancy.

  Slav grabbed a huge lug hammer he had left by the door leading out on to the roof. His arms were still sore from working the pulley, but adrenaline was surging through his muscles. Whatever elaborate costume the spider was, there was a man inside it, and a man could fucking die.

  White rage filled his heart as he lifted the hammer and swung it hard towards the spider’s midriff. He waited for the crunch of bones. In his wrestling days he’d often stepped out of the ring covered in someone else’s blood with a grin on his face. Causing pain was addictive.

  ‘Watch out!’ Laurent shouted. Slav groaned, his arms vibrating, as the hammer struck metal and bounced backwards.

  ‘It’s a robot!’ Edgar shouted.

  The spider was still fighting to escape, legs thrusting and stabbing towards them. Slav peered into the darkness of its body and saw a pale shape peering out. It looked like a human face, but the skin was bleached, dead. In some ways it reminded him of his own albino skin, but this was worse, like the skin of a drowned corpse.

  ‘Piece by piece!’ he shouted. ‘Break the bastard up!’

  The clang of metal rang out across the rooftops. Pieces of bloody fur scattered around them as the blows rained down. Several times the spider’s legs darted out, leaving deep lacerations on Slav’s legs and chest, but he ignored them, trying to get close enough to strike at the creature’s body, at the pale face he had seen peering out.

  Then Laurent screamed, and as Slav turned towards the other man the spider slipped out of the remains of the net like a tide of blackness. Slav landed one last huge swing of the hammer on its body, but then it was gone, dropping over the edge of the roof out of sight.

  Slav turned to give chase, but his strength was gone. He dropped the hammer at his feet and looked back at the others. Edgar was kneeling beside Laurent. Part of a needle-like leg protruded from his chest like a knife that had grown fur.

  ‘He needs a hospital,’ Edgar said.

  Laurent clamped his hands over the piece of leg and it slipped free. Blood quickly soaked down through his shirt.

  ‘Get moving with him,’ Slav said. ‘Tell them it was a mugging.’

  Edgar began to help a limping Laurent back towards the stairs. Slav watched them go, the pain of his own injuries becoming more pronounced as the adrenalin faded. His vest was soaked in blood, but none of his injuries were serious. He would need to clean them to avoid infection, but he’d received worse in the wrestling ring.

  The net lay slumped like a dead thing in the shadows below a raised border wall around the edge of the rooftop. Slav pulled it away from the shape underneath, wincing as he did so at the sight of the bloody corpse lying there.

  Dave Balls had been punctured by a dozen or more knife-like wounds, the shredded remains of his melon costume turned from light green to dark red. His face, drained of blood, was almost as pale as Slav’s own.

  Slav sighed and threw the net back over him, wondering how much bigger this problem might become. Dave Balls had become the first victim in the battle for Las Ramblas, but as Slav turned away and went to the edge of the roof, from where he could see the brightly lit street arcing down towards the port, he had a feeling Balls wouldn’t be the last.

  23

  Bad days brewing

  The thundering knock pulled Peter up out of his sleep like a corpse being dragged out of a grave. He’d drunk too much wine again, and the alcohol still had a hold of him, its greasy fingers pressing firmly into his skull, leaving his vision blurry. He thumped his head on a doorframe as he staggered towards the door, hands reaching blindly out for the light switch.

  It had to be the police again. He should have known he hadn’t seen the last of them. He pulled the door wide and started to beckon the caller in.

  Slav the Giant pushed through the door into the room. He tossed something on the floor and kicked it in Peter’s direction.

  Peter had no time to be either afraid or confused. His barely sober eyes read the situation as it was without prejudice: an enormous blood-soaked Russian was standing in front of him. A furry black stick lay on the ground in between.

  ‘We caught the spider,’ Slav said, his voice a huge, Russian-accented boom. ‘I thought you might like to know.’

  Peter was slowly coming to his senses. They had announced their mission to him at the last union meeting, but he had neither approved nor disapproved of it. With the police watching him he hadn’t wanted to be involved, but nor had he felt it necessary to refuse their right to stand up against these things that were invading their territory. Slav, though, looked like he’d just come back from war.

  ‘Was anyone hurt?’ Peter said, feeling stupid the moment the words were off his tongue.

  ‘Everyone,’ Slav said. ‘Dave Balls is dead. Edgar has taken Laurent to hospital. He might die too.’

  Peter felt his knees go weak. ‘Dave? Laurent?’ he couldn’t think of anything to say other than parrot the names like a dumb kid learning poetry by rote.

  ‘The spider escaped. We took just this part of it. Pick it up.’

  ‘I don’t know that—’

  ‘Pick it up!’

  Slav’s fists clenched. His arms were scored by deep lacerations like a gladiator who had been whipped, but his muscles still bulged with menace. His burning red eyes bled hatred.

  Peter knelt down and picked up the furry stick. A shudder ran up his arm as he turned it over, realizing what it was.

  Part of the spider’s leg.

  ‘One man dead and another who might yet die, and all we get is this,’ Slav said. ‘Look at it. Tell
me what it is.’

  The fur felt strangely synthetic, like plastic carpeting, but when he turned it over he gasped and almost dropped it. He probably would have had his fear of Slav not been even greater.

  A metal rod stuck out of a glistening compressive substance, which had been wrapped in the synthetic fur. When he touched it his finger came away with a brown-red stain on the tip.

  It was like congealed blood, but it couldn’t be.

  ‘We thought it was a robot the way it was acting. Something remote controlled. We figured if we smashed it up we were just breaking some rich bastard’s toy.’

  ‘This is human tissue,’ Peter said.

  ‘There was a man in there,’ Slav said. ‘I saw his face.’

  ‘Are you sure? This doesn’t make sense.’

  Slav pointed at the piece of the spider’s leg. ‘You’re our leader, you figure this out.’ He turned and headed for the door, but as he got there he stopped and looked back. ‘Before we’re all killed.’

  As the door closed, Peter looked down at the thing in his hands, then suddenly, as if waking from a trance, he realised what he was holding and tossed it away across the room as a shiver ran through him.

  He pulled out a chair and sat down, trying to make sense of things. Dave Balls was dead. Laurent was hurt, while Slav and presumably Edgar had got off with relatively light injuries. In exchange, in attempting to destroy what they had thought was a machine, they had discovered some kind of biotechnology.