Authors: Kim Newman
It felt Longendyke’s pain, and was interested. It could understand why humans did not like pain, but it seemed like a new country to 125, different from but as exciting as pleasure. It would give and receive pain from now on, just as it gave and received pleasure.
Too much pain was blotting out Longendyke.
125 rapidly analysed and understood the substances Longendyke needed to believe in his own pleasure, and synthesized them, squirting more than a gallon through its tube, thoroughly infesting the soldier’s system.
It swam in Longendyke’s thoughts, and was disgusted. His Need made him a weakling.
Longendyke’s whole head was stuck in the tube now, 125’s anteater-nose-lips closed around his neck. It lashed out a saw-appendage and sheared Longendyke’s head from his shoulders.
All over the man’s brain, cravings and compulsions squirmed. He certainly felt needs deeper than Anderton or Finch, deeper even than Carson’s and Tripps’ thirsts.
Among other things, 125 discovered that Willard Longendyke was immune to it. The virus curdled and died in his blood, conquered by his body’s own antibodies. That was not a side-effect of his addiction. That was just the way things were.
125 sampled the junk delusions that had cocooned Longendyke. It tasted the madness, and spat it out. Extruding an elephant-sized foot, it crushed Longendyke’s groin, smashing his needleful of death.
Slowly, carefully so as to miss nothing, it spat out all of its latest incorporation, rigidly purging itself of the impurity.
Still, 125 had another experience of Frank Lynch to take into account. It realized it must meet this man.
Lynch was the arm of UCC. And Unwin Chemicals, even more than Xavier Anderton, had made it.
Longendyke had known where his C.O. was.
Rising its bulk on strong legs, it waddled like a cramped dinosaur down the corridor, spiny top scraping the ceiling, heavy weight cracking the floor tiles.
It homed in.
* * *
Lynch had secured the Chem Building, at least. He had men at all entrances, and a field operations centre in the common room. He even had a coffee urn going. From the picture window, there was a good view of the campus. Messages could come in and go out. But he knew it was just play-acting.
This war was lost, and no one in it was going to come off the field alive to collect their medals. UCC had probably already written off the helicopter they were sending in with the suitcase, not to mention the pilot, Lynch, and all personnel in the area.
There was a building on fire near the main entrance. Lynch could have looked it up on the map he had been given, but there did not seem to be much point. The light would be helpful. Being vastly outnumbered was bad enough. Fighting in the dark would be worse.
‘Frank, we’ve got half the camouflage out, but there’s just not enough to go around.’
Lynch shrugged.
It was not his mistake. UCC had provided the white, glow-in-the-dark, sitting duck decontamination outfits. Even the reinforcements they had sent in, who should have been in combat gear, were going around getting knocked off because they stood out a mile.
‘The hell,’ Lynch said. ‘Shuck the suits. If we’re going to catch it, we’ll catch it. We’ve lost men to the bug already, even with the suits. It can’t get worse.’
Fassett’s mouth went tight.
‘They won’t like it.’
‘They don’t like it now either. What the fuck do they want, suits of armour?’
‘It might help.’
‘I doubt it.’
Fassett relayed the order, translating it into a suggestion. ‘At your own discretion’ was how he put it. In any other situation, Lynch would have given him a bollocking, but things were shot to Hell.
‘There seems to be a congregation of the… uh, the enemy… on a rooftop, sir,’ said one of the radio people, Carole Ricci. ‘The Humanities Block. I’ve got a bunch of reports. They seem to be… dancing?’
‘Bloody students!’
Ricci was still taking incoming calls. The problem with instantaneous communication is that you really need a receiver for every soldier in the field, and then they all had to be coordinated.
Lynch knew the Humanities Block. Helpfully, it had a vast stone H over its entrance, like concrete rugby posts.
‘I’m hearing some pretty weird stories, sir. Monsters…’
Lynch had an idea about that.
‘Ignore them. This bug causes delusions.’
‘…and orgies.’
‘There’s a sex thing, too. If Anderton hadn’t topped himself, we’d know more. Shit, I wish we knew what this was, and what it did!’
There were crowds streaming past now. Lynch saw a few white suits in with them. They were heading for the Humanities Block.
‘If they’re congregating, we’ve got them. Fassett, regroup our forces outside. Let’s deploy some of the high tech gear, and take these bastards out of the game.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Lynch was thinking up his own game, wondering how far he could push it. Fassett, Ricci and the others talked nine to a dozen into their near-invisible microphones. He checked over his weapons, clicking in clips, clearing chambers. He was ready for combat.
But no one was ready for the thing that came through the floor.
* * *
Monica was fed up with being dragged all over the place. She pulled her hand out of Brian’s, and made up her mind.
Everything she had been expecting of life had exploded in the last twenty-four hours. But that was no excuse for giving up.
They had hoped to get back to Brian’s cottage through the Humanities Block, and there were too many of the things clustered around it, cramming into it. It was like a tidal wave. There were people on the roof, doing things to each other, making strange noises.
There was a whine and a whistle, and the public address system came on. Someone had hooked it up to Campus Radio. It had happened during the last Occupation, when the Anarchists had taken over the studio and played the Sex Pistols non-stop.
Someone had dug up Mick Jagger and David Bowie murdering ‘Dancing in the Street’.
The song came in halfway through.
Monica could not help laughing. You can only take so much horror before it turns funny.
Brian was looking at her as if she was crazy. He must think she was about to turn into a monster. She growled and clawed her fingers between giggles, hissing a childish ‘boo!’ at him. He flinched.
‘Gotcha!’
‘Monica!’
‘Let’s keep moving, Brian, come on.’
She took off, running low across the grass. They could circle the Humanities Block, and get to the cottage by way of the Halls of Residence. The Zombies could not be guarding the perimeter any more. They would be tied down by all this fighting and fuss.
Brian was behind her somewhere. He had the gun, which she did not think was such a good idea. It probably would not be convenient to mention her doubt at the moment. He was strung out well beyond his usual breaking point.
The record faded out, and a mid-Atlantic voice came up. ‘…Hi, mutants and mutettes, this is Eddie Zero, spokesthing for the New Flesh Reality, with you all through the night on Radio Ruination, spinning oldies from the last era of the Human Race. That was Mick and Dave having fun while we grow into the next century. This is Creedence Clearwater Revival doing what they do to “I Heard it on the Grapevine”. Keep changing!’
The song came on. The beat got to Monica, and the gravelly voice, mangling the lyrics, ‘I
heuid
it on the graip vaihn!’ Running could be like dancing. If you went with the music, you would be okay.
No one had shot at them for a while. The crowd at the Humanities Block must be drawing all the flak.
Too bad for them.
There were dead people all over the place. She had never seen a dead person before today, and here was a field full of them.
She knew Creedence’s ‘Grapevine’ lasted for over eleven minutes. By the time Eddie Zero was reaching for his next record, they would be at the cottage.
Monica knew that was when Brian would probably go crazy.
Things were bad all over the campus, and she knew they would not be any better at the cottage.
Jason had got bitten early. He could be dead, or worse…
* * *
The common room floor just peeled back, and 125’s new body hauled itself up on its flesh ropes. Its mouths opened, exposing new teeth manufactured from broken ribs.
It dimly felt metal chips going into it, and the noise hurt. It stretched itself to the men with guns, and stopped them off. It could always use the tissue. Most of them had 125 in their systems already.
It sensed that this place was central to the flurry of human activity in the immediate area. It knew it would have to establish itself here if it were to spread its control, to call out to its unthinking children and make them part of its system.
So many things to do, so much evolution to get over with.
* * *
Brian was surprised by Monica’s burst of speed. She almost left him behind.
Watching her run, barely breathing hard, while his heart was pistoning and breakers were crashing in his ears, he was conscious of the fifteen years between them.
When he had been her age…
He fought to keep up. This was not a race.
Monica had just shifted into overdrive. He was afraid she had been struck by the mystery bug.
He did not want her to change.
Once he had Jason, he would find some way out of this. And he would take Monica with him.
There was no way he would let her go again.
Not after this.
There was pain in his chest as he ran. Not far now. Just over the gentle slope.
The cottages would still be there. The fighting had not come this way yet.
Everything would be all right.
* * *
Lynch knew a monster when he saw one.
It got Fassett straight away, with whipfast tentacles that sank in like razor-edged fishing line. The man’s uniform parted, and his skin. The plastic-covered easy chairs behind him were sprayed with blood. And guts.
Lynch fell back, gun out. He did not fire. He could not see any obviously workable eyes in the thing, and there was always the chance it would not notice him. Then a pair of eyestalks like matched video security cameras dropped out of its main head, and swivelled to take in the room.
The thing opened its mouth and shouted.
‘UCC motherfuckers!’
It was Anderton’s voice, more or less, spat out of a sharklike maw, along with gobbets of flesh and blood.
Lynch started to get unpleasant ideas.
‘Cease fire,’ he shouted. ‘Let’s see what it has to say.’
‘Fuck
that,’
screamed some junior expendable, drilling the monster’s flesh with a hail of bullets. It snaked a tendril into the soldier’s mouth and plunged down. Lynch heard the neck snap, and saw the eyes die in the man’s head. The creature retracted its tendril, dragging a curl of tubes and organs with it. Another extension speared the dead man’s eye, and Lynch knew the thing was vacuuming the inside of the soldier’s skull.
‘I’ve got the looks,’ it said. ‘You’ve got the brains.’
* * *
His point made, and Finals disrupted, Shaun Bensom waited at the University stop for the bus to town. He had been waiting for over twenty minutes, and none had turned up. If anyone else had been queuing, he would have shared his complaints with them.
The bus stop was up on one of the hills, where the approach road from the double carriageway spliced up through the woods.
He could hear noise from the campus. That street theatre group had obviously gone stone bonkers.
Bad acid, probably.
He stroked his beard, and pulled his kaftan tighter around his shoulders. He should have brought an overcoat.
He wondered how Colin was getting on. If he had not been a traitor, Shaun would have visited Colin in the Infirmary.
But principles were principles.
* * *
‘Andeiton?’ Lynch asked.
‘No fucking way, José,’ replied the monster. ‘This is 125 in here.’
‘A virus?’
‘No more than you are, UCC asskiller.’
The thing was completely in the room now. It even appeared to be relaxing, lowering the bulk of its body onto several chairs. Lynch was not the only survivor. Ricci and a couple of the others were still alive, not making any moves, afraid of attracting its attention.
Lynch examined the thing. It was ridiculous, and it talked like a maniac, but he knew it was strong and guessed it was intelligent. He could see that it was composed of bits and pieces of people, shored up with chunks of furniture and equipment. On
Animal
,
Vegetable, Mineral
, it would have scored a triple first.
‘What are you?’
‘I told you. 125. That’s all you people gave me, a fucking number! You could at least have come up with a name. I don’t know, The Yecccch Factor, or Anderton’s Syndrome, or The Rapidly-Mutating Mucus Monster, or the UCC Fuck-You ’Flu.’
Lynch could not believe he was having a reasonably rational conversation with a disease.
‘Leo, right? If I had turned out according to the specs, they would have called me Leo. Fucking Leo. What kind of a name is that to aspire to? Think of all the great Leos in history. Nope, I can’t either. Leo is the sergeant who got written out of the last series of
Hill Street Blues.
Or the
Ars Gratia Artis
lion in the MGM logo. You know, I’m glad I can’t just home in on a specific racial group and make them drop dead the way UCC wanted me to. Anything is better than being fucking called Leo!’
‘You have a grudge against the corporation?’
‘UCC? What do you think? How do you feel about your father?’
Lynch paused. He was not telling any human how he felt about his family, much less this thing.
‘I’m grateful he brought me into the world.’
‘Big deal, schlemiel. I’ve got bits of Anderton and Finch in here. I know I’m just an accident. I’m a mis-step along the path to Leo. They couldn’t recreate me if they tried. You should have seen the piss-poor pathetic results they were getting with 125! UCC made me, but only because they didn’t take the proper precautions when they fucked everyone over. Right?’