Golgotha Run (12 page)

If this was so, it was particularly unfortunate that the path of intended
escape lead directly to the House of Autoerotic Strangulation, one of the
Mimsey World’s most popular and crowded attractions.

And from this point on the carnage had to be seen to be believed.

And you can see it now for only $79.99, on
When Vacations Go Bad: Extreme
.
Press your red interactive button now.

Lenny and Karl, the SAPS paramedics, had truly died and gone to heaven.
Phrases involving the words
happy
,
pigs
and
shit
came to mind—though
it was probably more akin to a pair of vampires after an explosion in a
slaughterhouse.

They had landed their Meat Wagon on the scene to find a number of SAPS units
already there, but that didn’t matter. There were enough pickings for
everybody. Forget about making the quota—they were well into bonuses and
overtime here.

Frantic happy minutes were spent filling up their storage units to capacity.
They didn’t even need to fill the cracks with limbs or other organs.

Market conditions, at the moment, were for some reason placing a premium on
human heads—and there were more than enough of these available without so
much as looking at the other small-time stuff twice.

Possibly they had become a little delirious, high on the fact of this totally
unexpected and lucrative windfall, but when Karl had suggested checking out
the House of Autoerotic Strangulation, Lenny had not argued too much.

“Code twenty-three,” Karl had said. “That means a Classified Test Subject on
the loose from one of the Big Guys. I never seen anything like that. I bet it’d be a fuckin’ sight to see.”

“Yeah, right, Karl,” Lenny had said. “If we lived long enough to fuckin’
tell
about it.”

“We won’t get close or anything,” Karl had assured him. “Close enough to get a
look and then we just duck the fuck out.”

He became thoughtful.

“You never know, though. Maybe it’s filled up on whatever it eats. Maybe we
could get a chance to pull it down ourselves. I can think of lots the Big Guys
could do for two guys who manage to pull it down.”

At the time it had seemed, if not a plan, then at least something worth
checking out just to see if it might be possible. Now, in the reeking chamber
that had once been the House of Strangulation, Lenny just didn’t think so.

Lenny’s working life didn’t lend itself much to squeamish-ness, but the
current circumstances were definitely heading into the country of the too
much.

Possibly it was all the evidence of what the hanging bodies, those who had not
managed to join the mass exodus on the arrival of the Code 23, had been about
before they died.

The basic purpose of the chamber had precluded bright lighting in the first
place; now even the blacklights ‘were out. In the foetid darkness, Lenny
half-expected to hear the rasp and rumble of some Great Beast’s breath.

He’d have preferred that to the clink of chains in what was otherwise silence,
come to think of it. At least that might give some clue as to what was lurking
in the dark, and where.

He realised that he lad lost contact with Karl.

“Karl?” he rasped, casting about with his SAP-issue flashlight. Flashes of
variously depending bodies catching the beam. Nothing more.

Then, off to one side—and literally in the space of half a second—the
sound of something scything through flesh, the
clunch-clunch-clunch
of
impossibly busy mastication, and then dead silence again.

Whatever had just happened, had happened too fast for Lenny’s mind to process.

“Karl?” he called again, still casting somewhat bemusedly around with the
flashlight.

Something bony and razor-sharp swung in out of the darkness. Before it lopped
his head clean off, Lenny caught the impression that it seemed to be attached
to a tube of fleshy and possibly living matter.

Lenny’s body spasmed and keeled over, the head spinning off into the dark, to
rebound off a chain and fetch up wedged against one of the hanging bodies in a
manner that would have almost certainly startled the owner of it, had they
been alive.

All of this had happened so suddenly, though, that it was some time before the
impulses in his brain shut completely down. Thus, with the last of his dying
perceptions, he was able to perceive the sudden flash of alien light from
nearby, the subsonic-loaded roar of something in pain and the thump of
something big hitting the ground.

He was able to hear the cheerful, female voice saying: “You see what I mean,
Masterton? I told you it was a good idea to arrange things so some of the dumb
SAPs went in first.”

… And we’re outside (I don’t know how we got here), shot from the
geodesies to the gravepits, and she’s leading me, sylph-like now, albified.
She’s shucking non-essentials left and centre as she hauls me through the
mud and ruptured coffins, past the thieves new-gutted hanging from their
ropes; past the shamen with their mortified and wormy hearts. The schimiraras
an th’ tomajawks an knifs with grey hairs stick to the heft. She’s
positively glowing.

You made this, she’s telling me. Do you see? You made it and you own it and it’s yours.

I slipped on something (momentarily). Ointment made from monkshood, nightshade, hemlock blended with the fat of children. They use it, apparently, to fly.

She dips a wafer in the stringy half-clotted mess (it’s something else, now, and something not entirely pleasant) and proffers it (I’m kneeling, now, before her; begging for something that I cannot now recall). The monkey still hanging from my neck, enraged, attempts to snatch it away.

She avoids the little clutching hands. Looks down on me. You really don’t, she says. You have no idea. You made yourself forget.

Her fingers taste of earth and shit and chemicals as she shoves them into my mouth, and works it open, and at last administers the eight-pointed communion wafer.

“The process of living,” said Masterton with relaxed and somewhat weaselly
smugness, “is one of dynamic recursion. We do all this crap, all manner of
crap, and like as not it comes to nothing and we just end up back where we
started.”

Eddie Kalish scowled around himself at the Factory medical-centre room.

Everything was as he had left it, save that Laura Palmer’s blood had been
cleaned from the wall—and for the flexible yet stout woven polycarbon
straps, around his forearms and shins, that now secured him to the frame of
the bed.

“Screw you,” he said. Whatever the Zarathustra processes had done for him, in
this form at least, they hadn’t made him strong enough to break loose from
woven polycarbon straps.

“And the wit just keeps on scintillating,” Masterton said, still with that
same shit-eating grin.

“Imagine it as similar to the processes of any other life, if it makes you at
all happier,” he continued. People wake up, they do stuff and then they go to
sleep again. Wake up, do stuff and go to sleep all over again. We just run
through the iterations over and over again, with minor variations, until we
get to the point where we’re doing things more-or-less right. Like that
computer program about an ant, or whatever it is, that blunders around
erratically for a while and then starts progressing on a line.

“Now, are you finally going to stop thrashing around and screaming abuse and
injuring yourself long enough so I can give you the true skinny? It really
won’t take that long, and at the moment you’re just wasting everybody’s time,
including your own.”

Eddie considered this. When he had first woken up—again—here in the
Factory an indeterminate number of days before, the knowledge of his
recapture, together with disjointed half-memories of what he had done in the
interim, had alternately plunged him into hysteria and catatonic shock. The
latter, of course, being exacerbated by an increased regimen of anaesthetic
hypos.

Things had not exactly been improved by the fact that Masterton had insisted on
showing him, in more lucid moments, securicam footage of the events that had
occurred out in the No-Go and the
Mimsey World of Adventure.

The thing that Eddie Kalish had turned into. The things that he had done.

Now it seemed that, temporarily at least, the sheer hysteria had burned itself
out. It was time to start thinking again. Time to think in terms of
formulating a plan. And for that Eddie needed hard information.

“So why don’t you tell me all about it?” he said. “Pretty please, with sugar
and shit on top?”

“Screw you,” said Masterton, without apparent rancour. “First thing I gotta
tell you—which you probably worked out yourself already—as that as a
part of the Zarathustra process we’ve been electromagnetically pulse-pumping
data into your head. Uploading you with all manner of useful info, including
an enhanced vocabulary—and hard though it is to imagine, it’s pretty much
working. What’s a
Benedicta?
”

“An angel-girl,” said Eddie, automatically. “The sort of girl who, when you
see her for the first time, she’s like some evidence of God. Baudelaire wrote
a prose poem about it—“

“And there you go,” said Masterton. “You didn’t get it right, but it was a
reasonable guess, and a while back you couldn’t read the caption under a
Hustler
cartoon without moving your lips. And I’ll bet you dollars to day-old dogshit you never even heard of Baudelaire.”

Eddie thought about it. “What good does me knowing about Baudelaire do?”

“Cause we’re turning you into a fag, all right?” Masterton shrugged. “It
doesn’t have to mean anything, and a lot of it’s just random. The more you
know, the more you have to think
with
, you know? Bang it around into new
shapes in your head.

“Anyhoo. The process messes with your dream-imagery as the brain tries to sort
it all out—but you’ll have noticed how your dreams are getting
seriously
out of whack, you know what I mean?”

Masterton moved around the bed forcing Eddie to strain his neck to keep him in
sight.

“If you sat down and tried,” Masterton continued, “knowing all the stuff that
we’re streaming you, knowing the stuff that happened in your life, there’s
still shit coming in from somewhere entirely
else
. Information there’s no
possible way you should know. Some whole other world.

“That’s because you’re part of an experimental project, classified on
absolutely the highest level. The people you killed in the sex-park, they’d be
dead anyway now if you hadn’t killed them. As are maybe a couple of hundred
who caught direct sight of you and survived.”

The enormity of this took some little while to sink in to Eddie. “How can
you…” he managed at last.

“We threw in a lot of wet-team resources and didn’t care if it got messy,”
said Masterton, artfully failing to get the point. “You know, in an extremely
prejudicial sort of way. We doctored the microcam-evidence, too, to remove
anything distinctive or identifiable about you, even in your transformed
state. Any detail that might possibly trace you back to us.

“And speaking of which: the point of the programme, so far as you and your
dreams are concerned, is that we’ve added a certain… extra little something
to your Zarathustra mix. From a whole other source. And it’s to do with the
way the world’s been getting weird these last few decades.”

“You don’t have to tell me about the world getting weird,” said Eddie, more or
less for the sake of something to say.

“Oh, I don’t mean just the low-grade madness you’d have encountered back in
Cracker Ridge, New Mexico, or wherever the hell it was,” said Masterton.
“There’s stuff happening out there now that makes the shit that happened to
Des Moines look sick.

“The big flip-over happened sometime around the turn of the millennium—I
mean, before that, you could take a through-line through history and with a
bit of work, and rather like dreams, you could see how it all sorta fit
together and
worked
even if only with hindsight.

“That just doesn’t fly any more, on anything other than a limited and local
basis. Things are becoming discontinuous—like the informational Singularity they predicted we’d be living in as far
back as 1972, but bleeding into the physical and actual level. Reality-glitches, temporal-perception-glitches, mass-hallucinations.” Masterton
sighed. “Ask anybody who knows, they’ll give you a different take. A different
explanation for it. Contact with alien entities, or extradimensional entities,
has disrupted the world on a fundamental level—or human perceptions of it,
which pretty much amounts to the same thing so far as humans are concerned.”

Masterton moved back around to the other side of the bed. Eddie gave up on
trying to keep him in sight and stared at the ceiling instead.

“Or maybe we’re seeing the first evidence of time-travel, the first wave of
contact from the future impacting on the timeline. A bunch of the more
fundamentalist whackos are convinced that we’re just living in the Last Days,
with the Maw of Hell opening up and demons coming through to clear the way for
the Great Beast…”

“So what’s your theory?” Eddie asked.

“What?” said Masterton.

“What do
you
think is really happening to the world? You know, personally.”

“Well, you know, personally I think it’s to do with four-dimensional space,”
said Masterton. A little defensively, Eddie thought. “The three-dimensional
construct we perceive of as Space is falling through the fourth dimension
of Time—that’s why travelling through time doesn’t take any actual
effort
,
yeah? Thing is, we’re not just travelling through time at a second-per-second, we’re
accelerating
at a second-per-second-per-second.

“Things are speeding up as we come closer to whatever temporally-gravitational
source we’re falling towards and we splash like a watermelon thrown off a
compound-block. The cracks are beginning to show. Or maybe we’ve smacked into
something on the way down…”