Golgotha Run (9 page)

The initial effects had been quite impressive to say the least. The pores of
every human body opened like industrial vents and began pumping out a sludge
and spray of deconstructed pathogen-components and accumulated toxins.

Foreign bodies like artificial hearts, hips or small items lodged in some
inextricable location as a child were physically
ejected,
often at
velocities of several thousand metres per second. There were cases, in
particularly crowded situations, of some largish hunk of matter being
fired
into someone else, ejected in its turn to hit some other body and the process
continuing on for up to an hour.

Old scars and fresh wounds healed themselves in a matter of seconds. Calloused
tissue went, too, being the product, effectively, of cumulative
minor injury—with the result that fingertips and the soles of feet ended up as soft and
pink as those of a baby. The Rapture Bug would counter further damage to this
otherwise vulnerable new flesh, of course—though unfortunately without
suppressing the pain reflex.

The question of biological organ transplants had been somewhat problematic, on
the basis that the Rapture Bug was, in the end, something of a misnomer. It
did not, as such, resurrect the dead; it merely transformed the living into
something effectively immortal and invulnerable.

Hearts, livers, lungs and so forth with a dissimilar genetic coding from their
hosts were ejected and replaced, but being living humanoid matter in their own
right couldn’t die. The “homing” mechanisms of the attendent to the Bug meant
that they would gravitate together with the other such items transplanted from
the original donor. Piles of living offal, sitting there forlornly and without
the ability to regenerate further.

The primary biological transformations that made sexual reproduction instantly
obsolete, among the good citizens of Des Moines, had occurred with the same
speed as the regeneration of original hearts and lungs and renal systems…
with the result that a lot of those actively engaged in copulation at the time
ended up being catapulted across the room. Pregnancies spontaneously aborted,
the reaction driving several thousand sudden mothers into the air to bury
their heads in any available ceiling.

Fortunately, as coherent living humanoid matter, the offspring came under the
remit of the Bug and would survive to grow, just as those children whose
entrance into the world had been slightly less dramatic.

Twins, though, were and are the worst known cases on record. Or triplets, or
quads… those separate human beings, in any case, sharing an entirely similar
DNA pattern-signature. With them, the “homing” mechanisms of the Event
operated with a vengeance…

And better, Eddie thought, to forget about those shrieking, boiling,
continually exploding and imploding lumps of matter that were the end result
of two, or three, or any number of human-sized objects trying to occupy a
single human space. Better to forget the fact that, for all of it, they were
still by all accounts alive. The enhanced insight, the thing inside that let
him pull the real meaning out of stories, chose this moment to cut in.

Hadn’t it been lucky, Eddie thought that GenTech had been right on hand to
throw up containment when the Rapture bug, whatever it was, had hit Des
Moines?

Wasn’t it just so
fortunate
that this Professor Zarathustra had been able to
reverse-engineer, tone down, tweak and reproduce the effect in a manner that
was (a) useful to GenTech itself, and (b) resulted in a rejuvenation product
that every rich old scumbag under the sun would be falling over themselves to
buy.

It couldn’t have worked out better if GenTech itself had loosed the Bug in its
prototypically virulent state, using the unfortunate citizens of Des Moines as
experimental subjects…

Eddie decided that he’d rather like to learn a bit more about GenTech aims. He
was only following Masterton’s orders, after all.

A few moments later he had stumbled on the command-codes for the various
surveillance cameras dotted around the corridor-complex that Trix Desoto had
referred to as the Factory.

There was a security station with its complement of armed guards.

There was a refectory space, and the medical technician—dressed, alas, in a
decidedly less exciting manner than had been Trix Desoto in her comedy-nurse
costume—who periodically came to administer the sedative hypos that,
apparently, were intended to regulate Eddie’s sleeping patterns and which
worked insofar as they knocked him out like a light.

There was a room remarkably like the one Eddie had imagined on first waking up
here—brightly lit and walled with antiseptic while tile. On a surface that
looked disquietingly like a mortuary slab lay a thin, pale figure that Eddie
recognised: the old guy from New Mexico. The body stirred. Obviously still not
dead, then.

A Suited figure instantly recognisable as Masterton was conferring with a
medical technician Eddie didn’t know as she plugged cables into a sensor-unit,
suspended on a gimbal-rig over the old guy, and ran the self-diagnostics. Then
they nodded together and the technician activated the unit.

Eddie couldn’t believe what happened next. Or rather, he believed it… he
just wished that he couldn’t.

And for a while he:

Didn’t feel like doing anything but fly, pinwheeling through the air over the abstract mesh of tendrils, alive to nothing but the rush of kinaesthesia. The simple joy of it.

Eventually, he:

Regained some grip on himself and on his mind; if he was here yet again then is was probably important. There was something his mind was trying to tell him. There was something here for him to learn.

On the extreme edge of perception, he caught a glimpse of:

Creatures of some kind, hanging in the air, sculling lazily through the gulf with cilia-like pseudopodia. Their bumbling course drew them closer to him. They appeared to have noticed him.

He:

Decided to hurry things along and meet them halfway. He was actually, to be frank, some small part of his mind was telling him, getting a bit tired of the obliquity. He wanted to know what this was about once and for all. He rotated himself laterally in the abstract air and accelerated toward the creatures.

As he drew closer, more of the:

Creatures became evident, in tens, and hundreds, thousands… and at last millions. There was a swarm of them. As he drew closer, individual details became distinct—and something inside him began to scream. The same word. Over and over again.

Say it three times and it’s true.

A barbed and chitinous hook shot for him, a length of slimy cord trailing in its wake and attaching it to one of the bulbous creature-masses. The hook punched into his horrified and gaping mouth, burrowed through to burst from the back of the neck with a
clunch.

The pain was immense; it:

Hauled him, the creature, on its line, towards its mass. In human terms, in waking terms, the bulk of it would have been miles across. A seething chaos of forms and textures that suggested some weird mix of corruption and clockwork, bone cogs and escarpments ticking through a black and churning mass of diseased bile.

The:

Creature hauled him, spinning on his line, into the foetid mass of itself. Buried him inside himself. Engulfed him.

Eddie Kalish shook himself awake. He had to be awake and ready for this. Like
the old joke, it was almost time for him to go to sleep.

At least, it was almost time for the medical technician to come in with the
hypo. Eddie had wondered, more than once, what the purpose of it really was;
it wasn’t as if he didn’t spend the days and nights drifting in and out of
dreams in any case.

Maybe the staff needed the routine of knowing that there were certain hours
when patients were guaranteed to be sparked out.

In any case, the procedure would prove useful now. Eddie spent a minute or two
with his datapad, accessing the surveillance systems and keying in a number of
commands he knew how to enter like they were written on the back of his
hand—without ever quite knowing how he knew them.

Presently, the technician came bustling in. Under her somewhat generic-looking
GenTech staff uniform she was a cheerful girl, in her late teens, named Laura
Palmer, if you could believe the little polycarbon plaque clipped to her lapel. To the extent
that he have her any consideration at all, as a person, Eddie quite liked her.

“Evening, Mister Kalish,” she said cheerfully. “And how are we this evening?”

She always called Eddie
Mister Kalish
with a kind of joking parody of
respect, like he was an old guy who kept pissing himself and had to be led
around by hand and jollied along. Maybe it was just what the people running
hospitals always did with the people in their care—Eddie Kalish had no basis
for comparison.

And not that even thinking about the idea of old guys didn’t open up a nasty
can of worms, for Eddie, at the moment.

“Don’t feel well,” Eddie mumbled, trying for what he imagined as sounding
ill—but succeeding merely in the sort of voice that people used to use when
phoning the office on the day of a really important event like the sun being
out and feeling like going fishing. And then they cough.

“Feel bad…” Eddie continued, breaking into a cough and waving his right hand
randomly and vaguely in an attempt to indicate something about his left
shoulder. “Look at this…”

“Don’t you worry,” medical technician Laura Palmer said, producing the hypo
from its ziplock case with cheerful briskness. “A good night’s sleep and
you’ll be right as rain.”

Automatically, though, she had leaned in, inclining her head toward the
shoulder Eddie had indicated. Eddie Kalish reached up and grabbed her head and
smacked her face into the wall.

He’d merely planned to knock her out, but he didn’t know his strength. The
force of it pulled Laura Palmer physically off her feet to the extent where
she literally left one shoe behind.

There was a sharp crunch that Eddie Kalish would subsequently spend years
trying to forget and fail. A spray of blood.

The motion had ripped out several of the tubes plugged into Eddie’s arm. Now
he grabbed the other tubes and contact leads attached to and plugged into him
and pulled them off and out. He had no idea what this was gonna do to him,
at this point in whatever Zarathustra procedures were going on, but at this
point he didn’t give a shit.

Time to move. Time to get the hell
out
. That was all that counted.

He spent a few seconds, though, checking the body of Laura Palmer. He thought
he’d crushed her skull, but in the end it seemed that he had merely broken her
nose. Her breathing was ragged, and Eddie had no idea of how much he might
have hurt her in an ultimate sense, but at least she was still alive as of
now.

He fumbled through her uniform until he found the key-card which had given her
access to his room, then bundled her up in the polythene sheeting that had so
recently covered his own body and left her on the bed, arranging the various
tubes and leads so that they might or might not appear to be connected to her.
If anyone were to look in, it wouldn’t pass even a cursory glance, but what
the hell, you never knew.

The anaesthetic hypo lay where Laura Palmer had dropped it, its ziplock case
containing several more to one side. Eddie picked them up and got the hell out
of there.

Eddie jammed his stolen keycard into the slot. A panel readout pulsed from red
to amber and the door slid open onto darkness. The faint smell of someone
else—and someone, or some thing, that might or might not be entirely human.

Eddie had never, really, been in a room used by a single person as entirely
personal space. He had no idea if what he could make out of the contents, in
the light spilling from the doorway from the corridor outside, was usual or
not.

A scattering of discarded holo-vid disks, data-wafers and actual bound
paperback books which must have cost a fortune to whoever had paid for them,
decomposing in some abstract sense to informational mulch. Visible tides, in
the second-hand light, included:
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
,
A Cure for
Cancer
,
The Eye of the Lens
,
The Odyssey
,
Paradise Lost
,
The Medusa Seed
—that one quite obviously torn to shreds with some anger, and hurled away with some force—and
Camp Concentration.

A collection of dolls—or rather, a collection of broadly humaniform figures
ranging from proprietary children’s toys to an antique, jointed, wooden
artist’s marionette. Each of these figure had been twisted into postures
suggestive of agony, laughter, orgasm, some particular and telegraphic
emotional state.

All had been modified in some manner. A stuffed rag doll, for example, had
been meticulously skinned with hand-stitched thin black leather. Scrawled in
bright pink lipstick across something that looked like a huge egg with
diminutive arms and legs stitched on (Eddie had never heard the nursery rhyme
Humpty Dumpty) with poppy eyes, stringy hair and an approximation of green
velveteen pants, was the word SUCK.

A brightly-keyed technocrome poster of the old movie goddess, Anna Nicole
Smith, arching her back in a pose and gold lame borrowed from the even older
movie goddess, Marilyn Monroe.

Mismatched four-colour facial features, ripped from other sources and pasted,
turned her smile into something insane and rictive, her eyes burning holes of
psychosis.

The sleeping form of Trix Desoto on the somewhat foetid expanse of a mattress.
She was half-transformed into… well, whatever the hell it was she
transformed into.