Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
John glanced over his shoulder at their advance, still punching keys. The Hummingbird began to whir, and lifted off the pavement at last. Several feet off the surface, it floated down a row of cars, still shaded by a protective roof. But the hot sky glared beyond, as if to taunt them.
"They're each one a cell," he told her. "One cell of one great being. And now they're beginning to come together..."
The Hummingbird cleared the covered section of the lot, sunlight filling the craft like a waterfall of lava. John tinted the windows darker. The helicar now began to lift higher...but they heard a sound against its rear. John glanced at a screen on his control console. It showed that two of the conjoined Afflicted had seized hold of the craft, and were borne aloft with it. "Oh," he said, "you want a ride, huh?" And he punched up the speed.
H'anna gripped her arm rests; her already agitated stomach rolled over inside her as John whipped the helicar through the city canyons, picking up altitude then dramatically dropping, taking a sudden turn at an almost sideways angle. At last, though H'anna did not actually see the creatures become dislodged, the screen showed they had lost the twin parasites.
John leveled the craft and cut back on its speed. "Where do you live?" he asked, and H'anna numbly told him. They began to head in that direction.
They were too far up to see what was happening on street level, but in one spot H'anna saw a fire from a crashed hovercar or helicar, black smoke billowing. She heard the banshee cries of sirens distantly all around them.
At last, H'anna was able to formulate at least one of her countless questions. "How do you know what's going on, John?"
"I don't know everything about it. Nobody does. I was a police detective on Oasis, H'anna. An old friend of mine was arrested after he murdered the members of a strange cult. I investigated, and I soon found out why he did it. The stars had come right, and the Outsiders began to come through. We barely managed to stop them, my friend and I, but he was killed. That was the great cataclysm, H'anna...that was when all these people became afflicted. Infected, with the consciousness of one or more of the Old Ones."
"They're...possessed?"
"Yeah. But not by the Devil. By beings more powerful than any demon anyone ever dreamed up. The Old Ones are a race of beings that are dead, but waiting to be reborn. They need our help to do it. Some people say that another race of beings, called Elder Gods, originally beat them down, locked them out of our dimension...but other people disagree about that, and claim there is no bad race/good race war, corresponding with Christian devils and angels. Not many people know about any of these secrets and mysteries, H'anna, and like I say - the few who do can't agree. Most of them, like me, are seeking their knowledge and fighting against these creatures alone. How much the government believes, how much they're fighting against it, I don't know. But they looked the other way when I started killing cult members myself. The worst they did to me was take my badge and kick me off Oasis. So I settled here. Took a job in the soup kitchen just to be near the Afflicted...study them...keep an eye on them..."
"Those three little girls in the cafeteria said they remembered you," H'anna recalled now. "They said your name..."
"Yeah. I guess I should be flattered. We're just insects to the Old Ones, but I guess I got their attention when I fought them on Oasis. I closed the door on them, with my friend's help. But he knew more than I do. He knew how to close the portal. But this time, I'm not sure I do..."
She tried to assimilate all this as they rode on. In the close confines of the vehicle, H'anna caught the subtle scent of her own sweat, brought out by heat and exertion. She squeezed her arms closer to her body, and then felt ridiculous for it; here the world was crumbling about her ears, and she was afraid that her body odor might offend the man seated beside her. The Hummingbird was small and their knees lightly touched. She found that small human contact to be a vast source of security.
"That's my building, coming up," H'anna announced, pointing out a distant tower with a reddish sandstone color and texture, wedged between two taller and sleeker models.
"Here," John said, and reached across her knees to flip open a dash compartment. He withdrew another handgun, this one larger and composed of a matte gray ceramic, which he passed into her hands. "Keep it. It's loaded with blue plasma capsules, so be careful. It should melt anything living that gets in your way."
Not exactly flowers or candy, but their first date had been unconventional from the start. So much for her fears of John Bell being a boring companion. She turned the pistol over in her hands, both afraid of it and grateful for it.
"What's that?" John snapped, and H'anna's head jolted up in time to see the line strung across their airborne path a second before they struck it. It looked like a clothesline draped between skyscrapers; was no doubt some sort of power cable. But a cable running across an open airway? She immediately tensed for impact, expecting the cable to shear its way through the old craft, cutting its occupants in half. But the cable was cleaved, and its two halves dropped away like a severed vine. Throwing a look over her shoulder, H'anna thought she saw something like drops of glittering mercury falling from the hacked ends. And in addition to that, brief sputtering forks of a violet electricity. A connection had been broken...it was indeed a kind of power cable...and yet up close she had seen it wa
s silvery in color, and organic-looking.
"Look," John said, calling her attention to the fore again as they neared her building and turned a corner to approach it more directly.
There were more of those silvery vines, stretched here and there between buildings quite distant from each other, like the strands of an immense spider web. In fact, they could see how the strands had got up here: crawling across the face of H'anna's building was a cluster of four or five Afflicted, merged into one creature that was appropriately very spider-like in appearance. As they drew closer, and stopped at a hover not far from it, the creature turned several of its heads and snarled silently at them. Black teeth, whipping black tongues. Faces like those of mummies half wrapped in metallic bandages - withered, as if they were draining their own fluids out of themselves in order to secrete this ooze. And inside a window of the reddish building, they could see others of the Afflicted moving about. One of those strands or cables actually passed through the open window into one of the building's apartments.
"John," H'anna said with a dreamy, entranced horror, "that's my apartment."
"What?" He then pushed the helicar ahead a few feet to get a better look inside. H'anna leaned across him to see.
The silvery organic web strand ran into her living room. Ran directly to her sculpture "Headless Angel", which was wrapped in veils of metallic secretion. Across these veils, miniature flashes of lightning fluttered like thoughts firing through the membranes of a gigantic brain.
"What is that thing?" John demanded.
"I'm an artist; it's a sculpture of mine. An angel, or a demon, with no head."
"No face? And a triple crown?"
"Triple halos."
He turned to her, his stare so intense it was accusatory, inquisitional. "Why did you design that?"
"I didn't design it! It came in a dream."
John gazed out again across the city at the other strands trailing away into the distance. "Do you have other artist friends who've been dreaming strange ideas for their art?"
"Yeah...yeah, you know, I have. My friend Todd has been going through what he calls his Mollusk Period. He keeps dreaming about giant squid...squid angels with wings..."
"They're connecting up their lines of power. It can't just be artwork, idols. It may be powerful books...archeological displays in private collections...anything else linked to their past that might focus their energy. They're weaving a web. Whatever's at its nexus has to be the portal they plan to come through." He faced her once more. "Our destinies converge, H'anna. But for a minute there I thought you were one of them. Anyway - I can't let you off here..."
"Thanks; I'd rather not."
"We have to tear down this web. Excuse me a minute." He tapped a button, and opened his side window. Now they could hear the hissing of that multi-limbed, multi-headed chimera. The head of an elderly man unhinged its jaw like a snake's and began an ear-splitting ululation.
John's gun bucked, spewed its solid projectiles, his arm stretched out the car window. Black brain matter spackled the reddish wall. The creature started to fall, half of it dead, half still hissing, gummed palms coming away from the wall it clung to. John drove more slugs into it, and at last it was peeled entirely away. They watched it tumble to its death in the street far below, the elderly man still howling, still lashing his tongue all the way down.
John emptied the rest of his clip into H'anna's apartment, but not at the Afflicted that skulked within. He sprayed the shrouded "Headless Angel". They heard its black metal skin ping and clang as the bullets punched through it. The triple halos were blasted away. The arm raised in cursed benediction was bent to another angle. The whole figure toppled from its base - and the lightning stopped flickering across it.
"Sorry," John told her.
"I've had worse reactions to my art."
He smiled at her. Closed the car window. And now the Hummingbird flew onwards again, tearing through the silver strand that was extruded through H'anna's open window. The other end of it passed right through the body of the giant dancing Indian woman who sang the praises of her net service on the opposite roof top. As her severed umbilical cord fluttered away she caterwauled cheerfully in their wake.
-4-
John took the helicar up higher, above the ceiling of the city. An alarm sounded in the car, and a stern female voice let him know he was out of the proper airways and that his violation was being recorded in central police files. Oh well.
They began to make out the pattern of the web below them. It glittered in the sun as if spun from thin lines of steel. The pattern had an almost geometric configuration to it, more like a gigantic hieroglyph than a spider's web. Yet it did appear to have a central point of convergence...
"That's FAM," said H'anna. The Fine Arts Museum.
"I know," John said. "I've been there. It makes sense. They have something there I should have destroyed before. I didn't know how to do it without being caught. And I guess I underestimated how dangerous it could be. But it's one of the reasons I decided to settle in this town."
"What is it?"
"Something you
plagiarized, H'anna, without knowing..." He began to drop altitude again.
They could s
ee more and more of those multi-limbed creatures crawling like flies across the faces of the buildings as they descended; some now seemed to be made from as many as a dozen bodies. H'anna saw a man dragged out of his apartment window by one of this swarm, but she also saw another man lean out of his window and fire an old pump-action shotgun into one of them. She watched another creature open one of its myriad mouths and fire a silver line out of it, which sailed amazingly far until it stuck to the building opposite, where another monstrosity took hold of it and scampered away out of sight with it, around the corner of the building. They were so like industrious insects, serving their unseen queens in their alien dimension. Preparing this world so that those queens might break free from their imprisoning chrysalises and fly free once more.
John lowered his car to the rooftop parking lot of the Fine Arts Museum. Even as they
landed and floated under the covered section, two other crafts hastily departed. A man ran past them with his wife, both carrying young children in their arms. "Don't go in there!" the man yelled as they charged by. H'anna watched after them nervously until they were safely in the air, then turned to follow John to the elevators, where he had patiently waited for her, popping a fresh magazine into his pistol as he did so.
When she reached him, he asked, "Sure you want to go with me, H'anna? You could stay in the car. Take the car, if I don't come back..."
"I feel safer with you."
"Really? They have a grudge against me."
"I don't care. I don't want to be alone."
"Okay; but I'll be too busy to ask you again." Then he hit the button for the elevator.
The bell dinged, the door slid open, but the elevator was already crammed full. H'anna gave a cry and scrambled backwards, as a silvery tentacle lashed the air just inches from her face. There were as many as twenty Afflicted in the elevator, now so fused and shrouded in metallic webs that they had become an amorphous mass. John wheeled about and flicked the switch to chamber the first round off his fresh clip, but before he could aim his gun, H'anna extended hers in both fists and fired shot after shot. The blob howled from nearly two dozen toothless mouths as the blue-glowing plasma immediately began to spread, like fire across paper. The now inhuman limbs thrashed in agony, the flanks of the thing pitched and heaved as they blackened. John hit the door button again, and the sight and most of the stench of the liquefying creature were shut away.
He hit the button for the other elevator, hopefully with better results. They both stood with guns pointed, legs spread in firing stances. Ding. The door parted. Their fingers curled. Just a soft instrumental version of last year's cutting edge music hit. They boarded the lift.