Xenoform (49 page)

‘Nice of you to join us, Debian,’ Spider said, accepting a drink of water from Tec. ‘You, too, Roland. You brought that robot, then,’ he added, eyeing Ari suspiciously.

‘Yeah, it ain’t gone crazy yet,’ said Roland. ‘Sorry about your friend, man.’

‘Yeah,’ said Spider with a heavy sigh. ‘We crashed into an RPC pod, that’s why this whole thing happened. Fuckers jumped out, woman pointed a gun at us. Roberts had to get out to tackle her – they had us blocked in. She killed him, I killed her. Her friend, too. Guess I kind of lost it, cos next thing I remember I was here.’ He shrugged. ‘Warrior’s death – that was what he would’ve wanted.’

‘I guess,’ said Whistler sadly. ‘Certainly there are people dying worse ways out there. Are you okay to move?’
‘I suppose I’ll have to be. Anything beats staying here. I think the station came under attack. There was shooting, screaming. They’d sent that damn thing–’ he indicated the remains of the Freak, ‘–to interrogate me. It was a brain diver. They wanted you, Whistler. It was damned weird – the bitch just went crazy and tore her own face off. I think most of RPC have left the building, cos nobody came to check. It was heavily computerised, so I thought maybe the virus had got to it somehow.’ He looked to Debian for confirmation or denial of this possibility but Debian diverted his gaze, which brought the large pool of human blood round the base of the Freak uncomfortably into view. He shut his eyes instead.

‘That was what you did?’ Whistler asked Debian, incredulous. He wouldn’t answer her except for a slow shaking of his head. This butchery was not something she would have considered him capable of. Reluctantly she admitted to herself that she really didn’t know him at all. ‘Let’s move, then,’ she said at last. ‘We haven’t seen any RPC yet, except from afar.’

‘I ain’t seen anybody for what seems like days,’ said Spider.

‘You need help to walk?’ asked Tec.

‘I dunno,’ said Spider, getting shakily to his feet. He swayed, then steadied. Roland put a smooth pistol in his claw. Spider hefted it, smiling grimly, and stretched. He felt his bruised and bloodied jaw. ‘I hope we see the fucks who did this on the way out,’ he mused. And, as they slowly and cautiously made their way up a level into the main reception floor of the HQ, they did.

The ground floor of the building had clearly been breached. There was wreckage everywhere – smashed furniture, piles of bullet casings, dead and sometimes dismembered RPC bodies. The greenshit had a firm hold up here and the state of metamorphosis in the building, which somehow had barely reached the basement level, was clear and pronounced. The slime dripped in long stalactites from the ceiling, grew up from the mushy carpet, blocked doors, bunched from the drawers of smashed desks and filing cabinets as if these items were vomiting into the detritus, making tree-like structures that tangled and intertwined. It had grown into and over the bodies of fallen humans and robots, who looked as if they had engaged in a fire-fight of epic proportions.

‘What the hell has been happening in my absence?’ demanded Spider. ‘Can’t you guys look after the world without me for a few days?’

‘The robots went crazy,’ answered Tec.

‘Yeah, we saw that,’ said Spider. ‘On the way back from Roland’s. Machines losing the plot all around us, pods crashing. We saw a gyrocopter hit a building, man – whoever heard of a ’copter crashing? I mean, what’s with all this green shit?’

‘
Not green shit,’ answered Whistler. ‘
Greenshit
. The GDD. I forgot you’ve never really seen it, Spidey. There’re loads of the infected on the streets – Roland reckons they’re processing matter. We don’t know what into.’

‘Yeah? Well it looks like something from a fucking nightmare.’ He picked his way over what might have been a partially-dissolved jumble of human limbs, a look of repulsion on his battered face.

As they wandered through this awesome, sickening vision Debian faltered and stopped. ‘Not all of these people are dead,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper. Whistler doubled back and asked him to repeat what he had said. ‘They’re not all dead. Look!’ He pointed.

She swung the smartgun over the scene, observing the tiny readout, and muttered, ‘Damn it, you’re right.’

On the floor before them, filling the juncture of two corridors, was a tangled, minutely trembling pile of gelatinous-looking organic matter. Revolted and compelled in equal measure, the group moved closer. The pile looked at first sight amorphous, shapeless beyond any hint of conventional order. It was only when one let one’s eye relax, instead of attempting to pick out details that seemed almost wilfully to resist inspection, that one noticed the jumble of human bodies incorporated into the monstrous pile. Resperi uniforms showed through in places like the nuclei of amoebic cells, torn and shredded as if subjected to immense forces, jutting with malformed additional limbs. Faces –
actual human faces
– stared out from the depths of the blob. Whistler noticed with revulsion that an intact and breathing human torso protruded from the mass like a broken bone through flesh, and the head atop it was still conscious.

‘Hello again,’ said Spider to this slack human face. ‘Day not going to plan, then?’

The face uttered a low and empty moan: ‘Aaaaahhhh...’ and the eyes, now completely green and pupil-less, rolled slowly to focus on Spider.

‘You,’ whispered a voice that was little more than the merest sigh of breath. ‘And you.’ The face now turned as far as it could towards Whistler. ‘We hoped you might come.’

‘Who or what the hell are you?’ she asked, her face a snarl of disgust fixed firmly to the sight of her smartgun.

‘
He
was
an RPC officer, name of Ramone, last time we met,’ explained Spider with a touch of cold relish. ‘Now, though...’ He uttered a short bark that was not quite a laugh. ‘What the hell happened to you guys?’

‘
Greeeeenshit
...’ sighed Ramone. ‘It...did this...Ate us...up...’

‘Yeah, I guess it did,’ said Spider thoughtfully. Debian thought he heard the merest hint of a smirk in Spider’s voice, a trace of satisfaction, and he shivered involuntarily.

‘Go on, then,’ breathed Ramone. Staring into the depths of the greenshit mass Whistler could make out more of his body, now twisted and reshaped into some weird, insectile mass of chitin and jelly, sharp jags of bone and re-jointed limbs. That reworked, incorporated body flexed within its biological prison, a look of pain and horror flickering across the changing, bearded face. ‘Have your revenge.’

‘Yes,’ said Spider. A grim smile drifted across his face like the shadow of a vulture circling in the sky. ‘Just so.’ And with that, he simply turned and left. Whistler and the others lingered, staring into that shapeless shape. And then, by silent consensus, they turned and followed their comrade. Debian was horrified at this cruelty, so stunned and sickened that it never even occurred to him to take matters into his own hands and use Roland’s loaned weapon as a merciful panacea. He followed the others, feeling disassociated and dreamy. A weak, protesting cry came from behind them, but it might have been no more than the sound of the wind blasting the massive shell of the building, muted by the thick layers of ceramicarbide.

They searched through the shattered passages and rooms of the building for a usable exit onto the street but found none. They cautiously examined the main doors, finding them welded and barred. Sofi offered to melt through with the plasma-thrower again until they heard the insane metallic grunting and growling of the battle-bot that still stormed up and down outside. They crept away again into the base, seeing nobody else, fearful all the time that either the robots or the GDD victims who had attacked the building would return.

‘Back into the tunnel, then,’ said Roland. ‘We could have been at the van by now. What we doin’?’

‘I agree,’ said Whistler. ‘We’re just wasting time here. Let’s do it.’

They headed back down onto the cell-level. Snaking tendrils of greenshit were growing down the stairs into the basement now like roots seeking veins of moisture in the earth. Tec expressed his alarm, shared by all, at how quickly it seemed to be growing. They filed into the court tunnel in tense silence, Ari leading them again. From there they passed once again through the entrance Sofi had cut and into the sewer access tunnel. From behind them, somewhere in the Resperi building, a monstrous howl came drifting on the stinking air. They picked up the pace, mindful that the creatures must be somewhere behind them. But when they arrived back at the manhole through which they had originally entered they found their exit blocked. A tangled mass of greenshit grew across the hole, as if deliberately engineered to thwart them.

The group assembled on the floor below, frightened and exhausted, each of them feeling trapped in this alien nightmare. The normal, sane world seemed like the dream now – this subterranean land of darkness and warping change had become the only reality.

‘Let me try the plasma thrower again,’ said Sofi, dialling some minute adjustment into the manual controls. Ordinarily she would have been plugged into the gun but she dared not now in case the weapon had picked up the AI virus before being disconnected. ‘It’ll burn anything, right?’

‘Anything bar ceramicarbide or diamond, pretty much,’ agreed Ari.

‘Yeah,’ said Whistler, her voice small in the tunnel. ‘Try it.’

They gave Sofi some space and she let loose, hosing the mass with fire too bright to look at directly. Gouts of green steam filled the tunnel and the others backed away, coughing and retching on the sickening stench of it, flapping at the air and staggering as if under physical assault. As Sofi burned and blazed, vaporising snarls of root-like matter, the greenshit grew back just as fast. In fact, as she stood below it with the thick muzzle of the thrower raised aloft the greenshit seemed actually to be
advancing
on her, reaching down with slowly-twitching fingers that grew back in one place faster than she could burn them in another. At last the gun spluttered, fizzed and gave out, spitting out a last few weak blobs of plasma onto the tunnel floor. Sofi stepped away, pulling one arm free of the grasping tendrils.

‘Fuck!’ she exclaimed vehemently. ‘Out of fuel!’ She joined the others where they waited a little way up the tunnel. ‘What do we do now?’ Shaken heads all round.

‘Shit, I guess you guys should have left me there,’ said Spider depressively.

‘Don’t be daft, man,’ said Whistler. ‘If we die down here we do it together.’ She watched in bafflement as Sofi lit a joint and leaned back against the wall. Her bright mohawks were flares of colour amongst brown leaves of shadow.

‘Remember that shelter I mentioned?’ asked Ari in its nearly-human voice, the cheeriness of which couldn’t help but be annoying under the circumstances. The situation didn’t seem to be concerning the machine at all – it sounded resignedly buoyant.

‘What about it?’ answered Sofi, snorting out twin plumes of smoke from her nostrils.

‘You want us to hole up in some old bunker?’ asked Tec with an evident lack of enthusiasm.

Whistler cursed under her breath, with real feeling. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I guess it makes a kind of sense
– safe place to keep our heads down and get our bearings. We’ll do it – looks like
we’re playing follow-the-robot again.’

Ari led them back down the access tunnel again to the first junction. ‘This way,’ it chirped.

As they proceeded up the tunnel in a state of nervous expectation Whistler’s smartgun suddenly flared with lights. Both she and Ari cried out for caution at the same time. The group paused to listen. The unmistakable howls of the changed echoed down the tunnel towards them. A tiny trickle of green slime was running along the floor.

‘Sounds like a lot of them,’ said Whistler. ‘Close-by – one-hundred metres.’ She spoke in a throaty whisper, eyes darting around the shadows. She wished that she had night-vision.

‘Go on or go back?’ asked Roland in what constituted an inappropriately loud speaking voice under the circumstances.

‘Back,’ said Ari, already back-tracking rapidly. ‘Come on! There is another way.’

Again they fell in behind the machine – a ragged little train of the displaced – and presently Tec dropped back and fell into step with Debian. The sounds of the changed had faded behind them but Tec’s face betrayed his worry.

‘
Hey,’ said Debian, his voice strained
– u
naccustomed to moving at a sustained pace, he was developing a bad stitch.

‘Does it not concern you that we’re all still following this thing?’ Tec asked without prelude.

‘What? Roland’s robot?’

‘Yeah, of course, man. You’ve seen what the virus has been doing to robots. It doesn’t seem impossible that the virus could do something as intelligent as making that thing lead us into some sort of trap.’

‘Ari can almost certainly hear us, you know,’ said Debian as quietly as he could.

Tec shrugged but didn’t suggest that they attempt
wireless communication
. ‘Don’t you think it’s a little coincidental that Ari just stumbled over our van like that? This is a big city, man.’

Debian turned this thought over – he really hadn’t considered this before. ‘I don’t know...Maybe Roland tagged the van with a tracer or had the robot follow it just as a matter of course. He’s some sort of underworld intel-man, isn’t he?’