Veniss Underground

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Jeffer stared, his body stiff. His breath caught in his throat. Centuries slow, he picked up his rifle from the balcony railing.

  “Who is it?” Balzac's tired voice, muffled, came from the room at Jeffer's back. They had barricaded themselves in and had booby-trapped the stairwells. Inside the room, the autodoc produced a thin, blue-tinted light that couldn't be seen from the street.

  The pale, moonfaced boy Mindle, a refugee from a northern crèche already destroyed by the invaders, sidled along the wall until he was close enough to whisper, “Is it her again?” Mindle's voice held no fear, no surprise. Only Mindle's body registered such nerve-end pricklings; at his spiritual core he had been frozen solid for a hundred years. Jeffer had seen too many like him in recent months as the crèche sent younger and younger men into battle.

  “Keep Balzac quiet,” Jeffer whispered back. “If she hears him . . . get Con Fegman, if he's able, to watch the door.”

  Mindle nodded and, wraithlike, disappeared into the darkness.

  Below, Jamie began to cry out Balzac's name in the plaintive timbre of one who is lost and alone and afraid.

  Balzac muttered a few words and Jeffer heard Mindle's soft voice, calm and reasonable, coo a soothing reply.

  The shape on the street below stiffened, sneezed, and said, “Balzac, my love?”

  Balzac's voice in reply: “Is it—could it?”

  Mindle cursed. Jeffer heard a scuffle, a strangled cry, and silence, his gaze never straying from her. Lost and afraid. How could he ever consider her someone he had known? The sounds of her aloneness, her confusion, struck him as faintly pitiable, that she should, in any manner, try to re-create her former life. Such a curious double image: to see her on the street below and yet to remember all the times when Balzac had invited him over for dinner, Balzac and Jamie both exhausted from twelve hours of overseeing their reclamation projects in Balthakazar. She had never seemed vulnerable while arguing with him over the Con's latest decisions or about how to adapt the hydroponics hangars to open-air conditions. The lack of hardness in her now, the weaning away of any but the most dependent attributes, made him wary.

  The stone wall behind him bruised his back. He didn't play the statue very well; he was sweating despite the cold and he imagined his breath as a vast, unmoving field of ice particles.

  Perhaps, as on the two previous nights, she would miss them, would pass by, rasping out her song.

  Jeffer raised his rifle to his shoulder. Pass by, he wished desperately. Pass by and be gone. He did not want to risk the sound of a shot. Come dawn, they would move elsewhere, maybe come across another unit and cobble up enough numbers to mount a counteroffensive.

  Pass by. Even better, remake history. Let Balzac come to me swimming at night at the oasis. Let Balzac tell me of our parents' death. Let him be the eldest and follow me to Balthakazar.

  She stopped directly beneath his balcony, at an extreme line of fire. She sniffed the air. She growled deep in her throat.

  “Balzac, are you there?” Such a reedy, ghostly voice.

  She paced in a circle, still sniffing.

  Jeffer allowed himself to be seduced by the fluid grace, the single-minded purpose behind the strides, the preternatural balance, for she was still beautiful.

  She stopped pacing. She stared right up at him with her dead violet eyes, the snarl of fangs below the mouth.

  “Jeffer,” she said.

  His finger closed on the trigger. The red tracer light lit up the pavement. The bullet hit the pavement, sent up a rain of debris.

  But she was not there.

  He could already hear her—inside the building. Battling through their booby traps. Barricades ripped apart, flung to the side.

  “She's coming up!” Jeffer shouted, running back into the room. “She's coming up!”

  Mindle and Con Fegman stood against the wall farthest from the door. Balzac sobbed, curled in a corner, guarded by the autodoc. It was clear Mindle had propped Con Fegman up and that the old man would fall down given the opportunity. Which left Mindle and him to stop her. Mindle had their last two laser weapons, a rifle and a handheld beam. He aimed the rifle at the door. They both knew it had only two or three more charges left.

  “Give me the rifle,” Jeffer said. “Keep the other one—a cross fire.”

  Mindle nodded, threw the weapon to him. Jeffer caught it. His heart pounded. His hands shook. He flicked the safety.

  Mindle said, “Soon now. Soon now.” He rocked back and forth on his heels. His eyes were dilated. He licked his lips.

  They heard the scrabble of claws upon the stairs. Heard the rasping of her breath.

  The terror left Jeffer in that instant, as if he had become as cold as Mindle. He wanted her to come through that door. He wanted to kill her.

  The sound of claws faded. Silence settled over the room.

  Jeffer looked at Mindle in puzzlement.

  Mindle smiled and winked. “Just wait. Just wait.”

  Then she hit the door with such force that the metal shrieked with fatigue.

  “Balzac! Open the door!”

  Another blow to the door. An indentation the size of her paw. A growl that would have ripped up Jeffer's insides a minute before.

  “Go away,” yelled Con Fegman, who fell, thrashing, in the fever haze of his infection.

  “Balzac! Open the door!”

  Balzac looked up from his corner. Jeffer could see the anguish in his eyes.

  “Don't,” Jeffer said.

  The door tore open as if it were paper.

  METAL AND stone exploded into the room. Jeffer was yelling but Balzac couldn't hear the words. She stood there—huge, black, half-seen in the autodoc's blue glare. She shook herself, debris fluming out from her body. Mindle dove into Balzac's corner and caught him in the ribs with an elbow. It drove the air out of Balzac's lungs. Before he could get to his feet—to warn her? to protect Jeffer?—she leapt at Jeffer. Jeffer's laser rifle flashed and burned her hindquarters off. Jamie screamed and, trajectory altered, landed in a bloody, crumpled heap beside him, brought to a stop by the wall.

  The body thrashed, the claws whipping out from the pistoning legs. Balzac ducked, covering his head with his hands. Con Fegman, struggling to his feet, was ripped by a claw and sent reeling by the impact. The front legs sought traction, flailed, and the great jaws beneath Jamie's head gnashed together, opening reflexively only inches from Balzac's throat. Fangs the size of fingers. Breath like an antiseptic wind. Blood spattered over the blunt muzzle. He could see the tiny pink tongue muscles tensing and relaxing spasmodically.

  Jeffer shouted an order to the autodoc. The autodoc lurched over on its treads, extended a tube, and stuck a needle into what remained of the flesh dog's left flank. The flailing died away. The great jaws lost their rigidity and rested against the floor. Blood seeped out from beneath the body, licking at Balzac's drawn-up feet. Con Fegman moaned.

  Balzac sat up against the wall, unable to look at his beloved. An endless singsong ran through his head: if only, if only. If only Jeffer had let him talk to her while she was still on the street, perhaps he could have persuaded her to go away—and perhaps he didn't want her to go away. He let out a deep, shuddering sigh and stood on trembling legs.

  Mindle blocked his path, so close he could smell the boy's rotten breath.

  “Kill it,” Mindle hissed, his face white with hatred. “Kill it now!”

  Mindle's eyes had narrowed to knifepoints. Balzac looked away—toward Jeffer, toward Con Fegman.

  Con Fegman, in a misty, faraway voice, said, “I can't see anymore. I can't bear to see anymore,” and covered his eyes and began to weep.

  Balzac pushed past Mindle, turning his shoulder into the boy so he stumbled backward. He went over to Con Fegman and knelt beside him, looked into his ancient face. Such sadness, such shame, that one of the crèche's elders should be dying here, like this.

  Balzac took one of Con Fegman's hands, held it tightly in his own.

  Con
Fegman grinned with broken teeth and said, “I need water. I'm so thirsty.”

  “I'll get you water. Autodoc—Con Fegman. Full medical.”

  Balzac stood and allowed the autodoc to do its job. It injected tranquilizers, enveloped Con Fegman in a sterile white shield and, away from meddling eyes, went to work on him.

  “Don't waste ammunition,” Jeffer said. “It's dying anyhow. It can't hurt us.”

  “No, she can't hurt us,” Balzac said.

  Mindle's hand wavered on his laser. Balzac stared at him until he lowered it.

  “Jeffer,” Balzac said. “Please, get him out of here. The traps. Have him redo the traps.”

  “I'm here,” Mindle said. “I'm in the room.”

  Mindle's hot gaze bore down on him, and he tensed, prepared to defend himself.

  Jeffer nodded to Mindle. “Go downstairs and fix the barricades. Put up more traps. I'll keep watch on the balcony. At dawn, we move out.”

  “And will we take that thing with us?” Mindle asked, in a voice sweet as poison.

  “No,” Jeffer said, and stared pointedly at Balzac. “I promise you we won't take her with us.”

  “Compassion!” Mindle spat, but he headed for the door.

  Balzac watched him—a man-child, both ancient and newly born, gaunt but innocent of hunger. Balzac couldn't blame him for his rage, or for the madness that came with it. He could only fear the boy. He had always feared the boy, ever since he had come to the crèche: an albino with frazzled, burnt white hair sticking up at odd angles, and eyes that made Balzac want to recoil from and embrace Mindle all at once. The eyes hardly ever blinked, and even when he talked to you, he was staring through you, to a place far away. Mindle had laughed at their reclamation project, had not seen the point in the face of war. Why did they persist when they knew what they knew? Perhaps, Balzac thought, they had simply refused to believe in the proof Mindle brought with him.

  It had been Mindle, a refugee from the north, who had first given a name and a face to the enemy, fed the growing unease of the Con members. Before him, there had only been disturbing phenomena: strange, ungainly creatures lurking at the edge of campfire and oasis; dismembered human corpses not of the crèche; then little gobbets of divorced flesh with cyclopean eyes that twitched like epileptic rats as they walked and, when dissected, proved to be organic cameras, click-click-clicking pictures with each blink of the single liquid-blue eye.

  Mindle had brought them a present, unwrapping the corpse of one of the enemy at a Con meeting. It was the only body yet recovered, badly burned and curled up into a fetal position like a dead black cricket, but still recognizably mammalian. Weasel-like. Two meters tall. Fangs snarled out from the fire-peeled muzzle.

  “At first they walked around in plain view, directing their troops,” Mindle had told the Con members. “Darting here and there, sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two legs. A meerkat hybrid, no doubt a leftover from biotech experiments before the Collapse, with a much bigger skull and an opposable thumb. Made creatures. When we captured this one, they went into hiding, and now they only send their servants, the flesh dogs . . .”

  Watching the grimace of Mindle's features, the hatred embedded there, Balzac had felt a prickle of unease, as if Mindle were not the messenger but the presence of death itself.

  WITH MINDLE gone, Balzac turned to Jamie, her face set like a jewel in a ring, nearly buried by the folds of tissue on the flesh dog's head. Clinically, he forced himself to recall the little he knew about such symbiosis: Jamie's head had been cut from her body and placed in the cavity usually reserved for the flesh dog's nutrient sac; the nutrient sac allowed the beast to run for days without food or water. Her brain stem had been hardwired into the flesh dog's nervous system and bloodstream, but motor functions remained under the flesh dog's control. She could not shut her eyes without the flesh dog's approval, and although she kept her own eyes, they had been surgically enhanced for night vision, so that her pupils resembled tiny dead violets. Sometimes the wiring went wrong and the symbiote would fight for muscle control with the flesh dog—a condition that ended with uncontrollable thrashing and a slow death by self-disembowelment.

  Jeffer stumbled over a chair and Balzac became aware that his brother still shared the room with him.

  “Why don't you leave, too,” Balzac said, anger rising inside him.

  “You shouldn't be alone. And what if there were others? I need to watch from the balcony.”

  “There's no one with her.”

  “I'm staying. You'll hardly know I'm here.”

  Balzac waited until Jeffer had stepped out to the balcony. Then, thoughts a jumble of love and loathing, he forced himself to stare at his lover's face. The face registered shock in the dim light, stunned as it began to recover itself. As he watched, the eyes, pupils stained purple, blinked rapidly, the full mouth forming a puzzled smile. Balzac shuddered. She looked enough like the Jamie he remembered for love to win out over loathing. He had known it would; deep down, in places he would never reveal to anyone, he had hoped Jamie would track him here. He had assumed that once she had found him again he could bring her back from the dead.

  Looking at her now, he had no idea what to do.

  “Balzac? Balzac?” That voice, no longer demanding and sexy.

  He was so used to her being the stronger one, the one who had an answer for everything, that he couldn't reply. He couldn't even look at her. Throat tight and dry, legs wobbly, he took a step toward Jeffer. Jeffer was only a silhouette, behind which rose the night: a ridge of black broken by faint streaks of laser fire.

  “Help me, Jeffer.”

  “I can't help you.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I would have shot her in the street.”

  “But you didn't.”

  “I missed.”

  “Balzac,” Jamie said. The disorientation in her voice frightened Balzac. He ground his teeth together to stop his tears.

  “She can still hurt you,” Jeffer said.

  “I know,” Balzac said. He slumped down against the wall, his shoes almost touching Jamie's head. The floor was strewn with dirt, pieces of stone, and empty autodoc syringes. Beside Balzac, the flesh dog's entrails congealed in a sloppy pile.

  “Balzac?” Jamie said a third time.

  Her eyes blinked once, twice, a miracle for one who had been dead. She focused on him, the flesh dog's head moving with a crackly sound.

  “I can see you,” she said. “I can really see you.”

  You're dead, he wanted to say, as if it were her fault. Why aren't you dead?

  “Do you know where you are?” Balzac asked. “Do you know who you are?”

  “I'm with you,” she said. “I'm here, and it's cold here.”

  The effort too much, too soon, with the flesh dying all around her, Jamie's eyes closed to slits.

  Balzac wondered if what he saw was not just a carnie trick, if beneath the flesh lived nothing more than an endless spliced loop, a circuit that said his name and tried to seduce him with the lie that Jamie lived, long enough for it to drive him mad. Jamie had died. He knew that; if he saw her now, she was ghost cloaked in flesh, as dead as the city of powdering bones. The same war that had given the city a false heart—a burning, soul-consuming furnace of a heart—had resurrected Jamie. Yet he must assume that she was more than a shadowy wisp of memory, because he could not prove her ghostliness, her otherness. What cruelty for him to abandon her should she be aware. And trapped.

  Jamie had died on the front lines a week before, then and now separated by a second and a century. His recollections were filtered through a veil of smoke and screams, the dark pulsating with frantic commands. Particular moments stood out: the irritation of sand grit in his shoes; a lone blade of grass caught just so between yellow and green; an ant crawling across an empty boot, its red body translucent in the laser glow; the reflection of an explosion, the burnt umber flames melting across the muzzle of his rifle; the slick feel of Jamie's grime-smeared
hand in his, her pulse beating against him through the tips of her fingers.

  Crowded together in long trenches, they had been only two among several thousand, waiting. They did not talk, but only touched.

  The flesh dogs appeared promptly at twilight, bringing silence with them in a black wave. They wore the masks of friends, the guise of family. They jogged and cantered across the fires: fueled by a singleness of purpose, pounding on shadow muscles, ripping swaths of darkness from the night so as to reimagine themselves in night's image. Eyes like tiny dead violets. An almost-silent ballet of death.

  Then, on cue, they halted, forming a solid, uniform line. They stood so still it would have been easy to think they were a row of ancient statues built on the order of a brilliantly deranged despot.

  In the lull, Balzac hugged Jamie, taking comfort in the feel and scent of her body.

  Above, dirigibles coughed and grunted with the effort of discharging missiles, flashes of light catching ground combatants in freeze-frame.

  As the flesh dogs came into range, in such numbers that the ground reverberated with the thunder of their passage, the defenders of the trench opened fire: the spitting sparks of lasers and the rhythmic phutt-phutt of rifles entwined in an orgasm of recoil and recharge. It took immense discipline to stand in the teeth of such a charge. The rifle in Balzac's hands seemed heavy, difficult—it wanted its head, and in the heat of battle it was all he could do to keep it aimed and firing, his finger awkward on the trigger.

  In reply to the defenders' barrage: a chorus of bone-thin voices attached to alien bodies, a thousand ghosts wailing across the ruins in the timbre of old friends pleading for their lives, calling out to the living by name.

  It brought madness bubbling to the surface, so that the defenders shot and recharged with incredible speed, shouting back their own hatred to block out the voices, obliterating the present that it might not obliterate the past.