Knee-Deep in the Dead

by Dafydd ab Hugh

“Flying skulls, you lamebrain! Call ’em as you see ’em.”

  I found out she hadn’t run into any of the mysterious blue spheres, either, so far the only good thing to come out of the Gate. I had the feeling that before this was over, there would be much more of the naming of names.

  Now it was back to business. Lunchtime was over.

  It was a brief rest; we needed real sleep. We needed to find somewhere secure so that we could take turns sleeping and watch-standing. And we needed real food.

  “Something feels weird about this place,” she said. Something about Deimos was creepier than Phobos. The place was colder, but that wasn’t it. The odors were about the same, but a bad taste seemed to go with it. Maybe we were closer to the source of the sour-lemon stench that hung around the zombies. Whatever it was, a cloying odor underrode everything, something very slowly rotting.

  “I hate looking at it,” I answered her. If lesser demons were in charge of the other Martian moon, then Old Nick himself had drawn the blueprint here. The skulls were starting to get on my nerves. They were everywhere, all different sizes and shapes, always more evil than a normal human skull.

  As we explored, the color we noticed most was red, darkening into the shade of rare steak. The little voice wanted to know why it wasn’t getting hotter. Red was hot. Hell was supposed to be hot.

  The floor became moist with the hated ooze, not yet deep enough to require slogging through a river of the stuff. I wondered if Arlene and I were exploring the great intestine of something so gigantic that I was going to have a hard time ripping out its guts.

  It seemed like the deeper we went into hell, the closer we got to the life force. Screw that. The Martian moons were more appealing as desolate rocks exposed to the cold of space.

  “Bad news,” said Arlene, pointing at a teleport platform at the end of a corridor. We had no choice: use it or go back. Along with all the normal maps I wanted, I now wished for a map showing where all these grids connected up. How many shopping days before Christmas?

  “Somebody’s got to do it, Arlene.”

  “Do what?”

  “Recon these teleport things.”

  She placed a firm hand on my shoulder, “Nice of you o volunteer, Corporal. Rank before beauty.”

  “Pearls before swine. I was about to delegate, PFC!” I looked around. “The layout’s different here than on Phobos.”

  Looking back, I observed the vista of emptiness we had walked through to get to this point. I had the feeling that the walls were squirming when I didn’t look at them.

  “More dead ends. I don’t like jumping into a fire when I’m getting fat and happy in the frying pan. But we’re humanity’s vanguard, right?” It sounded sarcastic, but I didn’t mean it to be. “We’ve got to find out what’s happened and communicate with someone up the chain.”

  Whenever Arlene smiled, it felt warmer, nicer, than when we’d just been palling around. War brings out something good in a certain kind of person. I didn’t know about me, but I was sure about Arlene.

  “Besides,” she elaborated, “best way to stay alive is to be on the offense. I’m coming right behind you.” There was no one I’d rather have backing me up.

  “Give me thirty seconds.” They wouldn’t be my famous last words, I hoped.

  The teleporter sensation, now that I was ready for it, was similar to the Gate, but quicker, less disorienting. My clothes stayed on and the weapons didn’t disappear. I was ready to secure the beachhead.

  I’d arrived on a platform virtually identical to the one at point of departure. I should have jumped off right away, but I was distracted by the sound of heavy pile drivers, coming closer and closer. Jesus and Mary, I realized, they’re footsteps!

  18

  Abruptly, I remembered where I stood. I leapt off the platform just in time; Arlene had counted the full thirty seconds before following.

  “Clear?” she asked as she sparkled into view.

  “No,” I answered. “Listen to that.” Light as a cat, she pounced down beside me. The thudding sound wasn’t getting any softer.

  “Poke your head around the corner,” she suggested. “I have a pretty good idea what’s making all that racket.”

  We took our time approaching the corner. Arlene gestured that she would go first. I don’t argue with a lady. When she glanced back at me, her face was stern. “You’ve been wondering what I call a demon,” she said. “So take a good look.”

  I did. And as Gunny Goforth might have said, she wasn’t just a-whistlin’ Dixie.

  A whole box of demons marched around atop a two-story platform that looked as though it might lower any moment. One of the “pinkies” started making those pig sounds I found so disgusting. But as I paid close attention to the anatomical details of this thing, I decided the Porker Anti-Defamation League might disagree with my description.

  These monsters were the most massively concentrated collections of muscle power in the whole zoo. They were about six feet tall, with mouths that looked like they could swallow Cleveland . . . and probably had. They were demons, all right. She had me there. So long as these guys were wandering the corridors, nothing else deserved the name. Their flesh was a dark pink; Arlene’s nickname for them was accurate.

  They didn’t see us yet; but it didn’t look as if we’d be going anywhere if we didn’t deal with them. There were no other doors; eventually, that platform would have to lower so we could ride it up.

  They stamped around on short, stubby legs, like shaved gorillas with horns and saw teeth. “Do they have any projectiles?” I asked Arlene.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fireballs, lightning, anything like that?”

  “They don’t throw anything at you.” She noticed my body relax a little. “Don’t let it fool you,” she warned. “They’re deadly if you get anywhere near them.”

  “Can we pop them from down here?” I asked.

  “Not likely. You need concentrated force, like a .458 Weatherby or a twelve-gauge at ten feet. I saw an imp go after a demon, and the pinkie took three fireballs in the face and swallowed the imp whole! It burped out the bloody spines.”

  Data point: imps and demons, like imps and zombies, don’t get along.

  “Fly, if we’re going to progress, we’ve got to lower that platform. There’s no other way to kill them with what we’ve got.”

  I noticed I’d been leaning against something hard and metallic. It was another skull switch, just begging to be flicked. I started reaching for it but Arlene butted my hand away with her shotgun. That hurt.

  “You don’t know what that’s going to do,” she protested.

  “I can’t help it . . . I’m a born lever-puller.” I flicked the tongue. With a loud groan, the platform lowered like an elevator. The demons wandered off. They snuffled their pig snouts and evidently scented us, for they made a beeline.

  As they came for us, we scutted back around the corner. The demons didn’t seem able to run, but they could power-walk with that thud-thud-thud pounding through our skulls.

  Arlene and I both had shotguns and a serious attitude problem toward demons. I found their open mouths an irresistible target. The first one ate my powder, and the back of its head opened up like a watermelon. There is always something to say for close range. Arlene took hers out with a well-placed blast to the chest.

  If we were acting like a team with our backs to the wall, the pinkies were dying as individuals, marching forward two abreast to receive their quota of shotgun death. The corpses piled up, providing sufficient time for us to reload and do it again.

  As an added bonus, none of the monsters made that snuffling pig sound. They were too busy roaring as they died. The roaring was loud, but it was the mark of their defeat. I started feeling good about my bloody work.

  “Like shooting drunks in a barrel,” I said to Arlene.

  “Don’t get cocky!”

  She was right. Hubris.

  The ranks of the enemy finally diminished. We’d stu
mbled into a finite number and we were using up our demons fast . . . about as fast as our shotgun shells.

  “Don’t discount them,” Arlene warned me. I wasn’t about to discount her experiences. “So long as you can keep them at a safe distance, this is all right. But I saw what happened when a buddy got his arm bitten off; and then it ate his head. He avoided being a zombie, only to wind up as demon food.”

  Good things come to an end, even in a paradise like Deimos. A bullet came very close to ending the career of Yours Truly. This tipped me off that someone was shooting at me.

  “Look out!” I shouted at Arlene; but she was already down, crouching behind the wall of demon bodies.

  During the precious seconds I spent saving myself from whoever was playing sniper, the last demon charged like a runaway bulldozer. I turned to find myself staring into a meter-wide maw.

  I thought I knew what a bad smell was before that moment. A square mile of human cesspool might come close. The odor was so bad it was like a weapon. My eyes watered so I could hardly see.

  Arlene shouted something, but I couldn’t make out her words. She was busy with problems of her own; the sniper was still at it.

  One of those bullets, clearly meant for Arlene or me, connected with the back of the demon. It had the same reaction as a human being would have . . . if stung by a mosquito. While it tried to scratch at its back (and I wondered how it could accomplish such a task without ripping itself to ribbons), I swung the shotgun back into action. The target came forward, and the bore of my weapon literally went down its gaping maw. I pulled the trigger.

  My eyes filled with stinking monster blood; not a desirable state of affairs when trying to avoid the persistent rifleman. I could hear Arlene, though, shouting, “That’s the last of them,” as her shotgun finished speaking for her. She had to be speaking about the demons. I could still hear the ping-ping of rifle fire over my head. But it was a relief to know that no pinkish mouths would chew my tender epidermis.

  Arlene crawled over to me and started rubbing the blood out of my eyes. I could manage that on my own. I just hadn’t gotten around to it. “Spread out,” I ordered, “don’t make one target!”

  She didn’t argue with my superior combat experience. She rolled away without a word while I finished clearing my vision. Whoever was trying to shoot us had taken a break, probably just to reload. I was certain it wouldn’t last; he had the high ground, beyond where the platform had been. We needed to alter the situation in our favor immediately.

  “Platform!” I shouted, then charged the lowered lift. It had its own switch, which I flipped. The lift started up, and Arlene finally realized what was happening. She ran and leapt, barely catching the edge. I pulled her up; we crouched back-to-back and took a little trip.

  On the next level, we rounded a corner and came face-to-, well, you couldn’t call it a face really—we ran right into another demon. I didn’t know about Arlene, but I found the situation very annoying. We’d just been through all that. We were so close that, as it charged, I fell back on my butt and fired a round between his legs. This staggered the demon, and Arlene finished the job, plugging it head-on and killing it good and proper.

  Now we could return to the more traditional task of trying to find out who was shooting at us.

  Past the platform we saw two doors. Exchanging glances, we approached. One had a blue border and the other had a red border. Of course, they were both locked. I missed my rockets.

  I extracted my blue key card and inserted it into the proper slot, swiping it across the mag reader.

  The door opened with a clean, whistling, hydraulic sound. At the other end was a teleport. Deimos had a “thing” for teleports, all right.

  “The lady or the tiger?” asked Arlene.

  “What?”

  “A story I read once. We’ve got a red door and a teleport. Which one?”

  “Yeah, too bad we don’t have a red key.”

  “Hell, Fly, all you had to do was ask!” She produced a key card and presented it to me. Arlene liked to play when working. “I found it in the secret room while waiting for you to rescue me,” she said with a wink.

  “I’ll pick the lady,” I said, and started to insert the red key.

  Marine training comes in handy. I heard something on the other side of the door; and there was nothing wrong with Arlene’s ears, either. I swiped the key through the slot, then skipped to the side, scattergun ready. Arlene took the opposite side.

  The moment the door opened, she discharged a shell, killing a zombie on the other side. He was holding a shotgun just like ours. He wasn’t the sniper. The zombie standing next to him had a Sig-Cow, and I wasted him. We cleared the room, each covering 270 degrees.

  The room was really more of a walk-in closet. It was empty of more zombies. But I was already worried about something else: if the one with the rifle had been shooting at us, then had ducked in here, it had all the signs of an ambush. But zombies didn’t think! An ambush suggested tactical thinking . . . thinking!

  I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to confide in Arlene my suspicions of an overall Mind guiding the invasion, using a great number of mindless opponents against a few human survivors to learn our limits.

  She probably wasn’t in the mood for a quiet, analytical discussion right then. There was too much blood on her, on me.

  Now it was the lady’s turn to find a switch. The room was flooded with clean, white light. We had found a treasure chamber . . . medical supplies, more com-rats, and ammunition, lots of it. Best of all was another of those handheld video things.

  “Fly, you know what this is?” exclaimed Arlene in excitement. I let her tell me. “It’s a computer map of the entire floor plan!”

  The medical supplies allowed me to return the “favor” Arlene had done me. She’d been winged by the sniper. She wasn’t carrying any bullets around with her, but one had grazed her shoulder. And she had other cuts and bruises from our last battle.

  “I’m your doctor now,” I said.

  Eyeing the self-heating tins of food and coffee, she sized me up through slitted eyes and said, “I’d rather you were the cook.”

  “Chef,” I corrected her. “And what’s the difference, anyway?”

  “Between a cook and a chef?”

  “No, between a doctor and a cook!”

  “You win. Feed me, Fly.”

  I bit my tongue. “Doctoring first.” She didn’t argue, but continued working on the computer map as I tended her wounds. I found a tube of the same cream she’d used on me; but she didn’t grimace. I used the hypo to inject the antiviral; but she never flinched. She really was a better man than I.

  We didn’t have any disagreement until I insisted we get some sleep. “You’ve got to be kidding, Fly. I’m not about to close my eyes and lie down in a rotting pile of zombie corpses!”

  “We can carry them out and pile them in front of the door.”

  “Oh, great—an announcement that we’re in here.”

  “All right. I’ll throw them onto the last teleport platform.”

  “We’ll throw them.” As simple as that, sweet reason had prevailed.

  The job took twenty minutes. We didn’t bother with the teleporter; we spread them like speed bumps among the demons. Maybe visitors would think they had killed each other.

  Then we enjoyed our first real meal together. The snack had only kept us going; this was a veritable feast by comparison.

  I insisted that she sleep first. She’d been on the go longer than I. While I was still being nursemaided by the Rons, she was at risk, in battle, up to her eyeballs in demon guts. She would sleep first, whatever it took.

  Turned out all it took was getting her to put her head down “just for a moment.” I let her sleep for four.

  When it was my turn, I went out like a drained tallboy. She woke me with a gentle hand on my shoulder and a beautiful face to appreciate. We’d both been too exhausted for nightmares. We were living them.

  I hated to l
eave that room. The same way I’d felt about the Phobos lab infirmary. No, that was wrong. This room was better than that. I’d shared the time with a woman whose survival turned my universe from empty muck back into gold.

  Blinking away pieces of sleep, I slung the Sig-Cow across my back and we returned to the blue door and again faced the teleporter. “Same routine as last time?” I asked.

  “Nah. Let’s go together.”

  “Why not?”

  “What the hell.”

  We found ourselves in a room with no doors, no windows, and one of Arlene’s big, pink demons.

  “Mine,” I called, and pounded a shell before Arlene could argue.

  “I have a feeling there’s plenty to go around,” she said.

  I was almost starting to like the pink bastards. Their lack of projectile weaponry made them favorites in my book. Of course, I hadn’t seen them chow-down on a comrade the way Arlene had.

  I took point, positively greedy for my next demon kill. I moved well ahead of Arlene.

  Oh, Fly. Hubris, hubris, hubris! Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

  Turning one of those treacherous corners so common in both Phobos and Deimos, I stepped right into The Wizard of Oz. What else could you call a giant, floating head?

  19

  This head wasn’t handsome enough to be a movie star. Its grotesque skin was made of millions of squirming, knotted, bloodred worms stretched over a huge, inflated balloon. For an instant I thought of the floating blue sphere.

  Staring into the single red eye of this floating pumpkin with a tube for a mouth, I doubted it would make me feel like a million . . . years old, maybe.

  I dived sideways as the pumpkin spit a ball of lightning out the tube mouth, burning my scalp and hair as it sailed past. It exploded against the wall, producing a million slivers of blue-flickering electricity that had every hair on any part of my body standing at attention.

  “Mary, Mother of God!” I cried. “Another one that shoots stuff!”

  I ran back toward Arlene, shouting, “Run, run, run!” With pain and surprise still fresh, I couldn’t think of anything else to do.