Knee-Deep in the Dead

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  “What in God’s name was that?” Arlene gasped, still shaking.

  “No naming game for this baby,” I said. “Already has a name. You’re looking at the same model of Hell Prince you dodged when you slipped through the crack on Phobos, before the Gate. This is what was tramping down the corridor while you scrawled a skull and C-bones on the wall.”

  She shook her head, clearing alien cobwebs and appearing truly weary for the first time. “Boy, if the light had been better, you’d have been on your own, Fly, ’cause I sure as hell wouldn’t have wasted two seconds making a mark with that mother staring me in the face.”

  “Oh yes you would have.”

  “Egomaniac.”

  We needed all the cheering we could give each other. Picking through the carcasses, it seemed unfair that our only reward would be more ooze exactly where we needed to go.

  “Damn,” said Arlene, “the whole place looks flooded.”

  “You came up with the jogging theory,” I reminded her. “Let’s find out how good it is.”

  I shouldn’t have said anything, for then she insisted on going first, running through the middle of the toxin. I followed close behind, feeling the pain right through my soles. We didn’t quite manage to jog, but we did keep up a brisk walk.

  The toxin slowed us down with a sucking, gripping quality; each second made me feel like it had been too long since my last checkup. I kept wishing for another of those crazy blue spheres to show up: I was beginning to wonder if I’d imagined the first.

  All bad things come to an end. We finally made it around the facility to the other elevator in Sector 9, not ten feet from where we’d started, if only we’d been able to shove through the flesh-ivy. I was beginning to hate the ooze more than I did the monsters . . . except when it was in barrels.

  The lift was the antique kind with a lever to start and stop, rather than buttons. We had a hell of a time trying to get it to stop at the next level down.

  The level started with a teleporter; not a good sign, far as I was concerned. “My turn to go first,” I said; Arlene didn’t argue.

  By the time she arrived, thirty seconds later, I was back at work. I’d killed three imps and five former soldiers/workers, a more dim-witted than usual zombie collection.

  “My turn to rescue you,” she said; but this was duck soup after the hell-prince. Heck, most of the zombies weren’t even armed!

  “We’re getting good at this,” I said.

  “Don’t get cocky,” she warned. I let it pass without remark.

  A platform lowered as we approached, as if inviting us into the parlor; still feeling cocky despite Arlene’s warning, I stepped aboard. Arlene followed, of course.

  At the top, I took a turn and came face to face with another hell-prince, holding a blue key card in its claws!

  “Get it—get it!” Arlene shouted; I didn’t know whether she meant the card or the monster . . . but in either case, I had only four rockets left, not enough!

  I jerked up the launcher, then paused, staring. Something was weird. Then I realized: we were nose-to-snout, and the thing hadn’t screamed yet.

  Or moved. I edged closer . . . It was frozen solid, like it had seen a gorgon from Greek mythology. Turned to stone.

  Heart pounding like a pile driver, I stepped close and gently plucked the blue key card from its claw. Then I rejoined Arlene on the floor, still shaking.

  Toxic waste literally surrounded us, the dry space where we stood like an island. The light was good enough to see other raised machinery platforms making islands in this sea.

  Arlene found a pole of thin metal. She tapped around for shallow parts and traced a crossable path to the first “island”; then she repeated the process until we made it through the toxic goop and into blue-glowing corridor.

  At least the color of the corridor made me glad to have the blue key card. On cue, we ran into a blue-trimmed door at the end of the corridor. We crossed into a narrow corridor with red-glowing walls, floor, and ceiling, so bright that it hurt our eyes. We heard a familiar thud-thud at the end of the hall; it sounded like more flesh blocks.

  Variety is the spice of life, even on Deimos. The sounds came from a piece of stamping machinery that didn’t seem to be the least bit organic. I was grateful for that.

  “Oh, great,” said Arlene, “some jerk has tossed another key card onto the base.” The implication was that we couldn’t walk away from something so valuable as another computer key card.

  A giant, metal piston repeatedly smashed down to within a few centimeters of the base, stamping anything on the base into powder. “Arlene, why would anyone put the card out for us, except as bait? We don’t need it.”

  “We used the blue card to get this far,” she insisted. “What’s behind the mystery yellow door?”

  “But Arlene . . .” She was through listening. The only way to get the yellow key card was to slide across the base, grab it, and roll off the other side before the stamping part came down to turn the contestant into paté.

  She backed away, measuring the piston’s rise and fall with her eyes. I was about to stop her and tell her about the patented Fly technique for opening doors; then I remembered my meager supply of rockets.

  “At least let me do that,” I said.

  “You? Corporal Two-left-feet on the drill field?”

  I opened my mouth to angrily protest; then I realized she was right—understating it, if anything. I never could get the timing right on anything more complicated than dress-right-dress or point-and-shoot.

  My heart in my mouth, I watched Arlene count, timing the piston. Then quickly, before she could think better of it or I could object again, she jumped just as it hit the low point and started to rise again.

  Arlene sprinted across the room and threw herself into a face-first baseball slide, scooping the key card in her arms. She slid to a halt . . . but she was still on the base!

  For an instant she froze. I couldn’t possibly reach her in time—and a horrible image flashed through my mind.

  If Arlene died, in the next cycle, I knew I would jump on the machine and die alongside her.

  Thank God I didn’t have to make that decision; at the last second she made a panic roll off the platform.

  Arlene left the key card on the stamper, near the edge; but it was a simple matter, when the piston rose, to scoop it off from where she stood.

  She pocketed it . . . and good thing; past the stamping machine was a thick airlock door, tough as a bank vault, surrounded by yellow lights. I doubt a rocket would even have scratched the chrome. Maybe a SAM.

  The yellow key card let us into a central, circular corridor surrounding a giant, cylindrical room. We took a lift down into the room; once inside, the lift moved up again.

  “Uh, Fly, I don’t see any switch to bring it back down.” Damned if she wasn’t right.

  From inside, the lift door looked like a spine with ribs coming out of it. Once again, no human would ever have made anything like this. The aliens were definitely reworking Deimos, and had been for some time.

  “I don’t like their interior decorator,” she said, as if reading my mind. She tilted her head in the direction of the latest attraction. A row of what looked like red spittoons stretched out of sight, and on each one there was a skull bathed in red light.

  “If these were human minds, I’d say they were psychotic,” I commented.

  “You know something, Fly? Every monster we’ve seen has a head too large or strangely shaped to be mistaken for a human head.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how do you account for the skulls? Whether they’re designs on walls or ceilings or whole skulls like these, they’re all human.”

  “And they couldn’t have been taken from us, not all of them; with all the zombies and unbeheaded corpses, who’d be left?”

  She touched one. “This isn’t real,” she said. “More like metal than bone.”

  I turned it over, looking at it from different angles. “I’ll b
et it’s meant to scare us, same as the freakin’ swastika. Well, we’re past being bothered by Halloween.”

  I instantly regretted my choice of words. No sooner would I toss a challenge into the air than it would be answered. Was someone watching our every move?

  This time it was a horde of Imps, zombies, and a couple of pumpkins coming around the curve of the room, screaming doom in our ears. Fortunately, they were only coming at us from the one direction. We would have had no chance if attacked from both directions.

  Arlene dropped flat, and I let fly with my last rockets. I ignored the imps, concentrating on the two pumpkins, the greater threat.

  Somebody got careless on the other side, and soon all the monsters were mixing it up among themselves.

  We drew back around the curve and waited for silence; then we slid back and smoked the survivors with shotgun and AB-10. I still had one last rocket.

  In the course of the fight, somebody—us or them—accidentally activated a switch in the floor that caused part of a staircase to rise. When the last pumpkin smashed into orange and blue slime against the ruined head of the last assassinated imp, we started up the steps. Arlene activated the next switch.

  Another set of steps rose, and we took them to the third switch and set of stairs. At the top we found a teleporter.

  We stepped aboard one at a time, me first, teleporting to a long corridor with barred windows looking outside. Arlene bent over for a closer view and pulled back with a gasp.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You didn’t see the stars or Mars.”

  Swallowing hard, she motioned for me to look for myself. She wasn’t in the mood for humor. Blood had drained from her face, a reaction I’d never before seen in Arlene. I put my face against the window.

  As a child, I’d seen a painting in a museum that gave me my first nightmare. I hadn’t thought of it in years; but now it came back to me.

  Beyond the window was a river of human faces, hundreds of them, each an island in an ocean of flesh. Each face had a horrified expression stamped on it, each a damned soul.

  The spectacle achieved its purpose. We were both distracted. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been so careless as to allow a stomping, single-minded demon to get close enough to clamp its jaws on Arlene’s back and shoulder.

  Her cries were echoed by each face in the river of damned souls, each screaming Arlene’s pain and torment.

  23

  Arlene!” I shouted. I grabbed the monster with my hands and literally pulled it off her before it could position itself to take a second and certainly lethal bite.

  It stumbled clumsily. I grabbed the AB-10 and pumped two dozen rounds into its open, blood-caked maw. It didn’t get up.

  I was almost afraid to touch her. Blood pumped out of the horrible, fatal wound.

  Arlene was dying.

  Her face was sallow, eyes vacant and staring. One pupil was dilated, the other contracted to a pinpoint. There was nothing I could do, not even with a full medical lab.

  But damn her, she was not going to die here and join that river of faces.

  As gently as I could, I lifted Arlene’s bleeding body in my arms and carried her out of that circle of hell. Her rasping breath was a call to arms, a signal that life and hope still remained in the young gal.

  I set her down at the end of the corridor; the lift door was blocked by a river of what appeared to be lava. Hoping the red stuff was at least no worse than the green stuff, I dashed across into an alcove where a single switch mocked me.

  I flipped it, causing a path to rise up through the “lava.” So far, so good. I ran back, grabbed Arlene, and walked across the path as quickly as possible.

  At the last step before reaching the lift, I heard a grinding noise from behind. I paused and looked back: a new path rose slowly, leading to an alcove hidden from view except from where I now stood.

  The cubbyhole contained another one of the blue-face spheres that I thought I’d never see again, the one item that I had hesitated to tell Arlene about because it seemed so incredible.

  The sight was like another of the adrenaline bursts. Quickly, before the path could lower again, I powered her across, not bothering to stop and pick up pieces of equipment that fell from us, some landing on the path, some lost in the lava. I had a great terror that the sphere would fly away just before I got there, like a carnival balloon just out of reach.

  I reached it, hesitated for a moment—then literally threw Arlene onto the sphere to make sure I wouldn’t be the one to touch it first.

  With a nearly audible silent pop, the blue liquid was all over her; and the red liquid on her body, the blood, evaporated into the blue. Arlene sat up and coughed, looking like someone coming out of a deep sleep.

  “How do you feel?”

  “My shoulder hurts like a son of a bitch. What the hell happened?”

  “Pinkie decided to have you for a midnight snack. I put him on a diet. You sure you’re all right?”

  Standing up, she shook her arm, staring in wonder at the shredded sleeve and tooth marks. “What in God’s name did you do to me?”

  I figured the time had finally come to tell her about the magical blue spheres. She had no trouble believing me.

  Only my pistol and some shotgun shells had been lost to the lava. Weapons in hand, we slid into the elevator and pressed the only floor button, labeled Command Center.

  The lift had barely begun to grind slowly downward when suddenly Arlene reached past me and pushed the red “kill” button. The elevator stopped, falling silent.

  “Why did you kill the power?”

  She stared at me before answering. For a moment I had a terrible fear that something had gone wrong with the blue sphere and she was going to turn into a zombie in front of me. Instead she asked, “Fly, are you starving, or is it just me?” I shook my head. She continued: “Maybe it’s that blue thing, but I’m so famished I could swallow one of those pink demons.”

  “How about floating pumpkin pie for dessert?”

  “And I’m suddenly exhausted. Fly, I need some sleep.” I had completely lost track of the supplies. Arlene hadn’t. “Don’t you ever listen to training videos? Never wander into battle without MREs.” She demonstrated the truth of her maxim. Suddenly, I realized I was hungrier than I thought. A Meal Ready to Eat sounded like the finest, gourmet cuisine in the solar system.

  “A stopped elevator as a secure base. I never would’ve thought of it.”

  “Next best thing to a Holiday Inn,” she added, raising an eyebrow. Arlene showed a domestic side that surprised me. While we talked, she took the packages of freeze-dried food and mixed them in the water of her canteen. “Sorry it’ll be cold,” she said as I watched her shake the contents with the skill of a bartender preparing the perfect martini.

  “That’s all right, beautiful. I like cold—” I picked up the package, glanced at the title. “—cold beef stew.”

  I also liked the fact that Arlene was alive. As we chowed down, I felt the strongest emotions since finding her on Deimos.

  Maybe she sensed the inappropriate feelings coming off me in waves. She lowered her head and blinked rapidly, as if stopping herself from crying by main force.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Don’t want to tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  She hesitated. “Willy,” she said. “PFC Dodd.”

  “Oh.” I squirmed uncomfortably.

  “I’ve been forcing myself not to think about him. He’s dead, isn’t he? Or . . . worse.”

  “You don’t know that! I thought you were dead or reworked, but I found you alive.”

  “Find anybody else?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Fly, I’ve accepted the fact. That he’s dead, I mean. I don’t think I could face—the other possibility.” She looked up, her eyes moist but not tearing. “Promise me something.”

  “Anything possible.”

  “If we find him and he is, you know . . . and if I
can’t do it . . . will you? Promise? And don’t mention him again.”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. Funny lump in my throat. Yeah, babe; I’ll be happy to blow away my rival for your hand if he should happen to turn up a zombie. No problemo!

  She changed the subject, wrenching my mind back on the primary issue. “Fly, I think it’s pretty likely that the aliens we’re fighting aren’t the same ones who built the Gates.”

  “I was wondering about that myself,” I said. “All this weird stuff, skulls and satanic symbols—there was nothing about the Gates themselves that hinted at this. The Gates don’t look like a Vincent Price movie.”

  “There’s nothing eldritch about the Gates,” she said. I was starting to like that word. “So let’s assume these aliens found the Gates and discovered a way to turn them on from the other end. But why do they look so much like human-style demons?”

  “Genetic engineering?” I suggested. “They could be deliberately designed to look like our conception of hell, particularly the hell-princes. They’re the dead giveaways.”

  “Can’t you find some other word than dead?” she begged, a fleck of red tomato paste on her lips.

  “The hell-princes are just too much like medieval drawings of the devil to be natural.”

  “Unless they really are hell-princes,” Arlene said.

  I shook my head, unwilling to consider that possibility. So we sat in silence for a moment, finishing our food and drink. Much more thinking along these lines and I’d be ready to take communion again.

  “I was never really afraid of monsters as a child,” Arlene finally said. “Grown-ups were scary enough by themselves.”

  “Why invade at all? What is this for?”

  “Good question,” she said. “Here’s another: If they can genetically engineer imps and demons, why do they need human zombie-slaves? And why grow human flesh?”

  “Maybe they want super-zombies, more powerful than these dead excuses for lemmings, but still able to pass among us undetected.”

  Arlene yawned, struggling to show enthusiasm. “But that may be their weakness, Fly. The zombies don’t amount to much. You and I aren’t scared by skulls and evil symbols. What if there is a finite number of the actual monsters and they can’t easily recreate them? What if the monsters too are ‘reworked’ from other creatures, creatures the mastermind has to breed and raise? That would mean every horrible creature we kill is one fewer to invade Earth if they can’t be replaced. Until the new, improved pod-people come on-line.”