I liked it. “Arlene, if you’re right, all we have to do is kill everything . . . and we end the invasion.”
We didn’t have anything for dessert, so we used imagination to sweeten the conversation. “I’ve been thinking about the idea they’re using Deimos as a spaceship,” I said. “How can you move something as large as a whole moon?”
“I was thinking some sort of hyperspace tunnel. Yeah, I know; I’ve been reading too much sci-fi, Fly.”
I didn’t say it. At least it was something, a hypothesis. “Maybe there’s some way to break through the tunnel walls?” I asked.
“Maybe. But it could also kill us. We don’t know if ‘outside the walls’ has the same physical laws; and even if it does, if there’s even any air.”
“It could also disrupt what’s happening, maybe destroy Deimos and everything on it.”
“Including us? But that would throw a monkey wrench in their invasion plans,” she said with a smile that turned into a yawn. She wasn’t bored. Her eyelids were heavy from exhaustion.
“If these creatures run the moon—the ship,” I said, “then what horrors guard the tunnel wall?”
“Those faces couldn’t be real, could they? I hated those faces . . .” Her head nodded forward and she snored. It wasn’t a very loud snore.
The elevator was as secure a place as we were likely to find. I sat watch and let her sleep. There was an eerie silence despite the faint vibration. After four hours I woke her up.
“Your turn,” she insisted, rubbing pieces of sleep from her eyes.
“Don’t let me sleep more than three hours.”
“Fly, sleep! I command you to sleep,” she said, making hypnotic passes. I slept . . . not because of the mystic passes, but because of a mud slogger’s ability to sleep anywhere.
I could have done without the dreams.
The river of faces touched something deep in both of us, the place where you store up all your fears and regrets. Going to sleep meant sinking right into that place.
I was tangled in long, sticky fibers like a giant spiderweb, but at the center of the web was a face made of a hundred different faces. I didn’t want to look at it; but the face came closer, slowly rotating like a planet, showing different faces spread across its surface, smiles melting into frowns, rows of eyes like so many beads of glass, noses creating an uneven mountain range stretching to the horizon.
Then the sphere of blue faces was pressed right against mine, and it had stopped turning. In the center was the face of my long dead grandfather as I had seen him in the open casket. His toothless mouth was working, lips twisting, but no sounds came out.
I knew what he was saying, though: “Dinna let them rework me, Fianna Flynn, me lad . . . dinna never let them rework us all, b’Gad.”
The sticky fibers became tendrils sliding up my nose and into my mouth, choking me. The truth is out there . . .
I woke up in a cold sweat. Arlene was shaking me hard. “Fly, are you okay?”
“Sleep is overrated,” I gasped. I was just as tired as when I’d put my head down. Standing, I felt dizzy. Probably running a fever, but I didn’t want to mention it. There was nothing to be done anyway. I pushed the button back in to reactivate the power; then I pushed the floor button, and the elevator continued its trip to the Command Center.
It was a good thing we’d eaten and tried to get some rest. The moment the doors opened, we were in another damned firelight with zombies, imps, pumpkins, and a specter.
The ambush trapped us in the lift. We used the lift doors for cover.
By the time we worked our way out, we’d cleaned a huge room with stairways at either end, leading up to a split-level. There were six pillars; each had its designated nasty hiding behind it.
Pushing through a door at the top of the split-level, we found a gigantic indoor garden or arboretum. The air was thick with pollen from a jungle of fleshy plants overgrowing where some breed of computers used to be.
Arlene sneezed repeatedly. I lucked out. I was so exhausted that maybe I wasn’t breathing as deeply. “You can say one thing for the greenhouse,” I observed. “Plants are plants here, and not combined with machines.”
Blowing her nose—allergies—Arlene added: “And men are men, and so are the women.” All that was missing was a handsome horse and blazing six-guns.
The absence of monsters was reason enough to explore. We could breathe later. The primary motif seemed to be a blackish, oily wood that sure as hell never originated on the old home planet. Periodically, the wood bubbled and popped, like ulcerated sores in whatever monstrous trees had produced it. I imagined a three-headed Paul Bunyan with ax-handle hands cutting the planks.
The ground squished underfoot as we walked; I looked closely and saw incredibly long, wafer-thin insects scooting out from under our feet. We finally reached the end of the arboretum and the vegetation ran out against puke-green marble, just as we’d seen back in the warehouse.
“Will you look at that?” said Arlene, pointing at red-orange curtains of fire crackling beyond the high walls, at a sufficient distance that we weren’t roasting.
“Now that’s bad taste,” I said. “Next they’ll have Lieutenant Weems in a red devil suit pop out of a cake.”
“Complete with pointy tail?” she asked wryly.
“You have a twisted mind, PFC Sanders.”
The better to explore with, I added mentally. I hoped this situation wasn’t like those science fiction stories where the terrifying menaces are taken telepathically from the greatest fears of the human beings involved. My worst fears couldn’t be this corny!
Arlene found a switch that opened a hidden room; we went with the flow. Entering the chamber, we marveled at how different it was from what we’d seen before. The entire room was constructed of that black, oily, ulcerating wood. There was one object in the room, placed at dead center: a bas relief of a demonic monster more horrible, or more ridiculous, than any we’d fought. Every physical attribute of the thing was exaggerated so that it almost seemed to be a cartoon. The largest protuberance of all was its penis, sticking out at a 45-degree angle.
“They’ve got to be kidding,” said Arlene.
“I hate to bring it up, but that’s probably another switch,” I suggested.
“I’ve handled worse,” she admitted.
24
As she flipped the switch, we heard familiar heavy, grinding sounds outside in the marble chamber. Being nearer the door, I took a look-see. I wasn’t the least bit surprised to see a set of stairs rising up in the marble room leading straight up to one of the walls of fire. Arlene joined me in pondering this new development. Neither of us seemed to be in a great hurry to run up those stairs.
“Do you feel fireproof?” she asked me.
“I left my asbestos pajamas back on Earth.”
“Maybe there’s an opening we can’t see from down here.”
“We can only dream,” I sighed. I went first. She was close behind, though. As soon as it became too hot, I had every intention of stopping. I didn’t feel any heat at all.
Arlene noticed as well. “This isn’t a bit like Campfire Girls,” she said. “By now, all the marshmallows in my pocket should be screaming out: ‘Put me on a stick!’ ”
“You have marshmallows?”
“No.”
“I don’t think it’s a real flame. Wait here, Arlene. If I catch on fire or die of heat stroke, you’ll know there was something wrong with my theory.” Another ten steps up the stairs convinced me that I was definitely on to something. Ten more steps and I was becoming certain. I still wasn’t hot as I walked right up to the curtain of seething flame and very slowly put my hand out.
The hand went right through the fire, disappearing from view without causing Yours Truly the least discomfort. I didn’t even get a blister. “Arlene,” I called out, “the fire is an illusion. Come on up.”
I walked right through, then turned around where the fire should be . . . and there was nothing there
but the welcome sight of Arlene coming up the stairs. “Arlene, can you see me?” I asked.
“No,” she answered, staring right at me. “You’ve disappeared behind the fire.”
“For my next illusion,” I announced with my best stage magician’s voice, and stepped back through where the curtain had to be, “I pull something cool out of my hat.”
“Like a beer?” she asked, taking the last steps two at a time so we stood on the same level.
“No beer, but I do have a surprise.” She was curious, and I bent from the waist, gesturing through the curtain. She preceded me to the big surprise.
“Oh, no,” she said, “not another teleporter.”
We were both pretty worn-down by this point, but a new teleporter meant we had to make a decision. What we needed was a map to show us the location of all the frying pans and fires. “So should we bother with this one or not?”
She sighed. “We’d better try it, Fly. We’ve got to find a way off this moon, and this is pretty carefully hidden away. Let’s give it a shot, hon.”
“Who’s first this time?” I asked.
She hooked her arm in mine. “Let’s do it together again.”
Weapons out, we stepped aboard. With a flash of light, we zapped to a huge room shaped like the spokes of a wagon wheel.
Six hell-princes surrounded us.
Six monstrous mouths opened.
Six monstrous throats emitted guttural screams.
Twelve angry, red eyes burned at us in the dim light.
The hell-princes were not the only ones screaming. Arlene and I screamed, too. This was a sight to make anyone howl at the moon. As the green fireballs began exploding all around us, we simply lost it—running around like chickens with their legs cut off, shooting wildly. There was nowhere to run, but we sure as hell tried!
“Duck!” we shouted at each other at about the same time. The balls of energy made fireworks over our heads. Our gunfire was nothing more than a quiet popping in that chaos, mild raindrops, but we kept firing, me with my shotgun and Arlene with her AB-10.
I found a door by pure, random chance. Praying for a miracle, I hollered for Arlene and yanked the door open . . . and now I was surrounded by a dozen floating pumpkins! Frying pans and fires—definitely frying pans and pumpkins.
Arlene screamed something from the chamber with the hell-princes, but I couldn’t hear her over my own screaming. This situation was fast becoming unacceptable.
There were too many pumpkins even to think about shooting; death, doom, and destruction from all directions! I ran as fast as I could . . . right back into the room with the hell-princes.
I wasn’t thinking very clearly, but Arlene still had her head screwed on. Her hand snaked out and grabbed me. She’d stepped inside another of the spoke-chambers and now hauled me inside with her. I imagined wall-to-wall demons waiting for us, zombies stacked like cordwood to the ceiling, imp tartare . . . but inside, for the moment, was nothing but Arlene and Yours Truly.
She held a finger against her lips; I braced myself for the Bad Guys to come after us and imagined the absolute worst. A tidal wave of sound crashed on us—roaring, screaming, crashing. But all that came through that doorway was sound. The pumpkins and the hell-princes collided in a torrent of blood and vengeance.
There were so many monsters that they took a long time to die. At least fifteen minutes Arlene and I crouched in our little closet of safety as the pumpkins splattered themselves against the horned heads of the hell-princes. Blue balls of energy evaporated against lethal lightning bolts. Blood flowed thick on the floor. We stayed right where we were.
Finally, there was beautiful silence. We heard each other’s breathing. “Who goes first?” Arlene whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“Who takes a peek?”
I raised my hand as if I were back in grade school. Cautiously I poked my head outside the star-pointed hideaway. A single hell-prince remained on its feet. I pulled back inside our hideaway and reported.
“Then why isn’t he at the doorway threatening to rip our lungs out?”
I looked past her. The hell-prince loomed in the doorway, waiting to . . .
It looked like yesterday’s lunch today. Arlene saw my face, followed my eyes and saw it.
I grabbed for my rocket launcher, but it was gone from the webbing—dropped in panic in one of the two rooms, of course!
Arlene pointed her AB-10. “That won’t work,” I shouted. A peashooter against the most powerful monster we’d run into! Had she gone insane?
She pulled the trigger three times, and thrice the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.
She stared as the mauled, bloody beast staggered forward like Frankenstein’s monster, clutching at her. Winding up like the Mud Hens’ star pitcher, she heaved the gun into the minotaur’s ugly face. Good God. I’m watching an old episode of Superman! I thought.
It blinked. The horned head shook slowly back and forth, left to right, as if trying to remember something.
Then it fell, straight as a toppling redwood, to the cold marble—dead.
“And I didn’t even know he was sick,” said Arlene. We both burst into hysterical laughter—stress released.
The floor was slippery with slick, tacky pumpkin juice, and we almost slipped several times. Clambering across the body of another hell-prince, Arlene pushed into the pumpkins’ room and shouted, “You won’t believe this!”
“What?” I was hunting for my good pal, Mr. Launcher.
“Get your butt in here! Um, please get your butt in here, Corporal.” There it was! I snagged it and clambered after her.
The light was flickering, but I could see well enough. Crucified on the walls were the mutilated bodies of four hell-princes, with spidery trails of dried blood extending from their hands—if those hams with claws on the end could be called hands.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What the hell is going on here?” Blasphemy! chanted my memory-nuns . . . demons crucified in mockery of Our Lord.
The hell-princes were killed a long time ago; the dried blood told us that much. We made a circuit of the chamber and found plastic spheres with cracks so that they could swing open or close as easily. All the spheres were empty . . . but they were just the size to hold pumpkins.
“Pumpkin nests,” said Arlene.
I stared awhile longer at the four crucified bodies of the minotaurs. “My God, it must have been the damned pumpkins themselves put the princes up there! They must hate them worse than they do us.”
It was a religious revelation for both of us. “No wonder it’s so easy to pit them against each other,” said Arlene in awe. “They despise and loathe each other so much, they proudly display each other’s ripped carcasses.” She looked up at me, face lighting up. “Jesus, Fly, we have a chance to win!”
I saw where she was headed. I had thought that the monster-aliens were simply so bad-tempered that when a zombie stumbled in the way of an imp fireball, or a demon took a bullet meant for one of us, they lost their concentration and turned on each other with mindless ferocity.
But “mindless ferocity” didn’t explain the cold, deliberate crucifixion of hell-princes by pumpkins, did it? Such a contemplative act required a deep, abiding animosity or hatred, and the single-minded determination to torture.
Something, the “mastermind,” held them together; but left to themselves, the natural inclination of each monster would be to hunt down all the other kinds and kill them.
The thought certainly suggested our tactic: kill the damned mastermind, and let nature take her course!
Now the only question was where in this hell that mastermind was.
We continued searching the pumpkin room. We found it stuffed with ammo, everything from rockets to shells to rounds for Arlene’s depleted AB-10; the various firelights had run us dry. After loading up, we pushed past one of the crucified hell-prince bodies and checked out the rest of the wagon wheel.
Not a creature was stirring, not ev
en a zombie.
“Shall we teleport?” asked Arlene.
“After what happened the last time we teleported?”
“We going to spend the rest of our lives on this karmic wheel?”
“Après vous, Bodhisattva.”
We teleported together. Appearing on a platform in a metallic room, we saw a door with blue trim that sure as shootin’ required a blue key card. Arlene went over and put her ear to it. “I hear what might be a lift operating; I guess we go thataway.”
“Key, key, who’s got the key?” I asked. “Another typical day on the job. Teleport. Get a key. Open a door. Find a teleport.”
Arlene smiled. “I guess we’re in a rut.”
25
Nothing remarkable about this area, except one dark section that was just begging for a flashlight. I went up, cast a light, and saw twisty passages that suggested a maze. The light was curiously muted, dying out after only a few feet.
“You want to poke in here?” I whispered; whispering seemed appropriate.
“Um . . . no. Maybe we don’t need to; and I don’t like the look of the place. It’s dark—not that I’m afraid of the dark!”
“Really? I sure am, especially recently. All right, it’s pitch-black, it’s a maze, and the ceilings are low and claustrophobic. Pass.” I mean, why? Life is short, especially on Deimos.
I was still staring into the blackness when gunshots yanked my attention back to Arlene. I raced down the hall and saw her pumping slugs into tiny, emaciated demons, so small I almost didn’t recognize them. “Look what I found!” she exclaimed, kicking the tiny bodies aside. Reaching behind their corpses, Arlene extracted a blue key card.
Knee-Deep in the Dead Page 17
