Knee-Deep in the Dead

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  We found a cozy room with four doors and a single switch in the center. “Do you hear that?” Arlene asked.

  Until she mentioned it, I hadn’t heard anything but our heavy breathing; but then I noticed something so unbelievably loud that a deaf man should have felt it; concentration is a funny thing.

  It sounded like the World Trade Center taking a stroll just outside.

  We rotated slowly, tracking the noise, and I thought about that movie with the tyrannosaurus stomping around.

  “Well, Fly, what now? I doubt we could climb back up again.”

  I looked up; the hole we’d climbed through was far over our heads. “We already know there’s no way to get us out in that direction. We’re here; if an exit exists, it has to be through one of those doors.”

  “Besides, we came here to do a job, Fly, even if that means fighting Godzilla.”

  I shrugged; what else was there to say? “One switch; four doors. Which one does it open?”

  I went to a door at random and tried to open it manually. Nothing. It wouldn’t budge, even when I kicked it. The behemoth still marched back and forth outside, shaking the entire building with every step.

  “I can’t help it,” I said at last, “I’m a born lever-puller.”

  “You’re repeating yourself,” Arlene repeated.

  She flattened against the wall as I slapped the switch, then joined her. All four doors opened smoothly, simultaneously.

  “Move out!” I shouted.

  As fast as we could, we bolted through the door and entered a tiny, garagelike room looking into a brilliantly lit, silver and white, chrome-covered keep—the size of Texas. Wings from the central room extended like an X into the huge tank.

  We slid outside on the double. The sound of the walking skyscraper inspired speed on our part—and that was without even bothering to look behind to see what was making all the ruckus.

  Halfway to one of the wings, I couldn’t stand the suspense; like Mrs. Lot, I looked back.

  I thought I’d seen everything. After imps and demons and pumpkins and hell-princes, I’d be able to handle anything else they threw at us! At least that’s what I thought.

  I’d also thought the hell-princes were giants when I first saw them. My scale was in for a rude awakening.

  “Mother Mary!” I shouted involuntarily. The others weren’t monsters any longer, not compared to this!

  It stood five meters tall, with piston-driven legs supporting a body that must have weighed hundreds of tons. Deep within its massive structure came the grinding of many gears. The arms were also piston-driven, and the left arm ended in a huge box that didn’t look anything like a lunch box.

  “No!” This time it was Arlene who had glanced behind and echoed my opinion. Now that we’d had our turn at making noise, it was time for the colossus to speak.

  The scream of rage that came out of its mouth was so loud that it was as if the two long horns—one on each side of its head, and growing out so far as to end over the muscled shoulders—were actually 50,000-watt stereo speakers amplifying the sound so that everyone could hear it from Deimos to Phobos to Mars.

  While it roared, the arm with the box on the end pointed at us. That broke the spell. We were both very good at noticing anything pointing at us.

  We ran like hell itself was on our tail, up the left wing seconds ahead of a terrific detonation. A miniature cruise missile had missed us, impacting against the far wall. Even at a distance of two hundred meters, the explosion knocked us off our feet.

  We ran as we’d never run before. All the eighteen-wheelers in the universe were coming at us on a downgrade to doom. We needed an exit ramp.

  “Look!” Arlene screamed, pointing at a narrow hole where the wings joined the central building we’d just exited. She dived through without a hitch. Me, I got stuck—it was Phobos all over again! But I wasn’t going to waste an opportunity, even with the wits scared out of me.

  I turned and loosed a few rounds from my trusty rocket launcher. I figured, Why the hell not?

  The rockets struck dead-on—with no apparent effect.

  The titan roared; a good translation, I guess, would be, “Now it’s my turn!”

  27

  The steam-driven demon returned fire, striking the wall of the wing, blowing us to the ground. The good news was that this finished the task of getting me through the hole.

  We were so stunned, we could barely pick ourselves up from the floor; a floor that was shaking from the approaching leviathan. “Get up!” I said, grabbing Arlene by the arm and pulling her to her feet. The colossus stomped straight toward us, and I knew that a flimsy piece of wall would be like a piece of Kleenex to the thing even before he ripped through it without slowing down.

  We staggered in the other direction, up the other wing. “My right foot’s numb!” Arlene hollered. “It’s asleep!” I heard the fear in her voice. I’m sure she could hear the fear in mine, too.

  “Wake it up,” I said, and while she stomped her foot, forcing the blood to circulate, I fired a few more rockets at the monster. There was no effect worth mentioning.

  “This thing won’t die!” Arlene shouted as we ran.

  “Not without something heavier,” I agreed. Arlene stared at the far wall and started mumbling to herself, obviously making thumbnail calculations. I added one and one, and got two human beings crazy with terror.

  As we rounded the corner of the next wing, we heard the steam-driven demon crunching after us. At least he wasn’t moving any faster than a brisk walk. At his size, if he didn’t tire, that walk would finish us. I didn’t want to think about the missiles he could fire. We turned another corner. So long as we heard him but didn’t see him, I figured we were doing our best.

  “Fly!” Arlene cried. “Near as I can figure, this room is much larger than the Gate gravity field the aliens set up.” She took another deep breath, coughed, continued: “The periphery of the room should be at normal Deimos gravity.”

  “Close to zero, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  I froze, staring at the far wall. Something was nagging at the back of my brain. This was no time to ignore hunches, instincts, or sudden revelation. “Arlene, we’ve got to lure Godzilla out of the anomaly and into the normal gravity zone.”

  She didn’t ask why. She had a better question: “Which one of us?”

  She was right. The only way to do this was for one of us to get into the zone and taunt the creature until it charged.

  Arlene did some quick mind reading. “There’s only one choice,” she said. “I’m faster, you lumbering ox.”

  I couldn’t argue with her about that. I was already a lot more winded than she. I used to kid her about having the fastest cleats in the Light Drop; now it was life or death riding on her foot speed. She must not have liked my expression. “Fly, it has to be me! Besides, you’re a much better shot with the rockets.”

  “Lot of good that’s done us.”

  “It’s the only weapon might even slow it down,” she insisted; and there was no arguing with logic. She stopped running and so did I. She put her hand on my cheek and it was warm and damp. We were both sweating like mad. “If I don’t make it,” she said, forcing her breathing to slow, and the words to come out slow and easy, “it’s been a cool couple of years. Take care, Fly, and when you start firing those rockets, try not to mix me up with the big guy.”

  I wanted to say too much, so I only nodded and kept my mouth shut. She jogged toward the distant wall, looking back over her shoulder once. I felt like a heel, but she was right. Got sweat in my eyes, too.

  Then the biggest monster in the universe rounded the edge and loped by. It walked right by me, sniffed the air with nauseating nostrils, and stopped! That unbelievable head slowly began to turn in my direction. I gave myself up for dead . . . but Arlene had other ideas.

  She made so much noise she could have been a three-piece band. She caterwauled, taunted, laughed, pointed, howled and hooted, and tap-danced for
a big finish. She passed the audition.

  The big mother raised its missile arm. Arlene, back against the wall in the corner, planted her feet firmly and shoved off, like a kid shoving off in a pool to get a head start at a swim meet. Darn near zero-g could be fun.

  She streaked sideways along the adjacent wall, and the missile impacted astern of her, pissing off the steam-demon.

  “Roaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggrrrrrraaaaaaaauuughghh,” it complained, stomping after her. She crouched, safe in a corner, watching every move the enemy made. When Godzilla stopped halfway and fired another three missiles, she was ready for it. She timed her leap to take her farther along the back wall, out of the blast radius.

  As the demon pumped after her, I had a clear view from behind, and noticed that a whole rack of small missiles was built into the creature’s back! What did that say about the thing’s creators?

  Then, one cannonball-crashing step past the invisible line did the trick, and the big guy launched into the air, smashing against the high ceiling. “Welcome to the gravity zone, sucker!” I yelled, then stepped out of cover and fired a barrage of rockets at a target that was just too damned big to miss. Hell, Lieutenant Weems could have hit this one.

  The rockets exploded against the demon, knocking it farther back against the wall. This got its attention. Eyes big as dinner plates looked at me in an unkindly fashion. The demon raised its arm, but didn’t fire. This was because it was slowly rotating in the air like a windmill. Good old zero-g!

  Every time it lined me up for a shot, it had shifted again. And while it was unable to steady itself, I kept firing rockets. By the time it managed to stabilize itself and line up a shot, I had pumped a total of fifteen rockets. Fifteen, and it didn’t give a spit!

  Realizing that sooner or later the steam-demon might get off a missile in my direction, I made plans.

  The essence of virtually every martial art—and they taught us a lot in the Light Drop Infantry—is to use the other guy’s own weapons against him. Like, what the hell? What did I have to lose except my life, and all Earth?

  I stood perfectly visible and stopped shooting; I wanted that titanic SOB to finally bring its missile launcher to bear. Sounds stupid, I know . . . but it really was all part of the plan.

  I meant to do that!

  Behind me the walls came to a point, and there was another hole in the wing just begging for me to fill her up. I waited until the steam-demon drew a bead on me . . . then I dived into the slit as it fired. By the time the cruise missile impacted against the wing wall, I’d rolled on the other side of it, protected.

  What happened next was in the hands of Sir Isaac Newton.

  The force of the shot threw the demon backward against the wall with such terrific force that five meters of solid monster was torn to shreds.

  It sounded as if an entire supermarket had been slam-dunked into the side of a mountain. The next sound was music to my ears: Arlene giving a war cry of such glee and joy that I wanted to join her around some prehistoric campfire to gloat over the dead enemy and marvel at our own survival.

  I still exercised some caution as I peeped around the wall. A few lights still flashed and flickered on the demon as it feebly tried to crawl. But this baby wasn’t going to bother us anymore.

  “Shall we put it out of our misery?” asked Arlene as she rejoined me.

  “Does it deserve so merciful a fate?” I asked. She raised an eyebrow in surprise. Sometimes I think she underestimated my intelligence. What, only girl Marines can get away with sounding pompous?

  “Best to play it safe,” she said. “I don’t want to get back on that merry-go-round.”

  I nodded. It only took the rest of my rockets, fired point-blank, to turn the prone body into cotton candy. “Whose turn is it to name the new monster?” I asked when the job was done.

  “You saw it first,” she said.

  “All right, then: steam-demon. That’s what I kept thinking when I watched it move.”

  “Not bad, Fly. You’re getting better at this. Maybe you could be a writer.”

  “No need to be insulting,” I said, patting her on the head in a patronizing way. This time I could get away with it. I felt good. It’s not every day you trick an unstoppable force into an immovable object.

  We explored and found a huge, round manhole in the floor near where the demon was originally standing. Perhaps it had been performing guard duty. Arlene did the inspection and laughed. “You’re going to love this,” she said, standing up.

  “Let me guess. It needs a key.”

  “You don’t like having to mess with keys, do you?”

  “Not when I’m fresh out of rockets.” But we had plenty of time for a scavenger hunt. Great. Whoever came up with the need for all these keys was on a par with the guy who invented cross-merging back on Earth. No torture too severe.

  “I’ll bet I know where it is,” Arlene said. Following her lead, we returned to the still-sparking, burning body of the steam-demon. Arlene found a key stuck in a slot in the creature’s belly. So he had definitely been the guardian. She started to pull it out and quickly yanked her hand away, cussing.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s freakin’ hot!” Being careful not to burn herself on the quickly slagging metal, she gingerly extracted it, shielding her eyes from the heat with her other hand. Wisps of steam rose off the purple computer key card, but it retained its shape. She grinned like a kid who’d just gotten the prize in the cereal box.

  We ran to the door in the floor, the hole for a mole. Arlene plugged it into the slot. The hatch rose, then rotated open. Through this opening we saw a brilliant, eye-hurting red. A rickety, wooden ladder descended out of sight. “I can hardly believe it,” she said.

  “Believe what?”

  “Has to be, babe. Fly, we’re looking right at the wall of the hyperspace tunnel itself.”

  We looked long and hard. “Now what?” she asked.

  I shrugged. When there’s no data, flip a coin. After all, the ladder wasn’t even charred.

  I reached my naked hand down into the red-red-redness. I touched a color. Arlene touched my shoulder.

  “What does it feel like?” she asked.

  I told her: “You’d think it would be hot, but it isn’t. It’s ice-cold.”

  “Weird,” she said, and put her hand down next to mine. “So what’s outside a hyperspace wormhole?” she asked.

  “Outer space?” I suggested. “That river of faces we saw earlier? Heaven and hell? Death?”

  We glanced at each other and nodded. Holding hands, we took a deep breath and stepped into the redness.

  Crimson red. Fire-engine red. Rose red. Bloodred. Lipstick red. Martian red. The color curled around us like cold, smothering, arctic water, filling our brains with the redness of death. We were on fire! But I felt no pain.

  The experience was not pleasant. The flames burned away our clothing and weapons, but not our skin.

  The ladder vanished; it was only in our minds, anyway. For a while we slipped and slid as if we were at a crazy amusement park; but at least we could see. No matter how bad a situation, I was always grateful for light.

  28

  The red tunnel was bathed in the kind of hazy glow you get in a dark room when you’re developing photos. So long as I could see my hand in front of my face, I wasn’t going to freak. But that was the only good thing about the situation.

  Then we fell into a room. Room? Some sort of internal organ . . . the walls, floor, and ceiling were pink, pulsating flesh, ribbed and liberally coated with slippery mucus.

  Once again both Arlene and I were naked as jaybirds. Instinctively, I covered myself again, just as I had before.

  “Oh, come on, Fly!” Arlene complained. “You’re a human being, thank God. We have little enough to remind us of who we are and why we’re here . . . we don’t need you being shy on top of everything else.”

  I slowly took ray hands away. But I tried not to look to hard at Arlene—I didn’
t trust myself. We were buddies; I wanted it to stay that way.

  “This place stinks,” Arlene said. Maybe my nose had stopped working. I counted myself lucky; the organ was diseased, sickly, and I was glad I couldn’t smell it. There was a downward slope that wasn’t so steep as to cause us to lose our footing altogether, but I wasn’t comfortable as we stumbled through the giant organ. I had a disturbing sense of what organ it was . . . a place we’ve all been before.

  “I just had a bad thought, Fly; I hope whatever burned away our clothes didn’t also burn away all the microbes in our guts that help us digest food. Without them, we’ll die of starvation no matter how much we eat.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, my voice shaky, as if I hadn’t used it for decades. “I don’t feel ravenously hungry, so evidently the Gate left the MRE food in my stomach. Probably left the microbes, as well . . . anything organic.”

  We both jumped when the demonic uterus started contracting. I had always hated amusement parks. Then we were sliding out of control. I grabbed Arlene’s hand and she squeezed hard.

  The contractions pushed us along the floor to a “door,” a giant, semitransparent cyst membrane with a doorknob in the middle. The knob was made of some kind of cartilage. I pushed my arm into a wet opening all the way to the shoulder and turned the knob.

  Two corpses were on the other side. They’d only been shadows seen through the membrane; we couldn’t tell what they were.

  One was male, the other female. After our experience with déjà vu, I experienced a momentary shock of thinking the bodies were our own! They weren’t, but they could have been related to us—similar body types, similar faces.

  I sure as hell knew who they were, though: one was the third woman in Fox Company besides Dardier and Arlene, Midori Yoshida.