Knee-Deep in the Dead

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  Naturally, the executions drew the attention of other monsters. They fired at the noise. We weren’t cast members in that show, but we took full advantage of our backstage passes.

  Fifteen minutes later there was one monster, count ’em, one monster left that we could see. For the moment, the spidermind was boss over itself. And it had one other problem besides not being able to get any decent help. The gun cylinders spun, empty. The spider hadn’t saved any ammo for us.

  “Ritch,” Arlene said, speaking quietly but enunciating clearly, “your plan worked brilliantly.”

  I’m sure he would have appreciated her good opinion of him—if he had still been alive.

  The damned, stupid spiny had killed him after all. I stared at the dead face of Bill Ritch, the captivity and torture survivor, comrade, the man who gave us a real chance to defeat the alien invaders. I looked at this brand new corpse and something snapped.

  “I’m sick of this,” I told Arlene. I shrugged off my beloved rocket launcher and handed it to my best gal-pal. “Keep an eye on me, First Class. You’ll know when to use it . . . and don’t, God damn it, miss.”

  “Show me the apple, Flynn Taggart, and I’ll pop it off your head.”

  I loaded up my shotgun, for attention-grabbing purposes only, and calmly walked out to face the ugliest alien of them all.

  “Hey, spider baby,” I called out. “Yeah, I’m talking to you!”

  The turret turned. The spidermind and I looked at each other . . . and suddenly I was overwhelmed with the most horrific vision of all: I saw the Earth in flames, burning buildings, fields, oceans of corpses. I saw the demons, not just aliens, but honest-to-Lucifer demons, wading through the rivers of filth and blood and urine, laughing in triumph.

  I saw mankind under the heel. Collars around our throats, chains on wrists and ankles. I saw collaborators, traitors, quislings, turncoats of every race and culture.

  I saw a “Vichy” Earth government.

  And I saw in the distance an endless parade of bigger and more ghastly demons. They filled the land from end to end, sea to shining sea.

  And I knew this vision was no nightmare plucked from my own subconscious fears. This was reality.

  I saw the future. I leaned forward and spat upon the shredded machine mind.

  “Remember the imp you had talk to me back on Phobos? That creepy leatherface asked for my surrender. Well, here’s my answer, you insect!”

  Raising my shotgun, I took careful aim and blasted toward the brain inside the crystal case. Then I did it again. And again. And again. I stopped at eight shots because I’d run out of shells, and because the turret had finally rotated in my direction and was chewing up the deckplates with 30mm rounds.

  I slalomed through the heaped corpses, looking for one in particular . . . one body not dead but pre-born, as my nuns would say, though in a hell of a different context.

  I was looking for my steam-demon, and that had to be a first!

  The spidermind scuttled after me; on open ground it could make quite a clip . . . quite a bit faster than a mere two-legger like me. But we weren’t on open ground; I chose my route well. I leapt from body to body like Eliza across the ice floes, and the frustrated arachnoid android started shooting the corpses out of the way for clearer footing.

  I put some distance between us, and for a moment the stupid thing lost me! Great . . . I should’ve brought an air horn. Crouching so I wouldn’t get clopped by a stray, I loaded up, stood, and fired a few more shells. It spotted me, screamed in triumph—just like you’d expect an insect to sound, magnified a billion times—and charged, Gatling barrels spinning like gyroscopes.

  I ran the hundred in world-record time. I flung myself through the air in a graceful swan dive, tucked at the last second, and rolled beautifully—dislocating my shoulder.

  I struggled up, shifted the shotgun to my right, weak hand, reached over the steam-demon, and let fly with the last shell.

  My cough was answered by a diarrhea of Vulcan Cannon rounds that tore up the iron flesh of the steam-demon like an AB-10 tears up plaster. The bullets ripped the legs apart; they ripped the head apart.

  They ripped the missiles apart.

  I clenched my teeth . . . now was the moment of truth. If they’d already attached those warheads . . . Well, I guess I’d either go north and meet the nuns, or . . . or stay right where I was—in Hell!

  Fifteen seconds and 750 rounds later, sudden silence startled me back to the here-and-now. My ears throbbed and rang, and my skull felt like it was still vibrating; but the spidermind had stopped shooting to see what damage it had done.

  I wasn’t about to stick my head up, but I didn’t need to: I closed my eyes and sniffed deeply.

  There is a smell most people don’t know, but once you’ve tasted it, you never forget it. Anyone who’s hung around a Marine air base or Naval air station remembers and pilots remember from the airport: it’s the pungent aroma of JP-9 “jet propellant,” and it tears through your septum, up your nasal passages, and straight into your brain. Think of ammonia, formaldehyde, and skunk-juice swirled together into a malt.

  There was no possibility of error . . . dozens of gallons of the burn-juice pooled around the steam-demon; in fact, looking down, I saw it seeping from under the body onto my side, eating away at my boots worse than the green sludge.

  My bruised eardrums were trying to tell me something urgent, a sound behind the ringing and throbbing: clicking feet. The spidermind was on its way to investigate!

  I backed slowly away, crouching lower and lower to stay behind the steam-demon; then the spidermind loomed, and I could no longer hide.

  It screamed again, this time in rage, not triumph, and charged.

  It slipped in the fuel slick that it itself had created. It tried to rise and slipped again, skating in the horrible stuff. JP-9 dripped from the spidermind’s underbelly, splashed up and down its legs, even sprayed across the crystal canopy.

  Time to split that apple, A.S.!

  I dashed to the side, waving frantically at the building; I couldn’t see Arlene. I pointed at the spidermind, screaming, “Now, now, you crazy bitch!” She couldn’t hear me, of course, or I never would have said such a thing!

  A tiny bud of red bloomed in the black doorway, flowering into the bright-red tail exhaust of our very last rocket. I hit the deck, hands over head, belatedly wondering whether any of the jet propellant had sprayed on me . . .

  I barely heard the explosion through the ringing, but the force kicked me in my dislocated shoulder. After a moment with my eyes shut, arms locked over my head, I ventured a glance.

  The spidermind screeched and skittered, joyously engulfed in bright white flames, like one of Weem’s monks protesting the war in Kefiristan by immolating himself with burning gasoline.

  I watched for several minutes, keeping low as the last of the spidermind’s ammo exploded, bursting off in all directions. Mobility lasted only half a minute, then the intense heat melted the crystal canopy, turning the truck-size brain into a crispie critter in seconds. It took longer for the metal body to liquefy, even longer for the whole mass to bubble through the melted deckplates. At last there was nothing left of the dreaded spidermind but a smoking crater. . . . “Get used to it,” I muttered, unable to even hear my own voice. “Think of this as a rehearsal for the next eternity.”

  A hand grabbed my arm—my left arm. “No!” I screamed; then I screamed again in pain as Arlene yanked on my dislocated shoulder.

  “Jesus, Fly, I’m sorry!” I faintly heard her voice, as if through a speakerphone across the room.

  I rolled onto my back, swearing like a drunken longshoreman. “Oh,” she said, “I see what it is. Hang on, Fly, this is going to hurt—but you’ll thank me for it in a minute.”

  Would you believe she grabbed my biceps, pulled my arm out of the socket, and snapped it back into place?

  I passed out.

  I came to in a few seconds, then cursed her out again, sorting the epithets
alphabetically, in case I missed any. I passed through the scatological and had started on the blasphemous when she shut me up by planting a big, wet boot-heel on my mouth.

  She sat me up; by then, my ears were starting to recover, and I could hear what she said. “Pretty spectacular, Fly. I guess we won. . . . Ritch would’ve loved this spread now.”

  But still I heard the hum of power. The lights remained lit. Something was wrong with this picture.

  “I hope you won’t take this wrong,” said Arlene, staring curiously around, “but why aren’t we plunged into terrible darkness, Fly Taggart?”

  “I know what you mean, A.S. We can’t feel total satisfaction until we’re freezing to death in the black night of space . . .”

  “And running out of air.”

  “So what’s gone wrong with Bill Ritch’s plan?”

  She frowned in thought. “I guess that building didn’t house the power receiver, after all,” she said. “It must have been the communications gear by which the spidermind was controlling all the other creatures.”

  “You mean all the creatures left on Deimos and Phobos will destroy one another, like these guys did?” I smiled . . . I like that thought.

  “The spidermind was barely able to control them as it was,” she pointed out. “They have a natural hatred for each other.”

  I remembered the crucified hell-princes. Then I remembered Bill, dying from the stupid blast from a stupid imp. Now he was gone!

  Focus, Fly . . . focus.

  We went back in the control room and I threw a piece of canvas over Ritch. We laid his body out in the place that was the most appropriate crypt: the scene of his victory over the demons.

  “All right,” I said. “I think we should retrace our steps back to the surface of Deimos. Maybe we can figure out how to get back to Mars from there, or at least figure out where in hell we are.”

  “Watch your language,” Arlene said seriously. Hm, Arlene Sanders—with religion.

  As we worked our way back up through the levels of Deimos, we found the dead bodies of hundreds, then thousands, of the alien monsters. It was as if the Cosmic Orkin company had come through and done a big special on demonic infestation.

  There were a very few live ones, so completely out of it that they hardly seemed worth killing. Somehow Arlene and I found the will to exterminate them anyway.

  When we reached the surface, we discovered the pressure dome was cracked, the air rushing out, creating a minihurricane. Of course, we had been adequately briefed on the basics of life in space. It would take days for all the air to escape; we weren’t planning to wait around that long.

  I looked past the crack—and stopped breathing. I stared so long, forgetting to blink, that my eyes blurred.

  I wasn’t staring at Mars anymore. Where Mars had loomed, hanging over our heads like a wrecking ball, was a different planet, one that looked disturbingly familiar: blue-green, familiar land masses, cloud cover, teeming with six billion cousins and uncles.

  We weren’t in a hyperspace tunnel any longer. We looked for several minutes, hoping it was a shared hallucination. At last Arlene said, “I guess we know their invasion plans now.”

  As I stared at Earth in the skies of Deimos, through a cracked and broken pressure dome, I felt a queer sense of dislocation, as if I were no longer sitting inside my own body—but standing alongside. I shook, as if I had a terrible fever, mindlessly clutching at my uniform—Weems’s uniform. “Well,” I began feebly, “at least we stopped them.”

  “Did we?” She reached out, as if trying to pet the planet.

  Beyond the domes, amid the bright-flecked black of space, other bright spots flared upon the continents, shining through the scattered clouds. Nuclear explosions would look just like that; other things, worse things, could look like that as well.

  “Jesus, they’ve already invaded,” Arlene said, hope draining away from her voice faster than the escaping air.

  I took her by the arm and said, “It’s not over, Arlene! We’ve already proven who’s tougher. We won’t let it end like this!”

  But we had no ship, no radio, not even a really long rope. We were stuck in low orbit around Earth, a mere four hundred kilometers away, hanging over our heads like the biggest balloon we could ever hope to play with.

  I shut my eyes tight, then opened them. How would we do the impossible? How could we jump four hundred kilometers to Earth and kill the orbital velocity?

  We didn’t say anything for a very long time. We watched the white spots appearing over the northern hemisphere, over the hot, blue oceans and cool, green hills of earth.

  Suddenly, Arlene gasped; her eyes opened wide. “Fly, I have it!”

  “What?”

  “I know how to do it!”

  “Do what damn it?”

  Her lips moved, silently calculating. Then she grinned. “I know how to get us across to Earth, Fly!”

  DOOM Novels Available from Pocket Books

  KNEE-DEEP IN THE DEAD by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

  HELL ON EARTH by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

  INFERNAL SKY by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

  ENDGAME by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  This work is based upon the computer software games DOOM® and DOOM II®. DOOM copyright © 1995, 2005 by id Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved. DOOM and the id Software name are registered trademarks of id Software, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

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