by Conner, Jack
THE ATOMIC SEA:
VOLUME FIVE
FLAMING SKIES
by Jack Conner
Copyright 2015
All rights reserved
Cover image used with permission
FROM THE AUTHOR:
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The World of the Atomic Sea
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Chapter 1
Avery started coughing. Cracking his eyes, he saw the bedroom fill with yellowish vapor. Poison. Alarm ran through him. Terror. Desperate, he held his breath and shook Layanna awake. She sat up, wide-eyed, coughing into her hand. The gas turned her eyes red. His own eyes burned, too. But the worse pain was in his lungs, which felt like some corrosive substance was eating away at them. How much had he breathed in? Enough to kill him? His striations burned.
“What—? What—?” Layanna began, but couldn’t finish.
Avery stumbled out of bed. Gas surrounded him.
Gas ...
Could it be?
She did it, he thought. General Carum actually did it. She and her team of unwilling Lai scientists had mass-produced their super-weapon, it had to be. Gods, please let me be wrong.
He and Layanna opened the door to find Frederick leaning against the railing overlooking the stairwell. He hacked and wheezed, and tears streamed down from red eyes. Gas swirled about their feet, even their waists. Avery ached to take a breath.
Suddenly, Frederick straightened, as if just realizing something, and choked out, “Father.” He rushed to Edgar’s bedroom, and Layanna followed.
Avery started after them, then remembered something and peered into Frederick’s room. Waving the smoke out of his face, he entered. No time to lose. Sitting next to a table cluttered with tools and drug paraphernalia was a briefcase, and hanging on the wall above it a gas mask, just as Avery had supposed. Frederick had been too panicked or high to put it on. Still holding his breath, Avery slipped it over his head and sucked in a deep lung-full. It stank of plastic and old sweat, but it was the sweetest breath he could remember.
Breathing through the filter, he emerged from the room and descended to find Janx and Hildra wheezing and hacking. Both had rags tied around the lower halves of their faces. When Janx saw him, the big man said, “Got any more of those, Doc?”
Speaking loudly to be heard through the plastic, Avery said, “If this is what I think it is, it shouldn’t be harmful to you. Only me.”
“What is it?” Hildra demanded.
“I don’t know. But General Carum said the gas she was developing only targeted the infected.”
“Bullshit!” came a voice from above, and Avery spun to see Frederick and Layanna descending. By their grim faces he knew that Edgar hadn’t made it. The coughing must have been too much for him. Layanna looked especially shaken; the closure she had dreamed of would never happen. Frederick, however, must have been expecting this for a long time.
“You just want my mask!” Frederick said. “Give it to me or so help me—” He doubled over, coughing.
“You’ll be fine,” Avery told him.
“And—if you’re—wrong?”
Then you’re already dead.
Layanna seemed concern. “Francis, are you sure—?”
The sound of squealing tires and crunching metal drew their attention, and Avery cracked the door to see yellowish mist wreathing the street. There had been some light early morning traffic, and the occupants of the vehicles had pulled to a stop or hit each other and were now coughing or writhing on the road.
The newest car had gone off course and struck a brownstone across the way. Smoke billowed from the engine. The driver, an infected Urslinian man, likely ex-Octunggen, in once-fine clothes, stumbled from the automobile, shaking his head and coughing wretchedly. As Avery watched, the fellow collapsed to his knees and wheezed on the sidewalk. Other than Avery, he was the only infected man in sight.
A shattered bomb had embedded itself in the road, spiderwebs veining out from the crack. Thick yellow vapors oozed from the interior.
Layanna helped Avery into some clothes. He tugged them on dutifully, but his attention was rooted on the people wheezing along the road. His gaze returned to the infected man, who suddenly rose to his feet.
A great change had come over him. Where before he had borne one of the most typical of infected looks, that of a man with piscine elements—scales, gills, even a crested head, but with a recognizable human underneath—now his aquatic elements had taken over, or were in the process of doing so. Scales thickened and darkened, overlapping areas that had been normal flesh before. Gills that been inert now quivered and sucked in breath, or attempted to. The crest on his head flushed crimson. He seemed larger, stronger. His teeth grew out, sharp as needles. Where they grew, his gums bled, coating the needles with red. His eyes, all black now, glared out at the world, and he mewled in pain and anger, an altogether inhuman sound.
No, Avery thought. No no no ...
The man, or whatever he was, rushed at the next nearest victim of the gas, a woman in her early thirties. Though her looks were average and her clothes homespun, she had flowing golden hair elaborately curled and obviously took great pride in it. She held the locks out of her face as she coughed, which she did as daintily as she could. When the shadow of the fish-man loomed over her, she glanced up briefly, then did a double-take as he reached for her.
Avery hurried across the road, but it was too late. The fish-man hefted the woman over his head and gnawed at her abdomen as she screamed and beat at him. He whipped his head back and forth, chewing and snapping, and her blood spattered him and dripped down his neck and chest. Pink intestines coiled around his cheeks. When she beat him harder, he snapped her whole body with his powerful arms. Something cracked. She went limp, but she still made those pitiful gasps of pain.
Avery tugged at his pockets and realized he didn’t have a weapon. He was about to tackle the fish-man’s legs when someone jerked him to the side—Layanna.
“Don’t,” she said.
Hildra was rushing up, raising her gun. The extradimensional one. The fish-man had already tossed the woman aside and had been casting about for his next victim. His eyes fixed on Hildra.
The bullet punched him high in the left chest. He tottered forward, his eyes riveted on the one-handed woman. She fired again. He stepped forward again. Closer. Grinned a bloody grin.
“Damn you!” she said, and fired again, this time at his head.
Brains exploded out of the back of the fish-man’s skull, and he toppled dead to the ground, blood and fluids pooling all around.
Avery crept closer to him, staring down at the transformations. “Did you ... did you see?”
Layanna patted his shoulder. “We saw it.”
“Hell of a thing,” Hildra said.
Behind her, Frederick and Janx were approaching.
“You were right,” Frederick told Avery. He didn’t sound apologetic, simply stating a fact. “It only affected him.”
&nbs
p; Hildra looked at her gun. “Almost out of fucking bullets. Shit. We can’t kill any of ... well, her people—” with a nod to Layanna, who gave no expression “—without them. Shouldn’t have been so fucking wasteful. Damn!”
The gas was starting to clear—people, still coughing, were picking themselves up from the road and sidewalk; a young man, seeing the dead woman, moved toward her, rage and confusion on his face; Layanna spoke with him for a moment and indicated the dead fish-man. Meanwhile, Avery could still hear bombs being dropped in other parts of the city. The sound of large planes droned overhead. The great, glowing jellies bobbed through the skies, hundreds of them, hunting, hunting, more transparent now that it was day.
“This changes nothing,” Frederick said, when Layanna had returned to them. “In fact, it only makes it clearer. I don’t know how, but I know this is happening because of you, Mother. I want you all out now.” He stormed back inside.
“Shit,” said Hildra.
“We need to get out of here,” Janx said. “Little bastard might turn us in.”
Layanna looked sad at the thought, but she did not deny it. Heads lowered, they started back toward the brownstone to ready themselves, all except for Avery.
“No.”
They turned back to him. “What now?” said Janx.
Avery frowned thoughtfully. “I want to talk to Frederick.”
Inside, Frederick, no longer coughing, was rifling through his pantry, searching for alcohol. There wasn’t much left. He grabbed a mostly empty bottle of bourbon and poured its contents into a glass. The fluid gleamed of amber, and he wolfed it down greedily, inhaled a breath and poured another with trembling hands. When he saw Avery come closer, he shot the doctor a glare of such malice that Avery was tempted to take a step back.
“What do you want? Why are you still here?”
“We need your help,” Avery said.
“Too bad.”
Avery lowered his voice. “You will help us. Either under your own power, or ours. The choice is up to you.”
“And how exactly can you make me to do anything, you bald little bastard? I know what you’ve been doing with my mother. Don’t think I don’t. And I know where that gets you, and I hope you wind up just like my father, dying painfully in some gutter-hole with only your druggie son to look after you.”
“Will you help us willingly?” Avery said.
“Fuck you.”
“I’ll take that as a no.” Avery turned to Janx and Hildra. “Bring him up to the hall bathroom in five minutes.”
Janx nodded, and Hildra saluted tiredly, but her eyes were curious. “Will do.”
Avery started up the stairs. Frederick tried to follow, but Hildra was faster, and Avery heard a grunt behind him and glanced over his shoulder to see Frederick on his knees, Hildra grabbing a fistful of hair with her hand while touching her hook to his throat.
“He said five minutes,” she said, jerking the hair.
Frederick gasped. Layanna stepped forward to intervene.
“This is it,” Avery told her, as serious as he could. “This is our only chance. We must act on it or be lost.”
Slowly, she nodded. She did not try to interfere again.
Avery ventured into Frederick’s room and went right to the suitcase beside the table. He had expected to find only a small dose of hava, enough for a few hits. Instead the suitcase, which looked quite expensive, was two-thirds full of tightly-wrapped packages of brownish powder. Frederick had not lied. He truly was a businessman. Amazed, knowing this was both a fortune and a hundred deaths, Avery seized the suitcase, then moved to the bathroom and prepared the event.
When five minutes had passed, Janx marched Frederick up the stairs, and Hildra and Layanna followed. Per Avery’s instructions, Janx made the drug dealer kneel outside the entrance to the bathroom while Avery hovered over the bathtub. Frederick let out a gasp when he saw the piles of hava stacked in the stained white tub, then turned a murderous look on Avery, who held a book of matches over the mountain of drugs.
“You wouldn’t!” Frederick said. Every muscle in his face had contracted.
Avery struck the match and tossed it onto the pile, then leapt back hurriedly. As soon as the flame ignited the hava, a great heat wave boiled up. There came a roar, and a ball of flame that scorched the ceiling and turned the walls black. Smoke filled the air, and through it all the hava burned brightly. Avery, now safely in the hallway, was nonetheless grateful for his gas mask. Frederick screamed and bucked.
Janx let him go. Frederick ran into the smoke-filled bathroom, but the heat defeated him, and he reeled back, eyes watering. Anger contorted his face.
Frederick launched himself at Avery, but Hildra casually tripped him and he fell face-first to the floor. In a fury, he tried to rise, but Janx kicked the back of his right knee. He went down. Hildra grabbed his hair and pressed her hook against his throat again. Avery stood in front him, just out of reach, and Janx cracked his knuckles to the side. It was as if they had practiced this maneuver a dozen times before, and Avery had to admit feeling a touch of adrenaline at the activity.
“You fucking bastard!” Frederick raged. “You fucking fucking bastard! Bitches and bastards, I’ll kill you all!”
Avery removed the gas mask, waved the smoke out of his face and turned toward the inferno. “Watch this. It shouldn’t be much longer.”
Moments later the fire in the bathtub transformed into a twisted monument of glass. A tiny ember still blazed deep inside it, lighting up the whole most beautifully, limning its franges and fingers of glass flame, and then it too died. The inferno still rose, but now it was frozen, like a crystal monument. Smoke began to collect to it, hiding its glitter and sheen.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Avery said. “And you put that in your veins. But I digress.”
Tears had come to Frederick’s eyes, and they weren’t caused by the smoke. “What do you want, you fucker? You dead fucker. You don’t even know what you’ve done! That hava could’ve bought a mansion! Five! You have no idea what I did to get it.”
“And how many would have died for those mansions? But I will not moralize. I’m a doctor, and I did feel obligated to torch that garbage, but that’s not why I did it.”
“No?”
“No.” Avery tapped his jacket pocket, then pulled out a thick packet of hava. Frederick’s eyes widened. “This is the last remaining packet. It might—might—be enough to get you back on your feet. I know the amount I destroyed—I know you couldn’t have bought it all yourself. With it burned, you could be in trouble with whatever partners you might have. This should help. And I will give it to you, much as I hate to, but only if you help us.”
Frederick stared at the packet. He licked his lips. He blinked his eyes, and the moisture was gone. His gaze returned to Avery’s, and some of the fire had left it. Replaced by calculation. By resignation.
“What do you need?”
* * *
Gas still roiled through the streets as they moved through the city, but it had noticeably cleared, and after a time Avery felt comfortable removing his mask again. People still struggled on the road, some coughing, some just sitting there dazed. Many had been involved in vehicular accidents, and the survivors gathered around the dead and gave aid to the wounded. Avery and the others had taken the vehicle of the infected man Hildra had shot, and they cruised down the chaotic streets, weaving in and around stopped cars, always on the lookout for patrols and checkpoints. Somehow order still existed, even in this bedlam. When they saw a checkpoint, Avery quickly veered away. Once he saw a dirigible marina tower in the distance, and it was still blocked off and guarded.
If nothing else, he was reassured by the weight of his guns—the extradimensional one Janx had returned to him and the conventional pistol (serial numbers filed off) that Frederick had given him. Frederick had also made sure, with their prompting, that they were all armed and their guns loaded.
They moved south, Frederick giving directions from the p
assenger seat while Avery drove. Layanna and Hildra squeezed beside Janx in the back. The car was old but Octunggen, which meant large and well-built. They kept the windows tightly shut.
After they left the expatriate slum, they saw that many more bodies tangled the streets beyond. Blood had congealed around the corpses, and flies had begun to feast. There were piles and piles of the dead, some having fallen where they lay, others stacked like cordwood either by madmen or troopers in gas masks. Feral dogs slunk out of alleyways, sniffing. Some had already begun to feed. The bodies Avery saw were mostly human, non-infected, killed in the violence, but he did see a few mutants.
The first one he saw was a fish-man like the one whose car he was driving; the dead man’s mutations seemed to have continued beyond what Avery had seen earlier. Scales had grown thick and hard, overlapping each other, digging into skin. Rivulets of blood wept from several places, thighs and underarms, where the scales had penetrated the flesh and kept going. The man’s sharp, needle-like teeth had grown as well, and sharp red points had shoved through his lower jaw, bits of flesh hanging from them. The sharp teeth must have driven through his upper jaw, too. Perhaps that was what had killed him. His own transformation had doomed him. Avery saw another mutant body, then another. All showed the same characteristics, the same types of deaths.
“Remarkable,” he said.
“Fucked up,” Hildra said.
“Yes, but remarkable. Whatever Carum’s gas is, it seems to stimulate mutation in the infected. It must be incredibly painful, but it also must necessitate a huge metabolic shift. Massive calorie intake must compensate for all that transformation. They must be hungry. Perhaps that’s what drives them mad.”
Many of the corpses showed the characteristics of death by transformation, but many others had been ripped apart in fits of violence, and most of these looked gnawed on. Eaten. Avery realized that the destruction stretched in all directions. He was making his way, once again, through a city of the dead.
