“I appreciate what you’re saying, Smithy,” Frostbite said. “You know I do. However, timing is important. We let him rest too long and he’ll wake up dead. All of us will.”
“I suppose . . .”
“So, gather ‘round. Everybody. Let’s go over the plan again. Malcolm S, why don’t you start? We’ll follow around a circle, with each of us filling in the blanks a bit. Brainstorming and tweaking and that sort of thing.”
“Sure,” Malcolm S said. “It’s this way. Size-wise, man, they have the advantage. In sheer viciousness and killing instinct, too. But we have strength in numbers, only so long as there are a lot of us. If they keep picking away at us as they been doin’, we are going to lose any advantage in no time.”
“Anyway, Malcolm S, tell him about our idea,” Frostbite said.
“Right, so this is the plan. . .”
Timmy Jimmy leaned forward, straining against the pain in his head and the ringing in his ears. But the ringing was not so loud he couldn’t hear the howling and the flapping of leathery wings: the giants returning to their nest.
Behind him, Patty Patty whimpered.
DEMONOLOGY
The beasts, demon spawn from outer space, circled in the night above the New York City skyline, making their way to their hive, their nest, their hole in the ground. They smelled of blood and filth and rot. While they flew, they used their sixth sense to search for one Mr. Zachary Zemeritus of East 62nd Street, Manhattan.
But Zachary Zemeritus couldn’t be found by mortal senses, or by immortal alien ones, either. The ducts in his body generating pheromones, the pituitary things, had been replaced by microscopic hoses and levers that released pressure and air. In fact, the beasts, in their pursuit of him today, flew over, past, or near the hospital a total of thirty-four times, without an inkling that the one they sought lay defenseless, senseless, and asleep just a few hundred feet below.
Zachary Zemeritus had a dream. In the dream, it was night and wolves pursued him, wolves the size of buildings. Zachary ran and ran, but he couldn’t, after a good game, run any further. He turned to face his pursuers, who glowered and salivated and prepared to jump on him. Somehow, he wore a knight’s armor made of the finest gold.
They leapt upon him, but they couldn’t do anything to penetrate his armor. They used their nasty claws, their large, scummy teeth, but nothing broke through. Yet somehow, Zachary found himself dying. But before he died, he watched as a tiny, beautiful butterfly with white and gold wings flittered away into the sky. Below him, an army of little people, all with rhyming names, slew the wolves.
Zachary wanted to awaken from this dream, from this death, but he could not. He was so wounded, with so much metal and electronics sewn into his body, his body refused to allow it. Plus, all the drugs being pumped into his system would keep him floating in the dream world for a few days more.
All he could do was watch the most exquisite butterfly he’d ever seen vanish into the darkness.
Outside in the hall, Zachary’s doctors conferred.
“Well, what do we think?” Dr. Grayzan asked.
“I love what I’m seeing so far,” said Dr. Tyler from the UK. “He seems to be healing quite nicely.”
“I have to agree with my inestimable colleague from the UK,” Dr. Takahashi from the Yamanashi prefecture near Tokyo said. “Patient ‘Z’ is progressing in a positive way. His recovery seems accelerated, in fact. Considering it’s only been a few weeks.”
“What about you, Dr. Botha?” Dr. Grayzan asked.
“I’ll withhold judgment for now, if that’s acceptable to all,” said Dr. Nokuthula Botha, the doctor from Johannesburg. “He seems to be doing well. Due to the experimental—no, make that bleeding-edge—level of surgery we did, some never tried before even on animals, it’s too soon to tell. In fact, I believe ninety-nine percent of what we did was only previously verified on computer models and only carried out on 6-D45 holograms. Yes, all of that was one hundred percent successful and gave us the courage to move on to the next phase. Of course, when we heard about this poor man, it called out to us. He would have died anyway. The perfect test patient for all of us to try out our pet technologies, and all on the same person. Don’t get me wrong—I have high hopes. But I’m conservative when it comes to evaluating the chances of a patient’s recovery from an operation of this magnitude.”
“Yes, I agree. Let’s say I’m cautiously optimistic,” said Dr. Van Wijk of the Universiteit Leiden.
“Hmmm, very well,” said Dr. Grayzan. “Let’s wait and see. Another week should give us more sets of data to analyze.”
“Agreed.”
“Well, see you all tomorrow,” Dr. Grayzan said. “I have a report to work on. I’m going to be here most of the night, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, yes. We all have similar reports to work on,” Dr. Botha said, waving his hand dismissively.
“Yes, goodnight all,” the rest chimed in.
“WHAT HAVE WE HERE? ARE WE HAVING A LITTLE PARTY?”
Atrōx Manzer shrieked in his AutoTuned-sounding voice. His laugh was a lion’s roar crossed with the metal screech of subway wheels slamming to a stop.
“WELL, YOUR PARTY HAS ENDED. OURS HAS JUST BEGUN.”
The vicious things swooped around the cavernous room, peeing and crapping as they did, laughing and spitting and shooting snot out of their noses. The besieged people below ran and dodged and tried to take cover, but there was no place to find safety, to get away.
Soon, the creatures from Hell fell upon individuals and dragged them, literally kicking and screaming, up into the air to snack on them. It was truly Hell on Earth, and there appeared to be nothing anyone could do to save this small group of nearly a hundred victims. Everyone seemed to understand, without speaking it, that when this hundred were used up, they would be replaced, over and over again.
“I can’t do this,” Timmy Jimmy said after the destruction, the defamation, the defiling of the people in this deep basement place.
“You must, we must,” Frostbite said. “Before they return. Or it’s the end for all of us.”
“Look,” Timmy Jimmy said. “We have no weapons, no explosives. Nothing to build a bomb or anything. If that is your great plan, we are doomed.”
“You’re wrong. Look around you. Everywhere, there are potential weapons. Gas lines and electrical lines run along the ceiling and walls and floors.”
“How do you propose we ignite them, without also blowing ourselves to kingdom come? Even if we are successful in detonating something, the explosion would fill this whole space with flames in a split second, and we’d be caught in the same inferno that we are hoping will immolate the demons.”
“We’ve thought of that. We need to make a barrier. One strong enough to stop the flames.”
“The flames will be eternal. You understand that?” said Timmy Jimmy. “They will burn until someone somewhere figures out there’s a leak and shuts off the valves that send the gas here. What metal are you suggesting we use to protect ourselves, because let me tell you, steel won’t work, iron won’t work, aluminum won’t work. I don’t know of any metal with the ability to stand up to hours or possibly days of intense heat.”
“You are thinking too simply. We don’t need metal.”
“What, then?”
“Concrete.”
Timmy Jimmy sighed.
“Where will we get that? Plus the water and sand to mix with it.”
“No, we don’t need to make it. We have it. We’re in it.”
“What are you saying?”
“They have that other room, similar this one, where they return to nest. It’s around a corner. Cement walls are everywhere.”
“Even if by some miracle we were able to ignite the gas, the flames will shoot into here as well.”
“Yes, that’s true. But only partially. The idea is we move to the hallway on the other side. That gives us yet another cement wall. Two thick cement walls, floor to ceiling of concrete and rebar, should
give us more than enough protection.”
Timmy Jimmy stroked the miniature beard on his chin and pondered this, his long black hair falling into his eyes again.
“Maybe,” he said. “Okay, at this point I’m willing to consider that there is a slim chance that the double barriers might be enough. We won’t be sealed in, you know, so the flames might still find us. But that requires that the burning gas make quite a few 90-degree turns to do so. I’ll go with this for now. But what about igniting the gas? We haven’t got a sledgehammer, for example. How can we bust open a gas main? Even if we could, how would we prevent them from smelling the gas46—or, worse, us from dying from it?”
“First things first. We found a length of pipe with a valve at each end. We merely close off that section of pipe . . . ”
“And what—hope in the meantime it doesn’t burst?”
“Yes, of course. We close it off and find a way to break that section, if only slightly. When the time comes, we turn the valve back on and the gas will rush through the pipe and out the crack, filling the room the monsters are in within a matter of seconds.”
“All right, let’s say we can do this. How do we ignite it? Won’t we need to be in the same room?”
“This is where we need you. We saw your bravery earlier. The risks you took to save young Patricia.”
“Patty Patty.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Fair enough. Anyway, you’re the man for the job. Someone has to go in and light the gas.”
“This is an insane plan. You know that, don’t you?”
“What other options do we have? We are being taken out one by one, ten by ten. Soon we’ll be dead anyway, defiled and destroyed in the most disgusting ways. At least this way, we can hope. At least maybe we have a chance, however small.”
Timmy Jimmy said nothing for a few minutes, as if his thoughts were miles away. Then: “Oh, hell. I’ll do it. Do we have matches?”
“That’s another thing,” Frostbite said, sheepishly.
“What?”
“Well, we don’t have matches or lighters or nothing.”
“Of course not. So what’s the plan?”
“You’d have to get in there, carrying a live, sparking wire.”
“What?”
“You’d have to get in—”
“No, I heard you fine. It will blow up, the whole shebang, the second I got close enough to the gas.”
“No, no. You go in first with the electric wire and get the hell out. Then we hit the gas.”
“They’ll see me.”
“Maybe so.”
“They’ll catch me.”
“More than likely.”
“I’m dead meat.”
“One way or another, yes. We all are, unless we try this.”
Off in the near distance, the sound of the flapping of monstrous wings filled the air overhead.
“They’re back!” someone shrieked.
ESCAPEE
“He’s gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘he’s gone?’”
“I mean, I went to check on his progress and he is no longer in his room,” said Dr. Van Wijk from Universiteit Leiden.
“But, Dr. Van Wijk, there are electronic locks on all the room’s doors. No unauthorized personnel can get in or out without the code. Furthermore, Patient ‘Z’ was certainly not authorized.”
“Yes, Dr. Grayzan, I realize that. I can only tell you what I discovered. Come with me.”
The pair jogged down the corridor and around the corner, left at the next corner, and down a different hall. Dr. Grayzan punched in a code, and they proceeded through a set of doors. Twenty paces down another pair of doors loomed. Dr. Van Wijk swiped a card, and those opened. Down this hall, third entrance on the left, sat Unit 27B. Inside was supposed to be Patient “Z.” Grayzan pressed in a different code and the entrance popped open with a soft hiss. The bed was empty. All the machines were on, but the wires hung in space, monitoring nothing.
“What the—?” Grayzan said. “What — the — hell!”
He flung open the covers in a desperate attempt to reveal the metal machine that was now Zachary Zemeritus. Grayzan checked behind the various carts holding equipment, as if expecting to find him crouching there, all six feet of him, containing inside and out the most advanced robotics the world has ever seen.
“How did he get out? He wasn’t even supposed to be awake. Not even walking. We had weeks of training ahead of us with him.”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know,” said Van Wijk.
“What seems to have happened here, gentlemen?” said Dr. Takahashi from the Yamanashi prefecture near Tokyo.
The other two doctors turned. “He’s gone. He’s simply disappeared.”
Dr. Takahashi looked past them. The large shelving rack, containing servers, laptops, and various bodily-function-monitoring devices, had been rolled aside, like a boulder from a tomb.
“He can fly, you should know,” said Dr. Takahashi.
“He can fly?”
“Yes, of course.”
“That wasn’t in the specs.”
“No, but it was something I have been working on in Yamanashi on my own. I thought I might add it in during the procedure, but only if there was time. There ended up being enough time, it turns out.”
“That would have been good to know. We are thirty stories up,” Grayzan shouted. “If we’d known he could egress the room through flight, we’d have locked and barred the windows just as we did the doors. Jeez!”
“Let me remind you, my esteemed colleague: this whole operation is an experiment. None of us had any idea what would work and what would not. Or whether it would work at all or if we’d end up with only a shiny, very expensive corpse.”
No one said anything for a long time. Grayzan stared at his feet. Van Wijk at his hands. Dr. Takahashi at the window.
After an extended pause, they strode almost shoulder-to-shoulder to the open window and peered outside. The streets and sidewalks appeared to be a long way down. The clouds passed close by, as did the soaring birds. It was a dizzying height, and all three men clutched the windowsill.
Just at that moment, a voice boomed out into the room: “What in blazes is going on? Where in hell’s bells47 is Patient Z!”
When the shouting hit their ears, the three men at the window, already suffering from a small case of the vertigo, almost toppled out. They recovered and turned to face Dr. Nokuthula Botha, the doctor from Johannesburg.
“Dr. Botha, you startled us to nearly death!”
“Patient Z” flew through the skies above Manhattan as if in a dream, over Central Park, past the New York Public Library, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, then to the financial district, Tribeca, Soho, and Greenwich Village. Over to Gramercy, Murray Hill, and up to East Harlem, over to Morningside Heights and back down again to Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, and the West Village.
Zachary floated silently, the magnetron anti-gravity system inverting the Earth’s gravity to keep him aloft using almost no energy. He was powered by a tiny solar battery, backed up by lithium, backed up by hydrogen cells. All in a container on his neck smaller than a dime. He soared and swooped, an angel on holiday.
The former Zachary Zemeritus was having the time of his life. Somehow, his brain had only to think it, to suggest it, and this armor he wore responded as well or better than his own body used to.
With his enhanced vision, he regarded the bustling city below, his one eye a camera-type lens, zooming in and out at his will, coloring the scene pastel, or posterized, or grayscale. He sniffed the pizza, the hot dogs, and the steaming pretzels hundreds of yards below him. He picked up individual conversations distinctly, even those taking place in cabs and in the subways. Even more amazing, he also perceived thoughts, people’s prayers.
“Dear Lord, help my son. He’s trying, but he can’t do it alone. Relieve him from his addiction.”
“God, if you exist, I know I’m
just a meaningless speck in all this, but I need your assistance . . .”
“Dear Lord, comfort my wife. I love her so. Don’t let this cancer take her from me . . .”
“Dear God, if I get out of this alive, I promise, promise, promise, I’ll return to church. Every Sunday from now on”
“Allah, praise be yours. If it is in your heart to help my family, please find me a job before we are forced to leave America, our adopted home . . .”
“They’re back. Oh God, oh dear God, they’re back. The demons are here to kill us all, rape us all!”
That was a strange one, the former Zachary Zemeritus thought. What was that all about?
He drifted down, closer to the tops of the buildings, and continued to bank with the breeze down Broadway, heading toward the overpass near FDR Drive and the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
“Jesus, no. NO! Oh my GOD, NO!!”
Z, though concerned, was not disturbed. Something terrible was happening, but he was so filled with drugs, hormones, steroids, anti-inflammatories, and all that, that his brain and his emotions were detached. He was receiving information, but he was unable to react to it.
He swooped along the bridge. He could no longer distinguish individual voices. Nevertheless, the content of terror, fear, and disgust was all the same, in a hundred voices, of different ages, different ethnicities, different genders.
He hovered, a sedated hummingbird, and listened.
The screaming had stopped.
He heard only tears falling, tapping moistly onto dry concrete, landing with a slight echo as if they fell in a vast, empty space.
“Helena, come here. Quick.”
“What is it?”
“Look, up in the sky? Is it a bird?”
“Well, it can’t be a bird, unless birds are made of metal.”
“Some kind of plane, then?” Dani said.
“Pretty small plane, if it is.”
DEMON DAYS: Love, sex, death, and dark humor. This book has it all. Plus robots. Page 7
