by Michael Shea
The gel instantly responded to the scrambling spider: flowed swiftly to it, and engulfed it. Its struggle was in slow motion now, its working legs seeming to smoke at first, and then to become smoke. The bulky abdomen lasted longest, became a cloudy ovoid, became fumes, and then was gone.
“Now look,” said Dukes. “Notice that it’s just a little bigger?”
“It … it’s hard to tell,” said Ming.
“Trust me. Feeding adds to their mass. Excuse my putting it this way, but the more of you Margolian nails with this shit, the more he’ll have.”
There was an unmistakable click, the hammer of a firearm right behind them. A gravelly voice said, “Dead easy folks. Perfectly still. Whatever that is, I’m takin it.”
“OK man,” Dukes said carefully, “I’ve gotta pick it up with this.” He tucked the stick in, the gel englobed around it, and he turned to face their intruder. “Terkle!” he barked with disgust, apparently recognizing this huge goon with big bony shoulders and acromegalic jaws, a long chain earring dangling from his lobe. Given his size, his stealth in coming up behind them was remarkable.
“You asshole, Terkle! There’s no way you can use this thing.”
“You shittin me? That’s some kinda high-tech shit there! Hand it over or I plug you all where you stand.” He was holding a machine pistol with a big clip under the stock, and showing them a forty-five caliber muzzle.
“Shit! All right. Hold out the paint can and I’ll drop it in.”
“Fuck that. One of you hold the can.”
Dukes turned to Abel. “Take this, man, and hold it so—” He whipped the globe at Terkle’s face, pressing the stick’s release button. Flattening like a pie on the goon’s face, the gel instantly englobed his whole head. Reflexively he flung away his gun to tear the gel off with both hands, and his hands too were instantly engulfed in it.
“Shit!” said Dukes. “The thing’ll get too big to handle! Grab his fuckin arms and try to pull at least his hands outta there!”
A ghastly tango commenced—two of them on each arm hauled mightily against the galvanic rigidity of the big man’s muscles—and then, suddenly toppling them off balance, the arms came free—handless, with black ragged wrist stumps.
“Hold him up!” Dukes shouted, for Terkle’s legs were buckling and he was going slack. “Hold him up! We can’t let it get to the rest of him, the fuckin gel will get huge.”
They propped the goon and Dukes held his stick poised above the hungry globe as it worked on the head and neck. Terkle’s face bulged huge within the sphere—a drowned man seen through the porthole of a sinking ship. His hands, like two crabs drowning with him, were going smoky.
Dukes thrust in the stick and the gel cohered, obedient—as it were—to the extent that the sphere ate the neck the rest of the way through, and then allowed itself to be lifted free, the skull still dissolving within it. Terkle’s body slumped to the ground.
“Shit!” raged Dukes. “We’ll need at least a three-gallon bucket now! You asshole!” And he kicked Terkle where he sprawled, headless and handless.
Abel and Cherokee searched the trash heap, and came up with a water-cooler, empty. “Can you get it into this?”
“Bring it here.” Dukes studied the much larger globe. “OK, he’s softened up enough. Hold the jug under it.”
He touched the stick differently, and gel began to elongate, tapering downward. Its contents were a smoky skull and almost shapeless hands, and these too elongated and tapered, the skull seeming to make a comical grimace as it narrowed, narrowed down through the bottle neck.
A scrap roll of duct tape yielded them a sealer for the mouth. “Thank you, my friends,” said Dukes. “I truly hope you stomp Margolian’s ass. Now we should all bid adieu to scenic Redding.”
* * *
Dr. Winters, Sunrise’s veterinarian and high school chemistry teacher, selected Trish Meeks as his assistant for testing the nano-gel sample. Trish’s style was sort of Hillbilly Goth—purple lipstick, hair half petroleum-black and half screaming-scarlet. She’d been a real wiseass in class two or three years back, but Winters had early on tricked her into admitting how smart she was, and had been employing her ever since.
The doctor was a man who would provide anyone—more or less on request, in his dreamy and bemused way—with concise and informed judgments on everything from fertilizer composition to high-tech hog paint jobs. Not a very demonstrative man himself, he was almost universally liked. Even touchy Trish Meeks—and this at times when she was not actually working for him—used Winters’ house key every week or so to let herself in and make sure he had enough of the right things in his fridge and cupboards. Fuck you if you asked her about it, but everybody knew it was so.
As to where they would set up a lab to work on the specimen, Cap came to him with a good idea. When Cap had bought his hardware store, Winters had shared with him countless little wonders of physics relevant to the tools he sold, and of chemistry relating to his paints and varnishes.…
Now Cap said, “Look here, Doc. My store shares a concrete foundation wall with the Masonic Building next door. I already cut through it so people can move between the buildings without exposure outside. Give you two ways in and out. Use the Masonic’s basement—it’s bigger an’ emptier than mine, an’ we can mount guards on both your entries.”
So in the Masonic Building’s basement Winters and Trish Meeks installed a lawn pool, a stout metal frame which supported a thick, supple plastic cavity with almost sheer walls. A dozen assistants made shelves, reconnected the plumbing of an old sink, and saw to stringing strong lights everywhere.
At last they cut off the top of the bottle and extracted the gel with the control stick. It was a hefty load lifted one-handed—about the dimensions, when spherical, of a small beach ball. They set it into the pool liner, and keyed its release from the stick.
It sat inactive. Menaced with a rod, its globe surged forth engulfing it, then flowed away and drained entirely off it. It would engulf any object set in motion near it, but, finding it inorganic would eject it.
After a series of such little experiments, Trish lit one of her cigarettes—severely rationed by Winters in the “lab” here—and blew smoke on the gel. Its sphere bulged out a bit to meet the smoke’s impact, seeming to taste. “What it looks like, sir,” she said respectfully, “is that you can’t get anything inside it that it doesn’t wanna eat.”
“That’s right, Trish. Of course, we’ll try applying caustic substances topically, to see if it can be damaged that way. But I’m afraid we’ll have to start by feeding it, to see if we can learn anything by watching it ingest something.”
“Patti’s Pets has got some white rats.”
XIII
ENLISTEES AND PROPERTIES
Day Three. Panoply Studios informed Sheriff Smalls of the “Shoot Schedule”—not of its start date, mind you, but of its duration. It would last two days, starting both days at sunrise—nice touch, that—and ending at midnight. There would be three “Acts” each day, separated by “substantial intervals for rest, recuperation, and repair.”
Japh and I walked down Glacier Avenue. The town was alive with hammers and saws, people all over from the roofs on down, the street full of traffic. Two rafts dangled iron laddering from cable hooks, laying it for bridges and gangways to join all the rooftops. Inside, jackhammers were connecting basements where possible, following Cap’s example. Headlamps and floods were being installed on eaves and gables everywhere, to light things up for the night fights.
As we walked I noticed Japh had picked up Sheriff Smalls’ trick, scratching his own prosthetic forearm, a souvenir from Alien Hunger, from time to time when he was thinking. Right now he was sorting out what he wanted to say to me.
He said, “Curtis.” Being patient. Trying to make me see his side. “Ike Klemm’s as smart as George Junior, yes. And he has scads of friends down there. That’s cause he’s a shoulder-thwacker, hale fellow well met. George Junior makes himself he
ard, an’ they call him an asshole cause he says whatever he thinks, but people listen to him for just that reason. I just trust him more.”
My friend was beginning to chap my ass. “Hey. My brother! Listen to yourself. You’re talking the Georges here!”
“I know! True! The Georges are batshit. But I trust ’em. You know, all the jokes Ike tells, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him really laugh.”
“The only time George laughs is when he’s callin you an idiot.”
“Yeah, but he’s really laughin.”
I had to think that one over. And then I had to smile. “You might be right, old tight.”
Along the downslope rim of Sunrise, and spreading maybe two miles farther down the hills, were the homesteads of the Hangers, most of them as old as Sunrise’s, but outside her corporate border. A neighbor community of generations’ standing.
Hangers strictly respected all property lines with Sunrise. Scores of Hangers visited us, shopped, drank, ate out, and partied with us every night of the week.
At the same time, a humorous tension prevailed between our populations. Sunrisers gripped the Hangers’ hands or hugged them in greeting, and said, “Hey, Hang, you lookin good for a guy from Creepy Hollow.”
Because downslope of Sunrise, though still fertile and verdant, the open ground diminished, and Hangers lived somewhat more closely with their trees, and in their little shaded vales, while Sunrisers lived larger and sunnier. Both groups took pride in their lifestyles, and lived mostly on pretty good terms with each other.
We were down near the river now. Waved to Cherokee and Abel putting some extra armor on their hogs. Crossed the bridge over the Glacier River—not wide, but a good fast stream with spring not far past—and stepped into Hanger territory.
The “Georges”—George Senior and George Junior—lived in a cabin in a tree-choked ravine half a mile downslope. For almost his whole life George’s father had called him Junior, and George Junior had called himself Alphonse, a name of his own furious choosing against his father’s equally furious opposition.
They argued about his calling himself Alphonse every day, with the same persistence they showed in arguing about everything else.
Mav Drood, a sweet little old spice grower just across the gorge from them, had once told me and Japh about the Georges with a vehemence that was unusual for her: “Those Georges have got more different arguments than a dog has fleas. The variety of ’em! One argument winds down, an’ another one jumps right up in its place! An’ they run through every single goddamn one of those arguments, every fucking day of their lives!”—this tirade uttered by Mav with a certain air of being entertained.
For decades Alphonse had lived all over the globe. He’d rather have died than come back and live with his skinny mean old fart of a father, but the hideous and insurmountable fact was that George Senior had no one else on earth who would go through the Hell of taking care of him in his old age.
At our knock he yanked open the door. The crookeder shape of George Senior stood right behind him, giving us the identical bushy-browed glare as his son. Both of them had the mad, big-pupiled eyes of hawks.
Japh spoke in his friendliest, most charming manner, eager to get everything out at once, knowing it was impossible not to anger either of these men. For starters, whichever name you called George Junior would start a row with one of them.
“Gentlemen, we’re sorry to be bothering you, but we’ve come because you’re smart and we need your help carrying some news to your friends and your neighbors.” He paused, inviting an answer. Nothing. The two pairs of hawk-eyes kept glaring at him. “We’d like you to know that anyone willing to come help us fight the Studio gets—”
“Fuck yes I’m gonna fight!” gaunt, rickety George Senior bellowed. He had a powerful voice, despite his skinniness. “They’re fuckin with my mountain! Some a your shit-storm’s bound to splatter us! This is my place here!”
“It’s my place too!” George Junior croaked (he was a heavy smoker). “I fuckin restored this place for ya! I fuckin drywalled an’ painted an’ porched an’ decked an’ re-floored an’ shingled an’ tiled an’ re-roofed it for ya!”
“You? You mean you an’ a buncha’ other know-naught goons—an endless horde of ’em gorgin on my bread an’ peanut butter an’ suckin up all my beer!”
And, they were off. Japh and I hung on tight until finally George Junior paused for breath and I shouted, “Please, come up and fight with us, for acres and citizenship! Tell your neighbors. Come up tonight!”
And then we literally bolted, and left them standing there, jaws open, frozen in mid-argument.
* * *
The sun was half sunk, and the sky over Sunrise red now. The vehicles in the street had sprouted headlights. White sparks sprayed down from where they were welding ramps and barricades. Japh and Cap and I just stood in the street, watching it all. Jool commed me from up at Chops and Gillian’s. They were making her a padded leather cuirass. I tried for a joke. “Is that to cover your ass?”
“You’re the ass,” she laughed. She definitely wanted me to be snappy on this point—would stand for no “freaking out about the baby.” “He’s highly portable,” she had lectured me. “Mammal moms fight off predators when they’re this pregnant and a lot more so. Don’t give me any shit about it!” I worried more for her than for the baby, which was not yet as real to me as she was. But I knew it was not in her nature to back down.
George Junior’s com interrupted us. “Buncha people down here are comin up to talk to you all.”
We got Smalls on it. We needed a gathering space now, and decided on the big parking area behind Cap’s Hardware shared by the lumber yards and machine shops. Cap’s little concrete loading dock back of his store made a natural speaking platform with good acoustics.
Just as dark fell the Hangers came up fifty or sixty strong, and the Sunrisers gave them the center of the lot. They parked their pickups and ATVS and hogs at all different angles, got out and leaned or sat on their rides, or stood in little groups in the truckbeds. Stoically listening as hundreds of Sunrisers listened all around them.
George Junior was sitting on the roof of his deformed old pickup with his legs crossed on his windshield. His own and his whole delegation’s body language made it clear that he was their spokesperson.
The Hangers were a body of very opinionated and independent folks. Few of them were followers by nature, or even had much patience for views not their own. But George Junior could always just step up and spokesperson for the whole lot of them. Such was his long-ingrained paternal training in the sciences of dispute, naysaying, contradiction, and vituperation, that whenever he stood up and started proclaiming the truth about something—about anything—people just shut up and let him do it. It helped that most of his proclamations were sharp and to the point, at least when—as now—George Senior wasn’t there to embroil him in argument.
His voice was a smoky caw—sounded like a big crow. He addressed himself to Smalls on the loading dock. “We can bring at least fifty to the fight. Fuck detailed arithmetic for now, but that’s gonna mean about three hundred countin significant others that’s gettin property up here when the fight’s over, whether they wanna live full-time on it or not.”
“So basically fifty or sixty households,” said Smalls, talking quick to get it out before George Junior could contradict him. “You’ll get fifty acres for every household, wherever they wanna choose ’em from whatever’s not already taken. You join us an’ fight an’ you’re full Sunrisers.”
“What else would we be?” George squawked. “Fuckin-ay-straight full ’Risers! So first things first! Whatever kinda weapons you’re gettin together, we want you to share ’em!”
“The fuck did’ja think we were gonna do?” said Smalls, and then—amazingly for this dour man—he produced a crooked little grin. “How ’bout some thirty-cal machine guns on tripods, Alphonse?”
George Junior actually blinked. “If you’re not just blowin sm
oke up my ass,” he answered, “then you’re finally talkin somethin besides shit!”
The news had come to Smalls just half an hour before. Mazy’s sister Althea had a best friend named Sugi who was also close to Mazy, and had just commed her. Sugi was in Accounting at Panoply, and had just been laid off. “Listen, Maze,” she said. “Mark Millar’s sequel to Somme—The Marne—is in preproduction. They’re shipping some properties to the secondary set for the shoot. Properties’ll be trucked up the Five—a pretty big truck. A shipment of thirty-cals and live ammo. I mean like machine guns, belt fed!”
* * *
We decided the takedown of the truck could be done with four bikes and four rafts. I rode shotgun behind Christy. Just past noon, with traffic on the six lanes sparse, we came up flanking the truck on the Five down in the Valley. It was a tractor-trailer. We pulled up, two beside the truck and two beside the trailer’s front wheels, hoping this would work. We didn’t want to hurt the driver, but weren’t sure of the physics of the situation with something this size doing ninety klicks.
We blasted the outer front wheels of the truck and the outer front wheels of the trailer. This crippled the speed of the front of the rig, and the trailer, unslowed, began to swing forward till it spanned three lanes, swinging so sharp it began to tip over.
Lance and Trek dropped their sector-boat’s bows to the trailer, put some counterthrust to the teetering mass, Kate in her raft helping at the cab’s tail end. It was a near thing, rubber smoking and shrieking, the big brute tilting, tilting, but then the sector-boat raft started to swing the slowing truck through a full one-eighty, till they brought it to rest in the breakdown lane aimed back the way it had come.
The driver was severely ticked, but got suddenly sociable on receiving our two hundred K. He gravely drew together his brow and said, “Yeah, I got a good look at ’em, Officer. Big Swedish-lookin bikers, Aryan tattoos. Had a rig like mine with ’em. Offloaded me with a little forklift, slick as snot!”
