Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  As they watched, it lifted out of the dust, the snakes revealing themselves as a beard of tendrils attached to the elephantine body of a creature rising on a pair of stiltlike legs. It was a dozen stories tall, its head studded with black eyes that rotated and blinked like those of a chameleon. The tendrils slithered and played across the flank of the nearest standing tower. Brickwork crumpled, and loose blocks shivered down the slopes and exploded among the fleeing pedestrians.

  A stream of translucent bells, almost like bubbles, issued from the fissure created by the elephant creature as it strode away. This gossamer swarm twisted and spiraled into the air in an unbroken chain.

  “This can’t be happening,” said Bethany. “This is not really happening. What is this, Wesley? What the fuck is this?”

  He had no answer for her.

  They arrived at the rooftop helipads and divided into two groups to be conveyed out of danger by the waiting helicopters. These short-range aircraft would deliver them to the Republic, waiting at Sugarside, which would allow Bishop to escape farther from the calamity. The pilots conducted preflight checks and began to spin up the rotors on the helicopters.

  Heavy fighting was breaking out in the city. Gunfire chattered, and heavier artillery boomed from the cordon line. Whatever these creatures were, they had already encountered the United States military.

  “Let’s go, boss man,” said Patrice. He lifted Bishop into the helicopter and handed him a pair of noise-canceling headphones for the aircraft intercom. Misha Rosen and her crew piled into the helicopter with him. The PitSec team climbed into the second helicopter. He would have preferred a detachment of Milo’s selfless warrior cultists, but the fools weren’t answering his calls.

  Patrice reached a hand down to help Bethany into the helicopter. She waved him away. Her pinned hair was unraveled by the downwash from the helicopter.

  “I can’t go,” she shouted into the roaring turbines. “My sisters are in the city.”

  “We can make arrangements for them. I will send men to pick them up.” Bishop found himself more afraid of living without Bethany than facing the nightmare in the city below. “We can get them to safety.”

  “No,” she said, clutching his day planner to her chest. “I’ll see you off, but Patrice has to take care of your ass from here.”

  “Please, be sensible,” he said. Patrice held him back from climbing out of the helicopter to bring her aboard.

  “Right now, I want to be with my family, not an idiot child like you.”

  Bethany handed him his day planner at the last moment before the helicopter lifted off from the pad. She watched them depart, lonesome on the windswept roof of the spire. As the helicopter turned away, gaining altitude, Bishop realized that creatures were scaling the outer surface of the tower. They were duplicates of the creature that had attacked him in the maintenance vault. Some bashed in windows and leaped into the offices; others were climbing with ease, ascending all the way to the summit of the building.

  “We have to go back,” said Bishop. “Land the helicopter.”

  Patrice twisted in his seat to face Bishop and the crew from World Insight. He lifted his headset.

  “Dyin what ya want? Dat it? Nuh-uh. Ain’t turnin dis round.”

  “I command it,” said Bishop.

  “She done made her nest,” said Patrice, settling the headset back onto his head. “Ain’t do nobody no good get da whole of us et by dem tings.”

  They lifted clear of the Pit compound as anarchy spread beyond its walls. The pair of helicopters wheeled north, gaining altitude to avoid a twisting black cloud of flying creatures. Artillery batteries flashed from their positions in Hollywood. Streams of multiple-launch rockets arced through the air, bright missiles curving from launchers and into the Pit, to burst among the carnage already under way.

  The helicopter banked, and Bishop witnessed the fighting below them. All along the cordon the military was engaged with monstrosities. Tracers spilled into the air, and rockets exploded among apartments and throughout the rusty brambles of Creeptown. Convoys of troops moved to stem the tide of breakouts, and tanks shuddered along the elevated highways, panning their turrets from side to side and firing at targets of opportunity.

  He was so intent on watching the action beneath the helicopter that he almost missed the diaphanous spheres drifting up into the air all around them. Each glistening sack of air contained a dark green nucleus, no larger than a tennis ball, suspended in its midst. One of the sacks drifted close by the window, and Bishop saw that the nucleus was a collection of closely-packed organelles fringed with wriggling cilia. It drifted up, toward another, and as they came closer, they each accelerated as if attracted by magnetism.

  More spheres lifted from rooftops, gleaming in the sunlight, clotting together into a whirling, lifting balloon shape. This quickly adhered to another aggregation and grew in length. It began squirming through the air in a motion that suggested purpose and reminded him of the rise and fall of a Chinese dragon.

  Without warning it twisted its colonial length and spiraled in their direction. It moved with breathtaking speed and fell upon the lead helicopter. The rotor blade dashed many of the sacks to pieces. Hundreds and thousands more poured through the windows and door, and every person in the helicopter was carried away. They did not fall; they dissolved inside the mass. Clothing and flesh and bone disappeared in seconds and colored the serpentine colony translucent pink. Bits of metal and plastic dropped from within the creature. The serpent broke suddenly apart. The spheres drifted away from one another and settled toward the ground.

  Without its pilots, their companion helicopter banked hard right, directly into the path of Bishop’s helicopter. Patrice shouted a warning, and the pilot pulled hard on the stick. The engine whined in protest as they gained altitude. The helicopter disappeared below Bishop’s view.

  The landing strut clipped the rotor of the pilotless aircraft. High-velocity shards burst through the helicopter’s floor, shredding the pilot into gory ribbons and perforating the ceiling. Smoke billowed out of the engine and was sucked into the cabin. The aircraft plunged. Lights went red all across the control panel. The automated voice of an altitude alert began chiming, “PULL UP! PULL UP!”

  Patrice, coated in the pilot’s blood, possibly injured, attempted to gain control of the helicopter. The engines had lost all power. Misha Rosen and her crew were screaming. Bishop’s sigh of resignation was lost to the howling airframe as the helicopter plummeted to the street below.

  Patrice fought the stick to the bitter end, but it was to no avail. The helicopter smashed into the street, what was left of the fixed landing struts buckled, the canopy exploded, and the metal frame of the helicopter deformed around Bishop. The forward cabin crumpled, instantly killing Patrice. Misha Rosen was impaled on a dislocated crossbar of the helicopter. The cameraman and producer were flung beneath the wreck. The helicopter shrieked and skidded along the ground for most of a block, smearing their bodies to jelly.

  When it had finally come to rest, Bishop realized its new geometry trapped him on the ground. Misha Rosen was alive but unable to speak. Eyes wide and disbelieving, she gripped the bar impaling her chest. Her face twisted in anguish. She tried to speak and never did.

  Bishop’s back was an agony of fragments. It was broken, and he knew it. One wrong move, and shattered vertebrae might pinch his spinal cord and paralyze him. His body from his armpits up was still in the helicopter, caged by the wreckage, but his legs and bare stomach were outside the helicopter on the street. The hot metal of the helicopter clicked as it cooled around him. He slipped easily into unconsciousness and hoped he would never wake up again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  They rode the elevator up from the depths. The scientists clung to one another and moaned with fear at each new shock felt through the dangling cable. Polly Foster shed her insulating suit. The elevator was swampy with residual heat and thick with the cloying, marrow smell of the Pool. She was hardly able to f
lex the fingers of her right hand because of the second-degree burns.

  Dr. Robin Burns crouched beside Polly and began tearing strips from the lining of her coolant suit to wrap Polly’s hand.

  “I’m sorry,” said Polly. “Dr. Roux was ...”

  “She shouldn’t have been here,” said Robin. “I didn’t find out until we were already in the air.”

  “Find out what?”

  “Does this hurt?” asked Robin as she began wrapping Polly’s burned hand.

  “No.” At least the pain had stopped. All of her nerve endings were cooked. “What did you find out about Dr. Roux?”

  “Dr. Delgado’s office was supposed to vet every candidate I suggested.” Robin continued wrapping Polly’s hand, her motions made awkward by the thick gloves of the coolant suit. “I suppose they did not pry into personal lives. I knew Madeleine from a field study we did in Greece. I thought I knew her.”

  Robin tied the bandage off on Polly’s wrist. She stood, and Polly saw the stress etching her features. Sweat or tears dampened her cheeks.

  “Dr. Madeleine Roux was an orphan. Her parents were killed in an air accident almost thirty years ago. She was adopted and became very attached to her new mother and was distraught when she, too, died only last year. That mother was you, Polly. One of your duplicates.”

  The overwrought embraces and meaningful gazes now made sense. Polly experienced an unexpected wave of loss.

  “I suspect she came to try find her actual mother. You were the next best thing.”

  “She never would have found her,” Polly said bitterly. “When we die, we forego our past identities.”

  “I would imagine that is not entirely impossible,” said Robin.

  Polly tried to imagine doing it, and she had to agree with Robin. She still dreamed of her children all these years and identities later.

  The elevator opened onto the central elevator plaza. The lights were extinguished, and the immense chamber was consumed in spore grass and softly glowing bliss fruit. Mycelial fans, bright like coral, swayed in the currents of moist, cool air. Columnar macro-fungus ascended above them, anchored on roots as big as human limbs, creaking as they grew, opening a canopy of fleshy, gilled umbrellas over their heads.

  Crab rats scurried through the undergrowth. Strange vegetation pulsed in the dark and created hypnotic patterns of varicolored light. Here and there mounds of fallen debris, overgrown with vegetation, created hills and valleys soft with the quivering fronds of spore grass. Confused, naked duplicates wandered in the alien garden.

  “Stay close together,” said Polly. “Keep the duplicates away from us.”

  As they ascended toward the surface, they encountered venting gas polyps, the sticky tongues of carnivorous flora, fronds that seemed to whisper with human voices and grotesque scenes of death and destruction. Polly kept the team moving through it all.

  Screams echoed in the distant halls, and the aftershocks, though much weaker, continued to shift the floor beneath their feet. Such rumbling was compounded by a steady drum of surface shocks. Polly believed they were explosions from bombs or artillery. The two surviving marines, Hudson and Romero, agreed with her assertion.

  All approaches to the lobby entrances were cut off by fallen debris or impassably overgrown with alien vegetation. Polly took them out the way they had come in, climbing the muffled barrel of a truck tunnel to the loading bay. The sounds of the outside world filtered down the tunnel: the crash of explosions, distant chatter of machine guns and automatic cannons, and the crowing of thousands of birds.

  The source of this crowing became clear as they escaped from the tunnel and into the loading bay. The walkways high above them, which they had crossed hours before, had become the roost for thousands of enormous black bird creatures. Scores of the bat-winged animals rose from their perches high above and swooped down to pick at dead bodies strewn among the grassy trucks. They were as big as any raptor but grotesquely alien in their details.

  “Move slowly and don’t be afraid of them,” said Polly, hoping her advice was sound.

  “We should take a truck,” said the Marine called Devereux.

  “Yeah, man,” agreed Hudson. “I can rig it up, and we can ride right out of here.”

  Polly vetoed the idea. Even the least contaminated of the trucks was buried under spore grass. To drive it, they would have to scrape off the windows or drive blind. They stayed close to the trucks and advanced into the loading bay. The grass-entombed vehicles supported a menagerie of tiny insects and jelly-bodied creatures as prey for the crab rats. There were also slow-moving black animals, the size of two spread hands, that seemed made out of bent wires. These collapsed in upon hapless jellies that crawled beneath their limbs.

  “Remarkable,” said Dr. Nandy. “It is a complete ecosystem, deployed ready-made.”

  “It is wonderland of nightmare,” said Sokov, limping along near the back of the group.

  “Quiet,” said Polly.

  They passed seizes of the alien birds squawking and waving their wings at one another. The birds stood on the backs and bellies of the dead scattered across the roadway, peeling pink ribbons of meat from the corpses and fighting over organs. A few seemed to notice Polly, but they did nothing more than watch her from multiple pairs of eyes as their wide, flexible jaws snapped up strands of human meat.

  They reached the last of the trucks remaining before the ramps ascended out into the open air, and Polly called for a halt. From her vantage she could only see the sky, stormy with smoke and sallow glimpses of daylight. The sounds of battle had receded to the distance. The ramp out of the loading bay was broad but congested with hundreds of the crowing birds. The loading crews must have attempted to flee and perished there in great numbers. The only way out was through the mass of birds.

  “We go single file,” said Polly. “Very slow. Very careful. No sudden moves. Follow me.”

  She walked deliberately, mindful of her footing on the debris. The first of the birds saw them and lifted into the air. They squawked their contempt and returned to their roost up near the ventilation fans. Polly proceeded in among the feasting birds. Some watched or flapped their leathery wings with irritation. Robin was immediately behind her, the line extending single-file down the ramp, winding between the groups of birds as they neared the surface. In one spot the line was forced to climb over the bodies. The fresh meat displaced awkwardly beneath their boots. The tension was sickening. It manifested in the hitching breaths the scientists took, audible over the suit radios.

  They were almost there. Polly was able to see the damaged heap of the nearest cooling tower and the fires raging through an outbuilding that had once served as a barracks for workers. Polly stopped and turned to say something to Robin, following on her heels.

  “Ah!” The cry came softly over the radio. Polly could do nothing but watch as one of the scientists crossing over the bodies lost his footing and fell directly into a mass of feasting birds. The scientist’s flailing limbs collided with the birds and spooked them into the air. The surrounding birds were not so easily frightened. Several took an airborne hop, landing atop the fallen scientist.

  “No! No! God!” the man screamed.

  Polly did not even remember his name, but she recognized his voice as one of a small contingent of Dutch computer-modeling specialists. His fearful pleading became hysterical, agonized screams as the bird creatures began testing him with snapping jaws. Up above, the birds roosting had taken notice, and by ones and twos they were beginning to descend toward the fallen scientist.

  “We have to do something,” pleaded Dr. Nandy.

  “Shoot those motherfuckers!” said Hudson.

  She raised the machine pistol and aimed at the mass of birds. The scientist’s flailing, bloodied limbs were visible among them. There were far too many of the creatures, and they were gathering in ever greater numbers. He was doomed. She lowered the weapon.

  “Run,” said Polly, deciding as she spoke the word aloud. “Run, g
oddamnit! They’ll kill us all!”

  They ran, escaping the frenzied beasts into the tumult on the surface. They could not outrun the screams of the poor scientist. He continued gurgling over the microphone until a last, long, hitching breath. Static faded in and out at the limit of the radio’s range, intermingling with a repetitive click of the scientist’s helmet being moved as the birds feasted on his body.

  Fires raged out of control. Alien vegetation crept over the ruins of buildings, softening their edges, transforming the canyons formed by the roads into abyssal trenches teeming with lurid, strange life. Something enormous was rampaging just beyond the wall, partially visible through thick smoke. The scientists gawped in disbelief at the panoramic scene of alien destruction.

  One of the creatures that had attacked them in the Fane came bounding over a mossy car, its jaws chattering. Polly fired a burst from the machine pistol and knocked it into the grass. The gunfire roused the scientists from their stupor. She wanted to head straight out of the Pit along the main access road. Sokov and Robin urged them to cross among the overgrown vehicles and ruined buildings and return to the outbuilding where their equipment was stored. Polly demurred, but Sokov was adamant.

  “All archive samples in building. If I do not recover, then what is point?”

  She gave in to them. The outbuilding was damaged by an artillery shell but largely intact. Abandoned cars and trucks filled the street. A trio of PitSec armored carriers were halted in front of the building, hatches thrown open as the crews had bailed out. One was gutted by fire, but the remaining two seemed intact.

  “B-T-R,” said Sokov. “I drive in army.”

  The safety they might afford was too tempting to pass up.

  “We’ll take them,” said Polly, “and escape north. Get your samples, Sokov. They’d better be worth it.”