That Way Lies Madness

by James R Tuck

  The wrench crashed into Hannigan's face.

  The back edge of the tool drove him to the deck floor. I fell on him, swinging in blind fury. Anger burned supernova, the internal combustion of rage driving my arm like a piston as it rose and fell over and over and over again. Pounding through until metal met metal with a wet, pulpy clang.

  Tears burned salty acid trails down the torn flesh of my cheek. My ribs ached with every sob, vertebrae grinding bone to bone with every scream that tore from my throat.

  Something hard touched my arm.

  Jerking, I lashed out with the wrench . . . and fell on my ass.

  Klactac looked at me through the railing with his unblinking, segmented eyes, a three fingered hand extended in my direction. One mandible had snapped off and his thorax leaked a thin orange fluid from a crack but he stood steady on his feet.

  Behind him the crew had collapsed, meat marionettes with cut strings. They lay in piles on the bay floor twitching against each other, foam dripping from slack mouths.

  "Are you -tik- okay?”

  I nodded, numb.

  I just bashed my friend's brains out.

  Klactac's head tilted on the middle joint of his thorax. All four of his arms raised in the air, pointing over my head. My eyes followed, looking where he pointed.

  The rift had widened.

  It had grown large enough to cover the entire observation bay. Cold seeped from it, falling down like malignant mist, settling into my bones, sucking into my joints, contaminating my marrow with infernal terror. It was the certain dread of death. The swift sure knowledge that my brief time would end and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The futility of mere human life in the face of something both loathsome and immortal. It was inexorable.

  Relentless.

  Unstoppable.

  I rolled to my knees.

  My fingers had locked in a rigor around the wrench, the joints frozen and unable to open. I used the tool to push myself up. On my feet I lifted my face to the ceiling.

  My mind rebelled at what I saw. It made no sense, a conglomeration of images that jolted and jarred together, ringing through my eyesockets and echoing inside my skull.

  A colossal socket of malevolent eye.

  A curl of diabolical horn.

  A razored rim of bone-grinding teeth.

  There were other things indescribable and alien, the sight of which slithered against the membrane my mind. Things dark and disturbing and never meant for human eyes. My mind revolted, trying to save itself, to shut out what it was being seen by cracking the fragile shell of sanity protecting it, seeking to scatter, to run, to hide.

  The hot coal of anger in my chest kept me focused, cutting through the revolt in my head. I witnessed the horror. Not flinching. Not turning away. I watched as it loomed behind its decomposing prison.

  I wasn't afraid of dying.

  My voice was hoarse, scraping the sides of my throat as I shouted. The words rasped out, barely above a whisper, but I knew she would hear me anyway.

  "You're too late, bitch. I destroyed the FTL Drive. This ship isn't going anywhere else.” Defiance thrilled deep in the pit of my stomach.

  Take that, you bitch.

  The voice that came from Klactac's jointed throat wasn't his own.

  “Others will come. They will come looking for you and they will find me instead.”

  I cut eyes over to the alien.

  The pilot stood on the other side of the railing, head cocked to the side, a cobra watching a newborn mouse.

  A trillusk latched itself along the side of his face, circling the edge of his segmented eye to lay on his bulbous, alien brow.

  I raised the wrench my fist clenched, joint-locked.

  Keeping my eyes on the alien I spoke to the thing in the rift. "I'll kill him. I will. Just like I killed Hannigan.”

  “Puny human, daughter of the apes who cast me out and locked me here on this hollow, empty edge of the universe, as long as my children are there I am there. I do not taste death and neither do they. I have the patience of the Aeons. I SHALL be free. I will it and thus, so mote it be.”

  The words rolled off the swirled walls of the cargo bay, shaking free a mist of rust that washed over the mass of fallen crew members. They began to squirm. Here an arm stretching, there a leg twitching, muscles contracting and flexing the possessed began to rise.

  I stepped over Hannigan's tremoring body and sneered at the thing above me.

  "Not if I have anything to do with it.”

  I took a deep breath, pulling air in deep. My lungs felt heavy, stuffed with ground glass. The end of the sprocket wrench hooked over the railing with a clank. Stretching, my other hand closed on the lever for the bay doors.

  Looking at the Klatuu pilot the entire time I squeezed the safety and yanked the handle.

  I'm sorry, Klactac. I truly am.

  The organic iron of the bay doors cracked with a deep, metallic grind.

  The world around me ripped apart in a maelstrom of decompression. It yanked against me, bouncing me on the organic iron grate that made the floor under my boots.

  Unanchored, the crew were lifted and flung to the ceiling in a violent explosion. Forty-nine bodies shoved against an opening an inch wide by the merciless hand of physics. They piled along the seam for a long moment, flesh resisting vacuum, threatening to be stronger. They sealed the gap and my feet settled firmly on the control deck.

  Slowly at first, then rapidly gaining pace, a crumbling sand sculpture against a crushing tide, they pulped, masticated by the irresistible pressure. Fluids and bits squeezed through the narrow opening, bursting on the other side to freeze in chunks and smears and tumble through the cold, unyielding void of space.

  Klactac and Hannigan were the last to be mashed and mixed and thrust out. Their faces seared into my mind, crystalline and scalpel sharp, before they were folded and juiced into oblivion.

  I shut my eyes.

  Man-made atmosphere lifted me, pulling my feet off the ground as it rushed past to pour out the seam. My fingers slipped, my hold on the lever to close the bay doors lost, torn away in the first second. I hung onto the wrench I'd hooked to the railing with swollen, battered joints. The meager gulp of oxygen I'd sucked into my injured lungs burned away rapidly. Black fuzz throbbed behind shut eyes. With a grizzled pop my shoulder separated, the joint slipping in a burst of pain that drove through me, keeping me from blacking out.

  My hand slid down the wrench.

  The fingers were still locked and welded in a cramped rigor but the force of the vacuum tore the flesh on my palm, ripping it against rough hatchmarks. Blood seeped, lubricating the space between raw torn flesh and rusty organic steel.

  In my mind, in the middle of the creeping black fuzz and the gnawing gibbering panic, came the face of an angel.

  My daughter.

  Smiling.

  Welcoming.

  At last.

  My hand came free of the steel.

  Chapter 13

  “Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is transport ship Alhazred. Current location 13.8 GPC from Earth. The FTL Drive is damaged beyond repair. One crew member remains. Seeking rescue, repair, and return to Earth.”

  Cracked, chapped lips pulled close to the microphone, so close that hard flakes of dead skin rasped as they brushed the oxidized organic steel mesh. The voice behind them dropped to a strangled whisper. “Please come get us.”

  I leaned back and reached over, flicking the switch that would begin broadcasting the distress signal on a repeating loop, blaring it out into the void, siren calling to the rescue ships that would come seeking when this one did not return on schedule.

  The switch was slick and wet as I pulled my finger away.

  Ia, Mother. They will come for us soon.

  Crawling from the chair to the floor, I crouched. One leg twisted out from under me, spiraled and shattered where I fell to the cargo bay floor when the ship's safety protocols switched on and pulled shut the cracked bay door
s.

  I was using my left hand now, the tips of the fingers on the right one scraped away to bare, sanded bone. They hurt. The pain was all throbby.

  And delicious.

  I went back to work.

  My raw, bloody fingerpad traced obscene, arcane sigils and symbols into the layer of rust coating the organic steel floor under my bare, bloody feet.

  A voice hummed around me, dancing off lonely self-replicating metal in a sing-song chant.

  It was mine.

  "shuubb . . . niggggg . . . uurrrrrr . . . ath . . .”

  Turn the page for my

  Twisted Zombie Love Story

  He Stopped

  Loving Her Today

  (original version appeared in ONE BUCK ZOMBIES)

  HE STOPPED LOVING HER TODAY

  Three months.

  Three months since the dead came back and the world went to shit.

  It felt like thirty years.

  He knelt in a building that used to sell hardware and do-it-yourself materials to yuppies and rednecks. All the shelves were empty, trash filling the aisles. Everything that could be used to build something or kill something had been looted long ago. His knee was in some sticky substance.

  He didn’t notice.

  A tight band compressed his ribs as he worked to control the breath that wanted to huff and puff and give his position away.

  He stared outside through the closed doors of the store. The fact that they were shut didn’t mean much since the glass from them littered the floor, winking like magic crystals. Thankfully the shamblers didn’t pick their feet up when they walked so the two inch door frame was enough to keep them in the parking lot and out of the store. They would bump into it and then turn and move in another direction. Just like those little remote controlled cars that used to exist.

  They would ignore him.

  Unless they sensed him there.

  Somehow death did not steal away their hearing, or sight, or sense of smell. He willed his body still, folding into himself like origami, creasing and pushing himself into the smallest space possible.

  He was a mouse in a field.

  He was a shadow in the night.

  He was a speck of dust in the eye of God.

  He would be safer further inside the store, as far from the dead as possible, but if he retreated now then he couldn't be sure and he had to know.

  She was following him.

  He thought she was following him.

  He had to be sure she was following him.

  So he watched, crouched in a shell of a store, scanning the dead people who shuffled and milled around the broken door only a few feet away. Dust puffed off the shelf he peered over with each shallow breath. His brain registered that most of that dust was likely made up of dead skin.

  There was certainly enough of it to go around.

  The dead circled in front of the store in a pattern like migratory birds, jostling and bumping each other. Their moans of hunger formed a white noise background to everything, thrumming the air like a broken guitar.

  Slow, step by shambling step, they milled. Clothes they had were disintegrating from exposure. His nose didn't register the smell of them anymore than it picked up on his own pungency. Water was for drinking when it could be found, and couldn't be recycled if used to wash. No filtration in the world could have salvaged it after that. The three months of summer had been dry ones, long on swelter and short on rain, teasing with heat lightning and hollow thunder.

  Some of the dead had desiccated, skin drawing tight over skeletons, any loose flab or unnecessary sinew fallen off and lost in a trail of things that were nonessential if you were dead. Others had bloated and swollen, internal gases building until their skin resembled nothing less than a garbage bag from a restaurant, full of meat and fluid. Those shuffled, skin tight like a drum, liquid insides sloshing around like water in a balloon.

  But those were not the worst ones.

  No the worst ones, the truly terrifying ones in the crowd of undead horror, were the rarer ones who didn't rot.

  At least not much.

  No, they slogged along oblivious to the fact that they were the walking dead. Looking almost alive, skin and hair intact, the only thing gone was their life, snuffed out and replaced with a hunger for living human flesh. They wandered, moaning a mockery of language.

  That's what she was.

  Outside, the mass of undead shifted and his heart clenched. His heart rate stayed high, never lowering past hammering. Before the outbreak he'd been on blood pressure medicine, tiny pills that tasted bitter and made his head swim. Now, after three months of little food and a lot of running to survive, he was half of himself. The End Of The World Diet, it’s a bitch, but it works. Living in constant fear kept his heart rate up, but this spiked it even further, ratcheting it into a rapid pounding in his chest. His hands covered his sternum, trying to keep it muffled as it thundered in his ears.

  Past the door he saw a glimpse of red, an evening gown, once beautiful to match it’s wearer, now dirty, torn, and dingy to match it’s wearer. She shambled with the others, passing within feet of the door. Her peaches and cream skin had turned waxy, but still intact. Her lips were still full even though they hung slack and open to reveal gore stained teeth and release a moan of hunger. Thick blonde hair, once like liquid sunshine, sat dull and matted on her head, still held to the updo she was buried with. A thin strand of freshwater pearls hung around her neck, a gift on an anniversary from a loving husband.

  Her face turned toward him and he pulled back further into the shadows, instinctively hiding from blank eyes filmed over with fish-belly skin, one grimy hand rising to his mouth in horror. His shift pulled his knee free with a squelch from the gummy foulness that held it to the floor. The breath he had been working to control locked inside his lungs and bile acid-etched its way up his throat. The corpse took one more step and hit the door frame with a shudder.

  She paused.

  Another of the dead bumped her, making her feet shuffle, swirling her out into the eddies of a dead tide.

  It was her.

  * * *

  The back office was small and dark, lit only by the stump of candle he'd used so sparingly. It sat dripping on the heavy steel desk he'd pushed against the door. He watched the wax run like water and puddle, then cool and form thin wrinkly skin on its surface, only to watch that be covered by another runny drop of liquid paraffin. The golden light glinted along the barrel of the gun he held in his mouth, lips clamped on it like a pacifier.

  He didn't taste the metallic tang or even feel the phallic hardness pressing on his palate. His finger was nonchalantly on the trigger, not that it mattered, the hammer would not fall on the only chamber holding the only bullet in the gun. This was his ritual every time he had a chance to stop running. Light the candle, kiss the gun, and decide if that day was the last day he would live in hell.

  Tonight his mind wasn't on the gun or on the walking dead.

  Tonight his mind drifted to a spring afternoon ten years back.

  He'd met her at a friend's wedding. They bumped into each other at the buffet line, shared a laugh, shared a dance, and then shared a cab to his place. By the time Monday came he was smitten.

  Captured.

  Surrendered.

  The romance had been whirlwind (he hadn't wanted to give her time to come to her senses) and they exchanged vows on that warm spring day on the lawn of a tiny Methodist church pastored by her Uncle John.

  Two years of wedded bliss yielded two sons; male, rambunctious versions of her.

  A sob cracked around the metal tube in his mouth, striking the silence in the office. He choked it off, swallowing it away from the freakish ears of the dead outside.

  Thank whatever God might be up there getting a sick thrill out of this that the children were not with her outside right now.

  The three of them were the first people he knew in their small town who caught the Borshaw virus and succumbed. They died, the boys fi
rst and then her. When the boys took sick he had been hurt, angry, and wounded. When she was taken he'd been devastated. Everything inside him had been scooped out and left on the floor to rot. Pain filled the cavity left inside him. Pain that ate at him and needled the interior of his skin like nettles. If there were a another soul around he would never admit that his love for her was so great it made the deaths of his children insignificant.

  But alone, huddled in a dark room at the end of the world with a loaded gun in his mouth, he could recognize that it was the truth.

  And it didn’t make her any less what she was.

  He pulled the gun from his mouth. Saliva glistened, golden in candlelight, giving the gun a pornographic appeal. Not seductive; disturbing, but still alluring. Every night since he'd found it in a dead man's hand with its lone .44 caliber salvation he'd contemplated riding that train.

  One small squeeze.

  He wouldn't even hear the gun fire.

  But would that be the end? If he didn't destroy his brain then he'd return as one of them. He'd be like her, driven by a hunger he would never fulfill, always shambling and shuffling along, moaning in pain and loneliness and desperation.

  His heart closed like a fist, thinking about her suffering that until she finally fell down, her corpse worn out. The urge to use the one bullet on her, to end her misery in one quick movement, surged inside him. He could do it. It would be simple. Or would it? Could he hit her? Not just could he pull the trigger on her in his heart, but did he have the skills to hit her in the head and put her down?

  Not without being too close to get away from the others.

  He could miss, or worse shoot her but not end her suffering.

  Dirt smeared away from his hand as he wiped his eyes. He couldn't do that. He couldn't risk that. Even now, he fought the urge to move the desk out of his way and creep back out to the door just to be able to look at her again.

  He shouldn't.

  He stood, gripping the desk by the corners and lifting it up, swiveling it away from the door. The candle guttered and wavered with the movement, more liquid paraffin gushing over short wax walls to dash madly away until it cooled, locking into place, freezing its intent.