The next training session goes much more smoothly. Darren doesn’t try to help anyone. Luckily, the only person who was in danger of being consumed was the frail looking woman from the day before. The slag she was battling had clamped itself onto her slarm and she had, in turn, devoured the attacking slag like a wild animal.
That night, at dinner, Shell announces: “Rest up tonight! Tomorrow the fugue will arrive and we will take it to Hollow City!”
The troops look down at the blackened slag meat on their plates. They do not seem very excited. After dinner, they break up to go about pushing the walls of the chamber back. Darren finds Shell milling around and approaches him.
“I need to talk to you,” Darren says.
Shell turns his head and says, “Speak.”
“I just wanted to find out if you’re really serious about this. When was the last time you were above ground for any period of time?”
“Let me stop you right there, trooper. I’ve heard it all before. And it’s not like that. It’s not a matter of being outnumbered. I know what the slags have become. They’ve become giants. They’ve become so much more than they were. But they can’t win because we’re the chosen.”
“Chosen by whom?”
Shell shakes his head. “You don’t understand anything, do you?”
“I guess not,” Darren says. “Maybe you could explain.”
“You can’t explain faith. Do you know what faith is? Having faith in something is to believe in it unconditionally. Pearl is the chosen. She’s like Jesus or something. I’ve explained to you a little about what she can do and you’ll get to see her do a lot more tomorrow. Maybe then you’ll understand. Can you do me that favor? Can you put off your doubts until tomorrow? What are the alternatives, really? It doesn’t seem like so much to ask. You can go above ground and die, live out your remaining days alone and in fear, or you can actually believe in something. I think you’ll find it feels pretty good to believe in something.”
Darren doesn’t want to agree with him but he doesn’t necessarily want to argue either. He walks away silently, figuring that’s a happy medium.
He isn’t able to sleep that night.
14.
Bleary-eyed, he watches the flurry of activity around him. The troops, led by Pearl and Shell, march toward the pool beneath the ring of fire. Pearl hoists up her skirt and climbs into the pool. The skirt floats up around her.
“Everybody in! Everybody in!” Shell shouts.
Darren thinks this is the stupidest thing in the world. He’s the last one in the pool, except for Shell. Everyone is gathered around Pearl. She raises her arms up to the dripping ceiling. The hole has long since closed. He’s tempted to reach beneath her skirt and then he sees that everyone is doing exactly that. Even Shell. Especially Shell. His eye is rolled back in his head, his body vibrating with something that could very well be ecstasy. Dirty old perv, Darren thinks. But now is not the time to start bucking any trends so he reaches under her skirt as well. It’s basically just a mass of other hands at this point. He honestly thought the fugue would be something other than group frottage but, nevertheless, here it was in all its unwashed glory.
And then something does begin happening.
The pool is swirling around them and rising up toward the ceiling. It begins going faster and faster, water droplets pelting Darren in the face. He can’t see anything. At first the drops sting and then they separate even further until they are a swirling mist. Now he’s in some sort of cluster with all the other troops. They’ve all locked arms around each other and bunched toward the middle, tightening up around Pearl. He thinks he hears her moaning. It could be pleasure or could be the fact that all of her bones are being smashed.
Then they are floating en masse and Darren loses all sense of the cavern around him. He loses all sense of the bodies around him. It feels like he is floating through the air. Then he sees Pearl. It’s him and Pearl, floating in a cool gray mist over the blighted world. She’s moving against him and smiling and she’s putting his hands under her dress and he can feel his erection. It’s the first one he’s had probably since the last time he’d had sex with his wife. Her hands reach toward the button on his militia issue pants and there’s a part of him that really wants what might happen except for one disconcerting thought. He imagines Pearl floating through all these other spaces with all these people. He imagines her with gross Terry and creepy Shell. He imagines her going down on the skeletal lady. He realizes he doesn’t even know the names of most of the people here. He feels even more alone than he did before and he brushes her hand away. Her smile dissolves and he makes eye contact with her. He feels her reaching inside of him with eyes that look like a gray sky with bolts of lightning streaking it. She’s trying to control him or something. He looks down. Down at the scary distant ground, smoldering and devastated. She grabs his chin and forces him to make eye contact with her.
You have to.
You have to.
You have to.
It’s like a whispered chant inside his head. He tries to shove her away but she isn’t going anywhere. He puts his hands over his ears, closes his eyes and screams as loud as he can. It’s all muffled in the swirling mass of the fugue and he feels her hands all over him and he tries as hard as he can to make his erection go away. He can’t shake the feeling that something very bad is going to happen if she succeeds in this.
Time passes and he can’t tell if it’s going fast or slow or fast and then slow. He can’t tell if they have stopped or if they are continuing to float. He can’t tell when he is all alone or when she is all over him. He tries to turn his back on her. He feels her hands on him. Her mouth on him. Anything to coax him into hardness and it’s her persistence that solidifies his opinion.
And then he feels the solid ground beneath his feet and he’s standing there with the other troops, Pearl at the vanguard. Everyone else carries a look of something like paranoid bliss in their eyes and Darren feels dirt scouring at his skin and hears the screeching roar of slags and a world burning down.
They exit the fugue and come upon the devastated exoskeleton of what used to be Hollow City.
15.
Emerging from the fugue, Darren has an immediate sense of badness. It’s dark from all the smoke in the air. Standing in front of them is an army of mammoth slags, easily two stories high each. Ten troops are immediately devoured. They’ve walked into something. Shell was a fool for having faith in Pearl. Whatever parlor tricks she could do, no one could get them out of this.
He snaps to attention and sees a giant toothy mouth in front of him. The opening is as big as a pond. The slag is rearing back its blind head. Before he can feel its teeth cut him in half, just as that enormous head begins its descent, Darren leaps forward into the mouth.
He hears the teeth snap shut and feels the slag’s head move around him in something that could very well be confusion. Then he’s sliding down its gullet and deep into its body. It smells like decaying meat and bile. Darren throws up, adding to the heady scent. Then he feels movement. They are moving toward something even though Darren feels the only something he is probably headed toward is certain death. He wonders how long it will take for the slag’s stomach acid to devour him.
The inside is strange and fleshy, covered in something like oozing mucous. No bones anywhere. Nothing to grab onto. It’s only a matter of time before he’s sucked down into whatever sick bowel this thing has and that will probably be it. He isn’t a worm, isn’t a parasite, isn’t made to live in shit.
He plunges his hand into the gross mucous of the slag’s insides. He sets his slarm to work on the wall. The rapid movement jostles him. The slarm is probably so small it feels like little more than a pinprick to the giant slag. But he doesn’t need much to make it out. Just a small opening. Then he can run to... where? Where will he run to? Where can he run to? This is certainly the end. He just watched half the troop devoured in a matter of seconds.
While his slarm works on
the flesh of the slag he thinks about what happened.
It had to have been a set-up. But who was setting them up? Pearl or Shell? It had to be one of them. Darren leans toward the one who did not sacrifice her arm to “the cause.” Even though he really wants to believe it’s Shell because he’s such a prick. He supposes it could be both. Maybe they really do have some idea how to end this and just don’t want anybody else around when it happens.
His slarm must be hungry because it tears through the slag with amazing verve. Darren sticks his good arm through the hole and feels what might be air on his fingertips. It’s hot and grainy, not wet and slimy. He takes that as a good sign. He sticks the slarm out and lets it clamp onto the outside of the slag to get a good grip and then he rips his way out. He pushes his head through, pulls his body through, wipes the clinging mucous from his eyes and slides down the back of the monstrous slag.
It immediately turns to snap at him but its size, while a great asset, is also a great hindrance. Darren darts for the first narrow spot he sees. A tiny access alley between two storefronts. Midway down the alley he stops to catch his breath and marvels at his brief glimpse of this new world.
The slags are reshaping it. It looked like everything was destroyed and the parts used to make bigger structures. Even the buildings to either side of him must have been nearly ten stories tall.
Darren’s slarm is going crazy. If he isn’t careful, it’ll take his face off. What good is it, really? The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks maybe it’s some kind of signaling device for the other slags. How else would they have known they were all going to be there?
If he is going to have to look out for slags around every turn, he doesn’t want to have to worry about one attached to his body. He roots through the nearest dumpster, filled with old trash beyond rotten, until he finds a tin can. It isn’t a knife but it’ll do. The lid is still attached to the can by about an inch of tin. He bends it up, holds the ridged part of the can and begins hacking at his slarm at the shoulder, cutting on the slag part and not the Darren part. The slag gnashes its teeth and Darren angrily hacks at the front of it until the area approximating its mouth is loose and falling to the greasy asphalt. Then he continues hacking on the shoulder part. He doesn’t feel any pain and when the slag is dangling there, Darren sticks his right hand into the gap and rips it the rest of the way off. Then he throws it on the ground and stomps it mercilessly. He turns to look at the end of the alley and sees Shell running.
He kind of wants Shell dead so he runs after him, wishing he had a gun or, fuck, even another arm would be great, at this point. Luckily, he still has the tin can clutched in his right hand.
16.
Darren reaches the end of the alley and it occurs to him that, since Shell is running, he might be running from something. But it’s too late. He turns to his left and sees an enormous slag half-running half-slithering toward him. Its legs are too rudimentary to carry him quickly but they are there and Darren can only think about what they’ll look like weeks or months from now.
Darren ducks back into the alleyway, knowing the slag has sensed him. The slag slows but doesn’t stop completely and Darren thinks he is very lucky. Tentatively, he takes another step out of the alley. The slag is running off to his right, eclipsing Shell who runs before him. Darren thinks he could try and save Shell but he also thinks Shell is mostly the one who brought them here.
Where was Pearl?
Darren takes a deep breath and assesses things. Tries to orient himself and realizes it’s impossible to orient yourself to someplace you’ve never been. What he needs to think about is getting out. Getting out or dying. Those are probably his only two choices. To his left two slags are battling each other. One is the older kind that looks like a slug except he’s the size of a house. The other is the newer, more evolved kind, Tyrannosaurus rex-like arms and legs that, at this point, just jut out from the lower body, too small to even reach the ground.
The city is a patchwork of devastation. Some houses are destroyed while others are built up to three and four times their original sizes. Cars line the side of the road. Most of them are blackened shells. All of them are flattened. Trash and debris is strewn everywhere. Many things are on fire. The smoke and heat scorch his lungs and he wonders how much of what he is breathing is the nasty chemical stuff the Army used against the slags in the final days of the second attack. He realizes he doesn’t care. It will just kill him quicker and, staring at the world he is left with, he thinks death is a very admirable option.
This world has probably long been scavenged and emptied of weapons, by people who thought they had a chance at a time when that might have been true. A lengthy quest to find the perfect weapon is out of the question. He wishes he still had Gary. A blackened brick sits atop a pile of blackened bricks. He looks at the rusted can in his hand. Brick or can? He decides he can throw a brick. The can is too delicate to do damage if thrown. He drops the can and picks up the brick, turning to his right. Part of him wants to watch Shell get devoured by the slag.
Cautiously, he wanders down the broken sidewalk, looking through the shattered windows at sagging displays of merchandise finally revealed for what it is—worthless junk. To his left, hanging from an awning, are several dead bodies of varying shapes and sizes. They are all male and they have numbers tattooed onto their naked torsos. Maybe this had been a way to keep track of the dead at one point?
The slag is a couple blocks ahead of him and he can see it straining to force its way into one of those narrow alleys. It seems Shell had found a way to escape. That left him for Darren.
Darren doesn’t know why he hates Shell so much. Perhaps it’s his blind faith. If there were ever a thing to completely remove one’s faith, Darren thought the apocalypse would surely be it.
Now how to get the slag away? Darren could always enter the building adjoining the alley and see if there was some kind of opening. Or he could just taunt the slag. Really tempt death.
He throws his brick at the hulking beast. It bounces off and clatters to the ground, breaking in half. Darren thinks about bending to pick it up but realizes he doesn’t care. He’s too tired. Instead, he just looks at the slag. And notices they are developing eyes. He doesn’t know if this is a good or a bad thing. They seem to have done a fine job of sensing their prey. Now, with eyes, they would just be forced to look at the ugly world around them. Darren holds out his arms and waits for the slag to clamp down on him.
But it doesn’t.
It snaps its giant teeth and Darren clenches his jaw thinking, This is finally it. But the slag is snapping its teeth at another slag, one that has slithered up behind Darren.
Darren steps out of the way.
Seeing the larger slag, the smaller one goes into some sort of frenzy and launches itself at the behemoth.
They’re fighting each other.
That’s why the large one was after Shell and didn’t seem concerned with Darren. Shell still had the slag as a left arm. Darren had removed his. The slarms weren’t weapons, they were bait.
He approaches the alley and turns to his right. Shell is huddled against a melted dumpster midway down the alley.
Darren approaches him slowly, wondering if Shell has a gun or not.
“How are you still alive?!” Shell yells. But it’s not the authoritative yell he had used back in the chamber. It’s a panicked yell. This is a different Shell, Darren thinks. One completely transformed by fear.
“Whose idea was the slarm?” Darren asks, moving closer and closer to Shell.
17.
“Pearl’s!” Shell shouts. And before Darren can stop him, he’s jabbering on. “She’s one of them. You don’t understand. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid. How I fell for it. I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I would never have fallen for something like this. She did something to me. She has powers. Do you know how important that is? Do you know how special it is to possess something like magic when it looks like the who
le world is going to hell? Everybody was looking for something like that. Even people who didn’t believe in anything wanted something to believe in because they knew they couldn’t do it themselves. There was no way to survive on your own.”
“I did.”
“What?”
“I survived on my own. I did all of this on my own.”
“You were ready to drown in the ocean.”
“Better in the ocean than in the mouth of a slag.”
Shell has no answer for that. Then he says, “I was here years ago. Before the second wave. All the residents believed that it was nearly slag free. They believed Pearl made it that way. They called her the Queen of Town. But you want to know what I think?”
“Not really.”
“I think Pearl started the plague. I think there were no such things as slags. I think she found some way to come here through that goddamn fugue and bring her plague gods with her. And I think she had all the charm and magic to do it. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Darren doesn’t know whether or not to believe Shell. He supposes what he’s saying is no more ludicrous than anything else he’s witnessed over the past few days. He does believe Shell’s intent is good and those good intentions may be what save Shell’s life.
“What happened to your slarm?”
“Still haven’t figured that one out, huh?
Shell’s one eye is blank. He isn’t even able to draw his own conclusions.
“The slarm is a fucking signal. The slags don’t want us anymore. It’s probably been so long since they’ve eaten human they don’t even remember we’re food. They’re eating themselves now. But they’re also connected psychically or something. They can sense each other. Maybe it’s sonar. By keeping that idiot thing on your shoulder, you’re begging to be found and eaten. I bet Pearl knows where you are right now.”
Slag Attack Page 11