Snake Eyes

by Joseph D'lacey

  Eventually, she managed to pull the door closed behind her but it seemed to be at great cost to herself. Johnson could see on the monitor, now half obscured by a thick rope of greenery, that there was blood coming from her mouth. In closing the door she’d severed many major limbs of the vine and inside the security chamber there was a flurry of movement. The chamber seemed to hold a particularly dense collection of vine limbs; possibly where the roots of this particular vine had taken hold. Cut tendrils and healthy ones slapped at her and began to take hold.

  She managed to wrench the safe open and pull out her gun and a blade. It was the start of a battle. Even through the solidity of the reinforced door, Johnson could hear the muffled reports of each shot she fired. On the monitor the image turned white each time she pulled the trigger. Human and plant limbs flailed together. In her hand she swung a switchblade in every direction, hacking and stabbing at the vine. When the larger limbs tried to take hold of her she fired into them, splitting them. Fluid began to spatter the camera; he couldn’t tell if it was blood or sap. For every vine she cut or destroyed with a bullet, more seemed to grow from the walls and ceiling, one even unfurled from the safe.

  There was no way she was going to make it and no way he was going to open the door to her even though, for some inexplicable reason, Johnson felt he owed it to her.

  He sat down in the centre of the room away from the walls, on his couch. No more shots came from the security chamber. From this distance he could only see vague movements on the screen.

  “Phone JHD.” He said.

  He heard the connection and a ringing tone.

  “This is the Justice and Harmony Department of Tier Two. How may we assist you today?”

  “Put me through to Beckeridge, please. This is urgent, it’s Officer Johnson.”

  It was a long wait. On the tiny screen by the door all movement had ceased.

  “What the hell do you want, Johnson? You’ve got some nerve calling me.”

  “I need you to pull me out, sir. I’ve got two dead lowlifes in here and the place is crawling with weed.”

  “You’re wasting police time. That’s an offence, or had you forgotten already?”

  “Sir, I need evac and reassignment immediately. I’ve been identified.”

  “What are you talking about Johnson? We fired you months ago.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve been off the force for three months. You never made it past day one on the outside. You couldn’t cope with the adjustment from the psych endurance test. Weaver tried to persuade you to come in but she said you got violent, tried to rape her. We canned you right there.”

  “But sir, I’ve been working my contacts hard and now they’ve figured it out. These two came here to kill me. They know I’ve been turning Sooth dealers in to you.”

  “You didn’t make a single bust, Johnson.” Beckeridge was laughing. “All you did was get high. For all I know you’re high right now, hallucinating this whole thing. You certainly hallucinated your involvement in JHD business.”

  The weight of Beckeridge’s words sank onto Johnson’s shoulders like wet concrete. He covered his face with one hand.

  “Johnson, you still there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I liked you. You almost made a good drug squad officer but almost isn’t enough. Don’t be calling here again.”

  The line went dead. The only sound in the apartment was the damp rustle of the vines as they sucked Fury dry.

  Johnson went to the bedroom to retrieve his tube of Sooth from under the mattress. In it he found two Saturns left. He had no recollection of using the others; maybe Beckeridge was right. He took one Saturn, pushed the pill out and placed the disc into his viewer. It took him a long time to come up with a good thought before he placed the pill on his tongue. There was no whisky left so he let it dissolve and swallowed its bitterness as the mesh of plant life grew stronger all around him.

  “Play.”

  Chapter 22

  With Fury and Elina digested by the weed, Johnson knew it wouldn’t be long before someone came looking for them. All his Sooth was gone. He wanted more, even though he couldn’t account for most of the Saturns. There was no Mist left in the apartment either; not even a Beat cap. It meant he would have to hit the streets again.

  In the bathroom, he checked his appearance in the mirror. When he didn’t recognise his own face, a tear slipped from the outer corner of his right eye. It travelled from his skin onto the flattened meadow of black hair that was his beard. There it glistened before sinking and disappearing. The beard was full and he could not remember the last shave he’d had. It looked to Johnson as though he had never shaved.

  His hair, too, once cut to a regulation centimetre was now a twisted unwashed mass. He saw the dirt ingrained around the skin of his forehead and baring his teeth found them stained yellow. The clothes he wore were the same subculture leathers he’d first worn on his arrival from JHD. He realised with a wave of self-disgust that he smelled bad. Not only of dirt and body odour but also of urine and faeces.

  He peeled the clothes from himself as if they were a skin. It hurt to remove them –much of his body hair was torn away as they came free. He walked from the bathroom back to the living space to feed his clothes to the weed. Near the front door where Fury’s body had been there was now a thick clump of creeper that retained the vague outline of a human.

  He threw his soiled garb towards an unnourished looking knot of tendrils in the corner beside the viewer. They coiled hungrily over the clothes until they were lost to sight. He noticed as he walked back into the bathroom that none of the creepers attempted to reach for him any more, despite the entire apartment being lined with vegetation; all the angles smoothed by organic growth. It had become a living cave of deep green.

  The bathroom remained relatively free of weed and so he set about removing all the traces of dereliction that his body had manifested. Taking the crusted bandage from his shoulder he found no trace of a scar from Fury’s razor strip. He tossed the bandage through to the bedroom. A swaying vine caught it in mid air and drew it back to the proximity of the wall where it was shredded by hungry shoots.

  He cut his beard and hair with scissors first and finished the job with his depilator. He had to tear it from its shrink wrapper, realising he hadn’t used it once since moving in. As he removed all traces of hair from his face and head he noticed something unusual about his tattoo. A flickering. He froze and looked down to his chest.

  Nothing.

  Looking back into the mirror he continued to shave and it was when he turned his face that he noticed the movement. The spider moved when he moved. As he faced the mirror its head pointed to the left side of his chest but when he turned his head the spider shifted its legs, swinging itself to point in a new direction. Johnson placed his hand onto his chest, over the body of the spider, and turned around. Below his fingers he could see the spider shimmering its legs as it turned with him. And yet he felt nothing beneath his palm even though the movement was obvious.

  He cut his finger and toe nails, eventually casting all his cut hair and clippings to the weed in his bedroom. He then showered as hard as he could, scrubbing the crusted filth from his behind and the backs of his legs, scouring the stench from his armpits. The smell became worse for a while as the hot water rehydrated the mess before washing it all away. He abraded his hands and feet with a stiff brush, determined to rid himself of every trace of grime and followed the shower with a bath in the hottest water he could stand, adding soothing aromatic oils. When he was satisfied, Johnson withdrew the plug and was cheered to see the water draining away, just as clear as when he’d immersed himself.

  Finally, he scraped his tongue clean, flossed and brushed his teeth and cleaned the insides of his ears. In the bedroom, he struggled with the weed to open his wardrobe. From it he took another set of skintight leather clothes, this time all in black. He left his waistcoat unbuttoned so that he could see which way the spi
der pointed. Pushing his feet into a clean pair of boots, he added a bodkin to each of them.

  He slipped his handgun, still unused, under the waistband at the back of his trousers, put his two remaining clips in the back pockets of his striders and walked towards the door. He tested the spider by turning around in front of the door. When its head pointed upwards he was facing the door. That, then, was the way to go.

  His pale skin looking vulnerable under the black leather, his head shining, the scalp grey and hairless, Johnson walked through the tangle of weed in the security chamber and out into the city of Tier Two.

  Chapter 23

  The weed had wrought many changes.

  The rampways and thoroughfares were now green corridors, rounded into tunnels by the choking tendrils. Johnson’s apartment had only been an example of minor growth, he now realised as he trod the springy floors waiting for a snakelike loop of vine to snare him. The plant, whether it was one or several he couldn’t tell, had smothered everything. Some of the buildings were totally bound in green, some of the tendrils as thick as tree trunks. He knew if anything as large as that got a hold of him he’d be crushed in a second.

  And yet the weed was eerily quiescent. Slight flutters occurred at the tips of the smaller vines as he passed but nothing else seemed to threaten him. It was as if the entire plant was sleeping.

  If that was true then it had put the city to sleep too. There was no noise at all. The billboards that had once blocked the view from his window every few minutes were lying tilted or broken on the rampways or smashed beyond recognition at the street level. Through the occasional break in the canopies below he could look over the edge and down into the streets. Looking up, he saw cracks in the weed’s thick cover and shafts of sunlight bursting through. There was no traffic, no construction, no whine of hyper jets. When the gentlest breeze did occasionally blow, all he could hear was the sighing of leaves.

  The silence wasn’t merely due to the impossibility of movement for machines. Johnson supposed that he might well be the only person still alive in the city. Everywhere he looked, the outlines of human forms were sculpted in green along the tubular corridors. Some of them were lying down as if sleeping; others were contorted, the vine capturing their last movements in living sculpture. The entire city was now populated by silent emerald statues and the weed that had mimicked them at the moment of death.

  The walk to street level was a long one. Under other circumstances Johnson would have taken an elevator or even a taxi but now walking was the only way to anywhere. The spider made the journey even longer by turning at unexpected moments to indicate a different route to the one he would have chosen.

  He eventually came out at street level and was able then to see a little more light coming down from very far above. The tendrils of weed had not blocked out the spaces between the buildings the way it had covered the rampways; the unimpeded daylight was a welcome sight. Following the spider, he walked away from his part of town along the centre of a street that would usually have been clogged with traffic. He took care not to trip on the thicker vines, ever wary of ‘waking’ the slumbering carnivorous garden that overlaid the city.

  The smell of fresh cuttings and the sap of trimmed garden plants mingled with the unmistakable stench of rotting meat. The streets were clogged with the partially digested victims of the weed, every one of them mummified by tangles of creeper.

  When he reached a dead end, a vertical wall of green, he knew he’d come to the city limit, usually perforated by several gates where the arterial roads lead in and out of Tier Two. Now, all such exits were blocked by the new forest. Johnson realised that following the spider might have been nothing more than folly. It occurred to him that he might have been safer back in the apartment. In the moment he had the thought, he heard a sound behind him. He knew without looking what it meant.

  When he turned, however, what he saw was not a stream of thick tentacles reaching for him. Instead, he saw the bodies of the dead tearing away from the rest of the weed and standing alone. The risen corpses, swaddled in green vine, didn’t stand still for long.

  They came slowly, as if unsure of their feet, like toddlers when they first stand up. Many of them fell over before hauling themselves upright and walking again. All of them advanced in his direction. Johnson looked at the spider and found it was no longer oriented towards the great wall. Instead it was pointing along it.

  He began to run. He left the clumsy revenants far behind at first but everywhere he looked more were rising. Behind him the numbers of green corpses grew; to a gang, to a crowd. Ahead he saw stairs leading upward; that was where the spider was directing him. He took the steps three at a time until he was exhausted. The spider had led him to a staircase which doubled back on itself over and over again, leading endlessly upwards.

  Within minutes Johnson was no longer running. Lumbering was the best he could manage and without the help of the handrail, he doubted his legs were strong enough for the ascent. His body acted as though he hadn’t exercised for years and very soon he had to stop and rest. Looking down over the creeper-covered stairway he saw hundreds of green bodies pushing upwards behind him, only a couple of levels below. The vines he was stepping on appeared to be dying and turning brown but the green bodies chasing him seemed to be getting faster, learning not only how to walk with confidence but also how to run.

  Johnson took a few more deep breaths and ran on up the stairs. From somewhere up above he heard the now familiar rustle and thump of more weed mummies. They were coming down to meet him, trap him in the stairwell. With no choice but to press upwards, he slammed into them with his shoulder, knocking five of them down and stepping over the rest as he continued to climb—they didn’t resist at all. He used the same tactic on the next group he met but they, too, were learning. One of the fallen in the group laid a hand on his ankle as he barreled past. He kicked the hand away and continued, realising only a couple of levels later that the arm of the weed mummy still gripped him. He flung the dead limb away.

  The next group was stronger and there were more of them. They pushed him backwards, every one of them reaching out to him. He pulled the bodkins from his boots and began to stab at their heads. The spikes penetrated with ease and immobilised the creatures instantly. He pushed through, puncturing every head until he’s paralysed the whole cluster. They stood swaying and bewildered on the stairway until he pushed the two nearest to him and the group collapsed downwards, blocking the stairwell solidly. It bought him the time he needed.

  The spider continued to point the way to the next level of steps and he obeyed its directions with reckless faith. The spider was all he had left. The groups of weed mummies appeared many times in the process of his upward journey and each time he dispatched them with spikes to their heads before using them to block the progress of the ones that followed. Each encounter sapped both Johnson’s will and his strength.

  Why am I even bothering to fight them? There’s no way out of this.

  He still had a choice. Wouldn’t giving in and letting them take him be simpler? Then the nightmare that his life had become would be over once and for all.

  As he staggered upwards, the self-admission that he’d let himself be swamped by drugs and alcohol hit him hard. He’d practically killed himself already.

  How did it come to this?

  He tried to remember his life before enrolling at the academy. No recognisable memories came to him. Indistinctly, he had a sense that he’d once lived in a valley in a much more peaceful city than this one but it seemed lifetimes in the past. He believed, though he didn’t know why, that he had once fought against terrible odds and been wounded in the process. Was that why he’d tried to become a Narcotics Squad officer? The fighting of those odds, the way he’d been outnumbered, was similar in some way to the odds he was fighting now. But where was there to escape to? Surely the way out of Tier Two was not to be found by climbing ever upward.

  The questions, the doubts, killed his adrenaline. F
or a while Johnson sat down and listened to the weed mummies struggling up below him. It sounded as if they had learned the rudiments of speech now. He heard their moans and cries of hunger or whatever it was that drove them to chase him. Sitting was easy. They would catch him and that would be the end.

  Finally, I’ll be released.

  The thought didn’t ease his mind. It merely disgusted him to know that he could think that way. That he could allow defeat to be the answer to his problems. It was anger that pushed him once more to his feet just as the army of leafy soldiers reached the level below him. Once again, he was running.

  Two levels up he emerged onto the top of the city. It, too, was covered in growth but the weed had shriveled and was lifeless. The spider pointed along the open expanse of what seemed to be a huge flat roof and so, one more time, he ran. It was good to see the sky again; it gave him a surge of elation to think that he was almost free.

  The elation disappeared just as quickly when his running brought him to a precipice. He had reached the very limit of Tier Two. The spider still pointed outwards, into the void. Down below, miles down, was water; reflecting blue and silver in the sunshine but so distant the waves appeared not to move at all.

  He looked back and saw the weed mummies streaming up from the stairwell. They assembled into ranks, their numbers too great to count. The cohorts of androgynous green humanoids spread out along the horizon of the building until he could no longer see the rest of the city behind them. Slowly, as one, they moved in.

  The closer they came, the more distinct were their voices:

  “We will be like you, Johnson.”

  “You cannot reach the first tier, Johnson.”

  “Let us evolve together, Johnson.”

  “You are the last survivor, Johnson.”

  “Give up, Johnson, you are so tired.”

  “Join us, Johnson, you have already failed.”