With a terrific yank, she wrenched the goggles from her face and dropped the headlamp on the floor in a brittle crunch of glass. It hurt even more than when she fell and whacked her head in the first place. Tears gushed from her eyes and blood dripped on her cheeks and nose.
Sniffling, she used the collar of her lab coat to mop at the mess. She blinked. She wiped her eyes. She didn’t want to play anymore. Detective Investigator Special Agent Mel wanted to be off the case.
The hallway was all dark and empty, except for her and the cats.
It had worked.
The oozy blob-spider-jellyfish things and wormy dangling strings were gone—
Except, then, with a rising cold terror, she realized that maybe she was wrong.
The cats with their ninesight were still watching the stairs.
Just because she couldn’t see them anymore...didn’t mean they weren’t...there.
They might even be moving toward her right now.
But no one else would see them either. No one would know. And nobody would believe her, because she was only a kid.
Sitting on the floor, hugging Queenie, Mel started to cry.
BUG ZAPPER
Richard Lee Byers
Baker lost it halfway through the systems check. Already sweating in my Kevlar, steel, and plastic suit, I turned to find out why the technician had stopped talking and saw him sitting, slack-jawed and vacant-eyed, in front of his console.
“Baker,” I said, “take a pill!”
He didn’t. I walked over, put my hand on his shoulder, and shook him. He still didn’t react.
I yelled for help. Someone came eventually, a doctor trotting across the cavernous space that hadn’t seemed so huge and echoing back when the building was swarming with scientists, soldiers, and workers.
The physician was a tall young woman in retro cat-eye glasses. Somebody had introduced us at some point, but I didn’t remember her name. The syndrome makes it difficult to take an interest in anything, including other people.
The doctor took a syringe from the pocket of her white coat, uncapped and tapped it, and squirted a little clear solution into the air, then injected Baker in the neck.
That didn’t help, either, and when he didn’t respond to the treatment, the doctor sagged like a balloon with the air leaking out of it. “Why are we even bothering?” she sighed.
For a moment, I didn’t know, either. Then I snapped out of my funk and shouted, “Pill! Now!”
That startled her into motion. She fumbled open a yellow plastic bottle and dry-swallowed one of the red and white capsules inside.
“Give me one, too,” I said. I had my own bottle—I never let it out of my reach—but my gauntlets made me clumsy. She passed a pill through the open visor of my helmet and put it in my mouth.
The floor manager found another technician to finish the systems check. When we finished, I told my team—six armored Army Rangers with SCAR rifles slung over their shoulders—to close their visors, and the reflective ballistic glass erased our faces. Then we activated the resonators built into our helmets.
First, there rose a hum like the hiss of static between radio channels. But only the hum. The snarls, roars, and the gibbering that always seemed on the brink of articulating comprehensible, horrible words had long since fallen silent.
Next, everything started glowing. Some people claim to see the phosphorescence as silvery, like moonlight, or as pale violet, but if they do, that’s a defense mechanism. It’s really an alien color that human beings can’t perceive normally.
The otherworldly light turned mundane objects translucent. Close up, they were mostly opaque. Solid and real. But farther away, they were cellophane. Beyond the walls loomed Cubist mountains with promontories that occasionally rearranged themselves like pieces sliding in a puzzle. Above the roof hung several moons like cracked, misshapen eggs.
A pair of jellyfish drifted ten feet off the floor. One trailed tentacles that writhed right through the oblivious doctor’s face and cat-eye glasses, without resistance. A scaly bat-like thing hung by its feet from a catwalk, and a giant centipede with an apelike head that was on upside down crawled over the arms of a forklift.
One of the soldiers let out a yelp. In a way, I didn’t blame him. The monsters the resonators revealed were ugly in a way mere grotesquerie didn’t explain. It was a transcendent ugliness that made a person’s eyes tear up and bile burn in his mouth.
But it seemed stupid to act scared when there were only four, and none of them were trying to interfere with us. I remembered when they were everywhere, like fish in a corral reef, or the pioneers’ descriptions of buffalo covering the plains, or passenger pigeons darkening the sky. That was a sight worth screaming over.
The yelper had MORRISSEY stenciled on his helmet and vest. I decided to keep an eye on him.
A little jumpiness might not be the worst thing in the world. It showed he still cared if he lived or died. But I didn’t need him panicking in an emergency.
The Rangers and I piled into our up-armored Humvee. The demolitions expert settled himself beside his supplies, all secured in their boxes and buckled straps. The machine gunner and another soldier climbed into the turret, and the driver headed for the exit. At first, we hardly seemed to need it, but as we approached, the wall congealed into something more substantial-looking than a soap bubble.
By the time we got outside, the multiple moons had disappeared. Now, a latticework of colossal bones divided the sky into squares. Closer to the ground, geysers erupted from shimmering spots in the empty air to fill green, steaming pools. Insects scuttled to drink the liquid and vomit forth their wriggling larvae, but not in anything like their former profusion.
Morrissey reached for the keypad on the side of his helmet.
“Don’t!”
He froze. “I wasn’t doing anything.” His youthful baritone voice had a Southern-fried twang.
“You were going to switch off your resonator.”
“Well…okay. You got me. But as long as I’m just sitting here, what difference does it make?”
“Probably none. But with so many resonators working, the Humvee exists more in T-space than in normal space. If you deliberately shift yourself out of phase with the rest of us, there’s a small but finite chance that it will stop existing for you entirely. You’ll fall through the floor and back into the real world.”
He grunted. “Wouldn’t that be a shame.”
“You volunteered.”
“I didn’t know it would be like this.”
I frowned. “I asked for T-space veterans.”
“The sickness is hitting the military as hard as it’s hitting everybody else. For what it’s worth, I’m the only rookie.”
The driver called, “We’ve got a problem.”
I craned in my seat for a better view out the windshield. The highway ran on before us in a filmy kind of way. But we could see right through it down into a gorge that nobody had encountered in this patch of T-space before. Waves rolled sluggishly back and forth in the dark viscous liquid at the bottom. Occasionally streams of the stuff tried to squirm up the stony walls but splashed back down after a few yards of defying gravity.
“The way I see it,” the driver said, “we’ve got three choices. We can go on the way we’ve always gone before and hope the highway stays real the whole way. We can turn off the resonators and drive in the normal world.” A couple of the other Rangers murmured their approval of that idea. “Or we can look for a way around.”
“I’m not willing to risk the road,” I answered, “and the point of making the whole trip in T-space is to give us a chance to spot whatever it was that neutralized the previous teams from a distance. Go around.”
“Roger that.” He turned left down a street that ran more or less parallel to the crevasse. A gaunt, eyeless thing like a stretched-out black panther staggered in hopeless pursuit. It was probably too famished to manage its usual flickering lope.
“The weirdest par
t,” Morrissey said, “is seeing two things in the same place. Things that seem like they can’t both be true.”
“It’s because you’re seeing normal space with your eyes and T-space with your pineal gland.” He looked at me like he wanted to ask what the pineal gland is but was afraid of seeming stupid. “Jesus, kid, didn’t they give you any orientation at all?”
“Williams—the guy who was supposed to be here—got sick at the very last minute.”
“Then let me tell you what’s what.” I hoped some chat might take our minds off the shifting, flowing hyper-dimensional chaos outside the Humvee, which was difficult to look at even without a thousand hideous creatures slinking, slithering, or gliding every which way.
“Back in the early years of the Twentieth Century, a crackpot inventor named Crawford Tillinghast enhanced his perception with the first resonator, looked into T-space—which turned out to be the same thing as entering it—and got himself killed for his trouble. No big surprise, right? Considering what we now know about the place.
“And in a better world, that would have been the end of that. But Tillinghast left his notes behind, and decades later, they came into the hands of a physicist whose hobby was fringe and discredited science. He looked them over and, much to his surprise, decided there might really be something to them.
“He built his own resonator, and the modern study of T-space began. The dangers—well, some of them—were obvious, but the potential for new knowledge was limitless, and the scientific community and the governments backing it figured that with the proper resources and protocols, they could handle it.”
“But they couldn’t,” Morrissey said. He raised his visor long enough to pop a pill and wash it down with a swig from his canteen.
“Actually,” I said, “while we were only studying, things weren’t too bad. There were accidents, but nothing completely catastrophic. Then the scientists discovered that to a limited degree, T-space impinges on the normal world even without a resonator field.”
“Why?” Morrissey asked.
“Beats me. I’ve seen the equations, but I can’t explain them, or any of the really complicated science. My job was—still is, I guess—to understand just enough of everything to formulate action plans and lead teams to troubleshoot problems in the field.”
“Yahtzee,” the driver said.
Beyond the windshield, the gorge had disappeared when a different layer of T-space replaced the one we’d been experiencing. We turned right onto a nice, solid, opaque road that ran through a forest of trees with mouths. The trees had torn off much of their foliage and bark and broken their smaller branches as they pawed at themselves in an endless search for the rodents that used to nest atop them but weren’t there anymore.
Morrissey considered the trees, made a little sound of disgust, and looked back at me. “So. T-space impinges.”
“Yes. In practical terms, that meant some people sensed the monsters without realizing it consciously. Some of the parapsychologists even claimed their minds touched ours in a telepathic kind of way. Anyway, research proved that the mere presence of certain creatures promoted the nastier forms of human aggression. Murder, rape, torture, child abuse, you name it. And once we knew that, it was only natural to wonder if we could improve the world by exterminating the filthy things just like we’ve tried to eliminate the smallpox virus or mosquitoes carrying malaria.”
“Did everybody think that was a good idea?”
“Not quite, but as it turned out, everybody who mattered. Obviously, it was a huge undertaking, but by then, we thought we’d learned enough to pull it off, and pretty much everyone who sees T-space creatures hates them instantly. Maybe that made the decision makers reckless.”
The demolitions expert made a spitting sound. “You think?”
I sighed. “The project gave us a few good years. ‘On Earth, peace, good will toward men.’ Meanwhile, the towers we’d built in T-space were working even better than expected, killing off species right and left and breaking down the whole ecology. But who cared? They were monsters, and it wasn’t our ecology.”
“Except that it really was,” Morrissey guessed.
“Yeah,” I replied. “It turned out that even though the monsters stimulated some of us in a bad way, all of us need them to stimulate us in a good way. Alien as they seem, they’re our symbiotes, like the bacteria in our guts. Specifically, they’re vital to human motivation, and if they don’t make a comeback, eventually, every person in the world will go catatonic and die of hunger and thirst.”
“So we need to shut down the bug zappers.”
“Yes, and unfortunately, we can’t do it remotely. The towers are self-contained. There’s abundant energy in T-space if you know how to collect it—even Tillinghast discovered that before he came to grief—and even if we’d been sure it would work, it would have been dangerous to run a landline or create any sort of permanent link between this place and the normal world.”
“So people need to go into T-space to shut down the zappers hands-on,” another soldier said, unscrewing the cap of his pill bottle. “But as far as we know, nobody’s managed to do it or even come back from the missions. No one in the whole world.”
“So we’re not going to mess around with the controls inside our tower,” said the demolitions man. “We’re going to blow the mother up. Fast. In and out before anything bad can happen to us.”
“I see it,” said the driver, braking to a stop.
Actually, he saw the top of the spire—or bug zapper, as Morrissey and the other Ranger called it—sticking up above some lower buildings on the outskirts of the city. Constructed of bare girders, it looked a little like an Eifel Tower that some huge fire had heated red-hot.
But the ruddy glow was misleading. The towers didn’t actually throw off heat. They emitted a kind of radiation that was only a little harmful to humans but both alluring and highly toxic to many creatures native to T-space.
The Ranger sitting up beside the driver peered at the huge machine through digital binoculars. “I don’t see anything different.”
“It looks okay from up here,” called one of the men in the turret.
“Drive on,” I said.
The closer we approached, the more rotting monster bodies we found, and neither the Humvee’s chassis nor our helmets did much to block out the stink. One Ranger tore open his visor and retched down the front of his vest. Meanwhile, the armored car veered around the larger husks and bumped over smaller ones.
In due course, we reached the square of tarmac surrounding the base of the tower. The Humvees of the teams who’d attempted this job before us sat among the scores of alien corpses. But there was nothing to tell us what had actually happened to our predecessors.
“We can search the other vehicles,” said the Ranger who’d thrown up.
“No,” I said, sneaking a glance at the name stenciled on the demolition specialist’s gear. “Ramirez has the right idea. He sets the explosives, the rest of us stand guard, and then we get the hell out of here.”
Four of us climbed out of the Humvee, although the driver and the men up top stayed where they were. Ramirez trotted toward the tower. He’d studied the blueprints back at the base and knew where to place the charges.
Picking my way among the decaying bodies, I prowled some little distance away from the utility vehicle. Like everybody else, I was looking for signs of trouble.
But for that first minute, I didn’t see any. Though a few blue-green flies the size of rats were crawling on the dead things or flitting above them, they couldn’t hurt a man in body armor. Their rocky faces sliding, the distant mountains opened to reveal the vistas of galaxies and nebulae they held at their cores. But that had been going on for years and was no threat to us, either.
“One down!” Ramirez called. Then the light changed, the red glow of the tower giving way to another alien color no one ever sees in the normal world. This was one I’d never seen before, either. For an instant, my brain tried to
perceive it as an electric white, then surrendered and accepted the otherness for what it was.
Lifting my rifle, I spun around. At first, I couldn’t tell where the new light was coming from. Then, suddenly, the source appeared. I had the sense that it had emerged from around a corner or behind a barrier even though there was so such object nearby.
It was a haze of otherworldly glow almost as tall as the tower itself, and within the cloud was a Tinkertoy skeleton made of lines of glare. Shifting like the shapes in a kaleidoscope, the lines danced to form a series of patterns. Once again, my brain tried and failed to turn what I was seeing into something more tolerable. Even though I could barely make them out, I recognized that the angles and congruencies would have been impossible if I were back where I belonged.
The thing was closest to Ramirez. Inside it, lines and triangles rotated or formed to point at him.
As soon as they did, he became almost unbearable to look at, too. I could still see the outside of his armor, but also both his naked body and the bones and organs packed inside it, and all of that from multiple angles at once.
Screaming, fumbling to unsling his rifle, he floated up into the air, broke apart, and dispersed like a puff of smoke. It only took a moment, but there was still a wisp of him twisting above the ground when the rest of us opened fire.
Was there any hope that firearms could hurt an entity like Ramirez’s killer? Maybe, because of those of us who were left, Morrissey was the closest to it. But it ignored him to focus elements of its internal structure on the Ranger blasting away with the M2 heavy machine gun, the most powerful weapon we had.
Cursing at the top of his lungs, he clung to the gun to keep the entity’s attention from floating him up out of the turret. He disintegrated anyway.
His partner up top took over for him, but only for a second. Then the creature pointed again and dissolved him, too.
“Turn off your resonators!” I bellowed. “Turn off your resonators!” Raising my hand to my helmet, I typed in the code.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 9
