Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  Bobbi kept on. "I made them think the elevator was out, so they didn't try and cut it — Hell, if they didn't have so much of this hospital on backup systems they'd probably have sniffed this place out long ago. They've got incinerators down there that could go up with a wink. So what I think is..."

  "Bobbi, hush," Walken said softly. He stuffed the Sony into his back pocket; he heard a muffled query emit from his ass as he lifted the C-J's muzzle and waited for a long moment. Walken definitely saw movement at the other end of the corridor now. Slowly he crept down the side of the hall, brushing past faded holographic health notices and yellowed paper handbills with the gun leveled ahead.

  Suddenly there was a crash as a Special Tactics cop, gray armor and assault rifle and all, came pinwheeling through a doorway at the end of the hallway. A pale thing in the shape of a boy was trying his best to put a battered fire axe through the officer's chest, swinging away at the armored breastplate. As they fell it broke through, red splattering against fading white tile. Blood continued to fountain in a gory arc as the ghoul struck again. The cop's death rattle went unheard, sealed behind the faceless helmet and his assailant picked itself up off the ground.

  Walken found himself alone in the corridor with the thing. It was supposed to be an adolescent boy, no more than thirteen or fourteen - or perhaps it might have been once, for it was something entirely different now. It was hairless, elongated and ghoulishly thin, like an Old City feral magnified. Strange white skin, like the gazelle's down below, was stretched taut over a naked body that was little more than bone.

  It turned toward him, the eyes gray — no, they were silver, he realized with a start, shining metallic under pallid lids splashed with red. An empty gaze, as flat and cold as polished glass. Mechanical. The thing took a step forward and hefted the gory axe in its hand.

  Walken tracked the pale terror with the C-J and thumbed the tactical spot, flooding the thing's face with the harsh light of the blinder lamp. It didn't so much as flinch.

  Walken squeezed the trigger.

  The ghoul staggered back as a hole opened up in its chest, but it did not fall. Walken saw the wound, bloodless and dry; his brain tried to make sense of this as it swayed on the spot, tried to stifle the instinct to run as it recovered. And then his shock gave way to grim resolution and Walken lifted the C-J again to shoot it straight in its head. Half its skull exploded as if blasted apart by the roar of the pistol alone, blowing a fountain of white gore across the fallen trooper's armor. It collapsed to the ground in a senseless tangle.

  "Fucking hell," muttered Walken, stepping back and into an adjoining room. He pressed himself against the wall, closing his eyes, catching his breath. New horror here. The buzz of animal terror erupted in his ears, lizard brain screaming again for him to run, to hide, to flee. With difficulty he closed his eyes, forced the fear down his throat. Instead he focused on the growling desire for revenge and the familiar burn of rage and tension began to take over again.

  Walken stared at the gun, amazed at its limitation. No wonder the ST cops were having so much trouble. He pulled the Sony out of his pocket. "Bobbi?"

  Her face was back to its original pallid anxiety. "You all right?"

  "That's... an interesting question." He giggled; his mind raced as it tried to force the mystery that was the dead thing into some frame of reference, a shrill species of madness only barely kept in check by the wall of vengefulness his mind had built. "I think I just shot a walking corpse."

  "What?" She squinted at him from the display.

  "It just..." He shut his eyes again, saw the flat silver eyes staring at him, laid over the image of the lattices of lymphatic ductwork, the brains milked for their juices in their vats, the vivisected forgotten. Somewhere in the hospital the soft pops of automatic rang out again. "...maybe it was a some kind of robot."

  "Robots? Corpses?" She screwed up her face. "You're not making any sense, baby. Why don't you-"

  "I'm all right," he cut across, forcing himself into sense. He let animal alertness take over, forced the questions into some back corner of his brain. "I need to get out of here, Bobbi. There's shit down here that should never have happened and can't be allowed to go on. I have to take this place out."

  "Take this place out?" She stared up at him from the monitor, obviously spooked. "Jesus, baby, what have you been seeing down there?"

  "Babylon," he said and the word came to him oddly. "Like Lionel said. Terrible shit, terrible like you wouldn't believe. It all needs to burn." Yes, something said in the back of his mind, a very different voice than what spoke up lately — it was the old voice, the crusader. Himself. The world began to snap back into focus; whatever horrors lie ahead of him, he couldn't let them crush him. He had time to go crazy afterward. "Yeah," he heard himself say. "It all needs to burn. Right to the ground."

  "Tom." Bobbi's voice was hard, stern.

  He blinked down at her. "What?"

  "You're talking to yourself." She sounded nervous in a completely different way now.

  "I'm all right," he said with a toss of his head. "What about the troopers? Won't they think I'm one of the hostiles?"

  "They won't see you at all," she said.

  "Why the hell not?" he asked, peering around the corner of the hall to see if things remained as they were. Both figures still lay dead in the hallway.

  "This hospital has a powerful transmitter up top," she said, "Dunno why, but it's there. It's strong enough for me to piggyback CivPro's local comms. I'm running a ghost process now that's hiding you from their sensors — like, the analysts will pick you up on review of the footage, but that's then. Right now nobody in gray plates gonna bother you."

  Thank you, false reality, he thought. "But they can still shoot me," he said, "Right?"

  "Bullets won't bend around you, no," she said, "But at least you'll only have to peg players on only one team heading out, right?"

  Walken let out a breath, looking impressed. Things certainly seemed to be looking up. "All right," he said, as a certain degree of bravado began to bloom inside him once more. "All right. Fucking fantastic job. I'm gonna try and make it out of here."

  "Keep me in your hand," she said without humor. "I'll point you in the right direction. Just keep away from the lobby, all right? It's like a fucking war zone in there."

  "Lobby," he murmured to himself. "Right."

  There was something in his voice that scared her further; she stared at him, the green eyes wide. "Tom," she said, "Maybe you should wait until it's over. Maybe you should..."

  "Bobbi." Again she fell silent as he invoked her name. "You said there were incinerators here?"

  Her brows furrowed. "Yeah," she said. "Old Russian superpyrolitics. Real unsafe at this age; must've gotten them cheap. They're on standby but I could start them pretty quickly. Why?"

  "You said they'd go up?" Walken leaned out again, checked the dead in the hallway again. Nothing moved. "Would it take out the hospital?"

  "....yeah? I gotta get them to spin up, but they're not at all complex — they should redline pretty quickly once I turn them on full blast." Bobbi's eyes narrowed a little bit. "Why are you asking me this?"

  "Overload those incinerators," he rumbled. There was no room for argument in his voice and she offered none in reply. "Do it now, girl. I got things to do in the meantime. And Bobbi?"

  "Yeah?"

  He gave her a smile, suddenly warm and soft in contrast to the warrior certainty that filled him. "I stopped caring about going back to the Bureau a long time ago. You remember that."

  She looked up at him through the monitor, shocked into silence. A hint of tears rimmed her eyes. "All right, baby." Her voice wavered like smoke. "Just come back to me."

  "One way or another, honey. Bye for now." Walken killed the comms window, turned the Sony off and stepped out into the hall. There was no more room for self-preservation, just the instinctual pulse that pointed him down the hall. He had to get to the lobby, had to find that white devil taking dow
n the police troops. The voice in his head commanded it now and, for the first time, he found himself being moved despite the battery of survival urges that stood up and screamed for him to do otherwise.

  Filled with a strange, fearless certainly Walken moved down the hall, past the corpses of the ST trooper and the ghoul. He stared at the thing as he passed; he had not hallucinated the bloodlessness of the wound in its chest. It looked strangely shrunken, withered, almost as if it had been dead for a while. Walken's eyes narrowed as he tried to think of how that could even be possible, then forced himself back to the task at hand. He was going to have a look at the lobby, he was going to take that bitch down and he was going to take as many as he could with him on the way out.

  Walken had two magazines of uranium slugs and a single cassette of comet rounds. More than enough, it seemed to him, for the purpose at hand.

  Down the weathered corridors he went, homing in on the lobby as if by instinct, past two more pale, shriveled bodies shot literally into pieces. Lying by them was their ST killer, whose head was turned the wrong way around. Fresh blood stood lurid and red on fading walls pocked with bullet holes. He passed dead cops, dead ghouls, all different ages and sexes. He saw a little girl, no more then seven, lying in an examination room with the top of her head blown away. She clutched two severed fingers, torn from an officer's armored gauntlet, in her little white hand. He thought of the Doll and shivered. He never seemed to stop shivering now.

  What was going on in this place? He strode down the corridors as if he walked through hell, ever closer to the lobby and the growing volume of gunfire. With every turn, Walken witnessed some new scene of abomination. From what he saw, the ST heat hadn't done the job they'd thought; the closer he got to the lobby, the number of dead cops increased. It was war here, all-out and savage, only the natives weren't afraid of the white man's guns and could pull off his goddamned arms before he could fire a shot.

  Walken made it to the hospital's front and saw hard foam barricades sprayed up around windows. Through the translucent yellow resin, the flashing lights of the CivPro cordon outside could be seen, a constant glow of denial. He knew from their procedures that the foam barricades would extend up at least a few floors; jumping from any higher wasn't exactly a possibility if he wanted to get away alive. Maybe, though, he could find a service exit...

  At the end of the next hall, a push-door led to the lobby. He closed his eyes, extracted the magazine from the C-J's grip and replaced it with another. He saw the chain of orange-banded comet penetrators in his mind's eye as they slid home and, as they did, his inner voice commanded him to center. He felt like an ant being driven by a parasite, urged on to certain doom — but he had no time for questions. Walken strode down the hall and pushed through, ready for the worst.

  What met him on the other side of the lobby door, however, was at once both similar to — and worse than — what he had expected. It was, in a word, an abattoir. The lobby had once been a wide expanse of ancient blue and white checkered tile, lined in places with carpet runners upon which sofas and chairs had been arranged and with a round central kiosk for information. At one point, the lobby — like the rest of Orleans Hospital — had been a place of sanity, of welcome, but now it stood inch-deep in blood.

  This had been the staging place for the major clash between the Special Tactics forces and whatever the Genefex crew had thrown at them. Gray-plated bodies lay in bloody heaps all across the floor, their life pooled red and livid against the white and blue. They had been killed not with bullets but with their own weapons, chairs, whatever was in reach of their bloodless attackers. One poor bastard had been literally shoved into a chair and pulled apart, his guts a cordon leading to nowhere. Another lay slumped over the lip of the counter with a steel ruler driven through the back of her helmet.

  The strength of the shrunken white killers shocked him, but so did their precision; like the Koreans before them, the gargoyles were killed with the same clinical grace. Like plucking the wings from flies, he thought to himself; it struck him that they hadn't been killed so much as they'd been put down.

  Not that the ST had gone out without a fight. There were many ghouls here as well, fragmented by bullets and even what appeared to have been a stray grenade. There was no blood, however, save for the pallid mess that leaked out of the open braincases of a few of the horrid things.

  Beyond the corpses of the combatants, however, there was nothing else. He had no targets and, worse yet, the shattered doors of the hospital lobby had been sealed by the opaque yellow barrier of hardened foam. Walken found himself a bit sapped by the lack of action. He had psyched himself up, poured out what little bit of adrenaline still remained only to find that he was too late for the battle that he had sought. He would have a few minutes to rest.

  Walken sagged a bit and sat on the edge of an upturned sofa, alone in the sea of gore, the gun in his lap. What could he do now? If Bobbi had any sense and trusted that he'd be able to escape, she'd already be overrunning the furnaces down in the hospital's core and nothing he had in his possession would allow him to escape the barricades sprayed up the sides of the hospital. After surviving what he had, was it his fate now to simply burn away with this place, to vanish with the evidence?

  Within himself, the voice gnashed its teeth in frustration. He had to find a solution, something he could do, before Bobbi's dickering with the furnaces sent him straight to Hell. He had no desire to simply kick over.

  "This is not something you'll be able to feel your way out of, my friend."

  The voice that came from behind him was Exley's, the same strange monotone in his voice as before. It crawled under his skin, worked its way up his spine, seeding horror where it went.

  Walken stiffened but managed not to show his surprise. "It was worth a try," he said instead. "We're all gonna die in a few minutes anyway."

  "It always amuses me when they think we do not know," said another voice — it was the other gazelle's, rife with a savage amusement.

  Walken turned to look at them. Exley was dressed as Walken remembered him in brighter days, a flat gray suit cladding his mountainous form and carbon-black tie dangling from a precise knot under the collar of his white shirt. A brimmed, flat-topped hat was pulled down over his eyes. One hand was stuffed in the pocket of his slacks and in the other was the familiar black shape of a Nambu. Walken was surprised to see that its magazine indicator glowed green. "They always do," he said and then he used a word to address the gazelle that Walken did not recognize. It sounded like a name. Emitra.

  She shrugged. "It is as Mother tells us." Emitra was a direct copy of the one he killed in the morgue, though she wore a different voice; the same pale hair and eyes, the features exactly copied, the same pale mouth twisted in a cruel smile. Her eyes were unnatural Genefex silver, too and Walken now began to wonder if everyone with those implants was a tool of the company.

  Walken stared at her, confusion welling in his head. "You look like she does," he said, blinking at her like an owl in a spotlight. "But your eyes..." His own eyes narrowed. "Who the fuck are you people? What are you?"

  "All questions to be answered in time," stated Exley. "But first, we leave here. Thanks to your woman..."

  "Whom I am going to kill," said the gazelle, her own monotone spiking into cheer around the edges. Walken's hand slid to rest on his pistol, hidden largely by his back, as something like laughter issued from her hateful mouth.

  "...all evidence of this location is about to be wiped out." Beneath the brim of his hat, Exley glared at Emitra before turning his eyes back to Walken. "We did not expect her actions, but it means nothing. Mother still wants you. So we go."

  With the gazelle's words, a familiar moire of rage had begun to slide over his eyes. He looked to the bodies sprawled around them, the red humanity spread across the floor. The pools of pink where the shattered skulls of dead ghouls had spilled their white contents. Life and anti-life, mingling.

  Walken's eyes lifted to Emitra the
n, her designer clothes splashed with blood that was not her own, her bare hands still dripping with the remnants of the murdered. She wore it like water, unconcerned and his stomach tightened into a burning knot to see it. "Why?"

  "You don't get to ask that," said the gazelle. "Well, not yet." Her lips were spread into a vicious smile; her teeth, small and white, gleamed perfectly in pale gums. "Mother will explain everything."

  His hand tightened on the grip of his weapon. "So you're saying," he said, his voice now perfectly calm, "That you have to take me? That your 'Mother' has demanded it? Whatever happens?"

  "He has a strange way of talking," the gazelle said to Exley, smirking. "Do you think he's damaged?"

  Exley ignored her. "That's the case," he said, though he now looked at Walken with dull curiosity.

  "Good," Walken said and sprang up.

  Emitra almost made it when he pulled the C-J up and fired. So fast was she — far faster than anything he'd ever seen before — that Emitra actually managed to dodge two of the flaring lances of the comet rounds before the third drilled her squarely in the face. She barely had the time to scream before she went down, spinning in mid-dodge, pinwheeling to the blood-slick floor. White steam plumed from her ruined head and the smell of cooked meat and plastics stung his nostrils.

  Walken had none of the same reflexes, of course. When Exley squeezed the trigger on his Nambu there was no dodging, no whirling out of the way. His chest sprouted lime-colored flowers and his fingers turned to lead and, before he could blink, the poison in the darts was already easing him down toward the floor. At least, he thought as his vision dimmed and he fell to his knees before the blank-faced mountain that was Exley, it won't be like last time.

  Sleep came dark and heavy, a peaceful fog that filled him through and through.

  Walken had never experienced the sensation of the Bureau's chosen neurotoxin, but he knew that its effects were instantaneous — instantaneous and powerful, it appeared, for he did not stir once before finally waking. His eyes opened to the blurry black gloss of a vaulted ceiling tiled with marble, pools of dim gold thrown across it by unseen fixtures. Cool, smooth material brushed against the back of his neck, the back of his palms. He shuddered, turned his head — and saw the vast ribbon of glass that was a window, high up, the glittering towers of the New City dwarfed below. He must be in one of the mutant towers, he thought, those bizarre giants that glowered down over the city landscape. He was lying on a couch.