Zombie Galaxy- the Outbreak on Caldor

by Scott Reeves

  Anyway, this was a planet-wide emergency. Why should they haggle over money at such a time? But more than likely, the man was holed up in his apartment, ready to defend his riches against looters, and would probably view Harlan as such.

  They would have to be careful.

  “Why bother stopping, Harlan, sir?” engineer Beckor asked. “Let’s just plow on in, full steam ahead.”

  “Because,” Harlan replied, “pretending this is a democracy and I need to explain my decisions, we need to know the lay of the land. We still don’t know what’s happening out there. All we know is there’s some sort of plague. We need information, to calculate the chances that our families are even still alive. It takes money to run the mining equipment, you know.”

  Still concerned about money!

  “We’re going in, one way or another,” Jacy said with sudden truculence. “Even if my kid isn’t alive, I want to take his body back to space with us.”

  Harlan bristled slightly at the mutinous comment, but he let it pass. They’d been friends and crew for too long to let such rancorous words break them apart. Plus, he couldn’t afford to alienate his only pilot at this point.

  “You will, Jacy. We all will,” he said, looking around at each of his crew as he made that promise. “We’ll at least have their bodies. But we still need to gather information about the plague for the infirmary, if there’s a chance we’re going to be bringing it on board. Right now’s as good a time as any to do it.”

  Jacy nodded. “All right,” he conceded. “Sorry, sir.”

  Harlan stood and called off a few officers. “Smirl,” the communications officer, “Polk,” the mining technician, “and Tam,” an actual miner, “you come with me. Jacy and Beckor and you others, stay here and be ready to go when I’m back.”

  Or be ready to come in and rescue us, he wanted to add, but didn’t.

  He and the members of his little landing party went midship to the airlock. They each grabbed an old-fashioned, bullets-and-gunpowder rifle —none of those high-tech guns for his ship— and cycled through the lock.

  Harlan was the first to set foot onto the landing pad. He cleared from the short ladder, making room for the other three to disembark.

  Wind rushed past them, strong enough to sweep them from their feet if they weren’t careful. And cold enough to chill them to the bone and shrivel their nutsacks if they didn’t get back inside quickly.

  “Let’s go,” Harlan commanded, and they warily crossed the short expanse of the pad between the ship and the building. The wall was a long segment of reinforced steel glass, currently frosted over to a dark red wine color, so that they couldn’t see into the apartment.

  Couldn’t see who might be watching them from within.

  All they could see was a reflection of themselves approaching, their hair and clothing whipped into a frenzy by the intense wind.

  They reached the door, visible only as a rectangular hairline in the darkness of the glass wall.

  Harlan and his men stopped in front of it, huddling around the door.

  “You hear that?” Smirl asked.

  Smirl had really good hearing. Harlan supposed you had to, if your job involved communications.

  Harlan listened, and he too heard it.

  Extremely faint above the roar of the wind, he could hear a violent pounding on the glass of the door. Coming from within the apartment. It repeated rhythmically. The glass shook with each impact.

  “What do you think it is?” Harlan asked.

  “Someone knows we’re out here,” Smirl said.

  “Throwing themselves against the glass to get at us,” Tam said.

  “Or at least throwing something against the glass,” Harlan said.

  “Think it will hold?” Polk asked.

  “Wait a minute,” Tam said. “Might some precious soul in there be shooting at the wall, to shatter it? In which case we better duck for cover?”

  Smirl shook his head. “I don’t hear any shots. We would hear a report even from a pulse rifle. All I hear are impacts.”

  Harlan looked around the edges of the door. “There’s no opening mechanism on this side. It’s probably keyed to an RFD implant.”

  “What do you think, Captain?” Polk asked. “Blast our way in?”

  “Whoever’s alive in there might not like that,” Smirl said.

  The issue was decided for them when the door abruptly slid aside and a slavering fat man came rushing and growling out through the door.

  The heavy beast of a man collided with Harlan, tackling him to the ground. Harlan screamed and raised his arms, grinding his forearms against the man’s throat in a desperate attempt to keep the man’s snapping teeth from closing on his nose, lips, eyes, or whatever else the enraged man tried to sink his teeth into each time his head lashed forward.

  “Fuck!” Harlan screamed. “Get this fat bastard off me! I can’t hold out!”

  The other three clutched at the man, trying to pull him off Harlan. But the man was just too heavy, his attack too fierce, and so they merely grappled futilely, unable to get a grip that held, and when they did, unable to shift the weight of the man.

  Finally, Smirl gave up and put a bullet through the fat man’s head.

  His weight instantly collapsed atop Harlan, who began attempting to wiggle his way out from under.

  The other three, fearful that the sudden cessation of motion on the man’s part might be a ruse, began tugging and shoving at his bulk. Harlan assisted from beneath, and soon they had the fat man’s possibly dormant body rolling across the landing pad toward the ledge.

  When they reached it, they kept on rolling him, until he went over the edge and plummeted downward, swiftly disappearing into the misty depths of the steel canyon between the buildings.

  Harlan was still flat on his back, breathing heavily. The blood of the fat man smeared his body, and a trail of it marked the path they had followed in dragging him across the landing pad.

  “Who the fuck was that?” Tam burst out into the sudden relative calm. “What the fuck was that?”

  “That,” said Harlan, “was Babbit. That fat son-of-a-bitch was one of the wealthiest men on this level of the building.” Harlan had met the rich man a few times, so he recognized him. “I guess we won’t need to pay a berthing fee. That’s a plus.”

  He climbed to his feet.

  “Did you see his eyes?” Polk said. “It didn’t look like anyone was in there.”

  Harlan nodded. He recalled his last conversation with his wife, when she had said that it was their daughter, but it wasn’t their daughter. Now he knew from first-hand experience exactly what she had meant.

  Polk continued: “How was something that brain dead able to figure out how to open the door?”

  No one answered, because it was obvious: in his repeated impacts against the door, Babbit must have randomly slammed against the opening control.

  Polk made a discrete motion at Harlan’s face, and Harlan wiped a smear of blood off his face with the back of his sleeve. He considered going back into the ship for a few moments to change clothes and wash off the blood, but decided against it. Time was wasting, and if Babbit’s blood was infectious, they were fucked already.

  So Harlan motioned at the open apartment door. “Let’s go.” And he stepped forward.

  The apartment —Hell, Harlan thought to himself, this is no apartment; it’s a mansion— was sumptuous. It was so far beyond the cramped quarters they were used to, both on the ship and here at home in their own apartments deep within the heart of the Murray Building, that they spent precious long minutes wandering through the place, goggling at the artifacts of wealth beyond imagining.

  They passed through room after room —small rooms, cavernous rooms, mid-sized rooms— rooms devoted to every imaginable function of life: bedrooms; kitchens; bathrooms; atriums; a pool room (both a swimming pool room and a room with a pool table); media rooms for the display of all sorts of entertainment such as holovision and even old-fashi
oned 2D-projected “movies,” as they had used to call them. All of them filled to bursting with the trappings of wealth: marble floors; artwork; gold inlays and filigree; enormous shag rugs made from the pelts of rare animals from a dozen different worlds; refrigerators filled with caviar and other exotic foods so expensive and exclusive to the world of the rich that none of the miners even had any idea what they were; beds literally built for kings, preserved from Earth’s pre-Galactic era...

  There was even an orgy room. Or perhaps it was a harem room. Whichever, it was a bedroom with an enormous bed. The bodies of naked women, and half-dressed women, were scattered all throughout the room. Literally scattered. A torso here, an arm there, a leg here, a head there. There were a few intact women, but the flesh of those were riddled with gashes, claw marks, and ragged wounds that looked as if something had been chewing on them. Or not something, but someone.

  Babbit, perhaps? Might he be the only survivor of the massacre that had taken place in this room, the only victor in an orgy of violence rather than of sex?

  The room smelled as bad as it looked, and the four of them only managed to glance inside briefly before reeling away in disgust. Polk and Tam actually underwent several minutes of explosive vomiting in which they plastered the expensively papered walls of the hallway with the chunky remnants of their most recent meals mixed with a thick green fluid of bile and other gastric juices.

  The incident shook them from their envious exploration of the rich man’s apartment. Their families were waiting, families that, they worried, might be in the same state as the women in that room, with perhaps one of their kin playing the part of Babbit.

  Thus, with a renewed sense of the urgency of their mission, they trooped back through the apartment to the front door.

  “No transmat pad for the likes of this Babbit,” remarked Harlan, noting the conspicuous absence of any such pads. “Who wants to risk being trapped inside here in the face of a technological disaster? An actual door, no dependence on a transmat entry point: that’s the sign of true wealth.”

  “Are you kidding?” Smirl said. “Who wouldn’t want to be trapped in a place like this? Imagine those women back there when they were whole! And anyway, an actual door is a security risk for a treasure trove like this. This guy was probably the target of every two-bit criminal in this scraper, and all the surrounding scrapers, too. Give me transmat-only access to a place like this any day.”

  “I agree with Smirl,” said Polk. “Doors are for the poor, not the rich.”

  “Then why do all our apartments have transmat pads for doors, and his doesn’t?” asked Tam.

  “Good point,” said Polk.

  “It’s a conundrum for sure,” Harlan acknowledged.

  They arrived at the main door of the apartment.

  “Ready your rifles, boys,” Harlan ordered as he reached a hand toward the door control. “We don’t know what’s out there.”

  “I think we’ve got a pretty good idea after Babbit,” said Tam.

  Harlan pressed a button, unlocking the door. Then he pressed a lower button, and the door slid open.

  Cradling their rifles in anxious arms, they all four peered cautiously outward.

  The hallway beyond was utter pandemonium.

  People drenched in blood raced past the door, screaming gibberish and bellowing ragefully. On many, their flesh was shredded, limbs still attached only by tiny threads of skin.

  Other people staggered slowly past, their movements sluggish and jerky. But their bodies were equally as damaged, if not more, than their faster moving counterparts.

  “What the hell happened here?” Polk said in a trembling voice. “What kind of a plague is this?”

  Some of the wild people began to notice the quartet of miners in the doorway. The slower ones paused, as if their minds —or whatever passed for minds in these human beasts, Harlan thought to himself— were taking long moments to reorient their actions. Then they began moving toward the open doorway.

  Meanwhile, the faster-moving ones would have likewise headed for the door, but the slower-moving ones, which suddenly began stopping and reorienting themselves, distracted them, and the faster-moving ones leapt upon them, teeth gnashing and hands ripping at flesh.

  And then the chaotic mass seemed almost to part, forming a narrow aisle of cleared floor leading across the hallway. And there stood revealed one of the animal men, buck naked and holding a humongous barrel gun at his waist. It was a heavy-duty crowd suppression machine gun with a drum of ammo dangling beneath it like a huge sac of testicles, and a second barrel that could lob grenades. Hard to believe the man could actually wield it. The weapon must have been torn off a robocop.

  And it was leveled straight at the quartet in the doorway.

  Almost before they could react to the man’s abrupt appearance, the gun spun up from a low rumble to a high-pitched whine, and began spitting bullets their way.

  Harlan reeled away from the door shouting, “Oh, shit!” even as Tam’s head exploded in a spray of blood and tissue.

  The remaining two men needed no orders from their captain to prompt them into action. Even as Tam’s body was toppling toward the floor, blood spraying from the mangled neck, they whirled from the door and raced back through the apartment toward the landing pad.

  Harlan paused only for a scant second to slap at the door control. The door slid shut, and then he was hard on the heels of his fleeing crewmen, sparing not even the slightest thought for Tam’s body.

  Behind him, he could hear the wall vibrating as the wild man battered it from the other side with bombs and bullets.

  How had one of those bestial men gotten a gun, let alone figured out how to use it? How could they figure out anything, for fuck’s sake?

  Or had it been one of the infected? Harlan hadn’t gotten all that good of a look. He supposed it might have been a survivor, who had been staking out Babbit’s apartment in case the rich man showed himself.

  A looter, then. Not a plague victim.

  They had gotten the lay of the land, Harlan thought to himself as he ran through the apartment. Oh, shit, had they ever gotten the lay of the land!

  He could only hope his old mining ship could bore its way through the reinforced walls of a rich man’s apartment, and past the firepower of who-knew how many heavily-armed survivors standing between him and the apartments of his and his crews’ families.

  But the ship had bored through some pretty hard mineral deposits in her time, and she was built to withstand the rigors of deep space, including collisions with space debris.

  Gina’s Starry Eyes, his old girl, was up to the challenge.

  When they returned to the landing pad and the ship, Harlan gestured at the protuberances bristling on the forward breast of the aging old gal. “While we’re out here,” he told Polk, “you might as well check the cutting lasers and the pulverizing screws.”

  Polk glanced at the four laser turrets, two high on the curving breast and two below. Then he glanced at the six immense screws that hung three to a side of the ship, two on each side facing forward and extending far past the bow of the ship, and one on each side facing outward, almost perpendicularly to the line of the keel.

  Those four lasers and six screws had chewed their way into many a metal-rich asteroid over the past few decades. An immense megascraper was no match for them. They would methodically chew their way inside like a maggot burrowing into a slice of rotten meat.

  After his cursory glance, Polk nodded, satisfied. “They look fine to me.”

  “That didn’t take long,” Harlan muttered. “Jesus Christ, what the hell am I paying you for? I suppose you normally credit yourself two hours for that piss-poor half a minute of work?”

  Polk frowned. “No, sir. I’m just skilled at my trade. So skilled that I can do in an hour what it would take a novice an entire work day to do.”

  “So I should be glad your expertise is saving me money, eh?”

  “That’s right, sir,” Polk said.
/>
  Harlan grumbled, but smiled inwardly. “All right, people, let’s get back on board and go find our families!”

  He, Smirl and Polk boarded the ship, powered her up into mining mode, and started forward.

  Toward their homes.

  Andy Watson

  The platform was approaching the level on which Samala’s apartment lay.

  It had been a relatively long journey. Not as long as an elevator ride would have been, or a trip down the stairs. But it was long and boring, and the cold wind rushing through the narrow canyons between megascrapers buffeted them relentlessly.

  At first, Mal had tried to alleviate the boredom by singing the glories of Samala’s snatch. It was a divine snatch, he claimed, a snatch alongside which all other snatches paled in comparison, a snatch unto itself. If Andy really wanted to experience God, Mal proclaimed, then he should stick his dick into Samala’s snatch, which Mal assured he would allow, just once.

  But such talk had quickly died out, due to Andy’s discomfort with the subject. Talk had then naturally turned to the related subject of Samala’s apartment. Mal had gone into great detail about a few trips he had once taken through the ventilation ducts to map a way to her apartment, so that he might sneak into her bedroom some night and enjoy her snatch while her father slumbered in the next room in blissful ignorance. It seemed to Andy that Mal was proud of his exploits with Samala and her snatch, and enjoyed talking about them. He also mentioned the ducts because that was how the youth planned to get back to her apartment, bypassing the transmats.

  Andy had wondered why her apartment, and a great many others, were only accessible by transmat.

  “Because normal entrances require hallways,” Mal explained. “And hallways require space. Space is valuable, and we decided that it’s better used for living quarters or businesses, rather than hallways, which are made obsolete by transmat technology.”

  Andy had shaken his head, thinking of the wide open spaces of his homeworld, of the Great Outdoors which were absent from Caldor. Caldor was like a hive of termites in comparison.