“Hello?” he said. “Who is this?”
At first, there was nothing and Clark began to wonder if he was dreaming. The whole day had been crazy. No less crazy than any other invasion he had conducted, but between the Jackson woman’s attempt on his life on television and now one of his soldiers trying to convince him that his son had somehow keyed into the comms system, everything that was happening could just as easily have been a dream.
Then he spoke.
“Dad?” His voice was weird. Calm but with an underlying note of tension he had never heard before. “Are you listening?”
“Lucas? What’s going on? How did you get on this channel?” And even as he said it, he felt a small thrill of success. The Light Wire. The Light Wire was up and running.
“Dad, I’ve—I have something for you. For everyone.”
“What?” Clark was confused. “Look, you have to get off of this line right now, I-”
“Just listen,” his son interrupted. “Just—listen to what I have to say. You know I’ve never been good at talking or articulating out loud but I’m going to try.” He took a breath on the other end and Clark could feel the tension. “I had a whole thing written out. A manifesto. I sent it to all of the news stations but I had also planned on reading it right here and now. I’m not going to do that.”
“What are you saying?” Clark asked. He had no idea what this was about but he could feel a cold pit forming in his stomach. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to like it.
“All I want to say is—I love you. You haven’t exactly been there for us—for mom and me or my brothers—but you tried, and I appreciate it. That’s just it though: you actually tried. One of the most powerful men in the universe and you tried and still—it’s just not enough. None of it’s enough. There’s still pain and anguish and hatred and it’s become incredibly clear over the last few years that none of that can be defeated. None of it can be destroyed. At best, we can hold it at bay but it always wins in the end. Any seed of happiness is always smothered out by darkness. No matter what happens, we still die. Every sun still burns out. This whole thing is just one big doomed mistake heading towards an inevitable death, so I’m here to get it over with.”
“Get what over with?” Clark asked. He could already see the men around the room begin to tense. Everyone in here had been trained in both diplomacy and hostage negotiation as a part of their occupancy training, and they knew what textbook desperation sounded like. None of them knew what to do, but Clark watched one of his commanders give him a hard and questioning look.
“Trace it,” Clark mouthed and the man hurried quickly out of the room.
And then, as if reading his father’s mind, Lucas said, “I know what I sound like, Dad. I know that you’re probably trying to trace the signal but there’s no need. Right now, I’m hooked into the manual override port on the Light Wire on Lydia. I’ve got my comm device hooked up to my long-wave receiver and—and it’s already too late.”
“Look Lucas, whatever you are about to do, you don’t have to do it. We’ve got everything in hand here right now and I can come home and you and your mom and I can talk about this. Just-”
“No,” Lucas snapped, a thread of steel in his voice. “It’s over. Humanity’s cancerous actions are over. We are obviously some mistake of nature—some disease or mutation—because we don’t act in accordance with it at all. Maybe the world is doomed and maybe everything is born to burn and die, but we’re the only ones who make it worse. We’re the only species that makes others suffer. And the only one that suffers itself. As far as I can tell, mother nature tried to wipe us off the face of existence once with the Dislocation and failed. Now we’re worse than ever so we need something more. A plague. An extinction. We need to do to ourselves what she could not.”
“Lucas, I don’t—”
“Goodbye, dad. I hope you go quick.” Then, his voice flattening, “You will all bow one way or the other to the Crimson Coronach. And sooner or later, everyone will become a member of the Inflamed.”
And with that, there was an audible click from the other end. At first, Clark thought that his son had turned whatever communication device he was using off. Then, as sound began to filter through the speakers, it became clear that he had switched to his manual input channel.
It was like nothing Clark had ever heard before. Still overcome by the emotion in his son’s voice, the song that was coming together in his earpiece almost sounded like an extension of himself. The music wasn’t exactly music as he understood it, but there was no other way to describe it. It was mournful and at the same time, guttural and organic, as if it was being pumped through some secret throat that mankind had never seen before or had the capacity to fathom. It was a gulping and grinding sound with an achingly slow melody being scraped over the top of it.
Before he knew what was happening, Clark felt the sting of hot tears in his eyes. He almost couldn’t bear to listen anymore. The sound was verging on the point of pain and he suddenly yanked out his earpiece along with everyone else, and that’s when he realized the problem.
The sound wasn’t coming through the earpiece.
It had been so hard to tell at first because the song sounded like it was coming from the inside of his own head like some vivid hallucination, but now that there was no other explanation he knew the truth: the sound was coming through the Light Wire. Had to be.
The golden veins of light that ran up and down the wire were now a throbbing ultraviolet. The mechanism almost seemed to strain with it and with each throb, the color grew more intense.
“Turn it off!” Clark yelled, turning toward the counsel where Nathan, the man who had engaged the Light Wire, was hurriedly typing away.
“I’m trying,” the man stammered. “I keep trying to shut it down but the source has been hijacked.”
“From where?”
Nathan punched the keyboard a couple of times, then: “Unknown. The signal source is unknown.”
“Unknown?” Clark said. “What the fuck does that mean? No where is unknown. Every Light Wire in the universe is known. That’s the goddam point.” But Nathan just shrugged, panic plain on his face.
Suddenly, the music seemed to crescendo, and as it did, the veins of color on the spire pulsed brilliantly, sending out a pulse wave of sound and color. Clark felt it rip through him, like a burst of electricity. It damn near knocked him to the ground, but at the last minute, he planted his feet and righted himself.
“What the fuck was that?” he bellowed. Some of his soldiers had fallen to the floor and were staggering back to their feet. The music had ceased but there was something in the air. Some feeling of anticipation.
It was a few seconds before they heard the sound, and for a few seconds after that, they couldn’t identify it. All Clark knew was that somewhere deep down inside of him there were alarm bells going off.
Then he reached hesitantly down and picked up his earpiece. Afraid to put it in, he glanced around the room and saw fear and apprehension on the faces of all of his soldiers. He didn’t want to, but he knew he had to do it—knew that his place as a leader was to do the thing that everyone else was afraid to. So he did.
With a quick and practiced motion, Minister of Defense Seamus Clark popped his earpiece into his ear and listened to the rest of his forces all trying to chime in at once.
They were screaming.
10
The Inflamed
Every nerve in Raquel’s body crackled as the song played and the pulse wave hit. It was agonizing, and the moment Raquel heard it, she knew something bad was on its way. It had sounded like the Infinite Communion she had heard back aboard the Leopold when 49 had hacked their comms and pumped it over their speakers. It was like a song but not, its tempo and pacing sounding grossly inhuman. It sounded like death itself—like an invitation.
The Infinite Communion had also had the power to bend the hearts of the hopeless toward its abhorrent design. When one submitted to it, the unknowable fli
cker of the human soul was suddenly snubbed out and replaced with something else. The flesh and bones were suddenly recoded into something horrid, picking and choosing which flesh was worthy and which wasn’t.
49 had later explained that he had experimented with death and necromancy, trying to find the perfect form. He had killed and rewrote the code of genes and biology, shaping copy after copy of his horrible creations, and once he finally landed on a few consistent forms, he had been surprised that the ones that resonated with him weren’t necessarily designed for fitness but were some sort of dark and twisted joke.
The monsters the crew of the Leopold had fought were lumbering wretched things with half of their parts removed and rearranged. Humanoids with eyestalks and pelvises for heads. Crawling spiders with ribs and finger bones for legs. They were less like animals and more like pieces of crude and satirical art. Raquel didn’t know much about art, but it had felt like the rough and on-the-nose drawings of a misanthropic child who hated their parents. The sort of thing designed only to degrade and destroy.
That was almost what this new song sounded like, but there was something different about it. It was still blunt and brutal but with an underlying depth. It moved the listener in ways they couldn’t explain, however sick it made them feel. Raquel almost wanted to stop to try to pick apart exactly what it was about the song that touched her and moved her—what buried ghost of a memory it stirred deep down inside of her.
But there was no time for that now. Now there was only time for one thing. Survival.
When the song reached its climax, there seemed to be a sort of pulse that shot out over the ground. Raquel felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck tingle as she rocked with the wave, and some people felt more than that as they were knocked sideways into the live wire fence. The crowds in all of the cages were rocking and yelping with the shocks, which is why it took them a moment to realize what was happening.
The reason Raquel noticed was that she felt the blood and brains sliding off of her face. At first, it was a relief—the stain of the woman’s accidental death being washed away by some unknown force—but then she saw the body.
The lifeless corpse of both the woman and her son rose into the air in unison, their flesh rippling as if there was something moving beneath the skin. Raquel looked down and saw King staring up in amazement, his eyes wide with incomprehension, and then she turned to see the same expression on Byzzie’s face.
The whole crowd watched as the dead were raised, twitching and convulsing into the air. The woman’s husband even reached out to touch her but upon contact, his fingers sparked with electricity as if he had touched the fence.
What Raquel saw next would haunt her dreams until the day she died.
The bodies of the woman and her son suddenly sucked into themselves like a ball of dough being rolled between two hands. The balls hovered in the air—globules of rippling flesh—and as they did they slowly turned a deep red color. They almost looked like some sort of grotesque water balloons made out of flesh and filled with blood and churning body parts.
Raquel turned and focused on the ball nearest to her inside of the cage. Then it popped.
Six spear-tipped legs suddenly shot out of the center of the quivering mass and skewered multiple people. Raquel barely managed to dodge one of the legs as it sliced over her shoulder. She felt the wet splash of blood on the back of her neck as someone behind her died.
All things considered though, Raquel had gotten lucky. Byzzie on the other hand had a harder time of it.
Raquel watched in shock as Byzantine Jackson took one of the legs through the joint of her shoulder. The young woman cried out in pain as she reached up to grasp the alien appendage that had skewered her. Then she cried out in sorrow as she looked down and saw her brother Cory lying on the ground.
The young boy lay there in a pool of dark red, the top of his head sliced neatly off. The whole scene was simply too much for Raquel to take in—too much to deal with. She felt her mental grasp slipping, any semblance of hope draining away. People were throwing themselves against the fence in an attempt to escape, the acrid stench of burning flesh and hair scorching the air.
The multitude of serrated legs that had taken a handful of lives within seconds were all joined together in a single ball of writhing crimson flesh. Shiny black eyes peered out from multiple sockets, and a pair of wicked-looking mandibles clacked at the end of a long and pointed snout.
A foot suddenly knocked into the back of Raquel’s head as a body was lifted over her and brought to the creature’s mouth. Still holding its other victims, the monster greedily shredded the body, taking whole pieces of raw meat down in huge swallowing gulps. Before its meal was even finished, its body lurched and lengthened, a tail shooting out of its back and whipping through the air like a scythe. Its legs remained their original size, tall and narrow. But the head and body of the thing seemed to be having some sort of reaction to what it had just eaten.
The soft, fleshy parts of it had nearly doubled in size, the fresh skin stretching and breaking to reveal a hard maroon shell underneath. Bones snapped and locked into place as its insides rearranged itself at a frightening pace. Then, no more than a minute after the thing had first appeared, it stood towering over the crowd of people, its legs still pinning bodies to the ground, tail making a whistling sound as it cleaved the very air itself.
Then the real massacre began.
Blood and viscera flew as it began stabbing its fore-legs down. Raquel ducked and weaved around them, turning around to pull the still-shocked husband of the murdered woman away from the monster, but as she grasped his wrist she found that that was all she was holding. With a perplexed look on his face, the top half of his abdomen slid apart and fell to the ground. Raquel let go of the amputated hand and it dropped to the ground.
Blood and body parts flew as people were dismembered and cut down. The chaos of the crowd was so great that they wouldn’t have noticed an entire fleet of gunships flying overhead. Right now, they were stuck in a literal meat grinder.
It was then that Raquel noticed the monster was letting out a high-pitched feral shriek. So inhuman was the sound that Raquel attributed it to some sort of cry of bloodlust at first, but then, as her wits began to return to her, she recognized it for what it was. Pain.
Then she discerned another cry coming from her left, a cry of rage. No, cries of rage. A man and a woman. Raquel sprang into action.
For a brief moment, she caught a glimpse of Byzzie and King through the bloody melee. King had one of the creature’s legs stuck through the top of his thigh, blood running down onto the ground like a river. Despite his wound, he had pulled the creature within range of the electrified fence and was scorching it ceaselessly against a wall of blue sparks and white smoke.
While the monster was weakened, Byzzie was pulling for all she was worth on the monster’s tail, trying to mash its body into the fence as well.
In that brief glimpse she was afforded, Raquel knew that they had momentary control of the creature and that they were about to lose it. King was bleeding out onto the ground and visibly losing strength by the second, and with Byzzie’s injured shoulder, she wasn’t even pulling half of what she normally could.
Fighting against the swinging arms and legs of the crowd around her, Raquel burst towards her two crewmates. She tripped once, stumbling forward and then stumbling again, but was able to right herself each time and before she knew it, she was right next to Byzzie, her one good hand wrapped tightly around the monster’s tail.
She pulled at the same time Byzzie pulled but it wasn’t enough. The thing was too big. Too strong. In moments it would be able to shake them loose and then it would kill them. Out of options, Raquel reached up with her left hand and wound her forearm around the thick and fleshy tail as if it were a massive rope. Byzzie pulled and Raquel leaned back with her. They rocked together once, twice, three times, and then on the fourth, they felt the thing’s legs shift and stumble and suddenly its bo
dy was hissing and crackling against the fence.
Sparks and smoke filled the open area, almost making Raquel gag. Still, the three of them held fast, pressing the flailing creature against the electrified wires. If nothing else, maybe they could short out the circuits and make the whole fence grid go down. If that happened, then at least some of the prisoners might be able to escape up and over the tops of their cages while their captors were preoccupied.
And preoccupied they were; Raquel had no doubt about that. Even in the intense close-quarters struggle, she acknowledged the sounds of shouts and gunfire coming from not-so-far-away. The dead bodies of both the woman and her son seemed to have been affected by the shockwave that had surged through the city, and if that were the case for every person that had been killed in the last few hours then the PUC definitely had a fight on their hands.
She didn’t know where the other monster was that had been created by the son’s body, but Raquel guessed that it had run off in search of easier prey. In fact, with the exception of the cage that she was in, the electrified prison that the PUC had hastily thrown up around the city and shoved everyone into was probably protecting them for the most part. At least, until those things ran out of PUC soldiers to kill. Then who knew what would happen to the prisoners. Surely the monsters could jump, and given the ferocity of the one they currently had pressed up against the fence, she doubted they would care too much about getting a momentary shock in the process.
Raquel screamed as she poured every ounce of strength and effort she had left into keeping the monster at bay. She looked over and saw that King’s strength was beginning to fail and that Byzzie was practically hanging onto the leg with her single working arm. The electricity was clearly hurting the creature but she wasn’t sure it was killing it. In fact, as the trio’s strength dwindled, Raquel could almost feel the rigid leg she was grasping beginning to tense.
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