Bad Dreams (48 page)

‘Who are those bastards in the rad suits?’ asked the student.

‘There’s an outbreak,’ said Brian, ‘a kind of plague.’

‘Since when did they shoot sick people?’

‘Since forever, kid.’

‘Shit.’ Suddenly, the man looked younger. The gun in his hands was a toy. It was as if he was playing John Wayne and the Japs with his playground friends.

‘I’m Nick Styron, remember?’

‘B minus?’

Nick half-smiled. ‘C plus.’

‘Yeah.’

‘It was a good course.’

‘Thanks, but I don’t…’

‘…think this is the time to talk about crap like that… yeah, I know what you mean. But nobody ever taught me what to talk about while people are shooting at me.’

Another car, one of the last, went up. A bonnet sailed through the air, and clanged against the sculpture. Brian took some hot sparks in his face, and had to blink furiously. A girl ran past, hands clutched to a bleeding neck. She got halfway up the slope towards the Admin Building before they cut her down. She rolled backwards, eyes open, skin flapping above her collar.

‘Fucking government,’ said Nick. ‘First they cut our grants, now they cut our throats.’

Two students were on the girl now. One had a gun, and also the gloves and mask of a Zombie. The other – an obese kid with a check shirt and bag-bottom jeans – knelt over the body and tore strips out of her throat with pudgy fingers. He looked like Billy Bunter guest-starring in a splatter movie. He opened his throat, and gobbled down the flesh he had taken. His mouth was already smeared with treacly blood.

Nick was staring at the disgusting feast in total disbelief.

Nick and the masked student pointed their guns at each other, but did not do anything about it.

‘Nick?’

The voice was muffled.

‘Shirley?’

The mask nodded. Brian realized there was a girl inside it, a girl he had seen about the campus. Shirley Brownlee or Brownlow or Something. Not much of a face, but cheerful and sharp. Languages.

The fat boy was still glutting himself. He was into the dead girl’s stomach now, scooping out red handfuls.

Shirley shrugged, and her gun wavered.

‘It’s not what you think, Nick. It’s just…’

She did not have anything to say.

If Nick had not shot the pair of them, Brian would have. He looked at the kid as he fired. His eyes were screwed shut. His aim was all over the place. He hit them enough times to do the job, and kept on firing until the gun was empty.

When Brian picked up Shirley’s gun, he found out that she had not worked out what to do with the safety catch.

It was slightly quieter now.

Brian took charge. ‘Let’s go.’

Monica was keen, but Nick was lost in himself. He still had his eyes shut, was still gripping the gun. The trigger clicked.

‘Nick.’

He shook his head.

Brian knew he would feel like a shit later, but he could not look after everybody. He took Monica’s hand, and they ran out from behind the sculpture.

He had to get Jason.

* * *

They were gathering. The building was crowded now, and they were all trying to get close to Cazie. She was among her people, making contact, picking up lieutenants, admiring the changes she saw around her. Every moment that passed made her more powerful. Daddy would have been proud of her. She had seen an opportunity, and seized it. Now, she would exploit it until it bled.

She embraced everyone. It did hot matter what they had been. It was what they were now that counted. Her standards of beauty and worthiness were changing all the time.

The corridors were thronging with the new humanity.

Already, the ranks were being purged. Cazie had sanctioned the extermination of the relics of the old order. That was an important first step.

In the dean’s office, she was seeing everyone individually. They came in, and presented their changing bodies for her approval.

She gave her blessing to the long and the short and the tall, the huge and the thick and the small. And for those she did not approve, there was Elliott Frazier.

An American academic who taught History of Philosophy and fronted a popular BBC2 late night talk show once a month, Elliott had changed early. His forearms swelled like Popeye’s, and his hands had become spiny lobster-claws. Then spiked chains had come to the surface of his skin, breaking through. Now, if he concentrated, he could make his paws buzz like a chainsaw.

‘To be is to act,’ he said, smoke rising from his buzz-bludgeons. Those Cazie did not approve fell to Elliott Frazier.

As Elliott put his whirring arm through the chest of a spotty first-year, Cazie wondered whether she should have a stricter system. Bearing the marks of change was probably not enough. Many of the new humanity were only halfway there. They were handicapped by their changes, stuck with dysfunctional bodies. Perhaps she should turn those over to Elliott as well. The new humanity could not have these casualties dragging along behind like millstones.

After Elliott was through with the rejects, Cazie was having the remains thrown out of the office window. Quite a pile of quartered humans was accumulating on the grass below. There was not a thing in the office that was not spotted with gore, and Elliott was dyed as red as Diggory Venn, flecks of flesh and bone measle-marking his handsome face, clogging his five-hundred-dollar haircut.

Cazie poured herself a cup of coffee from the dean’s personal percolator. Thanks to Elliott, lumps and chunks floated in the brown, but that just improved the taste. From now on, Cazie would always take her coffee black with ground-up old-mode human being.

She gulped, said
‘Damn
fine coffee,’ and laughed.

The dean had been one of the first to meet Elliott’s new fists. The professor had lightly passed his fast-moving clump of fingers over the dean’s skull, flensing away all the features, shredding bone and gristle from his nose and cheeks.

The dean was at the bottom of the pile.

Elliott leaned against a desk, and buzz-sawed an indentation before he could pull himself upright. Sawdust clogged the cracks in his mottled skin, and he buzzed in the air to clear out the apertures.

If Elliott could not control himself, he would have a hell of a time when he next needed to use the urinal.

Erica Figg, one of Cazie’s flatmates, was brought in. She smiled nervously, and rolled up her sleeves to show pulsating scratches. Luminous feelers were poking through, displacing the flesh.

Cazie gave her the nod and, relieved, Erica retreated.

‘She’ll be a princess,’ Cazie said.

‘Names do not give things meaning,’ Elliott speculated. ‘Meaning makes things things.’

Clare slipped into the room, tongue darting, skin shining. She was hairless now, and perfectly scaled. Her greenish-white belly rippled with new muscle.

‘Turn on the radio,’ Clare said.

Elliott reached for a transistor, hands buzzing, and pulled back. He looked at his lumpy saws.

Impatient, Clare turned the radio on, and fiddled with the dial.

‘…ya-hootie,’ screamed a voice from the speaker, ‘this is Eddie Zero on the Apocalypse Airwaves, bringin’ you music to evolve by. We’ll be rockin’ to ruination all through the night here on Campus Radio. You might have expected to hear some Third World Shinola when you tuned in, but our regular disc jockette ate something that disagreed with her. Her friggin’ record collection. Yep, that’s the truthiest truth to come down. Posie turned up her toesies, and is pushin’ up rosies, which is cosy with Moses because she was fuckin’ gettin’ up all our nosies. There’s been some changes made, and Good-Lovin’ Eddie’s liberated the airwaves. Can you handle that? Things are never goin’ back to normal. Mama’s got a brand new
baaag.
Remember, Eddie says, “Fuck your Mom, she fucked you!” And here’s Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and the Trinity with a mean mind-bender from 1968, “This Wheel’s on Fire”.

Cazie thought she heard something in Eddie’s rant.

‘Thank you, Clare,’ she said. ‘Send some of our people over to the station, and make sure Eddie stays on the air. Also, hook him up to the P. A. He’ll be our voice.’

* * *

This gig was sour as a three-week-old onion milkshake. Willard Longendyke, formerly Private First Class of the United States Marine Corps, currently Private-Equivalent of the Unwin Chemical Corporation Covert’ Security Division, knew the pooch was screwed, the bridge was out, the gears were jammed and John Wayne was dead.

This time, it was not the shit. This time, there really were fuckin’-A honest-to-Ed McMahon monsters on the loose outside his skull. It mattered not how blasted he was.

He needed a jab
prontissimo
. His skin was crawling like a nest of snakes, and he was itching to fill the seat of his radiation drawers with high calibre crap cinders.

He saw a shadow in the corridor, and shot a fire extinguisher. It bled foam.

He had a case of nerves he could not shuck off.

If the One-Man Lynch-Mob knew about Longendyke’s Need, the C.O. had kept it real quiet. He assumed his secret was still deep and dark, or else Lynch would have chewed him an extra asshole and made him crap his brains out through it.

Since the Bozz Man bit the big one, Longendyke had offed three more. That brought his score for the day up to six.

A) Girl with buffalo horns. B) Guy with teeth in his eyes. C) Stereotyped panicking, praying, ‘we’re all gonna die’-ing obstacle to the pursuit of his duty.

None of them had been armed. Throughout his career, Longendyke had made a habit of only shooting at people he was damn certain did not have the firepower to shoot back.

That made a lot of tactical sense.

He was still packing his sub-mach death-spitter, his serrated cubit-long throat-slasher, a couple of wicked frag grenades, a lead-and-semen-packed sidearm, and a just-in-case two-shot derringer slung in his jock, nestling up to that schlumphing gap where bollock number two had formerly been located.

Just now, he was cut off from the rest of his squad. If there was a rest of his squad. His policy now was to shoot whatever came down the corridor. It had done all right so far.

He had bagged B), C), and the fire extinguisher in this goddamn corridor.

Longendyke had never been to college. Judging from this set-up, he had missed little.

Chain of command was in the crapper. Longendyke was on his own now, and he knew who to take his orders from now.

Mr Dopey. That precious shit.

Three primed needles were snug in metal cigar tubes in his breast pocket, under his decontamination suit. All he needed was a private place to take a jab from the squeeze, and then the formula could take effect.

It could hardly screw things up any more.

He was in the building where all the fuss had started. Lynch was a floor or so up, in his command post. The Lynch-Mob was still keeping it together, but Longendyke knew it was all over bar the Kleenex. This situation was on a one-way trip to Peoria.

The corridors here all looked the same, rows of blue doors with little numbers. Offices and laboratories. This was as good a place as any. Everyone had cleared out when the shooting started.

He paused, and shucked the top half of his suit, letting the torso and sleeves hang from his waist. He felt like a human schlong in a ruptured rubber.

After adjusting his hardware to give him a little manoeuvrability, he took out the first of his shit stogies.

He made a Groucho gesture with the cigar tube, then cracked it open and slid out the hypo.

The sharp needle glinted, ready for puncturing, and the fluid dream caught the light, beautiful and terrible and just the thing to take a poor one-balled soldier’s mind off the whole painful show. It was liquid lurve, a sea of forgetting.

He hunkered down in an alcove by a lab door, and wriggled out of his suit. He was not one of those poor saps who stuck it in their arms and left tracks. You might as well write ‘I AM A JUNKIE AND A LOSER’ on your bicep in a join-the-dots tattoo.

He pulled out the derringer in its leather pouch, and put it aside. Then, he eased his jockey shorts down, and lifted up his dick, tickling the scabbed over tissue with the needle. He already had the beginnings of a righteous hard-on. A couple of pumps, and he would be in the happy humping ground.

It was tricky to find the flattened vein he had turned into a socket. This was where he plugged in his power.

Finally, he pricked the surface, and sunk the needle in. It had to go all the way in, no matter how bad it hurt.

It hurt you now to love you later.

Sucking in air, he stabbed himself. The pain went away, and he was conscious of the thin length of needle in his groin. The hypo hung like an extra dick growing below the first one. Most guys he knew had two balls and one dick.

Trust Willard Longendyke to be different.

A door opened inwards and Longendyke froze, knowing no explanation would satisfy the Lynch-Mob. He was pink-slipped and blacklisted for sure. Come to think of it, nobody
retired
from the UCC CSD.

Something squeezed through the doorway, taking chunks of the surrounding wall with it.

Longendyke had nothing to say.

This was not the usual thing. Even after he had squirted himself with magic juice, this was not what he would have expected.

It was big, and it was wide. It had a hide like a hairless buffalo, and a few human arms and heads. Otherwise, nothing about it compared to anything he had ever seen, known, dreamed of, conceived or would have considered believing in.

Longendyke did what he usually did when confronted with something overpoweringly awful. He saluted it.

A spike made of fused bone shot out of the thing and fixed into his forehead.

* * *

125 had never touched a living brain before.

It was not so different from the components it had already absorbed. Information funnelled through its tendrils and was added to the stockpile it had accumulated earlier.

It was not impressed with Willard Longendyke.

‘Hey, man,’ Longendyke began, then trailed off, ‘shiiiit…’

125 sucked in brain tissue with its vacuum tube appendage. Longendyke’s eyeballs popped out of their sockets, and clung to the tube, working loose.