North Wind (28 page)

He felt crazy himself, for what he was imagining he saw in their faces. He took a step backwards. Aditya came and stood in front of him, eyes alight and nasal flaring. he crooned.

Bella tried to laugh.

The Beauty’s white teeth glittered. you
were the object of it all.>

Bella repeated.

said the Beauty, pensively.

Bella looked wildly around, as if the trickster might step out of a corner of the room.

Then Bella understood that every slight he had suffered on the way to this séance had been without malice. It had been Aditya’s insensate, necessary preparation of himself and his household, for this moment: for what they meant to do.

he pleaded.

He watched Bella’s face.

said Aditya.

Bella dropped to his four feet: flight was irresistible. It was useless. Albertine and Gilberte caught him and pulled him upright. Celeste the Silent peeled back his sleeve. Viloma used his thin knife to remove a piece of flesh from Bella’s arm, sealed the wound carefully with a secretion from his mouth, and divided the flesh among the bowls.

wailed Bella.

Albertine was getting squeamish.

The medium licked blood from his fingers.

shouted Bella.

Aditya had returned to his place in the ellipse. He stared up at his victim: wildly exhilarated.

he breathed.

Viloma made a gurgling in his throat, and spat a stream of his own blood into the first bowl. Everybody took a mouthful, mixed it with saliva and spat it onto the little pieces of Bella’s arm. The Signifiers began to invoke the last formal name of the deceased.

“JohnnyJohnnyJohnnyJohnnyJohnnyJohnnyJohnnyJohnny—”

The participants stared into their bowls. Albertine and Gilberte’s grip on Bella didn’t slacken.

protested Bella. He was too frightened to feel any pain from the wound in his arm, or maybe Viloma had numbed it. He could not believe they would go on cutting him into bits until he died. But Aditya’s mad exaltation terrified him.

see—>

The cultures began to stir.

warned Viloma, electrified.

The things grew fast. There was a brittle explosion of sound. The first bowl had shattered. Something stood out of it, the color of raw flesh, limbless: a small tube of muscle lined with a mass of teeth. It did not wait to be questioned. It coiled itself and shot across the room. Whether by accident or by volition, it wrapped itself round Gilberte’s naked throat. It set to work. It ate. With astonishing speed, it grew. It split into two: they ate, they burgeoned and divided. Another bowl shattered, and another. The room was full of flailing limbs, screams and blood.

Bella woke out of blind flight and found himself running two-footed in a greyed-out darkness, blood-spattered hands and arms stretched out ahead of him. He didn’t know where the blood had come from, it was not his own. He fell against a door and bounced back. The door was barred and plastered over with danger signs: . There were letters incised over the lintel, not printed or grown there but cut in an amateurish way and filled with black pigment. He stared at them, agonizingly concentrated. Get out of here…OUT. To get out he had to go down.

He spun around and ran. Wherever he found stairs going down he went down: and finally came to a strange kind of engineer’s den. A big place, shining under dust; curved giant pipes. No way out. He’d come too far, have to go up. But there was light coming in at a window. He broke it and scrabbled through, and out from a crumbled rent in the base of the tomb.

He stumbled back to the front of the smaller building. The picnic can of car-food was there. He felt the way he’d felt when he was on the run with Sid: so exhausted he could hardly breathe. Eat something. He couldn’t lift the container. He managed with difficulty to squeeze some liquid into his palm. He tried to drink: and spat, gagging and coughing.

He remembered what car-food could do. There was more in the car, back at the fence. With luck, he’d find a way of striking a spark.

ii

Sid and the Campfire Girls arrived at the site in a personnel truck that had been deposited at a cautious distance by air-frame. It rumbled through the abandoned campus and pulled up outside the tomb. Sid got down with the rest of them, thirty suits. The shells were tattoo-skin camouflaged with Allied insignia and colors: a disguise that could be rapidly switched. The Campfire Commanding Officer, Colonel Janet Ezra, came up to Sid. She’d told him to call her Colonel Jez.

“What d’we do now?”

He found it hard to cope with the suit’s helmet controls, or the voice that seemed inside his head. He was too frightened. He counted the suits and was awed at the Fat Man’s bargaining power. The boss had said:
you were right and I was wrong. We should take Bella away from those people. By force if necessary, but a show of force should be sufficient.
He had called in favors with the USSA Special Exterior Force, and sent Sid to Germany with a miniature secret army.

He had explained what he thought Aditya meant to do. As Sid understood it, the alien necromancers would kill Bella slowly, once they got themselves set up at this significant location. The aim had been for the secret army to reach the sarcophagus first, and prevent entry. The Fat Man had believed that Bella would be handed over without a fuss, in that case. Aditya himself might leap at the chance of a pitched battle with rival treasure-hunters, in the middle of the Gender War. Luckily, the Fat Man said, Aditya would not be making the decisions. But they’d found the car at the fence, and the Fat Man’s mysterious deductions had become irrelevant. It was too late. The Aleutians were here before them.

A colonel of the USSA Special Exterior Force was taking orders from Sidney Carton in a very limited sense. She just wanted to hear his opinion.

“We go inside,” he said, “Ma’am.”

The colonel thought so too. They found only one breach in the tomb. The suits went inside, armored, leaving the breach guarded. They were experts. They moved through the smaller building like a phalanx of ghosts, and quickly found the place where the séance had been held. It was three floors up: a room spread with a welter of blood and other tissue, the rags and tatters of flesh completely unrecognizable.

The two suits who found it called for Sid and the Colonel to join them.

“What happened Sid?” demanded Col Jez, inhumanly calm. “We came here to defuse a dangerous stand-off and secure the release of an innocent hostage, hopefully without violence. This doesn’t look like the same situation as was described.”

Sid couldn’t speak. The bloody stillness overwhelmed everything. He and the Fat Man hadn’t told the SEF about the alien necromancy. But nothing the Fat Man had said explained this. Campfire Girls moved around, examining the spattered walls and stooping to the floor. Sid’s helmet was slaved to the Colonel’s; he had the Radio Suit band and not much else. He didn’t know what they were doing. How could they be so calm! Ezra’s suit moved its head from side to side.

“They say these nuclear-accident places are haunted.” The helmet turned, as if Sid had made some comment. “I don’t rule out the possibility. The aliens didn’t come to an evil place like this for any good reason. Maybe they woke something—”

Then someone shouted in Sid’s head. The voice was human, but he couldn’t understand the words. Something like: it’s still going on, it’s still happening! For a flash of time, for seconds, the helmet printed across his eyes a burst of full SEF head-display. He glimpsed dark scenes, rimmed by flickering calibration that he couldn’t read: a corridor full of flames: naked, bestial running things. The same voice yelled “We’ve found the nest!” The Colonel and the two suits rushed out of the bloody room, towards the action. Sid blundered after.

The Aleutians had left their lamps behind in the séance room, and the local lighting-commensals that clung to the ceilings were either dead or sleeping. Everything happened in a gloom in which the sharp edges of local walls and doors connected painfully, cruelly, with peoples’ elbows, knees, flanks, places (that made them giggle). At last a lamplighter managed to coax a glow in some material he found lying about. They laughed at each other’s nakedness, and laughed even more at the absurdly provident who’d snatched up clothes when the magic went so awfully wrong.

Some people grumbled against the person—whose identity had better remain veiled—who’d led their lord astray. But without rancor. People cannot help behaving like themselves. There were no thoughts of appealing to the local police: who had arrived, apparently, on some kind of tip-off. Local police could be assumed to be as hostile as the cops at home would be, in these circumstances. Necromancy, especially when practiced on a subject who is still alive at the start, isn’t a respectable pursuit. It would be better if everybody died. That way, there’d be less scandal. There were no regrets. One paid for the glamour of life with Aditya in episodes like this. They reminded each other of pleasant times, and looked forward to pleasant times to come. They embraced, groomed, shared wanderers; composed themselves.

Aditya and his housekeeper were the two Signifiers left alive. They had thrown together a barricade, on a landing in front of the room to which the remaining Silent had fled. Viloma’s corpse was being devoured on the stairwell above them. They’d failed to drag it away from the creatures.

doing!>
howled Morel.

Part of the barricade was a filing cabinet. They tossed withered papers and heaps of charged plastic over it. The creatures of the séance pounced on anything that moved. They devoured and grew and divided and devoured. The weapons Kershaw had provided were useless. The situation needed fire, gouts of flash-heat, nothing else would stop these things.

answered Aditya coolly.

do
something!> The space between the barricade and the doors was filled with the sound of their own breath. Snaking, toothed arms of raw flesh were seeping through every crack.

Aditya murmured, fascinated.

Morel glanced at him, and shuddered. he realized.

An endless tongue, thin as a whip and razor edged, lashed at Aditya’s cheek, laying it open to the bone. He laughed.