Slag Attack (15 page)

   “
Terry said he told you you weren’t supposed to do that.”

   “
Terry’s a dick.”

   “
You’re a dick. And you’re training’s over. You come out until everyone finishes and then you’re on clean-up detail.”

   
Darren wants to argue with him but sees the resulting outcome as too stupid to even consider. He slumps his shoulders and leaves the chambers. He looks to his left and makes fleeting eye contact with Pearl. If she wasn’t filthy she would be pretty striking, he thinks. Sex is so far behind him he doesn’t even think about it. He just puts his head down and wanders around, realizing he doesn’t have anywhere to wander to.

13.

Clean-up isn’t the chore Shell had undoubtedly intended it to be. Darren had cleaned up and eaten countless slags. They had little to no effect on him when they were dead. He uses the shovel and wheelbarrow provided and wheels the remains out into the main chamber. The others are gathered around a long table and Darren realizes he is probably wheeling out their dinner. He had hoped they had something more exotic to eat down here. He should have known. They’d gotten his hopes up with the canned food. So far this place hasn’t really shown him any perks of living with other people. Darren lets the wheelbarrow rest next to Shell, standing at the head of the table.

   
Beside Shell is a rusted metal barrel with a grill grate over the top and flames guttering down below. At least they are going to cook the slags before eating them. There is an open spot at the very end of the table. Darren walks down there and sits. No one speaks. They stare reverently toward the head of the table, toward Shell and Pearl. Darren wonders how long everyone has been here. He wonders if they have been brainwashed somehow. Or maybe they’re just desperate. He wonders if Shell and Pearl actually have a plan or if it is just some dream they hold over everyone’s head. If it
is
a dream. It sounds more like a nightmare to Darren.

   
Dinner is consumed in silence. Darren’s slag is undercooked. Many people gag while eating the slag meat. Darren takes that to mean they are still moderately human. He wants to ask them if they know they are going to their deaths. Do they realize what the slags have become? Do they really think there are other people out there?

   
That night he gets to sleep and actually feels a modicum of safety for the first time since the attacks. They sleep in two hour shifts because if they all slept at once they would end up buried.

   
The next training session goes much more smoothly. Darren doesn’t try to help anyone. Luckily, the only person who was in danger of being consumed was the frail looking woman from the day before. The slag she was battling had clamped itself onto her slarm and she had, in turn, devoured the attacking slag like a wild animal.

   
That night, at dinner, Shell announces: “Rest up tonight! Tomorrow the fugue will arrive and we will take it to Hollow City!”

   
The troops look down at the blackened slag meat on their plates. They do not seem very excited. After dinner, they break up to go about pushing the walls of the chamber back. Darren finds Shell milling around and approaches him.

   “
I need to talk to you,” Darren says.

   
Shell turns his head and says, “Speak.”

   “
I just wanted to find out if you’re really serious about this. When was the last time you were above ground for any period of time?”

   “
Let me stop you right there, trooper. I’ve heard it all before. And it’s not like that. It’s not a matter of being outnumbered. I know what the slags have become. They’ve become giants. They’ve become so much more than they were. But they can’t win because we’re the chosen.”

   “
Chosen by whom?”

   
Shell shakes his head. “You don’t understand anything, do you?”

   “
I guess not,” Darren says. “Maybe you could explain.”

   “
You can’t explain faith. Do you know what faith is? Having faith in something is to believe in it unconditionally. Pearl is the chosen. She’s like Jesus or something. I’ve explained to you a little about what she can do and you’ll get to see her do a lot more tomorrow. Maybe then you’ll understand. Can you do me that favor? Can you put off your doubts until tomorrow? What are the alternatives, really? It doesn’t seem like so much to ask. You can go above ground and die, live out your remaining days alone and in fear, or you can actually believe in something. I think you’ll find it feels pretty good to believe in something.”

   
Darren doesn’t want to agree with him but he doesn’t necessarily want to argue either. He walks away silently, figuring that’s a happy medium.

   
He isn’t able to sleep that night.

14.

Bleary-eyed, he watches the flurry of activity around him. The troops, led by Pearl and Shell, march toward the pool beneath the ring of fire. Pearl hoists up her skirt and climbs into the pool. The skirt floats up around her.

   “
Everybody in! Everybody in!” Shell shouts.

   
Darren thinks this is the stupidest thing in the world. He’s the last one in the pool, except for Shell. Everyone is gathered around Pearl. She raises her arms up to the dripping ceiling. The hole has long since closed. He’s tempted to reach beneath her skirt and then he sees that everyone is doing exactly that. Even Shell. Especially Shell. His eye is rolled back in his head, his body vibrating with something that could very well be ecstasy. Dirty old perv, Darren thinks. But now is not the time to start bucking any trends so he reaches under her skirt as well. It’s basically just a mass of other hands at this point. He honestly thought the fugue would be something other than group frottage but, nevertheless, here it was in all its unwashed glory.

   
And then something does begin happening.

   
The pool is swirling around them and rising up toward the ceiling. It begins going faster and faster, water droplets pelting Darren in the face. He can’t see anything. At first the drops sting and then they separate even further until they are a swirling mist. Now he’s in some sort of cluster with all the other troops. They’ve all locked arms around each other and bunched toward the middle, tightening up around Pearl. He thinks he hears her moaning. It could be pleasure or could be the fact that all of her bones are being smashed.

   
Then they are floating en masse and Darren loses all sense of the cavern around him. He loses all sense of the bodies around him. It feels like he is floating through the air. Then he sees Pearl. It’s him and Pearl, floating in a cool gray mist over the blighted world. She’s moving against him and smiling and she’s putting his hands under her dress and he can feel his erection. It’s the first one he’s had probably since the last time he’d had sex with his wife. Her hands reach toward the button on his militia issue pants and there’s a part of him that really wants what might happen except for one disconcerting thought. He imagines Pearl floating through all these other spaces with all these people. He imagines her with gross Terry and creepy Shell. He imagines her going down on the skeletal lady. He realizes he doesn’t even know the names of most of the people here. He feels even more alone than he did before and he brushes her hand away. Her smile dissolves and he makes eye contact with her. He feels her
reaching
inside of him with eyes that look like a gray sky with bolts of lightning streaking it. She’s trying to control him or something. He looks down. Down at the scary distant ground, smoldering and devastated. She grabs his chin and forces him to make eye contact with her.

   
You have to.

   
You have to.

   
You have to.

   
It’s like a whispered chant inside his head. He tries to shove her away but she isn’t going anywhere. He puts his hands over his ears, closes his eyes and screams as loud as he can. It’s all muffled in the swirling mass of the fugue and he feels her hands all over him and he tries as hard as he can to make his erection go away. He can’t shake the feeling that something very bad is going to happen if she succeeds in this.

   
Time passes and he can’t tell if it’s going fast or slow or fast and then slow. He can’t tell if they have stopped or if they are continuing to float. He can’t tell when he is all alone or when she is all over him. He tries to turn his back on her. He feels her hands on him. Her mouth on him. Anything to coax him into hardness and it’s her persistence that solidifies his opinion.

   
And then he feels the solid ground beneath his feet and he’s standing there with the other troops, Pearl at the vanguard. Everyone else carries a look of something like paranoid bliss in their eyes and Darren feels dirt scouring at his skin and hears the screeching roar of slags and a world burning down.

   
They exit the fugue and come upon the devastated exoskeleton of what used to be Hollow City.

15.

Emerging from the fugue, Darren has an immediate sense of badness. It’s dark from all the smoke in the air. Standing in front of them is an army of mammoth slags, easily two stories high each. Ten troops are immediately devoured. They’ve walked into something. Shell was a fool for having faith in Pearl. Whatever parlor tricks she could do, no one could get them out of this.

   
He snaps to attention and sees a giant toothy mouth in front of him. The opening is as big as a pond. The slag is rearing back its blind head. Before he can feel its teeth cut him in half, just as that enormous head begins its descent, Darren leaps forward into the mouth.

   
He hears the teeth snap shut and feels the slag’s head move around him in something that could very well be confusion. Then he’s sliding down its gullet and deep into its body. It smells like decaying meat and bile. Darren throws up, adding to the heady scent. Then he feels movement. They are moving toward something even though Darren feels the only something he is probably headed toward is certain death. He wonders how long it will take for the slag’s stomach acid to devour him.

   
The inside is strange and fleshy, covered in something like oozing mucous. No bones anywhere. Nothing to grab onto. It’s only a matter of time before he’s sucked down into whatever sick bowel this thing has and that will probably be it. He isn’t a worm, isn’t a parasite, isn’t made to live in shit.

   
He plunges his hand into the gross mucous of the slag’s insides. He sets his slarm to work on the wall. The rapid movement jostles him. The slarm is probably so small it feels like little more than a pinprick to the giant slag. But he doesn’t need much to make it out. Just a small opening. Then he can run to... where? Where will he run to? Where
can
he run to? This is certainly the end. He just watched half the troop devoured in a matter of seconds.

   
While his slarm works on the flesh of the slag he thinks about what happened.

   
It had to have been a set-up. But who was setting them up? Pearl or Shell? It had to be one of them. Darren leans toward the one who did not sacrifice her arm to “the cause.” Even though he really wants to believe it’s Shell because he’s such a prick. He supposes it could be both. Maybe they really do have some idea how to end this and just don’t want anybody else around when it happens.

   
His slarm must be hungry because it tears through the slag with amazing verve. Darren sticks his good arm through the hole and feels what might be air on his fingertips. It’s hot and grainy, not wet and slimy. He takes that as a good sign. He sticks the slarm out and lets it clamp onto the outside of the slag to get a good grip and then he rips his way out. He pushes his head through, pulls his body through, wipes the clinging mucous from his eyes and slides down the back of the monstrous slag.

   
It immediately turns to snap at him but its size, while a great asset, is also a great hindrance. Darren darts for the first narrow spot he sees. A tiny access alley between two storefronts. Midway down the alley he stops to catch his breath and marvels at his brief glimpse of this new world.

   
The slags are reshaping it. It looked like everything was destroyed and the parts used to make bigger structures. Even the buildings to either side of him must have been nearly ten stories tall.

   
Darren’s slarm is going crazy. If he isn’t careful, it’ll take his face off. What good is it, really? The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks maybe it’s some kind of signaling device for the other slags. How else would they have known they were all going to be there?

   
If he is going to have to look out for slags around every turn, he doesn’t want to have to worry about one attached to his body. He roots through the nearest dumpster, filled with old trash beyond rotten, until he finds a tin can. It isn’t a knife but it’ll do. The lid is still attached to the can by about an inch of tin. He bends it up, holds the ridged part of the can and begins hacking at his slarm at the shoulder, cutting on the slag part and not the Darren part. The slag gnashes its teeth and Darren angrily hacks at the front of it until the area approximating its mouth is loose and falling to the greasy asphalt. Then he continues hacking on the shoulder part. He doesn’t feel any pain and when the slag is dangling there, Darren sticks his right hand into the gap and rips it the rest of the way off. Then he throws it on the ground and stomps it mercilessly. He turns to look at the end of the alley and sees Shell running.