Xenoform (44 page)

‘Yeah,’ said Sofi sourly.

‘You, however...’ said Roland. He wagged a finger at her, but he didn’t finish his sentence – wisely, in Debian’s opinion. Sofi seized the holdall and began rummaging inside it angrily. Something exploded hugely but distantly, felt through the walls and floor more than heard. Most of the group ignored it altogether – they were already getting used to the sounds of violence around them. Sofi straightened up holding the plasma weapon determinedly, her face thunderous. ‘Right,’ she said simply. Holding the gun on one hip, she returned to rummaging in the bag. ‘Why the fuck are there hats in here, man?’ she asked.

‘You’ll see,’ said Roland. ‘Just hand ’em round, one each.’ Bemused and frowning, Sofi at least did as he asked and distributed the varied assortment of headgear. The others took the hats with mild confusion but nobody objected. ‘Also, nasal filters in the front pocket there. You gonna want those too.’

‘
So what’s it like out there, Roland? Looked pretty bad when I peeped out from the car park,’ said Whistler. ‘Power’s been off but Tec got a gennie running. It could go off again any time, though, if something blocks the exhaust up there. Most of the city looks to be in darkness. Those
creatures
...’ She trailed off, looking confused and angry.

Roland slung the rocket launcher across his back on its leather strap and indicated the bag. ‘Help yourselves,’ he said to the group at large. ‘It’s pretty bad,’ he admitted. ‘Chaos. Big fire seems to be going out – think they powder-bombed it – but there’s little ones starting all over and nobody really putting them out. Saw a battle-bot shooting it out with its own police unit up on Sickle Street. Them creatures, the changed, the GDD victims, whatever you wanna call ’em...I reckon they’re
processing
stuff. They kinda altering the city, filling it with that green slime. It’s everywhere – hanging off wires, covering pods. Kinda one big dripping, growing mess. Seems to be more every time you look. Where that greenshit come from, and why now, I dunno.’

‘Into what are they are processing stuff?’ asked Tec.

Roland simply shrugged. ‘Didn’t ask the one that stepped out in front of me, just shot it with a rocket. Was a little close range, to be honest. No sign remaining afterwards.’ He coughed, adding, ‘Bit odd, really, the whole thing.’

Debian thought he might be beginning to understand what was happening here. Processing. He turned the word over in his mind. He wanted to get back into the net, talk with the AI again. It still had things to answer as far as he was concerned. He wanted something better than the cryptic nonsense of last time, some concrete answers about Cyberlife, Alcubierre and what the AI really desired from him. He wanted to check the address it had given him, too. He was starting to think he might have some idea of what was there.

‘Odd?’ repeated Sofi, rubbing one cheek sensuously against the dull barrel of the plasma thrower. ‘Robot, human, monster...whatever. I’ve had enough of being cooped up in here. Let’s get Spidey. And death to anything that gets in the way.’

‘
That’s the spirit!’ enthused Roland. ‘Let’s not hang around, eh?’

‘
Look,’ said Debian, ‘maybe I should stay here, try the net again. I think I might be onto something with it.’ He felt his face flush hotly, as if he had suggested the indulgence of some unacceptable vice.
Guilt
, he identified the emotion as. But he wasn’t entirely sure why.

‘You’d have to stay alone, if so,’ said Whistler. ’Cos Tec comes with me.’ She glanced to Tec, who nodded. ‘You really fancy being here by yourself? ‘Cos you’re welcome if you want to.’

Debian considered this. She was right. No matter how much he wanted,
needed
, to walk the web again, talk to the monster, the thought of being alone in this echoing building while the world degenerated outside, waiting for people who might never return, filled him with deep dread. ‘Okay, I guess I’ll come along. Maybe I can even be some use along the way.’

‘Good, glad to have you,’ said Whistler. ‘Get ready, all! We roll in ten. And we ain’t coming back for anything, okay? Pack for war. Go, people!’

‘Also,’ shouted Roland above the sudden eruption of activity, ‘I reckon we should retrieve your van.’

‘Sure,’ said Tec, looking back over his shoulder.

‘How far away is it?’ asked Whistler.

‘Nearby. Be better to get it than go by foot. Especially when you see what it’s like out there.’

‘Raining, is it?’ asked Tec as he dashed out to grab whatever items he deemed essential for the mission.

‘Yeah,’ grunted Roland. ‘Guess it is.’

Iaella came dashing up the corridor in a disorganised-looking yet effective blur of small limbs. She was still at the age where this was her normal rate of ambulation – where, indeed, she ran everywhere unless specifically directed not to – but something in her posture spoke of genuine urgency this time. Stevin was on his feet at once, the nail gun in his hand. Had he been sleeping? He thought perhaps he had.

‘What is it, honey?’ Iaella hurtled from the shadows and flung herself into his arms.

‘Something bad, Daddy! I’m frightened. I looked out my window and there’s monsters out there!’

‘What?’ Stevin rubbed his eyes, trying to force them to work more satisfactorily in the near-total darkness. He went to the window, carrying Iaella in the crook of one arm. She clung to his neck like a baby chimp to its mother, her face buried against him. He could feel her small heart fluttering inside her like a trapped bird. Cautiously, he parted the curtains beside the front door. What he saw caused him to stagger back, almost dropping Iaella, letting the curtain fall back into place. ‘Oh!’ he cried unintentionally. ‘What the...’ He put Iaella aside, raising the nail gun, which looked suddenly silly, toy-like. She protested and tried to hang on but he brushed her away. ‘Shush! Quiet, honey. I just have to look again. You’re right – something’s going on out there.’

‘Daddy, I’m frightened,’ she said quietly, but she sat still, her back up against the wall, arms round her knees. The child was getting used to being frightened. They lived just outside the zone of devastation created by the barge crash and there had been shooting on the streets earlier, despite the area being under a contract with Citidef and usually crime-free. Iaella had never heard shooting before.

At first, pods and robots had begun failing, running amok, in some cases actually attacking the emergency services who responded to the crash. Those few who
had
responded to the crash, anyway. Stevin and Iaella had been ushered inside by a Citidef officer and told to keep off the streets, listen to the streams, keep all doors locked, and, conversely, not to panic. The aura of calm that the officer had clearly been trying to project had been weakened slightly by the thick stream of blood flowing from his broken nose.

Zorra had not come home from work as expected. The police had not allowed Stevin and Iaella to go out and look for her.
Too dangerous
, they said.
Stay inside
, they said.
Total lock-down
, they said.

L
ater in the day the streets had filled with shouting mobs who roamed up and down chanting in what might as well have been a foreign language for all its discernibility. A young man with a wild array of feathers sprouting from every aperture of his clothing had been shot dead directly opposite Stevin and Iaella’s house a few hours ago. They had never seen where the shot had come from – the man had simply been running along the road one second and then skidding along on his back the next, spreading blood behind him like a snail-trail. Nobody had moved the body. The man’s handheld communicator lay in the street about three metres from his prone form, screen-up. It had rung once, long and persistent, then been silent.

Stevin had set up guard just inside the front door since that incident.
Stevin and the nail gun – keeping the neighbourhood safe!
he thought wildly as he parted the curtains again. He caught sight of his own reflection as he did so and didn’t like how wide-eyed and scared he appeared. He looked like a bush-baby, full of primitive timidity. Trying to control himself, slow his breathing, he looked out.

The scene was a vision of hell. Or another world. Or something...

‘What the
fuck
,’ he uttered, forgetting that Iaella was even there. ‘What the blue f–’

‘Daddy? Are they out there still?’ asked a small voice from near the floor. The voice sounded as if there might be tears underneath it. ‘I want Mummy to come home now. Where’s Mummy?’ The words were a question but the tone was rhetorical.

‘Honey, go upstairs, get your coat and shoes on. Grab the green bag and get back down here to me. Quick, now.’ He said all this without moving his face from the crack in the curtains.

‘Daddy?’ It was the squeak of a mouse.

‘
Do it
!’ he hissed, and she scarpered. Her light footsteps clattered up the stairs.

Monsters. Stevin felt a hysterical laugh building inside him. The body of the nail gun was cool and dead against his cheek.

Almost everything up to two streets away had been either levelled by the shockwave of the original blast, burned since or bombed by the air force. The skeletal remnants of a few buildings twisted out of the ground like mangled fingers clawing at the sky, backlit by the residual glow of the huge fire. Although the flames had died down, smoke still poured from the wreckage in one solid pillar as big as a mountain. It towered over the skyline gigantically. Ash was still raining down, but less of it now. Also, the colour of it had changed. It looked sort of
green
where it settled on the windows, which still scrolled regularly to clean themselves. Stevin wondered how they could still be powered when everything else for miles around seemed to have gone off.

Across the road, in the burned and blasted garden of the Piper family’s house stood a truly bizarre creature. At first, he thought it was a modified human. In City Six you got used to seeing some strange body shapes. But it wasn’t.

The creature was vaguely humanoid, as if it had once
been
human, or been loosely based on one, but its body was a tattered and ill-defined tangle of textures and appendages. It seemed to be growing out of, or
into
, the ground itself. Sticky tendrils descended from its limbs, connecting it to the bizarre landscape that was growing around it. The ground on which it stood, or grew, or whatever, looked as if it had grown thick, dark vegetation where previously there had been well-mown lawn. This growth, glistening wetly, seemed to coagulate, or clot into thicker areas, making the outlines of larger and more solid shapes. They looked plantlike, organic. One of them appeared to be twining itself around the blackened stump of the Piper family’s apple tree. Parts of the original architecture – a ceramicarbide kerbstone here, the remains of a broken wall there – remained, poking through like the bones of a decomposing body. Parts of the plantlike mass twitched and moved grotesquely, inching up and out. It was
growing
, he was sure. He felt a cold sweat beading his forehead. How long had he been asleep? And where was Iaella? He felt panic rising in his throat, swallowed it down again.

The creature jerked and lolled, and started to slowly advance up the road. The tendrils that joined it to the landscape tensioned and relaxed like the strings of a puppet as it moved. Then he saw others.

‘Shit...’ he breathed in the darkness. ‘How many...Twenty? Thirty?’

The creatures were arrayed all along the road as far as he could see. They lurched slowly through people’s gardens and yards, around their cars, in and out of open doors. Jets of vapour or fluid sprayed sporadically from their upturned mouths into the air. Their faces were indistinct, melted-looking and amorphous. Some of them moved on four or six legs, some walked upright like humans, others were sagging and lumpy blobs of tissue. It was the GDD. He knew it. All week he had been listening to increasing reports of mutants stalking the city and suggestions that it was somehow due to the GDD infection. Monsters, computer bugs, civil disorder, the city burning: It could not be coincidence that all of these things were happening at once.

As if to confirm this notion he saw a huge, dog-shaped battle familiar prowling and circling around one of the monsters further down the street like a faithful hound. Was the machine
protecting
it? That was how it looked – master and his dog. Surely not. Were the monsters controlling the machines somehow? Was that whole earlier scene of robots failing or attacking people
their
doing? Were those creatures somehow behind the loss of power, net connection, streams? The barge crash? How was any of that possible?

Stevin knew one thing for certain: It wasn’t safe here. If, as he suspected, the site of the crash had been some sort of
focus
or epicentre for whatever was happening in the city, then moving away from said epicentre seemed the only plausible option for survival. Those things out there looked like trouble. Stevin was an intelligent man and he could see at once that, whatever those creatures were, they were changing the city, changing the environment, and he didn’t want to be around while that happened. As he had slept that area of corruption had crept as close as the properties opposite. And as he watched the green, mouldy, vegetative coating was spreading towards his house, texturing the ground with weird little organic nodes and nodules.