Rat King, page 6
front of him. Her long hair fell perfectly straight, parted in the middle and
tumbling over her shoulders and down over her breasts. She was naked, and Dean
felt stirrings within him that were still new enough to be alien.
Phaedra stepped forward.
"I knew you'd come back one day, Dean. Back to where it's safe."
She held out her hand. Dean hesitated, then raised his own arm to take her hand.
Again why would she say safe?
As Dean's fingers were about to brush against Phaedra's, some instinct made him
suddenly pull back his hand.
She immediately changed. Her face hardened, seemed to grow old and lined in
front of him. She opened her mouth, and instead of speech nothing emerged but a
harsh and sibilant hiss, like a stickle that was about to attack. Her hair
seemed to disappear without Dean noticing where it had gone, and her hands grew
the ugly suckers typical of the mutie stickies. Her open mouth was filled with
sharp, needle-point teeth, and he could smell her fetid breath across the short
distance between them.
Although the sudden transformation was shocking, Dean showed the same sharp
reactions that had kept his father alive for many long hard years traversing the
Deathlands, and snapped onto his back heel, throwing his balance back to roll
with the attack. Phaedra—or whatever it was that had pretended to be her—came
forward and pitched into him. He used the creature's momentum and his own
back-foot balance to throw it over his head.
The creature hit the wall behind with a sickening thud. They were close enough
for it to lose none of the initial momentum, and so it hit the hard surface with
some force—enough to knock plaster off the wall in chunks, dust filling the air.
Dean coughed, tears filling his eyes and blurring his sight.
He swore under his breath, not wanting to shout and risk taking in another
lungful of dust.
The stickie came at him, rising from the floor as though it had merely brushed
the wall. It hissed and spit at him, rushing at him with arms flailing.
Dean backed up and readied himself in a combat stance, prepared to take the
creature. He blocked one wild swing of its arm and followed with a
straight-handed thrust at the stickie's exposed right side. He felt his fingers
penetrate the soft flesh with a sickening squelch, and he jerked his hand free
as quickly as possible, determined not to get stuck in the creature. It yelped
in fear and pain, pulling back, its thin blood spewing out of the ragged wound.
Anger, the fear and the pain were just about discernible in the black and
glistening eyes as it gave a cry and rushed for Dean once again.
Why, he thought, casting a glance around, was there never anything around to be
used as a makeshift weapon when a person really needed it?
It was a momentary lapse of total concentration that his father would never have
made: Dean's youth and inexperience teaching him a harsh lesson.
The stickie was on him a split second before he was fully prepared. The flailing
arms were just a touch too quick for his defenses, and one of the hands glanced
across his face, the blow pulling at his flesh and scoring it.
The pain spurred Dean into complete concentration. He had to end this, and end
it now. He lowered himself and dived in underneath the flailing arms, pushing
against the stickie with all the power he could muster from his aching calf
muscles. It was enough to drive them back against the wall. Dean was ready for
the impact, and gritted his teeth as the impact jarred every bone in his body.
He heard the sickening crunch of splintering bone, the thin snapping sounds of
the stickie's ribs giving way and the high, fluting whine of its cries of pain.
Every breath driven from its unprepared body, it sank to the floor, stunned, as
Dean stepped back.
The youth ignored the aches of his own body and focused his attention on the
task at hand. While the stickie was still sitting, dazed, Dean stepped forward
and took its head in his hands. Tensing his muscles, he jerked the head sharply
to the right, and then to the left.
He heard the snapping of its neck a millisecond before the cry of pain and
surprise that was wrung from its throat. The light in its eyes dimmed swiftly
and faded.
As Dean stepped back, it was no longer a stickie. There, in front of him, with
her neck broken and her naked body covered in weals and bruises, blood running
over her belly to pool between her thighs, was Phaedra.
Dean howled in anguish.
"THE KID'S GOING CRAZY," yelled the small tech as Dean's jerking, howling body
lifted itself off the couch, pulling wires and electrodes from his body, the
tangles and terminals coming out of the comp console with an alarming amount of
sparks and crackles. A small fire broke out, doused immediately by an alarmed
whitecoat with a high-domed forehead and bug eyes. She was completely bald, with
her front teeth missing. It would seem that she also had a cleft palate, as she
uttered a worried yet incomprehensible noise.
The only calm personnel in the room were Murphy and Wallace. Sarj Murphy studied
the Gen very closely.
"Desist this ridiculousness. The good book dictates calm in times of emergency,
and I will have calm."
Wallace's voice rose almost imperceptibly in volume as he got to the end of the
statement, but the increase was accentuated by the sudden silence that descended
on the room, broken only by the hum and buzz of the still fizzling terminals.
Murphy couldn't help but be impressed. And worried. This would be a formidable
foe.
"Bring the outsider back," Wallace continued in quiet, authoritative tones.
"I'm not sure if we can… At least, not that quickly," the geek tech said
absently, squinting heavily at where Dean had subsided back onto the couch. His
eyes were moving wildly behind the closed lids, and his breathing was labored
and shallow.
"I think you will," Wallace said simply.
"Sir." The tech snapped to attention, something in Wallace's voice reminding him
of his position.
Murphy, on the other hand, was dubious. And if the kid didn't survive, what hope
was there for the old man who lay in the next sick bay, similarly wired up?
"NOT LIKE THIS, DOC. Frightening."
"Worry not, my sweet. There is no puzzle to which there is not a solution, if
you care to think of it. Be it logical or lateral, there is always a path that
can be followed."
"Don't look to me like there are any paths here at all." Lori looked at Doc
Tanner with wide and uncomprehending eyes.
Doc sighed. It was ever the way that Lori, as sweet as she was, failed to
understand the simplest allusion. He cared deeply for the girl—a fellow waif in
a strange land—but couldn't help but find her obtuseness, at times, irritating.
They were standing in a dark cavern, the only light— if it could be called
such—a faint phosphorescent glow from the rocks around them. The cavern seemed
to stretch away into an unspecific and threatening darkness, a feeling of fear
that was in no way alleviated by the faint roar of a distant gale and the odor
of old, burned flesh that hung over them like a curtain.
The pearl handle of Lori's Walther PPK .22 blaster glowed softly as it picked up
the reflection of the rocks. Her long blond hair framed her glittering eyes. Doc
could see little else of her in the darkness, but as they advanced a few steps
he could hear the clicking of her high heels on the rock floor.
In the mind of Dr. Theophilus Tanner, reason struggled to gain the upper hand
over the encroachment of fear. Doc knew that the others considered him crazy,
sometimes tipping into incoherence. The simple fact was that they were correct
He had seen things and been through mind- and body-wrenching experiences that no
one else had shared. And it was unlikely that anyone else would.
He shuddered involuntarily as he remembered things he had seen when the
scientists of Operation Chronos had tried to shut him up. He remembered the
mewling mess that had been Judge Crater. Perhaps he would have been better dead
than to end up like this, prone to lapses into insanity. For a man with Doc's
intelligence, it was a strain to know that he walked a narrow ledge between
coherence and madness. He had once heard someone say that stupidity had saved
many a man from madness. Perhaps that was true.
"Doc, what we gonna do?"
Doc was jolted back to the moment. He looked at Lori, peering through the
darkness to focus on her.
"I said, what we gonna—"
"I know, my dear. I heard you the first time. My grasp on sanity may be a little
tenuous at times, but my hearing has not suffered. As to the action I propose we
take, I would suggest that the best course of action at the present time is to
actually take no action."
Lori giggled. "You're crazy, Doc."
Doc smiled to himself but refrained from comment. Slowly, in his mind, the
fragments of the puzzle were assembling themselves into a whole. He remembered
the fat, evil-looking woman whose throat he had sliced in twain. He remembered
the attempt to escape from the redoubt, and the signs of a sudden evacuation by
the staff. And then there were the trank darts fired from the strange vehicle.
And now he was here.
With Lori?
Doc felt the weight of the LeMat in his hand, and knew that it was primed to be
fired. In his other hand he held the swordstick. It was a sign to him of the
changes that had occurred in his life that he, an academic by vocation, no
longer felt safe unless he had a weapon or two at hand. Particularly now.
Particularly as, although she was standing next to him, he knew that Lori had
been dead for no little time.
Doc was about to speak when a blast of air hit him like a solid blow to the
solar plexus, doubling him over and driving the breath from his body. He was
aware of Lori screaming, her shrill voice mixing into the roar of the gale as it
hit them.
With a sickening realization, Doc knew that they were facing a foe worse than
any baron, scavenger or mutie. They were facing the implacable force of nature
gone wild, distorted by the rad blast of skydark.
It was a foe against which all weapons were useless.
"Doc! Help me…"
"THE OLD DUDE is looking a bit wired," remarked Pri Firclas Baker, scratching
his head and noting idly that he'd made his tender scalp bleed again, a tuft of
hair caught under his nail.
"It's nothing we can't handle," snapped the willowy woman who was the end of a
long line of techs for this section. By some fluke, Dr. Tricks was an almost
perfect specimen of womanhood. A throwback to a cleaner, less rad blasted gene
pool, she had flowing raven hair and sharp, classical features with high
cheekbones. As a result she was the target of lustful attention from every male
in the redoubt. At first Gen Wallace had high hopes of using Tricks to start a
new gene pool and eradicate some of the problems of inbreeding and mutie
infiltration.
Until he discovered the one flaw in Tricks's otherwise immaculate makeup: she
was sterile. He ruled that she was out-of-bounds. If she couldn't breed, then he
didn't want his men wasting their seed on her.
It didn't stop them trying, which made her weary of the attention.
It also made any male soldiers assigned to her section slack in their attention
to detail. Baker had been commanded by Wallace to inform him of any change in
the old man's signs. He was too busy watching Tricks move around the lab to
really pay much attention to the way in which the monitor screen was registering
a rapid variety of signals. Like Dean, studied so carefully in the next room,
Doc had REM that was going crazy, and sweat poured from his body as the muscles
twitched beneath his skin.
"Don't you think you should go and tell the Gen what's happening here?" Dr.
Tricks said archly.
"No, it's nothing," Baker replied without giving the monitors a second glance.
"The old dude'll probably kick it, but so what?"
"I'm not so sure that the Gen will see it that way," Tricks warned.
"Screw him."
"Brave words when he's not here."
"Screw him. Although I'd rather screw you."
Tricks sighed as Baker moved toward her, and she reached for the small,
palm-sized stun gun she'd taken from the R&D repository some time back for just
such an occasion. But despite this distraction, she still kept an eye on Doc,
who had started to make small whining noises in the back of his throat.
THE WIND HAD BUFFETED Doc until he was huddled into a corner of the cavern,
hunched into a fetal position, trying to protect as much of his aching body as
was possible from the sheer force of the air and the myriad small pebbles and
specks of dust and dirt that whipped and stung against exposed skin. His
eardrums hurt where the roar of the wind drove pressure against them until he
felt that they would burst.
And yet he could still hear Lori screaming over the roar of the wind. It was so
plaintive, so helpless, that it overrode Doc's desire to protect his eyes and
ears. He looked up, screwing up his eyes to try to cut down on the amount of
dust that could tear at them. The force of the wind was such that his eyes dried
almost immediately, and he blinked painfully.
The phosphorescence provided enough light for him to see that Lori had been
blown along almost to a point where she was hidden by the encroaching maw of
darkness. She was clinging to the rocks, her clothes almost torn from her body,
dark flecks on her skin showing where the flesh had been ripped, raising bloody
weals.
Perhaps it was his imagination. Perhaps it was his conscience. Whatever, Doc was
sure that he could see a pleading light in her eyes, despite the fact that
logically he shouldn't be able to tell from this distance, in these conditions.
He knew that if he didn't go to help her, then she would surely die.
And yet she was already dead. Doc knew that. He could recall with an awful
clarity the nightmares he still suffered where he saw her consumed by flames.
Lori was dead. She couldn't be here. Yet she was.
And he couldn't fail her again.
AS BAKER ADVANCED on Tricks, Doc gave a loud yell and almost lifted himself off
the couch.
"I really think you'd better get the Gen," Tricks said softly as Baker turned in
shock. "I think he's ready."
IT WAS ALMOST impossible to describe the sensation of moving against that
implacable gale. It was like drowning in air, yet the stones and dirt that
whipped against him made it at times seem like fighting against a moving, living
wall of rock. And still Doc pressed on, his wiry frame pushing every ounce of
strength he had into forward progress.
He got to within a few yards of Lori before he looked up again. What he saw made
his dry eyes fill with tears, caused him to pull up dead.
There were now three figures being blown into the maw of the tunnel. Lori wasn't
one of them.
"Emily?" he whispered. Doc felt as though any sanity he might be clinging to was
about to be severed, driven from him by the vision that was now before his eyes:
his wife and children being thrown into the darkness by the roar of the gale.
And then the greatest contradiction of all hit him: how could he be fighting
against a howling wind that was blowing his family in the opposite direction?
Many things in nature had changed since skydark, but not something as
fundamental as this.
Doc dropped to his knees and howled.
MILDRED SHOOK her head, her beaded plaits swaying about her shoulders.
"No way. It just can't be."
The doctor sitting opposite her smiled sadly. "You know something, Mildred? If
you were sitting here right now, where I am, you wouldn't be in the slightest
surprised by what you're doing."
Mildred fixed him with a stare. "Come on, you're not telling me that I haven't
got a valid point. More than anyone else you have sitting here, I know that an
initial diagnosis can be misleading…"
"Listen to yourself, Mildred. It's typical denial. We've run a full series of
tests. You have a cyst. It's not major, and it can easily be removed. There
won't be a problem."
Mildred sat back and looked out of the window at the freeway beyond the hospital
entrance. All of a sudden she felt so lonely. Everyone out there seemed so
carefree, so untroubled by an invasion of possibly hostile cells within their
