Atomic Horrors, page 21
You need to die now, to let go, Olive told him and, as always, how right she was, how very right. Why did he keep living with most of his blood gone? He must have lost many pints by now.
He heard a splashing out in the water.
They’re coming now. They’re coming.
He focused his eyes and he saw multitudes of giant crabs down the beach. The moonlight turned them into surreal, impossible things like VW Bugs driving out of the water. They would find him. They would strip him to a skeleton. His bones would bleach in successive days of sun and salt. Gulls and cormorants would pick away at what was left.
The splashing again.
Oh no.
Oh Jesus, no.
A massive crab emerged from the water, its mottled carapace plated, spiky with sharp protrusions, whip like antennae rising into the night. It skittered towards him on segmented legs, reaching out with huge serrated pincers that were clicking open and closed, anxious to grip something, greedy to scissor through flesh and bone. His death knell was a constant jarring, mind-shattering click-click-click-clickety-click. CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICK—
As it seized his leg with one beaded, water-dripping cheliped, slicing through skin and muscle, crunching through bone, he screamed away the last bits of his mind in a hysterical expulsion of terror and agony.
The crab had him.
The crab owned him.
It dragged his carcass to its mouth and began to tear strips of meat from his belly. And despite his screams, he heard its voice very well, its unnatural hissing sibilance lancing through his brain: “Vicki,” it said, “My name is Vicki.…”
BRIDE OF
THE TERMITES
As Luanne lay there bleeding, pulling her broken body ever forward, she remembered that long ago, before the war, she’d had a husband and children. The scary part was that she could not recall what happened to them. She was dying. She supposed that the answers to a lot of things would be known to her soon, or, there’d just be bigger questions.
Crawl, she told herself. Just … crawl.
Her inner voice was the motive force that kept her going even though she was in incredible agony from the beating. Typho and his rat pack really went after her this time. They’d beaten her before, kicked her unconscious many times, but never like this. Now she was ruined. Blood was coming out of her mouth and ass. She felt … loose inside as if things that were supposed to be connected had broken free.
If she could just make it into that old rotting shed. It was only about fifteen feet away. She could get inside, close her eyes. It would be a good place to die. She didn’t want to die out in the streets where the rats and wild dogs would get her.
Crawl.
She smelled bad … like shit and piss and infection, a rank odor that was partly because she hadn’t bathed in weeks and partly because her bowels had let go. And they had pissed on her. After they beat her guts out, Typho and the others had pissed on her. And they had laughed about it.
The shed. She had made it.
Trying to ignore the pain, she pushed open the door and crawled inside, over the splintered floor. There was nothing in there but cobwebs and a few moldering sticks of furniture. The wind blew the door shut behind her and she lay there, coughing out blood.
That Typho.
That goddamned Typho. Doing this to her because she’d helped herself to some canned lasagna. She’d been weak. She hadn’t eaten in days. Typho didn’t care. He claimed that this part of the ruined city belonged to him and everything in it. The food stores. The water. The people. She was poaching, he said. Poaching. She had been beaten before by touching something without asking. He owned everything, even the air, she supposed.
Now it didn’t matter.
Now there would be peace.
Her eyes fluttered closed … then, minutes later, maybe an hour, she opened them. The pain had lessened slightly into a cold numbness that seemed to pervade every inch of her. What had woken her was a tickling on her skin as if someone was dragging a feather over her.
Oh no, she thought. A rat.
But it wasn’t a rat. It was something else, something that made her recoil in revulsion: a huge insect about six inches in length. It was a glossy white, its abdomen composed of closely-packed ring-like segments. It was its legs that were tickling her. It seemed to be tapping her arm repetitively. Its head, in contrast to its body, was a shiny orange-yellow with tiny black eyes and a set of wavering antennae.
She wanted badly to swat it away, but she had no strength. Even breathing was painful. Her lips were crusted shut with drying blood, her vision blurry. She was probably in some sort of delirium. The bug wasn’t there at all. It existed only in her mind.
This was what a feeble, fading voice in her head told her.
Her eyes closed.
When they opened again, there were six such insects on her. They looked familiar, as if she had seen them in a book sometime in the past. They were all madly tapping her with their legs, appraising her with their eyes. She felt an absolute instinctual fear of them.
She wanted to scream.
They were on the walls of the shack, too. Dozens of them and they all seemed to be looking at her, studying her.
Just let me die, she thought. Wait until I’m gone to eat me.
And the most perfectly insane thing was, she had the strongest feeling that they understood her, that they were not just dumb bugs, but something special. Something unique.
As they intently scrutinized her, she drifted off into oblivion.
When Luanne came out of it, it was many days later. How many, she could not be sure. She was only aware with some inner sense of a great passage of time. The amazing thing was that she felt no pain. Not a stitch of it. How was that possible? Maybe she was too far gone. Was that how it was when you were about to die? Did you feel liberated from your pain? Permeated by a feeling of wellbeing and euphoria? Was that it?
She was not alone.
The bugs were still there, only there were many more of them now. They were not on her: they gathered around her in orderly ranks. Some of them had larger heads the color of blood with huge mandibles. Yet, they made no aggressive moves.
They watched patiently.
Her mind was as clear as it had been in days, maybe weeks. She knew what the insects were—termites. There was no mistaking it: they were termites.
But so large, so strange.
Mutations.
They were mutations.
That had to be it. But not sickly and weak like the others she had seen, but vibrant and healthy. The radiation had not harmed them. It had … evolved them into a new order, a higher species.
It was as if they were venerating her somehow like she was royalty. She was more convinced than ever that they were intelligent. She tried to tell herself that such a thing could not be, but the more she argued with herself, the more certain of it she was.
She found them fascinating.
She was no longer repelled by them. They were fellow creatures in a devastated world. She knew that her body was healed, that even her internal injuries and broken bones had been knitted up. She did not know exactly how, only that they had done it. Even the dried blood at her mouth had been cleaned.
They repaired you, she thought. They helped you and … and now you must help them.
But what did they want? That was the question. She knew she was well enough to hop to her feet and run out the door. She didn’t think they would try to stop her. In fact, she was sure of it. That wasn’t their way. They weren’t keeping her as a prisoner. No, they were fawning over her, worshipping her in their own way. They were all sort of standing, balanced on their hind set of legs. As they looked at her, their heads nodded to the left, then the right like puppies awaiting their master’s voice.
They wanted to listen, to hear what she had to say.
So, she started talking.
“We survivors are in a real world of hurt,” she told the attentive crowd of her benefactors. “We human beings made a mess of this world. We really did. Now we try to live, to go on day by day. Get enough food to eat. A safe place to lay our heads at night. We want to start again, put the world, our world, back together again. But how do we do that and should we do it at all? If we started, will we just be dooming future generations? Will we just be creating the same monster that killed us in the first place? Will we be on the same path to Armageddon? Maybe all roads lead to the same destination when we walk them. There’s a word for what I’m trying to tell you … cyclical, that’s it. A cycle that will repeat itself again and again until we find a new road to walk.”
The termites listened with rapt attention. Never in Luanne’s long, hard, frustrating life had anyone ever took this sort of interest in anything she had to say. But they were captivated by all that she said, like she was the second coming of Jesus. A prophet delivered unto them.
“The scientists said we developed from a lower order, an ape-like ancestor. That we evolved from animals and somewhere along the line, we accidentally became intelligent, aware. Some people don’t believe that.” She laughed. “You know why? Because they don’t want to believe it. They like to delude themselves that they’re God’s children, made in his image. What’s that saying? God’s a neurotic, intolerant, greedy sack of shit? No, I know we came from animals. We were nothing but a terrible accident. I grew up with animals. I was used and abused by them. I read about them every day in the newspaper. Animals. Beasts on two legs. All organized into tribes that hated anyone that was different, anyone who thought different, anyone who didn’t believe what they believed. Divisive is the word. It was the only thing we were really good at other than killing each other and stealing what they had. And all of them tribes, oh yes, all of them manipulated by the rich and powerful. Nothing but sheep that were easily led, puppets dancing on strings to a tune whistled by their masters.”
Her captive audience seemed to bristle a bit at that. She figured they were part of a colony that co-existed and served one another, lived for the good of all. The heretical, hypocritical, destructive culture of humanity probably sickened them.
“But where does that leave us? I don’t know. Should mankind be allowed to rise again? Should the same pack of selfish, greedy wolves be allowed to destroy the world a second time? I don’t think so. Which brings me to my situation. What Typho did to me. Because there’s always a Typho, isn’t there? Always some paranoid, aggressive piece of shit trying to lord over the rest of us. I was an easy target, because I’ve been an outsider all my life. I never fit in any appropriate box, so I became a victim like I been a victim my entire life.”
She swallowed, because more of them had gathered now. Hundreds clustered around her, filling the shed. So many, it made her skin crawl, but at the same time she was in awe of their community, their togetherness.
“Now, you apparently fixed me. I don’t know how and I don’t know why you bothered. But here I am. That’s all I got to say.”
The insects muttered in low, droning reverberations as if they were discussing what would come next. As Luanne waited there, they moved in closer and closer, not in a dangerous way, but as if they needed to touch the living god among them.
She had never felt such love before.
Whatever the termites had done to her when they repaired her, she came out of it with her sense of smell highly activated. It was an amazing thing. She could smell the close dankness of the shed, of course, but more so she could smell the richness of growing things outside, flowers blooming and sweet sap running. The foul smell of a scavenging dog a few streets over. Unburied corpses in the distance. She could cast for scent in every direction like a bloodhound.
And she could smell them.
The colony had a peculiar odor that was not exactly sweet or sour, acrid or bland, but a low, oily smell like chemicals. Formaldehyde, she thought. Faint, but there. Kind of like pickles or the juice they were preserved in.
So, when one of Typho’s thugs came for her, as she knew one of them would, she could smell him. She knew by the stink of hormones and glandular secretions that it was a hoodlum called T-Bing: a gigantic ape that routinely beat people to order for his master. Another rabid dog.
She could smell his hate.
But she smelled more than that. She was aware of his fear, too, because beneath that wagonload of black flesh and acid attitude, he was a frightened little boy who had always used his size and strength to intimidate and menace. It hid his numerous insecurities. Because deep inside, he was weak and shivering.
He kicked open the door of the shed. The entire structure shook as it did sometimes in the wind. He filled the doorway.
“Figured you’d be here,” he said. “Just knew. Typho say, go get that ugly bull dyke bitch. See if she still alive. If she is, put her lights out, T-Bing, cancel her ass good and proper. Don’t want that big, stupid lesbo stinking up my streets.”
Luanne nodded. “And what did you say?”
“I say, it done. Sure as shit.”
He stepped forward, a nickel-plated 9mm in one massive fist. She could smell two things on him immediately: indecision and obedience. He didn’t want to kill her, not really, but he would because that’s what his master said.
“Nothing personal, bitch.”
He brought up the gun and then lowered it when he heard a peculiar, high-pitched whirring. “Hell was that?” he asked, fear creeping into him like worms into bad meat. “You hear that?”
She did. It got louder. So loud that it incapacitated him like a directed sonic weapon. He cried out and dropped the gun. He let out a strangled cry and dropped to one knee, pissing himself.
Then one of the soldier termites dropped onto his head. Another attached itself to the back of his neck. Three more climbed his legs. They vaulted from their holes with smooth efficiency. The colony was under attack by an intruder and they knew exactly how to deal with it. T-Bing screamed and thrashed, his fear amplified to the point that he was nearly insane with it. As he fought and cried, the stingers of the soldiers pierced him rapidly again and again like the needles of a sewing machine. They stitched him into a paralyzed, flaccid heap of flesh that could only lay there, drool running from his mouth and his eyes wide and white with terror.
By then, forty or fifty of the soldiers had appeared. Then fifty more. A hundred more. They swarmed over him, stinging him, juicing him with paralytic toxins until he was as senseless and dopy as a fat, juicy spider taken by a hornet.
The soldiers looked to Luanne.
They waited for her orders.
“Can he still feel pain?” she asked them.
Their jointed, wavering antennae telegraphed to her with that same sibilant whirring that his nerve endings were unimpeded. Not only was he aware, but he could feel every piercing stinger sliding in and out of him like a hot pin.
“Bring him to me,” she said.
Like ants, they were incredibly strong and could lift something like thirty times their own body weight. Which would have been like her being able to lift a pickup truck over her head. It was little effort for them to drag a 350-pound man ten feet. They accomplished it in seconds, dumping T-Bing at her feet. She studied him with a combination of pity and hatred. He symbolized everything that was inherently wrong with the human race. He was a pile of trash.
“Render him to bones,” she ordered them. “And do it slowly.”
There was no hesitation.
T-Bing could not scream because his vocal cords were inoperative, but his eyes mirrored his agony as they took him apart piece by piece with their scissoring, razor-sharp mandibles. They peeled his skin free in sections, then they went after his connective tissue and muscles. The smells radiating from him were those of a dying animal, sharp and foul and sour. His mind snapped long before they were done. One of the last things they took were his eyes.
When he was a gleaming rack of bones before her, Luanne was pleased.
She very rarely left the shed, but when she did, seeking out those stragglers who had long before been her friends, she found that she could no longer communicate with them. Her ability to use verbal language had diminished as she became part of the colony. The termites did not communicate the way human beings did. They made a variety of sounds —whirrings, trillings, hissing noises—conveying state of mind and being without cumbersome speech. Their mode of communication was partly telepathic and partly chemical, a purely organic system that was symbolic by nature, an exchange of detailed imagery that was far more descriptive and perceptive than simple spoken language.
When Luanne tried to talk with others, she found herself struggling to form the words that would properly illustrate what was in her mind. It was not only frustrating, but infuriating to a great degree, because simple spoken language could not adequately convey what she was thinking, why she thought it, or how she felt about it. Which was how the termites did it. Each single thought was accompanied by complex images that were intuitive, intellectual, and emotional at the same time.
Her old friends simply stared at her as strings of monosyllabic blather foamed from her lips, words attached to words and strung into incomprehensible sentences that made no earthly sense. It was like trying to talk to someone in the depths of a Tourette’s episode.
Eventually, she gave up.
She was no longer part of their world and their language was bland, insipid, terribly rudimentary. The language of grunting apes. Listening to it not only annoyed her, it repulsed her on some primary level.
After two or three tries, she gave up.
She never left the shed again.
Though she no longer ventured out into the world or had congress with her own species of any sort, she received all the gossip in the streets. It was a simple matter to send her mind out and feel what the stragglers felt, hear their thoughts and fears. She knew how many were dying of radiation poisoning. The hottest parts of the city. Those exposed to the worst dust storms of fallout. Mutations that had been seen. Where food was to be found, uncontaminated drinking water, safe shelter. Which communicable diseases were making the rounds.
