Eternal Life Inc. (24 page)

He nodded to himself. This checked out with the view out front, from the car. With the façade gone he’d been able to look into all four apartments on this floor. In the one on the right, this one, the floor was gone. The next apartment, the one he was to meet Susan in, had looked pretty intact, while the last two were clogged with rubble from the roof collapsing through the ceilings.

Harry checked his watch. He had less than fifteen minutes to check out this floor. He moved up the hall keeping close to the wall. He glanced into the second apartment.

The rotting remains of a door sagged open against the inside wall, but the concrete floor looked solid enough. He tested it anyway before stepping through. A hall led to a large living room
where the collapsed façade left it open to the storm blowing through a curtain of foliage.

A walk-in closet and a small bathroom opened off the hall. In the bathroom a sink had been torn off the wall and smashed into the toilet in some long ago orgy of destruction. The empty eye sockets of a human skull glared up at him from a nest of smashed ceramics. Harry noticed more bones scattered around, broken and gnawed. They didn’t look that old, he thought, and was startled by a scuttling rustle off to one side. He spun around with his Glock ready and caught a glimpse of what looked like a mutated sewer rat disappearing down the open toilet drain hole.

The rat-thing was huge and elongated like a dachshund, with a long segmented tail and a scorpion-like stinger on the end of it. Harry kept his gun on the drain and backed out of the toilet. His heart beat wildly and his breath was coming in hard, sharp gasps as adrenaline pumped through his body.

John Wayne rides again, he thought, as he leaned against the wall and reached into his mind, opening himself to his ka and shutting off the flow of adrenaline and other stress hormones. He felt his heartbeat slow and his breathing stutter down to normal. He’d heard about weird animal mutations down here in the Sinks, but hearing about them and seeing them were two different things.

He quickly checked the rest of the apartment, the living room and what had probably been a bedroom, but found nothing but scattered bones and overgrown rotting clumps of what might have been anything from furniture to bodies. After the bathroom, he didn’t bother to check too closely.

He walked back out of the apartment and turned down the hall to check the last two doors. As he expected, they were both clogged with piles of rubble that spilled out into the hall. He walked over and looked up at the waterfall pouring through the hole in the ceiling at the end of the hall. The hole was almost six feet wide. A long flap of concrete ceiling was hanging by a pair
of rusting reinforcing rods against the back wall. The hole formed a perfect drain funneling all the rainwater off the half-collapsed roof down into the corridor.

As he stared up through the hole, he was blinded again by a lightening flash that overloaded his night goggles with white light. He looked away and waited for his vision to clear. Just then, he heard a scuttling clatter of rubble falling from the hole and instinctively swung his gun toward the sound, fearing that one of those rat things would jump down at him. When his vision cleared, he saw only a dribble of rubble that must have been dislodged by the rain.

He turned back to the apartment and his rendezvous. It was almost time. He stationed himself in the little toilet off the hall, after first jamming a piece of broken ceramic into the drain to block it. Hiding in the darkness, listening to the rain and the occasional rumble of thunder, he wondered what he thought he was hiding from. There was no sign of Seraphim, Slavers, or anyone else. Did he really believe that Susan was hiding something? And all because of a nagging doubt, a vague feeling, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on…Was he going paranoid nuts or something?

He was just supposed to meet Susan here. That was all. Then they would go deeper into the Sinks to meet her contacts. That would be the time to be paranoid.

Once again, he saw her lifting the veil, taking off the dark sunglasses, revealing the bruised battered remnants of her beauty. He felt her crying in his arms, and for just a moment he caught a glimpse of that “something” that had been nagging him all day, that “something” that brought him here early, to stand hidden in the darkness; just a glimpse of a shadow of something that fled again when he heard the soft, muffled whine of approaching grav-units.

A moment later, the big black limousine nosed through the curtain of vines and moss hanging in front of the apartment. It
was showing no lights, but Harry felt the back-wash of detector radiation sweeping the apartment. The car turned ponderously, blocking the opening. Then it settled, rocking gently on its grav-units, a few inches above the floor.

37

There Be Monsters Here

Harry stood in the smashed bathroom and wondered, what now? Why didn’t he just go out and meet Susan? She had kept her word and was right on time, and he had found nothing here to back up his own paranoid suspicions, but still he hesitated. He could hear the muffled hum of the car’s idling spin-generators through the background patter of rain. Distant thunder muttered uneasily. What was he waiting for, an engraved invitation maybe? He shrugged and was about to step out of the bathroom when he heard the faint click of a car door latch. He hesitated and then carefully leaned out of the doorway to see what was happening.

The windows of the grav-car were polarized darkness but a long sliver of light fanned out of the interior as the door slowly swung open. At that moment, a giga-watt lightning flash burst directly overhead.

Once again, white-light overload blinded the night vision goggles, and Harry ripped them off impatiently and his baseball cap went flying in the process. A moment later, a deafening clap of thunder drove him staggering back into the bathroom. For a few seconds, he couldn’t see or hear anything, but as the thunder rolled away, he thought he felt something rush past his doorway. He couldn’t be sure; maybe it was just his imagination, maybe just the pressure wave from the explosive lightning strike freakishly channeled through the apartment, or maybe just sensory overload.

He let the goggles hang around his neck, brushed old plaster dust out of his hair, and peeked out. The car door stood all the way open, and the soft pearly radiance of its interior lights spilled out into a darkness filled with rotting concrete and old
bones. Susan sat in the softly upholstered interior, illuminated like some dark, fairy queen, dressed in black as she had been that afternoon with the veil of her little nineteen forties, June Allyson hat pulled down. The dark sunglasses were gone. She sat motionless, waiting.

Harry regarded the tableaux. It reminded him of one of those old Renaissance paintings with a solitary figure sitting in darkness, dramatically illuminated by a candle flame or single ray of light. He shook his head and smiled appreciatively. Susan always did know how to make an entrance.

Just then, she slowly turned her head as if she’d heard his thoughts, but she’d probably heard some minor scuffing sound when he shifted his weight to peek around the doorframe. At any rate, she seemed to look directly at him, but it was doubtful she saw him. She sat in the light, her eyes not adjusted to the darkness, and even though a little light from the interior of the car spilled down the hall, the section where Harry stood was in deep shadow.

She smiled to herself, just a slight Mona Lisa quirk of the lips. Then she slid across the seat to the open door and started to get out. Harry noticed she was wearing elegant, open-toed, stiletto high heels. Not very practical down here in the Sinks, he thought.

As she stretched one long silk stocking leg to get out, her short black skirt rode up over her thigh. Harry caught a glimpse of the soft, milky white skin where the old fashioned, now high fashion, garter belt caught the top of the stockings. He felt his breath catch in his throat and his stomach tightened in that old familiar way. He wondered if he would ever get over her.

She paused, holding the pose as if she knew he was watching and knew what effect it was having. She bent over, put her elbow on her other knee, rested her chin in her hand and looked directly at him. This time, there was no doubt that she saw him. “Hello, Harry!” she said in a breathless whisper. “Have you been
waiting long?”

Harry gave an embarrassed sigh and started to step out into the light. At the last moment, he remembered the pistol he still held in his hand and stuck it back in his shoulder holster. “Hello, Susan,” he said as he started to walk towards her. “This is kind of a funny place for old friends to meet.”

“Old friends?” she said archly, and then shrugged dismissively. “But why not here? This is where it all started.”

“Where what started?” Harry asked. As he approached the car, he thought he heard something rustle in the flickering darkness beyond the faint fan of light from the open door. He stiffened, coming to a stop, squinting, trying to make out what it was. He should have kept the night goggles on, he thought as his hand strayed towards the Glock. At that moment, three lightning flashes, one after the other, lit up the apartment like an old Frankenstein movie set. Harry squinted into the stuttering blue light, looking for his own imagined monsters but saw nothing but rotting clumps of indeterminate refuse.

He thought he heard Susan start to say something, but it was washed away in a roll of thunder. As the thunder grumbled into silence, she continued, “Well, it’s the night for it, don’t you think?” She swung her other leg out of the car and sat in the open door with her knees primly together and smoothed her skirt down.

“For what?” Harry asked irritably, peering into the darkness.

“For bad dreams and worse memories. Do you still have bad dreams, Harry?” She hugged herself and shivered as if she was suddenly cold. “I know I do. And lately, reality has been nothing to brag about either.”

“What’s going on, Susan?” Harry asked as he leaned on the open car door and looked down at her. She looked so small and vulnerable, huddling in the light of that huge black limousine. Like a frightened child, Harry thought, and felt an almost irresistible urge to get down on his knees and wrap her in his
arms.

“What’s going on?” she repeated and looked down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap. “I told you. I’ve made arrangements. I’m going far away before it’s too late.” She lifted her head and looked up at him. Through the flimsy, black net veil, he could clearly see the cuts and bruises that disfigured her face. Her blue eyes seemed unnaturally large, the pupils dilated with the thousand-yard stare of a shell shock victim. “Come with me,” she pleaded.

Harry closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “We’ve been through this before,” he said. “We both know it’s over.” Even as he spoke the words, he knew they were a lie. He wondered if it would ever be over.

He looked down into her eyes, those sad, beautiful blue eyes. They filled his world; they were his world. In their fathomless depths, guilt and retribution were redeemed with the promise of love reborn. He could have the dream back again. He and Susan together…

Without knowing how he got there, he suddenly found himself kneeling before her, gently lifting the veil from before those beautiful blue eyes. “You and I together again, Harry.” Her lips were moist and full, whispering to his deepest desires. “We can have the dream again…Take me, Harry! Oh please take me!” she moaned with sudden passion.

Harry felt desire sweep over him like a dark tidal wave. “Careful, Harry!” a small voice whispered in the back of his mind. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. There’s something wrong here. You know it. You can feel it.” Harry groaned because he knew it was true and he wanted her anyway.

“But she’s another man’s woman,” that little voice made the mistake of pointing out. “Yes! And see what he did to her!” Harry screamed in silent triumph as the walls of his resolve disintegrated. He took Susan in his arms and pulled her down onto the back seat of the limousine.

A faint smile played across her lips, her eyes were vast fathomless seas a man could happily drown in. He felt her arms around him, answering his desire, her lips swollen with promise. “Kiss me!” Her breath whispered past his ear and pulled a last groan of surrender from his lips as they met hers…

In that instant, when their lips touched, when it was already too late, Harry knew he’d made a mistake. In that instant, he knew what had been bothering him ever since meeting Susan that afternoon. He knew it in the same way he knew Mae West wasn’t human as soon as he touched her hand.

Even though Susan had worn black leather gloves that afternoon and shied away when he tried to touch her face, he had felt something was wrong. He felt it more strongly when he held her in his arms but love, guilt, and shame refused to acknowledge it. Not until this moment, when their lips met and there could be no doubt, not until this moment when it was already too late, not until his ka screamed, “This isn’t Susan! This can’t be Susan! This is something wearing a Susan body, something inhuman, something filled with insane, ravenous hunger…”

Harry tried to pull away, but Susan’s arms tightened around his body like steel bands. “No!” he groaned and tried to twist his lips aside. He gave a hoarse scream as small, sharp teeth bit into his lower lip and would not let go. A hand, possessed of inhuman strength, grabbed his head and forced it back until their lips met again. Harry felt the teeth let go and tasted the blood from his torn lip as her lips closed on his and her tongue darted into his mouth before he could stop it.

Her tongue squirmed deeper into his mouth. It felt cold and slimy with a sharp, metallic taste. He bit down on it, hard. It was like biting down on steel mesh that ground against his teeth as it pushed into his mouth. He felt its ravenous hunger, read its monomaniacal intent, flashing like red neon in his mind.

His arms were still free and he grabbed her hair with both hands and tried to pull her head away, but she held on with such
inhuman tenacity that instead he tore out a large, bloody clump of her hair. He gagged at what he had done, but the thing that wore her body didn’t even notice.

He tried to get to the Glock, but the thing held his body clamped so tightly that it was impossible. He felt its tongue crawling across the top of his mouth, blindly seeking the soft palate at the top of his throat, that soft spot of vulnerability so beloved by suicides, where it could drive up into his brain and make the electric connection that would suck the ka out of his body.

Black waves of panic threatened to engulf him. He wanted to open to his ka and draw on its extra strength to fight back, but he knew instinctively that was just what this monster wanted. By opening to his ka, he would only be exposing it, making it easier for this eater of kas, to satisfy its ravenous hunger.

His body bucked and flopped convulsively like a hooked fish, but Susan’s arms only tightened their inhuman, vice-like grip, crushing his ribs and driving the breath from his lungs. He tried to break her hold by kicking out against the floorboards, levering his body up and twisting so that they rolled off the car seat and crashed onto the concrete floor.

He felt her tongue press against his soft palate. He screamed and gagged, rolling over and over through mud, mold, and rainwater rot but he was beyond noticing. Only a pinhole of reason remained in a wall of blind, animal fear.