Everybody Scream! (46 page)

His wife and daughters had never caught up with him. Now where the hell were they? Probably watching those fireworks he had heard going off a little while back. Was that them up ahead? Christ, were they still gawking at those stupid crab legs? There was a small crowd there now but Nick saw his daughter Claire’s bright pink Sphitt t-shirt and knew it was them; he quickened his pace and drew in enough breath to berate them.

“For Christ’s sake, Venus, are you still here?” he began, arm aching, pride smarting, grateful for the opportunity to yell at someone.

“Look,” she told him.

Nick looked. His brow furrowed. “What the blast are they doing?”

The three Bedbugs stood before the legs in a line, the one in the middle with some kind of black device on a strap around its head area which had no winking lights or lit screens but which exuded a thin bluish stream of gas from a grilled vent in one side.

There was a waterfall splashing out of the sky. It poured over several of the legs and had a faint pinkish tinge. A large muddy puddle with trash floating in it spread around the Bedbugs’ pincered feet. Was that creature actually underwater in its dimension, having now torn a hole wide enough to let in its sea? How long might it go on for–long enough to flood the carnival until they could get some zapper under the flow to catch and eliminate it? Might the hole in the dam widen, the gush too violent to contain, until that alien sea flooded all of Punktown? Or was this a sort of amniotic fluid released with the birth of the creature into this plane?

Nick saw a curled leg uncurl and touch the muddy ground; he could see it sink and settle as weight shifted onto it heavily. He watched a pincered claw appear from the sky, then become a whole leg which also settled into the mud, all within thirty seconds. He counted fifteen legs in various states of advancement, with more claws appearing.

The moon-sculpture called The Head was nearly directly overhead.

“Let’s go, Mom.” Mallory clung to Venus’s waist. “I’m scared.”

“Wow!” said a little Choom boy who came running to watch.

Something else began to appear…not a leg. Its shape and identity were not apparent at first, particularly through the widening pink waterfall.

“My God!” Venus exclaimed, recoiling suddenly against Nick. “Look at those eyes!” And then she let out a scream…but at something new that had come into her vision.

Toward the crowd came a human man, pained but determined. Blood from his nose had caked on his face, in his mustache. He wore a dusty black plastic jacket and carried a frighteningly over-complex rifle with multiple barrels, heavy-looking for him to carry let alone the dead child he had taken it from.

“Look out,” he croaked to the crowd firmly, and they obliged…had been obliging even before he spoke.

One of the Bedbugs noticed him and began to chitter excitedly, a cicada-like sound.

The man took a wide stance and red ray bolts sprayed from him.

The chattering Bedbug went into a crazed tarantella. Some of the bolts glanced off its chitin-like armor. Others cracked the shell, sent pieces of it flying like pottery shards, and a viscous greenish fluid spattered and ran from the punctures. It went onto its back, kicking and lashing its tentacle-like arms in the spasm of death.

Hector switched his aim to the one in the middle.

The black device, specifically. The blue smoke vanished, the plastic or metal or chitin shell dented, cracked, and from the cracks escaped flicking snake tongues of black electricity. The web of electricity spread from the device across the shaking Bedbug’s body. The device didn’t explode…the black current simply stopped, and released from its grip, the Bedbug dropped dead, its two prosthetic arms adapted to life in a hominid-dominated society steaming.

Hector ducked as one of the giant legs shot out of the air and swept at his head. Another–it caught his sleeve. He hurled himself to the ground, and from the ground on his back fired at the last Bedbug as it came leaping-scrambling toward him with maniacal speed and movements, chattering piercingly. Before the whipping arms could reach him the ray bolts drove it back, back, back. It fell, convulsed, the cicada-screams dwindling and green life fluid oozing.

Hector rolled away from the reaching arms through the mud, regained his footing and now faced the eyes of the Gatherer.

It made no sound, no cry, but despite the nonhuman aspect of the eyes, Hector could see and hear the roar of hatred in them. The chanting device was destroyed; it was wedged between worlds…pinned. But so long as it was reaching into this world it could still collect the energy-traces of the freshly dead. Hector leveled the muddy humming rifle and squeezed its trigger.

The ray bolts glanced off the thick external skull-like housing around the eyes, but one eye dented in, dented more, caved inward and a pudding-thick green blood came flopping out. Quick scribbles of black electricity also issued from the wound. The great creature did not cry out even now, but the legs had gone mad, all clawing the air and mud, tangling with each other, the many heads of a Hydra with a sword in its breast. Hector couldn’t hit the other eye through that frenzy, or worsen the damage of the existing wound. Hot rays whined off the armored legs–one of them, the first one, still sporting the spray-painted words “Toby Fucks” like a tattoo.

A bolt ricocheted back at Hector, over his shoulder, almost hitting someone off behind him as well. This wasn’t working. He looked down at the gun, read the tiny digital displays. Plasma launcher. He thumbed the switch and a green light came on. Again he pointed the rifle and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

Someone from behind was coming forward, and took his elbow.

“Let me see that,” said Nick Bovino, jaw set. “I was in the army.”

Hector allowed the man to take the weapon from him, stepped to one side to numbly watch.

Nick fell into the wide stance of a rock singer, swivelled the gun, muscles bulging, and yelled as he launched plasma capsule after plasma capsule…

The white hot gelatinous material quickly encased a number of those limbs that pawed at the air like the legs of rearing demon horses. The legs blazed a trembling white, and the increased frantic kicking and stamping sent hot globules flying, dislodged, but fortunately no one was hit.

The audience grew–people came running, children with puffs of candyfloss–and some of its members advanced to plant themselves beside Nick. Two teenage gang boys spat at the creature and then opened fire with their revolvers loaded with a much weaker plasma bullet. A paunchy middle-aged Choom with a baseball cap blew off rounds on an old semiauto with lead bullets. A Fog security man arrived panting, then another, confused as to whether to break up the firing squad or add to it–but by then Nick had started punctuating his plasma onslaught with rocket grenades. This cooperation was not harmony. The audience and shooters shared a focus, unified in fear, and loathing, and hostility. On one hand it was encouraging. On the other, these people weren’t sure why they were fighting this monster, except that they had seen one man, Hector, battling it. They only knew it was big and unknown to them and so they feared it and so they had to destroy it. Only by a dim instinct and by good fortune were they correct, this time, in their hostility…and so it was heartening to Hector nonetheless as he watched them kill the Gatherer. This time it was cavemen spearing a mammoth rather than big game hunters shooting an elephant. It had a good purpose. He could admire them–cautiously.

The rocket grenades were what did the trick, so it was Nick, really, who killed the monster, the others just adding their symbolic support. And even then they couldn’t be sure the great animal was actually dead–both eyes gone, chunks of armor blasted away, the legs no longer thrashing, just quivering limply, dragging the mud, some finally melted to stumps by the plasma, the constant pink waterfall rinsing away the oozing green blood–as it slowly slipped backward into its own dimension. The head with the black electricity dancing from its shattered eyes submerged into empty air, vanished. Leg after leg. The waterfall decreased. The water stopped, the receding stopped, the portal clamped shut on two last legs, one of them reading “Toby Fucks.” And these Nick blasted with plasma and grenades while the security men pushed everyone else back. The bombs shook Hector; he flinched. And it was over.

Shiny with sweat and grinning, exhilarated, Nick looked around for Hector as if he might hand him a trophy. He would make love to Venus tonight like a teenager. “Hey–you want this back?” He extended the bulky rifle.

“Keep it.” Hector smiled tiredly, his bruised belly unknotting slowly, gingerly…but with pleasure, as if insinuating itself into a soothing steamy bath. “Thank you.”

“Yeah…sure.” Nick would have liked to ask the man some questions but he was already slipping away into the crowd, vanishing from sight like the creature. Nick was left standing confused, holding the assault engine, muscular and sweaty, and it was Nick who would appear in holographs and photos on the front pages of tomorrow’s tabloids and newspapers: “The Man Who Beat the Monster,” “The Hero at Last Night’s Paxton Fair.”

When he got home that night and listened to the news before taking a soothing steamy bath, Hector would learn that the government’s attack on the creature affixed to The Head had been successful. The panning camera view of the corpse would make him shudder.
Only a Nymph
. He would count five pairs of various-sized eyes, some of a different color or shape. He had only seen a
fifth
of the Gatherer’s immense face, he would realize.

The Gatherer above the bank in inner Paxton had come fully through, devastating much of that vast structure but not reaching the street below before various security forces could respond. Fortunately, at that hour the bank had been nearly empty and only a few people, mostly police, were killed (and drained of their trace-energies?) before the Gatherer climbed back into the sky and disappeared again into its own world.

It would soon develop that the Earth Colonial Network would send teams of soldiers, accompanied by Theta researchers, into the vast corral of the Bedbugs to guard those tormented inhabitants from the feasting, with orders to fend off or kill those Bedbugs that persisted. The souls would be claimed as kidnapped members of the Colonies, and it would be demanded that the Bedbugs release them to continue on the various roads they had been hijacked from, return them to the various places–where they might have come to a final rest–from which they had been abducted. Once in a great while drastic, decisive action did cut machete-like through the jungles of red tape. This was one such rare occasion, precipitated by the attempted invasion of the three Gatherers.

Until they could be freed, the harvested ghosts would slowly cease the idiot wailing of the damned…though still forlorn, disoriented, mournful, they would come to only sniffle or moan at the most. This change would make it easier for the Theta crews to question them coherently and learn from them. Their sense of waiting would take on another character, and though most wouldn’t be sure where they were destined now, some would actually become high-spirited and optimistic. The shadow of Johnny Leng would not be one of these.

Hector would call his old workplace the next afternoon and admit his role. His killing of the Bedbug priests. And he would reveal the terrible secret of purple vortex. He would be anxiously invited down to his old workplace to talk, to help…

Even through all his own fear and loathing, however, Hector couldn’t fully
hate
the Bedbugs. He could even identify with them, a little bit. He feared sharks. But he didn’t hate sharks. Sharks had to eat, didn’t they?

That night, or actually in the early hours of tomorrow, Hector would finish his bath, watch some more news reports on VT, shut off his VT with a tired smile, go into his bedroom and stretch out on his bed…and sleep.

His greenish-blackish Kodju silk jacket was tossed over a chair and he had removed his string tie and its clasp, loosened his collar, rolled up his shirt sleeves to his elbows, but Del didn’t remove Dingo’s pistol from his waistband, starkly outlined there against his white shirt. Sophi was holding him, crying softly, the pistol touching both their bellies at once like a cold erection between them. Del whispered to her, rubbed her back through her sweater. Stroked her thick mane of hair.

“I’m sorry, Del,” she moaned.

“You don’t have to say that. It’s my fault. I didn’t listen when you needed me. I was selfish. It’s my fault.” But Del knew it was his fault and her fault and Johnny Leng’s fault and Roland LaKarnafeaux’s fault and the Martians’ fault and Mitch Garnet’s fault and on and on. They were all interconnected, all gears in the machine. And so he knew better than to unduly take on much more than his share of the responsibility for tonight’s carnage. Carnage. Funny word. From the Latin
caro
,
carnis
–representing “flesh.” The same source for the word carnal. And for carnival. Del had read once, and it had stuck in his mind and strangely resurfaced now, that “carnival” came from the Latin words
caro
and
levo
, and meant “to take away flesh.”