Golgotha Run (7 page)

Such people who reckoned time would also consider Dogboy Who Waits as maybe
fourteen years old, but of course he didn’t think in those terms. He was
simply there and alive in the faintly fungus-phosphorescent dark that was all
he had ever known.

Now the time had come for movement and speed, even urgency. It would not be
long before others sensed and smelled the kill.

Working quickly with his blade, Dogboy Who Waits gutted the okapi, identified
those lights that were best to eat by touch and wolfed them down. This was the
quick nutrition that needed no cooking. Then he began the less hasty business
of jointing the carcass and laying up the choicest cuts of hock and haunch in
his salt sack.

The kill had been an adult, and large enough that Dogboy Who Waits could
countenance leaving some proportion of it for others; the impulse to claim it
all and defend it to the snarling death was surmountable. And this was
fortunate, because torchlight was winding its way cautiously through the debris strewn
through the tunnels.

As the torches drew closer, Dogboy Who Waits recognised those who were holding
them: three boys of roughly his own age, a slightly younger girl trailing
behind. A stable and viable breeding-group—insofar as stability and
viability had any meaning down here in the tunnels. An actual tribe.

And to the extent that he could know anybody, Dogboy Who Waits knew them, and
knew their rituals.

The leader of them—of middle-size, but with the alert look of one who led by
resource rather than by means of sheer, mere physical bulk—grunted in what
passed for the sub-language peculiar to his tribe, and gestured with his torch
to the small pile of entrails which Dogboy Who Waits had, with some
consideration, left to one side when butchering his kill.

It is possible that some practices and rituals are basic to human beings,
ingrained and dormant in the backbrain and only resurfacing when some imposed
and overall patina of “civilization” is absent. On the other hand—and far
more plausibly—people just do stuff. All kinds of stuff.

People do certain things in the past and then, quite by chance, they’ll do
something similar a thousand years later. It’s just what people do.

In any case, it just so happened that this particular tribe had evolved an
interpersonal ceremony in common with that of plains-dwelling Indians from
several centuries before. The leader of the tribe planted his torch in the
accumulated mulch of the tunnel floor.

Dogboy Who Waits picked up the entrails, and slowly drew them through the
flame. The partially-digested fungus within cooked with a strangely pleasant
small, like frying mushrooms.

Dogboy Who Waits and the leader of the tribe hunkered down, facing each other.
Each took an end of the length of cooked intestine in their mouths, and then
they began to swallow. And swallow. And swallow until their faces were no more
than inches apart.

Now would come the actual test of strength—and Dogboy Who Waits had the
uneasy feeling that he didn’t have it in him. Or, rather, that he had too
much. He was beginning to wish that he hadn’t filled up on fresh lights after
making his kill.

Dogboy Who Waits risked a glance at the other two members of the tribe, the
boy and the girl, who were watching the contest expectantly, hungrily. They
might fall on him in anger if they saw him cheat—but it was certain they
would fall on him, and tear him limb from limb, if he lost.

Dogboy Who Waits decided to risk it, and do what the leader of the tribe,
immured in ritual to the point where doing so would never so much as occur to
him. He bit down hard on the length of cooked intestine in his mouth and
heaved…

And later.

Dogboy Who Waits clambered over a twisted mass of scaffolding and swung
himself up onto the sagging remains of what had once been a maintenance
gantry. From here it was a clear run to the place he called, in his nonverbal
way, home—a ruptured and ketone-reeking tank that had once fuelled the
electrical back-up generators of a Transit Authority depot.

The tribe had tracked after him, angrily, for the better part of half a mile,
but there had been a sense of squabbling half-heartedness about the pursuit.
Their leader had, after all, suffered a lapse in authority—he might have
lost the ritual contest by way of trickery, but he had still lost. He might
not end up with the others falling on him and tearing him limb from limb, in
much the same way as they would have done to Dogboy Who Waits, but the sense
of dissention had given Dogboy Who Waits the edge he needed to escape.

Now Dogboy Who Waits made his way along the gantry, senses alert for the
slightest evidence of movement or danger—and all unaware that others were
hunting, waiting in a manner that would put his own skills to shame…

The explosion set Dogboy Who Waits on fire and knocked him from the gantry to
fall thirty feet and hit a loose pile of garbage and concrete scree crumbled
from the tunnel walls. Free hydrocarbons, produced over years by the decomposing garbage, briefly and fitfully ignited under the body’s immolation.

The pain was immense, impossible to bear—and then it was simply gone. It
had reached the point of overload, where the neurosystem could not recognise
it as such. Dogboy Who Waits lay sprawled on the rubble and smouldering
garbage, breathing in flame. The mucus in his lungs converted instantly to
steam, expanded catastrophically in his lungs and burst them. In the salt-sack
slung from his body, choicest cuts of nocturnal okapi meat roasted merrily
alongside his own.

“Aw,
fuck!
” came a somewhat irritated voice to one side. “Why’d ya have to use an incendiary round, Karl? Is there any way we can at least save the fuckin’ head?”

“This is WWAXZY News, every hour, on the hour—sponsored by Balls of Joy
Premium-brand Profiteroles.
Mm-mm.
Just taste that creamy biotextured soy-milk goodness! Balls of Joy is a property-division of GenTech Industries SA
and Creamy Goodness is a registered trademark. All rights reserved.

“And our top story is, of course, that Freak-E has officially announced her
split, both romantically and professionally, from manager, Slee-Z. In an
official statement she said: ‘You nothing but a scrub, Slee-Z. All you ever
done is cash in on my talent, motherf_____r. Well you can kiss my round black a__ if you
think you ever gonna make another cent out of me. I’m Big
Master X’s b____h now. Word to your motherf______g mom!’

“The rest of Freak-E’s statement is unfit even for broadcast on this station
but highlights included allegations that Slee-Z has one of the world’s largest
collection of porcelain teapots and isn’t adverse to the use of a strap-on
when it comes to bedroom fun.

“Big Master X is CEO of Big Black Beats Inc and a self-made multi-billionaire.
Born in the Brooklyn No-Go in 2007,
Big Master X—real name Justin Jones—overcame the combined handicaps of
having a pronounced stutter, being massively obese and hitting every branch of
the ugly tree when he fell out of it, to record his first number one single by
the time he was nine. The following year he set up his own record label and
within six months accepted an eight-figure offer from Eidolon Corp to buy out
Big Black Beats. Freak-E is the latest in a string of female recording artists
signed to BBB with whom Big Master X has been romantically linked following
high profile affairs with Russian teen rap sensation Ivana Sukayov and all
three members of Afghan agit-pop trio, Bombs Not Burkas.

“Slee-Z was unavailable for comment but sources close to the music, clothing
and prostitution mogul have told this station that Slee-Z is unlikely to take
Freak-E’s defection, especially to his biggest rival, lying down.

“In other news, aspiring Independent presidential candidate, William Hicks,
has announced that he has proof that the information linking the Democratic
Confederation of the Congos with the Basque Reunification cell who took out
the Washington Memorial last spring to be entirely fabricated.

“What kind of President, asks Hicks, could be so addled and opportunistic as
to confuse two entirely different and separate world powers purely on the
basis that he considers them both to be dangerous foreigners with guns?

“A White House source, speaking off the record, sez: ‘William Hicks might once
have had a first-class mind, but these latest statements show that he’s now
completely delusional—delusion evidenced by his belief that he could ever
become President in any real world.’

“And if the independent candidate is delusional then it looks like these
things are catching. We here at WWAXZY have been receiving some very strange
reports today.

“In Tokyo, more than a hundred subway commuters have spontaneously developed
symptoms consistent with that of a Sarin attack. Physical traces of any kind
of contaminant has yet to be found.

“The images of ghost-like and gigantic women have been glimpsed floating over
several of the world’s most isolated communities, variously described as
resembling the Angel of Mons, Winged Victory of Samathrace and, in the New
Hegonomy of Bangkok as that of Rati, Ragalata the vine of love, Kelikila the
Shameless, Mayarati the Deceiver—a multiple deity currently appearing in her
aspect of a huge-breasted woman who drives all who might behold her mad with
carnal lust. To which, all WWAXZY can say, is that some godless savages get
all the luck.

“And speaking of massive goddesses who drive all who might behold them mad
with carnal lust, we now return you to our back-to-back marathon of Freak-E
hits. Here’s the hot new mix of ‘Be My Pimp’…”

He was:

Caught and killed and falling through darkness, tumbling head-over-heels with his heart in his mouth; boogiemen in the dark, their juju light shining bright behind the ragged holes of their eyes; still he continued to fall and it was heard to breathe… razor-shards in his lungs and blood on the walls and sick, slick mucus on the walls and something was happening to his—

He was:

Plunging through a cavern of membrane, tubular clusters of matter clinging to the sides and small lights flashing among them in a manner reminiscent of readouts. Here and there the membrane walls were ripped open to expose a darkness in which hideously distorted images of human faces were projected: white circles with black-circle eyes and screaming yaws of mouths.

His:

Skin felt loose and gelid. Without pain it sloughed off from his bones and streamed behind him as he fell and (sloughing and reforming, hauling itself back in and tangling, twisting around, transmuting into something bright, so bright, and metametallic that he…)

He:

Hit the floor of the cavern headfirst. Again, there was no pain, merely the
abrupt cessation of motion. He lay there for a moment, face buried in a soft
and decomposing mulch of what might be meat—or the idea of meat—then
hauled himself up.

The skeletal remains of hands attached to forearms sprouted from the fleshy
cavern floor, rotted to bone that was a bright and absolute white—far whiter
than any bone one might encounter in any real world. The hands were shrouded
in a haze of branching microtubular filaments—it was as if something had
rotted the flesh away with such peculiar precision as to leave the neural
matter intact.

The hands moved. They clutched and scrabbled at him, grabbing at him with a
cloying intimacy that seemed to slide around inside his head. Something hot
and clotted bursting in his
head
…

And he:

Screamed. Screamed so hard he thought his lungs might painlessly burst. And
from him came a Big Light—like a reflex-sting, a burst of white-hot plasma,
blasting the clutching hands away from him and burning them to nothing.

He:

For a moment he stood in the smoking crater of charred meat, staring ahead
dumbly. After a while he realised that he was holding his hands in front of
his face, realised what he was looking at: mirror-bright, his hands were, his
whole body was, as though sculpted from solid but nevertheless in some sense
fluid chrome.

The sense of cool air on his face.

The explosion of plasma that had come from him had ripped a hole in the
membrane-wall of the cavern. Bright light came from it, bright shapes moved
beyond.

Feet slipping in grease, crunching on the burned remains of clinging hands,
Eddie Kalish walked towards the rip.

“There you go. That’s a boy!”

Eddie Kalish opened a bleary eye to see something he had never seen before.

Well, he had, but the transformation of it was of such a nature that it left
the pattern-recognition areas of the mind temporarily wrong-footed.

When you thought of Trix Desoto, you thought of her in a comedy-nurse costume,
wounded, close to death—and about to turn into some diabolical monstrosity
from the very lowest reaches of Hell. If Hell actually existed, of course,
which of course it didn’t.

Looking at her sitting there, now, on the edge of the hospital bed, relaxed
and cheerful in an underwired patent-leather catsuit that would do wonders for
the self-esteem of any girl, and so on Trix Desoto contrived to be
spectacular, it took the mind a moment to adjust.

“Now, my advice to you,” said Trix Desoto,”would be to get the ‘what happened’
and ‘where am I’ out the way with the minimum of fuss. Everybody tries to find
a new way of saying it, and it never works.”

Eddie looked blearily around the room. Some part of him vaguely expected it to
be a sterile environment, white-tile walled and lit by harsh and buzzing
fluorescent tubes. Instead, it was just the kind of neat little room you might
find in an expensive private nursing home called Sunny Gables or the like.
Plaster walls and cornicing. Drapes over the window. Discreet little oil-pastel landscapes dotted around.