Hell on Earth (18 page)

The reasoning part of my brain ran the odds and concluded that we were screwed. It had done the same on Deimos where Fly and I had beaten the odds so often as to give a bookie a nervous breakdown. That was with just two top-of-the-line human beings against boxes of monsters. Now with four of us, we had the boxes of monsters badly outnumbered.

Albert and I entered the alley that felt like home after the grocery store. One advantage of fighting monsters was not having to worry about identification and who-goes-there games. There was a certain gait to a running human that the zombies lacked. They forgot a lot about being human.

Fly sighed and shook his head, somehow managing to say “I can't take you
anywhere!”
and “welcome back” simultaneously without speaking a word. We were together again.

D
amn, I was glad to see Arlene again. After all we'd been through together, survival was getting to be a habit. If reality took her away from me in blood and fire, I wouldn't mourn until I'd finished avenging her on the entire race of alien monsters. If by some miracle I was still alive when it was over and she wasn't, I would mourn for the rest of my life. Maybe she felt the same, but I couldn't afford to think about that.

As Albert dropped the grocery basket of rotting lemons right in front of Jill—who made one of her patented “ick” sounds—he tossed a quick glance back at Arlene, and it seemed to Yours Truly that the aforesaid returned it with interest. Compound interest. Well, stranger things had happened, especially lately. But I would never have imagined any chemistry between . . . well, it didn't bother me if something were cooking between them. All that mattered was the mission, I told myself.

“That caterwaul was you?”

“Like the good old days,” said Arlene, “when we were young and carefree against a bloodred Mars filling up the sky.”

“Huh?” said Jill.

“Uh,” said Albert.

When Arlene waxed poetic, she was a happy camper. “Mission went well, did it?” I asked. “All right, let's apply the beauty treatment.”

Albert bravely set the example, squashing several of the lemons and a lonely lime between his big hands then applying the result to his face. Arlene followed suit, and I, after taking a deep breath, dug in. There were plenty to go around. Then I noticed that Jill was hanging back.

“You're going to have to do this,” I told her in my friendly voice.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said, only the second time she'd pulled the sullen bit around us. I could well imagine her giving this treatment to the President of the Twelve full-time. I wouldn't fault her for that.

“It's not that bad,” said Arlene, rubbing one down the side of her own leg. Staining camo wear was a nonproblem.

“Okay, okay,” Jill said, picking one up and tentatively applying it to her nose. “It's gross,” she said with heartfelt sincerity.

“Here, let me help,” I said, becoming impatient. I took a lemon in each hand, squeezed, and then began rubbing the results in her hair.

“Hey!” she said, backing away.

“No time to be belle of the ball,” I snapped, continuing the operation on her face.

“Hey!” said Arlene, coming over, taking one of the lemons out of my hands and brandishing it under my nose as if it were a live grenade. “What do you think you're doing?”

“Doing my bit for truth, justice, and the American way.”

“Uh-huh,” said Arlene, reeking of a lack of conviction. “Fly Taggart, I need to explain this to you so that you will understand.” Smiling pleasantly, Arlene stomped on my right foot.

While I was digesting all the implications of her argument, she whispered in my ear, “She's a woman, not a child.”

“Don't treat me like a child!” Jill chimed in, as if she could hear.

“Don't act like one.” I leaned close, ignoring Arlene, and spoke to Jill as I would to one of my squadron Marines who was acting out. “Listen up,
ma'am.
When you've got a set of butter bars, you can start thinking and making decisions. But until then, you do what
I
say, and
I
say this stuff is going on now.

“We've done your hair and face; next step is the rest of your body. You want to do that yourself, or do you want to give me a thrill by having
me
do it?”

She stared, then took the lime I held out. Test time was over for now.

We finished applying the lemons. Jill made faces but did fine; I hoped she wouldn't stay pissed for the rest of the mission. Arlene lemoned the backs of the rest of us where we couldn't reach, and then I did the same for her. After that, we bid farewell to our alley and moved out.

Albert took point and led us toward the railway station. I took the rear. Fortunately, now that we smelled like zombies, we could walk openly and carry our weapons. We rounded a corner and found ourselves in a mob of the previously mentioned. I could see Arlene start to tense up—understandable after what she and Albert encountered at the grocery store. But a moment later she was putting on a good act, probably better than mine.

For a moment I worried about Jill's performance: arms straight out like a bad copy of Frankenstein's monster, legs too stiff and jerking as she walked . . . too exaggerated. She'd never make it on the legitimate stage. But the zombies didn't seem to notice.

We passed through an archway and suddenly we were surrounded by imps, hell-princes, and bonys, with those damned rocket launchers strapped to their backs. I watched the bonys walk with a jerking motion so bad I could imagine strings pulling them as if they were the puppet skeletons I'd seen in Mexico during their “Day of the Dead” festival. If I hadn't already seen one in action in the truck, I'd think they were fake. One thing: they gave me new appreciation for Jill's performance as a zombie.

Then came that lousy moment when the Forces of Evil unveiled yet another brand new, straight-off-the-assembly-line monster. This one wasn't inadvertently funny in the manner of the bonys. This one was just plain disgusting.

The word fat barely described the awfulness of this sphere of flesh. We passed close enough to smell years of accumulated sweat, a neat trick considering how new the model had to be. The thing made me think of a planetoid trapped in Earth's gravitational field, only' this hunk of flesh comprised fold upon fold of nauseating, ugly, yellow, dripping, flaccid chicken flab.

Of course, that was only a first impression. As it came still closer, I decided that it was a lot worse than I first imagined.

All I could think of was a gigantic wad of phlegm carved by flabby hands into a semblance of the human form with two beady pig's eyes sunk deep into the grotesque face. At the end of each tree-trunk arm was a massive metal gun, starting at the elbow.

In a choice between being blasted by those guns or
touched in any way, there was no contest. I could imagine a lot of names for the thing, and I was sure Arlene would have some ideas; but I wanted Jill to have the honor of naming this one. She'd probably come up with a better name than the different terms for excrement unrolling in my mind.

There were plenty of other monsters and zombies through all this, more than enough to keep us all on our toes and plenty scared. But this thing was just too much for my stomach.

The two steam-demons looming up before us were more dangerous; but there was something almost beautiful about them in comparison. They were well-shaped, with good muscle tone showing on the parts of them that were flesh instead of machine. Even their metal parts seemed clean and shiny compared to the dingy, rusty-looking metal tubes sticking out of that fatboy. I knew I was in trouble when I started making aesthetic judgments about the monsters.

I didn't like the way the zombies hemmed us in. I pushed left and right, trying to lead my troops out, but always shying away from the vigilant hell-princes and bonys; they kept getting underfoot . . . whenever I'd try to ghost, there they were.

It took some moments for the penny to drop:
we were being herded like cattle.
By the time I realized it, it was too late to get out; the zombie mass funneled together, headed toward a large building. My heart went into overdrive, and I was already starting to calculate the odds of bolting, when Albert leaned close and rumbled into my ear, “Here's some luck—they're driving us into the train station.”

I looked, and by God if he wasn't right. They were putting us on a bloody train!

A man's heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.

The only possible fly in the ointment would be if the damned train were headed east; but I had a gut feeling it was headed straight into Los Angeles.

We couldn't avoid the steam-demons; they were standing at the boarding ramp to the open cattle car that was already starting to fill. Well, we'd decided to take the first opportunity to get aboard, and this surely was some sort of sign.

Those old nuns of mine were receiving a lot of prayers from me lately. I could never imagine saints or angels; so when I got in one of these moods, those withered souls in black and gray habits played across my memory. I used to think the nuns that taught me were ugly old crones. With what I'd been seeing lately, they had taken on a new beauty in my mind's eye.

My prayer was simple. Don't let fatboy get on with us, please; pretty please with a Hail Mary on it.

It was easy to stay together; there wasn't any room to be separated. We were packed in like the Tokyo subway at rush hour. Of course, I realized that if we
were
separated, we'd have the devil's own time trying to get back together.

When all this was over, I thought I might give religion another shake; as the door to the cattle car closed, I saw that we weren't going to have to put up-with fatboy: it got onto another car.

“It's open in the back!” said Jill in surprise. At first I made to silence her for fear we would attract attention, but there was so much noise going on around us that our words wouldn't be noticed over the roaring and growling filling the narrow space. We were being pushed toward the rear of the car, where instead of a solid wall, there was an arrangement of vertical wooden posts with horizontal metal slats running through them.

“That's some window,” Arlene commented.

“I see that none of you were brought up around livestock,” I said caustically. “It's a cattle car.”

With a grinding sound, the train started forward with a great lurch, throwing us into our rearward neighbors, who growled and pushed us back. The former humans who were now zombies did not behave nearly so well as humans would have; some responded to being jostled by firing off a few shots. “Great!” shouted Arlene.

“If this escalates, we'll be wiped out in here!” I hollered back.

“What can we do about it?”

“Nothing!” I admitted. Time again to trust to luck. The nuns must have been working overtime, because the shots suddenly ceased. I glanced over and saw Albert with his eyes closed, moving his lips silently. I supposed that if praying was going to save us, this was a job for the pro.

Jill grabbed the back of my pants; it was a good idea—I grabbed Arlene, and she caught Albert.

We traveled past several small towns that evidently held little of interest. The night sky had a weird glow, but I still preferred it to the return of day, if that sickening green sky was waiting for us. It was too dark to make out details, but occasionally we saw fires burning on the horizon, funeral pyres to mark the passing of humanity. We finally came to a violent stop and there was more jostling. Our luck was still with us; the gunshots did not resume.

“Damn, I wish we could see through the door,” I said. Behind us was a splendid view of a smashed building and a nice stretch of barren countryside; but heavy sounds in front of us indicated some action.

“The designers must not care if the cows are well-informed,” said Arlene.

As if in answer to my request, the heavy wooden
door in the side of the train was pushed open to unpack some zombies, and we were greeted by a sight you don't see every day. A contingent of steam-demons was being herded by a spidermind. They were guarding what appeared to be a truck dolly in which a human form was wrapped up in bandages from head to toe. There was a slit for his eyes, but that didn't help tell us anything about the man or woman propped up on the dolly; we could only assume this was a human because there were straps across the figure—a dead giveaway that he was a prisoner.

The sight made me remember Bill Ritch. The only human they would take care to preserve with his mind intact was a human with knowledge they needed and couldn't extract without destroying . . . which meant that here was someone else we should either rescue or kill. He couldn't be left in the hands of the enemy, giving them whatever they needed. They marched forward out of sight, the steam-demons tramping in eerie, mechanical lockstep.

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking?” Arlene bellowed at me.

“Loud and clear!”

“They've got their tentacles on another of our tech lads!”

“Listen up!” I screamed. “Have plan!” They gave me their undivided attention, easy to do in such cramped quarters. “Grab guy! Run!”

Arlene rolled her eyes, unimpressed.

“How—move?” shouted Jill.

“Slowly!”

While we considered the strengths and weaknesses of our position, the monsters took the bandaged figure toward the front of the train. Although we couldn't see very well, it was easy to figure out what happened next.

The train started up again, having received its important cargo.

“Forward!” I screamed. “Make path!”

Jill wriggled her hand slowly out to where she was able to extend her fingers and . . . the best way to describe it was that she goosed the zombie-woman in front of her. The nervous system of a zombie isn't great shakes compared to when it was alive, but there were sufficient sparks left to kindle into fire.