Xenoform (33 page)

Spider swung the gun instantly back round to face front, where Roberts was struggling with the female officer and losing. The numerous sharp planes of her arms and legs were cutting him to pieces. Droplets of blood flew like confetti. He seemed to have the stunner jammed up against her angular midsection as she struggled to bring her gun between them. The stunner was discharging uselessly into her, wreathing her form in a crackling aura. Her actual organic body must have been well insulated from the exterior blading because she seemed to feel no effect whatsoever.

Spider couldn’t get a clear shot and so, without hesitation, he leapt out of the van, expecting Resperi reinforcements at any moment. As he did so he heard the machine pistol rattle percussively, saw bullets ricocheting off the road surface. Roberts screamed – a wordless sound of pain and rage. The officer slashed upwards with the sword-like edge of one arm, catching Roberts under the chin and sending him arching backwards in a fountain of blood. Using the space that this created, she kicked him further off balance and brought the gun up. The little eyes inside that mess of metal twinkled with satisfaction.

And then Spider shot her with the mag-rifle. The liquid point melted through her armour with blinding speed, disintegrating inside the meaty core of her body. Blood burst from between the creases and crevices of her blades and her dying hand squeezed the trigger of the machine pistol one last time. A chattering stream of bullets tore along the road, stitching the tarmac, pattering off the front of the van. Roberts staggered and fell in a crumpled heap, his trench coat billowing around him. Spider shot the woman again, this time in the head. Jellied chunks of flesh and shards of metal flew.

‘Look where you’re fucking driving next time!’ he screamed at her collapsing form. He could have shot her all day, the way he felt. He had one hundred and ninety-seven rounds left, after all. But Roberts needed help. Spider went to him and knelt beside his battered body, laying the rifle on the road beside him. He was aware of sirens blaring in the streets around them, knowing that any number of them could be heading here.

He cradled Roberts’s head tenderly in his powerful claws, his huge chest heaving with deep, ragged breaths. Roberts’s face was a pulverised ruin and his body was slashed and torn. His chin had been split by that last powerful blow and his teeth jutted out at crazy angles. He lay in a formless heap, his arms and legs splayed at improbable angles. The stunner was on the floor beside him in a pool of gore. His eyes, however, were sharp and clear within the remains of his face.

‘
So much...for our...damn...
contract
,’ he rasped. And then he died.

Spider knelt beside the body of the man who had stood beside him through years of madness and danger, utterly drained, utterly defeated. The rifle lay next to him, forgotten. He felt nothing, but it was a nothing more intense, more blanketing than any emotion could have been. It was a great, voluminous nothing as blank and black as a midnight sky. Part of his mind urged him to go, leave the scene of the crime, but that part was distant, so distant. He didn’t even notice when men and women in the chequered colours of RPC filtered from the streets around him, closing in, weapons drawn, to surround him.

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Lifkin Oman
heard the incredible detonation of the fuel barge crashing into the city. Possibly a part of his mind understood and was horrified by what was clearly a huge catastrophe, but the kernel that remained of Lifkin’s original being had retreated far inside. It squirmed there like a cowed and beaten dog, unable to assert any influence over the actions of what had once been Lifkin’s body.

Lifkin had broken all the mirrors when it became clear what was happening to him, and so even if he had wanted to, and had actually been able to control his traitorous body, he would not have been able to see the full extent of the completed metamorphosis anyway. This was one small island of mercy in a sea of random cruelty.

Some days ago he had gone to bed with a raging headache and uncontrollable shivers following the installation of the most attractive pair of amber cat’s eyes that money could buy. He had assumed at the time that he was suffering from some sort of infection caught during the surgery and of course, in a sense, he was.

His girlfriend had called him around ten pm that night, asking why he hadn’t shown up at her flat as arranged. Communicating by DNI had intensified the pressure of the headache unbearably and it had taken all of his resolve not to scream,
Just leave me alone! Leave me alone, I’m in agony!
He had managed to put her off for the night, underplaying just how truly awful he had felt when she had woken him.
It’s probably just a hangover from the anaesthetic
, he had told her.
I’ll catch you tomorrow
.

It had turned out to be more than just a hangover from the anaesthetic. He had failed to return to sleep that night – in fact he hadn’t slept since then. Parts of his new mind shut off here and there, quite unknown to him, shuffling responsibilities between each other as the very structures of his brain and body were ruthlessly re-written. After all, the new Lifkin hadn’t had much to do so far – he was mainly just waiting for the signal. Resting was part of the process, even if actual sleep was not possible.

That second morning he had got up from his fruitless attempts to relax when the savage burning of the daylight filtering through the window sent his head into fresh paroxysms of torment. He had stumbled to the window, one hand over his slitted eyes (those new, expensive eyes) and dragged a tall wardrobe over to cover the glare.
Maybe
, he thought,
they set the brightness too high on these damn implants. That would explain a lot. I’ll have to call them – this can’t be normal
.

But he hadn’t called them. He had sat, exhausted by the exertion, on the sofa, feeling nauseous. Then, when the reeling and swaying became too much, he had lain down. He had stared blankly at the wall, unaware that he was doing so, for six hours and fourteen minutes. And then, gradually, he had become conscious of the fact that he had fouled himself. This had brought him round a little and he had almost got as far as sitting up when there had been a knock on the door. His head had whirled sickeningly as the sound hammered through it. A voluminous anger swelled within him. Whoever it was, he had vowed, they would regret disturbing him today.

Slowly, achingly, he had made it to the door, driven only by the need to stop the noise. It had been Quietta, his girlfriend. ‘Lifkin!’ she had exclaimed, taking a step back, her eyes wide pools of fear. ‘What happened to your face?’

He came round again later, sitting again on the sofa. He briefly scanned the flat and was glad to see that Quietta was gone. But her tattered and blood-soaked clothes had been on the floor of the bathroom. That was when he had trashed his flat. He had felt no remorse, no concern, no fear, although he was clearly losing his mind. He had felt only the raging, all-consuming anger. It blazed like fire in him, clouding his already faltering vision, baking his skin from the inside. He smashed furniture to pieces, tore the soft furnishings to confetti with his teeth, pissed up the walls, beat electrical appliances to death with a hammer, revelling in the flying sparks.

His next period of awareness had begun when he had seen his reflection in the mirror. Part of him recoiled in horror. His mouth was a snaggle-toothed maw, his gullet a dark and mossy jungle, his hair a ragged, washed-out shock of straw. Those damned amber eyes, though, blazed brightly in the wreckage. Bony protrusions ridged his head, his hands, his chest. Why had he not noticed these before? His fingers stretched out to slippery tendrils, nodes of squishy cartilage bulging along their lengths. Then he had smashed not only the mirrors but every surviving reflective surface in the flat. Where he cut himself on shards of plastic and glasspex he bled green sludge. He examined this foul effluent with morbid interest.

What had happened to Quietta? He seemed to be alone now. Maybe he had killed her – he really couldn’t be sure. That raging, changing part of his mind was sadistically glad. Exultant, even. This had been the fourth day after his surgery. Time, by then, had lost all meaning to the monster that had once been Lifkin Oman. The slime exuding from his body was starting to dissolve channels into the floor of his flat, making a pattern not unlike the so-called canals of Mars.

Greying memories of life, love, family, friends, work, hobbies, sports, sleep, sex, exercise, films, books, food, drink and a hundred other echoes of humanity flitted across his fading mind from time to time. They were like images seen from the window of a moving gravpod – detached and blurry, then gone. Once he tried to snatch at an image of his mother – whether to embrace her or kill her he didn’t know – before realising that she was only a remembered, distant concept and not an actual presence. He painlessly vomited up a homogenised slurry that had once been his internal organs and sat again on the sofa, waiting for the signal. He didn’t know yet what it would be. But then, he was unsure of a great many things now. His name, for instance. Lemkin? Liftik? Quietta? It didn’t matter.

He must once have moved the wardrobe aside from the window because he remembered standing there and observing the night sky, which hung above him vast and soft and womb-like. He had watched it with the most incredible longing, motionless, leaking thick slime from every orifice, from the very pores of his skin. A lightpusher was rising from the city atop a telescopic column of exhaust. It was truly fascinating from his new perspective. He reached out one twisted hand to grab onto it.

The floor and shattered furniture of his flat were starting to change too, where the green goo touched them. His environment was slowly becoming one with his altering body, which was now just one more lump in a terrible, stinking three-dimensional soup. When the filtering threat of dawn had begun to corrupt that beautiful sky he had pushed the wardrobe back and then lost touch with reality again for an indiscernible time.

The mystery of Quietta’s disappearance was solved when Lifkin, in another brief interlude of lucidity, had gone to the kitchen cupboard to investigate the source of the scratching, nagging sound that had brought him out of whatever reverie he had been lost in. Inside the cupboard, curled into the foetal position, was the green, deformed remnants of a human being. It looked as if it had once been a woman, which would tally with the torn and bloody clothes on the floor, but beyond that he could not be sure. How long had she been there? He could not say, but something about her appearance rang a bell somewhere deep within him.
Girlfriend
, he thought, but the word carried with it no discernible meaning.

Although clearly alive in some sense, the woman had not responded to his presence and the Lifkin monster had made no real efforts to get a response from her. To the new Lifkin this strange, living fungus cropping up in his own kitchen was not really any cause for concern. He had noticed that she, too, was leaking that viscous, reeking goo. It flowed under the door of the cupboard, pooling thickly on the floor, mingling, presumably, with his own effluent, joining them together. He felt a vague satisfaction. This was how it was supposed to be, surely? Surely. And now that he saw her, he was sure he could
feel
her, too, taste her presence through the greenshit itself. It was oddly reassuring.