Chapter 17
Twenty-seven standard bullets, four ball busters, two incendiaries, ten rubbers, three micro-grenades, the prod at 64 percent power, the boot knife, the thigh shivs, a garroting lasso, the poison-injector ring…it seemed like a shit arsenal against the darkness of that black pit. She searched the lab three times over, but it didn’t seem that Friar had any weapons—how could he be private justice without at least a taser or a tranquilizer gun? Manners only took you so far in a gunfight. Did he stab people with his scalpel? She’d have to go in with what she had. Or she could run away. She could go to the gun store and buy a bazooka, a machine gun, a flamethrower, a laser, or a sixty-thousand-dollar plasma launcher. But even then would she be ready? Could she make it down those steps again knowing that door was open? The surprise was a gift and she needed to take it. Friar was down there, alive or dead, and if he was fucking with her he would have to pay.
There was an elevator, she saw, a large steel platform the size of an industrial dumpster that slid down two metal rails to drop her just in front of the door. It moved damn slow, giving her more time to think than she needed. The bare light bulbs down passed one by slow-ass one, the platform above getting smaller and smaller, and she reflected on her own stupidity. Mercenaries—she could have hired a dozen crack heads with shotguns to run ahead and eat bullets for her. Another light. Hemu, he might have had some mystical answer for Friar’s disappearance. Another light. ElilE. Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard. Another light. And why did she care anyway? If Friar wanted to fake his own death and live in a sewer, how was that any of her concern? Maybe he had an ex-wife giving him grief or he was in debt or forgot to pay his taxes. What did he have to do with her case—with her survival? Everything, of course.
The elevator came to a jolting stop right in front of the door. Truly massive, larger than she’d thought, you could drive a whole subway car through it. Why did Friar need such a large door anyway? She realized she had to pee and shuffled into a corner behind one of the door’s hinges to relieve herself. Better. There was a control panel with seemingly obvious open and close buttons, but also a keypad that she assumed was to lock the damn thing. Which meant he was trying to keep something from getting out, right? Or maybe he kept his gold in there in great heaps and piles—wouldn’t that be a happy ending? A ring of the same bare bulbs that traced the elevator illuminated the area around the door but didn’t do much to punch away the darkness beyond. She could see about eight feet through the door—it appeared to be dirt floor and naked rock and there was the faint outline of a concrete frame amidst the rock. Oh well, here goes nothing.
She stepped into the darkness and then took another step. Nothing happened. She took another step and then a skip. “Hello!” she yelled down the tunnel. Her voice echoed back, except it seemed to be saying, “Idiot.” What had she expected? The door to slam shut and the lights to go off? The door weighed fifty tons. She could roast a chicken and limbo to safety in the time it took to close. As for lights…she took enough steps that the entrance was a small bright circle and then switched on her night vision. Perfect. She certainly was in a tunnel, about the same width and height as the door, and dank and wet and clammy. There were footprints in the dirt—a clue!—and her scanners told her they belonged to size-nine male loafers. That sounded like something Friar would wear. Obviously, this was his mysterious tunnel.
She kept walking. It seemed like she walked for a very long time, but maybe it was just the lack of entertainment feeds and her creeping sobriety. Crap. She hadn’t taken stock of her barsenal before heading out. There were just a few swills—now her flask was empty and the backup flask was low. She had some diluted sky in her pocket ring, but would that be enough? Walking and walking and walking and—a door. It had snuck up on her, another door, similar to the first, closing off the tunnel. Well now what? There was a symbol on this door, something crazy that a retarded child might draw. It was a bunch of straight and squiggly lines, crossing and connecting and blending and flowing together, and now as she looked she saw they were changing and moving and seemed to have color beyond the green tinge of the night vision. She wanted to touch the symbol and so she did, and then gasped as the lines came up from the door and slid into her veins. She felt them pumping and sucking and draining her blood, a delicious joy and near-sexual pleasure rushing up and distracting her brain with ecstasy as they killed her. She jerked her hand away and screamed as her skin tore and blood splashed out, more of her precious blood spilled, lost. The strings had fused to her veins, melding into them so it was impossible to see where they ended and her body began. She grabbed her boot knife and slashed upwards in a long arc, severing the strings. Instantly the ecstasy was gone, replaced by an agony that overwhelmed her pain filters for a full five seconds. Her veins dangled from a ragged gash along her wrist and her whole arm shook. She fell to her knees and then back on her ass and choked back vomit and the urge to sob.
It took about eight minutes for her machinery to get the situation under control. She slapped on three knit patches, cotton-candy threads soaking up her blood and melding into her flesh to create a nice temporary skin. Her platelet injectors were on overdrive and they informed her she’d lost about a liter of blood, which might explain the wooziness, the headache, the exhaustion and possibly the self-disgust. Or maybe that was because she’d managed to spring the very first trap she’d come across and nearly die. But what kind of trap was it? Her night vision was good, top notch—she’d spared no expense—but obviously it had missed a few details. She switched it off and supercharged the contact plates in her left hand to form a lackluster flashlight. It’d drain calories like a motherfucker and with less than a full tank o’ blood that might be an issue, but damn it she needed to see. The scribble design was still there, no longer moving, no longer mesmerizing. It seemed to her the black lines had assumed a reddish tinge from drinking her blood. What kind of trap was that? She’d never seen anything like it. Wires that cut you, yeah, drugs that made you feel good, yeah, needles that drained your blood, all the time—but never in a neat little package like this.
Her head started to hurt and she switched off the makeshift flashlight and went back into night vision. The expedition was a failure, just like everything else she’d done. There was no control panel here, nothing she could find anyway with eyes or scanners—and she wasn’t about to run her fingers across any more surfaces. The door was closed, she didn’t know how it opened; it was time to go home and get drunk, and maybe go to a hospital. And she would have, too, if a crack of light hadn’t appeared almost with that thought and the door hadn’t swung silently open with a deal more speed than she had anticipated. And the view beyond—once her vision adjusted—took her breath away. Great, my blood, my breath, my sanity—what more do you want? My tits in a basket?
In front of her was a cavern the size of a football field. She knew it had to be at least that large because there was a cathedral inside, right in front of her. A stone bridge extended from the mouth of the door across a four-lane-highway chasm to an equally impressive door in the side of the cathedral. To her left and right were more doors, closed, with their own stone bridges leading to their own cathedral doors. Assuming they went all the way around, she guessed there were fourteen doors in all. She switched off her night vision and found she could still see. The cavern narrowed at the top, disappearing in a luminescent golden cloud. She stepped onto the stone bridge—it seemed so old, but how could it be?—and her footsteps sounded loud but didn’t echo. There was a noise, she realized, in the background, faint and present like an engine hum or rushing water. She hadn’t noticed it at first, couldn’t notice it unless she was really paying attention. What was it? It sounded like voices, hundreds, thousands of voices, singing softly, men, women, children, tenors, basses, whatevers, high and low all singing together. With that same crawling, slithering-vinyl sensation up her spine, with a sickness in her heart and groin and belly, she recognized the song pouring up from the pit below and echoing from the walls, the song in the screams of newborns and the gasps of the newly dead, in car honks and sex ballads, the song of an eye grating against its socket and a worm digging its way through human flesh: uausuausuausuausuausuausuausuau…
She followed the song, walked to the edge of the bridge and looked down. There they were, the bodies, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands maybe, dead—or alive? They moved, or seemed to, writhing like maggots around one another in a great fleshy soup that filled the cavern. From another hole—a lower hole, a hole with no bridge, one of hundreds—came the creature. It looked like a pile of human torsos fused together and jammed onto the body of a train-sized centipede. It slithered out of the hole and down the side of the cavern, coming, coming, coming, seemingly no end to its body. The first fifty feet of it detached from the wall and swung gracefully out over the pit of bodies below. It reared and Saru saw on its belly a long line of human bodies—oh God, children too!—held by smaller arms. The flesh pool seemed to rise up, the arms of bodies within it reaching out to embrace the bodies trapped in the centipede. They were cradled and carried down with care and love to disappear into the flesh pool. Then the centipede slithered back up the wall and back into its hole and was gone.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
She screamed and whirled, the Betty leapt to her hand and she barely adjusted her aim enough to keep the bullet from going right through Friar’s skull. It nicked the top of his ear, taking about three centimeters of skin with it. He didn’t flinch.
“Friar!” she yelled. The Betty wobbled in her hand. Her arm was still shaking and from more than just the blood loss. She forced herself to take a deep breath and then managed to speak in a semi-normal voice. “Give me a reason not to hit you this time, because I am freaked the fuck out.”
He waved his hand like he was brushing away a piece of dust and the Betty jerked out of her hand and flew over the side of the bridge. Well, fuck. She tried to laugh but all she felt was defeated. “You’re one of them then, eh?”
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
She sat on the stone railing of the bridge and put her chin in her hands. Then she looked over the side, down at the writhing pool of flesh. One of those fuckers had her gun. Could she get it back? How far was the Betty’s jump distance? Not three hundred feet. She turned back to Friar. How had he snuck up on her like that? He was the same as he’d been before except now instead of the professor getup he was wearing a black caji suit. He still had that potbelly, still had that balding head with the gray-hair sides, still had those tired eyes that still looked sad. Not an athlete, not a warrior. But he was one of them. He was part of this. And so it seemed the rules did not apply. She’d have to kill him, kill him for real this time. Get some real satisfaction.
“So what?” she asked him. “Are you gonna kill me now, like you killed those girls? Was it you who killed them?”
“We gave them life.”
“Yeah, your friend said something about that before I shot him. Are you going to give me life, then?”
“If you want it.”
“I don’t. I’m going to go get another gun, and I’ll be back to kill you then.”
She stood and walked to the door. It was closed, of course. She didn’t want to touch it in case it sucked away more of her blood. Kicking seemed safe but it still didn’t open. She looked over the side. Could she climb down into one of those holes? And accomplish what? Better to take her chances with Friar than the centipede from Hell. Ah Friar, what’s your game? He just watched her, standing there, making no moves. Patient man. She sidled over casually and then charged him. Her shoulder slammed into his side and yes! she knocked him back a foot. The prod landed in his testicles and he didn’t even wince, just stood there as the arcs of lightning jumped around his thighs. He raised an arm, fingers limp, and swished them around. Strings exploded from his hand and fingers like the strings of the door and shot into her neck this time. She screamed and fell to the ground as the sensation of ecstasy filled her yet again and the blood drained from her body.
“Stop,” she gasped, and he stopped. The wires zipped out of her neck, leaving a dozen tiny wormholes, and slurped back into friar’s hand, which he then extended to help her up.
“Bastard,” she breathed, and tottered to her feet. It was hard to see. Her platelet injectors were saying her blood levels were dangerously low. No fucking duh. “Let me go,” she said. “Open up that door. I don’t want to be here!” She really didn’t.
“Would you like to see inside?” he asked, gesturing towards the cathedral. “It is a work of art.”
No, she didn’t want to see inside. She didn’t want him to drain any more of her blood either. Think! Think damn it! Stall. This is your life we’re talking about here, missy. Granted, it ain’t much but it’s yours and he’s trying to take it so think of a way to save yourself and then you can go home and drink forties and watch porn and never think again.
“Okay,” she said.
He started walking and she followed. What was the range of those wires? What was the range of his little gravity manipulator that had flicked away her Betty? Did he need a line of sight? She didn’t have enough guns or blood to be scientific about it.
At first the cathedral had looked kind of like a drip castle that a child would make out of mud, but as she drew closer she saw that it was all carved stone, more fluid and life-like than she had ever seen. There were more human bodies, and they were happy, embracing, kissing, and fucking in a huge orgy spread out across the surface of the cathedral. In a way it was beautiful, but if it was supposed to depict the pit below they were way off the mark. And of course, how did it even get there? Stall. She needed to stall. She needed time, time to think, time to be rescued. Who knew she was here? Anyone? Everyone who would care was already dead.
“Why did you fake your own death?” she asked him.
“I didn’t.”
“So you accidentally faked your own death?”
“No. I died—my human body died. And then I came back. Then I realized what I was, and what my role was in this world.”
“So…you died and now you’re what? A feaster?”
He smiled at her. It was warm, not condescending, like a grandpa delighted by a precocious child. Looking at his kindly old Santa Claus face it was almost impossible to imagine that he had just shot wires into her neck and sucked out her blood, that he was talking to her above a pit full of thousands of bodies in front of the cathedral of an alien death cult, and not in a mall somewhere with a child on his lap asking them what they wanted for Discount Day.
“A feaster…yes, that is what you would call me. No. I studied them, the UausuaU. I wanted to know about the elzi, what they saw, but I was always afraid to look myself. I made…others look for me, which I regret, forcing those people to join in the One. No, I don’t regret the joining, but my methods were crude, blundering—human. I caused pain, too much pain, and some were lost. The meeting should come with joy. I think that’s why they brought me here. To welcome you with joy.”
He stopped in front of the cathedral door and she stopped a few feet behind him, resisting the temptation to split his domey skull with her prod and run away. She’d tried that already. He reached up a hand to stroke the carving of a naked thigh—more scenes of joy and love and Eden and frolicking under trees with your tits hanging out. A split appeared in the center of the carving, so faint she hadn’t seen it. Light filled the gap and it grew. The scent of…incense? wafted out as the doors swung inward and Friar stepped inside. He turned, bathed in the light of the entrance, and beckoned with that Santa Claus smile. She sucked in a breath and followed.