Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (10 page)

Amenities done, Dukes said, “Well then. So show me, please.”

Cherokee discreetly unlimbered the belt and handed it under the table. Faint papery sounds rose from Dukes’ busy fingers.

He smiled at them all and strapped on the belt under his jacket. Brought something up from his lap, and set it on the table: a lidded one-gallon paint can.

“OK, kiddos,” he said in a low voice. “Lean real close. I’m due back this evening. Sorry this has to be quick and dirty, cause you got some risky shit here. This piece of gel is in its base active mode. It’s pure raw material and gives you no clue to the shape of the APPs that’ll be made of it. This is the stuff in its, like, minimal or rest mode, called PSI: Pursuit, Seizure, and Ingestion. Meaning it’ll catch and consume anything organic that moves.

“When you come to trying to work with it, dump it into a walled-in pen or pit with smooth vertical sides and no cracks or seams it can ooze through, OK? Cause if it can, it will. It’s highly fluid and can exert powerful pressure. To capture it and put it back in whatever container you’re using”—Dukes grinned here—“you’ll need your paint stick.”

And he pulled out something that looked like a foot-rule, with little nodes on it instead of numbers. “You stick it into the gel and press here and the gel coheres around the stick. You push this node to drop it back in the can. I don’t have any idea what-all this stuff can do beyond the basics I’m gonna show you, but just bear in mind your APPs are gonna be made of it. So, come on.”

The five of them slipped out through that warren-like gloom as discreetly as they could, and went round to the back of the establishment. Here sprawled a chaotic dump of motor parts and box-springs, chassis and old appliances, and every other kind of bulky trash. The sun—bright gold across the Valley—put the Elephant in chilly shadow. “Over here should work,” said Dukes, leading them over to an abandoned claw-foot bathtub.

“You see I found us a guinea pig.”

A very sizeable tarantula was in the tub. It was futilely trying to scramble up the slippery enamel sides. The drain hole’s plug was firmly in place. “OK,” said Dukes. “Watch everything I do.”

He popped the lid off the can, and thrust his “paint stick” inside it. He thumbed a node … and drew out a translucent sphere, blackish green. This globe just perceptibly rippled, yet gripped the stick as if welded to it. There was a fugitive corruscation within it, blurred constellations slowly cycling. Dukes thumbed again, and the sphere plopped into the tub.

The gel instantly responded to the scrambling spider: flowed swiftly to it, and engulfed it. Its struggle was in slow motion now, its working legs seeming to smoke at first, and then to become smoke. The bulky abdomen lasted longest, became a cloudy ovoid, became fumes, and then was gone.

“Now look,” said Dukes. “Notice that it’s just a little bigger?”

“It … it’s hard to tell,” said Ming.

“Trust me. Feeding adds to their mass. Excuse my putting it this way, but the more of you Margolian nails with this shit, the more he’ll have.”

There was an unmistakable click, the hammer of a firearm right behind them. A gravelly voice said, “Dead easy folks. Perfectly still. Whatever that is, I’m takin it.”

“OK man,” Dukes said carefully, “I’ve gotta pick it up with this.” He tucked the stick in, the gel englobed around it, and he turned to face their intruder. “Terkle!” he barked with disgust, apparently recognizing this huge goon with big bony shoulders and acromegalic jaws, a long chain earring dangling from his lobe. Given his size, his stealth in coming up behind them was remarkable.

“You asshole, Terkle! There’s no way you can use this thing.”

“You shittin me? That’s some kinda high-tech shit there! Hand it over or I plug you all where you stand.” He was holding a machine pistol with a big clip under the stock, and showing them a forty-five caliber muzzle.

“Shit! All right. Hold out the paint can and I’ll drop it in.”

“Fuck that. One of you hold the can.”

Dukes turned to Abel. “Take this, man, and hold it so—” He whipped the globe at Terkle’s face, pressing the stick’s release button. Flattening like a pie on the goon’s face, the gel instantly englobed his whole head. Reflexively he flung away his gun to tear the gel off with both hands, and his hands too were instantly engulfed in it.

“Shit!” said Dukes. “The thing’ll get too big to handle! Grab his fuckin arms and try to pull at least his hands outta there!”

A ghastly tango commenced—two of them on each arm hauled mightily against the galvanic rigidity of the big man’s muscles—and then, suddenly toppling them off balance, the arms came free—handless, with black ragged wrist stumps.

“Hold him up!” Dukes shouted, for Terkle’s legs were buckling and he was going slack. “Hold him up! We can’t let it get to the rest of him, the fuckin gel will get huge.”

They propped the goon and Dukes held his stick poised above the hungry globe as it worked on the head and neck. Terkle’s face bulged huge within the sphere—a drowned man seen through the porthole of a sinking ship. His hands, like two crabs drowning with him, were going smoky.

Dukes thrust in the stick and the gel cohered, obedient—as it were—to the extent that the sphere ate the neck the rest of the way through, and then allowed itself to be lifted free, the skull still dissolving within it. Terkle’s body slumped to the ground.

“Shit!” raged Dukes. “We’ll need at least a three-gallon bucket now! You asshole!” And he kicked Terkle where he sprawled, headless and handless.

Abel and Cherokee searched the trash heap, and came up with a water-cooler, empty. “Can you get it into this?”

“Bring it here.” Dukes studied the much larger globe. “OK, he’s softened up enough. Hold the jug under it.”

He touched the stick differently, and gel began to elongate, tapering downward. Its contents were a smoky skull and almost shapeless hands, and these too elongated and tapered, the skull seeming to make a comical grimace as it narrowed, narrowed down through the bottle neck.

A scrap roll of duct tape yielded them a sealer for the mouth. “Thank you, my friends,” said Dukes. “I truly hope you stomp Margolian’s ass. Now we should all bid adieu to scenic Redding.”

*   *   *

Dr. Winters, Sunrise’s
veterinarian and high school chemistry teacher, selected Trish Meeks as his assistant for testing the nano-gel sample. Trish’s style was sort of Hillbilly Goth—purple lipstick, hair half petroleum-black and half screaming-scarlet. She’d been a real wiseass in class two or three years back, but Winters had early on tricked her into admitting how smart she was, and had been employing her ever since.

The doctor was a man who would provide anyone—more or less on request, in his dreamy and bemused way—with concise and informed judgments on everything from fertilizer composition to high-tech hog paint jobs. Not a very demonstrative man himself, he was almost universally liked. Even touchy Trish Meeks—and this at times when she was not actually working for him—used Winters’ house key every week or so to let herself in and make sure he had enough of the right things in his fridge and cupboards. Fuck you if you asked her about it, but everybody knew it was so.

As to where they would set up a lab to work on the specimen, Cap came to him with a good idea. When Cap had bought his hardware store, Winters had shared with him countless little wonders of physics relevant to the tools he sold, and of chemistry relating to his paints and varnishes.…

Now Cap said, “Look here, Doc. My store shares a concrete foundation wall with the Masonic Building next door. I already cut through it so people can move between the buildings without exposure outside. Give you two ways in and out. Use the Masonic’s basement—it’s bigger an’ emptier than mine, an’ we can mount guards on both your entries.”

So in the Masonic Building’s basement Winters and Trish Meeks installed a lawn pool, a stout metal frame which supported a thick, supple plastic cavity with almost sheer walls. A dozen assistants made shelves, reconnected the plumbing of an old sink, and saw to stringing strong lights everywhere.

At last they cut off the top of the bottle and extracted the gel with the control stick. It was a hefty load lifted one-handed—about the dimensions, when spherical, of a small beach ball. They set it into the pool liner, and keyed its release from the stick.

It sat inactive. Menaced with a rod, its globe surged forth engulfing it, then flowed away and drained entirely off it. It would engulf any object set in motion near it, but, finding it inorganic would eject it.

After a series of such little experiments, Trish lit one of her cigarettes—severely rationed by Winters in the “lab” here—and blew smoke on the gel. Its sphere bulged out a bit to meet the smoke’s impact, seeming to taste. “What it looks like, sir,” she said respectfully, “is that you can’t get anything inside it that it doesn’t wanna eat.”

“That’s right, Trish. Of course, we’ll try applying caustic substances topically, to see if it can be damaged that way. But I’m afraid we’ll have to start by feeding it, to see if we can learn anything by watching it ingest something.”

“Patti’s Pets has got some white rats.”

XIII

ENLISTEES AND PROPERTIES

Day Three. Panoply
Studios informed Sheriff Smalls of the “Shoot Schedule”—not of its start date, mind you, but of its duration. It would last two days, starting both days at sunrise—nice touch, that—and ending at midnight. There would be three “Acts” each day, separated by “substantial intervals for rest, recuperation, and repair.”

Japh and I walked down Glacier Avenue. The town was alive with hammers and saws, people all over from the roofs on down, the street full of traffic. Two rafts dangled iron laddering from cable hooks, laying it for bridges and gangways to join all the rooftops. Inside, jackhammers were connecting basements where possible, following Cap’s example. Headlamps and floods were being installed on eaves and gables everywhere, to light things up for the night fights.

As we walked I noticed Japh had picked up Sheriff Smalls’ trick, scratching his own prosthetic forearm, a souvenir from
Alien Hunger,
from time to time when he was thinking. Right now he was sorting out what he wanted to say to me.

He said, “Curtis.” Being patient. Trying to make me see his side. “Ike Klemm’s as smart as George Junior, yes. And he has scads of friends down there. That’s cause he’s a shoulder-thwacker, hale fellow well met. George Junior makes himself heard, an’ they call him an asshole cause he says whatever he thinks, but people listen to him for just that reason. I just trust him more.”

My friend was beginning to chap my ass. “Hey. My brother! Listen to yourself. You’re talking the Georges here!”

“I know! True! The Georges are batshit. But I trust ’em. You know, all the jokes Ike tells, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him really laugh.”

“The only time George laughs is when he’s callin you an idiot.”

“Yeah, but he’s really laughin.”

I had to think that one over. And then I had to smile. “You might be right, old tight.”

Along the downslope rim of Sunrise, and spreading maybe two miles farther down the hills, were the homesteads of the Hangers, most of them as old as Sunrise’s, but outside her corporate border. A neighbor community of generations’ standing.

Hangers strictly respected all property lines with Sunrise. Scores of Hangers visited us, shopped, drank, ate out, and partied with us every night of the week.

At the same time, a humorous tension prevailed between our populations. Sunrisers gripped the Hangers’ hands or hugged them in greeting, and said, “Hey, Hang, you lookin good for a guy from Creepy Hollow.”

Because downslope of Sunrise, though still fertile and verdant, the open ground diminished, and Hangers lived somewhat more closely with their trees, and in their little shaded vales, while Sunrisers lived larger and sunnier. Both groups took pride in their lifestyles, and lived mostly on pretty good terms with each other.

We were down near the river now. Waved to Cherokee and Abel putting some extra armor on their hogs. Crossed the bridge over the Glacier River—not wide, but a good fast stream with spring not far past—and stepped into Hanger territory.

The “Georges”—George Senior and George Junior—lived in a cabin in a tree-choked ravine half a mile downslope. For almost his whole life George’s father had called him Junior, and George Junior had called himself Alphonse, a name of his own furious choosing against his father’s equally furious opposition.

They argued about his calling himself Alphonse every day, with the same persistence they showed in arguing about everything else.

Mav Drood, a sweet little old spice grower just across the gorge from them, had once told me and Japh about the Georges with a vehemence that was unusual for her: “Those Georges have got more different arguments than a dog has fleas. The variety of ’em! One argument winds down, an’ another one jumps right up in its place! An’ they run through every single goddamn one of those arguments, every fucking day of their lives!”—this tirade uttered by Mav with a certain air of being entertained.

For decades Alphonse had lived all over the globe. He’d rather have died than come back and live with his skinny mean old fart of a father, but the hideous and insurmountable fact was that George Senior had no one else on earth who would go through the Hell of taking care of him in his old age.

At our knock he yanked open the door. The crookeder shape of George Senior stood right behind him, giving us the identical bushy-browed glare as his son. Both of them had the mad, big-pupiled eyes of hawks.

Japh spoke in his friendliest, most charming manner, eager to get everything out at once, knowing it was impossible not to anger either of these men. For starters, whichever name you called George Junior would start a row with one of them.

“Gentlemen, we’re sorry to be bothering you, but we’ve come because you’re smart and we need your help carrying some news to your friends and your neighbors.” He paused, inviting an answer. Nothing. The two pairs of hawk-eyes kept glaring at him. “We’d like you to know that anyone willing to come help us fight the Studio gets—”