Atomic Underworld: Part One (11 page)

Tavlin
had always blamed her for not being there, for making him lie, and somewhere in
the back of his mind he had blamed her for passing on the infection in the
first place, and she blamed him for not making enough to buy the expensive
pills Jameson had required, and blamed him for his drinking and
self-destructiveness later. Yet what could he do? His son was dead and his wife
was once again a whore, and they hated each other. He thought she had almost
been relieved when he had left her, when he had abandoned the undercities and
returned to the upper world. His world. A place she could never feel
comfortable in again.

He
stared out over Taluush now, at its lights, the boats coming and going on the
water. There was little traffic out now, but there was enough. He supposed the
Octunggen were out looking for him still. Where were they? Were they combing
the streets and alleys? He supposed he had better be off. Back to Muscud.
Sophia knew she needed to leave, she would be fine. He was sorry he had screwed
things up for her here. That would just be one more thing she could hate him
for. Give her something to do, some reason to go on. In a way, he was almost
doing her a service. A real humanitarian, like Sgt. Wales.

He
sighed, finished his bowl and settled up. Then he lurched off through the city
streets, receiving strange looks from people about him, and he realized he was
bleeding again. He had torn his sutures with all the activity. He was a bloody,
ragged-looking non-infected man in a city of mutants; he would stand out like a
preacher in a whorehouse—or, knowing several preachers, maybe moreso. His
pursuers would find him easily.

Yes,
it was time to leave. He made his way toward the docks. He descended ramp after
ramp, finally descending into the buffer zone between the upper levels and the
territory of the G’zai. The activity of a plaza surrounded him. It was
nighttime, and the nightlife of Taluush teemed, riotous. One three-breasted
woman with conical funnels sticking up from her head in a straight line instead
of hair sold glowing vials to shady-looking characters. A loud nightclub blared
with noise, and Tavlin saw thumping, leaping, gyrating shapes in the smoky
darkness, lit by neon strips and cigarettes. A male prostitute in tight pants
and an unbuttoned snakeskin shirt lounged against a streetlamp, smoking a cigar
suggestively, while moths flapped about the light over his head, sometimes
covering the light completely and throwing him into darkness, sometimes
illuminating him fully, as if he had his own personal strobe light.

A
boy in ragged clothes sold stolen watches. His eyes widened when Tavlin grabbed
him by the back of the neck. “Hey! Lay off! What’re you about?”

“I
told you to clear out,” Tavlin hissed. “Lay low for a couple of days.”

He
released the boy, who thrashed like a wet dog, then glared up at him. “Who are
you to tell me what to do?”

“Someone
who’s trying to look after you.”

“Fuck
off.”

The
boy started to walk away, but Tavlin spun him back around. He wasn’t sure how
he could convince the boy to take him seriously, but he was determined to try.

Before
he could give it a go, however, something behind the boy drew Tavlin's
attention, and he stood riveted, eyes fixed on the sight.

Dripping
wet, the great monstrosity oozed up from the level below, towering over the
infected men and women around it. Tavlin stared at it, trying to make sense of
it. It wasn’t quite shaped like a maggot, nor a centipede, nor a shrimp, but it
shared attributes of all three. Its head was vaguely shrimp-like, and white
shrimp-flesh covered the whole of it, shot through with pink veins. Writhing
cilia. Chittering mouth-parts. A profusion of whip-like tendrils. It carried
itself erect, walking on a bed of cilia, but Tavlin sensed it could also walk
horizontally, crawling like a fat centipede. Black, glistening eyes stared out
at the world from its head—alien, insectile, unblinking, of different sizes.
Maybe six or eight of them, maybe more, it was hard to tell with the jutting
pincers, the stalks of antennae that sliced the air overhead. As it moved
through the crowd, people fell away from it on all sides, giving it space.

Tavlin
stared, mouth open.

The
boy took the opportunity to wriggle loose of his grasp and back away. “Never
seen a G’zai, huh, mister?”

“No.
Never.”

The
white horror moved closer, towering perhaps two or three feet over the heads of
the mutants, its antennae whipping several feet even higher. Tavlin could hear
the cutting noises they made.
Whup
whup
whup
.

“Don’t
worry, mister, they’re harmless,” the boy said.

“Are
you sure? It looks dangerous.”

“I’m
sure. See, I’ll—”

Two
whip-like cords shot out from the G’zai and lassoed a man about the middle. It
was an uninfected man, Tavlin saw, of medium height and build. Likely an upper
coming down into the sewers to enjoy a night of depravity on the cheap. The man
screamed and was dragged off his feet toward the abomination. Energy like green
fire passed through the tendrils into the man, and his screams turned into
howls of agony.

Two
constables, who had been loitering in the shadows watching for people to extort
money from, rushed forward, drawing their pistols. A gun cracked, then another.
Tavlin saw bursts of flesh erupt on the G’zai, and a viscous white substance
ran from the wounds, but the creature didn’t seem to register any pain.

Others
appeared.

Tavlin
hadn’t noticed them, so focused was he on the first one, but more G’zai,
perhaps a dozen or so, had wormed their way up from their cocoon-like lairs and
now cut through the crowd on the platform. Tavlin heard a scream and spun to
see three more of the chittering white abominations slice and whip the crowd
about them. Green fire erupted among the mutants, spreading from one to
another. Tavlin saw one of the G’zai lift an appendage with an opening at the
end. The appendage rippled in a muscular fashion, like an elephant’s trunk or a
throbbing phallus, and then some sort of energy passed out of the dripping
orifice—the air rippled around it, though the energy was invisible—and the
blast struck the nearest constable. He exploded into a thousand wet pieces.

A
second G’zai whipped its tendrils at the other constable, and the tendrils tore
through him as if he were butter and the tendrils superheated knives. He
collapsed into even chunks revealing perfect cross-sections of flesh and bone
and fat on the floor, like a selection at a butcher shop, each chunk wrapped in
a decorative layer of skin and uniform.

People
ran, screaming. Where they ventured too close to a G’zai, tendrils whipped them
to shreds, or green fire burned them into strange charred shapes, reducing them
to flaming lumps that still seemed to scream, or else were blown apart by
dripping orifices on the end of certain limbs. The G’zai butchered the infected
with no mercy or seeming motive. Tavlin saw the uninfected man they had dragged
down surrounded by two more G’zai, who wrapped their own tendrils around him.
His screams grew so hoarse he could no longer scream. He simply juddered and
writhed on the ground, foam frothing his lips. Strangely, they did not kill
him.

The
G’zai took down another non-infected man, and the same thing began to happen to
him.

Some
fleeing person smashed into Tavlin, knocking him over. Boots stampeded his
abdomen. Someone kicked the side of his head.

The
boy grabbed his arm and helped haul him to his feet. “Run, you idiot!”

The
boy fled into the chaos, toward a ramp leading up. Tavlin pelted after him,
wondering if perhaps he should take a ramp down, toward the docks, but as soon
as the thought occurred to him he shrank in horror from it. The G’zai occupied
the bottom level. To go down was to die. Even as he found the boy and started
up a ramp, he saw the towering, white, chittering shapes flow up a ramp from
below and swarm the plaza, cutting bloody swathes through the crowd.

They’re
after me
. They had captured two uninfected men of his general height and
description. They could only be looking for him.

He
cut through the crowd following the boy. The youth vanished into a pool hall on
the next level, and Tavlin pushed his way in through the opening after him. It
was darker in here than out, and the press of people blocked many of the
lights. It stank of stale cigarette smoke, mold and body odor. Fighting through
the press, Tavlin mounted a pool table and scanned the crowd until he saw a
small form slipping through the packed shapes toward the rear of the hall.
Tavlin jumped down and elbowed his way through them, after the boy. Mutants
around him were breaking pool cues into jagged-tipped sticks to use as weapons
or pulling out their own guns and knives. The employees of the pool hall
gathered behind the bar, the apparent owner checking to make sure his shotgun
was loaded.

With
practiced ease, the boy slipped through a doorway and into a back room, and
Tavlin followed.

“Don’t
follow me, asshole!” the boy shouted over his shoulder as he ran up a narrow
stairway.

Tavlin
ignored him and plunged upward.

Screaming
erupted in the pool hall behind him. He heard the shotgun roar, then the cracks
of smaller weapons. The screams pitched higher and higher.

The
pool hall occupied one level of a tower, and the boy was leading up into the
rest of it, which stretched out like a junkheap honeycomb on all sides. License
plates stuck out from the walls between bicycle wheels and sheets of metal.
People vanished into their warrens, blocking the doors behind them. One shouted
to the boy, who cursed him and ran on. Breathless, heart smashing against his
ribs, Tavlin followed.

The
boy pounded up another stairway, then another.

Screams
filtered up from below. More gunshots. Tavlin felt sick in the pit of his
stomach.
What have I done now?

The
boy led on, and Tavlin began to wonder if he had any destination at all or if
he were just putting distance between himself and the G’zai. At last the boy
reached the highest level of the tower and sprinted through an exit, across a
ramp toward a platform.

Running
beside him, Tavlin panted out, "Is there a way out of town that doesn’t
involve going down to the docks?”

The
boy hesitated, as if not sure he wanted to reveal his secrets even then. He
started to open his mouth to reply, but just then a pair of G'zai appeared from
a connecting
rampway
. People screamed and divided all
around them.

The
tall white things cut through the press of mutants, smoke pouring around them.
A gang of townspeople very close to Tavlin and the boy, armed with homemade
weapons, rushed toward the creatures. One G'zai lifted a dripping tentacle,
then another. Two separate blasts hit the mutants. Tavlin, wondering if they did
in fact mean to take him alive, threw himself to the floor even as the G’zai
released the pulses. He dragged the boy down with him.

The
lad screamed. There came an awful
splat
sound, and then something wet covered them both from head to foot. Tavlin tried
to turn his mind off to it as he pulled the boy up the ramp and away from the
G’zai.

"Well?"
Tavlin demanded. "Is there another way out of the city?"

Around
him the people they passed were staring at them, and it wasn’t until Tavlin had
to wipe blood and oozing flesh out of his eyes that he realized why. He and the
boy were absolutely soaked in viscera. The boy was trembling and crying, much
of the brave townspeople that had just died now coated onto him like glue, but
at the moment he looked livid enough to put his grief aside.

“Yes,"
he said. "There's a way."

The
two emerged onto a plaza that was full of smoke and screams, where Tavlin and
the boy paused to gasp for breath and wipe gore from their hair.

“Well?”
Tavlin pressed.

“There’s
tunnels up above, through the rock of the ceiling. Smugglers used to use them.”
With a crooked grin, the boy added, “Still do.”

Tavlin
didn’t know what the boy and his people smuggled and didn’t care. “Then let’s
be going.”

More
screams filtered up from below.

“This
way,” the boy said, and led them up a ramp. Bodies littered the ground around
them, as well as signs of great destruction, as though a hurricane had swept
through, but hopefully the creatures that had done this had already passed on.

Tavlin
started to go with the boy, then paused.

“What’re
you waiting for?” the boy said, as he ushered the others up the ramp.

“I
have to go back for somebody.”

The
boy looked at him as though he were mad—worse, as though he were one of the
walking dead. “Change your mind, I’ll be at the end of the Ale-Maru.” Tavlin
knew this was another hanging section like the Singh-Hiss, the one that terminated
in the clock.

Tavlin
nodded, then turned away. The boy and the others vanished up the ramp, into the
chaos. Tavlin wished them well, but he had something he had to do.