Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) (22 page)

The giant was facing me. He had gotten bigger. He had also grown scales, and claws, and big teeth and a tail. Okay. Not human.

Did you know he could do that?

their contraplicate nature was obscured.

The lizardman hissed and swung a fistful of claws at my face—fast. Catskinner dodged out of the way. My hands lashed out with both knives and he dodged. Not good.

Catskinner swung the table around and it got tangled up in the lizardman's legs (the screen going back to the No Signal blue as the laptop went clattering off someplace) and he went down, which was good, but he was able to roll out of the path of Catskinner's descending knives and lash out with a foot—also clawed—which Catskinner dodged by leaping straight up in the air and coming down with both feet on the lizardman's tail, which must have hurt because I could feel little bones splintering, but he was striking back, curled in a tighter curve than a human could have managed and biting, ripping my pants but—I hoped—not my skin.

All of which happened before Russwin could get up. The other audience members hadn't even begun to react. Somewhere in the darkness behind the lizardman was Alice. I hoped that she'd be able to get clear.

Then we were back at it, slash, dodge, jump, slash, roll, neither the lizardman's claws or Catskinner's knives able to connect. Catskinner had never fought anyone as fast as he was before. I didn't know how long he could keep it up before burning up all my reserves, but I knew it couldn't be long.

At some point we knocked the screen down and the beam of the projector cast a fuzzy blue glow across the walls and ceiling. Out of the corner of my eye I caught the biker's body and it looked strange, deformed somehow, but Catskinner's attention was focused on the lizardman.

“Duck!” Russwin yelled and my body hit the ground. Russwin fired—the same steady rhythm as when he was shooting at the minraudim, one and two and three and four and five. The lizardman was moving, down and around and tying to make for Russwin, but I think he was hit three times, maybe four. It staggered him, slowed him down enough that Catskinner was able to jackknife up and bury the bayonet in one reptilian eye and the screwdriver in the other. Blood, pale pink and watery, sheeted his scaly hide.

Make sure it's dead, I suggested.

of course.

My hand left the bayonet in place and returned with the cleaver. Holding the lizardman's body upright with the screwdriver Catskinner chopped, after three swings the body fell, leaving me holding the head.

it's dead.

I took my body and Catskinner let me. I was instantly weak. It wasn't just the usual hunger; I was bone weary. Human bodies weren't designed to operate at Catskinner's level, it was like hooking a 110 volt motor to a 220 line. It worked great for short bursts, but my body needed time to recover. Over the last few days Catskinner had taken my body more often than in the previous month, and the strain was showing more and more. I didn't know how close my nervous system was to burning out, and I didn't think Catskinner did either.

Russwin came up beside me.

“Sic transit tyrannosaurus,” he said softly, looking down at the body of the lizardman. I realized I was still holding the head, so I dropped it.

the others still live.

Let them. I don't care about them. I didn't care about much of anything. I was exhausted, body and soul. Godiva was dead, Morgan was dead. I didn't have anywhere to go or anything to do, except leave here.

they seem to care about you.

I looked out at the crowd. Some of them were out of their chairs, some heading to exits, some on the floor, all of them staring at us. Yeah, heck of a show, huh?

Beside me I heard Russwin reloading his pistol. I didn't know where Alice was.

“We'll, uh, we'll just be leaving now,” I said.

my knives.

Right. I reached down and pulled the screwdriver loose from the lizardman's head. The bayonet was a little trickier, I had to put my foot on the head to hold it in place and yank. It came free and I utterly failed to conceal how shaky I was on my feet. Not good, I wanted to crowd to still be scared of me, at least long enough to reach the exit.

“Cobb!” Alice called from someplace behind us. “We have a problem.”

Russwin turned to look, his head and his gun swiveling together like synchronized swimmers. He looked back to me, then at the assembled crowd.

“Ladies and gentleman, you need to leave this room at once. Please, everybody, gather your belongings, and if somebody could get the lights, please.” His voice was calm, commanding, a perfect cop voice.

It worked, too, for a moment. Then the first people to reach the doors pushed on them and they didn't open. Then the people behind them started pushing. And still no one got the lights.

I turned to look at whatever it was that Alice and Russwin had seen. My eyes had adjusted pretty well to the blue light from the projector. On the floor by my feet was the lizardman's body, and the lizardman's head, and over there was the biker's body, or, rather, the biker's bones. Bones?  The bones gleamed wetly in the blue light and there was some kind of pool of liquid, like the one around Victor's body, but it was in the wrong place, it was closer to me than the bones.

And it was moving. Toward me. I stepped back and Russwin reached out, guided me around him to the other side of him. The fluid didn't change direction as I half expected it to, it kept rolling across the floor until it reached the lizardman's body. The lizardman started liquefying, the inhuman bones poking through the flesh and the pool growing, spreading. It was thicker than blood. In the blue light it looked like yogurt.

“What's that?” I asked Russwin. I really didn't want to know, it was just habit.

“Can somebody please get the lights on?” Russwin's voice was starting to lose its calm control, but a moment later the lights came on, dazzling us all. In the light from the overheads the pool of goo was pink. A pale pink, the color of lips.

Russwin headed to one of the doors, his gun held loosely, pointed at the floor. Alice joined us quickly. As we reached the people struggling to push the door Russwin said loudly, “Stand aside—let's get us all out of here.”

They weren't panicked, not quite or not yet, so they parted grudgingly to let us through. It was a simple set of double doors, with commercial panic bars. I pushed on the door, and it depressed, but the door didn't open. Something was holding it closed from the other side.

“I tried that,” a man said angrily.

“They're not supposed to lock those,” another man added. “Fire codes.”

I pushed harder, and the door didn't budge. I didn't like it, but I was going to have to ask Catskinner to come out, one more time.

Then the screaming started. Someone at the edge of the crowd had fallen, but he wasn't the one screaming. He was melting into pink goo—the ones around him were screaming.

We need out of here now.

In answer Catskinner threw my body against the door, hard enough to bend the door and crack the paint, but it still didn't open. He moved back for another run and Alice yelled, “The wall! Go through the wall!”

Catskinner changed my direction and brushed a couple in matching T-shirts out of the way and hit the wall. Drywall caved and a stud splintered and then I was through, out into the hallway. I saw a frame of 2x4's nailed up over the door, and then I was rolling across the hall as the crowd poured out after me.

I lay there in the hall, feeling weak, which is how I realized that it was me laying there. Catskinner had retreated while I was in the air. At which point I figured I probably should get up before somebody trampled me.

Russwin was leading the crowd out, offering encouragement and instructions and in general acting like the wise and strong authority figure in the midst of the crisis. He was good at it, too. He didn't even need to point his gun at anybody.

Alice came up beside me. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” I got to my feet. “What was that?”

“Some sort of metamorphic anthrophage,” she answered absently. When am I going to learn to stop asking questions like that? “We need to get moving,” she added.

I was about to ask why when the pink goo started oozing out from under the door.

“Right.”  

The crowd was headed down the hall to the front doors. I didn't see anybody from any of the other events—had they evacuated the rest of the con while we were in the slideshow presentation? They must have, at the same time they were putting the frames in front of the door. Whoever “they” were, they had been busy.

All for me? Sure, it was flattering, but was I really worth all this trouble? I didn't know who this Agony Delapour was—except that she probably wasn't really named Agony—but I figured she was a good reason to leave town. I should have run as soon as Dr. Klein and her goons had killed Victor.

Alice and Russwin could keep fighting the good fight. Me and Catskinner, we just weren't the world saving types. Florida, maybe. I could stand seeing the last of cold weather for a while, and I could set up shop taking out drug runners—nice, safe, human drug runners with lots of guns and cash. I'd destroy the drugs. That way I could save a little bit of the world.

One of the girls headed for the exit in front of us slipped and fell, then two others beside her. Alice held out a hand to stop me, but I had already seen them starting to liquefy. The pink goop had flowed under the other set of doors and headed back down towards us.

A smart blob. This could get
really
ugly.
 

Chapter Twenty-One

“that which can not go on forever comes to an end.”

I turned and looked back the way we came. The goop hadn't quite filled the hallway behind us. There was room for a quick run and a short jump to get past it, but only if I moved now, so I did. As I ran I felt Catskinner's focus and heat on my back like a sunburn, but he didn't try to take over. I jumped and made it with feet to spare.

Alice kept up, more or less. I heard her hit the ground just after I did, and she kept running. The rest of the crowd—those who hadn't been dissolved—were going the other way, to the front of the building. Russwin was up there somewhere. Alice and I were cut off.

“Do you know where the back door is?” I asked her.

She was gasping. I glanced back—the goop was flowing slowly enough that I felt comfortable slowing to walk. Gratefully she fell into step beside me.

“No . . . . I didn't see anything back this way.”

I looked around. Blank hallway, doors at the end. “There's got to be one, right?”

“Yeah . . . or you can punch another hole in a wall.”

Maybe. Or maybe I'd drop dead of a heart attack as soon as Catskinner tried anything. But they had to have a loading dock, employees entrance, something.

Assuming it wasn't nailed shut. I found myself wondering if being turned into goo hurt.

The doors we were headed towards were labeled “No Admittance—Employees Only.” Past the door the hallway continued. It was dirtier, darker. The walls and the carpet were the same, but they hadn't been kept up. A half-open door on the left led to a storeroom with mops and buckets and vacuum cleaners—and no door out. Moving on there was a door on the right. I opened it—a restroom with a tiny window way up high. Keep going.

I glanced behind me. The goop was flowing under the “Employees Only” door. It seemed to be moving faster. Alice glanced back, took a deep breath, and broke into a jog.

Another door on the right. I pushed it open. It was a kitchen—cold and dry, evidently not used any time recently. The big stainless steel tables were empty.

Except for the one that held Godiva.

I stopped and Alice ran into me.

“There's no exit here,” she said breathlessly.

“You go on,” I told her.

“You can't do anything for her.”

I turned to her. “You. Go. On.”

She nodded, started to say something, then turned to go. The door swung shut behind her.

Catskinner was silent as I walked slowly to the table where Godiva was tied down. He didn't really experience time the same way living things do, and he didn't understand that the pink goop was flowing behind us and would reach this room soon.

I did, but I didn't care. I was too tired and too hurt to care.

Godiva. She looked so small, naked and bound to the table, cut open like that. The wound was smaller than it had looked on the screen, maybe the length of my forearm, running from the bottom of her rib cage to the little tangle of soft golden pubic hair. For the picture the edges of it had been pulled apart, but they had mostly closed now, leaving only an inch or so of her insides exposed at the widest point.

There was almost no blood. I wondered where it had gone.

It wasn't right.

She wasn't human, but she wasn't a monster, not like me. She didn't deserve to be stripped and butchered and left like this.

The plastic was thick and had been wrapped around her body and the table multiple times. Somehow it made her look more naked than if they'd just left her without clothes. I fumbled one of Catskinner's knives out of my pocket—the survival knife—and slit the plastic. Peeled it off. Underneath it she felt so cold.

Alice was wrong, I could do something. I could do this. I could treat Godiva like a person instead of a thing. Maybe no one would ever know, and maybe it was the last thing I would do, but I could do it. It mattered. I looked around, but there was no trace of her clothes, or her glasses, or her teeth. I took off my shirt and laid it across her body. It covered her breasts, the wound in her belly, and her groin. It gave her some dignity.

Death happened. It was inevitable. Everybody dies, even the powerful, the wise, and the strong. Dehumanization, though, that wasn't inevitable. That didn't have to happen, and as long as there was breath in my body it wouldn't happen to anyone who had been kind to me.

Strength, I had always believed, lay in being able to do what another could not do. For the first time I encountered someone truly stronger than I was, someone who could do what I could not. Looking down at Godiva's body I realized that there was no better death than to die fighting that kind of strength.