Catskinner's Book (The Book Of Lost Doors) (23 page)

I lay my head on her chest. She seemed warm, with the shirt over her.

That was it, all I could do. Time to go. If I could.

The pink goo was flowing under the door to the kitchen, smoothly crossing the tile floor towards my feet. As an abstract ideal, dying for a noble gesture sounded good. Looking at the reality, though, was a little different.

I hopped up on the table next to Godiva. There really wasn't room for both of us, so I cradled her head in my lap, pulled my feet up. Let's see if this shit can climb.

It pooled around the legs of the table, but stopped when it was maybe four inches deep. It filled most of the kitchen floor, but it seemed to be able to defy gravity only to a limited extent. Fatal it might be, but it still had the limitations of a fluid.

Then Godiva's body jerked. I jumped in response and damn near knocked both of us off the table. Her mouth opened and sucked in air, a long ragged breath. A moment later she exhaled. She was breathing.

She had been dead. I was sure of that—I knew all about how dead people looked and felt. Somehow, now, she was breathing, and dead people didn't do that. I had thought she had felt warmer when I put my shirt on her, and now I was sure of it. She was alive again.

I held her and her breathing smoothed out. I put my hand on her neck felt her pulse.

Her eyes opened.

“James?”

I nodded. I couldn't speak.

She reached to put her arms around me and then lay back down. “Oh . . .  ow!”  She looked down at herself. There was blood on my shirt now. Gingerly she reached out and lifted it to look under.

“Oh, that's not good. What the hell happened?”

“Well, um, somebody wrapped you in plastic and then started to, uh, dissect you.”

She sighed and laid her head back down. “Typical.” She turned her head gingerly from side to side. “Is there any of that plastic wrap left? That'll do until I get some suture.”

“But—” I was overwhelmed. Too much, too fast. “You were dead.”

She looked up at me quizzically. “No, I wasn't.”

“Yes, yes you were. Believe me, I know dead when I see it. You were dead. No breathing, no heartbeat, cold skin, not bleeding—dead.”

“I was in anaerobic stasis.” Like she was saying she'd been taking a nap.

I took a deep breath, tried to force myself to be calm. “I don't know what that means.”

“Oh,” she reached up to take my hand. “I keep forgetting how much you don't know. I'm sorry.”  A pause, and I could see her trying to dumb down the explanation so I could understand it.

“Okay,” she began. “You know I'm not human, right?”

I nodded.

“I was born human, and then . . . I got changed. Like you, with the servitor configuration on your back. But, in my case, it's a physical symbiosis. There's a, well, it's an alien plant life form living inside my body. It has the ability to restructure my body and it can synthesize various organic compounds—like what I fed you.”

I nodded. That much I could grasp.

“Now, it's more or less under my conscious control. It responds to my brain's commands, just like the body I was born with. But it's different from me in a lot of ways. It's a vegetable, and it's a pretty damned tough vegetable. Very hard to kill. Case in point—it doesn't need to breathe.”

“But you do.” I objected.

“Yes and no. See, when my body—my animal body—becomes oxygen starved it passes out. But the symbiote doesn't. Instead what it does is take over the functions of my blood supply with its own circulatory system. It's an osmotic—eh, that doesn't matter. The point is that the animal part of me was in a kind of suspended animation and the plant part of me was keeping it alive. That's why I didn't exhibit any obvious vital response.”

“So when I cut the plastic off your face—?”

“It let oxygen get to my lung tissue, so the symbiote was able to reactive my aerobic respiration cycle.” A pause. “It woke me up.”

It was incredible. She was alive. “Like sleeping beauty, only without the kissing part.”

She smiled up at me. “Sometimes the dragon does rescue the princess.” She lifted her hand to my face and touched my lips. “We can do the kissing part later.”

She started to swing her legs around and I grabbed her. “Wait! There's more. There's some kind of flesh-eating goop all over the floor.”

She craned her head to look down. “Flesh-eating goop, huh?”

“Yeah, it's like The Blob. If you touch it you dissolve and turn into more of it. Except bones—it leaves the bones. Alice called it a—” I concentrated—“meta . . . morphic  anthro . . . something.”

“Metamorphic anthrophage,” Godiva supplied. “Yeah—that just means that it eats you and turns you into more of itself, which really is what any carnivore does, except the process takes a lot longer with most things. It's got to be a depolymerizing agent, probably bound to some simple free ranging intelligence. Where did it come from?”

“Catskinner killed this guy and he turned into slime, and the slime got a bunch of other people.”

Godiva bit her lip. “Assume that it's able to metabolize at least some of the tissue as a food source . . . hmm. It left the bones, you say? They were clean?”

“Nothing but bone.”

“Not good. Skin, connective tissue, muscle, hair—that's a broad spectrum agent. We've got to kill it.”

“I'm in favor of that. How? I'm guessing stabbing it won't do much good.”

Godiva looked around. She sat up, pressing my shirt to her belly. I winced in sympathy. “There might be something in those cabinets that can help.”

The cabinets in question were a good four feet away, above the steel counter that ran along three sides of the room.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don't know. Something. Can you get there and look?”

Could I? Catskinner could, I was sure of it, but he had been oddly quiet since he'd smashed through the wall in the meeting room.

Can you get me over there?

perhaps. there is risk of further damage to your pattern.

Risk? How bad a risk?

unweaving.

You mean it might kill me?

yes.

If I fall into that blob it will definitely kill me.

you can jump that far without me.

The hell of it was, he was probably right. It was a little far for a standing broad jump, but if it had just been chalk lines on the sidewalk I wouldn't even have hesitated.

“Okay, I'm going to give it a shot,” I said. “Catskinner has been using up a lot of my . . . I don't know, chi force or something. He says that it might kill me for him to take over, so I'm going to make the jump myself.”

Godiva looked at me gravely, then nodded. “I understand.”

She started to twist her body to face me, then stopped, grimacing. “Be careful,” she said, pain in her voice.

“Oh, yeah,” I agreed. “Careful is priority one.”

I got up on my knees, then on my feet, moving slowly. The table was as steady as pavement—probably bolted to the floor. I looked over at the counter top—wide, clean, probably bolted to the wall. It didn't look that far.

Then I looked down at the pink goo that covered the floor, the stuff that would dissolve me the moment I so much as touched it. All of a sudden that counter looked a lot farther away

I took a deep breath and got ready.

wait.

Yes?

bend your legs more.

I crouched a little. This okay?

and turn to your left.

I turned a little. Like this?

now jump.

I jumped. Both my feet hit the counter, and then my face hit the cabinet, but I was able to grab it. There was a moment of panic, but I was there and solidly planted. Not bad.

Thank you.

i understand how not to die.

That he did. I opened the cabinet closest to where I'd landed and started looking for things to help us not die.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“there is nothing so complete that it cannot be abbreviated.”

“Let's see. Ketchup, mustard, steak sauce—oh, here we go! Salt, a ton of salt. That's got  to be good, right?”

“It's not a slug, it's an animated
viscoelastic liquid. Keep going.” Godiva was lying back on the table, holding my shirt to her belly. I didn't like how bloody it was getting.
 

I went to the next one. “Plastic forks, spoons, cocktail napkins, plastic cups—no good, right?”

“Right.”  

The next one held more of the same. “Salt shakers, tablecloths, napkin holders, candles—”

“—wait!”

“Candles?”

“Tablecloths, what kind?”

“Uh,” I poked through the stack. “Paper, plastic . . . paper and plastic, looks like.”
 

“Gimme one of each.”

I looked over at her. “You're going to kill the slime creature with tablecloths?”

A drawn-out painful sounding sigh. “No, I'm going to stop my bleeding with tablecloths, so I can live long enough to kill the slime creature.”

Oh, yeah, there was that. I scooted around on the counter so I was facing her. “Okay, I'll just, uh, gently lob them, okay?”

“Paper first.” She wasn't looking good at all.
 

I pulled out a paper tablecloth—in a plastic bag, so maybe it was sterile, or at least close. I tossed it and it landed on her chest.

“Thanks.” She pulled my shirt off her. It was soaked in blood. “You're not getting this back. Sorry.”
 

“I don't care about the shirt.” Under the shirt she looked worse than not good. She raised her head enough to glare at me. “Keep looking.”
 

Right. “Uh, big jars. Olives, cherries—”
 

Godiva let out a long gasp, tinged with pain. “Well, on the plus side, this is a really neat incision.  If I can get the edges lined up—ow—it probably won't even scar.”  

I tried to concentrate on the contents of the cabinets. “Pickled eggs—eh, does anybody eat those?  Let's see. . .” I had to scoot down the counter to the next one.
 

Godiva was talking, quietly, to herself. “Okay, Dr. Millerson, will you close?” Then to me, “I don't suppose you've run across a couple of tubes of super glue?”
 

“Sorry, not yet—”
 

I heard paper rustling and her body shift on the table, mixed with hisses of agony. “Rule number one, keep the insides on the inside and the outsides on the outsides. . . . Okay, toss me a plastic one, okay?”
 

I'd left them in the other cabinet, so I had to scoot back. I grabbed one and looked back. She was wrapped in white paper from shoulders to thighs. Red was already leaking through the front. I tossed the plastic tablecloth and she reached for it, but it slipped through her fingers and fell with a splat in the pool of flesh-dissolving goo.

“Shit! I'm sorry, I—”
 

Her eyes closed for a moment, then she looked back to me. “Just get another one.”

I threw the second one so it landed on her. “Good, what else have we got over there?”

I scooted back across the counter. “Coffee, filters, cream and sugar, stirrers, cups—”
 

“No help, go on.”

Plastic was rustling now. Her movements sounded slower, and her gasps of pain more frequent.

The next one was stuck. No wait— “It's locked.”

“So fucking break it open.”

I still had Catskinner's knives. I took the modified screwdriver and jammed it between the door of the cabinet and the frame. I leaned into it and it popped open suddenly. For a heart-stopping moment I teetered on the edge of the counter then pulled myself back up.

“Booze. Rum, whiskey, vodka—”
 

“Now you're talking!” The rustling paused.

“You need some to sterilize your cut?” I asked.

“Naw, I don't much worry about infection. My symbiote doesn't play well with others. It pretty much kills off anything else that tries to live in me. No, alcohol's a poison.”
 

“It—yeah, I knew that.” I looked over the edge of the counter. “So. . . how do I get it to drink?”
 

A choked laugh, then a gasp. “Just pour it in the goop.”

That was simple enough. I started with a bottle of vodka, spun the cap off and poured it over the side of the counter. I was expecting steam to rise from it, but the clear liquid just spattered onto the think pink goop and got absorbed by it. When the bottle was empty I reached for another.
 

“So, how do we tell when it's dead?” I asked.

Godiva rustled a little bit in her plastic wrap. “Ah, that's better. Well, it's not exactly 'alive' now, but the chemical bonds that allow the captive outsider to manipulate the fluid require a quasi-organic stability. The alcohol should break that down—it should begin to flow downhill when the outsider loses cohesion.”

I was halfway through the second bottle. “Which way is downhill?”

“Hmmm. Well, if we're lucky there's a drain under all that goop—this is a commercial kitchen, after all.”  

She shifted and then sat up on the table. “Ahhh. . . . Much better. Do me a favor, use the rum last, okay? I could use a shot.”
 

I dropped the second bottle of vodka, grabbed one of gin. “Do you think that's a good idea? What with, uh, that cut and all?”
 

She shrugged. Now that her body was tightly wrapped she looked much better. “I can't go into shock—the symbiote would just put me in stasis again before that happened.”

The gin was gone. There were a couple of bottles of whiskey, I grabbed the cheap one first. No sense in feeding Glenlivet to the blob if I didn't have to.

“Rum's very high in sugar, you know.” Her voice was starting to sound better, too. “Easy to metabolize. I used to be a beer drinker, back in school. Never had much of a sweet tooth, before. Part of the change, these days I crave sugar all the time. Of course, I don't have to worry about cavities anymore—or gaining weight, for that matter. Like you, I'm eating for two.”