Fantasmagoria (16 page)

“There was a time without Furies. We were peaceful, happy, playful. But we were coveted, enslaved, forced to serve, like those creatures down there. Our numbers dwindled.”

“I didn’t know that either.”

“Ma’m Colonel,” Lette interrupted. Her hands were definitely shaking.

The colonel saw it. “The baths are wearing off faster, aren’t they?”

Lette nodded. She grabbed her own trembling arms. “It burns . . .” she whispered.

“Go.” The colonel nodded. “But return quickly. We’ll be leaving soon.” She watched her Fury move past the mechanoids and out the loading dock.

“What’s wrong with her?” Gilbert asked.

“She’s losing control,” the colonel replied. Lette had been woken too early. It was an accident. The others wouldn’t share her flaws. “Bathing in the blood of her victims temporarily eases the pain, and the blood lust.”

Gilbert wanted to know who she was going to kill, but he noticed the minotaurs shuffling. Everyone was less stiff without the Fury around.

“Furies, like Lette, saved us from extinction, but not without sacrifice. According to scripture, the Holy Mother, Dame Althea Altharius, traveled to Mount Arat to see the Oracles of Goyen, where she immolated herself on top of their sacred sepulcher in protest of the silent god. Legend says as her blood seeped into the stone the Infinite Clockmaker was moved, and He modified His creation. From thence forth, if ever the seed of a man touches Amazonian flesh . . . well, you know the rest.” Colonel Sryn turned to one of her lieutenants, a sleek, beautiful soldier with dark hair and blue eyes. “Radio the truck. Tell them we’re almost ready.”

The soldier saluted and retreated down the steps.

Gilbert watched her leave. Other than jumping, those steps were the only way off the catwalk. Leaping to the floor was suicide. Even if he didn’t break his neck, he’d be left hobbled and unable to flee. The minotaurs were on the ground, and they were beginning to throw their weight around. Tension was palpably increasing.

“You see how we’ve resorted to sperm-mongering.”

Gilbert had been right. The mechanoids must be whores from LaMana’s brothels, maybe Pimpernel’s too. If Iku hadn’t ejected her tank at Kosi’s, he realized, his own semen might have made it in there. His stomach turned. He looked away. That’s when he noticed the working girls were being paid as they left. “That’s a lot of semen.” He wondered if the contents of the vat could break his fall.

“That’s why we are here, Mr. Tubers. Men bring it from all over the Empire. Even some aminals sneak in. Gambling and sex are the only reasons anyone comes to the frontier. Semen is the one thing this city produces in quantity, and the criminal syndicates have a lock on the supply.”

Gilbert nodded. The colonel was making it clear she didn’t like working with gangsters; criminals were undesirable in a utopian society.

A loud beeping broke his concentration. A tanker truck backed into the basement of the building. The Amazons were about to haul it all away, he realized, and Gilbert’s heart beat faster. That meant it was almost time to go.

“That’s enough,” the colonel said to another subordinate. “Tell the rest of those creatures to leave.” She turned back to Gilbert.

“What are you going to do with me?” he repeated.

“Although it’s odd to consider it, you are half Amazon, which means you are exceedingly intelligent. I think you know.”

He looked at the vat and the disappointed, departing mechanoids. If he was going to jump, it would have to be now.

“You were part of something magnificent, Gilbert, the preservation--no, the rebirth of the Amazon race. Unfortunately, sacrifices must be made, although I’m sure that’s small consolation.”

“You haven’t told me why I’m this way.” He needed more time. “Please.”

The colonel watched a minotaur snort at a passing soldier. “Unfortunately, we’re out of time. I’m sorry, Gilbert. I truly am. I can only imagine how disappointed you must be. I take no pleasure in this.” She nodded to a nearby soldier, who squirted liquid from the end of a syringe.

Gilbert thought about his dad, pressed to the wall of that elevator by all those commuters too oblivious to help the dying workman sweating and silent at the back. He wasn’t going to die that way. He wasn’t.

He stared at the tank of semen, gathered from an unknown quantity of men. This was it. He had to act.

Gilbert Tubers was an engineer. He knew exactly what happened when high-energy radiation streamed through a long metal conductor. You got radio waves. Broad-spectrum radiation should produce broad-spectrum radio. He hoped it was enough.

Gilbert removed his glove and grasped the metal railing of the catwalk. But nothing happened.

“What are you doing?” The colonel squinted.

Gilbert’s hands sweat, and that’s when it hit. Every minotaur in the room shrieked as their shock collars blinked on. The Amazons froze. The mechanoids screamed as five-hundred-pound horned behemoths began tearing at everything around them in a rage.

“Damn!” Colonel Sryn pulled a revolved from her lieutenant’s belt and beat Gilbert’s hand with the butt.

He yelped and hit the floor as she trained the gun on his head. The pair stared at each other through the round visor of Gilbert’s hood. The colonel handed the gun back to the soldier—she knew what would happen if his tissues were too damaged. His arm was already broken thanks to that idiot Pugs. Gilbert was a walking nuclear bomb. He had to be disposed of properly.

Pandemonium erupted. An Amazon was gored and thrown against the wall. Her compatriots opened fire with automatic rifles. The bullets ripped into the minotaurs’ flesh but still they came.

Colonel Sryn raised three fingers above her head. Somewhere, a sniper began shooting the rampaging beasts through the skull. A puff of red and some fragments of bone were the only visible evidence of the high-powered shots, and one by one, the behemoths dropped. The Amazons had come prepared.

The colonel walked down the steps. “Bring him!” She motioned to Gilbert and strode to the door. “And clean up those bodies. No trace.”

“Ma’m.” A stunning redhead in a crisp black uniform stepped down from the cab of the tanker. “The Empire has arrived.”

Colonel Sryn walked past the truck and looked up at the sky. “Right on schedule.”

Gilbert stumbled down the stairs on purpose. His suit protected him from the worst of the fall, but the pain in his arm was unbearable. He yelled. The Amazon with the syringe held it in the air and bent to grab him. That’s what he had been waiting for. Gilbert ripped her narrow-barreled sidearm from its holster.

“STOP!” But he didn’t point the gun at any of his attackers. Gilbert held the gun to his own head. He pulled off his helmet for effect. He was flushed and sweating. Every breath throbbed through his arm. “Just, stop.”

The room was clearing. The last of the mechanoid whores, those who had been cowering in the corner, scurried away in squeaks. The minotaurs lay on the ground. Some were still panting. All were dead or dying.

The soldier with the syringe, a buxom brunette with dark green lipstick, stepped toward the radioactive man.

“Halt,” the colonel commanded. “Gilbert, what are you doing?”

“I’m not going to let you poison me. If you come close, any of you, I’ll pull the trigger. You know what will happen. You’ll die. Your soldiers will die. Maybe you don’t care about that. I don’t know. But I bet you care about your mission. The tanker,” he motioned to it, “and everything in it will be vaporized.”

Colonel Sryn spread her arms wide. “Everyone stay back.”

Gilbert began to back out the large delivery door, gun to his head, walking free as his own hostage. His broken arm pressed his hood to his body. It hurt. “And I don’t want anybody following me!” His voice and hands shook.

A long, black car screeched to a halt in the alley. Marcelline opened the back door. She’d been waiting for him to complete his assignment. She didn’t look happy.

Gilbert paused for a moment and ducked into the car. The nearest Amazons rushed forward with rifles raised.

“Stop,” the colonel called.

Her soldiers watched Gilbert disappear down the alley. They turned back, confused.

“Took him long enough,” the colonel complained. “As soon as Lette returns, she will track and destroy him. Right now, the last shipment is our only priority. We need to get it out of the city before the Aminals attack.” She looked again at the white Imperial zeppelin casting a shadow over the skyline.

The tall, graceful soldiers nodded and went straight to work securing a long hose between the vat and the tanker. Within minutes, Lette strode back into the building with a sigh and a smirk. She looked drunk. Blood dribbled down her lips.

The colonel waved her over. “Mr. Tubers has escaped. Track him and kill him. Then meet us back at base.”

Lette smiled. She put her glasses over her black eyes and wiped the blood from her lips with one finger. “Which way?”

Colonel Sryn pointed and watched the Fury saunter after the radioactive man. Everything was proceeding as planned. Lette was damaged and losing control. That was unacceptable. By his death, Gilbert would do the one thing no one else in the world could, and two loose ends would be eliminated at the same time.

“Goodbye, Gilbert,” the colonel whispered. “We won’t be seeing each other again.”

The tanker rumbled to life and the colonel climbed into the cab. As the truck pulled away, plain-clothed Amazonian agents dispersed in a dozen different directions and disappeared into the city.

(EIGHTEEN) An Idiot with a Gun

Jack had learned long ago there was no situation not made worse by an idiot with a gun.

He saw a pistol clatter to the asphalt near the saurus’s splayed toes, its foot arched high on a heel spike. He looked up and saw himself reflected in the windows of a nearby office building. His arms were outstretched in a silent plea, tied by twisting straps that ran three times around the beast. He was a belt buckle slung low.

Overhead the gun’s owner, a policeman, was shrieking. He stopped as the fat from his midsection erupted against the glass like the cream from a twice-bitten doughnut. Moments later his uniformed legs hit the ground, held together by his belt, followed by a sprinkling of blood. Strapped to the creature’s belly, Jack could feel the crunch of each gnawing bite and the gulp that followed. The roar vibrated through his body and shook the glass.

Jack watched from his low perch, swaying back and forth with each stride, as people ran screaming through the street, mouths wide, faces contorted in panic. Shorn of rational thought, they stumbled in front of the beast like pinballs, bouncing off stopped cars and overturned rubbish bins, unable to decide whether it was better to make for cover or to try to outrun the thing as it tore through power lines and street lamps. The little round hero in the police uniform had urged them all to flee and started shooting. The bullets ripped into the creature’s scales and did just enough damage to piss it off and make it notice the insects scurrying underfoot. And a junkie always has the munchies.

The beast was still in a daze, having awoken only half an hour earlier, and it lumbered through the streets with the single-minded intensity of a virgin on a date. It had been calm at first as it walked through the industrial district. It sniffed the air and strode between squat warehouses. As it moved into the old city, it stopped only occasionally to rip a Neverod addict from the seeming safety of a building interior. Like an anteater at a mound, it ripped brick and jammed its massive, boney head through, blowing snot and chomping at the smelly drug user cowering in a bathroom or screaming in a stairwell. It ignored everyone else.

Then the police had arrived and erected a makeshift barricade of cars, which the saurus knocked over like driftwood. It was clear they thought the creature was crazed and moving at random, as if the 90-foot megalosaurus had wandered into the city by accident and gotten lost. They were firing at its head in the hopes of driving it away, but Jack knew better. It wasn’t going anywhere. Hanging like a limp dick from its belly, Jack could see it was heading for the brownstones and brick flats of Old Amazonus. Drug central.

Jack felt the splatter of gunfire ripple through the beast’s body. The bullets weren’t enough to stop it, but they were taking their toll. He could see trickles of blood on its face and neck like running zits. They were pissing the monster off.

The saurus bellowed and charged through a busy intersection, kicking cars and stepping on people. It took out a row of mailboxes with its tail. Then it lowered its head and vomited the contents of its stomach. Acid mixed with foamy blood, half-clothed body parts, and most of a large shark washed the street. The saurus heaved mightily and vomited again. It was having withdrawals. It would only get worse. It would only get sicker. Pugs was right. It wouldn’t stop until it devoured Erasmus’s drug den and killed everyone inside.

Kids. Helpless kids.

Jack closed his eyes. He felt a flame, like a pilot light, flicker in his heart. It was the same heart-candle from that night, his last night with the gang, the burning he felt as he walked down the stairs and into the doctor’s dark coven.

“An easy one,” Erasmus had told him. “The boys will pick up and drop off.” Jack just had to make sure LaMana’s thugs didn’t fuck things up. “The Butcher knows we’re beating him on the streets, but they won’t try anything with you there.”