Nocturnal Emissions (20 page)

More heads turned their way. Arms long held out in invitation to dance, or in the caress of a bloodlessly white cheek, now lowered and shifted somnam-bulantly. The dreamers were awakening.

“Maybe we should get outside,” Kubin said, echoing Morrow’s earlier sentiment, “until we can assess the situation…”

“What?” Golding laughed in his amazement, in his exhilaration. “We have to communicate with them! We didn’t come all this way to run away like children…and we can’t be harmed by them, you know.” He neglected to bring up the matter of his partner who had nearly been killed by an avalanche…or the fact that he had been the first to use his weapon here. The weapon he wasn’t returning to its compartment.

“They won’t be happy that we killed the others…”

“The others were already dead. If they hadn’t been, they’d have kept them inside where they are.”

“Unless,” Kubin said, “they left those others outside to watch over them.”

“Or even,” said Morrow, “to be the ones to flood the chamber, to keep these party-goers in stasis.”

“We’ll soon find out, but we have to keep our heads,” Golding told his companions.

The level of the fluid was below the lowest of the bullet holes in the glass.

Fluid no longer ran out the punctures, but still the flood was receding in the immense aquarium. And now, the figures within were moving more freely.

First one, then another, began to wade stiffly through the thigh-high pool…move toward the wall of glass. In only a few seconds, it seemed all of them intended the same…

As one, the jumpers stepped back further from the glass wall.

The first to reach the glass was the woman who had first turned her head.

She was smiling now, her red lips stretched back from white teeth that somehow seemed to leer just as eerily as those of the living mummies. She was mouthing words they couldn’t hear, or on a frequency their sensors were not sensitive to. Her hands slapped suction-like against the glass, her fingers spread wide. Others came up behind her, pressing her forward, squashing her bosom flat against the barrier. More hands pressed against the barrier. More mouths working, more hungry grins.

The webs around the bullet holes were spreading. The trio heard the cracking sound.

Now all three of the explorers, even Morrow, had their pistols in hand.

“It’s giving way,” she hissed.

They could see eyes glittering in the shadows of the masks’ holes, where there had only been a void in those of the less perfectly preserved soldiers.

One of the palms was pressed directly against one of the bullet holes.

Then, with a shatter, the hand was through, and chunks of thick glass dropped to the wooden floor, which was moldering gray out here, lacquered glossy in there. The skin of the hand had been slashed in several places, and blood flowed from the lacerations. Red blood, not the black sludge of the soldiers.

But not only was blood released. Voices could now be heard through the hole…still muffled by the dense glass, but unmistakable. There was a chorus of moaning, not of melancholy but of yearning. An almost erotic ocean of sound. Mixed into this was the groaning of pain from those squashed directly against the glass, such as the man whose hand grasped convulsively at the explorers in the air, dribbling blood to the floor. Such as that first woman, who was no longer grinning carnally but grinding her teeth in agony.

“They’re insane,” Kubin muttered. And it was indeed as if a tea party of the mad had been entombed in a liquid asylum. “We have to go…”

“Hold your ground!” Golding shouted, himself grinning, his own eyes mad. “We can’t be killed!”

“Our suits can be ruined…our mission can fail,” Morrow stammered.

“This mission is anything but a failure!”

Another of the bullet holes was enlarged, more glass fell. A man’s head pushed out through this new hole, his hat falling away to reveal the white wig beneath. If his agonized mouth was spewing words, they were lost in the increasing clamor of voices. His neck, slashed by the edge of the glass, ran with brilliant gore, streaking down the glass as the amniotic fluid had done.

And now the explorers realized that all of that fluid had vanished from the room behind the glass barrier.

Then, the barrier could take no more. With one abrupt crash, it split like a chunk of arctic ice plowed up by a ship, fell away. The crush of bodies piled forward in an avalanche of flesh. Some were buried beneath, their hands scrabbling as if for fistfuls of air to breath. Those atop them crawled over them, and others over them in turn. Women’s wigs now, finally, tilted or fell entirely away from the dark hair pinned beneath. But as yet, no masks had fallen. The serenity of their upper faces contrasted horribly with the hunger or pain in the lower portions of their pallid visages.

The explorers backed further and further away. But already, some of the revelers were regaining their feet. And then, they were running at the explorers.

Arms outstretched, fingers like claws, mouths open so terribly wide.

“Run!” Kubin shouted at Morrow, and the two of them whirled in the opposite direction.

And there, shambling toward them, were a half dozen of the desiccated soldiers in black. Some with cup-handled swords drawn. Several with flintlock pistols. Kubin managed to get off several shots—smashing the lower jaw off one soldier—before a double-edged sword with a long slender blade crashed down on his wrist with such unexpected force that the delicate hand was partly severed from the servo-driven suit. His gun skittered across the floor.

Morrow shot a soldier in the center of its enameled forehead. The mask split down the middle and fell away, shards of it lodged in the guard’s skull.

Drooling black blood, which her sensors told her reeked of decay, the cadaver sank to be replaced by another. And then a flintlock thundered. The air was filled with bluish smoke. She felt the impact in her chest, and she staggered back…back into the arms of the revelers. Twisting her head in a panic, she saw that Golding had already been engulfed. He, too, was finally firing his gun…but his hand, then his entire arm, was wrenched out of him by the sheer numbers and ferocity of the party-goers.

Kubin was down on the floor, and buried. Faces and hands pressed against his helmet as they had pressed against the glass wall, lips mashed as if to kiss him, rings and teeth grating along the surface.

He realized that hands were tearing at the tubes on his suit. Slipping inside his suit. Dismantling his gear, in their frenzy. He realized that in trying to unclasp and unscrew what they took to be a mere helmet, they were in fact removing his head-piece from the rest of his walking vehicle.

A woman and man stood up in sudden horror, holding the head of Kubin’s suit between them. Out of the helmet, Kubin stared at them, still blinking, before the last artificial tendons snapped free of his neck stump, and the hologram blinked out of existence.

Five: The Resurrected -

The three bodies lay naked in a line on a long dining table, as if prepared for a feast.

Revelers, their wigs and dignity restored, either sat at the table staring at the pale cadavers while sipping wine, or milled about in subdued conversation. They were waiting.

One of the cadavers, a middle aged man, had a bullet hole in his upper chest where Golding had hit him with a wild bullet. The wound had been cleansed. It was already dilating smaller. Already healing.

Another, younger man was the one whose throat had been slashed on the barrier’s broken glass. But this yawning gash was already sealing…and he was beginning to flutter open his eyes.

The beautiful masked woman who had first turned her head, first reached the glass had been killed in the crush of bodies, her neck broken. But she sat up stiffly atop the dining table, and again turned her head rustily to take in her surroundings.

Morrow glanced down at her new, naked body, and mewled, “Oh my God!” in a voice, in a language, that was not her own.

All at once, the revelers at the tables and milling about burst into applause.

Kubin was swinging his legs over the side of the table and trying to get to his feet. He stumbled, but two revelers took his elbows to help him stand. Atop the table, Golding had sat up in his new flesh and gingerly touched the puck-ered hole in his breast.

The trio were the only people in the room not to have clothing, or wigs…but new masks had already been affixed to their faces. Kubin’s had one of those elongated noses, Golding’s one of those falcon beaks. Morrow’s was delicate and lovely in its shape, framing lustrous brown eyes where her own eyes had once been a faded blue.

“I’m Morrow,” she said effortlessly in that alien tongue, turning to face Kubin. “Are you Gee or Kay?”

“It’s Kubin,” he told her. Kubin looked to the other man as he slid off the table unsteadily to his feet. “Gee?”

“It’s Golding,” this stranger confirmed.

The applause had died away, but smiles beamed on most of the faces of the revelers.

“How are we in these bodies?” Kubin asked, his lower jaw trembling so violently that his teeth came close to chattering. He ran his hands over his chest. His hands could feel his chest, his chest could feel his hands.

“They’re three who died when they surrounded us,” Golding said, pointing to his bullet wound. “We’ve…occupied their bodies. Like we animated the suits…”

“But
how?
” Morrow blurted, involuntarily grasping Golding’s forearm.

They both felt the contact as if these were the bodies they had been born with…

From the opposing walls of the hallway, several of the smartly attired and hideous-visaged soldiers took a few steps forward…in case there was trouble.

They carried lances that looked both ceremonial and wicked.

“It is ironic,” said a new voice. “But it is fitting, I suppose.” One of the revelers, a man in purple crushed velvet embroidered with gold trim, his tricorn hat in matching hues, rose from one of the chairs at the table seemingly as long as a highway. “It is Destiny, one might think.”

“What’s happened to us?” Kubin demanded, backing away from the man.

He stood protectively beside this new woman who was Morrow, her hair falling in long dark tendrils down her back, where Morrow’s had been short and graying.

The man in purple spread his gloved hands. His lips looked rouged, his white flesh powdered, and he had a black beauty dot pasted at one corner of his mouth. “We sought to inhabit you. To find new bodies in you. We did not realize that your bodies were artificial.” He smiled with a look of embarrassed apology. “We sought to will ourselves into your bodies. Instead, you willed yourselves into the bodies of our dead. Apparently, without intention.”

“But how could we do that?”

“As we would have done. But this is our punishment, I suppose, for being so greedy. To be denied new flesh.”

“How could we will ourselves into these bodies?” Kubin persisted. “Make them come back to life, and heal? We don’t have those skills.”

“Over time, it has become the nature of our bodies. Even though they had expired, those bodies you now inhabit no doubt drew you into themselves as much as you were drawn, unconsciously, to them. We knew this had transpired when we tasted your essences in flight.”

“Why would you want to steal our bodies?” Golding asked, moving closer to the man.

“This is why,” answered another man dressed in a rich brown velvet. He partly lowered the mask from his face. Beneath it, his eyes were filmed a milky white, and an ugly lesion showed at the edge of his wig’s hairline.

“Without being preserved in our bath,” a woman sighed, smiling sadly,

“we will erode very quickly.”

“Yes,” boomed another man, dressed in black as the sentries were, pushing himself forward between the others. He was not smiling, and he thrust a finger at Golding. “You released us prematurely. You are invaders here.

Don’t you see that you’ve doomed us all?”

“Where is it that you come from?” asked another woman.

“What world is it?” asked an elderly, daintily dressed man.

The angry man persisted. “You’ve slaughtered us all…condemned us to rot, like them.” He gestured to one of the guards. “Worse than them. We’ll soon all fall apart…”