Armageddon?? (30 page)

“We
must mobilize for war. Our armed forces depend on armored vehicles for their
mobility and for defense against baldrick attacks. Those armored vehicles need
fuel and the battles over the last few days have shown how much they require.
We must give them priority for supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel.
Accordingly, I have given orders for fuel rationing to be instituted here in
the United States. Each licensed driver in a family will be allowed to buy no
more that twenty gallons of automobile fuel per month. Government help will be
provided for car pooling and other requirements. There is a crying need for
more vehicles to carry the supplies needed to our troops. Therefore, most
private automobile production in this country is to be converted to military
use. Heavy truck plants will, of course, be converted to produce military
trucks. Car and SUV facilities will be converted to produce light armored cars
or aircraft depending on their level of technology. The only exception to this
will be factories producing electric cars or small commercial vehicles. We have
talked much about replacing gasoline-powered automobiles in our society. Now,
our hand has been forced.

“In
the last two days, 600 of our men and their allies have sacrificed everything
they had for us. They gave their lives, knowing what awaited them beyond death.
Now, we must match their sacrifice and bend every will, every nerve, every
muscle in a great national crusade that will see our enemies driven into the
dust and humbled. Thank you all, and good night.”

President
Bush turned off the microphones and stared at the office wall. He’d just told
the American people that they couldn’t drive around any more they way they used
to. Ah well, it had been nice being popular again for a while.

Chapter
Twenty Two

Ibn
Sina Hospital, Baghdad, Iraq

“These
things smell dreadful. Couldn’t we have chilled them?”

“We
did Doctor. Unfortunately dead baldricks appear to rot very fast indeed. As far
as we can tell, its daylight that causes them to decay, not temperature.”

“Ultraviolet
sensitive then? Would that tie in with reports of their sensitivity to lasers?”
A doctor in the observation gallery sounded very thoughtful.

“They
do seem to be sensitive to most of our technology, from ultra-violence to
infra-dead.” A chuckle crossed the gallery. The baldricks were running west,
with three armies in hot pursuit and another closing in from the North.
Suddenly, they seemed far less frightening.

Doctor
Surlethe nodded and looked at the baldrick corpse stretched out on the
dissection table in front of him. “This is a big one even by baldrick
standards, nearly 3 meters tall, weight 200 kilograms?”

“Before
your army shot large pieces off him, yes.” Another ripple of laughter ran
around the operating theater. The relationship between Iraqi and American had
eased to the point where they could make jokes about each other without fearing
consequences. On the other hand, the Iraqi nurse flushed slightly, even now she
felt ill at ease receiving public attention.

“Let’s
have a look at the X-rays.” Surlethe had them set up on the overhead displays.
“Is everybody seeing what I’m seeing?”

“It’s
very human.” One of the watching doctors spoke hesitantly. “Human but not
human, as if it was a human body seen through a nightmare.”

“Exactly,
the body is laid out almost identically to ours. The single upper arm and upper
leg bones, the two bones in the lower arms and legs. The same number of ribs,
of vertebrae. If we go by bone count and position, this thing is human. But, of
course, we know it isn’t. The bones themselves are twisted and distorted, and
there are things here that have no equivalent in our anatomy. Not just
superficial things either, like the horns and tail. There’s these things as
well.” Surlethe tapped the body where what appeared to be huge muscles ran down
its back. They were so large they made the creature’s spine look as if it was
in the middle of its body rather than its back. The creatures stunted wings
stuck out of them reminiscent of broken branches from a snow bank. “50 percent
of its body mass would you say?”

There
was a ripple of agreement. “I thought they were muscles that allowed it to fly
but they’re not. This thing can’t fly. Did histology come up with anything?”

“Doctor
Surlethe, we find this hard to believe but we think they are electrocytes. The
samples we took show them to be very similar to those in the electric eel but
they are much larger and many times more numerous. The electric eel generates
500 volts at 1 amp, if these cells work the same way, the baldrick should be
able to generate 5,000 volts at 10 amps. Almost 100 times more power.”

“That
would explain much, especially their ability to fire bolts of lightning. Let’s
have a look inside shall we?”

Surlethe
took an electric carving knife, he’d already found from bitter experience that
surgical scalpels had a very short life when faced with baldrick skin, and
sliced into the dead baldrick. The smell was far worse once the skin was opened
up and inside, the internal organs were already decomposing into slush.

“From
what we can see here, it’s the same as with the bone structure. The internal
organs are human in placement but wildly different from us in shape and
appearance. We have no real idea of the fine detail of function of course. For
example, this looks like a liver but is it? What else does it do? Thoughts
people?”

“It
is as if it was human but became corrupted.” The Iraqi nurse was speaking
slowly. “Almost as if this was once human but something got at it, corrupted
its DNA.”

“It’s
worth noting that the other bodies are very similar to this. If this is the
result of DNA being corrupted, then the corruption was done systematically. The
process has created a new species.”

“Did
this evolve from us? Or is it parallel evolution?” Another Iraqi doctor
watching the dissection spoke. He was slightly guarded, incredibly, he’d heard
that there were Americans who were still dumb enough to believe in creationist
stories and deny the scientific truth that stared into their faces. It was so
strange, how could a people who could create such wonders also believe in
things so foolish? Still, he didn’t want to upset one of them, they had guns as
well as strange beliefs.

Surlethe
thought carefully. “I’d say its parallel evolution, they started out as the
next-level-up version of us and something happened to them. Either they’ve been
infected with something that messed up their DNA or they’ve been engineered to
look like this.”

“Genetic
engineering needs technology.” Yet another Iraqi doctor. “And we know they
don’t have it.”

“We
think they don’t Doctor. Its very probable they don’t and we certainly haven’t
seen it yet. But we can’t rule out the possibility that there’s pockets of
technology somewhere. However, genetic engineering doesn’t need that high
technology, just patience and breeding experiments. Look at dogs, a Rottweiler
and a Chihuahua were engineered from the same ancestor. These could be the
same.” I wish they’d let me dissect that succubus Surlethe thought. Then we’d
have something to compare this with. “Right, well, lets look a bit more before
this one decays to nothingness.”

Outside
Gary’s Shoe Store, Lakeview Mall, Chicago, Illinois

“But
its….. una ropas de puton.” Maria looked at the top her school-friends were
urging her to buy. If she’d worn it back in Honduras, her mother would beat her
and old women would whisper accusations behind her back. But here?

“Look
girl, you’re in America now. Halter tops, mini-skirts and fuck-me pumps get
issued at the border. Get used to it.” Shana’s voice was severe but she was
laughing underneath it.

Maria
looked dubious but she could see her friends were right. Dress standards were
different here. She’d only been at the school six weeks and this was her first
time hanging out in the mall with her new friends. She didn’t want to embarrass
herself or them. What she didn’t know was that she was far from the first new arrival
from Central America who’d joined the school and all the girls with her
understood how difficult the adjustment from the highly conservative lifestyle
she’d come from was. The Immigration Department might run assimilation classes
for new arrivals but the high school girls had their own, much more efficient
program. She should have guessed from the way they were speaking, the group had
two African-American girls, three Anglos and two Latinas. They were speaking in
a strange mixture of Spanish and English, switching from one language to the
other in mid-sentence with unconscious fluency, the whole mixed in with ebonic
slang. Viewed objectively it was an awesome display of bilingualism.

She
held the blouse up against herself again. In truth, it was quite modest by the
standards of teenage girls at a mall and was on sale, 80 percent off. And it
did make her look nice. She pushed her hat a little back on her head, trying to
make up her mind. All the girls were wearing the fashionable kepi-style caps
with aluminum foil built into the crown and neck, that was one thing that had
changed since The Message. Now, everybody wore caps, all the time. The stores
here were full of them, some cheap baseball caps with foil inserts, others much
more expensive. Maria finally made her decision. She’d take the top. She took
it to the counter and, as she started to pay, her friends broke out in a round
of applause. She’d just done something her mother would not approve of and that
was her first step to becoming a real American teenager.

“Hey
man, you, like, going to get some more donuts?” One of the Anglo girls, Marcie,
was speaking to Philip Phelan, the shift supervisor of the Mall security
guards. He smiled a bit weakly at her, it was a joke all the rentacops on duty
here had to put up with but she was a customer so her jokes were, by
definition, funny.

“Fraid
not ma’am. Crispy Kreme ran out of original glazed so I’m going to have to make
do with Pop-Tarts.”

“Poor
baby.” Marcie’s voice was sweetly consoling. “The red light comes on again in
an hour so I’m told.”

“Why
thank you ma’am. I’ll bear that in mind.”

Marcie
watched Phelan continue his rounds, a shadow of concern crossing her mind. He
was way too far over-weight and she could see him wheezing slightly. It
reminded her of her father before he’d had his first heart attack. He really
should be sitting comfortably behind a desk, she thought. Then she frowned
slightly, there was a ripple in the air down by the food court. Something
overheating? Or a fire? She was just about to call attention to it when the
ripple changed to a black dot and then to an ellipse.

She’d
seen what stepped out of that ellipse on news programs, on film of the fighting
in the Middle East, but she’d never expected to see something like it in her
local mall. A baldrick, fully nine feet tall, complete with horns, tail and
trident. Eyes glowing red and small pointed beard seeming to bristle at the
stunned shoppers. There was an eerie silence as people tried to absorb what was
happening. A silence that was interrupted by a crack and brilliant blue flash
as the baldrick discharged his trident at a woman pushing baby carriage. The
crash as the woman went down, convulsing from the massive electrical shock,
broke the spell.

“Run!”
Shana grabbed Maria and started bundling her forward. Years of threatened
shootings in high schools had lead Americans to learn a vital lesson; when
trouble is breaking out, get as far and as fast in the opposite direction as
possible. Maria didn’t have that inbred instinct and had to be shown. Her
friends half-pushed, half-dragged her towards the exit adjacent to the mall’s
Macy’s store.

Across
the mall, the shoppers were dispersing in different directions, depending in
which exit was nearest. The silence was replaced by the sound of screaming from
the chaotic mob of people. In its midst, the baldrick grabbed another victim
with the claws of one hand, ripped him open with the other and threw the
disintegrating body into the mass of running people. Then, it looked around,
its eyes fixed on a group running for the Macy’s exit and set off after them.

Philip
Phelan didn’t run. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a gun either. The mall
rentacops weren’t allowed to carry them. He did have a taser and he used it,
helplessly watching the barbed metal spikes bounce off the skin of the
baldrick. The monster had already carved its way through three more people,
throwing their dismembered remains around and Phelan believed that his job was
now to buy as much time as he could for the rest to get clear. The monster
reached out for him, almost lazily , its great claws reaching for his throat.
Phelan had drawn his baton and he swiped at the grabbing hand, knocking it to
one side. Them he slashed back in the opposite direction, hitting the monster
in the throat, causing it to stagger for a second. For one delirious moment, he
actually believed he had a chance of winning the encounter, then he felt the
claws on the baldrick’s other hand sinking into his abdomen. They hooked around
the bottom of his ribs and the last thing that Phelan ever felt was him being
hurled into the air as his chest came apart.