Bad Dreams (46 page)

She walked into the kitchen, and put on a cooking apron. It had a big, primary-coloured apple on it. She still had her shoes, and most of her skirt. She felt decent.

Then she took a knife, choosing the straight-edged carving implement over the serrated breadknife. She did not hold it overarm like a silly girl in a horror film, but like a switchblade, so she could slash and stab.

God knows where you learn all this stuff. Television, probably.

‘Jason,’ she shouted, ‘you can come out now. Abi’s not angry.’

Silence.

‘We’ll have some cake.’

A growling, somewhere upstairs.

She was not stupid. He would have to come for her.

She hunkered down in the hall, facing the stairs, and waited.

He was only a boy; he was not patient at all. Inside two minutes, the study door opened, and he came out.

He had grown, but he was still a boy. His legs were hairy, but white patches showed through at the knees. His genitalia were ridiculously, cherubically small. He had pulled on a T-shirt with a picture of Batman on it.

‘Abi… still hun
-greee
!’

‘Come down and eat, you chickenshit cocksucking little bastard you!’

She had never used words like that before. He giggled. Little boys like to be shocked.

‘Motherfucker!’

He came down the stairs, laughing and snarling. He was still slobbering.

She held the knife tightly. Its sharp edge glinted in the last of the daylight in the hall.

She imagined traced lines on his body, where she would cut.

‘Cunt-eater!’

Three steps from the bottom, he tensed to leap. She extended the knife before her.

Jason pushed himself into the air, and hit her. The knife went into him somewhere. They were thrown back against the front door. The Chubb lock burst.

Stumbling backwards on the porch, Abigail kicked a pair of milkbottles aside. She fell, and Jason was on top of her, clawing and scratching.

She stabbed upwards, sawing into his flesh, grinding against his ribs, pulling free, and stabbed again.

She stood up, and Jason fell off her. He tried to crawl away, towards the fence that bounded the cottage’s postage-stamp garden. He tore at the earth, uprooting herbs and vegetables.

Abigail bent over him, and stabbed him in the back. She slashed across the back of his neck, opening him to the bone.

When it was done, she kicked him to make sure, and sat down by the fence, waiting to be rescued.

It was all over.

She still held the knife, just in case, but she did not need it. Jason was done with, over with.

A man with a mask on came, and she knew he would rescue her. She stood up to throw her arms around his neck, to kiss his mask, to sob on his shoulder, to thank him…

…but he shot her.

* * *

‘Christ, what a mess!’

Anderton had not gone out easily. Lynch saw that the scientist had redecorated the ceiling with his brains. Droplets were still forming and falling in the laboratory.

It was all falling apart.

‘Where’s Gail?’ he asked Fassett. ‘I need some expert opinion.’

‘We had to shoot him, Frank. He freaked.’

‘Shit. What about the University doc, Hind?’

‘He went down with the others at the Infirmary.’

Lynch was tired. He knew they were probably all dead by now. He had had his mask off too often. They all had. ‘And Bosworth isn’t responding either.’

Lynch thought it through, and did not get a pleasing result.

‘Sir,’ buzzed in his ear, ‘call for you in the mobile H.Q.’

He tapped his mike. ‘Patch it through.’

A voice he recognized but could not put a name to came on. ‘Lynch, we’ve been following the print-outs. You’ve got a fuck-up situation.’

‘You’re telling me. When are your experts coming?’

‘Never. We’ve redrawn the scenario. We’ve got to contain this. I’m sending you a suitcase. We’ll have you out of there, and a cover ready.’

He did not argue. It was probably worth losing half the country to get this bug the hell off the face of the Earth.

‘When?’

‘The chopper’s on the way. Deal with this in a soonest-possible mode.’

The voice was gone. The thing in his ear was dead.

Shit, shit, shit.

No way would UCC bring him out, or any of his team. They were just potential infection vectors like the rest.

But he did not feel any different in himself.

Something Anderton had tried to say earlier came back to him. 125 was not necessarily a disease. What had he called it, a symbiote? Perhaps this would not be too bad after all. And the suitcase might be useful.

‘Fassett, let’s take this place off the map.’

‘Frank?’

‘We’ve got the phones, right? Put them out of commission forever. Have the men shoot anyone trying to leave, crazy or not. Let’s retake this fucking place and establish ourselves some sort of control, okay?’

‘Yes, Frank.’

* * *

He could not believe it!

Willard Longendyke thought of himself as a scumbag, but this chick had hacked up some kid with a fucking carving knife.

He had shot chicks before. In the Zone, and with the teams. One of the towelhead ‘ters’ had been a German broad. Ugly fuck with a face like a horse’s rear end.

This girl looked about fourteen. The sort to wait for Lassie to come home and to be friends with Flicka.

He was shaking in his suit.

The Need, the Need, the Need…

Someone shouted at him, and he whirled, firing from the hip. Old dude in a leather jacket, standing by a motorsickle. His chest blew up.

The Bozz Man was in sight. He came over, assessed the situation, and nodded approval.

Longendyke had to get away.

He had a bellyful of snakes, and every square inch of his skin was on the move. Sweat bunched his suit at the ankles, crotch and armpits.

The Bozz Man jogged off.

Fuck this shit!

He scragged the Sergeant-Equivalent neatly, one shot to the back of the head, pushing him away, shoving him down.

He did not feel any different.

He had been gulping back vomit all day. Now, he was on the verge of getting under control.

One jab, and he would fly.

No one had seen him bring down the Bozz Man.

That was chilly, then.

He left the dead girl where she was, and ran past the cooling Sergeant-Equivalent, looking for the building he had been in earlier. Most of that was roped off-limits. He could find a quiet, undisturbed corner there and treat himself to the needle.

Everything was about to come together, to make sense.

* * *

Gabrielle was easier to deal with than Jackson had been. Brian just knocked her down with a bodyblow, and she was like a turtle on its back. Without a head, you do not have much of a sense of balance.

Monica snatched up Gabrielle’s telephone. She held the receiver out to him. Nothing.

‘Lynch is closing us down.’

‘Bastard.’

Now what? Brian had no ideas. He could not do anything to save the world any more. There was only his own.

‘Jason. We’ve got to get Jason. And get out.’

That meant a trip across campus. Less than half a mile. But half a mile through a combat zone.

‘My car,’ said Monica. ‘It’s by the Union Building, across the square.’

‘You’re an angel.’

‘Not yet.’

‘Let’s go.’

* * *

Pete thought he would drop by the York House bar and have a drink.

There were people running all over the place, but so long as he walked nobody took much notice of him. He had on a duffel coat he had found lying abandoned, and there was some money in it. That was good luck.

The bar was packed, as usual. It had just opened. He saw Neil, Phil and Stef in their usual corner, with a tableful of pint glasses in front of them. There was loud music playing.

His mates were sitting with Harry the Hack, the University’s writer-in-residence. A master of post-modern horror, Harry was supposed to be teaching a course on James Herbert, but had not bothered to turn up for any of his scheduled lectures. Apparently, he had spent almost all his time on campus drinking and being ill.

‘…What you have to understand about
Land of the Giants
,’ Harry was saying, ‘is that it demonstrates Irwin Allen’s recurring theme that man’s ambitions should exceed his grasp. Hey, Pete…’

They all turned to look at him. They were surprised to see him. The bar went quiet like in a Western when Gary Cooper walks in.

Pete was about to order a round, when he realized how unfair it was. He always had to be first to dig into his pocket. The others always hung back. Phil only bought rounds when there was just the two of them, and Neil kept going on about the cashpoint not working and being out of readies. They could buy their own from now on.

‘You should be in the hospital, guy,’ said Stef. ‘You look like shit.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, ‘just fine.’

A pinball machine was clanging and clattering in the recreation room next to the bar. He could hear it, and a lot of other things. Radios, conversations, shuffling feet, clanking glasses, running water.

A tall student in a football shirt pushed past him, on the way to the bar. He did not say ‘excuse me’ or anything, so Pete took his windpipe out of his neck, cut it in half with his teeth, and let it dangle.

There was a lot more noise. He could not identify it.

Air was whistling through the tube he had yanked out of the rude student’s throat. And blood spurted like water from a ruptured hose.

Pete put his mouth to the geyser, and had his drink. The bar was empty by the time he had finished, and all the tables were turned over. Neil, Phil and Stef had left their pints unfinished, but he did not fancy the piss-poor beer you got here. Only Harry the Hack stayed, and he was trying to focus on his whisky, mumbling about Lacanian tropes in
The Magic Cottage.

Pete went to the rec room, to see if he could scare up a game of pool.

There was nobody playing there. Nobody there at all, in fact, except for the man in the white suit with the gun. He did not look like a pool player.

The man’s aim was low. Pete saw holes going into his stomach, but could not feel anything. He was sure his gut could chew the lead slugs up. It had before. There were ropes of flesh growing under his jacket, like potato tubers. He did not know what they were, but his body seemed to have it under control.

The man shot him again, in the head this time.

He felt the metal in his brain, felt his cerebral tissue clustering around it, making walnut-size pearls of thinking matter.

One by one, his senses went out, leaving him in the dark.

He could not move any more, but he could think.

He thought he was still growing.

* * *

Cazie was Queen of the Hill.

She had people with her now, people who were beginning to understand. Clare was a help, of course. Always Clare, always there. She was on the roof of the School of English and American Studies, with the first of her followers.

‘Go with it,’ Cazie told a kid just wriggling through his clothes. ‘Let your body find its new form. It’ll be right for you, I promise.’

The others stood in a circle as she coaxed the true thing out of the old shell. Hair fell off like a wig, and his head swelled like a soft-shelled egg. He was going to be bright.

‘Beautiful,’ purred Clare, taking the new man’s hand.

Clare was not raw any more. She had strikingly beautiful scales that reflected the sunset like prisms.

They had guns, of course. Picked up from the men in white, donated by those outsiders who had accepted the new ways. But they would not need guns much longer.

There were other ways of getting what they wanted. Special ways. Cazie was still learning, but a whole universe was opening up before her. She could taste everything, feel everything, be everything.

Unlike many of the others, she still looked much as she had once done. Although when she held her hand up, she could see the bones glowing inside, stronger, more complicated than they had been before. She felt her brain changing, multiplying its strength inside her skull. That was her way of changing, she knew. She was moving into the dark areas of the brain that most people never use.

The change was a fulfilment of human potential.

Some of the others were discovering their new channels of pleasure. Groups of two or three or four clung together, penetrating, loving, giving. It was a good way to start. Eventually, there would be children. A pure new generation. Babies who had never been human.

With every minute, she had more at her side, more converts, more disciples.

The boy prone on the concrete stiffened, and metallic arches erupted from him, gathering into a crustacean-like construction. It skittered away from what it had been.

Cazie turned her head up to the skies, and ululated. A long, low note began in her stomach and rang out over the campus, calling to the newborns, warning those who would cling to the past.

The sun was going down on the old humanity.

PART THREE

GRADUATION

O
n a fluorescent panel inset into the ceiling of the main laboratory, the virus designated Batch 125, present in highly concentrated form in the brain tissue formerly lodged in the skull of Dr Xavier Anderton, began to think by itself.

What little was left of Dr Anderton was surprised. 125 had been interesting, but this was unprecedented. As the viral thoughts expanded, forming a rudimentary consciousness, Anderton’s lingering mind faded slowly to black.

Warmed by the heat and light behind the plastic panel, Batch 125 progressed rapidly from sentience to sapience, compounding its vague first impressions with scraps of Anderton’s memory. It had an idea of what it was, and of its special powers and capabilities.

It could grow, and so it did.

Greyish tissue ballooned and spread, dendrons forming, synapses sparking. Its consciousness moved into the empty brain cells, expanding literally and figuratively. Already, it was moving, and thinking, in three dimensions. Nerve tangles sprouted, and dangled like tendrils, feeling around in an increasingly methodical manner.