Bad Dreams (47 page)

There were four dead people in the room, saturated with 125. Each of them could be useful to the newborn.

The nerves thickened, coated themselves with fibrelike skin, and became tipped with bony barbs. These sank into the remains of Donald Carson, Elizabeth Finch, Xavier Anderton and Kevin Tripps. Viral clusters came together, and barely animated corpses began to move experimentally. 125 played with its extended body/bodies, increasing its control over its movements.

It experienced pleasure.

Finch, the least damaged, was the first of its components to get up on its feet. The others soon joined it, joined with it. 125 pulled itself together, and sloughed off the irredeemably dead flesh. The still-growing, still-changing portions formed the beginnings of a serviceable body. Finch, Carson and Tripps contributed new cranial matter, and this was suctioned up through a new-formed tube, globbing around the thinking remains of Dr Anderton, forming a fully-functional, surprisingly well-balanced thinking centre for the virus. Finch and Carson were the core of its musculature, but Tripps, whose flesh was virtually liquefied, provided easily accessible bones for moulding and redistribution.

Whatever it touched, it could change.

Through Finch, whose optic nerves were still in place, it was granted the miracle of sight. It knew light from dark, and made sense of the shapes around it. It checked its senses, and meshed its means of perceiving reality. By now, 125 had a complete picture of the world into which it had been born; at least, it had a complete picture of the UCC facility where it had been coaxed into existence.

The world was a wonderful place. Being as a state was infinitely preferable to non-being. It was pleased.

The brain detached itself from the ceiling and descended into the body it had built for itself. It felt stronger by the second.

With Finch’s hands, it picked up a beaker, and crushed it to ground glass. 125 could shape and destroy its environment. Infinitely renewable, its consciousness able to shape at will the raw materials of its form, it smoothed over the bloody gashes in Finch’s hands, expelling the shards and splinters, forming patches of skin far more resilient and efficient than Finch had been used to. Formica, it found, was superior to flesh.

It was dimly aware of the human beings it had once been. It had the specialized knowledge of Anderton and Finch, which gave it some useful insights into its own preexistence. Having the same knowledge from two consciousnesses gave it a three-dimensional, almost spiritual, grasp of its origins and purpose. It knew what had been expected of it, and precisely how it had failed to live up to its creators’ designs. A disappointment but an interesting disappointment, was its verdict. It was already proud enough to believe it could improve upon those first thoughts, and to make its own way.

From Carson and Tripps, it inherited an odd cross-section of general knowledge. Carson collected model trains and chased women, two activities strangely alien to 125 for which it developed a vestigial enthusiasm. Tripps was a fighting man, who would kill by reflex and always followed the orders passed down to him. 125 felt that unwise. Both men had been unduly interested in a substance called beer, but 125 decided this was a dependence it could do without and took a few moments to burn the last of this sensibility from its mind. It stored away the filleted remnants of their memories for later examination and use.

Outside the laboratory, through thick and windowless walls, it perceived a jagged sound that Tripps recognized as gunfire. It was able to extrapolate from what Tripps and Anderton knew of the crisis – and of a peculiar individual named Frank Lynch – and more or less guessed that there was a battle in process out on the campus. It was not surprised, but it was prompted to take precautions.

It thought the world might be dangerous for the thinking man’s virus, and concentrated on growing a diamond-hard carapace around the bulk of its brain. That was the organ where it lived, and so it needed protection. It found it was able to absorb and redistribute non-living matter, and so it used the bricks and metal of the laboratory to strengthen its body. It reinforced its borrowed bones with steel from scientific equipment. Meticulously, like a mediaeval engineer constructing a fortress fit to withstand six months of heavy siege, it made itself safe.

Now, it had hands and eyes and ears and mouths, means of movement, the ability to reproduce, digestive and excremental systems aplenty, and a few notions about self-defence.

It practised moving about the laboratory. Using Finch’s hands, it tried out the computer terminals, the machine pistol (empty, but interesting), and the taps. It picked up a series of beakers and was not satisfied until it could perform the function without breaking the glass. Hands were tricky, fiddly organs, but once it mastered the use of them, 125 felt the lord of its domain.

It made fists. With rubber bands it found on a bench, it played cats’ cradle with itself.

Gobbets of tissue kept exploding in its brain, dumping information from its components’ memories.

Anderton had been worried about dandruff, which did not strike 125 as a fit problem to concern one of the greatest minds of the late 20th century. Finch had been a passionate follower of a television serial called
EastEnders
, and 125 became confused as to which of the people in her memory were real friends and acquaintances and which were fictional constructs from this intriguingly alien medium. The cobweb tangle of relationships between the real and unreal, complicated by kinships Finch had seen between people she knew and characters in the soap opera, were frustratingly impenetrable and, in an experimental fit of pique, it burned that large chunk of information out of itself, experiencing a relaxing moment of peace before Carson’s numerical listings of the physical appeal of workmates and students crowded in – Finch rated a generous 8 – and provided 125 with yet another sampling of the inefficiency, inconclusiveness and impenetrability of the human mind.

125 detached itself completely from the ceiling, leaving an afterbirth of dead tissue hanging like mould from the fluorescent light panel, and gathered itself in.

It had no aesthetics, no morality, no philosophy, no cultural background, and just a smidgen of a sense of humour. But it could learn.

It was confident of its ability to get on in the world.

* * *

When the brainstorm hit Eddie Zero, he was in the waiting room outside the tiny Campus Radio station. Posie Columba was way into her three-hour show of shit from the Third World, giving a spin to some Peruvian dude who was into twenty-minute narwhal-horn solos. Eddie wanted to make this lima bean lover rectally ingest his own instrument.

He was there yet again to jockey for some airspace for real rock ’n’ roll. He had petitions, and a suitcase full of sides. The collective were still unkeen on him, especially after the row yesterday, but he was willing to be reasonable. He was willing to be in a room with Posie, even though she had a voice that made him want to rip her lungs out through her nasal passage.

His ankles were itching, and he had to ease his drainpipes up away from his socks to get in a good scratch. He thought that bloody rabbit who gave him such a turn this morning had given him myxomatosis. Bugs had nibbled his ankles, and turned fluffy tail before Eddie could deliver a penalty standard kick to its rump.

He hoped it had got caught by a French chef. He remembered
Watership Down
: you’ve read the book, you’ve seen the film, now
eat the pie
!

The Peruvian track finished, a good seven or eight years too late for Eddie, and Posie came on again, stumbling through a link as she slipped across the border into Chile, and set up for a little Andean nose flute number.

It had nothing on The Chords’ ‘Sh-Boom’. Eddie would rather have listened to Cliff, or Tommy Steele, or Bernard Cribbins.

Even the Bay City Rollers might have been palatable.

Sheena, who was on the desk and was all right really, made a puking face, and Eddie shook his fist at the injustice of it all.

Sheena Ikimoto was a Japanese glam queen, and Eddie had been trying to warm her up for four terms without any notable success. And he had thought girls only went to overseas universities to get out of arranged marriages and into wild sexual relationships with rockin’ rebels.

He was itching all over now, and scratching as if he had the world’s worst dose of crabs.

‘Shivers down my backbone, ooo-oooh,’ he hummed.

There was a sunshine and rainbow poster up for a world music gig in Mandela Hall this Saturday. Posie was probably one of the organizers, and doubtless keen on spreading her chubby thighs for some Latino lute-basher in the hospitality suite afterwards.

There were two spots of pain in his forehead, just under the edge of his pompadour, as if little screws in his brain were coming loose and working their way out through the skin.

Through thick glass windows, he could see Posie reverentially slipping her Peruvian album back into its cover. On her, the jockey headphones looked like a plastic hairband. Stu, the student engineer, was twiddling knobs in the gallery – if a broom cupboard with a console like the dashboard of a mini metro could be called a gallery – trying to make the noise go away.

The brainstorm hit.

He opened his case, and picked out the side. He had it as a re-release single. Not worth a bean, but the music was the same on CD or a wax cylinder.

He got up and went to the studio door. Ignoring the red light and Sheena’s protests, he ripped the thing off its hinges with one hand, and squeezed his way into the tiny, hardboard-soundproofed room. Picking through the spaghetti wires, he got to Posie and, free hand on the back of her head, rammed her face onto the Chilean record. Her nose and teeth crunched vinyl, and something went inside her head. The song cut out with a jarring screech, and there was blissful silence.

Empty airwaves.

He took Posie’s face off the turntable, pulling up the record with it, and set up his side.

‘Hell-oooooo, baby,’ he purred into the microphone, his blob-ended antennae bobbing in front of his eyes, ‘that was the last of the Vomit from Valparaiso. Do not adjust your set, adjust the inside of your head, because abnormal service has been resumed. Hail hail rock ’n’ roll, this is Eddie Zero. And
this
is Eddie Cochran…’

Stu turned the dials up as loud as they would go, and the first strums of ‘Summertime Blues’ jangled out into the air.

He saw Sheena bopping through the window, and made a triumphant fist in the air.

He was gonna raise a fuss, he was gonna raise a holler…

* * *

Monica’s car was still by the Union Building, but a battle was being fought in the car park.

The Zombies were as outnumbered as Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, but they took a toll on the rioting students – Brian could not tell if they were infectees or not – who were assaulting them.

Brian had to hold Monica back, keep her down behind a large piece of sculpture. Something knife-edged and ugly. Early in its history – about 1964 – the University had won all sorts of design awards for its layout. Now, the cast brass pieces were mainly green-furred humps.

‘Wait. It’ll pass.’

One by one, the cars exploded. The dusk was briefly dispelled by fireflashes. People on fire ran away, out of the flame, and threw themselves into the still-green pond. In seconds, the water was completely clogged with grey, writhing bodies.

Brian could smell overdone meat. He was too used to the screams now to notice them any more.

A Zombie, wrapped from head to foot in fire, blundered by, leaving an ashy handprint on the sculpture. Brian pulled Monica out of his way, and patted in panic at the smouldering patch on her pullover where the dying man had touched. He felt the familiar swell of her breasts under layers of clothes, and did his best not to think about anything but keeping them both alive.

They were joined in their cover by an active body. Brian felt himself being shoved aside, and held Monica tighter. A burst of gunfire, agonizingly loud, went off near Brian’s head.

The newcomer was a skinny young man with an attempted beard and moustache. Brian thought he might have been in his Approaches to Watergate seminar group last winter. He had got a gun from somewhere, and was killing people with it. He had no obvious symptoms of the disease.

A Zombie circled around behind them. Brian jabbed an elbow into the young man’s side, and he swung around, getting off a stuttering round before the Zombie could get his aim fixed. The white figure spurted red, and was flung off its feet.

‘Get it, Brian.’

Brian did not know what the young man meant.

‘The gun.’

The Zombie was still tangled with his gun. Brian left Monica, and crawled forwards on his knees and elbows. He was shaking. There was a burst of fire above his head. He thought it best not to look up. He got a hand to the gun, and pulled. It would not come away. The strap was looped around the Zombie’s shoulder. The wounded soldier was still moving feebly, trying to sit up.

Writhing inside, Brian got a good hold of the gun and swung its butt at the Zombie’s – at the
man’s –
head. Because the strap was so short, he could not get much force behind the blow, but the mask cracked open.

‘You fucking fucker!’

The dying man swore up at Brian, and spat blood onto the inside of his faceplate. Brian yanked the gun, and it came free, pulling the man’s arm into an unnatural position. Brian pushed himself away from his victim, and sprinted back towards the sculpture. He could not work out how to hold the gun properly, but the young man took it away from him when he got back to them anyway. The gun he had scavenged was empty now.

‘Jesus-fucking-Christ,’ said the young man. ‘What in the name of Holy Fuck is going on?’

Monica shook her head. Brian saw that her car was on fire, and knew they would have to change their plans. The car exploded, panels and glass expanding in a burp of petrol-fuelled flame.

‘My parents gave me that for my twenty-first,’ she said.