Bad Dreams (51 page)

The record came on, and Eddie hung up. Loser, he thought. A lot of people were not ready for this flesh trip. He was there to help them.

Eddie had grown a pair of dangling antennae that gave his greasy pompadour a ‘My Favourite Martian’ look. He kept brushing them back, but they just sprang up again. Bastards. He had also grown an indestructible erection, and had had to open his jeans or die.

At first, he had shafted Sheena while the records were on. She had suddenly warmed up to the idea, after all these months of no-way-no-how. He could get himself off in the three-minute playing time of the average single and still have enough breath to do the next link. But she could not keep up with him after the fourth or fifth side, and was busy with the switchboard now.

He was still ejaculating periodically. It was the rock ’n’ roll. There were strands of semen over the discarded records Posie had left on the floor.

He gripped the arms of his chair as he came again. A jet of come came out of his dick like toothpaste vigorously squeezed from a tube. He beat his own record, and splattered the far wall.

‘Thanks, Burl,’ he said as the song ended, ‘and now here’s one for those of you crying alone at home, needing a good cheering up. “Pillow Talk”…’

Eddie could not resist giving a spin to Doris Day. Nothing was more out of line than Doris Day, but he could not help himself. He got off on it. Doris’s voice got to the head of his dick better than any flesh girl he had ever known.

Jesus. His erection was an uncontrollable rod of flame.

‘Hey, Stu,’ he shouted at the studio manager, ‘come get Posie out. It’s fucking cramped in here, and she’s beginning to smell good to me!’

Stu came in, and took a hold of Posie’s shoulders. Eddie had just folded her up and packed her into a gap where she would go, and now she was stuck. Stu had three-inch teeth like needles and almond-shaped cat’s eyes. He licked his lips with a rough tongue and he eased Posie out of the studio.

Eddie reached for the
Easy Rider
soundtrack album, and lined up the cut he wanted to spin next. He knew who was born to be wild now…

* * *

Lynch met the chopper himself.

He went up on the roof. It was flat and big enough. He had had four flares set off to light up the landing area. He could not hear the helicopter coming in for the racket of Doris Day – Doris Fucking Day! – but he saw the lights from a long way off.

It was dark now, and the burning buildings near the main entrance were sending flames fifty or sixty feet into the air. There would be fire engines soon. UCC could not stop people seeing the blaze and reaching for the phone. The place was on a main road.

The perimeter patrols had been useless for hours. Most of the infectees were in the Humanities Block, but some must have breached the boundaries and be fleeing on foot or in vehicles. Even the suitcase would probably not take 125 out completely, then. It was typical corporate stupidity, but on an unprecedented scale.

Lynch was mildly surprised that he still had so many people with him. He would have quit obeying orders hours ago, and run as well as he could. There had been some drop-outs, but they seemed to be due to infection rather than the decay of discipline. UCC trained its people well; this lot really did act like Zombies.

He could hear the helicopter now. It was fifteen feet or so above the roof, and hovering inside the Perspex bubble, he saw two figures in what ought to be deep-sea diving suits. One waved. It had no discernible face.

The bubble opened, and a megaphone clicked on.

‘Catch!’

The suitcase fell out of the air, into Lynch’s arms. He clutched it. It was as heavy as any other full metal briefcase, and someone had stuck a yellow smiley patch on it.

The chopper closed its bubble, and started upwards, like…

…
like a bat out of hell!

‘Fucking bastard scumsuckers!’ he shouted inaudibly into the chopper’s wind.

He held the case up to his ear, like an idiot expecting an explosive device to be a ticking black cannonball with a fuse in the top and
BOMB
written on it. There was no sound, no hum, no nothing.

But he knew UCC had slipped him a live one.

He put the suitcase down, and pulled out his Magnum. The company’s mistake had been in sending a civilian chopper, rather than one of its military models with an armoured fuel tank.

Or maybe the boardroom jockeys did not consider that revenge might be a part of his psychological profile.

One shot should do it.

He took aim at the tanks of the retreating helicopter, and pulled the trigger, feeling the recoil like a sledgehammer-blow to his wrists.

He made a neat hole, and waited a split second…

* * *

Clare was one of the new humans still on the roof. Most of Cazie’s followers were downstairs, listening to her speechify in the School of English and American Studies lecture hall. Clare liked to be out of doors. It was good for her new complexion.

She had shed her skin entirely, but the new one was doing fine. It secreted fine oils, and she could see rainbows forming and breaking in the wrinkles at her joints. It felt like a designer wetsuit.

Her voice hissed when she heard it.

Cazie was still fond of her, and that gave Clare a certain cachet with the others. She would stay on the roof with her new friends until Cazie needed her.

They watched the man on top of the Chem Building shoot the helicopter down. It was very professional. They all applauded as he took aim like Dirty Harry, and squeezed off a single shot – which they could not hear over Steppenwolf – at the bumblebee machine. He must have holed the petrol tank, because it exploded in mid-air in a ball of orange and red. Sparks and flaming chunks rained. It was a fireworks display. The burning hulk, bent rotors sticking out of it, crashed downwards, jamming nose-first into the library steps. There, the fireball exploded in an eye-punishing burst of light and heat.

A wave of hot air struck Clare, and dried her skin out. Her glands worked overtime, squirting from her pores. She summoned a horny-handed lad to massage her. He was eager to please. She turned on her back, and pulled him down onto her. He went still and did not do anything. She tried to remember what she always said at parties to get talking to someone, then said, ‘What’sssss your major?’

‘Uh… uh,’ he stammered, ‘c-c-classics.’

‘Interessssting?’

‘N-n-not really.’

Her tongue came out, latched onto his lips, and drew him towards her mouth.

They melded by the firelight.

Clare remembered Thommy and Rote, and came like a supernova when she realized how dead they were, how much they were missing all of this fun.

It was good to be in at the start of something important.

* * *

There were still people about she could talk to. They were straggling away in small groups, mostly headed for the woods, but some just moving from place to place at random, trying to stay alive.

Monica stopped her bike and tried to get information whenever she could. From a few words exchanged with someone she had once – all of three days ago – had to interview for a part-time union post, she had a rough idea of the situation on campus.

It was Arts vs Sciences, as usual. The crazies, whom she could not help but think of as Cazie’s people, were all over the Humanities Block. The Zombies, Lynch’s crew, were operating out of the Chem Building. Both factions were in disarray, but both had some sort of purpose. And they were at war.

The problem was that, the way things were, Monica did not know which side to throw in with. How could she best serve the interests of the students! Or of anyone else?

Hating herself for it, she knew she would have to go with Lynch.

She kicked down, and the bike’s engine revved. Wheeling across the lawns, she zig-zagged towards the Chem Building.

The machine was bigger and heavier than anything she had ridden before, and she felt sort of guilty about violating the crash helmet laws. Apart from anything else, a skid-lid might have stopped any stray bullets.

There had been a major explosion by the library, and a crowd was dancing around the fire, as if waiting to pull baked potatoes out of the ashes.

She could not get up speed because there were too many ankle-catching chain-link fences around. Most people who came off bikes wore padded leather that protected them a lot better than her sensible skirt and blouse would.

By the VG shop, a brightly coloured group from the Gay Soc were taking turns raping an unpopular member of the rugby club. None of the participants were particularly human any more. ‘A try,’ shrilled a high-pitched voice, ‘now go for the conversion!’

The bike hit the slope that led up to the Chem Building, and she pulled back on the handlebars, leaning forwards, willing the machine to conquer gravity and get her up to the forecourt.

By the doors, where Cazie’s picket line had been, there were a couple of Zombies with guns.

* * *

125 was being a bystander.

Lynch had the suitcase on a bench in the lab, and one of his men, Willis, was tapping it.

‘Any ideas?’ Lynch asked it.

‘No. I shall be interested to see how you deal with this problem.’

‘Great.’

It was intrigued by the round yellow paper face attached to the suitcase, and made an inquiry about its significance.

‘Don’t ask,’ Lynch said.

Willis pulled out a pair of pliers and clipped something. He opened the suitcase. There were complicated works inside it, packed tightly.

‘It’s standard equipment,’ Willis told Lynch. ‘Not tricky at all.’

‘Then switch it off.’

‘Ah… but there’s no off switch.’

Lynch was being very cool about it all, 125 thought. ‘How long have we got?’

‘Difficult to tell. There should be an LED timer showing, but they’ve painted over this one.’

‘Thank you, Josh Unwin.’

Willis took a scalpel, and began scraping. ‘There. Eight hours, twenty-three minutes, and some seconds.’

‘That should be enough for Josh and the board of directors and the cabinet to get on a plane for Hawaii, right?’

‘Lynch,’ said 125. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could deal with this fairly quickly. We have other things to do.’

‘Okay, okay. Willis?’

‘I can try, of course. My preferred course of action would be to get in the truck and drive like crazy, but I suspect the company will have thought of that…’

‘Right. We’re outlaws. If we leave now, they’ll shoot us down. If we stay, we wind up a fine radioactive ash.’

Willis tapped something in the case. Lynch winced, to 125’s amusement.

‘If I can get in here, I might be able to put the timer out. That won’t disarm it, of course, but it will stop it going off. In fact, it’ll give us some bargaining levers.’

‘How so?’

‘We’ll have joined the Armageddon Club.’

‘What?’

‘With this in our possession and under our control, we’ll be a nuclear power.’

That, 125 thought, sounded interesting.

‘Our enemies, the Unscrupulous Chemical Corporation and its toadying, government lackeys, are in the Chem Building, sisters and brothers,’ Cazie told her audience. ‘We must smite them, crush them, kill them, smash them, mash them, gash them. They must be put out of our way if we are to grow as I think we know we must grow. Proliferation is what we are after now. And conversion. And transformation. We can latch onto this rotten, class-ridden, iniquitous, inhumane society and eat out its fucking heart. They used to say we were powerless, wanking around with ideals and hopes we’d jettison as soon as we graduated to the so-called Real World. Now is our chance to piss all over that. Once we’ve taken the Zombies out, we can spread, go into the places the Imperial High War-Bastards live and spread our loving kisses to them. We can change them, we can change society just as we have changed ourselves. We can remake the Real World. Are you ready to take what you need and do what you can? I think you are, I
know
you are. Remember, we’re the new humanity, and
we’ve got something to say
!’

The crowd went wild. This is what it must have been like at Woodstock, at Agincourt, at Nuremberg, at Alamogordo, at the Winter Palace, on the Long March, at Greenham Common, in London when Berlin fell.

Cazie reached out and loved them all.

Shaun Bensom had given up waiting for the bus, and started walking. It was only an hour or so to town on foot across country and through the back roads.

He hoped there was some food in the flat. After his day on the picket, he was hungry.

Nobody was about.

Monica was lucky. The Zombies did not kill her on sight.

‘Lynch,’ she shouted, ‘I’ve got to see Lynch.’

They lowered their guns, and let her into the building. It was hard to be heard through the hoods, but she managed to make herself understood, and an officer scuttled off to find the big man.

She stood with a single guard, a faceless figure with a camouflage poncho over its whites. Besides its hood, it had a tin hat and khaki knee-protection pads. It was a miracle the person inside could stand up and walk, let alone fight a battle.

She did what she usually did when she had to stand about waiting in some corner of the University, and read the notices pinned up on the board. The announcements of plays, concerts, exam timetables and lectures were surreal after what she had been through. She found it easier to deal with the reality of armed guards in decontamination suits and familiar faces turned monstrous than with the forgotten rut of normality.

The officer returned, and signalled for her to follow.

He led her upstairs, into what had been the common room.

It was Hell. In the middle of the room squatted a monstrosity the like of which was even beyond Monica’s recently traumatized and expanded powers of credulity. It was big and wet and parts of it were horribly familiar. It had faces, and hands. And other organs she had not thought to see on the outside of anything alive. It churned, and bugged out several of its eyes at her.