Bad Dreams (53 page)

‘Harry, you cretin,’ Hopkins said as he walked towards the fire chief, ‘why aren’t you deploying your forces properly?’

Gold saw a two-shot of Hopkins and McKendrick in the Panavision windscreen. The fireman loomed over Reg like King Kong. His face was streaked with soot, and he was soaked. Gold could not hear what Reg was saying to the man, but he could see that McKendrick was not answering him. There were others in the dark, shambling shapes that gathered around the fire chief.

McKendrick’s arm went up, into the darkness beyond the headlights’ throw, and came down again. Hopkins staggered and fell onto the bonnet of the police car. A red smear appeared high up on the windshield.

Hopkins’s checker-circled cap was pinned to his skull by a fireman’s axe. He pulled at the handle, and then stopped moving. The splash across the window was an irregular graffiti splurge now. Gold could not see much past it. He reached for the wipers button, but felt stupid and sick.

He had not made up his mind what to do when the doors were pulled off the car and the hands came in for him.

‘Bloody copper,’ he heard a voice yell, ‘get his balls!’

125 had almost lost interest by the time the word came in that the enemy was coming.

It was sorting out bits and pieces of knowledge, memory and impulse taken from its former personalities, and subsuming them into its viral identity. It was a learning experience. It was amused by the mutual feelings that Anderton and Finch had never been able to share, and reflected that their lives might have ended differently had they extended their relationship outside the laboratory. Still, they were together now. Longendyke was still there, if only as a trace element. The jittery addict was like a foul taste 125 could not lick out of its mouths.

It did a little thinking about its plans for the future. There was a notion of biological destiny it found quite appealing. It was curious to see whether it would be absorbed by the human race or vice versa. One thing was certain, a new dominant lifeform would rule the world once this struggle was over. Whatever emerged from the battle would be unrecognizable to the old world.

Lynch interrupted its train of thought with the news.

‘The mob is on its way, 125. If you come over to the window, you’ll get a good view.’

There was a crowd approaching. 125 could see it a lot better than Lynch, because of its altered eyes. The flaming torches the students carried, like peasants from a ’30s Frankenstein movie, burned splodges into its retinae. It beheld its children, and was fairly pleased with them.

Lynch was excited. 125 could tell he enjoyed the prospect of a battle.

‘I’ll be back,’ he said, and left.

The first shots were fired, from snipers on the roof, and people in the crowd went down. The dead did not fall. They were carried on by inertia, pinned between shoulders, finally dragged under by some obstacle catching a foot. As many of the living were trampled.

There was a girl in there who 125 was interested in meeting.

It still had no direct experience of Cazie, but it had been keeping up with the reports. She might well be the first human to come to terms completely with the 125 in her system. The girl could be one of the triumphs of the symbiosis. That made her important. It hoped Lynch would refrain from killing her.

It felt a species of pride in its offspring, and recognized in the emotion an echo of Anderton’s suppressed feelings for it. Human relationships did not go in circles, but in bramble-tangles.

The first wave broke, and fell back, leaving dead or wounded people on the forecourt. Some of them had deviated considerably from the human pattern.

The crowd regrouped, and surged forward again.

Monica had to be in the battle. She could have huddled with the shellshocked victims in the lecture hall until it was all over and one side or the other came in to exterminate them, but it was not enough. She had to see this through.

Perhaps she would even get killed, and not have to worry any more.

The front hall was full of Lynch’s men, piling out to join in the shooting. They dipped into cases of ammunition as they passed the reception desk, and jammed clips into their guns. Monica noticed that the last few men had to take only one clip apiece.

Lynch had not mentioned it, but she guessed they were low on firepower. They could not have brought much ammunition with them. This thing had developed far too quickly to be well thought-out by anyone.

That gave Cazie’s crowd a good chance of coming out on top. Only to be vaporized in a few hours by UCC’s suitcase.

Terrific.

Lynch was on the steps outside, barking orders, firing off short bursts from the hip. The monster was not in sight.

Monica slipped through the doors and went out.

It was as bright as day. Fire rained down from the flamethrowers. There were burning people everywhere. The field machine guns chattered and shook on their tripods for almost thirty seconds, and were silent. They had only one belt of ammunition apiece. Lousy organization. But, within range of the guns, lay a wedge of dead and dying.

The fallen were fantastical creatures, barely recognizable as the transformed human beings they were. Monica saw faces like starfish, scales and plumage, talons and pincers, huge eyes and mouths. There, in the front rank, still bleeding a clear, watery fluid, was Lindy Styles, half her face swollen and fungoid, the other half normal.

God.

The last time she had seen Lindy, she had been rounding up student volunteers to partner Lynch’s perimeter patrols. Now, she was a mutant and dead.

Monica hugged herself, and tried to keep back.

A line of flame passed over the bodies, and they caught instantly. Lynch was directing his flamethrower people to create a barrier of the burning dead.

The stench hit Monica’s nose.

A Zombie near her freaked out. The smoke had grimed his faceplate, and he could not see. He waved his arms, and blundered into the flames. His suit must be fire-resistant because he kept flailing about – a black figure amid the white-hot blaze – for minutes.

She could not hear anything. It was so loud, she was inured to it all. Once, at a rock festival, her ears had felt like this. That had lasted for weeks afterwards.

Then the fires went down, and the students started coming through.

Three figures plunged through the curtains of flame, and twitched in the gunfire before falling in smouldering heaps on the forecourt. Then another two, then more. They came, and they died.

A girl, her long braids going like roman candles, got close enough to a Zombie to rip through his suit with her bare claws. She died, but Lynch’s men shot down her intended victim along with her.

They were losing already.

Willis’s mouth was a blackened ruin. Most of his tongue was gone, and his palate was patched with drying Lucite.

But he was still hungry.

03: 27: 46

He had already eaten all the foam rubber packing, and crunched up a couple of circuit boards. The jacketing he had skimmed off the electrical wiring was easy to chew and swallow, but some of the metal components hurt when they went down.

03: 19: 16

The red numbers were still flickering, but he would have them stopped soon.

03: 16: 28

He had tried to bite through the metal cylinder in the middle of the suitcase, but had broken a few teeth for his pains. He had picked up the shards of enamel and gulped them back without trying to taste them. He knew he was dribbling blood.

03: 09:17

Really, all this was just an appetizer.

03: 01: 04

He was very, very hungry. And he had heard that plutonium was supposed to be delicious.

02: 57: 18

* * *

125 was spreading. It kept its bulk in the common room, where Carole Ricci and the rest of Lynch’s communications people were doing their best to ignore it as they co-ordinated the fighting, but it extended itself into the ventilation system and the interstices between the floors. It probed the extremities of the Chem Building, sucking in a great deal of electrical wiring. It was running a little short of living material to counterbalance the huge quantities of inanimate matter it was using to fortify itself. 125 would need some more human flesh.

It found a few corpses within reach, and snaked tubes to them. Those that had been dead the longest were just meat, but two still had flickers remaining in their brains. 125 nurtured and cherished the new information, even as he redistributed the bones and organs.

Eyes were especially useful.

Lynch could feel the tide turning. He knew his military history. Everyone remembered the 300 Spartans, and Davy Crockett at the Alamo, and Custer at Little Big Horn, but nobody admitted that those people had lost the battles. Their achievement was holding out as long as they did while ridiculously outnumbered, but they had still got killed at the end.

That was what would happen here. He had started with maybe 150 people. The enemy were in their thousands. He had the guns, but could not keep them operational.

And the bastards he was fighting did not care whether they lived or died. That made them dangerous.

He was already considering withdrawal scenarios. And he had 125, if the monster could pull through and if he could trust it.

Fucking monster!

He looked at his watch, and tried not to think of Willis.

Cazie was immortal, invincible, God-only wise…

…but she knew enough to be at the back end of the horde as they stormed the Chem Building. Her newborns would have to soften the Zombies before she could take part in the victory.

Her hair was standing on end now. Electricity whiplashed as she walked.

She had lieutenants up front, directing the attack. They could execute her designs faithfully. She still thought up the strategies, and gave instructions, but she knew how to delegate authority.

‘You’ll bow before me, UCC cocksuckers!’ she yelled, ‘and then we’ll see what’s what!’

She had picked her personal troop carefully. None of the melters, leakers, bleeders. None of the half-formed, those trapped between stages of humanity, dying like fish in acid. Only the best, the most perfect, the most adapted of the new humanity were selected for her private cadre, her elite guard.

Elliott Frazier stood by her side, her official bodyguard.

She watched the battle, watched wave after wave disappear through the now-feeble wall of flame. There was less gunfire now. Good. The weapons would soon be gone, and old humanity would have only its weak and useless hands and limbs to fight with. Then she would step forward to inaugurate the new era with a mass spilling of the blood of the old.

The fire chief was with the cadre too, unable to talk because of the tigerfangs crowding his mouth, but as alert as a big cat on the prowl.

He had grown out of his uniform as his body changed, but still wore his yellow poncho and red helmet. A tall man before, his elongated, hunched back made him a giant. When the fire brigade had arrived, and the spark of growth had leaped into the chief, Cazie had seen a way into the Chem Building. She was thinking faster now, down multiple trains of thought, foreseeing, calculating, planning…

There was another spurting of fire from the UCC flamethrowers, and the barrier sprang up again. Another packed-in mass of Cazie’s followers was consumed instantly. Some scattered like fireflies, but most stood their ground, pressing forward.

There were only single shots now.

Cazie extended her fingers, and sparks leaped and danced like Tinkerbell. The fire chief smiled ferally, and raised his hand to catch the blue light. An arc coursed between them.

‘Now,’ she said.

The fire chief nodded, and swung himself gracefully up into the seat of his vast, beastlike machine. Cazie’s corps, already aboard the fire engine, cheered, and rattled their weapons in salute.

Elliott Frazier buzzed his arms, now huge and heavy with chainsaw elephantiasis, in the air, and the shreds of his jacket at his shoulders were agitated, spitting out chunks of stranded cotton.

Eddie Zero sang through his bullhorn, accompanying his ghetto-blaster, one of the old songs. ‘Johnny B. Goode’. He was out of the studio now, but still on the air.

Cazie climbed up into the broad seat beside the fire chief, and lazily gestured.

Lightning ripped the air, and the vehicle rolled forward.

‘Funny how people get off on killing other people, isn’t it?’ mused 125.

‘Pardon?’ said Ricci.

‘Nothing really.’

‘Fine.’

The woman went back to talking into her throat microphone. 125 had the idea that the battle would not go well for the CSD. They were highly trained and facing a rabble, but sometimes random unpredictability was an advantage.

125 was intrigued by the line of Ricci’s throat, the tiny pearl-like studs in her earlobes, the trace of a perfume she must have tried to scrub away before hitting the field.

There was a lot of activity outside, still. 125 could see the bright red fire engine driving up, crushing bollards, and ripping up grass like a bulldozer. A crowd swarmed along beside it, shouting and chanting. Firing rapidly, the outermost guards were falling back to the Chem Building.

125 was wondering whether it had dealt with the right person. If Cazie Bruckner took out Lynch, it would have to renegotiate with her.

At least they had something in common.

A stream of water, as solid as a concrete girder, shafted through the fire, knocked men and guns out of the way, and broke against the side of the Chem Building.

Monica was out of the line, but still got soaked. The jet cascaded off the wall, and the forecourt was awash.

Another stream came, tearing up tiles, and churning brown clouds of dirt. A Zombie was caught by the water, and lost his arm cleanly to the high-pressure jet.

Windows shattered, and frames were pulverized.

The fire wall was going out.

Then the juggernaut came, rolling over the charred bodies of its slaves, blaring Chuck Berry, bearing the inheritors of the earth.