Bad Dreams (54 page)

Monica saw Cazie in the fire engine, and marvelled at the change in the girl.

A few shots went off, and a cobweb crack appeared in the engine’s broad windscreen. There was answering fire from some of the things perched up on the half-raised ladder.

Lynch was waving his arms. His shouts were lost in the din, but Monica knew what his signal meant.

Fall back.

A suited figure grabbed her arm, and pulled her back with him, into the lobby of the Chem Building.

She could not understand. It took her a moment to realize the Zombie was looking out for her, saving her life.

The gesture did not mean as much as it would have done yesterday.

Her saviour slipped on the wet floor of the lobby, and sprawled, skidding backwards. The fire engine mounted the low steps, and crashed into the front of the building. The doomed man burst under its front wheels.

Monica ran with the rest, as bricks parted and glass fragmented. The front cab of the engine rammed its way through the double doors, and the head of the beast was caught inside the building.

Lynch personally fired off a burst at the windscreen, which became as white and opaque as packed sugar, then fell away entirely.

In the cabin, a figure danced and jerked as Lynch killed it. Ropes of blood squirted out through the broken side windows.

It was not Cazie. It was a fireman.

Cazie was gone.

There was noise upstairs.

‘Fuck,’ shouted Lynch. ‘They’re inside!’

Flesh petals were blossoming from the holes in Clare’s side. She had been shot a couple of times, but that did not hurt at all.

She zig-zagged down the corridor, running with the others. If anyone got in their way, they were knocked down and trampled. Someone usually took the trouble to kill them. Clare did not have to do that sort of thing any more.

Elliott Frazier strode behind the first wave, finishing people off with a rasping pat on the head. He only had to touch his whirring club hands to a Zombie’s mask to turn the white headshape into a red ruin, shot through with shards of glass and bone.

Last term, Elliott Frazier had given her a C+ in the Modern European Mind course.

Clare’s insides were growing faster than her skin, swelling up her stomach, clogging her breathing. Her new skin was splitting, and she saw raw redness in the cracks.

Already, she was dragging an armful of internal organs around with her.

Whatever it was she had had, she was losing it now.

Finally, she just stopped running and curled up on the floor to wait for it.

It did not take long.

Death settled on her like a black bat, wings folding around her head, darkness blotting out her eyes.

Lynch was nearly down to his bare hands, which put him easily on a par with the enemy.

On the stairs, he caught a hunched over goat-thing and broke its back with a practised move.

Whoever was left ought to be retreating to the common room. That would be the last ditch.

Shit, this was a crazy way to die!

He wondered how Willis was doing, and rather hoped he would just fuck up, cut the wrong wire, and bring down instant oblivion.

Like the UCC people thought, it would tidy things up.

He stepped in something that had been a girl amphibian, its guts already hanging out of great tears in its abdomen. Noxious fumes farted out of the corpse.

Lots of the enemy were being laid low like that. 125 had said it was mostly fatal.

If he was doing this all over again, he would have grilled the monster more, found out more about the fucking bug.

Someone big and dangerous with frizzed hair and tusks came out of an office, and he wasted it with his last bullet. He got rid of his last gun, and ran towards the common room.

What a life!

Cazie was calm and confident. There must be only a handful of the Zombies left, and her people were everywhere.

Her elite clustered around her protectively, keeping the jostling rankers away from her spark.

Clare was dead with honour. But Elliott Frazier was still with the programme.

They came down from the upper floors, swarming in through the ladders that had breached the windows of the big laboratories. They met little resistance.

Still, a lot of her people were in bad shape. One or two had just upped and died for no reason at all. Evidently, only the strongest could take being hiked up the evolutionary scale.

‘Cazie,’ someone growled, ‘look!’

It was Eddie Zero. He had found a small hatch, leading to a projection booth. Through the aperture, Cazie saw the main science lecture hall. It was full…

…full of…

‘Food,’ said Eddie.

‘Later,’ she snapped, ‘later.’

Back in the corridor, someone was waiting for her, a cockatoo-plumed woman she had picked for the elite earlier.

‘Where are they?’ Cazie asked.

‘The common room. There aren’t many.’

Cazie was serene. She felt the thrill of winning, but wanted a moment of peace.

It passed.

‘Okay, let’s finish this thing.’

125 saw how the fight was going. From its remote eyes, it saw the students prevailing against the CSD forces.

Now, the battle was inside the Chem Building. Inside its body.

It took its flesh where it could be found, reabsorbing itself from the systems of many of the fallen. New consciousnesses crowded in, granting new insight, offering new sensations.

Many of the new components had been significantly mutated by their earlier exposure to 125, and it was pleased at the new shapes and forms they had found.

It suspected that its effects on human beings had a great deal to do with individual psychology. 125 made whims flesh, reshaping bodies to fit unconscious minds.

It took a particular type of mind to become perfect.

125 regretted Lynch’s immunity. After Cazie, he would have made the ideal avatar.

It draped itself stickily across corridors like a curtain, entrapping those who blundered into it.

With each component it absorbed, it became better, stronger, smarter, more fit…

Monica collapsed on a chair in the common room. She guessed the Zombies were down to single figures.

She had a stitch. Momentarily, she thought she had been shot, but there was no wound.

She gasped for breath.

The monster was up and about, swaying on its spiny legs. It would be a shock even for Cazie, Monica thought. It had grown, and it seemed to be fixed to the walls and ceiling like a complicated appliance, organic plugs slotted into holes. Its tentacular appendages pulsed like snakes swallowing large rats, and lumps were funnelled into its main bulk.

God, she wished she could have this day over again. She would stay in bed, or emigrate to Australia, or go home to her parents, or any bloody thing…

Lynch had blood on his hands. At least she supposed it was blood. He stood with the monster, tensed and ready.

There was nothing for it but to wait for Cazie.

Eddie went through the swing doors first, then came out again dead, a knife sunk to the hilt in his face between his antennae.

That gave Cazie some pause, but her aides swept past her and into the common room. Eddie was mashed underfoot.

Cazie stepped forward, and went into the room.

Shit! Fuck! Jesus!

What was
that
?

‘Hello, Ms Bruckner,’ it said.

No one moved. 125 was in control.

It tipped itself forward, and looked at Cazie Bruckner. A halo of blue flames seemed to shimmer around her head, but she was in deep shock.

‘You don’t know me, but you’ve got me, so to speak. I’m Batch 125, your disease. Your symbiote, to use the word of the day. Actually, I’m not all that symbiotic, as you’d have noticed if you had paid attention to the way ninety-three out of a hundred of your fellow infectees self-destruct within a few hours. Congratulations. You’re one of the very few people who have been able to come to terms with having me.’

She was obviously smitten at first sight. Her blue aura flushed red, and, mouth agape in wonder, she came, forward, her hand out to touch 125. She was extraordinarily beautiful by anyone’s standards. At least, certainly by the standards of all the people whose brains 125 had absorbed. He felt he had taken enough grey matter on board to make his own aesthetic judgements now.

He opened a mouth and wolf-whistled.

The girl got close to it. Lynch stepped between them. ‘We’ve got a deal, 125!’

125 shot a few quills at the CSD man.

Lynch took the darts in his neck and shoulder. A rush of excruciating pain shot through his entire body.

A barbed arm came out of 125’s bulk, and stuck into his chest. He felt the triple claw sink in, and heard his ribs crack.

He was lifted off the floor.

This would teach him even to consider trusting a fucking virus!

He kicked, his combat boots scraping carpet.

His bowels let go.

125 was talking to him, but he could not listen.

The charge hit him through the hooks in his chest. With the first jolt, he went into convulsions. He twisted badly enough to break his spine.

125 had developed some sort of biological laser, and was shocking him like an electric eel.

His brain fried. His eyes popped. His skeleton burned white hot, and turned to ash in his body. He was cooked through in seconds.

Monica held her nose.

125 dropped Lynch through the hole in the floor. He stuck in the gap, speared by upward-bent rods.

He had died with his eyes open.

125 roared with something that might have been laughter. Cazie was slowly sinking to her knees, ready to worship the creature.

Infectees were crowding into the room.

Elliott Frazier – the dreamboat TV prof – took aside one of Lynch’s surviving soldiers and took him apart with a few swipes of his whirring, swollen, bloody arms. Somebody tried to surrender, and Elliott did for them. Lynch’s last radio operator took off her headset and carefully put it down. Nobody bothered her.

Monica kept looking back at Lynch’s black, bloodied face. She did not know whether she should envy the dead.

Now what?

Willis picked up the clippers, snipped the final wire, and…

…the little red numbers stopped.

Cazie sat down, and watched the monster pick through the leftovers.

All but three or four of her cadre were dead or dying, and the monster was sucking out bits and pieces, incorporating them into its already-vast bulk.

Elliott Frazier submitted to it. He offered up his arms, and they were sucked into the doughy lump of the monster’s body. He looked back one last time, smiling slightly, and let the wave of flesh engulf him, sucking him in completely. A wall of warty skin formed behind him. She heard his distinctive buzzing, muffled by the ton of flesh, and the skinwall undulated in agitation.

She wondered if it had thought how it would get out of the building. It was already bigger than any of the doors. The only hole big enough for it was jammed up by the fire engine.

It did not seem to bear her any malice. She thought it might be rather fond of her. It extruded a head on an arm, and kissed her on the mouth with it.

A charge coursed through her body.

The head was hairless, but had Elliott Frazier’s handsome face.

She was almost satisfied.

125 dangled tendrils into the laboratory, and reached for Willis’s head.

The delicate filaments went into the man’s brain. It was riddled with virus, but 125 could pick up the information it needed.

The suitcase was out of commission.

125 let Willis go. There was no point in killing the man and, after all, he was probably the only human being who would ever – intentionally or not – save its life.

It had Cazie under its spell already, and that gave it all the cards.

It was a shame the human body really was not a very good vehicle. It was susceptible, but too fragile to keep the virus alive in its system for more than a few days. 125 was beginning to realize that it was not the super-virulent plague it had been sold as.

There were infectees spreading out there, passing on the disease. But without the concentrated exposure the original victims had had, the next generation of infectees would struggle on, and maybe even fight off the virus. A few steps down the line, and it would be no more serious than a cold.

Under natural conditions, it could just have mutated into another anonymous disease and never have been more than a footnote.

But it had this body, which was adapting very nicely to its purpose. It was the smartest bug that had ever lived.

And it had Cazie Bruckner.

* * *

Monica watched the thing grow.

Already, it was more like a plant than an animal. Its flesh clung to the walls, and grew into the ducts and out of the windows. Arms and legs hung semi-uselessly from its branches, a nasty reminder of its raw materials. Eyes peered out of pink masses. Elliott Frazier’s head surveyed the room, a familiarly thoughtful expression on its face. If 125 could find a wig and a pipe, it would be able to do a perfect impression of the professor.

She thought it was probably all through the building by now. There had been an appalling wail earlier, and the thing had been very active. Then it went quiet, and the flesh reddened. New blood. It must have got into the lecture hall. There would have been more than enough flesh in there to feed the creature, but probably not enough to kill its hunger. Hundreds more were dead, but she was too tired to feel stricken by the loss.

She tried to remember faces. There had been a crowd in the hall, sitting quietly, waiting for rescue. But they seemed less real than the individuals, than Brian, Jason, Lindy, Frazier. Even than Lynch. She would never be able to watch anyone pretend to die in a war film or a Western again without remembering.

It looked for a while as if the thing would eat Cazie, even. It was talking very quietly with her, almost seductively. Then, it wrapped the girl in tendrils of flesh. Cazie was lifted off the floor, held in a writhing web of tissue. Her face was serene, almost beatific. The flesh folded around her, nuzzling her like a kitten. Only her head was outside the creature. Then, Cazie gasped, and her body wriggled within its sleeping-bag-like cocoon. With acute distaste, Monica realized the creature was making love to its high priestess.