Bad Dreams (55 page)

That completed her day.

* * *

Cazie felt 125’s touch all over her, and felt its extruded flesh slipping into her body, warming her loins, moving gently, pumping into her. There was an electrical crackle as they joined, and she was having another of her minute-long orgasms.

Her brain danced, and dreams flickered behind her eyelids.

125 was her ultimate father-lover.

For several months when she was five or six, her father had taken to coming to the nursery and touching her private places. She had repressed the memory, but realized how it had formed her.

125’s touch washed away the stain Daddy had left.

Cazie did not now know what her father had meant. She thought his touch had been innocent not exploratory. He could not have been thinking of anything else.

125’s voice was inside her, encouraging her, passing on what it had learned, seeking out new pleasures for her.

She changed her mind about her name. There was nothing wrong with Corinne.

She hung in the webbing of its flesh, her legs braced, her insteps arched as 125 grew inside her, teasing, pushing, secreting.

It loved her without question.

That made it unique in her life. She felt wetness on her face, and realized she was crying.

* * *

When it was over, 125 allowed Cazie to slip out whole again. What was left of her clothes was gone, as was her pubic hair. She had been licked clean and dry.

She looked like an alien Eve, her body sparkling where 125 had caressed.

Monica was not able to look at her.

Cazie slept now, under its protection. For the first time, she saw the girl completely relaxed.

It was still eating everything. Monica guessed it was taking minerals aboard as well as living matter. Its hide had metallic patches, and some parts of it were a bricky orange.

She wondered why she had been left alone. Too insignificant to be a problem, she supposed. Not like Lynch, who had long been squeezed through the hole in the floor and eaten up. There were others alive in its coils, she knew. Lynch’s radio operator was sitting still on her chair on the other side of the room, apparently untouched and untouchable.

It was nearly morning.

* * *

125 had completely annexed the Chem Building, making it a part of its body. It would need to be a giant to survive among human beings. A giant of flesh and steel and concrete.

It had absorbed over a thousand brains, and learned many things, many skills. Most of the personalities it had snuffed out quickly, but it was sampling the range of human character types. It even absorbed Frank Lynch, taking on board his grasp of strategy and his lack of regard for human life. It was beginning to get a good idea of what the world beyond the valley was like.

It knew that people were going to be its biggest problem. It had to eat more of them, to know more about them. It had to be big enough to be indestructible, and smart enough to avoid capture and enslavement. But, through the minds it was starting to think of as its ancestors, its contributors, it had read millions of books, lived through countless situations – wars, love affairs, divorces, seminars, rock concerts, crimes, riots, orgies, demonstrations, political meetings, films, plays, murders, arguments, jokes, reconciliations, deaths, births, illnesses, childhoods, injuries, triumphs. It was developing an all-round personality.

It ate people, it ate walls, it ate furniture, it ate girders, it ate stone, it ate plastics. It went through laboratories indiscriminately, absorbing chemicals, elements, whatever. There was little it could not use somehow.

It would stay where it was for the moment, and solve the problem of mobility later. It suspected that it could detach parts of itself and send them out to do some of the more fiddly jobs on their own. It could convert many of the dead people at its disposal into puppet creatures, linked to it through strong, thin filaments. Perhaps, in time, it would learn to be smaller.

It would keep Cazie, and a few others, inside, near its brain. It wanted external input, and someone to talk to.

It sucked the building’s electrical works into its system, and distributed the wiring throughout its body, snaking the plastic-and-rubber coated strands alongside its veins and nerves, then growing solid sheathing around all three systems. It detached itself from the mains, remembering through several different consciousnesses the 1950s science fiction film in which the vegetable monster is electrocuted. It knew lots about a lot of things.

It had eaten a movie buff somewhere along the line. The film was
The Thing From Another World
, 1951, directed by Christian. W. Nyby, produced by Howard Hawks, based on the story ‘Who Goes There?’ by John W. Campbell, Jr, and starring Kenneth Tobey, Douglas Spencer, Margaret Sheridan, Robert Comthwaite and James Arness as the Monster.

Knowledge filled up the back of its brain, the random accumulations of several thousand lifetimes systematically sorted out and put to use. 125 felt that it could sing, kill, make love, cook, change a fuse, repair a car, write an opera, type, solve a crossword puzzle, follow the plot of
EastEnders
, educate a child, handle a hostage crisis, do a million other things.

To replace the mains, it generated electricity and amused itself by keeping on the lights in the common room. It concentrated hard, and was able to do it, although a sudden surge popped all the bulbs along the ground floor corridors when it first began to generate.

Then it ate something that disagreed with it.

* * *

‘Noooooooo,’ screamed Willis, ‘it’s mine! Mine!’

The obscene tentacles that had grown throughout the laboratory fastened on the suitcase, and cut through the metal casing of the core as if it were an eggshell.

‘My plutonium! My ploot! Mine! Mine! Mine!’

The suitcase disappeared entirely into the main sucker.

Willis chewed a wooden bench in frustration.

He filled his mouth, and found himself stuck into the bench, held fast by his growing rows of teeth.

His heart and lungs stopped minutes after his mind had gone.

* * *

As soon as it tasted the radioactive material, 125 realized it had made a mistake. Tendrils of death shot out like cancers from the ruptured suitcase, leaving dead tissue in their wake.

125 tried to retreat, but the death grew, looking for its consciousness.

The weight of useless flesh began to drag it down. It felt itself coming apart, fragmenting.

The plutonium pumped more death into it.

Whole areas of its mind went dark as the black crab fed on its brain. Death ate and absorbed it as it had eaten and absorbed its components.

It rediscovered pain.

Like Lynch, it resolved to fight to the end. As death encircled it, 125 vowed to survive.

It tried shedding large lumps of itself, rending away live sections to prevent the plutonium poisoning spreading just as houses had been blown up to block the Great Fire of London.

It did no good. The death was in its system now, in its blood. It could not be rid of the poison.

There were so many things 125 wished it had done…

* * *

Monica woke up to find 125 in a bad way. Chunks of it had fallen off, and lay congealed and greyish on the carpet. It hung loose from the ceiling and walls. The lights were off.

‘Overextended yourself, didn’t you?’

It did not talk back.

Cazie was still asleep, curled up like a kitten. The radio woman was still sitting, calm and mad.

Monica got up, and left the common room. The corridor was full of the stink of death. Withered and shrunken rows of flesh hung like party ribbons. Dead bodies grew out of the mass.

125 was dead or dying. She knew it was not a miracle. She knew the virus was just an organism like her, and the world was a hostile place. It had made a mistake in thinking itself invulnerable, not that she could blame it for reaching the conclusion.

She went downstairs. There were holes in the walls, and oddments of debris littered the main hall. 125 was kicking weakly in some places, but mostly it just hung and putrefied, slimy lumps falling off.

She squeezed past the crumpled fire engine, and came out into a bright summer day that hurt her eyes.

The campus was quiet. It looked like a WWI battlefield. Most people in sight were dead. Water was still dribbling from the firehoses. A few fires persisted. Early birds had descended, and were picking at the corpses, tearing loose bite-size chunks. A few other survivors were wandering around dazed, or slumped asleep with dew on their faces.

125 had extended itself beyond the building, squeezing thick, leathery tentacles through the sewage outlets and other holes in the wall. They hung, life dribbling away, human features liquefying. A snapping dog was tearing at one mass of the creature, shredding through olive skin to the pink meat beneath.

She sat down on the damp concrete forecourt, and crossed her legs, and cried.

Somewhere, overhead, helicopter blades sliced the air. They got louder.

EPILOGUE

REASON IN THE AGE OF LUNACY

C
orinne had been strapped down for weeks now. The leather thongs at her wrists and ankles were reinforced with half-inch-thick metal bars, and a wide steel belt held her midriff to the iron cot which, in turn, was bolted to the floor.

They had been feeding her intravenously, and doing tests. She was fed up with tests.

From one of the nurses, she had gathered she was not the only one in the facility. There had been other survivors. Some of them had died in the early days, but she knew she was not in danger.

The voice in her head told her she would survive.

The nurses were all pretty and pleasant, and definitely not working for the National Health. One of the doctors had said something about ‘the corporation’ picking up the bill, and so she supposed she was being held by UCC.

In a sense, she appreciated the rest.

They had opened her up and looked around and sewn her back together. They had X-rayed her from every conceivable angle.

The voice in her head told her she would be strong.

Once, early on, she had got her fingers to a nurse, but now they watched her hands, and kept her nails clipped. They had to do that every morning with industrial pliers. It hurt, but Corinne did not scream and shout any more.

The voice in her head advised her to keep quiet and calm, to wait for her time. It would be soon.

This could not last.

No one had come to visit her in hospital. She supposed her parents thought she was dead.

Actually, if Josh Unwin were personally to telephone her father and inform him that he was holding prisoner and torturing Little Corinne, Daddy would probably go along with it. Daddy was a big fan of Josh Unwin, and would not let go by a chance to lick the bigger fish’s bottom clean. No matter what it cost.

She would be a better parent. They had not told her yet, but she knew already.

It was the voice that talked to her inside her head.

She had been getting her strength back. She knew she could break restraint any time she wanted. But for the moment she lay back and took her food in the arm, and pretended the shots they gave her had some effect. They were stupid.

They thought they could get rid of it, but were dithering. She would be out before they ever came to a decision.

She knew lots of things they did not.

Like, for instance, she knew who the father was.

I
spent much of the 1980s affiliated to arts collectives, including Sheep Worrying Enterprises – a Somerset-based theatre-music-fanzine-whatever bunch for whom I wrote or co-wrote a bunch of plays – and the London listings magazine
City Limits
. With Neil Gaiman and Eugene Byrne, I was also responsible for the Peace and Love Corporation, which provided humorous filler articles for girlie magazines like
Knave
and
Fiesta
and was a mainstay of the short-lived funny magazine
The Truth
. We would have liked to do one of those wildly successful trivial humour paperbacks, but no one was interested in publishing our projected laff-a-paragraph guaranteed hit
How to Lose Friends and Irritate People
– perhaps because none of us could draw (Neil can a bit, actually) and those things all had scratchy cartoons of dead cats or live penises in them. Aside from giving us a much-needed source of freelance income, the P&LCo (like Sheep Worrying) was a testing ground for ideas we’d develop later. Several of Neil’s comics arcs and novels echo a structure we’d used for a series of articles on various big topics (education, religion, etc.), in which a naïve narrator (his name was Paul Lobkowitz) is accompanied on a journey by an ambiguous trickster know-it-all (Dr Sigmund von Doppelganger) who would teach him life lessons, essentially, by ripping him off. It’s possible (ahem) we were thinking of the relationship between Swamp Thing and John Constantine in the Alan Moore–Steve Bissette–John Totelben run on
Swamp Thing
. I first experimented with the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format of my novel
Life’s Lottery
in a
Penthouse
piece co-written with Neil called ‘Sexual Pursuit’, about a hapless bloke trying to hook up in the singles hot-spots of Leamington Spa (mostly, it didn’t end well).

Though the bulk of the P&LCo stuff was written by Neil, Eugene and me, other folk who happened to be in the room when we were trying to be funny sometimes joined in. Stefan Jaworzyn, and prime mover of the band Skullflower, was a frequent contributor, as was the late Phil Nutman, British correspondent for
Fangoria
magazine. In a roundabout way, the novels collected here are Phil’s fault. I met Stefan at Sussex University at an all-night screening of horror films in 1978 and ran into him again in 1984 at the Scala Cinema, where he later co-curated the Shock Around the Clock festivals. I first agreed to work with Neil on what became our little-known book of science fiction quotations
Ghastly Beyond Belief
when Jo Fletcher introduced us at a British Fantasy Society pub meeting in 1983 (I think she was trying to get rid of him). Neil, Stefan and I were at the Scala for a launch party for a book about film posters in October 1984 and met Phil there. Some of us watched
The Projected Man
that afternoon, and went on to the press screening of
The Last Starfighter
in the evening. This was the era of VHS, and we’d often get together in the tiny room I had in a hippie flat in Muswell Hill for marathon-length overnight viewing sessions. I had started reviewing films for
City Limits
and the
Monthly Film Bulletin
, and occasionally
Venue
in Bristol, where Eugene was an editor. Anne Billson was often sent by
Time Out
to cover the same films, and we all met her about the same time. Stephen Jones and Dave Reeder founded the important ’80s film fanzine
Shock Xpress
, which Stefan took over… and we all wrote for that, along with Shock Around the Clock co-chairman Alan Jones. Clive Barker’s first
Books of Blood
made a splash in the genre and he got started on doing all the things he’s done, in theatre, film, literature and painting. Clive lived in Crouch End, in the street next to the one I moved to in 1988. Peter Straub had once lived there too. A weird fact:
Anno Dracula
, the
Books of Blood
and
Ghost Story
were all written within a circle a hundred yards or so across.