Knee-Deep in the Dead Read online

  I decided that solipsism was a load of crap.

  And when I looked up, my old friend was back, the crusty, brown monster with ivory-white spikes . . . and he’d brought his buddies. They watched me stagger to my feet, and they laughed.

  Then one of them wound up and threw something, some sort of mucus ball that burst into bloodred flames as it left the creature’s hand. I dived across a burned zombie, and the flaming phlegm spun me buttocks over boots.

  I looked for a weapon, a glint of metal, a tube, something! But no, these demons were actually producing the fire with their bare hands . . . and their aim was deadly.

  The monsters hissed, pointing directly at Yours Truly; then the zombies noticed me for the first time and began shooting. They weren’t too particular about innocent zombies getting in the way, either—and whenever one zombie would shoot another, or a demon would pelt a bunch with a flaming mucus ball, the monster victims would turn on their monster allies, completely forgetting about me. While I ran screaming from one side of the room to the other, I filed that little datum somewhere in the back of my brain for future use.

  Now the room was really filling up with at least a dozen zombies and three leathery demons . . . and again I dived to the side as a whirring, screaming hunk of steel buzzed my helmet. This time there was no mistake: it was a goddamned flying skull with flaming rocket exhaust spewing out the back. It turned and banked, trying to mow me down and chew me up with razor-sharp, steel teeth, like one of those wind-up “chattering skulls” gone mad.

  But the fireballs were the main problem; the brown demons were a lot tougher than the zombies. Suddenly, I was grateful for the pillars; they provided cover, at least. Making a mad dash for the nearest, I fired off the shotgun at the remaining zombies.

  Catching my breath, I risked running to the next pillar. This time a fireball almost fried me. There was just no way I could get to the demons from here without being toasted . . . and the shotgun range was too short to pop them where I crouched.

  While I dithered, I heard a whirring behind me, then a harsh, iron screech. Sure enough, the flying skull had sailed around the pillars and spotted me again.

  I can take care of you at least, you F/X reject! I whipped the riot gun around and fired from the hip, not even taking time to aim.

  It was the best mistake of my life.

  The little bugger skittered out of the way; I tried to track as I fired, and I popped one of the toxic barrels instead.

  It exploded with a terrific concussion, kicking me in the body armor like a mule and tearing off a chuck of my kevlar vest. The skull vanished in a spray of metal gears and exploding JP-5.

  Almost immediately, my bruised eardrums were assaulted by another explosion, then another and a fourth. Five or six more barrels touched off in rapid succession. All I could think was thank God I was on the other side of the pillar.

  An acrid cloud of blue smoke swirled around the walls and floor . . . residue from the explosive oxidation of the toxic goo. Gasping, I peeked around the pillar at a scene of astonishing carnage.

  Zombies and demons alike had been torn to shreds and strips of gray flesh, their parts mingling in a hellish mulligatawny. The stench of a thousand sour lemons permeated the room, even driving out the horrible, burning smell of the toxic fumes. Jesus, I thought, I hope the cameras got the shot.

  I climbed shakily to my feet and padded toward the door, chastened by the awesome destructive power in those forty-gallon drums. At the edge of the room I found the only other survivor.

  The demon crawled along the ground with its hands, one leg blown entirely off and the other twisted into a crazy angle. It leaked yellow pus, globules that burst into flame as soon as they dripped off the monster’s body.

  I leveled my shotgun at its head. “Die, you dumb animal,” I said with a smile.

  “Aaanimaaal,” repeated the demon, “not . . .”

  I paused, startled. I didn’t know they could talk. “You’re right,” I prodded, “at least animals kill you clean or leave you alone.”

  It twisted its head all the way around to stare up at me while lying belly down on the floor. My stomach turned at the sight. “You—are aanimaals when we fix planet.”

  I curled my lip, but my heart leaped. Which planet was that? Mars? Or did the aliens’ plan include Earth? “We’ll mow you down as fast as you bubble up out of the sewers, you piece of filth.”

  The alien monster laughed, opening its mouth wide enough to swallow a man’s head. “Weee throw rocks . . . big rocks.”

  The image was ludicrous; but I got a premonitory shudder. Somehow, I guessed the emphasis was on the word “big.”

  8

  Despite my better judgment, I was too intrigued for the moment by the sound of pure evil pleading its case. “Why haven’t the others spoken to me? Can you all talk?”

  It opened its mouth wide, exposing gums full of squirming cilia and teeth that rolled and shifted position. “Not . . . all ssssame, like you-mans not sssame.”

  The alien crawled on a bit farther. I don’t think it was trying to escape; it knew that was impossible. I began to worry that it was leading me toward something. Ahead of me was a greenish stone wall carved in bas relief with a hideous, demonic face. Somehow, I doubted that was an original furnishing in the Phobos base of the Union Aerospace Corporation.

  “How aren’t we the same?” I prodded. I felt in my gut that I was on the verge of something important.

  “Ssssome . . . fear,” it gasped. Its face showed no sign of distress, but I knew from the shudder that wracked its body that it was very near death. “Othersss sssstrong . . . you ssstrong.”

  Good Lord—was this alien thing admitting a grudging respect for Fly Taggart?

  “Few ssstrong, like you ssstrong . . . mosst good for ssslavesss. You-man ssslavesss.”

  A thought buried deep behind my ears thrust itself forward. I wasn’t too fatigued to pick up that slip of the tongue; even a tongue as thick and brutish as this one. Few strong—others strong . . . there must be other humans who were still themselves and still breathing!

  When hell came to Phobos, I had to keep hope locked up in a small space without a zip code.

  I kept a poker face; the monster might be smart enough to spot my eagerness at the possibility that one of the living might be Arlene.

  Any human survivor would change the Phobos situation dramatically: food and water were minor problems, but I could only operate so long without sleep. With no one to stand guard, giving in to exhaustion was suicide. But I couldn’t keep going forever; and if I couldn’t rest, all the ammo in the solar system would not save me.

  “I’m touched by your concern for my survival,” I said.

  “Deal,” he unexpectedly offered, ignoring the sarcasm. “You . . . live; you work; you help.”

  All I had to do was work with the alien invaders and help them conquer the human race, and they might graciously allow me to live as a slave. Jesus, how tempting, I thought.

  I decided that I liked the ones who grunt better. What did these creeps want from me? “I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re after?”

  The thing laughed. The sound grated on my nerves like a ripped bagpipe. “Hell . . . we after,” it declared. “Ssssurrender . . . help; you live, you-man.”

  “As a zombie?”

  “You live, not deadwalk; you sssee othersss.”

  “What others? Who else survived? Did a girl survive?” Great, Fly; nice and subtle. Does it even know what a girl is? Does it care?

  “You help . . . you sssee othersss.”

  I stared down at the loathsome thing. I knew I had gotten all the intel from it that I could. “Let me answer,” I said at last, “louder than mere words can do. Tell me if this is tough enough.”

  Without another thought, I pointed the shotgun at the monster’s upper chest and pumped a round at point-blank range. The alien jerked—then amazingly, stared up at me, still alive by a thread.
/>   The alien grimaced, facial muscles finally growing rigid. Then for a moment it relaxed. “We could eat anybody onccce,” it declared. Then it stopped moving; even the cilia in its mouth stood up straight and froze. The demon was dead.

  After catching my breath, I started getting angry. It was one thing to fight a human enemy, but battling malignant demons? Every time I killed one of these humanoid things, I felt like doing a hundred more. That might be the only good to come of this latest encounter. Give no quarter and kill, kill, kill. Kind of reassuring to learn that all that Marine training hadn’t been a waste of time.

  Of course, the rational portion of my brain still made plans. I wanted to climb down and out of this hangar and reach my next objective, the nuclear plant. The plant was the most dangerous item to fall into enemy hands. Better it should fall into my hands.

  Making one last circuit of the zombie bodies, I scavenged for blessed ammunition. I’d have killed for a decent backpack; come to think of it, that’s probably how I would have to get one, I was running out of pockets for the ammo.

  So, how to get out of the hangar? My playmates found their way in; all I had to do was reverse the process. First thing was to hug the wall and make a nice, slow circuit of the big, ugly room.

  The damned monsters bothered me a lot less than the architecture changing on me. I’d never been in Phobos Base before, but I’d talked to guys down on Mars who knew these installations; there was no way this place hadn’t undergone a change as bug-nut crazy as the demonic characters themselves.

  And what made that more upsetting than the monsters was the idea that the floor you walked on, the wall you brushed against, the damn place could turn on you and become something else. Like a cartoon world that suddenly turns everything into rubber . . . except you.

  If this kept up, Yours Truly was going to place his imagination on short rations.

  I leaned against the wall, and suddenly it was like those old Abbott and Costello movies back Earthside: the wall had a hidden door. I even tripped going through the blasted thing. In my mind a laugh track played and played and played.

  I fell into a new corridor, which I followed to a rising wall at the south end of the hall. There was another of those crazy platforms near at hand. Instinct told me to give it a wide berth, and who am I to argue with my most cherished faculty? When I reached the wall, I found another switch, which I flipped.

  The wall shooooshed up, revealing a down staircase; it was an encouraging sign—the nuke plant was down another level or two, I vaguely remembered. Cautiously, I started down the stairs, grateful for steady light. My reward was the biggest slime pool yet, waiting at the bottom. If only I’d remembered to bring swimming trunks, I could have gone in for a dip. Best toxic sludge in the whole solar system right here—come one, come all.

  Skirting the pool, pressed against the wall, I finally ran out of hangar. Along the narrow corridor past the toxin, I found the shredded body of another one of those brown-leather, spiky demons. If it were a talker, someone had already silenced it forever with seven or eight rounds from a Sig-Cow. Score another for the Corps.

  The bug lay against a sliding door that belonged on a dumbwaiter. I yanked it open, happy to take out my frustrations on something that didn’t shoot, claw, or flame me back.

  Sure enough, it was a lift, barely big enough for a big guy to squeeze into. I spotted a funny mark on the wall, as if someone had started to draw a map using a bright, red paint stick—we use them to blaze trails in forests or urban environments. Whoever it was had been interrupted in mid-map. I studied it for a bit, then shrugged; whatever he was trying to tell me got lost in the translation.

  I scrunched inside the tiny lift, wondering which of the two buttons would take me down to the plant. Staring at the labels, I decided to push the one marked “Nuclear Plant.” And they say you don’t get an education in the service!

  With a jerk, the tiny lift sank, swerving and rattling all the way, as much as screaming out Here I come! to the whole world. Well, to the whole Phobos pressure zone, I guess.

  I didn’t have to guess whether this important part of the base had fallen into enemy hands. The minute I stepped off the platform, I was in the soup up to my neck. This particular recipe called for more zombies than I thought could be crammed into such a small space. Come to think of it, the space wasn’t all that small. I guess when it’s wall-to-wall corpse-sickles, it’s easy to lose track of the finer points of design.

  For the first time in my life I felt what it was like to be claustrophobic from being surrounded by walls of human flesh—well, formerly human flesh. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t dead meat.

  Two things worked in my favor: first, so many zombies were sardine-canned in the room, they could hardly move, and most of them didn’t even know I was there. Second, it had become clear to me by now that the only use for brains in a zombie was for gray and white color contrast when you blasted their heads like rotten fruit. Even Gunny Used-to-Be-Goforth had been operating on motor reflexes, and he was the most dangerous one yet.

  There was plenty of time to think about such things because there was really nowhere for me to go, and I was waiting for one of them to notice me. Then one of those wonderful moments of dumb luck added the final spice to the soup. Another contingent of zombies trooped into storage, and one of the shambling creeps elbowed aside another, simply trying to find somewhere to stand. In the tiny, new space created, I noticed an undamaged map on the wall!

  By this time, I’d arrived at the conclusion that zombies were not responsible for the destroyed radio equipment, the vandalized maps, the deliberately wasted weapons. The advantage of attending my first zombie convention was that there apparently wasn’t room for the demon monsters to get in here and do their damage; the space was being used for zombie storage.

  Trying to look dead on my feet—not difficult—I shambled a few meters to where I could get a better view of the map—it was a full schematic of the entire station seen from the side. Unfortunately, it didn’t include overhead views for each level; but at least I could see how far down the station went. My God, it even had a You Are Here arrow!

  I was indeed at the nuclear plant level; above me was the hangar, while still below were the Toxin Refinery—didn’t that sound appetizing—Command & Control, the labs, Central Processing, and MIS. Jesus . . . only six more levels to clear; I was afraid it would be thirty!

  Funny how what I was seeing triggered memories of malls and shoppers. Best not to dwell on that . . .

  Somewhere in the back of my head a shrill voice screamed for me to get the hell out of that room. I figured this situation was too lucky to last.

  Without false modesty, I can say I was proven a prophet. In that sea of pale, dead faces, two dry as dust eyes came to rest on Yours Truly. Hoping the unfocused eyes would continue their survey of the room, I didn’t move a muscle . . . which was normally what the zombies did when they had no orders and had not spotted a human: they stood and did nothing.

  Except, that is, for the one who wouldn’t stop staring at me. I wasn’t about to make the first move. I’d been through a lot lately but I could still count.

  It seemed like this could go on forever; but then, out of nowhere, a zombie-child separated itself from the rest of the throng and stumbled toward me.

  Jesus! For a second I didn’t recognize that she was as dead as the rest. Seeing plenty of zombies recruited from soldiers made it easy to forget the UAC civilians that had been on this base. But somehow I’d never dreamed there would be children here.

  The kid headed straight for me, mouth opening and closing but no sounds coming out. Then those soft, wet, cold hands were rubbing on my arm . . . and I couldn’t stifle my reflexes. I put my arm around her to comfort her.

  All hell broke loose.

  Staring-boy opened his mouth, too; but instead of words, he belched an inarticulate roar. But he was so hemmed in by his fellows, he couldn’t raise the pistol in his right hand. Impatient guy th
at I am, I acted: I tilted up my shotgun and squeezed the trigger.

  A dead-center blast helped a lot. I pumped the slide, then pounded home another shot to clear a path.

  Then I was running as fast and hard as I could to the left. In close quarters like this there was no opportunity to use the rifle. My best bet was to find elbow room where I could at least make a stand but that wouldn’t put me in a cul de sac. The sounds pounding in my ears told me that they were following me, but I wasn’t about to turn around and take a head count.

  I ducked into an open doorway, then turned like Custer at bay. Three of the creatures shambled past, not even noticing me—the fourth was not so obligingly stupid. It pushed through the doorway, and I raised the shotgun.

  Just before I turned that face into an explosion of red, something about it reminded me of my grandfather. I wish that hadn’t happened. I was doing all right until then.

  The trouble was that every time I made careful calculations about what I could do in terms of stamina, willpower, and even strategy, the old emotions got completely away from me. I’d thought I was a better Marine than this. Then again, they’d never trained us for a nonstop horror show.

  I needed a break. I needed to lie down for five minutes because my lower back was killing me and there was a muscle spasm in my right shoulder blade. A nice cold drink of water would have gone a long way toward cooling the fire in my brain. But seeing old Granddad’s face on the umpteenth zombie was the latest straw breaking the latest camel’s back.

  I couldn’t shoot. I just couldn’t! I grabbed it by its coveralls and shoved it backward with superhuman, adrenaline strength.

  It bowled over some of its buddies; then one in the back rank raised a lever-action rifle and tried to blow my fool head off.

  I slapped the deck face first, and the bullet scorched the air, blowing apart one of the zombies that had missed the turnoff a few seconds back, splattering the other two with what passes for zombie brains.

  The creatures went mad. That shot must have kicked their IFF off-line, because they opened up on their zombie brethren, who cheerfully returned fire. In seconds, every zombie was shooting wildly at anything that moved!