“Pray for war,” Duke muttered now. Wishing it were war.
But this wasn’t war. War was with people. This was some other category of butchery.
The corridor Duke had taken went straight, zigged to the right, went straight again — and then dead-ended. The door at the end was open: a rectangle of night. Duke wasn’t eager to go through it.
But he made himself push ahead, probing the room with his gunlight.
The room was piled with corpses — they were literally piled up, as if someone had tried to use them as a sort of impromptu barrier, a fortress of dead human flesh.
“Christ…” Duke murmured.
Some of the bodies were trembling a little — weren’t they? Or was that an illusion caused by his hands shaking the gunlight?
He wasn’t taking any chances. They could be transforming…
He moved into the room, and started firing, putting a round into the head of each corpse. The bodies flinched as he fired into them — just flesh reacting to impact, but in the dimness his imagination made it seem they were trying to crawl away from his gun muzzle. His stomach lurched, and he almost threw up — probably would have except it had been so long since he’d eaten. He had a nutrition bar in his pocket — but the thought of eating made his stomach contort again. He kept firing, firing…blood runneled around his feet — red blood, not black…
He paused to put in a fresh clip, coughing from his own gun smoke.
There was another sound, besides his coughing. Something moving, and maybe a moan, coming from the far side of the room.
He swung his weapon around, fired in that direction, toward another heap of bodies — which was twitching ever so slightly.
“Jesus Christ, stop shooting!”
Duke knew that voice, didn’t he? “Who the hell’s in there?”
Two arms popped up from the pile of human corpses. Duke almost fired at them, out of sheer tension, but he managed to hold back. A face came after the arms. Bloodied but human. It was Pinky.
Pinky glared at him. “Don’t just stand there, you dumb son of a bitch, get me outta here!”
Fifteen
“YOU WILL NOT hesitate, and you sure as hell won’t turn back,” Reaper was telling his sister. “Research here is over.”
They were standing in the wormhole chamber, close to the tank where the silvery droplet spun and pulsed.
“When I go through the Ark,” he went on, “you count to three and come after me. I’d send you through first, but I don’t know what’s waiting over there…”
“I’m afraid we do know,” she said softly. “I just don’t know if those things are the only enemy —”
“You understand what I’m telling you, Sam? You don’t get a sudden inspiration and go back to the goddamn lab. You don’t go looking for souvenirs or clean underwear. You follow me through. One…”
“…two, three. And I go through. I think I kinda get it, John.” But Sam was smiling sadly at him — he was just trying to protect her. She looked at the Ark. “You hate going through that thing…Maybe you’re the one who’s stalling here.”
“How do you know I hate…well yeah. Everyone does. Okay, I’m going. Remember —”
“I know, I know, one-two-three.”
He turned, took a breath, and stepped into the Ark’s field of sensitivity — as always getting the eerie feeling he was stepping into the embrace of something alive and sentient.
He shuddered, feeling again that he was diving into cold water that was instantly warm water, then icy again…
The mercurial droplet leapt at his eyes, and he was falling into infinity. Living seas swirled around him in impossible colors, improbable smells.
But suddenly he was somewhere familiar…familiar tropical colors, familiar tropical smells…
He was no longer falling — there was solid ground under his feet. He was back in that rain forest where Jumper had died. Back in the steaming jungle, with all his men. Even the ones who had died there. They were alive now…or anyway they were standing up and looking at him.
Mac was there, too. Destroyer. Goat in the background. And Portman. All standing around him, staring at him — Mac had to gaze at him from waist height, because Mac’s body was carrying his own head in his hands, holding it at the level of his navel.
“Good to see you, Corporal,” said Portman. Sneering it. He was pretty mashed up, but his body seemed to be more or less hanging together, in a raw-meat kind of way, as if the butcher had sliced him up, then strung him back together with whatever was at hand.
“Good to see you…” Reaper said vaguely. Though it wasn’t good to see Portman or the other dead men — not like this. Walking, talking ruins.
Reaper shook his head. Where am I? Wasn’t I going through the Ark? Where’s Sam?
“We got some memories, huh?” said Mac’s detached head, chuckling. How was it talking without a voice box? “Remember that time we all went on furlough together — the whole bunch of us drunk in the same whorehouse, shouting at each other through the wall. ‘How’s yours?’ ‘She’s great — but small!’ ‘Hey yo, mine’s big enough to kick my ass!’”
Reaper dutifully chuckled at that. “Yeah. We had some times…” His lips felt rubbery.
“We did,” Duke said.
Duke was quite intact. Wasn’t dead yet. So why was he here with the dead guys? For that matter, Reaper wondered, why am I here?
“Don’t know,” Duke went on, “if we’ll have any more good times, way things have been going, Corporal…”
“Yeah well…talk to…to Sarge…”
It was hard to think, hard to talk here. This was all wrong.
“Talk to Sarge?” the Kid shook his head. “I don’t know about that. I just hope I live to see twenty-one, man. That’s all. Just get to twenty-one…”
“Remember…remember,” Portman said, “you guys were going to a ball game. Didn’t want to take me along…But then you said, Hey, come on, Portman. I remember that. You’re not so bad, Corporal…”
“Thanks, I uh…why…why are we…”
“But then again, pretty soon Duke and the Kid here are going to be looking for their head like Mac or their arms like me…And that’s all about you fucking up, isn’t it…Corporal?”
“I’m doing the best I can. Trying to get somewhere now…I’m trying to get to the compound…to get Sarge’s six…”
“Are you? Then you’re fucking up again,” Portman said. “’Cause here you are. Loafing in the jungle with us…You remember this jungle. Where your ol’ pal Jumper bought it…thanks to you.”
“You were our corporal,” Mac said. “You should’ve done a better job. We’d be alive now. You should’ve kept me in line of sight. Sarge was busy — you were responsible. You let that thing whack my head off. You let me die, Reaper. You should’ve covered my six…”
Reaper felt wet on the outside, with the humidity and his sweat, and bone dry inside. His lips stuck together, and it was painful to pull them apart and talk. His voice came out in a desiccated rattle, “Look, Mac — I just didn’t know what we were dealing with.”
“What about me?” Jumper asked, pushing to the front of the group, grinning at Reaper with this wrecked, bloody mouth. The top of Jumper’s head was missing, just the way it’d been when he’d been shot in the rain forest, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He had one eye left, hanging down on his cheek, and it swiveled to look at Reaper as he chuckled. “Did you know what you were dealing with when you let ’em kill me, Reaper? Jungle fighting? Like you never had done that before…” He plucked his eyeball, rubbed it against his flak jacket as if he were polishing a marble. “Can’t see for shit through this thing…” He put the eye back in place. “That’s better.”