It couldn’t have worked out better if GenTech itself had loosed the Bug in its prototypically virulent state, using the unfortunate citizens of Des Moines as experimental subjects…
Eddie decided that he’d rather like to learn a bit more about GenTech aims. He was only following Masterton’s orders, after all.
A few moments later he had stumbled on the command-codes for the various surveillance cameras dotted around the corridor-complex that Trix Desoto had referred to as the Factory.
There was a security station with its complement of armed guards.
There was a refectory space, and the medical technician-dressed, alas, in a decidedly less exciting manner than had been Trix Desoto in her comedy-nurse costume-who periodically came to administer the sedative hypos that, apparently, were intended to regulate Eddie’s sleeping patterns and which worked insofar as they knocked him out like a light.
There was a room remarkably like the one Eddie had imagined on first waking up here-brightly lit and walled with antiseptic while tile. On a surface that looked disquietingly like a mortuary slab lay a thin, pale figure that Eddie recognised: the old guy from New Mexico. The body stirred. Obviously still not dead, then.
A Suited figure instantly recognisable as Masterton was conferring with a medical technician Eddie didn’t know as she plugged cables into a sensor-unit, suspended on a gimbal-rig over the old guy, and ran the self-diagnostics. Then they nodded together and the technician activated the unit.
Eddie couldn’t believe what happened next. Or rather, he believed it… he just wished that he couldn’t.
8.
And for a while he:
Didn’t feel like doing anything but fly, pinwheeling through the air over the abstract mesh of tendrils, alive to nothing but the rush of kinaesthesia. The simple joy of it.
Eventually, he:
Regained some grip on himself and on his mind; if he was here yet again then is was probably important. There was something his mind was trying to tell him. There was something here for him to learn.
On the extreme edge of perception, he caught a glimpse of:
Creatures of some kind, hanging in the air, sculling lazily through the gulf with cilia-like pseudopodia. Their bumbling course drew them closer to him. They appeared to have noticed him.
He:
Decided to hurry things along and meet them halfway. He was actually, to be frank, some small part of his mind was telling him, getting a bit tired of the obliquity. He wanted to know what this was about once and for all. He rotated himself laterally in the abstract air and accelerated toward the creatures.
As he drew closer, more of the:
Creatures became evident, in tens, and hundreds, thousands… and at last millions. There was a swarm of them. As he drew closer, individual details became distinct-and something inside him began to scream. The same word. Over and over again.
Say it three times and it’s true.
A barbed and chitinous hook shot for him, a length of slimy cord trailing in its wake and attaching it to one of the bulbous creature-masses. The hook punched into his horrified and gaping mouth, burrowed through to burst from the back of the neck with a clunch.
The pain was immense; it:
Hauled him, the creature, on its line, towards its mass. In human terms, in waking terms, the bulk of it would have been miles across. A seething chaos of forms and textures that suggested some weird mix of corruption and clockwork, bone cogs and escarpments ticking through a black and churning mass of diseased bile.
The:
Creature hauled him, spinning on his line, into the foetid mass of itself. Buried him inside himself. Engulfed him.
Eddie Kalish shook himself awake. He had to be awake and ready for this. Like the old joke, it was almost time for him to go to sleep.
At least, it was almost time for the medical technician to come in with the hypo. Eddie had wondered, more than once, what the purpose of it really was; it wasn’t as if he didn’t spend the days and nights drifting in and out of dreams in any case.
Maybe the staff needed the routine of knowing that there were certain hours when patients were guaranteed to be sparked out.
In any case, the procedure would prove useful now. Eddie spent a minute or two with his datapad, accessing the surveillance systems and keying in a number of commands he knew how to enter like they were written on the back of his hand-without ever quite knowing how he knew them.
Presently, the technician came bustling in. Under her somewhat generic-looking GenTech staff uniform she was a cheerful girl, in her late teens, named Laura Palmer, if you could believe the little polycarbon plaque clipped to her lapel. To the extent that he have her any consideration at all, as a person, Eddie quite liked her.
“Evening, Mister Kalish,” she said cheerfully. “And how are we this evening?”
She always called Eddie Mister Kalish with a kind of joking parody of respect, like he was an old guy who kept pissing himself and had to be led around by hand and jollied along. Maybe it was just what the people running hospitals always did with the people in their care-Eddie Kalish had no basis for comparison.
And not that even thinking about the idea of old guys didn’t open up a nasty can of worms, for Eddie, at the moment.
“Don’t feel well,” Eddie mumbled, trying for what he imagined as sounding ill-but succeeding merely in the sort of voice that people used to use when phoning the office on the day of a really important event like the sun being out and feeling like going fishing. And then they cough.
“Feel bad…” Eddie continued, breaking into a cough and waving his right hand randomly and vaguely in an attempt to indicate something about his left shoulder. “Look at this…”
“Don’t you worry,” medical technician Laura Palmer said, producing the hypo from its ziplock case with cheerful briskness. “A good night’s sleep and you’ll be right as rain.”
Automatically, though, she had leaned in, inclining her head toward the shoulder Eddie had indicated. Eddie Kalish reached up and grabbed her head and smacked her face into the wall.
He’d merely planned to knock her out, but he didn’t know his strength. The force of it pulled Laura Palmer physically off her feet to the extent where she literally left one shoe behind.
There was a sharp crunch that Eddie Kalish would subsequently spend years trying to forget and fail. A spray of blood.
The motion had ripped out several of the tubes plugged into Eddie’s arm. Now he grabbed the other tubes and contact leads attached to and plugged into him and pulled them off and out. He had no idea what this was gonna do to him, at this point in whatever Zarathustra procedures were going on, but at this point he didn’t give a shit.
Time to move. Time to get the hell out. That was all that counted.
He spent a few seconds, though, checking the body of Laura Palmer. He thought he’d crushed her skull, but in the end it seemed that he had merely broken her nose. Her breathing was ragged, and Eddie had no idea of how much he might have hurt her in an ultimate sense, but at least she was still alive as of now.
He fumbled through her uniform until he found the key-card which had given her access to his room, then bundled her up in the polythene sheeting that had so recently covered his own body and left her on the bed, arranging the various tubes and leads so that they might or might not appear to be connected to her. If anyone were to look in, it wouldn’t pass even a cursory glance, but what the hell, you never knew.
The anaesthetic hypo lay where Laura Palmer had dropped it, its ziplock case containing several more to one side. Eddie picked them up and got the hell out of there.