Fifth finger and I’m thinking about being up in Amanda’s office looking at her slide show. Her explaining to me the origins of life. Vyrus mates with bacteria. How long an idea like that needs to circle around and around in my head before it makes any kind of sense to me. What they call the implications. That HERV thing she talked about. All of us with viral scraps in our DNA, just not all of us have Vyral material as well. That idea finally catching up to me. If it all really started with the Vyrus, then it’s not just in us, in people, it could be in anything. Inactive Vyrus cells in any DNA. Waiting to be activated. And then who knows what the hell you end up with. Phil saying to me, experiments. Little Amanda in her lab, seeing what happens when you activate the Vyrus in all god’s creatures. Thinking now, She’s making monsters.
And no more fingers to think with.
We move around the corner, facing that long arm of the L-shaped basement, row of doors, a few of them open. The thing I killed against one wall, just outside an open cell door, another dead monster by the opposite wall, that thing under the pile of dead enforcers still quivering. Light from the Mini Maglites some of the crew have clipped under the barrels of their weapons. Quiet except for our shuffling feet and rapid breathing. Clear shot to the hole in the floor where we can trickle down into the sewer one at a time. No one wanting to be the short straw, last man on top. Edging closer, waiting for that Klaxon to sound, all the doors to slam wide. Feels like the vibration of the bell is hammering the air already, but it’s just heartbeats. Closer to the hole. Ready to go flat and stick my head down there and tell Terry something that will keep him from opening fire on Predo’s crew. No time to be picky about joining up with anyone who has a gun, Ter. The more the merrier. Few more steps and I’ll just start talking, hope the right thing comes out. Something like, Don’t shoot! Monsters!
Meanwhile, my own personal monster, my Vyrus, goes at my intestines with its teeth. I stutter-step, trip up the guy behind me. Predo yanks me along.
– Pitt!
I try to keep moving my feet, but it feels like I’ve been bit in half at the waist, no legs to move, innards dragging on the ground.
Then they’re back, teeth pull out, feet are under me, and I’m moving for the hole, ready to make my play when something explodes underneath. Stone and mortar and shards of rusty iron blasted into the air as Hurley erupts from the hole, sledgehammer in one hand,.45 in the other, landing on his feet next to the widened hole, screaming to the troops now visible below.
– Tis da double cross i’tis!
And the vibrations that have been hanging in the air waiting to break, the Klaxon sounding, the doors opening, the yellow blur that bursts from one of them zeroing in on Hurley’s chest. Size of a large dog, it will chew a hole through his lungs when it hits him, but it never gets there, hammer snapping mid-shaft as Hurley smashes it from the air, a blow so hard the thing splits in half, each part whirling across the basement spewing yellow blood that smells of rotted Vyrus, smacking against the wall and falling to the floor.
Hurley brandishes the broken handle of his hammer.
– Holy shite!
And then more monsters.
And then everyone shoots at everything.
The tiny red dot overhead, the camera watching, Amanda Horde upstairs. We’re not defenseless, was what she said.
I shoot at something that tries to kill me. What it is, someone with a name I know, or a thing that isn’t supposed to be, I can’t say. I just start killing my way toward the pile of bodies blocking the door.
It would have been good to know what Predo meant when he said him and his enforcers had been driven to the basement. It was a heady time when that word passed his lips and I didn’t bother to notice it. Or its implications.
In the basement, I have one thin slice of something resembling an advantage. That being that I don’t care about killing Coalition or Society. I don’t much like anyone down there, but I haven’t been trained to hate the other side. Or anyway, it’s a long time since I stopped believing there were sides. Monsters or no, most of these grunts finally have a clear target and a piece in their hands and they want to run up a body count. Once the first one uses the distraction of Amanda’s experiments to take a potshot at the other team, any idea of sticking it to the mutual enemy evaporates and it’s a free-for-all.
When you’re used to going it alone, a free-for-all is just your natural environment. If the people around me weren’t at one another’s throats most of the time, I’d never have survived, starting with my mom and dad.
People may hate me, they just sometimes hate one another even more, but the monsters don’t care one way or the other. That’s why first thing I do when it all goes sideways is I turn around and shoot the guy behind me in the stomach a couple times and drag him toward the door. He catches a couple more bullets as we pass the hole, but he’s still alive enough for a good scream when something broadsides us and plows us to the ground, him on top. Feels like the thing that took us down is trying to dig through him to get to me, but it’s just as likely trying to get inside so it can lay a clutch of eggs in his liver. I worm out from under and belly-crawl into a thicket of legs, shell casings raining down, getting stomped.
When a taloned limb appears in the mix, I unload the clip in my gun, bullets severing it from whatever it’s attached to, bullets gone astray taking out the legs of a few of the enforcers.
Claws reach into my back, grab my spine, and try to rip it out.
In the time I think it’s really happening that way, I’ve rolled to my back, screaming. But it’s just the Vyrus again. Inopportune timing.
Someone steps on my stomach. Someone else steps on my bad knee. The claws let go of my spine and I roll again and move, realizing that the person who stepped on my knee was one of Terry’s partisans.
The stupid fuckers are coming up.
There’s a pile of bodies in front of me. Can’t tell anymore which way I’m pointed. Could be the pile of enforcers that was blocking the door, could be a brand-new pile. My cheek is lashed open by a whip. I look and see that mass of quivering tentacles. So at least I have the right pile of dead people. I start digging into the pile and something has my ankle. I look back, expecting to see one of those tentacles has me, but it’s a partisan, one of those shaved-head semi-anarchist fucks that all look alike. Some son of a bitch I don’t even know his fucking name, he’s missing half his left arm and his jaw, but he’s using his last breath on this earth to fuck with me, when he could be looking for someone’s dropped gun to shoot himself and die quicker.
Me, I dropped my empty gun a few seconds ago, haven’t found a replacement yet. So I swing the wire saw at his wrist, snag the free end as it wraps around, yank back and forth, and he’s got no hands to pick up anything anymore.
I’m digging into the pile of dead people again, going under, feeling the weight of them on top, hoping the door is ahead of me, hoping I don’t pop out the wrong side of the pile and have my head snatched off. The pile thrums around me as it’s raked by bullets. I dig deeper, my hand feels steel plate, I reach down, find a crack at the bottom of the door and start to yank and push, but it’s either locked or the dead are too heavy to move. I get the two fingers of my left hand in there and pull and push, looking for something to give.