After a time, sick of the sight of them, he went over and covered the horrible gory blotch where Johnson had died and unlashed and covered up the maniac’s unfortunate victim. Then he sat at a table, off to one side, and, as the minutes dragged into hours, tried to collect his thoughts. It was neither pleasant nor easy.
Chapter Fifty-One
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He’d thought that maybe they’d start out small, but when the Reformist Council told him that their first order of business was to assassinate Chief of Police Hanson Knox, Lumler knew that this was not to be. These people wanted him to help kill his former boss. And, thinking it over, he had to admit, it was a pretty good idea. Remove the head and the body will die. Besides, the crazy psycho bastard had it coming, big time.
“But it ain’t gonna be no cakewalk,” Lumler told them. “This dude is one shifty fucker.”
They were assembled at the group’s headquarters, the basement of a former recording studio, now heavily reinforced, barricaded, and stocked with weapons, with a set of city maps spread before them on a table. Over the past two days Lumler had been shown around, so to speak, and had met all kinds of members of the Reform. Now he was back with the seven leaders.
“An’ anyway,” he continued, “what the hell does whackin’ the Chief do towards stoppin’ the deformos? You said you had a plan for that, something to end the War, right?”
“That’s right,” said the Professor. There was something familiar about this older, dignified-type man, Lumler had decided, but he couldn’t quite place where or when he might have met him. “And this is part of it.”
“How?” asked Lumler, his thick brow knitting. “I mean, the Chief’s got nothin’ to do with the Army. Sure, you take him out, you’re gonna have a lot easier time with the PF, but if the Army don’t hold off the muties, what then?”
“Haven’t you noticed?” said the woman called Stiletto, whom he’d come to grudgingly admire.
“Noticed what?” said Lumler.
“No fighting!” said Stiletto, waving an arm. “Think about it. Have you heard anything for the past two days? Anything other than the odd gunshot?”
Lumler frowned; come to think of it… “Yeah,” he said, “you’re right. So what’s up with that?”
“It’s the Emperor’s Birthday!” said the Professor, as if this made all the sense in the world. “They’re all busy with his party.”
Lumler scowled angrily. “Look,” he said, “if you guys are just gonna talk shit and jerk me around, I can just go sit over here in the corner and have a nap. I mean, what the fuck?”
Santiago intervened, laughing. “Oh, take it easy,” he said. “Don’t get all pissed off. We know a lot more about the deformos than you might expect. See, the Professor here was in charge of a kind of special project the Governor set up to study ‘em. Know your enemy and all that.”
“Huh,” said Lumler. “And?”
“Well,” said the Professor, taking over, “I was able to examine quite a few deceased specimens and even a couple of living ones. It was most enlightening. In fact, it’s quite a fascinating phenomenon, really. That is, if my theories are true.”
“Yeah, like how?” said Lumler.
“Well, as I see it,” said the Prof, warming to the subject, “these beings are actually nothing less than an offshoot of human evolution. A subterranean race, perhaps as old as mankind itself, that has evolved completely beneath the surface, maybe at depths that we couldn’t conceive.”
“No shit?” said Lumler. “But come on, how come we didn’t know about ‘em? Before, I mean. Hell, if they’re like, a whole race of people, wouldn’t there have to be a whole lot of ‘em? How come nobody ever saw one before the Fall?”
“They were too deep,” said the Professor. “And they kept out of our way, which was easy enough, considering that even our deepest mines and drillings penetrate only a fraction of the Earth’s crust.”
“But what did the they eat? What did they do down there? And why did they come up and attack us?”
“Good questions,” said the older man, nodding. “But I fear I don’t have all the answers. As far as why they’ve surfaced, I have to think that it’s because of the Fall. Somehow they sensed that something had happened, something that had killed off all of the surface-dwellers. Something had opened the door to the world they’d known but never been able to explore. In other words, they saw we’d all died and have come up to have a look around.”
“And that ain’t all!” said Stiletto. “Freaky bastards.”
“Yes, well,” continued the Prof, “to return to your questions, we have no clue as to what exactly their society or organization, if any, is like, as they do not speak anything like English. Or any other human language, for that matter. Personally, I think that they are of the most primitive nature, probably with very little culture as we know it, self-predatory, and violently cannibalistic. Of course, they’re photo-sensitive, almost blind above ground, which explains why they only attack at night.”
“Hey, great,” said Lumler wanly, “cannibal humanoids from the deep, huh? Some kinda creepy mole people? Is that what I’m hearing?”
The Professor frowned and then shrugged. “More or less, if you want to be simplistic about it. But as I said, it’s really quite an amazing phenomenon! After all, just think about it—thousands and thousands of them, down in the deep crust of the Earth, for hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. And why not, really? After all, the earth’s surface is only the mere skin of the entire planet. The interior, while not terribly hospitable for us, may have spawned all manner of life! What if there are more life forms such as this down there? Even among the specimens I’ve seen, I’ve been able to identify at least a dozen distinct permutations of what we call mutants. There is the lagomorph group—the short, fat ones—and then the endomorph group, which can be further divided into the pseudo-pod or tentacle subsets and—”
“OK, OK,” said Lumler, interrupting. “I get it. There are whole swarms of these things. I mean, the whole thing sounds like something out of a shitty science fiction book, but what the fuck, you know? These days, there’s all kinda weird-ass shit like that, so maybe you’re right. And maybe you’re out of your fucking mind. But whatever. Can we get back to the issue here? What does all of this have to do with somebody’s birthday?”
“Ah, well,” said Santiago, “that’s where the Emperor comes in. See, for some reason, this one man, some total nut-job survivor named Johnson, managed to hook up with the muties. Maybe they liked him, maybe he did something for them or gave them something they wanted or whatever, but however it worked out, he ended up as these things’ leader. Every other normal person on earth, they just want to kill and eat, but this guy? They love him.”
“Why?” asked Lumler.
“Nobody knows,” said Still. “An’ most likely? We never will.”
“Huh, OK,” Lumler said. “So anyway, they got a leader. A human leader. And what? It’s this dude’s birthday? So what?”