(hollow men stuffed men headpiece filled with straw)
and Lewis Carroll
(why you’re nothing but a pack of cards)
before Mia’s dan-tete raised its unspeakable head from its first meal. Its blood-smeared mouth opened and it hoisted itself, lower legs scrabbling for purchase on its mother’s deflating belly, upper ones almost seeming to shadowbox at Susannah.
It squealed with triumph, and if it had at that moment chosen to attack the other woman who had given it nurture, Susannah Dean would surely have died next to Mia. Instead, it returned to the deflated sac of breast from which it had taken its first suck, and tore it off. The sound of its chewing was wet and loose. A moment later it burrowed into the hole it had made, the white human face disappearing while Mia’s was obliterated by the dust boiling out of her deflating head. There was a harsh, almost industrial sucking sound and Susannah thought, It’s taking all the moisture out of her, all the moisture that’s left. And look at it! Look at it swell! Like a leech on a horse’s neck!
Just then a ridiculously English voice—it was the plummy intonation of the lifelong gentleman’s gentleman—said: “Pardon me, sirs, but will you be wanting this incubator after all? For the situation seems to have altered somewhat, if you don’t mind my saying.”
It broke Susannah’s paralysis. She pushed herself upward with one hand and seized Scowther’s automatic pistol with the other. She yanked, but the gun was strapped across the butt and wouldn’t come free. Her questing index finger found the little sliding knob that was the safety and pushed it. She turned the gun, holster and all, toward Scowther’s ribcage.
“What the dev—” he began, and then she pulled the trigger with her middle finger, at the same time yanking back on the shoulder-rig with all her force. The straps binding the holster to Scowther’s body held, but the thinner one holding the automatic in place snapped, and as Scowther fell sideways, trying to look down at the smoking black hole in his white lab-coat, Susannah took full possession of his gun. She shot Straw and the vampire beside him, the one with the electric sword. For a moment the vampire was there, still staring at the spider-god that had looked so much like a baby to begin with, and then its aura whiffed out. The thing’s flesh went with it. For a moment there was nothing where it had been but an empty shirt tucked into an empty pair of bluejeans. Then the clothes collapsed.
“Kill her!” Sayre screamed, reaching for his own gun. “Kill that bitch!”
Susannah rolled away from the spider crouched on the body of its rapidly deflating mother, raking at the helmet she was wearing even as she tumbled off the side of the bed. There was a moment of excruciating pain when she thought it wasn’t going to come away and then she hit the floor, free of it. It hung over the side of the bed, fringed with her hair. The spider-thing, momentarily pulled off its roost when its mother’s body jerked, chittered angrily.
Susannah rolled beneath the bed as a series of gunshots went off above her. She heard a loud SPROINK as one of the slugs hit a spring. She saw the rathead nurse’s feet and hairy lower legs and put a bullet into one of her knees. The nurse gave a scream, turned, and began to limp away, squalling.
Sayre leaned forward, pointing the gun at the makeshift double bed just beyond Mia’s deflating body. There were already three smoking, smoldering holes in the groundsheet. Before he could add a fourth, one of the spider’s legs caressed his cheek, tearing open the mask he wore and revealing the hairy cheek beneath. Sayre recoiled, crying out. The spider turned to him and made a mewling noise. The white thing high on its back—a node with a human face—glared, as if to warn Sayre away from its meal. Then it turned back to the woman, who was really not recognizable as a woman any longer; she looked like the ruins of some incredibly ancient mummy which had now turned to rags and powder.
“I say, this is a bit confusing,” the robot with the incubator remarked. “Shall I retire? Perhaps I might return when matters have clarified somewhat.”
Susannah reversed direction, rolling out from beneath the bed. She saw that two of the low men had taken to their heels. Jey, the hawkman, didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind. Stay or go? Susannah made it up for him, putting a single shot into the sleek brown head. Blood and feathers flew.
Susannah got up as well as she could, gripping the side of the bed for balance, holding Scowther’s gun out in front of her. She had gotten four. The rathead nurse and one other had run. Sayre had dropped his gun and was trying to hide behind the robot with the incubator.
Susannah shot the two remaining vampires and the low man with the bulldog face. That one—Haber—hadn’t forgotten Susannah; he’d been holding his ground and waiting for a clear shot. She got hers first and watched him fall backward with deep satisfaction. Haber, she thought, had been the most dangerous.
“Madam, I wonder if you could tell me—” began the robot, and Susannah put two quick shots into its steel face, darkening the blue electric eyes. This trick she had learned from Eddie. A gigantic siren immediately went off. Susannah felt that if she listened to it long, she would be deafened.
“I HAVE BEEN BLINDED BY GUNFIRE!” the robot bellowed, still in its absurd would-you-like-another-
cup-of-tea-madam accent. “VISION ZERO, I NEED HELP, CODE 7, I SAY, HELP!”
Sayre stepped away from it, hands held high. Susannah couldn’t hear him over the siren and the robot’s blatting, but she could read the words as they came off the bastard’s lips: I surrender, will you accept my parole?
She smiled at this amusing idea, unaware that she smiled. It was without humor and without mercy and meant only one thing: she wished she could get him to lick her stumps, as he had forced Mia to lick his boots. But there wasn’t time enough. He saw his doom in her grin and turned to run and Susannah shot him twice in the back of the head—once for Mia, once for Pere Callahan. Sayre’s skull shattered in a fury of blood and brains. He grabbed the wall, scrabbled at a shelf loaded with equipment and supplies, and then went down dead.
Susannah now took aim at the spider-god. The tiny white human head on its black and bristly back turned to look at her. The blue eyes, so uncannily like Roland’s, blazed.
No, you cannot! You must not! For I am the King’s only son!
I can’t? she sent back, leveling the automatic. Oh, sugar, you are just… so… WRONG!
But before she could pull the trigger, there was a gunshot from behind her. A slug burned across the side of her neck. Susannah reacted instantly, turning and throwing herself sideways into the aisle. One of the low men who’d run had had a change of heart and come back. Susannah put two bullets into his chest and made him mortally sorry.
She turned, eager for more—yes, this was what she wanted, what she had been made for, and she’d always revere Roland for showing her—but the others were either dead or fled. The spider raced down the side of its birthbed on its many legs, leaving the papier-mâché corpse of its mother behind. It turned its white infant’s head briefly toward her.
You’d do well to let me pass, Blackie, or—
She fired at it, but stumbled over the hawkman’s outstretched hand as she did. The bullet that would have killed the abomination went a little awry, clipping off one of its eight hairy legs instead. A yellowish-red fluid, more like pus than blood, poured from the place where the leg had joined the body. The thing screamed at her in pain and surprise. The audible portion of that scream was hard to hear over the endless cycling blat of the robot’s siren, but she heard it in her head loud and clear.