Just Another Judgement Day Page 4

  “We’ve been here for ages,” said Joan Taylor. “Doing all sorts of things you wouldn’t approve of. You’ll probably take the blame for a lot of them. Everyone knows about you, but no-one knows about us. Though I can’t say I believe half the things they say about you.”

  “Goody Goody Two-shoes,” said Stephen.

  “Any chance we can make a deal?” I said.

  Joan raised an eyebrow. “Would you?”

  “No,” I said. “Your very existence offends me.”

  I lunged forward and punched her right in the face. She fell backwards, sprawling awkwardly on the floor. She hadn’t even had the time to take her hands out of her pockets. I looked round, and Suzie had already taken her shotgun away from Shooter and back-elbowed him in the throat. I grinned. Sometime back, Suzie and I had both received werewolf blood, diluted enough that we were in no danger of turning were, but still potent enough that we healed really quickly. My aches were already fading away. I looked down at Joan Taylor and smiled as she scrambled angrily back on to her feet.

  We stood facing each other, hands clenched into fists at our sides as we concentrated, both of us calling on our gifts. I opened my inner eye, my third eye, and studied her coldly, searching for some gap in her defences, something I could use against her. I could feel her doing the same thing. Strange energies flickered on and off in the air between us, a tension of unseen forces building and building until they had to explode somewhere. My gift versus hers. It was like arm-wrestling with invisible, intangible arms.

  I was vaguely aware of all hell breaking loose in the hospital ward, as Suzie and Stephen went head to head. Shotgun blasts were going off all over the place, accompanied by the roar of grenades. Beds overturned, and patients were thrown out, disconnected from their supporting tech. Dark smoke drifted across the ward as equipment caught fire.

  I couldn’t let this go on. We were too evenly matched with our duplicates, and too many innocents were getting hurt. So I found a slippery patch under Joan’s left foot, let her stumble and lose her concentration for a moment, then I yelled to Suzie.

  “Hey, Suzie! Switch partners and dance!”

  She grasped the idea immediately and turned her shotgun on Joan Taylor. And while Stephen Shooter hesitated, I used my gift to find the one pin that wasn’t secure in his grenades. It popped out, Stephen glanced down, and there was a swift series of explosions, as the one grenade set off all the others. Small parts of Stephen Shooter went flying all over the hospital ward in a soft, pattering, crimson rain. Behind me there was the single blast of a shotgun, and when I looked round Joan Taylor was lying flat on her back, without a head. She probably wasted time trying to find a way to stop Suzie, the fool. No-one stops Suzie Shooter.

  “They were good,” I said. “But they weren’t us. They hadn’t been hardened and refined by life in the Nightside.”

  “They weren’t us,” Suzie agreed. She came over to me and looked closely at my face. “You took a hell of a beating.”

  “So did you. Thank the good Lord for werewolf blood.”

  “But you still tried to get to me, to protect me. I saw you. I didn’t even think to do that for you. You’ve always been better than me, John.”

  “Forgive me?” I said.

  She smiled briefly. “Well, just this once.” She looked at Joan’s headless body. “I’ve never cared for cheap knock-offs.”

  “Our dark sides,” I said.

  “Well, darker,” said Suzie.

  I considered the point. “Do you suppose . . . there might be better versions of us, somewhere? In some other world? More saintly selves?”

  “You’re creeping me out now,” said Suzie. “Let’s go find the Baron and shut him down.”

  “First things first,” I said. “I’ve had enough of this place. No more suffering innocents. Not on my watch.”

  I raised my gift again, and studied the whole ward through my inner eye, until I could See the connection the Baron had forged with his science and his voodoo, between the patients in their beds and their more fortunate duplicates in the Nightside. A whole series of shimmering silver chains, rising from every patient and plunging through the ceiling. And having found them, it was the easiest thing in the world for me to break the weakest of the chains, with the slightest mental touch. Pushed out of its awful balance, the whole system collapsed, the shimmering chains snapping out of existence in a moment. The patients in their beds cried out with a single great voice, as all the traces of age and surgery and hard living disappeared; and, just like that, they were young and perfect again. They didn’t wake up, which was probably as well. Let Walker send some people down to help them, and hopefully get them home again.

  Suzie and I had other business.

  I considered what must be happening, in all the best clubs and bars and parlours in the Nightside above, as rich and powerful faces were suddenly struck down with years, and the many results of debauchery and surgical choices. I visualised them screaming in pain and shock and horror as they all finally assumed their real faces. What better revenge could there be?

  “You’re smiling that smile again,” said Suzie. “That I’ve just done something really nasty and utterly justified and no-one’s ever going to be able to pin it on me smile.”

  “How well you know me,” I said. “Now, where were we? Ah yes—the Baron.”

  “Bad man,” said Suzie Shooter. She worked the action on her shotgun. “I will make a wicker man out of his nurses and burn him alive.”

  “I love the way you think,” I said.

  We found another door that opened on to another stairwell, leading down into hell. We crept quietly down the bare concrete steps. The Baron had to have heard the fire-fight above him; but he had no way of knowing who’d won. Suzie led the way, shotgun at the ready, and I struggled to maintain my gift, searching the descent below us with my inner eye for hidden traps or alarms. But the stairwell remained still and quiet, and there wasn’t even a glimpse of a bamboo nurse.

  The smell hit me first. A thick stench of spilled blood and spoiled meat, of foul things done in a foul place. It grew stronger as we descended the last few steps and found ourselves facing a simple wooden door. The air was hot and sweaty, almost oily on my bare skin. It was the heat of opened bodies in a cold room, the pulsing warmth of inner things exposed to the light. Frankenstein . . . I pushed quietly past Suzie, and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. I went inside, and Suzie was right there with me, silent as an avenging ghost.

  We were in a great stone chamber, carved out of the very bedrock itself. Rough pitted walls and ceiling, and an uneven floor partly covered with blood-stained matting. Naked light bulbs hung down on long, rusting chains, filling the chamber with harsh and unforgiving illumination. There were shadows, but not nearly enough to hide what had been done in this place. Trestle tables had been set up in long rows, and each of them bore a human body, or bits of bodies. Men and women had been opened up, and the parts dissected. White ribs gleamed in dark red meat. Piles of entrails steamed in the cool air. Heavy leather restraining straps held the bodies to the tables. They had been alive when the cutting began.

  The Baron had gone back to his old surgical experiments. Frankenstein, the living god of the scalpel.

  He was standing at the far end of the room, wearing a blood-spattered butcher’s apron over his cream suit, half-bent over the body on the table before him. It had been a young woman, though it was hard to tell that now. The Baron looked up at me, startled, his scalpel raised, dripping blood. We’d interrupted him at his work.

  “Get out,” he said. “You can’t be here. I’m doing important work here.”

  “This isn’t a surgery,” I said. “It’s a slaughter-house.”

  He straightened up, and, with almost prissy precision, put his scalpel down beside the woman’s body. “No,” he said calmly. “A slaughter-house is a place of death. This is a salon dedicated to life. Look beyond the obvious, Mr. Taylor. I am working to frustrate death, to cheat hi
m of his victims. I take dead flesh and make it live again, all through my own efforts. You have no idea of the wonders and glories I’ve seen inside people.”

  He came out from behind the table to face Suzie and me, wiping the blood from his bare hands with a bit of rag. “Try to understand and appreciate what I’m doing here. I have gone far beyond merely duplicating nature. Now I seek to improve on her work. I use only the most perfect organs, reshaped and improved by surgical skills perfected over centuries. I . . . simplify things, removing all unnecessary details. And from these perfect parts I have built something new—a living creature completely in balance with itself. I see no reason why it should not live forever, and know lifetimes. It took me so long to understand . . . the key was to work not with corpses, but with the living! To harvest them for what I needed—the most fresh and vital tissues!”

  “How many?” I said, cutting him off roughly. There was something almost hypnotic in the brute certainty of his voice.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “How many what?”

  “How many victims, you bastard! How many good men and women died at your hands, to make your perfect bloody creature?”

  He actually looked a little sulky, angry that I hadn’t got the point, even after he’d explained it all so carefully.

  “I really don’t know, Mr. Taylor. I don’t keep count. Why should I? It’s the parts that matter. It isn’t as if they were anyone important. Anyone who mattered. People go missing all the time in the Nightside, and no-one ever cares.”

  “He does,” said Suzie, unexpectedly. “Part of why I love him. He cares enough for both of us.”

  The Baron looked at her uncertainly, then turned his attention back to me. “Progress always has a price, Mr. Taylor. Nothing is ever gained without sacrifice. And I sacrificed them.” He gestured at all the bodies on all the tables, and smiled briefly. “I do so love an audience. A failing, I admit, this need to explain and justify myself... But I think I’ve rattled on quite long enough. Am I to understand that Joan Taylor and Stephen Shooter will not be joining us?”

  “No,” said Suzie. “They rest in pieces.”

  The Baron shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I still have my nurses.”

  He snapped his fingers, and a whole army of bamboo nurses appeared out of the bare stone walls, snapping into existence, to fill the space between us and the Baron. They surged forward, bamboo hands reaching out to Suzie and to me, but this time I was prepared. I’d been waiting for them. I took the salamander egg from my coat pocket, crushed it in my hand, and threw it into their midst. The egg exploded into flames, and a dozen nurses immediately caught fire. Yellow flames leapt up, jumping from nurse to nurse as the bamboo figures lurched back and forth, spreading the flames with their flailing arms. In a few moments the cellar was full of juddering, burning figures, a hellish light dancing across the bare stone walls. Suzie and I were back by the door, ready to make our escape if necessary, but the Baron was trapped with his back against the far wall. He watched helplessly as the nurses crashed into his trestle tables, overturning them and setting them on fire, too. And in the end he had no choice but to shout the command Word that shut them all down. The figures crashed to the floor and lay there, still burning. The sound of crackling flames was very loud in the quiet.

  Suzie and I moved forward into the cellar again, stepping carefully around blackened bamboo shapes. The Baron studied me thoughtfully. He didn’t look nearly as worried as I’d thought he would. He had the air of someone who still had a card left to play.

  “Wait,” he said. “I’m sure we can reason together.”

  “I’m pretty sure we can’t,” said Suzie.

  “You must meet my latest creation,” said the Baron. “See the results of my work. Creature, stand! Show yourself!”

  And from a dark, concealing shadow in one corner, something stirred and stood up. It had been sitting quietly on a chair all this time, so inhumanly inert it went unnoticed. Suzie moved quickly to cover the figure with her shotgun as it moved forward into the light. It was beautiful. Tall and perfect, utterly naked, it stood head and shoulders above us all, perfectly proportioned, no scars or visible stitches anywhere, thanks to modern surgical techniques. It had strong androgynous features, and it moved with a sublime and perfect grace.

  I hated it on sight. There was something . . . wrong about it. Perhaps simply because it didn’t move like anything human, because its face held no trace of human thoughts or human emotions. I felt the same way looking at the creature as I did when surprised by a spider. An instinctive impulse to strike out, at something with which I could never have any empathy.

  “Isn’t it marvellous?” said the Baron von Frankenstein, moving forward to place one large and possessive hand on the creature’s bare shoulder. “Hermaphroditic, of course. Self-repairing, self-fertilising, potentially immortal.”

  No breasts and no obvious genitals, but I took his word for it. “Whose brain did you use this time?” I said finally.

  “My own,” said the Baron. “Or at least, all my memories, downloaded into a brain wiped clean of its original patterns. Computers have made such a difference to my work. You see, Mr. Taylor? Even if you kill me here, my work goes on. I go on, in every way that matters.”

  He patted his creature fondly on the shoulder. It turned its perfect head and regarded him thoughtfully, turned and placed its perfect hands on the Baron’s face, and ripped the Baron’s head right off his shoulders. The body fell jerking and kicking to the floor, the neck stump pumping blood, while the creature held the Baron’s slack face up before its own. The Baron’s eyes were still moving, and his mouth worked, though no sound came out.

  “Now that I exist, you are redundant,” said the creature, to the Baron’s dying eyes. Its voice was like music; horrible music—with nothing human in it. “I have all your knowledge, all your techniques, so what use are you? Yes, you made me. I know. Did you think I’d be grateful?”

  “I can’t believe he didn’t see that one coming,” said Suzie.

  The creature looked into the Baron von Frankenstein’s eyes, satisfied itself that its creator no longer saw anything, and tossed the head aside. Then it turned slowly, thoughtfully, to consider Suzie and me.

  “Nice operation the Baron had here,” said the creature. “Think I’ll take it over.”

  I shook my head. “Not going to happen.”

  “You can’t stop me,” said the creature.

  Suzie shot it in the chest at point-blank range. The blast blew half its chest away, and the impact sent the creature staggering backwards. But it didn’t fall, and when it regained its balance the huge wound was already repairing itself. The creature’s mouth moved in something that would have been a smile on anything human.

  “My creator made me very well. The best work I ever did.”

  I raised my gift, searching for the link that held all the creature’s separate parts and pieces together, but there wasn’t one. The Baron hadn’t used science or sorcery to put his creature together, only expert surgical skills honed over lifetimes of work. I dropped my gift and looked at Suzie.

  “We’re going to have to do this the hard way. You ready to get your hands dirty?”

  “Always,” said Suzie Shooter.

  So we took a scalpel each, slammed the creature to the floor, and took it apart piece by piece. There was a lot of kicking and screaming, and in the end we had to burn all the pieces separately to stop them moving, but we did it.

  TWO

  At Home with John and Suzie

  Until Walker’s people arrived, Suzie and I stuck around, talking to the newly awakened patients, and comforting them as best we could. Well, I did most of the talking and comforting. Suzie isn’t really a people person. Mostly she stood at the door with her shotgun at the ready, to assure the patients that no-one was going to be allowed to mess with them any more. A lot of them were confused, and even more were in various states of shock. The physical injuries might have been reversed, bu
t you can’t undergo that kind of extended suffering without its leaving a mark on your soul.

  Some of them knew each other, and sat together on the beds, holding each other and sobbing in quiet relief. Some were scared of everyone, including Suzie and me. Some . . . just didn’t wake up.

  Walker’s people would know what to do. They had a lot of experience at picking up the pieces after someone’s grand scheme has suddenly gone to hell in a hand-cart. They’d get the people help and see them safely back to their home dimension. Then they’d shut down the Timeslip, and slap a heavy fine on the Mammon Emporium for losing track of the damn thing in the first place. If people can’t look after their Timeslips properly, they shouldn’t be allowed to have them. Walker’s people . . . would do all the things I couldn’t do.