Short Fiction: The Dead Man and the Berserk
The club is called Bazard and the old brick building doesn’t want it. This is meant to be a temple of industry, a factory that once produced nice respectable toxic products. Now it’s used to manufacture midnight pleasuremongers from daytime wage slaves and bored school kids. It is an abomination. The walls cry tears of dust and mold while the load bearings creak hollow spook house protests that aren’t even blips beneath the crushing sonic weight of the music.
It’s a Saturday night soaked in sweat and spilt alcohol, and five hundred of them undulate together on the dance floor; leather children, necrophages, next-gen cybergoths filtering the world through their designer spectrographic goggles. On the main stage, a band with the Babel-text moniker “griMM/griN” is in the middle of a shriekgasming second set. Their frontflesh, a milky waif two generations too late for heroin chic, has a vocal splitter that allows her to scream the death metal refrain and sing Lovecraftian lyrics in a soft siren falsetto at the same time. The women sway and the men thrash, vice versa in some cases, under an aurora borealis cascade. The light field, magnesium flare-magenta and acid mist-green, is generated as one solid slate. It materializes in the rafters then blinks down toward the floor in scanning waves. As it descends over the crowd, tossing heads break through the field like drowning victims struggling for their last gasps.
Two men hit Bazard after 1:00 a.m. that the mood and the music don’t touch. They’re not here for either. They are stoics in a cult of hedonists, still buoys in an angry sea.
The first one, renamed upon being reanimated, is called Gideon. The Company prefers to command their Dead Men in this war. He’s otherwise unremarkable. Unremarkable height, unremarkable build. But his skin is as hard and dark as Venusian rock, skull clean-shaven except for long curving sideburns and a meticulously kept Van Dyke; a look that was in vogue ten years ago. The ceramic mail shirt and black slicker he wears, with its fiberglass suspension rings down the spine, are more contemporary.
The one behind him, the big man, 6’5” and wide through the shoulders, as white as Gideon is black, follows his lead. Darrick’s threads aren’t as shiny as Gideon’s, dusty black jeans and dustier boots, an old charcoal shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He’s new to Gideon’s world. His eyes wander more, his mind questions more. He is new, but not inexperienced, not unsure. Those eyes that wander are not wide eyes, they’re slit and sharp and broadcasting on all-bands a warning wherever they search. And the titanium collar around his neck looks like it’s there for a reason.
“Who’re we looking for?” Darrick asks, the faces all blurring into one frenzied mosaic.
“We’ll know soon,” Gideon says.
In the thick of it Darrick pauses, eyes to the stage, pupils dilating as they refocus.
“What is it?” Gideon asks.
“The chick. The lead singer. She’s sending out double-coded sound waves. I can see them.”
“I know.”
“Can anyone else?”
“No.”
“What’re they for?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Gideon says. “It’s not why we’re here. Focus.”
“That is weird, man. They’re like fireflies going into everybody’s ears. Except for ours. Is that the implants?”
“Focus!”
“All right. But it’s weird.”
Gideon slips a hand inside one the pockets on his slicker, as casual as a man waiting for a bus. He calibrates the device tucked down there by touch, reading the buttons like Braille. It remodulates the aurora cascade above their heads; now the light carries a saturating signal, electromagnetic particles that penetrate the pores, designed not to disrupt everyday cybernetics. The particles are encoded for a single purpose, a specific power supply. When the scanning field descends for the two hundredth time of the night no one notices any difference, and at first glance the crowd seems unaffected; and at second glance…at third glance. Then Gideon spots him, a man who was just another too-spiff club nanite in his surface-of-Mars print jacket a moment ago, before his body was inundated with EM particles.
At first it looks like an absent seizure, then a full blown seizure, and by the time anyone realizes it’s not a seizure at all, the man’s spine bursts through his back like an angry invertebrate. The circle of bodies that’s formed around him watch as he’s de-boned by the hand of the gods, holding their drinks in front of them like protective talismans. The reproTon has already grown into the man’s skull and seized his ocular cavities; his eyeballs suddenly disappear. Tears rip through each cheek and his mandible snaps off, hanging down his chest like a broken trap door, an escape hatch being employed by the thing wriggling free through his cracked hard palate. The man’s neck balloons as the reproTon pulls its chassis up his throat, the part that released his spinal cord, poisoned by the EM particles in the man’s blood, forced to excise itself from his body.
The reproTon hits the dance floor a second before the pile of wasted flesh it has discarded like an infected limb. Its head is no bigger than a doll’s and decorated with bits of the man’s frontal lobe. His eyes dangle from interface cables connected to it. The reproTon’s body is just a small mass of claws and gears overgrowing a cylindrical frame; it’s impossible to distinguish the blood from the oil it fabricates to lube its moving parts. The metallic mushroom thing writhes weakly, like a newborn, slowly righting itself.
Meanwhile the men who’ve beaten it from the bio brush are trying to circumvent Chaos’ children, the rest of the rollers and ravers and clubbers who think all is right in their supersonic, chemically-synthesized world. Darrick shoves them aside and the crowd lets him because they think he’s a bouncer; later they’ll tell the Uni cops he looked so much like one.
Gideon has almost reached it when the reproTon starts hopping across the club floor, head bobbing and gears springing like some grotesque tinker toy. This toy, however, is self-generating. Blue tendrils of electricity fire from its metallic skullcap, wafting and careening like luminous sea algae under oceanic currents. They create a magnetic vortex, calling every ounce of metal in a twenty yard radius: furniture, piercings, jewelry, watch parts, PDAs, cell phones. It cannibalizes every useable bit of hardware, reshaping metal with centrifugal force and melding the new pieces into a crude bipedal form, building itself a body from the ground up, literally, and doing it on the run. The pogo stick inertia moving it forward becomes the hobbling gait of two prosthetic legs.
Gideon and Darrick try to intercept, to close the gap between themselves and reproTon. But the crowd is too thick and oblivious, the club too big. The pair is caught in an undertow of bodies recoiling from the industrial monstrosity clawing its way off the dance floor with hands made of forks and drink stirrers. Even Darrick’s arms, the only two things that never fail him, seem useless to stem the tide.
“We’re losing it!” Gideon yells. “We can’t let it get out the door!”
“Need a diesel with a cowcatcher to mow these fuckers down, man.”
“Darrick! Berserk!”
“I can’t. I’m not pissed off.”
“It’s getting away!”
“This is a rave, not a battlefield.”
“Berserk! Now!”
“I can’t!”
Gideon doesn’t have time to argue the point any further. The knife is in his hand as if it’s always been there. He picks the fleshiest part of Darrick’s thigh and sinks the blade, all four inches. Gideon twists the knife’s mother-of-pearl grips until its polycrystalline edge scrapes bone.
The pain is God; vengeful, all-powerful. Opposing it is surprise and confusion and anger. Darrick’s agonized curses turn into animal growls that sound like the death throes of some heavy machine. The on-set of convulsions is quick, and the convulsions are inhuman in their violence; it should be physically impossible for muscles to contract that fast. He starts to change. His veins and the seams of his clothes seem to burst at the same time. The titanium collar around his neck stretches into two dozen individual platelets on a band of silicon elastic. Roars shake the heat-woven air, shattering the reverb of the music, and the bear goes crashing through the crowd, brushing bodies aside like tall blades of grass. Its claws never taste flesh, but the blood of a dozen broken noses stains its dull amber coat. More than a few bodies fall under the stampede. More than a few rib cages are crushed by it.
The bear, not a grizzly, not anything that’s tromped the open terra for two thousand years, catches the reproTon at the top of the staircase leading to the main doors. The limbs it’s formed from steel bar stool legs and rolled up serving trays fold in the bear’s angry maw. The personal defense systems of reproTons are as varied as a person’s response to attack. This one runs 50,000 volts through the bear’s body. It only singes fur and enrages an already raging berserk. The bear crushes the reproTon to the grated flooring of the staircase, mashing its cobbled guts under a shaggy paw. The human eyes attached to its robotic head have already glazed over, but now what was operating them dies as well.
A berserk’s bloodlust is not sated by lubricant, and so it will turn on the crowd, drawn to their heat, to the thunder of their hearts and in their veins.
Gideon’s traded in his knife for a thumbnail remote controller. It only has one button, and when he presses it, the titanium platelet against the back of the bear’s neck emits a steady stream of alpha waves, sent through the cervical spinal cord to the inferior end of the medulla oblongata. The bombardment retards the brain chemistry of the berserk, triggering a recall before rave flesh is put on tonight’s menu.
The berserk comes on fast and violent. The trip back is slow torture. First shedding fur, then skin cells, bones moving and cracking and breaking down under a thick hide that’s slowly becoming thin skin. Bald paws split and become webbed fingers and webbed toes that have yet to remember how to evolve. The maw is hardest to watch. Its teeth break. It regurgitates blood in buckets. Its wet black snout shrivels and falls off. Then the whole thing shrinks, withering, vaguely phallic and disturbing. But the eyes never change, just their inflection. The humanity returns. The rage, like crimson rings around each iris, has receded.
Five minutes later, five minutes that are forever for the beholders and longer for Darrick, who’s curled up on the floor, naked, hairless, toothless, and bleeding. The bristles of the bear’s coat surround his fetal shivering like threshed wheat.
He’s forgotten all about the knife wound.
Darrick’s first words aren’t really words. They sound like hard wind in a cave. His breath is so ragged, his voice so deep.
“God it hurts…it hurts…”
“I know,” Gideon says, kneeling beside him.
“Help me…oh fuck…help…”
“I can’t.”
Instincts say touch him, hold him for support; physical, emotional. His hand hovers. The air moves an inch between Gideon’s fingers and Darrick’s shoulder. Anywhere he places them will bring agony, at least right now. Gideon can hear Darrick’s epidermis solidifying. It sounds like wood swelling and splitting in a heavy rain.
The band has stopped playing. The bouncers, called out in force, idle in their leather muscle vests. They want none of this. There are so many sets of unblinking eyes straining to process the horror, so many minds, so much sense memory searching for some point of reference that will put this situation into a context they can accept.
Gideon watches the remains of the reproTon. They need to be contained. It can convert the radiation from the several hundred electrical appliances in the vicinity. It can regenerate. The containment team is waiting outside with their lead-lined anti-deuterium storage equipment.
This one wasn’t parasitic. It was symbiotic. For all they know the pile of meat ventilating on the dance floor was born conjoined with the reproTon. Gideon sees it more and more now. He’s seen baby birds hatch with fiberglass eyes. He’s seen flora blossom with nanotech pollen. He’s seen The Integration, the inevitable process of mankind merging with its own rampant technology, that the transhumanist movements prophesized and The Company refuses to accept. The Company, who dispatches teams of reanimated soldiers like Gideon and sapienmorphs like Darrick to combat reproTons as if they’re a disease that can be contained. And though Gideon wasn’t reprogrammed to think outside mission parameters, he knows that soon their efforts won’t matter anymore. The difference between a plague and evolution is only what’s left. Soon there’ll be no more Sneetches without stars, and Gideon and his berserk partner will just be outmoded hardware.
Darrick has stopped moaning, and even though every muscle, every joint, every splinter of bone screams, even though it feels like he’s only a day born and trying to stand on his own, he does it. He stands, aching and unashamed, swallowing the blood from his gums because using the muscles involved in spitting it out would hurt far more.
“I’m cold,” Darrick says.
Gideon nods. “I know what that’s like.”
“What’re they all staring at?”
“A Dead Man and a berserk,” Gideon says, and green-lights the containment team.
END
Matt has short fiction in Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest issue 8. In April, 2008 we released his first collection of stories titled The Next Fix.
Matt Wallace is currently poised to take the Australian film industry by storm. He is a trained catch wrestler, a Michelin chef, a skilled swordsman, an accredited demonologist, and a master of Filipino knife-fighting. He also writes the occasional fallacy.
An award-winning author and screenwriter, Matt has spent the last few years making his name and his bones in the medium of podcasting. Upwards of 10,000 listeners now download his stories released through the monthly Variant Frequencies podcast, and he has twice been honored with the Parsec Award for short fiction. His first novel-length release, the deeply prosaic, ultra violent, highly experimental The Failed Cities Monologues, garnered a small battalion of fans who have become fond of stalking Matt at conventions in full character costume. It is currently available from Podiobooks.com.
Buy Matt Wallace’s collection of dark SF titled The Next Fix from Apex Publications.
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