From: rat@taronga.com (Doni Cantu)
Subject: Tory Goethe Visits Clear Lake
Date: 29 Jun 92 16:48:50 GMT



Yes, yes, we're back, kiddies, with more Neat Things.  Today's installment
is, basically, violent.  And we have a variant on those neo-dogs, now,
kinda urban menace-like, eh?  This one's violent, anyway; I can't classify
the first one, exactly; the next one is really weird and brought to a
simmer in various hideous anime in-jokes.

This particular story sprang into existance a coupla days ago at about,
say, one ay-em, as I was suffering from a massive caffeine crash.  Call me
twisted, but I like this one.  Really.

Flames, replies, ordering information, all that rot, you know the drill.

===========================[saw here]================================


               |       Neo-Houston Volume II:      |
               |   Tory Goethe Visits Clear Lake   |
               |                                   |
               |        by Doni "Rat" Cantu        |



        Mom was careless for the first time in her life that morning.
        All the alley'd contained were the usual drifts of litter.  I
don't know why I turned my back on Mom and the crumpled aluminum-siding
alley wall as she wrinkled her nose.  And I don't know what led me to the
street.
        Even as I swept back onto the rubble-strewn sidewalk she began to
scream.  Even as I turned she was cut short.  She was dead before I'd run
my first step.  She'd stopped bleeding before I turned the corner.
        They stopped feasting as I arrived.
        And--I saw--

        My dad's sidearm--a Colt M1911A1 .45, the same design used a half
less two centuries ago in the trenches of Neuve Chapelle--materialized in
my right fist as their bloody muzzles whipped upward.
        I pumped eight slugs deep into the first, blowing the thing apart
in a storm and torrent of gore.  The kick threw me back two steps and spun
me into the decaying concrete wall of a decades-condemned high-rise.  Had
I opted for the M2012 .45 with selectable autofire, I would have torn my
arm off at the shoulder.  As it was, the recoil nearly broke my wrist.
The reports were deafening in the alley.
        The first barreled into me before my spent clip had hit the trash
underfoot.  My lungs emptied convulsively from the impact--I didn't even
mass half what it did, and I knew basic physics--and I came down hard, a
two-point landing, on my right shoulder and the back of my head, before
momentum flipped me ass-over onto my belly in the middle of the street,
ribs and chest nearly punctured from the mountain range of its spine.  My
left hand bent painfully under my own weight.  The full clip I'd held
slipped from my fingers.
        Choking in pain and anger and fear I fought to breathe, scrambling
to my knees.  Half-soaked trash slithered and shifted under me.  Four more
of the creatures cannonballed from the alley.  Their sickly milky-gray
eyes glowed from deep within their blood-matted hides, and I cursed the
day I followed my mother into Clear Lake.
        I ducked away from two, and I heard them race into the lot behind
me before they could turn.  But the third struck me square in the
shoulder, breaking some bones and throwing me onto my back.  The fourth
pounced, talons first, aiming for my face.  Things went red as I heaved
myself to one side.  Nylon and Kevlar shredded under its teeth.  The
underlying layers of spun bucky-carbon fiber indented deep into my forearm
under its dagger teeth.  I thrashed, cracking the knuckles of my free hand
against the stony osseus deposition that erupted from these things' spines
and shoulder blades.  My dad's .45 spun away as I lost my grip on it.
        Another went for my thigh, but I brought my knee up enough to kick
it in the throat, stunning it for a fraction of a second.  I twisted,
feeling the grating of bone in my ribs and shoulder, and tore my freak
blade from its holster patch.  The knife whined as its blade blurred with
high-frequency vibrations, and I plunged it into the creature sawing at my
arm.
        It jumped as the blade parted its skull just below the ear.  The
jolt sent its teeth through the final fibers of my sleeve and into my arm.
 I howled.  I popped a wedge of bone and brain off the top of its head off
with a convulsing of my wrist, then hammered the blade up to the hilt
across its haunch and chest.  The blade's oscillations were nearly drowned
by the steel-coil muscles lying under the hide.  A vaporous stench filled
the street as ichor spurted.
        It didn't let go.  I couldn't feel anything below my shoulder on
that arm.  Blood streamed from the end of my sleeve and down the back of
my gloved left hand.
        Two more of the nightmares flew at me.  They hardly touched the
ground.  They /sailed/, each leap taking them three meters.  I took a
gasping breath, trying to force my emptied lungs to fill.  The freak blade
whined.

        Someone shouted, and the leftmost one flew downward at an angle,
legs crumpling, as an HE shell smashed through it and opened a crater in
the pavement.  Shrapnel tore into my face and punched into my chest, and
paper mulch plastered everything.  I nearly took off my ear with the freak
blade as the explosive concussion hit me.
        Jaws clamped across my boot, and I felt the steel plating in the
toe warp under the pressure.  Abruptly, the thing was torn apart by HMG
fire, but I didn't have the time to shake my boot loose as I opened a gash
across the muzzle of another, praying my adrenaline didn't run dry before
I was dead.  Two more were looking to dismember me, oblivious to the hail
of bullets around it.  A chunk of bone flew from the spine of one as a
slug struck it.
        Somehow I sucked enough ichor-reeking air to yell, humbling
enough, "/Help/!"  I got to one knee, kicking the dead monster's jaws from
my boot and hacking at the air between me and the two others.  Milky-dead,
hate-filled eyes glared at me.
        A pressure wave rippled my hair as a figure screamed past, feet
first into the things.  He was leaning back hard, the flight pack strapped
to his back and the backs of his thighs flaring with blue-white rocket
exhaust as he both cut power and used thrust from the vents across his
shoulders to keep him from falling on his back.  The beasts crunched and
rolled away from the impact, bootprints prominent in their armored hide.
        Had I still been carrying the Colt, I would have shot at him,
running on reflex.  The panic passed as quickly as it came.
        I got to my feet, listed hard to the right, and stumbled a few
steps back to the alleyway.  Blood ran through the fingers of my right
hand as I squeezed my torn left sleeve.  I was covered in my blood, their
ichor, and wet trash.  The vibroblade whined, forgotten, pressed against
my sleeve.  It went silent as I dropped it.
        Then a tremendous baying began.  The buildings rang with the
sound.  Howling, animal screaming, horror video come to life.  It was so
loud it hurt my stomach, so loud it exceeded the sound thresholds my poor
ears were limited to, by such a factor that all I could hear was a low
rushing sound.  And, at the end of the street, a river of creatures began
to spill across the concrete, a dozen kinds of predator,
naturally-occuring and non-, a pack of packs, a stampede of every single
thing I'd been told not to even /think/ about fucking with, /ever/.
        The baying broke into assorted barks and howls, my ears ringing.
Someone shouted, "/Here/!  Girl, over /here/!"  I ignored his curses, and
staggered to my fallen .45.
        On trying to bend to get it, I lost my balance and hit the curb,
face-first, and I felt a tooth snap.  I gagged as my mouth filled with
blood.  Hell would have been a welcome change of condition.  Bullets
cracked across the block, and the yippings and grumbling came closer, as
the gunfire became sporadic.
        A great wind scattered anything left loose, abruptly, swirling
paper and cordite smoke and the tang of ozone as a magnetic-induction LAV
plummeted to within a handspan's distance of the ground.  I curled into a
bleeding ball, and rolled onto my side.  Which hurt.

        I was back on the sidewalk again, gravel crunching beneath my
boots, my canvas fatigue pants soft and white at the stitching.  The scent
of rotting Clear Lake carried all the way to where we were.  The only
thing I could think of was the way lunch was congealing in my stomach,
greasy, icy lumps of egg and the spiced sausage the locals called
chor-itzo, and the fact that no one, not even mom, went on foot anywhere.
No one did anymore.  Everyone was above that.
        The crumpling of sheet metal, it sounded like.  Then a thud, two,
and then the most sickening, harshest, highest-pitched scream I'd ever
heard, higher-pitched than any scream I'd had to listen to, to a point I
had thought beyond even the female register, past anything related to
human sound.
        I turned my head, then began to pivot on the toe of one boot.  The
scream had stopped, even the echoes.  I heard a gristly sound, then a
bucket of well-soaked laundry hitting the ground.  I heard a splash.  I
was starting back, lifting my fists to my collar in fear, tucking my chin
downward, not wanting to be afraid.  A beetle crunched like celery
underfoot.  The alley entrance was in front of me.
        Mom had a ring on her finger.  I never understood the joke behind
it being made from silver and cold-wrought iron, but she and dad thought
it funny.
        The ring finger it was on, and a little finger from the same hand,
were half-curled, pale, a bit wrinkled, lying on top of a flattened
cardboard box.  There wasn't much blood.
        I shouldn't have taken that last step forward.  No one should be
seen like that.
        There were several of the things standing on and in and around
Mom.  Ugly shapes, blunt, with too many teeth and, at the shoulder, almost
up to my own shoulders.  One had something from Mom's opened chest cavity
in its mouth.  One had a foot inside her.  They were covered in her blood,
and still hungry.  Mom's neck was mostly gone, as was the top part of her
skull.  Blood was everywhere, entrails were everywhere, bits of the coat
she wore, the one four sizes too big and fraying at the edges, stuck to
everything.  For a long time I stared at the body, which looked like a
jigsaw puzzle someone had stolen most of the pieces from.  Limbs were
separated, chunks of things not supposed to be in chunks were sticking to
their heads, and even as I stared at all the blood, pitchers of it, a
barrel of it, I wanted her to get up and fight them, fight them with her
empty eye sockets and exposed jaw--

        --throwing up, crying, I hear
        get us up!  everything tipping forward, popping
        can't feel where's mom

        I sat on the edge of the bed, knuckles white as I squeezed Mom's
ring into the palm of my hand so hard I knew it would leave a bruise.  I
didn't even feel like crying anymore.  Crying was something I thought I'd
learned to live without.
        They'd saved my life, such as it was.  Defoe, Whitman with his
flight pack, Shaw, Virginia, the rest.  They'd had me hospitalized.
Fortunately, I hadn't needed anything in the way of replacements.  It took
most of a year for me to recover.
        So I sat there, palm starting to sweat from the exertion.  I
thought of the jump in my lifestyle; but then, anything from the streets
was a damnsight higher.  I cursed my mother, my father, myself, the dogs,
"new dogs", Whitman called them, cursed Whitman, cursed Shaw, cursed them
all, damned the 'Lake, and swore I'd never, ever, /ever/ let myself get
beaten again, by anything.  Animal or otherwise.
        So I joined Them.


===========================[saw here]================================

This travesty of literary genius Copyright (c) 1992 Doni Cantu.
Re-transmission and distribution, via means electronic or otherwise, is
just fine, but you can't take out the attribution, or try and sell it to
someone, and so on.  Readers not in the continental United States please
add five dollars for shipping.  And, while you're at it, get me a ham and
swiss.

Next time:  more fun-filled cartoon madness in that halcyon high school of
high schools <hey, gimme a break, I haven't been out of it for long, eh?>
CHAS H MILBY!
--
rat@taronga.com | "I ignored an axiom."  --Albert Einstein, on Relativity