The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [90]
“All right,” Valentine muttered. “Hope you’ve got a plan, is all…”
Beckett snorted. He did not mention that he could see a black shape, creeping down the wall on the far side of the chamber. Head first, it slowly slithered down the icy walls, somehow folding under or around or through the wooden platforms in the way. Wait, wait, wait. Wait until it gets to the bottom. The shape moved out of sight.
“Now,” Beckett said, softly. “Start up. Slowly, quietly. Right?”
“What?” Valentine practically shouted. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “What? You mean…it’s here? I mean, here, here? Like, in this room?”
Beckett nodded, and gestured to the stairs. The young coroner started to back up the wooden steps, his hands hovering near the grips of his revolvers, though he knew bullets wouldn’t stop this adversary. Beckett waited for a few seconds, then he, too, began the ascent.
The two men could now hear a strange noise from behind the maze of wooden partitions on the floor of the chamber. It was a wet, sticky noise, like someone was pulping fruit.
“Go!” Beckett shouted, suddenly. “Run!”
Valentine didn’t hesitate. He tore up the stairs, Beckett close on his heels. They’d made it less than a hundred yards before Beckett turned. He could see the thing now, crawling up the stairs after them.
If the corpses of the translated men had been awful, this living specimen was a thousand times worse. It was a mess of shifting limbs, some fading grotesquely from sight, others appearing and disappearing at random; it’s flesh not only blossomed and turned itself inside out again and again, but it slithered across the bones, sometimes leaving the skeleton behind, rearing up like a clutch of snakes, only to return to that hideously shifting body. Coils of blood and gristle darted out from its body and dropped back in, or they waved like an insect’s antenna, lightly touching the wood and ice around it. It’s face was the only thing that never changed, and it was even more awful for its stillness. The thing’s face was just like the faces of the dead men: locked in a rigid, unchanging, terrible scream, its jaws stretched and mouth open, its eyes rolled back in its head. The head rolled lifelessly on its neck, in movements seemingly unrelated to those of its bizarre agglomerations of real and phantom limbs.
Beckett drew his weapon as the thing approached. It was moving slowly, perhaps because it didn’t feel threatened, but the coroner suspected that would change once it heard gunfire. Have to make this count. He aimed carefully, not at the monster before him, but behind it…
“Beckett!” Valentine whispered desperately. “What are you doing? Bullets don’t hurt it!”
At the sound of the gunshot, the thing froze, or it froze as much as it could. Its millions of arms and legs still blinked in and out of existence, its weird, lifeless head still rolled about on its shoulders, but it had stopped its approach.
Missed, Beckett thought. Try again.
The thing began to move towards him, this time more quickly. After the second gunshot, it began to charge up the wooden stairs.
“Shit!” Shouted Valentine. He drew his revolvers and opened up on the translated man, which paused beneath the hail of bullets. Flesh exploded out of its back, then splashed right back into its skin; each bullet left a tiny whirlpool in the rapidly mutating body of the creature.
“Done,” Beckett said. “Go, go, go!”
The two men turned and ran up the stairs, all thought of care and safety abandoned, despite the rickety wooden construction and the lack of guardrails. That weird, pulping-fruit sound followed them, keeping distance easily.
Beckett was almost breathless when they reached the top platform. He made straight for the control-room. “Get out,” he told Valentine.
“What are you doing?” The younger man screamed