Charles Stross - The Fuller Memorandum

“It’s too big a coincidence,” Mo says harshly.

“You diagnose enemy action?” asks Barnes.

“Absolutely. We’re on our way to retrieve”-she glances around the cabin-“among other things, a document of binding. And there’s that.” She gestures forward, through the windscreen, at the churning night beyond the gates. “What are the odds that he’d blow a gasket right at the critical moment?”

Alan Barnes thinks for a moment, then nods vigorously. “All right, Doctor, assuming you’re correct, how do you think I should deal with the situation? We came expecting to deal with cultists and a possible hostage rescue, not the night of the living dead. There are certain tactical issues to consider.” He nods at the windscreen. “Notably, (a) how we get through the crush to wherever our cultists are holed up, (b) how we deal with them when we arrive, bearing in mind that our arrival is not going to be terribly stealthy, and (c) how we get out alive afterwards. I should say that the possessed are your department. We’ve got a SCORPION STARE interferometer, but that’s an area denial weapon-wouldn’t do us much good to burn through the walking dead and catch Mr. Howard in the sweep, would it?” He looks at her expectantly. “Do you have any recommendations?”

“Hmm.” Mo squints at the windscreen. “If this truck can get close to the chapel-you’ve got a link to the police helicopter?”

“Yes-why?”

Mo looks up at the hatch in the roof of the driver’s cab. “I need to be able to see what’s going on,” she says. “We need to find the center of this summoning and kill whatever’s responsible. Can you give me something to stand on?”

“You’re thinking of-” Alan looks at her violin case. “That’s not terribly safe.”

“Can you think of a better idea?” Mo bares her teeth in something not too unlike a smile. “Because I’m fresh out of subtlety right now.”

“As long as we keep moving ahead, and they don’t come climbing over the bodywork, it ought to get us in close,” Howe says slowly. “Sir, if we ride topside with entrenching tools to keep ’em off her-”

“Very good.” Barnes nods jerkily. He looks at Angleton: unconscious but breathing. “We can’t wait for the ambulance,” he says finally. To Howe: “Off-load him. Jude, you wait with Dr. Angleton. Howe, you want to leave a guard?”

“Sir. McDonald, you’re staying with Jude and the doctor until the ambulance shows up. Once he’s on his way to hospital, wait here. If the trouble overflows, leg it-we’ll pick you up later. Clear?”

McDonald-short, wiry, still dressed as a fireman-nods. “Can do.”

“Okay, get the stretcher and jump to it. Williams, get Dr. O’Brien’s instrument patched into the external sound system. Scary, collect two shovels and get up top. Let’s move it!”

Minutes later the truck rolls slowly towards the gates of Brookwood and the heaving darkness beyond, three figures crouched on its roof. Two of them hold collapsible shovels with sharpened edges; the third clutches something bone-white in her hands. She lowers her bow until it kisses the strings of her instrument. The walking dead turn to listen as Mo plays her lullaby. Beyond them, in the darkness, the screams are getting fainter.

HERE’S WHAT I SEE IN THE CRYPT:

The dusty counterpane on the altar-bed falls away as the two mummified lover-sacrifices sit up. They glow with the pallid green of bioluminescence from within, their empty eye sockets writhing with a nauseating slow-motion churn as they look around. Bony metatarsals click on the flagstones as they rise to their feet.

A bunch of the cultists are fleeing, making a dash for the iron-studded door. They don’t care whether they end up on Iris’s shit-list; they’re more scared of the walking dead.

A male cultist, still robed and bearing one of their shotguns, is the first to show some balls. He moves into a firing line on one of the rising dead, bringing his gun to his shoulder. He aims, and fire gouts from his weapon. Indoors, reflected and reverberating from stone, a fired shotgun hammers your eardrums with spikes of compressed air as sharp as knives. I see people shouting, and Iris spasms and screams in my grip, but I hear nothing but echoes from that dreadful report. The walking cadaver’s head vanishes in a spray of bone and parchment, but still it stumbles forward, straight towards the shotgun-aiming guard. He stares at it in disbelief, then lowers his aim and fires again, blasting a hole in its thoracic cavity. The truncated revenant falls, but its arms and legs are still moving. Another cultist, one of the ones who stripped for Iris’s disastrous summoning, dances forward, holding up a billet of wood. He smashes it down on the twitching remains, raises it, prepares to bring it down again-

The mortal remains reach out, and one bony fingertip scrapes the inside of his calf.

I can feel what happens. The glory of satiated hunger, the sensual, almost erotic sense of dissolution as the feeder in the night moves from the parched, damaged host to this new playground of sensual corporeality, driving down and digesting its former owner’s identity, submerging him in a tide of white noise.

It only takes a split second. I make eye contact with the possessed one: I recognize the glow at the back of his eyes, a reflection of my own refulgent glory. I nod at the shotgun bearer, who is sidling carefully around the bed, clearly stalking the other cadaver, and mouth “Take him.” The syllables my tongue curls around are not English, nor any other language routinely spoken by human beings. The feeder blinks with delight at being so honored as the vehicle of my will. And then he begins to move.

Perhaps five seconds have passed since the man at the back shouted Run for it and broke for the door.

What Iris and those cultists who aren’t fleeing see is probably something like this:

They see the Eater of Souls, newly risen from his bed, grab their high priestess and whirl her around in a deadly embrace, warning them to stand back. Then the skeletal remains on the bed sit up. One of them stands and begins to advance on the congregants. A guard shoots its head off, then blows the still-walking corpse in half at the waist. A member of the chorus bashes it twice with a length of wood. He freezes for a second-then hurls the timber at the guard’s head and leaps.

The other feeder hobbles out from behind the four-poster bed. It’s halfway up the stepped ring of mattresses, and it’s moving towards the exit. Meanwhile, the mob of terrified cultists have gotten the door open. And that’s when the real panic begins.

Iris is shaking but I force her to turn, holding her so that she can’t look away. “This is your doing,” I shout in her ear, barely able to hear my own voice. Harsh words force themselves through my larynx, words that come without my willing them: “Death waits you! You’re all going to die! You have signed an oath of obedience to your dark master, and with Hell you are in agreement. Death awaits you all!”

Her congregation numbers perhaps thirty to fifty at most, with another eight to ten on guard outside. The Wheelwright dead, in contrast, number in the hundreds, and the honored dead of the Skull Brethren certainly outnumber Iris’s followers. I can feel the feeders waiting outside the door, eager for the warmth they can sense within. Wait for my word of release, I tell them.

(Eager? Sense? I’m not sure those words are applicable to feeders. I’m not sure feeders are conscious in the way that we are-or even as aware as mammals or birds. They’re bundles of rough reflexes, bound together by the strange grammars of night, more like software agents than anything that’s ever had flesh. But if it walks like a lizard and breathes gouts of fire you might as well call it a dragon, and the feeders certainly seem to prefer bodies with a bit of metabolic energy and structural integrity remaining…)