Infernal Sky by Dafydd Ab Hugh Read Free Book Online Page A

I’ve studied them.”
    â€œTrust me on this, Doctor—they’re dangerous.”
    â€œBut manageable. That’s all I’m saying. If we had a live cyberdemon, then we’d have a problem of containment. The same as if our mancubus was living. I know you call them fatties.”
    â€œYou have a whole fatty?”
    â€œFortunately it’s dead. Unlike the specimen here, he seems to be slowly decaying.”
    I laughed. “They smell so bad alive I don’t see how they could get any worse.”
    â€œThe stench reminds me of rotting fish, sour grapes, and old locker-room sweat. Come on. I’ll show you.” He didn’t need to take my arm, but I let him. He was like a friendly uncle who wanted to show off his chamber of horrors. We went past sections of flying skulls laid out like bikers’ helmets. I’d always wanted a motorcycle.
    â€œWhat do you call the Clydes?”
    â€œWe don’t,” he answered quickly. “We think your friends were wrong to think they might be the product of genetic engineering. They’re probably the human traitors who were given some kind of treatment to make them tractable.”
    The fatty was behind glass and made me think of a gigantic meat loaf that had been left out in the sun. The metal guns it used for arms had been removedand stacked up next to the monster like giant flashlights. He looked sort of pathetic without them.
    â€œYou can’t smell it from here, but if you want to step into the room . . .”
    â€œNo, thanks.” I turned him down, unsure if he was kidding me. “Let’s see the zombies.”
    I wish I hadn’t asked.
    He led me to the end of the warehouse, where I finally saw some other people in white lab coats. For a moment it had seemed as if the whole place belonged to Ackerman and his monsters. We went out into a corridor. I figured the zombies had been given a special place of their own.
    Like I said, what’s great about scientists is the way they refuse to talk down to kids. Ackerman started to lecture, and it was fine with me:
    â€œThe most interesting part about studying zombies is the residual speech pattern. We have recorded many hours of zombie dialogue. Some of them fixate on the invasion, speaking cryptically about gateways and greater forces that lie behind them. Others pick up a pattern from their own lives, repeating phrases that tell us something about them. A final test group doesn’t speak at all. We are attempting to find out if they retain any capacity to reason after the transformation.”
    â€œNo,” I said as strongly as I could. “The human part of them is dead.”
    â€œI understand how you must feel,” he said. “It’s easier for all of us if we assume we’re not killing anyone human on the other end of the gun barrel.”
    I shook my head. “You don’t understand,” I told him. “I’ll kill any skag who betrayed us. The traitors are still human. I wouldn’t have any problem pullingthe trigger on those creeps in the government who helped the demons.”
    â€œAll right, calm down,” he said in a completely different tone of voice. “I was really talking about myself just then. It’s easier for me to work on these, er, zombies, if I think there’s no humanity left.”
    Arlene keeps saying I can be a real pill, so I decided to be that way on purpose. I asked, “What difference does that make to you, Doctor, if they weren’t geniuses when they were alive?”
    He laughed instead of getting mad. “You are smart, Jill. I need to watch my step around you. I hope we’ll enjoy working together. We can start now. What’s your theory of why a few of the big monsters seem able to reason?”
    â€œYou mean like the spider-minds?”
    I didn’t need to tell him what that word meant. “Apparently all of them. Then there was the loquacious imp