The Long Road, Part 5f/?
Continued from Part 5e
The shadows grow thicker as they venture into the city outskirts, entering a low-density neighborhood. A smog soup creeps in around the cracks and edges. The initial track is easy enough to follow. But as the tears grow, first into spoonfuls, then into puddles, Alan scrabbles over ledges and slides down cracked slopes. He's beginning to wonder whether the trip is worth the effort-he's not even sure what he expects to find-when they crest a small hill and stop. A great fist has punched a hole into the Grid. The hill they're on is actually the lip of a crater, and at the bottom of the crater is the source of tears, resting in a lake of black muck.
Quorra's posture tenses. Her eyes dart around the dark, cloaked crevices of their environment.
The grotesque, boulder sized monster has lost three of eight serrated razor legs; the main torso is cleaved in two. From an inner hull of severed ducts, shredded wires, and webbed cartilage, thick, viscous sap oozes out, hanging down in a solidifying, suspended curtain of acid rot. The smell stings sight and burns the throat. However, what troubles Alan most is not the odor but a lack of distinguishable anatomy: no head or eyes anywhere on the carcass. He checks from a couple of perspectives, just to be sure. Too bad he can't get closer without taking a gory bath.
“Is this the same creature we saw when we arrived on the Grid?”
“Bigger,” Quorra murmurs.
She's on the opposite side of the rim, in front a runty building barely the size of three outhouses squished together. The structure's foundation is at an an angle; the walls skew in an impossible contortion of contradictions, holding each other up in an equilibrium on the verge of collapse. Quorra barely touches the door before it swings wide and moans into frigid, stale air.
Wondering what she's up to, Alan traipses after her and into chaos. Shattered tables and chairs dominate the interior of the narrow enclosure. Alan's boots crunch on layer of broken glass gravel mixed with grease. The remaining floor is strewn with fragmented bottles and garish light fixtures-all jagged edge corpses poking out from under a camouflage of filthy, pungent waste. He holds his nose, and Quorra jerks her thumb toward the wall.
“I think we found the nest.”
They crouch beside their find.
The nest is a crusty chitinous material stitched together in a tessellated network of cells. It's been built into a cannibalized metal housing, and lies suspended above a tunnel burrowing down deep, deep, into an abyss Alan's eyes can't penetrate.
Someone has slashed open the alien egg sacs. More ooze trickles out of the burst pouches, flowing into the tunnel.
Quorra raps the skeletal metal framework of the hive with her knuckles.
“I'm surprised Clu left any of these around,” she says. “Too much antique user culture.”
Alan looks up and down. The bottom and insides are carved out for the nest, but the sooty, boxy shell is still intact. It's shorter than a man, “U” shaped at the top, and surfaced on the front edge with hauntingly familiar log ridges. Beyond those observations, however, the grime-paste is too thick to make out more than a sickly, smudged ruin. He's stumped.
“It's a jukebox. Flynn brought them to the Grid.”
The resemblance morphs the ruin into a horrifying abomination.
Alan's about ready to suggest they return to a less nausea-inducing location-they've been gone a while-when a sharp sting bites into his heel.
“Jesus!”
Alan falls forward. Furious and acting unconsciously, he strikes.
The defiler is a worm.
Or was a worm. His disc is embedded in an six-legged segmented crawler about the size of his forearm. Like the behemoth outside, this insect does not appear to have eyes. The “head,” tipped with the needle protrusion of a narwhal, is faceted like crystal obsidian, while the halved body blends in seamlessly with the environment.
Quorra helps him up. Alan retrieves his disc and grimaces at the black guts sloughing off the edge.
“Guess I don't need to worry too much,” she says. “Looks like you can take care of yourself.”
As they retreat, he peers over his shoulder. The new angle further undermines the illusion of the building's stability, and the structure appears frozen on the instant of careening into a lake of black blood. Over the door's mouth is a sign etched faintly in tarnished gold.
Continued from Part 5g