The Brave Men and Women of Borisch & Sons Extermination Company #2
She bends nozzle-first into the tunnel, and Guy crawls after her.
Water drums in his ears as he inches toward the heart of the root, following the hunched outline of Three’s tank.
When the passage opens, he drops onto an iron platform and struggles with his own torch.
A shower of blue sparks reveals the grand, ancient phloem.
The enormity of the drainage shaft outpaces his torchlight, its true size only hinted in the metallic reflections of its threaded system of catwalks.
Twinned pillars of Catoptric water roar at his sides—to the left, descending, purple with waste, and to the right, fresh and silver but just as toxic, drawn up to the factories and laboratories by natural laws so arcane that, according to famed alchemist Gilde Vernhardt, even God has forgotten them.
Three advances, uncowed by the fatal black drop on either side.
Guy follows closely behind, gripping his nozzle, eyes narrowed.
He can’t see beyond the falling waters, and fares no better when he turns his gaze to the rising ones.
Metal groans overhead; a boulder of rot cascades down with the sewage and clangs against the handrail.
The clod disappears in a spray of oily water, but the sound clings to the air, cold and sharp as a knife’s edge.
At the murky periphery of his vision, a curtain of mist shimmers and parts.
Something dark slithers past him—he turns, but before he can aim his nozzle, Dawn thrusts his curved blade downward.
Steel locks between antennae, then glides into flesh.
Bristles rise all along the creature’s keels, expelling an incandescent cloud of venom, but Dawn holds firm.
Metal cracks through chitinous segments, then pulls free, and two halves of a millipede, each the size of Guy’s leg, wriggle helplessly along the catwalk.
“Spiny fucker!” Three hoots. She inspects the thing, then kicks one of its halves over the edge of the catwalk. Rushing water drowns the scream of its descent. “Chimeras. Knew it. The size of the thing. Must be the brood-parent.”
Guy glances at the creature’s remaining half, though it’s difficult to examine while it spews the last of its light-bending toxin, wearing illusion like a carapace.
The thing has taken on Tyro’s shape, rolling in linens and shrieking with laughter, like she used to back when she found her brother’s caricatures funny.
His chest aches as Dawn nudges the child-thing into the void.
“Keep searching,” Three says. “Nest’ll be around here somewhere.”
Guy paces the catwalk, torchlight weaving trellises of shadow from the stairways.
At one rounded end of the chamber he finds a stubborn streak of darkness, a silhouette that refuses to move with his torch.
He squints. A dozen paces below him, concealed in the septic mist, a fissure runs through the wood.
Carefully, he pulls a grenade from his bandolier and tosses it.
It detonates in a puff of phytothrin. The crack swells, creaks, and expels a mass of insects.
“Impeccable eye, Moulène.” Three appears beside him, leaning on the handrail and examining the net of rusty beams around them.
Guy, the lightest of the group, recognizes a familiar calculation in her eyes.
He tenses when she kneels, pulling her ropes and clips from her auxiliary pouch.
“Well, go on,” she laughs, snapping one to his belt. “Finders keepers.”
As they lower Guy toward the fissure, ancient metal squealing at his weight, he rolls a pearl of wisdom around in his mouth. He can’t remember which oyster it had come from, but he guesses it might be Vrenecker’s Platitudes in F Maximum.
“‘Cursed is the eye that wanders,’” he sings into his respirator.
“What’s that?” Three calls from above him.
“Halt! Here!”
Metal whines, and he lurches downward, jerking to a stop before the crack.
He grips his ropes, ensures each is clipped safely at his waist, and probes elbow-deep into the wood.
Soft with rot, the fissure is easy to pull apart—a few heartfelt tugs and he wrenches a splintered slab away, revealing an infested recess.
A cloud of dust and verminous exudate follows.
He coughs, rattles his most troublesome filter, and lifts his torch to the alcove.
It’s the width of his apartment, crawling with at least a dozen familiar species.
Most are benign: the ubiquitous Whittleston termite, bushels of devilvine, spore-spraying blast mice.
A few chimera millipedes scurry among them, dripping with psychotropic toxin.
It’s an ugly infestation, for sure, but not ugly enough to lose his eyes over.
“Apologies, gentlemen,” he mutters. He adjusts the stops on his cannulas—phosphates for the millipedes, holy water for the devilvine, a dash of neem for luck—and sweeps his nozzle over the swarm.
As the alchemical cloud swallows the recess, his victims dive for cracks, releasing a chorus of squeaks.
Guy shrugs off a shiver. Four years in this business and he still flinches at the suffering of pests.
Adults, larvae, plant, animal, fungus, all the usual hybrids of each, he leaves nothing untouched.
“Down to the last egg!” Eir Borisch likes to holler into the barracks’ sap-powered announcement system, usually at night, and usually after enjoying a few glasses of Dagdrun ’88 at his desk.
“No son of my father leaves a job unfinished!”
As the swarm thins, the recess takes shape in his torchlight, a diorama of rotting splinters and fungus.
Guy replaces his nozzle, allowing the fumigant to disperse, and slides into the alcove.
Among the sewer-fox droppings and silver frass, he finds an abundance of nesting materials: discarded newspaper, moth-eaten textiles, a small marble likeness of a saint, her face cracked and scraped as if by teeth.
He supposes the cavern may have once been a refuge for a mad prophet, or an escapee from Strangleroot.
A shadow sweeps across his vision. He turns to the farthest wall of the alcove, adjusting his nozzle to clear whatever remains of the swarm, but stays his hand.
The wall is moving—not with the rustling of a thousand pests, but with a synchronous lurch.
His stomach turns when he pieces together that he is not looking at many tiny movements, but a single large one.
Segments of an exoskeleton roll by him, slowly at first, like the windowless cars of a departing train. Chest tight, feet tethered, he stares at what he is increasingly sure will be his abrupt end.
The centipedal body unfurls, impossibly long, impossibly armed.
Terga loosen along a spinous chain, each large enough to shield a warhorse.
A pair of thick legs appears, then another, then another, then another.
Bristles spiral along every surface, an uncanny carpet of iridescence rippling from the tip of its tail to its dark, eyeless head.
Two kinked antennae twitch as the creature turns toward him, segment by segment.
Its face opens. A black slit appears at the center and ripples agape, pulled apart by a stretching ring of mandibles.
Mucus slings between the rims of its mouth, an inverted funnel terminating in a round void of a throat.
Something like breath wheezes through it, and Guy hears the first tremolo of the overture to Larbella.
His gasp unsticks from his lungs. His legs snap into motion, and he stumbles toward the open shaft, raising his pesticide nozzle and twisting open the cannulas with shaking hands. “Up!” he cries over the roaring sewage. “Up, Three!”
The creature follows, weaving between fungal stalks and broken porcelain.
From the depths of its face-funnel, a long tongue unfolds—or something like a tongue, barbed and dripping and thick as Guy’s arm.
It spirals toward him, unfurling from a base slick with glands, too close, too clear in the sputtering light of his dropped torch.
A canister thumps into his emergency barrel just as his heel finds the lip of the fissure.
The soft rot gives under his weight, and he tips into empty air.
His nozzle cracks, and a canister spins toward the creature, swallowing the alcove in sulfur.
A dark streak whips through the haze. Something snaps taut at his temple—his rope, a respirator tubule, the skin of his ear.
Pain shoots across his face, a high-pitched ring vibrating down to his jaw, the back of his neck, resonant as a struck chord.
Fumigants flood his mask, burning his lips, his mouth, his scrunched eyes.
There is a moment of stillness as he falls, inverted and weightless.
Then, he swings, and his back meets something hard.
Blind, deafened, he rolls to a stop and gropes for his nozzle, for his knife, for a handhold.
He is still groping when a pair of mandibles wraps around him, heaving him limp and helpless into the solid warmth of a mouth.
He tries to cry out, to call for help. He wants to curse the monster, to die with an insult on his lips—but the most he can manage is a feeble, horrified laugh.
His mother was right. He’s going to die in a gutter.
Like his father, but instead of a pair of fabric shears to the back, it’ll be a bug bite.
And Tyro—poor Tyro will be livid at his wake.
When his thumb name is spoken thrice and the lunar priests dump him—or whatever pieces of him can be found—into the Catoptric, she’ll scream and wail and kick.
And when it’s over, when he joins his fallen coworkers at the bottom of the toxic river, a new hire will inherit his iron-vine suit, and she will inherit his debts.
That image alone motivates him to struggle.
He won’t let the thought of her ink-blackened arms be his last. He won’t consider the marks spreading from her wrists, proliferating as she grows, new loans taken on to pay back the last, and the last, and the last, elbow to shoulder, neck to ankle, until they have to shave her head to make room for more debt, moving to her lips, her tongue, the whites of her eyes, the soft beds of her fingernails—
Eyes clamped shut, deafened by the ringing in his ear, Guy squeezes his aching ribs, pushing out the last of his breath. He squirms, striking out when some sort of appendage hooks under the straps of his mask.
A hand catches his wrist, and his helmet comes away in a puff of iridescent gas.
He gasps, coughing out the last of Borisch & Sons’ Proprietary Aerosolized Formulation, and his senses realign.
The mandibles around his chest soften to Dawn’s arms. Tyro’s debt ink flattens to harmless, crosshatched catwalks.
The musical stridulation of the creature fades with each throb of his ear.
“Talk to me, Guylag,” Dawn says.
“Shit, Moulène.” Three appears over Dawn’s shoulder. “You dead?”
“Dead—enough,” Guy coughs. “That thing—big one.”
“What thing?”
“You didn’t see it?” He hesitates. “Bigger than a horse. Several horses. Streetcars.”
“Cute,” Three mutters. “Guylag’s seeing dragons. Check his pupils, Corporal.”
“It was—”
“He’s bleeding.” Dawn tilts Guy’s ear toward the light. “He hit his head.”
“Well then, hit it again,” Three says. “See if you can’t rattle his brains back into place.”
“It had some sort of stinger,” Guy says. “Shit, it stung me.” Instinct pulls his hand to his ear, but Three catches his dirty glove.
“Let me see.” Her wooden hand clamps over his wrist, while the other brushes aside his curls and spreads open the wound. “Well, something did. Chimera, probably. No wonder you’re yapping bugshit.”
“It wasn’t a chimera,” he rasps.
“Whatever it is, it’s not there now.” Three pulls out her canteen, uncorking it over his ear.
“So as far as we’re concerned, job’s finished.
And the only way to unfinish it is to check.
We don’t want to tarnish Borisch’s stellar reputation, do we?
” She caps her bottle. “We’ll stitch this shut later. ”
“Captain,” Dawn starts, “we should take him to the infirmary.”
Guy shivers. Policy dictates he present his injuries to the exiled veterinarian who acts as Borisch & Sons’ company physician, but there is little point.
For most stings, like other occupational exposures, either no treatment is needed, or no treatment will work.
Prognoses are reached when Dr. Nic shuts her eyes and flings her scalpel at a painted gameboard.
“We could,” Three sighs, “if he wants to file an incident report. And with all his contract violations—”
“No,” Guy says. “No report.”
“That’s the spirit. Now, pull your ass together.” She hauls him to his feet. “You’ll be fine. Never saw a chimera kill anyone. You’re gonna want to die in an … about an hour or so, but you won’t. Probably.”
“Captain,” Dawn says. He lays his hand against the nape of Guy’s neck and gives a firm squeeze, steadying him as he once did when they were errand runners, when the slightest stumble might’ve sent him flailing into the Catoptric.
“Honestly, worst poison in there is BSPAF,” Three says.
“Hose him down. I’ll squeeze Nic for some nightshade—Dawn, keep an eye on him tonight.
See if he starts leaking out both ends and talking to ghosts.
Don’t let him follow any visions. Can’t have him running off a bridge chasing his dead ma, like Matteson. ”
“Captain,” Dawn mutters.
Guy’s head swims, pain vibrating through his ear. “I’m fine,” he rasps.
“He’s in your charge, soldier.” She clasps Dawn’s shoulder, and her gold tooth glints. “Try not to let him croak. And if he does, at least make sure he doesn’t leave a mess.”