Ultimate Thriller Box Set - Crouch Blake - Страница 27

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“Huuuuungry. Need sheeeeep.”

“Are sheep what you'd normally eat?” Sun asked. “Before you were able to talk, I could only guess.”

“Sheeeeeep are goooood.”

Sun had opened the small door and pushed the sheep through. Bub snatched it up in his claw and quickly snapped its neck.

“Bub, sometimes when you eat the sheep, you kill it and bring it back to life,” Sun said. “How do you do this?”

Bub continued to twist the sheep's head until it came off like a bottle cap. He sucked on the neck stump, tilting the body up as if it were a giant beer.

“Seeeeeeeecret,” Bub said, gurgling from the liquid in his mouth. Some of the blood ran out of the corner and matted his chest hair.

“Can you do it now?” Sun asked.

“Yesssss.”

Bub held the sheep's headless carcass tightly to his chest. A minute passed, and then the animal's legs began to twitch and buck. Bub dropped it to the ground, and the sheep took off in a sprint and rammed full speed into the Plexiglas barrier. It hit with a large crash, smearing the glass with blood.

The sheep righted itself, shook, then ran again, this time barreling into one of the artificial trees.

Bub croaked with baritone laughter. The sheep's head, still in his claw, opened and closed its mouth in silent protest, its eyes darting back and forth.

“Baa-aaa,” Bub said, imitating the sheep's sound. He held the head in front of him like a hand puppet. “Baa-aaa.”

Sun had to steel herself and hoped she hadn't lost composure. A glance at Dr. Belgium found him ashen, and Andy had a look on his face that predicted vomiting.

“Thank you, Bub,” Sun said in metered tones. “That's enough.”

Bub tossed the sheep's head into his mouth like a piece of popcorn. It continued to squirm while being munched on. His other claw shot out and grazed the runaway sheep body. It’s belly unzipped, intestines winding out like a firehouse. The demon grabbed a handful and shoveled them in.

“Goooood,” Bub said.

“I've got to stop coming here during mealtime,” Andy said, clutching his stomach.

The demon cocked his head to the side, appearing confused.

“Are you sick, Aaaaaandy?”

“No, Bub. It’s just that your eating habits are a little... distressing.”

“You wanted to seeeeee.”

Andy was looking greener and greener, so Sun answered. “We want to learn from you, Bub, but we have a culture gap. Some things that you do aren't done in our culture, so we don't know how to react to them.”

Bub jumped up to the Plexiglas, holding the sheep. Sun hadn't seen him jump before. The leap was over fifteen feet, and Bub landed hard enough to make the ground rumble. He yanked off one of the sheep's hind legs and held it to his chest. It began to twitch and then bend at the knee back and forth.

“Eeeeeach part is aliiiiive,” Bub said.

“The little parts are called cells.”

“Cells,” Bub repeated. “When the body dieeeeees, the cells still live for some tiiiiiime. I can maaaaake them think the body is still aliiiiiiive.”

“How?” Sun asked.

Bub held the twitching leg up for Sun to see. It was no longer bleeding—in fact, it looked as if it had healed.

“God,” Bub said. “I have pooooowers from God.”

Sun asked, “Can we have that leg so we can study it?”

Bub cocked his head to the side and appeared to think it over.

“Yessssssss.” Bub walked over to the sheep door and squatted, waiting. Sun took a breath and forced herself to move. She unlatched the door and Bub thrust the leg through it, stump first. Sun held it with both hands. It was heavy, and she felt the muscle fibers in the thigh contract and expand, exactly as if the sheep were alive.

“Ressurrrrrrrrrrection,” Bub said.

After he said it, the sheep's leg contracted and the hoof missed her head by inches. On reflex she dropped it, and it flopped around on the floor like a landed fish.

Bub laughed.

Sun fought the surrealism of the scene and bent over, this time grabbing the leg by the hoof. She walked it over to Dr. Belgium, who was watching the whole episode slack-jawed.

“Can you take some blood samples? Tissue and marrow too?”

Belgium seemed reluctant to touch the leg, but consented and held it by the hoof as Sun had. The leg jerked wildly, and Belgium dropped it. He and Sun bent down for it, and Belgium got a firmer, two handed grip.

“I'll be in Red 5,” Belgium said, indicating the lab. He walked off, holding the leg at arm's length of his body.

“Do you want moooore? I could maaake the organs moooove.”

Andy's hand clamped over his face and he went from green to white.

“Thank you, Bub,” Sun said. “There's no need for any more right now.”

Bub nodded, then went back to eating. “You okay?” Sun asked, rubbing Andy's back.

“I'm becoming a vegetarian,” he replied.

Bub's munching sounds in the background made Andy gag again.

“Do we have any children's videos on table manners?” Sun asked.

Andy gave her a weak grin.

Behind the Plexiglas barrier, Bub grinned as well.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“I need more Internet tiiiiiiiiiime,” Bub told Dr. Belgium when he returned from Red 5. Sun and Andy had left.

“I don't think that's a good idea,” Belgium answered. His Adam's apple wobbled up and down in his throat.

“I muuuuuust learn moooore.”

Belgium laughed, high pitched and near hysterical. “You're joking! You went through the entire website of the Encyclopedia Britannica in an hour and a half. You can process information faster than it loads.”

“Open the dooooor,” Bub said. “Let meeeee oooooout.”

“I don't think...”

“I’ll tell Raaaaace,” Bub interrupted.

“What? Are you blackmailing me?”

“Fraaaaaank,” Bub said softly, the trace of a purr in his voice. “I need more tiiiiiime to seeeeequence my geeeeenome.”

Belgium said nothing.

“Don’t you want to leeeeave heeeere, Fraaaaank?”

Belgium pictured himself, in a boat on a lake, a rod in his hand, the sun in his eyes. He hadn't fished since he was in grade school, but right now it seemed like the most appealing thing in the world.

He hit the code to Bub's door. It rose pneumatically and the demon folded his wings and left his habitat for the second time that day. He squatted next to Dr. Belgium and gave him a pat on the head, which Frank recoiled from.

“Gooooood, Fraaaaaank.”

Frank ducked down, away from the hand. The claws grazed his scalp. It was like a hairbrush made of needles.

“You maaaay goooooo,” Bub said, lumbering over to the Cray computer.

Belgium squatted and stayed put, watching as Bub hunched over his workstation. The keyboard was like a pocket calculator to Bub, the monitor must have been like looking at a digital watch. Belgium laughed. It reminded him of an old cartoon, where an elephant moved into a mouse's house, dwarfing everything to comic proportions.

Using the tip of his pinky claw, Bub accessed the ISP and began to surf the World Wide Web. Samhain's Internet connection was fiber-optic. The load times were instantaneous. Bub's hand became a blur, as did the monitor. It seemed impossible that Bub could be absorbing all of that information that fast, but Belgium knew that he was.

He tried to think of all the reasons this was bad. Why shouldn't Bub be allowed to learn about the world he was in? Think of the things he could teach us, the bridges he could gap, the mysteries he could solve. Bub could be the key to solving all of the world's problems; disease, hunger, war, death. Bub could create a utopia.

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