Equoid

The roof beams creak, as if something vast is adjusting its weight distribution. “Shub. Shub. Glurp. Daddy, it wants me to talk to you. Daddy? Will you come up here?”

I swallow bile and tense my leg muscles to flee. “No,” I say.

“Shub! Shub! Shub!” The thing with Ada in the attic, the thing working her vocal cords, booms at me, a menacing rumble. Obviously, it’s not happy about its latest self-propelled snack refusing to follow the lure upstairs. I use the rumbling as my cue to unhook the sample jars and look around. Her spawn crawls over the woodpile, near the dead and half-eaten troopers. Tiny horses and cone snails, swarming and chewing. I swallow again. Look sideways: near the door, a handful of snail shells crushed by boots. Survivors inch across the floor around them. I crouch down and use my forceps to take living samples, one per glass-walled tube. Snail, horse, snail, horse. They go back into the crush-resistant fiberglass box and I lock it and sling it over my shoulder.

That’s what I’m really here for, you know. It was pretty clear that this was a zero-survivor situation once Alan confirmed that brick three was missing. But anything I can learn from the Queen…

“We have met before,” the Queen says through Ada’s childish larynx.

“Have we?” I ask.

“You remember me. I was your Hetty. I said we would meet again. Isn’t that right? ”

My skin crawls. I begin to frame a reply, then stop. I was going to say something human, but: do not disclose operational intelligence to happy fun serial group mind horror. I try again: “You wake up each time: reincarnation, isn’t it? You find yourself fat and sleepy and spawning in a warm, food-rich place. And you remember who you were—who you are. Is that right?”

“I knew you would understand! Come close and you can join me.”

Bingo. “And you keep trying to do better each time, don’t you? What was the idea, this time?”

“Will you join me if I tell you? I will make you immortal and we will thrive and feed and dance joyous through the aeons—”

“Yes,” I lie.

“It has been so long since I have mated with another mind… Yes, you must join me! My idiot offspring eat their mother’s flesh and then their siblings, before they mate and grow sleek and strong and seek out a nest and settle down, and I awaken behind their eyes. One or two in each brood prosper that way. But I have worked out a way for more to survive to maturity. Join me, help me, and we will be fruitful and amplify and become myriad.”

“I don’t think so.” I can’t hold it back any more.

“Why won’t you—”

“Your last worker is on its way home to visit, carrying your last Renfield. But it’s not going to be allowed to get here, Shubby. We’re not going to let you distribute your spawn via the girls at St. Ninian’s. The school’s on lock-down, and they know what to search for. Acid baths, Shubby. Anything that looks like My Little Pony is going to take a one-way trip through an acid bath and a furnace on sight. Snails, too.”

A snarling animal scream cuts through the air behind me, from beyond the closed doors. It’s cut short by a harsh chatter of automatic gunfire.

The thing above me roars in existential pain and heaves its bulk up, then brings it smashing down on the ceiling. Paint dust and splinters fall and the light bulb shakes, the shadows flickering across the room. “My children! My beautiful future flesh! My babies! Traitor! I would have loved and cherished your memories forever!” The snails and tiny horses swarm on the skeletonizing remains of the dead soldiers. Another voice cuts through the cacophony: “Dadd-ee! Help me!”

I step back towards the door. I tap my throat mike and speak quietly: “Got samples. No—” I glance at the ladder—“survivors. Over.”

“Roger,” Alan says calmly. “Target neutralized in yard behind you. Come on out. We’re falling back now. Over.”

I throw myself backwards at the woodshed doors. The ceiling creaks and screeches and then begins to buckle, giving way and drooping from the edges of the loft stairwell opening. Something huge is pushing through from above, something like the rasp of a slug the size of a bus, iridescent and putrefying and bubbling with feculent slime. It vents a warbling roar, “ShubShubShub.” The door gives way behind me as I topple, getting a vague impression of writhing tentacles, a huge nodding eyeless horse-head, something like a broken doll impaled on a wooden stick—

Someone catches me and then I’m sprawling across a back as they pick me up and run across a farmyard, dodging around the fallen bulk of another of the horses from hell. I can see stars and a high overcast of cirrus whirling overhead as my rescuer pounds across the packed earth. Wall to one side, reflecting the livid glare of a burning building. “Get down!” someone shouts in my ear as he drops me on the ground in the lee of a drystone wall.

“Got it—” I scramble for cover as the incendiary fireworks surge overhead and the woodshed lights off with a whump I can feel in my bladder.

And then I lie there until Sergeant Howe gives everyone the all clear and sends a medic to look me over for triage, clutching the sample box like grim death and telling myself that it was all over for Ada Doom Edgebaston long before I walked through the woodshed door.

Because reincarnation only works for alien group mind horrors, doesn’t it?

Keep telling yourself that, Bob. Take your sample tubes back to R&D in London, leave the burning wreckage of the farm behind. Take your cold comfort where you can, and keep telling yourself that the nasty thing old HPL saw behind the woodshed was lying or mistaken, and that you’ll never meet it again.

Who knows? You might even be right…

HOME OFFICE

CONFIDENTIAL

Procurement Specification: HO/MPMU/46701

Date of Issue: May 3rd, 2006

Requirement for:

Enhanced-Mobility Operational Capability Upgrade Mounts for Police Mounted Units

It is becoming increasingly clear that in the 21^st century mounted police are seen as an anachronism by the public. Despite their clear advantages for crowd control and supervision of demonstrations and public sporting events, mounted operations are expensive to conduct, require extensive stabling and support infrastructure, and compete for resources with other specialist units (e.g. airborne, tactical firearms, scene of crime investigation).

This document contains the operational requirements for upgraded genetically engineered mounts that will enhance the capabilities and availability of our mounted officers…

Desirable characteristics:

Mounts should exhibit three or more of the following traits:

• Endurance in excess of 6 hours at 30 miles/hour over rough terrain (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

• Endurance in excess of 30 minutes at 50 miles/hour on metaled road surfaces (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

• Ability to see in the dark

• Ability to recognize and obey a controlled vocabulary of at least 20 distinct commands

• Invisible

• Bulletproof

• Carnivorous

• Flight (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

State of Requirement

CANCELLED September 5^th 2006

by Order of Cabinet Office in accordance with recommendation of SOE (X Division) Operational Oversight