Jerry shrugged his shoulders. He wondered if she'd heard him talking to the creature in the cell. If she had, he was embarrassed about it. No point hiding it, though. Last thing to do in a secret underground government facility was act suspiciously. "I was just chatting with Wolfie here."

Nessie raised an eyebrow and gave him a lopsided grin that was extremely cute. "Wolfie?"

"Yeah, better than calling him Lycanus Canini."

"I suppose you're right. Don't know who came up with all the names, but they do lack personality. Wolfie here can be quite playful. I smuggled a few chew toys in and he seems to like them. Don't tell the General, though. They don't get along."

Jerry smiled. He was glad there was at least one person looking out for Wolfie. "So, erm, is there anything I can help you with? I'd like to make myself useful around here."

Nessie chewed the side of her mouth and seemed to think. "You can help me do some research in the library, but I'm only going to be in there for an hour or so. Fatal Autonomy is on later and I never miss it."

Jerry laughed. He was surprised that someone so bookish could be a diehard fan of a flaky TV cop drama. "You actually like that show?"

Ness nodded enthusiastically. "I love it." She put her hands up in front of her. "I know I know, it's kind of lame, but I just find it fascinating. I hear they base the killers on real life psychopaths."

"I think that fat lady cop is annoying, but the private eye hero is pretty cool, I guess."

"I know. He's so... dark. I wonder if he's like that in real life."

"Do you do that, too?" Jerry asked. "Whenever I see a show I like, I wonder how they'd act in person. I mean, I know Bruce Willis doesn't kill terrorists for real, but I wonder if he really is tough and funny."

"I love Bruce Willis. I've seen the Die Hard movies a billion times."

"Or Sigourney Weaver."

"Aliens!" Nessie squealed. "That scene where she has Newt and they walk into the queen alien's nest, surrounded by hatching eggs. I could never be that brave."

"But here you are, surrounded by monsters. That's pretty brave."

Nessie blushed. "It's not the same."

"It's not the same because that was a movie, and you're really here. Seriously, how would your friends freak out if they knew you were giving chew toys to a giant wolf?"

Nessie's smile fell away, and she looked at her clipboard. "I, uh, am going to go watch my show now."

"Maybe I'll give the show another chance," said Jerry, feeling his mouth go dry but not knowing why. He also needed to go to the toilet real bad all of a sudden.

Nessie didn't say anything.

Tell her you want to come with.

Come on, chicken. Tell her!

"Mind if I, um, tag along, watch it with you?"

"Uh, yeah. Sure. There's a TV in the library. It's at the end of this floor. It's pretty cool, if you're into that kind of thing. Lots and lots of old, rare books."

"Sounds neat."

Neat? Lame! What am I, eight years old?

Nessie smiled. "Yeah, it's actually super neat. Come on. I'll lead the way."

Chapter Fifteen.

"What about co-existing peacefully?" Andy asked the demon.

For more than twenty minutes, he and Sun had been trying to get through Bub's surface malevolence, only to realize how deep the evil actually was.

"Nooooooo peeeeeace."

"You have the ability to heal, to resurrect. You could save millions."

"Humans are vermin. Doooooo you invite roaches to dine at yooooour taaaaable? Or doooo yoooooooooooou squaaaaaash them?"

Perturbed, Andy said, "Our species could learn from each other."

"Your speeeeeeecies will be myyyyyyyy slaves."

"So you say. But I can't help but notice that you're the one locked up."

"Foooooooor noooooooowwwww."

"You're really hung up on this evil trip, aren't you, Bub?" Sun asked.

"Eeeevil issssss subjective. There are twoooo opposing forcesssssss. Order and disorder. Both require enerrrrrgy."

"So you're disorder?"

"I am become death, the destroyer of wooorrrrrrrlds."

Andy recognized the odd-sounding quote. It was last said famously by Robert Oppenheimer, after creating the atomic bomb, quoting the Bhagavad Gita.

"But you can also create," Sun said, "and give life. They say a cheetah can't change its spots, but you literally can. Why the fatalism?"

Bub's body began to twist and contort, and he abruptly turned himself inside out in a spectacle of splitting skin and cracking bone and churning organs, blood and tissue exploding out in all directions. Then his body began to reassemble itself into something human.

Something human, and recognizable.

Bub had transformed himself into their friend, Dr. Frank Belgium.

"Frank?" Sun asked.

Frank blinked. He was nude, a thin sheen of blood covering him. "Andy?" he said. "Sun? Is is is that really you?"

"It's not Frank," Andy said, backing away. "It's a trick. Bub can change into things, remember?"

Frank put a bloody palm on the glass. "Sun, you know it's me? Right? We we we worked together a long time."

It looked and sounded exactly like Frank. It even copied his strange speech patterns. Andy's heart rate doubled, and he felt as if he'd been slapped.

"Why am I I I locked up?" Frank said. "And and and naked?"

Frank began to move his hands over his body, rubbing in the blood like moisturizing cream.

"You look so so so pretty, Sun."

Andy stepped away from the glass as the Frank thing began to stroke itself. Sun cleaved onto Andy's side.

"Let's get away from it," Sun whispered.

"NO!" Frank bellowed. He stretched out his arm, and then it bent backwards at the elbow with a sharp CRACK!

Both Sun and Andy gasped, and as Frank screamed in pain he held up his hand, fingers splayed out, and each digit bent back, as if an invisible hand was breaking them one by one.

Then his leg snapped at the femur, a ninety degree angle that made the bone burst through the skin.

Frank continued to masturbate as his left foot began to twist, crackling like a bag of chips, rotating a full three hundred and sixty degrees until the skin split. His screaming became interspersed with bits of hysterical laughter.

Then his eyes popped out and hung on his cheeks by the stringy optic nerves.

That was their cue to leave.

"You won't esssssscape me, Dennisonssssssss," the demon was back to using its normal voice. "You won't essssccccccaaaaaaape."

"That wasn't Frank," Andy told his bride as they hurried down the hall.

"I know."

"It's just Bub messing with our heads."

"I know."

"I still feel sick."

"Me, too."

Then they both bent over and puked breakfast onto the floor.

"What? Is married life that bad? There's still time for a quickie annulment."

Andy looked in the direction of the voice, and saw a cell occupied by a banana.

"Let's get out of here," Andy said.

"Don't leave," the banana replied. "We'll have a bunch of fun. Get it? Bunch? That is, until everyone here dies. Want to hear my maniacal laugh? Bwahahahahaha! EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE!!!!"

They took the elevator to level four, and ended up in the conference room.

Sergeant Rimmer was sitting at a long table, watching his computer monitor while texting on his pager. Andy glanced at the screen and saw it showed live security camera feeds from several cells in the Spiral, including Bub's.

"I saw what that demon just did," Rimmer said. "You two okay?"

"Yeah," Andy said, still feeling sick.

"Did you learn anything new?"

"A banana insulted our marriage," Sun said. "Then told us we're all going to die."

"Oh. Mu." Rimmer shook his head. "He's some sort of multidimensional being. Supposedly can be everywhere at once, throughout all of spacetime and the multiverse. At least, that's what he says. He came in with a shipment of fresh produce and started insulting everybody. Teased Nessie to tears. We put him on subbasement 5 because no one likes him. I guess you could say he's fruit gone bad."

"Is he dangerous?"

"I don't think he's harmed anyone, physically. But some of his jabs are pretty pointed. He'd be really good doing one of those celebrity roasts."

Andy changed the subject. "Other than General Kane being bitten by the wolf, have there been any other problems at the facility?"

"No. Hasn't been a serious security breach on my watch for almost five years."

"How long have you been here?" Andy asked.

"Almost five years."

"So what did you do before that?"

"I was a Sergeant in the Army Rangers. On the ground during the invasion of Iraq."

"How did you end up here?"

"Stumbled upon something I shouldn't have."

Andy leaned forwards. "Really? Care to share?" He was less interested in the story and more interesting in getting the image of Frank Belgium out of his head.

Rimmer put down his pen and looked up at them. "I suppose I can tell you. Not that I particularly enjoy telling it."

Sun and Andy said nothing.

So Rimmer continued. "My unit was in the south-western Iraqi desert near Rutba. We were looking for a chemical weapons processing plant that Intel told us was in the area. We had managed to flip a guy in the Republican Guard. He'd explained that Saddam had several WMDs ready to launch the very moment he was declared dead or captured-kind of like a dead man's switch. One of the Army's primary objectives was ensuring that this was not true, or neutralising the devices in the case that it was. The plant south of Rutba was our first and only lead. We didn't want Saddam to know that we were on to his plan, so command sent in three Ranger units. My unit was in the area directly south of Rutba. So far we'd found nothing but desert, but we had an itinerary and we weren't going to bug-out until we hit every point on our map. But when a sandstorm came in, it ruined our radio equipment and left us all turned around on ourselves. I could have gone north towards the road and called the mission in as a bust, but I made the decision to keep heading south instead. We were in the middle of the desert, a perfect place to hide a facility. Turns out I was right."

"You found the chemical plant?" Sun asked.