“You need me, to talk to Dr. Wishart. To get through, beneath. I’m the one plugged into Mutant Central.”
She had heard them, all of them, talking, he realized. But had she forgotten, was she unaware of her imprisonment in the attic?
The others were silent, empty of suggestion. Wilma drew Cal away from Tina, out of earshot.
“I can’t tell you what to do. That child, though… she has a gift. Maybe she has it for a reason.”
“If that thing gets hold of her-” Cal protested.
“Something’s got hold of a lot of children in this town. They’re dying of it.” Wilma sighed. “I can’t tell you, but I can ask: Give all those other children their chance.”
Her hand in his was warm in the night air, and weightless. A dragonfly, Tina flowed beside him toward the Wishart house. The light about her had returned, its pastel mists veiling her.
At the perimeter of the gouged, ravaged front yard, Cal halted and released her hand. The scattered, butchered remains of the grunters lay cold and insensate among the weeds.
Deliberately, Cal drew his sword and stuck it point first into the damp earth. Then he unclasped his belt and scabbard, laid them alongside it. He straightened and looked at his sister, into the sapphire flame of her eyes, saw her disquiet and her resolve. He took her hand, turned back toward the house.
“Dr. Wishart, please. We need to talk with you.”
He had tried for a normal tone, but his voice sounded harsh to his ears, invasive. He tensed, waiting. But all was stillness, save for the cicada hum.
We’re not going to hurt you. Cal aimed the thought toward the house, made a mantra of it. He pressed away what Wishart had tried to do to him, locked his fear behind a door in his mind.
He took a hesitant step onto the ruined lawn.
NO. The word, forceful and blunt, came at them. Cal flinched, and he saw Tina wince with it, wondered how much louder it seemed to her.
The body pieces of what had once been the sons and husbands and fathers of the town did not stir. Warily, Cal moved past them and, with Tina, climbed the broken steps of the porch.
In the porch, the battered, bloodstained corpses of the books heaved and fluttered as if blown by a breath but did not fly at them. There was a sound, a deep creaking groan, like the whole house shifting on its timbers. A sense of watching, of waiting, rose from the walls, from the air about them.
They crossed the porch, stepped through the place where the kitchen door had been torn from its hinges, and entered the house.
Wilma had finally gotten the Russian doctor to agree to lie down, but only when she had positioned her sofa by the front window so that he could monitor the progress of Griffin and his sister toward the Wishart house. Under his guidance, Wilma had redressed his wound-the impromptu bandage was soaked through-and washed the blood from his face, the doctor all the while protesting impatiently. But now, at last, he lay quiet and watchful.
Wilma glanced out the window, saw that Griffin and his sister had crossed the Wishart porch with nothing rising to bar their way. A promising first step. She said a silent prayer as they vanished into the house.
Wilma stepped onto her own porch. Goldman and the Brooks woman stood rigid, gazing toward the Wishart house, seeing only darkness, hearing only the vague sounds of the fading night.
Pausing behind them, Wilma caught a scent on the air, or thought she did, distant and elusive, of coal and earth and blood, heard a soft rustling in the woods that might have been wind. It brought Hank to her thoughts. Since they had been attacked, since he had thrown himself at the grunters and yelled for her to run, she had heard nothing of him, seen no sign. Had they killed him? Or had he managed, through the ferocity of his attack and his fleetness, to get away?
She had seen no blood at the site, and that had heartened her. But thinking on it now, it seemed strange. Hank had been outnumbered, surrounded. Surely they would have drawn some of his blood, or he theirs. In all their previous attacks, they had proven unrelentingly murderous. If they spared him, what possibly could have been their motive?
Puzzling over it, Hank’s struggled words came back to her. They know I led the men out of the mines, they’re looking to me to-
To what?
And then, with a chilling certainty she could not have explained, Wilma thought she knew.
To lead them.
Hank, with his cool head and audacious nerve, his relentlessness and grit. The voice in his head had been working on him, striving to fill him with an irresistible desire to kill Bob Wishart. What if it had overwhelmed him at last, as it had Joe Rance and Eddie Dayton and the others like him? But more than that, what if Hank-who alone had kept his wits about him even as he changed and had led his team, what remained of them, to the surface and safety-what if Hank retained his ability to strategize?
Not for him the unreasoning frontal attack doomed to failure. No, he would watch and wait for his moment, until the dark intelligence in the house was distracted, its attention focused on. .
Other visitors.
The scent was stronger, unmistakable now, wafting from the trailer park that bordered both her home and the Wisharts. And the sound, louder and most definitely not the wind.
Wilma stepped in front of Goldie and Colleen, both unaware of what was urgently, oppressively clear to her.
“We’ve got trouble,” she said.
GET OUT GET OUT. It came like a blow, and Cal stepped back. Tina’s fingers closed tight around his, and he felt her trembling. In its corner, the refrigerator jerked threateningly. Cupboard doors slammed in manic rage, their contents long since smashed to nothing.
GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT.
“Can you reach him, Tina?” Cal fought not to shout over the shriek in his mind.
“I’m trying.” She struggled to get the words out, a pulse twitching at the corner of her eye, her breath coming in short gasps. “But there’s something else in here pulling at me.”
He could hear the panic in her voice, and he tried to will into her what calm he retained. Whether coincidence or not, she seemed to gather strength. She closed her eyes and concentrated, her feet drifting down to graze the floor.
The scream in his mind eased back.
The refrigerator quivered and was still. The cupboards lapsed into silence. They walked forward more quickly now, into the lightless pit of the hallway, the faint illumination that radiated from Tina’s flesh magnified eerily by the dust.
The door of the far bedroom on the left was shut, blue-green light leaking out along its frame.
We’re not going to harm you, we’re not-
From the edge of his vision, Cal caught the blur of a dark object hurtling toward them. Tina saw it, too; her aura flared up to field it.
“Don’t,” Cal called to her. She caught his meaning-do nothing that might be perceived as a threat-and faded her aura back, rendering it insubstantial. Cal blocked the object, a black Bakelite telephone, with his forearm. Pain shot up his arm as the phone rebounded, bounced off a wall and lay motionless.
There was a quaking beneath his feet, he could hear cracks splintering along the walls on either side of him, and the whole house seemed to moan.
You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe, but Cal could feel fear rising to engulf the universe, and he felt his own fear in answer.
In the flickering light of Tina’s glow, Cal could see the picture frames lurching and slamming against the walls to get free, the carpeting tearing itself up. Tina was shaking, her hair whipping about as in a gale. Her eyes were huge, desperate, as she strained to stay focused amid the assault of clashing wills.
“Cal-Cal-I-!”
And then it was as if something deep within the house snapped, and there was a roaring that went on and on. The dead bulb in the fixture overhead ruptured, spewing glass. Cal instinctively moved to shield his sister. Picture frames tore free, and yellow pages shuddered up and catapulted at them. He batted them aside wildly, shouting. Then he felt a tingling on hi
s skin and his eyes were dazzled as Tina’s luminescence flared out to enfold him, and relief and disappointment flooded him.
Magazines reared like hawks, struck the incandescence and were rebuffed, a side table came swinging up to shatter. Medicine bottles launched themselves, exploded against the barrier; pills and glass shrapneled against the bubble and fell back.
And over the deafening fear-rage bellow, another noise, rumbling from deep within the walls, a cracking, crashing, ripping nightmare of a sound. Chunks of plaster burst from the wall, and a thick timber shot out of the opening, piercing Tina’s barrier. It caught her a glancing blow on the side of the head, like a giant flicking a finger. She cried out and crumpled, her radiance damping down to nothing, leaving them defenseless.
The very air seemed to vibrate with triumph as the onslaught intensified, a cannonade of pens and paperweights and metal trays raining down on them. Cal fell on his sister, covering her with his body, taking the brunt of it. An aluminum medicine cart crashed into him, a heavy wall clock, a radio. He cried out at the spiderweb agony of cracking ribs. Doors along each wall were flinging themselves open and shut, laboring to tear themselves from their hinges. A bookcase tumbled toward him, scattering heavy volumes and figurines, which tore and shattered yet still bounded forward to expend their fury on him.
Cal curled into a tight ball around his sister, unmoving beneath him, and he knew it was the end and there was nothing he could do. One of the doors shrieked loose and cartwheeled through the air, smashing down on him with mad exultation, and he screamed, and in the scream was the entirety of his failure and his love and how he would give anything, do anything to save her, to consume himself and all the world if only, only-
Oh God oh God oh God, for God’s sake, please, please, please, don’t hurt her!
And in the deafening silence that followed, he couldn’t say whether he had screamed it or just thought it.
But the response was immediate, as all the objects dropped lifeless to the carpet, the quivering of floor and walls and ceiling halted, and the dust hung mute in the air.
Beneath him, Tina was breathing in quick gasps, moaning softly. Cal rose, pushing the heaped debris and remnant of door aside. The motion sent white-hot needles coursing up his side, and he nearly blacked out. But he inhaled slowly, pushed the vertigo down.
Bending stiffly, hissing against the pain, Cal took his sister’s hands. She was conscious, breathing more evenly now. He helped her to her feet, and she rose shakily, floated up off the floor, glimmering once more.
Slices of misty, first dawn light filtered in through the frame whose door had ripped free and the others where doors hung ajar. Only the far door on the left remained shut, the ghost light seeping along its edges. Tina opened her mouth to frame a question, but Cal motioned her to silence. She leaned in to him, and he put his arm around her as they advanced.
His feet crunching on shards of glass and plastic and ceramic, he stepped to the door, reached for the knob. But before he could grasp it, the door swung open.
Like some lost city of scrap metal amid the wild, the trailer park loomed, silent and dark. Several of the elderly residents had gone missing weeks ago, with hideous gashes in the sides of their motor homes the only indication of what had happened to them. The rest had moved in with friends and relations, where light and numbers kept the night things at bay.
Moving quickly, Goldie and Colleen at her side-Doc having been ordered to stay behind-Wilma could sense the grunters on the other side of the trailers, coming fast toward the Wishart house, could hear their low, eager exhalations.
Too late, Wilma spied the rock hurled from behind a tree, wasn’t fast enough to reach Colleen. It struck the lantern she carried, shattering it, quenching its light.
Then the grunters were on them, more than Wilma would have thought possible, oozing from the brush and low branches, from beneath rusty Winnebagos and corroded Airstreams. A hard, compact form dropped on her from atop one of the dented aluminum structures, and she was rolling with it on the mossy ground as it tore hissing at her. She scratched at its eyes, drove it shrieking away. She cast about in the blur of bodies for her companions, saw them amid the surging, growling forms, flailing wrench and staff and forcing the grotesques back.
But then two more of the devils came at her, and another butted his head into her stomach, and she was dragged down gasping, their fists pummeling her, one of them grabbing her throat. She twisted, tried to claw at them, but their weight was pressing her into the earth, she couldn’t catch her breath, felt herself giving way, the stink of them close on her, their laughter filling her ears.
And then the smell of blood was everywhere, and the taut, heaving grunter on top of her collapsed, hot liquid spilling over her face, and she was released, the other two squealing, running away. A hand reached down to her, and she seized it, climbed to her feet.
The sword he held was still clotted with earth from where it had been plunged into the dirt in front of the Wishart house.
“Sorry to disobey your orders,” Doc said.
Wilma grinned, but there was no time for words, as beyond the press of bodies, she spied a familiar, darting form.
Hank, unmistakably. On the move with a chunk of concrete in his hand, giving low, growling orders, rallying his followers as he vaulted past the others. Rolling and regaining his footing, running as he had as a boy; no, even faster.
Toward the Wishart house.
And Wilma, bounding with her uncanny feline grace, was after him.
Bob Wishart lay immobile on the bed, his eyes closed, still connected to a maze of wires and tubes and useless, dark machinery. Beside him stood his brother, lightly resting a protective hand on Bob in much the same way, Cal realized, that he had his own hand on his sister’s thin shoulders.
Dr. Fred Wishart looked as he had in the flash Cal had glimpsed earlier: pale, translucent, with little indication of the power he wielded. But Cal could see that the tiny flashes of light that made up Wishart’s skin were continually flickering out and reflaring, as if he were in a constant state of disintegration and rebirth, photon by photon. The mighty effort he was expending was consuming him; it took the fuel of the entire town to keep him from being extinguished.
It was he, not the Source, feeding on Boone’s Gap.
Dr. Wishart’s gaze followed them as they entered the room, and there was that same desperate fierceness Cal had seen before, with a new, indefinable note tempering it. Power murmured and flickered in the corners of the room, blue lines of what looked like fire creeping across the floor, slow-moving greenish mists oozing from the walls.
Wishart turned to his twin, spoke in a voice surprisingly melodic and gentle. “Bob?” Cal saw that the two were breathing in unison.
Bob’s eyes fluttered open. Fred nodded toward the doorway, toward him and Tina. Bob turned his head dreamily to them. Barely conscious, hardly moving, he seemed held by a whisper.
“There, you see?” Dr. Wishart said. “No harm.”
Bob looked relieved, and Cal was again struck by the difference between the brothers, the difference that had been branded on them before the Change, before they were grown. The frantic, anguished moment in the hall came to Cal, his despair to save his sister, who knew him best, whom he loved above all. And he understood that it was his need that had spoken to the minds of the unseen twins, had moved Fred to relent, to spare them. . for Bob’s sake, for his gentler nature.
And how much did Bob know of the rest?
Cautiously, Cal inched farther into the room with Tina. “You haven’t told him?” he asked Dr. Wishart. “He doesn’t know about the others?”
Fred Wishart’s gaze darkened. Bob looked at him, perplexed.
“It’s nothing,” Fred told him, too quickly. But his brother’s eyes remained on him, inquiring. “I’m not strong enough. I’m just borrowing from some of the people here. . to keep you alive, to keep us together.”
And killing your neighbors, the people you grew up
with, who never did you harm. Cal wanted to hate him, this monster who had mutilated those wretches on the lawn and in the fog, who was even now draining the life from the old and the young and the weak.
But drawing his sister closer to him, holding her there, Cal found he could not.
Cal heard Tina’s soft voice. “You’re killing the town, everyone in it, to keep this going.”
“Fred?” Bob’s voice was tender and mournful, a parched croak, long unused. “Fred, we can’t. .”
“No, Bobby. If I let go, you’ll die-”
“But Fred. .”
Fred’s crystalline-bright eyes flashed on Cal and Tina, and Cal felt himself assailed by a blast of thought. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU DON’T KNOW.
Bob’s troubled gaze, briefly on Cal, returned to his brother. Fred reacted as though to a caress. Damping his anger, he said, “The world-something. . happened. More important than-”
Fred Wishart froze for a moment, buffeted by some internal war he alone was privy to. He continued, ever so gently, “I let go, I’m destroyed, too. Something bad needs me-to be whole. . ”
Bob turned his head on his pillow, looked pleadingly at Cal. “Please. Tell me. What’s happening here?”
Again, thought crashed into Cal, guilty, frantic, desperate, justifying, words all tumbled and overlapping, a jumbled mea culpa and defense. PURE RESEARCH CHANGED OBJECTED CHANGED DEVIL’S BARGAIN CHANGED ME CHANGED NO CHANGE LOVE BOB LOVE NO-
Cal looked at Bob, trying to steady himself, trying to focus through the screaming in his mind.
Desperation-driven, panic-driven madness, Cal could empathize with. But in the face of this howling self-justification, everything in Cal rebelled.
“You should know,” Cal’s low voice trembled, every word a fierce battle, “You have a choice. You have a-”
NO NO NO.
It thundered in Cal’s brain, the room itself shaking, tortured, accusatory.
NO TELL NO BLOCKING DOORWAY BLOCKING HOLDING CLOSED CAN’T OPEN SWALLOW WHOLE SWALLOW ME I CEASE WHO WHAT I AM MONSTER.
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