The Forbidden Zone

by Whitley Strieber

  "Jesus," Brian cried.

  Lizzie's body surged in Bob's arms. "What the hell?"

  Grabbing her by the hair, Ellen yanked the child clear of him and hurled the wet, breaking mass of her as far away as she could. The force broke the carcass open and they came pouring out, swarming, their wings buzzing, their red legs scrabbling.

  Bob lurched back, astonished, then horrified. He gagged, frantically brushing his chest.

  "Evidence," Brian cried, "it's evidence!" He plunged toward the mass of insects. But the father's long left arm whipped around, and suddenly Brian was confronting one of those clawed hands in the light of day.

  All of them ran out of the woods and across the bordering meadow, and dove into their cars. "It's evidence," Brian moaned, but he started the engine as the hand swarmed out of the woods and the insects followed in a mass as cohesive as a jelly, dashing toward them like a shark in air. They took off at full speed toward Ludlum and safety.

  "They were trying to get away," Loi said. She looked down the road. "They also knew."

  "Don't anybody panic!" Ellen's own voice told her that she was about to do just that. Loi heard it, too, and touched her shoulder, a gesture Ellen found curiously reassuring.

  She cried a little bit as the car moved down the road. In the front seat Loi sat stiffly erect, staring out the windshield. They climbed a hill, and the tires complained around a sharp curve. The forest was thicker here, drawn close to the road on both sides. They drove in its dense shade.

  Without warning Ellen was thrown forward, her head hitting the back of Lois seat. "Brace yourselves," Brian yelled, but too late. The car pitched, there was a terrific jolt, followed by an explosion of white dust.

  Silence. Both airbags hung out of their housings, deflated. "Are you OK?" Brian asked. With shaking hands he reached toward his wife.

  Loi was clutching her abdomen. "I think so," she responded in a careful voice.

  Ellen was completely confused. "The airbags went off?"

  No reply. Then, from Loi: "Why did you stop?"

  "I didn't. Jesus!"

  An enormous coil rose in front of the car, higher and higher, unwinding itself in the light. It was dead black, filled with rushing musculature.

  Loi shrieked in short, sharp bursts. Brian leaned back, staring, his teeth bared.

  Ellen jumped out onto the road. The thing was coming up from the ground, clumps of flowers and chunks of pavement ripping away as it surged out.

  Hundreds of gray threads surrounded the car like a web of fungus.

  Ellen tore at them, yanked Loi's door open. She and Brian scrambled out. Ellen struggled, ripping at the curtain of threads. Where they touched her, they made her skin itch fiercely.

  There came a piercing sound. Brian shouted, Ellen shrieked, Loi went stumbling back toward the Wests' car. The heavy coils were dropping down on the rental, crushing and pulverizing it.

  From the woods came a snapping, sizzling sound. They began to see purple light winking among the leaves.

  Then Bob was beside them. "Let's move," he cried. The whole group of them forced themselves into his car, crowding in, falling all over each other.

  They turned around, going in the only direction they could— right back into Oscola—the trap.

  Twelve

  1.

  The car hurtled down the curving road, pushing through fifty, sixty, seventy. Brian drove hard, the images of what he had seen in the woods building in his mind. Surely those masses of sweat-stirring insects couldn't think, couldn't remember what they'd been. But the other things—those long, long arms, those hands...

  The filed nails he'd observed on the hand last night took on a whole new meaning. That had once been a person's hand, those nails had probably been filed in a local home before the horrible transformation took place. Maybe he'd been face-to-face with an old friend.

  "It's ail because of me," he said.

  "Shut up," Ellen snapped. "Quit apologizing."

  "You are not responsible, husband."

  "Brian, it's an awfully long jump for me from some esoteric physics experiment to—what we're up against." Bob spoke for them all, Brian felt sure.

  "Jump or not, it's real. Otherwise you'd never have been in my facility."

  "I saw blue pipe. I can't remember much else. That E. G. and G. logo. It could have been a lot of different places."

  "No. That pipe was made especially for us, using an experimental fabrication process. It's unique."

  As they passed the Michaelsons' wreck, Brian noticed that Loi closed her eyes. Ellen made a raw, empty sound that could have been a sob. Nancy held her boys' heads down.

  The sentinel trees whipped past.

  "There," Loi said.

  "What?"

  "Just where the road curves. Something is moving there."

  He floored the gas and they raced past the spot at ninety. Purple light flickered in the corner of his eye. In the seat behind him, Nancy sighed and squirmed. Her younger boy's head popped up. For a moment he drank in the light. "I like that," he cried. "Stop. Stop, Uncle Brian!"

  Brian pressed the gas pedal to the fire wall and the car leaped ahead.

  Purple light, sizzling sounds... and pleasure—howling, insane pleasure: it didn't hurt to be transformed bone and brain and gristle into one of those vile nightmares, it felt good.

  "If it looks like they're going to get us, I think we should consider suicide," Bob said.

  At that Chris burst into tears. His brother, now sucking his thumb, made no sound. "Bob," Nancy said with soft reproach.

  "I don't want the boys to end up like—God help us!"

  Ellen barely moved her lips as she spoke. "I want to win this."

  "I agree. We must win." Loi slipped her hand into Ellen's, and Ellen laid her head against Loi's shoulder.

  They all fell silent, all hearing the same thing—a drumming sound was coming up the road, moving fast.

  "The Viper," Brian whispered.

  "Let's get the hell out of here!"

  And go where? There was only one road between Oscola and the outside world, and this was it. The alternative was to go up to Towayda.

  "It's not the Viper," Loi said. "Listen carefully!"

  When it appeared, the vehicle proved to be an ordinary pickup, blue and tired-looking. It was piled high with household goods.

  Brian got out and walked into the middle of the road waving his arms. He knew the family, of course. It was Jimmy Rysdale and his wife and kids. The Rysdales were really Ruisdaels, one of the original settler families. They had come with the Dutch landowner, the patroon, who had settled the area in the eighteenth century.

  When they stopped Bob gave them the story of the Michaelsons, speaking quickly, his voice so low that he sounded as if he was sharing a pornographic secret. He omitted the terrifying details of what had happened next, saying only that something very, very dangerous was guarding the way out of Oscola.

  "But you can't cut off a whole town," Jimmy said. "What about people tryin' to come out here? FedEx and stuff, and the grocery truck and the beer wagon? And calls. What about phone calls?"

  "Our phone is dead," Loi said. "Was before we were burned out."

  "Yeah, well, ours has been dead since last night. That's what decided us."

  "Some phones are working,"' Ellen said. "I got through to the Wests from Ludlum, remember."

  Brian thought: you were probably meant to get through. He thought also that the enemy was a careful planner, that he had a remarkable head for details and a highly developed sense of theater. But he was careful. He did not want them to lose what little hope they had, for he did not want death or suicide. He was herding them into his lair.

  Jimmy Rysdale was on the near side of fifty, balding and a little dumpy, but a good farmer and a smart businessman. He owned a piece of a specialty lumbering operation that made out pretty well. He and Brian had hunted grouse and deer together, and Annie made about the best venison sausage in the Three Counties. Their you
ngest, known as Annie Junior because she looked so uncannily like her mother, was ten, solemn, and said to be a math whiz. Their boy, Willie Rysdale, was a starting pitcher for the first time this year on the Oscola Patroons, and a pretty good one from what Brian had seen.

  "Let's go, Jimmy," his wife called from the truck. She had red O'Shaughnessy hair, and the flashing green eyes of that clan. "Jimmy, start the truck. We're getting out of here!"

  "I don't think that'd be such a good idea," Brian said. "Our enemy must know he can't keep a town isolated for long."

  Jimmy stared off down the road. "Which might also mean this is the last chance."

  "It's past that, Jimmy."

  Rysdale did not respond directly. "We're gonna spend a couple of weeks with my sister in Saratoga, make a few visits to the track." The races would be in full swing down there at this time of year.

  He got back into the truck.

  "Mr. Rysdale, don't do it," Ellen said. "Think about your kids!"

  Jimmy looked at her in amazement. "What the hell do you know, Miss New York hotshot newspaper lady?"

  "Too much," she said.

  Jimmy lowered his head, closed his eyes a moment. "Them things that've come," he said in a mean voice, "we hear 'em tunneling under the house."

  "They want us," Annie said, "they're gonna get the kids!"

  "Shut up, Annie! The less we talk about it, the better."

  "We can tell these people, Jimmy! They're like us, they won't go to the judge's. So them things, they were coming up under the house. And the closer they got, the more you could hear... voices."

  "It was people screaming, Mom!"

  "If we could get word to the military," Jimmy said, "they could come in here and fix this. That's why we have to leave, it's not just to get away. We aren't quitters. It's for patriotic reasons."

  Brian shrugged his shoulders. "What're you gonna do? Who're you gonna tell?"

  "You tell people the truth, you're gonna end up in a padded cell like I did," Bob said.

  "We've been trying and trying to get physical evidence," Brian added. "Now that we're trapped here, it's there for the taking. We're up against something very smart, very careful, very determined. And why not? He's fighting for his life, just like us."

  "With every blow, a demon grows stronger. To fight back we must be cunning also." Lois eyes were steady. She believed in her demons as much as she did in her own breath.

  Brian recalled the sound of little Lizzie Michaelson's body falling open, the soft, tearing whisper of the skin parting, and then that hideously energetic buzzing as her contents spewed into the air. In the thoroughness of its evil, the attack was indeed profoundly demonic.

  But there was another side to that, wasn't there? The old Greek word for demon, daimon, also means soul, or source of knowledge. To look into the eyes of the demon was to see the truth.

  There was movement in the pickup and Willie emerged. He was still his handsome, athletic self, but he looked as if he'd been crying. "Let's get going, Dad." His voice was sullen.

  "The Michaelsons," his father said, gesturing ahead. "We don't want that."

  "So we don't pull over or slow down or do whatever they did. Come on, Dad!" The boy hefted a shotgun, pumped a shell into the firing chamber with an efficient snap.

  Now the daughter came down off the truck. "I don't want to die." She tugged her father's sleeve. "I'm staying here, Daddy!"

  "Shut up, sis!"

  Jim Rysdale looked down the road. Brian followed his eyes. "You could go examine the Michaelson wreck, buddy. Convince yourself."

  Willie climbed up into the truck bed, stood behind the cab and ported his gun. "Let's move out, Dad."

  Just then something shifted behind the roadside screen of trees. All eyes turned.

  Loi saw it first, a slick black worm a foot in diameter uncoiling in the grass. Locusts leaped away from its gliding progress, as it exuded itself from the ground, its tip probing ahead.

  How quick you are to make your point, Brian thought.

  Bob was the next to see it. He cried out, an inarticulate bellow. Willie fired his gun, which discharged with a bone-jarring boom. The pellets tore through forest leaves with an angry clatter.

  Pouring blood, the worm slid back into the ground. "See, Dad? Now, let's go."

  A hand shot out of the woods on a long black arm and dug into Annie Junior's hair. It started dragging her toward the woods. She was too stunned to cry out, but her eyes widened, her hands went up and fluttered uselessly against the thing.

  Her mother's fists went to her temples, her whole body lurched as if she'd been gut shot and she shrieked, a raw, resounding cry of astonishment and anguish. "My baby!"

  Willie aimed his gun. Now Annie Junior shrieked, kicked, tore at the claws.

  "You'll kill her, Willie!"

  "I can get it, Mom!"

  Loi started after Annie Junior. Brian didn't even have time to call her before she had her arms around the girl's waist. Then she was ripping at the shrieking child's hair, trying to extract it from the monstrous fingers before the long arm retracted into the woods.

  Brian could see more coils gliding up among the leaves, their hands flexing, claws spreading.

  Loi and the child were moving fast now, their bodies making a rasping sound as they were dragged across the summer-dry grass. Loi's stomach ground against the earth.

  Brian ran after her. Stretching out his arms, he hurled himself at their feet and grabbed his wife around the legs.

  The poor child's hair was torn right out of her head, and she screamed in agony.

  The hand shot into the air on its long, curving arm, its fist full of bloody blond tufts.

  "Baby, baby," Annie cried, dashing to her little girl.

  There was a thunderous boom and the shotgun spat white smoke. The shot slapped the wall of leaves and the gray shapes within undulated.

  Then Annie Rysdale had her daughter in her arms. The child was bawling, gripping her temples with fists like gnarled white nutmeats.

  A moment later the two vehicles were speeding off in the direction of the town. To relieve the congestion in the Wests' car, Brian and Loi rode with the Rysdales. Annie Junior was on blankets in the truck bed, cradled by her mother. Willie was with them, clutching the shotgun to his chest.

  Brian put his hand on his old friend's shoulder. "Jimmy buddy," he said.

  "They are from the world underground," Loi said. "They've broken loose. We must get them to return to their world."

  "That may not be possible."

  "That was a very brave thing you did, Loi. I don't know what to say—you saved our baby."

  "You would have saved mine."

  2.

  All the way to the Wests' house they saw broken telephone and power poles, lines down everywhere. Just in the past half hour, great destruction had been done. Worse, they observed half a dozen more wrecks along Route 303, and a tall column of smoke rising from the direction of the Jackson place out on the Towayda Road. This time there were no sirens raised in response.

  When they arrived back at the Wests', Pat and Jenny Huygens were waiting in their car with the windows locked. They opened them as the little caravan drove up. "Bob," Pat said, "you gotta get the state police—"

  "I'm gonna try to use my radios."

  Everybody went into the house. They made sure all doors and windows were closed, and most of the windows curtained. Nobody wanted to risk so much as a glimpse of the purple light, day or night.

  During the next hour more people came, drawn to the authority represented by Lieutenant West, and because they saw the other cars there.

  The growing carnage along Route 303 had been what turned them all back.

  In addition to the Rysdales and the Huygenses, old Mary Yates, Brian's cousin Dick and his wife Linda, and Father Palmer from St. Paul's church came. He was followed by the Reverend Simon Oont, the Dutch Reformed pastor.

  Dick and Linda brought a bucket of fresh eggs, which made more sense tha
n the family heirlooms and favorite clothes that tended to clog the trunks of the other cars.

  "We're the accidents," Brian said, "the ones who've been missed."

  The seventeen people present cramped Nancy West's living room. "We oughta go on a rampage, kill 'em all," Dick announced.

  "That'd be smart," Bob responded. He'd been trying his handheld radio. It appeared to be working, but he couldn't break in on any of the calls. "Funny, the division's still patrolling the Northway as usual. No emergency's in effect or anything."

  "Don't they ever come back in here?" Jenny Huygens asked.

  "Not normally. Just the sheriff."

  Mary Yates barked out a laugh. "So that's why we're being eaten by devils from hell."

  "Let's inventory our weapons," Bob said. "We have to know where we stand."

  There were five shotguns, seven deer rifles, a couple of .22s and five pistols.

  "We need a plan," Mary Yates said. "We need to sit down and work it out right now."

  "The things are getting bigger and stronger," Jim Rysdale responded. "How do you plan against that?"

  Brian wished he had more information. But he could scarcely imagine the bizarre permutations of his elegant theories that had led to this disaster. A theoretical particle traveling back through time doesn't lead to... monsters. "I suspect it's going to go very quickly now. I doubt we'll be left alone for long." He looked around him. "My thought is, every single survivor from Cuyamora County is right here in this room. Look at it this way: we've been very efficiently rounded up. Now for the coup de grace."

  "I think you're right about that," Father Palmer said.

  "I have an idea," Dick Kelly announced. "I say we work out a fuel line from Fisk's to the judge's root cellar and pump as much gas as we can down there. Then just strike a goddamn match." Dick had black hair cropped close at the back and around the sides. The curls left on top looked curiously artificial, but Brian knew that they weren't, having yanked at them many times when they were boys.

  "A two-mile fuel line—that's a technical problem and a half," Pat Huygens said. He'd been a civil engineer. He was retired now. "What're you gonna do, get every garden hose in town?"