The Forbidden Zone

by Whitley Strieber

  Holding on with one hand, she touched her face with the other. "Did it get me?" she bellowed. Her baby kicked. "Did it get me?"

  "No!"

  "Thank God." As they raced off into the night, she had the bloodcurdling realization that the demon was especially interested in her, and she knew why: it wanted her baby.

  Ellen was behind them when she saw, coming up from behind the tree line, something entirely new and completely unexpected. A gigantic, tapering mandible, visible in the dark only as a shadow, probed along behind Loi and Brian's speeding ATV. It was as if the most tremendous, the most terrible of all the dragons of myth had risen from the depths.

  For a moment it wavered, as if seeking direction. Then it stopped, focused, and went questing after Loi. On its first pass it came so close that she rubbed the back of her head where it had touched.

  "Loi," Ellen shouted, "look out! Look out behind you!"

  When Loi turned in her seat she saw a grasping, outstretched hand with fingers ten feet long.

  She grabbed Brian's waist and hung on for dear life as they chugged toward the sheltering forest. On her cheek she felt a chill cooler than the wind rushing past, felt it slip around her neck, felt the gentlest of tugs, persistent, getting stronger—then broken.

  She was free.

  But then the serpent arm flashed back into view, tremendous fingers waving gracefully in her face. She shrieked, threw herself against Brian's back. Her baby leaped within her. She felt a dull, deep pain. "No, please," she whispered. She tried to force the muscles to relax, but they did not relax. Again her baby jumped. There was a dull, familiar pain. "Oh, no. Please no."

  The serpent arm rose high over the ATV, curling in a huge arch. Then its end disappeared into the roiling clouds. She could not see where it was anchored to the ground, or the gigantic creation of which it must be a part. It was large enough to slap all four vehicles to oblivion. "Brian, it's going to hit us!"

  The tree line was fifty feet away.

  She could feel the thing's presence above like the looming cave-in of a tunnel or a fat client at the Blue Moon Bar sinking down on her. Then the ground shook, the ATV's engine wailed, and the whole enormous thing crashed into the road behind them. The hand closed on air.

  Instantly the gigantic apparition rose, stretching its serpentine form to the absolute maximum, and this time swinging out to the side. As it shimmered away into the woods seventy- and eighty-foot pines shattered into matchsticks, their trunks riven, the roar of their fall like the voice of a maddened river.

  It came back, sailing toward them at full speed, right beside them, then just beside the rear tires, then just missing, the fingers extended.

  They were within twenty feet of the woods.

  But the road before them erupted in a geyser of dirt, stones and soil and concrete flying upward as something came bursting out of the earth.

  Desperately Brian swerved away. Loi, who had been hanging on by one hand, was thrown hard to the side. She fell, her shoulder glancing off the ground. As she felt the shock blast through her, she screamed in pain and terror. Her womb shuddered like jelly, and long, hot knives of pain penetrated deep.

  "Loi!"

  She grabbed his back, the far edge of the seat, forced herself up. "I'm OK!"

  The other ATVs were coming fast, engines bellowing.

  Brian gunned his engine, their ATV leaped ahead—and Loi found herself lying in the road flat on her back. Her mind snatched details, the smell of the exhaust, the faint warmth of the pavement, the gnarled shadowy clouds above.

  From underground came a booming, pulsating sound. Her skin felt suddenly shivery, tight. She saw Brian still on the ATV, a look of absolute horror on his face. Then she felt the ground churning beneath her body.

  She was falling.

  She saw Brian disappear, the sky above him disappear, saw it all become a haze, a blur, then saw it folded away into blackness. She was dropping fast, so astonished that she couldn't even cry out.

  From far above she heard Brian shouting, heard her name echoing.

  Then she hit something thick and warm, sank into it, kept going down and down, felt it hot around her, breathed, choked, tasted a foul taste, went deeper and deeper and deeper.

  2.

  Brian threw himself to the ground, began clawing at the pavement, which was still loose where Loi had been absorbed. But the stones soon acquired a sort of crazy, spinning weight, rushing out from under his fingers and back into their places.

  Inside of twenty seconds there wasn't a trace of the hole that had consumed her. The only sign that it had ever existed was the presence of pale, friable clay, just like the summit of the mound, or the spot out on the Northway where Bob had been taken.

  Deeper silence descended. It was broken when frogs out in forest ponds resumed a tentative chorus. Brian crouched beside their ATV, weeping.

  He was unaware of the others as they pulled up around him. Realizing that something was terribly wrong, they'd come back.

  Bob leaned over him. "Brian?"

  "I've lost her!"

  His words sickened them all. She had been their strength. Her belief in escape was what had sustained their effort. She was the only reason that any of them were still alive.

  Ellen went down to him, put her arm around his sweat-soaked back. "Oh, Jesus," she said.

  It felt as if his heart had been ripped out of his chest. The agony was so pure that he didn't cry out, he didn't even weep. He was there, and Loi wasn't.

  "We have to keep going," Nancy said from the dark nearby. "We can't stay here. Loi would want it, Brian. She wanted us to survive." Nancy's voice went low, and a great, racking sob escaped.

  Nobody moved. They were all together now, all in one place.

  "This could be a trap," Chris said. The boy he had been had evaporated like foam, replaced by this tough little survivor.

  Brian looked at him. He wanted a son. He wanted another baby to raise. He wanted Loi. "You go," he told them all.

  From deep in the ground there came a cry, long and full of mourning.

  That ended what little self-control remained. The anguish came pouring out like lava from the depths of his soul and he raised his eyes to the sky and howled. Then he hammered at the ground, finally leaped to his feet, yanked the pistol out of his belt and emptied it into the road, which sent back little puffs of steam where the bullets struck the asphalt.

  Then there came up from the center of him such a feeling as he had never known before. He went beyond agony. It felt as if his soul was congealing in psychic fire. But it also brought him a certain peace, the peace of an absolute decision, of total and complete determination.

  "I'm going in," he said. "I'm going to go in there somehow, and I am going to find her and get her back."

  "Come on, honey," Nancy said to Bob. Her voice was urgent: they could hear the humvees off in the darkness somewhere.

  "We gotta go, Brian," Ellen said. She got on her ATV. The others got on theirs, all except Brian. He backed away.

  "I can't leave her." He would not tell them this, but he was hoping that the thing would return and take him as well.

  Ellen got off her vehicle. "You go ahead," she said faintly to Bob and his family, hardly believing her own voice.

  "Brian," Bob said, "I've gotta keep going. I have my family to think of."

  "You go," Ellen said, "it's dangerous here."

  "I can't."

  She reached out to him, was glad that he let her take his hand. "Brian Kelly, you listen to me! If you stay here, you'll never have the chance to help her."

  "A door that's been opened can be closed," Brian said firmly. "If I can get inside, maybe I can do some good."

  A great rush of wind went through the trees, bringing with it cold, intimate smells from the deep forest. "I see a light," Joey hissed.

  A hard white light was flitting through the woods, and they all knew what it was. It flew slowly along, almost lazily, winking on and off as it passed among the tr
ees.

  Ellen had the horrible, secret thought that they might be looking at part of Loi. She went closer to Brian. It was going to be awfully hard to get on that ATV and leave him behind.

  The Wests mounted up. "If we can get help," Bob said, "we'll come back for you, buddy. Both of you." He looked at Ellen. "We've gotta move."

  "I'll be going out on my own later," Ellen heard herself say. She was amazed at herself. But the truth was that she had become too committed to Brian and Loi to leave them like this. She just couldn't do it.

  Brian's hollow eyes bored into her. His face was a sweaty mask. "Ellen, don't be an idiot." There was something very new in his voice: it cut, it was raw, it was white-hot.

  "There's another one," Chris said. A second lightning bug darted across the road. Under them, the ground vibrated.

  The Wests left, dashing off into the dark.

  Brian nodded to Ellen, almost formally welcoming her to the world of his pain. "I thought he would take me, too."

  "Who is he?"

  Brian shook his head. He looked down. "That's what I need to find out."

  3.

  Loi was struggling against the thick, mud-like substance. It was getting in her mouth, her eyes. She had to breathe and she couldn't, she was in agony, her whole body being pressed harder and harder, so hard she couldn't stand it. Her womb was getting tighter and tighter, and she was afraid she was going to burst.

  Then she was back in the brothel, spreading her legs and counting, one, two, three. No, she was in real, physical filth, drowning in it.

  Involuntarily her mouth opened as she gasped for air. She had to breathe, she had to, had to! Mud came sliding in.

  Then air.

  Air, roaring clouds of it: she hacked, spat, spat harder, shook her head, gasped and promptly choked on little stones and soil, shook her entire body. Debris cascaded around her, plopping to a floor that sounded soft and damp.

  Total darkness.

  She gulped and belched helplessly, as she'd seen prisoners do in terror of impending torture.

  She raised her hands to her belly. Trembling, she felt down to her vagina for blood there, brought up her finger and tasted... only her own familiar musk.

  She got to her feet—and found just overhead a dense, giving thickness centered by a puckered, rubbery area. It was like an opening in the ceiling, closed by ligaments. She pushed her fist into the center of it, and in a moment dirt ran down her arm.

  Then it came to horrible life, tightening as if it was filled with muscle. Her hand was forced out. The lips were rigid now, being held taut. She could not push them open again.

  This did not feel like a tunnel or a room or a cave. It was so confined, the air was so bad, that she felt as if somebody huge had his arms tightly around her chest. She flailed against the limits of the tiny space, her hands slipping in the substance that coated it.

  She hadn't been sucked into a cave at all, she'd been swallowed. As she ran her hand across the soft floor, the slick, sinewy walls, they shuddered and seethed. This was a living thing. She was inside a huge organ.

  That broke her. She slapped the giving walls, kicked the floor, which gave and bounced back like a sponge.

  Another fear invaded her, and she felt her face with frantic little detailed gestures, trying to be sure that she had not changed, that she had not become—

  No, her skin remained smooth and soft.

  Then she heard something new, a hissing, rattling sound. It was coming closer to her. She drew away from it—and found herself pressed up against the other side of the living chamber.

  The space was getting smaller, she could feel the far wall touching her, then pressing against her.

  A blazing white explosion of terror convulsed her and she wailed, feeling as she did it all the loneliness of the truly lost.

  She did not know how long she screamed, but eventually her howls changed to hard, gulping breaths. The air was even more dense now. Breathing didn't work well. She was being smothered.

  Then she knew that something was pressing against her belly. Her reflex was instant—she pushed away, pressing herself into the wall behind her. Dense liquid squeezed out behind her back and oozed down her shoulders and breasts.

  Hard, rough hands grasped her thighs, scraped slowly along her sides, again coming to her stomach. Inside her, the baby jerked spasmodically.

  She could not move any farther away. The hands came up her sides, up her breasts, her shoulders, her neck. She heard a rattling sound not an inch from her face. Reflexively, she tried to shield herself.

  Her hands came into contact with thin wrists as hard as steel pipe, cold and covered with hairs like spikes. The hands came to her hands. They also were hard and cold.

  When they tried to close on her hands, she reached out, slapping, hitting.

  She came into contact with a face. Undoubtedly it was a face: she could feel the shape of it. But the cheeks were hard, the mouth was complex with parts that tickled her palms as they worked. The eyes were dry and protuberant, feeling under her sliding fingers like the surface of a strainer. They reminded her of the eyes of a fly.

  Her baby was jumping and jerking, as if he entirely shared his mother's anguish.

  Slowly, the face turned, and her fingers slipped away from the eyes. But there were hard, springy hairs all around them and she clutched these and pulled as hard as she could.

  A great caw burst out, blasting straight into her face. The hands came up and closed their hard fingers around her wrists and yanked her arms away. She twisted, she spat, she shrieked.

  A feeling of incredible malevolence washed over her with the power of a hurricane stinking of profound rot.

  She could not see him glaring at her, but she knew that he could see.

  "Kill us," she said. She was thinking of the hideous changes she had seen in the Michaelsons and the Rysdale boy and poor Father Palmer. This must not happen to her baby!

  A new sound came, a sawing wheeze, coarse, loud, as if it was made not with vocal cords but by sticks rattling together. Even so, she recognized this sound: it was laughter, the laughter of triumph.

  He had hunted her and captured her and taken her for one reason: the child.

  Seventeen

  1.

  Ellen and Brian had moved off into the woods and were making their way slowly west, paralleling the town. To their right, they could occasionally hear the falls of the Cuyamora River as it came leaping down out of the mountains. To their left behind a screen of thick forest lay Oscola.

  Brian was stricken by his loss, but he had tabled drastic action until he knew what had happened to Loi. If she was dead, then he thought he would want to join her. He had to find out. Rather than paralyzing him, it was the nature of this uncertain grief to drive him to greater effort. His mind was now entirely centered on discovering her fate and the fate of their child.

  He watched Ellen riding slowly along beside him. Although he felt gratitude for her support, she could not stay.

  Ellen also watched him. She did not know how he kept on. Had she suffered a loss like his, her first impulse would be to just shrivel up and die. She could see his pale ghost of a face, his dark mass of curly hair.

  His mind analyzed and deduced. There had to be a way in, and it must be somewhere in this general area.

  The highest probability was that the entrance to whatever remained of the facility would be near the judge's place. He had excellent reasons to think this.

  First, the judge had been co-opted early, and the initial manifestations had taken place on his mound and in his root cellar. Second, as they drew closer to the estate, Brian was observing more and more changes in the plant life—subtly twisted limbs, leaves reduced to contorted green knobs, or turning into sticky green-black sheets that stank of mold.

  It would have made sense for the scientists involved to move the facility to Oscola. It was close to the Ludlum campus, site of the original problem. More importantly, the town was in the middle of a small
but geologically unique area.

  The veins of iron and basalt that ran beneath it were among the strongest geological formations on earth. The men who were fighting this war would have wanted that strength, in case they had to try another containment effort.

  So he knew where he would find the entrance to the new facility, and that was where he was going.

  Ellen stayed with him, even after they moved past a clump of pulsating, bloated saplings.

  He called to her. As soon as she stopped she slumped over her handlebars. She was almost done in. "Yeah, Brian?"

  "It's time for you to follow the Wests."

  "I think I can help."

  "Ellen, it's not real likely that I'm going to be coming back."

  "But there's a chance we could hurt this thing, isn't there? Or even stop it altogether."

  He could not lie to her. "There's a chance. Not a good one, though."

  What she wanted was to be in a nice cozy bed with a cup of cappuccino and a sweet, loving husband. But that wasn't to be. She could not turn away from this problem, not if there was any chance at all of doing something useful here. "What would we have to do?"

  "Get the equipment turned on—assuming that's even possible."

  "Turned o?i? You'd think we'd have to turn something off. Bust hell out of it."

  "The link's already been made or this wouldn't be happening. Obviously my colleagues were trying to break it."

  "What link?"

  "I'm not sure. But I know I'm right about the equipment."

  "Which is where?"

  "You remember that old iron mine?"

  "How could I ever forget it?" The wetness the spiderlike thing had left on her legs remained a vivid memory.

  "If we go down there, we'll find an entrance, almost certainly."

  "We have a couple of pistols. We'll need flashlights. A company of marines."

  He smiled at her then, a thin smile. "Listen to the frogs."

  Their croaking had risen to hysteria.

  "And the crickets," Ellen noticed. They were shrilling wildly.

  From all around them there came a continuous rustling, creaking sound. "If we're going to go, we'd better do it, Ellen."