“¡Ayúdeme!” she cried.
Peter then realized the man beside her was not actually a man. Or at least not entirely. One side of his face was almost normal, but the other side was misshapen, with lumpy, red skin drooping down like the neck of a turkey. The arm on that side of his body was much longer than the other, with skin hanging loose in the same way. He stood beside the hysterical woman, gazing at her with one eye drooping several inches below the other. He held out his good hand as if trying to calm her.
Both cops got out of the Tahoe, the driver nearly knocking the disfigured man over as he opened his door. The disfigured man then turned his attention to the officer. He tried speaking, but one side of his mouth was drooping almost to his chest, and the sounds were incomprehensible. He reached for the officer as if pleading for help. The cop shoved him away and said, “¿Qué te ocurre? ¿Qué está pasando aquí?”
The officers had left their doors open, so the woman got in the front seat and slammed the door shut. She crawled over the center console and closed the passenger door.
“Ma’am, are you okay?” Robert said through the mesh barrier.
She was whimpering and staring into her lap, and she didn’t answer. Peter leaned forward so he could see what she was looking at. It was her hands. They were transforming. One finger on each hand was much longer than the others, with a membrane of skin stretching between the elongated finger and the woman’s armpit. The membranes were bunched up at the armpits, constricted by her t-shirt sleeves.
“¿Qué está pasando aquí?” the cop outside the door shouted again. His partner was now beside him, and they both had their sidearms aimed at the disfigured man. The man’s face was now even more misshapen, and his head leaned to one side due to a lack of solid structure on that side of his neck. Suddenly he collapsed into a heap on the road. The two officers stood over him, staring, apparently at a loss for what to do.
As Peter looked through his window at the poor bloke lying in the dirt, another movement outside the car caught his eye. He squinted, trying to get a better look. “Bloody hell,” he muttered.
Walking toward them from between two houses was a creature that looked like a crocodile, but with hind legs as long as a man’s. The front legs were shorter, about the size of a man’s arms, and so the creature walked at a slant, with its hips and tail higher than its head.
“Hey!” Peter rapped on the window to get the cops’ attention. When they turned to him, he pointed.
The crocodile continued walking leisurely toward them, although with its abnormally long legs it looked like it could easily outrun a human. The cops turned their guns on the approaching creature. It came right up to the helpless, disfigured man, and the officers stepped back against the SUV. The crocodile was three meters long from its snout to the tip of its tail. Its entire body was much larger than that of an adult human. Was it possible multiple people were merging into one creature as they were transforming? If not, perhaps this creature had previously been a cow or horse.
The woman in the front seat continued crying as Peter and Robert watched the surreal scene outside the vehicle. The crocodile gazed at the helpless man. It then nudged the man with its snout. The man moaned pitifully and tried to move away, but his body wouldn’t cooperate. Nearly all of his exposed skin had now transformed into loose piles of flesh splayed out on the ground. Apparently sensing the man’s helplessness, the crocodile attacked. It clamped onto his arm and started backing up, dragging him away.
Finally the two policemen acted. They both fired at the creature. It released the man and raised up onto its hind legs. It then charged at the cops, closing the five meters of distance with frightening speed. The creature hit one of the officers, slamming him back into the SUV and rocking the entire vehicle. The officer went down with the snarling, thrashing crocodile on top of him. His partner shouted something and shot point blank at the creature. He fired again, and again, until the crocodile stopped moving. He shoved the creature aside and helped his partner up. The guy was covered in blood, either his own or the creature’s.
The cop who had just saved his partner threw open the driver door, got in, and began shouting into his two-way radio. “Officer down! Necesitamos ambulancias y refuerzos en—”
Suddenly he took notice of the woman in the seat beside him. She was still crying, but her voice was changing. It was now more of a screech, no longer human. She still held her hands out, staring at them, but there was barely room for them in the confined space. The elongated finger on each hand had continued growing and each was at least a meter long now, with the leathery membrane draping down into her lap. Her fingers were becoming pterodactyl-like wings.
The officer dropped his radio and got out. He put an arm around his partner and helped him limp away from the SUV. They turned and looked back at the vehicle, one man’s face glistening with sweat, the other’s with blood.
The uninjured officer locked his eyes onto Peter’s, and they stared at each other through the glass. But then the cop shifted his gaze, looking at something beyond the SUV, behind Peter. He said something to his partner and started guiding him away. The two men half-ran, half-staggered between houses and were gone.
“God almighty,” Robert said.
Peter turned, and then he saw why the cops had fled. The ground on the other side of the street was moving. It was covered with insects, or some other type of small creatures. Thousands of them. They seemed to be coming from a row of fruit trees growing beside one of the houses. The trees were rapidly getting smaller, because pieces of their limbs were breaking off and falling to the ground. But the fallen pieces were not simply accumulating in piles. They were dispersing, crawling away from the trees of their own volition, spreading out in every direction. Some of them were already in the street, moving toward the Tahoe.
Peter realized the driver door was still open. “We have to close the door!” He pulled the lever to open his own door. It was locked. Robert tried his door. Also locked.
“Ma’am,” Peter said through the mesh barrier. “You need to close the door.”
But the woman was beyond understanding him. Her arms had become wings, folded awkwardly in several directions because they were too long to extend fully in the tight space. Her head and shoulders were hunched over, and Peter couldn’t see her face.
He slammed his hand against the steel mesh. “Ma’am, close the bloody door!”
She straightened up and turned. Her face was no longer human. It had become elongated, with a beak extending out in front of her eyes. She opened the beak and squawked at him through the barrier, baring rows of pointed teeth.
“They’re under the car now,” Robert said. He was too busy watching the spreading swarm outside to pay much attention to the transforming woman. “They look like centipedes. Big ones. We’ve got to shut that damn door!”
Suddenly the woman went berserk. She thrashed her wings and dislodged a laptop that was mounted on the dashboard. She tore at her t-shirt with her long beak, trying to rip it from her body. She then scratched and wriggled her way past the steering wheel and out the open door. She scrabbled over the grotesque body of the turkey-neck man, and then Peter could see that there was no woman left in her at all. Her shorts had come off in her struggles, revealing short legs with tiny clawed feet. A thin, meter-long, hairless tail whipped about between the two legs. Horrified and fascinated, Peter couldn’t take his eyes off her. She expanded her wings, tearing away what was left of the shirt. She tried flapping her wings a few times, but her torso was still proportionally too large for flight.
Abruptly the winged reptile stopped moving. It fixed its stare on the ground. The centipedes were now swarming the dirt beneath it. It thrust its beak out and grabbed one, like a heron snatching a frog. It threw its head back to swallow the centipede and then picked up another.
“They’re getting in!” Robert cried, lifting his feet off the floor and onto the seat.
Peter looked. Several centipedes the length of his hand
were crawling on the floorboard. He lifted his feet to avoid them.
He and Robert were trapped.
Peter rolled onto his back and kicked the glass window. Pain exploded in his scorched foot and he cried out.
“Move over,” Robert said. Without waiting for Peter to move, he threw himself onto his back and kicked the other window with both feet. It didn’t break.
Peter pulled himself from beneath Robert and got to his knees. He looked down in time to see a centipede crawl up and over the edge of the seat, inches from Robert’s head. He pulled his sleeve over his hand and flicked it onto the floor.
Robert grunted and kicked again. This time the window cracked, but it was held in place by the safety membrane between the glass layers. Two more kicks and the glass fell to the ground. Robert got to his knees as Peter brushed two more centipedes off the seat. More of them were making their way into the vehicle.
Peter and Robert looked at each other. Robert nodded over Peter’s shoulder and said, “I don’t want to die like that.”
Peter turned. The winged reptile was still trying to eat the swarming centipedes, but now it was struggling. Its once-rigid beak was sagging, flapping around loosely. The creature was transforming again, probably due to contact with the centipedes.
Peter looked down and flicked another centipede off as it came over the lip of the seat. “Okay,” he said. “Out!”
Robert reached through the broken window and found the door handle, but the door still wouldn’t open. He went through the window head first until he was sitting on the door with his feet on the backseat. As Peter brushed more centipedes off the seat, he heard Robert grasping at anything he could on the Tahoe’s roof to gain leverage. Robert managed to pull one knee through the window, but as he struggled with the other leg, he fell onto the road.
He was on his feet in an instant, stomping on centipedes and cursing. He spun around. “They’re on my back! Get them off!”
“You’re okay,” Peter said. “I don’t see any. Clear the ground, I’m coming out.” Peter flicked one more centipede and then lunged through the window. Robert grabbed him around the chest and pulled him out.
“Kill that one, and that one!” Peter said, pointing at centipedes that were breaching the perimeter Robert had established. Although Peter’s right shoe was still mostly intact, there was almost nothing left of his other shoe to protect his seared flesh. And he didn’t want to find out whether seared flesh would transform into a monster as quickly as healthy flesh.
Robert kept stomping, but it was a losing battle. They had to run.
“This way!” Peter took off down the street, away from the epicenter of the centipedes, stepping between them with his exposed foot as gingerly as he could. This was far more painful than he had imagined, but soon he and Robert were ahead of the spreading swarm.
Peter heard a low droning sound above. Things were flying about just over the houses—at least half a dozen of them that he could see. They were the size of pigeons, but they weren’t birds. They were dragonflies.
“We need to find cover,” he said. “One of the houses.”
Robert grabbed his elbow and pulled him off the street. “This one!”
Like the others, the house was basically a box with a flat roof. The front had a single window and a door, both with metal bars over them.
Robert rapped on the door frame. “Hey! Can we come in?”
A woman’s voice came from beyond the door. “¡Vete! Go away!”
Robert glanced at Peter. He then tried opening the outer door. It was locked. He rattled it loudly. “We need help! We’re hurt, and—”
A blast came through the door, hitting Robert in the chest. He immediately crumpled to the ground.
“Robert!” Peter kneeled next to him.
Robert was wheezing, like the wind had been knocked out of him. Peter rolled him onto his back and then felt himself going pale. Just below Robert’s collarbone, a four-inch cavity had been gouged into his chest.
“Bloody hell, you shot him!” Peter screamed at the house.
Another shotgun blast came through the door, whizzing over Peter’s head. He dropped instinctively and pressed himself against his friend. Robert weakly lifted one of his arms and wrapped it around Peter as if trying to protect him. His gurgling breaths were coming through the hole in his chest, just beneath Peter’s ear.
And then the wheezing stopped. Robert’s arm loosened and fell to his side. Peter kept his head there for a moment. He didn’t need to look at Robert’s eyes to know he was dead.
Something crawled over the blistered skin of Peter’s ankle. He pushed himself up, shook off a centipede, and stomped it with his right foot. But more were coming—a lot more. Before getting up, he allowed himself one look at Robert’s face. Blood had run from his mouth and nose. Peter wiped at it with his sleeve and pushed Robert’s eyes closed.
He looked up at the house. The woman was staring at him through one of the four-inch holes, but then she backed away, probably holding her shotgun ready to shoot again.
He swallowed, fighting off the urge to start sobbing. There wasn’t time for that. Centipedes were gathering at his feet. Bird-sized bugs were swooping above. The town was being overrun by monsters that defied all logic.
Peter ran. He ran to the end of the row of houses, and then he ran next to the gravel road until he came to the paved highway. He turned right and kept running, step after agonizing, bone-crunching step.
So focused was Peter on putting one foot in front of the other that the car was nearly on top of him before he even knew it was there. Its horn sounded just behind him, startling him from his trance. It was a red Corolla, and it had slowed to match his pitiful pace. A woman in sunglasses behind the wheel leaned forward to get a better look, and then she mouthed some words he couldn’t hear with her windows up. She pointed to her passenger door.
Peter got in. “Thank you. Gracias.”
Instead of accelerating, she continued gazing at him. “Mr. Peter Wooley?”
He stared at her. Was she from Helmich’s compound? He grabbed the door handle, ready to bail. “How do you know my name?”
“Everyone knows who Peter Wooley is, no? Unless they don’t watch the news. Acho men, what is happening? I saw police. Many police! And you, Mr. Wooley, you look like mierda. You look much better on television.”
If that was a joke, he wasn’t laughing. “Can we get out of here? This area isn’t safe.”
She started driving again. Seconds later a group of navy blue police vehicles screamed past them, headed for the village. Peter wished he could warn them that there was probably nothing they could do.
“What is happening?” the woman asked again.
He shook his head. “Not easy to explain. People are getting sick, and every person they touch is getting sick.”
She took her foot off the gas and looked at him. “Are you sick?”
“No. If I were, you would already know it. This is going to sound crazy, but it changes people—turns them into creatures. Animals.”
She continued slowing down and came to a stop on the road’s shoulder. She gazed at him for a moment and then took off her sunglasses. She had striking brown eyes. She wore a snappy, business-like blazer and skirt the same red color as her car. Perhaps in her late thirties. Close to Peter’s apparent age. But of course Peter was fifty years older than his apparent age.
“Animals?”
Instead of replying, he watched two helicopters fly over, also headed for the village. They didn’t appear to be military, perhaps police or news choppers.
The woman also watched them fly over. “If you were not Peter Wooley, I would push you out of my car. But now I am afraid. This is because of the Lamotelokhai, no?”
He nodded. “It’s because of what someone tried to do with the Lamotelokhai. Do you mind telling me where the bloody hell we are?”
She tipped her head forward. “Salinas is just there. It is where I live.”
“And w
here is Salinas?”
She frowned at him. “Caribbean side.”
“Caribbean side of what?”
Her frown deepened. “You don’t know you are in Puerto Rico?”
“Puerto Rico. That makes sense.” He glanced at her. “It’s a tedious story. How far are we from Salinas?”
She pulled onto the road and accelerated. “It’s just there.” She tipped her head again. “Just a mile.”
“That’s too close. It won’t be safe there.”
“You are really starting to scare me.”
“I’m sorry, but you should be afraid.”
She drove in silence for a minute or so. “My name is Georgia. I would shake your hand, but I don’t want to turn into an animal.” She emphasized the word like she didn’t believe him, or perhaps she was making a joke.
“Georgia, could I use your cell phone?”
Her phone was already in her lap, and she handed it to him. “I have been trying to call my madre and padre, but I think the towers are overloaded.”
Peter tried calling Jonathan Benson but immediately got a simulated voice saying in Spanish and then in English that his call could not be completed. Bobby and Ashley were dead, Robert was dead, no one knew where Peter was, and everything around him was going to hell.
Rectangular houses appeared on both sides of the road, and they passed a tire store and a Walgreens. Two ambulances screamed by them, followed by more police cars. There were no pedestrians on the streets. Perhaps the people of Salinas already had some idea of the horror only a few miles away—horror that was no doubt spreading and would soon engulf this city.
“A hospital is just ahead,” Georgia said. “I will take you there.”
“No, I don’t need a hospital.”
She glanced at him. “But your leg.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.” Peter didn’t feel like explaining that his burns would be healed by tomorrow—if he lived that long.
Diffusion Box Set Page 70