The Skunge

by Barr, Jeff

  Inside, Maas sat upright, his head turning and questing as Sugar's call filled his brain. The Skunge growing from his eye sockets whipped and lashed.

  From the darkened back of the SUV, a liquid animal grunt. A large sound, something huge and profoundly heavy.

  Maas turned and smiled blindly into the back.

  "Soon," he said.

  The vehicle rolled through the gates, and the Skungers followed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO

  He found a set of keys behind the sun visor, and the truck started with a throaty growl. He rolled the truck forward to the enormous steel plate of the hydraulic lift.

  He jammed his foot down on the brake, grunting with pain, and reached for the phone. It rattled on the console, and his hand froze. It rattled again, louder this time. Something was shaking the ground. A deep rumbling sounded from the floor of the docks, and he saw shafts of light streaming in as the lifts overhead began to lower. It took him a moment to understand what was happening, and then the truth struck him. He scrabbled for the phone.

  Someone had opened the gates for them. The Skungers were coming inside. He punched at the remote viewing app, scrolling down the list of views until he found the camera showing the parking lot. They were up top, directly over his head, gathered like flies on a piece of green meat. He craned his neck to look up.

  Several of the hydraulic pillar lifts were on the way down. Skungers thronged the platforms. As he watched, one fell or was pushed off the side. The Skunger dropped toward him like a stone, and landed on the hood of his truck with a boom. Blood and green ichor splashed the windshield. Arneson slammed the truck into reverse and sped backward. The Skunger slid off the smashed hood, trailing broken vines and gaudy streaks of green and red fluid.

  He hit the gas, spinning the wheel. The truck arrowed back toward the tunnel door. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people inside Juniper Ridge, and he wouldn't sacrifice them for his own escape. He drove with his left hand, holding the phone with his right. Once on the other side, he'd close the tunnel doors, trapping the Skungers within. And then—

  "Oh, shit."

  In the mouth of the tunnel, a line of Juniper Ridge security guards, clad in black riot gear and carrying long truncheons. In front, pointing a gun at Arneson's face, his face split in a sneering grin, was Crantz.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY THREE

  Arneson slammed up the steel ramp and brought the truck to a screeching stop, ten feet from the line of guards. Their shiny black exo-skeletal riot armor glinted in the overhead lights, and their steel truncheons arced and spat with electricity.

  Arneson climbed down from the truck. He stood between the opposing armies.

  "Fuck," he said. "I wish I had a gun."

  The two sides rushed. Arneson braced for the fight.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR

  The Skungers crashed into the guards like a ragged swell of polluted water on a seawall. The screams of humans and Skungers rang out, along with the sounds of the guards' carts slamming into Skunger bodies. The guards lifted phones and fired off squalls of the anti-Skunge signal, but most of the strength was lost, rendered ineffective in the vast open space of the docks.

  The guards fought for dominance; the Skungers fought for their lives. Truncheons flashed in the overhead lights, and the stench of ozone filled the air mixing with the acrid smell of the Skungers. Men screamed.

  Arneson worked his way down the tunnel, away from the docks, kicking and clawing and tearing; anything that tried to grab and hold, he made them pay. He cracked bones, tore flesh, received blow after blow on his back and a particularly stinging blast with a truncheon.

  Crantz loomed ahead, great and terrible, like a statue of a forgotten, minor deity. He grinned at Arneson.

  "Close the tunnel, Crantz. Stop them here, keep them out of the—"

  "You think I give a shit about those people?" Crantz waded toward him. "We are going to end this right here, right now."

  Arneson wondered if he meant the battle for Juniper Ridge, or just Crantz's seemingly inexhaustible hatred. Then he decided it didn't really matter.

  Arneson jumped, aiming for Crantz's thigh. One good hit would let the big man's size be his own undoing. But Crantz saw it, and instead of flinching or deflecting, instead grabbed Arneson out of mid-air.

  Crantz slammed his head into Arneson's face while his massive arms squeezed so hard Arneson heard his ribs creak. Finally he freed a hand, and smashed it across Crantz's face, but without a steady foot on the ground, the blow lacked power. Crantz snarled at him, spitting blood from his lip, and brought up one meaty hand, his thumb jamming into Arneson's eye.

  The pain was excruciating. Arneson was surprised how quickly the body forgets the sensation of agony. Crantz ground his thumb inward, seeking the meat of his brain. The agony of being on the table had already faded from his mind, and he could no longer recall that exact feeling. The body's way of protecting the mind.

  He formed the fingers of his right hand into a flat spear and jabbed them at Crantz's eyes. It was a glancing blow, sliding off the side of his nose, but it forced Crantz to lessen the pressure on his eye. Arneson rolled his trapped left wrist, bending it almost a right angle. Crantz's hand, as big and strong as it was, couldn't follow that flexibility. He had to let go. But his hand came up with a gun.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY FIVE

  Two points of light approached from the gloom of the tunnel. Headlights. A cart, speeding toward the battle, driven by Lester Brayle. Behind him slumped Sugar, her form lumpen and monstrous. Brayle stared straight ahead, the overhead fluorescents glinting from his glasses. The guards stopped, staring, as the Skungers turned and lowered their misshapen heads in deference to their queen.

  Brayle's head, except for his eyes and his mouth, was wrapped with Skunge. The stuff covered his nose, his ears, and spirals of it wound their way around the length of his neck. Even his hair had been subsumed in the writhing profusion. Only his eyes, bright and hellishly aware, remained uncovered. Tentacles of Skunge ran from Sugar into the flesh of his neck, near the base of his brain, pulsing like a vein. More were embedded at his wrists and ankles. The places where the Skunge entered his body angry red and swollen, rippling as more tendrils of the stuff worked their way inside him. At Sugar's command, Brayle unfolded himself from the driver's seat and stood before the gathering of humans and Skungers. His movements were jerky and unnatural, like film on a slipped reel.

  "All must/you will stop. Be calm. The end of change comes soon." Brayle spoke, his voice replaced with a buzzing alien parody. His body twitched and jittered as the Skunge fibers fired electrical impulses through his invaded brain. His fingers plucked restlessly at his stained lab coat, the nervous tic of a man in the midst of a nightmare. The guards stepped back, unsure. The Skungers moved closer, their hungry eyes on Sugar. One man shouldered his way through the throng and face the cart.

  Crantz panted for breath. Speckles of blood, smudged by his sweat, dotted his face and clear plastic goggles. "Let Dr. Brayle go, you freak." He stepped toward Sugar, raising his gun. "Let him go, or I start blowing holes."

  Brayle regarded him with his crazed eyes, his body moving fitfully. He raised his hands, palms facing upward in supplication. "The end of change comes soon."

  Arneson stared at the abomination that Sugar had become. He had to force himself to look away, and the person his eyes alighted on was Crantz. Arneson watched Crantz's eyes widen, saw his nostrils flare, saw his finger tightening on the trigger. Before thought, before feeling, before anything could interfere, Arneson jumped. He grabbed for Crantz's gun hand, yanking the black eye of the barrel away from Sugar. He only had seconds to look into that dark tunnel and see his own death rushing toward him.

  The gun boomed, belching a pearl of fire into Arneson's face. The back of his skull exploded with a gaudy burst of blood and brains.

  He hung on Crantz's arm for an agonizing second, then dropped to the concrete with a slithering thud. A last agonized breath wheezed
from his mouth.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY SIX

  The vision in Arneson's remaining eye dwindled to a guttering pinwheel of light. He regarded it with wonder, watching the light whirl and spin. Pain spiked his nervous system. He wasn't hurt bad, was he? He'd heard the shot, but it must have missed. He stared at the floor, so close to his face. Cold seeped into his skin, emanating from the cement floor of the tunnel.

  "Sugar?" he tried to say. No sound emerged. His voice was like a breath of dust. He laid his head back down, for just a moment, relishing the cool kiss of stone. A swirling sense of fatigue filled his limbs. He realized he could no longer move his arms or legs, but the problem didn't seem important.

  A doorway loomed in his vision. A dark tunnel entrance. Another of Juniper Ridge's many doorways, perhaps. Who knew where this one would lead? An entrance, or an exit: what was the difference? He knew how important it was to reach that door, though he no longer remembered why.

  A woman. Someone he had searched for without knowing, and found her in a scummy little California town. A wave of sudden clarity washed over him. It was the doing, not having done something; that was the goal. He wanted to share his sudden knowledge with Sugar. Together they could discuss it. Turn it over between them, passing it back and forth like a polished stone. He wanted to tell the child, once old enough, about the distance between the past and the present, and how to bridge that gap in the space of a lifetime.

  Perhaps he would see her, and the child, beyond the door.

  He pulled himself through the threshold, and into the nothingness beyond. The last of the light in his mind sputtered and winked out.

  Arneson—or a man who called himself that, but forever a man without a name—let go of the past.

  He died.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY SEVEN

  Brayle leaned over Arneson's body. A tremor ran through his body, starting at the legs and ending in a bone-rattling seizure that brought him to his knees. More seizures racked him. His head swung back and forth in a helpless gesture of negation. The shaking quickened, faster and faster until his alien face became a blur. His eyes were nothing but wet white smears in the blurred green smudge of his face. Tiny crackling and tearing sounds emerged from him, growing louder.

  Brayle's head exploded. Streamers of Skunge, splashed with blood and brains, rained down on the tunnel floor with sick plops. Something squirmed its way out of the ragged squirting hole of Brayle's neck, something black and green and red, a bundle of Skunge shaped like a brain. It knitted itself into a crude facsimile of a head, complete with a ragged slash for a mouth and two whorled knots of pulsing Skunge in place of eyes. The head opened its mouth and screamed.

  Humans and Skungers fell, deafened, to the floor, blood pouring from ruptured ears. Freshets of gore ran from their noses and ears, as their brains were battered by Sugar's squealing, buzzing, alien scream of mourning.

  After it was gone, the air rang with it, until something new took its place.

  A voice boomed from the docks, amplified into a cataclysmic roar that thrummed through the concrete of the tunnel. As the echoes died, so too did Brayle's spasms and quivering palsy. He collapsed back into the driver's seat of the cart.

  "COME, CHILDREN." The voice was immense, irrefutable, rumbling through the air like thunder. "COME, AND MEET YOUR MAKER."

  CHAPTER SEVENTY EIGHT

  There, in the middle of the docks, a black SUV. Maas stood before it, his face bearded with Skunge, body lumped with it, arms ringed with growths. He still wore his California surfer-boy shorts and flannel shirt. He leaned against the back doors of the SUV, one leg kicked up with nonchalant ease.

  He smiled as the Skungers entered. When he saw Sugar, he spread his arms wide. "Welcome to the party." He laughed. "You know, I was kind of pissed at you about this—" he indicated his Skunge-covered arms. "But now that I'm used to it, it's the best thing that's ever happened to me. This is the future, baby!" He waved his hand at Christian and the army of Skungers. Now he turned serious, but his eyes retained a humorous twinkle. "And guess what? I brought you something else." He unzipped his shorts. Between his legs, where his penis had been, a long, thorny tentacle whipped through the air like an enraged snake. He cackled. "Come to Daddy."

  Sugar's alien voice hissed from Brayle's new mouth. "You are not my father," she said.

  "Well, you're right about that, honey," Maas said. He turned and opened the back doors of the SUV. "But I brought him to you."

  The thing that had been Christian Neumann poured out of the SUV, a writhing black and green nightmare of crawling, hungry flesh. Faces rose, submerged, and rose again in the corrupt flesh. If Sugar was a goddess, Christian was a god—or a devil. A deity of perfect madness.

  Some of the guards screamed and bolted as he emerged. They raised their phones, triggering the disruptor signal over and over, but the effects were lost in the booming space of the docks. Men fell to their knees, terrorized beyond reason by Christian's corruptive presence and their own fear. Christian left viridescent pools of slime on the concrete as his cancerous mass flowed forward, the amorphous lines of his body slopping over the guards where they knelt in supplication. Their bones crunched as he absorbed them, their screams not cut short but only gradually muffling as they were digested alive.

  Maas turned to the Skungers. His laugh, sounding more like a scream now, rose over the other sounds, jagged and bright and splintery with madness. "Take them! Take them and offer them to your new God!" He raised his arms, and the Skunge on his body whipped frantically.

  The Skungers turned on the guards and began to slaughter them. A red-bearded guard squealed in terror as four Skungers converged on him, tearing at him. Another sobbed and cried out for God to rescue him while they ripped open his torso and yanked out handfuls of glistening pink guts. They threw the bodies to Christian, who sucked them in through his gelatinous surface. He grew larger with every feeding. He made huge, contented grunting sounds, especially when fed a human who was still alive.

  Brayle turned his new Skunge head toward Maas, the pulsating knots of his eyes seeming to grow.

  Finally, only a handful of humans were left—the rest torn to shreds or drowning in Christian's guts as he gorged. The rest, including Crantz, huddled in a miserable group, ringed by Skungers.

  Christian was larger now, fed with blood and souls. He turned to Sugar, pulsing with unending sick hunger. "JOIN US." He extruded a long pseudopod of tissue. It reached toward her like a blind worm. "BECOME ONE WITH US."

  Brayle's body, puppet-like, stepped between Christian and Sugar and spoke. "The end of change comes soon."

  Maas uttered a barking laugh. "Bitch, we are going to change the world."

  With shaking hands, Brayle ripped open his lab coat. He was naked underneath. He dug into his belly, tearing at the flesh. Chunks of skin flew from his furrowing hands. Blood welled up and dripped in clots down the front of his pants. He clawed through until he reached the tense red layer of muscle underneath. The Skunge flowed down over his arms and speared into the muscle, tearing it open with a sound like wet sheets in a cold wind. Finally, his fingers scrabbled at the wet gray sac of his stomach, and he plunged his hands into his own gut.

  When his hand emerged, he held the blinking steel tube of the bomb. The pulses of light came faster, and faster. It began to emit shrill noises.

  beep beep beep

  Some tiny part of Lester Brayle must have remained deep within his broken, spoiled body. The last vestige of air in his lungs pushed out one last word in a dying croak. "No," he said.

  "Sugar?" Maas said. He sidled closer to Brayle's shaking body.

  Sugar's voice issued from Brayle's gaping mouth. "The end of change comes now."

  "No!" Maas and Christian screamed. Maas leaped for the scientist.

  beep beep beep beepbeep beeeeeep

  CHAPTER SEVENTY NINE

  Explosions can be beautiful, in their own way. This one was no exception. In the first milliseconds, blue-white fire blossomed;
it grew from a blinding point of light to a white death's-head looming over them all.

  Christian exploded like a pile of rotting shit under the spray of irradiated fire. Maas was blasted into ash, then even that was vaporized. Brayle's last thoughts were of his son. The surviving humans died with the image of the glowing white skull of fire imprinted on the back of their eyes. The Skungers were consumed in the cleansing fire.

  All but one.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  The tunnel door opened with a rumble. Heat roiled out from the docks, rippling the air. Sugar dropped the phone she had been holding and entered the tunnel.

  Her skin was luminous: electric lashes of blinking light limned every curve and angle of her body. Her translucent skull was filled with coiling green vines that writhed like living tattoos.

  She could have been the goddess of love, or death, or change.

  Beside her stood a child. The boy was every bit as wondrous as his mother: underneath his skin, the dark trails of Skunge twined, intricate as a fingerprint. He took his mother's hand as they regarded the dead man on the floor. He looked up at his mother. She gazed back at him with eyes like undersea sunlight.

  A living, tactile silence passed between them.

  She knelt, pale green muscles working smoothly, and rolled him onto his back. His face, obscured behind a mask of blood, was at peace. She stroked the lines of his face, noting each scar and line. His left eye was a churned red horror, but the right eye was only plastered closed with blood. She touched his face. A slender thread emerged from her fingertip, twisting around her finger before brushing against him with delicate care. From underneath his eyelid emerged a slender vine of the Skunge. It rose to meet hers, and they twined together.