“Even in photographs?”
Jack simply offered a wan and knowing smile. He’d been down that line of reasoning, it seemed. “Then you won’t see them at all,” he said. “Just a strange spot your mind won’t fix on. I still don’t know why or how. But I know it’s true. I’ve taken photo after photo, shown them to strangers even, and nothing.” He pulled a few sheets of paper from a drawer behind him. “Here,” he said, handing them to Beth. “This is what they really look like. Best that I can put together from my memory.”
The crude sketches showed a thing, vaguely humanoid in shape. It had a smooth, segmented body that sprouted slender limbs that terminated in flat flippers. It had no neck. Instead, a bulbous node protruded directly from the body. Its eyes were black orbs set wide apart on either side and just above a ring of jagged fangs. A walking slug. Nothing but slimy flesh, lidless eyes, and razor teeth. A nightmare.
“Not as sexy as the movies make vampires out to be. Won’t sell a lot of tickets to teenage girls with that thing on your poster.” Jack took the sketches from her trembling hands. “The mind sees what it wants to see. But strip away the illusion, and it’s nothing but a worm. A big, ravenous worm. No bones, pure muscle. That’s why they’re so strong. That’s how they can wriggle through just about any opening, seem to vanish or materialize like smoke.”
“But if they’re just leeches, how come they seem so intelligent?”
“In some ways, parasites are the apex of natural selection, the most highly evolved species on earth. They outnumber free-living organisms four to one. We like to think that we’re the top of the food chain. We’re not. They are.”
“This viral recoding, how long does it last?” Beth shuddered at the thought that she’d already been invaded by those things, penetrated, changed.
“It lasts forever,” was the answer. “Once you are infected—recoded—you will always see them as what you want to see and never as they are.” Jack leaned back against his console. An invisible weight seemed to press on both shoulders. “Sometimes I wonder if we’ve all been born with it. If the whole world is recoded.” He glanced down at her. A look that might have passed for pity flashed across his face. “Would it have been easier to believe it was magic?”
“Maybe a little.” More than a little. Magic, demons, even an uncaring God would be easier to deal with than this. “How did you . . . how did you know? How did you learn all this?”
A strange gleam flickered in Jack’s eyes. “Let’s just say that I learned a lot of it the hard way. The rest is another story, for another time. Right now, the important thing is knowing how to tell them apart from us. And you do that with one of these.” Jack pulled a long vial from his belt. It was identical to the one he’d had that night in Axis. The one he’d said short-circuits their illusion by sending the prefrontal cortical area of the brain into hyperactivity or something. The one that he said lets you see them for what they were—see more of them then you would want to.
Beth wasn’t sure she wanted to see them at all. She took the vial from him, and lifted it to the light. Inside, she spotted a small glass capsule suspended in the solution. “How do you use it?”
“You rap it against something hard. That releases the catalyst. The reaction forms a gas that short-circuits the illusion once you breathe it in.”
“What’s it like?”
“Like inhaling broken glass,” he answered. “And it will paralyze your reflexes. Do you understand? You are going to have to breathe it out consciously.”
Beth nodded absently, still trying to scrape away the image of what those things really looked like. The walking slugs that wore human faces. “What happens if I don’t remember to breathe it out?”
Jack’s eyes met hers and held them. “Then it will kill you.”
Fifty-five
If someone had asked Beth Becker to imagine herself on death row, requesting her last meal on this earth before walking that long mile to the place where she would ride the lightning, she would have answered without hesitation. A large pie from the coal-fired ovens of New Harbor’s famed Sully’s Apizza, one with pepperoni and extra cheese. She hoped she wasn’t tempting fate by bringing that exact order back to Jack’s van.
Snow fell in fat flakes, leaving wet, round kisses on the pizza box’s cardboard top. Already, an inch-thick blanket of white covered the Docklands. Moonlight glistened across everything, turning even the blight and desolation into something fit for a Christmas card. The scent of charred pepperoni, oregano, and garlic filled the air. She caught whiffs of it in the steam venting from the D-shaped punches in the box’s sides.
Beth ducked through a tear in the lot’s cyclone fence. On the cracked concrete supports, she could still make out the remnants of her target practice. The red and blue paint splotches splattered across the graffiti were now beginning to get lost under the dusting drifts. Blood was nowhere to be seen. He’d padded off into the night just as she’d headed out to get their—hopefully not last—supper. One of Jack’s snap vials sat in her pocket. It knocked reassuringly against her keys with every step.
Beth drew near the van. Ten yards from the side hatch, she caught a glimpse of something from the corner of her eye. A shade lurching toward her in the gloom. She stumbled in fright. The pizza box slipped from her grasp and landed in the snow, facedown. The figure stepped into a pool of watery light cast by the lot’s lone street lamp.
It was Jack.
“Jumping Jesus, you scared the hell out of me.” She bent down to retrieve the box. “I hope you like cardboard on your pizza.”
There was no response.
Beth stepped back. Something was different about Jack. Something about the way he tilted his head, about the way he moved. Something wrong. “Jack?”
Still no answer. He advanced on her with a stilted gait that was nothing like his usual fluid grace.
“Jack, cut it out.” She backed up. Two yards separated them now, the pizza lying dead center between them. “What is this? Some kind of test? More training?”
Again, no response. If this was a test, Jack was playing it close to the vest. “Fine,” she said. “I’m not looking you in the eyes, happy?” She kept him in a hazy focus, just as he’d told her to do. Her hand brushed against the snap vial that protruded, ever so slightly, from her pocket.
Jack advanced in a broad semicircle, avoiding the pizza as he drew nearer to her. She shifted, too. It had to be Jack. If this was one of those things, it would have just come straight at her, not worried about crushing dinner. Except . . . except she’d ordered the pizza with extra garlic. It had been a little joke for herself. But sure enough, Jack was giving the box as wide a berth as that thing that looked like Ryan had done with the salt.
No. No. No. This wasn’t happening. “Jack, if that’s you, you’d better answer me.” Beth reached into her pocket for the vial. “See?” She held it aloft. “I’m making sure. I’m being safe.” If that was what he wanted, if this was the last part of the test, she’d give it to him. She rapped the vial against her thigh, felt the glass capsule suspended inside crunch. Then she flicked off the cap and lifted it. She almost gagged on the acrid fumes, but she sucked them in deeply, perhaps too deeply.
The margins of her vision began to color and twist, to bubble up like film stuck in a projector, as new images burned through. Jack’s face changed in an instant, morphing into a smooth, almost featureless visage. The rest followed. She saw it all: the slick segmented body, the lidless onyx eyes, the broad flat head, the sharp teeth. It hunched toward her on stump-like legs, reached for her with wide, flat flippers.
It was as spellbinding in its grotesqueness as the illusions had ever been in their allure. Beth felt the ground beneath her turn to morass, her legs to aspic. Comets of light burst across her vision, and a jagged pain stabbed at her temples from the inside. She tried to call for Jack—to yell out—but her lungs were frozen.
It was the gas. Jack had said she’d have to force it out herself. She strained her diaphragm, but her chest was calcified. Asphyxia gripped her. She pounded her ribs. Her gut. Again, with both fists. Nothing. Her lungs would not obey. In another minute, she’d be done. And that thing seemed to know it.
Beth stumbled back. The creature vaulted the distance. It hit her like felled timber. Both of them went sprawling backward. The thing’s bulk crushed her rib cage, knocking the wind from her—and the gas with it. She sucked at the air, pulling in just enough to remain conscious. She threw out both arms, gripping the thing at the shoulders. Already, it was beginning to change back into Jack. The illusion flickered like a strobe between creature and Jack. Creature and Jack. Creature and Jack.
It snapped at her. Again. Only inches away. She tried to scream for help. Nothing but a pathetic squeak emerged. The van’s fold-down step, its closed door, they were just yards away. But it might as well have been miles. Jack—the real Jack—was inside. She felt the creature’s hungry mouth graze her throat. The thing was almost all Jack now, all except the yards of splintery teeth that spiraled down its throat. Its eyes locked on hers.
It was Jack after all. It always had been. This was just a test. She had passed and could stop fighting now. If she would only yield. Submit, those eyes seemed to say. Surrender, and you will find peace.
And just as she was about to give in, everything exploded in a flurry of white. There was no scream from the creature; there was no longer a head for it to scream with. Warm viscous fluid drenched Beth as the decapitated body slumped onto her. Jack-the real Jack-stood framed in the van door, gun still leveled at the thing that had looked so much like him.
“Get it off me!” Beth screamed, straining to heave the thing off of her. Its body was soft and yielding, its gelatinous bulk smothering her, and the white blood still gushed from its blasted neck. “Getitoffme! Getitoffme! Getitoffme! Getit—”
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Jack said, shoving the thing to the side, freeing her. “I got it. It’s dead.”
Beth scrambled back, her heels digging up dirt and snow as she tried to put as much distance between her and the creature as she could. The effluvia clung to her skin like snail mucus, and panic rose in her gorge as she frantically tried to scrape it off. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down. She was safe now. Shaken and messy but safe. The thing was dead. The poison gas that had ripped her lungs to screaming shreds was leaving her system.
She looked over to see that Jack was already sprinkling the corpse with salt. It began to dissolve and melt. Steam from the snow around it billowed in a fog to mingle with the corrosive vapor rising from the creature’s melting skin, as the snowflakes continued to fall on everything, unabated. This was twice now that she’d seen one of the creatures as Jack. How could she trust him—trust anything—if she could no longer trust her own eyes? There had to be a way, but how? He’d said it himself. The mind sees what it wants to see.
Beth would have broken down right then. She would have let the tears and sobs consume and console her, if not for the sound she heard echoing in the brittle night air. The soft, hollow padding of footfalls on the van’s thin metal roof.
Fifty-six
Jack stood sentry over the corpse. How had this thing managed to slip through his security net? He’d planted tracking beacons at every possible point of entry in a quarter-mile radius. But yet his console had remained dark. He’d treated the perimeter with heavy doses of repellent spray. Blood had been on nightly patrol. But here it was just the same, and it had attacked Beth, within feet of his own doorstep while he’d been inside, oblivious. If this place was no longer safe, nowhere would be.
“Beth,” he said over his shoulder, eyes still fixed on the melting mass. “I need to know where you first spotted this thing. Which direction did you see it come from?”
There was no answer.
“Beth,” he said, turning. “Need to know—” He froze. Something had caught her attention. Something behind him. She raised one trembling hand. Jack whipped around. On top of his van, he saw the figure of a woman loom into view. She wore a diaphanous shift, and her hair hung in soft auburn waves. An elfin sprite framed by falling snow. Jack slackened his focus before he fell victim to her spell.
Just as he did, he spotted two more figures rising behind her. They surged over in a pack. The first one leaped straight for him. Even as she descended, Jack was struck by how blindingly graceful she was, sailing through the air almost in slow motion, her scarlet tresses fanning out behind her like flames. He could already feel his thoughts drifting to how nice it would be for the two of them to walk hand in hand in the moonlight.
It landed face-first into one of Jack’s juniper stakes. He’d been waiting. He’d been in the same situation far too many times to fall for that illusion. The point jutted right out the back of her copper-maned skull. But the thing was still flailing, still screaming that ear-tearing shriek.
Jack rose, hands tight around the wooden shaft, and shoved the thing supine. Then he drove the business end of the stake deep into the hardscrabble earth and stomped on the butt end with the heel of his boot. He stomped again, for good measure, feeling the peg hold fast. The creature was skewered to the ground, still alive, still writhing, screaming, and scratching as it tried to get free.
He had drawn his pistol, about to put an end to it, when he was blindsided by one of the others. He went sprawling to the ground. The gun slipped from his grasp and slid away, leaving a two-yard trail in the fresh-fallen snow. He felt himself rolling, gravel and snow rasping against his back. The thing pinned him down. He shut his eyes tight. He couldn’t risk falling under its spell. Not at this close range. Not with another one of them still out there. Not ever.
He felt a gush of hot air hit his face, heard those clicking teeth, as its mouth snapped again and again. He fumbled for his belt. His hand hit the lip of his salt bag. He wormed his fingers through the drawstring enclosure, muscles straining to the snapping point, and was just able to grab half a handful. He drew it back, opened his palm, and jammed the salt into the creature’s cheek.
It screamed. Jack watched that same winsome face liquefy like butter in a pan as the creature reared in agony. He quickly drew in both knees, then jammed his boot soles into its chest. The thing went flying, gouging up folds of snow as it skidded across the lot.
Jack’s practiced hand landed on one of the auto-snares. He snaked out the loop, and before the thing was back up, he had the wire around its neck. The creature clawed for a final futile instant before white foam sprayed everywhere. The stench of metal and earth filled the air. Its body slumped into the snow, while the head rolled into the shadows like an errant kickball.
Jack looked to see that the first creature was still writhing on the ground, hopelessly staked through the face. Its frantically flailing limbs drew snow angels on the ground. It was almost comical. He followed the trail to where his gun ought to have been, but there was no sign of it.
A slow sinking feeling spread across his gut. Without the gun he was helpless. Worm food. His belt hung around his waist, empty. Most of his weapons sat inside the van, out of reach and useless. Those few he’d brought with him he’d used up already and had nothing left to fight with. And there was still another one of those things out there. At least one.
He heard footsteps behind him, closing fast. He turned. There it was, the final creature. In his mind it appeared identical to the first two, that same scarlet snow sprite. He slackened his vision and readied himself. He’d fight it bare-handed if he had to, but already the pull of its illusion was growing stronger. Nothing to fear, Jack, it seemed to broadcast. Isn’t it time you just relaxed and forgave yourself? The creature crouched low, about to lunge.
And it suddenly went down. A jet of white foam spurted from its chest. It screamed that terrible steel-on-slate scream. Jack snapped his head to the right to see that Be
th was standing there. She held his pistol in two trembling hands. The barrel was still pointed at the thrashing creature. Once again, she had saved his life. He was safe.
Then she lifted the gun and pointed it right at him.
Fifty-seven
Beth watched Jack creep closer. Was it him? Or was it one of them? There were two dead Jacks already. Another one was pinned to the ground, still squirming, with a stake through his face. Did he kill them all? Did one of them kill him? Was this just another part of the illusion?
Whoever—whatever—it was, it had its hands outstretched. Were they held up in defense? Or was it about to attack? She tightened her grip on the pistol, felt the knurled grip dig into her skin as she tried to steady the barrel. Beth . . . it might have said. They couldn’t talk, could they? Giant leeches, blood flukes, whatever—they couldn’t talk, could they? Could they make it seem as if they were talking? Beth . . . easy . . . Was this just her brain playing more tricks on her? “Don’t come any closer!”
Beth . . . easy . . .
She kept him—it—in her sights. Her finger found the trigger. Her mouth felt stuffed with dryer lint. Didn’t he hear her? Didn’t he care? “I said, don’t come any closer.” From behind her came a sharp bark. Jack lunged. She fired.
Her aim was off. The shot went wild. The pellet missed by inches, flashing harmlessly against the side of the van. Suddenly, the thing had its arms around her. It stripped the gun from her grasp and held her tight. She fought to get loose. Squirmed and screamed and kicked.
But no, it was Jack who held her. She knew that now. She knew it in a way that made her wonder how she could ever have been seduced by those things and their illusions. She began to relax. He held her tight, the way a brother would. No, the way a lover would.
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