As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

He heard Beth’s voice. It was faint, coming thinly through the smoke-filled air. He struggled to get back to his feet, scanning the chamber for some sign of her in the flickering light. Some proof that this wasn’t just the toxin, wasn’t just another one of their illusions. Then he spotted her, coming through the smoke, haloed by the red light. Oddly beautiful, like some sort of angel.

  No.

  Not her.

  Beth was buried under a million tons of rock. This was just life’s last sick prank. How dare one of them come to him like this. How dare one of them come to him as her. He trained his gun on what his lying eyes told him was Beth, as his vision went soupy, and he kept his hand ready on the kill switch.

  “Jack. Jack.”

  But maybe. Just maybe. Maybe it was her. Maybe there had been some miracle. If only he could know for sure. He had to know. And he could. He reached for a vial. His fingers brushed nothing but broken acrylic shards. He looked down. They’d all been crushed, every vial destroyed. It must have happened in the fight with the creatures on the way in. Again, he wished he could laugh.

  “Jack!”

  He snapped his head up. Beth strode toward him, moving away from the rest of the indistinct shapes. Was it her? How could he know for sure? I didn’t matter now. He lowered his gun, letting fate decide. He wouldn’t be a murderer. Not again. He’d rather die.

  Beth drew close, crouching down to him. He looked up at her, for the first time noticing her beauty. She was stunning, even caked with grime, a vision. He felt safe, gazing into her liquid black eyes. “Beth . . .” he said, his voice the treble pipe of a child.

  And the creature that was not Beth attacked—a perfect strike, right to his jugular.

  Sixty-nine

  Push it out. Push the illusion from your mind, Beth commanded herself, gazing out at the sea of Jacks filling the chamber. She shut her lids tight. Push it away. Don’t let it take hold. She opened her eyes.

  Jacks. Hundreds of them. All creeping toward her.

  Beth backed up. She’d never be able to tell which one was really him. Not in the fading flare light, not down here. She heard the rush of the water sluice behind her. Maybe she could just slip back out before they got her. She had no idea where that shaft might lead. It didn’t matter. Anything, anywhere, was bound to be better than here.

  No.

  She was here on a mission. Jack was out there somewhere. That, or he was dead, and she’d have to take up his mantle. Finish what he’d started. She reached into her pocket, tugging with her numb and bloody hand at the single stake she’d salvaged. She’d fight her way through all of them one at a time if she had to, until she found Jack or that detonator, or die trying. She clutched the sharp juniper shaft tightly to her chest, along with the vial.

  “Jack!” she called. “Jack!”

  She rapped the vial against her thigh, uncapped it with her thumb, and sucked in the vapor. Almost instantly, the illusion shattered. The writhing, undulating creatures flashed from Jack to the boneless horrors they were. Hundreds of them, all ready to pounce. She scoured the chamber, spying the real Jack fifty feet away and fighting for his life against one of them.

  “Jack! No!” Beth screamed, heaving the gas from her lungs as she watched the thing still flickering between real and illusion sink its needle-like teeth into the base of his neck. She leaped, stake extended, and hit, driving the point through the center of its back.

  She felt the wood shaft sink deep into the creature, felt its warm lifeblood flow through her hands as she muscled it to the side. She took Jack’s gun from his limp hand and fired a round into the thing’s chest. It went down, but more creatures advanced. She scraped up the last lit flare and stood between them and Jack. “Jack. Jack, get up.”

  He didn’t answer.

  The flare began to sputter. Not long now before there was nothing but blackness. She’d never find her way out then. Wouldn’t last a second with those things. She crouched down, elbowing Jack. “Jack,” she said, a tremor in her voice as she glanced at him, seeing the full effects of the neurotoxin beginning to take hold. “Jack, you’ve got to get up. Get up! Now is not the time for sleeping.” The flare stuttered again. “Jack, now! Get up. I think I’ve found a way out.”

  By way of answer, he inched the detonator toward her with a trembling hand. “Finish . . . finish the . . .”

  “No. No. Get up.” She could see the creatures in her peripheral vision, inching closer.

  “Go,” he managed to cough out, his vocal cords beginning to seize.

  “No,” she said, sticking the gun into her waistband. “You’re coming with me.”

  “Go . . . live . . . fight . . . more . . . there’ll be more . . . always be more . . .”

  “No. I’m not leaving you here.” She hooked her arm around his torso, dragging him up. “I can’t fight these things alone.”

  He looked at her. Something nearing a smile spread across his face. “I did . . . once,” he said, before slipping into the blackness.

  “Wake up! Wake! Up!” But it was no use. The flare gave a warning hiccup. Any second now and it would die. She took a deep breath and dragged Jack toward the water sluice, waving the creatures back with what little flame was left. With each step, they grew bolder. She could hear the rush of water; she was almost there. She stole a glance back. The fissure was just a yard away. She heaved the flare at the throng of creatures—still flickering between real and illusion—buying herself just enough time to push Jack into the sluice.

  She held him back by the scruff of his jumpsuit, keeping the stream from carrying him off as she herself climbed in. Then she let him go, praying that he would stay faceup long enough for her to find him. The flare lying on the ground hiccupped again. One of the creatures leaped over it, its wide, teeth-filled mouth open and hungry.

  And met nothing but the barrel of Beth’s gun. “Give me a break, already.” She squeezed the trigger and then, not even waiting to watch the creature die, she let the water carry her away.

  Seventy

  The bottom dropped out from under her. The sluice opened up into a larger chamber. She fell, landing with a bruising smack on the surface of an underground pool. A hump floated past her. She reached out—an act of blind faith—and caught a fistful of wet cotton. It was Jack. She’d grabbed his jumpsuit and pulled him over to her. In the dim light, she could just barely see his eyes. They were open and staring blindly into nothingness.

  She let the current carry them, and soon they had drifted out through a culvert and were bobbing up and down on the slow-moving river that ran through the middle of New Harbor. The sky above them stretched out in all directions, a judging Damascus gray. She spied the shore and fought against the frigid current. It seemed like forever before she reached the bank. And she was surprised to find that she still had enough strength to pull herself up onto safety of the mud, dragging Jack’s waterlogged body with her.

  She was flooded with the urge to sleep. A creeping haze spread across her eyes. The silty river sloshed across her legs. And she was unable to pull herself farther up onto the bank, no matter how cold the water was. Her stamina was sapped, her strength spent. She clutched at the front of Jack’s jumpsuit. Her fingers fumbled at it, her hands frozen by the icy water, the chill air, as she rolled him faceup.

  She looked over at Jack. His hair was matted with mud, one ear plugged with it. His wounds wept blood, staining the mire ruddy. His eyes were caked with filth but nonetheless stared sightlessly up at the tin sky. Beth pulled him tight, pressing her cheek against his chest. She couldn’t feel the slightest rise or fall of his torso, and was unable to detect even the faintest trace of a heartbeat. All she could hear was the syncopated slap of the river as it lapped against their bodies. She clasped him close, sensing her consciousness begin to slip, flowing from her body like the water flowing out to the ocean.

  Beth wished for tears, but she was too d
rained even for that small release. She closed her eyes, welcoming the strange warmth that began to blush across her body, welling up from deep inside. It was a kind of knowing. She tugged the detonator from Jack’s belt and extended the antenna, fighting to keep her lids peeled as she opened the safety gate. She took one last glance at the open culvert that they had come from and, without even pausing to pray, she pressed the button.

  Seventy-one

  They know not Time. Not as we do. They know not hours, days, or years. Rather, their lives are broken into seasons. There is a season for sleeping, when they burrow deep into the earth, all but dead for what we deem decades. There is a season for feeding, when they creep from their dens to feast upon blood, storing what they need to rest, to grow, to mature in time for the next season.

  The mating season. The season when they will wake and seek one another out over untold miles. Drawn together by chemical signals only they can read, traveling across lakes, through rivers and streams, to cavernous underground chambers where they breed and spawn. Theirs is a cycle that has repeated and repeated and repeated for millennia.

  Beyond the seasons, there is nothing.

  Only a threat will shift them from their perfect adamantine rhythm. A threat to the cycle. And deep beneath the sleeping streets of New Harbor, that threat has been eliminated. The scent of the trespassers has been flushed away, and the season will resume undisturbed.

  And in that lightless chamber, without eyes to see them or tricked brains to recast them, they exist as they are. As they have always been. Nothing if not beautiful in their own way. The most elegant, most efficient, most ruthless predators the world has ever known.

  Unheeded by them, the vault’s perfect blackness has been breached, broken by the plinking of tiny red points of light, spreading scant illumination for just a fraction of an instant before the chamber is flooded by a thin, nearly invisible white haze.

  Some of them feel an itch as the fine dust lands on their backs. Some taste the grit of gunpowder in the atmosphere. None of their instincts tell them to worry. This is not a threat to the season.

  And then comes the flash. And then comes the heat. And then comes the end.

  Piercing wails would fill the air if the fire did not consume them in an instant. If the inferno did not come so quickly and was not so total. Flames sear skin from their backs, burning them to curling cinders, boiling the eggs within their cabled sacs in the brief time between eruption and collapse.

  The force of the vacuum strains at the ancient masonry, breaching the vault, crushing the creatures to nothingness beneath that unforgiving stone mass. As this season, and all that might have followed, ends.

  Seventy-two

  She pulled the final missing-person flier from her scuffed and battered satchel, then tacked it up to the big mahogany doors of one of the university quads with a satisfying thwack. She stepped back to admire her work, a moment of quiet reverie, knowing it would likely be the last that New Harbor ever saw of her. She walked away, her blond hair trailing in the wind and the dog padding behind in her wake.

  A second early-season blizzard had rolled over New England the previous night, laying down a five-inch-thick blanket of snow, and this afternoon, the sky hung over everything like a dome of lead. The quad stood desolate, empty, the students tucked into their cozy suites for a lazy day, classes canceled.

  By tomorrow, the rain would wash it all away, and the snow, like her, would be but a memory. She knew that flier, the one that bore her face and her old name, probably wouldn’t last the afternoon, but it felt good sticking it there. Within a month, her memory would be as buried and forgotten as the horrors that lay dead and unknown beneath her feet. She took one last look at what had been her home, sucked in a deep breath of briny New Harbor air, then turned her back. Turned the page.

  Her daylight life was over. The good-time girl who doled out drinks and kept the party rolling all night long was no more. In her boots stood a soldier, a warrior, a protector, a guardian as complete as the man who’d changed her forever.

  She’d kept out of sight since the vault’s collapse. The media had blamed the devastation on overpressurized sewer gas. “Another example of our crumbling national infrastructure,” one talking head or another had blathered at her from a storefront TV display. “Thank God no one was injured.”

  No one injured? she’d thought. Yeah, right.

  Even lying in the slime and mud of the riverbank, she had known as soon as she could claw her way up that it would be time to move on. That there would be more of them, that there would always be more. Perhaps not here but somewhere. Somewhere waiting.

  She’d quietly drained what little money she had left from her checking account. It wasn’t much, just enough to stock up on supplies, pick up some new clothes and to buy a beat-up Chevy Scottsdale four-by-four with a camper cap. The truck wasn’t nearly as grand a vehicle as Jack’s battle van—not by a long shot. But it would do for the time being, at least until she’d modified it. Retooled the engine, beefed up the suspension, installed a roll cage. All of which were well out of her skill set, but she’d learn. She’d always been a quick study.

  Beth stamped the wet snow from her new boots and slogged her way over to the pickup. She opened the back of the truck. “Hop in, boy,” she said, and Blood obeyed. She shut the gate and moved to the cab. As she climbed inside, she felt a blast of warm, dry air coming from the dashboard vents.

  She pulled off her shades and tugged down the itchy blond wig she’d worn all day. Her hair was shorter now, easier to maintain. Who knew when would be the next time she’d be able to get a shower or wash up with something besides the cold water of a truck stop’s bathroom sink?

  She turned down the heater and put the truck into drive.

  “You ready for this?” Jack asked.

  Beth looked over to him, sitting in the passenger seat. His arm was in a sling, the stitching in his face and neck was still weeping a bit, but he looked a far sight better than he did lying in the river mud. “Not really,” she answered, as she pulled out onto the open highway.

  She hit the accelerator, and they drove on toward the coming night, as a brilliant flash crescendoed from horizon to horizon out at the rim of the world.

  Epilogue

  Agent Ross tugged down the wet flier. It was nearly indistinguishable from the many others tacked to the telephone pole directly in front of the crater that had once been Club Axis. He scrutinized the grainy face that stared back at him from the wavy, ink-smeared paper. So this is the girl, he thought. Not hard on the eyes.

  Ross adjusted his mirrored shades, taking stock of the rubble. The advance-deployed field agents—forensic specialists—had picked apart what was left, brick by blasted brick, and come up cold. They logged some badly degraded genetic material but nothing useful. Nothing they didn’t already know. Ross shook his head and walked back to his black Division-issued Town Car.

  He settled into the buttery leather of its heated seats. Almost two decades of loyal service to The Division certainly had its perks, and the car was one of them. He flicked on the stereo; the onboard hard drive spit out Switched-On Bach, one of his favorites. He put the car in drive and pulled away from the Strip. As the mathematically perfect tones wafted from the dashboard speakers, Ross tapped his fingers in time to the music. Bach always settled his nerves, especially Carlos’s rendition.

  He drove on, cruising through New Harbor until he eventually found himself peering through the windshield at the crypt-like headquarters of the most recondite of the university’s secret societies: the Order of Sormen. The snake-wrapped battle-axes flanking the red granite building’s wrought-iron gates stood mocking against the mottled gray sky, and the building itself radiated a coldness that made the chill New England air seem balmy by comparison.

  They didn’t have secret societies at the college Ross had graduated from. Secret societies were incompatible with
Morehouse’s mission to maintain an open exchange of ideas and information. There were fraternities. Ross himself was a “Que,” an Omega Psi Phi man. He had the brand to prove it, a set of interlocking Greek letters that had been seared into his skin with a red-hot coat hanger when he was only eighteen years of age. He knew he was not the only man in his line to wear a brand. His ancestors who had arrived on the shores of America via the Middle Passage no doubt had. But Basil Ross might have been the first to wear one by choice.

  Ross hammered the steering wheel with the heel of his palm and drove on. The Order had to be behind this. He felt it in his very bones. There was no way something like this had happened practically in their own basement without them at least knowing about it. The Order, of course, had pleaded ignorance when pressed. They’d sent the Division liaisons back with nothing more than a handful of empty platitudes after a three-hour jerk-off session in their leather-paneled receiving room over some snifters of Louis XIII.

  And again, The Division was stuck watching Jack Jackson pop up on the grid and vanish like a phantom before they could get him—or the creatures he hunted—in their sights. Ross admired his slickness, his craft. He’d have made a good Division agent, one of the best, had this been a different world.

  If only they had sent Ross in first. Instead, they’d sent a couple of rookie agents who had nabbed a homeless crackpot who’d denied even seeing Jack Jackson before they’d managed to break him with the right combination of chemical coercion and “enhanced” questioning techniques. The error had cost The Division days. Had cost them everything. The rookies paid for it. Division eggheads were already using them, or their component parts, anyway, for nanotech-cerebral-interface experiments. The Division didn’t suffer fools.

  Ross switched off the Bach. It wasn’t helping. He pulled the car into a deserted gravel lot overlooking a school of rusting barges that lolled in the New Harbor straits like iron leviathans. From now on, capturing Jack Jackson was priority number one. Jackson had in his possession something that belonged to The Division. In some ways, Jackson himself belonged to The Division. And Agent Ross would see to it that that property and anything else he may have annexed—namely, the girl—were returned to their rightful owners.