As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

And saw that the chair was empty.

  Jackson stood on the other side of the room, looking down at his hands in bewilderment. Kander froze. The process had accelerated faster than he’d anticipated, and Jackson had learned to control it. No bonds could contain him now. Only this room could contain him—and perhaps not for long. They locked eyes. Jackson reached out, his arm stretching longer than humanly possible.

  Kander bolted through the hatch. He slammed his palm against the biometric scanner and hit the panic button, initiating the decontamination sequence. He had reached the door when he felt a boneless arm coil around him, crushing his abdomen and pulling him back inside. “No! No! No! NONONONO NOOOOOO!”

  Kander saw the ceiling, and the floor, and the ceiling again. He was flying. He hit the far wall so hard the steel sang, his lungs collapsing and his head battered by fireworks. He fought to regain his footing, lurching for the hatch just in time to watch it swing shut, sealing him in. He scrambled up to the portal and saw Jackson’s face on the other side of the glass.

  And he knew the countdown had begun.

  Forty-Seven

  A feminized computer voice reverberated in the narrow confines just outside the ’Clave. “Ninety seconds until full decontamination.”

  Kander was on the other side of the sealed hatch window. Jack watched as he clasped one hand over the back of his head. It came back red with blood.

  “What’s happening?” But even as the words passed Jack’s lips, he knew the answer. The neutron pulse wave that the doctor had talked about so cavalierly—the one he’d planned to use to eradicate him—was about to claim its own creator.

  Kander moved his lips soundlessly.

  “What?”

  The doctor threw his head back in silent laughter, pointing downward. Jack followed his finger to an intercom box positioned halfway up the door. He clicked it open.

  “I guess this is the end, Jack.” The thin, tinny approximation of the doctor’s voice had a strangely resigned ring to it. “I would say remember me fondly, but I doubt you’d follow through on that.”

  “Sixty seconds until full decontamination.”

  “The world will remember me, though. It will remember what we’ve done here.”

  Jack looked around frantically. Just above the intercom sat a small touch pad. Besides that and the hatch wheel, there was nothing but the smooth steel wall of the ’Clave. “Tell me how to stop it.”

  “There is no stopping it. No stopping any of it.” Kander’s voice was oddly disconnected from the movement of his mouth, coming just a beat late because of the intercom delay. “The process will proceed . . . by design.”

  “Forty-five seconds until full decontamination.”

  “There has to be some way.” Jack tapped futilely at the hatch’s touch pad. It remained blank and indifferent. “There has to be some way to get around it.”

  “I’m afraid not. The biometric scanner is keyed to my palm print only.” Kander held up his red right hand. “In hindsight, I suppose I should have thought to put one in here, too.” And with that, he laughed.

  “Thirty seconds until full decontamination.”

  A queer look flashed across Kander’s face, framed there by the tiny riveted window. “I thought you’d be glad to watch me die. You surprise me even now, Jack.”

  Jack shook his head. He’d seen enough death—Sarah, Wilcox, the countless nameless victims he’d watched those creatures claim year after year. He desperately scanned the walls around the hatchway. There had to be something Kander wasn’t telling him.

  “Twenty seconds until full decontamination.”

  “What a wonderful father you’ll be,” came Kander’s voice through the intercom’s tiny speaker. “Such a proud father.”

  Jack’s blood frosted. “What are you talking about?”

  “Fifteen seconds until full decontamination.”

  “Just wait, Jack. Your children will bring this world to its knees.”

  “Kander! Stop talking nonsense, and help me figure out how to get you out of there.” Jack wrenched on the hatch wheel. It didn’t budge.

  “Ten seconds.”

  “Good-bye, Jack.”

  “No!” Jack strained at the wheel, a burst of starfire coursing through him. The wheel twisted with a shrill metallic screech. It was going to open.

  “Seven seconds.”

  The wheel grew hot in Jack’s hands as it spun faster and faster. Then it fell from the hatch, rolling on the floor like a hula hoop. Jack looked at the frozen axle. All that remained was a bent metal nub that glowed red.

  “Five seconds.”

  Kander gazed at Jack through the glass. And a genuine smile spread across his face. “You have no idea what’s coming, do you?”

  Jack pounded on the hatch, “Kander—”

  “Two seconds.”

  “You’ll be a god.”

  “Kander!”

  “Good-bye . . . Monarch.”

  A flash of light seared Jack’s eyes, blinding him. He stumbled from the hatch, landing on the floor in a heap.

  “Full decontamination complete.”

  • • •

  Jack saw nothing but darkness. He took one ragged breath after another, trying to calm his frantic mind. He couldn’t lose control again. His vision would return. He simply had to will it to do so. His body was now his to command completely. He knew that.

  He focused his mind on sight and sight alone. He could feel a warm tingling in his eyes. Indistinct shapes began to form slowly in the murk. Soon the lab came into a hazy focus, like a film shot through a grease-smeared lens.

  Jack stumbled to his feet and went to the hatch window. All he saw inside the ’Clave, however, was that it was clean. The doctor, the specimen—everything but the chair was gone. Even the molecular dust Kander had spoken of was gone, vented into the atmosphere.

  He heard footsteps coming from the hall behind him, followed by the clanging of the door. “Dr. Kander?” It was Ross’s voice, his sonorous baritone shaky and unmoored.

  Jack turned. Along with Ross were Agent Thorne and Beth and a group of four agents. “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  Beth broke from the others. She rushed to him, and he felt himself backing away from her, not wanting to infect her with what he’d become. “Jack,” she said, almost breathless. “We know who she is, what she is—”

  “I know what she is,” and I know what I am, he added silently.

  Ross stepped closer, determined. “What do you mean, gone?”

  Jack glanced at the ’Clave and watched the realization dawn on Ross. “The specimen, too,” he added. “It was inside with him.”

  “No. No! Not again!” Ross rushed at Jack, grabbing him by the shirtfront and slamming him against the ’Clave hatch. “You killed another one of my scientists?”

  Jack could feel Ross’s tight fists pressing into his chest, and he knew that if he wanted to, he could twist Ross’s head off like a bottle cap. He could rip both arms right from their sockets as if he were tearing off strips of newsprint.

  “I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t have.” Jack kept any trace of anger from his voice. In fact, he felt he was moving past anger, moving past all the baser parts of himself. “You know that touch pad is biometric. Kander was the one who initiated the sequence. He tried to kill me.”

  Ross narrowed his eyes to little more than suspicious slits. “Now, why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know. You hired him.”

  Ross let go of Jack. He stepped back, smoothing the lines of his ruffled suit jacket. He turned to the largest of the agents who hovered near the door. “Please escort Mr. Jackson and Miss Becker to their quarters. They are not to leave until the current situation has been dealt with.”

  Immediately, two of the four agents started for them.

  “Wait,” Jack said as one agent clapped a rough hand on his shoulder. “I know why she’s coming here.”

  Ross ignored him. “Double the
guards if you have to.”

  “I can help.”

  “I think you’ve helped enough,” Ross said.

  Jack tried to shake the grip of the agent manhandling him toward the door. He opened his mouth to protest once more, but before he could, Agent Sands burst through the door.

  “Agent Ross,” she said. “Agent Diamond and the interception team have the anomaly surrounded. They’re awaiting further instructions.”

  “Surrounded?”

  “Yes, s—yes, Agent Ross.”

  “Surrounded where?” demanded Ross.

  “Here.”

  “Here? Where here?”

  “She’s here.” Sands’s voice had become a treble pipe. “She’s right outside the compound.”

  Forty-Eight

  Before they’d made it outside, Beth had told Jack everything. She’d told him about the ice coffin in New Jersey, about Brigid Casey, about Lascarre’s experiments on her, about the monograph, and about how the Order of Sormen was behind it all.

  And Jack had told her nothing.

  As they passed through the compound gates, the first thing they spotted was a phalanx of six agents, Diamond among them. Gone were the suits, exchanged for full riot armor. Strapped to their backs were insulated tanks equipped with dispenser hoses.

  Thorne had informed them that the tanks were filled with a cocktail of liquid oxygen, liquid nitrogen, and liquid kerosene gases kept in stasis at forty-one degrees Kelvin—nearly four hundred degrees below zero. At close enough range, the gas would freeze any organic matter instantly.

  It made sense. If the ice coffin had kept the thing that had once been Brigid Casey in suspension before, chances were good that cold was her weakness. Chances were good but thin.

  Past the semicircle of agents, they spotted her. The setting sun behind her had just begun to dip below the harbor. She sat there on the ground, at dead center of the desolate, garbage-strewn lot, pinned by the business ends of those freeze cannons.

  Her long tail was coiled up beneath her. Her arms had returned to their human shape, and she wrapped both of them around her slim, naked torso. Her head hung down. Her long scarlet hair hid her face, but her body was racked with sobs.

  “She’s crying,” Beth said as they drew closer.

  “Stand back!” barked Agent Diamond.

  “Crying? Why?” demanded Ross. “Does this have something to do with the specimen? The one you destroyed?”

  “No,” Jack said, unable to take his eyes off her—off what he was destined to become. “No. It’s . . . something else.”

  “Don’t you see?” Beth took another step closer.

  “I said keep back.”

  Beth ignored the command. “Don’t you get it? This was her home,” she said. “The Caseys lived on Bank Street. That’s two blocks from here. All she wanted was to come home. That’s all she wanted, to come home.” Beth took another step closer. “To come home . . . to this.” Beth spread her arms as if she could encompass the industrial wasteland that radiated out from Brigid Casey and grip it tight. As if she could shake it and demand answers.

  Jack knew what he had to do. She’d touched his mind once. He could do that now. At least, he could try. Maybe there was still hope that no more blood would be spilt today. He stepped toward her.

  “Look, fuck-o! I said keep the fuck back!”

  “I have to go to her. We can communicate.”

  “I said back!”

  Jack ignored Diamond, eyes only for Brigid Casey.

  “Stop moving!”

  “Brigid.”

  She looked up at him. Those endless green eyes spoke of eternal pain—but perhaps, just perhaps, they also whispered of hope. If he could only touch her mind the way she’d touched his, she would know she wasn’t alone. It was a small thing, but it was a start. Jack inched closer. She lifted one slender hand, reaching out to him.

  And she was hit full force with a blast from a freeze cannon.

  “No!” Jack whipped around to see that it was Diamond who’d pulled the trigger. He turned back to Brigid. A look of confused betrayal washed over her face. Her arm hung there. The skin, from shoulder to fingertips, was covered by a hoary layer of frost that sparkled in the last rays of the dying sun.

  She waved her arm, now as rigid and fragile as an ice block. It cracked, breaking off and crumbling to the ground, where it shattered into countless frozen cubes, leaving nothing behind but a blasted stump. She looked at what was left of her arm with a child’s innocent confusion. And it was then that Brigid Casey screamed.

  She reared back, rising high, her tail roiling behind her. Jack dropped low, rolling out of the way as she lashed out, knocking two agents to the ground like bowling pins. The whip end of the tail struck one of the freeze tanks, fracturing it.

  “Run!” screamed the agent who wore it, an instant before both exploded in a hail of blood, bone, brains, and shrapnel.

  A freshet of liquefied gas splattered against Brigid Casey, sending her sidewinding back and screaming in pain.

  Her coiled tail had taken the brunt of it and now frosted over the same way her arm had. It was as stiff and white as a marble tombstone.

  Jack watched as she struggled to back away from her attackers, the unfrozen part of her dragging the deadened coils across the dirt, plowing a deep furrow in it. She only managed a yard before collapsing. She tried to scream again, but all that came out was a warbling, mournful sound.

  The remaining agents advanced, took aim, and fired.

  “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” Jack shouted. His voice lost to the repeated hiss of the freeze cannons.

  He went to one knee, nausea overtaking him. Suddenly, he realized he was feeling the blasts himself—faintly, yes, but he was feeling them just the same. Each one a punch through a pillow, an echo of agony. And there was more. Along with the pain, he felt her fear—Brigid Casey’s fear, Brigid Casey’s pain. She was broadcasting it all straight to him.

  Jack lurched up, stumbling to Ross. He gripped the man’s jacket hard enough to tear the shoulder seam. “Can’t you see she’s hurt? Can’t you see she’s scared?”

  Ross shook him off. “Scared? I would fucking hope so.”

  The agents fired again and again and again. Jack felt the world around him swirling as if it had been dropped into a funnel. Through the collapsing eye, he saw Beth and reached for her hand.

  She clutched it tightly, turning to him. “Jack? What’s wrong?”

  “Everything,” was the best he could manage. And he held on to her like a shipwreck survivor clinging to the last piece of floating timber in an ocean ready to swallow him whole.

  He could do nothing but listen as the blasts dwindled to intermittent bursts. When they finally stopped completely, he looked up. Brigid Casey hung like a statue from some forgotten age. Icicles dangled from the arching coils of her tail like stalactites. Only her eyes seemed to possess even a glimmer of life. They locked on Jack, radiating a terror that was as boundless as the universe.

  A heaving crack split the air. The tail crumbled beneath its own weight, breaking up into a mound of icy white shards. She fell, her body severed at the waist but cauterized by the cold. She struggled to get up, clutching the earth with her one remaining hand. A thin, dejected mewl escaped her lips.

  Agent Diamond stepped forward and took aim.

  Jack pushed himself between them. “No!” he commanded, arm outstretched, palm upraised. “That’s enough.”

  Reluctantly, Diamond looked to Ross. Ross nodded, and the man shouldered his weapon.

  Jack went to her. She collapsed at his touch. He clasped both hands over her temples and closed his eyes. He tried to reach into her mind as she had once done with his.

  He saw only blackness. Endless blackness.

  Jack laid what was left of her body on the ground. Almost instantly, it began to lose shape. He knew that soon it would be nothing but an unformed lump. And after that . . . it would be nothing at all.

  A rage like one he had
never known gripped him. He whipped around to face the agents—the murderers. “I hope you are all satisfied with what you’ve done. I hope you’re happy. It didn’t have to be this way—”

  “She attacked you!” Diamond spat. “You fucking idiot! She attacked all of us!”

  “Ross, you saw her. You saw what she was doing. You know that wasn’t an attack.”

  “I don’t know what I saw,” Ross admitted, but his tone told a different story.

  “He’s right,” said Agent Thorne.

  Ross wheeled on her. “Agent Thorne! Have you forgotten what happened in Asbury Park?”

  “With all respect, Agent Ross, I will never forget what happened there. But as far as I can tell, the anomaly—Brigid Casey—she’s only ever attacked when threatened. Jackson’s right.”

  Jack looked at her with shock and perhaps a touch of admiration.

  “Of course, he’s right!” Beth added. “She didn’t come here to hurt us. She didn’t come here to hurt anyone.”

  “Then why did she come here?” Ross’s eyes bore down on Jack. “What do you know that I don’t know, Jack? What did Kander tell you before you fried him?”

  “Nothing,” Jack said, rubbing his temples. “Kander signed his own death warrant.” Jack stumbled. A deep throbbing had overcome him. It was as if the tide were suddenly rushing in to fill his head. “What I know, I know from her. She was reaching out for help. She was reaching out for me. And now three of your agents are dead. She’s dead, and . . .” Jack’s voice trailed into nothing as he watched a look of paralyzed awe wash over everyone. “What?”

  It was Beth who lifted her hand, her mouth a wordless O as she pointed directly behind him.

  Jack wheeled around. And there was Brigid Casey. She’d been reborn into a new body culled from the ashes of the old. Gone was the tail, and she stood on the same slender legs she’d once possessed. She looked exactly the same as that first time he’d seen her. She took everything in, naked and unafraid, possessing the form of a young woman—and the power of a god.

  She raised both palms. She tilted her head slightly as she gazed at Jack. Her eyes had lost the terror, they had lost the loneliness, but they had not lost the rage. In them now was nothing but the rage. She touched Jack’s cheek with one cool palm and opened the link between them. Suddenly, he knew it all. He knew what had happened. She’d gone to the gates of death and come back with a new truth, an instinctive truth.