“JUST DON’T TOUCH IT, OKAY?” she continued, shifting gears. Incredibly sweet now, her voice. And utterly reassuring. “I’LL BE RIGHT OUT TO FIX IT, OKAY?” Then she pushed the button one final time, headed quickly around the counter.
A banged-up black Jeep Cherokee wheeled onto the lot as Jennie reached the door. She stepped outside, flashing a quick, terse, automatic smile at the driver and his friends before crossing in front of them. They were three young longhairs, probably in their early twenties: all in all, more Grateful Dead than Megadeth in spirit.
But they looked severely wired, and the Jeep came in just a little too fast; it had to squeal on its brakes to keep from nailing her. She jumped, felt her adrenaline level surge.
And that was when she smelled it for the first time: an ugly, vaguely industrial reek with the distinct undertaint of decomposition. It was like the stink of the Spring Grove paper mills, redoubled and befouled. For one brief, uncomfortable moment, it made her head spin.
“Feh.” She scowled, tried to peg the source of the smell. It seemed to be unlocalized, everywhere at once: almost as if it were pumping out of some smokestack somewhere, riding the breeze down to her little store.
Or, perhaps, coming up from the valley.…
Behind her, the Cherokee’s driver was out the door, getting ready to gas up with the engine running. The other two guys headed quickly into the store. A third car—a Hyundai—pulled into the lot, sidled up behind the van.
Suddenly, things were moving too fast; she could feel the situation skittering out of her control. Jennie turned to the white-faced man: still standing there, nozzle in hand. First things first. She proceeded toward him.
The smell intensified the closer she got to the van. It was a more specific smell—oilier, thicker, more cloying—but it was clearly of the same gross vintage. She felt the nasty little headrush resurge. It slowed her to a crawl.
And that was when she saw, at last, the soapbubble-thin, translucent veil of slime that coated him. Saw it move, across his surface and into the fabric of his clothes, pooling at the stains in his pants, his shirt, the bandanna around his swollen right hand.
And that was when she saw, at last, why the family was screaming. Saw the little four- and five-year-old faces, suffused and glistening, as if the mucus drooling from their nostrils had spread out to envelop their heads, their hair.
Saw the mother and her little bundle, little bundle that kicked and squirmed, little oilslick hands and feet in weak, convulsive motion.
Then Jennie tried to scream as well. It welled in her throat, a soundless explosion, while the horror froze her in place.
“…pleeeeeeeeez…” croaked the white-faced, dying father. Up close, the sheen was uniform: a moist glaze across his eyes, his nose, his teeth and tongue. His bandaged hand fished into his pocket, came up with a thin wad of glistening bills.
“DON’T TAKE HIS FUCKIN’ MONEY!” shouted a voice from behind her. The Cherokee’s driver, wild-eyed and unequivocal. He had just spotted the dying man.
“…pleeeeeeeeez…” Holding out to her the poisoned currency.
Jennie shook her head no, began to back away.
“DON’T LET THAT FUCKIN’ ASSHOLE TOUCH YOU!” There was more than a touch of hysteria in the voice. An incredible hatred, born of terror. “DON’T EVEN LET HIM TOUCH THE FUCKIN’ PUMPS…AW, MAN…!!!”
Jennie’s gaze swept from the kid to the man and back again, back. The driver of the Hyundai was in the picture now, staring. He had no idea what was going on. She wanted to relate, but that level of innocence had already been burned off of her by the last thirty seconds.
All those years of reading science fiction, of voluntarily and willfully empathizing with the impossible, weirdly helped her to draw a bead on the moment. There was a voice in her head—of course there was—and that voice was insisting that this isn’t happening.
But that voice was wrong, and all she had to do was look in the eyes of the dying children in order to know that truth. All she had to do was look in the crying eyes of the mother who turned to her now.
And mouthed the word.
The magic word.
Please.
There was a paper towel rack on the pole that supported the intercom speaker. She had resupplied it shortly before noon. She pulled from it now a stack of paper towels as thick as a Frank Herbert novel, then turned her attention to the pump.
There was a greasy skidmark that glossed the metal lever that activated Number Two.
The skidmark was spreading.
Oh God. Jennie palmed the blue-gray towels, advancing on the stain. Omigod. She watched it spread, then stop, as if it were aware of her advance. Oh Jesus. When the pale gray/ white-faced man offered her the money yet again, she whispered, “No, please,” and then sidled slowly past him.
Reaching out for the lever.
“NO!!!” screamed the kid, and she flipped the switch, letting go of the towels the instant she was done. They hit the curb and began to stain, going dark and slick as they twitched on the pavement. Jennie backed away fast, staring at her fingertips. They were fine. Zero contact. She rubbed them together. Nothing. Fine.
“Okay,” she said, then turned away, getting as far away from the sight and smell of them as she possibly could, turning and walking rapidly toward the door of the store and the safety within. She didn’t look at the Cherokee’s driver. She didn’t look at the Hyundai maricón. She just stared at the doors until she was upon them, then threw them open and didn’t look back.
“‘Scuse me,” said one of the longhairs inside, the one from the passenger seat. He had a loud pink and black R.E.M. T-shirt, and his pupils were enormous. She brushed past him, unable to even think about him as she moved back to her place behind the counter.
“‘Scuse me,” he repeated, following her to the end and then pacing her back up front to the register. “Do you have any cases of, like, Spaghetti-O’s in the back?”
“Any canned shit!” yelled his friend, from the back. He had opened a box of Heftys, was loading one garden-size bag with cans that he swept with one arm off the shelves.
“No.” Jennie had the phone in her hand. She was punching in 911.
“Any cans at all,” said R.E.M. The courteous veneer was thin, and spreading like the gas pump stain. “Look, it’s kinda important…”
Jennie thought about the supplies in the back. She hadn’t really checked, but she knew they had to be slim. Tuesday, they’d restock.
If Tuesday ever came.
The phone rang. “No,” she said. It rang again. “I’m sorry.”
“Listen.” R.E.M. leaned close, against the counter. His winning smile was horribly frayed. “You can come with us if you want. Okay? I mean, you have a car?”
Jennie sucked wind, and her eyes went no. The realization was like a cinder block dropped on her belly. No. And she thought about her man.
The phone rang again. No answer. No answer at 911.
“Listen to me. You don’t want to be stuck here.” The kid’s voice was urgent, and utterly sincere. “You don’t know what’s going on down there…”
“Down where?” The phone rang again. Her voice sounded tiny.
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TELLIN’ HER, MAN?” yelled the guy in the back. His voice had picked up the driver’s ugly edge.
“SHUT UP!” screamed R.E.M. “JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!”
The phone rang again, then loudly clicked. A voice came on. A robot voice. “We’re sorry. All our circuits are busy at present…”
“Oh, God,” said Jennifer Quirez. Something else had clicked in place. It threatened to drag her to her knees. “Oh, God,” she reiterated.
Thinking of Austin Deitz.
Once upon a time, a million years ago, Jennie had seen a film called Miracle Mile. It was a story of doomed True Love in the face of nuclear Armageddon. The film had ached and torn at her, for all the right wrong reasons.
Because she wanted to believe in true love.
&
nbsp; And because she wanted to believe that the world would never end.
At that point—late one night, alone with her HBO—she had watched that goddam movie and then cried for hours, not crying herself to sleep because sleep never came, it disturbed her that badly.
And she’d realized that—if it came right down to it—the only thing worse than dying with your own true love would be to die alone.
Especially once you’d found him.…
“Please hold…”
Jennie came back. R.E.M. was still staring at her, but his friend was already heading out the door with the garbage bag. “COME ON!” screamed the friend, throwing open the doors.
“Good luck,” said R.E.M, and then turned away, too.
Outside, the Cherokee driver was yelling at the white-faced man. “YEAH!” he hollered. “I WANNA SEE JESUS AIRLIFT YOUR ASS OUT OF THIS ONE, YOU STUPID COCKSUCKER…!”
Then the doors slid shut, and she couldn’t hear what happened anymore. She watched them move in pantomime, all three of them climbing into the Jeep while the all-but-dead man pumped away, twenty dollars and counting as she read the console meter, all of it free as the canned goods clattering away in the Hefty Cinch Sak, down old Route 74 and away from here forever.
The guy in the Hyundai got back in his car and drove off without even touching the pump. When the tan Arrow van pulled away at last, it was almost as if nothing had ever happened.
Another illusion, quickly dispelled by the sight of the spreading stain.
There were a couple of orange emergency roadside cones in the back. She knew just where to put them. When the next car pulled in, it was restricted to the three and four pumps at the butt end of the island. Then she went back in to wait and pray.
While she waited, she stared at the clock.
It was two fifteen.
And counting.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Deitz came up from the darkness, piece by piece.
His entire being was fragmented, his consciousness buried beneath the rubble like an earthquake victim in the wreckage of his home. Every synapse and sinew, dislocated and disjointed, lay in a heap inside him.
Slowly, something shifted through the rubble.
Rebuilding.
Hearing was the first sense to return. His stoppered ears opened suddenly, the fluid in his cochlea giving way in a hot trickle, and suddenly Deitz could hear again.
Hssssssss…sh-sshhhh…
The claustrophobic deep-sea-diver hiss of ragged, clotted breath filled his head. Hsssssss…sshhhhhh…
How long he listened there was no way to gauge; time was marked but not counted by the simplest of life’s cycles. Air flowed in, flowed out again. Dimly, primordially, he recognized the breathing as his own.
Hssssssss…sh-s-sshhhhh…
Feeling came next, sensitizing the millions of nerve endings that laced through his skin like a shut-down electrical grid. Deitz was now a feeling, hearing, breathing machine. There was pain, but it was veiled, muted as the thud of novocaine on a rotted tooth. He could feel his lungs move up and down, could feel the thousand points of penetration where razored grass punctured rubberized canvas and quivering flesh.
He could feel other things, too. Strange. New. Shifting and sliding inside his suit. Hard to fix in the contained universe that was Deitz.
Gradually, consciousness focused as the power came back on in his nervous system. “Hnnnnnnn…” he groaned. His voice was impossibly huge in the confines of his hood.
“Hhn-nhhhhhhhhhhh…” he gurgled, swallowing thickly, and resumed breathing. Sweat slicked the surface of his face. Air flowed in, flowed out. He hawked loudly, his swollen sinuses suddenly giving way.
And, upon him like a wall, was the smell.
It was the reek of the Black Bridge road, revisited and amped to the millionth power: roses, rot, industrial solvent, forest green, and brimstone mixed with just a hint of something never smelled before by Man.
It was the stench of the New World rising, the sweat and blood and excrement of things that had never existed before. Could not have existed.
Until this moment.
Suddenly, he knew where the stench was coming from.
IN ME NOW!!!!!!! The thought screamed in his head. IN ME NOW!!!!!!! Like a soul in a shredder, a snake uncoiling in his brain. IN ME NOW!!!!!! Stuffing the enemy down his throat and forcing him to swallow.
Taking ahold of his face from behind.
And grinding it in his failure.
Deep inside him, Overmind wriggled, burrowing like a worm into his core.
Deitz shuddered, flatlined and went away, his mind going fetal, like a child with a high fever. Overmind responded by gunning his vital signs like a motorhead at a traffic light, making his dead heart race and his digestive system bubble. His limbs kicked into spastic motion, flopping and flapping in galvanic response. His penis engorged with blood and toxin, twitching like a frog’s leg on a hot electrode wire. He ejaculated joylessly, sperm oozing out to join the other juices accumulating in his suit like gravy in a boiler bag.
And in his mind, Deitz the fever-child had tried to run away. But there was nowhere to go, no place untainted, no way to escape the horror inside him. He retreated to the marrow of his bones, and Overmind was there: pulsing, arthritic, icy with malevolent delight. He slipped into coma, and Overmind was there: poisoning the vacuum, swirling in the void, at home in his unconsciousness as well.
Overmind dogged him every step of the way: nudging him, prodding him, torturing him, bending him over to prong his perception from behind. Seeping out, from every direction, to alter and color and rape the lens through which he was forced to perceive.
Dictating the new terms of his vision.
Lookie, it commanded wordlessly. Lookie lookie lookie lookie…
He fought it, not wanting to see, not wanting to see like that. It came at him like a speeding train, over ten years in the making: over ten years, to which he had dedicated his life, watching the train move toward him at a barely perceptible crawl…
…before shifting now, suddenly, into hyperdrive: hurtling toward him through the blackness, its headlight now a pinpoint now a floodlight now a blazing sun…
When the light consumed him, Deitz’s eyes began to see.
Light: milky and opaque, burning down his optic nerves, spilling into the dark crevasses of his brain. A jumble of senseless, murky, undifferentiated shapes: dancing before him, filling him with dread. It came to him that the inside of his visor was dripping with condensation, turning the world runny and hopelessly diffuse.
The pain was stronger now, a throbbing pulse that started in his legs and spread through his whole body. His eye muscles twinged, flexing, independent.
He looked to the right. Overmind looked left. He looked to the left.
Overmind looked right.
He tried to speak. His mouth did not respond. His mouth was no longer his own. It had been annexed into Overmind, along with the rest of him.
MY BODY! he thought-screamed. MINE!
Deitz focused his will like a missile and fired it. It bought him a moment’s brief shred of control. His jaws wrenched open and his breath sucked in, his teeth prying apart like a rusty spring trap. When he tried to scream, his black tongue lolled into the breach.
Then he lost control, jaws clamping down hard until the blood squirted hot across the roof of his mouth.
Overmind let him taste it.
Then it asked him what he thought.
And Austin Deitz began to cry, fat tears rolling nowhere, formed inside his soul alone. His face refused to collaborate in the expression of his agony, his boundless despair. It mocked him: crazily crossing the eyes, black-red lips contorting in a bloody, toothy grin. Smiling on the outside, crying on the inside.
My body. Desperately. Bitterly. Mine.
But even he didn’t believe it anymore.
A tremor passed through him. The master, whistling to its dog.
Then, slowly, Deitz’s b
ody began to rise and pull itself free.
The corpse was impaled, a thousand times over: a thousand wet, rank violations of the flesh. Overmind seemed not so much indifferent as mildly amused by the damage, the sensations of sickly rot and pain and transformation. But Deitz—the tiny spark of soul-identity that still remained his own—felt every razored gash and sliding, still-inserted blade of grass in intimate detail.
Deitz’s body sat up, slowly. It braced itself with one hand on the living bed of nails, lost the middle finger just above the second knuckle, felt the severed digit drop into the bifurcated palm and rest there like a charm. Then it got to its knees, its feet, felt the soles impale deep and slide loose again, rising. Over and over.
As it walked toward the bridge.
At the edge of the river of pus that had been Toad Road, a crust had formed. It was enough to support the dead weight. Deitz’s body followed it, plodding on wobbly sticklegs, chest arrhythmically recycling its rancid, humid fumes. Stumbling like a bum on Sterno, random blades of razored grass hanging off the mangled back like porcupine quills.
The Deitz-thing dragged itself up the steepening incline: a deep-sea diver, knee-deep in the sloshing, self-contained ocean of itself. It sealed its own ruptures as it walked, plugged its own leaks in the outer skin, let the boil-in fluids continue to rise. The roar in its ears was the sound of Creation—the primordial, protean, plasmic pool—raging and churning on either side of the blind, visored mask it wore.
And the roar grew louder, as it crested the hill. It turned. The roar grew louder still. The Source lay directly ahead, now; Deitz felt himself shudder before its astonishing power. It flooded his senses, overwhelmed his spark with an alien longing, far stronger than love.
Lookie lookie lookie lookie…
Deitz tried again to shut his eyes.
They simply opened wider…
…and watched, in helpless horror, as the condensation on the inside of his visor parted like a curtain: the tiny beads of liquid rolling off to either side, waggling their little moist tails like sperm like eels like baby snakes.
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