Returning to him his sight.
At the heart of Black Bridge.
And the New Creation.
Hell unfolded before him.
There was a whirlpool at the center of the creek: a vast liquid aperture, a hundred feet across, like a gaping mouth on the surface of the water. It roiled around the perimeter, bubbling madly, then settled into a winding, almost stately corkscrew as it spiraled down into abyss…
…only no, not exactly; the opposite, in fact: corkscrewing back and heavenward to dredge up the darkness, vomiting barrels and black slime from the belly of the earth.
The quagmire spread the breadth of the creek, bubbling muck that oozed like a lava flow and hardened. Its skin cracked open in a thousand places. Suppurating sentient toxic slag.
Things moved in the scum: the unfortunate indigent fauna of the water and woods, caught in a squeeze play of the new order. A doe, trying to escape the carnivorous plants, had gone headlong into the bank. It spasmed in the sucking mud, eyes rolling white in its head as the killing vines probed and planted seeds beneath its tawny hide.
Rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, and chipmunks had also fled and were subsumed. They flailed pathetically in the mire, wiggling like bait for the flippered monstrosities that belched forth from the hole.
Something thrashed directly beneath the bridge: six-foot-long carp, garbage-eaters throwing themselves into the shallows, their scales rupturing even as the first vestigial limbs sprouted from their sides. They moved toward the trapped mammals with long mouths snapping, sucking in the new air and dreaming of flesh.
The trees that rimmed the water were bowed under the weight of the strangling vines. Several had nests in their boughs, enormous conglomerates of mud and twig, riddled with softball-sized holes.
The nests were humming.
An insectile shape emerged from one of the holes, feelers busily probing atop its teardrop head. It was puppy-sized, and its segmented body bristled with short, deadly-looking spines. Wasp, Deitz thought, although the name no longer fit.
Wasps had always terrified him.
He hadn’t known what terror was.
More of the insects appeared, crawling around the tortured trees, new wings unfurling in the sun. The drier ones lit from their perches, testing their wings on the hot still air. Their stingers were long as bayonets, their buzzing like the whine of a hundred ripsaws cutting through the roar of the abyss.
Several took off, lightning-quick, skimming the surface of the creek. They zigged and zagged against the current, heading upstream and far beyond.
And there was more. There was more. It spanned the horizon, overrunning the water and landscape for as far as the eye could see. Unnameable shapes, violations of form, wild new species of untraceable origins thrashed and wailed and spawned there.
At the center of the only Hell that mattered.
The Hell that Mankind had created on Earth.
The thought descended upon him then, a branding iron burning hundred-foot-high letters into his brain. And all that was Deitz reeled from the impact as Overmind spoke, the simplest expression of the infant god’s greed.
MINE! it said. MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE!
And it was true. The war had been lost, irreversibly and forever. Deitz could see it now, see it all too clearly.
His mind snapped like a twig.
Suddenly, the program clicked into place. An instinctive knowing, clear-cut and unquestioned. Suddenly, he understood how a bee felt in the hive. Completely plugged in to the schematic.
Completely at One with the higher plan.
And there was a terrible peace there, in giving in to Overmind. A terrible burden removed from one’s shoulders. The burden of doubt. The burden of shame. The burden of responsibility and individuation.
In the mind of God, all things are possible, and all can be forgiven.
But Austin Deitz could not forgive.
Not even dead.
Not ever.
No. A primal response, preceding thought. No. Beyond denial. No no no. A gut reaction, pushing back against the program.
Overmind blinked, uncertain.
No no no no no. A slowly mounting groundswell of power, forming at the base of his will. No no no no NO. Building, in pressure and size.
He felt his fingers clench, and knew that he had caused it.
NO!
Confusion shuddered through the Overmind, in the contained universe that was Deitz.
NO NO NO!!! He relished the power, refused to give in to the satisfaction. The trade-off was control: seeping back into his dead limbs, the muscles and bones that powered and framed them. Already, he could turn his head, wipe the hideous grin off his dead, bloated face.
He could even close his eyes, if he wanted to.
He no longer had the desire.
MINE! The word belonged to him now. The concept belonged. To him. MINE! It could have the rest of the fucking world.
MINE!!! It could even turn him into a monster.
But he would be his own monster.
MINE MINE MINE!!!
Then he turned, heading back in the direction he’d come, negotiating the crusty bank of his own complete volition. The lifeforce that spawned him held back in awe, stunned and shunted out of the driver’s seat by the astonishing, presumptuous fact of free will.
My way, he said.
And became, in that moment, the first fallen angel of Overmind.
His men were rising up from the depths as he returned, crawling out from under the abscessed surface of Toad Road. Their faces were barely visible through the coagulant slime that had swallowed them, the afterbirth that sluiced them back out into the world. Beckett, Burroughs, Hooper, Franklyn: essentially faceless now. Taken over. Drones of the One True Faith.
Deitz’s suit had filled, as well; the boiler bag had risen to the brim. He found that he lived now as much in the fluid as inside of the skin that had once defined him. It was not a problem to see through the inch of opaque liquid; his eyes drifted out of their sockets, pressed against the Plexiglas faceplate that framed the bounds of his new flesh.
The trucks were rising, too. Deitz wondered if the others would pose a problem. He was becoming far less Deitz than thing, a malformed union of the two.
With a purpose, he found, that would not be denied.
Pyle, still in the lead truck, turned toward Deitz as he approached, his Barney Rubble bonhomie long since expired. His eyes were flat, and the color of gelatin; his open mouth worked endlessly, producing no sound.
It didn’t matter. Deitz already knew what he had to say.
My turn, he said, eyeing the empty driver’s seat.
And waiting for his moment to arise.
When the road reformed beneath them, the HazMat team regrouped as well. It was an unexpected addendum to the original script, but Overmind was nothing if not flexible.
It gave the first heretic his first wave of followers.
And waited to see what it got in return.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
In the handful of minutes since two, a net of sorts had begun to form: confused, scattered, mounting. Across the county, like light pins winking on across an electronic map, a pattern of pandemonium emerged: overloading phone circuits, jamming call-lines, feeding the rumor mill.
And spreading.…
A very frustrated Kirk sat behind the wheel in the PennSupreme parking lot, listening to the ticking doom-clock in his head and weighing his options.
A pay phone stood before him: utterly useless, every signal a busy signal, every line jammed. The two-way radio sat under the dash, its mike still in his hand. The mike was dead.
Not an accident.
Because to turn it on would be to invite the wrath of Laura, who would ream him out before he could get a word in edgewise. But to spill his guts enough to win her over would tip his hand to every other reporter in the tri-county area, thereby guaranteeing a blown scoop.
And there, as they say, lay the rub.
/>
Because Kirk needed some input. Kirk had just returned from Paradise Waste, where his little journalistic blitzkrieg had come to a grinding halt with the discovery of one big fat dead Harold Leonard, cooling on his office floor.
Leonard did not look like he went gently into that good night. His eyes were screwed shut tight and his tongue protruded in a horrible yechh face; little white flecks of stillmoist spittle caked the corners of a mouth that was torqued into the most miserable grimace Kirk had ever seen. Harold Leonard had gone out with a terrible secret on his lips.
Combined with the clutch of rifled documents, it spelled out a knowledge that Kirk was not entirely sure he wanted to hear.
And even less certain he could afford not to.
Kirk eyed the radio. “Aw, screw it,” he muttered, and flicked it on.
The car filled with harsh white noise. “Ouch!” Kirk winced, thumbing back the squelch control. He toggled the mike switch.
“Laura,” he said. “Come in, Laura.”
Nothing. His voice seemed to echo weirdly, the wave of noise shifting and modulating as if it were trying to form the words. “Laura, come in…”
Kirk listened, as Laura’s voice came up from under the hiss.
“Kirk…?” it began.
At the sound of his voice Laura crossed the room in record time. “Kirk!” she demanded, white-knuckling the handset. “Kirk, where the hell are you?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said. Hiss clung to his words like sargasso.
“Don’t play games with me!” Laura said. “Get your butt back in here, now!”
“I’ll be back soon,” he said, his voice distant. “Trust me. I’m on to something.”
“KIRK!” Laura yelled. “COME BACK IN HERE RIGHT NOW! KIRK! YOU’RE FIRED! KIRK!” The noise put an echoing trail on her words, mocking her. “KIRK…!”
But there was no answer from the other side. Just the rippling echoes in the alien wall of noise.
Kirk switched the radio off, his bowels turned suddenly to water and slush. “I didn’t hear that last part,” he said to himself. “The transmission broke up, and I couldn’t make it out.”
He figured if he said it another hundred times or so, it would start to sound like the truth.
But the fact was, he had heard it. YOU’RE FIRED. Just two little words, but they changed everything. YOU’RE FIRED. It was amazing, astonishing just how thoroughly they had clipped his strings, sucked the fire from his guts and the wind from his sails.
Suddenly, everything he’d done—from the day he entered broadcast school to the moment at hand—was ashes. Cinders. Confetti in flames. There was nothing he could do to salvage his career now. He had taken the gamble, and lost.
Big-time.
The pain began to penetrate the protective cold that his mind had thrown up. Pictures of the future began to unveil themselves, unbidden. He could imagine the look on his old man’s face when word of this got out. He could imagine the way this would play on the industry dirtline. He tried to imagine ever getting a job in broadcast media again; but that picture, for some reason, just wouldn’t come clear.
“I’m dead.” The voice barely registered as his own. “I’m dead.” Staring into his rearview mirror. The face that stared back at him was a frightening grayish white.
“Oh, man,” he whimpered, slumping across the steering wheel with his crisscrossed arms shielding his forehead. “What the fuck am I gonna do now?”
Kirk was not the only one in the grip of despair. Back at ‘PAL, Gary sat trapped at the editing console, dialing and redialing his house. For roughly the fiftieth time, he got a little recorded voice, droning “…all of our circuits are temporarily busy. Please try…”
“…your call again later, yeah, yeah. Shit!” he muttered. He slammed the phone into the cradle. Somewhere up stairs, he could hear a telephone ringing, ringing, ringing.
“HANG UP!” he bellowed.
It stopped. Gary huffed in pained relief. Before he could relish the silence, the phone rang again. It had been this way for almost an hour, an endless upward spiral of fear and frustration.
Gary picked up the handset and punched in the number again. He didn’t know what else to do. There was nothing else to do.
When the prerecorded operator’s voice came on the line, he nearly punched a hole straight through the wall.
And at 911, things were getting worse by the minute.
Dottie Hamm had drained the last of her Big Gulp. The straw rasped against the bottom, probing for stray droplets of lukewarm Coke. She was down to her last Munchkin. It was beginning to look like she’d never get any again. Nor would she ever get to eat lunch. In fact, she hadn’t been able to leave her seat to so much as pee for the last three hours.
Dottie cast an anxious glance at Dave, who shrugged and rolled his eyes as his call screen lit up once again. The calls that had started as a trickle were now a flash flood of near record-breaking weirdness.
Because the voices that clogged the lines were panicvoices, frantically spitting out tales of fear and delirium. Worse yet, the callers Dottie checked out on her video monitor didn’t display mile-long rap sheets of crankdom. These were not your chronic paranoid freaks. Most of them, before today, had never dialed 911 in their lives.
They were just folks: ordinary citizens calling in to say their trees were singing, saying their gardens had attacked them, or their dogs or kids had gone out to play and not come back.
Dottie was stumped. They were just folks. And they were scared. Dottie didn’t blame them one bit. She knew a few things they didn’t.
And she was getting a little scared herself.
Because it wasn’t every day that you called in police from Hellam Township and Paradise County, two fire companies and HazMat, and have every single one of them disappear, now was it?
It vexed her. One by one, she called them in. One by one, they dropped right off the map. She checked the lines again. The signal path down to Hellam was a wall of white noise; nothing was coming from within ten miles of Black Bridge, on any frequency.
It’s like the Bermuda Triangle popped up right in our own backyard, she mused.
And damn if it wasn’t spreading.
“Shame on you, Dottie,” she scolded. She looked at the list of people to call in the event of just such an emergency. Her bladder felt like a overfull water balloon, ripe and ready to burst. She punched in the number, and waited.
This call was definitely a first.
She hoped to heaven it would be the last.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Ah-hah…Yes, I see…Yes, that is very strange.”
Blake, still holed up in his study, paced and spoke softly into the phone. “Have you notified anyone else?”
Blake’s brow furrowed with concern, as every name punched another hole in an already leaky boat. “Hmm,” he said. “And HazMat did what? Ah-hah.”
His headache was back, a whanging pulse in the top of his skull. “Yes, I’ll get right on it,” he said, fighting every urge to lash out. He grasped the heavy obsidian glass paperweight that graced the corner of his desk and squeezed as hard as he could.
“Yes,” he said, as crisp, angled edges cut into soft finger skin and the pain in his hand beat back the pain in his head. “Good job, Dottie.” He smiled thinly. “Keep me up-to-the-minute, will you? Thanks so much.”
Blake rang off and let go of the paperweight in a simultaneous release of stress. A smear of blood slicked its surface.
“Shit.” Blake hissed, pulling out his handkerchief. He’d cut himself, alright, a thin laceration on the inside of the knuckle line. His handshake hand, his deal-sealing hand. But his headache had abated. For now.
He wrapped the hanky around the cut and paced: thinking, thinking.
This was bad. Correction: this was beyond bad. This was a nightmare. With Dottie’s report of foul-smelling water, isolated dementia and blight ringing in his ears, he became increasingly convinced that some sort of hallucin
ogenic substance was involved in this chemical spill.
It was a horrifying thought, but he could think of no other explanation. For his part, it would be nothing but bottled water and spirits for the duration.
Meanwhile, the odds on containment grew skimpier by the second. While there was still time to be bought, Blake continued to plug holes; he sat down at his desk, flipped through his little oak Rolodex until he came to Huntington, Tom. He punched in the number and waited.
Busy.
“Shit!” he spat. He hit the redial button.
Busy.
Blake cursed again and fed the number into the auto-dialer, punched send. As the phone worked, Blake gazed pensively at his surroundings. He could feel his window of opportunity narrowing, and his tastefully appointed digs were feeling more prisonlike by the second.
Finally, the phone caught, chiming a melodious little brrrr…brrrr…brrrr…
“Answer the phone, dammit,” Werner said into the mouthpiece. Then, “Tom? Werner Blake. How are you, old man?” Reptile-smiling. “Great. Listen, I just wanted to call and keep you apprised of a situation that’s developed.”
Blake opened up his hand, studying the Rorschach-pattern of blood staining the white linen hanky. “Well, nothing too serious, we hope, but we’re still scoping it out…”
He nodded his head, the picture of corporate concern. “Of course. But handled wrong, this could impact adversely on mutual friends. We’d like to treat this with some sensitivity, not start a flap over nothing.…” Nod, nod.
One down, he thought. Tom Huntington was nothing if not a team player. Blake relaxed behind the game, on auto-pilot now. He could finish this conversation in his sleep. “Ah-hah,” he said.
For some strange reason, even as he spoke, Rio kept coming to mind. Blake closed his eyes and could picture it: lush mountains, tropical beaches, incredibly beautiful women, a favorable exchange rate, and a government sympathetic to economic opportunity…
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