by Jack Hamlyn
And what they wanted, he wanted.
Mooney moved through the mall, his heightened animal instinct guiding him to FOOD. He was now in the sector that Ex-2 had fought for before being overwhelmed. Casting his helmet aside, he discovered two of his brother slugheads feeding on a dead exterminator. He joined them, shoving sweet globs of belly fat into his mouth and chewing them with carnal satisfaction. As the food reached his stomach, its nutrients were siphoned off by his slug which, even then, was growing at an alarming rate.
As he filled himself, he was rewarded, feeling better with each swallow.
Then the flukes cut him off and he began to crash.
He needed more.
He had to have more.
And in the shadowy runs of his brain, he knew a way to achieve this.
The hot suit of the exterminator lying at his feet, that which wasn’t spattered red, reminded him that there were others. His instinctively hated them. But at the same time, he knew they were FOOD. He would find them and feed on them.
But they were dangerous.
He would have to be cunning.
He started the long walk back to the other end of the mall. Along the way, he saw his helmet and put it on.
Now they would accept him.
His stomach growled.
His slug purred happily at his belly.
The flukes gorged themselves on his brain tissue.
And he was content…but hungry.
28
Janis D was the only survivor of Ex-5. All the others were slugified or dead. She had crawled into Tony Roma’s on the second level, leaving a blood trail behind her that looked—ha, ha, ha!—like the smeared slime trail of a slug.
Now ain’t that something? she thought. Ain’t that just something?
Things had gotten hot and heavy.
Real hot and heavy.
The sluggos were everywhere on level two. Within ten minutes of staging, Five made contact. They gunned down a dozen slugheads and torched twenty more. Then the sluggos came from everywhere—Red Lobster and Romano’s Macaroni Grill, the Longhorn Steak House and Ruby Tuesday’s. They were everywhere and in unbelievable numbers. Five emptied magazine after magazine, spent round after round after round. They emptied both flamethrowers, but it still wasn’t enough.
Janis D called Ex-2 for backup.
Two charged up the dead escalator and ran into a wall of sluggos coming down to greet them.
Rounds flew.
Grenades were thrown.
The floors were greasy with blood and viscera. As the last few valiant exterminators in full retreat fought a losing rear-guard action, the sluggos (driven to maniacal levels) dove off the railings on top of them.
The survivors of Two were buried alive and torn literally to pieces.
With all that lead flying, somebody was bound to get drilled by friendly fire. Janis D just didn’t think it was going to be her. Not until some scattershot took out her left kneecap.
Now they were coming for her.
She had made it into Tony Roma’s—damn, for a minute there she thought she could still smell the ribs but it was only the roasted smell of burning bodies—and managed to get a pressure bandage on her knee, shooting herself up with antibiotics and morphine. Between the latter and the trauma, she was going in and out of consciousness.
As she peered around the corner out into the mall, she saw a good thirty or forty slugheads crawling in her direction. They were following her blood trail, sniffing it like dogs. Backlit by the raging fires behind them, clouds of black smoke churning in the air, body parts cast about, it looked like a medieval vision of Hell out there.
They would have her.
Or would they?
As the first ones came through the door of Tony Roma’s, as voracious as any customers that had ever come for the baby back ribs, Janis D knew there was no surviving this.
They would gut her.
They would skin her and feast on her organs, suck up her salty blood and snap her bones for the creamy marrow within.
She studied the ruined faces and slavering mouths of the pack, bare feet from her now.
As they made to take hold of her, she played a little trick on them. Something she had seen in an old WWII movie with Mickey Rooney. When he was surrounded by the enemy, wounded and unable to move, old hard-bitten Marine Mickey had played a joke.
So she followed suit.
When they grabbed her, she pulled the pins on her last two grenades.
And closed her eyes.
Right before they went off and took seven or eight sluggos with them to the promised land, she thought about Kurta. He’d always been the best, exterminating more slugheads than anyone else.
Oh yeah, Kurt? Beat this!
Then the grenades exploded.
29
West came awake to a sensation of being petted like a dog. Of a hand stroking him gently, running up and down his chest with a slow, gentle motion that made him want to sink back down into dreamless sleep. There was a vague memory in his mind of his mother doing the same thing to him when he’d had a bad dream.
Except that his mom had died when he was fourteen.
And he was not home, not in his bed. In fact, he was—
Where?
He couldn’t be sure. But as his mind gradually climbed the steep hill to full consciousness, a sense of panic woke inside him as did physical pain. An awful throbbing in his legs and belly.
What? What? What?
Slowly, infinitely slowly, a sense of where he was and where he was not came back to him. He blinked. His eyes focused. He licked his dry lips. He tried to move, but the pain in his guts and legs kept him still.
As terror surged hot in his belly, he realized he was being held…and worse, what held him.
He heard a gurgling noise.
Fine droplets of something dark and muddy dripped onto his face bubble.
There had been an explosion. He knew that much. It had blown him into the store, into Sephora…and this thing had found him.
Through his bubble, he saw a scaly, mottled hand. Its ring finger was missing which made it look like the yellow claw of a bird. It brushed against the Acrylite of the bubble, then it resumed stroking his chest.
He wanted to scream.
But he didn’t dare.
The slughead that held him was making no threatening moves. He was like some big, much-loved doll to it. And the slughead—a woman, something like a woman—was a child mothering over it.
Dear Christ, she was even making cooing sounds.
Cooing sounds that were somehow slurping and liquid.
The store was semi-illuminated by a guttering orange light from the fires. There was also a dull yellow light from his helmet. He hated it, because as he shifted his head slightly, it showed him the woman in detail.
She was a monster.
There was no getting around that. He had seen some perfectly horrible-looking sluggos, but never anything like this. She looked like some quivering fetal rat, embryonic and unformed. Her skin was a sheer yellow membrane, oddly transparent. He could actually see her veins and arteries delivering blood, flexing quilts of muscle, a jutting architecture of bone. There were only a few scraggly, spine-like hairs on her head. The skull was long and narrow, set forward on the neck, the eye sockets huge, the nose pushed in, the jaw pushed out.
He tried not to completely lose it.
He was shaking inside his hot suit, damp with chill and sweat.
She brought her revolting face in closer, appraising him with glassy, immense eyes that were unblinking and fishlike. Something squeezed its way out of her nose and dropped to the helmet bubble: a squirming fluke. She plucked it up quickly, sucking it between her lips. The sound of her chewing it brought his stomach into his throat.
Not now, not now, a voice in his head warned him. Don’t you dare throw up now.
He was hurt bad. He knew that. It must have been a grenade that got him. If that was the case, then his legs and
maybe even his belly had shrapnel in it. But that still didn’t explain why this fucking sluggo was…well, nursing him, for lack of a better word. She should have been trying to tear him apart, to feed on him.
Yet, as hideous as she was, she was being almost loving to him.
He tried to regulate his breathing. His legs, particularly the right one, were really starting to hurt. They felt wet which meant he must have been bleeding pretty bad. If he laid here too long, he might bleed right out. But his rifle was gone. There was still the knife at his left hip and the .9mm at his right…at least, he hoped so. The gun was the thing. But he had to get it out without startling his keeper. If she felt threatened, she’d probably rip him apart.
She was still cooing.
He inched his hand towards the holster. The gun was still there. He waited, then popped the catch. She made a low snarling sound in her throat. She’d heard it all right. She brought her yellow, sunken face closer to the bubble. Through her membranous flesh, he could see her abnormal skull grinning at him.
Jesus, this was going to be touchy.
She stroked him, cooing and gurgling, watching the entrance of Sephora for activity. Now and again, she would cock her head as if she had heard something, her body tensing…then she’d relax.
West slid the .9mm out with infinite slowness, not more than an inch at a time. When he finally had it almost free, he heard approaching footsteps. The slughead went stiff and trembling like a cat that has sighted a bird. She growled low in her throat like a watchdog. She looked at him and then at the figure approaching the entrance. She began making hissing sounds. She pulled herself up in a crouch and West slid off her lap with a jolt of agony in his legs.
He grimaced, trying not to cry out, but a groan escaped his lips. He saw the huge fleshy sack at her belly visibly palpitate.
The sluggo, as if finally realizing he was a living thing and food, screeched and tore at him.
West screamed.
He tried to get the gun out and dropped it—
30
“Kid,” Kurta cried out when he saw West, putting the tactical light of his Ithaca on him and the mutant horror that was attacking him.
The sluggo screeched.
Kurta didn’t hesitate. He fired, racked the pump, and fired again. The slughead seemed to explode, gore splattering against a still-standing rack of bath soaps. Blood and meat rained down on West, who was crying out in disgust or pain or maybe both.
Kurta charged in there.
He saw the woman’s slug burst free from its sheath and crawl up West’s leg. He set his riot gun aside, and snatched the slug in his hands. It writhed like a snake, twisting and turning, putting out slippery jelly. He nearly dropped it. As he made to give it a toss, it wrapped around his left fist and spat gobs of goo onto his face bubble that splatted like soft hailstones. They tried to root themselves to the glass and he brushed them away, leaving a smear.
The slug would not let go so he gripped it in both fists and squeezed it with everything he had, clenching his teeth and bearing down. It made an awful whirring sound as it bulged to the bursting point…then it exploded in his hands, erupting with slime and meaty tissue. He tossed its flaccid, dead remains aside. It looked like a rubbery, burst balloon.
Kurta’s face bubble was thick with gore.
He fumbled around, finding a drapery and wiping the slimy remains free.
“You okay?” he asked West.
“Not great,” West admitted, outlining everything that had happened.
“Probably The Pole. Had to be The Pole.”
“Mooney?”
Kurta shook his head. “No, kid. He’s dead. I found him floating in the fountain with a dead sluggo.”
“Dammit. I liked him.”
“Yeah, so did I.”
Kurta still had his medical bag. He applied clotting agent to West’s legs—the right one was the worst of the two—and bandaged them up, gave him a shot of antibiotics. But no painkiller.
“Sorry, kid, but I can’t have you nodding off on me. I need your eyes.” He packed his medical bag back up. Like his guns, it was the one thing he dared never leave behind. “You got shrapnel in there, man. Nothing in your belly, though. Skin’s not even broken. You must have been punched by some flying debris.”
“I’m not gonna lose a leg, am I?”
“No, I don’t think so. We get back to the bunker, they’ll put you out, clean the metal out of you.”
West relaxed a bit. “How are we gonna get out of here?”
“We’re going to walk. At least,” Kurta said, “I am. You’re going piggyback.”
Inside his helmet, West shook his head. “I can’t let you do that. It’ll put you at risk.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“But—”
“Just leave it to me, kid.”
31
West had an idea.
Since Kurta insisted on being used as a sedan chair, he wanted to make it easier on both of them. He’d worked at a big mall in Pittsburgh. Functionally, they were all pretty much the same, he explained to Kurta. The electrical, plumbing, telecom lines etc. were run in mechanical shafts beneath the floor.
“If we can find one of the maintenance sites, there should be access to the shafts.”
“Then what?”
“Then we follow them under the mall. They’ll lead to access hatches set in the sidewalks outside for utility workers,” West said. “You’ve probably seen them a hundred times at malls. You’ve probably walked over them.”
Kurta liked it.
It would be a good way out. The chances of running into slugheads down there would be minimal. Once they were outside, it would be easy to get to one of the APCs.
“Okay,” he said. “What’s the best place to look?”
West told him that a mall the size of Southgate should have several maintenance sites. The best place to look would be in one of the corridors that led away from the stores, the ones where the restrooms were located. That’s where the maintenance sites would be along with storerooms, janitorial closets etc.
Kurta nodded. “All right. I’ll be back soon as I can. Keep out of sight.”
“You can count on it.”
32
The Pole was filled with self-congratulations because he was such a wily, sneaky cuss.
As far as he knew, he was the last living member of Ex-3. Five and Two were fucking worm food by then.
There was only him; no one else.
Instead of dying below like the others, he decided to reach the outside from above. He’d found a maintenance crawlway with a ladder. He assumed it would reach right to the roof. Instead, interestingly enough, it terminated above Red Lobster. It was a service shaft leading up to the catwalks and rafters.
At first, he’d thought: Ahh, oh shit. This is no good.
Then a little light went on inside his brain—well, why not? Crawl along the rafters, keep going until you reach the catwalk just beneath the skylights. Open one of them and crawl out onto the roof. That’s a start. A real good start. And you avoid the hordes below.
He was proud of himself.
Maybe that goddamn Kurta had been a good leader and a real ass-kicker. Maybe Mooney had been smart and knew everything about anything. And maybe Spengler had just been born lucky.
Sure, and maybe The Pole didn’t have any of those things in great supply, but what he did have was common sense and good instincts.
He was way up there now, but it was no biggie. Heights had never bothered him. Slinking his way along the rafters, knocking a few stray birds’ nests aside, he had a pretty good view of not just the ground floor but the second floor.
And, Jesus, they were lousy with slugheads.
Hundreds? Sure, he didn’t think that was too much of an exaggeration. It would have taken some real balls, some real luck, and some real planning to get through that gauntlet.
No wonder the others were dead.
It’s the best thing you could have
hoped for, Kurta. The very best thing. Because sooner or later, it was gonna be war between us and you knew it like I knew it.
There was no doubt of that in The Pole’s mind. And when war came, he could be a real crafty SOB. It wouldn’t have been a face-to-face battle. No sir, Kurta was too mean for that honorable hero shit. He wasn’t a guy you wanted to take on like that. No, The Pole had it all worked out—he would have stabbed that high and mighty prick right in the back.
Not that it mattered now.
God, the smoke was thick up here and the heat was fucking unbearable. The filter on his mask was keeping most of it out, but it couldn’t do squat for the heat. In his biosuit, he felt like a wiener in a bun being slow-roasted.
But not far, not far now. Catwalk is only thirty feet away. You can make it. Keep your eye on the prize.
Now and again, the smoke cleared and he could see the sluggos below. Some of them were on fire. Others were stumbling about like they were almost dead. Still others, on the upper level, were picking at the bones of Five.
He began to crawl faster before he was overwhelmed by the heat or lost his nerve because of what he was seeing below. It all reminded him a little too much of his days in Catholic school. When Father Petakis had described the torments of Hell to them in fourth grade, this is almost exactly the sort of thing that The Pole had pictured in his impressionable mind.
Just get to that catwalk or you’re going to die up here. The birds’ll pick you down to the bones.
And it was this image more than anything that really got him moving. For he could see it with a surreal sort of clarity in his mind: the shrunken hotsuit tangled in the rafters, yellowed bones poking out of it at right angles, the bird’s nests built in his ribcage, his skull offering a leering grin behind the face bubble.
Coughing on the bad air in the helmet, he got closer to the catwalk and the freedom it offered.
33
Ducking away from slugheads, the smoke thicker than ever in the mall as the fires blazed out of control, Kurta figured if they didn’t get out and get out soon, they never would.