by Brian Hodge
He was unaware of the others as they pulled up around him. Realizing that something was terribly wrong, they’d come back.
Bob leaned over him. “Brian?”
“I’ve lost her!”
His words sickened them all. She had been their strength. Her belief in escape was what had sustained their effort. She was the only reason that any of them were still alive.
Ellen went down to him, put her arm around his sweat-soaked back. “Oh, Jesus,” she said.
It felt as if his heart had been ripped out of his chest. The agony was so pure that he didn’t cry out, he didn’t even weep. He was there, and Loi wasn’t.
“We have to keep going,” Nancy said from the dark nearby. “We can’t stay here. Loi would want it, Brian. She wanted us to survive.” Nancy’s voice went low, and a great, racking sob escaped.
Nobody moved. They were all together now, all in one place.
“This could be a trap,” Chris said. The boy he had been had evaporated like foam, replaced by this tough little survivor.
Brian looked at him. He wanted a son. He wanted another baby to raise. He wanted Loi. “You go,” he told them all.
From deep in the ground there came a cry, long and full of mourning.
That ended what little self-control remained. The anguish came pouring out like lava from the depths of his soul and he raised his eyes to the sky and howled. Then he hammered at the ground, finally leaped to his feet, yanked the pistol out of his belt and emptied it into the road, which sent back little puffs of steam where the bullets struck the asphalt.
Then there came up from the center of him such a feeling as he had never known before. He went beyond agony. It felt as if his soul was congealing in psychic fire. But it also brought him a certain peace, the peace of an absolute decision, of total and complete determination.
“I’m going in,” he said. “I’m going to go in there somehow, and I am going to find her and get her back.”
“Come on, honey,” Nancy said to Bob. Her voice was urgent: they could hear the Humvees off in the darkness somewhere.
“We gotta go, Brian,” Ellen said. She got on her ATV. The others got on theirs, all except Brian. He backed away.
“I can’t leave her.” He would not tell them this, but he was hoping that the thing would return and take him as well.
Ellen got off her vehicle. “You go ahead,” she said faintly to Bob and his family, hardly believing her own voice.
“Brian,” Bob said, “I’ve gotta keep going. I have my family to think of.”
“You go,” Ellen said, “it’s dangerous here.”
“I can’t.”
She reached out to him, was glad that he let her take his hand. “Brian Kelly, you listen to me! If you stay here, you’ll never have the chance to help her.”
“A door that’s been opened can be closed,” Brian said firmly. “If I can get inside, maybe I can do some good.”
A great rush of wind went through the trees, bringing with it cold, intimate smells from the deep forest. “I see a light,” Joey hissed.
A hard white light was flitting through the woods, and they all knew what it was. It flew slowly along, almost lazily, winking on and off as it passed among the trees.
Ellen had the horrible, secret thought that they might be looking at part of Loi. She went closer to Brian. It was going to be awfully hard to get on that ATV and leave him behind.
The Wests mounted up. “If we can get help,” Bob said, “we’ll come back for you, buddy. Both of you.” He looked at Ellen. “We’ve gotta move.”
“I’ll be going out on my own later,” Ellen heard herself say. She was amazed at herself. But the truth was that she had become too committed to Brian and Loi to leave them like this. She just couldn’t do it.
Brian’s hollow eyes bored into her. His face was a sweaty mask. “Ellen, don’t be an idiot.” There was something very new in his voice: it cut, it was raw, it was white-hot.
“There’s another one,” Chris said. A second lightning bug darted across the road. Under them, the ground vibrated.
The Wests left, dashing off into the dark.
Brian nodded to Ellen, almost formally welcoming her to the world of his pain. “I thought he would take me, too.”
“Who is he?”
Brian shook his head. He looked down. “That’s what I need to find out.”
3
Loi was struggling against the thick, mud-like substance. It was getting in her mouth, her eyes. She had to breathe and she couldn’t, she was in agony, her whole body being pressed harder and harder, so hard she couldn’t stand it. Her womb was getting tighter and tighter, and she was afraid she was going to burst.
Then she was back in the brothel, spreading her legs and counting, one, two, three. No, she was in real, physical filth, drowning in it.
Involuntarily her mouth opened as she gasped for air. She had to breathe, she had to, had to! Mud came sliding in.
Then air.
Air, roaring clouds of it: she hacked, spat, spat harder, shook her head, gasped and promptly choked on little stones and soil, shook her entire body. Debris cascaded around her, plopping to a floor that sounded soft and damp.
Total darkness.
She gulped and belched helplessly, as she’d seen prisoners do in terror of impending torture.
She raised her hands to her belly. Trembling, she felt down to her vagina for blood there, brought up her finger and tasted… only her own familiar musk.
She got to her feet—and found just overhead a dense, giving thickness centered by a puckered, rubbery area. It was like an opening in the ceiling, closed by ligaments. She pushed her fist into the center of it, and in a moment dirt ran down her arm.
Then it came to horrible life, tightening as if it was filled with muscle. Her hand was forced out. The lips were rigid now, being held taut. She could not push them open again.
This did not feel like a tunnel or a room or a cave. It was so confined; the air was so bad, that she felt as if somebody huge had his arms tightly around her chest. She flailed against the limits of the tiny space, her hands slipping in the substance that coated it.
She hadn’t been sucked into a cave at all, she’d been swallowed. As she ran her hand across the soft floor, the slick, sinewy walls, they shuddered and seethed. This was a living thing. She was inside a huge organ.
That broke her. She slapped the giving walls, kicked the floor, which gave and bounced back like a sponge.
Another fear invaded her, and she felt her face with frantic little detailed gestures, trying to be sure that she had not changed, that she had not become—
No, her skin remained smooth and soft.
Then she heard something new, a hissing, rattling sound. It was coming closer to her. She drew away from it—and found herself pressed up against the other side of the living chamber.
The space was getting smaller; she could feel the far wall touching her, then pressing against her.
A blazing white explosion of terror convulsed her and she wailed, feeling as she did it all the loneliness of the truly lost.
She did not know how long she screamed, but eventually her howls changed to hard, gulping breaths. The air was even more dense now. Breathing didn’t work well. She was being smothered.
Then she knew that something was pressing against her belly. Her reflex was instant—she pushed away, pressing herself into the wall behind her. Dense liquid squeezed out behind her back and oozed down her shoulders and breasts.
Hard, rough hands grasped her thighs, scraped slowly along her sides, again coming to her stomach. Inside her, the baby jerked spasmodically.
She could not move any farther away. The hands came up her sides, up her breasts, her shoulders, her neck. She heard a rattling sound not an inch from her face. Reflexively, she tried to shield herself.
Her hands came into contact with thin wrists as hard as steel pipe, cold and covered with hairs like spikes. The hands came to her hands. They
also were hard and cold.
When they tried to close on her hands, she reached out, slapping, hitting.
She came into contact with a face. Undoubtedly it was a face: she could feel the shape of it. But the cheeks were hard; the mouth was complex with parts that tickled her palms as they worked. The eyes were dry and protuberant, feeling under her sliding fingers like the surface of a strainer. They reminded her of the eyes of a fly.
Her baby was jumping and jerking, as if he entirely shared his mother’s anguish.
Slowly, the face turned, and her fingers slipped away from the eyes. But there were hard, springy hairs all around them and she clutched these and pulled as hard as she could.
A great caw burst out, blasting straight into her face. The hands came up and closed their hard fingers around her wrists and yanked her arms away. She twisted, she spat, she shrieked.
A feeling of incredible malevolence washed over her with the power of a hurricane stinking of profound rot.
She could not see him glaring at her, but she knew that he could see.
“Kill us,” she said. She was thinking of the hideous changes she had seen in the Michaelsons and the Rysdale boy and poor Father Palmer. This must not happen to her baby!
A new sound came, a sawing wheeze, coarse, loud, as if it was made not with vocal cords but by sticks rattling together. Even so, she recognized this sound: it was laughter, the laughter of triumph.
He had hunted her and captured her and taken her for one reason: the child.
Chapter 17
1
Ellen and Brian had moved off into the woods and were making their way slowly west, paralleling the town. To their right, they could occasionally hear the falls of the Cuyamora River as it came leaping down out of the mountains. To their left behind a screen of thick forest lay Oscola.
Brian was stricken by his loss, but he had tabled drastic action until he knew what had happened to Loi. If she was dead, then he thought he would want to join her. He had to find out. Rather than paralyzing him, it was the nature of this uncertain grief to drive him to greater effort. His mind was now entirely centered on discovering her fate and the fate of their child.
He watched Ellen riding slowly along beside him. Although he felt gratitude for her support, she could not stay.
Ellen also watched him. She did not know how he kept on. Had she suffered a loss like his, her first impulse would be to just shrivel up and die. She could see his pale ghost of a face, his dark mass of curly hair.
His mind analyzed and deduced. There had to be a way in, and it must be somewhere in this general area.
The highest probability was that the entrance to whatever remained of the facility would be near the judge’s place. He had excellent reasons to think this.
First, the judge had been co-opted early, and the initial manifestations had taken place on his mound and in his root cellar. Second, as they drew closer to the estate, Brian was observing more and more changes in the plant life—subtly twisted limbs, leaves reduced to contorted green knobs, or turning into sticky green-black sheets that stank of mold.
It would have made sense for the scientists involved to move the facility to Oscola. It was close to the Ludlum campus, site of the original problem. More importantly, the town was in the middle of a small but geologically unique area.
The veins of iron and basalt that ran beneath it were among the strongest geological formations on earth. The men who were fighting this war would have wanted that strength, in case they had to try another containment effort.
So he knew where he would find the entrance to the new facility, and that was where he was going.
Ellen stayed with him, even after they moved past a clump of pulsating, bloated saplings.
He called to her. As soon as she stopped she slumped over her handlebars. She was almost done in. “Yeah, Brian?”
“It’s time for you to follow the Wests.”
“I think I can help.”
“Ellen, it’s not real likely that I’m going to be coming back.”
“But there’s a chance we could hurt this thing, isn’t there? Or even stop it altogether.”
He could not lie to her. “There’s a chance. Not a good one, though.”
What she wanted was to be in a nice cozy bed with a cup of cappuccino and a sweet, loving husband. But that wasn’t to be. She could not turn away from this problem, not if there was any chance at all of doing something useful here. “What would we have to do?”
“Get the equipment turned on—assuming that’s even possible.”
“Turned on? You’d think we’d have to turn something off. Bust hell out of it.”
“The link’s already been made or this wouldn’t be happening. Obviously my colleagues were trying to break it.”
“What link?”
“I’m not sure. But I know I’m right about the equipment.”
“Which is where?”
“You remember that old iron mine?”
“How could I ever forget it?” The wetness the spiderlike thing had left on her legs remained a vivid memory.
“If we go down there, we’ll find an entrance, almost certainly.”
“We have a couple of pistols. We’ll need flashlights. A company of marines.”
He smiled at her then, a thin smile. “Listen to the frogs.”
Their croaking had risen to hysteria.
“And the crickets,” Ellen noticed. They were shrilling wildly.
From all around them there came a continuous rustling, creaking sound. “If we’re going to go, we’d better do it, Ellen.”
She took a deep breath, blew it out. Then she revved her ATV, put it in gear. “Here goes nothing,” she muttered under her breath.
They moved off, deep into the forest.
At first the trip was uneventful, as far as Ellen was concerned. She did begin to notice the twisted limbs, the funny leaves. Then she saw a fern that looked like a pile of seaweed. A few minutes later a black, complicated creature flashed past in her headlight. It was too big to be an insect, too full of spindly legs and feelers to be a bat.
She watched for lightning bugs.
With a soft scratching sound something landed briefly on her chest. She glanced down just in time to see what appeared to be a flying scorpion, its wings still whirring.
Before she could even scream, it had sailed off into the dark.
The closer they got to Mound Road, the more things changed. The trunks of trees were grotesquely twisted, and their leaves were withering like small, closed fists. Purple light glimmered beneath the forest floor. Wet brown tendrils sprouted from the moss, twisting and growing, seeking.
Closer, and the fattened tree trunks were sprouting great black sheets of material in place of leaves.
Along with the trees everything was changing, the ferns turning to flopping, rubbery slabs that exuded black ichor, the mushrooms growing to great size, a fog of mold-stinking gas.
A pearl-white millipede at least eight feet long glided out in front of her. Before she could stop she had driven over it. With a splash the soft body exploded, slopping her feet with liquid that reeked like clabber.
Despite the rough ground, Brian increased speed. Behind him Ellen’s vehicle careened along, bouncing into a gully, then bursting back into the thicker woods.
Now the leaves when they touched her clung a little and felt like leather. Purple sparks played in the soil, and the haze was like dust. She coughed, bringing up something like black tapioca.
Brian kept his eyes focused ahead, watching the dark woods whip past. It wouldn’t do to hit a tree. Even letting those crawly leaves touch his bare arms made the gorge rise in his throat.
He wanted only to follow Loi’s fate. If she was dead, then he would die. If she had been changed, then he would submit.
The thought of her suffering even a little bit made him twist his throttle and go speeding even faster through the woods, forgetful of the less efficient driver struggling to keep up.<
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Rough limbs dragged at his chest. His stomach felt as if it was boiling.
A glow flickered in the woods ahead, as quickly died.
Ellen also saw the glow, and sensed her will faltering. Then she fixed her attention on the speeding ghost in front of her.
He swerved to avoid a sapling. At the same moment he saw another flicker off among the trees. He grew wary, began to sweep the area ahead with his eyes. Above all, he didn’t want to be destroyed on the way in.
They’d used his equipment to open a door into another world and this was what had come out.
Behind him he could hear Ellen’s four-wheeler slurrying and slipping, the engine alternately guttering low, then screaming. She wasn’t much good with it. Maybe she’d get lucky and the thing would overheat. She’d be out here alone, but at least she’d be alive.
Off to the left he saw a gray strip. For a moment his heart raced. They were closing in on Mound Road.
They broke out onto the grassy shoulder at more or less the same time. The clouds had parted and they could see the Milky Way overarching the heavens. The moon hung low in the west, above it the evening star.
But their light shone down on a forest that was twisting and lurching and changing, limbs sweeping back and forth against the sky, whole trees splitting with explosive reports, contorting into new shapes, growing great, misshapen leaves as black and slick and floppy as sheets of fungus.
The din was horrendous. The crunching and creaking of limbs, the sighing of leaves in extreme agitation, the bellows and shrieks and ululations of the forest creatures, all combined into a single groaning cry.
When they stopped their ATVs this new sound at first confused them. Then Brian understood. He could hardly bear to do it, for he knew what he would see. But he forced himself to look down the road toward the judge’s house.
There, in all its contorted glory, stood the borderland of a new world. Huge, bloated barrels topped by fungoid sheets had entirely replaced the trees. Black, twining vines covered with hair so stiff they looked as if they had been shocked attempted to choke the barrels. Here and there dark forms moved slowly along. Cries rose and fell, gawps and croaks echoed. All stood beneath a purple haze. The farther they looked, the thicker the monstrous forest became, the broader and higher the barrels, the wider the black, mucus-dripping sheets that they presented to the sky.