by John Inman
“How do we do this?” he hissed.
At that moment, they heard a soft, whimpering cry coming from below. A human cry. A child’s cry. “Help me!” the child sobbed. “Please!”
“Oh shit,” Jonas gasped. “It’s a kid!”
Thrusting the backpack filled with blood into Terry’s arms, he vaulted down the last flight of stairs. Straight into the creatures’ lair. Beneath his pounding boots, the metal catwalk rattled loudly enough to wake the dead.
Chapter Thirty
“NO!” TERRY screamed. But it was too late. Jonas was too far away to be snatched back.
Terry knelt at the top of the staircase. He watched as Jonas splashed through the pool of placental slime with the mewling, maggotlike infants still feeding on what was left of the teenage girl the creatures had dropped before. There was almost nothing left of her now, and the babies were clamoring for fresh meat. Their mewling intensified as Jonas hotfooted it through and around them, heading for the mess of upturned vats lying in a tumble by the back wall. The disgusting infants snatched at his ankles as he passed, but cussing up a storm, Jonas shook them off as quickly as they latched on.
Looming ahead of Jonas, the queen appeared, her white-smeared jaws oozing the chemical concoction she had been devouring earlier. She opened her gaping mouth wide and roared in fury at the intruder. Around her, the flying creatures, her workers, her drones, trembled and scuttled in the shadows, aching to swoop in and tear Jonas limb from limb. But they were clearly afraid of the queen and refused to draw any closer than they already were.
Regally, the great creature ignored her underlings, as queens are wont to do. Her beady eyes, black and fearless, were centered solely on Jonas. When he slipped in the placenta at his feet, the queen raised her broad wings as if preparing to attack. But Jonas reclaimed his footing and kept running.
“Where are you!” he cried, scurrying through the shadows, searching for the child.
Up ahead, both Jonas and Terry heard a plaintive plea. Terry tensed at the top of the stairs while Jonas shifted course immediately, hustling through a tumble of old barrels that must have once held chemicals for the production of whatever the hell it was they had been making here. Supplements, supposedly. Growth supplements, no doubt, judging by the size of the queen.
Jonas disappeared behind the barrels, and at the edge of his sight, Terry could see the workers shuffling closer. They were preparing to attack Jonas now that he was farther away from the queen.
But before they could swoop in, Jonas reappeared. He popped out from behind the barrels and into the dim light so quickly that Terry heard himself shouting a cheer before he even knew it was coming.
His jubilation died quickly enough when he saw what Jonas was carrying in his arms. It was the little girl from the yellow Camry. The one traveling with her mother. The one he thought had been slain with the mother back on the road when they found the abandoned car with the shattered, bloodied windshield.
As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, Terry still took a moment to wrack his brain, trying to think of the girl’s name. Jenny…? Jackie…?
Jilly! That was it. The kid’s name was Jilly.
Grabbing up the shotgun and the two backpacks filled with infusion bags, Terry stormed down the stairs to help Jonas. Not caring about the noise he was making now, he danced through the placental pool as gamely as he could, kicking the young fuckers out of the way like fat squishy footballs. In their midst he dropped the two backpacks and left them in the writhing mass of infants. Slinging his shotgun back over his shoulder, he tried to take the girl from Jonas’s arms, but Jonas shrugged him away.
“I’ve got her,” Jonas cried. “Let’s get out of here! Where’s the blood?”
Terry pointed to the backpacks on the floor. The embryos were crawling all over the two bags, trying to find a way inside. Even the flying workers seemed to have taken an interest in the bags. They were edging closer to them, less afraid of the queen now than they had been before. Terry wondered if they could smell the blood.
Well, if they didn’t now, they would in a minute.
“Get up the stairs, then!” Terry yelled. “I’ll be right behind you! I’ve got one more thing to do.”
Jilly lifted her head to stare at Terry, her eyes wild and terrified. She wore only a filthy pair of cotton underpants. The rest of her clothes had been ripped away. Her frail body was coated with filth, although she seemed to be unhurt. She flung out a tiny hand and grabbed Terry’s collar. “I remember you,” she said. “You saved me and mommy from the lion in the cave.”
Terry tried to smile, to comfort the girl. “That’s right, honey. Now we’re here to help you again.”
She blinked as if accepting his words as utter truth. She glanced back at the place where Jonas had found her. “I’m the only one left,” she said. “The others are… dead.”
“You mean there were others with you?”
Jilly nodded. “They were feeding us to those white things, one at a time.”
Jonas and Terry both looked back in the direction where Jonas had found the girl.
“Are you sure you’re the last?” Terry asked, fighting the urge to weep at what this child had gone through.
Jilly nodded. Then biting back a sob, she squeezed her eyes shut as if trying to block it all from her mind. Everything. The creatures. Her mother’s death. All of it.
She began to sob quietly in Jonas’s arms as Terry pushed them both toward the stairs.
“Go,” Terry ordered. “Get her out of here! I’ll be right behind you.”
Jonas turned to run but stopped when a large shadow fell over the three of them. It was the queen. She lumbered toward them on her crutchlike wings. She trembled and flung her massive wings wide as if daring them to pass. A whining tremolo of fury erupted from deep inside her furry throat. It was a wail of anger and ferocious hatred. With the scream came a fresh spate of foul air rising up from beneath her broad wings, like the stench of corruption at the opening of a sodden casket. The smell brought tears to Terry’s eyes, and again he pushed at Jonas to get him moving toward the stairs.
The queen shuffled closer, and as before the workers retreated, drawing back into the shadows. As Jonas and Terry slid and stumbled through the placental slime and the maggotlike creatures wriggling in it, snapping at their shoes and cuffs as they passed, the queen bellowed in fury once again.
Terry chased Jonas across the factory floor, slipping and sliding through the filth. He clambered up the catwalk staircase hot on Jonas’s heels. As Jonas continued racing upward with Jilly weeping in his arms, Terry turned at the first landing and stared down at the writhing creatures below. At the maggoty babies, blind and disgusting, slithering in the slime. At the winged workers—the drones, the killers, like the ones that took Bobby—hesitating in the shadows as if afraid to move without the queen’s permission. Then there was the queen herself. Her wings spread wide, her vast corrupt body pulsating with hate and bloated conceit, offended to the core that these paltry human beings had invaded her domain.
It was toward the queen that Terry focused his purest rage. The ugly bitch.
And it was that final thought that made him laugh out loud.
He raised his hand and shot her the finger, then lifted the shotgun and aimed it at the two backpacks on the factory floor. They were all but buried beneath the crawling bodies of the newborn young, their greedy voices and fat white bodies still clamoring to be fed, still scrabbling for flesh to rend, for blood to drink.
“I’ll give you blood.” Terry smirked. And sighting carefully, he pulled the trigger.
The shotgun kicked and the noise was deafening, echoing between the factory walls. He recocked and fired again. Down below, first the blue backpack, then the yellow one, exploded in a mist of red as pints and pints of blood splashed out in every direction, splattering everywhere.
The winged workers immediately billowed out from every shadow, every crevice. The queen roared in anger. The fat you
nglings mewed and slavered and squirmed over the remnants of the shotgun-shattered bags, fighting one another to feed, relishing the fresh bounty. And over it all, an influx of winged workers swarmed into the building from outside, drawn by the smell, pushed to ravenous insanity by the spicy scent of fresh human blood. Swarm after swarm, creatures roared through the windows above, drawn by the scent radiating up from the factory floor. They swept down through the catwalk staircases, a solid stream of hunger and fury.
As the creatures spilled into the building from outside, Terry spun and threw himself up the staircase, batting the flood of beasts aside as he climbed. Jonas was already out of sight, around the staircase bend on the flight above. He could hear Jonas’s boots clattering across the catwalk. He was speaking softly, crooning almost, trying to calm the girl in his arms. At the sound of Jonas’s voice Terry’s heart swelled to twice its size and he admitted yet again how much he loved the man. How much he wanted to be with him for the rest of his life.
But first they had to get away from this building and give Briggs the signal to attack!
“Look out!” Jonas yelled from above.
Terry looked up just in time to see another swarm of creatures swooping down from the floor above, dipping in a cloud down the staircase in front of him like a tornado of flesh and claws and teeth. Whirling and corkscrewing, they funneled their way toward the factory floor below… homing in on the smell of food. Behind them, in swarm after swarm, more creatures kept coming.
Unable to move forward against the flood, Terry hunkered down while the beasts swooped over him in a steady stream. When the last of the creatures had finally passed, he allowed himself a second to chuckle maliciously at how stupid they were. Then he took off running to catch up with Jonas and the girl.
It was time to get the hell out!
Chapter Thirty-One
JONAS FLIPPED the face mask back out of the way and sucked in a great mouthful of clean air. Sunlight had never felt so welcome against his skin.
His shoulders ached with the weight of the girl clinging to his neck. He kept one arm around Jilly’s waist as he clamped her to his chest, and with the other arm he climbed carefully down the fire escape at the back of the building. Off to his left in midair, he saw one of the colonel’s drones monitoring his descent.
Even as he climbed down, his whole body shaking with fatigue and adrenaline, Jonas kept staring upward, waiting for Terry to exit the building too. Wondering what was keeping him. Wondering what he would do if Terry didn’t come out at all.
Their plan had worked. He knew that much. Scattered creatures were still flitting through the shattered third-floor windows from God knows where. They were homing in on the scent of blood exactly as Jonas thought they would. Amazingly, his plan had worked far better than he ever hoped.
But he knew damn well he wasn’t going to let Briggs blow the place up if he didn’t get Terry out first.
Jilly sobbed softly in his arms, and he gently shushed her, telling her everything would be all right. “Just hold on. We’re almost there.” The child buried her face against his neck and squeezed her eyes shut, her own small body trembling as much as Jonas’s.
He craned his head back and stared upward again while he continued to descend. The creatures had all gone inside. No others were entering now, flapping their way between the shattered panes. He could imagine them all in there, swooping down toward the factory floor, lured by the scent of blood. He had heard the gunshots. He knew what Terry had done to release the blood. But now it was time for Terry to leave! Where the hell is he?
“Terry!” Jonas bellowed toward the windows above.
The girl clutched him more tightly, startled by his yell, and as he shushed her again, he spotted a weary face poking from the window above, wearing a grin.
“Keep your pants on!” Terry sputtered. And clambering through the window frame, into the sunlight and out of the gloom, he began scrambling down the fire-escape ladder. He moved quicker than Jonas because he didn’t have a kid around his neck and had both arms free. Soon Terry had caught up, and the rest of the way down, the three descended together.
In the sky beside them, the colonel’s drone descended too. His strength almost drained, Jonas gratefully set a foot to the ground and stepped back out of the way so Terry could leave the ladder too.
He looked down at the young girl in his arms and realized she was asleep. Poor kid. What she must have gone through!
Jonas breathed a sigh of relief when Terry stepped close and wrapped his arms around the two of them, Jonas and the girl.
Jilly opened her eyes, and Jonas could see in their gentle depths that she knew she was safe. A weary smile twisted her mouth as she looked at her two rescuers. Slowly she closed her eyes, her face at peace. With both arms free to hold her, Jonas realized the kid weighed practically nothing. Heaven knew how long it had been since she had eaten. He had to get her to the authorities and let them take care of her.
“Send the signal,” Jonas said, slipping free of Terry’s arms. “Send it now while the creatures are still inside.”
Terry nodded, all business. It took him a moment to locate the drone hovering overhead, but when he did, he snatched the white handkerchief from his coat pocket and flapped it furiously in the air. To Jonas’s surprise, the drone immediately sent a signal of its own in the form of a fine line of infrared light, aimed directly at the building at their backs. He and Terry gaped at each other with quizzical expressions on their faces.
Then both men seemingly realized simultaneously what it meant.
“That’s the homing beacon for the missile!” Terry cried out. “We have to get away. Five minutes, Briggs said! We’ve only got five minutes!”
Clutching the girl tightly to his chest, Jonas took off running at Terry’s heels. They raced for the Jeep half a block down and flung themselves inside. Staring up through the windshield at the brick building in front of them, they saw the infrared beam of light centered directly on the shattered third-floor window they had escaped through. In his imagination, Jonas saw what a napalm-tipped surface-to-surface missile would do when it struck its target. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Then again, maybe it was.
Banging his fists on the dashboard, he yelled, “Drive! Drive! Get us out of here!”
Jilly popped her eyes open, terrified all over again. Jonas shushed her back to silence while Terry cranked the engine over, slipped the Jeep into gear, and scattered rocks in his wake as he floored the accelerator and fishtailed out of the alley toward Spangle’s main drag.
Moments later, they were passing the Spangle city limits sign and headed for the open highway. Terry’s hand came across the seat and Jonas took it, tucking it under his chin. Nestling against Jonas’s chest, Jilly’s eyes slipped open, and she saw the two holding hands. Once again she smiled.
“Boyfriends,” she whispered sleepily. And Jonas and Terry smiled too.
Jonas squirmed around in the seat and looked at the tiny town retreating behind them.
“Pull over,” he said. “Let’s watch the fireworks.”
Terry did as Jonas asked. Leaving the girl sleeping in the seat, Jonas pulled Terry out onto the road. He pointed to a small hillock only yards away, and they climbed it side by side to get a better vantage point.
The day seemed like any other day. Birds were chirping in the desert underbrush. Off in the distance, Terry’s mountain rose up in the sunny haze. But here, closer at hand, the scent of honeysuckle washed over everything, drowning out the memory of other smells. Other smells if not other images. Jonas stood there blinking, trying to wipe them from his thoughts. Hoped he’d never think of them again.
Terry stood close at his side. He leaned in and whispered, “We’re safe,” and Jonas nodded. Jonas heard footsteps behind them and turned to see Jilly treading carefully with her bare feet on the stony road. Terry took pity on her and scooped her into his arms. Jonas edged close again, and the three of them stood watching the town’s meager skyline in the di
stance.
A sound that might have almost been imaginary began to make itself heard in the distance. A soft whooshing sound. But in seconds, the barely perceptible whooshing became a screaming roar.
All three humans ducked as the SSM screamed past, seemingly inches above their heads but actually far higher. Was that the shock wave of its passing Jonas felt, or was it an illusion? Jilly let out a tiny cry, but Jonas and Terry both cuddled close, coaxing her to silence, letting her know yet again that she was safe.
Jonas lifted a hand and pointed off in the distance. He aimed a fingertip at the spot where he could see the roofline of the brick factory they had recently left.
“Watch,” Jonas whispered in Jilly’s ear, still pointing. “Watch.”
The three of them froze. Waiting.
The fireball came so quickly they barely reacted. Only the girl let out a whimper. Jonas merely stood and stared, Terry tense beside him, as a gigantic eruption of flame blossomed in the middle of town. The sound wave from the exploding inferno hit them a second later. Thick black smoke billowed skyward, darkening the desert around them. The flames swelled outward into a cloud, as red as the rising sun. Jonas thought he could hear the fury of the flames eating at the building from where they stood. The last remaining windows in the research facility exploded in the heat. Jonas lifted his hands to his face, fearing the heat would blister his skin, the fingers of flame reach out and singe his hair.
The great fireball swelled high in the sky, then as quickly subsided. The explosive sounds quieted. But the flames remained.
Jonas and Terry and the girl stared for long minutes, made speechless by the destruction they were witnessing.
“They killed them, didn’t they? The monsters?” Jilly softly asked, her head at rest against Terry’s chest.
“Yes, honey,” Jonas said, aching to take a wet cloth and wipe the filth from her face. “The creatures are gone now. The soldiers burned them up. They won’t bother us anymore.”