And then Ethan was at the front of the store, keys in hand, and a third shot rang out, aimed at the main window, which did not shatter, but splintered instead into a web of cracks. Ethan picked up the magazine rack—the one that had toppled earlier—and hurled it, striking the window dead-centre. Weakened, the glass exploded in a storm of shards. There was a thrum of wings and the buzz and whoosh of beetles inside the convenience store, swooping randomly like disturbed bats, and Tobe ducked out of their way, shielding his face with his arms and thrashing at the bodies that swept over him. By the time the insects had settled and the air had cleared and Tobe dared lift his head, Ethan and Tory were gone.
14
Unrelenting, the rain streamed down in a torrent, louder than ever now that a portal to the outside world had been opened.
Tobe searched the grey, but could not locate Ethan or Tory. They’d passed without trace, vanished.
Why did they leave us?
Many of the bugs were still airborne and aimless. Only a few had entered the store—most of them had congregated under the light of the gas canopy. All of them clicked and buzzed noisily.
Ignoring the bugs and the screams and shouting from the others, Tobe turned back inside, mind racing. The tendrils that had erupted from Ressler had stilled. Within their tangled web of crimson, Ressler’s form writhed weakly.
He was still alive.
Christ…
Ganson was the same. Like Ressler, blood-red tendrils bound him to the spot. Not that he required restraint; he hadn’t been going anywhere. Some of the strands had slithered like worms from his body to creep up the glass door, others along the ground, across the concrete. As much as they had spread, they remained fixed to him like uncut umbilical cords. For the moment, these tendrils had ceased moving. Beetles crawled nearby, but gave Ganson and his parasite a wide berth.
Ethan and Tory had steered clear of Ganson, too. That’s why they’d avoided the door and exited through the window.
Just like Ethan had suggested.
Maybe they’re going for help, Tobe thought. Maybe they aren’t running away after all, and will return.
No. Tory’s eyes had confirmed otherwise. The two of them were gone.
Their escape had been planned. Ethan had headed for the office at the same moment Tory had gone for their packs. It seemed they’d intended on stealing the car all along. They’d probably hatched their plan in the moments after Tobe had bumped into Tory outside the staffroom. The car was small; there hadn’t been room for everyone. So they’d figured on getting out of there first, and leaving the rest of them to their fate.
Had they ever intended on taking Tobe with them, going for help? Maybe the offer had simply been part of their ruse, and they’d planned to run when he and Brad were in the workshop—less people to deal with. Then everything had gone to hell, and they’d had to improvise.
No plan survives first contact.
Tobe got to his feet, still dizzy from his fall. Through an auditory haze, he heard Rachel crying, and Brad and Sarah arguing over what to do next, their voices filled with disbelief and hysteria.
Terrible, disheartening sounds.
Ganson, however, had, like Ressler, fallen quiet. Tobe didn’t think him dead. Not yet. He was fucking invincible.
Maybe he was being kept alive.
The tendrils that had swarmed from the two men were the same vein-like structures—the hyphae—that had engulfed the staffroom. Yet unlike those threads, these had displayed stunning speed; Tobe had likened the explosion to an eruption of tapeworms. No doubt the organism was parasitic, replicating at a frightening rate inside the blood and organs and flesh of its host, growing subcutaneously before discharging. Tobe didn’t know how the two men had become infected, or how long ago, but the period of gestation seemed brief.
In the semidarkness, a bug flew past Tobe’s ear, from behind. He heard the powerful thrum of its wings, and ducked reflexively. It passed harmlessly to land amongst a group of bugs clustered near the lighted fridges.
“They took the car!” Sarah said.
Tobe turned to her. “Forget about them!”
“But they left us!”
Tobe ignored her, looked at Scottie. “There’ll be a phone in the office! I’ll look. You get everyone out, through the window!”
Bodies burst into motion. Tobe ran against the flow, towards the office, skirting Ressler. The smell of gore—metallic and yet also earthy—filled his nostrils. Although the hyphae had ceased moving, he thrust the Maglite’s beam at the closest threads, just in case.
As he passed, keeping an eye on Ressler, he kicked an object on the ground. It spun across the tiles towards the office. Some kind of wallet, covered in blood. He didn’t care to touch it, but didn’t need to. As it tumbled, it flipped open, and Tobe realised the wallet had been ejected from Ressler, likely from a pocket in his shirt when his clothes had burst open.
He gasped when the beam of his flashlight framed the photo ID, and the blood-spattered badge.
A police badge.
Christ.
Ressler was a cop.
They’d assaulted—and then bound to the chair—a goddamned cop.
15
It explained the gun. By his lack of uniform, Ressler was off-duty, but still carried his weapon and his badge. Why the hell hadn’t he identified himself? It would have saved them a shitload of problems.
Perhaps Ressler was undercover. This would clarify his claim that he was the truck driver. Not wanting to blow his cover, Ressler would be hesitant to identify himself. He hadn’t known Scottie had found the driver ID, and would have otherwise gotten away with the deception.
Tobe thought this unlikely. If Ressler had been working undercover, he’d have an assumed identity, a cover story. He could have fed them that and they’d have been none the wiser. Claiming to be the truck driver, taking such a risk, didn’t make sense.
It didn’t matter.
“Get it off me!”
It was Sarah, over by the window. One of the bugs had landed on her, and she spun wildly, slapped it away. Another came for Brad, who did the same.
Leaving the wallet, Tobe bolted to the office and pushed past the door.
He shone the Maglite about. Please be something. If not a phone, anything will do.
Most likely an ordered space prior to Ethan’s entry, the office was a chaotic mess. Tobe directed the beam of the Maglite over random clutter: an upended chair, loose papers and folders, a computer keyboard with a wireless mouse—and an overturned coffee cup whose contents had spilled across the counter and onto the floor.
Beside the coffee cup, its edge poking from beneath an open ring-binder, sat a phone.
A landline.
Please work.
It didn’t. It was dead. Somehow, Tobe knew it would be.
Shit!
He resumed his search. Into a board screwed to the adjacent wall protruded multiple hooks. One of these, labelled ‘Workshop’, bore two sets of keys. One set, on its own ring, probably opened the main door to the workshop. The second ring held car keys. There was a vehicle in the workshop! Heart thudding in excitement, threatening to explode from his chest, Tobe grabbed both keyrings and burst from the office.
On the way out, he accidentally crunched a beetle underfoot. He may well have stepped on a crab shell—the exoskeleton was firm and chitinous. Still, his foot punched through and he slipped in the creature’s innards, went down to his knees. He rose quickly, but the sticky gunk glued his shoe to the floor. He gagged at the foul smell and ripped his foot away. Several more bugs swarmed the path ahead and he leapt over them.
As he landed, the bell above the entry door tinkled.
The door had opened, and Ganson was inside the store.
16
Ganson hadn’t risen, hadn’t, by his own volition, forced the door open. He lay motionless on his back, spread across the threshold, the door held wide by his bulk. He’d fallen inside.
The crimson strands were mo
ving again.
Tobe paused to assess the situation, just a few feet from the office door. He glanced away from the hyphae and towards the main window. Scottie and the others had escaped. They were outside, moving as a group towards the far end of the canopy.
Only he was left—just him in here with the swarming bugs, Ressler… and now Ganson.
The hyphae that had poured from Ganson’s body and massed against the closed door, had, more by weight than intent, forced it ajar. Ganson’s considerable bulk had exaggerated the effect and likely forced the door fully open. Whether or not the door had been closed properly—or whether it had come unstuck, the jamb or the lock damaged by recent events—mattered little. The door was open, Ganson was inside, and the tendrils had reanimated.
The veiny threads slithered snakelike across the floor, towards the centre of the room, splitting and branching along the way, searching. Also on the move were the tendrils growing from Ressler. They stretched now in two clear directions; one group heading towards Ganson, the other towards the staffroom.
The organism was consolidating, attempting to fuse each of its streams to become a single, connected mass.
Christ…
Tobe was certain the streams could not be stopped, even in the light. They had underestimated the organism, oversimplified its behaviour. The creature that had apparently lain dormant in the staffroom, seemingly light-sensitive, was now aroused and thriving in the near-dark, somehow aware of its different parts, separated as they were. Perhaps it had been biding its time, awaiting certain conditions or the appropriate moment to make its move, to strike.
Tobe and his companions were prey, and here in the depths of whatever world they found themselves, they’d been hunted. Tobe had a mental image of one of those incredibly ugly, toothy anglerfish, the predator with the growth on its head tipped with a luminous lure to attract quarry. He and his group had been drawn to the organism and held by it, unaware of the teeth that loomed beyond the lure, the fate awaiting them in the inky blackness.
We’re not finished yet.
Tobe headed for the shattered window.
17
Crossing the floor, he encountered more bugs flooding the store, swarming the ground and circling above the aisles of canned food and snacks, crawling over the CaffMax coffee station. The creatures weren’t attacking—not exactly—but they were amassing. They were aroused, becoming more aggressive.
Tobe flailed and kicked at the beetles. Nearing the window, he regarded Ressler for the last time. Cop or otherwise, the man was beyond help: the Maglite’s powerful beam confirmed that Ressler was fully under the organism’s control, no more than a host or a source of nutrients. Most likely both.
Tobe noted something else: a series of strange protuberances on Ressler’s skin—the bits of flesh that Tobe could see that had not ruptured into oblivion. The protrusions seemed to be formations of gristle; tubular knobs with holes at the top. Tobe turned to Ganson. The same growths had formed on him. They resembled large, open pores.
No. They’re more like breathing holes, or perhaps vents.
Vents.
That’s what they were. Openings in the skin to vent…
Vent what?
From outside, beneath the canopy, Scottie waved his arms and yelled, “Tobe, move it!”
18
Tobe reached the window at the same moment Brad rushed back to lend him a hand. Clearing the window’s massive frame of a couple of remaining spurs of glass, Brad raised his voice above the downpour. “We could burn the fucking place, the creature. Plenty of fuel; it’d blow big and burn hot.”
Tobe climbed onto the sill, considered telling Brad it wasn’t a fucking movie, but decided against it. Maybe blowing up the station was a good idea.
Tobe leapt out. At the window’s base, next to a discount bin full of brightly-coloured balls, drops of blood dotted the concrete. Someone had cut themselves, maybe Ethan or Tory in their haste to escape, or maybe one of the others.
Avoiding Ganson’s blood, he and Brad ran to the pumps, dodging clusters of beetles as they went. The canopy was a shield against the rain, which, in the night air, smelled heavily of ozone. The bugs out here weren’t as aroused as those inside the store, but Tobe led the group on without pause.
“Make for the workshop!” he said.
“Did you find anything?” Rachel asked.
“Keys,” Tobe said. “I think there’s a car in the workshop.”
“Thank God! I want to get out of here.”
“Me too, and I have somewhere in mind,” Tobe said.
Sitting in deep shadow, the auto repair workshop lay adjacent to the main building, just metres from the edge of the canopy. Tobe’s flashlight slashed a path through the darkness. Several bugs flew straight into the stream of light. Another grazed the flashlight itself.
Tobe led the group from the canopy and into the deluge. The drops fell hard and warm, so heavy that he thought he might buckle under their onslaught. He was instantly drenched. The water rolled off him slowly and seemed to have an unusual, oily quality.
Tobe ignored the dark-tinted glass door that served as the shop’s customer entry. He crossed instead to the closed, double-width security roller-door beside it.
Turning on his own flashlight, Scottie trained the beam on Tobe’s hands while Tobe fumbled with the keyring. Wet and oily, it slipped from his grasp. He retrieved it and—still fumbling—isolated the appropriate key. Tobe unlocked the roller-door and raised it.
The interior of the workshop was dark. Twin flashlights probed the gloom. Concerned about attracting more bugs, Tobe refrained from engaging the overhead fluorescents.
He had no need for extra light, in any case.
Tobe had prayed the car parked in the workshop wouldn’t be up on the repair lift; he’d hoped to find it on the ground, ready to go. His prayers had been answered. Directly in front of them, at ground level, the nose of a charcoal Mitsubishi Outlander poked out of the murk.
“Everybody get in!” Tobe called above the rain, moving inside and shaking water from his clothes. He depressed the remote, and the compact SUV’s doors unlocked with a beep. He and Scottie ran to the driver’s side, Brad and the girls diverting the opposite way.
Tobe opened the door, slid behind the wheel. To his relief, the engine started. The headlights cut brightly through the yawning garage door into the rain-lashed night. Several bugs flew from the darkness into the twin beams, but the deluge kept most at bay.
Tobe adjusted the rearview… then froze.
Brad and the girls hadn’t yet climbed in. Nor had Scottie.
Something wasn’t right.
Tobe killed the engine and jumped from the car. A strong, musty smell rose from the darkness, full of ozone and earthy scents.
From the other side of the SUV floated muted conversation. Tobe heard Brad say, “What the fuck?” His voice was muffled by distance and the drumming rain.
Tobe skirted the vehicle. His four companions stood huddled between the car and an open door leading to the customer reception area. Like the workshop, this room also lay in darkness. Tobe followed the gaze of his companions to the concrete floor, where puddled on the ground at their feet, illuminated by the light of Sarah’s phone, was a large patch of charcoal-coloured oil. Hardly unusual in this environment, Tobe thought, but on closer inspection, he realised the stain wasn’t oil at all—it was far thicker, and more like some sort of viscous goo or plasma. It had been smeared, as though someone had slipped in it. Brad kneeled.
“Don’t touch it!” Sarah said.
Brad lifted a spanner from a nearby workbench and poked the goo, drew it up from the ground. It came away in sticky strands. “What the fuck is it?”
“Leave it alone, please,” Rachel said.
“It looks like a snail trail,” Sarah said. “If it wasn’t black, I’d say it was slug slime.”
“Fuck me. That’s gotta be one large slug.” Brad wiped the substance against the concrete, but when it wouldn�
�t come off the spanner, he discarded the tool entirely. It clanged loudly into the darkness. Brad stood, glanced at Scottie. “Hell, maybe it was a giant Bookworm,” he said, snickering.
The joke fell flat and even in the dim light of the flashlights, Tobe could see the doubt in his eyes, the fear.
His dread-filled expression was the last thing Tobe caught, because in the next instant, Brad was gone.
Tobe did not see what had grasped Brad from the shadows and reefed him from view, up towards the ceiling, and was barely conscious of the sudden screams and frightened expletives, the pleading voices. He barely registered any of this; to him, it was a confused jumble of background noise. He sensed a loss of control of mind and body, and guided by a force surely not his own, he raised the Maglite. He saw nothing in its beam, yet sensed an entity, large yet formless, clawing across the ceiling, ahead of the light, too fast for him to track, and then it was gone, had escaped into the reception area. Before he knew it, he was running after it, plunging into that dark room, and in the beam of his flashlight there was an open window with rain streaming through, a source of ingress and egress—but no entity, no Brad. No-one followed him—he heard their distressed cries back in the workshop.
On the roof came a thud, and a heavy skittering, as though something large scurried from one side of the building to the other, heading back the other way, in the direction he’d just come. He tracked the sound across the rooftop, back to the front of the building, and as he did, he exited the reception area to re-join the others in the workshop, where voices still begged to know what had happened and if anyone had seen anything. He pushed through the clustered bodies and ran to the roller-door, staring into the rain, which slashed hard through the SUV’s headlights.
Slithers Page 10