by Ilsa J. Bick
“You don’t know if it’s not the same everywhere else in Lambeth. Maybe this is the way it goes. How it …” He swallowed. “How it all ends.”
“Bet not,” Emma said.
Tony scowled. “Whose side are you on?”
“Everyone’s. But Rima’s right, and you know it.”
“Think, Tony,” Rima said. “You’re saying the fog isolates each and every person in London like this? Then what? Starves them out? Waits for them to die?”
“It could.” His jaw thrust in a stubborn jut. “Not like anyone knows for sure.”
“That’s ridiculous.” She gave her wrist a small tug. “It’s waiting, Tony.”
“Yeah? So do spiders. Spin their webs and wait for a stupid fly to bumble in before moving in for the kill.”
“I’m not a fly.” But she could actually see a strange, unearthly spider at the center of all this: Come to my parlor … “You want to stay here? With them?” She waved her free hand at their tumble of sacks. Her old fear was back, too, rising in their throat. You watch; they’ll get up and walk next. She muscled that down. “Eat up whatever’s in our sad little bundle, and then what? Wait? Dig a cave? Eat each other? Tony, we’re cut off and on the snow. I fail to see how I can possibly make this any worse than it already is.”
“There’s always worse.”
“Tony.” Emma gave him an exasperated look. “Let her try.”
“What is this? Five seconds ago, you’re the one worrying about getting zapped.”
“But we can’t just hang around, waiting,” the girl said. “I’ll do it, if you want. Maybe it should be me, anyway. I came from it. When I touched the square down cellar, it opened up. So maybe we’re looking at this wrong. What if it’s come back for me? What if this is how I get home?”
“Neither of you knows anything for sure,” Tony said. “You’re both spitting in the wind and hoping it don’t come back in your face.”
“But you don’t have a better idea.” When his eyes skipped away, Rima ducked her head to capture his gaze. “I’m the one knows how to draw. If nothing happens, we let Emma try. Tony, we have nothing to lose.”
“Rima.” His lips were so tight the skin around his mouth was white as the fog. “If something goes wrong … say, it grabs you or … I don’t know. Don’t you understand? I might not …” Emotions chased across his face. “What if I can’t stop it taking you? I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“That makes two of us,” she said.
“No.” Emma slid her hand into Rima’s chilled palm. “Three.”
2
HE DIDN’T QUITE give up. “Shut it,” Tony said when she objected. “It’s either me or the rope. Choose your poison, but you’re not getting close to that without me having hold of you one way or the other.” He looked down at Emma. “Without us hanging on.”
“Got that right,” Emma said.
“What if it doesn’t like you hanging on?” Rima asked.
“Bugger that.” He untied the rope from their cart. “It can suck wind for all I care.”
“Fine,” she said, “but no rope. I’m not the prize in a tug-of-war.”
“All right. Then it’s me and bare hands.” Tossing the loops onto the fractured snow, he yanked a pike from where it had buried itself in snow and then took up a loose fistful of her coat between her shoulders. “Arm’s length. First sign of trouble, I pull you back, no arguments.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, though she wasn’t at all sure about that.
“Guys.” Fishing out their second pike, Emma took up a position by her side, like an armed guard. “Let’s just do this, okay?”
Judging distance was hard. But if the cart was the center of whatever odd dome or sphere they were in, then she thought they clambered, perhaps, fifty or sixty feet in a slow, uncertain shuffle, feeling for softer snow through their boots and bypassing jagged chunks. When she was five feet away, she looked back over a shoulder. “You feel that?”
“Yeah.” Emma made a face. “Tingles.”
“All my hair’s standing on end, like I scuffed over a carpet,” Tony said.
That was exactly right. She shot a glance at the cart. Why, she wasn’t sure, but nothing had changed: the sacks hadn’t budged. Idiot. No one’s getting up for a stroll.
“What is it?” Emma asked.
“Nothing.” Then why do I feel watched? She faced forward again. The fizzy sound was louder, too, and more like the buzz of an excited crowd. People?
“This is what it sounded like down cellar.” Emma held the pike like a spear. “You should be really careful. When I reached in the first time, something grabbed me.”
“Now you’re telling us?” Tony said.
“All right,” Rima said, when she’d come within arm’s reach. “Far enough.”
“Wait,” Tony said. She heard the soft crunch of snow and felt Tony set his feet. “All right, go on. Ready as I’ll … No, Emma, you get back here, stay behind me.”
“Why? God, get over yourself. It’s not like it’s going to explode.” The girl made a disgusted sound. “Fine.”
“Here goes.” Pulling in a breath, Rima stretched her hand. The next moment, she let out a small cry.
“What, what?” Alarmed, Tony gave her a tug. “Rima?”
“I’m all right. It was a spark. Like … a shock, but sharp like needle pricks? Cold too, but not terrible. Just a surprise.”
“Is it freezing cold?” Emma asked. “That’s what it was like down cellar.”
“Yes.” She haahed on her numbed fingers. “Surface is a little gummy, too, like aspic left out too long that’s started to dry.”
“Do you hear anything?” Emma asked. “Like a click or something?”
“No.” This time, when she touched the fog, she was ready for the sting and waited to see if it would stop. It did, but her hand wouldn’t go any further either.
“Anything?” Tony asked as Emma said, “See? Maybe she’s not the one it wants.”
The girl might be right. No whisk of anything leaving her, and nothing coming back from the fog either. A stab of disappointment. I was so sure there was something or someone … She gasped as a sudden frisson raced up her spine.
“What?” When she didn’t reply, Tony tightened his grip. “Rima, what …”
“I feel something.” An understatement: she wanted to turn around but couldn’t. It was as if invisible hands had shot out to grasp either side of her head.
“What do you feel?”
“I think … No, Tony, don’t.” Panic thrummed through her chest as she sensed him gathering himself to give her a good yank. “Don’t move. Don’t do anything.”
“What’s happening?” Emma asked.
“It’s … it’s …” She gasped as the fingers of these unseen hands seemed to pierce her scalp and melt through her skull. At once she could feel the creep through her brain, the snuffling, probing action of a dog sussing out exactly what all those exotic scents might be. “I think it’s”—she almost said tasting or testing—“trying to get to know me.” A bizarre thought, but it also seemed correct. “Figure out what I am.”
“Wow,” Emma said. “It’s alive?”
Perhaps. She felt a slight tug, as if an invisible hand wanted to pull her a little closer and into the light. The feeling was … familiar, as if someone had said her name in a crowded room. Her focus sharpened, and the sense she got back was recognition: Aha, there you are.
All at once, that tasting, testing sensation slid away, and in the next second, she felt the pressure on her head ease. She took a hesitant step back, and then Tony was turning her around, wrapping her up.
“You all right?” His eyes were bright. Blinking, he skimmed a light hand over her forehead. “What was that?”
“You get anything?” Emma asked. “Did it talk to you or something?”
“I d-don’t know.” She was shaking from the contact as much as the cold. Her hands were white as bone. As the fog. Even with
the contact broken, her brain squirmed at the memory. Sliding into every nook and cranny. The fog seemed unchanged. She had no idea if that was good or bad. “I’m not exactly sure. It felt like when you’ve got a pamphlet, a magazine? You’re not sure it’s to your liking, so you … you read a few pages or thumb through to another spot …” She broke off at the expressions on their faces. “Don’t look at me like I’m a nutter. You asked what it felt like.”
“So it was reading you?” His tone was skeptical. “Trying to decide if it wanted to know more of the story, or if it was satisfied with only a few choice bits?”
“I know what it sounds like.” A tiny flicker of anger now, though not much. What he’d just said snagged like a burr in her mind: a few choice bits. That fog had been actively searching for something very specific, and she thought it had found it. But what? “Well, no matter. Nothing’s happened. It either doesn’t understand me, or I’m not that interesting. I didn’t get anything from it. There was nothing to … to draw.” It wasn’t doing that to me either. The fog hadn’t taken anything; it was only browsing.
Emma said, suddenly, “Does the snow look funny to you guys?”
“Funny?” Tony peered. “Yeah. That …”
“Rippling,” Emma said. “Like when you look through water.”
“I do see that.” Bending, Rima squinted at the snow’s slight shimmy. “What is that? Not another quake, surely. I don’t feel anything.”
Emma shrugged. “Kind of reminds me of heat shimmers. You know, when you see mirages and the air looks like water? But the temperature hasn’t changed.”
“Regardless, we’ve the same dilemma. We’re trapped, and—” Rima stopped so suddenly that Tony, following close behind, blundered into her. She barely felt him snatch her arms and hardly heard his question over the hammering of her heart. But she did hear what he said next: “Christ.” And Emma: “Oh boy.”
So they saw it, too. Despite the slight shudder in the air, this was no mirage or fantasy stroked from her mind by the fog—although she did think that this was the juicy bit those phantom fingers had prized free. Perhaps it hadn’t been all that hard either. After all, she had thought of both: one image had come to her that very morning, as Tony thrashed awake from a nightmare she’d also had, and the other had flashed into her mind not all that long ago, thanks to the very strange Constable Doyle.
3
FROM THIS VANTAGE point and now that Rima had a chance to think about it, she realized that the fog had come down like a bowl or bell jar to carve a wide circle, the kind you might find in a circus. (Or—considering Emma’s uneasiness—the asylum’s dome.) If the cart was dead center, then they were along the edge, at roughly five o’clock.
On the far side of the cart, the woman was not quite opposite them. Say, nine o’clock, and probably because she’d decided this was the best place from which to observe. At this distance, Rima could tell only that her ankle-length skirt was jet. Her hair was coiled in a perfect chignon. Her face, angular as a skull’s, was just as white, and the sockets were very dark. But for the shape—rectangular lozenges—and that glint of gold, you might have imagined her eyes were gone altogether.
Purple spectacles. She saw how, in contrast to them, the woman’s boots hadn’t even dimpled the snow, and then she realized with a twist of sick dismay that the woman’s shoes weren’t even touching the ground.
“It’s her,” Emma said. “That’s the woman who tried to get me.”
“Yes.” It’s the same woman I saw here, in the asylum, in Kramer’s office. Her heart was beginning to hammer. She came for the other Tony. She’d come for them all, it seemed—and yet, perhaps, that woman was the lesser of two horrors.
Across the snow, by their cart, those sacks of dead … were moving.
EMMA
Infected
SHE’D FELT IT as this odd worming sensation along her neck, her jaw, the gash on her forehead. Not the usual drip-drip but an unctuous squirming. Now, she stared as a small, fresh red puddle suddenly shuddered on dusty canvas as if the earth was gearing up for another quake. The blood-pool stretched, elongating to a teardrop, then a finger, and finally a muscular red rope … and then it headed for Weber.
House showed me this in that blink to Madison. She could feel her eyes bugging from their sockets. Beyond this cell, out in those halls, the other patients were still wailing, and the pressure to start screaming herself burned like fizzy pop in the bottleneck of her throat. My arms started to bleed and then the whisper-man pulled himself out of a book. Meme’s right. She watched her blood undulate as it snaked for the dead man. Weber’s head was a misshapen jigsaw. Everything above the right cheekbone was gone, nothing left but a pudding of brain tissue, pulverized bone, and pulpy meat that looked black in the cave’s greenish-yellow glow. His left eye had popped like a cork under too much pressure and goggled, gray as dirty ice, on a sliver of dusky nerve. The empty socket, wide as an ice-cream scoop, stared in wide-eyed wonder. The man’s jaw was out of joint, his bluing tongue lolling, held in place by a shred.
I’m stained, infected. She had no idea what had happened after she lost consciousness; there had been no awakening to find Eric and her mind joined. But her blood was proof: he was in there, and so were Casey, Rima. A dark piece of Lizzie. Horrified, she watched the red eel of her blood nose Weber’s blued tongue the way a curious puppy pokes at a squished snake, probing and then drawing itself along Weber’s dead flesh in a slow, very thorough lick. I can’t go back home, not carrying this in my blood.
On the floor, Weber’s tongue twitched.
“Oh!” Emma caught the rest of that scream in her hands as Bode flinched, dropping the scalpel he’d just tugged from the dead man’s pocket, and yelped, “Wh-what, what?”
Weber’s blue tongue shivered. Thick globules of Weber’s dead black blood quickened. The mattress was alive with writhing flesh and undulating ropes of blood and whips of tissue. In the hollow bowl of Weber’s skull, a jellylike slurry of curdled brain and oily fluid heaved and rolled in a slow, gelatinous surge as if someone had just given a pot of thick oatmeal a good stir, and there was sound now: an unctuous, wet splot-sploosh-fwap-splat that reminded her of Jasper gutting a nice fourteen-incher, digging out intestines and liver and lungs with his fingers to slap into a guts bucket. On his left temple, Weber’s lone eyeball was slowly creeping back toward its socket, the nerve spooling onto an invisible reel the way a sinker spins on a tangle of fishing line. As it seated itself, the eye—lidless and fat as a boiled egg—roved in hitches and jerks as if trying to get a fix. Then it fetched up, the eyeball quivering, the iris tick-tick-tick-ticking, as if there was an operator on the other side, some guy in Mission Control keying instructions: No, pan left, go back. After another second, the eye twitched back a millimeter at a time—tick-tick-tick—and then froze … on her. A split second later, Weber’s neck worked, and then there came a guttural, lowing, gagging moan: “AAAAHHHH …”
“Christ!” Bode was by her side in two great leaps. Snatching her wrist, he yanked her away from her corner and slung her around, crowding her toward the door. “Come on, come on!” he bawled. “We’re getting out of here now! Run, run!”
RIMA
Rotters
“MOVE, MOVE! GET back!” Grabbing her arm, Tony shoved her behind him. “Emma, you too. Let’s just … we’ll …” He didn’t finish that thought.
The fog took nightmares from my head. That’s what it was parsing. It wanted what scares me. Horrified, Rima could only watch as the sacks bunched and wriggled. These fears were at the tip of her tongue, foremost in her mind. I dream about a woman with purple eyes who takes Tony. I talked to Doyle about the dead coming back to life.
Now, her worst and freshest nightmares were coming true. But what was the woman waiting for? Rima saw how still she was, like a statue. Meme said that Kramer already had a Tony. This woman had come after Emma, and if Meme was to be believed, this woman had also visited the other Rima’s world. Even if Rima herself wa
s of no use, the woman must want Tony and Emma at least.
“Then take them!” she suddenly screamed at the woman. “Please! Do it now before these dead come back to life!”
“Rima!” Tony grabbed her arm. “What are you doing?”
Trying to save you both. Maybe it was insanity or only desperation, but she was screaming now, shaking her fist at the woman. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Then please, please, take Tony away. Take Emma! Get them out of here! This is my nightmare, not theirs!”
“No!” Emma pressed close to her side. “I’m not going anywhere with her, and not without you!”
She paid no mind. “Get them out!” she shouted at the woman. “Please, I’m begging you!”
“Rima!” Grabbing her shoulders, Tony gave her a shake. “Are you mad? Stop, stop! We’re not going anywhere.”
“You won’t have a choice.” That woman hadn’t budged, she saw. Probably settling in for a good show, but why, why? “If she wants you, she’ll take you, and when she does, don’t fight her, Tony. Stay alive. Please, promise me you’ll stay alive. You too, Emma.”
“What are you talking about?” Tony shook her again. “We stay together!”
No. That was precisely what she didn’t want. God, please, help us. Her eyes hopped from the woman to the cart and those sacks. She could see the sudden bulge of a head in one, the thrust of an arm and hand in another. The outline of a foot. With only the low hum and higher fizz from the fog against which to compete, the scrape of nails over fabric was very plain. Sacks are so thin, you can see daylight through the weave. They’d tear through that burlap in seconds.
“Lord.” Tony’s voice quavered. “Listen to them.”
The air swelled with a loud, long chorus of moans. She couldn’t tell if they were suffering or these were the only sounds a dead man or woman, with either a bloated tongue or no tongue at all, could make. Or maybe it really hurts to come back from the dead. There came a very distinctive, very loud ripping sound of cold, dry cloth, and she saw the lips of that one sack jackknifed over the cart’s edge suddenly gape. Two skeletal arms battled their way through its mouth, and then a girl’s head appeared through the rent. Her face was gaunt, the cheekbones like knife blades, her flesh green with decay. Rearing, the girl set her bony hands on the cart and levered herself until she was looking right at them.