“You hayseed motherfuckers believe me now?” Wade asked.
The slack jawed police made no response. Everything was shifting, growing in minute increments, joints of weeds and eldritch tree limbs lengthening in crunching movements as if in pain. Fist sized bugs crawled up sweating tree trunks, scoring the fleshlike bark. Clusters of faced mushrooms shuddered, breathing, and lumps of fungus glowed in the dark.
“P Porker,” White ordered.
“Yuh yuh yeah, Chief?”
“Get out there. Check it out.”
“Yuh yuh you gotta be crazy, Chief.”
“Get out there, you big creamcake!” White kicked Porker in his tremendous rump. “Check it out!”
“I wouldn’t send anyone out there,” Wade advised.
“Shut up! Peerce, get out there! This fat baby’s got no balls. Let’s see if you do!”
Peerce stood unsteadily, looking at the green fog, then back to White. He took a breath and stepped out.
“There’s things in that fog,” Wade warned.
“Things?” Peerce queried, looking back. He waded out. It was like a green swamp; the fog had risen to midthigh now. Black cane stalks swayed to and fro, acrawl with noxious bugs. From some of the plants hung fattened seedpods with drooling—and distressingly human—lips. “Things,” Peerce muttered again. Now he was ten yards out. “I think I can see ’em.”
Yes, they all could. The grove’s wildlife, no doubt, had taken note of them. Wade spotted ghost shapes of things roving beneath the surface—fog vermin. Scuttling parasites feasted on dead possum bellies, and waddling things like groundhogs, lacking heads, scampered about, raising trails of mist. But worst of all were the gilled snake things, which seemed to swim vigorously beneath the fogtop.
“Bring him back, you idiot,” Wade said. “Those things bite.”
White smirked, then yelped as one of the fat pinch faced spiders lowered itself on a line of snot. It tried to bite White on the nose. Wade batted it away, laughing.
Then Peerce began to howl.
He was jumping, struggling. One of the fog snakes had affixed its flat sucker mouth to Peerce’s crotch. He tore it off, along with his zipper, and then another snake latched onto his ass.
“Help me!” he pleaded.
“Porker! Get out there and help Peerce!”
“Fuh fuh fuck you, Chief,” Porker stammered.
“St. John! Get out there!”
“Eat my shorts, Chief. He’s your man, you get out there.”
Peerce tore off another eel, then tried to run back. Suddenly he tripped and sank completely beneath the fog, screaming.
Jesus Christ. Wade dashed out. Glimpses of things approached, and he kicked them as best he could, or stepped on them. One of the fog snakes swam near, a big one, but Wade stepped on its head just in time. Then something like a fanged toad, the size of a softball, hopped forward. Wade stomped down hard. The toad burst under his shoe like a Baggie full of pudding.
Wade saw the fog churning. A hand surfaced. He grabbed it, pulled, and hauled Peerce back to the trail.
Green mist blew from Peerce’s nostrils. “Chief, those things were tryin’ to eat me!” White gave him a look that said, Better you than me. They spent the next five minutes picking slugs and horned insects off of Peerce. His clothes hung in tatters.
“What is this place, St. John?” White asked grimly.
“I don’t know,” Wade said.
Porker pointed shakily. “And what’s that black box?”
Before Wade could hazard a guess, they heard a car.
“Turn your lights out!” Wade instructed. They huddled down. Across the dell, a car entered the morass. The submerged headlights projected luminous green plumes. It was a Dodge Colt.
“It’s Phillips,” White whispered. The cops drew their guns.
The car faltered through the grove, knocking down tall stalks of perverted plants. The fog came up to the Colt’s windows. Unseen monstrosities howled as Jervis drove over them.
Then the car rose out of the fog, parked on the hillock. Jervis got out and lit a cigarette. Then he hoisted something out of the trunk. Even at this distance they could see that it was a girl, unconscious or dead. Jervis, the body over his shoulder, stood before the black box and…disappeared.
He’d disappeared into it.
Then another, smaller figure emerged from the car, a black, hooded figure. It knelt daintily before the hideous, bulbed plant.
“That’s one of the sisters,” Wade whispered.
Now the sister was plucking things from the plant.
“What the fuck’s she doin’?’ White asked, squinting.
“Eating bugs. Those bitches eat anything.”
“We gotta find out what’s goin’ on here.”
“Chief,” Wade implored. “I can’t put it any more eloquently than this: We have to get our swingin’ dicks the fuck out of this gore hole before those walking meat grinders realize we’re here.”
“Not yet,” White said. “I want Phillips’ ass.”
Wade rolled his eyes. “Hey, cement head. I just got done telling you he’s already dead. You can’t kill him.”
“Shut up, St. John. Go get the binocs out of the cruiser.”
Wade crunched back to the first clearing. He found the binoculars in the console and smiled when he noticed the key in the ignition. Even I’m not big enough a prick to leave them here.
Or was he?
It didn’t matter. A burst of yelling blared from the grove, then gunshots.
Then: “St. John! Start the car! We’re comin’ out!”
The shit’s flying now. Wade turned the engine over and popped open the doors. He scoped down the trail with the binoculars.
Holy, holy shit, he thought.
At least a dozen sisters had converged on the police. Flashes popped, guns were firing right and left. It looked like Custer’s last stand—only Custer, in this case, was White, and he and his men were faring about as well. They emptied their guns as fast as they could fire them, reloaded and fired some more, all for nothing. Hooded sisters fell on them from all angles. Vicious, liquid giggles rose like surf within the grove.
—New pigs!
—Fat, juicy pigs!
Two sisters held Porker up, while another eviscerated him in place. Pale hands delved like cleavers into the tremendous stomach, parting slabs of fat to expose the succulent organs.
—He’s so big!
—Lots to eat!
It happened so fast that the poor jerk just stood there a moment, looking at his opened belly. Fat people were often taken advantage of, but never like this. Blood and fist sized wads of fat flew as the sisters helped themselves. Porker provided a veritable all you can eat feast. The sisters’ hands rummaged and plowed, until nothing remained of the choice merchandise of Porker’s abdominal vault. The sisters fed well. They slaked their appetites and rejoiced, flinging organ scraps in macabre celebration.
That’s what I call losing a hundred pounds the hard way, Wade mused.
Peerce was trying to aim, backing up, with White firing behind him. Peerce’s big .44 Blackhawk jumped in his hand, but each slug was either brushed away or plucked from its trajectory.
Wade did indeed consider leaving. I don’t owe these guys anything, do I? But just because they were assholes didn’t mean he should abandon them. Shit! he concluded. Damn it, shit!
Now Peerce was overrun, flailing amid the besieging sisters. White threw his empty guns at the girls, as Peerce screamed in perfect Deep South terror. —What’s this? one of the big ones asked, and held up the CM tear gas gun. Their giggles pitched as she shoved the barrel down Peerce’s throat and pulled the trigger. There was a damped bang!—the proximity fuse burned out—another bang!—and then Peerce began to expand, quite like a parade float, growing, growing, buttons popping, until he was huge. The sisters marveled at this spectacle. Eventually Peerce burst. Offal flew like spaghetti and sauce—then all was obscured by tear gas.
Wade grabbed the Sentry flaregun in White’s console. He got out and aimed. “Come on, Chief! Run your ass off!”
The brew of sisters didn’t like the CS agent. They staggered, gagging. Chief White clambered up the carcass ridden trail. Behind him, though, a sister emerged from the smoke.
“Duck!” Wade shouted.
White hit the dirt. Without much confidence, Wade discharged the flare gun and watched the projectile burn a line down the trail. Mystified, the sister caught it, looked at it as it hissed out its propellant. The canister exploded, splattering her with ignited magnesium. It stuck to her face, cloak, and sunglasses, bubbling intense neon red. The sister wailed.
Wade jumped back behind the wheel as White lunged in. The car whipped a reckless circle, Wade’s teeth clenched as he steered.
“Goddamn you, St. John, you goddamn bastard!” White blubbered. “You said there were only four of ’em!”
The car shuddered down the logging road. White threw up his hands and screamed. Wade screamed, too, when he saw what White was screaming about.
At least a dozen more sisters blocked the road.
Where the hell did they come from!
“RUN ‘EM DOWN!” White bellowed.
Wade proceeded to do just that. He gripped the wheel hard and trounced the gas. They stood like bowling pins. Wade plowed into them with such impact that the lead sisters exploded jets of black blood from their mouths, inundating the windshield. Wade turned on the wipers and kept plowing. He watched each rank collapse under the bumper, and saw now that they numbered more than a dozen, much more. They were using themselves as barricades—they didn’t care. They just stood there, grinning, as Wade mowed them down. The bodies thumped under the cruiser’s wheels; there were so many of them it was like driving over hay bales.
In the rearview, the sisters, though crushed, were getting back up to run after them. It figures, Wade thought. And in front, the grinning white faces loomed and fell, only to be replaced by more. Then the passenger window shattered.
I have had better days, Wade considered.
Several sisters hung onto the car, snatching at White. White screamed honorably, gouging at their hideous, giggling faces. It’s me they want, Wade realized, not White. But White was in the way, and that was his hard luck. The sisters struggled further to get to Wade, clawing through White. White just screamed and screamed.
At last the car had run over the last of the cloaked women. Wade whipped out onto the Route, but he still had two sisters hanging onto the passenger door. Wade expertly sideswiped a fat oak tree and skimmed them off.
He drove for miles before daring to stop. The grille was pounded in, the fenders crumpled, the hood aglaze in shiny black blood. But White, Wade noted, had come out of this worse than the car. The sisters had pulled his face and scalp off, pulled his arms off, pulled his throat out. What now rode as passenger bore no likeness whatsoever to good old shucking and jiving Chief White. He’d written his last traffic ticket, that was for sure.
Wade idled up to a ravine. “Rest in peace, Chief,” he muttered.
He rolled White’s remains out of the car and took off back toward campus.
—
CHAPTER 30
Jervis grinned. “How about some entertainment, Lydia?”
Lydia moaned.
On the germinationwarren’s floorwall, Elizabeth Whitechapel lay nude, twitching. Orangish, swirling light hovered within the warren as Jervis led in an exceptionally grotesque holotype. Four shoulders composed its arched back, housing four sets of arms. A fifth set of arms served as legs, joined by a muscled buttocks. The beast’s sinuous skin shined blood-red in sweat. Puffy vertical slits formed its eyes, nose, and mouth.
By now, Lydia was catching on. The word spaceship didn’t sit well with her, but what else could this be? She’d picked up bits of conversation: they kept talking about leaving, leaving tomorrow night. As in…taking off? They’d also mentioned recharge, which could refer to a power supply of some kind. Other words, weirder words, had reached her ears, too. Stasisfield. Psilight. Interspecielmetis. The word alien didn’t sit well with her either, but if the labyrinth’s tenants weren’t aliens, what were they? She’d noticed many of the cloaked women. Many pranced about naked, their sleek white bodies faintly veined, their breasts nippleless, their pubes bare. They were clones.
Invaders, Lydia thought.
Movement caught her eye. The holotype, whose genitals looked like a cluster of spoiled grapes, hobbled a circle around the naked girl. The girl seemed paralyzed. Nevertheless, there was wantonness in her eyes. Somehow they’d induced a positive sexual response when the girl should be screaming bloody murder. The girl wanted this multilimbed thing. She wanted it to mate with her.
Oh my God, Lydia thought. With all eight of its webbed hands, the holotype kneaded its clustered genitals, which soon swelled to a budded red pole. The pole was then inserted into the girl’s mouth. This oral foreplay did not last long, however, before the thing’s member grew too large for the confines of the girl’s mouth. It was withdrawn, pulsing. Lydia’s stomach churned.
Jervis appeared at the static barrier, “How do you like the entertainment so far? Beats Seinfeld any day, huh?”
Behind him, shrieks of pleasure erupted, unearthly grunts, and a vigorous slapping sound. Thank God Jervis blocked Lydia’s view. “Why?” she croaked.
“The master plan,” Jervis encrypted.
Elizabeth Whitechapel screamed in staccato bursts. The wet slapping speeded up to a blur.
“He’s one of the bigger ones,” Jervis noted, “and I don’t mean shoe size. But we soften the girls up first so they can take it.”
Lydia grew dizzy. Her head spun with the screams.
“And if you think that fucker’s big, take a look at Pretty Boy over there.” Jervis pointed to the adjoining hold. “You haven’t forgotten about him, have you?”
No, as a matter of fact she hadn’t. The holotype they’d reserved for Lydia was thumping the repulsion screen with its fingerless hands. Its raw meat face surged forward, red lust in its gelatin eyes.
“You’re gonna get every inch,” Jervis promised. “Right up the ass.”
It beat its massive erection against the screen and mewled.
Jervis laughed out loud. Lydia fainted.
««—»»
Wade awoke just past noon, glare on his face. Sunlight, he thought. Oh, bliss. He’d hidden the cruiser behind the town theater and had dozed off. He’d slept as if dead.
By now the cops would be going apeshit looking for White, Peerce, and Porker. And there was still the question of Lydia; she was the only one Wade trusted enough to tell, but where was she?
He left the cruiser, electing to return to campus on foot. He’d have a hard time explaining to the gate guard how he came to be driving Chief White’s cruiser without the company of Chief White. He crossed campus stealthily, mindful of police. Something deep in his gut told him not to return to the dorm, but this he dismissed as nerves. It was daytime now. He had nothing to fear in the daytime, did he?
He trotted down the bike path which paralleled the student shop. He stopped in his tracks and nearly shouted with joy.
His Corvette sat shining in the shop lot.
Wade ran. “Lydia! It’s me!”
No reply. But she must be close by—the keys were still in the Vette, and on the console lay Tom’s pendant that she found on the Route, and the little pistol. There was something else too, something that looked like a portable tensor lamp. Hadn’t he seen it before, at the sciences center?
“Lydia!”
Pieces of padlock lay on the pavement. The shop door stood ajar. Wade knew something was…fucked up. Inside, he peeped, “Lydia?” First he noted the untarped cars, then the jugs. Then he found Lydia’s Colt Trooper Mark III on the floor.
Then he heard voices.
The wall? he thought.
The voices were coming from the wall. Like walking in a dream, Wade moved closer. What is that? He
noticed a black dot on the wall. But when he put a finger to it, he discovered it wasn’t a dot at all, but a hole.
Hole, he thought moronically. In the wall. Voices… Hole. Wade put his eye to the hole and looked in.
Jervis was hanging a naked girl on a harness. Behind him, a wall glowed orange around racks of big circles, like kegs. Steam rose amid distant machine sounds.
As if in supervision, Professor Dudley Besser looked on.
“You know, Prof, five girls doesn’t seem like much.”
“It’s exponential, Jervis,” Besser said. “The fissionizationvessels are needed only to provide basic metis prototypes. From there, after computer calculated transfections, the desired metis types are mass produced exponentially.”
“Oh,” Jervis remarked. “Like a production line.”
“In a sense, Jervis, yes.”
Wade’s eye seemed sewn open to the hole.
Jervis was kneeling now, punching some kind of nozzles into the bottom of the hanging girl’s feet.
“We still leaving tonight?”
“Yes, we have to. The stasisfield is draining.”
Jervis glanced up in a sudden concern. “What about Wade?”
“Leave Wade to me,” Besser said.
Was it Wade’s imagination, or was the nude girl in the harness…stretching?
Now Jervis was milking white sludge out of her feet. The sludge oozed from the nozzles into big jugs—identical to the jugs Wade had just seen in the shop. The gelatinous white glop reminded him of the stuff he’d seen in that sump at the clearing.
Wade, as usual of late, was doubting his sanity. This was a reasonable surmise when you were seeing and hearing people through a hole in a cinder block wall, the other side of which was a fucking parking lot, and even more reasonable when the people you were seeing and hearing through that hole were passively milking white sludge out of a naked girl in a harness. And Wade was right; the girl was indeed stretching. Her body now sagged fully to the floor. She looked boneless. Jervis took her down then and very calmly—Jesus, gag me! Wade thought—stuffed her into a big can. The girl’s head flapped like a rubber bag, her limbs as slack and pasty as baker’s dough. Jervis packed her in tight and lidded the container.
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