by Tim Curran
And it was her fault.
She was alone.
Terribly alone and, dammit, she was just no good at subterfuge. She didn’t think like that (which is why the wives always seemed to find out).
Hurry up for godsake, hurry up!
The elevator was creeping up to the garage and Shawna’s heart was pounding, perspiration making her shirt cling to her spine. She tapped her foot, swore under her breath, bunched her hands into fists.
Closer, but not there just yet.
She wondered what they would do to her when they caught her. If they’d even listen to what she had to say. Maybe they’d think she was holding back and torture her. Did they still do that? Remember waterboarding, honey? What do you think they were doing with those Muslims? Holding their fucking hands? Right, right. Only it wasn’t called torture anymore, now it was known as enhanced interrogation techniques. At least to those doing it, but to the people receiving it, it was still fucking torture.
Bing.
The door opened.
A woman in a business suit was standing there. “Miss Geddes?” she said. “I’d like you to come with us.”
6:07 P.M.
They had her and Stein saw it.
He stepped outside and waited for them. He slid the 9mm Beretta from inside his windbreaker and casually threaded the silencer onto it, facing the wall.
Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?
But he didn’t honestly know.
What are you going to do with her once you grab her?
Again, he didn’t know but it seemed to be the right thing to do so he was going with it. God only knew there had been precious few moral and ethical decisions made in his life so this time he was doing what was right.
He could hear the Geddes woman sobbing.
They were coming.
He kept his back to them. A few other people in the parking garage were watching now. People passed in cars, staring. No doubt one of them would be calling the Metro boys on their cell. Not much time, but enough.
“Oh, please, please,” Shawna Geddes was saying. “I haven’t done anything…I really haven’t.”
They were ignoring her, showing no mercy as good little S5 cogs.
As they made to pass him, Stein said, “Excuse me.”
When the man turned, Stein brought up the 9mm in one smooth practiced motion. The guy’s eyes bulged and his hand tried to make it inside his coat, but a slug went through his forehead, scattering blood and brain matter to the concrete. He made it like three steps with a scarlet stream gushing from his head before he hit the ground. The woman, who had Shawna Geddes hooked by the elbow, let out a cry, released her and came at him with a very sloppy kick. Stein dodged it, cracked her in the face with the butt of the Beretta which elicited a sharp little scream from her as her nose snapped and blood fountained from the nostrils. Before she could hope to recover, he smashed her in the face with two quick left-handed jabs that dropped her to one knee.
Shawna Geddes stumbled back and tripped over the man’s corpse.
The female S5 agent should have been done, but she launched herself, swinging at Stein. He dodged it, but not the kick she brought to his shin which threw him off balance. Then she kicked again. A perfect side-kick just like she’d been taught which caught him a glancing blow on the ribs and threw him up against the wall.
Her face webbed in blood, her eyes huge and crazy, she tried another move. Stein dropped the gun, dodged her kick, caught her arm and twisted it in the socket which made her cry out and fall forward…just in time for his knee to make contact with her nose, further mutilating the cartilage.
She went down and he kicked her in the ribs.
Then he stomped the back of her neck a little harder than he intended because he heard the vertebrae snap.
He grabbed up the gun and those precious few bystanders that had been thinking about intervening ran off.
But so had the girl.
“SHAWNA!” he called out as she ran through the garage. “I’M HERE TO HELP YOU! STOP! WAIT FOR ME!”
But of course, she didn’t. Stein went running after her, ignoring his throbbing shin and closing in on her. She nearly made it to an exit ramp when a car raced out and struck her, throwing her up on the hood and rolling her off to the pavement.
Shit! The dumb bitch!
But as Stein ran to her aid, he saw that it was no accident, because the car slammed on its brakes and now it was revving to back-up and finish the job. Stein put a round through the windshield and that threw off the driver’s trajectory. The car—a maroon sedan—missed her and slammed into the cement barrier, tail lights shattering in shards of plastic.
And by then, Stein was at the car.
The driver looked at him once and Stein shot him through the head, spraying the inside of the sedan a brilliant red.
6:12 P.M.
What?
What?
WHAT?
Shawna heard a voice speaking her name, she was sure she heard a voice speaking her name, then hands taking hold of her—ow, shit, that hurt, man, that hurt—and carrying her. Like a child. Picking her up and carrying her away. Voices. Voices were screaming. Sirens in the distance. Somebody was shouting. A man shouted back, FBI, FBI, FBI, stand clear…
Her eyes opened and she was in a car.
Driving.
Oh no, oh no, it was one of them. They had her. They had her. Shit—
She reached for the door, but her limbs were rubbery and weak, she couldn’t seem to coordinate them. But she had to get away. She had to find Harry. Get to Harry. There was safety with Harry.
A hand patted her shoulder.
What?
“Take it easy, just take it easy,” the voice said. “I’m getting you out of here. I don’t think anything’s broken. Just keep your head down for now.”
Well, that part was easy.
She felt herself drifting off even though she was aching. No. She couldn’t drift off. She tried to sit up and that hand forced her down again.
“Sit still,” the voice said.
“Fuck you,” her own voice said. “Let me go.”
“If I let you go, they’ll kill you.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m a friend. Now take it easy.”
It was pointless to fight against him or resist him in any way and she knew it. So, she sank down in the seat and it was warm and soft and nice. She thought about Harry and her eyes flickered open, then closed again. She felt herself drifting away.
“That’s better,” the voice said. “That’s better now.”
But by then Shawna was in dreamland.
DETROIT, HOLY CROSS HOSPITAL:
THE MORGUE, 6:32 P.M.
Cold, holy Jesus it was cold.
Colder than Rudolph’s nuts.
This playing possum business was all and fine but Johnny Kopok had been at it for hours now, sleeping with the dead, and he knew he couldn’t do it much longer. Good thing was, he figured, that when they brought him down into the morgue with the cold cuts there wasn’t enough room to put him in a drawer so they stacked him up with the others. And it was only in the last hour or so that they’d begun the grim business of feeding the bodies into the incinerator.
“You don’t want to go in, too,” he whispered, “then you better do something.”
“What do you got in mind?” said another voice.
Johnny jumped…as much as he could jump with the dead crowding him to either side on the floor…and looked around. Did I hear that? Sometimes my brain ain’t so good and I don’t remember the last time I had a good taste, so maybe, just maybe—
“Name’s Bertie Panella,” the voice said. A woman. Of all things.
Johnny sat up and introduced himself to the old woman down the way. “Pleased to know you, Bertie.”
“Same here, Johnny.”
“You ain’t got a worm in you, do you?”
“Not yet,” Bertie told him. “But some of these dead one
s might.”
Johnny explained his situation and Bertie responded in kind. She had been in the hospital to have a benign tumor removed from her throat—fifty-odd years of smoking will do that to you, she pointed out—and all went well. She was set to be sprung today…then the Martians came and what a mess it all was. Johnny didn’t know what all that Martian talk was until Bertie explained that sometimes when she had a good load on or hadn’t had a taste of the old Mary Lou in a few days, she started seeing Martians.
“Sometimes they come right out of the walls,” Bertie told him. “It’s a helluva thing. Mostly I hear ‘em whispering in the closet.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Johnny told her with all sincerity.
“I know they’re in my head,” Bertie explained. “But I don’t like ‘em none better.”
Johnny could sympathize with that.
“Then when those people in the white suits and hoods came in, I was sure I was just imagining ‘em. Martians. Goddamn Martians. But bigger and not green-faced. Then they stuck needles in me and I knew they was real.”
“They’re real, all right,” Johnny told her. “Real as snot on a doorknob.”
“So what’s our plan?” Bertie said.
“We… ssshhh… they’re coming.”
“Martians?”
“Yep.”
Johnny and Bertie curled-up with the rest of the corpses and waited it out. A couple men in white containment suits bustled in and grabbed a few corpses and dragged them off. They loaded them on gurneys and wheeled them away, off to the incinerator.
When they were gone, Johnny said, “Okay, doll. We make our move now.”
“I’m with you.”
They worked themselves free of the corpses and stepped out of the cold room and threaded their way through the various autopsy rooms and then out into the hallway.
“Okay,” Johnny said. “There’s the elevator, down at the end.”
“You think that’s wise?”
“Maybe you’re right. Let’s make for the stairs.”
Together, they went to the fire door and got through it just in time. As Johnny peaked through the window in the door, he saw four more soldiers in their suits—not so white anymore—come for more corpses. Being as quiet as they could, Johnny and Bertie climbed up the stairs, making for freedom… if there was such a thing left anymore.
CHICAGO, RIVER NORTH:
THE WAREHOUSE, 6:51 P.M.
Wake up.
You must.
Wake.
Up…
Harry felt his eyes open, then shut; open, then shut; open, then stay shut and nothing he could say or think or do could seem to change that. He knew he was dreaming. Even though it was all drugged and narcotic and surreal, he knew it was all a dream, it had to be a dream. He just needed to wake up because Shawna was in danger and he needed to help her.
It felt like he was laying on a table.
He drifted off and then almost came around but just couldn’t open his eyes.
He could hear voices.
Voices he did not recognize.
One of them said: “Just how much did you give him?”
“The usual. Just enough to take the fight out of him.”
The first voice laughed. “That’s a lovely black eye you have.”
“He got the jump on me.”
“Ah, and you a professional. How perfectly amusing.”
Who the hell were these people and why was he on this table? Not only that but strapped to it.
“Cut him loose,” the first voice said.
“If he gets crazy again…”
“I have no fear of that. Besides, I have a professional like you to subdue him.”
Harry’s eyes flickered open.
He saw faces. He did not recognize them.
Dreaming, still dreaming. He must be dreaming.
“Mr. Niles,” said the first voice. “Can you hear me?”
Harry opened his eyes. He licked his lips. “Where the hell am I?” he said.
“Yes,” said a voice. “Where exactly?”
GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP:
SHATI REFUGEE CAMP
1:13 A.M. PALESTINE TIME
Meir Cohan listened to the things speaking in their hissing, whispering voices. He could not be sure if they were talking to one another or just to themselves. There was no way to know and he honestly did not want to know. They were things. They were men and women and children infested by grotesque parasitic worms and he had all he could do not to break down sobbing or vent his mind in one wild shrieking scream.
You are a soldier, he told himself, in enemy territory. You must look at it no other way. If you were facing Hamas murderers, you would not shrink so. Do not shrink now.
You’re maybe the last one left.
Dear God.
But it was certainly possible. Laying there amongst the bodies and wreckage, his face blackened by soot and his orange biocon suit torn and burnt, his helmet gone, he knew he must keep his nerve. If they taught you nothing else in the IDF, it was to keep your nerve. To keep a cool head in a combat station.
Around him were literally dozens of IDF soldiers scattered and heaped and tangled together. A few were melted together from the fires. Several fires were still burning, throwing jumping orange-yellow illumination against the rubble and debris. The air stank of burning corpses, pungent clouds of smoke drifting about. Cohan was in a real situation here and he knew it. The bombed-out husks of block houses surrounded the little courtyard on three sides, the fourth being the serpentine alleyway that had brought the IDF here in the first place. Gathered in the mouth of the alley and along the walls, coveting pockets of crawling shadow, were the infected ones.
They were not human anymore.
He could not see them clearly…just glimpses of hunching things, slack things, flaccid and vermiform like that which infested them. Now and again, he would see one move with a hideous inching sort of motion that made him shudder, made his stomach feel almost watery.
The idea of trying to break out was ludicrous.
He’d never get past them. And the idea of going through them… no, absolutely not. He still had his knife. What a sweet relief it would bring drawn across his throat.
Better suicide than to become something like that.
What, then?
He did not know. Much like Johnny Kopok a world away, Cohan was doing his best to pretend he was a corpse. So far, he had fooled the hosts themselves who were little better than mindless shells under the dominion of their respective worms. But he knew he would not fool the worms. And they were active. Of the fifty or sixty bodies of the IDF and Palestinians cast about and heaped in ramparts, there were several Israelis that were still alive… if you wanted to call it that. They were infested now. When their hosts had been gunned down or blown apart or lit up by flamethrowers during the assault, their individual worms had burst free, many severely damaged, seeking new hosts, new bodies to infect and enslave.
Right now, there were an uncounted number of worms sliding amongst the bodies.
Cohan had seen one of them take a survivor not ten minutes before.
He was still shaking from the sight. The man had been Eli Stern, the lieutenant of Cohan’s platoon. Stern had been grazed by friendly fire. Wounded, but nowhere near death. That’s when the worm found him. It rose up amongst the bodies, a pallid ribbon that looked—if anything—like some mammoth inchworm considering a leaf to chew on. It arched itself and hung its head-bulb down low like a rattlesnake readying itself to strike.
Stern saw it hovering over him.
Cohan was certain of that. He saw it and he made a choked whimpering sound in his throat.
Cohan had never felt more of a coward than he did at that moment, knowing the lieutenant needed him but unable to move, to act, to do anything but hide there within the skin of his suit. Far too terrified and revolted by the worm to do anything else.
I’m sorry, Stern. God knows how sorry I am. But I can’t. I just c
an’t. I’m afraid, you see, I’m afraid that if I so much as twitch it will come after me. And the idea of it touching me… the feel of it sliding over me… it’s too much. Please forgive me but it’s just too much…
The worm’s body, Cohan saw, was made of segments, each of them a pulpous, glistening white and oiled with an opaque slime that looked oddly like the jelly from a canned ham. The smell coming off it was sweet and repellent. It made Cohan’s mind sink into a droning field of fuzz and made his stomach pull down low, bottoming out.
He gagged.
He felt bile squirt up the back of his throat.
He tried not to flinch. It took every ounce of willpower he had to avoid coughing or vomiting at that moment. He didn’t think the worms could hear, but he had a feeling they could sense vibration, movement, maybe even body heat.
The worm drew its head-bulb over Stern’s face and Stern was aware of it, oh yes, but he was drugged out, senseless like a junkie with an arm full of heroin. All he did was stare with shining, glazed eyes, his mouth hanging slack, a thread of drool coming from the corner of his lips. The worm kept bumping Stern’s face with its head-bulb, Cohan saw, but what it was in fact doing (he soon realized) was jabbing him with the scarlet stinging spines that ringed its mouth… which was sort of like two dark slits intersecting in an X-shape.
Then the mouth opened.
It seemed to split the head-bulb wide and Cohan looked down the black maw of its throat and it was spiked with teeth. Maybe not true teeth, but barbed protrusions that looked oddly like the thorns of rose stems. And not just a single ring of them, but one ring after another and another, all crowded and overlapping. Then three pink squirming things came out like tongues, except they were more akin to the tentacles of a sea anemone.
