The skin tore away from the opening like lightning bolts through the tissue, the clothes holding the halves together only momentarily before tearing from the collar all the way to the waist, where the belt strained ferociously against the inner revolt.
With a scream like a hiss of air through a hole in an oxygen tank, the body buckled, folding sickly forward. Both hands slapped the floor, pressing the body up to all fours. The skin covering the fingers popped open and was shed away from the knobby lengths of bone formerly sheathed within; chunks of adipose tissue rode a wave of pus out of the body through the skin, now sloughing off in chunks. As he arose, Jack’s humanity fell from what he had become like placental remains following his rebirth.
The creature that was the Secretary of Defense rose to its full height, sinewy spine popping loudly.
Tightly meshed scales like those of a salmon covered his bare body from head to toe, a shade of black deeper than midnight under a lunar eclipse. Sharp spines protruded from his jawbone beneath either ear, a series of them running along the slant of his mandible to his chin, growing smaller until they were little more than nubs. A tatter of scaly flesh hung beneath his chin, flattened to his scrawny neck like a dewlap, red as a widow’s hourglass, as though he’d been slit straight up the neck. What had once been lips were now twin rows of matching scales following the course of the torn corners of the mouth halfway back through the cheeks. There was no cartilage to blunt the nose, but rather a small spike that formed the peak of a triangle of stretched reptilian skin, the nostrils oblong diagonal slashes.
He scoured the room with eyes so yellow that they created a phosphorescence of their own, marred by amoeboid black shapes like a leopard’s coat had it taken on life, watching as the others slowly began to draw their first breaths of the afterlife.
Limp spines cascaded from his head and the sides of his neck like dreadlocks, draping down over pectoral muscles resplendent with small pointed peaks like chocolate chips. They continued down his smoothly scaled abdomen leading to a cloacal vent surrounded by an assortment of spikes like a mountain range encircling his waist before trailing down the backs of his thighs to his calves where they again rose as sharp lances like miniature yucca plants. Where the flesh had been stripped away from the bones of the feet, the toes had been replaced with scales clear back to the bases of the metatarsals so their feet looked like a bird’s, were it to have five long toes rather than three, and a stunted calcaneal hook.
The creature rocked back onto its heels and screamed up into the ceiling, causing the very earth between it and the surface to tremble. The formerly limp spines adorning its neck straightened to attention, giving it the appearance of a pine tree for a neck, while the great flap of skin under its chin snapped wide into a tattered arc, flaring as red as a matador’s cape. The whole head shivered with bestial rage, shivering loose the last droplets of humanity to pattern the floor of the War Room.
It leapt effortlessly atop the table and sped across it, sharpened protrusions of bone like talons tearing ribbons of wood from the oak table. Bottles of champagne were launched into all corners of the room to shatter into a foaming mess of bubbles that spread out toward the discarded refuse of humanity littering the tiled floor in piles like so much dung. Tendons flinched like tightening cords under the black skin, and the creature was airborne, driving its claws through the metal grate and wrenching it aside, sharpened heels bored straight into the concrete wall. As if lacking any substantive structure, the creature flattened first its head and then its shoulders, and shimmied right into the duct in the wall. Sparks flew from its talons as it disappeared into the darkness, following the air to its source a hundred feet up.
The others followed, bellowing shrieking hisses and scurrying up the walls as though gravity were only a mild inconvenience, ducking through the far too small vent and slithering upward to the world. Their world.
Cry havoc…
II
Near Cliffwood, New Jersey
ADAM THREW HIMSELF BACKWARD, SLAMMING HIS HEAD AGAINST ONE OF the smooth stones fallen from the wall, but at that moment, he didn’t even feel it. His attention was completely enraptured by the yellow and black eyes locked on his, on the groaning sounds the corpse was making as it tried to rise from the ground.
Claws split through the bratwurst-like fingers of the body, the flesh immediately curling back like petals from a blooming stamen. With a tearing sound, long black spines arose from the back of the man’s head, trailing all the way down past his shoulders. A seam ripped down the center of his forehead, and before Adam could even catch his breath, those clawed fingers were hooked beneath the rent flesh, skinning himself.
Adam scrabbled in reverse like a crab, unable to steer his gaze from the scene playing out before him. The flesh peeled away to reveal a misshapen head wider than the cranium that had formerly contained it. It was flat along the top, the spikes rising from the center of it like a series of daggers. The eyes were set into deep gouges, surrounded with heavily ridged scales like the twin mouths of so many caves. It shivered like a dog shaking out of a river, the fleshy chunks of the face and shoulders slopping to either side. With a loud hiss like water tossed on boiling oil, the creature reared back, opening a mouth so wide it extended nearly all the way across its cheeks to its ears. Hooked reptilian teeth rimmed the black maw, the bulbous tongue merely tipped by the formation of a fork.
“What the hell?” Samuels gasped, and the next thing Adam knew, the grunt had the barrel of his weapon against the side of the creature’s head.
Before Adam could close his eyes, hot fluids spattered up his chest and across his face, the headless creature swaying momentarily as it tried to continue the motion of rising to its feet, before finally dropping back to its knees and falling forward. A rush of pasty fluids washed out across the grass from what little remained of the thing’s stunted head.
“Jesus,” Peckham spat, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. “Stand down!”
Samuels didn’t even hear him over the whirring expulsion of another round, which pounded a hole through the dead thing’s back, leaving a crater in the dirt below.
“Did you see that?” Carter shrieked. “Did you guys freaking see that? He was dead. You all saw him. The guy was freaking dead and then he was trying to get back up… His head just split open like—”
Norman placed a hand on the soldier’s shoulder and he flinched like the medic had been holding an iron to his flesh.
“Time to move out,” Samuels said firmly, his wild eyes unblinking. Something had tripped inside of him and he was now strung as tight as a power line.
“I’m in charge here!” Peckham barked, but when Samuels turned and he saw the look on the man’s face, he gave up his pretensions.
Adam dared to scoot closer to the body, staring straight down the neck. The head hadn’t been cleanly removed, but he could clearly decipher the anatomy. His cross-sectional understanding was limited to what the CT and MRI radiologists dictated, but he could clearly see the severed trachea burbling little white bubbles in front of an esophageal tatter. The cervical spine looked as he had expected it to, with one small exception. The spinous processes had grown nearly a foot long, terminating in the spikes he had watched tear through the back of the dead man’s neck. The canal that carried the spinal nerves to the brain, the vertebral foramen, had expanded so much that it had ruptured through the weakened pedicles of the vertebrae, the spinal fluid no longer a light amber, but rather a rich rusted orange like an aged railroad spike pried from the ground where once the transcontinental had run.
Before he could even begin to examine what remained of the man’s back, Samuels was jerking him to his feet by the back of his shirt and shoving him forward across the field.
The other men were already sprinting low along the wall to the far side of the field, disappearing into the once again thick forest.
Adam glanced quickly to his left before he was propelled into the underbrush. The buck’s carcass no longe
r stood from the ground as it had only moments prior, its antlers no longer stabbing the earth. All that remained was a long patch of blood atop a spread of fur as though it had been removed from the meat and stretched to tan. A flash of gold caught his eye as something bounded away from him, its hind quarters as red as the setting sun, and then he was slapping branches from his face.
He tripped and scrabbled on all fours, forcing himself to his feet to keep pace with the other men. Without a path, they threw themselves heedlessly forward through the brush, the scrub slashing nasty scrapes into their forearms and cheeks, the rapidly approaching trunks of the sycamores giving just a heartbeat’s notice for them to swerve to the side.
With everything he had racing through his head, Adam couldn’t even begin to comprehend what was going on, let alone where they could possibly be going. He had witnessed whatever that thing was crawling out from the dead man’s skin. There was no rationalizing that thought away. He’d peeled his own skin like he was tearing off a bandage.
“There!” one of them shouted ahead of him, though by the time Adam looked up from making sure that he didn’t trip and lose his footing, they were already upon it.
Carter was at the back door of some sort of structure that looked like a small farmhouse with some sort of warehouse abutting it. He was banging on the door with his fist so hard that the trim around it was starting to crack.
“Open the door!” he shouted, looking hurriedly back over his shoulder and doing a quick head count.
“Stand aside,” Samuels said calmly, walking up the pair of cement steps and raising one of his enormous boots. With a grunt, he kicked the door inward so hard that the knob was driven into the waiting wall behind.
Samuels disappeared into the darkened kitchen as the storm grumbled overhead.
The others hurried into the house behind.
They were through the kitchen and into the living room before any could so much as acknowledge the absolute silence contained within, yet the smell had been the first thing to accost them.
Down the hallway to the right, a bloated woman with diseased-looking black skin was curled on her side under the blankets in the bedroom to the left, her child in the room across the hall. Neither so much moved enough to suggest any semblance of life, though the stench was nearly proof positive to the contrary.
“No one back here,” Carter said.
“You think?” Peckham snapped.
Carter’s stare flashed with rage, barely contained by twisting his grip on the rifle he could barely keep from pointing at his superior.
“There’s no time for this,” Norman said, wrapping his arm across Carter’s chest and guiding him toward the front door, which stood wide, revealing twin Hummers sitting right in front of the house.
Samuels was nowhere in sight.
“Where did he go?” Norman asked, the last to thunder across the front porch and onto the withered lawn, but his question was answered by a large bang from off to the right.
They followed the sound, rushing to the front of a large steel building that almost looked like an old airplane hanger. The wide front door stood ajar.
“Samuels,” Peckham called, charging through the open door.
The larger man was at the back of a room filled with farming implements, from a tractor that looked like its prime was well behind it to a claw-toothed tiller that was dented and broken from trying to turn the rocky earth.
“Tell me,” Samuels shouted from the back of the room, where he was grabbing large steel racks covered with paint cans and bags of seed, prying them from against the back wall and toppling them face first to the concrete floor. “How does a small farmer with little cash crop afford a Hummer, let alone two?”
Peckham didn’t know where Samuels was going with that line of thought, but Carter picked up on the cue.
“Come to think of it, I didn’t see much of anything at all growing on that back acreage.”
He joined Samuels against the back wall, banging against it to hear the hollow intonation like a bass drum.
“Stand back!” Samuels finally barked in frustration. He raised the assault rifle to the wall and punched a hole through the drywall. Pounding the edges of the freshly opened wound, he widened it to the point that he could crawl through, slipping one leg through before following with his upper body and finally the remaining leg.
He whistled from beyond.
“What’d you find, Sam?” Carter called, ducking in behind him. After a moment, he stuck his head back out. “You guys aren’t going to believe this.”
* * *
Adam had never seen that much money in his life. Each of the steel cases lining the wall to the left were packed with hundred dollar bills stuffed so tightly that he couldn’t even slip his fingertips in to pry any of the stacks out. There had to be multiple millions of dollars in that one room alone and God only knew how many more were stashed around the place.
Samuels stared up at the retractable roof, following the steel cords down to the wenches mounted on the walls to either side. Large wooden crates were stacked atop palettes in the center of the room. Lengths of thick chain ran beneath the palettes before wrapping back over the top where they were bound together by some sort of large rusted hook.
Carter broke open one of the crates, hauled out a large bundle and tossed it into the middle of the floor. It was about the size of a concrete block, wrapped tightly in duct tape. He set down his rifle long enough to grab his knife from the hilt and stabbed it straight into the brick. Withdrawing it quickly, a cloud of white powder blossomed from the wound.
“Well, now what do you think about that?” he mused.
“Any luck?” Norman called back to Peckham, who was clear back in the outer room trying to raise anyone on the com-link. So far all they’d been able to find was static, but Peck looked bound and determined that he was going to find something regardless. As he had one hand pressed over his free ear, and the other mashed by the receiver on the device, he was oblivious to anything but. There had been no dial tone in the house, nor any other means of outside contact.
“A real entrepreneur,” Adam said, finally turning away from the massive stockpile of cash, “but what does this have anything to do with getting out of here?”
Samuels smiled and walked over to one of the chained palettes. He closed the enormous hook in his hand and gave it a solid tug, looking up at the peak of the corrugated metal roof.
“It’s got to be close,” was his only response, though the smile continued to play on his lips.
Grabbing his rifle, he walked back toward the impromptu entrance they had created not five feet from where the real door was hidden behind a cabinet filled with camouflaged gear from jackets to hats for all of the various seasons, and climbed through the hole. He passed Peckham without a second glance and walked just out beneath the slight overhang of the building.
To the right was a thick copse of trees bordering the driveway leading off into the forest. He ran for it without a word or a look back over his shoulder.
Carter followed while the others hung back with their commanding officer, who was now shouting obscenities into the crackling static, watching as Samuels disappeared into the woods.
“I don’t know what in the world that jackass thinks he’s possibly going to find that will be of any kind of use—” Peckham cursed beneath his breath, the words dying the moment Samuels staggered backward toward the private road, dragging what looked to be a mess of vines out onto the gravel.
The whole wall of trees seemed to be following him out, trailing what appeared to be large branches as though cascading down a waterfall behind until they revealed—
“Sweet mother of Pearl,” Norman said reverently, chasing the words with a whistle.
Four long blades were the first to reveal themselves, followed by a camouflaged body that nearly matched the forest identically. A smaller rotor adorned the tail of the thing.
Carter whooped and threw back the sliding cargo door and ho
pped up into the cabin beside what appeared to be a bucket seat.
“What?” Samuels called, beaming. “You ladies need an invitation?”
III
Dover, Tennessee
MISSY SAT ON THE LIVING ROOM FLOOR IN FRONT OF THE COUCH, REPEATEDLY dialing 911. Each time a busy signal replied, she switched off the cordless phone and dialed it again. Over and over and over until, with a scream, she hurled it across the room against the wall. A piece of plastic fractured off, letting the battery dangle out by little red and black cords onto the carpet.
They’d gone house-to-house, ringing doorbells at first, and then finally just walking through the front doors with a cursory knock. Everyone they came across was not only already dead, but swollen up like so many hammer-smashed thumbs. Mrs. Perkins had stared back at them from beneath the dissipating bubbles in her bathtub. Mr. Houghton had been propped up in the corner of his brand new theater room with a flyswatter in his hand, his corpse framed by Rorschach smears of insect blood and guts on the freshly painted wall. Kelly Weston, who Missy had babysat until as recently as the year before, had made it halfway from the swing set in the backyard to the screen door, propped open by her mother’s bloated form, before being overtaken. There had been plenty of other people who they couldn’t recognize sitting behind the wheels of their cars where they’d crashed into lampposts, or heaped in front of their open mailboxes, or scattered around their television sets that hummed the emergency broadcast signal tone. How many had died with the 911 recording playing in their now deafened ears through the useless receiver? It even looked like there was a whole football team lying in the field beyond the high school amidst toppled orange cones, towels and paper cups blowing away from them on the wind.
The endless droning of car horns was the only semblance of life to be either seen or heard. Squirrels encircled the trunks of the trees where they’d fallen, lumps of fur lay lifeless behind fences and in window sills, birds littered the streets like so much refuse. No matter how loud either screamed or how fast or far they ran, there was nothing left alive to answer them. No one running panicked through the streets like they were. No one cowering in their homes waiting for whatever fate had slipped through town like the spectral cloud of death to return. Everyone. Everything. Dead.
The Fall Page 26
