“No kidding,” Piranha said. “Thought I’d let you test that path first, bro.”
“You owe me, remember?” Terry said. “Ladies first.”
Somehow, joking helped.
Hippy made the first move, pulling ahead on his leash with a low, throaty growl that made him sound like a rottweiler, except bigger. Terry wrapped the rope tightly around his palm to make sure Hippy didn’t dart loose or lunge at a freak. He’d never heard of an infected dog, but why chance it? Even a few steps forward made the stench strangle them like a wet tarp.
Freaks moaned and grasped out, but Terry and Piranha had a six-inch buffer on each side—far enough to avoid being touched, but close enough to see the rancid flesh on the freaks’ fingers and the red moss carpeting their nails. Eyes glowed red in the light.
The gallery of horrors in the tunnel felt endless, and Terry fought to keep his eyes on the path ahead instead of the questing fingers. Several already pressed themselves against the bars, and others crawled on the ground, laboring to get closer, pulling themselves with their arms while their misshapen legs dragged behind them. Some of the freaks’ legs had simply been sheared off. Others tried to crawl toward them but couldn’t, held in place by strong roots growing from their torsos, anchoring them to the ground. More than half were women. Many had white hair and wrinkled skin like the luckless vagabonds in the camp outside.
“Where is it?” a man’s voice barked from behind them in the dark, and Terry turned around, expecting to see a Gold Shirt behind him. “I wanted my bagel with a big hole! Thursday!”
Only a freak’s gibberish. It was so easy to forget that some of them could talk.
He tasted vomit bubbling in his throat, but swallowed it back. He didn’t have time to be sick, and he needed all of his concentration to keep on his feet. His legs threatened to take him down to freak level.
After the too-long walk, a closed door came in sight a few yards ahead.
But one freak stood ahead of them, near the door, its guardian. He was the only freak who wasn’t in a cage, and the sight of him sent Hippy into a barking frenzy. A symphony of moans answered Hippy, nearly popping Terry’s eardrums.
“Freak!” Terry and Piranha said in unison, ready to run the other way.
Time slowed down long enough for Terry to see the light glinting from the freak’s chained ankles, and his finger froze just as he was about to fire his gun. “Wait … he can’t get to us!” Terry said.
Piranha got the message, but Hippy yanked so hard on his leash that Terry nearly lost his grip. The dog’s barking echoed in the tunnel.
“Shut up!” Piranha said, swinging his leg back to kick Hipshot, but Terry blocked the kick.
“No, man!” Terry said, shoving Piranha. “What are you doing?”
“He better shut the hell up, or we’re—”
Keys jingled loudly from the other side of the door the freak was guarding.
Breathing hard, Terry and Piranha raised their guns. It’s over, Terry thought.
It was too late to run. As bad as the freaks were, Gold Shirts were worse. A shoot-out in the tunnel meant they would never see Kendra or Sonia again. They huddled close, as if they could build a human fortress.
When the door opened, a bright light momentarily blinded Terry.
“In a sneak attack,” a woman’s calm voice said in a schoolteacher’s cadence, “the operative word is sneak. I told you not to bring that mutt.”
Ursalina! She looked like a supermodel in her sexy dress, standing boldly close to the freak.
“Watch it!” Terry said, his voice shaky. “He’ll bite you!”
Ursalina laughed and shrugged. “Ralphie here?” she said. “No teeth. The only time he bites is in his freaky dreams.”
Ursalina came to them, and they shared a hug. Even Hippy stood on two legs, trying to lick her face. Terry didn’t think he’d ever been happier to see anyone.
“It’s safe in there?” Piranha said.
“Safe as it’s gonna get,” Ursalina said, beckoning them toward the open door. “Come on in, before you can’t wash the freak stink out of your hair. Steer clear of Ralphie—he can’t bite, but he slobbers like a dog. No offense, Hippy.”
Hippy licked her offered palm. No offense taken.
The doorway led to a bland basement room with industrial carpeting and walls covered in weird Threadie murals, but it felt like the gates of heaven. A single young Gold Shirt was hogtied in a corner, moaning against a gag. He sounded barely conscious. Poor guy.
“Making friends?” Terry said, glancing at the stranger.
“I probably should kill him, but”—she shrugged—“what can I say? I’m a softie.”
“Where’s—” Terry and Piranha started to ask about Kendra and Sonia.
“Kendra went to the library with some old guy,” Ursalina said. “But Sonia’s with Wales, maybe in his room.”
Terry felt uneasy relief about Kendra, but Piranha’s face transformed into such a mask of rage that Terry wondered if he would shoot the helpless Gold Shirt on principle.
“Then what are we doing down here?” Piranha said.
He tossed Ursalina her Nine.
Thirty
The flu shot is to blame,” the creature said. “Designed to trigger the immune system against a viral intruder. But it triggered something else … in us. What should have been a peaceful process became a nightmare for us all. Do you think it’s easier for us? Put yourself, for a moment, in my place.”
Kendra had backed as far against the locked door as physics would allow, but her body still pressed as if she could find a way through the solid mass. The creature’s slow circling had become a straightforward approach, and it stood only ten yards from her, still veiled in darkness.
Kendra didn’t hide her fumbling with the doorknob, turning and yanking with all her strength. If the door wouldn’t give her an escape, maybe the lock would. The knob was slippery from the terrified perspiration on her palm.
“Fighting,” the creature scolded with a sigh. “Fighting makes it so much harder.”
“What are you?” Kendra said. The creature seemed to slow its approach when it spoke, and her only hope now was stalling tactics, even transparent ones.
“I am you,” it said. “One of you, on the other side of it all.”
Then the creature moved again, part slither, part feline glide. Kendra let out a quiet yelp.
“What do you want from us?” Kendra said.
“A home,” it said.
“And you’ll kill us to take it?”
A gleam of a smile came in the darkness, almost as if its teeth were radiant. “Not death, Kendra—life. We can live together. This has all been … unfortunate. It doesn’t have to be as it has been. As you see, I have no need to bite you. No instinctive compulsion.”
Kendra’s voice would only emerge as a whisper. “But … the others …”
“Do I seem like the others?”
The creature emerged into a small bar of light, enough for her to finally see its full face, and Kendra drew in a long, stunned breath.
It was … beautiful. That was the only word that felt right. She had expected visceral ugliness, but the creature bore the beauty of a newborn baby, or a praying mantis. God help her, those two images first came to mind. The eyes were large, covered in a red semisheer veil, enough for her to see black or deep blue underneath. With such eyes, how did it create art?
The creature smiled, and she saw that it had no teeth, but there was a chitinous ridge of white bone along the gums, as if all the teeth had fused into a single mass. Even that smile, in its oddness, felt reassuring. Exotic. She realized that she wanted to be closer to the creature, to examine it. She felt …
Attracted. When the right word came to her, she felt nearly faint. But she couldn’t escape the sensation. Her skin broiled in the creature’s sight. This wasn’t the electricity she felt with Terry, but something warm and fiercely inquisitive.
Was he doing that to her?
>
“What do you want from me?” Kendra said.
“Your potential,” the creature said. “I’ve seen so much in the dream. You are an ally to my kind. You are capable of … loving us. You could transition without fear.”
“You’re wrong,” Kendra said. “I could never love your kind.” Her voice rose, forceful and angry. “After everything you’ve done? I’ll never forgive you! Never!” She might as well have been lecturing herself.
“We’re all victims of this accident, Kendra.”
“You’re monsters! You’ll always be monsters!” Her last words were a sob. She was flooded by memories deeper and much more vivid than the snapshots the creature had shown her from its past. She saw her father’s grin, smelled her mother’s bosom, saw the helpless terror in Grandpa Joe’s eyes when he realized that he had made a fatal mistake and Kendra would be alone.
Sobs emerged as wails, wracking Kendra’s body until she doubled over. Now she could only lean against the door, drained by the depth of her losses. She felt herself falling into a hole so deep she might never see the sun again.
Devil’s Wake had always been only a dream. She had no family. There was no one and nothing left. She would fight to stay away from the creature as long as she could—fight to say she was Still Here—but she suddenly realized what Ursalina had been trying to communicate since the first day she fled to the Beauty: survival was a bitter joke. Survival for what? The next worse thing?
The world belonged to monsters now.
Kendra had to hear the voice outside of the door once, twice, perhaps three times, before she realized it wasn’t only her imagination.
“Kendra!”
Somewhere nearby, Terry was calling for her.
“I’m here!”
Kendra’s voice was so clear that she might be standing next to him. Terry and Ursalina hadn’t been in the library long when Terry was sure he’d heard Kendra crying in the distance. She wasn’t at any of the empty library tables, and each passing second increased the likelihood that a Gold Shirt might discover them.
Then he examined the library wall and realized that the glossy wood wasn’t only a wall—it was a door. Kendra was inside!
“Guys, she’s here!”
“Terry, help!” Kendra called.
Kendra’s plea, so helpless and terrified, hit Terry’s stomach like a physical blow. He would have broken the door down if he’d had to, but he found the gold-plated doorknob and turned it. Locked. He turned the pin and tried to fling the door open, but Kendra’s weight was against it. He hoped it was Kendra.
“Kendra, move back!” he said, and suddenly the door gave freely.
The door opened to darkness that reminded Terry of the tunnel. Ursalina raced in behind him, gun ready, and found a light switch. Spotlights came on from above, illuminating eerie artwork and sculptures like the murals in the basement.
But Terry’s breath withered in his mouth when he realized that the largest piece, the one closest to him, wasn’t a sculpture—it was … what? Something else. As kids, he and Lisa had watched an old black-and-white sci-fi movie called The Deadly Mantis, and although this thing’s eyes were more humanoid than insect, its posture made Terry feel as if he was facing the beast in life, with shinier skin. Then it was gone, a hallucination.
“Freak!” Ursalina said, trying to track it with her handgun, but it moved too fast. Only a teetering easel showed its hasty path away from them. Kendra shrieked in fear, grabbing Terry’s arm to draw close to him.
“Don’t shoot it!” Terry said, and realized that Kendra had said it too, a unified thought. “Too much noise,” Terry went on. “Not till Piranha finds Sonia.”
But it was a runner! Faster than a runner. Dear God, had Kendra been bitten? Kendra saw the question in his eyes and shook her head emphatically. “It didn’t touch me,” she said. “But you can’t shoot it. It’s a new kind of …”
“A new kind of dead.” Ursalina cut her off, her eyes tracking the beast’s shadows.
“Not with your gun,” Terry said, talking to himself as much as Ursalina. If he pulled the trigger, he would empty his clip from sheer repulsion.
“He talks!” Kendra said. Was she pleading for its life? “We can learn from him. His name is—”
A fully grown man’s weight suddenly landed on Terry’s back, and then he was on the floor. Where had it jumped from? When Terry landed too hard on his knees, he could only watch as the baseball bat rolled from his hand. Frantically, Terry tried to fling the thing away from him, but it held on. Terry bit his lip to keep from screaming. He felt the thing’s hot breath like orange heat against his ear and reverted to a toddler.
“Don’t let it bite me—”
Ursalina leaped on the pile to try to pull the freak away, and when Terry turned he saw the freak’s mouth wide open as it moved to try to bite her exposed forearm.
“Stop it, Harry!” Kendra shouted, and the beast whipped around to stare at her, as if her voice had hypnotized him.
Harry? Seriously? And was that fondness in his eyes? Hers?
When Kendra raised the bat high, ready to strike, the beast shook its glistening head. “You love him,” the beast said in a watery, not-quite-human voice Terry would never forget. “Bring him with us. I have so much to show you.”
Instead of answering, Kendra swung at its temple. The creature barely moved to try to avoid her, but despite a chunk sound, Kendra’s blow was too polite. The beast was still on its feet, moving away slowly as it gathered its senses to run. Ursalina snatched the bat from Kendra and chased the thing step for step through the maze of sculptures.
“Ursalina, keep it alive—” Kendra tried to say, but Ursalina swung as if she were trying to send a baseball to the moon, hitting it square in the mouth. This time, the blow sounded more like a watermelon being pulped, and its teeth shattered. The creature screamed before staggering and falling. Ursalina took a broad-legged stance over its prone form and hit it again. And again.
Ursalina hit the creature until she was shaking, and Terry had to look away.
“Don’t kill it,” Kendra whispered through tears, long after the beast was dead.
Thirty-one
Terry and Ursalina had warned Piranha to wait for them to find Kendra instead of looking for Sonia first, but Piranha didn’t think Sonia would be able to wait. Every time Piranha blinked, a lurid image of Sonia and Wales haunted his mind’s darkness. So he was alone as he followed the map toward the corner of the mansion that was Wales’s true residence, expecting a confrontation at any moment.
He was almost alone, anyway.
He and Hipshot had never been best friends, but Piranha had traded the bat for the dog, hoping Hippy would be able to keep quiet in the mansion’s freak-free zones. The gold shirt he’d swiped from the guy Ursalina had captured probably wouldn’t do him much good—he had yet to see a brother in the ranks of the Gold Shirts, much less a Gold Shirt with a mutt like Hippy—but camouflage might keep him alive.
Yeah, I’m the new guy, he rehearsed in his mind. Power to the Threads.
“Where is she, Hippy?” Piranha said. “Come on, boy. Make me a believer.”
Dutifully, Hipshot sniffed the floor in a convincing mimicry of tracking mode. Piranha didn’t buy the Lassie act, but he hoped they were headed the right way. The wings closer to Wales’s quarters had fewer lights on, and more paintings like the ones he’d seen on the basement walls.
The echo of two sets of footsteps twenty feet down the hall froze Piranha, and he darted around a corner to avoid being seen, trying to reel in Hipshot’s rope like a fishing line. “Heel,” he whispered, an afterthought, and the dog suddenly sat beside him, out of sight. Well, damn, Vern had actually trained the pooch! Who knew?
Two Gold Shirts breezed past, never noticing them. They walked so close, Piranha could smell their deodorant.
Piranha held his breath for almost a full minute after they were gone, his heart a jackhammer as he tried to remember how to breathe. His gun was i
n his pants, which meant he had the map in one hand and Hippy’s leash in the other. Bringing a map and a dog to a gunfight sounded like the punch line to a bad joke. He knelt down to untie Hippy’s rope, kicking it into a corner behind a potted plant. Hippy wagged his tail, happy to be free. Remembering Terry’s technique, Piranha rubbed the dog’s chin and tried to stare him in the eye.
“If you run off, you’re on your own.”
Hippy licked his face. Blech. Still, Piranha smiled. “Stay,” he said firmly.
Hipshot understood that perfectly. His tail stopped wagging, and he whimpered.
“You heard me,” Piranha said. “Until I come back or call you—stay.”
Hipshot’s haunches nearly rose, but he fought his protective instincts and sat. The damn dog would obey! He could stash Hipshot in a hidden corner, out of sight, and call if he needed him, like one of the cool pet tricks he’d watched on Letterman. If he survived this night, he and Hipshot might become buddies after all.
“Good boy,” Piranha said, and left to the sound of Hippy’s thumping tail. Feeling worlds better armed with both the gun and the map, Piranha continued his painstaking journey down what he hoped was the right hallway. He walked fast, almost a jog, and the ceiling opened up. A large glass-domed atrium filled with trees and tall plants appeared right where it was supposed to be, and if he got to the southeast end …
The next footsteps, from behind him, were so swift and soft that Piranha barely heard them, and he knew he’d been spotted.
The footsteps froze. Maybe this would be like a gunfight in Tombstone, and the Gold Shirt would give him time to draw. Slowly, Piranha turned. If he had to, he decided, he would toss his gun down to the floor.
But no such order came. Sonia stood six feet behind him, wide-eyed and petrified. Then she saw him in a shaft of moonlight, and heartbreaking relief washed over her face. Her clothes were mussed, but she looked unharmed.
“Piranha?” she said, hesitating, afraid to believe her eyes.
“Sonia! You okay?”
He ran to her, and they embraced. Sonia was trembling head to toe. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on as if they were being swept out to sea. “You scared the—I thought—” She fumbled for sentence. “That shirt?”
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