John Shirley - Wetbones

by Unknown

  A thick, oily fog had gathered around the Ranch. Constance hadn't noticed it coming. Now, she watched it thicken as she sat on the wooden lawn chair, near the brick barbecue. Near the pool. The black girl, Eurydice, sat on the terrace beside her, nude and shivering, hugging her knees. Constance hadn't been able to get her to say much except her name. That was okay, too.

  She wondered at the fog. She knew it was no natural

  fog. She could feel it on her skin, sliding over her with exquisite subtlety. A slithering feeling. And it was so thick and so dark overhead.

  She saw, now, where it came from. It seeped upward from the pool. The glossy surface of the pool, so green it was black. Something seethed just beneath that surface. It was getting impatient. It was getting near time. It was nearly there . . .

  There were others. Two women and three men, standing around near the door. They were just gray-black silhouettes in the fog. One of the men was playing with the buttocks of the shorter of the two women; another man was playing with himself. She thought they were looking her way, but she wasn't sure.

  Music started up behind her, making her jump a little. She turned and saw the More Man and the Handy Man standing by Ephram's old ghetto blaster. Thudding, foreign sounding music. The two men had been standing there for awhile, she decided. Staring at her from behind.

  What were they planning to do with her?

  She had been thinking about killing herself, off and on, in the hours since Ephram's death. She was free of him. Denver had certain psychic powers, but nothing to compare with Ephram. He didn't have Ephram's power to paralyze her with a look. She could find something, something sharp perhaps, and kill herself before they began to use her. The More Man frowned, looking at her, as if he guessed her thinking. She spoke quickly, to distract him, said the first thing that came into her head. "This . . . this fog. What is it?"

  "It's to keep the daylight from irritating the incubation," he said, nodding toward the pool. "Not that daylight would hurt them. It just irritates them, might spoil the timing a little."

  She tried to remember what Ephram had said about the Akishra. "How come . . . how come they're, um, incubating here? I mean - they're not exactly from . . . from this world. Are they?"

  "Oh but they are," Denver said. "They live in two worlds at once. Till now, though, they've been more physical in the Astral plane." He looked down at her maimed hand. Stared directly at the stump of her missing finger as he said, distractedly, "That's changing, little Constance. The Akishra's rootedness in the farther world. After this, they'll be quite physical here.'' He said it with wistful resignation. "And they'll be everywhere. . . ." Adding softly, to himself, "Just everywhere . . ."

  She supposed that ought to frighten her, but she couldn't see how anything mattered, except getting away for a little while. She tried to think of something else to say. And wished that Ephram had showed her something. Taught her something. But there just hadn't been time.

  Now and then, she could see the worms. She saw them now, around Denver and the Handy Man, a wriggling corona picked out against the fog.

  She grimaced and turned from them, to Eurydice. Said to Denver over her shoulder, "Can Eurydice have a blanket or something?"

  "No," Denver said. "I think not."

  "Oh, don't be stupid," someone else said, strolling up to them. "Give the plaything a blanket."

  Constance turned to look, and didn't recognize the man.

  "Constance," Denver said, "This is our friend Mr. Arthwright. Mr. Zack Arthwright."

  "Such thorough introductions are really not necessary," Arthwright said, looking annoyed.

  "She's not going anywhere. Where's Lissa?"

  "I was hoping you knew."

  Denver shook his head. "Haven't heard from her. And the others?"

  "They're in the front house. Getting fucked up. Dilettantes! They'll be here, in a few minutes."

  "Good," Denver said. He looked at Constance. "It's almost time."

  The ladder was made of roughly-sawn, irregular tree-branches. Trying to climb it, Prentice felt like one of the silent movie comedians he'd seen in the book about Hollywood parties. He slipped and tumbled his way up the ladder, at last achieving its top, and the top of the fence, as Lonny trudged up pulling the cable. "I got it all worked out," Drax had said. Prentice snorted. If he'd thought this thing through the way he'd put this ladder together, badly lashed, of twine and pine branches and two by fours, they were in deep shit.

  "We're in deep shit no matter how you look at it," Prentice muttered.

  He thought he heard Amy say, You're doing the right thing.

  He'd imagined her at his elbow for an hour now, urging him to do as Drax said . . .

  Now, looking over the fence into the mist around the Doublekey Ranch, listening to the eerie, wailing, alien music from beyond the trees, Prentice thought: Maybe, after all, he ought to get down the road to a phone. Call Jeff. Call the cops . . .

  But, no. Not after what Lonny had told him. There was no time to talk the cops into getting a search warrant.

  And Lonny hadn't been making any of it up, Prentice knew. Kenson had told him. Lissa had shown him. And Amy whispered to him. There was no turning back.

  Prentice paused a moment at the top, balancing precariously on a crooked branch, peering into the foggy underbrush. "There's . . . some kind of smoke around the house . . ." He whispered down to Lonny. "Maybe it's on fire. But . . . actually it doesn't look like smoke."

  "The sick fuckers are probably barbecuing some poor asshole," Lonny said, a little too loud. "Yo, go on over and take this fucking cable, I can't hold it no more. It's heavy."

  Prentice winced. Go over? He wasn't looking forward to it. "Maybe they hired a new security guard."

  "I don't think they got it that much together. They're too caught up in their own weird shit, man. Let's get it over with."

  Prentice sighed and took a moment to bend the wire ends at the top of the fence downward, so he wouldn't snag on them. Then he slung a leg over, braced, slung the other leg over, cursing under his breath. He was using muscles he'd forgotten about.

  He lowered himself to the end of his arms and then dropped to the dirt, half expecting to be shot in the back or to feel a dog's jaws close over his throat. But nothing happened, and there was no sound, except the distant, dissonant music. He turned and looked at Lonny; he was hoping Lonny wasn't as scared as he was. The kid's expression was controlled, but his fear was there, in the tension of his hunched shoulders. He wanted to bolt, too.

  Instead, Lonny pushed the cable through. It was an old, rusty cable four inches in diameter, thickly coated in rubber insulation, its nearer end covered with a homemade cap of rubber and black electrical tape. Touching

  the cable, Prentice could sense the electrical field around it; the suppressed power coursing through it. It ran twenty yards back behind Lonny to a spindle that Drax had set up, an hour earlier, that acted as a roller; there was another one in the brush, and from there it stretched to the electrical tower Drax had patched into.

  If the old man couldn't open the front gate, Prentice thought, all this is for nothing.

  It was going to be a hot day. Some insect in the undergrowth made the sound of a monomaniacal marraca player; a lizard zig-zagged over a rock on the other side of the fence. Lonny's face was streaked with dust and sweat. He was angry and scared. Prentice found himself admiring the boy. "You're a pretty tough kid," he said. He had a need to say something sentimental to someone, now. Before going on with it. And probably getting his ass blown away.

  Lonny glared toward the Doublekey Ranch. He put his hand on the old Colt .36 six-shot revolver that Drax had given him, stuck now in his belt. "Mitch is dead. You should've seen the look on Orphy's face, too."

  "How you know Mitch is dead?"

  "Drax said so. After a while, you get to believe him."

  "You've probably done enough here, Lonny," Prentice said dutifully. He hoped the kid wouldn't take his advice, as he went on,
"You could split now. Make your way back to town."

  Lonny turned the glare on Prentice. The look was one unceasing outpour, unwavering as a cop's flashlight. "Mitch . . ." He wasn't capable of saying the rest without breaking down - or bursting into a screaming rage.

  Prentice nodded. "Yeah. Well. Come on over. It's almost time."

  It was daytime, but it was night. Garner felt the hair rise on the back of his neck when they stepped into the fog. The stuff was almost as dark as smoke, but it wasn't smoke. You could breathe it, though you were sorry to; it left a faintly repugnant taste on the palate. Garner now carried the pistol that had been pointed at him a few hours before. Jeff Teitelbaum carried an Uzi - but not quite a real Uzi. It was a semi-automatic variety that gun-lovers could buy legally through the mail. Each trigger pull let go a round, but it didn't spray bullets. "I always knew they should ban these fackers," Teitelbaum had said, getting it out of the trunk of his car. "I'll vote for a ban. But I wanted to get mine before the ban came down. For once, I'm glad I'm that kind of sicko. It'll be useful, today, seems to me . . ."

  They'd found the front gate unguarded - Teitelbaum had seemed surprised at this - and they'd popped it with a crowbar, then climbed over the black iron inner gate. Now, prowling through the brush not far inside the iron fence, inside the cloud of dirty fog, they could no longer see the main house. There was only a thirty-yard visibility here, in the shadow of the trees and brush, and the closer they got to the house the thicker the fog seemed, the darker it got.

  "Maybe this fog shit is some kind of toxic leak from somewhere," Teitelbaum said, as they moved slowly along the brick path.

  "It's not making us cough," Garner pointed out. "And if it is, we've had such a thorough dose by now . . ." He shrugged.

  Was Constance here? Was she alive? It might be better not to find out . . .

  Up ahead, to one side, was a sort of tunnel of roses. Climbing vines from rose bushes had crawled thickly

  over a trellis passageway. Through a gap in the roses, Garner glimpsed something moving.

  Garner had used a gun, in his pre-pastoral years on the street, but mostly for bluff. Once, he'd shot a guy in the leg. He hadn't wanted to kill him. But this time . . .

  Am I really going to be able to kill someone? Garner wondered. It was the last time he wondered that.

  They'd walked up close beside the trellis. The smell of roses was cloying and mixed revoltingly with the fishy stink of the fog.

  A hand darted through a gap in vines and closed around Teitelbaum's neck, jerked him against the trellis so that rose petals showered and his Uzi barked into the ground before he lost his grip on it. The gun fell clattering on the brick as Teitelbaum shouted a name - it sounded like "Lissa!" - and Garner rushed to his side.

  He saw their attacker through the gap in the roses. It was a woman. Lissa, he assumed.

  Her head had been smashed open, just above the left temple. The crack in the skull could be clearly seen, splintery and deeply gashed into the tissue beneath. There was nothing in her eyes. And as Garner struggled to pry her hand free of Teitelbaum's throat and struggled with his own rising terror, he was pretty sure that she was dead.

  Teitelbaum had told Garner about the Akishra. Had repeated Kenson's story. Which Teitelbaum had come to half-believe himself. So Garner knew about the worms. And he believed - in some intuitive way he'd always known about them. And somehow Garner knew, without doubt, that the blow on her skull had killed this woman.

  And he knew that only the worms were keeping her going.

  They were moving through her easily, through this

  once beautiful woman, like snakes through water, weaving in and out of her. Leaving her skin bruised but unbroken where they'd gone. Others waved around her head like the ring of slippery stingers bristling from a sea anemone. Somehow, in taking her over, becoming more corporeal. Operating her. Moving her about. It was something you could see in her unnaturally sinuous movements; the animalistic suddenness of her attack.

  Garner, trying to yank the flailing, bubbling Teitelbaum free now, felt something wet winding itself around his wrist. He let out a childish yell of revulsion and jerked away, slapping the thing off him, then jerking the gun from his waist band. He thrust it through the gap at the woman, and pulled the trigger. It was harder to pull than he expected. The gun boomed and recoiled, knocking Garner's hands up to impale on inch-long rosebush thorns. He hissed between clenched teeth in pain and pulled his hands off the thorns, drew back from the bush. The woman had fallen back; Teitelbaum was kneeling, clutching his gun to him, making hacksaw sounds as he gasped for air.

  Garner forced himself to move toward the entrance to the rose tunnel. Just at the edge, he saw the woman woven into the vines. The dark fog slithered past her in wisps that were like the ghosts of the vines that held her. She spoke hoarsely, barely audible, "Kill me kill me kill me kill me kill me and fuck you fuck you forever"

  Garner acted instinctively. Whispering, "Go with God," as he pointed the gun at the woman's head, and blew her brains out.

  She slumped in the vines. Then the worms started to show themselves . . . She began to wriggle free . . .

  He heard Jeff Teitelbaum calling hoarsely to him but he moved on, around the corner . . .

  Someone was running up the alley of roses, with a gun in his hand. Nearer, the woman was getting to her feet. No: The worms were raising her body to stand. Using the meat of her, collectively driving her remains. Beyond her, a man was coming toward them; he wore a yellow shirt and yellow pants and a gold chain.

  And spun around, smashed by bullets, when Teitelbaum fired three rounds at him in two seconds, firing through the bushes. "Dammit!" Garner shouted. 'You don't know who -"

  "It's fucking Sam Denver!" Teitelbaum shouted. "He's -"

  He didn't finish saying it, maybe seeing Denver get up - though the top of his head was shot away. Walking toward them with a side to side swish that might have been funny except for the blood masking Denver's face and the worms emerging from him, far more than in Lissa, coming out like a carnation blossoming in fast-action, the thin petals writhing with urgency. The fog - looking gray green, now, as if moving into some new stage - patterning itself in the air around Denver, responding to the changes in him, creating an etheric, vermiform aureole around him like the mandala behind some tusked Hindu deathgod.

  Five more licks of fire and five cracks from the faux Uzi, and Denver danced backwards and fell flat. Then began to get up once more, springy and eager.

  Lissa was missing most of her face, but she was reaching, now, for Garner. He fired once more into her neck, hoping that if he snapped the spine . . .

  She went down. And immediately began to get up

  God - had they done this to Constance?

  Garner turned and ran after Teitelbaum, who was

  trotting toward the main house, crying like a child - and waving the gun around like a small boy playing Army.

  Garner tried to remember a prayer from the Bible. And couldn't.

  Somewhere behind them, he heard the rumble of an old vehicle, a big engine that coughed and missed and sounded as if its engine would give out at any moment.

  The gunshots had come from the West, Prentice thought, near the front of the place. He and Lonny were off to the South. "Probably just playing with guns and whoever they got now," Lonny said calmly. 'It's too soon for it to be Drax."

  They were dragging the cable like a firehose, Lonny taking the head of it, working their way through the brush to the inner fence. They'd moved deep into the fog, though the stuff reeked wrongness, and they could make out the bulk of the main house beyond the fence and the screen of trees . . .

  "Oh God," Lonny said, pausing with the cable hitched up on his hip, pointing at something to one side.

  Dogs. Parts of the dead guard dogs he'd told Prentice about.

  "You do that to their bodies?" Prentice asked, without thinking.

  "Dude, you think I'd mess with them like that?" Lonny
replied, disgusted by the suggestion.

  The dogs had been gutted; their entrails hung like Christmas ornaments from the branches of the small pine standing close by; the purplish, dried-out guts dripped with maggots. The remaining corpses of the dogs, on the ground, had their backs broken, were twisted into

  Oroborous circles of rotting flesh; still attached to the necks, their heads were shoved down under their ribs and back between the hind legs, snouts forced up and out through ripped rectums, the entire head crammed through to the ears. Through his disgust, Prentice marvelled. It had taken someone considerable time and effort and it seemed supremely pointless. The fog swarmed almost imperceptibly around the wrecked carcasses. The sight made Prentice's stomach feel as if it were turning inside out, too.

  He turned away and they stumbled on, dragging the cable to the black iron fence. It was lower than the other; Lonny scrambled easily over it, dropped to the other side, and pulled the cable through. Prentice made the climb, with significantly more difficulty, and dropped to the other side just as the old Ford pick-up, its one working headlight making a tunnel of dull light through the fog, jounced through the brush, its tractor wheels finding purchase in the thick mesquite and grinding through. Old Drax grinned in the cab of the truck as he pulled up with the rear of the truck close by them. Looking closer Prentice saw that the grin was more a rictus of fear. The old hippie was as scared as they were. Wearing overalls now, Drax came huffing out of the idling truck, hands shaking, and ran to the back . . .

  "I saw some of 'em, saw some of 'em, had to run one of 'em over," he chattered as he dropped the tailgate of the truck and reached for the cable. He and Lonny muscled it up to the spool fixed to the pick-up bed.

  It was a wooden spool with another, similar length of cable attached to it. The spool was bolted down onto the bed of the truck. He ripped away the black tape on the cable end, glancing over his shoulder, obviously expecting someone to come after them at any moment. "You

  do that shooting?'' he asked Lonny, as he worked. He took hold of the cable on an insulated section and with the other hand unscrewed the cap. The exposed copper spat fine sparks into the fog.