Koontz, Dean R. - The Bad Place

by The Bad Place(Lit)

  Bobby was relieved to see that Frank also had not brought with them any

  of the slime from the narrow alley in Calcutta or wherever. Their shoes

  and pants were clean.

  Then he noticed something on the toe of his right shoe.

  He bent forward to look at it.

  "I wish we could stay here," Frank said.

  "Forever."

  One of the roaches from that filth-choked alley was now part of Bobby's

  footwear.

  One of the biggest advantages being self-employed was freedom from

  neckties and uncomfortable shoes, so he was wearing, as usual, a pair of

  soft Rock port Supersports, and the roach was not merely stuck on the

  putty-colored leather but bristling from it and melded with it.

  The roach was not squirming, obviously dead, but it was the or at least

  part of it was, some bits of it apparently having been left behind.

  "But we've got to keep moving," Frank said, oblivious to the roach.

  "He's trying to follow us. We have to lose him by Darkness.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  They were on a high place, a rocky trail, with an incredible panorama

  below them.

  "Mount Fuji," Frank said, not as if he had known where they were going

  but as if pleasantly surprised to be there,

  "About halfway up." Bobby was not interested in the exotic view or

  concerned about the chill in the air. He was entirely preoccupied by

  the discovery that the roach was no longer a part of the toe of his

  shoe.

  "The Japanese once thought Fuji was sacred. I guess they still do, or

  some of them do. And you can see why. It's magnificent."

  "Frank, what happened to the roach?"

  "What roach?"

  "There was a roach welded into the leather of this shoe. I saw it back

  there in the garden. You evidently brought it along from that

  disgusting alleyway. Where is it now?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did you just drop its atoms along the way?" 'I don't know." 'Or are

  its atoms still with me but somewhere else?"

  "Bobby, I just don't know."

  In Bobby's mind was an image of his own heart, hidden within the dark

  cavity of his chest, beating with the mystery of all hearts but with a

  new secret all its own-the bristling legs and shiny carapace of a roach

  embedded in the muscle tissue that formed the walls of the atrium or a

  ventricle.

  An insect might be inside of him, and even if the thing was dead, its

  presence within was intolerable. An attack of entomophobia hit him with

  the equivalent force of a hammer blow to the gut, knocking the wind out

  of him, sending undulate waves of nausea through him. He struggled to

  breathe, at the same time striving not to vomit on the sacred ground of

  Mount Fuji.

  Darkness.

  Fireflies.

  Velocity.

  They hit more violently this time, as if they had materialized in midair

  and had fallen a few feet onto the ground. They didn't manage to hold

  on to each other, and they didn't land on their feet, either. Separated

  from Frank, Bobby rolled dow a gentle incline, over small objects that

  clattered and clicked under him and poked painfully into his flesh. When

  he tumble to a halt, gasping and frightened, he was face down on gray

  soil almost as powdery as ashes. Scattered around him, sparkling

  brightly against that ashen backdrop, were hundreds if not thousands of

  red diamonds in the rough.

  Raising his head, he saw that the diamond miners were the in unnerving

  numbers: a score of huge insects just like the ones they had taken to

  Dyson Manfred. Caught, as he was, in whirlpool of panic, Bobby believed

  that every one of those bugs was fixated on him, all those multifaceted

  eyes turned toward him, all those tarantula legs churning through the

  powder gray soil in his direction.

  He felt something crawling on his back, knew what it must be, and rolled

  over, pinning the thing between him and the ground. He felt it

  squirming frantically beneath him. Propel by repulsion, he was suddenly

  on his feet, without quite remembering how he had gotten up. The bug

  was still clinging to the back of his shirt; he could feel its weight,

  its quick-foot advance from the small of his back to his neck. He

  reached behind, tore it off himself, cried out in disgust as it kicked

  against his hand, and pitched it was far away as he could.

  He heard himself breathing hard and making queer little sounds of fear

  and desperation. He didn't like what he heard but he was unable to

  silence himself.

  A foul taste filled his mouth. He figured he had ingested some of the

  powdery soil. He spat, but his spittle looked clear and he realized

  that the air itself was what he tasted. The warm air was thick, not

  humid exactly but thick, like nothing he had experienced before. And in

  addition to the bitter taste, it had a distinctly different but equally

  unpleasant smell, like some milk with a whiff of sulfur.

  Turning around, surveying the terrain, he realized that he was standing

  in a shallow bowl in the land, about four feet deep at its lowest point,

  and about a hundred feet in diameter. The sloped walls were marked by

  evenly spaced holes, a double layer of them, and more of the

  biologically engineered insects were squirming into some of those bores,

  out of others, no doubt seeking-and returning with-diamonds.

  Because it was only four feet deep, he could see above the rim of the

  bowl. Across the huge, barren, and slightly sloped plain in which this

  depression was set, he saw what appeared to be scores of similar

  features, like age-smoothed meteor craters, though they were so evenly

  spaced that they had to be unnatural. He was in the middle of a giant

  mining operation.

  Kicking at an insect that had crept too close to him, Bobby turned to

  look at the last quarter of his surroundings. Frank was there, at the

  far side of the crater, on his hands and knees. Bobby was relieved by

  the sight of him, but he was definitely not relieved by what he saw in

  the sky beyond Frank.

  The moon was visible in broad daylight, but it was not like the gossamer

  ghost moon that sometimes could be seen in a clear sky. It was a

  mottled gray-yellow sphere six times normal size, looming ominously over

  the land, as if about to collide with the larger world around which it

  should have been revolving at a respectable distance.

  But that was not the worst. A huge and strangely shaped aircraft hung

  silently at perhaps an altitude of four or five hundred feet, so alien

  in every aspect that it brought home to Bobby the understanding that had

  thus far eluded him. He was not on his own world any longer.

  "Julie," he said, because suddenly he realized how terribly far from her

  he had traveled.

  At the far side of the crater, as he was getting to his feet, Frank

  Pollard vanished.

  AS DAY dimmed and darkness came, Thomas stood at the window or sat in

  his chair or stretched out on his bed sometimes reaching toward the Bad

  Thing to be sure it was coming closer. Bobby was worried when he

  visited, so was Thomas worried too. A
lump of fear kept rising in his

  throat, but he kept swallowing it because he had to be brave and protect

  Julie.

  He didn't get as close to the Bad Thing as last night. N close enough

  to let it grab him with its mind. Not close enough to let it follow him

  when he quick-like reeled his own mind string back to The Home. But

  close. A lot closer than Thomas liked.

  Every time he pushed at the Bad Thing to make sure it was still there,

  up north someplace, where it belonged, he knew the Bad Thing felt him

  snooping. That spooked Thomas. The Bad Thing knew he was snooping

  around, but didn't do anything and sometimes Thomas felt maybe the Bad

  Thing was waiting like a toad.

  Once, in the garden behind The Home, Thomas watched a toad sit real

  still for a long time, while a bright yellow butterfly fluttered pretty

  and quick, bounced from leaf to leaf, flower to flower back and forth,

  round and round, close to the toad, then so close, then closer than

  ever, then way out of reach, then closer again, like it was teasing the

  toad, but the toad didn't move, not an inch, like maybe it was a fake

  toad or just a stone that looked like a toad. So the butterfly felt

  safe, or maybe just liked the game too much, and it came even closer.

  When The toad's tongue shot out like one of those roll-up tootes they'd

  let the dumb people have one New Year's Eve, and caught the butterfly,

  and the green toad ate the yellow butterfly, every bit, and that was the

  end of the game.

  If the Bad Thing was playing a toad, Thomas was going to be real careful

  not to be a butterfly.

  Then, just when Thomas figured he should start washing himself and

  changing clothes for supper, just when he was going to pull back from

  the Bad Thing, it went somewhere. He felt it go, bang, there one second

  and far away the next, slipping past where he could keep a watch on it,

  out across the world, going the same place where the sun was taking the

  last of the daylight. He couldn't figure how it could go so fast,

  unless maybe it was on a jet plane having good food and a fine whine,

  smiling at pretty girls in uniforms who put little pillows behind the

  Bad Thing's seat and gave it magazines and smiled back at it so nice and

  so much you expected them to kiss it like everybody was always kissing

  on daytime TV. Okay, yeah, probably a jet plane.

  Thomas tried some more to find the Bad Thing. Then, by the time the day

  was all gone and night all there, he gave up. He got off his bed and

  got ready for supper, hoping maybe the Bad Thing was gone away and never

  coming back, hoping Julie was safe forever now, and hoping there was

  chocolate cake for dessert.

  BOBBY CHARGED across the floor of the diamond-strewn crater, kicking at

  the bugs in his way. As he ran he told himself that his eyes had

  deceived him and that his mind was playing nasty tricks, that Frank had

  not actually teleported out of there without him. But when he arrived

  at the spot where Frank had been, he found only a couple of footprints

  in the powdery soil.

  A shadow fell across him, and he looked up as the alien craft drifted in

  blimplike silence over the crater, coming to a full stop directly above

  him, still about five hundred feet overhead. It was nothing like

  starships in the movies, neither organic looking nor a flying

  chandelier. It was lozenge shaped, at least five hundred feet long, and

  perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. Immense. On the ends, sides, and

  top, it bristled with hundreds if not thousands of pointed black metal

  spines, big as church spires, which made it look a little like a

  mechanical porcupine in a permanent defensive posture. The underside,

  which Bobby could see best of all, was smooth, black, and featureless,

  lacking not only the massive spines but markings, remotesors, portholes,

  airlocks, and all the other apparatus one might expect.

  Bobby did not know if the ship's repositioning was coincidental or

  whether he was under observation. If he was being watched, he didn't

  want to think about the nature of the creatures that might be peering

  down at him, and he sure as hell didn't want to consider what their

  intentions toward him might be. For every movie that featured an

  adorable alien with the power to turn kids' bicycles into airborne

  vehicles, that were ten others in which the aliens were ravenous flesh

  eat with dispositions so vicious as to make any New York he waiter think

  twice about being rude, and Bobby was certain that this was one thing

  Hollywood had gotten right. It was hostile universe out there, and

  dealing with his fellow human beings was

  scary enough for him; he didn't need to make contact with a whole new

  race that had devised countless new ways of its own.

  Besides, his capacity for terror was already filled to the brim running

  over; he could contain no more. He was abandon on a distant world,

  where the air-he began to suspect-might contain only enough oxygen and

  other required gases to keep him alive only for a short while, insects

  the size of kittens crawling all around him, and there was a possibility

  that much smaller dead insects was actually fused with the tinicals of

  one of his internal organs, and a psychotic blond giant super human

  powers and a taste for blood was on his trail-and the odds were billions

  to one that he would ever see Julie again or kiss her, or touch her, or

  see her smile.

  A series of tremendous, throbbing vibrations issued from the ship and

  shook the ground around Bobby. His teeth chattered and he nearly fell.

  He looked for somewhere to hide. There was nothing in the crater to

  afford concealment, and nowhere to run on the plain beyond.

  The vibrations stopped.

  Even in the deep shadows thrown by the ship, Bobby noticed a horde of

  identical insects begin to scuttle out of the bore holes in the crater

  walls, one after the other. They had been called forth.

  Though no apparent openings appeared in the belly of the ship, a score

  or more of low-energy lasers-some yellow, some white, some blue, some

  red-began to play over the floor of the crater. Each beam was the

  diameter of a silver dollar, and each moved independently of the others.

  Like spotlights, they repeatedly swept the crater and everything in it,

  sometimes moving parallel to one another, sometimes crisscrossing one

  another, in a display that further disoriented Bobby and gave him the

  feeling that he was caught in the middle of a silent fireworks show.

  He remembered what Manfred and Gavenall had told him about the crimson

  decorations along the rim of the bug's shell, and he saw that the white

  lasers were focusing only on the insects, busily scanning the markings

  around each carapace. Their owners were taking roll call. He saw a

  white beam fidget over the broken corpus of one of the bugs he had

  kicked, and after a moment a red beam joined it to study the carcass.

  Then the red beam jumped to Bobby, and a couple of other beams of

  different hue also found him, as if he was a can of peas being

  identified and added to someone's grocery bill at a
supermarket

  checkout.

  The floor of the crater was teeming with insects now, so many that Bobby

  could see neither the gray soil nor the litter of excreted diamonds over

  which they clambered. He told himself that they were not really bugs;

  they were just biological machines, engineered by the same race that had

  built the ship hanging over him. But that didn't help much because they

  still looked more like bugs than like machines. They had been designed

  to mine diamonds; they were not attracted to him whatsoever; but their

  disinterest did not make him feel better, because his phobia guaranteed

  that he was interested in them. His shadow-chilled skin prickled with

  gooseflesh. Short circuiting nerve endings sputtered with false reports

  of things crawling on him, so he felt as if bugs swarmed over him from

  head to foot. They were actually creeping over his shoes, but none of

  them tried to scurry up his legs; he was grateful, because he was sure

  he would go mad if they began to climb him.

  He used his hand as a visor over his eyes, to avoid being dazzled by the

  lasers that were playing on him. He saw something gleaming in the

  scanner beams only a few feet away: a curved section of what appeared to

  be hollow steel tubing. It was sticking out of the powdery soil, partly

  buried, further concealed by the bugs that scurried and jittered around

  it. Nevertheless, at first sight Bobby knew what it was, and he was

  overcome with a horrible sinking feeling. He shuffled forward, trying

  to crush any of the insects because, for all he knew, the penalty for

  the additional destruction of property might be instant incineration.