by David Wong
“Let’s just say I came a long way to make sure that don’t happen.”
From behind us, John said, “If you’ve been following us since we got kidnapped, you must have been up for more than two days.”
“More like fifty hours.”
We rode silently for a minute. Less than a minute actually, according to Morgan.
“Make that fifty hours and thirty-seven-point-two-three seconds. It’s the adrenaline, I guess. I ain’t really been tired. The thrill of the hunt.”
We drove in silence for a moment. Red taillights appeared up ahead. I reached out and gripped the dashboard.
Morgan said, “That, and those loud, piercing voices in my head.”
Morgan’s eyes exploded.
He shrieked as two sprays of blood flecked over the windshield. Jennifer screamed behind me, John and Fred bellowed “OH, FUCK,” simultaneously.
Little white rods poured down the cop’s face, swirled around inside the truck. He let go of the steering wheel. I reached over and grabbed it. We left the road.
We shook, rattled, bumped. The horizon and sky swapped places in the windshield and the roof of the car bashed me in the shoulder. Glass bits rained down in my eyes and ears and up my nose, the dashboard punched me in the forehead, the roof hammered me a second time, and Molly’s furry ass rolled over my face.
Finally, the vehicle banged to a stop.
Silence. Only a soft chittering over the desert breeze. And then came the voices.
CHAPTER 6
Meet Dr. Marconi
THAT SUCKED. I pried my eyes open, feeling scratchy little bits in there that could either be sand or glass. I worked the lids open and found myself staring at dirt. Everything was upside-down; I was hanging by my seat belt. I felt like every single joint in my body had been wrenched painfully out of socket. It was agony from head to toe, so dark now that it took me a moment to realize that the massive, spreading pool down on the ceiling was not motor oil, but blood.
I craned my neck over and saw hunks of meat flying off what had been Officer Freeman/Appleton in juicy ragged pink-and-yellow layers, bone and ribs and a spongy mass that must have been lungs. Out from the meaty shreds came rushing masses of the tiny white demon-rod things, swirling around the interior of the truck like rice in a blender.
That’s not what caused me to panic, not that or the faint wet, ripping sounds next to me. No, what got me moving, what sent me clutching at the seat belt clasp, was the sound of the swarm.
Oh, that sound. Not something coming through my ears at all but a kind of shrill electricity in my brain, a million sharp, spiky, poison thoughts ricocheting around my head.
Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from T-bone steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at ten thousand watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. It was madness and desperation and deprivation and torment gone supernova, screeches and howls and, sprinkled in here and there, my own name.
It blew every thought out of my head, tore my mind open. I was frantic, patting around for the clasp to the seat belt with hands shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. I could vaguely hear actual screams around me, right from the backseat, but they might as well have been a thousand miles away. These little white streaks were buzzing around my face now, past my ears, skipping over my skin.
I got my fingers around the little plastic box that held the seat belt but couldn’t find a button, couldn’t see it, pressed and pulled and finally just started clawing at the thing like a little kid in a tantrum. I felt this itching over my bare arms, and then little pricks like needles and I knew what it was, I fucking knew, and I started contorting my body to crawl free from the belt like an animal wrenching from a trap.
Movement, all around me in the darkness.
Glass shattering in the backseat.
Somebody getting dragged out.
Screaming.
I ran my hand over my forearm and a thousand of the rods scattered off into the air. I heard a resulting uproar in the voices, shrieks like teenage banshees at a boy band concert, except nothing like that at all. The sound—it was so massive and yet so compressed in my skull that it was a physical pressure against my temples. I thought I could feel wheezing, creaking fissures in the bone.
Then, hands were grabbing me, pulling at the seat belt. A hand came into view and with a flick there was suddenly a narrow blade there, a switchblade cutting at the strap. I fell free, crashed down. Four hands were dragging me out of the wreckage by the shirt and shoulders, my back scraping over a bed of glass bits.
It was Fred Chu and John, pulling me free. Everybody was yelling, freaking out. Molly was dancing around and barking—total panic at the sight of the little cloud of white insects blowing around me like pillow feathers.
The worms had settled on my arm again and were landing on my neck and face. I brushed them off, swatted at them in the air. John seized my arm by the wrist, dug out the brown bottle of alcohol from his pants and doused the arm with it.
This seemed to annoy the flying worm things more than anything, and my skin was on fire with their attempts to dig their way in. I sputtered, “That ain’t helping! The alcohol isn’t hurting th—”
John flicked his lighter and set my arm on fire.
I said before that my skin was “on fire” with the pain but being confronted so soon after that sentiment with the actual experience, I admit that other thing was nothing like my skin actually being on fire.
But even the white heat on my arm was nothing next to the pain that suddenly erupted inside my skull. Hundreds of the worms were burned alive and the psychic outcry was like shoving my head inside a 747 engine. It was a nuclear bomb of sound, earth-shattering, feeling like an explosion of razor blades in my cranium.
And then, silence. John was rolling my arm in the dust, patting out the flames. The skin was beet red and peeling in places.
I sat up, tried to focus my eyes, tried to get to my feet, fell back down on my ass. I saw John had blood running down his forehead and he was trying to wipe it from his eyes, the empty liquor bottle at his feet. He leaned over and puked. Jennifer was on her knees in the dirt, had a chunk missing from her upper thigh and her hair was matted to the side of her head with blood.
Big Jim was pointing and screaming. Molly was barking.
Fred.
Screaming.
Thrashing around as if on fire.
The swarm had found him.
The flying worms poured out of the wrecked SUV like a kicked hornet’s nest. All landed on Fred.
He was coughing, choking, the rods gushing into his wide-open mouth. In five seconds it was over.
Fred collapsed.
We all knew he wasn’t dead. Jim and John and Molly stared toward Fred in dull shock, a silence settling over the scene so heavy it was almost a solid thing.
Only Jennifer moved. She sprinted toward the dead SUV, a little squirt of blood jumping from her leg wound with each step. She crawled in, grabbed something, then backed out quickly.
Fred moved. He twitched, flopped onto his back, then clumsily got to his feet. Everybody flinched and took steps backward. I forced myself to my feet over the protest of my leg muscles. Fred—if it was still Fred—looked confused for a moment, then brushed himself off and said, “It’s okay, guys. I’m okay. I’m okay.”
Jennifer ran up, and I saw what she had retrieved from the SUV. It was Morgan’s shotgun. The thing was gleaming in the moonlight with a layer of tacky blood. Without asking, Jim took it from her and checked the chamber to see if a shell was loaded. He laid it over his shoulder like he was suddenly the captain of this crew. He said, “We gotta ge
t a car, guys. Somehow.”
Nobody moved. Jennifer looked at me expectantly. What was I supposed to do? I could barely keep my feet. I looked Fred dead in the eyes, searching them.
I said to Fred, “Go flag down a car.”
Jim nodded like this was a perfectly good plan and followed Fred as he walked toward the highway. Jennifer gave me an exasperated look, went up to Jim and tore the gun from his hands. He spun, asked her what the heck she was doing. She backed away from him and I half expected her to blow a hole through the infested Fred with the shotgun.
She didn’t.
Instead she went right to me and pushed the gun into my hands.
Very slowly and carefully Big Jim said to me, “What are you going to do with that, David?”
John, Jen and I stood side by side, facing Fred and Jim from about ten feet away.
Fred said, “Whoa, guys. Guys, we’re all shook up here. Okay?”
Jennifer said, “Jim, were you not paying attention to what just happened? That’s not Fred. Not anymore.”
“We don’t know what happened,” snapped Jim, glancing over at Fred. “Does anybody here understand this? Really? Screw you if you think you do.”
Fred said, “Guys, look, I don’t know what you think you saw but I’m still Fred in here. Ask me anything, I’m me. I mean, we were all in that car when the cop exploded. Any of us could be . . . infected or whatever, but we gotta hang together. We’re like, the fuckin’ good guys here. Right?”
Everyone looked at me. I was the armed one. I looked down, as if deferring to the shotgun. It was cold, heavy and sticky with Morgan’s blood.
A breeze blew past us. From my right, Molly let out a low growl.
I closed my eyes, let out a long breath and said, “Go flag down a car.” Big Jim and Fred turned once more and took a step toward the highway. I let out a breath, took two steps forward.
I raised the shotgun and blew Fred’s head off his shoulders.
Blood flew. I saw it mist in the moonlight, for a split second frozen in the air like a snapshot. There was that feeling again, the sparks in my head, the old violence high, the electricity of it shivering through me.
Fred’s body slumped to its knees, then fell flat on its chest.
Blood.
Screaming.
Panic.
The old familiar sights and sounds.
I had been here before.
Big Jim recoiled, splattered with Fred’s blood, yelling something I couldn’t hear. Everything was dull, slow. I craned my head to see John and he had an expression I had seen there a few times before, something like fear, and pity. I wanted to put the butt of the shotgun through his face. I loathed that look. It said, “You are what you are, Dave, and that’s that.”
I caught a glimpse of Jen, her hands clasped over her mouth. This seemed like such a fucking good idea ten seconds ago, didn’t it?
There was movement out the corner of my eye and it was Big Jim, stomping toward me, rage lighting up his face. That was a familiar look for him, too, seen in a dozen high school fights, his fists about to come loose like fighting dogs tearing out of their cages.
Yeah, Jim, you can quote the Bible to me but you and I got the same sickness.
I aimed the shotgun right at his face.
Jim looked into the barrel, took two more steps, then raised his eyes to meet mine.
He stopped.
His eyes never moving from mine. He said, “The day after the Hitchcock thing, back in school. I saw you, you and your buddies, laughing. Laughing in the hallway. Not twelve hours after Billy died. I know all about you, Dave. You got the Devil in—”
I pumped the shotgun.
“This is not a conversation, Jim.”
Every muscle was tensed. We faced off that way, seemingly forever, the trigger pressing into the skin of my finger.
Shoot him. Shoot everybody.
John broke the moment. He sprinted up toward Fred’s prone body, grabbing and dragging it. “Get him to the truck!” Jennifer went to help him, but the two of them were making slow, halting progress pulling the deadweight through the sand.
John said, “Dave! These things are starting to come out of him!”
Jim stared me down a moment longer and then turned and walked toward them. John muttered something to him but Big Jim knocked both him and Jen aside. He dragged Fred’s body back to the wreckage of the SUV and laid him against the rear door. A familiar fuzzy cloud was emerging from the ragged stump that had been Fred Chu’s head.
Jim stomped toward me and, with a quick, impossibly strong motion, easily ripped the shotgun from my hands. He turned and aimed at the gas tank of the SUV.
I flinched from the expected explosion, had the sudden crazy urge for a ball of fire to spew out and reduce all of us to ash.
Nothing. Instead there was a patch of little holes in the metal, a heavy rain of gasoline splattering down the rear and onto the prone body of Fred Chu. John stepped up to his corpse, flicked open his lighter and tossed it down.
Fred Chu went up in a ball of flames. The fire licked up the trunk of the SUV, reached the gas tank and ignited the contents with a heavy, metallic THONK, sending us flopping to the ground, little bits of metal plunking softly into the sand around us.
Jim got to his feet and walked toward me again, the shotgun pointed at the ground. The adrenaline was draining from me so fast I thought I’d be sitting in a puddle of it soon. So tired. So tired.
Two feet away, Jim raised the gun.
Man, just do it. Just do it and let me sleep out here in the sand until the sun goes supernova and turns the whole world into a charred memory.
He threw the shotgun in my gut, and walked away. The barrel was warm. We all got to our feet and watched thousands of the little particles swarm out of Fred, burning like sparks over a stirred campfire. In my head, the concert of damned voices faded and died.
John said, “Do you think that’s all of them? The worms, whatever they are? Do you think we got all of ’em?”
I didn’t answer.
“Because I got a feeling that if just a few of them get away, hell, if just one of them gets out and gets into a body, they’ll multiply. Lay eggs and do what they do.”
Nobody answered. What was there to say?
It took us fifteen minutes to flag down a car. I convinced Jennifer to stand out by the road alone, shivering and mussed and looking victimized, one shapely leg coated in crimson. Soon a shiny new SUV pulled over, driven by a young guy and his wife, on their honeymoon or whatever.
As soon as their passenger door was open I sprinted out and put the gun in their face, forced them out while Jim apologized profusely, swearing we would bring it back. The five of us and the dog piled in and we drove into the night.
“I DON’T LIKE it,” said Jennifer softly, as if afraid the looming, dark thing on the horizon could hear us.
She was looking at the Luxor Las Vegas Hotel, a pyramid jutting into the night sky, big and black and geometric, like something from the year 3000. We were parked in the lot of a massive neon-lined steakhouse maybe a quarter mile away, all of us beaten and stinking of smoke and looking like war refugees.
We had ducked into a truck stop restroom just outside of the city and washed as much blood off ourselves as we could. Jim spat out two teeth. John was pretty sure he had a concussion and would still be vomiting if he had anything in his stomach. I had double vision in one eye, and in general I felt like I had been run through a wood chipper. We bought four first-aid kits and fixed ourselves up as best we could; Jennifer patched her thigh with a roll of Ace bandages and a tampon. We bought armloads of convenience-store food and sat eating as we drove around looking for the Luxor. This parking lot was as far as we got before somebody asked what the plan was.
“The Justin thing is in there. Right now,” Jim said, nodding toward the Luxor. “So what are we waitin’ for? This whole thing, it could be going down right this minute for all we know and we’re out here doing nothing.”
John said, “If he summoned Satan, we’d see it from here, right?”
This was the most any of us had spoken since the accident and the ensuing clusterfuck.
I said, “First problem is we got to get into this thing. Guy like Marconi, probably attracts a lot of nutjobs. Got to think the doors will be guarded and I don’t particularly feel like shooting my way in there.”
Jim said, “Think, David. The séance or whatever it is is happening inside a casino. You won’t get five feet inside the door with a gun before nine guys in suits tackle you.”
“And shove your head in a vise,” John added, helpfully.
I said, “Well, I don’t like our chances without the gun. Unless Jim wants to try to quote Bible verses at it.”
Jennifer put up her hands, said, “Guys, let’s not make this a dick-measuring contest, okay?”
There was silence for a moment, then John said, “That’s good, because it wouldn’t be no contest at all.”
Silence again.
“That is, I’m referring to my cock being bigger than either of yours.”
I sighed and said, “John, I don’t think anyone in this vehicle is in the mood to—”
“John, let me make one thing clear,” Jim said, cutting me off in his most stern, evangelical voice. “Every man is blessed with his gifts from the Lord. One of mine happens to be a penis large enough that, if it had a penis of its own, my penis’s penis would be larger than your penis.”
There was a moment of stunned silence, then I heard Jen start laughing so hard I thought she would choke.
“Fuck all of you,” John retorted. “You don’t even exist. We’re all just a figment of my cock’s imagination.”
Jim tried to suppress his laugher, and failed. One more victim, sucked in by John. You get in the room with him and you just fall into a warm pool of beer and video games and penis jokes, staring out at the universe with him and saying, “Do you believe this shit?”
I thought, not for the first time, that John could start a pretty fucking successful cult.
I looked down at the shotgun in my lap, a heavy, cold, hateful thing still coated in grit and blood. I noticed something else, a broad lump in my pants pocket. I dug into it and pulled out the folded envelope of cash I had gotten from the alley guy yesterday. I wondered if I wound up not using it if I should go find the guy and give it back to him. From behind me, Molly barked.
