Jack scrambled back from under the deadfall. He weighed his options. A cave-in? Would that work? A couple of choice jabs to the right support column, and untold tons of rock would come hurtling down. If he was fast enough, he might have a wisp of a chance of making it back out before the falling debris flattened him.
It would certainly be simple enough, and, like most simple solutions to complex problems, it was the wrong one. Sealing off this section might stop them here. But sooner or later, they’d find another way out. Especially if these tunnels snaked as far under the city as Jack suspected. Better to find them now, eliminate them here.
Jack pressed on, moving from this chamber to another. And then another. And another. They seemed to go on forever. The air was rife with the rank smell of decaying flesh. Raw death. Even his iron constitution began to give under the crush of it. Wetness rose in his gorge, and it was all he could do to crush the urge to retch.
It wasn’t long before he located the source of that stench. A heap of rotting rat carcasses. Thousands, if not tens of thousands. Each one desiccated, reduced to a husk of skin, bones, and fur. Rats. That’s how so many of them had managed to keep living down here for so long. They’d been eating rats. And when that food source had gone dry, they’d gone searching for another. Jack padded forward as silently as possible. He was getting close. Up ahead, he spotted the low-arching entrance to another chamber. He was just about to investigate when he noticed something poking from behind the heap.
A hand. A human hand and a bare arm. The corpse it was attached to was that of a young woman still dressed in her silvery Halloween costume. A single feathered angel wing poked out from underneath her torn torso. Even blanched and waterlogged, her skin pulled taut against her skull, Jack recognized her from the picture on Beth’s flier. He bent low and lowered her lids. It was all he would be able to offer. He peered into the gloom. Behind her were at least ten more bodies in various states of decay. This place was their grave. He prayed it wouldn’t also become his.
Jack ducked under the low-slung arch. Inside, he found himself dwarfed by a vast vaulted ceiling. He looked up in awe at the stone dome as it stretched out in the cardinal directions far beyond his sight. The light from his meager lamp faded into the blackness, exposing little of what surrounded him. And that, more than anything, made Jack Jackson very, very nervous.
He tugged a road flare from his belt. If there were creatures sleeping in that blackness, this would wake them up, but it was a chance he’d have to take. Better to fight them where he could see them than continue to stumble around blindly. He laid one hand on his pistol’s hilt, twisted open the flare with the other, and struck it with the ignition plate.
Sparks spit from the lit end. A searing red-orange magnesium light flooded the chamber, and Jack Jackson finally saw, rising above him, what had been cloaked in darkness. It took every ounce of nerve he had to keep from dropping the flare. And to keep from screaming.
Thirty-nine
Gabby wondered why the grown-up girl looked so scared. “Ith that your doggie?” she asked, pointing at a doggie as it poked its nose through the doorway. She hoped it was her doggie, because she wanted to pet it on its head.
“Sort of.”
Gabby stroked the doggie’s fur. It was soft but kind of rough at the same time, too. Gabby wanted to get a puppy dog for herself, but Mommy had said they had to wait until Daddy got back from being in the war so they could afford to move into a big house, because doggies didn’t like to live in apartments. “What’th his name?”
“Blood,” the grown-up girl answered after a moment. “His name’s Blood.”
“Blood? That’th a thilly name.”
“He’s a silly dog.”
He didn’t look very silly. He looked kind of dirty. But she petted him anyway, because this doggie sure seemed to like being in the apartment building. Maybe he was a special kind of doggie. Maybe she could tell Mommy about him when Mommy got back from her work, and they could find one like him. If she had a doggie like this one, maybe she wouldn’t have to hide from the boogeyman, because then he’d be too scared to get bit.
“Do you live here? With the doggie?” She kept her fingers crossed where the grown-up girl couldn’t see them.
“No, we don’t. We’re just here to do some work.”
“Exthterminating?”
She nodded yes.
“Even the doggie?”
She nodded yes again, and that made Gabby sad, because it meant that maybe doggies didn’t like living in apartments buildings after all. “Oh,” she said. “Can I keep petting him?”
“Sure thing, sweetie,” the grown-up-girl said in that kind of voice that grown-ups use when they want to talk about something other than petting doggies. “This boogeyman, you saw him through the windows?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Can you show me?”
Gabby thought about it. “If I do, you won’t tell Mommy I wath in the laundry room?” She knew she wasn’t supposed to play there. Mommy had told her it was a good place to catch germs. She didn’t understand how catching germs could be good or why anybody would want to catch them, anyway. Germs made your nose runny and your throat all tickly. She figured that was probably because the germs didn’t want to get caught, and that’s how they let people know that.
“It’ll be our secret.” The grown-up girl made to zip up her lips, so she knew it was true.
Gabby shook her way out of the dirty laundry and stood up. She took the grown-up girl’s hand and led her over to the windows. “There,” she said, and pointed out. “And thometimeth from my bedroom, too. Mommy doethn’t believe me. She thinkth it’s because of the Harry Potter movieth. And that I shouldn’t watch them becauth they give little girlth nightmareth.” She tugged on the grown-up girl’s hand, looking up at her. “Do you like Harry Potter movieth?”
“They’re all right. The boogeyman, what does he look like?”
Gabby scrunched up her brain. It was hard to tell people what the boogeyman looked like because he always looked different, even though she always knew it was him. “He wearth a hat. A big black one, like a magician, with a big coat with red licorice in the pocket. And he’th got flat teeth and eyeth that look like from a doll. That’th what he lookth like thometimeth.”
“Sometimes? What about the other times?”
Gabby scrunched up her brain again. Why was it always so hard to remember what the boogeyman looked like? “He can change. One time, he changed into a fish with a hat. A thcary fish that biteth. Another time, he wath like a fox but with a perthon mouth and a big hat. And then another time, he wath a thnake but one that had armth and feet.”
“A snake? . . . with a hat?”
She shook her head no. That time, the boogeyman had forgotten to bring his hat. It did seem like the boogeyman kept changing the way he looked so he could trick her. Mommy said that was how dreams worked, in a voice that told Gabby she didn’t believe her about seeing him. But Mommy also said that she wasn’t mad at her. That she knew she wasn’t lying, just confused. “You believe me, right?” she asked the grown-up girl.
“I do, Gabby. I do.” The grown-up-girl kept looking out the window in a way that made Gabby think that maybe she had seen the boogeyman, too. And that maybe she was scared. And then she was even more happy that they had the doggie with them.
Forty
Jack stood slack-jawed at what rose before him. Never in the years he’d spent fighting these things had he seen anything like it. He’d never even imagined such a thing could be possible. The mound was fifteen feet high at least, twenty across, and covered in blister-like lumps, each one the size of a bowling ball.
He drifted toward it, curiosity pulling him in to examine the mammoth mass’s leathery, translucent skin. It was thick and covered in cracked ridges, like alligator hide. And it was cabled through with a mesh of vein-like webbing, through which
pulsed some kind of fluid. This thing was alive. Or, at least, whatever it held was. He peered closer, getting as near to it as his burning flare would allow. Beneath the membrane, he could just make out the distinct shapes of polygons. The inside looked almost like honeycomb. Was that what this was, some kind of food-storage mechanism? Something linked to their hibernation cycle?
Jack almost gagged. The scent of them was ripe down here, dead leaves and galvanized tin. They were close, closer than he liked. He crept carefully around the mound, following the arterial network until he reached the far side. There the veins grew thicker, coupling together and eventually merging into a single thick cable. Something like a taproot. He followed it with the beam of his headlamp.
Jack Jackson had seen many things over the past twelve years—things that would break a man’s mind, shatter it into useless fragments. He’d watched those creatures perform wonders surpassing any of the vampire fantasies that had been cooked up by screen scribes and hack novelists. He’d seem them drain a hapless victim of blood in seconds. He’d seen them leap distances of ten yards or more, slither through openings barely larger than his fist. He’d been held in thrall by their illusions and witnessed, with his own eyes, their true form.
None of it could have prepared him for what he saw writhing before him, slithering across the sloping far side of that mound. It was a scene straight from Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of hell—crossed with the gatefolds of a thousand pornographic magazines.
Women. Dozens of them. Naked and softly squirming on top of one another, limbs interlocked, their flawless skin glittering in every shade—ivory, teak, alabaster, mahogany, amber, gypsum. Hair the same—copper, jet, flax, chestnut—from pin-straight to kinked curl. Their bodies ran the gamut from runway-thin to hourglass-elegant. It was a smorgasbord of lust, every conceivable desire sat on display there in his flare light. Their movements were trancelike, their eyes shut, their squirming slow, languid. The only thing they had in common was their uncommonly arresting beauty and their seemingly unquenchable desire for one another.
Jack was unable to take a single step back or even to tear his gaze from the illusion. There had to be fifty of them, at least. No wonder they had become so bold in their attacks. No wonder, if this was how many were down here. If this was how many mouths needed to feed.
No way was he was equipped to deal with this many, not out in the open, and sure as hell not buried deep beneath the earth. He’d be lucky to take out a tenth of their number before they got him. Suddenly, Jack wished—no, prayed—for a way to extinguish his flare, to put it out before they responded to his come and get it beacon.
And that’s when it hit him. He was a dead man. This vault would prove his tomb. He’d gone too deep and now would pay for his trespass. Those things were going to tear him to shreds and feast on his blood, while he stood there like an idiot, flare in hand.
But he wasn’t dead. As that knowledge sank in—sank deep—he realized that whatever it was those beautiful horrors were doing was more important than feeding. It had to be, or he wouldn’t be standing there like a gawping carp to witness it. He slipped a snap vial from his belt, rapping it against his palm and wincing at the slight popping sound it made as the glass capsule inside shattered. One of the creatures stirred but didn’t turn to face him, didn’t even open its eyes. Jack breathed deep, waiting for the chemicals to push the illusion from his mind.
The vision came in flashes, as it always did, and he was struck with a shimmering look into what could only be described as the darkest regions of some tenebrous abyss, one that made the reports of Dante look like Disneyland in June. The cavernous vault and burning red flare light only added to the terror. Jack pushed the panic deep, fighting the urge to flee, forcing himself a step closer to the creatures in their true form as they writhed in their pulsating orgy.
He spotted a net of threadlike tendrils connecting them to one another. It spread out from their bodies and joined with the cabled webbing. He watched as small orbs flowed through the arterial network and were deposited into the growing mass.
In a flash, he understood. The mass of creatures writhing across the reptilian skin of that mound—slithering in and out of one another’s tangled embrace—weren’t guarding it. They weren’t sleeping. They weren’t feeding.
They were breeding.
How many eggs could possibly be in this colossal sac? Hundreds? Thousands? Each one ready to hatch another one of them. Visions flashed before him of those things bubbling up from the earth, descending on New Harbor. Hell on earth, demons from the pit come to devour all in their path. Apocalypse.
Jack pushed the snap-vial gas from his lungs with a hack, muffling the sound the best he could with the cuff of his sleeve. As the chemicals drained from his bloodstream, the images began to break up. He backed away silently, eyes never leaving the terrible wonder before him or the evil that lay beneath it. It wasn’t till he finally turned that he saw the other mass of writhing creatures in the light of his dying flare and the second egg sac they were cabled to.
And many more behind them, stretching into the darkness as far as he could see—and beyond.
Forty-one
As Jack finally made it back into the nightclub’s deserted office, his mind could not stop reeling. The shock of what he had witnessed in the dank confines of those tunnels, and what it might mean, devoured every thought.
While he’d plodded back through the water sluices, ignoring the numbing, muscle-seizing cold, he’d calculated all possible permutations. And each time he’d reached the same conclusion. Unless he could figure out a way to stop them and stop them soon, a lot of people were going to die.
He’d almost made it to the file storage room, ready to climb out and make the leap over, when he heard footfalls behind him. He turned, his gaze locked on the smoky violet eyes of a prepossessing club girl. She was clad in a short, shimmering skirt, high-heeled boots, and a tight, midriff-baring halter. It was the type of girl Jack had seen a lot of hanging around outside of Axis on busy nights. The type that sometimes grabbed his attention in weaker moments. He felt his feet shifting toward her. He commanded his body to stop.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
No answer.
It couldn’t be one of them. They never came out in the day. They couldn’t stand the sunlight, not even indirectly. No, this was some dim-bulb coat-check girl. Had to be. Maybe one who didn’t speak English. One who was new and didn’t seem to mind that a total stranger was standing in the middle of the manager’s office brandishing sidearms. Jack felt himself shuffle another half-step toward her, impotent in his attempt to tear his eyes away from hers. He gripped the hilt of his pistol, about to draw.
And stayed his hand. Never count on anything. That’s what he’d told Beth. And it was the code he’d lived by. He had to be sure about this. There was enough innocent blood on his hands already. Jack tugged a snap vial from his belt. The girl kept pace, silent, cocking her lissome neck to the side, sniffing the air. That was a bad sign. A really bad sign. He rapped the vial on the edge of the desk, about to lift it to his nose.
She leaped, vaulting the distance frighteningly fast, landing on him with far more force than that tiny frame of hers should have allowed. Jack felt the gun fly from his hand as she latched onto him, driving him to the ground. He fell back, supine, fighting to keep his exposed flesh away from her—its—mouth. Its wide-opening mouth.
Jack pushed with both hands, but even as he did, even as that mouth snapped and snapped and snapped, his eyes showed him nothing but the vision of a ravishing coquette. Even as he spotted those all-too-familiar rings of glittering teeth—row upon row, stretching so far back he couldn’t fathom it—he wanted nothing more than to give in. To give up.
The creature reared its head back for a strike. It hit him at his shoulder, latching on with those spiny, splinter-like teeth. He felt no pain, just the beginnings of the rush.
The neurotoxin’s unbelievable pleasure exploded through his nerves, blowing his mind to ecstatic smithereens as she pulled him into her embrace. Blood welled up around the corners of her sucking mouth, and Jack’s muscles howled as he tried to tear away, but she—it—was suckered on fast.
No. Not now. Jack had been on this precipice before. He’d been there and worse. He’d be damned if he was going to give in now. Not after what he’d seen. Not now that he had so much more to do. He yanked a stake from his belt and reared back, aiming for the creature’s beautiful face.
His forearm sang with a numbing thud as the thing slapped it aside, sending the juniper stake flying. The creature’s mercury quickness was too much for Jack to fix his gaze on. Especially now, with the—with the rush. The chemicals wrapped their serpentine stranglehold around his brain’s pleasure center.
No. No. NO. NO! Jack gripped the thing’s head, finally managing to disengage its fangs. He felt the locked bite give way as those needle-like teeth tore from his flesh. The ecstasy fleeing and agony rushing to fill the void. He held the thing at bay with trembling, fatigue-ravaged hands. It still wore that beautiful face. Was still that seductive club girl. Even with a blood-smeared mouth full of razors snapping at him, lunging. Again. And again. And again. He didn’t know how much longer he’d be able to hold out.
Or how much longer he’d want to.
Forty-two
Beth leaned against the windowsill, watching the little towheaded girl smudge the glass with her tiny moist palm. Blood sat not a foot away, a cautious look in his eye. Beth reached over and tousled Gabby’s flaxen hair.
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