The floor was packed clay that gave softly beneath Jack’s feet. But across it, zigzagging all the way to the only hiding place in sight, was a trail of raked furrows smeared with patches of clear slime.
“That’s fresh,” Jack said as he drew close to a workbench. There was about half a foot of clearance beneath it. He squatted down on his hunkers and watched a shadow wriggle farther back into the darkness.
“Cover me.” Jack dropped, prone, snap vial held close and gun at the ready. He rapped the vial flat against the clay. His beam swept the underside of the bench. The thing recoiled a bit farther, terror roiling down its length at the touch of the light.
Scores of gashes rent the creature’s skin, each one weeping gelatinous ooze. One lidless black eye held Jack there. The other had been gouged out completely, nothing left but a rent socket. A thin wheeze came from its gawping mouth. One flipper was tucked beneath its body, twitching slightly. The other had been torn off at the shoulder, leaving nothing behind but a ragged stump. The creature flapped it pathetically in what might have been warning.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks . . . scared.” Jack gripped the vial tightly, his thumb still poised to flick off the cap, when it hit him. He was seeing the creature as it was, and he was doing it without the gas.
No. It wasn’t possible. This had to be just another illusion. Just one that was more complex and terrifying then he’d ever experienced. He was seeing the illusion of a terrified and injured creature. Sympathy for the devil, nothing else. But perhaps . . .
No! He had to be certain. He flicked the cap off the vial and sucked the vapors in deep.
And the creature remained as it was. He saw it as nothing but a hungry worm, one that was dying. The thing shuddered under the bench, almost pleading for the end with that single blank and hollow eye. It wasn’t possible. But there it was just the same.
Jack coughed out the gas as softly as he could. A pair of invisible hands squeezed his shredded lungs. He coughed again, louder this time. And could feel those hands gripping even tighter, fingers digging deep. The cough became a hack, one he could not control.
“Jack? Are you okay?”
Jack tried to pull in enough breath to answer but couldn’t. His vision tightened to pinholes. The creature crept closer, close enough to strike.
“Jack!”
He felt Beth flop down beside him. The creature reared back and lashed out with viper quickness at her.
Stop!
Afterward, Jack still wouldn’t know if he’d spoken the world aloud. But the thing had listened. Of that much he was certain. It listened to him and it stopped, inches from Beth, still as a sculpted frieze.
A single pellet from her pistol was all it took to put an end to it. The creature’s head exploded in a freshet of white. And it was over.
“That was weird,” was all Beth had to say, but Jack could hear the shock cloaking her voice. It was more than fear. It was wonder.
“What did it look like?” he asked her, feeling as if an unaccustomed tremor had colonized his voice. “What did it look like to you?”
“Nothing.” She had yet to put down her gun. “It happened so fast I couldn’t get a clear picture. Just a black shadow.”
And that was all the thing would ever be now, a twitching shadow slowly losing shape as what was left of its lifeblood spread out in a growing white pool. A base and selfish instinct seized Jack. He needed venom. He grabbed the creature, hauling its corpse out from under the bench.
“Jack, what are you doing?”
He ignored her and pulled a syringe from his belt. He rammed the needle home, aiming for the sacs lying just under the skin.
“You still need more?”
He did. He needed it desperately. He didn’t want to admit that, but he did. He’d gone a long time without the venom. The supply he’d harvested—and consumed—only made him need it more. He drew on the plunger, but the barrel came up dry. He must have just missed the sac. He yanked the needle out and tried a second time. And again, nothing. After his fifth attempt, he knew it was useless.
A sick sense of longing radiated through him. All the venom was already gone, expended. How? Why? He tucked the syringe away, trying to convince himself that it didn’t matter, that he’d get more, and that the trembling in his hands was not getting worse.
He was about to reach for his salt bag, about to melt what was left of the creature, when they heard a scuffling creak come from above.
“Someone’s up there. Someone’s in the house.”
Jack made it outside a few paces ahead of Beth. At first, he saw nothing but the tall grass waving lightly in the afternoon breeze. Then he saw her. Just the glimmer of a face staring at him from deep within the verdure. Her hair was a shock of scarlet. Her eyes a deep and transfixing jade. She held him spellbound.
But just for a moment. And then she vanished, leaving nothing behind but a trail through the rippling grass. In a blink, she was already so far away that even at a dead run, he knew they’d have no chance of catching up.
“What was that?”
Jack had no answer.
Ten
FORKED RIVER, NEW JERSEY
Beth gazed through the diner’s window, all smudged and smeared by untold handprints. Through it, the eastern sky had lightened but not much. The place smelled strongly of Pine-Sol and old grease, enough to smother the rich aroma of the two black coffees in front of them.
The cook, visible through the stainless pass-through, was busily prepping for the early-morning rush. Soon the ticket wheel above him would spin like a carousel, and the booths flanking theirs would fill with the type of men who showered after they got home from their jobs.
They had pitched their hundred-dollar tent home at nearby Double Trouble State Park. Camping wasn’t technically allowed there, but at eight-thousand-plus acres, Jack admitted he didn’t feel terribly bent about hijacking fifteen square feet of the place, and Beth agreed. The tent wasn’t much, but it was theirs.
“Who do you think it was you saw?” she asked. “Outside the house.”
Jack leaned back in the padded booth. It had been patched just above his shoulder with red duct tape a shade darker than the vinyl. “I don’t know if it was a who.”
Jack had told her that what he saw may have looked human, but they both knew that what something looked like wasn’t always what it was. Since then, they’d followed the clues to two other towns.
In Stafford, Blood led them through a gap in an old stretch of pine plank fence. A mile into the woods beyond it, they found a low hollow beneath a ridge of trap rock, almost obscured by a massive deadfall. Nearby, the corpses of at least three people had all but liquefied in black mire. But nothing remained inside the hollow but the lingering stench of rotting leaves and old pennies. The creature that had made its home there was gone.
In Galloway, they discovered the remains of another den in a weed-choked mausoleum at the far back of a long-neglected cemetery. The crypt’s iron doors had been broken open. One hung askew from a single twisted hinge, and the other rested twenty yards away, at the end of a furrowed line of newly overturned earth. Inside, the coffins and their occupants had been reduced to splinters of wood and bone. The creature that had occupied it was also gone. And one glance was all it took to know it had not gone quietly.
“And you’re sure it wasn’t another creature you saw?” Beth asked, forking another bite of pancake into her mouth. She couldn’t remember ever being so hungry.
“No.”
“What did she look like?”
“I told you that already.”
He had told her, but the description had been scant in details. “Tell me again. Maybe you forgot something.”
“She was beautiful,” he admitted, but his voice carried with it no trace of lust. “Ethereal. Young. Auburn hair, milk-pale skin. Eyes that looked right through me. But the pull wasn’t there. You know . . .”
She did know. Beth knew the pull of t
hose things better than anyone other than Jack himself. “You said she moved fast.”
“Inhumanly fast.” Jack shook his head. “Maybe it was just a trick of the light. I haven’t been one hundred percent since New Harbor. Sorry.”
That was a truth neither of them had spoken about until now. Jack had been different. Something inside Jack had shifted. His rigid code of conduct had relaxed somewhat, and in its place, Beth saw a new fluidity that had surprised her at first. Even so, in quiet moments, she’d wonder if this new Jack Jackson was just another mask he’d taken on. Just another suit of armor protecting the scarred and scared man dwelling deep inside. And just as quietly, she hated herself for doubting him. She buried the thought, hoping to forget it. “Maybe it was just a hiker.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
Jack pushed his breakfast away from him. Other than half a strip of bacon and one neatly clipped-off corner of his western omelet, he hadn’t touched it. “I know this is going to sound crazy . . . but I don’t think she was wearing clothes.”
Beth canted her head, Gimme a break full in her glare. That was one detail she wished she’d known about earlier. “And you still don’t think it was one of the creatures?”
“No. I don’t,” he said.
“Why? She was naked. You know how it works.”
“I do. And she was naked, yes. But not that way. She looked . . . vulnerable.”
The creature’s illusions could be deviously clever, and Beth felt that vulnerable might just be the guise most likely to get Jack within striking range. The same tack had almost worked on her the last time they faced one in Kentucky. “You know that could—”
“I know,” he snapped. “But she wasn’t one of them. You need to trust me. She wasn’t.” Jack stared out into nothing, crossing his arms. “And she was out in broad daylight. You know they don’t do that. She’s either another hunter or she’s something else.”
Another hunter? One who liked to stalk the creatures in her birthday suit? Beth leaned back against her booth bench. She’d never seen him like this. All his steely-eyed determination gone to rust. “Jack, is there something you aren’t telling me?”
His eyes didn’t lift from the Formica. “No.”
Fine. Beth knew what Jack was like when his eyes went dark like that. It was like staring into the windows of a shuttered storefront. She folded her napkin and dropped it onto the table as she rose. “I need to use the ladies’.”
Jack said nothing, just kept staring into empty space as she rose. On her way to the back, she passed a banded stack of the local newspaper’s early editions. What she saw printed in bold on page one stopped her cold. All doubts about what they were to do next, gone.
Eleven
CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY
Déjà vu all over again. That’s what Beth thought as they rolled into town. According to the news report, half a dozen people had gone missing in the past three days alone. That should have been enough to give her that been-here-done-that feeling, but there also was the city itself. Night had fallen, and Camden looked eerily how New Harbor might without the University adding a sheen of respectability to it. Camden was what her hometown would have been if the Docklands had swallowed the rest whole.
They rounded a block of half-boarded-up tenements, and their destination came into view.
Déjà vu all over again.
DAAZE was written above the entrance in lighted letters that looked as if they had been scavenged from five different signs. There might have been a length of chain hanging slack from a steel post welded to an old car rim, rather than a velvet rope swinging between two polished brass stands. The hulk guarding it might have been dressed in a track suit and bright white Pumas instead of designer jeans and an open-collared dress shirt. The music thumping away might appeal to a different demographic from that which had frequented Axis, but at heart it was the same. DAAZE was a nightclub. And all six victims had last been seen within a three-block radius of it.
She looked at the patrons as they sidled past the bouncer, wondering if any of them knew the ones who’d been taken. She wondered if there was a bartender inside who’d lost her best friend, or one who was worrying over the disappearance of an old flame, the way she had a thousand lifetimes ago. She wondered if there was a little girl, waiting alone at home for a mother who had kissed her good night for the last time and not known it.
Déjà vu all over again.
“The attack pattern’s been surprisingly tight,” Jack said as he pulled the truck to the curb, elbow resting on the shelf of the open window. All worry about what he’d seen in the field outside the house shelved. “The den’ll be on this block.”
He hopped from the truck and went to the back. He let Blood out. In New Harbor, Jack had used a tracking console and radio beacons to find where those things lurked. Since then, they’d had to rely on more primitive methods to ferret them out. Blood was one of them.
By the time Beth had walked around to join Jack, a low growl was already forming deep in Blood’s throat. The dog’s muzzle was pointed down the block, at a shuttered and abandoned bank.
They left the truck parked down the block from DAAZE. Beth hoped they wouldn’t come back to find it up on cinder blocks with both doors and the engine missing.
Beth readied herself, nervously running her hands over the contents of her tactical belt. No one from the club across the street seemed to pay them much heed. Their weapons and equipment were concealed well enough, hers under a Vietnam-era army jacket she was practically swimming in, Jack’s beneath a duster that fit him so perfectly he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a postapocalyptic remake of A Fistful of Dollars.
The bank dominated the center of the block. The letters that had once been fastened above the entrance were gone—no doubt stripped long ago and pawned as scrap—but watery gray ghosts of the name, Empire Bank and Trust, remained, staining the lintel just beneath the crumbling cornice.
The bank was a relic from the days when money was kept on-site, when buildings like this needed to project an aura of safety and power. Power it had in spades, even if that power was a dark, haunted one. Safety, however, had long since taken the last train out of Camden.
Blood was almost jumping out of his skin as they made their way to the front of the bank. His growl grew to a timber-sawing buzz. Jack knelt by him, resting one heavy hand on the dog’s neck. “Stay here, boy.” Beth fought the urge to do the same, to share in the bond between them. However, as close as she’d grown to Blood these past ten months, she knew he answered to one master.
They shoved against a boarded-up door, and it gave way. The bottom edge ground against the threshold, leaving just enough room for them to slip through. Blood took his place just outside, standing sentry.
The place reeked of stale air and piss. Their own tentative footfalls echoed like timpanis in the hollow structure. Each of them clicked on a flashlight, and the beams pierced the gloom, presenting a patchwork picture of the interior. Above them, the vaulted ceiling stretched past the reach of their beams. The curved sides were covered in a ruin of torn silk bunting that hung in shreds like funerary wrappings. In the center of the cracked tile floor were the remains of a mosaic. It might have once depicted an eagle clutching a shield, but half of it had cratered away. Holes gaped in the floor, any one of them an invitation to a turned ankle.
Directly ahead of them stood a row of iron portcullis windows. At the far wall, just past the bars, Beth could spot the shadow of an open vault. And between the two, the shadow of something else. Something that was moving toward the only door separating them. A door that was open.
“Don’t look at it.” Jack was already reaching for a snap vial. “Cover the door. Let me know if you see anything. Shadows, movement, anything.”
Beth drew her pistol and trained it on the narrow slit of night just past the entrance, fighting to keep her eyes from flicking over to that thing. “What’s it doing?”
“It’s
waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“An opportunity.”
Beth clamped her jaw tight, gripped her pistol tighter. She backed up until she could see Jack in her periphery. She heard a crack as Jack activated the vial. He breathed in deeply, and his entire body began to vibrate as the chemicals took hold. “What do you see?” she asked.
Jack took another step closer. He leaned in. And then he shook his head and coughed out the vapor. “Too dark to see much. It’s pacing. I’m pretty sure it knows we’re here. But every time it comes close to the door, it pulls back. I think it wants to attack but is afraid to come too close.”
“Is it wounded? Like the other one?”
“Yes. No. I’m not sure.” He coughed again, and when he spoke, his voice was little more than a gravel whisper. “Wounded, yes. But not in the same way. And . . .” Jack’s voice trailed thin into the musty air.
“And what?”
“And this is a trap.”
Twelve
Agent Thorne twitched nervously. The dead air in the small room above the bank vault stank of sweat and boredom. Three days’ worth of it had accumulated as they’d waited and waited and waited for the two people who had just crept through the front door to arrive.
She stood next to Ross, at the dead center of the wall, along with four other agents, Agent Lamb among them. The loft’s meager light highlighted his salt-and-pepper flattop, making him look even more like a man-child. His constant fidgeting only added to the effect. All of the agents were keyed up and jittery, all except Ross, who remained statue-still.
Ross leaned in at an eyepiece, as did a couple of the others. Each eyepiece was tethered to a camera that gave a full view of the bank’s interior. While it somewhat distorted their perspective, they were not willing to risk a look with their own naked eyes at the creature that stalked the dark beneath them—least of all Thorne, who had felt its power firsthand.
As it was, they’d lost three agents just trying to fit the creature with Kander’s largely untested “collar.” Two killed outright and one put in a coma she was unlikely to wake up from. Thorne hadn’t witnessed the carnage herself, but the whispers circling about the incident had it that the attack had happened in seconds. Kander’s only response was to note that the creature must have been hungrier than he thought and to order six more agents in immediately. They had better luck subduing it, but the resentment among the ranks was palpable.
As the Worm Turns Page 40
