And the fish were jumping out of the water, trying to escape from the water, but there was absolutely nowhere to go. And some of the fish, the fish looked funny: too big, too aware, too abjectly malformed.
“Oh my God,” Lydia whimpered, backing up and away from the water. She was staring at the back of Garth’s jacket, the logo that no longer filled her with pride. She had never imagined that being right could hold so little satisfaction.
Across the creek, the crowd from the End Zone was huddled beneath the green and white awning that covered the huge back patio. They had come out to gape at the burning rain, the pillar of fire in the distance. Lydia recognized her father there, amongst the masses. In this fresh context, his face looked no different from anybody else’s.
No different from her own.
And suddenly, it was no longer hatred that she felt for him. That time had passed. Now it was terror that filled her heart: a terrible drowning sense of irreversible loss. For one soul-wrenching moment, she thought about calling out to him.
Then the black rain began to pour…
…and she couldn’t see, she couldn’t see through the impenetrable curtain. But when the screaming started, she closed her eyes and saw it all too clearly. Saw the awning disassemble, eat away at an alarming speed: erasing the differences between them completely, joining them together in one undifferentiated mass of shrieking reeling molten flesh and jutting mechanical bone, like the girders and struts of unfinished buildings in an earthquake, draped in a runny meat stream…
Then she screamed, and Garth slapped her across the face. He didn’t want the fish to hear. They were jumping higher, with perverse determination.
And the water was rising.
They still didn’t know why.
At Black Bridge, the original spawning ground, the parameters of a whole new world continued to rapidly evolve. It had all manner of brave new, never-before-seen creatures in it. Walkers. Swimmers. Crawlers. Flyers. Breeders, Drones and Queens. Beautiful, ruthlessly violent Monsters and hideous Growths of inviolate weakness and meek, self-righteous passivity.
Hunters and hunted. Feeders and food.
But everyone needed to eat.
And this was the strangest, most horrible thing: one by one, they forgot who they were. Losing touch with the toxicity that spawned them.
Losing conscious connection with Overmind.
One by one, they settled into their new roles. Their new forms. With no memory of the Source from whence they came.
Suddenly, they found themselves lost: deprived of the empathy that came from being and knowing that they were all one thing.
Reconstructing the food chain, in their own mutant image.
Blindly starting the cycle all over again.
There was a wave. It came from the whirlpool at the heart of Black Bridge, the heart of the New Creation.
It barreled straight for the heart of the city.
Lydia and Garth could see it coming.
It was twenty feet tall, and it spanned the width of the basin. From where Garth and Lydia stood, there was no clearance unless they clung to the underside of the bridge. They were pylons there, rough handholds to cling to.
They had no other choice.
The wall came in, undercut at the moment it collided with the flood shelf. Graygreenmultiformed NewSpawn impacted, impaled, blew forward and opened, revealing their innermost selves. The innards and tendrils that soared through the air in front of the wave meant nothing to the creatures that were spared. Over the top, and to hell with the hindmost.
Fuck everyone and everything else.
There was a five-headed faceless eel-spawn, razored and flailing and thirty feet long. It threw itself out of the water blindly, passed less than a foot from Garth’s face. “HELP!” he shrieked, hanging on for dear life.
But Lydia could no longer whip up such passion. She could already feel herself starting to change. The toxins were in her bloodstream, in the mist on her face and the air in her lungs. Her surface flesh felt rubbery and numb, like her shell-shocked emotional core.
It no longer mattered what happened.
Lydia Vickers wasn’t dying.
Merely changing in shape.
The next creature down the pike had Garth’s name on it. Its emerald, taloned head raked the underside of the bridge, etching a groove through the concrete and steel. It caught him just above the hip bone, separated upper intestine from lower as it snapped through the spine like blackboard chalk in an irate teacher’s hands. Lydia’s gaze went to her friend’s, watched the lenses glaze over.
No future, indeed.
Watching Garth fall was like watching a packet of fast-food catsup grace an order of french fries. Spoot. Zero fanfare. He was emptied, crinkled up and gone in a blink of the eye that devoured him.
And all she could do was hang on, hang on, shrinking back against the concrete as far as the physics of the situation would allow. She had spent her whole life trying to stand out from the crowd, and now all she wanted was to be invisible.
Waiting for the change to take over completely.
Waiting to join the parade.
There had been, until quite recently, one hundred eighty-eight thousand human souls in Paradise.
They were dying off now, at a rate that averaged out to roughly ten thousand people per minute.
Past the first major volley of rain, the majority were taken out by Boonie’s parting gift. It rode the water mains, infiltrating through the pipes, sneaking up behind the walls to slaughter from within.
It burbled through the Jacuzzi jets of Carol Blake’s room at the Blue Dove Inn, bringing both she and her pet tennis pro to a rich red blistering boil. It came up through Tom Huntington’s plumbing to bite off his ass as he sat on the crapper, grunting through a half time power-dump. It mixed into Chris Crowley’s whiskey and water, induced him to hack up his glistening innards at the foot of the big-screen TV.
It brought Marge Leonard running to the bathroom, in response to the sound of her children’s screams. She found Wally and Timmy and little Thea, thrashing in their Sunday bath, a greasy slick of molten plastic tub toys swirling across the surface as they bubbled and sputtered down to a chunky toddler bouillabaisse.
Marge screamed and shoved her arm into the tub, stripping her flesh all the way to the elbow as she groped for the drain plug and pulled. Then she collapsed to the floor: her arm gone, her mind gone.
And her babies, swirling down the drain.
It was a pattern that replicated itself again and again, across the county. From Wolf’s Head to Fairview, West Manheim to East Manchester, across the length and breadth of a county under insuppressible siege. From the Paradise Athletic Club to the Pleasant Acres nursing home, Bob’s Big Boy to the Lincoln Woods, the Masonic Temple to the Miracle Car Wash, with thousands and thousands and thousands of private dwellings in between.
Over and over. Again and again.
Bearing no conceivable, remotely merciful end in sight…
The lines at 911 went suddenly, totally silent.
Cut off from the world.
Dottie Hamm stared around the bright-lit County Control complex, fighting down the astonishing, paralyzing terror she felt. For years, she had been the one who provided a lifeline for others when they found themselves trapped in the big world of hurt.
Now she was the one without a lifeline.
And, as with Deitz before her, there was no one else to call.
Kelly had put on a fresh pot of coffee. God bless her. What else were they supposed to do? Wait out the collapse of the telephone lines, the return of their emergency backup. Remain in control.
No matter what.
Dottie poured herself a cup, started dousing it with NutraSweet. Formaldehyde bloodstream rumors notwithstanding, she hated her coffee unsweetened or black. Then she dumped in a dollop of half-and-half.
It started to swirl. Round and round, round and round.
In a lazy figure eight.
“Dottie,” Dave De
ll said; and before she had even completely turned, the cup was up to her mouth.
She tipped it back, and felt the hot liquid affix to her lips like a living thing: sluicing through the space between her teeth, filling her mouth in one enormous burning gulp, then consciously forcing its way down the clenched, sloping apperture at the back.
There was no scream. The toxin swallowed it whole, on its way down her throat. It ate her throat as well, boiling the meat and dispensing rank red musclefroth in its stead. It ate down to her stomach, recombined with her juices, transforming Dottie’s digestive tract into an organic pressure cooker of pain.
Dave Dell vaulted over the low sill as she dropped to the floor and spasmed. He slid his wiry arms under her armpits, desperately attempting the Heimlich maneuver to clear her clogged pipes. He clasped his hands over her solar plexus. Took a deep breath. And pressed.
When her abdomen exploded, his arms went along for the ride.
The spawn that had once been Strong John and Dean worked in tandem. Like Micki, they used geometry to invoke a higher power. But instead of a circle, they had traced the manmade straight-line grids that defined the city.
Up and down the narrow one-way streets and shady tree-lined boulevards, past crumbling tarpaper shanties and cozy Cape Cods, past tastefully renovated townhouses and lush Georgian abodes. Street by street. Block by block.
Sealing off the city limits.
Their tanker trucks were loaded to capacity with inert, as-yet-unawakened toxin. Their sprayer rigs had dispensed it: leaving local residents gagging and retching, keeling over by the dozens on their lawns and living room floors in Overmind’s ever-expanding wake.
But as the rain conjoined with it, something triggered in the dormant pox.
Self-awareness. A sense of purpose.
Unlimited possibility.
It rampaged with lethal abandon under the blood-red sky, stirring kin in the fatty tissues of its fleeing victims. It struck them down, shrieking and thrashing, only to instantly raise them up snake-faced or insect-headed, flippered and flailing; the lost denizens of the city of the damned.
They took to the streets in packs, cavorting with the stormsong.
Ready to join the Parade…
And still the rain came down.
It came in many colors now, an oilslick rainbow that crowded the sky. Like its brethren at the bridge, it had lost all but peripheral touch with Overmind. There were simply too many drops to imbue with one single consciousness.
The connection remained as a sort of collective unconscious: a molecule of telepathic toxicity that stayed in touch with its essence, implicitly recognizing itself in every face it saw.
But as it landed and spattered and pooled, a group consciousness reemerged. Not Overmind, precisely, but a shared beingness that evolved very quickly into a shared identity. A second-level Overbeing.
A new elemental.
The spirit of the New Blood of the Earth.
The kitchen stank of chemicals and cindered hair.
Gwen sat at the little cafe table she’d scarfed at Christie’s Antiques. She was rapidly retreating: into herself, into a somnambulistic cocoon of shock.
Micki pressed past her, frantically searching the cupboards and drawers. Micki said she was sorry, it couldn’t be helped. But then, Micki was being incredibly insensitive right now: by making Gwen get out of her chair; by smelling as horrible as she did; by forcing Gwen to look for some stupid candles that wouldn’t help anything anyway.
And they couldn’t be just ANY candles, no, they had to be WHITE candles, as if that made a fucking bit of difference. As if any of it did. As if Gwen should be doing anything but waiting for Gary to come home.
Especially when she felt so terribly sick.
And she did, oh God did she ever feel terrible. It was like some strange virus had entered her body, a walking talking thinking virus, and it was saying badfeelbadfeelbad, a whispering mantra, badfeelbadfeelbad as if that were its life’s ambition.
And she looked bad, too, no question about it, her skin gray and pallid in the wan kitchen light. The stink didn’t help a bit. It made her acutely queasy. Of course, nausea at a moment’s notice had been a linchpin of the Taylor Family Pregnancy ever since…
Gwen felt the bile-rush sneak up on her like a runaway Peterbilt, and she puked all over the kitchen floor.
“AHurp!” she belched, then staggered toward the kitchen sink. She’d almost made it when the next wave hit, and she doubled up and puked again, in a wider arc that missed the sink and splattered the cabinet itself…
…and there were a lot of chemicals in there, household powders and liquids and sprays, but she had never looked at them in quite this way before…
…as suddenly there was a voice in her head that wondered what, say, Liquid Drāno might taste like: just a drop, not enough to hurt you, just enough to find out what it’s like…
…and it wasn’t like a compulsion or anything, not like a pregnant craving, it was more just an intellectual curiosity that made her grab the Liquid Drāno, shake off the globs of vomit, carefully untwist the cap…
“GWEN!” Micki screamed, and knocked the bottle from her hands, making her cry for no good reason. Even though Micki could see that she was sick, that she just wanted to curl up on the floor with her big hard tense swollen belly that couldn’t feel anything, inside or out.
Just curl up.
And wait for Gary to come home…
Deitz rammed the truck across the wreckage of the Amoco Shop ‘N’ Go at three twenty-five, big wheels chewing through dead and detritus alike before screeching to a halt less than five feet from the front doors. The mounted heads upon it wailed: forced to bear witness, driven far beyond madness by the world they had helped to create.
The headlights’ glare pierced the shadows as Deitz stepped out of the truck, staring in terror at the gaping space where the big plate-glass windows had been.
(late too late too late too)
Broken glass carpeted the interior in a billion glittering crystal shards, glistening before him as he crunched through the ruined front door. One of the service island trash cans lay in the rubble like an enormous bullet. Living rain oozed and slithered before him like vermin, retreating from his path. The pumps were down. The store was savaged.
And Jennie Quirez was nowhere to be found.
(late too late too late)
Deitz stood there, lost, in the middle of the aisles, feeling the last of his dead heart clench with the inescapable weight of his loss. He felt it snap and rend asunder. Lost to him now. Like her. Forever.
And it came from him, then: a primal moan that originated at the core of his soul.
“Hhnnnnnuhhhhh…”
It fed on his pain, amplified itself in the cramped confines of his skull. “Hhnhhhnnuhhnnnuhhhhhhh…”
Deitz had no mouth. His face was gone. It had liquefied and recongealed, taking on the shape of the chemical suit’s hood like gelatin in a mold. But the sound was building, becoming a cry, a mounting burning keening howling razor-ribboned wail that sliced its way to the thick, insensate flesh his bulky suit had become.
“J-JhejhennnAAAAHHHHHHHHH…”
A fissure developed in the lower part of the faceplate: a fold now a crack now a split-wide rift, a ragged jack-o’-lantern mouth that stretched from ear to ear. Oily juices spilled from the crevice, bubbling in the breach.
“J-JEHNNNNNNNNNHHHH!!!!!! JJEHHHHNNAANNNNAAAAHH!!!!! JEHHHHNNNEANNNNNNEEHHHHHNNNNNAEEEHHHH!!!!”
And that was when he heard the sound: a tiny, mewling sound, very nearly lost against the background throes of the dying world.
It was coming from behind the EMPLOYEES ONLY door.
Deitz crossed the ruined expanse of the store, crashing through emptied display racks and discarded, useless, toxic goods. The freezers hummed. The mad truck screamed. Condensation writhed beneath his touch as he put his hand on the heavy door and pushed.
The door slid back. The still-burning headli
ghts of the truck sliced through the shadows. The walls, the floors, the ceiling dripped with sentient damp.
And Jenny was there.
She was hunkered down behind a stack of waterlogged, bloated cereal boxes in the farthest corner of the tiny room. Her face was hidden, her head down on her knees, her hands protectively cradling her skull.
“Jehnn…” he moaned.
He recognized her by her thick mahogany hair, most of which lay in piles around her haunches. A few stray tresses still clung tenuously to her scalp, which was chalky, pale and colorless as her hands, her arms, her neck. He could clearly see the veins in her scalp, pulsing arrhythmically under the stippled papyrus surface of her skin.
She patted the crown of her head gingerly; one of the few remaining hanks dislodged and floated to the floor, where the movement of air sent it wafting like a dust devil. She clutched at it blindly, missed, sobbed again.
“Jehnnn…” Deitz murmured thickly. “Jehnneeee…”
She looked up, head tilting this way and that, trying to fix the sound. It was only then that he understood.
Her eyes—those warm and bottomless brown eyes that could light up a room with love—were gone. They had de-evolved, along with the rest of her beautiful, broad yet delicate features. No luscious lips. No regal nose. No gently sloping brow. No more. She was worn away and rounded down: a crude, half-finished sculpture of herself, rendered in mutely glistening mold.
He moved toward her. She started to mewl.
“Pleeeease…” she whispered.
“Shhhh…” he murmured tenderly. “Ss-shhhhh…”
He reached down to help her up. She cried but upon contact with his thick, rubber-coated fingers. He bent, grasped her gently around the torso, then slowly began to rise…
…and that was when he heard the snap, a sound so faint he might not have caught it at all had he not gone suddenly off-balance, holding her upper torso as if he’d lifted a pillow instead of a living woman…
The Bridge Page 29
