And fought his way toward the door…
Inside the nursery, a garden had grown.
The vines writhed together in a spiraling latticework dance: younger tendrils, twig-thin and deft, interweaving with the stouter ones to form elaborate grids of containment. If they couldn’t get in, then nobody could get out. In the minutes since Gwen’s first contraction, the vines had grown to envelop the circle of light: a ten-foot ring of thorns that reached all the way to the ceiling, pressing into the plaster hard enough to fissure and buckle it.
They fed on fear and pain.
They were very well fed. The vines had grown perversely, virulently fecund in this atmosphere: tonguelike leaves swelling fat and thick over bloated blood-red pods of fruit that ripened and rotted and thudded to the floor in an instant, like the stars of some cheesy stop-motion nature film.
All in the three minutes since Gwen’s first contraction.
“It’s coming,” Gwen said tersely, bracing for the pain. “Oh God Gary hurry…”
The groundswell of the second contraction rippled across her features like heat lightning. Veins bulged in her forehead. Her nostrils flared.
“Breathe!” Micki coached, watching her friend’s face flush crimson as their hands squeezed together hard enough to snap bone, a pressure that built until a thin, kettle-boiling eeeeeeee emitted from Gwen’s lips, snapped off into a machine-gun volley of hyperventilating breath.
Downstairs, the front door flew open.
Gwen screamed, head whipping violently in the direction of the sound. She screamed Gary’s name. Micki turned as well, her mind racing a mile a minute, going thank God you made it, you made it through the circle as she tried to imagine the road he had traveled, tried to imagine how in hell they might escape, wanting to escape more than anything in the world…
…but Gwen was in labor, she could pop at any second, and the logistics of escape were incalculable under those circumstances. Gwen was in no position to run, to fight, to do anything but what her entire physiology was geared up for in these moments. And Micki did not want to deliver a baby in the back of a moving pickup truck.
Gwen’s pain had plateaued. Micki could feel it receding, could feel the pressure of Gwen’s grip diminish like steam from a ruptured valve…
…and suddenly a look of such utter horror possessed her face that it froze Micki in midmental stream.
“It’s not ready!” Gwen wailed. “It’s not ready!”
“What…?”
“It’s not ready to come out! Oh GOD…!”
Micki’s hands traced the contours of Gwen’s swollen belly, felt an unnerving liquid slosh beneath the rock-hard wall of muscle. Gwen cried out again, inarticulate this time, not out of pain but from mortal terror.
It only took a second to peel off Gwen’s panties and part her legs. Micki was no midwife, but she’d been around enough to know what to look for. In the dim light, it was difficult to see, but the outer vaginal lips felt impossibly bloated to her touch.
She reached inside, just as the sound of footsteps slowly thudded up the stairs. They were staggered, and painfully uneven. He’s all fucked up, said an anonymous voice in her head, even as her middle finger probed the moist walls of Gwen’s interior. Oh, no…
And then she reached the cervix, the throat of the uterus, felt the elastic ring of cartilaginous muscle that must dilate for the child to emerge. Her fingertip slid over the os, expecting to find an aperture some ten centimeters around.
Instead, she found a pinhole, not even a centimeter wide.
What? she thought, fingers checking again. It didn’t make sense. Even normally, it would have been at least two centimeters wider than this. It was as if the muscle had irised shut intentionally, as if refusing to allow the baby to be born…
Get away from her NOW, Bob-Ramtha roared.
And Micki had one final moment of disorientation, a second too long. She looked at Gwen’s face, saw the eyes rolling back, got a very brief flash of her life in poignant retrospective.
She started to withdraw her hand.
Just as Gwen’s water broke.
She began to die from the moment it first sluiced between her fingers, pooled in her palm, trickled down her wrist. The blood of the New Earth soaked into her pores, raced down her conduits, tended the little black seed in the pit of Micki’s belly.
She was completely unaware that Gary had entered the room, had no idea that Gwen was dying, too. For her, these last moments were a total obsession that lasted entirely too long.
You can’t run from the devil in your own back pocket, sang that anonymous voice in her head. Unchained at last, the black seed bloomed, throwing off the chains she’d kept locked for so long. The cancer burned through her, raiding cells, inciting riots, commandeering the myriad systems in her body; lymphatic, nervous, digestive, reproductive. Telegraphing one simple, fatal message.
The vines were inside her now, too.
Micki watched in horror as they rose up, swelling beneath her skin, sprouting tendrils and thorns, a thousand black needles impaling her from within and emerging, puckering from the riddled surface of her skin.
Micki looked past Gwen, past the circle to the wall. The Faery Queen was there, watching impassively, not real at all but paint on plaster, the vines gouging her surface even as the wasps bored holes and laid eggs in her face. And Micki knew that the balance had forever shifted, that the tables had been turned. The benign monarchy was overthrown by a muscular new regime.
Nature herself was banished, in exile.
And the world she knew would never heal.
The barbed-wire knot of panic became hideously literal then. Micki choked on her own bristling esophagus, felt a gallon of tumorous curds tear loose from within her intestinal tract, spewing vile gobbets from her nostrils and mouth.
The thorns encircled her brain like a crown, punctured her eardrums from the inside, snaked out along the optic nerves to skewer her eyes like cocktail onions, blinding her forever.
And Bob-Ramtha’s voice called out to her, but he could not get through. It was like she was no longer tuned to his station. Harsh static enveloped and took him away.
And then she was gone as well: not liberated by death, but merely subsumed. The black seed thrived in its new location, set down roots and claimed her, her substance and spark, reduced to raw fertilizer for the next wave of earthly Creation…
…and Gwen was still screaming when Gary threw himself at the last line of defense, hacking at the vines that entwined and enmeshed the circle, slicing his way to the last spirit door.
A buzzing filled his ears. He ignored it, concentrating on the angry tendrils that he sawed in half as they desperately tried to free themselves from the entanglements they had chosen. Black liquid spritzed. It burned where it landed. He ignored it as well, driven by adrenaline and love.
Gwen called out his name as the first red stringy wasp-thing rose from the rotting fruit pulp on the floor. It poked a hole in the soft flesh beneath his left eye, injected agony. He grabbed the wasp-thing before it could pull out, felt the satisfying squish of it between his fingers, and grabbed another vine. Gwen shouted something else, more weakly, but he couldn’t hear it over the sound of his own bellowing pain.
He sawed into a stout vine; its blunt, blind head swung back like a mace, thorns punching holes the size of tenpenny nails in his side as it smashed his ribs.
Gary fell face-first through the fissure he’d carved in the ring of thorns. His head cleared. His shoulders followed.
Something grabbed ahold of his leg.
“NO!” he screamed, slashing back with the knife. The resulting gush of acid sap ate into the back of his knee.
By the time he pulled himself fully inside, time had slowed down dramatically for him. He could savor every twitch of his St. Vitus spasms, isolate every last trill of her tiny dying sounds. A nerve-dead numbness had settled over him, trading all his other pain for simple, searing cold.
He could not stop shaking.
That was the only thing he cared about in the poisoned world it had become.
The air seemed to grow warmer in the circle, the vines exuding a foul chlorine-cholorphyll scent. He crawled to her, dizzy, and looked into her eyes. He saw the faint spark there, his presence fanning it like a breath on glowing embers.
She tried to smile, could not. The spark faded. A single tear leaked out, too weak to fall. He nodded, touching her face, her hair.
“I’ll see you on the other side, darlin’,” he whispered. She nodded her head, but barely.
And God did he hope it was true.
Then she shuddered, and her light winked out.
Forever.
Leaving him alone on this fucking godforsaken world, with no hope and no possible reason to go on. Leaving him alone with only her dead lips to kiss, trying to imagine a reason on earth for hanging on. His side was numb and bloody, his leg a twisted stick. He leaned against her belly, searched his eyes for tears and found none there.
The knife in his hand felt like a shortcut on the road he was already on. There was nothing else to do. He wiped the sticky blade on his pants leg and pulled back his sleeve, placed its edge trembling against the skin of his wrist.
And the baby kicked.
Gary lurched and sat up, astonished. He’d felt it clearly, an audible thump. He whirled, pressed his ear fully against Gwen’s dead belly.
Deep in the stillness, something stirred.
The baby was alive.
“Oh, God,” Gary croaked. He looked at Gwen, but there was no doubt: her skin was gray and cooling, her eyes gone milky opaque. The Gwen he knew and loved was gone for good.
But the baby…
Time was critical. There was no other way. He had to do it, he told himself. He had to do it now.
Gary knelt before Gwen’s body, pulled her dress back to reveal the swell of her womb. This is not my Gwen, he told himself over and over, fighting down the revulsion. This is not my Gwen. He placed the knife against the firm mound of flesh just over the rise of her pubic mound, and pressed.
The first cut was too hesitant, separating the dermis but scarcely touching the muscle beneath. The blood that came was sluggish, lifeless. Gary groaned and wept, and forced himself to repeat the motion. He pressed harder this time, piercing the abdominal wall and drawing upward with steady pressure from the edge of her pubic mound over the rim of her navel.
The second time Gwen’s womb split open with a wet melon sound. Gary gagged and kept going, lengthening the breach. Gwen’s body sagged, relieved of the stress of containment. Gary moaned and kept cutting.
The placenta became visible, a spongy pink-red mass already sloughing from the wall of the womb. Gary finished the cut and dropped the knife, the tears streaming from his eyes.
Hands trembling, he parted the folds of flesh.
And reached inside his wife.
“Oh please…” Gary keened, tearing through the diaphanous veil of tissue. “Please…” He grasped the infant, cradling its head as he scooped under its back.
And pulled their baby free.
The child was a deep pinkish red, smeared head to toe with afterbirth. “It’s a girl, Gwen,” he murmured, tears coming now as he cradled the infant in his hands. “Spike is a little girl.”
And at the moment, Gary felt the entire universe pinwheeling on its axis, stars and planets realigning themselves around their new center, in the very heart of Hell.
Which he held, at this moment, in his bloody, battered hands.
His daughter moved, little limbs spasming from the rude shock of emergence. Gary’s heart stopped. Something was wrong.
She was not breathing.
“NO!” he cried, heart sledgehammering, feeling her squirming struggle for life. He saw her turn a dark plum color, her tiny features contorting in panic. He looked closer and saw the little plugs of mucus damming her nostrils.
Without hesitation, he brought her face to his lips and sucked the plugs out, tasting salt and slime, then spat them on the floor. Then he turned her over and slapped her; another, thicker plug dislodged from her throat.
The blockage fell away then; Gary watched, stunned, as her airways opened up and she took her first breath.
Then returned it, with a raw cry of life.
“YES!” Gary wailed, sobbing now, cradling his little girl in his arms. “YES!” as he swaddled her, using one of the quilts from under Gwen’s legs to wipe away the blood and afterbirth, expose her clean pink infant skin.
Her skin, which instantly speckled with a billion dots of red.
Her skin, through which the viscid poison oozed from every single pore…
And Gary Taylor wiped her down. Then he did it again. Then he did it again. He wiped and he wiped to keep up with the flow, scrubbing a slate that would never be clean. Long after his mind was gone. His purpose forgotten. His life turned to ashes.
Cleaning up after the sins of the fathers, too late.
While the baby screamed into the night.
CHAPTER SIXTY
The Wolf’s Head Nuclear Generating Station melted down at three fifty-four, eastern standard time. It was the final straw. When the core breached the reactor and hit upward of three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, it slagged a hole through the ten-foot-thick concrete-and-rebar lining of the containment vessel and kept right on going.
Burning its way to the center of the earth.
Two hundred feet down, the core hit an underground spring. The water was waiting for it. Molten day and liquid night met with a kiss, deep in the folds of the earth. The plume born of their joining rocketed back to the surface, blew the lid off the containment building. A lethal radioactive cloud rose five hundred feet into the sky, annihilating the ones who had fought to contain it.
Then it spread its wings and rode the prevailing winds.
The winds blew around and around the world.
So, too, was the underground spring inextricably bound to the bloodstream of Earth: an unseen and unbroken flow, feeding springs and creeks and rivers and oceans for hundreds of thousands of miles around.
As above, so below.
And on the New World’s surface, so neatly in between, the exodus began. One hundred and eighty-eight thousand souls, saying good-bye to Paradise as they fanned out across the hardened concrete arteries of the old world. Each one carrying the seeds of the future within it, and nothing to stand in their way.
On I-83, en route to the nation’s capital, Austin Deitz and Lydia Vickers led the way. Deitz remained at the fore, so that the screaming, eternally-suffering heads of industry would be sure to miss nothing of what they had wrought.
Inside the truck, Deitz drove in silence. A strange peace had settled over his soul. The jagged lips, unfeeling still, had evolved into a smile. He could feel Jennie’s everywhere presence, within and without. Tiny, delicate mushrooms sprang forth by the thousands. Covering his body.
Keeping him warm.
The Scuzzbug, too, had flourished, become a radiant flagship for the new regime. Its fuzz-covered surface was livid, alive. Vile, organic banners and sentient streamers flapped behind it, extensions of its cold metal flesh.
Inside sat Lydia, intensely mad and grinning from ear to ear to ear: the original Overmind majorette, cheerleading the boisterous procession. There was a future, after all, and it was here. Her dozen limbs were living proof. They kicked out through the windows with pep rally abandon, waving slick gray pom poms of rippling skin that waggled at one hundred miles per hour.
To the halls of justice, to the seat of government, to the highest office in the land, the victorious malformed hordes of Overmind descended. They had come to show their appreciation. It was payback time. For a job well done.
From there, it all went down in a matter of days.
And that, as
they say, was the end of that.
PART EIGHT
PARABLE
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful blue world, dancing and spinning at the heart of all creation.
Her name was Gaia, which meant “Goddess of the Earth.”
Of all the planets in the dance, Gaia was the most abundant, the most vibrant with life. So many colors adorned her surface; so many hopes and dreams played across her face; so many forms sprang up from her imagination that it seemed as though surely her light would never fade. And the dance would never end.
Then one morning, she woke up crawling with cancer.
It was a whole new ball game.
The envelope, please.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book differs from our others primarily in the extent to which we owe our major players. Of the usual list of suspects, special thanks to Richard Monaco and Adele Leone, who went above and beyond the call; and to Janna Silverstein, for her editorial eye.
Endless love and thanks to Marianne (for every single thing and boy were there a lot of ‘em, darlin’); to Lori (for the decade and the dreams); to Lisa (for love, in the life after); to Melanie and Mikey (for being entirely too cool, and lending us much-needed hope for the future); and to good ol’ Uncle Fred (who was always there when we needed her).
Specific and heartfelt kudos to Mickey Halper, whose insights into electronic media, local politics and motorcycle maintenence inform this book to the core. God bless, bubs. You know the deal.
Additional thanks to: July, for true-life sagas; Felicia, for hospital specs; Mystery K and Mystery D, for the skinny on nukes and 911; Linda, again, for a billion concrete acts of beneficence; Greg Landis, for helping put us on the midnight dumping trail; Blaine Quickel, for the smalltown low-down; and all you nutsy funsters out there, writing those Letters to the Editor.
Beyond that, hats off to Unca Pat, D-boy, R.C., Clive, Poppy, our folks, Scott Wolfman and Wolfman Productions, Pete & Gail, Pat LoBrutto, Gary, Kathy Becker, Leslie & Adam, Mary, Steve, Doug Winter, Steve Niles, Peter Atkins, Nick Vince, Barbie Wilde, Kathy, Ellen, Phil, the rival gangs at KNB and Optic Nerve, Tom Savini, George and Chris Romero, the cast and crew from Nightbreed and Night of the Living Dead, Cindy, Todd, Clarence, Mark, Julie, Amber, Buddy, Jesus, Jen, the folks from Outer Limits, Dangerous Visions, Forbidden Planet, and the Fantasy Inn (U.K.), our Bookland buddies and all the other friends we failed, like the bastards we are, to mention.
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