by Edward Lee
Dellin had ignited the fluid with a spring-loaded flint-igniter; Clare remembered using them to light Bunsen burners in college lab classes.
The thing tramped out of the room, bellowing and burning harder, then:
Pandemonium.
Dellin charged Winster, had his hand around his throat. “You should remember what you keep in your store rooms, Harry,” he said, choking him. “It burned the wood out around the lock with sulphuric acid and just torched up your creation with phenol—”
Clare grabbed Adam’s wrist and could think of nothing better to do than bite it. Adam shouted. He dropped the gun, and it clattered across the floor. She was reaching for the gun stuck in his belt with her other hand, but then he grabbed her throat with his big hand, began to squeeze.
Clare was shocked by his strength, instantly locked up in terror. His fingers compressed like vise-grips, were cutting off the blood supply to her brain. In just a few seconds, her vision was dimming. A thought struggled across her mind: Can’t let the fucker kill me—not like this—
But she was going limp.
“Lights out, honeybunch—”
It was impulse rather than volition that sent Clare’s thumb into Adam’s eye. His hand flew off her neck and suddenly he was bent over, holding his face.
“You BITCH! You poked out my fuckin’ EYE!”
“Clare!” Dellin yelled. “Get out of here while you can!”
More phenol on the floor had ignited—now the tiles were burning, the black smoke filling up the room. Clare ran, not to escape but to search for a weapon so she could help Dellin. She raced into the next room but before she could make an earnest search—
“Damn him!”
She heard Adam’s footsteps right behind her.
The room was another lab; she noticed a table with several computer monitors on it—so she dove under it.
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, you little blond bitch,” Adam’s voice rumbled. “I’m gonna do a job on you that’d make the devil proud…”
Clare squashed herself against the wall under the table. She could see Adam, from the waist down, coming closer, and her gun wasn’t in his belt anymore, which meant that it was now in his hand.
What a stupid move, she realized in an instant dread. Now I’m trapped under here. All he needed to do was bend over and look down…
Think of something! she screamed at herself. She could see Adam’s boots—they were walking right for her.
With both hands she grabbed a power cord to one of the monitors just above her; she yanked down hard several times. On top of her, she heard the monitor smack into the wall.
“There she is—”
That last yank managed to rip the cord’s connections out of the monitor. Now she was holding the cord with its bare ends exposed, the other end still plugged into the wall.
“Come out, come out wherever you—”
Clare slipped out from under the table, was lying on her back between Adam’s legs. He looked down, grinned, pointed the gun—
Then screamed bloody murder.
Clare had reached up with one hand, grabbed his belt, while her other hand jammed the bare wires into his crotch. The raw electric charge crackled; she could see white-blue arcs jumping around his pubic area. He stood there, screaming and shuddering, and soon his groin began to smoke, the potency of the charge no doubt amplified by all those metal piercings in his genitals.
Eventually, Adam collapsed.
Terrific, she thought. Adam was dead, his heart halted by electrocution, but when he’d fallen, the gun slid under a set of heavy shelves, irretrievable. She pulled herself up, gave him a final glance. His crotch was smoking. One eye hung out of the socket, the other was blood-red from hemorrhage.
“Go fuck yourself, Adam,” she said to the corpse. “And pardon my fuckin’ French.”
She ran back into the other room where Adam had dropped the first gun but she could scarcely see now from all the smoke.
“Dellin! Where are you!”
There was no answer, just the crackling of flame. She edged in closer, squinted, and then she saw them.
Shit!
Joyce had regained consciousness, was screaming for help as she lay strapped to the table. Stuart Winster had Dellin backed up against the wall with a crow bar across his neck.
He’s killing him!
Again, it was instinct more than any premeditation on Clare’s part. She grabbed Stuart by the hair from behind, jerked him to the right with all her might. His head banged hard against the grooved metal table. Dellin lunged forward to help, pinned his shoulders down. Meanwhile, Clare had already brought the IRMT nozzle. She jammed it right against the front of his forehead.
Then she smacked the DISCHARGE button.
The grotesque two-fingered hand reached up, grabbed Clare’s throat and squeezed but Clare just gritted her teeth and took it, all the while Stuart began to shudder on the table as the device slowly cauterized random nerve centers in his brain. The pincer-like hand shuddered, too, around her neck, then slid off.
“It think he’s done,” Dellin said.
“Not quite. I want this sick son of a bitch well-done,” Clare said. Stuart lay drooling, immobile but still quite alive. Dellin opened the desiccator hatch, and Clare gave Stuart a little pull and he rolled right in.
Then Dellin closed the hatch.
“Come on, this place is burning up quick,” he said.
Clare was unstrapping Joyce, helping her off the table. “Here, take her and get yourselves out of here!”
“Where are you going!”
Clare picked Adam’s pistol off the floor, grabbed a flashlight.
“I’m going after Harry!” she shouted back and disappeared into the smoke.
««—»»
It was either intuition or luck that told her which way Winster would go. When she got out into the hallway, she almost turned toward the exit door, thought about it for a second, then turned in the opposite direction and went for the ladder that descended into the great sewerpipe. Immediately, she saw the footprints in the muck, leading away.
She didn’t waste time.
She ran.
When she got to the dead rodent, she leapt over its collie-sized carcass, not stopping to look too closely at the smaller vermin that were now feasting on it. But she did remember what Adam had said when they were down here earlier: We’re in its home. There’s probably more of ’em, lots more.
Clare hoped she didn’t get the opportunity to find out if this was correct.
Winster’s footsteps kept going straight when she arrived at the next ladder and outlet—the one that rose up into the basement of Mrs. Grable’s cottage. He didn’t go up there—he kept going straight.
So that’s what Clare did, even though it had just occurred that she had no idea where the pipeway ended.
Her boots slopped through deepening muck. She’d traversed another hundred yards, but down here, in the stinking dark, it seemed like a mile.
Go back, a voice in her head tried to seduce her. Go back, find Dellin and Joyce, get away from this place
“No,” she answered herself.
She wasn’t going to give up. She couldn’t.
Winster had come down into this tunnel, and she wasn’t going to stop until she found him.
But after just another few yards, something jeopardized her determination.
Damn!
The tunnel branched off into a fork.
By now she was walking in muck ankle-deep. It wasn’t holding footprints.
Which way?
Just forget about it. Go back!
Another voice, then—not her own—made the decision for her.
“I’m here, Clare,” Harold Winster said.
Where the tunnel branched to the right, Clare aimed her flashlight. She could see him, just barely, about sixty or seventy feet away.
“Neither of us can run all night,” his voice echoed, “and you know full well how dangerous this sewer is.
I’m taking a big chance here, Clare, hoping that I’m a little bit out of range of your gun.”
Actually he was. She had a bead on him now, but it was a real long-shot.
“Let’s make a little deal,” Winster said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” she nearly laughed. She cocked her pistol, held the bead on his body’s center of mass—the most practical target in a low-light long-range firing condition.
“Before you fire a volley of bullets at me, please hear me out.”
Clare’s finger was about to squeeze the trigger, but then she paused.
“I must seem like the most evil man in the world to you,” he intoned.
“Yeah.”
“But if you kill me, all you’ll be serving is a rather foolish primal emotion: revenge. I’m not being trite when I tell you that I’m on the verge of a break-though that can change our society—for the better.”
Do I really want to hear this?
“Bullshit, Winster. If I kill you, I’ll be making the world a safer place.”
“You may believe that, to yourself. But you’re letting your hatred obstruct your objectivity. You can’t even begin to know the good things that can result from our research…”
But this was just more rhetoric, and all of a sudden, it struck her.
Why did he stop? Why didn’t he just keep going? It didn’t make sense that he’d stop to confront her, knowing she was armed. Then she thought back to when they were in the clinic, how Clare herself groped for any distraction to keep Winster from hitting that discharge button.
He’s doing the same thing to me now, she realized. He’s playing for time.
But time for what?
Time for someone to sneak up on me from be—
Clare spun around and shrieked. She only had time to get off one round—into the middle of the huge, taloned hand that slammed down on her. The bullet went right through the hand but the thing that the hand belonged to didn’t care in the least.
The gun was wrenched away, and Clare was grabbed by the throat and raised upward—
smack!
Her head was slammed into the top of the pipe.
She went completely limp, then was dropped into the muck.
“Well done!” Winster celebrated.
Clare was too dizzy now to see with any great clarity, but she didn’t really need to see to realize that this would be an appalling end. The clone’s abominable body odor was much worse now that it mingled with the stench of burnt flesh. The face, chest, and shoulders were crusted with char, but the black eyes gleamed wetly in their slits.
God in heaven…
The shot to the head was beginning to wear off, but this seemed the cruelest truth of all: she’d be regaining her senses just in time to feel the full force of this most monstrous rape.
The thing tore open her top. Then it reached down to tear open her pants—
“Look out!” Winster shouted.
Clare, in the horrid daze, didn’t understand why Winster was suddenly bellowing. The monster’s hands came off her body; the angled, blackened face looked up. Clare brought her hands to her ears, screamed at the nightmarish shock of muzzleflash and deafening shots—
The clone’s huge head exploded into fragments before her eyes. Lumpy brain matter flew out of one side and splattered against the pipewall. Clare counted five pistols shots that had been fired.
It was Rick who was helping her up.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of this shit-hole.”
Clare’s life had just been inexplicably saved, but her emotions remained raw, inflamed. There was still one more thing to do.
Clare picked up her own pistol out of the slime, and grabbed the flashlight.
“Clare, forget it,” Rick tried to talk sense. “He’s too far away—”
Winster had turned back around, was running away. She could barely see him down range.
She took a breath, let half of it out, and—
BAM!
One shot. In the gun-sight, Winster fell.
“Jesus, you got him,” Rick said. “Now can we go?”
But Clare ran forward, deeper into the pipeway. She had to finish him.
Rick was pulling her back when Winster started screaming. They were still several yards away from where the bullet had dropped Winster.
“Holy shit!” Rick shouted. “Look at those things! Clare, we’ve got to—”
“—out of here!” she finished for him, and they both turned and ran.
Winster’s screams followed them all the way back to the ascending ladder, and when they climbed into the late Mrs. Grable’s basement, and then ran like maniacs out of the house, jumped in the Blazer and spun wheels out of there, Clare thought she could still hear Winster’s screams.
In that last glimpse of him down in the sewer, she and Rick had seen several hairless, collie-sized rats very meticulously eating Colonel Harold T. Winster alive.
««—»»
They were driving off the grounds. Rick was at the wheel. They’d picked Dellin and Joyce up on the road just past the clinic.
The clinic was an inferno.
No one said anything for a while.
Joyce sat up front. Clare was sitting in back with Dellin, his arm around her as the shock wore off. It wouldn’t all wear off—ever—but she regained a level head fairly quickly.
“Rick,” she asked. “I forgot. Thanks for saving my life.”
“Sure,” was all he said, Joyce hugging him.
“Winster showed us a tape from one of the security cameras. We saw Stuart give you both barrels in the belly.”
Rick pulled up his shirt, showing the pocked Kevlar vest. “My mama didn’t raise no dumbell. But I thought I was a goner for sure when the retarded kid threw me in the lake. That eel or snake or whatever it was had me around the neck, dragging me down. But it let go pretty fast after I shot its head off.”
Thank God, Clare thought.
Joyce was still shook up. Clare knew it would take her some time to get back to normal. Dellin’s arm around Clare was almost desperate.
“I still can’t believe what Winster was doing back there,” he said.
Clare remembered the stink of the thing, and its sheer hulking weight on her back in the tunnel. “Believe it,” she murmured. “What happens now?”
“I don’t have a clue,” Dellin said. “And to tell you the truth, I don’t even want to think about it right now.”
“But where are we going to go?” Joyce asked.
“I know a great place,” Rick answered.
“Where?”
“Any motherfucking place but here…”
Even when they were back out on the main road, off the official grounds of Fort Alachua Park, they could see the fire raging in the woods.
Through her exhaustion, one last thought occurred to Clare:
I wonder what the master sample was. Winster never said…
But the thought dissolved, and she was asleep in Dellin’s arms as they headed for the bridge that would take them to the interstate.
— | — | —
Epilogue
FEDERAL LAND GRID S27-0078
CENTRAL FLORIDA
JUNE 1995
“Professor?”
The voice seemed distant, but the face from which it came was a blur right in front of him.
“Professor Fredrick?”
Fredrick’s eyes were wide open, focusing. He lay prone somewhere. Where’s the sun? he wondered, though he wasn’t quite sure why he would think that.
A hand gently nudged him.
“Professor Fredrick, don’t be alarmed. You’re going to be all right…”
More of his vision was sharpening. He looked down and saw that he lay on a cot, and there was a man kneeling before him, a fairly non-descript man save for the white arm-band with the red cross on it.
A doctor, he realized, or an EMT.
The man could see that Fredrick was conscious now. “I said you’r
e going to be all right, sir, but I regret to inform you that you’re the only survivor. Everyone else was killed, I’m afraid.”
Fredrick didn’t know what he was talking about but even the grave message didn’t set in. When he looked around he saw that he was in a tent. Several other medical technicians milled silently about, and there were other cots there too, but the people who lay on them were covered fully by white sheets.
“It’s a miracle we were able to get you out.”
Fredrick reached up through a wave of pain, grabbed the man roughly by the collar. “What in God’s name happened? Where am I?”
“Sir, you’re in an emergency field hospital,” he was told. “Can’t you remember anything? You were down in that cavern, with the other archaeologists.”
His hand released the collar, and more shock bloomed.
The cavern. The cenote. We found an original Ponoye Indian cenote—and the mummified bodies…
“There was a cave-in, sir. The forward part of the cavern collapsed.”
When Fredrick gulped, he swallowed ancient dust. “Dales, my assist—”
“I’m afraid he was killed, sir.”
Tears sluiced through more dust on his face. “I had half a dozen students down there with me. They’re all—”
“They were all killed, Professor. I’m sorry.”
Fredrick stared at the ceiling of the tent, more tears welling. The mummies, be damned. Suddenly the greatest archaeological discovery in the history of the state of Florida meant nothing. Everything would’ve been destroyed in the cave-in but that didn’t matter now. His students were like his children, and Dales was the closest thing he’d ever had to a real son.
Dead, came the bare thought. Dead because of my obsessions.
Fredrick only wished he could’ve died along with them.
A sudden jolt of adrenalin grabbed his heart when memories began to surface. They’d been in the cenote, past the dolmen on which the Indian girl had been sacrificed to some nameless god. But the priests of the ritual had been sacrificed too—manually dismembered. The 10,000-year-old scene had been too confusing, but Fredrick knew the trimmings of the ritual. An incarnation rite, he remembered. And then—
