The Homing

by John Saul

  Now he glanced at his watch.

  Quarter to three.

  Three more hours, and it would start getting light.

  A shout interrupted his thoughts, then another. When Shannon looked up into the hills, he saw the beams of several flashlights crisscrossing as they searched one of the slopes.

  Flipping on the powerful searchlight mounted on the roof of his squad car, he began moving the beam slowly back and forth, working it up the hillside in a steady pattern. A moment later Karen Owen appeared next to him, clutching the halogen spotlight from the pickup truck.

  “Did someone see something?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t know,” Shannon replied, not looking at her as he concentrated on keeping the pattern of his searchlight tight.

  “Molly!” Karen called out. “Ben! Where are you?” Turning on the brilliant halogen light, she sent a bright beam all the way to the top of the hill, working it slowly along the crest.

  Suddenly, at the very edge of the beam, she thought she saw a flicker of movement.

  She held the light still for a moment, then slowly moved it back the other way. “Molly!” she called out again. “Molly, it’s Mommy!”

  And then—miraculously, it seemed to Karen—a tiny figure appeared in the center of the spotlight.

  A tiny figure, wearing clothes that Karen recognized instantly.

  A tiny figure that waved. And then she spotted another figure.

  “It’s them!” Karen shouted. “Oh, God! It’s Molly! And Ben!”

  Mark Shannon shifted his own light until its beam held steady on the two children. “Go,” he said. “I won’t let them out of the light for a second.”

  Karen, though, didn’t even hear him, for she was already running, stumbling, up the hill, Marge Larkin scrambling after her.

  Ten minutes later, their children in their arms, Karen and Marge were back.

  Five minutes after that, in the safety of the Owens’ brightly lit kitchen, Molly and Ben told the story of what they had seen that night.

  And as they listened, Karen Owen and Marge Larkin began to cry.

  CHAPTER 30

  Sara McLaughlin stumbled along the track that was now only barely visible in the faltering moonlight. She no longer had any idea of how long it had been since she fled from the hospital, let alone where she was or where she was going.

  There was only the imperative need emanating from somewhere deep within her, driving her on, compelling her to move toward an unknown goal she could not comprehend. In her haste, she tripped, her right foot—which had been bleeding steadily since she slashed her toe on a broken beer bottle an hour before—smashing into a rough fragment of granite. Sara grabbed reflexively at a large bush next to the trail, and the long thorns studding its twisting branches pierced her skin, sinking deep into the flesh of her palm.

  Staggering, she lurched two more steps before losing her balance completely and dropping to the ground, scraping the skin from her left knee and twisting her right ankle as she fell. For a moment she lay where she was, her heart pounding, her lungs working feverishly to pump oxygen into her body.

  Despite her bleeding foot, the stinging punctures in her left hand, and the throbbing pain in her ankle, Sara struggled to her feet and moved on, leaving the trail now to cut cross-country, her numbed mind oblivious to the jagged rocks and sharp twigs that tore at her feet, stripping the skin away until she was running on the raw tissue of her soles, every step so painful that another person—one whose mind still possessed some shred of sanity—wouldn’t have been able to walk at all.

  But Sara’s mind had stopped functioning long ago, though her body kept moving, driven far beyond the bounds of endurance by the inhuman force dwelling within it, a force now grown so large that her slim body could barely sustain it; a force that now, responding to the directions of an intelligence far greater than the sum of its individual parts, was embarked on a last desperate attempt to rejoin the great mass of its being, and to search out a new host upon which to feed.

  Sara McLaughlin, her mind and body totally subjugated to the demands from within, stumbled on through the night.

  “Are you mad at me, Mommy?” Molly Owen asked, her voice quavering, her eyes moist.

  They were upstairs, and though the sky was just turning gray with the first faint light of dawn, Karen was tucking her daughter into bed. As Molly’s question echoed in her head, she laid her palm on the little girl’s cheek and shook her head. “I guess not,” she said. “But you have to promise me never to do anything like that again, darling. Don’t you know how frightened I was when I woke up and found you gone?”

  Molly’s chin trembled. “I wanted to surprise you,” she said. “We didn’t know we were going to get lost! We were just trying to help!”

  “I know.” Karen sighed, remembering once more the strange story Molly and Ben had told of finding a valley far up in the hills, where their brother and sister had been in a cave, surrounded by insects.

  Millions and millions of them, Molly had assured her.

  The story couldn’t possibly be true, of course, though surely they must have seen something up there. But what?

  And what had happened to Bailey?

  Karen still felt a chill as she recalled that terrible howl she’d heard a few hours ago.

  A howl that had been cut short, as if whatever uttered it had suddenly fallen victim.

  To what?

  A swarm of bees attacking it as they had attacked the mare a few days ago?

  A feeling deep in her gut told Karen that it had, indeed, been the big friendly mongrel with the constantly wagging tail whom she had heard screaming in terror and agony in the silence of the night. That same feeling in her gut whispered to her that whatever had attacked Bailey was nothing the dog had ever experienced before, something even more frightening than the scene Molly and Ben had described.

  Part of Karen wanted to know what it had been, but a greater part of her hoped she would never find out. “I know you were just trying to help,” she reassured Molly now, kissing her on the forehead and trying to keep her voice from betraying her fear. “But the way to help isn’t to go up into the hills in the middle of the night by yourself, and I want you to promise me you’ll never do it again.”

  Molly’s big eyes fixed on her own. “I promise,” she whispered. “Cross my heart, and hope to die.”

  No, Karen silently said to herself. Don’t ever wish to die, darling. Not ever. But when she spoke, she managed to conceal from her little girl most of the pain and fear she was feeling. “Then everything’s all right,” she said. “Now I want you to go to sleep, and when you wake up, maybe—”

  Maybe Julie will be here, was what she’d been about to say, but she could no longer bring herself even to suggest such a thing, for deep in her heart she no longer believed it.

  “—maybe things will be all right again,” she finished. But things wouldn’t be all right, not if there were any truth at all to the children’s bizarre tale, which sounded to Karen more like something they must have seen on television than anything they could possibly have actually witnessed up in the hills. Yet the children’s voices had trembled with fright, even in the safety of the farmhouse, and their words had the ring of truth, rather than the hollow sound of a story they’d made up to extricate themselves from trouble. “Sleep, baby,” Karen crooned. “Just go to sleep.”

  Staying with Molly until she finally drifted into an exhausted sleep, Karen at last turned off the light. She slipped out into the corridor just as Marge Larkin was coming out of the next room, where she’d been tucking Ben in. Neither woman spoke until they were both at the bottom of the stairs. Then Karen turned to face Jeff’s mother.

  “Do you think we’re ever going to see Julie and Jeff and Kevin again?” she asked.

  Marge hesitated, then shook her head grimly. “If we do,” she said, her words barely audible, “I’m not sure we’ll be able to recognize them.” Her voice, then her whole body,
began to tremble. “They’re dead,” she said. “Oh, Lord help me, Karen, I just know it. I can feel it!”

  Karen put her arms around Marge Larkin. “I know,” she whispered into Marge’s ear. “I feel the same way.”

  For a long moment the two women stood silently together, supporting one another in their mutual grief.

  In the basement of Carl Henderson’s house, Ellen Filmore raised her head from the microscope, stretched her aching back, then rubbed her eyes with her fists. Refusing Shannon’s attempts to send them away, she and Roberto Muñoz had worked together all night long on the chance that they could learn something—anything—about Henderson’s creation that might help the infected children.

  From Henderson himself they had heard little. So deep was their concentration that for minutes at a time they would forget about him completely, until the silence of the lab was suddenly interrupted by one of his sobbing pleas to be released from behind the locked door of the darkroom.

  Pleas that neither of them had even been tempted to heed.

  “Have you got that lung tissue ready?” Ellen asked Roberto, who was preparing slides for her as fast as he could.

  “Almost,” he replied. He carefully cut a tiny tissue sample from the rat’s lung, transferred it to one of the thin glass slides they’d found on a shelf above the counter, then applied a drop of dye to it. Covering it with a second slide, he passed it over to Ellen. “Seems like this was a lot easier back in school,” he said. The rat’s internal organs had been so thoroughly destroyed that it was only barely possible to identify them.

  Ellen Filmore pressed her eye to the microscope, adjusted the light and the focus, then found what she was looking for.

  Under the magnification she could clearly see the alveoli. Though a few of them still looked perfectly normal, most of them did not. Rather than being the tiny empty sacs used by the rat’s lungs to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, many of the alveoli she was now looking at were occupied by something else.

  Something that, though invisible to the naked eye, was easily identifiable under the microscope.

  Insects.

  The final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

  Throughout her long night’s work, she’d begun to understand the life cycle of the parasitic colony that had infested the rat’s body before it died.

  In its blood she’d found something that looked to her very much like a larval insect form, which she had assumed was what Barry Sadler had found in the blood samples she’d taken from Julie Spellman and Jeff Larkin.

  The larvae, though, seemed to have metamorphosed into various kinds of adults.

  In the rat’s intestines, she found what appeared to be some kind of workers, tending to eggs.

  In its heart she’d found a queen, surrounded by attendants, which produced a constant stream of eggs, laying them directly into the bloodstream, which transported them to the nursery in the intestines. As the eggs hatched into larvae, they returned to the circulatory system, apparently taking their nourishment directly from the host’s blood. Then, as they entered the pupal stage, they redistributed themselves once again, larval royal attendants returning to the heart, and nurses to the intestines.

  But she’d found other kinds of adults as well.

  The rat’s brain had been filled with them, and though she had no idea what their purpose had been, the results were clear to Ellen under the microscope: they had been destroying the brain, burrowing through it, devouring it cell by cell. As she’d studied the damage the colony had done, Ellen felt a growing sense of horror, for the destruction of the brain had not been random. Rather, the organisms worked their way carefully through the tissue, riddling it with tiny passages so it almost resembled a microscopic anthill.

  The rat might have felt nothing, for a while.

  Then it would have begun experiencing phantom stimuli as the parasites devoured more and more nerve cells.

  It could have felt pleasure, but more probably experienced excruciating pain.

  Before it died, it would have gone both blind and deaf, for both the optic and aural nerve centers were gone.

  Then, as the colony multiplied, expanded, and continued feeding, the creature’s mental processes would inevitably have been affected. But the colony, behaving with the same peculiar intelligence as a hive of bees or a nest of ants, had begun their feeding with noncritical areas, leaving the most vital parts of the brain intact so their host would survive as long as possible. Indeed, the autonomic nervous system and the portions of the brain controlling it seemed still to be almost intact.

  The question, though, was what would happen when the host inevitably died. It was when that question formulated in Ellen Filmore’s mind that she finally turned to the lungs.

  And found her answer.

  The adult forms that were still present in the alveoli of the rat’s lungs were different from any of the others.

  For one thing, they had wings.

  Wings, she assumed, that would fall off soon after the insects had taken their maiden flight, just as the wings of termites and ants are shed once the colony has split.

  As she examined the alveoli more closely, she discovered that even among the adult forms in the rat’s lungs, there were variations.

  She discovered three pupae that were much larger than the others; these, she assumed, would be queens.

  All of them were equipped with what appeared to be sharp proboscises.

  Ellen Filmore shuddered, imagining what would happen if an uninfected animal came close enough to an infected one just as the swarm had prepared itself to split.

  She could imagine a cloud of the microscopic insects erupting out the infected lungs, riding the air currents for no more than—what?

  A foot?

  Perhaps only an inch or two?

  In an instant the attackers would bore through the skin and be safely into the bloodstream, ready to colonize a new host.

  Colonize it, and kill it.

  Still, as she examined the rat, Ellen Filmore found a few anomalies.

  What, actually, had killed the rodent?

  As she and Roberto dissected it, its brain didn’t appear to be fatally damaged.

  And why had the exhaust filter on the acrylic box in which the rat was held been covered with a film of the insects, all of whom were dead?

  Obviously, the creatures couldn’t survive outside a mammalian host for very long—from the observations she’d already made, they weren’t adapted for anything else.

  Then why had they deserted the host, only to die?

  Because the rat was dying itself?

  Exhausted in mind and body, she finally straightened up once more. “Come on,” she told Roberto. “Let’s go upstairs and see if Henderson has any coffee in his kitchen.”

  Roberto nodded toward the closed door at the far end of the basement, from which they had heard no sound at all for the last hour. “What about him?”

  Ellen’s eyes hardened as she remembered the hours she’d spent behind that door, locked in the darkness. Once again she felt the terror that had paralyzed her as the spiders crept up her leg. Now, as she thought about what this man had unleashed on the teenagers of Pleasant Valley, the terror she’d felt earlier dissolved once more into cold rage. She was tempted to cross the room herself, turn off the lights, and release some of Carl Henderson’s specimens into the dark chamber to torture him as the spiders had tormented her. A moment later, though, she put the impulse down. “Leave him there,” she told Roberto. “The way he’s built that room, he won’t get out until Shannon comes to take him to jail.” She led the way up the steep flight of stairs, blinking in surprise as she stepped through the door into the entry hall and realized that dawn was starting to break.

  In Carl Henderson’s kitchen, she poked through the cupboards in search of a jar of instant coffee. Then she spotted a coffeemaker sitting on the kitchen sink. “Am I going to turn that on, or are you?” she asked Roberto.

  Roberto grinned. “
Sit, Doc. You look even more beat than I feel.” But as he searched for a clean filter to put into the machine, he became aware of a noise.

  A low humming, as if there were a swarm of bees somewhere nearby. When he looked out the window, he saw it.

  “Holy shit, Doc,” he breathed. “What the hell is that?”

  Moving next to him, Ellen Filmore, too, gazed out the window. For a moment she wasn’t certain what he was talking about. Then, in the steadily brightening light, she saw it.

  Far off in the distance, hovering above the hills that lay beyond the field behind Carl Henderson’s house, was what looked at first glance like a dark cloud. As she focused on it, her ears began to pick up the same sound Roberto had heard a moment earlier.

  Insects.

  Millions and millions of them, billowing out of the hills, rising into the sky, their sound droning louder by the moment.

  Ellen Filmore’s eyes widened as she realized what the steadily rising hum meant. “Come on,” she told Roberto, grabbing his arm and starting toward the kitchen door. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Get out?” Roberto said. “But—”

  “Can’t you hear them?” Ellen asked. “Can’t you see them? They’re coming right toward us!”

  Roberto tore his eyes away from the doctor to look out the window once more.

  The cloud of insects appeared to be growing by the second, and now Roberto realized Ellen was right—already they were beginning to advance into the field. As he watched, the fence that marked its far boundary disappeared into the dark mass, exactly as if it had been swallowed up. He suddenly remembered his grandfather telling him about a plague of locusts that had swept through his village in Mexico when the old man had been a boy. Like night, in the middle of the day, Roberto. You couldn’t see, you couldn’t hear, you could hardly breathe. We thought we were going to die. We all thought we were going to die. Now the memory of his grandfather’s words catapulted Roberto into action. The coffee forgotten, he followed Ellen Filmore through the foyer to the front door and outside.

  “My car!” Ellen shouted, running to the driver’s side of her Buick. “At least we can call someone!”