The taste of tar, acid, rot from the underside of a hundred dead logs filled his mouth and nose. He would have eaten an oily clod of dirt to cleanse it. Luther recoiled and Will spat the still spasming insect back into the boy’s mouth where its lower half was already dying. In its death throes the wasp’s abdomen stung Luther’s tongue, the inside of his cheek, the roof of his mouth and soft palate. The boy rolled away from Will, clawing at his own face and grunting. Luther hooked the insect’s remains from his mouth and stood.
Will gained his feet and drew Smaug. The headlights from the jeep gave him a white aura and illuminated his target: Luther Becket, slow now and confused without his driver. Will leveled his gun at a boy who should have been able to grow up, get a job, fall in love. Two-Bears spat in the dust and cocked the hammer back. “C’mere,” he said.
Chapter 35
The Najarian house stained the night. The once elegant Victorian used to sit on the corner like a prim southern belle in a hundred yards of bubbling crinoline, all perfect landscaping and gingerbread. But sometimes evil shows its mass and bears down on a place, begins to push it through into somewhere else. Will parked the jeep across the street and leaned against the door panel. How in hell had he not seen it before? The house was fucking leering at him, daring him to charge in and save the day. It would be okay, all he had to do was his best and the universe would take care of him because that’s what was fair and right and bullshit. The house was like a slow-eyed teenager, egging Will into a fist fight while hiding a switchblade behind its back.
Headlights flashed to his left.
Will waved at the Subaru squatting a few houses down. The doors flung open and what was definitely not the A-Team piled out. Two-Bears couldn’t help but smile for a second—Loraine, pear-shaped and hard with her (and it was hers now) 12-gauge at port arms; Kiddo, galumphing along in that awkward puppy gate, his limbs getting too big for his brain, a long kitchen knife in his belt like he was playing pirates; Darwin trotting behind, game as hell. And dear George, who after half a life of poisoning himself had gained back much of his vitality. Will had forgotten how tall his friend was and now that George had gained some weight, the spread of his shoulders was impressive. He looked like a football player again. Limping a little, but steady enough. The M16 was strapped across his back like he’d been born with it. (Well, to be fair, just about everyone from around here was born with some kind of firearm near to chubby little hand—can you say G’bless America?) The A-Team they weren’t, but damn, they might rate at least a B+.
Will leaned back against the jeep and crossed his arms over his chest. Kiddo drew up next to him and copied his posture right down to the disaffected smirk. Loraine stared at the house. George stared at Will.
“She’s in there man. We gotta’ move.”
“I know it, Georgie, but I reckon she’s not by herself.”
Kiddo asked, “How many people used to, you know, live here. In Shard, I mean?”
“Before The Fire?” George said.
“Yeah, and after.”
“There were almost a thousand folks in this town during its heyday,” George said. He didn’t like having his back to the house, felt like flies on his neck. He faced it and continued, “I suspect there were about thirty-five or forty of us as near as last month.” He took a big inhale of night air, filling his chest with honeysuckle and sulfur. “That sound about right to you, Sheriff? Around forty?”
Will was checking the cylinder of his revolver. He spun and flicked it shut with a flourish he’d practiced in alone his office hundreds of times. “It was exactly thirty-three not two weeks ago.”
Loraine spoke up, “You think most of them are in there?”
Will considered, nodded. “Maybe. I think it’s a little less more like. Folks seemed to’ve been drifting away from town over the past several days, not many, but some. When I went around the other day, there were a few cars missing.” He paused and shook out his hands. “But not enough to make this easy. There could be one or two of them in there, which is bad enough, but I get the feeling this is some kind of, I dunno’.”
“Nest,” Loraine said.
“Hive,” Kiddo corrected.
“Sure, hive. That fits,” Will said. “Freaks me out just a little more than I already was, but yeah. You sure Erica’s in there?”
George shrugged. “She has to be.”
Will looked at him a second. She has to be or what, Georgie? “Well, we can’t just go in there blasting away. There’s every chance we’d hit her by accident.”
“Where’s your pet nightmare giant spider when we need it?” George said.
“I’m sorry, my what? My pet? Are you fucking kidding me?” Will blushed. “Sorry, Kiddo. Sorry, Loraine.”
She waved him off, “At this point? Oh, please.”
“Seriously, though, Will. Can’t you, I don’t know, summon it or something?”
“No, George, I really can’t. Besides, I got the feeling Yïn’s probably back underground with the dragon.” He shook his head. Knee deep in quasi-possessed living dead and Will still couldn’t get his mind around a dragon. “I think that’s where we’re going to need to get to if we get through this.”
“Why?” Loraine asked. “I mean, can’t the dragon take care of itself?”
“If that were the case,” Will said, “I doubt any of us’d be here right about now.”
Darwin nosed the air and let out a yap toward the house. He looked up at Childe, his tail high and ears perked. “What’s up?” Kiddo asked. “You smell somethin’?” Childe took a deep pull of night air and his brow crinkled. He took another to be sure. The adults were arguing about who would go in which door or something when Kiddo interrupted, “Hey, guys?”
Loraine turned, “Not now, honey.”
“No, mom, seriously. I think I smell smoke. Darwin does, too.”
George put a hand on his shoulder, “That’s Shard, buddy. You’re pretty much always going to smell some species of smoke. You ought to be used to it by now.”
Kiddo shook him off. “No, Mr. Rhodes. It’s not the same thing.” He looked over at the Najarian house. “I think maybe that house is on fire.”
Will glanced over at the front porch while taking in a lungful of air through his nose. Something was burning and it wasn’t underground. He squinted and thought he caught a flirt of yellow through the kitchen window, like a woman in a dress rounding a corner. “I, uh, I think Kiddo’s right.”
That’s when the parlor windows blew out in a spray of little stars. The eyes of the house lit orange and flashed at them. The heat ran across the street and blew the hair off their foreheads. Will felt the spit on his lips dry, his skin tighten.
George screamed, “Erica!”
And everything went right straight to hell.
* * *
Erica never felt the butt of T.R.’s rifle connect with her skull. One moment she was watching herself writhing in the agony of George’s murder—the very picture of a hundred thousand women on the news in Gaza, in Iraq, in Harlem, beating their chests and shrieking for the loss—the next moment she was here. Here was nowhere: a vast dead plain of gray hardscrabble under a low, leaden sky. Everyone who has ever walked in a field of flowers or lay down in grass would know the place simply because of what it was not—it was the wastelands and it was forever.
She walked toward the horizon, away from the memory of George’s shy smile in the morning over coffee at his kitchen table, the Appalachian caramel of his voice. Her feet threw up little puffs of steel-colored dust as she trudged away from George’s strong hands on her body, the fine lines next to his eyes, her smile reflected in them. Head down, arms down, hair lank and swinging, Erica moved away from him because if she tasted even a trace of the feeling she’d found, she would go mad. The whole side of his face had been a sheet of blood and he had been still. Erica loosed a cry, a flutter of pain like a sparrow finding an open window in a warehouse. The strange atmosphere enveloped the sound and dropped it to the
earth.
She looked up. Earth. Did this place qualify for that descriptor? No, this was Planet Elsewhere. The clouds flowed in and out of each other in random currents, more smoke than vapor and with no wind to push them. Erica’s eyes followed an upside down creek of cloud toward the horizon. Now she marched with her head back and her mouth wide open, eyes on the roiling sky. George would’ve known what to call a cloud formation like that. Here was this guy living in the middle of nowhere who seemed to know a little something about everything. His mind emptied out on the pillow.
Erica stopped and squeezed her eyes shut. A guttural sound, like a hit to the stomach, lurched over her tongue. She shook her head to clear it of George, but he stayed, he held her. If she’d had a knife she would have opened her own chest to tear out the aching, beating thing. She opened her mouth to scream and opened her eyes.
It was good that she had stopped. What she thought was the horizon had been an optical illusion. She had marched herself to the razor edge of a high cliff. Erica gasped and looked down. A hundred feet down, a thousand feet, ten thousand and then… Not blackness, not darkness. Not even death. It was beyond the end of those things. And it pulled. “Look, ma,” Erica whispered. “The Abyss.”
There was no central mass on which to focus, no tendril of color to differentiate a swirling eddy from a still pool. It wasn’t even the color black as she had always understood it. Even the deep behind one’s eyes in the midnight dark is shot through with images, flashes of the mind. This was pure nothing. Erica imagined this was what a black hole must be like, something so powerful that not even light could escape. But instead of a star slowly unraveling its glowing plasma wrapper at the event horizon, Erica felt the outer layers of herself begin to strip and flow over the edge. She got a flash of George’s face, scowling over some op-ed piece in the Times, and felt it fall away into the chasm.
Her right foot dislodged a pebble and she watched it tumble and flip out of existence. Would it be so easy if she followed? Could she skip the process of slow stripping at the edge and cease this pain immediately?
A deep cold rippled up her spine. Something, someone was behind her, its presence pushing a mass of decrepitude and frost. Its footsteps were heavy, like those of a giant; she could feel their bass thud in her feet and chest as it approached. Erica felt the shape of a man invade her peripheral vision, but could not bring herself to look. It was tall, but bent at the shoulders, dark hair cascaded like tar. She heard the creak of leather. It was silent as the abyss below.
After a long time, Erica heard herself whisper, “Can I help you?”
It made a sound that might be classified as laughter. It made Erica’s teeth hurt. “Help me?” The Pompiliad considered, “You will. It’s true.”
Erica wanted to look at it full on, but fear bridled her. The skin on the arm nearest this person was alternately hot and cold, clammy and desiccated. “Huh-how will I help you?”
“Your body will be a cornucopia and give birth to new gods.” It turned its great dark eyes on her, “Many gods.” Erica’s spine was stiff as glass, her joints frozen as it lifted a limp finger to her cheek. Sickness and sleep pulsed off it like stink. Her eyes grew heavy. It would be so easy to slip over the edge. “Go then,” the Pompiliad said. “Fall away into nothing. We don’t need your mind, just your perfect machine.” The finger caressed her jaw line and dripped down her neck, over her shoulder and traced the swell of her breast. Her nipple hardened and burned.
She sensed a change and was able to look over. George stood next to her, his good, strong hand on her body. But this wasn’t George. His touch made Erica feel like she was set free of some self-manufactured armor; this creature’s contact made her want to bury herself in steel and stone. It was wearing George’s likeness like a salesman wears a suit. Deep within her an ingot began to heat and glow red. Her blood warmed and her eyes narrowed. She turned to face it full on and the human mask dropped away.
A bruise-colored blur burst from its shoulders like an eruption of nerve gas. It was accompanied by a low, thrumming buzz that got into Erica’s head and twisted like a knot. The arms melted into the torso and six chitin spears thrust through the rib cage, segmented and became insectile legs. The waist cinched thin as Erica’s wrist as if some invisible lariat yanked tight. The clothes melded with skin and all turned a slick, hard black. The head elongated and cruel pincers gnashed the slow air. Twin reflections of Erica bent in its obsidian crystal ball eyes. Her gaze drew down and along the obscenity at the end of its abdomen: a foot-long chitin dagger dripping with some viscous fluid.
When it spoke, the sound was like sheet metal blown over sand. “You will help us. You will mother us. You will be queen to the hive.”
She threw up her hands and backed off a step. A piece of the hardpan cracked and slid away from under her heel. Erica glanced back in time to stop herself from backing over the edge. Somehow the giant wasp-thing had herded her toward the abyss. She hadn’t even noticed moving before now. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe the strange ground had reconfigured under her. All horrors seemed possible here. “Wait!” she tried, her mind side-slipping into lawyer mode, “If you need me to help you, how can you throw me over the edge?”
The terrible pincers clicked and stuttered off each other like castanets. It thrust the air with its stinger, but Erica had no more room to back off. Her brow drew down. It was laughing at her. That ingot in her gut grew hotter.
“We don’t need your mind,” it repeated, “just your perfect machine.”
Erica looked down at her feet and realized for the first time that she was naked. She felt no need to cover herself, she wasn’t cold and the thought of feeling shame in the face of such abomination was absurd. Her brain began to run over this gibberish about her mind and machine, began to find pattern. It if could throw her over the edge into that great nothing and still have her body then it followed that anything that happened here had nothing to do with her body. It was a dream, or a nightmare, or some coma universe. Either way—“This isn’t real.”
Erica’s head snapped up. She faced her doubled self in its eyes and repeated, “This isn’t real. I’m not really here.” The wasp retreated a couple feet, floating under a flickering cloud of purple wings. Erica advanced a step away from the edge. “This is all in my mind, is that it? Some dream? And you want me to toss myself, my mind, over the edge into that, that shit?” She turned and spat into the abyss. “You disgusting puta madre. What? You get my body after you convince me to empty my own head?” The Pompiliad retreated further and seemed somehow smaller, the volume of its wings muted. Erica advanced on it, her dream-muscles taught and her fists clenched into hammers. “You killed George, didn’t you? It wasn’t really that kid at all. It was you.” Hot tears burst over her eyelids, flowed over her cheeks and hit the ground with a sound like nails on tin. “I was just starting to find my life and you took my one true good away from me.”
The wasp halted and blurred. Again the figure of George Rhodes stood tall and beautiful before her. Erica gasped from the pain in her chest. “Cruel,” she whispered.
“We will still have your machine, but now you will have to live through it,” it said. “We came here as a mercy.”
It became still and its skin turned gray as the dust at their feet. Cracks zig-zagged up from its boots to its head. A shudder ran the length of it and it fell apart in dirty chunks like a shattered mud statue. The wind picked up in a fierce gust and grabbed every last piece of grit, blowing the Pompiliad away. When the wind died down, Erica stood alone in a world of her own making. She thought of George again, her George not some demonic replicant, and felt more heat from that ingot. Now it was white.
“Wake up, chica,” she said to herself. “Wake up.”
And for a wonder, she did.
* * *
Erica opened her eyes to near total darkness. She could make out the earthen cellar and the old wooden stairs leading out. What light there was spilled down from wherever they led—a kitche
n, she imagined. Her arms and legs weren’t bound, but she was encased in something that restricted her movement to just a few inches here and there. An open strip at her eyes allowed her to breathe and see out. It was like she was in one of those mummy sleeping bags but standing up. Her eyes widened as she made out the holes in the walls and their inhabitants. Most of the cellar was honeycombed and each cell was stuffed with a person. Some of them were slotted in like bodies in a morgue, but about half were facing out, their heads tilted up or back depending on whether they lay on their backs or stomachs. Those who faced out had white, empty eyes like the people she had seen at the little village in the woods.
Panic rose in her throat and wanted to flutter out in a scream, but she bit down on it. Bit her tongue pretty good, too, and the blood filled her mouth with iron and anger. This was the world of physical things (perfect machines) but she had brought that glowing piece of steel back with her. She drew on it now and pushed against the mud casing, but it was thick and hard. Her brain began to run over everything she had: the creature in her mind, the things in the walls. Wasps. They were like wasps. How did wasps build nests? Her mind threw a Discovery Channel image of a yellow and black insect daubing mud in little rows to construct cells for its larvae. They chew. Oh, Jesus. She was going to have to chew her way out.
She shoved her upper jaw forward in a ridiculous overbite and was just able to get the leading edge of her teeth on the bottom lip of the eye slit. She began to scrape, slowly and carefully at first. Erica Mendez wasn’t about to go through the death of the man she loved and an escape from dream-hell just to die because she chipped her damn teeth. She had to make it. That thing was coming and it had plans for her machine. A piece of the casing crumbled into her mouth. It tasted like old, stale dirt and her mouth filled with saliva so fast her glands hurt. She spat it to the side and glanced at the staring faces of the wasp people. They were still. She was able to get more of a purchase now and took a serious bite. A piece of mud-cement the size of a pie plate tumbled away. She stifled a little cheer. She could get her whole head out now. She tapped her chin against the crust and a felt another large section give way. It wasn’t dry yet! That was it. If she’d stayed unconscious for what, another twenty minutes, there’d have been no chance.
Shard Page 31
