It felt like a long, thin crab claw and as it clamped down and twisted, he shouted out before he could stop himself. With his other hand, he tried to grab whatever had a hold of him, to pry its grip loose. Suddenly a second and then a third claw shot out and grabbed his free arm.
He swore and kicked out blindly at the thing, feeling the skin of his wrist and arm tearing and bleeding as he wrenched free first one hand, and then the other.
“We’ve got to get him out of here,” Julia said, picking up a fragment of what looked like wrought iron. “Back toward the door.” She put one flat hand in the center of Peter’s chest and started backing up, using the other hand to bang loudly against the wall with the piece of iron. “Come on!” she shouted, and the sound echoed. “Come get us!”
The shadowy shape seemed to hunch and twist, not so much standing up as reconfiguring itself into something more vertical. It let out a weird, breathlessly warbling cry like a frightened screech owl, and launched itself at them.
Peter shoved Julia out of the way just as the heavy, chaotic mass of the terrorist’s impossibly mutated body slammed into him, sending him reeling back out though the door and into the pool.
The water was warm and highly chlorinated, burning as it flooded up his nose. The wounds on his arms hurt like a bitch. He flailed out with both hands, but lost any sense of where his attacker was. His lungs began aching for oxygen as he gathered himself and kicked upward toward the distant, shimmering surface.
When he reached it, he sucked in a massive gasp of air and frantically looked around for the mutant. He couldn’t see anything that lay beneath the churning surface, and was suddenly excruciatingly aware of his legs, dangling beneath him. It was like floating in a murky shark tank, knowing that terrible things lurked somewhere below.
He had to get out of the water.
He cast an eye around the perimeter of the pool, and spotted Julia standing by the ladder on the right side, waving him over. That ladder was much closer than the steps leading out of the shallow end, so he started paddling in her direction.
He was nearly halfway there when Julia’s face went tight and grim.
“Hurry, Peter,” she called. She didn’t have to say it twice.
He risked a look back and saw the dark irregular shape of the creature rising up toward him, reaching with way too many long, thin limbs.
He started swimming hard, making a beeline for the ladder, when the water he was swimming through suddenly disappeared, dropping him ten feet to the cracked cement at the bottom of the pool. He let out a grunt of dismay, but couldn’t bring himself to be surprised. So many impossible things had happened, in so short an amount of time, that he was beginning to suffer from surprise fatigue.
He cracked his chin on the cement, tasting blood in his mouth. The impact left him breathless and gasping as he struggled up on his bruised knees, and looked around. He was trapped at the bottom of a triangular well, with walls made of water. Curious, he reached out to touch the water, but a shimmer flickering along the impossible surface made him yank his hand away, letting out a cry of alarm.
Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the walls were gone.
It wasn’t like having a ton of water dropped on him. It was just there, all around him, as if it had been there all along. Only now he was on the bottom of the deep end, with ten feet of water above his head. Worse, he had just exhaled, so his lungs were completely empty.
With a spurt of adrenaline he kicked off the bottom and started swimming for the surface. The water was so strongly chlorinated that it hurt to open his eyes, and even when he did, his vision was too blurry to see around him. His heart was pounding, his empty airless chest starting to burn, and he was about to break the surface when the water disappeared again.
The sound that was wrenched out from between his clenched teeth as he tumbled back to the bottom was more frustration than fear. He scrambled to get his feet under him, shook off the impact, and looked up. He could hear Julia calling out to him, but he couldn’t see her. The shifting channel of water made her voice seem distant and echoey.
Then she stepped into his view, looking like a mourner standing over an open grave and giving him the impression that he was about to be buried alive. But she was pointing behind him and yelling.
When he turned around, he spotted what used to be the terrorist at the other end of the empty channel, twitching and squirming half in and half out of the liquid wall. Whatever human form remained was hidden beneath what looked like a dense layer of the kind of junk that gets stuck in a storm drain after a heavy rain. Twiggy appendages, flapping rags of skin and irregular, jagged lumps, all various sickly shades of ashy gray and cyanotic blue. Every one of the dozens of quivering, disorganized limbs ended in something different—crablike claws and bony hooks and abnormally jointed fingers tipped with what looked more like teeth than nails.
The only thing that made the head distinguishable from the rest of the mess was a cavernous mouth full of slick, bloody tusks. They were growing so fast Peter could see them curling and twisting like eager bean sprouts, making a hideous creaking sound as they did. He could also see the now familiar swelling egg-like nodes on their ropy stalks beneath what should have been the man’s chin.
They were growing, too.
Time was running out.
The creature seemed to spot him suddenly, though Peter couldn’t imagine how—his eyes, ears, and nose were completely obscured by mutated flesh. His top-heavy, irregular form hunched and flexed, claws clicking and reaching. Then somehow he broke free of the wall between the realities, and charged like an angry bull.
Peter backed against the pool wall, fists up and as ready as he could be, but then the water was there again, blinding him and causing him to bounce off the wall and drift weightlessly upward.
He felt something clutching at the leg of his pants and kicked out against it in reflexive fear and revulsion.
But then the water was gone and he fell awkwardly on one leg, twisting his ankle and sending a shooting pain up his calf. Before he could right himself, the water stuttered in and out several times, disorienting him completely. He heard a buzzing shriek, and in a moment of gasping for precious air he looked over at the terrorist. A twisting shimmer in the nearby water had sheared a large chunk of rag-like flesh away from the lower part of his body. The blood pouring from the wound was bright red, surprisingly normal.
Peter scrabbled away from the spreading crimson stain that came creeping across the dry pool bottom. He had to figure out how to get away from the bleeding monstrosity, and get his ass the hell out of this pool.
The walls of water on either side of him were pulsing with deadly shimmers, but the one on the left less so than the right. If he timed it right, he figured he should be able to push through the impossible vertical surface and into the water, so he could swim up and out of this hellish trap.
He took a step to the left, and immediately regretted it. His ankle was badly twisted, and let him know it the second he tried to put any weight on it at all. Pain caused his vision to go white for a moment. He swore under his breath and did a little limping shuffle to shift his weight to the other leg.
“Peter?” Julia called from the deck above. “Peter, are you all right?”
“Never better,” Peter replied through gritted teeth, mostly to himself.
He concentrated on watching the shimmers, timing their pulsing patterns until there was a miraculous lull, leaving a section of clear, safe water about the size of a surfboard. He sucked in a deep breath and dove through the vertical surface, pushing off with his good leg. There was some resistance, but not enough to stop him.
Once underwater, he made for the surface like a torpedo. No thought of the terrorist or the shimmers or anything other than getting up and out.
He breached the surface with a huge gasp and grasped the edge of the pool. He felt something grip the back of his wet shirt and started to fight instinctively against it until he realized it was Julia
, trying to help him. She hauled him upward, nearly pulling his shirt up over his head.
He was half out of the pool with his chest pressed against the tile between Julia’s bare feet when the water disappeared, leaving his legs dangling in the air. If it the pool deck.
For a moment, all he could do was lie there on the tiles, suck in oxygen, and be happy to be alive and out of the treacherous water.
He turned to Julia to thank her, but she was gone. He pushed himself up on an elbow and spotted her at the far end of the pool, wrestling a large, old-fashioned blue-and-white-striped life preserver off the wall.
“What…?” he started to ask, but she was ignoring him completely, her attention completely fixed on the terrorist still flailing at the bottom of the pool.
“Help me,” she said, unwinding the white plastic rope attached to the life preserver. “We need to get him out of there. Hurry.”
Peter quickly realized what she was thinking. They needed to get him out of there so that she could inject him before the nodes on his neck burst and released their deadly airborne payload.
Airborne…
“Julia,” Peter asked, frowning. “What would happen if the nodes burst underwater?”
Julia stopped, then squinted at him, head cocked and thoughtful.
“Well,” she said. “Theoretically, the chlorine would kill the virus. However, I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty, since the theory hasn’t been tested in a controlled laboratory environment.”
“What if we held him under, instead of pulling him out?”
“It might work,” Julia said. “In fact, there’s a good chance that it would. Except…”
“It’s wrong, isn’t it?” Peter said, picking up on her train of thought. “Drowning the poor bastard. I mean, he didn’t know what he was getting into. It’s one thing, not being able to save him, but cold-blooded—”
“Don’t be stupid,” Julia hissed. “It’s not that. It’s the fact that the rifts are causing the water to fluctuate in an erratic manner. If it were to disappear at the moment when the nodes burst, well…” She didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to.
Peter nodded, the weight of the decision heavy on his shoulders.
“The mutation is progressing at an accelerated rate in this subject,” she continued. “Surface changes are so profound that finding an accessible vein to inject the antidote may be near impossible at this late stage.” She tossed the life preserver away and picked up a long wooden pole with a hook at the end. “Your option makes more sense. We have to take a chance at trying to force him into the water and hold him there until the danger of infection has passed.”
“Until the danger of infection has passed.” Peter thought. “Not until he’s dead.”
He had to look away from Julia for a moment, genuinely disturbed by her icy, ruthless determination. Peter had done some, well, bad things in his life—things he regretted or wished he’d done differently, but he’d never actually killed anyone. He’d been caught up in scenarios in which people had been killed. He’d participated in scams and con games that went wrong and resulted in people getting killed. And maybe those people would still be alive today, if they’d never had anything to do with him.
But he had never actually taken a life with his own two hands.
Not that the terrorist at the bottom of the pool would have hesitated to end Peter’s life, given the chance. But it would be a stretch to call it “self-defense” when his victim was trapped like the proverbial fish in a barrel.
Julia took his hand. Her voice was low and soothing.
“Whatever is left of that man’s consciousness is experiencing unbearable pain right now.” She pulled a hook-tipped rescue pole off of a wall rack, and pressed it into Peter’s hand. “It would be a mercy killing. Like putting a dying animal out of its misery.
“Besides, it’s our only option,” she added.
Peter nodded and took the pole. Julia set her mouth into a tight, determined line and grabbed the pole’s twin off the wall for herself.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Let’s do it,” Peter said.
Bracing himself to avoid putting weight on his ankle, he reached the pole experimentally down toward the terrorist, who was in an empty portion of the pool. The pole was about twelve inches shy of long enough to reach.
“Damn,” he said. “Now what?”
Julia didn’t answer, and climbed down the ladder and into the pool in a section that currently had water in it, but was close to the empty area. Keeping her head above the surface, she reached down through the water with the pole, pushed through the anomalous surface, and managed to hook the writhing mass of the terrorist’s body. His convulsions changed with the introduction of this new enemy, but she managed to anchor her grip, pinning him to the pool bottom. There was a slick beneath him, a little water, but mostly a disgusting mixture of blood and other unidentifiable fluids. It was pooling, leaving a slippery surface.
“Come on,” she said, leaning over and still clinging to the ladder with one hand, motioning with her head for him to get in beside her.
He did as she asked, easing himself back into the water, climbing down with one hand, anchoring himself on his good foot, and reaching out with the pole. After some brief fumbling, he was able to hook part of the terrorist.
Realizing in some animalistic, hindbrain way that he was under attack, the terrorist started to flail and squirm more violently than ever, but he couldn’t gain sufficient balance. He was unable to get free.
“Pull him toward us,” Julia said. “Into the water. On three.”
Peter tightened his grip on the pole, and nodded.
“One… two…” She arched a brow at him.
“Three!”
Peter struggled for leverage, dragging the bleeding mess headfirst into the water. The mysterious shimmers sliced and needled the flailing bulk of the misshapen body, releasing swirling clouds of blood into the water like chum. The wall of liquid began to shift, the empty area changing with it and then winking out of existence as if it had never been.
Seconds later, the empty space reappeared around the terrorist. Without the buoyant water to hold him up, his full struggling weight nearly yanked the pole out of Peter’s hands. Julia teetered and almost slipped completely under the surface, but the hook on the end of her pole came free and abruptly released her from the battle.
With all the weight on the end of Peter’s pole, he needed to better anchor himself. He hooked his elbow around one of the rungs on the ladder, and his open wounds sent fiery pain up his arm. He hung on for a moment, but whatever the hook had been attached to came loose in a bloody clump, and the creature flopped back down to the bottom.
“I can’t reach him there!” Julia said, extending the pole to the limit of her reach. “My arm’s not long enough.”
Peter was taller, with longer limbs, but he still had to go down two more rungs of the ladder to reach the terrorist, leaving him submerged up to his neck. He had to tip his chin upward to keep his nose and mouth out of the water, which made it difficult to see what he was doing down below.
God, I hope none of that shit’s in the water around me, he thought. Then he pushed aside the idea, and focused. He managed to hook a twitching appendage, and started battling to move the terrorist back into the water.
“Hurry!” Julia said. “Those nodes are going to rupture any second now. Just try to get the head into the water!”
Easier said than done, Peter thought, but he didn’t waste the effort needed to speak. Instead, he gritted his teeth against the pain in his arms and ankle.
The thrashing increased. It was hard to tell if the terrorist was suffering from another seizure, or just fighting like a panicked, dying animal, but the result was the same.
“I can’t see a damned thing,” Peter said. “Which end is the head?”
“The end that’s closest to you,” Julia replied. “Pull it toward you.”
The wate
r shifted, and shifted again, but Peter kept on pulling him closer to the wall. Once he had the terrorist pinned to the bottom directly below them, he leaned his full weight on the pole, riding out the bucking and thrashing until it started to slow.
Then, suddenly, the water Peter was in was gone, and both he and the terrorist were in a narrow tunnel of air.
No longer buoyant, Peter clung tight to the ladder and looked down. Below him, the terrorist’s whole deformed body had gone a deep, dusky blue—except for the quivering nodes, which were pearly white and glistening. They had swollen to the size of mangoes.
“Oh, my God,” Julia said, flinching with her knuckles pressed to her lips. “They’re going to rupture!”
Adrenaline pumped into him, and Peter gave the pole a desperate shove, pushing what was left of the terrorist’s head into the shimmering water just as the nodes burst, releasing a thick, milky fluid into the water. Julia let out a sharp sound that sounded like a cross between a gasp and a laugh, but Peter was in no mood for it. He just held on, grimly keeping the terrorist pinned against the bottom of the pool until he stopped moving.
It only took about a minute, but it felt like the longest minute of Peter’s life.
When it was finally over, the shimmering tunnel of air—and all the other anomalies—just vanished, leaving the pool and its surrounding area looking normal. Gone were the piles of trash and broken tiles. The only evidence that anything unusual had occurred was the broken lounge chair. That and the body, floating in a spreading, milky cloud.
Seeing that cloud, Peter scrambled to get out of the pool before it could reach him. Julia followed, and as they stood there, dripping, he looked down at the pole he was holding. A tool designed to save lives.
The irony wasn’t lost on him.
“Should we… fish him out?”
She shook her head.
“Leave him,” she said. “Let the chlorine finish its job.”
Fringe 03 - Sins of the Father Page 19
