Thirty-seven
Six hours to die. After the first half hour, Caitlin
knew that her sanity would not survive a fraction of it. The hunger in
itself became desperation beyond measure. Her body writhed with a life of
its own, her muscles cramping and contracting, pulling one against the
other until she screamed herself hoarse in protest of the pain.
As Derek had promised, it wouldn't be long before
she'd tear herself to pieces. Through it all, she would be conscious.
The caterpillar had endowed her with superhuman endurance and
inadvertently given her the ability to suffer beyond human understanding
of the word.
She wanted to scream unendingly. Instead, her voice
gave out. From the depths of her agony, horror emerged like a cold
vacuum. Any moment now, her bodily tissues would begin tearing. Her
bones would begin to snap.
A gunshot caused her to jerk so violently that the
fire of a pulled tendon stabbed through her like a shaft of iron heated to
incandescent. The single gunshot was followed by a flurry of crackling
and popping noises. Men, women and children screamed in fear and in anger
from all sides through the thin fabric of her tent. When the commotion
died down, a man exploded through the flap of the tent and leveled a rifle
at her.
"Oh, my God!”
He rushed back out again.
He came back with a second man who gawked at the
sight of Caitlin's body twisting in its strange contortions. He then
turned his head aside and vomited on the dirt floor.
"Kill me!" Caitlin said with all that was left
of her voice.
She recognized both of them. They were from Brighton
Hollow, and neither of them was going to shoot the stepdaughter of Sheriff
Leon Biggs. "Better let Rex take care of this," one of the men said.
They both vanished. Within seconds of their
departure, Caitlin suspected that she had hallucinated her would-be
rescuers. Her tortured mind was seeking any means of escape from the
escalating pain, even imaginary ones.
She opened her eyes when someone touched her arm.
Hallucination or not, the distraction was a blessing. Rex stood over her
wielding a knife. He turned the blade downward, and it passed out of her
sight.
The pain of its thrust into her body would have
hardly been felt. It would have released her from her nightmare in an
instant.
It never came to pass. She panicked, thinking that
Rex Hogan, too, was going to leave her to die in this horrible manner, but
her legs and arms were suddenly free.
It accomplished little. She had no motor
coordination left. She could make no use of her freedom. She raised her
head, rolling her eyes up to the caterpillar's cage at the head of the
cot.
Rex understood what she wanted. He couldn’t kill
her. He could either abandon her to die, or he could free the
caterpillar. Either it would feed her and take a second host, or end her
suffering and feed itself.
Rex circled around back of the cage and sliced a
nylon tie holding the lid in place, then slipped out of the tent,
abandoning Caitlin to whatever fate held in store for her.
Freed, the caterpillar pawed the air with half its
body length. The gray tongue lashed out and spiked her in the shoulder.
Caitlin waited for the paralysis and the final agony of death, but the
caterpillar withheld its venom. It leaped onto the cot alongside her head
for a closer examination. She felt it sniffing about her neck. She saw
the gray tongue retract.
The caterpillar bit her, reaching deep for the
carotid artery. Despite its own need to feed, the insect recognized the
greater need to take a host.
Caitlin's convulsions quieted. She sighed,
overpowered by the sweet sensation of feeding. Pleasure became a torment
almost a great as the pain she had experienced.
She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling. Tears
filled her eyes. How many lives had Rex sacrificed to save her life?
What did that say about his feelings for her?
Except that his love and his gesture of compassion
had backfired. No matter how terrible her death, her suffering would have
ended in a few more hours. Now, the nightmare would continue toward its
inevitable conclusion. In the end, when there were no more people left in
the world, her death-of-all-deaths would begin all over again. And there
would be nobody left to stop it.
