Eleven
Sasha raced down the stairs before he could make good his
escape. She hugged him fiercely. Wallace pried her loose with mounting
desperation. "I'll go for help."
Sasha lay her head against his chest, trembling
violently. "Love me first," she whispered.
Wallace stepped out of reach, repulsed by the
temptation to take advantage of her. Not now. Not like this. Nobody who
had consumed the mushrooms was in their right minds.
"Stay here," he said again, encouraged by her blank
stare. "I'll be back as soon as I can."
He fled out the front door before she could protest
further, backtracking briefly to turn out the living room lights and lock
the door behind him.
He remained in the shadows on the porch until he was
certain Duke was nowhere about. Starting up the darkened street on foot,
he looked back and saw Sasha watching from his upstairs window.
He paused alongside Peg Sullivan's bungalow halfway
up the hill. He had seen Peg and her boyfriend transformed into monsters
by a toxic mushroom and lured into another world by some inhuman siren
call. He told himself that it was only a crazed fantasy brought on by the
spore clouds. It had to be. Otherwise, the same thing was going to
happen to everybody who had eaten the mushrooms, even if they had spit it
out like Sasha. Most of it out, she had said.
And what else?
He absently grasped the wound on his right arm, and
his hand came away bloody. More than just hallucination was involved.
He ran the rest of the way up the hill at a dead run
and looked both ways up and down the boulevard at the crest. A half block
away, a car had nosed against one of a line of maple trees. Its door hung
open and interior lights still burned. Wallace ran from shadow to shadow
to the vehicle and found it empty and still idling. If he took the car,
he need only drop it off at the police station when he finished with it.
He had to go for help.
Wallace slipped behind the wheel and closed the
door. He ground gears and backed it into the street. Ahead glimmered the
brightly lit business district and the Possum River bridge that separated
Willington from Dale City. Red and blue lights flashing atop Dale City
police cruisers forming a barricade at the bridge.
Wallace drove the mile or so to the barricade and
pulled to the curb. He shut off the engine and tossed the keys under the
seat, then went the rest of the way on foot along the sidewalk. As he
approached, he heard the bolt of a rifle snick open and close.
"Move away from he side of the building, son."
The voice was all business, amplified by a portable
bullhorn.
"If you have some identification on you, take it out
slowly. Hold it up to the light."
Wallace held up his empty hands. He had nothing on
him.
An office emerged from the police lines and
approached. "Hey, you're the kid from that dead-end street. You said
something about toadstools in the woods."
Another of the police officers behind the barricade
bellowed in anger. "If it's a goddamned germ, you're gonna get yourself
infected, Nick!"
"It's a mushroom!" Wallace cried out, angry at not
having the guts to speak up and hold his ground sooner. "It's a mushroom
growing all over the woods that says eat me on it, and everybody
was crazy enough to do it!"
The police officer drew closer, frowning at Wallace's
blood-soaked shirt. The cop's name tag read Waldenski. Wallace took note
that Waldenski was a Sergeant.
"What the hell happened?" Sergeant Nick Waldenski
growled at him.
Wallace spoke through chattering teeth. "Everybody's
going crazy. I might be a little crazy, too."
"How about if we take a run to the hospital and have
that arm bandaged? I'd like to ask a few questions along the way."
Wallace thought it a great idea. He let Nick take
his uninjured arm and guide him through the barricade. The group of armed
Dale City cops parted as they passed through to a police cruiser parked on
the other side of the short bridge. Wallace kept his eyes to the ground
as they passed, aware of the rifles pointed their way. They were afraid
of him.
Nick put him in the front seat and closed the door,
then circled around and slipped in behind the wheel. "We've been getting
wild reports of unarmed assaults and forcible abductions," he muttered as
he backed the car around and started through Dale City. "We've lost three
police units. Did you see anything on your way through town?"
"The mushroom's doing it," Wallace said, confident of
at least that conclusion. "People are acting crazy."
Nick glanced at him without expression. "How did you
hurt your arm?"
"I got bit by a snake, I think."
"Where did you see this snake, son?"
"In the woods behind my house where the mushrooms are
growing." Wallace leaned his head back and closed his eyes. If only he
could lose consciousness and sleep for as long as it took for the crisis
to end.
During the short drive to the hospital, Wallace
noticed that Dale City wasn't in much better condition than Willington.
Police cars and ambulances wailed and screamed this way and that. The
city looked deserted and darkened.
"It's happening here, too?"
"It seems to be coming from Willington," Nick said.
"I think you had the mushroom thing down pat. The National Guard and some
specialists from the Army are on their way. We'll have this thing under
control pretty quick."
"They're still growing," Wallace said, remembering
the new carpet of mushrooms and the spore cloud he had kicked through.
"We have specimens being analyzed. We can deal with
mushrooms."
"Yeah, but somebody's doing it," Wallace heard
himself say. "We're being invaded, I think.”
"Invaded? Invaded by who, Wallace?"
He couldn't bring himself to say it. Again, his
courage was failing him.
The crazy mushrooms were a trap. The hole in the
grotto was luring its victims into another world, victims that had been
transformed into monsters. The same would happen to Sasha and Aunt
Bernice.
Wallace's eyes snapped open. What would happen to
Sasha if Duke found her first? What had happened to
Jimmy Smith and the waitress?
