Thirteen
A nervous Guardsman in plain fatigues sat at his
bedside and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. Wallace did not know if
he had been sleeping, or just staring obliviously into the dismal morning
until the man appeared. "What's happening?" he asked, baited by the man's
silence.
"We're having problems with
some of the residents of Willington," the Guardsman said.
"They're in the basements."
"You've seen them?"
Wallace gave a reluctant nod, hoping he would not
have to describe what he had seen in any detail.
"You spent the past two nights in Willington," the
Guardsman said. "How did you manage to survive?"
Wallace wondered if the questions constituted a
formal interrogation, or if the Guardsman was just a curious passerby? "I
was just lucky, I guess."
"I see. What can we do for the townspeople, do you
suppose?"
He considered the question and gave a shrug. "Don't
try to stop them. They'll be gone by morning."
"Gone? Where, may I ask, would they go?"
He had witnessed madness. How could he hope to
relate it in terms that would sound sane and reasonable.
"Nick's with us," the Guardsman said casually. "He
says you made reference to a rabbit hole. We know about the mushrooms.
Is there really a rabbit hole, Wallace?"
"Yeah, there's really a rabbit hole," Wallace said,
relieved that the Guardsman was willing to take him at his word as Nick
had done. "I saw two of those monsters go through it. I think the rest
will follow tonight."
"They went through a hole in the ground, Wallace?"
"No. It's a hard thing to explain. You wouldn't
believe me if I tried."
"We should have a look before anything more happens."
Wallace studied the sky visible from beneath the open
flaps of the tent. Not much daylight remained, evidence that he had
indeed been sleeping. A steady drizzle fell, further diminishing the
available light. "It's getting late."
"We'd like to take a squad in and reconnoiter," the
Guardsman persisted. "Nick's willing to accompany our team.
How about you?"
"Who are you?" Wallace said, suspecting that he was
talking to more than an unranked private despite the plain fatigues the
man wore.
"Let's just say I've flown in from a place in
Maryland where we keep an eye out for civilian emergencies involving
biological or chemical threats of an exotic nature. I'm not really with
the military. Call me Calloway. It's a code name, but I answer to it
like I would my own."
Wallace sat up. His injured arm was stiff and sore.
His pants were torn and bloody and the hospital gown tucked into his waist
less than adequate against the afternoon chill.
Calloway took notice of his discomfort. "We'll get
you dressed and fed. How are you feeling otherwise?"
Wallace was feeling spaced-out. It was difficult to
focus his attention upon any one thing for long. He looked about the
tent, but could see nothing of the vaporous figures with glowing eyes
hovering over him. "I guess I'm okay."
Calloway rose to his feet. "I'll have someone drop
off a change of clothes and have the mess throw together something hot.
Do you need anything else?"
Wallace needed to find Sasha. He needed to run as
far from Willington as he could get. He shook his head and closed his
eyes, hoping to fall asleep again before the promised change of clothes
showed up. Maybe they'd change their minds and not bother him for the
balance of the day.
But a Guardsman no older than himself showed up with
an armful of clothing a few minutes later and pointed out the shower. The
walls were canvas, but the water was hot. Wallace scrubbed himself with
soap and dressed with shaking hands and goose bumps. Someone had guessed
his size, but everything fit, including a pair of real combat boots that
he hoped he'd be able to keep. He was then led to a mess tent manned by
two cooks who sat him at a corner bench and fed him a roast beef dinner.
He drank a glass of milk and was sipping black coffee when Sergeant Nick
Waldenski slipped in beside him at the table.
"You don't have to go along with any of this," Nick
told him. "You're a civilian and a legal minor to boot."
"I don't mind," Wallace said.
"Do you honestly think you know what's happening?"
Wallace thought he did, although he had no idea what
the winged serpent and the vaporous beings meant. Hopefully, they were
only paranoid delusions that would disappear when the toxin of the spore
cloud he had breathed wore off. But he shrugged in response to Nick's
question. Given an opportunity to show others the portal, he was content
to let them reach their own conclusions.
"You holding up okay, kid?"
Wallace shrugged again, but gave the cop a wry grin.
"Did you lose anyone in Willington?"
"My Aunt Bernice and a girlfriend," Wallace said
stonily, "except they're not dead."
Nick grimaced and nodded understanding, thinking that
he was only denying the evidence of carnage in town.
"I don't think there's anything we can do to help
them," Wallace said, "the ones that are still alive, I mean."
"You can't expect us not to try. Are you about
ready?"
Wallace finished his coffee. "Yeah, I'm ready."
Wallace followed the cop to a waiting group of seven
armed National Guardsmen and three old style jeeps. One of the seven was
Calloway. Calloway gestured Wallace and Nick into the back seat of the
lead jeep and climbed in alongside the driver.
Without further delay, the small convoy weaved its
way down rutted lanes of mud between the tents to a gravel road, and from
there to a blacktop leading into Dale City. They drove unimpeded through
a barricade of rolled barbed wire that stretched into the countryside to
either side of the road for as far as the eye could see.
Calloway murmured constantly into a walkie-talkie.
He glanced around and said, "We've got a problem ahead. We're going to
stop and observe the proceedings for a few minutes."
The convoy stopped several hundred feet further down
the road alongside a lone house on a block-sized lot filled with vegetable
gardens, a greenhouse, and a metal barn. The single-story house was
surrounded by armed National Guardsmen in white biochemical protection
gear.
"We have a test subject in the basement here,"
Calloway said quietly, "a young man we suspect responsible for the deaths
of his own children. Our basement buddies seem to be in a stupor. We're
not quite sure what happens if we rouse them, but it's a necessary
prerequisite to getting them to our field hospital for medical
evaluation. This should give us some idea of what we're up against."
Gunshots sounded from inside the small house. A
Guardsmen came careening out through the front door, his head covering and
air tanks spiraling through the air in two different directions.
A naked man with glistening skin leaped through a
front window and landed on the lawn outside. He squatted and took in his
surroundings. As glass rained down about him, he looked almost human from
a distance, but a rifle opened fire prematurely, and the monster dispelled
that notion in an instant.
He dodged to one side like lightning, then leaped
toward the nearby Guardsman who had fired on him, racing past without
stopping, but sending a gout of blood erupting skyward in his wake. A
volley of gunfire followed, but human reflexes were incapable of taking
aim on a target that could move faster than the eye could follow.
Calloway bolted to his feet and grasped the butt of a
holstered sidearm. Nick's attention was elsewhere. The street smart cop
calmly scanned the surrounding neighborhood, on guard against trouble from
unguarded quarters.
"Better leave them alone," Wallace said. "They'll
stay put until they're called."
Calloway glared down at him. "Called?"
"I'll show you. Just don't shoot at them. It's not
their fault."
Calloway sat down and gestured the driver to continue
on. Nick squeezed his shoulder in a show of moral support as the
procession wound its way through deserted side streets to the bridge and
into Willington. Behind them, the gunfire continued.
Wallace directed them to a dead-end a block away from
his own house. He had Aunt Bernice in mind and didn't want to risk a
confrontation with her. He didn't want to see what she had become, and he
didn't want to see her hurt. He tried not to think similar thoughts about
Sasha.
The woods were darker than he would have liked. A
light rain began to soak through his clothing. He was shivering by the
time they reached the grotto, chilled by fear as much as the
cool rainy evening.
When he caught of whiff of ozone, he hung back,
remembering the crackling sound of electricity and wondering about the
extent of an electrical disturbance in the rain. He stopped dead when he saw the
blue-rimmed portal casting a shaft of isolated sunlight, disbelieving his
own eyes even having visited the phenomenon once before.
The armed Guardsmen took up positions surrounding the
oval shaft of daylight and the sunlit plains visible only from the front.
Nick and Calloway went down into the grotto alone, stunned by what they
were witnessing. Nick tended to hang back, wisely in Wallace's opinion.
Calloway slipped his pistol from its shoulder holster and advanced step by
slow step.
Wallace went down to where Nick was standing. "It's
another world," Nick said in awe. He pointed at a bird flying by.
Despite the distance, Wallace could see that it had two sets of wings.
Calloway went a good twenty or thirty feet through
the portal, his clothing dampened by the rain in one world and drying in
the setting sun of another. He squatted and run a handful of dirt through
his hand. A small herd of the kangaroo-deer stirred uneasily in the
distance.
Nick started forward to join the man. Wallace tugged
at his sleeve. "It's getting dark. I don't think this is a good idea."
Nick nodded his willingness to abide by Wallace's
experience and stepped back.
"I wonder about the risk of microbiological
contamination," Calloway called out. "A single wayward microbe could
devastate an entire ecology. I don't think this is a natural phenomenon
any more than the damned mushroom."
Calloway ventured recklessly further away. Wallace
looked about the grotto, taking note that the gray day darkened rapidly.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and when it faded, he heard the
high-pitched, almost inaudible siren that he knew on some deep,
instinctive level to be a call to the portal.
And that meant the altered townspeople were emerging
en mass from their basements and dark niches into the failing light of
day. Wallace tugged anxiously at Nick's sleeve. "We gotta get out of
here."
Calloway raised his head and frowned. He, too, heard
the call. Nick turned about nervously and muttered a profanity in nervous
anger.
"Get him out of out of there!" Wallace cried out.
"Nick, get everybody out of the way!"
A continuous volley of gunfire sounded in the
distance. The circle of Guardsmen about the grotto milled about in
growing agitation and confusion. Knowing from which direction the exodus
from Willington would be coming, Wallace edged around the perimeter of the
shale outcropping. Guardsmen in his path leveled their rifles
distrustfully, preventing him from escaping entirely. "We've got to get
out of here!" he yelled into their faces. "They're coming!"
But it was already too late. The first of the
transformed townspeople came barreling in from the dusk light, moving with
a speed and agility that made it hard to think of them as having been
human. The first arrival was a small female. For all Wallace knew, it
may have been Aunt Bernice herself, or the thing she had become. It
bounded high over the heads of the Guardsman in its path, leaped from the
shale ledge to the portal, and paused only long enough to startle
Calloway. Then it shot past the man and fled out across the plains in the
setting sun.
Wild rifle fire popped and rattled from all around
Wallace. A bullet struck a nearby rock and buzzed past his left ear.
Dark shapes continued to bound in from the woods and pour through the
portal, moving too fast and unpredictably for the Guardsmen to react,
either in an attempt to kill the beasts, or to escape being knocked to the
ground by them.
Within seconds, the increasing numbers of the
monsters bottlenecked the portal and become a perfect target for any
Guardsmen inclined to open fire on them, except that Calloway was in the
line of fire, trapped on the other side of the portal by the constant
influx of altered human flesh.
Wallace continued to yell for the circle of Guardsmen
to get out of the way. His cry was drowned by screaming Guardsmen
attacked by the beasts or injured by wild gunfire. Nick shoved Wallace
down alongside a ridge of rock as the fury and chaos of the bottleneck
intensified. Wallace jammed the palms of his hands against his ears in a
vain effort to block the tumultuous racket.
The silence, when it came, rang in Wallace's ears.
He looked up in time to see the last of the monsters pass through the
portal. Thirty feet away in that other world, Calloway struggled to his
feet. He took a step forward and sank to one knee on an injured ankle. Nick
started toward the portal to help.
Wallace saw the edge of the portal shimmer and
grabbed Nick's arm. Nick shook Wallace's hand loose with a grimace of
annoyance. He managed one more step toward the portal, but faltered when
the opening contracted to a point of light and vanished.
Wallace stood in sudden darkness, chilled to the bone
and surrounded on all sides by the groans and sobs of an injured
Guardsmen. Shouts echoed in the woods. Flashlights danced among the
trees and rapidly converged on their location.
Nick dropped a hand on his shoulder. "Let's get the
hell out of here."
The cop pulled Wallace up the rock wall and pushed
him toward the trees. "We got separated from the others. If you know
what's good for you, we weren't here. We saw nothing."
Wallace followed the dark shape ahead of him for what
seemed to be an eternity, then dropped to the wet ground too exhausted to
continue when streetlights appeared through the trees.
Nick pulled him to his feet. "Don't give up on me
yet, kid. Just a little further and it'll all be over."
Hauled unceremoniously to his feet, Wallace stumbled
on through the night knowing it had only begun. On all sides rose the
vaporous figures surrounding him with the blue-white intensity of their
glowing eyes.
