Thirty-one
A bare foot slapped down on the cold cement floor
alongside his head. A four-fingered hand with a blackened stub of what
had been a little finger lifted the hatchling from Melanie's body by the
scuff of its neck. Murmuring to the mewing creature in a language Wallace
did not understand, Sasha squatted, exuding casual affection while
avoiding the gnashing teeth and frenzied frustration of her tiny captive.
In time, she extracted a second hatchling crawling onto Wallace's chest.
She cuddled both newborns, seemingly oblivious to their desperate hunger,
or perhaps ignoring it.
Another flash of blue light filled the basement. A
portal appeared, filling the basement with gray, dim daylight.
Sasha eyed the phenomenon without reaction. She
climbed to her feet and passed from Wallace's view. He heard her talking
briefly. He couldn't tell who she was talking to, or what she was saying,
but she spoke English. Wallace sensed no one in the basement other than
Sasha, Melanie, and himself. When the light flashed for the last time and
total darkness closed in, Wallace could sense that Sasha was gone, having
taken with her the two hatchlings.
Wallace experienced a magnitude of panic he had never
known. The chaos of his raging emotions blinded him to his environment.
He never saw the ASG strike force and technicians swarm down the basement
stairs minutes later. When he came to his senses in one of the ASG's
field hospitals, he still could not move. He needed to run screaming
through the countryside a blithering idiot. Instead, he lay paralyzed,
his eyes focused on a dark corner of the tent, praying in desperation for
merciful unconsciousness.
When his terror finally passed, it left complete
apathy in its wake. He could move by the second day, and just after noon
of a bright and cold morning, Melanie paid him a visit. She looked only a
little less shaky than himself and sat at his side. Her face looked gaunt
and drawn by fatigue
"I heard you were in a pretty bad way," she said,
scooping up his hand from the bed.
"Nobody came to help us," Wallace said.
"My boss apologized for that. He said the
electromagnetic pulse was stronger than before. It knocked out
electronics and ignition systems a half mile away and damaged a
transformer that supplied power to some of the equipment. They're going
to fiber optics and moving sensitive equipment out of range, so they're
still telling me that it won't happen again."
Wallace ignored Melanie's feeble attempt at humor.
"If it hadn't been for Sasha, we'd be dead."
Melanie took a deep, shuddering breath. "Yeah, I
know. Our best guess is that she overheard a conversation about our trap
and the fact that you and I were serving as bait. Either she doesn't like
leaving the two of us alone together, or she knew that we were in danger."
Wallace was nauseous, sore, and angry. He had
trusted Melanie and her ASG. They had been bested by the monsters and
their portals time and time again. "So what happens now?"
"Some of the cameras worked just fine, so we got
video recordings of everything that went on in the basement. You need to
see for yourself what we're up against."
"Sasha's gone. What do they need me for now?"
"Sasha will explain in her own words. Come looking
for me when you're ready."
Melanie left him alone. In time, Wallace threw the
blankets aside and tried his balance. When he finished dressing, he asked
the first passing soldier for Melanie and was led the way through a dark
and cold morning to another tent.
A flat-screen monitor and a video player had been set up on a table. There was coffee and a tray of bagels
alongside a toaster on the surface of a desk. A kerosene heater filled
the tent with a smelly heat. Melanie was nowhere in sight.
She joined him a moment later. Wallace poured
himself coffee. He sat on the edge of the desk and ate two blueberry
bagels. He refilled his coffee cup and turned to eye the television.
Melanie gestured to one of two folding chairs. "You
had better sit down for this."
Melanie turned on the television and slipped a disk into the player. Wallace recognized the basement when an image took
form. Two monsters moved into view.
Their legs from the waist down reminded Wallace of
the mythical Pan, except that the goat hooves were three clawed toes, and
the legs were scaled rather than covered in hair. Their hips were
attached higher along the torso than a human and the legs clearly designed
for running. Their elongated, four-finger hands were longer than their
short forearms, their skulls slender, positioned on the neck at an odd
angle, and equipped with powerful jaws. Oversized, elongated eyes sloped
back alongside the skull. The cranial bulge warned of a high level of intelligence.
They vanished from view for a time, then reappeared,
each carrying a naked human body in a device that had been engineered for
that purpose. It took Wallace a moment to recognize himself being lowered
to the basement floor. Melanie was placed at his side.
Smaller, slender beings appeared in the background,
shadowy figures that handed the larger intruders two leathery eggs. They
were placed as Wallace remembered on his and Melanie's body. The monsters
then departed. The portal flashed vivid blue and was gone.
Wallace grew uneasy watching images of their own
naked bodies lying motionless in the dim light. Less time than he
remembered passed before he saw the egg on Melanie's body rupture open. A
creature like an enlarged maggot with a quasi-human face emerged. It
mewed as Wallace remembered. As it broke free of a membrane covering its
body, Wallace got a clear look at the rest of its sinewy body from a
higher perspective. Its nostrils flared, and it hurriedly crawled
from Melanie's leg to her torso. Within seconds, it would have attacked.
It was then that Sasha stepped into view. Calmly,
she reached down and lifted the horror from Melanie's body. She tucked it
squirming beneath one arm and squatted between them until the second
hatchling emerged. From his new perspective, Wallace watched her turn to
face the hidden camera responsible for their recording. Her alien beauty
filled the monitor screen.
"The portal will reappear in a few minutes. I
will return the children. Qualin knows what is happening. We will need
help from the Saur if we hope to stop the Carn."
Another flash of blue illuminated the basement.
Sasha turned and stepped into a deserted, garden-like setting. The portal
collapsed behind her as a veritable thunder of footsteps of the ASG
sounded from upstairs.
Melanie shut off the monitor. "Sasha's hardly
showing any symptoms of stress. That shouldn't be even remotely
possible. We think your friend Ghaedor is working behind the scenes to
stabilize her and smooth things out for her. Whoever Qualin is, she seems
to be right on top of the situation."
Wallace walked around the perimeter of the tent to
burn off nervous energy. "We have to go back. Is that what you're
saying? We have to go back and wait for her to return."
"They're only giving us three days. If Sasha doesn't
make it back by then, the county is being evacuated and conventional
military forces are taking over. The ASG will be out of the picture.
There's a few people in a position of authority who are afraid that Sasha
may be one of them, that she'll betray us and side with her own kind."
"What can they do without her?"
"I don't know. Nothing, probably."
Wallace felt confident that Sasha would return. He
felt less confident of his ability to cope with the changes that had come
over her. Something else had been peering out through Sasha's dark eyes,
something not entirely human.
Melanie backed up the video recording, then advanced
the image frame by frame as the egg sac split open and the creature
spilled onto her body.
She stood and stared at the image. "I didn't have a
very good view of what was going on. No wonder you were so rattled. I'm
sorry."
"Feel sorry for whoever's died that way," Wallace
said. "You said hundreds."
"Hundreds. At least we can guess why by now. The
environment on the other side of the portal is so badly contaminated, it
must be interfering with the reproduction and health of those creatures.
They’re feeding their young in a healthier environment."
And the horror would continue to repeat itself on an
ever expanding scale. They were helpless to stop it.
Wallace looked away from the
monitor rather than replay the memory so
vividly again. It had replayed itself a thousand times in his
mind's eye and had
set a core of madness burning deep in his soul. He left the tent and
Melanie made no effort to stop him. He wove his way through the tents and
discovered a pristine meadow in back, stretching for a mile or more. He
started out on foot in the cool sunlight, his pace and his mood picking up
as he walked. He wondered if he'd stop when he reached the distant wall
of trees, or if he'd just keep walking and never come back.
He stopped at the dark face of the woods trying to
bring to mind somewhere else in the world he could go. The answer came to
mind easily enough. He had absolutely nowhere to go. The thing he was
running from did not stalk him in terms of distance. It would find him
anywhere. It had become a part of him. Until he could defeat it, it stained his soul.
He turned back feeling empty, although he enjoyed the
unblemished meadow of grass and wildflower. A deer flashed its white tail
in the distance and bounded off. Chipmunks chattered and darted away at
his feet. Close to the ground, colorful finches flittered about. Larger
birds flew by overhead toward more distant destinations, or wheeled
casually in search of prey below.
The thin blue incandescent line stopped him in his
tracks, the visible side of a portal that seemed to go nowhere. Within its
perimeter, the same meadow stirred in the morning breeze. Sunlight cast
shadows at the same angle. The scene, inside or out, were the same.
With his heart pounding and his legs so weak that his
knees threatened to buckle, Wallace knew better. The portal went
somewhere else. He waited for either Ghaedor or Maligoth to appear and offer
an explanation. When nothing happened, he sidestepped cautiously and
approached the phenomena, scared, sullen, and resentful, and trying to
mask the fear of being caught between two forces that had already altered
his perception of reality forever.
It had to be Maligoth at work again. He could walk away from
it easily enough, but not with Sasha's life at stake. He had to know
what was being offered, or threatened.
Still indecisive, Wallace approached the portal for a
close look. Something moved into his field of view as his perspective
changed.
On the ground before him in that other world lay his
undamaged bicycle.
