Thirty
Melanie came and went at odd intervals for the next
three days. She put off Wallace's next visit with Sasha until the evening
of the third day. Wallace found Sasha still in her bed in the tent
hospital and, as Melanie had warned, mildly sedated. She looked healthy
except for a strange shininess to her skin. When she turned her head in
the bright overhead lights, the side of her face reflected light in dim
patterns of blue and silver.
She surprised Wallace by sounding content with her
lot. "The doctors are helping me cope with everything that's been
happening. They told me you already know something's wrong."
Wallace didn't want to talk about it. She had
suffered enough. She was barely more than a child and she had done
nothing wrong to deserve the suffering she silently endured. "I miss
you," Wallace said.
"I miss you, too, and I miss my mother," Sasha said
through a flow of tears. "I wish I could go home."
"I'll take you home when this is over. I owe you big
time. You saved my life."
Sasha managed a brief smile. "I wouldn't have one
without you. They said they'd give me money to live on for the rest of my
life when this is over, if I cooperate, something like social security, I
guess. I was thinking that we could buy a convertible and take a trip
somewhere, just the two of us. We wouldn't ever have to come back."
Wallace nodded. If she said anything more, he'd
start bawling again.
Sasha looked to Melanie standing in the background.
"Please don't let him get hurt."
Melanie was wiping a few tears of her own on her way
out. "That's just great. Now I'm supposed to be a baby-sitter. Like I
can keep anybody from getting hurt."
Melanie was more upset than seemed justified by
Sasha's condition. She broke down outside the tent and wandered in
circles in a fit of tears and frustrated anger she had no way to vent.
"Melanie?"
She shook his hand away. "Did you notice how she
kept her hands beneath the sheets?"
Wallace hadn't.
"Her two little fingers are gangrenous. Her hands
are changing. She's only going to have three fingers and a thumb."
Shock jabbed at him like a physical blow. "They'll
never let her go."
"Not true. She'll be out in two days. She's
skittish and they don't trust the tranqs they're using on her
biochemistry. They keep expecting her to die, or go insane, but she's
adapting as fast as the changes occur."
Once on the road, Melanie started off in the wrong
direction. "We're setting up housekeeping out in the boonies again," she
said in response to Wallace's confusion. "We've got to keep Sasha out of
the public eye, and I guess they want her to have more room to move around
in so that they can watch her behavior."
Wallace sat on the edge of his seat. "Has the
killing stopped?"
"Hell, no. There have been three more deaths, and we
think there was a shorter period of paralysis, minutes rather than hours.
We've found a drug in the bodily remains, something similar to curare.
It's being administered subcutaneously by spray or needle by intruders who
weigh over two hundred and thirty pounds. They got that from a broken
floorboard. And they found amniotic fluid on or about the victims, so
they're guessing that our miniature carnivores are probably the infants of
the two hundred and thirty pound adults who are using us and our world for
a food supply and a nursery."
A part of his mind tried to block out the sound of
Melanie's voice. He caught himself counting telephone poles as the car
sped down the road.
"The deaths are starting to spread out into the
general population. Within another week, news is going to leak. When the
media figures out what's going on, there’s going to be hysteria. If that
grotesque little Ghaedor buddy of yours wants to help, he can be a little
more specific about what we're up against. What in hell does he expect us
to do?"
Wallace had no answers to her questions. It was all
he could do to keep up with the constant barrage of information she kept
throwing at him.
Melanie increased her speed. She pulled into the
drive of still another farmhouse within the hour and sat idling the car
with the lights illuminating the face of the structure. Wallace figured
that it was about eight o'clock in the evening. He didn't relish the
thought of wandering the empty farmhouse for the long night to come.
"Same situation as with the last one," Melanie said.
"We're in the path of the killings, except that they're spreading out, so
the probability of an attack here is smaller than it was before, unless
Maligoth has a few more rats to spare for his special friends. Sasha
should be back with us day after tomorrow."
Wallace balked. "Not again. We can't do that
again."
"And why the hell not? Wallace, she's got the
reflexes of a cobra on cocaine. Would you like to see a video replay of
that rat attack?"
"No!"
Melanie stared at him as if reevaluating his entire
worth to the world.
"Well, she may be an asset to have around. Besides,
they want to watch her interact with us. Her personality is changing.
This Saur female, whatever it is, might
know something useful about our invaders. Sasha may be the break we need
to defend ourselves. Isn't that the way it's supposed to work?
Wallace couldn't keep any of it straight in his
head. Fear scrambled his reasoning. Seeing the skin on Sasha's face
shine like the hide of a snake had unsettled him more than he had
thought. Melanie should have kept the news of Sasha's gangrenous fingers
to herself.
Melanie nodded to the house. "Wanna go in and get
comfy? We got junk food, television, a genuine VCR, and I noticed a few
horror movies among the tapes. Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers..."
Wallace glanced at her, appalled that she could joke.
"Don't look at me like that. The previous owner of
this house was a connoisseur of horror movies. For eighty grand cash, he
left them all behind for us."
Melanie led the way into the house. Again, Wallace
could see no evidence of tampering by Melanie's people, no microphones or
cameras in lampshades or taped in dark corners of the room. As before,
his mood was too unsettled to be bothered by the knowledge that he was
being watched.
Melanie inspected the house. She then headed for the
front door.
Wallace followed like a lost puppy.
"Melanie, wait! Where are you going?"
"Sasha might object if I stay. I can have one of the
vans park in the drive and sleep there.”
"Don't be mad at her because she came back."
She wiped tears away with the back of her hand. "I'm
not handling this too well. I'm pissed because I liked working with you,
and I thought we'd have a chance to get to know each better."
"But why?" He held his arms out to her in a gesture
of helplessness. "Why me?"
She drew closer to him, but wouldn’t let him touch.
"Wallace, I graduated from a college like Harthmore when I was fourteen.
I was sent to MIT a year later. I was going to be a mathematician.
That's where I encountered the ASG. They were screening students for a
certain psychological profile. They tagged me and offered me a program I
couldn't refuse and I've been training with them ever since. Even within
the ASG, I'm supposed to be something of a prodigy. My bosses coddle me.
The guys I work with wouldn't touch me with a ten foot pole. Some of them
would fuck me, if they could let it go at that, but they're not
comfortable enough with me to be my friend."
Wallace had always felt awkward and stupid in her
presence. He had known she was someone special. But he hadn't thought he
could be of any real importance to her. He hadn't thought he could be of
any real importance to Sasha, or to anyone.
"You're just a kid, Wallace, an ordinary, happy kid
who would have gotten what he wanted in life in the end. I envy you for
that. You're young and unsure of yourself, but that's not going to last.
You're going to do just fine."
Wallace looked down at his feet, embarrassed.
She laughed gently. "I don't want to own you. I
just wanted to be your friend. I suppose I wanted to play around with you
a little while we were working together."
And then along came Sasha.
"Please stay," he said. "I'm not married. I can
have friends."
"She owns your soul, Wallace. You couldn't get it on
with me because of her. You've had so much sex with her during the past
few days that there were times we thought you were going to physically
injure yourselves. Sasha's behavior has been borderline
psychopathological.”
"But I love you, too."
Melanie cocked her head in surprise. "You what?"
Even Wallace was startled by his choice of words.
"Where would I be without you?"
"So you think you love me?"
Wallace just shrugged his apology and started to turn
away. Melanie was more than he could handle, and his own confused
emotions were too much to try to sort out.
"Shit."
Wallace looked back at her in surprise. Tears
streamed from her eyes.
"She's going to scratch my eyes out, Wallace. I'm
afraid of her."
She sat on the couch and said nothing for a time.
"Okay, so I've had a rough day, too, and I'd as soon crash here. We'll
handle it the way we did before Sasha came back."
Wallace led her by the hand to the upstairs bedroom.
Fully clothed, they crawled beneath the covers and lay trembling in one
another's arms. "Are they watching?" Wallace said.
"Yes, but it wouldn't matter much what we were
doing. They got this radio wave x-ray machine that can see right through
clothes anyhow.”
Melanie's cell phone jangled. Melanie sat up in
bed. Wallace did the same groggily and realized that hours had passed.
They had both drifted effortlessly to sleep.
"Got it," she said, and set the phone on the
nightstand. "Sasha got agitated. They think a portal may have opened
somewhere nearby. They could ozone, and some alarms went off. Wallace,
she got away from them."
Wallace rolled to his feet and felt along the wall
for the wall switch. Melanie reached out and stopped him. "They're
looking for her. There's nothing we can do but wait."
"But she'll go to Harthmore and I won't be there!"
"They’ve got infrared cameras monitoring the
countryside around Harthmore. They'll call us when they find her.
They'll need you to control her, so you'll see her as soon as she shows
up."
Wallace sat on the edge of the bed, wallowing in
guilt.
"Wallace, she's not helpless, and we need to be here
for this. We're pressed for time. People are dying. We need things to
happen. And when they do, we need to be in control."
Wallace glanced at the living room clock. Three
hours sleep wouldn't go far.
"We can use the sleep," Melanie suggested mildly.
"What if they can't find her?"
"They’ll find her."
Wallace paced the room for nearly an hour, then
crawled back into bed at Melanie's side. It was as good a place as any to
close his eyes and wait.
Cautiously, Melanie snuggled beside him.
A creak of the floorboard awakened him. He would
have been on his feet in an instant. A sting on the neck stopped him.
The best he managed was a feeble twitch. Melanie managed a whimper of
protest, and he felt her go limp and quiet as well.
Wallace could move no part of his body. His eyes
blinked, his heart beat, and his lungs sucked air. He felt as if his soul
had been transferred to a machine that would not respond to his will. He
lay in the dark, terrified, panicking, and absolutely still.
A massive hand tipped in sharp nails rolled him onto
his stomach. Something whirred softly, and his clothes fell away. An
object like a cushioned board roughly a foot wide and the length of his
body came down upon him. Clamps closed on his shoulders, buttocks, and
the calves of his legs. Without a moment's hesitation, he was hoisted
into the air and carried off.
He could feel the breeze of movement as he was spun
and turned about, moving rapidly through the house and down the basement
stairs. He heard footsteps pounding, slow and heavy, and floorboards
creaking in protest.
He smelled the terrifying tang of ozone and knew that
he was in the presence of the giants from the portal. He could see little
in the darkness, nothing more than a silhouette of a massive humanoid
shape towering above him, ducking through each doorway and down the
basement stairwell.
He was set on cold cement and rolled onto his back.
His head rolled to one side, giving him a perfect
view of Melanie lying next to him like a white, anatomically correct
doll. Her opened eyes stared at the ceiling.
From the bottom of his field of vision, he caught
sight of animals that were not men, monsters that moved with intelligence
and grace. They were truly monstrous in size with muscular shoulders that
would have put a human weightlifter to shame, and tapering bodies dressed
in snug uniforms of blue and yellow. The arm and leg joints were subtly
wrong. The shape of their skulls and their faces were more reptilian than
human.
Massive arms with slender, four-fingered hands
brought leathery, egg-shaped objects two thirds of a yard in length into
view. One was placed upon Melanie's body, covering the area of her lap.
The other pressed on his own legs and belly, soft and warm. He could feel
something moving inside the object.
Blue light flashed, followed again by the sting of
ozone. Complete darkness and silence closed upon him.
Something was definitely moving inside the object on
his body, a desperate, squirming, living thing seeking to escape
confinement. It was an egg, Wallace decided, soft and pliable. Reptiles
laid such eggs, he remembered, turtles and snakes, eggs with coverings
like flexible leather.
Time passed. No help came to their rescue. Wallace
heard Melanie's egg sac rupture. He could not help but see the thing that
emerged, mewing like a kitten, crawling with frantic, instinctive
coordination to the warm body awaiting it.
This should not have been happening. Five minutes
had passed. If the house was monitored as extensively as the last one,
what had become of Melanie's ASG?
As the hatchling left a trail of seeping fluid across
Melanie's body, Wallace thought that the rats would have been more
welcomed. They at least would have provided a swift death cloaked in the
anesthesia of shock. If the thing on her body bit her, if it ate her,
Melanie was going to suffer a slow, methodical, and horrific death.
It sniffed its prey in growing interest. It growled
deep in its throat. It's thrusting jaw opened and a full mouth of razor
sharp gleamed in the dim light.
Wallace's remembered the human remains he had seen in
refrigerated compartments. His sanity would never survive what he was
about to witness, if he had time to go insane before the same thing
happened to him.
