Twelve
The clock in an alcove in the emergency room of the
Dale City Hospital read four in the morning, although the ward reminded
Wallace of freeway traffic on a Saturday evening. Incoming ambulances cut
off their sirens a block away and left in a roar of exhaust after having
dropped off their charges. The injured were stunned or hysterical, often
oblivious to their wounds. Frightened and confused nurses, unaccustomed to
dealing with large scale crises and terrified by tales of murderous
predators, hurried about in a blind effort to quell the chaos.
Wallace was taken to a cubicle where he dozed in a
mild delirium for most of the hour it took for a nurse to arrive and
bandage his arm. He awoke later in a quiet hospital room with no memory
at all of being transported there. Before his anxiety got the best of
him, a doctor opened the door to a quiet corridor of the hospital, pausing
to talk in low tones to Sergeant Nicholas Waldenski. The doctor called
for a nurse and entered his room with the woman in tow.
"Unwrap the right arm, please."
Wallace held his arm out to allow the nurse to do her
thing. He cried out in alarm as the injury appeared to view. What had
started as two puncture wounds had enlarged to an oval-shaped, festering
wound.
"You said a snake bit you," the doctor said.
"It was just two little bite marks!" Wallace
protested.
"Can you tell me what kind of snake it was, Mr.
McFerguson? It's quite important we know. We can't administer an
antibody or an antitoxin without knowing the specific venom we're up
against."
Wallace gaped at the man in horror. "I don't know
what kind of snake it was!"
"Have you ever seen anything like it in the past?
Anything similar?"
"No!"
"Please describe the snake to me, Wallace. Size,
color, particularly the shape of the head. Rounded? Triangular?"
"It had wings on its head." Wallace lowered his
gaze. "It was silver."
The doctor gazed at him, jotted a note on his
clipboard and said, "I see."
"The mushrooms read eat me on them! They all
read eat me all the way through the meat!"
The doctor glanced back at the Sergeant standing in
the background. Sergeant Waldenski nodded solemnly, then shrugged his
helplessness. "The kid's got a point. Nobody's come up with an
explanation as yet."
"Is there a possibility you may have imagined this
creature?" the doctor asked gently.
"Yes! The mushroom's making people crazy!" Wallace
gulped air and calmed himself. "I didn't eat any, but they're giving off
clouds of spores. I might have breathed something."
The doctor nodded approval of Wallace's theory.
"Quite possible." He sighed in displeasure, "but it doesn't help us deal
with our immediate medical problem."
Wallace stared at the man in abject terror, fearful
of being told he was dying, or that his arm would have to be amputated.
"Well, we'll take a tissue and blood sample. Maybe
the lab can come up with something. If the venom in that wound generates
new symptoms, or if the gangrenous tissue spreads, you may need further
treatment. We'd like to keep you overnight, if you don't mind."
Wallace knew better than to reject the suggestion.
They weren't going to let him go back out into the fracas injured and
delirious, and he didn't want a police guard posted at his door.
"Yeah, I think that would be a good idea," he said.
"I'm really tired."
The Sergeant stopped the doctor as he turned to
leave. "I don't care how crazy these stories sound, we have confirmation
that we are dealing with a mushroom as Wallace describes it and that some
kind of physical mutation is making the victims of this fungus pretty
damned dangerous. Check with the people in the emergency room. They're
taking the brunt of this crisis."
The doctor turned to the nurse. "Take a smear, a
biopsy, then wrap it back up." He hurried off without looking back.
The nurse wheeled in a tray from the corridor. With
a face taut with worry and fatigue, she dabbed at his wound with a cotton
swath, bandaged it again, and then gave him an injection in his uninjured
arm. When she left, the Sergeant approached Wallace and forced a grin.
"That was a shrink rather than your run-of-the-mill M.D. you were talking
to, but he's had some experience with snakes in Southeast Asia, from what
I hear. You're in good hands."
"I've got to get back to Sasha and my Aunt Bernice,"
Wallace told the man, convinced now that he wasn't going to make it. His
tongue felt swollen and clumsy. He wasn't sure he could get up if he
tried.
"We're missing cops, Wallace. They were armed and
well-trained, so I wouldn't recommend going back alone. It's almost
daylight anyhow, and the National Guard will be here within the hour.
Give some thought to your winged serpent. You're not doing so well
yourself."
"There was more than just that," Wallace said,
letting the rest out and hoping the cop would be tempted to take him back to
Willington to check it out. "There’s a place in the woods. I went there
last night to see if everybody had gotten out of the woods okay. I saw
something."
Nick's neutral expression held fast. "Is that where
you saw your winged snake?"
Wallace hated himself for being so spineless. "A
rabbit hole, I guess."
Nick grinned. "And a rabbit wearing a waistcoat and
a top hat, right?"
Surprised that the cop understood the reference,
Wallace took no offense at the bantering. "You'd have to see for
yourself."
"I'll pass word along. Nobody's going to doubt your
word until we check it out. In the meanwhile, I think you ought to give
it a rest. Let that shot the nurse gave you do its job."
Wallace had every intention of refusing Nick's
advice. When the police Sergeant left, he closed his eyes long enough to
calm the vertigo that was spinning the world about his head. He slept
despite himself, and when he opened his eyes, it was light outside, a
cloudy and dreary morning.
The world beyond his tinted hospital window had
fallen eerily silent. His arm tingled, and itched intolerably, as if
swarming with maggots trying to burrow into inflamed, sensitized tissue.
"What the hell!"
Wallace bolted upright in bed and ripped off the
bandage. He gave a cry of fright at what he saw. It wasn't bigger
in size, but
it was bubbling and hissing as if boiling. As he watched, the wound began
to emit a fog, or a fine mist.
Wallace threw his arm out away from his body and
averted his face, terrified by the phenomenon. Out of the corner of his
eye, he watched the mist ascend into the darkness. He expected to see it
disperse through the air. Instead, it held its vertical form and drifted
to one side to be replaced by a second rising column.
Twin pinpoints of light began to glow in the top of
the first column, then the second as still a third began to rise from his
arm. Ghostly stick figures with rounded heads glared down at him with eyes of
blinding intensity.
They had to be products of his imagination. The
thought that he had gone mad consoled him. Reality gone mad would have
been infinitely worse.
Seven figures took form. They stood about the room
like sentinels, hovering in midair and facing him in an enclosing circle.
Wallace fumbled for the TV remote and pushed the button that would bring a
nurse. Even when she came through the door and walked through one of the
specters, he could not tear his eyes from them.
"Is there something you need?" The nurse was an
older woman. She smiled warmly.
"Don't you see them?" Wallace pointed at a ceiling
corner with an unsteady finger. They were less visible in the light from
the corridor, but their eyes still glared.
The nurse looked about with a frown. "Do you
see something? May I ask what it is you're seeing, Wallace?"
If they knew his name, they had probably been warned
that he was hallucinating. And if the nurse couldn't see the blue-white
stars of their eyes, perhaps he was hallucinating after all. He lay his
head back down on the pillow and closed his eyes.
"Nothing, I guess."
The plump, middle-aged woman
patted his arm. "Would you like something more to help you sleep?"
Wallace shook his head. "No. I can sleep okay."
The nurse eyed his unbandaged arm. "You should keep
that wrapped."
Wallace pretended to sleep. She used forceps to pick
up his old bandage and placed it in a plastic carton. She wore plastic
gloves while rewrapping his wound.
When she left, Wallace sat up and evaluated his
physical condition. Aside from feeling light-headed from lack of sleep,
he hadn't been incapacitated by his injury. The sedative had lost out to
his heightened state of anxiety. The stick figures were still standing
about the room, but they were dimmer and less imposing now, whatever they
were.
He got out of bed and checked the closet. All his
clothes were still on hand, aside from his bloody shirt. He dressed,
leaving on his hospital gown to serve as a shirt and tucking the excess in
his pants. He then cracked the door open and inspected the corridor
outside. With the nurse's station off to his right, the elevators to the
left, and no one in sight, he had only to cross the corridor and punch the
down button.
He rode the elevator to the ground floor. The door
opened on a corridor still busy with fast-moving pedestrian traffic and
uniformed National Guardsmen. Wallace went out a side entrance into the
gray morning without being stopped. He crossed a parking lot in the cool
morning air, a street, then escaped into the alleys and yards of a
residential neighborhood.
Once the hospital was out of view, he turned toward
the downtown area of Dale City, taking cover when military jeeps and olive
drab trucks passed close by.
The police barricade was gone from the bridge leading
into Willington, the business district deserted. Helicopters coming and
going along the northern horizon suggested that the National Guard had
moved the quarantine perimeter back to encompass both towns.
Wallace found the car he had used nosed to the curb
where he had abandoned it with the keys hidden beneath the seat. He drove
home, idling in the drive in front of the house and prepared to flee if
Duke and his friends were still lurking about. In time, he shut off the
engine.
He didn't want to go inside the house. He didn't
want to go down into the basement to see what had become of Bernice and
Brother Sebastian. But he had to help Sasha, so he went inside regardless
and shuffled his way through the gloom to the basement stairs.
Gray light filtered up the stairs from the basement
windows. The even weaker glow of a twenty-five watt bulb illuminated the
concrete floor at the base of the stairs.
"Aunt Bernice? Are you down there?"
She was. He could hear uneven, rasping breathing.
Step by slow step, he went down to see what had happened. There was a bad
smell, and something dark had been spilled over the floor.
Bernice squatted in a dark corner across the
basement, her arms crisscrossed against her chest, her forehead resting
against her arms. He rushed to her, freezing in place halfway across the
floor.
He saw a body on the workbench off to his right in
his peripheral vision. He didn't want to look at it directly. He knew by
the size of the pale mass that it was Brother Sebastian.
He absolutely dared not move a muscle. Something was
terribly wrong with Aunt Bernice. Her skin glowed a shiny metallic blue.
She panted like an animal as she slept. The changes that had been wrought
had filled out her body and distorted her all out of proportion. Even the
shape of her skull had changed. If he awakened her, Wallace suspected
he'd never reach the top of the stairs alive. She had become one of he
monsters he had seen in the grotto.
He turned, and he saw what he had not wanted to see.
The corpse that had been Brother Sebastian Grieg stared at the ceiling
with an expression of surprise fixed upon its waxen face. Its chest was
bare, and its feet. Wallace's mind refused to register the condition of
the body between head and feet. Most of its bulk seemed to be
missing. Some of it was on the floor steaming in a pool of congealing
blood.
Slowly, Wallace backed to the stairs, his head
roaring with panic. He turned, scurried up to the kitchen on hands and
knees, and closed and locked the door behind him. When he regained some
trust in his equilibrium, he went to the staircase leading upstairs.
"Sasha?"
He had no choice but to go up and look for her. He
found nothing. The upstairs rooms were empty.
He paused at his bedroom window. All of the
downstairs windows had been broken in the house across the way, and the
front door stood open. Duke had done that. Maybe Duke had Sasha.
Hopefully, Sylvia had returned in time to take her daughter away to
safety.
Wallace went back down and out to the car. A
nightmare of monumental proportions had engulfed Willington. He wouldn't
be able to move about freely once the National Guard began its sweep
through town. He didn't know where Duke lived, but Brian Dolson would
know. His old schoolmate only lived three blocks away.
The house Wallace drove to looked as trashed and
deserted as Sasha's. He left the car idling at the curb and stopped
halfway up the sidewalk. A body of a young man lying face down in a pool
of blood blocked his way. Before he could decide whether to turn away or
go around the obstacle, the front door creaked open, and a man with a
shotgun emerged from the shadows.
Brian Dolson eased out from behind his father looking
dazed and confused. "Hi, Wallace. What's up this morning? We heard
helicopters. Is someone coming to get us?"
"National Guard," Wallace said, nodding to the
north. "Just outside Dale City. They should be coming in pretty quick.
I'm not sure if they got things figured out yet. How you guys doing?"
Brian looked more than a bit unsteady on his feet.
"Me and Dad are okay. Mom and my sisters are gone. Phone's out. We had
Dave Smitty staying with us last night. He went out with a gun for help,
but he never came back. Have you seen those monsters, Wallace? I think
they're eating people. Dad found bodies next door. I don't think you
oughta come any closer. He's been really paranoid about visitors this
morning."
Wallace was more than happy to keep his distance from
the terrified looking man with the shotgun. "I'm looking for Sasha. Do
you know where Duke lives?"
Brian pointed down the street. "Other side of town.
Four-fifteen Dover."
"What happened in the woods yesterday?"
Brian's eyes widened. "Man, everybody started to eat
those mushrooms! I got there late and I would've partied with them, but,
man, they started acting really weird, drunk like, but a lot worse. I
swear to god, they were raping all the girls, except most of the girls
were going at it just as crazy as anyone. Nobody had any booze, so I
figured it was the mushrooms and I just got the hell out of there. I
don't know what's been happening since, except that we've seen things
running around that look like lizard people. I guess they were the ones
killing everybody. I swear to God, Wallace, I saw one chase down a car
and break right through the back window."
Brian pointed to a car with its grill folded around a
tree at the end of the block. "That one there. It dragged a girl out and
took her out back of that house. There's hardly anything left of her
now."
Wallace backed away from the porch, more filled with
dread now than ever. "Gotta go, Brian. Better stay put and wait for the
cops. Either that or try to get out while it's light out. They're
sleeping in the basements."
Brian's father dragged Brian back into the house by
the scuff of the neck and closed the door behind him. Wallace turned and
ran back to his car, half expecting a shotgun blast to catch him in the
back.
Wallace drove to four-fifteen Dover, a small,
inexpensive house like most houses in Dale City. The last thing
Wallace wanted to do was to go inside and find what he knew he was going
to find. He had no choice, because if Sasha was here, he had to know what
had become of her, if she had become a monster, or a victim.
The house inside was a shambles. Furniture lay
scattered about and broken, and blood splattered the walls. He tried the
basement lights, but a fuse was blown. Despite the insanity of searching
the darkness alone and unarmed, his only option was to leave without
knowing what had happened to her.
So he went down regardless, one quiet step at a
time. When the carnage appeared to view, he took deep breaths to keep
himself from vomiting. He counted the remains of four partially devoured
bodies. He had no way of knowing whether they had been male or female.
Only an intact foot or a hand here and there testified to the fact that
they had been human victims.
Four of the transformed monsters squatted against the
back wall. He could see their eyes blinking like reptiles in the dim
light. None made a hostile move toward him. They had satisfied their
hunger. They had been transformed and had fallen into a stupor. Wallace
suspected that they would remain in hiding until the siren called them to
the portal.
Brian's description was as good as any. They were
lizard people. All hunched up as they were, he couldn't tell their sexes,
but he recognized two of them. The one on the far right had been Duke.
Wallace eased back up the stairs, his heart
palpitating so badly that he felt certain he would faint dead away. He
could feel rather than see the presence of the vaporous beings with the
eyes of blue-white fire accompanying him. His throbbing arm was a
constant reminder of their presence.
Wallace drove home in his borrowed car. He left it
idling and got out, pacing to and fro in growing agitation.
"Sasha!"
His hoarse voice echoed in the silence and went
unanswered.
He had but one final destination. He got back in the
car and drove north through Willington and Dale City. He slowed approaching a crowd of soldiers dressed in white biochemical suits with
twin air tanks strapped to their backs. He parked a half block back and
walked the rest of the way on foot.
"Come forward," an amplified voice called when he
hesitated. "Come on through our ranks to the white van in the rear."
Two armed guardsmen accompanied him as he passed
through the group. He was escorted to a van filled with medical
apparatus. A nurse and a doctor awaited inside, neither dressed in any
protective clothing. "We're in the same boat as yourself, lad," the
doctor said, a gaunt man in his fifties. "We're all quarantined until
they can figure out what they're up against. Come on up and join us."
Wallace climbed inside and sat where indicated. "How
many people got out?" he said.
The doctor began taking notes on a clipboard, then
set it aside and approached with a tongue compressor. "Oh, I think we
have four or five hundred about. You're the last we've seen in the past
few hours."
Four or five hundred out of a combined population of
two thousand or more? Wallace sat still for a quick examination of his
throat, nose, ears and eyes. Next on the agenda was another blood sample
drawn from his arm.
"It's the mushrooms," Wallace offered.
"Do you think so?" the doctor asked politely, most of
his attention focused on drawing a vial of blood. Afterward, he inspected
Wallace's bandaged hand. "I see you've been to the hospital earlier."
"I went back to Willington to look for my
girlfriend."
The doctor glanced at him in surprise. "Have you
seen any of the… others?"
Bile burned at his gut. What could he say without
telling the man of the carnage he had seen?
"We should at least have a specimen soon," the doctor
said. "Then we'll have a better idea of what we're up against."
The carnage needed no explanation. It simply needed
to end.
The doctor unwrapped and examined his arm. "I think
I heard about you. Is this the snake bite?"
"Yeah. I'm Wallace McFerguson."
"Well, you can go on to the camp. Hopefully, you'll
find friends and relatives waiting for you. I'd advise against going back
into town."
Wallace was escorted by two armed National Guardsmen
dressed in ordinary fatigues to a pasture surrounded by barbed wire and
filled with rows of large military tents. He was taken to a tent filled
with cots. Most were empty. "Stay put," one of the men ordered. "They
got you down for debriefing, but it may be awhile."
Content now to do as he was told, Wallace laid down
and pulled a blanket over his shoulders. His eyes were closed when he
heard the volley of gunfire nearby. He hadn't yet fallen asleep when
another echoed through the rainy, darkening afternoon from further away.
