Twenty-five
Sasha returned alone late in the afternoon. She was
smiling as she came through the door, but rife with tension. "I promised
I'd take you for a walk. They said it would help."
Wallace had showered and dressed. They started off
across town on foot in the cold autumn sunlight.
"Melanie took me to a doctor," Sasha said. "He said
I was in good physical condition. He showed me tapes and pictures the
National Guard took of everything that happened in Willington so that
nothing I might hear about or see would catch me by surprise."
Sasha took a deep, shuddering breath and quickened
her pace.
"They told me I might know something of important to
the ASG," Sasha said, speaking a bit louder as she hurried along. "It's
happening again, and they have to stop it, so I said it was okay if we
continued to work with Melanie Cass, except that if she gets naked with
you again, I'll scratch her eyes out."
Sasha looked back at him apprehensively and waited
for him to catch up. "Melanie apologized. She said she liked you and was
spending a lot of time with you, and she hadn't slept with a man in ages.
She said that nothing happened between the two of you because you had
taken my disappearance pretty hard."
Sasha stopped and embraced him. She lay her head on
his shoulder. She seemed calm, but constant tremors ran through her
body. "It never really happened to me, did it, Wallace?” she said, her
hot breath washing across his neck. “I must have gotten lost in the woods
and that horrible friend of yours, Maligoth, found me and brought me to
you so that he could blackmail you. Do you think that's what might have
happened?"
For all Wallace could say for sure, that's the way it
could have happened. Not for a moment did he believe it. But he did
believe that if Maligoth could reach between worlds and between centuries
of time to abduct his victims as Ghaedor claimed, then anything was
possible.
Sasha took his hand and started walking again. "I'm
not going to let Mom know I'm okay just yet. With father so upset,
they'll just fight again over me. I'll wait until it's over before I
phone her. Mom doesn't really believe I'm dead anyhow, does she?"
"I told them both that you were alive," Wallace
said. "I know your mother believed me. I think your father did, too, but
he was frightened for you."
Sasha turned off the sidewalk and wandered out into a
park sparsely populated by young mothers and their toddlers.
Wallace tried to take her hand and offer what comfort
he could. She pulled it out of reach and stepped away. "They told me
that those who had been infected by the mushroom were like piranhas, that
the changes going on inside their bodies made them desperately hungry for
protein and not responsible for what they did. They became confused and
they killed and cannibalized even their own families. But that didn't
happen to me. I spit it out. I remember telling you that I spit it out."
"I remember that, too," Wallace assured her. He
stuffed his hands in his pocket rather than risk Sasha seeing how bad he
was shaking.
Sasha turned suddenly. "I want to go back now."
Once back at the apartment, it started all over
again. She quickly undressed and waited for Wallace to lose the battle
with his own confused desires.
But she quickly became insatiable. Some time later
in the afternoon, Wallace threw her off. "That's enough. I can't do it
all the time."
Sasha embraced him from behind. "They ate each
other, Wallace. They were making love and they got confused. They were
hungry.”
Wallace rolled away from her in sudden fright. He
stood alongside the bed, looking down at her in fear that she had lost her
mind.
"They must have forgotten who they were." Sasha
stared into space, her eyes dark with a blend of fear and indecipherable.
"They didn't even know what they were doing."
She shuddered violently in the throes of some secret,
self-contained passion. Wallace's stomach convulsed. He rushed to the
toilet. When his dry heaves ended, he gargled with mouth wash and
wandered on shaky legs to the window overlooking the park.
The leaves were gone from the trees. Soon, the
desolation of winter would be upon them.
Sasha lay sprawled across the bed, her eyes closed.
Restlessly, she writhed, lost in her own nightmarish, erotic thoughts.
Wallace watched her. Her flawless body and her exotic beauty only served
to deepen his obsession with her. She was no longer the vivacious,
wide-eyed child he had known, brimming with youthful energy and eager for
all life had to offer. That had all been swept aside and replaced by
something far darker and less innocent.
The phone rang. Melanie was on the other end. "Did
Sasha tell you about our little field trip this evening?"
"No. Is it necessary?"
"It's absolutely necessary. If she can't help us
understand what may have happened, we're in serious trouble. I'll be over
to pick the two of you up in a few minutes."
It was only a little before seven, but Wallace had
been ready to call it a day. Sasha was half asleep. "Melanie's on her
way," he said.
Sasha sighed, but arose without further complaint.
They were both showered and dressed by the time Melanie arrived.
She drove them to a sheet-metal
clad building in the countryside, one of several of the type used to store
farm equipment. Now, the buildings were surrounded by barbed wire
and illuminated in the night by halogen floodlights. Armed National
Guardsmen let them through a gate. The inside of the largest
building was filled with white-smocked lab technicians and their
equipment. In a crudely partitioned section at the rear, Wallace was
shown insulated crypts equipped with glass covers and filled with
refrigerated human remains. The glass was frosted, but he caught an
initial glimpse of an unmarred human foot connected to white bones before
he backed quickly away. With her lips parted in astonishment, Sasha
began a systematic inspection of the content of each crypt, not nearly as
shocked as he had been.
"These people died during the past week," Melanie
explained in a low tone of voice.
"But you told me two people died!" Wallace protested.
"They were the first. There have been others since.
Look at this."
A nearby computer showed Wallace a quick file for
each victim, a name and a brief personal history. "How many are there?"
Wallace said, alarmed as screen after screen flashed by.
"Twenty-eight."
Wallace reeled with panic.
"We suspect the majority of potential victims managed
to avoid death by simply sensing danger and keeping a safe distance from
it," Melanie said. "Local law enforcement officials have received quite a
few reports of prowlers. They're not aware of most of the deaths. More
than half the victims we have on hand were elderly and hearing impaired.
Most lived alone."
Melanie touched another key and brought a map of the
area sprinkled with red dots on the screen. "The deaths have been
occurring in a spiral outward from Willington and Dale City. News of
these incidents is being suppressed by the military for the time being.
The ASG is still operating autonomously. Nobody is too sure who we are
and far more ignorant than us about what is happening. I don't know how
much longer that will last."
Sasha drew close. "What killed them?"
Melanie glanced at Wallace, sharing with him her
alarm at Sasha's cold acceptance of death, and then she looked down at the
keyboard and tapped a few more keys. "This is a computer generated image
of the jaw structure of the creature that inflicted the wounds we find on
the corpses."
An image of a slowly rotating, partial skull filled
the screen. The jaws were human-like, but more massive in proportion to
the rest of the skull, and lined with a greater number of small, but sharp
teeth. "Notice that the jaw is hardly more than five inches across,"
Melanie said.
Wallace looked at her, startled.
"It's something new," Melanie said quietly.
"Whatever the creature is, it's less than a yard in length, an entirely
different kind of creature than the mutated townspeople we lost in the
Willington portal. We're not too far from the farmhouse where the first
couple died. We don't have the complete results of the forensic tests
yet, but I wanted to have a look for my own benefit. Will you go with
me?"
Wallace had no choice. His only priority was to keep
the three of them together. Sasha seemed willing to follow without giving
any clear evidence that she clearly understood everything that was
happening.
The drive to the farmhouse took less than ten
minutes. The gravel driveway had been barricaded. Nobody seemed to be
about in the evening darkness, but two uniformed guards emerged from the
underbrush to wave Melanie's car through with the barrels of M-16 rifles.
Melanie waved at one of the men casually.
She led the way inside the deserted house and turned
on lights just inside the door. "Take a look at the locks on the door and
windows."
The farmhouse was old, but the doors and windows had
been replaced with vinyl replacement units. Wallace doubted if they'd
pose much of a barrier to a determined burglar, but these were all intact
and undamaged. And locked.
"The house was tight as a drum," Melanie said. "The
locks were set by the people who died inside this house. Nobody could
have left the premises without leaving an unlocked exit behind them. None
exist."
The basement was dark and smelled typically musty.
Wallace caught a faint odor of formaldehyde on the way down. Melanie
stepped aside at the bottom of the stairs.
The floor ahead was splattered with dried blood.
Beneath a single twenty-five watt bulb, a stain ran to a nearby floor
drain. "Their clothes were removed upstairs," Melanie said. "They were
brought down here afterward."
Sasha looked at Melanie in surprise. "You said the
things that killed them were only three feet long."
They both glanced at her in startled surprised.
Regardless of the nature of her emotional problems, Sasha was alert and
rational. She had been an intelligent girl, but Wallace had never seen
her think and react this fast and decisively. It was a new part of her,
an unfamiliar one, and one that frightened him.
"That's the other half of our mystery," Melanie said.
Wallace had assumed the deaths to be the savage,
primal acts of violence Willington had experienced. Something far more
sinister was happening in the outlying countryside.
"They were brought down here before they were
killed," Melanie said. "Family members who phoned and should have checked
on them waited too long. The two victims at this location hadn't been
dead for long when they were found, and there wasn't much left of them.
There was no evidence of a struggle, but they were alive at the time of
their deaths. Arterial blood is under considerable pressure when a heart
is beating. A severed artery caused that trail of bloodstains against the
west wall."
Wallace knew what Melanie was hinting at and waited
for her to say it aloud. "Whatever did it came and went through a portal
like the one in the grotto,” she said. “And the apartment,"
"That means they can come and go as they please,"
Wallace added.
Melanie gestured. "Follow me. I've got one more
thing to show you."
Wallace and Sasha followed her back upstairs.
Melanie stopped in the living room entrance and pointed to where clothing
lay scattered across a rug.
"Their clothing was removed rather than torn away,
but you can see buttons on the floor. All the buttons on the victims'
clothing were popped off. The zipper to the man's trousers was torn and
the victim's hip was broken in the process. That wasn't done by the much
smaller carnivores that devoured the corpses. In fact, it was done by
something with more than human strength."
Wallace smelled the sudden tang of ozone. He spun
about in alarm, searching the shadows for signs of a portal in the room.
A radio clipped to Melanie's belt beeped. Sasha was
closest to Melanie at that moment. Melanie grabbed the girl's arm and
backed toward the front door. Wallace hung back a moment longer, looking
down the basement stairs. He heard the crackling of electricity and saw
the faint, telltale glow of bluish light.
An icy chill danced along his spine. A thousand
childhood fears had been justified in a split second. Monsters lurked in
dark places.
Melanie backed out the front door and all the way to
the middle of the front lawn, pulling Sasha along with her. She spoke
briefly with the radio held to her lips. Sasha shook loose from Melanie's
protective grip and threw herself into Wallace's arms with a cry of panic.
Traffic approached from both directions along the
county road. A spotlight mounted on a nearby telephone pole snapped on to
wash the face of the house in a glare of light.
"Let's go home before we get hemmed in by traffic,"
Melanie said. She hurried Wallace and Sasha into the front seat and
roared off into the night, ignoring the white vans turning into the drive
behind her.
"Your radio beeped," Wallace said. "Was that a
warning? Did they know something was happening?"
Melanie sighed heavily. "The house was monitored.
We wouldn't have otherwise been allowed inside."
"But our apartment was bugged that first night,
wasn't it?"
Melanie's knuckles whitened on the steering wheel.
"The transmitters failed. The new equipment is better shielded."
"Do they hear and see everything we do?"
"Wallace, we've been under a microscope from the
beginning, and we're never more than a few minutes from help."
"We've put on quite a show for them," Wallace said
sullenly. He had suspected. He had been afraid to ask.
Melanie shook her head vigorously. "We’ve got more
important things on our mind right now, and the recordings are destroyed
as soon as we have no further use for them. We don’t take the risk of
them being used against us by another agency.”
Sasha had no comments or questions of her own to add
to the conversation.
"Do you mind?" Melanie said quietly a few minutes
later. "Can you live with it?"
Wallace remembered how the beeper had sounded almost
the same instant he had smelled the ozone and how fast Melanie's
mysterious ASG had responded. "I can live with it."
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Melanie
and her friends were one step ahead of him. All he had to do was to hold
his sanity together one moment at a time until it was over. And hope that
Sasha could do the same.
Melanie glanced at Sasha seated between them.
"Sasha, how are you doing?"
Sasha stared ahead into the night, her eyes wide and
unfocused. "Please make it stop," she whispered.
"We'll be home soon," Melanie promised.
As if home was a safe haven. Melanie had said it
without thinking. Wallace saw a tear when she realized how utterly
foolish it sounded.
