Twenty-eight
Corin let Billy Trevor make his call to Richard
Welk. Silver Ridge had been cut off from the outside world. Meddling
agents from Trevor Industries would work to his advantage. There were
outsiders in town, and if his adversary was among them, he needed to
identify the individual as soon as possible. He needed to poke a stick
into the festering wound and see what manner of creature raised its ugly
head.
He had been monitoring the activity at the motel on
the north side of town, growing increasingly suspicious, but alarmed only
after Abraham Darker pulled to the base of the hill with an apparent
weapon in his possession. While Billy typed his messages to Sarah
Trevor’s attorney, Corin watched a monitor in Billy’s peripheral vision
that showed Abraham Darker kneeling alongside the truck and unpacking a
box. A nearby drone in the underbrush drew closer and switched to
infrared.
Corin recognized the content of the box as a weapon
that did not belong in Billy’s era. This was the clue he had been
watching for. The confrontation with the adversary was upon him almost
before he could initiate his self-defense. The adversary had been lurking
in Silver Ridge all along, and the first blow was about to be struck.
Corin took over control of the body, forcing Billy
into the psychic background. He lunged for an intercom.
“Evie, run!”
His cry echoed throughout the house. Two floors up,
Evie sat cross-legged in the center of her bedroom, dressed in an elegant
negligee and folding the new clothes she had been trying on all evening.
She had been lost in thought, giving her suicidal despair second thought
and rehearsing the inevitable and dreaded confrontation with Abe over
Noah’s death.
“Evie, run! Drop whatever you’re doing and get
down here! Now!”
Alarmed, she climbed to her feet. “What’s the
matter?” she muttered, not certain of where the voice was coming from, or
if it could hear her reply. “What’s happening?”
“Evie, we’re going to lose the house! Run!”
She knelt and began bunching clothes into her arms.
“You don’t have time! Evie, run!”
She was naked beneath the few sheer pieces of lace
she wore. She would at least have to take a moment or two to dress. . .
“Get her!” Corin cried. “Now!”
She didn’t even see where they came from, but the
room was suddenly filled with spiders. Of all Corin’s little machines,
only the spiders frightened her. Corin had said that they used exactly
the same neuron structure to coordinate their eight legs as real spiders.
They were the fastest and most agile of any of Corin’s machines, and they
gave her the creeps the way they buzzed across the room, a peculiar sound
of hundreds of needle sharp legs clicking across wood and tile, and then
in utter silence across the rug.
The machines launched themselves at her. Their
multiple legs snapped about her ankles, then tugged violently to throw her
off balance. She went down on hands and knees, and they swarmed over her
in an instant. Her next scream was one of genuine pain as countless
needles shredded her delicate negligee and dug deep into her skin for
purchase.
They clung in chains about her body. Others used the
chain as holds to lift her clear of the floor and race across the room.
She was out the door in an instant. Her breath caught in her throat as
she went down the sweeping stairs and across another flat expanse to the
elevator.
She had a chance to scream again in the elevator.
The doors opened on the basement chambers, and her scream echoed through
empty corridors.
She was clear of the elevator when the explosion
blasted down through the shaft, blowing in the ceiling and enveloping a
trailing horde of spiders in a glare of light. In the next instant, the
heavy metal doors slammed shut, but not before a photoflash of heat
engulfed her body. She jammed her burning eyes closed and sucked
superheated air to scream one final scream of utter terror.
