Captain Quad (44 page)

Awed, she turned back to Peter, aware only now of her nakedness. Touching him, feeling his touch, was like the most intense physical rush multiplied a thousandfold, and she tumbled helplessly into the depths of her arousal. He'd shown her so much in just a few stunning moments, and she trusted him wholly.

He would not harm her.

(That's you down there, and you're going to drown!)

But there was only Peter.

When Kelly looked down again, this time from much higher up, she saw the water lap over her chin.

They rose hand in hand, gathering speed, Peter's smiling eyes holding her in thrall—

And Kelly stopped. She looked down and saw the crown of her head bob beneath the surface. There was a panicky feeling of suffocation, but it passed. She started off again, then hesitated once more, a cleft forming in her spectral brow.

Thirty feet below, her untenanted body ceased to move.

She had heard or perhaps felt something. . . vital, and now she groped for it; it was like trying to hear a whispered voice in a roomful of chattering people, and she clutched at it, the way a drowning man might clutch at a floating reed.

Then she had it. It was a single syllable, a whisper of breath.

A name.

Will.

Now the thought was joined by an image, Will's loving face, and Kelly thrust it in front of her like a shield. Peter saw it, and his expression of calm reassurance fell away.

You killed Will.

Peter looked down and saw Kelly's thick hair floating on the lake like a discarded wig. He tugged at her impatiently.

That doesn't matter, Kelly. Nothing matters now. Only us. Only our love. Come with me now, before it's too late.

Understanding dawned like a dead sun in Kelly's eyes. She held on to Will's image. It was burning now. Burning up.

You killed him. You destroyed the only person I've loved since you. Why?

Peter glanced down again, the movement furtive. To Kelly he looked like a sneak thief who had just heard distant sirens.

Why?

Because. . . because he touched you, Kelly!
He put his filthy hands on you! You're mine!

Kelly felt fury twisting inside her like something runny and half alive.

No, Peter. I am not yours.

She released his hand and withdrew. She looked down for her body and saw only a closing black eddy of water. The circle of ice gaped like a fiendish mouth.

Panic seized her.

I don't want to die!
she cried. Leave me alone!

Kelly, please. . .

No! Kelly screamed, watching Will burn on the silver screen of her mind, letting the flames kindle her rage, oh, blessed sweet killing rage—

She spun away.

You're coming with me!

It was a petulant bellow, the final barked threat of a paper tiger, and Kelly glared back at him spitefully. His form buzzed like cheap neon, and now his face was changing in the cold March sky. It was like watching a demon dissolve its false shape, and Kelly felt fear at this awesome display. The warmth in his eyes exploded into cold blue flame and he roared at her, showing her suddenly, finally, what he'd truly become.

Bitch!

Then he was rocketing toward her, all human shape gone, transformed in an eyeblink into that malign blue light, yawning open like a vortex into hell. It swirled around her, stalling her, dragging her back—

And Kelly screamed, NO!

Kelly, please. . . That petulant whine.

No.

Forsaking him, Kelly whirled toward the patch of open water below. She tried to advance toward it, but she felt thick, heavy, drugged. It was like trying to swim through a vat of cold soup. She could feel herself. . . fading, blacking out.

Dying. . .

God, please help me. I don't want to die.

There was a blur of motion—then she was under the lake, deep in its seamless domain, searching for her drowning body. She found it easily, floundering at the end of that strange blue cord—but when she reached it, it repelled her.

It faced her, opened its eyes, and grinned. Good-bye, whore, it said, precious air bubbling out.

Get out! Kelly shrieked. Then she struck her body like a hot bolt of lightning. She penetrated her own flesh—oh, it's so cold!—and expelled him like an evil thought.

She turned and peered into the shifting darkness, the water numbing her to the marrow. The moon was still there, reflected on the surface overhead, and she slogged toward it through the killing depths. Her body had advanced only a few yards past that smooth lip of ice and now she thrust her face into the air, sucked at it, drank it in. Choking, she staggered toward shore, her soaked woolen sweater drooping from her torso in heavy folds, and collapsed in the frigid shallows. Regaining her feet, she blundered shoreward again, this time falling on dry land. Lying there shivering, gasping, she turned and glared up at him.

He was flickering, fading.

"You can't have me," she sputtered, coughing up lake water. "Even if you kill me, I'll never be yours. I hate you. You're not Peter anymore. You're a monster. Peter's dead."

I am not dead!

And as it had so often before, Peter's rage sought to work against him. He could feel it trying to drag him back to his body, but he would not go back, he—

"Fuck off," Kelly said, and laughed. She sat up on shore, struggling to conceal the fact that she was freezing, on the verge of blacking out. She waved a dismissive hand. "Bring on the dogs, you bastard. Bring on anything you like. I'll buy a gun and be ready. But you can't touch me now. Not anymore. You'll never touch me again."

There followed a moment when she feared she had gone too far, that he would harden into that fearsome warhead Sam had told her about and punch a hole in her chest.

Then he grunted and reeled away. It was as if unseen cables had been jerked from behind by powerful hands. A look of impotent rage boiled in his face, and Kelly understood that his unending fury had finally defeated him. His body was tugging him back the way an aggravated parent might tug a naughty child.

It's not finished, Kelly, he cried.

Then he was gone, a faint streak of light, the tail of a dying comet.

Kelly sagged backward on the snow-crusted rocks. She could see the house at the top of the hill, visually inverted, uninhabited, nothing there but Chainsaw's body—and the phone.

The house looked a mile away.

She flopped onto her belly like a giant tadpole and began to crawl, her limbs feeling numb and vestigial. As she looked at it, the house seemed to withdraw down a long dark tunnel, its well-lit windows fading to yellow smudges. . . and then nothing.

Kelly fainted dead away on the hill, her heart stumbling off in a precarious rhythm, her core temperature plummeting toward that of a corpse.

Impotent rage seethed within him as he dipped and tumbled toward the hospital, toward the ramshackle base camp that was his body. He was out of control—and he had been so close! Another few seconds and she would have been his—!

Peter's involuntary retreat ceased. It was like running headlong into a cinder-block wall. A whining buzz saw of pain slit through the top of his skull—and now a chunk of light blew out of him and was extinguished; it felt like flesh being tom out, clawed out, and he screamed; he screamed and the gulls rose up from the island far below, a screeching, wheeling white cloud.

Understanding followed the pain.

Sam! It was a roar.

Sammeeeeeeeee!

Another chunk blew out of him, and another, crippling gouts of the thing he'd become, and now he was moving again, flipping and cartwheeling like a dead autumn leaf. He tried to hold himself in, the way a gut-shot soldier will clutch his uncoiling guts, tried to smooth out his flight. . . but it was pointless. He was a rag in a twister's sucking funnel.

Sam was not just shaking him awake.

Sam was killing him.

The hospital came into view, a smooth black promontory in the dawn's brooding light, and Peter tumbled toward it. He felt no regret, only a blind, delirious fury and the consummate bitterness of betrayal. He had ignored Sam's threats, believed them to be angry but empty words.

He had been wrong.

He twirled toward his ninth-story window like a plummeting aircraft, the March wind wailing in his ears. When he struck it, the window exploded, the double pane pulverizing into fragments the size of sequins. They showered Sam where he stood at the bedside with a pillow seated tightly over Peter's face.

Sammy, no. . .

It was a feeble whisper, an unheeded plea.

Too late.

As Sam straightened up, removing the pillow, Peter caught a glimpse of his own dead face, fish mouth gaping, eyes mashed shut, airless chest jeweled with broken glass. In an agony of dissolution, he merged with the corpse on the bed. It was like sinking into raw, refrigerated meat.

Sam looked down at his brother's corpse.

It grinned.

Then it sat up, and Sam screamed.

THIRTY-NINE

Dr. Hanrahan was the intern on call for the chronic ward. So far it had been a pretty laid-back rotation, nothing like the rat race she'd stumbled into during her stint in obstetrics the month before. Most nights she slept right through, curled up on a cot in the sleep room down the hall.

But tonight the call had been an urgent one—a possible respiratory arrest in 908—and now she thumped down the hall with the nurse, the utensils of her trade jouncing in her jacket pockets. She knew the patient in question, a quad in his middle twenties. The remote alarm on his diaphragmatic stimulator had sounded, and the nurse had paged her right away. She'd said something about hearing glass breaking down there, too, but Hanrahan had still been half asleep, and the information had barely registered. They rounded the last corner before Peter's room—

And stopped dead in their tracks.

"What the hell. . . ?"

Now it came again, a deep-throated lowing sound more beastly than human. Barely aware they were doing it, the two women clutched each other in the hallway, their heads rapping painfully together. They exchanged fearful glances, then separated, embarrassed, the renewed silence refuting the existence of that sound. If it had been there at all, it had been one of the old chronics, moaning in his senile sleep.

They started along the hallway again, more cautiously now—and froze a second later when a terrific crash came from Peter's room, and a brilliant blue light began to flicker beneath the closed door.

A crackling blue bolt struck Sam in the throat and sent him reeling into the wall unit. The TV slid off its perch and exploded. As Sam collapsed, the entire wall unit let go and came crashing to the tiles, narrowly missing him. He clambered to his feet, still clutching the pillow.

Peter's corpse was sitting up in bed, its eyes pearly-blank, its scrawny arms flapping like the limbs of some haywire mechanical toy. Its mouth worked soundlessly. . . then that deathly moan rolled out and Sam felt his bladder let go. The air was saturated with a dense electrical charge, and when Sam clutched the bed rail for support the shock nearly snapped his wrist.

He took a step toward the bed—and Peter's VCR sailed past his head, missing him by inches. It shattered against the wall, jags of plastic and fractured circuit board buzzing through the air like shrapnel.

She's dead, Sammy. The words were blunt and hollow, as if spoken through an oil-filled tunnel. I drowned the bitch. Drowned her like a rat.

Sam threw himself onto the bed, arms extended like pile drivers, eyes bulging in disbelief. His fingers closed around his brother's dead neck, the force of the attack driving Peter's body onto its back.

"You're dead!" Sam cried, jamming the pillow over Peter's face again. "You're fucking dead!
"

Peter's body began to rise off the bed, supporting Sam's weight with ease. Barely sane, Sam released the pillow and it tumbled away. . . and now Peter was staring up at him, hard cobalt light twisting in his eyes. His corpse quivered between Sam's straddling legs, coursing with some awful energy, and now his flesh began to bloat and distort, throwing itself into hideous folds and excrescences. That killing light poured out of his eyes and surrounded them, blinding Sam to the horrid transformations that were still taking place beneath him.

This is your eviction notice, Sambo, Peter crooned, I'm moving in.

Suddenly flaccid, Peter's body dropped to the bed, dumping Sam to the floor. As Sam lay there, something jolted up through his balls and centered in his skull, and Sam felt like a sheet of wet paper, two giant hands tearing him slowly in half. His mouth fell open, but his voice was gone.

You're going to die, Sammy.

He felt the cold breath of these words in his heart.

And it's going to be horrible.

"Hey! Open up in there! Open up!"

The commotion in the room had reached a frenzied peak—then it had ceased. That unearthly radiance had flickered and flared like a living thing; then it, too, had been extinguished, as if someone had pulled the plug on a freaky acid-dream light show. A few of the ambulatory patients had poked their heads out of their rooms, but the nurse had hustled them back inside. Finding the door locked, Dr. Hanrahan had used the nearest phone to call Security. The guard was thumping down the hallway right now, key rings jangling.

"Unlock this door," Hanrahan said urgently.

"What seems to be the prob—"

"Just do it."

After finding the right key, the security guard unlocked the door. He started to pull it open, but Hanrahan placed a restraining hand on his arm.

"Let me," she said with quiet authority. She opened the door just wide enough to admit her head.

It took the intern a few moments to credit what she was seeing—Sam Gardner, whom she had spoken to only once, standing in the dark by his brother's obviously dead body with a pillow clenched in his fist, the wall-size window that overlooked the science center glassless and blowing cold air, the room a shambles—then she withdrew her head. It took another few seconds to piece together what had most likely taken place in that room. Then she dismissed the guard and signaled the nurse to join her.