Coven (35 page)

—
He’s so big!

—
Lots to eat!

It happened so fast that the poor jerk just
stood there a moment, looking at his opened belly. Fat people were
often taken advantage of, but never like this. Blood and
fist sized wads of fat flew as the sisters helped themselves.
Porker provided a veritable all you can eat feast.
The sisters’ hands rummaged and plowed, until nothing remained of
the choice merchandise of Porker’s abdominal vault. The sisters fed
well. They slaked their appetites and rejoiced, flinging organ
scraps in macabre celebration.

That’s what I call losing
a hundred pounds the hard way,
Wade
mused.

Peerce was trying to aim, backing up, with
White firing behind him. Peerce’s big .44 Blackhawk jumped in his
hand, but each slug was either brushed away or plucked from its
trajectory.

Wade did indeed consider
leaving.
I don’t owe these guys anything,
do I?
But just because they were assholes
didn’t mean he should abandon them.
Shit!
he concluded.
Damn it, shit!

Now Peerce was overrun,
flailing amid the besieging sisters. White threw his empty guns at
the girls, as Peerce screamed in perfect Deep South terror.
—What’s this?
one of the
big ones asked, and held up the CM tear gas gun. Their giggles
pitched as she shoved the barrel down Peerce’s throat and pulled
the trigger. There was a damped
bang!
—the proximity fuse burned
out—another
bang!
—and then Peerce began to expand, quite like a parade float,
growing, growing, buttons popping, until he was huge. The sisters
marveled at this spectacle. Eventually Peerce burst. Offal flew
like spaghetti and sauce—then all was obscured by tear
gas.

Wade grabbed the Sentry flaregun in White’s
console. He got out and aimed. “Come on, Chief! Run your ass
off!”

The brew of sisters didn’t like the CS
agent. They staggered, gagging. Chief White clambered up the
carcass ridden trail. Behind him, though, a sister emerged
from the smoke.

“
Duck!” Wade
shouted.

White hit the dirt. Without much confidence,
Wade discharged the flare gun and watched the projectile burn a
line down the trail. Mystified, the sister caught it, looked at it
as it hissed out its propellant. The canister exploded, splattering
her with ignited magnesium. It stuck to her face, cloak, and
sunglasses, bubbling intense neon red. The sister wailed.

Wade jumped back behind the wheel as White
lunged in. The car whipped a reckless circle, Wade’s teeth clenched
as he steered.

“
Goddamn you, St. John, you
goddamn bastard!” White blubbered. “You said there were only four
of ’em!”

The car shuddered down the logging road.
White threw up his hands and screamed. Wade screamed, too, when he
saw what White was screaming about.

At least a dozen more sisters blocked the
road.

Where the hell did they come from!

“
RUN ‘EM DOWN!”
White bellowed.

Wade proceeded to do just that. He gripped
the wheel hard and trounced the gas. They stood like bowling pins.
Wade plowed into them with such impact that the lead sisters
exploded jets of black blood from their mouths, inundating the
windshield. Wade turned on the wipers and kept plowing. He watched
each rank collapse under the bumper, and saw now that they numbered
more than a dozen, much more. They were using themselves as
barricades—they didn’t care. They just stood there, grinning, as
Wade mowed them down. The bodies thumped under the cruiser’s
wheels; there were so many of them it was like driving over hay
bales.

In the rearview, the
sisters, though crushed, were getting back up to run after
them.
It figures,
Wade thought. And in front, the grinning white faces loomed
and fell, only to be replaced by more. Then the passenger window
shattered.

I have had better
days,
Wade considered.

Several sisters hung onto
the car, snatching at White. White screamed honorably, gouging at
their hideous, giggling faces.
It’s me
they want,
Wade realized,
not White.
But White was
in the way, and that was his hard luck. The sisters struggled
further to get to Wade, clawing
through
White. White just screamed
and screamed.

At last the car had run over the last of the
cloaked women. Wade whipped out onto the Route, but he still had
two sisters hanging onto the passenger door. Wade expertly
sideswiped a fat oak tree and skimmed them off.

He drove for miles before daring to stop.
The grille was pounded in, the fenders crumpled, the hood aglaze in
shiny black blood. But White, Wade noted, had come out of this
worse than the car. The sisters had pulled his face and scalp off,
pulled his arms off, pulled his throat out. What now rode as
passenger bore no likeness whatsoever to good old shucking and
jiving Chief White. He’d written his last traffic ticket, that was
for sure.

Wade idled up to a ravine. “Rest in peace,
Chief,” he muttered.

He rolled White’s remains out of the car and
took off back toward campus.

—

CHAPTER 30

Jervis grinned. “How about some
entertainment, Lydia?”

Lydia moaned.

On the germinationwarren’s floorwall,
Elizabeth Whitechapel lay nude, twitching. Orangish, swirling light
hovered within the warren as Jervis led in an exceptionally
grotesque holotype. Four shoulders composed its arched back,
housing four sets of arms. A fifth set of arms served as legs,
joined by a muscled buttocks. The beast’s sinuous skin shined
blood-red in sweat. Puffy vertical slits formed its eyes, nose, and
mouth.

By now, Lydia was catching
on. The word
spaceship
didn’t sit well with her, but what else could this be? She’d
picked up bits of conversation: they kept talking about
leaving,
leaving tomorrow
night. As in…taking off? They’d also mentioned
recharge,
which could refer to a
power supply of some kind. Other words, weirder words, had reached
her ears, too. Stasisfield. Psilight. Interspecielmetis. The
word
alien
didn’t
sit well with her either, but if the labyrinth’s tenants weren’t
aliens, what were they? She’d noticed many of the cloaked women.
Many pranced about naked, their sleek white bodies faintly veined,
their breasts nippleless, their pubes bare. They were
clones.

Invaders,
Lydia thought.

Movement caught her eye.
The holotype, whose genitals looked like a cluster of spoiled
grapes, hobbled a circle around the naked girl. The girl seemed
paralyzed. Nevertheless, there was wantonness in her eyes. Somehow
they’d induced a positive sexual response when the girl should be
screaming bloody murder. The girl
wanted
this multilimbed thing.
She
wanted
it to
mate with her.

Oh my God,
Lydia thought. With all eight of its webbed hands,
the holotype kneaded its clustered genitals, which soon swelled to
a budded red pole. The pole was then inserted into the girl’s
mouth. This oral foreplay did not last long, however, before the
thing’s member grew too large for the confines of the girl’s mouth.
It was withdrawn, pulsing. Lydia’s stomach churned.

Jervis appeared at the
static barrier, “How do you like the entertainment so far?
Beats
Seinfeld
any
day, huh?”

Behind him, shrieks of pleasure erupted,
unearthly grunts, and a vigorous slapping sound. Thank God Jervis
blocked Lydia’s view. “Why?” she croaked.

“
The master plan,” Jervis
encrypted.

Elizabeth Whitechapel screamed in staccato
bursts. The wet slapping speeded up to a blur.

“
He’s one of the bigger
ones,” Jervis noted, “and I don’t mean shoe size. But we soften the
girls up first so they can take it.”

Lydia grew dizzy. Her head spun with the
screams.

“
And if you think that
fucker’s big, take a look at Pretty Boy over there.” Jervis pointed
to the adjoining hold. “You haven’t forgotten about him, have
you?”

No, as a matter of fact she hadn’t. The
holotype they’d reserved for Lydia was thumping the repulsion
screen with its fingerless hands. Its raw meat face surged
forward, red lust in its gelatin eyes.

“
You’re gonna get every
inch,” Jervis promised. “Right up the ass.”

It beat its massive erection against the
screen and mewled.

Jervis laughed out loud. Lydia fainted.

««—»»

Wade awoke just past noon,
glare on his face.
Sunlight,
he thought.
Oh,
bliss.
He’d hidden the cruiser behind the
town theater and had dozed off. He’d slept as if dead.

By now the cops would be going apeshit
looking for White, Peerce, and Porker. And there was still the
question of Lydia; she was the only one Wade trusted enough to
tell, but where was she?

He left the cruiser, electing to return to
campus on foot. He’d have a hard time explaining to the gate guard
how he came to be driving Chief White’s cruiser without the company
of Chief White. He crossed campus stealthily, mindful of police.
Something deep in his gut told him not to return to the dorm, but
this he dismissed as nerves. It was daytime now. He had nothing to
fear in the daytime, did he?

He trotted down the bike path which
paralleled the student shop. He stopped in his tracks and nearly
shouted with joy.

His Corvette sat shining in the shop
lot.

Wade ran. “Lydia! It’s me!”

No reply. But she must be close by—the keys
were still in the Vette, and on the console lay Tom’s pendant that
she found on the Route, and the little pistol. There was something
else too, something that looked like a portable tensor lamp. Hadn’t
he seen it before, at the sciences center?

“
Lydia!”

Pieces of padlock lay on the pavement. The
shop door stood ajar. Wade knew something was…fucked up. Inside, he
peeped, “Lydia?” First he noted the untarped cars, then the jugs.
Then he found Lydia’s Colt Trooper Mark III on the floor.

Then he heard voices.

The wall?
he thought.

The voices were coming from
the wall. Like walking in a dream, Wade moved closer.
What is that?
He noticed
a black dot on the wall. But when he put a finger to it, he
discovered it wasn’t a dot at all, but a hole.

Hole,
he thought moronically.
In the wall.
Voices… Hole.
Wade put his eye to the hole
and looked in.

Jervis was hanging a naked girl on a
harness. Behind him, a wall glowed orange around racks of big
circles, like kegs. Steam rose amid distant machine sounds.

As if in supervision, Professor Dudley
Besser looked on.

“
You know, Prof, five girls
doesn’t seem like much.”

“
It’s
exponential,
Jervis,” Besser said.
“The fissionizationvessels are needed only to provide basic metis
prototypes. From there, after computer calculated
transfections, the desired metis types are mass produced
exponentially.”

“
Oh,” Jervis remarked.
“Like a production line.”

“
In a sense, Jervis,
yes.”

Wade’s eye seemed sewn open to the hole.

Jervis was kneeling now, punching some kind
of nozzles into the bottom of the hanging girl’s feet.

“
We still leaving
tonight?”

“
Yes, we have to. The
stasisfield is draining.”

Jervis glanced up in a sudden concern. “What
about Wade?”

“
Leave Wade to me,” Besser
said.

Was it Wade’s imagination, or was the nude
girl in the harness…stretching?

Now Jervis was milking white sludge out of
her feet. The sludge oozed from the nozzles into big jugs—identical
to the jugs Wade had just seen in the shop. The gelatinous white
glop reminded him of the stuff he’d seen in that sump at the
clearing.

Wade, as usual of late, was
doubting his sanity. This was a reasonable surmise when you were
seeing and hearing people through a hole in a cinder block
wall, the other side of which was a fucking parking lot, and even
more reasonable when the people you were seeing and hearing through
that hole were passively milking white sludge out of a naked girl
in a harness. And Wade was right; the girl was indeed stretching.
Her body now sagged fully to the floor. She looked boneless. Jervis
took her down then and very calmly—
Jesus,
gag me!
Wade thought—stuffed her into a big
can. The girl’s head flapped like a rubber bag, her limbs as slack
and pasty as baker’s dough. Jervis packed her in tight and lidded
the container.

“
I’ve still got some bodies
to bury. Then can I—”

“
Yes, Jervis, but be sure
to tend to this first.” Besser handed Jervis something, a black
cube of some kind, the size of one of those Rubik things. “It’s
programmed to detonate at one minute after midnight. Make sure
you’re back before recharge.”

“
When’s that?”

“
Eleven fifty five,
exactly.”