Coven (44 page)

The white hot pain blew away, his
vision snapped back. He could feel his nerves reconnect. Jervis was
whole again. He knew what would happen if the rod had been
completely removed.

The interruption had consumed only moments,
but in those moments, Wade had escaped.

Jervis ran so hard his feet cracked the tile
floor. When he trampled down the stairs, the stairs collapsed
behind him. Down the hall, the front doors beckoned. He sprinted
for them.

He assumed Wade had fled for the Vette. But
then there was always that old saying about assumption. Something
didn’t feel right. Halfway to the doors, Jervis stopped.

He sniffed the air.

Fear.

Again, he could smell its tang, its giveaway
fragrance.

He turned and headed back to the lab.

Why would Wade return there? Jervis noticed
the cut down door to the storage closet but ignored it. Wade
would have to be brainless to go back in there. What he didn’t
notice, however, was that the beam hewer was no longer on the
floor.

“
Say your prayers,” Jervis
advised.

Wade leapt from the closet.
Jervis turned. There was a silver flash, a
swoosh—

Thump!

Suddenly Jervis lay flat on his back.
Fuddled, he looked up. Standing in front of him was Wade, holding
the hewer.

And standing beside Wade was…a pair of
pants.

Wait a minute,
Jervis realized.
Those
are MY pants.

Indeed, they were. And they were Jervis’
legs that filled them.

“
How do you like those
cookies?” Wade spat.

Then it came to him. Jervis had been cut in
half at the waist. His lower body stood before him. His upper body
lay on the floor.

Wade threw his head back and laughed in
triumph.

Jervis frowned. Talk about minor
inconveniences. “You still don’t understand, do you?”

“
I understand that you’re
in two pieces,” Wade replied.

Jervis hopped up on his hands. His legs
remained standing. “All you’ve done,” he said, “is make two of
me.”

Wade shrieked. Jervis’ legs began to chase
him around the lab. “You’ve gotta be shitting me!” Wade yelled.

Jervis’ living torso lit yet another
Carlton. He walked around the lab tables—walked, that is, on his
hands, an ambulatory trunk. This wasn’t so bad; it gave him a
different perspective, at least. Now he knew how it felt to be
short.

Wade was running mad circles around the
tables. He’d been chased by pissed off girlfriends, irate
fathers, and police—but never by…legs. This was not an easy
situation to assess. He grappled at the window. Jervis’ legs kicked
him in the ass. Jervis laughed, hobbling up before a trail of
innards.

“
Two against one. I know
it’s not fair, but that’s life.”

“
You prick!” Wade shouted,
kicking at the legs. “I cut you in half and you’re
still
fucking with
me!”

“
Sucks, doesn’t
it?”

Wade was opposed by both sides. Jervis’ legs
kicked at him from the front, while Jervis’ upper body grappled
with him from behind, tried to drag him down. The hewer lay yards
away.

Wade did what any man would do when being
mauled by two halves of a resurrected corpse: He attacked the
weaker twin. He tackled the legs. The legs kicked up. He crawled
forward as Jervis’ torso held onto his belt, one hand slithering
for his balls.

Wade grabbed the hewer and rolled. Suddenly
Jervis was wrapped up in his own legs. This confusion gave Wade
time to rise.

Jervis fumbled to untie himself. Finally his
legs came untangled and stood back up.

The hewer blazed down. The first strike cut
the legs in half. Without the foundation of unity, the legs now
hopped about independent of each other, useless.

Jervis, the walking torso, looked up in
horror. The hewer’s second strike took off Jervis’ right arm, the
third his left.

“
Now I’ve made
five
of you,” Wade
pointed out. “What are you gonna do now?
Roll
after me?”

“
Aw, shit, Wade. You’ve
ruined everything,” Jervis complained, dismembered.

“
Let’s get down to
business.” Wade dropped to one knee. “Where’s the bomb?”

“
Can’t tell you, man.
That’s against the rules. At one minute after midnight, that bomb
goes off, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“
But the labyrinth leaves
at midnight. One minute
after?”

“
In that one minute, Wade,
the labyrinth will be a million miles away.” Jervis turned his head
toward the wall clock. He smiled. “Twenty five
minutes.”

“
Tell me where it
is!”

“
No can do, buddy. It’s a
doozie, though—the same yield as a Pershing II warhead.
Everything—the campus, the town, and every single person in it—will
be vaporized. We’re talking about a ten mile radius of
scorched earth.”

Wade looked numb with despair.

“
The Supremate likes to
leave his mark,” Jervis continued. “Just a little memento, like a
promise in the wind.”

“
But thousands of people
will die!” Wade shouted.

“
Yeah, but someday the
Supremate will return, for the repopulation phase. When that
happens, he’ll kill
everybody.”

Now Wade was on both knees,
a beggar. “Jervis,
please!”

“
We’ll just have to make do
without a holotype. I’m sure they’ll be able to find something
suitable in the holds, it’s no big deal. So face it, Wade. You’re
screwed.”

—

CHAPTER 40

In a bimagneticfieldeffectelectrostatic
snap, the Supremate blinked. It blinked as might a tired old man.
The blood of its hypervelotic heart and line hash veins ran
cool and slow. So much power was flooding the reserves that there
was little left for anything but the discreet switch systems. The
Supremate needed nothing else at this point, however. It could
sleep and dream as the labyrinth prepared itself for recharge and
exitpulse.

It felt good to be sleepy, a welcome lull in
an endless fury of high speed computer transactions. All life
in the labyrinth lay in hibernation now, save for a few sisters in
the emergencysensorcove. The Supremate, in other words, was quite
alone. In this strange magnetic solitude, it felt peace.

Jervis was so far away, his transception
signals could no longer be read—there was no power left, no blood.
The Supremate guessed that Jervis had failed in securing the earth
holotype. That was unfortunate, but it mattered little. The
Supremate grew weary of this frivolous world. It looked forward to
returning in some future eon and destroying it.

The one called Besser had been trying to
escape when the sensorposts winked out. This, too, was of no
significance. If the Supremate’s pets in the grove didn’t get him,
the bomb most certainly would.

—
THINGS COULD BE
WORSE,
the Supremate considered.

It smiled then—in a sense, at any rate.

Then it went back to sleep.

««—»»

“
I’m
going to report you,” the girl complained. She was driving a
silver Saab, obviously an Exham student on her way to the summer
sessions. Lydia had flagged her car down on the Route. The girl did
not take kindly to being commandeered by police.

“
Do whatever you want,”
Lydia said.

“
This is outrageous,” the
girl replied. She wore a shirt that read “If pro is the opposite of
con, what’s the opposite of progress?” A frosted, purple Mohawk
ridged her head.

They’d been on the road a half hour now; a
half hour more and they’d be there. Sid and Nancy stood awry on a
sticker adhered to the dash. “I want your name and badge number,”
the girl said.

Lydia gave them to her. “You want my shoe
size too?”

“
And you can bet my father
won’t like this. He’ll sue you.”

“
Clam up and drive,” Lydia
said. “Jesus.”

The girl simmered. Her Mohawk looked like a
scrub brush.

When they finally arrived back on campus,
the girl stopped just past the gates. “You wanted a ride to the
campus,” she said, “and here’s the campus. I refuse to drive you
another inch. This is where you get out.”

“
Wrong, brushhead. This is
where
you
get
out.”

“
I—hey!”

Lydia shoved her out of the car. She landed
on her rump.

“
You can’t steal my car!”
she wailed.

“
Sure I can.” Lydia slid
behind the wheel and slammed the door.

“
Hey!”

“
Shut up,” Lydia said. God,
she hated girls who whined. “And fix your hair.” She jammed the gas
and sped for Campus Drive.

««—»»

Professor Besser was a sight. Blubbering
like a baby, he hopped down the servicepass. The .357 slug had
exploded in his knee. Each time he fell down, he bellowed. But he
had to get out. Any death was preferable to dying in the labyrinth.
He would either be fed into the sustenanceprocessor or consigned to
the communal holds where his rectum would prove a most welcome
entertainment to the holotypes.

Mother!
he thought.

Even the slightest weight on his bad leg
sent bolts of pain up his spine. The shattered joint crunched like
broken glass. He should have been wearing diapers, for all the
crying and pants wetting. Oops. Here came a big number two
now, to add to the disgrace. In truth, that’s all Besser was and
ever would be: a three hundred pound pants pissing and
 shitting baby. Terror had a way of bringing out the best in a
man.

“
Mother!” he rejoiced. He
could smell his own shit. But this was too good to be
true!

The mindsign, though very weakly now, glowed
its promise: POINTACCESSMAIN#1.

Besser crawled forward, blubbering. He took
a deep breath, raised his key, and plugged it into the
extromitter.

When he was out of the
labyrinth, he found himself not in the safety of his office, nor
the student shop, but in the
grove.
His eyes bulged.

—

CHAPTER 41

Wade sat up on the table, looking down at
the dismembered torso of his friend. Jervis inclined his head up
and smiled.

Wade assessed the agenda as thus:

1) It was now 11:35 P.M.

2) At 11:55
P.M.
,
recharge
would occur, whatever that was.

3) At midnight, the labyrinth would take
off.

4) At one minute
after
midnight, the bomb
would detonate and wipe out the entire campus and town.

5) Wade didn’t know where the bomb was.

6) Jervis wasn’t going to tell him.

Beautiful,
Wade thought.

Next he assessed the obvious yet elusive
elements of evil involved. (1) The labyrinth was a
spaceship/genetic engineering factory that would someday
return to earth and repopulate it with mindless integrated slaves
optimally hybridized from various life forms. (2) The
Supremate ran the show. (3) The Supremate enlisted certain
natives—i.e., Tom, Jervis, Winnie, Besser—to assist in specimen
procurements. (4) The Supremate was evil.

But evil was relative,
wasn’t it? Certain people gave their allegiance to evil for certain
reasons. Some of these reasons were voluntary. Besser and
Winnifred, for instance, had sided with evil through their own
greed. But Tom and Jervis had gone over involuntarily, which meant
that their loyalties must be maintained by
control.

Evil,
Wade thought.
Control.

He glanced at Jervis. “You’re not evil.
Neither was Tom.”

“
There’s no such thing as
evil,” replied the head affixed to Jervis’ limbless torso. “There’s
only idealism and reality. What joins the two together isn’t evil,
Wade. It’s perfection.”

Hadn’t countless presidential candidates
made the same assertion, as well as countless monarchs?

“
All I know,” Wade
speculated, “is that a couple of days ago, you were a good person.
Now you’re evil. I want to know why.”

Jervis gushed laughter. It had—yes—an evil
ring to it.

Wade hopped off the table. “It’s that thing,
isn’t it? That thing they put in your head.”

Jervis stopped laughing.

“
What would happen,” Wade
wondered, “if I pulled it out?”

“
Get away from me!” Jervis
shouted. His torso was suddenly shrugging, rocking, inching back.
“Stay the fuck away!”

“
That’s it, right? If I
take it out, you won’t be evil anymore.”

“
I’ll die!”

“
You know what I think,
Jerv? I think you
want
to tell me where the bomb is. You
want
to tell me how to defuse it.
Except that thing in your head won’t let you.”

“
Don’t, Wade! Please
don’t!” the torso yelled.

Wade grabbed the small black knob in
Jervis’s head. It was about the size of a marble, and it was
warm.

As he pulled, Jervis screamed.

The torso went stiff. The
head arched back, mouth locked open in an unbroken howl of pain.
The transceptionrod didn’t come easy; it
creaked
out a little at a time, like
twisting a nail out of old wood. Two inches, then three, four,
five. Finally, at the sixth inch, the rod came out.