Coven (45 page)

Jervis’ head and torso fell still.

Wade threw the wet transceptionrod into the
hall.

The reaper worked quick, giving Jervis an
instantaneous refund on the time he’d borrowed from death. The
torso and face began to rot in short order, going from gray to
brown to…mush.

“
Damn it,” Wade muttered.
It had been worth a try, at least. But instead of removing Jervis’
evil, he’d only succeeded in removing life. In seconds, it seemed,
the torso began to bloat.

Then the sagging brown face said,
“Time.”

“
Jerv! You’re still with
me!”

The order of nature reduced Jervis’ voice to
a sluggish, phlegmy rattle. “How much…time?”

Wade glanced at the clock. “It’s twenty till
midnight.”

Jervis made a facial gesture of approval.
Putrefactive slime oozed from his stumps, his shit dark face
melting. He spoke in a liquid wisp. “The bomb is in my car, right
outside.”

“
Great! Tell me how to
disarm it! How do I turn it off?”

“
Can’t,” Jervis bubbled.
“Preprogrammed. Can’t disarm it.”

Wade was outraged. “What do I do with it,
then? It’s got a ten mile kill zone! I can’t just throw it
into the woods and stick my fingers in my fucking ears! Tell me
what to do!”

Jervis smiled, if in fact his percolating
lips were still capable of it. “Put it…” he wheezed, hacking up
slop. “Put it in the labyrinth.”

“
If I go back in the
labyrinth, the Supremate will know. He’ll send the sisters to tear
me up.”

“
Supremate won’t know.” A
sputter. Jervis was going fast. “How do you think you got out so
easy earlier? This close to recharge…no power. Sensorposts are
dead. Supremate has no way of knowing you’re there.”

Wade stared down. Jervis was losing his race
against autolysis. His lips split. His eyes had liquefied and
pooled in their sockets. “Use my key. Pointaccess to first
subinlet. Look for sign…”

“
What sign?”

“
Guidance…tracking…pah pah point.”

“
Okay, what
then?”

“
Put bomb there
and…get…out.

Wade touched the corpse. It was hot with
rot.

Yet Jervis’ mush face still smiled in
final freedom. The gas fat torso began to smoke. “Stick it up
the Supremate’s ass.” A titter, like a giggle. Then: “I—I…”

“
Aw, no, Jerv!”

“
I’m gone.”

And he was.

««—»»

The bomb was black, a six inch cube,
but it seemed like magic to shift minutely in size. It felt warm as
a hearth brick.

He’d found it on the front floor of Jerv’s
Dodge Colt, which had been turned, over the last day or so, into a
hatchback gorewagon. The Supremate had transformed his friend into
a murderer. It was time for payback.

Better get a move
on,
Wade thought. He jogged back into the
building, back to the lab. What remained of Jervis was just a
clothed rib cage around which had settled a large puddle of dark
slime. The only remnant of the real Jervis Phillips was a pack of
Carlton 100s stuck in the shirt pocket.

Wade snapped the extromission key off the
corpse’s neck, then ran up to Besser’s office.

The extromitter dot stared like a glazed
eye. Wade’s watch read 11:42—eighteen minutes would be plenty of
time to get in and out. He felt surprisingly fearless as he
inserted the key and began to extromit. What did he have to worry
about? Even if there were any sisters left, the Supremate wouldn’t
be aware of his entrance. There would be no way that the Supremate
could alert them. These were comforting thoughts.

They were also stupid ones.

—

CHAPTER 42

Lydia slammed the brakes and skidded. In
front of the sciences center, she saw Wade’s Corvette and another
car behind it. Lydia backed up and wheeled in.

The other car was a gold Dodge Colt, Jervis’
car.

The spotter and Tom’s key remained where
she’d left them in the Vette. Lydia grabbed them and rushed into
the building.

It wasn’t hard to find where the
confrontation had taken place, nor was it hard to discern the
victor. Somehow, Wade had done the job on Jervis—the dismembered,
smoking carnage was proof. But the cadaver’s neck lacked the
extromission key.

Oh, no,
she thought.
He didn’t—he
couldn’t have—

She picked the hewer off the floor and ran
upstairs.

The extromitter glowed weirdly in Besser’s
dark office. When Lydia put two and two together, she didn’t come
up with four, she came up with DUMB ASS. More than likely, and
for some unknown reason, Wade had gone back into the labyrinth.

Besser’s desk clock read
11:44. She knew that the labyrinth was leaving at midnight. She
also knew that five minutes
before
midnight, recharge would occur, and she had no
idea what that entailed. One more thing she knew: Wade wouldn’t
last a second in the labyrinth on his own.
Goddamn imbecile,
she thought. She
saw no other choice but to go in after him. But as she reached for
Tom’s extromission key, she heard…what?

What were they? Grunts?

She turned quickly, hefting the weight of
the hewer. She thought it might be Wade, but when the shadow—and
the sloppy, wet sound it brought—crossed the office door, she knew
far too well who it was.

“
Huh hi, Lydia. You’re
sure lookin’ mighty pretty tonight.”

When she saw the state of
the thing which stepped into the block of moonlight, all Lydia
could say was, “Oh,
fuck!”

“
I always kind of had a
crush on ya. Course, I never said nothin’, figured you’d laugh at
me, you know?”

But Lydia was definitely not laughing. She
was as revolted as she was terrified. The thing facing her was
Porker.

Wade said he’d been killed in the grove by
the sisters—disemboweled. But she needed no explanation when she
saw the knob end of the transceptionrod in his head.

Porker was naked, huge, pale as turned
cream. His completely eviscerated abdominal cavity hung open in
plain view. No organs there, just empty space. The sisters had
eaten his innards and brought him back for service, getting double
their money’s worth of the poor obese slob.

“
Where’s Wade?” Porker
asked.

“
How should I
know?”

“
Did he go back into the
labyrinth?”

“
He’d have to be crazy to
do that.”

Porker’s boyish, chubby face turned up in a
grin. “You didn’t answer the question.”

“
All right, how about this:
I don’t know where Wade is.”

“
I think you do,” the
young, insecure voice replied. Muddy bare feet trudged forward,
thudding. “And you’re going to tell me.”

Porker had been gross enough in real life;
dead, naked, and gutted, he was grosser still. Lydia swung the
hewer, hoping the creature’s huge limbs would be too sluggish to
respond. Instead the fat hands blurred, caught the hewer below the
blade, and tossed it aside. The big boyish pumpkin grin blazed in
the moonlight.

The clock read 11:45. Lydia shucked her
Trooper, without much confidence. She remembered how effective
bullets were against the dead. Nevertheless, she fired two Magnums
into Porker’s plump face. His head jerked back, the face cracked.
One more double tap from the Trooper widened the crack to a
grinning fissure, but like a monster sleepwalker, Porker continued
to lope for her. Flaps of white flab hung ragged around the opened
belly, through which the obvious erection peeked. Porker grinned in
spite of his divided face, and said, “You haven’t had it till
you’ve had it from a dead man.”

Despair touched her frown. Lydia was sick to
death of being a sex object to monsters and dead men. She shrieked,
disgusted, as Porker’s body collided into her. Before she could
even get off her last two shots, he dragged her down, straddled
her, and began to open her pants.

««—»»

The labyrinth was cold now,
like a meat locker. Wade’s breath condensed before his face. The
psilight was so low he could see neither walls nor floor. Only the
extromitter dot of each access guided him from place to
place.
Tracking guidance point,
he forced steadily into memory,
searching.

He shivered, yet the bomb in his hand seemed
to be gaining temperature. Soon it would be too hot to hold. He
glanced, almost casually, from the next subinlet. The sign
hovered:

EMWGUIDANCETRACKINGPOINT.

“
Eureka!” he whooped. He
extromitted into the canted chamber of glowing red and yellow
threads. The crisscrossing, intense light brightened even as he
watched. Wade didn’t know this place from a hole in the ground, but
there was one thing he felt sure of: something big was in the
works, and it was going to happen soon.

Sweating, he dropped the bomb on the floor
and extromitted back out.

Dead sensorposts extruded
from the ceiling. Thank God they were inactive now. Getting in had
been easy, and he saw no reason why getting out shouldn’t be just
as easy. “Home, James,” he muttered. He plugged in his key,
thinking
down down down!
and disappeared into the glowing black
slit.

««—»»

Porker was drooling on her, fumbling with
her pants. Lydia couldn’t even squirm against the tremendous, dead
weight. The broken face and toothy grin twitched in lust.

Gagging, she poked the Trooper. The
blue steel barrel entered the spreading crack and she squeezed
off round number five. Gun smoke and bits of pulp gusted back into
her own face. She heard something clink, and Porker stiffened.

She fired the last round, keeping the barrel
deep in his face. Like a lid, the top of his skull blew off—the
transceptionrod flew across the room. Porker made a deep, lowing
sound, like an impaled cow, then sidled over, dead.

“
Thank you, Colonel Colt,”
she whispered, and glanced at the clock: 11:47. What bothered her
most, as she grabbed the hewer and began to extromit, was this: If
they’d seen fit to bring Porker back from the dead, what had they
done with…

««—»»

Sergeant J. T. Peerce stepped out of the
final subinlet before the main point access. “St. John! Over
here!”

Wade froze. A reflex nearly caused him to
use his jeans for a bathroom. Peerce waved from the servicepass,
wearing a clean police uniform and the same redneck sneer he’d been
born with. In other words, Peerce looked normal.

“
I saw you die,” Wade
stammered. “Last night, in the grove.”

“
Do I look like I’m dead,
you daddy rich nitwit?”

But how could this be? “I saw the sisters
kill you!”

“
You musta been seein’
things, then, ’cos I’m standin’ here, ain’t I? I got away from them
bitches after you and Chief White split. Come on, will
ya!”

Wade considered this. He’d
been scared shitless last night, and come to think of it, he wasn’t
really sure
what
he’d seen. Sometimes the trauma of horror played games with
the mind.

“
What are you doing here?”
Wade asked, still unsure.

“
Lookin’ for you, ya
moe ron. Prentiss got half the force out searchin’ for ya. She
said ya might’ve come back here when we found that punk Jervis’
body with no key ’round his neck.”

Wade took several cautious steps forward.
The power of suggestion plus seeing Peerce alive and well left him
no choice but to be convinced.

“
Come on, goddamn it! We
gotta hightail it outta here. Prentiss told me this place takes off
in ten minutes. Move it!”

But seeing was believing,
wasn’t it? Or at least seeing what you
wanted
to believe. Right now all Wade
wanted to see was someone on his side.

He shed his reservations and approached
Peerce.

“
By the way,” Peerce
inquired. “Why’d you come back in here anyway? It don’t make no
sense.”

“
Before Jervis died, he
told me to plant the b—” A quick shock hacked off the last word.
Wade’s knees locked up.

A whorl of intestines had popped out of
Peerce’s shirt.

“
Aw, shee it,” Peerce
griped, looking down. Then he looked at Wade with a dead grin.
“Almost had ya goin’ for it, huh?”

Wade turned and ran, and Peerce ran after
him. Peerce was faster, despite the inconvenience of dragging
intestines. The iron hand snatched Wade by the neck and raised him
off his feet.

“
I wanna know what ya were
doin’ in here, St. John.”

Wade, choking, noticed that Peerce was
chewing tobacco. He also noticed the transceptionrod sunk deep in
his head.

“
I was looking for some
cuff links I lost,” Wade wheezed.

Peerce spat brown juice. He opened a
switchblade. “Punk rich boy piece a shit. Start talking by the
time I count three. If ya don’t” —Peerce grinned— “then I start
carving.”

The blade flashed in front of Wade’s left
eye.

“
One.”

Did I come all this way
just to get snuffed by a dead redneck cop?
Wade asked himself against a hail of incredulity.

“
Two.”

His heels kicked high on the wall. He could
feel his face turning blue.

“
Maybe you’ll feel like
talkin’ once I pop one of them rich boy eyeballs out,” Peerce
said. Then he said, “Three.”