Homing (46 page)

"I'm going to need all of you in the morning, and the last thing I'm gonna want is to have to send people out looking for my search party. Clear?"

For almost @ hours the search had gone on, but so far, just as Mark Shannon had expected, there had been no results.

Now, from his command post midway between the Costas farm and the Owen spread, he was trying to stay in radio contact with everyone at once, producing an often unintelligible jabber of overlapping conversations.

Up in the hills, lights glimmered as the searchers made way slowly along the paths, pausing every few minutes to sweep their flashlights in wide circles.

Clouds had begun drifting in, and the moon, so bright two hours ago, was now only intermittently visible. If it disappeared entirely, Shannon wasn't sure how the search could continue. Half an hour ago he'd started issuing warnings to the searchers to watch their batteries, to make sure they had enough light left to get themselves back down to the road in the event the moonlight failed.

Still, in a few more hours dawn would begin to break, and then at least they'd have a chance. Except that Shannon kept thinking about the sound he'd heard just before he and Roberto broke into Carl Henderson's house.

The sound that Manny Gomez had heard too, along with Karen and Russell Owen, and Marge Larkin.

"I don't know what it was for sure," Manny told him when he first arrived on the scene. "But I can tell you it sure sounded to me like something was dying out there. A coyote maybe." Then he'd glanced over to make sure Karen and Russell were out of ear shot. "Or maybe that dog of theirs, Bailey."

"That's what I'm thinking, too," Shannon had admitted.

Now he glanced at his watch.

Quarter to three.

Three more hours, and it would start getting light.

A shout interrupted his thoughts, then another. When Shannon looked up into the hills, he saw the @ lights of several flashlights crisscrossing as they searched one of the slopes.

Flipping on the powerful searchlight mounted on the roof of his squad car, he began moving the beam slowly back and forth, working it up the hillside in a steady pattern. A moment later Karen Owen appeared next to him, clutching the halogen spotlight from the pickup truck.

"Did someone see something?" she asked. "What's going on?"

"Don't know," Shannon replied, not looking at her as he concentrated on keeping the pattern of his searchlight tight.

'Molly!" Karen called out. "Ben! Where are you?"

Turning on the brilliant halogen light, she sent a bright beam all the way to the top of the hill, working it slowly along the crest.

Suddenly, at the very edge of the beam, she thought she saw a flicker of movement.

She held the light still for a moment, then slowly moved it back the other way. "Molly?" she called out again.

"Molly, it's Mommy!"

And then-miraculously, it seemed to Karen-a tiny figure appeared in the center of the spotlight.

A tiny figure, wearing clothes that Karen recognized instantly.

A tiny figure that waved. And then she spotted another figure.

"It's them!" Karen shouted. "Oh, God! It's Molly! And Ben!"

Mark Shannon shifted his own light until its beam held steady on the two children. "Go," he said. "I won't let them out of the light for a second."

Karen, though, didn't even hear him, for she was already running, stumbling, up the hill, Marge Larkin scrambling after her.

Ten minutes later, their children in their arms, Karen and Marge were back.

Five minutes after that, in the safety of the Owens' brightly lit kitchen, Molly and Ben told the story of what they had seen that night.

And as they listened, Karen Owen and Marge Larkin began to cry.

The story couldn't possibly be true, of course, though surely they must have seen something up there. But what?

And what had happened to Bailey?

Karen still felt a chill as she recalled that terrible howl she'd heard a few hours ago.

A howl that had been cut short, as if whatever uttered it had suddenly fallen victim.

To what?

A swarm of bees attacking it as they had attacked the mare a few days ago?

A feeling deep in her gut told Karen that it had, indeed, been the big friendly mongrel with the constantly wagging tail whom she had heard screaming in terror and agony in the silence of the night. That same feeling in her gut whispered to her that whatever had attacked Bailey was nothing the dog had ever experienced before, something even more frightening than the scene Molly and Ben had described.

Part of Karen wanted to know what it had been, but a greater part of her hoped she would never find out. "I know you were just trying to help," she reassured Molly now, kissing her on the forehead and trying to keep her voice from betraying her fear. "But the way to help isn't to go up into the hills in the middle of the night by yourself, and I want you to promise me you'll never do it again."

Molly's big eyes fixed on her own. "I promise," she whispered. "Cross my heart, and hope to die."

No, Karen silently said to herself. Don't ever wish to die, darling. Not ever. But when she spoke, she managed to conceal from her little girl most of the anger and fear she was feeling. "Then everything's all right," she said. "Now I want you to go to sleep, and when you wake up, maybe-"

Maybe Julie will be here, was what she'd been about to say, but she could no longer bring herself even to suggest such a thing, for deep in her heart she no longer believed it.

"Maybe things will be all right again," she finished.

But things wouldn't be all right, not if there were any truth at all to the children's bizarre tale, which sounded to Karen more like something they must have seen on television than an anything they could possibly have actually witnessed up in the hills. Yet the children's voices had trembled with fright, even in the safety of the farmhouse, and their words had the ring of truth, rather than the hollow sound of a story they'd made up to extricate themselves from trouble.

"Sleep, baby," Karen crooned. "Just go to sleep."

Staying with Molly until she finally drifted into an exhausted sleep, Karen at last turned off the light. She slipped out into the corridor just as Marge Larkin was coming out of the next room, where she'd been tucking Ben in. Neither woman spoke until they were both at the bottom of the stairs. Then Karen turned to face Jeff's mother.

"Do you think we're ever going to see Julie and Jeff and Kevin again?" she asked.

Marge hesitated, then shook her head grimly. "If we do," she said, her words barely audible, "I'm not sure we'll be able to recognize them." Her voice, then her whole body, began to tremble. "They're dead," she said.

"Oh, Lord help me, Karen, I just know it. I can feel it!"

Karen put her arms around Marge Larkin. "I know," she whispered into Marge's ear. "I feel the same way."

For a long moment the two women stood silently together, supporting one another in their mutual grief.

In the basement of Carl Henderson's house, Ellen Filmore raised her head from the microscope, stretched her aching back, then rubbed her eyes with her fists. Refusing Shannon's attempts to send them away, she and Roberto Munoz had worked together all night long on the chance that they could learn something-anything about Henderson's creation that might help the infected children.

From Henderson himself they had heard little. So deep was their concentration that for minutes at a time they would forget about him completely, until the silence of the lab was suddenly interrupted by one of his sobbing pleas to be released from behind the locked door of the darkroom.

Pleas that neither of them had even been tempted to heed.

"Have you got that lung tissue ready?" Ellen asked Roberto, who was preparing slides for her as fast as he could.

"Almost," he replied. He carefully cut a tiny tissue sample from the rat's lung, transferred it to one of the thin glass slides they'd found on a shelf above the counter, then applied a drop of dye to it. Covering it with a second slide, he passed it over to Ellen. "Seems like this was a lot easier back in school," he said. The rat's internal organs had been so thoroughly destroyed that it was only barely possible to identify them.

Ellen Filmore pressed her eye to the microscope, adjusted the light and the focus, then found what she was looking for.

Under the magnification she could clearly see the alveoli. Though a few of them still looked perfectly normal, most of them did not. Rather than being the tiny empty sacs used by the rat's lungs to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen, many of the alveoli she was now looking at were occupied by something else.

Something that, though invisible to the naked eye, was easily identifiable under the microscope.

insects.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Throughout her long night's work, she'd begun to understand the life cycle of the parasitic colony that had infested the rat's body before it died.

In its blood she'd found something that looked to her very much like a larval insect form, which she had assumed was what Barry Sadler had found in the blood samples she'd taken from Julie Spellman and Jeff Larkin.

The larvae, though, seemed to have metamorphosed into various kinds of adults.

In the rat's intestines, she found what appeared to be some kind of workers, tending to eggs.

In its heart she'd found a queen, surrounded by attendants, which produced a constant stream of eggs, laying them directly into the bloodstream, which transported them to the nursery in the intestines. As the eggs hatched into larvae, they returned to the circulatory system, apparently taking their nourishment directly from the host's blood.

Then, as they entered the pupal stage, they redistributed themselves once again, larval royal attendants returning to the heart, and nurses to the intestines.

But she'd found other kinds of adults as well.

The rat's brain had been filled with them, and though she had no idea what their purpose had been, the results were clear to Ellen under the microscope: they had been destroying the brain, burrowing through it, devouring it cell by cell. As she'd studied the damage the colony had done, Ellen felt a growing sense of horror, for the destruction of the brain had not been random. Rather, the organisms worked their way carefully through the tissue, riddling it with tiny passages so it almost resembled a microscopic anthill.

The rat might have felt nothing, for a while.

Then it would have begun experiencing phantom stimuli as the parasites devoured more and more nerve cells.

It could have felt pleasure, but more probably experienced excruciating pain.

Before it died, it would have gone both blind and deaf, before both the optic and autonomic nerve centers were gone.

Then, as the colony multiplied, expanded, and continued feeding, the creature's mental processes would inevitably have been affected. But the colony, behaving with the same peculiar intelligence as a hive of bees or a nest of ants, had begun their feeding with noncritical areas, leaving the most vital parts of the brain intact so their host would survive as long as possible. Indeed, the autonomic nervous system and the portions of the brain controlling it seemed still to be almost intact.

The question, though, was what would happen when the host inevitably died. It was when that question formulated in Ellen Filmore's mind that she finally turned to the lungs.

And found her answer.

The adult forms that were still present in the alveoli of the rat's lungs were different from any of the others.

For one thing, they had wings.

Wings, she assumed, that would fall off soon after the insects had taken their maiden flight, just as the wings of termites and ants are shed once the colony has split.

As she examined the alveoli more closely, she discovered that even among the adult forms in the r-at's lungs, there were variations.

She discovered three pupae that were much larger than the others; these, she assumed, would be queens.

All of them were equipped with what appeared to be sharp incisors.

Ellen Filmore shuddered, imagining what would happen if an uninfected animal came close enough to an infected one just as the swarm had prepared itself to split.

She could imagine a cloud of the microscopic insects erupting out the infected lungs, riding the air currents for no more than-what?

A foot?

Perhaps only an inch or two?

In an instant the attackers would bore through the skin and be safely into the bloodstream, ready to colonize a new host.

Colonize it, and kill it.

Still, as she examined the rat, Ellen Filmore found a few anomalies.

What, actually, had killed the rodent?

As she and Roberto dissected it, its brain didn't appear to be fatally damaged.

And why had the exhaust filter on the acrylic box in which the rat was held been covered with a film of the insects, all of whom were dead?

Obviously, the creatures couldn't survive outside a mammalian host for very long-from the observations she'd already made, they weren't adapted for anything else.

Then why had they deserted the host, only to die?

Because the rat was dying itself. Exhausted in mind and body, she finally straightened up once more. "Come on," she told Roberto. "Let's go upstairs and see if Henderson has any coffee in his kitchen."

Roberto nodded toward the closed door at the far end of the basement, from which they had heard no sound at all for the last hour. "What about him?"

Ellen's eyes hardened as she remembered the hours she'd spent behind that door, locked in the darkness. Once again she felt the terror that had paralyzed her as the spiders crept up her leg. Now, as she thought about what this man had unleashed on the teenagers of Pleasant Valley, the terror she'd felt earlier dissolved once more into cold rage.

She was tempted to cross the room herself, turn off the lights, and release some of Carl Henderson's specimens into the dark chamber to torture him as the spiders had tormented her. A moment later, though, she put the impulse down. "Leave him there," she told Roberto. "The way he's built that room, he won't get out until Shannon comes to take him to jail." She led the way up the steep flight of stairs, being surprised as she stepped through the door into the entry hall and realized that dawn was starting to break.