Last Gasp (77 page)

CRASH!

Thinking it had broken through the door, Ruth almost leaped out of her skin. The room filled with crimson light and there was another deafening drumroll of thunder. Behind her Chase moaned and writhed on the bed. Her mind snapped shut like a steel trap. Do
something! Don't just stand there like
a
brainless cunt!

The decision made, she acted calmly and swiftly. Dragging and cursing him, she got Chase into the corridor, returned for the battery lantern, and slammed the door shut, making sure it was securely on the catch. She switched the lantern on and by its light saw that his face was white as paper, his hair plastered to his head like a skullcap. Ruth was afraid he was dying.

A footfall behind her jerked her upright, her nerves taut as piano wires.

Dan knelt beside her. “Is he sick, too?”

It was only then she became aware of groans and stifled screams in the other rooms along the corridor. Chase wasn’t the only one. Was it the food or the water? The water. Poisoned water from the skies. It was impossible; they couldn’t win. With unbreathable air and undrinkable water what hope was there for any of them?

They moved Chase to another room and tried to take stock of the situation. Out of twenty-seven people nine had the same symptoms as Chase, suffering from intense stomach cramps and vomiting. Half a dozen of the others complained of feeling unwell and Ruth supposed it was only a matter of time before everyone was stricken. At Nick’s suggestion they carried all the sick into one of the larger apartments with two connecting rooms, where it would be easier to keep an eye on them. Mattresses were brought in and arranged around the walls. Soon the rest came to join them, obeying the primitive group instinct of herding together for mutual protection and companionship. From the jungle to the complete floor of a hotel and now to two rooms: They could hardly huddle any closer.

The storm raged around them with terrifying ferocity, battering at the walls and shaking the windows in their frames.

Nick knelt by Ruth’s side as she made one of the children comfortable. “How are you feeling?” he asked her worriedly.

“All right so far. But I don’t think any of us will escape it, Nick. We’ve all eaten the same rations and drunk—”

A middle-aged man was crying out piteously for water, raising himself on one elbow, mouth gaping. One of the women hurried to him with a plastic cup and Ruth leaped up and knocked it from her hand.

“No water!” She swung around, shouting it at everyone in the room and those through the connecting door. “The water could be contaminated. Nobody is to drink it!”

“Is it the water?” Nick asked her. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t know anything for sure. It could be the food, the heat, the air—” Ruth made an empty, angry gesture. “How in hell do I know?” Nick looked across at Chase whose face was contorted in an awful grimace of pain. He turned slowly, seeing the writhing bodies, hands clutching their stomach. “We have to give them something. Have we any pain-killers left?”

“Yes,” Ruth said stonily and told him about the medical pack and the noise she had heard.

“Did you actually see it?”

“I didn’t wait to see it. Would you?”

“That means you can’t treat Jo,” Nick said in a hushed voice. His lips thinned. “You can’t give her a shot—”

“I can’t treat anybody!” Ruth snapped coldly. She closed her eyes, screwed them tight, and clenched both fists. After a moment she opened her eyes, hollow and rinsed out. “I’m sorry, Nick, forgive me. No, I haven’t any drugs at all; they’re in the medical pack”— she suppressed a shudder—“in that room.”

Ruth turned away. There was nothing more to say and precious little she could do. She tried to comfort Chase, who was delirious, babbling something about being lost in Antarctica.

Nick closed his hand around the doorknob and very carefully increased the pressure. As it began to turn he said, “Is the safety off?” His voice was thick and ragged.

“Yes,” Dan whispered. In the light of the flashlight his face had the appearance of a Halloween mask. The automatic was a burnished blue glint at the level of his hip. He raised it in front of him as the door opened a crack.

At first sight the room was empty.

Dan crouched and shone the light under the bed. Nothing there. He turned the beam on the door of the closet, which was closed. Ruth had said it was the double closet farthest from the window. If there had been anything in the closet, it hadn’t come out. Snakes didn’t close doors behind them, no matter how well brought up they were.

Nick said, “As soon as I open it—fire.” He cleared his throat, trying to muffle the sound. “Ready?”

Dan went down on one knee and held the gun straight in front of him and sighted along the barrel. “Ready.”

As if in slow motion Nick bent at the knees and reached out at full stretch. He touched the handle with his fingertips and pushed and the door slid back, rolling silently on polyurethane bearings. Dan’s finger tightened on the trigger, but he didn’t fire because there was nothing to shoot at. The bulky brown canvas pack, flap unbuckled, stood on the third shelf down with two cartons of cotton swabs beside it, one opened. The rest of the closet remained hidden behind the center and side panels, an unknown quantity.

“Move to the left,” Nick murmured. “Shine the light inside.”

Still on one knee, Dan sidled around, holding the flashlight in his left hand. His throat felt cramped but he was unable to swallow. Nervously he saw Nick craning forward, trying to see into the shadowy recesses, and wanted to warn him not to go too near, to edge back out of the way, but his tongue was bloated, filling his mouth and tasting of dried leather.

Jagged lightning forked beyond the window. Then came a rolling boom of thunder and with it another sound, that of a sinister warning rattle.

Time stood still.

Dan’s blood seemed to freeze in his veins as the rattle ceased, and simultaneously he fired as the reptile struck. A long pointed splinter spun through the flashlight beam, sheared from the center panel. Dan fired again as the broad diamond-backed body recoiled, winding back upon itself, and again, aiming into the heavy curled mass of coils, pumping the trigger until the clip was exhausted and the hammer clicked metallically in the sudden deathly silence.

“Did I get it, is the bastard dead?” Dan asked in a rushed whisper.

He shone the light into the spattered closet and saw a quivering mound twitching convulsively. The head, almost severed from the body, was lying on one side, mouth gaping slackly, the extended fangs dripping blood....

Blood?

Blood!

Dan blinked sweat from his eyes. Couldn’t be. Wasn’t time. Too quick. He’d fired before ...

He shone the light down to where Nick was lying, his face obscured by an elephant’s trunk with two deep raking marks in it. The trunk ended in a hand, Nick’s hand, raised across his forehead to protect himself. The trunk was his arm, huge, gross, puffing up and turning blue-black.

Nick’s flesh was warm and yet clammy with a strange mottled pattern underneath the skin. There was no need to check his pulse: The venom had reached his heart in seconds. He was already dead.

Dan stuffed the two cartons of cotton swabs inside and shouldered the medical pack. In the corridor the dense cloying smell of rotting carpets and the fungi growing on the walls made his stomach heave. It was the stench of putrefaction. Of things growing in dank musty darkness and decaying even while they grew. Feeding other things that decayed and died. The evolutionary process spiraling downward into protozoic mush.

His shoes made squelching, sucking sounds as he went along the corridor. In the beam of the flashlight the walls appeared to shimmer whitely, the bell-shaped fungi trembling and exuding tiny white pearls of fluid. He stepped closer. He held the flashlight up close. The pearls were white grubs with rudimentary features and a bifurcated division in the tail. He watched as one of them squirmed over the lip of the bell and dropped to the floor. The floor was alive with them—he swung his flashlight in an arc—thousands, numberless millions.

The carpet seemed to be moving under him, a broad white stream filling the corridor. And they were dropping from the walls by the hundreds, he saw, eager to move out into the world, their world, to seek nourishment.

Dan remembered the white grubs in the tent feeding off his friends. He knew now what they were—and what they would become. These were the larvae of the homunculi, come to inherit the earth.

He walked through them leaving flattened oozing footprints, entered the suite, and shut the door.

Chase stirred and moaned in drug-induced slumber. His shirt and trousers were saturated, the foam mattress soaking up perspiration like a giant sponge.

Ruth sat watching him with her back to the wall, knees drawn up. She had administered morphine-based analgesics and was down to the last pack of vials, which on half-dose might go around one more time. With the fever and lack of water there was a danger of salt depletion and dehydration, but there was nothing else she could do.

The room was airless and sweltering and it was getting hard to breathe. Every breath required a conscious effort. She’d never realized how difficult it was when you had to concentrate on the simple act of replenishing your lungs. Breathe in, breathe out. In and out. In. Out.

The storm had faded to a background rumbling. Mingled with it was the sound of weeping from the next room. Jen had wanted to go to him, unable to bear the thought of her husband lying alone, untended, uncared for, but Dan had restrained her. He didn’t give a reason, only that it was safer to stay here and not venture into the corridor.

It was very peaceful now that the storm had abated. Ruth felt comfortably drowsy and relaxed, only dimly aware of the tightness across her chest, drifting into a deep dreamless sleep.

“They’re blocking off the air!”

Dan was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the door. She watched him hazily. He seemed to be babbling.

“If they fill the corridor we won’t be able to breathe.”

Ruth flinched, then cowered away as he grabbed hold of a chair and smashed it with all his strength through the large window. The glass collapsed in the frame and tinkled away into the night. At once the fetid smell of the jungle wafted into the room, but now Ruth found that she could draw breath without the constricting pain in her chest. She struggled to her feet, gasping.

“Dan, who’s out there? Is someone—something—in the corridor?”

He didn’t answer. She followed his gaze to the door. Paint was flaking off. The door seemed to be bulging. The sound of straining timber sang a low steady note of protest. There was a metallic screeching as the hinges were forced out of their seatings.

“What is it? For God’s sake, tell me!”

Dan was crouching, arms hanging limply, his face drained of expression. “They’re growing in the corridor,” he said faintly. “I don’t see how because there’s nothing to eat out there. The food’s in here. But they’re growing all the same ...”

The door split down the middle and something white seeped though.

Ruth grabbed him, her nails digging into his arms.

Jen appeared in the doorway, mouth working, eyes wide with shock, and behind her Art Hegler shouted hoarsely, “They’re breaking through! Stop the bastards, stop them!”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Dan said helplessly. “They must be everywhere by now.”

He glanced up as the ceiling creaked. A woman scuttled into a corner, screaming through her hands. Dan stared upward as bits of plaster showered down and a jagged crack opened up with a noise like a rifle shot. He couldn’t believe it. The pressure! Pulpy soft bodies surely wouldn’t have the strength. But their combined weight might do it, packed tightly together, struggling and squirming for growth, for expansion, for life.

Plaster and shreds of insulation were falling all around, filling the air with dust. Dan pulled Ruth to the wall and together they stooped, trying to protect themselves from the debris. Shielded by a raised arm, Dan peered through the thick pall of dust, quite certain that he was hallucinating. The aliens had landed. A silver-suited humanoid figure was descending slowly from above, hovering in midair. Another followed, and another, and they were being invaded by a swarm of aliens from the hole in the ceiling.

Standing there like an apparition, the bulky helmeted figure looked all around and then stepped toward Chase. Ruth tried to get in the way, using her body as a shield, but the silver figure pushed her aside and knelt down as if to inspect the man on the mattress more closely. In place of a mouth there was a metal grille.

“Dr. Chase, I presume,” said the alien. He spoke in English.

Chase opened his eyes, adrift in a sea of pain and confusion. He nodded slowly and closed his eyes.

“Glad we got to you before the uncles did,” said the alien cheerfully. “Ready to leave?”

“Uncles,” said the man in the green smock. “Never heard of them before?”

Chase paused from sipping the amber liquid through a plastic tube to shake his head. It was concentrated glucose with a cocktail of protein and vitamin additives. Far too sweet for his taste, but Dr. Pazan insisted that he consume 300 ccs every twelve hours—essential if his body were to combat the effects of the polluted rainwater.