New Title 1 (37 page)

The helicopter touched down on the hilltop.

How long would it stay?

“Blegghh,” Tripwire said again. And then, mercifully, he was dead. He died so quickly he didn’t even have time to shut his eyes.

FUCKER FUCKER MOTHERFUCKER—

With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand Oddy closed Tripwire’s eyes. He set the body down with as much gentleness as his clumsy arms were capable of.

Answer stood ten feet away. His lips and cheeks and the inside of his mouth were sheathed in blackness. Only he wasn’t Answer anymore. His eyes, previously blue, were now completely red. On the other hand, he wasn’t
not
Answer: physically he was unchanged and his eyes, though a different shade, still radiated the same chilling deadness.

“You wouldn’t believe it, Sarge,” he said, voice slightly breathless. “You wouldn’t bel—”

He said no more.

Because that was when Oddy pulled the Webley

…
FUCKER…

the sound of the hammer cocking like some great cosmic gear turning over

…
DIRTY MOTHERFUCKER…

and shot him square in the face.

Answer’s head rocked back in a spray of black and red. His arms flew upwards like a giddy rider awaiting a roller coaster’s plunge. His back bent at a ludicrous angle and his arms pinwheeled for balance: he looked like a man perched on a high-rise ledge caught off-guard by a sudden gust of wind. Then he fell backwards to land with a puff of snow.

««—»»

Oddy never got the chance to view the result of his marksmanship. It was as if the crack of his pistol had signaled the start of some desperate race as the creatures who’d lain in wait burst into the clearing and made a reckless beeline for him. He got a good look at the leader of the pack, an apparition straight out of a madman’s fever dream: the legs of a giant crab and the elongated neck of a giraffe terminating in the flattened head of a Portuguese Man O’ War, bulbous green eyes set atop insectile stalks and its mouth packed not with teeth but with bone, sharpened knuckles of bone chattering a skeletal calliope.

Oddy turned and ran faster than he’d ever run before. His feet skimmed across the snow so quickly he couldn’t be certain his boots left their indentation in the snow. Fear and exhaustion fought against one another; fear was winning at the moment.

He reached the base of the hilltop. Something buzzed past his skull. There was a wet ripping sound and Oddy raised his hand to the stump where his ear used to be. He dug his feet into the hillside, unable to feel the ground beneath him, and started to climb. Noises gathered beneath him, clickings and gurglings and the sob of hungry infants.

He snagged his foot on an exposed root and something snapped below his Achilles tendon and for a moment nothing and then pain roared up his leg, through his belly, through his neck. It seemed to rip the top of his head off and he puked a gut-wrenching stream into the snow but he never slowed, never gave pain the upper hand. He was thinking of Gunner and Tripwire and Crosshairs and Slash and how he owed it to them to reach that fucking whirlybird; he couldn’t save them but if he could save himself then maybe, somehow, he’d be saving them all. The concept made no sense but it was all he had and he clung to it like a drowning man to a life preserver.

There was a snapping whiplike noise and sudden pain sang up his arm. Oddy stared down at his left hand to see that now, in addition to the stripped tendons, his ring and little fingers were gone.
Well, at least I can still make a peace sign
, he thought madly. He glanced over his shoulder at the creature who’d done it: small, the rough size of a monkey, the skin of its head peeled off in tiny ribbons that danced and circulated around its raw face in the manner of streamers tied to an oscillating fan. Its limbs were filament-thin threads, the purplish tendrils of an anemone, thousands upon thousands, lashing out to lick at his lower extremities.

He spun awkwardly and fired. Through dumb luck or benign providence the slug struck the creature’s center and sent it tumbling backwards, filaments licking uselessly, where it was trampled by the advancing horde. Oddy’s peripheral vision was a blur of bizarre movement and streaking shapes, things beyond description, things nearly beyond
conception
, things his tautly-stretched mind rebelled stridently at the very existence of. Pain blossomed in his skull, a great burst-open flower, making his eyes water. He ran on senseless feet, legs pumping, arms pistoning, blinding blood in his eyes. The helicopter was ten feet away. The lowered gangway yawned like an open mouth.

The time it took him to cross those remaining ten feet was a little under three seconds. Yet those scant moments unfolded into a lifetime inside his head. Unconnected images sprang, unbidden, into his mind: his mother chopping onions over the sink, the sun streaming through an open window to touch the blackness of her hair; a package of cigarettes, his father’s brand, half-open on a folding TV-tray, droplets of blood flecking the cellophane wrapper; a pretty girl on a city bus who had touched his knee and so he had touched hers and something had passed between them but now all he could recall was the narrow outline of her bra-strap beneath her blouse and the smell of her body like fresh-picked spearmint; the draft letter held in his twenty-year-old hands, his clean and unlined and somehow innocent hands, the letter’s folds machine-straight and the words stark on the bright white page; a dark trench in the jungle’s heart, the stink of terrified young bodies and tracer fire snapping overhead; Dade’s face blown wide open and his limp body rolling across the freeway. And he wondered, idly but earnestly, what his mother was doing right now, at that exact moment, who she was talking to or what thoughts might be occupying her mind as her son fought for his life in a place as foreign and remote as the dark side of the moon…

The gangway made a hollow metallic sound as his boots struck it. Oddy thought it was perhaps the most wonderful sound he’d ever heard. He pounded up the ramp, overbalanced, and toppled forward into the cabin. Gunmetal-gray pain exploded like shrapnel in his leg and ear and skull; slivers of shooting light spun through his vision like formations of tiny burning sparrows.

“Go!” he screamed. “Get the fuck out of here!”

The pilot—who, through some heroic feat of inattention, had failed to take note of either Oddy’s scrambling ascent or the monstrous daisychain attending him—turned to regard the cabin. The man he saw—black and filthy and wild-eyed, blood squirting from his hand and his head and a thousand smaller wounds besides—looked in no way like the man he’d dropped off seventy-two hours earlier.

“Where are the others?”

“Gone!” the bloody black man said with a rising note of hysteria in his voice. “Dead!
GO!
”

“All of them are dea—?”

It was then the pilot saw something fly through the gangway breech. For a moment it was just a blur—either that, or the only way his eyes and mind could cope with such a creature’s existence was to blur it out. But the blur rapidly fused into a solid shape and his heart trembled in his chest.

The first thing that came into focus was the texture of its flesh: red and shifting, dimming and brightening like embers in a gusting wind, lumpen and pustulent and shimmering under the cabin’s bright lights. Next was its method of locomotion: a pair of wings, now nothing more than a black-boned exoskeleton, the ribs hung with moldering rags of flesh, and at its rear a fish-like tail, also fleshless, slashing the air. Then its head swam into clarity and the pilot recoiled as if slapped: petals of burning-ember flesh peeling back—no, not peeling back but blossoming outward, like some cancerous flower—to reveal the smallest of faces, wrinkled and wizened and aged beyond all fathomable bounds, a shriveled walnut face, tiny blind eyes and a mouth like a wound, sharp needlefish teeth and the sound of its body cutting the air was horrid, the sound of a dying child’s screams.

The black man raised his pistol and fired almost casually. The flying thing was knocked against the cabin wall and a gout of ichor plastered the dull metal behind its body.

“Stay or go,” the black man said. “Your choice now.”

“Jesus,” the pilot whispered as the thing made a slow descent down the hull, leaving a shiny wake of itself behind. He thumbed the gangway switch.

A pneumatic hiss and the gangway began to rise. Oddy struggled to a sitting position and leveled the Webley at the narrowing slit of darkness. His ears—his
ear
—rung with the concussive pistolfire and deeper inside his head there was another kind of ringing, huge and thudding and furious.

Come on
…

The barrel trembled. He bore down hard. It stabilized.

Bring it if you want bring it if you may oh can you just BRING IT…

Shapes lashed and cringed in the murk outside, getting closer. The gangway rose: now five feet from closed, now four…

“Holy fuck!” the pilot screamed as something slammed into the windshield. Blood and slaver exploded across the glass. The thing, small and toothy and determined, slammed into the glass again. Again. Again. The pilot jumped with every impact. The windshield splintered, then a big section of it went milky with cracks. Lacking any practical method of defense, the pilot switched on the windshield wipers, which, in slapping against the creature’s flanks, only enraged it further.

The gangway was two feet from closed, one and a half…

Come on come on come the fuck ON
…

A thick cable shot through the gap.
No,
Oddy realized quickly,
not a cable. A tentacle.
It was a tentacle, and there was a neat grid of suckers on the underside of its mucous-coated length.
No
, Oddy realized in an apoplexy of horror,
not suckers. Faces.
Each of the disks he’d assumed were suckers was indeed a twisted, screaming, sickeningly human face. The tentacle thrashed against the honeycombed metal grate and some of the faces burst open like overripe fruit. Shapes proliferated in nauseating abundance outside the helicopter, flukes and scraps and scabs, a whirlwind of colors and textures and scents. Oddy fired through the dwindling aperture; the bullet whined off the hull and out into the darkness. Then the gangway snicked shut. The tentacle, neatly severed, writhed on the floor like a cleaved earthworm.

“Now!” Oddy screamed. “Now!”

“The fuck you think I’m doing?” the pilot screamed back.

He pulled hard back on the steering yoke and the Labrador started to ascend. Then something
thwapped
against its side with massive force: as if a giant redwood had been felled on top of them. Oddy was hurled against the airframe. His skull connected with a metal rib and his vision blurred. An explosion barked overhead and sparks jetted down around them. The windshield broke inwards and pellets of Saf-T-Glas sprayed the pilot’s face. The hull groaned and there was a sound like a beer can crushed underfoot and the lights flickered, then winked out. They flickered on and Oddy saw the pilot fighting the joystick, trying to stabilize the helicopter as something dark and gelatinous squeezed through the windshield hole.

Oddy shook his head clear and staggered aftwards. The pilot was bug-eyed looking at the amorphous black shape expanding into the cockpit, billowing out of the hole, a shiny dark bulb. Oddy jammed the gun into it—the barrel dimpling its skin as if it were an over-inflated innertube—and pulled the trigger. It exploded with a wet
plot
, spewing noxious matter that burned their faces and hands. Oddy stumbled back and his ass hit the tape deck and suddenly “Manic Monday” by The Bangles reverberated throughout the cabin, Susanna Hoffs singing
Just another manic Monday; wish it were Sunday…

Oddy clubbed the Webley’s butt into the console and her voice cut out abruptly.

The pilot flicked his stinking hair out of his eyes and bore down on the yoke with as much strength as he possessed. Things were pinging off the underside of the hull and the sound reminded Oddy of how Charlie would fire at low-flying Hueys in hopes of rupturing the fuel tanks but he knew this pinging was not bullets but claws and teeth and other appendages that defied all laws of nature and sense. Something slammed into the cockpit beside his head and the metal buckled inwards in a riotous outline of the thing that had struck it. Looking at that indent, the utter
senselessness
of it, Oddy’s heart sped up and his saliva glands spurted bitter juice into his mouth.