New Title 1 (15 page)

“How bad can torn-up roads be?” Peter asked, sounding nervous. “My truck’s got four-wheel drive.”

“Like, canyon bad,” Ally’s classmate retorted. “People have been, like, just parking and climbing down and back out again, so it’s a total traffic jam, too.”

“Then the snakes aren’t trying to keep us from leaving; they’re just keeping vehicles from coming and going,” Alison said, frowning. “Like the police, or fire trucks. Or the Army. That’s bad. That means they’re intelligent.”

“They’re aliens,” someone said.

Voices immediately rose in argument, some pointing out how stupid it would be for aliens to invade such a small campus; others pointing out that the electricity was off, the land lines down, and the cell phones getting busy signals, so the same thing could be happening all around the world. The phone guy said he couldn’t find anything online about alien attacks. A girl testified that she’d gotten through to her mother in North Dakota and everything there was fine. Someone else said there was nothing aliens would
want
in North Dakota.

Alison wrapped her arms around herself, shivering despite Pastor Lindgren’s coat. She tried to blank out the argument and concentrate on what a hero in a horror movie would do next.

Either hike out and warn the National Guard, or go fight the snakes herself.

Fighting brought her back to the question of weapons. Neither Peter nor Jarret had thought that the construction companies would store dynamite on campus. After some consideration, she’d had to agree.  Campus security didn’t even allow air guns and pocket knives on campus, much less explosives.

If this were a science-fiction movie, she’d be able to use some kind of cold ray to put the snakes into hibernation...or whatever...but she’d already taken her two mandatory science courses, and she hadn’t seen anything like a giant refrigeration unit in the science building.

“Look,” Peter said, “how far around campus have the snakes dug? Can we cut through somebody’s backyard?”

“Hello? Drive through someone’s yard? Are you crazy?”

“I’m not crazy! This is a
emergency
!”

“I’ll go with you,” one of the students volunteered. “We can drive around and find out if the snakes missed anything.”

Slowly the other students nodded, two of them volunteering to follow on their motorcycles.

Alison wavered, then finally decided they were right.

“We have to warn the authorities,” she said, as confidently as she could. “If the snakes are only here on campus, the cops might not know about them yet.”

That started another argument over alien-invasion logistics, but at least they were arguing as they pulled out their keys and headed for their vehicles.

XXI

Auctor inspected Viator’s captive with curiosity, his thousands of eyes scanning, analyzing, and recording. The captive bared its teeth and excreted some kind of liquid over Viator’s claws. Viator’s tentacular tongues flicked out and tasted it on several levels of hyperspace.

It is primarily photonic waves arranged in overlapping patterns
, she said, bemused.
Watch
. She moved the captive into another space and its shape changed. Then she moved it to another, and it took yet a third form.

It was one of the sigil guardians, Auctor was almost certain, but it made no attempt to oppose them. An immature sigil-spawn, perhaps? Or a lesser creature that had camouflaged itself as a sigil-guardian to protect itself against predators?

Does it conceive of itself as matter or light?
Auctor asked, carefully running an eye-covered feeler through the creature for an internal examination. Its internalities seemed incomplete and illogical. Auctor compared its structure to that of the other hypospatial beings it had encountered in the past and wondered if this one were damaged.

I am not even sure it has self-realization.
Viator brought the creature back into their preferred limis.
Do you want to try to communicate with it?

Auctor choose the hypospace with the highest probability of being the creature’s native home and retracted the protective membranes from its communicative organs, reshaping them to work at a suitably mechanical level. He repeated his query several times, in the several different communicative patterns.

No response, although the thing quivered with more intensity. Auctor turned a few hundred eyes toward Viator.

You may be right.
He meditated a moment. If it were an immature guardian, it should be destroyed. But if it were something else, it might generate useful data if it were tagged and released.
Release it. Let us see where it goes.

As you wish.
Viator dropped it back onto the path where she’d plucked it. They watched it race off, and then, taking pains to remain unseen, they followed.

XXII

Todd stared at the spot where the floating creatures had vanished, recognition tickling the edges of his consciousness. Their name was there, just out of reach. If he waited long enough, he was sure the answer would come to him.

“Andrew? Is that you?”

He turned, along with Markham and Jack Langthorn, and saw that the two men from the edge of the field had joined them, staggering as the earth shook. One of them was wearing a nylon Vista Hills Police Department jacket and kept his hand on the gun holstered under one arm. He was visibly shaking, his eyes constantly moving past them to check the center of the field. Todd recognized the other as Pastor Lindgren.

“Luther.” Markham and the pastor shook hands, their faces eerily lit by the remaining sputtering spotlight. “What do you make of all this?”

“Nothing good. What are you doing here?”

“Jack, Edward, this is Pastor Lindgren.”

“We’ve met,” Todd said, nodding cordially to the minister. Jack held out a hand and shook.

“Do you have any idea what those things are?” Markham asked. Lindgren looked back at the field.

“It’s the Gudrun curse.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Jack said, with feeling. “Curses I can do something about. How about them weirdlings? You know anything about them?”

Lindgren shook his head again. “They were never mentioned in the stories. But—”

The ground jerked and they all froze, feeling the tremors running beneath them.

“They gutted one of my men,” the police officer said, abruptly. “They made his skin and bones vanish and left his guts hanging in midair. Then they threw the rest of him away, too. There.” He pointed.

Todd looked, but all he could see was a crumpled shape on the ground. He started to step forward for a closer look, but then Lindgren began to speak again, and he decided to stay and listen.

“My grandfather was a pastor, too, one of the men who investigated the Gudruns’ disappearance,” Lindgren said. “He told me there’d been rumors about vagrants and migrant workers vanishing in the area, but nobody’d paid much attention to them. Sixty years ago, this was all ranchland and countryside, and the police didn’t worry if a Mexican migrant or two went missing.”

The shaking had become a constant, distant tremble. Wherever the snakes were, Todd thought, they had left the north campus.

“One day the Gudruns didn’t come to church. My grandfather stopped by on his way home to check up on them. He didn’t find them, but he did see a deep, blood-edged hole in one of their fields.” Lindgren gestured out to the broken ground beyond them. “Grandpa called some neighbors over to make sure the Gudruns hadn’t fallen into the hole—he thought maybe an old cave had collapsed—but the hole went down so deep that the searchers finally gave up. The ground around the top was saturated with blood. If the Gudruns
had
fallen down the hole, they had to be dead.”

“What frightened the Gudruns’ nephew?” Todd asked, remembering the terse passage in the history book. “He seemed to be in a hurry to sell the ranch.”

“Yes, and he sold it for much less than he could have gotten if he’d waited. You see, when Grandpa found the bloody hole, he also found some other things: an old horn bowl, a bone dagger, and a long wooden stick. They were covered with runes and blood. He hid them away because he didn’t want to get the Gudruns in trouble until he’d had a chance to talk to them himself, and when the Gudruns never showed up, he waited to show them to their nephew. Well, the nephew didn’t know what they were, either, so the two of them searched the house for clues. Down in the basement they found a trunk full of books—terrible things, apparently, full of horrible illustrations. Grandpa said they were in Latin and Norwegian and some languages he didn’t recognize.” Lindgren sighed, looking haunted. “He’d always thought the Gudruns were good Lutherans, but it seems they’d been dabbling in the occult.”

Todd smiled to himself as Jack and Markham exchanged guilty glances.

“Do you still have the books?” he asked.

“No. Grandpa burned them. He told me the flames turned blue and smelled like burning flesh.”

“Well, burning them probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but it don’t help us much now.” Jack rubbed his chin. “I don’t suppose he remembered any titles?”

“
Apocalypses Apocryphae
. I remember that one. I looked it up online once. It was printed in Leipzig in the 1800s and would be worth quite a bit now.”

Jack turned to Todd. “Apocalypses sounds like your department.”

“Serpents, dragons, worms, and similar creatures are common in apocryphal writings,” Todd said, gazing back out at the field. It was a stark palette of black and white to his eyes. “They were adopted into Biblical lore from older religions.  Then again, I’ve heard some fringe elements argue that dragons are universal archetypes because humans share a racial memory of dinosaurs.  That’s a historical impossibility, of course, unless one’s a young-Earth creationist.”

“Or them snake-things were the original dragons,” Jack suggested.

“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Dragons are no stranger than mal'akhim.”

“Fuck dragons,” the policeman said, turning suddenly. “I don’t care about dragons. What the
hell
were those floating things? Did you see what they did to Jackson? They gutted him, just like that. I shot them, but it didn’t make any difference. Bullets don’t hurt them.”

“Easy, now,” Jack said. Todd watched as the lanky man took a step forward and laid a friendly hand on the policeman’s shoulder. He expected the policeman to object, but instead he fell still, meeting Jack’s eyes. “We don’t know what them weirdlings were, either, but we’re gonna find out. You musta been the first to see them.”

Todd noticed that Jack’s usually negligible accent became more pronounced as he spoke to the officer. The man pulled on his country-boy persona like a second skin, virtually radiating American sincerity. 

The policeman shivered and drew in a deep breath.

“I’m Walt. Walt Clancy. Detective.”

Jack dropped his hand and smiled.

“Nice to meet you, Detective Clancy. I’m Jack. Maybe you can help us figure out what’s going on here. You were at the dig when the quake hit, right?”

Clancy turned and looked across the field.

“There was someone else here. He said he was the provost.”

“Gregory Penemue,” Todd said. He followed Clancy’s gaze, but that part of the field was lost in a darkness too deep for his handicapped eyes to pierce. “He
is
the provost.”

“Did they—did they kill him?”