Origin (29 page)

Batlings be damned, he had to get the hell out of there.

Belgium threw open the door and rushed out into the Blue Arm, slamming it behind him.

There were no batlings left.

He just about wept with relief.

Then he heard the familiar scratching/gurgling sound.

Shirley was free, and biting through the door. Soon she’d be in the hallway.

Andy stuck his head out of Blue 1 and Belgium ran in and slammed the door behind him.

“Frank? Are you okay?”

“We need need need to get out of here.”

“What’s going on?”

Belgium’s eyes scanned the room, frantic.

“Weapon. We need a weapon.”

Something hit the door with a tremendous thump.

“What the hell is that?” Andy said.

“That’s Shirley.” Belgium said, gasping. “She ate Harker, and she’s still hungry.”

Andy picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Sun, there’s something in the hallway. Don’t leave your room.”

The biting sound came from behind the door. Belgium watched the sawdust begin to fly, and the blur of gnashing teeth.

“Did you find the cattle prod?” Belgium asked.

“Not yet. Maybe it’s not even here.”

“He’s military, he’d keep his only weapon nearby.”

Belgium looked under the bed and came up with a white stick. “It doesn’t look big enough,” Belgium said.

“Figure out how it works.”

Andy went into the General’s closet and began taking clothes off hangers.

“What are you going to do, dress it?” Belgium said.

Andy knocked away hangers and pulled out the closet rod. It was four feet long and two and a half inches wide, solid wood.

“Can you use that prod?” Andy asked.

“I think so.”

Andy raised the rod above the hole.

But, as quickly as it had begun, the chewing stopped.

Andy bent down to look through the hole. Belgium stopped him.

“Don’t. It knows that trick.”

They waited for almost a full minute.

“It’s going after Sun,” Andy said. “We have to go get her.”

Frank couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less, but the thought of that nice veterinarian alone with that horrible thing forced him to move.

Andy motioned with his chin for Belgium to open the door.

Dr. Belgium fought every ounce of common sense he had and reached for the knob, slowly turning it.

Andy gave him a nod.

Here goes nothing.

Belgium flung the door open and Andy gripped the rod and brought it back like a baseball bat.

The demon wasn’t there.

Belgium crept into the hallway, looking right, looking left.

“Where the hell did it go?” Andy asked.

“Maybe it went back to Harker’s room. Or maybe…”

Belgium looked at the floor, making out the faint bloody footprints the thing had left while chasing him. The prints stopped at Race’s room, then went over to the opposite wall, and…

“Up the wall,” Belgium said.

Andy and Frank raised their heads, slowly, to the ceiling. The demon was hanging upside down like a giant gecko, staring at them with its milky eyes.

It pounced. Andy swung, but it landed inside the arc of the rod and hit him squarely in the chest, knocking him back into Race’s room.

Belgium watched as the creature dug in its claws and snapped at Andy’s neck. Andy shoved the closet rod into the hinge of its jaws, forcing its head back.

Frank rushed to help the linguist.

“Take that that that!” Dr. Belgium yelled.

Frank hit the thing in the side with the cattle prod.

Nothing happened.

Belgium looked at the prod, and flipped the switch in the other direction and tried again.

Nothing.

“Dammit, Frank!” Andy yelped, struggling with the beast. “You’re a goddamn molecular biologist! Figure the damn thing out!”

Belgium flipped the switch twice more, then noticed the handle could turn. He twisted it, heard a click, and touched the prod to the hellspawn.

There was a loud crack and a spark at the contact point. The thing squealed and rolled off of Andy. Belgium thrust the prod at the creature again and nothing happened.

“Reset it!” Andy yelled, getting to his feet.

The demon lunged at Belgium, toppling him over and sending the cattle prod skittering across the floor.

Snap snap snap
went the beast’s jaws. Belgium gripped its neck and tried to force it away, a battle he was quickly losing as the teeth inched closer. It’s breath was hot and sour, and the injured tongue shot out and once more got Frank in a stranglehold.

As his vision blurred, Frank saw Andy step behind the demon and swing the rod like a home run champion. The contact was solid, and Belgium could feel the shock of the blow vibrating through the monster’s tongue.

The thing rolled from Dr. Belgium’s chest, and Andy followed up with another viscous swing to its head. The wet
WHAP
was accompanied by a cracking sound, and Shirley slumped over.

Belgium reached for the dropped cattle prod. He turned the handle and shoved it at the demon’s body, causing a burn where it made contact.

Belgium did it again, and then once more.

Shirley didn’t move.

“I think we got it,” Andy said.

Belgium zapped it twice more.

Sun appeared, clutching a towel and a tiny cylinder of pepper spray.

“What was it?” she asked.

“One more reason to avoid working for the government,” Andy said. “We need to find the vent that’ll lead to the Yellow Arm. Frank!”

Belgium was still zapping the dead creature.

“Frank! It’s dead! Save the battery!”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“The Yellow Arm is to the right of the Blue Arm,” Sun said. “Down the hall here there’s another ceiling vent. I bet it goes both ways, left to the Purple arm and right to the Yellow.”

“We’ll drag a dresser out here to stand on. Frank! Enough with the cattle prod!”

Belgium zapped the demon once more, for good measure, and then joined them.

With little difficulty, they pushed a dresser out into the hall under the ceiling grill, up onto its end. Andy took out the drawers, which allowed him to climb the piece of furniture like a ladder. He pulled off the vent and peered inside.

“The duct ends in a T, going off in both left and right directions.”

“How much time left?” Sun asked.

Andy checked his watch.

“Twenty-six minutes.”

“Hold still.”

Sun used the towel to wipe away the blood on Andy’s scalp, and then went to work on his wound with a tube of super glue.

“Is this going to… ow! Jesus!”

“Hold still. I’ll be done in a second.”

Belgium took a deep, calming breath, which was no help at all. Everything hurt. He felt miserable. Not just for himself, but for this cute young couple, who’d done nothing to bring this shit storm down on themselves.

“Sun, Andy,” he said. “I’m really sorry. This is all my fault.”

“Were you the one who gave him the code for the gate?” Sun asked.

“What? No no no. Of course not. I let him use the Internet because I thought it would help teach him to read. Now I see—”

“Don’t worry about it.” Sun pocketed the super glue and patted his shoulder.

“But—”

“No buts. Bub has been planning this all along. He got to all of us, in one way or another. Don’t beat yourself up over it. This isn’t your fault.”

Belgium felt a lump grow in his throat. Sun had no way on knowing it, but she’d given him the nicest gift he’d ever received.

“Thank you, Sun.”

“Now let’s go stop a nuclear explosion.”

S
ince Bub first walked the earth there have been over five hundred attempts on his life. Sometimes it was just a single assassin armed with an ineffectual club or a useless dagger. Other times it was a conspiracy of many, or a carefully prepared trap.

He’d eluded death in all situations. Besides the fact that he was extremely hard to kill, Bub had developed a knack for thinking like humans. They rarely surprised him. The closest he’d ever been to actual death was at the hands of the Maya, and only then because they’d been extremely lucky.

But this time, Bub was worried. A one kiloton weapon, the equivalent of two million pounds of TNT, was more than enough to blow him into oblivion. And even if the nuke didn’t explode, it still posed a threat.

Something had to be done. Something quick.

The demon went to the end of the hallway and stared at the air conditioning vent. He put his ear to it, listening to the faint sounds of the humans inching their way through. Bub was much too big to fit inside the small duct, but that could be fixed.

With one talon he yanked off the grating.

The demon closed his eyes and focused on his own DNA structure. He hadn’t lied to Belgium about that. Bub knew his genome like a man knows his name. He’d memorized every base pair, every gene, every chromosome, and knew what every one of them did.

He did some quick equations in his head, decided what needed to be done, and placed his right claw on his chest, injecting himself with his own essence.

Genetic manipulation had limits. Bub couldn’t make the drastic changes to himself as he did with other life forms. If he altered his own genome too much, he’d become something entirely different and wouldn’t be able to change back.

He also had a set mass to work with, and it was impossible to make himself larger or smaller. Bub could not have turned into a rat in order to fit through the bars of the gate. But he could change his genome enough to fit into the air condition duct. He’d done it earlier today, when he escaped his habitat through the sheep’s door, after that zealot Father Thrist refused to help.

All it took was a little time and effort.

Without pain, his shoulders dislocated and moved up alongside his neck. His skull elongated and his mouth shrank, his ram’s horns flattening against his face and curving inward. With a crackling sound, Bub’s ribs stretched out and compacted, making his torso longer and thinner. Both hips popped audibly from their sockets and slid closer together. His organs shifted around in his body cavity, adjusting to their new spaces.

Bub was now twice as long and half as thick. He resembled a funhouse mirror reflection of himself.

He stuck his head into the vent and glared in the direction of the humans. They could wait. For the moment, they were allies, no more wanting to explode in a nuclear fireball than he did.

Bub looked to the left, sniffing the air. That was were the sheep were.

The demon wormed his way into the vent and slithered snake-like to the Orange Arm. He knocked out the ceiling grate with a flick of his wrist and poured himself out of the duct and into the Orange Arm hallway.

His nose took him to Orange 12, and he went in. Inside were over a dozen sheep. But Bub wasn’t hungry.

In order to escape Samhain, Bub had to be able to bypass these titanium gates. They’d been built to withstand a creature of his size and strength. But how would they hold up to a much larger creature?

Bub looked at the thousands of pounds of raw material around him and got started.

A
ndy looked down into the Yellow Arm from the ceiling vent.

No Helen.

He carefully bent the grating down and eased himself over the opening, going through legs-first rather than face-first like he had in the Blue Arm.

His landing was louder than he would have liked. His eyes nervously scanned both directions to see if the creature was coming.

So far, so good.

Sun handed him the clothes rod, and he helped her exit the duct. They both assisted Dr. Belgium.

“Where do you think she is?” Frank whispered.

They moved down the hall slowly, Andy paying special attention to the ceiling—he wasn’t going to let anything drop on him again.

“Do you hear that?” Sun said.

Andy held his breath and listened.

“It sounds like laughter.”

“A laugh track,” Sun said. “It’s a television.”

“She’s watching TV?”

“Not beyond the scope of possibility,” Belgium said. “Helen watched a lot of TV. Maybe when Bub changed her genome, some of her memory remained intact.”