Silas: A Supernatural Thriller (33 page)

Paul’s chest and stomach were a wan shade of olive green. Thick varicose veins pulsed beneath his waxy flesh. His navel was black and crusted over, his stomach sunken like an anorexic’s. Yet none of this was as repulsive as what I found between his ribs.

Positioned just left of center on his breastplate was an eight-inch tube. It was black and seemed to be made of rubber. In the center of the tube shone a circular, red-and-green, eye-like emblem. The whole device was covered with a layer of slime. From each end of the tube were two wires, one green and one red. The points where these wires entered Paul’s skin oozed with pus and meniscus fluid. It was a wholly frightening-looking device whose purpose I could only imagine.

I heart a soft ticking noise and bent over the black and slimy thing, making sure to keep my own flesh as far away as possible. It came again, a faint
chink
, like a lock sliding into place. Then it happened again. I counted four Mississippi before it happened a fourth time.

“So weird,” I said aloud.

Silas grabbed my hair and pulled me up. He looked frightened. He put his hands on my cheeks and guided my head until I was looking in Paul’s direction. The man with the weird apparatus in his chest gazed upon me, his face a twisted mask of pain. He moved his lips, speaking words I couldn’t hear. Bloody spit trickled over his chin. I leaned in closer.

“Pull it out,” he murmured.

I sat up and grimaced. “You sure?” I asked. “What’ll it do to you?”

Paul grabbed my shirt and my collar fell away from my nose. That smell of rot, of death, overran my nostrils again, burning my nose hairs. I glanced at the emaciated hand that held me, and then back at its owner.

“Do it now,” he said, louder this time. The mechanical joylessness from earlier entered his tone. Silas noticed this too and backed up ever so slightly. Paul gritted his teeth and said with even more force, “There’s not much time. I can’t hold it back much longer.”

As if to illustrate that point, the hand not holding my shirt snapped up and started wrenching my hair. White hot pins gouged my scalp. It felt like the guy was going to rip my hair right out of my head. In a panic I lost sight of my apprehension and wrapped both hands around the tube embedded in his chest. My fingers sunk into the sludge covering it.

Paul heaved and so did I. The device lifted off his chest easily, pulling the wires taut beneath his stretched skin. Paul intensified his hair-wrangling efforts, dragging me into a bent, half-kneeling, half-standing position. He seemed to gain strength with each wasted second. I looked over and saw the hand not pulling my hair inching closer and closer to the cane, which was only a few short finger-lunges away.

“Oh shit!” I said with a yelp, and tugged on the device harder.

Paul screamed and arched his back as the wires pulled farther and farther out, ripping his skin and causing blood to flow. He let go of my hair and tried to get my hands off the thing, but my grip was sure and he kept slipping. I rose to my feet and backed away, still pulling. I couldn’t believe how long the wires were. Standing off to the side as I was, they were at least four feet long and still emerging. I thought of marionette strings, shivered, and yanked harder still.

Two more feet was all it took. The wires popped free from Paul’s chest. The ends of the wires were balled, and they ripped open his sternum. Blood disgorged from the slits in liquid ribbons. Paul’s body convulsed. I released the oblong, glop-covered, ticking device. It fell to my feet with a wet clank. The wires writhed on the floor like they were dying. The balls at the ends of them were collapsible spheres that snapped open and shut. Yet another shudder overcame me.

I kicked the sickening device away and knelt over my fading doppelganger. Silas joined me. There were tears in Silas’s eyes as he stroked the dying man’s sandy hair. Paul had stopped convulsing by then, lying still in an ever-expanding pool of red. His chest rose and fell sporadically and his eyes were open, brimming with moisture. I placed one slime-covered hand on his cheek.

“Hey there, man,” I said, looking into my own eyes. In my growing sorrow I didn’t feel the slightest bit silly when I asked, “How’re you feeling?”

“Been…better,” Paul managed to cough out. His breath smelled like rotten beef. He closed his eyes and uttered, “Just…
unp
…plug…it…” in a voice so small it seemed to come from another dimension. He convulsed one more time, a faint cry creased his lips, and he fell still. I searched his neck for a pulse and couldn’t find one. Blood no longer spurted from his wounds.

He was gone.

“Oh no,” I whispered. I sat back and Silas came up to me, rolling into my lap. My heart raced. “Unplug what?” I asked the dead man, staring at him, pleading with his corpse. “From where?”

The lights in the room dimmed. The ticking from the device I yanked from Paul’s chest grew both louder and closer together. The evil eye in the center of the contraption pointed in our direction, flashing red, green, red, green. The ticking became so fast that it was like a drummer gone wild on a snare drum. Then, it abruptly stopped, making a popping noise before a plume of smoke rose up.

When that happened, the lights in the room faded even more. A horn, like an air-raid siren, blared. I covered my ears and winced. A woman’s voice came next, speaking in a flat, mechanical tone so deafening that the siren seemed pitiful by comparison.

“EMERGENCY CODE 233.53,” the voice said. “PROJECT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED…INITIATING COUNTERMEASURES…YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO ENTER THE PASSWORD.”

“Goddamn it, what
now?
” I screamed.

53

“FIVE…FOUR…THREE…”

I skittered around the room like a caged baboon while the mechanized lady in the machine counted down. The giant panels on the walls lit up with ominous numbers, counting along with her. With emergency lights flashing, everything around me was colored red and black. I jumped over Paul’s corpse and worked my way around the multiple consoles, searching for something to grab hold of. The consoles’ undersides were smooth and gapless, with no chords to be found. I reached mannequin man, the cataleptic robot, and stepped over it. “Unplug HIM?” I bellowed at the monitors. Then I turned to Paul’s body, above which Silas still knelt, and yelled, “It’d be nice if you weren’t so freaking vague!”

I hadn’t made it a quarter of the way around the room when the countdown clock hit zero. “INITIALIZING PURGING MEASURES,” the voice said, and everything stopped. The red lights faded away and the fluorescents came back up. The endless drone of machinery from beneath the structure ceased, as well. All was silent, all was still. Silas looked up at me with curious, concerned eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe there’s a malfunction or something.” I waved my arm in a wide arc, as if he could understand the gesture. “I mean, this place has got to be pretty damn old. Maybe everything just bro –”

Another thunderous sound shook me to my core, cutting me off, sounding like a series of giant rubber bands snapping in steady progression. Instinctively I cowered, covering my head with my arms in case something fell from above. Then I heard a sequence of pops, followed by the hissing of steam from a colossal tea kettle, and finally the rumble and creak of gears grinding together.

All that noise came from behind me, from the platform on which the Monster of
Oddville
crouched.

Not really wanting to, I slowly dropped my hands and craned my neck. My heart, that poor, damaged vessel, beat faster than it ever had before. I backed away, still stooped, until my head cracked against an instrument panel. Flashbulbs of pain blocked out my sight.

The stars faded and I saw the various tubes that held the Dreadnaught in place dangling around it, no longer attached. More grinding followed, and the whir of servos followed that. The two telescope-like eyes on the beast’s head glowed red, whining as they contracted back into its metal skull and then out again. Its joints shuddered and screeched. It rose from its squat and stood at full height. The mechanical arms lifted their razor-filled hands. The wings spread wide. Its mouth of steel daggers opened and it shrieked. It was the same sound I’d heard outside the bomb shelter. At a distance it had been disturbing, but up close, as with most every sound that had pummeled my eardrums over the last couple days, it was unbearable.

Soon the thing closed its mouth and the squealing stopped. The Dreadnaught’s neck rotated from side to side, its telescoping eyes searching. It took a clunking step forward and I cowered further beneath the instrument panel, hoping to shrink away beneath the overhang. It gaze passed over my head and rested firmly on Silas.

The boy had moved away from Paul. He hunkered on all fours, lips peeled back, revealing pink, unblemished gums and human, non-threatening teeth. His nose became a shriveled prune in the middle of his face as his brow pleated downward. When he’d been a dog I’d only seen this pose twice before. Even as a human it frightened me.

The image of the wolf-girl, with Big Guy’s sword embedded in her skull, popped into my head as the giant mechanical beast stepped off the platform. I felt a sudden rush of shame, hiding while a naked young boy held his ground. I stood up on quaking knees and dashed from my secluded spot. In my rush I forgot about the seven-foot obstruction sprawled out before me. My foot thwacked mannequin man’s side with a tinny
clank
and I toppled over. The floor came up too quickly for me to protect myself, and my chin hit it with a sickening crunch. I chomped down on my tongue and blood poured into my mouth. I spit it out and cursed the useless thing I’d tripped over
.

My head spun around and I stared at mannequin man. More to the point, I stared at the
thick wire attached to its head.
That had to be what Paul wanted me to unplug – hell, it was the only thing left in the room that I
could
. I smacked the steel floor and moved in to examine what I was dealing with, and upon testing the clamp that held the cable in place, my spirits lifted. A tiny bit.

When I glanced up, I saw that Silas now stood in front of me, blocking my view of the thing from the plinth. A subsonic wail discharged from its general direction. The gear-grinding noise became louder, and it was followed by the metallic
clang
of its feet hitting the floor. The dais was only thirty feet from us at most, but the thing seemed to move very slowly, so I did my best to ignore it. I wrapped my hand around the cable and pulled. It seemed to give a little, but didn’t come off. I tried again, and got it a little looser. Two more yanks, I figured, and it would be free.

It turned out those were two yanks too many, because the sound of a giant blowtorch filled the air and the room got really, really hot. I glanced up in time to see Silas run at the great steel beast, which now floated in the air and flapped its wings while a plume of fire spread out below it.

“Silas, no!” I cried.

My boy was quick, but adrenaline made me quicker. I stopped trying to dismantle the cable from mannequin man’s head and dove for him. I caught his ankles as he left the ground and he fell. At that moment the Dreadnaught soared past us. Its razor hand swiped, missing Silas by mere inches. If I hadn’t reacted so quickly…

I had no time for that sort of thinking. I jerked Silas to me by his calf and looked him dead in the eye. “Get back,” I ordered, gesturing to mannequin man, not sure if he’d understand what I wanted him to do. “Go pull the wire from its head. Now.” He nodded, eyes wide, and scurried off.

Our attacker’s telescoping lenses followed him. The mechanical beast was now on the other side of the room and had lifted a good fifteen feet off the ground. Its body angle flattened and there went that blowtorch noise again. It started forward, picking up speed as it flew.

What happened next took only seconds to complete, but in my mind it lasted forever. When I saw the thing flying in Silas’s direction I bent my knees, measured the distance between us, and jumped. I might have been a large man, but the impact of my body into that thing barely changed its course. I grasped its torso and held on for dear life. It started flying in circles. I managed to pull myself onto its back and hunkered down between the flapping, rubber-like wings. I plunged my free hand into the mess of exposed wires that went from its neck to the back of its head. When I yanked, they popped loose with a sizzle. The beast swerved to one side and pitched me off like a rodeo bull. Somehow I landed on one knee and one foot. I watched the thing veer sharply to the left and crash head-first into the far console. Its massive weight caused the wall to buckle.