Sins of the Father (28 page)

The shimmering of the water was made more disconcerting by the shimmering of reality around it. The motion was so disorienting that he found himself becoming queasy with motion sickness.

Here and there tiles were missing, cracked, or shattered, leaving random piles of rubble. One of the columns was held up by two-by-fours, and along the far side of the pool was a row of wooden lounge chairs, some ornately carved, others ruined and falling apart. Beyond them were three doors labeled “Ladies,” “Gentlemen,” and “Steam Room” respectively.

One of the lounge chairs had been knocked over, and crouching behind it was the man from room 803. The mutations that wracked his pale and sweating flesh were totally different from those endured by his female companion. He had the same egg-like swollen nodes under his jaw, but the majority of the changes seemed hard and bony, instead of soft and fleshy.

His shoulders and elbows had sprouted miniature mountain ranges of jagged bone that pushed up through the skin like teeth. The contours of his skull were shifting, elongating and fanning out, until the result resembled the collar of a triceratops. The tortured skin of his scalp was stretched and splitting, blood oozing down between his wild eyes and along his nose.

He was swaying back and forth.

In addition to the changes to his flesh, there was a halo of shimmering corruption all around him. The tile beneath his feet was cracked and stained. The ceiling above him was full of holes, decorated only with overlapping colonies of different colored mildew. Most disturbingly, the section of the pool closest to him was empty, almost as if a slice of the water had been removed, like a cake with a piece cut out.

“Take it easy,” Peter said softly, hands out toward the swiftly mutating man. “We’re here to help you.” He tipped his chin to the right, indicating that Julia should go that way while he started moving slowly in the other direction. He kept his body and attention turned toward the man, but still had to watch out for shimmering rifts in the tile beneath his feet.

He tracked Julia’s progress out of the corner of his eye. She was keeping pace with him, coming around the far end of the pool and reaching the other side. As she walked, she was filling the syringe.

The terrorist began whipping his increasingly unstable head back and forth from Peter to Julia, gripping the edge of the lounge chair so hard it was starting to crack. The bony collar added weight, and made the movement even more grotesque.

“It’s okay,” Peter continued, trying to draw the man’s focus away from Julia. “It’s okay. Let us help you. You don’t want this, do you? Of course not. Please, let us help you.”

The man seemed to hesitate for a moment, then let out a high-pitched shriek and lurched upward, flinging the lounge chair.

Peter threw himself to the left and managed to avoid taking the brunt of the attack, but the chair still glanced painfully off the side of his body before clattering into the wall and shattering into pieces. In the time it took him to recover and refocus, the man had scuttled backward and ducked through the door marked “Steam Room.”

“Damn,” Julia said, running up to the door. “This is bad. That kind of moist heat will speed up the reproduction of the virus.”

“Okay, then,” Peter replied, selecting a sturdy, foot-long chunk of wood from the wreckage and testing its heft. “We’d better go in after him.” He hoped he sounded more confident about it than he felt.

Julia nodded her agreement.

“Ready?” she asked, hand on the doorknob.

Peter nodded, switching his grip on the wooden club and pressing his back against the wall beside the door.

She nodded and pushed the door slowly open, keeping her body pressed against the wall on the opposite side. Once the door was open, all that was revealed was thick, swirling steam, obscuring everything.

The two of them waited for a few seconds that felt like hours. Waiting to see if the terrorist would come lunging out, or if they were going to have to go in after him.

As time ticked by, it became clear that the guy wasn’t coming out.

Peter exchanged a look with Julia, and cautiously stepped into the doorway.

Once inside, he saw that the space was larger than he had expected, and realized that the steam wasn’t as solid as he thought. It was like everything around the sick terrorist—flawed with inexplicable
otherness
. There and not there, in a pattern almost like ephemeral tiger stripes hanging in mid-air. The areas that weren’t entirely obscured by the steam looked more like an old forgotten storage room, complete with jagged, shifting chunks of decayed furniture and wooden crates.

There was a sound like voodoo drumming coming from the far end of the long, narrow space—a rapid series of hollow, rhythmic thumps.

“Sounds like a seizure,” Julia said, slipping in behind Peter. “Where is he? Can you see him? We should try to grab him and inject him now, while he’s unable to resist.”

Peter didn’t reply, but held up a hand, indicating that she should be quiet.

The steam was messing with the acoustics, but he was pretty sure that the sound was centered inside a thick cloud clinging to a corner of the back wall. He edged slowly along the wall to the right, keeping his eyes on the far corner, but he kept on bumping into things that were there and then not. He barked his shin on a length of rusty metal tubing that might or might not be the leg of a damaged card table, and then half tripped over a mildewy heap of damp cardboard.

Yet by the time he regained his footing, whatever it was that had been in his way was gone.

Muttering a curse under his breath, he continued making his way toward the sound.

When he got closer to the far end of the room, a dark shape became visible within the steam, but it didn’t seem even remotely human. What he saw looked more like the spasms of a dying cockroach.

He reached out to poke at the thing with the piece of wood, like a little kid who’d been dared by his friends to touch some road kill. Nothing happened. The convulsions continued unabated, and the writhing steam alternately hid and revealed the terrible new shape, parting like a stripper’s veils.

“What are you waiting for?” Julia hissed, lifting the syringe. “
Grab him
.”

Peter reached into the steam, blindly hunting for something he could grab onto in the twitching chaos. But nothing his fingers encountered felt anything like a normal human limb. More like storm-tossed tree branches, rough and abrasive, with sharp points and edges.

“I can’t…” Peter began, but whatever he was about to say was eclipsed by a roughly swallowed gasp when something shot out from within the steam, and grabbed his arm.

It felt like a long, thin crab claw and as it clamped down and twisted, he shouted out before he could stop himself. With his other hand, he tried to grab whatever had a hold of him, to pry its grip loose. Suddenly a second and then a third claw shot out and grabbed his free arm.

He swore and kicked out blindly at the thing, feeling the skin of his wrist and arm tearing and bleeding as he wrenched free first one hand, and then the other.

“We’ve got to get him out of here,” Julia said, picking up a fragment of what looked like wrought iron. “Back toward the door.” She put one flat hand in the center of Peter’s chest and started backing up, using the other hand to bang loudly against the wall with the piece of iron. “Come on!” she shouted, and the sound echoed. “
Come get us!
”

The shadowy shape seemed to hunch and twist, not so much standing up as reconfiguring itself into something more vertical. It let out a weird, breathlessly warbling cry like a frightened screech owl, and launched itself at them.

Peter shoved Julia out of the way just as the heavy, chaotic mass of the terrorist’s impossibly mutated body slammed into him, sending him reeling back out though the door and into the pool.

The water was warm and highly chlorinated, burning as it flooded up his nose. The wounds on his arms hurt like a bitch. He flailed out with both hands, but lost any sense of where his attacker was. His lungs began aching for oxygen as he gathered himself and kicked upward toward the distant, shimmering surface.

When he reached it, he sucked in a massive gasp of air and frantically looked around for the mutant. He couldn’t see anything that lay beneath the churning surface, and was suddenly excruciatingly aware of his legs, dangling beneath him. It was like floating in a murky shark tank, knowing that terrible things lurked somewhere below.

He had to get out of the water.

He cast an eye around the perimeter of the pool, and spotted Julia standing by the ladder on the right side, waving him over. That ladder was much closer than the steps leading out of the shallow end, so he started paddling in her direction.

He was nearly halfway there when Julia’s face went tight and grim.

“Hurry, Peter,” she called. She didn’t have to say it twice.

He risked a look back and saw the dark irregular shape of the creature rising up toward him, reaching with way too many long, thin limbs.

He started swimming hard, making a beeline for the ladder, when the water he was swimming through suddenly disappeared, dropping him ten feet to the cracked cement at the bottom of the pool. He let out a grunt of dismay, but couldn’t bring himself to be surprised. So many impossible things had happened, in so short an amount of time, that he was beginning to suffer from surprise fatigue.

He cracked his chin on the cement, tasting blood in his mouth. The impact left him breathless and gasping as he struggled up on his bruised knees, and looked around. He was trapped at the bottom of a triangular well, with walls made of water. Curious, he reached out to touch the water, but a shimmer flickering along the impossible surface made him yank his hand away, letting out a cry of alarm.

Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the walls were gone.

It wasn’t like having a ton of water dropped on him. It was just
there
, all around him, as if it had been there all along. Only now he was on the bottom of the deep end, with ten feet of water above his head. Worse, he had just exhaled, so his lungs were completely empty.

With a spurt of adrenaline he kicked off the bottom and started swimming for the surface. The water was so strongly chlorinated that it hurt to open his eyes, and even when he did, his vision was too blurry to see around him. His heart was pounding, his empty airless chest starting to burn, and he was about to break the surface when the water disappeared again.

The sound that was wrenched out from between his clenched teeth as he tumbled back to the bottom was more frustration than fear. He scrambled to get his feet under him, shook off the impact, and looked up. He could hear Julia calling out to him, but he couldn’t see her. The shifting channel of water made her voice seem distant and echoey.

Then she stepped into his view, looking like a mourner standing over an open grave and giving him the impression that he was about to be buried alive. But she was pointing behind him and yelling.

When he turned around, he spotted what used to be the terrorist at the other end of the empty channel, twitching and squirming half in and half out of the liquid wall. Whatever human form remained was hidden beneath what looked like a dense layer of the kind of junk that gets stuck in a storm drain after a heavy rain. Twiggy appendages, flapping rags of skin and irregular, jagged lumps, all various sickly shades of ashy gray and cyanotic blue. Every one of the dozens of quivering, disorganized limbs ended in something different—crablike claws and bony hooks and abnormally jointed fingers tipped with what looked more like teeth than nails.

The only thing that made the head distinguishable from the rest of the mess was a cavernous mouth full of slick, bloody tusks. They were growing so fast Peter could see them curling and twisting like eager bean sprouts, making a hideous creaking sound as they did. He could also see the now familiar swelling egg-like nodes on their ropy stalks beneath what should have been the man’s chin.

They were growing, too.

Time was running out.

The creature seemed to spot him suddenly, though Peter couldn’t imagine how—his eyes, ears, and nose were completely obscured by mutated flesh. His top-heavy, irregular form hunched and flexed, claws clicking and reaching. Then somehow he broke free of the wall between the realities, and charged like an angry bull.