Spawn of Hell (40 page)

“What they did—and I blame myself for it—was force his car off the road, and drag him bodily to the plant to be imprisoned. They injected him with—stuff—that they’d never tried before. I don’t know what they thought it would do. Before it had taken too much effect, George managed to escape, managed to get all the way to New York. Probably he dropped in on you as a desperate measure. When you called my home, Mimi contacted me in Lancaster and I instructed her to tell you a lie, while I called Anton. I was still angry with my son. Anton sent men to search for him. They found him, brought him back. Already horrible changes had occurred to his body.”

David shivered, remembering how George’s shoulders had just—squeezed in—as if there was nothing to him.

“It was getting worse and worse, his condition, and Anton didn’t know what he could do aside from keeping him alive. I insisted they return him to the house, and set up a special room and installed a nurse. I think they went along with me because they were afraid I’d explode. My anger at George had turned to guilt and regret. Every day his condition got worse and worse, more and more horrible. Wait until you see! Wait until you see what kind of things they’re capable of!”

More than ever David questioned his willingness to find out, but knew he couldn’t turn back now. “How exactly do you fit in with this experimentation?” he asked. “What is your position in the Corporation?”

“I was one of the few who argued in favor of merging with Barrows, of shifting our emphasis from drugs and pills to recombinant DNA research. It caused quite a furor at the time, as most of the employees—men who were unskilled in such research, and even opposed to it in some cases—had to be let go, and new ones hired. I had been an administrator before, but afterwards was promoted to vice-president of the pharmaceutical firm in charge of public relations, as well as receiving a minor, but powerful appointment within the Corporation’s administrative body itself. My salary increased tenfold. I thought that life was going to be beautiful.

“It’s not beautiful, David,” he said as they pulled into his driveway. “It’s rather ugly, I’m afraid.”

David didn’t argue. They got out of the car and stole into the front hall. “George’s nurse was asleep when I left. I don’t entirely trust the woman. She’s a bit too friendly, and I’ve long since stopped thinking I had enough sex appeal to attract a much younger woman. I think Clair thinks there’s something going on between us. Sometimes I wish it were true.”

They reached the inner hall, which ran perpendicularly to the one they were in and led down to George’s room. Bartley still spoke in a whisper. “First I’ll show you what they did to my son. Then we’ll go out to the plant. It’s risky, but we’ll have to take that chance. They plan on committing wholesale murder this evening, but I need proof—charts, diagrams and such—before I can go to the authorities. In some other town, where hopefully, the Corporation has no influence.”

“Murder? How do they propose to do that?”

“You’ll have to see when we get there. Otherwise . . .” He let his words trail off. “Remember, you’ve promised to get Miss Braddon to use her influence on any media people she knows. I want to blow this all sky high.”

“I’ll do my best. I’m not sure who she ‘knows,’ if anyone.”

“She can get to them through her contacts, if nothing else. And a beautiful woman
always
has contacts.”

Bartley put his ear to the outer door of the nurse’s chamber. Hearing nothing, he assumed she was asleep. They sneaked quietly into George’s sickroom. It was painted crabapple green and its one window had been boarded shut. In the exact center of the room was a regulation hospital bed around which partitions had been placed. A bank of complicated machinery stood off to one side, monitoring his functions. Through the gap between to partitions, David could see a huddled form in the bed, covered with sheets, a tube from an intravenous bottle going into his arm.

“Prepare yourself,” Ted Bartley said, drawing aside the curtains. “I guarantee you’ve never seen anything like this before.”

The figure in the bed was finally revealed. David stepped back, gasping. Never had he imagined anything so
horrible.

“They can’t put bandages on him. They are immediately absorbed into his skin.” Bartley leaned over the body, familiarity with it not entirely disguising his revulsion, and pulled down the bedcovers. David felt waves of nausea overwhelming him. He tried to stay steady on his feet, tried to recover from the shock.

The man on the bed resembled a skeleton, encased by a gelatinous sheath of some transparent substance, which fully revealed all the internal organs, gray and undulating, inside the hideously transformed body. The bones were barely holding it all together. The face had no recognizable features, only a see-through head revealing a pale white skull thin as eggshell and a messy, pinkish brain. The eyes bulged out from sunken eye sockets; they stared unseeing straight ahead. There were no eyelids, no hair, no flesh, anywhere. Veins and capillaries stood our red within the grayish mass that George’s skin and bones had converted to.

“He is alive. Barely,” Ted said. “The bones are too weak, too rubbery to support him, so he cannot move or get out of bed or be transported anywhere. Besides, what could a hospital do that isn’t being done here? He is not conscious. He is not in pain, physical or mental. He is not even human anymore.

“First the bones start converting, so that he could not sit or stand or walk. That was why they had no trouble capturing him in the city, he could not possibly run away. It must have already started by the time he saw you. He has been in bed, wasting away, all this time. Then the other night, the final transformation. The flesh completely changed, the skin as we know it disappeared within the space of a few hours. Clair ran in here, saw what had happened, and went quietly mad.

“Now do you know why I want to destroy the Corporation and everyone behind it?”

“Is George’s condition related to this Frederick Anton’s plan to commit ‘wholesale murder’?” David asked.

“No,” Bartley replied. “Not at all. It was just a sideline. They introduced mutated, contaminated genetic material into his—”

David put his hand out and silenced the man, soundlessly telling him to stand stock still. “Listen,” he whispered. “I hear something moving. It’s coming from behind that door.”

The connecting door to the nurse’s quarters appeared to be closed, but both of them could hear low noises, short clicks, coming from behind it. Bartley realized that the door was slightly ajar. “The phone. She’s on the phone. The bitch must have been spying on us. Even now she’s calling for help.”

He stepped over to the door and swung it open with a violent thrust, marching angrily into the next chamber. David saw a pretty, slender young woman standing by a bed, holding onto the telephone. She knew what Bartley was up to, what he planned to do.

“PUT THAT PHONE DOWN!” Bartley dashed to her side and knocked her onto the bed. She emitted a tiny scream as he put the receiver to his ear and listened. “Good. It’s still ringing. She didn’t get through.” He slammed the phone down and turned his full attention on the nurse. “Listen to me, you little bitch. You are not to call anyone. You are not to contact anyone. Or I’ll make you regret it, I assure you.”

“What are you talking about, Mr. Bartley? I was only going to order a sandwich.”

“Bullshit. That door was closed when we came in; now it’s ajar. You were listening to us. You work for them, and I don’t trust you. Besides,” he looked down at the tray sitting on the bed, a plate with smears of gravy, a few pieces of fatty meat. “I see you already had your dinner just now. Mimi would never leave a tray lying around for long, and she could have made you your ‘sandwich.’ “

The submissive expression left Nurse Hamilton’s face. “I have my orders,” she said. “I’m not to let you out of this house, and I’m not going to. You’re already opened your mouth too much. Go ahead and threaten me. If I don’t call in, they’ll send someone here to check on me.”

Bartley’s hand lashed out, slapping her across the face. Her cheek was blazing red. Furious at his action, she picked a fork up off the tray and stabbed at his face as he hovered above her. Bartley managed to swing his hand up in front of his eye before the implement could plunge into it, but the prongs sunk into the hand just above the knuckles. He cried out, pulling back, as the fork fell to onto the floor. “BITCH!” He slapped her again. Thin rivulets of blood ran down his arm.

David had been watching from the doorway. “Your hand-?”

“It’s all right. I’m going to have to tie her up.”

“Go ahead! Tie me up!” Hamilton screamed. Suddenly she got up and ran past Bartley and David before either one could stop her. “I’ll murder this thing you call your son,” she shouted. She reached out and knocked over the intravenous stand, the bottle crashing to the ground and shattering into a hundred pieces, spilling clear fluid all over the floor.

“NO! NO!
Stop her!”
Bartley screeched.

David grabbed the nurse from behind, but she was too strong, too determined. As if sensing his weak spot, she kicked him in the leg, and he doubled over in pain. The machinery began to beep, signaling that something was wrong with the patient in the bed. “He’s dying!” Bartley rushed over to the nurse as she started pulling tubes and wires off of his son, parts of George coming with them, slapping disgustingly against the walls, the nurse’s white uniform, the curtains. Still she pulled, the beeping growing louder, Bartley’s voice more hysterical. Beyond reason, he started battering her, his arms and fists flailing out, hitting her in the back, the neck, the head. David tried to ignore his pain, not sure of who to help, who was most in danger of dying at the other’s hands. It would not do Bartley any good to commit murder.

He shouted for them to stop but they were beyond hearing. The nurse took the metal stand which had held the intravenous bottle, lying against the bed at an angle, and began beating at George’s body with it, ignoring his father’s blows. There were horrible
glopping
sounds as the rod left indentations wherever it hit, picking up parts of the body with each downward thrust. “STOP IT!” Ted Bartley rammed his fist directly into the woman’s open mouth. She bit down with all her strength, but he kept jamming it in. Teeth and blood poured out of the orifice. Sensing an opening, a temporary lull in her concentration, Bartley thrust out his other hand and started pulling at the side of her mouth with his fingers, pulling the lips over as they formed a grotesque, unnatural grin. The flesh started tearing, and more blood poured out. His hand was in her throat up to the wrist, and above the sounds of her agonized whimpering came the noise of ripping membrane.

Fighting back unconsciousness, the nurse reached back to the small night table beside George’s bed. She had carelessly left her cigarette lighter there, although she had been prohibited from smoking even when next door. She grasped the lighter in her fingers, and managed to produce a flame. Lifting up the fiery lighter, she held it to Bartley’s back, setting fire to his shirt.

It didn’t have the desired effect. Even with his flesh burning, he would not remove his hands from her face. Blood drenched down over the woman’s uniform, spattering onto the skirt, Bartley’s clothes, and the floor. Seeing the flame cascading over Bartley’s back, David was at last shocked out of his benumbed inactivity, and ran over to him, beating out the fire with his fists and a handkerchief. “Let her go,” he screamed. “It won’t help any! Let her go!”

“They didn’t even try to cure my son,” Bartley hollered above the woman’s death rattle. “They just let him turn into this—this horrible thing. They didn’t even try! And she’s one of them. We can’t let her tell them this. They mustn’t know I plan to betray them until we have time to get away.”

The woman’s struggles were weakening. David was sickened by all the blood. Bartley’s hand was in almost halfway up to the elbow joint now. Vomit and mucous coated his fingers, the woman choked and heaved. David wondered if he could keep down the contents of his own stomach. “You don’t have to kill her. She’s incapacitated now. We’ll tie her up as you suggested.”

Bartley hesitated, but saw the wisdom in what David said. He removed his arm, and stopped pulling at the ragged, bloody remains of her mouth. But as soon as he released his grip, she came back to life again, and began scratching wildly at his eyes. “My God!” David grabbed the rod she had dropped before and jammed it into her stomach, too sickened by the brutality of his actions to do it hard enough to have effect. He saw blood seeping out from under her fingers, which were clamped to Bartley’s face. God, she was gouging his eyes out! He hit her with as much force as he could muster, closing his eyes at the moment of impact.

There was a scream, then a
plop,
and a muffled, horrible yelling. He opened his eyes. Her nails had town at the skin below them, but Bartley’s eyes themselves had been untouched. Thank God. Then David looked down on the bed and wished he hadn’t.

Nurse Hamilton had fallen onto George’s body. It was now in the process of absorbing her. She had simply
sunk
into the sticky, translucent miasma of organs and bones, and kept on sinking, the stuff oozing into her mouth, cutting off her cries of horror and outrage. Her legs, which were sticking out of the bed, and hence were free of the substance which made up George’s form, kicked out and kept on kicking for moments until they finally stopped. David finally tried to pull her free, grabbing an arm which dangled from the bed. She would not budge. She had been suffocated inside George’s remains. David was in shock—
he had just killed someone!
Bartley seemed to sense what he was thinking and put his hand on David’s shoulder. “You saved my life, David. Keep reminding yourself of that. You saved
our
lives. And maybe many more.”

The machinery on the wall registered no life signs. George, too, was dead.

Bartley stood there a moment, staring down at his son and the woman George had virtually engulfed. There was nothing to do now but continue. David wondered if either of them could retain their sanity after this terrible episode. David also knew that if the Corporation could do
this
to a human being, they were fully capable, as Bartley had implied, of unleashing God-knows-what horrors on the unsuspecting town of Hillsboro.