Summer of Night (67 page)

Like sharks diving deep, thought Kevin. He had his father's Colt Government Model.45 in both hands now and he racked a round into the chamber, holding the semiautomatic's grip steady in his left hand, finger on the trigger guard, while he pulled the slide back. The first round chambered, the automatic 'cocked and locked' as his father called it, Kevin set his thumb on the hammer as he waited for the lamprey-things to emerge on this side of the street.

Nothing happened for a minute or more. There was no noise-or at least no noise audible over the crash of storm and continuing gurgle of the centrifugal pump. Kevin held the automatic in both hands and gently lowered the hammer before he shot his foot off. He looked down at the pump and hose, decided that it was still feeding properly, and stayed on the truck rather than jump down.

One of the lamprey-worms surfaced six feet to the right of the truck, the other threw gravel into the air as it arched out of the driveway. Their bodies were long and segmented. Kevin saw the working mouth as the first one passed, saw the quivering tendrils and pulsating gut lined with teeth.

He raised the pistol as the thing surfaced and dove again, but he did not fire. Mein Gott! His arms were shaking.

The one in the driveway dove to the right as it submerged again, displacing more gravel and passing under the hose as its endless back disappeared. What if it hits the underground tank?

Kevin climbed higher onto the truck, looking down into the open filler cap on top now, calling desperately into the walkie-talkie. "Dale… Harlen! Anybody! Help. Come in, over!"

Static-lashed silence.

Kevin clambered forward to the cab, leaned down and swung the passenger-side door open, thinking of getting in out of the wind.

The lamprey-thing surfaced five feet to the right of the cab and lunged, the mouth opening wider than the width of the body itself, flaps and tendrils pulsing as it smashed into the door with a thud that rocked the three-and-a-half-ton vehicle.

Kevin had released the door and rolled across the roof of the cab, away from the thing, his mouth open and ready to scream but with no sound emerging but rapid gasps. He teetered on the driver's side of the cab, fingernails clawing at the smooth metal of the roof. He went over but managed to grab the upper frame of the open window and land heavily, his feet clanging on the running board, the radio flying out onto the grass of the yard.

The second lamprey surfaced fifteen feet out and cut through the grass in an arching rush that left sod flying ten feet into the air. Kevin saw it coming, saw the radio knocked farther away by the thing's wake, and then he swung himself up onto the hood of the truck, his long legs scrabbling for purchase there.

The second lamprey-thing smashed into the driver's door with the same blind fury that the first had shown. It backed away, arching its quivering feeding-mouth six feet into the air, like a cobra weaving before striking. Kevin spread-eagled himself on the rocking hood and looked to his left; the first thing had backed off, had dived into the gravel again, and now rose in full force to crash into the right door again. Glass broke and the heavy door warped inward.

The instant the first lamprey backed off, before the second one attacked again, Kevin scrambled over the hood and roof of the cab, leaping onto the higher steel tank, feet sliding out from under him, but not before he threw himself forward and grasped the cylindrical filler cap in the center of the tank, his legs sliding off to the right.

Nine feet of lamprey unwound from the soil and went for his legs, tendrils quivering. Kevin got the full benefit of the death-stench rising from the thing's pulsing interior, and then he swung his legs up like a trick horse-rider, hanging completely by the force of his arms, his blue jeans skidding against the curved steel tank.

"Go git 'em!" came a voice over the wind.

Kevin looked over the tank to see Cordie Cooke standing by the truck shed. The wind plastered her shapeless dress against her and flapped it like a manic brown flag behind her. Her short, crudely chopped hair stood straight back from her face.

Cordie released the large dog she was holding back by a leather thong. It threw itself across the ten yards to the worm-thing on the far side of the truck. Kevin swung his legs up and over as the segmented thing rose and struck again on the lawn side.

It fell back, leaving a trail of slime on the side of his father's steel tanker. There was a dent in the steel not ten inches from Kevin's raised sneaker.

The dog growled and leapt on the first lamprey, its massive forelegs spread as it landed on the thing's segmented back. The lamprey arched and then dove, the dog chewing and growling, leaping from its back to run six paces before leaping on it again as the lamprey surfaced farther down the driveway.

"Come on!" screamed Kevin.

Cordie ran down the hill and jumped for the fender. She would have fallen back if Kevin's hand hadn't caught her wrist and pulled her up. The first lamprey surfaced and slammed its mouth into the tank a foot below her bare legs; it slid off the rear fender and began circling again, the growl ing and chewing dog going crazy on its back. The second lamprey was circling on the lawn as if it were building up speed.

"Up here," gasped Kevin, pulling her to the top of the tank. They stood, balancing in the high wind with their arms out, legs straddling the raised filler cap.

The first lamprey suddenly arched back on itself, its open end coming around faster than a snake could strike. The dog had time to howl once before most of it disappeared into the wide feeding orifice. The body pulsed, the mouth widened, the dog became a lump near the front of the giant worm, and it dove again, disappearing beyond the gravel into the yard near the street.

"Lucifer!" said Cordie. She was sobbing without noise.

"Look out!" cried Kevin. They swung off the right side of the truck as the second lamprey charged in from the yard again, its pulsing mouth rising eight feet into the air and slamming into the top of the tank near the filler cap this time.

Kevin and Cordie looked over their shoulders as the first thing circled and came back.

The centrifugal pump continued to chug and the gasoline continued to pump into the bulk tank as both lamprey creatures rose and converged.

THIRTY-NINE

Dale led the way up the stairs to the first floor, pausing at the landing to shine his light around the corner. More dark fluid trickled down the steps. The banisters, railings, and the lower section of the green walls were streaked with the waxy, chitinous material he had seen in the basement. The two boys stayed near the center of the steps, weapons raised.

There had been swinging doors at the top of the north stairwell, but both had been broken off their hinges. Dale 562 Dan Simmons paused there, watched the thick fluid seeping under the smashed wood, and then he leaned forward and shone his flashlight into the main hall of Old Central.

The light bounced off a confusing mass of dripping pillars and walls that Dale did not remember being there. Harlen had whispered something. Dale turned his head back. "What?" "I said," repeated the smaller boy with careful enunciation,"that there's something moving in the basement." "Maybe it's Mike."

"I don't think so," whispered Harlen. He swung the flashlight beam behind him. "Listen."

Dale listened. It was a scraping, sliding, rasping noise, as if something large and soft had filled the entire hallway below them and was pushing desks, chalkboards, and all the other detritus down there ahead of itself.

"Let's go," whispered Dale and stepped out over the stained and hanging door.

He felt Harlen step into the great space behind him, come up next to him, but Dale did not turn to look. He was too busy staring.

The interior of Old Central looked nothing like the building Dale had left for the last time seven weeks earlier. His neck first pivoted as he took in the scene, then arched as he looked up through the center stairwell."

The floor was awash with thick, almost-dried brown fluid that rose to the top of Dale's sneakers like some great molasses spill. The walls had been covered with a thin layer of pinkish, vaguely translucent material that reminded Dale of the naked and quivering flesh in a nest of newborn rats he had uncovered once. The organic-looking stuff dripped from railings and banisters, hung in great cobwebby strands from portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, dribbled in even thicker webs from the hooks in the cloakrooms, dangled from the doorknobs and transoms, hung from the corners of the boarded windows like huge, irregular picture frames made of pulsing flesh, and rose toward the mezzanine and dark stairs above in a great cheesy mass of strands and rivulets.

But it was above them that the nightmare grew obscene.

Dale arched farther back, seeing Harlen's flashlight beam join his own.

The second- and third-floor balconies were almost covered with gray and pink strands, the filaments growing more substantial as they rose toward the central belfry, arching and crisscrossing the dark space up there like flesh-colored flying buttresses in a cathedral designed by a lunatic. Stalactites and stalagmites of graying epoxy were everywhere, dripping from darkened light fixtures, rising from railings and balustrades, hanging across the great central space like clotheslines made of torn flesh and ribbed cartilage.

And from those 'clotheslines' hung a foul wash of what looked like pulsing red egg-sacs. Dale's flashlight beam stopped on one and he saw dark shadows inside, scores of them. They were moving. The entire sac pulsed and throbbed like a human heart hung on a bloody thread. There were dozens more.

Shadows moved on the mezzanines. Liquid dripped from the dark stained-glass window. But Dale had eyes for none of this. He was looking at the belfry.

Above the third-floor landing, the 'high-school level' that had been closed off for so many years, someone had torn out the broad-planked floor of the belfry. And that is where the glow was coming from.

"Glow' was not the right word, Dale realized, as he stared at the bluish-green throbbing, stared open-mouthed at the radioactive false light of the thick, fleshy web tendrils that filled the belfry, and at the redly glowing thing centered there.

He might have called it a spider, for there was a sense of many legs and more eyes; he might have described it as an egg sac itself, for Dale had seen the half-formed heart and reddish eye of such a thing in the yolk of fertilized eggs on Uncle Henry's farm; he might have said it was a face or giant heart, for it resembled both in a sick way… but even from forty feet beneath the thing, staring upward with a growing sense of despair and sickness, Dale knew that it was none of these things.

Harlen tugged at his arm. Reluctantly, almost unwillingly, Dale Stewart tore his eyes away from the center of the flesh-web far above.

The first floor here, so far from the sick glow in the belfry, was very dark, a complex fold of shadows on shadows. Now one of those shadows moved, separated itself from the web spun tunnel of a first-grade cloak-room and stepped softly toward the boys.

Arms shaking, Dale raised his shotgun as the pale face floated into focus above the shadow of a body.

Dr. Roon stopped ten feet from them. His black suit blended with the darkness; his face and hands shimmered softly as Harlen's flashlight beam danced there. There were other sounds behind him, softer sounds in the basement behind the boys.

Dr. Roon smiled more broadly than Dale had ever seen him smile.

"Welcome," he whispered, blinking against the light. His teeth looked slick and moist. "Look up again, why don't you?"

Dale flicked a glance upward, not taking his eyes off the man in black for more than a second. What he saw made him ignore Dr. Roon and look up again, lowering the shotgun so as to hold the flashlight beam more steady.

Lawrence was up there.

Mike decided that taking the tunnel had not been among the smartest choices he had ever made. His hands and knees were bleeding openly now, his back was killing him, he was lost, he felt like several hours had passed, he was sure that he had almost certainly missed anything that was happening in the school, the lamprey-things were coming back, he was almost out of shotgun shells, his flashlight was giving out, and he'd just discovered that he suffered from claustrophobia.

Other than that, he thought, I'm doing just fine.

There were so many branchings and twists in the tunnel now that he was sure that he had gotten lost. At first it had been easy identifying the main branch from the tributaries since the primary tunnel had been harder packed and still redolent from the huge worm-thing's passage, but now all the tunnels were like that. He'd had to decide between multiple branches a dozen times in the last fifteen minutes, and he was sure that he had chosen wrong. He was probably somewhere out beyond the burned hulk of the grain elevator and still heading north.

Fuck it, thought Mike, and then added an Act of Contrition to his mental rosary of Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

Twice the lamprey-things had almost had him. The first time he had heard and felt the approach from behind and struggled in the narrow tunnel to get the fading flashlight and Memo's squirrel gun aimed the right direction without blowing his foot and ankle off. He had seen the mouth tendrils waving like pulpy white seaweed before firing the first time, not taking time to flinch from the sound before reloading and firing again. The thing had burrowed down through the floor of the tunnel, allowing Mike to get off one final shot at its back. It was like throwing gravel at armor plating.

A minute or so later, that lamprey or its twin had burst through the roof of the tunnel not five feet in front of his face as he crawled along, the open face pulsing and writhing blindly as it sought him. Mike had forgotten that the things didn't have to stay in their old tunnels, and that oversight had almost killed him.

He had thrown the useless squirt gun into the maw of the thing, seeing the teeth-lined gut clearly as it swung his way, and then he had fired, reloaded, fired, reloaded.

It was gone when he blinked away the retinal echoes.

He had clambered forward wildly, panicked now, glancing up at the roof of the tunnel and down between his hands, waiting for the mouth to emerge and take him.

It had emerged a moment later, several yards ahead of him, but had continued burrowing straight down as if panicked itself by something on the surface. The tunnel had filled with the reek of gasoline.

Mike had stopped crawling for a moment, stunned with the implications of that smell. God, God, it's gotten to Kev's tanker truck. He wished he had one of the radios. Do radios work underground? Kev or Duane would know. Then he remembered: Duane was dead; Kevin might be too.

Mike crawled forward, his body reduced to a simple organ designed to transmit pain from various extremities to his exhausted brain. It was cool down here. It would be nice just to curl up in a nice warm ball and go to sleep here, let the last of the batteries drain away and the light fade… just sleep and dream of nothing.

Mike crawled forward, the squirrel gun loaded but tucked in his waistband along his right leg, his palms leaving bloody prints on the corrugated tunnel floor.

The noise when he heard it was louder than the lamprey sounds he'd heard before previous attacks. It was as if both creatures were coming down the tunnel after him. From behind. Very quickly judging from the rapid buildup in vibration and sound.

Mike crawled faster, the flashlight in his teeth, his head banging stones and the tunnel roof as he hobbled along as fast as he could.

The burrowing sounds increased in intensity behind him. He could smell the things now… the rotted garbage and dead-flesh stench of them, and above that another smell… sharp and terrible. He glanced back and saw a fierce light approaching around the bend in the tunnel behind him.

Mike flung himself forward, losing one of the squirt guns and not noticing it. The flashlight flickered out and he threw it away; the widening tunnel was illuminated fully by the flare of the lamprey's passage behind him.

Something large and loud and bright filled the space behind him. He felt heat from it, as if the lamprey mouth and gut had become a furnace.

Suddenly the tunnel floor dropped out from underneath him and Mike tumbled downward, sliding and scrabbling on loose rock and cold, flat stone. It was some sort of wider cave here, dark as the tunnel but much wider, and Mike pawed out Memo's squirrel gun and cocked back the hammer even as he continued kicking himself sideways, finally slamming up against a vertical slab of stone.

The light from the tunnel opening grew brighter, the earth shook, and the lamprey suddenly appeared, tendrils and maw pulsing wildly. It rumbled past Mike like an express freight train not deigning to pause for such an unimportant stop, its glowing and blazing flesh passing not two feet from Mike's sneakers as he tried in vain to push himself into the solid wall behind him.

The thing had passed, crashing through more stone and continuing on into darkness, leaving a trail of slime and smoldering flesh, before Mike realized two things: the lamprey had been on fire and Mike was no longer in the tunnel.

He was in the Boy's restroom in the basement of Old Central.

Kevin went one direction and Cordie the other, each of them teetering on the slick curve of the steel tank. The lampreys smashed into the center where Cordie and Kevin had been, pounding against the stainless steel and sliding back to earth with a scraping of teeth on metal. One of the things brushed against the hose as it surged past, pulling it from the filler tube in the ground. Gasoline sloshed back downhill and splashed the grass.

"Shit," whispered Kevin. He teetered forward and glanced down into the open filler cap of the bulk tank: more than half full, not full enough.

The lamprey-things were both circling in the soft soil of the lawn, their gray-and-pink backs arching like some caricature of the Loch Ness Monster. Kevin heard a door slam and wondered if it were his father or mother, looking out the door at the southeast corner of the house, staring above the whipping treetops at the wall of storm. He hoped not. Two steps onto the lawn would show them the lamprey-things circling; another two steps and they would see the truck pulled onto the north drive.

"Stay here," he shouted and let himself slide down the curved side of the tank, bouncing off the metal ledge above the left rear fender with the longest leap he could manage.

He hit and rolled near the open end of the hose. It was sucking air now, the centrifugal pump still working. Kevin started to lower it back into the underground fuel tank.

"Look out!"

He swung to his right and saw both of the lampreys rushing toward him, tearing through the sod as fast as a man could run.

Kevin dodged behind the truck, sweeping the hose around instinctively. But the movement of his right hand on the switches was not instinctive, merely an act that seemed to precede the mental command.

The first lamprey was six feet from Kevin's feet when the pump reversed and the gasoline sprayed from the tanker onto the open maw of the thing. It dove into gravel. Kevin sprayed its back as it curled beneath the ground, pouring more gasoline into the hole when it had passed.

The second one had veered right and circled, and now it swept in. Cordie screamed just as Kevin raised the arc of 5OO uan oinuuuiia gas fifteen feet out onto the lawn, soaking the front of the thing.

A stench of gasoline warned him that the first lamprey had surfaced behind him. Kevin jumped to the rear fender as the thing swept blindly past, mouth chewing at the left rear tires. He soaked it down, poured more gas into the hole it left.