The Scream (55 page)

The great taloned hand was the first thing to emerge from the wide-open crack in the world.

It rose: claws first, five in all, each of them long and dark as coffin lids; fingers, then, surprisingly short and stubby, less than ten feet long apiece, with thin semitransparent webbing between them; the palm next, big as a tractor trailer cab; the wrist, fat and slick and hugely pulsing.

And then the hand was reaching up at the end of an arm too huge for comprehension, reaching for the dead ArenaVision module, the fingers wrapping around it and dawdling with the tons of glass and metal, pushing it like a demonic crib toy, then grasping and wrenching and tightening and pulling as if to hoist itself out farther
. . .

All of this Hempstead observed in the moments before he opened fire.

It had been hard, at first, to reconcile himself with the fact that he wasn't dead. New rules were not enough to cover it. Nothing was enough. If this wasn't Hell, then there was no point in even conceiving of one.

But he still had his mind and his body and his gun; and if they still worked, then maybe it was just a matter of new rules after all.

There was only one way to find out.

Hempstead switched to full automatic and proceeded to empty his clip. Even at this range, it was impossible to miss. Thirty nine-millimeter slugs tore an impressive series of spurting holes in the soft red flesh on the flip side of the elbow. They seemed to cause considerable pain.

That was the good news.

The bad news, of course, was that it wasn't enough. It wasn't even close. All it did was piss the thing off. When the arm jerked back in anguish, the hand took the ArenaVision module with it, showering sparks and steel and glass onto the already suffering masses below.

Then the hand cocked back.

And lobbed several tons of death at the source of its pain.

There was time to scream, but no time to spare. He dove through the doorway, rolling toward the stairs, past the anonymous corpses and down, just as the wall of the press room exploded inward in a shower of ruptured cinder block and leviathan steel.

Then he was running, the last several steps disappearing behind him as he raced through the blood-drenched hospitality room and out into the lower concourse, toward the exit and whoever was left to exit it with him, because there was no fucking way to fight anymore, there was only retreat, and it had to be swift, and it had to be now . . .

"
Pray!
" Mary screamed, grabbing hold of his collar. "
Pray
, God DAMN you!" She'd found Weissman, running like a maniac through the explosions and terrified survivors near ramp LL. And he'd kept right on running, leaving Mary and the pastor to the tender mercies of the Lord.

Mary couldn't leave, though. She didn't even understand why. Common sense and terror said
GO! GO! GO! GO!
through every traumatized circuit on her body. The Horror rising before her confirmed the impulse.

But something else deep inside her spoke. Not in words, but nonetheless.
Stay
, It said.
And fear not
.

For I am with you always
.

It was a small voice, but It was growing by the second, and It was not afraid. Feeling It strong and clear in that moment of shattering dread, she realized that all names for It sloughed off like dross. She could not contain It, she could not explain It.

But she believed It, heart and soul.

She found Furniss. She wrenched the spikes from his hands and hauled him up. She shook him like a rag doll with strength she never even knew she had. And she screamed.

"PRAY!!!"

Daniel Furniss's eyes met hers for a microsecond, and they stopped spinning. He nodded his shell-shocked head, and then he started praying, following her words this time, barely making the connection of one word to the next to the next, having but the tiniest grasp of the truth that he had vaunted for so long. He was stripped utterly bare in the face of It and words utterly failed him. That didn't matter, though.

It was the thought that counted.

Together, they prayed. . . .

Walker was just coming out of the security room where Kyle had stowed the ordnance when he ran into Hempstead. He'd stripped off the eye patch and gas mask and found that the left lens was smeared with a clot of worms the consistency of bloody vermicelli. That clinched it. Walker had changed his mind about a whole lot of things in the past twenty minutes, and he was damned if he wasn't going to do something about it. He had to hurry; his grip was slipping, every tickticktick of the clock finding him weaker and them stronger.

Which is why he got caught in the hall. He wasn't paying attention to the hall; his mind was fixed on the two heavy RPG7 missiles that he carted, and the noise coming from the arena. He was still very much a man in a nightmare. But he was also, for the first time in forever, a man with a dream. He stared straight into the eyes of the man with the gun.

"I should kill you," Hempstead said flatly, the Uzi chest-leveled. The shock of twenty-year-old memories screaming back like a freight train was a stunner. He saw the scars etched into Walker's sweat-streaked face. "I ought to kill you right
now
." The gun hovered, poised.

Walker nodded and then he smiled, a grim slit of genuine emotion. "Yeah, I know. So kill me
later
."

He held out one of the RPG7s.

Hempstead weighed the decision another twenty microseconds or so. Then he took the weapon.

"I will, you know," he said. "Believe it."

Walker nodded. "I do."

There was a God; and if there wasn't, then oblivion had a real keen sense of justice. Oblivion was the best that Rod could hope for now
.

Too bad there was no hope.

From where he lay, with his guts blown out, the palace gates were clearly visible. He could see what lay on the other side. He could see where the end of his life was leading.

The end of his life had taken a long time to get here. Gut-shot victims tend to have that problem. Rod knew all about it. It was a great way to prolong the agony: give the squandered past plenty of time to replay while the present went leaking away.

But there always came the moment when the end showed its face.

The face was here
.

It emerged the size of a weather balloon, with a skin about as thick, growing thicker by the second. Its head wasn't coated in slime, its head
was
the slime, as viscous as the skin of a soap bubble. It was an enormous outline, filling itself in: translucent, swirling, mutating a million times a second like some humongous claymation creation, boiling and spitting and laughing insane howling rage as it became zygote, then fetus, then baby, then toddler child teen adult ancient twisted inhuman mockery of the world it was struggling to gain hold of.

The other arm came bursting out of the hole like a misfiring rocket, careening up and over and smashing into the floor of the arena, pulping bodies both dead and alive in an expression of its enthusiasm. Victims were grand. Victims were sweet candy. The body followed, trailing huge, bloated breasts over distended belly, reptilian tail and long pulsing phallus and snapping vulva between squat, scaly legs. A long, long umbilical cord trailed back into the pit like so much moist pink rope. The phallus whipped around viciously, its many-toothed opening snapping at the victims under each splayed foot, gobbling them in chunks and hunks, then stuffing one whole into the vulva and pounding him to death in debased coital embrace.

Rod thought about the many sweet victims he'd tasted, let the roll call of their faces take one last quick pass across his fading vision's path. So many eyes, remembering him. Waiting, on the other side of the gate that he'd spent his whole life trying to get through.

Waiting for the chance to return the favor.

And now, as momma closed in on the stage and the mouth opened wide to greet him, that chance had finally come
. . . .

There was no question as to whether Momma had made it or not. It was here, all right. The closer it came, the more real it got.

And it was funny, but as they reached the side of the stage and he watched Rod disappear screaming into that leering maw, Walker listened again to a speech he'd made to the late guitarist less than forty-eight hours before.

This is the physical world
, he'd said,
and all the physical rules apply. Once she gets here, she's just a bigger and better version of us. You know what that means?

You know what that means?

"It means your ass is mine," Walker whispered to himself, then turned to Hempstead and said, "Get your people out of here. Now."

"But-"

"Just
do
it!"

Hempstead weighed the situation again. It took even less time now. His people were scrambling off the back of the elevated platform behind the dead cathedral backdrop, and they needed help. He looked at Walker one last time, laid down the spare missile, then turned and bolted for them.

As Walker armed the one-shot he saw Jake stumbling around from the other side of the stage with what looked like a very broken arm. Hempstead caught up to him and yelled something unintelligible, gesturing back at Walker. Jake nodded and looked back at him. There was some justice in the universe after all, Walker thought. It was comforting.

Walker watched as the refugees beat their hasty retreat, disappearing amid the piles of road cases. He gave them a couple of extra seconds to get toward the back door. Momma was busy tearing up the stage and the audience before it, heaving bodies and equipment high into the air and squashing them back underfoot, reveling in its arrival.

That suited him just fine; he had the perfect welcome home present. He shouldered it.
An RPG7 will blow the shit out of a fully armored tank at six hundred yards
, he reasoned. "Let's see what it will do to your face at fifty."

Walker stepped out from behind the speaker column and aimed.

"MOMMMMAAAAAAA!!!" he screamed.

The demon head snapped around to snarl at the sound of his voice.

And Walker fired . . .

They were almost out the back door when the first explosion went off. If they had any intention of stopping, they didn't show it. The blowback from the blast shook the huge steel and plastic and aluminum maze like an earthquake, threatening to send it tumbling down like a giant toddler's building blocks.

They scrambled frantically on: Hempstead pulling Jake, Heimlich helping Jesse helping Ted, a mad follow-the-leader dash for the sanctuary of the back ramp and open air. A tremendous roar followed the blast, sending the teetering boxes smashing down in a jumbling heap, blocking all thought of returning to help fight the beast. There was only the door, and the night, and the wail of distant sirens coming from all parts of the city . . .

. . . and Walker shouldered the second rocket as he stared up into the freshly blasted pit that was the left eye of the demon. He'd missed, striking only a glancing blow off the temple, but it yielded results. The thing was real as real could be now, and boy, it was pissed. Real demon skull had flown in gleaming-white shards across the breadth of the amphitheater; real demon brains roiled in the opened chamber, leaking out to fall and hit the very real floor.

Billions upon billions of tiny, angrily thrashing worms
. . .

Momma reeled in the agony of the betrayal, its one good eye meeting his and narrowing to a glowing, bottomless trench, filled with pure ageless hatred. It charged the distance between them in a flash, huge, fanged mouth gaping wide to take him in. Walker sighted straight down its throat as it covered the distance, counting back one fifty, one hundred, seventy-five . . .

"Welcome to Earth, bitch." He smiled.

. . . sixty, fifty . . .

"WELCOME TO THE
FOOD CHAIN
!"

He pulled the second trigger.

The shaped charge round flew straight and true, right into the Demon's howling face.

The explosion knocked it back another twenty feet, sending a brilliant fireball into the already troubled air and joining everything it touched-flesh and blood, body and soul-in that all-consuming, cleansing white light. . . .

By the time the second explosion rocked the building, Jake and company had crawled up to the relative safety of the parking lot. Hempstead and Heimlich had picked up Jesse and Ted and carried them, leaving Jake to stand a wounded rear guard.

No one came; not out the back door anyway. The exterior of the Spectrum Sports Arena looked bad: a lot of burning vehicles, a lot of dead or wounded bodies. He leaned against the ramp wall and listened to the sounds that filled the air on the heels of the aftershock.

A long, keening maelstrom of a scream, spiraling up and up and up . . .

Then gone.

The sounds of a world gone mad flooded in a moment later, like water leaching into a bootheel on a beach. Stragglers started spilling out of the distant exits. Sporadic gunfire could still be heard on the far side of the building, but it was answered by gunfire and sirens, and more sirens and more, and somehow Jake thought that, deprived of their source, the Screamers wouldn't last much longer. The world would simply squash them.

The world usually did.

The pain in his arm came throbbing up to meet him as the endorphins burned off. "
God
," he murmured, collapsing to the ground. He tried to find the words that could phrase the question in his mind, found none that fit, and settled for the basest response.

"Help!!
Shit!
HELP!"

Hempstead came jogging back within the moment. "Yo, Jake!"

"Here!"

"Are you okay?" It was not a casual question; Hempstead checked him for undiscovered damage.

"Yeah, yeah . . . OW! Shit." Jake groaned. "Maybe not."

"Heimlich's already flagging down an ambulance for Ted and Jesse," Hempstead said, relieving Jake of the Uzi. He swung it a couple of times by the strap and heaved it, far down the ramp and into the carnage. "We civilians now, bro'. Ain't nobody comin' outta that door. C'mon, we gotta get that arm tended to."