Or why she was here.
The darkness was flowing around her, filling up the room. The figures that moved around her were painted in tones of mint green and bright red. Then the colors swirled as she went deeper, and deeper.
She felt the others hands, the colder hands, on her. But she didn’t care.
She felt the dull pinch of teeth. That registered as pain, but as far away, on a shelf, over there, somewhere else.
As Jillian’s eyes closed, as the anesthesia took her all the way down, she had one last glimpse of the room. A doctor with an Indian face and eyes filled with blood, bending toward her stomach. Another pinch, another bite.
The anesthesia pulled her under and she was smiling as Dr. Sengupta, the nurses, and several patients gathered around her gurney and devoured her.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
MASON STREET NEAR DOLL FACTORY ROAD
The dead moved toward the cruiser. Trooper Saunders had stopped screaming by now. Dez’s screams died slowly in her throat as she stared through the rain-smeared window at the monsters. Most of them were clustered around the body, but the rest were coming her way.
Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God …
There was no way out.
The rain was getting heavier by the moment, obscuring the window, making it hard to see what they were doing.
“Shit,” Dez breathed and immediately slid down off the seat, crammed herself into the footwell and tried to disappear. The rain was so loud she could not even hear the moans of the dead.
Please please please …
Then she heard the driver’s door creak against its hinge. She dared not look. Above her, around her, there were soft sounds. Hands touching. Bodies bumping without force against the skin of the cruiser.
Dez held her breath.
They can’t see me down here. Not through the rain on the windows.
The thin hiss of fingernails on wet glass and dripping metal.
They can’t smell me. The rain stinks of earth and manure and ozone.
The vehicle rocked as someone … something entered it.
Please, God … they don’t know I’m here.
The rain was so loud. It drowned everything out. Dez willed it to drown her out. The air began to burn in her lungs.
JT … where are you?
Outside there was a whishing sound as another vehicle drove by, and then a change in sound as it slowed.
“Hey!” called a voice. “Are you … oh, Jesus Christ!”
The scream of tires. Turning, turning, burning as the water on the blacktop evaporated and the rubber smoked. A higher shriek as the tires found purchase, the roar of the engine as the car accelerated away.
Then nothing but the rain. So much. So heavy.
It fell and fell. A steady thunder on the roof and the rear windshield. Cold and wet breeze coming in through the open door.
But beneath the rain … nothing.
Dez had to let the breath out. It was a fireball behind her sternum.
She let it out open mouthed. Slow, forcing her throat open wide. No stricture, no sound. Exhale it all out. Hold. Wait. Inhale. Silent.
God … don’t let them hear me.
She waited for the dead-limp hands to start beating on the glass. She turned her head an inch and peered up, wanting to see and terrified to see the worm-white fingers poke through the grille.
Waited. Watched.
Dez breathed as silent as a ghost while she waited for the dead to come for her, to take her, to devour her.
She didn’t have her gun. Saunders had taken it. If they got to her, if they infected her, there was not going to be a way out. No exit strategy. No fast ride on the night train. She would die, and be consumed, and …
… God, please don’t let me be a monster.
God, please.
Please.
Please.
Mommy, please …
… Daddy …
Please …
The rain hammered down and the wind blew.
And she waited to die.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
MAGIC MARTI IN THE MORNING
WNOW RADIO, MARYLAND
“This is Magic Marti at the mike and we are in a world of hurt out there. The storm is parked over Stebbins County and we’re seeing torrential rains and gale-force winds. Small and moderate streams are flooding, and we’re getting reports of road washouts. Telephone and cell lines are taking a beating from the storm, which seems to have knocked out communication with local police and fire. That’s the bad news, and I wish I had some good news to throw at you, campers. If you can hear my voice, then get to high ground, lock your doors, and we’ll ride this out together.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CONROY’S ACRES
Selma Conroy said nothing as Homer Gibbon paced back and forth across the dining room floor. He was agitated, his eyes jumpy, his fingers twitching. Every step was an awkward lurch as he fought the increasing stiffness in his muscles.
“He lied to me,” Homer snarled. “He lied to me. To me.”
He turned and swept his arm across the table, knocking dishes and stacks of magazines and a week’s worth of mail onto the floor with a crash. Homer slammed his fists down on the tabletop and leaned on them, shaking his head slowly back and forth.
“I thought he understood.”
Selma said nothing. Magazines and unpaid bills littered the floor around her like fallen leaves.
Homer stopped moving and looked down at his hands. They were caked with blood. They were cold hands, pale and …
That’s what Volker had told him.
You are a dead, damned thing. The doctor’s words down the phone line. Venomous and filled with betrayal. Not the voice of the Red Mouth at all.
He held his right hand up to his eye, studying it. The flesh did not look right. Even apart from the scratches and blood, it looked wrong. On a deeper, more troubling level.
Wrong.
His skin … moved. Like the way flesh crawls when it contracts in the cold. Or when there is so much fear the skin wants to retreat from it.
Like that. Only … not like that at all.
It rippled. As if something were moving just below the surface.
He could barely feel it, though. His arms and legs were stiff and sore. Everything hurt. It was all he could do not to scream with each step.
You are dead.
Dead.
A damned thing.
The doctor had done something to him. Volker had admitted it. He’d thrown some scientific bullshit at him. Parasites and crap like that. The doctor had actually tried to hit with some shit about vodou.
Dead.
Homer pressed his left forefinger to the back of his right hand. The flesh trembled with a sensation like squirming.
“Oh God fuck me,” whispered Homer. “What the fuck did you do to me?”
I damned you, Mr. Gibbon. I damned you to suffering so that you’ll understand.
“Yeah, well fuck that, Doc.” Homer’s voice was hoarse. “I already know. I’ve known all my life. The Black Eye shows me everything. The Red Mouth tells me everything I need to know. Maybe you fooled it, you cocksucker, but the Red Mouth will whisper to you. Oh, hell yes and no doubt about it. Ain’t that right, Auntie?”
Selma said nothing.
“But what did you do to me, you Frankenstein fuck?”
He pressed thumbnail against his skin. Below the surface it felt like something popped. Something wet and small. Setting his teeth in a grin that was wired in place by pain and hatred, Homer pressed his nail into the skin, rubbing it back and forth until it made a pale groove. Not a red welt, but a pale trench. That only made him madder. He pressed the thumbnail in, finding a cracked section and using that like a plow to cut the flesh, constantly rubbing back and forth, squeezing his fist to force the blood out.
Only it wasn’t blood. It was a black muck, thicker than oil and filled with white threads. No, not threads. Worms. Or maggots. They wriggled and twisted in each black drop that rolled outward from the cut.
Homer Gibbon stared at the goo … and what swarmed and thrived inside of it. Inside of him.
“No,” whispered Homer. The truth of it—what Volker had told him over the phone and the proof crawling from his veins—staggered him. He backpedaled drunkenly until his back crunched into the wall. He slid down to the floor, his mouth opening and closing as a scream kept leaping up from inside his chest to rip loose and break the world.
“Auntie?”
That word, small and plaintive, was the only sound he made. It was faint, nearly a child’s voice. A lost voice.
Aunt Selma did not answer.
She could not.
She had no mouth with which to speak. No lips. No tongue.
She sat amid the debris from the table, her robe soaked scarlet from the blood that flowed from all the red mouths Homer Gibbon had opened on her skin.
Homer stared blankly at her, and it took him almost a minute to understand what he was seeing. There were black spots in his mind, obscuring memories both recent and old. But not Dr. Volker’s words. No, each and every one of them were as clear as if he were crouched behind Homer and whispering in his ear, but Selma…?
Homer knew what had happened to her.
He could feel the weight of meat in his stomach. He understood what that meant. It’s just that he had no memory at all of having done it.
Homer had not wanted to do this. Not to Selma. Not to her.
He sat and stared and tried to weep. He strained to force out a single tear.
“Come on, you fucker,” he yelled, as if Volker was right there in the room. “Give me that much. Let me still be human enough for that.”
He felt a tingle at the corner of his eye, and with great relief he touched his fingers there, needing to see the ordinary glistening wetness of that tear. The world began spinning around him. The drop of liquid on his fingertips was as black as the Black Eye. Tiny worms wriggled in it.
Homer Gibbon screamed. And this time the scream was real, full and charged with all of the power of his hate and rage.
He screamed and screamed. He jumped to his feet and raged through the house, tearing it apart. Be damned to the pain in his muscles; he took that pain and fed it in like fuel to his fury. He shattered windows and threw chairs across the rooms. His hands swept pictures from the walls and his feet kicked side tables to kindling. He overturned the sofa and slashed at the curtains with fingernails and teeth and then with knives from the kitchen.