He sliced off a length of cable, stripped the ends, and screwed them to the plunger. Holding the wire, he gave a final look into the panel. He would have to take a wild guess. This one? No, that.
A barrage of fire behind him. “I’m not kidding, Michael, we’ve got about ten seconds!”
With four quick turns, he spliced the ends of the wires together. Alicia was backing toward him, firing in short bursts. The sound reverberated off the walls of the tunnel, hammering his eardrums. Good God, he was tired of this sort of thing. Tired of guesswork and laboring in the dark, tired of leaking valves and bad circuits and busted relays—tired of things not working, things that refused to bend to his will.
“Need some help here!” Alicia yelled.
Her rifle drained, Alicia tossed it aside and drew a pair of blades from her belt, one for each fist. Michael grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into him.
The tunnel was a squirming mass.
They fell backward as the first viral careened forward. Michael drew his sidearm and fired two shots, the first sparking off its shoulder, the second catching it in the left eye. A splash of blood and with a shriek it skidded to the floor. They were scooting backward toward the bulkhead, Michael firing his pistol, shoving his heels against the concrete, one arm encircling Alicia’s waist to drag her with him through the fetid water. He had fifteen rounds in the gun, another two magazines stashed in a pocket, useless and out of reach.
The slide locked back.
“Oh, shit, Michael.”
So: the end of the line. How slow its approach, how sudden its arrival. We never truly believe it’s coming, he thought, and then before we know it, it’s here. All the things we’ve done in our lives, and the undone things as well, extinguished in an instant. He dropped the gun and pulled Alicia tight against him. His hand was on the plunger.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
—
The change was complete.
Fanning’s face was still tipped upward, lips parted, eyes shut. A sigh of satisfaction heaved from deep in his chest. The being before her was not one Amy had ever seen or imagined—still recognizable as himself but neither wholly man nor wholly viral. An amalgam, half one and half the other, as if a new version of the species had been born into the world. There was something of the rodent about him, the nose snoutlike and full-nostriled, the ears triangulated at the top and swept back from the curve of his skull. His hair was gone, replaced by pinkish natal fuzz. His teeth were the same, though the mouth itself had enlarged into a kind of windblown grin, giving a full view of his fangs, which dripped from the corners. His limbs possessed a thin-boned delicacy; the index fingers of both hands had elongated to curve-tipped points.
Amy thought of a giant wingless bat.
He stepped toward her. His eyes locked on hers; she dared not look away, no matter how much she wanted to. Fear had paralyzed her limbs. They felt far away and useless, loose as liquid. As Fanning neared, his right hand rose. The digits were webbed with a translucent membrane. The daggered index finger, jointed in the middle, unfurled toward her face. Her eyes clamped shut instinctively. A prick of pressure on her cheek, not quite hard enough to break the skin: every molecule in her body shuddered. With lascivious slowness the nail traced downward, following the curve of her face. As if he were tasting her flesh through his finger.
“How good it is to let the truth come out.”
His voice, too, had altered, possessing a high, hidden note with a squeaking sound. The air around him smelled of animals. The small, burrowing things of the world.
“Open your eyes, Amy.”
Fanning was standing beside Peter. The virals had hauled him upright.
“This man, he is your curse, as Liz was mine. It’s love that enslaves us, Amy. It is the play within the play, the stage on which the tragic drama of our human lives unfolds. That is the lesson I have to teach you.”
And with these words, Fanning opened his jaws wide, tipped Peter’s face upward on the end of one long, webbed digit—tenderly, like a mother with her child—and clamped his jaws around Peter’s neck.
—
The squeak of current from the plunger was not enough to open the bulkhead all the way; but it was enough to get things started. As the door’s counterweights jolted downward, creating a gap between the door and the floor of the tunnel, Michael and Alicia were blasted by a jet of water. In less than a second, the tunnel became a roaring river. Michael attempted to rise, but the force was too great, he could find no traction, and then they were tumbling, hurtled downstream in the roiling water.
They plunged into the station, going like a shot. There was no real light, only a vague glow from the stairway, glimpsed fleetingly as they passed. Water filled his nose and mouth, foul-tasting—he imagined this to be the taste of rats—and threatening to choke him. They were riding just beneath the platform. Gripping Alicia by the wrist, Michael reached out with his free hand and made a desperate lunge for the edge. His fingers touched but tore away.