own minds by saying it was just a cold or something…even though we all damn well knew that even cold bugs were serious business these days.
“I can’t even breathe out of my nose, Nash,” he told me. “My muscles and joints ache all the time. Sometimes I have trouble breathing.”
“Don’t say anything to the others, not yet.”
He shook his head. “Afraid I can’t do that, Nash. I can’t take the chance of infecting them with what I have.”
Good old Specs. Guy went through life pretty much afraid of everything. One of those people that God or Nature or what have you had given barely enough strength and fortitude to get through day by day. But when the chips were down, he was as strong as they came. As selfless as you could imagine.
We told Janie and Sean and they would have been totally justified to want to get away from him, but they didn’t. He was one of us and we were going to make it together.
“Don’t you worry, little brother,” Sean told him. “We’ll get you on your feet. Before you know it, me and you’ll be hunting Trogs again.”
Specs tried to smile at that and a tear slid from his eye.
The next few days were bad. Specs’ skin began to take on a bluish, cyanotic tinge that concerned us all. He couldn’t breathe. He was gasping all the time. He was hot to the touch and a sour-smelling sweat rolled down his face. He’d have choking fits that would go on for ten minutes. In a last ditch attempt, Sean went and found us some military-grade antibiotics and we shot Specs full of them. It did no good. It was simply too late.
Mostly he was incoherent, thrashing in his sleep and even convulsing. There was little we could do. Janie mothered him the best she could. Now and again, he’d wake up, look at me, and start talking about throwing corpses in the back of the garbage truck in Youngstown or sleeping in cars or any of the other stupid things we’d done.
It was then I realized he was going to die. The idea of that cut me open, made me bleed. We’d been through a lot. Specs was like some stupid little brother that annoys you, hangs around, but won’t go away and you’re secretly glad for it. I didn’t want to be without him.
Then one day, he said to me, “Nash…don’t let me die like this…it hurts…everything fucking hurts…I can’t even breathe. Put me out of my fucking misery.”
I just shook my head; it was unthinkable.
But Specs was insistent. “Please, Nash, don’t make me suffer. Give me…give me to The Shape.”
It was insane and I told him so, but he kept pushing and he made Sean and Janie hear him out, too. See, Specs was of the mind that The Shape was pissed off at him because it had been his idea to do the burnt offering of that old man. That’s not what The Shape had wanted at all, Specs said. So it had let him get infected with some germ as a punishment. Maybe it was true, maybe it was bullshit. Who knew?
“See, that’s why this is perfect,” he told us. “I’ll be a sacrifice. I’ll give myself to that monster and it’ll save me from dying slow and it’ll keep The Shape happy. He’ll take care of you guys, keep you safe.”
I was absolutely against it. True, The Shape did want something more. I knew that. I felt that. I’d heard it in my mind. My big mistake was telling Specs that. But it was too late.
“Please, Nash. Please,” he kept saying.
We were all against it…but that pathetic, pleading look in his eyes wore us down. Sean broke first and said it was the only goddamn decent thing we could do for him. And then Janie…
“He’s our friend,” she told me. “I’m against wasting life of any sort…but we can’t make him suffer. If this is what he wants…I guess you should allow him it.”
There was argument, but he got his way.
We were going to sacrifice Specs.
We were going to give him to The Shape.
15
Sean scavenged us a stretcher and we carried Specs to a warehouse on around sunset. We weren’t going to burn him or any of that fucked up pagan madness. We were going to do it the right way and just let The Shape have him. We set the stretcher atop some crates. We lit candles because Janie said we should. Specs loved all that occult pageantry.
Then it was time.
I’ll never get that night out of my mind. The candles flickering. The cavernous silence. That creeping chill that came in off the river. The warehouse felt like a tomb.
I held his hand and we talked. “Remember that day when we sat on that bench, Nash? We ate Dinty Moore stew and drank Dew. That’s the day I knew you were my best friend in the world.”
I couldn’t take it. I started balling my eyes out. I told them all that I just couldn’t go through with it. I lashed out at Sean and Janie and they just watched me with defeated, sad eyes. Then I looked at Specs fighting for every breath, then I knew I had to do it.
So I summoned The Shape.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on that sphere of darkness in my mind that I always associated with it. Right away, I could feel it coming and I was flooded with a primal terror that was ice-cold, freezing. The atmosphere of the warehouse immediately went from being simply neutral to activated. That’s the only way I can describe it. Around us there was no longer just dead air, but an ether that was charged and deadly and thrumming with energy. The hairs on my arms and at the back of my neck stood up like I had come into contact with a charge of static electricity.
I went down on my knees, absolutely senseless.
Janie and Sean pulled me back to safety.
I smelled a sharp stink of ozone and something like burning flesh, hot blood boiled to steam. Then an awful, acrid stench like melting wires and blown fuses. The warehouse seemed to tremble. The concrete floor vibrated. There was a searing hot flash of something like chain lightening that blinded me momentarily and then the Shape was coming: a boiling black mass like thunderheads getting ready to shoot lightening at the earth. It was a spinning, roaring, unstable irradiated elemental force that came with the heat of coke ovens and the toxic glow of nuclear reactors. Looking at it was like looking into the primeval fires of cosmic creation.
Janie screamed.
Sean fell on his ass trying to get away from it.
The Shape was pulsing, revolving on an axis of pure atomic force that was frightening to behold, a storm of fallout and dust and particulated matter with a heart of superhot plasma. It made a buzzing sound like a million angry hornets.
I stood there, feeling its heat burning the fine hairs on the back of my hands. It was matter and force and pulsating energy, but it was not mindless. It was sentient and directed. Absolute nuclear chaos that was living and evil and hungry. At the very center of the whirlwind itself, there was a zone of blackness darker than anything I had ever seen before, the blackness that must exist beyond time and space. And flickering luminously within that shrieking void of antimatter were two red eyes that looked hot enough to melt steel.
Without further ado, it took Specs.
Dear God, it took him.
The mass of The Shape was constantly changing and reinventing itself, but I suppose if you had to give it spatial dimensions I would have said it was probably something like twelve feet in height, maybe six in width. It hovered over Specs for a moment or two and that’s when he realized exactly what he had given himself to.
He screamed.
Probably with his last reservoir of air he screamed like I’ve never heard a man scream before with a wild, cutting, hysterical sound that echoed through the warehouse. Sean made to go to his aid and I held him back. Specs was beyond our help. If Sean had gotten close to that radioactive furnace, he would have been vaporized.
Because that’s what happened to Specs.
He was sucked into it and I saw him spinning in that godless void, I saw him bulge up and then literally
