mottled gray and pink like it was shedding its skin. Tommy pulled away from the window. It coiled at the glass, about as big around as an arm, smearing the rain and leaving bits of itself stuck to the glass. Then it retreated and several more limbs spilled over the outside of the window. Some of them were jointed like the legs of a cricket and at least one of them looked something like a human arm but with no hand at the end.
There was another thudding and their guest took off.
Mitch caught a quick glimpse of it…something huge and bulbous with a hundred trailing appendages. It veered off into the rain, but he could not say it flew off, just maybe drifted away like it was filled with helium.
“I’m for getting the hell out of here,” Tommy said.
Harry nodded. “I second that. Take me back to Slayhoke. It’s too scary out here.”
Mitch found himself laughing at that. It had to be the most absurd thing he’d ever heard anyone say and being Tommy Kastle’s friend all these years, he’d heard some pretty damn absurd things.
Tommy said, “I ever tell you about that cousin of mine with the third nipple?”
Mitch laughed nervously.
“It’s true,” he said. “My cousin Kathy. Kathy Dolin. When I was ten I spent the summer with my cousins in Streator, Illinois. Goddamn hot, I remember that. One night, my cousin Joe said, you wanna see something and I said, sure. Kathy was taking a bath. There was a coat closet on the other side of the tub and you could see through a crack in the caulking, see somebody in the tub. I saw that nipple, swear to God. Kathy had some pretty big pillows on her, but right in-between them, there was another nipple, looked like maybe it hadn’t really took.”
Harry was giggling.
Mitch said, “And what’s the point of that story, Tommy?”
“Pretty obvious, ain’t it?” he said. “There are certain things man was not meant to look upon. Like what’s inside that building ahead.”
He drove them up to the fence, but the gate was locked.
“I guess we walk from here,” he said.
They got out into the water, that building looming up above them. They took their guns, a couple flashlights, and two Coleman lanterns they had taken from Mitch’s garage. The main gate was locked, but they slipped in through a smaller gate that wasn’t. They huffed it up the drive and to the main entrance. There was a little guard shack out front. A soldier with an MP armband was sitting in there, slouched in his chair. His flesh had oozed off him like hot cheese, was stuck to the floor and walls in a webby mess.
At the door, they paused.
“Go ahead, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is your party.”
14
Of course, the front door was locked.
They’d gotten through too many entrances already, so there was bound to be one that wouldn’t let them in. This was it. All of Fort Providence was high security, but this place, this building, was especially so. Just a steel- faced door with a small slit of thick one-way glass at the top. There was a slot where you could insert your ID card if you happened to have one, but other than that, you weren’t getting in. And there was not a single window that they could see.
“What now?” Tommy said.
“We just go around the side,” Harry explained. “Where the fire was. Should be open there.”
It was a plan.
At least they were out of the water now, that was something. Though it wasn’t like they were going to dry out any time soon with the rain pelting them. Mitch leading, they moved through the wet grass, the rain running down their faces. Patches of groundfog blew around them. But other than the rain, there was no sound to be heard. Just that same dead silence that was eerie and unearthly. They could tell themselves that they were alone, but they knew better than that. Maybe there weren’t any people around as such, but there were other things. Awful things that they just did not want to meet up with.
The building was cut from brick, whitewashed and windowless, boxy in shape. There were cameras set out, listening devices, motion detectors…not that any of them were much good any longer being that there was no one to monitor them. Generally, there was a smell of dankness and rot, but now and again they smelled that acrid odor of the yellow rain. Something that was very frightening, because if it came down suddenly, they were done for. There was no cover to be had anywhere.
“Pick it up,” Mitch told them.
But it was not easy. Their clothes were so heavy and wet they seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. They trudged along behind Mitch until the scene of that burned wreckage came into view. Whatever had exploded, it had destroyed not only that jutting wing, but a good section of the main building. What they were seeing were crisscrossed blackened beams, rubble, and twisted metal scattered in some great heap. They found a few bodies in there cremated right down to the skeletons. Lots of mangled conduits and pipes, the shattered remains of what might have been machinery.
“Look at that,” Harry said.
Above, on the roof, there were a dozen crows sitting up there, stretching their wings and clacking their beaks. In the rain, you couldn’t see much of them. They were just perched up there like they were looking for something to descend upon.
“Something alive, anyway,” Tommy said.
But Mitch didn’t think so. “Look over there.”
Another body just around the side of some metal drum, boiled to slop like the others. There were three of those crows on it, pulling out strands of pulpy meat with their beaks. That was bad enough, but as they looked closer they could see that those birds were not right. Their hides were threadbare and you could see the bones through them. One of them had very little flesh on its head and you could plainly see the skull beneath, one eye socket with a black eyeball, the other empty. They flapped their wings and kept pecking and picking.
“Lead on,” Tommy said. “I’ve had enough.”
Mitch ducked under a burnt arch of wood, climbed over a pile of bricks and slid down the other side, leapfrogging iron beams and a spiderwebbing of pipes and melted hoses. And as he did so he was thinking that whatever had gone up here, whatever had exploded, it had let loose an incredible amount of energy and an incredible amount of heat. He was seeing that wrecked machinery and a lot of the metal was actually fused, lots of glass melted in to unrecognizable shapes. There were times as they picked through those ruins that he thought the whole thing would come down on top of them. But finally they made it, climbing over a collapsed wall and sliding beneath jagged sheets of cracked plasterboard.
And then they were in.
Great sheets of plastic were hung from ceiling to floor to keep the wind and rain out of the rest of the complex. There were a couple more bodies here, soldiers apparently, reduced to a sort of mush that had absolutely nothing to do with the fire. Their skeletons looked like they were trying to climb out of the doughy paste their flesh had been reduced to. Carpets of moss were growing out of their mouths.
“What the hell did this?” Harry asked, wrinkling his nose at the smell which was not so much organic decay but something hot and moist like plaster rot, the stink of old houses threaded with wood blight. “That rain? It turned their skins to goddamn gruel? Looks like fucking Malt-O-Meal.”
“Ground zero,” was all Mitch could say about it, a blanket explanation that explained absolutely nothing.
“Here’s another one,” Tommy said.
This one might have been a woman judging from the long brown hair hanging from its scalp. And although her hair was only mildly singed, her flesh had gone liquid and mushy like the others. She was like some morbid wax effigy that had been lit up and then put out just as it began to melt, her flesh sinking into the skeleton below, her fleshless jaws locked in a scream. One hand was reaching out to them, a laminated plastic ID card in it that looked like a credit card.
“C’mon,” Mitch said.
They pushed aside the plastic sheeting and found themselves in a long corridor studded with offices, the
