ceiling.
Damon.
Romero let out a tiny, involuntary cry.
Aquintez was dangling up there, looped by Damon.
Palmquist’s nocturnal brother was bigger than three bed sheets strung together. Just a roiling gray mass of tissue set with a coiling network of white, fibrous growths. Dozens of opaque tubes and feelers and bloated fleshy tentacles were writhing and snaking from that miasmic horror, roiling like flatworms and maggots and corkscrewing like the tails of hogs, searching along the ceiling and tapping the individual tiles like fingers.
It was obscene. It was positively obscene.
Romero just looked up at it, empty and numb and stiff, playing the light along that mass that reached out in every direction and seemed to be growing by the moment. Those tentacl Tht les were made of a gelid flesh that was transparent like the skin of deep-sea shrimp. You could see fluids flowing through veins and collecting in capillaries. Some of those tentacles ended in hooks and others in black depressions like mouths that dripped an acrid juice.
Romero wasn’t sure where he found the strength.
Outside, the war went on and on, but it was very distant like something heard playing from a neighbor’s TV on a summer night. Quite calmly and lucidly, Romero said, “Damon, put the man down. You know my voice, you know you can trust me…”
The thing up there surged and squirmed, its flesh broke open with blisters that weren’t blisters but flat yellow eyes set with red-slit pupils. At least two dozen of them and more opening all the time.
“Damon,” Romero said, droplets of that juice hitting him now and burning holes in his skin. He flinched, but did not waver. “Please, put the man down.”
And of all the crazy, unbelievable things, the creature did.
It set Aquintez back on his feet and Aquintez’s mouth was locked in a crooked, silent scream and his eyes were black as tidal pools. You could see where those hideous suckers had touched him, the red welts they had left, the bruising beneath the skin as blood vessels were burst from that awful suction.
Romero looked at the thing.
It looked back at him.
He tried to tell himself not to hate it, not to let his skin crawl and stomach boil with the absolute disgust and revulsion that it inspired. His aversion to it was more than physical, but spiritual. It made something in his soul wither and blight. This then was the hidden brother, the externalized other, the crawling, creeping monstrosity that swam in the scummy pools and dirty, polluted backwaters of Palmquist’s soul. A thing born of childhood terrors and nightmares, spawned in some invidious lagoon of primal human terror.
But Romero thought he maybe could control it.
Then something like a huge central mouth ringed with yellow curving fangs opened up and the beast that was Damon let go with a screeching howl of pure anger. It took Aquintez and pulled him apart, all those tentacles and tubers moving in him and through him, investigating and prodding and rending.
And that’s also when Romero moved.
He pulled a shank from inside the back of his pants and put it into Palmquist’s throat, sawed and cut until his hands were warmandon t and wet with blood and tears ran from his eyes.
Oh, Danny, oh Jesus, kid, I’m sorry…
Damon dropped what was left of Aquintez.
He let out an echoing, bone-rattling roar: freight trains and tornadoes and cluster bombs and wailing sirens, an explosion of raw, shrill noise that put Romero to his knees, made his eardrums implode and his nose bleed and his heart seize up and filled him with a manic need to claw out his own eyes.
And then Damon fell.
Fell and blanketed Romero, wanting to crush and kill and squeeze and tear…but as Palmquist died, so did his brother. Damon came apart in a rain of filth and blood, scum and offal and squirming, squealing things and then was nothing but a slimy, gelatinous pool.
And then the lights came on.
What was left of Damon steamed and bubbled and evaporated.
Romero shielded his eyes as the SWAT team came through the door. Maybe they saw the carnage and maybe they saw the knife in his hand. Regardless, they did not hesitate.
Romero opened his mouth.
And about thirty bullets went through him, dropping him dead next to Palmquist’s bed. He let out a final, wracking breath and died. And with what he had seen, it was almost a blessing.
The riot was over.
And so was Damon.
