He lowered himself to the end of his arms and then dropped to the dirt, half expecting to be shot in the back or to feel a dog's jaws close over his throat. But nothing happened, and there was no sound, except the distant, dissonant music. He turned and looked at Lonny; he was hoping Lonny wasn't as scared as he was. The kid's expression was controlled, but his fear was there, in the tension of his hunched shoulders. He wanted to bolt, too.
Instead, Lonny pushed the cable through. It was an old, rusty cable four inches in diameter, thickly coated in rubber insulation, its nearer end covered with a homemade cap of rubber and black electrical tape. Touching the cable, Prentice could sense the electrical field around it; the suppressed power coursing through it. It ran twenty yards back behind Lonny to a spindle that Drax had set up, an hour earlier, that acted as a roller; there was another one in the brush, and from there it stretched to the electrical tower Drax had patched into.
If the old man couldn't open the front gate, Prentice thought, all this is for nothing.
It was going to be a hot day. Some insect in the undergrowth made the sound of a monomaniacal marraca player; a lizard zig-zagged over a rock on the other side of the fence. Lonny's face was streaked with dust and sweat. He was angry and scared. Prentice found himself admiring the boy. 'You're a pretty tough kid,' he said. He had a need to say something sentimental to someone, now. Before going on with it. And probably getting his ass blown away.
Lonny glared toward the Doublekey Ranch. He put his hand on the old Colt. 36 six-shot revolver that Drax had given him, stuck now in his belt. 'Mitch is dead. You should've seen the look on Orphy's face, too.'
'How you know Mitch is dead?'
'Drax said so. After a while, you get to believe him.'
'You've probably done enough here, Lonny,' Prentice said dutifully. He hoped the kid wouldn't take his advice, as he went on, 'You could split now. Make your way back to town.'
Lonny turned the glare on Prentice. The look was one unceasing outpour, unwavering as a cop's flashlight. 'Mitch…' He wasn't capable of saying the rest without breaking down – or bursting into a screaming rage.
Prentice nodded. 'Yeah. Well. Come on over. It's almost time.'
It was daytime, but it was night. Garner felt the hair rise on the back of his neck when they stepped into the fog. The stuff was almost as dark as smoke, but it wasn't smoke. You could breathe it, though you were sorry to; it left a faintly repugnant taste on the palate. Garner now carried the pistol that had been pointed at him a few hours before. Jeff Teitelbaum carried an Uzi – but not quite a real Uzi. It was a semi-automatic variety that gun-lovers could buy legally through the mail. Each trigger pull let go a round, but it didn't spray bullets. 'I always knew they should ban these fackers,' Teitelbaum had said, getting it out of the trunk of his car. 'I'll vote for a ban. But I wanted to get mine before the ban came down. For once, I'm glad I'm that kind of sicko. It'll be useful, today, seems to me…'
They'd found the front gate unguarded – Teitelbaum had seemed surprised at this – and they'd popped it with a crowbar, then climbed over the black iron inner gate. Now, prowling through the brush not far inside the iron fence, inside the cloud of dirty fog, they could no longer see the main house. There was only a thirty-yard visibility here, in the shadow of the trees and brush, and the closer they got to the house the thicker the fog seemed, the darker it got.
'Maybe this fog shit is some kind of toxic leak from somewhere,' Teitelbaum said, as they moved slowly along the brick path.
'It's not making us cough,' Garner pointed out. 'And if it is, we've had such a thorough dose by now…' He shrugged.
Was Constance here? Was she alive? It might be better not to find out…
Up ahead, to one side, was a sort of tunnel of roses. Climbing vines from rose bushes had crawled thickly over a trellis passageway. Through a gap in the roses, Garner glimpsed something moving.
Garner had used a gun, in his pre-pastoral years on the street, but mostly for bluff. Once, he'd shot a guy in the leg. He hadn't wanted to kill him. But this time…
Am I really going to be able to kill someone? Garner wondered. It was the last time he wondered that.
They'd walked up close beside the trellis. The smell of roses was cloying and mixed revoltingly with the fishy stink of the fog.
A hand darted through a gap in vines and closed around Teitelbaum's neck, jerked him against the trellis so that rose petals showered and his Uzi barked into the ground before he lost his grip on it. The gun fell clattering on the brick as Teitelbaum shouted a name – it sounded like ' Lissa! ' – and Garner rushed to his side.
He saw their attacker through the gap in the roses. It was a woman. Lissa, he assumed.
Her head had been smashed open, just above the left temple. The crack in the skull could be clearly seen, splintery and deeply gashed into the tissue beneath. There was nothing in her eyes. And as Garner struggled to pry her hand free of Teitelbaum's throat and struggled with his own rising terror, he was pretty sure that she was dead.
Teitelbaum had told Garner about the Akishra. Had repeated Kenson's story. Which Teitelbaum had come to half-believe himself. So Garner knew about the worms. And he believed – in some intuitive way he'd always known about them. And somehow Garner knew, without doubt, that the blow on her skull had killed this woman.
And he knew that only the worms were keeping her going.
They were moving through her easily, through this once beautiful woman, like snakes through water, weaving in and out of her. Leaving her skin bruised but unbroken where they'd gone. Others waved around her head like the ring of slippery stingers bristling from a sea anemone. Somehow, in taking her over, becoming more corporeal. Operating her. Moving her about. It was something you could see in her unnaturally sinuous movements; the animalistic suddenness of her attack.
Garner, trying to yank the flailing, bubbling Teitelbaum free now, felt something wet winding itself around his wrist. He let out a childish yell of revulsion and jerked away, slapping the thing off him, then jerking the gun from his waist band. He thrust it through the gap at the woman, and pulled the trigger. It was harder to pull than he expected. The gun boomed and recoiled, knocking Garner's hands up to impale on inch-long rosebush thorns. He hissed between clenched teeth in pain and pulled his hands off the thorns, drew back from the bush. The woman had fallen back; Teitelbaum was kneeling, clutching his gun to him, making hacksaw sounds as he gasped for air.
Garner forced himself to move toward the entrance to the rose tunnel. Just at the edge, he saw the woman woven into the vines. The dark fog slithered past her in wisps that were like the ghosts of the vines that held her. She spoke hoarsely, barely audible, 'Kill me kill me kill me kill me kill me and fuck you fuck you forever'
Garner acted instinctively. Whispering, 'Go with God,' as he pointed the gun at the woman's head, and blew her brains out.
She slumped in the vines. Then the worms started to show themselves… She began to wriggle free…
He heard Jeff Teitelbaum calling hoarsely to him but he moved on, around the corner…
Someone was running up the alley of roses, with a gun in his hand. Nearer, the woman was getting to her feet. No: The worms were raising her body to stand. Using the meat of her, collectively driving her remains. Beyond her, a man was coming toward them; he wore a yellow shirt and yellow pants and a gold chain.
And spun around, smashed by bullets, when Teitelbaum fired three rounds at him in two seconds, firing through the bushes. 'Dammit!' Garner shouted. 'You don't know who -'
'It's fucking Sam Denver!' Teitelbaum shouted. 'He's -'
He didn't finish saying it, maybe seeing Denver get up – though the top of his head was shot away. Walking toward them with a side to side swish that might have been funny except for the blood masking Denver's face and the worms emerging from him, far more than in Lissa, coming out like a carnation blossoming in fast-action, the thin petals writhing with urgency. The fog – looking gray green, now, as if moving into some new stage – patterning itself in the air around Denver, responding to the changes in him, creating an etheric, vermiform aureole around him like the mandala behind some tusked Hindu deathgod.
Five more licks of fire and five cracks from the faux Uzi, and Denver danced backwards and fell flat. Then began to get up once more, springy and eager.
Lissa was missing most of her face, but she was reaching, now, for Garner. He fired once more into her neck, hoping that if he snapped the spine…
She went down. And immediately began to get up
God – had they done this to Constance?
