Turn her over.
They are hatching.
They wanted him to roll her over so the Triangles on each ass cheek could hatch properly. He looked at Patty’s shuddering body, now covered with blood, pus, vomit and purple slime.
She had ceased all movement. Her eyes were glazed and fixed open, her eyebrows raised, and her face frozen in a sneer of terror. She looked almost dead. Caterpillar dead. All hosts probably died-it made much more sense than having the ex-host in a position to kill weak hatchlings. What had finally done her in? Some toxin? Screaming mental overload?
That thought crystallized Perry’s emotions into two camps, polarized his hatred of the Triangles and the overflow euphoria at the hatching. He pushed back the happiness, the joy-those emotions weren’t his, and he didn’t want them in his head anymore.
Turn her OVER.
Turn her OVER NOW.
The mindscream slammed his attention back to the dead Fatty Patty, and suddenly he knew how they had killed her. He recognized the look on her face and the whimpering noises she made, realized why she’d just lain there as the things ripped free from her body, why she didn’t put up a fight. It was because an all-out mindscream had paralyzed her.
They’d screamed so loud, it killed her.
Perry jumped off the couch and knelt next to her body, His knees slipped a little in the thin film of puke/blood/pus/purple that coated the carpet. He moved quickly; he didn’t want another mindscream, one that night be bad enough to make his brains drip out his ears like a McDonald’s Gray-Matter Shake.
Turn her over, they are hatching.
They are hatching!
Perry put his hands on her shoulder and pushed, only to find that instead of rolling over she just slid across the muck. She was dead weight, pardon the pun.
Repetitive clicking noises filled the room. Some came fast, some slow; all had different pitches and volumes. He could feel his Triangles growing impatient; another mindscream was rapidly approaching, the crack of the master’s whip on the slave who can’t perform. The power had changed hands once again.
He put his bad knee on her left shoulder and reached across her dead body. He grabbed high up on her right arm. He pulled back on the arm, slowly turning her. She flumped onto her stomach, her tits squishing out like half- inflated inner tubes.
Free from the weight, the Triangles on her ass wasted no time. They thrust only a few times before ripping free in a great gout of blood, an orgasmic finish to their necrophilic sex/birth. One flew out at an angle, hitting the kitchen table before falling to the floor. The other sailed upward in a steep arc, flying toward the lampshade. Like a LeBron James jumper swishing through the hoop, the Triangle slid through the lampshade’s open top. It hit the illuminated bulb, first with a sudden sizzle, then a loud crack as the tiny body exploded. Black goo splattered against the inside of the lampshade, a wet silhouette as it slowly dripped toward the floor.
Thanks for saving me the trouble, Perry thought.
A wave of anger and depression crashed over him, overflow emotions again, fighting for mental space with his own feelings of villainous satisfaction at the newborn Triangle’s untimely death.
What happened?
Where did he go?
Why doesn’t he answer?
His Triangles still couldn’t see, he remembered, because he remained fully dressed. They only sensed that the newborn was gone. He felt their random anger coursing through his body-he had to choose his words carefully.
He slid up his sweatshirt sleeve and held it up to the lamp.
“He hatched right onto a lightbulb. It was an accident.” In his voice he heard that servile tone, the tone of Fatty Patty trying to placate him, the tone of his mother trying to avoid a beating. “It fried him on the spot.”
His answer appeared to satisfy the Triangles. They said no more. The steady clicking slowed considerably. The baby Triangles were crouched down on their tentacles, resting their pyramid bodies against the carpet. Their eyes closed, they stopped moving-they appeared to be asleep. Only an occasional click escaped their still bodies.
The strange aroma of burned Triangle flesh filled the room, slightly overpowering the odors of Perry’s own rotting shoulder, the vomit and the smells of birthing that floated in the still apartment air. He felt his own Triangles fall asleep-their constant mental buzzing slowly fading away into near nothingness, like a barely audible car radio tuned to AM static.
He was alone, left to gaze upon the facedown, dead Fatty Patty. He knew he didn’t have much time. In addition to the three Triangles in his own body, he had five hatchlings to deal with, creatures that he knew nothing about. How long would they sleep? What would they do when they awoke?
Apart from the questions that raged through his mind, he knew one thing for certain-he wasn’t going to end up like the weakling lying on the living-room floor, giant fist-size holes left in her corpse. If he had to die, it wouldn’t be like a victim, waiting nicely for the Three Stooges to rip out of his rotting body.
If he was going out, it would be on his feet, fighting every step of the way-like a Dawsey. His shoulder throbbed, his back itched and his mind spun feverishly, thinking of a way to kill them all.
69.
On Dew’s twenty-second birthday, he’d been getting piss-faced drunk at a small bar in Saigon with his three closest friends, all members of his platoon. The bar had white walls, Christmas lights across the ceiling and plenty of working girls. Hell of a party that turned out to be. Dew had stumbled to the bathroom to take a piss, and in midstream heard a bone-thumping explosion followed by a scream or two. He wasn’t quite sobered up by the blast, but what he saw when he came out of the bathroom obliterated his buzz completely.
The white walls were streaked with chunks of bone, bits of hair and bright-red trails slowly dripping down the wall like living Rorschach blots. The blood and bits belonged to his buddies and the seven-year-old suicide girl who’d entered the bar wearing the latest fashion in homemade explosive backpacks.
That incident, that hated memory, was the first thing to enter his mind when he walked into Perry Dawsey’s apartment. So much blood-on the walls, on the floor, on the furniture. The kitchen floor looked like a pattern of brown and red rather than the original white. There was even blood on the kitchen table, some of which had slowly spilled over the edge and dried in a thin, brittle-brown stalactite. The apartment crawled with Ann Arbor cops, state troopers and men from the Washtenaw County coroner’s office.
“It’s really something, huh?”
Dew looked at Matt Mitchell, the local coroner who’d escorted him to the crime scene. Mitchell had a crooked smile and a glass eye that never seemed to look the right way. His face held a small smirk, almost an expectant look, as if he were waiting to see if the gore would make Dew blow chow.
Dew nodded toward the body. “You got an ID on the couch-potato Jesus over there?”
“Couch-potato Jesus?” Mitchell looked at the body, smiled, then looked back to Dew. “Hey, that’s pretty frickin’ funny.”
“Thanks,” Dew said. “I’ve got a million of ’em.”
Mitchell flipped through a small notepad. “The victim is William Miller, a coworker of Dawsey’s and apparently a friend-they went to college together.”
“Isn’t this an awful lot of blood to come from one victim?”
Mitchell gave Dew another quizzical look, but this time it held a bit of surprised respect. “That’s pretty observant, Agent Phillips. Not many people would have noticed that. You seen stuff this intense before?”
“Oh, maybe once or twice.”
