Her mind turned cartwheels as she covered her first quarter mile with darkness falling like a dark shroud from above. She was out of immediate range of whatever had clogged her senses, the raging mountain that had croaked its appetite upon the world.
She tried to understand what could have brought something like that into the world. But maybe it had always been there, somewhere across a billion skies, across the not-quite-endless universe.
And it was not only growing, it was learning. It had adapted to the strange environment and was evolving in order to survive, assimilating itself into the biosystem. Or, perhaps, it was assimilating that system into itself in a mutual transference, a symbiosis where both predator and prey were the same.
Because it knew her name…
She was so lost in her thoughts that the car was almost upon her around the bend before she saw it. Its headlights washed over her as she jumped to the side of the road. Her ankle twisted as she fell in the ditch. The car slid to a halt, tires rasping on the gravel as they grabbed for traction. A door opened, lighting up the passenger compartment.
'You okay?' called a voice. She counted the heads of three men. Risky, even here in the low-crime region of the mountains. Still, she didn't have much choice, if she wanted to get home before the sun rose. Before the Gloomies swarmed.
'Uh, sure,' she said, limping cautiously to the open door. “Had a breakdown up the road.”
“Yeah, saw the car,” an old man in the front seat said. He talked with the rural drawl that marked him as a native. “And the… uh.. boy…”
Under the interior light, she made out the faces of the men inside the Mercedes. The man in the back seat, who looked to be in his fifties, was well-dressed and had friendly blue eyes. The driver wore an expensive suit, his styled blond hair trimmed evenly three inches above his collar. He seemed a little nervous. She watched in the rearview mirror as his eyes kept flicking to the leather-faced old man beside him.
'Hop in, young lady,” said the man in back. “You don't want to be out there on a night like this.” He slid over behind the driver. “I’m Herbert DeWalt. Your chauffeur is Kyle Emerland and that there’s Chester Mull.”
“Tamara,” she said. “Tamara Leon. Thanks for the lift.”
Tamara got into the seat he’d vacated and looked at the two men up front as the Mercedes pulled away. They had driven out into an open stretch of valley, with hay fields on both sides. The rising moon bathed the valley, making the distant ridges look creamy and vague. She almost relaxed. Then she saw that the old man in the front passenger seat had a shotgun.
'Don't be alarmed, ma'am,” DeWalt said. “Nobody's going to hurt you. We're on a little business trip here.'
Chester turned and grinned at her, showing his few teeth as if they were precious jewels. A dark knot of tobacco was lodged in one jaw. He smelled as if he had crawled out of a whiskey barrel.
'Ain't a fit night for man nor beast. Nor woman, for that matter,' he said, glancing appreciatively at her face. 'We don't mind the company nary bit. You got green eyes, but they're the right kind of green.”
'Hush, Chester,' DeWalt said. 'We don't need to frighten her any more than she already is.'
The driver glanced at the shotgun. Chester tilted the gun toward him. 'Nothing to be scared of, Emerland, as long as you don’t drive over any big potholes and make my trigger finger slip,' he said to the driver.
'Emerland,' Tamara said. “You’re the developer.”
Emerland beamed a little at the recognition, even though his eyes twitched with anxiety.
'Nothing personal, but I heard you were a real jerk,' she said. DeWalt and Chester laughed. Emerland seemed to shrink in his seat a little.
'Goddamn, look out!' Chester yelled. Emerland yanked the wheel, dodging the figure that seemed to have risen from the roadbed out of nowhere. Tamara heard a thump against the rear quarter panel.
“Did I just hit somebody?” Emerland’s eyes were wide in the rearview mirror.
'It was a frigging mushbrain,' Chester said, gurgling from a mouthful of brown saliva. He relieved his burden onto the Mercedes’s burgundy carpet. 'Saw its green eyes flashing. Sonuvawhores must be all over the place by now. Keep driving before it decides to stand up again.”
Chester pointed the shotgun again for additional encouragement. Emerland floored the Mercedes and kicked up a rash of gravel. Emerland’s cell phone rang, and Chester lifted it from the seat, cracked open his door, and chucked the phone out of the car. “Don’t want you blabbing to your buddies before we’re done,” Chester said to Emerland.
'We were right, Chester,” DeWalt said. “I don't know if it's a disease, but it seems to be spreading. That's what-the fourth one of them?”
Tamara startled them by saying, 'There are dozens by now.'
DeWalt and Chester turned to her and Emerland dared a glance in the mirror.
“It’s up on the mountain, whatever it is,” she said. “The thing that caused all this.”
'Hey, that's what we was thinking…' Chester trailed away.
'I know about them,' she said, not sure how to begin. “They’ve been in my head… I see things.”
She knew she sounded insane, but the world was insane, as if God had tipped the universe upside down and shaken the laws of existence. And right now, she needed allies. Some madnesses were best shared. Robert was miles away, safe with the kids. At least, she hoped they were safe. She’d have to trust Robert to take care of the family while she dealt with this.
“You see things.' Emerland shook his head. “Christ. I’ve been kidnapped by a traveling freak show.'
'Shut up and drive,” Chester said. 'And don't open your yap till we get to your dynamite shed. You seen them things as plain as we did.' He turned to the back seat, giving Tamara his wet, crooked smile. 'Go ahead, now. We're listening.'
She told them about her knack for seeing the future, the quick version, no frills and no embarrassment. It was the first time she'd ever told anyone besides Robert. It gave her confidence somehow, to tell a bunch of strangers who weren't in a position to be skeptical. But it also made the clairvoyant gift seem more real than ever before, as if she could no longer deny it, even to herself. They didn't laugh once.
As the Mercedes slid through the greasy night onto the main highway, she described the shu-shaaa, what she had sensed from the forest and the boy. She told them about its 'cosmic mission,' realizing as she explained it just how farfetched it sounded. They didn't interrupt, only nodded and grunted. When she finished, DeWalt told her about the Earth Mouth they had found.
'That's it,' she said. 'The strange music I heard that wasn't really music. It's the source. Its voice.”
“You mean it talks? ” Chester said.
“It called me by my name. Through the boy.”
Chester had lowered his shotgun so that the occasional passing motorist wouldn't see it in the flash of headlights. He said, 'Ordinarily, I'd call it a bunch of hippie claptrap and think somebody's been smoking some funny weed. But I seen it with my own eyes, and ain't no dope ever filled this old head. But something's as fucked up as a football bat, and it ain't just me. They’re like zombie creeps in some picture show.'
'Well, it's got its ‘mission,’ as you say, Tamara,' DeWalt said. 'And we have ours.'
He told her about their plan to dynamite the cave. 'We know it's probably a job for the military or the FBI or whoever has jurisdiction over alien invasions-'
'But it would take days, maybe weeks, before you convinced somebody you weren't crazy,” Tamara said, the resident expert in being called crazy. “And it’s getting stronger by the minute. I can feel it. It’s learning about the world, growing, getting smarter.'
Chester peered at her with one bleary eye, crow's feet crinkling as he squinted. 'One more thing's bothering me. Hell, lots of things is. But what’s this ‘ shu-shaaa ’ business?'
'Maybe it absorbed the sound from some life form in the woods. Something it converted. But the boy tried to talk to me. So it must be learning language. Human language.'
'I expect it already knows tree talk, then. And the talk of pigs and chickens and whatever rot Don Oscar’s head was filled with. Maybe that explains why old Boomer was trying to bark but kept on making them swampy sounds.'
'And the people who have turned, they still have some of their own thoughts, but the thoughts are trapped and mixed in with the parent, the shu-shaaa.'
'I'm no Einstein,' DeWalt said, 'but what you're saying doesn't really follow what we know about
