Bad Glass

I got dizzy. I thought I was falling, toppling forward into the void. Without vision, without that point of reference, I lost all track of the world. The Vicodin, I thought. The alcohol, the plank upside my head. It wasn’t the world doing this, I assured myself. It wasn’t the spores or the speed of light. It was the things I’d done to myself, and the things I’d let happen.

I reached out to catch myself against the floor, keeping the flashlight and baseball bat clenched tightly in my hands, but the floor didn’t come. I just continued spinning through the void.

“Dean …” It was Floyd, terrified, keening in the dark. “I hear him …” And I wondered at the “him.” Mac? Floyd’s dead brother?

I blinked, still toppling forward, spinning down into the pit under the city, plummeting toward the heart of the world.

“Dean!” It was still Floyd, but more frantic this time. I could hear feet clumping against wood, a terrified stutter step.

I blinked again and realized that the darkness wasn’t complete. There was the dimmest of lights off to my left, sitting there, stationary, in the corner of my eye, even as I continued to spin through space.

I flicked my flashlight back on and found myself still standing in the middle of the hub. Not falling. I spun around, panning the flashlight across the room. Charlie had a confused look on his face, but there was no fear there, just a strangely distant interest, like he was buried in his own thoughts, trying to work out a complex problem. Floyd was different. He had his hand up against his chest, clutching at his heart. There were tears on his cheeks, and his mouth was moving, quivering open and shut without making a sound.

“Left,” I said, pointing toward the tunnel down which I’d seen the light. “We’re getting somewhere,” I added, trying to sound reassuring.

I continued on, leading the way forward.

The tunnel ended at a concrete wall. There was a hole there, punched through the concrete, leading into a dark basement. I stuck my head through and panned the flashlight left and then right. It was a large multiroom basement, something you’d find beneath an office building, not a private residence.

I had no idea where we were. We should have hit the river long before we reached any type of large building. Had we somehow made it downtown?

There was the sound of scuffling up ahead in one of the adjoining rooms—feet scraping against concrete, spinning on a heel. Then the loud crack of rifle fire. “To the left!” someone called. There was another crack.

A quiet hiss: “Got it!”

And then, frantic: “Is that it? Are we done?”

I moved into the basement, and Floyd and Charlie followed, staying a couple of steps back. The room was damp, smelling of mildew and rot. Charlie shone his flashlight toward the door on the far side of the room. There was a faint red light in the gap at its foot. The sound was coming from behind the door.

I shut off my flashlight and gestured for Floyd and Charlie to do the same. Then I made my way to the door. Slowly, I turned the knob and pushed it open, afraid of what I might find on the other side.

“Shit!”

There was a blur of motion as a soldier in the middle of the room raised a rifle and pointed it at my chest. Then a collision of limbs, and a bullet snapped into the wall at my side.

“Don’t!” Danny cried, after straight-arming the soldier’s rifle. “Fucking stand down, man!”

My heart stuttered inside my chest. I glanced to the wall at my side; concrete dust rained down from a neat hole punched at just about heart level. The soldier with the smoking gun stood still for a long moment, his eyes wide in terror at the lethal mistake he’d almost made.

There were two other soldiers in the room, in addition to Danny and the terrified gunman. The four of them were standing back to back to back to back in its center, each covering a different corner. There was a road flare burning near a door on the far side of the room. It illuminated the concrete walls in flickering red light.

For a time, everyone was silent, stunned, not quite sure how to react.

I glanced around the room. There were dinner-plate-size gaps in each of the four walls—large, unnatural boreholes, at least a dozen of them—up near the ceiling and down at knee level. There were piles of dead spiders on the floor beneath each hole—drifts of huge twitching limbs torn apart by rifle fire. Some of them were deformed. I didn’t look too closely, but I’m sure I saw human features mixed in with the battered arachnid bits. And not just fingers. A nose and an open mouth. A lolling tongue without lips. A whole fucking hand.

Danny gestured toward us frantically, and his soldiers broke formation, starting toward the door at our backs.

“We’ve been down here for almost an hour,” Danny started. (An hour? I thought. That didn’t seem possible.) A hint of a smile appeared on his lips as he crossed the room. “What took you so fucking—?” Then his foot caught on something. His arms cart-wheeled in the air for a moment, and he toppled over backward. He landed flat on his back. His flashlight and rifle clattered from his hands and a loud whomp of breath exploded from his lungs.

I started forward, ready to help him to his feet, but he began to move on his own, twitching on the floor. I froze in shock.

“Danny?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

He didn’t respond. Instead, his eyes rolled back inside his head. He arched his ass off the floor, keeping his shoulder blades and upper back flat against the concrete. Then he started to make a loud gurgling sound—almost a liquid growl—and thick, foamy strings of saliva spilled from his lips. I pulled back.

“Unnnnghh!”

His quivering hands made their way up to the line of buttons on his shirt. He grasped and pulled the drab fatigues apart, revealing the pale white skin underneath. Then his eyes—until now completely rolled back inside their sockets—slowly spun forward, and he looked down in terror as his fingernails continued with their ripping motion, now working away at his flesh. It was like he was trying to pull his skin apart, trying to open up his chest and reach inside. His fingernails left behind beveled lines filled with crimson.

“Danny!” I managed, my voice choked with shock and confusion.

And then the hand broke through.

It should have torn him apart, it should have pushed him wide open, but it barely made a wound: no displaced mass, no tectonic movement inside his bones and flesh. Just a hand, reaching up from his heart, sprouting from his skin like a grotesque tree.

First fingers, then wrist. Then forearm. Then elbow. All the way up to a thin, unexercised bicep. Pale, subterranean skin, streaked with thin streams of blood.

The hand swiveled on its wrist—a graceful, artistic movement—and blood spilled from its open palm. It froze in that position, palm open and cupped—not as a statue would freeze, motionless, but rather as a human would freeze, complete with tiny muscular tremors.

Floyd, Charlie, and the soldiers all stumbled back as one, and I heard the sound of retching behind me—a violent dry heave—but I stayed perfectly still. Despite their terror, they all kept their flashlights fixed on Danny’s grotesque, broken form. Some of the beams were shaking, and I heard Floyd give voice to a tiny little sob.

Danny quivered for a moment—the last vestiges of life fleeing his body—then his lower back collapsed to the ground and all of his muscles fell slack. His bladder released, and the room filled with the stench of urine. I thought I heard the sound of his last breath rattling out in a violent heave, but that might have just been my imagination, my need to put some type of punctuation at the end of this horrific statement.

It was a gruesome sight. Absolutely horrible.

Slowly, reflexively, I popped the lens cap off my camera, raised it to my eye, and started taking pictures.

The soldiers ran away as soon as they got the chance. They retreated back the way we had come, leaving behind a stream of choked obscenities. I think Floyd would have run, too, if I hadn’t been there to stop him. And Charlie … I don’t know what Charlie would have done. His face was calm despite startled, wide-open eyes.