Coven

Lydia reloaded and got back her breath. No sense in wasting time. Thought, she thought. She plugged her key into the extromitter and thought about Wade.

««—»»

The scalpel flashed, lowering. All Wade could see were the two sisters’ intent faces and point filled grins. He felt the scalpel tip touch his temple…

Then the first sister’s eyes…exploded.

Suddenly he was released. Shrieks spun like mad banners about his head. Besser was bummeling forward, shouting “Noooo!” His shout was answered by a very loud bang!

Wade sat up. At the rear of the warren, he saw the two sisters…cooking. Their petite bodies blackened. Their faces bubbling. Soon their shrieks sputtered out, as their crisped mouths erped up white slop. They congealed in the corner, a blackened, smoking mass.

“Are you gonna sit there all day?” Lydia inquired.

“Lydia!” Wade shouted, and jumped off the table. She smirked as he giddily planted kisses all over her face.

“Save it for later. We’ve got to get out of here.”

Besser, curled on the floor, wheezed out blubbers. Pain bloated his face like a balloon. Lydia had blown his kneecap off.

“What about him?” Wade asked.

“Fuck him,” Lydia answered. She cocked the Trooper and pointed it at Besser’s head.

“Yes!” Besser begged. “Please!”

Lydia looked baffled. “You want me to kill you?”

“For God’s sake, yes! Don’t leave me for the Supremate!”

Wade remembered the hash room, Besser’s inheritance, no doubt, for failure. “Leave the fat fucker,” he said.

“Noooooo!” Besser wailed. “Pleeeeeeease, nooooooo!”

Lydia reholstered the Trooper. She and Wade left the warren as Besser’s pleas faded behind them.

She led him toward the next extromitter, explaining how she’d killed the sisters with the ultraviolet spotter. It wasn’t sunlight that killed them, it was the UV rays of the sun’s spectrum. Wade was impressed by her ingenuity, and also her faith. She’d come into this horrid place for him.

Then suddenly, she stopped. “Wade, before we go on, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What’s that. babe?”

“I love you.”

“Uh.” Wade hemmed. “Yeah.”

Lydia looked the way a girl always looks when she’s pissed. “Well?” she said, hands on hips.

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you going to say you love me too?”

Jesus, Wade thought. Sure, he loved her, but he couldn’t tell her that. It wasn’t his style, not this soon. When a guy said that, he’d lose the upper hand. Instead, he said, “Ditto.”

Now she really looked pissed. “I knew it. No balls.”

“Hey!”

“I almost got buggered by a monster for you. The least you—”

“I seem to recall doing a little rescuing today myself.”

“That’s not what we’re talking about—”

“And this is not the time or place for a romantic spat,” he added. “We’re in a fucking spaceship.”

“Just shut up and come on,” she said, disgusted.

Wade dredged up some nifty terms from his Sociology 202 class. “We can isolate and identify the spatial parameters of our relationship later.”

“Isolate and identify this,” she said, and gave him the finger. “Besides, there might not even be a later.”

“What are you talking about? We’re home free.”

Lydia laughed. “Don’t you know how the extromitters work?”

“Yeah, you stick the key in the hole and we’re out of here.”

“Not quite. They’re programmed by thought, level to level. But the only way we can leave is through the main point access.”

“So? Let’s go there and split.”

“Wade, every warren and hall, every extromitter, every everything in this place has a sensor in it. Eyes and ears. The Supremate knows where we are and what we’re trying to do.”

Wade’s enthusiasm plummeted.

“And you can bet your Corvette,” she went on, “right now the Supremate is ordering every sister in the place to the main point access, to keep us from leaving.”

“Besser said most of the sisters were terminated.”

“Most, or all?”

Wade gulped. “Most,” he remembered. This was getting too complicated, like the trig and literature courses he’d gotten untold D’s in. He didn’t want to be confused with facts—he wanted out. “So the sisters are waiting for us at the exit?”

“Yes,” Lydia clarified.

“Use the spotter.”

“The spotter’s battery powered, and it’s already getting low.”

Fanfuckingtastic, he thought as she plugged her key into the next extromission dot and pulled him through.

Wade didn’t care to have the molecular mass of his body turned inside out as a means of transportation. Elevators were more to his liking, or ladders, stairs, dumbwaiters—anything. They extromitted down several levels until they made it to what Wade presumed was the bottom of the labyrinth. At the end of the warren, the sign glowed like a mirage: POINTACCESSMAIN#1.

But the main was empty. No sisters stood in wait.

“This can’t be right,” Lydia murmured.

“Stick the key in the hole!” Wade shouted.

She did so, almost fatally. She couldn’t believe it was going to be this easy. Nevertheless, this final extromission left them standing dumbfounded by the wall of the student shop.

“You did it!” Wade celebrated.

They ran their asses off, to the door, to the parking lot, to the waiting Vette. The twin turbos roared. The Vette’s plushness embraced them, and in a moment they were smoking out of the lot, through the turn, away, away…

Wade’s mind, as he drove, fielded countless abstractions. He thought of birds flying lazily across the heavens. He thought of cathedral ceilings, long open pastures, endless seas. Never again would he take the becalmed night or the beauty of the world for granted. Indeed, the air smelled of freedom—

—and maybe even absolution.

—

CHAPTER 37

Jervis, as with everything now, took the radio to have a special meaning, symbols like shadows of his new, mysterious life. The campus station played “Head Cut,” by the Banshees, “The Cutter,” by Echo and the Bunnymen, and “Delicate Cutters,” by Throwing Muses. “Lots of cutters tonight, folks,” the D.J. said. Jervis agreed.