Coven

“By the way,” Peerce inquired. “Why’d you come back in here anyway? It don’t make no sense.”

“Before Jervis died, he told me to plant the b—” A quick shock hacked off the last word. Wade’s knees locked up.

A whorl of intestines had popped out of Peerce’s shirt.

“Aw, shee it,” Peerce griped, looking down. Then he looked at Wade with a dead grin. “Almost had ya goin’ for it, huh?”

Wade turned and ran, and Peerce ran after him. Peerce was faster, despite the inconvenience of dragging intestines. The iron hand snatched Wade by the neck and raised him off his feet.

“I wanna know what ya were doin’ in here, St. John.”

Wade, choking, noticed that Peerce was chewing tobacco. He also noticed the transceptionrod sunk deep in his head.

“I was looking for some cuff links I lost,” Wade wheezed.

Peerce spat brown juice. He opened a switchblade. “Punk rich boy piece a shit. Start talking by the time I count three. If ya don’t” —Peerce grinned— “then I start carving.”

The blade flashed in front of Wade’s left eye.

“One.”

Did I come all this way just to get snuffed by a dead redneck cop? Wade asked himself against a hail of incredulity.

“Two.”

His heels kicked high on the wall. He could feel his face turning blue.

“Maybe you’ll feel like talkin’ once I pop one of them rich boy eyeballs out,” Peerce said. Then he said, “Three.”

««—»»

As she’d guessed, Peerce had caught Wade. She swung the hewer low right to high left. The unimaginably heavy blade was suddenly aerodynamic; it glided through the air with the greatest of proverbial ease— swoooooooosh—and took Peerce’s head off in a perfect line.

Lydia laughed in spite of herself. The head bounced off one wall, then another, then rolled down the servicepass. But—

“Lydia!” Wade yelled.

Peerce’s headless body remained standing. The switchblade remained in his hand—

“Pull the rod out of his head!”

What? she thought. She dropped the hewer and turned. It was too dark to see where the head had rolled, but then she stumbled on something and fell on it, like a fumble drill. She felt the top of the head, found the transception knob, then grabbed it with her fingers and pulled.

“Hurry!” Wade yelled, still held aloft.

She pulled and pulled. The rod wouldn’t come out. It was like trying to unseat a masonry nail from cement.

Wade was screaming.

Peerce’s severed head expectorated tobacco juice into her face. Thanks a lot, she thought. She raised the head to her mouth, grasped the rod flange with her teeth, and yanked.

Amid an awful, dry grinding sound, the rod began to come loose. Now it was Peerce’s head that was screaming. The rod jerked out of the skull in half inch stops. Peerce’s standing, headless corpse was shuddering in place.

When the transceptionrod came out all the way, the knife-wielding cadaver collapsed.

Lydia threw the head as hard as she could against the passwall. It cracked like heavy porcelain. Wade staggered as if drunk down the pass. “You like to keep a guy in suspense, don’t you?”

“Are you all right?”

“I think so. At least I don’t have to go to the bathroom anymore. What time is it?”

Lydia consulted her watch. “Eleven fifty four.”

“We’ve got six minutes.”

They ran like slapstick idiots down the pass. Wade held onto her as they extromitted down to the next level. “What did you bring that for?” he asked, noticing the UV spotter on her belt.

“In case the sisters are around.”

“They’re all either dead or hibernating,” he informed her. “At least that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”

They weren’t two steps into the next servicepass when, at once, their surroundings went from dark to light. Suddenly they were standing in brilliant radiance; the labyrinth’s ice cold changed to stunning heat. Myriad sensorposts glowed in shimmering black, and all around them the labyrinth hummed like high tension power lines.

Lydia checked her watch. “Eleven fifty five,” she said.

“Recharge,” Wade realized.

“Does that mean—”

“It means the Supremate knows we’re here.”

««—»»

Nina McCulloch woke up alone in a hospital bed. What was she doing here? The room’s only light came from the window.

She’d had a terrible dream.

Elizabeth and her two friends. The hooded girl in the black cloak. And Jervis Phillips, dead but walking.

It wasn’t a dream, she realized. It was the devil.

But God had saved her from that, hadn’t He?

Some police had brought her to the hospital. Nina prayed thanks to God. She wondered, though, if the devil had been vanquished. Show me a sign, Lord, she prayed.

The room filled with light.

It came from the window. Nina got up to look. At first she thought it must be a fire of some kind, it was miles distant. Forest fire? she thought. Plane crash?

She saw a gaseous yellow aura rising in the sky. It seemed to be coming from past the campus, the forest near the agro site. It wasn’t a fire, though. It was an emanation.

No, Nina thought. A sign!

««—»»

The Supremate’s pre recharge sleep was over. Fleeing the labyrinth’s hot and glowing bowels made Wade think of Jonah and the whale. He and Lydia came out on the last level. The fully energized sign beamed at the end of the pass: POINTACCESSMAIN#1.

They stopped in their tracks. A hum vibrated in their heads. When they turned around, they saw six sisters emerge from the extromitter behind them.

“Pardon me while I shit my pants,” Wade muttered. These sisters were the biggest he’d seen. They were beautiful in their immense, alien hybridized perfection. The last one to emerge stood over eight feet tall.

“I’m going to burn these bitches down,” Lydia said. She pushed Wade toward the last extromitter. Cloaked, the sisters advanced, showing fang crammed grins. They moved slowly at first, then began to run so fast they seemed aflight. Lydia set the UV spotter on the floor.

“Turn it on!” Wade shouted.

But Lydia was waiting for them to get close. When the first two were only yards away, she flicked the spotter on. Shrieks whistled. The sisters leading the pack began to smolder, then their white faces exploded. Wade and Lydia were splattered.