It was the most horrible thing Perry had ever seen. The wasp eggs didn’t just hatch and rip their way out of the caterpillar . . .
They ate their way out.
When the eggs hatched, the new wasp larvae fed on the caterpillar’s innards. And they grew. The caterpillar struggled for life but could do nothing about the larvae eating it from the inside. The caterpillar’s skin bulged, rippled, moved as the larvae inside continued to eat, methodically chewing away at its guts with the same slow, robotlike precision that the caterpillar used to dispose of a leaf. It was appalling. It was a living cancer. And to make it worse, via some horrid instinct the larvae knew what to eat; they consumed the fat and internal organs while leaving the heart and brain alone, preserving the crawling buffet for as long as possible.
So perfect was the larvae’s evolution that they didn’t kill the caterpillar
until they finished their growth cycle — as they ripped their way out of the caterpillar’s skin, glistening with the wet slime of the chewed guts, their victim kept squirming, writhing with what little energy it had left, amazingly alive even though its innards had been munched on like the Sunday breakfast bar at Big Boy.
Was that what faced Perry? Were they consuming him from the inside? But if that was the case, then why were they always screaming at him to eat? They weren’t going to take over his mind. That much was obvious — if they could take over his mind, they wouldn’t need eyes, now would they? Maybe this was just the first stage — if they could grow eyes, why not a mouth? Why not teeth?
He calmed himself, forcing himself to focus, think logically. He was, after all, an educated man. A college boy, as Daddy would say. All he had to do was think, and maybe he could come up with some answers on his own.
He just didn’t have enough information to form any kind of hypothesis, nothing to go on. No clues. Even Columbo would have been stuck with this one. Of course, Columbo would play the blithering buffoon, countering the suave, rich att.i.tudes of his homicidal targets. Columbo would let stupidity show, wear his weakness on his sleeve, allowing his targets’ confidence to grow and grow and grow until they let something slip, something tiny, something that would normally go unnoticed. Unnoticed by normal eyes, but not Peter Falk’s cross-eyed stare. That’s what he had to do; play dumb, and get them talking.
“Hey f.u.c.kers.”
he y h.e.l.lo
“What is it you fellas want with me?”
what do y ou mean want
“Why are you in my body?”
w e don ’ t know
So much for detective work. There was really nothing else to do. Just sit. Sit and wait. He was nothing more than a walking, talking buffet table. Sit and wait. Sit and listen.
You gonna let ’em push you around like that, boy?
Another voice . . . his daddy’s voice. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t a voice in his head like the Triangles’, it was a memory. No, not a memory, a phantom. His daddy’s voice, as if his daddy were with him in spirit.
“No, Daddy,” Perry said, his voice a dry husk. “I won’t let them push me around.”
He hooked his index finger under his sweatshirt collar and pulled it back violently, ripping it slightly, exposing the Triangle on his collarbone. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that the icy-black eyes were blinking away, taking in the view of the living room and all the knickknacks that Perry had acquired since high school.
The fork still sat on the plate, a few rivulets of spaghetti sauce clinging to the tines. Perry grabbed it with a caveman grip, clutched it like a murderous dagger. He giggled once as he remembered the punch line to an old grade-school joke.
“Fork you, buddy.”
With all the force he could muster, he jammed the fork into his trapezius. The center tine poked through one of the black eyes with a tiny, wet, crunching noise.
The tines kissed off his scapula and out the back side of his trapezius, accompanied by a double-squirt of red and purple that landed wetly on the couch’s worn-thin upholstery.
He wasn’t even sure if he felt it. He didn’t have to scream in pain — the Triangles took care of that.
It wasn’t even a scream, really, just a noise. A loud noise. A f.u.c.king h.e.l.lfire and bear-the-cross loud noise, blaring like a klaxon alarm stuffed down his auditory ca.n.a.l to rest nicely against his eardrum. He rolled off the couch, thrashing his head in sudden and all-encompa.s.sing agony.
He rolled onto his back, reached up, grabbed the fork and twisted it, driving it up at an angle deeper into his shoulder.
Perry couldn’t know that on the second thrust the fork tines punched a neat hole through the Triangle’s main nervous column just below its flat head, killing it instantly. Had he known, he probably wouldn’t have cared — all he knew was that he wasn’t a patsy, wasn’t some pushover, he was Scary Perry Dawsey and was once again whipping a.s.s.
“You f.u.c.ks!” Perry screamed louder than ever before, perhaps needing to hear himself over the horrid death-shriek that raged through his head. “How do you like it? How’s it feel?”
stop stop stop stop
stop stop stopstop
“The f.u.c.k I’ll stop! How’s it feel? How does it feel?” Tears found their
way out of Perry’s tightly shut eyes. Pain raged through his body, but his conscious mind felt none of it.
f.u.c.ker y ou will paystop Stop STOP
“Bite it, baby!” Perry fed on the pain like an alcoholic diving into that first off-the-wagon drink. “I’m doing this one and then I’m calling the Soldiers to come get the rest!” He twisted the fork again and started to say something, but lost the words as the fork stuck deeply into a tendon. He made the major mistake of giving in to the pain, rolling in useless protest — his shoulder and the end of the fork hit the front of the couch, driving the p.r.o.ngs in ever deeper.