She gagged, stumbled backwards, turned to the gutter, vomited.
Jenny pulled Lisa two steps back, farther away from the thing with which Gordy was grappling.
The girl was screaming.
The slime oozed around the bony hand, reclaimed those denuded fingers, enfolded them, sheathed them in a glove of pulsing tissue. In a couple of seconds, the bones were gone as well, dissolved, and the glove folded up into a ball and melted back into the main body of the organism. The thing writhed obscenely, churned within itself, swelled, bulged here, formed a concavity there, now a concavity where the bulge had been, now a swelling nodule where the concavity had been, feverishly changing, as if even a moment"s stillness meant death. It pulled itself up Gordy"s arms, and he struggled desperately to rid himself of it, and as it progressed toward his shoulders, it left nothing behind it, nothing, no stumps, no bones; it devoured everything. It began to spread across his chest, too, and wherever it went, Gordy simply disappeared into it and did not come out, as if he were sinking into a vat of fiercely corrosive acid.
Lisa looked away from the dying man and clung to Jenny, sobbing.
Gordy"s screams were unbearable.
Tal"s revolver was already in his hand. He hurried toward Gordy.
Bryce stopped him. "Are you crazy? Tal, d.a.m.n it, there"s nothing we can do."
"We can put him out of his misery."
"Don"t get too close to that d.a.m.ned thing!"
"We don"t have to get too close to get a good shot."
Gordy"s eyes became more tortured by the second, and now he began to scream for Jesus"s help, and he drummed his heels on the pavement, arched his back, vibrated with the strain, trying to push up from under the growing weight of the nightmarish a.s.sailant.
Bryce winced. "All right. Quickly."
They both edged nearer to the thrashing, dying deputy and opened fire. Several shots struck him. His screaming stopped.
They quickly backed off.
They didn"t try to kill the thing that was feeding on Gordy. They knew bullets had no effect on it, and they were beginning to understand why. Bullets killed by destroying vital organs and essential blood vessels. But from the look of it, this thing had no organs and no conventional circulatory system. No skeleton, either. It seemed to be a ma.s.s of undifferentiated-yet highly sophisticated-protoplasm. A bullet would pierce it, but the amazingly malleable flesh would flow into the channel carved by the bullet, and the wound would heal in an instant.
The beast fed more frantically than before, in a silent frenzy, and in seconds there was no sign of Gordy at all. He had ceased to exist. There was only the shape-changer, grown larger, much bigger than the dog that it had been, even bigger than Gordy, whose substance it now incorporated.
Tal and Bryce rejoined the others, but they didn"t run for the inn. As the twilight was slowly squeezed out of the sky in a vise of darkness, they watched the amoeboid thing on the sidewalk.
It began to take a new shape. In only seconds, all of the free-form protoplasm had been molded into a huge, menacing timber wolf, and the creature threw its head back and howled at the sky.
Then its face rippled, and elements of its ferocious countenance shifted, and Tal could see human features trying to rise up through the image of a wolf. Human eyes replaced the animal"s eyes, and there was part of a human chin. Gordy"s eyes? Gordy"s chin? The lycanthropic metamorphosis lasted only seconds, and then the thing"s features flowed back into the wolf form.
Werewolf, Tal thought.
But he knew it wasn"t anything like that. It wasn"t anything. The wolf ident.i.ty, as real and frightening as it looked, was as false as all the other ident.i.ties.
For a moment it stood there, confronting them, baring its enormous and wickedly sharp teeth, far greater in size than any wolf that had ever stalked the plains and forests of this world. Its eyes blazed with the muddy-b.l.o.o.d.y color of the sunset.
It"s going to attack, Tal thought.
He fired at it. The bullets penetrated but left no visible wound, drew no blood, caused no apparent pain.
The wolf turned away from Tal, with a sort of cool indifference to the gunfire, and trotted toward the open manhole, into which the field lab"s electric power cables disappeared.
Abruptly, something rose out of that hole, came from the storm drain below the street, rose and rose into the twilight, shuddering, smashing up into the air with tremendous power, a dark and pulsating ma.s.s, like a flood of sewage, except that it was not a fluid but a jellied substance that formed itself into a column almost as wide as the hole from which it continued to extrude in an obscene, rhythmic gush. It grew and grew: four feet high, six feet, eight...
Something struck Tal across the back. He jumped, tried to turn, and realized that he had only collided with the wall of the inn. He hadn"t been aware he"d been backing away from the towering thing that had soared out of the manhole.
He saw now that the pulsing, rippling column was another body of freeform protoplasm like the Airedale that had become a timber wolf; however, this thing was considerably larger than the first creature. Immense. Tal wondered how much of it was still hidden below the street, and he had a hunch that the storm drain was filled with it, that what they were seeing here was only a small portion of the beast.
When it reached a height of ten feet, it stopped rising and began to change. The upper half of the column broadened into a hood, a mantle, so that the thing now resembled the head of a cobra. Then more of the amorphous flesh flowed out of the oozing, glistening, shifting column and poured into the hood, so that the hood rapidly grew wider, wider, until it was not a hood at all any more; now it was a pair of gigantic wings, dark and membranous, like a bat"s wings, sprouting out of the central (and still shapeless) trunk. And then the body segment between the wings began to acquire a texture-coa.r.s.e, overlapping scales-and small legs and clawed feet began to form. It was becoming a winged serpent.
The wings flapped.
The sound was like a whip cracking.
Tal pressed back against the wall.
The wings flapped.
Lisa"s grip on Jenny tightened.
Jenny held the girl close, but her eyes, mind, and imagination were fixed upon the monstrous thing that had risen out of the storm drain. It flexed and throbbed and writhed in the twilight and seemed like nothing so much as a shadow that had come to life.
The wings flapped again.
Jenny felt a cold, wing-stirred breeze.
This new phantom looked as if it would detach itself from whatever additional protoplasm lay within the storm drain. Jenny expected it to leap into the darkening air and soar away-or come straight at them.
Her heart thumped, slammed.
She knew escape was impossible. Any movement she made would only draw unwanted attention from it. There was no point wasting energy in flight. There was nowhere to hide from a thing like this.
More streetlamps came on, and shadows slunk in with ghostly stealth.
Jenny watched in awe as a serpent"s head took shape at the top of the ten-foot-high column of mottled tissue. A pair of hate-filled green eyes swelled out of the shapeless flesh; it was like viewing time-lapse photography of the growth of two malignant tumors. Cloudy eyes, obviously blind, milky green ovals; they quickly cleared, and the elongated black pupils became visible, and the eyes glared down at Jenny and the others with malevolent intent. A foot-wide, slitted mouth sprang open; a row of sharp white fangs grew from the black gums.
Jenny thought of the demonic names that had glowed on the video display terminals, the h.e.l.l-born names the thing had given itself. The ma.s.s of amorphous flesh, forming itself into a winged serpent, was like a demon summoned from beyond.
The phantom wolf, which incorporated the substance of Gordy Brogan, approached the base of the towering serpent. It brushed against the column of pulsing flesh-and simply melted into it. In less than a blink of an eye, the two creatures became as one.
Evidently, the first shape-changer wasn"t a separate individual. It was now, and perhaps always had been, part of the gargantuan creature that moved within the storm drains, under the streets. Apparently, that ma.s.sive mother-body could detach pieces of itself and dispatch them on tasks of their own-such as the attack on Gordy Brogan-and then recall them at will.
The wings flapped, and the whole town reverberated with the sound. Then they began to melt back into the central column, and the column grew thicker as it absorbed that tissue. The serpent"s face dissolved, too. It had grown tired of this performance. The legs and three-toed feet and vicious talons withdrew into the column, until there was nothing left but a churning, oozing ma.s.s of darkly mottled tissue, as before. For several seconds, it posed in the gloomy dusk, a vision of evil, then began to shrink down into the drains under it, down through the manhole.
Soon it was gone.
Lisa had stopped screaming. She was gasping for air and crying.
Some of the others were nearly as shaken as the girl. They glanced at one another, but none of them spoke.
Bryce looked as if he had been clubbed.
At last he said, "Come on. Let"s get back to the inn before it gets any darker."
There was no guard at the front entrance of the inn.
"Trouble," Tal said.
Bryce nodded. He stepped through the double doors with caution and almost put his foot on a gun. It was lying on the floor.
The lobby was deserted.
"d.a.m.n," Frank Autry said.
They searched the place, room by room. No one in the cafeteria. No one in the makeshift dormitory. The kitchen was deserted, too.
Not a shot had been fired.
No one had cried out.
No one had escaped, either.
Ten more deputies were gone.
Outside, night had fallen.
34.
Saying Goodbye The six survivors-Bryce, Tal, Frank, Jenny, Lisa, and Sara-stood at the windows in the lobby of the Hilltop Inn. Outside, Skyline Road was still and silent, rendered in stark patterns of night-shadow and streetlamp-glow. The night seemed to tick softly, like a bomb clock.
Jenny was remembering the covered pa.s.sageway beside Liebermann"s Bakery. Last night, she had thought something was in the rafters of the service tunnel, and Lisa had believed something was crouching along the wall; very likely they had both been right. The shape-changer-or at least a part of it-had been there, slithering soundlessly through the rafters and down the wall. Later, when Bryce had caught a glimpse of something in the drain inside that pa.s.sage, he had surely seen a dark glob of protoplasm creeping through the pipe, either keeping tabs on them or engaged upon some alien and unfathomable task.
Thinking, also, of the Oxleys in their barricaded den, Jenny said, "The locked-room mysteries suddenly aren"t very mysterious any more. That thing could ooze under the door or through a heating duct. The smallest hole or crack would be big enough. As for Harold Ordnay... after he locked himself in the bathroom at the Candleglow Inn, the thing probably got at him through the sink and bathtub drains."
"The same for the locked cars with victims in them," Frank said. "It could surround a car, envelope it, and squeeze in through the vents."
"If it wanted to," Tal said, "it could move real quietly. That"s why so many people were caught by surprise. It was behind them, oozing under a door or out of a heating vent, getting bigger and bigger, but they didn"t know it was there until it attacked."
Outside, a thin fog was coming up the street, rising out of the valley below. Misty auras began to form around the streetlights.
"How big do you think it is?" Lisa asked.
No one responded for a moment. Then Bryce said, "Big."
"Maybe the size of a house," Frank said.
"Or as big as this entire inn," Sara said.
"Or even bigger," Tal said. "After all, it struck in every part of town, apparently simultaneously. It could be like... like an underground lake, a lake of living tissue, beneath most of Snowfield."
"Like G.o.d," Lisa said.
"Huh?"
"It"s everywhere," Lisa said. "It sees all and knows all. Just like G.o.d."
"We"ve got five patrol cars," Frank said. "If we split up, take all five cars, and drive out of here at exactly the same time-"
"It would stop us," Bryce said.
"Maybe it wouldn"t be able to stop all of us. Maybe one car would get through."
"It stopped a whole town."
"Well... yeah," Frank said reluctantly.
Jenny said, "Anyway, it"s probably listening to us right this minute. It would stop us before we even reached the cars."
They all looked at the heating ducts near the ceiling. There was nothing to be seen beyond the metal grilles. Nothing but darkness.
They gathered around a table in the dining room of the fortress that was no longer a fortress. They pretended to want coffee because, somehow, sharing coffee gave them a sense of community and normality.
Bryce didn"t bother putting a guard on the front doors. Guards were useless. If it wanted them, it would surely get them.
Beyond the windows, the fog was getting thicker. It pressed against the gla.s.s.
They were compelled to talk about what they had seen. They were all aware that death was coming for them, and they needed to understand why and how they were meant to die. Death was terrifying, yes; however, senseless death was the worst of all.
Bryce knew about senseless death. A year ago, a runaway truck had taught him everything he needed to know about that subject.
"The moth," Lisa said. "Was that like the Airedale, like the thing that... that got Gordy?"
"Yes," Jenny said. "The moth was just a phantom, a small piece of the shape-changer."
To Lisa, Tal said, "When Stu Wargle came after you last night, it wasn"t actually him. The shape-changer probably absorbed Wargle"s body after we left it in the utility room. Then, later, when it wanted to terrorize you, it a.s.sumed his appearance."
"Apparently," Bryce said, "the d.a.m.ned thing can impersonate anyone or any animal that it"s previously fed upon."
Lisa frowned. "But what about the moth? How could it have fed on anything like the moth? Nothing like that exists."
"Well," Bryce said, "maybe insects that size thrived a long time ago, tens of millions of years ago, back in the age of dinosaurs. Maybe that"s when the shape-changer fed on them."
Lisa"s eyes widened. "You mean the thing that came out of the manhole might"ve been millions of years old?"