77 Shadow Street (47 page)

Martha Cupp

The creatures that had been forged out of the bodies of Smoke and Ashes were lying on the floor in the light of the sconces and the yellow glow of the fungus, trembling at first and gasping as though exhausted, but then suddenly mortally still. After a brief stillness, those disparate parts of different species began to fall apart from one another, the hodgepodge organism quickly collapsing into a pile of dismembered limbs, loose eyeballs, sets of strange teeth, and detached ears, as though they were the pieces of some bizarre pop-it-together toy in the tradition of Mr. Potato Head. Disassembled, the various parts began to melt into gray sludge.

Edna said, “Smoke and Ashes must have eaten something very bad.”

“Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it got into them some other way.”

Voice faltering, Edna said, “Whatever did our kitties do to deserve a fate like that?”

“Better them than us,” Martha declared.

She loved the cats, but she wasn’t as sentimental about them as was her sister, who did needlepoint portraits of them and sewed costumes for them to wear on holidays.

“We don’t even have their poor bodies to cremate,” Edna said. “They’re like sailors lost at sea.”

“Get a grip, dear.”

After some sniffling, Edna said, “I miss our lovely furniture.”

“We’ll get back to it.”

“Do you think we will?”

Martha watched the two puddles of gray sludge, and instead of answering the question, she said, “If they turn back into cats, do
not
pick them up.”

Silas Kinsley

Padmini and Tom retreated a few steps to allow Silas and Bailey to provide Dr. Kirby Ignis with the benefit of their flashlights as he knelt beside Julian Sanchez. The blind man seemed to be paralyzed yet rigid, but that was the least worrisome aspect of his condition.

Only recently Silas would have thought himself delirious or insane if he had witnessed such a thing, but he entertained no doubt that the current transformation of Julian from a man into a
thing
was real. The first and most obvious indications were in the wrists, moving forward toward the fingers, where the bones changed within the living flesh, elongating and rearticulating, both lengthening and broadening his hands. The metamorphosis wasn’t as fast as that of a man becoming a werewolf in the movies, but it was shockingly rapid nonetheless.

Daring to hold the wrist of one of the morphing hands, which Silas could never have brought himself to do, Kirby Ignis said, “His pulse must be almost two hundred per minute.”

“We’ve got to help him,” Padmini said, but the anguished tone of her voice suggested that she knew nothing could save Julian.

Kirby indicated the bloody bite on Sanchez’s cheek. “Its teeth evidently have hypodermic function, injecting a paralytic agent. Then that tubular tongue … it must be designed for esophageal intubation. Goes down the throat … the throat of the prey. Down the throat … to pump the swarm into his stomach.”

“Swarm?” Bailey asked. “What swarm?”

“That gray sludge. The nanomachines, nanocomputers, billions of tiny machines that convert the prey itself into a predator.”

Although he found it difficult to look away from the morphing fingers, Silas saw that the restructuring of the body was likewise under way, the full extent concealed by clothing. Julian’s slippers had come off and one sock had split as his feet, too, enlarged and changed shape.

“If that thing was part machine,” Bailey said, “then it was a weapon. And Julian is turning into a weapon.”

The familial tremors with which Silas was occasionally afflicted overcame him now, triggered by emotion as easily as they could be touched off by extreme weariness. Although he pressed his lips tight together, his mouth quivered as though with palsy. His right hand trembled to such an extent that he thought it wise to slip the pistol into a pocket of his raincoat.

He remembered the dream that Perry Kyser talked about in the bar at Topper’s:
Everything torn down, every man for himself. Worse. It’s all against all.… Murder, suicide, everywhere, day and night, unrelenting
.

Just as he returned his attention to Julian’s face, the false eyes, a pair of plastic hemispheres, popped out of the blind man’s sockets and rolled down his cheeks. Where they had been were not vacant holes but new eyes, all gray with black centers, like the eyes of the thing that had bitten him. The bitten would soon become the biter.

“Move back,” Bailey Hawks urged Dr. Ignis. “We can’t let this happen to him.”

Kirby Ignis moved, and Bailey knelt. He put the muzzle of his pistol against Julian’s head, said “God be with you,” and blew out the man’s brains, which appeared more human than those of the Sally Hollander thing had been.

Witness

The Pogrom occurred in two phases, the first planned and the second unanticipated. During the interim, certain alterations were begun to prepare the Pendleton for a new purpose. Due to the sudden reappearance of the Pogromites, who should have self-destructed after their mission was accomplished, most of those changes to the building were never made. Among the few completed were the construction of a series of secret passageways, through which the master of this realm could move discreetly to monitor his acolytes. By default, with all the believers dead, Witness became, so to speak, the reigning prince of this castle. He could move about the building by way of hidden stairs, blind corridors, and concealed doors.

From the gloom within what had once been the women’s lavatory, through the door that stood open on rusted hinges, Witness watched the tall man—someone had called him Bailey—destroy the Pogromite developing within the blind man’s body. He clearly regretted the need to kill the one they called Julian, but he acted with no less decisiveness and conviction than he had shown when he shot Julian’s attacker in the head.

Other residents from other periods of the building’s history had not been armed when they had arrived here. But at least four of the current journeyers had firearms on them when the transition occurred. Witness considered what this might reveal about the everyday violence of their time as compared to that of earlier eras, and he supposed they might be better prepared to survive than those who had come before them.

They had shot out a number of the security monitors that were still functioning. Although it violated his commission and the very purpose of his entire life to date, Witness used his wireless link to deactivate the remaining components of the security system. The Pogromite would still hunt them down, but perhaps less efficiently.

With this fourth mysterious transition, all within 114 days in Witness’s time, he had reason to believe that his ultimate role might be different from what it had been thus far. He had evidence—was staring at it right now—that the ninety minutes this transition would apparently endure could be the most important hour and a half in the history of the world. Seventy-one minutes remained, and his greatest fear was that he might not do the correct thing to ensure that this grim future never occurred.

Dr. Kirby Ignis

Standing over the tortured body of Julian Sanchez, who perished halfway through the lycanthropic transformation, Kirby Ignis was so profoundly alarmed by what he had seen thus far that for the first time in his fifty years, his mind outraced itself, leaping from induction to conclusion to deduction to a new induction, from a host of inferences to a few equally astonishing theories,
flying
along multiple routes of explanation with such speed that he could not adequately process his thoughts and arrive at a considered course of action. He wished that he could be alone in his simply furnished apartment with his aquarium, Italian opera sung in Chinese, and a cup of green tea. But wishes weren’t going to come true in
this
Pendleton, and he needed to get a bridle on his thoughts and rein them back from a gallop to a trot.

He could see the fear in Tom, Padmini, Silas, and Bailey, and it was a raw, visceral terror held in check in each case because all of them were people whose life experiences and accomplishments taught them the importance of self-control. Kirby’s fear was different in quality from theirs, emotional but less so than theirs, a sort of cold fear where theirs was hot, more intellectual than not, because he possessed the knowledge to understand more profoundly the meaning of
this world in which they found themselves. There were things that he could tell them to help them comprehend the full potential of the threat they faced. But as much as he respected all of them, he felt certain that sharing too much with them would push some of them, if not all, from controlled terror to panic, which would put all of them at even greater risk.

Of Bailey, Tom Tran asked, “You said it was turning Mr. Sanchez into a weapon?”

Indicating the blind man’s mutant remains, Bailey said, “You can see for yourself.”

“Weapons are made. Who can make such a weapon?”

“No one in the time we come from. Someone between then and now.”

Tom shook his head. “What I mean is—
why
would anyone make such a weapon? Are there people in this world who would do such a thing?”

“What kind of people developed nuclear weapons?” Kirby asked. “They weren’t monsters. They had good motives—an end to World War II, maybe make war so terrible that it would become unthinkable.”

“We know how well that worked,” Bailey said.

Kirby nodded. “I’m just saying, let’s not go off on some tangent like extraterrestrials. These creatures were born in our past, not on another planet.”

Padmini said, “The one that attacked poor Mr. Sanchez? Was that once … was it Miss Hollander?”

“I saw something of her in it,” Silas said. “I think it was.”

“I’m sure it was her. Used to be her,” Bailey agreed.

“Then there’s another in the building,” Padmini said. “The one that bit Miss Hollander, changed her. That one is still somewhere in the building.”

Winny

In Gary Dai’s apartment, when the thing flew through the room immediately below him, Winny almost froze on the second step from the bottom. Crawling, scuttling, squirming creepers were bad enough. Over the years he had pretty much gotten over his fear of bugs by picking them up, holding them in his hands, and studying them. Beetles, caterpillars, earwigs, spiders—but not the brown ones because they might be brown recluses with venom that dissolved your flesh. He had never been freaked out by things with wings, not even bats, but the swooping presence below, glimpsed only as a shadowy form, was a lot bigger than a bat, big enough to carry off a cocker spaniel if not even a German shepherd. Winny didn’t weigh nearly as much as your average shepherd. Something to think about.