Backwoods (30 page)

The flesh under Langley’s chin also split as
his neck began to elongate, stretching like molten taffy being
pulled to unnatural, elastic proportions. Further and further, his
neck stretched, the muscles and ligaments beneath pulling taut, new
blood vessels growing in a bizarre, interlocking latticework, until
Langley’s head bobbed at least three feet above his shoulders.

“
Santoro,”
he said again, his cheeks
rived wide enough so that when he opened his mouth, his bottom jaw
seemed to come completely unhinged, dropping unnaturally,
grotesquely wide. She screamed at this, then screamed again as what
looked like a pair of chelicerae, the massive fang structures of a
spider or crab, suddenly protruded from beneath his upper lip,
extending from where he’d carried them retracted and tucked against
his upper palate. This was apparently what had happened to his
front teeth and gums, how Moore’s retrovirus had transformed them
into something horrific, hideous and new.

“Dani!” With a desperate cry, Andrew lunged
at Langley, plowing into him from the side, trying to knock him
away. Instead, Langley pivoted to greet him, keeping Dani pinned to
the wall with one hand and reaching out, catching Andrew with
surprising speed and force with the tines of the other. Those twin
spikes locked beneath Andrew’s throat, abruptly snuffing his
airflow and he choked vainly for breath, thrashing as Langley
hoisted him off his feet, leaving him to struggle in mid-air.

“Andrew!” Dani wailed.

“
Andrew,”
Langley echoed, those
grotesque pedipalps waggling. Arching his back with a sickening
series of
pops
as his vertebrae snapped into new, unnatural
configurations, Langley exposed his stomach, bowing it out so that
when he dragged the hooked tip of one of his mutated ribs to gouge
open his navel, both Dani and Andrew had clear and unobstructed
views.

“Dani. . . run,” Andrew gagged as Langley
eviscerated himself, slicing open a thin seam in his gut that split
wide with a moist, squelching sound, letting a tumble of intestines
suddenly protrude. Dani screamed, her voice ripping up shrill
octaves as the slick coils of entrails suddenly began twitching and
moving of their own accord. Like a nest of snakes uncovered, they
began to writhe and wriggle, sliding free in thick, fingerlike
projections that reached out from Langley’s belly to touch her,
grope at her.

“Dani,” Andrew croaked. “For…for God’s
sake…”

His voice cut short as Langley threw him
across the room, sending him crashing into the wall, bouncing off
the desk and slamming face-down against the floor. Although he
didn’t black out from the impact, he hit hard enough for his mind
to slip into a momentary murkiness, for his eyes to droop closed
and remain that way, at least until Dani’s next shrill, piercing
shriek ripped him soundly from the edge of that unconscious
oblivion.

The nasty tendrils of Langley’s intestines
had encircled her arms, heading for her shoulders. She struggled
wildly, screaming like a fire bell. Andrew remembered the video of
Langley and the camel spider, the sadistic glee he’d taken in
tormenting it.

He’s toying with her,
Andrew thought,
gritting his teeth against a swell of dizziness as he shoved his
hands beneath him and struggled to sit up. He’d jostled a broom
that had been left propped against the desk in his fall, and when
it toppled, the handle barked him in the head.

“Leave…her alone,” he seethed at Langley,
knocking the broom aside. It was flimsy and cheap with plastic
bristles and a lightweight, hollow aluminum shaft. It was nothing
he could use as a weapon, which he was about to need in short
measure, he realized, as the other screamers broke away from their
tight circumference around Langley and Dani and started shambling
toward him.

Shit,
he thought, sitting up,
scrambling back toward the desk. He glanced around wildly, looking
for his pistol, which he’d lost in the initial screamer’s attack.
Not that it would do him much good, he suspected. The screamers
were too badly infected with Moore’s virus. Its regenerative
properties were so accelerated now, they were nearly instantaneous,
and he doubted even a wound to the heart would be lethal anymore.
He didn’t see the gun, but did spy something else, a rumpled
package of Marlboro Lights among the blankets beneath the desk,
Suzette’s chrome-encased Zippo lighter beside it.

He grabbed the broom in one hand, Suzette’s
fallen lighter in the other. His fingers were shaking, so much so,
he had to tuck the broom beneath his arm and use both hands to flip
back the lid of the Zippo and paw at the flint wheel. It took him
three tries, each one more desperate and harried than the last,
before he got it to light, and he whipped the end of the broom
around, shoving the flame beneath the angled edge of the grey
plastic bristles.

Please work,
he thought, inching back
even as the screamers inched forward. Like Langley, they were
fucking with him, playing cat-and-mouse, biding their time so they
could take him at their leisure. They didn’t perceive him as a
threat, and hadn’t all along, which was probably why he’d made it
out of the forests alive after escaping their snare trap in the
first place.

Because they let me go.

“Fuck,” he whispered, blowing lightly on the
bristles, which had begun to blacken and sear with the heat of the
wobbly flame. They weren’t igniting, but they were smoldering long
enough to burn the plastic, to send thickening strands of pungent
smoke spiraling toward the ceiling.

The screamers fanned out around him in a
quickly collapsing circumference. There was the silverback looking
one, he of the massive forearms and oversized tree-trunk hands that
had initially attacked Andrew. Another, the one who’d been shot in
the neck, now boasted a macabre mask of throbbing, pulsating blood
vessels, each thick and glistening, heaped and tangled around its
face and neck like mangrove roots. Another had lost most of its
lower jaw in Dani’s initial gunfire; it listed loosely in a broad,
irregular maw, its tongue lolling out of the gaping space in
between. The last one had a crest of irregular bony protuberances
framing its head, where the upper and transverse processes in its
vertebrae, the prominences in its spinal bones, had grown radically
and out of control, punching through its skin, fanning out like the
frills of some prehistoric dinosaur.

Larry, Curly, Moe and Shemp,
Andrew
thought, still frantically waggling the Zippo beneath the broom
bristles, even though the lighter had grown hot in his hand, the
stink of searing metal growing as acrid as that of scorched
plastic. Enough of the bristles had melted that the entire end of
the broom now smoked, stinging his eyes, making him blink against
reflexive tears.

He stepped over Suzette’s outstretched,
motionless legs, sparing her a glance. Her head listed toward her
shoulder, her eyes frozen in a sleepy half-blink.

Damn it, Suzette, why didn’t you come with
me?
he thought with a momentary pang that might have been anger
with her, but more powerfully, was anger at himself.
Why didn’t
I make her? Why didn’t I try to make things right with her, do
something, say anything so she’d have just shut up and
come?

Tilting his head back, he hoisted the broom
head aloft. He’d deliberately moved this way to reach one of the
smoke detectors set into the ceiling. It was a photoelectric
variety, and he strained to get the smoking bristles as close to it
as he could. From overhead, a sharp, startling tone suddenly
sounded, a woman’s voice coming from hidden speaker plates beneath
the ceiling tiles.

“Warning,” she said. “Smoke detected in
sector nine-seventeen. Fire suppression system to engage in ten
seconds. Please observe emergency protocol and evacuation
procedures at this time. This is not a drill.”

He didn’t know if the screamers understood
what he was doing until that moment, but they figured it out and
lunged at him, any pretense of coyness or clumsiness aside. They
charged like grizzly sows defending their cubs.

“Nine seconds,” the automated woman’s voice
said.

Andrew swung the broom between his hands,
smashing the end of it into Shemp’s head as he charged. The broom
handle snapped, the cheap aluminum splintering in two with the
impact, but the blow knocked charred and smoldering bits of plastic
bristles scattering like confetti and stunned the screamer enough
to send it stumbling sideways.

“Eight,” said the woman. “Seven.”

The screamer with the broken jaw—Moe, as
Andrew had come to think of him—darted in from Andrew’s left. As
Andrew pivoted, it grabbed the broken broom shaft in its hand,
trying to wrest it away from him.

He’d dropped the Zippo, but true to design,
the flame had remained lit as it had fallen into some of the
blankets from Suzette’s nest. These had started to smolder, sending
more smoke into the air, with small flames beginning to lick at the
fabric in widening tongues.

Andrew shoved against the broom handle,
turning it loose as the screamer tripped over Suzette’s corpse. It
floundered for a moment, its bulging eyes seeming all the more wide
with surprise, then fell against the burning blankets. With a
startled howl, it scrambled upright, its deformed arms and legs
getting tangled in the smoldering folds. It flapped its arms,
danced a mad jig and screeched as it tried to shrug its way
free.

“Six,” the overhead voice droned. “Five,
four.”

The mangrove-looking screamer—Curly, as
seemed fairly apt—plowed into Andrew like a runaway bull, knocking
him off his feet, pinning him to the ground as they landed
together. Andrew reached up, but rather than grabbing it in a
chokehold, felt his fingers sink between the pulsating shafts of
its veins. With a disgusted yell, he clawed at them, seizing
fistfuls and yanking, feeling the rubbery tissue squelch and yield
beneath his fingers. Blood spurted as he ripped them open, spraying
his face. As quickly as he could rip open the veins and arteries,
he watched new ones grew whip and twine upward to take their
place.

“Three, two,” said the automaton. “One. Fire
suppression engaged.”

A claxon sounded, sharp and shrill, and then,
from overhead nozzles, a thick spray of highly pressured carbon
dioxide vapor suddenly plunged down. Immediately, the room was
engulfed in a dense fog. Andrew managed one deep gulp for breath
before it washed over him, obscuring even the screamer straddling
him from view. Clamping his lips together, he held his breath.

There was no amount of regeneration in the
world that could allow an organism to breathe without oxygen and in
less than five seconds, the heavy blanket of gas had completely
displaced all of it in the room. The screamer fell away from Andrew
and he could see it if he squinted. It writhed on the floor beside
him, pawing at its throat as it suffocated. Once it was off of him,
Andrew acted fast, scrambling to his feet, rubbing furiously at his
eyes to get the sting of blood out of them. Hands outstretched, he
floundered toward the doorway until he hit the wall, and from
there, he patted and pawed until he found the blue metal box
mounted just inside the threshold.

It’s oxygen,
Alice had told him.
Little portable tanks, a mask. They’re in all the rooms. Daddy
said it’s an ocean standard.

He found two cans inside, each smaller around
than a beer can, but each affixed with a clear rubber face mask at
the end of the tapered nozzle, with a little plastic handle for
administering the flow of oxygen from can to mask. Yanking them
loose, he shoved one against his mouth and nose, then depressed the
trigger. He heard a soft hiss and took a breath.

How long before you smother?
he
thought, panicked. He spun around and stumbled forward, tucking the
second canister protectively beneath his arm. He didn’t know how
much oxygen one of the little cans contained. Judging by the size,
he suspected not much. They’d been designed to provide enough
oxygen for the wearer to get out of the building, not for any
long-term survival.

The carbon dioxide nozzles had stopped
spraying, and the hazy cloud began to dissipate. He could see the
silhouettes of screamers sprawled on the floor, still scrabbling
weakly with their deformed limbs, uttering horrible, sodden,
gagging sounds. When he found Dani, he fell to his knees. Taking
only intermittent breaths from his mask, then laying the can aside,
he tore at the overlapping tendrils of Langley’s intestines, which
he’d used to bind her in a gruesome, mummy-like fashion, nearly to
her hairline. Andrew ripped them back from her face enough to find
her mouth and nose, then pressed the oxygen mask against her,
depressing the plastic trigger. It took two hits from the canister
before her eyelids fluttered, then flew open wide. He heard her
muffled cry against the rubber mask and shook his head at her.

It’s all right,
he tried to convey,
leaving the mask on her face. She was disoriented, though,
frightened and confused, and struggled briefly with him, trying to
push him away, slapping at him in a frantic frenzy. After a moment,
realization dawned on her, along with recognition, and her
struggles ceased. She uttered a stifled cry then sat up, shrugging
and thrashing to work her hands loose from Langley’s guts.

Working together, they managed to wrestle her
free. Leaning heavily against him, she stumbled to her feet, both
of them keeping their oxygen masks over their mouths and noses.
Andrew nodded to indicate the doorway, and she nodded once in
affirmation. He kept a steadying arm around her as they limped
together toward the door. One of the screamers—Larry, it looked
like, to judge by its massive, misshapen hands—pawed weakly for
them as they passed, and with a muffled cry, Dani danced sideways
to avoid it. It didn’t move again, but they passed it quickly
nonetheless, giving the rest of them as wide a berth as possible in
their bid to escape.