From a Buick 8 (25 page)

At the same time he became aware of that tenebrous rustling, his eyes seemed to sharpen. The world took on a preternatural clarity. He could see the rosy pink of Curtis's skin through the thin gloves he was wearing, and the matted whorls that was the hair on the backs of his fingers. The glove's white was very bright against the creature's midsection, which had gone a matted, listless gray. The thing's mouth hung open. Its single black eye stared at nothing, its surface dull and glazed. To Sandy that eye looked as big
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as a teacup.

The smell was getting worse, but Sandy said nothing. Curt and the Sergeant were right in there with it, next to the source. He guessed if they could stand it, he could. Curt peeled up the wing lying across the creature's middle, revealing sallow green fur and a small puckered cavity that might have held the thing's genitals. He held the wing against the corkboard. 'Pin,' he said.

Tony pinned the wing. It was dark gray and all membrane. There was no sign of bone or blood vessels that Sandy could see. Curt shifted his hand on the thing's midsection so he could raise the other wing. Sandy heard that liquid squelching sound again. It was getting hot in the supply room and had to be even worse in the closet. Those Tensor lamps.

'Pin, boss.'

Tony pinned the other wing and now the creature hung on the board like something out of a Bela Lugosi film. Except, once you could see all of it, it didn't really look much like a bat at all, or a flying squirrel, or certainly any kind of bird.

It didn't look like
anything.
That yellow prong sticking out from the center of its face, for instance was it a bone? A beak? A nose? If it was a nose, where were the nostrils? To Sandy it looked more like a claw than a nose, and more like a thorn than a claw. And what about that single eye? Sandy tried to think of any earthly creature that had only one eye and couldn't. There had to be such a creature, didn't there? Somewhere? In the jungles of South America, or maybe at the bottom of the ocean?

And the thing had no feet; its body simply ended in a butt like a green-black thumb. Curt pinned this part of the specimen's anatomy to the board himself, pinching the furry hide away from its body and then impaling a loose fold. Tony finished the job by driving pins into the corkboard through the thing's armpits.
Or maybe you call them wingpits,
Sandy thought. This time it was Curtis who made an involun-tary sound of disgust behind his mask, and he wiped his brow with his forearm. 'I wish we'd thought to bring in the fan,' he said. Sandy, whose head was beginning to swim, agreed. Either the stench was getting worse or it had a cumulative effect.

'Plug in one more thing and we'd probably trip the breaker,' Tony said. 'Then we could be in the dark with this ugly motherfucker. Also trapped, on account of Cecil B. DeMille's got his camera set up in the doorway. Go on, Curt. I'm okay if you are.'

Curt stepped back, snatched a breath of slightly cleaner air, tried to compose himself, then stepped forward to the table again. 'I'm not measuring,' he said. 'We got all that done out in the shed, right?'

'Yeah,' Sandy replied. 'Fourteen inches long. Thirty-six centimeters, if you like that better. Body's about a handspan across at the widest. Maybe a little less. Go on, for God's sake, so we can get out of here.'

'Give me both scalpels, plus retractors.'

'How many retractors?'

Curt gave him a look that said
Don't be a bozo.
'All of them.' Another quick swipe of the forehead. And, after Sandy had handed the stuff over the top of the camera and Curt had arranged it as best he
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could: 'Watch through the viewfinder, okay? Zoom the shit out of the mother. Let's get the best record we can.'

'People'd still say it's a fake,' Tony said mildly. 'You know that, don't you?'

Curtis then said something Sandy never forgot. He believed that Curtis, already under severe mental strain and in increasingly severe physical distress, spoke the truth of his mind in baldly simple terms people rarely dare to use, because they reveal too much about the speaker's real heart. 'Fuck the John Q.'s,' was what Curtis said. 'This is for us.'

'I've got a good tight shot,' Sandy told him. 'The smell may be bad, but the light's heavenly.' The time-code at the bottom of the little interior TV screen read 7:49:01P.

'Cutting now,' Curt said, and slid his larger scalpel into the pinned creature's midsection. His hands didn't tremble; any stage-fright accompanying the arrival of the big moment must have come and gone quickly. There was a wet popping sound, like a bubble of some thick liquid breaking, and all at once drops of black goo began to patter into the trough under the easel.

'Oh man,' Sandy said. 'Oh, that really stinks.'

'Fucking
foul,'
Tony added. His voice was thin and dismayed. Curt took no notice. He opened the thing's abdomen and made the standard branching incisions up to the pinned wingpits, creating the Y-cut used in any human postmortem. He then used his pincers to pull back the hide over the thoracic area, more clearly revealing a spongy dark green mass beneath a narrow arch of bone. Sandy had never seen anything like it.

'Jesus God, where's its
lungs?'
Tony asked. Sandy could hear him breathing in harsh little sips.

'This green thing could be a lung,' Curt said.

'Looks more like a - '

'Like a brain, yeah, I know it does. A green brain. Let's take a look.'

Curt turned his scalpel and used the blunt side to tap the white arch above the crenellated green organ.

'If the green thing's a brain, then its particular evolution gave it a chastity belt for protection instead of a safety deposit box. Give me the shears, Sandy. The smaller pair.'

Sandy handed them over, then bent back to the video camera's viewfinder. He was zoomed to the max, as per instructions, and had a nice clear picture.

'Cutting . . . now.'

Curt slipped the lower blade of the shears under the arch of bone and snipped it as neatly as the cord on a package. It sprang back on both sides like a rib, and the moment it did the surface of the green sponge in the thing's chest turned white and began to hiss like a radiator. A strong aroma of peppermint and clove filled the air. A thick bubbling sound joined the hissing. It was like the sound of a straw prospecting the bottom of a nearly empty milkshake glass.

'Think we should get out of here?' Tony asked.

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'Too late.' Curt was bent over the opened chest, where the spongy thing had now begun to sweat droplets and runnels of "whitish-green liquid. He was more than interested; he was rapt. Looking at him, Sandy could understand about the fellow who deliberately infected himself with yellow fever or the Curie woman, who gave herself cancer fiddling around with radiation. 'I am made the destroyer of worlds,'

Robert Oppenheimer muttered during the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, and then went on to start work on the H-bomb with hardly a pause for tea and scones.
Because stuff gets you,
Sandy thought.
And because, while curiosity is a provable fact, satisfaction
is more like a rumor. Or maybe an out-and-out myth.

'What's it doing?' Tony asked. Sandy thought that from what he could see above the pink mask, the Sarge already had a pretty good idea.

'Decomposing,' Curt replied. 'Getting a good picture, Sandy? My head not in your way?'

'It's fine, five-by,' Sandy replied in a slightly strangled voice. At first the peppermint-clove variation had seemed almost refreshing, but now it sat in the back of his throat like the taste of machine-oil. And the cabbagey reek was creeping back. Sandy's head was swimming more strenuously than ever, and his guts had begun to slosh. 'I wouldn't take too long about

this, though, or we're going to choke in here.'

'Open the door at the end of the hall,' Curt said.

'You told me - '

'Go on, do what he says,' Tony told him, and so Sandy did. When he came back, Tony was asking Curt if Curt thought snipping the bone arch had sped up the decomposition process.

'No,' Curt said. 'I think touching the spongy stuff with the tip of the shears is what did it. The things that come out of that car don't seem to get along with us very well, do they?'

Neither Tony nor Sandy had any wish to argue that. The green sponge didn't look like a brain or a lung or anything else recognizable by then; it was just a pustulant, decomposing sac in the corpse's open chest.

Curt glanced toward Sandy. 'If that green thing was its brain, what do you suppose is in its head?

Inquiring minds want to know.' And before either of them completely realized what he was doing, Curt reached out with the smaller of his scalpels and poked the blade into the thing's glazed eye. There was a sound like a man popping his finger in his cheek. The eye collapsed and slid out of its socket whole, like a hideous shed tear. Tony gave an involuntary shout of horror. Sandy uttered a low scream. The collapsed eye struck the thing's furry shoulder and then plopped into the drip-gutter. A moment later it began to hiss and turn white.

'Stop it,' Sandy heard himself saying. 'This is pointless. We're not going to learn anything from it, Curtis. There's nothing to learn.'

Curtis, so far as Sandy could tell, didn't even hear him. 'Holy shit,' he was whispering. 'Holy fucking shit.'

Fibrous pink stuff began to bulge from the vacant eyesocket. It looked like cotton candy, or the
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insulation people use in their attics. It came out, formed an amorphous node, then turned white and began to liquefy, like the green thing.

'Was that shit alive?' Tony asked. 'Was that shit alive when it - '

'No, that was only depressurization,' Curt said. 'I'm sure of it. It's no more alive than shaving cream when it comes out of the can. Did you get it on tape, Sandy?'

'Oh yeah. For what it's worth.'

'Okay. Let's look in the lower gut and then we're done.'

What came out next killed any real sleep for at least a month. What Sandy was left with were those short dozes from which one wakes, gasping, sure that something one can't quite see has been crouching on one's chest and stealing one's breath.

Curt retracted the hide from the abdominal area and asked Tony to pin it, first on the left and then on the right. Tony managed, although not without difficulty; the work had become very fine and both of them had their faces close to the incision. The reek in that close must have been tremendous, Sandy thought. Without turning his head Curt groped out, found one of the Tensor lamps, and turned it slightly, intensifying the light pouring into the incision. Sandy saw a folded rope of dark liverish red stuff intestines - piled on top of a bluish-gray sac.

'Cutting,' Curt murmured, and caressed the edge of his scalpel down the sac's lumpy, bulging surface. It split open and black ichor shot out directly into Curt's face, painting his cheeks and splashing his mask. More of it splattered Tony's gloves. Both men recoiled, crying out, while Sandy stood frozen behind the video camera with his jaw hung down. Pouring out of the rapidly deflating sac was a flood of rough black pellets, each of them wrapped in a swaddle of gray membrane. To Sandy they looked like spider-snacks which had been put up in cobweb shrouds. Then he saw that each pellet had an open glazed eye and that each eye seemed to be staring at
him,
marking him, and that was when his nerve broke. He backed away from the camera, screaming. The screams were replaced by a gagging sound. A moment later he vomited down the front of his shirt. Sandy himself remembered almost none of that; the five minutes or so following Curt's final incision were pretty much burned out of his memory, and he counted that a mercy.

The first thing he remembered on the other side of that cigarette-burn in the surface of his memory was Tony saying, 'Go on, now, you hear? You guys go on back upstairs. Everything here is under control.'

And, close to his left ear, Curt was murmuring another version of the same thing, telling Sandy he was all right, totally cool, fi'-by-fi'.

Five-by-five:that was what lured Sandy back from his brief vacation in the land of hysteria. But if everything was five-by, why was Curt breathing so fast? And why was the hand on Sandy's arm so cold?

Even through the rubber membrane of the glove (which he had so far neglected to take off), Curt's hand was cold.

'I threw up,' Sandy said, and felt the dull heat hit his cheeks as the blood rose there. He couldn't remember ever feeling so ashamed and demoralized. 'Christ Jesus, I threw up all over myself.'

'Yeah,' Curt said, 'you hurled like a hero. Don't worry about it.'

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Sandy took a breath and then grimaced as his stomach knotted and almost betrayed him again. They were in the corridor, but even out here that cabbagey reek was almost overpowering. At the same time he realized exactly where in the hallway he was: standing in front of the rickrack cabinet from which he had scrounged the extension cord. The cabinet's door was open. Sandy wasn't sure, but he had an idea he'd fled down here from the supply room, perhaps with the idea of crawling into the cabinet, pulling the door shut behind him, and just curling up in the dark. This struck him funny and he voiced a single shrill chuckle.

'There, that's better,' Curt said, sounding as pleased as a mother whose child has just managed to tinkle in the potty for the first time. He gave Sandy a pat and looked shocked when Sandy shrank away from his touch.

'Not you,' Sandy said. 'That mung . . . that goo - '

He couldn't finish; his throat had locked up. He pointed at Curt's hand, instead. The slime which had come out of the bat-thing's pregnant dead uterus was smeared all over Curt's gloves, and some of it was now on Sandy's arm as well. Curt's mask, pulled down so it hung against his neck, was also streaked and stained. There was a black crust like a scab on his cheek.