The Skunge (31 page)

"Best and brightest minds, working for the richest government in history, and you can't see inside a seed-pod."

"We tried. We tried X Ray, backscatter, millimeter scan, heat sensing, you name it. Every time, the reaction was…extreme. Basically, when the thing opened, it looked like the people inside had exploded. This one, we custom-built a modified MRI machine to look, but the pod started jittering so badly we had to stop before she shook herself to pieces. Who knows what kind of damage that did. Opening it, without destroying it, is impossible. We can't cut it, can't crack it, can't see inside it—it's a black box. We took some bits of expended material and ran some tests to see just how strong this stuff is, and the advanced armory guys are taking it apart, atom by atom, to see what makes it so strong."

"So your options are: destroy it, or wait to see what comes out of it."

Brayle looked sheepish. "We don't have a choice."

Arneson contemplated it. "You called this thing
she
."

Brayle nodded. "We've only ever seen the cocooning behavior from female infectees. And only females that exhibited certain other conditions." He gestured to the chrysalis. "Her name is Sarah Brightman. She writes children's books. Or did, once upon a time, at any rate. She was in the hospital for gall stones when the Skunge emerged."

Arneson walked a circle around the cocoon, eyes intent. "Sexually transmitted?"

"She was raped."

Arneson considered this for a moment. "And this complication you talked about. Let me guess; she's pregnant, too." At Brayle's nod, Arneson closed his eyes. "So what the hell is going to happen to the baby?"

"That," Brayle said, his eyes far away, "is the question, and the answer." Brayle moved back to the doorway. "Now, come on. I have more to show you."

CHAPTER FIFTY NINE

The hallways on Phase Three had the same oyster-colored carpet and bland industrial lighting, but something was different. The air held a sinister, sub-audible tone that made Arneson's teeth vibrate. The corridor felt tight and claustrophobic, like the walls were waiting for your guard to drop so they could fall upon and devour you. Brayle stopped at the next door they came to, and used his phone to enter.

"Our next exhibit." He gestured for Arneson to enter first.

A screen lit up as they entered. White letters on a black screen, with a red, translucent symbol super-imposed over the text. For Arneson, who had seen warning signs of every stripe, the image screamed one thing: danger. Arneson read the words on the screen

"
Atrax Tyrannus. Warning: entrance prohibited without Apex clearance. Do not enter habitat without a Kevlar suit rated at a minimum as U-84. Do not attempt to remove any objects from the habitat. Do not—"

Arneson turned to Brayle, eyebrows raised. "Habitat? I didn't have this place pegged as a wilderness refuge. You some kind of tree-hugger, Brayle?"

"Not quite. Don't get me wrong, I love animals; they're delicious. But this isn't exactly the San Diego zoo. I guess you could call this a refuge, but not the usual kind. Come on in, have a look."

Brayle gestures toward a large, glassed-in middle section half the size of a basketball court. The glass wall was rounded, and the glass was threaded with steel mesh almost too thin to see. The core was dimly lit, filled with lush vegetation, and a sparkling pinkish mist.

Brayle spoke into his phone. Arneson caught something that sounded like 'feeding time'. After a few moments, something stirred in the mist. A shape, somehow familiar, coalesced in the fog. Arneson relaxed when he saw that it was a deer. A white-tail, common in Central Oregon. Next to the scrawny types that Arneson had hunted in his youth, this one was glossy and plump. The deer munched at the vegetation, eyes shining with what might have been contentment.

Then something opened in the forest floor, yawning like a dark mouth. From the hole emerged a pair of spiny black chitinous legs, each as long as Arneson's arm. As quickly as they had appeared, they disappeared back into the hole in the ground. The deer never even looked up. Not until a dozen identical holes in the floor opened up and spit out an equal number of crawling black horrors. Spiders the size of large dogs, with hairy black bodies and sparking, ruby-red eyes as large as saucers. And their legs; there was something
wrong
with the legs. They moved in ways that tricked the eye. Arneson's head throbbed as his eyes tried to follow the crawling figures. He blinked—did they have too
many
legs, or not enough?

They fell on the doe and began to tear it apart. It screamed in bestial terror, bleating out its last moments. Soft brown flags of the deer's pelt flew, only to be hooked down out of the air by spiny, chitinous legs. Blood gouted as the thing toppled onto its side. The spiders burrowed into the deer's stomach, fighting against each other for the guts like pigs at a trough. The stronger ones wriggled their fat bodies into the gaping holes they had chewed into the deer's well-fed stomach.

"Sometimes they'll just play with whatever we give them," Brayle said. "Chase them, tire them out; then they hold the poor thing down and lay eggs in it. They'll break the thing's legs, and leave it alone. The babies hatch within a day, and eat their way out while the host is still alive. We kill the young, of course. The ones we have here are more than enough for study."

"Where did you get them?"

"A hidden island in the South Seas. A totally self-contained environment, where they could evolve into the most efficient predators around. You should have seen the things they were eating." Brayle pinched the bridge of his nose. "Jesus, watching these things still gives me a headache." He regarded the doe as it screamed through its death throes. "Can you imagine if these things got loose and started breeding out there? In the suburbs? In the cities?"

The deer shook as flesh was ripped from still-living bone. Even through the special glass, Arneson heard the thing screaming.

"They're pretty freaky-looking, sure, but still just spiders." Even as Arneson said it, he knew it for the lie it was; there was something different about them—something that made his stomach twist itself into anxious knots.

"What if I told you they couldn't be killed?"

"Anything can be killed."

"Well sure, running one through an industrial blender, it'll kill
that
spider. But if a piece bigger than your thumbnail gets loose…it floats away on the wind until it lands on something—a rotting carcass, for example—that it can feed on. It grows and starts reproducing, without procreating, almost immediately."

"Groovy."

"Isn't it, though."

One of the spiders broke off from the assault. It paused, and turned slowly toward the glass. Arneson looked into its red, bulbous eyes, and he could have sworn the thing saw him and marked him. Then it jumped.

It slammed into the glass hard enough for Arneson to feel it through his boots. The underside of the spider was a gnashing pink-gray gullet rimmed with wickedly-sharp teeth. The mouth flexed and writhed as the thing tried to bite at glass. The hooks on its legs held it there in defiance of gravity. Arneson could see the glass clouding with its breath.

"It could take off your arm and you wouldn't even feel it until the thing was already climbing its way up to your face." The spider scuttered back and forth across the glass, the rows of teeth meshing and un-meshing in a slithery, obscene way that made Arneson's stomach turn. He tore his gaze away.

"Quite a place you're running here, doc." He stepped up to the glass and tapped on it. The spider froze, listening, then dropped off and returned to the deer's corpse. "So, you collect creepy-crawlies. Everyone need a hobby."

"Ah! But we don't just collect them. We control their population, husband them, study them. Let me put it this way; have you ever heard even a
whisper
about these things?"

"Can't say I have."

"Exactly.
This
is what we do here. This is
why
we're here."

"What are you trying to tell me? To just trust the government to know what's best for me, and let the men in black suits protect me from all the stuff that walks in the dark?"

Brayle smiled. "It may seem like that—hell, maybe I
do
mean that. But that's big picture stuff. National—hell, world-wide interest stuff. I'm talking about you and Sugar. You two can help us here. You can help a lot."

Arneson felt unease creep into his stomach. Orders he understood. Direction, ditto. But favors: favors you did only for those you trusted. For trench-mates, the guys you knew had your back because they knew you had theirs. "What is it?"

"Before I tell you, I have something else to show you," Brayle said.

The next specimen room was almost completely dark. The only light was a screen that lit up when they entered. A cone of red light shone inside another glass core. It shone down in the center, like a street-lamp with a crimson bulb. The air swirled with smoke and a fine, glittering dust.

"She doesn't breathe air. She may breathe the silica dust we circulate in the air, or she may just enjoy it. She may not breathe at all."

"She?"

Brayle leaned forward and knocked on the glass. Arneson expected some writhing Lovecraftian horror to come screaming out of the gloom, but there was nothing. A faint eddy in the mist, a bare suggestion of movement.

Then he saw her. First he saw her shape: slim, tall, a long curving thigh. When her eyes sparkled at him out of the shadows, his first thought was that she resembled Sugar.

Then she stepped out into the light.

Arneson felt his senses swim. She didn't resemble Sugar. Not at all. She was far more beautiful, far more desirable, far more—

There was something
wrong
with her. He blinked. It took him a long moment to digest what his eyes told him; another moment to process it so he could really
see.

"Dear God."

She was darkly scarlet, like she had been dipped in paint. He could see every striation of muscle, every vein standing out in sharp relief. When she moved, as elegant as a dancer, the red light gleamed off exposed muscle and tissue, the tiniest, teasing peek of bone. A beautiful women with her skin removed.

"We call her the Skinned Woman. We have no idea what she is, but I bet when you first clapped an eye on her, you were pretty impressed. Am I right?"

"Yeah." Arneson could barely blink, let alone look away from the woman.

"She has that affect on men. But trust me, she does not want dinner and a date." Brayle paused to consider. "Well, she doesn't want the date, at least."

The Skinned Woman tilted her head at Arneson, then walked toward the glass with an elegant, languorous lack of haste. She would have looked at home strolling along the Thames, under a parasol, a suitor at either elbow. Arneson tried to stop looking, and found he could not. His eyes stayed on hers, seeing the alien red planes of her face. Mocking, insane laughter rose up in his mind. She smiled, showcasing teeth like red needles, then turned and walked away. Finally he wrenched his gaze away.

"You get used to the effect after a few times," Brayle continued. "The whole
woo-woo look-at-me
business." He waggled his fingers in front of his face. "And the laughing. At least most people get used to it. Others get one look, and they just can't forget about her. She rides their mind from that moment on, and all she wants them to do is break her out. She whispers to them about how slowly she's going to eat them, and bathe in their blood, and swallow their souls, that sort of thing. Really terrible stuff; but to them, it is like being singled out by God. The victim is never really the same. Before we found a cure for the obsession, we lost a few guys. They ended up killing themselves trying to break her out."

The Skinned Woman passed back through the light, this time sparing them little more than a glance. Arneson felt the look like a punch to his gut, but it faded as soon as she passed from sight.

"But you're a tough guy, aren't you? Strong-minded, self-controlled. You don't have to worry about that kind of thing."

"That's right." Arneson looked like he'd been run through a ringer. In a way, he had. "How about we stop here, Doc. I think I've seen enough."

"Oh, the best is yet to come, my friend," Brayle said. He started off down the corridor. "The best is yet to come."

CHAPTER SIXTY

They saw it all that night: the horrors from beyond the stars, the eyeless freaks, the pallid nightmares that crept after them on tenebrous legs. Nightmares come to hideous, Technicolor life. Arneson wondered aloud how he would ever sleep again; Brayle reminded him that he had, in fact, asked for it. Soon, midnight showed its face, and they entered the final hallway.

Brayle's showy, false coyness disappeared as they entered the room. The last room on the tour. He became grave, face composed, eyes watchful.