The Skunge (33 page)

"Ha. I see your tastes in literature are as varied and delinquent as my own." He looked down at his phone. "Here we are, just a couple of guys snorking down fine-sipping Scotch and discussing nightmares come to life. It's a strange old world, and the most interesting of times to be alive."

Arneson lit a smoke. "True enough. But just think of the fat government pension you'll collect when all this is behind us."

Brayle considered Arneson again, his eyes glittering. "Maybe. If I'm being honest, and with this much booze in me I may as well…let's just say that the people I work for may not exactly qualify as a government agency."

"Juniper Ridge is a government facility."

"True, as far as it goes. All of the legitimate funding comes directly out of the budget of the department
du jour
. This decade, it's climate science. The one before that? Cloning. Ten years from now? Who knows." Brayle pinched the bridge of his nose. "If there is a ten years from now. And somehow I get the idea that there isn't much of a retirement plan around here." His eyes closed, then snapped open. "I need to hit the head."

As soon as he stepped away, Arneson lunged for the phone. He snatched it up just before it could switch into sleep mode. For a moment, he sat frozen with indecision. What was he hoping to find, exactly? What did he think Brayle—or the people he worked for—were hiding? He almost set the phone down, contemplating the idea of just letting it ride. He was tired. Tired of suspicion, tired of always playing a role, always waiting to be discovered. Would he be happier just putting his trust into some greater power?

No.

He swiped through various screens, his eyes scanning. Finally he found what he wanted. He read it, then returned to the original screen. He set it back down and settled back into his seat just as Brayle returned and dropped into his chair.

"Pour me another, would you? It's been a long day."

Brayle picked up his phone, glanced at it, typed in something, and set it down. He accepted the drink and offered it in a toast.

"I'll drink to that," Arneson said. They clinked glasses drank the whiskey down. Arneson got ready to make his move.

When the team of security guards crashed in, it took four of them to take him down.

CHAPTER SIXTY THREE

When the medical team wheeled Arneson into the operating theater, Brayle was standing beside the bed. He looked spindly and ascetic in his mask and gown, like a praying mantis dressed in doctor's robes. He looked like he'd aged overnight.

"You look like shit, Brayle," Arneson said.

Brayle swallowed. "Didn't sleep very well."

"Oh, had a couple bad dreams, Doc? That's a real shame."

Brayle regarded him through the fluorescent-frosted lenses of his surgical goggles. With his own thick glasses behind them, his face resembled even more some insect of dubious origin.

"Nothing to say Doc?" Arneson gave him a hard, spitless grin. "Hurting me, hurting
her
isn't going to help you stop this thing. You know that."

"Won't it? I wonder. It was your girlfriend that brought this fucking curse down on us all. And don't think that your above blame—the drugstore cowboy act doesn't impress me."

"I think that you're trying to rattle me, but you're the one who's scared. Like maybe your handlers are leaning on you—harder than you're used to, maybe. Are you starting to wonder what happens when they don't need you anymore?"

Brayle was silent.

"Maybe you're wondering what would happen if they were to send
you
downstairs? All the way down. What else would you find, down there? I don't think you know. I don't think anyone knows."

"No. Not really. There are theories." Brayle paused, his hand coming up to pinch at the bridge of his nose. He was stymied by the goggles. "I think it's hell. 'Hell is empty and all the devils are here.' Have you ever heard that before, Arneson?"

"Yeah. Back in high school."

Brayle leaned over Arneson, close enough to see the map of broken blood vessels in the Doctor's eyes. Something else, as well—Brayle's eyes were full of fear. "Hell isn't empty—it's full.
Full of things
."

Arneson turned his face away. The Skunge shifted inside, squirming through every vein, artery and nerve-tunnel in his body. His core, his center had been breached, and it was worse than dying could ever be. "I've listened to guys like you a thousand times. Using your own fear to justify your actios. You know what you can do? You can cram it sideways. Let's roll."

Brayle stared at him a moment longer, started to say something, then shook his head and moved away.

When the pump began to thrum, the physical sensation was so novel and profoundly uncomfortable that it took a full twenty seconds before he recognized it as pain. Once he did, waves of it came fast and fiery. The sensations was like they had painted a scorching acid on his skin and then began drawing on him with dull tattoo needles. That was bad, but what came next was much worse. If someone had implanted a vacuum pump inside him, cranked it up to eleven, and then flipped the switch—maybe that would be the equivalent. Every part of him contracted, all at once. Every muscle in his body, from the tiniest above his eyebrows to the long muscles of his thighs, began to burn.
This is your entire body fighting back
. Panic clawed at his mind. He talked his way through each new wave, focusing his mind on the phantom sound of his inner voice.
This is your entire body—every cell—waking up and coming alive
.
They are fighting because this is going to kill them
.

Another spasm. There was a crack like ice breaking and his right leg exploded with pain. He would have howled, if he could have found the breath. His vision exploded with pure white agony, eyes rolling back in his head. His overburdened mind shut itself down, lapsing into a buzzing electric cocoon.

The scream of the Skunge filled him. The sound of Sugar in the gas station, in the elevator. The sound of the devils, howling.

This is the Skunge, dying. Die, you fucking curse. Die screaming, and go back to hell.

And then his mind cracked, flipped, and shut down.

Coming back to life was like fighting his way up through clouds of sticky smoke. It gummed his eyes, his mouth, his ears. When he opened his eyes, he saw nothing but filmy blackness. He heard voices, people calling him by names he had almost forgotten. He spoke back, in his mind. Y
es. Yes! I'm here.
I'm alive
. His body would not respond. Nothing functioned. He walked through his nightmares, old and new. Emotions he had no name for wracked his mind. He saw colors he could not describe, and they danced and whirled around him like a carousel, spinning and spinning.

Unconsciousness and wakefulness flipped and spun. He would wake up in his old bedroom, next to Nicole, terrified, from a nightmare he couldn't remember. Then he found himself back in the trailer in California, hearing the wail of a baby. He stalked through the trailer, unable to find the source. Finally he stopped in front of the door, that hateful door of memory, and his mind screamed at him not to open it. He did anyway, and found himself in the corridors of Juniper Ridge, chased by something inhuman. Every door snapped open and closed, like hungry mouths. Every room was filled with the torn bodies of men, women, children. One by one, they lurched upright to follow, their eyes flat, black, and hungry.

They chased him through the guts of the building, nothing but winding gray hallways skinned with carpet, shining steel, black smoked glass and screens scrolling alien characters that slid across his consciousness like raw eggs across a plate. He saw the skinned woman, heard her insane laughter, and his heart thudded in his chest. Then she was there, right there in front of him. He could only watch as she came for him, her mouth like a gnashing red disaster of teeth. Her face became Nicole's, then Sugar's.

Some part of him knew it was a dream; you couldn't spend as long as he did undercover and not develop the animal instinct about what is real and what is not. But the thought of waking up from this nightmare gave him no hope. He began to think he wouldn't be able to wake up. Maybe the treatment had gone wrong, and he would stay there, forever trapped in the dream world, sleeping through life, running through the endless corridors of night, pursued by ghosts from his past.

Then the booming voice of a god woke him, and brought him back to the real world.

CHAPTER SIXTY FOUR

"Wake up, asshole." Arneson
knew
that voice. Who was it? Not Sugar. Not Brayle. Sonch? Maas? Someone he had taken down over the years, some backwater drug lord or vice king, back for revenge?

Whack!

His face stung. The momentary pain was nothing more than a single flake of the avalanche of sensation running up and down his body. His skin was too cold, too hot, too tight. His head throbbed. It was a few moments before he realized his eyes were open. A white ceiling, white walls, indirect muted lighting. The smell of clean sheets and the biting tang of rubbing alcohol. Juniper Ridge. The recovery room.

"Wake up, you stupid bastard."

Whack!

The room shook. Someone had slapped him. He shifted his eyes right, then left and saw nothing but darkness. Realized his eyes had slipped closed, and opened them again.

Hanging over him like a fat, angry moon, was Crantz. Flecks of food hung in his goatee, and his eyes were shot through with glaring red vessels. He looked sick.

"Crantz." His voice was like a rusted gearbox. Tried again. "
Crantz
."

"Hey, there he is! Big bad Arneson, back from the dead. It's good to see you, asshole."

"Can't say…same about you. Brayle?"

"He's around. Just thought I'd come and say hi while you're on the mend." Crantz's breath was like a sewer.

Arneson closed his eyes again. "Great. Go 'way."

"Not just yet. Wanted you to see something first."

Arneson tried to roll away, and something was wrong. He puzzled over the sensation before adrenaline flooded his system, revving his heart-rate up. He couldn't move. His body refused direction; not a twitch or spasm of muscle to reward the increasingly frantic signals his brain sent down the inert wires of his body. It was like trying to lift a freezer-full of meat just by thinking hard at it. It wouldn't have mattered, at any rate; he was tied down, arms and legs strapped into padded leather manacles attached to the bed with steel eye-bolts. Crantz chuckled and thrust his phone in front of Arneson's face.

Sugar, all of her blond hair gone, her delicate features buried in the Skunge; there was so little left of her under the Skunge that it could have been anyone. But it wasn't anyone, it was her. Arneson knew by the way she drew breath. She sat, unmoving, in a concrete cube of a cell, a room with a cement slab bed and a drain on the floor.

"Rat f-f-fuck. Kill. I'll kill. You."

Crantz giggled porkily, then slapped Arneson across the face with the phone.
Whack
! Then again, harder. He stared down at Arneson with something like lust. "You ain't killing shit. You and your Skunger girl are fucked." He leaned down close. "Fucked in the ass. You know that, right?"
Whack!
Another smack with the phone, this one hard enough to send reverberating bells through Arneson's head.

"Fucking kill you, Crantz."

Crantz waved his hand. "Yeah, yeah, right. By the way, you want to know where you recognize me from? From right here in Junction City. We went to high school together. Remember?"

Arneson coughed. His throat was on fire. "You on the cheer-leading squad?"

Crantz raised his hand again, and this time formed a fist. "Of course you don't remember me. None of you too-cool kids would ever remember Crantz, the fat little toad." He took a deep breath and composed himself, then smiled like a snake. "Once you're on the outside, I guess you're on the outside forever. I guess maybe I can't blame you. When you left school, I was still a little runt." He leaned in close. "Sometimes I still feel like that little kid, getting ignored by all the girls, and all the guys. But now I'm big. Let this be a lesson to you: the past repeats itself. Try not to forget that in the time you have left."

Arneson stared into Crantz's face. He searched his memory for a flash of recollection. Nothing. "Fuck you. Get Brayle."

Crantz's face broke out in his cruel, sunny grin. "Oh, he's around."

"I'm here. If you're done tormenting him, you can go." Brayle stood in the doorway. He wore an ugly, strained smile, the corners of his mouth held up as if by hidden wires under his skin.

"I'm not even close to through with him. But I've got stuff to do." Crantz straightened his uniform shirt with exaggerated slowness, pulling at his tie, staring Arneson in the eyes. "Be seeing you," he said, and walked out.

"Can't wait," Arneson croaked. He closed his eyes again, and this time when he opened them, Brayle was there.