The Skunge (36 page)

He breathed something like a prayer and opened an outside view of Juniper Ridge. There, across a concrete expanse, he could see the mountains. His heart lifted at the sight. The two months he and Sugar had spent in Juniper Ridge seemed as long as memory. A delicate blue haze of forest fire smoke hung around the mountains, the sun sinking toward the horizon like a dropped penny.

He clicked around the view, drinking in the view of the parking lot bathed in the glow of magic-hour sunlight. That's when he saw them.

Skungers. Thousands of them. They stood at the gates, ominous and still as birds in a Hitchcock movie.

He pulled up a magnification app on the phone and scanned the crowd. Up close, he saw a frightening panoply of Skungers. Some looked barely infected, only hints of the Skunge growing from exposed skin and interleaved with their hair. Others were nothing more than hulking, vaguely human-shaped lumps of Skunge tentacles. He scanned the crowd with the phone.

He was missing something. What? He swept the crowd again, looking for whatever had pinged his intuition. He let his mind float, giving it free reign to fasten somewhere, splitting his brain into component parts.

Part of his mind was consumed with worry about Sugar. He had no plan. She was either past redemption, or the clock was ticking away to her final transition. He thought of her inside one of the chrysalises, sleeping through a change that would render her something other than human. In his memory, Sugar's face had sharpened, while Nicole's had faded like an old photograph. It stung—but as Sugar liked to say, sometimes the cure is worse than the ill. Nicole would remain there, inside his memory. The first woman to teach him about loss, and—

He snapped back to focus on the Skungers at the gates.
Women
. That's what was missing. There were no females at the gates. He thought back to Sugar's story of her encounter at the hospital in LA. What Brayle had said. The female of the species. Sugar, as their Queen.

Panting with pain, exhaustion, and something like panic, he sprinted toward the trucks.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

Sugar was tired. So tired, now. An old song chimed in her memory, something about having so far to go. She would have smiled, had she still been able to.

She swept down the corridor, pushing her new body to its limit, she felt her body gearing up, generating a frightening thrum of power. She knew what the power could do, and what it was meant to do. And she would let it happen, once she finished her redemption work.

She had felt them there, at the gates, for days. Her

subjects

fellow Skungers, gathering together, to commune as a whole mind. She felt the pull. The power of the Skunge as the throng outside coalesced into one hive mind that whispered to her, insinuating and persuasive.

She pulled out Brayle's phone. Her new fingers, delicate bundles of Skunge, extended and danced over the surface. With Brayle's phone she could control doors, windows, lights. She could control
everything
.

So tired, but she had more to do before she could rest.

She pressed a series of buttons on the phone, waited for it to flash yellow, then turned to Brayle.

He lay plastered to the floor with Skunge. She took his hand, and rolled his thumbprint across the panel. The icon flashed, and turned green. It was done.

Outside, the gates slid open. She raised the phone to where her mouth once was, and she began to sing.

CHAPTER SEVENTY ONE

When the gates began to open, the Skungers, suddenly unsure, looked back toward a large black SUV. The windows were tinted over like blind eyes, and the back end sagged toward the pavement.

Inside, Maas sat upright, his head turning and questing as Sugar's call filled his brain. The Skunge growing from his eye sockets whipped and lashed.

From the darkened back of the SUV, a liquid animal grunt. A large sound, something huge and profoundly heavy.

Maas turned and smiled blindly into the back.

"Soon," he said.

The vehicle rolled through the gates, and the Skungers followed.

CHAPTER SEVENTY TWO

He found a set of keys behind the sun visor, and the truck started with a throaty growl. He rolled the truck forward to the enormous steel plate of the hydraulic lift.

He jammed his foot down on the brake, grunting with pain, and reached for the phone. It rattled on the console, and his hand froze. It rattled again, louder this time. Something was shaking the ground. A deep rumbling sounded from the floor of the docks, and he saw shafts of light streaming in as the lifts overhead began to lower. It took him a moment to understand what was happening, and then the truth struck him. He scrabbled for the phone.

Someone had opened the gates for them. The Skungers were coming inside. He punched at the remote viewing app, scrolling down the list of views until he found the camera showing the parking lot. They were up top, directly over his head, gathered like flies on a piece of green meat. He craned his neck to look up.

Several of the hydraulic pillar lifts were on the way down. Skungers thronged the platforms. As he watched, one fell or was pushed off the side. The Skunger dropped toward him like a stone, and landed on the hood of his truck with a boom. Blood and green ichor splashed the windshield. Arneson slammed the truck into reverse and sped backward. The Skunger slid off the smashed hood, trailing broken vines and gaudy streaks of green and red fluid.

He hit the gas, spinning the wheel. The truck arrowed back toward the tunnel door. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people inside Juniper Ridge, and he wouldn't sacrifice them for his own escape. He drove with his left hand, holding the phone with his right. Once on the other side, he'd close the tunnel doors, trapping the Skungers within. And then—

"Oh, shit."

In the mouth of the tunnel, a line of Juniper Ridge security guards, clad in black riot gear and carrying long truncheons. In front, pointing a gun at Arneson's face, his face split in a sneering grin, was Crantz.

CHAPTER SEVENTY THREE

Arneson slammed up the steel ramp and brought the truck to a screeching stop, ten feet from the line of guards. Their shiny black exo-skeletal riot armor glinted in the overhead lights, and their steel truncheons arced and spat with electricity.

Arneson climbed down from the truck. He stood between the opposing armies.

"Fuck," he said. "I wish I had a gun."

The two sides rushed. Arneson braced for the fight.

CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR

The Skungers crashed into the guards like a ragged swell of polluted water on a seawall. The screams of humans and Skungers rang out, along with the sounds of the guards' carts slamming into Skunger bodies. The guards lifted phones and fired off squalls of the anti-Skunge signal, but most of the strength was lost, rendered ineffective in the vast open space of the docks.

The guards fought for dominance; the Skungers fought for their lives. Truncheons flashed in the overhead lights, and the stench of ozone filled the air mixing with the acrid smell of the Skungers. Men screamed.

Arneson worked his way down the tunnel, away from the docks, kicking and clawing and tearing; anything that tried to grab and hold, he made them pay. He cracked bones, tore flesh, received blow after blow on his back and a particularly stinging blast with a truncheon.

Crantz loomed ahead, great and terrible, like a statue of a forgotten, minor deity. He grinned at Arneson.

"Close the tunnel, Crantz. Stop them here, keep them out of the—"

"You think I give a shit about those people?" Crantz waded toward him. "We are going to end this right here, right now."

Arneson wondered if he meant the battle for Juniper Ridge, or just Crantz's seemingly inexhaustible hatred. Then he decided it didn't really matter.

Arneson jumped, aiming for Crantz's thigh. One good hit would let the big man's size be his own undoing. But Crantz saw it, and instead of flinching or deflecting, instead grabbed Arneson out of mid-air.

Crantz slammed his head into Arneson's face while his massive arms squeezed so hard Arneson heard his ribs creak. Finally he freed a hand, and smashed it across Crantz's face, but without a steady foot on the ground, the blow lacked power. Crantz snarled at him, spitting blood from his lip, and brought up one meaty hand, his thumb jamming into Arneson's eye.

The pain was excruciating. Arneson was surprised how quickly the body forgets the sensation of agony. Crantz ground his thumb inward, seeking the meat of his brain. The agony of being on the table had already faded from his mind, and he could no longer recall that exact feeling. The body's way of protecting the mind.

He formed the fingers of his right hand into a flat spear and jabbed them at Crantz's eyes. It was a glancing blow, sliding off the side of his nose, but it forced Crantz to lessen the pressure on his eye. Arneson rolled his trapped left wrist, bending it almost a right angle. Crantz's hand, as big and strong as it was, couldn't follow that flexibility. He had to let go. But his hand came up with a gun.

CHAPTER SEVENTY FIVE

Two points of light approached from the gloom of the tunnel. Headlights. A cart, speeding toward the battle, driven by Lester Brayle. Behind him slumped Sugar, her form lumpen and monstrous. Brayle stared straight ahead, the overhead fluorescents glinting from his glasses. The guards stopped, staring, as the Skungers turned and lowered their misshapen heads in deference to their queen.

Brayle's head, except for his eyes and his mouth, was wrapped with Skunge. The stuff covered his nose, his ears, and spirals of it wound their way around the length of his neck. Even his hair had been subsumed in the writhing profusion. Only his eyes, bright and hellishly aware, remained uncovered. Tentacles of Skunge ran from Sugar into the flesh of his neck, near the base of his brain, pulsing like a vein. More were embedded at his wrists and ankles. The places where the Skunge entered his body angry red and swollen, rippling as more tendrils of the stuff worked their way inside him. At Sugar's command, Brayle unfolded himself from the driver's seat and stood before the gathering of humans and Skungers. His movements were jerky and unnatural, like film on a slipped reel.

"
All must/you will stop. Be calm. The end of change comes soon
." Brayle spoke, his voice replaced with a buzzing alien parody. His body twitched and jittered as the Skunge fibers fired electrical impulses through his invaded brain. His fingers plucked restlessly at his stained lab coat, the nervous tic of a man in the midst of a nightmare. The guards stepped back, unsure. The Skungers moved closer, their hungry eyes on Sugar. One man shouldered his way through the throng and face the cart.

Crantz panted for breath. Speckles of blood, smudged by his sweat, dotted his face and clear plastic goggles. "Let Dr. Brayle go, you freak." He stepped toward Sugar, raising his gun. "Let him go, or I start blowing holes."

Brayle regarded him with his crazed eyes, his body moving fitfully. He raised his hands, palms facing upward in supplication. "
The end of change comes soon
."

Arneson stared at the abomination that Sugar had become. He had to force himself to look away, and the person his eyes alighted on was Crantz. Arneson watched Crantz's eyes widen, saw his nostrils flare, saw his finger tightening on the trigger. Before thought, before feeling, before anything could interfere, Arneson jumped. He grabbed for Crantz's gun hand, yanking the black eye of the barrel away from Sugar. He only had seconds to look into that dark tunnel and see his own death rushing toward him.

The gun boomed, belching a pearl of fire into Arneson's face. The back of his skull exploded with a gaudy burst of blood and brains.

He hung on Crantz's arm for an agonizing second, then dropped to the concrete with a slithering thud. A last agonized breath wheezed from his mouth.

CHAPTER SEVENTY SIX

The vision in Arneson's remaining eye dwindled to a guttering pinwheel of light. He regarded it with wonder, watching the light whirl and spin. Pain spiked his nervous system. He wasn't hurt bad, was he? He'd heard the shot, but it must have missed. He stared at the floor, so close to his face. Cold seeped into his skin, emanating from the cement floor of the tunnel.

"Sugar?" he tried to say. No sound emerged. His voice was like a breath of dust. He laid his head back down, for just a moment, relishing the cool kiss of stone. A swirling sense of fatigue filled his limbs. He realized he could no longer move his arms or legs, but the problem didn't seem important.