“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.