“Stop,” he cried out, hoarsely, shouldering the rifle. His hands were shaking, his balance unsteady, and the barrel waggled erratically this way and that. “For God’s sake, Prendick, stop it!”
With a sickening, wet tearing sound and even more horrific POP as his spinal column snapped like a pencil bent too far too fast, Prendick wrenched himself free. Or, more specifically, the top half of him. His upper torso, head, shoulders and arms all suddenly toppled to the floor in front of Andrew, leaving the rest of him—everything from the navel up—pinned against the side of the cargo truck. Blood immediately spurted in grisly fountains from severed blood vessels, and a heaping pile of entrails left exposed from his torn abdominal cavity spilled out.
“Jesus Christ!” Andrew forgot himself in his shock and horror, and stepped down onto his maimed heel in recoil. Immediately, pain lanced through his entire right side, and with another cry, he collapsed to the floor. The gun slipped from his fingers. With a strained grimace, Andrew reached for it, arm outstretched. His fingertips brushed the butt and he crawled forward on his belly, mewling at fresh pain.
Just as he slapped his hand against the stock, Prendick grabbed hold of the rifle by the barrel.
“Glagggh,” he said and Andrew screamed again because there was no way Prendick could still be alive, no way in hell Prendick could still be moving around, never mind grabbing for a goddamn gun, not cut in two like he was, with half of his guts on the garage floor behind him, the other half smeared out across the front end of the cargo truck.
Andrew stared in terrified shock down the short length of the muzzle and into Prendick’s face. His brows were furrowed, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a blood-stained smear. Again, he uttered that awful, cawing sound—“Glllaaaaagghh!”—then Andrew pulled the trigger.
He’d inadvertently set the gun to burst again, not semi, and a wild stream of bullets suddenly spewed from the barrel. The rounds ripped into Prendick, punching baseball-sized craters where his left eye had been, pulverizing his nose, shearing back the skin of his cheek and splintering teeth beneath. Andrew screamed the whole time, even as the gun jerked and shuddered in recoil, forcing him to lose his grasp. As his finger slipped from the trigger, the gun fell still and silent, leaving a thin film of acrid smoke lingering in the air between him and Prendick.
“Andrew,” he heard Alice cry out, frightened.
“It’s alright,” he called back, but his voice was strained and shrill, sounding anything but alright. But God, oh, man, the last thing he wanted was for Alice to come barreling around the corner and find the bisected remains of Mitchell Prendick sprawled on the floor, not to mention the body of her dead father still slumped behind the wheel of the truck.
“But you were shooting,” he heard her hiccup, a tremulous, tiny sound. “I heard you scream.”
“Everything’s okay.” He managed to sit up, get his knees beneath him, then flipped the safety back on and used the rifle to prop him as he stood. “Just stay where you are. Okay? I’m coming to you.”
And then, through that thin haze of gun smoke, he saw something moving on the floor, something wriggling and twitching, like an oversized earthworm caught on the sidewalk on a warm summer’s day, a nightcrawler struggling to make it back to the loam.
A whole nest of them, in fact, Andrew realized, as the smoke thinned further, and he could see more of them now, those peculiar, snakelike things squirming on the floor. Like fingers, he thought. Reaching for me.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered.
The gunshots had at first covered a sound he now heard clearly, like a rotten walnut slowly cracking open to reveal blackened, festering meat within. Snap-crackle-POP went this curious, nasty sound, then something crawled out of the smoke and shadows underneath the wreckage toward him.
It wasn’t Prendick, not exactly, not anymore.
Like they had with Langley, the lower sets of his ribs had broken free from the bands of costal cartilage securing them to the sternum. In Langley’s case, these ribs had grown, protruding through the flesh in new, arm-like appendages. With Prendick, they had lengthened, but also sprouted articulations, like the jointed legs of a spider or scorpion. These spindly limbs fanned out beneath the ruins of his torso, while he used his hands to arch what remained of his spine back, lifting his head, cobra-like, from the ground. Again like Langley, the mess of his eviscerated guts seemed to have come alive, a writhing, intertwining mess of intestines and colon, like the tails of a swarm of rattlesnakes thrumming in menacing admonition.
“You took the virus,” Andrew said. “Moore’s retrovirus. You injected it into yourself.”
Prendick’s remaining eye rolled toward him, a pale blue disk floating in stark, ghoulish contrast to the bloody-red of his cornea. The tips of his rib appendages, squared-off and raw, made wet squelching noises as they tap-squish-tap-TAPPED on the floor, propelling him forward with an insectile efficiency. The popping sound Andrew had heard as Prendick had torn himself in two had been the sound of the base of his spine wrenching free of his pelvic girdle. Although at first the length of it trailed behind him like a grisly tail, he raised it now, as if the vertebrae had become flexible, hinged joints instead of a fused column. His spine arched behind him like a scorpion’s tail, and likewise, capping the tip like a spear was the ragged point of Prendick’s tailbone.
“You stupid son of a bitch,” Andrew whispered and Prendick screeched, lunging at Andrew, the whip of his spine striking, scorpion-like and lightning fast . Andrew ducked sideways, hunching his shoulders, and heard a loud, hollow crash as the tip punched into the side of the truck behind him.
Prendick’s shriek was eclipsed by another, this one high and trilling, as Alice scurried around the back of the truck and caught sight of him.
“Alice,” Andrew cried, pulling the trigger again, grasping the gun with both hands to keep it steady while he sprayed Prendick with a wild volley of bullets. He could hear them ricocheting off the concrete floor. Prendick began to screech and through the gun smoke, Andrew could see the horrible mass of his entrails flapping and flailing.
“Come on!” Wheeling about, floundering with his wounded leg, Andrew grabbed Alice beneath the arm and hauled her in step. Using the gun like a cane, he hobbled, hopped and otherwise hauled ass however he could toward the garage door.
“Wait! What about my daddy?” Alice cried out, then stumbled and fell to the floor. Andrew stooped, getting his arm around her, then they both looked up to see Prendick on the move again, scuttling on those horrific little legs across the tarmac. Alice screamed, and Andrew let loose another crazed round of rifle blasts, shattering chunks out of the floor.
“Hold on to me,” he told Alice, grabbing her about the waist. He felt her arms first lace, then lock around his neck and he stumbled to his feet, supporting her against his hip with one arm, holding the rifle like a crutch with the other.
“He’s still moving,” Alice wailed as Andrew shambled for the door. She was small, but while he might have ordinarily bore her slight weight without a problem, he was half-crippled and hurting, just barely making any headway.
He’s not going to stop, Andrew thought grimly, brows furrowed, teeth gritted, tendons standing out, taut and strained, in his neck. Not going to stop moving, or coming after us. Not until he hunts us down and kills us. Because it’s like Moore said. That’s what animals do, and that’s what he’s become. Hell, it’s what Prendick’s been all along.