They had nothing to do with Janie or I.
They were in league with The Medusa and they were waiting for it to come, their savior, their prophet, a new god for a seriously warped new world.
Janie and I had not been assimilated yet. That made us dangerous. That’s why those figures in the spacesuits had backed away from us when we entered the complex: it had been revulsion and fear. Fear of infection. Fear of contamination. For they feared healthy, normal bodies with their active compliments of antibodies as much as we feared Ebola.
Janie and I were nothing but disease masses now, infections to be eradicated. We were the abnormal ones.
After a time, two forms in orange suits returned. One of them carried the black box.
“It’s time,” the one with the box said.
“Don’t do that to us,” I said. “Please. Just kill us. Destroy us. Don’t shoot us with that virus.”
“We’re not going to do anything to you,” the man said. “When you are converted, it will be she who touches, she who welcomes you into the fold.”
He was talking about The Medusa.
“Please,” Janie, said, tears running down her face. “Don’t hurt us. Don’t hurt us.” She put her hands to her belly. “You can’t. I’m pregnant.”
14
Three hours later, I was still reeling from that one.
But it all made sense when I finally calmed down and was able to look at it with some kind of perspective. Janie had been strange and moody for some time now, even worse than usual, and that had less to do with me being with Mickey than with something much larger than all that. She told me knew since Gary. When we were in that pharmacy after the Hatchet Clan attack and after those birds fed on the Clans, she had slipped off and gotten a pregnancy test. One of those home jobs where you just read the strip. I remember her disappearing that day. Then coming back with that funny look in her eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
“What would the point have been, Rick? What would it have changed?”
“I had the right to know.”
“Maybe you did. Maybe you didn’t.”
The men in the space suits took us out of the complex by gun point and led us off into the fields and brought us to a hilltop. You could see for miles from our vantage point. And what I saw was a little valley spread beneath us and it was filled with people. The same sort of people we had run into in Bitter Creek: the diseased, the dying, the suffering. That crazy old man had said they had been congregating in the town for some time and for a particular reason.
It’s coming for all of us! Coming out of the east, yes sir! And there’s those here that want it to come! You see all them sick ones? They been pouring in for weeks! For weeks! Some have died, but others is hanging in just so they can see it! Look it in the face when it comes home to roost!
That’s what he had said and now I was seeing them, thousands upon thousands of them crowded together beneath us, a hot wind of pestilence blowing off them as they waited in the seepage of their wastes and drainage. They were moaning and chanting, holding leprous fingers up to the sky, watching for the coming of their god with ulcerated faces and eyes filled with blood.
Dozens of men in spacesuits with submachine guns ringed the bottom of the hill in all directions. Dozens more waited at the fringe of the crowd below. There would be no escape for Janie and I. None whatsoever. At least, that’s what they thought. But I had already decided that a swift charge at them would make them open up on us, cut us down out of sheer terror. Because they were afraid of us.
Dying beneath a hail of bullets was better than the alternative.
“When will it happen, Rick?” Janie asked.
“Soon,” I said.
And it would be soon because there was a spreading stain of gray rising up at the horizon and I knew it was The Medusa, darkening the land as it…or she…came.
I sat there, holding Janie’s hand like we were a couple lovers waiting for the fireworks to begin on the Fourth of July. I drew off a cigarette, wishing I had a cold beer to go with it. Wishing for a lot of things, I guess. What vexed me was that even though I understood much of what was going on now, I still did not understand my part in it or, more precisely, The Shape’s part in it. Why did it want us here? What was so fucking important about all this that it kept pushing us west?
What did it want here?
What did it need here?
I had to know, somehow I had to know. I closed my eyes to the mulling crowds below and shut my ears to their fevered cries. I concentrated on that sphere of darkness. This time I did not call it up. I communed with it.
15
Right away a wave of blackness rolled through my brain. My mind was uplinked with that of The Shape and The Shape was letting my mind reach out beyond until I could sense The Medusa out there. I could feel a horrible crawling in my head as if thousands of worms had infested my brain, tunneling, digging deeper, breeding and brooding, their hot, moist eggs bursting with millions of writhing larval young.
I screamed.
In my mind I screamed.
For this was The Medusa, what it was: an invasive life force of infestation and pestilence and charnel horror. Not worms, not really, but exploding particles of virus.
The Medusa’s voice was in my head, a dry and snakelike hissing.
I could smell millions of slimy corpses rotting, bursting with gas and worms, greening with putrescence. It was a crypt smell, a stench of fuming corpse ovens, of carrion boiling with maggots, of viral infestation. Of cities heaped with the dead and plucked white bones piled like ramparts up into the sky.
The voice hissed and the worms dug deeper and I felt my mind implode like thunder, as The Medusa enveloped it in a black, pestile cloud of corruption, invading my mind as its children must invade cells: sliding tendrils through membranes, draining them dry, bloating them with a hideous viral pregnancy like millions of eggs hot and juicy that would erupt with seeking death-
16
Janie shook me out of it and I was thankful for that because I don’t know if I would ever have come out of it on my own. My eyes opened and I saw that creeping shadow closing in on the valley. I saw the faithful cheer and heard them scream with delight or terror and perhaps both. The Medusa spread across the earth like a fire storm destroying everything in its path.
I had felt it in my mind and I had seen it in my dreams and now I saw its physical reality as everyone in the valley did.
A spreading gray shadow that was blank and formless, as far as the eye could see: lifeless, hollow, a vapor of dead alien plains. Then…fragmenting, swelling and bursting, slitting open like some immense birth canal in an undulant mass of white and worming tendrils that reached for miles, reached right up to stars themselves as the world became carrion threaded by a million-billion hungry corpse worms. The tendrils split apart into more webbing tendrils and filaments and snaking ropes of slime that were viscidly alive.
And beyond it, rising like the cold marble graveyard face of the moon was The Medusa itself: an elongated, mutating, ever-changing firmament of gaseous malevolence. An elongated face like a dead-white moldering corpuscle, flaking and fragmenting in the hot cemetery wind of plague breath and swirling bone dust. A living pestilence of viral matter with a mind of gnawing starvation and immense black tunnels for eyes that reflected the tenebrous glare of shadowy sterile worlds and the dripping voids between the stars.
The faithful began to scream.