But mostly what she saw was snakes.
Rattlers.
Her fingers touched something. She gasped and almost recoiled, but that was just nerves; the thing was hard, unliving. A straight-edge at the height of her torso. A table. Covered with an oilcloth. She thought so. She walked her fingers across it, and forced herself to freeze when one of the scuttery things touched her.
It crawled over the back of her hand and down to her wrist, almost surely a spider of some sort, and then was gone. She walked her hand on, and here was something else investi-gating her, more of what Audrey had called “wildlife.” Not a spider. This thing, whatever it was, had claws and a hard surface.
Mary forced herself to hold still, but couldn’t keep entirely quiet; a low, desperate moan escaped her. Sweat ran down her forehead and cheeks like warm motor-oil, stung in her eyes. Then the thing on her hand gave her an obscene little squeeze and was gone. She could hear it click-dragging its way across the table. She moved her hand again, resisting the clamor of her mind to pull back. If she did, what then. Stand here trembling in the dark until the stealthy sounds around her drove her crazy, sent her running in panicked circles until she bashed herself unconscious again.
Here was a plate-no, a bowl-with something in it. Congealed soup. Her fingers fumbled beside it and felt a spoon. Yes, soup. She felt beyond it, touched what could have been a salt—or pepper-shaker, then something soft and flabby. She suddenly remembered a game they had played at slumber-parties when she was a girl in Mamaro-neck. A game made to be played in the dark. You’d pass around spaghetti and intone These are the dead man guts, pass around cold Jell-O and intone These are the dead man ’s brains.
Her hand struck something hard and cylindrical. It fell over with a rattle she recognized at once… or hoped she did: batteries in the tube of a flashlight.
Please, God, she thought, groping for it. Please God let it be what it feels like.
The squalling from outside came again, but she barely heard it. Her hand touched a cold piece of meat (this is the dead man ’sface) but she barely felt it. Her heart was hammering in her chest, her throat, even in her sinuses.
There! There!
Cold, smooth metal, it tried to squitter out of her grip, but she squeezed it tight. Yes, a flashlight; she could feel the switch lying against the web of skin between her Y thumb and forefinger.
Now let it work, God. Please, okay.
She pressed the switch. Light sprang out in a widening cone, and her yammering heartbeat stopped dead in her ears for a moment. Everything stopped dead.
The table was long, covered with lab equipment and—rock samples at one end, covered with a checked piece of tablecloth at the other. This end had been set, as for dinner, with a soup-bowl, a plate, silverware, and a water—glass. A large black spider had fallen into the waterglass and couldn’t get out; it writhed and scratched fruitlessly. The red hourglass on its belly showed in occasional—flickers. Other spiders, most also black widows, preened and strutted on the table. Among them were rock——scorpions, stalking back and forth like parliamentarians, their stingers furled on their backs. Sitting at the end of the table was a large bald man in a Diablo Mining Corpo-ration tee-shirt. He had been shot in the throat at close range. The stuff in the soup-bowl, the stuff she had touched with her fingers, wasn’t soup but this man s clotted blood.
Mary’s heart re-started itself, sending her own blood crashing up into her head like a piston, and all at once the flashlight’s yellow fan of light began to look red and shimmery. She heard a high, sweet singing in her ears.
Don’t you faint, don’t you dare—The flashlight beam swung to the left. In the corner under a poster which read GO AHEAD, BAN MINING, LET THE BASTARDS FREEZE IN THE DARK! was a roiling nest of rattlesnakes. She slid the beam along the metal wall, past congregations of spiders (some of the black widows she saw were as big as her hand), and in the other corner were more snakes. Their daytime torpor was gone,
and they wnthed together, flowing through sheetbends and clove hitches and double diamonds, occasionally shaking their tails.
Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint—She turned around with the light, and when it happened upon the other three bodies that were in here with her, she understood several things at once. The fact that she had discovered the source of the bad smell was only the least of them.
The bodies at the foot of the wall were in an advanced state of decay, delirious with maggots, but they hadn’t been simply dumped. They were lined up… perhaps even laid out. Their puffy, blackening hands had been laced together on their chests. The man in the middle really was black, she thought, although it was impossible to tell for sure. She didn’t know him or the one on his right, but the one on the black guy’s left she did know, in spite of the toiling maggots and the decomposition. In her mind she heard him mixing I’m going to kill you into the Miranda warning.
As she watched, a spider ran out of Collie Entragian’s mouth.
The beam of the light shook as she ran it along the line of corpses again. Three men.
Three big men, not a one of the three under six-feet-five.
Iknow why I’m here instead of in jail, she thought. And I know why I wasn’t killed. I’m next. When it’s through with Ellen m next.
Mary began to scream.
The an tak chamber glowed with a faint red light that seemed to come from the air itself.
Something which still looked a bit like Ellen Carver walked across it, accompa-nied by a retinue of scorpions and fiddlebacks. Above it, around it, the stone faces of the can taks peered down. Across from it was the pirin moh, a jutting facade that looked a bit like the front of a Mexican hacienda. In front of it was the pit-the mi, well of the worlds. The light could have been coming from here, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Sitting in a circle around the mouth of the mi were coyotes and buzzards. Every now and then one of the birds would rustle its feathers or one of the coyotes would flick an ear; if not for these moves, they might have been stones themselves.
Ellen’s body walked slowly; Ellen’s head sagged. Pain pulsed deep in her belly. Blood ran down her legs in thin, steady streams. It had stuffed a torn cotton tee-shirt into Ellen’s panties and that had helped for awhile, but now the shirt was soaked through. Bad luck it had had, and not just once. The first one had had prostate cancer—undiagnosed-and the rot had started there, spreading through his body with such unexpected speed that it had been lucky to get to Josephson in time. Josephson had lasted a little longer, Entragian-a nearly perfect speci-men-longer still. And Ellen. Ellen had been suffering from a yeast infection. Just a yeast infection, nothing at all in the ordinary scheme of things, but it had been enough to start the dominoes falling, and now…
Well, there was Mary. It didn’t quite dare take her yet, not until it knew what the others were going to do. If the writer won out and took them back to the highway, it would jump to Mary and take one of the ATVs (loaded down with as many can tahs as it could transport) up into the hills. It already knew where to go: Alphaville, a vegan commune in the Desatoyas.
They wouldn’t be vegans for long after Tak arrived.
If the wretched little prayboy prevailed and they came south, Mary might serve as bait.
Or as a hostage. She would serve as neither, however, if the prayboy sensed she was no longer human.
It sat down on the edge of the mi and stared into it. The mi was shaped like a funnel, its rough walls sliding in toward each other until, twenty-five or thirty feet down, nothing was left of the mouth’s twelve-foot diameter but a hole less than an inch across. Baleful scarlet light, almost too bright to look at, stormed out of this hole in pulses. It was a hole like an eye.