“What’s that?” he asked.
“C-24,” she said. Looking at him meaningfully.
His mouth went dry. “No.”
“I took it from Carmack’s lab…”
“No, forget it.”
“You’re bleeding to death,” she said flatly. “It might save you.”
He looked at her. How could he tell her? He had to be as evil inside as anyone here. She just didn’t know what he’d been forced to do, in the RRTS. He flashed to that teenager he’d blown in half, the day they’d lost Jumper…
“I’ve done things,” he told her. “You don’t know. Places I’ve been — dark places…”
“I know you,” she said.
“No you don’t. You don’t know me.”
“You’re my brother. I know you,” she insisted. And there were two big tears rolling down her cheeks.
Another wave of weakness shivered through him. He almost fell right then. A black gulf was opening up in front of him.
She was right. He was dying. This was his only chance.
Increasing clamor from the blocked entrance to the room. The door gave out a jarring thud and shivered. They were trying to break through — and in a concerted way, now.
Let us in! the monsters roared — in the language that preceded language.
Breathing hard, Sam turned to look at the door. Now it was bending inward, shaking; she heard the redoubled roaring. There was no more time for theories or arguments.
Reaper unholstered his sidearm, cocked it, and handed it to her. “One in my heart,” he said crisply. “And one in my head, the second…”
“I won’t need to!”
“Don’t hesitate! If I start to turn into one of those things…don’t wait. Do you hear me?”
She bit her lip. Then nodded.
He rolled up his sleeve, and Sam prepped his arm with alcohol. She intertwined the fingers of her free hand with his, clasping hard as if she could keep him alive, keep him here in the world with the strength of her grip.
“I’ve missed you,” she said. And she gave him the shot, injecting him with the stuff that made men supermen — or into monsters.
The serum was coursing through him and…he felt nothing.
It wasn’t going to work. Maybe the label had been wrong, or the serum not yet complete…
And then — he felt everything, all at once: every nerve, every cell of his body howling in outrage as it was invaded.
He was no longer cold. A wave of inconceivable heat rolled through him, and another, more and more. His back arched, his fingers fisted, his eyes started, his mouth went into a kind of rictus and his throat seized up and he couldn’t even scream as the C-24 roared through him, setting up a chain of cause and effect that reached beyond the biological, somehow resonating in the quantum realm: sucking energy from the world around him, forming it into matter, infusing it into him.
His body slowly began to swell, his bones creaking; his clothing tearing at the seams. He wasn’t growing like an imp — just firming, thickening, rippling with an energy that the physics of his own world didn’t even have a name for, as yet…
But it was too much — the sudden complete change of it all. The pain was unimaginable, a cosmos filled with nothing but agony. His body and brain couldn’t take it.
He wasn’t going to live through this. Nothing could. It was unbearable. He didn’t even want to live any longer. Feelings like this — of every last cell of his body interpenetrated and redesigned, made into something alien, in just a few seconds — were beyond comprehension.
And then the pain stopped — and so did his heart. He was falling —
And bang, he hit the floor. The world dissolved into a murky blur. Darker, darker yet.
He blew out a long slow breath — and was unable to draw another in. That breath — had been his last one.
Nineteen
SAMANTHA GRIMM MADE up her mind to shoot her brother in the head.
John had begun convulsing, his face a rigid mask of pain, and she could see the change taking place in him, the C-24 transmuting him before her eyes: his muscles, already firm, were bulking; there was a certain trace of heaviness in the bones of his face, indicating they were becoming more dense…
And the eyes. They seemed animalistic — two fires in his skull.
She was almost exhausted. And she was seeing everything through a glass, darkly: she’d liked Duke, despite his clumsy moves on her — maybe because of them — and she’d seen him sliced and diced. She’d seen Pinky, whom she’d worked with for so long, backed into a corner, then abducted by a monster. She’d seen Carmack become a monster. She’d seen heaps of bodies. She’d seen Sarge murder that nice Kid for having a conscience. She’d been told it was her responsibility to blow herself and her brother to kingdom come.
She was seeing doom everywhere she looked. Everything seemed hopeless. How could she believe, in this moment, that C-24 wouldn’t do to her brother what it had done to Curtis Stahl?
And as John fell onto his back, shaking, going into the last stages of the transformation, Sam raised the pistol, to shoot him in the head.
Then the door behind her burst open, and she turned to see an imp rushing at her, drooling mouth agape, squealing with hatred. She fired the pistol at it almost point-blank — wounding it in the right shoulder but not stopping it, not even slowing it. It struck the gun aside, then backhanded her, knocking her sprawling.
“John!” She managed, as she fell.
Head spinning, she felt something grab her by the right wrist and drag her across the floor, toward the shattered door. She struggled feebly, but the blow to her head had left her badly stunned, almost paralyzed.
She shouted her brother’s name one last time as she was dragged through the door, into the hallway, into reeking gloom, then it was all too much, and she lost consciousness.
Sam woke to a warped ringing sound — it was in her own ears, as if her head were a cracked bell, still ringing from the blow to the face the imp had given her. And there was a choking smell of rot and vinegar and blood.
Her eyes slowly cleared, and she saw she was in the bottom of a large air shaft, forty feet across: the central station for pumping and purifying oxygen throughout the compound. She’d seen down into it one time, on her first and only tour of the place: a vertical shaft with three gigantic fan blades whirling in it.
A little rusty light filtered down from a skylight, at the top of the shaft about four stories up, flickering with the slow turning of the fan blades. On the other side of the shaft, its back to her, the imp crouched over the body of a woman…using its talons to rip pieces of thigh meat from the woman’s leg, stuff them in its maw.
Watching it feed, Sam controlled the impulse to vomit — and to scream.
If you want to live, control yourself. This is your chance — when it’s not watching…
She wondered vaguely why she was still alive at all. Obviously it wanted to infect her, or it would’ve killed her already. She touched her neck, wondering if the thing had already pierced her with its tongue-barb. She could feel no wound there.
Maybe they needed to do the deed while you were conscious. Maybe it was saving her for later — if it was, it wouldn’t be for long.
Slowly, Sam sat up and looked around for an egress. There was a tunnel, the way they’d probably come in — but it was on the other side of the imp. She couldn’t get to it without being noticed.
She spotted a metal maintenance ladder, rungs built into the wall, running all the way up the air shaft, passing through narrow crawl apertures beside the fan blades. Better than nothing.