As she neared Sarnia, she began looking for signs that would tell her where she needed to turn off. A few minutes later, she spotted one that told her to exit at the next turnoff for lodging, food, and fuel.
It was a simple building. Two stories, no more than fifty rooms—nothing fancy. The kind of motel where a salesperson or businessman might spend the night if they were looking for something on a budget. Certainly wasn’t the Ritz, but that was okay. All they needed right now was somewhere to lay their heads for the night.
Emily went ahead and scouted the ground floor, leaving the children in the SUV, engine running. She noticed a large Peg-Board behind the reception desk with sets of keys hanging from hooks. She confirmed her suspicions when she took a short walk to the first set of rooms; they took regular old-fashioned keys. She walked back to the reception area. There were only five or six keys missing from the board. The place had hardly been a hive of activity when the red rain had struck.
She took a key labeled twenty-nine and walked to the room through the dull-looking corridor; obviously fake potted plants on even cheaper-looking stands were intermittently placed along its length.
Unlocking the door to the room, she quickly checked out the interior: two queen-size beds, both made and waiting for the next guest. Well, she and the kids would most likely be the last guests to ever stay here.
Emily dropped her backpack to the floor and walked back to the Durango. She shut off the engine and opened the rear passenger door, allowing Rhiannon to hop out and Emily to step in.
Ben had gotten some of his color back, she noted, although his eyes were still tightly closed and he was very deeply asleep. His breathing sounded a little deeper, too. There was still a wetness to each intake of breath, and she thought she could discern a slight rattle in his throat when he exhaled. Other than that, he seemed to be holding his own.
“I’ll grab the bags,” said Rhiannon, already at the tailgate.
Emily picked up Ben with both arms, cradling him in the comforter, and waited for Rhiannon to grab everything she needed before she let Thor out of the SUV.
Ben was still running a bit of a fever; she could feel the heat permeating through the material into her hands as she carried him toward the entrance, Thor matching her pace step for step.
Inside the motel room, Emily asked Rhiannon to pull back the sheets of the bed nearest the door, and she laid Ben down in his polyester cocoon. He groaned a little but never opened his eyes. That was good, she supposed. The more rest the boy got the better. Rhiannon had been instructed to periodically give the boy water while they were traveling to keep him hydrated, and Emily had caught sight of her in the rearview mirror dutifully tipping liquid into his mouth, so she wasn’t concerned about him dehydrating. What she needed to do was get some food into him. It had been almost twenty-four hours since he had eaten anything.
She checked the box of food supplies they had brought in with them for the night and found a couple of squeezable foil pouches of pureed fruit. If she could get some of it down the boy, it would likely help both of them feel better. She squeezed some of the fruit onto a disposable spoon and began feeding Ben, pushing it carefully into his mouth before rounding up the dribble of grape that inevitably slipped from the corner of his mouth.
Rhiannon hovered for a few minutes, watching Emily feed her brother.
“Why don’t you find us something to eat?” Emily asked her after a minute, aware that the girl was uncomfortable watching her brother being spoon-fed like a baby, even if that was what he was—just a baby.
Rhiannon seemed relieved to be given something legitimate to do, and she headed over to the box of supplies and began rooting around. She pulled out a couple of cans of something Emily couldn’t make out and placed them on the nearby TV stand.
Emily spooned the last of the fruit into Ben’s mouth and reached for the two plastic medicine containers. She set the pills on the bedside cabinet while she went about unwrapping the boy from the comforter.
Emily managed to stifle the cry of revulsion in her throat before it made it to her lips. She glanced over at Rhiannon; the girl was busy riffling through her bag looking for some clean clothes to lay out for the morning, oblivious to Emily’s shocked expression.
Carefully Emily lifted the two edges of the comforter apart, exposing Ben’s body. Except what lay within the folds wasn’t Ben, not anymore.
Emily had been wrong about Ben; he hadn’t been getting better. He was transforming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ben’s chest was now a mass of black veins that spread out from his right shoulder toward his abdomen. Around his throat, like ivy climbing around the trunk of a tree, fronds edged upward toward his ear. At first Emily thought the plectrum-size overlapping flakes covering his right shoulder were just skin discoloration, but, as she moved her head closer, she could see they were actually scales, like a lizard’s but larger.
Emily looked up to make sure Rhiannon couldn’t see what she was seeing. She had moved into the bathroom with her toothbrush and a bottle of water. When Emily heard the door squeak closed, she gently rolled Ben over onto his stomach. The kid didn’t make a sound; what she had mistaken as sleep was more likely a coma state, she realized.
His back was completely covered in the same scales she had seen on the boy’s shoulder. They extended all the way down over his buttocks and upper thighs, stopping just short of his knees, and edged over his oblique muscles toward his tummy. Ignoring her revulsion, she ran her hands lightly over the rough scales; they bristled like the fur on a cat’s back at her touch. Something beneath the layer of scales pulsed and undulated.
Emily allowed Ben to roll onto his back again. The child’s eyes were tightly closed and his breathing had become faster than normal, almost like a dog’s pant. Drawing in a deep breath for courage, Emily eased back the lid of one eye with her thumb.
Gone were his iris, sclera, and pupil, replaced by a solid-red orb pitted with tiny dimples; at the center of each dimple was a small cluster of black spots. She let the lid drop back into place, then closed the comforter back over the boy and took a step away from the bed.
As she watched the motionless boy, her mind replayed the moment she’d killed the alien-puppeteer; that final second as the tentacle whipped through the darkness and hit Ben. She had been wrong all along about its motives. It hadn’t wanted to kill any of them; it had wanted to make them like it, to turn them, and in its final desperate second of life, it had managed to infect Ben.
Angelic, innocent Ben.
A feeling of utter despair took her firmly between its teeth and bit down hard, sinking its teeth into her very soul.
“How is he?” Emily hadn’t registered Rhiannon coming back in the room, but now she stood outside the door to the bathroom, looking far more concerned than a kid her age should have to.
Emily frantically waded through the morass of thoughts that filled her mind, looking for an appropriate answer. How was she supposed to tell Rhiannon her brother was changing into something alien? And if she told her he was fine, when he very obviously wasn’t, what then? While the transformation was only partially complete, what were they to do when he was no longer human at all? What was he becoming? If it was anything like the creatures that she had encountered so far, then he would be intent on ensuring both her own and his sister’s demise.
“The same,” she said finally as she placed the pills she had set aside in the boy’s mouth and washed them down with water. Ben swallowed reflexively. His breath stank like a cesspool, and she quickly turned away from him.
Rhiannon began to walk over to where her brother was laying.