The blackness grew.
Amy backed toward the portal and said, “This world, it’s uninhabited, right? There’s an empty universe for this thing to wreak havoc in?”
Tasker didn’t answer. I turned to go back through the portal … and stopped.
There stood the door, and behind it was a well-dressed family of what looked like tourists, a father and two boys eating some kind of bulbous turquois dessert I’d never seen before. The father was staring at us in bafflement. He looked like a steampunk lawyer, in a waistcoat and high shiny boots, a gold chain draped over one shoulder. He had well-oiled black hair with a skunk stripe of white that ran back from his forehead. His two well-groomed boys seemed only mildly curious.
One of the boys looked at me and said something that sounded like “Away” but the accent and tone made me think it was a greeting in a foreign tongue. They had a little dog with them. It barked. The boy had been in the middle of feeding it a bit of his snack.
I started to say, “You should back way from this thing,” but then my eyes registered what I was seeing and the words died. Behind the family was a scenic little town square—gift shops and fountains surrounding a large clock tower. Rolling down the narrow streets were cars of unusual design that seemed to all have three wheels, one in back, two in front. Beyond the square were neat little cottages as far as the eye could see.
Amy said, “Oh my god,” and I turned back to where the larva had been, now a shriveled husk. Blackness poured out, up and up into the sky, like the plume from an oil well fire. The darkness coalesced into a shape like a giant headless man with goat legs at least a hundred feet tall. I knew I should run but when I tried, my feet stayed planted as if saying, Are you seeing this shit?
John grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward the portal, but the moment I spun around, the shadow giant swept overhead, blotting out the sun.
It descended on the village. The tourist family didn’t scream. They didn’t have time, or a reason to. Neither did anyone in the village.
As the shadow swept over them, it did not destroy the village, it simply changed it. I knew the process from prior experience; it simply reached back in time—thousands of years, maybe millions—and tipped a series of events. As it passed overhead, striding on its goat legs, the village was replaced. And so were the people.
Where the tourist family had stood were now two eight-foot-tall humanoid beings, skin encrusted with ash-gray scales like the bark of a tree that had survived a forest fire. Their eyes were big and black and cold. They wore clothing that had the look of armor, polished and ornate, full of sinister sharp edges. One of the beings was holding a leash and at the end of it was a naked human child. Its arms and legs had been severed at the joints, the stumps covered in scars and callouses from where it had been walking on all fours all its life. It was starving, skin stretched over its ribs, a slit of white scar tissue where its genitals should have been. The child grunted—it was in the middle of defecating. It then turned and sniffed what it had made.
In the village beyond, I tried to take in the civilization that had replaced what had been there moments ago. The bark-skinned beings strode around stone buildings that all seemed to have been designed to withstand an invasion from the ground—high, windowless walls and heavy doors. The vehicles that prowled the streets all seemed to be military in nature—armored and on tank treads, rumbling slowly down streets made of some kind of black cobblestone. I saw two more human children, only I now realized they actually weren’t children—that was just the size at which their growth was stunted. They were loping down an alley grunting after a rodent they’d seen. In the street nearest to us, there was a cloud of flies around a pale, twisted shape lying at the end of a brown smear. One of the humans had been run over and left to rot in the sun.
At the center of town, where before had been the tall clock tower, was a pile of human skulls. Maybe thirty feet wide and a hundred feet tall. It looked old and sacred, a memorial to some historic victory.
One of the bark-skinned things in front of us shouted a stern command in our direction. He pulled from his back a weapon that looked like a whip—a black handle that led to a bundle of lengths of thin chain. He clicked the handle and the end of each bit of chain glowed orange, as if the whip was designed to brand the flesh as it lashed it. He let go of the leash and the stunted man on all fours came bounding in our direction.
It made a noise at us, a wet, barking grunt. “AYE! AYE!” And then he spat something that sounded like, “SUBMIT!”
Amy screamed. I felt Tasker shove past me.
The man-dog ran, filthy shoulders and ass cheeks bouncing, eyes wild.
“AYE! SUBMIT! SUBMIT! AYESUBMITAYESUBMITAYESUBMIT!!!”
John was shouting and then I was being shoved through the portal and found myself back in the NON facility. Tasker had skidded to her knees, having stumbled in her rush to get through. Her suit jacket had flipped up, revealing the holster clipped to her waistband that contained her pistol.
“SUBMIT! AYE! SUBMIT!”
The man-dog was coming around, heading for the open portal. I could smell it, the stench of human body odor and fresh shit.
I snatched the pistol out of Tasker’s holster, spun around, and shot the pathetic thing in its dumb, filthy face, an inch below a matted, filthy white streak of hair dangling over its brow. The thing flopped over and skidded to a stop inches from the door.
John quickly closed the coffin door and I tossed Tasker’s gun to the floor next to her.
Breathing heavily, John looked at me and said, “That’s the biggest night shart yet.”
Tasker looked at Gibson and said, “Send a memo. This is now Class H.”
I said, “There’s a category beyond extinction level?”
John said, “Eighteen, apparently. Guys, the Maggie larva was, uh, birthed at the exact same time as Mikey, right? So that means she could hatch at any second, if it’s not happening right now.”
We all stared at each other for a moment, then ran back through the open steel door, down the row of cells until we found Maggie’s. Her mother was there now—whatever pretense had gotten her out of the way before hadn’t held up for long. John, Amy, and I skidded to a stop in front of the half-eaten woman. Loretta’s eyes went wide. Well, one of them did—the other had been chewed off, along with the left third of her skull—the harried woman wondering what the hell the commotion was about.
Agent Tasker, who’d been moving at a more dignified pace dictated by the constraints of her businesslike skirt, arrived behind us.
The Maggie larva looked unchanged, for the moment.
Tasker said to Loretta, “Why don’t you come with me? We need to run some quick tests.”
“You can run them with me here.” Loretta, even with several bites having been taken out of her brain, was no dummy.
Tasker said, “This is a requirement, unfortunately. It would be dangerous for you—”
“I accept the danger. Give me a waiver, I’ll sign it.”
Agent Gibson was approaching as well, his cane a third footstep clicking on the floor with each stride. Reaching inside his suit jacket, ready to do this the hard way (or, let’s be honest—the easy way).
He said, “Come on, Ms. Knoll. Don’t make us—”
He flinched at the sound of exploding windows behind him.
26. GRAPPLING HOOKS AREN’T CHEAP, YOU GUYS
John
Everyone ran back out of the cell block, into the office area they’d just vacated. Ted Knoll and his comrade were disconnecting the ropes they’d used to swing through the conference room windows from the roof. They whipped assault rifles around to their shoulders and moved out among the cubicles.
A half dozen of the NON cloaks swarmed out to meet them. Ted and his partner fired exactly six shots. All six targets flopped onto the floor. Not a word had been uttered.