It was then he saw a form moving in his direction.
20
Death would be love’s last enduring kiss, Eva Jung decided. It would come in the night and its lips would be the heat that lit one last fire in the cooling embers of her heart here on this darkest of all dark nights in this bed where her husband had once made love to her.
The neighborhood was coming apart out there. She could hear houses crashing and walls falling and roofs collapsing. Her own house shook. Its foundation cracked open, black muck filling low places like dark arterial blood, pooling and shifting and rising, ever rising. She could hear pipes bursting and looping forms sliding down hallways and up stairwells.
But she was barely even aware of it. She felt only the years pressing down on her and the emptiness that described them which was hollow and without form. She was lying under the sheets, naked, her flesh covered in a slight dew of perspiration—the sweat of fear and the sweat of anticipation. In her soul, she was a virgin untried, her overripened fruit unplucked and untasted but juicy and full. Soon, very soon now, she would not be alone.
She heard a sound out in the hallway beyond her partially open door: a secretive sliding like skin against satin sheets.
Leonard? Leonard, is that you?
Though she knew somewhere in the vacant corridors of her brain that Leonard was dead, still she waited for him and would not have been surprised if his dark shape filled the doorway. She could almost smell his cologne, which always reminded her of well-oiled leather and green, needling pine forests. What she smelled then, what filled the room in dark fumes, was not that but something else. Her breathing increased as the door swung open and she could smell the foul sweetness of her lover. He had come unbidden, hungry and virile. She would be his meat and his wine and he would grow drunk upon her taste, giddy with what she had to offer.
Bring me your love. Bring me the filth and dirt of it. Let me squirm in it.
Her lover approached the bed with that same satiny swish-swish that was pre-seduction. Her heart throbbed in her chest. Her breath came quickly. Her skin was prickled with gooseflesh. She could smell what had come to take her. Its stink filled the room with a gassy foulness of rotting drainage ditches, but she was unaware of it. She smelled only the cologne: pine forests and pipe tobacco and worn leather. Her madness here on this last night of her life was complete and seamless; dream obscured reality and fantasy shrouded fact.
Please, oh God, please don’t make me wait, please… please…
Though she was hardly aware of the fact, Eva had uncovered herself, exposing her secrets to her lover. She spread her legs so he might enter her. Her lover raised his head above the level of the bed. Eva did not dare look upon him and destroy the beauty of these precious last moments. It was Leonard and she believed it was Leonard. To look upon the obscene, glistening foulness of the ichor-dripping thing that had come for her would shatter the illusion and it had to remain whole. So she refused to look at the immense, bulging vermiform creature that hovered between her spread legs, its segments pulled back like a foreskin to reveal an enormous oval mouth and the circular rows of razored teeth hanging with caustic threads of slime. Droplet by droplet, she felt its saliva burning hot against her sex.
Now… make it now…
Her lover did. Spinning with a corkscrewing motion indicative of its species, it entered her with a cutting, terrible velocity that brought blood and searing agony as she was torn open and ruptured, sinking into the bed which became a soup of her own fluids. She screamed and screamed again, dying with a last perverse taste of wickedness as she was quite literally split in two, knowing death was surely love’s last enduring kiss.
21
Kathleen moved out into the muck, unable to smell the steaming rottenness of it anymore. It seemed the world had always stunk like this. In the tight, crowded confines of her mind, she was unable to remember a world that was not flooded in bubbling black sludge. She stood there watching it, feeling it moving around her with tiny, sluggish currents.
“Don’t worry, baby Jesse,” she said, “Mama will get you out of this. One way or another.”
Weak from the loss of blood, she blinked away the dizziness that made her world pitch this way and that. She had to concentrate or she’d never get them out of this. Luckily, the baby didn’t weigh much.
She moved forward, being very careful of where she placed her feet. It wouldn’t do to slip in the muck now.
Sobbing, she clutched the baby tighter to her breast even though the agony of doing so sent white jolts of pain through her. But that was okay. The pain kept her conscious and kept her moving.
She wondered if anyone was left in the neighborhood.
She saw a few lights, but that didn’t mean anything.
“Okay, Jesse, Mama’s going to keep walking until she gets us somewhere.”
Kathleen didn’t know where that would be because so many of the houses on Pine Street were coming apart now. But she had to keep looking because it wouldn’t do to have Jesse out in this and, by God, she needed to sit down.
Moving with the stiff-legged locomotion of an automaton, she moved forward into the mud sea.
22
At the O’Connor household, Fern waited.
She waited in the kitchen, peering out into the darkness.
Marv’s been gone an awful long time, she thought as she stared down into the drain, wrinkling her nose at the smell coming up which was enough to curl the hairs in her nose. He should have been back by now.
There was no point in calling over to Tessa’s. She’d already done that three times now and there was no answer.
Fern didn’t know for sure what she was afraid of, but the fear would not leave her. It existed inside her, cold and slow-crawling, casting a shadow over her rational mind. There were a lot of things that could have happened. Marv could have been washed under and drowned. That seemed unlikely because he was a very sturdy, strong sort of man. He could have been overcome by the gases. But again, that didn’t seem plausible either. The houses in the neighborhood were coming apart and he could have been caught in a fall of wreckage. The only thing that had saved their house thus far, she figured, was that it was made of brick and would have probably outlasted the others by many decades if not a century.
When Tessa called earlier, she claimed she had been attacked. Attacked. But by whom or what? This was what Fern feared most, that whatever had gotten Tessa had also gotten Marv.
Oh, why hadn’t he taken his rifle with him?
Fern listened to the girls in the other room. They had uplinked their Nintendo DS systems and were having some kind of war. They were laughing, teasing each other, squealing with joy and growling with derision. Kids were really something. They could adapt very quickly. Thank God the Internet was still working or they’d have to play a board game or (gasp) read a book.
Barbaric, perfectly barbaric.
The smell coming out of the drain was getting worse.
So bad it made Fern almost woozy.
“Well, there’s only one cure for this,” she said under her breath. She went into the broom closet and came back with a jug of Hilex bleach. There wasn’t anything down there bleach couldn’t handle.
At least, she hoped not.
23
It was Tony that found Marv after Marv staggered out of Tessa Saldane’s house, the carving knife still in his hand.