The Squirming Page 10

  As he worked his way down past Hot Topic, heading for the corridor at the next turn that would take him to the bathrooms and hopefully what he sought, a couple sluggos appeared out of the smoke. He pulled back, ducking into the doorway of Torrid before they saw him.

  And it was then that something took hold of him from behind.

  Not just took hold of him, but dropped down on him.

  Shit!Shit!Shit!Shit!Shit!Shit!

  It was on his back, gripping his neck with something that felt like metal tongs through the biosuit. It squeezed and squeezed as other things crawled over his spine like coiling worms.

  With a cry, he dropped the Ithaca and went down to his knees. He reached back, hands scrabbling in a frenzy to peel that weight off his back, that undulating mass.

  But it clung tenaciously.

  Through the gloves, he could not tell what it was but in his rioting imagination, it was every horror spawned in the hellzone of a slug-infested world. He could not seem to get a grip on it nor a proper feel for what it was. It was firm and rippling, a living sheath of muscle.

  Then he saw its reflection in the plate glass windows of Torrid.

  A creeper.

  There was a fucking creeper on his back.

  Beyond panic, he jumped to his feet despite the pain at his neck. Without hesitating, he threw himself backwards, crushing the creeper between his suit and the brick façade outside the store. It gave out a piping sort of cry like a tree frog, but did not loosen its hold. He kept bashing it into the wall again and again, using every ounce of strength he had and all of his weight. Finally, on the sixth or seventh try, he heard a sharp sort of snapping sound. The creeper let out a high, trilling cry, its legs bicycling madly against the back of his suit with a very unpleasant slithery sort of sound.

  Got you, you prick! I fucking well got you!

  The grip at his neck weakened considerably. He reached behind him, grasped the quivering mass and peeled it free, whipping it at the wall with everything he had.

  It made another snapping sound as it struck.

  It flopped manically on the floor, trilling and squeaking now, one of its segments clearly damaged, cracked open like a peanut shell, a yellow soupy fluid leaking from it. Its tentacle-like legs scrambled for purchase, but it was bent, crooked, and it couldn’t seem to propel itself forward or get into a defensive or fighting posture (if it even had such a thing).

  Kurta stared down at it with an undeniable sense of triumph.

  It kept trying to pull away from him, knowing it was in serious trouble, but the best it could manage was a sideways lurching motion, a trail of that sticky yellow sap left in its wake.

  Finally, as if realizing it could not escape its fate, it raised its fore end off the floor, breathing rapidly and almost convulsively. What Kurta was seeing was pretty much what The Pole had—a shiny, blood-red arthropod, centipede-like, its looping appendages like something from a sea creature; the mouth yawning open with each gulp of air, revealing a ribbed, tunnel-like throat that led to its gut; the slithering mouth tendrils; and the perfectly awful black marbles of its eyes.

  It had to die.

  It was a living mass of eggs and Kurta knew it.

  Just one of these things was enough to infect a city.

  Just one. It would lay its eggs somewhere moist and warm, and from each would emerge a larval wiggler that would become a parasitic slug which, in time, would molt into a creeper like this one—capable of laying hundreds of more eggs.

  The big problem with these damn things besides the obvious, Kurta could recall Dr. Dewarvis saying, is that they have no natural enemies. The entire mammal kingdom is their host and their food. How are you supposed to stop something like this if nature won’t even lend you a hand?

  How right he was.

  These things were infesting the globe, completely unchecked save for the exterminators, and the idea of that, of mankind being brought to its knees and ultimate extinction because of an ugly crawly horror like this was not just repulsive, it was offensive.

  Kurta drew his .357 Python and blew the creeper away. It left a splash of yellow snot sprayed over the plate glass of Torrid. Split wide, its head was a macerated ruin. Drainage bubbled free. Its hind section convulsed one last time and released a gummy translucent emulsion filled with hundreds of eggs that looked like frog spawn.

  Picking up his Ithaca, Kurta, more than a little weak in the knees, resumed his journey.

  34

  The skylight panels were hinged, so it was fairly easy for The Pole to boost himself up through one of them and climb out into the fresh air. Then he began snaking his way over the top of the skylights themselves. He was certain they would support his weight, but to be on the safe side, he kept the catwalk beneath him at all times.

  Within five minutes, he was free of it and on the actual roof of the Southgate Mall. Good God, it was a rolling landscape of roofs, rising, falling, jutting and convex. There were seagulls up there and crows and ravens. Bird shit everywhere.

  And bones.

  The bones of animals and humans. The birds must have been carrying things up here to feed upon.

  He stripped his helmet off even though it was against the rules to do so in a hot zone.

  Fuck it.

  The air was fresh, as fresh as air can be with the stink of bird poo, dander, rotting things, and the smell of human remains wafting up from the parking lot. Regardless, after having his head stuck in the helmet for hours and breathing filtered air, it smelled wonderful.

  It was cool, fresh and cool.

  When he looked behind him, he could see the smoke escaping from the skylight he’d left open.

  It was going to be an inferno in there in an hour or so. All that dusty, dry merchandise was going to go up fast. Which was a good reason to find a way off the roof.

  He made it to the southern edge, but that was no good. It was a sheer drop of seventy feet to the parking lot.

  Now wouldn’t that just be ironic if I couldn’t get down?

  35

  “This is it,” Kurta said under his breath. “Exactly what I was looking for.”

  He was in one of the maintenance rooms. It was a pretty big place with a detailed map of the mall on the wall. A few desks covered with dusty papers and dead laptops. There was a storeroom with tools in cribs. Another room with a wall of electronic equipment that he guessed was the mall’s broadband hub. The thing that interested him was an elevator cage that apparently led to the mechanical shaft below.

  The sight of it made his heart sink.

  An elevator was no good without electricity.

  Then, relieved, he found a man-sized conduit with a ladder bolted to the wall that led down.

  He decided to have a look-see.

  If there were slugheads down there, better to face them now than when he was piggybacking West.

  It was an easy climb down and he panned about with the tactical light of his riot gun. The passage went on farther than his light could reach. It looked empty. He heard no sounds.

  Take a look. A good long look.

  So he did. He moved down the passage for about a hundred feet, maybe more, until it branched to the left and right. He went to the right for about another forty feet, then it branched again.

  Shit.

  It was a maze down there. Maybe back in the day when the lights were still working it might have made some sense, but now it was all pretty spooky. He could just about imagine wandering endlessly down there until he gave up, crawling into a corner to die.

  Melodramatics, that’s all.

  Maybe West would know, maybe he’d be able to make some sense of it. That’s when Kurta decided he wasn’t using his bean. The passages snaked all over the place beneath the mall because they had to. What he needed to do was to think about where he was in the mall itself and then move in that direction and that should terminate with one of the access hatches West was talking about.

  But that wasn’t for now.

  N
ow he had to get West down here and that would be a job in of itself.

  He cut back down to the ladder, feeling good about the fact that he’d seen no sluggos down there. He moved quickly up the rungs. In his mind, it was all so simple now if only it would work out. If only they could get out of there and to the APC without incident. Up in the maintenance room, he went back to the door, peered around and saw no one in the corridor.

  The smoke was thick. He could feel the heat building as he passed the hallways leading to the restrooms.

  And that’s when he saw a white blur come out of the darkness. It slammed into him. Hard. His knees buckled from the impact and the Ithaca hit the floor, sliding away.

  Fuck!

  A woman came charging out at him. She was on him before he could clear the .357 from its holster. He saw little of her before she hit him again. She was naked with very large breasts, reddish hair plastered to her face, and mottled gray skin. That was all he saw.

  Then she hit him and he saw stars again.

  She jumped on him, piggybacking him, legs scissored around his waist, her hands clawing at his throat as if they were trying to dig their way through the Tyvek material. This was even worse than the creeper. She kept saying something in a low, cracked voice and it took him a moment or two to realize it was, “Piss, piss, piss! Pissy piss piss!”

  It might have been darkly comic if she hadn’t been trying her damnedest to get him down where she could kill him.

  He whirled around, bucking and jerking, trying to throw her. Every time he tried to get his gun or knife out, she clawed madly at his arm, pinning it and nearly twisting it out of the socket.

  She wasn’t too heavy—he couldn’t imagine that she weighed more than 120 pounds. But in the hotsuit, in the heat and smoke, it was just too damn much. His legs were giving way, the strength running from him.

  Making squealing and croaking sounds, she kept batting at his helmet. He slammed her against the wall, but she clung that much tighter. Finally, stumbling about drunkenly, he tripped over a bench and they both went down.

  Then she had him.

  Effortlessly, it seemed, she pinned him, straddling him, still clawing at his face bubble as if she just couldn’t understand the nature of this barrier that separated her nails from his face. Gouts of foam and slime and some sort of yellow ooze like egg yolk hung from her mouth. Her eyes were horribly bloodshot, set in livid purple sockets.

  He got the .357 out after a good struggle and nearly got the barrel to her head, but she batted it away. He tried again and she knocked it away just as fast.

  He didn’t bother with anything fancy then.

  He cracked her in the side of the head with the butt. She let out a short little exclamation of surprise and he threw her off. She rolled over and came up, breathing hard. Clots of gore dropped from her nostrils and juiced from her mouth. She was like some heaving bag of carrion. She bared her teeth, cocked her head, squealed out some nonsensical thing, and began to crawl right over to him again.

  Her slug-sack was large and stout. It was securely webbed to her belly, sending out dark threads under her skin like rootlets right up into her large, trembling breasts.

  As she came on, chattering her teeth and reaching for him, a voice in Kurta’s brain said, you’re being attacked by a fucking stripper from Hell.

  He fired twice.

  The first round was off and blew a hole through her left shoulder. The second caught her right in the face, the bullet’s exit taking out the back of her head. Her brains and blood struck the corridor wall like a handful of greasy, slimy shit, slowing dripping down it in clotted trails.

  Kurta got to his feet.

  I’m coming, kid, I’m coming.

  Hurting, tired, he vanished into the funneling smoke and billowing heat.

  36

  After forty-five minutes of searching for an egress, The Pole realized that there was no way off the roof. Absolutely no way. The shortest drop was off the arch over the back of the food court where all the little tables were with their rotting canvas umbrellas. And that was still a twenty-foot drop onto the pavement.

  In the distance, he could see an APC parked.

  It must have belonged to Two.

  So close, so close.

  At the sight of it, he started shouting at the very top of his lungs: “DIRTY! DIRTY! DIRTY MOTHERFUCKING BULLSHIT! WHY THE FUCK IS ANY OF THIS GODDAMN WELL HAPPENING?” His voice echoed off into the distance, but no one, of course, answered it.

  He was alone.

  Dreadfully alone.

  The sun was beginning to sink into the western sky and it would be dark in a couple of hours and there he waited, most surely screwed, chewed, and barbecued (as they used to say when he was a kid a thousand years before, it seemed).

  What now?

  What the hell now?

  The smell of smoke was strong, even outside. Clouds of it were billowing across the parking lot, being pulled apart by the wind.

  Sighing, knowing his rage was just a simple waste of energy, he stepped to the edge of the arch.

  No, it was just too far down.

  Last thing he needed now was to break a leg or twist an ankle.

  It meant he had to go back inside.

  Shit!

  For a moment, he even thought of leaping fifteen feet through the air to the flagpole and shimmying down it. But he was pretty certain how that would end.

  He started back across the mountainous terrain of the roofs. He kept himself oriented as to where the APC was. He had seen several hatches that led back inside the mall. Probably crawlways for the maintenance people to get up top to work on the banks of air conditioners and what not.

  He was looking for a hatch as near to the outer wall of the mall as possible.

  Ten minutes later, he found one.

  It was only about thirty feet from the parking lot and, if luck held, it might have its own doorway leading outside. The hatch was locked from the inside, but he blew it open with his .357. He shined the light down there. Just ladder rungs in the wall leading down to the second floor by the looks of it.

  Putting his helmet back on and praying for an act of God, he started down.

  37

  It took some doing to get West down the ladder into the maze of passages. He was fighting against the pain of shifting his legs, but there was really nothing Kurta could do for him.

  “Just hang tight,” he told him. “Just hang tight.”

  Now he had him piggybacked and was moving slowly down the passages. He was just glad West didn’t weigh any more than he did. It was tough going at first, but after Kurta’s back adjusted to it, it wasn’t too bad.

  “Next turn,” West panted. “I think…I think we should hang left.”

  Christ, he sounded like shit.

  Once they reached the APC and Kurta got him inside, he’d shoot him up with morphine and put him out for the thirty-odd mile drive back to the bunker. It was the best that could be done for him.

  Kurta, the Ithaca pump in his hands, led the way forward. With the added bulk of West, he couldn’t move too fast. And maybe that was a good thing because they had come too far to fuck this up now.

  After ten minutes or so when West had not said anything, Kurta said, “Hey, kid, you still with me?”

  “Yeah…yes, sure I am.”

  Not good. He was getting weak. He needed some real medical care. C’mon, kid, don’t go out on me now. He had an urge to shift him a little so the pain in his leg would wake him up, but he didn’t have the heart to do it.

  After panning the left passage with his light, he moved slowly down it. He found a set of bones on the floor dressed in dirty rags. One of them had died down here or maybe it was a human being who’d just offed themselves. The desire to do that was something Kurta understood just fine.

  He didn’t like to think of how many times he’d contemplated the same.

  He paused.

  Did I just hear something or is it my own footsteps coming back at
me?

  Standing there, feeling West’s dead weight pressing down on him, feeling very much the rock and the hard place he was trapped between, Kurta heard the sound again.

  It was somewhere ahead.

  Somewhere the light would not reach.

  Question was: did he blunder into it or did he set West down, take care of business, and then come back for him? If he did the former and ran into a real sluggo nest, they were both fucked because there was no way to do any real fighting while he was carrying West. If he did the latter, he left West open to attack.

  The sounds ahead were getting louder, echoing down the passages so that he could not truly be sure they were ahead of him. Maybe they were behind him or off in one of those side passages.

  As the sounds gained volume, Kurta found himself more indecisive than ever before.

  He didn’t have a choice; he set West down.

  He crouched down with him and gently eased him off. He wasn’t answering now. He was loose, limp, and sprawling. He slumped over right away, and Kurta had to pull him back up, push him up against the wall in such a way that his own weight would keep him there.

  “West?” he said. “West? C’mon, man, answer me.”

  Nothing.

  Shit.

  Although they were in a hot zone and the baddies were pushing in, Kurta took off his helmet and then West’s. Despite the pressure bandage, there was blood seeping out of the tears in West’s suit. Kurta got his bad leg up, brought it across his knees so he could get a look at it, and blood ran out of West’s boot.

  A lot of blood.

  If the pressure bandage couldn’t stop the flow, chances were an artery had been nicked and if that was the case, West would never make it back to the bunker. He’d be dead long before they reached it.

  “West…West? Can you hear me? Kid…can you hear me?”

  West’s face in the light was sweat-beaded and pale. It felt hot to the touch. Drool ran out of the corner of his mouth. With his gloves off, Kurta could barely get a pulse. Not only that but his breathing was so shallow it was nonexistent.