Monstrous Read online

  “Watch your back!” Cody yelled, coming up quickly behind her and swinging his pipe into a fat, shelled body that was about to land on her back.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Their eyes touched briefly, and she felt a sudden connection with him that went far beyond what they’d once had. It was a connection she doubted could ever be broken, probably arising from the fact that they’d survived—up until then anyway—something so enormously catastrophic.

  “Hey! More web burning!” Rich yelled, breaking into Sidney’s thoughts. He was swinging his pipe and crushing anything that survived his blows.

  Sidney quickly brought her torch to where the webbing was thicker up ahead. Through the hazy gossamer she could see two spiders weaving furiously ahead of them, attempting to halt their progress.

  “Could use some exterminators over here,” she called as she pushed forward to the last of the webbing that blocked their way.

  Rich reached her, Snowy by his side.

  “What’s the haps?” he asked. She looked at him, experiencing that same feeling she’d had with Cody. They’d all been through so much together.

  “See those two nasties?” she asked, burning a hole that made the two weaving insects all the more obvious. “They need to go, and then I think we’ll be good.”

  Rich took a deep breath and strode closer, planting his feet and jabbing through the webbing. “Stand still, you son of a bitch,” he grunted, the gore-stained end of the makeshift weapon tearing through the web but missing the spiders entirely. He tried again, with similar results, and even with Sidney burning the webbing, the insects eluded him, continuing to build a wall of silky evil.

  “Maybe bullets’ll work,” he finally said, turning away to call to Langridge and Sayid.

  His pole was still stuck through the webbing, and as he called out to Langridge, who was closer, one of the spiders began crawling the length of it toward him.

  Langridge saw it before Rich realized the danger he was in.

  “Watch it!” she cried out, raising her gun as Sidney reached to set the spider afire with her torch.

  But they were both too late. The spider sprang onto Rich’s arm and sank its horribly sharp pincers into his flesh.

  “Ahhhhh! Son of a bitch!” Rich screamed, releasing the pole and shaking his arm frantically. His weapon clattered to the ground. Snowy jumped back with a bark.

  The spider fell, and Langridge dispatched it with a single shot. The remaining spider appeared, but Sidney was there to scorch its limbs, sending it skittering back up into the trees.

  Rich had dropped to his knees and was sucking on the red, angry wound, then spitting on the ground.

  Sayid rushed forward and knelt beside him.

  “Is he all right?” Sidney asked, keeping an eye on the webbing, burning away sections now with no interference from the weavers.

  “I don’t know,” Sayid answered, gazing at the wound. “That’s a nasty-looking bite.”

  “It’s all right,” Rich said. “Think I sucked most of the poison out.” He continued to spit on the ground.

  “How we doing there, Sidney?” Langridge asked as she ejected the empty clip from her gun and pulled another from her pants pocket, slipping it in place.

  “We can get through now,” she said.

  Cody was crushing some last-minute spider stragglers coming from the side of the road as Langridge headed toward Sidney, picking up Rich’s pipe on her way.

  “Good job, Sid,” Rich said, waving Sayid away and standing to retrieve his pipe from Langridge, who looked as though she really didn’t want to give it up.

  “You’ve got a gun,” Rich told her, and she handed it to him with a disgusted look.

  “Let’s move,” she said, motioning them through the opening burned in the wall of webbing. “Don’t want to give whatever it is that’s tracking us a chance to come up with something else.”

  Sidney took a look at what they were leaving behind. The ground was covered with the obliterated remains of countless spider-things.

  Maybe the alien presence inside her head would get the idea that they weren’t to be messed with, she thought, making sure to take it all in just in case the presence could see. She would have liked that.

  But doubted it would happen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  As they stood, wondering where Isaac had gotten off to, the gas tank on the SUV exploded with a sound like a clap of thunder, tossing them violently to the street.

  “Shit,” Doc Martin heard Burwell exclaim above the painful ringing in her ears. She was on her hands and knees, attempting to focus. She shook her head to eliminate the annoying buzz, her vision focusing on Velazquez, who had been thrown onto a nearby lawn. The woman looked stunned, rolling around as if attempting to build the momentum to stand.

  Burwell let out another expletive, and Doc Martin looked in his direction to see that he had risen to his feet and was looking at a deep, bleeding gash in his leg.

  “Shit,” she muttered, shaking off the muddiness. She forced herself to her feet, almost losing her balance again but catching herself as she started toward the injured man.

  Just as the screams ripped through the air.

  Doc Martin spun toward the sound and saw that it was coming from Velazquez. The poor woman was covered in bugs—carpenter ants from the looks—and was struggling to stand.

  Doc Martin changed direction and rushed toward the woman, trying to slap the ants from her body. But it wasn’t long before they were climbing onto her, their pincers biting into her own exposed flesh and sending stinging pain through her body. Velazquez seemed to be growing weaker as more and more ants swarmed over her. Frantically Doc Martin tried to rub them off her, ignoring her own pain, but it was soon clear that there was nothing she could do to help Velazquez.

  Burwell had hobbled closer, holding on to his bleeding leg. “Velazquez!” he screamed.

  “Get back!” Doc Martin warned, swatting at the bugs that attempted to crawl upon her own body. “Keep away or you’ll end up the same.”

  The veterinarian moved quickly away from Velazquez’s remains, away from the seemingly limitless insects that were surging up out of the earth.

  “We’ve got to get away,” she said to Burwell as she rubbed at her face where some ants had crawled down from her hairline. She grabbed his arm, trying to move him, but he cried out, tripping over a leg that seemed not to work.

  “You’ve got to get up,” Doc Martin urged, watching the writhing black carpet that had engulfed Velazquez move from what little remained of the woman’s body and head directly for them.

  Burwell tried to get up, but the bleeding from his leg was fierce, and he was weakening fast. He fell back to the ground, nearly unconscious.

  Doc Martin couldn’t leave him, too. Neither did she want to die like Velazquez, with the skin eaten from her body. That thought seemed to fill her with a surge of strength the likes of which she hadn’t felt since her forties.

  And that had been a long time ago.

  She reached down and practically picked Burwell up from the ground. “You’ve got to help me,” she grunted.

  Burwell moaned but did little to help her as she dragged him down the middle of the road. The shadow on the ground that flowed toward them gave her the inspiration she needed to keep going.

  She felt as though a million volts of electricity were coursing through her body, and everywhere she looked, Doc Martin thought she saw movement.

  Animal life converging upon them.

  She steered them toward a house on the right side of the street, and that’s when Burwell went completely limp, his body becoming so much deadweight that she could no longer hold him up. She stumbled, and they both fell to the pavement.

  “C’mon, you’ve got to get up,” Doc Martin begged. She didn’t want to turn around . . . didn’t want to see the moving shadow of life crawling toward them.

  Burwell just moaned. She could see the blood continuing to pour from his leg w
ound, and deep down she knew that he wasn’t likely to get up anytime soon.

  She was about to make the terrible decision, and one that she was sure would haunt her for the remainder of her years, when she heard it. The creak of a rusty door, followed by a voice almost as rusty sounding.

  “Hey, you.”

  Doc Martin looked up at a tiny cottage nestled in a patch of shadows thrown by two enormous oak trees. An old woman stood on the front steps, holding a double-barreled shotgun that looked as if it weighed probably as much as she did.

  “I need some help,” Doc Martin said, straining to get up from where she and Burwell had fallen.

  “Well I certainly can’t help you,” the old woman said. “I’m eighty-seven years old, for Pete’s sake, but if you get him and yourself inside . . .” She gestured toward the door behind her, then slowly maneuvered her ancient body around and headed back into the house.

  The ants were close. Doc Martin could practically hear them as their mass flowed across the street like water.

  Using the last of what she had, Doc Martin hoisted the man up, throwing one of his arms across her neck, and dragged Burwell onto the sidewalk and up the crumbling brick steps that led to the front door of the old woman’s house.

  And then inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  They passed through a set of heavy double doors into a part of Elysium that felt like the frozen food section of Stop & Shop.

  Delilah had heard this area referred to as the server center but had never been inside. It housed the servers that made up the hospital’s state-of-the-art computer systems, systems that were considered almost as important as the nurses and doctors in the care of their patients—particularly those on the top floor.

  The eighth floor housed the neediest of Elysium’s patients, those whose neuro systems were so damaged that they required constant care and monitoring. The patients in the Vegetable Patch, as the floor was insensitively called, were kept alive entirely by mechanical means—complex computer programs that fed them, breathed for them, administered their medicines, and monitored their vital signs and bodily functions. Without the machines, and the computers that ran them, the poor souls who resided on the eighth floor would die.

  Delilah had to wonder if that might have been a blessing.

  There were offices just on the other side of the double doors, and signs of violence were immediately obvious. Whatever had happened here had happened quickly.

  “Where are the stairs?” Delilah asked, feeling her heart begin to race.

  “Just at the end of the hallway here,” Deacon replied as the group approached the main server room, whose walls were made entirely of glass.

  And that was when they saw them—the revived patients inside the room.

  “Shit,” Deacon muttered as he quickly pushed the group back into a small alcove that led to a conference room.

  “Did they see us?” Mason asked.

  “No,” Deacon answered. “Looks like they’re too busy.”

  “Busy doing what?” Mallory wanted to know, sticking her head out from the alcove to see.

  Delilah looked as well, at first confused, and then it made a kind of sense. “They’re taking apart the servers,” she said.

  Mallory looked at her. “Like what Mr. Armstrong was doing back in the office?”

  She nodded. Many of the servers had gone dark, their blinking lights extinguished as they were gutted. “Just like it, only this is worse,” Delilah said.

  “How so?” Deacon asked.

  “The Vegetable Patch,” Phil said.

  “Yeah,” Delilah agreed, although she didn’t like the nickname at all. “Without those systems running, the patients up there will die.”

  “Not much we can do about that now,” Mason said. “I just want to get home to my family. Can we get to the stairs without them seeing us?”

  “They seem totally preoccupied,” Deacon said. “If we stay close to the far wall and creep low enough, we might be able to get by without them even noticing.”

  Delilah watched the patients in the server room, recognizing some from her own unit. They seemed to be working quickly, with little thought to their actions. Their hospital gowns were covered with blood, and their fingers were ragged from the work they were performing without tools.

  “Are we going to try this or . . . ,” Nancy finally asked, but her voice trailed off as she turned to look in the opposite direction. Had she heard something?

  “Yeah, we don’t have a choice,” Deacon said. “They don’t seem to be paying attention to anything but the computers anyway.”

  Then he explained where they’d be headed—through the door at the end of the corridor and up two flights of stairs to the skyway that would take them to the garage.

  But before they started on their way, it was Delilah’s turn to hear something. She looked back in the direction they’d come from, toward the double doors at the end of the hallway.

  There were more noises, and this time they all stared for a moment.

  “Let’s go,” Deacon ordered, drawing the group’s attention back to him as he led them out of the alcove and down the hallway past the server room where the patients worked feverishly to take apart the machinery inside.

  The sounds were suddenly louder and seemed to be coming from the ceiling above them now. Delilah was bringing up the rear and stopped for a moment, her eyes on the patients in the server room. Their movements slowed, and several looked up toward the hallway, but almost immediately they returned to their work, adding to the growing stack of computer components in the center of the room.

  What are they doing, and why? Delilah wondered as she turned away and headed for the others who had reached the door at the end of the corridor.

  She was almost to them when a loud noise sounded behind her, as if a piece of the sky itself had fallen. She turned to see the ceiling behind her had caved in. It took her a few moments to realize that what poured from the damaged ceiling was not water from the heavy rain outside but plump rats and cockroaches.

  “Oh God” was all Delilah could manage as the flood of vermin flowed silently toward her.

  “Delilah!”

  She heard somebody calling her name, but she couldn’t move.

  The wave was closer now, flowing up against the glass windows of the server room. The patients inside barely looked up; nothing would keep them from their task.

  “Delilah, come on!”

  Again she heard her name, and again she remained frozen in place, watching the ocean of life flow up to her sensible nursing shoes, the rats—almost as big as her mother’s cats, Tom and Jerry—swimming through the shiny brown sea of cockroaches.

  A roach the size of her thumb crawled atop her shoe, and that spurred her to action. She let out a scream as she kicked, flinging the bug back into the ocean of filth. And then powerful arms wrapped tightly around her waist, yanking her up and off the floor so fast that the air was squeezed out of her lungs.

  It was Mason who had her, dragging her the rest of the way to the stairwell door through which the others had already disappeared. He shoved her forward, but as she stumbled into the stairwell, she heard him cry out behind her.

  Delilah spun around to see that the wave had started to take him. He was going to be swept past the door, swallowed up by the—

  She reached out, grabbing the front of his work shirt, holding tight, ignoring the roaches that skittered over her hand. Mason took hold of her arm, struggling against the flow that threatened to take them both now.

  Delilah screamed, and then Mallory was beside her. The two of them managed to pull Mason into the stairwell, where they collapsed on the cold concrete floor, kicking the door closed against the onslaught of vermin.

  The three of them lay there, gasping, Mason’s gaze silently thanking them as the sound of thousands of claws scraping on the metal door filled the air.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  From the top of the road Sidney could see the marina park
ing lot and knew they would have trouble.

  But what else would I expect?

  The air above the marina swirled with life, mostly gulls from the looks of it.

  “We’re not going to make it,” she told the others as they caught their breath. She looked closely at Cody. He had watched similar birds kill his father in that very place. Was it really only twenty-four hours ago?

  As if sensing her thoughts, he looked at her. There was a coldness in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. Something was missing—something taken by this whole series of insane events.

  She wondered if that certain something was gone from her as well.

  “My father kept extra keys for the boats in the office,” Cody said.

  Sayid and Langridge looked down the road at the marina.

  “They’ll tear us apart,” Sayid said.

  “Too many for our guns, and ammunition is getting low,” the security chief said.

  “We can’t stand around here much longer,” Sidney said, noticing how twitchy Snowy was becoming as the dog glanced from one side of the road to the other. No doubt there were all kinds of things crawling through the woods in hot pursuit of them.

  “Hey,” Rich called out.

  Sidney looked behind them in the direction of his voice and saw him turning up a hidden dirt driveway. She headed toward him, the others following, and saw that the drive led to a rickety old garage. Rich was standing beside an old bread delivery truck, backed halfway up the dirt drive.

  “We could use this to get down to the office,” he said rather breathlessly, and Sidney noticed how pale he looked—his skin almost gray.

  “Do you think it’ll run?” Langridge asked, grabbing a chrome handle and sliding the side door open with a grunt. “Oh,” she said, looking inside, her lip curled with distaste.

  “But we only have to get as far as the office,” Rich said.

  His forehead looked damp and he kept slowly blinking his eyes.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t look like this thing has run in years,” Langridge said, hands on her hips.

  “Doesn’t have to,” Rich commented. “Bet in neutral it would roll quite nicely.”