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Chapter 6 – Meet Dr. Marconi

That sucked. I pried my eyes open, feeling scratchy little bits in there that could either be sand or glass. I worked the lids open and found myself staring at dirt. I realized everything was upside-down and I was hanging awkwardly by my seat belt. I felt like every single joint in my body had been wrenched painfully out of socket. It was agony from head to toe, so dark now that it took me a moment to realize the massive, spreading pool down on the ceiling was not motor oil, but blood.

I craned my neck over and saw hunks of meat flying off what had been Officer Freeman/Appleton in juicy ragged pink and yellow layers, bone and ribs and a spongy mass that must have been lungs. Out from the meaty shreds came rushing masses of the tiny white demon rod things, swirling around the interior of the truck like rice in a blender.

That’s not what caused me to panic, not that or the faint wet, ripping sounds next to me. No, what got me moving, what sent me clutching at the seatbelt clasp, was the sound of the swarm.

Oh, that sound. Not something coming through my ears at all but a kind of shrill electricity in my brain, a million sharp, spiky, poison thoughts ricocheting around my head.

Imagine fifty thousand men trapped on a desert island, deprived of food and water and sex but somehow kept alive for fifty thousand years. Then, after they’ve been tormented a hundred steps beyond insanity, tortured past self-mutilation and cannibalism, somebody drops off a sculpture of a naked woman made from perfectly-cooked steaks. If you could then capture the sound of them simultaneously fucking and eating and tearing her to shreds and broadcast it into the center of your skull at 50,000 watts, it would still sound absolutely nothing like what I heard. It was madness and desperation and deprivation and torment gone supernova, screeches and howls and images and I heard, sprinkled in here and there, my own name.

It blew every thought out of my head, tore my mind open. I was frantic, patting around for the clasp to the seatbelt with hands shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. I could vaguely hear actual screams around me, right from the back seat but they might as well have been a thousand miles away. These little white streaks were buzzing around my face now, past my ears, skipping over my skin.

I got my fingers around the little plastic box that held the seatbelt but couldn’t find a button, couldn’t see it, pressed and pulled and finally just started clawing at the thing like a little kid in a tantrum. I felt this itching over my bare arms, and then little pricks like needles and I knew what it was, I fucking knew, and I started contorting my body to crawl free from the belt like an animal wrenching from a trap.

It wasn’t working. I was aware of movement all around me in the darkness, heard glass shatter from the back seat and knew somebody was crawling out or was being pulled out behind me. I ran my hand over my forearm and a thousand of the rods scattered off into the air. I heard a resulting furious uproar in the voices, shrieks like teenage banshees at a boy band concert except nothing like that at all. The sound, it was so massive and yet so compressed in my skull that it was a physical pressure against my temples. I thought I could feel wheezing, creaking fissures in the bone.

Suddenly, hands were grabbing me, pulling at the seatbelt. A hand came into view and with a flick there was suddenly a narrow blade there, a switchblade cutting at the strap. I fell free, crashed down. Four hands were dragging me out of the wreckage by the shirt and shoulders, my back scraping over a bed of glass bits.

It was Fred Chu and John, pulling me free. Everybody was yelling, freaking out. Molly was dancing around and barking, everybody panicking at the sight of the little cloud of white insects blowing around me like pillow feathers. The things had settled on my arm again and were landing on my neck and face. I frantically brushed the things off, swatted at them in the air. John seized my arm by the wrist, dug out the brown bottle of alcohol from his pants and doused the arm with it.

This seemed to annoy the flying worm things more than anything, and my skin was on fire with their attempts to dig their way in. I sputtered, “That ain’t helping! The alcohol isn’t hurting th-“

John then produced his lighter, and set my arm on fire.

I said before that my skin was “on fire” with the pain but I admit it was nothing like my skin actually being on fire. But the pain inside my skull was a thousand times worse. Hundreds of these things were burned alive and the psychic outcry was like having my head shoved inside a 747 engine. It was a nuclear bomb of sound, earth-shattering, a pain like an explosion of razor blades in my cranium.

And then, silence. John was rolling my arm in the dust, patting out the flames. The skin was beet-red and peeling in places.

I sat up, tried to focus my eyes, tried to get to my feet, fell back down on my ass. I saw John had blood running down his forehead and he was trying to wipe it from his eyes, the empty liquor bottle at his feet. He leaned over and puked.

Jennifer was on her knees in the dirt, had a chunk missing from her upper thigh and her hair was wetly matted down to the side of her head with blood. Big Jim looked okay but was pointing and screaming, Molly was barking. I couldn’t find Fred, whipped my head around and finally saw him off by himself, thrashing around like he was on fire.

The swarm had found him and the rush of the things poured out of the wrecked SUV like a kicked hornet’s nest.

They were pouring into Fred.

He was coughing, choking, the rods gushing into his wide-open mouth. In five seconds it was over and Fred collapsed to the ground as if dead.

We all knew he wasn’t. I fell back flat on the ground, exhausted. Jim and John and Molly stared toward Fred in dull shock, a silence settling over the scene so heavy it was almost a solid thing.

Only Jennifer moved. She pushed herself to her feet, a little squirt of blood jumping from her leg wound with each step. She sprinted toward the dead SUV, dropped and crawled into it. The interior of the truck looked like it had been used to haul raw meat. She rooted around in there and grabbed something, then backed out quickly.

Fred moved. He twitched, flopped onto his back, then clumsily got to his feet. Everybody flinched and took steps backward, I forced myself to my feet over the protest of my leg muscles. Fred—if it was still Fred—looked confused for a moment, then brushed himself off and said, “It’s okay, guys. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

Big Jim turned away from him as Jennifer came back from the truck holding the detective’s shotgun. The thing was gleaming in the moonlight with a layer of tacky blood. Without asking, Jim took it from her and checked the chamber to see if a shell was loaded in. He laid it over the shoulder like he was suddenly the captain of this crew, looked right at me as if to ask if I had a problem with any of this. After a moment he said, “We gotta get a car, guys. Somehow.”

John glanced at me, looking uncertain. Jennifer looked at him and then me like she expected me to do something. I could barely keep my feet. I looked Fred dead in the eyes, searching them. Finally I said to Fred, “Go flag down a car.”

Jim nodded like this was a perfectly good plan and followed Fred as he walked toward the highway. Jennifer gave me an exasperated look, then trotted off after Jim. She came up behind him and tore the gun from his hands. He spun, threw out his hands in a “what’s the deal” gesture and asked her what the heck she was doing. She backed away from him and I half expected her to blow a hole through the infested Fred with the shotgun. I found myself hoping she would.

She didn’t. Instead she ran back toward me and John, pushed the gun into my hands and stepped aside.

Very slowly and carefully Big Jim said to me, “What are you going to do with that, David?”

John, Jen and I stood side-by-side, facing Fred and Jim from about ten feet away.

Fred said, “Whoa, guys. Guys, we’re all shook up here. Okay?“

Jennifer said, “Jim, were you not paying attention to what just happened? That’s not Fred. Not any more.”

“We don’t know what happened,” snapped Jim, glancing over at Fred. “Does anybody here understand this? Really? Screw you if you think you do.”

Fred said, “Guys, look, I don’t know what you think you saw but I’m still Fred in here. Ask me anything, I’m me. I mean, we were all in that car when the cop exploded. Any of us could be, infected or whatever, but we gotta hang together. We’re like, the good guys here. Right?”

Everyone looked at me, since I was the armed one. I looked down as if deferring to the shotgun. It was cold, heavy and sticky with Morgan’s blood.

A breeze blew past us. From my right, Molly let out a low growl.

I closed my eyes, let out a long breath and said, “Go flag down a car.”

Big Jim and Fred turned and again moved toward the highway. I waited for about five seconds, then stepped forward, feeling shaky on my battered legs. I jogged after them.

Five feet behind Fred I raised the shotgun and blew his head off his shoulders.

Big Jim recoiled, splattered with Fred’s blood, screamed something. He recovered and moved on me, I pumped the shotgun and aimed it right at his face.

Jim looked straight into the barrel, took two more steps, then raised his eyes to meet mine.

He stopped. That look he gave me, I had seen it before. We should have expected nothing else from you.

John sprinted up toward Fred’s prone body, began dragging it, said, “Get him to the truck!” Jennifer went to help him, but the two of them were making slow, halting progress pulling the dead weight through the sand.

Big Jim’s eyes never moved from mine. He said, “The day after the Hitchcock thing, back in school. I saw you, you and your buddies, laughing. Laughing in the hallway. Not twelve hours after Billy died. I know all about you, Dave.”

I kept the gun trained on him, said, “This is not a conversation, Jim.”

John said, “Dave! These things are starting to come out of him!”

Jim stared me down a moment longer and then turned and walked toward them. John muttered something to him and Big Jim knocked both he and Jen aside. He single-handedly dragged Fred’s body back to the wreckage of the SUV and laid him against the rear door. A familiar fuzzy cloud was emerging from the ragged stump that had been Fred Chu’s head.

Jim stomped toward me, ripped the shotgun from my hands, turned and fired into the gas tank of the SUV. We all flinched from the expected explosion.

Nothing. Instead there was a patch of little holes in the metal, a heavy rain of gasoline splattering down the rear and onto the prone body of Fred Chu. John stepped up to his corpse, flicked open his lighter and tossed it down.

Fred Chu went up in a ball of flame. The fire licked up the trunk of the SUV, reached the gas tank and ignited the contents with a heavy, metallic THONK sound, sending us flopping to the ground, little bits of metal plunking softly into the sand around us.

Jim stood, walked over and threw the shotgun in my gut. The barrel was warm. We all got to our feet and silently hung there for a moment, watching thousands of these little particles swarm out of Fred, becoming burning specks in the night air like sparks over a stirred campfire. In my head, the concert of damned voices faded and died.

John said, “Do you think that’s all of them? The worms, whatever they are? Do you think we got all of ‘em?”

I didn’t answer.

“Because I got a feeling that if just a few of them get away, hell, if just one of them get out and get into a body, they’ll multiply. Lay eggs and do what they do.”

Nobody answered. What was there to say? Slowly and lumberingly we turned away and moved toward the highway, in silence.

It took us fifteen minutes to flag down a car. I tried to get two to stop at gunpoint, but they just swerved and sped on because, bleeding and filthy and freaking out like I was, I probably looked pretty terrifying. Finally all we males hung back and Jennifer stood out by the road alone, shivering and mussed and looking victimized, one shapely leg coated in crimson. Just the second car that came by after that stopped, a shiny new Nissan SUV driven by a young guy and his wife, on their honeymoon or whatever.

As soon as their passenger door was opened I sprinted out and put the gun in their face, forced them out while Jim apologized profusely, swearing we would bring it back. The five of us and the dog piled in and we drove into the night.

* * * * *

“I don’t like it,” said Jennifer softly, as if afraid the looming, dark thing on the horizon could hear us.

She was looking at the Luxor Las Vegas Hotel, a pyramid jutting into the night sky, big and black and geometric, like something from the year 3000. We were parked in the lot of a massive neon-lined steakhouse maybe a quarter mile away, all of us beaten and stinking of smoke and looking like war refugees. We had ducked into a truck stop restroom just outside of the city and washed as much blood off ourselves as we could. Jim spat out two teeth, John was pretty sure he had a concussion and would still be vomiting if he had anything in his stomach. I had double vision in one eye and in general felt like I had been run through a wood chipper. We bought four first-aid kits and fixed ourselves up as best we could, Jennifer patching her thigh with a roll of ace bandages and a tampon. We bought armloads of convenience store food and sat eating as we drove around looking for the Luxor. This parking lot was as far as we got before somebody asked what the plan was.

“Guys, what are we sittin’ here for?” asked Jim, nodding toward the Luxor. “The Justin thing is in there. Right now. This whole thing, it’s goin’ down right this minute for all we know and we’re out here doin’ nothin’.”

“What’s ‘going down?’” asked Jennifer, looking at me. “What’s supposed to happen?”

I sat silent for a moment and then confessed, “I have no idea.”

“So we don’t even know he’s there, do we?” spat Jim.

“No, he’s there. Trust me.” I said that just to sound cool. I had no way of knowing where Shitload went. Before anybody could call me on that I said, “The problem is we won’t get six inches inside the casino looking all torn and bloody like we are. A dozen very polite and well-dressed security guys’ll snatch us and rush us to the hospital out of pure, human sympathy.”

This was the most any of us had spoken since the accident and the ensuing clusterfuck. John squinted at the casino, the front yard bathed in floodlights and featuring two giant sphinx statues. He asked, “Where do you park?”

“What am I even talking to you for?” Jim said to my back. “Guys, why are we acting like he’s in charge?”

Jennifer put up her hands, said, “Let’s not make this a dick measuring contest, guys.”

There was silence for a moment, then John said, “That’s good, because it wouldn’t be no contest at all.”

Silence again.

“That is, I’m referring to my cock being bigger than either of yours.”

Big Jim hesitated, then said, “Please. My cock’s cock is bigger than your cock.”

John retorted, “You don’t even exist. We’re all just a figment of my cock’s imagination.”

Jim let out a chuckle before he could stifle it, then pretended it was a cough.

“Even if we get into the hotel,” I said loudly, trying to drown them out, “the further problem will be getting into Marconi’s seminar. A function like that, dealing with ghosts and psychic crap, they know it’s gonna attract a lot of nutjobs. It won’t be open to anybody without tickets or advanced registration or whatever. And on top of all that, I don’t know how we get in with a gun.”

“-Or if a gun will even do anything,” added Jennifer.

I looked down at the shotgun in my lap, a heavy, cold, hateful thing still coated in grit and blood. I noticed something else, a broad lump in my pants pocket. I dug into it and pulled out the folded envelope of cash I had gotten from the alley guy yesterday. I wondered if I wound up not using it if I should go find the guy and give it back to him. From behind me, Molly barked.

John was looking off across the parking lot now where a massive, customized RV sat like a beached whale. Behind it was an 18-wheeler, painted white with neon outlines, some kind of logo airbrushed on the side. He asked, “I wonder what’s in there.”

Big Jim said, “Shipment of fags.”

This seemed to anger Molly, who stared out the windshield and went into a barking frenzy. I reached back and, for the first time in my life, smacked a dog across the nose with an envelope full of cash. Jennifer said, “Thank you.”

John said, “There might be some clothes in that RV. We could change, look normal. Get Dave an overcoat to hide the shotgun under. Then charge into the Luxor, find Justin and open a can of kill-ass.”

“We can’t break into somebody’s RV,” I said.

“Oh, hey. That’s Elton John!” exclaimed John, squinting at the logo on the side of the truck. He turned toward me. “There’ll be all kinds of shit in there. Come on.”

“No.”

“You got a better idea? You said yourself we’re not gettin’ in lookin’ like this. We don’t have time to go shopping.”

Molly retreated to the rear and started biting at the luggage the newlyweds had stacked in it. They probably had packed some sausages in there or something.

“No,” I said again, too tired to back up my argument. I watched as a kid trotted across the parking lot with a large take-out sack, handed it into the RV.

“See?” I said. “There’s people in there.”

“Okay,” John said. “How about the truck?”

“It’s gonna be concert stuff, right?” I said. “Amps and all that. The only clothes in there will be flamboyant Elton John costumes.”

Molly had pried open one of the cases in back, started barking at us. We ignored her. She kept barking, yelped as someone swatted her.

A slow smile spread over John’s face. He turned to me and said the five most horrifying words he knows.

“Dave, I have a plan.”

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.