Coven (30 page)

—
DISGRACE,
the Supremate thought.

The one called Winnifred was with Besser,
too. She sat masturbating in a chair. Sometimes a nativeemissarial
would not remain serviceable after the exordipathicsignaltrances,
exposure to the psilight, and the Supremate’s overall influence.
But she had helped in minor ways and had shown great faith. Too bad
she would have to die. And Besser, the rotund one, too.

The Supremate continued its overseeing. Two
sisters were inspecting the Erbling subjects in the activeport. The
Hartley subject had already birthed her first metisunit, which now
squalled healthily in the
biomaintenancecarbonsourcehypersaturationvault. Many more sisters
worked throughout the labyrinth, happy and close to mindless in the
discharge of their duties. The sisters were all integrated into the
Supremate—prime, living examples of the master plan’s
capabilities.

—
SO WHAT IF I CAN’T BE
GOD,
the Supremate mused.
—COULD GOD DO ALL OF THIS?

««—»»

Shauna Applegate stared into her ENG 291
text, bored shitless. Her roommate, Inez Packer, sat in the next
room, doing much the same. They were both in academic hot water.
They were reading about how F. Scott Fitzgerald had died in
disgrace, wholly despised by the literary community of the times,
even though he was a better writer than any of his contemporaries.
But of course, Shauna and Inez couldn’t’ve shit cared less.
They’d rather be partying.

Just as Shauna thought she’d die of boredom,
someone knocked on the door. “Who is it?” she asked.

“
Sushi Express.”

Sushi? Yuck!
“Inez! Did you order any carry out
sushi?”

“
Yuck!” Inez responded. “No
way!”

“
You must have the wrong—”
But when Shauna looked in the peephole, she gasped. A dead man’s
face grinned back at her.

“
Go away!” she shouted,
checking the lock. “I’ll call the cops!”

“
All right,” said the
voice. “I’m going away.”

The hewer cut the door down in one strike.
Shauna screamed as Jervis let himself in. A sister drifted in
behind him.

“
Are you Inez Packer?” he
politely inquired.

“
N no, she’s in
the—”

Jervis brought the hewer
down spectacularly—
wooosh!
—and sheared Shauna Applegate
in half, from head to crotch. Shauna’s two halves twitched on the
carpet. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about that goddamn
English class anymore.

Inez had seen it all from
her room (your roommate being cut in half by a dead man with a
beam hewer was a hard thing to miss). She screamed steadily
and threw books.
The Great Gatsby
hit Jervis in the head.
The Beautiful and the Damned
popped
him in the groin. When she slammed her door closed, Jervis hewed it
down. “Miss Packer?” he announced. “Your limo is waiting.” He
lifted Inez up by the hair. The sister’s spicule darted out in a
pink blur.

Inez turned limp, bewildered and paralyzed.
Jervis carried her out to the Dodge as the sister knelt at Shauna’s
halves, to eat.

“
Hey! What the hell are you
doing there?” a skinny security guard demanded on the exit
stairs.

“
I’m abducting a healthy
female college student for bifertilization with alien holotypes,”
Jervis answered, and palmed the guard hard enough in the face to
drive bone shards into his brain. With his free hand then, Jervis
dragged the guard out by the eye sockets, kind of like carrying a
bowling ball, and loaded them both into the Dodge Colt. Thank
heaven for hatchbacks!

Back upstairs, the kneeling sister seemed
disappointed. This was the same sister who had eaten David
“Do Horse” Willet’s penis the night before.

—
Jervis? How come there’s
no…

Didn’t these
crossmultibredintegratedhybrid airheads know anything?
“She’s a girl, pinhead,” Jervis apprised. “Girls
don’t have
dicks.”

—
Oh,
the sister said.
—Poo!

««—»»

They sat opposed, staring into each other’s
face. Wade had told Lydia what he’d seen at the grove. Lydia had
told Wade what she’d seen at the second mound. Neither doubted the
other.

“
Can two people go nuts at
the same time?” Wade asked. “Maybe campus utilities is pumping LSD
into the water fountains.”

“
We have to face it,” Lydia
said. “What we saw was real.”

“
We can’t just sit around.
We’ve got to do
something.”

“
Sure, but
what?”

Wade sneered. “You’re the one doing the
thinking, remember?”

They both jumped when the phone rang.

Who could it be this late? “Uh, hello?” Wade
answered.

“
Wade! It’s me, Jervis!
How’s it going?”

Wade instantly relaxed. “Fine, Jerv.
Where’re you at?”

“
I’m at the student car
shop. Couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d get started on a little body
work.”

Body work? At
night?
“Listen, Jerv, a whole bunch of
unbelievable shit has happened. You’ve got to get over here and
help.”

“
Sit tight. I’ll be right
there.”

“
Oh, and Jerv…” Wade’s
voice thickened. “Tom’s dead.”

“
Yeah, I know. I…” Jervis
paused. “I mean I—”

But Wade was pausing too. The obvious
conclusion beat into his head. There was only one way Jervis could
know about Tom…

“
You’re one of them, aren’t
you?” Wade grimly asked.

“
Hang up!” Lydia
yelled.

Jervis dispensed with the act. “The
Supremate wants you, Wade. It’s for something miraculous. Let me
bring you in.”

Tom had said the same
thing. Whatever they’d done to Tom, they’d now done to
Jervis.
Holy Jesus,
Wade thought.

“
There’s someone here who
wants to talk to you. He can explain better than me.” Jervis’ voice
was replaced by another, darker voice. Besser’s. “Wade, my boy! How
are you?”

“
You diabolical fat
psychopath!” Wade returned the greeting. “You’re the one who’s
responsible for all this, aren’t you?”

“
No, no, I’m just a
consultant. And Jervis is a laborer, like Tom before his
unfortunate mishap… You want answers, rightly so. But it’s not
something easily rendered into words—you’ll have to open your mind.
It’s a master plan, my boy, wiser than the sum of all human
knowledge. Call it a new societal mechanic.” Besser’s voice
softened. “Call it
destiny.”

“
Shit on societal
mechanics!” Wade yelled. “Bugger destiny! I want answers! Like who
were those nutty looking girls in the black capes and
sunglasses?”

“
Sisters,” Besser answered.
“They’re technicians, in a sense—engineers of the new
beau monde.
But they come
from the dark; they wear cloaks and sunglasses because sunlight
debilitates them.”

“
This was nighttime!” Wade
blurted. “The sun’s not out at
night!”

“
No, but the moon is.
Moonlight is merely sunlight reflected off the moon. Without
protection, even trace amounts cause cellular dissolution. It’s
their environment, my boy. The dark.”

Like vampires,
Wade thought.

Jervis was back on the line. “Is that
better?”

“
No,” Wade said.

“
Just give it time, Wade,
and give it up. One way or another, I’m gonna get’cha. So let’s
make a little deal.”

“
No deals,” Wade told him.
“I’m hanging up.”

“
Just listen a second,”
Jervis insisted. “You give me a break and come in willingly, and
I’ll guarantee that nothing happens to your new girlfriend. But if
you try and give me the slip, I’ll hand her over to the sisters.
You know what that means?”

“
What?” Wade
dared.

“
They’ll
eat
her,” Jervis said.
“And what they’ll do to her first is even worse. So be smart, Wade.
Do we have a deal?”

Wade hung up. His head was spinning.

“
He knows where we are, and
you can bet he’ll be coming for us,” Lydia said. “Where was he
calling from?”

“
The student
shop.”

“
That’s a good mile away.
We’ve still got time to get off campus. Come on.”

They rushed out of Wade’s room, but
footsteps greeted them not two strides out the door. They both
stopped. Stood. Stared.

Jervis was marching lackadaisically down the
hall. He was smiling. He was holding the hewer.

“
How the
fuck!”
Wade yelled. “You
said you were at the student shop!

“
I extromitted. Saves a lot
of time.” Jervis stopped for a moment, cocked his head. He was
looking at Lydia. “You know, Wade, that’s a mighty
sweet looking girlfriend you got there. It’d be a shame to let
the sisters have her. Before they eat her, they’ll let some
holotypes fuck her for a couple of days, the ones with the biggest
cocks. Then they’d core her ass like an apple. You ever see a human
chick get gang-banged in the ass by holotypes?”

Wade’s mouth fell open to say something, but
he could summon no words.

“
It wouldn’t be pretty, I
can tell you that. They’d Bukake the bitch, Wade. You want your
girl to go through that? You want the love of your life to have to
drink a gallon of holotype jizz while another gallon’s leaking out
her asshole?”

A lot of Jervis’ terms
weren’t jiving with Wade, but he got the picture.
I can’t let anything happen to her,
he thought. He knew he’d sacrifice himself in a
heartbeat...

“
So do we have a deal?”
Jervis asked.

“
Here’s a deal for you,”
Lydia said. Wade shouted “No!” too late. The gunshots cracked down
the hall. Lydia pumped two .357 semi wads square into Jervis’
sternum. Jervis went down.

Wade yelled, “What did you—”

“
Shut up and come on!”
Lydia yelled back.

They fled down eight flights of stairs. It
stood to reason that if Jervis could get here that quickly, those
girls in black probably could too. But Wade was still shouting
through his shock— “You killed him!” —as they stumbled from the
outside exit.

“
What did you think he was
going to do to us?” Lydia hotly reasoned. “
Kiss
us? Wake up!”

“
But he was my friend! You
didn’t have to kill him!”

The high, echoic voice boomed like thunder
through a mountain valley.

“
She didn’t,
Wade.”

Halfway to the Vette, Wade and Lydia froze
in their tracks. In dreadful slowness, their eyes roved up the
front of the eight story dorm.

Leaning out Wade’s window was Jervis, his
face agrin in moonlight.

“
Judas J. Priest,” Lydia
whispered. “I put two slugs in his chest…”

Jervis smiled down. “Like the old saying
goes, Wade,” the dead man’s voice echoed. “You can run, but you
can’t hide.”

—

CHAPTER 25

They checked into Gilman’s Motel. Lydia had
made Wade park down the street in a used car lot, so as not to
give their location away to anyone who might be hunting them. The
motel stood quiet in darkness. Lydia turned out all the lights.

They said very little. What were words worth
now? Lydia stripped and went to the shower, to wash away the stench
of the grove. She must’ve smelled like death. But no sooner had she
turned the spray to her face, Wade was with her. They washed each
other in silence; it was like getting new skin. Afterward, they
coupled brutally on the bed, not in passion this time, but in
desperation. Lydia didn’t need to be made love to, she needed to be
fucked, primitively and without endearments. They gave their bodies
to the other for use—to release the steeped horrors of the last
day. They did it repeatedly, fucking and coming, coming and
forgetting, venting the mad energy of their fear. The complete
inappropriateness of sex—after all they’d seen—made it completely
appropriate. They used each other’s bodies to purge their
minds.

Later, Wade lay panting into the crook of
her neck. Lydia gingerly unwrapped her legs. Her sex was sore. She
could feel his semen in her, still warm as it trickled. She liked
it. She liked the idea of a small remnant left inside of her. An
obscure gift.

He rolled off to her side,
a hand on her breast.
I’m going to tell
him I love him,
she thought immediately.
But what would he say? And would any purpose be served in saying
it?

No,
she thought. She’d save it for another time, if fate saw fit
to grant her one.

Lydia found her senses suddenly sharp.
Perhaps the furious sex had given her reason back. “Those women at
the graveyard… Besser said they couldn’t come out in the
daytime?”

“
He said sunlight does
something to them. They can’t even come out in the moonlight
without sunglasses and cloaks.”

Daytime,
Lydia thought. Sunlight. “Maybe
they’re—”