Coven (46 page)

««—»»

As she’d guessed, Peerce
had caught Wade. She swung the hewer low right to
high left. The unimaginably heavy blade was suddenly
aerodynamic; it glided through the air with the greatest of
proverbial ease—
swoooooooosh
—and took Peerce’s head
off in a perfect line.

Lydia laughed in spite of herself. The head
bounced off one wall, then another, then rolled down the
servicepass. But—

“
Lydia!”
Wade yelled.

Peerce’s headless body remained standing.
The switchblade remained in his hand—

“
Pull the rod out of his
head!”

What?
she thought. She dropped the hewer and turned. It was too dark
to see where the head had rolled, but then she stumbled on
something and fell on it, like a fumble drill. She felt the top of
the head, found the transception knob, then grabbed it with her
fingers and pulled.

“
Hurry!”
Wade yelled, still held aloft.

She pulled and pulled. The rod wouldn’t come
out. It was like trying to unseat a masonry nail from cement.

Wade was screaming.

Peerce’s severed head
expectorated tobacco juice into her face.
Thanks a lot,
she thought. She raised
the head to her mouth, grasped the rod flange with her teeth, and
yanked.

Amid an awful, dry grinding sound, the rod
began to come loose. Now it was Peerce’s head that was screaming.
The rod jerked out of the skull in half inch stops. Peerce’s
standing, headless corpse was shuddering in place.

When the transceptionrod came out all the
way, the knife-wielding cadaver collapsed.

Lydia threw the head as hard as she could
against the passwall. It cracked like heavy porcelain. Wade
staggered as if drunk down the pass. “You like to keep a guy in
suspense, don’t you?”

“
Are you all
right?”

“
I think so. At least I
don’t have to go to the bathroom anymore. What time is
it?”

Lydia consulted her watch. “Eleven
fifty four.”

“
We’ve got six
minutes.”

They ran like slapstick idiots down the
pass. Wade held onto her as they extromitted down to the next
level. “What did you bring that for?” he asked, noticing the UV
spotter on her belt.

“
In case the sisters are
around.”

“
They’re all either dead or
hibernating,” he informed her. “At least that’s one thing we don’t
have to worry about.”

They weren’t two steps into the next
servicepass when, at once, their surroundings went from dark to
light. Suddenly they were standing in brilliant radiance; the
labyrinth’s ice cold changed to stunning heat. Myriad sensorposts
glowed in shimmering black, and all around them the labyrinth
hummed like high tension power lines.

Lydia checked her watch. “Eleven
fifty five,” she said.

“
Recharge,” Wade
realized.

“
Does that
mean—”

“
It means the Supremate
knows we’re here.”

««—»»

Nina McCulloch woke up alone in a hospital
bed. What was she doing here? The room’s only light came from the
window.

She’d had a terrible dream.

Elizabeth and her two friends. The hooded
girl in the black cloak. And Jervis Phillips, dead but walking.

It wasn’t a dream,
she realized.
It was the
devil.

But God had saved her from that, hadn’t
He?

Some police had brought her
to the hospital. Nina prayed thanks to God. She wondered, though,
if the devil had been vanquished.
Show me
a sign, Lord,
she prayed.

The room filled with light.

It came from the window.
Nina got up to look. At first she thought it must be a fire of some
kind, it was miles distant.
Forest
fire?
she thought.
Plane crash?

She saw a gaseous yellow
aura rising in the sky. It seemed to be coming from past the
campus, the forest near the agro site. It wasn’t a fire, though. It
was an
emanation.

No,
Nina thought.
A sign!

««—»»

The Supremate’s pre recharge sleep was
over. Fleeing the labyrinth’s hot and glowing bowels made Wade
think of Jonah and the whale. He and Lydia came out on the last
level. The fully energized sign beamed at the end of the pass:
POINTACCESSMAIN#1.

They stopped in their tracks. A hum vibrated
in their heads. When they turned around, they saw six sisters
emerge from the extromitter behind them.

“
Pardon me while I shit my
pants,” Wade muttered. These sisters were the biggest he’d seen.
They were beautiful in their immense, alien hybridized
perfection. The last one to emerge stood over eight feet
tall.

“
I’m going to burn these
bitches down,” Lydia said. She pushed Wade toward the last
extromitter. Cloaked, the sisters advanced, showing
fang crammed grins. They moved slowly at first, then began to
run so fast they seemed aflight. Lydia set the UV spotter on the
floor.

“
Turn it on!” Wade
shouted.

But Lydia was waiting for them to get close.
When the first two were only yards away, she flicked the spotter
on. Shrieks whistled. The sisters leading the pack began to
smolder, then their white faces exploded. Wade and Lydia were
splattered.

“
Run!” Lydia yelled. They
tore for the extromitter. Lydia was plugging in her key. Wade
glanced back. Fangs glittered from flashes of wailing faces. Smoke
poured out of frantic black cloaks as the phalanx of sisters hulled
into the field of ultraviolet light. Flesh sizzled amid the
onslaught of shrieks. Spheric eyes ruptured, torrents of fresh,
black blood fell like rain as crisped hands reached out from the
billow of oily smoke. Then the rank of corpses fell atop the
spotter and died. But the spotter was
under
them, its deadly invisible
light buried by their sizzling bodies.

“
Oh, shit,” Wade
muttered.

The last and largest sister remained. Spots
of flesh cooked on her face, yet she had survived. Her fangs
protracted, and she lunged over the corpses.

Lydia grabbed Wade’s hand and pulled him
through the humming slit.

On the other side, Wade again caught only
glimpses of things, unstable fragments: the rocking backdrop of
Besser’s office, paneled walls, furniture, the carpeted floor, and
Lydia tugging on him trying to drag him through. The desk clock
read 11:59. Wade had oozed through the extromitter by everything
but his right ankle. Lydia pulled and pulled but he wasn’t
moving—

The sister’s hand had his ankle, pulling him
back. Lydia yanked from one side while the sister yanked from the
other. This was a tug of war, and Wade was the rope. He
was being pulled between the threshold of two worlds.

Lydia gave a final heave, and Wade’s ankle
came through the wall, along with the sister’s arm.

The desk clock’s lighted digits read
12:00.

A sound like an air raid siren whistled
into the room, and a terrifying, vibrating drone. The extromission
egress turned bright red, then snapped closed. Wade’s release came
as suddenly as a knife to a climber’s rope. He was thrown into the
middle of the office, tumbling into Lydia’s lap.

The sister’s arm had detached at the elbow
and lay severed on the carpeted floor.

Wade and Lydia looked up at the wall.

The extromitter dot was gone, which could
only mean that the labyrinth was gone too.

—

CHAPTER 43

Nobody ever knew what happened, except, of
course, for Lydia and Wade. The newspapers did their best to
speculate as to Exham College’s spate of disappearances and murder.
One paper blamed a clandestine drug ring. Another blamed the Dixie
Mafia, while still another blamed, of all things, a satanic cult.
Wade was tempted to write an article himself, about aliens
abducting humans for genetic hybridization experiments, but he
doubted that even the lowest of tabloids would go for anything so
farfetched.

As after any great calamity, things
eventually returned to normal. Dean Saltenstall’s murder had been
blamed on a burglar. Peerce, Porker, and Chief White had fallen in
the line of duty to drug merchants. Within days, the campus had
appointed a new dean, and the town counsel had elected a new chief
of police.

««—»»

“
Hi, Dad. This is
Wade!”

“
I would never have
guessed,” came Dad’s stolid reply over the phone line. “What did
you do this week, son?”

Wade contemplated the full
weight of the answer.
I saved the
world,
he wished he could say. “Oh, the
usual,” he said instead. “Worked, studied, that sort of thing. Just
another week in the life of a diligent student.”

“
Sounds like the usual
bullshit to me,” Dad commented.

Wade lay back in bed, eyeing Lydia. She
stood at the bathroom mirror brushing her teeth. Wade nearly
swooned: All she wore was a pair of devil red frilled
panties.

“
Wade, Wade? Are you still
there?”

“
Yeah, Dad, I’m still here…
Look, there’s something I have to tell you—”

“
Goddamn it! Not another
traffic ticket!”

“
No, Dad. This is
good
news.
I’m…engaged.”

“
You’re
what?”

“
Engaged. You know, as in
getting married.”

“
I know what engaged means,
Wade. Engaged to who?”

Wade smiled. “The chief of police.”

“
You’re telling me that
you’re engaged to Chief White?”

“
No, Dad. The
new
chief of police. Her
name’s Lydia. She’s a little bitchy sometimes, but boy has she got
a great ass.”

A wet washrag flew from the bathroom and
slapped Wade in the face. “You’re gonna love her, Dad.
Guaranteed.”

“
You never cease to amaze
me, son.”

“
Sure, but isn’t that how
it’s, supposed to be?”

Wade left his father with the expected
doubts. The old ballbuster would come around in time, like just
about anyone’s dad. Wade saw it as the first smart decision of his
life. And with any luck it would be the first of many.

“
So I’ve got a great ass,
huh?” Now Lydia was brushing her beautiful white blond hair.
“That’s the son to father consensus?”

“
Great legs too. And
hooters…” Wade whistled.

“
You’re a sexist pig, but I
guess I can live with it.”

Wade lounged back in the
pillows.
Happy ever after?
he wondered. Who knew? Who
ever
knew? But he just had a funny
feeling that this was going to work.

“
Sweetheart?”

Lydia glared. “Don’t call me sweetheart.
It’s so domestic.”

“
Okay…honeybunch. Something
just occurred to me, just now when I was on the phone with
Dad.”

“
What?”

“
We saved the
world.”

Lydia’s expression widened in the mirror.
The black bomb would’ve destroyed the vital tracking systems. Right
now, the labyrinth was space junk floating lost across the galaxy.
It would never return to where it had come from.

“
And I just thought of
something else,” Wade continued his muse. “I wonder what happened
to Besser?”

««—»»

On that particular night,
Besser had crawled brokenly across the grove. He’d escaped the
labyrinth only to find himself trapped in this thing laden
morass. He choked on green fog. Horned insects drilled into his
flesh; hot gourds and carcasses plump with moist rot crumpled
beneath his paddling hands and knees. His leg was numb now; it
dragged along behind him like a ball and chain. Things like eyeless
rats the size of groundhogs bit chunks out of it as he crawled
farther into the grove. The leech mouthed fog snakes swam
about him
en masse,
biting out a piece of flesh here, a collop of fat there. Even
the vegetation attacked him as he crawled on. Bulbs dipped from
sagging branches, spreading jaws full of crystal teeth.
Grime caked vines threatened to entangle him. Some large
shivering pod burst at its tip and vomited a gush of seeds and
stinking black slop into his face.
Oh,
Mother,
he thought beneath his
sobs.

One of the fog snakes tore out the seat
of his pants, then more—many more—converged to take bites out of
his huge buttocks. Professor Besser screamed louder than the horn
on his De Ville when something unseen sunk teeth like sewing
needles into one of his testicles. The entire grove was conspiring
to consume him bit by bit. Just as he concluded that he could go no
farther, his face rose out of the fogtop. He trundled forward, at
once delirious with excitement. Who said there were no miracles?
Besser had managed to crawl clear across the horrid grove, and he’d
survived!

Praise heaven!
he thought.

He looked at his watch:
11:55.
Recharge.

The entire forest moaned. The fog churned
like a lake in heavy rain. Through the trees, Besser could see the
unearthly oblong box that was the labyrinth. From its corners,
spears of yellow light lanced into the sky, and then billows of
luminous yellow gas began to rise. The labyrinth was recharging its
electromagnetic launch systems. Besser had to shield his eyes—light
as intense as the sun flooded the grove. The fog was boiling like a
cauldron of green stew. Besser crawled for cover. Five minutes
later came a brilliant yellow flash, then darkness.